On Microfascism: Gender, Death, and War

Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. When we look at fascism we tend to focus on how its politics are institutionalized and systematized, but to effectively counter fascist movement we need to understand it beyond its most visible and public expressions. To understand fascism, Jack Bratich believes, we must understand the way fascists see the world. To do this, we must look to the culture of fascism. There, we will find “microfascism,” or the ways in which a fascist way of understanding the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse our everyday life. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Bratich investigates a political ontology of fascist subjectivity. Before there is a fascist movement, he notes, there is a fascist body that can move or be moved. By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core and “becoming-man” as a key process of subjectivation we are able to observe the formation of a fascist body enacted through everyday sexism as well as feminicide. This body is also formed through appeals to recover the subjects created by earlier foundational wars. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency tarries with its own destruction (and thereby the destruction of others) we can trace how fascism refines and expands the necropolitics that underpin capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems. The implications of On Microfascism are unsettling. The seeds of the fascist worldview, it suggests, may be more widespread than we think. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To combat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” rooted in the ethics of aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.