This dissertation examines the repertoire of governmental responses to neofascism and hate in post-World War II Europe and North America, focusing on the way in which they are problematized within the contexts of democratic political behaviour, free and restricted speech, criminality, and multicultural relations. Materials examined include academic literatures, state commissioned reports, media coverage, court cases, remedial programs for hate offenders and autobiographical materials. Governmental responses are marred by a series of impasses that demonstrate the constitutive inability of post-war authorities to respond to the political element at the core of neofascism and hate. Attempts to address them as pathological social phenomena or simply as criminal or legally actionable forms of speech and behaviour fail to recognize their properly political force. In particular the neofascist problem reveals the limits of. and what occurs at the limits of, the technological mode of government, the biopolitical administration of life, and the sovereign structure of political community. This phenomenon has been the uncanny product of postfascist society, a society whose ethico-political structure revolves around the express prevention of the return of Fascism in its various guises. It institutionalizes and naturalizes the cut produced by Fascism's exclusion from legitimate politics, inadvertently creating the conditions for neofascist revivals that exploit the discontents of this process. To initiate the critical thought necessary to prepare a way out of the impasses of postfascist politics - to begin to think what it would mean to live in a non fascist as opposed to a postfascist society - - I present a minor analysis of the lines of transformation that animate the relationship between postfascism and neofascism. This analysis reveals the diabolical properties of the emerging politics of the exception, a politics with clear analogues in the current `war on terror,' in which the distinction between Fascism and liberal democracy becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. It also reveals a line of becoming that indicates the possibility of embracing a truly nonfascist sociality. The pathway beyond fascism does not and cannot pass through the repertoire of postfascist solutions but only through a singular assemblage of revolutionary forces that would have as their effect a non-fascist form of life.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1915 |
| Date | 30 November 2009 |
| Creators | Little, William A. |
| Contributors | Carroll, William K. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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