It is said that psychoanalysis is concerned with something which takes place on a small scale, barely the scale of the family and the person, whereas politics is concerned only with large social groupings. I would like to demonstrate that, on the contrary, there is a politics which addresses itself to the individual's desire, as well as to the desire which manifests itself in the broadest social field. And it has two forms: either a macro politics aiming at both individual and social problems, or a micropolitics aiming at the same domains (the individual, the family, party problems, state problems, etc.)
The despotism which exists in conjugal or family relationships arises from the same kind of libidinal disposition that exists in the broadest social field. Inversely, it is by no means absurd to approach a number of large scale social problems (for example, the problems of bureaucratism and fascism), in the light of a micropolitics of desire. In that case, it is no longer a simple question of describing preexisting social objects, but one of engaging in a political struggle against all machines of the dominant power, whether it be the power of the bourgeois State, the power of any kind of bureaucracy, the power of academia, familial power, phallocratic power in male/female relationships, or even the repressive power of the superego over the individual.
The militant Marxist system of thought…constitutes itself as the collective system of representation of the masses' desires. This system recognizes the existence of a revolutionary desire, but it imposes mediations on it: that of the theoretical representation of Marxism, and that of the practical representation of the party which is supposed to be its expression. A whole mechanism of transmission belts is thus put into place between the theory, the direction of the party, and the militants, so that the innumerable differences which run through the desire of the masses find themselves "massified," restored to standardized formulations whose necessity is deemed to be justified in the name of the cohesion of the working class and party unity. We have switched from the impotence of a system of mental representation to the impotence of a system of social representativity.
[This analysis] will no longer pretend to find all the answers in the action of a unique revolutionary party standing as a central depository of theoretical and practical truth. Therefore, a micropolitics of 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 [good/evil] dualism that presently contaminates the revolutionary movements. It would no longer seek support from a transcendent object in order to provide itself with security. It would no longer center itself on a unique object - the power of the State, which could only be conquered by a representative party acting in lieu of and instead of the masses - but rather, it would center on a multiplicity of objectives, within the immediate reach of the most diverse social groupings.
Starting from the plurality of partial struggles … far-reaching collective struggles could be launched. There would no longer be mass, centrally ordered movements which would set more or less serialized individuals in motion on a local scale. Rather, it would be the connection of a multiplicity of molecular desires which would catalyze challenges on a large scale. This is what happened at the beginning of the movement of May '68 : the local and singular manifestation of the desire of small groups began to resound with a multiplicity of repressed desires which had been isolated and crushed by the dominant forms of expression and of representation.
The unification of struggles is antagonistic to the multiplicity of desires only when it is totalizing, that is, when it is treated by the totalitarian machine of a representative party.
For political struggle to coincide with an analysis of desire, you have to be in a position to listen in on whoever is speaking from a position of desire, and above all, "off the track." At home, a child "off the track" is put down, and this continues in school, in the barracks, in the factory, in the trade union, and in the party cell. You must always stay "on the right track" and "in line." But by virtue of its very nature, desire always has the tendency to "stray from the subject," "to get off the track," and to drift from its proper course.
Section 2Let's come back to this question of fascism and to its relation to Stalinism and Western style "democracies." We are not interested in establishing reductive comparisons, but, on the contrary, in complexifying the models…There are all kinds of fascisms, all kinds of Stalinisms and all kinds of bourgeois democracies. These three groupings break up as soon as one begins to consider, at the heart of each grouping, the relative status of, for example, the industrial machine, the banking machine, the military machine, the politico-police machine, the techno-structures of the State, the Church, etc.
It is the same fascism under different forms which continues to operate in the family, in school, or in a trade union. A struggle against the modern forms of totalitarianism can be organized only if we are prepared to recognize the continuity of this machine.
Therefore, the analysis of fascism is not simply a historian's specialty. I repeat: what fascism set in motion yesterday continues to proliferate in other forms, within the complex of contemporary social space. A whole totalitarian chemistry manipulates the structures of state, political and union structures, institutional and family structures, and even individual structures, inasmuch as one can speak of a sort of fascism of the superego in situations of guilt and neurosis.
Today the productive forces provoke the explosion of traditional human territorialities [everything that marks us as a member of some group], because they are capable of liberating the atomic energy of desire. This phenomenon being irreversible, and its revolutionary scope impossible to calculate, the totalitarian-bureaucratic capitalist and socialist systems are forced to constantly perfect and miniaturize their repressive machines. We simply don't want to miss the impact of this totalitarian machine which never stops modifying and adapting itself to the relationships of force and societal transformations. Therefore, it seems to me that the constant search for this machinic composition of totalitarian powers is the indispensable corollary of a micro political struggle for the liberation of desire. Molecular analysis is the will to a molecular power, to a theory and practice which refuse to dispossess the masses of their potential for desire.
It is often asserted that, at their outset, the fascist regimes supplied a minimum of economic solutions to the most urgent problems - an artificial boost to the economy, a reabsorption of unemployment, a large-scale public works program, control of capital. These measures are then contrasted, for example, with the powerlessness of the socio-democratic governments of the Weimar Republic. Explanations like, "The socialists and communists had a bad program, bad leaders, a bad organization, bad alliances," are considered sufficient. Their deficiencies and betrayals are endlessly enumerated. But nothing in these explanations accounts for the fact that the new totalitarian desiring machine was able to crystallize in the masses to such an extent that it was felt, by international capitalism itself, to be even more dangerous than the regime that came out of the October revolution. What almost everyone refuses to acknowledge is that the fascist machine, in its Italian and German forms, became a threat to capitalism and Stalinism because the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in it. By reterritorializing their desire onto a leader, a people, and a race, the masses abolished, by means of a phantasm of catastrophe, a reality which they detested and which the revolutionaries were either unwilling or unable to encroach upon.
For the masses, virility, blood, vital space, and death took the place of a socialism that had too much respect for the dominant meanings. All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one. Hitler and the Nazis were fighting for death, right up to and including the death of Germany; the German masses agreed to follow along and meet their own destruction. How else are we to understand the way they were able to keep the war going for several years after it had been manifestly lost?
The last World War will thus have been the opportunity to select the most efficient totalitarian machines, those best adapted to the period. Unlike [Ur-]fascism, capitalist totalitarian machines manage to divide, particularize, and molecularize the workers, meanwhile tapping their potentiality for desire. These machines infiltrate the ranks of the workers, their families, their couples, their childhood; they install themselves at the very heart of the workers' subjectivity and vision of the world. From this standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the Western totalitarian machine has now completely surpassed its Stalinist counterpart. The failure of Stalinism, which is no doubt one of the most striking developments in the modern period, evidently stems from the fact that it could not adapt itself to the evolution of the productive forces and in particular to what I have called the molecularization of the work force.
This new situation, which involves heterogeneous social groupings whose action is not channeled into purely economic objectives, is met by proliferation and exacerbation of repressive responses. Alongside the fascism of the concentration camps, which continue to exist in numerous countries, new forms of molecular fascism are developing: a slow burning fascism in familialism, in school, in racism, in every kind of ghetto, which advantageously makes up for the crematory ovens.
Everywhere the totalitarian machine is in search of proper structures, which is to say, structures capable of adapting desire to the profit economy.
We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: "Fascism will not make it again." Fascism has already "made it," [long before Trump had ever taken power] and it continues to "make it. " It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire.
Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire.