“We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: ‘Fascism will not make it again.’ Fascism has already ‘made it,’ and it continues to ‘make it.’ It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution.”
Félix Guattari, ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’, 1977

The theme of a recent lecture series organised by OnCurating, and as part of which I gave a (different) lecture on 11 April 2025, was “Let’s Talk About … Anti-Democratic, Anti-Queer, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Right-Wing Spaces and Their Counter-Movements”. Belatedly, my article intends to critically counteract this title, its implied gesture of ‘talking about’, as well as the attendant designation of specific ‘spaces’ in which seemingly clearly delineated bad things happen. It is as though there were items or objects – misogyny, antisemitism, queerphobia or racism (curiously missing from the list) – which could be disentangled from each other (and broader frameworks), only to re-entangle them in a broad critique of what is frequently called a ‘swing to the right’ and ‘anti-democratic’ tendencies. 

The processes of dehumanisation shorthanded by these terms, however, are in my view much too weighty to be viewed from a simple meta-perspective that compounds them under ‘right-wing/anti-democratic’ shifts. If anything is certain at the moment, it is that ‘democratic spaces’ have always been very accommodating to ‘right-wing movements’ and have always been highly functional containers of processes of dehumanisation. Likewise, there is no unambiguous ‘countermovement’ to be won by running down a checklist of bad items to intervene against. As some authors featured in this special issue will likely demonstrate (I haven’t read their contributions at this time of writing), such itemisation inevitably leads to gestures that ‘play off’ topoi against each other, so that ‘antisemitism’ might cancel out ‘racism’, ‘queerphobia’ or vice versa – a symptom (or function) in my opinion of the isolation, abstraction and de-materialisation that happens when dehumanisation is ‘talked about’ with such item lists, which is to say, when it is addressed in increasingly impoverished languages.

In light of these reservations, I want to offer some thoughts towards a different perspective and speculate on a broad process of fascistisation. This process is not simply meant to include or combine such topoi, but it dynamises dehumanisation within mechanisms and flows of desire. Talking about fascistisation has been and is being suppressed by objectifying languages such as the title of the lecture series mentioned above, and further by the pervasive German language game that is frequently called ‘right-wing extremism research’. I think these language games are wrong and obfuscating, an issue all the more pressing in times of genocide, as everything is in such times. They are prone to become enlisted in a larger apparatus of fascistisation and annihilatory desire.

 

Liquidation

My speculations are informed by Felix Guattari’s text ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’ (1977), which paradigmatically rejects the notion of talking ‘about fascism’ as an object (always threatening to return), and instead emphasises its pervasiveness, mutability and dynamism. As one example, Guattari describes the Nazi fascist project as a totalising death project that did not pursue an ideology of ‘national or racial rebirth’ per se – i.e. “palingenetic ultranationalism” (Roger Griffin) – but instead mobilised a dynamic towards total annihilation. In the sense of a ‘desire for death’, National Socialism was successful in more ways than one: 

“All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one. Hitler and the Nazis were fighting for death, right up to and including the death of Germany; the German masses agreed to follow along and meet their own destruction.” (168–9)

“Fighting for death” in my reading can be understood as a primarily energetic movement rather than an ideological one in the strict sense. “Alles für Deutschland”, the slogan that has at times been adopted from the SA by the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), can be read as such an energetic statement: everything is to be surrendered for the nation, which means everything is to be annihilated for it, leaving it empty and only a provisional name for the drive itself. A transformation machine towards death. I would like to compare this notion of a ‘desire for death’ to a statement made by the blogger Curtis Yarvin, whom the New York Times recently portrayed as the chief ideologist of contemporary tech fascism. In February 2025, Yarvin described his plan for Gaza in similar libidinal terms, where ‘annihilation’ becomes ‘investment’ and the spaceless ‘capital/stock’ replaces ‘the nation’:

“[…] Gaza, without its residents (even more important, without their complex maze of Ottoman-era land titles), is worth much more than Gaza with its residents, even to its residents. This is 140 square miles of Mediterranean real estate, clear of titles, demolished and demined at a cost of perhaps ten billion dollars. This land becomes the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock Symbol: GAZA.”

There would be much to say on an international genocidal project, propelled by governments and military tech companies alike, which is currently clearing away human rights and international law, while also circumventing basic rights of assembly, free speech and habeas corpus in several Western countries. In the above quote, however, I’d like to highlight the centrality of energetic languages to the project of fascistisation, because Yarvin above all envisions a broad project of ‘liquidation’ (recalling Masha Gessen’s 2023 observation that “The ghetto is being liquidated”). Such languages are not simply ‘dehumanising’ and therefore speak with genocidal or anti-democratic intent, which could in turn be specified and dealt with under the ‘dehumanisation categories’ listed above. Fascistisation propagates genocide and annihilation in order to achieve something: establishing death factories to produce Lebensraum under National Socialism; turning people and places into market capital in Yarvin’s vision for Gaza. Complex orders – i.e. the migration history and plurality of societies; international law and domestic legal frameworks; democratic and other infrastructures, human rights – are destroyed to achieve liquidation or, in other words, liquefaction – turning people, land and history into streams of fuel or capital. “Alles” for the drive itself.

In this sense, contemporary fascisms might not ultimately imply an end goal – a state or condition of society or body politic – that is to be achieved and then solidified, such as totalitarianism or the above-mentioned “right-wing spaces”, enlarged to national or maybe global proportions. The phantasm of “GAZA Stock” seems to indicate as much. Likewise, such fascisms also cannot appropriately be prevented by addressing their itemised ideological concerns. Fascistisation may not even describe a ‘political project’ per se, but rather an energetic machine for endless transformation – for liquidating what exists. Walter Benjamin envisaged a similar machine in his essay ‘The Destructive Character’ in 1931, where he describes the titular type as such a transformational machinic agent:

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.” (301)

Based on this speculation on fascisms as processes of happy destruction, as liquidation undertaken to generate energy and “clear away” people, cultures and history, the following discussion will reflect on the current discursive austerity politics of ‘talking about fascism’. They are, I want to argue, a broad repressive apparatus preventing the acknowledgement and critique of such “fascist desires” (Morten Paul) and of blunting sensibilities towards their workings and effects. 

Minecraft Server „2b2t", June 2022. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/2b2t/comments/v903ok/the_destruction_of_spawn_over_time_in_18_images/
Posted by u/AuraTheLucario in r/2b2t

 

Discursive Austerity 

German discussions of current fascism(s) primarily revolve around rhetorics of preventing its repetition. Has fascism returned? Has the point that is called ‘never again’ been reached, or when exactly is ‘again’? Similar to the discourse around clearly delineated ‘spaces’, framing the question of fascism around particular points in time disarticulates much of its current currency and work – e.g. the varying intensities with which the energetic affects and energising effects of fascistisation are working all the time, with only occasional interruptions. ‘Never again’ obscures that “Fascism has already ‘made it,’ and it continues to ‘make it,” as Guattari writes. The term fascistisation draws attention to the current situation in which it is obvious that the consciousness-raising measures aimed at preventing the point of ‘again’ (e.g. German memory culture) have not succeeded, but rather failed spectacularly. When, for example, German discourse routinely invokes the paradoxical formulations of “historical amnesia” (Geschichts­vergessenheit) and simultaneous “historical backsliding” (die Ewiggestrigen) to circumscribe and anticipate a present nearness to a fascist takeover, it is clear that such attempts have not in any way hindered the energy production of fascist projects as such – voting patterns indicate as much, as do discursive patterns, deportation schemes, flows of capital, appeals to national exceptionalism, and so forth.

This failure to address what is going on because one focuses on what threatens to arrive is one result of the language game: if a mobilisation of energies is conceived as a ‘point in time’ or ‘state’ to be prevented, then its energetical, processual aspect is not addressed. Fixating on a future ‘point of no return’ disarticulates the increasing velocities at which things move. If a society organises its discursive approaches somewhat exclusively around temporal fixations, and dismisses and discourages many others, one can speak of social repression. It is therefore possible – and this is the speculation I am proposing – that the general approach to ‘fascism’ (and fixed objects such as ‘Machtergreifung’ or right-wing spaces) by way of ‘never again’ has also constituted a repressive apparatus in post-fascist societies. This is especially the case for Germany, which was not only trying to reinvent itself, but also had to consolidate – or overcode, as it were – two different postwar strategies of imagining nationhood in contra­distinction to state fascism.[1] In a way, this repression is already indicated in the name given to the branch of research that is supposed to address contemporary fascisms: In Germany, it is generally referred to as historical ‘totalitarianism studies’ (Totalitarismusforschung) and topical ‘extremism research’ (Extremismusforschung). Only this year, the University of Tübingen inaugurated the first academic institute in this line of research, called the Institute for Research on Far Right Extremism (IRex) [Institut für Rechtsextremismusforschung]. On a very basic level, ‘fascisms’ cannot be named and can therefore not be addressed as ongoing processes or projects, as social forces that are constantly present and continually active (and comprising, for example, queer­phobia, racism, antisemitism, etc.). At a base level, this is a problem: the scholarly disciplines tasked with dealing with the object also enact its repression – to what extent is an open question.

 

Repressive Apparatuses

To further speculate, I want to draw a parallel between this constellation and the critique of classical psychoanalysis elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. They argue that although psychoanalysis paid a great deal of attention to clinical
psychoses, it also repressed their specific logics, materiality and situatedness. Psycho­analysis transposed these clinical cases into the different neurotic types of bourgeois psychology, meaning that the neuroses of the psychoanalytic subject are abstracted and domesticated versions of clinical psychotic disorders. Psychotic structures are described by Deleuze and Guattari through their materialist concepts of the desiring-machine, becoming, wish-production and flows of desire, a way of understanding them that is repressed in the idealised and sanitised language of ‘complexes’ in psychoanalysis. Psychic and libidinal processes are not, in contradistinction to neuroses, metaphorical operations, they write in this passage which invokes the earlier parallelisation between a “desire for annihilation” and a “desire for capital”:

“It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal metaphor, that Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists. It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money?” (114–5)

According to Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis turns such open-ended psychotic forces and constellations into a theatre in which psychotic machines appear as mythologised neuroses, for example as the ‘Oedipus complex’. While a trace of the mechanical and production-oriented apparatus remains in the word ‘complex’ itself, the apparatus-like functioning is not linked to sites of meaning production but is domesticated into the fissured make-up of the heteronormative nuclear family. As a result, the bourgeois family takes on the proportions of Greek tragedy and is thus privileged as the mythical centre of society and the individual. The energy flows of psychosis are shrunken down into micro-dramas, and the work of libidinal machines is converted into individualised contradictions and dilemmas. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, psychoanalysis is carried by a repressive movement that dims down flows of energy into the neuroses of a bourgeois subject, in order to uphold the fiction of functioning social structures and located problems in the inner contradictions of individuals. Energies and lines of flight continue to rage and operate, but are reduced to the remnant of bourgeois neurosis, about which one can then talk.

I’m not advocating in particular for this criticism of psychoanalysis, but rather want to suggest that the ‘constellation’ into which Deleuze and Guattari put it is helpful to speculate on the constellation between fascistisation and the impoverished discourses mentioned above. When fascistisation is understood as an energetic machine that consistently dynamises social orders towards dehumanisation, selection, annihilation and liquidation, then research into right-wing extremism can, to a certain extent, be regarded as its psychoanalytical theatricalisation. Fascistisation uses the possible means to dynamise, liquidate and destroy – the concepts of ‘the people’, nation, gender, race, ability are means with which to mobilise differences into antagonisms for escalation. It denotes a desire for expulsion from the collective, dissolution in the collective and world destruction in the name of the collective. Measured against such an understanding, the currently prevailing paradigm of extremism research – which talks about ‘confirmed right-wing extremist’ (gesichert rechtsextrem) or ‘anti-constitutional attitudes’ (verfassungsfeindliche Einstellungen) – indeed seems like a domestication of energetic fields into group attitudes, individualised complexes and failures. 

Such domestication stabilises a specific image of democracy that claims to be so different from fascism that the latter can only attack ‘from the outside’. Fascism’s representatives on the ‘inside’ are therefore approached and treated as distinct objects (e.g. of extremism research, attitudinal research, deradicalisation, etc.) and its ideologies as ‘items of discrimination’. If something like fascistisation exists, and I think it does, it becomes simultaneously separated off and, as it were, psychoanalysed: fascism appears in the guise of authoritarian characters (treated as bourgeois neurosis), itemised sites of discrimination (reifying the groups discriminated against), and generally as something that is historically past but at the same time always threatening (as in memory culture). Any collective desires for destruction in the collective’s name are on the one hand relegated to historical research, and on the other are treated as deviations in the individual, to be diagnosed through the F-scale, authoritarianism studies and questionnaires focusing on items associated with extremist attitudes.[2] In this context, we are further dealing with de-differentiated neuroses, exhibited by the fact that from a German state perspective, there is no inherent difference between right- and left-wing extremism – both allegedly constitute an unspecific neurotic distortion of democratic subjects, for which the only therapy is more ‘centrism’ or ‘Mitte’. This paradigm transforms fascist energies and potentials into small, theatrical situations involving deviation, therapy and policing. 

According to Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is a line of flight, an interaction between various machines of desire, repression, destruction and death that cannot be localised in the individual, but rather offer and enact the individual’s dissolution. A line of flight captures, transforms, dynamises. National Socialism worked to perfect the industrial production of annihilation (the movie The Zone of Interest revolves around the technical improvements made to the crematoria), thus moving along a line of phantasmatic flight of efficiency, technical innovation and maximised production of dead bodies and space (as Moishe Postone argues, it was far from efficient). After this phantasmatic social order – which produced life and space for some by annihilating and displacing others – was defeated and/or annihilated itself, as Guattari writes, Germany made the attempt to transform this desiring apparatus into a discourse on individual character traits, extremist movements, and prohibited symbols and speech acts. This attempt was, on the face of it, a repressive strategy that both failed and is still the reigning paradigm.

Within this repressive movement, the discourse on ‘right-wing extremism’ is the small theatre in which ‘theatrical effects’ of fascism are presented as its ‘neurotic structure’, expressed always in certain people, to be publicly cured or prohibited. For years now, the attitudinal research carried out, for example, by the Leipziger Authoritarianism Study (Decker et al.) has been published under titles that are variations of the notions of ‘The Endangered Centre’, ‘The Radicalised Centre’, ‘The Fragile Centre’, etc. – regardless of what share of the vote the AfD secures, how radicalised or misanthropic governmental deportation industries are, how large the poverty gap is, how antisemitic, transphobic or racist the majority culture is – fascist energies continue to be described and objectified as neurotic crises of the centre. This results in a series of paradoxes that all point to neurotic structures and thus to individuals who generally require therapy, rather than, for example, to constellations of forces inherent in society itself which are energised and escalated by processes of fascistisation.

 

Mass Neurotic Data

With the digitalisation not only of fascism, but also of large parts of public and social communication, a resonant field has emerged in which the psychoanalytical theatre no longer functions, at least in terms of the medium. ‘Digitalisation’ itself means a technological and ideological line of flight that encompasses societies and allows the minor dramas of the bourgeois subject and their psychology to be transcended: as ‘users’, individuals are connected to huge, media-based apparatuses of resonance and escalating feedback. At present, research attempts to domesticate this unruly media environment, which produces fascistising energies at scale: research seeks to apply the F-scale and questions from authoritarianism studies to social media, for example by algorithmically evaluating big data repositories. Institutions that work with big data, such as the Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS), then publish findings of “forty million right-wing extremist messages” on Telegram, in the space of one month. From my perspective, it is unclear what forty million Nazi messages might mean within the neurotic theatre of ‘right-wing extremist attitudes’. When one acknowledges the dissolution and algorithmisation of milieu-specific spaces in networked media, it no longer makes sense to talk about ‘right-wing spaces’, any more than it does to refer to ‘right-wing extremist attitudes’. The theatre of extremism as bourgeois or democratic neurosis is unable to process the massified data events taking place on social media platforms any minute..

I believe that the function of these primarily diagnostic discourses is a further repression of fascistising lines of flight and energies, now including neuroticising approaches to digital media, upon which therapeutic measures are exerted: regulation, digital social workers, governmentalised practices of ‘moral outrage’ on the internet, media literacy. These entail the individualisation and psychologisation of fascist desire, as well as the individualisation of digital processes and thus the containment of a socio-technological line of flight to individual neurosis. This is a misunderstanding not only of fascistisation, but also of the digital condition to which modern media societies by and large have surrendered.

As Gilles Deleuze writes, what societies of control produce are not individuals but “dividuals”, data points and contact zones of systems and force fields. On the internet, such “dividuality” is mechanically and algorithmically generated. Attributing a psychology or authoritarian character to media assemblages such as ‘Donald Trump’ indicates the helplessness and repressiveness of these approaches. Where would Trump appear on the F-scale? How would Obama, Curtis Yarvin or Friedrich Merz rate, or the anonymous user XYZ? To me, these are somewhat pointless questions because such figures are only accessible via media and as media; they exist and operate as configurations of media, attention, power, discourses, and other aspects. Being a person or a psychology is just one of the many public functions they perform, as Brian Massumi convincingly argues in his book The Personality of Power. 

Digitalisation is a line of flight upon which Western societies at least are currently situated. The conversion of Gaza into American cryptocurrency or the prerogative state that Germany has installed under the term ‘reason of state’ (Staatsräson) – in other words, liquidation for the purposes of energy production – are other, related lines of flight. I want to argue that what is needed to ‘talk about’ fascistisation are descriptions of energy, analyses that capture the dynamisms that the discourse on right-wing extremism domesticates, objectifies and ignores. In that context, neurotic inertia continues to prevail along with the formation of the myth of the ‘resilient democracy’ that must defend and immunise itself against unspecific ‘extremisms’ – for example, by criminalising protests against an asymmetrical war and/or genocide. In my view, fascistisation means something else: a continuously operating machine to produce annihilation that is, among many other things, also coveted in current Western societies, as presently made visible in the legitimized annihilation of Palestine and its inhabitants. The research of fascistisation calls for something else than tracking mass neurotic data, sorting it into items in order to prevent, but rather to trace the destructive work that large-scale desiring machines and energising paranoid networks are already doing, all the time.

 

Literature

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’ [1931], trans Edmund Jephcott, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).

Oliver Decker, Johannes Kiess, Ayline Heller and Elmar Brähler (eds.) Vereint im Ressentiment; Autoritäre Dynamiken und rechtsextreme Einstellungen (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2024). 

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], trans. Martin Joughin, in Negotiations 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).

Masha Gessen, ‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust’, The New Yorker, 09.12.2023. 

Félix Guattari, ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’ [1977], trans. Suzanne Fletcher and Catherine Benamou, in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977 (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2008).

Brian Massumi, The Personality of Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025).

Morten Paul, ‘Faschismus als Lustgewinn’, Berlin Review, 21.02.2025. https://blnreview.de/ausgaben/2025-03/morten-paul-faschismus-als-lustgewinn

Moishe Postone, ‘Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus: Ein theoretischer Versuch’, Kritiknetz – Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, 2012. 

Curtis Yarvin, ‘Gaza, Inc. “What if Adam Neumann runs the roadshow?”’, Gray Mirror, 06.02.2025. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-inc

Simon Strick is a scholar of cultural, media and gender studies. He received his PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin with a thesis on pain, sentimentalism and biopolitics; his book American Dolorologies was published by SUNY Press in 2014. Strick has held positions at Humboldt University, Paderborn University, the John F. Kennedy Institute Berlin, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin and the University of Virginia. His monograph Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus (2021) received the Hans Bausch Media Prize and its analyses of online fascist spaces and their political impact have been widely discussed. Together with Kat Köppert (HGB Leipzig), he is currently pursuing the VW-Project Digital Blackface at the University of Potsdam. Together with Susann Neuenfeldt and Werner Türk, he founded the performance group PKRK, which has been active in Berlin theatres since 2009.