For Agamben, Everyone is a Fascist Except Those Who Really are Fascists
Raffaele Alberto Ventura
July 2021
In the last quarter of a century, the name of Giorgio Agamben has indicated not only one of the most widely read Italian philosophers in the world, not only a point of reference for a certain libertarian left, but also one of the most exciting intellectual experiences of the contemporary world. Agamben’s prose reads like a feuilleton, with its inventions, its effects, its twists and turns, and, of course, also its clichés, its mannerisms, and its shortcuts (for a withering examination, see the short essay by the Italianist Claudio Giunta). The authors that the philosopher has helped to promote are now part of the cultural baggage of an entire generation, the same generation that today finds itself embarrassed by his remarks on the Covid-19 pandemic, which according to him, is nothing less than an invention.
If he had simply written that it was mismanaged or exploited, perhaps exaggerated, he would have been closer to the truth, but certainly would not have caused such a stir. In the desert of other authoritative critical voices, this was enough to make the philosopher a point of reference for anti-lockdowners and anti-vaccinationists, in equal and opposite measure to the scandal of his progressive readership. The philosopher’s fame among a wider, perhaps hard-of-hearing, public is evidenced by Google search suggestions, among which the keyword ‘Giorgio Gambe’ stood out for some time [gambe: Italian for legs]. But it would be a mistake to attribute his positions on the pandemic to a late turning point or to a dual personality, Dr Giorgio and Mr Legs.
On the contrary, his positions are entirely consistent with the theoretical framework he has developed over the years, under the banner of a radical critique of modernity in its triple guise of state, capitalism, and science. The progressive readership, then, to be surprised by his stances so late, must also be very careless.
Sparks of Nazism
In a recent post, Agamben compared the vaccination pass to the yellow star worn by Jews during the Nazis. A sadly obvious image that had already been presented in various street demonstrations throughout Europe. It is not the first time that the philosopher has resorted to a completely disproportionate and vaguely obscene historical comparison, having already claimed a year ago that teachers who lend themselves to distance learning are of the same ilk as those who bowed to fascism. And yet, these kinds of comparisons are nothing new for Agamben, who often and willingly resorts to the ‘reductio ad Hitlerum’ — indeed, this is his true poetic signature, the card he has already pulled out several times to describe contemporaneity. As an attentive reader of Hannah Arendt, Agamben seems to have been engaged for twenty years in a radicalisation of his theory of totalitarianism in order to include the whole of modernity within it. But lately the results appear increasingly paradoxical, thereby revealing the limits of an anti-historical approach that only succeeds in the dual task of confusing the present while falsifying the past.
If the figure of the concentration camp was already central to one of his essays in 1998, it is with his celebrated analysis of the ‘state of exception’ — a paradigm useful for understanding the United States after 11 September 2001 — that Agamben achieves his most popular reductio. But Agamben sees sparks of Nazism in every form of use and abuse of the principle of necessity, he even finds them in the Weimar Republic, stating that “Germany had already ceased to be a parliamentary democracy even before 1933” — thus diluting Nazism to one long night in which everyone is a brownshirt, both before and after, because ‘true democracy’ does not exist. But the exercise is perilous, because considering Auschwitz as an expression of a more general catastrophe, called modernity, brings Agamben closer to the revisionist reading of Nazism given by its own actors, starting with Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.
Fascist non-fascists
In fact, there is a something more that makes this universal reductio even more jarring: for Agamben, everyone is a fascist… except the fascists. There is an endless literature on Heidegger’s temporary adherence to National Socialism, which divides historians and opens-up endless questions. However, the recent discovery of his unpublished notebooks, known as the Black Notebooks, should leave few doubts about his antisemitism. It is therefore surprising that Agamben, so attentive to the traces of fascism in didactics at a distance, was able to declare that those notebooks have nothing scandalous about them, insofar as Heidegger “sees in Judaism the element of the uprooting of culture” (recording of 5 April 2019, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris). Further expressions of this same force that uproots peoples, Agamben pointed out on that occasion, and paraphrasing the German philosopher, were Americanism and Soviet Socialism.
But this is precisely a classically revisionist argument, which does not absolve Heidegger but rather points out that he was not a bloodthirsty biological racist but an exponent of a Julius Evola-like ‘spiritual antisemitism.’ Which is nothing, in any case, to be proud of. A similar discussion surrounds Ezra Pound, the great American poet, who fervently embraced fascism precisely because of his own political, cultural, and economic ideas: that is, not by chance, not by distraction, not by opportunism.
Pound’s place in the history of twentieth-century literature is beyond question and we can be grateful to Giorgio Agamben for having edited an anthology of his writings — however controversial they may be (Pound’s theories inspire, as is well known, one of the most energetic groups on the Italian extreme right) — for Neri Pozza in 2016. However, it is a little jarring, to read within Agamben’s introduction, that no one had “criss-crossed” the Europe of his time with such “absolute lucidity.”[1] Agamben, seriously, can we really find no one more lucid than a poet so awestruck by Mussolini? Agamben’s preface to the anthology is vague and allusive, full of subtexts, as if to suggest that worrying about Pound’s political ideology (and his “illusions about Latin peoples and fascism”) would be a vulgarity unworthy of an intellectual who, like the poet, and like Heidegger after him, is capable of measuring the “catastrophe of Western culture.” But what exactly is this catastrophe in the face of which even fascism is reduced to a detail? Only the initiated are permitted to know.
Some clues: it was ‘an unprecedented break in the tradition of the West’ as ‘the link between past and present had been broken.’ How, when, why? Agamben’s commentary on Pound leaves us in ignorance, although reading the recent interventions on Covid-19 makes us realise that the new world being prepared is nothing other than the realisation of that ancient catastrophe. We can suppose that Agamben evokes the Nietzschean themes of the Conservative Revolution of the early twentieth century, and thereby refers to the catastrophe of the French Revolution or the triumph of calculating reason… but the philosopher might be better off remaining vague, so as not to shock his leftist fan base.
On the strength of the spoils of reputational capital, in those pages Agamben can still afford the luxury of validating complaints against “avarice,” “usury,” and “idolatry-of-money,” made by a notorious antisemite because, quoting the poet, “artists are the antennae of the race.” Such terms are anything but neutral, given the context. It will be no coincidence if Agamben’s words in praise of Pound simply add to these inoffensive ‘antennas of the species.’
Perish the thought that anyone should suspect that for Agamben the highest form of intellectual lucidity in the thirties was fascism or, rather, the ideology variously expressed by his beloved Pound, Heidegger, and Schmitt. And we know, from Agamben, that the real fascism is distance-learning and the vaccine pass: phenomena that are the extreme consequences of the catastrophe of which the fascist intellectuals — who are not really fascists — endeavoured to warn us. The art of Giorgio Agamben is all in the twists and turns.
Raffaele Alberto Ventura
Published in Domani, 29/7/2021.
Available at blackblog Francosenia.
A Spanish translation of Agamben’s Situating Ezra Pound, his introduction to the works of Ezra Pound can be found online.
Translated by Mickey Moosenhauer. Approved by R.A. Ventura.
[1] [Translators note: The quote from Agamben on the back-cover of the book reads: “Pound is the poet who placed himself most rigorously and with almost ‘complete impudence’ in front of the catastrophe of Western culture.” The original: “Pound è il poeta che si è posto con più rigore e quasi con ‘assoluta sfacciataggine’ di fronte alla catastrofe della cultura occidentale.”]
