Continuities of Fascism

The distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought, sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy, but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly its colonial foundations, thus obscuring the continuities between imperial policies and fascism. A recent book, The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity, contends that without confronting the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism.

In conversation with cultural theorists Ana Teixeira Pinto and Sladja Blažan, using this collected volume as a point of departure, Clio Nicastro and Agata Lisiak will critically unpack the ongoing processes of fascisization in Germany and beyond, reflecting on how the most recent political developments have affected, or possibly challenged, their theorization of fascism. Interrogating fascism’s genealogies and legacies, we will also contemplate possible ways forward, outside myopic and harmful frameworks of universality.

In cooperation with diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery.

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Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin, and a professor at HGB Leipzig. She is the editor of the Sternberg Press series On the Antipolitical and co-organized HKW Berlin's “The White West” conference/podcast series, co-editing the subsequent publication Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity. Her forthcoming book is Death Wall (Sternberg Press).

Sladja Blažan is a professor and the interim chair of the American Studies department at the University of Regensburg.  Recently she completed her second manuscript that explores the intersection of spectrality and morality under the title Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World (2024 University of Virginia Press). Previous publications include an edited collection with the title Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), an edited collection with Nigel Hatton, Literature and Refugees (Königshausen & Neumann, 2018).

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie e.V., Crellestraße 22, 10827 Berlin

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