HERE WE ARE, the day after. I guess our level of anxiety about fascism will have to remain in the red for at least another four years.
A few people have objected that Bataille's analysis of fascism itself smacks of fascism. Richard Wolin's chapter on Bataille in his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism is a handy example.
Wolin, I am guessing, aligns with Jürgen Habermas in identifying left politics as part of an Enlightenment legacy, relying on reason, evidence, and public discourse as the best instruments for shaping the polity, rather than tradition, revealed religion, mystical notions of race, and so on. From that perspective, Bataille's suggestion that we dip into the heterogeneous to find ways to resist fascism seems to be saying, let's use right wing instruments to combat the right wing! But the moment we start using right wing instruments, don't we become right wingers? I'm probably over-simplifying, but that seems to be Wolin's objection.
This may put us in mind--today especially--of Trump, who has been eager to draw on various dark energies to fuel his successful campaign: white supremacy, male supremacy, fear of the other, and other charged varieties of unreason. Could the left draw on some kind of dark energy of its own without ceasing to be the left? Does the left even have dark energies to draw on?
The closest the left comes to the adrenalin-amping of fascism may be religiously-inspired movements like abolition or some phases of the civil rights or anti-war movements of the 1060s. Not that religion is a dark energy, exactly, but it carries more an emotional appeal than a rational one. And it can be effective--I think it made a difference when mainline Protestants swung into line on same-sex marriage, for instance. Most leftists I know are chary of making God-based appeals, though. And if Wolin is right, they should be.
And is Wolin right? I don't know.
It's been a long day.
No comments:
Post a Comment