Postmodernism and Fascism

George Crowder of Flinders University has an interesting review in ARPA, the Australian Review of Public Affairs, of a new book by the philosopher Richard Wolin, who has previously published three books on Martin Heidegger, one of the principal fathers of postmodernism. The new volume is entitled The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004), and discusses the intellectual phenomenon known as the Counter-Enlightenment, which arose in Germany during the nineteenth century, was based on the rejection of reason, and, in Wolin's words, became the "German Ideology". It was an ideology that was destined to have a fateful significance for the development of European thought in the twentieth century:

From Germany, the German Ideology travelled to France. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the First World War and the Great Depression, many right-wing French intellectuals of the 1930s saw in the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment an antidote to the perceived corruption and decline of capitalist liberal democracy. Indeed, the enemy was really modernity as a whole. Socialism, too, was implicated in the image of a shallow, moribund civilisation in which the rationalist, bureaucratic organisation of economic interests was treated as central. The Counter-Enlightenment celebrated a different set of values that seemed to have been lost in modern times but might yet be recovered: vitality and manliness, ritual rather than reflection, the mythic or mystical dimension of experience in contrast with the scientific, self-assertion through violent conflict, and above all the rejection of reason in favour of action and instinct. These were the themes of Nietzsche—and they became the themes of fascism. These values attracted Heidegger, appealing to his philosophical emphasis on the authenticity of ‘being’ in contrast with reason and the pursuit of truth.

Among those French intellectuals who took the same path, Wolin singles out two as especially significant. Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s, retreating into ‘inner emigration’ during the War only when it became clear what fascism looked like at close quarters. Their significance, for Wolin, lies in their influence on Foucault, Derrida and their supporters. From Bataille the postmodernists take their condemnation of reason as ‘homogenising’ and suppressive of ‘difference’, without acknowledging that the difference Bataille is principally concerned to reassert includes anti-democratic authoritarianism and gratuitous (‘transgressive’) violence. From Blanchot the postmodernists inherit a suspicion of language as an insuperable barrier between thought and reality, ignoring the origins of this view as a rationalisation of Blanchot’s prudent wartime ‘silence’.

These themes—the ‘impossibility’ of language, and the homogeneity of reason and democracy—come together in the work of Derrida in particular. For Derrida, language can never generate the stable meaning presupposed by notions of objective truth, and the generality of legal rules necessarily impedes ‘justice’, which is always peculiar to concrete cases. In short, the notion of objective truth is incoherent, and the rule of law unjust. As Wolin points out, the first of these conclusions is itself incoherent, since it presupposes the objectivity it purports to deny. The second is typical of the postmodernist penchant for ludicrous overstatement and for striking radical postures that have no sane implications for political action. Justice, obviously enough, calls for both particularity and generality: attention to the particularity of cases, and general rules to prevent bias and special pleading. The silliness of Derrida’s pronouncements on the injustice of law is nicely brought out by Wolin though the story of the philosopher’s arrest in Czechoslovakia in 1981. Suddenly subject to a genuinely arbitrary decision process, Derrida found himself impelled towards the thought that humanist norms like the rule of law might have some value after all. Undaunted and with ‘great lucidity’, however, he rationalised this odd experience by positing a new philosophical category in which contradictory thoughts confront each other without ‘intersecting’: ‘the intellectual baroque’.

Where does the defining postmodernist hostility towards truth come from? Hatred of the Enlightenment and the modern world is its remote source, but one of Wolin’s most interesting and provocative ideas is that much of French postmodernism can be traced to what he calls the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ (189). For example, he attributes Blanchot’s ‘silence’ (that is, his doctrine of the impossibility of language) to a ‘subconscious will to unknowledge’ resulting from a failure or refusal to face the distressing facts of occupation and collaboration. Indeed, the Vichy Syndrome, Wolin believes, lies behind the radical and dogmatic scepticism of postmodernism as a whole. Although the Counter-Enlightenment or German Ideology was influential in France in the 1930s, it was after the War that notions of reason and truth reached their lowest ebb among French intellectuals.