"Ezra Pound" and "F/fascism"

Abstract

Terms applied to fascism such as "attractive, "appealing" and "fascinating" emanate neither from a formalist discourse of structures nor an intentionalist discourse of motives, but from the affectivist discourse of a primitive reader-response criticism which conceives of the self as a unified essence whose encounters with equally unified essences can be registered negatively as repulsion or positively as attraction, and calibrated accordingly. The question of Pound's F/fascism is inconceivable except as a consequence of the conjecture of two hermeneutical conventions: the privileging of politicising over aestheticizing reading practices, and the eduction of an authorial identity out of textual diversities.