Antifascism: Resistance Contra Progress in Simone Weil’s Political Thought

• In Event: Political Theory without the Bannister of Progress

Abstract

One of the most important questions of the last century is whether or not one can be antifascist without also being anticapitalist, anti-racist, and anti-state? Moreover, is it possible to achieve something like this without a positive vision of present and future progress? Simone Weil’s answer to these questions is the foundation of what I will call revolutionary pessimism. On the one hand, Weil offers an absolute moral position absolute pacifist resistance, and on the other hand she provides a compromised utopia that abolishes none of these to the past. In the face of this lacuna, this chapter asks how Simone Weil’s political thought resonated in the contemporary moment? To answer this question, I bring Weil into conversation with contemporary theories of fascism from Cristina Beltrán, Federico Finkelstein, and Alberto Toscano, as well as James Martel’s critical intervention on anarchist prophets towards a theory of revolutionary pessimism defined as action without expectation.
First, I address the question of how a revolutionary formula can be adapted from a thinker who once called revolution “the opiate of the masses.” I address Weil’s critique of words with capital letters and attempt a Weilienne conception of lowercase revolution in lowercase pessimistic terms. To achieve this, I reintroduce Weil’s mystical-political conception of attention and conceives of it as an actualizable formula for its political valence. In other words, this chapter looks at the contemporary forms of fascism and uprootedness and asks if Weil’s concept of attention may provide a guide for a politics that negates these without asserting a positive project. And it asks if such a politics of attention to the history of the oppressed is a quality that, rather than a preparation for decreation, could be a preparation for a very un-Weilienne revolutionary politics. Finally, I address the question of the chapter, for both Weil and myself, putting forward revolutionary pessimism as something beyond resistance, but without falling prey to the assumption that action will bring success or that a better world is inevitable either with or without action.

Author

• Scott Benjamin Ritner, University of Colorado, Boulder