Against Liberal Fascism

Other languages: Français

Since the French publication of this little book, Fragmenter le monde, in 2018, the shock of multiple disasters has definitively paralyzed any conception of a Progress that was clearly moribund in any case, but also the teleology of the old revolutionary traditions. It’s a dubious privilege to return to a book written just a few years ago and to observe so many wounds in such a brief timespan, along with a warning of further cataclysms to come. In the terminal stage of modernity that we are now passing through, a regime of super-acceleration has locked us paradoxically into a nauseous presentism. Tomorrow is already today.

We need to slow down. Block the machine. Punch holes in the present to throw open up a temporal multiplicity. Go somewhere else. But there are no more elsewheres that are not prey to the violence of planetary metropolization. Consequently, if revolutionary gestures can still be renewed, it’s by bringing these elsewheres into our here and now, by extending and differentiating [en faisant différer] the everyday worlds that we share. In the universal regime of overexposure of the self that dis-spirits the world, this can be accomplished by secretly fashioning a soul for ourselves through our encounter with other souls.

From the very first pages of this brief work, we are told that we must take note of the totalization of the world through its fusion of history and economy. History itself, transcending the historicity of its social formations, is in the process of subsuming the geobiological history of the Earth. The latter, in the different versions of its intelligibility (Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Nosocene, Necrocene), the source of all human fears, is enlisting all living beings in its morbid journey. As a result, we have come to believe that humans, as such and without distinction, have become history’s accursed share.

In the chaos where two imperial poles, with their uncertain recomposition, are facing off, the specter of a global conflagration re-emerges. We are no longer even spared the time-worn scenario of nuclear annihilation. It is in this context of an irresistible decline of the West which had imagined it could colonize the entire Earth for eternity, that the the eschatological specter also reappears, alongside the fading figures of its Priests — the militants of the economy — who still claim to govern the world. But the destructive infrastructural world that spreads its grid across the entire Earth has become autonomous. And society, its latest version being this monstrous ecclesia of networks, is imploding, becoming ungovernable. As we now know, the governing authorities, whether we like them or not, are nothing more than administrators of disaster, even as they go on plotting to crush any obstacle to the steamroller of their value-making factories, with their deranged social engineering. 

On its last legs, the capitalist world system is dragging us toward the realization of its much-touted prophecy: the advent of the end of History. In any case, it is no doubt the spectacular end of a history that is on display: that of society and its subjects, with their proclaimed autonomy that believed it could forget about its interdependencies: between humans, between them and other beings, between all beings and the life environments where they secure their existence. The pathology of the autonomous individual, the dream of his self-determination, could only result in the creation of atomized fascist-tending crowds. 

In the latest metamorphoses of social history, we have gone from a regime of accumulation through integration, with its implicit pact to assign a place to everyone (yet no less based on divisions for all this), to a radically exclusionary regime, no longer encumbered by any semblance of a social contract. All that remains of governmentality is to invent new connections between the state and the economy. This will be the role of the ecological transition and the Green New Deal as means of managing collapse and recovery, which affords new opportunities for those in the business of accumulation. It will also be the promotion of digital prostheses for a diminished humanity, with the totalitarian extension of a connectionism fabricating masses of atomized individuals who twist and turn in the aptly named social networks. Moreover, it will be the exponential growth of the surveillance and prediction industries, transforming subjects to be governed into virtual deviants, anomics, sick people, or potential terrorists. And it will be the old recipe of the weapons industry in the chaos of imperial repolarizations. In the end, it’s a matter of molding a globalized population composed of billions of zombies, entrepreneurs of themselves glued to their screens. Beings who believe they are ubiquitous, yet who are blind to the forms of communitarian living that occur in the very places they live. Beings in a state of permanent war, defending their besieged egos, their miserable identities. And this ranges from the planetary proliferation of the narco world luring the supernumerary derelicts with the promise of their share of merchandise, to the hipsters of Tel Aviv’s dating apps, ready to bash anything that moves in an open-air concentration camp, or the post-colonial, extraterrestrial urbanites of of Neom, Saudi Arabia who, stuffed full of arms provided by France, have been cheerfully massacring Yemenis for years. Last but not least, one must not forget the white supremacist or merely racialized mafia cliques running the states that haunt us, who conspire with each other while pretending to govern the social world, even if it is no secret that the latter is held together by nothing other than their police forces.

When you come down to it, the process of annihilation of the Palestinians by the state of Israel can be regarded as the barbarous dramatization of a cruel warning: once again, any form of life recalcitrant to the policies of a state can lead to pure collective liquidation. Adopting a level of hyper-extreme violence that is beyond comprehension, Israeli fascism, with its liberal trappings, a modernist and aberrant extension of the legacy of the Shoah, can decide to slaughter under bombs tens of thousands of children, women, old people, and animals; to demolish schools, universities, hospitals, places of worship, cemeteries, and archeological sites; to make uncultivable for decades the lands of a very small territory turned into a prison where several million people are squeezed together — dropping on it the explosive equivalent of four times the atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. And all this, naturally, in the name of defending the West, the free world of law in opposition to an armed sect that would like, for its part, to administer a proto-state.

The international juridical order inherited from the last world war is the wet rag with which we no longer even attempt to wipe up the blood of the innocent. 

And in this way, Gaza makes us forget the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Congo, in Sudan, in Yemen… It’s true that Israel is the spearhead of the Western apocalypse. The Jews of Israel have (finally) become our counterparts. Entrepreneurial, hedonistic, cosmopolitan like us. And democratic. Citizens of the Middle East’s only Rechtstaat. Besides, how the devil could we find any resemblance between the kids of our cities who are going green and those who dig out quantities of cobalt to feed the batteries of the bikes that roll through our smart cities? In a world where the play of the imagination has imploded, that’s asking a lot from us. 

Through subtle gradations, the logic of terror has become the politics of governments as political entities. As concerns France, wasn’t the revolt of the Yellow Vests in 2018-2019 the object of an unprecedented outburst of police violence for the sole purpose of terrorizing? More recently, at Sainte-Soline, in the south of France, didn’t the uprising of the men and women against the ravaging of rural lands result in a stupefying number of mutilated bodies? Shortly after the Yellow Vests, Chile’s insurrection of 2019-2021 experienced similarly peak levels of state violence. It would be a long litany to retrace the instances of explosions in the tinderbox that our integrally policed political planet has become.

But there are other, micro-political, modalities of terror. Two Argentine sociologists, talking about the lives of the new pariahs segregated into the shantytowns of Buenos Aires, products of a society adjusted to the despotic pressures of internationalized capitalism, invoke el terror anímico, “terrorized souls,” drained of energy yet at the same time hyper-mobilized by their constant exposure to vulnerability. At the risk of being taken for conspiracy freaks, we could say that for these governments it is a matter of averting social explosions through a devastating process of community implosion.¹ The narco sociability that spreads everywhere then becomes the mirage of a reconstitution of community for the orphans of society, where those who were once magnanimously granted places in exchange for subordination to a regime of exploitation have now become surplus bodies. The promise of a life plan inscribed within the coordinates of the economy has crumbled. A new ultra-violent entrepreneuriat of existential liberalism is busy replacing it in all the social geographies.

Meanwhile, a segment of the middle class claims to be resurrecting rehashed versions of the former avant-gardes, in a bid to shore up the representation of new fantasmal subjects. Since the class subject has evaporated (although there never have been so many proletarians peopling the Earth), and its old mediations – unions and parties, etc. – have become ghosts, decolonial or gender identities will now replace them so as to reinstitute the partitions of the political. But the new identity politics should be seen for what it is: the edutainment of a narcissistic survivalism struggling to replace the ancient universality of the working class. In truth, today as yesterday, we’ve learned to our chagrin that political representation leads fatally to scenes of predation, the theft of souls, the crushing of the experiential passages through which animated worlds emerge. A sad dramaturgy where floundering (and self-hating) personages attempt to speak in the name of a dreamy we. A tired, overplayed scene appended to politics ever since its Greek foundation, with its arkhè and its telos, with its fantasized parade of predators, “trained to kill each other around their bloody altars.”² The founding of a “we,” and hence of a “you,” which leaves the plurality of “them” in the shadows. Caesuras are everywhere, which doesn’t extricate us from the project of totalization, however.           

But there’s nothing left to found. Nothing left to totalize. Nothing to be identified. If the genealogies of colonial dispossession and their postmodern extension, if the generative powers of women’s struggles promise us new forms of emancipation, this must be on the condition that they aid our escape from the prisons of identity, by calling forth fragmentary worlds where compositions of multiplicities take form and transitive experiences between beings materialize, in the anarchic dynamism of life. Decolonial, feminist emancipation will never take place in the identitarian worlds of the reproduction of the same. This same would still be that of dominated subjects.

The various genders who imagined inhabiting the centers of the world thought they could be saved from the proliferation of disasters. We get little out of such efforts: the climate disruptions are striking the desiccated Sub-Saharan lands, charming French towns are being submerged by diluvian rains, while the south of Europe is racked by thirst. Megafires ravage the Chilean forests, certainly, but also, year after year, those of Canada and California. Plastic-poisoned seas are the same for everyone. The land corrupted by pesticides is causing an explosion of cancers in every region. The concentration of greenhouse gasses has been democratized. The only hope for easy breathing in London, Paris, Berlin or Barcelona is to externalize the damage of electric automation for the middle classes by sacrificing the new wretched of the earth condemned to extract cobalt from the mines at Kolwezi. And so, the circle of the new virtuous economy inexorably closes in upon us.

It will therefore be essential for the once-rich countries to register the existence of the subhumanities by setting themselves up as fortresses. It will be possible, without scandal, to allow the tens of thousands of migrants in their desperate treks to simply die. And to condemn those who manage to cross the borders to wander like trampled specters through the opulent cities, under constant threat of confinement and brutalization by the police.

But other fabricated separations have to be considered. Borders are proliferating everywhere, including internally. The same countries who used to brag about their social state, with its social distribution of goods and services, are in the process of methodically destroying their pastoral architecture, which claimed to take care of its population and its strays, transforming public services, the institutions of healthcare and provision into a field of ruins. Ghettoized territories spring up everywhere, like so many endogenous apartheids, hounded by police militias that are more and more autonomous. Privatization is the weapon and the name of this social Balkanization — this is an elementary fact. The world of private property, be it only a bungalow in a dreary suburb, or a leased car, is also a privation for others.

The neoliberal offensive of the 1980’s put an end to the mediations that moderated the violence of the relation between Capital and Labor — or that participated in its co-management (ah, the allure of the old Social-Democratic newspeak). In territories muted by welfare, insurrection and the Italian counter-insurgency of the 1960’s and 1970’s was the culminating moment of mediation’s collapse. Illustrious names once represented the brutality of that avatar of capitalist recomposition: Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher in Great Britain, the Socialist left of Mitterand in France… Or again Pinochet and his Chicago Boys in the South American hemisphere, a laboratory-prelude, as it were, to the decisive moment we’re going through today: the fusion of the old fascism and liberal management (but some historians warn us that Nazism was already a gigantic managerial plan devoted to the creation of a new society, just as tied to the economy and applauded at the time by all the liberals³).

For this is where we stand. We’re witnessing the wave of liberal fascism gain momentum. Today, any enlightened planner of the free world, from senile Biden to the psychopathic fraudster Netanyahu, from the outlandish Milei with his cloned dogs to the hysterical Macron, from post-colonial Sunak to the lethargic Scholz can conspire with affiliates to plan the dirty work of an economy of destruction. They all believe they can govern their province through existential fear, by promoting a state of universal dread. It’s a matter of keeping each of their subjects preoccupied with themselves. In any case, in a strange sadism that leaves us perplexed, it’s a question of destroying all relationships between beings that place them in community so as to institute mortal negligence as the primary social relation. 

As we know, the politics of the class subject has vanished. It has been buried by Uberization, by the hypnotism of cheap commodities, by social networks and a demented self-exposure contributing to the implosion of proletarian communities. What the utopia of capital offers us is the dream of belonging to an amorphic yet digitally connected middle class. A fifteen-year-old in France spends fifteen hours a day in front of a screen so as not to perceive the world.

Such is the core of the coming liberal fascism with its aggregation of hollowed-out egos, with its promotion of an overblown care of the self, incapable of forming a soul and causing the desert to expand. For it is through the encounter between souls that a milieu comes alive. Community cannot exist without passages between beings that allow us to differentiate ourselves [qui nous font différer].

War conducted by states against “communitarianism.” Implosion of popular communities. Negligence toward the weaving of our interdependences. And then, as if this social disaster wasn’t deep enough, emancipators who have nothing better to propose than the prisons of identity politics. A wretched fragmentation indeed.

To this, however, we may oppose another fragmentation, communal and generative in character, at odds with the production of value, beginning with the valorization of ourselves and our supposed identity. A fragmentation motivated by the joy of hospitality, which emerges in the welcoming of difference: communities through heterogenesis. These are the old anarchist values of mutual aid, forms of sharing that are always situated somewhere in particular, and which engender places that express them. These are the values that enable us to shun social determinations as well as any idea of foundation. We are all ungrounded [des effondrés]. We’re free to unfold our interdependencies over a multitude of paths that lead us to new perceptions and sensibilities. That is how we can overcome our fears in the face of the state-created chaos that is building up to new Armageddons.

The old scenes of politics have imploded. Their social subjects have disappeared, notwithstanding the neo-leftists with their chimeras that draw nothing but yawns from the police intelligence and surveillance services.

But there’s no question of ignoring the new feminist waves, nor the ways of disrupting the gendered atavisms and fighting against their acts of violence, nor the reappropriations of the thought and practices of decolonization, nor the figures of sabotage appearing in environmentalist struggles. Not in the least. These will be at the heart of the new forms of emancipation and reconstitution of vital communities, which alone are capable of giving difference its due. Communities through heterogenesis, gestures of reappropriation against dispossession, forms of care and attention addressing the vulnerability of existences and their life environments, a return to the generative powers as against social reproduction. But only provided we don’t insist on establishing new political scenes based on ideas, with their depressing abstractions. Provided one eschews representation.

I will return here to the statement of a careful philosopher: 

[F]irst it’s necessary to revisit the operations that enable the foundation, and also the principle that depends on it, to exercise their legislative function. […] Since Plato, thought has filled the world with representations. Representation has propagated itself everywhere, has covered the world and even conquered infinity. The whole world has passed into representation; and all the beings who inhabit it are conceived according to the requirements of representation. But “underneath” the world of representation there rumbles and has never ceased to rumble the groundless, the world of free, unbound differences. This is not the story of a “forgetting,” but of a denaturing of difference, an active warding-off of its powers, mistaken for those of chaos. Difference has not been forgotten, but it has been thought only as mediated, subjugated, enchained — in short, founded. Representation is grounded difference, or rather, to ground is always to found representation.

A refusal of representation, then, an anarchic effort once again. No first principles, no already-founded social world, no ontologization of a universal and ubiquitous subject, indifferent to the places where it dwells. A refusal of the vectorized time of a crumbling Progress, allowing a multiplicity of times to spring back into consciousness. A pluralization of past histories. Resurgences and insurgencies that take place because they create a place that is discordant with the space of the administered disaster.

Perhaps we need to abandon the political category of domination and instead embrace the vital experience of dispossession. The former inevitably succumbs to the forming of subjects defining themselves by their subjection, kidnapped as they are by those who aim to represent them. The latter opens up forms of reappropriation that depend on establishing ways of existing. In this usage, “establishing” is the outcome of our communal investigations; it has to do with modalities of experience that owe their existence to the ways of relating to other beings, who have their own different ways of existing and do so by singularizing the environments associated with them. So this involves nothing short of a community in the process of composition. Communization has always taken place in the context of an irresolvable conflict with society. A reactivation of the long minor and proliferating lineage of mutuality against sociality and its institutions. Today, against the atomizing socialization of the networks that are drowning us with a proliferation of relations that give properties to our attachments and thus prevent the creation of relationships, of ways of relating in our own right with other beings, every kind of being. In which case, it’s no longer a matter of subjects, closed-in on themselves, but of ways of existing whose wherewithal is found only in making exist other beings who cause us to exist in turn. And so on without end: compositions and decompositions that establish the singular environments of our shared lives. Passages and encounters that allow us to differentiate ourselves. Struggling anew for presence against the absence of the world of representation. Associations between worlds, fragment by fragment.

At this point, I need to lodge a retrospective self-critique: it’s that, in not having taken the measure, at the time of writing this book, of the degree of social decomposition that we are living through, with its fascizing effects, on the right but also on the left with its sociopaths (literally, devotees of society). To have not said more about the ways of inheriting the decrepit architecture of the social state, its formal law, what has been called its pastoral intervention: its whole machinery of control, including the unwanted attention it gives to irregular forms of life. Paradoxically, in our epoch with its new totalization, that of a new connectionism whose perfection coincides with atomization and separation, with its scraps of identity, it has become impossible to think of a revolution without transitions. The transitions of experience indicate paths that start from where we are. And if our progression is to be practicable, we cannot ignore the vulnerabilities of our existence and the ways of caring for it. Unfortunately, care has long been captive to the institutions.   

In our epoch of infrastructural gridding, it has become necessary to do investigative work concerning the agents of what some have called the negative commons, agents of the global metropolization. It is these inquiries that will open paths to an ecology of disconnection, renunciation, and dismantling, which is also that of the de-projection⁵ of the material machinery that locks us into the time of catastrophes.

In this same regard, we have to delve into the ways of inheriting (and abolishing, if need be) the institutions of production and management of the social bond, with its subordinations, which have monopolized the attention given to vulnerability. In a context of implacable collapse of social formations, we cannot dismiss the need for an investigation into the possible ways of creating commons of care, an ecology of solicitude for the fragility of existences. In a word, to gain a purchase on the ordinary worlds of survival, the communal resurgences cannot fail to deal with the hospital, psychiatry, and the pastoral apparatuses. Because the institutions — and this is their defining characteristic — exist only through their logics of designation, which are also those of separation. They institute themselves by instituting borders. To escape their work of reification, we must break through their walls and allow their outsides to rush in.

As orphans of the revolutionary parties, it would seem that our only recourse is to mobilize communal alliances. In Fragmenter le monde, I appealed, in spite of myself, to an oxymoron, calling for a party of multiplicities, a composition and a melding of insurgencies and resurgences. Our force, in the time to come, will reside in the production of living cartographies that map the itineraries between new communalities, and that make encounters possible, with their element of conspiracy. Only compositions between what differs can become forms of secession.⁶

The inquiry and exploration, therefore, will take the form of transfigurations that liberate us from our social identities. It’s by exploring what is happening elsewhere that can make our here exist. It’s in the passages that the vitality of the community will manifest itself. Revolution has always had its itinerants. 

Faced with a supraliminary world of destructions, composed of machineries of a staggering gigantism, and faced with the all-too molar “crisis of civilization” that causes us to sink into impotence, we would do well, perhaps, to turn our minds to the small things, las pequeñas cosas, as Silvia Rivera Cosicanqui suggests:

En el ‘tiempo de las cosas pequeñas’, quizás sea hora de volver la mirada sobre la minucia de los detalles de la existencia, para hallar en ellos las pautas de conducta que nos ayuden a enfrentar los desafíos de esta hora de crisis.⁷

Desertion, secession, do not necessarily imply cutting ourselves off from a fantasized social body, but rather establishing fragmentary worlds within it, where the communities-in-process can materialize and we can relearn to cultivate hospitality and new ways to link together. It’s by attending as well to the fragility of existences, to their diminishment, that we can confront the liberal fascism that perpetuates the power obsession of those bent on governing us.

We will be able then to multiply the past histories that retrace the plurality of our affiliations, which break through the presentism of the present. Our untimeliness is also the time of our extra-contemporaneity. The timeliness of communal worlds is manifested in the continuities that come from weaving together a multitude of forgotten histories, whose discontinuities expose the false cohesion of history’s official text. In this sense, attending to ruined worlds means tracing the continuity of discontinuities. 

There is no foundation. No origin, no concatenation of causes and effects. But rather a constant invention of history, the capacity to always imagine something else, an endless labor of imagination which is its truth.⁸ Perhaps, at the end of the day, it is a matter of accepting to live in a paradoxical movement: the radical determination of our experiences cohabits with an equally radical indetermination of the ways to recount them, of making them exist for others. And in this way of making them diverge, wagering that the others will return the favor. An always contingent reinvention of history, where the sweetness of our liberty is at the same time that of our attachments, which make us the partisans of a multiplicity of worlds. 

 We know that we are living through the beginning of the end of a vectorized and lethal history, perhaps its last, brutal bursts. At the same time, life, however you look at it, can be the source of an inexhaustible joy in the midst of a bottomless melancholy and sense of loss. Life’s sublimity resides in this. It’s always a call to the powers of innocence, which sometimes knows not to know when the times demand it.

Consequently, I said a little absent-mindedly, we would have to partake once again of the Tree of Knowledge in order to fall back into a state of innocence?

Precisely so, he replied; that is the last chapter of the history of the world.⁹

First published in Lundi matin #428, May 14 2024¹⁰

Translated by Robert Hurley

Images: Mathilde Guiho