Fascist Spectacle.pdf

Fascist Spectacle http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft18700444&chunk.id=0&doc.v...
61. An anti-women "cultural masculinism" and the use of gender metaphors in politics also characterized the Florentine
avant-garde artists who participated in the publication of Leonardo . In the case of Giuseppe Prezzolini, Walter Adamson cites the
influence of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (1903)—a discussion of female and male features wherein feminine becomes
synonymous with mediocrity, vulgarity, passivity, etc. See Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Mussolini refers to Weininger when talking about women with Ludwig, op.
cit., p. 181.
The Futurists showed a similar contempt for female characteristics. See Barbara Spackman's discussion of "virile" attitudes
in D'Annunzio and Marinetti in "The Fascist Rhetoric of Virility," Stanford Italian Review , vol. 8, nos. 1-2 (1990),
pp. 81-101. For an assessment of masculinism in European art at the turn of the century, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of
Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On feminine and
masculine values in late Victorian America and their connection to Catholic art, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:
Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), Chapter 6, "From
Patriarchy to Nirvana: Patterns of Ambivalence." On women as evil, also see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of
a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). On the crisis of masculine identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna,
see Jacques Le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crise de l'identité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990).
62. See Mussolini's June 8, 1923, speech to the Senate in Scritti e discorsi , vol. III, p. 137. Here Mussolini defined the liberal
state as a state "emptied of all attributes of its virility." I discuss fascism's discourse on virility in Chapter 5.
63. Speech of January 28, 1924 to the Assembly of the Fascist Party, in Scritti e discorsi , vol. IV, p. 38.
64. See speech of November 4, 1925, to the National Association of War Disabled, in which Mussolini said: "[Y]ou expect from
me a virile speech" ( Scritti e discorsi , vol. V, p. 184). Also see speech of June 26, 1934, delivered to the people of Venice after
Mussolini met with Hitler: "[W]e have become a strong people. Our peace is thus virile because peace avoids weak people and
accompanies strong ones" ( Scritti e discorsi , vol. IX, p. 101).
65. Yvon De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: Storia di un regime (Roma: La Rocca, 1950), p. 295. De Begnac's was supposed to be the
official biography of Mussolini.
66. See Mussolini's speech of September 24, 1925, delivered to a fascist audience at the Teatro Alfieri in Asti ( Scritti e discorsi ,
vol. V, p. 131).
67. Scritti e discorsi , vol. VIII, p. 120 (speech of October 17, 1932).
68. Ludwig, op. cit., p. 119.
69. Mussolini's artistic project is infused with purposeless "activism." According to Augusto Del Noce, Il problema dell' ateismo: Il
concetto di ateismo e la storia della filosofia come problema (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964), activism implies the lack of a finalized
goal and a misrecognition of the "other" as ''I." The others become objects so that no moral duties toward them are implied.
Activism identified with solipsism reduces the world to things. "I" am the only ''subject," and the world becomes my object of
domination. The will to power is an imperative unless "I" want to become an object myself (Del Noce, op. cit., introduction, pp.
cxlix-cliii). In Gentile's actualist philosophy, for example, all categories are reduced to one: the act of the thinking thought.
Reality is but the thinking thought that makes it; it is reduced to the "I," and the "I" constitutes the perennial actualization of the
spirit that creates itself. For Gentile, the spirit's act of self-creation takes place through three dialectical moments: pure
subjectivity (the thinking "I"), pure objectivity (the thought "I"), and the synthesis of the two (self-consciousness). To these
three moments correspond the three absolute forms of the spirit: art, religion, and philosophy. The subjectivized "I" befits art as
one form of the spirit. Of Giovanni Gentile, see L'atto del pensare come atto puro (1912); Riforma della dialettica hegeliana
(1913); Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916).
70. Ludwig, op. cit., p. 65.
71. Susan Buck-Morss, op. cit., p. 126. As for political theory, Buck-Morss refers to the Greek polis and Machiavelli. Also see
Cornelia Klinger, "The Concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Kant and Lyotard," Constellations , vol. 2, no. 2, pp.
207-223.
72. The idea that modernity tends toward omnipotent domination is typical of Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger identifies
subjectivity with the will to power. For a discussion of some of these issues in relation to democracy, see Joel Whitebook,
"Hypostatizing Thanatos: Lacan's Analysis of the Ego," Constellations , vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1994), pp. 214-230.
The fantasy of all male creation ex nihilo appears in what Heidegger calls Nietzsche's Mannesaesthetik (literally, male
aesthetics). According to Buck-Morss, Mannesaesthetik "is to replace . . . 'female aesthetics' of receptivity to sensations from the
outside" (ibid., p. 128).
73. Mussolini told Ludwig: "The populace is . . . more open to glory. Because glory you cannot understand it logically; it belongs
to feelings" (Ludwig, op. cit., p.64; see also p. 124).
74. Ibid., p. 120.
75. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books,
1973), ed. with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 217-251.
76. See "Dottrina del Fascismo" in Scritti e discorsi , vol. VIII, pp. 69-70. This essay, written in collaboration with Gentile, was
Mussolini's first theoretical piece on fascism.
77. Scritti e discorsi , vol. II, p. 335.
78. Scritti e discorsi , vol. V, p. 197. The idea of the new man had already appeared in the Futurists' longing for a "new" or "very
new" Italian. Marinetti foretold the coming of a unique type, a heroic character who was always in motion and always changing.
Fascism, however, could not tolerate unique, heterogeneous individuals.
The construction of a "new man" was also part of the socialist project in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany.
79. Scritti e discorsi , vol. V, pp. 321, 302, 454. The rhetoric of producing was characteristic of fascism. Since it presented itself
in opposition to the old status quo—the wordy system of parliamentarism—the fascist regime aimed at presenting an image of
itself as concretely working toward the establishment of fascist Italy, as concretely "remodeling Italy's face." Inaugurations of
works, for instance, always punctuated the celebration of the new fascist year. Whether it was the reclamation of swamplands,
the opening of a highway, the restoration of historical monuments, or the starting of a new railway track, the regime showed it
was always moving and was always involved in frenetic activities.
80. For what follows, see Jens Petersen, "La nascita del concetto di 'Stato totalitario' in Italia," Annali dell' Istituto storico
italo-germanico in Trento , vol. 1 (1975), pp. 143-168. Petersen analyzes the concept of "totalitarian state" by following the
method developed in Germany by Reinhart Koselleck: the Begriffsgeschichte .
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