Introduction

In this issue, we have a superb set of articles devoted to the life and work of Joel Olson, a self-proclaimed fanatic, a radical and activist scholar whose tragic premature death has brought a great deal of despair and mourning to the left academic and activist community. This set of essays—including one by Joel Olson himself—is one attempt to address some of the loss caused by his death and to continue the critical political projects he was engaged in. Olson’s earlier book, The Abolition of White Democracy, has been a major source of radical thought and inspiration since its publication in 2004. At the time of his death, Olson was working on another book, American Zealot: Fanaticism and Democracy in the United States. The essays in this issue address that book (which is actively being worked on by the contributors) and serve to illuminate and expand upon that future publication.

George Ciccariello-Maher starts us off with an introduction to Joel Olson and his life’s work. He describes Olson’s early roots in punk and his subsequent moves towards anarchism. As Ciccariello-Maher notes, Olson epitomized the concept of fanaticism in his own life. Rather than taking this as a pejorative term (as is usually the case in the United States), Olson urges the fanaticism of John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and other abolitionists who fought against slavery. For Olson, although chattel slavery is formally abolished in this country, the task of abolitionism is far from over. The very notion of a white citizenry must itself be abolished, Olson tells us. In this way, whereas anarchist politics are ordinarily oriented against state and capitalism, Olson adds race as a critical element. This is his great contribution to political theory and radical politics and it is in this spirit that these authors engage with and continue his work. George’s introduction can be viewed here

Joel Olson’s contribution to the issue follows, starting us off. The short passage we have from him constitutes the beginning of American Zealot. Olson describes how academics and many activists alike tend to have a horror of extremism. Generally we see these extremists as insane and invariably bloodthirsty and craven. To make such assumptions, however, effectively serves to depoliticize the extremist and her cause. As Olson tells us, extremism is the “extraordinary political mobilization of the refusal to compromise.” Critically, he distinguishes a “bad” fanaticism from a “good” by virtue of the question of demonization of the other. All fanatics face this temptation but those who resist (he cites William Lloyd Garrison and his followers as members of this group) allow for a “democratic zealotry,” a model for extremism that serves rather than thwarts a radical left position. In our own time, which Olson calls an “age of extremism,” the value of a radical position that does not reproduce the reaction of what it opposes is of critical importance. Insofar as both American Zealot and the Abolition of White Democracy seek to eliminate a middle position between a radical left and right, the possibility of an extremism that retains features of engagement, democracy and equality is a vital part of appealing to the vast middle that is precisely the subject of Olson’s political theory.

Alberto Toscano, who has his own book on fanaticism (with a title by that name) follows Olson’s essay with a contribution of his own. Toscano engages with Olson’s interest in Marxist analysis (something that distinguishes him as an anarchist) in order to consider the question of “surplus population,” especially in a racialized context. In so doing, Toscano looks to “an extremism for our times,”—a theoretical model that explains and incites the current crisis of politics and economics that we all face. As Toscano tells us, the concept of class, as we have historically understood it, is at odds with the notion of fanaticism. The idea of class itself serves, as Toscano puts it, to “civilize” social violence. Toscano further points out that the racialization of class identity complicates the notion of class which is normally understood as a set of “interests.” In the United States the question of a racialized surplus population has a concrete expression in the form of large segments of the African American population which is either incarcerated or permanently unemployed. Eldridge Cleaver and other radical activists in the 1960s embraced the term “lumpenproletariat,” as referring, not to a suspect class that tended to side with reaction but the very sort of uncompromising force that serves to animate a larger fanatical political movement of resistance. In this way, Toscano seeks to meld a Marxist reading of class with Olson’s advocacy of fanaticism, a way to turn the “surplus” of capitalist and racial forms of domination into tools of their unmaking.

Jordana Rosenberg’s contribution takes Olson’s approach to fanaticism and uses it as a way to have queer theory come to terms with recent tendencies towards ontology (what she calls the “ontological turn,” something that can be seen in the new materialism, in Object Oriented Ontologies, and other sorts of related and recent positions). Rosenberg opposes this turn insofar as it furthers the depoliticization that began with the Enlightenment distinction between the rational and the fanatical in the first place. In her view the current ontological turn produces a kind of “sheer bewilderment” in the left. Here, the very fabric of reality is seen as departing from the political, ceding it to forces of reaction. Furthermore, such a view accedes to what Marx calls capitalism’s “annihilation of space by time,” the way that space is overwritten by temporal patterns that induce consumerism, progress and other markers of capitalist chronology. This “chrononormativity,” is what Rosenberg sets out to oppose (including the chrononormativity of much of queer theory itself). This pattern of subsumption to capitalist chronology hides the history of settler colonialism and other genocidal and racist practices that for Rosenberg, as much as for Olson, are critical to the ways that capitalism both dominates and masks that domination. Through this lens, Rosenberg seeks to capture the aleatory—and hence queer—nature of the molecular as the basic fabric of the material and to rescue it from what she sees as a naturalizing and depoliticizing tendency (along the way creating conditions for the “restitution of space to time”). In this way, Rosenberg allows the fanaticization of the world from the molecular level up, thereby resisting and unmasking the ways that nature has been made to represent the false and reactionary positions of ontology in our time.

George Ciccariello-Maher’s own contribution to the essay is to take Olson’s conceptual analysis of fanaticism and apply it to the work of Franz Fanon. He draws upon Olson’s work in American Zealot to do so. As noted previously, Olson’s support of fanaticism is qualified; he seeks to distinguish between the fanaticism of a John Brown and a Ted Kaczynski by refusing to demonize the other. By the same token, Ciccariello-Maher notes that Fanon’s own approach to fanaticism is tempered as well. Recognizing the European roots of the concept of fanaticism (and the related concept of enthusiasm) Ciccariello-Maher calls for a “decolonialization of fanaticism itself.” While Olson himself embraces a Manichean view of the world, for Ciccariello-Maher there can be a “frozen” sort of Manicheanism which reinforces reaction and racism vs. a “dialectical” Manicheasm that best characterizes the work that both Olson and Fanon engage with. As Ciccariello-Maher explains, this engagement with Fanon shows that, contrary to usual depictions, fanaticism engages with rationality (albeit in a complex fashion), with concrete situations (vs. the abstraction of the Jacobins) and in which equality rather than hierarchy as its chief principle. Here too, we see a fleshing out of the kind of participatory, democratic form of fanaticism that Olson describes and which each of the authors in this issue seeks in their own individual and collective way.

Issue 17.2 concludes with an essay on Gilbert Simondon by Joe Hughes in which he reviews three volumes: Pascal Chabot’s The Philosophy of Simondon; Muriel Combes’ Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual; and, Arne de Boever et al (eds), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Four other book reviews follow: Alexander Livingston reviews Mark Blyth’s Austerity; Paul Apostolidis reviews Cristina Beltrán’s The Trouble with Unity; Michael D. Snediker reviews Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable; and, Mindy Peden reviews Dean Mathiowetz’s Appeals to Interest.