From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: AUT: Telos
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 11:24:11 -0400



Interesting critique. A lot better than the one by Alan Wolfe, which seemed to miss the boat by a wide margin on why certain authors find Schmitt worthy of reading. Especially if you ignore the use actually made by authors like Negri, Derrida, Foucault etc. of the "fascist" authors. It is an unimportant question to me whether a so-called leftist theorist is interested in a "fascist" writing or author. The question is always the use made of them. If they are used to justify repressive actions, then of course, there is something perhaps totalitarian or fascist lurking behind such motivations.  

Where I see an imprecision in a lot of these critiques is that they continually go from the point where there is a similar interest in moving beyong the status-quo, to the actual presentation of the "then what?". There is no isomorphy between the left and right who appropriate the discourses of everyone from Machiavelli to Nietzsche to Heidegger and Schmitt. The question that they seem to continually fail to ask is what is it that articulates the movements of the Left and the Right. Are they simply ideological differences? I think it must be taken further than that. After Marx, a clear line is set for distinguishing repressive/regressive v progressive/liberatory modalities of action and thought. When this Wolin guy finds similarities in legacy with the PM's and the Far Right, his criteria or denouncing Reason and Democracy is ridiculous. It is (as far as I know) never their intent to denounce those things as such when they do critique them as to denounce the limited and repressive formalizations of them that exist within any given "present". On the contrary, if both the far-left and far-right meet at Schmitt to say that present day capitalism must be defended against its enemies and America and the contemporary Western world should be defended against their critics and reformers for the sake of Reason and Democracy then clearly, yes, there does seem to be a similarity or newfound identity between the two. I've not read Lasch's new book to say anything about it. 

All of this is great topic, and I think that most of us have not really digested fascism yet, the lefts relationship to it, both in the past and in the present. In what I still consider to be two of the best analyses of Fascism ever, Guattari's "Micro-Politics of Fascism" and "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist", he really asserts the necessity of coming to grips with fascism's present, and its present at the singular or individual level. He also talks a bit about the relationship between Stalinism, Bourgeois Democracy and Fascism during their developments in the twentieth century, but he notes that there are in fact many differnt kinds of Stalinism, Bourgeous Democracy and Fascism, at both the macro and micro level. I think the notion to make complex vs to simplify and generalize is a good suggestion to follow when these critics talk about Fascism and its relation to the Left. Else we might fall into traps like saying that the "left/right" distinction is no longer valid. But again I should read Lasch before attributing that thought to him, perhaps he says that for a different reason. 

Lowe




>From: Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net> 

>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU 

>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu 

>Subject: AUT: Telos 

>Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 21:52:57 -0700 

> 

><URL: 

>http://www.postelservice.com/archives/cat_excavating_the_future.html 

>> 

> 

>-- 

>Michael Pugliese 

> 

> 

>     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- 




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