The Unconscious of History: Religion and Fascism between the World Wars and Today

Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best tool in the struggle against fascism would be a concept of history that is not surprised by fascism. In this paper I argue that such a conception must attend to the repressed forces that continue to shape history in politically ambiguous ways. I first revisit the appeals to religious and mythical authority by fascist intellectuals in Germany and Italy, before considering the irony that recent leftist critical theories appeal to the non-rational in ways similar to the fascistic work it contests. I conclude by returning to the interwar period to consider three efforts—by Freud, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger—that articulate an “unconscious of history” in response to totalizing violence. This genealogy asks whether contemporary critique unwittingly repurposes fascist hermeneutics or whether mobilizing the “beyond” of reason by both the right and the left demands more careful consideration.