Jeronimo Rilla (University of Buenos Aires)
What kind of group is Antifa?
3pm, 25th February, 2022
One of the highlights of the US 2020 first presidential debate was the one concerning Antifa. While Biden contended that Antifa is ‘an idea, not an organization’, Trump held the view that it ‘is a dangerous, radical group’. ‘When a bat hits you over the head, that’s not an idea’, he added. In this paper I offer an answer to the question regarding Antifa’s nature. First, I briefly outline the main characteristics of Antifa (section 1). Next, I review the philosophical underpinnings of the Trump-Biden discussion and identify its shortcomings in relation to this political phenomenon (section 2). Later, I draw upon the notion of personification of groups and develop an alternative theoretical framework (section 3). Specifically, I distinguish four axes of analysis: attribution; performativity; external personation; and autonomization. I then conclude that Antifa is a group, but that is mainly voiced and constructed as a collective person by external agents (section 4). Finally, I derive six insights that insiders and outsiders can infer from this approach to Antifa (section 5).