Body fascism is the hilarious term being used in this now notorious tweet:



Apparently, body fascism is nice, muscular male bodies being liked more than non-muscular, nice bodies which remain unpromoted. That’s my guess at least. I imagine they’d follow up with something about queerphobia, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, etc. and may not be entirely wrong.

[There is also a book and probably a whole field of discourse about “body fascism”. I really don’t are.]

The post could be a conservative mockery of leftism’s seemingly insane litigation of any perceived inequality, no matter how inherent and unchangeable that inequality may be. It seems tactically stupid as well, when we all know that sex sells.

At the same time it makes sense. Our idea of beauty is in many ways culturally and therefore economically determined and a fair target of criticism. The beautiful body has been an emblem of racist and classist ideology and so it smacks of fascism by default. The uncritical worship of a superior being with a superior (muscled, aesthetically pleasing) body is something we often ascribe to Nazism what with all the supermen and nude athletics.

Boris Groys (again, I quote him, I’m sorry, I promise I’ll quote other people here too–who aren’t Mark Fisher, even!) in his essay in “Art Power” on Hitler, Nazism and Fascist aesthetics talks about how fascisms great “gift” to art and expression was the re-centering of the body. The body grants visibility and immediacy, a speed other expressive mediums lack, and so all discourse is in some ways of the body. Gestures observed in videos, stills, soundbites are always what we see first. All discourse is therefore in some ways touched by fascism and to put “body” in front is redundant.

There is an irony in that the posts we see holding up fat, queer, black, etc. bodies as beautiful, or the countless magazine articles praising sexual discovery all are rooted in this discourse of the body. The body is mysterious, with powers to be unlocked through the gym or hormones or sex. “The discovery of one’s own body has thus become the greatest art of our age.”

The body is what dominates our “collective imagination” according to Groys, and the thing that makes one body more worthy than another is what Groys essay, and Nazism and Fascism, concern.

What distinguishes the heroic body of a media star from the unheroic bodies of

the audience? Where lies the magic border that separates the hero from the nonhero on a purely corporeal plane? These questions arise because on the ideological plane a democratic equality of all is postulated that does not in fact exist in the reality of the media. For in today’s media-driven democracy, all ideologies, theories, and discourses are equal, indeed—and hence also irrelevant. Yet bodies are all the less equal for that.

We can assume the posts about body fascism and misogyny above are pointing a finger at the audience and saying they are committing a fascist sin. Elevating the muscular over the non-muscular, the masculine over the feminine, the fairer skinned over darker, etc. There’s obviously truth that the media does this all the time. It’s also the experience of anyone from a category that is not conventionally attractive (or worse, belonging to several catgegories of unattractiveness) that you can be easily passed over as a potential partner. We all know sexual stereotyping and racism are interlinked in complex ways that can be internalized and politicized.

Mishima talks about the heroic body as something built by muscle and youth but also possessed by something mysterious, the dialectic of the spiritual and the material swollen with blood, resolvable only in the moment of death. In a passage from “Confessions of a Mask”, Mishima describes the mysterious heroism of a classmate’s body.

Without his being aware of it, some force had stolen into Omi’s flesh and was scheming to take possession of him, to crash through him, to spill out of him, to outshine him. In this respect the power resembled a malady. Infected with this violent power, his flesh had been put on this earth for no other reason than to become an insane human-sacrifice, one without any fear of infection. Persons who live in terror of infection cannot but regard such flesh as a bitter reproach. . . . The boys staggered back, away from him.

The sheer vitality repels the weak or those too afraid of holding onto their little lives. They lack the ability to become sacrificial, to be a beauty that exists only for a short moment in time. Youth and strength are fleeting and that fleetingness adds to their pathos and beauty, while the fact that they come to an end (and for Mishima and other fascist idealists, preferably a violent and bloody end) lets them be defined as works of art. Vitalism becomes a cult of heroic death and sacrifice, as it was for the fascists and as it seems to be in some of the writing and art of the “vitalist anarchists”.

These anarchists might fire back that even something as blatantly hero and body worshiping as this isn’t necessarily fascist. Surely, the body beautiful can be put in service to other ideologies. I certainly agree. I promised sub-Zizek style takes. The first thing that came to mind on the subject of “Body Fascism” was Zizek on Rammstein, speaking in the “Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”. On screen Rammstein do their mock-goth-Nazi schtick and Zizek spit-lubes all the stiff-armed teutonic posturing:

The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology enacted by Rammstein are something like pure elements of libidinal investment. Enjoyment has to be, as it were, condensed in some minimal tics: gestures, which do not have any precise ideological meaning. What Rammstein does is it liberates these elements from their Nazi articulations. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological state.

The way to fight Nazism is to enjoy these elements, ridiculous as they may appear, by suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning. This way you undermine Nazism from within.

So how does nonetheless ideology do this? How does it articulate pre-ideological elements? These elements can also be seen as a kind of a bribe. The way ideology pays us to seduce us into its edifice. These bribes can be purely libidinal bribes, all those tics which are condensed enjoyment. Or, they can be explicit discursive elements like notions of solidarity of collective discipline, struggle for one’s destiny and so on and so on. All these in itself are free floating elements which open themselves to different ideological fields

To take from the fascists playbook of aesthetic markers and “libidinal bribes”, almost none of which are their invention, and redeploy them for socialism is a good idea. It is a risky idea, rife with potential accusations of “Strasserism” and openings to reinvite the old bigotries disguised as aesthetic radicalism or post-post-post-leftist discourse but to do otherwise is to cede vital territory.

To cede all celebration of physical beauty and power to the right is an enormous act of self-sabotage. Abandoning the notion of discipline, authority, and order to the right under the name “hierarchy” was a disastrous ideological move. Giving away the celebration of beauty and physical power is another move where leftists move into the zone of self-parody. Obviously power, physical or otherwise, must be critiqued and discussed but to condemn its appeal outright is absurd.

I remember listening to a talk on fascist imagery in American entertainment and while much of it was insightful there was a funny moment where “anti-fascist fight clubs” were held up as actually embodying fascist ideology. By being violent, us vs. them, and in many ways, masculine, these fight clubs were identified as an ironic colonization of fascist ideology into left wing culture. That idea rests on the premise that organized violence is essentially fascist, and so resistance to fascism is also a fascism.

In the same vein, to say that extolling one body over another is fascism puts the whole concept of heroism as an essential fascist trait rather than something that fascism makes use of. That what bodies we deem worthy of heroic attention is informed by capitalism, class, and the many cultural emanations of those things goes without saying–To worship without critique is perhaps a central fascist trait.

“Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”



The fact that one of the people in the “Body Fascism” tweet are appears not to be white brought to mind Leni Riefenstahl, of “Triump of the Will” fame, and her later career photographing the Nuba people in Sudan. Beautiful black bodies dominating the frame is not something you’d expect a former Nazi to make, unless perhaps it was for the purposes of creating racial/sexual anxiety based propaganda. Riefenstahl’s art is not that. It is, like her two most famous films, a monument to athleticism and physical power.

Susan Sontag wrote a brilliant essay viciously and accurately dissecting the career and ideology of Riefenstahl. Sontag takes apart the “fascist aesthetic” she feels Riefenstahl displays even in her photos of Africans.

Riefenstahl was surely someone who understood the “Life Force” that Mishima writes about, the innate power in blood-swelled muscle that can speak to something beyond the intellect. All of her work is charged with the eroticism of physical power, in the sadomasochistic eroticism of bodies expressing their inequality in competition.

Extreme right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism. (Which is not something to the Nazis’ credit, but rather shows something of the nature and limits of the sexual imagination.)

Shades of Fisher here, and his attack on the DeSadean/Dionysian idiocy of male sexuality–Fisher, following Deleuze (?) disentangles masochism from sadism, offering the former up as an intellectually stimulating eroticism through aestheticization while sadism is physical, fascist, penetrating. Sontag’s view is older and in my view more correct: masochism is always linked with sadism and the urge to aestheticize the world comes with a wish to see that which violates this aesthetic destroyed or at least removed from sight. In addition, the sadistic degradation of a subject into an object can cut both ways.

Sontag describes so-called fascist aesthetics (though again, I might want the two word distanced and disentangled) as the enactment of a certain kind of scene that is given mythic potency by the fascist artist. The characters in this scene:

…flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing.

The appearance of Nazi uniforms in sadomasochism is an appropriation of the license to dominate inherent in the clean blackness of the uniforms and the severity of their symbols. The costume covers urges that simultaneously undermine individuality (the uniform itself, the turning a person into an object) and then elevates the individual through transforming sex into an expression of aesthetic taste. Sex becomes snobbery, and through both Kojeve and Fisher one could make an argument for sadomasochism being the preferred sexual mode or possibly a desublimated symptom of communism.

Sadomasochism, fascist warts and all, helps fulfill Fisher’s aesthetic demand that we discard: “the idea that the body is merely the container or envelope for interiority”. Sontag declares the popularization of sadomasochism and its aesthetics a new cultural development.

Never before in history was the relation of masters and slaves realized with so consciously artistic a design. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

Death, seriality, immortality through interchangeabilty, the synthesis of blood and spirit through sacrifice, bodiless orgasms occurring through the stimulation that comes from the very thought of totality–all of these potent, mythic ideas rippling beneath the skin of sadomasochism and voyeurism, in our flesh, in sex, in everything we see and do. I am not suggesting we fly too close to the Black Sun and so take in more fascism and reactionary idiocy for their own sake or in search of some edgy frisson (though maybe I’ve already done that too many times) , but I am saying that we should not reject out of hand the aesthetic power that is so obviously there.

Fisher’s idea of glam/goth is compelling to me. The idea of viewing the body differently as some cold, dead-but-animated surface is compelling. That idea of “Soviet Goth” was in direct response to Fisher’s displeasure at the apparent aesthetic victory of fascist over communist aesthetics. It was still no mistake that to call upon the Soviets, even in their avant-garde/constructivist mode is still to call on authority , power, and the strength to subdue.

To repoliticize aesthetics may be a goal fraught with the potential for messy (dialectical?) reversals but it also not something to abandon. Communism is sometimes presented as a scavenger, a reappropriator of the advancements that capitalism has let fall off the back of the truck, to paraphrase Haraway. Perhaps we should evaluate all aesthetics, all potential libidinal bribes, as such scavenged tools to be used for our purposes.