On fascism, non-fascism and antifa
Does ‘counter-violence’ damage the antifascist cause? Or is it delusory to talk about non-violence in the face of an opponent with no such scruples? Natasha Lennard explains to James Miller why antifascism rejects debate as an effective response to the fascist threat.... James Miller: Since you’ve written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term ‘non-fascist’ means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, written in the aftermath of May ’68.
Natasha Lennard: I used the term ‘non-fascist’ as
opposed to ‘anti-fascist’ in my title for a few reasons. I wanted to indicate
on the book’s cover that this isn’t a collection dedicated wholly to
‘anti-fascism’, as the term is commonly used to describe the radical tactics
taken up under the banner ‘antifa’ — that is, the set of (sometimes militant)
actions deployed over the last century to expose and disrupt fascist organizing
and fascistic forces. The term ‘non-fascist’ also appealed as a (perhaps
imperfect) gesture to the complications of ‘anti-fascist’ as a label widely
used in communist countries in the decades since World War II. Asserting one’s
position as ‘anti-fascist’ became, in many ways, meaningless when even the most
far-right, fascistic political groups disavowed the moniker ‘fascist’.
But above all, as you mentioned, I wanted to reference Foucault’s use of ‘non-fascist’ in his preface to Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (first published in English in 1977) to speak of the sort of intellectual, affective, communal, and emotional work needed to fight ‘micro-fascisms’ and everyday fascisms, or what Foucault called ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.’...
https://www.eurozine.com/on-fascism-non-fascism-and-antifa/
The law of killing - a brief history of Indian fascism
