In 1928, the French fascist Georges Valois wrote that under democracy two plus three equaled five but that in the new era of nationalist politics two plus three equaled six. What Valois meant is that under fascism a timeless truth would replace a logical truth. As he explained, in “bourgeois life, two and three make five. This is indisputable, according to the mercantile and legal spirit. In national life, two and three make six, because the heroic spirit changes.”1
This spiritual change applied both to individuals and to the national community. The fascist revolution implied a radical transformation of the self according to the plan. Under fascism, heroic political forces were supposed to be unleashed. As we have seen, fascists searched for the unconscious as a project of self-realization. For them, the search for instincts could lead to disorder and chaos, but framed within fascism, it led to political domination. As the fascist intellectual Massimo Scaligero put it, fascism imposed “order” on the self by “bringing it from the plane of unconscious decadence and material darkness to the light of absolute reality, which is determined and deliberately constructed.” This construction of reality was the result of an act of obedience to the ideology of the leader. Demonstrating the depths of this subordination, the fascist leader and education minister Giuseppe Bottai wrote to Mussolini in a personal letter, “I have put my own consciousness at the service of the leader.” Fascists, according to their own logic, were not akin to “neurotics, the exalted, and those affected by egoistical sentimentalism.” Fascist obedience represented the “translation” of the internal world of the unconscious into the absolute conscious order of fascism. It was an act of forza. It was the act of “command towards the self.”2
Similarly, Leopoldo Lugones argued that life was marked by a “law of force.” Truth was the outcome of power: “The truth constitutes a metaphysical entity, that is, a human ideation corresponding to various states of human information as well, which we call culture; and for this reason there were and always will be many religions and many philosophies.” But Lugones was not a relativist: he saw all these “ ‘religions and philosophies’ as being subordinated to the ‘instinct of domination.’ ” The fatherland was a result of this instinct to establish essential human hierarchies. Thus, it was “a phenomenon of natural history.” Lugones understood his political realism as the emanation of “the concept of potency.” Its limit was the same as the “capacity to impose a politics.” For him this “politica realitas” was at work in the Roman Empire. Potency, the will to dominate others, was “the dynamic expression of sovereignty.”3
Fascism demanded the exploration of the unconscious, its translation into politics, and the will to fight for a radical source of violence and authenticity. This fascist obsession with the role of violent desires in politics deeply preoccupied Freud and triggered a significant change in his theory of the unconscious. Despite the fascist emphasis on the dangers of the individualist psychoanalytic libido, for Freud, the libido was actually opposed to the damaging forces of the unconscious, what he called the “destructive instinct.” It was precisely during the years of fascism that Freud ascribed to the latter an overpowering autonomy from Eros. If before, Eros and Thanatos had worked more or less in tandem, fascism represented the loss of this weak stability. According to Freud’s translator, James Strachey, it was because of fascism, and especially Hitler’s actions, that Freud attributed increasing autonomy to “the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”
In his 1930 seminal work, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud highlighted the increasing political salience of destruction, an evolving domination that he saw in extremely pessimistic terms. He wrote, “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” In 1931 Freud added only one sentence to this previous paragraph, the last in the text. Regarding the ability of Eros to assert itself over destruction, Freud asked, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”4 He saw this question as melancholically rhetorical. In a private letter in 1936, he wrote, “The world is becoming so sad that it is destined to speedy destruction.”5 In his response to an invitation to leave Vienna and settle in Buenos Aires in 1933, Freud described Nazism as a “German ignominy.” More generally, he equated fascism with a brutal “education.” Fascism represented a “retrogression into all but prehistoric barbarism.”6
Fascism abhorred reason’s attempt to repress intimate desires for political domination. In this sense, it was intuitively and almost dialectically opposed to Freud’s interwar theory of the unconscious as well as to the critical arguments made by Hannah Arendt, José Carlos Mariátegui, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Cassirer, Jorge Luis Borges, and many other contemporary antifascists.7 In this context, one could argue that fascism’s resistance to critical theory was essentially part of its prereflexive reaction to reason. This resistance was rooted in something that Antonio Gramsci, probably thinking about fascism, located within the realm of political fantasies about the self and its subordinated role in the collective: the centrality of mysticism and the sacred in the context of the political.8
Adorno concurred, noting how destruction was at the center of the psychological basis of the “fascist spirit.” While fascist programs were “abstract and vague,” fascist realizations were false and illusory. Fascism had profound archaic roots. It represented the “crude” transformation of Christian doctrine into slogans of “political violence.” It involved revelation, sacrificial thoughts, simulation, and projection. Adorno distinguished here between leaders and followers. While the former often faked their religiosity and beliefs, he argued, the latter allowed themselves to be carried by lies. They simply wanted to religiously believe in the overpowering ego of the fascist leader. The leader confirmed his “basic identity” with followers based on innuendo. Then Adorno referred to “the role attributed by Freud to allusions in the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious.” Leaders projected their desires onto enemies and followers alike. In turn, their primary aim was the fulfillment of their followers’ repressed destructive desires.9
Desire and destruction (and the desire for destruction) were essential to the rise of fascism. The Peruvian antifascist thinker Mariátegui remarked that Mussolini had not created fascism; rather, “from a state of emotion, he extracted a political movement.” He wondered how Mussolini could sound as convinced by fascism as he had been by socialism: “What was the mechanism of the process of conversion from one doctrine to the other? This is not a cerebral phenomenon. It is an irrational one. The engine behind this change in ideological attitude was not the idea. It was the sentiment.”10
In fact, as early as 1914 Mussolini had identified his departure from socialism as a result of the need to follow “the new truth.” The future leader had identified this sacred truth with violence.11 Mariátegui agreed that Mussolini had consciously decided to leave behind socialism and embrace the fascist “cult of violence.” But Mariátegui did not believe that this new politics was the result of a personal evolution. Mussolini’s new faith had been dictated by his followers. They expected a particular reality from him, and he delivered. “His ideological consubstantiation” was a result of his decision to identify with the expectations of his fascist followers.12
Gramsci, Adorno, and Mariátegui, like Arendt and others, were not ultimately willing to believe that fascists really and rationally meant what they said. Yet fascism enacted a “theory of self” based on the political role of the unconscious. Fascism equated this passage from unconsciousness to consciousness with the disclosure of transcendental truths. For Adorno, this notion of the truth was dually rooted in the fetishization of reality and of established power relations. Fascism equated what was right with redemptive notions of salvation. The leader dreamed “a union of the horrible and the wonderful.” The result was not only the death and destruction of the enemy but also the self. The structure of fascism was embedded in the “unconscious psychological desire for self-annihilation.” Adorno warned his readers that although Hitler’s speeches were “insincere,” cultivated people were mistaken in refusing to take them seriously.13 Arendt also stressed the allusive dimension of fascism. Nazi lies “alluded to certain fundamental truths,” believed by “gullible Europeans,” and led them into the “maelstrom” of “destruction itself.”14
While many antifascists described fascism as seeking to impersonate ridiculous atavisms, fascists searched for the perceived archaic dimensions of the self. They saw in them the original nucleus of the truth. This is the reading that Borges stressed in his critical analysis of fascism during the interwar years. He also saw fascism as “sentimental.” But he went further. Fascism was a collection of political subjects who were, impossibly, studying to be barbarians. Fascism wanted to establish a new “morality.” Their full trust in the leader, the “idolatrous adoration of the jefes,” led fascists to believe in magic and the reification of total violence. In 1938, Borges argued, “Fascism is a state of the soul. In fact, it does not require from its proselytized followers more than the exaggeration of certain patriotic and racial prejudices that all people have.”15
Fascists wanted to leave reason behind and return to prejudice. Borges stressed that fascists were engaged in a form of thinking that represented the antithesis of reason. He called it “monstrous reason.” This “reason” wanted to rest its authority on the representation of the inner self, but, in fact, fascism could only present itself as “impulsive and illogical.”16 Notoriously, the fascist return of the repressed was a conscious act. In practice, and far from occurring intuitively, fascist self-immersion led to a doctrine of destruction. Fascist self-consciousness led to the equation of power, truth, and violence.
As conceived in a fascist key, consciousness represented a desired assertion of true sovereignty. Mussolini articulated this thesis in 1925, explaining that in fascism a generic population became “a conscious people.” For the Duce, this was the moment when “the truth of history became the bread of the conscious spirit of Italians.”17 At this point history was turned into myth. Its aim was the destruction of any trace of demonstrable truth.