Stathis Kouvelakis

Specters of ‘Totalitarianism’: Poulantzas Faced with Fascism and the State of Exception

Today’s rediscovery of Nicos Poulantzas’s works seems to have overlooked his works on fascism, which are demoted to the level of historical and historiographical documents. Here, I argue against such an understanding. In my view, Poulantzas’s theory of fascism and the state of exception constitute the pivot around which his intellectual and political itinerary was organized. Poulantzas only became a Marxist theorist, properly speaking, from the moment that he began to work on the question of fascism and thus to mount a militant intervention on the strategic questions central to a properly Marxist theory of politics. Poulantzas combined these questions with a further notion, without doubt more surprising coming from a Marxist theorist: namely, ‘totalitarianism’. Far from being limited to an object of polemic, this category would serve both to indicate a persistent problem and to provide a spur to venture down new paths.

The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy

The theoretical problem Bensaid tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaid’s contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force.