George Bataille, "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (1)

 THE TRUMP YEARS have (all too understandably) seen a lot of writing done on the question of what fascism was and is, and I have read a fair-sized chunk of it. Often writers who grappled with the phenomenon in its first manifestation get brought into the discussion--Gramsci, Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno--as they should be. But I haven't come across anyone mentioning Georges Bataille or his essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism."

But why not? Michel Surya, Bataille's biographer, notes that "He was the first person in France [...] to introduce the effective methods of psychoanalytic analysis into the body of political analysis, methods that, even more remarkably, had been filtered through his own personal experience." Since Trumpism seems to come red, wet, and howling right out out of the American Id, why not a little psychoanalysis? 

Surya notes parenthetically that Wilhelm Reich also has a claim to being first to the party in using psychoanalysis to understand fascism, but Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism does not seem to be getting revived either. 

Back when I was in grad school [sound of creaky rocking chair], Bataille's essay had a certain currency. A translation by Carl Lovitt that appeared in 1979 in the journal New German Critique kicked things off; I remember reading the essay in a xerox of a xerox, which I promptly xeroxed. The need for further xeroxing was circumvented by the essay appearing, again in Lovitt's translation, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, a selection of Bataille's shorter pieces skillfully assembled by Allan Stoekl and published in 1985. 

Visions of Excess was number 14 in the University of Minnesota Press series "Theory and History of Literature" when that series was just about the coolest thing going in the humanities [creaky rocking chair audible again]. 

The essay's original publication is a story with some interesting angles. It was published in two parts in the last two numbers (November 1933 and March 1934) of La Critique Sociale, a journal edited by Russian emigré and anti-Stalinist Marxist Boris Souvarine. (I don't know whether Souvarine would count as Trotskyist, but his journal is roughly comparable to the Partisan Review of the 1930s.) 

Souvarine republished the whole contents of the journal in  the early 1980s, at which time he had some sharp criticism of Bataille. Back in the 1930s, Souvarine's wife had left him for Bataille, so personal animosity may have entered into the question. But Richard Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason (2004) had some pointed criticism of Bataille's argument as well.

Another interesting detail: between the publication of Part I in November 1933 and Part II in March 1934, Paris saw the violent far-right near-coup of February 6, 1934. Part II was no doubt already written when that event occurred, but I wonder if Bataille revised in the light of what had just happened. The events of February 6 were a very big deal for right-wing intellectuals and eventual collaborateurs Pierre Drieu La  Rochelle and Robert Brasillach.

This is already too long. I'll write about Bataille's argument itself in another post.