Albert Toscano's 'Fascism as Life Form and Its Contemporary Culturalisms'

Focus Week am Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS): Facing the Far-Right/ Zum Aufstieg der Rechten

Book review & discussion in English

with Danny Hayward (LIAS artist fellow) & Kerstin Stakemeier (AdBK Nürnberg, LIAS associate fellow)

Alberto Toscano's book Late Fascism (2023) is a significant contribution to debates on the relationship between fascism, capitalism, race and gender. Reconstructing fascist ideas around time, death and myth, it also approaches the question of the plural anti-fascisms, questions of desire, and the relationship between defensive and utopian politics. "On a more optimistic note", Toscano writes "that progressive or liberal reforms may appear to racists and reactionaries as signs of a communist dystopia that is almost already here could also be interpreted as the distorted recognition of utopian traces that demand to be blasted out of the continuum of reformism."

This discussion of the book, led by Kerstin Stakemeier and Danny Hayward, will address the question of cultural expressions of fascism in the present. We will talk about what it means to think about fascism as a "life form", as mimesis, and about anti-fascism as method.