Högre seminariet, historia: Christopher Forth presenterar sin uppsats ‘What’s the Meaning of a Life Without Scars?’: Fight Club Culture and the Euro-American Far Right’

In 2019 The New Yorker ran a short piece entitled ‘The Men Who Still Love “Fight Club”’ referencing the enduring legacy of the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk and its 1999 film adaptation by David Fincher. Focused primarily on American society, the article fails to mention Fight Club's appeal to many in Europe and elsewhere who have also been attracted by its aggressive masculinism and critique of consumer lifestyles. As a first step into a strange and sometimes disturbing world – what I refer to as ‘Planet Fight Club’ – this presentation explores how Palahniuk’s narrative features in far-right political culture in Europe and America today. Using selective examples from France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United States, particularly from representatives of the pan-European youth movement Generation Identity, it proposes that ‘fight club culture’ articulates enduring historical tensions between masculinity and modernity while inspiring practical methods of preserving – sometimes violently – the supposed integrity of white European culture. As opposed to what is often described as a slumbering society of devirilized white males, fight club culture promises a sensory and experiential regeneration of white Western manhood, a new vitalism in a modern world often described as ‘dead’.