Fascism

This paper presents volumes 2 and 3 of the collective research project “Entangled Histories of the Balkans” dedicated to the “Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions” (edited by Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova) and to the “Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies” (edited by Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov). Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in the terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume apply a different approach. They all seek to study the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers, and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions, and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to the Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions. The volumes also invite reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens.

“Shipwreck with a Witness: Music and Fascism in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser”” is an attempt to think the multifaceted relations between music as an art and practice, and fascism as a desire as well as a political, existential, aesthetic, etc. condition and phantasm. These relations are explored through a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “The Loser” which is a fictional account of a doomed friendship between Bernhard‘s unnamed narrator, a fictionalised version of Glenn Gould, the infamous piano virtuoso, and Wertheimer – a caricature of the equally infamous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is through them that Bernhard addresses the problems of madness, desire for eternity and totality, the hatred of diversity and the Other, etc. By unpacking the dense logic and meaning of the above through ideas by Deleuze, Brassier, André Michels, etc., the text addresses the crucial figure of witnessing a transcendental trauma (fascism) qua event. Finally, the article engages with the theoretical and practical (ethical) importance of examining not just the relation between fascism and music but also the problem of the return of fascism within contemporary culture.