The Final Countdown: Fascism, Jazz, and the Afterlife

Abstract

The general question underlying this article is whether it is possible to turn a paradox into a productive principle. The article approaches this question through Adorno’s and Dainotto’s analyses of the jazz movement in fascist Italy. Jazz was marked by a specific paradox: on the one hand, it was banned due to its African American roots, and as such did not adhere to or glorify the Italian tradition; on the other hand, jazz served very well to protect the nationalist interests in the light of the nascent mass movements. Against the backdrop of these analyses, the article proposes two distinct paradigms of exception: the logic of count till all and the logic of count till none.