What is Antifascist Theory?

This talk is an effort to bring into synthesizing contact a range of greatly, if differently, useful theorists of fascism, from the ones we might most readily imagine (Marx and DuBois, Cesaire and Rodney, Bloch and Adorno) out to theorists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jasbir Puar, Giovanni Arrighi, Joshua Clover, Melinda Cooper, Lauren Berlant, Jordy Rosenberg, Benjamin Balthaser, and others. The aim is to make a sort of angular harmony out of these powerful, in some ways discrepant conceptual idioms, as we use them to try to think interpenetratingly about long histories of capital and dispossession, about racialization and security, about neoliberalism and the reign of political technocracy – all in the hope of getting some kind of usable analytic purchase on the calamitous present tense. We will conclude with a small mediation on the place, inside of all this calamity, of the analytic literature we call “literature.”