From lundimatin #509, (18/02/2026)
To take an interest in fascism is to feel a connection with a past that is imminent in a threatening future. This past is not simply an ancient present: it is a past that is contemporary with our present, actively feeding into it. It is not a past that determines our present, that is its prelude, or that is the first occurrence in a sequence of events destined to repeat themselves as they are. It is a set of gestures, materialities, affects, ideas and subjectivities that haunt our present: this haunting is both an imposing presence and a sign that attracts us, while remaining strange, different and heterogeneous.[1]
Like the plague’s capacity for mutations, the reappearance of fascism will not be an exact replica of what existed in the past but a significant difference reflecting the particular moment. Owing to its axiomatic relationship to capitalism, the form of fascism, its destruction of subjective autonomy, remains unchanged, but with every new reappearance it brings new content in different, historical presents, as Primo Levi observed in the 1970s, when he declared that every age could expect the return of fascism in new and different materializations.
Harry Harootunian, A Fascism for Our Time
Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia
Apostille:
The aim of this text is to identify latent and tolerated forms of fascism that lie below the threshold of social recognition. This study will seek to show how our post-war capitalist tendencies towards mitigation relay the material effectiveness of a certain form of fascism within us. This change in the scale of analysis will reveal a certain “molecularity” of fascism by scrutinising its finest crystallisations, contrary to a classical mechanistic and historicist analysis. A micro-reality of fascism will thus reveal itself in the affective economy of the body. Fascist impulses have entered the materiality of power and reached the underground limits of politics, administration, economics and communication. “Everything is physics”, said Deleuze, even fascism.
Fascism is not primarily a uniform, a pair of boots and a flag. It is a way of breathing power; a reflex, an impulse, a passion, an intimate adherence to the system that constrains us. Foucault pointed out that power does not weigh on us from the outside, but passes through us and ultimately shapes us. We end up as products of its substance. In the great factory of modern subjectivities, fascism imposes a most perfect rhythm, one that brings the body and command into alignment without resorting to the truncheon. Like an archaeologist, Foucault delves into the mysteries of power and reveals the secret of tyrannies without tyrants: there is no longer any need for the latter when everyone carries the disciplinary matrix within themselves. The policing act of monitoring oneself, has become the hallmark of contemporary power. The Empire is no longer to be conquered, it is the environment or milieu itself, the milieu through which a network of hierarchical micro-relationships is woven, into which an infinity of ways of submitting oneself slips. Our ‘control societies’, to refer to Deleuze, spread the molecule by means of the codification of affects, the normalisation of behaviour, the surveillance of language and the automation of gestures and attitudes.
This attack on multiplicity leads to the biopolitical logic of an “infra-political fascism”, which, from below, at the very root, makes the individual capable of the worst, even desiring brutality.
Thus, fascist subjectivity is not limited to the oppressor, the executioner or the tyrant, but extends to the “ordinary” individual, the average civil servant or the insignificant neighbour. This quiet enjoyment of the rules is rooted in the pride of conformity. And so the fascist subject demands his dose of discipline and finds blissful, comforting satisfaction in the norm.
Extending Foucault’s argument, we can observe that this insidious form of fascism is the logical outcome of biopolitical modernity.
But where Foucault dissects power and seeks the new investment of the body through the relations of this power, Deleuze and Guattari, in order to account for fascism, pick the pockets of desire. They scrutinise the grey and confused area where the world of drives and the world of politics intermingle. This is where fascism takes root. Their co-authored work, Anti-Oedipus, explores the possibilities and strategies of the struggle for emancipation when it is no longer solely economic in nature. They seek to identify new revolutionary horizons while analysing the conditions that make counter-revolutions possible, giving rise to new forms of fascism. Their question was clear: why choose fascism over revolution?
Anti-Oedipus (1972): Decompartmentalising desire, the radical materialism of Deleuze and Guattari
This book, which examines the internalisation of constraint, castigates the pervasive “Oedipalisation” that Freudian psychoanalysis produces and defends at every turn. This reduction of desire to the father-mother-child triangle, where the unconscious is bound by a play that endlessly re-enacts the same scene, is deemed counterfeit. Deleuze and Guattari correct this view by considering the unconscious not as a zone of lack or an Oedipal residence, but as a productive, desiring machine, a factory that works to produce. Desire, seeking to grow and become singular, is a creative force and circulates in social, economic and political arrangements. There is continuity between individual desire and social mechanisms. Desire is always inscribed in structures and arrangements. The task is therefore to understand how it can be captured and directed, channelled and codified. If Deleuze and Guattari inherit the thinking of Reich,[2] for whom capitalism is not only a social and economic system but also a mechanism that penetrates the psychological and emotional dimension of alienated individuals, it is because they share the observation that the political alienation caused by German Nazism has its origins in the unconscious, in innocence, and the impulsive and desiring “irresponsibility” of the masses. From this point of view, they are right to insist on explaining fascism “in terms of desire”: the Nazi regime did not impose itself on the German masses through ideological deception or illusion, but was wanted or desired because of the instinctual impotence resulting from the oppressive political structure of the institutions.
The relationship between desire and society becomes crucial; we can no longer consider psychological processes as autonomous and independent of the action of social forces.
This is an opportunity to explain Reich’s contribution to the grassroots understanding of the fascist phenomenon. He correlates fascism with a certain type of emotional and sexual economy, identifying a character structure as the crystallisation of a socialisation process. This structure, which Reich calls the “armour”, paradoxically refers to the level of rigidity, the lack of mobility that made the masses “malleable”, i.e. adaptable to all forms of abjection. In 1933, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was published, then republished in 1944. In this work, Reich sought to explain the genesis of a new fascist regime, an “acquired irrationalism” attributable to a certain psychic economy. To account for this becoming-irrational, he rejects a number of erroneous analyses of fascist domination. For example, he does not conceive of fascism mechanically as a reactive result of the economic crisis of 1929. He seeks out fascism by delving beneath the visible surface of things, scrutinising the “thousand little nothings” and other organisational elements that determine social customs and forms of affectivity. According to him, the fascist concept and its ideology coincide with the affective structure of the masses. Here, Deleuze and Guattari follow him:
There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the precon-scious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.[3]
From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari no longer view triumphant capitalism in the Marxist manner as a mode of production based on profit growth and private ownership of the means of production, but rather as a machinic system, an “arrangement” that makes desire function in the form of economic axioms. The individual is not an isolated being, a monad closed in on itself. He or she is an integral part of ‘heterogeneous assemblages’ composed of ‘territorial sites” where desire stabilises and “points of deterritorialisation” where it departs from the main axes and opens up to new horizons. An assemblage is a battery of sets where forces of change are expressed, moments when we leave the familiar behind and venture elsewhere. In short, the individual is a node of relationships in motion. And according to Deleuze and Guattari, the limitation of Reich’s approach is that it unwittingly falls back into a separation that it could have abolished: that between the psychic and the social, between two distinct orders of reality and causality. By maintaining this divide, Reich refuses to consider that desire and the social field are coextensive, that is, that they belong to a single, continuous and immanent process of production:
It is indeed a question of libido as such, as the essence of desire and sexuality: but now it invests and disinvests flows of every kind as they trickle through the social field, and it effects cuts in these flows, stoppages, leaks, and retentions. To be sure, it does not operate in a manifest way, as do the objective interests of consciousness or the chains of historical causality. It deploys a latent desire coextensive with the social field, entailing ruptures in causality and the emergence of singularities, sticking points as well as leaks. The year 1936 is not only an event in historical consciousness, it is also a complex of the unconscious. Our love affairs, our sexual choices, are less the by-products of a mythical Mommy-Daddy, than the excesses of a social-reality, the interferences and effects of flows invested by the libido.[4]
Deleuze and Guattari describe the political operation of the Oedipus complex as paranoid identification: the Oedipal family is merely a reflection of a social field that transforms the desire for connection with others into a fear of lack[5] (castration). This fear of lack brings desire back to fixed identities: rank, class, gender, race. The “despotic social organisation” of capitalism produces paranoid identifications by destroying or repressing all the connections and lines of flight produced and taken by the desiring machine. The social organisation dominated by paranoia channels the production of desire and sets it a goal under the authority of a fascistic sentiment. In short, the unconscious of fascism is the subjugation of the discourse of the One over the Other.
Finally, if power seduces and is a scene of excitement, as Foucault points out, it is surely because desire itself is a political force. It is therefore on this terrain that “nomadic” thinkers[6] intervene: desire constitutes a productive power and, as such, it is a raw material that fascist forces seek to catalyse.
Guattari’s “social chemistry of desire”
The strategic adversary that Guattari targets[7] haunts us, is immanent in desire-production, always reborn.[8] This fascism is the hostage-taking of desire. By locking it into closed identities, by telling it who it is and what it has the right to become. Thus trained in anxiety, it is channelled towards the One: THE leader, THE race, THE nation, THE people, THE tradition. A desire that is amputated, brought into line, turned against its own power of augmentation; in short, the art of transforming creative power into a force of coagulation. In this internal adjustment, Guattari shows how our desires are modulated until they become the guardians of their own captivity. To do this, let us return to the question of the unconscious.
The unconscious is no longer, as previously stated, the secret refuge of autonomous subjectivity, but becomes the primary place where social forces come together: “there is no boundary between the individual, the social and the unconscious”,[9] notes Guattari alone. Then, supported by Deleuze: “the unconscious has always been an orphan—that is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature and man, of the world and man.”[10]
The subject does not say “I desire my own servitude”, but simply feels that his servitude holds together the diffracted echoes of a certain coherent economy of anxiety. It is a shortcut experienced as a need for reassurance and stability in the flow of desire. Fascism is the libido of a necrotic social body; necrotic because it is impoverished and paranoid. It survives only in closed, rancid environments whose hostility is such that it individualises[11] cacti rather than free men:
We do not know what a subject is. However, we can know how it is constructed. What matters in the idea of the subject is not what it says about what it is, but the techniques and mechanisms of its institution correlated with the production of a depopulated ethos. The idea of the subject, in fact, tells us only about the operations that bring it into existence.[12]
We note that the libidinal political materialism proposed by Guattari invites us to consider fascism as part of a micropolitical economy of desire, which is itself inseparable from the evolution of productive forces. This explains, far from the explanation of fascism as a calculation of interests reflected by the masses, that we can “if necessary desire […] in a deeper and more diffuse way than our interest”, as Deleuze reminds us. Articulating desire and interest means recognising that power, whether it lies with the petty cop or the dictator, does not change in nature. The transversality of desire in the social field is transformed into a fantastic collective death drive. In this respect, the molecular and micropolitical scale chosen by Guattari corresponds to the way in which we reproduce or resist the modes of production of dominant subjectivities forged by the capitalist model by mobilising our affective complex. The “analytical-political” method, refusing to reduce political analysis to the mere critique of parties, brings to light the mechanisms that tighten and homogenise different social groups into disciplined collectives. This micropolitical approach to desire …
would no longer present itself as representing the masses and as interpreting their struggles. Which does not mean that it would condemn, a priori, all party action, all idea of party line, of program or even of centralism, but it would endeavor to locate and relativize this party action in terms of an analytic micropolitics which, at every turn, would stand in opposition to the Manichean dualism that presently contaminates the revolutionary movements.[13]
In Molecular Revolution [La Révolution moléculaire], Guattari blows apart the tired backdrop of political apparatuses and militant mythologies that claimed to organise change from the top down. His original gesture shifts the centre of gravity of the struggle towards that which transcends structures. These micro-scenes of everyday life, in their drifts and singularities, escape the grand narratives. Revolution ceases to be a promised event and becomes an immediate practice.
If power is granular, capillary, diffuse—anything but a coherent, unitary, and stable entity—then Guattari investigates by looking at where, in standardised forms of life and imposed identities, this power exerts its subtle influence and discreetly lays down the law. Faced with these mechanisms of centralisation, his watchword is clear: multiply the centres of creation, open up breaches, embrace plurality against artificial unity. The molecular revolution is a mode of intervention in the very texture of reality, the art of escaping reproduction and disciplinary routine. It is here that the connection with Foucault occurs naturally, like a clandestine passage from one barricade to another. The “Introduction to Non-Fascist Life” that Foucault wrote in his preface to the American translation of Anti-Oedipus is nothing other than the theoretical echo of Guattari’s intuition: fascism does not fall from the sky, it insinuates itself into the folds of everyday life.
Rejecting spectacular denunciations of power and fascism in favour of an exercise in dismantling invisible shackles, Foucault offers a manual for defusing the traps that lead us to desire our own subjugation, to consent to our own servitude.
Materials for a positive anti-fascism: Foucault reading Anti-Oedipus
What does it mean to be revolutionary in 1968? It meant achieving what the “resistance” against fascism and the military victory of 1944 had promised but failed to deliver: unleashing the passion for freedom and combining it with the passion for community, shattering all the repressive and fascistic structures of society and building new “forms of life”, targeting the capitalist machine in order to bend it to the desire for joy: “The real problem of revolution, a revolution without bureaucracy, would be the problem of new social relations, where singularities come into play, active minorities in nomad space without property or enclosure.”[14]
Non-fascist life offers the ethics of a testing ground that Guattari cultivated well. Opening up possibilities, Foucault shows how to live them without letting them be recaptured.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, he suggests a certain protocol, which he sets out in his preface to the American translation of Anti-Oedipus, beginning with an exhortation one can guess to be addressed to post-1968 revolutionary activists, to “free political action from all forms of unitary and totalising paranoia”. Here, paranoia is not to be confused with the schizoid form, the ultimate figure of deterritorialisation. On the contrary, the former plays into the hands of fascism by constantly seeking identity and homogeneity. The latter multiplies and frantically borrows lines of flight. A “non-fascist” life would be one that always moves towards difference, mutation and alteration. It is an ontologically “transitory” form of life.[15]
Foucault understands Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics that sets out to provide keys to liberating everyday life, bodies and subjectivities from latent and familiar fascism, “the fascism that is in all of us, that haunts our minds and our daily behaviour, the fascism that makes us love power, desire what dominates and exploits us”[16] through a conceptual apparatus that seeks to thwart the sprawling power that infiltrates every tiny element of the false normality of social interaction.
He proposes to summarise the contributions of Deleuze and Guattari in seven major principles that should enable us to free ourselves from the smallest traces of fascism embedded in the bodies, pleasures, desires and interactions of all. Against totality and unification, the old categories of the negative and poor speculative thinking, the love of power and the individualisation of rights, he places the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a manifesto for multiplicity, fragmentation, nomadism, de-individualisation, a way of thinking rooted in action and a desire linked to reality. The ethos that Foucault puts forward in this call to desert a world saturated with devices and arrangements designed to produce small-scale serial fascists takes the form of a new sentimental education. “Never fall in love with power” is the message at the very end of this anti-fascist “tract”. This phrase is often quoted in political circles, but it remains ambiguous and requires vigilance.
Taking the form of a warning, almost a prohibition, it reveals a desire: power is attractive, and even those who claim to be the most “anarchist” can feel this attraction, sometimes repressed. One can try to deny or repress this desire, but it always ends up resurfacing. Or we can recognise that it is complex, impure, that no one on Earth is entirely “holy”: there are only repressed desires and strategies of concealment. And rather than reading the phrase as a rigid prohibition, it is better to hear it as a warning, a “be careful”. Foucault seeks to move beyond the outdated opposition in orthodox Marxism between those who hold power and those who do not. For him, power is never absent. Everyone is responsible for it, to varying degrees. Thus, this sentence functions less as a strict moral rule than as an ethical compass, a reminder to be vigilant in the face of the seductions of power. Living in the world as an experimentor rather than as a supervisor of oneself requires a certain level of self-discipline.
We must undo the cop within us.
It is necessary to rethink ways of reducing, weakening or even suspending the police presence in our lives. The term “police” is actually based on two pillars: one is institutional, assumed, placed under the authority of the state and wielding so-called “legitimate” violence; the other insinuates itself into people’s minds and can be reactivated by anyone through attitudes of surveillance, denunciation, diffuse control, relaying a whole imaginary world of security. The first is clearly visible and identifiable, while the second readily hides behind supposedly “benevolent” or “inclusive” intentions or discourse. The two should not be confused, as their methods, means and targets do not overlap. However, they clearly share a common goal, one that defines all police action: the preservation of the established order.
It was Claude Vivien who, in the journal Chimères founded by Deleuze and Guattari in 1987, wrote a penetrating and accessible text on singularity that complemented Foucault’s ethical gesture. This singularity is not monolithic: it disperses, multiplies, changes, and becomes without becoming fixed. It almost dissolves, becoming “vaporisable”, as Baudelaire might have suggested. It never truly coincides with itself, and even desires this inner escape.
In this spring 1997 issue, Vivien outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-imperceptible”. Drawing on the work of Elias Canetti on Kafka, Miguel Abensour on the “choice of the small” and Taoist teachings, Vivien manages to grasp the importance of this concept by extracting its value of high resistance:
The unseen, the unnoticed, the imperceptible… It is through this movement that extreme resistance to control is achieved. Making oneself small, “infinitely small”, is not a regressive choice; on the contrary, it is a means of escaping violence, which constantly threatens to contaminate and infect us, that is to say, to make us participate in its injustice.[17]
His words deliberately echo those of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming.” Admittedly, the imperceptible is part of the ethical task associated with Foucault’s work, as proposed by Deleuze, Guattari and later Vivien. And even if it allows us to understand the importance of not locking ourselves into “the perpetually threatened fortress of the Ego, where the Great Paranoid enjoys and suffers”[18] in order to dismantle the “global logic of Performance, Rivalry and the Empire of the Ego, of excessive Competitiveness”,[19] it is perhaps the concept of becoming, decisive in Deleuze’s work, that may hold the greatest force of resistance and theoretical scope. Becoming is strictly “the opposite of the movement of the state apparatus of capture”[20] as Arnaud Villani puts it in the same issue of Chimères.
Shaking up binary distributions, towards a philosophy of encounter
The “capture apparatus”, according to Deleuze’s interpretation, comes into being when a reservoir is created, a founding reserve of the State. From there, a dual action is set in motion: measuring and appropriating. This action always applies to the same triptych: land, labour and currency made comparable and graspable, breaking with their original forms of territory, activity and exchange, which operated outside the logic of the state, or even against it. As soon as they enter this system of capture, they become a source of rent and profit. It is a movement that fixes and where flows are folded back towards a single principle of identity charged with codifications that constantly bring them back to the same instance.
In the same way that the capture mechanism functions as a double take (the first operating through comparison and monopolisation, the second locking them into the logic of rent and profit), we must understand all becoming as a becoming that multiplies, a becoming of becoming. First there is a dispersion, an “emission of particles”, a kind of becoming-mist; then comes the encounter of one mist with another, the dazzling attraction of their respective particles. And here, becoming has no other validation than its own movement: it suffices to test it. If becoming is therefore the opposite of capture, it is because all becoming involves a precise swarming, a regulated propagation (process) – and not rules – of forms. Becoming is therefore less a “state” than a politics: an immanent practice of liberating flows, the art of making capture impossible.
Becomings therefore pass through encounters. Far from a face-to-face encounter, the encounter is a cloud of particles where each form breaks down enough to align with another. Thus, allowing oneself to be contaminated by elusive flows that circulate in the intertwining of relationships without obeying identity assignments. Deleuze, in delivering his words: “I tend to think of things as sets of lines to be unraveled but also to be made to intersect. I don’t like points; I think it’s stupid summing things up.”[21], rejects the inclination – a Western inclination, it must be said – to see a person as a person, an image as an image, a city as a city. Deleuze’s regime of perception detects lines, an entanglement, the chaos of forces and their knotted flows in a person. The constitutive heterogeneity of reality presents itself to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. Deleuze’s metaphysics of the act – and not of being – makes us realise that what is important in subjects does not exist as central points, but resides in the periphery, in the relationships between subjects; in what happens between bodies. The question of the encounter arose from the challenge of rationally organising relationships with the common order of nature, in that, according to the very Spinozist Deleuze, we must “select and organise the right encounters”[22] in order to save ourselves from servitude.
Invitation to a new way of perceiving…
And you will need to forge a new education of the heart, thanks to which you will be able to love again. And you will do all this amid widespread hostility, for those who have awakened become the nightmare of those who still sleep.
Technology of the sensible: the brown dust under the carpet
Why is “power” the force that threatens everyone from within?
Claude Vivien[23]
Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle[24]
By repressing desire, fascist capitalism manages to shape human subjectivity to serve its system. By stifling the life forces that flow through our bodies, transparency becomes proof of existence. And normality becomes a bulwark against vertigo. Everyone must watch over the stranger they rub shoulders with, first and foremost the stranger they themselves have become. We must take care of the walls within us, between us, which are a constant threat. The regime of affects is under control: capitalist modernity is not primarily or solely a mode of production or an economic system, but a certain technology of the sensible, an engineering of affectivity. It governs not only through laws and discourse, but above all through arrangements of the senses that guide the way we perceive, desire and connect with each other. Power, through its invisible capillarity, governs by creating the conditions for certain things to be felt as possible and others as unthinkable. So that certain bodies are accepted and others are attacked. Its continuity with historical fascism lies in the restoration of the impenetrable and militarised body as the norm. Ultimately, civil war may not be a political possibility, a threatening future in times of fascism, but a reality intrinsic to the social script. Perhaps it has always been part of our lives; playing out imperceptibly in the insidious conflict of our ways of life; in our incompatibilities and differences. Diffuse, it is palpably there, in the atmosphere of cities, the arrangement of bodies, the rhythm of speech, the use of objects and the way we relate to each other. It is the infra-political reign of social mood.
Micro-fascism is what inhabits our bonds and erodes our affectivity. And a liberation from the subjectivising force of fascist capitalism will not exist without a process of re-conflictualisation and reaffirmation of civil war. It is in the construction of a camp of friends and the exploration of new dependencies that it will be possible to recapture every detail of our existences, as fascism intrudes like gangrene into the smallest parts of our bodies and minds.
Serge
[1] Benjamin Gizard, Fascisme : comment, pourquoi, l’enfer, intervention au séminaire La division politique, La parole errante, avril 2025.
[2] “Reich was the first to raise the problem of the relationship between desire and the social field … But since he had not sufficiently formulated the concept of desiring-production, he did not succeed in determining the insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the insertion of the drives into social production.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 118-119.
[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 104.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems”, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, Semiotext(e), p. 194.
[5] “The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious.” Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 111.
[6] Nomadic thinking is a form of thinking in motion practised outside a limited disciplinary field, aiming to open up philosophy to other fields of knowledge.
[7] “In this way, different totalitarian systems produced different formulas for a collective seizing of desire, depending on the transformation of productive fo rces and the relationships of production. We must endeavor to disengage its machinic composition, much as we would a chemical composition, but a social chemistry of desire which runs not only through History, but also through the whole social space.”, Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, in Chaososphy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, Semiotext(e), p. 163.
[8] Félix Guattari, “Au delà du retour à zéro”, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?, Lignes, p.297.
[9] Félix Guattari, “Subjectivité machinique plutôt que transcendance”, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?, Lignes, p.333.
[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 108.
[11] Here, consider only the metaphorical and ironic aspect. Individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s work is not limited to humans but extends to the animal and plant kingdoms. Plants and cacti individuate as much as humans do, without any axiological hierarchy.
[12] Josep Rafanell i Orra, Petit traité de cosmo-anarchisme, Divergences, p.56.
[13] Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, in Chaososphy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, Semiotext(e), p. 158.
[14] Antonio Negri, Viola Milocco, “Deleuze/Spinoza: Un devenir-politique”, in Archives de Philosophie, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Juillet-Septembre 2021), p. 52; “Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy”, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, Semiotext(e), p. 194.p. 145.
[15] Alain Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire, “L’ontologie vitaliste de Deleuze”, Seuil, p.61. 14 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits III, Galimard, p.133-136.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Claude Vivien, Chimères, “La singularité, l’imperceptible”, Printemps 1997, p.58.
[18] Ibid., p.59
[19] Ibid., p.60.
[20] Arnaud Villani, Chimères, “Gilles Deleuze et le devenir comme ligne de vie”, Printemps 1997, p.45.
[21] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 160-61.
[22] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, City Lights, 1988, pp. 55-6: “This is why Reason is defined in two ways, which show that man is not born rational but also how he becomes rational. Reason is: 1. an effort to select and organize good encounters, that is, encounters of modes that enter into composition with ours and inspire us with joyful passions (feelings that agree with reason)”. And Ibid., pp. 22-3: “That individual will be called good (or free, or ration al, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence.” Lastly, Ibid., p. 103: “This is why it matters little that the effort to persevere, to increase the power of acting, to experience joyful passions, to maximize the capacity for being affected, is always satisfied; it will succeed only to the extent that man strives to organize his encounters, that is, among the other modes, to encounter those which agree with his nature and enter into composition with him, and to encounter them under the very aspects in which they agree and accord with him.”
[23] Claude Vivien, “La singularité, l’imperceptible”, in Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, 1997, 30, p. 55.
[24] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (Source: The Anarchist Library; Bureau of Public Secrets).
Fascist subjectivisation
From lundimatin #509, (18/02/2026)
To take an interest in fascism is to feel a connection with a past that is imminent in a threatening future. This past is not simply an ancient present: it is a past that is contemporary with our present, actively feeding into it. It is not a past that determines our present, that is its prelude, or that is the first occurrence in a sequence of events destined to repeat themselves as they are. It is a set of gestures, materialities, affects, ideas and subjectivities that haunt our present: this haunting is both an imposing presence and a sign that attracts us, while remaining strange, different and heterogeneous.[1]
Like the plague’s capacity for mutations, the reappearance of fascism will not be an exact replica of what existed in the past but a significant difference reflecting the particular moment. Owing to its axiomatic relationship to capitalism, the form of fascism, its destruction of subjective autonomy, remains unchanged, but with every new reappearance it brings new content in different, historical presents, as Primo Levi observed in the 1970s, when he declared that every age could expect the return of fascism in new and different materializations.
Harry Harootunian, A Fascism for Our Time
Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia
Apostille:
The aim of this text is to identify latent and tolerated forms of fascism that lie below the threshold of social recognition. This study will seek to show how our post-war capitalist tendencies towards mitigation relay the material effectiveness of a certain form of fascism within us. This change in the scale of analysis will reveal a certain “molecularity” of fascism by scrutinising its finest crystallisations, contrary to a classical mechanistic and historicist analysis. A micro-reality of fascism will thus reveal itself in the affective economy of the body. Fascist impulses have entered the materiality of power and reached the underground limits of politics, administration, economics and communication. “Everything is physics”, said Deleuze, even fascism.
Fascism is not primarily a uniform, a pair of boots and a flag. It is a way of breathing power; a reflex, an impulse, a passion, an intimate adherence to the system that constrains us. Foucault pointed out that power does not weigh on us from the outside, but passes through us and ultimately shapes us. We end up as products of its substance. In the great factory of modern subjectivities, fascism imposes a most perfect rhythm, one that brings the body and command into alignment without resorting to the truncheon. Like an archaeologist, Foucault delves into the mysteries of power and reveals the secret of tyrannies without tyrants: there is no longer any need for the latter when everyone carries the disciplinary matrix within themselves. The policing act of monitoring oneself, has become the hallmark of contemporary power. The Empire is no longer to be conquered, it is the environment or milieu itself, the milieu through which a network of hierarchical micro-relationships is woven, into which an infinity of ways of submitting oneself slips. Our ‘control societies’, to refer to Deleuze, spread the molecule by means of the codification of affects, the normalisation of behaviour, the surveillance of language and the automation of gestures and attitudes.
This attack on multiplicity leads to the biopolitical logic of an “infra-political fascism”, which, from below, at the very root, makes the individual capable of the worst, even desiring brutality.
Thus, fascist subjectivity is not limited to the oppressor, the executioner or the tyrant, but extends to the “ordinary” individual, the average civil servant or the insignificant neighbour. This quiet enjoyment of the rules is rooted in the pride of conformity. And so the fascist subject demands his dose of discipline and finds blissful, comforting satisfaction in the norm.
Extending Foucault’s argument, we can observe that this insidious form of fascism is the logical outcome of biopolitical modernity.
But where Foucault dissects power and seeks the new investment of the body through the relations of this power, Deleuze and Guattari, in order to account for fascism, pick the pockets of desire. They scrutinise the grey and confused area where the world of drives and the world of politics intermingle. This is where fascism takes root. Their co-authored work, Anti-Oedipus, explores the possibilities and strategies of the struggle for emancipation when it is no longer solely economic in nature. They seek to identify new revolutionary horizons while analysing the conditions that make counter-revolutions possible, giving rise to new forms of fascism. Their question was clear: why choose fascism over revolution?
Anti-Oedipus (1972): Decompartmentalising desire, the radical materialism of Deleuze and Guattari
This book, which examines the internalisation of constraint, castigates the pervasive “Oedipalisation” that Freudian psychoanalysis produces and defends at every turn. This reduction of desire to the father-mother-child triangle, where the unconscious is bound by a play that endlessly re-enacts the same scene, is deemed counterfeit. Deleuze and Guattari correct this view by considering the unconscious not as a zone of lack or an Oedipal residence, but as a productive, desiring machine, a factory that works to produce. Desire, seeking to grow and become singular, is a creative force and circulates in social, economic and political arrangements. There is continuity between individual desire and social mechanisms. Desire is always inscribed in structures and arrangements. The task is therefore to understand how it can be captured and directed, channelled and codified. If Deleuze and Guattari inherit the thinking of Reich,[2] for whom capitalism is not only a social and economic system but also a mechanism that penetrates the psychological and emotional dimension of alienated individuals, it is because they share the observation that the political alienation caused by German Nazism has its origins in the unconscious, in innocence, and the impulsive and desiring “irresponsibility” of the masses. From this point of view, they are right to insist on explaining fascism “in terms of desire”: the Nazi regime did not impose itself on the German masses through ideological deception or illusion, but was wanted or desired because of the instinctual impotence resulting from the oppressive political structure of the institutions.
The relationship between desire and society becomes crucial; we can no longer consider psychological processes as autonomous and independent of the action of social forces.
This is an opportunity to explain Reich’s contribution to the grassroots understanding of the fascist phenomenon. He correlates fascism with a certain type of emotional and sexual economy, identifying a character structure as the crystallisation of a socialisation process. This structure, which Reich calls the “armour”, paradoxically refers to the level of rigidity, the lack of mobility that made the masses “malleable”, i.e. adaptable to all forms of abjection. In 1933, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was published, then republished in 1944. In this work, Reich sought to explain the genesis of a new fascist regime, an “acquired irrationalism” attributable to a certain psychic economy. To account for this becoming-irrational, he rejects a number of erroneous analyses of fascist domination. For example, he does not conceive of fascism mechanically as a reactive result of the economic crisis of 1929. He seeks out fascism by delving beneath the visible surface of things, scrutinising the “thousand little nothings” and other organisational elements that determine social customs and forms of affectivity. According to him, the fascist concept and its ideology coincide with the affective structure of the masses. Here, Deleuze and Guattari follow him:
There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the precon-scious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.[3]
From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari no longer view triumphant capitalism in the Marxist manner as a mode of production based on profit growth and private ownership of the means of production, but rather as a machinic system, an “arrangement” that makes desire function in the form of economic axioms. The individual is not an isolated being, a monad closed in on itself. He or she is an integral part of ‘heterogeneous assemblages’ composed of ‘territorial sites” where desire stabilises and “points of deterritorialisation” where it departs from the main axes and opens up to new horizons. An assemblage is a battery of sets where forces of change are expressed, moments when we leave the familiar behind and venture elsewhere. In short, the individual is a node of relationships in motion. And according to Deleuze and Guattari, the limitation of Reich’s approach is that it unwittingly falls back into a separation that it could have abolished: that between the psychic and the social, between two distinct orders of reality and causality. By maintaining this divide, Reich refuses to consider that desire and the social field are coextensive, that is, that they belong to a single, continuous and immanent process of production:
It is indeed a question of libido as such, as the essence of desire and sexuality: but now it invests and disinvests flows of every kind as they trickle through the social field, and it effects cuts in these flows, stoppages, leaks, and retentions. To be sure, it does not operate in a manifest way, as do the objective interests of consciousness or the chains of historical causality. It deploys a latent desire coextensive with the social field, entailing ruptures in causality and the emergence of singularities, sticking points as well as leaks. The year 1936 is not only an event in historical consciousness, it is also a complex of the unconscious. Our love affairs, our sexual choices, are less the by-products of a mythical Mommy-Daddy, than the excesses of a social-reality, the interferences and effects of flows invested by the libido.[4]
Deleuze and Guattari describe the political operation of the Oedipus complex as paranoid identification: the Oedipal family is merely a reflection of a social field that transforms the desire for connection with others into a fear of lack[5] (castration). This fear of lack brings desire back to fixed identities: rank, class, gender, race. The “despotic social organisation” of capitalism produces paranoid identifications by destroying or repressing all the connections and lines of flight produced and taken by the desiring machine. The social organisation dominated by paranoia channels the production of desire and sets it a goal under the authority of a fascistic sentiment. In short, the unconscious of fascism is the subjugation of the discourse of the One over the Other.
Finally, if power seduces and is a scene of excitement, as Foucault points out, it is surely because desire itself is a political force. It is therefore on this terrain that “nomadic” thinkers[6] intervene: desire constitutes a productive power and, as such, it is a raw material that fascist forces seek to catalyse.
Guattari’s “social chemistry of desire”
The strategic adversary that Guattari targets[7] haunts us, is immanent in desire-production, always reborn.[8] This fascism is the hostage-taking of desire. By locking it into closed identities, by telling it who it is and what it has the right to become. Thus trained in anxiety, it is channelled towards the One: THE leader, THE race, THE nation, THE people, THE tradition. A desire that is amputated, brought into line, turned against its own power of augmentation; in short, the art of transforming creative power into a force of coagulation. In this internal adjustment, Guattari shows how our desires are modulated until they become the guardians of their own captivity. To do this, let us return to the question of the unconscious.
The unconscious is no longer, as previously stated, the secret refuge of autonomous subjectivity, but becomes the primary place where social forces come together: “there is no boundary between the individual, the social and the unconscious”,[9] notes Guattari alone. Then, supported by Deleuze: “the unconscious has always been an orphan—that is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature and man, of the world and man.”[10]
The subject does not say “I desire my own servitude”, but simply feels that his servitude holds together the diffracted echoes of a certain coherent economy of anxiety. It is a shortcut experienced as a need for reassurance and stability in the flow of desire. Fascism is the libido of a necrotic social body; necrotic because it is impoverished and paranoid. It survives only in closed, rancid environments whose hostility is such that it individualises[11] cacti rather than free men:
We do not know what a subject is. However, we can know how it is constructed. What matters in the idea of the subject is not what it says about what it is, but the techniques and mechanisms of its institution correlated with the production of a depopulated ethos. The idea of the subject, in fact, tells us only about the operations that bring it into existence.[12]
We note that the libidinal political materialism proposed by Guattari invites us to consider fascism as part of a micropolitical economy of desire, which is itself inseparable from the evolution of productive forces. This explains, far from the explanation of fascism as a calculation of interests reflected by the masses, that we can “if necessary desire […] in a deeper and more diffuse way than our interest”, as Deleuze reminds us. Articulating desire and interest means recognising that power, whether it lies with the petty cop or the dictator, does not change in nature. The transversality of desire in the social field is transformed into a fantastic collective death drive. In this respect, the molecular and micropolitical scale chosen by Guattari corresponds to the way in which we reproduce or resist the modes of production of dominant subjectivities forged by the capitalist model by mobilising our affective complex. The “analytical-political” method, refusing to reduce political analysis to the mere critique of parties, brings to light the mechanisms that tighten and homogenise different social groups into disciplined collectives. This micropolitical approach to desire …
would no longer present itself as representing the masses and as interpreting their struggles. Which does not mean that it would condemn, a priori, all party action, all idea of party line, of program or even of centralism, but it would endeavor to locate and relativize this party action in terms of an analytic micropolitics which, at every turn, would stand in opposition to the Manichean dualism that presently contaminates the revolutionary movements.[13]
In Molecular Revolution [La Révolution moléculaire], Guattari blows apart the tired backdrop of political apparatuses and militant mythologies that claimed to organise change from the top down. His original gesture shifts the centre of gravity of the struggle towards that which transcends structures. These micro-scenes of everyday life, in their drifts and singularities, escape the grand narratives. Revolution ceases to be a promised event and becomes an immediate practice.
If power is granular, capillary, diffuse—anything but a coherent, unitary, and stable entity—then Guattari investigates by looking at where, in standardised forms of life and imposed identities, this power exerts its subtle influence and discreetly lays down the law. Faced with these mechanisms of centralisation, his watchword is clear: multiply the centres of creation, open up breaches, embrace plurality against artificial unity. The molecular revolution is a mode of intervention in the very texture of reality, the art of escaping reproduction and disciplinary routine. It is here that the connection with Foucault occurs naturally, like a clandestine passage from one barricade to another. The “Introduction to Non-Fascist Life” that Foucault wrote in his preface to the American translation of Anti-Oedipus is nothing other than the theoretical echo of Guattari’s intuition: fascism does not fall from the sky, it insinuates itself into the folds of everyday life.
Rejecting spectacular denunciations of power and fascism in favour of an exercise in dismantling invisible shackles, Foucault offers a manual for defusing the traps that lead us to desire our own subjugation, to consent to our own servitude.
Materials for a positive anti-fascism: Foucault reading Anti-Oedipus
What does it mean to be revolutionary in 1968? It meant achieving what the “resistance” against fascism and the military victory of 1944 had promised but failed to deliver: unleashing the passion for freedom and combining it with the passion for community, shattering all the repressive and fascistic structures of society and building new “forms of life”, targeting the capitalist machine in order to bend it to the desire for joy: “The real problem of revolution, a revolution without bureaucracy, would be the problem of new social relations, where singularities come into play, active minorities in nomad space without property or enclosure.”[14]
Non-fascist life offers the ethics of a testing ground that Guattari cultivated well. Opening up possibilities, Foucault shows how to live them without letting them be recaptured.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, he suggests a certain protocol, which he sets out in his preface to the American translation of Anti-Oedipus, beginning with an exhortation one can guess to be addressed to post-1968 revolutionary activists, to “free political action from all forms of unitary and totalising paranoia”. Here, paranoia is not to be confused with the schizoid form, the ultimate figure of deterritorialisation. On the contrary, the former plays into the hands of fascism by constantly seeking identity and homogeneity. The latter multiplies and frantically borrows lines of flight. A “non-fascist” life would be one that always moves towards difference, mutation and alteration. It is an ontologically “transitory” form of life.[15]
Foucault understands Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics that sets out to provide keys to liberating everyday life, bodies and subjectivities from latent and familiar fascism, “the fascism that is in all of us, that haunts our minds and our daily behaviour, the fascism that makes us love power, desire what dominates and exploits us”[16] through a conceptual apparatus that seeks to thwart the sprawling power that infiltrates every tiny element of the false normality of social interaction.
He proposes to summarise the contributions of Deleuze and Guattari in seven major principles that should enable us to free ourselves from the smallest traces of fascism embedded in the bodies, pleasures, desires and interactions of all. Against totality and unification, the old categories of the negative and poor speculative thinking, the love of power and the individualisation of rights, he places the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a manifesto for multiplicity, fragmentation, nomadism, de-individualisation, a way of thinking rooted in action and a desire linked to reality. The ethos that Foucault puts forward in this call to desert a world saturated with devices and arrangements designed to produce small-scale serial fascists takes the form of a new sentimental education. “Never fall in love with power” is the message at the very end of this anti-fascist “tract”. This phrase is often quoted in political circles, but it remains ambiguous and requires vigilance.
Taking the form of a warning, almost a prohibition, it reveals a desire: power is attractive, and even those who claim to be the most “anarchist” can feel this attraction, sometimes repressed. One can try to deny or repress this desire, but it always ends up resurfacing. Or we can recognise that it is complex, impure, that no one on Earth is entirely “holy”: there are only repressed desires and strategies of concealment. And rather than reading the phrase as a rigid prohibition, it is better to hear it as a warning, a “be careful”. Foucault seeks to move beyond the outdated opposition in orthodox Marxism between those who hold power and those who do not. For him, power is never absent. Everyone is responsible for it, to varying degrees. Thus, this sentence functions less as a strict moral rule than as an ethical compass, a reminder to be vigilant in the face of the seductions of power. Living in the world as an experimentor rather than as a supervisor of oneself requires a certain level of self-discipline.
We must undo the cop within us.
It is necessary to rethink ways of reducing, weakening or even suspending the police presence in our lives. The term “police” is actually based on two pillars: one is institutional, assumed, placed under the authority of the state and wielding so-called “legitimate” violence; the other insinuates itself into people’s minds and can be reactivated by anyone through attitudes of surveillance, denunciation, diffuse control, relaying a whole imaginary world of security. The first is clearly visible and identifiable, while the second readily hides behind supposedly “benevolent” or “inclusive” intentions or discourse. The two should not be confused, as their methods, means and targets do not overlap. However, they clearly share a common goal, one that defines all police action: the preservation of the established order.
It was Claude Vivien who, in the journal Chimères founded by Deleuze and Guattari in 1987, wrote a penetrating and accessible text on singularity that complemented Foucault’s ethical gesture. This singularity is not monolithic: it disperses, multiplies, changes, and becomes without becoming fixed. It almost dissolves, becoming “vaporisable”, as Baudelaire might have suggested. It never truly coincides with itself, and even desires this inner escape.
In this spring 1997 issue, Vivien outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-imperceptible”. Drawing on the work of Elias Canetti on Kafka, Miguel Abensour on the “choice of the small” and Taoist teachings, Vivien manages to grasp the importance of this concept by extracting its value of high resistance:
The unseen, the unnoticed, the imperceptible… It is through this movement that extreme resistance to control is achieved. Making oneself small, “infinitely small”, is not a regressive choice; on the contrary, it is a means of escaping violence, which constantly threatens to contaminate and infect us, that is to say, to make us participate in its injustice.[17]
His words deliberately echo those of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming.” Admittedly, the imperceptible is part of the ethical task associated with Foucault’s work, as proposed by Deleuze, Guattari and later Vivien. And even if it allows us to understand the importance of not locking ourselves into “the perpetually threatened fortress of the Ego, where the Great Paranoid enjoys and suffers”[18] in order to dismantle the “global logic of Performance, Rivalry and the Empire of the Ego, of excessive Competitiveness”,[19] it is perhaps the concept of becoming, decisive in Deleuze’s work, that may hold the greatest force of resistance and theoretical scope. Becoming is strictly “the opposite of the movement of the state apparatus of capture”[20] as Arnaud Villani puts it in the same issue of Chimères.
Shaking up binary distributions, towards a philosophy of encounter
The “capture apparatus”, according to Deleuze’s interpretation, comes into being when a reservoir is created, a founding reserve of the State. From there, a dual action is set in motion: measuring and appropriating. This action always applies to the same triptych: land, labour and currency made comparable and graspable, breaking with their original forms of territory, activity and exchange, which operated outside the logic of the state, or even against it. As soon as they enter this system of capture, they become a source of rent and profit. It is a movement that fixes and where flows are folded back towards a single principle of identity charged with codifications that constantly bring them back to the same instance.
In the same way that the capture mechanism functions as a double take (the first operating through comparison and monopolisation, the second locking them into the logic of rent and profit), we must understand all becoming as a becoming that multiplies, a becoming of becoming. First there is a dispersion, an “emission of particles”, a kind of becoming-mist; then comes the encounter of one mist with another, the dazzling attraction of their respective particles. And here, becoming has no other validation than its own movement: it suffices to test it. If becoming is therefore the opposite of capture, it is because all becoming involves a precise swarming, a regulated propagation (process) – and not rules – of forms. Becoming is therefore less a “state” than a politics: an immanent practice of liberating flows, the art of making capture impossible.
Becomings therefore pass through encounters. Far from a face-to-face encounter, the encounter is a cloud of particles where each form breaks down enough to align with another. Thus, allowing oneself to be contaminated by elusive flows that circulate in the intertwining of relationships without obeying identity assignments. Deleuze, in delivering his words: “I tend to think of things as sets of lines to be unraveled but also to be made to intersect. I don’t like points; I think it’s stupid summing things up.”[21], rejects the inclination – a Western inclination, it must be said – to see a person as a person, an image as an image, a city as a city. Deleuze’s regime of perception detects lines, an entanglement, the chaos of forces and their knotted flows in a person. The constitutive heterogeneity of reality presents itself to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. Deleuze’s metaphysics of the act – and not of being – makes us realise that what is important in subjects does not exist as central points, but resides in the periphery, in the relationships between subjects; in what happens between bodies. The question of the encounter arose from the challenge of rationally organising relationships with the common order of nature, in that, according to the very Spinozist Deleuze, we must “select and organise the right encounters”[22] in order to save ourselves from servitude.
Invitation to a new way of perceiving…
And you will need to forge a new education of the heart, thanks to which you will be able to love again. And you will do all this amid widespread hostility, for those who have awakened become the nightmare of those who still sleep.
Technology of the sensible: the brown dust under the carpet
Why is “power” the force that threatens everyone from within?
Claude Vivien[23]
Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle[24]
By repressing desire, fascist capitalism manages to shape human subjectivity to serve its system. By stifling the life forces that flow through our bodies, transparency becomes proof of existence. And normality becomes a bulwark against vertigo. Everyone must watch over the stranger they rub shoulders with, first and foremost the stranger they themselves have become. We must take care of the walls within us, between us, which are a constant threat. The regime of affects is under control: capitalist modernity is not primarily or solely a mode of production or an economic system, but a certain technology of the sensible, an engineering of affectivity. It governs not only through laws and discourse, but above all through arrangements of the senses that guide the way we perceive, desire and connect with each other. Power, through its invisible capillarity, governs by creating the conditions for certain things to be felt as possible and others as unthinkable. So that certain bodies are accepted and others are attacked. Its continuity with historical fascism lies in the restoration of the impenetrable and militarised body as the norm. Ultimately, civil war may not be a political possibility, a threatening future in times of fascism, but a reality intrinsic to the social script. Perhaps it has always been part of our lives; playing out imperceptibly in the insidious conflict of our ways of life; in our incompatibilities and differences. Diffuse, it is palpably there, in the atmosphere of cities, the arrangement of bodies, the rhythm of speech, the use of objects and the way we relate to each other. It is the infra-political reign of social mood.
Micro-fascism is what inhabits our bonds and erodes our affectivity. And a liberation from the subjectivising force of fascist capitalism will not exist without a process of re-conflictualisation and reaffirmation of civil war. It is in the construction of a camp of friends and the exploration of new dependencies that it will be possible to recapture every detail of our existences, as fascism intrudes like gangrene into the smallest parts of our bodies and minds.
Serge
[1] Benjamin Gizard, Fascisme : comment, pourquoi, l’enfer, intervention au séminaire La division politique, La parole errante, avril 2025.
[2] “Reich was the first to raise the problem of the relationship between desire and the social field … But since he had not sufficiently formulated the concept of desiring-production, he did not succeed in determining the insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the insertion of the drives into social production.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 118-119.
[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 104.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems”, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, Semiotext(e), p. 194.
[5] “The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious.” Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 111.
[6] Nomadic thinking is a form of thinking in motion practised outside a limited disciplinary field, aiming to open up philosophy to other fields of knowledge.
[7] “In this way, different totalitarian systems produced different formulas for a collective seizing of desire, depending on the transformation of productive fo rces and the relationships of production. We must endeavor to disengage its machinic composition, much as we would a chemical composition, but a social chemistry of desire which runs not only through History, but also through the whole social space.”, Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, in Chaososphy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, Semiotext(e), p. 163.
[8] Félix Guattari, “Au delà du retour à zéro”, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?, Lignes, p.297.
[9] Félix Guattari, “Subjectivité machinique plutôt que transcendance”, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?, Lignes, p.333.
[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 108.
[11] Here, consider only the metaphorical and ironic aspect. Individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s work is not limited to humans but extends to the animal and plant kingdoms. Plants and cacti individuate as much as humans do, without any axiological hierarchy.
[12] Josep Rafanell i Orra, Petit traité de cosmo-anarchisme, Divergences, p.56.
[13] Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, in Chaososphy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, Semiotext(e), p. 158.
[14] Antonio Negri, Viola Milocco, “Deleuze/Spinoza: Un devenir-politique”, in Archives de Philosophie, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Juillet-Septembre 2021), p. 52; “Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy”, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, Semiotext(e), p. 194.p. 145.
[15] Alain Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire, “L’ontologie vitaliste de Deleuze”, Seuil, p.61. 14 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits III, Galimard, p.133-136.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Claude Vivien, Chimères, “La singularité, l’imperceptible”, Printemps 1997, p.58.
[18] Ibid., p.59
[19] Ibid., p.60.
[20] Arnaud Villani, Chimères, “Gilles Deleuze et le devenir comme ligne de vie”, Printemps 1997, p.45.
[21] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 160-61.
[22] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, City Lights, 1988, pp. 55-6: “This is why Reason is defined in two ways, which show that man is not born rational but also how he becomes rational. Reason is: 1. an effort to select and organize good encounters, that is, encounters of modes that enter into composition with ours and inspire us with joyful passions (feelings that agree with reason)”. And Ibid., pp. 22-3: “That individual will be called good (or free, or ration al, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence.” Lastly, Ibid., p. 103: “This is why it matters little that the effort to persevere, to increase the power of acting, to experience joyful passions, to maximize the capacity for being affected, is always satisfied; it will succeed only to the extent that man strives to organize his encounters, that is, among the other modes, to encounter those which agree with his nature and enter into composition with him, and to encounter them under the very aspects in which they agree and accord with him.”
[23] Claude Vivien, “La singularité, l’imperceptible”, in Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, 1997, 30, p. 55.
[24] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (Source: The Anarchist Library; Bureau of Public Secrets).