Toward a Critique of Fascist Temporality: Deleuze, Heidegger, and History

This article pursues a Deleuzian critique of fascist temporality, or how fascism conceives of its relationship to time and history. This is done through a reading of Gilles Deleuze's critique of Martin Heidegger's history of being and his active membership in the National Socialist party. Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that Heidegger's history of being forms a teleological conception of history that philosophically justified his endorsement of National Socialism. Rejecting this model of thinking, Deleuze constructs a philosophy of becoming, which refers to the possibility of revolutionary events that could not be accounted for by historical time. In this article, I argue that Heideggerian temporality accords with the historical time that Deleuze's events explicitly undermine. While Heidegger's history of being led him to affirm fascist politics, Deleuze's view of events leads him to affirm the revolutionary struggles of marginalized groups. This article concludes with a Deleuzian elaboration of the temporality of fascism. Fascism is defined by a circular return and repetition of a historical past, which forecloses the very possibility of revolution.