Perversions of Fascism - Softcover

Vadolas, Antonios

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1855756021 ISBN 13: 9781855756021

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

Contemporary versions of evil demonise modern "fascists", "totalitarian threats", and "Hitlers". As if not obscure enough, fascist evil has been equivocally linked with perversion. This book reveals that both fascism and perversion implicate the non-symbolisable kernel in politics, which becomes the source of their mystification. It argues that the fascist does not take the same discursive position as the pervert does, regarding this symbolic gap. The author develops a new rhetoric, de-pathologised and de-ideologised, regarding the structure of the so-called pervert, introducing new vocabularies and directions for psychoanalytic research that further distance the pervert, or whom he calls the "extra-ordinary subject", from fascist politics and, instead, exposes his diachronic "fascist" isolation from the social edifice. This reveals the fruitful alternatives that can stem from a "return to Freud cum Lacan", which supports a flexible on-going reformulation of psychoanalytic knowledge.

About this title

About the Author:

Antonios Vadolas is a Lecturer in the MA in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society at Brunel University. He also teaches Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Therapeutic Cultures in Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Review:

"Fascism has often been regarded as a perverse ideology and perversion may easily appear as a fascist form of sexuality, yet in this brilliant book Vadolas demonstrates that these associations obfuscate rather than elucidate the eroticisation of power as one of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of the human condition. Lacanian psychoanalysis underpins many of the author's arguments, but insofar as theorising is also exercising power Lacan is as much the method as he is the object of study. Drawing on a vast range of sources and broadly conceived as a critical reflection on philosophical, ethical and psychoanalytic discourses of domination, this is the kind of book that no contemporary social scientist can ignore." (Professor Dany Nobus, Chair of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Head of Social Sciences)

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1855756021
• ISBN 13: 9781855756021
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376