Fascism doesn’t return. In truth, it never left. It changes faces, vocabulary, and settings, but its moral structure remains intact: the organized denial of otherness.
Frédéric Lordon recently published an article in Le Monde Diplomatique titled “Fascism: A Definition” (April 2025), in which he proposes to restore the term’s conceptual strength. Against those who reduce it to a historical relic or an aesthetic caricature—uniforms, armbands, parades—Lordon reminds us that fascism is not an image of the past, but a recurring form of organizing fear and mobilizing resentment. His warning is essential: without precise words, resistance is impossible.
Yet the strength of his text doesn’t hide the paradox that runs through it. Lordon seeks to define fascism from within the very rational horizon that produces it. He believes a definition can save us from chaos, when perhaps what we need is to step outside the framework that makes chaos appear as a threat. Fascism is not merely a political crisis: it is the symptom of an exhausted civilization, of an “organization of meaning” that folds back upon itself until it suffocates everything that doesn’t fit its form.
Lordon identifies three elements: an authoritarian state that monopolizes symbolic production and reinforces repression; a manipulation of the “identity anxieties” of the dominated, who turn their frustration against those even more dominated; and a hierarchical-civilizational doctrine, apocalyptic in tone, that legitimizes violence in the name of survival. It is a framework as precise as it is unsettling. It describes our present moment with disturbing accuracy. Yet what truly matters is not the description itself, but what it reveals: the historical closure of modern rationality around itself, the retreat in the face of the end of its own narrative.
In the first element—the authoritarian state—we see the conversion of power into the total administration of life. This is not merely political control, but the capture of thought. Education, research, culture, media—the entire apparatus is oriented toward the uniformity of all criteria of meaning. In the name of liberal neutrality, a generalized depoliticization is imposed, making any judgment from outside the system impossible. What appears as freedom of opinion is, in reality, seamless homogeneity. The closure of language takes on the dystopian form of tolerance.
The second feature—the manipulation of passions—is the affective core of fascism. Where social suffering could become consciousness, it becomes resentment. The wounded masses are called to reconstitute themselves by mobilizing against an internal enemy: the migrant, the feminist, the dissident, the poor—but also the “communist,” the “populist,” the “leftist.” Discontent turns into hatred, and hatred into belonging. This affective inversion—the transformation of pain into exclusion—is the mechanism that sustains the fascist machinery. No ideology can impose itself without first colonizing the body and its emotions.
The third feature—the doctrine of existential threat—culminates the process. Fascism is a “theology of fear” that almost inevitably leads to a “theology of cruelty.” Everything is justified in the name of survival—not mere life, but an imaginary privilege believed to have been stolen away: deportations, preventive wars, genocides. Bare life ceases to be what is defended and becomes what must be imposed over the life of the other, to continue calling itself truly human. Humanity divides between those who deserve to live humanly and those who embody the very danger to human life. Hence its religious character: there is no politics more theological—or theology more political—than that which decides who is human and who is not.
At this point, however, it is worth going beyond Lordon. Fascism is not a return of the past, but the persistence of a civilizational logic: that of a world that could only constitute and affirm itself by denying the other. Colonial modernity, structural racism, and patriarchy were its historical laboratories. What today appears as a “liberal identity crisis” is, in reality, the crisis of a system that has exhausted its capacity for self-affirmation through “recognition” and now sustains itself increasingly through the apotheosis of moral contempt. When everything external is perceived as a threat, history becomes paranoia.
Lordon’s definition can therefore be read as the diagnosis of a reason turned against itself. His call to think fascism conceptually is legitimate, but perhaps insufficient. Defining is not enough: we must deactivate the very matrix that produces the conditions for fascism. That matrix is the closure of modern meaning—the presumption that the world can be understood and governed from a single center, whether it be the State, the Nation, or the Market. Fascism does not invent that closure: it inherits it and pushes it to its extreme.
In the face of this, the political and ethical task is to tear down the walls that supposedly protect us but in truth imprison us—not by returning to a complacent liberal tolerance that sustains the very order that breeds fascism, but through a conversion of meaning. This means, first and foremost, listening to the bodies and voices that history has excluded: colonized peoples, victims of war, exploited or racialized bodies—they are not the margins of history but its condition of possibility. Where modernity sees danger, there lies a source of meaning. But we must also learn to listen to our own decaying, dying bodies, made invisible by a culture that denies vulnerable life, ontological suffering, and inescapable existential fragility in the name of the ethereal and insignificant.
To name fascism is, above all else, an ethical act. It means recognizing that every closure to otherness is the beginning of barbarism. Multiplying diagnoses is useless if we do not transform the relation between knowledge and life, between politics and vulnerability. Anti-fascism cannot be limited to institutional defense; it must become a lucid sensitivity, an inner disposition to recognize oneself as affected and to allow oneself to be affected.
Lordon is right: without definition, there is no action. But without a radical existential openness—without an ontology of vulnerability—there is no humanity. Fascism, at its root, is the negation of the outside. Resistance therefore begins by restoring that outside: by feeling life again as shared presence, by learning to say “we” without erasing difference. And also, by recognizing that this “we” is always provisional, because separation and death haunt us from the very day we enter that familiar world of “we” that defines us today.
Perhaps the anti-fascism of the 21st century will consist less in erecting conceptual walls than in learning to listen to the silence that comes from beyond. Where political power screams “existential threat,” the space of responsibility begins. Without responsibility, only fear remains. And fear, as history has taught us well, always ends up organizing itself in complicity with barbarism.
The recent electoral victory of Javier Milei in Argentina—despite corruption scandals, outbreaks of violence, and a colonial submission now without pretense—confirms how fully active the affective machinery Lordon describes remains. Resentment has become government policy, and cruelty a spectacle. The same device that mobilizes fear in Europe under xenophobic slogans operates in the Global South as voluntary submission to economic powers, accompanied by contempt for the weakest. The people, stripped of horizons, engaged in a war of all against all—in a kind of Hobbesian revival—have been led to confuse creative destruction with freedom; the recipe is well known. In that creative destruction, ruthless and unscrupulous, the global dimension of contemporary fascism is revealed: an alliance between despair and cynicism that no longer needs armbands or marches, only screens and markets.
The real question, more urgent than ever, is not how to define fascism, but how to relearn to feel life before all meaning has been replaced by its digital caricature. That means the problem is no longer simply “out there,” in words and things, but within us—in each of us—as unwitting agents of barbarism. Ensuring that this does not happen is part of the education of 21st-century militancy. We cannot confront barbarism with barbarism, nor submit to the demands of a political liberalism from whose womb that which we call fascism cyclically reemerges.
© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
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