The White West: Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity

Book Presentation & Conversation with Ana Teixeira Pinto and Felix Stalder

University of Applied Arts Vienna
Seminar Room 20
Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna

Kader Attia, Anselm Franke, Ana Teixeira Pinto (eds.)
The White West: Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity
Sternberg Press, 2023
ISBN 978-3-95679-533-6

Ever since neofascist movements began to surge across the globe, liberal commentators have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal ideologies. The consensus is reason or rationality––after the Second World War, mainstream scholarship has supported the view that adherence to fascism is a thing of unreason. This distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought, sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly its colonial foundation, thus obscuring the continuities between fascism and imperial policies. The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity contends that, without confronting the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism. This collection of writing by leading historians, theorists, and scholars engages the overlaps between philosophical predicates and colonial legacies, as well as the undertheorized continuities between fascism and settler colonialism.

With contributions by Larne Abse Gogarty, Norman Ajari, Ramon Amaro, Sladja Blazan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Donna V. Jones, Nitzan Lebovic, Olivier Marboeuf, A. Dirk Moses, Rijin Sahakian, Nikhil Pal Singh, Kerstin Stakemeier, and Felix Stalder