Against Historical Fascism, or, a Practical Philosophy of Everyday Immunisation against the Negative or Restrictive Effects of Power

Historical fascism as a macro phenomenon is by now a well-studied chapter of Western and world history. Based on the holistic organicism of early twentieth-century philosophies of life, and their sexualised and racialised hierarchies that divide and conquer different sections of humanity, European fascism is a necropolitical system of power which celebrates its own partial vision of life. Fascism is, then, a philosophical system that advocates a transcendental entity embodied in the European Man as the epitome of evolution and European culture as the motor of human civilisation. It is also an undifferentiated vitalist system that subjects all humans and non-humans under one universal law – that of the allegedly superior master race. This translates into the discourse and practice of the ‘white man’s burden’ as a gendered and racialised project of ontological disqualification of multiple ‘others’. The fascist worldview favoured a corrupt notion of human transcendence, a demented masculinism and a flair for esoteric and often obscurantist theories of racial and antisemitic domination and white supremacy. This is a mix which has always defied scientific rationality while claiming to operate on its behalf. This transcendence came with a celebration of life, of youthfulness and of human potestas, associated with a pseudo-spiritualist celebration of a ‘cosmic soul’ or Eurocentric mystical spirit, which was used as a tool of discrimination. The fascist versions of a deterministic notion of ‘vitalism’, however, were both opposed to and seduced by technological mechanisms, the rule of technology, and a modernist dehumanising narrative of progress.