An analysis by American historian Dagmar Herzog of the emotional springs and body-related obsessions of the new extreme right.
The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany's strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this "sexy racism," with its second main feature being that of an obsessive antidisability hostility – both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism's libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations.
The book features an afterword by Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso 2023).
"What might it mean today, politically and pedagogically, to go against the fascist grain and intentionally and systematically, combatively even, foster the capacities for empathy and solidarity, in our children as much as in ourselves? This is the question that Herzog leaves us with, and I cannot think of a more pressing one."
– Alberto Toscano
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her many books include The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century (2024), Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017) and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005).
