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Notes
For a brilliant analysis in this regard see: Alberto Toscano, “Notes on Late Fascism,” Historical Materialism [blog], available at http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism (accessed 15 February 2020).
Tyson Lewis, Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From riddles to radio (New York: SUNNY Press, 2020), p. 15, discussing William E. Connolly “aspirational fascism” under Trumpism.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 15.
Susan Buck-Morss. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, Vol. 62 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 3–41. The spectacle of Trumpism today, repurposing Buck-Morss’s analysis to our immediate moment, thus ends up fostering “an anaesthetization of reception, a viewing of the ‘scene’ with disinterested pleasure, even when that scene is the preparation through ritual of a whole society for unquestioning sacrifice and ultimately, destruction, murder, and death” p. 38.
Lewis, Antifascist Education, p. 11.
Ibid., 16. Following Benjamin, Lewis points out that persuasion through reason is fruitless. He goes on, “learning does not primarily happen through reasoned argument or critical self-reflection on beliefs” p. 21.
Jacques Lacan. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. Ed. JA. Miller. Trans. B. Fink. (New York: Norton 1998). Commenting on Lacan’s insight, Shoshana Felman notes that, “ignorance, in other words is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative” p. 79. See her, Jacques Lacan and the adventure of insight: Psychoanalysis in contemporary culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Lewis, Antifascist Education, p. 16.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., pp. 162–163.
Ibid., p. 161.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 21.
See the last part of the “Work of Art” essay. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. by H. Zohn. (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–251.
Franco Berardi, And. Phenomenology of the end: Cognition and sensibility in the transition from conjunctive to connective mode of social communication. (Helsinki: Aalto University Publication Series, 2014), p. 254.
Catherine Malabou’s work also lends insight to this line of thinking, as she recognizes that the blow to our “emotional apparatus” (amid a new age of political violence, itself devoid of sense) impedes our ability to attach and make decisions about the world. “If this apparatus remains mute,” she writes, “decision becomes a matter of indifference: Everything is just as good as everything else, so nothing is worth anything. The disturbance of cerebral auto-affection produces a sort of nihilism (…), an absolute indifference, a coolness that visibly annihilates all difference and all dimensionality.” Ontology of the accident: an essay on destructive plasticity. Trans. C. Shread. (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2012), p. 50.
Lewis, Antifascist Education, p. 162.
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Di Paolantonio, M. Educating Our Nerves in Unnerving Times: Cinematic Innervation as a Collectivising Experience in Tyson Lewis’s Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education. Stud Philos Educ 40, 105–111 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09746-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09746-5