CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK, The Fascism of Ambiguity A Conceptual Essay

THE FASCISM OF
AMBIGUITY
POLITICAL THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY
Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy encourages a sustained

dialogue between the most important intellectual currents in recent
European philosophy—including phenomenology, deconstruction,
hermeneutics—and key political theories and concepts, both classical
and modern. In doing so, it not only sheds new light on today’s
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Other volumes in the series include:
Ethics Under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and the Culture

Wars, Jason Hannan
Politics in the Times of Indignation: The Crisis of Representative
Democracy, Daniel Innerarity (translated by Sandra Kingery)
Medialogies: Inflationary Media and the Crisis of Reality,
David R. Castillo and William Egginton
Democracy and Its Others, Jeffrey H. Epstein
The Democracy of Knowledge, Daniel Innerarity
(translated by Sandra Kingery)
The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy of Western
Ethical Experience, Mika Ojakangas
The Politics of Nihilism, edited by Nitzan Lebovic and Roy Ben-Shai
On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Martin Heidegger
(edited by Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and
Michael Marder, translated by Andrew J. Mitchell)
Deconstructing Zionism, Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala
Heidegger on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marcia Sá
Cavalcante Schuback, Michael Marder and Peter Trawny
The Metaphysics of Terror, Rasmus Ugilt
The Negative Revolution, Artemy Magun
The Voice of Conscience, Mika Ojakangas
Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred, Jon Wittrock
THE FASCISM OF
AMBIGUITY
A Conceptual Essay
MARCIA SÁ CAVALCANTE
SCHUBACK
Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
Foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy
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First published in 2021 in Brazil as O Fascismo da ambiguidade: um ensaio conceitual
First published in Great Britain 2022
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CONTENTS
Foreword, by Jean-Luc Nancy vi

Preface ix
1 Lessons from History: Mussolini’s Fascism 1
2 Lessons from Critique: Some Elements for a

Critique of Historical Fascism 9
3 Neofascism: Pasolini’s Cine-Poetic Vision 23
4 The Fascism of Ambiguity 33
5 The Ambiguity of Sense 59
6 Metapolitics 77
Precision Exercise I
The Precision of Poetry: Orides Fontela 89
Precision Exercise II
Listening to the Ligatures of the Present 111
By Way of Conclusion 127
Notes 129
Bibliography 135
Index 141
F OREWORD
“Fascism” has too easily and hastily become the name of a political,
even more than political, devil. Because of the Second World
War, we hurry to lump together all forms of authoritarianism, of
national and racist exclusion and constriction, under this word.
This is because the war’s victors represented, in their diversity, a
demand of humanity, whereas the defeated represented, also in
their diversity, a negation or a surpassing of the human (of the
“only” or of the “too” human). The conviction that from then on
spread throughout the world was that there had to be—and that
there already was in fact—a theoretical and practical recognition
of human dignity. In this respect, the European Enlightenment
and its American avatars had triumphed over dark forces.
The disparity between the Western model (itself heteroclite)
and the Leninist and/or Trotskyist model was, however, going
to divide the front of the victors more and more—spreading
through various forms of decolonization, as the expansion of
either Enlightenment or revolutionary socialism. Instead of a
general appeasement, there was a feverish agitation of social and
cultural models, while the race of techno-economic mastery was
accelerating.
FOREWOR vii
Throughout this history of a great half of a century, the

word “fascism,” far from losing itself with the regimes that had
incarnated it, subsisted or returned according to two axes of
signification: the first was the amalgam, signaled above, of all
forms of authoritarianisms (a significative example in France:
the left treated De Gaulle as a fascist when he rose to power
in 1958 due to the Algerian impasse); the second was, on the
contrary, the sentiment of a necessity to better understand the
meaning of this term that was about to reemerge according to
the semantics of “control,” of “technological mobilization,” of the
integration of civil society in the State and the power of techno-
economical organs.
The two motivations converge: without a doubt, we did not
understand enough how fascism had been and continues to be—
by mediating changes of habits and mythologies—an important
dimension not only of the visible politics but above all of the
profound culture (or the in-culture) of our society.
How this happens has to do with the manipulation of
significations and values. This is the departing point of the
present book by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback.
It shows how this comes firstly because this fascism has no
longer a need of mobilizing, as its predecessors, a mythological
arsenal coming from a supposed past. If before there was a
wish to reenact repairs of an ancestral authenticity combined
with a noisy avant-gardism, today it is enough to play with the
viii FOREWOR
ambiguities coming from a reign of opinion, of the complexity

of relations between States and private interests, of a general
appetite for the innovation of technique and of a “youngism”
admitted as a cultural norm. With the products of what we could
name a “signaletic civilization,” the entire field of consciences
and desires is saturated with significations—ambiguous and
undetermined.
For fascism has always proceeded from a will to sense: a will
in the most imperious denotation of the term—a sense with
the fullest, most achieved value of the word. For example, the
people (Italian, French, Chinese, etc.) detain an accomplishment
of sense by itself, by its nature, in that everything should be put
in its service. By a hidden axiom, fascism rejects every open and
unachievable sense (philosophical, poetic) and all transcendent
(religious) sense. When a thought, an expression, or a faith
pretend to break the tension of sense, they are thereby also fascist.
Today, it is an ideo-mytho-logy of the polymorphous,
individual, and indefinitely repeatable satisfaction that fascizes
the rich by their commerce and their consumption, the poor by
their lack and their hate. Cocaine or smartphones—these are good
examples of this fascism whose reality could be named addiction.
For addiction is the escape from the real and the symbolic: it is an
existence where ambiguity consists in in-existing.
Jean-Luc Nancy, May 2021
PREFACE 1
Fuse or Interexist
Fernando Pessoa2
The future is by definition imageless.

History provides it with the means to be thought.
Paul Valéry3
This essay is an attempt, a rehearsal at understanding. It attempts

to comprehend the new form of fascism that is today destroying
so many bodies and souls on and of the Earth. Its intention is to
present more of a conceptual search than an analysis of the fascist
politics spreading all over the world, having the case of Brazil
as an indicator of some of its senses. The purpose is to write a
conceptual essay and not to propose a finished conceptualization.
As an essay it aims, on the one hand, to gather elements for a
conceptualization, and on the other, to follow the style of thought
in motion and of open reflection. There is a dispute over how
to designate the conservative pushback that plagues not only
Brazil but also a large part of the world. For many international
political scientists, it is more a case of right-wing populism than
x PREFACE
fascism, or more a case of conservatism and authoritarianism

than totalitarianism (Toscano, 2017; Traverso, 2017). For critics
and activists in Iran, fascism only exists in Iran and to assign the
term fascism to other right and extreme right regimes would be
to deny the gravity of the Iranian political situation (Shahrjerdi,
2020). It seems that every country experiencing this turn to the
right revendicates its own terminology and conceptual tools.
In Brazil, there is an increasing consensus that we are under a
neofascist regime. Those who resist recognizing this new form
of authoritarianism as fascism cannot admit that fascism can
acquire new and unexpected forms and defend that fascism can
only have one shape. Those who admit that today’s “new” and
“alt rightism” should be called fascism do legitimate the term by
means of pointing out the similarities to Mussolini’s and Franco’s
historical fascism, or to Hitler’s Nazism. Resistance to recognize
what is now happening in Brazil or other countries as fascism
or neofascism undoubtedly reflects the interests and political
perspectives of the analyses, but not only that: it reflects above
all the nebulosity that surrounds the presumed unequivocality
of the concept of fascism. It seems necessary to me to accept
this nebulosity and therefore deal with what we do not know
within what we do know about fascism, in other words, with
its unknown elements. However, the question concerns, before
anything else, the nebulosity of current times. If for millennia the
world has been asking the questions: where did we come from
PREFACE xi
and where are we going, today the urgent questions are different.
Today it is urgent to ask ourselves: where are we and what are
we? But most importantly: what are we (and are not), wherever
we are; and where are we (and are not), whatever we are.
In this conceptual essay, I begin by formulating some lessons
from history, both from what constitutes fascism and its power
of mobilization, as well as some critical and opposing lines to
historical fascism, elaborated during the first half of the twentieth
century. Then, I try to identify what constitutes the new in the
new form of fascism, taking Pasolini’s cine-poetic vision as a
starting point. Following his leads, I make an attempt to identify
the points where the new form of capitalism, which could be
called technoplanetarian and its neoliberal politics, the dynamo
of globalization, reveals itself as a new type of fascism. At these
points, I found in the world today a new way of imposing the
unequivocal meaning of fascism through a dynamic of making
every sense ambiguous, when their exacerbation empties them.
Fascism as a whole is unequivocal, but today its unequivocality
is exercised and imposed through a politics of ambiguation.
That is what I have called the fascism of ambiguity. To develop
this line of understanding, I also proposed a discussion on the
senses of ambiguity and of the ambiguity of the word “sense”
in order to explicit what the ambiguity of sense consists of. As
resistance to the fascist politics of depoliticization through the
ambiguity of senses, I suggested a politics of sense, understood
xii PREFACE
as precision exercises. Precision is not the same as order or

definite determination of univocal senses. This is what the old
forms of totalitarian ideology intended. Faced with the ideology
of ambiguity, I believe that it is crucial to do precision exercises
such as artistic, poetic, and musical precision. In the first exercise,
I examine the poetic precision of Orides Fontela and her poetics
of the anti-word and anti-sense. In her work, it is possible to
discover a poetic sense of resistance and opposition, implicated
in her use of “anti” as a prefix. In the second exercise, I outline
a reflection on the musical concept of ligature as an exercise in
listening to the bindings not only between the present and the
past, and the present and the future, but also between the present
and the present. This is an attempt to outline elements in order
to think about the disconnected connection of the desire for a
fusional identification with the stereotypes of such a desire and
the determination of finished and closed forms. This exercise is
an attempt to clarify another sense of bond and of the common.
These exercises are not a conclusion for this essay. They are what
they say: exercises, attempts, searches, sketches, and rehearsals,
opening up the unsaid and the unthought.
This essay has many people to thank: Patrick Pessoa and Tania
Rivera who, during the preparation seminars for our course on
Dissidences, during the pandemic, helped me to understand a
number of issues addressed here with comments of great value
and critical light; Adauto Novaes for reading the manuscript,
PREFACE xiii
inspiring suggestions, and years of work on the mutations of

the contemporary; Luisa Buarque and Bernardo de Oliveira for
the discussions of several passages in the text that helped me to
clarify what obscures us today; Tora Lane and Johan Hegardt
for inspiring conversations about the urgency of these issues,
in the realm of our research project on “Traces of oblivion:
Identity, Heritage and Memory in the Wake of a Nationalistic
Turn;” Irina Sandomirskaja, Peter Trawny, and Michael Marder
for conversations along the years. And finally, I also appreciate
that the Postgraduate Programs in Philosophy and Postgraduate
Studies in Contemporary Arts Studies at Universidade Federal
Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro welcomed me as a visiting professor
during 2020.
Stockholm, February 2021
xiv
1
Lessons from History:
Mussolini’s Fascism
The prevailing view of historical fascism defines it as an

authoritarian, conservative, and above all ultra-nationalist
political ideology. In Europe, the fascist phantom is the phantom
of an exterminating, racist nationalism and a controlling,
censoring statism. In Brazil, each of these terms, nationalism,
racism, extermination, statism, control, and censorship are
co-implied, because they are enunciated and practiced having
colonization as a starting point: the experiences of extermination
as a principle and the expropriation of one’s self by the other are
structural and not conjectural.
Fascism is, as we know, a term coined by Mussolini to
designate the party he founded in January 1915, the Fascist
Revolutionary Party. In the famous entry on Fascism written
by Mussolini and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile for the
1932 edition of the Encyclopedia Italiana, Mussolini insists that
2 THE FASCISM OF AMBIGUITY
even in that first period his only doctrine was a “doctrine of

action.” Denying the doctrine of socialism an effective practice,
he declared the practice of socialist doctrine as the foundation
of fascism. The aim was not a theory of action, but fascism as
a “need to act” and fight, hence the name he conferred to the
“Fasci Italiani di combatimento” [Italian Fasces of Combat]
movement. As a doctrine of action, fascism claimed to be
contrary to doctrinal expressions, asserting itself as a set of
“aphorisms, anticipations and aspirations,” a political doctrine
that pretended to be completely different from all the previous
ones. If this new style of writing a doctrine of action, intended
by fascism, lacks carefully elaborated ideas or logically linked
paragraphs, it replaces doctrine with words of “faith.” The aim
was to appropriate the socialist desire for action. Its intention was
to touch the people without mediation, that is, to cause emotion,
a verb that literally means to set the people in motion, however,
without the mediation of the mechanisms of representation,
understood by Mussolini and other political theorists of the time
as the undemocratic stain of democracy. Fascism designated a
doctrine of action whose objective was to implement a State of
the people represented directly by the Duce, a word that means
“conductor.”
Mussolini’s entry in The Enciclopedia is revealing. It affirms a
new style of doctrine: aphorismatic, anticipatory, aspiring, and
non “doctrinal.” We thus find defined more of a change in the style
LESSONS FROM HISTORY 3
of ideological language instead of a new ideology. The ideological

language gains a new aesthetic. This is an important first point
to be kept in mind when trying to clarify the nebulosity of the
concept of fascism today. The second point to be highlighted
is the difference that Mussolini makes between theoretical
doctrine and doctrine of action and the pathos of mobilization
of that doctrine, a mobilization that must be total, recalling the
title of the famous essay by Ernst Jünger (2002). Fascism always
says: no more theories, no more words: it is time not only to
act, but also to act from beginning to end. In these formulations,
fascism is a mobilizing and distorting appropriation of Marx’s
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”
(Marx, 1998 [1976]). Fascism distorts because it does not want
transformation, but the deformation and extermination of the
world. Indeed, it substitutes the senses of transformation with
the powerful meaning of destruction. But how does this doctrine
work? It acts bellicosely, repudiating all pacifist doctrine: “War
alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and
sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to
face it” (Mussolini, 1968), as read in the same entry by Mussolini.
Fascist ultranationalism brings people together in an immediate
relationship with the Duce, their conductor, who was seen—
which coincides with what was experienced—as their “direct
representative,” unmediated and, in this union, generating the
electrifying experience of uncontrolled human energy. The

Duce, the great conductor, is the electrifying conductor of all
human energy that only in war—that is, in hatred—reaches its
maximum tension. In the words of Mussolini’s entry, this anti-
pacifist spirit inhabits not only the people, but each individual
who, even though wounded by war, writes on their bandages “Me
ne frego,” “I don’t care a damn” or “so what?,” to demonstrate not
only an “act of philosophic stoicism” or to “sum up a doctrine
which is not merely political,” but also the “evidence of a fighting
spirit which accepts all risks. It signifies a new style of Italian
life.” In the same passage, Mussolini also speaks of how fascism
is “love of life” conceived as struggle, duty, and conquest, as a life
lived for oneself and above all as a life lived for others and their
substitutes. This love of life is “love of one’s neighbor,” the entry
continues, not the vague and abstract neighbor of a “universal
embrace,” but the differentiated neighbor watched with vigilant
eyes. It is a life understood as the selective and natural proximity
of the strongest. According to Mussolini, it is this conception of
life that opposes fascism to Marxist and scientific socialism, and
to the materialist conception of history. He considers that the
latter only aims at the economic well-being of the people. But
for the fascism formulated in this entry, economic well-being
cannot be equated with happiness, because the issue is “spiritual”
well-being. In addition to combating Marxist socialism, fascism
combats democratic ideology and its liberalism by considering
that it represents the “lie of political equalitarianism, the habit

of collective irresponsibility,” propagated by the “myth of felicity
and indefinite progress.” If democracy is understood, on the
contrary, as “meaning a regime in which the masses are not driven
back to the margin of the State” then fascism can be described
as “an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy,”1 the
entry states. Fascism presents itself, therefore, as a conception
of life practiced as a fight against Marxist socialism and liberal
democracy. It is an anti-pacifist life, that is, an armed life, but at
no point in the entry does it “anticipate” what kind of life may
emerge after total mobilization, after total war. In acclaiming war
as the highest tension of all human energy, fascism—which is
hyperbolically valid for Nazism—proclaims an absolutely final
purpose, an end without an after, the end as an end.
When re-viewing the fascism that constitutes European optics,
in the film Le livre d’Image [The Image Book], of 2018, Jean-
Luc Godard shows quotations from Joseph de Maistre (1753–
1821)2, the main theorist of the French counter-revolution,
signatory of the conservative ideas from which contemporary
authoritarianism germinated and remains today one of the
great inspirers of the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) and
other corresponding movements, which summarize the fascist
desire to fuse with life in death. Some of the quotes recited in the
film say: “divine war,” “land soaked in blood,” “the altar where
everyone must die,” “everything must be sacrificed until the total
eradication of evil,” “the executioners are the cornerstones of

society,” a world where “the innocent can pay for evils.” These
phrases and quotes place us, as spectators, in the experience
of hearing their echoes penetrating us. This is to underline the
end, that is, death, the end of all ends, “the apocalypse turned
into an army,” as in a quote by Malraux, also recited by Godard,
as the ultimate goal of the fascist love for life. Living to die, no
materialism can be more immaterial than the fascist cult of the
spirit. Fascism is by definition necropolitics.
Remembering or re-citing—to accompany Godard—the
main lines of Mussolini’s historical fascism helps us to clarify why
we speak of fascism today. The term comes from the Latin word
fascis, which literally means bundle and refers to an object used
by the lictor, the magistrate in ancient Rome, who symbolized the
power and authority of the supreme magistracy. It was a bundle
of sticks usually tied to a bronze ax. The fascists appropriated this
symbol, of Etruscan origin, but it could already be found, and
continues to be disseminated, in the national emblem of France,
in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, and in the emblem
of the Swedish police. The fasce remains today as a present
symbol, even if unnoticed, of justice and law. The monument to
the heroes of the crossing of the Atlantic, donated by Mussolini
to São Paulo in 1929, with two “fascio littorio” remains standing
on the banks of the Guarapiranga Dam in the southern district
of São Paulo.3
It is the experience of a bond around necropolitics, the

experience of the “common” mobilized by the fascist doctrine
of action and the “love of life in death” that for me legitimize
the use of the term “fascism” and not populism, conservatism,
or simply authoritarianism, to designate the mobilization of
destructive forces—and not “obscure”—operating today among
us, with the purpose of conducting [ducere] human energy to
the point of maximum tension.
8
2
Lessons from Critique:
Some Elements for a
Critique of Historical
Fascism
Total mobilization and maximum acceleration of all human

energy to the point of its highest tension define fascism as
necropolitics, a politics of death that makes the end its purpose.
The energy of the end appropriates the desire for the beginning.
This is the politics of what in French has been called jusqu’au
boutisme at the beginning of the twentieth century, a drive-
to-the-end-at-any-price, to designate the defenders of the
continuation of the First World War to the end, even if it costs
incalculable human losses. It means the extremism of the
extreme. As Edgar Julius Jung (one of the main leaders of the
so-called “conservative revolution,” who mobilized in Germany
several critics of the Weimar Republic, of parliamentarism, and

of liberal democracy) formulated, “the essential thing is not the
program of the Conservative Revolution, but its power” (2007).1
What is the power of the “Conservative Revolution” which
pretends to be “a revolution against the [Socialist] Revolution
by a closed and well-organized minority,” as defined in 1900 by
one of its first ideologues, the French Charles Maurras (1911),
leader of the French far-right movement Action française? It is
the power of total mobilization and maximum acceleration—
the power of electrification, the electrifying contact, and not
its revolutionary program. So how can one explain that the
“proletariat,” the “people,” allow themselves to be mobilized by
fascism and not by the Socialist Revolution? This question has
mobilized and still mobilizes countless critics and activists against
historical and contemporary fascism since the first decades of the
twentieth century. This point also remains as one of our questions.
Gramsci’s response points toward an update of the sense
of fascism. He considers that fascism and liberal democracy
are two aspects of the same reality (Gramsci, 1924), the reality
of a liberalism that is predatory not only for oppressing the
people through the social relations resulting from its modes of
production, but which also aims to destroy the possibility of an
organizational bond between workers. The function of fascism
is, according to Gramsci, to operationalize the destruction of the
possibility of these organizational bonds, to disentangle the living
LESSONS FROM CRITIQUE 11
sense of community, substituting it with ideological constructed

links. Fearing the mobilizing force of the organizational
bonds of the working classes, liberal democracy, or in a more
precise sense, democratic liberalism, is mobilized to stem the
revolutionary desire. This mobilization of democratic liberalism
against revolutionary desire occurs not only through measures
of strength, persecution, killing, and defamation of its leaders,
but also through the appropriation of certain revolutionary
and socialist ideas. Gramsci was the great theorist of “cultural
hegemony,” of apprehending how bourgeois elites secure their
power through cultural hegemony and also of grasping how
liberal capitalism is capable of assimilating socialist and Marxist
ideas in a way that makes them ambiguous and empties them.
As we have seen, Mussolini asserts himself as a socialist but,
unlike socialists, he is committed to his extreme action; he even
declares himself a democrat, but unlike democrats, he proposes
a centralized and authoritative democracy, non-representational
because he “directly” represents the people. With the concept
of cultural hegemony, Gramsci has also indicated that the fight
against fascism is also a fight for cultural hegemony. Today the
“war against cultural Marxism” driven by neofascist rhetoric
shows how Gramsci’s conception is being appropriated,
misappropriated, and rendered void, above all through the
mutation of the very dissolution of the meaning of culture in
technoplanetarian capitalism.
Gramsci’s analyses of fascism, of how fascism and liberal

democracy come together, and how cultural hegemonies are
built, provide elements to show how the fasce, the bundle,
the fascist way of uniting individuals around a “bronze ax,”
that is, of a necropolitics, is a way of confusing the experience
of bond, and destroying the senses of community. Fascism
confuses organizational bonds—between workers—with the
identification of each individual with the conductor [the Duce,
the Führer] of the masses, when one finds oneself cut off from
one’s real bonds. This means a substitution of the sense of
bond, of joining and uniting the working class, with that of
individual and identifying fusion with the leader, which thus
generates a fusional collectivity based on an identification
process. The mobilizing “force” of fascism is linked to the
mutation of forms of junction and reunion, to the mutation
of the very sense of “bond” that technological advances in
the modes of production make and impose on the social
body and each unique existence. The heart of liberalism is
the fragmentation and atomization of society, mobilized and
accelerated by the development of technique.2 It is important
not to forget the essential link between the emergence of
fascism and the fascist power to mobilize and accelerate “all
human energy” to its highest tension and the question of
modern technique. Without a reflection on the acceleration of
technological advances in the late nineteenth century and its
demonstrative mobilization in the First World War, all analysis

of fascism remains limited.
In a very enlightened essay, written surprisingly in 1897, under
the title Methodical Conquest, the poet Paul Valéry perceives
and analyzes the unprecedented power of technique in the way
Germany mobilizes after the Franco-Prussian war (Valéry,
1957).3 Its mobilization is not simply to build an armed peaceful
State, but war-ready trade in order to turn armed mobilization
into economic mobilization. The dynamo of this technical-
military-economic mobilization is the devouring imperative
of organizing inequality, by mobilizing all the resources of the
excess, the most powerful weapons, the most effective strategies,
and making the excess the most powerful weapon, itself the
most inexhaustible resource; commercially, the strategy is to
produce a cheaper product faster than the wholesale product.
Technological advancement, carried out by the Germans in an
astonishing way, and which made it possible to transform the
military mobilization of all technical, scientific, and intellectual
resources into economic mobilization, turned this mobilization
into a method, the method of an experience of continuous
reason, entirely dedicated to the prediction of the future, to
carefully weighed probabilities, “everything to weaken chance”
(Valéry, 1957, pp. 1855–6), in order to eliminate creation.
The advent of modern technics opens the door to the desire
to achieve overwhelming freedom, the immense freedom of
wanting everything, which starts to define the technical sense of

happiness. A phrase from Albert Camus’ Caligula, sums up the
spirit of what is at play: holding with strangling force Caesonia’s
throat, his wife, who had asked him if the dark freedom he had
achieved was happiness, Caligula exclaims in ecstasy: “I live,
I kill, I exercise the delusional power of the destroyer, against
which that of the creator looks like monkey play” (Camus, 1958,
p. 170). On the agenda is the destruction of the creative force, the
emptying of the sense of creation when it is emptied by perpetual
technical transformation where nothing escapes the will to
innovation, the delusion of growth in accuracy and power, which
makes it unwise to persevere with being and so create. Since
then, to create became confused with innovating and “styling” as
they say today. The military mobilization of war funds, as Valéry
demonstrates so well, depends on a mobilization of all knowledge
and sciences, which cooperate for the production not only of all
stages of production but also of production itself. By becoming
an economic war, war is waged everywhere, and the economy
becomes inextricably linked to war. All parts of the globe, all
instances of life, all the resources of the Earth, everything must
be meticulously studied, investigated, and defined according
to categories and genres, everything must become the object
of representation and malleable quantity for calculation, thus
building commercial captain-generals (Valéry, 1957, p. 1859).
Unparalleled accuracy apparatus, information services, and
secret police are created, and the multiplication of information

and the development of advertising become instruments to
achieve total production, which extraordinarily includes the
“production” of each individual; the Germans saw since the
beginning of the industrial era of production that production
must be personalized, that is, it must meet the demand produced
within each one. This causes not only a social, but also individual
mutation. This method made total requires the individual’s
mediocratization and the means to “one-dimensionalize” him,
evoking here a later term, proposed by Herbert Marcuse (1991
[1964]), that is, to pacify the individual in order for him to accept
this framing of all existence, of individuals without choice,
individuals who define themselves as those without choice. The
great philosophies die, Valéry insists, leaving only anonymous
science, without general critique, but fertile in reinventions
(Valéry, 1957, p. 1865). Discipline and method, organization and
division of labor ad infinitum, are emulators of the total action
that is accomplished with a technology that raises and promotes
the irreversible alliance of military mobilization and economic
mobilization in its own manner of mobilization. This method
allows for both total mobilization and total control. This is the
method by which the production of the object is simultaneously
the production of its future consumer (Valéry, 1957, 1870).
With this, the individual of an obedient mass is produced, easily
mobilized to conduct all his energy to the highest tension. Valéry
foresaw, in an amazing way, Hitler’s future Germany and gave

an important key to understanding the core of fascism from the
expansion of technological liberalism, itself a technology for
its expansion. This key presents new elements to understand
Gramsci’s thesis that liberalism and fascism are two aspects of a
single reality and also why the oppressed choose an oppressive
regime. Not only are the relations between social classes in a
techno-capitalist production regime at play but also the mutation
of social relations and individuals operated by the technologies
of production. In this visionary text, Valéry does not let us
forget that the question of modern technics is the question of
a bellicose method turned economic method and that this
bellicose economic method becomes the method par excellence
of capitalist expansion. However, all of this depends on the
production of all areas of the individual’s existence, including
the production of the individual himself, the production of his
desires, and even the production of his “unconscious.”
At stake, are above all the productive and producing use of all
energies and most of all the human energy. This was what Wilhelm
Reich, one of Freud’s students and creator of the so-called body
psychotherapy, learned well, who in his studies on the psychology
of the masses sought to understand the energetic dynamics of
social forces and not just the processes of identification of the
individual with the mass and of the mass with the leader, as
Freud has shown (Freud, 2004). Reich thought that Marxism,
which had conferred a language to the desires for freedom and

emancipation of the oppressed classes, did not take into account
the energetic dynamic and the “social effect of mysticism” on the
dynamics of social forces. For Reich, fascism is the expression
of the irrational structure of the average man whose primary
impulses have been repressed for millennia: “fascism is the basic
emotional attitude of man repressed within our authoritarian
civilizing machine and his mechanical-mystical conception of
life. It is the mechanical-mystical character of modern man that
produces fascist parties and not the other way around” (Reich,
2012). Thus, Reich goes so far as to affirm that “each one carries
fascism within oneself ” because fascism is not defined by the
leader and his magnetic force, but by the psychology of the
repressed, irrational human energies. Following Reich’s lessons,
it is clear that fascism puts the psychology of the masses on the
agenda, which, as Durkheim had clearly observed, is more than
the sum of individuals. Fascism must be seen, therefore, as a
phenomenon that reveals the psychology of an all-particular
object—the mass—and not just a phenomenon to be observed
by psychology.
A recognizable feature of fascism is the hatred of the other. In
Reich’s view, racism and its exterminating hatred are not products
of fascism; fascism is a product of racism. This is shown today in
an exponential way. It is indeed impossible to understand both
historical and contemporary fascism without recognizing that
they arise on the basis of systemic racism and colonial heritage,

thus fascism—historical and contemporary—is anchored in
the hate of the other’s otherness. It is important to understand
the “question of the other” in fascism because the “other” that
must be constructed and produced as an object to be hated and
thus uniting individuals against the hated other is also part of
the extremist rhetoric that makes the end its maximal purpose:
Fascism replaces “this must change” with “everything must end.”
This means the replacement of the desire for transformation with
a desire for extermination. If transformation implies the desire of
the other, fascism wants to replace that desire with the desire of
the same once again, always the same, the similar other, which
is the desire for the “same” to start again. The reactionary mixes
here with the progressive: once again—always repeating—the
same and the similar other against the differential other. Fascist
hatred for the other depends on the equivocation of the very
sense of other: other as the same again, once again the same,
appropriating oneself in order to exterminate the other as a
transformative revolution. Thus, only the other transforms and
to transform oneself is to become other.
In his reflections on “The psychological structure of fascism”
(1933/1970), Georges Bataille presents the complexity of
“heterology,” of logos, that is, the discourse and rationality of the
other in opposition to “homology,” the discourse of the same,
which permeates fascism and modern society. Bataille starts
from the relation between individual and collective conscience,

affirming the difficulty of apprehending the connection and
passage between one and the other. He also makes use of the
metaphor of electricity, of electrical contact, in an attempt to
make appear not the individual or the collective conscience in
itself, but the electrifying contact between both. In this electric
current that unites the individual and the collective, a current
that is always in motion, two poles tend to form and stabilize:
a homogeneous social existence and a heterogeneous one. In its
homogeneous existence, society is productive, useful, and all its
elements are apprehended, evaluated and measured based on
their function. Homogeneous society is for Bataille an expression
of the dominant form of economy and capitalist society with
their divisions of class and hierarchy, organized by laws and
administered by a techno-bureaucracy. The “homogeneous” order
is installed with the objective of establishing the homogenization
of the world: its “onedimensionalization,” in Marcuse’s expression.
The homogenization of the world is achieved through the
collaboration—as Valéry had previously apprehended in a
visionary way—of all processes and resources: intellectual,
scientific, technical, and “spiritual.” But for there to be a desire and
intention to homogenize, it is necessary to admit the existence of
heterogeneous elements, which resist homogenization, which
belong to the order of the unproductive, magic, and mysticism
and that the homogeneous society (productive, useful, and
effective) expels as waste for not knowing how to assimilate it.

Homogeneous society expels every differential element. Bataille’s
analysis is itself ambiguous and, in many ways, confused. Seen
from the perspective of European history, as Valéry and Reich
also do, which is the optics of a homogenizing techno-scientific
rationality, every heterogeneous, unproductive, irrational, and
mystical element must be eradicated and expelled. But this
generates a repressed heterogeneous unconscious that grows and
rises as a “fascist” mass.
In the Brazilian case, which is the case of a fundamentally
heterogeneous society, the fascist mass expresses itself as a desire
for homogenization, for the expulsion of all elements that are
not exactly heterogeneous (since this society is heterogeneous, a
people of countless selves), and of all the forces of differentiation
and change. Colonial history is the history of the violation of the
right not only of the other, but of being others, in the richness
of their plurality, a richness that defines as our a priori being
a sameother, always other in each same. This is the contrary
of being the same other and other again; of being the same
order of homogenization. The otherness in each one is what
the fascist desire seeks to annihilate by imposing a desire for
homogenization. The “Brazilian fascist unconscious,” to keep in
mind the case of Brazil, is that of a desire for homogeneity and
identification with a same other and other again, the same order
again, in power. With this, the figure of the “other” is swallowed up
and absorbed by the same, which further triggers hatred toward

the other other and the other in each one. From the perspective
of Bataille’s discussion, the fight against fascism appeals to the
heterogeneous values of heterogeneity, as only these can subvert
the system of homogeneity that is installed with the capitalist
and liberal economy. Heterogeneous values are not just “other”
values in the hegemony of the same, but values that let the force
of heterogenization take place and expand in society.
What this brief survey of some elements for a critique of
fascism makes clear is how fascism aims to achieve “unconscious”
automatism, to appropriate and control the realm of the
uncontrollable and involuntary energy in order to extort its power
of heterogenization, differentiation, and creation. The fascist goal
is to exterminate the other, the source of all transformation.
In an attempt to comprehend the new form of fascism that is
afflicting and plaguing many today, however, it is not enough to
resort to concepts and visions related to historical fascism. It is
important to be aware of the changing forms of production and
especially the ontological mutation now being experienced.
In the Brazilian context, more specialized studies show
the continuity of a fascist mentality in Brazilian elites and a
fascist desire as a modus operandi in Brazilian society since
the era of Getulio Vargas. Several discussions about fascism
today start from the assumption of such a continuity, which
necessarily needs to be considered to some extent. What,
however, complicates today’s view of fascism “only” or “above

all” as a continuation of historical fascism is the blindness for the
ontological mutation that is evident in contemporary history in
the so-called phenomenon of globalization. In other words, the
difference between historical fascism and what we can initially
call contemporary neofascism is not only a difference in the
means, articulations, and expressions of historical fascism in a
world governed by new techno-economic conditions and their
political and social consequences. To understand this difference,
it is necessary to understand that the “new” conditions are a
mutation of the conditions and, therefore, which cannot be
apprehended merely as a passing from one form to another
of the same phenomenon, following a temporal sequence that
allows the comparison between past forms with successive
forms, between previous and later forms of the same formation.
To admit that we live in times of mutation is to admit the
need to think about the emergence of forms that cannot be
referred to previous forms as their evolution, development, or
even transformation. The mutation of forms is the emergence of
forms that cannot be referred back to others. It is the very notion
of form that is at stake. The question here is of a new experience
of the new and of form.
3
Neofascism: Pasolini’s
Cine-Poetic Vision
In the 1960s Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a lot about the new
form of fascism that he saw emerging in the postwar period.
In his Corsair Writings, his journalistic chronicles and essays,
there are inspiring visions for an attempt to think about the
ontological mutation where the new form of fascism could
develop (Pasolini, 1999). According to Pasolini, neofascism
arises from within the new form of capitalism closely allied
to the new forms of technology, in his time, called televisual
technology and its resulting consolidation of society and mass
culture. With his kinetically critical eye he saw the new means
of communication and information operationalize and effect a
“cultural genocide,” the extermination of values, souls, language,
gestures, and people’s bodies (Pasolini, 1999, p. 407). In his
short films like the one about the village of Orte, in the region of
Lazio, or the one about the old part of the city of Sanaa, capital
of Yemen, Pasolini documents the “form of the city” as a form

of the “scandalous revolutionary force of the past.” His kinetic
gaze seeks to grasp the traces of this scandalous force at the
moment of its destruction, brought about by the neocapitalist
devastation that is also a mutation of the predatory mode of
the liberal capitalism we know. The “scandalous revolutionary
force of the past,” which Pasolini recognizes in the form of these
ancient and medieval cities, embedded in the cosmic landscape
of the world, differs from the mythological, fictionalized “past”
built by fascist and Nazi ideologies. It differs in that they show
how the soul becomes soul in the soul, how the body becomes
a body in the body, so that the soul appears as an extension
of the body-on-body [dynamic] of life and the body as the
soul of the soul, one in the other, the other in the one. Just by
quickly pointing out Pasolini’s insistence on the revolutionary
sense of the past one draws attention to the need to rethink the
sense of the past, the difference between, on the one hand, its
revolutionary force and its reactionary appropriation and, on the
other, the actuality if not revolutionary, at least critical, of this
force, with the emerging voice of ancestral worlds such as those
of the original peoples and Black culture, today so threatened
with persecution and extinction. In any case, Pasolini indicates
that the media revolution—the rise of mass and consumer
society, the technological innovation that has spread globally
since the 1960s, of which, in Brazil, the construction of Brasília
PASOLINI’S CINE-POETIC VISION 25
is a striking testimony—achieve an anthropocide. A skinning

of the human in the human takes place when the power of
consumption is consummated and is itself consumed thus
becoming ab-solute, a world entirely closed in on itself, a total
immanence. Didi-Huberman considers that Pasolini sees “the
overexposed power of emptiness and indifference transformed
into commodity” (Didi-Huberman, 2001, p. 31). And that is
what Pasolini claims to have seen through his “senses.” Through
the senses, he sees an “anthropological mutation” and “cultural
indifferentiation,” operated upon senses, through which fascism
is finally able to affect the mutation of human consciousness and
sensitivity when every sense is replaced by “a potent abstraction,
[by] a pragmatism that cancerizes the whole of society, a major
central tumor . . . ” (Pasolini, 1999, p. 1530), “a disease that
contaminates the social fabric at all levels, an ideological disease
that affects the soul and does not exempt any soul” (Pasolini,
1999). Thus understood, neofascism represents a profound
break with the forms of organization and discursive formulas
of historical “fascism” because it comes from the transmuted
background of human consciousness. The disappearance of
“spirit” and “popular culture” and their replacement by media
culture are for Pasolini’s ferocious testimonies of “cultural
genocide” and “loss of linguistic ability” that characterize the
“power of consumption.” According to him, Historical fascism,
which he also called “paleofascism,” had never been fascist
because it had failed to transmute the depth of the human soul,

the mode of being human. That is why it was still possible to find
forms of resistance to fascism. Only the power of consumption
was able to achieve total fascism, the one that absorbs in its
logic all forms of resistance and exposes fascism operating even
within anti-fascism (Pasolini, 1999, pp. 336–43). Still to explain
and understand is how this absolutization proceeds.
Pasolini finds evidence of this “unpredictably new” form in
an event. He saw through his “senses” that “something” had
happened and that this “something” was the disappearance of
fireflies in the Italian landscape (Pasolini, 1999, p. 1457). In the
poem “The Resistance and its Light” (Pasolini, 1999, p. 358) and
in a known text in which he speaks of “the disappearance of
fireflies” (Pasolini, 1999, p. 1269), Pasolini explains the political-
existential vertigo of this event. For him, fireflies are the flashing
lights of resistance to the extermination of life within life, which
broadly defines fascism. This something that happened in the
Italian landscape was the disappearance of fireflies, the flashing
lights of resistance. The poetic force of this image of resistance
has inspired several discussions, especially in the quest to revive
the sense of resistance in a world landscape like ours, which is
increasingly resistant to resistances.1
To discuss the issue of resistance fireflies, however, it is also
necessary to understand how the “power of consumption”
is capable of fully realizing neofascism, the total control of
human consciousness and sensibility. Pasolini refers to the

disappearance of fireflies as “the event of something”: “something
has happened.” What happened to make the fireflies disappear?
I want to propose that the mutation of every thing into “any
thing” and nothing, in effect, the mutation of every thing into
any thing is what happened. Pasolini’s discussions reveal not only
an anthropological but also an ontological mutation, a mutation
of the sense of being. By saying “something,” Pasolini touches
the heart of neofascism, which is the power of the emptiness of
sense and meaning. The emptying of the sense and meaning
of people, of gesture, of life, of human, of existence, of body,
of soul, of politics, of society, of language, the emptying of being
and its senses, in short, the emptying of the sense of sense. The
“power of consumption,” by which a “cultural genocide” and an
“anthropological mutation” are carried out, is the power of the
emptiness and the indifference of sense, a new sense of sense, the
mutation of sense itself. Pasolini does not develop the question of
the mutation of sense. He insists on the “loss of linguistic ability.”
Both in his thoughts on “the heretical experience” (Pasolini,
1976) of language and on the relation between language and
cinema, there are creative reflections on the life of oral language
and its action characteristic, where life as a whole, within the set
of its actions, speaks. It is in this sense that Pasolini recognizes
the equivalence between cinema and the primal language of
men, the action-language. This is the linguistic ability that the
neofascism of mass society and media culture removes and

annihilates, appropriating the kinetic force of language through
the media. Even without touching on the issue of emptying the
senses, Pasolini recognizes that the loss of linguistic ability is
linked to the mixture and confusion of senses that thus empty
themselves. This is the annihilating force of neofascism, which,
according to Pasolini, remained unrealized in historical fascism.
The disappearance of resistance when fascism and anti-
fascism come together appears in a long poem that Pasolini
wrote, inspired by his visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1970. During
the military dictatorship, Pasolini spent a few days in Rio and
Salvador together with Maria Callas, on the way to the film festival
in Mar del Plata.2 The poem bears the title Hierarchy [Gerarchia]
and was published in 1971 along with some other poems related
to the Brazilian trip in a volume called Transhumanize and
Organize [Trasumanar e organizar] (Pasolini, 2003, pp. 207–11).
Hierarchy is a long poem, where a sensual and sexual experience
of the city of Rio de Janeiro is expressed through the encounter
with the carioca Joaquim, a hustler in Copacabana, in whose
eyes Passolini sees reflected his encounter with Brazil. More than
a narrative poem, it is the narration of a poetics, understood as
a gaze that sees itself in the other’s gaze. This is what is meant by
cine-poetics proposed here.
Pasolini, the poet, lands and goes through customs toward the
“incognito.” He arrives “in a city beyond the ocean.” He arrives
in Rio de Janeiro. What exists beyond the ocean? The “desperate

city” of a colonization “where poor Europeans came to recreate
a world in the image and likeness of theirs, forced by poverty
to make a life from exile.” What the cine-poetic eyes soon find
is an inverted Hierarchy, because the last ones are the old—the
Europeans—and the first ones are the young, the glaring youth in
the most beautiful hustlers, “the first to be found in the places we
always discover.” The city emerges to those cine-poetic eyes that
seek to see the gaze in everything they see: streets and boulevards
emerge through the eyes of these young people, the first ones,
of whom whose stature a few old intellectuals manage to reach.
Through the eyes of the hustler, this “boy of the people,” who
becomes a guide holding the poet “by the hand with delicacy,”
the cine-poet discovers the “invariability of life,” a discovery
that requires “intelligence and love,” whose “asceticism requires
sex, requires dick,” because life requires that one penetrates life.
Thus, he sees “Rio from the inside, appearing eternal.” Joaquim,
hustler, boy of the people, the guide to the slum that “was like
Capernaum under the sun,” “a shack on top of the other,” “twenty
thousand families” and little by little revealing themselves to
the other, “one word after another,” “prudently,” “absently”
spoken: the communist and subversive cine-poet; the hustler,
a soldier in a division specially trained to fight subversives
and torture them. Then the encounter of the cine-poet, “great
connoisseur,” and “he, [the] guide” happens. In the favela, the
European-Italian-subversive-cine-poet meets the family of the

colonized-Brazilian-hustler-guide-subversive-trained-to fight
and torture subversives, and is welcomed by the mother, the
“invariability of life.” The cine-poet “seeks perdition and finds a
thirst for justice.” In the favela, the cine-poet meets people who
“either don’t think about anything or want to become the city’s
messengers.” And in that encounter, he discovers how “it is by
pure chance that a Brazilian is fascist and another subversive,
and that the one who gouges out eyes could be mistaken for the
one from whom the eyes are gouged out.” The cine-poetic eyes
see the surprising fact of how here the oppressed can become
oppressor, of how he who blinds can be blinded, of how “Joaquim
could never be distinguished from a malefactor.” Pasolini
then writes the central verse of the poem: “so at the top of the
Hierarchy, I find ambiguity, the inextricable knot.” For here, in
Brazil, which the cine-poet takes as “my wretched homeland,”
the one whose owners are money and flesh, while being so
poetic, there is “within each inhabitant” “an angel who knows
nothing,” “either old or young, hastens to take up arms and fight,
regardless for either fascism or freedom.” We can undoubtedly
criticize, as the celebrated Brazilian film-director Glauber Rocha
did, Pasolini’s “old” vision of the so-called Third World; criticize
his vision of the city, of man, of prostitution, of Brazil (Rocha,
2006). But the value of this poem for our discussion is in Pasolini
having caught, in his cine-poetics of the city and the bodies that
guide him, the “inextricable knot” of ambiguity where fascist

and subversive are confused, where those who have their eyes
gouged out could soon become those who gouge out eyes, where
one can fight for both fascism and freedom. Pasolini’s lesson
is that of a view of the points of contact between fascism and
subversion, of the place where we must investigate not only how
the “return of the repressed” was possible and the reasons for
a presumed “retrotopia” (Bauman, 2017) of the world, but also
for the ineffectiveness of inherited forms of resistance and the
urgency to reinvent them.
32
4
The Fascism of
Ambiguity
Pasolini’s reflections on “televisual neocapitalism” are part of

the great debates on “mass media,” the “mass media system,”
the question of technology and information, the cybernetics
revolution, and new techniques of control and surveillance,
which since the 1960s and 1970s have not ceased to be debated.
By surprising the unpredictable “neofascist” form of the power
of consumption of a “televisual neocapitalism,” Pasolini clearly
saw that “planetary capitalism,” no longer productive, but
financial and monetary, is tele-mediatic capitalism. For him,
neofascism no longer needed any form or value from historical
fascism: tradition, family, or religion because when pulling man
from man, body from body, soul from soul, the neofascism of
consumer society and mass culture realized what no ideological
content of the previous fascism had achieved: the lethal mutation
of human sensibility and consciousness. But how, then, do we
comprehend the reactionism and pushback that accompanies

what we are calling fascism today? In a world where any-end-
justifies-the-means is universalized, where absolute finality
has no finality, how do we comprehend the moralizing and
conservative discourse that circulates everywhere? Indeed,
we must start from what, at first sight, constitutes a surprising
contradiction and that must be posed as a guiding question:
how is it possible that technoplanetarian, neoliberal, financial
capitalism, unthinkable without the new forms of information
technology, robotics, algorithms, social media, media spectacle,
artificial intelligence, that is, capitalism without borders,
essentially “internationalist,”—because today power is entirely
in the digital hands of powerful inter-, multi-, and transnational
conglomerates—lives together so well alongside authoritarian,
nationalist, protectionist, and patriotic governments? Why are
there “nationalisms” in the situation of a transnational “worldwide
un-world” (Granel, 1982, p. 59), in the expression of the French
philosopher Gérard Granel, where nations are nothing more
than “franchises of world capital”? (Granel, 1982), as Brazil today
demonstrates in such an excruciating way? These questions arise
when we assume that, in order to understand the new form of
fascism that is afflicting and plaguing our time, it is necessary to
understand the new form of worldwide “capitalism” that causes
it. It is impossible to conceive one without conceiving the other.
Our starting point is that, from the point of view of its internal
THE FASCISM OF AMBIGUITY 35
logic, neoliberal, techno-mediatic, and financial capitalism has

fascism as its system and not that fascism is its allied force.
In its new form, fascism exposes how, in the age of planetary
technique, man ceases to be the subject of history, as the new
subject becomes technique; technoplanetarian capitalism. If the
total State of totalitarian systems is to be considered as a subject-
State (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 2002, p. 24), then today total
technique is the world’s subject, indeed the subject of subjectivity.
We know that the fascist defense of national sovereignty
against the international defense of the Amazon and its
indigenous nations and peoples shows in a wide-ranging way
how the government’s protectionist politics is the way “Brazil”
places as quickly and widely as possible “its” Amazon-commodity
for sale on the “Amazons” of the world market. There is really
no contradiction between technoplanetarian capitalism and its
neoliberal ways to proceed, which is defined as absolute anti-
statism, and fascist statism, because today the State is already
a branch of neoliberal capital, the State is itself anti-statist. The
need for a strong State presence is explained by the need to
carry out the privatization of the State in the quickest and most
complete way, without further ado and political negotiations. The
anti-globalization discourse of the Brazilian fascist government
is by no means anti-liberal; on the contrary, it is a discourse
that is partly more neoliberal than the neoliberalism driving
globalization.
The goal of this new type of fascism is very clear and precise:
it means “total mobilization”—Ernst Jünger’s term remains
relevant—toward a techno-neoliberal media politics whose
ferocity increases with the accelerated depletion of the planet’s
natural, human, and non-human resources. Fascism is never
ambiguous and its goals are unequivocal. The “need” for
nationalist, protectionist, reactionary, and restrictive policies, for
the construction of physical and discursive, mental and sensitive
walls, is clarified by this goal, of conducting neoliberalism to
its maximum point, before “the world ends,” and of making
apocalypse its weapon. To do that, it needs to replace the desire
for transformation with a desire for extermination, “let’s end
all this” as soon as possible. The State of current fascism is the
State that, in its apparently anachronistic exacerbation, empties
the sense of State and operationalizes the implementation of
neoliberalism as the only viable politics to “save” the country
from “collapse,” leading the collapse toward collapse. Under the
discursive cloak of the cleansing of cronyism and corrupt civil
service, State policy is made to streamline as much as possible
both the entrepreneurship of every worker, the annulment of all
labor laws, the privatization of all State-owned companies, the
outsourcing of the economy, etc., such as State entrepreneurship,
that is, the transformation of the State into a company. This
means the need to empty the sense of State through the excess
of a State politics against the State. The other need is for the
State to undermine public space, for politics to undermine and

empty the sense of politics, to undermine social movements and
expressions of resistance, combining traditional mechanisms
of torture, persecution, extermination—as in the case of
Marielle Franco1 and many others—with the promotion of the
privatization and deprivation of the common space. This is done
through the excess of social media, the continuous “selfization”
of each individual, identified with their image for consumption,
which today is not only of things but the consumption of images
of things and above all of themselves. Narcissus would no
longer know how to recognize himself in contemporary virtual
narcissism. A verse from the chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone,
often overlooked in various analyses of this play that does not
age, expresses in a concise way what happens: hypsipolis, apolis,
the excess of polis, of politics, the emptying of the polis, of
politics. The excess of sense, the emptying of sense: this is the
rhythm of an operation of sense, which empties sense by its
exacerbation, by its hyperbole. This is, in my view, the main
driver of the new form of fascism that afflicts and plagues us
today. The unequivocal goal of neofascism finds its method in
the ambiguation of every sense and value.
Reality today confirms that fascism lives very well within
a democratic regime, not only because fascism is elected
democratically or even because fascism and democracy would
be two sides of the same coin, as suggested by Gramsci. The
new way of coexistence between fascism and democracy is

very clear, for example in Brazil, partly because after decades
of authoritarianism and military dictatorship, democratic
institutions are still on the path of democratization and partly
because in its new form, today’s fascism presents itself as
pretending to be more democratic than democracy. Thus, if
democracy has the representational system as its “weak point,”
since many feel they are still not represented in it, today’s fascism
proclaims itself more democratic than democracy, because it
exercises a power that “speaks” to each individual “directly”
via Twitter and WhatsApp, no longer needing representatives,
because democracy now wants to be the mediatic presentation of
everything that happens and not merely a representation that is
never sufficiently representative. Thus, everyone is deluded by the
possibility of direct access to inaccessible power. Furthermore,
if democracy means the power of voting, each individual feels
“empowered” by voting continuously with their daily likes, every
minute, for everything and everyone. More than ever democracy
shows how all political categories are reduced to public opinion.
With “likes” and “dislikes” at every second of life, this voting to
continuously give the impression of a hyperactive “agency” in a
democracy exercised continuously on social media. This equates
and confuses the consumer vote with the political sense of voting,
the vote as a citizen. Voting on everything all the time empties
the sense of the vote when citizenship mixes with consumer
activity. Citizenship is exercised as one consumes and the right

to citizenship is no longer dissociated from the right to consume.
Thus, the hyperbolic vote annuls and empties the political sense
of the vote. That is why today’s fascism is deliriously in need of
votes. Through excessive voting, the power of decision rests on
the digits of the algorithmic and automatic system. If historical
fascism boasted that it achieved what no representative
democracy was capable of, that is, “being” the people directly
and not simply representing them, through an identification
of the people with their leader or “Duce,” then today social
media seem to be able to finally realize this “desire,” through
the “direct” mediatic contact between clichés of all kinds and
“each individual.” Instead of the historical mobilization of the
masses, “social media” attract atomized individuals, isolated and
impoverished consumers, toward connectionless connections,
relationless relations, senseless senses, and valueless values.
Democracy is defined as a regime based on freedom of
expression. Today’s fascism wants to present itself as exercising
more freedom of expression than in classic liberal democracies
because it has the “courage” to say what it wants in everyone’s
face. Rather than completely banning freedom of expression and
completely infringing the well-known censorship mechanisms
of a military dictatorship, the fascist government boasts of using
the most vulgar, violent, humiliating, hateful, homophobic, racist,
ordinary, and lowest words. It replaces the sense of freedom
of expression with a practice of libertarianism of expression,

boasting the courage to say what the politically correct censures
within itself. Thus, it is the politically correct that exercises
censorship, self-censorship, while fascist speech appears as an
excess of freedom of expression. In this exacerbation of the sense
of “freedom of expression,” the sense of freedom of expression
is emptied of sense. Excessive sense empties sense. This so-
called democracy that is more democratic than democracy—
new fascism—lives from the emptying of the sense of people
by replacing the idea of people with their privatization and
deprivation, when everything happens directly between the
environment and each individual. Today, the people is a sample
and a statistical population, the sum of isolated atoms and
atomized isolations, brought together in networks and groups
mediated by the “virtual” and virtualized by the “medium.”
For our discussion of the new form of fascism that today
surpassed the neofascism formulated by Pasolini, it is worth
noting the development of new information technologies and the
sense of bond and connection that are operationalized in them.
Social media are the most powerful way to achieve and establish
bondless bonds, relationless relations, and encounterless
networks. It is important to be aware that the hyperconnectivity
generated by the networks disconnects precisely when
hyper-connecting. The exacerbation of the sense of bonds,
ties, networks, connections—“links,” “networks,”—empties, by
excess, the sense of relation. It is the hyperbole of the sense of

relation that empties the sense of relation and the relation of
senses. With this, both the in-between-us—the open space of the
common, more decisive for a living and free politics than any
demarcation of a common space—is seen to be privatized and
private, because the opposite of in-between is not together but
hyperpolarization2; also, the space of solitude of each one, the
space of creation, is privatized and private because it is confused
with the isolation that includes or excludes each one from the
market and its images. With the pandemic, these and many
other issues discussed here have become more acute.
The new fascism continues to exercise the age-old boundaries
of every totalitarianism: divide et impera, divide and conquer
and also panem et circenses, bread and circus. The difference
is that it intensifies them by making them ambiguous because
today fascism unites in order to divide and thus stimulate even
more evidently so that each one should voluntarily serve the
tyrant—the neoliberalization of all systems—and that every
bread becomes a circus, that is, every reality, especially that
of the breadwinner, becomes a spectacle. Thus, democracy
is dissolving as if “naturally” (which today means the same as
artificially) not by decree or institutional act (although several
acts and decrees are also being voted in the congress while media
scandals occupy the front pages) but while being preserved as an
empty form by the growing disarticulation and the continuous
dissolution of the common and of the practices of inclusion. The

viralization that disseminates and thus exacerbates senses not
only empties them, but also operationalizes the naturalization
of all types of discourse, especially hate and exclusion discourses
within this senseless hollow. The linguistic mechanisms for
naturalizing racism and exclusive segregation studied so carefully
by Victor Klemperer in his important work, Language of the
Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (Klemperer, 2000), find
today in social media and in the robotic algorithm of messages,
a means of uncontrollable naturalization. Through “humor” and
viral “jokes” in memes and messages, hatred starts to become as
natural as the artifices of its production. The “loss of linguistic
ability” observed by Pasolini, as a sign of televisual neofascism,
is now going viral and becoming naturalized by the continuous
production of new words and expressions, through which the
unacceptable becomes the most natural.
What Pasolini had seen as the event of “something” happening
and which he witnessed with the disappearance of fireflies from
the Italian landscape, becomes more and more explicit as the
universal event of every thing, sense, and value transforming
into any thing, into any sense and any value, emptying both
the senses and values of things as well as the sense and value of
sense and value. This is what we may call the “anyzation”3 of each
thing. With that, the sense of each and every one, the sense of the
singular, dissipates, since each one is now confused with anybody.
This is what the advancement of information technologies, the

development of artificial intelligence, of the numerical society
manages to naturalize and thus universalize and totalize. The
thesis I would like to outline is that the “unpredictably new”
form of fascism, which we are witnessing today, is the form of
the ambiguity of all forms. It is a fascism that is articulated in
the ambiguity and oscillation of all sense and value in such a way
that in this oscillating ambiguity, sense and value lose value and
sense. Ambiguity here means emptying, by making every sense
equivalent to any sense. It is because of this ambiguous oscillation
and oscillating ambiguity where all formulas and expressions
can be inverted and perverted, where every sense and value
can be turned against itself and against any other that not only
the “voluntary servitude” of everyone to the tyranny of a unity
that annihilates all living unity—evoking the classic concept
and discussions of Etienne de La Boétie published clandestinely
1577 (1976)—but also the new mechanisms of power, control,
and censorship, become possible. It is this dynamic of sense that
I am calling here the fascism of ambiguity.
The fascism of the ambiguity of every sense and value is
found today everywhere. At any moment and in any situation,
we see senses oscillating between right and wrong, true and false
in a growing ambiguity that makes it appear, in an astonishing
way, how even the polarization of senses, values and positions
triggers the ambiguity of senses more than their distinction
and demarcation. The very oscillation of the sense of “fascism”

testifies to the continuous ambiguation of senses: how to speak
of fascism if today’s “Duces” are nothing but caricatures of past
fascists, parodies of dictators? Everywhere there are caricatures
of caricatures, idolatries of idolatries, masks of masks, parodies of
parodies, all intentionally staged in autopilot mode, which allows
us to say that they are both caricatures and non-caricatures, both
masks and non-masks, both fascism and democracy, because
in the world of image, where everything is what it is not and
what is not is what is, non-being presents itself as non-being and
not as what is hidden behind being, everything is by definition
ambiguous, one of the faces of Janus, the two-faced face. In the
world of ambiguous oscillation and the oscillating ambiguity of
senses, which is the world of the image of the image, nothing
is hidden; everything is shown and shown in everyone’s face,
including the hiding of senses and intentions.
Without this dynamic of the ambiguation of sense, there cannot

be what is called “capitalism.” What has been called capitalism
within the scope of economic and political-economic theory
corresponds philosophically at its core to what Nietzsche thought
and developed in terms of “nihilism.” In the light of philosophical
nihilism, “capitalism” can be defined as the political economy of
the ambiguity of senses. To grasp it, one can follow how Marx, in
his analysis, sees money not only as a key element for his political
economic concept of capitalism but also as a power to realize the
ontological mutation at stake in the capitalist world. This was
what the young Marx had already noticed when, inspired by a
reading of the play Timon of Athens by Shakespeare, he wrote
enlightened lines about the essence of money. In them, Marx
draws attention to the fact that money is not defined by numbers,
but by affecting a continuous ambiguation of senses. Money
makes the “ugly look beautiful, the bad good,” the outside turns
inside out and the inside out turns outside, thus transforming
everything that exists into its own opposite (Marx, 1963). To say
that money buys everything and that everything has a price is
not simply to say that money corrupts everything and empties
all values. It also shows the value dynamics involved in money.
Marx shows us that the economic value of things is linked to
human work and, therefore, to the human and social reality of
its production. Things have a use-value and this value is often
invaluable, both because it is something difficult to replace and
because it has an affective value. But things have a commodity
value, an exchange value. The capitalist economy is an economy
based both on transforming use-values into exchange value and
making use-value an exchange value. Changing means replacing.
The capitalist world is a world committed to replacing everything
with everything: not only replacing all values with exchange
value, not only replacing things with commodities, affective

relations with interest relations, ethical values with economic
values, but making everything replaceable and redundant:
people, lives, and both human and non-human existences.
And money does that by emptying everything of sense, making
everything equivalent to everything. This makes all senses
equivalent and ambiguous. By mixing the sense of equality with
that of equivalence, money confuses the sense of value by stating
that everything has the same value. In fact, what is being said
is that all values are reduced to a single sense of value, which is
monetary value, the emptying and empty value of every value.
This apparent equality, which is nothing but the same amount of
money, legitimizes the substitution of everything for everything.
Money, as Marx will deepen in his later thought, is not value, but
“value-form” (Marx, 1990, p. 232). Thus, appropriating all things,
money becomes the most “thing” thing that exists, and finally,
the only “thing” that exists. In addition to making every sense
ambiguous by emptying it of sense to the point of being able
to transform it into its opposite, money transmutes what I have
into what I am, so that I become only what I have. With money,
being as a whole is reduced exclusively to having. Money, Marx
says in this brief text from his youth, is the bond of all bonds,
[das Band aller Bände], the “chemical force of society,” the one
that unites by separating. Its activity is to create connectionless
connections, relationless relations, transmuting everything that
exists into mediation. Money is the means of fragmenting society

through the iron-bonds of dependence. This universalized and
universalizing practice of creating bondless bonds, of diluting
bonds by the excess of links gives a decisive sense to “bundle,”
fasce, the typically fascist social identification bonds. In this
sense, one could say, with Gramsci, that liberal capitalism carries
fascism in its kernel: in nuce.
This brief discussion about money aims to indicate the
revealing power of the ontological mutation that capitalism
performs and not specifically on how Marx analyzes money
in the totality of his economic theory of value. For Marx the
central key to define the capitalist world is the relation between
the world of commodities and the world of social relations, a
relation that has to be considered in its specific historical frame.
But in order to seize this relation as the core of capitalism, it
is necessary to understand how money becomes capital, the
genesis of the “surplus-value” arising from a growth of exchange
value, which Marx identified with labor force. In capitalism,
labor force is a commodity whose consumption augments
exchange value, whose “use” creates a surplus in exchange value.
Following Marx’s Capital, the capitalist transforms money into
commodities which will be the basis for new products but to
which he incorporates another commodity, living labor force,
transforming value into capital and thereby extending the
production of value beyond measures. That is why the value of
a commodity is the “crystallization” of social labor and depends

on the incorporated quantity of labor. The need to remind
the key concepts in the context of our discussion is to keep in
mind the dynamics in which things become personified and
persons become things, how relations become commodities
and exchange as such becomes the only utility and use. The
capitalist world is the one in which money becomes the main
commodity forcing the world to give up both the thinghood of
things and social relations. The reification of everything means
the rendering of everything into anything whatsoever, hence
into the loss of the sense of thing through the exacerbation
of thingness; the reification of social relations, of humanity,
means de-socializing the social. Surplus value is Marx’s concept
that reveals the “logic” of capitalism not only of reifying social
relations and transforming social labor into commodity but
above all as the logic of voiding value through the addition of a
“value” that is more than value itself. This logic of “surplus value”
operates even more powerfully in technoplanetarian capitalism,
when the nature of social labor is transformed to the point that
social relations become the techno-mediatic mutated nature of
work. The more the surplus generates a surplus of the surplus,
the less values have value.
The dynamic of ambiguation of sense and value, which
constitutes the very social dynamics of production relations, is
not, however, something that superimposes what is economically
produced, but what is incarnated in products. Another of Marx’s

precise and precious concept was that of commodity as a fetish.
The famous passage in Capital on the fetish of the commodity
describes the commodity as that which makes sensitive and
palpable what is supra-sensitive and impalpable, that is, its
exchange value, which is a reflection of social and productive
forms. Being “a sensitive/supra-sensitive thing,” [ein übersinnlich
sinnliches Ding] (ibid., p. 276), the commodity exposes the
invisible and impalpable forms of social relations as visible and
palpable, operating as if by magic or spell the transformation of
the relation between men into a relation between things, on the
one hand, and on the other, the individual’s objectification and
his relations. Things become personified and persons reified.
The commodity is the spell of the transformation of human
relations into things, the substitution of use-value for exchange
value, or more precisely, the mutation of use into exchange and
mediation. If things in their “trivial” sense, the table in one’s
childhood home, have a use-value, an affective and thus priceless
value,4 then as a commodity, the table becomes any table, which
as such can be replaced by any other table. To be a commodity
means therefore to stop being this thing in order to become
anything, an X, and as such substitutable for any other thing and
thus capable of receiving any value and sense depending on how
it presents itself. To be a commodity, a thing must lose its sense
of thing in order to receive not only the value of being any thing
but above all any value whatsoever. It is the transformation of “S

is P,” the universal form of predication, into “S is X” (= any thing,
sense, or value), the predication formula of “any.” The social
forms of work and production, exploitation and capitalization
are hidden under the spell of “any” thing, “any” sense, and “any”
value. The commodity is not simply a thing or the objectification
of relations; it is the substitution of things for the thing-form,
of relations for the relation-form. The value of being able to be
anything whatsoever, the value of ambiguity, flexibility, and
substitution is decisive here. For only then both what has a price
and what has no price, both price and appreciation or esteem,
can come to have any price. Everything will depend on how the
commodity is presented and exhibited, that is, the spectacle of
the commodity. Commodity fetish is the spectacle of the power
of the emptiness of sense. This is what allows and promotes the
flexibility and mobility of values as a supreme value.
Neoliberalism, technoplanetarian capitalism, is a dynamic of
constant transformation. However, a constant transformation is
an oxymoron, because it expresses a transformation that does
not transform itself; in fact, a transformation that transforms
everything is one that transforms everything except the sense of
transformation. It is a transformation that can only generate a
status quo, a dynamic conformism. The Aristotelian description
of the first unmoved mover [ho ou kinoúmenon kineî] serves
well to define capitalism, which moves everything except
motion itself. Here everything must become insecure, but in

such an absolute way that the continuity of this insecurity must
be guaranteed at any cost. Nothing can stand still where it is.
Everything must always leave where it is, having to turn into
anything whatsoever, so that it can be used at any time, by any
one, in any way, without any limit, be it natural, technical, ethical,
or cultural. The digital and virtual world is the full realization
of this continuous transformation of everything, which
transplants everything from its site to its website, taking it from
its security, however fragile it may be, into solid insecurity. All
that is solid melts into air, recalling Marx’s famous formulation.
A lesson from untransformative continuous transformation is
that the “immanent” need for fascism in this capital dynamics
corresponds to the need to preserve not so much known forms
but the forms of the known, not so much old and stable senses
and values but the stable form of value and sense so that senses
and values can continue to circulate, to become mixed and
confused, to feed the incendiary fire of the ambiguation of all
senses and meanings, including the senses of meaning and the
meaning of sense. The great confusion is to think that the new
fascism that afflicts the world of today wants in fact a return to
conservative values and senses, well, these would require a world
structure entirely different from that which the new fascism
intends to consolidate, which is the form of a spectacular world,
where everything ceases to be or have any sense and value,
being and having only the empty form of senseless sense and
valueless value.
For such a spectacle, it is essential that the form of sense can
be maintained so that the contents of sense can flow without
anything to obstruct its malleability. Ensuring the malleability
of senses, their ambiguous oscillation, is decisive in order
to control all resistance and critiques of the overwhelming
expansion of neoliberal political economy. At the world’s present
moment, where the immoderation of global capitalism in the
form of social injustice, hunger, violence, and misery screams
and becomes explicit with uncontrollable force, not only in
Brazil but worldwide, fascism grows to mobilize all human
energies in order to immobilize resistance and critical energy.
Hence the “need” for a new form of fascism for the logic of
neo-liberalism, the logic of anything goes, where everything is
worth nothing, nothing is worth everything, and everything
is worth anything. This new form of fascism takes the form of
ambiguity, where all forms become ambiguous, even fascism—
because it is fascism, but it is also not fascism. In a world where
everything is spectacle, where everything is and lives from the
image, where one can “be” what one wants, where identity is
defined by identification with an image, every sense is similar
and can be equivalent. But what cannot be confused is that the
emptiness of sense has the form of sense and meaning, or that
is, appears, and seems like sense and meaning. Fascism—always
conservative and reactively reactionary—wants to maintain the

form of sense and form of value to ensure the dilution of senses
and values and, thus, undermine every critique and censor every
insurgency; hence its need to return to the “past” and to make
it necessary for “an acute sense of the past” to exist alongside
the anxiety for continuous change and progress.5 The return to
the past, the reaffirmation of the already given in an essential
manner, is, before any reactionary content, a return to the past
forms, to the structure of the “formed” and “known,” and more
of a return to the forms of the reactionary than to reactionary
forms. The fascism of ambiguity must, first of all, ensure the
permanence of forms in a world where even form is formless,
in a world governed by continuous circulation and substitution,
flexibility, mobility, and malleability of every sense, value, and
content. In the anguish at the lack of form in the world, it is
tempting to pay attention to discourses on returning and going
back to forms. The fascist desire is a desire for stability, to be able
to “live in peace minding my business,” to secure “my livelihood,”
to find a hyper-political way to live apolitically. But these “solid”
forms and values are forms of forms, forms of values, and
forms of senses and meanings, hollow in themselves in order to
consolidate the operational mode of the continuous dilution of
the life of forms, senses, meanings, and values. If fascism today
presents the contradiction of resuming anachronistic fascist
content, of donning a discourse where the mythology of the
“people,” of tradition, of order, of morality, and of civility returns,

in a world entirely submitted to the neoliberalism of “anything
whatsoever,” to inexorably transnational capital, to a digitally
limitless world, to the point of submitting reality as a whole to
its total virtualization, is to ensure the empty form of sense in
order to be able to fill it with any sense whatsoever. This “formal”
need is justified insofar as control not only of consciences, but
above all of the collective unconscious is at stake, and, if that
were not enough, also of the form of the unconscious, of what
could be called the formal unconscious,6 when one accepts the
unconscious as an automatism of the order of the uncontrollable
and unpredictable. With the new information technologies, all
based on the literally understood “televisual,” the availability of
the brain to become empty and available for more images and
messages upon receiving a hyperbolic and continuous flow of
images and messages, expands. One is continually “facing a
system capable of filling a place in order to empty it of its natural
mental qualities,” as the writer Bernard Nöel noted in his book
The Available Brain (Noël, 2015, p. 8).
This means also the maintenance of the form of sense and
the form of value that fuse capitalism with worship and, thus,
with religion. This was a critical illumination expressed by
Walter Benjamin as early as 1921, in a reflective fragment titled
“Capitalism as religion” (2013),7 which today shows its enormous
relevance, especially considering the relation between fascism
and religion in countries like Brazil, Poland, and others. It is not

exactly “religion” that is in question, but the religious cult and
the cult of religion, in other words, the inherited religious form,
emptied of religiosity, hollowed in order to receive any ideological
content, which is clear in the neo-Pentecostal movements.8 In
its general concept, cult comprises internal and external acts in
which God is honored, worshipped, adored, and idolized. The
Bible distinguishes the cult of idols from the cult of the true God
and in the Latin West, the Vulgate uses the term cultus to express
care for beauty.9 Despite the different Greek and Latin terms for
“cult” and the countless discussions and distinctions made by
theology and the history of religions about its meaning, “cult”
is basically understood as the “act” and “form” of expression
of a sense of veneration in relation to God and the sacred.
Effectively, it is the sense of the form of veneration that explains
the religious character of capitalism and that can also point out
how technoplanetarian capitalism connect so intimately with
cultic religions, as in Brazil and which also seems to give sense
to Catholicism as in Poland. Here we can also recognize how the
exacerbation of the cult of religion empties the sense of religion
as an experience of the sacred and of mystery. The decisive thing
is to spectacularize the spectacle.
In his analyses of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth
century, Walter Benjamin discussed the need to spectacularize
the commodity, realizing how the exhibition in showcases and
universal fairs are not just a place for selling commodities but
to expose the commodity as an exhibition, as an “enchanted
object” and “epiphany of the unattainable,” according to the
reading by Giorgio Agamben (1977, p. 46), as a culture of
“spectacle,” bringing Agamben close to Guy Debord. Benjamin
makes it very clear in this 1921 text how the “analogy” with the
“foggy regions of the religious world” proposed by Marx when
speaking of the “fetish” of the commodity, is the decisive mover
of capitalism. The fetish is the core of capitalism as a cult. Thus,
it can be said that capitalism is a “purely cultic religion, perhaps
the most extreme that has ever existed” (Benjamin, 2004 [1996]).
Being a “purely cultic” religion, it has no need for dogma or
theology, while pure cult is a form without fixed content, thus it
can receive any content. It is fundamental that the cult remains
always worshipped, that it remains a permanent cult, where
every acquisition of a commodity is celebrated as a feast and
euphoria. However, the concept of debt is kept from religious
worship. In German, the word for debt is Schuld. It is the same
word for moral guilt. Debt and credit, guilt and faith: the ethical-
moral vocabulary has long been confused with the financial and
economic vocabulary, where the second contaminates the first
in a way that makes it impossible for the reciprocal to be true.
The cult of capitalism does not save us from sin, as Benjamin
observes, but creates debt. Every debt is an affirmation of a
causal relationship of attribution to something external and
antecedent, to which the present and the future are due. Cultic
capitalism is capitalism based on credit and debt. Thus, debt
becomes universal, even incorporating God in its invoice. With
this, capitalism itself acquires the sense of a transcendent order
that cannot be touched or altered by man, being like a divine
order without a god or the order of a god without any divinity, an
exterior and antecedent order that explains everything and from
which one cannot escape. Benjamin does not see in capitalism
the secularization of a transcendent order, as Max Weber had
proposed, but as a universal cult of immanence—far from a
world erected by the death of God, capitalism is the world that
imposes God “upon human destiny,” which allowed Brecht to
write in one of the poems of his Kriegsfibel that “God is a fascist”
[Gott ist ein Fascist].10
Benjamin indicated the need for the alliance of religion—
as a mere cultic practice, in which religion empties itself
of all religiosity—with capitalism, an alliance today made
tremendously clear in technoplanetarian capitalism, that is, in
the development of techno-mediatic, planetary, monetary, or
financial capital. The loss of all social bonds and social relations
at work, which results from devastating entrepreneurship,
outsourcing and the increasing digitalization of work, not only
transforms the sense of work but also and above all dissolves
and empties the sense of work. The immemorial concept
and experience of work are thus emptied and absorbed by
new forms of digital, virtual, managerial production, and

uberization. Doing and its poetics become senseless. Thus
the human bonds, bonds that the churches of capitalism will
want to fill in order to control the energy released through this
profound emptying, are lost.
5
The Ambiguity of
Sense
Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote a poem titled The
End of the World (2003), which says:
At the end of a melancholic world

men read newspapers.
Men who are indifferent to eating oranges
burning like the sun.
They gave me an apple to remember

death. I know cities are telegraphing
for kerosene. The veil I watched flying
fell in the desert.
No one will write the final poem

of this particular twelve-hour world.
Not the last judgment
the final dream is what worries me.
At the end of our melancholy world, men read “Facebook,”

“Twitter,” “WhatsApp,” “memes” and become teledistanced from
the explosive reality of the burning real. The poet speaks of the
pretentious illusion of writing a final poem and even of imagining
a final judgment. At the end of a world, which is by no means
the same as the end of the world, because worlds end without the
world ending, the “final dream” is the most dangerous. Discussions
abound about the new world that the world is living, a frighteningly
“brave new world” to remind us of the title by Aldous Huxley, a
new world that never ceases to evoke the world of total control, of
Georges Orwell’s big brother in 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Inception, The Handmaid’s Tales,
and many others. Even without knowing it, João Cabral knew that
today each resistance poem posted on the web feeds at the same
time the robotics of the algorithms with information about who
writes and who reads them. Today, the world of total information
controlled by information is already in place. Furthermore, in
this world, it is the excess of information that misinforms and
disinforms. It is worth discussing the mutation of the world,
of a new world-form in which known forms of the world lose
their forms, and in which countless forms of life struggle to self-
recognize and be recognized. The great challenge is to think about
the mutation of the world, as this requires becoming aware that
our concepts and experiences of transformation are not enough
to think about mutating the world-form.
THE AMBIGUITY OF SENSE 61
It is not surprising to see a turn to the extreme right, to

conservatism and fascism when considering the issue of world
control. The question is, on the one hand, control of the world of
control, its use and exploitation. But, on the other hand, there is
also the lack of control in the world of control, because the world
that mobilizes and organizes itself to control everything is not
able to control its own control. There is a difference between self-
control, understood cybernetically as control technology that
self-regulates and self-controls automatically, and the immanent
limit to the unlimited desire to control everything, since this
requires the impossibility of controlling that desire. Thus, the
power of controlling everything also discovers its powerlessness
to control that power. The machine, as Baudrillard said, does
not know how to do anything other than a machine, it does not
know how to differentiate itself—only man self-differentiates
to the point of becoming a machine. But we still have to ask
ourselves what is the final dream that happens at the end of
our melancholy world of the control of everything? Is it the
dream of an endless world, an eternal world? In other words,
of a world that has managed to end the end and kill death? Is
this the final dream? This seems to have been Caligula’s final
dream, the hallucinating tyrant who, moved by the suffering of
the death of his sister-lover Drusilla, dreams of killing death.
His final dream was to found “the kingdom of the impossible,”
that of a life that eradicated from life its finitude, its limit. But
to make this dream come true, the only way he found was to
kill everything before death, to advance the death of everything.
In the dramatized version by Camus, Caligula justifies why he
needs to add to the evil already inherent in the world, yet one
extra total evil. He says he does it because of the despair of a
disease of the body and not of the soul because it is the disease
of a body pulled out of the body and not only of a body without
a soul, or soulless, as one usually thinks. The final dream is of a
body even more soulless than a soulless body: it is that of a body
without a body, expropriated from itself. A life without finitude,
without a differentiating and thus creative limit, is the life of
a delusional power of destruction that, as mentioned earlier,
Caligula describes as one close to which the power of creation
is nothing more than “monkey play” (Camus, 1961). It is the
dream of an unbearable release, of the hallucinating loneliness
of one who had to destroy everything around him in order to kill
death as a condition of life. Caligula embodies the final dream
of techno-mediatic capitalism, which promises to end the end
by ending any and all forms of life that safeguard finitude and
limit as sources of differentiation and singularization; the power
of creation.
This final dream undoubtedly worries our poet, especially
because, in order to realize this delusional dream, the techniques
of destroying and killing everything around—in order to
achieve, in death’s advance, to “kill” death—are techniques for
exterminating senses. I have insisted on the urgency to reflect

upon the ambiguity of senses. Indeed, nothing is perhaps
more ambiguous than the word “sense.” The word “sense” has
several meanings in Latin languages. Sense means that which
is sensed, the senses of sensation and the body, the sense of
being touched by the other, by life, by the world. One can speak
here of sensible sense, meaning both the faculty of perception
and the realm of feelings and sensation. As a dynamic of being
touched by the lives of the world, by the worlds of life, sense is
also linked to the articulation and thinking of the world’s senses.
Therefore, sense mixes with signification and meaning. One
can speak here of intellectual sense, meaning the intelligibility
of things. Saying sense, what is also the case in German Sinn,
both “senses” are intertwined, the sensible and the intelligible,
perception and knowledge, feeling and understanding. This also
explains the oscillations in the use of the term in English and the
tendency to distinguish these two main senses of sense, leaving
“sense” for feelings, emotions, perceptions, and “meaning” for
knowledge and understanding. Moreover, in Latin languages,
“sense” has even a third sense, namely, of direction, for instance
when saying “sens unique” meaning one-way-street. Thus, sense
means, before any signification, a motion of world-experience
within life, the being exposed to the world. The word “sense” is
furthermore used in several expressions: common sense, good
sense, moral, and aesthetic sense. There is also the sixth sense,
an expression for the perception of the imperceptible—a kind

of divinatory sense—and for the contact between feeling and
thinking, something that could even be described as “sensing-
thinking” and “thinking-sensing,” to evoke the new verbs
used by two celebrated Brazilian authors Guimarães Rosa and
Clarice Lispector. This abundance of senses of sense indicates
the richness of the experience of sense but also the extension of
consequences when this richness is appropriated by the politics
of ambiguation of senses.
When speaking of the ambiguity of sense, we want to indicate
the emptying exacerbation-dynamics of senses, an exacerbation
of every sense of sense and above all that which thus mixes sense
and signification, which makes it difficult to see the difference.
This dynamic implies several movements at once. It implies,
on the one hand, the reduction of senses to significations, here
understood as established and inherited contents of meaning,
and, on the other hand, their simplification. In this reductive
simplification, every sense that is difficult to be assimilated
without efforts is proscribed and everything that is difficult to
express is denied existence. Reduced to signification, simplified
to immediate absorption, meanings can be then exacerbated and
saturated. The opening force of senses understood primarily as
the simultaneity of grasping while being grasped, of touching
while being touched, of the exposure of existence exposed to
the world, by the world, in the world, is reduced to the impact
of meanings, which dissolve immediately as soon as another

meaning impacts. Senses are thereby reduced to signification,
and the movement of sensing, experiencing, is reduced to
determinate meanings that are voided, the moment they
become saturated through exaggeration. Today, it is not only the
so-called intelligible senses that are emptied by exacerbation.
Something similar happens with the so-called sensible senses.
The exacerbation of the image overshadows vision to such an
extent that today we are barely able to exercise the vivacious
patience of the gaze. For gazing is to make the visible, visible, and
not simply being impressed by the visible. When criticizing the
hegemony of an ocular principle of thought and thus claiming
listening as a principle, it is often forgotten that the hyperbolic
exacerbation of the image not only reduces the ability to listen,
but also the ability to gaze. We are blind not due to a lack, but
due to an excess of images. The digital world has reduced the
hand to the touch of a few fingers, to the digital, and with it the
life of touch and contact seems to lose its sensible directions.
The more the body is virtualized and idealized, the more the
violence upon body increases, the dynamics of emptying sense
by its exacerbation removes the sense of sense. Not only are
the known senses emptied, that is, of their significations, but
above all the sense of making sense. Thus, one can perceive the
nihilistic dimension of the “neoliberal” and global dynamics of
the world.
It is necessary to clarify a little more the sense of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is undoubtedly an ambiguous concept. Ambiguous
literally means being adrift and being able to go anywhere and
everywhere. The prefix ambi is a corruption of amphi and it
means around. Aristotle had already observed the ambiguity of
ambiguity1 and sought to discern some of its senses. Ambiguity
can be understood as equivocity, where the same word has
different meanings, for example, crooked (bent) and crooked
(dishonest), such as the word justice, spoken by the executioner
or by the victim. For this purpose, Aristotle reserved the term
“homonymous.” Ambiguity also refers to a syntactic ambiguity,
which generates, according to Aristotle, the fallacies of reasoning
and obscures understanding. This is what he called amphiboly,
for example: “ . . . he affirms to be a stone.” This part of a sentence
may imply that he claims that something is a stone or that he
himself is a stone. With that, what is spoken about is obscured
and one is neither certain about the subject nor the object of the
discourse.
There is no language without ambiguity and undoubtedly
the richness of language is essentially linked to its power to
make sense, to open up to multiple interpretations and the
reinvention of significations. Thus understood, ambiguity
indicates the creative wealth of language. Simone de Beauvoir
showed the importance of developing a “moral of ambiguity”
and Merleau-Ponty considered that philosophical thought is
liberating due to its power of ambiguity, understood as that of

rising up against the univocity of sense, which is the tyranny of
imposed, closed, and dogmatic signification.2 Zygmut Bauman
developed a critique of modernity as critique of its project of
order to rule over the creative power of ambivalence.3 Julia
Kristeva developed several thoughts on the need to retrieve
the ab-jective force of ambiguity.4 The praise of ambiguity that
appears in various philosophical, poetic, and ethical reflections
in the twentieth-century results from the struggle against the
totalitarian ideologies of that century, which are ideologies of
the totalization of sense in univocal significations. Brainwashing
is the imposition of an unequivocal and unique signification and
meaning that states it is only possible to think this, understand
this, and any discussion about sense must be punished, tortured,
and exterminated. But today it is important to distinguish not
only between ambiguity or equivocity and univocity, but also
between several possible senses and a single sense. It is necessary
to distinguish above all between being able to have any sense
whatsoever and the richness of open senses and half-open
senses. Thus, it is important to understand that ambiguity does
not refer only to a word having several senses, to polysemy and a
phrase that can be read in different ways. Ambiguity in the sense
of the richness of the life of senses is now being emptied by the
excess and exacerbation of ambiguity, which instead of opening
up to new senses, immobilizes the plural senses making every
sense equivalent to any other. As I have already stressed, fascism

is never ambiguous and ambiguity as the openness of senses, the
source of creative language, is the most opposite to fascism. But
the fascism that we see emerging today affirms its unequivocal
meaning, making every sense and meaning ambiguous, first by
confusing sense and signification, and this in such a way that
the very richness of ambiguity is emptied by hyper-ambiguation.
Its goal is to destroy the creative source of language, that is, to
destroy man in man. Ambiguity sees itself transformed into a
dynamic of the emptying of every sense by making every sense
equivalent to any other and any thing. Therein lies the fascism
of ambiguity.
There are several strategies to realize this immobilization
of the creative force of senses through the hyper-ambiguation
of ambiguity. The practice of renaming is one of them, already
apprehended and discussed by Russian formalists like Viktor
Shklovskii (2018). Slogans like “There was no military coup,
there were motion and counter-revolution” and “Freedom and
democracy in Brazil are due to the military that prevented
Brazil from being communized in 1964” are the aberrations we
have heard recently in Brazil. This continuous renaming belies
the truth of history and immobilizes vital and real oppositions
and contradictions by making them equivalent. To belie and
not simply lie is another fascist technique.5 One gives with the
right hand and takes back with the other. The fascist himself,
who appears either as a fascist, or as thoughtful, or as incendiary,

or as savior, extinguishes the fire that the fascist exacerbation
ignites on the bonfire. In the continuous renaming and belying
it is fundamental to create the confusion of senses that empties
both every sense and, we must insist, the sense of making sense.
These strategies show that the exacerbated sense of ambiguity
transforms the creative openness of senses into being able to
mean anything and to be interpreted in any way.
But here what also appears as the ontological dimension
that defines ambiguity is not only that which encompasses the
relation between the reality of the sense and the sense of reality
but above all the can-be. In a not very often read paragraph
of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, one finds a reflection
on ambiguity, which, together with curiosity and idle talk,
constitutes improper modes of being-in-the-world, modes of its
“decay” (Heidegger, 1996, § 37, pp. 237–40). Leaving aside issues
related to Heidegger’s thought, the problems that his concepts
of proper and improper, authentic and inauthentic continue to
raise in the academic debates of philosophy and the humanities
and even underlining that these issues are very important to
discuss fascism, the paragraphs where curiosity, small talk, and
ambiguity are discussed give us important keys to understand
“loss of linguistic ability,” “linguistic dispersion,” and the emptying
of speech acts in the fascism of ambiguity. And, above all, these
discussions also provide keys to apprehend where ambiguity and
ambiguation strategies are at work in today’s discursive economy

of proper and improper, of the mechanisms of real and symbolic
appropriation and expropriation. Everything here works to
render the possible and the impossible inoperative in the real.
Ambiguity operates in the context of coexistence, of community,
preventing the liberating openness being distinguished from the
imprisoning anyzation. For one does not think and talk only
about what happens and occurs, but also about what may or
may not happen. Today, more and more, it becomes clear that
the society of spectators is very much the society of expectators,
always expecting what is going to happen, for Twitter to ping,
for the news that will arrive, for what will happen in the next
second and about what should be done. Thus, “one lives faster.”
Thus, we live in the here and now, continually disconnecting
from the possibility and the urgency to be present to the present,
without realizing it. The most decisive thing, however, is that
by articulating on the seesaw of the maybe yes, maybe not; it
may and may not be; “there will be a military coup,” “there will
be no coup”; “he will fall,” “he won’t fall”; he will act, he won’t
act; the impulses for action are immobilized, and above all the
sense of the possible is emptied. This maybe/maybe-not mixes
the oscillating sense of might with the power of the possible. The
ambiguity of fascism makes use of ambiguity and its strategies in
order to empty the possibility of the possible itself. Its goal is to
make the possible and even the impossible, inoperative.
To eliminate the need for senses to make sense is an integral

part of that final dream of killing death, which is also the final
dream of eliminating any and all resistance to this delusional
power of destruction. This is the final, active, and awakened
dream of fascism as a whole. There are many ways one could
try to eliminate resistance to the power of destruction. The most
immediate is physical violence, extermination, the extermination
of the other and all of his transforming power. But it seems that
even this is not enough, as it cannot exterminate the force of
resistance itself. The question that the dictator always asks is how
to eliminate the power to resist destruction, which is the power
of creation. Therefore, the great fascist dream is not to eliminate
freedom of expression, but above all freedom of thought.
Caligula’s answer is by destroying everything, eliminating all
springs, drying out all sources, and devastating the soil by making
it desertic and laterite. But even though he was completely mad,
Caligula recognizes and shouts in his last speech in the play
by Camus: “I am still alive,” remembering that while there is
life there is resistance to the power of destruction because life
is creative resistance. The formula that fascism today finds is
more virulent: to exterminate the sensible and intelligible life
of senses, in order to make impossible any distinction between
just and unjust, good and evil, true and false, Heaven and Earth,
sensibility and insensibility. The undermining of senses, both
intelligible and sensible happens through the very exaggeration
of senses, of an odd hyper sensibilization that renders sensibility

itself insensible. Thus, the somehow unnoticed character of the
mutation of sensibility contemporary fascism operates with and
upon. To this mutation of sensibility, belongs the extermination
of horizons, of the dancing lines of difference, of the threshold-
voices that distinguish without separating, that unite without
mixing. This means the extermination of the space-between
differences, of the “in-between” us. An extermination that takes
place when it is no longer possible to distinguish between a wall
of exclusion and a threshold, between difference and apartheid,
between the uniqueness of each one and the characterlessness
of anything whatsoever, between the lethal flexibility of a
capitalism without borders and the movement of life, between
the ambiguation of senses and the openness of the life of senses.
When equality is confused with equivalence, understood as
everything being measured by monetary value, when the symbols
of a long tradition of struggle for freedom are appropriated in
order to become symbols of oppression, a confused emptiness
of senses is installed. Everything is worth everything. Nothing
is worth nothing.
At this point, the search for molds and stereotypes has been
installed, of types for identification not with content, but with
forms and images of content. It is these molds and stereotypes
that fascism offers. In a world of extermination and emptying of
life-forms, there is an emptying of the sense of identity through
its exacerbation. Waving the flag, armed gestures, the truculence

of gym bodies, etc. The techno-mediatic dynamics of global
capitalism is not simply that of emptying the sense of things
and modes of being by transforming them into commodities,
that is, into what can be equivalent, exchanged, and replaced
by any thing. It is, above all, to carry out this emptying that
turns every thing into any thing, which reduces thing to “thing-
form,” through its exaggeration, its auxesis. Auxesis eliminates
the need for any exegesis. In a world where everything
must lose form, contour, content, and, therefore, identity,
this compulsive and compulsory loss occurs through the
hyperbole of identity. Everything must be detraditionalized by
hypertraditionalization, deontologized by hyperontologization,
and deidentified by hyperidentification. We have already noted
that one of the defining traits of historical fascism is that of
fusional identification with the leader and with the images of
people, nation, and race built through the construction and
naturalization of hatred toward the other. What is decisive here
is not the identity, but the “identification apparatus” (Lacoue-
Labarthe & Nancy, 2002, p. 31). We have also indicated that
today this identification is no longer directly with the “leader”
who claims “to be” and not only to represent the people, but
passes through the fusional identification with mediatic images
of oneself and others, with the spectacularization of oneself and
of everything. The construction of the identity of a “pure” and
“strong” race, of an “original” and “authentic” people constituted

the mobilizing force of historical fascism. In the Brazilian case,
where the “original peoples” and the “traditional cultures” are
not a construction, they are not a fabricated myth, but the living
testimony of cultural forces, marked not only by colonial history
and the systemic racism of Brazilian society, but due to the violent
social and economic inequality that results from a dizzying class
difference, the fascism of technoplanetarian capitalism instead
wants to eradicate and exterminate the “proper essence” of these
peoples and cultures because “the interest in the Amazon is not in
the Indian, nor in the fucking tree, it is in the ore.” The question is
not one of either the proper or the improper, but of the property,
in effect, of the appropriation for the total expropriation of the
country. Fascist politics now uses developmentalist slogans
characteristic of the military: “we have to remove the Indians
from the Stone Age in which NGOs leave them,” quoting phrases
of the Brazilian Ministry of Environment. In the case of Black
communities that were never able to own land, which survived
through the force of recreating the sense of territory in the
experience of the terreiro-community and terreiro-city6 (Sodré,
2019), what fascism wants to eliminate is their transforming
cultural force, the power of their culture of transformation.
What replaces the mythological cult of the proper and original
in historical fascism is the hyperbole of identification with the
mediatic narcissistic imagery, which operates on the historicity
even of human sensibility and thus of political sensibility. This

means the fusional identification with the capitalist and mediatic
dynamics of identification. Today’s forms of resistance to fascism
take on the issue of identity as their only power, when political
resistance strategies seem weakened in the face of a world system
where the total technique of totalizing capitalism becomes the
great subject of history. The ambiguity is made clear when we
realize that the struggle against fusional identification with
the fascist identification apparatus that mobilizes the capitalist
technique makes use of an appeal to fusional identification with
the persecuted, threatened, and violated identities. There is a
great oscillation between the concepts of identity, identification,
and identity politics. Fascist identity politics fights against the
political force of cultural identities which have been oppressed
along centuries of colonial history: the same word “identity”
oppresses and emerges as resistance, urging the need to clarify
the different senses of “identity,” the distinct processes of
identification and the sense of politics the concept of identity
involves. How the fascism of ambiguity appropriates all of these
concepts in order to make them ambiguous in a way that makes
it difficult to distinguish whether defending a race is racism or
the way to fight racism is decisive. In the confusion of senses
fostered by the fascism of ambiguity, every sense can take on
any sense so that libertarian discourses can be used against
freedom. In the military dictatorship, a verse of the Brazilian
poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, known by heart by almost

every Brazilian, “There is a stone in the middle of the road”
was used as a slogan by the Vale do Rio Doce company during
that period, but slightly reformulated: “There is a stone in the
path of Brazilian development” (Wisnik, 2018, p. 112). In this
ambiguation, one often tends to forget that traditional cultures
such as Afro-Brazilian and indigenous peoples’ are cultures of a
millenary experience for which fixed and consolidated “identity”
is not only an illusion but also a danger, the danger of installing
the finished and closed as a life principle. The ancestral is not
an identity fixed in time, but the experience of a continuous
plot within the web of life and the living, always being narrated
in a new way through inherited narratives. The ancestral is
the experience of another sense of identity, unthought and
unthinkable for the frantic search for images of identification
and appropriation of every means of identification. There is
much to be learnt from the experience of ancestry as a human
experience of de-identification of the figures and figurations of
the unlimited power of the human to be used against the fascist
fusional identification. This is perhaps one of the senses of the
“revolutionary force of the past,” the power to unlearn to be
attached to figures and forms of being in order to be able to exist.
Here we touch on an experience that reveals the in-between
space of history, the in-between us, an us that binds all forms of
life, human and non-human, to each other.
6
Metapolitics
The politics of the fascism of ambiguity happens, as indicated

above, in the dynamic indecision between “it is” and “it is not,” by
which one bets on continuous and widespread chaos. A question
that remains to be asked is about the ideology of fascism today.
The fascism of ambiguity is materialized in an ideology that is
defined through an alleged “de-ideologization.” It mimics the
supposedly de-ideologized ideology of liberalism, which, as
Gramsci had clearly noted in the 1920s, substitutes ideology
with cultural hegemony.
In her analyses of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt insisted on
how the totalitarian regimes of the first half of the nineteenth
century, Nazism, and Bolshevism were imposed due to their
ability to articulate ideology and terror. What we see today, which
we have called the fascism of ambiguity, is a new constellation of
ideology and terror. In Arendt’s argument, ideology is a coherent
and comprehensive conception of the world, which aims to give
a unique meaning to history as a whole, past and future, always
accompanied by a scientific vision. Therefore, a univocal and

unequivocal sense capable of explaining the whole past and the
whole future, in order to justify every totalitarian action in the
present, always accompanied by a “scientific basis,” that is, covered
with scientificity and objectivity. The ideology of the fascism of
ambiguity operates quite differently. By emptying the sense of
making sense from the world, the senseless and nonsensical then
come to explain the past as a whole and any future in order to
justify every spurious action in the present. The lack of sense of
sense says, on the one hand, “there is no sense in seeking sense”
and, on the other, “it is better to leave the nonsense of the world
to the administrators of the senseless god of today’s world.” In
the world of digital technics, robotics, algorithms, and artificial
intelligence, science is no longer a realm for legitimizing
worldviews in competition with religion, because science is
already the world. Thus, by delegitimizing science discursively,
by proclaiming the Earth is flat and the truth of creationism,
one delegitimizes not only the contents of science but also the
very need for legitimizing and grounding knowledge. Today,
when Wikipedism replaces Enlightenment Encyclopedism,
each one “has” the right to rewrite knowledge and its history.
Everything being equal, to both rewrite European history from
the perspective of what this history has forgotten, butchered,
exterminated, and to rewrite history from authoritarian interests
in the manipulation of historical truth, are presented as equally
METAPOLITICS 79
“legitimate.” Thus, the usurpation and adulteration of history

are confused with historical justice and reparation. Through the
imagination of discourses and the discursiveness of images, every
sense tends to become equivalent and equivalence becomes valid
as the only realm of legitimacy, not least because equivalence
starts to become confused with democratization. Furthermore,
the speed with which information proliferates, disseminates, and
“goes viral” disinforms the information. By confusing knowledge
with information, the living and critical sense of knowledge is
emptied, which means hard study, attention, care, and thought
exchange. As a continuous confusion of senses, the ideology of
the fascism of ambiguity depoliticizes through the exacerbation
of politics, de-socializes through hypersocialization on social
media, and disinforms through the excess of disparate and
always ambiguous information.
The ideology of the fascism of ambiguity has no ambiguity.
Its intentions are grotesquely exposed and proposed. Everything
is wide open. But the means of exposure is through a politics of
the ambiguation of senses; a political action that depoliticizes
by hyperpoliticizing, that alienates by placing the “political”
vocabulary on every screen of daily life. The French ideologists
of the Nouvelle Droite [New Right] called this political action,
“metapolitics.” Metapolitics is a term coined by the German
philosophers Christoph Hufeland (1762–1836) and August
Schlöser (1735–1809) and introduced to the French language by
Joseph de Maistre, the French reactionary thinker of the counter-

revolution, aiming to find the first causes and principles of the
phenomenon of politics. Alain Badiou used the term recently,
in his book Métapolitique (1998) to propose an emancipatory
ontology of the political phenomenon.1 Shortly afterwards,
Alain de Benoist, a French New Rightist, proposed it as the
term for action. “The metapolitical action consists of trying to
restore sense to the highest level through new syntheses.”2 This
is the term of a political action to restore sense to the elites, to
justify non-egalitarianism, not only justifying the organization
of inequality that, to some extent, defines any liberal regime
but to found new inequalities. The appropriation of a notion
linked to the history of conservative and right-wing ideas in
France (Joseph de Maistre) by a left-wing thinker like Badiou
and its re-appropriation by an extreme right-wing ideologue
shows the dynamics of appropriation and expropriation of ideas
and beliefs that Gramsci had already understood so well in his
analyses of cultural hegemony and the need to carry out a war of
motion rather than a war of positions. The extreme right defines
“metapolitical action” admitting the use of a certain “right-wing
Gramcism” and intends to turn the spell against the sorcerer, that
is, to play Gramsci against Gramsci to thus empty the mobilizing
force of his concepts. In the expropriating appropriation of the
terms implied here, one can see that, as an action, taken in
the sense meant by the extreme right, metapolitics means to
METAPOLITICS 81
meddle with the politics of ambiguation of senses, aiming to

instill in the soul of each person the certainty of the nonsense
to seek, make, and create senses. This is a comprehensive way
of establishing a new cultural hegemony in a world that is
already hegemonic in terms of its techno-economic principle
of organization. As Gramsci had seen, liberal capitalism is more
effective in immobilizing the left because it is able to absorb
elements of revolutionary Marxism and Socialism within its
ideals and ideas, thus undermining the force of resistance
to the expansion of its power. Now, the right is appropriating
Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony. In this way, the
difference between right and left becomes blurred, with a view
to emptying left-wing discourse as a whole, that is, the discourse
of emancipation and liberation from the system. Therefore, it is
no wonder that de Benoist’s introduction on Wikipedia reads:
“a critic of Christianity, neoliberalism, free market, democracy
and egalitarianism” and that he is a critic of Bolsonaro. This is
the extreme right devouring the imaginary of socialist utopias
and the socialism of utopia, that is, of the transforming possible.
As an action, the fascist sense of metapolitics aims to eliminate
emancipatory thought from the political phenomenon beyond
(meta) techno-instrumental politics.
For some centuries, the distinct and precise positions between
“right” and “left,” or, “political laterality,” resisted any ambiguity.
Today, they are increasingly confused. If for years the right could
be conceived as “a metaphysics—or if one likes, a mythology,

an ideology—of something given, of something absolutely and
primarily given and to which nothing or very little of essential
can be modified” while the “left implies the reverse: that this [the
essential] can and must be modified” (Nancy, 2019), then today
it is the “right” that proposes the modification of the essential
in order to implement images of the essential while the “left,”
mobilized by the politics of identity, aims to restore the essential
in every image. Today it is the extreme right that claims an
“international”—“extreme right of all countries, unite!”—and
who lost the role of “revolutionary critique.” The internationalism
of nationalism reaffirms the character of “megalopolitic” of
politics today, of how “each” politic seeks global legitimacy.3 If
for years it has been possible to attribute the conviction that “on
the one hand, collectivity is formed and normalized from itself
and, on the other hand, it is ordered in relation to humanity as
a whole” as the “minimum content” of the “left,” then the idea
that man is the producer of his own social existence today is
confused with the reality that man is voluntarily a servant of
capitalist production, which is formed and regulated from itself.
It is then the production of oneself that becomes the “essential
datum” that cannot be modified because this self-production
is presented as an order that transcends collectivity and the
individuals, a divine order, perhaps even more divine than the
Divine. Total-techno-capital is the total-subject.
METAPOLITICS 83
The fascism of ambiguity produces a “metapolitical action,”

whose dynamo is the excess of politics and politicking
that, through increasing digitalization, depoliticizes by
hyperpoliticizing, as I have already insisted. The goal is to
depoliticize by politicization. In this way, micropolitics is able
to remain separate from macropolitics. Thus, the horizons of a
possible other are what has to be undermined. Today, the fascism
of ambiguity does not only foster hatred against social groups,
majoritarian minorities, critics, thinkers, and teachers (the
representatives of “cultural Marxism,” an expression that means
nothing more than defenders of culture as a source of creation).
It encourages, within its varied forms of hatred, the grand-hatred
of the other possible, the power to become other as the possible,
brought about through a micropolitics of hatred: the hatred
that surpasses hatred for one’s neighbor to become today hatred
for family members.
Following and developing Arendt’s reflections a little more,
totalitarianism is not merely the imposition of an ideology; it
is the articulation of ideology and terror; it is the imposition
of a state of fear. Today’s fascism does not need to implement
terror camps—even if they are still built and implemented with
variations, camps for migrants who escape camps—because
terror is already incorporated into society itself. Terror is already
implanted in the extermination practices; be it of indigenous
peoples, Blacks, workers, or children; be it by the militia,
crack cocaine, inhuman exploitation, violations of all rights,

and today, more and more, of the right to existence. The new
form of fascism is militia-military, playing with the ambiguity
of a militia that takes the place of the military—from the point
of view of the violent force of control and torture—and the
military as the savior of militia violence, when both collaborate
with each other. Fascism is democratically elected in order to
legitimize the implementation of terror against terror, violence
against violence. If the military used weapons to prevent armed
struggle and massacre the resistance forces, today the fascist
government arms the population for it to massacre the force of
resistance within itself—this, in alliance with militia violence
and the military readiness to add violence to the violence. In
the face of social insecurity not only established, but promoted
and acclaimed4 by entrepreneurial capitalism, where work and
its social ties are dissolved in the shift from productive work to
digital work (Casilli, 2010), this “insecurity” appears as almost
nothing close to the insecurity generated by the “terrorist” threat
and by the terror experienced in urban centers, to which Latin
America serves as a powerful example. This is how the “precariat”
ceases to be revolutionary in order to join populism and fascism,
as its “insecurity” in the neoliberal form of “life” is threatened by
a much greater, uncontrollable, transcendent insecurity. Thus, it
seems best to ensure social insecurity by choosing strong regimes
that, with the violence of control, promise to protect against
METAPOLITICS 85
the uncontrollable violence, pointing toward the freedom of a

religious comfort in consumption.
The forms of censorship also change in the fascism of
ambiguity. The emptying of senses and, above all, the sense of
giving sense to sense generates a tremendous form of censorship
which is the sense censoring sense. The writer Bernard Nöel
suggested the term “sensure,” sensorship with s, in order to
express this new mode (Noël, 1990). This is a step beyond self-
censorship, which defines the fear of speaking, either for fear of
arrest or loss of a job, or for fear of hurting another or oneself.
The sensorship with s, where the sense censors sense, is enhanced
by the censoring methods of limitless and unpunished violence.
But what is surprising is how sensorship operates through the
proliferation of senses disseminated in social media, through the
unrestrained rhythm with which they acquire and lose meanings
and significations.
In the vertigo of sense being emptied of sense due to excess
sense, we witness daily the implosion of resistance fireflies,
which Brecht had also witnessed when he saw his critique
of businessmen ironically dressed as gangsters in his The
Threepenny Opera be highly appreciated by businessmen
because their “truth” was being presented in order to be
appreciated as it is (Arendt, 1973, p. 335). Was Pasolini right
that the resistance fireflies have completely disappeared from the
world’s landscape? How to resist today’s fascism if the concepts
used by antifascist politics are easily appropriated by the fascist

politics of ambiguation, such as the concepts “identity,” “race,” or
“rewriting” history? Or is it something more than to resist that is
in question? Isn’t to exist more at stake than to resist? Maybe one
should re-exist? What sense does existence have if not to expose
oneself to the openness of senses? The tragedy of the neo-fascism
of the ambiguity of senses, which establishes an unusual power,
the power of the emptiness of sense even and perhaps above all
of power itself—for power is both about the closing in within
coercion and the openness of the impossible in the possible—
means to confuse the openness of senses with the emptiness of
sense. With this, it becomes almost impossible to glimpse the
need to invent a mode of existence exposed to the openness of
senses without this being the same as living in the nonsense
of the senseless. Living under the sensorship of sense through
which contemporary fascism establishes itself and expands,
the difficult task of cultivating an art of “subtle distinctions” is
imposed, a task that even Kant, a philosopher so precious in his
distinctions, considered to exceed the competence of philosophy
(Kant, 1998). This task is mainly an art of listening in order to
discern the same from the same, to distinguish the ambiguity
that confuses every sense by obstructing the possible from the
ambiguity that interrupts the iron dogmatism of significations
in order to put in motion the creative work of thought and the
thought of the creation of senses. One of the great ambiguities
METAPOLITICS 87
is, in effect, that of ambiguity itself, that which lies between the
openness of senses and the emptiness of sense.
To be able to hear the vague and indeterminate, not as
deformed and emptied, but as form being formed, sense being
sensed, and the being of existence being and existing, is at stake.
And so to hear this vague of being as an exposing of oneself
from one-to-the-other, as one in-between-us, experienced as an
inbetweening and not as a space measured and controlled by an
“us” and a “you” tied up in fasces-fascist bundles of usurped,
denied, renamed, and manipulated senses. Thus, the society
of the spectacle of numerical connections—connections that
connect by destroying connections, relations that only relate
by interrupting relations, the society of automatic decisions
and invisible responsibility—exhibits the terror of destruction
that destroys the “inbetweening” of the in-between, of the
undetermined, vague, and open inbetweening of the one in-
between us, “between water and land, between silence and
word, between sleep and vigil,” to remember the verses of the
Russian poet Lev Rubinstein (2018). Guy Debord had insisted
that the only possible critique of the society of the spectacle and
the perfection of its censorship, which we are calling sensorship,
would be such an intense combination of theory and practice
that a critical theory could only be conceived as a “rigorous
practice” (Débord, 1994, p. 132). He also proposed that
“diversion is the fluid language of anti-ideology” (Débord, 2016,
p. 134). What in the 1970s could still present itself as a deviant

and resistant language today has become an instrument of even
more insidious misrepresentation. The mix of oppositions is
even more expansive today because we only find, everywhere,
the sameness of “cultural undifferentiation” and a tremendous
indifference to the extermination of so many lives, visible and
invisible, anonymous and anonymized lives.
The Precision of
Poetry: Orides Fontela
Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse. To live is not a precise

need, neither is sailing sufficient. One needs precisely to
learn to re-exist. For this, a politics of sense, of open senses, is
needed, where one could distinguish not the diverse, but what
is presented as the same. A politics of care for the language is
necessary, capable of observing nuances and minutiae, the
almost invisible distinctions that abysmally separate the same
from the equal, the leveling ambiguity that makes every sense
equivalent to any other of the living multivocity. A language of
precision fundamentally different from univocity is necessary,
a language capable of saying no without allowing itself to be
absorbed by what it needs to deny in order to exist, a language
that says “anti-” without slipping into mere antonyms, which
for standing out, allow the life of differentiation to slip by—the
power of becoming other, that needs to be maintained in each
one, as the power of “being singular plural”.1 This is the precision

of poetry that is not limited only to the poetry of the language
of words.2
It is in this sense that I would like to propose some precision
exercises. The first is a precision exercise of listening how poetry
is itself an indefatigable precision exercise, a “sweet flower of
precision, graceful, yet precise” as João Cabral de Melo Neto
never tired of saying (2003, p. 357).
Poetry is necessary. At this moment when we not only
confirm the emptying of words and senses but also witness
the techno-mediatic spectacle of this emptying removing
the possibility of speech and words making any sense, at this
moment, when sense is used against itself, when everywhere
sense becomes antisense, poetry becomes precisely necessary,
more than necessary. But how does one precise the precision
of poetry? By seeking the help of theory in order to propose
a theory of poetic precision? However, how does one develop
a theory of poetry? We know of numerous theories of
poetry: aesthetic, linguistic, political, psychological, stylistic,
structuralist, hermeneutic, materialistic, idealistic, contextual,
intertextual, and all the adjectives formed from the countless
“isms” of the history of ideas. By admitting that philosophy is
the theory of theory, would it then make more sense to consider
a philosophy of poetic precision?3 But however poetic a
philosophy or a theory may be, wouldn’t one always be looking
THE PRECISION OF POETRY: ORIDES FONTELA 91
for a realm outside poetry in order to precise the precision that

only belongs to poetry? And even if one attempted to elaborate
a poetics of precision, wouldn’t one be pushing poetry outside
or beyond itself? These questions highlight the difficult relation
between theory and poetry and ultimately between philosophy
and poetry. Much can be said of this relation and several
quotes from philosophers and poets about such a relation can
be recalled and discussed. But what a moment as extreme as
ours seems to claim is not so much the formulation of either
a theory, a philosophy, or a poetics of poetic precision, but
how to put in word the imprecise and painful coming to word,
and how to think not only about the senses of precision and
the precision of senses but also about the coming to sense of
a sense. It now seems to me more precisely necessary—in the
whirlwind of the vertiginous nonsense and ambiguity of senses
and words—to listen and follow with reflexive attention the
coming to sense of senses and the coming to word of words. For
perhaps it is in this putting in word of the coming to word and
thinking of the coming to sense of a sense, in this experience of
“source” and “open sore,” that it becomes possible to specify the
precision of the poetic word. Thus, instead of looking for the
final word, the full sense of a motion of saying and thinking, it
would be necessary to pay attention to the experience of how
the precision of the poetic word deals with the imprecision
of the search for the word, of how the precision of the poetic
sense faces the antisense of sense. Therefore, poetry would be a

lesson in relating to the anti-sense and the anti-word, a lesson in
dealing with the dissolution and emptying of words and senses,
a hard lesson in precision in a world rescinding, in every realm,
its contract as world. Such an exercise also requires another
type of theoretical text, a text with a distinct essayist character,
a type of writing that draws and outlines rather than paints and
configures—because the unspoken and unthought at stake are
themselves in motion, and not merely a veiled realm behind the
said and the thought.
In the poetry of Orides Fontela (2015), a poet still quite
unknown outside of her homeland Brazil, we find one of
the most extreme and intense lessons in precision that our
language knows. How to be a poet in times of dissemination
and usurpation not only of words and their senses, of senses
and their words, but also of existence itself, when one is at all
times close to giving up on life and reality? In a poem dated July
23, 1964, we read:
It tires me being. The numberless open sore

of myself scintillates; wordless, damp
red source of being, longing and tedious
to proceed, uninhabited, alive.
To continue. Oh, ignored presence

of being in me, secret and contingency,
mirror, shallow crystal, submerged

in the eternity of existence, still.
It tires me being. Oh, open sore and old dream

of golden transmutations and other lives
beyond me, beyond another life!
But it shapes my being. The essence holds me

(deep and truthful root) to the immutable
condition of being a source and open sore. (p. 293)
In the pain of the tiredness of being, in the boredom of the

difficulty of having to continue, at the moment when the definite
articles turn into a cry—“the open sore,” “oh, open sore,” one is
“wordless.” But in this “wordlessness,” one hears how, in this cry,
one cries “oh, the ignored presence of being in me,” the “secret
and contingency” of being, the “eternity of existence, still.” In
this cry of being within the cry of the tiredness of being, one
hears how the “dream of golden transmutations and other lives,
beyond me, beyond another life” is old. When discovering the
antiquity of this dream, one hears how it “shapes my being,” how
“the essence holds me (deep and truthful root) to the immutable
condition of being a source and open sore.” The poem speaks
of another sense of transformation that is no longer defined as
the search for “lives beyond me, beyond another life,” but to be
shaped by being, by the eternity of existence, of being held by
the immutable condition of being a source and open sore. Here

it speaks of another sense of resistance to the tiredness of being
and the boredom of continuing. Here:
Being is high agony, a difficult trial:

to self-overcome between metamorphoses
a living essence in extreme purity
striping away the spells, mists, myths. [. . .] (ibid., p. 292)
as another poem from the same period says. The resistance is to
“striping away the spells, mists, myths” of another life. It means
to plunge into the “purity of extreme contingency,” that of simply
being, “absolute being” that is only absolute because it is nothing
but being.
To simply be constitutes the “difficult trial,” the “high agony,”
where another sense of transformation that we are also calling
resistance becomes exposed. How can one articulate this other
sense? How can one articulate to simply be? In this trial and
agony of being, one is left “wordless,” a wordlessness that always
accompanies pain and its cries, “oh.” The precision of the poetic
word at the moment of the shattering of words and senses, when
nothing remains but being, which strips away every myth of
being beyond being, is fundamentally linked to the experience
of being “wordless.”
There are several ways of being “wordless.” Either in pain or in
love, words disappear and the cry of the unbearable or the groan
of ecstasy remains. One is wordless when everything is difficult

to say, either because everything is yet to be said or because there
is nothing left to say. In a poem titled “Say,” which is found in
Orides’ first book of poems, Transposition, written between 1966
and 1967, we hear:
Everything
shall be difficult to say:
the real word
is never tender.
Everything shall be hard:

merciless light
excessive experience
too much awareness of being.
Everything shall be
capable of hurting. It shall be
aggressively real.
so real that it shatters us.
There is no mercy in signs

or in love: being
is excessively lucid
and the word is dense and hurts us.
(Every word is cruelty) (ibid., p. 47)

The poem does not say that everything is difficult to say but
that everything “shall be” difficult to say. This future does not
speak of any future contemplated by the old dream of “golden
transformations,” of reaching a life beyond another life, a being
beyond being. It speaks of the strange future inherent in being,
a present future, difficult to articulate, impossible to conjugate
because the future is already “happened-being” (ibid., p. 87).
It speaks of the difficulty of saying when everything is in tune
with the experience of overcoming “that old dream” of an
afterlife which results in “getting real” [cair na real], a common
expression, which in Orides’ poetic language speaks of receiving
the “merciless light” of “excessive experience” of “too much
awareness of being.” In the merciless, excessive, and bright light
of that lived awareness of being, “everything” “shall be difficult
to say,” “everything shall be hard,” “everything shall be” “capable
of hurting” because “everything shall be aggressively real.” The
difficulty of articulating the real, overwhelming everything,
making everything aggressively real is the difficulty of saying the
“real word,” the one that “is dense and hurts us,” the real word
that “every word is cruelty.” The most tremendous difficulty is to
say the real word. Here emerges a precision of the precise poetic
word: that of being a real word and not a word about the real.
How can one distinguish the “real word” from a word about
the real? This distinction refers to the overcoming of a historical,
cultural, and civilizational and therefore habitual and ingrained
distinction between the word and the real. Every word is cruelty
because the word is real and not an unreality imposing itself on
the real or a second reality parallel to the real. In a poem also
from her first book Transposition, titled “Ode I,” we hear about
the clarity of such a cruelty:
The real? The word

human thing
humanity
penetrated the universe and behold, it delivers me
solely a rose. (ibid., p. 52)
The real appears as a question and the question “the real?”

is already the word as an inscription of the question. As an
inscription of the question of the real, each word always re-enacts
the cruelty of, in the word, as a word, from the word, the human
thing, humanity penetrating the universe and “behold,” in this
penetration, it delivers to each one “solely a rose,” the soleness of
a rose, the rose of soleness. The human word is cruel not because
it would be a convention, an ideality or immateriality pretending
to correspond to the real, a non-rose seeking an adequation
to the rose-thing. The cruelty of the word lies in being, in its
humanity, that is, in its testimony of human penetration into the
universe, the delivery of solely a rose. This penetration is real,
so aggressively real, as difficult to say as a rose. It is as much
rose as rose cannot be separated from its name. And if human
penetration into the universe is violent, it is not because it takes

the rose from its infant innocence, without speech, name, or
word, but, precisely, because it murders the name of the rose, the
name of the flower. This is what another poem from Transposition
titled “Rose” says:
I murdered the name

of the flower
and the same flower complex form
I simplified in the symbol
(but without eliding the blood)
However if solely
the word FLOWER – the word
is humanity itself
how to further express what
is, living, nonverbal density?
(The ex-rose, twilight

horizon)
I murdered the word

And my hands are full of, living, blood (ibid., p. 49).
The poem tells us about the word FLOWER. The word

FLOWER, in capital letters, speaks both of the word flower and
of the word as a flower. The murder perpetrated by the human
penetration into the universe is the killing of the power of words’

names, the power of the word being a flower. Humanity does not
murder things, the flowers, the roses of the real, but the thing,
the flower, the rose of words and names. Humanity is a murderer
of language. And this logocide begins with the belief that the
word itself belongs only to humanity. In this belief, it becomes
impossible to “further express what is, living, nonverbal density”;
the flower-being of words or the word-being of flowers. Thus,
rose becomes ex-rose, and yet, hence the parenthesis, “twilight,
horizon,” the loss of its dawn, the dawn that Homer described
as “rose-fingers,” ῥοδοδάκτυλος. The rose, as present in Orides’
poetry, and explicitly linked to the dawn as in the poem Dawn
from the 1986 book Rosette, says:
Rose, roses. The first color.

Roses that horses
Trample. (ibid., p. 221)
the rose of roses, trampled by the horses, confirms that human

violence does not act directly on things but rather on the human
to compel it to spur horses upon the roses. The rose of the words’
fingers and the blood of the living hands of its murderer expose the
root of the anti-sense and the anti-word that overwhelms us today
as the illusion of language being about the real and not of the real.
In the experience of language as being of the real, the real
proves to be anti-real. This is not merely a formal inversion: what
was once ideal is now treated as real and vice versa. What is shown
here is how the difference between human and universe, between
language and thing, between thought and reality, narrated as an
ancient myth against myth, is discovered to be the fold of a fan. It
is as if history had not noticed that the presumed fissure between
the ideal and the real was nothing more than the fold of a fan.
In one of the Fan poems found in the 1973 book Helianthus, we
hear that:
[. . .]
IV
Step by step
(fan opening)
gesture on gesture
(fan opening) weaving
the anti-rose and its splendor
absolute
gesture.
Cultivates (cult)
In act extreme
Splendid
presents (apprehends)
the arid summit
vertical light
extreme
VI
Re-discovery:
the lovegaze
apprehends
THAT
VII
Open fan. O(h)

Real
– the insoluble real
only presence. (ibid., pp. 112–13)
Far from fissure or scission, the real emerges here as a fan

opening, showing differences such as folds and pleats, “step by
step,” “gesture on gesture” where what used to be called “cult”
appears as cultivate, what before was spoken of as “apprehend”
is now revealed as to present itself and what was rose emerges as
“anti-rose,” “splendor,” “absolute,” “gesture.” No longer the rose
against the word rose, but the fold of the real, of the “insoluble
real,” folding endlessly in presences only. “Anti-rose” speaks of

only the insoluble real present, the re-discovery that apprehends
THAT in capital letters, that rose is and not what a rose is. That
being is and not what being is, thus speaks the real language.
Only the insoluble real present, the anti-rose presents itself as a
fold in the omega circle of the real, written with capital O(h), the
circle, in the poem Circle, is explained as follows:
The circle
is astute:
it curls up
autophagically involves.
After
explodes
– galaxies! –
opens up
living
Pulsates
Multiplies
circledivinity
perplexed
(perverse?)
the unicircle
devouring
everything. (ibid., p. 356)
The word anti-rose does not separate the rose from what
it is not, but through the “lovegaze,” it rediscovers the rose as
only a presence, as a fold in the fan “autophagically” opening
from the real, “devouring everything.” “Being is enough for
the rose: /everything rests in it,” as the verses of Rest say,
another poem from Helianthus (ibid., p. 151). The “anti” of
anti-rose does not deny but affirms, presents, puts the rose
before its splendor of absolute gesture, as if in a mirror.
A poem from Transposition, titled Poem II, makes this sense
explicit by saying:
To be in the mirror
deterred flow
ante-oneself
lucidity. (ibid., p. 40)
This is the “anti” of “ante” or “before,” [diante] showing

another sense of denial and resistance, which is the very sense
of showing, appearing, presenting, or exposing oneself. Orides’
poetry is full of these “anti”: the poem Anti-Caesar, which
rediscovers the story in the following verses: “I didn’t come/I
didn’t see/there was no war” (ibid., p. 246); the poem Antigenesis,
which rediscovers a beginning no longer as parting or the parted

and separated but as:
Dome par
ted
the heavens
rupture.
Solved Earth. Life ends. O(h)
Breath
Reabsorbed
and the mighty dark

water
sips
the
Light. (ibid., p. 277)4
The parting and the parted with which we represent the

beginning, be it as a departure from non-being toward being,
as the separation of a unit, or the expulsion from a paradisiacal
rest, is re-discovered here as an even dome, a paired dome, and
when the heavens rupture, the Earth emerges solved and life
ends because Heaven and Earth are distinguished as a breath
that is reabsorbed, and the mighty dark water sips the light in
such a manner that sipping is light. And always this capital O(h),
the omega circulating the breath of the real; and there is also a
whole cycle called The Anti-bird, which sings of a bird whose

“nest is stone,” a bird that “weighs,” that “resists the skies,” that
“endures,” “despite.”
The re-discovery that the rose, the Caesar, the genesis, and the
bird of the “anti” sing and tell of, is always spelled with a hyphen,
which more than a separation that unites or a trace of union that
separates, indicates an active of “gesture on gesture,” of “step by
step,” an open sore and suffering patience, almost a laboratory
work, where
We dis-arm the fact

to – patiently
re-generate the structure
being born of what

merely happens.
We re-make life.
as in the poem Laboratory (ibid., p. 36), also included in

Transposition. The real word is a dis-armed word, re-generated
because it is the word of “being born of what/simply happens,”
a word of life simply re-made of being. Re-discovering thus
how the real is anti-real, the real of simply being, of being
born of what simply happens; the real word, the one that is
not about the real but of the real, becomes detached from the
form, or rather, from the sense of form, to re-discover itself as
“simply a balance of rhythms,” to “live the pure/uninhabitable

act” (ibid., p. 35).
[ . . . .]
Detained fluency of being; form
– simply a balance of rhythms.
[. . .]. (ibid., p. 148)
The cruel, real word, speaks the harsh precision of words

continually transposed, one touching the other, one folding the other
in the opening of the fan of the real. Throughout Orides’ work, we
hear countless words formed from touching each other, touch, not
only in the sense of contiguity and juxtaposition but a sense passing,
like a bird of what-happens, of the instant-happening of being: thus,
a vocabulary is born, a vocabulary of the lightinstant [instanteluz],
colorinstants [coresinstantes], fluxuniverse [universofluxo],
experienceflowerchant [cantoflorvivência], neofluent [novifluente],
fragmentsvoices [vozesfragmentos], redsky [vermelhocéu],
timepresence [presençatempo], lovegaze [olharamor], shestar
[elaestrela], sheflower [elaflor], flowerinstant [florinstante],
oscillateshines [oscilafulge], infancytime [tempoinfância], bodynave
[corponave], selfinterimpregnate [interfecundar-se], tremblelight
[tremeluzir], circledivinity [divindadecircle], unicircle [unicircle],
experienceyes [olhosvivências]. The real word is cruel because it
precises the imponderable imprecision of the lightinstant, the one
where everything oscillates “between north and orient” (ibid.,
p. 126), “between north and nothingness” (ibid.) but it does so in

this “tremblelight,” “neofluent” oscillation, like traces in the air,
scribbles in the sky, graffiti on the water, the happening of being.
The precision of the poetic word comes from listening
attentively to the rhythmic balance of the instant, the “detained
fluency of being.” This is the precision of a gaze surprised by the
instant, trapped by this surprise, discovering in the instant a
“tranquil stone,” as we hear in an Ode (II) from Alba (1983):
The surprise-instant: birds

crossing the silence
the
surprised
instant: shells
enameled, still
the instant
this tranquil stone. (ibid., p. 212)
The life of experience is re-created in this lesson in precision,

in which poetry articulates the inaccurate of the oscillation
“between north and orient,” the “tranquil stones,” and the
“enameled shells” of the instant. One learns to re-exist. Thus,
instead of looking for remnants of sense in order to resist the
deviation from the emptying of words and senses due to the
excess of senseless words and insanity full of words, poetic
precision speaks the language of re-existence, a language

that pronounces itself on the borderline, when existence is
“wordless,” with senses on the tip of the tongue, and “under
the tongue” sheltering “the knowledge that the mouth tastes/
the mortal flavor of the word.” “Everything shall be difficult to
say” not because everything has been said or because there is
nothing more to say but because everything is yet to be said, at
the tip of the tongue, under the tongue when existence is almost
desisting from existing. Poetic precision calls for very hard and
cruel, difficult, and rough training, which means “knowing the
silence by heart,” listening to the oscillating movement of the
coming to word of words, the tremblelight of senses coming
to sense, sustaining oneself in the oscillation between “north
and nothingness” where “the mighty fragile happening” (ibid.,
p. 70) of a word contained in silence, felt in thought, “the word
overcome and forever inexhaustible” (ibid., p. 93) may happen.
This is the laboratory in which life is re-made and one learns to
re-exist when one accepts that
Life is the one that has us: we have

Nothing more. (ibid., p. 369)
In the experience that there is no being beyond being, there

is no life beyond life, that we have nothing but life having us,
that being is enough and that everything shall be difficult to say,
everything shall be hard, everything shall be/capable of hurting,
one learns to re-exist in the light of the instant, the one that never
tires of teaching that
The open
lives
open sore and/or

star
is
eternal.
The open
shines
destroys walls
intense and free
Love. (ibid., p. 397)
110
Precision Exercise I I
Listening to the
Ligatures of the
Present
Throughout this essay, attention was drawn to how information

technologies, which produce the digital world’s virtual reality,
are hyperconnectivity technologies, which, due to their own
structure and dynamics, disconnect individuals from their
singularity. This essay also insisted on how the dynamo of
financial techno-mediatic capitalism, of technoplanetarism
and its neoliberalism lies in establishing relationless relations,
bondless bonds, and connectionless connections. We live in
a world of continuous connections and links. Everything is
connected and connections can be easily established. But one
of the conditions of this continuous and limitless connection
is that nobody becomes the binding that each one as existent
already is. Being a binding is not the same as having or making
connections. Constitutive bindings are continually uprooted,

massacred, and destroyed by a production regime that tends
to produce more and more productions. Uprooting indigenous
peoples from their lands, a people from their history, the unique
life of their experience and memory, are common “practices”
of a process of continuous expropriation and appropriation,
which accompanies modern history and today is spreading
at every level of individual and collective, social, and cultural
existence, in what we are used to describing as globalization.
These are not only fragmentation and dissemination practices,
but also socialization, which de-socialize and a-socialize. This
is in addition to one of the principal techniques of totalitarian
regimes that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.
One of the characteristics of totalitarian terror was to implement
a collective practice that isolated individuals by desingularizing
them, forcing them to identify themselves fusionally with
the dictator and with the dynamics of collectivization. But no
totalitarian regime has been as effective as the world of digital
connections. Practices of breaking the bonds with existence are
at play, which disconnect the bonds not only with the past and
the future, but above all with the present. Alienation today does
not mean not being able to see the present or how the past and
the future interconnect with the present. It means to experience
such an exacerbated present here and now so that the present
becomes disconnected from the present, thus reducing the
LIGATURES OF THE PRESENT 113
revolutionary force of the past to stereotypical images and forcing

the openness of the future to empty itself into phantasmagoria.
This means the loss of the present as it loses itself in the here and
now. The most disorienting sense today is the one that confuses
the present with the here and now and the presence with the
factuality of things at hand.
The question of how to act and how to resist grows in the
face of the derangement strategically implemented by the
fascism of ambiguity. But considering the dynamics of a more
than contradictory world, woven into the inextricable knot of
ambiguity, the world where those who have their eyes gouged
out are also those who gouge eyes out, the world of voluntary
servitude to the tyranny of the one and the diversified same
everywhere, where could one find the point where disperse
elements bind and become a dissidence from a world-condition
that keeps repeating itself to such an extent that the forms
of resistance to that condition eventually reproduce such a
condition? How does one break this endless repetition and
reproduction of oneself? And furthermore, how does one define
the common binding, that of the commons, which does not fall
into fusional identifications? How does one de-identify oneself
from the desire to fusionally identify oneself?
To think about these issues, we need a politics of listening
and of voice, which allows the re-existing force of singularity to
resonate in the emptiness and hollow of senses, the one that opens
the space between us. But where to find and how to define this
common “bind” if not in the space between the countless selves
that form the selves of the common? How does one conceive of
this living and pulsating space between of the in-between us? To
this end, I would like to propose a second precision exercise for
the conceptual outline attempted here, by importing a technical
concept from music: ligature. To import a musical concept is
to import the fundamental experience of listening and of the
materiality of a sound. This starts from a need or necessity, the
need to exercise listening to the binding of and to the present
and the present as a togetherness with the past and the future,
which does not pass through images and figures, contents and
significations. In music, relations are related to relations. Music
is embodied binding in each of its elements and aspects. And
music is the experience of the figureless, which is perhaps the
only possible figure of the presence of the present becoming the
present.
What is, to bind? To bind has many senses. We are bound with
things and people. We bind in the sense of being attentive and
touched. To bind, conjoin, or connect is perceiving, realizing,
becoming aware, and paying attention. We connect lights and
cables. The body is made of joining ligaments, bundles of fibers
that twin the human body not only to the animal world but
also to the plant world. We know of amicable and love binding
relations as well as of connecting ties. To bind is also the primary
sense of the Greek word logos, which also means language

and reason. Logos is the binding relation between relations, a
word that was also used in one of the first treatises on music
in ancient Greece to designate what we now call the musical
interval, the relationship between sounds. Not every relation
binds and a binding relation is something that may or may
not happen. Marcel Proust went so far as to say that a novel is
like mayonnaise: sometimes it thickens, binds, and sometimes
not. In this sense, a binding relation also refers to the way in
which dissidence was understood, at the time when that term
became well-known and disseminated within the context of
protest movements in Eastern European countries against the
iron domination of the Soviet regime. In Czechoslovakia, for
example, which experienced a significant dissident movement,
very distinct, more and less politicized people, with different
political desires and cultural habits, came together against
Soviet repression when the rock group, The Plastic People of
the Universe [PPU], the most representative group of the Czech
underground, was arrested and censored. It was this event that
generated the binding relation, which made the Czech people’s
dissent against the occupation intensify. In 2013, in Brazil, the
increase in bus fares provided a binding relation among some
part of the people with the fascist right and the defense of wild
neoliberalism. A similar increase in Chile made the left bind
together, for a widespread critique of neoliberalism. This notion
of binding relation, of connecting, which historically is associated

with the concept of dissidence, follows a different dynamic than
a decision. Perhaps it would be worth trying a new verb here,
the verb “to diside,” which follows the dynamic of resonance
and propagation of a sound and light wave. To “diside” is not
the same as to dissent. It means to get into a dislocated position
through a binding that suddenly takes form in the middle of a
process. It is therefore no wonder that music has played such an
important role in becoming the “link” of apparently dispersed
people in so many contemporary revolutions that may be better
conceived as dissidences, from the Prague Spring to the Arab
Spring. The Arab Spring, which counts as a revolutionary wave
that emerged on social media does not speak only in “favor” of
social media as a means of liberation; even if its meaning can be
discussed, if it has or not been orchestrated, etc. it speaks mainly
of a type of sound propagation and resonance because it was a
song that generated the “link.”
However, we should not forget that binding relations
presuppose separation. This does not mean that it is only
possible to bind what is separate, because it is possible and also
necessary to relate to relations, to bind to bonds, to connect
to what is connected, to bind togetherness. It is in this context
that I propose to import the musical concept-term ligature in
order to listen to the realm of resonating and propagating not
only sounds but especially the voices of sound and the sounds of
voices. With this concept, an attempt is made at displacing the

mere register of reasonings, discourses, and speeches, as well as
the dynamics of meanings and significations. An urban graffiti,
posted on the Internet, of a verse by the Brazilian activist and
musician Marcelo Yuka, reads: “peace without a voice is not
peace, it’s fear.”
The voice sings and speaks against fear. The voice knows not
only places but also the strangeness of the place of place because
today the place is also placeless. A powerful and beautiful
contemporary oeuvre—beauty is not harmony, it is the force of
an irruption—in the Brazilian theatrical scene is by Grace Passô,
particularly Vaga Carne.1 It is the staging of the voice entering a
woman’s body, the voice looking at the world, the voice entering
the words, the voice that is the inside-out in the outside-in—of
entering into things, of different forms of life, of the emptiness of
the air, of the hollow of openings and craters in the living world,
and of the world as vague flesh. In this work, the voice is a voice,
just that, a mode of existence that invades matter.
I am a voice, that’s all. And even though I know that you do

not believe in this type of existence, which is not human, I
have come here, to utter sounds from your limited languages;
languages that don’t decide. They don’t decide whether to
say what they write, or whether to write what they say. I am
communicating with the words of a human animal, because
you are so selfish, so selfish that you only understand your own
languages. I could communicate in Morse Code, inaudible
sounds, magnetic waves, or whatever. You think my existence
doesn’t exist, but you need to know that voices do exist. And
they invade matter. And they are voracious for matter.
(Passô, 2018, p. 17)
What mode of existence is that of the voice? The voice that is a

vibrant sound that makes one vibrate; which is neither an inside
nor an outside, but an inside-out in the outside-in and vice versa,
flesh more than body or body more than body. The voice endows
voice to the mode of existence of sound. It is a very strange mode
of existence because, by its very “nature,” it is refractory to the
image and its figurations of visibility. The voice of sound and the
sound of the voice resist visibility, even though sounds may be
converted into images, even when sounds may be seen through
their colors, as Alexander Scriabin did when building his color
keyboard, to sound in his work Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.2
In addition, sound has a voice because it is in itself several
sounds at the same time, neither mixing nor juxtaposing, but
diverse in itself, which was the delirious discovery of the Orphic
Pythagoreans, already ancestrally known by ancestral African
and Eastern tribes and peoples. A musical sound, which we
hear as a unit, as this note and not another, is already a series
of what is called in English “harmonics,” a designation that
confuses more than elucidates, as it encompasses understanding

within the realm of the harmonious. “Harmonic” translates
the phenomenon of supra-tones, which includes sub-tones,
since a sound is already the resonance of several sounds.
Certain traditional singers in Africa and Vietnam, for example,
manage to sing three to four notes at the same time, sounding
the harmonics or supra-tones of a sound at certain points of
the vocal chords. The voice is the singularity of the sounds of
plurality in action, being active and passive, interior and exterior
at the same time, the times of several times, the rhythm of the
rhythmic syncopes of life.
The sound, the voice—this existence that is from the inside-
out in the outside-in, one in the other, is, in its own materiality,
both resistant to the visible figurative of the forms formed, as well
as to the unitary one, individualized, atomized. Being in itself
multiple and diverse, being the one that is more than one in the
one, which is, the sound, each sound, each sound of the voice,
is already a binding relation. In the sonorous experience, there
is no “unity,” since each “unity” is already a finite multiplicity,
resonance, and propagation of the self within itself. The binding
relation of musical elements, in the various dimensions of music,
is by definition a relation of relations.
The musical concept of ligature presents us with a few signs
in the recording of sound, in the mode of existence that is sound
and voice. Ligature is a sign from musical writing, a graphic
sign, a musical graffiti. It is a written mark that introduces a new

kind of inscription that is nonetheless fluid and dependent on
context. It is a line that binds and connects notes. It emerges with
the very emergence of musical notation during the development
of plainchant, “but was also the way in which troubadours
notated their songs: as if this music of love and longing required
a new vocabulary of conjoining connection.”3 Neumes, the signs
of early notations in medieval music, did not spell out exact
notes and rhythms but were almost like notations of breathing
(pneuma, in Greek), notations of the sounds, rhythms, and
resonances coming to the voice. The vertical lines that bind the
neumes are the first ligature notations, binding the movements.
In medieval scores, we see a notation of sound movement rather
than a succession of independent notes. Thus, a syllable was
sung with different sounds, forming what is called melisma and
melismatic lines. Here there is no bar, there is no measure of the
notes; the measures arise from the flow and movement of the
voice entering the words. There is no tonality either; this music
is modal.
In modern classical music, when musical notation starts from

measure bars, from quantified notes, from more fixed rhythmic
and melodic structures, or from specific harmonic rules, of the

tonal system, ligatures are shown as arched lines.4
In music theory, modern ligature and legato can assume three

different functions but are always joined together. One can speak
of duration ligature, which without extending the notes, without
changing the value of their duration, indicates the joining together
between the notes in a succession, as the binding between the
currently sounding note mixing with the beginning of the next
note. In this case, the currently sounding and the beginning-to-
sound are played together. From the point of view of duration,
the ligature does not make one note last more or less than the
other, but it does indicate the sound of listening to the passage
from one note to another when both are played, so to speak. In
vocal music, the duration ligature indicates that a syllable is to be
sung over more than one note, detaching the movement of music
from being chained to the syllabic structure of the words, and
thereby rendering possible a kind of musical release. The ligature
can also indicate how the notes are articulated. One can speak
here of articulation ligature. In this case, it indicates how when
passing from one note to another, the notes are distinguished at

the very moment of their inter-sounding. It is the binding of notes
that allows each note to sound. Finally, ligature also represents
expression. One can speak of expression ligature, which does
not mean the marking of some accent, either strong or weak, or
intonation, but expressiveness in the conduction of the phrase,
which ignores the rules, but comes from listening to the music
itself. Duration, articulation, and expression ligatures are so
intrinsically bound that it is difficult to make clear distinctions
between them. They are dimensions of the way sounds, which
are resonant binds and binding resonances, bind and resonate
in music.
In the field of theory, every conceptual transposition from
one area to another—here transposing music into a conceptual
essay of a philosophical nature and with a focus on a political
issue—must be done cum grano salis, with care, because in this
transposition one can easily lose both the technical sense of its
origin and the phenomenon to be understood. The distinction
between these three senses of sound ligature can, however, help
us to sketch out an understanding of the ways the present binds
to the present. The duration ligature can guide a listening to how
the present is bound to the past; the articulation ligature to how
the present is bound to the present; and the expression ligature to
how the present is bound to the future. It is, however, important
not to forget that the present is already a binding with the past
and the future, the one in itself differentiated, a sole-resonance

of passing, carrying the already-past and the yet-to-pass, in a
visceral binding. Hence, one ligature cannot bind separately
from the other.
The present is always passing, binding past and future in the
memory. Much is said today about the return of the repressed
past, the forgetfulness of the past as a way of repressing and
controlling the revolutionary force of the past or as a desire to
return—the nostalgia for the past—nostalgia for the dictatorship
but also nostalgia for the forms of resistance to dictatorship, for the
lack of future, of horizons of change. But in all these discussions,
there is a tendency to forget that the past is not something that is
no longer present, and thus can be forgotten or remembered; the
past is not just a content, an image, a signification that becomes
absent and distant, declining into oblivion, in order to be able
to resurface, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The past is also
the indelible memory of a movement that does not pass, the
movement of passing that does not cease to pass. Therefore,
the past not only passes, but it also grows. The past grows and
ferments. Thus, it never returns as it was, but always displaced
from itself, in a differentiated repetition of itself. In the panic
of finding ourselves condemned to an endless repetition that
confines and isolates us in an immanence without outside,
without opening to an other, by listening to how sound repetitions
of past sounds gradually dislocate, makes evident much about
the ligatures between the present and the past. An example is the
piece Come out, by American composer Steve Reich,5 composed
in 1966, which uses the voice of one of the six young blacks from
Harlem arrested for the murder of Margit Sugar, a Hungarian
refugee, who opens the piece with the fragment “come out to
show them” from the phrase: “I had to, like, open the bruise up,
and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them” to the
police. Reich recorded the fragment in two channels that first
sounded in unison but gradually the two “voices” start to sound
apart, and through a continuous loop, the same voice repeated
without interruption forms numerous repeated voices until it is
no longer possible to discern what is being said thus allowing
the power of the rhythm and the sound of the sounding words
to sound.
One of the most difficult ligatures to hear, however, is
the ligature between the present and the present, the very
articulation of the present, as the contemporary world severs
the binds with the past and the future by severing the binds of
the present with the present, when the present sinks into the
here and now of consuming consumption. Listening brings the
present into its own presence, the presence of the voice sounding
while it sounds, the listening of being and existing, not as this or
that, not like this or otherwise, but simply of being in being. This
is the very experience of sound touching us, of the voice that
is the inside-out in the outside-in and vice versa, touching us.
Listening listening and seeing seeing make appearing appear in

the event of that instant. To bind to the is-being means to bind to
what has no form or figure, it means to bind to being passing and
not to being having already passed and not yet having passed.
The difficulty is in becoming aware of how this articulation
ligature is a breathing ligature that, when taking a breath,
makes the transforming force of being, of existing, without
predications, appear. This being, without reason or why, a pure
donation of life, is what no gesture of appropriation is capable
of appropriating; it is what exceeds all anyzation, capitalization,
instrumentalization, and representation. Clarice Lispector, the
great thinker of the is-being, of the gerundive of being, did not
tire of being astonished at the fact that existence exists.
From the ligature between the present and the present, one can
glimpse the dimension of the ligature between the present and
the future, which unlike the past, has no figures, images, remains,
vestiges, or fossils. The yet-to-come, as Paul Valéry insisted, is by
definition imageless. It is neither figurative nor abstract, and I
do not mean abstract in the logical sense, but in the pictorial
sense of the term. The ligature with the non-image of the future
is an expression ligature that does not project figurative images
and past forms already formed, together with desires for the
hollow of the present, upon the blank canvas of the future. The
ligature between the present and the future, which we are calling
expression ligature in this precision exercise, is more a ligature
with the possibility of the possible than with possibilities thought

from predetermined potentialities. Therefore, yes and no are at
play. Another piece that works with the creative ambiguity of yes
and no is the play JaNe Duette (2004) by Rodolfo Caesar who, by
looping Joseph Beuys saying Ja, ne, yes, no, sounded the echo of
yes in no and of no in yes.
In this precision exercise, a conceptual line was sought to
think about the need to listen to the binds of today with the is-
being of existence, a listening to the sounding sound, the sound
of sounding, an openness of image and form, an openness that is
radically distinguished, but always narrowly, from the formless
and imageless anyzation of each form of life and existence. As
John Cage once remarked, these are “lines that must be read
in one breath [but that] are printed separately [. . .]. These
operations or ligatures are not determined by chance, but are
decided by improvisations” (Cage, 1987, p. 79). These are the
ligatures that allow the movements and passages to sound
interbeing more precisely, an in-between experienced as an
active verb, as inbetweening. In listening to the inbetweening, it
is possible to perceive how the present is bound to the is-being
of existence. An in-between which allows an in-between-us to
appear and resonate, capable of sharing the openness of senses
and opening space for the resonance of the voice, life’s mode of
existence in the bodies of the world. Only multivocation may
challenge ambiguation.
By Way of Conclusion
A conceptual essay cannot present a conclusion. Its gesture is

an opening for more reflections and discussions, toward the
unsaid and unthought. The effort of this essay was to sketch out
questions, lines of thought, listening paths, and ways of saying
that allow us to glimpse the precision of interexisting and not
of fusing and merging, which warns of the danger of allowing
ourselves to entwine around the bronze ax that today wants to
separate world-emptied life from the open world of life. I see
the new form of fascism as the way techno-mediatic capitalism
works, in which senses and values are emptied due to their
hyperbolic auxesis. Fascism is necropolitics, the politics that
replaces and occupies the desire for transformation with the
politics of extermination, replacing the everything must change
with an everything must end as soon as possible. Its most potent
weapon is to turn every sense and value equivalent, each thing
into any thing, nullifying differences and exterminating by
naturalizing hatred of the other as a force for transformation
and presence of the possible in the devastated real. Against

this necropolitics, there remains a politics of senses, of poetic
precision, of listening, and of the voice, a tireless exercise of
endowing words to the coming to words, of giving sense to the
coming to sense, of thinking the coming to thought, and thereby
experiencing the binds of the present to the is-being of existence,
and discovering in the is-being, the uncontrollable force of
re-existence.
NOTES
Preface
1 A first version of some of the thoughts proposed here was presented
in a lecture given in November 2019 in the Artepensamento cycle,
organized by Adauto Novaes, which had the relevant title “Still in
the storm.” The published version of this talk can be found in Adauto
Novaes (ed.) Ainda sob a tempestade (2020). Some examples of the
ambiguity here in question were gathered in Luisa Buarque and Marcia
Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Desbolsonário de bolso (2019). A Portuguese
version of the now elaborated version in English is published by
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. O fascismo da ambiguidade (Riode
Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 2021).
2 “Fundir-se ou entreser-se.” Fernando Pessoa, Textos filosóficos, vol. I,

Estabelecidos e prefaciados por António de Pina Coelho, Lisboa: Ática,
1968 (imp. 1993):36.
3 “L’avenir par définition n’a point d’image. L’histoire lui donne les
moyens d’être pensé,” Paul Valéry. Oeuvres, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard,
1960), p. 917.
Chapter 1
1 These quotes were taken from the official translation of the entry,
published by the fascist government and available here: http://www.
worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm
2 Joseph de Maistre is the older brother of Xavier de Maistre, author

of the famous book Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), an author
130 NOTES
whose work greatly influenced the modern novel and, in Brazil, the
work of Machado de Assis.
3 http://guianegro.com.br/oito-monumentos-racistas-em-sao-paulo/
Chapter 2
1 Edgar Julius Jung was also critical of the form that Nazism had taken,
as he did not consider it radically conservative.
2 That which encompasses theoretical and applied sciences. [T.N.]
3 I am especially grateful to Adauto Novaes for the suggestion of this

surprising text by Valéry, which, despite decades of reading Valéry’s
work, had gone unnoticed!
Chapter 3
1 Even before the book that Didi-Huberman refers to in his book, Nancy
Mangabeira Unger, without even knowing Pasolini’s texts, had already
discussed the “perplexity of fireflies,” in the book O Encantamento do
Humano (SP. Ed. Loyola, 2000).
2 For an article in Italian about Pasolini’s trip to Brazil: http://www.

centrostudipierpaolopasolinicasarsa.it/pagine-corsare/la-vita/altre-
geografie/ppp-in-brasile-nel-1970-un-viaggio-e-la-poesia-gerarchia/
Chapter 4
1 Marielle Franco, born 1979, was a Black Brazilian politician,
sociologist, feminist, and human rights activist murdered with several
shots on March 14, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro.
NOTES 131
2 I thank Patrick Pessoa for such a precision.
3 In some texts I published previously, I suggested the verb “to

whatsoever,” “whatsoevering.” But maybe anyzation can render my
point more clearly here. See my article “The Lacuna of Hermeneutics”
in Research in Phenomenology, 51 (2021).
4 On the affective value of use-value, see the beautiful letter from Rainer
Maria Rilke of November 13, 1925 to Witold von Hulewicz and
the commentary by Giorgio Agamben in, “Marx; or, The Universal
Exposition” in: Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
(Minnesota: University Of Minnesota Press; First edition, November
17, 1992) and also George Simmel. Die Philosophie des Geldes
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).
5 See Georges Bataille’s discussions on “Nietzsche and fascism,”
in: Oeuvres Complètes by G. Bataille, and also Jean Baudrillard’s
discussions. The System of Objects, 9th edn. (NY: Verso; January
17, 2006).
6 Karl Mannheim had already learned in 1929 that the control of

the collective unconscious was at stake. What he did not realize
was that it was not only the repressed and sublimated unconscious
contents to be controlled but also the very form of the unconscious
in the unconsciousness of the form, which, under Walter Benjamin’s
inspiration and his notion of “optical unconscious,” I propose to
call “formal unconscious.” See Karl Mannheim. Ideoloie und Utopie,
9th edn. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, [1929]–2015),
pp. 30–49.
7 See the interpretation by Giorgio Agamben of this brief text by

Benjamin in: Creazione e anarchia. L’opera nell’età della religione
capitalista (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2017), pp. 115–32.
8 Perhaps the relevance of the Deridean formulation of “religionless

religion” has never been so clear, which, in its Blanchotian
reverberation, has the ambiguity of being a statement of how religion
today is empty of religiosity and even that religion may only become
religiosity if separated from religion.
132 NOTES
9 See entry “cult” in the Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, ed.

Heinrich Fries (Munchen: DTV Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970).
10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HgDUgMmROE
Chapter 5
1 See K. Jaako and J. Hintikka. “Aristotle on the Ambiguity of

Ambiguity,” in: Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy,
2: 1959, pp. 137–51 and Barbara Cassin’s considerations in L’Effect
sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 348–55.
2 On the creative sense of ambiguity, see A. de Waehlens. A philosophie

de l’ambiguité. L’ existentialisme de Merleau-Ponty (Louvain:
Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1951) and Simone de Beauvoir.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Open Road Media, 2018).
3 For Bauman ambivalence and ambiguity are synonymous, see Zygmut

Bauman. Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
4 Julia Kristeva. Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University

Press; 1991).
5 Nuno Ramos saw this clearly in his chronicle in Folha de São Paulo,
May 3, 2020.
“I read the following question on the Internet: how does a fascist lie?
Well, he does not lie—he belies. He belies what he said and accuses
us of saying it for him. He creates an echo chamber in which the
energy of what he said, of his verbal ‘act,’ has already been lost, and it
is in this very loss that he invests. A fascist lies without grammar, not
out of ignorance (erring in grammar is never a problem), but because
he needs a linguistic dispersion that borders on the unintelligible
and where, although the sense of what he says is clear (for example,
‘a coup’), the opposite will also be meant, in a lateral and apparently
meaningless little phrase, so that it can be rescued, if necessary. More
than falsehood, the fascist lie is a case of cowardice.”
6 Terreiro is the house of worship of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé.

NOTES 133
Chapter 6
1 Pierre André Taguieff, French sociologist dedicated to the question of
racism and anti-racism, who wrote a lot about the French New Right
and de Benoist, speaks of “Republican Metapolitics,” without however
defining the term. See, Pierre André Taguieff. The Force of Prejudice:
On Racism and Its Doubles (Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001).
2 Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier. “Manifest: La nouvelle

Droite de l’an 2000.” https://www.revue-elements.com/produit/la-
nouvelle-droite-de-lan-2000-version-pdf/
3 For a philosophical discussion about megalopolis and megalopolitics,

see Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991), pp. 191–204.
4 In a significant study on the constitution of the Weimar Republic

and on the doctrine of immediate democracy, where he discusses the
juridical-political question of the referendum as a legal instrument
to oppose representative democracy to immediate democracy, Carl
Schmitt states that the “original phenomenon” [Urphänomen] of
democracy, as suggested by Rousseau, is acclamation. Carl Schmitt.
“Volkentscheid und Volksbegehren. Ein Beitrag zur Auslegung der
Weimarer Verfassung und zur Lehre vonder unmittelbaren Demokratie”
in: Beiträge zum ausländischen öffentlichen Recht und Völkerrecht, Heft
1 (Berlin/Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1927).
1 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural (Syanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
2 I am grateful to Gabriel Itkes-Sznap for the enlightening discussions

on poetic precision, to which I have been able to participate, as his
advisor to his doctoral thesis on the topic. I consider important to
134 NOTES
distinct precision from exactitude leaving the latter to natural sciences

and the realm of its probabilities.
3 See Jean-Luc Nancy. “Fazer, a poesia,” in: Alea Estudos Neolatinos

15(2): 414–22, December, 2013.
4 See also the poem Genesis, ibidem, 147.
Precision Exercise II
1 For a beautiful critique of Vague Flesh, see Patrick Pessoa. http://www.
questaodecritica.com.br/2016/10/vaga-carne/#more-6068
2 This is a link to a page with various sounds-colors visualization

instruments. http://homepage.tinet.ie/~musima/visualmusic/
visualmusic.htm
3 Thanks Peter Hanly for this remark.
4 I am grateful to Carlos Alberto Figueiredo, professor of graduate

studies in music at UNIRIO, for the enlightening and stimulating
conversation about ligature, during the writing of this chapter.
5 I am grateful to Rodolfo Caesar who showed me this piece and

explained the loop technique used by Reich. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50, see also Caesar, Rodolfo. O enigma de
lupe (Zazie editions, 2016).
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INDEX
absolutization 26 Apolis 37
action 2, 11, 15, 27, 70, 78, 79, 80, appropriation 3, 11, 24, 70, 74, 76,
81, 119 80, 112, 125
action-language 27 re-appropriation 80
doctrine of 3, 7 armed life 5
metapolitical 83 artificial intelligence 34, 43, 78
Afro-Brazilian 76 atomization 12
afterlife 96 atomized individuals 39
agency 38 atomized isolation 40
algorithms 34, 42, 60, 78 authentic 69, 74
algorithmic system 39 inauthentic 69
alienation 112 authoritarianism 5, 7, 38
ambiguation 37, 44, 45, 48, 51, 70, auxesis 73, 127
72, 76
hyperambiguation 68 Belie, belying 68, 69
politics of 64, 79, 81, 86 binding 111, 112, 113, 114, 115,
ambiguity 30, 31, 43, 44, 45, 50, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122,
52, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 123
70, 75, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, bond 7, 10, 11, 12, 40, 46, 47, 112,
91, 113, 126 116
fascism of 43, 53, 68, 69, 75, 77, bondless bonds 40, 47, 111
78, 79, 83, 85, 86, 113 human bond 58
syntactic ambiguity 66 social bond 57
amphiboly 66 boundaries 41
analogy 56 brainwashing 67
anonymous 15, 88 bundle 6, 12, 47, 87, 114
anonymized 88
anthropocide 25 can-be 69
anyzation 42, 70, 125, 126 capitalism 34, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50,
apocalypse 6, 36 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 72, 75
142 INDEX
entrepreneurial capitalism 84 cultural forces 74

financial capitalism 34, 35 cultural genocide 23, 25, 27
form of 24 cultural hegemony 11, 12, 77,
global capitalism 52, 73 80, 81
liberal capitalism 11, 24, 47, 81 cultural identities 75
neocapitalism 24, 33 cultural Marxism 11, 83
planetary capitalism 33 cultural undifferentiation 25,
techno-mediatic capitalism 33, 88
62, 111, 127 culture of spectacle 56
technoplanetarian capitalism mass culture 23, 33
11, 35, 48, 50, 55, 57, 74 media culture 25, 28
televisual neocapitalism 33 popular culture 25
worldwide “capitalism” traditional cultures 74, 76
censorship 1, 39, 40, 43, 85, 87 cybernetics 33
self-censorship 40,
cine-poetics 28, 29, 30 de-identify 113
coexistence 38, 70 de-ideologization 77
colonization 1, 29 democracy 2, 5, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41,
colonial heritage 18 44, 68, 81
colonial history 20, 74, 75 authoritarian democracy 5, 11
commodity 25, 35, 45, 47, 48, 49, liberal democracy 5, 10, 11, 12
50, 55, 56 representative democracy 39
community 11, 12, 70 deontologized 73
conservatism 7, 71 digitalization 57, 83
contingency 92, 93, 94 dissidence 113, 115, 116
control 1, 15, 21, 26, 33, 43, 52, 54, divide et impera 41
58, 60, 61, 84 dynamo 13, 83, 111
total control 15, 26, 60
critique 15, 21, 52, 53, 67, 82, 85, electrification 10
87, 115 emancipation 17, 81
cronyism 36 energy 9, 15, 21, 52, 58
cruelty 95, 96, 97 human energy 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 16
crystallization 48 epiphany 56
cult 55, 56, 57, 74, 100, 101 equality 46, 72
fascist cult 6 equivalence 27, 46, 72, 79
culture 11, 74, 96 excess 13, 36, 37, 40, 41, 47, 60, 65,
cultural existence 112 67, 79, 83, 85, 107
INDEX 143
expansion 16, 52, 81 hyperconnectivity 40, 11

capitalist expansion 16 hyperontologization 73
expansion of power 81 hyperpoliticizing 79, 83
expropriation 1, 70, 74, 80, 112 hypertraditionalization 73
extreme right x, 61, 80, 81, 82 hypsipolis 37
fascist phantom 1 identification xii, 12, 16, 20, 39,

fetish 49, 50, 56 47, 52, 72, 73, 74, 76,
figureless 114 113
finitude 61, 62 identification apparatus 75
flexibility 50, 53, 72 identity 52, 72, 73, 75, 76, 86
formless 53, 126 identity politics 75, 82
franchises of world capital 34 ideology xii, 1, 3, 4, 77, 78, 79,
fragmentation 12, 112 82, 83
freedom of expression 39, 40, 71 anti-ideology 87
fusion 12 immobilization 68
fusional collectivity 12 inbetweening 87, 126
fusional identification xii, 73, indifference 25, 27, 59, 88
75, 76, 113 inequality 13, 74, 80
insecurity 51, 84
gerundive of being 125 insurgency 53
globalization xi, 22, 112 interbeing 125, 126
anti-globalization 35 interexisting 127
internationalist 34
hatred 4, 17, 18, 21, 42, 73, 83, 127 is-being 125, 126, 128
heterogeneous 19, 20, 21
heterogenization 21 junction 12
heterology 18
historical fascism x, xi, 1, 6, 10, labor force 47
17, 21, 22, 25, 28, 33, 39, legitimacy 79, 82
73, 74 lie 5, 68, 87, 111
homogeneous 19, 20 life-forms 73
homogenization 19, 20 ligature 114, 116, 119, 120, 121,
homonymous 66 122, 123, 124, 125
homophobic 54 articulation ligature 121, 122,
hyperbole 37, 41, 73, 74 125
hyperbole of identity 73 duration ligature 121, 122
144 INDEX
e xpression ligature 122, 125, 126 money 30, 45, 46, 47, 48
sound ligature 122 morality 54
linguistic ability 25, 27, 28, 42, 69 mutation 11, 12, 16, 22, 24, 25, 27,
links 11, 40, 47, 111 49, 60
logocide 99 anthropological mutation 25, 27
individual mutation 15
macropolitics 83 lethal mutation 33
malleability 52, 53 mutation of sensibility 72
managerial production 58 ontological mutation 21, 22,
Marxist socialism 5 23, 27, 45, 47
mass culture 23, 33 myth 5, 74, 94, 100
mass media 33 mythology 53, 82
meaning 3, 5, 11, 27, 51, 52, 53,
55, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 77, nationalism 1, 34, 82
85, 117 ultranationalism 3
mediatic narcissistic imagery 74 naturalization 42, 73
mediation 2, 47, 49 neofascism x, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27,
mediocratization 15 28, 33, 37, 40, 42
melancholy 60, 61 neoliberalism 35, 36, 50, 54, 81,
memory 112, 123 111, 115
metapolitics 79, 80, 81 neo-Pentecostal 55
micropolitics 83 networks 40
military 68, 74, 84 non-egalitarianism 80
military dictatorship 28, 38, non-human 46
39, 75 numerical connections 87
militia-military 84 numerical society 43
misrepresentation 88
mobility 50, 53 onedimensionalization 19
mobilization 3, 7, 11, 14, 15
armed mobilization 13 paleofascism 25
demonstrative mobilization 13 pandemic xii, 41
economic mobilization 13, 15 panem et circenses 41
historical mobilization 39 people 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24,
military mobilization 14, 15 27, 29, 30, 35, 39, 40,
military-economic 46, 54, 73, 74, 114, 115,
mobilization 13 116, 118
total mobilization 5, 9, 10, 15, 36, indigenous peoples 76, 83, 112
INDEX 145
phantasmagoria 113 reality 10, 16, 37, 41, 45, 54, 60, 69,
politics ix, xi, 9, 27, 35, 36, 37, 41, 82, 92, 100
64, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89, virtual reality 111
113, 127, 128 re-existence 108, 128
fascist politics 74, 75, 86 relation 10, 16, 19, 27, 41, 47, 49,
megalopolitic 82, 133 50, 54, 69, 87, 91, 114,
necropolitics 6, 7, 9, 12, 127, 115, 119
128 affective relation 46
politics of listening 113, 128 binding relation 115, 116, 119
state politics 36 human relation 49
techno-neoliberal-media- interest relation 46
politics 36 production relation 48
populism ix, 7, 84 relation-form 50
power xi, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 21, relationless relations 39, 40,
25, 34, 38, 43, 45, 47, 61, 46, 111
62, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 81, social relation 16, 47, 48, 49, 57
83, 86, 89, 90 religion 33, 54, 55, 56, 57, 78
fascist power 12 renaming 68, 69
power of ambiguity 67 resistance, 26, 28, 31, 37, 52, 60,
power of consumption 25, 26, 71, 75, 81, 84, 85, 94,
27, 33 103, 113, 123
power of creation 62 retrotopia 31
power of decision 39 return of the repressed 31, 123
power of destruction 71 revolution 18, 116
power of emptiness 86 conservative revolution 9
power of rhythm 124 counter-revolution 5, 68, 80
precariat 84 cybernetic revolution 33
precision xii, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, revolutionary critique 82
106, 107, 108, 114, 125, revolutionary desire 11
126, 127, 128 revolutionary force 24, 76, 113,
private 41 123
public opinion 38 revolutionary sense 24
rhythm 37, 85, 106, 119, 120, 124
racism 1, 17, 18, 42, 74, 75 robotics 34, 60, 78
real 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103,
104, 105, 106, 128 same 18, 20, 21, 86, 89, 113
anti-real 105 sameness 88
146 INDEX
s ameother 20 de-socialized 79
selfization 37 hypersocialization 79
sense 63 solitude 41
anti-sense space 41, 76, 87, 114, 126
emptiness of sense 27, 50, 52, common space 37, 41
72, 86, 87, 113 open space 41
intelligible senses 65, 71 public space 37
nonsensical 78 space-between 72
senseless 39, 42, 52, 58, 78, 86, spectacle 34, 41, 50, 52, 55, 56,
107 87, 90
sensibility 27, 33, 71, 72, 75 spectacular world 51
sensibilization 72 spectacularization 55, 73
sensible senses 65, 71 state 2, 5, 13, 35, 36, 37
sensing-thinking 64 statism 1, 35
sensorship 85, 86, 87 anti-statism 35
sensure 85 stereotypes xii, 72
signification 63–67, 85, 86, 114, subjectivity 35
117, 123 substitution 12, 46, 49, 50, 53
singularity 111, 113, 119 subversion 31
social supra-sensitive 49
social body 12
social classes 16 technique 12, 13, 33, 35, 62, 68,
social existence 19, 82 75, 112
social fabric 25 televisual technology 23
social forces 16, 17 Terreiro-city 74
social groups 83 Terreiro-community 74
social inequality 74 terror 77, 83, 84, 87, 112
social injustice 52 territory 74
social labor 48, 79 tension 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15
social media 34, 38, 39, 40, 42, theology 55, 56
85, 116 thing-form 50
social movements 37 thinking-sensing 64
social reality 45 threshold-voices 72
social relations 10, 16, 48, 49, ties 40, 114
57 social ties 84
socialism 2, 4, 5, 81 tiredness 93, 94
socialization 112 totalitarianism 41, 77, 83
INDEX 147
tradition 33, 54, 72 ethical value 46

transformation 3, 18, 21, 22, 36, exchange value 45, 46, 47, 49
49, 50, 60, 74, 93, 94, monetary value 46, 72
127 surplus-value 47, 48
constant transformation 50 theory of 47
continuous transformation 51 use-value 45, 49
technical transformation 14 value-form 46
transmutation 93 valueless value 39, 52
transnational 34, 54 veneration 55
violence 52, 65, 71, 84, 85, 99
uberization 58 virtualization 54
unconscious 16, 54 virtual narcissism 37
collective unconscious 54 voluntary servitude 43, 113
fascist unconscious 20
formal unconscious 54 war 3, 4, 11, 14, 80, 103
heterogeneous unconscious 20 divine war 5
unconscious automatism 21 economic war 14
unequivocal 36, 37, 67, 68, 78 total war 5
universalizing 47 word 2, 3, 29, 39, 42, 66, 67, 87,
univocal 78 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99,
univocal signification 67 105, 108, 117, 120, 121,
unspoken 92 124, 128
unthought 76, 92, 127 anti-word 92, 99
poetic word 107
value 21, 23, 33, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, real word 106
47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 121, senseless word 107
127 wordlessness 93, 94
affective value 45, 49 world-form 60
economic value 45, 46 worship 55, 56
148
149
150
151
152
153
154

CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK, The Fascism of Ambiguity A Conceptual Essay

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THE FASCISM OF

Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy encourages a sustained

Series editor: Michael Marder

Ethics Under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and the Culture

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are

First published in 2021 in Brazil as O Fascismo da ambiguidade: um ensaio conceitual

First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright © Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, 2021, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-6861-6

Series: Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Foreword, by Jean-Luc Nancy vi

1 Lessons from History: Mussolini’s Fascism 1

2 Lessons from Critique: Some Elements for a

4 The Fascism of Ambiguity 33

5 The Ambiguity of Sense 59

By Way of Conclusion 127

Throughout this history of a great half of a century, the

ambiguities coming from a reign of opinion, of the complexity

The future is by definition imageless.

This essay is an attempt, a rehearsal at understanding. It attempts

fascism, or more a case of conservatism and authoritarianism

as precision exercises. Precision is not the same as order or

inspiring suggestions, and years of work on the mutations of

The prevailing view of historical fascism defines it as an

even in that first period his only doctrine was a “doctrine of

of ideological language instead of a new ideology. The ideological

electrifying experience of uncontrolled human energy. The

that it represents the “lie of political equalitarianism, the habit

eradication of evil,” “the executioners are the cornerstones of

It is the experience of a bond around necropolitics, the

Total mobilization and maximum acceleration of all human

several critics of the Weimar Republic, of parliamentarism, and

sense of community, substituting it with ideological constructed

Gramsci’s analyses of fascism, of how fascism and liberal

demonstrative mobilization in the First World War, all analysis

wanting everything, which starts to define the technical sense of

secret police are created, and the multiplication of information

foresaw, in an amazing way, Hitler’s future Germany and gave

which had conferred a language to the desires for freedom and

they arise on the basis of systemic racism and colonial heritage,

from the relation between individual and collective conscience,

effective) expels as waste for not knowing how to assimilate it.

and absorbed by the same, which further triggers hatred toward

however, complicates today’s view of fascism “only” or “above

of Yemen, Pasolini documents the “form of the city” as a form

is a striking testimony—achieve an anthropocide. A skinning

because it had failed to transmute the depth of the human soul,

human consciousness and sensibility. Pasolini refers to the

neofascism of mass society and media culture removes and

in Rio de Janeiro. What exists beyond the ocean? The “desperate

European-Italian-subversive-cine-poet meets the family of the

guide him, the “inextricable knot” of ambiguity where fascist

Pasolini’s reflections on “televisual neocapitalism” are part of

comprehend the reactionism and pushback that accompanies

logic, neoliberal, techno-mediatic, and financial capitalism has

State to undermine public space, for politics to undermine and

new way of coexistence between fascism and democracy is

2 Lessons from Critique: Some Elements for a