[A much larger and politically challenging version has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 July, 2018]
Badiou’s Determinations
In a
recent lecture, the French philosopher Alain Badiou (2016) suggested that ‘in some sense, this new political figure—Trump, but
many others today—are near the fascists of the 30s. There is something similar.’ Badiou does admit that the current
near-fascists are without ‘their strong enemies of the 30s, which were the communist
parties.’ As we saw, the real prospect of a communist take-over, in the face of
near-total collapse of bourgeois democracy and economy, was a critical condition
for the rise of fascism in Germany. Badiou recognizes that the condition is
totally absent in the American scene because the US continues to be the biggest
superpower with near-absolute military control over much of the planet; also,
the specter of communism has essentially disappeared from the planet, especially
in the countries that concern Badiou. The military-industrial complex that
dictates the terms of political arrangement, say in US, will not allow any
significant changes in the character of power that has made the
world-domination possible. These facts alone are enough to reject any
meaningful ascription of fascism to the political authority in the US and the
West. I return to this later in the essay.
Nonetheless, the lure of a grand
philosophical category leads Badiou to invent a new political concept:
‘democratic fascism,’ which he calls a ‘paradoxical determination.’ So, how is
democratic fascism both a fascism and different from the original one? What are
its distinctive features? Badiou’s response is that it ‘plays something
different,’ a ‘different music’ perhaps. Having thus secured an artful—almost
musical—category, Badiou begins to play on its tonal possibilities. After
dispensing with critical economic and historical features of classical fascism,
he now portrays the character of democratic fascism with dark features of
individual psychology such as racist, machiste [macho], and violent.
He also stresses the ‘fascist characteristic’
of thought and speech that operate ‘without any consideration for logic or
rationality.’ He is able to stress it because he takes it for granted that
‘democratic fascism’ is characterized by ‘dislocation of language,’ such
that ‘the language is not the language of explanation, but an affective
language which creates a false but practical unity.’ I hope the
feature of dislocated language is one of the ‘differences’ from the original
case. Otherwise, it will mean that the holocaust was partly caused by
linguistic misunderstanding.
Once the idea of fascism is thus
detached from its historico-economic context and attached to menacing foul-mouthed
faces, many more details come into view. For example, Badiou is now able to
enlarge the list of characteristics of democratic fascism to include: vulgarity,
a sort of pathological relationship to women, and the possibility
to say and to do, publicly, some things which are unacceptable for the big
part of human beings today. On this count, fortunately, female democratic
fascists are ruled out by definition since the criterion of women having
‘pathological relationship’ to other women is rarely met, if at all. So, Golda
Meir, Indira Gandhi, Maggie Thatcher, and lesser figures like Maya Kodnani escape
Badiou’s philosophical grip.
Clearly by now, Badiou’s vision of
fascism is almost totally covered by Donald Trump. So the list of male
democratic fascists expands rapidly because Trump is no exception. Thus beginning
with Hitler and Trump, Badiou takes on other men ‘progressively,’ as he says:
Berlusconi in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, Sarkozy in France, and the shady
characters in India, Philippines, Poland and Turkey. Basically, the idea is
that if you are a male leader who has won elections, your chance of being a
democratic fascist sharply increases if you are also violent, machiste, vulgar, pathologically related
to women, and you say whatever you like without attention to consistency. Once
you satisfy these conditions, you become a ‘paradoxical determination,’
a figure who is ‘inside the democratic constitution but who is in
some sense also outside: inside and outside.’
The trouble with this artistic portrayal
of fascism is that Benito Mussolini, the suave gentleman, doesn’t fit. Instead
of being a raging psychopath frothing in his mouth, Mussolini was actually
something of a scholar and a novelist, a thoughtful atheist who also despised
racism. He translated excerpts from Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and Kant, and wrote poetry and
published a novel, L'amante del Cardinale (The Cardinal's Mistress).
Further, Badiou’s ‘determination’ fails to
explain how his sketch of a pathological monster like Donald Trump—with his
violence, vulgarity, irrationality, and ‘dislocation of language’—was able to
painstakingly build a global, multibillion dollar real estate empire almost
single-handedly, and then ran a skillful presidential campaign against Hilary
Clinton, the favoured candidate of the military-industrial complex. Similar
remarks apply to Badiou’s characterization of Silvio Berlusconi as a democratic
fascist.
In the other direction, Badiou’s method
of characterizing fascism seems to apply to the revolutionary general Vo Nguyen
Giap, one of the most respected leaders of Vietnamese communist movement. In
fact, in a prominent, seemingly respectable pro-US monograph on the Vietnam war
published by the Oxford University Press (Davidson 1988/1998, 12), it was
categorically stated that ‘Vo Nguyen Giap was definitely not your “Mr. Nice
Guy.”’ The learned author disclosed that ‘reports in the hands of the US
intelligence agencies depict Giap as somehow combining the worst personality
traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.’ Incidentally, according to The New York Times Review of Books,
Davidson’s book ‘is widely
regarded as one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Indochina
wars’ (Mirsky 1991).
Now Giap was depicted as a combination of Hitler and
Mussolini because one of the reporters covering the Vietnam war characterized
Giap as ‘a peasant, a surly boor.’ ‘Like Der Fuhrer,’ Davidson added, Giap ‘is
impulsive and sometimes irrational,’ and ‘like Mussolini, he is vain and
self-indulgent.’ For example, Giap ‘wore button shoes,’ ‘sported tailored
Western suits’ and flaunted his young second wife, Davidson reported with
disdain. My point is that, if the intelligence reports on General Giap’s personality
hold, Alain Badiou has no means of denying that Giap was a fascist, and not
even a ‘democratic’ one since the structure of political consent in Vietnam
doesn’t exactly mimic Westminster. It is of some interest whether Badiou’s
conception of fascism matches that of the CIA’s for much of the non-Western
political leaders, especially the communist ones with Joseph Stalin, Mao ze Dong
and General Pol Pot leading the pack.
In
the cited lecture, as uploaded in the internet, Badiou does not mention the
sources of his creative inspiration. Net-addicts might form the irreverent
impression that Badiou’s political philosophy is constructed under the
influence of Charlie Chaplin’s Great
Dictator, and the dozens of lists of fascism-features that inundate the
internet these days. For example, one of the more popular lists with thousands
of approvals includes the following items among others: Hitler had not
got married, Hitler had come to power campaigning that he would end all
problems in a jiffy, Hitler used to love getting photographed, Hitler used to
call his rivals anti-nationals/traitors, Hitler used to love dressing up and
look good.
(To be continued)
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