A Conversation on Late Fascism
Alberto Toscano and Evan Calder Williams , e-flux, March 15, 2024
This is an edited version of the live event that took place on December 12, 2023 at e-flux in Brooklyn. Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis is published by Verso.
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AT: I remembered reading interviews Michel Foucault did with Cahiers du Cinema and another film magazine, which are not at all well known. In the early to mid-seventies, there is a set of films made by avant-garde or auteur European filmmakers—Cavani, Pasolini, Visconti, and others—that link the emergence of Nazism and fascism to questions of sexuality and gender. This was often done in rather dubious, or as we say today, problematic ways, and it leads to a lot of debate, some really historically curious debates.
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But I think it’s a really interesting moment for a whole set of reasons. And Foucault intervenes in this. Foucault is both quite funny and quite insightful in some of these interviews.
He says that the first problem with these films is that they make us believe—which is both false and in its own way dangerous—that there was an erotic charisma to Nazism. He counters by saying that, at the sexual level, Nazism is like a marriage between an agronomist and a charwoman. (I forget exactly, it was some terrible sentence like that.) His point is that it’s the least sexy thing in the world. That’s what these films don’t get at all, because they’re obsessed with the leather and the boots and all the fetishism.
ECW: Can I read a couple sentences from the interview? Because it’s inimitable and worth hearing: “Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century, but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit bourgeois imaginable. Himmler was a vaguely agricultural type and married a nurse.” (Slightly mean to nurses, I have to say.) “We must understand that the concentration camps were born from the conjoined imagination of a hospital nurse and a chicken farmer, a hospital plus a chicken coop. That’s the phantasm behind the camps.” It’s a pretty remarkable interview.
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Foucault News 