**I wonder what psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and philosopher Gilles Deleuze would think about Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s apparent takeover of the USA? Is it Fascism? Is it a revolution? Is it indeed a coup? Or is it an example of something different?
Guattari describes quite simply in his essay Everybody Wants to be a Fascist what is expressed in greater detail in the two Capitalism and Schizophreniabooks written by him and Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In this article, I want to offer Guattari’s perspective, as I see it, on the recents events in the States, both to understand those events better, and also better understand the works of Deleuze and Guattari and the light they have to bring to humanity through their in-depth and inspired analysis of our personal and social structures.
There are two premises which I believe are found in the works of Deleuze and Guattari which I read in the light of the teachings of Christ, and which I am resting on in my thinking in this article:
1) Desire is real, it leads us to God, and while there is still Desire there is still hope. Fascism is a perversion of Desire. Desire, even when it takes us down a perverted or corrupted path such as where Fascism takes us, still has its roots in God, and there is still hope of escape whilst there is life. See my adaptation of Proverbs 2 which specifically explores these ideas.
- Capitalism is not of God. It is a death machine that feeds on life — it feeds on “lines of flight” in the language of Deleuze and Guattari — and does so in order to perpetuate itself. Capitalism is (at least part of) the “powers and principalities”, the spiritual forces of evil, that the soul struggles with when it tries to follow Christ into life and love. “For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12).
There is nothing in particular to be said against Capitalism (just as we might say the same about AI, or any other technology). “Capitalism” is understood in a particular way in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, it has a particular power as a machine. Capitalism’s machinic process is that it “eats” human desire. So Capitalism, in its machinic power, is a kind of metaphor. Once you pay for something, or value something financially, the life is being taken out of it. As Jesus said, “give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”. At the same time, we live in this world. Jesus wasn’t a political activist, he taught us one commandment, “Love each other”, and he didn’t teach us how to do this. While Capitalism is not bad in itself, or at least, no more “bad” than any other thing of this world, the things of this world are not things we need to go seeking after in order to seek God. We can understand it in this way: “Sabbath was made for the man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27)… Capitalism is there for the man, not man for the Capitalism…
In this new episode in human history, in what we are witnessing in the States, it seems to me that the machine of Capitalism, ever-searching for more efficient and ruthless ways (no judgement, Capitalism is just trying to be efficient) to manipulate (to its mouth) that which sustains it (ie, the desire and, thus, life of the people) has (finally?) demonstrated its ability to harness and utilise the immense power of Fascism.
Jesus says the wheat and the tares grow together (Matthew 13:24-30), and it is thus with fascism and life.
Fascism, so present in our human DNA (as it were), is a potent source of nourishment for Capitalism to feed itself on, if it can manage to do so. Guattari describes the difficulty Capitalism has in harnessing the raw-power-of-the-people that comes with a people captivated by fascism; fascism which runs so close to the roots of human life, that is a pervasion of true Desire, so that it gives a hate-fuelled dynamism and energy which is unfettered even by the love of money. So, previously dismissed as unmanageable by the powers of state infrastructures following its lack of success in the Second World War, we thought Fascism had “gone away”.
However, Guattari states, “Fascism has already ‘made it,’ and it continues to ‘make it.’ ” Fascism, he says, “finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire”.
Guattari describes the power of Fascism as being so potent in us humans that it overwhelms the “lockdown” mechanisms of Capitalism — “Capitalism fears large-scale movements of crowds” — and thus, previously, Fascism was seen as an opposing force to Capitalism, too maverick. We saw (or thought we saw) that with Hitler and the Third Reich, Fascism tried, and it failed. Now, it seems, Capitalism has found a way to own and consume even Fascism. In Trumps’s “tell it how it is” “man of the people” “let’s get it done” administration, in the light of Guatarri’s analysis, we are witnessing Capitalism finding a way to maintain its stronghold through the strongest and most potent sources of power, which perhaps would make this latest iteration of Capitalist consumption un-defeatable, except for the fact that darkness can never eclipse the light. “The light shines in the darkness,and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Jesus came to show us that life cannot be eclipsed by death.
Guattari says that fascism gained a stronghold in the wake of a “socialism that had too much respect for the dominant meanings” — don’t we know it — but yet, “fascism was brought back to these same dominant meanings by a sort of intrinsic bad faith.” The people thought that Fascism would release them from the “dominant meanings” that seemed to oppress them, but they are misled. The truth is that it is only life which will direct us out of this double bind. At least in our own hearts. As St Paul the apostle says, we can be captivated by the “empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition” and I believe that this is what has happened.
“See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition, according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ. For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily, and you share in this fullness in him, who is the head of every principality and power.”
Colossians 2:8-10
Anything — such as socialism, psychoanalysis, activism, church — that attempts to work with these forces of Fascism and Capitalism in order to subdue them, but does so without love risks being re-consumed by the forces it would seem to offer opposition to. So, for instance, Guattari states that “[psychoanalysis] is of increasing interest to pedagogues, priests, and political commissioners of all stripes.” Normalisation/adaptation or “schizophrenia”, and re-consumption, will be likely to result.
What is love? Real love; whatever that is. There is no way to define love in a way that can be relied upon to be understood, so I just refer to the love that Jesus commands us to in John 13:34.
As described in my previous essay, “The Bride of Christ as Spiritual Directee — John of the Cross and Spiritual Direction”, here https://elrupiria.weebly.com/blog/the-bride-of-christ-as-spiritual-directee-john-of-the-cross-and-spiritual-direction , Capitalism and Fascism, in light of the works of Deleuze and Guattari (and so many others such as Wilhelm Reich), is an important issue to understand, consider, and discern, with, and in Christ.
How to do we approach fascism, and the fascist within us, with genuine love?
I think the way forward is outlined well by Dick Schwartz in his explanation of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) method of meeting “parts” of ourselves with the knowledge that there are “no bad parts”. There are plenty of discussions of this concept available online, and I am posting a few links below, and here a quote from Schwartz’s book No Bad Parts:
**For seven years I consulted to Onarga Academy, a treatment center in Illinois for sex offenders. I had the opportunity to help those clients listen to the parts of them that had molested children, and over and over I heard the same story: While the offender was being abused as a child, one of their protectors became desperate to protect them and took on the rageful or sexually violent energy of their perpetrator and used that energy to protect themself from that abuser. From that point on, however, this protector continued to carry that burden of the perpetrator’s hatred and desire to dominate and punish vulnerability. The part also was frozen in time during the abuse.
Thus, the kick in molesting a child came from being able to hurt and have power over someone weak and innocent. These perpetrator parts would do the same thing in their psyches to their own vulnerable, childlike parts. This process—in which protectors in one generation take on the perpetrator burdens of their parents while they were being abused by those parents—is one way that legacy burdens are transferred.
As we healed their parts stuck in their early abuse, their perpetrator parts could unload their parents’ violent or sexual energies and, like other parts, quickly transformed and took on valuable roles.
During this period, I had the opportunity to work with other kinds of perpetrators (including murderers) with similar findings. I remembered that famous Will Rodgers saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and I realized that I could say that about parts. I ultimately liked all of them—even the ones that had done heinous things.
Now, decades later, I’ve worked with countless clients (as have other IFS therapists around the world) and I believe it is safe to say that there are no bad parts. Spiritual traditions encourage us to have compassion for everyone. This aspect of IFS actually helps make that possible. IFS operates from the radically different assumption that each part—no matter how demonic seeming—has a secret, painful history to share of how it was forced into its role and came to carry burdens it doesn’t like that continue to drive it. This also implies clear steps for helping these parts and the people they are in heal and change. It brings hope to the hopeless.**
No Bad Parts by Dick Schwartz, p20-21, available here
I have also made a couple of videos on this subject, No Bad Parts, the Catastrophising Part: Part One and Part Two.
We would all be close to Christ, close to life, close to Love, if we could be. That which separates us from God, which separates us from each other, which separates us from our selves, needs to be approached and met with love (compassion and curiosity), not with the idea of eradicating it, but with the idea of there being no fault. “Oh, set me free from captivity, that I may praise your name!” (Psalm 142:7). Jesus calls Judas “friend”, and so can we meet even those who betray us and call them “friend”.
For Deleuze and Guattari, we can interrogate and understand the micro levels by interrogating and understanding the macro levels and vice versa. In the same way, in IFS, “parts” are “parts” of “parts” in a way that continues in both directions, up and down, probably to infinity. So, we can each look at our selves as a part of humanity as a whole, and we can each look at parts of ourselves as parts of that single human being. And we can also look at parts of our parts, and so on. It is like looking at a fractal. Thus, when we look at fascism as a part, we can see that we have parts of ourselves that are “fascist parts”, just as there are “fascist parts” of our wider society. These parts aren’t everything, they aren’t the whole.
In the same way we might meet hurting and rejected parts of ourselves, we can meet hurting and rejected parts in each other, and in our communities. Even when parts are doing damage, we can approach them not with the mentality of uprooting them, but, at the very least, with necessary tolerance that the part is indeed there and there’s no avoiding the truth of its presence. And then, from there, moving towards a deepening of love which meets, in the full face of the hate, violence, sadistic pleasure, etc, which might confront us there, the part that is separated from God. Just as Jesus met with Judas, and just as he met others that betrayed him, we can meet. Jesus saw deeper than the hurting part that was lashing out or closing down in its own defence. He saw that no-one turns their face from Love unless they have to.
Ruthie Baigent, 13th February 2025
More about Félix Guattari’s essay Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist, including a pdf download, here: how-do-we-live-in-this-life-which-is-not-one.html
Footnotes:
There follows full quotes of Guattari that I have picked out from his essay Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist, chosen as most relevant to current events. In these quotes, Guattari describes the processes of Capitalism and Fascism, thinking in terms of historic examples of fascism from the period of the Second World War (WW2). And of Fascism as an abstract machine still operating in our human systems, inside us, and inside of our social structures:
Fascism only remained external to acertain typeof bourgeoisie, which rejected it only because of its instability and because it stirred much too powerful forces of desire within the masses. The remedy, welcomed in the paroxystic phase of the crisis, later seemed far too dangerous.In fact, the alliance of the Western democracies and totalitarian Stalinism was not formed to “save democracy.” It was formed only because of the catastrophic turn which the fascist experiments had taken, and, above all, in response to the deadly form of libidinal metabolism which developed in the masses as a result of these experiments. During this whole period, the planet was seized by a crisis that seemed like the end of the world.What almost everyone refuses to acknowledge is that the fascist machine, in its Italian and German forms, became a threat to capitalism and Stalinism because the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in it. By re-territorialising their desire onto a leader, a people, and a race, the masses abolished, by means of a phantasm of catastrophe, a reality which they detested and which the revolutionaries were either unwilling or unable to encroach upon. For the masses, virility, blood, vital space, and death took the place of a socialism that had too much respect for the dominant meanings. And yet, fascism was brought back to these same dominant meanings by a sort of intrinsic bad faith, by a false provocation to the absurd and by a whole theatre of collective hysteria and debility.Unlike fascism, capitalist totalitarian machines manage to divide, particularise, and molecularise the workers, meanwhile tapping their potentiality for desire. These machines infiltrate the ranks of the workers, their families, their couples, their childhood; they install themselves at the very heart of the workers’ subjectivity and vision of the world. Capitalism fears large-scale movements of crowds.We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: “Fascism will not make it again.” Fascism has already “made it,” and it continues to “make it.” It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micro-political economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst of fascist repressions.In all likelihood, the goal [of psychoanalysis] will be to promote a normalisation, an adaptation of individuals to the bureaucratic system. Thus, the technique of Oedipalisation, the chasing of desire back into familialism, is not an activity which is confined to the analyst’s consulting room. It is of increasing interest to pedagogues, priests, and political commissioners of all stripes. In the end, wasn’t the preparation of the Moscow trials already a kind of psychoanalysis?
Resources for Internal Family Systems (IFS)
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/these-parts-will-fight-end-protect-you
https://davidtianphd.com/masculine-psychology-podcast/ifs-therapy-schwartz-no-bad-parts/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3zt9LQxhA
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-get-to-know-and-love-all-the-parts-of-your-self