Antinomies and lace

In book club news, I decided to get in on the Lucy Parson Center’s study group for Devin Zane Shaw’s Philosophy of Antifascism, which meets tonight in advance of the webinar with Shaw that they’re hosting in two weeks. Having successfully driven demand for the book up, it took me a bit to be able to get down to the LPC and acquire a copy, but I did. 

 

I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish the book by tonight’s book club because, while it is not very long, it is a real proper philosophy book and therefore a bit dense. Rather than focusing on Marxist or anarchist theory, Shaw’s focus is on French Existentialism, a school of thought I know absolutely jack about, although which it appears has a lot to say about fascism and antifascism due to all its most famous writers living through the Nazi occupation of France. One of my main takeaways from this book is definitely “I should read Simone de Beauvoir one of these days,” but another one was definitely “I am too dumb for existentialism.” 

 

There are a lot of concepts that are somewhat easier to grasp, like the three-way fight model, which here is explicated along slightly more ideological lines than the way I’d always heard it, but in a way that makes it easier to think about ideas and ideological contradictions, so that was actually quite nice. Other bits are much harder. What is an “antinomy” and, upon Googling it, is it just a fancy word for “contradiction” or does it have additional nuances? What do philosophers means when they talk about “policing” and “bad faith” and “politics,” because they seem just different enough from the everyday usages of these terms to make me really confused? 

 

Fighting my way through the earlier chapters about the nuances of French existentialist philosophy definitely paid off, though, as in the later chapters we get to some more concrete discussion of modern antifascist organizing, and how these various arguments can inform strategic and tactical choices in confronting the modern Far Right and navigating the relations between the modern Far Right and the “mainstream” racist violence of settler-colonialism. 

 

I wish I had more intelligent stuff to say in this review but I used up all my thoughts on the book club and I will have to come up with yet more thoughts for the webinar, so I’m taking pity on my poor dumb BA in English brain and wrapping up now.