Sami Khatib (Berlin)

May Day School 2015: How do We Think about Fascism Today?

Ljubljana, April 30, 2015

The Aestheticization of Politics:

Rereading Benjamins Theory of Fascism
Fascism is originally reactionary. Standing in the place of a political discourse,
formation or movement aimed at the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism, fascism
blocks and diverts the energies of socio-political revolution. In this sense, every fascist
re-action is triggered by, yet not reducible to socio-political actions within the sphere
of class struggle. If fascism is a pseudo-event (Slavoj Zizek), which fills the void of
an absent or failed revolutionary event, fascism can only be grasped from the
perspective of an emancipatory political struggle. Walter Benjamins theory of fascism
is written from such a perspective. In the mid 1930s he famously stated: The masses
have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in
keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing
of political life.1 In other words, the politico-economic deadlock that forecloses the
chances for the democratization and communization of the productive forces
inherently (re)produces the aestheticization of the political sphere in order to keep the
status quo unchanged. In my paper, I will revisit Benjamins famous dictum and try to
shed light on his concepts of fascism and aestheticization.

(1) Fascism as ideological displacement

Generally, fascism can be framed as the articulation of a pseudo-rebellion against
capitalism in order to keep capitalism in power. It goes without saying, that such a
paradoxical project cannot be solely derived, deduced or explained from the standpoint
1

Benjamin, W. (2008): The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, in The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings;
Brigid Doherty; Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 41; henceforth
abbreviated Work of Art.

of bourgeois common-sense rationales such as theories based on already constituted

subjects or groups supposed to act rationally in accordance with their allegedly
objective class interests. In other words, fascism is the violent mobilization,
formation and, ultimately, destruction of particular groups of people (if not entire
societies) in order to keep things as they are whatever the particular interests,
fantasies or goals of its agents and victims are. From such a perspective, fascism is the
paradigmatic form of ideological Verschiebung, displacement2 a phantasmatically
invested attempt to displace the social antagonism of capitalism from the site of class
struggle to the site of phantasmatic antagonism. As is well know, in the case of
German fascism the ideological screen of this phantasmatic displacement was antiSemitism, that is, class antagonism displaced and rendered as the eternal struggle of
the Aryan race against the Jewish anti-race. In terms of its ideology, Nazi fascism
was the paradoxical attempt to give its own mode of ideological displacement a
proper place a naturalized sphere of race, culture, and soil Blut und Boden.3
However, the political imaginary of Blut und Boden was not limited to pre-modern
forms of life but attached itself mainly to the concrete use-value dimension of modern
industrial capitalism. In this way, industrial machinery, Krupp steel, German
engineering became the direct expression of Blut und Boden.4
If one were to formulate a critique of Nazi ideology, the analysis of the anti-Semitic
fantasy of the Eternal Jew would be the point of departure to unravel this mode of
ideological displacement. Such a critique would come to the conclusion that behind
Nazi ideology there is no material reality that could be unveiled or enlightened by
correct consciousness. The ideological displacement, which renders class struggle as
anti-Semitic race-struggle, is strictly speaking tautological and resists attempts to
rationalize it ex post. Put differently, in capitalism anti-Semitism is the paradigmatic
form of ideological displacement, which cannot be reduced to functional theories of
2

Cf. Zizek, S. (2006): The Two Totalitarianisms, in London Review of Books, URL:
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms>.
3
I owe the insight into the dialectics of fascist ideologys displacement and placement to Jana Tsoneva,
Ljubljana, April 30, 2015.
4
An illuminating analysis of how German fascism fetishized the rooted concrete use-value dimension of
industrial capitalism while attempting to liberate this concrete dimension from its rootless abstract value
dimension can be found in Moishe Postones Marxian theory of anti-Semitism; see Postone, M.: AntiSemitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to Holocaust, in New German Critique,
No. 19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews. (Winter, 1980), 97-115.

false consciousness. Behind the ideological displacement, which in the case of fascism
articulates its pseudo-rebellion against capitalism, there is only a purely social relation:
the commodity form and class antagonism, the persistence of which fascism organizes.
The figure to which this sort of ideological displacement was historically attached has
changed in our days; it is not only the phantasma of the Jew that is being produced to
give material evidence to fascist ideology (some theorists argue that this position is
now taken by the phantasma of the Muslim). However, the systemic need to fill in the
subjective position of ideological displacement, to produce the subject that
materializes a phantasmatic antagonism, still prevails whatever its contemporary
figure is. This operation of ideological displacement is not limited to the domain of
ideas, concepts or beliefs. Rather, precisely as an imaginary form it is part of fascist
reality, the material staging ground to organize formatted masses in order to allow for
the continuity of capitalist relations of production.
Starting from this minimal definition, it should be clear that in the case of fascism we
face two seemingly contradictory movements: continuity and rupture.
Continuity insofar as fascism is continually run by capitalist relations of
production.
Rupture insofar as fascism is the exceptional suspension of most of capitalisms
legal framework achieved by the bourgeois revolutions of 19th century.
With this double feature, continuity and rupture, we are able to specify what in the
1930s Max Horkheimer said about fascism: those who do not want to talk critically
about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism. Or, to rephrase this formula:
those who have no critical grasp of the functioning of capitalist continuity, that is, its
everyday modus operandi as permanent crisis, should also keep quiet about
capitalisms fascist exception. Moreover, with fascism our notion of normality, of so
called normally functioning capitalism, is challenged. Any normative concept of
liberal capitalism, based on the discrimination between what is the rule and what is its
exception, necessarily misses the character of fascism. If I say capitalism is the
necessary, yet non-sufficient condition of fascism, I do not make a reductive vulgarmaterialist argument concerning historical causation. Rather, in almost Kantian
fashion, I claim that capitalism is the historical condition of possibility of fascism,
3

allowing, in the first place, for arguments concerning historical causality. Again, it is
only our critical notion of capitalist continuity that allows for a non-reductive and nonidealist concept of capitalisms fascist interruption an interruption aimed at
preserving capitalist continuity by all means. In terms of the relationship of fascism
and capitalism, we have to reject explanations that employ a simple binary between
causal deduction on the one hand and relative autonomy on the other. Capitalism is the
necessary, yet non-sufficient precondition of fascism. However, in fascist everyday
life capitalist preconditions and their ultimately contingent fascist potentialities acquire
a life of their own, coexisting next to each other, rendering political contingency as
historical necessity and thereby blurring the line between effect and its condition of
possibility.
Giving Horkheimers dictum its proper meaning, in 1940 Walter Benjamin stated:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception
[Ausnahmezustand, ] in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We
must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we
will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception, and
this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism. One reason
fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a
historical norm. (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 392; Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. I, 697)
Implicitly referring to Carl Schmitts theory of the state of exception5 in which
sovereign power seeks to ground its authority, Benjamin calls for a revolutionary
antithesis, the real state of exception, which could disrupt the fascist Ausnahmezustand
(by aiming at the exception of the exception). According to Schmitt, sovereign is
who decides about the state of exception martial law for instance, that is, the violent
suspension of the normality of the law in order to safeguard its normal functioning.
This seemingly paradoxical operation, the exceptional suspension of the law in order
5

Cf. Schmitt, C. (2004, 1922): Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souvernitt, Berlin:
Duncker u. Humblot.

to ground and implement it, is addressed by Benjamin in terms of a state in which the
exception has become the rule rupture and continuity exist next to each other,
blurring the line of what is the normal degree of state violence.
Already in his essay on The Critique of Violence from 1921, Benjamin tested out the
limits of state violence and its supplementing powers by invoking the term divine
violence, a revolutionary violence that interrupts the continuity of applied rules as
laws (what he calls law-preserving violence) and the original implementation of
such rules (what he calls law-making violence).6 Both forms of violence, lawpreserving and law-making violence, mutually presuppose each other that is why
Benjamin calls them mythic; they form a circle without exit.
Put into practice, however, these two forms of mythic violence are difficult to
differentiate. In the sphere of direct state repression, i.e. the police, law-preserving
force and law-making violence are always spectrally conflated, whereas in the realm of
the social order mythic violence has become almost invisible. While excessive lawmaking violence is today more or less outsourced from the capitalist centre into the
periphery, in contemporary post-Fordist capitalism mythic violence tends to obscure
its law-making force by turning into a seemingly intangible juridical web of biopolitical practices. This form of law-preserving violence operates as a self-producing
and self-eternalizing microphysics of power (Foucault) producing and re-producing,
disciplining and controlling, regulating and sanctioning bare life as actual, potential or
superfluous labor force. Mythic violence has thus become the political economy of
bare life however productive the latters labor potential might be. In other words,
state violence as mythic violence is inherent to the law, be it in bourgeois or fascist
forms of capitalist domination. And vice versa, if rebellious movements break the law
in order to establish a new one, they remain within the paradigm of the state and its
spurious dialectics of mythic violence. Benjamins question, however, is: is there a
realm of truly revolutionary politics outside and beyond of the law and the state a
sphere of justice and non-legal violence?
6

Cf. Khatib, S. (2011): Towards a Politics of Pure Means: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence, in
Anthropological Materialism. From Walter Benjamin, and Beyond, Paris: Hypotheses, stable URL:
<http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org/1040>

The entire argument of Benjamins Critique of Violence hinges on demonstrating how

sovereign power, through the suspension of the law in the state of exception,
partakes in the spurious dialectics of law-making and law-preserving violence. In other
words, the fascist state of exception guarantees and coexists with the normal
functioning of mythic violence materialized in the law. This safeguarding coexistence
a situation in which the state of exception has become the rule creates a zone of
indistinction in which the very concept of normal state violence loses its normative
base. What is outside of the law is rendered as the center of legal violence and vice
versa. In this sense, Schmitts theory of the state of exception can be read as an
attempt to include that what is outside of the law by inventing a fictitious zone of
indistinction inscribing the law into nature and nature into the law. Against this
attempt to ground the normalized interior of legal violence in an external zone of
indistinction in which the normal rule coexists with its exceptional suspension, the real
state of exception aims at the revolutionary deactivation of both the normal
(bourgeois-liberal) functioning of mythic violence and its (fascist) guarantee in the
state of exception.
With this working definition of the asymmetric antithesis of fascist pseudo-event
and revolutionary politics or, as Benjamin put, the antithesis of a state in which the
exception has become the rule on the one hand and the real state of exception on the
other, I will move on to Benjamins famous definition of fascism as the
aestheticization of politics.

(2) The aestheticization of politics

For a long time, Benjamins criticism of fascism has been summarized along the lines
of this formula. To such aestheticization, as the passage goes on, communism answers
with the politicization of art. What is less known about this over-cited formula is the
argument from which Benjamin draws the concluding chiasmus of politicization
versus aestheticization. The entire passage from the famous essay on The Work of Art
in Its Age of Technological Reproducibility from 1935/36 reads.
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The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation

of masses are two sides of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the
newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations
[relations of production] which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in
granting expression to the masses but on no account granting them rights. The
masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them
expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of
fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. [] All efforts to aestheticize
politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war,
makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while
preserving traditional property relations. That is how the situation presents itself
in political terms. In technological terms it can be formulated as follows: only
war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technological resources while
maintaining property relations. [] Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as
practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art. (Work of Art, 4142)
Ever since the 1960s, generations of Benjamin scholars, art theorists, leftists and
antifascists have tried to make sense of this chiasmus. In this paper, I will not focus on
what the politicization of art could mean today and to what extent contemporary
capitalism has fulfilled this demand in a perverted way in the domain of so-called
immaterial labor. Rather, I will only concentrate on the aestheticization of politics and
how this formula contributes to a theory of historical and contemporary forms of
fascism.
Speaking about the aestheticization of politics, one cannot but ask a simple question:
What is it in politics that is being aestheticized, which has not been aesthetical in the
first place? What is the relationship of the fields of politics and aesthetics which
allows for the political operation of aestheticization? Against a nave reading of
Benjamins formula we are to insists that politics is itself inherently aesthetical. I am
tempted to agree here with Jacques Rancire who argues that the aestheticization of
politics, the assertion of its aesthetic dimension, is inherent in any radical
7

emancipatory

politics.7

As

Zizek

rightly

summarizes

Rancires

take

on

aestheticization: This choice [] goes against the grain of the predominant notion
which sees the main root of Fascism in the elevation of the social body into an
aesthetic-organic Whole.8 If aesthecization is a certain mode or practice within what
Rancire calls the distribution of the sensible, we have to acknowledge that there is
an aesthetics at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamins
discussion of the aestheticization of politics specific to the age of the masses.9
However, Benjamins point was not an aestheticization of politics which turns
something anaesthetical into aesthetics as paradigmatically figured in what Siegfried
Kracauer called the fascist mass ornament, the monumental party rallies of the Nazi
party in 1930s Germany. The problem of the fascist representation and acclamation of
state power is not its specifically aesthetic quality. As many liberals who follow the
Arendtian doctrine of totalitarianism have noted: in Stalinist Soviet union so-called
mass ornaments, the marching and parading of organizing masses, was common
practice in order to give the new Soviet state a form of self-representation. Rather,
Benjamin referred to a specifically fascist mode of aestheticization that is different
from emancipatory or communist modes of aestheticization. In other words, within the
field of politics aestheticization has at least two meanings:
(1) the articulation of the inherently aesthetic nature of emancipatory politics. In an
earlier text from 1929, Benjamin discussed the immediate articulation, presentation or
staging of the aesthetic medium of politics in terms of Bildraum, image-space an
unmediated aesthetic space of political action beyond pre-formatted political
representations.10
(2) the Fascist mode of aestheticization which forecloses the image-space of politics
7

Rancire, J. (2004): The Politics o f Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill,
London: Continuum, 12-19.
8
Zizek, S. (2004): Afterword in: Rancire, J. (2004): The Politics o f Aesthetics. The Distribution of the
Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 76.
9
Rancire, J. (2004): The Politics o f Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill,
London: Continuum, 13.
10
Benjamin, W. 1978. Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. New Left Review, vol.
108, 47-56 (March-April 1978), cf. Benjamin, W. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Hermann
Schweppenhuser, Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp; see also: Khatib, S. (2014): To
Win the Energies of Intoxication for the Revolution: Body Politics, Community, and Profane Illumination,
in Anthropology & Materialism. A Journal of Social Research, 2nd Issue, 2/2014: The Persistence of Myth,
stable URL: <http://am.revues.org/348>.

and renders politics as organically holistic, displacing the reality of social antagonism
to the field of the imaginary in which naturalistic representations function as social
categories. Historically, the aestheticization of class struggle was figured in the
idolatrous image of the Aryan bermensch; class struggle was rendered as race
struggle.
With these two types of aestheticization, we have to modify our concept of political
aesthetics. The aesthetic dimension of politics is neither limited to the distribution of
the field of the sensible (as Rancire claims) nor limited to the field of the visual.
Rather, aesthetics and accordingly modes of aestheticization refer to the realm of the
sensible and the non-sensible. Indeed, one may even summarize Benjamins
innovation within the field of Aesthetic Theory as the discovery of a non-sensible
aesthetics. With Benjamin we are able to theorize different types of sensible and nonsensible, pictorial and linguistic images within the field of politics.11
In terms of the specific fascist aesthetizicization of politics, Benjamin speaks about
fascisms ability to provide an Ausdruck, expression, for the demands of the masses.
Such expression does not change the dominant capitalist relations of production;
rather, it preserves them. However, the operation of expressing class antagonism
without changing it is not merely illusionary or ornamentally. It has material effects
since the matter of politics is also made out of aesthetic practices. Providing the
masses with an expression of class antagonism does not add any further aesthetic
expressiveness to politics. However, it violently separates the aesthetic dimension of
class antagonism from the site of class struggle. In other words, for Benjamin fascist
11

In the essay on The Work of Art in Its Age of Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin gives some clues
and concrete examples. Analyzing the socio-political conditions and impact of forms of art in the age of their
technological reproducibility, Benjamin does not limit himself the realm of the sensible. In one of the essays
most overlooked passages he describes the subject matter of his materialist inquiry as a theory of perception
which the Greeks called aesthetics (Work of Art, 41). However, Benjamins theory of perception is not a
theory of sensuous perception only. Consequently, his concept of the aesthetic is not limited to the field of
the visible or a certain regime of the distribution of the sensible like in Rancire. Rather, Benjamin has a
peculiar notion of aesthetics as a theory of Wahrnehmung, perception, or, literally taking as true.
Wahrnehmung is for Benjamin not necessarily a perception of the sensible. In quite non-Kantian fashion, he
allows for a theory of non-sensible aesthetics, which enables us to theorize fascist aesthetics as a mode of
the production and reproduction of politics beyond fascist iconography. In other words, the famous
Benjaminian term of aestheticization is not about the distribution of the sensible within fascist politics but
about a mode of the production of meaning traversing the realm of the sensible and the non-sensible, political
reality and the political imaginary.

aesthetizicization is the procedure of extracting a certain political imagery from the

field of potentially emancipatory politics and making it a mobile, disposable tool of
the representation of state violence.
The

political

imaginary,

the

site

of

images,

spectacles,

fantasies

and

(self)representations, becomes a naturalized screen of real politics. Despite its

naturalizing and depoliticizing functioning, the fascist mode of expressing class
antagonism is modern and denaturalizing. It performs a kind of inverse
Verfremdungseffekt, alienation effect (Brecht), cutting off the political from the
aesthetical and thereby short-circuiting real politics and the political imaginary.
Without this violently performed short-circuit, the political imaginary of fascism
would be immediately exposed to attempts of antifascist reappropriation. Put
differently, a film like Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will (1934) only functions as
a fascist aesthetizicization once its aesthetic circulation and distribution is controlled
and enforced by direct state violence. Therefore, there is no such thing as fascist
aesthetics proper. Fascist imagery without its supporting state violence that is, a
state in which the state of exception is farcically repeated as the rule, short-circuiting
real politics and the political imaginary is not inherently fascist but open to
potentially emancipatory subversion.
Of course, in the case of Slovenia I am thinking of the famous example of N.S.K.
(Neue Slowenische Kunst) and the band Laibach. If the fascist mode of expressing
class antagonism by displacing its site is not anymore guaranteed by a specifically
fascist regime of the distribution the realm of the sensible and non-sensible, its images,
representations and icons can be reappropriated, reproduced and circulated as culturalindustrial commodities, exposing fascisms mode of aesthetizicization. One might
even add that the commodified circulation of so-called fascist aesthetics (I am
speaking of Nazi fashion, parades, symbols etc.) can devalue their specifically fascist
use-value as a medium of ideological displacement. Instead of fetishizing the
semblance of the aesthetic regime of fascism and essentializing it as fascist
aesthetics, we are do denaturalize fascisms own mode of aesthetic naturalization.
The materialist weapon against ideological displacement is further displacement,
which shifts the original displacement to another scene. The site of this further
displacement which brings about the real Verfremdungseffekt, alienation effect, is also
10

aesthetical, yet its form is different. The communist mode of expressing class
antagonism while changing it is still to be discussed; however, we already know that it
does not fetishize and eternalize its ideological mode of displacement. Its images
exceed the scope of representations of power and state violence.

11