April 29, 2019, by criticalmoment

Fascism and Crisis: Workshop with Alberto Toscano (Thursday 2nd May at 1pm)

Dear All,

Please do join us for this timely and important event this week, in which we will try to think through responses to the rise of the alt-right …

FASCISM AND CRISIS

Workshop with Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths)

Date: Thursday 2 May, 1 – 4 pm

Venue: A19 Trent Building, University of Nottingham

Description:

The recent strengthening of the far-right in the political arena around the world has been increasingly diagnosed by the left, liberals and conservatives alike as a return of fascism. Today, for some commentators (i.e. Snyder, Butler, Stanley), names like Trump, Le Pen and Bolsonaro (among others) often reappear as old and awkward ghosts of Italian and German fascism. As Dylan Riley suggests (Riley 2018), such perspectives mobilise a form of analogical thinking in order to categorize, explain or dismiss today`s political events by way of a comparison to twentieth-century European Fascism. However, this transhistorical account of fascism does not account for its inherent links with the current economic, political, and border crises.

This workshop will follow contemporary left-wing thinkers (Balibar, Traverso, Farris) in probing the limits of analogical thinking and problematizing the abundance of meanings ascribed to fascism. This task requires rethinking the various definitions of fascism in their relation to the current economic and political crises.

Alberto Toscano’s talk entitled ‘Afterlives of Fascism’ will work with ‘analogies’ and ‘dis-analogies’ of the contemporary situation, comparing current events with the early 1970s Black Liberation Movement. The talk will be followed by a workshop centred on questions such as: What are the benefits and limitations of analogical thinking for analysing the rise of the far-right today? How can we think of fascism in its glocality? What role do global colonial interdependencies play in our understanding of ‘new’ fascism/s? We will have a discussion in relation to two theoretical approaches touching on these issues: Étienne Balibar’s postcolonial account of the racism-nationalism relationship, and Enzo Traverso’s concept of post-fascism. These texts will be distributed beforehand via email but you are welcome to just turn up for the discussion to.

In either case, those interested in attending should e-mail us at: theoryandmodernity@gmail.com

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