Andrew Hewitt
(Germanic Languages), UCLA

Ideological Positions in the Fascism Debate

April 5, 2004
4:00pm, 306 Royce Hall

Perhaps more than any other historical event, German Fascism has coalesced about itself competing and conflicting theories of history. As an emergent ideology, it was itself organized around a challenge to bourgeois historiography, proposing – in the face of Enlightenment narratives of progress – a leap onto the meta-narrative level of mythology, and a return to prehistoric notions of community. Subsequently, historians have debated and questioned National Socialism’s specificity as an ideology and uniqueness as an historical event – the most famous instance being the Historikerstreit of the ‘80’s. These debates, however, have focused almost exclusively on the immense ethical dilemma posed by the Shoah as well as on the problems of representation facing both historians and artists in the face of the unrepresentable.

While it is, of course, patently absurd to seek to uncouple National Socialism from the historical event of the Shoah, it seems clear that the “fascinating fascism” of which Susan Sontag so famously wrote has either become inaccessible to us, or lost its appeal. By mapping out ideological positions in the fascism debate as they emerged through the twentieth century, I seek to contextualize not National Socialism itself, but the philosophical questions it has been used to articulate. Though I suggest no answer, underpinning the presentation is the question as to what discourse of fascism, if any, might emerge from our current situation.

Andrew Hewitt is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages. He has written extensively on questions of aesthetics and politics. His publications include Fascist Modernism (Stanford Univ. Press, 1993) and Political Inversions (Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). He has recently completed a manuscript, Social Choreographies: Ideology as Performative, that deals with ideology as a category of action rather than consciousness.

This is the fifth seminar of our year-long series, the Ends of Theory. This series is a forum for discussion of the role and aims of theory in the humanities and social sciences today. For the purpose of the seminars, theory will be defined broadly as any sustained reflection on the basic methodological and substantive assumptions of a discipline or disciplines. The format may include formal papers, readings distributed in advance, or informal debate, as announced. Each seminar will be led by a UCLA faculty member whose current work addresses significant issues of a theoretical nature. The seminars are generally small, and lively interaction between seminar leaders and audience can be expected.

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