Introduction to Bataille

Abstract

Georges Bataille's Psychological Structure of Fascism is of historical interest in more than the degraded sense usually given to that term. An obvious question must, however, be addressed. What draws our attention to a long neglected essay, written in 1933-34, attempting to present the rudiments of a theory of fascism? Fascism, however much impelled by a silent drive to self-destruction, was in fact defeated from the outside. We still live the consequences of the failure of any oppositional politics to overcome fascism from the inside, and so our historical interest in the 1930s continues to take the form of a political interest in the state of critical theory itself, then and now. Fascist ideology was an antiMarxism to which Marxism found no adequate political response. National Socialism was a rehabilitation of capitalism which outstripped the socialist movement. And, most importantly, fascism was a mass movement that preempted the revolutionary organization of the masses. The labor of the historian has been to discern, in the social and cultural dynamics of the rise of fascism, the gaps which mark the failure of effective opposition to emerge or sustain itself. The belatedness of this historical knowledge rejoins the efforts of those theorists who, in the 1930s, confronted fascism as a crisis in their own cultural and intellectual practice. For the labor of theory addresses itself precisely to what, in the domain of historical and political realities, has become problematical. Bataille, like Ernst Bloch, saw in fascism elements of a social experience that the socialist movement could not afford to cede to the Right though it already had. Bataille's theoretical project thus shares another aim with that of Bloch: to discover in the ground of fascist mobilization the historical and affective forces which could and must form the base of social revolution. In this both of these theorists were too late and, therefore, too soon. It is precisely this misalignment, this temporal gap, between theory and reality, between historical process and political practice, that defines the relevance of Bataille (or Bloch) today. Marcuse put the problem succinctly in the preface to his writings collected in Negations: At that time, it was not yet clear that the powers that had defeated fascism by virtue of their technical and