Anti-fascist praxis, while necessary to stem the tide of iterations of fascist political manifestations, has at times fallen prey to the same Achilles’ heel of some anti-colonial theory: being determined by what it is against.
Being determined by what one is against can lead to, or collapse into, that which is opposed. This danger is specifically present when that which is opposed is conceptually structured through binary oppositions, such as the us-them formulations of fascism.1 Carl Schmitt’s universalization of the friend-enemy distinction as the ground for the political, therefore, serves as an ever-present warning to, and concept test for, anti-fascist theory and praxis.2 Schmitt, a fascist political theorist, argued that politics is the determination of who is a friend and who is an enemy, in the same way that morals are a judgement of what is right and what is wrong. For Schmitt, there is no politics apart from this basic distinction. Anti-fascism risks becoming what it is against if it adopts this fascist structuring of politics whereby the universal antagonism of friend-enemy reigns; i.e., “You are either anti-fascist or you are fascist.”
Strategic anti-fascist action, tactics, and training can delay, postpone, or interrupt fascism, but insofar as it conceptually mirrors what it is against, there lingers its potential contortion. Antifascist and nonfascist attempts to move beyond mere rejections of fascism and toward alternative ways of being and politics that are less easily twisted to serve fascism are therefore engaging in the domain of education.3 Gayatri Spivak has described this domain as follows: “education in the humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.”4
If education is understood as a rearrangement of desire rather than the transmission of predetermined conclusions or content, then the cultivation of imagination becomes integral for antifascism. Reading is perhaps an often-overlooked aspect of cultivating an antifascist sensibility through imaginative practice. Reading gives us occasions to encounter worlds, relations, and possibilities that exceed the binary structures through which fascism organizes life. Slow, imaginative, poetic reading is one way to lower defensive othering, reduce feelings of threat, and thereby soothe the self, so that desires may be rearranged without coercion. Desires that may then be educationally altered to propose forms of politics beyond those grounded upon friend-enemy distinctions.
The point is not simply to read against fascism, but to read resources capable of enlarging the imagination beyond fascism’s terms. There are many resources to read for such antifascist, uncoercive rearranging. For example, instead of merely rehashing European critical theory’s opposition to fascism, Alberto Toscano has turned to the Black Radical Tradition as an already existing repository of antifascist theory, praxis, and futures.5 In a similar move, I turn here to the antifascist work of the North American Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose work offers an imaginative reserve that can shape one’s imagination and, in turn, rearrange desires, thereby opening horizons of antifascist futures.
Simpson has offered glimpses of her people’s antifascist imagination throughout her corpus, but she specifically offers antifascist insights in her recent book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Writing an endorsement for the book, author Omar El Akkad stated, “No writer in recent memory has more thoroughly rearranged my moral compass than Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and no book brought me more solace than Theory of Water.” Here again, solace and rearrangement are found in company. It is in this vein of endorsing the reading of her work for its ability to inform one’s imagination, and therefore for its educational potential, that I introduce a few aspects of her work that direct the imagination it yields in antifascist trajectories.
The mythopoetic reserve of stories, characters, narratives, and places that Simpson accesses for educational imaginative practices of “making worlds” and building “lifeways” is a reserve informed by the rest of the earth—what is sometimes called the natural world. Yet the turn toward mythopoetics, nature, and a world beyond conventional political categories requires some caution. If antifascist education is concerned with avoiding the conceptual structures that fascism itself exploits, then we must also ask whether appeals to nature, origin, and an underlying world can inadvertently reproduce the search for a singular ground that has historically nourished fascist thought. Such a reach toward a mythopoetics informed by a natural world may cause some to hesitate. Did not Heidegger, the card-carrying Nazi, make a similar move in his ontological musings from Dasein to a spiritual Volk intertwined with a fundamental ontology of the natural world?6
The comparison with Heidegger therefore raises a crucial question for Simpson’s project: what prevents an appeal to the more-than-human world from becoming another appeal to a singular origin or fundamental ground? In Simpson’s account, it is precisely the plurality and relationality of the world that prevents such a reduction. Simpson’s world-making mythopoetic reserve is one laced with multiple origin narratives, spiritual beings, and a shapeshifting character and teacher, Nibi (water). Therefore, Simpson’s mythopoetic reserve highlights diversity and multiplicity rather than a quest towards a fundamental singular ontology or an exclusionary outworking. Her antifascist educational vision of worldmaking is suffused with variety:
“World making requires love, kindness and care. It requires collectivity and relationality…There are many origins. The land and the waters, the universe, hold all the knowledge we need to make other worlds. World building is difficult global work. It is sacrifice, both collective and individual. It requires difference and diversity. There is no centre or centring in the creation and maintenance of a network.”7
What emerges here is not simply a different description of the world, but a different political imaginary: one organized through relation without requiring a centre around which identities and antagonisms must be arranged. This is how Simpson’s world-making becomes significant for antifascist education. Such an antifascism, with no centre or centring, generated from and into variety, is perhaps one that can avoid collapsing into its opposite. Through reading her storytelling, imagining the characters and places, one may be educated into an imagination wherein if there is no centre perhaps there is no enemy. And then, if there is no enemy, perhaps politics is altogether different than antagonism.
But if the possibility of such a politics is to be more than an abstract negation of antagonism, it requires an image of how relations might actually be organized otherwise. Simpson finds such an image in Nibi—water—which becomes both teacher and model for a politics grounded in movement, relation, and shared life. Simpson articulates the beginning of such a world through the education she has received from Nibi (water). Informed by Nibi, she writes, “Water is the network that facilitates communication and relationship between all forms of life. Water is a liminal space, always shifting between states…And still, it is in motion…And all life shares this water.”8 Networking through liminality, shifting, motion, and sharing is an imagined politics less easily contorted into its opposite.
What matters for antifascist education, then, is not that water supplies a political metaphor, but that imagining politics through water displaces the fixed boundaries and oppositions through which antagonism becomes thinkable in the first place. Such an imagination has educational potential as it refutes containment, refutes capture, refutes binary oppositions, and even refutes the state, thereby luring her reader’s desires in different directions.9 The politics that follow from this imagination therefore do not begin from a friend-enemy distinction; no such universalized antagonism is necessary. And so, as one is educated by and into this imagination, this imagination may take us to a different future. An antifascist future. A morning in new worlds.
This morning, at the end of this world, I ask myself what I would give up to bring into being a different world, to change the air, to change everything.10
- For a description of this binary, non-dialectical mode of thought within fascisms broadly see: Silas C. Krabbe, “Responding to Fascist Thought in Education: Resources for Anti-Fascist Pedagogy from Paulo Freire,” Philosophy of Education 79, no. 2 (2023): 158, https://doi.org/10.47925/79.2.154. ↩︎
- Carl Schmitt and Tracy B. Strong, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, with George Schwab and Tracy Strong (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Carl Schmitt et al., The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2010). ↩︎
- For a description of the threefold typology of anti-fascism, antifascism, and nonfascist invoked here, see: Silas C. Krabbe and Tyson E. Lewis, “Antifascist Education: An Introduction,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 46, no. 3 (2024): 377–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2024.2370094. ↩︎
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 526, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523. ↩︎
- Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso Books, 2023), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=30724129; Tyson E. Lewis et al., “Late Fascism and Education: An Interview with Alberto Toscano,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 46, no. 3 (2024): 526–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2024.2309771. ↩︎
- Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale University press, 2022); James Phillips, Heideggers Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford university press, 2005). ↩︎
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (Knopf, 2025), 41–42, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=31552502. ↩︎
- Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water Canadian Edition, 50–51. ↩︎
- “Mino-bimaadiziwin is incommensurate with statehood because networks built from relationships are incommensurate with statehood.” Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water Canadian Edition, 111. ↩︎
- Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water Canadian Edition, 56. ↩︎
To cite this article:
Silas C. Krabbe, ‘Imagining as Antifascist Education,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 18 (2 September 2026).
Imagining as Antifascist Education © 2026 by Silas C. Krabbe is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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