An introduction to a non-fascist geography

Chris Philo's Adorno and the Antifascist Geographical Imagination is an important and timely book, and few could have imagined how timely it would be by the moment of its publication (Philo, 2025). It is an ambitious book, that brings together political theory, history and geography, and to survey the extensive range of Adorno's writings is a major undertaking. The book effectively shows how those texts speak so powerfully to the present moment, our present spaces and places, to the politics of the present, perhaps providing a history of the present.

The book is anchored by an aphorism: ‘To think antifascistically is necessarily to think geographically; to think geographically ought to be to think antifascistically’. It appears at the very beginning of the Prologue, in its own single sentence paragraph, immediately followed by a paragraph from Adorno's Metaphysics lectures from 1965, and a single reference. Had it been a sentence followed by a gloss, and all by Adorno, the typography would have been no different. But it is, as Philo indicates, an ‘invented aphorism’; his own, not Adorno's. Nonetheless it stands as a way of framing the work, and the reading of Adorno which follows.

Philo notes that ‘what I offer is in substantial measure an “English Adorno”, arguably too a “poststructural Adorno”, even as I have tried to avoid certain mischaracterisations seemingly typical of anglophone readings’. My knowledge of Adorno is far less than Philo's, so those more expert than me should engage with the specifics of that reading.

My comments are in three registers. First, praise about what I think the book does successfully; second, to push Philo a bit more to sharpen what is at stake in one of the analyses; and then finally to think about what the book enables – even requires – us to do.

The geographical in Adorno

One of the book's strengths is the way it excavates a geography from Adorno's writings. It does this not just by looking for the moments where Adorno explicitly talks about spatial or geographical concepts. It does that of course, and I might have tried to do something systematic about how Philo mines Adorno on territory, territoriality, non-territorialised, de-territorialised, re-territorialised and so on. The same might be done with nature, space, place, border, landscape, region, and other ‘key words’ for geographers. There are powerful geographies here, especially in terms of the movement of populations, the situation of the death camps, the diaspora and the exile. Adorno, of course, wrote much of his work, including The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979), in the United States.

Place, Landscape and Region are three of the terms in Chapter Five's ‘Geographical Glossary of Negative Dialectics’. But so too are other terms which are perhaps not ordinarily associated, or at least not primarily associated, with the discipline of Geography – artworks, capitalism, natural history, non-conceptual, qualities and quantities. I particularly liked the penultimate chapter, Chapter Nine, on Adorno and music. Here Philo reads Adorno, and reads Adorno against Adorno, on 12-tone music and his relation to modernist composers, in his writings and his letters, and on his dismissive, even ignorant, comments about jazz. Philo also discusses Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and indicates how it ‘dramatises how, for Adorno, critical-musical reflection – even when the musicology is front and centre – can never absent itself from questions about progression, regression, fascism, resistance, history and, I will add, geography’ (p. 223).

So, there is an expanded geographical imagination here, much expanded, boundless, and undisciplined in the best sense of that word. The book makes an important contribution here not just to the discipline of Geography, in political, cultural and historical geographical forms, to name just three; but also to other fields – political theory, cultural studies, musicology, and more – in terms of showing what a geographical approach can make and contribute. All this is to be applauded.

The politics of calculation

Reading Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity (1973), Philo rightly opposes the Frankfurt School to Heidegger. Part of Heidegger's critique of modernity, though is shared with Adorno and Horkheimer, particularly in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philo notes that there is a parallel critique of calculation and what Heidegger labelled as Machenschaft, machination. Heidegger's retreat to a rural Black Forest idyll is familiar: his hut, the tools of the farmer, the hammer of the blacksmith, his invocations of the shepherd of being, the fourfold of being (gods, mortals, sky and earth) and his love of Hölderlin's poetry. His criticisms of what was being done to the Rhine river, the exploitation of nature by technology and the reduction of things to standing reserve are well known.

If Heidegger is sometimes used as an inspiration for an ecology, it often blurs into an ecofascism, though how and why might have been explored in more detail. There are quite a few moments where reactionary, rustic-fascist, and so on are used to describe Heidegger. Of course, Heidegger's membership of the Nazi party is well-known, and his active role as Rector of Freiburg University is widely discussed. But is Heidegger's thinking, and here I particularly mean his critique of calculation and technology, fascistic because he was a fascist – a member of the party, a political actor, racist and an antisemite? Or was his thinking of calculation and technology fascist, and that was what led him to make the political choices he made? You might think there is little difference, and practice there was no question of his association. But if his critique of calculation and technology is, in its essence, as he would say, fascistic, then two questions might be posed: why? and how do other critiques of this, including Adorno's, escape it?

What I think is interesting is that in materials Heidegger published in his lifetime, the critique of machination, technology and calculation either has a vague target of metaphysics or modernity; or is directed against America and Russia. There is the notorious line in An Introduction to Metaphysics, a 1935 lecture course published in 1953, of Europe caught in the pincers between these powers. It is striking in the 1930s, and recalibrated in the Cold War 1950s. In posthumously published manuscripts, notably the Beiträge, the Contributions to Philosophy, and its sequel Besinnung, or Mindfulness, the critique is turned against National Socialism – not the National Socialism Heidegger had wanted, to which he still held onto in thought, but the National Socialism that actually existed. In the most recent revelations, in the so-called Black Notebooks, an international Jewish conspiracy or mindset is seen as crucial to this calculative mode of thinking.

I wrote on Heidegger and politics before the Black Notebooks were published, but I tried to think through and with Heidegger's notion of calculation in a political register in a book called Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation (Elden, 2006). There are three chapters – Speaking on rhetorical politics; Against on polemical politics and Number on calculative politics. These are three cuts through Heidegger's thinking about the political.

His engagement with calculation predates his active political career, from the mid-1920s, even if the most famous essays on technology are post-war. The calculative mind reduces objects to number, aggregates the dissimilar, fractures the continuum into a number sequence, and reduces geometry to arithmetic. Heidegger's thinking of political community is related to this, to how we might constitute a plurality, a congregation, out of dissimilar individuals. There are questions of going from the individual Dasein to Mitsein, being-with or being-together, on which Heidegger's thinking of politics founders. It is problematic both in terms of how humans comport themselves to things which share their mode of being – other humans, the constitution of a community, social or political; and how humans comport themselves to things which do not share our mode of being, objects, nature, the geographies of the world. The critique of calculation is there most explicitly in the second; but some of its problems are at root in the first, which I think is where Heidegger's tendency toward fascist thought, and fascist practice, comes from.

How then do we understand the difference between Adorno and Heidegger on this? How can one critique of calculation be progressive and the other reactionary, fascist? There is mention made of Heidegger's jargon of ‘action, martiality, authority, compliance, a structure of ‘care’ hinging on self-preservation not compassion, a ‘heroic’ predilection for ‘sacrifice’ (even maybe of the self), and more’. We can, and should, criticise these aspects of Heidegger. Yet Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity does not have the answer to what I think is a more difficult question. This is a question – about the politics of a critique of calculation – which I’d like to invite Philo to say a bit more about.

A politics of possibility

Right at the beginning of the book, Philo, following Adorno, says of fascism:

Its enemies – on which it fixates and feeds – are detail and nuance, difference and otherness, dispersals messing up concentrations, margins resisting centres: in short, all that I routinely identify as the crucial stuff of ‘geography’.

Valuable work has been done by Neil Smith on Isaiah Bowman as Roosevelt's Geographer (2003), Gerry Kearns on Mackinder (2009), Ian Klinke on Ratzel (2023), and, although he was not a disciplinary geographer, Juliet Fall on Carl Vogt (2020). Carl Schmitt's influence on and critique by geographers is mentioned briefly in passing in a note; Augusto Pinochet is not mentioned at all, though he studied and later taught military geography. Theresa May – a conservative and not a fascist, certainly, but an enemy of what she called ‘a citizen of the world’ as a ‘citizen of nowhere’ – notoriously has a Geography degree. Equally there is a conservative tendency in much US geography, and recent events have shown just how unwilling conservative America is to stand against authoritarianism.

Further, are the aspects of Geography Philo identifies sufficient? Necessary, perhaps, but more might have been done to tease out what kinds of geography are opposed to fascism, and what are complicit. Is it really true that ‘Geography-as-discipline, is inherently, constitutionally, opposed to fascism in all its murky shadings’?

If we are to interrogate geography (the topic), and Geography (the discipline), in relation to fascism, which seems like an ever-pressing task in these dark times, then Philo has given us much to consider. We might follow Foucault on Deleuze and Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus he described in a preface to the English translation as ‘an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’. Foucault describes their book as one in which

The book often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives (1983, p. xiv).