Introduzione alla vita non fascista

by Michel Foucault, Deborah Borca (Editor)

“Come fare per non diventare fascista anche quando (soprattutto quando) si crede di essere un militante rivoluzionario? Come sbarazzare del fascismo il nostro discorso e i nostri atti, i nostri cuori e i nostri piaceri? Come rimuovere il fascismo che si è incrostato nel nostro comportamento?”.

In poche epoche come nella nostra si è fatto un così gran parlare di fascismo. Ovunque, nuovi movimenti dichiarano con fierezza la loro identità neofascista, mentre le sinistre usano quella stessa etichetta per accusare le destre. Ma nel mulinare di parole, si corre il rischio di perdere la percezione della vera natura di questa presenza ingombrante del nostro passato. Perché il fascismo è un’ideologia sorprendentemente tenace, e le sue modalità di pensiero le abbiamo attaccate sotto le suole delle scarpe, anche quando ci proclamiamo antifascisti. Ma allora come si fa a vivere una vita davvero non fascista?
In queste brevi lezioni, Michel Foucault prova a dare una risposta con riflessioni che aprono squarci sul nostro modo di intendere la politica e la società. Esaminando i meccanismi che ci fanno cadere nelle trappole fasciste, Foucault ci offre alcune linee guida per evitarle – prima regola: mai innamorarsi del potere.

144 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2025

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[gretafasurf ☆ · Rating 4 out of 5]

alcuni estratti li avevo già letti ma mi sono ugualmente gasata

[Yalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not think the selection and organisation of this collection was particularly inspiring. I picked this up at a bookshop in Rome because the one I had brought with me was too heavy to carry around everywhere. And what is a person supposed to do when they are waiting for their food at restaurants and the moments of time where other people tend to use their phone? I hate using my phone, with each passing year it feels more and more like an electronic collar. I chose this one, because I was familiar with the material in English so it would not be so difficult to read in Italian. And… It was difficult to read in Italian but I learnt many new words.

Originally I was writing this review in Italian but I came across a translation from a Spanish newspaper on current events. This would make writing it too difficult for me so pardon me for writing this in English. Here is the excerpt:

“[redacted] wasn't selling girls' bodies, he was selling the experience of impunity. The end product was not the sexual act, but the assurance that there would be no consequences. The comparison being made of Pasolini's Salò film and the [redacted] files is not a metaphor, in an explanation of the real thing. Pasolini unveiled the intimate logic of naked power, the same that [redacted]’s roles expose in raw, without aesthetic mediation. Salò does not speak of historical fascism, but of fascism as a permanent possibility of capitalism. It's not about "insanity" or "individual perversion". It is about the instrumental rationality of power when it is emancipated from all ethical limits. Power doesn't just want obedience, it wants to create reality. [redacted] was not an isolated sadist but the manager of a legal and morally extraterritorial territory, where the capitalist elites created an experimental space freed from all human law.”

Given this, this selection of Foucault’s writings is perhaps the most important thing anyone who wants to live in a world—not a better world, not even a liveable world—but the world as the bare minimum of the environment a human must exist in. Many young people see political beliefs and identity as things which one is in possession of and discard as appropriate, and not as values which one must live. Here, Foucault calls upon us all to live anti-fascism in our everyday lives which goes against the personal laziness and hopelessness which have come as a result of the American maxim “the personal is political”—rather political hope remains precisely in changing our desires, our tastes, our behaviours to resist “the fascism in our heads” or to exceed the personal because « il rapporto di sovranità non si applica infatti a una singolarità somatica, ma a delle molteplicità che si collocano, in qualche modo, al di sopra dell'indivualità corporea » (2025: 60).

“But power is not omnipotent. It has cracks. And in those cracks grows the ordinary. The resistance here is not "complaint", ', but practice of re-appropriation: Re-appropriation of the body. Re-appropriating the narrative. Re-appropriation of the look. Where there is testimony, there is gap in the power. Where there is memory, there is a possibility of justice.”