Four Theories of Fascism: Desire, Bodies, Aesthetics and Movement

Taught by Juan Diego Pérez Núñez (Acid Horizon Research Commons)

Fascism has become one of the most contested and urgent concepts of the current political moment. The usual discussion around fascism tends to focus on its definition as a historical phenomenon — whether it is a finished chapter of the twentieth century. This course proposes a different approach: to understand fascism not primarily as a regime or doctrine, but as a sensibility and a form of desire that persists and mutates across time. Drawing on four major theoretical interventions — Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, and Klaus Theweleit — the course explores how fascist sensibilities are characterized by an affective disposition to protect what is perceived as the organic body of the nation through the violent destruction of anything that threatens the hardening of social hierarchies. Rather than treating these thinkers in a unified way, the course stages a productive tension between their frameworks, asking what each suggests for our present historical moment.

Readings draw on Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, and Klaus Theweleit.

Course Structure

This four-week seminar unfolds through a series of interconnected explorations of fascism as desire, aesthetics, micropolitics, and patriarchy:

Superfluousness, Ideology and Law of Movement

This session reads Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism as a theory of fascism — an exercise that requires going beyond Arendt's own stated intentions. Setting aside the widely criticized equation of Nazism and Stalinism, this session argues that what Arendt ultimately uncovers is an account of fascism's specific logic: a voluntarist and destructive force that understands itself as the realization of nature's law of movement. The session also elaborates how Arendt's critique reveals how the preconditions for fascism take root in a society where labor has become the dominant form of life and millions of people are rendered superfluous, a condition whose contemporary resonances in late capitalism are difficult to ignore.

Fascism as Aestheticization of Politics

This session develops the concept of aestheticization of politics from Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The objective is to examine how fascist aesthetics produces the artificial construction of a monumental community that considers itself a totality without internal fractures, a people transformed into a spectacle of itself. Fascism thereby cultivates the idea of a sovereign will capable of overcoming any limit through technique, an idea that finds its ultimate expression in the total mobilization for war, which Benjamin identifies as a fascist drive toward self-annihilation. The session also considers how this theory of fascism illuminates contemporary articulations between fascism, technology, and spectacle.

Long Live Death! Microfascisms and the Fascist Line of Flight

How could millions of people desire fascism? This session engages with the micropolitical and molecular theory of fascism developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The aim is to show how these authors locate the singularity of fascism in its capacity to penetrate every scale of social life, producing a specific form of desire. Through examples drawn from historical fascism and contemporary politics, the session explores how fascism operates less as a centralized regime than as a decentralized, molecular, and reactionary force that depends on the support and complicity of ordinary people. Special attention is given to the concept of the "suicidal line of flight" — the way fascism converts a potentially transformative and subversive force into pure destruction — and its implications for understanding fascist violence, war, and genocide.

Patriarchy, Body Armor, Fear of Dissolution

What is the relation between fascism and patriarchy? The consolidation of misogynistic and anti-"gender ideology" currents has become one of the defining features of contemporary right-wing movements. This session draws on the psychoanalytical theory of fascism developed by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies to argue that patriarchy was not incidental but constitutive of historical fascism. Through a dialogue between past and present fascist experiences, the session examines how fascism is deeply rooted in a conception of masculine body characterized by self-repressing desire and an obsessive drive to "purify" life of disorder, flow, and contingency. This framework opens a productive line of inquiry into the affective logic of contemporary reactionary politics, from incel culture to pro-natalist nationalist policies.

Instructor Bio

Juan Diego Pérez Núñez is a doctoral researcher in political philosophy at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), where his current work focuses on Karl Marx's philosophy of time. His MA thesis analyzed new fascisms from the standpoint of affective critical theory and was awarded highest honors. His research focuses on modern and contemporary political philosophy, the relationship between affect and violence, theories of fascism, and eco-Marxism. He recently published the article "From the Rift to the Metabolic Mismatch: Ecological Crisis, Materialism and Philosophy of Nature" in Las Torres de Lucca: International Journal of Political Philosophy. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his master's thesis, titled Fascism: Contemporary Persistences and Reconfigurations.

Course Schedule

All sessions meet from 7:00–9:00 PM EST via Zoom.

Session 1: November 4 — Superfluousness, Ideology and Law of Movement

Session 2: November 11 — Fascism as Aestheticization of Politics

Session 3: November 18 — Long Live Death! Microfascisms and the Fascist Line of Flight

Session 4: November 25 — Patriarchy, Body Armor, Fear of Dissolution

Students will receive permanent access to all recorded lectures and a recurring Zoom link for all sessions.

Upon enrollment, download the welcome package and use the materials to navigate to your classroom.