Journal Article

UNE SCIENTIA SEXUALIS FACE À LA MYSTIQUE FASCISTE

SIBERTIN-BLANC, Guillaume

2016

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Humensis
• Subject: DoSSiER: PSYCHANALYSE, L’autre MATÉRIALISME