fascism

[Dave Monroe]

Wolin, Richard.  The Seduction of Unreason:
   The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from
   Nietzsche to Postmodernism.  Princeton, NJ:
   Princeton UP, 2004.

Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political
misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent
shock waves throughout European and North American
intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has
been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In
this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit,
Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation
with fascism has been widespread and not incidental.
He calls into question postmodernism's claim to have
inherited the mantle of the left--and suggests that
postmodern thought has long been smitten with the
opposite end of the political spectrum.

In probing chapters on C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, Wolin
discovers an unsettling commonality: during the 1930s,
these thinkers leaned to the right and were tainted by
a proverbial "fascination with fascism." Frustrated by
democracy's shortcomings, they were seduced by
fascism's grandiose promises of political
regeneration. The dictatorships in Italy and Germany
promised redemption from the uncertainties of
political liberalism. But, from the beginning, there
could be no doubting their brutal methods of racism,
violence, and imperial conquest.

Postmodernism's origins among the profascist literati
of the 1930s reveal a dark political patrimony. The
unspoken affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and
postmodernism constitute the guiding thread of Wolin's
suggestive narrative. In their mutual hostility toward
reason and democracy, postmodernists and the advocates
of Counter-Enlightenment betray a telltale strategic
alliance--they cohabit the fraught terrain where far
left and far right intersect.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7705.html

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