Deleuze & Fascism

This edited volume deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a

mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on
hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. The
book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism
and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and
contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate
over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global
political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the
theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for International Relations (IR) in
a manner that is very much lacking in current debates about IR.
Covering a wide array of topics, this volume will provide a set of original
contributions focussed in particular upon the contemporary nature of war;
the increased priorities afforded to the security imperative; the changing
designs of bio-political regimes, fascist aesthetics; nihilistic tendencies and
the modernist logic of finitude; the politics of suicide; the specific desires
upon which fascism draws and, of course, the recurring pursuit of power.
An important contribution to the field, this work will be of great interest
to students and scholars of international relations, fascism and international
relations theory.
Brad Evans is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School
of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, the University of Bristol.

Julian Reid is Professor of International Relations at the University of

Lapland, Finland.
Interventions
Edited by:
Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams,
University of Warwick

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for
cutting.’ In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge,
critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best
place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the
world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary. Michael J. Shapiro, University of
Hawai’i at Mãnoa, USA

Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i at Mãnoa, USA

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which
scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial
traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative
analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology,
politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and
textual studies in international politics.
Critical Theorists and International Relations
Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams
Ethics as Foreign Policy
Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley
Universality, Ethics and International Relations
A grammatical reading
Véronique Pin-Fat
The Time of the City
Politics, philosophy, and genre
Michael J. Shapiro
Governing Sustainable Development
Partnership, protest and power at the world summit
Carl Death
Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes
International Relations and Non-Western Thought
Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam
Autobiographical International Relations
I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
War and Rape
Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry
Madness in International Relations
Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health
Alison Howell
Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt
Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg
Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson
Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in world politics
François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder
The Politics of Speed
Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world
Simon Glezos
Politics and the Art of Commemoration
Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain
Katherine Hite
Indian Foreign Policy
The politics of postcolonial identity
Priya Chacko
Politics of the Event
Time, movement, becoming
Tom Lundborg
Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation
Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch
Europe's Encounter with Islam
The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli
Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction
Badredine Arfi
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis
Necati Polat
The Postcolonial Subject
Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri
Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
Lauri Siisiäinen
Volunteer Tourism in the Global South
Giving back in neoliberal times
Wanda Vrasti
Cosmopolitan Government in Europe
Citizens and entrepreneurs in postnational politics
Owen Parker
Studies in the Trans-Disciplinary Method
After the aesthetic turn
Michael J. Shapiro
Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics
The scars of violence
Brent J. Steele
Celebrity Humanitarianism
The ideology of global charity
Ilan Kapoor
Deconstructing International Politics
Michael Dillon
The Politics of Exile
Elizabeth Dauphinee
Democratic Futures
Revisioning democracy promotion
Milja Kurki
Postcolonial Theory
A critical introduction
Edited by Sanjay Seth
More Than Just War
Narratives of the just war tradition and military life
Charles A. Jones
Deleuze & Fascism
Security: war: aesthetics
Edited by Brad Evans and Julian Reid
Feminist International Relations
‘Exquisite Corpse’
Marysia Zalewski
The Persistence of Nationalism
From imagined communities to urban encounters
Angharad Closs Stephens
Deleuze & Fascism
Security: war: aesthetics
Edited by
Brad Evans and Julian Reid
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 selection and editorial matter: Brad Evans and Julian Reid,
contributors their contributions
The right of Brad Evans and Julian Reid to be identified as editors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Deleuze & fascism: security, war, aesthetics / edited by Brad Evans &
Julian
Reid.
pages cm. — (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995. 2. Fascism. 3. International relations. I.
Evans, Brad (International relations), editor of compilation. II. Reid, Julian
(Julian David McHardy), editor of compilation. III. Title: Deleuze and
fascism.
JC481.D397 2013
320.53′3—dc23
2012035531
ISBN: 978-0-415-58967-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-37470-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Michael Dillon
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction Fascism in all its forms
Brad Evans and Julian Reid

1. Desire and ideology in fascism

TODD MAY
2. Anti-fascist aesthetics
MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
3. Fascism and the bio-political
BRAD EVANS
4. Movement and human logistics Pre-emption, technology and fascism
GEOFFREY WHITEHALL
5. A people of seers The political aesthetics of post-war cinema revisited
JULIAN REID
6. Waltzing the limit
ERIN MANNING
7. Politics on the line
LEONIE ANSEMS DE VRIES
8. Fascist lines of the tokkōtai
NICHOLAS MICHELSEN
9. Fascism, France and film
RUTH KITCHEN

Index
Contributors
Brad Evans is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Global
Insecurities Center, the School of Sociology, Politics and International
Studies, the University of Bristol, UK. He has published extensively on the
Liberal bio-politics of security, contemporary war and political violence, the
politics of catastrophe, along with mediation's on post-liberal political
thought. Brad is the author of numerous books and edited volumes, most
recently including: Liberal Terror (Polity Press: 2013) and Resilient Life:
The Art of Living Dangerously (forthcoming with Julian Reid, Polity Press:
2014). He is the Founder and Director of the Histories of Violence project
(www.historiesofviolence.com) and a member of the Society for the Study
of Bio-political Futures.
Julian Reid is Professor of International Relations at the University of
Lapland, Finland. He taught previously at King's College London, Sussex
University, and SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University
of London. He is the author of numerous studies of the liberal biopolitics of
war including The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (co-
authored with Michael Dillon) (New York and London: Routledge, 2009)
and The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity,
and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2009, 2007 and 2006).
Leonie Ansems de Vries is Assistant Professor of International Relations
at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. She holds a PhD from
the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Her doctoral
thesis draws upon insights from modern political theory, continental
philosophy (especially Deleuze and Foucault) to produce a novel account of
political life. At the heart of this research lies a concern with the notion of
political life understood as a question of ordering and disordering: the
management and disruption of conflicting claims regarding what life may
be and become politically. Her current research continues the exploration of
the relationship between politics and life from a multidisciplinary
perspective. A second research strand interrogates the relationship between
governance and resistance. Before joining the Malaysia Campus in 2011,
Leonie taught at the Department of Politics and International Relations,
QueenMary University of London.
Ruth Kitchen is a researcher at the University of Leeds. Her work
examines the relationships between twentieth- and twenty-first-century
French literature and visual culture, critical and cultural theory, and
historiography. She has published several articles on guilt in French
literature and film concerning the Nazi Occupation of France. Her
monograph, A Legacy of Shame — French Narratives of War and
Occupation, adapted from her thesis, will be published with Peter Lang in
2013.
Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and
Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal,
Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a
laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and
philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. In her art
practice she works between painting, dance, fabric and sculpture
(www.erinmovement.com). Current iterations of her artwork explore
emergent collectivities through participatory textiles. Her project Stitching
Time was presented at the 2012 Sydney Biennale and The Knots of Time
will open the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium, in 2014. Her
extensive publications address movement, art, experience and the political
through the prism of process philosophy, with recent work developing a
notion of autistic perception and the more-than human.
Todd May is a Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He is the
author of 10 books, including The Philosophy of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciere, Our Practices, Our Selves, and
Death, and Friendship in An Age of Economics (2012). Todd's
contemporary philosophical writings regularly feature in The New York
Times ‘The Stone’ column.
Nicholas Michelsen was awarded his PhD by the Department of War
Studies, King's College London, where he is currently a Teaching Fellow.
He holds an MRes in War Studies and an MA in International Conflict
Studies from Kings College London, and a BA(Hons) in International
Relations and Philosophy from the University of Sussex.
Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the University
of Hawai'i, Mãnoa. He has published extensively on areas of political
theory and international politics. Among his recent publications are Studies
in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (Routledge, 2012).
Geoffrey Whitehall is an Associate Professor of Political Science at
Acadia University, NS, Canada. He teaches courses in Contemporary
Political Theory, World Politics and Discourses of Cultures and Technology.
His research explores Sovereignty and Pre-emptive Governance and the
Aesthetics of International Politics. His publications have appeared in the
journals International Studies Perspectives, Theory and Event, Borderlands
and Millennium.
Introduction
Fascism in all its forms
Brad Evans and Julian Reid
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-1

The post-war Liberal imaginary is predicated on the doubly political and

moral claim to have somehow overcome fascism. As Felix Guattari
describes, ‘we have been led to believe that fascism was just a bad moment
we had to go through, a sort of historical error, but also a beautiful page in
history for the good heroes … that there were real antagonistic
contradictions between the fascist Axis and the Allies‧ (Guattari 1995: 239–
40). This book is dedicated to challenging the tenets of such a way of
comprehending the differences between fascism and its liberal
‘conquerors’. Indeed it is concerned not just with reposing the question of
what it would mean already to have overcome fascism, nor simply with
questioning the belief that we might still be able to overcome fascism in the
future, so that even while recognizing our historical failures and present
predicaments better, we might yet achieve a more effective overcoming of
fascism. In contrast we are concerned with interrogating contemporary
power relations as predicated on the real and necessary existence of
fascism. The problem of fascism today cannot simply be addressed as that
of the potential or variable return and reconstitution of fascism, as if
fascism had ever, or could ever, ‘disappear’, only to return and be made
again, like some spectral figure from the past. The problem of fascism
cannot, we believe, be represented or understood as that of an historically
constituted regime, particular system of power relations, or incipient
ideology. Fascism, we believe, is as diffuse as the phenomenon of power
itself. In other words we are here to explore ‘not only historical fascism, the
fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilise and use the
desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our
heads, and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love
power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us' (Foucault
2000: xiii).
For the same reasons that power itself is an ineradicable condition of
possibility not just for social relations, but relations as such, so fascism,
also, must be understood as something elementary not just to political life,
but life as such. Relations, fundamentally understood, in all their endless
variations simply are fascist. Life, as well, is, we believe, fascist. There is
always the desire for power underwriting life. For a life to be lived freely, it
cannot fully exorcize the impulse towards or desire for power. With these
axioms in mind, we have undertaken this book, with a view to shifting the
theory of fascism in International Relations and other social scientific
disciplines from their prevailing macro-historical moorings, and boorish
preoccupation with interwar and Second World War Europe, to focus on the
‘micro-fascism’ that Michel Foucault alluded to in his short but brilliant
preface to Anti-Oedipus (Foucault 2000), the book from which we and all
the contributors to this volume have taken our leave in developing the
approach that we have here (Deleuze and Guattari 2000). This is a
formidable challenge, but it is one we embrace.
The authors of Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix
Guattari, sought to debunk the prevailing idea of fascism as either simply a
political ideology perpetrated by a wicked elite upon the unwitting masses
or a totalitarian mode of organization impressed upon an unintelligent and
instrumentally subdued population, to understand it, in socially agential
terms, as an expression of the desire of the masses; a ‘desiring machine’ as
well as a ‘war machine’ which mobilizes every element of the desire of a
people for its own repression and eventual destruction. As Brian Massumi
describes, fascism, as understood by Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is a manic
attack by the body politic against itself, in the interests of its own salvation
… it is desire turned against itself ’ (Massumi 1999: 116). The task we and
our collaborators have taken on, inspired by Anti-Oedipus as well as the
larger corpus of work by Deleuze, in the first instance, is approaching the
problem of fascism, thus, as a phenomenon of the desire for one's own
repression in order that we might track ‘down all varieties of fascism, from
the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that
constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives’ (Foucault 2000:
xiv). Fascism, therefore, in all its forms. We find insufficient the wide and
diffuse range of both traditional representations of relations between
fascism and modernity as some kind of aberration of the modern, as well as
critical representations of the potential of humanity for some kind of
evacuation of the modern, as if we might yet rid ourselves of the potential
to be or become-fascist, by understanding modernity better. Neither of these
ways of thinking about the problem of fascism will suffice, invested as each
of them is in different ways, in an understanding of fascism as a contingent
outcome of either modern power relations gone wrong, or modernity itself
as a mistake that can yet be made good. We are seeking to break the mould,
here then, with our own Deleuze-inspired account; the very first book, ever
written on the precise subject of Deleuze & Fascism, by understanding
fascism as elementary to politics and power relations per se.
 We do not believe fascism to have been an event that can ever be
historicized, reduced to a discrete time period or state, society and culture,
but nor do we believe fascism to be somehow beyond representation.
Fascism demands representation, naming and diagnoses, but at the same
time such modes of representation, naming and diagnoses can only ever be
historical, contingent to the form of fascism being addressed, and
remembering, always, that fascism is by definition a multiplicitous
phenomenon. Fascism is not, in other words, something that we ought ever
to have conceived as being capable of conquering, and sticking with an old,
tired and worn-out representation of fascism is the largest trap we have been
concerned with avoiding. Fascism is a problem for us, but that does not turn
it into a problem we believe we can ‘solve’. The worst fascisms arise in
response to problems that are poorly understood, and on the back of trite if
well-meaning solutions. We are not problem-solvers of fascism. Fascism
has no ready-made solution, for power and life have no ready-made
solutions. We write to reproblematize it so that the ways in which we
respond to it can do other forms of work in the world than simply reproduce
the old formulae.
In more substantive terms we are focused here in this book on the
transformations in the character of fascism created by the liberalization of
modern states and societies, and we are committed to demonstrating the
inherently fascist character of liberal modernity itself. As such the book has
been edited with a view to developing a theoretically distinct approach not
just to the problem of fascism, but liberalism. This is a book in a certain
sense, then, about what we might call ‘liberal fascism’. Our interrogation of
the ‘failures’ of the liberal post-war project is fuelled by an understanding
of fascism today not as a contingent outcome of liberalism's development
and expansion, but as an expression of the ontological irreducibility of
fascism for liberal power relations per se. Nazism was notoriously
predicated on the belief that by promoting the security of the Aryan race
above that of all other races, and indeed by doing away with other racial
groups, so the biological life of the species would be improved. Liberalism
and Nazism are not the same, but nor was Nazism the exception to
liberalism. For the boundaries between such different but incestuously
related biopolitical rationalities, concerned as they have been throughout
their history, and as they still are today, with governing the human by
weeding out and waging war upon ‘the inhuman’, are not just porous but
infectious. In other words liberalism has to be comprehended not as
exceptional to but coextensive with the very form of fascism it claims to
have ‘conquered’. We point this out not simply because we loathe and
deplore liberalism. Even if we do. It is not that liberalism has a particular
predisposition for becoming fascist. As we’ve already said, fascism is a
phenomenon that has to be addressed, we believe, as a necessary element of
all forms of power relations, which means at the very least all politics.
Unless one believes in the possibility and desirability of living in a post-
political world, fascism is a phenomenon one has to recognize as
constitutive of political practice. It is not simply that we undertake a risk,
even, of becoming fascist, in order to be and act as political subjects. Or
that such a risk demands the development of an ascesis, or art of prevention
or purification, in order to render the politics we practise less fascist. Our
understanding of fascism is one of it being a necessary outcome, and effect,
of being political. We say that fascism is in us, in a way to indicate that not
only do we make fascism come about every bit as much as fascism makes
us come about, nor that we all contain a potential to become fascist or
behave fascistically, but that we exist and act politically only through
practices that are themselves already fascist, with little potential to be
otherwise. Politics demands of us that we not only desire but love power.
Such a love cannot be acclaimed non-fascistically.
While our inspiration in developing this approach, and that of the authors
of each of the subsequent chapters, stems from the philosophical and
political ruminations on fascism of Deleuze, this way of reading Deleuze on
the problem and phenomenon of fascism does make significant departures
from existing attempts to glean from his texts what the nature of that
problem and phenomenon are. A few before us have undertaken well-
intended and worthy readings of Deleuze to demonstrate the extent to which
the development of the power and expansion of the liberal world post-1945
cannot be disengaged from the fascist regimes they fought against in the
mid-twentieth century. If that were the limit of our argument we would be
as well to wrap up now and direct the reader to the many different texts in
which this argument has already been diffusely made. Anyways, without
reading Deleuze, that the boundaries between liberalism and fascism are
porous is obvious by now in this era of global war without end, exercise of
exceptional powers of internment without end, the utilization of the camp
form, and widespread use of torture against innocents on a mass scale by
liberal states and their proxies. Indeed, fascist discourses have only grown
and become more engrained in tandem with the proliferation of liberal
power relations in recent years to the extent that fascism today is
fundamentally a banality of liberal biopolitics, nationally and
internationally. Hannah Arendt had a great riff in her book on Eichmann on
the ‘banality of evil’ to explain how the Holocaust was made possible not
by fanatics committing exceptional acts but ordinary people going about
their daily tasks (Arendt 2006). Such is precisely the case of liberal fascism
today. Ride a London Tube train, observe the social surveillance, and you
are witnessing a lynch mob in its molecular becoming. Indeed it is obvious
to us that fascism today is rarely less pronounced and vicious than in the
forms it takes not just among the ordinary, but in and among discourses and
practices that declare themselves to be avowedly ‘anti-fascist’. The
consistent identification of the liberal project in the post-war era with the
victim and survivor of the Holocaust is one of the key techniques with and
through which liberalism has been able to elide its own fascism such that to
be divested of the ability to lay claim to an identity of victim or survivor is
itself to be at risk of being on the receiving end of liberal fascist violence.
Nothing seems to us more degraded, more banal, than the laying claim to
being ‘anti-fascist’ for the same reasons that nothing seems more
undignified than the desire to speak on behalf of ‘victims’. This book is not,
and could not be further from, awork of anti-fascism. We are not anti-
fascists because to believe in the integrity of such a moral claim is to be
wilfully blind to the fascism that, necessarily, underwrites one's own
political subjectivity. There is no political position with less integrity and
compromise with that which it seeks to combat than the card-carrying ‘anti-
fascist’.
It is well documented, of course, how, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on
the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, President of
the United States George W. Bush informed his public that they were now
at war with ‘Islamic fascists’. Invoking the problem of fascism in the way
that he did was one among many crude means by which Bush attempted to
secure the conditions for the horrible war and destruction of peoples that the
United States and its liberal proxies have conducted over the last ten years,
but the same crudity can be identified in discourses on the Left where
fascism is still spoken about as if it were some limited position and practice
that can be targeted as well as some behaviour or tendency of which the
Left itself is capable, at least, of purifying itself. We are not purists for the
same reasons we are not anti-fascists. Politics is fundamentally an impure
practice. We are not interested, either, in pursuing the possibility of some
kind of ascetic approach to politics and subjectivity on account of our
impurity. We believe instead in the necessity of accepting impurity as a
condition of possibility for political thought and action. That means
accepting that we are all, always fascists of multiple kinds.
Nor, however, are we interested in this book in simply following Deleuze
on the problem of fascism. Too much of the work that uses Deleuze for
political theorization does so in a facile way, simply obeying the Word of
the author in a, given the idiom, absurdly Oedipal fashion. In contrast, we
are taking this as an opportunity to reassess the fundamentals that Deleuze,
especially in his co-authored works with Felix Guattari, insisted on as a
basic diagnosis of the roots of the problem of fascism. If we were simply to
follow Deleuze we would of course diagnose fascism, in both its micro and
macro forms, in all its forms, as an expression not just of the self-repressive
body, but of the ‘paranoiac body’ — paranoia being that which, Deleuze
argued, the body becomes when it can no longer tolerate life, and no longer
cope with its excess of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 2000). As remedy we
would wager on the schiz as the revolutionary figure and saviour of the
fascist subject that Deleuze and his many followers have claimed it to be.
However, we cannot agree with those who think that the problem of fascism
today can be understood in the same ways that it was in the early 1970s
when Anti-Oedipus was first published. The problem of fascism is bound
up, as Michel Foucault also made clear in his preface to that work (Foucault
2000: xiii–xiv), with the problemof revolution and militancy, and these
latter questions, of militancy and what a revolutionary politics might today
entail, require entirely reproblematizing from our point of view. If we were
simply to accept Deleuze's word as to the ways in which fascism circulates
in power relations that function on the exclusion of and violence against life
and desire then ‘the Schiz’, defined as it was by him as that peculiar figure
that is permanently ‘out for a stroll’, given over to life, being led by its
desire, would be attractive still to us. However, the problem of power
relations in our age is different, qualitatively, to that which Deleuze
confronted with incisive provocation.
We have never been so saturated in power relations configured by ‘life’
and so interpellated into the performance of following our ‘desire’, such
that to attempt to refuse life and desire is itself to find oneself staring into
the face of a fascist imperative to live more and desire better. Instead we
will pose questions such as whether confronting liberal fascism today
requires the cultivation of an intolerance of life, of the reduction of the
human to a thing that merely lives. Whether or not, for that political project
of resistance to liberal fascism, we need, in contrast with the schiz, a new
delirium. Perhaps not a Body without Organs but Organs without a Body.
Of which paranoia we might wager to be a highest power; what the organs
become when they are divested of the body that makes them cling to their
life functions. We might ask questions as to what a paranoiac life is and
what a paranoiac body can do. The problem of fascism can no longer just be
about dismantling binary constructions of insides and outside, getting out
and about ‘for a stroll’, as if political subjectivity would be possible without
its inner life, bereft of a discourse on its security. We do not buy the
argument that security and the practice of securing equates automatically
with fascism, directly translating ‘into snuffing out wildly nomadic and
disorganizing desires and destroying those who perpetrate them’ (as made
by Ravetto 2001: 229). Or put it this way: if it does, then we accept that an
understanding of fascism as a form that is fundamental to politics as such
needs to account for the equally multifarious politics of (in)security as
understood through the framework of a dispositif. For the same reasons that
as Deleuze himself argued ‘no information could ever have defeated Hitler’
(Deleuze 2000: 269), so we believe that no contestation of fascistic power
relations is possible without a vernacular discourse on security and will to
secure that which is at stake and imperilled by the constitution of a fascist
regime of power.
These are our thoughts. Our way of buggering with Deleuze. As he
would have wanted it. We find a lot of limitations to the work of Deleuze.
Limits are sites of transgression and that's where we do much of our work
in this text. We are not ‘Deleuzians’ or interested in trying to be. The
‘fascist ethos’ is as alive in Deleuzian critique, the policing of the
boundaries of what Deleuze is said to have meant when he said this or that,
and the endless exegesis of his Word. We are not writing here in order to
make ourselves into Deleuzian fascists. It would be too easy to rattle out a
standard Deleuzian take on the problem of fascism and account for a
Deleuzian strategy for the delegitimation and struggle against fascism. Not
that we necessarily disagree with the need and real existence of such
strategies. It is well attested, for example, that liberal states and the vast
multiplicity of discursive forms and agents they have relied upon for their
legitimacy post-1945 have continued to preserve a ‘fascist ethos’ by calling
on many of the same narratives and calls to arms against ‘inhuman’
enemies on which earlier fascist regimes, especially Nazism, relied. Of
course they have, we know that, and have been saying that all along. We
admire Deleuze-inspired authors such as Kriss Ravetto who have argued for
the necessity of a strategy of ‘delegitimation of the modernizing process
and its narrativizing project’, and for an understanding of the sources of
fascism as residing in the reduction of multiplicity to unity itself (Ravetto
2001: 233). Indeed, there is lots of evidence and support to be found for
such an approach in Deleuze's works. In his two-volume work on Cinema,
for example, Deleuze argued that the problem of fascism was rooted, at
source, in the classically and, prior to 1945, widely perpetrated political
belief in the unanimity of ‘the people’ and its organic capacity to become
true unto itself. It was the hideousness and dangers of that belief in the unity
of ‘the people’ that was, he argued, destroyed by the experience of fascism
in Europe during the midtwentieth century, as well as the exposure of the
extent of the European colonial legacy and the continued racisms and
exclusions on which US sovereignty remained based. That experience in
turn generated, he argued, in the cinematic medium, a shift from ‘true’ to
‘false narration’, reflecting a relative loss of faith in the potential for unity
on which the ideal of ‘the people’ had classically drawn. The Holocaust,
especially, had exposed the violence which a typified people, mystified to
the point of assurance in its own coherence, could do to whoever does not
meet the criteria of its essential type, and thus cinema was called upon to
reinvent itself so that it would no longer perpetrate the myth of a true
narration through which the temporality of a people or its individual
characters could be represented as synchronized. Ravetto's analysis and that
of practically all of the Deleuzian literature on this thematic of cinema and
political aesthetics has bought into this understanding of what fascism was
and what has to be done, politically and aesthetically, to avoid its ‘return’.
There is an irony here, though, not just to the ways in which authors such
as Ravetto have followed the Word of Deleuze, but also to the ways in
which, by doing so, they have bought into an historicized understanding of
the nature of fascism as such. For such a simplistic way of representing
fascism, as something that ‘happened’, in particular spaces and times, and
dividing the fascism of past time from that of present time and the question
of future time, does an immense injustice to the greater complexities of the
theory of fascism suggested by Deleuze's collaborative works with Guattari.
It is not that we think the Cinema works are of no or even less value for the
development of our own Deleuze-inspired take on fascism. Indeed, we have
been at pains, in directing our collaborators in this text, to make them
engage more fully with that element of Deleuze's theorization. However,
there is a desperate need for creative work at the interstices of these
different works of Deleuze, in order to produce new work of greater
coherence and ambition than any of them produce by themselves. Also, we
believe in the necessity of questioning the problematization of fascism as
offered by Deleuze in the Cinema works on account of its outdatedness.
Deleuze's evocation of post-1945 cinema as responding to a call to struggle
against the fascistic violence of imposition of false unanimity upon peoples
contrasts, at the very least, with the desire to establish some revised account
of the terms and conditions for solidarity in struggles with liberal regimes
that are as diversifying and life affirming as they are unifying and death
instilling (Reid 2010; Reid 2006; Dillon and Reid 2009; Badiou 2003: 11).
So our questions become how does the reproblematization of political
struggle, consequent upon history and the growth and expansion of liberal
power relations, affect our understanding of the politics of Deleuze's
account of the problem of fascism in the twenty-first century? Is Deleuze's
thesis concerning the paranoiac nature of fascism and the militant and
revolutionary potential of the schiz still convincing?
Todd May kicks us off by reproblematizing the differences between
Deleuze's understanding of fascism as a phenomenon of desire and the more
traditional Marxist account of its roots in ideology and belief. May
recognizes the salience while seeking to transcend the limits of both
approaches by theorizing the importance of practices to fascism in the
context of contemporary America. As he argues, fascism emerges
principally in the practices in which we engage. Not because we desire
fascism but because what we desire is fascistic, and not because we believe
in fascism but because what we believe is fascistic. In essence May argues
that Deleuze was only half right. People do not just desire fascism. Instead,
they are committed to various practices that they believe to be important for
who they are. Anything that interferes with those practices is seen as a
threat. In particular contexts those practices can therefore become fascist, as
was the case, he argues, in the United States between 2001 and 2008. If it
remains the case that having a commitment to those practices is a matter of
desire, so it also remains the case that those practices cannot change without
people's awareness. Hence, for May, to understand properly the
contemporary relevance of Deleuze's provocation we need to supplement
his theory of desire with a Foucauldian view of the history of practices in
order to understand the fascism of the everyday.
Michael Shapiro continues the analysis of the fascistic dimensions of the
United States through an examination of the aesthetic practices that
comprise it. As Shapiro argues, forms of fascism pervade post-war America
operating in production of aesthetic subjects, but these are not the fascisms
of total war. Indeed these are fascisms concerned with the maintenance of
liberal peace rather than simply the mobilization for war. Attempts to
conserve the historical definition of what constitutes both a fascist and an
anti-fascist aesthetics should be seen, therefore, Shapiro argues, as
expressions of the new fascism. Shapiro's evident motivation here is to
salvage something of the political out of this nihilistic ruination. What we
may term a will to counter the progressive nothingness that grows in the
face of localized anxiety. Developing his earlier theory of the ‘cinematic
heterotopia’, which effectively reintroduced political agency into the
otherwise dormant discipline of film studies, one that simply portrayed the
audience as passive subjects, Shapiro detects in the works of Syberberg and
Philip K. Dick, especially, ‘counters’ to the new fascism. As Shapiro
explains, countering the new fascism requires rejecting any attempt to
diagnosis it as arising out of particular states of mind or expression of
concern for deviant subjectivities, to focus instead on how such diagnoses
and securitizations of fascist deviancy operate themselves within essentially
fascist registers. Only when we recognize the complicity of hackneyed
understandings of the problem of fascism with the actualization of the new
fascism will we become able to speak of an anti-fascist aesthetic, Shapiro
argues.
Brad Evans follows directly on from Shapiro's contribution to pursue
further the nature and logics of liberal fascism. Concerned with the links
between micro-fascist desires and macro-fields of political formation,
Evans attends to the gradual capitalisation of peace witnessed in the age of
liberal dominance. Of crucial significance here, Evans argues, is the
displacement of geopolitical territorial concerns with global biopolitical
logics of survivability and the impact this has upon the microphysics of
power. This permits a biopolitical reading of fascism as societies’ wider
political functions are openly recruited into a planetary war effort in all our
names and for all our sakes. It also provides a novel interpretation of
Oedipalization as fascism appears to be an emergent problem bound
inextricably to the permanent emergency of our radically interconnected
age. While the contemporary operations of power are altogether contingent,
Evans is nevertheless troubled by a more prevailing historical remnant —
namely the moral entrapments set by Immanuel Kant. Although Kant's
legacy is often associated with the planetary virtues of lasting peace, Evans
traces the inauguration of the biopolitical imperative to ‘make life live’ to
the Kantian moral revolution in thought. This biopolitical reading of
fascism proves telling. With life haunted by its own potentiality, the desire
for security is effectively undermined by the very ontopolitical
commitments a Kantian-inspired liberal account of life holds true.
Securitization thus becomes a more important strategic game as we move
beyond a Schmittian paradigm for global affairs into an age dominated by
an imperative the mask of mastery of which is to render everything
potentially endangering. Such is the story, Evans argues, of liberal fascism.
Geoffrey Whitehall explores further the challenges of liberal fascism by
critiquing the doctrine of pre-emption that infamously became the hallmark
of the George Bush, Jr, regime. At the heart of liberal fascism, Whitehall
argues, is the way in which different logistical movements are learning to
coordinate, communicate and integrate with an increasingly comprehensive
degree of optimization and efficiency. No longer torn between war and
peace, liberal fascism functions in the logistical assemblages that constitute
the war/peace relation in favour of the former. Central to this assemblage is
the concept of the ‘global triage’ which demands a shift away from the
logic of politics to the logic of movement. For Whitehall, two key features
of the triage are preemption, which pushes the decision into a non-political
time, and technology, which enacts those decisions as if through habit.
Having explained the significance of this to our understanding of security,
war and power, Whitehall concludes by looking at the way in which the
cultivated desire for human optimizations and efficiencies also amplifies a
kind of self-hatred of humans and humanity. Liberal fascism, as such, is
rooted in this logistical habit that constitutes a human desire to be more
human. It desires killing machines that save lives in the name of humanity.
Julian Reid examines Deleuze's account of the roles of cinema as a
source of resistance to fascism, focusing on his celebration of the post-war
‘cinema of the seer’ and the ‘people of seers’ that Deleuze argued populate
it. Seers are characters who have lost the power of action only to gain a
more worldly power of (in)sight. Characters for whom the disciplinary
organization of the senses necessary for participation in collective
mobilizations has not simply broken down but has been displaced by an
intense power to see the hitherto unseen. Post-war cinema shows us seers
and in doing so, Deleuze argues, underlines the potential for resistance to
fascistic imperatives to mobilize and collectivize entailed in our own
‘becoming visionary or seer’ (Deleuze 1989: 21). It encourages in us the
power to see the world for what it is in a way denied to us while we remain
in the sensori-motorised relation with the world celebrated in fascist
aesthetics. While partially convincing as a response to the historical fascism
of the mid-twentieth century, Reid argues that Deleuze's understanding of
both fascism and the resistance of the seer are outdated and no longer work
in the context of the forms of liberal fascism that organize power relations
today. Nevertheless, as Reid shows, when we look at cinema today, we can
see that it has responded to these new challenges in ways unforeseen and
unexamined by Deleuze. Focusing not just on the figure of ‘the seer’ but its
relations with ‘the cretin’ in the Dogme classic Festen, Reid spins the
relation between seeing and creineity in a manner that overcomes some of
the limits of Deleuze's own analysis as well as making more sense in the
context of the particular forms that liberal fascism is taking today.
Erin Manning's intervention opens onto Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir,
exploring how the film resists the fascism of liberal humanism. Through a
close reading of Deleuze's Logic of Sense and his Cinema texts, paired with
an engagement with a film that traces a complex history (that of the Sabra
and Shatila massacre), Manning traces the dangers of fascism as they
surface within Waltz with Bashir, and proposes a micropolitical reading that
opens onto the possibility of a different politics through its deployment of
what Deleuze called ‘the power of the false’. Fascist aesthetics are, as
Deleuze argued, underwritten by a suicidal myth of ‘true narration’; the idea
of a world in which the contingencies of life will be gradually subject to
order so that the transcendental truth of the fascist subject will eventually be
secured and the stories of the past will gradually be given their coherence
through the completion of action in the present. Fascism prophesizes its end
and moves toward it with suicidal certainty. As Manning argues, Waltz with
Bashir flirts with these tendencies but ultimately resists them. Engaging
with while evading them, it works to produce something quite different
from the microfascisms that lure it: an uncertain field, a memory that leads
nowhere but to its dynamic futurity. Thus is it, as Manning argues
compellingly, that Waltz with Bashir refuses both fascism as well as any
easy solution to it. A film that offers no promise of security from fascism,
nor even the certainty that it is not fascism that is present in it, but which
nevertheless, in that uncertainty, offers itself as a politics in the making.
Leonie Ansems de Vries exposes the difficulties of committing to a
politics that prioritizes lines of flight, given that Deleuze argued fascism
itself to operate on such lines. How, she asks, can we resolve the paradox of
life's tendency to create, order and destroy on the same line(s)? Can a
politics that prioritizes the creative potentials of the line of flight escape the
liberal fascism of emergency governance, which operates on a very similar
understanding of life's emergent properties? The political problematique
that de Vries articulates here is challenging. If what holds the most
promising creative potential also carries the most serious danger of
destruction, and if the course of movement can neither be controlled or
predicted, how is it possible to produce a politics of affirmative becoming
without also becoming fascist? In order to draw out the stakes of this play
— its fascistic dangers as well as its political promise, de Vries engages
Deleuze and Guattari's politics of lines by connecting it, first, to their
biophilosophy revolving around the notion of the milieu and, second, to the
Spinozan ethics of bodies they produce. This leads her to question whether
or not Spinozan ethico-politics of bodies understood in terms of relations of
movement/rest and powers to affect/to be affected can hold the promise of a
life beyond fascism. Through lines, milieux and movements, she argues that
while the subject is capable of becoming different to fascistic performances,
it remains impossible to be free from fascism. This leaves us on uncertain
lines that demand our continued vigilance or else we become that which we
believe to be politically abhorrent.
Nicholas Michelsen demonstrates that the Deleuzoguattarian schema is
an effective conceptual tool box for mapping forms of fascism other than
Nazism. Providing a novel reading of the cartographical nature of Deleuze
and Guattari's account of Fascism, Michelsen addresses the three lines their
work proposes to explore its relevance to our understanding of the politics
of suicide. Focusing on self-immolation proves significant since it
highlights how their theory of deterritorialization reveals qualitative
differences.Michelsen therefore responds here to the key critiques levelled
at the theory of fascism developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia by
emphasizing the inadequate consideration given by scholars, especially
Eugene Holland, to the third (suicidal) line in the schema. He argues that
only with attention to the suicidal line can the utility of the
Deleuzoguattarian account of fascism be understood. That utility is
demonstrated for Michelsen through mapping the concrete case of Japanese
fascism, and the tokkōtai or ‘special-attack’ suicide units of the Pacific War,
along the more purposeful lines proposed in A Thousand Plateaus. The
implication being, as Michelsen writes, ‘the terrifying cold peace of
deterrence has now passed, but this certainly does not mean that the third
line has disappeared from contemporary politics. It is rather conjugated
anew. Deleuze and Guattari's statement that late-capitalist global order is
‘post-fascist’ is explicitly not positing the rise of a non-fascist order’,
Michelsen makes clear. ‘Rather fascism continues directly into the post-
fascist assemblage by way of global innovations of the suicidal line of
flight.’
Ruth Kitchen completes our volume by examining fascist violence and
aesthetics in French cultural memory through the lens of post-war cinema.
Exploring the ‘four dangers’ of fascism identified by Deleuze and Guattari
in A Thousand Plateaus, she offers a compelling reading of two films, The
Raven (Le Corbeau) and Hidden (Caché). These films, released in 1943 and
2005, respectively, refer to two conflicts in French history that have left
long-lasting scars on cultural memory — namely, the Nazi Occupation of
France (1940–44) and the Algerian War (1954–62). The political contexts
in which these films were made were different. Nevertheless, through an
examination of their digenetic and cinematic techniques, Kitchen reveals
meaningful resonances that traverse the temporality of each production.
Drawing in particular upon Deleuze and Guattari's attention to the micro-
physical techniques of power and their concomitant applicability to the
world of representation, her analysis illustrates how micro-fascist
trajectories (low-level fascist acts, attitudes and manifestations) blur the
spatial and temporal boundaries of inside and outside, abbreviated in her
contribution, to ‘inside-out’. In doing so, Kitchen traces the connections
between past and contemporary fascisms in filmic techniques and French
cultural memory to offer a poignant analysis of fascist aesthetics in the
twenty-first century.

References
Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin, 2006)
Badiou, A. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003)
Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Athlone Press,
1989)
Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Athlone Press,
2000)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000)
Dillon, M. and Reid, J. The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life
Live (New York and London: Routledge, 2009)
Foucault, M. ‘Preface’ to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000)
Guattari, F. Chaosophy (New York: Semiotext, 1995)
Massumi, B. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass. and
London: MIT Press, 1999)
Ravetto, K. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
Reid, J. ‘Of Nomadic Unities: Gilles Deleuze on the Nature of
Sovereignty’ (Journal of International Relations and Development
Vol.13 No.4, 2010)
Reid, J.The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal
Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).
1 Desire and ideology in fascism
Todd May
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-2

Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part
of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desire
into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent
dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29)

It is the task of this paper to show that the above quote is exactly half right.
Fascism is a matter of desire. However, it is not only that; it is also a matter
of ignorance or illusion. In fact, it arises at the point at which desire and
ignorance and/or knowledge arise. In order to show this, we will contrast
Deleuze and Guattari's thought with that of a contemporary journalist who,
to my knowledge, has not been brought into productive discussion with
contemporary French thought. In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas
Frank argues that it is precisely a matter of ignorance or illusion (and for
Frank, specifically, ideology) that is operative in the dominance of
conservative thought in America's heartland. It is because the masses have
been duped into believing an ideology contrary to their interests that
Republicans have come to dominate that part of the country. As with
Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will argue that Franks is exactly half right.
In order to place these two halves into a proper whole, we will need to
appeal to a picture of desire and illusion that roots them in human practice.
It is through a conception of practice that we can recognize that, in a sense,
people can, under certain conditions, want fascism. This is true even though
people rarely tell themselves that it is fascism that they want. Again, it is
through a conception of practice that we can understand how people can be
duped into endorsing fascism, even when it is against their interest. The
conception of practice to be developed here will have affinities with the
thought of Michel Foucault. Although Foucault does not offer a theoretical
articulation of this conception, it can be said to be operative particularly in
his more genealogical work.
In order to approach these ideas, I will start with a short summary of
Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of desire and then of Franks's treatment of
illusion. The goal is simply to situate the key elements of these discussions
as a backdrop for the positive conception of practice to be developed here.
Then I will return to these elements in order to show their proper place in
that conception and, one hopes, to show the half-rightedness of each of
these treatments. My claim for the alternative conception will not come in
the form of an argument. I do not try to show that either Deleuze and
Guattari or Franks is half-mistaken. Rather, I seek to put in place a
conception of human practice that is compelling enough that the way I
situate desire and illusion will also seem compelling. That is to say, in
keeping with Deleuze's dictum in Dialogues, rather than arguing at length
against the reduction of fascism either to desire or to illusion, I will mostly
‘go on to something else’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 1).
For Deleuze and Guattari, fascism, like much else in human commitment,
is not a matter of ignorance or mistaken reflection. This is in keeping
particularly with Deleuze's Nietzschean orientation toward human
consciousness: that it is secondary or even epiphenomenal. For Deleuze,
much of what makes us tick is unconscious. Consciousness comes
afterwards. The vast majority of human experience and motivation happens
outside our reflective awareness. ‘Underneath the self which acts are little
selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the
active subject. We speak of our “self” only in virtue of these thousands of
little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who
says “me”’ (Deleuze 1994: 75).
This idea finds expression in Anti-Oedipus' central claim that ‘the social
field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined
product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or
sublimation, any psychic operation … There is only desire and the social,
and nothing else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29). We must be careful in
understanding this citation. It could appear to be more Rousseauian than it
is. If we take Deleuze and Guattari to mean that there is only desire on the
one hand and the social on the other, it would be only a short step to
thinking that the social is an evil that represses desire. This would align
their thought with Rousseau's idea (at least in some of his moods) that
organized society represses the natural goodness of human being.
However, this would be to forget the central idea of Anti-Oedipus: that
desire is productive. If there is only desire and the social, it is because
desire produces the social. Rather than, as with psychoanalytic theory,
desire being desire for something, desire directly creates its objects. We can
recognize here Deleuze's distinction between the virtual and the actual. The
actual is a product of the virtual. The virtual is a field of difference from
which all actuality arises. The actual, in turn, emerges from the virtual,
while still retaining the virtual within it. In the same way, desire produces
the social. Now it may be that the social produced by desire in turn
represses or transforms or distorts desire, as the authors argue Oedipus
does, but this does not mean that the social is exterior to desire, or that it
comes from something or somewhere else. As Deleuze insists throughout
his career, there is no transcendence, only immanence. Deleuze and Guattari
note in What is Philosophy?of all the illusions of philosophy, ‘First of all
there is the illusion of transcendence, which, perhaps, comes before all the
others’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 49). To say that there is only desire and
the social, then, is to say that there is only desire and what it creates, which
includes the social.
On this view, if there is a problem of fascism, it is a problem of desire
rather than of illusion or ideology. ‘It is not a question of ideology. There is
an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but
does not necessarily coincide, with preconscious investments, or with what
preconscious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects,
individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests … it is
not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1977: 104). The picture Deleuze and Guattari are trying to
overcome here is a traditional Marxist one. On this picture, the reason the
masses do not immediately seek their own interests — which would
necessarily be revolutionary ones — is that they have been ideologically
deceived. They have been convinced that their interests are aligned with,
rather than contrary to, the interests of the ruling class. If this is right, the
political task would be to educate the masses, to get them to recognize their
true interests. Otherwise put, the first task of political struggle would be to
overcome the ideological blinders that have prevented the masses from
seeing their true interests.
The problem with this picture is, in Deleuze and Guattari's view, that it
sees things the wrong way around. It is not that we come to desire fascism
rather than revolution because we mistakenly believe that fascism is good
for us. Rather, it is because we become invested in fascism that we come to
believe in it. Desire as a form of unconscious creation and investment
comes first. In fact, from this perspective it does not even matter whether
we believe in fascism. We can be entirely cynical and believe in nothing at
all. Politics is not a matter of belief; it is a matter of what we desire. To ask
why it is that the masses form beliefs that are against their own interests is
to ask the wrong question; it is to ask a question at the wrong level. ‘We see
the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with
passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an
interest in it, since it is here that they search for and measure it. Interest
always comes after’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 346).
Even to ask why we desire fascism is to mistake the political project. The
goal instead, which is the project of schizoanalysis, is to recognize the
character of libidinal investments and then to see what can be done to make
those investments more revolutionary. ‘The first positive task consists in
discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or functioning of his
desiring-machines, independent of any interpretations’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1977: 322). The second task is ‘to reach the investments of
unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from
the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely
capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1977: 350). Rather than interpreting reality for the masses so
they that can come to see what is oppressing them, to recognize the fascism
which they have been duped into embracing, schizoanalysis aims to
discover the particular investments one makes into the social field and then
to counter them with other, more revolutionary, investments.
This, I would argue, is why Anti-Oedipus is written in the way that it is.
There has, of course, been much commentary on the style of the book: its
energy, its use of curse words, its slash-and-burn treatment of Lacan and
others. However, if we treat the style as something exterior to its message,
we miss the point of that style. If the political goal were one of convincing
people to believe otherwise than they do, then there might be something
juvenile about the writing, but that is not the political goal. Rather, it is to
get people's desire going in another direction. Anti-Oedipus seeks to realign
our desire more than our belief. It seeks to follow its own message that we
ask not what something means but how it works. That is why, when
Foucault claims in the preface to Anti-Oedipus that it is ‘a book of ethics’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii), he is right on target. It is a book that
seeks to get us to live differently, not by convincing us of better ways to
live, but by offering desire (as well as philosophy and critical social
thought) another way to invest in the social field, which is to say another
way to create.
If, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the concept of ideology is an execrable
concept that hides the real problems’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 344), for
Thomas Frank ideology or illusion is precisely the heart of the matter. In
What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America, Frank seeks to understand the Republican strategy from the Regan
years of the 1980s to the Bush years of the early 2000s (the book was
published in 2004, prior to the second term of the Bush administration), to
win the support particularly of middle America and, for Frank's purposes, of
Kansans. What puzzles him, which is not dissimilar to what puzzles
Deleuze and Guattari, is how people can be brought to support policies that
are directly opposed to their interests. Where Deleuze and Guattari undercut
the primacy of the concept interests, however, Franks seeks instead to
remain precisely on that terrain. His strategy is to show that by focusing on
certain cultural issues, the Republicans have been able to garner support for
their economic programs, which is really what motivates them:
 The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern
… Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on
corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century
pattern of wealth distribution … The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk
corporate.
(Frank 2004: 6)

Frank's critique can be seen as part of Marxist tradition of ideology critique,

although he is not, to my knowledge, a Marxist. His view is that by getting
people to focus on what have come to be called ‘wedge issues’ — abortion,
homosexuality, violence and sex in movies and on television, evolution, etc.
— they can be enlisted in support of the Republicans, for whom these
issues matter less than transferring wealth to the economic elites. In fact, as
Frank points out, there has been very little change on the wedge issues over
the years. When Republicans assume office, they rarely give more than lip
service to those issues. (Abortion may be a bit of an exception here,
although it is still fundamentally available to most women, even if it is
more difficult to obtain.) On the other hand, there has been a massive
transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, in accordance
with Republican economic policies.
This massive transfer of wealth has been devastating for Kansas. While
companies that locate in Kansas receive various economic perks, Kansans
find themselves in dire economic circumstances. In Kansas in particular,
economic deregulation has led to extraordinary wealth for agribusiness,
while leaving most Kansans far worse off economically. ‘Indeed, over two-
thirds of Kansas communities lost population between 1980 and 2000, some
by as much as 25 percent. I am told that there are entire towns in the
western part of the state getting by on Social Security; no one is left there
but the aged. There are no doctors, no shoe stores. One town out here even
sold its public school on eBay’ (Frank 2004: 60). What Frank describes has
not, of course, been limited to Kansas. David Harvey, for instance, who
writes more self-consciously in the Marxist tradition, has detailed a global
shift of wealth during the course of the neoliberal period (dating roughly
from the 1980s to the present). ‘After the implementation of neoliberal
policies in the late 1970's, the share of national income of the top 1 per cent
of income earners in the US soared, to reach 15 per cent (very close to its
pre-Second World War share) by the end of the century … And when we
look further afield we see extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power
…’ (Harvey 2005: 16–17).
How has this transfer of wealth been able to go unopposed by those who
have been its donors? What is the role of cultural wedge issues in blunting
this opposition? For Franks, the wedge issues help erect a distinction
between two kinds of people, those elites and us regular folks. Some of us
regular folks may have money, but we've earned it the old-fashioned way.
Those other folks are just lucky, and don't deserve what they have. ‘Class,
conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation.
It is primarily a matter of authenticity … In red land both workers and their
bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys
at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and
the big ideas for running things that they read in books’ (Frank 2004: 113–
14).Wedge issues, then, function as ideology. They do not so much cover up
the fact that there are disparities of wealth as contextualize and minimize it.
For the Republican strategists, wedge issues don't operate simply by
getting one to focus attention on cultural issues while the economic
disparities are being created. On the contrary, these disparities are being
created openly. In order to be able to do so, Republicans operate by creating
and/or reinforcing a particular sense of identity among those in what are
called the ‘red’ states. That identity consists in humility as opposed to
arrogance, reverence as opposed to atheism, and ‘above all, a red-stater is a
regular, down-home working stiff, whereas a blue-stater is always some sort
of pretentious paper shuffler’ (Frank 2004: 23). Once this identity is
created, wealth can be transferred and people impoverished as long as that
transfer is being made to others who are just as ‘red’ as oneself. Moreover,
if there is blame to be assigned for the circumstances in which one finds
oneself, it belongs not to those who share one's identity but instead to those
who do not. As I write these words in May 2010, the Tea Party stands as
exemplary of this element of Franks's analysis, blaming Washington, Wall
Street and immigrants for the current economic straits of the United States.
While the last of these is not an elite ‘blue’ group, it is a population that is
said to be favored by that group because it doesn't understand the trouble
caused to real people by immigrants, who, after all, are not really part of
‘us.’
We might pause a moment here to consider the relationship between two
terms I have invoked together: illusion and ideology. Frank does not make
the distinction, although it is perhaps worth marking. Ideology is a matter of
beliefs. However, of course, that doesn't distinguish it from science or the
study of ethics or anything else with an epistemological character, including
illusion. The unique character of ideology is its way of working with
beliefs. It works by getting people to develop certain beliefs that will have
the effect of making other things happen, things that are the real goal of
those instilling the beliefs (or of those who, while not seeking to instill
them, still benefit from them). Ideology, then, does not have to be a matter
of illusion. One can believe, for instance, that abortion is wrong and also
believe, correctly, that liberals support abortion rights, but if one votes out
of these beliefs for someone who, while opposing abortion, is more
interested in supporting policies that enrich the wealthy, then one is subject
to ideology. Opposition to abortion becomes ideological in character.
Often, however, ideology is aligned with illusion. In Frank's analysis, the
creation of ‘red state’ and ‘blue state’ identities in order to support
conservative policies involves not only correct beliefs but illusory ones as
well. For instance, one belief underlying support for Republican policies is
that a free market will make life better for ‘down-home working stiffs.’ Of
course, it has not. This is an illusion. As we have seen, it is a persistent
illusion, since it remains strong in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
Moreover, there can be something illusory in the ideological use of
abortion as well. If the Republican strategy of wedge issues uses abortion
and identity in order to press an economic agenda, and if, as Frank seems to
imply, their real concern is not at all with the former but only with the latter,
then those who vote Republican are under the illusion that those they vote
for will press their causes in a serious way. As we have noted, once in office
it is the economic rather than the social issues that take precedence. To this
extent, illusion and ideology converge in that people are voting against their
interests at all levels.
One might object here that Frank's analysis is closer to Deleuze and
Guattari's than the summary I have offered here suggests. For instance, one
might insist that we read Frank's view not as the creation of an ideology but
rather as the creation of a desire from which certain beliefs go. On this
view, the Republican strategy is to create a sense of identity that becomes
the object of desire, a desire that, in the end, works against the interests of
those who succumb to the strategy. Below I will argue that such a view, a
view that places desire beneath belief, is misplaced. The two must be
intertwined. However, in Frank's case this seems to get matters the wrong
way around. To be sure, there is desire. Without the identification with the
sense of identity the Republican strategy fails. However, the desire is based
upon a certain set of beliefs, beliefs about who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are.
Without these beliefs, the desire does not come into play.
Franks's view of the conservative Republican mode of operation, of
ideology that mixes certain (perhaps) correct beliefs with certain illusions,
is exactly the kind of analysis that Deleuze and Guattari oppose. It is an
inversion of their proposed relationship between desire and illusion. As
mentioned at the outset, I want to argue that both Franks and Deleuze and
Guattari are half right. Both of them are seeing something, but neither of
them grasp the whole picture. Before I turn to my alternative picture, let me
pause momentarily over the fact that we have not discussed the question of
what fascism is. One might wonder whether Franks is really talking about
fascism in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari mean it in their approach. If
not, then the contrast I have set up is a bit forced.
Deleuze and Guattari say very little about what they think fascism is.
Foucault, in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, probably offers the closest
definition when he writes that, ‘the major enemy, the strategic adversary is
fascism … and not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and
Mussolini … but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and our every day
behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing
that dominates and exploits us’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii). For
Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is not a particular arrangement of the state or
a relation of the state to its population, but instead a form of oppression that
is often embraced by those who are oppressed. If we remove the libidinal
aspects of Foucault's definition (which are precisely what is at issue in this
discussion), then it is in keeping with Franks's analysis, one that asks how it
is that people can endorse and even embrace what oppresses them, as well
as others.
 It seems to me difficult to deny that Deleuze and Guattari are right to
discover an aspect of desire in fascism so defined. There seems to be
something erotic about fascism. We can see this in the passions through
which people embrace their own oppression. Even the phenomena Franks
discusses, the cultural orientation of recent conservatism, evoke strong
vehemence and zeal among those who stake their identity there. On the
other hand, to reduce fascism simply to a matter of zeal — to divorce it
from belief — seems to render it blind. After all, people do not only
embrace fascism; they can always tell a story about why their endorsement
of (what they do not call) fascism is justified, and even mandatory. Franks
captures this belief-character in his approach.
If we want to concede something to both Deleuze and Guattari's focus on
desire and Frank's ideological orientation, we need a picture of ourselves
that will integrate both. I would like to sketch this picture here, and then
show how it can incorporate both these elements of the analysis of fascism,
elements that we might call, a bit loosely, the volitional and the epistemic
elements. This integration hinges on the concept of practices, through
which these elements can be seen operating in complementary ways. Let
me first define the concept of a practice, and then turn to the role practices
play generally in our lives and then specifically in supporting and
maintaining fascism.
Elsewhere, I have defined a practice as ‘a regularity (or regularities) of
behavior, usually goal-directed, that is socially normatively governed’ (May
2001: 8). Regularities of behavior are doings of the same thing, as long as
we understand by ‘the same thing’ a loose sort of sameness. The practice of
bicycle riding, for instance, involves peddling a bike. There are many ways
to peddle, but all peddling is the same thing in the sense I mean. It is a
regularity of behavior, like prescribing medications in psychiatry or talking
with students in teaching or recounting the events of the day in diary
writing or running the bases in baseball. Almost all practices, moreover, are
goal-directed. Bicycling is a form of transportation, psychiatry seeks to cure
people of psychiatric problems, etc. This does not entail that people who
engage in a particular practice do so because of the goal. I may just enjoy
riding a bicycle and not care where it gets me. However, the practice itself
is structured around the goals of getting from one place to another. The
reason I use the term ‘usually’ is that there are practices that, it might be
argued, are not goal-directed. The obvious example is sitting Zen, whose
proponents argue cannot succeed if one has a goal in mind. (Whether the
particular goal-lessness of Zen should be called a goal is neither here nor
there for our purposes.)
The normative governance of a practice consists in both the rules and the
ways of doing things that are constitutive of that particular practice.
Practices tend to have rules, without which one is not said to be engaging in
that particular practice. To fail to follow a rule is not necessarily to be doing
something bad; it is simply not to be engaged in that particular practice. If I
bring out a deck of cards and start playing solitaire in my classroom, I am
likely no longer engaged in the practice of teaching (unless, of course, I am
trying to illustrate a pedagogical point in doing so, in which case I'm not
really playing solitaire). More pointedly, if I am supposed to be torturing
someone, and I begin to educate them on the fine points of how to endure
torture, I may be doing a good thing, but I'm not really engaged in the
practice of torture at that moment.
Not all norms of practices are rules. There are ways of doing things, often
involving bodily movements, that are ‘like so’ but cannot really be brought
under particular rules. When one is learning to ride a bicycle, and the bike
starts to sway, one learns to swing it back, like so, in order to stabilize it. In
fact, learning to be expert in a practice often involves mastery of many of
its non-rule norms. A good teacher has a sense of when to stay with a
particular issue and when to move on to the next one, just as a good hockey
player gets a sense of just the right instant to cross the blue line.
Having said this much about the normative governance of practices,
however, we should also recognize that, for most practices, normative
governance is not static. Norms can evolve over a period of time in
response to changing circumstances, and one can challenge the particular
norms of a practice (or even the practice itself, as one challenges the
practice of torture). To return to the example of playing solitaire in class, if
one insisted on solitaire as a particular technique with particular results in
pedagogical practice, it might become a norm of the practice. This does not
mean that it would be required of all those who participate in a practice.
Practices have both norms of requirement (if one doesn't follow this norm,
one isn't in the practice) and norms of permissibility (one is allowed to do
this or that in the practice but it is not required in order to be engaged in that
practice).
Finally, the normative governance of a practice is social. This is a point
insisted on by Wittgenstein in his private language argument (Wittgenstein
1953). There is no such thing as a private practice. To be engaged in a
practice is to be engaged in something that is socially recognized as a
particular kind of practice.
Once we see what a practice is, we can immediately recognize that most
of what we do over the course of our lives involves being engaged in
practices. Jobs, hobbies, child-rearing, athletics: all of these are practices. In
fact, outside relaxation and random activity, almost the entirety of our lives
are taken up with participation in practices. That is to say, most of our lives
are, in one sense or another, socially normatively governed. We should be
neither surprised nor disturbed by this. There is no cause for surprise
because people are, for the most part, social animals. We interact with other
human beings on a regular basis. Those interactions are regulated in various
ways. To say that they are regulated is not to say that they are pre-
determined in their patterns, any more than to say that a baseball game is
regulated is to say that its outcome can be known in advance. The social
normative governance of practices is not necessarily a straitjacket; it is,
more usually, a framework that allows us to interact meaningfully with one
another. It is indeed difficult to see how meaningful interaction could occur
in the absence of norms.
When does normative governance become a straitjacket? Otherwise put,
when can it take on a more fascistic character? There is no one way for this
to happen. It could be that the practice itself is defined by norms that make
it fascistic. The practice of torture would be an example of this. The norms
of torture combined with one's engagement with it as a practice render it
immediately fascistic in the sense defined a moment ago. Alternatively, it
could be that the practice itself is benign, but that the introduction of certain
norms makes it fascistic. Imagine, for instance, the practice of
psychoanalysis being governed by a norm that required all successful
analysis to integrate people back into society so that they endorsed the
current social arrangements. Or yet again, the norm itself could be benign
under certain conditions, but be held so rigidly that it is applied even when
it becomes inappropriate to do so. Here one can imagine a society without a
military draft that establishes a voting age of twenty-one. Later, it votes for
a draft for those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, without
allowing the affected members a say in the institution of the draft. That
would have a fascistic character, at least on the part of those who endorse
the vote. The relation between norms and fascism, then, is a complex one,
having less to do with the fact of norms and more to do with their particular
character and operation in particular circumstances.
The concept of practices, I have argued elsewhere, plays a central role in
the thought of Michel Foucault (May 1994: chapter 5). In Foucault's
genealogical work, practices are the principal unit of the level of analysis.
As he once insisted during a discussion of his history of the prisons, ‘the
target, the point of analytic attack, is not that of “institutions,” nor of
“theories” or “ideology,” but of “practices” … practices considered as the
site of intertwining of what is said and what is done, of rules that one
imposes on oneself and reasons that one gives oneself, of projects and
proofs [evidences]’ (Foucault et al. 1980: 42). Practices are where
knowledge and power take place. Although I cannot give a full accounting
of that claim here, let me point out that, for instance, the disciplinary power
discussed in Discipline and Punish arises within the intersection of various
monastic, military, penal and health practices, just as the power of sexuality
in the first volume of the History of Sexuality arises through a convergence
of religious, architectural and therapeutic practices. These practices, as
Foucault insists, involve knowledge, or at least claims to knowledge. They
require, and in turn generate, various kinds of claims that are committed to
by those engaged in the particular practices. The commitment to these
claims is holistic. People do not need to commit themselves to all of the
various claims generally held in a practice. Just as with the norms of a
practice, its epistemic claims can be questioned. However, to be engaged in
a practice requires commitment to the broad epistemic outlook framed by
that practice. For instance, to be engaged in psychoanalysis requires that
one be committed to some idea of the unconscious, to some concept of the
role that language plays in the human mind, etc. As Wilfrid Sellars insists,
‘empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational,
not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise
which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’ (Sellars 1963:
70).
It is precisely here, in the general epistemic commitment that practices
require, that we find the epistemic commitment to fascism that Frank
discusses. It is because people's lives take place largely in the context of
practices, and because practices involve ways of knowing (or claiming to
know) that fascism arises as an ideological matter, or, more accurately, as
an epistemic matter. In order to see this, let's take an example from
contemporary discussion: abortion. As Frank discusses, the anti-abortion
movement has been particularly strong in Kansas politics. The roots of this
movement lie, of course, in fundamentalist versions of Protestantism as
well as in the Catholic Church. It is unsurprising, then, that the anti-abortion
movement is not simply about abortion. It reflects a larger overall view, one
that has to do with the nature of families, the role of government and the
primacy of certain religious values. As Frank points out, Kansas' traditional,
moderate Republican candidates ‘who had patiently worked their way up
the party hierarchy for years were seeing the positions they coveted filled
instead by some holy-rolling nobody screeching against big government
and interested only in doing away with abortion and taxation’ (Frank 2004:
97).
How is this a matter of practices? It is a matter of religious practices,
which involve knowledge (or claims to know). Essentially, the picture is
this. To be committed to, say, a conservative Protestantism is, among other
things, to be committed to a certain set of practices. These practices are not
only ritualistic expressions of faith. They involve ways of living: what
kinds of things one can do and cannot do, how to raise one's children, how
to interact with family and neighbors, etc. Further, these ways of living are
inextricable from certain beliefs. These beliefs include the view that
abortion is wrong because it takes a fully human life. They also include the
wrongness of homosexuality. Positively, they involve beliefs in the moral
rightness of the traditional family, hard work and keeping what one has
earned. One might be tempted to ask whether these beliefs are matters of
knowledge or matters of faith. However, for those involved in these
practices, that would be a distinction without a difference. The knowledge
arises from the faith; an account of knowledge as something like ‘justified,
true belief ’ would be inappropriate here.
It is worth noting that in a work that pre-dates his collaboration with
Guattari, Deleuze offers a denunciation of illusion that is compatible with
the analysis we are offering here. The introductory chapter of his book
Bergsonism sees Bergson as involved in a ceaseless struggle against
illusion. Although the details of this struggle are a bit wide of our concerns,
what is central to Bergson is to get free from the grip of a picture that
oppresses us. That picture (which in Bergson's case primarily concerns the
relation of space and time) does not only give illusory solutions to the
questions we ask; it sets up false problems. ‘The very notion of a false
problem indeed implies that we have to struggle not against simple mistakes
(false solutions), but against something more profound: an illusion that
carries us along, or in which we are immersed, inseparable from our
condition’ (Deleuze 1988: 20). On this view, the illusion in play in the
Republican strategy described by Franks, for instance, would be the
identities ascribed to ‘blue’ and ‘red’ state residents, from which the false
solution of voting Republican would follow.
Seeing these practices as matters of knowledge is not difficult. Neither is
seeing them as matters of desire. Practices have both epistemic and
volitional elements. The volitional elements exist along two registers, one
related to the commitment to the practices themselves and the other in the
relation of those practices to one's sense of who one is. The first is internal
to the involvement in a practice. To be committed to a practice is not simply
to ratify its claims to knowledge or some certain number of those claims. It
is to engage oneself in that practice through one's behavior. For most of us,
even that is not enough. A teacher, for instance, who does not more than
behave according to pedagogical norms and endorse the beliefs required by
those norms may well be alienated from the practice of teaching. She may
be just going through the motions. One can imagine her saying, ‘Yes, I
believe in the rightness of teaching, and I'm still doing it, but my heart isn't
in it.’ A person like this is certainly engaged in the practice of teaching, but
in an impoverished way. This impoverishment might not be a bad thing: one
who is just going through the motions of torturing people might not be quite
so interested in causing pain to another. However, we would say of a person
like that that she isn't fully committed to the practice.
Full commitment is a matter of desire, and desire in a sense very close to
the one articulated by Deleuze and Guattari. It is not desire as a Lacanian
lack; it is desire as creative and productive. If, for Deleuze and Guattari,
desire produces, then the desire involved in one's commitment to a practice
is also productive. It involves a connection to other beliefs, behaviors,
things and others, in ways that are not foreign to many of the descriptions
offered in Anti-Oedipus. Although not all the connections discussed by
Deleuze and Guattari are ones involved in practices (for example the
connection of mouth to breast), many of them are. The reason not all of
them are is that Deleuze and Guattari are offering a more general
ontological view rather than the restricted regional one that focuses
specifically on practices.
 This leads to the second way in which practices are bound to desire. To
be alienated from one's practices is to feel that somehow what one is doing
is not deeply tied to who one is. Conversely, to be immersed in practices in
a motivated way is to draw a sense of who one is through one's involvement
in those practices. The answer to the question of who one is often centrally
requires reference to the practices in which one is engaged. One is a mother,
a teacher, a swimmer, etc. In this tie between one's practices and one's sense
of oneself, desire plays a central role. This is not the type of desire we saw a
moment ago; it is not the productive desire of being immersed in a practice.
Rather, it is the desire that binds one to one's practices, that makes them
constitutive of who one is. Some practices, of course, are more significant
to one's sense of oneself than others. As we will see momentarily, it is those
practices — especially religious and economic ones — that often come into
play in the creation and promotion of fascism as Deleuze and Guattari
define it.
Practices, then, have both epistemic and volitional elements; they are
both matters of knowledge (or, in some cases, ideology) and desire. We
have not yet answered the question of the relation of practices to fascism.
Given the discussion so far, however, it is only a short step to see that some
practices either are fascistic, or promote fascism in combination with other
practices. In the case of the conservative ideology discussed by Frank, this
is manifest. Neither the conservative Christianity nor the Republican
economic program he treats is tolerant of different forms of living and
acting. They are both very circumscribed in what they consider to be
acceptable forms of behavior. For the former, those forms centrally involve
traditional gender and family relations as well as certain relations to one's
work. These are what the Republicans have exploited in their attempt to
create a sense of ‘red state’ identity. For the latter, it is a matter of endorsing
and allowing the spread of a free, unregulated capitalism that, in Frank's
view, benefits those who contribute to the true objects of Republican
solicitude: the economic elites.
The intertwining of these two groups — conservative Christians and
Republicans — lies in the use the latter makes of the former in order to
create the particular sense of red state identity that allows the latter to
maintain power, often at the expense of the interests of the former. In that
sense, one can say, contra Deleuze and Guattari, both that fascism is often a
matter of interests, and that people can be fooled into acting against their
own interests. It is a matter of interests in that the interests people have that
stem from their practices can be fascistic. We can see this in two places in
Frank's discussion. First, the interest the Republicans have in maintaining
the domination of economic elites has led to support for fascistic practices
of conservative Christianity as well as for linking those practices, via a
conception of self-reliance and hard work, to free-market capitalism.
Second, the interests conservative Christians have in their religious views,
and the importance of those practices to their sense of who they are, has led
them to support economic practices that are oppressive to many people.
Among those who have been oppressed by the economic practices
supported by conservative Christians are the conservative Christians
themselves. This is the third place at which interests can be fascistic, and it
is the central point of Frank's book. People have been duped into supporting
and participating in economic practices that have been detrimental to their
interests. Those practices have been economically destructive to the lives
and communities of people in Kansas, and elsewhere. This has been
allowed to happen in large part through the support of Kansans for practices
that have been linked to the practices that they have come to define as
determinative of the kinds of people they are.
 However, this is only half the picture. Very little of what I have described
in the last few paragraphs has been a matter simply of epistemic mistakes. It
has also been a matter of desire. This desire emerges in several ways,
perhaps most palpably in the virulence with which conservative Christians
treat those they think of as ‘blue state’ people. The anger against ‘pointy
headed liberals’ and others who do not share in the red state identity Frank
analyzes are subject to deep, and at times violent, vituperation. The
demonstrations of the current Tea Party movement provide abundant
evidence of this. People whose identity comes from its commitment to
conservative Christianity react strongly to anything that seems to threaten
their sense of who they are. This, of course, is not true only of conservative
Christians, but of many of us under conditions in which we feel our sense of
self to be threatened — which means that desires linked to fascism may not
be far from most of us. If who we are is bound to our practices, then those
practices are not matters simply of epistemic ratification but of engagement
and motivation. They are objects of desire, or better they involve habits,
actions and outlooks through which our desire is channeled. If they are
fascistic, then we must say that this is because people desire fascism. If that
fascism is oppressive to the people immersed in those practices, we can say,
or at least half-say, that ‘the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain
point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism.’
In accounting for the kinds of fascism discussed by Deleuze and Guattari,
then, we can say that it is not solely a matter of state forms but instead lies
within, or potentially within, each of us. In order to understand it, we must
look both at its epistemic and the motivational aspects.We must see the
fascism both in what we think and in what we want and create. We do not,
or at least very few of us, think anything we tell ourselves is fascistic.
Rather, it emerges in the practices in which we engage. It arises not because
we desire fascism but because what we desire is fascistic; it arises not
because we believe in fascism but because what we believe is fascistic. As a
result, we must be vigilant about fascism, not only among conservative
Christians but among ourselves and our own commitments. What we desire
and what we believe have consequences that are often beyond our own
reckoning. It is not, then, just those others on whom we must keep an eye,
although they have given us much reason to do so. We must also keep an
eye on ourselves, lest the critique of fascism we employ become a type of
fascism that we embrace.

References

Deleuze, G. Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988)

Deleuze, G.Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.What is Philosophy? (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994)
Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. Dialogues (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987)
Foucault, M. et al., L'impossible prison (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1980)
Frank, T. What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the
Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004)
Harvey, D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005)
May, T. Our Practices, Our Selves: Or, What it Means to Be Human
(University Park: Penn State Press, 2001)
May, T.The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism
(University Park: Penn State Press, 1994)
Sellars, W. Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul-Humanities Press, 1963)
Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (New York: MacMillan,
1953)
2 Anti-fascist aesthetics
Michael J. Shapiro
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-3

The new fascism is not the politics and the economy of war. It is the global agreement on security,
on the maintenance of peace — just as terrifying as war. All our petty fears will be organized in
concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called
upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our
neighborhoods, in our local theaters.
(Gilles Deleuze 2006: 138)

Introduction: expanding the meaning of fascism

Doubtless Deleuze's characterization of ‘the new fascism’ is disturbing to
those who are invested in their experience of the fascism associated with
‘the politics and economy of war.’ For example, Bruno Bettleheim's
incessant attacks on anyone who tried to characterize the phenomenon
reflect the hostility of many of fascism's war-time victims toward attempts
at explaining, re-inflecting, or expanding its meaning (Bettleheim 1986).
That hostility toward people who poach on one's experientially cultivated,
ideationally entrenched enmities is expressed by one of Don DeLillo's
aesthetic subjects, Win Everett, a character in his Libra, a novelistic
biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged Kennedy assassin. At one
point in the narrative Everett, the fictional commander of the abortive Bay
of Pigs invasion, is listening to a radio announcer reporting on Cuba's role
in ‘Marxist subversion in our hemisphere’:
He didn't need announcers telling him what Cuba had become. This was a silent struggle. He
carried a silent rage and determination. He didn't want company. The more people who believed
 as he did, the less pure his anger. The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger.
(DeLillo 1988: 148)

Throughout his Libra, DeLillo gives Win Everett a psychological profile,

especially a paranoid security mentality. Among other things, Everett
checks the door locks and the knobs on the gas stove more than once before
retiring every night. However, given the genre within which DeLillo is
writing, Everett and the rest of the novel's characters are better thought of as
aesthetic rather than as psychological subjects. The implications of such a
shift in the approach to subjectivity are explicated in Leo Bersani and
Ulysses Dutoit's analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (1963), a
film in which a couple becomes estranged, as the wife Camille (Bridget
Bardot), has her feelings for her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli), turn from
love to contempt. Bersani and Dutoit point out how Godard's focus, which
is not on ‘the psychic origins of contempt’ but on ‘its effects on the world,’
shows ‘what contempt does to cinematic space … how it affect[s] the visual
field within which Godard works, and especially the range and kinds of
movement allowed for in that space’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2004: 21–22).
Similarly, the fascist mentality enacted in DeLillo's Libra is expressed
not as a psychodynamic development but in the way the novel's moving
bodies, driven by their preoccupation with securing the imagined coherence
of their identity-allegiance to ‘America’ and to US hemispheric dominance,
reaffirm a Cold War cartography. Thus for example as DeLillo recreates the
historical characters, Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, and mobilizes
them for an encounter in the novel at the historical moment just prior to the
abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, their different mentalities are
animated in the ways they give Cuba alternative morphologies. Ferrie
complains: ‘You can't invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men,’
to which Oswald replies, ‘Cuba is little.’ Ferrie responds, ‘Cuba is big,’ and
Oswald once again says, ‘Cuba is little’ (DeLillo 1988: 321). As I note
elsewhere, the ‘polyvocal poetics of Cuba’ that the encounter between the
characters effects, maps much of the desire-shaped, geopolitically focused
ideoscape of the America of the John F. Kennedy presidency (Shapiro 1992:
80).
While Libra's gloss on fascism is oblique, another DeLillo novel, White
Noise, approaches the phenomenon more directly, albeit still from the point
of view of invented characters. His main protagonist, Jack Gladney, who is
the Chair of the Department of Hitler Studies at ‘the College on the Hill,’
has an academic calling that fits well with his preoccupation, a fascist-
emulating obsession with death (as Susan Sontag has famously observed,
the fascist aesthetic includes a deep desire for intimacy with death; Sontag
1975). DeLillo's Gladney enacts another aspect of the fascist aesthetic. He
screens a Nazi documentary that is reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl's
regime-sponsored documentary of Hitler's visit to Nuremburg, The Triumph
of the Will (1934). His department's documentary features mass, militarized
rallies with:
close up shots of thousands of people outside a stadium after a Goebbels speech, people surging,
massing, bursting through the traffic, Halls hung with swastika banners, with mortuary wreaths
and death's-head insignia. Ranks of thousands of flagbearers arrayed before columns of frozen
light, a hundred and thirty aircraft searchlights aimed straight up — a scene that resembled a
geometric longing, the formal notation of some powerful mass desire.
(DeLillo 1985: 25–26)

Appeals of fascism
The historic Nazi rally simulated in White Noise conveys an aspect of the
appeal of Hitler's party at the time it was assuming power. However,
although much of the party's mass appeal was orchestrated by its visual
displays (its public semiotics), it should also be noted that the party
developed its following at a time of national economic deprivation. In a
classic explanatory-oriented investigation of the rise of the Nazi party in
Germany, Rudolph Heberle describes the economic and related status crises
experienced by various social strata in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and
surmises:
It should not be difficult to understand why, in such circumstances, a party led by fanatic patriots,
which denounced radically all existing parties, which claimed to be independent of any particular
economic interests, the only champion of the real people and the avant-garde of the awaking
nation, would exert immense attraction for the uprooted middle class elements, for politically
untrained youths, for political adventurers, and for counter-revolutionaries in general.
(Heberle 1945: 6)

Elaborating, Heberle writes, ‘When the terrible depression with its mass
unemployment cast its shadow on the people's minds, when masses of
young voters grew up who had never had a permanent job or any job at all,
the Nazi party offered at least activity, an outlet from the doldrums, and also
shelter, food, and uniforms, attractions which made it a bitter competitor of
the Communists in certain proletarian areas of the metropolitan cities …’
(Heberle 1945: 9).
Heberle conducts a data analysis to validate his economy-focused
explanatory model. Focusing on public opinion and party voting patterns of
diverse occupational groups in the rural, Schleswig-Holstein region of
Germany from 1918 to 1932, he shows how the National Socialists were
able to displace other radical parties, not only by playing on economic
issues (all the parties were doing that) but also by promoting mass
participation. However, there are hints of the other kind of appeal to which
DeLillo gestures and to which Heberle refers as well, an aesthetic appeal
that is evident in Heberle's remarks on uniforms and mass participation. The
appeal of the National Socialist's elaborate and colorful uniforms and
regalia was part of their aesthetic strategy. That strategy's effectiveness is
registered in a statement attributed to Walter Henisch, a press photographer
who served as Josef Goebbels's official war photographer. Henisch, a man
wedded to his photographic art and not to the Nazi ideology, is described by
his son Peter (in his novelistic biography of his father) as explaining the
attraction of the National Socialist party when they marched into Austria:
‘Compared to the Socialists and even more to the conservatives, the Nazi's
were remarkable. They did something for your senses, especially for your
eyes, and therefore for the camera’ (Henisch 1990: 50). What Walter
Henisch experiences is one small marker of a more pervasive aspect of the
appeal of fascist aesthetics, which shows up in popular culture texts,
especially films such as The Night Porter, The Damned, and Scorpio Rising
in the form of ‘the eroticization of Nazi regalia in certain gay cultures’
(Schnapp 1996: 236). Such contemporary aesthetic effects of Nazi or more
generally fascist aesthetics points to what Kriss Ravetto has observed as the
way ‘Fascism occupied the unique (if not contradictory) space of a
historical past and a political present’ (Ravetto 2001: 5).
Of course, as is well known, photography was only one dimension of the
Nazi media strategy. Goebbels was particularly struck with the capacity of
cinema to create mass appeal and was especially taken with Sergei
Eisenstein's cinematic celebration of the Russian revolution. While
Eisenstein rebuffed Goebbels after the latter wrote for advice about
propaganda films (Eisenstein 1988: 280), the very form of his cinematic art
was also recalcitrant to Goebbels's propaganda plans. As Jacques Rancière
points out in a gloss on the film-propaganda relation in Eisenstein's films,
Eisenstein's films cannot function as propaganda because ‘a propaganda
film must give us a sense of certainty about what we see, it must choose
between the documentary that presents what we see as a palpable reality or
the fiction that forwards it as a desirable end [and]… Eisenstein
systematically denies us this sense of certainty (Rancière 2006: 29).
 While Rancière sees Eisenstein's films as recalcitrant to a fascist
aesthetic, he construes Brechtian theater as positively anti-fascist:
If Brecht remained as a kind of archetype of political art in the XXTH century, it was due not so
much to his enduring communist commitment as to the way he negotiated the relation between the
opposites, blending the scholastic forms of political teaching with the enjoyments of the musical
or the cabaret, having allegories of Nazi power discuss in verse about matters of cauliflowers, etc.
The main procedure of political or critical art consists in setting out the encounter and possibly the
clash of heterogeneous elements … to provoke a break in our perception, to disclose some secret
connection of things hidden behind the everyday reality.
(Rancière 2006: 30)

Rancière's gloss on Brechtian theater resonates with Walter Benjamin's

discussion of the fascism-aesthetics relationship (in a Brecht-inspired
essay). Although Benjamin famously noted the fascist tendency to
aestheticize politics, he also saw cinema's potential as an anti-fascist genre
because of the way it alerted (shocked) the spectator rather than, as was the
case with the Nazi aestheticization, simply encouraging mass allegiance
through collective expression (as he put it in his ‘Work of Art …’ essay:
Benjamin 1968), or encouraging the displacement of political sensibility
through commoditization and mass consumption (as is implied throughout
his incomplete Arcades project). What accords especially well with
Rancière's reference to a ‘break in perception’ is Benjamin's reference to
the shock effect of film. As Benjamin puts it:
The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their
constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks,
should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film
has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it
inside the moral shock effect.
(Benjamin 1968: 238)

In his conclusion on fascist aesthetics as the aestheticizing of politics in

‘The Work of Art …’ essay, Benjamin writes, ‘All efforts to render politics
aesthetic culminate in one thing: war’ (Benjamin 1968: 241). However,
here I want to focus on a cinematic aesthetic that supplies a critical response
to what Deleuze calls the new fascism (to repeat part of the epigraph at the
beginning of this essay), which is immanent in the current structure of
‘peace’: ‘All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty
anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called
upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant
voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our local theaters’ (Deleuze
2006: 168).
Heeding Benjamin's optimism that cinema can provide an anti-fascist
aesthetic, while bearing in mind Deleuze's take on the manifestation of the
contemporary micro fascism, I turn to some artistic texts that produce a
Deleuzian antidote to the micro fascism to which he refers. To appreciate
the Deleuzian conceptual riposte to micro fascism, we have to understand
the primary individual and collective identity fantasies (and their material
implementations) that have animated the original fascist aesthetic. Among
the most telling was the architectural projects that the Italian fascists
undertook in the city of Arezzo. In order to overcode the contingencies
associated with a complex, historically assembled ethnoscape that belied
attempts to attribute racial homogeneity to an originary Italian nation, they
decided to designate the Arentines as the original Italian race. In order to
backdate the Arentines' role in creating the basis of the nation, they altered
Arezzo's buildings by medievalizing them.
The project ‘was simultaneously a tool for civic redefinition and a means
for declaring Fascist allegiance’ (Lasansky 2004: 107). Specifically, the
fascists sought to ‘recover Arezzo's idealized medieval past’ by changing
the façades of buildings to turn back the architectural clock from what was
a renaissance architecture to a medieval one (Lasansky 2004: 117). The
fascist project was aimed at turning the contingency of presence into fateful
organic solidarity, at inventing a coherent and unitary historical people and
individual identity coherences (racial among others) that accord with
exclusionary membership in the collective. Architecture was one among
several of the artistic genres that were pressed into the service of securing
identity coherence. Festivals, exhibitions, theatre and film were also used.
Like Goebbels, Mussolini saw film as ‘the regime's strongest weapon.’
Accordingly, the regime produced short documentaries that featured ‘shots
of individuals outfitted in period costumes and panoramic views of
medieval and Renaissance buildings decorated for the occasion with
hanging tapestries, banners, and flags’ (Lasansky 2004: 99).

Counter-aesthetics: Syberberg
Although cinema was central to the fascist aestheticization of politics, it
also lends itself to a politics of aesthetics. While the aestheticization of
politics encourages ritual allegiance, a text that enjoins a politics of
aesthetics ‘suspends the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and
reframes the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects
and objects, the common and the singular’ (Rancière 2004: 65). Here I turn
first to Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977),
which resembles the anti-fascist aesthetic in DeLillo's White Noise as well
as comporting with a Brechtian anti-fascist aesthetic (part of Syberberg's
explicit intention). The aesthetic is Brechtian in the sense described by
Benjamin (already noted) in that its shock effect creates a ‘heightened
presence of mind’ and in the sense described by Rancière in that it creates
breaks in perception through its ‘clash of heterogeneous elements.’ Hitler is
a seven-hour film the primary heterogeneity of which combines Brechtian
and Wagnerian aesthetics to effect what Syberberg refers to as an ‘aesthetic
scandal: combining Brecht's doctrine of epic theater with Richard Wagner's
musical aesthetics, cinematically conjoining the epic system as anti-
Aristotelian cinema with the laws of a new myth’ (Syberberg 1982: 18).
The ‘scandal’ is heightened as well by Syberberg's combination of
cinematic genres, a mixing of ‘documentation with subjective interpretation
and imagination with historical fact’ (Mueller 1980: 60). In Susan Sontag's
well-wrought phrases, the film is a ‘medley of imaginary discourse’ with a
‘complex sound track … interspersed between and intermittently overlaid
on the speeches of actors,’ and with ‘a varying stock of emblematic props
and images’ (Sontag 1973: 143). Moreover, by focusing on minor
characters — for example Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten, and Hitler's
valet Karl-Wilhelm Kraus — the film encourages the viewer to discover
‘horror in the banal’ (Syberberg 1982: 13).
One of the film's major analytic assumptions, which Syberberg shares
with DeLillo, is that Hitler as an historical subject is fundamentally a
cinematic character. In DeLillo's case, that assumption is enacted in his
Running Dog, a novel the main drama of which is based on a search for
rumored pornographic film of Hitler, created during the last days of the war.
At the end of the novel, the film turns out to be something else. It shows
Hitler as an aesthetic figure, imitating Charlie Chaplin for a bunch of
children:
The figure shuffles toward the camera, his cane swinging. Behind him, in a corner of the screen,
one of the small girls looks on.
Briefly the main is flooded in light — the bleached and toneless effect of overexposure. With the
return of minimal detail and contrast, he is very close to the camera, and his lifeless eyes acquire a
trace of flame, the smallest luster. A professional effect. It's as though the glint originated in a
nearby catch light.
He produces an expression finally — a sweet epicene, guilty little smile, Charlie's smile, an
accurate reproduction …
Three quarter view. At first he seems to be speaking to the smallest of the children, a girl about
three years old. It is then evident he is only moving his lips — an allusion to silent movies. One of
the women can be seen smiling.
 (DeLillo 1978: 236–37)

Syberberg also evokes Chaplin; Hitler's valet does ‘a burlesque of Chaplin's

impersonation of Hitler in The Great Dictator’ (Sontag 1973: 148). In
contrast to DeLillo's treatment, Hitler is a cinematic subject who does not
command direct attention. Rather, Syberberg presents the Third Reich as a
whole as a cinematic apparatus. Hitler appears through actors who ‘reenact
the kitsch fantasies of the Third Reich’ (Santner 1990: 143). Thomas
Elsaesser puts it well: ‘Syberberg wants to rediscover art, this time imitating
not the heroic self- and world-denying stances of German idealism, but one
that builds on the kitsch-debris of history, the material consequences of
such heroism’ (Elsaesser 1981: 116).
While a significant aspect of the anti-fascist aesthetic in Syberberg's
Hitler is in the way the Hitler phenomenon is presented as a bad movie, a
kitschy horror show that focuses on the banal and indirect aspects of Hitler's
presence — for example, a commentary by Hitler's valet referring to
underpants and night shirts and remembrances of breakfasts and film
screenings, to appreciate the effects, we have to recall the heroic versions of
Hitler and Germany that the film parodies. For example, as Sontag points
out, the film ‘uses, recycles, parodies of elements of Wagner. Syberberg
means his film to be an anti-Parsifal, and hostility to Wagner is one of the
leitmotifs: the spiritual filiation of Wagner and Hitler’ (Sontag 1973: 155).
To conceptualize the significance of such an aesthetic, we can turn to the
insights supplied by Deleuze in his analysis of the painting of Francis
Bacon. He suggests that Bacon does not begin to paint on a blank canvas.
Rather, ‘everything he has in his head or around him is already on the
canvas, more or less virtually, before he begins his work’ (Deleuze 2003:
71). In order to resist the ‘psychic clichés’ and ‘figurative givens,’ the
artists must ‘transform’ or ‘deform’ what is ‘always-already on the canvas.’
It is also the case for Syberberg, the Hitler phenomenon is always-already
on screen with its ‘psychic clichés’ and ‘figurative givens.’ Hence
Syberberg's Hitler deforms what is on screen by deforming not only the
heroic operatic epics of Wagner but also the pious, hero-making Hitler
documentary, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Ultimately, Hitler is
erased as Syberberg's aesthetic subject is Germany's reception of the fascist
spectacle: ‘There will be no other hero, only us’ (Syberberg 1978: 81). In
addition, Syberberg's film accomplished an important shift, one from Hitler
as character to Germany as the domain of his reception. It is a change, as
Deleuze points out, ‘taking place inside cinema, against Hitler, but also
against Hollywood, against business … A true psychodynamics will not be
found unless it is based on new associations, by reconstituting the great
mental automata that he enslaved’ (Deleuze 1989: 264).

Philip K. Dick, another counter-fascist aesthetic

If the artistic mechanisms central to the fascist strategy for securing
allegiance were aimed at fixing originary and exclusionary national identity
by among other things creating a static, exemplary citizen body the unity of
which is organic, what would constitute an anti-fascist aesthetic? Rather
than a static, historically invested people with enduring and exclusionary
characteristics, the anti-fascist body is one — after Deleuze and Guattari's
treatment of the body — that is a turbulent assemblage of different rates of
being that co-inhabit a body, the becoming of which involves radical
contingency. Insofar as such a body achieves a coherent order, it is not the
homeostatic equilibrium of the well-run machine but rather the dynamic
coherence of Deleuze and Guattari's ‘abstract machine’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987). Cinema is a medium that is doubtless best able to convey
such a body, and no film better exemplifies such a capacity than Richard
Linklater's film version of the Philip Dick novel A Scanner Darkly (2006).
Taking Benjamin's assertion that a politically progressive cinema can
counter the fascist cooptation of cinema to enact an aesthetics of war, but
updating the ‘war’ from the 1930s and 1940s geopolitical version to the
contemporary ones involving wars on drugs and ‘terror,’ I want to identify
the way Linklater's film achieves a contemporary anti-fascist politics of
aesthetics.
At the level of its plot, A Scanner Darkly resonates well with the
microfascism problematic that Deleuze articulates. The main
character/protagonist Bob Arctor leads a double life. In one, he belongs to a
household of drug users; in another he is Fred, an undercover police agent
assigned to collect damaging evidence on the household's drug culture. The
Dick scenario is as follows: The war on drugs has not gone well because a
highly addictive, illegal drug, Substance D, which is made from a small
blue flower, has spread all over the country. Bob Arctor is the undercover
agent assigned to infiltrate the drug culture. In his undercover role, he
moves in with drug-using housemates in a poor Anaheim, California
neighborhood. When at his police station he is co-named Fred, and he hides
his identity from fellow officers by wearing a ‘scramble suit’ that produces
rapid changes in visible identity (in effect a visual realization of the
Deleuzian ‘turbulence’ as ‘different rates of being’ co-inhabit a single
body). Moreover, the Dick story and Linklater film version add a
grammatical twist to the Deleuzian version of micro fascism. Rather than a
general ‘we’ who are invited to ‘stifle every little thing, every suspicious
face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our
local theaters,’ Bob Arctor, as Fred, is called upon to stifle himself. As the
story progresses, he becomes a divided subject who is both part of the
surveillance team and one of its investigative targets. In order to maintain
his cover after he becomes part of a drug-using household, Arctor uses
substantial amounts of Substance D, which causes the two hemispheres of
his brain to work independently and, ultimately, to compete (‘Bob’ has a
dissonant voice within). Although one narrative thread of the film speaks to
the damaging effects of drug use, Bob's schizoid condition constitutes an
escape from normalized subjectivity. His schizoid body is nomadic in
Deleuze and Guattari's sense, for its movements resist the modes of
identification that bodies are captured by when they operate in terms of the
usual organic functions.
The Surveillance regime, recognizing Bob's/Fred's growing dependence
on and seeming disability from Substance D, treats Arctor's developing
schizoid tendencies as a psychological issue. They see him as one suffering
from a neurocognitive deficit and rename him Bruce, seeking to create a
subject they can treat. However, although the Bruce/Fred/Arctor body is
psychologized by the policing authorities, in the context of the film that
body is better rendered as an aesthetic rather than a psychological subject.
Two conceptual assets emerge from such a shift. First, the focus on the
body as an aesthetic subject turns us away from psychological phenomena
and toward a spatial analytic as I noted in my earlier reference to Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit's reading of a Jean Luc Goddard film Contempt. As is the
case in Godard's film about an increasingly estranged couple, a focus on
aesthetic rather than psychological subjectivity illuminates cinematic space
— in this case a space that mimes the micro-fascism of securitization — as
the film inter-articulates the life world with the panoptics of drug
surveillance. In that process, the scanner is a primary focal point. As a
result, one of the film's (like the book's) primary questions, which Fred/Bob
asks himself, is ‘What does the scanner see?’:
I mean really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they
used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days see into myself. I see only murk
outside, murk inside. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the
 scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have
been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little
fragment wrong too.
(from A Scanner Darkly)

Second, while a primary narrative thread of the film is a story about the
dangers of drug use, the Fred/Arctor body is recalcitrant to the narrative.
Vincent Amiel's observations on the subversive cinematic body serves well
here. Amiel analyzes those films (e.g., those of Robert Bresson, Buster
Keaton and John Casavetes) in which what he calls ‘the cinematographic
body is no longer an object of film knowledge; rather it is a model of
knowledge via editing … [It is] simultaneously that which is filmed and
that which (re)organizes the film in the mind/body of the spectator …
[becoming the] source rather than the object of cinema’ (Game 2001: 50–
51).
While in what Amiel calls ‘classic cinema’ the moving bodies were
simply vehicles for a story, in his terms the tendency was to ‘abandon the
body's density for the exclusive profit of its functionality,’ so that it was
merely ‘at the service of narrative articulations,’ in much of contemporary
cinema ‘the idea is for the cinema to dis-organ-ize the body … by means of
revealing its fragmented nature, by extracting from it the yoke of unity and
consciousness, by giving it back the complexity of its own determinations’
(Amiel 1998: 7).
Certainly the protagonist in Scanner should be understood aesthetically,
even though he develops a psychosis. ‘Bruce’ (Arctor) discovers the blue
flowers that are the source of the drug Substance D. Inasmuch as the blue
flower is a symbol of German romanticism, the psychosis-inducing flower
is also an aesthetic icon. As such, it assists in recruiting the film into a
politics of aesthetics frame rather than moving it toward the simple policy
problem of how to treat a drug-induced psychosis. Moreover, chez
Benjamin, the blue flower motif suggests that the film evokes the
pervasiveness of illusion (what Benjamin referred to as phantasmagoria)
rather than psychic delusion (where illusion as phantasmagoria is Dick's
emphasis in the novel). The cinema version of Scanner is ideally suited to
such an aesthetic frame, especially because of the way it situates the viewer
vis-à-vis the couplet of reality versus illusion. As Benjamin suggests in his
run up to the blue flower imagery, ‘the shooting of a film … presents a
process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which
would exclude from the scene being enacted such extraneous accessories as
camera equipment, lighting, machinery crew, etc. … Its illusory nature is a
nature of the second degree, the result of editing.’ Benjamin adds, ‘The
equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice, the
site of immediate reality has become the “blue flower” in the land of
technology’ (Benjamin 1968: 232).
In interpreting Benjamin's meaning here, Miriam Hansen insists that the
blue flower imagery helps Benjamin lend a political force to cinema-as-
form. For Benjamin, she writes, ‘… if film were to have a critical, [i.e. anti-
fascist] cognitive function, it had to disrupt that chain [the mythical chain of
mirrors] and assume the task of all politicized art and [quoting Susan Buck-
Morss] “not to duplicate the illusion as real, but to interpret reality as itself
illusion”’ (Hansen 1987: 204). The ‘metaphor of the blue flower — the
unattainable object of the romantic quest’, she adds, suggests the critical
role of cinema's ‘distortion of distortion.’ Most significantly, according to
Benjamin, the actor who is able to maintain her/his ‘humanity in the face of
the apparatus,’ frees the mass audience from myth as they ‘watch an actor
take revenge in their place …’ (Benjamin quoted in Hansen 1987: 205).
To elaborate the critical anti-fascist aesthetic insights of Benjamin and
others that Scanner delivers, we can consider the name of Dick's main
protagonist, Arctor, likely a reference to the subject-as-actor, and follow his
relationship to illusion. Arctor is under cover, acting an identity, performing
in effect for the scanners. Moreover, his persona is deployed on both sides
of the surveillance process; he is both a subject and object of surveillance
and is therefore performing for himself as well. The split in his focus of
observation is doubled by the way Substance D has created a split between
the hemispheres of his brain. These dual divisions encourage a model of
historically fraught subjectivity that is decidedly anti-fascist in more or less
the sense in which the Brechtian subject emerges from his theatrical
practice. In Brechtian theater, what is in front of the audience, as it is acted
out, is conveyed as something that might well be otherwise. The effect is a
dualism that points to the possibilities of multiplicity, a sense of not simply
what is being done ‘but what might just as well have not been done, what
might have been something else altogether, or simply have been omitted’
(Jameson 1998: 58). As a result, what is presented is a challenge to the
fascist desire to reign in contingency in order to establish historical
necessity.

A cinematic Philip Dick anti-fascism yet again: Minority

Report
Everybody runs; everybody runs.
(John Anderton (Tom Cruise), Minority Report)

As Kriss Ravetto (2001: 227) points out, ‘… hundreds of films have been
produced on the subject of fascism …’ However, I want to emphasize that
what makes a film anti-fascist is not necessarily a matter of the way it
explicitly addresses the historically bounded phenomena that produced a
Hitler and Mussolini. Jacques Rancière makes the point well in his
reference to the politics of the novel. For example, he suggests that Virginia
Woolf's novels are more connected with democratic history than Emile
Zola's, not because she wrote ‘good social novels but because her way of
working on the contraction or distention of temporalities, on their
contemporaneousness or their distance, or her way of situating events at a
more minute level, all of this establishes a grid that makes it possible to
think through the frames of political dissensuality more effectively than the
social epic's various forms’ (Rancière 2004: 65). Accordingly, one might
surmise that Dick's Man in the High Castle (1992), which explicitly
addressed an America that is organized around the victory of fascism
(Germany and Japan have won World War II as the novel begins), is his
most anti-fascist story. However, I want to suggest, in accord with
Rancière's point, that like his Scanner, Dick's Minority Report, especially in
its cinematic realization, delivers a more effective anti-fascist aesthetic.
The film version of Minority Report articulates well the Deleuzian
conception of micro fascism and goes beyond Scanner's anti-fascism
because it displays a coercive society-wide securitization rather than the
more focused assault on one of society's sub-cultures. That securitization is
effectively an imposition of a ‘peace’ that stifles all forms of dissonance.
Although the society represented is not explicitly fascist, as it is in Dick's
Man in the High Castle, it is nevertheless a society of totalizing control, run
by a precrime unit that arrests and incarcerates anyone who is interpreted as
planning a violent crime. The suborned interpreters are precogs, psychic
women who are connected to informational prostheses to form a person-
technology assemblage. With its form as well as its content, Steven
Spielberg's film version of the story provides the most notable
representation of a contemporary politics of surveillance, well captured in
Gilles Deleuze's conception of ‘societies of control.’ Whereas Foucault
conceived the disciplinary society, based on enclosures — the school, the
factory, the prison and so on — as historically supplanting the old societies
of sovereignty, Deleuze argues that the society of control has displaced the
disciplinary society. It is not a society of walls and containments but a
system of domination that works through modulations and coding
procedures: ‘In the control societies what are important are no longer
numbers and names but codes, a password instead of a watchword’
(Deleuze 1992: 5). They are codes that control movements from one
function and setting to another and the coding mechanisms are located in
dominant centers, centers of capitalism (global incorporations) but also
articulated in the control measures of the state.
Although capitalism is disproportionately connected to ‘societies of
control,’ there is also a micro fascism that is state-oriented. With respect to
this aspect, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘The administration of a great
organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of
petty fears [amounting to] … a macropolitics of society by and for a
micropolitics of insecurity …’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 215–16).
Within this model of securitization, the social order has two opposing
modalities: machines of capture in which bodies and spaces are coded, and
lines of flight, which are the mechanisms and routes through which people
elude the machines of capture. In effect, the lines of flight constitute
micropolitical reactions to the mechanisms of capture to resist the society's
‘normalizing individualization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 208–31).
Minority Report's enactment of a dynamic opposition between the
machines of capture and the micropolitics of escape takes place in
Washington, DC, in 2054, where the ‘precrime unit,’ which has aspirations
to become a national program, operates the policing mechanisms through
which persons identified as future criminals are arrested and incarcerated.
While the eventual escape and return to normal life of one of the precogs,
who has been held in a drugged state of suspended animation, is part of the
film's drama, the most significant body (the primary aesthetic subject) in the
film is that of John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), who when the film
opens is the head arresting officer of the precrime unit. Anderton's moving
body, first as part of the mechanisms of capture and subsequently as a
fugitive from the unit he formerly led, drives the film's primary narrative.
At first he operates as a wholly suborned body, with his movements, for
example, gesturally drawing out the information on a future crime from his
unit's media technology screen but then, after he is set up and programmed
by the unit as a future criminal, as one moving to stymie the machine of
capture.
Ultimately, Anderton's exoneration involves a recovery of the precrime
unit's suppressed archive of minority reports (submitted by precogs who see
the future crime differently). As Philip Dick's version of the story puts it,
‘The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority’
(Dick 2002: 45). In the film version, the minority reports have been
suppressed (because the head of the program, eager to have it implemented
nationally, has suppressed them in order to represent future criminal acts as
certainties rather than probabilities), and Anderton learns that his only hope
is to find the one in his case, if it exists. Ultimately, although the narrative
has a positive ending (John Anderton is exonerated, the head of the program
is discredited, and the precrime program is eliminated), the film's most
significant aspects are non-narrative, anti-fascist and micropolitical.
In the opening scenes, Anderton's body functions as a physical extension
of the precrime surveillance and arrest functions, filmed with Anderton's
body moving in a musically accompanied ballet that is in harmony with the
machinery of prediction; his movements at this stage are wholly modulated
and choreographed by the system. Specifically, his swinging arms are
shown pulling up the relevant images on a large screen, and subsequently
his moving body is shown closing in on the alleged perpetrator. Later, the
images of his body and its movements are subversive. As his body
challenges the totalizing precrime choreography, he evinces a counter-
movement to those of the system's machine of capture, and to do so he has
to modify his body to subvert the surveillance system — for example, by
having his eyes replaced to subvert the coding system, which reads eyeball
patterns.
As a result, Anderton is an exemplary Deleuzian fugitive: ‘Everybody
runs,’ he says when the police first try to apprehend him, and thereafter his
running requires him to move in ways that allow him to escape from the
coding apparatuses and exemplify Deleuze's suggestion that there are
always forms of flow that elude the capturing, binary organizations.
Notably, apart from Anderton's movements, which articulate Deleuzian
lines of flight by exploiting the gaps in the apparatuses of capture, the
subversiveness of his body is also a function of a film form that opposes the
body to the narrative. As is the case with the aesthetic subject in Scanner,
Bob Arctor, John Anderton's body performs as the kind of cinematic body
analyzed by Vincent Amiel, a cinematic body that is ‘dis-organ-ized’ and
thus resistant to the functionality of the film narrative (Amiel 1998: 7). As a
result, the film uses Anderton's body to realize the Deleuzian political
inspiration to resist the apparatuses of capture and thus works not simply
through its narrative drama but also through its imagery, as an exemplary
anti-fascist aesthetic.

Conclusion: alternative methodological strategies

As I have noted elsewhere, the experience of fascism has had a
disproportionate shaping effect on the post-World War II development of
the social sciences, especially political psychology. As I put it, ‘In the case
of political psychology what was enjoined was a search for the fascist
personality, understood to be a deviant type susceptible to authoritarian
impulses or appeals [and among the inquiries undertaken were] … the
authoritarian personalities studies of Theodore W. Adorno and his
associates, Milton Rokeach's work on open versus closed minds, and H.G.
Eysenck's addition of a tender-minded versus tough-minded axis of opinion
to the study of political ideology’ (Shapiro 1996: xix). In sum, for the social
sciences in this period, to understand the emergent dangers of fascism, one
must inquire into what Adorno et al. referred to as the ‘potentially fascistic
individual’ (Adorno et al. 1950: part one, 1). Thus for Adorno et al., as was
the case for Eysenck, and Rokeach, the problem of fascism emerges from
susceptible mentalities. Those fascism-susceptible mentalities are treated by
Eysenck as an ideological complex, a convergence of conservatism with
tough-mindedness, articulated as a commitment to capital punishment and
other harsh treatments for criminals, among other things (Eysenck 1954:
147). Rokeach (1973) lumped fascist mentality with orthodox Marxism-
Leninism and rendered both mentalities as forms of dogmatic cognitive
organization, while fascism-susceptible mentalities are treated by Adorno et
al. as an indication of ‘psychological ill-health’ (Adorno et al. 1950: part
two, 891–970).
In contrast, when fascism is interpreted as a dispositif — a complex,
coercive apparatus — rather than merely as a mentality, we are in a position
to appreciate its insidious effects on the social order — its war against
difference in the name of social peace — by turning to arts that mobilize
aesthetic subjects who both mime and resist fascism's choreography. If we
heed familiar social psychology versions of fascism, we license a search for
troubled psychodynamic stories and the identification of effective clinical
interventions. If we focus on the fascist dispositif — where a dispositif is ‘a
thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures,
scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions
… the said as much as the unsaid … the elements of the apparatus’
(Foucault 1977: 194) — we are encouraged to pursue inventive staging
rather than psychological investigation; in short, to turn to the arts as they
enact the fascist dispositif and thus, for example, to let Hans-Jürgen
Syberberg's and Philip K. Dick's imaginations trump Adorno et al.'s
recapitulation of the quest for dangerous mentalities.

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Giroux, 1982)
3 Fascism and the bio-political
Brad Evans
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-4

Reich's warning
Gilles Deleuze's account of fascism owes considerable intellectual debt to
the work of Wilhelm Reich. Noting in particular how Reich discredited
orthodox wisdom, Deleuze wanted to question how conditions of servitude,
humiliation and slavery could actually be embraced given the right
conditions:
Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on part of
the masses as a explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires
into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no the masses were not innocent
dupes; at a certain point, under certain conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of
desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 31)

This reading of fascism is undoubtedly provocative. Not only does it bring

the emotional (affective) field back into political analysis. It forces us to
confront the ways in which any society may actually desire that which
ordinarily appears abhorrent: ‘Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own
annihilation, or the power to annihilate’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 183).
Importantly, for Deleuze, since fascism is socially invested i.e. actively
produced, its continued recurrence should alert us to every compromise
made with oppressive forms of power. What Foucault identified to be
‘Fascism in All its Forms’: ‘not only historical fascism, the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to use the desire of the masses so
effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our
everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the
very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: xv).
Deleuze does more than simply cast new light on the nature of fascist
power. He moves us beyond the limits of historically specificity. Fascism is
quite often mistakenly associated with totalitarian power. This power is
embodied in those grotesque projects which, predicated upon the myth of
national supremacy, have ethnically cleansed the social body of particular
minority groups, i.e. Armenians, Jews, Gypsies and so forth. This reading
enables us to identify, rather holistically, highly contingent fascist regimes
which have attempted to totalise their grip on power vis-à-vis the designated
exceptions to the social order. Inevitably, since these regimes are seen to be
the outcome of extremely unique conditions/sentiments, attentions are
drawn to the perversion of grand modern narratives in order effectively to
learn from mistakes in the past, without necessarily abandoning grand
political posturing. Fascism, in other words, tends to be explained in terms
of its historical departures or pathological aberrations. Those darkened
moments that overshadow the otherwise enlightened path towards human
progress and emancipation. Whilst this diagnosis has come to dominate
political theory, Deleuze noted how it was woefully inadequate and devoid
of critical valance. Not only does it fail to account for the intellectual
conditions that allows fascism to eventually take hold; it is deaf to Reich's
uncomfortable and yet brutally honest cry that individuals actually come to
desire the very forms of power that dominate themselves and others alike.
Whilst Deleuze's most pertinent writings on this problematic appeared at
the height of the Cold War, the ‘capitalisation of peace’ he sketched out is
arguably even more resonant today. Fully aware that liberal capitalism had
the edge over its Cold War rival, he specifically warned against the ‘new
fascism being prepared for us’ (Deleuze 2006: 138). This he believed was a
‘global agreement on security’ that was ‘just as terrifying as war’. A ‘vision
of peace’ tied to ‘Terror and Survivability’. Importantly, for Deleuze, since
this vision no longer has any respect for territorial integrities, it brings to
the fore a new problem of fascism that is tied to a problem of planetary
endangerment. More than anticipating the biospherical enclosure of
political space, this reading is fully alert to the advent of the post-
Clausewitzean security terrain that inverts our understanding or security,
power, war and violence:
Total war itself is surpassed towards a peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken
charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the states are no more than objects or means adapted to
that machine. This is the point at which Clausewitz is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say
that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not simply enough to invert the order
of the words so that they can be spoken in either direction: it is necessary to follow the real
movement at the conclusion of which the States, having appropriated the war machine, and
having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates
the state, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 465)

This chapter will foreground these ‘wider political functions’. In doing so, it
will argue that any understanding of contemporary fascism needs to move
beyond the lure of ideological reification and towards understanding it
through the conditioning prism of what Foucault terms the dispositif of
security if it is to be combated in the twenty-first century.

Bio-political mediations
Deleuze's conception of fascism extends well beyond and yet appears prior
to the tyrannies of a totalitarian state. Bypassing sovereign temporalities, it
focuses instead upon those power formations that can appear in many
different localised forms whatever the political emblem. These include
‘rural fascism and city and neighbourhood fascism, youth fascism and war
veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left, and fascism of the Right, fascism of
the couple, family, school and office’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214).
This brings us to the fundamental distinction Deleuze draws between
fascism and the Total State: ‘Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the
totalitarian state, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its
own devising’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214). Whilst totalitarian
regimes are capable of oppressing populations, they result from the actions
of a relatively small number of individuals. Fascism, in contrast, works by
manipulating what appeals to the general population. It mobilises the
masses by drawing attention to political problems of the everyday: ‘what
makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micro- political power, for it is
a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism …
Only micro-fascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does
desire desire its own oppression, how can it desire its own oppression?’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 215). This localised focus is sig- nificant.
Since it is understood ‘the masses certainly do not passively submit to
power; nor do they “want” to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic
hysteria; nor are they tricked by ideological lure’, it is the masses’ active
investment in their own political decay that allows us to challenge all
attempts to give fascism ideological determinism.
Deleuze does not, however, seek to diminish the importance of macro-
specific fields of formation. His vocal admiration for Primo Levi
emphasises this point. Levi's personal testimonies not only explain in the
most intimate details the divisive nature of fascistic rule (even amongst the
Lager's captors); it was his sophisticated account of the economy behind
these relations which obliterated the absurd notion that the phenomena
should be consigned to the pages of history: ‘Nor is it in the extreme
conditions described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being
human. We experience it in insignificant conditions, before the meanness
and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation
of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the
values, ideals, and opinions of our times’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 107).
The argument here is straightforward. Localised or even psychic forms of
oppression only make sense once wider fields of political and social
formation are taken into account. Or to be more specific, since every regime
(dictatorial, monarchical, liberal) has become isomorphous to the politically
suffocating dictates of the world market; there is no reason to presuppose
that any political project is immune to the active production of determinable
inequalities.
So how does desire connect to the wider social field? Deleuze argues that
all desire is assembled. Desire does not exist in some isolated personal
vacuum. It is an integral part of the collective human condition. Desire
connects us to the social world, while the social world intercepts individuals
with its many complimentary and competing flows. Hence, for Deleuze,
‘there is no such thing as social production on the one hand, and a desiring
production that is mere fantasy on the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003:
29). Social production is ‘purely and simply desiring production itself under
determinate conditions’. It is nonsense, therefore, to suggest that individuals
and society can be empirically separated. They are ‘strictly simultaneous
and consubstantial’ (Massumi 2002: 68). Importantly, however, since it is
the assemblage which ‘gives desire a fascistic determination’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2002: 215), the problem, as Eugene Holland puts it, is to question
‘what exactly are the assemblages that produce the “thousand little
monomanias [and] self-evident truths … giving any and everybody the
mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman,
neighbourhood SS man”’ (Holland 2008: 77–78, quoting Deleuze and
Guattari). This is supported by Ian Buchanan (2000), who notes that to
understand the relationship between the human and its world, one must take
into account both the individual desire to exploit determinate conditions,
along with the nature of those assemblages that articulate those desires to
the point of their effective normalisation. For it is only through this wider
strategic focus which connect localised forms of micro-physical desire with
macro-politicised forms of social organisation that the power over life can
be properly understood.
Deleuze famously re-orientated our understanding of social systems by
arguing that ‘lines of flight’ are primary. One implication of this is to
suggest that no social assemblage is ever completely totalising. Life is
always potentially greater than the sum of its assembled parts. This brings
us to an important distinction Foucault draws between the ‘milieu’ and the
‘dispositif’. For Foucault, the ‘milieu of life’ in its original scene is ‘the
space in which a series of uncertain events unfold’ (Foucault 2007:22). It is
a ‘problem of circulation’ that composes of unmediated natural flows (i.e.
weather systems), along with artificially constructed agglomerations (i.e.
populations). This space of flows in many senses correlates to what Deleuze
termed the ‘non-stratified’:
the interior presupposes a beginning and an end, an origin and a destination that can coincide and
incorporate everything. But when there are only environments and whatever lies between them,
when words and things are opened up without ever coinciding, there is a liberation of forces
which come from the outside and exist only in a mixed-up state of agitation, modification and
mutilation.
(Deleuze 1999: 72–73)

If the milieu refers to the open field of possibility, for Foucault, the
dispositif ‘works on the basis of this reality, by trying to use it as a support
and make it function in relation to each other’ (Foucault 2007: 47). It is all
about creating a ‘specific arrangement’ so that life can be made to live: ‘no
longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing
circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad
… in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled
out’ (Foucault 2007: 65). Tasked then with ‘modifying something in the
biological destiny of the species’ (Foucault 2007: 10), the dispositif
operates by, first, promoting what is ‘generally desirable’ to the population,
and second, seeking to eliminate what is uncertain in any given situation.
As Foucault explains:
By the term apparatus [dispositif] I mean a kind of formation, so to speak, that a given historical
moment has as its major function the response to urgency. The apparatus therefore has a dominant
strategic function … I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means
that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete
intervention in the relation of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to
block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a
play of power … The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces
supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.
(Foucault 1980: 194–96)

Whilst Foucault invoked the dispositif in the context of the problem of

security (dispositif de la sécurité), it shares an intimate relationship to the
problem of war. Modern societies are ‘security conscious’ insomuch as our
ways of thinking politically have been dominated by the security
imperative. Modern societies are equally ‘war conscious’ insomuch as our
ways of acting politically have been profoundly shaped by the battles which
have contoured our very existence. There is, however, an important point to
clarify here. As both Deleuze and Foucault (following Nietzsche) properly
understood, it is a mistake to see war and security as strategically opposite.
War is not simply reducible to the absence of peace. Neither does peace
necessarily denote a succession of hostilities. Generating the very
conditions of political possibility, modern politics in fact resembles the
extension of war by other means (Foucault 2003). That is to say, since the
‘grid of intelligibility’ for securitisation continues to extend ‘the operational
practices and discursive assumptions of the logos of war into the logos of
peace’ (Dillon 2008: 176), to reason that peace is the extension of war by
other means, surreptitiously implies that those other means are sanctioned,
justified, articulated and made real on account of their prevalence within a
war/security/life triangulation that mobilises the social body against
whatever threatens the progressive imaginary of peaceful settlement.
Oedipalisation is fully invested in this entire process. In Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze puts aside all previous epistemological and ontological
constructions of the subject based on Freudian-inspired structural
articulations. Deleuze's main criticism of psychoanalysis (consequently of
the Oedipus complex more generally) was that the constitution of human
subjectivity is based upon an original moment of negation which
consequently entails reliance upon epiphenomena. Deleuze argued that
desire is not, however, based on an essential lack, along with any such
binary arrangement which precludes multiple expressions, traversal,
possibilities and becomings. More than a problem of sovereign tension/
recovery, the very lacuna of which is premised upon fixed notions of
self/Other, it is an ongoing process that re-works kingship by naturalising
hierarchies and determinable inequalities in the most micro-political,
adaptive and dynamic ways (see Holland 1999). It is therefore the
witnessing of Oedipus as a productive (hence economising) over-coding
force that concerns the contemporary: ‘the child does not wait until he is an
adult before grasping — underneath father-mother — the economic,
financial, social, and cultural problems that cross through a family; his
belonging or desire to belong to a superior or inferior “race”’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2003: 278). Oedipus is ‘born of an application or reduction [of
social dynamics] to personal images, presupposes an investment of a
paranoiac type’. Someone who ‘engineers the masses, he is the artist of
large molar aggregates, the statistical formations or gregariousnesses, the
phenomena of organised crowds. He invests everything that falls within the
province of large numbers (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 279).
This brings us directly to the Foucauldian concept of the bio-political.
Bio- politics refers to the strategisation of aggregated life for its own
productive betterment. It links the ‘individual’ to the ‘population’ via a
general economy of political rule. Deleuze appreciated the applicability of
this concept long before it gained widespread academic currency. In his
book Foucault, he paid considerable attention to those ‘diagrams of power’
in which modern systems of production, power and knowledge begin to
take into account the ‘processes of life’, along with the possibility of
modifying them: ‘administering and controlling life in a particular
multiplicity, provided the multiplicity is large (a population) and spread out
or open. It is here that “making something probable” takes on its meaning’
(Deleuze 1999: 61). This account of power is significant for two key
reasons. First, since life becomes the principle referent for political
struggles, life's politics either lives up to political expectations or puts the
destiny of the entire species into question. As Deleuze says, ‘when power in
this way takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power already puts
itself on the side of life, and turns life against power: “life as a political
object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system
so bent on controlling it”’ (Deleuze 1999: 76). What resistance therefore
extracts is ‘the forces of life that is larger, more active, more affirmative and
richer in possibilities’. Second, once power is broached bio-politically, it
becomes increasingly clear why discourses of (insecurity feature heavily in
the mobilisation of ‘war machines’ for the securitisation/betterment of
politically (disqualified life. For when life becomes the principle object for
political strategies, violence so often associated with historical fascism
appears less pathological and more reasoned:
When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty … when it becomes the ‘bio-
power’ or ‘bio-politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that
emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces the symbol of
sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more
hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the
name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself
to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as a juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as
a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological’ danger.
(Deleuze 1999: 76)

A bio-political reading of fascism is crucial. Foregrounding notions of ‘life

necessity’, the possibility that oppressive forms of politicisation can take
place within legal frameworks becomes clearer. Fascism then is not
necessarily a failure of the liberal imagination even if we understand
liberalism to be simply a juridical commitment to rights. Neither is there
any reason to believe that normative frameworks (especially those tied to
universal moral proclamations) can prevent it from appearing within any
social assemblage. To the contrary, normative judgements are in fact part of
the problem. Essential to the play of power-politics, ‘norms’ normalise
power over by limiting the political field of possibilities. They provide the
necessary moral architecture so that a sophisticated assay of life can take
place on the grounds of reasonable deliberation. They claim a monopoly
over the terms security, rights, justice and peace, so that political
judgements on the qualities of life become morally binding. Normative
questions are not only therefore central to understanding what qualifies to
be politically authentic; it properly disallows life so that its elimination can
take place without any crime being committed. Less a problem of legal
transgression, normative deliberations allow us positively to enforce what is
necessary for a life to be lived well. While this entails the promotion of
certain qualities so that ways of living thrive, it also entails fundamental
decisions about what must be eliminated so that it is possible to overcome
those related dangers to the secure sediment of political existence.

The unification of life

Ever since Hobbes wrote his Leviathan the concept of sovereignty has been
aligned with the unification of life. Wonderfully depicted in the famous
illustration which accompanies his manifesto, the body of the sovereign
always presumes given unity of the body-politic. Security, then, if there is
to be any, insists upon this divine figuration. What confirms political
wholeness, the unity of the authentic political subjectivity, infers a
completion in the order of things; oneness becoming the natural and
intended condition proper to politically qualified life. All else is simply a
dangerous impediment to natural togetherness. Whilst this inception of the
security imperative into the modern imaginary colonised early modern
political thinking to the extent that every political state of mind was
ontologically programmed to become a mind of the state, sovereignty alone
nevertheless always failed to deliver on its promises. As the supreme source
of authority its allegiance has proved incapable of taming the multiplicity of
forces in any given social order. This was fully appreciated by Immanuel
Kant who, contrary to the neo-Kantian juridical proclamations, insisted that
something above and beyond sovereign power was necessary to ensure that
perpetual peace can be established. So how then is the transcendent field
conceived given that sovereign power alone cannot unify the species?
Indeed, what is the unifying principle for the human collective given that
the human condition is always and already assumed by the limits of its
reason to be too dangerously flawed to meet this task alone?
Our answer is actually to be found by paying more considered schematic
attention to the wider corpus of Kantian thought. The familiar Kantian
narrative suggests that the unifying principle for humanity is located in its
juridical commitment rights and justice. Humanity, from this perspective,
makes itself real on account of its commitment to those constituted forms of
allegiance which reason human togetherness to be the natural order of
things. Kant, however, was always dubious that law alone could create the
lasting conditions of perpetual peace he so craved. What is more, not only
did Kant question our ability to access the universal in any given
experience, but he also posed a direct challenge to any universal
predilection by introducing into his schematic a highly contingent notion of
evil premised on its productive, adaptive and earthly qualities (Anderson-
Gold 2001; Michaelson 1990). Kant's project should therefore be less
judged against its ‘Kingdom of Ends’. His belief in the limits of human
reason after-all defied any completed reverence. Neither should he be
simply condemned for condemning us to a representational image of
thought that ties our political imagination to idealised forms. Why Kant
holds such a privileged place in the liberalism tradition is that he introduces
with righteous onto-theological quest the bio-political notion that freedom
is primarily a societal-wide problem of good versus dangerous circulations.
Since the Kantian project in other words merely deploys universal
narratives (in all their idealistic representational forms) in order to mask the
contingent problem of life necessity (which firmly relating it to
‘unnecessary’ conditions rendered evil to be something part of this world),
what is transcendent is principled through an eschatology of the living — a
divine economy of life itself (Evans 2012).
Whilst Kant inaugurated liberalism's bio-political imperative by
moralising the productive nature of human activity, the horrors of Nazism
justified this imperative's imperative. The spectre of the Third Reich both
haunts and conditions the liberal imaginary to the extent that its occurrence
has subsequently given sure moral purchase to the attempts at strategising
planetary life. Nazism could not then be seen to be a tragedy that happened
to the European Jewry alone. It has become the model against which all
human imperfections (political, economic, social, cultural, or otherwise)
could be ultimately judged (Lyotard 1990: 77). This has had a lasting
political impact. Not only has the calling ‘never again’ been used to create
protective enclaves for endangered peoples (a policy in itself which reveals
the highly contingent application of the liberal responsibility to protect), but
it also has been deployed to sanction forms of interventionism that
ultimately have led to the collapse of the Westphalia pretence. Whilst the
trauma associated with Nazism therefore seemed to destroy the very idea of
humanity as a concept the moment it seemed to be gaining widespread
political currency, it nevertheless has become the liberal condition of
possibility par excellence. That is to say, whilst the holocaust in particular
categorically denies any meaningful philosophical intelligibility —
especially if one takes the original task of the philos to be the order of
friendship, every shameful lasting memory it provides resurrects humanistic
impulses out of the ashes of its most troubling episode.
Nazi Germany has proved integral to the revival of liberal thought by
laying the intellectual foundations for the capitalisation of peace to follow.
The work of Friedrich Von Hayek struck a precise chord. In his influential
work The Road to Serfdom (1944), he managed to offer a damning
indictment of state socialism by equating it with the rise of fascist power.
Hayek equally managed to rework the theory of the state insomuch as it was
recognised to provide a necessary regulatory and policing function essential
to the secure functioning of the market economy. Indeed, for Hayek, not
only was the free market the best possible model for dealing with the
devastating economic problems of the time, but more important still, since
it was inextricably bound with individual freedom and liberty, it was
equipped with its own moral and political armoury that is necessarily
universalistic (Shand 1992). In short, for Hayek, given that the political
problems the world faced could be reduced to a matter of economic
organisation, questions of economy were by their very nature of moral and
political importance:
The so called economic freedom which the planners promise us means precisely that we are to be
relieved of the necessity of solving our own economic problems and the bitter choices which this
often involves are to be made for us. Since under modern conditions we are for almost every-
thing dependent on means which our fellow men provide, economic planning would involve
direction of almost the whole of our life. There is hardly an aspect of it, from our primary needs to
our relations with our family and friends, from the nature of our work to the use of our leisure,
over which the planner would not exercise his ‘conscious control’.
(Hayek 1944: 69)

The crux of Hayek's argument was straightforward. The false tyrannical

promises of ‘planning for freedom’ meant that societies had abandoned the
truly enlightened liberal ideal of man as both a free economic and political
animal who was capable of mastering his own moral destiny through
reasoned choice. This abandonment had disastrous consequences in the
sense that it was the dangerous seduction of socialist-inspired planning that
had taken us on an amoral detour which constrained the intellectual and
creative potential inherent to a free market society. The liberated subject
was in other words being suffocated beneath the bureaucratic and
oppressive weight of planned institutionalism. Hayek thus called for a
return of key principles of laissez-faire liberalism which, attending
specifically to the freeing up of economic activity, led to the emancipation
of the political subject on a planetary scale. As Hayek explains, ‘in no other
field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth
century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international
relations’ (Hayek 1944: 163). Through Hayek, not only then was a
conscious call made to challenge the traditional political integrities
enshrined in the principles of Westphalia since they actually stood in the
way of global emancipation. Replacing juridical unity with a truly effective
global political economy, he made it clear that there was an intellectual
obligation to settle the political at all costs:
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of
courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defence of
things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism … Unless we can
make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its
implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the
prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was
the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.
(Hayek 1969: 194)

Whilst Hayek equipped the free market with a sure moral purchase, it is
nevertheless possible to detect beneath the surface a shameful deceit.
Sovereignty for its part has always betrayed unification. As Schmitt (1996)
famously proclaimed, what makes the sovereign concept real is the ability
to declare upon the exception. It only functions by mapping out distinctions
between politically qualified and politically disqualified in a manner in
which the latter informs the former (Agamben 1995). Sovereignty's
technical mantra is therefore ‘inclusive-exclusion’. It relies upon marks of
absolute separation in order to define the realm's moral and political
registers. Indeed, it is only by pointing to the epiphenomenal that one's
place in the world begins to make any phenomenological sense. Without
‘them’ who are ‘we’? Without ‘externalities’ why the ‘internal’? Without
‘endangerment’ what need for the ‘sovereign’? Such markers have
undoubtedly dominated what it means to think politically. Moving through
the allegiant frames of Queen and Country, Fatherland, Motherland,
Homeland, Nation, and even onto the final great binary of ‘outright’
destruction made possible by the geo-strategic divisions of the Cold War,
sovereign unity has been inextricably bound to a regimes of power and
violence that are ‘marked out’ by clear lines of demarcation between
self/other, inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, and so forth. Its
unity at best bequeaths uneasy alliance, while at worst Total War.
Progressive unification in contrast is made real on account of its modes
of ‘incorporation’. While these modalities emanate from humanistic
sensibilities, they are nevertheless initially conceived in ‘quantitative’
terms. This enables relative comparisons. Indeed, what is progressive as a
matter of principle only finds meaningful expression once wagered against
the ‘regressive’. Since progressive notions of unity are therefore premised
upon ‘statistical’ qualities that sub-divide elements into various deviations
from the ‘standard’, progressive imaginaries consists of ‘unifying’ and
‘divisive’ tendencies which make judgements premised upon temporally
conceived stages of advancement or backwardness. That is not to suggest a
uniform teleology. Modern times are multiple times. Each can live on its
own sliding scale. While a progressive imaginary thus emanates from a
more/less incomplete account of life, the ‘identification’ of those of
‘inferior quality’ who are subject to remedy and demanding engagement
births the problem of race by means of the need for a sophisticated
taxonomical assay. This is the betrayal. Since these taxonomies have never
been simply tied to epidermal schematics and distinctions alone, race has
always been tied to the wider problem of societal progression/regression
that provides judgement on particular ‘ways of life’. The outcome of course
has been to invoke humanistic narratives in order to accentuate the most
acute and violent divisions amongst the human species.
 Zygmunt Bauman's mastery of the Holocaust provides an important
complimentary here. As Bauman notes:
The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust (and more than
contingently related to the overwhelming desire not to look the memory in its face) is the gnawing
suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an
otherwise straight path of progress, more than a cancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body
of the civilised society; that, in short, the Holocaust was not an antithesis of modern civilisation
and everything (or so we like to think) it stands for.
(Bauman 1991: 7)

From Bauman's perspective, the Holocaust appears ‘normal’ in the sense

that it is ‘fully in keeping with everything we know about civilisation, its
guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world — and of the
proper way to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society’
(Bauman 1991: 8). Society then embraced ideas of racial supremacy while
it sought social perfection: ‘What may list that possibility to the level of
reality is, however, the characteristically modern zeal for order-making, the
kind of posture which casts the extant human reality as a perpetually
unfinished project, in need of critical scrutiny, constant revision and
improvement. When confronted with that stance, nothing has the right to
exist because of the fact that it happens to be around’ (Bauman 1991: 229).
Not then some moment of exceptional crises. It was in fact normal that the
Nazis’ fascistic appeal man- aged to mobilise popular support by
manipulating desires to terrifying yet normalizing affect.
Bauman's work exposes fascistic violence in a thoroughly modern (i.e.
reasoned, rational and calculated) way: ‘Jews were to die not because they
were resented; they were seen as deserving death (and resented for that
reason) because they stood between this one imperfect and tension ridden
reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happiness … They were killed
because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the schema of a perfect
society. Their killing was not the work of destruction, but creation’
(Bauman 1991: 76, 92). So contrary to Agamben's insinuations, this
particular genocide was not a problem that opened up a threshold between
legal/illegal exceptionality. Operating within the law, notions of legality
were openly recruited into a wider normative framework in order to set out
those who deviated. This narrative is undoubtedly challenging. Detecting
within modern reason itself a distinct logic of power which sanctions the
wholesale slaughter of millions providing it can draw upon the daily
security concerns of life necessity/survivability, fascism is firmly embedded
within the operative fabric of bio-political mod- ernity. Not only does this
force us to come to terms with the enlightenment's racist heritage, but it
demands a more considered appreciation of the lessons to be learned so as
to move us beyond the narrowly defined remit of sovereign
protections/abuses.

The insecuritisation imperative

For every ‘great organised molar security’, there always exists ‘a whole
micro- management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the
point that the motto of domestic policy makers might be: a macro-politics
of society by and for a micro-politics of insecurity’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2002: 215, 216). This logic of supplement is telling. Since security at the
widest levels is premised upon the securitisation of the local, what happens
locally is always directly concerning since it impinges upon the wider frame
of reference. Local forms of insecuritisation today are firmly written against
all our securities. With the contemporary milieu of planetary life tied to a
global problem of life necessity, no longer does one act out of national
survivability alone. Total planetary endangerment is now the default setting
for a broadened and deepened security agenda that places life centre to its
political strategies. Moving then beyond any geo-strategic account of
vulnerability, contemporary liberal subjectivity is now made real on account
of its need to be resilient to each and every threat which potentially
threatens to engulf total species existence. Insecurity as such no longer
registers in epiphenomenal terms. What threatens is no longer ‘out there’. It
is endemic to a liberal will to rule which, denying the outside any rightful
distinction (even though life still exists beyond the liberal pale), imagines a
political and social world of active incorporation that is already foreclosed.
This is what it means to live in an age of liberal reason. Not that
liberalism is universally embraced; more that everything, as a de facto
given, ought to be incorporated. This has had a number of telling
implications: first, encouraging a more proactive phase of liberal
engagement, the conduct of war has become fully bio-politicised in the
sense that war has been inextricably tied to human-itarian considerations
(Reid 2006; Dillon and Reid 2009); second, with sovereign integrities
bypassed, maladjusted societies have been increasingly brought into a
global imaginary of threat (Duffield 2007); third, since this has led to the
merger between the military and the developmental, Clausewitz has
effectively been inverted on a planetary scale so that liberal politics has
become the continuation of global war by other means (Evans and Hardt
2010); fourth, with the very idea of ‘the people’ considered to be resolved
by the global closure of political space, once-familiar distinctions between
the inside/outside, military/ developmental, war/peace and soldier/citizen
have entered into lasting crises (Evans 2010); and fifth, since what has
become known as the development- security nexus (directly tying the
dramatic materialisation of life to conditions of social cohesion) has
continued to widen its security ambit to include the environment and
climate adaptation, liberal bio-political rule has become generalised so that
the management of ‘active living space’ matters for all our sakes on a
planetary scale (Evans and Duffield 2011). None of this has made us feel
any safer. It does, however, insist that since nothing, no one and nowhere is
strategically marginal, nothing, no one and nowhere can be left to chance!
Whilst the desire to ‘save strangers’ has been presented to be a triumph
of liberal reason, it nevertheless conceals a sophisticated racial assay of
planetary life through which ‘Others’ continually appears to be a problem to
be solved. Indeed, saving strangers more often than not requires saving
them from themselves. While this neo-colonial tendency can be traced back
to the early enlightenment period, new impetus has been added in the post
9/11 moment. Building on from the 1990s’ Human Security notion that
underdevelopment was dangerous, local maladjustment increasingly has
appeared to have planetary consequences. What happens in the most remote
areas is taken to have dire consequences for our metropolitan districts.
Afghanistan proving to be the case point. With the local therefore having
collapsed into the global, our sense of (in)security has been firmly written
alongside the (in)securitisation of who are deemed to be regressive in a
world of radical interconnectivity. So not only does the existence of
Otherness become the default setting for planetary security governance, but
it is right to intervene in order to transform any society providing what is
politically necessary can be linked to global problems of life necessity.
This is not a difficult connect. The idea that we need to think of threats in
recombinant planetary terms has become the truism of the twenty-first
century (see World Economic Forum 2010). Terror itself now appears so
parasitical to every form of disaster that it is fast becoming the basis for a
new normalcy as the advent of the all hazard threat spectrum increasingly
defines the security terrain.1 With everything potentially connectable, it is
now possible to write of the becoming-terror of each and every societal
concern that plagues modern liberal societies. Despite, then, the discursive
respite in the ‘war on terror’ narrative, the strategic effort has actually
multiplied to the extent that all forms of crises management are increasingly
written as part of the counter-terror strategy. Think, for instance, of the
becoming-dangerous of trans-border migrations, toxic agents, infectious
diseases, shadow economies and even financial catastrophes, to name a few.
Not only does this place the capacity for terror into the heart of all possible
eventualities (Evans 2010), but it openly recruits us all into the planetary
war effort so that the way we go about our daily business can be written
against the demise of those who seek to destroy our politically settled way
of life (or vice versa). No wonder that universal commitments have become
altogether contingent. The fact that we may need to tolerate the
proliferation of security technologies, the re-working of legal safeguards,
along with the daily militarisation of public space, simply indicates that
today's recombinant crises are always greater than the secure epistemic
comforts once afforded by ontologically fixed notions of being in the world.
Overwhelmed by its own hyperbolic contingency, contemporary security
practices are no longer tied to limit conditions. Neither do they put most of
their energies into realising universal laws. Life instead is increasingly
governed through the ongoing emergency of its emergent existence (Dillon
2007). This has had a profound impact upon liberal forms of security
governance. Learning from past disasters, whilst seeking to pre-empt the
next possible event, the art of governing has become a proflexive pursuit
open to continual adaptation and change. Provoking what is seen to be
dangerously lurking in the shadows, it seeks actively to produce the future
by forcing that which is yet to be formed into being. It is here that the
economising nature of risk-based strategies really comes to the fore. Not
only do risk-based strategies render possible crises amenable for public
consumption by relating them to personal costs, but they allow for strategic
choices to be made based on likely physical and material consequences.
Decisions, in other words, can be made based on the relative value of the
occurrence. With liberal societies therefore becoming more adept at
producing security-based products for those who can afford the safe futurity
they promise, danger-aversion strategies quite literally come at a cost. So
while this consumerist approach re-affirms that we currently live in the
most insecure of times, the security stakes equally appear far from evenly
distributed as fundamental questions of protection and disposability are
made on the basis of cost-/effect-/risk-based modelling.

Fascistic exposure
Dangers require exposure to the fact. Manipulated desire also requires
exposure to the fact in order to force the body to act upon the present in
order to thwart certain possible outcomes. Invariably, the manner in which
desires are to be mobilised in the face of certain dangers largely depends
upon the political strategies recruiting insomuch as the nature of threat is
always rationality- specific. Every threat occasions a rational underpinning
which foregrounds its primary specificity in the collective political
imaginary. Liberal regimes for their part operate in a particularly novel way.
Unlike totalitarian systems which rely upon secrecy, liberalism brings
everything into the open. It continually exposes us to that which threatens
the fabric of the everyday. Even our own violent excesses are subject to the
same treatment. Since the sources of our anxieties do not therefore rest
upon the fear of the unknown, i.e. the advent of disappearance, fears are
generated through a communicative assault which overloads the senses by
heightening the stakes of all appearances. Indeed, since visual
representations of threat so integral to future imaginaries have become
globally networked — hence effectively rendering localised drama greater
affective power than ordinarily afforded — the visualization of all
dangerous encounters becomes the power of the image combined in its
affects. Everything in this visually internalised world is connectable — our
fears included.
We are reminded by Paul Virilio's (2007) two regimes of fear. Mapping
out the distinctions between totalitarian and liberal regimes, Virilio reveals
some disturbing connections. While the former invokes paranoia by
working in the shadows, the latter strikes at the same senses through
overexposure. The former, in other words, stifles reality through repression
and censorship, while the latter overloads the imaginary in a frenzied
assault so that we are anxiously synchronised yet blinded to the attempted
mastery of social space. The relationship to violence is particularly telling.
While the embodiment of totalitarian regimes is pre-figured in the
‘disappeared’ — those missing lives who offer no empirical verification of
the encounter — liberal violence is virtuously declared. It takes place as an
‘open event’. It actively shapes the world anew by ‘making the world safer’.
Importantly, for Virilio, these affective relations are never simply
articulated in a linear, top-down fashion. Like a networked system they
endlessly feed back: ‘the synchronisation of sensations that are likely to
affect our decisions’ (Virilio 2010: 6). While the problem of terror has
therefore become connectable with all manner of everyday threats,
liberalism produces a different regime of fear that replaces the neat tensions
of sovereign (dis)order with the paradox of a bio-political potentiality in
which life itself always registers to be greater than the sum of its epistemic
parts. This will have a profound impact upon both the spatial and the
subject account of living systems.
Once notions of space are fully enclosed, nothing is epiphenomenal to
the order of things. What terrifies actually emerges from within the afflicted
com- munity. It is integral to the modalities which sustain life. It is therefore
no coincidence to find that contemporary accounts of terror demand
environmental frames of reference (Sloterdijk 2009). Within a global
imaginary of threat, we fear what we actually produce. That is to say, since
what endangers arises from within our living systems, what threatens is
integral to that existence (Virilio 2010). Not only does this imply that terror
is necessarily indiscriminate. It is also indiscriminable and indistinguishable
from the general environment (Massumi 2009). It precludes any prior
elimination of the fact on the basis that its sheer possibility inaugurates its
simulated occurrence. No longer then a conventionally singular problem,
contemporary terrors register in the multiple. Anything can become the
material source of our physical undoing. With sequential notions of
catastrophe as such firmly displaced by an unending continuum of endemic
crises, selective auto-immunity is replaced by the demands for an auto-
responsive logic that strategically connects all things liveable. Since this
invariably lends itself to pre-emptive forms of governance in which all
manner of threats blur into one strategic framework for counter-affection,
the political is effectively overwritten as the normalisation of threat
foregrounds an account of life already assumed to be settled.
Faced with these conditions, geo-strategic tensions appear to be mere
aberrations. Arcane remnants of an outdated past! Not only does this mean
that our sense of political community transcends traditional state-centric
demarcations, but enmity itself is radically transformed. As Michael Dillon
and Julian Reid note, ‘Here, there is no Schmittean existential enemy
defined, in advance or by what Schmitt calls the miracle of decision, by its
radical otherness … instead, only a continuously open and changing field of
formation and intervention: the very continuous and contingent emergency
of emergence of life as being-in-formation; becoming-dangerous’ (Dillon
and Reid 2009: 44). This again is altogether Kantian. While Kant proposed
a life of infinite potentiality, life in the process appeared infinitely
problematic. The Kantian subject there- fore not only finds its proper
expression in our complex, adaptive and emergent times, but the
paradoxical nature of its potentiality has redefined the security terrain so
that indisrimination becomes the default setting. This is perhaps what
Deleuze had in mind when he previously argued that a ‘global agreement on
security’ was ‘just as terrifying as war’, for when our very life processes
become the source of our bio-political concerns, what Kenneth Galbreith
once termed the ‘contented society’ is displaced by an Anxious Mass’ who
fear the infinitely dangerous: All our petty fears will be organized in
concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of
us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face,
every dissonant voice.’
Whilst it is common to suggest that this dismantling of traditional
sovereign allegiance has resulted in a crisis of subjectivity — to say that the
subject is in crisis misses the point. Liberal subjectivity is made real on
account of its ability to live through the ongoing emergency of its own
emergence. Eschewing fixed modes of being, it is forever in the making.
The liberal subject is therefore the subject of crises (Evans 2012). It lives
and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of
recovery. None of this is incidental. It is central to paranoiac underpinnings
of contemporary forms of fascism. While security has become the main
criteria of political legitimacy (Agamben 2001), still we hold onto the belief
that subjects of crises are desirable. Freed from the boundary-drawing
constraints of the past, it is the risk- embracing subject who is enriched
beyond their forbear's wildest dreams. This reveals the fateful paradox of
our times. Encoded with an altogether more powerful bodily trope,
contemporary liberal subjectivity is assumed to be exponentially more
powerful and dangerous because of it. It, too, registers the same dynamic,
decentralised and recombinant presumptions which give risk societies their
very meaning. If its allegiance, then, can no longer be taken for granted,
neither can its actions be anticipated with absolute precision. It, too,
operates beyond the epistemic pale. While planetary life is therefore seen to
be the proper embodiment of liberated political existence, life's emergent
globality renders it globally dangerous unto itself because of this
potentiality. We must in short learn to embrace and yet fear what we have
become.

Life as bio-technology
Late liberalism shares certain features with Deleuzian ontology. Like
Deleuze, it eschews fixed notions of being. Undermining traditional forms
of sovereign allegiance, it seeks to create political communities anew. Like
Deleuze, it also warns against the potential for political endangerment to
reside in the most localised of levels. The post-Industrial individual's
capacity to inflict a micro-apocalyptic attack is the case point. However,
this is where the similarities end. Not only does Deleuze's preference for the
micro-political stand in marked contrast to the universal orientations of
liberal advocates, but Deleuze's allegiance to the affirmation of difference
puts him in direct conflict with the liberal tendency to see the political as a
problem to be solved. Hence, whilst Deleuze puts forward a concept of the
political that is predicated upon one's affirmative becoming — thereby side-
stepping dialectical notions of enmity (Evans 2010a) — liberalism seeks to
‘control-becoming’ in order to manufacture consent by over-coding the
flows of life. If Deleuze, therefore, can be said to have a distinct ‘politics of
the event’ that is open to a future-anterior, the liberal problematic of
security takes this anteriority to be its point of departure so that all possible
events (which if true to the creative philosophical understanding of the term
‘event’ necessarily has an inherent political element of becoming-different
at its point of emergence) can be inserted into the strategic calculus of the
security dispositif.
Here we arrive at the problem of ‘life as technology’. This problematic
has a considerable genealogy in the continental tradition. Beginning with
Nietzsche, it would subsequently resonate throughout the critical works of
Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, to name a few. While
Heidegger in particular is widely regarded to be the most influential theorist
of technology, it was in fact Carl Schmitt who offered a purposeful critique
that was fully aware of the political, cultural and philosophical stakes
(McCormick 1997). Schmitt's contribution is significant for a number of
reasons. In particular, for our concerns, it was Schmitt who: first,
understood how technologically driven forms of oppression are latent
within liberal regimes of power; second, related liberal oppression to the
problem of the securitisation of life so that the political gets infiltrated by
technologised vision of being; third, understood that technology referred to
an entire ontological framework through which notions of political
authentication take place; fourth, appreciated how technological processes
of authentication are of an entirely different nomos to that of law, so that
juridical safeguards tell us nothing and offer no protections from those
technologies that fixate on the qualitative and the particular; fifth, paved the
way for an understanding of technology that moves beyond mere scientism,
so that the bio-affective dimensions to political manipulations are
appreciated; and sixth, set out a framework so that juridical ‘states of
exception’ appear markedly different from economising ‘states of
emergency’ that denote a more normal (though no less oppressive) state of
political affairs.
 Despite Schmitt's revival in the post-9/11 moment, very few have sought
to resurrect these particular concerns. Instead, his turn in fortunes in part
emanates from liberal engagements that have sought to deploy Schmitt
against himself in order to provide liberals with a way of distancing
themselves from the perceived geo-strategic excesses of the global war on
terror. With exceptionality therefore forming the basis on which a truly
internationalist order of things is said to depend, Schmitt has been
summoned to reveal the truth of a world in which power operates beyond
the law. Leaving aside the fact that these accounts categorically fail to see
liberalism as a contemporary regime of power, not only do they maintain
the ‘friend/enemy’ decision in order to draw out their own ‘concept of the
political’ (hence openly adopting Schmitt's methodology as they attempt to
criticise him), but by pursuing some pure theory of the exception that does
not grasp the ongoing exceptionality of every single law-making process
(i.e. every law is made in response to some perceived exceptional moment
of crises to prevailing order), there is a complete failure to deal with his
wider corpus of which exceptional politics is merely a temporal ordering
principle. Hence, while these attempts invariably fall into the precise
dialectical trap that Schmitt set (so that enmity is subsequently tied to a
vision of (in)humanity complete), no attempt whatsoever is made to deal
with the links between Kantian positivism and technological determinism
which he believed to be the basis of liberal oppression.
Despite our concerns with Schmitt, there is an evident danger here. Like
Heidegger, we cannot get away from the fact that his personal intellectual
journey proved to be politically disastrous. His personal affinities with
Nazism, in particular, make it extremely difficult to engage his ideas
especially in the context of fascism without invoking certain moral outrage.
One possible way of navigating through these troubled waters is to expose
the fateful paradox of his particular thought process. While Schmitt sought
to rework the ideas of Hobbes in order to antidote liberal formalism with
the myth of National Social- ism, he actually ended up supporting a regime
that became the master of the types of technologisation against which his
work was so keen to warn. This was certainly anticipated by Walter
Benjamin. Warning against the Schmittean ‘myth of the nation’ which was
presented to be the antidote to the liberal age of technology, fascism as
Benjamin explained was nevertheless consummate to the aestheticisation of
political forms of domination to ideal mythical forms more violent than
traditional forms of rule long since overcome:
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of
the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to its knees, has its counterpart in the
violence of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values … All efforts to
render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war … ‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus’ says Fascism,
and … expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense of perception that has been
changed by technology.
(Benjamin 1968: 241)

Despite the violence and failures of Schmitt's thought, he does unwittingly

force us to confront the dangers of political theology — whether the myth
of unity is to be located in the ‘Nation’ or indeed the universal predilection
to ‘Humanity’ complete. He also forces us to confront how the politics of
technology can close down the fields of political possibility. Liberals, for
the most part, have failed to come to terms with these particular debates.
One struggles to find any reference whatsoever to issues of technology in
the thought of recent luminaries like John Rawls for instance. When the
concept is introduced (like bio-politics), a familiar Weberian move is
adopted by introducing human agency so as to argue that the liberal subject
cannot simply be reduced to some mechanical instrument capable of being
prodded into action. Such critiques, however, rest upon particularly bad
readings of technology/bio-politics, which tend to follow directly on from
earlier counter-criticisms of continental philosophy by arguing against the
reduction of life to the level of pure technology. A return to Deleuze is
again necessary. Not only did he offer a more considered reflection on the
politics of technology which frees us from these purely technical accounts,
but his introduction of desire into the social field allows us firmly to cast
aside any attempts to link bio-political concerns with the abandonment of
political subjectivities.
Deleuze argued that technicity is not simply ‘machine-like’ or purely
‘technical’. Neither do machinic forms of enslavement precede social
assemblages: ‘machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there
is human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt
the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it
to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of
all by a diagram and taken up by the assemblages’ (Deleuze 1999: 34).
While some technologies may there- fore be completely indifferent to the
politics of life, we nevertheless still pro- duce what we desire. Since
technologies are not therefore enslaving per se, we need to analyse the
intimate relationships between social assemblages and the instruments they
positively deploy in the daily functioning of their systems of power,
knowledge and rule. Appreciating this reversal, Deleuze does more than
simply nuance our understanding of the politics of technology by
introducing human desire into the frame. By foregrounding the desiring
subject, he offers an account of bio-political fascism that is all about the
active liberation of certain political subjectivities/agencies at the expense of
others. Inverting then any account of technologically driven de-
politicisation which stands accused of leading to the evacuation of all
politics — more seductive still, following Deleuze, bio-politicised fascism
refers to the active politicisation of desires to the point of their unmediated
technical delivery.
Deleuze exposes the mistaken link between bio-politics and the
abandonment of political agency thesis. He also allows us to see that our
problem is not one of de-politicisation if one understands this process to be
the full reduction of life to some purely instrumental vision of species
being. Hence, moving beyond the soulless and emotionless narratives of
techno-pursuing instrumentalisation, his critique of affective bio-machinic
assemblages reconciles bio-logical capacities with the governance of life in
a machine-like manner. With machinic assemblages seconded by social
relations, what matters are the socially invested power relations which lead
to the (self)-deprecation of life. Whilst historical readings of fascism
therefore continue to separate passions from progressive rationalities, our
task remains to understand how desire can be manipulated in order to
permit the wilful subjectification of ourselves and others. So in spite of the
fact that the broadening and deepening of the security agenda is premised
on countering any abuse of political power, unless the political is privileged
in these encounters there is no guarantee that lives won't be politically
suffocated, so that once again Spinoza's tragic question echoes to reason
‘why is it that the masses stubbornly fight for their servitude as though it
were their liberation?’

Notes

1. This is clearly articulated in the British government's National Security

Strategy (2008), which explains: ‘the overall objective of this National
Security Strategy is to anticipate and address a diverse range of threats
and risks to our security, in order to protect the United Kingdom and
its interests, enabling its people to go about their daily lives freely and
 with confidence, in a more secure, stable, just, and prosperous world
… [Threats and risks] are real, and also more diverse, complex, and
interdependent than in the past. The policy responses outlined …,
therefore, [are] not only individually vital to our future security and
prosperity, but also wide- ranging, complex, and, crucially,
interdependent. They reflect an integrated approach to developing
policy and building capability, intended to deliver results against a
number of linked objectives.’

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4 Movement and human logistics
Pre-emption, technology and fascism
Geoffrey Whitehall
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-5

The likelihood that someone in a Western leadership position (i.e. George

W. Bush, Barack Obama, Stephen Harper, Nicolas Sarkozy or Silvio
Berlusconi) will be called a fascist today has increased (and perhaps for
good reason). Underlying this trend is an abandonment of the
exceptionalism of historical fascism and Nazism and, first, the
generalization of fascism as if it were a logic of politics, and/or second, the
mobilization of fascism as an axiological marker. In this chapter, I am
uninterested in the second (but also likely) explanation and am more
sympathetic to the possibility of the former. After all, the desire to find
another way to call someone or something evil, alien or fascist seems to lie
within the domain of an ever-proliferating fascist logic of politics.
A similar argument can be made about the often twinned term genocide.
Although there has been a proliferating use of the term as an axiological
marker of immanent fascism (and strategy for securing global action), there
has also been a parallel move away from linking genocide with the
Holocaust and Nazism. There are many more examples of genocidal
violence that are linked, not with historical fascism, but with colonialism,
totalitarianism and imperialism. Aimé Césaire (1972) identified the
fascination with the European genocide, for instance, with a discourse of
colonialism that treated these horrific events as exceptional instead of as
exemplary of something that was practised and perfected on non-
Europeans. Similarly, Hanna Arendt (1951) tied the European genocide to
scientific racism and bureaucratic efficiencies developed in South Africa.
Contemporaneously, Mahmood Mamdani (2001) traces the origins of the
populist Rwandan genocide to the production of political (not cultural)
identities through direct rule (native/settler) and indirect rule (divide
ethnicities and rule) during the colonial project. Mamdani also points to the
recent desire to mobilize the term as a tool (or ideological crutch) of
Western humanitarian intervention in the Sudan (2009). ‘If genocide is
indeed’, as Michel Foucault argues, ‘the dream of modern powers, this is
not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power
is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race and the
large scale phenomena of the population’ (Foucault 1978: 137). Perhaps
neither genocide nor fascism is entirely exceptional.
In this vein, a logic of politics that replaces lived complexity with
epistemological categorizations of self/other, settler/native,
civilized/barbarian and friend/enemy is shared by modern colonialism,
totalitarianism, imperialism, fascism and liberalism. Exploration of this
logic of politics has proliferated with the celebration of Giorgio Agamben's
work on the life that can be extinguished without violation to the internal
codes of civility in Homo Sacer (1998). Attention to refuges, enemy
combatants, infected lives and the global dispossessed is a meaningful
expansion of those earlier efforts to link fascism to broader political logics.
However, this singular attention to this logic of politics (sovereignty,
security and community) could benefit from some conceptual flexibility (if
not liquidity). Privileging the political logic of sovereignty through
perpetual critique is undesirable if the objective is renewing the political
itself.
In this chapter, I turn away from this logic of politics and instead
emphasize a logic of movement. A new political imaginary (both in terms
of diagnosis and directive) is needed that does not set up questions of
movement in order to celebrate their opposites in security, peace, justice
and reason. As such, I begin within movement, war and logistics. An
attention to movement, in general, and kinds of movement, in particular, is
required to become politically adequate to the challenges of contemporary
fascism.

From nomadology to Clausewitz and back again

Deleuze and Guattari's essay Nomadology (1986) remains one of the most
impressive works upon the political imaginary because it treats movement
as a creative force and not as a condition to be solved. From a kind of
encounter between the state, as an apparatus of capture, and the nomad, as a
line of flight, Deleuze and Guattari introduce an appropriated war machine
that is housed in the name of State Security. While the state operates with
the assumption that it has captured the war machine in the service of its
limited wars, those tendencies towards total war remain ever-present. The
war machine retains its deterritorializing nomadism. That the state never
had a war machine of its own is, in itself, a kind of warning; the state
should not be presumed to be in control of war.
Deleuze and Guattari's acknowledgement of the possibility that the war
machine takes itself as its object runs contrary to the Clausewitzian claim
that the state may use war as a mechanism to achieve its limited political
objects (i.e. establish political peace). They warn, ‘when total war becomes
the object of the appropriated war machine [it] can reach the point of
contradiction … [and become] unlimited’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:
118). However, ‘total war is not only awar of annihilation, but ariseswhen
annihilation takes as its “center” not only the enemy army, or the enemy
state, but the entire population and its economy’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1986: 118). Here, Deleuze and Guattari are not making a claim about the
scope and scale of war; instead, nothing escapes total war's unlimited gaze
because the appropriated war machine, with itself as its object, exists as a
self-actualizing movement. In this event, even the end of unlimited war fails
to provide a limit to this self-actualizing movement. War is without end.
Clausewitz's peace becomes a point of transduction as this new automatic
logic of movement is born.
Given that Deleuze and Guattari's writings on war in Nomadology are
directed, in part, towards the problem of fascism, it is worthwhile to ask:
did fascism, as a logic of movement, survive World War II? Although they
do not exactly give a clear answer to the question in one of their most
stunning statements, Deleuze and Guattari do establish the stakes of the
question. They assert ‘this worldwide war machine, which in a way
“reissues” from the State, displays two successive figures: first, that of
fascism which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than
itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, post-fascist figure
is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly as the peace
of terror or survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space which now
claims to control, to surround the entire earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:
118–19).We are left to wonder, nonetheless, did post-World War II peace
become a point of transduction when a new kind of ‘post-fascism’ was
born? Has the whole earth fallen to a kind of generalized war called peace?
In response, Deleuze and Guattari's indebtedness to Clausewitz remains
instructive.
 Clausewitz's optimism about politics limiting the drives of war (i.e.
hatred, animosity, the play of probabilities and chance) is revised by
Deleuze and Guattari. They reverse his maxim ‘war as the continuation of
politics through an admixture of other means’, to read ‘politics is the
continuation of war by other means’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 118–19).
In this spirit, war itself is the driving force. Clausewitz's theory of limited
war, as such, is read against his optimistic dismissal of the likelihood of
total war. Instead of limiting war, the complexity of hatred and animosity,
the reciprocal nature of war and the play of probabilities and chance, in the
end, redefine, reenergize and transform war. War, in this sense, might
become total (or even absolute). The three reciprocal actions of war that
Clausewitz identifies are critical here: first, war leads to the extreme;
second, as long as the enemy is not defeated, he could defeat me; and third,
a mutual enhancement of fear creates a new extreme (Clausewitz 1982:
103–5). Through these three reciprocal actions, war reveals itself to be its
own engine and, irrespective of state policy, its own end. Because Deleuze
and Guattari do not give origin or ownership of war to the state, wars need
not be restricted to finding their end or limit in political peace. Limited wars
may find further fulfilment in one or more continuous wars and become
what Clausewitz initially rejected: war is its own object (Clausewitz 1982:
106).
At least two post-WorldWar II horizons are available. First, total war
becomes politics (as Benjamin, Foucault and Agamben have suggested). In
this instance, the suspensions of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition are
extreme examples of a total war (or total peace) that seeks total domination
as its political object. To this end, we are right identifying every form of
pastoral power and petty fascism as the real emergency of our times. From
humanitarian organizations, to management consultants and community
policing, governmentalized war is everywhere! Or (and this ‘or’ need not be
exclusionary), war develops through one of its other constituent parts,
retains its own potentialities and becomes a different kind of movement.
Specifically, if Clausewitz's war is less about the ‘who, what and where’ of
politics than the exceptional choice of object, then the broad underbelly of
the war/politics synthesis might be that objective channel of war called
‘logistics’.
Treating logistics as the heart, and not the sideshow of war, would require
further distortion of Clausewitz's theory of war and would invite developing
the position of Clausewitz's critic, Baron de Jomini. For Clausewitz,
logistics are not tactical (i.e. use of military force in combat), strategic (i.e.
use of combat for the object of war), nor political (i.e. deciding the object of
war) (Clausewitz 1982: 173). As such, logistics are only ‘conditions’ and
‘extraneous activities’ that are used for the ‘maintenance of troops’
(Clausewitz 1982: 176). They do include war-like activities (i.e. building
infrastructure in the presence of an enemy), but they also include peace-like
activities (i.e. maintaining camps, providing subsistence for the troops,
caring for the sick and wounded, active management and administration and
preparing for war). Jomini warns against underplaying the significance of
these components of war. He states ‘Logistics comprises the means and
arrangements that work out the plans of strategy and tactics’ (Jomini 1972:
69). Without proper attention to logistics, as such, the plan (strategy) and its
execution (tactics) could not take place.
Jomini's insistence on logistics ‘forming one of the most essential parts
of the art of war’ (Jomini 1972: 252) is not necessarily what makes his
contribution interesting. Instead, Jomini's chapter on logistics reveals an
ever-expanding logistical horizon. He laments the inapplicability of old
definitions of logistics (i.e. the movement of troops) to more modern
situations. Instead, an expanded definition risks becoming ‘nothing more
nor less than the science of applying all possible military knowledge’
(Jomini 1972: 253). The importance of harmony of action is so great in war,
he concluded, that the subject of logistics expands: it is ‘not only the duties
of ordinary staff officers, but of generals-in-chief ’ (Jomini 1972: 254). It
should not be surprising, therefore, that the expansion of the military-
industrial complex has been a concern since (at least) Eisenhower, and the
expanding military-industrial-media-entertainment complexes electrify
those interested in contemporary warfare (Der Derian 2001; Singer 2009).
No longer can the developments in civil, economic, scientific and
technological domains be held separate from the theatre of war. If war were
to be waged through peace, as is proposed, it would necessarily pass
through the logistics of caring, feeding, training, entertaining and working
the population.
I want to suggest that this logistical emphasis can be pushed further than
what Jomini allows. There is an even more insidious expansion of logistics
in Clausewitz's own treatment of affect. Remember, the purpose of war for
Clausewitz is to break the will of enemy so that the full force of their battle
readiness cannot be mobilized. Clausewitz warns that ‘if war is an act of
force, it belongs necessarily also to the feelings. It does not originate in the
feelings, it reacts, more or less, upon them … ’ (Clausewitz 1982: 103, my
emphasis). Hatred, anger, fear and courage, for instance, are all emotional
and moral attributes that we easily identify with a theory of warlike
conduct. These attributes could be considered as motivational parallels to
tactics, strategy and combat in war. This consideration, in itself, would
suggest that the affective register constitutes a general infrastructural milieu
in which war occurs. Getting soldiers to fight requires mobilizing this
emotional logistics.
 Developing this logistical element further, Clausewitz's theory of will
does not solely rest with these specific emotional attributes (hatred, anger,
courage) but draws from a more fundamental affective register. This is the
key point. This affective register is the logistical creation and management
of the self. For Clausewitz, what aides in the management of the self is not
higher or transcendent qualities like wisdom (Thucydides), situational
awareness (Sun Tzu) or judgement (Machiavelli). Instead, he offers a
logistical solution: habit. ‘Habit’, Clausewitz argues, ‘gives strength to the
body in great exertion, to the mind in danger, to the judgement against first
impressions’ (Clausewitz 1982: 167). Habit is burned into the very
condition of being and becoming different. In war, we have habits of being.
‘Habit soon blunts impressions’ allowing instantaneous decisions in ‘the
sphere of activity’ (Clausewitz 1982: 160). Habit conditions the decision
and it manages the self logistically. In war we are reduced, before we are
killed, to the logistical element, the habit of living.
The complete reversal of Clausewitz, therefore, would treat the capture
of politics by war as a cursory moment in a much broader capture of
politics, war and life by an ever-expanding and all-encompassing domain of
logistics. Ignoring the centrality of logistics leads to the false difference
between contemporary peace and war. Whereas present day neo-
Clausewitzians see the revolution in military affairs and the push to full
spectrum dominance as reflections of a fundamental transformation of the
nature of strategy in contemporary warfare (Rasmussen 2006: 56), a
complete reversal would push beyond relations of war and peace into the
day-to-day life-habit or management of life itself. Instead of contemporary
warfare's new strategy being the management of multiple risks (i.e.
terrorism, pandemics, bank failures, resource shocks and mass migration)
and its political object being reducing them to zero through total domination
or peace (Rasmussen 2006: 65), a complete reversal would identify Deleuze
and Guattari's post-fascism within an affective logistics of human being.

Global logisticity as global triage

The war-peace that Deleuze and Guattari identify would be located and
would take its time in the logistical systems of systems that function to
make eruptions of war possible while managing an ever-present life-habit of
quotidian peace. To Clausewitz's chagrin, absolute war would be a singular,
self-referential, generalized grinding of peace that consumes the lives of 18
million a year while waiting patiently for the surrender of the next 2.7
billion who live in extreme poverty (Pogge 2008). Habits in war become
normalized in peace. This warpeace would be reflected in an automatic
functioning, an operating system, a reciprocal cycle fulfilling a kind of
permanent pre-emptive global logistical life. Logistical life, Julian Reid
explains, ‘is lived under the duress of the command to be efficient, to
communicate one's purpose transparently in relation to others, to be
positioned where one is required, to use time economically, to be able to
move when and where one is told, and crucially, to be able to extol these
capacities as the values which one would willingly, if called upon, kill and
die for’ (Reid 2006: 13). However, as Clausewitz warns, ‘the noiseless
harmony of the whole action … only makes itself known in the total result’
(Clausewitz 1982: 242). We have yet to name this total result.
What we are witnessing today is the actualization of a global triage
(Whitehall 2009, 2010). It is a global killing machine designed to save
lives. It saves some lives at the cost of others. However, the decision
between saving this life or that life is not political (i.e. deciding between
friend and enemy; Schmitt 1996); it is logistical. If it were political, then all
that would be required to limit contemporary fascism, for instance, would
be to, as Clausewitz suggests, change the political object through already
established political fields (i.e. the state, government, democracy, social
movements or the markets). Granted it is political that some lives are
deemed to be worth less, that others are treated as if they are worth more,
and that these onto-political decisions — about the status of being — are
derivative of a prior politicization of life itself and the production of a
population to be managed. However, these decisions are consistent with the
thesis that war is being continued through politics. A global triage operates
in excess of these very politicizations. These decisions constitute cursory
moments within the automatic functioning of a global logisticity that is
indifferent to the logic of politics and displaces the sovereign decision into
habit.
Obvious faces of the global triage have been witnessed in the H1N1
pandemic, the avian flu emergency preparedness plan, the US policy of full
spectrum dominance and the global ‘war on terror’. Often aspects of
international development policy, humanitarian intervention and human
rights policy are similarly problematized. Less obvious faces of the global
triage, however, operate in normal functioning global trade, finance and
industry, at one level, and the production of desire, culture and fashion, at
the other. The triage includes global-local collaborators from government,
military, industry, media, agriculture, health, education, advocacy and
entertainment. At the heart of contemporary fascism is the way in which
these different triages are learning to coordinate, communicate and integrate
into seamless optimizations and efficiencies. The global triage has two key
components: pre-emption, and technology. Pre-emption pushes the decision
into a non-political time and technology enacts those decisions as if through
habit.
Although the legitimacy of pre-emption is usually debated in military
terms (i.e. the US war in Iraq in 2003 or the Israeli attack on Egypt in
1967), the function of pre-emption is more closely associated with
legitimacy derived from the precautionary principle and the promise of
good governance. Central to these ideals is the creation of a temporal zone
intended to buffer the shocks of immediate events. As such, the threat
assessment that legitimizes all pre-emptive planning for pandemics, for
example, requires the catch phrase: it is not if, but when. Tough decisions
about life and death, allocation of resources, organizational structures are
set in advance so as to offer legitimacy and defer the sense of immediacy. A
kind of governing the future from the standpoint of the present seems
normal; however, what actually occurs is a governing of the present from
the standpoint of an imaginary future. Pre-emptive policy makers are, in
effect, time travellers in a kind of science fiction. This temporal reversal has
significant implications for how decisions are made and politics enabled.
Specifically, within the temporal buffer of pre-emption the boundary
between friends and enemies disappears. While the distinction may be
deployed in the public relations campaigns of such programmes and thereby
putting the issues back into a kind of language that the public ironically
finds non-threatening, within pre-emptive logistics the boundary disappears
entirely. As such, it becomes possible to build momentum by harnessing
and amplifying the threat of the enemy (i.e. cinema, video games). When
the chimera of legitimacy drop (i.e. democracy, civil liberty, habeas corpus),
a well-oiled war machine is revealed. Central to the function of this
machine, as Brian Massumi (2007) explains, is to become like the enemy in
order to destroy the ‘enemy’ (i.e. in counterinsurgency exercises and risk
management), and further, the enemy may actually be employed and/or
enriched in order to make strategic advances (i.e. vaccine programmes,
research plans or investment portfolios). Finally, the objectives of the
enemy become interchangeable with the promises of good governance (i.e.
justice, equilibrium and adaption). Mitigation, as such, has no friends or
enemies.
What is crucial for pre-emption to function, moreover, is the change in
the nature of the decision. Whereas within a logic that defines politics by
the friend/enemy decision (i.e. a privileged function of the logic of
sovereignty; Schmitt 1985), pre-emption allows excessive-binary, extra-
representational, and in-different distinctions to be made. In other words,
pre-emption does not require the choice between this or that (or that … ); it
allows for everything. It operates within an infinite linking of connections.
When nothing is denied or affirmed, whatever works 1 becomes a kind of
operating system. If an alternative definition to the friend/enemy distinction
is offered and politics requires taking or making the time, when you have no
time (Rancière 2009), then not only can the ‘political’ nature of pre-emption
be more fully appreciated, but it also becomes possible to imagine the
unexpected kinds of political horizons operating in and through a global
logisticity. Pre-emption makes time by occupying, exploiting and
mortgaging the future. It works by sucking up time in which political beings
breathe. To politicize logistics would, therefore, be exponentially more
difficult. As will be explored later, it would require that new time be made
for a time that never ‘is’.
The technological component of the global triage further depoliticizes
and displaces the decision. The further the act of deciding is pushed into the
automatic functioning of ever-emerging networks of networks, the more
insignificant the action becomes and the more difficult it is to politicize.
The decision, as such, is no longer an exception awaiting the sovereign
prerogative. Instead it has become a slipstream automatically operating
behind the movement. No longer a bottleneck, roadblockor gatekeeper, the
decision becomes part of the general logistical flow. Coupled with the
normalization of pre-emption, the decision unfolds long after the action has
already taken place.
This development has been anticipated. Manuel De Landa (1991)
identifies World War II as a logistical (not strategic or tactical) war because
it pressed into service the entire resources of the state (De Landa 1991:
108). However, the emergence of cybernetic systems that are automatic,
adaptive and self-correcting has further changed the way and the kinds of
wars that can be fought. De Landa charts the disappearance of the boundary
between advisory and executive capabilities (De Landa 1991: 1) in a
process that ‘would see humans as no more than pieces of a larger military-
industrial machine’ (De Landa 1991: 3). This development would allow a
system to maintain its shape as it takes ‘energy from its surroundings,
channelling and dissipating in through [its other] system of nested eddies’
(De Landa 1991: 8). The beginning and ending of a manoeuvre, battle and
even war becomes insignificant since the movement as a whole strengthens
the logistical systems that further energize adoptions and self-corrections.
‘The problem’, Paul Virilio (2008: 92) emphasizes, ‘is not to use
technology but to realize that one is used by it’. Not only is it impossible to
differentiate the present from the future or the past, who is friend or enemy,
but also what is collaborating in the overall pre-emptive movement. The
technological component not only pushed the decision into insignificance,
but it also makes the pre-emptive movement of networks automatic,
habituated and self-correcting. ‘The thing about collaborators’, he
continues, ‘is that you do not know you are one …’ (Virilio 2008: 203). The
global triage is like pure war. ‘Pure war no longer needs (humans) and that's
why it is pure’ (Virilio 2008: 180). The purity of the global triage operates
in advance of the event in so far as it is the event. It no longer takes
humanity as its object because it is not concerned with human well-being.
 The technological developments of information networks and everyday
machines have far exceeded De Landa or Virilio's projections. As the
boundary between military, industrial and civilian logistics collapses, what
has emerged is something Deleuze (1992) called the ‘societies of control’.
In the societies of control, Deleuze explains,
what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password,
while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much as from the
point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made
of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the
mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or
‘banks’ … The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is
undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.
(Deleuze 1992: 6)

Alexander Galloway (2004) develops these insights into what he calls

‘protocol’. Similar to a society of control, Galloway defines protocol as the
‘techniques for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent
environment’ (Galloway 2004: 7). This technique takes the shape of a
‘distributed network’ (Galloway 2004: 11) (which has replaced centralized
and decentralized networks) and functions through a logic of whatever
works. It simply includes, quoting Eric Hall, ‘intelligent end-point systems
that are self-deterministic, each end-point system to communicate with any
host it chooses’ (Hall quoted in Galloway 2004: 11). Logistical in nature,
protocol is not organized around centres or even objects; instead, they move
to the extreme in order to make things work.
Such a rhizomatic circuit appears to be contingent and unstable, but
ironically, its contingent perpetual emergence is its form. This is precisely
what makes the global triage capable of operating in total contingency.
Mapping the influence of Stephen Wolfram, Kathleen Hayles (2005) calls
the aspiration of total knowledge in contingency ‘the Regime of
Computation’ (Hayles 2005: 23). It can operate within contingency because
the regime requires no foundation (i.e. god, sovereignty, geometry) to
establish truth other than absolute minimalist requirements of differentiating
between something and nothing (i.e. one/zero) (Hayles 2005: 22).
Proponents of the regime make the strong claim that ‘computation does not
just simulate the behaviour of complex systems; it is envisioned as the
process that actually generates behaviour in everything from biological
organisms to human social systems’ (Hayles 2005: 19). Not only has the
boundary between friend/enemy, military/civilian and social/biological
collapsed but so have the boundaries between human, animal and viral. In
the midst of the global triage everything is infected life and part of a
complex, evolving organism.
Deleuze's comments on cinema's ‘automatic and psychomechanical
qualities’ are instructive in reconnecting pre-emption and technology back
to the affective management and creation of the logistical self in the global
triage. For Deleuze, the pre-linguistic images and signs specific to cinema's
spiritual automation, while retaining open war-like potentialities akin to the
highest exercise of thought, also invite a kind of ‘somnambulism’ in certain
movements. Somnambulism denotes a different kind of time in which
decisions are mediated through dream-like states of being. Like
Clausewitz's habituated soldier, the viewer ‘is dispossessed of his own
thought, and obeys only internal impressions which develop solely in
visions or rudimentary actions’ (Deleuze 1989: 263). Here Deleuze's
interest is in how German cinema, under fascism, realized how ‘the art of
automatic movement … was to coincide with the automization of the
masses’ (Deleuze 1989: 263). Superseded by the automata of computation
and cybernetics, however, the configuration of power no longer rests with a
Hitleresque commander. Common to the global triage, societies of control,
protocol and computation power are ‘diluted in an information network
where “decision makers” manage control, processing and stock across
intersections of insomniacs and seers’ (Deleuze 1989: 265). They converge
in a perpetual ‘somnambulism’ which constitutes a kind of habit of being
human. This habit of being transfers logistical information necessary for the
global triage to function in theatre. Simply put, the very forces that have
become the habit of being human collaborate with the logisticity of the
global triage. They collaborate within the affective register of human desire.

Human desire as logistics

That the very forces that define the logisticity of the global triage have
come to define what it means to be a desiring human being is certainly
troubling. Equally troubling is that to desire otherwise would be to invite
suspicion or be disqualified. If the logistical element would optimize the
human element, then why would better be rejected? In this sense,
Clausewitz's summation, ‘all war supposes human weakness, and against
that it is directed’, is particularly relevant. The desire for optimization is
used to defeat human weakness but to do so requires that humanity become
the object of war. Humanity is set to war with itself, not consciously, but
habitually. The human desire to develop a global triage, as a kind of
logistical care of the self, is therefore what is most troubling: we've come to
love to hate ourselves.
The problem of contemporary fascism has obviously become more
complicated than rehashing the political fascism of the twentieth century.
Although it is difficult to make out fascism without recourse to allegorical
fictions, Michel Foucault identified a more resilient kind of comprehensive
fascism. This fascism is a desire within us: ‘the fascism in us all, in our
heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love
power, to desire the very things that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault
quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xiii). Ashis Nandy similarly queried
the desire within colonialism (i.e. the intimate enemy) that encourages
colonized peoples to release forces that alter cultural priorities to fit and
even celebrate the logic of colonialism (Nandy 1998). Nandy explains, ‘as a
state of mind, colonialism is an indigenous process release by external
forces. Its sources lie deep in the minds of the rulers and the ruled’ (Nandy
1998: 3). One of the fundamental problems, as such, is one that Wilhelm
Reich rediscovers in the question ‘why do men fight for their servitude as
stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
29). Reaffirming Reich's sentiment further, Deleuze and Guattari assert,
‘what is astonishing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally
go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a
regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on
strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being
humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed that they actually want
humiliation and slavery not for others but for themselves?’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 29). Guattari explains that within this desire is ‘the rise of
comprehensive fascism’ (Deleuze 1995: 18).
It is not so easy to use human desire or, to evoke a parallel discourse,
human will to oppose comprehensive fascism. On the contrary, it is under
the banner of freedom that humanity's masses seem to desire more triage,
development and security. The little fascist wants more regularity, peace
and quiet, compliance, predictability and continuity. These habits are
desired and desirable. Moreover, the habit of desiring these habits has
grown into a kind of global ethic of care. Care, it seems, has become an
instrument of governmentality and a means of securitization (Duffield
2007). While the global triage is now championed as an extreme form of
caring for others, this caring is predicated upon an extreme disposability of
embodied lives (even our own). Collateral damage in humanitarian wars,
planned casualties in global human health, disposable peoples in the name
of development, and tradable bodies in economic growth remain indelible
images of the global triage. Mitigation, computation, regularity, peace and
quiet, compliance, predictability and continuity require that embodied life
be despised before ‘it’ can be cared for logistically. Life must be made a
problem before it can be solved. The development of the global triage
requires a desiring machine that loves to hate to love to hate to love …
It should be remembered that Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept
of a desiring machine to explain how a subject is produced, not in isolation
from the world, but in the midst of a social formation. Desire, they argue, is
not a natural impulse. Instead desire is always assembled (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986: 399). Desire is an assemblage of ‘machines driving other
machines, [and] machines being driven by other machines’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 1). Desiring machines themselves, as such, ‘represent
nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing and are exactly what one makes of
them, what is made with them, what they make themselves’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986: 288). To be sure, this is not a question of how a desiring
machine is to be used; the point is that desire itself is always already using.
Desire becomes a useful habit. ‘Desire’, Guattari reflects, ‘is part of the
infrastructure’ (Deleuze 1995: 19).
As such, it is not insignificant that Deleuze and Guattari argue that
‘people's interest will never turn in favour of revolution until the lines of
desire reach the point where desire and machine become indistinguishable,
where desire and contrivance are the same thing’ (Deleuze 1995: 20).
Perhaps in just such a time a new people, not a new humanity, can emerge
to take a revolutionary cause as their point of unification. However, this is
likely too optimistic. The difficulty is whether or not the social field that
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize (capitalism as an undifferentiated abstract
machine) neglects the logistical field. In this light, comprehensive fascism
need not be an attack by the body politic on itself, or upon its parts.
Comprehensive fascism makes ‘things’ work. It constitutes a kind of global
efficacy. It is habitual. As such, it is an order that operates beyond politics
and is indifferent to normalized political fields (i.e. the state, government,
democracy, social movements or the markets). Comprehensive fascism
makes the world go round, not by targeting the body politic, but by making
human habit that desires more habit.
It is no longer clear that we live in a world where it is only the state and
corporations that want to kill us (or some). There never was any recourse to
humanity's multitude in the struggle against fascism. As Deleuze and
Guattari remember, ‘No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain
point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983: 29). The problem is greater. Our habits, our desires are
collaborators. We live in aworld where eating, drinking, breathing,
touching, loving conspires against the integrity of life. Our life systems, our
biology, cells, nervous system and chemical balances have become ticking
time bombs. Again, human being is not an object in this war; this killing is
incidental. Just like the planned casualties of the global triage, it is not so
much that the environment wants to kill us, but it will. Just like it is not so
much that cancer, for example, wants to kill us, but it will. Involuntary
killing, as such, is the marker of our age. We no longer face the dilemma of
kill or be killed; instead, we now live in a condition in which we expect to
kill and expect to be killed.
How is it that we live so calmly? While these are processes that humans
have created, they have also become motors that are indifferent to those soft
bodies that they now shape. In the midst of these global-local, social-
biological, war-peace feedback loops, human life has fallen below the
threshold of necessity. In this fall we experience a kind of freedom and this
freedom constitutes a kind of desire. Seeking favour, relevance and
inclusion, it became strategic for humanity to court favour on the logistical
side of the auto-correcting curve of total war and contemporary fascism.
However, as the desire for promises of life, progress and freedom (for
some) has grown stronger, the human being has taken itself as its object. As
humans fall below the threshold of necessity, logistics continually presses
into the fatty future.

Back to a future which has no future

In sum, the answer to our introductory muse should not be ‘can fascism
happen again?’, but instead remains ‘can it be defeated?’ (Stannard 1992:
xiii). This chapter clearly imagines a future that will be more difficult than
the past. I have argued that questions concerning logistics are now more
important than past distinctions between war and peace. I have argued that
contemporary logistics need to be understood as a kind of global triage that
is organized around optimizing human life. However, I have also suggested
that this optimization occurs through practices of mitigation and auto-
correction that require becoming indifferent to specific human lives and
populations. In order for humanity to thrive some other humans must die.
While this should seem troubling, it isn't. It isn't because the triage has
become a habitual compromise that operates pre-emptively and
technologically beyond politics. The habitualization of this compromise,
moreover, is not an isolated event. On the contrary, habitualization is the
component of logistics that desires mitigation and auto-correction. Habit
and logistics are part of the same movement that makes ‘things’ work.
Given the indifference to specific human lives, it would be foolish to
assume we (individually) are exempt from humanity's total war on itself.
On the contrary, the logistical habit constitutes a human desire to be more
human. Humans desire killing machines that save lives in the name of
humanity.
At the heart of contemporary fascism is the way in which different triages
are learning to coordinate, communicate and integrate into seamless
optimizations. This logistical desire to make ‘things’ work is difficult to
politicize. Yet, I remain optimistic that different bodies will endure. There is
no escape. As the Invisible Committee writes in their manifesto, The
Coming Insurrection, ‘to go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not
coming; it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of
civilization’ (Comité Invisible 2009: 96). They joyfully proclaim, ‘the
future has no future’ (Comité Invisible 2009: 23), and here we sit. Perhaps
some consolation can be taken in the following Heideggerian strategy: the
de-politicization of logistics and the banality of life (systems) will
constitute an opportunistic movement. ‘The closer we come to the danger’,
Heidegger asserted, ‘the more brightly do the ways into the saving power
begin to shine and the more questioning we become’ (Heidegger 1977:
317). A kind of tactical solidarity can be re-established and a broader war
might be re-engaged that disrupts the habitual supply chain of the global
triage and enacts a kind of movement of creative forces beyond universalist
strategies that claim human rights, cosmopolitan justice, democratic
procedure and international law.

Notes

1. Thanks to my student Stephanie Redden for this phrase.

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5 A people of seers
The political aesthetics of post-war
cinema revisited
Julian Reid
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-6

What, if any, is the political function of cinema? Gilles Deleuze once

argued that the ‘classical cinema’ of the pre-World War II era participated in
perpetrating one of the great myths of political modernity: that of the
unanimity of ‘the people’ as collective subject. Not simply fascist cinema,
but Soviet and American cinema of the pre-war era, as well as classical
theories of early cinema, assumed the possibility of raising the
consciousness of ‘the people’ through the cinematic medium; of revealing
to the masses the shared truths presumed to be their essence, and which
given faith and perseverance would serve to convert them from disparate
mass into a unified people, thus constituting them as political subjects
(Deleuze 1989: 216). For these reasons cinema’s role was to serve in the
process of typifying the people, of guiding it in its historical process of
sorting out its collective identity. The destructions authorized on account of
that myth by the Nazis as well as by other regimes elsewhere in and outside
of Europe during the twentieth century served, as Deleuze argued, to alter
profoundly the course of cinematic modernity. Auteurs of the post-war
period took a much more jaded view of ‘the people’ and deployed cinema
in antagonism with the state-apparatus and its myth. Classical political
cinema persisted but it was countered by numerous directors working for
the ‘soul’ of cinema. Consequently it was only after World War II that a
truly ‘modern cinema’ emerged distinguished by its perception of the reality
that ‘the people’ as such can never exist. That there is no ‘the people,’ only
‘always several peoples, an infinity of peoples’ who cannot and should not
be made one (ibid.: 220). Modern political cinema is, then according to
Deleuze, a cinema of resistance to fascism, in which the idea of the people
as a unified collectivity is itself an intolerable ideal; a political miasma that
requires constantly warding off (ibid.: 221).
In Deleuze’s time political critique of a radical kind was indeed defined
largely by a preoccupation with resistance to the mythologies of national
unanimity on which the institutions of European state sovereignty still
rested. Here and now, however, the nostalgia for a political subject
equipped with some collective locus of identity is equally definitive. The
continuing saga of struggles against the state's imposition of false unanimity
upon peoples contrasts, at the very least, with the desire to establish some
minimal source of unity in struggles with regimes that are as diversifying as
they are unifying. How does this reproblematization of political struggle
and the politics of resistance affect our understanding of the political
function of cinema? Is Deleuze's thesis concerning the modernity of
political cinema still convincing? This paper reconsiders his account of the
shift from classical to modern cinema for politics in the twenty-first century
by focusing on his account of the post-war emergence of a new type of
‘people to come,’ its ‘cinema of the seer,’ and the power to perceive ‘the
intolerable’ that distinguishes it. We will see that while not a unity in the
classical sense of the term, the people to whom the cinema of the seer
addresses itself may nevertheless be thought about as a typology on which a
new kind of political community is imagined. In addition, however, this
typology, while not of a classical kind, is troubling for a politics of
resistance to fascism. It is not entirely clear that Deleuze's ‘people to come’
succeeds in averting itself from becoming-fascist. This chapter
demonstrates this through a reading of key films focused on by Deleuze,
and then proceeds to show how cinema of more recent times has moved
beyond the naïve account of the politics of seeing that underwrote Deleuze's
claims for the people to come in his seminal two-volume study.

From classical to modern cinema

To understand how classical cinema underwrote the myth of the unanimity
of ‘the people’ we have to grasp the function of the model of ‘true
narration’ underpinning both classical cinema and wider political
imaginaries of the prewar era. Classical cinema, dating roughly until around
the early 1940s, favored a form of ‘true narration’ that develops
‘organically, according to legal connections in space and chronological
relations in time’ (Deleuze 1989: 133). Such a cinema portrayed and
celebrated a world in which actions generate situations, which in turn
generate new actions that link up in a progressive and emancipatory series.
A world in which consciousness is gradually raised as things make better
sense and justice is gradually done; in which the contingencies of life are
subject to order so that a higher truth may be secured; and in which peoples,
both individually and collectively, become increasingly coherent.
Characters and societies encounter misfortunes in these films but only in the
form of challenges which are overcome in their journey to a more complete
state. In this sense classical cinema popularized the myth of a ‘true
narration’ on which the major political projects of its period depended; the
myth that the many different temporalities of lives can be synthesized in a
time that erases their differences and conflicts. Soviet directors such as
Eisenstein, Vertov and Dovzhenko all attempted to portray the progressive
and linear temporality of ‘the people’ struggling to overcome historical
trials and tribulations in the process of their becoming full subjects
(Deleuze 1989: 216). The very purpose of film, for Eisenstein especially,
was to inspire the action of the masses-as-people by increasing their sense
of themselves as a collective subject possessed of a ‘revolutionary
consciousness’ (Bogue 2003: 169). In Hollywood film of the pre-war era,
likewise, directors such as D.W. Griffith mythologized the historical
processes and events through which the diversity and conflicts of the
American people were overcome in restoration of their essential unity
(Deleuze 2005: 30–32; Martin-Jones 2006: 125–27; Iampolski 1998: 49–
82).
During the mid-twentieth century, Deleuze argues, a cinematographic
mutation took place serving to undermine this belief in the unanimity of the
people and its narrative time. In explaining its preconditions he makes
reference, among other things, to the trauma of World War II and its
consequences, the ‘unsteadiness of the “American Dream,” and the ‘new
consciousness of minorities’ (Deleuze 2005: 210). As he argues, the crisis
in cinema precipitated a shift from ‘true’ to ‘false narration,’ reflecting a
more fundamental collapse in faith in the powers of typification on which
the ideal of the nation-state, especially, had historically drawn and which
came to grief, quite literally and on a massive scale, in the killing factories
of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The Holocaust exposed the violence which
a typified people, mystified to the point of assurance in its own coherence,
could do to whoever does not meet the criteria of its essential type. It was as
if amid the destructions of the war, and following the acute exposure of the
necessary links between the myth of das Volk and the exterminatory
violence of the Holocaust, cinema could no longer believe in the myth of a
true narration through which the temporality of a people or its individual
characters could be synchronized. Thus a new form of ‘false’ rather than
‘true’ narration became more influential and a properly ‘modern cinema’
emerged. In place of chronological time cinema became characterized by a
‘chronic non-chronological time’ (Deleuze 1989: 129). Whereas true
narration functioned to instill coherence in the world and the characters that
populate it, false narration functions by tearing it apart. The actions of the
characters depicted become aberrant, dysfunctional, generating an aimless
wandering and series of chance, loose connections. The world depicted
became one where contingency reigns, where the discernment of
differences between what is true and false becomes difficult, and characters
are thrown haplessly from situation to situation, without possibility of
redemption.
Rather than being a sorry story of disenchantment, however, Deleuze
argued that the predominance of ‘false narration’ in post-war cinema
testified to an improvement in its story-telling function. For what cinema
did was not to mourn the loss of, or attempt to restore, the possibility of true
narration, but to reject it in a positive fashion on account of its failure to
approximate what is most real of the world, which is precisely the ‘power
of the false’ (Deleuze 1989: 126–55). The truth is, Deleuze argues, that in
its actuality the world does not add up, and as subjects in the world we are
necessarily destined always to fail to achieve coherence, only ever
constituting false unities forever prey to the decomposing affects generated
by the world. To believe and practice otherwise is to resist the true falsity of
the world. In modern cinema, by way of contrast, we are shown the reality
that indeed we never cohere, neither individually or collectively; that the
political concept of ‘the people’ is always bound to fail, that ‘the people’
will always go AWOL regardless of the attempts of regimes to unify them
(Deleuze 1989: 215–24).
 Classical cinema's attachment to the ideal of the people as a collective
subject was underwritten by a faith in the powers of human agency; of
belief in the human capacity to act in the world in order to improve its
condition. Modern cinema in contrast, Deleuze argues, shows us the
difficulties entailed in seeking a better world, the necessity indeed of
believing not in a different world, but in reconciling ourselves with the
realities of this world (Deleuze 1989: 170). For the promise of modern
cinema is that it enables us to confront the world as it really is rather than
seeing it as we might want it to be. Doing so requires that it shifts our
attention from the problem of how to act to the problem of how to see.
Modern cinema is fundamentally ‘a cinema of the seer and no longer the
agent’ (ibid.: 126). It is concerned with characters who in losing the power
of action have gained a more worldly power of (in)sight. Characters for
whom the disciplinary organization of the senses necessary for effective
action has not simply broken down but has been displaced by an intense
power to see the hitherto unseen. Modern cinema shows us seers and in
doing so, Deleuze argues, underlines the political potential entailed in our
own ‘becoming visionary or seer’ (ibid.: 21). It encourages in us the power
to see the world for what it is in a way denied to us while we remain in the
sensori-motorized relation with the world celebrated in classical cinema.

Deleuze's Bergsonism
Deleuze's account of the ‘cinema of the seer’ can only be understood as an
extension of Henri Bergson's account of the politics of perception. Bergson
argued that the failure to perceive that which is most real of the world is a
constitutive practice in the everyday business of being human (Bergson
1991). In order to make use of the world we literally have to practice
evading the reality of the world; distorting and reducing it to perceptions
that are unreal but which enable our smooth functioning in the world.
Within the political register of experience this involves us, crucially, in
distorting the reality of the oppression and deprivation to which we are
subject in the world as well as the oppression and deprivation of others on
which our own lives are predicated, perceiving the world such that our
identities go undisturbed. While we may sense oppression and deprivation
on a daily basis, our intellect intervenes within the course of experience to
organize our perceptions such that we tolerate what would otherwise seem
intolerable. In spite of this fundamentally human quality of illusion it
remains conceivable, Bergson argued, for us to develop aesthetic practices
with which to unmake our own illusions and ‘recover contact with the real’
(ibid.: 185). Such practices may well serve to harm us, making us sick with
the reality of our own existence, but they will nevertheless bring us closer
to those real conditions which Bergson believed to exist at the source of
experience. Thus might we, if we choose to follow Bergson, believe in the
possibility of developing aesthetic practices to relieve ourselves of the
‘necessary poverty of our conscious perception’ (ibid.: 38) to see the real
poverty and oppressions of a world which otherwise passes us by.
Bergson himself deplored cinema, arguing that it merely recuperates the
mechanisms of the ordinary forms of perception on which the sensori-motor
systems of humans depend for efficient action (Bergson 1928: 322–23).
Deleuze's claims as to the potential of cinema to increase our capacity for
(in)sight only would have served to rile him, but the political potential of
the arts to enable societies to see beneath the conditions of their own
illusions was a phenomenon that he held dear. He argued that the processes
by which the limits of our political sensibilities are redrawn are akin to the
process by which artists transform public perceptions with creative works
(Deleuze 2005: 976). This modern power of art is akin, he also argued, to
the ancient powers of seers and prophets in guiding communities (ibid.:
978–79). The celebration of the power of the seer is not, of course,
particular to philosophy or cinema. The Greek tragedians and poets
celebrated the power of the seer while, in a similar fashion to modern
cinema, deploying him or her to warn against the dangers of sensori-
motorized action, the classic example being the seer Tiresias who in order
to guide Homer's Odysseus home has to intervene and rearrange his senses
so that he does not fall victim to the same fate as his unseeing crew
(Barnouw 2004: 11); who, when deployed by Sophocles, resists his
conscription to the city of Thebes on account of the unseen corruption of its
king Oedipus (Gooding 2003). Nor is the dramaturgy of the disruption of
the sensori-motor system distinct to cinema. It is the condition of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, who faced with the rotten state of Denmark
discovers that ‘time is out of joint.’ Nevertheless, Deleuze argues that
modern cinema embodies Bergson's commitment to a politics of perception
to new effect. In arguing his case he provided a wide variety of examples
across a range of different genres, too vast to detail in total here, and some
of which, as I will explain, are less sustainable than others.

A cinema of the seer

The films of Alfred Hitchcock, for example, are richly populated by
characters who have developed a profound power to see ‘something
intolerable and unbearable’ (Deleuze 1989: 18), usually precipitated by a
physical accident or trauma. Activity and narrative continues in these films,
but in ways irredeemably inflected by the vision of the characters depicted.
However, in many cases the capacity to see the intolerable is provocative of
an action which merely aims at and succeeds in restoring order to the world.
Deleuze cites L.B. Jefferies, the hero of Rear Window, who by virtue of a
car accident is reduced to the ‘pure optical situation’ of gazing from his
apartment window into the homes of his neighbors, on account of which he
perceives the evidence of a murder committed by a traveling salesman
(Deleuze 2005: 209). Jefferies, however, demonstrates little evidence of a
political consciousness as such. Indeed he is an ally of the state seeking
only to restore social order with his seeing power. In other cases the power
to see is provocative of an action motivated by a desire to undo social order
but stopping short of producing political change. A good example is Uncle
Charlie in Hitchcock's earlier Shadow of a Doubt, whose childhood accident
conjures in him the power to see the invisible layer of social and economic
corruption underpinning American society, but on account of which he is
provoked to commit a series of murders targeting the obscenely rich. In this
case the capacity to see is provocative of a political consciousness which
produce a series of killings for private profit, which in their turn produce a
counter police action through which social order is also restored. A more
overtly political case is Martin Scorsese's 1970s classic Taxi Driver, in
which Travis Bickle returns from the trauma of the war in Vietnam able to
see the intolerable character of social relations that permeate everyday life
in the city of New York. Provoked but prevented from carrying out a
political assassination, Bickle ultimately acts to save a child prostitute from
her pimp (Deleuze 2005: 212–13). In this case the power to see the
intolerable is provocative of an action, which is itself the product of a
desired but ultimately frustrated political action, producing another private
act which serves ultimately to restore social bonds.
Both of these latter characters are possessed of a political consciousness
shaped by their capacity to see the intolerable, which is in turn constitutive
of a desire for action, but for whom the possibility of a political resolution
of the intolerable is foreclosed by the organization of the society in which
they live. Both Uncle Charlie and Travis Bickle are trapped within a society
content with being mere drones in the machinery of a state apparatus which
itself is banalized to the point of corruption. Each of these films, and if we
follow Deleuze, the ‘soul’ of modern cinema considered as a whole, depicts
the Bergsonian moment at which a character sees the intolerable and the
dramaturgy of a call to action that follows. Each of them, however, is
distinctive in its attentions to the conditions that frustrate that call and
which thus hinder action, inducing either paralysis or, at best, wrong or
botched moves. If we assume these films, as Deleuze argues we must, to be
representative of the soul of modern cinema, then we must conclude that
this is a cinema of political incapacity. A cinema that provides little hope or
investment in the possibility of a political resolution of the intolerable
conditions of post-war societies.
In a recent work Alain Badiou laments the power of cinema and the
dramaturgy of political incapacity to which it has led. Our problem
contemporarily, he argues, is not that of how we might see better but
precisely how we might rediscover the affirmative courage with which to
act better. Speaking up for the residual potential of theatre, which in
contrast with cinema, he continues to believe in, Badiou argues that our
time requires ‘an invention that would communicate, through theater ideas,
everything of which a people's science is capable. We want a theater of
capacity, not of incapacity’ (Badiou 2005: 75). Badiou's position is
indicative of the nostalgia for an art and politics of the collective subject;
the representation of its essences, the unification of its temporality and the
dramatization of its actions. Indeed, Badiou states in very clear terms the
need to return to such a model. ‘Consensual democracy is horrified’, he
argues, ‘by every typology of the subjective categories that compose it …
the duty of the theater is to recompose upon the stage a few living
situations, articulated on the basis of some essential types. To offer our own
time the equivalent of the slaves and domestics of ancient theater —
excluded and invisible people who all of a sudden, by the effect of the
theater-idea, embody upon the stage intelligence and force, desire and
mastery’ (Badiou 2005: 76).
The power that Badiou identifies with theater is superficially similar to
that which Deleuze accords to cinema: the power to make seen the
otherwise unseen. Theater, when it functions well, deploys the power of
seeing in its identification of those invisible parts of a people that a given
regime of power would rather went unseen, but the process by which it
makes seen the unseen is that of ‘typification.’ Typification proceeds by
eliminating doubt as to the vagueness of the subjective categories that
compose a hitherto invisible people in production of some kind of ‘essential
type’ (Badiou 2005: 76; Miller 2006; Natanson 1986). It seeks to reverse
the Bergsonian moment of insight whereupon the invisible is seen by
mystifying the unseen; its rendering into an illusory typology. Theater
operates in the political register by mystifying its public as to the composite
nature of the subjects it depicts. It is only by composing rather than
decomposing collective subjects, Badiou argues, that the arts can contribute
to political struggles, thus clarifying and simplifying public understandings
of who the invisible are, vivifying the public perception of them so that they
are credited with an intelligence and capacity otherwise denied them, and
lending them ‘affirmative courage’ in their struggles for political power
(Badiou 2005: 72–77).
Badiou attempts to restore to the arts a power to build a politics on the
sensori-motor function of individuals and peoples. In this venture it is not
only the responsibility of arts such as theater to see that which a given
regime of power refuses to disclose, but to give fictive unity to the unseen
so that they might better comport themselves as collective subjects on the
political stage. None of the cinematic characters that Deleuze celebrates as
distinguishing modern cinema would appear to meet the criteria that Badiou
specifies as necessary for them to be worthy subjects of a political cinema.
This is a cinema of incapacity, of paralyzed and traumatized characters
who, living in the margins, struggle to muster the courage to fulfill their
own convictions. Of characters who, overwhelmed by what they have seen,
fail to extricate themselves from the abyss with which they are then faced.
Does this mean, then, that we ought to shelve Deleuze's analysis of
modern cinema and leave behind the argument he makes for a ‘cinema of
the seer’? Ought we to return to an aesthetics of the sensori-motor
mechanism to restore a political subject fit for the twenty-first century?
There are severe problems with Badiou's account of the politics of
aesthetics which would have to be addressed for us to think so. In essence
Badiou's argument rests upon a highly elitist understanding of the relation
between the arts, its subject matter, and the audience or public. On his
account the power to see what would otherwise go unseen is an exceptional
practice confined to the arts themselves. It takes the vision of an artist to
see, but the representation of the unseen is an art based on techniques for
the construction of its illusionary coherence. The subjects depicted in
Badiou's account of political theater are not seers but agents issuing and
taking orders, possessed of a pragmatic intelligence and will to master the
conditions of their own existence. Thus there is a founding elitism and
partitioning of roles necessary for such a politics to take place. Badiou
imagines a theatre that shows the public its unseen, but which in rendering
the unseen visible exercises sovereignty over its public by mystifying it as
to its complexities and ambiguities.
Classically, within theater, the seer was conceived and portrayed in his or
her exceptionality. Like Badiou's conception of theater, a highly particular
power to which a people turned at moments of crisis, giving them directions
with which to recover their bearings, in order to resume the journey on
which they would eventually secure their truths. What modern cinema does,
however, is to democratize the seer by depicting him or her in everyday life
while also laying stress on the quotidian and fugitive experience of ‘seeing’
within postwar societies. It is not that post-war society lacks its seers — it is
awash with them — but it lacks the moral and political resources to heed
their call. This in effect is the story that modern cinema tells via its
depiction of seers and their everyday but fugitive perceptions of the
intolerable conditions in which they live and which make their lives
possible.
Ought we not then, still, to entertain the possibility of a people of seers?
A people distinguished as a collectivity not only by its precise power to see
at the expense of acting but also to share and circulate its perceptions of the
intolerable? Could the perception of the intolerable be construed, even, as
the missing source of a new form of unity among struggles in the twenty-
first century? Deleuze himself was convinced that each of these characters
— L.B. Jefferies, Uncle Charlie and Travis Bickle — was an expression of
a ‘new type of character’ (Deleuze 1989: 19); even a ‘new race’ (ibid.: xi).
In other words, they each constituted a typology; shared common features, a
particular disposition to the world, irrespective of their differences. Could
we not conceive of a people constituted by the radical equality with which it
perceives the intolerable? More recently, Jacques Rancière has
reconceptualized democracy as a capacity for the ‘sharing of the
perceptible’ and the ‘redistribution of its sites’ (Rancière 2004: 104). Do we
not witness here in the modern cinema the celebration of such a democratic
practice circulating among the characters it depicts? A new race of
character distinguished by the capacity to see that which a regime of power
relations would otherwise seek to make invisible; in other words, the seer
conceived as an ‘essential type.’ The idea of a community, which while still
‘to come’ is nevertheless testified to by art and by cinema especially?
At first glance Deleuze's own discussion of the politics of modern cinema
would warn us against such an argument. He differentiates between what he
calls ‘political’ from non-political cinema of the modern era. The concept
of political cinema is reserved in his works for cinema mainly of the non-
Western world, allowing for a further distinction between European versus
American cinema. In spite of his obvious admiration for much American
cinema of the post-World War II era, the genre as a whole was hamstrung,
he argues, by the absence of a concrete political project to which it could
contribute, its critique only serving to correct the misuse of power, in
striving to save the remains of the American Dream (Deleuze 2005: 215).
One could argue that this is precisely the political function that films such
as Shadow of a Doubt and Taxi Driver fulfilled, in that they depict the
futility of becoming politically conscious; the state literally always wins, it
would seem, in American film. The European traditions — neo-realism in
Italy and the French new wave — were more significant, Deleuze argued,
politically, but truly political cinema is to be found in what he quaintly
names the ‘third world’ (Deleuze 1989: 217).
There we encounter a cinema which while concerned with the formation
of a collective subject, works on different principles of people-production to
classical political cinema which was so beholden of ‘the people.’ For this
cinema is not attempting to address a people presupposed as already there
but one that ‘is missing’ and which therefore requires inventing. However,
the postcolonial cinema that Deleuze discusses as exemplary of a political
cinema is itself defined by the same perception of the intolerable which he
argues distinguishes the soul of American cinema. Modern political cinema
is not interested, he argues, in furthering the evolution or revolution of ‘the
people,’ like the classical cinema, but with seeding a ‘people to come’
which sees ‘the intolerable’ (Deleuze 1989: 215–17). This ‘people to come’
has a political conscience possessed of depth at the expense of heights; a
depth testified to in its perception of the reality that ‘the people’ as such can
never exist; that there is no ‘the people,’ only ‘always several peoples, an
infinity of peoples’ who cannot and should not be made one (ibid.: 220).
Modern political cinema is specifically a cinema of crisis, in which the idea
of a coherent collectivity is itself something intolerable; a condition that
requires warding off, and in which marginality is a kind of virtue in itself
(ibid.: 221). It is a cinema that responds directly to Vilém Flusser's equally
deterritorializing demand for a people which will take upon itself ‘the
profession and calling’ (Deleuze 2003: 15) to reject the ‘mystification of
customs and habits’ (ibid.: 11) on which each and every heimat depends
and be ‘a vanguard of the future’ (ibid.: 15).
There is at the very least, then, a tension here between Deleuze's
insistence on a distinction between political versus non-political cinema and
the common ground established between these different cinemas on account
of their shared typology of a people to come; a people of seers distinguished
by its sharing in the perception of the intolerable. This is a tension that runs
throughout his work. On the one hand an insistence that the artist alone is
quite incapable of creating a people, and that ‘a people can only be created
in abominable suffering’ oblivious to the concerns of art (Deleuze and
Guattari 1999: 110). On this reading the cinema of the people to come is
conditioned entirely by a political world extraneous to the world of cinema
itself (Deleuze 1989: 215–24). In what particular community a filmmaker is
located and in what social conditions he or she works will determine
whether or not the work obtains a political potential. On the other hand, a
Bergsonian belief in the potential emergence of a global subjectivity; the
idea of an aesthetic power inherent in the sensible modes of experience that
undoes the boundaries of any and every political subjectivity, American or
European, Western or non-Western, in constitution of a people to come
which is without territorial specificity.
In any case it is questionable whether the comparative framework that
Deleuze brings to bear on post-war cinema is sustainable. The distinctions
he draws between European, American and non-Western genres of cinema
are exercises in the creation of a series of what he himself called ‘badly
analysed composites’ (Deleuze 1991: 28), failing as they do to apprehend
the rhizomatic development of post-war cinema, especially its motifs of the
intolerable and its character of the seer. There is an only insufficient attempt
in Deleuze's analysis to think about the ways in which concepts such as the
intolerable were developed across the boundaries of national cinemas,
between Western and non-Western worlds, and between cinema and other
aesthetic regimes, such as literature, for example. The postwar production
of this new typology of a people to come distinguished by its power to see
the intolerable was itself a much more complex affair than Deleuze allows
for, born out of a series of cross-fertilizations from Western to non-Western
worlds and vice versa.
An example that elaborates the point is that of the cross-fertilization that
occurred between post-war Japanese literature and post-war American
cinema. More particularly between the novels of Yukio Mishima and the
films of Paul Schrader, of which Taxi Driver itself is a prime example
(Schrader scripted the film). Throughout Mishima's novels, from early
works such as Confessions of a Mask to his classic Temple of the Golden
Pavilion, through to the final Sea of Fertility tetralogy, we encounter
characters who bear all the hallmarks of the cinematic seer. Characters
confronted with images too intolerable for them to bear; images that
produce stuttering enunciations, failed political gestures, acts of violence or
self-sacrifice. In every case there is an overt political context to these
encounters with the intolerable. For Mishima's characters are always
vanquished subjects attempting to deal with the trauma of the defeat and
subjection of Japan in the wake of the end of World War II and amid the
American-imposed constitution that followed. In one integral sense the
intolerable of Mishima's novels is quite simply the American colonization
of Japan. The territorial circumstances of Mishima's characters and Travis
Bickle of Taxi Driver are thus starkly different, one inhabiting the land of
victors, the other that of the vanquished. However, in actuality there is a
more or less genealogical relationship between the seers of Mishima's
novels, such as the monk Mizoguchi of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
and the seers of post-war cinema such as Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver. Paul
Schrader, who wrote the script to the latter, would later go on to make the
biopic Mishima, a very poor attempt to depict the last days of the author
meshed with abbreviated accounts of three of his novels. However, some
time before Mishima, Taxi Driver had itself quite superbly recuperated the
spirit of Mizoguchi's character on the screen: the post-war condition of a
Japanese monk living in Kyoto transposed into that of an Italian-American
cab driver in New York.
Both Bickle and Mizoguchi are seers depicted in their becoming
conscious of the intolerability of their respective societies. These are
characters that in seeing the intolerable refuse to tolerate it. From the
vantage of their respective societies these are sick subjects on account of
that intolerance. In this sense they both clash powerfully with the model of
subjectivity on which the postwar development of both the United States
and the reconstructed state of Japan depended, both grounded as they were
on an ethic of tolerance. The concept of toleration derives, as we know from
the works of a long line of liberal theorists of politics from Locke to Rawls,
from the Latin tolere: to suffer, to countenance and put up with something
that wrongs or harms us. Thus the liberal subject tolerates on account of its
capacity to put up with and suffer that which in a more integral dimension
of reality actually offends or harms it. Whether configured as it was at the
end of the Religious Wars of the seventeenth century in terms of a demand
to tolerate the other who worships differently to oneself, or as it became
over time, a more obtuse demand to tolerate intolerable social and political
practices, toleration has been conceived throughout the historical
development of the liberal project as a tool for eliminating violence in the
interests of political security and stability. This is a security and stability
predicated on the production of a subject whose virtue rests not simply in its
will to respect diverse beliefs and social practices, but in its ability to avoid
countenancing that which harms it (Brown 2006). Thus his or her actions
depend on an entire economy of avoiding the Bergsonian moment; of
averting the gaze from the intolerable; on not seeing what lies above or
below; on rendering the social world a cliché. Both Bickle and Mizoguchi
testify, then, in their different ways, to the existence of another type of
subjectivity, another threshold of consciousness, and another kind of
perception, out of which a different type of people may emerge. Indeed one
that already exists, should we care to look for it. An intolerant people of
seers that desires the transformation of the conditions of its suffering.

The dumbest thing I ever heard

Modern cinema, then, irrespective of its differing territorial contexts of
production, opens our eyes and sensibilities to the possibility of perceiving
the intolerable, of our becoming seers. One of the primary methods by
which it does this, as Deleuze argued, is by showing us seers at the expense
of agents. However, there is another type of character that populates ‘the
soul’ of post-war cinema, whom Deleuze completely ignores, and yet who
is integral to the political work it performs. If we examine any of the films
that we have discussed here we discover that the depiction of the seer is
always achieved via his or her contextualization in a thick set of, often
paranoiac or neurotic, social relations with other characters who are
distinguished by their precise incapacity to see, actions of a
sensorimotorized nature, a kind of generalized stupidity; cretins. What
Deleuze fails to see in his focus on the seer of modern cinema is the extent
towhich the cretinization of sensori-motorized agency is fundamental to its
political resistance.
In another recent work Ian Buchanan draws attention to Deleuze's
failures to examine the ‘cretinizing schlock’ which in spite of what can be
said of the work of great auteurs such as Hitchcock or Scorsese, undeniably
makes up the bulk of contemporary cinema (Buchanan 2008: 10). Surely,
Buchanan asks, if we want to understand how it is that regimes are able to
mystify their publics, sustain illusionary narratives and make us tolerate the
intolerable, we have to examine not so much the great works of post-war
cinema but its schlock. Those films which are utterly unexceptional and
which function merely to ‘recycle old stories, old images, and old ideas’
(ibid.: 10). This in itself is a strange failing if we consider Deleuze's broader
philosophical ambitions which entailed an attempt to delineate the
conditions on which peoples, individually and collectively, come to desire
the conditions of their own servitude (Deleuze and Guattari 1984). Surely
taking the problem of the toleration of the intolerable seriously requires that
we examine the political function of cretinizing rather than just edifying
cinema?
Not only is it necessary to examine cinema's cretinizing schlock,
however, but also the characterization of cretineity which distinguishes the
soul of post-war cinema itself. The typification of the cretin is as
fundamental to the constitution of the people as is its typological seer. The
typology of the seer is predicated on that which it is not: its dumb
differential; its quick speaking and easy acting interlocutor. We can
recognize this by returning to the three films discussed earlier. In A Shadow
of a Doubt we encounter Uncle Charlie, a seer who in escaping from the
law is forced to take refuge with his sister's family headed by a partnership
of mommy-daddy cretins. Uncle Charlie's capacity to see the intolerability
of the reign of Capital in 1940s America is contextualized in relation with
the cretinous sister who exists oblivious to his true nature and lives out a
naïve relationship with state and society, as well as with his brother-in-law
who works in a bank reproducing on a daily basis the powers of capital. In
Rear Window the seeing function of L.B. Jefferies is depicted in contrast
with the cretineity of Lisa Carol Freemont, awoman who cares only for
fashion and small talk. In Taxi Driver the depiction of the seeing function of
Travis Bickle is heightened in its contrast with the cretineity of hiswork
colleagues. In conversation with one colleague appropriately named
Wizard, Travis asks for advice:
TRAVIS
I figured you've been around a lot so you could —
WIZARD
Shoot, that's why they call me the ‘Wizard.’
TRAVIS
I got — It's just that I got — I got —
WIZARD
Things got you down?
TRAVIS
Yeah.
WIZARD
It happens to the best of us.
TRAVIS
 Yeah, it got me real down. I just want to go out and really, really do something.
WIZARD
Taxi life, you mean?
TRAVIS
Yeah, well — No, it's — I don't know. I just wanna go out… and really — I really wanna — I
got some bad ideas in my head. I just—
WIZARD
Look at it this way. A man takes a job, you know? And that job — I mean, like that — That
becomes what he is. You know, like — You do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a
cabbie for years. Ten years at night. I still don't own my own cab. You know why? Because I
don't want to. Thatmust be what I want. To be on the night shift drivin’ somebody else's cab.
You understand? I mean, you become — You get a job, you become the job. One guy lives in
Brooklyn. One guy lives in Sutton Place. You got a lawyer. Another guy's a doctor. Another
guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born. I envy you your youth. Go on, get laid, get
drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we're all fucked. More or less, ya
know.
TRAVIS
I don't know. That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.

‘The dumbest thing I ever heard.’ Seers are never portrayed simply in their
fugitive condition of perceiving the intolerable, but always in relation with
their schmucks. Doing so allows post-war cinema to invert the master-
discourse of ‘the people’ that distinguished classical political cinema. In
Taxi Driver this is most overt in the scenes where Travis confronts the
cretineity not just of his work colleagues but of the state apparatus more
directly. This confrontation is sketched in a variety of encounters. One in
his cab with the Democratic party's presidential candidate Charles Palantine
(whose campaign slogan is ‘We are the People’), but more poignantly with
Palantine's campaign manager Betsy, who in spite of the gulf in social class
separating them, he seduces. In an exchange over coffee Betsy tells Travis
how he reminds her of the Kris Kristofferson lyric, ‘He's a prophet and a
pusher. Partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction.’ However,
when on their first date Travis takes Betsy to a porn cinema she is horrified
by the orgy of sensori-motorized actions that appear in close-up on the
screen. Unable to relate to Travis's motives (for whom porn symbolizes the
debasement of the sensori-motor mechanism), she rejects him. Like the
arch-cretin of Thebes, Oedipus at the crossroads, the state apparatus of post-
Vietnam America cannot bear the intolerable truths relayed to it by its seers.
Thus did cretineity in post-war cinema become not only the site of
something intolerable, but the distinguishing feature of the state apparatus
itself, and consequently that which must also be destroyed.

The cretin who once was blind, now can see

Basing the foundations of the people to come on the distinction between
seers and their cretins make it highly problematic to maintain, as Deleuze
argued elsewhere with Felix Guattari, that this is a people which exists
merely at the level of oppression, ‘and in the name of the oppression it
suffers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 379). For in its awareness of the
difference between its own capacity for sight and the relative blindness of it
cretinous contemporaries, it is a people which is then led to repeat its own
experience of oppression on its cretinous mass. In this sense an as
instructive portrait of the process by which the people to come emerges can
be found in another of Hitchcock's films, that of Rope. The main characters
in Rope are two wealthy socialites, who privately decide that they belong to
a minor and yet superior people capable of seeing what others cannot see,
and then proceed to murder a cretinous associate on account of his inability
to see what they can see. The film itself has been interpreted as a classic
critique of the ideological conditions for the emergence of fascism. Indeed,
if we examine many of the other seers constitutive of Deleuze's people to
come, they often tend to betray deeply racist, xenophobic and misogynistic
tendencies. Consider, for example, Uncle Charlie's diatribe against women
in Shadow of a Doubt. Likewise, the depiction of Travis Bickle in Taxi
Driver was notoriously toned down in post-production at the behest of
director Martin Scorsese and scriptwriter Paul Schrader on account of their
fear that his xenophobic monologues (and acts) would generate race riots
when shown on American screens (Schrader 2004: 117). In which light
Deleuze's representations of the constitution of the people to come may be
said to have romanticized the exceptionality of the power of the seer. For in
this figure do we not recognize, in fact, simply ‘a mass figure, an average
social character… integrated, asocial characters… participating in a
collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things’ (Sloterdijk 1987: 5)?
Undoubtedly, there is much akin between Deleuze's seer and Peter
Sloterdijk's cynic. The latter type, which in its ancient origins was as
exceptional as Diogenes in Athens, now describes a diffuse form of
subjectivity — that borderline melancholic who functions by keeping his
symptoms of depression well enough under control to remain more or less
able to work. Cynics, in spite of their socially diffuse positionalities,
Sloterdijk is at pains to stress, ‘are not dumb, and every now and then they
certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads’ (ibid.: 5). However,
the cynic, while a seer, bearing witness to the intolerable nature of the real,
also bears up to it in order to survive it. This is why Bickle, in spite of his
confrontation with the intolerable nature of the power relations in which he
finds himself invested, nevertheless puts up with them, accommodating
himself to them, regenerating them. He is as cretinous as the colleagues he
finds intolerable. It is highly instructive that the final scene of Taxi Driver
depicts Bickle back in his cab, running the meter.
If we want to trace an account of political subjectivity within cinema on
which to base a politics of resistance to the state apparatus it will be
necessary, therefore, to go beyond Deleuze's own rather naïve conception of
the films in which such a subject is to be found. The Danish cinematic
movement known as Dogme was instigated in 1995, the year of Deleuze's
death. Thomas Vinterberg's Festen was the first film to be certified
according to its manifesto or ‘Vow of Chastity’ as it was called (Von Trier
and Vinterberg 1995). Festen depicts the sixtieth birthday of the patriarch
Helge for which his children Christian, Michael and Helene return to the
family estate. A fourth child, Christian's twin Linda, has committed suicide.
It is an exemplar of the cinema of the seer in so far as it tells the story of
how Christian, the eldest son, having come to see the intolerability of
Helge's authority, particularly the abuse of parental power on which it is
based, then proceeds to revolt against Helge by denouncing his
intolerability in front of all the guests at the birthday dinner. Similar to other
seers such as Bickle in Taxi Driver, Christian struggles with states of
paralysis and trauma, at crucial points in the film appearing overwhelmed
by the task of confronting Helge's intolerability, desperately seeking the
courage to act. However, Festen cannot be dismissed as just another
example of the cinema of incapacity, as Badiou would have it, for Christian
does find the courage to speak, and in speaking he does find an audience,
which in turn is able to act with him. The people he addresses do ultimately
heed his call, and Helge's intolerable regime of power relations and abuse is
destroyed. Subsequently, however, Christian refuses the opportunity to
become the new patriarch or construct another set of intolerable power
relations by departing for Paris with Pia, the waitress at the dinner for
whom, having freed himself from the psychic constraints of the past, he is
now able to consummate a love.
At the same time it's important to register that Festen does not represent a
return to an aesthetics of the sensori-motor mechanism in the simplistic
manner that Badiou demands and identifies with political theater. This is
not a heroic story of the agency of Man, because Christian is only able to
overcome his paralysis through the affective alliances with, and agency of
his sisters, including the dead Linda, whose own suffering is born testimony
to from the grave in the form of a suicide note denouncing the oppression
and abuse of Helge and the power relations around which his authority
revolved. There is no escape from the fact that there is a partitioning of
roles in Festen: Christian sees and bears witness to the intolerability of
Helge, while others act in response to his testimony. However, the relation
between Christian and the others is not simply that of a seer to his cretins.
Christian exercises little if any sovereignty over his siblings, other guests
and parties. Indeed, the process by which Helge's regime is overthrown is
dependent as much on the power of those others around Christian to see and
bear witness to him, to his faults and weaknesses, as much as his own
integrity. One of the most crucial scenes occurs when Christian, having
made the first unsuccessful attempt to speak against Helge, retreats to the
kitchen to say goodbye to the chef Kim, his childhood friend, before
leaving. Apparently defeated by the failure of the guests to recognize as true
his denouncement of his father, Kim's words give Christian the strength to
continue. ‘How are you Christian?’ Kim asks. ‘Fine,’ Christian replies.
‘Fine?’ responds Kim, before calling the rest of the kitchen staff together
and continuing. ‘Well done Christian, you've made your speech. And now
you're going home. The battle's lost. Nothing has changed.’ ‘How long have
we known each other?’ Kim asks. ‘Since year one,’ Christian replies. ‘Since
year one. I've been waiting for this ever since and you just run away,’ Kim
observes. ‘What do you want Kim?’ a confused Christian asks, before the
course of narrative transforms and the battle is continued to its successful
conclusion.
Kim's intervention is crucial to that transformation. Christian is not only
unable to act without the support of his friend and others, but he is unable to
see himself without their seeing him. The seeing function is democratized
as much as the figure of the cretin is rendered ambiguous in Festen. For
Christian himself appears dumb in contrast with the clear sightedness and
intelligence of Kim and the rest of the proletarian kitchen staff, whose
agency is also crucial to the events as they unfold. Thus is it that Festen
spins the relation between seeing and cretineity in an entirely different way
to earlier expositions of the cinema of the seer, avoiding the taint of micro-
fascism so easily identifiable in the films that Deleuze naïvely celebrated.
Even the archcretin Michael, Christian's younger brother, who embodies all
of the worst traits of Helge's regime, is demonstrated to possess the power
of both agency and insight. Indeed, it is Michael's agency and willingness to
turn against the father that proves crucial in the latter's downfall, with
Michael eventually being the one to ask Helge to leave.

Conclusion
Deleuze's account of the modernity of cinema, including the distinctiveness
of its politics, can only be understood in the context of his broader political
thought and project. In the years since his death, his works have become
associated with the political ideal of a stateless world, of a human-social
assemblage which is utterly self-organizational, and which makes no
recourse to unanimity in the advance of political struggles. Certainly
Deleuze rejected the kinds of false unanimity on which the classical
political ideal of ‘the people’ was founded. When it came, however, to
confronting the political problems of his time he was insistent that a
political theory and practice of the present required a new typology on
which to advance its struggles. Substantial forms of political change, the
vast historical cleavages and upheavals which his works were concerned
with theorizing, were underwritten by collective projects. Deterritorialized
multitudes are not enough (Reid 2010). The main question that motivated
him, then, was that of how, in the establishment of particular regimes of
power did new counter-strategic collectivities emerge? How, in turn, did
such collectivities ‘embark on another kind of adventure, display another
kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in a nomadic war-machine’
(Deleuze 2002: 259)? This was not merely an historical point for Deleuze.
He thought it as pertinent for the present as in the past. ‘The revolutionary
problem today,’ he argued, ‘is to find some unity in our various struggles
without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the
party or State apparatus: we want a war-machine that would not recreate a
State apparatus, a nomadic unity… that would not recreate a despotic
internal unity’ (ibid.: 260).
Deleuze's arguments as to the importance of the cinema of the seer, its
new race of characters and its power to perceive the intolerable are all
highly indicative in this regard. These are characters who while bereft of a
political project to contribute to are nevertheless constitutive of a new kind
of political imaginary. Characters in which another kind of people can be
seen in its emergent properties: a people of seers. The cinema that Deleuze
describes posits the existence of this people in the condition of its
emergence. However, to see and extrapolate this we ourselves have to think
outside of Deleuze's own treatment of this cinema, especially the taxonomic
system through which he differentiates between Western and non-Western
cinemas, and his conception of political versus non-political cinema.
Moreover, we have to grasp this people of seers, its political practices of
seeing the intolerable, and the intolerant subjectivity on which it is founded
not simply in a deeply antagonistic relation with its cretinous Other. What
distinguishes the political function of the cinema of the seer is its depiction
of the antagonistic process by which cretins become seers, recognizing the
conditions that prevent them from being able to see, aswell as showing
would-be seers their own cretineity. The becoming conscious not only of
the intolerability of present conditions but dramaturgy of the call to destroy
it through novel alliances between the full range of different subjective
types is fundamental to the political function that this cinema performs.

References

Badiou, A. Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2005)
Barnouw, J. Odysseus, Hero of Practical Intelligence: Deliberation
and Signs in Homer's Odyssey (Maryland: University Press of
America, 2004)
Bergson, H. Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Whitefish, MT:
Kessinger Publishing, 2005)
Bergson, H. Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991)
Bergson, H.Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1928)
Bogue, R. Deleuze on Cinema (New York and London: Routledge,
2003)
Brown, W. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006)
Buchanan, I. ‘Introduction’, in Ian Buchanan and Patricia
MacCormack (eds) Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema
(London and New York: Continuum, 2008)
Deleuze, G. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London and New York:
Continuum, 2005)
Deleuze, G.‘Nomadic Thought’, in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and
Other Texts 1953–1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002)
Deleuze, G. Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991)
Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Athlone Press,
1989)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia 2 (London and New York: Athlone Press, 1999)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What is Philosophy? (London: Verso,
1996)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia (London and New York: Athlone Press, 1984)
Flusser, V. The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003)
Gooding, F. ‘Black Light’ (Critical Quarterly Vol.42, No.2, 2003, 4–
14)
Iampolski, M. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans.
Harsha Ram (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1998)
Martin-Jones, D. Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
Miller, V. ‘The Unmappable: Vagueness and Spatial Experience’
(Space and Culture No.9, 2006)
Natanson, M. Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
Rancière, J. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004)
Rancière, J. Politics of Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum,
2006)
Reid, J. ‘Of Nomadic Unities: Gilles Deleuze on the Nature of
Sovereignty’ (Journal of International Relations and Development
Vol.13, No.4, 2010)
Schrader, P. Schrader on Schrader (London: Faber & Faber, 2004)
Sloterdijk, P. Critique of Cynical Reason (London: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1987)
Von Trier, L. and Vinterberg, T. Vow of Chastity, 1995,
www.martweiss.com/film/dogma95-thevow.shtml.
6 Waltzing the limit
Erin Manning
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-7

The scene returns three times. In hues of amber and grey-black, three ani-
mated1 figures emerge from the sea. We see the first figure from behind, a
standing naked male body holding a gun, walking out of the water toward
an amber-grey shelled-out cityscape. Two more figures lie on their backs in
the water. Then the face, a face that will haunt us with its detached
familiarity, fills the screen, looking off slightly to the right.
A body framed by water, rippling black-amber, rises, shells brightening
the amber-hued night sky. The image pulls back, the cityscape now framed
by two feet peaking out of the water. Then we are close once more, facing
the rising bodies, accompanying them as they walk out of the sea toward
the city.
Two bodies, and finally a third, have now made their way out of the
water. Bombs fall on the scene of destruction but we don't hear them, the
audio-scape carried by the music that will haunt this scene, and with it, the
film, from beginning to end. In amber light we watch the bodies dress.
Then, the tone shifting from amber to grey, we accompany their climb into
the city, where, still fastening their clothing, they weave into the streets,
streets with posters of Bashir's face, streets full of mute, anguished women,
women whose voices we won't hear until the very last scene. Then, as the
camera turns, turning its back on the women, we are faced, again and once
more, with the face, a full-screen close-up of the soldier's impassive face.2
 Twice more we will see the stark amber sky and the soldiers dressing, but
never again will we see this scene from beginning to end. Yet as we watch
it, we will feel as though it repeats itself frame for frame: every time we
will once more have the experience of following the soldiers walking up the
stairs into the city, under the posters of Bashir, into the crowds of mourning
women, a repetition framed, always, by the face.
The repeated scene of the bodies rising out of the water begins as a
promise: it looks like a flashback. As with all flashbacks, we are lulled into
the feeling that there will be a dénouement, that the scene will grow into its
content, rather than withdraw again and again into the expressionless face.
Coming as it does soon after the first scene — the dreamscape of amber-
grey-black dogs barking, of violence on the cusp of playing itself out, the
city caught in a web of fear — we assume that this scene of bodies
emerging from water will hold the key to the missing facts that memory
holds at bay. We are almost certain the scene will provide the clues to the
Sabra and Shatila massacre, that the rising bodies moving into the amber-
grey night of war will let us know how the repressed returns.3
However, the repressed does not return.4 We are witnesses not to the
victims of truths now uncovered, but to sheets of experience exposing at
once the singular horror of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the
impossibility of containing it within an explanatory narrative. What returns
is not the past but the future, the ineffable more-than. Toward this future is
the figure of the face, the face we can never fall into, the face that resists
affective recognition, the face that leads us incessantly across, onto the
surface of an imagescape that folds, twists, undoes and recreates itself at the
complex intersection where life-living comes to expression.
Despite how haunted we are by the face and its reappearance especially
when we realize that it is the face of Ari Folman, the soldier/filmmaker/
memory-driver of the film the face never sticks. The face does not produce
the interiority for the film, does not become the centre as the affective
image around which the narration turns. It appears and disappears,
remaining flat, an impersonal surface that marks the passage from now to
now, from singularity to singularity, in a deferred rhythm without pre-
conceived connection, without attachment to time-as-such, without
territorializing on a ‘personal’ body. The face resists catharsis.5
Yet at first we cannot know this, and so we are almost certain the scene
of the rising bodies will provide the clues to the Sabra and Shatila massacre,
that the face staring into the amber-grey night of war will let us know how
the repressed returns. What we find instead is that we are witnesses to what
Deleuze calls ‘the power of the false,’ that which ‘replaces and supersedes
the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible
presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts’ (Deleuze 1989:
131). The many-ness of expressibility in all of its entangled unfoldings is
what is at stake here. This is why, despite appearances to the contrary, it is
soon revealed that this is not a film ‘about’ the Sabra and Shatila massacre,
not a film that attempts to ‘return’ to the past to resolve the massacre's
fascistic unfolding. It is a film, rather, that surfaces the complexity of time
to make felt what cannot be straightforwardly resolved, a film that asks
experience in the making to encounter its own uneasiness, its own
ineffability in the face of the incompossibility of truth.
 Figure 6.1

Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) is an animated film about living
memory, about life's opening onto memory as forgetting, about the
impossibility of memory's causal narration, about the ineffability of
violence's containment within the frame. It is a drama of amber and grey-
black that leaks onto all memory-surfaces, until it ends, finally, on the blues
and grays of archival documentation with one startling image of orange, a
dead girl's body on the sandy road of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp.
Waltz with Bashir is a film replete with singularities that do not add up, that
cross over into sheets of experience that cannot ever manage to tell the
whole story, once and for all, the story of how memory and war coincide.

The face
Waltz with Bashir is about how the virtual plane — what Deleuze calls the
metaphysical surface6 — of the film brings life back not as a human face,
not as a past converted into a present, but as a movement across. By
presenting the face in its withdrawing from the imagescape, Waltz with
Bashir creates a tight circuit between what presents itself and what remains
virtual, returning us to the image's own movement, to the affective tonality
of the imagescape's haunting amber-black-grey, thus creating an opening for
what Deleuze calls a life, the barely active stirrings of life at the limit. To
bring a life to the fore, the human face must remain deterritorialized,
collective: when territorialized on a ‘personal’ body of the individual, the
face too strongly proposes a territory, an interiority. In Waltz with Bashir,
the face that returns, the impassive face of the soldier/filmmaker, is felt as
the surface of its own collectively transient becoming. It does not
overcome. It is a life, affective resonance in the intensive passage between
surfaces of experience. A life, Deleuze reminds us, happens not through
transcendence, but on the transcendental field itself. ‘Whenever immanence
is attributed to subject and object, which themselves fall outside the plane
[of immanence], the subject being taken as universal, and the object as any
object whatsoever, we witness a denaturing of the transcendental … And
we witness a distortion of immanence, which is now contained in the
transcendent’ (Deleuze 2007: 389). A life is immanence felt in the stirrings
of actualization. Force of potential, force of life.
The characters in Waltz with Bashir are faces, but faces as flat surfaces,
as markers for the force of fabulation, a telling poised at the limit of
articulation, a telling, as one character explains, of a past ‘not in my
system.’ Fabulation is about the event, the event of time: fabulation is not
the telling of a narrative in the form of the ‘what was’ (the transcendent) but
the expression of ‘the act of legending.’ This act creates not a truth but an
opening onto the aberrant movement of time where the surface of the film
itself begins to ‘fiction,’ to ‘legend’ or fabulate, where the character (the
surface) begins to ‘fabulate without ever being fictional’ and where the
filmmaker cannot but ‘“intercede himself” from the real characters who
wholly replace his own fiction through their own fabulations’ (Deleuze
1991: 150, translation modified). What emerges via the face in Waltz with
Bashir are stories fabulating themselves, creating themselves in the merging
of events that do not constitute a clear continuity, events replete with
fantasy and dream, reconstruction and confusion.7 ‘Do you recognize this
picture,’ the filmmaker asks, ‘no’ the impassive face responds; ‘was I
always there?’ he asks another, ‘yes.’ The impassivity of the faces of the
characters as they relay their selective memories tinged with forgetting
invites a moving-across into the texture of memory itself. The telling does
not sink into the myth of an attainable past. It moves through events in the
making, creating a collective surface for the telling. In the fabulation that
ensues, the face resists empathy at any personal, individual level. For the
face here is not the locus of human expression, but the metaphysical surface
through which events pass; the movement of the events of the film bubble
at its impassive surface inviting us to move across into the collective event
that is the imagescape itself. We cannot get inside the faces, so we move
across their surfaces into the texture of the becoming-image, the becoming-
image of a forgetting that is all but a past uncovered. Shards of meaning
coincide, but no ultimate meaning is revealed. Waltz with Bashir is a web of
futures in the making more than a depth of remembrance, once and for all.
What we see is not the past bubbling to the surface, but life itself active in
the immanence of the future-arising, a life on the verge of appearance at the
very intersection where immanence transcends itself and merges with the
actuality of the ineffable.
A life is how the drama of the political expresses itself in Waltz with
Bashir. It is Nietzsche's ‘was that life? Well then once more’8 and
Massumi's bare activity.9 It is the force of agitation that pushes the virtual
to the limit, the dark precursor that propels the doubling of transcendence
and immanence into the pure experience10 of the now. It is the activity of
the metaphysical surface and, as such, it is the force of expression of the
transcendental field.
The concept of the transcendental field radically challenges standard
notions of transcendence. Where transcendence relies on the already-
existent platform of spacetimes of experience in order to overcome them,
the transcendental field is a pre-individual topological surface that spurs
aberrant movements out of which spacetimes are created anew, aberrant
because there can never be a pre-imposed path for how life can and will
emerge.11
A transcendental field can never be known as such; however, it can be
felt through the singular series — the lives — that bring it momentarily into
appearance: ‘Singularities are the real transcendent events, and Ferlinghetti
calls them “the fourth person singular” … Only when the world, teaming
with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities,
opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental’ (Deleuze
1990: 103).
Waltz with Bashir's relentless imagescape of amber-grey-black steers us
into an uneasy realm. It does not give us anything to hold onto and yet it
pushes us across. It forces us to think, as Deleuze would say, pushing
thought to the beyond where it is no longer about content, but about the
creation of movements of thought. Thought in its bare activity, thought at
the cusp where it merges with feeling.
Forcing thought to its limit where the thinking and the feeling are one,
Waltz with Bashir activates a protopolitics that merges, uncertainly, with the
politics the film can never get beyond, pushing the political to its limit, a
limit from which it returns — if it returns — as the dramatic image of its
own bare activity, broken into shards of light, amber-grey. There is no face
to latch onto, no expression with which to empathize and so we keep
moving. Waltz with Bashir proposes more than it provides, offering
affective tonality before content, providing color and force-form before it
gives us a figure, a body as such. Waltz with Bashir thus propels us across
the infrahuman topological surface of the image, forcing us to think not
simply what but how — what surfaces is also how it surfaces.
What — as allied to Being — is the question of transcendence, the
question of interiority and depth, while how — as allied to process, or
becoming — is the question of the transcendental field. There are no
questions that cannot be dangerous in their own right, that are protected
from returning to habits of thought, but there are few starting points as
lethal as the totalitarianism of Being: I is a habit, and where it leads is
toward the supremacy of the human.12 Being and the human cannot be
disengaged, and with the human at the center, the frame is already in place
for the eclipsing of the complexity of other ecologies, of other surfaces of
experience. Foregrounding instead the metaphysical surface as the how of
experience in the making opens the way for a different proposition. For how
does not delimit a field according to preexisting parameters: it opens it to its
outside, to the outside as it curves back in on the topological surface that
never quite contains it. How brings us back to the protopolitical and the
dark precursor which is its movement of thought, to politics at the very cusp
of its appearance, at the bare edge of its agitation. How does not guarantee
against the return of fascism or the microfascist tendencies the political can
and does call forth. However, it at least offers an opening onto the potential
of a forking, onto a life welling at the winding surface that is the singular
limit between now and now.13

The ineffable
To the physics of surfaces a metaphysical surface necessarily corresponds.
Metaphysical surface (transcendental field) is the name that will be given to
the frontier established, on the one hand, between bodies taken together as a
whole and inside the limits which envelop them, and on the other,
propositions in general. This frontier implies, as we shall see, certain
properties of sound in relation to the surface, making possible thereby a
distinct distribution of language and bodies, or of the corporeal depth and
the sonorous continuum. In all these respects, the surface is the
transcendental field itself, and the locus of sense and expression (Deleuze
1990: 125).
The transcendental field filters into experience as the virtual agitation of
life welling. It is not yet delineated into subject or object: it moves
intensively across, preindividually, aberrantly creating remarkable points
that emerge, eventually, as the subjects and objects of the next now. It
resonates with these singular events of becoming, propelling series into
actualities that carry with them the germ of its intensive surface.
The transcendental field in Waltz with Bashir expresses itself as the
emergent surface that is the repeated and varied contrast of amber-grey-
black. This contrast is felt as a field of resonance where color becomes
sonorous continuum — its surface the rhythm for the seeing-hearing of a
life coursing through. While the amber-grey-black returns, always, in
moments of recollection, it is not the content of the scenes that feeds
forward from the transcendental field but the quality, the rhythm, the
resonance, of the imagescape itself. The imagescape pulses through,
pushing forward and across, moving us with it, resonating with the unseen,
the ineffable. For the image resonates with the forgetting at the heart of
memory, the forgetting at whose limit life begins to bubble to the surface.
Never conscious of itself, the transcendental field is the qualitative
duration of the without-me of relation, of life-living. Radically empirical, it
emerges, barely, at the interval of feeling and felt. When we feel it, what we
feel is the cut of the interval, the between of its singular appearance here
and now. In Waltz with Bashir we feel this quality of the active interstice in
the intensive surfacing of amber-grey-black, we feel it in the resonant field
created by the contrast of the bright and the dull, we feel it as the
intersection where the impossibility of strategically coupling then and now
expresses itself. Throughout Waltz with Bashir, we are never really out of
this interval for we never rest in the amber-grey-black. Its stark contrast
moves us each time anew, reminding us that the past cannot be doubled
onto the present, that what emerges appears in the multiple now of life in
the making, of life fabulating.
Sheets of the present move at various rhythms, creating different
sonorous continuums and affective tonalities, and with them come different
resonant fields. Take the scene between the filmmaker14 and Ori, the friend-
therapist. In stark departure from the grey-amber-black tones of the earlier
scenes of the film, this scene, in which Ori describes a memory experiment,
is in greens and pinks. The experiment is as follows: people are shown
pictures from their childhood. They figure as children in these pictures and
the events are real — they actually happened. Then, the experimenters give
them a false image. This image still has them as the protagonist but the
environment is invented. They were never really there. As Ori relates the
experiment to the filmmaker, the scene shifts to a child in an amusement
park, the child like a cut-out in a field of clowns and Ferris wheels, all this
in bright candy colors. This is one such ‘not really real’ image: the
amusement park is not one the child ever actually visited. Eighty percent of
the people who take this experiment, Ori explains, claim really to have been
there when they see themselves in the picture. The remaining twenty
percent — those who are unsure of whether they were really there — are
invited to go home and think about it. When they return, and upon seeing
the picture of ‘themselves’ in the amusement park once again, they
‘remember’ the amusement park. As Ori says, ‘memory is dynamic, it's
alive.’
This scene briefly takes us ‘out’ of the story of war. An aside on memory,
it feels like a film within the film. We relax in the assumption that we are
pausing outside the atrocities of war while we are being taught a lesson
about the slippery quality of memory so that when we return to the ‘real’
film, we will expect less from the ‘truth’ of recollection. However, just
when we are certain that this is simply an academic exercise into the
inevitability of memory's failures, and that this scene is cast apart from the
real events of the film, the scene itself begins to fabulate: a washed-out
version of the amusement park scene briefly becomes the backdrop to Ori
and the filmmaker's con-versation, the Ferris wheel and the clown
appearing out the window behind the filmmaker's back. The amusement
park has made its way onto the surface of the now, into the story of how
war and memory can never strictly coincide. Memory has already begun
working its sly tricks. The force of fabulation has once more infiltrated the
transcendental field of the film.
This short, washed-out amusement park scene haunts the film. We see it,
but they don't — the filmmaker and Ori continue to speak about memory as
though nothing had happened, as though their discussion hadn't already
changed the imagescape's course. The appearance of the amusement park
behind the filmmaker's shoulder cuts into the past/future circuit he is
working so desperately to unravel, bringing a new surface to a complex
topological field of recollections of the forgotten past and dreams of the
unimagined future. Then, a few seconds later, the semblance of the
amusement park gives way once more to the dreary backdrop of an outside
garden, things back ‘as they should be.’ Yet this instance of memory's
intrusion into the future-present will continue to resonate at the edges of the
film's metaphysical surface. Like the dogs of the first amber-grey-black
scene, it never returns as such. Never again do we even see its colors — the
bright pinks and greens of the clowns and the balloons. Nonetheless, this
scene has altered the field, multiplying time's supposed linearity. ‘[T]here is
no other crime than time itself,’ writes Deleuze (1989: 37). The amusement
park image marks time/memory as aberrant movement. ‘What aber-rant
movement reveals is time as everything, as ‘infinite opening,’ as anteriority
over all normal movement … ’ (Deleuze 1989: 37).

Figure 6.2

The transcendental field does not transcend time. It fields time's creation
in the event. To transcend time would be to posit linear time in order to
redraw time's passage as an inside and outside of experience that moves
seamlessly from past to present to future. This would assume an
omnipresent (human) body, documenting, remembering, orchestrating,
witnessing. This is transcendence, operative always on the molar stratum of
experience where life appears as predefined. The metaphysical surface, on
the other hand, has no preconstituted spacetime. It has virtual circuits,
impossible flows, ineffable becomings, washouts, active always on the
molecular stratum where life is still in the making. Events as they come to
expression merge with this metaphysical surface in infinitely dynamic
ways. Dynamic events are full of holes, or better, of folds. They propel
subjects and objects into the world, but they are not presupposed by them.
Actively emergent from the transcendental field of experience, events do
not create form once and for all, they create openings for the force of a
taking-form. This is memory: the dynamic force of life-living in the uneasy
forming.
Transcendence builds memory from without, feeding the past ‘fully-
formed’ into the container of the present. To transcend spacetime is to move
outside spacetime to force a mode of life on living. Transcendence cleaves
morally, separating fields of experience into representations of good and
evil. It is a back-gridding procedure that creates a totality, a totalitarian,
tautological experience.15 The transcendental field, by contrast, has no
direction except toward the event, and no form in itself — it folds into the
event forming.

Desiring surfaces
Let's return to the first scene of the film. The only dream in the film, this
first scene is strangely disconnected from every other event, and yet its
surface quality imbues all future imagescapes. This scene creates the mood
of the film, its contrast, color and affective tone. For two minutes we move
to the threatening rhythm of twenty-six dogs, their growls and panting in
tandem with the synthesized sound of drums mixed with aggressive
barking, the image finally centering on an amber sky, a grey building, a
lone, distant face at a window looking out onto the street.16 Moving
alongside the dogs, our gait is one of horizontality, a threatening movement
across, relentless, from now to now to now.17 Never is there a clear sense of
the status of this now. The now is always moving. The movement is before,
behind and across and we move with it, horizontalizing the topological
surface of pure experience. The dogs surround us on this hor-izontalizing
plane even as we move with them, following them in their fight to the
death. In this terrifying moving surround, we see amber eyes as place-
holders of certain versions of events; we experience the mobilization of
discrete singularities, and yet nothing stays still as we at once participate in
and fear the mobile surface, the abstract surface of the amber-grey-black
that continuously moves across.18
As the opening scene gives way to future amber-grey-black scenes of
memory and forgetting, we become somewhat distanced from the horror of
the dogs, but the dogs have set the tone and we cannot but feel that, in the
end, there is no distance, no break in the movement across, only the
semblance of a strange, detached calm.19
This uneasy movement between surfacings, topological and horizontal,
between affective tonalities, lull and anguish, between calm and agitation,
terror and beauty, is active, always, in the contrast, amber-grey-black. The
amber-grey-black is a backdrop that is never strictly a background, forcing
the viewer into a continued seeing-feeling across strata: we are drawn into a
backgrounding-foregrounding resonance, we are lulled by the warmth of
the amber, but cannot tear ourselves away from the nightmare of the inky
black, the threatening night sky, the destroyed world of grey asphalt. So
with each return of the amber-grey-black, a version of the dogs return, their
eyes amber, their fur grey, the sky amber, the streets grey, their sound
amber-grey-black, the sonorous continuum resonant on the mobile surface
of the imagescape.
The amber-grey-black is the fourth person singular, as Ferlinghetti calls
it. It is the desiring machine that moves us across the surface of the image,
not so much feeding the narrative as fuelling the intensive absence of a
linear reminiscence. It promises no mimicry of itself, no representation, no
absolute recognition, no ultimate tying of loose ends. It keeps us poised at
the limit, that edge where terror haunts the image. This edge is never
transcended. It remains the affective tonality of what cannot be expressed:
the transcendental field of a micropolitics in the making.

Figure 6.3

The fourth person singular is not I. It is a desiring machine that cuts

across: ‘desire, by its very nature, always has the tendency to “leave the
subject” and to drift’ (Guattari 1977: 49, my translation). A desiring
machine is a machine in the sense that it cuts, assembles, produces. It
creates desire, and more desire, pushing the surface to the limits of its
desiring potential. In Waltz with Bashir the desiring machine of the film
creates an opening for transversal linkages without giving the fabulation
moral standing, for desiring machines are ‘machi-nic montage[s] that bring
into conjunctions semiotic chains and an intercrossing of material and
social fluxes,’ never situating them strictly on the side of good or evil (ibid.:
54, my translation). Desiring machines only propel: they promise nothing.
They creates openings, intervals, fluxes of potential relation. They propose;
they risk; and they move.
The fourth person singular is the protagonist of Waltz with Bashir, a
protagonist that flirts with microfascisms of pure reminiscence as much as
with the impossibility of activating the past in the present, a protagonist that
cannot be resolved or recognized as such. Like all topological surfaces, the
fourth person singular does not promise resolution. It desires folds. It
assembles singularities. It is nomadic. ‘What is neither individual nor
personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they
occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle
of auto-unification through nomadic distribution, radically distinct from
fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of
consciousness' (Deleuze 1990: 102).
The dogs are an example of a desiring machine. They are a multiplicity
that moves across experience in the making. They drive the film: they are
relentless impetus, movement across at the topological surface of memory
and dreams. As such, they are markers, remarkable points not for the
transcendence of the past — the unraveling of memory, the locating of its
source — but for the future anterior, the becoming of the ‘it was’ of the ‘not
yet.’ They are desiring machines for a potential to come. We never know
what they can do.
 Waltz with Bashir thus begins off-kilter, the amber-grey of the dogs
moving into the ineffable event of memory's desire. Memory crashes along
the surface. It gallops, its claws scratching into the dark grey parchment to
reveal not the surface's depth but its present scarring. Yet memory can
create new forms. The metastable quality of its movement across is replete
with its urge for transcendence. Desire can go both ways. This is the
danger: that memory will fight to the death for recognition of itself as pure
past, that it will create its own vortex of transcendence, that it will seek the
hole of putrid history, creating new microfascisms in the making with the
frenzy of vicious dogs out for revenge. This is totalitarianism at work. It
stops thought.20
Anything that flirts with transcendence risks totalitarianism, and while
fascism and totalitarianism do not strictly collude, fascism is seduced by the
aura of transcendent truth that is situated in the myth of a past, fully formed.
Fascism produces singularities that retell stories of belonging, that create
regressive attachments. It tells dark stories as though they happened in the
light of day and repeats these stories, creating doctrines from them. Fascism
predicts the ending and moves toward it, suicidally. The quest is
regressively circular. The search for the past that never was cannot but
create the self-destruction of presents in the making. Waltz with Bashir flirts
with each of these tendencies but in the end I think it resists them. Uneasily,
out of joint, it proposes something quite different from the microfascisms
that lure it: an uncertain field, a memory that leads nowhere but to its
dynamic futurity.21

At the limit: folding surfaces

‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (Simondon 1964: 260–64,
quoted in Deleuze 1990: 104). The impassive face that culminates the scene
of the men rising out of the water marks a limit. This limit is not a
boundary. It is a cleavage, an interval that opens back onto the surface of
the film's ima-gescape. The face that creates no interiority haunts this
surface. Because we cannot hold onto this surface, because its affect does
not easily translate to emotion, into a circumscribed entity, enveloping
recognition into itself, because we cannot sink into it, we instead feel with
its resonant contrast, its backgrounding-foregrounding, its movement with
the limit of memory expressing itself not as content, but as tonality. We feel
not for the life of this human body, but for the force that cuts across it, for a
life, the burgeoning of activity across surfaces of life-living. We don't feel
empathy.22 For the impassive face calls forth a protopolitics not of personal
identification, but of co-constitution where what is staged is less a face-to-
face encounter than an encounter with the beyond of the face, a beyond that
calls everything into question including the place of the human in
experience.
A life is not strictly of the human. A life is not interiority. It is pure
surface. It cannot be lived as such. It moves across, its volumetric surface
folding. It is pure experience, pure opening onto potential. It promises
nothing.
A life is felt in Waltz with Bashir as the activity of memory's deformation
in the event's coming to itself. It is wholly impersonal, yet singular. The
dogs move through it but never come to rest in it. ‘It's a haecceity, that is no
longer individuation, but singularization: life of pure immanence, neutral,
beyond good and evil, since only the subject that was incarnated in its midst
made it good or bad’ (Deleuze 1990: 361). Absolute movement. Aberrant
movement. ‘The entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space
is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living … to
belong to interiority does not mean only to “be inside” but to be on the “in-
side” of the limit … At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past
and external future face one another’ (Simondon 1964: 260–64, quoted in
Deleuze 1990: 104).
Aberrant because it does not evolve in any linear sense. It changes. The
surface senses not the past but its presenting, its making future of the
interior/exteriorfold, the expression of its limit as singularity. ‘Singularities
are distributed in a properly problematic field as topological events to
which no direction is attached’ (Deleuze 1990: 104). How singularities
resolve into the present-passing has to do with the interval between memory
and forgetting, ‘the memorandum which is at the same time afflicted with
an essential forgetting, in accordance with that law of transcendental
exercise which insists that what can only be recalled should also be
empirically impossible to recall’ (Deleuze 1994: 140). The problem:
‘solutions are engendered at precisely the same time that the problem
determines itself’ (Deleuze 1990: 121). Waltz with Bashir takes us far away
from empirical memory. It creates memories out of lived relations, in the
relation itself. Radically empirical, memory in Waltz with Bashir moves
with the forgetting that is essential for the creation of a problem worth
having, a problem that forces thought to the surface, across the surface.

Between the scenes

Between the scenes, in the stark contrast of nows, Waltz with Bashir
introduces a serial interlude: a music video. In each case, music overlays
the scene, a scene imbued with paradoxes of and in time. The first of these
‘music videos’ takes place on the ‘love boat’: ‘Then the war started and
they put us on that damned “love-boat”,’ Carmi recalls. OMD play and we
are transported into the 1980s with the reminiscent tune of ‘Enola Gay.’23
We watch as men dance on the boat, drinking. The scene happens in a
beyond of description, images unfolding without explanation for forty-five
seconds. Forty-five seconds to pan in from a remote distance to a close-up
of the partying on the boat. Forty-five seconds until the love boat explodes
and the water turns from black to red. Forty-five seconds until Carmi speaks
again: ‘I saw my best friends go up in flames before my eyes.’ However,
even as we hear the voice and we see the red water, even as we attempt to
situate ourselves in the between of the living room in Holland where the
discussion takes place and the capsizing boat, what we actually feel is not
the explosion. We feel a strange sonorous blue quiet: we watch Carmi being
taken away from the scene onto the body of an immense blue water-woman,
we watch as they drift together away from the love boat, their coupled
bodies as blue as the blue water, the blue sky, the blue boat. It is from this
vantage point, from Carmi's perspective, lying on the woman's larger-than-
life swimming body, that we see the exploding boat at last, that we see war
planes drop the bombs, as though for the second time. It is through his eyes
(his head turned away from us) that we watch what at first we only heard:
the scene turning blood-orange, bodies, boat, ocean colored by the event.
With the world once more turned amber, we watch with him, his face
resting on her stomach in the ocean, looking into the distance, impassive.
The music videos that appear sporadically in Waltz with Bashir are a
mode of accessing the strange interval between remembering and
forgetting. We feel this interval sonorously, in a strange betweenness of
color and sound, in the discordant rhythm of the feeling-telling. These
music videos create an eerie fissure in time, transporting us through
sonorous events into the tight circuit of the virtually actual, leading us, as
music can, into the affect of a recollection that is also of our own making.
Until the voice-over returns — and it always does — we waver in the
between that music can call forth, a between that places us fully in the
feeling of the past, in the present. In the music video scenes, this sonorous
continuum overlays the film's surface, multiplying the strata. The music
videos play with audio-vision at the limit where the pure experience of the
time-circuit vibrates, inviting us to feel the forgetting as it happens:
‘Transcendental memory … grasps that which from the outset can only be
recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past, but the being of the past
as such and the past of every time. In this manner, the forgotten thing
appears in person to the memory which essentially apprehends it. It does
not address memory without addressing the forgetting within memory’
(Deleuze 1994: 140).
Forgetting is memory's sonorous continuum, a sonorous continuum
created through sheets of repetition — the music video, the amber-grey-
black, the bodies rising out of the water — each of which is imbued with a
persistent refrain. These are differential refrains that play on repetition with
a difference: the Bach Piano Concerto #5 repeats three times, the Schubert
sonata is replayed in different versions throughout the film, the amber-grey-
black returns again and again, yet each is interpolated with the surfacing
imagescapes such that they are never exactly the same twice. The sonorous
continuum resonates in the circuit of time folding in on itself.
Memory as forgetting poses a problem that cannot be worked out in a
linear fashion, a problem that is not so much its content than its persistent
refrain, its persistent difference. The problem of memory is its affect, the
way affect resides both here and there, in the play of sensation of time's
shifting surface. To remember we have to forget the what of memory and
shift to the how of its strange vibrating surface. To remember, as Nietzsche
reminds us, we must forget. Otherwise, we fall into the clutches of the
transcendent traps of nostalgia, guilt and resentment that is memory's
‘what,’ memory's tight grasp on the containment of a unique capsule that
promises to move through time unchanged. This is not how Waltz with
Bashir plays with memory. Through the music video, Waltz with Bashir
brings memory to life in the resonance of the sonorous now of forgetting. It
tells a story in sheets of affect, a story that never quite fits together, where
events are more like hyperlinks than continuities in linear time. In Waltz
with Bashir, to remember is to activate an interval for forgetting that folds
across the metaphysical surface at the limit where the future-passing
unravels. Memory thus tunes toward actuality, making felt forgetting's
sonorous continuum, ‘the locus of sense and expression,’ sonorous in the
sense that it is a direct experience of time as rhythm, a pure rhythmic image
of sensation (Deleuze 1990: 125). This limit where forgetting meets the
event is where sense ‘doubles up,’ creating ‘the production of surfaces, their
multiplication and their consolidation’ (ibid.: 125).
If memory is trapped in an air-tight cell of linear narrative, its
consolidation will create black holes, traps of depth where resentment
colludes with the nostalgia and guilt of the ‘if only.’ In Waltz with Bashir,
the music video interrupts this tendency, pushing us into forgetting's
divergent strata, distracting us as the amusement park did, feeding the
imagescape forward toward more, more-than.
Deleuze calls forgetting the ‘nth power of memory’ (Deleuze 1994: 140).
Forgetting is how memory expresses itself in the event of the now. Without
the nth power, without forgetting as the dark precursor of memory in the
making, memory risks falling into transcendence, into the infinitely
regressive search for meaning. This brings with it a nihilist will to power
that holds to pre-imposed associations and recognitions, making superficial
links between a pre-constructed then and now, bridging regression into a
linear flow. Such nihilism holds onto the past as though it could be
transported fully formed into the present, as though it could be known as
such, and recreates the present in its image. Then, it polices this image,
holding it to its unchanging self. The Being of the what. The music video in
Waltz with Bashir subverts this tendency. The love boat fades into the
impossibility of remembering, drifting into the amber-grey foreground of
the ineffable as it moves across the shifting surface of the future-passing.
The second music video begins with a man walking onto the beach
holding a gun. Looking straight at the camera, the sun rising, the soldier
takes his gun and uses it to play air-guitar to the tune of Cake's ‘Beirut,’24
the words altered from its original ‘I bombed Korea.’ This scene as it
unfolds is a provocative re-play of the beginning of Apocalypse Now.25 In
this, the most obvious of the music video series, the no-time of military
down-time is foregrounded, making the crystal of time felt, riffing as it does
on the unassignable limit where the virtual and the actual coincide, ‘each
playing the role of the other’ (Deleuze 2007b: 149, translation modified).
We are thirty-six minutes into the film and have just taken part in the telling
of an event replete with the terror of war and watched as a lone soldier
swims to safety under the threat of air raids. ‘I didn't do enough,’ he says. ‘I
wasn't the hero type who carries weapons and saves everyone's life.’ After
that, music, and the image of planes crashing, boys surfing. No obvious
connection to the previous dark black-amber scene of the soldier's almost-
drowning, of the broken soldier who will never have done enough. Instead,
blue-green water, grey-yellow sky and sand, plans being made for the
massacre of Sabra and Shatila by commanders eating breakfast while
talking on the phone, games of beach badminton being played in the
distance. ‘I bombed Sidon today,’ the music croons as bombs fall like stars
from the sky and a soldier makes sunny-side-up eggs on a hot metal
remnant of a bombed-out car. Half-naked men surf. ‘I almost went home in
a coffin,’ the music continues, the soldiers' arms raised up in a dance of
victory or renunciation as they run into the star-studded sky. Then, as
quickly as it emerged, the music video fades back into the piecing together
of forgetting, back to the voice-over and the impassive face. The surface
moves again.
The next music video is of a completely different order. It is subtle and
graceful, with Bach's concerto #5 overlaying a surreal scene of soldiers
walking in slow-motion through a forest, their fatigues melding into the
dappled green of the leaves, their faces impassive in a tense atmosphere of
fear. Juxta-posed to the previous music video of macho images of men
surfing and killing to rock music, this music video plays on the uneasy
silence where beauty and terror coincide. For one minute, we watch as
soldiers move very slowly, their guns poised, their bodies tense, while in the
background, juxtaposed to the slowness of the soldiers' movement, we catch
a quick glimpse of two children crouching under trees, running from one
hide-out to another, looking for the perfect aim. Then, still in slow-motion,
one of the children launches a missile and we watch as it moves slowly,
slowly, through the two straight lines of soldiers walking toward us,
targeting the tank behind them. The missile inches in flight between them,
Bach's concerto playing uninterrupted, the missile's sudden hit causing the
soldiers to fall forward in a collective choreography of bodies lowering,
their faces still impassive. Then, in unison, the soldiers raise their faces and
continue to move forward, crouching along the ground, crawling off into
the distance.26
This music video is yet another fissure in the surface of the film, the
trans-cendental field now imbued with a new sense of danger — the danger
of the unthinkable limit between silence, beauty and death as it moves not
in the soldiers' individual bodies but across the shifting surfaces of their
collective becoming-body. Despite appearances, this is not an
aestheticization of death, not a micro-fascist tendency to ‘let art flourish —
and the world pass away’ (Benjamin 2002 [1936]: 122).27 For such an
aestheticization would privilege the individual, the One. Death is
everywhere here, but in the more-than: it is felt in the tense attention of the
killing field, in the shadows of the forest becoming cemetery, in the
collective becoming-body of the biogrammatic surface of the transcendental
field where memory and forgetting, movement and rest, beauty and terror
coincide. The music video is not an aestheticization of death but the calling
forth of the uncanny between out of which the then-now of experience
emerges. It is active in the relation, in the movement of sound and color, its
bodying choreographed as collective, its protopolitics felt as the very edge
where the terror of war is most ineffable and the memory of its violence
most ungraspable. It is in this relation, in the collective movement of the
transcendental surface, that the welling of the political at its bare-active
limit emerges and persists.

Becoming-body
Intensity of feeling in Waltz with Bashir emerges on the volumetric surface
of the becoming-body, the sensing body in movement, of the film itself.
This becoming-body resists the quintessential sensitive surface by refusing
to territorialize on the human face, except, perhaps, at the last scene, where
the animation gives way to documentary footage. In this amodal field of
experience, the becoming-body as surface is its own intensive multiple
movement across. It resists moving into a body, a personalized human body.
It remains instead a biogram on the transcendental field's topological
surface.
That the film moves between bodies in becoming, shaping the emergence
of a life not as body but as biogram,28 does not suggest that it disregards the
body. Quite the contrary. The biogram of the film makes Waltz with Bashir
all about the body, all about the intensity of life welling. What Waltz with
Bashir resists is the subjectification of this body, the stultification of this
personal experience as mapped through the recognition of the face as the
quintessential affective image. At the limit of the now of events diverging
where sense and memory coincide in an active forgetting, the becoming-
body is an attractor for the creation of nodes of resonance, of sonorous
continuums where a face has not yet congealed. This is why the face in
Waltz with Bashir eludes us. It is not yet fully formed. Until the last scene.
The biogram of Waltz with Bashir is a moving of preindividual life across
the folds of the surface of experience in the making. The becoming-body as
biogram plays at the interstice of individuation and singularity, trembling on
the resonant circuit of the virtual/actual now of pure experience, appearing
as a tonal difference that pushes the narrative along: the body not as content
but as crystal of potential. The biogram constitutes not a unique body, but a
body-emergent across series, the force of life that can never return to the
body as One. Force of life: where life is not yet individual or person but
collective individuation. Here, where the actual and the virtual coincide in a
tight circuit, there is no morality, there is only life-living, a life. Morality
belongs to the discourse of individualized politics where perpetrators and
victims are identified not as bodies in the making, but as fully formed nodes
of a politics already constituted, a politics that transcends the now of
experience.
Bare activity is the term Brian Massumi gives to the politics-in-germ of
the becoming-body. Politics-in-germ bubbles on the pre-individual level as
the singularly felt edging into life-living of the body-becoming. Bare
activity is not biopower. It is the biogrammatic tendency of an edging into
bodyness, of the surface welling into a singularity across series.
‘Biopower's “field of application” according to Foucault is a territory,
grasped from the angle of its actually providing liveable conditions for an
existing biological being. [Bare activity] operates on a proto-territory tensed
with a compelling excess of potential which renders it strictly unliveable.’29
On the edge of the livable: a life.
A life percolates. Unlike some of Waltz with Bashir's critics, we must not
mistake ‘a life’ with the life of the filmmaker, overlaying it with Ari
Folman or with a generalized version of the Israeli or the Palestinian body.
This is not what churns at the edges of the film. A life is the bare activity of
the surface folding, of the background foregrounding. A life pushes through
the plane of immanence, always on the verge of appearing, making itself
felt, but never ‘as such.’ Beyond good and evil. Protopolitical,
preindividual, a life shapes the sensing surface. We are caught by it, but
only peripherally, for it has always already moved beyond in a welling of a
new proto-territory. It is activation on the edge ‘at [the] intensive limit of
life’ (Massumi 2009). It is the waltz in Waltzing with Bashir.
The waltz: two men crouched on the edge of a road in a grey, shelled
cityscape fight over a gun in the midst of heavy artillery. Imminent danger
all around: soldiers shoot wildly, their anguish palpable. The sky is amber
against the grey of the buildings and the dusty asphalt. We see fire in the
distance. The soldier rises, the gun he has now managed to get a hold of at
his side. We watch, tense, as the soldier moves into the suicidal path of
bombs and bullets. The sound of a Chopin waltz playing in the background
intensifies. The soldier begins to cross the street to the rhythm of the music
in a three-step, all the while firing the gun into the air. Five seconds, ten
seconds, the image focused on his feet, one-two-three, one-two-three, the
bullet casings falling around him as he continues to shoot into the sky. We
hear a gunshot whizzing by but the soldier's seemingly invincible body is
the only one the image cares about, the ima-gescape dancing with him
amidst the gun-flame amber in the grey-light surround. As the waltz gains
in speed, the casings continue to pollute the earth around him and the image
turns and turns, waltzing with the soldier as the sky darkens, its amber
shadows intensifying in step with the image's focus in on the soldier's tight
circle, one-two-three, one-two-three. Twenty seconds.
Then the voice-over returns to address what is happening, but similarly to
the earlier music videos, this scene cannot be explained, cannot be
comprehended. So our attention remains focused on the soldier's movement,
his becoming-body dancing, a life quivering to the surface.
As the soldier's dance comes to an end, the image is taken over by the
larger-than-life poster of Bashir's face, gazing off-screen, pock-marked with
bullet holes. We sense a shift: from the micropolitics of the waltz to the
macropolitics of everything Bashir represents as the recently elected
president, as the murdered Phalangist leader, as the dark precursor to a war
already in the making. Bashir's face, larger than life, takes over the screen
until we are looking straight at him, another face that eludes us, that will not
look at us, but this is less an impassive face than a face uninterested in us:
Bashir's gaze is turned away, turned to the prelude, perhaps, of the Sabra
and Shatila massacre, a massacre we will neither fully see, nor directly
connect to, nor ever fully comprehend. Sixteen seconds with Bashir's face
looking away, a non-merging with its extensive surface, the macropolitical
surface of the Lebanon war.
What is the status of Bashir's face, filling the screen? How does this face
that refuses to face us coincide with the incessant return of the impassive
face that looks straight at us? What kind of circuit does Bashir's face
superimposed on the anguished waltz of the mad soldier create?
Bashir's face is not unexpressive, but nor is it engaged. It looks off into a
distance that cannot be fathomed — we cannot see what he sees. Here is a
proposition: Bashir's face creates the initial delimitation of a territory.30
This territory is where the massacre will take place: it is a specific place
with a date and a history and an aftermath. Bashir gazes toward the
macropolitical, his gaze directed toward the transcendent unity which is the
state, the unity from which he derives the power to make decisions such as
who is included and excluded from the realm of the political. Yet his face is
not there — it is here, here in the dance, here in the vertigo where the macro
and the micro coincide, where the affective tonality of a life coursing
through this life makes itself felt.
Bashir's face marks the passage from the abstract plane of experience
where memory and war collide without coinciding (the soldier's face) to the
plane of organization where war proliferates as the actual violence of
destruction. The soldier and Bashir's face: an uneasy pairing of bare activity
and representation dancing at the limits where the micro and the macro
coincide, at the dangerous limit where the micropolitical potentially
territorializes into fascisms in the making.31 For ‘[f]ascism is inseparable
from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from
point to point … There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each
hole, in every niche’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 214).32
Waltz with Bashir gives life to the bare activity of the political bubbling
to the surface of the transcendental field at the same time that it warns that
surfaces are not purveyors of moral truths. In the immensity of Bashir's face
filling the screen and dwarfing the soldier, we sense that protopolitics are
always potentially fascist politics, and yet we also feel the uncanny surplus
of the waltz's movement undermining the straightforward narrative of
political predetermination. From the waltz to Bashir, from the soldier's face
lost in the reverie of his mad movement to the calm certainty of Bashir's
distant gaze, a political drama is set forth that creates a tight circuit of
molecular potentials and micropolitical captures.
 As Ari Folman was creating Waltz with Bashir, microfascisms were
playing themselves out in different ways across political constituencies, as
they have a tendency to wherever there is a transcendent capture, be it
liberal or neo-liberal, conservative or neo-conservative. At the liberal edge
of the spectrum ‘we’ insist on a politics of recognition based on a
benevolent responsibility for the other that builds on dichotomies of
inclusion/exclusion, perpetrator/victim, and reifies the human in the name
of race, identity, gender. Not necessarily fascism, but certainly a tending
toward fascism in the name of a universal figure of the human. As Guattari
underscores, the universal as a tendency activates forms of microfascism in
the name of desire to have the final word on the moral and the immoral,
right and wrong, and this tending toward universalizing is with us, always.
‘Fascism happened and it never ceases happening. It travels through the
finest weaves; it is in constant evolution. It seems to come from the outside,
but it finds its energy in the heart of each of our desires’ (Guattari 1977: 62,
my translation). Fascisms are war machines that fill the holes and gaps of
potential, sedimenting the open topological surface of the transcendental
field. Fascisms are a strange interplay of rigidity and suppleness -rigid
disciplinings that reek of totalitarianism, supple choreographies of surface
cells in the making. Waltz with Bashir does not protect us from the micro-
fascist edges of politics. Indeed, it takes us again and again to their limit.
What Waltz with Bashir does is refuse to know in advance how the
consequences of the undeniable horror of the massacre play out, and where
the ongoing fascisms of politics in the making are located. In so doing, it
makes felt how fascisms never reign simply on the macropolitical surface of
experience — they crawl between, across strata of experience, resurging in
forms and forces less obvious than those in the macropolitical realm but no
less insidious.
 This is what Waltz with Bashir does: it complexifies the stakes by
resisting the settling of fascism within one or another of the camps; it resists
personalizing the political. Go back to the waltz scene, the scene of bullets
flying and a soldier dancing, and see once more how the impassive face of
Bashir is superimposed onto the agitations of a life. Note how, by
superimposing Bashir's face, enormous and compelling, onto the backdrop
of a mad dance of a soldier's undoing, Waltz with Bashir activates and
makes felt the originary difference at the heart of all dephasings. How it
makes felt that there is much more at stake than simply one surface of
experience. How it makes felt that what surfaces is also how it surfaces.

The drama of the political

For eighty-eight of Waltz with Bashir's ninety minutes, the face remains
impassive, resists empathy, undoes recognition. Or it looks away. This is the
brilliance of Waltz with Bashir, that it waits, creating sheet upon sheet of
experience, surface upon surface of feeling, contrast after contrast,
dephasing after dephas-ing, amber-grey-black upon amber-grey-black,
pushing us across the limits of the sonorous continuum, before it brings us
face to face with the documentary footage of the last two of the ninety
minutes. It is this, the intensive passage between abstraction and
recognition merging in the recognizable face of horror, that makes the final
scene of the film with the flesh-and-blood face of the wailing Palestinian
woman so powerful, so terrible.
The final scene leading up to the documentary footage of the Sabra and
Shatila massacre takes thirty minutes to unfold, beginning with the long,
slow close-up of Bashir's bullet hole-infested face framing the dancing
soldier's incessant one-two-three. For thirty minutes a back and forth in
time from a lawn in Holland to a couch in Israel. Then, finally, we arrive at
the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
 When we arrive, the scene is set: fascism beckons. ‘You know that
picture from the Warsaw ghetto? The one with the kid holding his hands in
the air? That's just like the long line of women, old people and children
looked.’
The victims are walking toward us, their bodies black against the amber
night sky. We are looking straight toward the child's face — the child who
reminds us of the child from the Warsaw ghetto — his hands up in the air.
The child walks slowly toward us, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine, ten seconds, but though we recognize his gesture, his slow walk
reaching toward a memory in the making, we cannot quite see him, we
cannot quite make him come to life, to our life. For his face remains
shadowed by the amber-black. Colour-light before face, surface before
content. Yet we know the content and it haunts us: we are there, back at the
camps, in the fascisms of our memories.
We enter the camp, this camp, its surfaces almost completely amber, the
air like an amber gauze of sand and light, and we walk behind the women,
the women we've seen three times before in the scene of the bodies rising
from the water, but this time the women are walking away from us,
screaming, wailing, clutching their bodies, holding their heads. We cannot
see their faces.
 Figure 6.4

Moving through them, we find ourselves beside their anguish, our pace
now a little in advance of their movements. We dread what we are about to
see. For in the distance we see him, facing them, the soldier-filmmaker, his
face filling the screen, his previously impassive face slowly falling apart.
As we approach, as the face beckons larger and larger, we see that the face
is no longer pure surface: it is leaking, breathing, chest heaving up and
down, mouth slightly open, eyes roving. We feel the face's breakdown, the
loss of its contours, and through this intensive folding we feel the whole
metaphysical surface of the film folding into expression. However, it is not
expression of content: we do not see what he sees, our backs still to the
women. What he sees: the ineffable, the ungraspable, the horror.
Then we do see. We see with our own eyes. We see the wailing
Palestinian women through the documentary footage taken in 1982. One
Palestinian woman's face fills the screen, growing larger than life, larger
even than the space of the frame. Then the face moves away from us, into
the devastation of the massacre. Now another face looks straight at us,
screaming, wailing into the eye of the camera in a language so many will
never fully comprehend. In a rush we feel everything, we feel the amplitude
of the transcendental surface now active on the surface of life, this life: we
feel the terror, the empathy, the guilt, the shame, the horror. Yet we feel it
not solely in their name, but in the fullness of our taking part; we feel it as
our own movement across the surface of the ineffability of experience. This
shift from animation to documentary footage shakes our relation to the
image. We feel-see the horror.
In two minutes, the metaphysical surface of the film has completely
shifted. Everything has come undone, but this is not the film's first undoing.
The series of undoings that occur throughout the film keep the circuit tight
between affect and emotion, holding us to the now of experience in the
making. These undoings are what keep us from taking the stance of the
dispassionate observer, that keep us from falling into our selves. We watch-
with, we feel-with the terror of a life fleeting, consumed, subsumed by the
horrors of war. So we become responsible before the event, in the face of it,
in its incessant coming-to-act, as Deleuze would say. For what Waltz with
Bashir has instantiated with its roving imagescape and its relentless
sonorous continuum is emphatically not a responsibility for the event, as
though the event could be captured and cir-cumscribed.33 This is not to say
that the coupling with fascisms in the making is not always there, at the
ready, as are the risks of becoming responsible for, of taking a
universalizing stance from beyond the event of a life's unfolding. The
specter of the boy with his hands raised, the recall of Warsaw, looms large.
A rigid segmentarity. However, still the film resists, I believe, and it is this
resistance that is most haunting.
 Figure 6.5

The documentary footage barely lasts one minute, its blues and grays
pausing in the end on an image of orange, a dead girl's body, before we are
taken back to black screen of the animated film, back to amber credits, back
to the Schubert that has returned more than once, differently each time,
activating the sonorous continuum of our experience in the watching.
Before the credits, though, the screen remains black, a blackness that lasts
an eternity of twelve seconds. We do not know where we stand.34 The
ground trembles with the responsibility before life. We cannot comprehend
the imagescape. It washes over us, black, a surface alive with the haunting
sonorous continuum of a horror uncharted, a surfacing that now gives time
for the re-creation of a circuiting back to each and every amber-grey-black
image of the film. We are back, rising out of the water, walking into a city
at dawn, terrified and deadened by the difference of repetition. We are back,
rising out of the water, dressing on the edge of the sea, holding our hands
up in the nightmare of Warsaw, lost in an image that refuses to situate us.
So Waltz with Bashir resists the resolve of a dogmatic political stance,
leaving us instead at the very heart of the drama of the political barely
active.
‘Everything changes when the dynamisms are posited no longer as
schemata of concepts but as dramas of ideas’ (Deleuze 1994: 218). How? is
the dramatic question. In its departure from the transcendental what?, the
differential how? is with what Waltz with Bashir is concerned. How: how to
conceive of relations of force over and above a power structure that puts the
individual at the center?
Relations of force are relations in their incipiency. They are tendencies in
the making. Their will to power is a fight to the death between the
metaphysical surface and transcendence. Transcendence often wins,
because in the end it is easier to give up on the amber-grey of the face-as-
surface, to turn away from the ineffable, to make the individual the starting
and the end point, to background the uncertainty of relations still in-
forming, to place blame, to live in resentment, to be a victim, to be guilty, to
be innocent.35 Yet to make the personal political — to opt for transcendence
— is radically to underestimate the power of fascism and its unique ability
to morph into folds of experience as yet unthought.
There is no question: responsibility must be taken, consequences must be
faced. The macropolitical cannot be ignored. However, the edge, the
differential, where the molar and the molecular meet is equally vital. For it
is here, where the bare-active forces of the political agitate beyond the
realm of the personal or the individual, that difference is felt at its most
acute.
Waltz with Bashir is a political drama the strength of which is that it plays
itself out at the uneasy intersection of a life effervescing and politics'
potential reterritorialization on the face of fascism.36 Waltz with Bashir
refutes an easy solution. There is no promise here, nor even the certainty
that it isn't fascism that rears its ugly head as the film comes to a close. Yet
it is also here, it seems to me, in the uncertainty, that the potential looms for
something yet to come that has not yet found its name, its face: a politics in
the making.
In providing us with the opportunity to think about the how of proto-
politics, Waltz with Bashir calls forth the future, but not a ready-made one;
an uncertain one. In doing so, it resists territory's refrain, creating the
opportunity for an ongoing conversation across surfaces of war and
violence, an ongoing conversation not only about past wars or ongoing
massacres, not only about the ineffability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and its micro- and macro-fascist tendencies, but also about the danger of
‘new forms of microfascisms: the simmering of familialism, at school, in
racism, in ghettos of all kinds’ (Guattari 1977: 62, my translation).
Waltz with Bashir does this by taking a protopolitical stance: we must be
wary of identifying too strongly with the face, for the face is a dangerous
proposition — either we recognize it as our own, or we turn away from it in
horror.37 The face must remain a topological surface equal to all other
surfacings: it must not territorialize too quickly onto an identity, onto an
individual, onto the Jew or the Palestinian. Because if it does, we will have
positioned ourselves in advance, and we will already have succumbed to the
most potentially racist of subject-object positions.
Beyond the face is where the politics of the more-than can begin, but we
must walk the tightrope carefully, remembering all the while, as Deleuze
and Guattari remind us, that there are no micropolitical experiments
impervious to capture by macropolitical tendencies and vice versa:
‘everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics
and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 213).
Beyond the human
On the dangers of macropolitical capture, we can learn, perhaps, from the
troubling about-turn of Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethical philosophy is
con-structed on the ineffability of the face, but for whom, as a Zionist Jew,
the face of the Palestinian was, in the end, too much to face.
Levinas's ethical philosophy is constructed around the concept of the
face-to-face encounter where ‘the face is present in its refusal to be
contained’ (Levinas 1961: 194). His ethics underscore the idea that the face
cannot be comprehended or encompassed and he is clear that the face must
not be thought as ‘content’ — that it ultimately cannot be grasped or
touched as such. The face is always the face of the Other, it is that which
underscores ‘the incomprehensible nature of the presence of the Other’ as
the first revelation of the absolute difference of the other, a relation that is
‘maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity’ (Levinas
1961: 195, 197).
So far, the face as Levinas conceptualizes it is very reminiscent of the
face in Waltz with Bashir. It refuses to be contained and operates as the
topological surface of difference. Where Waltz with Bashir significantly
diverges from Levinas is in its emphasis on the infrahuman and on the
question of the response/ responsibility. In Levinas, the absolute alterity of
the face, that ‘puts me in a relation with being,’ calls forth a need for a
response, and there is no question that this is a response directed at another
human (Levinas 1961: 212). Relations abound and encounters multiply in
Waltz with Bashir, but these encounters are between abstract surfaces —
face color, face sound, face dance, each of them operational in the tight
circuit where the virtual and the actual coincide and differential relations
play themselves out. Were Waltz with Bashir to demand ‘a response,’ a
human-to-human encounter before all else, it would risk falling right back
into the transcendence of political pre-positionings. In order to create an
opening onto the drama of the political where relations of force are what is
at stake, and not individual power, Waltz with Bashir must do everything to
avoid making the pre-composed, pre-narrated body of the human the center
of life-living.
This is the topic of the conversation that takes place between Levinas,
Alain Finkielkraut and Shlomo Malka in the aftermath of the Sabra and
Shatila massacre. The discussion begins with the question of response and
responsibility, underscoring, as far as I am concerned, the dangers of an
ethical philosophy that humanizes experience and seeks to comprehend it in
a gesture of recognition of its humanity.
Shlomo Malka begins the conversation by quoting a talk of Alain
Finkielk-raut's where Finkielkraut says, ‘We are all split between a feeling
of innocence and a feeling of responsibility, both of which are anchored in
our traditions and our ordeals. I do not yet know which of the two,
innocence or responsibility, we will choose as Jews. But I believe that our
decision will determine the meaning that we give to the ordeal of genocide’
(Malka 1989: 290).
Taking this quote as a starting point, Malka asks: ‘Levinas, you are the
philosopher of the “other.” Isn't history, isn't politics the very site of the
encounter with the “other,” and for the Israeli, isn't the “other” above all the
Palestinian?’ Levinas responds: ‘Prior to any act, I am concerned with the
Other, and I can never be absolved from this responsibility’ (Malka 1989:
290). Continuing on the subject of responsibility toward ‘those “who have
done nothing”,’ and focusing on the concept of an ‘original responsibility of
man for the other person,’ Levinas underscores the fact that ‘my self… is
never absolved from responsibility toward the Other’ (ibid.: 290–91).
 This statement of Levinas turns the stakes of the discussion toward the
specific question of the Jew and the Palestinian and the responsibility of
Zionism in the face of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Is it a responsibility
for or a responsibility before? Can there be any question of innocence?
Levinas responds: ‘in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are
faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is
just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong’ (Malka 1989: 294).
From the thinker for whom responsibility is always the question of the
response elicited by the face of the other yet who claimed that the face must
always remain without content, do we not experience here the stark
reterritorialization on the face against which Deleuze and Guattari warn in
their work on faciality?38 Isn't the question of responsibility once again a
question of whose face? Is it not the face of the other that we now see as
wrong?
This is precisely what Waltz with Bashir resists: nowhere in the film is
there a reterritorialization on the face of the other. By the time the
Palestinian women's faces appear, it can no longer be a question of territory,
the surfaces far too intermeshed. Waltz with Bashir thus resists the two
tendencies at play here in the bringing together of ethics and politics: the
staging of the politico-ethical solely in the body of the human and its
responsibility for the other it faces. Responsibility for reeks of benevolence,
a dangerous kind of liberal humanist ‘generosity’ that maintains the other as
either victim or perpetrator, keeping the strata rigid. Being responsible
before is a different proposition. To be responsible before is to engage at the
non-human limit of the barely active where a life is restlessly agitating. On
the cusp where the surfaces of life-living resonate, on the sonorous
continuum of the ineffable, responsibility before means that we cannot
already have positioned ourselves, that we are indeed, as Deleuze suggests,
sorcerers creating life, and more life.39
To create more life is to produce difference. It is to resituate memory in
the act of the telling that opens life-living to the pure experience of the
welling now. ‘Recollection introduces difference into the present in the
sense that recollection constitutes, each subsequent moment, something
new’ (Deleuze 2004: 45, translation modified). The drama of politics at the
heart of Waltz with Bashir is the recursive now, the terrible now of the
tense, war-infested street where the soldier erupts from his war-self into a
dance, the eerie now of the love-boat's dance exploding into blood-red
ocean, the strangely quiescent now of Bach dancing in the forest. This
drama of time, in time, is not theatrical. Waltz with Bashir does not
represent war, or memory, or suffering. It does not express it on a stage that
is separate from its happening. It lives it, on the very edge of life where life
takes on the resonant political drama of a life.

Notes

1. Waltz with Bashir was made first as a non-animated video based on a

90-page script and then transformed into animation (with 2,300
illustrations drawn by art director David Polonsky and his three
assistants). The animation format is a combination of Flash animation,
classic animation and 3D. In an interview with Erica Abeel from
indieWIRE, Ari Folman discusses his use of animation for this film
(with the exception of the last scene of the film, which is documentary
archival footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre). He says: ‘I had the
basic idea for the film for several years, but I was not happy to do it in
real life video. How would that have looked like? … If it could be
done in animation with fantastic drawings, it would capture the surreal
 aspect of war. If you look at all the elements in the film -memory, lost
memory, dreams, the subconscious, hallucinations, drugs, youth, lost
youth — the only way to combine all those things in one storyline was
drawings and animation. You know, the question most frequently
asked since Cannes is “why animation?” And it's a question that's
absurd to me. I mean, how else could it have been done? … [With
animation] you can go from one dimension to another … I think you
get enormous freedom with animation and illustrations. It's a really
great language for me, the best. You can imagine everything.’
www.indiewire.com/article/oscar_09_waltz_with_bashir_director_ari_
folman/.
2. In fact, this scene is almost identical to the final scene of the film,
except that in the last scene, the camera will not turn its back on the
women, and the face will open itself to the unthinkable suffering of the
massacre.
3. Deleuze speaks of the necessity for ‘the actual image [to] enter into
relation with its own virtual image as such; from the outset pure
description must divide in two, “repeat itself, take itself up again, fork,
contradict itself. An image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual
and virtual, must be constituted … We are in a situation of an actual
image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer
any linkage of the real with the fictional, but indisceribility of the two,
a perpetual exchange … And just as the real and the fictional become
indiscerible in certain very specific conditions of the image, the true
and the false now become undecid-able or inextricable: the impossible
proceeds from the possible, and the past is not necessarily true’
(Deleuze 1991: 274–75, translation modified).
4. This is not a film about personal redemption. In response to a question
about the ‘therapeutic’ aspects of making this film about ‘his’
experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war, Ari Folman says: ‘I'd say
the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked.’
www.indiewire.com/article/oscar_09_waltz_with_bashir_director_ari_
folman/ Elsewhere, underscoring the dynamic aspect of experience, he
says: ‘My belief is that any kind of filmmaking is therapy; but, it's
dynamic. You're actually doing
something.’theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/01/waltz-with-bashir-
evening-class.html.
5. In his excellent work on anime, Thomas Lamarre works with the
concept of the ‘superflat,’ suggesting that it is the very flatness of the
animated image that creates the potential for a certain kind of
metamorphosis and timing. He writes: ‘This is because, if one thinks
about flatness in terms of two-dimensional surfaces, then the logical
question becomes: how does anything happen in this surface world?
How does anything come forth or vanish? And how is such change
expressed. Clearly, events and change can be expressed only in terms
of an interaction of surfaces, as a movement of surfaces on surfaces, as
shift from surface to surface. I should like to stretch Murakami's
superflat, and think of a superflat that entails flat interactions or flat
articulations. That is, the superflat becomes a quality of movement,
change or transformation. In effect, the supposedly flat and depthless
characters and figures in anime are superflat. In their very flatness,
they are traversed by a potential for interaction, motion and
transformation. They move on a specific field of forces’ (see ‘From
Animation to Anime,’ Japan Forum 14(2) 2002: 329–67, 338). While
Waltz with Bashir does not fit into the category of anime, the use I am
 making of the idea of surface resonates with Lamarre's analysis, and is
informed by it. See also his important book The Anime Machine — A
Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
2009). Here, Lamarre develops much more thoroughly than I do here
the concept of animation and its potential as a visual and cultural
practice.
6. See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles
Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
7. In the English translation of Deleuze's cinema books, fabulation is
translated as story-telling, which in its common definition departs from
the way Deleuze is using the term. Fabulation, or the ‘function of
fabulation’ is a concept Deleuze takes from Bergson that departs from
the idea of narrative to touch on the question of what Deleuze calls
‘the power of the false.’ It is also implicitely aligned to the notion of
intercessor, which Deleuze defines as the conduit for expression.
Deleuze writes: ‘Whether they&re real or fictional, animate or
inanimate, we must create our intercessors. It's a series. If we do not
form a series, even completely imaginary, we are lost. I need my
intercessors to express myself, and they could never express
themselves without me: when we work we are always many, even
when it is not obvious’ (Deleuze 1995: 125, translation modified).
Fabulation follows directly from this notion of a manyness of
expression. In Deleuze's text on intercessors, it is through Pierre
Perrault's work that Deleuze activates the concept of fabulation. He
writes: ‘The fabrication of intercessors in a community stands out in
the work of the Canadian cinematographer Pierre Perrault: I gave
myself intercessors, and this is how I can say what I have to say.
Perrault thinks that, if he speaks alone, even if he invents fictions, he's
 bound to come out with an intellectual discourse, he won't be able to
get away from a ‘master's or colonist discourse,’ an established
discourse. What is needed: to catch someone else ‘legending,’ ‘caught
in the act of legending.’ Then a minority discourse, between two or
several, begins to form. We here come upon what Bergson calls
‘fabulation … To catch people in the act of legending is to catch the
movement of the constitution of a people. Peoples do not preexist’
(Deleuze 1995: 126, translation modified). This ties in with what
Deleuze writes in Cinema 2: ‘When Perrault is addressing his real
characters of Quebec, it is not simply to eliminate fiction but to free it
from the model of truth which penetrates it, and on the contrary to
rediscover the pure and simple function of fabulation which is opposed
to this model. What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the
truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the
fabulatory function of the poor, insofar as it gives the false the power
that makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster’ (Deleuze 1991: 150,
translation modified).
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and
All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), 157.
9. On his concept of bare activity, see, amongst others, Brian Massumi,
Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (MIT
Press, 2011).
10. ‘Pure experience’ is the term William James gives to the virtual-actual
nexus of experience in the making. He writes: ‘The instant field of the
present is at all times what I call the “pure” experience. It is only
virtually or potentially either subject or object as yet. For the time
being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that’
(James 1996: 23).
11. Ari Folman also speaks of the movements of the film as being
aberrant, referring especially to the strange gait of the animated
characters. He says: ‘Look at the motion. People don't walk in reality
like they walk in this film. It's a different kind of walk we developed,
slow and awkward. We had problems in animation creating this slow
movement. It's much easier to make action scenes.’
www.indiewire.com/article/oscar_09_waltz_with_bashir_director_ari_
folman/.
12. In the preface to the forthcoming Chinese translation of A Thousand
Plateaus, Brian Massumi writes: ‘What is at issue philosophically is
never the empirical question of “what” something is (the question of
being). It is the pragmatic question of “how” things go (the question of
becoming-oriented). What is always at issue philosophically is this
pragmatic question, taken to the limit of thought’ (Massumi 2010: 12).
13. In Cinema 2, Deleuze connects a cinema that creates time (creating
thought) to one that departs from a certain fascism of the
cinematographic. Citing Artaud, he writes: ‘the image must produce a
shock, a nerve-wave which gives rise to thought’ (Deleuze 1991: 165).
Microfascisms are challenged by the ‘as yet unthought’ allowing us to
‘discover the identity of thought and life’ where ‘the whole is the
outside’ and ‘what counts is the interstice between images,’ ‘a spacing
which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back
into it’ (ibid.: 179).
14. While it is clear that the film-maker ‘represents’ Ari Folman, we never
actually get to know the character. We know only that he was a soldier
and now makes films and that this is a film he is moved to make. ‘I'm
just a filmmaker!’ he says when Boaz seeks his help about the dog-
nightmare. ‘Can't films be therapeutic?’ Boaz asks? The filmmaker
 does not answer directly, except to say that he has not had any
flashbacks: ‘The truth is, that's not stored in my system,’ he says,
referring to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. ‘You never think about it?’
Boaz insists. ‘No, no … no,’ the filmmaker responds, his face
impassive. They hug and go their separate ways. ‘I'll think of
something,’ the filmmaker says. Waltz with Bashir is the force of
thought this thinking propels.
15. For more on back-gridding and experience, see Brian Massumi,
‘Concrete is as Concrete Doesn't,’ in Parables for the Virtual: Affect,
Movement, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002).
16. The ‘techno’ sound for this scene was made from ninety-eight tracks
reduced to five, Ari Folman explains in an interview.
www.indiewire.com/article/oscar_09_waltz_with_bashir_director_ari_
folman/.
17. The graphic novel Waltz with Bashir is completely different from the
film, despite the fact that the images are original animated drawings
and the text is the same. Without the movement across of the cinematic
imagescape, the affective tonality of the surface as a life does not come
through. In the graphic novel, the text takes over and the images
become aids or representations to the story. As a result, the characters
take on a more standard ‘personality’ and the story thus becomes more
traditional in its telling. This is not to suggest that only cinematic
images have movement. For stills that are immanent with absolute
movement, see any of Leni Riefenstahl's photographs from Olympia
(this question of the still-in-movement is further developed in Erin
Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (MIT Press,
2009)).
18. On the topic of movement and anime, Thomas Lamarre writes:
‘Animation then becomes something other than a process of animating
figures, of drawing all the stages to produce seamless movement. It is
a process of inventing machines of movement-machines of walking, of
talking, of running, leaping, flying, and so forth -that take up all
manner of objects.’ See ‘From Animation to Anime,’ Japan Forum
14(2) (2002), 329–67, 339.
19. For more on semblance and event, see Brian Massumi, Semblance and
Event: Arts of Experience, Politics of Expression (MIT Press, 2011).
20. Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The plane of immanence is not a concept
that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image
thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought,
to find one's bearings in thought … Thought demands “only”
movement that can be carried on to infinity. What thought claims by
right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the movement of the
infinite. It is this that constitutes the image of thought’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 37).
21. I say this being fully aware of the many conflicting responses to the
film and the disavowal of the film from many left-wing groups in
Israel, Palestine and abroad. That Waltz with Bashir is a film that
awakens paradoxical responses is its strength, I believe, and its
politics. Critiques follow two major lines: a lack of political
commitment (see Todd Brown below), and the absence of Palestinians
in the role of writing history (resulting in its incapacity to do justice to
the horror and its lack of responsibility) (see Naira Antoun). The
second critique is the more interesting one, and the one to keep in
mind here. My reading of the film does not seek to disqualify such a
critique, but to reproblematize the question of memory, experience and
the political via the affective surface created by the film. Whether or
not the film ultimately does justice to the horror of the massacre
cannot be the question, it seems to me, as nothing could do the
massacre justice. How movements of thought are generated by art,
how surfacings are complicated through the qualitative expressions of
the transcendental field art can activate is what I hope to address here.
The key question, it seems to me, is one that concerns attending to the
differential of molar/macro questions and molecular/micro questions. I
agree with Antoun that the issue of taking responsibility is always at
stake. This is an example of a macro question that must be addressed.
The problem is that when only this stratum is addressed, we quickly
fall into the personalization of politics, a personalization that appeals
to the transcendent plane of the state. See below how Antoun herself
falls into this trap, suggestion that the face in Waltz with Bashir is a
personal face, and building her argument on exclusion based on this
notion of the refacialization of politics.
Todd Brown writes: ‘In many ways, this is the hardest review I've ever
sat down and committed myself to writing. I regret watching Ari
Folman's Waltz with Bashir. No, it's not because it was a waste of time.
It wasn't because it was bad filmmaking. On the contrary, it is
filmmaking at its finest. Waltz with Bashir is, at the very least, an
astounding animated documentary with incredible originality and
breathtaking impact, a film that must be watched by anyone with even
a passing interest in world affairs or Middle Eastern History … While
Waltz with Bashir occupies the upper end of the scale in terms of
quality filmmaking, it incredibly dominates the lower end of the
political propaganda spectrum with its insidiousness … While I
applaud Folman for attempting to face up to the guilt of the Sabra and
Shatilla Massacre, this film falls utterly short of making any
commitment on the issue, instead choosing to weasel out of the grasp
of responsibility which even Israel's own Kahan Commission had
assigned to the IDF’ (twitchfilm.com/reviews/2009/10/waltz-with-
bashir-reviewwal.php).
Naira Antoun writes: ‘To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with
Bashir, to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians but with
Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely begins to describe the
violence that this film commits against Palestinians. There is nothing
interesting or new in the depiction of Palestinians — they have no
names, they don't speak, they are anonymous. But they are not simply
faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story that Waltz with Bashir
tells are Israeli soldiers. Their anguish, their questioning, their
confusion, their pain — it is this that is intended to pull us. The
rotoscope animation is beautifully done, the facial expressions so
engaging, subtle and torn, we find ourselves grimacing and gasping at
the trials and tribulations of the young Israeli soldiers and their older
agonizing selves. We don't see Palestinian facial expressions; only a
lingering on dead, anonymous faces. So while Palestinians are never
fully human, Israelis are, and indeed are humanized through the course
of the film … In the final analysis, this is what Waltz with Bashir is
about: the evasion of responsibility. It is not that the self-reflection
offered by the film is only partial, and that we would simply be nay-
sayers to be dissatisfied with it. Because there is no sense of what the
Israeli role in Lebanon was, because it is about ethically and morally
redeeming the filmmaker and his contemporaries — and by extension
the Israeli self, military and nation, the Israeli collective in other words
— because of all this, the film is an act not of limited self-reflection
 but self-justification. It is a striving towards working through qualms
to restabilize the self as it is currently constituted; it does not ask
challenging questions that would destabilize that self (electronicint
ifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml).
22. Empathy is not affective. It is an emotion that operates within the
register of the first person singular, where ‘I’ see ‘you,’ where subject
and object are predefined. As I will outline at the end of the chapter, is
‘responsibility for’ the other and not ‘before’ the other, an ethics of
recognition rather than a desiring machine for collective individuation.
Being responsible ‘before’ the other involves the embrace not of an
other qua human other, but of a tendency toward becoming. We are
responsible before in a collective individuation that resonates on the
cusp of the actual and the virtual where experience begins to take
form.
23. Enola Gay is the name given to the B-29 superfortress bomber that
dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
24. ‘I Bombed Korea’ is reworked into ‘Beirut’ by Zeve Tene.
25. Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1979.
26. This scene is strangely reminiscent of the dappled forest scenes and
classical music of Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line (1999).
27. ‘“Fiat ars — pereat mundus” says fascism, expecting from war, as
Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of sense perception altered
by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l'art pour l'art.
Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for
the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation
has reached the point where it can experience its own alienation as a
supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as
 practiced by fascism Communism replies by politicizing art’
(Benjamin 2002 [1936]: 122).
28. Deleuze's concept of the diagram (particularly as he develops it in
relation to Francis Bacon's work in Logic of Sensation), is closely
allied to my use of the bio-gram. See also Brian Massumi, ‘Strange
Horizon,’ in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
29. See Brian Massumi, ‘National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward
and Ecology of Power,’ Theatre, Culture and Society, special issue on
Foucault (2009).
30. 'the territory is the surface form extruded by the life-priming of bare
activity. It is the effective form of expression of what Deleuze and
Guattari would call a cutting edge of deterritorialization, understood as
the processual suspension of prior gridd-ings remitted to the formative
commotion from which they emerged.’ See Brian Massumi,
‘Perception Attack: The Force to Own Time,’ in Ontopower: Potential
Politics and the Primacy of Preemption (Duke University Press,
forthcoming).
31. For more on the relationship between the political and politics, see
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1999).
32. See also Foucault's introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-
Oedipus, which he calls a ‘handbook for anti-fascist living.’ He writes:
‘how does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one
believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? how do we rid our
speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? how do
we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983: xiii).
33. ‘Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only
population before which they are responsible in principle. The German
preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels responsible not for the calves
that die but before the calves that die and give him the incredible
feeling of an unknown Nature-affect. For the affect is not a personal
feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the
pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not
known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from
humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a
rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome
involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings. These are not
regressions, although fragments of regression, sequences of regression
may enter in’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 240, my emphasis).
34. Comprehension suggests a holding-together of ‘facts’ with a sense of
‘objectivity’ On the subject of objectivity and its relation to
filmmaking, Ari Folman says: ‘I don't believe in objectivity. There is
no objectivity in filmmaking. Logically, it cannot exist. The basic fact
that you go into an editing room with 200 hours of footage and by the
end of the editing process come out with a film that is 50 minutes or an
hour negates objectivity’ theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/01/waltz-
with-bashir-evening-class.html.
35. On the topic of blame, in answer to Erica Abeel's question, ‘Why
didn't you hold the leadership more to account? Sharon was complicit,
after all, he allowed the massacre to happen,’ Ari Folman responds: I
didn't want to make any statement about the leadership. I wanted to
recreate the world of the ordinary soldier. There was a commission that
found Sharon guilty, he was banned from office for life, then he came
back as Prime Minister, came back as a hero, think of it. Those things
 happen in Israel … Bottom line, for me it was not a revenge film
against Ariel Sharon. As for why he didn't stop the massacre, he's
asleep now, so we can't ask him. The whole plan for Lebanon was so
sick, to my mind. What the master plan was nobody really knows.’
www.indiewire.com/article/oscar_09_waltz_with_bashir_director_ari_
folman/. I quote this to emphasize the push and pull between the molar
and molecular as it plays out both in Waltz with Bashir and in my
reading of it.
36. For a thought-provoking article on Waltz with Bashir, see Gary
Kamiya, ‘What Waltz with Bashir Can Teach Us About Gaza,’
www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/01/13/waltz_with_bashir/index1
.html.
37. For a more sustained exploration of the horror of the face with respect
to Levinas's and Deleuze and Guattari's theories of faciality, see Erin
Manning, ‘Face to Face with the Incommensurable: Srinivas Krishna's
Lulu,’ in Ephemeral Territories: Representating Nation, Home and
Identity in Canada (Minnesota University Press, 2003).
38. See Deleuze and Guattari's chapter on faciality, ‘Year 0: Faciality,’ in
A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1987).
39. Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Memories of a Sorcerer, I. A becoming-
animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in
short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that,’ in A
Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnesota University
Press, 1987).
7 Politics on the line
Leonie Ansems de Vries
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-8

Introduction
Fascism, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, implies a molecular regime distinct
from molar segments: not the rigidity of state molarity but both the
suppleness and the dangers of the line of flight. In their conceptualisation of
social and political relations as a play of lines in dynamic interaction, lines
crisscross and clash as well as mix and merge; lines create and connect,
abort and destroy; lines function to capture, demarcate, defend and uphold a
territorial domain of limits and bounds, order and organisation; and lines
challenge, undermine, perturb and destroy domains or order(ing)s of
organisation and organisations of order(ing). If power and resistance,
creation and destruction, operate on the same line(s), then the problem is
not so much that forms of resistance come to resemble the regimes of power
they seek to counter, but rather that the gravest dangers lie in the capacity of
a single line to turn any direction. The same line(s) constitute the milieux of
strategies of both power and resistance hence neither their course nor their
outcome can be predicted in advance. Besides, the movement that holds out
the greatest promise of creative becoming — of modes of movement and
relationality affirmative of life — also poses the gravest danger of ending in
death and destruction. The political problematique that emerges with
Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of lines is accordingly this: if what
holds the most promising creative potential also carries the most serious
danger of destruction, and if the course of movement can be neither
controlled nor predicted, then how to produce a politics of affirmative
becoming without either getting bogged down in a regime of molar fascism
or falling foul to a fascistic logic of destruction?
In his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault
describes this text as a book of ethics that responds to the major enemy of
fascism. Being ‘anti-oedipal’, Foucault writes, ‘has become a life style, a
way of thinking and living’ to rid our speech, acts, hearts and pleasures of
fascism. ‘Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’ (Foucault
2004). It could be said that Deleuze and Guattari continue this project in the
second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, in
which they take up, pursue and perturb a Spinozan ethics to create a style of
politics/life free from fascism. Yet this work also indicates that the danger
of fascism looms incessantly and its force destroys irrevocably. Everything
happens on the same lines: the line of ‘destruction pure and simple’ at once
is/becomes a line of transversal connection creative of affirmative
difference.
Deleuze in turn finds an articulation of the problem of fascism in
Foucault's writings. In Foucault, he writes that the question of resistance to
power is (for Foucault) that of how to ‘cross the line’: how to create
transversal lines of resistance rather than integral lines of power? What
troubled Foucault is that transversal relations of resistance continue to
become restratified and encounter or even construct knots of power. If we
must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells us that this
outside is not a terrifying void and that this life, which seems to put up a
resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void of ‘slow, partial
and progressive’ deaths? (Deleuze 2006).
 Put differently, the question is how to avoid warding off one form of
fascism (macro-fascism) by getting bogged down in another form of
fascism (microfascism) or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘[w]hy does
desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression?’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 236–37). Only micro-fascism, they reply in A
Thousand Plateaus, provides an answer to this global question: it is because
everything happens on lines inextricably entangled and crossing over into
one another:
It is not that these lines are pre-existent; they are traced out, they are formed, immanent to each
other, mixed up in each other, at the same time as the assemblage of desire is formed, with its
machines tangled up and its planes intersecting. We don’t know in advance which one will
function as a line of gradient, or in what form it will be barred.
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 100)

Expressed in terms of a play of lines constitutive/disruptive of the social

and political field, fascism emerges as a problem more complex, mobile,
immanent and relational than a conflict between fascistic and anti-fascistic
forces, or a (dualist) opposition or interaction between micro- and macro-
fascisms. Moreover, connecting lines to the notion of the milieu(x) reveals
the significance of the temporal dimension of this fundamentally political
problematique. Whilst the effort to ward off both macro- and micro-
fascistic tendencies — and hence the conversion of one into the other —
consists in rendering visible and knowable their possible future courses, the
problem is that this cannot be predicted in advance, at least not without
recourse to fascism. Put differently, whilst the effort consists in laying out
in advance how the line will pass, the problem is that the line cannot come
to pass when everything is laid out in advance: the play is foreclosed when
the line of flight — both the most vital force against fascisms and its most
dangerous producer in its capacity to push it to a state of total destruction
— is immobilised. Because lines entangled in a complex play of
movements and relations can turn anywhere, one must establish and predict
where or how the line will pass; however, this cannot be done without
producing the forces from which one seeks to escape. Hence arises the
political paradox, in which the line of flight constitutes both the greatest
promise and the most perilous danger. As Deleuze and Parnet put it,
‘[everything is played in uncertain games’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 100).
In order to draw out the stakes of this play — its fascistic dangers as well
as its political promise — this chapter seeks to engage, create and perturb
the complexity, mobility and relationality of Deleuze and Guattari's politics
of lines by connecting it, first, to their biophilosophy revolving around the
notion of the milieu and, second, to the Spinozan ethics of bodies they
produce. An introduction to the politics of lines in the second section will
serve to explicate the political problematique. It also raises the question of
the historical specificity of regimes of lines. The third section connects the
play of lines to the notion of the milieu in order to expose the complex
mobile relationality of the forces at play, and to explore how practices of
biopolitical governance securitise the becoming of forces this entails.
Connecting the milieu, on the one hand, to Foucault's conceptualisation of
the dispositif of security and, on the other, to Dillon and Reid's notion of the
‘emergency of emergence’ will explicate how the contemporary
acknowledgement of the primacy of the line of flight provokes the
hyperbolisation of liberal fascisms. The final section probes a response to
this seemingly inescapable problem of fascism through Deleuze's Spinoza.
Does an ethico-politics of bodies understood in terms of relations of
movement/rest and powers to affect/to be affected hold the promise of a life
beyond fascism? Through lines, milieux and movements, it will emerge that
one can only become yet never be free from fascism, which leaves us on
uncertain lines.
A politics of lines
Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines and these lines are very varied in
nature.
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 93)

The ninth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1933: Micropolitics and

Segmentarity’ articulates a politics of lines in which the line of flight plays
a crucial role as both vital force and movement of destruction, promise and
danger. Both this plateau and the chapter ‘Many Politics’ in Dialogues, a
co-authored text by Deleuze and Claire Parnet, conceptualise the social and
political field as a set or multiplicity of lines which are irreducible to one
another (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: vi). A third exploration of the politics of
lines can be found in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, entitled
‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible… ’,
in which Deleuze and Guattari contrast the line to the point. Here the focus
will be on the field of lines.
‘We are segmented from all around and in every direction’, Deleuze and
Guattari (2004: 230) write in the ninth plateau. We are segmented in a
binary fashion (e.g. social classes, man/woman, adult/child, etc.), a circular
fashion (in ever wider circles: neighbourhood, city, country, world), and in a
linear fashion, on the basis of straight lines,
of which each segment represents an episode or ‘proceeding’: as soon as we finish one proceeding
we begin another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the
job. School tells us, ‘You are not at home anymore’; the army tells us, ‘You are not in school
anymore’.
(Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 230)

These three modes of segmentarity are interrelated, bound up with and

crossing over into one another, and change according to one's perspective.
The distinction to be drawn politically is, however, not between these types
of segmentarity. Nor, Deleuze and Guattari explain, on the basis of the
difference between segmentation and centralisation for the modern political
system is a regime of both centralisation and segmentation. All segmentary
lines are modes of order(ing) related to a plane of organisation. A more
productive distinction is that between rigid and supple, or molar and
molecular, segmentarities — segmentarities which are at once opposed and
entangled: they overlap, coexist and cross over into one another. For
instance, aggregates of perception or feeling involve a molar organisation
and rigid segmentary, yet there is simultaneously ‘an entire world of
unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that
grasp or experience different things, are distributed and operate differently’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 235).
It is in this context that Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘everything is
political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a
micropolitics.’ It is of importance to note that the distinction between macro
and micro, or the molar and the molecular, is to be understood in terms of
organisation and movement rather than size or scale. Macro-politics or
molar organisation relates to the capture of spatio-temporal and relational
ordering) in segmented, binary and homogenised categories, and the
centralisation of interior space; molecularity can be understood as the
(dis)order(ing) force that both underlies and uproots this order(ing).
Micropolitics constitutes a third movement that is in addition to the two
lines described above; there is a line of flight — or a movement in-between
— which is primary. Three different types of lines thus traverse, mark out
and disrupt the social and political field described by Deleuze and Guattari:
lines of molar segmentarity, lines of molecular segmentarity, and lines of
flight. The first are binary machines — social classes, sexes, ages, etc. —
which cut across and collide against each other, bringing about a dualist
organisation of segments. The status of molecular lines ‘seems to be
completely different’, Deleuze and Parnet write. For instance, their
segments are ‘proceeding by thresholds, constituting becomings, blocs of
becoming, marking continuums of intensity, combinations of fluxes’
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 98). Lines of molecular or supple segmentarity
thus make fluxes of deterritorialisation shoot between the binary segments.
These lines do not synthesize the binary segments but constitute a third
which comes from elsewhere and disrupts binarism. Hence the molecular
line does not arise through adding segments to molar organisation. Rather it
is a matter of tracing another line that is in the middle.
Thus within a (Cold War) conception of world order segmented between
East and West, molecular destabilisation occurs on a north-south line. No
great ruptures, but the little crack coming from the South: ‘[a] Corsican
here, else-where a Palestinian, a plane hijacker, a tribal upsurge, a feminist
movement, a Green ecologist, a Russian dissident’ (Deleuze 1995: 98). Put
differently, lines of molar segmentarity effect movements of
territorialisation, whereas molecular segmentarity relates to relative
deterritorialisation. Territorialisation refers to the organisation, ordering and
capture of space, time and relations; to impose upon the forces of life an
order of categorisations and limits. This operation of delimitation, which
establishes a frame and demarcates an inside and an outside, renders chaos
the opposite of order; and the order of organisation the opposite of
disruptive forces endangering the organisation of order and life. Movements
of territorialisation are deeply entangled with processes of
deterritorialisation, which uproot and challenge the binary order of
naturalised identities and categorisations and, Deleuze and Guattari
contend, are prior rather than derivative (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 10–
11).
 Finally, lines of flight are abstract molecular lines with an incessant
tendency to escape; mutant flows that flee the interiority of order(ing).
Whereas fluxes of deterritorialisation emitted through supple segmentarity
are relative — i.e. simultaneously compensated by reterritorialisations,
returning them into a molar equilibrium — lines of flight emit absolute
movements of deterritorialisation and decoding. These lines are without
beginning or end and do not pass from one point to another; they pass
between points, continuously moving in-between (au milieu) (Deleuze and
Parnet 2006: 98ff). It is this creative line of disordering) which, according
to Deleuze and Guattari, defines the social field.
What constitutes a molar regime of governance, organisation of order or
a state is not some consensual agreement of parties or men — i.e. molar
segments; what underlies and renders possible so-called political order is a
rupture, a movement of disorder(ing), the force of which is captured and
striated into a molar line reproductive of ordering). In other words, the
creative force of disordering), the line of flight, is made to work
productively for the reproduction of a particular regime of order such as the
state. Deleuze and Guattari accordingly emphasise that the line of flight is
primary in society; lines of flight do not flee from but constitute the social
field. ‘It is always on a line of flight that we create’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2006: 102). It can be said that the line of flight comes first, whilst the other
types of lines are derivative; however, its primacy is not chronological for
reterritorialisations occur simultaneously.
Deleuze and Guattari thus highlight the primacy of movements and
relations over constituted forms and organisation/organisms. What comes
first are the movements of flight, which constitute the social field by tracing
out its boundaries and gradations (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 101). ‘[W]hat
is primary is an absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight,
however complex or multiple…’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 63). Hence
the disordering force of absolute movement is explained not by the failure
of the molar line, but rather the absolute speed of the line of flight
constitutes the prior, intrinsic force of (dis) order(ing) that both disrupts and
constitutes the potential of the ordering of life politically. Beneath the
segmentation and binarity of macropolitics one finds micropolitical flows;
there is always something that flees or escapes. From a micropolitical
perspective, society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its
lines of flight: it flees all over the place.
Yet, it is only in relation to the stabilising function of reterritorialisation
— a return to molar organisation — that the line of flight gains its creative
productivity; without reterritorialisation the line of flight may turn
destructive — abolitionary or suicidal (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 239,
253). The play of lines comprises a continuous, complex play of mobile and
relational forces. Despite prioritising the line of flight, Deleuze and Guattari
stress that the three lines coexist and continually transform into one another,
and that all happens at once. ‘It is in terms not of independence but of
coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we
must conceive of exteriority and interiority… ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:
398). The three types of lines are entangled, caught up and immanent to one
another; engaged in a complex play of movements and relations
productive/disruptive of political (dis) order(ing). The complexity,
immanence, mobility and relationality of this play furthermore entail a
rejection of dualism in favour of ‘a multiplicity of dimensions, lines and
directions in the heart of the assemblage’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 100).
Politically, what counts is not the difference between individual and
collective, nor between natural and artificial, nor between organisation and
spontaneity; the differences that count pass between the lines. That is to say
that attention must turn towards the play of movements/relations of, on and
between the lines rather than to the dualistic oppositions that occur in molar
segments.
To summarise, the three types of lines that constitute/disrupt the political
field, which also explains, according to Deleuze and Parnet,
why we sometimes say that there are at least three different lines, sometimes only two, sometimes
only one which is very muddled. Sometimes three because the line of flight or rupture combines
all the movements of deterritorialization, precipitates their quanta, tears from them the accelerated
particles which come into contact with one another, carries them onto a plane of consistence or a
mutating machine; and then a second, molecular line where the deterritorializations are merely
relative, always compensated by reterritorializations which impose on them so many loops,
detours, of equilibrium and stabilization; finally the molar line with clearly determined segments,
where the reterritorializations accumulate to form a plane of organization and pass into an
overcoding machine.
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 102)

It has become apparent that the line of flight, whilst simple and abstract, at
once constitutes the most complex and tortuous — and accordingly most
dangerous — line (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 94). Moreover, ‘[i]n a
multilinear system, everything happens at once’ — in one move, the line
breaks free of points, coordinates and localisable connections (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 328, 322) — with the implication that ‘[n]o one can say
where the line of flight will pass’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 276). Does it
remain consistent; does it get bogged down or arrested into another line;
does it turn abolitionary? One cannot predict in advance what may happen
on the line. Each type of line has modes of movement and organisation —
of ordering) and disordering) — specific to it, which can nevertheless be
evaluated only in relation and in play with the other lines. Each type of line
accordingly carries its own dangers.
Resort to the seeming predictability of segmentised categories on the
molar line (‘a rigidity which reassures us’) will not suffice to avoid the
dangers and insecurities intrinsic to the tortuosity of the line of flight. The
rigidity of segmentised categorisations such as the reduction of life's vital
and creative complexity to dualistic choices, and the (fascistic) politics to
which this may lead, is specific to the macro-fascism that occurs on the line
of molar segmentarity. It turns us into ‘creatures which are most fearful, but
also most pitiless and bitter’. These excesses give impetus to and render of
great pertinence resistance against molar regimes of power. At the same
time, however, it will not suffice simply to blow up the molar line in a
movement of deterritorialisation or flight. ‘Even if we had the power to
blow it up,’ Deleuze and Parnet ask, ‘could we succeed in doing so without
destroying ourselves, since it is so much part of the conditions of life,
including our organism and our very reason?’ Resisting macro-fascisms
must be an effort of long labour and immense prudence — an effort not
simply to explode, but to manipulate, soften, divert and undermine the
molar line — directed at prevailing forms of order(ing) and organisation
both in the form of the state or order of governance and in the form of the
organisms that we are ourselves.
The line of supple segmentarity not only carries the dangers of the molar
line in miniaturised form but also holds its own. Referred to by Deleuze and
Guattari as the ‘black hole phenomenon’, this form of micro-fascism sees
one passing thresholds of deterritorialisation too quickly, without taking
sufficient precautions; one constructs a black hole, ‘with a self-assurance
about his own case, his role and his mission…: the Stalins of little groups,
local law-givers, micro-fascisms of gangs’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 104).
Finally, lines of flight, in addition to the macro-fascistic dangers of the first
line and the micro-fascisms of the second, also have the most dangerous
potential of turning into lines of abolition — of destruction of oneself and
of others. The examples cited by Deleuze and Guattari/Parnet suggest that
lines of flight are more prone to end in suicidal destruction than to produce
life-affirmative movements of becoming. To the question why their
examples are all of lines of flight turning out badly, Deleuze and
Guattari/Parnet reply that it is precisely because they are real and not
imaginary — i.e. not due to the intervention of other lines but on their own
account; on account of the abolitionary force intrinsic and specific to them:
‘Kleist and his suicide pact, Hölderin and his madness, Fitzgerald and his
destruction, Virginia Woolf and her disappearance’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2006: 105).
The three types of lines, albeit distinct in their modes of movement and
organisation — and hence in the dangers intrinsic to each — are entangled
in a complex play of movements/relations, in which lines clash and merge,
fracture and mix, produce and destroy and turn into one another. According
to Deleuze and Guattari/Parnet, it is this complexity, relationality and
mobility that explains why resistance against the stifling power of macro-
fascistic forces is often productive of yet more and different fascisms (in
molecular form). It is as a function of the deep entanglement of lines in play
— and hence of modes of being and becoming — that desire desires its own
repression. The problem of fascism accordingly becomes a complex play
ungraspable and irresolvable through dualistic oppositions such as fascism
versus non-fascism or macro-fascism versus micro-fascism.
An answer to the question why desire desires its own repression is
therefore to be found in the entanglement of lines or of modes of being and
becoming: because everything happens on the same lines, which are
inextricably caught up in one another and continuously clashing and
turning into one another. Due to the complexity, relationality and mobility
of this play, one cannot predict in advance what will happen on the line(s).
One cannot know beforehand where or how a line(-play) will run, turn, mix,
clash, abort, create, destroy, become, etc. Here arises the political paradox.
How to construct a politics when the greatest promise at once constitutes
the most perilous danger, and when one cannot know in advance how things
will (continue to) turn?
The introduction of the concept of the milieu will serve to shed more
light on this political problematique of lines in play. Albeit not articulated in
those terms by Deleuze and Guattari /Parnet, the play can be described
usefully in terms of milieux. Put succinctly, the molar line of rigid
segmentarity establishes a territorial order (the milieu as territorial
environment), whilst the line of supple segmentarity (the milieu as a
medium of action) swings between this order and the line of flight (the
milieu as movement in-between (au milieu)). Articulated thus, the play of
lines expresses the political paradox qua fascism: the line of flight is both
most creative and most dangerous, and hence not salvatory in itself,
whereas molar segmentarity constitutes both a requirement and the
impossibility of the becoming of the line of flight. This problem equally
confronts regimes of governance and forces of resistance. How to govern or
resist if lines continue to cross over into one another, and if the outcome
cannot be predicted in advance? How to govern or resist if the chances are
rife that one may end up in a black hole or on a line of destruction?
If everything happens on the same line(s), the distinction to be drawn is
not between lines of governance as opposed to lines of resistance. Rather,
attention must be paid to the movements and forces at play in particular
milieux. For example, how do lines and milieux produce, create, delineate
and adjudicate in the different orders of governance identified by Foucault
— sovereignty, discipline and security? Deleuzean onto-political
productions of lines and milieux run the risk of disregarding the evolution
of forms of (liberal) rule and the specificity of the ways in which the lines
play out in different regimes of power. Foucault's dispositif de sécurité
serves to ground and contextualise the plays of lines. It also raises the
question of what marks out the contemporary order, specifically in relation
to the entry of complexity in the domains of life and politics: how to govern
if life is emergent, continuously becoming beyond the bounds of its own
being?

Is this the end (of the line)?

It is an abstract line, a pure movement which is difficult to discover, he never begins, he takes
things by the middle [par le milieu], he is always in the middle [au milieu] — in the middle of [au
milieu des] two other lines? Only movements concern me.
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 95–96)

Carrying such profound and unavoidable dangers, do lines of flight

necessarily end in destruction? Deleuze and Parnet indeed suggest that ‘all
creation comes to an end in its abolition, which was fashioning it from the
start’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 105). Is this the end? Does destruction lie
at the end of the line? The notion of the void as well as the examples of
suicidal lines of flight Deleuze and Guattari/Parnet cite (Kleist, Fitzgerald,
Woolf, etc.), indeed appear to mark a definite end. Starting from the idea of
a play of lines produces a different thought. If lines are produced and
entangled in play, continuously encountering, creating, destroying and
crossing over into one another, and if (re)territorialisation is always already
en route a deterritorialisation, then is there not something beyond the line of
flight? If the line of flight is a line without beginning or end (always in the
middle [au milieu]), then how can it be that the turning destructive of the
line of flight appears to present the ultimate end: death, destruction pure and
simple?
The complexities and paradoxical nature — the promise and the dangers
— of the line of flight emerge with more clarity in terms of milieux. Like
the play of lines, the Deleuzean notion of the milieu serves to express the
simultaneity, relationality and immanence of productive and destructive
forces; of creativity, becoming, foreclosure, striation and abolition; of
macro- and micro-fascistic tendencies and non-fascistic movements.
Although Deleuze and Guattari do not develop a comprehensive theory or
conceptualisation of the milieu, their reference to the concept in relation to,
for example, organic strata and becoming in A Thousand Plateaus
nevertheless provides the tools to create a politics of milieux.
In the ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements’ of A Thousand
Plateaus, Brian Massumi draws attention to the difference between the
French and the English terms ‘milieu’, of which one must be aware when
engaging Deleuze and Guattari's writing on the milieu. Whereas in English
the term refers to ‘environment’, in French, the milieu continues to reflect
its various historical meanings, namely ‘surroundings’ (or ‘environment’),
‘medium’ and ‘middle’. Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term combines all
three conceptions (Massumi 2004: xvii). As an environment the milieu
refers to all that surrounds an organism or body and to all in which it is
immersed. Whilst often considered solely in spatial terms and in relation to,
yet distinct from, the organism, the milieu-as-environment constitutes a
complexity of spatio-temporal and relational (or affective) dimensions.
Second, the milieu-as-medium refers either to an instrumental medium of
action, or to a relational force in-between (au milieu). The critical
distinction between these conceptions lies in this: the milieu understood as
instrumental means in pursuit of a specified end is laid out between points
(e.g. beginning-destination), which defines its utility — that is to say its
function lies in specifying, in rendering predictable and knowable, the
direction and destination of movement; the movement in-between
constitutes a relational force without beginning or destination. Finally, the
milieu-as-middle has a double connotation, too; it refers either to the
movement in-between of the milieu-as-medium introduced above, or to a
static centre. Although Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of the
milieu combines these various aspects, emphasis is placed on its mobile and
relational qualities. The milieu, they write, consists of qualities, substances,
powers and events; intensities and affects (Deleuze 1998: 61).
Foucault's genealogical tracing of the concept and the practice of the
milieu in the lecture series Security, Territory, Population provides a
different account of the movements at play. For Foucault, the milieu
exemplifies a particular configuration of power, a dispositif of security. This
apparatus functions on the basis of the fostering and management of
circulations: ‘it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its
dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation,
and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (Foucault
2007: 18). As such, the milieu qua dispositif does not encompass the full
complexity of the forces at play; it heeds the strategies or deliberate
interventions of governance only.
Foucault's conceptualisation of the milieu focuses on its manifestations as
a space of circulation (environment) and medium of action. Security,
Territory, Population sketches the development of a distinctly liberal
governmentality. By tracing the genealogical shift from a problematisation
of power centred on the exercise of sovereignty over a territory to one
concerned with the regulation of populations via the notion of the milieu,
Foucault places the historical emergence of the concept and practice of the
milieu in the context of a number of interrelated developments, or
problems, in the eighteenth century, which he describes as problems of
circulation and action at a distance. In mechanics, for example, Newton is
occupied with the question of how one body sets another into motion
without direct physical contact, which he seeks to resolve via the idea of an
ether that permeates all matter and space. At around the same time, the
economic and commercial rise of the town prompts its opening up to
various forms of movement and the need to intervene only from a distance.
In the economic realm of the market, the biological domain of
health/disease and the political field of governance, too, notions of
circulation and action at a distance arise in the context of what Foucault
terms the problem of security (Foucault 2007).
Roughly speaking these movements can be divided into a threefold
development. First, the problems related to the rise of the town give rise to
new practices of security or mechanisms for the regulation of circulation
based on the notion of laissez-faire — i.e. by planning a milieu. In
mechanics the conceptual notion of the milieu arises with the questions of
the medium of action and action at a distance. Third, this mechanical notion
is subsequently adopted in and adapted to biology, as a result of which it is
transformed into an absolute concept and becomes intrinsically related to
man/the species: man and his environment or milieu. Rather than a strictly
chronological occurrence or a uni-linear causal sequence, these movements
emerge via a complex conjunction of conceptual and practical factors,
circumstances and developments (Foucault 2007: 21).
Foucault summarises the appearance of a dispositif of security both as the
problem of the town and in the context of the emergence of, first, a different
economy of power and, second, a different political personage, which is the
population. Of relevance in the context of this chapter is the function of the
milieu as a medium of action that facilitates the governance of the
population on the basis of its understood natural capacities and
requirements. Governance operates on the basis of a ‘freedom of
circulations’ — a laissez-faire. Fostering and managing circulations must
operate from a distance because a series of natural and artificial givens must
be taken into account. As that within which circulation is carried the milieu
expresses the relation between man and environment as a conjuncture of
geographic, climatic and physical elements and the human species insofar
as it has a body and a soul (Foucault 2007: 21, 23). If he wants to change
the human species rather than the individual physical body, Foucault
explains, the sovereign must act on the milieu; he must intervene at the
intersection between ‘nature’ (as physical elements) and the ‘nature’ of the
human species — i.e. at the point where the milieu becomes the
determining factor of nature.
The milieu as conceptualised by Foucault thus risks becoming
synonymous with the dispositif of security. As a response to urgency, a
dispositifhas a strategic function, that is to say it operates as a manipulation
of relations of forces, an ‘intervention in the relations of forces, either so as
to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them,
and to utilize them’ (Foucault 1980: 195–96). Foucault's concept of the
milieu precisely refers to the manipulation of forces through their regulation
on the basis of their understood nature, which is manifested in the fostering
and management of circulations.
The milieu of security is the space in which a series of uncertain elements
unfold (Foucault 2007: 20). It refers both to a multivalent and transformable
framework that requires regulation and to the regulation of (a series of)
events within this multivalent framework. That is to say that the milieu
concerns both time and space since the temporal problem of uncertainty
explains the necessity to plan a milieu of security:
The specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal
and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space. The space in which a series of
uncertain elements unfold is, I think, roughly what one can call the milieu.
(Foucault 2007: 20)
The problem of security in the eighteenth century is, both spatially and
temporally, a problem of action at a distance. According to Foucault,
governance can be understood as the continuous effort to order a field of
force relations: ‘to govern… is to structure the possible field of action of
others’ (Foucault 2002: 341). If the problem of governance is the
indeterminacy of life and the unpredictability of future events, then the
effort of governance is to render knowable and predictable the temporal
uncertainty of the future; and in order to regulate a future series of events
they must be inscribed into a space (Deuber-Mankowsky 2008: 139). In
order to make predicable events temporally distant the present must be
connected to the future through a straight line, which is drawn out spatially.
Time is introduced as a chief operative factor; however, its becoming nature
— its unpredictability — must be regulated through conversion into a space
of circulation.
Understood as a medium of action and the element in which it circulates,
the milieu of security on the basis of free circulations constitutes an attempt
to capture temporal insecurity within a given space. The freedom of
movement on the basis of which governance governs thus remains
subjugated to a principle of order and ordering within a specific spatio-
temporal domain that is laid out in advance. Here we touch upon a principle
distinction between two different understandings of the milieu as a medium,
as well as the distinction between Deleuze and Guattari's and Foucault's
conceptions of the milieu. The milieu as medium can function, on the one
hand, as a means-end strategy in which the end is specified a priori and, on
the other, as the movement in-between, without beginning or destination.
The former refers to the dispositif of security. Despite the attempt to let
things take their natural course, governance must specify in advance which
nature it seeks to foster and manage, and within which bounds it may
circulate. The milieu constitutes a medium of action instrumentally linking
means to end. In distinction, the milieu prioritised by Deleuze and Guattari,
the milieu understood as force in-between, has beginning or end. This is the
line of flight, which continuously becomes, and becomes beyond its own
bounds: its movement cannot be captured and remains elusive qua
movement.
Foucault's conceptualisation of the practices of governance in terms of a
dispositif of security serves to contextualise Deleuze and Guattari's onto-
political creation of lines. Nevertheless, the identification of the milieu with
the dispositif suffers from the reduction of the milieu to strategies of power,
leaving little space for attention to the creative forces of becoming which,
according to Deleuze and Guattari, constitute the very movement of
milieux. In the Foucaldian milieu, there is little space for resistance beyond
the strategic integration of forces into modes of ordering. Moreover, as
discussed below, practices of liberal governance have themselves
transformed in response to evolving conceptualisations of life, now
prioritising complexity, relationality and emergence. Whilst the productivity
of Foucault's dispositif lies in the possibility to differentiate between
historical manifestations of governance and the specificity of liberal
practices of security, it fails to encompass the complexity of the forces at
play. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid's (2009) examination of contemporary
manifestations of liberal rule and war demonstrates the importance of
paying attention to the disruptive force of complexity — the movement in-
between — as an operative principle of liberal governance.
Before turning to their analysis, the temporal dimension of the difference
between manifestations of the milieu as instrumental medium of action and
force of movement in-between must be further explored. The distinction is
astutely articulated by Henri Bergson, who distinguishes between the way
in which our intellect seeks to capture movement and our lived duration.
Contrary to our motionless and fragmentary view of it — taken from a
position outside of time — life, Bergson explains, ‘progresses and endures
in time’ (Bergson 2005: 58). Moreover, ‘[t]he more we study the nature of
time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the
creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’ (Bergson
2005: 13). Despite the continuous becoming of life — what Bergson calls
‘creative evolution’ — concerned primarily with practical action, the
human intellect focuses only on moments, positions, states in order to
establish where movement is going and to determine its end. That is to say
we are interested in the ‘unmovable plan of movement rather than the
movement itself (Bergson 2005: 329). Because ‘our interest is directed,
before all, to its actual or future positions, and not to the progress by which
it passes from one position to another, progress which is the movement
itself, we take ‘snapshots’ of what is continuously passing, in perpetual
becoming (Bergson 2005: 170).
By taking instantaneous views at intervals, the intellect, starting from
immobile states, seeks to reconstruct movement by putting together
‘immobilities’. Here lies the problem for, Bergson contends, it is an illusion
to think that one can construct ‘the unstable by means of the stable, the
moving by means of the immobile’ (Bergson 2005: 171, 297).1 This
illusion, which is essentially an effort to lay out in space succession in time
— to capture the future by representing its duration as already rolled up in
the past — Bergson describes as a natural mechanism of the intellect
(Bergson 2005: 370, 371). This mechanism furthermore informs scientific
method, ancient as well as modern. What Bergson terms the
‘cinematographical method’ refers to a conception of movement that
isolates moments (e.g. the positions T1, T2, etc. on a line), and has no
concern for what happens in the intervals. Science accordingly misses the
movement insofar as movement is becoming: ‘real time… as the very
mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge’ (Bergson 2005:
358).
Both the natural mechanism of the human intellect and the mechanistic
Scientific Method involve an effort to render movement visible and
knowable through its capture in positions and states — i.e. in immobilities
— and, by determining its direction and end, attempt to reconstruct
movement from immobile states. This implies an a priori construction of
the Whole that is it lays down the end in advance (Bergson 2005: 172–73).
Movement, which is mobile qua durational force, thus gains a spatial
determination and is accordingly immobilised. As Deleuze writes in his
book on Bergson, ‘one misses the movement because one constructs a
Whole, one assumes that “all is given”, whilst movement only occurs if the
whole is neither given nor giveable’ (Deleuze 1986: 7).
It is this endeavour to capture movement in immobile states through the
insertion of durational forces into a spatial framework that Foucault
identifies as characteristic of the dispositif of security. By seeking to render
visible and predicable the uncertain force of movement in the interest of
practical action (i.e. the governance of order) movement is immobilised. It
is an attempt to contain and order the tortuous unpredictability of the line of
flight through its capture in a segmentary order. However, spatialised within
a domain of circulations, time cannot come to pass; it cannot become. In
Bergson's words, ‘[t]ime is invention or it is nothing at all’ (Bergson 2005:
371). The production of a milieu of security through inserting into space the
temporal uncertainty and undecidability implies an attempt to determine in
advance the course and bounds of movement.
 From a Bergsonian and Deleuzean perspective, the attempt to render
movement visible is precisely what immobilises it. A priori determined,
movement becomes static and reproductive rather than creative, and the
becoming of life is foreclosed. Becoming — and according to Deleuze and
Guattari life is a matter of becoming — involves continuous transformative
processes, which challenge and break the ordering of order through
connections, mixtures, ruptures, cracks, etc., which involve heterogeneous
elements and forces. Hence the course, potentialities and limits of ordering)
and the whole of which it forms part can neither be predicted in advance
nor definitively established: they continuously change, adapt and transform
in ways unexpected and changing. It is the nature of movement that it is
always already different. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to when
they speak of becoming, the line of flight or the movement in-between (au
milieu).
A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the
contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle… a line of becoming has
neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination… A line of becoming has
only a middle [un milieu]… A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the
middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between…
[Becoming] constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man's-land, a nonlocalizable
relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the
other — and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 323–24)

Without point of origin or (predetermined) destination this line is the

absolute speed of movement (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 290, 323). Rather
than a centre (milieu) (which can be pointed out) or a connective line to be
localised between points, i.e. a medium (milieu), the milieu-as-middle
moves as an indiscernible, non-localisable passage. The point Deleuze and
Guattari wish to make is, precisely, that movement itself, qua movement, is
by nature imperceptible, below or above the threshold of perception:
‘movement itself continues to occur elsewhere’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 309–10). One arrives too early or too late. Movement becomes
visible only afterwards, when it is stratified or territorialised into an order of
organisation such as an organism, subject or space of security. That is the
effects of movement are perceptible, nevertheless, movement itself- the
force of the line in-between — is by definition unlocalisable.
This is precisely the problem, for how to organise an order, how to foster
and secure life, when its becoming is elusive, uncertain and unpredictable?
Liberal governance responds to this problem by means of the endeavour to
make knowable and predictable the uncertainty of future events through
planning a milieu of security. In other words, the problem of governance is
the problem of the passing of time and the becoming of life that is passage
of time, or duration. Governance must work with and on the basis of, yet
keep within bounds and circulations, life's tendency to pass, i.e. to move,
relate, connect, transform and become beyond boundaries and across limits.
This conversion of the force of becoming into an instrumental medium of
action establishes an order of segmentary lines; it is the conversion of the
risk of micro-fascistic destruction into the certainty of macro-fascistic
segmentation.
Deleuze and Guattari prioritise movements and relations, arguing that
forms of organisation and governance are derivative. In their conception of
life as becoming they gain inspiration from the complexity sciences.
Complexity theory, a critique of the dominant ‘Newtonian’ model of
scientific thought, starts out from the notion of the primacy of radical
relationality and the impossibility of complete understanding due to the
self-organising and emergent properties of complex systems such as the
living being (Dillon and Reid 2009: 72; Marks 2006: 10–11). Deleuze and
Guattari's prioritisation of movements and relations over constituted forms
thus provides a critique of the macrofascism of modes of (liberal)
governance. However, the question of how to govern life given its
emergent, self-organising and radically relational character has become
central to contemporary liberal thought and rule, too.
Dillon and Reid's The Liberal Way of War details how the liberal ways of
rule and war are intimately connected and co-constitutive, as well as how
the contemporary liberal way of rule/war is deeply influenced by
developments in the complexity sciences. The integration into liberal
analyses of governance of notions such as complexity and emergence
suggests a move away from its characteristic anthropocentrism towards an
account of mobile and relational forces. Dillon and Reid's work offers an
ingenious account both of the emergence of complex emergence in the
information and life sciences, which transforms the way in which life is
understood, and of how this new conceptualisation of life comes to inform
the liberal way of rule and war. If life is complex, emergent and radically
contingent — i.e. if life continuously becomes, and becomes beyond its
own limits — then liberal rule, which governs on the basis of life's
understood capacities and requirements, must accordingly adapt. Yet — and
this is the paradox of liberal rule/war Dillon and Reid wish to lay bare —
preoccupied with the fostering and regulation of life based on a particular
yet naturalised notion of what life is, that is to say concerned with securing
and determining the uncertainty that constitutes life's temporal nature, life's
becoming is readily understood as a becoming dangerous to itself (Dillon
and Reid 2009: 146).
Dillon and Reid invent the notion of the ‘emergency of emergence’ to
explicate the problematic nature of this paradox. Acknowledging the
emergent — and hence indeterminable and unpredictable — nature of life,
its fostering and management on the basis of security/freedom becomes a
constant effort at ‘emergency governance’ (Dillon and Reid 2009: 86…
88).2 The problematic nature of the paradox of liberal emergence, which
arises when the order of life becomes understood in terms of circulation,
complexity and connectivity, is adeptly articulated also by Dillon and Lobo-
Guerrero. Biopolitical governance operates on the basis of circulations:
more circulation means greater connectivity; increased connectivity in turn
begets an increase in complexity; and finally, the more things interconnect,
circulate and complexly adapt, the more contingent they become (Dillon
and Lobo-Guerrero 2009: 10–15). Hence, Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero
explain, contingency is now conceived the property of species life as well
as a mode of governance that takes life as its referent object, for politics
must govern on this basis. Liberal governance, as an effort to make
knowable and predictable, has evolved into governance through emergency
because its referent object is complex, emergent and contingent. In Dillon
and Lobo-Guerrero's words, ‘the complex adaptive emergence of the
contemporary understanding of what it is to be a living thing is the
emergency of its continuous emergence’ (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2009:
10).
Here emerges the crux of the problem for the effort to make live entails
the lethal business of waging war on life. The task of liberal rule, Dillon
and Reid write, is:
not only to adjudicate membership of the species. It decides, implicitly or explicitly, whom to
correct and whom to punish, as well as who shall live and who shall die; what life-forms will be
promoted and which will be terminated; and all so that life can be made to live the emergency of
its emergence.
(Dillon and Reid 2009: 87)

In other words, ‘good emergence has to be distinguished from bad, desired

emergence from unwanted emergence’ (Dillon and Reid 2009: 109), and to
recall Foucault's observation, the good must be maximised; the bad
diminished, or indeed eliminated. Hence the paradox emergent with liberal
emergence is that to foster life also means to wage war on it. That this
paradox lies at the heart of political modernity was of course already
conceptualised by Foucault. Taking cue from Foucault's work, Dillon and
Reid demonstrate the hyperbolisation of this paradox in the contemporary
liberal way of rule and war. Their analysis reveals, in addition, that both the
fostering of and the war waged on life become ever more excessive and
lethal as the capacities to understand and manipulate life advance. Thus,
rather than assuaging the problem of fascism, as Deleuze and Guattari's
prioritisation of movements and relations might suggest, the liberal
complexity turn has triggered the hyperbolisation of liberal fascism.
Rather than embracing and exploring the political potentials of the
becoming of life, liberal governance remains premised on the centrality of a
particular order(ing) and the imperative to secure, reproduce, naturalise and
universalise it. Due to the continued understanding of politics and life in
terms of its capacities and requirements for (self-)governance and
(self-)organisation, life's contingent, complex and emergent nature is
conceived an emergency, and governance crisis management. Moreover, as
emergency becomes the modus operandi of politics and life and hence the
operative principle of governance, it must be sustained in order for
governance to operate:
It is neither possible, nor in fact desirable, to bring an end to the emergency or, in effect, to
diminish its rage. For the emergency is now definitive of the condition of the every day life of
species life. Life, here, is the emergency; and emergency does not so much present an object to be
governed as set the very operant conditions of governability as such.
(Dillon and Reid 2009: 89)

The primacy, irreducibility and unpredictability of movement qua

movement throws up a political paradox for both Deleuze and Guattari and
liberal governance: how to organise a politics when its movement, qua
becoming, is imperceptible and fleeting; an unlocalisable passage that can
be captured, ordered or organised only after the event, and only by
immobilising it? We find (and create) ourselves on uncertain grounds, in a
continuous, intangible play between macro-fascisms of molar rigidity in
which the course and limits of movement are laid out in advance and life is
produced and inhibited thus; and the prospect of micro-fascisms of the void,
in which the flight of the moving line ends in (suicidal) destruction. How to
forge a politics, create a style of life, that avoids falling foul to either
fascistic movement?
Deleuze and Guattari's approach is one of experimentation and caution.
The question is, however, whether it offers a movement beyond the
destructive effects of liberal fascism qua emergency governance? Do they
seek to overcome the impasse at all; do they wish to specify what may lie
beyond, or how to move beyond fascism given their belief that one cannot
predict in advance how the line will pass? If the line of flight has no
beginning or end, then the void is au milieu de, in the midst of things,
which would suggest that it is fruitless to ask whether all creation ends in
destruction, and whether that is ‘the end’.
Even if all creation comes to an end in its abolition, which was fashioning it from the start, even if
all music is the pursuit of silence, they cannot be judged according to their end or their supposed
aim, for they exceed them in all dimensions. When they end up in death, this is a function of the
danger proper to them, and not of their destination.
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 105)

Going through the middle

How do Deleuze and Guattari propose to resolve the paradox of life's
tendency to create, order and destroy on the same line(s)? Can their
prioritisation of the line of flight answer the current fascism of emergency
governance, which is equally informed by the prioritisation of radical
relationality? Deleuze and Guattari's starting premise is that life is always
already in the middle; wherever we are, we are always already in a middle
— in a milieu and au milieu. If ‘[t]hings do not begin to live except in the
middle’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 41), then one cannot start at the
beginning and follow through to the end. Rather than laying down
(founding) terms or principles from whence relations and politics arise,
Deleuze and Guattari propose to study movements and relations in terms of
their speeds, affects, intensities and (re)productive and (disordering effects.
The aim or destination of movement is not the point and not the danger
either. In order to assess the productivity/destructivity of a line one must
study the line itself; its speeds and slownesses, its intensities, its effects. Put
in Deleuze's Spinozan terms, lines are to be studied in terms of their
relations of movements and rest and their powers to affect and to be
affected. Deleuze and Guattari thus turn towards the question of the body,
which they oppose to the organism. Whilst the organism constitutes a
stifling molar regime, the body is made up of movements and relations.
Dismantling the organism, they write, is a matter of ‘opening the body to
connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions,
levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories
and deterritorialisations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 177). Via Spinoza,
Deleuze defines a body in terms of its latitude and longitude — that is to
say, according to the kinetic and the dynamic principle. The first
proposition:
tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between
particles. That is, it is not defined by a form or by functions. Global form, specific form, and
organic functions depend on relations of speed and slowness. Even the development of a form, the
course of development of a form, depends on these relations, and not the reverse. The important
thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but
as a complex relation of differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles.
A composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence… It is… a matter of… how to
 live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something
else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle [au
milieu]…
(Deleuze 1988: 123)

The dynamic proposition, too, stresses that ‘[y]ou will not define a body (or
a mind) by its form, nor by its organs or functions, and neither will you
define it as a substance or a subject’. Rather than subjects, bodies are
capacities for affecting and being affected (Deleuze 1988: 123–24). The
question, accordingly, is ‘of what is a body capable?’ The problem is that
one cannot know this in advance because life is becoming.
Understood through Deleuze's Spinoza a body never stands on its own; it
is not an entity with certain properties, an internal organisation and external
boundaries that distinguish it from other entities and the environment.
Rather a body is defined by its modes of relationality; by the kinds of
connections that are established and the modes of engagement of which
these movements are productive. It is a question of what a body can do —
of its relations of movement and rest as well as its powers to affect and be
affected, which is to say that what a body can do is not fixed or determined
but a matter of becoming(s).3
Of relevance in conceptualising bodies are therefore not organs,
functions, species or genus. In a lecture on Spinoza Deleuze asserts that:
[i]f you consider beasts, Spinoza will be firm in telling us what counts among animals is not at all
the genera or species; genera and species are absolutely confused notions, abstract ideas. What
counts is the question, of what is a body capable? And thereby he sets out one of the most
fundamental questions in his whole philosophy… by saying that we don’t even know what a body
is capable of… a body must be defined by the ensemble of relations which compose it.4

Significant for Deleuze is the question of the powers of the body that
pertain to it. Most important is to know which encounters agree with one's
body; and most beautiful ‘is to live on the edges’, at the (joyful) limit of
one's powers to be affected. Because this limit differs for each body —
‘What counts is what your power is for you’ — no formula can be specified
that is good for each and every body. Moreover, a body being defined in
terms of relations of movement and rest and powers to affect and be
affected, degrees and limits of power continuously change. Deleuze thus
accords to Spinoza an ethics of becoming.
Spinoza becomes the thinker who poses the question of what a body can
do in terms of movement/rest and powers to affect/be affected. Hence, what
a body can do is a matter of its relationality. Defining the body thus, the
political problematique re-emerges:
We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are,
how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 284)

This ethological question of a body's mobile and relational capacities is an

ethical one because one cannot know in advance of what a body is capable.
Not knowing in advance how a body may move and relate, an approach au
milieu presents at once the most creative and the most dangerous approach.
Whilst experiment is their adage, Deleuze and Guattari also warn that one
must remain cautious. For example, processes of stratification that produce
organisms are both beneficial and unfortunate: strata limit, capture and
foreclose, yet strata simultaneously produce a platform for creative
becomings. ‘Is it not necessary,’ Deleuze and Guattari (2004:289) ask, ‘to
retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal
subject from which to extract materials, affects and assemblages?’ Without
strata there are no forms, substances or organisations: we are
‘disarticulated’, ‘chaos pure and simple’. Hence Deleuze and Guattari stress
that every effort at destratification such as ‘going beyond the organism,
plunging into a becoming’, must be undertaken with extreme caution for ‘a
too sudden destratification may be suicidal or turn cancerous’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 54).
Deleuze and Guattari do not simply advocate the creativity of bodies or
milieux of becoming over the rigidity and stasis of organism of
centralisation and molarity. The stratification of movement into orders of
organisation is both beneficial and unfortunate, as the example of
contemporary liberal rule and war demonstrates. The stratification of life's
becoming may invoke war on life, yet by providing a stabilising order,
processes of organisation simultaneously prevent forces of becoming from
turning destructive and enable further deterritorialising movements,
different becomings. Rather than a diametric opposition, what emerges here
is a play of milieux, a play of lines which clash, merge, mix, become,
destroy, produce, fracture, etc.
The force of becoming, the movement in-between is not salvatory in
itself: one must remain aware, in each instance, of the movements,
intensities and effects produced — i.e. of the kind of milieux in which one
finds oneself, or in which one may lose oneself. It is not enough merely to
set off on a line of flight, to gain absolute speed, to attack the organism,
state or order of governance as a suffocating form of organisation. In such
acts of resistance it is, moreover, not enough merely to remain cautious not
to replicate or reproduce the very modes of movement and forms of order
and organisation that one resists and thereby produce a rigidification of
extant order(ing) — i.e. to ward off macro-fascistic forces. Movements of
resistance of the genre of the line of flight must, most crucially, also be
effected ethically in the sense of a careful assessment of their effects in
order to avoid a micro-fascistic suicidal turn.
Where does this leave us? How to draw the line? What is Deleuze and
Guattari's guidance for the creation of a non-fascistic life? How to respond
to the destructive effects of liberal fascism qua emergency governance,
which exemplifies the lethal effects of attempts to turn the line of flight into
a regime of governance precisely in order to counter its destructive
potential? Deleuze and Guattari do not provide an answer or propose a
solution to this political problematique of life's entanglement in and on lines
simultaneously productive, destructive, stratifying, creative, stifling,
becoming and suicidal. Their creation of lines and milieux suggests that one
can only become yet never be free from fascism: the non-fascistic life exists
only in becoming. One cannot arrive at a life beyond fascism, one can only
create it, and its creation remains a continuous and continuously uncertain
effort. Given its open and uncertain character, the question remains whether
this style or ethics of experimentation can offer a response to the destructive
effects of a liberal fascism that operates on the same lines. One can draw
the line anywhere (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 103).

Notes

1. Bergson makes a similar argument in Matter and Memory. See: Henri

Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 191.
See also: Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time. An Introduction to Henri
Bergson (London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 159ff.
2. See also: M. Dillon and L. Lobo-Guerrero, ‘The Biopolitical
Imaginary of Speciesbeing’ (Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 1:
2009), 10ff.
3. See also: K. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life. The Difference and
Repetition of Deleuze (Oxford: Routledge, 1999), 12.
4. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Spinoza, 24/01/1978’, Les Cours de Gilles
Deleuze,www.webdeleuze.com (accessed 10 June 2010).

References
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Deleuze (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1999)
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Deleuze, G. ‘What Children Say’, in Essays Critical and Clinical,
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and London: Cornell University Press, 2006)
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8 Fascist lines of the tokkōtai
Nicholas Michelsen
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-9

Introduction
In fascism the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, confirming a claim by Paul Virilio

(1998), argue that fascist states are definitively suicidal. This argument
appears in a cartographic analysis of National Socialism as the assemblage
of three desiring-political ‘lines’. In A Thousand Plateaus, Nazism is
interpreted as conjugating a molar line (which defined Hitler's state as
totalitarian), a molecular line (which identified the Nazi movement as
characteristically ‘microfascist’), and a line of flight. The Nazi line of flight
is understood as an intrinsically catastrophic trajectory, which set the state
on a suicidal path, concluding with Hitler's telegram 71 declaiming ‘If the
war is lost, may the nation perish’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 255;
Virilio 1998: 41). Deleuze and Guattari argue that recognising the presence
of this suicidal trajectory does not simply hone our horror of the Nazi event;
rather, they suggest that state fascism is always suicidal inasmuch as it
conjugates the three lines.
The claim that state fascism is always suicidal has been challenged as
unsustainably deriving a universal theory from peculiarities of the Nazi
event (Holland 2008). The historical singularity of Nazi suicidalism
certainly seems to limit the utility of their schema for identifying or
charting the emergence of fascisms elsewhere. As a consequence, Eugene
Holland (2008: 94) suggests that we may discard the third line, and its
attendant concept of fascist suicidalism, whilst retaining the rest of Deleuze
and Guattari's theoretical edifice to chart the ‘resurgence of something like
old-fashioned fascism’ today.
In response to this and other critiques of the third or suicidal fascist line,
this chapter seeks to clarify the cartographical nature of Deleuze and
Guattari's approach. It will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of
state-fascism, as distinct from state-totalitarianism, is crucially an
assemblage of all three lines. For Deleuze and Guattari (2004b) all political
assemblages are built on three lines, each of which carries an integral
danger (see also Deleuze 2002). Suicide is the danger that lurks on any line
of deterritorialisation, alongside microfascism as the danger of molecular
striation, and totalitarianism the danger of molar striation. Fascism is
defined as the realisation of the dangers on all the lines of the political
simultaneously. The chapter argues, therefore, that suicidalism (the danger
on the third line) is integral to the Deleuzoguattarian theory of fascism, and
this is essential if we hope to mobilise them to think about fascisms today.
Responding to Holland's critique, the chapter will demonstrate that the
Deleuzoguattarian schema is an effective conceptual toolbox for mapping
the dynamics of fascist events other than Nazism. The Meiji regime that
took Japan into the Second World War was certainly defined by unique
cultural, historical and institutional dynamics. Yet, like Nazi Germany,
Meiji may be lucidly mapped in Deleuzoguattarian terms as a machinic
assemblage of the three lines to build a ‘suicidal-state’. Meiji Japan
certainly set out on ‘a road that finally brought the country to self-
destruction on a colossal scale in World War II’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 61).
Its tokkōtai, or special-attack corps, more commonly known as the
Kamikaze (divine wind), seem iconically to embody Meiji's eventual flight
towards self-abolition.
Charting the dynamics of Meiji fascism clarifies the status of Deleuze
and Guattari's claim that fascism carries an integral politics of suicide. To
mistake the suicidal line of flight for no more than an historical contingency
of Nazism is to neglect a crucial dimension of their account of fascism per
se. This is critical if we wish to pursue, with Holland (2008), a
Deleuzoguattarian programme for the analysis of fascisms today. Deleuze
and Guattari imply that fascist lines are to be found not simply in state-
totalitarian assemblages which make the molar and molecular resonate
together, but in global innovations on the third line that transform such
territorial formations into the machine-parts of a suicidal ‘peace machine’
(see also Virilio and Lotringer 1997; Virilio 1998).

The first and second fascist lines

Fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their
centralisation.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 236)

In Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, fascism is articulated as lying at one pole of
the fundamental political dichotomy between paranoia and schizophrenia
that structures the work. As John Protevi puts it, ‘fascism is largely
addressed architectonically, as a pole of desires … fascism is on the side of
paranoia and reterritorialisation, the counter-pole to schizophrenia and
deterritorialisation’ (Protevi 2000: 168). In this sense fascism may be
understood as the fundamental adversary engaged by the text (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004a: xv).
 In Anti-Oedipus, fascism is that which finds manifestation in the
repressive or paranoiac functions of any social, political, economic and
psychological assemblage (Land 1993: 66). Fascism names the myriad
seductions of paranoiac sensibility — from the reactionary lure of political
identity, to the overcodings affected by the family unit on the individual
psyche. Fascism is the general tendency of desire towards paranoiac
enclosure, stability and territoriality. As Michel Foucault puts it, Anti-
Oedipus is the account and critique of ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads
and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to
desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault in Deleuze
and Guattari 2004a: xv).
We are enjoined to cultivate our escape from fascism through a
programme of desiring political schizophrenisation, to challenge fascistic
enclosures with intellectual, artistic, organisational, familial, collective and
individual deterritorialisations, so as to release the molecular complexities
obscured by the paranoiac tendency of desire. Not even the molar unity of
our egos can be assumed as unproblematic; that unity is constructed only
through the over-coding of a crowd of molecular sub-selves. The ego is
built only on the effacement of prior self-difference, on the obscuration of
the dynamic multiplicity of productive desiring-machines which are the
condition for the possibility of being/becoming-human.
In A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, this account of fascism is given greater specificity. Nick
Land argues that ‘a massive shift takes place in the diagnosis of National
Socialism, which is dislodged from the general category of fascism, and
subjected to a more specific analysis’ (Land 1993: 73). Actual ‘historical
fascism’ is, as both Protevi (2000), and Foucault remark, almost entirely
absent from the earlier text. In A Thousand Plateaus, however, Nazism is
articulated as its paradigmatic enunciation (Protevi 2000: 167). Fascism is
no longer a virtual, catch-all concept, but apparently one which must be
reassessed according to its precise historical parameters.
A Thousand Plateaus explicitly distinguishes fascism from ‘molar’
totalitarianism. After all ‘there are totalitarian states, of the Stalinist, or
military dictatorship type, that are not fascist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b:
236). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the ‘concept of the totalitarian state’
is macropolitical; it concerns ‘rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of
totalization and centralization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 236).
Totalitarianism is built when the ‘localised assemblage’ of the state is
subjected entirely to an ‘abstract machine of over-coding’, causing all social
flows to come under a unified, centralised, vertical and hierarchical
bureaucratic structure (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254). The dangers
implicit to such a formation is clear; an absolute rigidity in sociality; a truth
defined from above; collectivised ‘values, morals, fatherlands, religions’;
the paranoid certainty of purified selfhood as against difference; a politics
characterised by ‘fear’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 250).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the National Socialist state was obviously
totalitarian. Nazism built a molar line which segmented society under a
rigid bureaucratic and identitarian uniformity. Nazism involved more than
this molar totalitarian segment, however. Under Nazism the molar line was
conjugated with a molecular segmentarity. This second, ‘molecular line’ of
fascism was central to the rise of Nazism and to its eventual trajectory or
machinic dynamics.
The second or molecular fascist line addresses the fact that Nazism began
as a ‘mass-movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 236). Historical ‘fascism is inseparable from
a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to
point, before beginning to resonate together in the national socialist state’.
This marks the socially dispersed historical flows that allowed the
emergence of National Socialism at that particular moment in time, and
identifies why the masses ‘desired it’. To understand the rise of Nazism,
Deleuze and Guattari argue, we must move below the concept of top-down
state authoritarianism to the emergence of the social movement that built its
popular appeal upon a narrative of national rebirth; we must explain, in
other words, the failure of Weimar democracy as a desiring machine.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the National Socialist movement began
as a cloud of tiny ‘microfascist’ formations, wherein flows of signification
were segmented into ‘micro-black holes’ of paranoiac enclosure. Such
molecular paranoia was dispersed in the narcissism of social sub-groups,
ex-soldiers, cities, rural networks, schools, families and beer halls, building
the powerful massmobilisation machine, under Hitler's charismatic
leadership, that took power, overthrowing Weimar, to establish the
totalitarian regime of the Third Reich.
At this point, the microfascist movement was conjugated with a molar
line under a ‘central black hole’ that defined Nazi fascism as a macro or
state process. The microfascist social machine continued, however, to
‘resonate’ within German society. In this way the molecular line enabled the
Nazi regime's characteristic reach into the micro-capillaries of social life.
By containing a supple resonance machine within the ‘closed vessel’ of the
totalitarian state the regime incorporates a ‘fluidity’ which contrasts
fundamentally with the ‘classical centralisation’ of Stalinist totalitarianism
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 236, 246).
The Nazi totalitarian state acts as ‘resonance chamber’ within which the
tangle of microfascisms that established it were put to work (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 247). As such, the regime plugged the social-movement
into its state function, attempting to over-code and order its microfascist
dynamics (which entail variously disordered quanta). In doing so, the Nazi
regime maintained a resonating molecular machine within society on which
it would draw to enact its genocidal project. Without these resonating
‘microfascisms’ at his disposal, Hitler's regime would have been unable to
achieve its ‘unequalled ability to act upon the masses’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 236, my emphasis).
For Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is a political assemblage of desire and
not simply a category of state organisation. They argue that ‘It's too easy to
be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the
fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both
personal and collective’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 237). There is a
fascism of the in-group, which haunts all social movements, and leads to a
microauthoritarianism masquerading as its opposite, even, or especially, in
those which pretend to a revolutionary avant-gardism (Thoburn 2008: 99).
However, there is also fascism at work in the very dynamics of being. We
are constantly prone to allowing our constitutive flows of desire to circulate
exclusively around particular objects; individuals; ideas; self-images;
aesthetic experiences, like heavy weights on a rubber sheet, sucking desire
into gravitic black holes from which it cannot escape. Such a cancerous
paranoid molecularity is deemed to be latent to our present societies:
Reproducing in miniature the affections, the affectations, of the rigid … supple segmentarity
brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce in small scale the dangers of molar
segmentarity … A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralised, and acts
instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids in molecular perceptions
and semiotics. Interactions without resonance. Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in
a thousand little monomanias, self evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and
no longer form a system, but are only the rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and
everybody a mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighbourhood SS
man.
 (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 251–52)

Whilst such a diffused micro-paranoia is dangerous of itself, the radical

danger revealed in Nazism is that ‘microfascisms have a specificity of their
own that can crystallise into a macrofascism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b).
The Nazi party rose to power precisely by such a microfascist social
movement rising up from below and establishing a totalitarian apparatus.
That microfascist social movement then took on the characteristics of an
enormous resonance machine within the German state. Nazism achieved its
characteristic power over social minutiae by nurturing its molecular
resonance machine within the void of the totalitarian state (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 246). The microfascisms already extant within democratic
societies allow us to assemble into desiring machines for our own
repression given the correct historical and institutional circumstances.
It is crucial to note that the difference between Nazism and other
totalitarianisms is in this regard, for Deleuze and Guattari, largely a matter
of degree. All totalitarian states set up a paranoid ‘resonance’ between the
‘centralised’ and the ‘segmentary’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 247).
There is always a ‘molar side and a molecular side’ in totalitarianism
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 248). Nazism certainly radicalised the
simultaneity of the two lines for Deleuze and Guattari, inasmuch as its
molecular segmentarity (microfascist social movement) originally set up its
resonantmolar totalitarianism(as opposed, for example, to it finding its
genesis in a military coup), and that molecularity was placed at the centre of
Nazism's socially penetrative mechanisms of rule. Nonetheless, they state
explicitly that all totalitarianisms seek to set up a resonant molecularity that
does not simply ‘seal, plug or block’ subversive tendencies but channels
popular flows into the service of paranoiac state function. Indeed, ‘the
stronger the molar organization is, the more it induces a molecularization of
its own elements’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 237).
Both fascist states and totalitarian states make the molar and the
molecular resonate together. This suggests that a category fascism, if it is to
be clearly distinguishable from totalitarianism (rather than being its extreme
limit), must involve more than molar-molecular resonance. For Deleuze and
Guattari it is important to recognise that the interaction between the molar
and molecular is neither intrinsically totalitarian nor fascistic. All political
forms have molar and molecular (paranoiac) dimensions: as a political
party, for example, will comprise a general identity coextensive with
multiple internal distinctions, factions, cliques, think-tanks, differential
priorities, and thus potential policy directions. Totalitarianism and fascism
maximise the rigidity of molar identity and set all the molecular distinctions
to resonate within its bounds; this is the paranoiac danger which haunts all
political forms, which assemble molar and molecular lines.
Up to this point it seems that A Thousand Plateaus can be read as a
straight-forward reaffirmation of Anti-Oedipus, adding greater clarity and
distinction to the concept of fascism as paranoiac. The politics of paranoia
builds itself on two lines (state totalitarianismand microfascism), which can
occur independently but are conjugated together with unprecedented
radicality in fascism-proper, when a state-totalitarianism builds a
microfascist resonance machine, or ‘even worse’ when a microfascist social
movement sets up a totalitarian state apparatus (Deleuze and Guattari
2004b: 253). In this regard, Nazism might be understood as a particularly
radical and socially entrenched form of totalitarianism, in which the
dangers inherent to both molar (state despotism) and molecular (a socially
diffuse microfascism) politics are conjugated together.
 Eugene Holland takes up Deleuze and Guattari's account at this point to
argue that, for the identification of contemporary fascisms, what is crucial
is the ‘transmission from movement to regime which occurred when the
molar and molecular lines conjugate’ to give birth to Nazism as a
particularly radical form of totalitarian politics (Holland 2008: 78).
Certainly ‘fascism require[d] popular mobilisation’, but it also requires
concretisation in a state-totalitarian body to form a macrofascism. A
directly comparable assemblage of molar and molecular fascist lines in the
G.W. Bush administration suggested to Holland that we witnessed the
‘advent of 21st century fascism in the United States’ (Holland 2008: 74).
Holland bases this argument on an identification of the ‘born-again
Christian social movement’, of which he views G.W. Bush as the
representative, as paradigmatically microfascistic. There is a ‘striking’
correspondence, he argues, between the psychodynamics of that born-again
Christian movement and the German Friekorps. The Freikorps, as
Theweleit (1987) outlined, were characterised by a process of ‘splitting’
negative internal signifiers onto external objects within a palingenic
narrative. This focus on ‘palingenesis’ and a functionally derived rejection
(scapegoating) of a determined other (the Jew) may therefore be understood
as suggestive of the structure of microfascism (Holland 2008). Holland
points out that the born-again Christian movement in the United States also
entailed a palingenic narrative of religious conversion/redemption, ‘weak
ego-synthetic abilities; they tend to see everything in stark, absolute terms
of black and white, good versus evil’, and an ‘extreme tension between
superego demands for absolute and unwavering adherence to a simplistic
homogenising moral code, and multifarious drives and desires arising from
the complexities and ambiguities of heterogeneous human existence in a
mass mediated global consumer society on the other’, with ‘the
homosexual’ replacing ‘the Jew’ as determined other. We see, in other
words, the very microfascist complexes that were definitive of the
psychodynamics of the Nazi regime at work in the psychodynamics of the
born-again Christian social-movement in the United States. These
microfascisms were set to resonance with the molar state apparatus by the
Bush administration.
Positing such psychodynamic correspondence with Nazi microfascism is
not, Holland accepts, sufficient reason ‘to declare the fundamentalist
Christian Bush regime “fascist”’ in the Deleuzoguattarian sense (Holland
2008: 89). Rather, departing from Deleuze and Guattari's account, Holland
finds further significant parallels with Nazism's genesis out of an emotive
sense of defeat (Versailles), and (totalitarian) behaviour in power, which
confirms the validity of the fascist referent for describing the Bush
administration. The born-again Christian social movement emerged from a
series of highly emotional defeats, beginning with the ‘Scopes trial’, but
continuing with ‘Roe vs. Wade’ and the failure in Vietnam. These defeats
established a religious-conservative ‘resonance machine’, with a powerful
media wing, which set out to ‘take back America’. Actually taking power
under Bush, that desiring machine sought to consolidate its rule in a
characteristically paranoid and, in tendency, totalitarian manner. The Bush
administration developed a politics rooted in fear; using security, after 9/11,
as a tool for ‘strengthening the state repressive apparatus’ at home and
abroad, and as a justification for the widespread suspension of rights. This
conjugation of a molecular microfascist segmentarity with a molar
totalitarian tendency, identifies, according to Holland (2008), the Bush
administration as a macrofascist (i.e. extremely totalitarian) assemblage in
the Deleuzoguattarian sense. That resonance between the molecular and the
molar suggested, to Holland, the reappearance of ‘something like old-
fashioned fascism’ in America (Holland 2008: 94).
Whilst Deleuze and Guattari certainly identified the horrific excesses of
Nazism with its resonating molar-molecular machine, Holland neglects the
central reason they thought that its assemblage of the molar and molecular
was quite so dangerous in the Nazi case. Holland is correct to note the
paranoiac and indeed fascistic potential of a state that sets itself up in
resonance with a socially dispersed religious fundamentalism. Indeed, any
radical conjugation of the molar-totalitarian and molecular microfascist will
produce a uniquely paranoiac assemblage. Significantly for this paper,
however, to construct the Bush administration as fascistic, Holland excises
the third constitutive line of Deleuze and Guattari's schema which marks
Nazism's character beyond the conjugation of totalitarianism with
microfascism. This occludes the fact that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the
politics of fascism are never exhausted by the paranoiac function (i.e.
making molar and molecular lines resonate within the closed vessel of
totalitarianism). Nazism entailed a third line, a suicidal line of flight, which
brings into play a completely different ‘abstract machine’.

The third line

There are not just two kinds of line but three.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 244)

The third line of fascism (its ‘suicidal line of flight’) completes the schema
developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari argue that in
relation to the third fascist line ‘the dangers of all the other lines pale by
comparison’. Furthermore, they are clear that whilst the third line emerges
from the supple yet nonetheless territorial (i.e. paranoiac) segmentations of
microfascist molecularity, its dynamics are deterritorialising or
schizophrenic. For Deleuze and Guattari, the Nazi fascist event entailed a
suicidally schizophrenic ‘war-machine taking over the state’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 254).
Deleuze and Guattari explicitly bind this element of their account into the
hypothetical framework developed in the Treatise on Nomadology, in which
paranoiac ‘state apparatus’ is distinguished from essentially schizophrenic
‘warmachines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253). In the Nomadology, a
state apparatus is identified as determined by an ‘abstract machine of
overcoding’. State orders, they argue, are fundamentally based on a regime
of interiorisation, hinging on the two-headed disciplinarity of policing and
taxation that allows a territory to be organised and dominated. States striate
space, so as to code and over-code desiring flows to serve a despotic
function. The state is an abstract machine for molar and molecular striation.
War-machines, on the other hand, are determined by an ‘abstract machine
of mutation’. This abstract machine is qualitatively and ‘quantifiably’
different in function to the machine of paranoiac overcoding,
deterritorialising desiring flows rather than reterritorialising them (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004b: 564). ‘The war-machine’ is the diagram of any and
every function which actualises an abstract machine of mutation. Any
assemblage which emits lines of flight, ‘quanta of deterritorialisation’ or
‘mutant flows’, whether social, cultural, aesthetic, political or/and
economic, is understood by Deleuze and Guattari as having built a war-
machine to do so (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253).
War machines, as they define them, set up a ‘smooth space’ within which
(social, economic, sexual, artistic) flows can circulate and spring up at any
point. This is why they are intrinsically linked to creativity or productivity
for Deleuze and Guattari (always a function of deterritorialisation). The
fundamental function of the war-machine is to construct and occupy smooth
space for unconstrained flux. Deleuze and Guattari ascribe the ‘invention’
of the war-machine to nomadic, pre- or non-territorial social systems. This
must not be taken to imply that war-machines are solely built by pre-
modern nomadic societies.When any practice is productive of new flows it
has necessarily built a smooth space, and thus employs a war-machine;
there are purely aesthetic warmachines such aswriting andmusic.War
machinesmaximise fluxion by allowing a form to occupy geography
(whether physical, intellectual, artistic, or social) without building an
interiorised (striated molar-molecular) territory upon it.
Actual war, as an exercise of force, appears in this hypothetical
discussion as the means by which nomadic orders build and defend smooth
spaces against territorial state apparatus. War is what war-machines engage
in when faced by the interiorising (reterritorialising) praxis of a state
apparatus. War, as such, is originally an anti-state function. By extension,
war is understood as only the ‘supplement’ of the war-machine, rather than
its originary purpose or fundamental essence. War is directed at the
paranoiac barriers to nomadic fluxion, and originally serves no other
purpose than to allow a war-machine to build and occupy smooth space.
War machines are only given war as their exclusive object by states. State
apparatus seeks to harness the capacity to wage war to aid in the
construction of territoriality. Consequentially they seek to capture, under
their system of interiorisation, the war-machine. In doing so, they over-code
that war-machine with its supplemental destructive function (as in
Clausewitz's dictum, making war serve as a means to state ends). When a
state apparatus co-opts awar-machine it short-circuits it, ‘divest[ing] the
war-machine of its power of metamorphosis’, and ‘substitute[ing]
destruction for mutation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253).
 Once affected, this capture of awar-machine by the state apparatus is
instantly vulnerable to a counter-coup due to a ‘catastrophic charge’
released (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253). Once a war-machine is given
war as its sole objective it can all too easily, Deleuze and Guattari argue, set
off on a line that is so absolute in its focus that the state in question is no
longer able to determine and code its directionality. Harnessing war ‘as a
means to a state end’ always entails the (supplemental) risk of becoming a
total or pure war. In pure or total war the warmachine's power of
metamorphosis returns as a perverse monstrosity; an overwhelming urge to
radical abolition of self and others which co-opts the state and sets it upon
an apocalyptically suicidal trajectory: the unlimited essence of war (as an
act of force) that Clausewitz identified is now given free rein (Reid 2006:
294).
When Deleuze asks, ‘why is the [creative] line of flight a war one risks
coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything
one could’, he is not using war simply as a ‘metaphor’ (Deleuze 2002: 140–
41). Rather Deleuze and Guattari argue that a suicidal pure war is a danger
integral to any deterritorialisation. Whilst we must deterritorialise or
smooth space to create (and thus build war-machines), that movement, at its
logical limit, potentially results in the suicidal dissolution of self (which
reflects the surrender of the war-machine to its anti-productive supplement):
‘War is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war-
machine after it has lost its power to change’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b:
253). Suicide is the supplement that may be built on any line of flight given
the correct (unlimited) conditions, such as, but not limited to, the short-
circuiting of a warmachine by a state apparatus.
Just as molarity carries with it the risk of instituting state-totalitarian or
despotic social arrangements and molecularity carries with it the risk of
forming little black holes of microfascist certainty, all lines of flight open to
suicidal excess (Deleuze 2002: 140–41). This is a crucial point, clarifying
that both paranoiac and schizophrenic processes have integral risks or
dangers. At the state level the danger on the third line manifests in the
catastrophic charge released when a state apparatus is captured by its war-
machine and set to pure war, but Deleuze and Guattari develop, in A
Thousand Plateaus, numerous examples of the integral association between
art's attempts to build smooth space and the tragic ends to which artists are
often inexorably drawn (Deleuze 2002: 61; Deleuze and Guattari 2004b:
208, 220, 227, 330). Their point is not that warmachines are suicidal rather
than productive, but that the productivity of warmachines (in building and
occupying smooth space) carries with it a suicidal danger that resides on all
lines of flight (just as a ‘totalitarian danger’ resides on all molar lines and a
‘microfascist danger’ resides on all molecular lines).
All lines of flight or deterritorialisation conceal suicide as ‘a danger
which is proper to them’, and this danger manifests itself in a variety of
ways (Deleuze 2002: 140–41).1 For Deleuze and Guattari there are suicidal
lines of flight in political assemblages which are not fascist (at the level of
the individual, aesthetic and evolutionary/organic as well as social). The
broader significance of this argument for Deleuze and Guattari's general
thesis on politics and creativity/deterritorialisation in A Thousand Plateaus
cannot be sufficiently engaged here; constraints on space insist that the
argument remain tightly focused on the sustainability of their theory of
fascism. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that it is the broader political
consequences of Deleuze and Guattari's claim that schizophrenia has an
integral danger which have called up such widespread antipathy to the idea
of a third fascist line, as the following section will outline.
 Regarding fascism, Deleuze and Guattari's point seems clear: beyond
assembling the dangers on the molar and the molecular into a resonating
paranoiac machine, Nazism built a line of flight into suicidal pure war.
Fascism as a general category, for Deleuze and Guattari, is defined by the
realisation of the dangers on all three lines of the political real — molar,
molecular and flight. What gives fascism its difference (from
totalitarianism) is the third line, which ensures that it always establishes
suicidal states.

Fascist suicide
Long live death!
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254)

No longer is it sufficient toworry about paranoiac desire desiring its own

repression and becoming closed down in black holes, succumbing to the
temptations of identity, self-certainty, truth and presence. A Thousand
Plateaus posits a danger inherent to creative schizophrenisation: that an
abstract machine of mutation, in the form of a war-machine turned to pure
war, takes itself as its object and embraces a strategy of radical self-
abolition. This seems an astonishing theoretical move, one that makes the
political schizophrenisation that is lauded in Anti-Oedipus a seriously risky
business. Indeed, as Protevi points out, ‘recognising these dangers’ results
in a ‘caution’ that appears throughout A Thousand Plateaus (Protevi 2000:
168). Such caution does not fit easily into the dualistic framework of Anti-
Oedipus. Indeed, Protevi suggests that accepting the categorical nature of a
disjunction between the texts is a precondition for any correct reading (see
also Protevi 2000; Holland 2008).
For Nick Land (1993), this disjunction between the texts represents a
fatal problem for the mobilisation of their thought. The idea of a line of
flight ‘gone wrong’ seems to betray the anti-paranoiac spirit of the earlier
text. The schizoanalysis of Anti-Oedipus, Land argues, was fundamentally a
call to ‘always decode… and extinguish all nostalgia for belonging’. As
such, ‘schizoanalysis shares in the delicious [antihumanist] irresponsibility
of everything anarchic, inundating, and harshly impersonal, seeks a fringe
of experimentation that knows no bounds, pushing to the edge of capitalism
(which is itself a schizophrenizing tendency), it is a dissolution of identity’
(Land 1993: 67).
For Land, the job of Schizoanalysis is unpicking the ways in which all
social forms (but capitalism in particular) refuse their own immanent
processes of revolutionary schizophrenisation. The, admittedly ‘crude’,
force of the earlier account lies precisely in its dichotomy between
molecular, revolutionary, schizophrenic and creative and molar, reactionary,
paranoid or fascistic: In sum, ‘between the dissolution and reinstitution of
the social order’ (Land 1993). Anti-Oedipus simply is the challenge of the
paranoiac and repressive with the schizophrenic and creative (Land 1993:
70). Abandoning the rigid exclusions of this dichotomy, for Land, implodes
the entire Deleuzoguattarian project.
It seems clear that this is an overreaction. The theoretical developments
of A Thousand Plateaus must be understood in terms of the evolutionary
trajectory of Deleuze and Guattari's political theory. Indeed, an auto-
problematisation of conceptual dichotomies which they construct forms an
essential machine part of the very fabric of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
as a rhizomic rather than arborescent text (as a processor of difference in
repetition). Paraphrasing Deleuze, the concept of the ‘suicidal line of flight
into pure war’ is designed precisely to disrupt the Anti-Oedipal ‘dualism’ of
paranoia and schizophrenia (or molar and molecular), not simply by adding
a ‘new term’, but by adding a new ‘dimension’ which cannot be contained
in the dualism but rather re-inflects it with difference (Deleuze 2002: 132).
This is explicitly illuminated in A Thousand Plateaus by way of the Nazi
example, inasmuch as a suicidal line of flight is seen to have inhabited the
molar-molecular dynamics ofNazismfrom the beginning. Nazism, aswe
already know, was more than a totalitarian state-apparatus: its genesis
certainly cannot be reduced to a military coup. Rather, Nazism was
constructed when a microfascist movement took over the state. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that to do so, the microfascist or segmentary resonance
machine adopted the characteristics of a war-machine, building within the
assemblage the (palingenic) line of flight that was to give National
Socialism is characteristic mass appeal. Resonating within the social body,
this schizophrenic war-machine always exceeded the totalitarian apparatus
that later sought to harness its resonance to a paranoiac function.
Unlike the totalitarian state, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is
constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and
abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they
were bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and the death of the
Germans, they thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed, all across
Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they
did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others… One can
always say that this is just a matter of foggy talk and ideology. But that is not true. The
insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not imply a need to tack on
vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow… the precise formation of Nazi
statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of
conversations. They always contain the ‘stupid and repugnant cry’, Long live death!
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254)

Deleuze and Guattari are clear that what they refer to in this passage is
more than simply the work of an over-coding totalitarian ideology.2 Rather,
the war-machine that was established within the resonating microfascist
segmentarity of German society carried within it an unlimited potentiality
which was only to be fully released with the onset of total war but clearly
pre-existed it. That frenzied line of flight manifested in a suicidalism both at
the political and ‘at the economic level, where arms expansion replaces
growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of
production towards the means of pure destruction’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004b: 254). The ‘paradox’ of fascism is that it was defined, from the start,
not by its totalitarianism, but by a ‘reversion of the line of flight into a line
of destruction’ that always animated its foundational molecular
segmentarity (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253, 255).
To contain its mutant flows, the Nazi regime had sought to stabilise its
warmachine within the resonant void of the totalitarian state, trapping a
mutation machine within a militaristic narrative of national rebirth. By
attempting to harness this schizo-function to a paranoiac order, a short-
circuited or cancerous line of flight is set up (militarised re-birth as a
corruption of the mutational impetus). By the 1940s, following this line, the
Nazi state had been entirely set to total war, now explicitly pursuing the
radical politics of abolition which proceeds from the paranoiac attempt to
over-code the war-machine with its anti-productive supplement.
By short-circuiting a line of flight through a molecular segmentarity and
a molar centrality, Nazism built a fully ‘suicidal-state’. Hitler's telegram 71,
which declaimed ‘If the war is lost, may the nation perish’, was the ‘normal
outcome’ of this particular assemblage of the lines. Turned to total war, the
Nazi state apparatus became little more than an appendage of its suicidal
war-machine (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 253).
Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not by the notion of the
totalitarian state but by the notion of the suicidal state: so-called total war seems less a state
undertaking than an undertaking of a war-machine that appropriates the State and channels into it
a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the state itself… It was this
reversion of the line of flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular focuses
 of fascism, and made them interact in a war-machine instead of resonating in a state apparatus. A
war-machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own
servants than stop the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 255)

The state apparatus became a machine-part of a society transformed into a

massive engine for the production of pure war: the pursuit of collective
rebirth through fire and bloodshed generating a politics which had no
horizon but destruction. The Nazi pursuit of palingenic total war, as a
perverse state militarisation of the molecular dynamics of desiring
mutation, was a line of flight into abolition (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b).
This is what determined the fascistic (as opposed to simply totalitarian)
character of Nazism for Deleuze and Guattari. It nurtured a suicidally
schizophrenic war-machine at its heart.
This characterisation of Nazism as distinguished by quanta of
deterritorialisation, a suicidal line of flight, strikes Nick Land as having
only a tenuous link to the paranoiac realities of Nazism. Land argues that it
is simply bizarre to claim that the Nazis had anything to do with war-
machinic schizophrenisation (Land 1993: 76). Nazis were the very opposite
of an excessive release of desiring flows. If you schizophrenise, you ‘let
go’. If you let go, as Land puts it, ‘you might end up fucking with a Jew, or
producing something degenerate like a work of art’. To the contrary,
Nazism is about ‘Conspiracy, Lucidity, and malice’, the proliferation of
enemies and paranoid subjectivities, gloom, oppression, the love of
obedience, leadership and symbols, ‘the icons of molar identity’ (Land
1993). To be a fascist is to pursue ‘nostalgia for what is maximally bovine,
inflexible, and stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same
patch of earth for eternity [and] above all, resent everything impetuous and
irresponsible… to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows, and
persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency’ (Land 1993: 75). In
short, Land argues, being a Nazi historically had nothing to do with ‘letting
go’ or taking flight (Land 1993).
Whilst Deleuze and Guattari do identify the risks of an unrestrained
deterritorialisation with the suicidal thrust of Nazism, their point clearly is
not, by extension, that all deterritorialisation straightforwardly risks Nazism
or fascism; this would certainly threaten to ‘domesticate’ their thesis (Land
1993). The Nazi suicide state is rather understood as having been assembled
in a very specific ‘set of conditions’; explicitly, the short-circuiting of a
war-machine through molar-molecular totalitarianism (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 466).3 The ‘fascist line of flight’ thus in no way detracts
from the fact that Nazism was an assemblage with paranoiac molar and
molecular lines.
Like Nick Land, Eugene Holland argues that Deleuze and Guattari's
account of ‘fascist suicide’ makes for a misunderstanding of the regime's
central character. He points out that ‘what the fascist movement offered
Germans was first and foremost renewed hope and confidence in the
German nation, not the prospect of suicide’ (Holland 2008: 79). Deleuze
and Guattari, Holland argues, make the catastrophic error of following
Virilio (1998) in misinterpreting Hitler's telegram 71 ‘as the interpretative
key to the fascist movement and regime as a whole’ (Holland 2008: 79). It
seems clear to Holland that an ‘apocalyptic moment of Hitler's sheds little
or no light on the emergence of the fascist movement that depended for part
of its support on rapid acceleration of the development of productive forces
and on the massive integration of unemployed and underemployed
populations into the workforce’ (Holland 2008: 79).
For Holland, the Nazi regime pursued the mobilisation of the entire
economy to war precisely in extension of its original promise to restore
self-confidence in the German nation: ‘What had not been possible to
maintain (or attain quickly enough) through the development of productive
force alone increasingly required the pursuit of power and domination
(scapegoating at home and conquest abroad) to achieve’ (Holland 2008:
83). Holland concludes that we have no reason to assume there was
anything ‘intrinsically “suicidal” about historical fascism… rather, the Nazi
State turned to total war and then pure destruction for contingent historical
reasons’ (Holland 2008). Whilst it is ‘apparent from th[e] telegram that the
fascist regime eventually reached a point at which Hitler could see its
imminent demise and would have preferred its total destruction to defeat’,
given the peculiarity of this process to the idiosyncrasies of the Nazi event,
the third line must be stipulated as irrelevant to any project seeking to chart
the resurgence of fascism today (Holland 2008).
If Deleuze and Guattari's third fascist line were simply a theoretical
extension from the Nazi case, and specifically Hitler's telegram 71, to
fascism in general, it would certainly indicate a lazy reduction and the
concept could be easily discarded in the way Holland (2008) suggests. The
problem with such a reading is that quite apart from simply extending their
theory of fascism from Virilio's reading of telegram 71, Deleuze and
Guattari are absolutely clear that they consent to the notion of the ‘suicidal
state’ only because they understand suicide as a ‘normal outcome’ of
fascism as a particular, and absolutely contingent, machinic assemblage of
desire. Fascism is defined as the assemblage of three lines, combining both
reterritorialising and deterritorialising desiring processes. In this context,
Holland's dichotomisation of palingenesis (rebirth) and suicidalism makes
limited sense. What Deleuze and Guattari are attempting to capture with the
concept of the third line is the dangerously uncontrollable excess of desire
that defined the palingenic urge of Nazi fascism alongside the heavy
centralisation of its totalitarian ideal. They suggest that it was the perverse
and proliferating over-capacity of desire within the resonating molar-
molecular apparatus which drove the Nazism project inexorably towards
destructive abolition (of self and others).
The cartography of the lines of the Nazi assemblage reveals how the
forces of desiring production within German society (which drove towards
the establishment of the Nazi totalitarian state apparatus) were assembled
with the molecular andmolar paranoiac lines to foster a suicidemachine. Far
from trapping or plugging the flow of deterritorialisation, that
molar/molecular ‘short-circuiting’ released suicidalism as a danger already
latent in Nazism's unlimited project of national palingenesis. The line of
flight into abolition was released in the attempt to trap awar-machine under
the totem of a national re-birth (promising, as Holland points out, ‘renewed
hope and confidence’), which was militarily over-coded from its beginnings
(as directed against the injustice of Versailles), and thereby collapsed
instantly into the pursuit of pure-war.
Holland's most incisive critique is in challenging Deleuze and Guattari's
claim that Nazism became suicidal as a consequence of some ontological
predetermination rather than particular historical circumstances (Holland
2008: 79). The idea that Nazism was suicidal ‘from the very beginning’
certainly seems problematic (Holland 2008: 79). An intrinsically suicidal
valence seems to challenge Deleuze and Guattari's claim to be doing
cartography rather than definitional taxonomy. Whilst the suicidal valence
of Nazi statements ‘from the very beginning’ is only noted as a curiosity by
Deleuze and Guattari, it risks inflecting their theory of fascism with an
essentialist tone (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254).
As noted above, for Deleuze and Guattari, quanta of deterritorialisation
always contain a potentially (though not necessarily) unlimited trajectory
which is the danger ‘proper’ to them (the central point here is that creation
is always indissociable from auto-dissolution: i.e. de-territorialisation). This
universal danger does not, however, fully explicate Deleuze and Guattari's
precise intent in terming Nazism suicidal ‘from the very beginning’. They
explicitly argue that the lines of flight or quanta emissions that crossed the
Nazi social-movement and built its popular appeal in the promise of
palingenesis had to skirt excess so as to allow them to ‘interact in a war-
machine instead of resonating in a state apparatus’. It was, therefore, for
Deleuze and Guattari, precisely the already schizo-excessive chapter of
Nazi desire that distinguished the movement from other totalitarianisms,
which generally tend towards conservative paranoiac formations. In other
words, though viewing its project in terms of re-birth, Nazi enunciations
always had an extravagance or overcapacity that refused to be fully striated;
the secret of fascism's unique horror was the paradoxically unlimited, even
globalising, scope of its palingenic project.
This excessive, schizophrenic dimension is central to what distinguishes
Nazism as a fascist movement from the totalitarian politics of paranoia for
Deleuze and Guattari. The excessive and morbid formation of Nazi
statements from the start was suggestive of, or opened into, the regime's
eventual trajectory, but did not necessarily structurally pre-determine it.4 As
such, Nazism's eventually suicidal trajectory was only materially actualised
with the machinic assemblage of all three lines during the Second World
War (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 254). This broadly incorporates
Holland's (2008) critique.
For the Deleuzoguattarian concept of fascism (as an assemblage of three
lines) to be deemed valid, however, Holland (2008) is absolutely right to
insist that it cannot simply be seen as a function of the specificities of Nazi
ideology, or of Hitler's individual psychosis. Holland implies that Deleuze
and Guattari's cartographic schema must stand or fall on its ability to
provide a functional toolbox for mapping fascist events other than the
German case. We do not, however, need to concur with Holland that
Nazism was the only historical derivation of the machinic dynamics of
fascist state suicide, and that Deleuze and Guattari's third line must
therefore be ejected from a general theory of fascism. By demonstrating the
utility of Deleuzoguattarian cartography for charting the quite different
dynamics of the Meiji suicidal state, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of
fascism (as the assemblage of all three lines) can be defended from the
charge that it reduces all fascisms to Hitler's ‘apocalyptic moment’. As a
consequence, Deleuze and Guattari's third fascist line must be re-integrated
into any programme for the analysis of twenty-first-century fascisms.

The fascist lines of the tokkōtai

Like Nazi Germany, Meiji Japan set out on ‘a road that finally brought the
country to self-destruction on a colossal scale inWorldWar II’ (Ohnuki-
Tierney 2002: 61). Its development, during the latter stages of war in the
Pacific, of the tokkoōtai or ‘special attack corps’ under the direction of a
war-machine set on total war, seems iconically to signify the emergence of
a Japanese ‘suicidal state’ that conjugated all three lines of Deleuze and
Guattari's schema of fascism. In this section the unique dynamics by which
the Meiji state built its politics of self-abolition will be articulated through
Deleuzoguattarian cartography, drawing on Ohnuki-Tierney's (2002)
ground-breaking sociological analysis. Whilst provisional, this account will
demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari's schema of three lines is a useful
conceptual tool for mapping fascisms beyond the German case, thus
countering Holland's critical charge of their reduction of fascism to the
idiosyncrasies of the National Socialist event, and reopening their concepts
to think about fascisms today.
The molar line
The Meiji regime clearly involved the establishment of a totalitarian state
apparatus. A molar line was drawn around the despotic figure of the
emperor, who was framed in messianic terms as the representative of a
national rebirth. This palingenic project may be dated from the forcible
opening of Japan to external influences by Commodore Perry, which
brought about the end of the much more supple and segmented Shogunate
system in 1854. Following this catastrophic event, a wholesale remodelling
of the Japanese internal order was pursued under the guidance of powerful
domestic elites, with the explicit aim being to construct a strong centralised
and nationalised state that would be able to resist such foreign incursions in
the future.
The Meiji constitution was the key event in the codification of this
nationalist project, establishing the imperial apparatus which rapidly
initiated a state-led programme of interventions at the social, cultural and
institutional levels. These reforms sought to Westernise the Japanese social
order, and set up a Europeanstyle state bureaucracy. Supposedly ‘useless’
Japanese traditions were discarded under central direction, and a wide range
of new institutions were put in place ‘affecting all aspects of the daily life of
the Japanese’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 63).
Simultaneously the traditional Shinto folk religion was steadily over-
coded by a molar segment. Local rituals were coordinated through imperial
control of local shrines to develop a ‘national Shintoism’ under state
direction: ‘Imperial rituals were synchronised with newly instituted rituals
in villages, schools, organisations and national shrines.’ Ensuring there was
a centrally coordinated shrine for each village meant that purely through
continuing traditional worship, normal Japanese ‘became willing
participants in the governmental program on religion’ (Ohnuki-Tierney
2002: 90). Shintoism was thereby increasingly over-coded by a molar-
totalitarian function. Meanwhile, ethnic minorities, such as the Ainu, were
marked through various strategies as genetically different from ‘authentic’
Japanese.
Victories in the Sino—Japanese (1894–95) and Japanese—Russian
(1904‒05) wars were an important catalyst for this molar over-coding. The
celebration of these victories helped to solidify and confirm the molar
national formation, giving birth to the militaristic colonial project that drew
Japan into the Second World War (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 95).
The Meiji state apparatus was established gradually, over a far more
extended historical period than the corresponding institutional formation in
Nazi Germany. It was founded by a relatively small group of oligarchs
rather than the up-swell of a microfascist social movement. Similarly, the
institutional format and content of Meiji totalitarianism was clearly unique
to its particular historical and cultural milieu, and notable for its exceptional
focus on the quasi-deified figure of the emperor. Yet its palingenic project
similarly entailed the molar over-coding of social, cultural and religious
practices, institutional and military structures, and ethnic/religious identity.
The Meiji assemblage was characterised by a massive molarisation which
reached its zenith in the 1930s and 1940s.
The molecular line
Like Nazi Germany, and indeed all totalitarianisms, the molar line alone is
insufficient to capture the dynamics of Meiji. Ohnuki-Tierney (2002) charts
how, continuous to and resonating with the rise of a molar totalitarian
apparatus, a molecular political aesthetic was constructed around the
‘cherry blossom’ imagery. This aesthetic brought into play a supple
segmentarity to build a dynamic and supportive resonance machine within
the closed vessel of the totalitarian state.
 The ‘cherry blossom’ long had been associated closely with Japanese
cultural identity; indeed, initially, following the fall of feudalism, there was
some call for all the trees to be cut down, since they were identified with
the now moribund regime (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002). The rising totalitarian
state realised early on the potency of the symbol for social engineering.
From the Meiji constitution onwards, Ohnuki-Tierney traces how
‘successive state machineries deployed cherry blossoms’, until it became
the ‘dominant political and military symbol’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 102).
Successive regimes engaged in the systematic planting of cherry trees,
especially in castle grounds, as part of a symbolic marking of the departure
from feudalism (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 121). The cherry blossom
increasingly was characterised as a uniquely Japanese tree, superior to any
found in China, Korea, or elsewhere. It became, in statenational discourse,
an identifier of the particular Japanese essence or ‘soul’. This was gradually
incorporated into the discourse of colonial expansion: foreign territories
were now claimed for Japan on the grounds that the Cherry Tree had been
found there. In colonised spaces, the cherry tree was exported to
‘symbolically stamp areas as spaces for imperial Japan’ (Ohnuki-Tierney
2002: 122).
It might seem easy to argue that this simply reflected a molar ideological
strategy, but Ohnuki-Tierney makes clear that the cherry blossom aesthetic
always entailed a complex dynamism that frustrates any such reduction.
The cherry blossom aesthetic long had been associated with a wide milieu
of significations within Japanese culture, constituting a supple marker of
self-hood. The cherry blossom as a cultural symbol was implicated not in a
single set of meanings, but in a complex of relationships. Its
anthropological connotations incorporated life and death, but also
reproduction, fertility, time and normsubversion (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002:
57). In this sense, the cherry blossom aesthetic from the very beginning
incorporated multiple quanta of deterritorialisation, being defined by an
abstract machine of mutation rather than over-coding. This dynamic
interpretative mutability was fatally to limit the ability of the molar state to
stabilise the aesthetic under the imperial referent.
As a consequence, to harness its deep cultural resonance, the cherry
blossom was increasingly over-coded by the totalitarian state under a
military connotation. Cherry blossom motifs were used to mark the new
European style of Meiji army uniforms ‘as Japanese’ (Ohnuki-Tierney
2002). At first, military colonisation of the symbol focuses on the
‘blooming life’ of the soldier-as-cherry-blossom. Gradually, however, the
flower comes to be over-coded with the idea of a ‘beautiful’ martial death
for the emperor (pro rege et patria mori). During the Second World War,
the Yasukuni Shrine was placed at the centre of this ideological strategy,
aestheticising martial death ‘for the emperor’ through the narrative of
heroic military dead being reborn at the shrine as ‘falling cherry blossoms’
(Ohnuki-Tierney 2002).
This military over-coding of the cherry blossom signifier increasingly
was distributed throughout the capillaries of the Japanese social order. The
‘“stupid and repugnant cry”, Long live death!’ appeared now in school
textbooks, songs and novels under a cherry blossom motif. We see traced,
throughout the Japanese social order, a dispersed micro-repetition of state
militarism, which was now bound into the much more supple register of
patriotic sentiment associated with the cherry blossom as a uniquely
Japanese flower (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 128). This seems to confirm
Deleuze and Guattari's claim that ‘the stronger the molar organization is,
the more it induces a molecularization of its own elements’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004b: 237). In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, this seems to mark
the state-led development of a molecular cultural-resonance machine that
bound Japanese society to the totalitarian project through an aesthetic
militarism.
Coding the cherry blossom with an exclusively military connotation,
however, meant that that aesthetic began to take on the characteristics of a
warmachine over-codedwith its supplement. The cherry blossom aesthetic,
vibrating within the resonance chamber of the totalitarian state, builds ‘a
proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to
point, before beginning to resonate together’ under a purely destructive
function (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 236). Clearly the molecularity
associated with the cherry blossom aesthetic was different from the
cancerous macrofascism that defined the Nazi event. No rise of a social
movement preceded crystallisation into the Japanese totalitarian state. Yet
the Meiji state establishes a no-less-cancerous resonance machine by
harnessing the supple segmentations of the cultural-aesthetic milieu of the
cherry blossom to its totalitarian militarism: building an aesthetic war-
machine within the social body. In this way, the Meiji regime, like Nazi
Germany, nurtured a war-machine at the heart of its resonant molar-
molecular totalitarianism.
That this cancerous (aesthetic) molecularity was actively constructed
through the Meiji totalitarian state's ideological strategy indicates that the
historical assemblage of Japanese fascism ran a different course to the
assemblage of Nazi fascism.Deleuze and Guattari are clear that the three
lines may interact inmultiple and dynamic ways. In its conjugation of the
molar and molecular lines into a resonant war-machine Meiji Japan was,
however, like Germany under Nazism, to sow the seeds of a no less intense
line of flight towards state suicide.
The suicidal line
Even before the molecular social dispersal of aesthetic militarism, the
principle of death-before-capture had become a key trope of Japanese
military discourse, with the precise technique for ‘honourable suicide’
rather than surrender forming part of the training of every Japanese soldier
(O'Neill 1981). There had already been various practical military extensions
of this principle of patriotic death. Such acts as manned submarine
collisions at Pearl Harbour and the so-called Banzai charges, infamous in
infantry engagements, all tapped into the aesthetic machine to structure and
frame them as heroic and beautiful. It was not until war in the Pacific
approached its dénouement following a series of catastrophic naval defeats
that such methods were turned into a systematic programme of military
self-sacrifice.
At this point the tokkōtai, or special-attack corps, was established. These
pilots were trained to fly bomb-laden planes into enemy vessels. Suicidal
attack methods became an increasingly central element of the Japanese
Pacific strategy. Unsurprisingly, the cherry blossom was the ‘exclusive
visual symbol for the tokkōtai operation’ from the start (Ohnuki-Tierney
2002: 165). By the end of the war Japan had expended thousands of its
youth, often drawn from the top universities, in such strikes. As the war
approached it end, training for the tokkōtai pilots shrank to an almost
nominal length (ensuring that many pilots simply missed their targets), yet
the practice built in intensity as defeat became ever more certain.
It is notable that the Meiji authorities took considerable convincing by
the strategy's advocates in the military hierarchy before suicidal-attack
methods were instituted as a systematic programme (Inoguchi and
Nakajima 1978). Despite the state's role in aestheticising military self-
sacrifice, the systematisation of tokkōtai methods was perceived, initially,
to be a bridge too far by the central authorities. In turning the aesthetic
resonance machine into a cultural processor of martial death the state-
apparatus had, however, by now set up a suicidal trajectory on its own
(molar and molecular) lines that resonated powerfully with the suicidal
tactics proposed by key elements of the military hierarchy. In turning the
aesthetic into a pillar of legitimation, the totalitarian state had already
synthesised the aesthetic with its military apparatus (with the cherry
blossom literally marking the uniforms of soldiers and sailors) and the very
concept of martial death. Meiji could no more refuse the logic of its actual
suicidal extension than completely jettison its aesthetic legitimation or
resonance machine. As such, the Meiji state's eventual acquiescence to the
tokkōtai strategy seemed almost inevitable. By this point the cherry
blossom aesthetic had more and more come to reflect the Deleuzoguattarian
account of a war-machine over-coded by its destructive supplement, to
which the state-apparatus itself had increasingly surrendered.
This process closely mapped with the dynamics outlined by Deleuze and
Guattari (2004b) in The Nomadology: a small group of military officers was
responsible for developing the strategy, and presented it to the state
bureaucracy, acting as representatives of a synthesised military-aesthetic
war-machine staging a take-over of the entire assemblage. This aesthetic
war-machine now set out on an unlimited line of flight into pure war
(victory or death). TheMeiji state apparatus became an appendage of its
war-machine on a flight towards abolition.
Deleuze and Guattari point out that the ‘reversion of the line of flight into
a line of destruction… already animated the molecular focuses of fascism’
in the German case (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 255). Similarly, the birth
of the tokkōtai cannot be understood without reference to the aesthetic war-
machine that the totalitarian state had set to resonate within society. A
Japanese line of abolition was built on the supple molecular character of the
cherry blossom aesthetic (and its abstract machine of mutation), being
turned to a line of destruction by the state-totalitarian apparatus, and therein
building a war-machine over-coded by a line of destruction aimed at both
the enemy and the self.
One certainly cannot overstate the psychological effect of the tokkōtai on
their American adversaries (Hoyt 1983).5 The practice seemed to spell out
unequivocally the radical otherness and incomprehensibility of the enemy
(Zeiler 2004: 109). Ivan Morris (1975: 168) argued that the special attack
strategy ‘produced indignation and rage out of all proportion to the tactical
importance’, and may well have contributed directly to the decision to drop
the atomic bombs, inasmuch as it seemed to prove the likelihood of
fanatical Japanese resistance to invasion. In this sense, the tokkōtai directly
drove the very real possibility of collective abolition that faced Japan at the
close of the Second World War (see also Rees 1997: 161; Zeiler 2004: 168).
By the end of the war, it certainly seemed, at least to its adversaries, that
Japan ‘no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather
annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004b: 255). Yet, unlike Nazi Germany, at the very brink of abolition,
following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the equally
if not greater devastation wrought by strategic bombing, Japan's fascist state
apparatus reasserted control over its war-machine and surrendered.
Virilio and Lotringer (1997: 212–13) argue that ‘were it not for Hirohito,
who was a fairly intelligent individual, the militarists would have carried
out a national suicide: an entire country committing mass suicide’.
Certainly, were it not for the emperor's decision to surrender, given the
unlimited aestheticised trajectory of its line of flight there seems little doubt
that much of the military establishment indeed would have fought to the last
man, and insisted that the Japanese people join that aestheticised collective
suicide. Some evidence of this possibility is to be found in the fact that
many of the officers involved in the tokkōtai operations would commit
suicide rather than surrender with their emperor. One officer central to its
design, upon hearing of the emperor's decision to surrender, flew his plane
into a mountain-side: surely the paradigmatic expression of a war-machine
pursuing its line to its logical limit (Inoguchi and Nakajima 1978).
A Japanese state suicide, Virilio and Lotringer argue, would have been
‘even more drastic’ than that of the Nazis because it would have formed ‘a
collective pact’ based on the cultural-aesthetic machine, rather than an
individual injunction by the despot (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 213).6 The
cherry blossom aesthetic certainly would have bound the population
directly to any potential plunge into state suicide. Yet, the dynamics of this
process are not as ‘alien to our culture’ as Virilio and Lotringer (1997: 213)
imply. Whilst undoubtedly the supple segmentations of the cherry blossom
aesthetic built on a uniquely Japanese cultural milieu, the construction of
the Japanese suicide-state took place via an assemblage of the three lines
which was clearly correspondent to Germany's. This suggests, from
Deleuze and Guattari's point of view, a broader category of (fascist)
assemblage.
Throughout the historiography of the Pacific War there has been a
tendency to view the tokkōtai as indicative of some form of Japanese
essence tied to Bushido Samurai traditions or a perverse cultural penchant
for death (O'Neill 1981; Lamont-Brown 1997; Benedict 1967).
Deleuzoguattarian cartography enjoins us to chart, in contrast to such a
culturally essentialist reading, the machinic dynamics that conjugated the
three lines to assemble its fascist politics of state suicide (when molar-
totalitarianisms enter into resonance with a socially dispersed molecular
segmentarity and pursue total war). The Japanese statemilitarised the cherry
blossom aesthetic to build a resonancemachine between the totalitarian state
apparatus and the cultural segmentations of Japanese society. In turning that
aesthetic to a purely military connotation, a line of abolition was
constructed on its line of flight, which resulted in the liberation of a war-
machine that dragged the entire state to the very brink of abolition.
There should be no doubt of the important differences that distinguish the
fascist suicide states of Germany and Japan. Inasmuch as the Nazi
totalitarian state was constructed by a war-machine (the National Socialist
movement), which was then set to violent resonance within the state, it
should be unsurprising that it was unable to pull back from the suicidal
trajectory already inherent to its palingenic project. Meiji, realising that it
must rein in its warmachine or follow its line of abolition, was able to return
to its originary paranoiac foundations in the molar line (in the form of the
emperor) to pull itself back from the brink of the abyss. Hitler, riding at the
head of the war-machine, thrust on into utter desolation. This confirms that
challenging paranoia with lines of flight is never sufficient. The suicidal
danger that is proper to lines of flight is even more terrifying than the
centralised power built on a conjugation of the molar and molecular, which
was paradoxically, in the end, to save Japan from self-abolition.

Conclusion
We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by nature and necessarily.
The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent
that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to draw maps, marking their
mixture as well as their distinctions.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 250)

It should be clear from this chapter that mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's
‘theory of fascism’ need not be reduced to searching out events that directly
repeat the Nazi rise to power. Rather, their cartographical schema enjoins us
to map fascisms in terms of their contingent assemblage of the danger of all
three lines of the political: molar, molecular and flight.
Holland argues that the rise of the Bush regime demonstrates that a late-
modern capitalist post-fascist regime can collapse or regress into fascism-
proper: ‘Postfascism can in certain circumstances give way to a resurgence
of something like old-fashioned fascism’ (Holland 2008: 94). This
argument is put to the service of a partisan politics, whereby Holland
contrasts the ‘old-fashioned fascism’ of the Bush Republicans with the
‘post-fascist’ biopolitics of the Clinton Democrats. Indeed, he argues that
the palingenic scapegoating of the Bush regime renders the subtler
disciplinarity of post-fascism relatively preferable.
To some extent Holland is surely right to direct our attention to the
paranoiac power of the religious-conservative resonance machine in the
United States. Such totalitarian-religious political assemblages may
conjugate their molar and molecular lines to build machines that seem to
approach the status of fascist phenomena (as in Iran, for example), but to
reduce, as Holland does, the third fascist line in Deleuze and Guattari's
schema to a contingency of Nazism is to miss a crucial dimension of their
political cartography of fascism as entailing both reterritorialisations and
deterritorialisations. This has determinant significance if we are to extend
their theory of fascism whilst remaining faithful to their brief comments in
A Thousand Plateaus about the ‘post-fascist’ assemblage of contemporary
politics.
Having disaggregated the suicidal line from the peculiarities of the Nazi
fascist event by outlining its corresponding function in the Meiji fascist
event, we must now set out to chart its evolutionary trajectory into the
present day. Deleuze and Guattari directly followed their analysis of
fascism with an account of the historical mutations which took place on its
third line (pure war) after the end of the Second World War. They are
explicit that fascist ‘suicidal states’ were ‘the child precursors’ of a global
politics of post-fascist suicide that renders such territorial formations
increasingly obsolete, initially, but not necessarily conclusively, through the
terrifying pure-peace of nuclear deterrence. For Deleuze and Guattari, state
fascism cannot simply be recapitulated because the suicidal line of flight
serves new functions within the global assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari
argued, following Virilio, that the bipolar war-machine of nuclear
deterrence set up a suicidal global regime of ‘pure-peace’ that categorically
displaces the suicidal national politics of fascistic ‘total-war’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 465, 516).
The terrifying cold peace of deterrence has now passed, but this certainly
does not mean that the third line has disappeared from contemporary
politics. It is rather conjugated anew. Deleuze and Guattari's statement that
latecapitalist global order is ‘post-fascist’ is explicitly not positing the rise
of a non-fascist order. Rather fascism continues directly into the post-fascist
assemblage by way of global innovations of the suicidal line of flight. The
fascist line of flight (as total war) mutates, via the Cold War, into what
suggestively they term a ‘new conception of security as materialised war, as
organised insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed
catastrophe’, under which ‘the enemy’ is now defined precisely by its lack
of specificity, as a register of disorder per se (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b:
516). Holland is ill-advised to search for the legacy of fascism only in its
national repetition. He may well find here the echoes of the first two lines
resonating, but they do so today within the framework of a global war-
machine that has transformed state apparatus into cogs of its global bio-
security mechanism (see Hardt and Negri 2000; Dillon and Reid 2009).
Any contemporary fascism must be mapped in its relationship to this
problematic.
This chapter has limited itself to elucidating and provisionally confirming
the utility of Deleuze and Guattari's cartography of three fascist lines. By
affirming the validity of the schema in its original format, against critiques
such as Holland's (2008), it has re-opened the space for us to chart
contemporary fascist re-assemblages of the three lines in Deleuze and
Guattari's cartographic schema. Under the contemporary global regime of
catastrophic bio-insecurity, territorial conjugations of the molar and
molecular (in America and elsewhere) must be reinterpreted as moving
parts in a global war-machine that overdetermines them. If we wish to think
about ‘fascism today’ with Deleuze and Guattari we cannot neglect its
fundamental relationship to the protean global politics of suicide at work in
this ‘Anthropocene era’ (Zizek 2010: 189).Without doubt, broader
questions concerning the relationship between politics and suicide in the
work of Deleuze and Guattari call for further critical elaboration, but if we
are to mobilise their cartography in search of fascisms today the third
suicidal line cannot be neglected.

Notes

1. Deleuze explicitly states, in his dialogue with Claire Parnet (2002),

that suicidal lines of flight are not limited to the molar/molecular short-
circuiting that assembles fascist suicide-states.
2. Though National Socialist state propaganda certainly deployed an
ideology of ‘glorious death for the fatherland’, as exemplified in
Munich's Tomb of the Martyrs.
3. On this note, Deleuze and Guattari argue that suicidal lines of flight
emerge in various, non-fascist, assemblages.
 4. What Deleuze would term a ‘virtual’ condition.
5. It is linked to a measurable rise in ‘psychoneurotic illness’ amongst the
US troops at the time: R. O'Neill, Suicide Squads: Axis and Allied
Special Attack Weapons of World War II: Their Development and Their
Missions (Slamander Books Ltd, 1981).
6. Indeed, Virilio's claim that the Nazi suicide state is derivable solely
from Hitler's telegram 71 suggests that Holland's charge of historical
reductionism may well be more valid as a critique of Virilio than of
Deleuze and Guattari.

References

Benedict, R. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York: New

American Library, 1967)
Deleuze, G. Many Politics. Dialogues II, ed. C.Parnet (Continuum,
2002)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum,
2004a)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004b)
Dillon, M. and Reid, J. The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life
Live (London and New York: Routledge, 2009)
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000)
Holland, E. ‘Schizoanalysis, Nomadology, Fascism. Deleuze and
Politics’, in I.Buchanan and N.Thoburn (eds) Deleuze & Politics
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
Hoyt, E.P. The Kamikazes (Robert Hale Ltd, 1983)
Inoguchi, R. and Nakajima, T., with Pineau, R. The Divine Wind:
Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II (Toronto and London:
Bantam, 1978)
Lamont-Brown, R. Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Samurai (London:
Arms and Armour Press, 1997)
Land, N. ‘Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-
production’ (Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology Vol.24,
No.1, 1993)
Morris, I. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of
Japan (Secker and Warburg, 1975)
Ohnuki-Tierney, E. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms:
The Militarisation of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
O'Neill, R. Suicide Squads: Axis and Allied Special Attack Weapons of
World War II: Their Development and Their Missions (Slamander
Books Ltd, 1981)
Protevi, J. ‘A Problem of Pure Matter: Fascist Nihilism in A Thousand
Plateaus’, in K.A.Pearson and D.Morgan (eds) Nihilism Now!
Monsters or Energy (London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000)
Protevi, J.‘A Problem of Pure Matter: Fascist Nihilism’, in
K.A.Pearson and D.Morgan (eds) A Thousand Plateaus. Nihilism!
Monsters or Energy (London and New York: Macmillan Press Ltd,
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Rees, D. The Defeat of Japan (Praeger, 1997)
Reid, J. The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal
Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006)
Theweleit, K. Male Fantasies (Cambridge: Polity, 1987)
Thoburn, N. ‘What is a Militant?’ in I.Buchanan and N.Thoburn (eds)
Deleuze and Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
Virilio, P. The Suicidal State. The Virilio Reader, ed. J.DerDerian
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)
Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997)
Zeiler, T.W. Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America and the End of
World War II (Scholarly Resources In, 2004)
Zizek, S. Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010)
9 Fascism, France and film
Ruth Kitchen
DOI: 10.4324/9780203374702-10

This chapter examines the questions of fascist violence and aesthetics in

French cultural memory through the lens of post-war French film. It
interrogates the problem of ‘agent-less’ violence and the lack of affect at
work in fascist discourses. In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze argues for the
potential of ‘free indirect vision’ in post-war cinema in which the
confrontation between the sound image and the visual image allows the
direct time-image to speak itself. This brings alongside the creation of an
event by the sound image through the act of myth making or storytelling
with the burial of that event in the ‘any-space whatever’ of the visual image
(Deleuze 1989: 153, 183, 279) and liberates an affirmatory politics of the
sound and the visual image which ‘connects them to each other in the
incommensurable relation of an irrational cut, the right side and its obverse,
the outside and inside’ (Deleuze 1989: 279). Although Deleuze's reading of
the time-image in post-war cinema offers resistance to fascist tendencies,
the cinematic image also has the potential for presenting, mediating and
enacting further fascist violence.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari identify four vectors or
‘dangers’ that give rise to and are identifiable in fascism: ‘Fear then Clarity,
then Power and finally the great Disgust, the longing to kill and die, the
Passion for abolition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 250). These vectors of
fascism will be examined through the analysis of two French films, Le
Corbeau (1943), in English The Raven, and Caché (2005), in English
Hidden.1
Although they issue from different times and political circumstances,
both films reveal the bleak trajectories of fascist violence. The fascist
violence operating in Occupied France is tacitly alluded to in Le Corbeau
and the memory of France's brutal oppression of those supporting and
fighting for Algerian liberation is implicitly referred to in Hidden. These
narratives and periods in French political and cultural history are connected
by a cinematic aesthetic that chimes with the four ‘dangers’ of fascism
described by Deleuze and Guattari. Although pertaining to different
historical moments and political struggles, the microfascisms that become
visible through the narrative and cinematic techniques employed by both
films, invoke the spirals of shame and entrapment that reveal resonances
between the vectors of current and future fascism and those of the past. The
chapter will explore how the concepts of being on the inside, an ‘insider’,
and being excluded, or an ‘outsider’ (étranger) are fusional components of
fascist discourses visible in contemporary constructions of political identity
and are also intimately connected with past cultural history and questions of
agency and complicity.
The propensity for fascism lies in us all. In The War: A Memoir, a
fictional journal documenting the real-life return of Duras's husband Robert
Antelme from Dachau concentration camp, French writer Marguerite Duras
writes that Europeans belong both to the race of Nazi perpetrators and to
their Jewish, political and ethnic victims. In response to Duras's statement,
French literary critic Martin Crowley observes: ‘One can hardly be
comfortable … with the notion that a torturer's denial of his victim's
humanity in fact affirms this humanity as shared’ (Crowley 2000: 169).
This implies that in the postwar world, any definition of human
responsibility must include the characteristic features of Nazism because
while fascist ideology sought to deny humanity, the acts of inhumanity it
carried out were inscribed within the sphere of humanity. Duras's narrator is
therefore proposing a shared responsibility for the crimes of National
Socialism that forecloses the question of agency.2 The issue of agency is
central to the legacy and aesthetics of fascist violence. Questions of agency
and responsibility for such acts can therefore only be addressed when the
tendency to deny a common bond of humanity is considered part of the
human condition. In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that in the post-war period,
cinema changes from being a cohesive representation of the world, ‘the
whole was the open’, to a fragmented presentation of unconnected images
the mediation of which the filmmaker no longer controls: ‘the whole is the
outside’ (Deleuze 1989: 179).
The author expresses himself through the intercession of an autonomous, independent character
other than the author or any role fixed by the author, or the character acts and speaks himself as if
his own gestures and words were already reported by a third party.
(Deleuze 1989: 183)

For Deleuze, this shift has the effect of liberating cinematic aesthetics.
However, this change in post-war aesthetics also mirrors a post-Fascist
problem of ‘agent-less’ violence and lack of affect. In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that the potential towards fascism in
the form of microfascisms can spring up indiscriminately regardless of
religion, cultural background or nationality.3 for France, the fascist violence
experienced as a result of the German Occupation during the Second World
War had a lasting cultural effect leaving traces in both thought and
aesthetics. These memories returned powerfully during France's war in
Algeria, when France, a nation formerly subjugated to German fascism,
became the brutal suppressor of Algerian liberty. In April 1961 De Gaulle
invoked Article 16 to declare a state of emergency in response to the
increasingly aggravated outbreaks of violence caused by opposition to the
war (Agamben 2005: 14). In his theory of multidirectional cultural
discourses of aesthetics, Michael Rothberg writes that the use of torture in
Algeria re-awoke memories and echoes of the acts of inhumanity
committed by the Germans during the Occupation among former members
of the Resistance and, perhaps more surprisingly, state officials:
in submitting his resignation in 1957, the secretary general of the police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, a
former deportee, wrote that he recognized in Algeria ‘profound traces … of the torture that
fourteen years ago I personally suffered in the basements of the Gestapo in Nancy’.
(Rothberg 2009: 193)

There is a cultural resonance between the scars of witness, exposure to or

involvement in acts of fascist violence during the German Occupation and
those of colonial torture and oppression during the Algerian War, as French
cultural critic Max Silverman points out:
the interconnections between fascism and colonialism and between anti-semitism and colonial
racism perceived by post-war theorists of racialized violence have for long fascinated a number of
writers, filmmakers and other creative artists in post-war France, yet their works are not often
received from this point of view, Alain Resnais' classic early film on the camps, Nuit et brouillard
(1955), is both an evocation of the radical nature of horror and a parable for the war in Algeria. In
the same year, Driss Charibi's novel Les Boucs, one of the first post-war novels treating anti-Arab
racism alongside the horrors of the war (in the figure of Isabelle).
(Silverman 2008: 418–19)

More recently, in 2002, the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front

(FN) party in the first round of the French elections revealed the weighty
support behind the far right in France. On the subject of fascism in France,
Robert Paxton, the American historian known for his influential work on
Vichy France, contrasts French support for the FN with the British National
Party (BNP) (Paxton 2004).4 Paxton observes that the aggressive and
transparent model of fascism presented by the BNP has hindered the party's
success, whereas in France, as in the Netherlands, far-right parties have
sought to become palatable to the public and have consequently won
popularity. Further debate about the undercurrent of fascism and implicit
political injustice inherent in the French state was raised by the 2005 riots,
when youths in the suburbs rioted, clashing with police and setting cars on
fire, following the death of three youths of French-Algerian descent who
died from electrocution on an electric fence as the result of a police chase
(Emery 2010; Murphy 2011). In his exploration of different manifestations
of French fascism throughout the twentieth century, Brian Jenkins observes
that fascism is amorphous and multifaceted:
Fascism comes in different national guises, changes shape and it moves through the phases of
ideology-movement-regime, interacts with other movements, adapts to shifting conjuncture.
(Jenkins 2005: 209)

Discourses of present-day fascist violence and its resonances with past

fascism are a recurring theme in French cultural production to the present
day (Sansal 2008; Littell 2006; Miller 2007; Paquet-Brenner 2010).

Fear
Deleuze and Guattari write that the first danger of fascism is fear: fear of
the loss of security or stability (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 250). Fear
becomes visible in both films through the existence of a perceived threat to
security and the culture of suspicion and surveillance that sparks further
fear in turn. The corrosive cycle of fear and surveillance is endemic to and a
product of fascist ideology. It feeds the steadily growing sense of strained
anxiety that personal, social and state security is somehow being eroded.
Deleuze and Guattari cite Daniel Guérin who claims that Hitler was able to
seize power because the micro-organizations created by his followers
presented him with ‘an unequalled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every
cell of society’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 236). This claim conversely
brings alongside the notion of the ever-watchful eye of the authoritarian
state, famously theorized by Foucault in the Panopticon, with the idea that
somebody may be watching not to enforce the law but to infringe it. In
Cinema 2, Deleuze observes that the difference between pre- and post-war
cinema is the ‘rise of situations to which one can no longer react’. This
leads to the seer, voyant, replacing the agent, actant (Deleuze 1989: 272). In
The Raven, the scene in which Dr Germain, the town newcomer and main
protagonist, receives his first letter is shot through the keyhole from the
perspective of Rolande, a snooping teenage girl. Effectively, the spying
camera eye captures and enables a sliding axis of active and passive witness
that creates the atmosphere of secrecy and surveillance, which permeates
the action. The letters of denunciation issue from a mysterious figure, The
Raven, who is at once considered an outsider to the community and yet
holds detailed insider knowledge of seemingly everyone's affairs. It
transpires that all of the letters contain at least a grain of truth. The fear
created by this unnameable insider ‘other’ creates guilt and secrecy and
closes down communication, generating further suspicion. Vorzet, the
flamboyant psychiatrist and husband of Laura, the woman with whom the
letters accuse the protagonist, town newcomer Doctor Germain, of having
an affair, advises Germain not to trust anyone. Not only does the oppressive
silence of the population communicate suspicion, but it also suggests there
are unspoken secrets to hide. In the letters, The Raven claims that he is
purging society of its moral debauchery. However, the effect of the poison-
pen revelations is progressively to unravel the social fabric of rural St
Robin by revealing that a vast swath of its inhabitants from the highest to
the lowest echelons of society are involved in socially, ethically, politically
and legally compromising activities. Although The Raven is a self-
appointed champion of moral virtue, he is acting outside the jurisdiction of
the law. He is perceived therefore as an insider-other, a rogue element,
which has penetrated the town's defences and must be flushed out.
Hidden opens with a static shot of the rue d'Iris looking towards a classic
Parisian apartment building in the tranquil and affluent thirteenth district of
the city. The rumble of distant traffic and early morning birdsong are
broken only by the occasional cyclist, pedestrian, or passing car. However,
as the minutes pass the stasis and banality of this scene becomes
increasingly unsettling. French cultural critic Libby Saxton observes: ‘we
wonder who else, besides us, might be looking, and why’ (Saxton 2007: 7).
Our belief that we are watching the opening scene of the film is shattered
by the discovery that we, like Georges and Anne, the film's protagonists, are
watching a filmed recording of the outside of their apartment. The blurring
of film and reality is achieved by Haneke's election to shoot the film on
high-definition video making the tapes indistinct from real cinematic time.
This ‘framing’ technique continues throughout the film. The seamless
splicing of surveillance video footage into the film causes the viewer to
begin to mistrust and interrogate the image. As in The Raven, there is a
disturbing instability and lack of security conveyed by the uncertain
temporal and spatial positioning of both protagonists and viewers. In
Hidden this feeds a sense of growing paranoia about who is watching and
who is being watched. The viewer is placed on the inside, and becomes
conscious that he or she is not only subject but also an object of the gaze.
The camera eye rigidly limits the field of vision, forbidding off-screen sight
and increasing the sense of impossibility of escape from the controlling eye
and delimiting the possibility of accessing the ‘bigger picture’ to
contextualize the meaning of minutiae. The camera's oppressive gaze
composes an incomplete picture that is both suspicious and disconcerting.
In agreement with Saxton's reference to the ‘out-of-field’ vision in Caché,5
French cultural critic Max Silverman adds that the image is only readable
through a reconnection with the ‘hors-champ’:
Those who have acquired a way of reading the image will realise that far from the ending
withholding its hidden secret, it actually makes it readable, not in the sense of solving the
whodunit (that is neither here nor there), but in terms of the transformation of the image from a
screen to a Benjaminian constellation composed of complex interconnections between the visible
and the ‘hors champ’ and between present and past.
(Silverman 2010: 63)

Although both Saxton and Silverman refer to the ‘hors-champ’ as a

stabilizing resource that has the potential to ‘re’-frame the present in light
of the past, Deleuze asserts that in post-war cinema, ‘there is no out-of-field
to inhabit’ (Deleuze 1989: 278). Contextualization or mediation in this
sense is therefore prohibited. The cinematic trick of the camera eye that
delimits space and, by implication, time (that is, the connection between
past and present), causes the audience to reassess their position in relation
to the image. No longer an agent, ‘actant’ in control of the image but
instead a seer, ‘voyant’, a simultaneously active and passive witness of the
film, the viewer becomes increasingly aware of his or her complicity in the
action being played out on the screen.

Clarity
The movement of clarity is the second vector of fascism. Deleuze and
Guattari observe that through vision and sounds we begin to perceive
spaces or holes permeating structures that previously appeared solid:
That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that appear in what used to seem full, the holes in
what used to be compact; and conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut
segments, now there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts of
segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Everything now appears supple,
 with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms and flutter in lines. Everything has the clarity of a
microscope. We think we have understood everything, and draw conclusions.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 251)

With clarity comes the realization that there are breaches in personal and
societal structures results in the deterioration of shared common values and
sense of community. The loss of belief in the transparency and integrity of
the law translates into the breakdown of law and objective morality. We are
both agents and objects enmeshed in and directed by quantum flows. In his
theory of the effects and management of violence in ancient societies, the
French cultural anthropologist, René Girard, uses the term ‘sacrificial crisis’
to signal a period of chaos, violence and revenge brought about by a lack of
difference between the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’, or ‘good’ and ‘evil’. As
these spaces or holes erase the distinctions between individuals, mediation
fails. There is no one to act as mediator. This heralds the onset of
Agamben's ‘state of exception’. Agamben asserts that the situation of
‘iustitium’ in Roman law is aligned with the ‘state of exception’ or
emergency.
a citizen who acts during iustitium neither executes nor transgresses a law but inexecutes
[insegue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of which, once the iustitium is
expired, will depend on the circumstances. But as long as the iustitium lasts, they will be
absolutely undecidable, and the definition of their nature — whether executive or transgressive,
and, in the extreme case, whether human or bestial, or divine — will lie beyond the sphere of the
law.
(Agamben 2005: 50)

By exploring the shift in the etymology of ‘iustitium’, which changes from

designating a ‘state of exception’ to the public mourning over the death of
the sovereign, Agamben locates the state of exception, lawlessness or
‘anomie’, in the sovereign or legal body, ‘nomos’.
 If the sovereign is a living nomos, and if, for this reason anomie and nomos perfectly coincide in
his person, then anarchy (which threatens to loose itself in the city upon the sovereign's death,
which is to say, when the nexus that joins it to the law is severed) must be ritualized and
controlled, transforming the state of exception into public mourning and mourning into iustitium.
(Agamben 2005: 70)

The result of the loss of the sovereign results in ‘charivari’, the suspension
of normal legal and social structures and hierarchies that accompanies
upheavals in political or social order. This is sometimes celebrated by
publicly performed parodies of law and justice. This moment brings about
the blurring of all differences already observed by Deleuze and Guattari and
Girard. In The Raven, law and order is effectively erased by the growing
frenzy for denunciation as no one is shown to be above suspicion. The
town's authority figures and care givers are slandered. The mayor is accused
of corruption and the chief doctor of the hospital and the hospital nurse are
accused of malpractice. The post office is inundated with letters addressed
in Raven-style handwriting, leading a post room worker to comment that
‘everyone is at it’. In Hidden, although initially portrayed as victimized
subject of surveillance, Georges, quickly becomes a suspect. His dismissal
of the first tape as a teenage prank, his refusal of Anne's suggestion that
they call the police, and later, the muted intimation that he may know the
provenance of the tapes and the violent child-like pictures that accompany
them suggest that he is hiding something. Similarly, other characters, Anne,
Pierrot, Majid and Majid's son, flatly deny accusations made against them
but also refuse to answer probing questions or to provide evidence to the
contrary. In The Raven and Hidden cracks appear in familial and social
units. Isolation reigns. The ‘clarity’ created by the blurring of differences is
a challenge to the established ethical order. The characters' motivations and
integrity come under scrutiny, intensifying the discourse surrounding
belonging and ‘otherness’ as it becomes increasingly unclear who is on the
inside ‘in the know’, and who remains outside ‘in the dark’. The permeation
and fluidity of these boundaries unleashes a sense of unbounded threat and
terror and engenders violence. In Deleuze and Guattari's depiction of
‘clarity’ chaos reigns and anyone can be a policeman or an SS.
Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident
truth and clarities that gush from very black hole and no longer form a system but are only rumble
and buzz, blinding light giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser
of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have sailed from the
shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less concentricized, no less organized: the
system of petty insecurities that leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn
dangerous, possessing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more disturbing than the
certitudes of the first line.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 251)

Clarity, as a fascist line of flight, can therefore be seen to permeate the fixed
social boundaries of home, work and the ‘outside’. The eradication of
difference uproots former solidarities and undermines social and legal
infrastructures challenging their ethical precepts and asserting the need for
radical action through the personal dispensation of justice. Paxton observes
that fascism seeks to eradicate all borders between the public and the
private (Paxton 2004). In Hidden, the borders between personal and private
spaces are persistently transgressed. After Georges tracks down and
threatens Majid and his unnamed son in their home, Majid's son intercepts
Georges at his workplace and confronts him about his harassment of their
family. Later, when Pierrot, Georges's son disappears, Georges leads the
police to Majid's flat in Romainville, where the police roughly apprehend
Majid and his son. French cultural critic, Jefferson Kline observes:
Haneke seems to bring the film's fictional events into interpretative arrangement not only with the
long tradition of the Franco-Arab conflict, but also with the current dynamics of the ‘war on
terror’.
(Kline 2010: 588)
The analogy of contagion used in both films is suggestive of the germinant
potential of microfascisms to permeate all strata and perceived ‘boundaries’
of society. Contagion appears in the form of information. In The Raven, the
‘information’ contained in the letters literally ‘informs on’ other members
of the community and instigates further acts of community-orchestrated
‘agent-less’ violence. Vorzet plots the town's frenzy for denunciation on a
chart likening the spikes and falls in letter sending to the temperature of a
feverish patient. In Hidden, ‘information’ takes the form of visual media —
the videotapes, cinema and television — during Georges and Anne's
anxious discussion about their son Pierrot's failure to return home, the
television news, in the background, flashes images into the family home of
the war in Iraq, torture in Abu Ghraib and the Asian bird flu epidemic. The
television screen is framed by the ceiling-to-floor bookshelves that decorate
the dining room, mirroring the set of the literary TV show that Georges
presents. It is in the report on the threat of a global bird flu pandemic that
the word caché (hidden), the film's title, is blurted into the couple's dining
room. Here fascist lines of flight permeate the ‘inside-outside’ boundaries
of the family's social, cultural and personal space spreading contagion or
virus. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘What makes fascism dangerous
is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a
cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 236). This plague-like power of fascism is vividly evoked by the last
lines of Albert Camus's The Plague, where Dr Rieux observes the town's
people's jubilation that the plague, widely considered to stand as an allegory
for Nazi oppression, has ended. Rieux observes that the plague can never be
truly expelled but instead lies dormant within the fabric of society.6 The
cultural implications of Western microfascist complicity in the occupation
of Iraq, acts of torture carried out by American soldiers and the endemic
nature of a potential global pandemic resonate powerfully with Georges and
Anne's feeling of fearful impotence at their son's potential abduction by
their stalker. However, in both films the superfluity of information in text
and image suggests not only the impossibility of holing up the spaces and
fluidity of the structures underpinning individual and societal relations by
revealing that the perceived dividing lines between the inner worlds and the
world outside are organic and permeable, but also reveals the emptiness of
the information that informs us of this. In Cinema 2, Deleuze observes that
the ‘nullity of information must be overturned in order to defeat Hitler’
(Deleuze 1989: 269). ‘Information’ in neither film is in fact the creator of
chaos but rather a conduit that reveals the porous and open boundaries
within individual, social and cultural identities and societal structures.
However, the becoming viral of information releases its potential as object
and vehicle of fascist violence.

Power
‘Power’, the third danger identified by Deleuze and Guattari, relates to the
questions of agency, complicity and impotence. Deleuze and Guattari
observe that power and impotence are alternating currents that run between
and connect the poles of power.
Every man of power jumps from one line to the other alternating between a petty and
grandiloquent style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking government
man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes
them. It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 252)

In the films, the notion of power is related to both personal and cultural
history. Past power dynamics determine present behaviours and choices.
This bears loaded implications for the future. In The Raven, rather than
revealing the secret ‘true morality’ of the heavily stereotyped characters,
Clouzot fills in the caricatures bringing them to life. It transpires that
Germain, the morally conservative scientist, is concealing his former
identity as a famous brain surgeon, following the tragic and traumatic death
of both his wife and first child in childbirth. As a result, he demonstrates
immense difficulty in forming emotional attachments, declaring at one point
that he has ‘neither friends nor enemies’. It turns out that Denise, the
vampish femme fatale, has conducted numerous love affairs in an attempt to
allay feelings of ugliness and bitterness about her ugly, deformed clubfoot,
which is the result of a childhood accident. Marie Corbin, the spinster
nurse, who is initially suspicious of Germain's intentions towards her sister
Laura and of Laura's responsiveness to his advances, is revealed to harbour
real feelings of jealousy towards her sister, who has married Vorzet, Marie's
former fiancé. The characters' present actions are therefore determined by
their pasts. These histories are concealed, however, because their revelation
could potentially sow seeds of suspicion about whether the motivating force
behind the malicious letter writing may be the settling of old scores. The
characters are rendered impotent and mute by past events over which they
have no power. It is notable that the film's frame of reference extends
beyond the screen to Occupied France, where the political choices of the
film's audience were also being stifled and suppressed by Raven-like Nazi
control. The film is further steeped in questions about complicity and power
as Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director, was working for Continental Films,
an allegedly French company, which employed French actors and directors
and produced French-language films, but was in fact financially supported
by Goebbels's propaganda ministry.7 At the time of the film's release,
despite being a huge success with audiences, The Raven was criticized by
Vichy, the Resistance and the Germans.
 This was not a picture of healthy provincial life as Vichy conceived it, and it is not surprising that
the film was criticized by the Vichy press for traducing all the icons of the National Revolution.
Nor was the film ever released in Germany: it was judged to be morbid, and the authorities could
not approve a film that implicitly criticized delation. But criticisms in the Resistance press were
no less strident: it vilified the film for portraying such a debased image of France.
(Jackson 2001: 325)8

The film, then, as a cultural object presents us with a complex web of

power as it tells of the ethical uncertainty and feelings of impotence and
complicity provoked by the presence of fascism.
In Hidden, Georges links the surveillance tapes and the disturbing child-
like drawings of a child vomiting blood and a decapitated cockerel to his
childhood. Georges's family took in a young Algerian boy called Majid
after his parents, workers on the family estate, disappeared in the FLN pro-
Algerian independence protest in Paris on 17 October 1961. It is inferred
that Georges, then a jealous six-year-old unwilling to share his home,
contrived to and succeeded in getting rid of Majid by telling his parents that
Majid was vomiting blood and that he had threatened Georges with an axe.
The suspected return of this past locks Georges into a disturbed but
determined silence about this memory, which is indeed also silenced in the
film, where it is only alluded to through flashbacks and in Georges's
nightmares. The bigger ‘story’, relating to the historical and cultural
backdrop of France's war against Algeria, the torture of insurgents by the
French military and the bloody suppression of the 17 October pro-FLN
demonstration by the Paris police is also left unspoken.9 It is these events
that are alluded to and concealed by the film's title, Hidden, Caché. Thus
while they are implicitly gestured to through the unfolding of the narrative,
they are left unexplored. However, the splicing of dissonant and unrelated
images of the past into the contemporary present of the film establishes
connections between them. In Cinema 2, Deleuze observes, ‘cuts or breaks
in cinema have always formed the power of the continuous’ (Deleuze 1989:
181). The film in fact mirrors how this event was suppressed in French
cultural memory by the government, media and historians until the 1980s.10
Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘it's too easy to be anti-fascist on the
molarlevel and not even see the fascist inside you’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 237). The eye of the film camera and the unseen observer or
surveillance camera places the viewer under scrutiny as it also catches us in
the act of looking. Saxton observes that the viewer's previously
unquestioned sense of justice and moral authority is compromised by
becoming aware of being seen watching. This predicament ‘confronts us
with uncomfortable questions about spectatorial complicity and agency’
(Saxton 2007: 13). This makes the viewer not only ashamed and paranoid in
the way described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his theory of the gaze, but also
complicit in and impotent witness to acts of fascist violence and power
(Sartre 1943: 275). Social theorist Martin Alonso cites humiliation as a
social differentiator in movements of mass destruction, such as
totalitarianism, colonialism and ethno-nationalism describing it as ‘an
emblem of asymmetry inherent to any form of domination for it entails the
deepest treatment of dispossession and plundering, the one entailing dignity
and honour’ (Alonso 2011: 11). However, I would argue that it is in fact
shame that provides this function by placing the witness in a position of
active disempowerment. This aporia evokes the way in which the witness is
simultaneously caught, compromised by and made complicit with the
narrative structures and/or the acts of perpetrators. In his thesis on witness
and the archive, Agamben notes that shame involves the subject being
forced to bear witness to his or her own desubjectification:
To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be
assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates in our own intimacy; it is what is most
intimate in us (for example our own psychological life). Here the ‘I’ is thus overcome by its own
 passivity, its ownmost sensibility; yet this expropriation and desubjectification is also an extreme
and irreducible presence of the ‘I’ to itself. It is as if our consciousness collapsed and seeking to
flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its
own defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own. In shame, the subject thus has no
other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own
oblivion as a subject. This double movement, which is both subjectification and
desubjectification, is shame.
(Agamben 1999: 106)

It is this deep complicity forcing the witnessing of inhumanity in humanity

that resonates with the idea of responsibility divorced from agency raised at
the beginning of the chapter in relation to the writing of Marguerite Duras.
Both films demonstrate the disturbing effects of fascist power on the
characters in The Raven and Hidden, who are rendered impotent by the
pervasive presence of the insider-outsider who enmeshes them in a network
connecting an over-determined present with an inescapable past. Viewers
are similarly compromised by and complicit in the fascist power dynamic of
the camera and cinematography which renders them insider-outsiders in the
filmic power discourse. Deleuze and Guattari write:
Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own
repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to
power; nor do they ‘want’ to be repressed, in a kind of melancholic hysteria; nor are they pricked
by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie
into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions,
expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but
itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple
segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives a fascist determination.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 236–37)

In both films, the desire for totalitarian-type oppression is borne out of the
inextricable complicity of discovering oneself as an historical cog in the
machine. Thus the dream of absolute disempowerment, which desires the
negation of responsibility, emerges with the awareness of the potential
revolutionary power of one's acts. The characters experience feelings of
impotence and victimization as they become further enmeshed in the
politics of power through acts of fascist violence. Here, we see the organic
evolution of the fascist power dialectic. The suppression of the past and the
violent mobilization of powerlessness as justification for current actions is
evidence of this tendency. This vector makes victims into perpetrators and
vice versa. Alonso illustrates the way in which the claim to collective
victimhood promotes and excuses acts of violence in programs like
Lebensraum, the manifest destiny, la mission civilisatrice, the Full
Spectrum Dominance of the American neoconservative PNAC (Plan for a
New American Century), Greater Serbia, Eretz Israel, to cite a few
examples, ‘sufferings real or perceived, have more power than joy to
compact individuals into social blocks, on the one side, and to the
comparative advantage of negative emotions on the other’, thus ‘the group
provides a context that renders aggressive behaviour socially acceptable and
normatively appropriate’ (Alonso 2011: 15). In both films, characters
attempt to renegotiate and seize power by reterritorializing fascist lines of
flight through the persecution of scapegoats. In The Raven, realizing that
they are failing in flushing out the letter writer, the town's people begin to
pursue instead the main targets of The Raven's allegations. Thus nurse
Marie Corbin is sacked and pursued from the hospital to her ransacked
house by a jeering, violent mob, at which point she is apprehended and
imprisoned. Similarly, the town council try to oust Dr Germain by
attempting to trick him into performing an illegal abortion, a crime of which
the letters accuse him. Finally, in an act of vengeance, the mother of a
cancer patient who committed suicide after receiving a letter confirming his
condition was terminal, murders Vorzet believing him to be The Raven. In
Hidden, Georges determines that Majid is the source of the videotapes and
pictures and embarks on a campaign of terror by tracking down and
threatening both him and his son. Saxton observes:
Ironically it is in the course of attempting to establish his innocence that Georges inadvertently
reveals his guilt, and begins to merit punishment. The videotapes start to catch him out, capturing
his contemptuous treatment of Majid and exposing his denials and protestations of ignorance as
half-truths or, on occasion, barefaced lies. At stake here are not the falsehoods of a selfish six-
year-old but an adult's refusal to confront and acknowledge responsibility for the consequences of
his past actions.
(Saxton 2007: 10)

These reterritorializing acts chime with René Girard's concept of the

‘surrogate victim’. The ‘surrogate victim’ is an outsider already shunned,
excluded, or in some way condemned by the community. The expulsion of
the ‘surrogate victim’ offers a potential solution to the fear about the
‘breach’ of security by microfascist ‘elements’ and the porous boundaries
and holes that have appeared in societal structures as a result. Individuals
previously scattered by isolation, paranoia, aggressive protectionism and
violence are united by the shared assault on a named individual who then
assumes the status of a common enemy. In her work on genocide and
collectively approved violence, Helen Fein coins the term ‘universe of
obligation’ to designate those to whom we have commitments and for
whom we feel responsible (Fein 1979). In this case, the ‘surrogate victim’
would not be included ‘in’ this universe. For Agamben, the state of
exception ‘iustitium’, which suspends the law, creates a vacuum of power.
It is in the struggle and search for the ‘auctoritas’11 that the persecution of
the ‘surrogate victim’ occurs.
It is as if the suspension of the law freed a force or a mystical element, a sort of legal mana (this
expression is used by Wagenvoort to describe the Roman auctoritas) that both the ruling power
and its adversaries, the constituted power as well as the constituent power, seek to appropriate.
Force of law that is separate from the law, floating imperium being-in-force [vigenza] without
application, and more generally, the idea of a sort of ‘degree zero’ of the law — all these are
 fictions through which law attempts to encompass it own absence and appropriate the state of
exception, or at least to assure itself a relation with it.
(Agamben 2005: 50)

In the state of lawlessness, ‘inexecution’ of the law against the ‘surrogate

victim’ takes place (Agamben 2005: 50). The void that opens up within the
law and political power also opens up the space of powerlessness to think
that Deleuze, in Cinema 2, recognizes in Artaud (Deleuze 1989: 166). At
this moment of ‘inexecution’ and ‘powerlessness’, we find the agent-less
violence of victimization of the surrogate. In The Raven, the individuals
selected are social outsider Marie Corbin, the stranger to the town Dr
Germain, and finally Vorzet, the flamboyant and eccentric psychiatrist
whose extreme relativism makes him an ethical outsider to the town's
conservative way of life. In Hidden, Georges selects Majid, a cultural
outsider, a first-generation, low-waged Arab-Algerian immigrant. The
‘surrogate victim’ becomes both the damned and the saviour of the
persecutor(s). The punishment and expulsion of the surrogate unites and
empowers the persecutor's enabling ‘re’-securitization through
establishment of division and boundaries. The ejection of the allegedly
pernicious but ultimately redemptive influence of the surrogate victim
restores peace by (re)asserting societal and legal order. In other words, the
selection and punishment of the surrogate victim enacts the unthought of
thought, articulated by Deleuze in Artaud's reading of the ‘powerless’
subject of cinema.
Artaud never understood powerlessness to think as a simple inferiority which would strike us in
relation to thought. It is part of thought, so that we should make our way of thinking from it,
without claiming to be restoring an all-powerful thought. We should rather make use of this
powerlessness to believe in life, and to discover the identity of thought and life.
(Deleuze 1989: 170)
However, in the case of these films, this does not reconnect us to thought
but instead bears witness to and is complicit in ‘agent-less’ violence, to the
very thing which Deleuze identifies in Artaud's celebration of cinema's
rendering of the powerlessness to think: ‘this central inhibition, of this
internal collapse and formalization, of this “theft of thoughts” of which
thought is a constant agent and victim’ (Deleuze 1989: 166). Thus the
community offsets the problem of real thought, which would force
questions of agency and collective responsibility by designating and
expelling or ‘outing’ the ‘surrogate victim’. This collective externalization
of the problem as a ‘necessary evil’ removes agency and the process of self-
reflection and critical inquiry that would lead to the discovery that we are
all located on the sliding axis that runs between surrogate victimhood and
the perpetration of violent persecution.12

Lines of flight/lines of destruction

For Deleuze and Guattari the difference between totalitarianism and fascism
lies on the line between orthodoxy and radicalism. ‘Totalitarianism is
quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war
machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 254). In other words, totalitarianism
seeks to establish and preserve boundaries whereas fascism is dynamic and
revolutionary, a plague-like power that can potentially infect anyone.
Agamben cites Carl Schmitt, who claims that Hitler and Mussolini were
‘quasi-dictators’ as they allowed the legal framework of former governance
to subsist alongside a constitution that was not legally formalized
(Agamben 2005: 48). In other words, they were not dictators of the
totalitarian model but rather fascist ‘auctoritas’ figures who brought
stability to the ‘iustitium’ state of exception by re-appropriating the systems
in place for their purposes. Although totalitarianism is perhaps desirable
because it distances the question of personal responsibility, as we have
already seen in the section on ‘Power’ and in the metaphor of contagion,
fascism is instead pervasive. It creatively exploits the desire for
reterritorialization by redrawing boundaries and difference for new political
purpose. Paxton observes that ‘Fascism in action looks much more like a
network of relationships than a fixed essence’ (Paxton 2004: 207). This
active selection and practice of a code of extreme ethics plots leads us to
Deleuze and Guattari's final danger: the line of flight that plots a trajectory
of pure destruction. The fascist line of flight ends in annihilation of both the
self and of others. Deleuze and Guattari write:
The line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with
other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and
simple, the passion of abolition.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 253)

They recall the Nazi announcement that the Socialist movement would
bring wedding bells and death to Germany. The lines of flight that mobilize
microfascisms are simultaneously the stirrers of mass movements and
revolution. Elsewhere Deleuze and Guattari describe the transformational
movement of a line of flight as a war machine. Only when the line turns to
war as end does it take on a fascist nihilism thus losing all creative power
and becoming bent purely on destruction.
war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost
its power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine,
either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even worse, has
constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war
machine no longer draws mutant line of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 253)

A permanent state of war is therefore both the end and necessary condition
of fascism. Deleuze and Guattari observe the desolation and desperation
generated by fascist movements: ‘They themselves emanate a strange
despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a state of war from which
one returns broken’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 252).
This theme of destructive violence is borne out in The Raven by the
earlier-mentioned suicide of one of the hospital patients after a letter from
The Raven informs him that he has terminal cancer. This act bears the
hallmark of despair and impotent resignation and submission to a greater
force. In Hidden, Georges reacts to the horror of witnessing Majid slit his
own throat by seeking out the dark, escapist sanctuary of the cinema. The
security of filmic fiction literally screens Georges from reality. It satisfies a
conservative orthodoxy providing a distance from the question of Georges's
agency and complicity in Majid's death. However, Hidden does not provide
such a distance. Cinema and digital culture are shown here to act against
Deleuze's reading of Artaud. The unthinkingness of the characters'
engagements with these media breeds affect-less microfascist tendencies.
Once at home, Georges takes sleeping tablets, cachets, a further homonym
of the film's title, in an attempt to distance consciousness of reality and
conscience. Majid's suicide is shocking not only because the graphic throat-
slitting scene is totally unanticipated but also because of the violence that
emanates from this act. Previously we described Majid as a scapegoat, a
victim of an iustitium, a state of exception that has wreaked chaos in
Georges's world or a surrogate victim, to use Giraud's phrase, of Georges's
microfascist tendencies. Yet, there is a further level to this act. Majid's
suicide is borne out of desperation at the violent persecution to which
Georges has subjected him as a cultural outsider both during their childhood
and now again in their adult lives. In this sense, the nihilism that emanates
from Majid's act aims at forcing Georges to face the consequences of his
own campaign of terror through further horror. Majid's suicide plots a
microfascist trajectory as it allows him to seize agency reterritorializing the
microfascism demonstrated by Georges's acts by transforming it into his
own deterritorializing fascist line. This movement coincides with Deleuze
and Guattari's observation that, ‘Suicide is presented not as a punishment
but as the crowning glory of the death of others’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 254). It is pertinent to this argument that the viewer is also forced to
witness the act of suicide as Majid gives no intimation of his intentions,
thus there is no ‘look away now’ prelude to the act. As a consequence, like
Georges, the audience is also forced into a shocked complicit collusion in
Majid's suffering and death. In The Raven, the slitting of Vorzet's throat by
the mother of the suicide victim in vengeance for her son's suicide must also
be considered a fascist line of flight. While this act ends the film and Dr
Germain declares that it solves the mystery, in fact it leaves a number of
questions unanswered. Earlier in the film, Vorzet points out that it is highly
unlikely that the 850 letters received during the two-month spate of
denunciation were the work of just one person. Both Denise and Laura
separately admit to writing letters and, at the height of the letter-writing
frenzy, a post office worker observes that ‘everyone is at it’. Although
Vorzet dies at his desk writing a Raven-style letter declaring that the town's
curse has been lifted, rather than an end to violence, I would suggest that
this act symbolizes a mutation of the vector of microfascist violence. It
perpetuates the cycle of violence by jumping the strain spiralling and
transforming victim into perpetrator. It thus bears a latent, threatening
legacy for the future. The Raven concludes with an over-the-shoulder shot
of Dr Germain looking out from the window over Vorzet's desk, where the
psychiatrist lies in a pool of blood, watching the suspected killer, the mother
of the cancer patient, make her way down the sunny street. This open
ending suggests a kind of ‘going underground’, which is, as we have
observed, a germinant trait of microfascisms.
 Fascist lines foster new violence and seed new microfascisms. Slavoj
Zizek postures that the war on terror is not perhaps after all targeted at
terrorists but at tacitly reterritorializing and consolidating the precepts of
Western democracy and identity among Westerners by inflecting the rise of
the anti-globalist movement with fears over security and power (Zizek
2004). Perhaps this is not even a distraction. By indulging in the bloody
horror and the full and raw exposure of the Western masses to the
‘deterritorializing’ dissension and instability of the Middle East, the war on
terror and now the Arab Spring make us treasure our own increasingly
restricted freedoms and accept as a necessity the tightening control of their
borders. In this vein, it is interesting to reflect on how the subversive and
persistent deterritorializations and microfascisms of Occupied France
implicitly illustrated in The Raven return in a different guise relating to the
colonial and post-colonial debates of the 1960s and as part of a twenty-first-
century discourse on cultural integration and Arab-Islamist terrorism in
Hidden. This evolution of microfascisms resonates against the
reterritorializations of French politico-cultural history by French historians
such as Robert Aron (1958). However, the cultural inheritance of fascist
complicities is clearly not limited to France alone. Paxton affirms that
fascism exists within all democratic countries.
‘Giving up free institutions,’ especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive
to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path
that fascism does not require a spectacular ‘march’ on some capital to take root; seemingly
anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national ‘enemies’ is enough.
(Paxton 2004: 220)

Hidden also provides insight into and critical commentary of other national
histories and cultural memories beyond France, as Silverman observes:
Haneke has argued that Caché works just as effectively as an indictment of other cultural
heritages: ‘I don't want my film to be seen as specifically about a French problem. It seems to me
 that, in every country, there are dark corners — dark stains where questions of collective guilt
become important. I'm sure in the United States there are other parallel examples of dark stains on
the collective unconscious.’
(Silverman 2010: 63, note 4)

Haneke's 2010 film The White Ribbon implicitly explores the reasons
behind the rise of Nazism in Germany though the lens of a series of violent
events in a small village at the eve of the First World War that appear to
have been orchestrated by the local children. Similarly, Haneke observes
that this film is not simply an indictment of Germany's past but also serves
as an allegory for harrowing and shameful events and periods in other
countries' pasts (Cinefilms 2010).
So far, in this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari's four dangers of fascism
we have followed lines that lead to destruction. In concluding, I would like
to consider the potential for creative and revolutionary lines of flight within
the fascist discourse of The Raven and Hidden. Children appear in the final
scenes of both films. In The Raven, the mother of the suicide victim passes
children playing as she walks down the street and away from the murder
scene. French cultural critic Chris Lloyd proffers that these children convey
a sense of hopefulness for the future (Lloyd 2007: 52). Hidden ends with a
seemingly innocuous long shot of the steps of (Georges's son) Pierrot's high
school. However, careful viewing reveals Pierrot sitting on the steps in
conversation with Majid's son. There has been no previous intimation that
the boys know each other. The ambiguity of this scene is much debated. I
would suggest that both film endings could augur positively or negatively
for the future. However what is interesting about the ending of both films is
the subtle interjection of chance into narratives that appear cripplingly over-
determined by microfascist lines. In The Raven, the children in the street are
playing dice. In Hidden, the boys are sitting on the steps of the Stéphane
Mallarmé high school. Both references bring to mind Mallarmé's influential
experimental poem A Throw of the Dice Never Eliminates Chance. In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze alludes to this poem when he describes
how the divine game of chance (re)opens the possibility of freedom:
First, there is no pre-existent rule, since the game includes its own rules. As a result, every time,
the whole of chance is affirmed in a necessarily winning throw. Nothing is exempt from the game:
consequences are not subtracted from chance by connecting them with a hypothetical necessity
which would tie them to a determinate fragment; on the contrary, they are adequate to the whole
of chance, which retains and subdivides all possible consequences … This is the point at which
the ultimate origin is overturned into an absence of origin (in the always displaced circle of the
eternal return). An aleatory point is displaced through all the points on the dice, as though one
time for all times. These different throws which invent their own rules and compose the unique
throw with multiple forms and within the eternal return are so many imperative questions
subtended by a single response which leaves them open and never closes them.
(Deleuze 2001: 353–54)

The revolutionary dice roll describes the trajectory of a war machine and
line of flight that is creative rather than nihilistic. Badiou describes this
movement as ‘an ethic of truths’ using the illustration of cultural
renaissance.13 The films reveal how past fascist and microfascist complicity
contrives to shame and terrorize us, engraining fascist violence deeper into
our cultural inheritance. This either silences our voices making us
‘outsiders’ or the ‘guilty’ scapegoats of contemporary political discourse, or
we in turn become ‘insiders’ the new terrorists of nihilism. The aesthetics of
microfascism revealed in The Raven and Hidden engender distrust, discord,
disempowerment and destruction foreclosing hope.14 Yet, as Deleuze and
Guattari point out, microfascisms originate from transformative lines of
creative resistance and revolution. Their trajectory is not pre-determined.
The films remind us that the violence of the past cannot be undone or
erased. However, resistance to fascism means the refusal of subjugation to
or seduction by fascist power. In the final scenes of The Raven, Dr Germain
and Denise recognize and celebrate the transformational power of new love;
where both had previously considered their outlooks doomed and hopeless,
they now look forward to becoming parents and a new life together. In
Hidden, the implied friendship between the sons of Georges and Majid
suggests a transformation of the former colonial and cultural divide. By
presenting viewers with the legacy of the agent-less spiral of microfascist
violence, the films warn of the vectors of past and indeed future
microfascist trajectories within historical and contemporary political
discourse. However, they also communicate the potential for a new throw of
the dice to make an affirmative break with the past and realize the hope of
fostering future freedoms.

Notes

1. The Raven, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and released in 1943, is

a classic film of the Occupation era. It caused controversy across the
political spectrum both at the time of its release and after the
Liberation and has continued to provoke debate up to the present day.
In the film, a spate of poison-pen letter writing creates social divisions
in a provincial town. The letters, which sow fear and suspicion, fraying
the social fabric of the town and bringing all the members of the
municipality into conflict, are all signed ‘The Raven’. The film bears
loaded, although, of course, prohibited cultural references to the
practice of denunciation encouraged by the Nazis. During the
Occupation, three million letters of denunciation were received by the
German authorities (Halimi 1989).
Michael Haneke's Caché gained considerable critical acclaim for its
implicit cultural reference to France's troubled colonial relationship to
Algeria and the war of independence. Set in the present day, the
presenter of a literary television programme and his family begin to
 receive videotapes that contain surveillance footage of their house
recorded on a hidden camera. The tapes are accompanied by a number
of childish violent drawings. The family's sense of security is eroded
as the ominous threats create a volatile atmosphere of unpredictability
and violence. While the film gained special renown for its shocking
depiction of suicide, Caché interrogates the effect of past political and
cultural violence on present-day life in France. The film makes
reference not only to the bloody state-sanctioned suppression of the
peaceful demonstration by the FLN, pro-Algerian liberation protestors,
by the French police on 17 October 1961, but also to the torture of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers and, implicitly, to anti-
Arab/Muslim socio-political discourses in France. Haneke's oeuvre is
well known for its portrayal of extreme physical and psychological
violence. His recent film, Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon, 2010),
set on the eve of the First World War, explored the generational tension
between parents and children in a German village. The film tacitly
explores the complex forces that motivated the younger generation
towards the fascism of National Socialism. Although The White
Ribbon provides engaging material for the analysis of fascist
aesthetics, this chapter chooses to focus on fascism within the French
context as the experience of Nazism in France, invasion and ensuing
occupation and collaboration, poses different questions from those that
arise from the situation in Germany.
2. Crowley observes: ‘Conventional thinking about responsibility — in
which responsibility divorced from agency makes no sense — cannot
apply, for Duras, after the traumatic event. The delimitation of
implication produced by such conventional responsibility in the face of
historical trauma (largely along the lines of national identity, as
 signalled by Duras's confrontational reference to “l'idée d'égalité, de
fraternité”) is simply inadmissible to Duras as a response to the
Holocaust, which must, she insists, be understood at the level of our
concept of what it means to be human’ (Crowley 2000: 163).
3. ‘Fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in
interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to
resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city
or neighbourhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism,
fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple,
family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black
hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before
resonating in a great, generalized central black hole’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 236).
4. Paxton's first book, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order 1940–1944,
shed new light on the extent of French involvement in the
implementation of Nazi policy in France.
5. ‘The rich and varied repertoire of off-screen spaces constructed by the
film opens out in all directions onto unchartered territory which, like
the “anti-classical” hors-champ analysed by Bonitzer and Deleuze's
“radical Elsewhere”, is heterogeneous to the space we see, a repository
of latent meaning that transcends homogenous space and time’ (Saxton
2007: 15).
6. ‘And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town,
Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what
those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books:
that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie
dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides
its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps
 the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it
would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy
city’ (Camus 1948: 285).
7. The Raven was one of thirty feature films produced between 1941 and
1944 that were financed by Continental Films, a Paris-based
collaborationist film production company. The company was directed
by Alfred Greven and affiliated to Goebbels's propaganda ministry. It
employed French directors and the viewing public were generally
unaware that, although legally French, production was controlled and
financed by the Germans. Continental Films' counterpart in the
unoccupied zone was the Comité d'organisation de l'industrie
cinématographique (COIC). Continental had an advantage over the
COIC because it was controlled by the Germans and consequently was
not subject to the more rigorous censorship of film production
operating under Vichy. During his time at Continental, Clouzot wrote
the screenplays for the 1941 films Le Dernier des six and Les Inconnus
dans la maison, and directed two films, L'Assassin habite au 21 (1942)
and Le Corbeau (1943).
8. The Raven received its most virulent attack in a 1944 clandestine
Resistance article where critics Georges Adam and Pierre Blanchard
compared the film unfavourably with Jean Grimillon's 1944 Le Ciel est
à vous. They criticized The Raven for its negative portrayal of the
French populace as petty-minded and backstabbing and for pedalling
the implicit message that the values of French society had rotted under
the Occupation. They read the film as anti-nationalist propaganda.
Julian Jackson observes: ‘While Le Ciel à vous showed the Resistance
and Vichy to be competing up to a point for shared ground, Le
Corbeau, (The Raven), simultaneously disapproved of by the
 Resistance, Vichy, and the Germans, was disconcerting because it
offered no simple answers’ (Jackson 2001: 326). Adam and
Blanchard's hugely influential article contributed to the film being
banned as pro-collaboration propaganda after the Liberation in August
1944 and to Clouzot being suspended from working as a director until
1947. There is still controversy as to whether the film is simply a
representation of fascist tendencies during the Occupation or rather a
subtle piece of resistance warning against the pervasive dangers of
fascism.
9. In French, the word ‘histoire’ means both history and story.
10. Didier Daeninckx's novel Meutres pour mémoire, published in 1985, is
widely credited with bringing the memory of this event back into the
public domain after over twenty years of cultural repression. The plot
revolves around the connection between contemporary politics, the
events of 17 October 1961, and the Occupation. D. Daeninckx,
Meurtres pour mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
11. Through the introduction of the ‘auctoritas’, a Duce or Führer figure
who is anomic and metajuridical, who is directly opposed to the
normative juridical identity of the ‘potestas’, and who brings together
anomie and nomos, Agamben claims that ‘the system transforms itself
into a killing machine’ — that is to say, a fully fascist operation
(Agamben 2005: 86).
12. The claims of Colonel Gaddafi that the ‘rebels’ involved in the Libyan
uprising were either mentally ill or ‘foreign elements’ under foreign
influence offer a recent illustration of this microfascist tendency.
13. ‘It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be
impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness,
that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the
 impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every
scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of
emancipatory politics, is the sole principal — against the ethics of
living-well whose real content is the deciding of death — of an ethic of
truths’ (Badiou 2002: 38–39).
14. Deleuze and Guattari quote Fitzgerald: ‘I had a feeling that I was
standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my
hands and the targets down. No problem set — simply a silence with
only the sound of my own breathing … My self-immolation was
something sodden-dark’ (Fitzgerald, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 253).

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Index
Adam, Georges 193
Adorno, Theodore 40
aesthetics , see anti-fascist aesthetics; ; cinema; ; fascist aesthetics;
Agamben, Giorgio 53, 65, 66, 183–4, 187; ‘state of exception’ 178–9,
185–6, 193
Alonso, Martin 183, 184–5
Amiel, Vincent 35–6, 39
animation 98, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124; anime 121, 123; see also Waltz
with Bashir
Ansems de Vries, Leonie 10–11, 126–47
anti-fascism 4
anti-fascist aesthetics 8, 27–41 ; Benjamin, Walter 30–1, 32, 34, 36;
body 34–6, 38–9; Brecht, Bertolt 30, 32, 37; cinema 30–1, 36, 37;
Deleuze, Gilles 33–4; peace, maintenance of 27, 31, 37, 40;
psychological/aesthetic subject's shift 28, 35–6; security/securitization
27, 35, 37, 38; surveillance 34–5, 36, 38, 39; see also cinema and
resistance to fascism; DeLillo, Don;; Dick, Philip;; Syberberg, Hans
Jürgen
Anti-Oedipus 2, 5, 13, 46–7, 153, 158 ; critique 11, 16; desire 13, 14–
16, 19, 24, 42, 47, 73–4; fascism 149–50; Foucault, Michel, preface to
2, 5, 16, 19, 125, 126, 150; ideology 16; see also Deleuze, Gilles;
desire;; Guattari, Felix
Antoun, Naira 123–4
Arendt, Hannah 4, 58, 64
Aron, Robert 189
Artaud, Antonin 122, 186, 188
authoritarianism 39–40, 151 ; see also totalitarianism

Badiou, Alain 83–5, 92, 191, 193

Bauman, Zygmunt 52–3
becoming 137, 138–40, 145, 146; becoming fascist 3, 11; creative
becoming 126; life as matter of 139; line of flight 133, 139; Spinozan
ethico-politics of bodies 144
Benjamin,Walter 30–1, 32, 34, 36, 59–60, 124
Bergson, Henri 23, 81–2, 86, 121, 138–9
Bersani, Leo 28, 35
Bettleheim, Bruno 27
biopolitics 3, 4, 9, 170; biopolitical governance 128, 141; definition
47; Deleuze, Gilles 47–8; liberal fascism 9, 48–50, 52–6, 58–61; life as
biotechnology 58–61; modernity 53; politics of technology 60–1
Blanchard, Pierre 193
body 34; anti-fascist aesthetics 34–6, 38–9; cinematic body 35–6, 39;
definition 143–4; Deleuze, Gilles 143–4; Deleuze/Guattari's treatment
of body 34–5, 38, 145; paranoiac body 5, 6; Spinozan ethico-politics
of bodies 11, 126, 128, 143–5; Waltz with Bashir (becoming-body
110–14; face 96, 97, 98–100, 106, 113, 114, 117–19, 123)
Brecht, Bertolt 30, 32, 37
Brown, Todd 123
Buchanan, Ian 45, 89

Camus, Albert 181, 192

capitalism 25, 74, 158; post-fascism 11, 170; societies of control 38
Césaire, Aimé 64
Chaplin, Charlie 32–3; The Great Dictator 33
Charibi, Driss 175
cinema 7; American cinema 78, 79–80, 85–6, 87; cinematic
heterotopia 8; Nazism 30, 72; propaganda film 30, 182, 192, 193; see
also following; cinema entries; documentary; Hidden; The Raven
Cinema 6–7, 10, 34, 72–3, 79–94, 121, 181 ; classical cinema 78, 79,
81, 86, 90; fascist violence 173, 174, 183; from classical to modern
cinema 79–81; from cohesive/fragmented presentation of the world
174; post-war cinema 9–10, 78–95, 173, 176, 177; resistance to
fascism 173; sound/visual image 173; time-image 173, 177–8;
‘true’/‘false narration’ shift 7, 80; ‘true narration’ 7, 10, 79–80; see
also Deleuze, Gilles; the seer
cinema and political aesthetics 7, 84; aestheticization of politics (anti-
fascist aesthetics 30–1, 36, 37; fascist aesthetics 31, 32, 40, 59–60,
124); political function of cinema 78, 79, 84; shock effect of film 30–
1, 32, 122; see also anti-fascist aesthetics; fascist aesthetics
cinema and resistance to fascism 9–10, 78–95, 96–125, 191 ; the cretin
10, 88–91, 93, 94; the cynic 91; Deleuze's Bergsonism 81–2, 86;
modern cinema 78, 79–85, 88–91, 93 (schlock 89); modern political
cinema 78, 84–6, 91, 93; the ‘people’ 79–81; ‘people of seers’ 9, 85,
86, 94; ‘people to come’ 79, 86–7, 90–1; The Raven 193; resistance to
fascism 79, 90–3; seeing the intolerable 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94; the
seer 9–10, 81, 82–8, 91–4 (resistance of the seer 10, 88, 90); see also
Hitchcock, Alfred; Scorsese, Martin;; Vinterberg, Thomas;; Waltz with
Bashir
Clausewitz, Carl Philipp 65, 66; habit 68; logistics 67; theory of war
66, 67–8, 156; theory of war, distortion 43, 54, 66, 67, 68
Clouzot, Henri-Georges 181, 182, 191, 192, 193; see also The Raven
Cold War 28, 43, 51, 130, 170
colonialism 64, 65, 73, 175, 183
Crowley, Martin 174, 192

Daeninckx, Didier 193

De Landa, Manuel 71
Deleuze, Gilles 4, 5, 11, 14; anti-fascist aesthetics 33–4; Bergsonism
26, 81–2, 86, 139; bio-politics 47–8; Dialogues 14; Difference and
Repetition 190; fascism in us all 27, 31; Foucault 47, 127; Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 33, 124; limitations to the work of 6, 7;
Logic of Sense 10, 98; micro-fascism 27, 31, 34, 37, 38, 122;
Nomadology 65–6, 155, 167; society of control 38, 71–2, 73; What is
Philosophy? 15; see also Anti-Oedipus; Cinema; desire; fascism;
politics of lines; A Thousand Plateaus
DeLillo, Don: Libra 27–8; Running Dog 32–3; White Noise 28, 29, 32
democracy 69, 70, 74, 76, 83, 85, 152, 189; Weimar democracy 151
desire 5, 105; Anti-Oedipus 13, 14–16, 19, 24, 42, 47, 73–4; desire as
creative and productive 24, 105; desire/practice relation 23–4, 25–6;
desire to be more human 9, 76; fascism 1, 4, 5–6, 8, 13, 14–16, 19, 23–
4, 25–6, 42, 73–5, 151 (desire for one's own repression 2, 19, 25–6, 42,
127, 133, 157, 184); global triage 73–4; manipulation of 61; of power
1, 4, 19; politics and desire 15; politics of technology 60; social
desiring production 44–5, 74
desiring machine 2, 15, 103–106, 124, 154; concept 74; Weimar
democracy 151
diagram 47, 60, 124, 155
Dick, Philip 8, 34–9, 40; Man in the High Castle 37; Minority Report
37–9; A Scanner Darkly 34–7, 39
Dillon, Michael: ‘emergency of emergence’ 141–2; The Liberal Way of
War 57, 128, 138, 140, 142, 171
dispositif 6 ; definition 40, 46; fascism 40, 43; governance 137; milieu
136, 137, 139; milieu/dispositif distinction 45–6; security dispositif 46,
58, 128, 134, 135–6, 137–8, 139; see also Foucault, Michel
documentary 30; The Triumph of the Will 28, 33; Waltz with Bashir
110, 114–16
Dogme movement 10, 91
Duras, Marguerite 174, 184, 192
Dutoit, Ulysses 28, 35

Eisenstein, Sergei 30, 79

Elsaesser, Thomas 33
Evans, Brad 1–12, 42–63
Eysenck, Hans Jürgen 40

fabulation 98–9, 102, 105, 121

fascism 1–2, 126, 188; comprehensive fascism 73, 74–5; contemporary
fascism 43, 65, 69, 73, 75, 76, 171; criticism 26; definition 19, 151;
(all three lines schema 149, 157, 162, 163); dispositif 6; historical
fascism 1, 2, 7, 10, 42, 43, 64, 150, 187; identity 18, 19, 25, 158; a
mass movement 13, 42, 44, 52, 72, 75, 151, 181; new fascism 8, 27,
32, 43; politics 1, 2, 3–4, 6; post-fascism 11, 66, 68, 170; power 1, 4;
problematization 2, 3, 6–7, 73, 171; representation 2–3; socially
invested 42; solution to/overcoming fascism 1, 3, 11, 128, 146, 181; as
system of power relations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 187; see also following; fascism
entries; cinema; desire; macropolitics; micro-fascism; Nazism; politics
of lines; war; war machine
fascism: Deleuze/Guattari: fascism as phenomenon of desire 8, 13, 14–
16, 19, 23–4, 25–6 ; Deleuze/Marxist understanding 8, 13–26; fascist
practices 8, 21–2, 24–6; ideology 13, 16–19, 23–5; illusion, ignorance
13, 14, 18, 19, 23; Marxism: fascism as ideology and belief 8, 15, 16;
United Sates 8, 13, 16–19, 23, 24–5; see also desire; Frank, Thomas;;
ideology;; practice
fascism in everyday life 1, 4, 8 ; fascism in us all 1, 5, 26, 27, 31, 57,
125, 150, 183; fascism-susceptible mentality 40; Foucault, Michel 1, 2,
8, 19, 42, 73, 150; see also micro-fascism
fascist aesthetics 7, 8, 10, 11–12, 124 ; aestheticization of death 28,
110, 165–6, 167; aestheticization of politics 31, 32, 40, 59–60, 124;
aesthetics of war 34; architecture 31; cinema/documentary 31–2;
fascist violence 11, 173, 174, 184, 176, 183, 184; identity 31; Japan
165–6, 167, 168–9; (aesthetic militarism 166, 167, 169;
aestheticization of death 165–6, 167); mass appeal 28–9, 30; Nazism:
aesthetic strategy 29–30; peace 40; suicide 10, 165–6, 167, 168–9; see
also anti-fascist aesthetics; cinema;; Hidden;; The Raven
fear: global imaginary of threat 54, 56; Hidden 177; insecuritisation
imperative 53–5; liberal fascism 53–5, 56–7; manipulation of 52; mass
57; micro-politics of insecurity 38, 39, 53; modernity 54–5; The Raven
176–7; surveillance 176; terror 52, 54–5; A Thousand Plateaus 38,
176–8; totalitarianism 55–6
Fein, Helen 185
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence: fourth person singular 99–100, 104–105
Finkielkraut, Alain 118–19
Fitzgerald, Scott 133, 134, 193
Flusser, Vilém 86
Folman, Ari 10, 97, 111, 120–1, 122, 123, 125; see also Waltz with
Bashir
Foucault, Michel 13, 38; Anti-Oedipus, preface to 2, 5, 16, 19, 125,
126, 150; biopolitics, definition 47; Deleuze, Gilles: Foucault 47, 127;
Discipline and Punish 22; fascism in everyday life 1, 2, 8, 19, 42, 73,
150; fascism in us all 1, 19, 42, 73, 125, 150; genocide 64; governance
133–4, 137; History of Sexuality 22; milieu 135–7; practice 13, 22;
revolution and militancy 5, 125; Security, Territory, Population 135;
surveillance 176; see also dispositif
France 11–12, 86, 173–94; ‘agent-less’ violence 173, 174, 180, 184;
Algerian War 12, 173, 174, 175, 183, 191; Comité d'organisation de
l'industrie cinématographique (COIC) 192; cultural repression 183,
193; De Gaulle, Charles 174; fascism 175–6, 192; fascist violence 173,
174, 176; inhumanity in humanity 174, 184; Le Pen, Jean-Marie 175;
micro-fascism 12, 173, 180, 189; Nazi Occupation 12, 173, 174, 189,
182, 189, 191; Nazi Occupation/Algerian War fascist violence
similarity 175; Vichy France 175, 182, 192, 193; see also Hidden; The
Raven
Frank, Thomas: What's the Matter with Kansas? 13, 16–19, 23, 24–5
freedom 49, 50–1, 189, 190

Galbreith, Kenneth 57
Galloway, Alexander 72
genocide 53, 64, 119, 185 ; see also the Holocaust
Girard, René 178, 179; ‘surrogate victim’ 185, 188
global triage 9, 68–73, 75–6; contemporary fascism 69; definition 69;
human desire 73–4; pre-emption 69–70, 72, 75; technology 69, 70–2,
75
globality/globalization 11, 54, 58; global agreement on security 27, 43,
57, 171; global imaginary of threat 54, 56; global politics of post-
fascist suicide 170, 171; global war 4, 54, 59, 69; global war machine
171
Godard, Jean-Luc: Contempt 28, 35
governance 70, 140 ; biopolitical governance 128, 141; ‘emergency
governance’ 11, 141, 142, 143, 146; Foucault, Michel 133–4, 137;
liberal governance 138, 140–2; liberal way of rule and war 141–2;
milieu 136; milieu of security 140; normative governance 20–1;
norms/fascism relation 22; politics of lines 128, 130, 132, 133; security
dispositif 137–8; security governance 54, 55; see also lines of flight;
milieu;; politics of lines
Guattari, Felix 1; Nomadology 65–6, 155, 167; What is Philosophy?
15; see also Anti-Oedipus; politics of lines; A Thousand Plateaus
Guérin, Daniel 176

habit 9, 68–9, 73, 74–6

Haneke, Michael 177, 180, 189–90, 191–2; The White Ribbon 190,
192; see also Hidden
Hansen, Miriam 36
Harvey, David 17
Hayek, Friedrich Von 50–1
Hayles, Kathleen 72
Heberle, Rudolph 29
Heidegger, Martin 58, 59, 76
Henisch, Walter 29
Hidden (Caché) 11–12, 173, 177, 191–2 ; ‘agent-less’ violence 184,
191; Algerian War 12, 173, 183, 191; clarity 179–81; creative and
revolutionary lines of flight 190–1; fascist violence 173, 183, 188, 191;
fear 177; ‘framing’ technique 177; Haneke, Michael 177, 180, 189–90,
191–2; ‘hors champ’ 177, 192; information 180–1; ‘insider’/‘outsider’
dualism 177, 184; paranoia 177; power 182–3, 184–6; suicidal line
188, 189; ‘surrogate victim’ 186, 188; surveillance 177 (surveillance
footage 177, 179, 180, 182, 185, 191); torture 175, 180, 181, 183, 192;
see also France; A Thousand Plateaus
Hitchcock, Alfred 82, 89, 91; Rear Window 82, 89; Rope 91; Shadow
of a Doubt 82–3, 86, 89, 91
Hitler, Adolf 1, 6, 28–9, 32, 151, 163, 176, 187; telegram 71 148, 160,
161, 171
Hobbes, Thomas 48, 59
Holland, Eugene 149, 153–4; Bush regime and fascism 153–4, 170;
suicidal line, critique of 11, 148, 154–5, 161–2, 163, 171
the Holocaust 4, 7, 50, 52–3, 64, 80, 192
Homer 82, 124
human rights 18, 48, 49, 69, 76

identity 31; collective identity 78, 79, 81, 86; fascism 18, 19, 25, 158;
fascist aesthetic 31; Japan 165
ideology 1, 2, 13, 16–19; ideology/illusion distinction 18;
ideology/practice relation 23–5; Marxism 8, 15, 16; wedge issues 17–
18
illusion, ignorance 13, 14, 18, 19, 23, 36, 42, 81, 138
immanence 106, 111, 123, 131, 134, 144 ; immanence/transcendence
relation 14–15, 98–9; see also transcendence
imperialism 64, 65
international law 76
interventionism 50, 54; humanitarian intervention 64, 69
Italy 86; Arezzo 31; Mussolini, Benito 1, 19, 31, 37, 42, 187

Jackson, Julian 182, 193

James, William 122
Japan 87–8; cherry blossom aesthetic 165–6, 167, 168–9 ; (aesthetic
militarism 166, 167, 169; aestheticization of death 165–6, 167);
fascism 11, 163–9 ; (all three lines schema 163, 169; molar line 164,
166; molecular line 165–6; suicidal line 166–9); Germany/Japan
fascist-suicide-state distinction 169; Hirohito, Emperor of Japan 168;
identity 165; Meiji constitution 164, 165; Meiji regime 149, 163, 164,
166; the military 165–6, 167, 169; national palingenesis 164, 165;
Shinto folk religion 164; ‘suicidal-state’ 163, 166, 168–9; tokkǭtai
suicide units/Kamikaze 11, 149, 163, 167–9 (Bushido Samurai
traditions 169); totalitarian state apparatus 164, 166–9; war machine
163, 166, 167–8, 169; World War II 149, 163, 164
Jenkins, Brian 175–6
Jomini, Antoine-Henri 67

Kant, Immanuel 9, 49, 57

Kitchen, Ruth 11–12, 173–94
Kline, Jefferson 180
knowledge 22–3, 24

Lacan, Jacques 16, 24

laissez-faire 51, 136
Lamarre, Thomas 121, 123
Land, Nick 150, 158, 160–1
legitimacy 6, 57, 69–70
Levi, Primo 44
Levinas, Emmanuel 118–19
liberal fascism 3, 6, 8–10, 142, 146 ; biopolitics 9, 48–50, 52–6, 58–
61; fear 53–5, 56–7; identification with fascism's victim 4;
insecuritisation imperative 53–5; life as bio-technology 58–61; lines of
flight 128, 146; peace, capitalisation of 9, 43, 50; quality of life 48;
securitization 9, 43, 46, 47; security 48, 53–5, 57, 58; security
dispositif 46, 58; war/peace relation 9, 43, 46, 54; see also liberal
humanism; liberalism
liberal humanism 10, 54, 74, 113, 119; humanitarian intervention 64,
69
liberalism 3, 4, 48, 53–4; commitment to rights 48; ‘emergency of
emergence’ 141–2; fascist character of liberal modernity 3, 4, 6, 53;
free market 18, 50, 51; freedom 50–1; liberal governance 138, 140–2;
liberal power relations 7; liberal reason 53–4; liberal subjectivity 53,
57, 88; liberal violence 56; The Liberal Way of War 57, 128, 138, 140,
142, 171; liberalism/totalitarianism distinction 56; maintenance of
liberal peace 8; neoliberal policies 17; regime of fear 55–6; toleration
88; United States 8, 17; way of rule and war 141–2
life 6 ; as bio-technology 58–61; fascism 1, 5, 48; a matter of
becoming 139; milieu/dispositif distinction 45–6; non-fascistic life
146; quality of life 48; Waltz with Bashir 98, 99, 106, 111–12; see also
biopolitics
lines of flight 10–11, 39, 45, 131, 143, 145, 187–91 ; creative force
130, 133, 190–1; definition 38, 129, 130; deterritorialisation 130, 131,
134; ‘emergency of emergence’ 128, 141–2; liberal fascism 128, 146;
the most dangerous line 132, 133, 134, 187; political paradox 127–8,
133, 134, 142, 143; resistance 126, 127, 133, 145–6; reterritorialisation
131, 134; war machine 187; see also politics of lines; suicide
Linklater, Richard 34–7
Lloyd, Chris 190
Lobo-Guerrero, Luis 141
logistics 75 ; emotional logistics 68; habit 68–9, 75–6; human desire as
logistics 73–5; Jomini, Antoine-Henri 67; logistical life 69; war 67–9,
71; see also global triage
Lotringer, Sylvère 168–9

Machiavelli, Niccolò 68
machine: abstract machine 34, 74, 150, 155 ; abstract machine of
mutation 155, 158, 165, 168; desiring machine 2, 15, 74, 104–105,
124, 151, 154; killing machine 69, 76, 193; see also war machine
macropolitics 44, 113, 118, 129 ; macro-fascism 127, 132;
macropolitics/micropolitics distinction 129; molar line 129, 130, 132,
133, 148, 150–5, 157, 164, 165; politics of lines 129, 131;
totalitarianism 150, 157; see also micropolitics; politics
Malka, Shlomo 118–19
Mallarmé, Stéphane 190
Mamdani, Mahmood 64
Manning, Erin 10, 96–125
Marxism 8, 15, 16
mass 47, 61, 72, 78 ; fascism as mass movement 13, 29, 42, 44, 52, 72,
75, 151, 159, 181; fascist aesthetics 28–9, 30; fear 57; violence 184–5;
see also ‘the people’
Massumi, Brian 2, 70, 122, 134–5; bare activity 99, 111, 113, 124
May, Todd 8, 13–26
Michelsen, Nicholas 11, 148–72
micro-fascism 2, 57, 127, 152, 153–4, 191, 192, 193 ; ‘black hole
phenomenon’ 132, 152, 157, 192; Deleuze, Gilles 27, 31, 34, 37, 38,
122; France 12, 173, 180, 189; germinant trait of 174, 180, 189, 191;
micro-paranoia 152; Nazism 148, 151–2, 153–4, 158–9; A Thousand
Plateaus 174, 181, 184; see also fascism in everyday life;
micropolitics
micropolitics 44, 113, 118, 128, 129, 131, 181 ; micro-politics of
insecurity 38, 39, 53; molecular line 129–30, 131, 148, 150–5, 159,
165–6, 169; politics of lines 127, 132; Waltz with Bashir 10, 105, 112,
113; see also macropolitics; micro-fascism;; politics
milieu 11, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 138 ; Bergson, Henri 138; concept
133, 135; Deleuze-Guattari/Foucault's distinction of the term 137–8;
Foucault, Michel 135–7; French/English distinction of the term 134–5;
governance 136, 140; milieu of security 136–7, 139, 140; security
dispositif 136, 137, 139; A Thousand Plateaus 134; see also lines of
flight; politics of lines
the military 55; boundaries collapse 54, 71, 72; Japan 165–6;
(aesthetic militarism 166, 167, 169); military coup 152, 158
minority 38–9, 42–3, 80, 121
Mishima, Yukio 87
modernity 2, 4, 46, 52; bio-politics 53; ‘emergency of emergence’
141–2; fascist character of liberal modernity 3, 4, 6, 53; fear 54–5; the
Holocaust 52–3
Morris, Ivan 168
movement: Bergson, Henri 138–9; logic of 9, 65, 66; movements of
flight 130–1; Nomadology 65–6; politics of lines 126, 127, 129–30,
133, 134, 139–40; unpredictability 126, 127, 142; war 65–6, 67, 155–6
Mussolini, Benito 1, 19, 31, 37, 42, 187

Nandy, Ashis 73
National Socialism: mass appeal 29, 159 ; suicidal line of flight 148,
150, 151, 159, 169, 171; see also Nazism
Nazism 3, 6, 49–50, 59, 148, 159 ; aesthetic strategy 29–30; cinema
30, 72; France 12, 173, 174, 175, 182, 189, 191, 192, 193;
Germany/Japan fascist-suicide-state distinction 169; Goebbels, Josef
28, 29, 30, 182, 192; microfascism 148, 151–2, 153–4, 158–9; molar
line 148, 150–1; molecular line 148, 150–1; national palingenesis 153,
159, 160, 162, 163, 169; paranoia 160–1, 162; rise of 29, 151, 158–9;
schizophrenia 160, 162; suicidal line of flight 148, 158–9; ‘suicidal-
state’ 160–3, 171; Third Reich 33, 49, 151; total war 157, 159–60,
161, 162; totalitarianism 148, 150, 153, 158, 162; war machine 157,
159, 160, 169; see also fascism; Hitler, Adolf;; suicide
Nietzsche, Friedrich 14, 46, 58, 99, 108
nihilism 8, 109, 187, 193
nuclear weapon 124, 168; nuclear deterrence 170

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 163–7

ontology 3, 24, 46, 58, 162

paranoia 5, 88, 163, 169, 177, 185; fascism 57, 149–50, 152–3, 154–5;
micro-paranoia 152; Nazism 160–1, 162; paranoia/schizophrenia
dualism 149, 155, 157, 158; paranoiac body 5, 6; paranoid security
mentality 27; politics of paranoia 153, 157; reterritorialisation 149; A
Thousand Plateaus 153; totalitarianism 56, 153, 154–5
Parnet, Claire 127, 128, 129, 131, 143, 146; suicidal line of flight 134,
171
Paxton, Robert 175, 180, 187, 189, 192
peace: anti-fascist aesthetics 27, 31, 37, 40 ; capitalisation of 9, 43, 50;
liberal fascism 9, 43, 50; maintenance of 8, 27, 31, 37, 40; pure-peace
170; war/peace relation 9, 43, 46, 54, 68; see also security
‘the people’ 86, 93, 121 ; from classical to modern cinema 79–81;
‘people of seers’ 9, 85, 86, 94; ‘people to come’ 79, 86–7, 90–1;
unanimity of 7, 78, 79, 81, 93; see also mass
Perrault, Pierre 121
photography 29, 30, 122
political psychology 39–40
politics 5, 129 ; aestheticization of politics 31, 32, 36, 37, 40, 59–60,
124; Bergson's politics of perception 81–2; concept of the political 58;
fascism 1, 2, 3–4, 6; global politics of post-fascist suicide 170, 171;
modern political cinema 78, 84–6, 91, 93; molar/molecular dimensions
153; political theatre 85, 92; political theology 60; politics of the novel
37; politics of paranoia 153, 157; politics of technology 60–1; Waltz
with Bashir 99, 100, 114–18, 120 (protopolitics 100, 106, 110, 113,
117); see also biopolitics; cinema and political aesthetics;;
macropolitics;; micropolitics;; politics of lines
politics of lines 10–11, 126–47, 148, 149–71 ; fascism 11, 126, 127,
132, 133, 157, 162; governance 128, 130, 132, 133; lines of creation
126, 127, 130; lines of destruction 126, 127; macro-fascism 127, 132;
macropolitics 129, 131; micro-fascism 127, 132; micropolitics 129,
131; molar line 129, 130, 132, 133, 148, 150–5, 157, 164, 165;
molecular line 129–30, 131, 148, 150–5, 159, 165–6, 169; movement
126, 127, 129–30, 133, 134, 139–40; political problematique 126, 127,
128, 133; security dispositif 128, 134, 135–6, 139; segmentarity 129–
30, 132, 133; Spinozan ethico-politics of bodies 11, 126, 128, 143–5;
suicidal line 11, 132–3, 134, 146, 148, 155–7, 158–9, 161–2, 166–9,
171; A Thousand Plateaus 126–7, 128–9, 134, 148; three lines schema
126, 127, 128–34, 148, 149–71; uncertainty 128, 133, 139;
unpredictability 126, 127, 137; see also governance; lines of flight;;
milieu;; movement
power 181–6; bio-politics 47; fascism and desire of 1, 4, 19; fascism as
system of power relations 1, 2, 3, 5, 187; knowledge/power relation
22; ‘the power of the false’ 10, 97–8, 121; liberal power relations 4;
resistance to 47, 127, 145
practice 13–14, 20–6; definition 20, 22; desire/practice relation 23–4,
25–6; fascist practices 8, 21–2, 24–6; Foucault, Michel 13, 22;
ideology/practice relation 23–5; knowledge 22–3, 24; normative
governance 20–1; norms/fascism relation 22; religious and economic
practices 24–5; social nature of 21; volitional and epistemic elements
20, 23–6
pre-emption 9; global triage 69–70, 72, 75; legitimacy 69–70;
operating system 70
propaganda: National Socialism 171; propaganda film 30, 182, 192,
193
Protevi, John 149, 150, 158
psychoanalysis 21–2, 46

racism 7, 64, 91, 117, 175; racial supremacy 52

Rancière, Jacques 30, 32, 37, 85
The Raven (Le Corbeau) 11–12, 173, 191, 192 ; clarity 179–80;
Clouzot, Henri-Georges 181, 182, 191, 192, 193; Continental Films
182, 192; creative and revolutionary lines of flight 190–1; criticism
182, 193; denunciation 176–7, 179, 180, 188–9, 191; fascist violence
173, 174, 184, 191; fear 176–7; information 180–1; ‘insider’/‘outsider’
dualism 176–7, 184; Nazi Occupation 12, 173, 182, 189, 191; power
181–2, 184–6; suicidal line 188–9; ‘surrogate victim’ 186; surveillance
176, 177, 179, 182; see also France; A Thousand Plateaus
Ravetto, Kriss 6, 7, 30, 37
Reich, Wilhelm 13, 42, 43, 73
Reid, Julian 1–12, 78–95; The Liberal Way of War 57, 128, 138, 140,
142, 171; logistical life 69
Resnais, Alain 175
responsibility 124, 174, 185, 192; ‘agentless’ violence 173, 174, 180,
184; responsibility to protect 49–50; Waltz with Bashir 113, 116–19,
123–4, 125
revolution 5, 16, 74, 93, 125; fascism 15, 187; lines of flight 190–1
Riefenstahl, Leni 122; The Triumph of the Will 28, 33
Rokeach, Milton 40
Rothberg, Michael 175
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14

Sabra and Shatila massacre 97, 112, 114–15, 120, 123; Sharon, Ariel
125; see also Waltz with Bashir
Sartre, Jean-Paul 183
Saxton, Libby 177, 183, 185, 192
schizophrenia 157, 158, 160; deterritorialisation 149, 155; Nazism
160, 162; paranoia/schizophrenia dualism 149, 155, 157, 158;
schizoanalysis 15, 158, 169; schizophrenic war machine 155, 159, 160
Schmitt, Carl 51, 57, 187; political theology 60; technology 58–9, 60
Schrader, Paul 87, 91
Scorsese, Martin 89; Taxi Driver 83, 86, 87, 89–90, 91, 92
security 134 ; anti-fascist aesthetics 27, 35, 37, 38; biopolitics 47–8,
53; development/security relation 54; fascism 6, 10, 27, 53, 171;
global agreement on security 27, 43, 57, 171; insecuritisation
imperative 53–5, 171; liberal fascism 48, 53–5, 57, 58; micro-politics
of insecurity 38, 39, 53; milieu of security 136–7, 139, 140; paranoid
security mentality 27; securitization 9, 35, 37, 38, 43, 46, 47, 74;
security dispositif 46, 58, 128, 134, 135–6, 137–8, 139; security
governance 54, 55; society of control 38, 71, 73; suicidal line 170–1;
United Kingdom 61; war/security relationship 46; see also peace;
social order
the seer 9–10, 81, 82–8, 91–4; ‘people of seers’ 9, 85, 86, 94;
resistance of the seer 10, 88, 90; seeing the intolerable 82, 83, 86, 88,
90, 91, 94; seer/agent replacement 176, 178, 183; witness 178, 183–4,
188; see also Cinema
Sellars, Wilfrid 22
Shakespeare, William 82
Shapiro, Michael J. 8, 27–41; cinematic heterotopia 8
Silverman, Max 175, 177, 189–90
Sloterdijk, Peter 91
social issues 45 ; desiring production 44–5, 74; fascism as socially
invested 42; social order 38, 40, 43, 49, 158, 179 (Japan 164, 166);
society of control 38, 71–2, 73; see also security
socialism 50, 51
Sontag, Susan 28, 32, 33
Spielberg, Steven 38–9
Spinoza, Baruch 11, 61, 126, 128, 143–5state 50, 148; Nazism and
‘suicidal-state’ 160–3, 171; sovereignty 48–9, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 133,
135; state apparatus 83, 93, 155–7, 160, 162, 164, 166–9, 187; suicide
148, 155–7 (‘suicidal-state’ 148, 149, 157, 160–3, 166, 168–9, 171);
war 65 (war as anti-state function 156); war machine 93, 155–7, 160,
162, 187; see also totalitarianism
suicide 11, 91, 92, 148–72, 188 ; concealment 157; deterritorialization
11, 148, 149, 155–7, 160–1, 162, 165, 188; fascism 148, 157–63;
fascist aesthetics 10, 165–6, 167, 168–9; (aesthetic militarism 166,
167, 169; aestheticization of death 165–6, 167); Festen 91, 92; global
politics of postfascist suicide 170, 171; Hidden 188, 189; post-fascism
11, 170; The Raven 188–9; state 148, 155–7; (‘suicidalstate’ 148, 149,
157, 160–3, 166, 168–9, 171); suicidal line 11, 132–3, 134, 146, 148,
155–7, 158–9, 161–2, 166–9, 171, 187; suicidalism 148–9, 159, 162; A
Thousand Plateaus 11, 148, 155–9, 170, 187–90; three lines schema
148, 149–71; total war 156, 157, 158, 160, 167, 170;
totalitarianism/fascism distinction 148–9, 152–3, 157; war machine
155–7, 159, 160, 162, 165, 171, 187; World War II 149, 163, 164; see
also Holland, Eugene; Japan;; lines of flight;; National Socialism;;
Nazism;; paranoia;; schizophrenia;; Virilio, Paul
Sun Tzu 68
surveillance 34–5, 36, 38, 39, 176, 183; Hidden 177 (surveillance
footage 177, 179, 180, 182, 185, 191); The Raven 176, 177, 179, 182;
A Scanner Darkly 34–5, 36
Syberberg, Hans Jürgen 8, 32–4, 40; aesthetic scandal 32; Hitler: A
Film from Germany 32–3

technology: bio-political fascism 60; global triage 69, 70–2, 75; life as
bio-technology 58–61; politics of technology 60–1
territory 46, 87, 98, 112, 124; deterritorialisation 11, 98, 124, 129, 130,
131, 132, 134, 189 (suicidal line 11, 148, 149, 155–7, 160–1, 162,
165); lines of flight 130, 131, 134; reterritorialisation 117, 119, 131,
134, 187; territorialisation 130, 134
terrorism 4–5, 54–5, 69, 189
theatre 31, 83–4; Brecht, Bertolt 30, 32, 37; political theatre 85, 92
A Thousand Plateaus 11, 125, 148, 150, 153, 170, 173; becoming 139–
40; desire 184; four ‘dangers’ of fascism 173, 190 (clarity 178–81; fear
38, 176–8; lines of flight 187–91; power 181–6); micro-fascism 174,
181, 184; milieu 134; Nazism 148, 150; paranoia 153; suicidal line of
flight 11, 148, 155–9, 170, 187–90; surveillance 176; see also Deleuze,
Gilles; Guattari, Felix; Hidden; lines of flight; politics of lines; The
Raven
Thucydides 68
time 130, 137; Bergson, Henri 138–9; time-image 173, 177–8; Waltz
with Bashir 99, 103, 104, 107–109, 120, 122
toleration 88; cinema: seeing the intolerable 82, 83, 86, 88
torture 4, 21; Hidden 175, 180, 181, 183, 192
totalitarianism 64, 65, 105, 149, 150 ; fascism/totalitarianism
distinction 44, 55–6, 148–9, 150, 152–3, 157, 159, 163, 187; fear 55–
6; Japan 164, 166–9; liberalism/totalitarianism distinction 56;
macropolitics 150, 157; mistakenly associated with fascism 2, 42–3,
44; Nazism 148, 150, 153, 158, 162; paranoia 56, 153, 154–5; regime
of fear 56; Stalinist totalitarianism 150, 151; transcendence 100, 103,
105–106; see also authoritarianism
transcendence 14–15, 98–9, 100, 103, 105, 117, 122 ;
immanence/transcendence relation 14–15, 98–9; totalitarianism 100,
103, 105–106; transcendental field 98, 99–103, 105, 110, 113, 123; see
also immanence

United Kingdom 61, 175

United States 8, 13, 16–19, 23, 24–5 ; American cinema 78, 79–80,
85–6, 87; Bush, George, Jr. 4–5, 9, 16, 153–4, 170; conservative
ideology 13, 19, 24–5; fascism 8, 153–4, 170, 190 (palingenic project
153–4, 170); Kansas 17, 25; liberalism 8, 17; pre-emption doctrine 9,
64–77; Republicans 16–19, 23, 24–5, 170; sovereignty 7; Tea
Partymovement 18, 25; see also desire; Frank, Thomas;; ideology;;
practice

Vinterberg, Thomas 91; Festen 10, 91–3

violence 98 ; ‘agent-less’ violence 173, 174, 180, 184, 191; fascism 11,
53, 173, 174, 184, 176, 183, 184; Haneke, Michael 192; Hidden 173,
183, 188, 191; liberal violence 56; mass and collectively approved
violence 184–5; The Raven 173, 174, 184, 191; see also war
Virilio, Paul 56; liberalism/totalitarianism distinction 56; ‘suicidal-
state’ 148, 160, 161, 168–9, 171; technology 71; war 71

Wagner, Richard 32, 33

Waltz with Bashir 10, 96–125; actual/virtual relation 98, 109, 120, 122,
124; animation 98, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124; Bashir, Gemayel 96, 112–
13, 114; becoming-body 110–14; biogram 110–11, 124; color 96, 100,
101, 103, 104, 107, 110, 118; critique 111, 123–4; desiring machine
103–106; documentary footage 110, 114–16; dogs 96, 103, 104, 105,
106; drama of the political 99, 100, 114–18, 120 (protopolitics 100,
106, 110, 113, 117); face 96, 97, 98–100, 106, 113, 114, 117–19, 123;
fascism 105–106, 113, 114, 117; filmmaker 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 111,
115, 122; Folman, Ari 10, 97, 111, 120–1, 122, 123, 125; a life 98, 99,
106, 111–12; memory 97, 98, 101–11, 113, 120, 123 (forgetting 98, 99,
101, 104, 107–109, 111); metaphysical surface 98, 99, 100–101, 103,
108, 115; Polonsky, David 120; ‘the power of the false’ 10, 97–8, 121;
pure experience 99, 104, 106, 108, 111, 120, 122; responsibility 113,
116–19, 123–4, 125; Sabra and Shatila massacre 97, 112, 114–15, 120,
123; Sharon, Ariel 125; soldier 109–10, 111–12, 114, 120, 123–4;
sound/music 101, 103, 104, 107–10, 112, 115, 118, 122; time 99, 103,
104, 107–109, 120, 122; totalitarianism 100, 103, 105–106;
transcendence 98–9, 100, 103, 105, 117, 122 (transcendental field 98,
99–103, 105, 110, 113, 122, 123); war 97, 102, 107, 112, 113, 116, 120
Waltz with Bashir, graphic novel 122
war 124 ; aesthetics 31, 34; biopolitics 54; friend/enemy distinction 51,
59, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72; global war 4, 54, 59, 69; liberal fascism 9, 43,
46, 54; liberal way of rule and war 141–2; The Liberal Way of War 57,
128, 138, 140, 142, 171; logistics 67–9, 71; movement 65–6;
Nomadology 65–6, 155, 167; nuclear weapons 168; sovereignty 51;
state 65; (war as antistate function 156); total war 51, 65, 66, 68–9, 75,
76, 156–7, 158 (Nazism 157, 159–60, 161, 162; suicidal line 156–7,
158, 160, 167, 170); Waltz with Bashir 97, 102, 107, 112, 113, 116,
120; war on terror 5, 54–5, 69, 189; war/peace relationship 9, 43, 46,
54, 68; war/politics relationship 66–7, 69; war/security relationship 46;
see also Clausewitz, Carl Philipp; logistics;; war machine;; World War
II
war machine 2, 43, 47, 65, 66, 70, 113, 187, 191 ; deterritorialization
155, 156, 162, 165; function of 155–6; global war machine 171; Japan
163, 166, 167–8, 169; Nazism 157, 159, 160, 169; schizophrenic war
machine 155, 159, 160; state apparatus 93, 155–7, 160, 162, 187;
suicidal line 155–7, 159, 160, 162, 165, 171, 187; total war 156–7,
158; see also war
Whitehall, Geoffrey 9, 64–77
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21
Woolf, Virginia 37, 133, 134
World War II 2, 71, 80 ; Japanese suicidal line 149, 163, 164; nuclear
weapon 124, 168; see also war

Zizek, Slavoj 189