"Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the "irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a "political aesthetic of death" at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), p. 48
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fascism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion."
"In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of…"
"Thus, the historical circumstance of the half century preceding the Second World War gave rise to the essence of fasc…"
"Fascism presented itself not only as an alternative, but also as the heir to socialism."
"The peoples of Yugoslavia do not want Fascism. They do not want a totalitarian regime, they do not want to become sla…"
"Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of the…"
"The similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini's corporative state or Hitler's total…"
"There isn't any difference in totalitarian states. I don't care what you call them, Nazi, Communist or Fascist..."
"[Fascist ideology was] a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. This form of so…"
"The last resource of the bourgeoisie is fascism, which replaces social and historical criteria with biological and zo…"