Abstract
The Fascist Stylisation of Time
Stimulated by the publication of Roger Griffith's Modernism and Fascism (2007), this piece revisits my 2003 study of fascist politics of history in Italy to identify the ideal-typical traits of what I call the fascist «historic imaginary», and explore its relations with its relation to the discursive and mental phenomena we call postmodernism/postmodernity. I argue that the fascist mental orientation towards time does not reside in what Griffin calls «a mental attitude towards the transcendence of time,» but in a de-temporalisation of historical time and an immanent conception of the relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum. I further contend that this de-temporalisation has very specific connections with the postwar stylization and serialization of historical time into the «temporality of the fashion decade» as well as with the perception of «historic event» (i.e. Holocaust, Fall of the Berlin Wall) as recoding the image of the «end of history».
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