Fascists build Death Worlds, worlds where their sovereignty, their bodily security, is grounded in the right to kill, "to let live or expose to death," the right to maim, to eliminate, and continually reduce others. The original conception of the death-world is taken from Achille Mbembe, though we will soon be looking at it from a different perspective. In Necropolitics, Mbembe describes death-worlds as: "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead". Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body-without-Organs (BwO) and combining this with the work of other theorists on fascism, this article will attempt to trace out a better materialist analysis of the psychology of fascism.
WHAT THE FUCK IS A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?Whether you are reading this online or in printed form, you have to touch your screen, a mouse, touchpad, keyboard, or the paper at some point. This connection between your hand and $getThing produces a sensory signal. The connection between your eyes and the light emitting/reflecting the text produces another signal. A recording of this sensory experience is sent down the nerves to the Central Nervous Thing.
As this sensory signal is received by the central nervous thing, it leaves something behind. The body without organs (BwO) begins with this residue of your full life's worth of sensory experience. It has been growing, changing, since the moment you had functioning nerves. The more intense any particular bit of sensory information is, or the more often it is repeated, the more likely it is to leave a lasting impression upon the body-without-organs.
The BwO is not quite "you," but it fundamentally shapes how you live and act in the world. It is the imprint left behind from the sum total of your sensory experience - but more than that - it is also the impulses, biases, deep-seated emotional responses and habits that have formed as a result of that imprint. It is the unconscious but physical and visceral material from which all our conscious behaviors begin.
In their later work (A Thousand Plateaus) Deleuze and Guattari write of the body-without-organs as a tool with almost boundless potential for creativity, something to be experimented with: but this is not the conception of the BwO that we need at the moment. No, it’s the earlier conception of the BwO in Anti-Oedipus that best describes the psychology of the fascist. In the place of what could be an “unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes [and continually recreates itself]”, the fascist has a prison, a camp, a place where nothing is permitted to move or pass. The body-without-organs of the fascist is a Death World.
GENDER, WAR, AND DEATHThe fascist builds a Death World in meatspace because he carries a virtual one around with him at all times. "Though the devastation wrought on his body originates in social agencies and human 'modelers' he perceives it only as an evil ('bestial') interior, which he cannot perceive as social and thus inevitably sees as 'essentially human.'" But what "social agencies" cause this? How do they build the inner/virtual Death World that the fascist then replicates?
A popular theory is that fascism springs from the conditions of capitalism and colonialism, and while this is true - colonialism is already the construction of a Death World. If we are to understand the social forces that could ever lead a human to being this broken in the first place, we need to grasp fascism's deepest roots in patriarchy and misogyny. As Virginia Woolf asserts in her 1938 analysis (Three Guineas): “Patriarchy is to private life as fascism is to public life.” Long before the Nazi-saluting, swastika-adorned fascist began building death camps and ruining the lives of complete strangers - he was a terror to those in his own household.
Jack Z. Bratich traces this development of patriarchal and misogynist subjects into fascist ones in his book On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death. Microfascism here is differentiated from fascism "proper" (or molar, macro, or mass fascism) in that it denotes the behaviors, attitudes, and relations from which mass fascism develops. What we are looking at is how the fascist BwO is built before it becomes totalizing and blooms into a recognizably fascist individual. The Death World is an attitude, a posture of contempt and disgust held in relation to material reality, and above all to the world of actual, living women. The fascist is so incapable, so deathly afraid of dealing with women and their desires on equal social footing that he will happily devote himself to constructing an entire world for exposing others to death - simply as a kind of social/emotional armor. So eager is the fascist to reduce, repress, and control women that he will happily harm and reduce his own life in the process.
Jack Bratich puts forward the term "autogenetic sovereignty" to describe his understanding of fascism. Sovereignty in this case already being described above as bodily security, autogenetic denotes a form of sovereignty springing from the fantasy of man's self-creation. "The self-made man, always on the rink of losing his subjective kingdom, must remake himself. This is done again and again through the reduction of women." Autogenetic sovereignty is a circuit in which the fascist continually flees from all that he fears in the material world to his internal world of fantasy. Because he is incapable of actually fully fleeing from the material world of women, the fascist returns to it, but with violent intent. Microfascism is a maintenance of the Self rooted in fear and resulting in repression and harm: "autogenetic sovereignty only exists as a process of renewal (rebirth) and elimination (of women)".
The fascist and proto-fascist gangs and paramilitaries are more modern variations on an older patriarchal formation: the Männerbund or (plural) Männerbunde, Germanic or even Proto-Indo-European men’s war-bands. These war-bands were composed of young, not-yet-fully-grown males, who only became men through rites of initiation based around “defending” their host culture through violence against others, including sexual violence. These Männerbunde as described may themselves be only fantasies dreamed up by the early fascist and proto-fascist theorists that preceded the Freikorps and Nazi Sturmabteillung. What isn’t fantasy is the actual war that these men’s associations have waged on women since long before fascism was a glimmer in Mussolini’s eye.
In his war on women, the fascist decides and upholds the boundaries of both “woman” AND “man.” Anyone in this society can be marked for violence for stepping outside the lines. This is not simply the result of the fascist’s law, it is the point: "It's not that patriarchal order is established first and then women transgress it. Law only exists as a way of framing Eve's behavior as transgression..The need for punishment and control precedes the establishment of law." Soon it’s not just women that the fascist fears, but men, Jews, Blacks, the Indian Savage, the transgender person, the communist, the contagious. Everyone who lives in the fascist’s world and dares to dream of something better. The Other’s desire for a better world becomes a newfound fear because it is a direct threat to the patriarchal-colonial order.
The freedom of living outside this order is looked upon by the fascist with horror, but "Hell is inside, in the darkness of the body; the body is a tomb, a dungeon." The circuit fires again. Fear, flight, “rebirth” and fantasy. Returning to reality: repression, reduction, elimination. It is unthinkable that anyone would want to live outside his order. But he can’t escape it. Everywhere the fascist looks he comes face to face “with the external incarnation of his devouring, dead unconscious.” The circuit of death fires again, and again, bringing the only form of freedom the fascist can imagine. With every repetition the circuit builds a death-world like a stream digs its riverbed.
The fascist has cobbled together a social/emotional armor that numbs him to the outside world. In order to feel something - anything through this armor - he seeks a series of escalating shocks at the expense of others. Eventually the fascist BwO seems to take over entirely. This late-stage, malignant fascist becomes necrophilic. Not in the colloquial sense of the word necrophilia (though unfortunately not excluding it): “The necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical…as if all living persons were things…The necrophilous person can relate to an object - a flower or a person - only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself…He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.”
The fascist’s greatest fear can now be summed up in a single word: decolonization. As Frantz Fanon describes on the very first page of Wretched of the Earth: “The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another ‘species’ of men and women: the colons, the colonists.”
Every white-bodied person (but cis men especially) is more likely than not already carrying a partially formed death-world around with them. You cannot by sheer force of will separate yourself from the racial character of your position in society, from the material impact it had on your development as a human being. “[W]hatever the name used..decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it”. It will take work: difficult emotional work, collective action on ourselves, amongst each other, and against the settler state. In order to become the best at killing fascists that you can possibly be, you have to kill the one inside (and probably multiple times). Every dyed-in-the-wool fascist could drop dead tomorrow, and fascism would still remain a forever-problem until we can learn to identify and excise these partial death-worlds once and for all.
How do you keep yourself sane in a racist and patriarchal society? BY DESTROYING IT. Don’t ever let a fascist call himself “pro-life” again. Take that shit back. What does your Lifeworld look like? What culture(s) do you draw it from? What are you doing to bring it about?
So the fascist craves death, not just for others but for himself as well. We may as well oblige him. But how do we kill as many fascists as possible while minimizing our own losses? By attacking the fascist everywhere it reproduces. Look for what he fears, watch how he runs from it with every word, every action. Interrupt the process. Shred his armor and try to reach whatever pathetic excuse for a human that remains. GET HIM TO FEEL SOMETHING – TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT HE FEELS SOMETHING - or put that undead piece of shit out of his misery.