Description
Book SynopsisOn January 20th, 2017, during an interview on the streets of Washington D.C., white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched by an anonymous antifascist. The moment was caught on video and quickly went viral, and soon “punching Nazis” was a topic of heated public debate. How might this kind of militant action be conceived of, or justified, philosophically? Can we find a deep commitment to antifascism in the history of philosophy?
Through the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, with some reference to Fanon and Sartre, this book identifies the philosophical reasons for the political action being enacted by contemporary antifascists. In addition, using the work of Jacques Rancière, it argues that the alt-right and the far right aren’t a kind of politics at all, but rather forms of paramilitary mobilization aimed at re-entrenching the power of the state and capital.
Devin Shaw argues that in order to resist fascist mobilization, contemporary movements find a diversity of tactics more useful than principled nonviolence. Antifascism must focus on the systemic causes of the re-emergence of fascism, and thus must fight capital accumulation and the underlying white supremacism. Providing new, incisive interpretations of Beauvoir, existentialism, and Rancière, he makes the case for organizing a broader militant movement against fascism.
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgements
§1. A Philosophy of Antifascism
§1.1. The Three-Way Fight
§1.1.1. Demarcating Antifascism and Liberalism
§1.1.2. Demarcating Antifascism and Fascism
§1.1.3. Settler-State Hegemony: Liberalism and White Settlerism
§1.2. Towards a Philosophy of Antifascism
§2. The Ethics of Ambiguity and the Antinomies of Emancipatory Violence
§2.1. Existentialism is an Antifascism
§2.2. Ambiguity and Solidarity
§2.2.1. Beauvoir’s Cartesian Egalitarianism
§2.2.2. Beauvoir’s Critique of Marxism
§2.3. The Antinomies of Action
§2.3.1. Discourse and Disagreement
§2.3.2. The Antinomies of Emancipatory Violence
§2.4. Vengeance, Violence, and the State
§2.4.1 An Eye For an Eye
§2.4.2 “I had my own Martyrs”
§2.5. The Three-Way Fight and No-Platforming the Far Right
§3. Politics That Does Not Command
§3.1. Demarcating Egalitarianism
§3.2. Politics Against the Police
§3.3. Disagreement and Command
§3.4. Why Fascism Isn’t Politics
§4. Punching Nazis
§4.1. The Reason for Militant Antifascism
§4.2. Punching Nazis Is Not In Bad Faith
§4.3. Punching Nazis Is Not Anti-Egalitarian
§4.4. Militant Antifascism Is Community Self-Defense
§5. Fighting White Supremacy: From Antifascism to Decolonization
§5.1. From Antifascism…
§5.2. Whiteness as Possession and Entitlement
§5.3. Whiteness as Settler-Colonial Sovereignty
§5.4. …To Decolonization
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