Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (4)

 HERE WE ARE, the day after. I guess our level of anxiety about fascism will have to remain in the red for at least another four years.

A few people have objected that Bataille's analysis of fascism itself smacks of fascism. Richard Wolin's chapter on Bataille in his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism is a handy example.

Wolin, I am guessing, aligns with Jürgen Habermas in identifying left politics as part of an Enlightenment legacy, relying on reason, evidence, and public discourse as the best instruments for shaping the polity, rather than tradition, revealed religion, mystical notions of race, and so on. From that perspective, Bataille's suggestion that we dip into the heterogeneous to find ways to resist fascism seems to be saying, let's use right wing instruments to combat the right wing! But the moment we start using right wing instruments, don't we become right wingers? I'm probably over-simplifying, but that seems to be Wolin's objection.

This may put us in mind--today especially--of Trump, who has been eager to draw on various dark energies  to fuel his successful campaign: white supremacy, male supremacy, fear of the other, and other charged varieties of unreason. Could the left draw on some kind of dark energy of its own without ceasing to be the left? Does the left even have dark energies to draw on? 

The closest the left comes to the adrenalin-amping of fascism may be religiously-inspired movements like abolition or some phases of the civil rights or anti-war movements of the 1060s. Not that religion is a dark energy, exactly, but it carries more an emotional appeal than a rational one. And it can be effective--I think it made a difference when mainline Protestants swung into line on same-sex marriage, for instance. Most leftists I know are chary of making God-based appeals, though. And if Wolin is right, they should be. 

And is Wolin right? I don't know. 

It's been a long day.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (3)

 STILL WITH ME? Okay. According to Bataille, the homogeneous, when it feels threatened, will resort to the heterogeneous to put down the heterogeneous.

To expand that a bit: Capital, which tends to represent itself as Good Decent Ordinary People, will resort to certain kinds of old weirdness, such as tribal loyalties and would-be übermenschen who have no investment at all in enlightenment notions like rule of law or representative democracy, if it fears that the unruly working class can use the rule of law and representative democracy to take control. Capitalism was married to representative democracy and rule of law for a long time, but if its survival requires throwing them aboard...over they will go, and capitalism will gladly marry authoritarianism.

In its bones, this looks a lot like the classic marxist analysis of fascism. Bataille has woven into it, though, a lot of new ingredients, since his idea of the heterogeneous includes not just the classic proletariat, but also a variety of unassimilable and even alarming folks--all kinds of folks who are not exactly Good Decent Ordinary People. This is an interesting development, I'd say.

Bataille took a lot of criticism, though, for suggesting that the workers' movement could learn a trick or two from the fascists--by which he meant, I think, trafficking in the heterogeneous. He writes (in  the Lovitt translation): 

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.

Fascism is not just a simple  revival of the ancien régime--it has added some powerful updates; it is juiced up with some powerful heterogeneous mojo.  But why couldn't the workers' movement work in its own new mojo, creating new and powerful "forms of attraction"? 

He gives no examples, just as Walter Benjamin (writing a couple of years after Bataille) gives no examples when he calls for communism to politicize art in response to fascism's aestheticization of politics. Presumably Bataille did not have in mind drum circles at union meetings, just as Benjamin presumably did not have in mind WPA-style Post Office murals. But what did Bataille have in mind?

Whatever he had in mind, there may be a problem, as Richard Wolin discussed long ago. I'll try to sort that out tomorrow.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (2)

 “TODAY WE KNOW,” writes Michel Foucault in his 1970 introduction to Bataille’s collected works, “Bataille is one of the most important writers of his century” (“On le sait aujourd’hui: Bataille est un des écrivains les plus importants de son siècle”). Not sure how well that statement holds up fifty years on, even coming from Foucault, but “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” is original and interesting and maybe even true, in spots.

Bataille draws on Marxism—as I mentioned earlier, the piece first appeared in a French journal that was Marxist but anti-Stalinist—but also on Freud, and quite a bit on anthropology. For a time in those days Bataille was running with the Surrealists, and he also attended Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. The man got around.

The crucial distinction in Bataille’s analysis of fascism is between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The homogeneous are the Good Decent People of the World, who largely agree on all important questions and are the bedrock of society, etc. The heterogeneous are everyone and everything that does not fit into the homogeneous. This has two zones, shall we say. One zone holds all the abject and despised: “trash, vermin, etc.,” “dreams or neuroses,” “mobs,” “impoverished classes,” “madmen” and “poets.” The heterogeneous needs to be kept out of sight, repressed, cleaned up, stuffed away somewhere. But—a big but—the heterogeneous also includes everything that transcends the normal, as well as that which fails to attain the normal. That is, the pure, the sacred, the noble, the exalted. In short, the revered and the despised have a kind of secret kinship (here we see  the anthropological dimension of the argument).

We’re not done, though. The heterogeneous also includes the working class, which homogeneous society (a) requites for its labor but (b) would rather not acknowledge as a reality or share power with. 

And this is where Freud comes in. “The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego.” This helps account for why a certain cruelty and remorselessness will enter into the efforts of the homogeneous to extirpate the traces of  the heterogeneous. Bataille is willing to call this “sadistic”—sadique.

Bataille asserts that “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence”—that is, part of the elite, exalted zone of heterogeneity, the realm of the pure, the forceful, the disciplined, the elite. The homogeneous is not itself the elite—it’s Good Decent Normal People, remember. However, the Good Decent Normal People may feel the need of the forceful and disciplined to keep the dodgy end of the heterogeneous—the vermin, the diseased,, the queer, the alien—under inescapable control. 

…Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.Whatever emotions their actual existence as political agents of evolution provokes, it is impossible to ignore the force that situates them above men, parties, and even laws: a force that disrupts the regular course of things, the peaceful but fastidious homogeneity powerless to maintain itself (the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action),

This is starting to sound a little like Trump, no? His base does not mind that he breaks the rules or crosses lines or violates the Constitution. The important thing is to have the sheer brutality needed to put the heterogeneous back into the outer darkness. Then all we Good Decent Normal People will be safe again.

Gregor von Rezzori, _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories_, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

 FIVE RELATIVELY FREE-STANDING novellas (the stories tend to be sixty-some pages), all with the same narrator at different ages, and all of them seemingly drawn from Rezzori’s own experience, so these days “fictionalized memoir” or “autofiction” might be the handier descriptor, but the book was published in German almost fifty years ago, so, sure, “novel,” why not? It’s an interesting book, however we categorize it.

Rezzori’s family was part of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with holdings in Romania, but Rezzori was born in 1914, just five years before the Treaty of Versailles did away with the Austro-Hungarian empire and (as a side effect) his family’s place in the world. His parents and grandparents never quite leave that vanished world, with its dueling scars and hunting in the Carpathians, but Rezzori has to figure out how to live in post-war world with not much beyond charm and upper-class manners. 

The first four stories track him from boyhood in the 1920s to young manhood in the late 1930s, with a final chapter on his life after World War II. The settings shift, as do his circumstances, but a unifying element is, as the subtitle indicates, the narrator’s anti-semitism. He is not an ideological anti-semite, not at all fanatical about it, but it’s how he was raised, and it seems perfectly natural and understandable to him, persisting even as he has friendships and even love affairs with Jews.

And then, after the Anschluss, with Austria now bound to Nazi Germany, anti-semitism is state policy. The narrator isn’t a Nazi, does not exactly approve of the Nazis, but he’s no dissident, and on some level the policy seems not exactly wrong to him if a little exaggerated. 

In this way the book is a subtle and perceptive study of how our own unexamined assumptions, given a little family and social encouragement, can lead us to acquiesce in evil. 

The prose has a somewhat over-stuffed, Victorian-Beidermeier style at times, but the whiff of the 19th century novel in the languor of the descriptions seems deliberate and ironic, given the 20th century horrors hovering unstated in the background.