Our Desire for Fascism

Keywords: fascism, Deleuze and Guattari, democracy
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of fascism in general by examining how it is conceived in Deleuze and Guattari's work. They understand fascism as desire, and they insist that fascist desire is something that present in us all, part of our psychological infrastructure. “Everybody wants,” as Guattari put it, “to be a fascist.” Of course our psyches also contain non-fascist desire: democratic desire, authoritarian desire, revolutionary desire, and so on. And so the question, for Deleuze and Guattari, is how we might work on our desire, how we might discourage our fascist desires (both individual and collective), and encourage our revolutionary ones, in what they call a project of “schizoanalysis.”

This way of thinking about fascism, I argue, can help us think more effectively about the present crisis of democracy in the United States. In his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Mark Seem argues that people in Britain and America tend to think that fascism “is a phenomenon that took place elsewhere, something that could only happen to others, but not to us; it's their problem.” In this vein, Joe Biden argued recently that the capitol insurrection of January 6th does not represent the “true America.” “This is not who we are,” he said. But if we think with Deleuze and Guattari, we understand that the rise of fascist desire is an ever present potential in all societies, including the United States. We should never assume fascism cannot happen here. It can. It can happen anywhere.