16 - Reclaiming Vital Materialism’s Affirmative, Anti-fascist Powers: A Deleuzo-Guattarian New Materialist Exploration of the Fascist Within

Summary

Introduction

In these times of pandemic uncertainty, socio-economic devastation and ecological catastrophe, extractivist capitalism continues to widen the gap between ‘grievable’ and ‘ungrievable lives’ (Butler 2020: n.p.). As neoliberal exploitation, radical inequality, racism and xenophobic nationalism reproduce and strengthen one another in the globalised arena, the troubling spectre of fascism manifests itself yet again, necessitating a turn to several Deleuzo-Guattarian lines of critical-creative analysis and inquiry. As Gilles Deleuze writes, the broad aim of the schizoanalytical programme he developed alongside his philosophical companion Félix Guattari, is to bypass ‘the strange detour of the other’ (B, 356), whereby desire becomes entangled in a polarised politics of identity during times of crisis and ressentiment. If, as these philosophers argue, fascism – and various types of neo-fascism – can be conceived of in terms of desire, then ethical, political and philosophical projects must work towards mediating desire’s pure flows of affective yearning and preventing these flows from violent stratification (fascism) or radical destratification (madness). In this respect, the concepts and strings of thought that have been developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s individual writings, as well as in their collective oeuvre and various reinterpretations, are essential to contemporary critical theoretical projects that are concerned with the problematics of desire, alterity and (inter)subjectivity.

In this essay, we explore how several Deleuzo-Guattarian anti-fascist concepts, such as the Body without Organs (BwO), together with (mainly Deleuzo-Guattarian-influenced) new materialist approaches towards affirmation, nomadism and vitalism, may help us to ‘keep an eye on all that is fascist, even [the fascist] inside us’ (TP, 165). Such an analysis is needed to frame the rise of neo-fascist political and economic regimes operating under the guise of neoliberal capitalism today – regimes we are both well acquainted with due to our situated positionalities as inhabitants of an increasingly interconnected world and as citizens of respectively South Africa and Belgium, where race and ethnicity-based apartheid and separatist movements are triggering cyclical eruptions of fascism. Key to such a Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of (anti-)fascism is an understanding of vitalism’s genealogy as well as the ethico-political debates around desire conceived of as élan vital (vital force). We begin our investigation, therefore, by contouring and reclaiming a more affirmative, anti-fascist and thus potentially emancipatory vitalism from certain Lebensphilosophien that are currently being exploited to fuel fear-mongering neo-fascist ideologies as well as exploitative neoliberal economics.