1st Edition

Perversions of Fascism

By Antonios Vadolas Copyright 2009
    376 Pages
    by Routledge

    384 Pages
    by Routledge

    Contemporary versions of evil demonise modern "fascists", "totalitarian threats", and "Hitlers". As if not obscure enough, fascist evil has been equivocally linked with perversion. This book reveals that both fascism and perversion implicate the non-symbolisable kernel in politics, which becomes the source of their mystification. It argues that the fascist does not take the same discursive position as the pervert does, regarding this symbolic gap. The author develops a new rhetoric, de-pathologised and de-ideologised, regarding the structure of the so-called pervert, introducing new vocabularies and directions for psychoanalytic research that further distance the pervert, or whom he calls the "extra-ordinary subject", from fascist politics and, instead, exposes his diachronic "fascist" isolation from the social edifice. This reveals the fruitful alternatives that can stem from a "return to Freud cum Lacan", which supports a flexible on-going reformulation of psychoanalytic knowledge.

    Preface -- Fascism and Perversion -- Introduction -- 1930s–1940s: The Frankfurt School and the Freudian left -- 1940s–1970s: The authoritarian and evil profile of fascism -- 1970s–1980s: Neo-Freudian perspectives -- 1990s: The surfeit of fascist jouissance -- Part I: Conclusion -- Discourse -- Introduction: The domination of the fascist and the Sadean master -- Power and mastery through the Lacanian prism -- The Lacanian discourse -- Three masters, three systems of domination -- Part II: Conclusion -- Ethics -- Introduction -- Sade with Kant and Eichmann -- Ethics and guilt -- From imaginary to democratic ethics -- Part III: Conclusion -- Politics -- Introduction: Politics and the embodiment of jouissance -- Beyond the fascist Utopia -- Exfra-ordinary anxiety -- Negating disavowal -- Part IV: Conclusion -- Conclusion: Love the object of your anxiety

    Biography

    Vadolas, Antonios