ABSTRACT
On the one hand, there are links between fascism and conservatism, which share themes such as defence of private property and anti-feminism. On the other hand, there are links between fascism and modernism based on the deautonomization of cultural production and the aestheticization of power as a ‘celebration of the creative potential of human beings’ (Berghaus 1996: 21). To make sense of this synthesis of modernism and counter-enlightenment, we need to explain how the ‘disruptive temporality of the new’ in fascist ideology becomes entwined with a historicist retreat into identity: fascism connects a mythical past with an idealized future through the revalorization of archaic, patriotic and identitarian themes by fixing and preserving an artificial value for ideological commodities through state intervention.
