© Antoine d’Agata 2023 Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York City and grew up in France. He worked for many years in humanitarian emergency operations in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, D. R. Congo, and other countries. His literary debut, The Kindly Ones (HarperCollins 2009), won the Prix Goncourt when it was first published in France as Les Bienveillantes in 2006, and has since been translated into nearly forty languages. His other works available in English include The Fata Morgana Books (Two Lines Press, 2013), Triptych: Three Studies After Francis Bacon (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising (Verso, 2015). His first feature documentary film, Wrong Elements, was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2016.

Klaus Theweleit is a German sociologist. He is best known for his two-volume study of the psychology of Nazism, Male Fantasies (University of Minnesota Press, 1987–89), first published in Germany as Männerphantasien in 1977–78.

Max Lawton is a translator of Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish. He is the translator of eight novels by Vladimir Sorokin, including Telluria (New York Review Books Classics, 2022) and Their Four Hearts (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022).

WORDS

This book is actually not about Degrelle’s politics, but about his language. “[...] [L]et us say with true words what their epic struggle was, how they fought, how their bodies suffered, how their hearts offered themselves up,” he writes. Very well: let us look at what these true words truly tell us. As they are written.

“[...] [T]here is a specifically ‘fascist’ mode of producing reality [...] fascism is not a matter of form of government, or form of economy, or of a system in any sense,” writes Klaus Theweleit in his great 1977 book Male Fantasies. Theweleit, perhaps the first to do so, decided to take fascists at their word. Working on a corpus of around two hundred novels, memoirs, and journals written by veterans of the German Freikorps from 1918 to 1923, he attempted to analyze the mental structure of the fascist personality. Impossible to here summarize this brilliant, polymorphic, and elusive book; the most we can attempt is to sketch out its general conclusions.

For Theweleit, the fascist or “soldier male” (der soldatischer Mann) cannot be understood in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, but must instead be approached through the psychoanalysis of childhood (Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler) and of psychosis (Michael Balint and others), as well as through concepts inherited from Deleuze and Guattari. The Freudian model of Id, Ego, and Superego and, therefore, of the Oedipus Complex, cannot be applied to him, as the fascist has actually never achieved his separation from the mother and has never built himself an Ego in the Freudian sense of the term.

The fascist is he who is “not-yet-fully-born.” However, he isn’t a psychopath; he has effectuated a partial separation, he is socialized, he speaks, he writes, he acts in the world in a manner that, alas, is often effective, he even takes power sometimes. In order to achieve this, he has himself built or caused to be built—by way of discipline, training, and physical exercise—an externalized Ego that takes the shape of a “suit” of “muscle-armor.” This maintains all of his drives, his desiring functions, which are entirely formless as he is not capable of objectifying them, on the inside, where the fascist has no access. But this Ego-armor is never entirely hermetic, it is even fragile; it only holds up thanks to external supports: school, the army, even prison. In periods of crisis, it crumbles and the fascist then risks being overwhelmed by his uncontrollable desiring productions, the “dissolution of personal limits.”

To survive, he externalizes what threatens him internally, and, thus, for him all dangers take on two forms, which are intimately connected: that of the feminine and that of the liquid, of “all that which flows.” As the fascist cannot entirely annihilate womankind (he needs her in order to reproduce), he splits her into two figures: the White Nurse (or the Lady of the Manor), a virgin, of course, who generally dies or, in any case, is somehow petrified, unless the fascist marries her, in which case she just simply disappears from the text; and the Red Nurse (or Prostitute), whom the fascist, in order to maintain his Ego, kills, preferably by crushing her with the butt of his rifle, transforming her into a bloody pulp. As for the threat of the liquid, the fascist can either project it onto Bolshevism, in which case it returns in the form of the Red Tide, against which he erects the dike of his arms and of his (hard) body, or he can tame it, by, for example, making the crowd flow into the rigid channel of the National Socialist parade.

© Antoine d’Agata 2023 Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York City and grew up in France. He worked for many years in humanitarian emergency operations in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, D. R. Congo, and other countries. His literary debut, The Kindly Ones (HarperCollins 2009), won the Prix Goncourt when it was first published in France as Les Bienveillantes in 2006, and has since been translated into nearly forty languages. His other works available in English include The Fata Morgana Books (Two Lines Press, 2013), Triptych: Three Studies After Francis Bacon (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising (Verso, 2015). His first feature documentary film, Wrong Elements, was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2016.

Klaus Theweleit is a German sociologist. He is best known for his two-volume study of the psychology of Nazism, Male Fantasies (University of Minnesota Press, 1987–89), first published in Germany as Männerphantasien in 1977–78.

Max Lawton is a translator of Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish. He is the translator of eight novels by Vladimir Sorokin, including Telluria (New York Review Books Classics, 2022) and Their Four Hearts (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022).

WORDS

This book is actually not about Degrelle’s politics, but about his language. “[...] [L]et us say with true words what their epic struggle was, how they fought, how their bodies suffered, how their hearts offered themselves up,” he writes. Very well: let us look at what these true words truly tell us. As they are written.

“[...] [T]here is a specifically ‘fascist’ mode of producing reality [...] fascism is not a matter of form of government, or form of economy, or of a system in any sense,” writes Klaus Theweleit in his great 1977 book Male Fantasies. Theweleit, perhaps the first to do so, decided to take fascists at their word. Working on a corpus of around two hundred novels, memoirs, and journals written by veterans of the German Freikorps from 1918 to 1923, he attempted to analyze the mental structure of the fascist personality. Impossible to here summarize this brilliant, polymorphic, and elusive book; the most we can attempt is to sketch out its general conclusions.

For Theweleit, the fascist or “soldier male” (der soldatischer Mann) cannot be understood in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, but must instead be approached through the psychoanalysis of childhood (Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler) and of psychosis (Michael Balint and others), as well as through concepts inherited from Deleuze and Guattari. The Freudian model of Id, Ego, and Superego and, therefore, of the Oedipus Complex, cannot be applied to him, as the fascist has actually never achieved his separation from the mother and has never built himself an Ego in the Freudian sense of the term.

The fascist is he who is “not-yet-fully-born.” However, he isn’t a psychopath; he has effectuated a partial separation, he is socialized, he speaks, he writes, he acts in the world in a manner that, alas, is often effective, he even takes power sometimes. In order to achieve this, he has himself built or caused to be built—by way of discipline, training, and physical exercise—an externalized Ego that takes the shape of a “suit” of “muscle-armor.” This maintains all of his drives, his desiring functions, which are entirely formless as he is not capable of objectifying them, on the inside, where the fascist has no access. But this Ego-armor is never entirely hermetic, it is even fragile; it only holds up thanks to external supports: school, the army, even prison. In periods of crisis, it crumbles and the fascist then risks being overwhelmed by his uncontrollable desiring productions, the “dissolution of personal limits.”

To survive, he externalizes what threatens him internally, and, thus, for him all dangers take on two forms, which are intimately connected: that of the feminine and that of the liquid, of “all that which flows.” As the fascist cannot entirely annihilate womankind (he needs her in order to reproduce), he splits her into two figures: the White Nurse (or the Lady of the Manor), a virgin, of course, who generally dies or, in any case, is somehow petrified, unless the fascist marries her, in which case she just simply disappears from the text; and the Red Nurse (or Prostitute), whom the fascist, in order to maintain his Ego, kills, preferably by crushing her with the butt of his rifle, transforming her into a bloody pulp. As for the threat of the liquid, the fascist can either project it onto Bolshevism, in which case it returns in the form of the Red Tide, against which he erects the dike of his arms and of his (hard) body, or he can tame it, by, for example, making the crowd flow into the rigid channel of the National Socialist parade.