Six
Literary Fascism and the Problem of Gender: The Aesthetics of the Body in Drieu la Rochelle
Pederasty and the Jews, they go well together. What a sorry decadence. . . . The entire world is in decadence. The "Modern" is a planetary catastrophe.
Drieu la Rochelle, Journal (November 18,
1939)
I hadn't understood that man gives form to woman, but she brings him her substance, her life, that magnificent brute matter of her spirituality which calls for the chisel [of man].
Journal (December 23, 1939)
More than ever I understand that for me lust, the confusion of bodies of so many women, was a way of subordinating the feminine element in my life to the exigencies of a masculine spirituality.
Journal (February 27, 1940)
To put the question of gender as it applies to fascism as directly as possible: Can fascism be assigned a sexual identity? And if it can, what is gained by focusing on the gender implications of fascist ideology? That fascism, with its cult of (masculine) youth, of the soldier-warrior, of virile and most often aggressive and violent athletic values in general, has become a topic of gender-oriented studies is certainly not surprising. Because fascist texts such as Brasillach's or Drieu la Rochelle's are in their general lines unapologetically rooted in what has come to be known as masculinist ideology, they seem to cry out for analyses concerned with gender differences. And in terms of the question of gender, it is certainly not difficult to show how a totalitarian masculinist ideology such as fascism—the ideology of masculine superiority radicalized or even absolut-ized—is itself a symptom of a deep fear of women and results in the violent rejection of all nonsubservient or nonidealized women, all those who threaten masculine superiority and male values, values that are considered masculine because they are phallic, aggressive, and destructive of women and of all those considered to be less than totally masculine males.
A problem of a very particular kind must be dealt with, however, when it comes to gender-oriented studies of fascism. It is not the problem facing any theory or critical methodology when confronted with the complexity of material that resists analysis and forces the critical approach to develop more flexible strategies to deal with such complexity, but the opposite problem, that of self-evidence. In terms of fascism, the work of gender analysis appears much too easy. The distinctions between masculine and feminine, aggressiveness and sociability, domination and freedom are seemingly so clearly drawn within fascist texts and politics that the delineation and denunciation of this absolute form of the masculine, and the analysis of the dangers of such an extreme form of "masculinism," do not themselves need to be either nuanced or complex. It may also be that the crassness and rigidity of the form of gender differentiation found in most fascist texts encourage the application of models and procedures of analysis that themselves accept rigid distinctions between the masculine and the feminine. The goals of such analyses are of course praiseworthy: to attack all expressions of fascism and undermine the sexual hierarchy blatant in all of them. The risk, however, is that of demonizing or pathologizing fascism in order all the better to distant oneself from it, of making fascism exclusively the expression of the "sick," overly aggressive, overly masculine male, or even of the pathological nature of maleness itself.
But if Freud got himself into trouble—as well he should have—asking the question, "What does a woman want?", we should perhaps learn from his mistakes and not be too hasty in asking and answering Freud's question and questions like it, whether we ask them of women or of men. For if we are or if we should be extremely critical of such questions when they are addressed to women, should not we be as vigilant and critical when it comes to men? Are we really so sure that we know what men want, what they are, and what their so-called "subject position" is that we are able, not just to show that fascism is violent, aggressive, and dogmatically hierarchical and exclusive in its communitarian aspirations, and in this sense "phallic" or "masculinist" in its dominant traits and essence, but also to argue or imply that "the masculine" is in its essence already fascist or protofascist, and that "the feminine" is thus privileged as the antifascist principle or force par excellence?
It is not as if such arguments are wrong. On the contrary, as concerns fascism, they seem self-evident and irrefutable. But what might appear to many as self-evident today, was not always so, because the history of the study of fascism is divided on the issue of the masculinist foundation of fascism, and nowhere more so than as it concerns French literary fascists and collaborationists. It seems evident to us now that the warrior mystique, the ideal of male bonding at the heart of fascist youth groups, fascist movements, and political parties, and even the cult of the dictator/leader, should all be considered products of the all-powerful, antifeminine male ego ideal; but from the very beginning, there have been those who have accused fascists in general, and those French fascists who were the most enthusiastic collaborators with Nazi Germany in particular, not for being overly masculine, violent brutes and male supremacists, but rather for failing to be masculine enough. In this way, collaborators were portrayed as being particularly weak and feminine, feminized males or homosexuals, not true French men. In other words, what would be taken by most critics today as evidence of an absolute masculine ideology has also frequently been treated as the failure of certain men to be "men," to live up to even a moderate version of "maleness."
The latter position cannot be simply dismissed, no matter how homophobic it might be, for it may not turn out to be any more (or any less) problematical than the position that simply equates fascism with the masculine. The most well known of the accusations against French collaborators that treated them as failed men, as "women" and/or homosexuals, was of course made by Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?", originally published in August 1945.1 In trying to explain French collaboration and at the same time distance himself and other members of the Resistance from it as much as possible, Sartre took an extreme patriotic and militantly nationalist position, treating collaboration as an "illness," a social pathology similar to criminality and suicide, "a phenomenon of disassimilation," a "fixation through foreign collective forms on elements badly assimilated by the indigenous community" (Situations, III, 46). Collaborators were considered by Sartre to be exactly what they (and, in fact, extremist nationalists before them) accused their own enemies of being: dangerous "forces of disintegration" (47) within the nation, social "waste" [déchet; 48, 49), a group that supposedly refused to be or could not be integrated into the legitimate political traditions and culture of France and that had to be rejected and discarded as waste in order to purify and maintain the authentic nationalist traditions, whether they were claimed to be republican or antirepublican in form.
Sartre claimed that collaboration was something the collaborator carried within himself long before he actually collaborated—an antisocial tendency, a fundamental choice, or a "vocation" (44) that could be said to constitute the "nature" (43) of the collaborator and that simply awaited the proper circumstances (the defeat and the Occupation) before manifesting itself fully. In a sense, Satre decided, these men were never really "French" to begin with, for they had "no real links to contemporary France" (48), and so their choice of the foreign coincided with their true foreign nature. This was the very same accusation that Barrès and others had made of Dreyfus and the Dreyfusards, and the identical claim that the anti-Semitic fascists and collaborators had made against the Jews. Sartre claimed that one should not confuse collaborators with fascists and that he was chiefly interested in describing the former. And it is certainly true that some French fascists refused to collaborate, while many nonfascists were in fact militant collaborators. But Sartre's portrait of typical collaborators, the "interior emigrants" who had always refused the democratic traditions of France, "royalists of the Action Française and fascists of Je suis partout" (48), coincides with the profile of the group of literary fascists being treated in this book. It is as if the most developed form of collaboration, the fullest realization of the state of the social waste product, is the fascist collaborator.
The French fascist collaborator is not only a disintegrating, foreign element within the authentic French tradition—"supported by foreign armies, he could only be an agent of the foreign" (50)—but he is also weak and effeminate. His chief characteristic is submissiveness, accepting and giving in, first of all, to historical events and, second, to what he perceives to be the most powerful forces of the present. The collaborator has been weakened by what Sartre calls "the ideology of our time, . . . stricken with that intellectual disease one can call historicism" (52). Such a disease weakens the political immune system, the system that allows one to resist the foreign and then question and even oppose the domination of historical events that may seem at any one moment to have already determined the course of future history. Without the force to say no to what exists, to resist what is for what could be, and moreover justifying "what is" as what should be, the collaborator—and here Sartre equated the collaborator directly with the fascist (61)—poses as a realist. But his realism, Sartre claimed, simply "covers over his fear of doing the job of man," which is "to say yes or no according to principles" rather than passively accepting a future forged by the present (53). The fascist collaborator is no man at all, for the effects of his historicist disease have rendered him incapable of fulfilling his obligations as a man.
Sartre denounced what he called the collaborator's hastily conceived "ethics of virility," in which "the submission to facts" was considered "a test of courage and of virile toughness" (56-57), in the name of an activist ethics and the true courage and virile toughness of the resistant. Writing after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the destruction of fascism in Europe, Sartre had the "force" of the present historical moment on his side, as he condemned the collaborationist's less than virile privileging of and submission to historical events. But more important, Satre's own anti-historicist "ethics of virility" depended on the fascist-collaborationist ethics being destroyed through nothing less than a test of force in man-to-man philosophical-political combat. His purpose was to show that the better "man" (the better concept of man) would always ultimately win in history; and, in fact, with the end of the war and the liberation of France, the better man had already won.
The fascist collaborator, "this priest of virile potency and masculine virtues," who believed in force and posited it as the ultimate moral concept, was for Sartre really a false man, for he acted like a woman and used "the weapons of the weak, of women," that is, "intrigue, trickery which is supported by force, . . . even charm and seduction" (58). Sartre highlighted in the writings of major fascist collaborators, such as Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Drieu la Rochelle, and Brasillach (whose name appears in his text as Brazillach), references to the relations between France and Germany that were characterized as "a sexual union in which France plays the role of the woman." For Sartre, this indicated that in the collaborationist relation to power, there was "a curious mixture of masochism and homosexuality. The Parisian homosexual milieu, moreover, supplied numerous and brilliant recruits [for collaboration]" (58). Sartre thus generalized from a limited number of references in the work of noted fascist collaborators, and from a limited number of cases of homosexuals who had collaborated, to make the collaborator a feminized male and collaboration a profoundly homosexual act. He alleged that homosexuality was not just the sign of "femininity" but evidence of the masochism of men who in the name of virility destroyed their own virility. The man-to-man combat thus was no contest, for one of the combatants had been disqualified from the start, with his virility, but not virility itself, so seriously put into question that he could not possibly defend himself against the stronger virile force of the true republican.2
In the name of completing the work of the French Revolution of 1789 through a new revolution, Sartre argued that "it is necessary to accomplish as much as possible the unification of French society," which meant that the primary element of disintegration, the collaborator—the "enemy democratic societies perpetually carry in their womb [en leur sein]"—had to be assimilated into democracy or eliminated; "the breeding-ground [pépinière] of fascists that democracy has always been" had in the future to be closely monitored and controlled by "restrictive laws" (60), so that fascism would not be born again. For only in this way would the failure of "every political realism" (61) of this type be guaranteed. Assimilation or expulsion, that was the only alternative open for the feminized, masochistic internal enemies of France. It is as if Sartre were also condemning the feminine side of democracy, for if democracy had not always carried in its womb such misformed, feminized males, then the unification of France would seemingly have already taken place long ago—among "true men." Only the harsh and restrictive laws of the authentically virile male could guarantee that the breeding ground of fascism constituted by Mother Democracy would be less fertile in the future, with "her" offspring being less masochistic, better formed, and more fully in conformance with the ideal, integrated male.
Sartre was certainly not alone among important political theorists of the left in characterizing the fascist as a "failed male" or homosexual. Theodor Adorno, in a section of Minima Moralia (translated by E.F.N. Jephcott [London: Verso Press, 1985]) written in 1944 and entitled "Tough Baby," made the sweeping claim that "totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together." His claim was based on the "observation" that so-called "he-men" or "tough-guys" were in fact "masochists," their lives based on the "lie [which] is nothing other than repressed homosexuality. . . . In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit they are like them" (46). Thus, Adorno continued, the more exaggerated and active the implementation of the male principle of domination, the more "totally passive, virtually feminine" it actually becomes. In other words, the total realization of the he-man in, or as, totalitarianism amounts to the creation of what could be called a "she-man," a man who is not really a man because he is too much or too exclusively a man and admits of no alternate principle to the masculine, a subject that "negates everything which is not of his own kind" (46). The exclusion of the woman, and of any other principle opposed to an absolute, masculine one, was in this way paradoxically seen as a sign of passivity and effeminacy, and thus of the homosexual. At its limits, then, the opposition masculine/feminine reversed itself, with one term becoming its opposite, and in this way the attack on fascism as the cult of the masculine principle constituted an attack on the feminine principle that represented the culmination of the masculine. It was only, then, in not being masculinists, that men could become men; it was in realizing absolutely the masculine principle that they would show themselves to be passive women.
Adorno thus left the hierarchy determining the opposition between masculine and feminine in place, but his concept of the way one term reversed itself and became the other seriously complicated the delineation of male and female. What was clear, however, was that the homosexual and the feminine remained negative terms, a destiny that the masculine was to avoid at all costs. Even though this was not Adorno's explicit intention, the process of reversal that he described was so radical that a blurring or ambivalence of sexual identity did occur at the limits of the distinction between the genders, for no matter how many negative connotations were attached to the process, if the masculine at the moment of its fullest, most exclusive culmination was necessarily transformed into the feminine, into a feminized version of the masculine, what really was left of the masculine and the feminine as distinct entities? Was not the masculine as such just as negative as the feminine, even in the masculinist terms of Adorno's argument, and was not the feminine just as positive as the masculine? The confusion of one gender with the other that Adorno's analysis produced did not neutralize in any way the "virile ideology" in which it was rooted, but it did reveal the contradictions at the core of the process of dialectical reversal in which the realization of sexual identity culminated, no matter which term was privileged and which one devalued.
To attack the limitations of gyno/homophobic approaches to fascism such as Sartre's and Adorno's may be an important step in the process of understanding better both the attractiveness of fascism to so many male writers and its aesthetic and political complexity, but it is not in itself sufficient, especially if the attempt to undermine the masculinist hierarchy evident in their work ends up instead simply reversing it. This is the case with Klaus Theweleit's freewheeling study of fascism, Male Fantasies.3 No study of the fundamental masculine identity of fascism has been more unrelenting, radical, and unorthodox in its chasse à l'homme than Theweleit's, but at the same time the problems and limitations of this work are many. They range from its major premise that fascism is primarily a question of the rigidity and violence of male desire, to its often superficial and confused treatment of both politics and psychoanalysis, to its mystification of the pleasure principle and gross simplification of Freud's notion of the death drive, and finally to its rambling and very subjective analyses of the political issues and texts it treats and the arbitrary or "free" associations it makes among very different issues. In spite of these and other limitations—its avoidance of any developed discussion of the racism and anti-Semitism at the core of Nazi ideology, for one—Male Fantasies does succeed in demonstrating the polemical force of the equation of the masculine with fascism, as well as of the resulting equation of the feminine and feminine desire with nonfascism or antifascism. It also reveals the problems with such equations, even if they were to be more systematically developed and were not connected to an idiosyncratic approach such as Theweleit's.
The primary problem has to do with the opposition itself between the masculine and the feminine, even or especially in the realm of desire, a problem Theweleit indirectly acknowledges at the very beginning of his two-volume study and to which he returns again near the end of the second volume. It is the issue of homosexuality and where it should be situated in terms of the opposition between repressive and violent male desire and male bonding, on the one hand, and what he depicts as open, non-restrained, flowing female desire, on the other. Everything he says about men's fear of women and of the images he associates with female desire seems to implicate the male homosexual as much as, if not more than, the male heterosexual in fascist desire. This leads him very close to both Sartre and Adorno in the question of the latent homosexuality of masculine desire in general and of the soldier male or the fascist male in particular. His repeated and energetic refusal to accept such a consequence of his own argument indicates, in my mind, the fundamental flaw within the argument itself, one that is explicitly denied but nevertheless functionally present in all of his analyses. For if the major premise is that desire is fundamentally either masculine or feminine, restricted or free, then there can be no ambivalence between or complication of these principles or of the identity of either sex. There is no place, therefore, for principles and forms of desire that are neither simply masculine nor feminine, that are both pleasurable and destructive or free and restrictive at the same time.
Theweleit uses the journals of the German Freikorps as his principal examples of the fantasies of the soldier male and thus, even though their actual participation in the German National Socialist party could hardly be called representative or conclusive, as examples of the fantasies of the fascist male in general. He not only equates the soldiers' political fears and hatred of communism with their imaginary fears and hatred of sexually active, free women, but he argues that the former are always rooted in and ultimately derived from the latter. He believes that fascist politics and ideology are always derived from and are a function of male desire, and that they are ultimately connected to the everyday desires and experiences of all men. For those who might not want to generalize as quickly as he does, for any man who is unwilling to call the specific desires and fears of the soldier males (or the male as soldier) essentially masculine and thus identify himself with them, Theweleit's response is simply that such a man is either lying to himself or has repressed what all men desire:
Any male reading the texts of these soldier males—and not taking immediate refuge in repression—might find in them a whole series of traits he recognizes from his own past or present behavior, from his own fantasies. (Any man who categorically denies this might want to verify it by asking the present, or past, women in his life.) (89)
Theweleit is thus claiming that a denial that the violent examples of male desire are typical of all men makes one, paradoxically, if not less of a man, then at least a man who does not know himself or his own fantasies. Theweleit, on the contrary, knows what a man wants, what he desires and fears, and how he acts with women, for he has listened to women, who are presented in this work as the ultimate and irrefutable authorities on what men desire, and how.
The man who knows what women know about men and admits that he too has these same desires and fears has a chance of no longer being as masculine or as patriarchal as before, a chance of fearing less and desiring more; that is, of desiring in an unbounded way—not as a man but as a woman. For as Theweleit puts it, "The pleasure principle . . . is in no way patriarchal" (201), and thus all true desire and pleasure are by définition feminine. The inverse, of course, Theweleit believes, is also true: all radical restrictions of "the flow of desire" or malformations of "productive" desire, its transformation into "nonproductive" desire, the work of destruction and the death drive, are thus masculine in their essence and fascist in their ultimate implications and applications.4 And fascism is nothing less than an attempt to eradicate pleasure and to control and thus "eradicate" the woman: "The core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure" (v. 2, 7).
Theweleit insists that he is talking about the "social nature of such 'gender-distinctions'" (v. 1, 221), not the nature of the male and the female as such, and not the natural attributes of either or both sexes in themselves. In this vein, he argues that "the sexuality of the patriarch is less 'male' than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much 'female' as suppressed, devivified—though sustaining less damage from its own work of suppression, it also contains the more beautiful possibilities for the future" (221-22). But in other instances and more frequently, he identifies the sexuality of the patriarch with male desire and destruction, the sexuality of the nonpatriarch with female desire and with the unbounded "productions" of the pleasure principle. These are the "beautiful possibilities" to which he refers. In the same vein, he also claims that "female chauvinism is a contradiction in terms" (v. 2, 87), which is to say that chauvinism is always the attribute of the male, even when practiced by women
The implementation of fascist economic and political policies was, according to Theweleit, on its deepest level the answer "to the fascist's need for activities to satisfy his psychic compulsion to domination" (v. 2, 406). In this sense, "the type of man who contributed to fascism's triumph" could be said to have "existed in essence long before the beginning of the war in 1914" (v. 2, 351), perhaps even from the beginning of time. Structurally similar to Sartre's version of fascism and collaboration—but the reversal of it in terms of the hierarchy of gender values it proposes—Theweleit's position on fascism in general, his denials notwithstanding, is that it constitutes the masculine essence or nature of a certain type of man, or of man as a type—of the man whose essence and destiny are to be fully male. Fascism originally "develops from his feelings [those of this type of man]; he is a fascist from the inside" before being one on the outside (380). The implication is that fascism will truly be a thing of the past only when the masculine type is destroyed from the inside, only when male-female relations are totally recast because the male has been totally re-formed or remade, and only when his desire also becomes productive (female) and cut off from all restrictive and destructive masculine forces. Arguing against the destructive norms of male (fascist) desire, Theweleit's radical alternative is itself strongly normative and restrictive, advocating a free and creative, unbounded desire as the ideal nonfascist principle and a new masculine type to replace the patriarchal fascist type: a superwoman to replace the superman. Theweleit not only acts as if he knows what men desire; he also acts as if he knows what desire in general should be.
Theweleit thus considers fascism to be primarily the struggle against desire: "Fascism, then, waged its battle against human desires by encoding them with a particular set of attributes: with effeminacy, unhealthiness, criminality, Jewishness—all of which existed together under the umbrella of 'Bolshevism' " (v. 2, 13). It is a battle in which the woman pays the heaviest price because, Theweleit claims, it is always against her—the woman in, or as, the Jew; the woman in, or as, the communist; the woman as disease and decadence—that the war is waged. Fascists hate women, hate the way they desire, and the pleasure principle they embody and live, and their fascism is primarily an expression of this hatred and the attempt to dominate and destroy any feminine threats to their own rigid, destructive, phallic identity. And inasmuch as all men are claimed to desire, fantasize, and act in their relations with women with the same fears and hatreds as those of the Freikorps and the fascists, all men, as men, are at the very least latent fascists.
And this is where the question of homosexuality comes in. In fact, it comes in everywhere, in all those places left empty by the suppression of the woman, everywhere men desire their own phallic rigidity and themselves to the exclusion of women. It is difficult to see how it could be argued that the logic of Theweleit's analysis does not imply that an imagined community consisting exclusively of men and determined by men, a world of masculine bonding and love, would in its essence be homosexual, and that the total realization of the masculine ideology in the male type then would necessarily be homosexuality. But Theweleit repeatedly rejects such implications. The first time he mentions the issue, it is to oppose the notion proposed by various writers (he refers directly to Reich and Adorno) that homosexuality is an essential component of aggression among soldier-males (that is, in his terminology, fascists) and group ties in general, as Freud argued. Such notions, he claims, cannot be sustained, given that we lack "any sort of theoretically grounded understanding of what the term 'homosexuality' might mean," and that there is no "agreement about the form of social behavior, love relationships and preferred activities, possibilities for satisfaction of drives, forms of pleasure and unpleasure, . . . that might be expected from the type of person who is labeled homosexual, or latently homosexual" (v. 1, 54).
Theweleit wisely advises caution in this area, therefore, because the differences of opinion indicate to him that the opinions advanced even among analysts constitute a "series of prejudices, false ideas, and personal-defense mechanisms" (54-55). To label something or someone homosexual has always been to treat (and reject) him as other. In what Theweleit considers a very cloudy area, and in order to avoid all anti-homosexual (masculinist) biases, he initially refuses to speculate and link the homosexual to the soldier-male, a concept for which he obviously feels a consensus (at least among women) already exists as to what this type of man desires and what forms of pleasure and unpleasure might be expected from him. In this sense, it is the lack of knowledge of homosexual desire that all the better highlights what for Theweleit is the known, representable, and theoretically grounded nature of nonhomosexual, masculine desire.
Near the end of the second volume, when he returns to the question of the relation between fascism and homosexuality, it is in order to separate "true" homosexual desire and sexuality from asexual, encoded sexual practices between fascist men, which he considers in fact not to be homosexual:
As a homosexual, the fascist can prove, both to himself and others, that he is "nonbourgeois," and boldly defiant of normality. His "homosexuality" is strictly encoded; and for this very reason, it never becomes sexual. Like the opposite from which it flees, it is rigidly codified. . . . [The fascist male's] escape into homosexuality ultimately functions as reterritorialization: as an act prescribed by the social order, it never opens new outlets; it simply reinforces dams. (323, 324).
In other words, when fascists act as homosexuals, their "homosexuality" is encoded in the same way as the sexuality of fascists who act as heterosexuals. Their fantasies and desires are, therefore, male rather than, homosexual; their flight from women (and "true" female desire) is identical to that of the nominally heterosexual soldier-male, who fears and flees women in the same way. The fascist male is not homosexual, then, even when he is a homosexual, because his desires do not meet the rigid standards of the norm Theweleit applies to them.
Theweleit, therefore, does act as if he also knows what homosexuals want, and consensus or not, he distinguishes what they desire, their true sexuality, from the homosexual practices of fascists, thus putting "true" homosexuals on the same side as women as representatives of the other of masculine (fascist) desire, on the side of true desire and pleasure. Desire itself is the sole property of the other of men: of women and men who desire as women do. The fascist, on the other hand, is a fully realized, extreme example of the male in general, of "a body incapable of the experience of pleasure in any form" (195). Fascism, as the negation of pleasure, is thus the most extreme form of repression, the fullest manifestation of the pathological.
Desiring, fantasizing, and having sexual experiences like a woman thus provide the only alternative to and cure for fascism, and in this way female desire is presented by Theweleit as the unique nonfascist, nonmasculinist norm.5 In the end, Theweleit's radically normative, "feminist" approach to fascism, which treats fascism as the supreme masculinist ideology, turns out to be just as restrictive and normative (in the name of liberation and female desire) as Sartre's or Adorno's traditional homophobic characterization of fascism as the work of "lesser men." Such is the risk—and it is a risk rather than a necessity—run by any critical endeavor that attempts to radically overturn the hierarchy of gender differences. It is the risk of reversing and in this way perpetuating the hierarchy, the risk of undoing the existing norms but in the process imposing new (or the same) norms that are linked to and dependent on the rejected norms through a process of radical opposition.
Sartre's, Adorno's, and Theweleit's analyses and condemnations of fascism all have as their goal the identification and isolation of the sexuality of the fascist and of fascism itself, so that we can all finally distance ourselves from or free ourselves of him and of it. Whether fascism is considered the supreme expression of the masculine or the less than masculine expression of an "inferior," feminized male is ultimately of less importance than the characterization of the fascist as a foreign or pathological other, as representing what is radically different from the ideal political or libidinal norm.
It would be impossible to deny that there is an important gender component in fascist imaginary constructs in general and in the construction of the figure of the fascist type in particular. But as much as we can learn from Sartre, Adorno, and Theweleit about pitfalls inherent in all attempts to determine the gender of fascism, it will take a more critical and less normative approach to the problem than theirs to deal with the question of "the gender(s) of fascism" in its contradictory complexity. It will take an approach that does not pretend to know what or how men and women (either heterosexual or gay and lesbian men and women) desire, one that does not know what authentic desire is or should be and that does not have as its ultimate goal the imposition of either a norm for desire or of desire itself as the ultimate norm.
Alice Kaplan has indicated some of the problems inherent in the determination of fascism as an essentially or exclusively masculine ideology.6 Unlike Theweleit, she insists on the radical ambivalence of fascist writers toward both the masculine and the feminine and the paternal and the maternal components of fascism, because, she argues, "sexism is highly interactive," and the various masculine and feminine categories are "so unstable" (Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 11). This leads her to conclude that "one can't 'decide' between the mother-bound and father-bound elements in fascism. They get bundled up in fascism's totalizing machinery and offered up in fascist language to appeal at different emotional registers at different moments of fascism's history" (24). Her own references in this context are primarily to Brasillach, but in much the same spirit I would argue that Drieu la Rochelle's writings constitute an even more complex, contradictory example of the instability and ambivalence of masculine/feminine, paternal/maternal distinctions within the "virile ideology" constituted by fascism. Just as his aesthetics contain both modernist and antimodernist elements—as Robert Soucy has argued in "Drieu la Rochelle and Modernist Anti-Modernism in French Fascism," Modern Language Notes, v. 95, no. 4 (1980)—and his politics both nationalist and antinationalist principles, an argument could be made that his fascism was as much if not more rooted in the ambivalence of gender as in dominant masculinist, homophobic values alone. His fascism thus consisted of a fusion (or confusion) of genders as much as it did of a fusion of different and even opposing ideologies and aesthetics.
This in no way denies that Drieu la Rochelle's aesthetics of politics were sexually charged, but it seems legitimate to ask with which sex(es) his politics were "charged," how they were "charged," and what relation they had to sexual difference(s) in general? It is not that masculinist values, including antifeminine and violently homophobic statements, are missing from his literary and political writings or his journal; it is just that an approach which focuses exclusively on the strictly masculinist side of his form of "male fantasies" would, like those insisting on the "feminine" or homosexual nature of fascism, fall short of understanding the importance of gender ambivalence in his aesthetics of fascism. This ambivalence certainly does not make him less of a fascist. It rather reveals the complexity of the question of gender in fascism and why fascism cannot be treated simply as the discourse of the other, whether the other is defined as foreigner, monster, or madman, or as either the "feminized," less than virile male, or as the fearful and violently repressive, gynophobic soldier-male.
Drieu la Rochelle consistently characterized the decadence of modernity in terms of both gender and race, associating decadence and the loss of productive virility primarily with women, homosexuals, and Jews. He considered force and creativity, on the other hand, to be aspects of the ideal character of the true male, even if rarely if ever achieved by real men. In this sense, his sexual and political fantasies of the ideal totalitarian community seem perfect examples of fascist "male fantasies." And yet a rigid opposition between the masculine and the feminine does not determine Drieu la Rochelle's approach to fascism in its entirety. For as he shows in his novels, and as he frequently indicates in his essays and especially in his journal written during the Occupation, the new fascist man and fascism itself are counterforces within rather than forces existing outside the general decadence of modernity: "As a good decadent, I have the taste for willed and conscious force due to a lack of spontaneous and inborn force. Believing in decadence, I couldn't believe in anything other than fascism, which is proof of decadence because it is the conscious resistance to decadence with the means determined by that very decadence" [Journal [November 25, 1942], 312-13). He presents the fascist "new man," therefore, not so much as being opposed in his very nature to the decadence of nonvirile or antivirile forces as using the means determined by the decadent figures themselves to resist the very decadence they represent. This seems to be the only way for him, a modern, decadent male lacking in "spontaneous and inborn [masculine] force," to achieve any relation to force at all. Because fascism, as he sees it, is willed, constructed, and aesthetically formed, it constitutes a relation to force that in Drieu la Rochelle's own terms could be said to be as "feminine" as "masculine," as aesthetic as political.
His form of literary fascism proposes an aesthetics and politics of the body, a way of forming the body in terms of the dual ideal of beauty and force. In Notes pour comprendre le siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), Drieu la Rochelle made his most developed statement concerning the place of the body in the new European spiritual community allegedly being created by Nazi Germany. He moved in this work beyond slogans such as "Better soccer matches than war" or "The France of camping and kayaking over the France of cocktails and cinema," which were typical of his writings for the Parti Populaire Français, to construct an entire history of the body.7 This history of the body was of course at the same time a defense and an illustration of fascism.
To return to the body is first of all to return to the theme of fascism as a transcendent movement of youthful energy, the most profound expression of life itself, of pure force. The body is a political and aesthetic figure, material and spiritual at the same time. If the individual body is weak, badly functioning, divided against itself, so will be the body politic, the people, and the nation. If the body is healthy, vigorous, and the support of spiritual and cultural values and energies, the people will also be healthy and united. The fascist cult of the body was thus not just an eccentric curiosity; it was at the very foundation or center of fascist aesthetics and politics. In fascist discourse the body functions as a metaphysical concept in physical form, the spiritual embodied in flesh and blood. Fascist discourse on the body and on such things as sports, camping, and hiking should thus be taken very seriously, no matter how naive and sophomoric it might at times seem in the work of writers such as Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach.
For Drieu la Rochelle, the Middle Ages, the imaginary model for the new Europe, was first and foremost a time of youth and physical force: "Youth triumphed not only in everyday practices but in the arts, poetry, philosophy, religion. . . . It was an era of physical force" (9). In this way, the Middle Ages was modeled after what, following Nietzsche and the German romantics, he called a first antiquity in Greece, an antiquity before force was tamed by form, before the Dionysian was subdued by the Apollonian, before body and soul were separated by philosophy (Plato); that is, before the body was "isolated under the false light of aesthetics" (8).8 Aesthetics in its narrow (Apollonian) sense isolates and divides; the body aestheticized is already the body in the process of losing its dynamic force. Drieu la Rochelle's continued insistence on force to counter the aesthetics of form led to a demand for a total aesthetics before the division of force and form. Such an aesthetics claimed that with fascism the body reemerged as it was before the long separation that originated in the second antiquity, which was developed in the Latin world, reborn in the Renaissance, and then finally became institutionalized in French neoclassical aesthetic theory. The body reunited with itself and the spirit thus became the principal sign of the new fascist man.
Drieu la Rochelle argued that the most profound sign of the catastrophic state of the body in modernity was not just the sorry, divisive state of politics in parliamentary democracies like France before the war. It was also the absence of genuine art in those countries, for with the disembodiment of modern man, the hands needed to create art were incapable of doing so. He believed that the decline of spiritual life and artistic creation always accompanied the decline of physical activity:
Today, what are hands good for? Hands, poor hands which hang down at our sides. How do you expect there still to be painters born, when our hands our dead? And musicians as well. And even writers. Because style, for the latter as for all the others, is born of the memory of the entire body. (84)
For Drieu la Rochelle, style was man, but man was nothing spiritually if he was not first corporally sound. The weakening of the body, and the lack of physical development and fitness, indicated also the end of art. Just as modern man, when he became urban and lost contact with his body, ceased "to be a peasant and a warrior, [which] is again for him a way of losing the sense of every work, every thought" (85), he also ceased being able to produce works of art—and thus to produce the political as a dynamic, Dionysian work of art.
A body that is not healthy but not yet dead still functions in a reduced sort of way. In modernity, active, productive man is reduced to what Drieu la Rochelle called the semi-impotency of eroticism: "Man no longer walks, no longer runs, no longer jumps. He barely moves his organs and his members. He eats and drinks too much. The only movement left to him is eroticism" (78). In eroticism, to deal with a theme that runs throughout Drieu la Rochelle's political essays and novels, no child is produced. The exclusively erotic act, which is barely an act, has no purpose outside itself; it is unproductive. This results in its being excessively repeated with fatigue, passivity, and "inversion" as the inevitable result: Man "makes love too much, he tires himself out, he becomes passive. Inverted with women, he might just as well be with men. And women caressing men can just as well caress women" (86-87). The figure of the productive body in Drieu la Rochelle's work is thus, not surprisingly, both homophobic and gynophobic, for the man who "barely moves his organs and members" for purposes other than erotic pleasure and the woman who caresses men (and women) for the same purely erotic ends are (along with Jews) the principal figures of the unhealthy body. What he called the decadent "urban syphilis" of modernity was indicated most dramatically in Drieu la Rochelle's work in such images as "nonproductive" sexuality, a sexuality that did not produce a child (a work).9
In literature, Mallarmé represents the disembodiment of art, having written poetry in which Drieu la Rochelle claims there is only impotent, aesthetic "eroticism" rather than genuine creative force, a form of writing that produces no work:
No longer a body but no soul as well. . . . No longer any passion, neither carnal nor spiritual. . . . No faith, except in art, but what is art if it no longer ejaculates life? An allusion to what was, to the ancient monument of creation; a delicate, fine, piercing gesture, the fleeting sway of an impotency that imitates the rhythm of coitus. An apology for sterility and mental onanism in Hérodi-ade; an analysis of physical as well as mental impotency in l'Après-midi d'un Faune. (98)
In the eyes of a Maurras or a Brasillach, Mallarmé also was invested with many of the attributes of what they considered the ultimate form of romantic decadence and sterility, because his poetry and poetics were seen as foreign to the French, a betrayal of France, and a destruction of the French language. For them, Mallarmé was situated in the place of the foreigner and the Jew. For Drieu la Rochelle, Mallarmé occupied the same decadent place, but in his argument it was primarily the place of the homosexual (of the Jew as homosexual), the allegedly onanistic, inverted, "feminized male."
If art does not "ejaculate life"—that is, consist of an outburst of energy that produces a work—if it is onanistic and thus in Drieu la Rochelle's terms impotent, then it cannot be considered true art, just as the imitation of the rhythm of coitus cannot be considered "authentic" coitus. The ideal (of) art is thus also an ideal (of) coitus, which admits of no imitations and determines a norm of pure force and productivity. The ideal of art as an original, productive corporal force thus determines a dogmatic aesthetics and normative sexual politics that support Drieu la Rochelle's condemnation and exclusion of the onanism of a Mallarmé and the "homosexual" onanism of all those whose erotic and aesthetic pleasure could also be deemed "nonproductive." Notes pour comprendre le siècle thus represents an indictment of decadent or degenerate art as being a manifestation of the physical and sexual decadence or degeneracy of the culture that produces them.
Drieu la Rochelle points to Paul Claudel as the contemporary poet who represents the opposite values from a Mallarmé and who has miraculously been able to produce once again an authentic and complete poetry: "In this last romantic, this last symbolist, there is no more romanticism, no more symbolism at all. The circle is closed, man has reconstructed himself; body and soul, after such a long separation, are joined together" (115). "Claudel is the only truly healthy writer since the Middle Ages who is also truly great. A bizarre and miraculous reawakening of force in this exhausted France" (124). Claudel, along with a few other exceptional writers—he names Péguy, Bernanos, Bloy—has rediscovered nothing less than the "mystical foundation" of the French spirit, its true foundation, which a long history of rationalism had covered over and whose loss romanticism, symbolism, and naturalism each in its own way had exemplified and mourned.
This brief history of literature is also, of course, explicitly a history of politics. The reappearance of the mystical in literature is presented as the rediscovery of the true spiritual source of the political. "Can one consider as a negation of politics," Drieu la Rochelle asks, "what is a just and preliminary absorption into the sources of mystical thought? It is necessary to understand, because these sources have been blocked from the beginning of the eighteenth century and always more or less obstructed since then, that this has made all politics futile" (127). The rediscovery of the mystical source of literature and art by a limited number of writers constitutes nothing less than the sign of the possibility of a total political revival and provides as well the model for that revival. Literature leads the way back to the origin and creates the spiritual foundation for the political revival that fascism was to provide. Fused with the rediscovery of "athleticism," which he called a "science of the total body" (134), the return to mysticism in literature, while he described as "the reawakening of spiritual athleticism" (139), Drieu la Rochelle pointed the way to the creation of the total human type, to fascism as the revolution and restoration of the body (153) and the birth of a "new man."
Drieu la Rochelle's novel Gilles10 has rightly been called a "fascist parable," for, as Michel Winock argues, "better than most theoretical texts, it presents . . . a rich catalogue of fascist ideas as they had been expressed within a French context" ("Une parabole fasciste: 'Gilles' de Drieu la Rochelle," in Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France [Paris: Seuil, 1982], 349). But given the importance of the series of portraits it presents of the various women with whom Gilles (the principal character of the novel) is involved, and the relation of those portraits to his political aspirations and disappointments, the novel could just as rightly be called a sexual parable of the fantasies of a fascist male and their fundamental relation to his politics.
In those rare instances when Gilles's relationship with a woman is presented in positive terms, it is because the woman has fulfilled the function assigned to women by the novel as a whole: that of manifesting the beauty and intensity of force in itself. Alice, a nurse with whom Gilles has a brief but intense affair while a soldier during World War I, is described by the narrator as bringing to Gilles "a magnanimity of the heart to which he had believed his destiny was devoted, . . . a force completely developed and completely released" (210). Her recognition of his potential force transforms him into the warrior he desired to be but could not be in war: "She recognized in Gilles a man who . . . presented himself as being of her race, given how direct he had been" (207). For it is in response to the intensity of her desire and force that his own soldierly force is stimulated and returns: "He loved Alice with all his war force having come back" (210). In Gilles, the soldier-male needs a woman equal or even superior to his alleged force in order to be equal to (his ideal of) himself.
This presentation of force and desire is certainly determined by masculinist values, but it defines a world in which all active women are not feared for being passionate, forceful, and even warriorlike but rather desired as both the stimulant and reflection of man's alleged force and virility. Alice herself is presented as a warrior-woman, the perfect double for the soldier-male, the ideal reflection in fact of what he is or would like himself to be. She exists so that he can prove himself worthy of the "force" that she seems to possess naturally and that she evokes spontaneously. If the "warrior-male" realizes himself through a woman equal or superior to himself, then the "warrior-female" in turn is fulfilled only by his self-realization: "The greatest joy a woman can have, that from which she can draw the most profound sensual effects, is the certainty a man gives her of his moral virility. Gilles, just back from the front, could supply this certainty" (207). Man's moral virility remains the ultimate and dominant value in this universe, but its certainty and confirmation depend as much on the warrior-woman, the woman of "race," as on the warrior-man.
Only the exceptional woman (like the exceptional man), however, can achieve this warrior status and be considered to belong to his race, a term that has more to do in this context with gender than with blood. In almost all other instances in this novel and elsewhere in Drieu la Rochelle's work, race is used in an explicitly anti-Semitic sense. For the "race" totally opposed to the warrior-race is the "Jewish race," and the figure presented as the psychological, political, and sexual enemy of Gilles in the novel is Rebecca, who is not only Jewish, born in Russia, and a communist, but is also interested in psychoanalysis. As important, if not more important for the politicized aesthetics of the novel, she is ugly: "Rebecca was small, with an ugly face and figure" (405). At the top of the "racial" and aesthetic hierarchy is the forceful, sexually liberated warrior-woman; at the bottom is the ugly, deceitful, corrupting Jewish communist.11
The sexual (and racial) characteristics and implications of the aesthetic ideals at the basis of Drieu la Rochelle's fascism are manifested most completely in the portrait of an American woman named Dora, for it is Dora, more than any of the other women in the novel, who embodies the beauty and force of the "superior race" and manifests in her body the possibility for the (re)birth of superior man:
Dora was not beautiful if you looked at her face. . . . But her body manifested the beauty of a race. . . . In this American, with her mixture of Scottish, Irish, Saxon blood, were crossed and multiplied several characteristics of the Nordic peoples. It was exactly this side that attracted all of Gilles's emotions. . . . When he took this big body in his arms, he embraced an idea of life dear to him. A certain idea of force and nobility that he had lost. . . . Why look for it anywhere else but here? Why look for it in the masculine world, in the spells of ambition? A woman is just as much a reality as the crowd is. A plague on the hierarchy of passions. One passion is worth just as much as another. (271)
Dora's body—and it is only her body that represents the pure, formal beauty and force of classical art—induces in Gilles a strong temptation to retreat from what he calls the world of men (of politics, ideas, and war) and be satisfied with embracing the aesthetic ideal of life and "a certain idea of force and nobility." Dora thus represents the material manifestation of Gilles's aesthetic and political beliefs as well as the further temptation to live in exile away from "men" in order, paradoxically, to remain in contact with that most manly of ideals, force, present in modernity not in the politics of men but in the beauty of a woman's body.
The extreme opposite of the racially and aesthetically determined beauty of the idealized body of the woman is not only the Jewish communist, however, but also the ugliness and impotency of the masculine body politic in democracy. In the third section of the novel entitled "L'Apocalypse," the political project devised by Gilles for a new "national-social party" is presented to the congress of the Radical party, where the diseased body politic is fully on display. The spectacle sickens Gilles but confirms what he already believes: "This public resumed all French publics. . . . France was nothing more than senility, avarice, and hypocrisy" (557). There is no real contact between orator and public, and therefore no "living" force is experienced or produced. As a political experience described in sexual terms, leaders and public were both satisfied with their private pleasures and took no interest in anything else: "The orator no more wanted to take hold of the public than the public wanted to be taken hold of. Instead of a holy and fertile sexual encounter, one saw two onanisms approach each other, brush against each other, and then slip away from each other" (556). Such mutual masturbation will, of course, produce no healthy political offspring and indicates that there is no chance that modern France—decadent, senile, and sterile, if not "degenerate"—could once again become young, virile, and productive.
Only fascism and a politics of creative force are presented in the novel as the negation of the politics of parties and sects and of all noncreative, nonproductive forces: of the masturbatory politics of democratic politicians and the masturbatory aesthetics of Jews and homosexuals, and finally, of all women who fail to measure up to the ideal of beauty represented by Dora and who love without reproducing and thus fall within either or both of the categories of decadence. Drieu la Rochelle's homophobia and anti-Semitism are thus intimately interrelated and important components of his fascist aesthetics of politics, for the Jew and the homosexual represent the extreme opposite of both the fascist male and the idealized, aestheticized woman, whose body displays the creative, aesthetic force from which the male is in fact separated and which he must "repossess" to realize himself fully as a man.
But the ideal woman must also be a fertile mother to ensure that death and sterility no longer dominate and that France will no longer be without children, without force, and without art; the "new man" without heirs.12 Fascism could be seen as the figure of the perfect fusion of the "fascist man" and the "aestheticized woman," a man who becomes a man only by first embracing and "possessing" the beauty and force of the woman. The man admires, desires, and cultivates the force of her beauty, which he no longer possesses in himself, before being able to become that force. The aesthetic (woman) in this sense is always the model and foundation for the political (man). The man must first "possess" the woman and assume or usurp her place, before fully taking on his function as a virile man. He cannot give birth to or become such a man by himself because he does not possess force in himself. He can possess and be at one with force only outside of himself, in or as a woman.
Drieu la Rochelle, militant fascist, is also clearly on the side of the beauty and creative, productive force he attributes to certain exceptional women. But which side that is may not be as easy to determine as it first might have seemed, especially when he becomes an active collaborator and must justify his fascism predominantly in terms of collaboration. In "A Certains" (August 1941), originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française while he was its editor, 13 he denounces the weakness of those reluctant to commit themselves to collaboration and compares them to Jews who are "horrified by guns" (58). Abruptly, he shifts from their supposed lack of courage in war to Jewish women who, he claims, considered it "disgusting to be pregnant" and "shameful to suffer in giving birth." Addressing them directly, he asserts: "However, you still allow for coitus. But undoubtedly your son will be a homosexual and no longer allow for it" (59). If the French do not act—that is, collaborate—then they will end up like Jews: fearful, sterile, impotent, and ultimately "homosexual." At the end of the essay, when he finally accuses "certain Frenchmen," those who passively resist collaboration, of being neutres—that is, neutral and neutered—he is accusing them also of not being true French men, of being Jews and homosexuals.
Drieu la Rochelle's most detailed justifications for his collaboration, besides the argument that Germany was in the process of creating a new unified Europe—"L'Allemagne Européenne" (January 1942) is the title of one of his essays from the Nouvelle Revue Française—were made on the basis of what he called his respect for and even love of force, no matter how and where it manifested itself. In "Entre l'Hiver et le Printemps" (April 1942), one of the essays on which Sartre based his claim that collaborators were all feminized males or homosexuals, Drieu la Rochelle presented himself as a member of a very select group as a lover not of his nation, but of an ideal European body soon to be created: "We are not very numerous, those who love Europe with a carnal love, a concrete love, a patriotic love" (Le Français d'Europe, 124). The state of a Frenchman who loves Europe and its force is never easy, because he finds himself almost entirely alone in his own country and a foreigner to the force he desires in others and for himself: "Alas! It is atrocious to love force, to be profoundly inhabited by the desire to live in its midst and to be for one's whole life excluded from this sacred resource" (119).
A true lover of force is therefore driven to look for force where it exists, even at his own expense and that of his country:
A man worthy of this name cannot look only within the limits of his own people. . . . I saw peoples stronger than the French. I was upset and rejoiced at the same time. He who loves force follows its scent, recognizes it wherever it is. And if force manifests itself against him and his people, he still has to rejoice. He rejoices in mourning. (120)
The carnal lover of force must be willing to follow "its scent" wherever it leads him and collaborate in the forms and political structures it institutes and in the destruction it brings about. His pleasure may never be simple, for it is always divided: it is not only the restricted pleasure of "a man" but also the limitless pleasure of "a woman," not only the pleasure of a man who "is" force in himself but also the pleasure of a man who desires or wills force in or as a woman, not only joyful, productive pleasure but mournful, destructive pleasure as well. It may even add to his joy that he, his country, and the women he at the same time idealizes and scorns always pay a price for such pleasure.
It may be legitimately asked at this point whether, within the context of French literary fascism, to love force in this way is to love as a man or a woman, and whether what one is loving in, or as, force are its masculine or feminine attributes, assuming one can still distinguish conclusively between them. Despite his condemnation of sterile, allegedly homosexual eroticism throughout his work, Drieu la Rochelle—as if anticipating Sartre's criticism and agreeing with it before the fact—also acknowledges in his journal what he calls his own "homosexual tendencies," which he relates not just to his sporadic impotency but also to his love of force: "I started very young being sporadically impotent. An introverted, inverted nature, but with women. Masculine in spurts, often Narcissus dreaming of possessing while being possessed. I was hopelessly masochistic and naturally sadistic in my spare time. . . . My enemies often sensed, it's visible enough, the feminine, inverted character of my love for force" (Journal [June 1944], 393). Such an admission, however, does not make Sartre's (or Adorno's) analysis any less problematical, but rather indicates the masculinist biases Sartre and Drieu la Rochelle had in common: a homophobic and gynophopic equation of homosexuality with femininity and masochism and the love of force, as opposed to masculine potency in itself, which is thus equated with the being of force. Drieu la Rochelle's admission of his own "homosexuality" in no way diminishes his scorn for "sterile" women and his condemnation of homosexuality throughout his work as the opposite of fascist (virile), productive force. It rather constitutes an admission that he himself never measured up to such an ideal but worshiped it from what he called an inferior "feminine" position, that he was in his own eyes less than a total man, and finally, that the decadence and "femininity" he denounced were important components of his own being and of the fascist aestheticizing of politics that he proposed.
In fact, one finds in the writings of Drieu la Rochelle the same ambiguity and ambivalence concerning the "gender" of fascism that were evident in Adorno's condemnation of the fascist masculine ideal for being homosexual. For what is not being acknowledged in such admissions is that the masculine ideal of force has, even in its own terms, an important feminine dimension. At the same time, the "subject position" of the lover of force is as much the man's as the woman's, the heterosexual's as the homosexual's. The denunciation of homosexuality and the devaluing of or scorn for the feminine must thus be read in more than one way. They are signs not just of the affirmation of the masculine but also of the contradictory, internal relation to the feminine of even the most masculinist of masculine ideals, that of the fascist male. And to love the force of Nazi Germany would then also be to love "as a man" the feminine side of fascism, and the failure to be that force oneself could also be seen then as the failure to attain aesthetic totalization, to be the ideal embodied by the aestheticized woman. The failure to be sufficiently virile is thus also the failure to be sufficiently womanly, the failure to be equal to the force manifested in the beauty of the woman.
In such a configuration, the woman is of course still being defined in terms of the man, with her place and function being determined by his desires and in terms of his ideals. But even within these serious constraints, the fascist man is not simply masculine or virile (nor the opposite); the woman, whether idealized or scorned, is not simply excluded, repressed, or feared by him but also desired and desiring. The notion of the "total man" is dependent on the idealized aesthetic totalization of the woman, and it is this dual process of totalization that defines Drieu la Rochelle's literary fascism more than the dogmatic and violent desires of the soldier-male.
Gender ambivalence is most definitely limited by such demands for totalization, but while fascism in general can still rightly be considered an extreme masculinist or virile ideology, in the case of Drieu la Rochelle, the goals of the literary fascism he desired but failed to realize could more accurately be defined as an extreme manifestation not just of the ideology of the man but rather of the ideology of gender as such, whether dogmatically masculinist or nominally "feminist." Such an ideology is constituted by the project to establish both genders as distinct and totalizeable identities, to make man as such or woman as such either an ideal type or the representative of absolute negativity, of a pathological deviation from and threat to the norm or ideal represented by the other. If this is so, no approach that accepts such distinctions and the hierarchies they impose, no matter which term is privileged or how vigorously the masculinist ideology of fascism is opposed, can effectively undermine the ultimate gender ideal of literary fascism: to be "total."