Zeynep Gambetti: Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms, Critical Times (2020) 3 (1), 1-32.
To what extent do the concept and theories of fascism help us to understand today’s fascist phenomena? I find Gambetti’s text very clever. She takes up Hannah Arendt’s reflections on fascist power and totalitarianism and discusses how they can be transferred from the then “imperialism-fascism-totalitarianism nexus” to today’s “biopolitics-security-neoliberalism nexus”. For Gambetti, what is essential is the reproduction of the devaluation of the “weak” and the “useless,” ultimately born of fear, a fear that turns against them and dehumanizes them as a threat. In this, totalitarianism and fascism “seize” the individual “from within” – also today.
However, I also struggle with the text. I find Gambetti’s transference of fear in totalitarianism to fear in neoliberalism too imprecise. I don’t think Arendt would have gone along with that – even if she assumed the possibility of personal responsibility in every situation. But above all, fear doesn’t really explain to me what I observe as fascist tendencies in Brandenburg or in Bombay and Delhi. This focus on the production of insecurity and fear in neoliberalism obscures what is all too apparent in ethnographic observation: the joy and sense of empowerment felt by those who are convinced by fascist ideas. Now, of course, one could say that you have to feel powerless to experience joy in a self-empowerment. But is that it? Is the experience of powerlessness enough to explain the joy of power? Such “deficit” analyses of the possibility of fascistization processes may overlook essential moments. And that, in turn, diminishes the strategies of resistance.