The Philosophy of Antifascism: Resources

I no longer blog thanks to Twitter, teaching and other commitments. However, I will dedicate--and hopefully continue to update--this post as a resource guide to my writings on antifascism around and related to the core contribution to the project, The Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

Last update: May 6, 2023

On January 20th, 2017, during an interview on the streets of Washington D.C., white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched by an anonymous antifascist. The moment was caught on video and quickly went viral, and soon “punching Nazis” was a topic of heated public debate. How might this kind of militant action be conceived of, or justified, philosophically? Can we find a deep commitment to antifascism in the history of philosophy?

Through the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, with some reference to Fanon and Sartre, this book identifies the philosophical reasons for the political action being enacted by contemporary antifascists. In addition, using the work of Jacques Rancière, it argues that the alt-right and the far right aren’t a kind of politics at all, but rather forms of parapolitical and paramilitary mobilization aimed at re-entrenching the power of the state and capital.

Devin Shaw argues that in order to resist fascist mobilization, contemporary movements find a diversity of tactics more useful than principled nonviolence. Antifascism must focus on the systemic causes of the re-emergence of fascism, and thus must fight capital accumulation and the underlying white supremacism. Providing new, incisive interpretations of Beauvoir, existentialism, and Rancière, he makes the case for organizing a broader militant movement against fascism.

Purchase Philosophy of Antifascism at leftwingbooks.net (here) and receive a free copy of the pamphlet The Politics of the Blockade (Kersplebedeb, 2020) (see here and here).

Reviews (open-access) or Discussions:

• Donovan Irven, "The Three-Way Fight and Antifascist Philosophy," Erraticus, January 18, 2021 (link).
• Shane Burley, "Antifa Academics," Full Stop, April 5, 2021 (link).
• Robert Luzecky, Symposium, June 17, 2021 (link) 
• Craig Fowlie, "American Antifascism Comes of Age," May 13, 2022 (link).
  
• Red Menace: Neither Liberalism nor Reaction: Centering the Three-Way Fight, August 31, 2022 (Podcast link)
  

 Related Writings:

• With Stanislav Vysotsky, "Conference Report: Antifascism in the 21st Century," Three Way Fight, February 7, 2023 (link).
• "Where Do We Go Next? A Review of Shane Burley's Why We Fight," Three Way Fight, November 3, 2021 (link).
  
• "Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight," Three Way Fight, August 1, 2021 (link); in pamphlet form from 1312 Press (link).
  
• "From German Communist Antifascism to a Contemporary United Front," Preface to T. Derbent, German Communist Resistance 1933–1945 (Paris: FLP, 2021), 1–17 (link).
• "'Command that Does Not Command': Reconsidering Rancière's Opposition of Politics and Policing,"Parrhesia 33 (2020), 83–112 (link: it's an early version of chapter 3 of Philosophy of Antifascism)
  
• "On Toscano's Critique of 'Racial Fascism,'" Three Way Fight, December 30, 2020 (link).
• Review of Ajith (K. Murali), Critiquing Brahmanism, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, December 9, 2020 (link).
• "Between System-Loyal Vigilantism and System-Oppositional Violence, Three Way Fight, October 25, 2020 (link).
• Review of Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, May 13, 2020 (link).
• "Fighting Fascism with Feminism: A Review of Petronella Lee's Anti-Fascism against Machismo," Social Justice Centre, January 5, 2020 (link).
  

 Interviews and Book Events

• With Revolutionary Left Radio, August 16, 2020: "A Philosophy of Antifascism: Existentialism, Decolonization, and the Three-Way Fight" (link).
• With The Howard Zinn Book Fair's podcast Books to the Barricades, August 2020 (link).
• Join Book Launch with J. Moufawad-Paul, December 10, 2020 (link) 
• Rad Reads, "End Table Book Chat" January 8, 2021 (YouTube)
  
• With Revolutionary Voices, "Antifascism and Philosophy," January 22, 2021 (link).
  
• With Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, "Philosophy of Antifascism in a Settler-Colonial Society," January 31, 2021 (link).
• Brotherwise Dispatch vs. Devin Zane Shaw, Brotherwise Dispatch, vol. 3, issue 13, June-August 2022 (link).
  
• With What's Left of Philosophy, "Antifascism and Emancipatory Violence," March 6, 2023 (link)
  

Bonus: Rad Reads reviews The Politics of the Blockade January 26, 2021 (Youtube). 

"Impossible Identifications" at the EPTC

If you want to know where I've been during 2013, I've been working on a book on Jacques Rancière and philosophy. In Part I, I focus on Rancière's account of political subjectification, and I argue that we could get a better sense of his account if we consider his work in relation to Descartes, Beauvoir, and Sartre (and vice versa). In terms of the overall architecture of the book, my paper on Cartesian egalitarianism should be Chapter 1, and this paper on Sartre and Being and Nothingness is half of Chapter 2. I will be presenting a rough draft of the second half of Chapter 2 at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) in the first week of June. Here's a link to the program, and I am looking forward to the fact that Jason Wirth, who reviewed my Schelling book, will be giving the commentary on my more recent work.

Here's the abstract:

"Impossible Identifications: Rancière as Reader and Critic of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason"

In this presentation, I examine the influence of Sartre, especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason and several contemporaneous essays on anti-colonialism, on the political thought of Jacques Rancière. A reconsideration of Sartre is in order for two interrelated reasons: first, both Sartre and Rancière propose accounts of emancipatory political subjectification in which subjective praxis emerges as a radical break with a given set of oppressive and exploitative social relations; and second, both Sartre and Rancière conceptualize identity as a function or operation of oppressive or exploitative social relations, and thus political praxis involves a disidentification with one’s previous identifications and interests.

But I'd like to note that Rancière critiques how Sartre hyper-instrumentalizes political praxis. The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the paper:

An important difference between Sartre and Rancière turns on how they conceptualize this dynamic of disidentification. I will argue that Rancière, in his landmark Disagreement (1995), thinks politics as a paradoxical and non-instrumental praxis, an activity with neither end nor interest other than the disruptive and transformative effects of the supposition of equality, meaning “the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality” (Disagreement, 30). In this sense, Rancière is consistent with his earlier criticisms of Sartre found in The Philosopher and His Poor (1983), where he argues that Sartre’s account of activity results in the hyper-instrumentalization of praxis: “if the world’s matter is to bear the history of liberation, it must be traversed entirely by technique” (Philosopher and His Poor, 155). Freedom becomes a “super technique,” always turned to an ultimate end which forecloses on “the elastic intervals of autodidact freedom…in the disoriented space of pathways and dead ends where people searched not long ago for what rebellious workers and dreamers called ‘emancipation’” (156, 147). This hyper-instrumentalized praxis never escapes from either internal or external exigencies—whether Sartre is discussing the exigencies of the practico-inert, the pledged group, the organization, or ultimately, the party (140, 154).

I will argue that Rancière’s claim that politics involves an “impossible identification” is proposed as an alternative to Sartre’s account of praxis. In short, Rancière’s paradoxical politics involves a political subjectification that undermines previous identities by momentarily identifying with a part of society that has no part, with this dynamic introducing new and more egalitarian ways of speaking, being, and doing into a given set of social relations (or what he calls a “distribution of the sensible”).

The Nothingness of Equality

I've been putting the finishing touches on an essay that ought to see the light of day sometime in 2012 (it has already been accepted for publication). If you were in Montréal last April at the Sartre Society conference, you've already heard parts of it. If everything works like I want it to, it will eventually form part of a chapter in my book on Jacques Rancière. Here's an abstract of what you have to look forward to:

The Nothingness of Equality: The ‘Sartrean Existentialism’ of Jacques Rancière 

I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière’s egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency, and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière’s thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being, and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre’s project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity.

The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes

For my introductory philosophy courses, such as 'Great Philosophers' this semester, I always teach Descartes' Meditations. However, for my 'Fundamental Questions' course I've been using The Good Life, edited by Charles Guignon, and he includes selections from The Passions of the Soul rather than the Meditations or the Discourse on Method. Which means that rather than concluding with the problem of Cartesian dualism I was beginning my lectures with his attempted resolution.

Discussing this material reminded me that I had wanted last year to read The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited by Lisa Shapiro (University of Chicago Press, 2007; it is part of their series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe"), as a companion to Descartes' published work. This month, I finally did, and it was well worth the effort-- not the effort of reading their correspondence, but of fitting it into the reading stack. They prove to be a lively and engaging pair. Elisabeth refuses to accept Descartes' attempts to dodge her objections to his dualism, and he proves willing enough to eventually draft an early version The Passions of the Soul to answer her questions, only to, of course, provoke more objections and questions. Elisabeth, for her part, seems to approve of the Cartesian perspective in general, although she seeks to overcome the dualism between mind an body, and to work out (with Descartes) an ethics that can help her with both personal and political situations. Along the way, they discuss Seneca, Epicurus, and Machiavelli. If not for anything else, there are unlikely moments for those accustomed to Descartes' published work, such as his admission that "the Schools are right to say that the virtues are habits," or his verdict on Machiavelli: after noting the faults of The Prince, he notes that "I have since read his discourses on Titus Livy where I noticed nothing evil."

I can't always say that I like reading the winding paths of philosophers' correspondence. That being said, I recommend The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes to the reader who is looking for a different and not often noticed side of early modern philosophy and letters.

The New Course Description

The new, emboldened doctor has a new course description for his class entitled 'Great Philosophers':

It is a good question, in the year 2010, to ask why we should talk about ‘Great’ philosophers. A title such as this seems to indicate a set of essential qualities of both greatness and what it takes to be a philosopher. To our more skeptical eyes, a decade after the turn of the 21st century, it seems to be an anachronism. Do not the ‘Great’ philosophers overlap with a particular image of society that is overly white, European, bourgeois, and imperial? Have not the very promises of philosophy or even civilization been used to oppress those excluded? Minorities? The colonialized? The poor? Women?

And yet, is there not a promise in some of the ideas that continuously reappear in the history of philosophy that make it worth learning, appropriating, and even worth fighting for? Does not philosophy diagnose our situation with concepts such as modern alienation, or provide arguments for understanding the relationship between the self and society? Does it not affirm, in the face of oppression, the possibilities of subjectivity and political agency, freedom, and liberation?

This class is an investigation into this contradiction at the heart of the history of philosophy: while it has often reinforced the prejudices of the ruling elite, or of society, it has also offered the promise of a better, more egalitarian, world. While we will not resolve this contradiction, in reading the ‘canon,’ –which includes Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau– along with its critics –including Marx, Engels, de Beauvoir and Césaire– we will discover some of the conceptual tools that will allow us to think critically about what it means to do philosophy.

The Personal is Still Political: The Status of Women in Philosophy

The autumn of 2009 has witnessed an interesting upsurge in questions of women’s place in the study of philosophy. The season began with several blog posts commenting on news reports about the absence of women studying philosophy. Subsequent posts and news stories began to question why so few women were studying philosophy, how this problem could be addressed and even whether the only problem was that the disparity appeared to be a problem rather than a natural tendency. One particularly contentious set of exchanges on the topic took place on Brian Leiter’s blog, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, and concerned the question of whether philosophy classes constituted a hostile environment for women. One of the original news stories on the topic explained the absence of women in the philosophy classroom by suggesting that “one reason may be that women are turned off by a culture of aggressive argument particular to philosophy, which grows increasingly more pronounced at the postgraduate level.” This suggestion, regardless of its merits as a description of what turns many people against philosophy and not only women, drew the ire of Brian Leiter’s corner of the blogosphere. After launching ad hominem [sic?] attacks on two prominent women philosophers who he regards as “hacks,” Leiter offers the enlightened suggestion that it is “demeaning to women” to say that the excessively aggressive argumentation that he prefers drives women out of the classroom and contributes to the absence of women in the profession generally. Never mind that this kind of dismissal, which Leiter employs quite regularly—as when a subsequent post jokes that Judith Butler writes her books using a random academic sentence generator—, may be precisely the kind of aggressiveness that women and others find intolerable about the study and profession of philosophy, the question deserves more than the dismissive or inevitably confounding treatment it receives from Leiter.

Without referencing that debate in her article for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s October 16^th “Diversity in Academe” issue, Regan Penaluna offers the hypothesis that misogyny in the philosophical canon may account for the absence of women in philosophy classes and their subsequent absence in the profession. Perhaps aware that her article would appear in a special “diversity” issue of the Chronicle or perhaps as an ironic underscoring of women’s exclusion from mainstream philosophy, Penaluna claims that since “the canon as it stands is almost entirely composed of men—including many who have little good to say about women” this situation “cannot but contribute to an unwelcoming environment.” (B27) Citing the fact that “other disciplines, such as history, English, and the sciences, also have male-dominated canons, but they attract comparatively more women than philosophy does,” Penaluna suggests that “for this reason, one might conclude that the cause of gender disparity in philosophy is not the canon” (B27) thereby suggesting that professors’ handling of misogynous material might have something to do with women’s attraction to the field. This would make the problem of philosophy less an academic problem concerning what to study and more a political problem about how to study it. In short, the disparity between women in philosophy and women in other fields with male-dominated canons might be a political problem rather than an epistemological one. Mercifully, Penaluna quickly provides the corrective to the unsettling question of whether philosophy professors’ handling of the subject might be partially to blame for the exclusion of women when she asserts that it “would be wrong” to exculpate the canon for the political actions of its interpreters.

Of course it is possible that both the canon and its handlers are to blame for creating an atmosphere of hostility toward women in the faculties and classrooms of philosophy departments. After all, it is not the philosophical canon alone that “demands that its students identify more closely with its canonical figures” (B28), it is rather philosophy faculty themselves that either do or do not “bring a critical approach to the interpretation of patriarchal texts, while also raising awareness of [. . .] works by women” (B27). Nevertheless, Penaluna explicitly rejects the idea that the political decisions of philosophy faculty to utilize a sexist canon without bringing a duly critical perspective to texts and thereby encourage their students to passively accept not only canonical figures but their misogynist attitudes are to blame before reiterating “that there are few women in philosophy because the canon is sexist and there is little being done about it.” (B28, emphasis added) Although that little conjunction, and, is unstressed in Penaluna’s article, I prefer to stress it because it highlights that the textual problem is actually a political problem about the relations that philosophers have not only with their material, but with one another as well. If philosophers are trained to emulate rather than critique their forbears, this is a failure of philosophical reflection to consider the political consequences of a certain kind of activity; it is not an effect that texts produce on their own. If it were not the activity of philosophers that made the difference then the “obvious” solution that “philosophers consider the misogynist passages of great philosophers in a critical manner” and “mainstream feminist philosophy” (B28) would have no chance of success before the occult power of the text.

The proposal to mainstream feminist philosophy, however, will only have marginal success at bringing more women into the classroom and the profession without a corresponding change of attitude toward the philosophical canon. One of the prevailing themes in feminist philosophy involves critiquing the canon’s exclusion of women through their inclusion as an object of study. That is, in the Aristotelian conception of woman as receptacle, for example, part of the problem is the presumption that woman are known and not misrepresented by that description. Consequently, the traditional role of women in philosophy has been a form of passive inclusion as an object of knowledge whose ability to speak has been far more rigorously proscribed because of that inclusion than because of women’s exclusion. To be sure, Brian Leiter includes women like Judith Butler in his philosophical universe, but he does so by suggesting that she works unthinkingly, mechanically, instinctively and therefore “incompetently” in the medium of thought that is philosophy’s proper sphere. It is therefore unsurprising that feminist philosophers have raised significant questions about the phallogocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition and thus found themselves at odds with the preferred narrative of inclusive progress that philosophy spins about itself. At the same time, it is unsurprising that those feminists who questioned the political effects of philosophy’s preoccupation with the cerebral at the expense of the bodily became the objects of scorn for the philosophical mainstream committed to toeing the same line that resulted in women’s exclusion in the first place. The problem with the token inclusion of women philosophers who do not challenge the philosophical mainstream is that the presence of a Martha Nussbaum or Maudmarie Clark, valid in its own regard, is purchased at the expense of disparaging those who challenge the profession, like Butler or Rand, as either hacks, or “sophomoric,” as Leiter characterized Penaluna’s mention of Nietzsche’s possible misogyny.

In denying the political responsibility of philosophers, I wonder if Penaluna offers a critical narrative that is in fact very comfortable to academic philosophers because it does not significantly disrupt their standard practices within the profession. These practices may start with reading the same books ad nauseum, but they further involve utilizing the same conceptual techniques no matter what their limitations and no matter what the consequences of those limitations. For example, in attacking the canon, one is conspicuously silent on the complicity of academics, who may have hesitations about the possibly misogynous bits in Nietzsche or the pro-slavery aspects of Aristotle, but skip over that material rather than assessing it openly. This preserves the respected tradition of decorum in which philosophers decline criticism until they can be sure about the grounds for criticism at the expense of those for whom such views are not only intolerable, but detrimental. It is emblematic of this attitude that Peter Carruthers suggests that the proportion of women in philosophy needs further study by experimental philosophers. By skipping over misogyny in philosophy through delay or oversight or simply substituting it with material that makes the same substantive point without including the offensive details, academics convey a powerful message about the place of women in the discipline: misogyny and those it hurts are not part of philosophy proper, a field that knows no gender, class or cultural identity. Rather these are simply errors to be at least ignored, or at best replaced with a more inclusive figure that preserves the timeless truths of the masters. As Penaluna notes, such an attitude is neither philosophically, nor socially responsible. Misogynous aspects of the canon should impugn the philosophical integrity of those associated with them because they display a stark lack of attention when “philosophers who devote[] their lives to investigating human experience” can ignore a significant portion of humanity by remaining “simply unconcerned with the condition of women.” (B29) Moreover, it begs the question of the social function of philosophers if they believe that the experience of women or the difficulty in responding to misogyny belong to subjects outside the purview of philosophical reflection.

Because I am not sure that Penaluna isn’t simply a more subtle and nuanced writer than I am, I will refrain from claiming that she misleads readers by downplaying the political implications of choices that philosophers make about their subject-matter. This may be wise if for no other reason than that she cites the numerous political decisions philosophers make to promote the continued relevance misogynist ideology. Nevertheless it seems relevant to emphasize that these claims are not simply hypothetical postulates, but reflect the actual conditions of women studying and making their way into the profession of philosophy. The absence of women from philosophy classrooms and the professoriate is already a political issue that many current members of the profession have ignored, promoted, misrepresented or resisted. Philosophical reflection should play a role in deciding which of these options we would like to continue, but that will not come about unless one is clear that reflection takes place within the medium of political relationships rather than being outside of them.

Words of the Wise

Like a few of my friends at the moment, I am currently working on job applications for tenure track positions in philosophy. There are a lot of things I could say about this process, but let's just say that I've heard, more times than I can count, that "soon there will be lots of jobs because a lot of professors are due to retire." That rumor has been going around, I've also heard, since the mid-1980s. Which is why I found this piece of advice, sent to me from a friend who has been through this routine before, to be apt.

You're probably at least hip-deep in advice on this thing people call the job market. I have my own, which is to keep in mind that anyone who advises you on the way to be successful in the job market should immediately be suspected of naivete at best, gross bad faith in most instances, and for the rest, total hypocrisy. I wish you the absolute best (pardon the pun).