Mussolini's rhetoric, Trump's threat

 

In 1963, Jean-Pierre Faye (who latter became known for his reading of the fascist unconscious in Heidegger), published an article that extended the front, so to speak, of Cold War politics. Entitled Totalitarian Language, Fascist and Nazi, Faye tried to turn the discourse of totalitarianism, heavily influenced in that period by Arendt, in a historicist direction.

The assumption, in 1963, was that “totalitarian” was always a denigrating term. It came, so to speak, outside of totalitarian ensembles, and illuminated them critically. This was the liberal dogma.

But Faye found this move historically false. As he shows, the term did not originate outside of fascism as a term of critique, but rather inside it.

In fact, in Italy, as he puts it in a sidenote, totalitaria originated in commerce as a term to describe representatives of stockholders at business meetings. The 100 percent of stockholders were the totalitaria represented. In the political context, however, it appears first in a speech Mussolini gave at the Theater of Augustus in Rome on June 22, 1925, addressing the delegates of the Partito Nazionale Fascist. In Faye’s account, the discourse, as reported in the papers (with some variants) contained a key phrase: “what is called our ferocious totalitarian Will will be pursued with ever more ferocity!”

I should point out that, in what I call fascitude, the appropriation of fascist rhetoric and gestures, Mussolini’s speeches have definitely been culled by the speechwriters and consultants around Trump and Vance.  Trump has gone from the Vegas ratpack rhetoric of his campaign in 2016 to the dull thump thump thump that propels his aging masculinist oratory of today. His speeches now combine program and threat, in which the program exists, ultimately, only to carry out the threat: it is the death-drive as political legitimation, and it goes down like honey in the era best represented by a thousand zombie apocalypse films.

But I digress.

Faye points to the reception of the speech. Le Popolo d’Italia of June 23 explained to its readers that “fascism will take up once again the march of Revolution, deciding upon the full, totalitarian and inexhorable conquest of all the powers and organs of the State.” In the even more fascist Idea nazionale, a phrase is used that Faye underlines: “la stressa affirmazine totalitarian” – which is “an affirmation that is a passion and faith before it is a political proposition.” The IN goes on to explain why this is incomprehensible to the centrists even more than it is to the socialists or people on the left: “because our adversaries – not the socialists, but the demo-liberals – are, as a result of their whole mentality, disposed not to be [in] themselves, but to welcome the words of the other, even if the word is destruction, as it is with the socialists.”

The question that keeps being asked today is whether Trump is a fascist. I don’t know – but I do know the centrist response to Trump is classically  ineffectual centrism, a legalistic mindset that can’t comprehend that a whole policy can be animated simply in order to carry out a threat. The threat, in other words, is the social psychological motive – the program is the afterthought. By this logic, ferocious totalitarianism, or Trump’s “swift and unrelenting” approach amount to the same kind of political formation.

TBC