87. We should investigate precisely what strikes us as already familiar and well known—known to the many, and even to those who gird themselves to investigate. Instead, it isn’t even slightly well known. We know much less than we think we do. In that which we consider super familiar, and even obvious, discounted, the most interesting mysteries lie concealed. Deceived by its smirking familiarity, it is in ordinary life that we can handle the unknown.
88. If we suppose that man is reasonable, that is, endowed by nature with reason, then by becoming reasonable and behaving reasonably, he achieves no progress, accomplishes nothing noteworthy.
90. What holds a community together is what is taken for granted in it. What there is no need to argue about, what was discussed and agreed upon once and for all in the very act of founding the community, and which it is assumed will last long enough before having to go back over it and reexamine it. But when nothing is taken for granted, then nothing holds that community together anymore. The parliament, understood as a debate over ideas, is not allowed to call everything into discussion. Free opinions can be exercised from time to time on a given topic, but not on all topics simultaneously: that would be the equivalent of having the ground give way beneath your feet during an earthquake. The very field upon which the social structure was founded would no longer exist: its surface ravaged, its perimeter shaken, rendered indistinct. For that reason, a community cannot rise, prosper, and preserve itself on the basis of critical thought, which, by definition, takes nothing for granted. And that is why in any human community, those who exercise critical thought without setting aside some topics are viewed askance or considered a certain concern, if not with outright hostility. A human society is not based on doubt. It can be enlivened by doubts, provided they do not undermine it as a whole.
92. People say that social relations are underpinned by a supposed contract, but who’s ever seen it, who’s signed this contract? Of all the social pacts and contracts hypothesized by political philosophers, who are the actual parties to the agreement? Where is the populace, where does it live, what is it called? Where are their signatures, the dates, the embossed validation stamps?
93. Modernity is the era in which prophets are false prophets. All equally false. Typical of the modern era are both those who believe blindly in false prophets and those who unceremoniously unmask them.
95. Why is it, I ask myself, dispassionately, when analyzed closely and rationally, that fascism always appears so ridiculous? Grandiose, perhaps, or terrible or sometimes tragic, even admirable, but always and inevitably ridiculous. Every time you are left agog, stunned, as you read through accounts, watch footage, listen to speeches. You are inevitably driven to parody what you see, as if it were, however, the conscious and mocking basis of that parody. It hardly seems possible that what stirred so many illusions and such vast tragedies, what drove hearts and clubs and daggers and hand grenades and, finally, tanks, could have been such a piece of buffoonery. No, that can’t be. And yet, yes, it can be, it is possible, it was possible, and perhaps it always will be. Which means that it is the emergence of fascism into the light of reason, its discovery or revelation or extraction from the concrete material of historical action, to be scrutinized by measured reflection and critical analysis, it is precisely this cognitive process that alters its essence, that transfigures it, reducing it to that sideshow skeleton, good only for eliciting shrieks of fright and bawdy laughter. Like a fish of the abyss that loses its mysterious luminosity if brought to the surface, where it resembles nothing so much as a pathetic little monster. Was that miserable object really what aroused such fear, what triggered such delirious excitement? All that remains of the tragedy and the epic are little heaps of cinders, and what little survives has the general tenor of a stage set after the show is over: painted trees, cardboard swords, plaster chickens. After a thousand books on the topic, fascism remains mysterious. Mysterious in what is most evident, in its essence, which so stunningly coincides with its ostentatious appearance. Exactly the opposite of communism (which is always as duplicitous and Machiavellian in its practices as it is crude and monolithic in its principles), fascism is exactly what it seems: explicit, manifest, proclaimed, and yet incomprehensible. Perhaps certain aspects of our lives are destined to remain unknown, or else known but not understood, since knowledge, in fact, with its ascensional and reductive movement, can only transform its discoveries into the objects of mockery. Knowledge, in other words, does nothing to the subconscious by dint of knowing it, neither alters it nor unlocks it, at the very most, it destroys it, rationalizes it to the point of making it a skeleton of its former self. The most extraordinary characteristic of fascism remains the fact that it is a subconscious that has been everted and exhibited, transformed into a thunderous voice, into an enameled surface . . . Knowing doesn’t matter, modifying matters: and the modifications take place in a mysterious fashion.
96. In vain the attempt was made to combat it. I mean to say, with means other than weapons, which, when the time came, proved effective. But it was hopeless to try to fight it with ideas or words! That would amount to so much wasted time. Fascism is what by its very nature cannot be subjected to criticism. Its shadow cannot be illuminated, and in fact, if it ever is, it simply vanishes. Since a place of such a nature that it remains wholly impermeable to knowledge or the calling into question or discussion does not exist (just think, not even God could make such a claim!), it is invented instead out of whole cloth, and this is, no doubt, a brilliant move, and only intellectuals could ever have thought of such a thing, only people capable of formidable abstractions but also endowed with the common touch, a little like Giotto’s frescoes and the invention of Pinocchio. The whole history of Italian intellectuals can be summarized in the perverse pleasure taken by such a subtle and skeptical mind as Leo Longanesi’s in inventing the slogan “Mussolini is always right.” Not since the time of Zeno and his unbeatabletortoiseshadsuchaself-sufficient, well-rounded, one-dimensional paradox been created! Like the logical brainteaser of the phrase “I am lying.” When reason has a hard time keeping up with rapid change and the world around you begins to waver and shimmer, then what’s needed is an act, an invention. A brilliant intuition. While all of European science oscillated in the cloud of probability, and even the pope could feel the fullness of the divine mandate trembling in his hands, and the pillars upon which the weight of the world rested were starting to crumble, in that chaos of incredulity and skepticism, certain Italian literati were able to restore a modicum of certainty! Even Luigi Pirandello with his sophisms, his “maybe like this, maybe like that,” and the various contortions about identity and doubts about who is who and who did what, even Pirandello, more skeptical than Gorgias and more of a Taoist than Zhuangzi, who dreams of being a butterfly who dreams of being Zhuangzi . . . even for Pirandello, one certainty existed: MUSSOLINI IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
97. Pointless to scold fascism because it refused to submit to analysis, because it refused to behave in accordance with the categories so dear to its critics, who therefore denounced it as guilty of irrationalism. Irrationalism is no vice, it is something of which fascism boasts. And fascism is not even guilty of irrationalism, when you stop to think, but rather a singular form of mystical materialism, a roughhousing spiritualism, a proteiform entity that can get the better of its adversary because it’s capable of commandeering its appearance and stealing its strength, adding it to its own, and turning it in a different direction. If what is normally emphasized in fascism is its sectarian spirit, its rigidity, the extremist purity that demands the elimination of all impurity, the cult of the healthy body that shakes off of itself all contaminating elements (foreigns, blacks, Jews, Communists, renegades, draft dodgers, etc.), what I instead see from the very outset is an extraordinary and eclectic collection of contradictory attitudes and fragments of disparate doctrines, a mimetic fury that is by no means exclusive, quite the contrary, in fact, a reckless and paradoxical attempt to be at once reactionary and revoluti
onary, men of order and of disorder, of the right and of the left, defenders of the bourgeois and the antibourgeois, traditionalists and extremely modern, profoundly Catholic and ferociously, Nietzscheanly anti-Christian, ascetics and yet men of action, proponents of vitality above all other values and at the same time prophets of death, fans of death, wooers and courters of death, in other words, everything that it is possible to think and do as long as it is all fused together into a single lunge of vitality. The subconscious is a machine that cannot help but produce. Consider Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s diary, in which he says a thousand times that he is a Fascist but that he wants to become a Communist, to be bourgeois, or perhaps the only aristocrat still in circulation, and at the same time an aesthete, a shut-in, and an implacable man of action and a mystic and ascetic, but also as simple and pure as was the French peasant of bygone days, an impotent seducer, a refined barbarian, a hard-living saint, in other words everything, but absolutely everything, in a savage all-inclusive ambition, provided that this frenzy finds an adequately aggressive, insolent expression, capable of astounding, seducing, frightening . . . Fascism doesn’t explain itself but it functions, it functions as long as it functions, like an animal before it falls ill or is killed. It’s not only praise of the body, it is a body itself, whose life cycle almost always coincides with the life cycle of its Duce’s body.
98. More than on the purely political plane, where it hybridizes watchwords of disparate origin, Fascist ideology, or perhaps we should say the distinctive and unmistakable flavor of fascism, can be found in its purest state in the writings of a philosophical or mystical nature, when they explore such archetypical or abyssal subjects as sex, destiny, honor, courage, the rise and decline of civilizations, the metaphysical tradition, the Oblivion of Being, race, and death. More than dealing with the forms of state or government, issues that he willingly leaves in the hands of jurists, on these fatal themes, the Fascist truly has something to say and, above all, a distinctive way of saying it, suddenly soaring high above the political arena, where he is always forced to take borrowings from and crossbreed in hasty fashion with the languages of the other traditions, socialist, nationalist, anarchist, grassroots activist, accentuating now one now the other aspect in accordance with contingencies and needs, as did the Fascist movement’s original opportunistic founder. As it swerves and fishtails from right to left, a celebration of absolute modernity and a religious cult of the past, revolution and reaction, so that it’s never clear what its activism aims at (whether, for example, to overthrow the bourgeoisie or stand as a mighty bulwark in its defense), Fascist thought moves at greater ease in the spiritual dominion of metaphysics, erudition, the philosophical polemic, and therefore in the field of the symbolic. And in fact, the Fascist doctrine isn’t—or it isn’t only—a political doctrine, but rather a declension of symbolic thought. It interprets the world in accordance with a specific reading and it tends to express itself through symbols, or rather, it wouldn’t be capable of expressing itself in any manner other than through symbols. Hence the cause of its attraction to more erudite repertories, the inexhaustible mines of the history of religions, the mysteries of esotericism.
99. And since everything that you desire is real, real even if it doesn’t exist outside of your desires, so fascism can be real even when it lies, in fact, especially when it lies, because its falsehood is a real desire. The same can be said of the hatred that engenders it, that engenders fascism and that, in its turn, is engendered by fascism. Desire doesn’t spring from the absence of something but, quite to the contrary, from its presence, even if that is in the form of an image, a phantom, which is as real as all the rest. The production of phantoms and specters by the Fascist machine is stunning . . . a love of truth obliges us to say that no one could ever have complained about being deprived of phantoms during the two decades of Italian fascism, the Ventennio, and even more so in the aftermath of the war, right up to the present day, and today more so than ever. The masses that it stirred by exalting them were by no means deceived, what they desired they obtained, exactly what they desired, and in great abundance. Did they want excitement and death? They got them. Like those who dabble in S&M games, it would just be childish to get scandalized afterward if every so often someone wound up choking themselves to death while hog-tied. You can only smile pityingly at those, some of them respected intellectuals, others ordinary citizens, who declare that they were “disappointed” by fascism, that is, that they would have liked it to be more leftist, or even more ferociously rightist, Hitlerian, Stalinian, less plebeian and vulgar or less bourgeois and sanctimonious, more anticlerical or Mussolinian or grassroots-driven or social or mystical or aristocratic or racist, or maybe they wanted it to be nonracist (“Yeah, after all, that’s the one mistake that M. really made . . .”), in other words, that they would have preferred it to be like this or like that . . . Since it’s a recipe with many ingredients, some of which can be alternated with each other, or used in variable quantities, the result is that everyone can cook their own fascism for themselves in their own mind, removing or adding at their pleasure anarchism or eugenics, charisma or the Middle Ages, to taste.
102. When it comes to concrete matters, political and religious movements veer so sharply away from the ideas of their founders that they can be fought by making use of quotes from those same founders. And so people are able to denounce Christianity and the Church in the name of Jesus, and His “authentic message”; ditto for historical communism, with verbatim quotations from Marx; while select passages from Nietzsche are used against the philosopher’s most fanatical followers. It is natural that this should take place within the context of ideologies sufficiently vast or contradictory to give rise, within their own confines or in the course of their larger spread and diffusion, varying practices and even ones that are entirely at odds with each other; just as there can be no doubt that the fringe groups that have moved farthest away from initial principles, almost to the point where you’d say they’d turned them on their heads, would simply never have existed without those principles, from which they undoubtedly first took their inspiration. That the inspiration might have been perverted is something intrinsic to the very nature of all inspiration: it is, in fact, the way that all theories have of modifying and updating themselves, thus giving rise to entirely new ideas, over time and space, that is, throughout the course of history and in the specific locations around the world where they have been accepted and applied; as well as, to use the words of the philosopher in question, the apparent decay that takes place in the passage from ideal purity to concrete implementation which responds to no other necessity than that of “no longer [burying] your head in the sand of heavenly things, but [carrying] it freely, an earthly head which gives meaning to the earth!” The meaning of the earth will be very different then from that imagined with eyes closed, head buried in heavenly sand . . . and no farther from the truth than its ideal formulation would have been.
103. The most current and clamorous example of this multiplicity is to be found in Islam, when, that is, verses of the Qur’an are cited to condemn acts committed in the name of the Qur’an.
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