One could also argue that anyone who links these three quite different
people together as a single cultural force, system, or entity is thinking
fascistically. But that would be stupid. In general using the holocaust
or Hitler as an example, allegory, or metaphor is two edged. On the good
side, it reminds us that, as D&G would say, we are all potential
fascists. On the bad side, by using them as examples for any type of
system that is all-encompassing, systematic, or whatever--or even by
suggesting that we are all potentially fascists;--this removes the
historical specificity of what happened, why, and how we are to live with
it, prevent these sorts of attrocities and forms of power, and so on.
More than that, to suggest that thinking in totalities is the same thing
as committing mass murders is just plain silly. By this reasoning,
Jameson, Said, Kenneth Burke, de Beauvoir, to name only a few, are all
mere synonyms for Hitler. Anyone who believes this has fallen prey to
the "fascistic" thinking of the _Dialectic of the Enlightenment_, a book
that posits a causal totality, and then has multiplied Adorno and
Horkheimer's reasoning by about 10.
This lining up of philosophers in a politics of complicity is
self-deconstructing.
We might at least try thinking in terms of an economy of complicity--at
any rate, an occasional distinction would be refreshing!
Erik
Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53211
email: edl@xxxxxxxxxxx
------------------
people together as a single cultural force, system, or entity is thinking
fascistically. But that would be stupid. In general using the holocaust
or Hitler as an example, allegory, or metaphor is two edged. On the good
side, it reminds us that, as D&G would say, we are all potential
fascists. On the bad side, by using them as examples for any type of
system that is all-encompassing, systematic, or whatever--or even by
suggesting that we are all potentially fascists;--this removes the
historical specificity of what happened, why, and how we are to live with
it, prevent these sorts of attrocities and forms of power, and so on.
More than that, to suggest that thinking in totalities is the same thing
as committing mass murders is just plain silly. By this reasoning,
Jameson, Said, Kenneth Burke, de Beauvoir, to name only a few, are all
mere synonyms for Hitler. Anyone who believes this has fallen prey to
the "fascistic" thinking of the _Dialectic of the Enlightenment_, a book
that posits a causal totality, and then has multiplied Adorno and
Horkheimer's reasoning by about 10.
This lining up of philosophers in a politics of complicity is
self-deconstructing.
We might at least try thinking in terms of an economy of complicity--at
any rate, an occasional distinction would be refreshing!
Erik
Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53211
email: edl@xxxxxxxxxxx
------------------