Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:15:22 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: re: Deleuze and fascism




>>> lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com 08/30/04 02:51PM >>>

> >>> messmer-AT-endpage.com 08/29/04 04:16AM >>> 

>All this says to me is that "people often tend towards 

>authoritarianism", why do we need all the nonsense about "abstract 

>machines" and so on? Thats a lot of needless avantegarde gibberish if 

>you ask me. Which you didn't. 

> 

>The trouble with this gibberish is that it kind of universalises fascism within a crypto-psychological discourse, thereby deflecting attention from its more specific co-ordinates. In my opinion these are: 

> 

>A nation (or effective substitute). 

>A national humiliation, i.e. humiliation of all those who identify strongly with the nation. 

>A hostile and nefarious Other, usually a 'foreigner', which is represented internally by fifth columns, traitors and decadent elements. 

>A crisis of culture. 
None of these critiques have anything to do with what D&G wrote. These are critiques of very bad generalizations, and generalizations made upon very incomplete paraphrasings. 

Anyone bothered to read their writings on the subject one would know that the nation IS situated, that crises and humiliation HAVE been a part of the"crypto-psychological discourse" of psychoanalysis since Freud, and that the idea of the Other IS addressed in their book. There is absolutely nothing universalizing nor ahistorical about their argument. 

The problem is not avantgarde gibberish, its a communication problem, between those who are communicating something only very difficultly communicable (the COMPLEXITY of the issue of Fascism), with people who find this communication at odds with their conceptions. 

Now, even though I've already said it, I'll say again that this "Fascism lives within everyone" paraphrasing that we're associating with D&G is simply inadequate.

Tahir: I'm afraid this point eludes me.

 If they must emphasize the molecular nature of the fascism its only because the historical interpretations could never even mention such an idea. Its was always the Führer. And also because AO is still a book attacking a psychoanalytic idea. One has to keep all of this in context. It seems quite silly to me to critique aspects of ideas that one doesn't have a full picture of. 

Lowe

Tahir: Two points: 1. I was critiquing what was said on the list, not somebody's book. 2. When persons who advocate this stuff start referring to their interlocutors  in terms of repression and neurosis and character armour and all the rest just because they either haven't read this great book or disagree with what they are reading on the list, then such persons have fuckall right to preach about the virtues of complexity. All that they do is 'discover' in their intellectual opponents the very 'fascism' that is being talked about. Rather simplistic I would have thought. 

It may be too 'complex' to tell me why it is that my conception of fascism isn't good enough. In which case I will rest happy with the definition that I gave and I won't take your word for it. OK?

Tahir 





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