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.