From lundi matin #459, 14/01/2025
Interview with Argentine philosopher Veronica Gago
Philosopher, feminist activist and member of the Ni Una Menos collective. “How has neo-liberalism managed to make the logic of sacrifice part of the common language?” she asks in this interview, in which she reflects on the reasons for the programmatic antifeminism of the far right and the masculinisation of institutional politics.
“The government is creating a state anti-feminism that aims to combat the feminist movement both in public squares and in public policies and feminist institutions.” This characterisation comes from Veronica Gago, philosopher, political scientist and feminist activist. “Feminisms today condense the social figure of the scapegoat: it’s not just a question of a cultural war, it’s also a question of the political radicalism of feminism and the social transformations it promises”, says the researcher.
In this interview, conducted for the podcast Los monstruos andan sueltos[1], Veronica Gago analyses the scope of what she defines as “patriarchal restoration” and refers to the process of the masculinisation of politics: “Allied political components continue to blame the rise of the far right on feminisms.”
If we look at the far right emerging at this moment in history, what is new and distinctive about this neo-liberalism from below, as you define it in your work?
The radical novelty of neo-liberalism is that it is a form of government that, instead of requiring obedience, relies on freedom. In terms of classical political theory, to govern means to obtain obedience from people. The turn taken by neo-liberalism is to start by saying that in order to govern we must ensure that everyone cultivates their own freedom. This is a change at the level of political subjectivities. One thing is to say: OK, I obey, I don’t obey or I organise disobedience. Another thing is that the very idea of being governed relates to the idea of one’s own freedom. This shift in the axis of government from obedience to freedom represents a radical novelty, because it manages to associate freedom with extreme individualism. Previously, the concept of freedom was linked to a collective project, whereas what neo-liberalism achieves at this stage is a vague definition circumscribed solely within the limits of the individual. The illusion is that this free individual can be governed or governable.
If you combine increasing job insecurity and social exclusion with this idea of extreme individualism, the message could be that there is no way out of the crisis, find your own…
Exactly, because this idea of individual freedom also stimulates a desire for action. In the narrative of the far right, this exhalation of the potential for action is strong and is the driving force behind this expansion of neo-liberalism from below. So, if you receive social welfare, it means you admit that you are incapable, that you need help, that you are destitute, and that in any case you are allowing yourself to be victimised by the state. This is the narrative that has managed to spread, replacing the assertion that these are conquered rights. This defeat concerns the way in which rights are perceived today. Thus, the deformation put in place by these ideologues who devise strategies on how to incite people consists in addressing the oppressed who, despite everything, feel that they have something to lose. This is how ideologues set up oppositions between different impoverished social sectors. Historically, when emancipatory thought maintains that we should feel annoyance, fury and anger towards those who deprive us of what is ours, and that this anger goes from the bottom to the top, these ideologues manage to ensure that this rage is dispersed horizontally. The desire for progress, which is legitimate, is then instrumentalised, giving rise to a whole series of phenomena that ensure that feelings of hatred, frustration and resentment never reach the top.
Feminisms have been elevated to the position of political enemy and form a central part of the cultural war waged by the far right. How do you analyse this programmatic definition of the new right?
There has always been a misogynist element in historical fascism, but what we’re seeing at the moment is that this has taken on unprecedented importance in the construction of the figure of the internal enemy, the scapegoat. Today’s feminisms condense this figure and I think this has to do with the progress and experiences of social transformation of recent years, in which feminist struggles have been the protagonists. Particularly in Latin America, feminist struggles have managed to enter into synergy with popular, trade union, indigenous and anti-extractivist struggles. The trajectory of feminisms has resisted enrolment in what can only be defined as the gender agenda. They have submerged it. For example, if we think of the social revolts in Chile or Colombia in 2018 and 2019, feminist collectives have forged a strong link with revolts that demonstrate innovative political articulations. Feminisms are now also asking how to manage the precariousness and violence of current conditions in a way that is neither individualistic nor authoritarian. I believe that this is the great gamble that feminist struggles have taken in recent years, and in this sense they are in direct competition with the proposed solution of the new right, which maintains that the only way to deal with the crisis is to become active as an individual macho landlord and, if you manage to arm yourself and kill whoever is on your side, so much the better.
You mean that, following in the footsteps of authors like Wendy Brown, you believe that the anti-feminism of the far right is not just a cultural war?
Absolutely. It doesn’t seem to me that anti-feminism is a cultural or purely ideological issue or one that isn’t rooted in the material issues that these feminist struggles are discussing. This is why the far right responds, as in the case of our current government, with practises of state anti-feminism aimed at combating both the feminist movement in the street and feminist public policies and institutions. This anti-feminism promoted and legitimised by the State is also what gives an additional characteristic to anti-feminist violence.
As well as being against rights, all the signals coming from the government are in the direction of challenging another order, of restoring a conservative family order…
The fact that right-wingers are reactionary doesn’t mean that they don’t have a programme with proposals. As you say, this is really the question of the concept of patriarchal restoration expressed by Judith Butler, according to whom the term reaction is too limited. What these new right-wingers are saying is that there was an idyllic time in the past, the time of patriarchy, and that we have to go back to it.
How would you describe this attempt at restoration?
I think there’s a very strong idea of restoration, according to which authority must be clear and precise and attributed to the figure of the virile father, and in which privileges find a certain biological basis. So there are various visions of the world that seem to promise stability in the face of daily insecurity. This is what the far right does best with its promise of stability: “We have an idea of order. Things will go back to where they belong, they will be orderly, everyone will know what they have to do, and what’s more, it will be a natural order.”
There is a very active core, you could say a very strong emotional core, of young men who support the far right. This is also a concrete fact in Argentina. It’s a complex phenomenon, because they don’t all hold conservative positions and often the most reactionary and violent core appears to be over-represented. How do you interpret this masculinity, which also coincided with the Marea Verde [Trans. Note: campaign to legalise abortion, symbolised by a green scarf]?
There’s a reaction to the destabilisation that the feminist movement has generated in masculinities, especially in those that are highly precarious. I think it’s precisely here that the effects of feminism can be seen: as a revision of sexual and emotional ties, as a reflection on the privileges of masculinity and how all this intersects with the decline of the male figure as responsible for the economic support of the family. It all comes together in a way that leaves young men disorientated, unsettled and often resentful. We saw this when they said that now they don’t know how to behave, that now we can’t say anything and if we do, we’ll be censured. In other words, an insecurity that has also positioned feminism as a kind of moral force, whereas that’s not what feminism is. It’s a movement that breaks down privilege and forces us to rethink relationships. So there are a lot of things to keep working on. Because, having said that, there are so many young people who are feminists, so many men who think and already have a sensibility that was unthinkable ten years ago, who have lived through this period and whose experience is more that of feeling really comfortable in freeing themselves from the imperatives of masculinity.
There are leadership figures in this world today taken on by far-right women, from Marine Le Pen to Giorgia Meloni. These leaders tell us that there is no such thing as inequality and they are presented as proof of women’s empowerment. In our country, the other side of the coin is that the political scene is heavily masculinised, even within progressive circles. Do you see it that way?
I think it’s very important to stress that this re-masculinisation of politics that we’re seeing in Argentina is not a phenomenon exclusive to the right or the far right. Progressive national-popular sectors have supported the thesis that feminism is responsible for the rise of the far right. Let’s be clear, this was the necessary step for the masculinisation of politics.
If we look outside Argentina, in Mexico we have for the first time a President of the Republic who openly proclaims herself to be a feminist, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
I think this is very important: to think about this conflict at the level of political leadership too, because as you said, for some years now the Right has been actively producing women leaders, precisely as a form of biological challenge to feminism, saying that all women as women are not necessarily left-wing, progressive, transformative. So the fact that today some right-wing women are promoting, for example, anti-abortion or pro-birth claims, racist or anti-immigration claims, or criminalising social protest, also seeks to be a riposte to feminism, as if feminism could be refuted by these right-wing women leaders.
There are scenes of social and political life that have the capacity to condense a historical moment, that bear the signs of a change of era or a certain threshold crossed. If you had to choose one image from Milei’s Argentina, which would you share with us and why?
I was struck by the scene of the shop assistants printing Milei’s slogan no hay plata [T.N.: there’s no money] on their T-shirts, repeated to the point of nausea. I have a strong question in relation to the desire for prosperity or anti-austerity expressed in general by popular movements and struggles. There is a desire to increase pleasure and consumption, clearly contrary to austerity. Milei manages to transform his phrases into printed T-shirts as a kind of introjection of austerity. So I think that while the Macri government introduced the logic of meritocracy, we’ve now reached a later phase, which is that of sacrifice. The idea that we have to sacrifice ourselves and also limit consumption, the good life, the desire for what we want. For me it’s an image replete with questions: how do we move from this meritocracy to the logic of sacrifice, how do we manage to make such a thing a common language? It also includes the feeling of guilt for what happened and for what we imagined possible. I mention this image because it seems to me to reflect a very strong particularity of Argentina, which also has to do with the role of inflation and near hyperinflation. It seems to me that, in general, everything is analysed as an economic phenomenon when in fact it is a highly political phenomenon, because inflation is the daily experience of the permanent depreciation of our individual efforts. So it seems to me that there is an important link here in understanding this logic of sacrifice, of “there is no money”. And also to understand inflation as the logic of the self-discipline of desire and the limitation of what we can aspire to do or conceive for the future.
The search by politics for its own scenario that takes account of the profound social and political transformations accelerated by the pandemic continues to be an open question for the parties and political forces in the popular and progressive camp. Perhaps we need to start by asking the questions, so that we can ask new ones that can question this time of precariousness and crisis.
I believe that the task of movements is to produce questions.[2] The Chilean Julieta Kirkwood[3] saw the women’s movement in Chile as a fundamental movement for democracy. This is a very good way of thinking about and describing a movement, not only in terms of what it did and said, but even more so in terms of the questions it succeeded in raising as collective issues. So to think that the political task is to construct and ask questions that put us in tension, that take us to the limits of what we are capable of thinking, saying and doing, is a fundamental task. A central question is how to appropriate collective wealth, free up forms of use of time and how this produces other subjectivities which, in terms of states of mind, affective capacities, are today completely afflicted by forms of depression, anxiety, fear and uncertainty. I believe that people’s self-esteem is fundamental. When we go back in history to those brilliant moments of the people, we see that there was an enormous production of popular and collective self-esteem. The conviction that we deserve things, that it is possible to do certain things, that there is a dignity that we have earned.
So the question has to do with audacity, with the ability not to give up on imagination?
Yes, the ability to produce audacity and to recover and reappropriate movements that generate self-esteem. To believe that we deserve things in collective terms, and not in the terms of this individualistic meritocracy, which in the end does nothing but spread anxiety.
As far as feminism is concerned, what question would you raise?
The question today is what it means and how to maintain collective spaces. Because in a moment of turmoil, of general joy, it’s easier to take part in a collective space and maintain it. So for me the question is how, when conditions are so unfavourable, to maintain the collective spaces that are fundamental to being able to think in terms of processes and not isolated events. This includes positions of retreat, where collective spaces need to be preserved.
“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this darkness, monsters are born.” Antonio Gramsci’s quote describes a turning point in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. Does it remind you of our times?
This phrase resonates for me in the sense that something new is happening and that we are on the threshold of a historic change. I hear a lot of people say that they’d never have imagined experiencing something like this or that they’d never have thought they’d go through it again. So I think that, at the moment, there’s a fairly widespread feeling of a historic turning point. That’s also what surprises us a little, that we can’t patch things up or find a more or less intermediate solution, because the level of transformation and crisis in capitalism is really strong, and capitalism, in its very crisis, is becoming ever more violent and aggressive in order to find a way to re-launch itself, at the same time as it centralises the concept of innovation. We also see this in the far right: “we are the revolution, we will change everything, nobody will stop us.” The whole revolutionary language of transformation and daring is what they are trying to appropriate, because it is precisely this language and this attitude that seem to be up to the moment we are living through. In this sense, then, it seems to me that the phrase calls out to us because we are in a period of general upheaval that imposes demands and obligations on us in terms of the boldness we spoke about before. We cannot be content with half measures, because others will be bolder, but in the opposite direction to our aspirations.
What about monsters? Because feminism and transfeminism have appropriated the notion of monstrosity…
Of course, to assert that we’re all monsters. We always say that the monster is a divine warning, a message from the beyond to say that there is something truly new. So I think the monster is what we don’t recognise, what is unknown and doesn’t fit into the pre-established models available to us for recognising what exists. That’s where we find this appropriation of the monstrous, in the double sense of warning and then asserting our ability to break out of the mould. The monstrous as resistance to sticking to a standardised, recognisable form, and yet as a warning. Thinking about how we relate to the monstrous, not just out of fear, but as a way of thinking about it as something new that still has no form.
Interview conducted for CLACSO (Latin American Social Sciences Council) by Ana Cacopardo for the podcast series “Los monstruos andan sueltos” in collaboration with el diario.ar, where it was published as a Spanish-language article (28.11.24).
[1] T.N.:“Monsters on the loose” is a podcast on the new right produced by the Argentinean magazine elDiarioAR in collaboration with CLACSO – Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales/Conselho Latino-americano de Ciências Sociais [Latin American Social Sciences Council].
[2] We probably mean questions in the usual sense, but also in a broader sense here, not unrelated to other terms such as demand, claim or problem.
[3] T.N.: One of the founders of the Chilean feminist movement of the 1980s.