Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History

Watching Quentin Tarantino films is uncomfortable. They are mostly known for the all-too-real depictions of violence. The poster for his early film, Reservoir Dogs, has the main characters, all gangsters, walking shoulder to shoulder on their way to their ill-fated heist. The image is an homage to Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, a film about aging gangsters pulling off one last heist after the Wild West era of America history has ended. In the Wild Bunch, probably for the first time in cinematographic history, viewers are treated to blood splattering on the camera lens. The depiction of violence, especially for 1969, is jarring. In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Orange is shot in the stomach during the heist and, unlike most Hollywood films, he doesn’t flop twice on the ground and die on the spot. He’s bleeding and dying painfully through the whole film, begging Mr. Blonde to take him to the hospital. The violence is jarring. In Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds the stylized violence continues unabated, but with political implications. Django Unchained is a “spaghetti southern” in which Django is killing Southern slavers. In Inglourious Basterds, the Basterds burst Nazi skulls with bats, scalp the Nazis they have killed, and generally slaughter anyone associated with Germany and/or the Nazi regime. The film ends with the fanatical leadership of the entire Nazi regime machine gunned down and burned, and Hitler himself filled with bullets in a paroxysm of violence. Fanatics massacring fanatics. What is most uncomfortable in Tarantino’s films, however, is not the violence. Instead, it’s that we don’t find ourselves hating psychopaths and fanatics. How is it possible that we don’t hate Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction when he carelessly shoots Marvin in the face? Who doesn’t revel in Southern slavers being killed in Django? Who doesn’t celebrate the execution and scalping of Nazis in Basterds? With Tarantino’s films, we are often forced to choose our heroes from a list of awful fanatics. And choose we do. In Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History, Zachary R. Goldsmith argues that “fanaticism ought always to be rejected as an approach to politics because it is fundamentally antidemocratic, anti-political, anti-liberal, and never necessary” (155). The book is an effort to provide a semantic, or concept, history of “fanaticism.” This method, which Goldsmith describes numerous times in the book, prompts him to track the use of the word “fanaticism” from the ancient world through the modern. The author is careful to tell us that the idea ought not be conflated with its cousin “enthusiasm,” mostly because enthusiasm falls into the domain of religion. What is curious is that early in the book we are told numerous times that definitions of words like fanaticism are not possible because, citing Nietzsche, “such concepts are beyond definition” (3). However, in the next paragraph we’re given a ten-point definition, which is repeated two paragraphs later: