Arendt’s conception of love and anti-fascist education

Abstract

Recent scholarship on anti-fascist education has stressed the role of everyday manifestations of power and oppression as the locus of molecular or microfascism, a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari. While identifying the ways in which power structures operate at the quotidian level is undoubtedly an important educational task, this paper argues that an anti-fascist educational approach must also account for the ways in which such structures are connected to concrete political manifestations of fascism. To this end, it explores the potential contributions and challenges of an Arendtian conception of love in the context of anti-fascist education. Drawing on Arendt’s polemical interactions about love with Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem, this paper suggests that Arendt’s conception of love as belonging outside the realm of the political, and her rejection of a love for the nation and for collectivities in general, can serve as important pedagogical tools in uncovering and critiquing specific affective appeals characteristic of fascist and neo-fascist rhetoric. While in Arendt’s own work love is not explicitly associated with an analysis of fascism, her thinking about love brings us back to questions about the very meaning of politics, questions that are foundational to any meaningful attempt to establish an anti-fascist pedagogy.[AQ]