While fleeing the Nazis in 1939, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin penned his theses on the concept of history. The eighth overturns the classical view that philosophy begins in wonder, stating that astonishment in the face of rising fascist regimes could only be philosophical if it became “knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable” (Benjamin 2007, 257). In the 1930s as today, the merger of right-wing politics with populist religious nationalisms short-circuits the Enlightenment’s progress narrative and leaves liberalism asking the question, “how is this still possible?” This paper argues that the “unconscious of history” account for the mythical, irrational, and religious forces whose repression produces their symptomatic return in reactionary politics.
Interrogating history’s underlying narratives raises fundamental questions about the relationship between secular modernity and its political forms. As the historian Robert O. Paxton notes, fascism the first major political innovation of the twentieth century (Paxton 2004, 3). It was also the first to emerge after the so-called death of God. German National Socialism and Italian Fascism relied heavily on myths that could provide a sense of national renewal to peoples suffering in the wake of World War I and an economic depression. Such political gestures were inextricable from academic appeals to something “outside” the law or reason, whether Carl Schmitt’s comparison of the sovereign exception to a divine miracle (Schmitt 2005, 36) or Giovanni Gentile’s explicitly linking the “uncompromising religiosity” of Italian Fascism to the “religious depth” of the fatherland in his “Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals” (Schnapp 2000, 300).
For these reasons, postwar critical thought was largely anti-myth insofar as it was anti-fascist. For example, Emmanuel Levinas associated the philosophy of Hitlerism with an “elementary force” (Levinas 1990, 64), and after the war he would view the “renewal of mythology” as a misguided reaction to the catastrophes of technical reason (Levinas 1998, 51). Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer would famously argue that enlightenment exerts a totalitarian “mythic terror” insofar as it shares its principle of immanence with myth (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 22). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy would later crystallize the complicity between myth and a certain “logic of fascism” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990, 294).
It is a historical irony, then, that the past twenty years have seen myth reclaimed in service of antifascist academic and political projects that turn to the same inassimilable remainders and sacred unknowns once disavowed in the name of democratic norms. Within the decolonial turn, An Yountae has called for resignifying “the murky figure of the sacred” as an alternative religion that gestures toward an abyss “on which unthinkable and unknowable forms of world are to be made” (An 2024, 21-22). In the black study of religion, J. Kameron Carter avers that “myth cannot be bypassed” (Carter 2023, 129). However, against the “imperial myth” of racial capitalism, he proposes a “generative myth” that cuts across what is real in the name of a “surreal” “material mysticism” that might one day count as real. In his view, the anarchy of black religion is a “deviant, fugitive, and ana-formative dissidence from and improvisation through what has been called religion and the human” (Carter 2023, 34). This deviant dissidence is precisely what Lee Edelman calls “queerness.” For Edelman, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, queerness names the void that is constitutively subtracted from the world “as it is,” and the threat and strength of queerness is to present the current world as “not-all,” implying that it could be otherwise (Edelman 2022, 19).
If these methodological projects all reclaim an outside irreducible to reason, whether figured as mythical, mystical, or sacred, they do so because carving out such a space prevents the world as it is from claiming to be all there is. Following Jacques Derrida, once the possibility of secrecy—and its link to responsibility—is excluded from political life, there is only a single step from the democratic to the totalitarian, whose expectation of control in the light of absolute exposure brooks no secrets (Derrida 2008, 35). The paper concludes by revisiting three key moments from the interwar period when thinkers appealed to an “unconscious of history” in response to different forms of closure: Sigmund Freud’s “archaic heritage” that unconsciously transmitted truths repressed from history; Franz Rosenzweig’s “protocosmos” as an ever-enduring reserve beneath the revealed world; and Martin Heidegger’s “unhappened history” that supports the structure of historicity. The fact that these gestures came from across the political spectrum demands asking whether any such appeal to the irreducible necessarily draws on a fascist hermeneutics that must be named as such, or whether such a religionizing challenge to instrumental reason may still be a reasonable resource not worth ceding.
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An, Yountae. The Coloniality of the Secular. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.
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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.