Introduction

Today, we are witnessing a burgeoning of reactionary forces that are taking over institutions and using their electoral majorities to privatise the public sector, dismantle the welfare state and move backwards in terms of equality, sustainability, and labour and financial regulation. In addressing the conditions of the emergence of these authoritarian populisms, cultural theorists have maintained that their success lies in the way that real problems, lived experiences and unattended contradictions are represented within a logic that pulls them towards the interests of the right wing. While this view goes beyond an overly simplistic position of moral and political purity, it still does not explain the existence of tyranny and servitude. In the years before Margaret Thatcher was elected as UK prime minister in 1979, the psychoanalyst, philosopher and activist Félix Guattari developed a theory of fascism that managed to explain how the energy of the masses was placed at the service of a reactionary social order. According to Guattari, the intensification of the dynamics of hierarchisation, exploitation and segregation that proliferated with the advent of neoliberal capitalism converges on the spreading of a new type of fascism on a planetary scale. Unlike previous forms of authoritarian fascism, this new regime operates in the interiority of subjects and its main goal is to ensure that ‘each individual assumes mechanisms of control, repression, and modelization of the dominant order’ (SS, 258). His thesis is that fascism has abandoned the order of molarities – collective equipment, political parties and ideologies – and nowadays exists molecularised, dusty and imperceptible in the social body. The reason why today ‘everybody wants to be a fascist’ (CS, 154) can be explained only on the basis of a constitutive relationship between desire and fascism. A desire that, asconceived by Deleuze and Guattari, has neither an object nor belongs to any expert; on the contrary, it produces the real and lies within everyone’s reach.

The Guattarian account of molecular fascism operates within the coordinates of integrated world capitalism, that is, it offers a perspective that helps us grasp how libidinal production is currently being captured and remote-controlled by an economy that stands on the axiom of profit.