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    • Tag: fascism

    • 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.

    • Surplus Fascism

      Daniel Loick, Vanessa E. Thompson (2026). Surplus fascism: Reflections on current tendencies of abandonment in Germany and beyond. New German Critique, 53(1), 203–223. 

      In this essay, Daniel Loick and Vanessa E. Thompson develop the thesis that current authoritarian and fascist developments worldwide should not be understood as political exceptions or mere reactions to short-term crises. Rather, they were structural responses to profound changes in modern capitalist societies and emerged from them, particularly the increasing production of so-called “surplus” population groups. For the grave structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be simply contained through consensual mechanisms. Here, fascism does not appear as a contrast to the existing system, but as an intensification of its internal logics and a deepening of existing power relations.

      The starting point of the analysis is the observation that right-wing and authoritarian movements construct very similar enemy images internationally. Migrants, refugees, poor or unemployed people, feminists and queer individuals, as well as political opponents, are portrayed as a threat to a supposedly natural social order. These commonalities suggest that such political developments cannot be explained primarily in national terms, but rather stem from global social and economic dynamics. Crucial to this is the notion that certain groups are “too many” or socially superfluous.

      For a theoretical explanation, we draw on Karl Marx’s concept of “relative overpopulation.” Accordingly, capitalist modes of production necessarily generate people whose labor is no longer needed. Technological development, economic competition, and structural inequalities lead to growing segments of the population being permanently excluded from social participation. These people are not only economically marginalized but are increasingly constructed and perceived as a social burden or threat. The promise of fascist politics lies in eliminating these superfluous groups through deportation, criminalization, organized neglect, or even physical extermination.

      Currently, several crisis processes are intersecting: a crisis of capitalist overaccumulation, a crisis of nation-state integration, the transformation of traditional gender orders, and the ongoing ecological crisis. Fascism emerges as an affective and political reaction to a situation in which more and more people see themselves threatened by the danger of becoming superfluous themselves. Drawing on Marxist and critical theory, psychoanalytic approaches, and radical Black and anti-colonial critiques, we argue that authoritarian subjects repress their own fears of real or symbolic loss of status by marking other groups as “abject” or reprehensible. The punishment of these groups generates a sense of moral superiority and control. Violence and exclusion thus function not only as political strategies but also as emotionally gratifying practices that stabilize a threatened self-image.

      Politically, this dynamic is particularly evident in the expansion of state punitive and control mechanisms. Tighter migration policies, intensified policing, the criminalization of protest movements, or the increasing control of public spaces are forms of a carceral politics aimed at managing, isolating, or displacing surplus populations. Examples in the German context include the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement and the intensifying racist expulsion of refugees and migrants.

      If we understand fascism not as the opposite but an extreme form of the liberal-capitalist status quo—one that, through state and economic practices, repeatedly prepares people for their disposability—then it cannot be combated by merely defending existing political institutions. Since the production of “surplus” is inherent in the capitalist system itself, anti-fascist politics cannot rely solely on integration or reform. Instead, we propose an abolitionist perspective that abolishes the capitalist social system, fundamentally rebuilds social institutions, and is guided by the experiences and struggles of marginalized groups. Such a politics aims to create social conditions in which no one is superfluous anymore.

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-12158867

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • 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.

    • Fascism – normality, not exception

      Alberto Toscano: Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, New York (Verso) 2023.

      That Alberto Toscano has struck a nerve with his book, which was recently translated into German, was evident at the end of June at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The book launch, a conversation between Toscano and prominent guests (Bafta Sarbor, Lama el Khatib, and Quinn Slobodian), took place in the large auditorium, which was nearly sold out. Toscano does not offer a diagnosis of the present à la “this is fascism now”, and he strictly rejects any definition of the term based on a checklist of core characteristics. As a reader seeking orientation, this approach can be frustrating. But you are rewarded for reading on: above all with an invitation to think of fascism not as something spectacular, as a state of emergency, as the radical opposite of freedom and democracy, but as a potential and a process that thrives especially within liberal democracies and is experienced very differently by groups with different positionalities—along lines of race, gender, and sexuality.

      The book is divided into seven chapters, which build on and refer to each other, but can also be read individually depending on your interests. All chapters have in common that Toscano gives the authors who inspired him ample voice and often relates them to each other in surprising ways. I would like to briefly introduce two chapters that I consider particularly important: Chapter 2: “Racial Fascism” and Chapter 3: “Fascist Freedom.” In Chapter 2, drawing on anti-colonial thinkers and scholars/activists of the American Black Radical Tradition of the 1970s, Toscano turns the conventional historical classification of fascism on its head. Following Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. DuBois, and others, he argues that already the brutal colonial rule and the exploitation and violence-based as well as violence-generating capitalist divisions of the US Reconstruction period (1861-1877) should be understood as early forms of fascism. These, he argues, paved the way for and helped shape the regimes of the interwar period in Italy, Germany, Croatia, and elsewhere, which are now regarded as “historical fascism.” In a second step, Toscano takes up the insight that fascism did not end with “historical fascism” and its capitulation in the 1940s—at least not for those who were and are subjected to brutal disenfranchisement and violence even in democracies. He quotes, among others, from the prison writings of Angela Davies and George Jackson and states:

      “Jackson and Davis are profoundly aware of the disanalogies between present forms of domination and historical fascism, but they both assert the epistemologically privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a carceral-judicial system that could fairly be described as a racial state of terror. In distinct ways, they can be seen to relay and recode that foundational gesture of anti-racist and Black radical anti-fascism crystallized in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. As the Martinican poet and politician tells it: ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the Gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’” (Toscano 2023, 32)

      Fascism and fascist processes are persistent and yet often invisible to those who have the privilege of not being directly exposed to the violence and the terror. In the chapter on “Fascist Freedom,” Toscano seeks to clarify the relationship between fascism and neoliberalism. I find this chapter particularly important because the terms fascism and neoliberalism are frustratingly unclear today, while being at the center of diagnoses of the present that see them as competing rather than consider them together. People ask: is this (still) neoliberalism or (already) fascism? For Toscano, this is the wrong question. He shows that the conventional idea that neoliberalism is fundamentally critical of the state, while fascism abolishes all forms of freedom in favor of state power, is neither theoretically nor historically accurate. He quotes from the writings of Mussolini, Reinhard Höhn, Ludwig von Mises, and others to prove that neoliberalism is indeed pro-state, but pro a very specific type of state, namely one that unleashes market forces and defends private property. Fascism, on the other hand, is indeed pro-freedom, but only for very specific freedoms enjoyed by privileged groups. In the Third Reich, too, the regime’s supporters and executors were granted considerable freedoms. According to Toscano, it is a mistake to overlook and dismiss the “spontaneities and enjoyments that fascism offers to its managers, militants or minions” (Toscano 2023, 61). Those who read on to the end are rewarded with tentative attempts at a definition in the short concluding chapter. Toscano identifies “four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism” (Toscano 2023, 156) that he wants to make his readers aware of. In a nutshell, these are: 1) that fascism existed before “historical fascism” and that it has survived it, 2) that fascism is by no means experienced in the same way by everyone, 3) that fascism can be understood as a mode of preventive counter-violence in response to epochal panics (such as the panic of the “Great Replacement”), and 4) that fascism not only demands submission from its supporters and perpetrators, but also offers them certain forms of freedom—such as the freedom to exercise violence and enjoy doing so.

      ↗ www.versobooks.com/products/2627-late-fascism