7 - Giving Grace: Human Exceptionalism as Fascism

Summary

Fasces, a bundle of rods held together in unity with a binding tie. Many rods, one goal, one focus, one force. The tie that looks internally towards the rods with a vision of the homogeneity and superiority of the collective as identical in value and in drive to power. The tie that looks externally to exclusion and a distorted perspective of all outside as difference and all difference as inferior. The basic tenet of division and division alone, with the aim being that the vision of the rods is the only valid one, that the fate of the outside should be in the hands of the collective unity because theirs is not simply the superior vision but the only valid and viable one. The outside is incapable of vision. The division not of some people against others, but of the social against the natural. Humans against the world. All anthropocentrism is fascism. All human exceptionalism is fascism.

In his preface to Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault demarcates seven tenets that we must adopt in order to live a non-fascist life. All seven tenets emphasise a jubilance in the loss of both power and ego that anti-fascism affords. This directly contradicts the maxim of Kraft durch Freude which affiliated leisure with work for the single vision of fascism, and also shows the insipid connection between fascism and contemporary capitalism where the production of the consumer self as a leisure activity is the forced labour of modern and postmodern subjectivity, a thoroughly joyless activity. Against the excesses, or accursed share, of contemporary capitalism where too much is what drowns the individual in the misery of perpetual demands for choice in the grooming of identity and development of ego, no matter how pop or PoMo (indeed the velocity of ego-transformation is part of postmodernity’s own challenge to joy), many turns to ethics are denigrated as privations denying humans their supposedly evolutionary but entirely arbitrary dominance of the Earth. From the feminist as killjoy, after Sarah Ahmed’s work (2017), to the rise of abolitionism (absolute veganism that refuses all interactions with non-human animals as exploitative), it seems the awareness that the enforcement of dominating human power is unnecessary is some kind of affront to the human’s undeserved place atop the hierarchical world of organisms.