Abstract
With these words, addressed to his comrade-friend Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille reported on the spot his “very strong” impression of the Mostra della rivo-luzione fascista [MRF], a historical exhibition set up in Rome to celebrate the fascist decennale (the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome). This was Batailles first visit to fascist Italy. A few months earlier he had published his seminal essay on the “Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in which he theorized the fascist phenomenon as the subordination of homogeneous social relations to heterogeneous ones; that is, of the cohesive rule of law and economic structures to the flexible world of sacred bonds, psychological ties, “unproductive expenditure,” and “excess.” The essay was the culmination of two years of intense readings and was aimed at providing a general theory of fascism that also encompassed German Nazism. Thus, one can’t help but ponder why Bataille was so astonished, even startled, before the historical exhibition of a phenomenon he had just theorized? Could this exhibition have caused Bataille to waver in his theoretical assessment of the common heterogeneous core of Italian Fascism and German Nazism?
My dear Raymond, I am writing from the fascist exhibition itself because there are comfortable tables to write: hence the idea of writing to you. The exhibition is filled everywhere with black flags with embroidered skulls, especially in the shrine of the dead. One of these flags figures in the reconstruction of Mussolini’s squalid office in Milan. I am quite astonished. I didn’t know this history. I am even startled. It won’t evidently lead me to buy a shining croix du feu (insigna of the French fascistic movement by the same name), nor will it change me a bit, but the effect is very strong.
Georges Bataille, 19341
The main argument presented in this essay is fully developed in my book, The Historic Imaginary Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). I thank the press for allowing me to publish here some material belonging to the book.
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Notes
Georges Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” La Critique sociale 10 (November 1933): 159–65 and 11 (March 1934): 205–11. Now in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings: 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 137–60. All quotations are from this 1985 version.
For a brief introduction to Batailles life and work see Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994).
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 218.
Walter Adamson, “The Language of Opposition in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Rhetorical Continuities between Prewar Florentine Avant-Gardism and Mussolini’s Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 64 (March 1992): 22–51.
Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Walter Adamson, “Futurism, Mass Culture, and Women: The Reshaping of an Artistic Vocation, 1909–1920,” Modernism/modernity 4, 1 (1997): 89–114.
Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); in particular Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Walter Adamson, “Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,” American Historical Review 95, 2 (April 1990): 359–90; and “Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religion in the Italian Case,” Journal of Contemporary History 24, 3 (July 1989): 411–36.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics. Between Arnarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), esp. pp. 218–76.
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1984).
Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Luigi Freddi, Traccia Stomco Politica per la Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome: 1932), p. 6.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 28.
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© 2004 Angelica Fenner and Eric D. Weitz
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Fogu, C. (2004). Fascismo-Stile and the Posthistorical Imaginary. In: Fenner, A., Weitz, E.D. (eds) Fascism and Neofascism. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04122-7_4
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