'We wouldn't be dead for quids': Hansonism, fascism, death and difference

There are a number of ways in which the Australian political movement led by Pauline Hanson can be implicated in the totalitarian episodes of the twentieth century. But there are also significant differences between what Hansonism presents us with in Australia and what totalitarianism has presented us with in Europe, in the fascist and stalinist regimes with which totalitarianism is associated. The suggestion in this paper is that totalitarianism can be understood in schematic terms as a mutation of the symbolic order through which differences have been arranged and evaluated in Western thought since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. Specifically, it belongs with the history of the binary opposition. Its mutation is that it attempts to realize - that is, to accomplish in reality - the fiction of the binary structure, which is its claim to comprehend or to be able to totalize and exhaust the space over which its positive and negative terms must govern. In a contemplation of death and difference, the question is considered here of what is to be gained for thought in characterizing Hansonism as a neo-fascist phenomenon.