Une scientia sexualis face à la mystique fasciste

The article proposes a rereading of Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism in counterpoint to the Foucaldian historicization of the «repressive hypothesis». It tests another hypothesis, according to which fascism not only represented one of the first objects of a Freudo-Marxist synthesis, but in effect overdetermined its formulation, causing it to take on (at the risk of breaking with the postulates of psychoanalysis and of Marxism) a dimension of excess analogous to that which it posited in the case of fascism, identifying it as the factor accounting for the latter's traction on the «masses». In the case of Reich, this would involve the idea of a «natural sexuality» or of an «orgasmic economy», to be turned back against a nazi biologism. It would also imply, in the case of Georges Bataille, writing at the same time, the idea of a «heterology» combining the lessons of the Freudian Massenpsychologie and those of the sociology of the sacred stemming from Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss, which could thus be turned against the fascist mysticism

Face (sociological concept · Linguistics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Philosophy