The Fascism of Ambiguity: A Conceptual Essay

Description

This book contributes to the work of elucidating the new forms of fascism and authoritarianism that arise today in intimate relation with new mediatic and information technologies. It presents elements of the connection between capitalism and fascism and makes clear how fascism today uses the ambiguity of senses and meanings as its most efficient way of infiltrating our reality and thereby becoming unequivocal. The fascism of ambiguity is a fascism that grows the more the ambiguities and paradoxical dimensions of the contemporary situation become explicit. It departs from some lessons of history regarding both historical fascism and some of the main critical lines and thoughts produced in the beginning of the 20th Century. It shows what is new in today's form of fascism, discussing its connection to techno-mediatic capitalism, to the dynamics of emptying meanings and senses through a technique of rendering them ambiguous and exacerbated. It outlines some guiding thoughts regarding the question of ambiguity and metapolitics today and concludes by proposing two exercises of precision, through the lenses of poetry and music, as a way to resist and counter-act the fascist metapolitics of the ambiguity of meanings and senses.

Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Soedertoern University, Sweden.

With a precise sense of the stakes and undertow of current destructions of meaning, Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback taps architectures of sense and exposes the overall will to make and break sense. Her writing explores the manipulation of significations and values associated with fascism and its mutating offshoots. This work uniquely delivers a crucial reboot based, in part, on the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy. Timely, knock-out, and brilliant. It takes on the conservative pushback that plagues our ways of thinking through identity and race. Her HQ is located in the populist literatures of original peoples, an outpost from which she reevaluates Hannah Arendt's theorems on crucial totalitarian junctures by means of digital technics, robotics, AI, and other algorithms of technological immediacy. She meets the Nietzschean criterion of explaining and eliminating toxic spillovers of destructive grammars and behaviors of the human. * Avital Ronell, University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA * Examining the ties between the present-day global techno-finance capitalism that overcomes all borders and undermines all distinctions and the types of indifference, indistinction, and ambiguity it produces as well as relies on, Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback confronts head-on one of the most perplexing specters that haunts the contemporary world: the specter of (a new) fascism. Without ambiguity, The Fascism of Ambiguity embodies a return of conceptual precision much needed today. * Frank Ruda, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Dundee, UK *