The phantom that haunts us (again): post-fascism, affect, and the paradoxes of cultivating an anti-fascist sensibility in education

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the notion of ‘post-fascism’ in contemporary times, and explores how attention to the affective ideology of post-fascism can inform pedagogical thinking that cultivates an anti-fascist sensibility in education. It is argued that to do so, it is necessary to somehow break fascism’s grip on the body and its affective pull. The analysis offered in this paper enables a critical interrogation of how the education field itself may be implicated to the cultivation of ‘fascist traits’ by being complicit to the structures and practices that are connected to neo-fascism such as neo-liberal globalisation. Despite the paradoxes entailed in education’s efforts to cultivate an anti-fascist sensibility, educators have a lot to gain from interrogating their own complicity and especially how they can engage with their students in anti-complicit actions that challenge fascist structures and practices in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-fascism
• affect
• anti-fascist sensibility
• pedagogy
• education

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Another term that could be used here, as one of the anonymous reviewers suggests, is Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of ‘social fascism’ (or ‘societal fascism’) which denotes a set of social processes by which large bodies of populations are kept outside or thrown out of any kind of social contract (see Santos’ interview in Dale and Robertson 2004). Although ‘social fascism’ is a viable term, the notion of ‘post-fascism’ is preferred, not only because the latter is more general and multifaceted, but also because it is connected both to new forms of fascism and historical fascism, as explained by Traverso; both of these dimensions are crucial for my analysis in this paper (see next section for more discussion).

2 This paradoxical role of education, for example, is shown in a recent analysis of educational populism in social media, that is, ‘how the New Right has successfully utilised the capabilities of new media to direct populist rhetoric into education policy environments’ (Watson and Barnes 2021, 1). I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this example.