Subject constitution and governance in Wyndham Lewis and Friedrich Nietzsche: Towards a study of fascism and modernity

What was the appeal of fascism for so many artists, writers, and intellectuals? Much recent attention--both scholarly and journalistic--has been paid to this controversial topic. This dissertation intervenes in the ongoing discussion of fascism and intellectuals. I do not undertake historical analyses of various modernist figures, but rather, attempt to lay some of the necessary theoretical groundwork for the study of this vexed and vexing problem. Specifically, I wager that the interpretive crux for future readings of fascism will be the question of the subject. Essentially, this dissertation overviews several recent and powerful theories of subject constitution. I begin by examining Althusserian models of identity construction--applying insights about subject-interpellation to the "case" of Wyndham Lewis. After my first two chapters, however, I turn to more materialist theories of subject constitution: centrally, the metaphor of the inscribed body as it appears is Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In analyzing the theoretical limits of this conception of the body, I critically engage some close readers of Nietzsche: especially Michel Foucault and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In my final chapter, I displace the metaphor of the inscribed body with a different Nietzschean figure for the subject: the body as a dietetic organism. Attending to the theory of the organism in Nietzsche draws our attention away from the essentially aesthetic question of subject constitution and directs it towards more political or organizational concerns. I conclude that a conception of subjectivity in terms of the problems of governance (such as we find in the late work of Foucault) will be peculiarly useful for addressing typical modernist (and male) anxieties over subject-loss. Modernity's anxious discourse against cultural excess and depropriation may be seen as a fascist ideologeme.