Re: The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics

Speaking of which, this should also invoke the reference to philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who at 20 joined Naziism on account of his having fallen in love with the fascistic aesthetic...

His autobiography, Killing Time, is accessible from Stanford University Press, 1995. 

--Monica




--- Dave Monroe <[email protected]> wrote:
>Ravetto, Kriss.  The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics.
>   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
>
>A startling revision of the aesthetics in the wake of
>the Holocaust.
>
>Amid the charged debate over whether-and how-the
>Holocaust can be represented, films about fascism,
>nazis, and the Final Solution keep coming. And in
>works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg,
>debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism,
>symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an
>uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once
>used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial,
>sexual, and political others. This book exposes the
>"madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to
>the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical
>constructions from political, ideological, and moral
>codes. In a brilliant analysis with ramifications far
>beyond the realm of film, Kriss Ravetto argues that
>contemporary discourses using such devices actually
>continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual
>analogies of the past.
>
>Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of
>World War II in which generic images of evil
>characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets
>the different, more complex approach of such
>filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and
>Lina Wertmüller. Rather than reassuring viewers of the
>triumph of the forces of Good over the forces of Evil
>and the reinstitution of ethical values, these
>filmmakers confound the binary oppositions that
>produce clear and identifiable heroes and villains.
>Here we see how their work-complicating conventions of
>gender identity, class identifications, and the
>economy of victim and victimizer-disturbs rather than
>reassures the audience seeking relief from a sense of
>"bad history."
>
>Drawing on history, philosophy, critical theory, film,
>literature, and art, Ravetto demonstrates the complex
>relationship of thinking about fascism with moral
>discourse, sexual politics, and economic practices.
>Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means
>to say that we have conquered fascism, when the
>aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how
>we look at political figures and global events.
>
>Kriss Ravetto teaches film history, criticism,
>philosophy, media, and gender studies in the
>Department of Critical Studies at California Institute
>of the Arts [= CIA (!!)]. 
>
>$19.95 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3743-1 
>$54.95 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3742-3
>
>296 Pages 32 halftones 7 x 10 (2001)
>
>http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/R/%20ravetto_unmaking.html
>
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