Patrick Eiden-Offe, Was ist Faschisierung? Einige theorie- und begriffshistorische Überlegungen [What is fascization? Some theoretical and conceptual historical considerations], Merkur, 922/80, March 2026.
The article explores how far we can go in our current political situation with a replacement or shift in terminology recently proposed by French philosopher Pierre Zaoui: “If we cannot talk of fascism as such, we can at least talk of fascization and being fascisized, as we do of racialization and being racialized.”
The idea is to no longer understand fascism as a system that can be defined on the basis of a catalog of characteristics, but rather to think of it in the progressive form, as an open and always contingent process. Fascization takes place in the bundling (Latin: fasces/fascis) of strategies, through interlocking, complementing, and mutually reinforcing each other, whereby contradictions, opposites, and temporary relaxations are always possible.
In the analysis of contemporary political phenomena, the concept of fascization primarily addresses subjective and intersubjective processes that take place in the sphere of affects, desires, and language: in the use of “exterminatory signifiers” (Zaoui), the pleasure of violence, excess, and exclusion, not only but especially on social media. The process category helps us to address and analyze these spheres theoretically without having to dismiss individual subjects or groups as fascists in toto. Fascization literally takes place subcutaneously, in bodies and desires—and that is where it can also be resisted.
With regard to historical analyses, the process concept of fascization allows us to consider large spatial and temporal dimensions. Fascization thus becomes tangible as a global and historical longue durée phenomenon that asserts itself in the history of colonialism and capitalism: With Suzanne and Aimée Césaire, we can conceive of a colonial fascism before and after (European) fascism, whose violent and dehumanizing continuity can be conceptually captured. With Karl Polanyi’s concept of a “fascist virus,” fascization can be traced back to the establishment of the capitalist property order—as a latent threat of violence and destruction that accompanies and ultimately secures this property order. Today, on the one hand, the (post)colonial order of the world is once again being called into question. On the other hand, global capitalism is reconfiguring itself in a way that can be brought into conceptual proximity with processes of “primitive accumulation” (data mining, virtual enclosures, digital extractivism). The concept of fascization can help us to relate our present to the colonial capitalist history of violence. This history continues today—or is interrupted. The question of counterstrategies, the question of anti- or non-fascist de-bundling, remains open in the article.
↗ https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/artikel/was-ist-faschisierung-a-mr-80-3-5