Título: THE PSYCHO-CULTURAL UNDERPINNINGS OF EVERYDAY FASCISM. DIALOGUE AS RESISTANCE
Autor: TIBURI, MARCIA
Año: 2022
Género: FILOSOFÍA POLÍTICA
Formato: PDF
When the Brazilian public intellectual Marcia Tiburi published «The Psycho-Cultural Underpinnings of Everyday Fascism» in 2015, fascism was yet to return to the public consciousness. But Tiburi was motivated by the kind of fascism she was noticing in daily life – people who fail to practise any kind of reflection about society, betraying a pattern of everyday thought characterized by the repetition of clichés and the angry language of hatred. Three years later, Brazil elected the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
Now available in English for the first time, this prescient work speaks to our present moment. Fascism is among us once again, evident in the collective expression of exacerbated authoritarianism and the growing hatred against difference and people marked as socially undesirable. Drawing on her own first-hand, brutal encounters, Tiburi connects ways of thinking in Brazil to what is happening around us today and introduces us to the fascist as manipulator, the distorter of other people's speech; fascist as an activist of evil on a daily basis, the one who lives by fostering racism and male-domination and is proud of it.
Tiburi takes us beyond formal policies, reinvigorates ideas from the Frankfurt School and refuses to otherize supporters of fascism. Instead she asks what is amiss in their lives that then attracts them to a political project that victimizes them. This powerful book forces us to consider to our actions at a subjective level and changes our way of thinking through issues of hate and divisiveness pervading politics everywhere.
When «How to Talk to Fascists» was published in Brazil in 2015 many people said I was exaggerating by using the term fascist in the title of my book. My editor at the time did not want to publish it at all. The first edition sold out in a few days, but no one believed that people could be interested in a strange subject such as fascism at that time. I heard people were going to bookstores to hide my book. Which is a curious phenomenon, when it comes to a book on hatred —and against hatred— but which has suffered several attacks of hatred since it was published. Those people were moved by hatred toward the title itself, probably they never read it beyond the cover. People who were unable to understand the irony and provocation of this title were also led to carry out acts based on hatred towards me, in a mixture of misogyny and anti-intellectualism that became a time bomb triggered by the media militias and the extreme-right press and came to explode in 2018 when, persecuted and threatened, I was forced to leave Brazil. (Marcia Tiburi)
“Tiburi provides a thought-provoking criticism of the ideas of supporters of the far-right movements that have swept the globe. This insightful book offers readers everywhere a deeper understanding about how to respond to this authoritarian trend and its defenders.” (James N. Green, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Modern Latin American History, Brown University, USA)
“An essential book for those concerned with defending democracy against the current onslaught of authoritarianism. Combining the best of the Frankfurt School with personal (sometime life-threatening) experiences with right-wing populism in Brazil, Tiburi skillfully dissects the psycho-cultural underpinnings of 21st century fascism and in the process offers an indispensable guide to those struggling to defeat its rise throughout the world.” (Jonathan Warren, Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, USA)
“At last, this prescient and bold work by Marcia Tiburi, a leading Brazilian intellectual, is available to a broader audience. Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro “talks” to the public in the language of spectacular violence, of debasement of the other, of flagrant, abject ignorance. Tiburi's book decodes and contextualizes his authoritarianism for us; I only wish it were less relevant.” (Amy Chazkel, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University, USA)
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