Fascism Re-performed: Benjaminian Mimesis, Platonic Methexis and Bertolucciâs The Conformist

Adrian Switzer

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ChapterÂ 8 Fascism Re-performed: Benjaminian Mimesis, Platonic Methexis and Bertolucciâs The Conformist

In: Plato and the Moving Image

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Adrian Switzer

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 171â193

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004398290_010

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Abstract

The focus of the chapter is on Bernardo Bertolucciâs film The Conformist; specifically, the chapter argues that the Platonic aspects of the film are key to its counter-fascist politics. Though intended by Bertolucci to be counter-fascist, still, the film depicts Fascist Italy beautifully and presents its protagonist â a state operative hired to kill his former philosophy professor â in sympathetic light. Platoâs allegory of the cave, which is referred to and restaged a number of times in the film, is meant to represent breaking from fascist politics and turning toward the light of progressivism. Yet, the parallel between the Platonic allegory and its depiction in Bertolucciâs film is inexact, which leaves the politics of these scenes and images in an ambivalent state. Generally, an artwork of one political significance always can be appropriated by the politics it opposes; the chapter develops this point about film in particular through Benjaminâs writings on film. According to Benjamin, film is the form of everyday modern life. Our habitual ways of behaving and the ways in which memory and forgetting blend into one another are all essentially filmic. The formal coincidence between film and the everyday means that every act, utterance and gesture is political â and, as such, ambivalently positioned between progressivism and regressivism. An artwork whose politics are decidedly counter-fascist is one that queers, in a formal sense, the scenarios in which the charactersâ speech and acts are staged; in the case of film, such queering of the everyday is effected at the formal level of composition and editing. The chapter argues that to decide the politics of an artwork for counter-fascist progressivism, as Bertolucci successfully does, the work must stand in queer relation to the political reality that it critically reperforms; or, to put the same in Platonic terms, Bertolucciâs film âparticipates (methexis)â in the forms, signs and imagery of Fascist Italy so as to divide and multiply their significance away from a single, regressive meaning.

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Plato and the Moving Image

Series:Â Value Inquiry Book Series, Volume: 332, Value Inquiry Book Series Online, Volume: 332, and Philosophy of Film, Volume: 332

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004398290

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 17 May 2019

Subjects
- Art History
  - General
- Philosophy
  - Aesthetics & Cultural Theory
  - Ancient Philosophy

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ChapterÂ 8 Fascism Re-performed: Benjaminian Mimesis, Platonic Methexis and Bertolucciâs The Conformist

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Plato and the Moving Image

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ChapterÂ 8 Fascism Re-performed: Benjaminian Mimesis, Platonic Methexis and Bertolucciâs The Conformist