The Daddy Dialectic
July 26, 2018 1:43 PM   Subscribe

“The stench of this scene is age-old,” wrote the German philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1935. For Bloch, the appearance of fascism in Europe was not the irruption of an unprecedented evil, but the expression of a deep-rooted structure in contemporary form; it unearths “a piece of fossilized moon,” shining down “a path which one strangely recalls.” Against the characterization of fascism as a unique horror, Bloch saw its orgies of cruelty as an uncanny return. “Old grotesque faces eerily arise […] the Nazi dances all night.” “Both hell and heaven,” Bloch moaned, “have been surrendered without a fight.”

Why would Bloch — why should we? — care about the unsurrender of hell? An unstated presumption saturating much public discourse is that we are meant to cling to “reasonableness” at moments of manifest insanity. This, I believe, is a flawed approach. If I had a dime for every “Coffee Party: Incite Civility and Reason” bumper sticker I’ve sighted in the college town where I teach, and never at any of the anti-deportation rallies — well, suffice it to say that the resistance to fascism goes nowhere if its main arena is the echo chamber of the Whole Foods parking lot, where a tidy “progressive” domesticity is carried out without active care for those being torn apart.

Like Bloch said, this stench is entrenched. How entrenched?
posted by standardasparagus (10 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not so familiar with Spain or Italy, but Fascism in Germany seems to have deep roots as reactionary, illiberal and anti-democratic movement stretching back to at least WWI. Ludendorff and Hindenburg were both supporters of the Nazi Party, as did capital.

My point is that what we call "Fascism" is in reality just something that is deeply embedded in our own political cultures.
posted by JamesBay at 2:18 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I should add, to the introduction here,
Now this is a topic about which I have some experience. Experience, that is to say, not only with desire, but also with those people for whom our fidelity to desire places us in special proximity to hell. And by “those people,” I am talking about my late mother, the elegant and brutal Barbara Lynn Horowitz Rosenberg.

[…]

But this essay is not exactly about family history. It’s not exactly about Frankfurt School Marxism either, and it’s not exactly about fascism. Rather, it’s about how for some of us, these concerns can’t be kept apart.

Because, really, we’ve been in this stench so long. I’ve been thinking for a while about this line from Stuart Hall’s reluctant memoir, Familiar Stranger, released this past summer: “I have never thought that the detail of my life, of the kind which fills memoirs, was of much intrinsic interest or significance. I have however […] ‘lived in interesting times.’” At issue here is not the specificity of a life, but the intersection of ourselves with broader historical forces, or what Fredric Jameson, in an entirely different context described as “galactic visuality”: that moment when our perspective swivels and we realize that it is the “stars that look down on us.” Certainly I’m no Stuart Hall. But I take from Hall this simple point: writing the self is, at its root, a question of marking with language the places where history touches us. And Reader, it touches us everywhere.
posted by standardasparagus at 2:31 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I like the message here. I had the same response to Hannah Gadsby's 'Nanette.' The time for cool wit is passed. The time for being pissed off and loud is here.
posted by es_de_bah at 3:05 PM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


Wow, that is a wild piece of writing!
posted by The Toad at 3:44 PM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


This fucking, fucking great. And I say this even as a non-American.
You can have your home or you can have your desire; this is a certain bildung of queerness.
Fucking right.

Without coming from a shared background, without having had a scene, I got it. Especially at this time of ours, this Trumpocene, or precisely because of it.

I sometimes scream in my sleep. The other day I howled at perhaps around 4am, naked in the bed, and I heard my words "MOM I LOVE YOU!" Perhaps it's the only way I could say these words, howling like about to die. For context, she's alive and well.

I feel I'm on the verge of something. Either it's that I'm going to get cured, or something even better. Maybe not better, but more worth the shit.
posted by runcifex at 2:35 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


This was great. I really enjoyed reading it.
The "permanent readiness for the Marvelous" linked article was also really interesting.

I thought this bit was particularly fascinating and will have to consider going forward.
"Another way of putting this is that, unlike Bloch’s midcentury Europe, we don’t have the surplus libidinal energies of mass communist movement for fascists to usurp, parody, or mimic. Rather, today’s neofascism has a strange, parasitic relation to the affective surplus and the energies of the family. Actually, to be much more specific, it has a strange, parasitic relationship to the energies of the family’s decomposition.
...
This — the family, and all its contortions — is a certain kind of hell, no doubt — and, to recall the issue with which I began — a ground that we must not surrender. We queers know the contours of this particular hell so well; we know how to inhale its phantasmagoria air, and — if we are committed to a radical politics that does not seek assimilation so much as transformation — we know how to exhale elements of a different composition."

posted by AnhydrousLove at 2:52 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


This was really excellent writing--illuminating about the mechanisms of society and the mind, as well as lived experience.
posted by heatvision at 3:10 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I knew I was going find Delany down in the middle of that.
posted by the Real Dan at 9:44 AM on July 27, 2018


To me, this has been the summer of Hannah Gadsby and other LGBTQ people, both in the media and in person, teaching and inspiring me with imaginative ideas of what the world could be like. I feel so much appreciation for their courage to share their stories and how they have helped understand my own (cishet) troubled relationship with gender.

This article is inspiring and I'll definitely read more Rosenberg! As a life project of sorts, I've been wanting to get to the bottom of symbolic/linguistic resistance to oppression. This article has given me a ton of angles to think from.

So in short, thank you so much for posting this, standardasparagus!
posted by ipsative at 11:49 AM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is a good post, thank you.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:20 PM on August 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


« Older Ironsworn RPG   |   Even the dog experts only ID'd 28% correct on... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments