On Late Fascism: Derrida,Toscano and the Return of Absolute Hostility

Toscano’s Late Fascism Thesis

Perhaps the best way to begin the exposition of Toscano’s account of late fascism is with the quote from Max Horkheimer he uses to introduce Chapter 4: ‘Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism’ (Horkheimer, 1939: 2). The relationship between capitalism and fascism, however, is far from transparent, and Toscano’s Late Fascism is a collection of essays on the reactionary political currents that have arisen from the evolution of capital into its present-day global-techno-scientific regime. As such, his project is closely related to the idea of cognitive mapping he inherited from Fredric Jameson’s version of Marxist culture critique, the details of which he sets out (with Jeff Kinkle) in Cartographies of the Absolute. ¹ To put things in an overly synoptic way, the presupposition of cognitive mapping is that capitalism has evolved into a global regime of virtual networks, financial institutions, supply chains, biomedical manipulations, cybernetic programmes, and AI systems whose totality is beyond direct representation (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015: 1–6). There is, in other words, no possibility of an aesthetic form that could capture the multiple abstractions through which capitalism impacts on the lives of those who inhabit its heterogeneous spaces. Indeed, the concept of the map that is explored in the book maintains that it configures an acute tension between the techno-instrumental demands of the system (to make everything more efficient, more programmatic) and the immanent possibility of representing the sites of anonymous suffering that are passed over in the regime’s aesthetically-induced consumption (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015: 9–10). And so the political significance of mapping the literary and aesthetic forms which have pursued the spiritual and aesthetic violence of capital is, firstly, to make transparent the sites of its most inhuman modes of exploitation, secondly, to set out the global interconnectedness of these sites, and, thirdly, to outplay the ‘paralysing awe’ in which the spectacle of capital has taken hold of our cognitive faculties (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015: 241–2).

The guiding thread of Toscano’s Late Fascism is to elaborate the relationship between the reactionary images of race, nation, empire, sex, and gender that have been presented by late fascist movements, and the ‘economic, juridical and political abstractions’ through which capital constantly expands its regime (Toscano, 2023: 75). For Jameson and Toscano (and indeed for Derrida, as we will see in a moment), this relationship is fundamental to the process of commodification, as Marx understood it. In the first chapter of Capital, Volume One, the subjection of people, labour and objects to the invisible determinations of exchange value is what initiates the regime of real abstraction through which capital expands its capacity for exploitation (Marx, 1990: 125–77; Toscano, 2023: 76). The commodity form, in other words, has always functioned by extending its regime of abstraction: initially into the regimes of economic, legal and political organization that formed bourgeois society, and later into the biotechnological, AI, virtual, and cybernetic networks of ‘Globalization 4.0’. Conceived historically, this process has a dual aspect. On the one hand, digitization is the regime through which capital has assumed the virtual forms that have sustained its exponential growth and, on the other, it has produced an everyday experience of life that is fractured, impoverished, and ‘out of sync’ with sustainable ideals of sociality (Toscano, 2023: 4–11). The intensity of this experience is unevenly distributed across the national, economic and cultural spaces that are formed within the global totality of capital, and Toscano attempts to draw out the different modalities of fascism that have emerged inside and outside of the Western context. My primary concern is with his account of the intensification of reactionary currents that has resulted from the hyper-consumption, hyper-rationalization, and hyper-instability that has been normalized in European democracies.

So, let us return to the account of abstraction presented in Chapter 4 of Toscano’s book. One of the tropes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that became central to National Socialist ideology was that capitalism, in its liberal democratic form, was Jewish. The worst excesses of plutocracy, individualism, and national decay in Weimar Germany were attributed to a ‘Jewish’ system of abstract rights that were inimical to the preservation of the Aryan race and their nation. This was the basis of Carl Schmitt’s essays, ‘Public Law in New Context’ and ‘National Socialist Legal Thought’, which maintained that political rights should be granted only to the ‘racial comrades’ who make up the ethnic body of the Volk (Schmitt in Mosse, 1966: 323–6). Toscano interrogates the detail of this process, following Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that Nazi anti-Semitism maintained that Judaism lacks both a messiah and a spiritual community, and that the absolute demand of the unknowable God has led the Jews, as a race, to assert formal laws of citizenship which divide the ethnic unity of the nation (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 168–208). ‘The Jew’, in other words, is identified with the spread of a system of abstraction that allowed his race to become ‘middlemen’ in the dirty immaterial work of banking and the financialization of capital (Toscano, 2023: 81). The Nazi identification of abstraction and Judaism, however, should not be taken as the exclusive form in which fascism racialized the effects of capital on the cultural and political constitution of the nation-state. Toscano rightly insists on the fact that the return of fascist movements to Europe after the war has been marked by an ongoing and relatively homogeneous reconfiguration of race in their respective ideologies. In the constellation of figures that make up late fascist semiotics of race, the Jewish banker/intellectual/Bolshevik has been supplemented, though not displaced, by the sacred sites and vestments of Islamic religiosity, and the persistence of biopolitical myths about the sub-humanity of black men and women (Toscano, 2023: 43–7).

The constant provocation between the neoliberal tendency to fragment class and cultural identities and the re-emergence of fascism as a system of mythic ideals is developed throughout Toscano’s Late Fascism. In the first chapter he discusses Ernst Bloch’s account of the multiple ‘non-synchronous’ temporalities that criss-crossed German society between the wars (Toscano, 2023: 9). In his Heritage of Our Times, Bloch argued that the uneven development of German capitalism and the intensity of its attendant crises had provoked a recourse to elements of petit bourgeois and peasant class identities that capitalist rationalization had left largely unreconstructed (Bloch, 1991: 98–103). And so, peasant mythologies of nature and obligation to the feudal lord and petit bourgeois principles of order and state hegemony returned to the present as ideals to be defended against the endemic uncertainties of capital. It was this condition of ‘subjective non-contemporaneity’ that was mobilized so effectively by Nazism. The animistic forms of peasant religiosity that were, for Bloch, only partly stabilized by Protestantism and the unrewarded discipline of the Mittelstand were mobilized through Nazism’s refurbishment of Germany’s ‘unfinished past’ (Bloch, 1991: 108–9). Nazism was able to engineer a reordering, or re-serialization, of both classes in a counter-revolutionary community of blood and soil that was based on endemic fear of Soviet Communism and a historic hatred of Judaism. Today, though, the fascist mobilization of ethnic community has a different geopolitical dynamic: the vagueness of national boundaries and indigenous identities has produced a spirit of reactionary life in which the racial other occupies a central yet ambiguous position (Toscano, 2023: 4). This ‘spirit’ consists of gathering certain ideals of racial community into an aesthetic regime that seeks to assert the privileges of those with the proper class, ethnic and religious provenance. The ‘autotelic’ individuals who create their own worlds within the fractured time of national economic life have become the subjects to whom the spiritual bargain of late fascism is offered (Chandler, 2013: 212). The terms of this bargain are complex and include a multiplicity of economic, political, and aesthetic figurations of ‘whiteness’ that come, firstly, from an ideological nostalgia for national capital and the Fordist regime and, secondly, from the post-war history of ultra right-wing movements (Toscano, 2023: 19–24). Such appeals are reiterations of classical fascist mythology: the story of a once powerful nation destroyed by abstraction, miscegenation, and cynicism, and which can only be redeemed by the restoration of its ethnic origins. And yet, Toscano argues, the political horizon of late fascist parties is more conservative than their classical antecedents. For their representations of national life before the post-war catastrophe of mass immigration must also repudiate, or at least defer, their association with Nazism’s biopolitical racism (Toscano, 2023: 114).

It is, for Toscano, axiomatic that fascism originates in structural crises of late capitalism. Such crises, as Bloch and Benjamin both pointed out, have an unprecedented intensity and can rapidly become catastrophic at the objective and subjective levels of socioeconomic integration. In his ‘A Tour of the German Inflation’, for example, Benjamin described the destructive impact of the hyperinflation of 1923 on the institutional life of civil society and on the practical-subjective forms through which the social Gemeinschaft was experienced (Benjamin, 1997: 54–60). Once this reciprocal destruction gathered pace, the time of civil society was radically altered: it became distorted and uncanny; the most basic exchanges between individuals and objects were rendered strange and devoid of their familiar meanings. This, for Toscano, is the time for fascism; the radical uncertainty around race, national identity, gender, and sexuality that is brought about by the most acute crises of national capitalism (Toscano, 2023: 98). It is at such points that the ‘spirit’ of fascism emerges as a mythology that is founded either on a cultural (in case of the Italian variant) or racial (in the German version) narrative of origins. There is a particular logic to this emergence which Toscano calls time in fascism, that is, the way that the mythological history of race, nation, and people is gathered into a hermetic nationalism that offers the possibility of a new beginning. The masses, in other words, are offered the chance to become participants in a war against the personified forces that have destroyed the integrity of the race and the purity of ethnic culture (Toscano, 2023: 99–100). Such wars are fought on many fronts: they are mobilizations of masculinity in paramilitary squads and state armies, they are exhortations of women to supply the reproductive needs of the nation, they are calls to artists and intellectuals to enter the service of the new order, and they are the forced deproletarianization of labour performed in the service of the Volk. And so, the ‘palingenetic nationalism’ that Roger Griffin identified as the essence of fascism is always more than a simple strategic ideology (Griffin, 1991: 32–6). It is the chance of a wholesale migration of life into a world of ‘spirit’ whose designations of purity and community are constantly transformed in the war for the future/past (Toscano, 2023: 99–100). I will come to the significance of this idea of spirit in Derrida’s work in the following section.

Toscano’s theory of late fascism maintains that the return of the ultra-right to the political mainstream can be properly understood only when certain analogies with the classical period are given up. So, to look for contemporary examples of the paramilitary organizations of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in Germany, or the Partito Natiozionale Fasscista (PNF) in Italy, is to misunderstand the historical processes through which the ‘spirit’ of fascism has returned to the present. The late form of fascism that has come to haunt liberal democracy in Europe (and America) is a racial politics. But the form this has taken is the outcome of a historical relationship between post-war liberal capitalism and the maintenance of ‘black labour’ as a de facto condition of compound economic growth (Toscano, 2023: 46–7). The persistence of racism as the shadow of the post-war reconstruction period and the neoliberal revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s forces us to acknowledge that fascism, in the form of systemic discrimination, is compatible with individualist ideologies that have been regarded as its antithesis. As Toscano put it in his ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, the movement ‘reacts against what is already a liberal reaction’ (Toscano, 2017: 13). So, to search compulsively for signs of the return of mass paramilitary violence among late fascist movements is to be bewitched by a ‘fantastic historiography’, in which Nazism is portrayed as sine qua non of fascism’s return (Jameson, 1995: 367–71). As a contemporary antifascist critique, political theory should be concerned with the ways that racial mythologies have been remobilized as a kind of postmodern deferral of actual violence, rather than provoking re-enactments of old-style fascist paramilitarism (Toscano, 2023: 1–4).

This demand for critical attention to the return of the mythic and aesthetic forms of fascist politics, however, is not a repudiation of the risks they pose. The spirit of fascism that has remained present in post-war liberal democracies has gone through continual transformations that began almost as soon as the war ended (for example, the Occidentalist international that emerged under the influence of Maurice Bardéche, Robert Braillach, Julius Evola, and Per Engdahl, and which formed the basis of the anti-Islamic ideology of the Front National under Jean-Marie Le Pen [Mammone, 2011: 313–16]). The form in which this has taken place, according to Toscano, is the aesthetics of fascist mythology. The folk stories of heroism, sacrifice, and duty that have persisted in extreme nationalist movements in Europe are untranslatable into the discursive regimen of language (Toscano, 2023: 116–17). As a genre, they call forth a ‘community of blood’, whose disciples are, in effect, created by the political aesthetics of fascist life. Toscano refers to the religio mortis, or religion of death, that is presented in Cesare Pavese’s novels (but which could also be extended to the German examples of Ernst Junger’s novel Storm of Steel and Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter), which were not meant to be contributions to a universal ‘literature’, but sheer exhortations to young men to join the fight for the nation and its people (Toscano, 2023: 121). If there is an analogy between ‘classical’ and ‘late’ fascist movements, this consists only in the fact that the latter have continued to use this appeal to a ‘spirit’ of racial and national life that cannot, and indeed must not, be translated into the forensic clarity of language. Thus, the entry of late fascist parties into the political mainstream has depended on their development of a complex economy of aesthetic simulation, in which the catastrophe of the fascist past is constantly deferred in the mythology of the new Völkisch life. Without such a deferral, the mobilization of those millions of non-synchronous individuals who voted for the Alternative for Germany, National Rally, Brothers of Italy, etc., would not have been possible (Toscano, 2023: 5).

I will conclude this section by looking briefly at the idea of sovereignty that accompanies Toscano’s account of late fascism. In his ‘Notes’ he maintains that the absolute surplus of energy that the NSDAP was able to mobilize in Weimar Germany has no counterpart in contemporary forms of fascism. He argues that the background to Bataille’s account of the psychological structure of Nazism, as a limitless effervescence that takes hold of the masses and briefly coincides with reactionary elements from the bourgeoisie, is a response to the threat of integration into the Soviet regime (Bataille, 1997: 144–5; Toscano, 2024: 12). As such, to analyse contemporary fascist parties as if they embody the same reactionary surplus is to misunderstand the process of inheritance that has allowed them to return to liberal democracies as populist movements. What we have with late fascist parties are organizations that present a mythic reterritorialization of the state, through which the white, male, indigenous population would be returned to its post-war condition of privilege. Toscano describes this as a ‘border fascism’ that aims at restoring control over the immigration of racial others who have exploited the laxity of the liberal state and its institutions. This version of fascism is also obsessed with a certain biopolitics, in which the ‘natural’ demarcations of gender and sexuality are defended as both the origin and the objective of the nation-state (Toscano, 2023: 157). And yet, to be effective among the non-synchronous elements of the white population, the claim that race is the origin of absolute sovereignty, à la Carl Schmitt, must be deferred through a complex economy of simulation. The multiple aspects of this process are, as we have seen, presented in Toscano’s account of the aesthetics of late fascist politics, and this raises an important question about the idea of cognitive mapping. The map that Toscano draws of fascist movements and their relationship to the deterritorializing power of capital involves what is undoubtedly a necessary separation of their contemporary form from the presumed unfolding of its essence in historical time. Conceptual understanding, in other words, demands that we grasp the contemporary specificity of their strategies, mythologies and appeals. However, and this brings me to Derrida’s approach to the politics of return, this analysis inevitably puts back into play the spectres of race and genocide that haunt the formation of fascist movements within the cultural economy of the nation-state.

Fascism as Absolute Hostility

For Toscano, late fascism is related to a specific trajectory in late capitalism: the tendency of the process of commodification to pass into a regime that constantly multiplies the virtual networks through which social and political life is staged (Toscano, 2024: 13). The formation of the individual, in other words, takes place within systems that have supplanted the analogues of presence that formed liberal democracy, and which are the outcome of purely functional, technological and economic imperatives. Consequently, the nature of politics has been transformed; it has become a constant re-staging of spectres (of class, family, race, nation, sex, etc.) that seeks temporary consensus among the fractured subjects that have been created by deterritorialized capitalism. This process of re-presentation has been the subject of a certain convergence-divergence between Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson’s respective accounts of the contemporary significance of class politics. As we have seen, Jameson’s account of cognitive mapping demands that we indicate the points within the global matrix that might, potentially, form the basis of resistance to the abstractions through which capital constantly expands its regime. According to Jameson, Derrida’s attempt to do this in Spectres of Marx remains essentially ‘messianic’, in the sense that his idea of the spectre belongs to an economy of past and present that places the political reality of the latter within the context of a redemptive history (Jameson in Sprinker, 1999: 59–65). I will argue that this is to misread the place of messianicity in Derrida’s philosophy, and that consequently Toscano’s account of late fascism, as an application of Jameson’s aesthetic theory, underplays the reactionary potential of the contemporary ultra-right in Europe.

The publication of the English translation of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in 1993 produced a series of negative reactions from the left that were largely focused on what was understood as his neglect of class relations. However, these reactions, which were summarized in Michael Sprinker’s collection Ghostly Demarcations, were not univocal. They ranged from straightforward iterations of Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois ideology’, to more sophisticated engagements with Derrida’s account of the spectralization of the commodity form and its ethical and political implications. Jameson’s contribution, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, is interesting because it exemplifies the structure of convergence-divergence with Derrida that I mentioned above. On the one hand, Jameson agrees with Derrida’s claim that the migration of capital into the virtual forms of media-techno-scientific production is already implicit in Marx’s account of the commodity as a spectral incarnation of exchange value (Jameson in Sprinker, 1999: 64). On the other hand, though, he maintains that there is something ‘messianic’ in Derrida’s thought that is inherited from Walter Benjamin: the idea that any politics of class resistance that takes shape within the matrix of spectral capitalism is part of an epochal responsibility that cannot be configured through the quasi-empirical reference points of the cognitive map. As such, the ethico-political demand of Derrida’s ‘Marxism’ floats free of actual geopolitical engagement and ‘brings the whole feeling of dashed hopes and impossibility along with it’ (Jameson, in Sprinker, 1999: 62). However, I would suggest that this feeling does not signify despair, or the ‘awed paralysis’ at the spectacle of capital that Toscano spoke of in Cartographies of the Absolute (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015: 241). Rather, it is the demand that we recognize the re-formation of the spectres that have been put into play by global capitalism (race, class, sexuality, gender, etc.) as an ethico-political demand that complicates the ‘mapping’ of late fascism in a number of important ways.

In his essay ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, Derrida (1989) examined the distinction that Walter Benjamin attempted to maintain between ‘law creating’ and ‘law preserving’ violence. Benjamin argued that the secular regime of law that maintained the social order was a form of suspended violence, whose continuity is sustained by a combination of strategic police interventions and religious and ideological conventions. The latter, however, are mythic; they produce order through a regime of collective representation that is always implicated in the perpetuation of sacred hierarchies. It is this reproduction of the law that involves human beings in the constitution of divine violence, for the messianic horizon of revolutionary change is always re-opened by what is ‘to come’ after the regime of secular law has been re-constituted (Benjamin, 1997: 153–4). Derrida argues that the structure of this argument retains an expiatory element, in which the human weakness for mythic ideals is redeemed by the destruction of those who have been destroyed by its excesses (Derrida, 1992: 62). In his post-scriptum to ‘Force of Law’ he argues that if Benjamin’s principle of divine violence were to be applied to the Holocaust, this would condemn those who died to a nameless and unremembered annihilation in the fires of the crematoria. The ethico-political demand that arises from the event of the Nazi genocide, in other words, comes from the infinite detail that made up the life of each individual who was liquidated in the death camps – the detail that, for Derrida, is signified by the name of each one who died. And so, the lesson to be drawn from the final solution is that each murder is a singularity, and that all collective annihilations are unique events that cannot be incorporated into any form of redemptive history. As Derrida puts it, we must ‘think, know, represent for ourselves, formalize, judge the possible complicity between all these [contemporary reactionary] discourses and the worst (here the final solution)’ (Derrida, 1992: 63).

So, how are we to conceptualize this possible complicity between contemporary ultra-right movements and the annihilationist ideology of Nazism? The account of Heidegger’s association with National Socialism that Derrida presents in Of Spirit is important here. The essay is concerned with a theme we have already encountered in Toscano’s work, namely, the idea of fascism’s ‘rushing forward into the past’ (Toscano, 2023: 100–12). Derrida’s argument is that the structure of self-assertion, that is already present in Heidegger’s designation of the essence of Dasein in Being and Time, is re-presented in the cultural turn of his philosophy during the 1930s (Derrida, 1991a: 57). His work on Trakl’s poetry, for example, concentrates on the tropes of fire and inspiration as the expression of a Germanic ‘spirit’ which, among all forms of collective existence, is presented as the greatest invocation to unity between the will of the individual and the life of the nation. The corruption of national culture, therefore, must be opposed by the guiding light of ‘spirit in flames’: for it is in its leading back to the original foundation of Germanic life that the true arc of Dasein’s destiny can be traced (Derrida, 1991a: 96–8). This figuration of spirit, even if it is held in a certain epoché that would separate it from an assertion of the necessity of Heidegger’s Nazism, is inseparable from his attraction to the NSDAP (Bennington, 2016: 102–3). Thus, the point to which Derrida returns throughout his essay is that the volatility of spirit that is expressed in Heidegger’s cultural turn exemplifies the same aesthetic exorbitance as Nazism’s palingenetic mythology. Indeed, the integration of Hitler’s racial ideals into the cultural, political, and artistic spheres of civil society after 1933 was facilitated by a spirit of intellectual complicity, exemplified in Heidegger’s infamous text ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, through which philosophy assisted in Nazism’s tearing destruction of political reason (Derrida, 1991a: 65–7). I will return to the effects of this complicity in a moment.

The establishment of the National Socialist state in Germany marked the point at which the affiliation between the populist aesthetics of Nazism (the unity of blood and soil, the destiny of the Volk, and the historical mission of the leader) and the biopolitics of race were revealed as the most radical expression of fascism’s drive for reterritorialization. Derrida examined the dynamics of this conjunction in ‘On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political’, whose central theme was Carl Schmitt’s attempt to formulate the racial mythology of Nazism into a system of exclusive legal rights (Derrida, 1997: 112–37). The foundation of Schmitt’s philosophy is a strict designation of politics as that which arises from the primordial relationship of friend and enemy. States are formed through associations whose durability is established by war with others who threaten the integrity of the group. This austere definition of the state is radically opposed to the abstract rights of social democracy, for the excessive differentiation of civil society into sectional interests tends to destroy the ethnic bonds that constitute the distinctive being of the nation. This is what underpins Schmitt’s 1933 essay, ‘Public Law in a New Context’, which attempted to base the possession of individual rights in the Nazi state on purely racial criteria. According to Derrida, the logic of this argument is formed within the economy of spirit that he associates with fascism. For the dramatization of friendship and enmity through which Schmitt presents the distinction of every state that is worth the name is always already a mythico-aesthetic, rather than an analytical, designation of political authority (Derrida, 1997: 113–15). Thus, it is the necessary slippage between Schmitt’s concept of the friend-enemy relation as the origin of political order among European nations, and the mythology of blood and soil to which he constantly refers, that licenses the disenfranchisement of those racial enemies to whom the social democratic order had granted formal equality (Derrida, 1997: 133).

The question this raises, of course, concerns the designation of race in the cultural and political universe of Nazism, that is, its transformation from a legal category that is subject to specific prohibitions and exclusions to the mythic figuration of a national struggle for which a ‘final solution’ was deemed necessary. It is often argued that the fascism of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (PNF) differed from that of Hitler’s National Socialism in its rejection of race as a biopolitical category. The difference is marked by the unwillingness of the PNF to accept ‘race’ as anything more than a hyperbolic expression of the unity that existed among the Latin peoples who lived in the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. And so, while it is true that the idea of Romanità had certain racial, or at least Occidentalist overtones, it never gave rise to the cosmological racism of the NSDAP (Gregor, 1969: 270). However, it seems to me that the original form of fascism, as it was expressed in the admixture of modernism, futurism, nationalism, and corporatism that was brought together in the PNF, is a prototypical expression of absolute hostility: a politics of difference with a powerful sense of the friendships and enmities that form the unity of the nation and its people. And so, what took place between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the inter-war period is important, because it reveals the inherent tendency of fascist mythology to move towards a biopolitical narrative of racial difference. The history of the ‘Pact of Steel’ was defined by the clash between the German and Italian versions of race and the unwillingness of the Italian regime, before the foundation of the Salò Republic, to co-operate with the Nazi demand for the deportation of Italian Jews. And yet the existence of the Hitler regime, as a state founded on the principle of absolute hostility to its racial other, produced a crisis in the culture and politics of Italian fascism. The Italian ‘Manifesto of Race’ attempted to engineer a compromise between the two versions of race politics but ended up simply bolting the anthropological anti-Semitism of the Nazis onto the Italian constitution (Gregor, 1969: 277). ²

The point here is that the form of absolute hostility that is configured in the Italian fascist regime has a moral and aesthetic determination that exceeds the political figurations through which its authority was originally constituted. For Derrida, the fables of non-human powers through which the authority of the sovereign has invested the substance of modern civic life are an attempt to express the absolute potency required of the king or the prince in defence of his state (Derrida, 2009: 35). He must be like the fox, the lion, and the wolf, like God, like death, but in a way that is always aware of the ethical life of the state for whose sake he enacts his terrible powers (Derrida, 2009: 57). This hesitancy of political philosophy towards the attribution of pure autonomy to the person of the king (he is ‘like’ the wolf, ‘like’ God, ‘like’ death, etc., without ‘being’ them) is important. For we might, then, think of the beginning of fascist hostility in the PNF, with its relatively modest racial doctrine of Romanità, as marking the inception of a historical movement towards the complete forgetfulness of reason that was the counterpart of Nazism’s racial mythology. The logic of absolute hostility that is essential to all types of fascist politics, in other words, cannot be indefinitely deferred in regimes of aesthetic and discursive re-presentation. For if the ‘fascism-producing’ crisis is the outcome of certain systemic developments in the organization of economy, subjectivity, and culture, and if these developments are of sufficient intensity and duration, then it will tend to produce a biopolitical condensation of racial politics across the various ultra-right movements to which it has given birth. Our own historical present, in other words, is the site of a dialectic of the real, the complexity of which is unfolding, on the one hand, through the political simulacra by which late fascism has revitalized the symbolic economy of the national identity, and, on the other, through the return of an ontological politics whose ideals (of race, spirit, and destiny) have an inescapable relationship to the violence of the past.

Derrida and the Late Fascist Synthesis

Ernst Nolte, in his Three Faces of Fascism, claimed that the success of the Nazi Party was down to their ability to bring about a synthesis among the fractured elements of the old class system in Germany. He argued that Hitler’s radical appeal to myths of ethnic nationalism was, for a brief and unstable period, the only effective way of reaching the heterogeneous, individualized suffering of those who lived through the political and economic crises of the Weimer Republic (Nolte, 1965: 399–400). ³ This idea of an emergent ‘fascist synthesis’, that is sustained through the mythology of ethnic nationalism, is one of the primary themes of Toscano’s account of late fascism. As we have seen, he argues that the return of the ultra-right to the political mainstream depends on a mobilization that takes place ‘more at the level of fantasy than of function’ (Toscano, 2024: 13). And so, the late fascist movements that have led this mobilization are once more engaged in the project of uniting non-synchronous subjects who have lost their autonomy in the fragmentation of national life. However, while there are weak analogies with the inter-war success of Nazism, the contemporary form of fascist representation is not, in any simple sense, an iteration of National Socialism. This, as Derrida and Toscano recognize, is both a tense logical truth (i.e. that time T is non-identical with time T*) and a political demand that arises from the re-presentation of the fascist past. As we have seen, however, Derrida’s account of political inheritance gives a certain privilege to the impact of Nazism on the spiritual and aesthetic identity of European culture and, as such, presents what he conceives as the general economy of remembrance and forgetting into which fascism re-emerged after the war (Derrida, 1991a: 111–13). And so, I want to examine the synergies and disjunctions that arise from considering Toscano’s account of late fascism as a possibility that has emerged within this volatile economy of political remembrance.

So, what are the terms of Derrida’s account of the political economy of inheritance? Firstly, his concept of absolute hostility is not an attempt to subsume the fascism-producing conditions that arise from global capital under a messianic history that leaves no room for political resistance. I have argued that Jameson’s critique of Derrida underplays his insistence that, even though the living present is always subject to the return of mythic forms that have been implicated in the destruction of the law, their mobilization in the form of party ideology, political strategy, etc, constitutes a unique demand for democracy to come (Derrida, 1994: xx). As an application of cognitive mapping theory to contemporary fascist representations of race and nation, Toscano’s analysis presents snapshots of a reactionary dialectic that is ‘after’ the absolute hostility that fascism inherits from its past. This is not to say that these snapshots are simple misrepresentations of the living present into which fascism has re-emerged as a political force, or that they simply map unfeasibly utopian resolutions onto the present crisis. Rather, it is to insist on the fact that the development and performance of late fascist ideology that he describes is taking place in a context whose volatility is already driving them beyond the reactionary transformations of liberal democracy they have achieved. Toscano is right to argue that the aesthetic repertoire through which late fascist parties have presented the rights of white indigenous constituencies has performed a complex deferral of their descent into crudely antagonistic stereotypes of race and religion (Toscano, 2024: 13). However, this strategy does not neutralize the spectres that haunt the identity of European culture, and neither does it seek to defer indefinitely the expressions of absolute hostility that have always been essential to fascism’s appeal. Indeed, the fact that late fascism has emerged from an unprecedented conjunction of crisis conditions should lead us to consider its future provocation of those ‘European’ spectres (ethno-nationalism, biopolitical racism, Occidentalism, etc.) that it seeks simultaneously to embrace and deny.

Secondly, Derrida’s account of the spectro-politics of which late fascism has become the contemporary focus is essentially related to the deterritorializing networks of global capitalism. In Spectres of Marx, he argues that fidelity to Marx lies in accepting that locating the unity of the proletariat in the virtual space of technological capital is impossible, and that the perpetual fracturing of its existence into nameless suffering, exploitation, and death marks the persistence of his revolutionary demand (Derrida, 1994: 20–1). Toscano’s elaboration of the dynamics of late fascism lies close to this model of spectralization; he regards the return of fascist mythology to the political mainstream in liberal democracies as an aesthetic refiguration of national and ethnic identity within the abstract networks of global capitalism (Toscano, 2023: 76). Both Derrida and Toscano, in other words, share a concern with the way in which the transnational regime of capital has exceeded its capacity for programmatic adaptation and produces events which demand political solutions to its recurrent crises. Toscano’s work, then, is important because it presents late fascism as a complex regime of aesthetic simulation, discursive innovation, and strategic targeting that has evolved within the volatile geopolitical space of capital and which has been effective in penetrating the political mainstream in liberal democracies. However, the reactionary coalitions that have arisen from this political shift are, by virtue of their negotiations of the historical violence by which fascism has been defined, a source of escalating hostility. As such, the deformations of civil society that have been accomplished by late fascist parties demand to be considered as a preliminary form, whose potential for the racialization of life vastly exceeds the current simulacra of national community. Here, the messianic demand of Derrida’s thought would encourage us to look for the indigenous signs of a defensive reaction of Northern, First-World, technological economies to who or what may be coming: climate refugees, mass migration, radical resource depletion, etc. (Derrida, 2002: 66–7).

This model of the relationship between global capitalism and the return of fascist politics is the topological form which enables a dialogue between Derrida and Toscano’s work on the reactionary re-formations of race, nation, and religiosity that have taken place in Western liberal democracies. The question that formed the core of Fredric Jameson’s response to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx concerned the despair that the latter supposedly introduced into the Marxian dialectic. The constant pursuit of the pathos of the name could only lead to a collapse of the revolutionary optimism required to map possible alliances that could oppose the reactionary strategies of capital. As we have seen, it is this account of cognitive mapping that provides the theoretical framework for Toscano’s approach to late fascist politics. The seven essays that comprise his book describe a sphere of abstraction through which capital has dehumanized the world, and which is the condition of the reactionary aesthetics of race, gender, sexuality, and desire that has formed the basis of fascism’s return to mainstream politics. These essays are brilliant pieces of synthetic thought, which pinpoint the descent of community into fantastical mythologies that seek to alleviate the growing fear of impending catastrophe. However, it seems to me that something of Jameson’s impatience with the quasi-messianic element of Derrida’s thought finds its way into Toscano’s analysis. His essays inherit the idea that the post-war evolution of capital has integrated fascism into aesthetic and discursive regimes that have contained its tendency to destroy every limitation that is placed upon it. Late fascism, particularly in its European forms, is defined by its reproduction of the hyper-rational parameters of capitalization through the re-formation of race as a signifier that never quite becomes the destructive form it promises to be. However, and this is the crux of Derrida’s idea of the absolute hostility, the repetition of fascism’s aesthetic re-integration of life is marked by an excess that always threatens to exceed the ideological tropes in which it returns. The explicit and subliminal forms of Islamophobia that have been spread by late fascist parties, for example, constantly intensify the fear of losing the ‘valued collective “We”’ that underpins the democratic institutions of the state (Diefenbach and von Scheve, 2023: 68). The intensity and dynamism of this threat cannot be registered in the cognitive map of fascist reaction and resistance; it exceeds it as a potential that Derrida attempts to mark in his account of the dead who haunt the racial provocation of hostility (Derrida, 1991b: 43).

The difference between Derrida’s and Toscano’s analyses is difficult to specify analytically, and yet it points to something that, I believe, is essential to understanding the dynamics of late fascism. From its earliest beginnings, fascist ideology has expressed the demand for absolute hostility to what lies outside of the nation and its people; its essence is the attempt to exclude every trace of otherness from the ‘abode, habitation, house, hearth, family and home’ that constitute the substance of indigenous life (Derrida, 2000: 149–50). The remarkable success of late fascist parties in the last decade has been dependent on the mitigation of this ethnic hostility through tropes of cultural, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity. The biopolitical potency of race, in other words, has been diffused into popular mythologies that both promise and withdraw the threat of racial violence. As Toscano pointed out, late fascism has, until now, remained within the parameters of the neoliberal conjunction of individual rights, formal legality, and repressive policing (Toscano, 2023: 45). And yet, it is more than the reproduction of this reactionary social imperative. As simulations of the absolute hostility that formed the essence of classical fascist movements, late fascist parties are unstable entities that exist between two agonistic possibilities: subsumption under mainstream conservatism (which has its own reactionary potential) and radical hegemony in an ongoing destruction of the formal rights and equalities that are presupposed by neoliberal capitalism. The events through which the latter has begun to emerge as a reality are already being played out in the reformation of the global imperium of capital and its institutions. And so, in my concluding remarks, I will offer a brief sketch of the ethics and politics of this process.

Conclusion

Toscano remarked of his idea of late fascism that, ‘like “late capitalism” and “late Marxism”, it gestures towards the fact that fascism, like every other political phenomenon, varies according to its socioeconomic context’ (Toscano, 2023: xi). He goes on to state that classical fascist ‘fixes’ to the catastrophic effects of mid-20th century capitalism are ‘out of time’, and that analogies between then and now are, in general, misleading about the organizational and ideological dynamics of contemporary fascist movements. However, this begs the question of what the value of a political-historical analogy might be. It is certainly the case that the heavy industrial, hyper-masculine, highly traditional context of inter-war Germany is not directly comparable to the hyper-mobile, hyper-individualistic culture of postmodern capitalism. Toscano’s analysis, therefore, presents what is essentially an account of reactionary effects whose origins can be traced to the accelerated development of global-technological capitalism at the start of the 21st century. As a practical process, however, this development involves a level of human experience that is crucial to understanding the return of fascist politics; for the enactment of fascist reaction, as a politically orchestrated commitment to myths of ethnicity and belonging, takes place within the remains of the nation as a legal, ethical, and political totality. This is why the European context has a certain privilege in the critical evaluation of fascism’s return. For the mythic forms in which the absolute hostility of fascism has been constantly reconfigured since the war have never been erased from the sites of national identity formation. States, nations, regions, etc., have retained the potency of ethnic life, and it is through this volatile economy of difference that fascism’s absolute hostility sustains its libidinal power. The highly particularized convergence of national and existential loss, therefore, is key to understanding the resurgence of fascism’s race mythology and the catastrophic potential this entails. The nation has become a place of spectres and disjointed time; it is an overlapping of mythologies, nostalgias, and reactionary desires which constantly provoke the messianic violence of racial difference that is intensified by late fascist movements (Derrida, 1997: 130–1).

What Toscano has described as late fascist parties, then, have been formed inside this cultural milieu. They operate within the catastrophic time of our historical present, mobilizing its endemic fears through the deep-seated ethnic dispositions of the nation. However, and this is perhaps the political lesson of Derrida’s Of Spirit, the enactment of the fascist repertoire of reactionary ideals of masculinity, sexuality, community, and belonging is also a radical redesignation of the ideals of spirit through which European cultural identity has been formed and re-formed (Derrida, 1991a: 96). The transformative power of European ‘late fascism’ has arisen from the conjunction of three effects of global capitalism: the ongoing erasure of practical reason from the political body state, the presence of visibly heterogeneous ‘others’ in the public space of the nation, and the return of a powerful mythic-aesthetic staging of ethnic identity as the exclusive condition of national politics. The heterogeneity of national experience is, as I have said, impossible to register directly within the parameters of a strictly cognitive map; it remains a quasi-messianic potential for the escalation of racial violence to truly inhuman levels (as was the case in the ethnic cleansing that broke out in the Bosnian war in the 1990s). The organization of late fascist parties, despite the complex economy of deferrals through which their racism has been popularized, is guided by a leadership principle whose decisions are made as the performance of an absolute insight, the Augenblick, which repeatedly penetrates the falsity of everything that has gone before, and of the catastrophe that will come if the perpetrators of that falsity are not controlled, expelled, or destroyed (Bennington, 2016: 114–15). Toscano’s map of the global conditions that have led to the emergence of late fascism provides, it seems to me, a comprehensive topology of the spread of this reactionary populism in the developed nations of the West. What it does not adequately register, however, is that the different sectors of the map, its territorialities, are always sites of historic religiosity, racialized hostility, ethical recognition, and political violence whose volatility is provoked constantly by the expansions of the fascist apparatus.

Toscano’s account of the conditions that have led to the emergence of late fascism moves perhaps too easily between the Marxian gesture of Jameson’s cognitive mapping of global capitalism and the recognition that the co-ordinates of such a map are traversed by a potential violence whose opportunism it cannot possibly encompass (Toscano, 2023: 72–3). He is certainly correct that the event of fascism’s return is neither historical repetition nor the pure aesthetic posture of political simulation. However, there is a rejection in his work of any analogy between the past and present manifestations of fascism, that leaves his account of late fascist politics abstracted from its contemporary effects on the constitution of the law and the state. The return of fascist parities after Auschwitz, I have argued, has given rise to a quasi-messianic time whose symbolic violence remains both a gesture of welcome to the impending catastrophe and the chance of the ‘scattered’ antifascist sovereignties that haunt the memory/remains of the state (Bennington, 2016: 1–8; Derrida, 2005: 82). For Toscano, such a solicitation of heterogeneous voices, agencies, and constituencies would have little chance of success against the fascist apparatus without the organizational power of the map. But, perhaps, the current crisis demands that we also consider what such voices reveal about the opportunistic violence and stupidity of a rapidly evolving fascist worldview.