As early as 1934 he argued that communism had failed to exploit the ‘political importance of collective emotions’ as adroitly as fascism had: ‘The great discovery and the essential originality of fascism is its utilisation of the irrational as [an] autonomous … factor in the political domain.’ Fascism was an ‘emotional and ideational revolution’ that exploited the ‘psychological misery’ of the proletariat as much as its ‘economic poverty’. Surrealism spoke to this ‘misery of desire’ too, but in a way that opposed the fascist manipulation of ‘masochism and sublimation’. Such attention to collective emotions suggests that Yoyotte had read Freud, in particular Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921).
[…]
Bataille was also involved in the mid-1930s, with his bitter rival Breton no less, in an explicitly anti-fascist group called Contre-Attaque, which in one of its communiqués inveighed against the ‘heterogeneous’ trinity of French fascism: père, patrie, patron.
[…]
these old anti-fascists had failed to see that, in the society of spectacle, fascism operates primarily through the colonisation of everyday life.
Hal Foster, Tightrope of Hope, LRB
Le Journal d’un Prisonnier … is, at best, a mediocris opus. (newyorker)
