Debatte

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    • Author: Katrin Koeppert

    • The interesting pleasure to accuse others of taking pleasure in accusing fascists

      The interesting pleasure to accuse others of taking pleasure in accusing fascists

      A cosy German corner; photo: private

      But of all things, an article that seeks to completely ignore these debates is now setting the tone in German press media. Jan Phillip Reemtsma claimed in his FAZ article in early May that the question of whether what we are currently experiencing is already fascism reflects a desire to create a sense of belonging. Not only that it remains unclear who is the subject or target of his accusation. He also reduces the complexity of existing analyses to a matter of belonging. With a stroke of the pen, he dismisses the fact that for those affected by violence, a sense of belonging can be essential for survival, and that for academics who are already feeling the effects of restrictions on academic freedom, the assurance of a space where certain things can be said can have existential significance. According to Reemtsma, the search for an answer to the question of whether this violence and these infringements on communicative rights already constitute fascism is not driven by the gravity of the situation, but merely by the desire to feel morally superior in the cozy corner of like-minded people.

      At any rate, the article is indeed revealing regarding the detachment from the world expressed in its terms such as “affective togetherness.” It acts as if, in today’s fragmented public sphere of digital communication, a group driven by a desire for morality could still come together in such a way that a sense of belonging emerges. And affect is set in opposition to epistemology as well as the political, as if 30 years of queer-feminist affect and media theory had never taken place. The recent reflections under the term “fascization” are also deliberately ignored. That “fascization” has analytical potential has already been made clear by Robin Celikates and Rahel Jaeggi in their response to Reemtsma. To realize this potential, however, we need the aforementioned theories of affect, which are often entirely absent from public debate. I therefore begin my reflections on fascism/fascistization with the concepts of pleasure and desire. However, my approach is less in the vein of Deleuze/Guattari; rather, I am concerned with a concept of fascism following Black, queer-feminist theory.

      Robin Celikates/Rahel Jaeggi as well as Alex Demorivić, Carolin Amlinger/Oliver Nachtwey and Ivo Eichhorn, in their contributions to the “fascism debate” hyped up by media engineering, refer to fascization as a primarily temporal concept: as a concept of a phase (Demorivić), of a process (Amlinger/Nachtwey, Eichhorn), of a form of progression (Celikates/Jaeggi). These authors use images of movement and mobility to counter the analogies between historical fascism and contemporary forms of authoritarianism that so disturb Reemtsma, even as he himself reproduces them in his article. The concept of fascization suggests that difference is produced in repetition and that the incompleteness of fascism projected from the past onto the present is revealed in this difference.

      Implicitly, and perhaps obscured by the numerous references to Horkheimer/Adorno in the replies, the concept of “fascization” is also linked to the affective concept of desire according to Deleuze. Fascization as a process also points to an energy that “assembles the social field” (Deleuze 1996, 29, transl. kk), which affects us as desire and connects us on a micropolitical level with the formations of power that spread throughout the assemblage of desire (ibid., 21). Paul Morten (2025) has already outlined this; Simon Strick’s forthcoming book suggests it. Fascism, therefore, is no longer to be viewed solely from the molar instance of the state, the military, or the police, but from the micro-conditions of an “individuality of a day” (Deleuze 1996, 31. transl. kk), whose connections constitute the moment of the conjuncture. The current conjuncture of fascism arises—one might conclude—from the relations of micropolitical events in the minutiae of post-digital reactionary cultures, which unify for a specific moment. Fascization as a desire is therefore never merely a lust for destruction attributable to a situation of scarcity, as Amlinger/Nachtwey (2025) suggest, nor is it a natural given of an authoritarian, destructive character or a lustful urge for harshness, as it flashes through here and there in the work of Eva von Redecker (2026). Rather, fascization appears, particularly against the backdrop of fragmented, algorithmized publics, as a heterogeneous structure that is increasingly composed of the relations within digital reactionary culture (such as comments, likes, and reposts). No leader figures can be discerned in this structure anymore; strictly speaking, not even the authority of gender remains (Deleuze 1996, 23). Rather, it presents itself as a quagmire in which one gets stuck, as von Redecker puts it. Paul explores the extent to which, with such an understanding of desire, one can conceive of fascization as something that gets under one’s skin—not as a consequence of the feeling of being part of a mass movement, but as a consequence of digital media’s affective “microtargeting” (2025, 4). I myself have attempted, in the lecture series “Prompting Fascism,” to conceptualize it as the effect of a need generated by AI technologies and rhetoric—no longer to seek, discover, or generate output, but rather to command it through input.

      Without claiming that such a concept of fascization can explain everything, it becomes clear to what extent affect does not stand in opposition to analysis. On the contrary: with the concept of desire as a concept of affect, epistemologies of conjunction move to the center of attention. By referring to connection, we learn to direct our gaze no longer toward the poles of state and subject, violence and desire, tech and bros, but toward the relations—the “intersectional” (Crenshaw), “intra-active” (Barad), and “infra-active” (Ferreira da Silva) relationships. Black, queer-feminist bodies of knowledge are coming to the fore, bodies of knowledge that have been rendered nearly unrecognizable in current analyses of fascism. Instead of the accusation of a “lust” for the accusation of fascism, as Reemtsma has made, it is my aim to highlight these bodies of knowledge because they recognize the significance that affects hold for the analysis of fascism. They are also important, however, because they make it possible to address the anthropocentric narrowings of the discussion through their focus on relations and connections.

      In this regard, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2022) concept of relation can be particularly helpful. Drawing on the figure of refraction, she adds to Deleuze and Guattari’s eternally mobile field of immanence of desire the negativity required for an understanding of the differential effects of fascization. What is meant here is a conception of relation that arises from the brutal scene of colonial-racist subjugation and, at the moment of the questioning (negativization) of the status of the human that accompanies this violence, makes fascization comprehensible as a dynamic of annihilation that is never directed solely against racialized people and groups of people. It allows us to understand fascization as something that, at the moment of the persecution and extermination of these groups of people, is always also directed against the annihilation of land that is, in a sense, racialized—for example, in the form of the extraction of raw materials. Conversely, this means that the extraction of land can always also be viewed as fascist in the sense that it functions in a way that is directed against certain people.

      Samir Gandesha (2020) consequently speaks in this context of a “posthuman fascism”. Since the pandemic and through automation and AI—according to Gandesha—fascism has focused, on the fringes of a massive process of de-skilling the workforce, on intensifying the extraction of raw materials. This extraction goes hand in hand with the prospective obsolescence of humanity and the destruction of the world, which Gandesha, drawing on Achille Mbembe, describes as the “Becoming Black of the World.”

      At the risk of overgeneralizing, this seems to me to be precisely the crux of the matter. Meanwhile, the desire to accuse others of taking pleasure in the accusation of fascism only generates effects that distract us from the important debates.

    • Disgust and eroticism of the new fascist body

      Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper (The New Fascist Body), with an afterword by Alberto Toscano, (Wirklichkeit Books) 2025.

      “In a context in which propaganda is often no longer easily distinguishable from enlightenment, documentation, and serious research,” the debate about the authenticity of images showing hunger and starvation in Gaza reached its low point in the summer of 2025: Not only did journalist Tobias Huch deny that the images circulating at the time documenting the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli military, he used the case of the emaciated boy Mohammed Zakarias al-Mutawaq as an opportunity to accuse Palestinians of provoking genetic diseases and having low IQs due to their sexual behavior. Unimpressed by medical assessments that clearly identify signs of starvation despite the boy’s pre-existing condition, and indifferent to countless other images showing underweight children, Huch’s X-Post aimed to degrade the Palestinian population by establishing a link between disability and sexual morality.

      This very connection is at the heart of the new book by Holocaust researcher and gender studies scholar Dagmar Herzog. “Der neue faschistische Körper” (The New Fascist Body, 2025, Wirklichkeit Books) adds an important piece to the puzzle of current theories of fascism. The focus of what she calls postmodern fascism is on the “confusing connections between sexual and disability politics” (35), with the intersectional categories of gender, race, and class being supplemented by the important category of disability.

      Taking the success of the AfD as a starting point, Herzog discusses in the first chapter the extent to which anti-migrant racism is made “sexy” (9) by stirring up disgust for disabled bodies. Herzog traces the “fear-driven (…) devaluation of any vulnerability” (9), which is conveyed through the eroticization of (physical) superiority, for example in AfD election campaigns, using five scenes that, not coincidentally, also play on the keyboard of the German Staatsräson (raison d’état). Among other things, Herzog shows how the devaluation of the Arab-Palestinian body and intelligence goes hand in hand with German envy of alleged Jewish intelligence, infused with anti-Semitic motives. Based on a careful reading of statements by journalists such as Ulf Poschardt and Mathias Döpfner, she elaborates on how this affective coupling of disgust and envy is used, on the one hand, to court Jewish intellect for (reputational) economic gains and, on the other hand, to affectively forestall the potential immigration of Palestinians who have lost everything through genocide.

      In this sense, one could say that we are in a phase of preconditioning, which Herzog explains in the third chapter, drawing on George Mosse. Mosse had argued that the racist sensitization of Germans, who felt themselves to be a chosen people at the latest with the rise of the National Socialists, had already begun in the 1890s—along the “affective seam” (48) between the exterminatory hatred of disability and the sexual charge of “racial hygienic” procreation. Disgust and eroticism are the binding forces that work toward an ideal future, which is why Herzog speaks of “frontlash” (24) rather than backlash in relation to postmodern fascism: The attack anticipates and responds to a development such as the migration of Palestinians, which has neither begun nor is likely under the current political conditions of pacification of the “Middle East conflict.”

      Emotions are excellent tools for such a preemptive attack, which is why Herzog considers their activation to be the strongest link between postmodern fascism and National Socialism. Their stimulation, and the open rejection of their repression, directly indicates that we are in a phase of fascistization and can no longer speak only of authoritarianism. For the emotional attachment to National Socialism also presupposed having penetrated the intimate sphere and revealed “the innermost secrets of desire” (41), writes Herzog in the second chapter. Even today, by focusing on the pre-political sphere, on feelings and desires, fascism is being prepared in the subjects and our “mental attitude” (47) is affectively preconditioned.

      It is an important insight of Herzog’s that even historical fascism could not be reduced to a “biology-obsessed regime” (42), but was based on social constructivist theories of the mutability and malleability of desire. We have never been modern, not even in historical fascism; this is how Bruno Latour’s words could be interpreted in Herzog’s view. Even in National Socialism, there are signs of a concept of socially conditioned constructions of desire, as examined in postmodern theory. Postmodern fascism is therefore not a description of the present, but rather a kind of backward shock. Aimé Césaire coined the image of the shock triggered by the application of colonialist methods in Europe against white Europeans during National Socialism. Although transferring this image to the subject at hand is not without risks, it seems to me that the application of postmodern methods from the Nazi era is the shock of our present: The neo-fascist co-opting of the contestability of immutable truths (6), which is central to postmodern theory formation, represents a shock to postmodern theory formation as an echo of the past of National Socialism. Postmodern theory must recognize how its insights can be turned against itself.

       The good news about recognizing the changeability of our desires and the contestability of truth is that, as Alberto Toscano puts it in his afterword to Herzog’s book, following Walter Benjamin, we can make ourselves completely useless to fascism by orienting our desires toward accepting vulnerability and not repressing it through fitness-asketic self-optimization.