Un-represent: theorizing the reason of political fanaticism

ABSTRACT

Recent theorizing on the concept of fanaticism has paid much attention to the identity of fanatics. Viewed in this way, fanaticism becomes a degradation, employed in the naming of existential political enemies. This political labelling helps foster identification, delineating the parameters of civility and extremism. And, in a politics that privileges compromise and sympathy, such parameters might be essential. Yet what results is a theory of fanaticism as an ideational void – always an identity applied to degrade another. By privileging incivility and extremism as political harms, such theories offer specific, rather than generalist accounts of fanaticism, as these harms are specific to secular liberal politics. Such theorizing poses a real danger, misrecognizing fanatics as only already political enemies, ignoring the positive political potential in yet incomplete fanaticisms. In this paper, I argue that failed fanatical efforts are those which receive publicly accepted identifications as fanatical, while successful fanaticisms are those which disrupt the very processes of representation. I engage a developing discourse, highlighting implicit tensions between political representation and the functioning of fanaticism. Ultimately, I aim to explain how the ascriptive irrationality applied to fanatics is only ever politically successful when fanaticism fails as a method, collapsing into an identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Fanaticism
• slogan
• political irrationality
• Lenin
• representation
• affect
• extremism
• agency

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lars Tønder for inviting me to submit my research for this special issue. His close reading, as well as the commentary from two anonymous reviewers, has proved invaluable. Part of this research was conducted during my stay at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. My thanks to Axel Honneth for hosting my research visit there and to colleagues at IfS for their many insights. Thanks also to my many students during several seminars on fanaticism at Amherst College – the chance to experiment with these ideas in the seminar room has greatly improved my arguments. Special thanks to Simon Stow, who commented on the entire manuscript, and whose notes have only made the research more convincing and precise. All errors or misstatements are otherwise my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the dangers of social and political dangers of misrecognition (Honneth 1996). While Honneth focuses on spheres of misrecognition of one identity for another, here – in the example of fanaticism – I argue that the danger of misrecognition comes from the use of the pre-formed identity of the enemy, which is applied to a disparate variety of groups and persons. For a parallel concern regarding liberalism and the identity of the irrational other (Olson 2009).

2 Olson (2009) and Toscano (2010) both offer detailed accounts of abolitionism as an example of exactly the sort of inherited fanaticism. I argue that this example may have certain theoretical limitations, conflating theories of fanaticism with theories of abolitionism, and thus limiting fanaticism to the particularities expressed in abolitionism.

3 I take political representation here to be both formal (electoral) and informal (civil society, public opinion) modes of presenting the identity and beliefs of another group, rather than allowing for the possibility of the direct presencing of that identity. On related notions of representation see Saward (2010); and for further elaborations on the structure of representation in democracies, see for example Urbinati (2006). While Colas (1997) makes the argument that fanaticism originates in response to representation, as I discuss below, this misses part of the historical force of particular fanaticisms – that it is an actual break with a specific representation itself.

4 On the desire for immediacy of self-presentation, see Colas (1997, 353–5). Contra Colas, my aim is to demonstrate that fanaticism reveals itself in the specific attempt to rupture its own mediation, rather than in the mere desire to avoid mediation itself.

5 And it is this very notion of the ‘real’ which cannot be reconciled with formal or informal modes of representation.

6 This is because Olson turns to ‘public opinion’ – so central to Philips own thinking – as a source of legitimate authority which could counter existing norms.

7 As opposed to language that merely catalogs or reports, language that is understood as ‘incorporeal transformation’ works to fundamentally transform the listener (or in this case the reader). See Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 83). Deleuze and Guattari themselves take up the question of the slogan, and especially Lenin's treatment of the slogan, to help illustrate this point (again, 83).

8 Lars Lih attributes this to Uvan Krylov's poem ‘The Two Barrel Carts.’ See Lih (2006, 567). Krylov's fable describes the sound of two barrels, one full of wine, the other empty, and the resulting sound that each barrel produces. For recent translation, see Krylov (2010, 17).

9 As Jean-Jacques Lecercle reflects on this point,

When we ask what faculty is specific to the slogan, we must indeed attribute to it some strange characteristics: a kind of instantaneousness in the emission, perception and transmission of the slogans; a wide variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to feel absolved of the slogans one has followed and then abandoned to welcome others; a properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the apprehension of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping language as an immense indirect discourse. (Lecercle 2002, 32)

10 As Jan Müller puts it, ‘Every theory (of allegiance) should provide an account of … the object of attachment, the mode of attachment, and the reasons for attachment’ (2007, 47). For the most recent revaluation of representation, see for example Disch, van de Sande, and Urbinati (2020). A close survey of the recent literature on political representation in contrast to the rethinking of fanaticism I offer here in this paper, would be a fruitful extension of this research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Poe

Andrew Poe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. His research interests are in democratic theory, political violence, extremism, and affect and emotion. He is currently completing a new research project on democracy without police.