Perversions of Fascism

by Antonios Vadolas

Overview

Contemporary versions of evil demonise modern "fascists", "totalitarian threats", and "Hitlers". As if not obscure enough, fascist evil has been equivocally linked with perversion. This book reveals that both fascism and perversion implicate the non-symbolisable kernel in politics, which becomes the source of their mystification. It argues that the fascist does not take the same discursive position as the pervert does, regarding this symbolic gap. The author develops a new rhetoric, de-pathologised and de-ideologised, regarding the structure of the so-called pervert, introducing new vocabularies and directions for psychoanalytic research that further distance the pervert, or whom he calls the "extra-ordinary subject", from fascist politics and, instead, exposes his diachronic "fascist" isolation from the social edifice. This reveals the fruitful alternatives that can stem from a "return to Freud cum Lacan", which supports a flexible on-going reformulation of psychoanalytic knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780429917240
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Vadolas, Antonios

Table of Contents

Preface -- Fascism and Perversion -- Introduction -- 1930s–1940s: The Frankfurt School and the Freudian left -- 1940s–1970s: The authoritarian and evil profile of fascism -- 1970s–1980s: Neo-Freudian perspectives -- 1990s: The surfeit of fascist jouissance -- Part I: Conclusion -- Discourse -- Introduction: The domination of the fascist and the Sadean master -- Power and mastery through the Lacanian prism -- The Lacanian discourse -- Three masters, three systems of domination -- Part II: Conclusion -- Ethics -- Introduction -- Sade with Kant and Eichmann -- Ethics and guilt -- From imaginary to democratic ethics -- Part III: Conclusion -- Politics -- Introduction: Politics and the embodiment of jouissance -- Beyond the fascist Utopia -- Exfra-ordinary anxiety -- Negating disavowal -- Part IV: Conclusion -- Conclusion: Love the object of your anxiety

Editorial Reviews

"Fascism has often been regarded as a perverse ideology and perversion may easily appear as a fascist form of sexuality, yet in this brilliant book Vadolas demonstrates that these associations obfuscate rather than elucidate the eroticisation of power as one of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of the human condition. Lacanian psychoanalysis underpins many of the author's arguments, but insofar as theorising is also exercising power Lacan is as much the method as he is the object of study. Drawing on a vast range of sources and broadly conceived as a critical reflection on philosophical, ethical and psychoanalytic discourses of domination, this is the kind of book that no contemporary social scientist can ignore."

Professor Dany Nobus

"Fascism has often been regarded as a perverse ideology and perversion may easily appear as a fascist form of sexuality, yet in this brilliant book Vadolas demonstrates that these associations obfuscate rather than elucidate the eroticisation of power as one of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of the human condition. Lacanian psychoanalysis underpins many of the author's arguments, but insofar as theorising is also exercising power Lacan is as much the method as he is the object of study. Drawing on a vast range of sources and broadly conceived as a critical reflection on philosophical, ethical and psychoanalytic discourses of domination, this is the kind of book that no contemporary social scientist can ignore."

From the Publisher