In grotesque realism… the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed…. This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic ‘economic man,’ but to the collective ancestral body of all the people.
Mikhail Bakhtin, writing of the grotesque in carnival, Rabelais and His World
Politics is never an excuse. Politics is a situation. Of course, the poor and the rich have always existed, and it is around this that politics was born. It is a situation of contrast, collision, debate, of hatred, and also of love.
Lina Wertmüller, from the short documentary, Lina Wertmüller, une cinéaste d’amour et d’anarchie (Vimeo)
If we may venture a claim about a central idea in the films Lina Wertmüller, it is that they express the impossibility of politics without love – such a politics would be reduced to the management of life and the extraction its energy –, and of love without politics – love is shaped and winnowed through the many layers of relations of power that mark everyday life. It is through this lens that Wertmüller reads political ideologies and human behaviour and agency, a lens that can only reveal and revel in tensions, incoherencies and contradictions. If her films defy ideological purity, to the dismay of her critics, she turns the accusation back on them – for those who are willing to see –, unmasking the demands for “purity” as the greatest form of violence, because it can tolerate no disorder, no wild life, no anarchy.
There is no promise of final resolution or redemption in Wertmüller’s work. Her films are intensely political, but not in the sense of offering up agitprop manifestos or declarations about what is to be done. Instead, she tells stories of individuals struggling to realise themselves against worlds that surpass them, which they never fully understand or even begin to control. They accordingly act blindly, but also in the only way that her characters have learned to struggle in adversity; a struggle that therefore can only be incomplete, contradictory, and forever renewed.
Wertmüller, through what may be called an aesthetics of the grotesque, signals the illusions of human perfectibility and progress, illusions which end in regimes of fear. Before the latter, it is her anarchist “man in disorder” that lights a path.
Lina Wertmüller died this last December 9th. We take this moment to celebrate her art of “love and anarchy”.
I would like to stress my horror at these attempted assassinations. These acts are both evil and stupid as they harm the cause that they are meant to serve… But those assassins are also saints and heroes… When their extreme gesture is forgotten, we shall celebrate the ideal which inspired them.
Errico Malatesta, as cited in Amore e Anarchia
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Fascism as the “reconquest”: Éric Zemmour’s political crusade
A breath of African air sweeps them [the Visigoths] from the Peninsula (…) I will be told that, despite this, we knew how to complete our glorious eight centuries of Reconquest. And to this I naively reply that I do not understand how you can call “reconquista” a thing that lasts eight centuries.
José Ortega y Gasset, España invertebrada
Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims. A system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it, must be developed from one of these possibilities. The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more the questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon – at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion which continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
Georges Bataille, The Psychological Structure of Fascism
Within a period of a week, Éric Zemmour, a radical french nationalist journalist and essayist, announced his candidacy in the country’s upcoming presidential elections (30/11/2021) and the creation of a political organisation named the “Reconquête” (05/12/2021).
On both occasions, his speeches offered disturbing text-book examples of fascist discourse, with a theatricality uncommon in contemporary institutional politics.
His words are carefully chosen, but violent, in both their meaning and their consequences. He presents himself as the paladin of the French People, a people with glorious – political, cultural, scientific, economic – past, but past that has been undermined, shattered by a confluence of globalising elites, transnational political authorities and laws, an anti-patriotic left, a gluttonous national tax regime and inflated administrative bureaucracies, de-industrialisation and impoverishment, the loss of criteria of merit and excellence in education, social fragmentation, the destruction of the traditional family, and the “colonisation” of the country by those who would refuse to accept the nation’s values and culture.
If the enemies are not new, forming part of the repertoire of fascist ideology, the explicit targeting of feminism and LGBTQIA advocacy gives a contemporary form to the ideology’s traditional defence of patriarchy. To this is added the figure of the foreign welfare-state beneficiary and, above all, the non-assimilated or non-assimilable muslim. For this last, there are but two options: either accept assimilation or leave.
For Zemmour, the task of French politics today is not to reform practices, institutions or laws, but to save france and the french nation from destruction and eradication. For a thousand years, the french people, Zemmour tells us, have been a beacon to the worlds’s nations. Zemmour promises that it will continue to be so for another thousand years.
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