Author: Jon C (Plan C friend)
Donald Trump is pathetic, absurd, laughable. His infirmities as a human being are legion and many of them might be a source of sympathy if they didn’t include extreme narcissism, vengefulness and petulance, and if they weren’t entwined with racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia – and if he weren’t perhaps the most powerful and therefore the most dangerous man on the planet. In his recent book The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life, the philosopher Brian Massumi (perhaps best known as the translator of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s classic A Thousand Plateaus) characterises Trump as follows:
Trump’s image is not of the traditional strongman, but rather that most contemporary of male figures: the “toxic masculinity” of the spoiled man-child. He oscillates between performances of self-aggrandizing puffery for the adoring audience and self-sorry vulnerability compensated for through cattiness, if not outright aggression, directed towards others.[1]
Massumi argues that, despite the cult around Trump that we might usually, or as a kind of shorthand, label a cult of personality, there is no identification with an image of the traditional strongman (despite the absurdly kitsch trading cards that Trump put out, jumping on the NFT bandwagon). Rather, Trump identifies with this oscillation that Massumi describes. ‘The spectacle of it was mesmerizing.’[2] The trading cards were of course part of this oscillation, this spectacle, this absurdity. On this, Massumi cites a journalist pointing out that the cards were supposed to be kitsch, operating ‘as a wink among MAGA insiders, signaling their difference from and opposition to the “elites” whose haughty sense of taste would presumably be wounded by such images.’[3] Trump’s supporters, it is suggested, worship Trump as a form of insurrection, as a ‘fuck you’ to all the things they feel ‘oppressed’ by. But they do this without recognising that they are exploited by capital or oppressed by those, like Trump, whose elitism is based in wealth and power. Instead their ‘oppression’ is more like a form of irritation that comes down to them through culture wars and their ‘insurrection’ is aimed at those whose ‘elitism’ is based in education.
This is only one, really very small element of Massumi’s argument – and even here, I’m simplifying. This book is over 300 pages long and is often very dense. Massumi appears to be focusing specifically on American fascism, but it seems clear that fascists across the West are linking up and sharing some basic notions. Fascists internationally also share an affective dimension – a feeling about their insurrection against education, against even intelligence as they constantly repeat and amplify combinations of gaslighting, delusions and simple lies across social media, and take great pleasure in literally insulting the intelligence of anybody who opposes them. This dimension is certainly a key M.O. of Reform supporters in the UK (and those to their right), and the language used is strikingly similar to that used by MAGA supporters. This affective dimension, this turn to politics as a form of trolling (or trolling as a form of politics) – possibly performed by bots as much as by real fascists – floods social media, often targeting left accounts as well as circulating within their own online bubbles. It seems on the surface to have as its aim little more than winding up and demoralising the left. However, in its shared idioms it also composes a contemporary micropolitics, a microfascism (the fascism that circulates with and around individuals and communities rather than what might be called the macro-fascism represented or imposed by parties and states) that, before and beyond state power, builds communities of fascists across borders, across the West. For all their self-identification as “nationalists”, this international fascism reveals itself to be rooted much more deeply in racism than in the nation state, the latter being in reality little more than a convenient vehicle for power and for the spread of ideology – as evidenced in the recent calls from fascists in the UK for the USA to bomb British cities.
In his latest analysis of fascism, Massumi returns to Deleuze and Guattari’s first collaboration, 1972’s Anti-Oedipus, for philosophical and psychological resources. As such, Massumi’s book is an exercise in schizoanalysis (which is, very briefly, Deleuze and Guattatri’s project of reworking both Marxism and psychoanalysis – via Spinoza, Nietzsche and others – with the aim of fully taking into account the social nature of the human individual as well as the vital role played in the formation of society by desire, getting away from the Freudian obsession with the privatised family of “mommy-daddy-me”). Despite this, Massumi himself makes more frequent references to his work as ‘process philosophy’. This latter term is summarised early on as “taking constituting activity and events as primary, rather than already-constituted things and subjects.”[4] It’s possibly also worth noting that he takes the second aspect of his book’s subtitle – “for Anti-Fascist Life” – from Michel Foucault’s well known Preface to Anti-Oedipus, in which Foucault said that “Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.”[5] Foucault also characterised Anti-Oedipus as a “book of ethics”[6] and Massumi’s book is this as well. In addition to analysing Trumpian fascism by pursuing its psychological and ontological roots and manifestations with an exacting but rewarding thoroughness and detail, Massumi lays out the philosophical (and psychological, which is to say, schizoanalytical) bases for non-fascist ethical behaviour. However, before there are mutterings about ivory towers and the urgent need to take action (and while recognising the latter) I would like to insist that the ethical is also political and is needed to inform and understand our own political actions.
Towards the end of the book, Massumi contrasts a way of responding, acting and thinking that he calls the “singular-collective” with the “abstract-general”. He writes:
The singular-collective is this unbounded multiplicity of instantiations of the same character. It is a species of being in the infinitive: ‘to dog.’ What it is not is an abstract general idea subsuming individuals under an abstract general category by a selective judgement of resemblance, construing them as particular cases meeting its standard: the dog, in the conventional logic.[7]
The abstract-general is a key component of fascist responding, acting and thinking that involves categorising people and then judging them in relation to that category: the woman, the trans person, the black person. After judging people by the abstract-general, fascism then judges these categories against what Massumi calls the Man Standard. He goes on to say that, “Rather than judge, the singular-collective evokes belief in the world. Think of this in terms of race, or of gender. What singularly collective becomings does the world have in store?”[8] This is an ethical move that clearly has political implications and effects and is presented as something that needs to be pursued consciously by the left in order to avoid microfascisms in our own politics as well as countering macro-fascism proper. According to Massmi, this ethical move is even what thinking itself is. This is partly suggestive, for me at least, of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “right-wing intellectual” is a contradiction in terms (in this case because thought necessarily has to consider a primacy of becoming, where conservatism and fascism would both seek to abolish becoming in favour of an eternally fixed and absolute being, all deviations from which are abominations):
The point of thought is not to simplify reality, but to become equal to its complexity. This is not an easy task, but it is a necessary one if the desire is to embrace potential and foster it, rather than triage and discipline it.[9]
Since Massumi’s ambition is to produce a deep and thorough examination of the production of contemporary Trumpian fascism, this book delves deeply into the processes behind the production of individuality and personhood (which are not the same thing, as Massumi persuasively argues). This book also considers the ways in which fascism can be, and is, in all of us to some extent, seeded within such processes. These processes are, of course, social and collective: in line with the essential movements of schizoanalysis, or process philosophy, the individual-collective binary breaks down very rapidly and is ultimately utterly untenable. However, one thing this account lacks is any kind of class analysis or consideration of class relations within contemporary capitalism at all, except perhaps to the extent that the working class might be discerned as subsumed within “the non-identitarian figure of the ‘minor’[10] in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking”[11]. As rich and potentially useful as it otherwise is, this is a major gap in its account.
However, as we have seen, certain aspects of the collective psychology of contemporary fascism are presented quite clearly:
The Trumpian desire is to stamp out the becoming, plug the escape routes, silence the expression of proliferating differences, and strike their self-affirming expression with negativity. It is to do so while extending the white privilege erected and defended by the Man-Standard to include the liberating right to whine one’s single being: to act out one’s personal grievances as self-indulgently, chaotically, pettily, and petulantly as one normopathically pleases.[12]
This is, in a sense, at both the head and the base. This is how Trump behaves but it is also how many of his supporters behave. It is fascism without an ideology (at these levels – at least some of those around Trump seem to have quite clear ideological positions), built on a sense of grievance, based in some cases on what seems to be little more than irritation that has built and morphed into a vicious and frequently homicidal fury. As I have already mentioned, when we read their “contributions” to social media, or see them interviewed on YouTube, we most often get – and this is the same with the vast majority of the UK fascists on social media – a combination of gaslighting, lies, and sneering contempt. The latter seems often to come from a belief that actually everybody “thinks” the way they do, but the rest of us are hypocrites or liars, “virtue signalling,” while they are authentic, authentically themselves, they have “the balls” to be themselves. This is one of the aspects identified by Massumi that seems most pathetic and laughable, but which is the source of a great deal of danger:
The Trump media figure gives license to his supporters to be themselves – even their worst selves, their most selfish, petty, hateful selves – and then to congratulate themselves on that achievement, as if by acceding to this figure of themselves they were effectively participating in a glorious refounding of the nation […] What is felt as liberating was precisely for a leader to give license rather than to legitimate.[13]
The great danger is the way they feel they can do what they like, because it has been sanctioned by their fascist daddy. Not only that, but following their worst impulses is glorious, it is the reestablishment of a golden age. No matter that they are spreading misery and suffering: those who suffer deserve it, even if they’re children, because they are subhuman and in some way evil (there is always a great putrid moralism at the heart of fascism). And so the nastiest sadism is justified for the fascists, even while it damages them too, like an infection, or like cancer.
This book is, at least in potential, a valuable contribution to a philosophical understanding of fascism on many levels. It is a shame that it is not more accessible, but that is perhaps a testament to the complexity of its subject matter, which goes far beyond fascism and digs down into the formation of human personhood itself.[14] That its difficulty is recognised by Massumi himself is attested to by the fact that he has also published an open access companion text, Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary, available from Minor Compositions at Massumi-AntifascistVocabularly-Web.pdf. The practical outcomes of Massumi’s book, however, are less clear. It offers, on one level, just what it says on the cover: a theory of fascism that leads to an intellectual means of trying to live, ethically and to some extent politically, as an anti-fascist. On the other hand, the lack of engagement with the relationship between capitalism, class and fascism leaves it short of proposals for practical action. That is where political groups, alliances and movements come in – and where the working class re-enters the picture, intersecting with all the other human beings with an interest in, and a desire for, liberation from the various social strait-jackets the fascists wish to put us in, and to “affirm the escapes, and foster their multiplying and varying across qualitative transformations that potentially amplify and resonate throughout the social field.”[15]
[1] Massumi, Brian, The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life. Kindle Edition. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2025, p. 34.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, p. 35.
[4] Massumi, p.4
[5] Foucault, Michel, Preface to Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Captialism and Schizophrenia, trans. By Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Penguin Classics, Kindle Edition. P. 4.
[6] Ibid, p. 7.
[7] Massumi, p. 284.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Massumi, p. 285.
[10] It’s possibly worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari assert that “The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat.” Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Captialism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2, trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. P. 494.
[11] Massumi, p.46.
[12] Massumi, p.48.
[13] Massumi, p.37-38.
[14] Massumi’s theory of personhood, or “personing” (it is a process of becoming rather than something you simply are; in Deleuzian terms it might even be better designated as “to person”) is complex. As well as being set out in this book, there is also an entry on personing in the free companion text Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary that runs to over two pages. However, very briefly, Massumi characterises it through the model of a spinning top, taken from Henry James. The top itself is matter – the body. The spin of the top is individuation. “An individual is a dynamic bodily form that is inseparable from, while remaining irreducible to, the matter moving through it. To fail to distinguish between the movement and the matter would be as absurd as ‘seizing a spinning top to catch its motion.’” (Massumi, p.78) The person, on the other hand, or the personality, is “the continuous variation in the pattern of the spin across different throws in different condtions”. (Massumi, Brian, Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary. Colchester/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2025, p. 80) This text goes on to say that “The person grows bottom-up, through the body’s contractions of habit. It is also susceptible to top-down overcoding, the application of the Man-Standard being the prime example.” (Ibid.)
[15] Massumi, p. 299.
