Fascism theory | Submission as pleasure gain?

The French surrealist and theorist Georges Bataille (1897-1962) Photo: Wikimedia The analysis of fascism by the French writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962) fascinates and irritates in equal measure. She had a bad reputation in Germany for a long time. On the one hand, this is because Jürgen Habermas Bataille powerfully attested to a fetish for violence in the early 1980s and polemically declared him the pioneer of a “young conservative” movement in philosophy. On the other hand, the reservations are based on the fact that some of Bataille's West German translators and interpreters during these years belonged to a milieu that overlapped with the so-called New Right.

On the occasion of the new edition of Bataille's essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism", which will be published on October 29th in Rita Bischof's translation by Matthes & Seitz Berlin, Morten Paul and Elena Stingl show in their afterword what the ambivalences that characterize the text have to do with Bataille's theoretical convictions about fascism. In Bataille's eyes, an accurate analysis of fascism and effective anti-fascism are only possible if one is prepared to take the appeal of fascism seriously.

Bataille's essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" appeared in two parts in "La Critique sociale" at the turn of the year 1933/34. The magazine was founded in 1931 by Boris Souvarine, a former member of the Communist International and co-founder of the French Communist Party (PCF). Souvarine had been expelled from all official communist organizations in the mid-1920s after opposing the Stalinization of international communism. Together with other rejected PCF members and anti-Stalinists, he then founded the “Cercle communiste Marx et Lenin”, which was renamed the “Cercle communiste démocratique” in 1930. (…) Among Parisian intellectuals, Souvarine enjoyed the reputation of an insider who was also an outsider. He was not afraid to publicly question the authorities of the communist parties, but remained loyal to their goals - the abolition of bourgeois property relations and the capitalist mode of production.

Due to his distant proximity to communism and the resulting effort to keep the spirit of Marxism alive in a non-dogmatic way, Bataille sought contact with Souvarine's group in the early 1930s. This turn is significant when one considers the environment in which Bataille had moved in the previous years. The librarian and archivist began writing literary texts in the 1920s and, through his friends Michel Leiris and André Masson, met the surrealists around André Breton in 1924. Although he later described this encounter as a phase of awakening, Bataille remained on the periphery of Parisian surrealism. Bataille rejected Breton & Co.'s idea that art should be put at the service of the revolution, as well as the request to join the PCF together, which led to a falling out shortly afterwards.

However, this does not mean that Bataille considered the discussion of politics to be irrelevant or art to be apolitical during these years. The Cercle offered him an opportunity to engage intensively with communism and Marxism without joining a party or doctrine. In “La Critique sociale” he regularly published reviews and articles in which he tested an extremely idiosyncratic political way of thinking that was met with skepticism even among his fellow campaigners. Simone Weil, for example, who was friends with Souvarine and who also published articles in "La Critique Sozial" from 1933 onwards, warned the members of the Cercle against further collaboration with Bataille: the ideas of revolution that clash here are too different for one to be able to claim to be fighting for the same goals.

In fact, in his articles, Bataille developed a conception of revolution that was unusual even among dissident communists. In the reply “À propos de Kraf[f]tEbing,” for example, Bataille warns against the loss of validity of Marxism. Its instruments threatened to no longer be able to cope with current developments - the global economic crisis, mass unemployment, the rise of fascism, the transformation of the Russian state into a totalitarian regime. Marxism can only be saved through a hybridization of its methods and a criticism of power that does not only start at the level of class conflict. Bataille brings Freudian psychoanalysis, which will be elementary for the fascism essay a little later, into play here as an “implicitly revolutionary” form of knowledge with the help of which it is possible to face the “most pressing and unpleasant questions” of today.

In a review of André Malraux's "La Condition humaine" from 1933, Bataille formulated for the first time the idea that a revolution, instead of just being a transitional stage towards the establishment of a new order, should also be understood as a "state of excitement" that in itself already has a revolutionary effect. In a revolution, people's actions no longer follow the rules and constraints of the system that is to be overthrown, and this liberation of actions can have a happy effect. The proletariat, according to Bataille, lives and dies without its own activity having any meaning or value other than increasing the wealth of those who have property. In the revolution, on the other hand, the proletariat experiences that its own activity is valuable for itself. However, Marxism does not take the emancipatory potential of such experiences and conditions into account at all. In Bataille's eyes, a more than functional understanding of revolutionary processes was necessary to keep the legacy of the workers' movements alive. It is this idea to which Simone Weil responded with her warning.

The supporters of fascism experience themselves as potent in submission.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Bataille found himself in a double dissidence with the developments of Marxism: with official party communism and with anti-Stalinist communism. The examples from his other articles in "La Critique sociale" show that the theory of fascism, which is developed in the essay on the psychological structure of fascism of 1933/34, is also the result of this specific context of conversation, as it takes up a number of the considerations from the articles.

However, this connection broke down a short time later, and not just because of the lack of agreement within the “Cercle”. The political events required new alliances and other forms of critical intervention: In February 1934, ultra-right groups in France gathered to storm the seat of the French House of Representatives, which was pushed back by security forces, but was viewed by many as a fascist coup. As a result, anti-fascist alliances were formed throughout France, from which a united front emerged from the previously divided socialist and communist forces, the Popular Front. (…) Bataille was also involved in several group projects that were shaped by the dynamics of popular front anti-fascism and increasingly left the framework of Marxist theory behind. (…)

But the essay begins with the diagnosis of a deficit. As a critique of political economy, Marxism, according to Bataille, neglected questions of the political and the religious as "modalities" of "social formation." He only asserted the interactions between the economic basis of society and the so-called superstructure, but did not analyze them. Bataille now wants to do this using the example of fascism. For Bataille, fascism is a phenomenon of the social superstructure, which can be used as an example to develop such an analysis of interactions: for Bataille, it is “the psychological structure” that “constitutes the essence of fascism and not the economic conditions on which it is based”. Nevertheless, in Bataille's eyes, the psychological and economic structure of society are connected. Looking at fascism in particular can help to illuminate the relationship between the base and the “modalities” of “social formation.”

In this respect, Bataille's assessment is similar to the diagnoses of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, who was associated with the communist movement, or the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who at the same time had formulated sharp criticisms of the strategy of the world communist movement. For Bataille, Bloch and Reich, it was initially important to note that fascism was a popular form of rule. In doing so, they opposed the idea that emerged after the First World War and was still widespread in the early 1930s, that fascism was primarily a bourgeois rule maintained by the means of dictatorship. However, according to Bataille, such a rule based only on military power would not be able to establish itself in the long term; rather, it would depend "crucially on the internal attraction that emanates from the leader." This is also why it is important for him to understand how fascism was able to win the support of broad sections of the population. (…)

In his essay on fascism, Bataille refers to Sigmund Freud's study "Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis" from 1921. In a footnote he describes this as an "introduction essentiale", as the French original says, as an "important introduction to the problems of fascism". In this study, Freud devotes himself to the behavior of individuals in large groups of people, or, as he puts it there, to the “mental change of the individual in a crowd.” He already emphasizes that in the masses the "affectiveness" is "extraordinarily increased" and states that there is a "removal of [...] inhibition of drives." In order to explain this irritating emergence and effect of masses, he takes into account two aspects that Bataille considers central to the explanation of fascism: on the one hand, "the role of the leader", on the other hand, the "behavior of the highly organized", i.e. artificial, permanent and stable masses - in contrast to crowds and mobs that form spontaneously and only temporarily, to which the classic of mass psychology, Gustave Le Bon's "Psychology of the Crowd" (1895), to which Freud focuses intensively, is devoted relates.

According to Freud, the mechanism of identification is fundamental to mass formation. According to him, people outsource their ego ideal - the psychological entity that exercises a control function - to the leader. This outsourcing and reshuffling is the binding agent that also creates the connection between the individuals and thus creates the mass. This mechanism concentrates and increases collective excitement. Based on this, Bataille comes to an initial definition of fascism as a genuine mass phenomenon: "The affective current that connects the leader with his followers in the form of the moral identification of the followers with the leader (and vice versa) is a function of a common consciousness of increasing, violent, immoderately growing energies that accumulate in the person of the leader and become unlimitedly available in him."

In fascist mass formation, the loss of a common (homogeneous) measure does not lead to a state of dissolution, but is transformed into a concentration of force that now appears excessive. The process of identification with the leader's power is driven not least, says Bataille in a footnote, by "a latent inferiority complex" that can be observed particularly in Italy and Germany. In both cases, this can be traced back to the questioning of their sovereignty in the course of the First World War, a "mutilated victory" for Italy on the side of the Entente on the one hand, as a war defeat, a dictated peace complete with the "stab in the back legend" in the German Reich on the other.

In the fascism essay, however, the process described is primarily related to societies during the time of the global economic crisis. Given the collective experience of powerlessness, participation in the supposedly “unlimited” power of the leader seems extremely attractive. In the fascist leaders, the masses encounter a figure who seems to belong to a completely different reality. In one of the most famous passages of the essay, Bataille writes: “In their opposition to the democratic politicians who in different countries represent the inherent platitude of homogeneous society, Hitler and Mussolini appear at first glance to be completely different. Whatever feelings their current existence may arouse as political factors of development, one cannot help but see the violence that they raise over people, parties and even the laws."

The mass psychological mechanism, as Freud describes it, creates in the followers of the fascist movement the feeling that they are taking part in a violence that they would not allow themselves and that they as individuals cannot control. This encourages their willingness to surrender to the fascist leaders. They experience themselves as potent in submission.

And in a certain sense they are not wrong, because the power that the leaders exercise over them comes from their own excitement - without them, the masses of their followers, these leaders too were just fanatical screamers. Bataille is therefore less concerned with understanding Mussolini or Hitler as particularly exceptional or charismatic individuals. Rather, it is only through the described mass psychological dynamics that they become the leaders they present themselves as.

(…) In Bataille's conception, however, not only dangers arise from such "completely different" - in his terms: heterogeneous - elements, which the fascist leaders appear to be, at least "at first glance". He also describes phenomena whose subversive potential he has hopes for as “heterogeneous”. In this way he distinguishes “the heterogeneous existence of authority from the heterogeneity of a formless uprising, where the for-itself has the meaning of ‘for the rebellious people’”. The term therefore serves him to explain fascism from its mass psychological and affect-political side. And it helps him to describe the social revolution in a way that is fundamentally different from the Marxist philosophy of history.

According to Bataille, revolutions have so far only succeeded in societies in which sovereignty was still embodied by kings. In democratic and republican societies, however, where sovereignty lies, at least in the idea, with the entire population, the authority against which a subversive movement can turn disappears. Without this opponent, the communist promise obviously cannot develop enough force. Then the proletariat, as the “crystallization point” of the subversive movement, faces competition from forces such as those represented by the fascist paramilitary groups.

In a “critical phase of disintegration,” those excluded in the crisis – more than those who have always been excluded – become susceptible to imperative forces. They react to the disintegration not with the intention of further eroding the existing order, which would be the goal of the "liberating subversion of society", but with the promise of establishing a new rule. (…) Bataille also provides starting points for an explanation for the irritating fact that fascism emerged as a new form of absolute rule in democratic societies.

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