The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity by Habermas Jürgen; Lawrence Frederick; McCarthy Thomas

Author:Habermas, Jürgen; Lawrence, Frederick; McCarthy, Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2014-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

II

The victory of the Fascist movement in Italy and the National Socialist takeover of power in the German Reich were — long before Auschwitz — phenomena from which issued waves not only of irritation, but also of fascinated excitement. There was no theory of contemporaneity not affected to its core by the penetrating force of fascism. This holds true especially of the theories that were in their formative period in the late 1920s and early 1930s — of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, as we have seen, no less than of Bataille’s heterology or Horkheimer’s Critical Theory.6 In November 1933, when Heidegger was making his campaign speeches for the “Führer,” Bataille published a study of The Psychological Structure of Fascism.7 In contrast with Marxist attempts, he directs his attention not to economic and social-structural causes accessible only to theory, but to the most visible effects, especially to the palpable social-psychological phenomena of the new political movements. He is particularly interested in the connection between the masses mobilized by plebiscites and their charismatic Führer-figures, and generally in the show aspect of fascist leadership (brought to mind by Fest’s Hitler film) — the cultic honoring of leaders as sacred personages, the artfully staged mass rituals, the manifestly violent and hypnotic elements, the breach of legality, the renunciation of even the appearance of democracy and all egalitarian values: “The affective stream that connects the Führer with his followers in the form of moral identification ... is a function of a common awareness of mounting energies, growing violently into a state without measure or standard, which are accumulating and becoming available without limit in the person of the Führer.”8

Bataille was Marxist enough at the time to recognize the objective conditions of crisis of which fascism was only the exploiter. The capitalist economy and its apparatus have first to “collapse because of internal contradictions” before a kind of violence that has no affinity whatsoever with the structure of existing society could inject itself into the functional gaps. The principle of freedom of choice was incorporated in democratically constituted industrial capitalism, a subjective freedom of choice for private entrepreneurs and for workers as well as for citizens (isolated in the election booths): “The movement and ultimate triumph of National Socialism owe not a little to the fact that some German capitalists became aware of how risky for them this principle of individual freedom could become in a crisis.”9 To be sure, the functional imperative for a totalitarian abolition of this principle remains “an empty wish” taken by itself; the resources on which fascism feeds — which is to say, the “inexhaustible wealth of forms of affective life” — cannot be explained in functionalist terms. That these forces taken over by the fascist state obviously spring from a realm that is heterogeneous in relation to the existing society gives Bataille the motivation to study heterogeneous elements. He is not satisfied with psychoanalytic explanations that derive from Freud’s study, Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis’10 he is convinced instead that the

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