Fascist spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini's Italy

Abstract

A cultural history of Italian fascism, this work traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of a regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. The author reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi aregues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfounding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, it privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.