Mohammad Hadi: Your work sits at the intersection of Marxism, political theory, critical theory, and the study of fascism. Your Late Fascism is particularly concerned with understanding contemporary far-right politics not simply as a repetition of historical fascism, but as something emerging from the crisis and contradictions of contemporary capitalism. My first question is: looking back at the trajectory from The Theatre of Production through Fanaticism, Cartographies of the Absolute, and Late Fascism, do you see these books as different attempts to approach the same underlying problem, or did the object of your thought genuinely change along the way?
Alberto Toscano: Well, that’s demanding a serious amount of speculative introspection, as it were. I think there’s probably a relatively big difference or gap, perhaps, between the work I did in my first book—which, after all, is the product of a PhD in philosophy and therefore comes with all of the shortcomings, but perhaps also the benefits, of semi-monastic seclusion in a doctoral programme and a real immersion into authors and texts, in some ways not divorced from political concerns altogether, but certainly distant from them in both form and content.
For everything else that I’ve written, there is not necessarily an underlying thread per se, unless we’re going to be very generic, like a critical theory of contemporary capitalism and an effort to think about forms of politics and subjectivity that might overcome or surpass it. But that doesn’t really tell you very much.
I think there’s definitely a style, if not a method, that governed the writing of the other books, which was really the effort to respond to salient problems emerging out of conjunctural crisis broadly speaking. Whether we’re talking about the discourse on fanaticism during the so-called war on terror in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the wars in Afghanistan and everything that followed; or the work in Cartographies of the Absolute with Jeff Kinkle responding to this problem regarding the representation of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–8; or, indeed, the work in Late Fascism.
Certainly, some of the questions in Fanaticism have shifted because of the ebb, at least from public spectacle, of Islamist movements and their place in the so-called war on terror after the demise of ISIS and so on. That has been less present, but, of course, it’s still very much in the mix and still very much part of a profoundly Islamophobic US far-right administration that is rolling over a lot of these frameworks and matrices into new forms.
MH: I have this impression that the level of unexpectedness in fascism has been really increasing. Day after day, we find ourselves caught off guard, not only by news, but by strategies, by mechanisms.
AT: There’s one point where Alain Badiou has this quip where he says the image of the contemporary world is one of “frenetic stasis”. I think this is really the sense of both dragging along all kinds of forms of politics, ideologies, practices, and institutions that by any standard of progress or emancipation would have to have been sent into the dustbins of history long ago, but, at the same time, a permanent mode of shock, affront, and so on.
That is very bewildering and disorienting, certainly for the intellectual habits that would link thinking about the immediate present, the broader conjuncture, and a historical phase that we might have inherited from critical theoretical or Marxist traditions. The mediation between the response to yet another obscenity or atrocity, at the same time as we seem to be stuck with the entrenchment, the congealing, the ossification of all kinds of dynamics of class, power, privilege, and geopolitical aggression that are very old, is difficult.
You can see this in the clearest way in how the contemporary US state under Trump is both reviving and relying on a sedimented history of oppression, repression, and exploitation, at the same time as constantly – in a spectacular television ratings logic – trying to ratchet up the news cycle into a speed commensurate with the algorithmic sorting and ranking of data flows.
This is also having very direct effects on what we could call, for want of a better word, the rationality of political power. So, in this world where thousands of ceasefires are announced that are not ceasefires at all, where negotiations are constantly announced that don’t actually occur, where grand claims are made and then retracted – one day Trump says he’s going to basically commit genocide in Iran by destroying the country entirely, the next day he says, “These are reasonable people that we can deal with.”
Faced with that, it’s very tricky to find the right register of analysis and response. On some level, thinking of the underlying structures and the longue durée is not so difficult, but finding an analytical grip on the more short-term or even mid-term dynamics is very tricky. That shearing difference is something that one can only try to approximate solutions or responses to. But it’s in the very nature of the turbulence, in the very nature of the interregnum, that it is disorienting – and perhaps disorienting also for its agents and participants, who are engaging in all kinds of bizarre forms of improvisation without having a settled economic or geopolitical order in which you would be making decisions along a relatively predetermined path. That’s why the erratic character is structurally baked in, and that’s part of the issue.
MH: It actually convinces me in a way that a new sense of modesty is required by intellectuals, in the sense that, due to the agility of power and the acceleration happening there, and the complete and relentless manoeuvring of power, it is highly likely that what I wrote yesterday is impertinent tomorrow. That requires a kind of modesty, and in the absence of that modesty, we might deal with an irrelevant metaphysics of power that is not going to be useful.
AT: Yeah, I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve found it useful to have the discipline of regular commentary or analysis – precisely because of that. It is a bit of a check or at least an opportunity to verify, corroborate, or test some ideas that you might have about the nature of contemporary fascism, geopolitics, etc.
I have had this experience where you’d write a piece on a Monday, especially if it’s related to US foreign policy or the deployment of ICE within US cities. You file it on a Monday and have until Friday to go through corrections and revisions, and sometimes until the last minute it was like, “Oh, they’ve retracted this”, “Oh, they’ve added another statement”, or “This thing that was meant to be imminent hasn’t happened.”
Somebody the other day was itemising the amount of times Trump or US officials had claimed either an agreement or some kind of definitive victory in the US-Israeli war in Iran, and it was absurd! Every other day there was some grand announcement. Or, if you count up the infractions to the so-called ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, I think it’s 10,000. The semantic parameters or notions like “agreement,” “ceasefire”, “peace”, or even “war” lose any stability and coherence.
That forces you to try a kind of political hermeneutics to find the level at which patterns and tendencies exist. That’s tricky, because sometimes the chaos is just chaos, and sometimes the chaos is a facade behind which there is a greater solidity of purpose or interest. That becomes very difficult to adjudicate, especially from a Marxist standpoint, when the level of personalised concentration of both power and capital reaches such astronomical, stratospheric levels that you can’t really speak of a distributed or collective class rationality as you might have before.
I’m not sure that in thinking about the intensifying turn to the right of US or other politics, you can really think about class interests in the same way. Of course, you can engage in a class-composition analysis of everybody who’s funding or voting for Trump, and make interesting arguments regarding the alliances between different fractions of capital – the work of someone like Melinda Cooper in her book Counterrevolution is very effective and smart about that. But, when it comes to certain decisions or moves, we’re really talking about the overwhelming power and erratic whim of a very few individuals.
This is also what’s happened in the context of the US state. Before, even under Bush Jr, there was a kind of rationality to State Department official ideology – there was a solidity of institutional personnel that allowed you not to have to divine what a single individual’s choice was. But, both at the level of the state and of capital, you’re getting this increasing shrinking where the whim actually does matter. It is possible that certain decisions are made just to enrich yourself and your family by engaging in a policy that you can capitalise on in the next 24 hours. The cronyism and personalism is extremely intense, and that creates conundrums for a critical analysis.
At the same time, there are very deep structural logics at work about profitability, the nature of the economy, debt, etc. So, you can’t be totally captivated into the fetish of the personalisation of politics and power, to think the world is nothing but what Elon Musk, Trump, and Netanyahu decided to do this morning. There are very deep and significant logics at work; it’s just that the mediation between these is very difficult to put into an analytical form, and therefore to think not just critically, but perhaps even strategically.
MH: It brings me to another question about fascism which is quite relevant. The fact that we’re constantly caught off guard by new forms of fascism suggests that fascism is inherently unpredictable. Each time we think we understand how fascism operates, it appears again in a different shape. Here, I really don’t mean the AfD in Germany, or the lazy attribution of fascism to Trump, Elon Musk, or Netanyahu, which is common everywhere. It looks like, sometimes, fascism eludes the human mind precisely because it does not remain fixed. As tools, resources, and circumstances change, it also changes. So, what do you think about this nature of fascism?
AT: Well, I think the irony – and that’s something I tried to explore perhaps too briefly in the book – is that fascism in its original Italian formation, shall we say, at least the Fascism that called itself such, was both explicit and reflexive about this dimension. In 1921, before the March on Rome and the seizure of power by Mussolini, he wrote an article titled “Fascism and Relativism,” where he claims that Fascism is the only new political form generated by the 20th century.
We should take this quite seriously. Socialism and communism, in their basic lineaments and theoretical infrastructure in the work of Marx and so on, as well as other left intellectual formations, were roughly crystallised by the late 19th century. Even modern electoral social democracies were already consolidated by the late 19th century in the SPD. So, in many ways, while communism as an official state ideology and everything that comes with the victory of the Bolsheviks involves novelty, it is not necessarily novelty at the level of the basic parameters and visions associated with Marxism, communism, or socialism.
Mussolini was a significant figure on the left of the Socialist Party before shifting to the nationalist, interventionist wing and then breaking to form the Fascist movement. He says provocatively, “We are the only political form that has fully reckoned with the transformation in our understanding of truth and reality that comes with the theory of relativity.” On one level, it’s completely comical and typical of the bluster, rhetoric, and exaggeration, but the consequence is influenced explicitly by a certain reading of Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence and an anarcho-syndicalist tradition, Mussolini says, “We are both proletarian and anti-proletarian, aristocratic and anti-aristocratic.” The only constant is this principle of action, will, and a kind of virile, martial cult of power.
That’s very significant, because, aside from a principle of ultra-nationalist politics of will and action, it’s building a capacity for almost indefinite plasticity into the genetic code of this movement. This allows a remarkable level of flexibility, rhetorically and ideologically, concerning its relationship to capitalism, the economy, or the working class. Of course, we can argue for deeper structural imperatives that fascism finds to reproduce and bolster the prerogatives of property and capital. But the fact that the same movement will present itself in quick succession as ant-capitalist and then as ultraliberal is striking. When Mussolini gives speeches on the eve and in the wake of the March on Rome, he says he wants the state to have very little presence in public life. Even if we take things totally associated with fascism, like “the trains ran on time”, Mussolini explicitly says we need to take the state out of things like the railways and schooling. That’s totally antithetical to our image of fascism based on its so-called totalitarian or planned dimensions.
That speaks to the point you’re making. That is why I tend to argue that, if we want to have a more pertinent, creative debate about fascism which would speak to the demands of our political and intellectual conjunctures, it’s that early moment of Italian Fascism that matters. The reason for that is not because it repeats itself, but because it sets up this matrix of plasticity and deliberate incoherence. That is one of the movement’s strengths: its capacity to co-opt, shift registers quickly, and evade the criticisms and internal breaks that haunt movements with a primacy of coherence and rationality, like socialism or liberalism.
My provocation in the book was that instead of taking fascism, and especially Nazism at its genocidal peak, as the model, we gain a lot from thinking about historical conjunctures that cannot be flattened onto that.
MoH: But there is also a subject there, either inherent in that fascism or exposed to that kind of fascism. So, I’ll shift attention to subjectivity in relation to fascism. What happens to political subjectivity when the future can no longer be imagined as a continuation of the present, but only as something that must emerge through its destruction? I’ve been witnessing this recently a lot, both in Iran and here. Could this produce a particular kind of subject who inhabits the threshold between an unbearable present and an imagined future without knowing what that future will actually contain? I am talking about the subject exposed to fascism.
AT: One of the major methodological, theoretical, and practical difficulties of approaching fascism in terms of subjectivity is that, for the reasons we have rehearsed – cynicism, pluralism, and relativism – it may be problematic, perhaps even futile, to posit that fascism requires or produces a singular form of subjectivity.
Interestingly enough, even when the later Frankfurt School engaged in projects combining psychoanalysis, critical theory, and empirical psychology (like Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality), Horkheimer noted that, when fascists win, they work with all kinds of incompatible subjects. You can’t say there was a single personality under Nazi Germany, but rather look at what dispositions in a proportion of the population make it more likely.
Because of that relativism, the ability of fascist movements to generate inter-class alliances maps onto their ability to create subjective blocks between disparate tendencies. For instance, much of the electoral success of the contemporary far Right is manically conservative in the sense of mobilising a paralysing fear that residual benefits or properties accruing to certain parts of the population (because of gender, racial background, or citizenship) are likely to be taken away by migrants, trans women, or what have you.
A lot of that core support does not want the upending of the world or a revolution for the “New Man”, but simply wants the improbable continuation of a status quo cleansed of threatening others. There’s an acceptance of the violence and cruelty required to restore these privileges, but no widespread acceptance that supporting these movements requires revolutionising yourself or entering novel institutions.
This existential conservatism means there’s an unstable relationship at work. The full-on utopian, transhuman, or posthuman dimension of the contemporary Far Right sits in the upper echelons of this class coalition – in AI hype, network states, chartered cities, and the cyborg deliriums of Musk or Thiel. It doesn’t percolate into the core electoral appeal, which is pretty conservative or reactionary and only really innovates at the level of its open acceptance of cruelty and inhumanity in ways that break with traditional twentieth-century postwar conservatism.
There is a spectacle and an enjoyment—the idea that “we’re not just defending the status quo, we’re giving you a share in the enjoyment of a violence that only the state can project”. But the futurist dimension, present in its moneyed backers and tech billionaires, doesn’t make up the bulk of its appeal. In the long run, terraforming the US with data centres for AGI to prolong inflated stock valuations has no popular constituency.
The social fortunes of the Far Right are quite quotidian and continuous with dynamics from the past 30 years, except now entering into synergies with this global tech-billionaire dimension. There’s a danger in fetishising the intellectual spokespeople, because a large component is continuous with what we’ve experienced for decades.
MH: That’s definitely a premise worth highlighting; there is a deep-seated relationship between relativism and fascism. It sounds counterintuitive, because fascism is normally associated with something absolute.
I want to shift attention now to late Iranian fascism for a moment, and I hope I can articulate this clearly. Much of your work examines how political subjects are shaped by crises of capitalism and social order, but what if we turn the question around: can a prolonged crisis become more than a condition that people suffer or respond to, and become something they come to invest in or even desire?
I’m thinking particularly of situations in which war, rupture, or radical political transformation can begin to appear preferable to an intolerable status quo. How might we understand this kind of attachment to crisis, to this kind of rupture, politically? Because here we are talking about war discourse and the concrete rupture that the subject is experiencing. What do you think about it?
AT: One other lesson from thinking through early Italian fascism is not just relativism, but pessimism. That’s a dimension of far-right ideology we underestimate. We think political movements attract popular investment because they promise a better world or happiness, but fascism is certainly not a politics of happiness. In fact, happiness is viewed as a feminised, feeble, Christian ideal.
There is a strong seam within fascism attached to a martial ethos, to sacrifice, even to defeat, which has a deeply pessimistic strain. I’m working on a book on politics and tragedy, and there’s an interesting seam of far-right thought – including revolutionary conservative thought – that starts from the premise of the human condition as one of suffering and hardship, and wants to valorise that. Mario Tronti or Furio Jesi in his book Right-Wing Culture talks about this religio mortis, this religion of death that is part of fascism.
When Adorno writes on aspects of the new right-wing extremism, he talks about a “feeling for catastrophe” – a peculiar construction where fascism feeds on fear, not to dampen it or promise resolution, but as the promise that it will be your catastrophe, or that you will star in it, mould, direct, and accelerate it, with others as its (first) victims.
Adorno notes that, if people drawn to these movements are told their impending doom or feeling of being replaced can be resolved by benefiting everyone, including those they despise, they do not find that an attractive option. That’s why there is a limit to thinking universal welfare programmes alone will eliminate far-right mobilisation. There is a libidinal and political dimension passionately attached to that sense of loss and being besieged, which legitimates the desire for violence or supremacy.
In our moment, this plays into the sense of ecological catastrophe or collapse. Even when climate denialist, much of the Far Right is oriented toward the reality of these crises, but wants to dominate and control them as an occasion to expel, rule, and subjugate.
There is an orientation toward crisis – Adorno’s “feeling for social catastrophe” – which carries a profound anxiety to conserve the status quo, but with an attitude of: “If that’s lacking, then maybe we should just bring the whole thing down.” It’s like the Samson doctrine in Israeli nuclear policy: “If we’re at risk, we’ll annihilate ourselves with everybody else.” Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in the 1970s called this a “line of abolition” – a fascist orientation toward annihilation.
MH: You’ve devoted parts of your book to the question of revolution alongside fascism. Different writers, when they write about revolution, mean a moment that tears open the field of possibilities before its meaning has been settled.
Thinking from recent experiences, from the Iranian experience, I have become interested in what happens when such a rupture is viewed from outside – when the destruction produced by war, sanctions, or political collapse is celebrated as if it were itself a revolutionary opening. Could we be losing the distinction between a rupture that opens possibilities and a rupture that simply destroys the conditions in which possibilities can emerge? And what happens politically when outsiders begin to read destruction as liberation, perhaps because they see the collapse of an existing order more clearly than the lives and possibilities being destroyed within?
AT: That’s a great way of delineating the problem. Sometimes, I wonder whether, if we think of revolution – or of the event, to gloss Badiou simply – as the opening of a radical possibility, something previously thought impossible, we also have to ask what conditions allow such a possibility to emerge. Does a country or socioeconomic system require some degree of stability or legibility for a revolution to become possible at all?
In comparative history, that’s a complex question because of the obvious link between conjunctures of war and revolution – World War I and revolution, or the French Revolution and warfare. But the idea that because revolutions require rupture, an external rupture can set off change is profoundly problematic – not just morally or politically, but at a formal level.
The idea that even people who are not consciously partisans of imperial intervention or advocates of social movements being manipulated from outside can fall into this deus ex machina temptation: if catastrophe is necessary, then let’s take catastrophe. That is a disastrous, depressing position. Decades of cogent critique show the wrongheadedness of the notion that revolution can be instigated from outside. What comes to be triggered from outside is just an exploitable catastrophe without end, not autonomy or emancipation.
The amorphous, mutable character of contemporary war makes less legible what social transformation might take, because the wars themselves don’t allow for the same legibility as before.
Even the parameters of imperialism have changed considerably. Before, even though cynical and hypocritical, there was a discourse of “democratisation” used as an excuse for violence in the 2000s, say in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, as seen in Venezuela, the explicit logic is what they call “regime editing” or “regime management”, backed by the crass dictum “to the victor, go the spoils.”
At the beginning of the war in Iran, Trump expressed disappointment that they hadn’t allowed him to pick the next Ayatollah after the assassination of Khamenei. That was striking – the idea that “what we want is control from the outside”. The same with Cuba, where they keep having talks hoping to find someone amenable to money. The image is not some pseudoliberal revolution, but external control.
If we accept that liberal humanitarian interventionism (a.k.a. imperialism) was corrupt to begin with and is now dead even for its erstwhile promoters, it’s important to ask what the real possibilities for autonomy and liberation might be in Iran and as elsewhere.
About the Authors:
Alberto Toscano’s work spans critical theory, Marxism, political philosophy, Italian thought, and theories of fascism. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum. His work has focused increasingly on the historical and contemporary forms of authoritarianism, racial capitalism, and fascism, as well as on anticolonial and anti-racist traditions of political thought.
Mohammad Hadi is a philosophy graduate based in Berlin. He completed his doctorate at the University of Tübingen in 2016, and he is currently working on essays on war and philosophy. He hosts the interview podcast Rhizastance. His first novel, Iranically, set in a postwar Iran, is forthcoming from Ekpyrosis Press in 2027.
