Masochism and Terror:

Fight Club and the Violence

of Neo-fascist Ressentiment

Andrew Hewitt
My contribution to this series of articles in Telos is not that of an historian
or a social theorist, and it does not deal with totalitarianism in anything
other than a rather spectral sense. To this extent, it might seem a little
out of place. This essay concerns itself not with the analysis of a specific
historical society that might (or might not) be characterized as totalitarian,
but with the way in which a certain sense of the totalitarian has shaped the
self-understanding of liberal Western popular culture. It starts from two
very different points. At the level of theory, I examine avenues of political
thought—specifically critical of totalitarianism—^that have been blocked
by the historical events of the latter half of the twentieth century. At the
level of cultural representation, however, I begin with an artifact of popular
culture that I take as typical of certain trends in the representation of "fas-
cism"—that term being understood, in this case, in its broadest and most
imprecise sense as something disruptive to the liberal ideals of tolerance
and non-violence. The essay will veer, then, rather perilously between the
sublimity of high theory and the ridiculous thrill of a Hollywood action
movie. In the process, I wish to argue for the operation of two apparently
contradictory understandings of totalitarianism within public cultural dis-
course. The first—^which I will call the terror of the totality—opposes the
open consensus of civil society to the closed order imposed from above by
the state apparatus. The second—which I will call the terror of the frag-
ment—opposes that same consensus to the threat of chtonic or atavistic
violence arising from below. This latter is totalitarian insofar as it derives
either from conviction—^the belief in a truth whose totalizing claims can-
not be squared with the pragmatic give-and-take of liberal debate, and

104
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 105

whose claims must be enforced—or from a fundamental pre-social vio-

lence or antagonism that reveals the partiality and impotence of our social
conventions. It is through the concept of terror, I wish to argue, that we
might begin to understand what links these two different threats to liberal
society. The first form of violence—state terror—operates as a machine;
the second—the terror that predates all social contracts—erupts.
With the collapse of Eastern Etirope's communist regimes follow-
ing more than forty years upon the defeat of European fascism, it again
became possible—as the various contributions to this series attest—^to
resurrect a concept of totalitarianism that had long been compromised by
its role in justifying the political standoff of the cold war. The very same
historical events that have allowed the concept to resurface, however,
seem at the same time to have disabled another strain of thinking about
totalitarianism. I think specifically of the analysis offered by Max Hork-
heimer and Theodor Adomo in Dialectic of Enlightenment—an analysis
in which the twin poles of totalitarianism are marked not by fascism and
communism, but by fascism and capitalism.' I am no political scientist,
but I think it safe to say that the equation of fascism and capitalism as
political forms of totalitarianism is, on the face of it, absurd. It is certainly
not a contention I would wish to defend, nor one I even think it particu-
larly necessary to refute in this essay. I would, however, like to rescue
other aspects of Horkheimer and Adomo's analysis from the oblivion to
which recent events in political history might seem to have condemned it.
Globalization—with the cultural, political, and military conflicts that it
has unleashed—seems to have made Horkheimer and Adomo's infamous
critique of the twin totalitarianisms of fascism and capitalism pertinent
once again. My contention is not that Horkheimer and Adomo's fears have
somehow come to fruition through globalization, but that a rhetoric that
enabled opposition to an enemy whose power was characterized by its
sheer totality no longer meets the exigencies of a situation in which that
power is applied in a fragmented or terroristic fashion. There is a danger,
I believe, in persisting with the characterization of fascism or neo-fascism
as culturally monumental and politically invested in the State. We need to
be attentive to the operation of proto-fascist ideology within the rhetoric of
those who oppose totalization. We need to uncover the rhetoric of a certain
bio-politics that was always fundamental to fascism.

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adomo, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John

Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987).
106 ANDREW HEWITT

It is my contention that we need to think the concept of terror in dia-

lectical relation to the concept of totality as it is articulated in Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The totalitarianism thesis of the 1950s rendered problem-
atic the strain of Hegelian Marxism (practically synonymous with Westem
Marxism tout court) that depended upon its power to resolve the contra-
dictions of capitalism within a teleological "grand narrative" through
recourse to the work of the so-called "master-thinkers."^ Likewise, for
the post-war left, the concept of revolutionary violence—^the role of terror
within the provisional dictatorship of the proletariat—^was colored by the
need to confront and work through the challenge posed by a quite spe-
cific form of state terror, namely the atrocities of the Stalinist Gulag. The
Gulag seemed to provide prima facie evidence for the equation of fascism
and communism that formed the basis of the cold war's totalitarianism
thesis. As a unifying term, totalitarianism described a "top down" terror
made possible by the erasure of the difference between State and Party, by
the concomitant foreclosure of civil society, and by the identification of
political reason with the demands of a trans- (or arguably pre-) historical
subject. This subject might be figured as the race, or a concept of the pro-
letariat that was itself also justified by Marx's reference to an ambiguous
ethical imperative of the "species being."
Terror, it would appear, was on the side of totality—the bringing to bear
of the fiill might of the totalitarian regime upon its cowed and terrorized
subjects. Of course, the operation of this "terror" was more complicated
in reality, and the fact that it was used primarily to characterize Stalinism,
rather than Nazism, is important. This terror was characterized not only
by virtue of the might that was brought to bear (the terror of totality, as I
would call it) but by the arbitrariness and unpredictability of its operation.
The binary racial logic of Nazism was altogether clearer and outwardly
directed: I am who I am (Aryan) because I am not who you are (Jew). In

2. I take the term from Andre Glucksmann, Les maitres-penseurs (Paris: Grasset,
1977). The work typifies the project of the so-called nouveaux philosophes of the post-
1968 backlash in France. Themselves imbued with the ideology and rhetoric of the 1968
student uprisings, these thinkers nevertheless reacted strongly against that intellectual
tradition to challenge the potentially totalitarian thrust of Hegelian Marxism. Often over-
looked outside France—and overshadowed by the more successful intellectual exports of
poststructuralism, whose intellectual rigor they lacked—these thinkers signaled the disaf-
fection of radical thinkers in Europe with the systematicity and rigidity of leftist political
theory. In the current context, they are interesting for the way in which—like Horkheimer
and Adomo—they, too, take up the putative implication of the concept of totality so crucial
to Hegelian thought in the ideological workings of totalitarianism.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 107

the Soviet case, by contrast, terror relied both upon the total power of its
agent and upon the fragmentation of any social or civil unit capable of
resisting it. It could happen everywhere, it could happen anywhere. Even
where a binary logic of "them" and "us" was invoked to justify purges,
the very nature of the purge was paradoxically oriented toward "us" rather
than "them." The purgative and self-devouring nature of Stalinism made
it almost impossible to know whether one was terrorizer or terrorized.
Indeed, this uncertainty is the condition ofterror, the final intemalization
of an extemal power structure. In this sense, then—^according to a "logic"
that I would characterize as the "fragmented" operation of terror—one
cannot truly speak of the subject of terror. Terror, in this formulation,
would be a discourse and practice in which the status of the subject is itself
called into question: Am I subject or object of the purge? Can there be a
subject of the purge? Is the purge the process whereby the true historical
subject is to be effected?
What I wish to suggest—in an historical leap—is that it is this "frag-
mented" or "fragmenting" aspect ofterror (i.e., its dialectical and disruptive
operation rather than its total power) that presages the terrorist ofthe twenty-
first century. The suicide bomber is not just one form of terrorist, but the
very realization ofterror in all its dialectical rigor. Rather than explore this
claim in the geopolitical terms of East-West confrontations, however—a
field of which I know less than nothing—I wish to explore cultural shifts
within the cultural representation and theorization of power in Westem
Etirope. I do so in order to demonstrate ways in which this concept of
terror has arisen as a dialectical response to forms of "totalitarianism" still
perhaps best explained by Horkheimer and Adomo—^whatever the pat-
ent shortcomings of their analysis at the level of political formations. My
observations, therefore, belong in a volume considering the recrudescence
of totalitarianism as an analytic category only insofar as that attenuated
notion of the totalitarian operative in Dialectic of Enlightenment might be
said to retain some interpretive value.
What I wish to retain from Horkheimer and Adomo might only be
termed "totalitarian" by way of a conflation all too common in their
analysis: namely, a pervasive confusion of "totality" and "totalitarian"
that derives from Adomo's oft-quoted dictum from Minima Moralia, "The
whole is the un-tme" {Das Game ist das Unwahre). Any self-closing, self-
legitimating system that projects itself as a totality is liable to the chaise of
totalitarianism from the perspective of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed,
108 ANDREW HEWITT

from such a standpoint, the global capacities of capitalism render it all

the more "totalitarian," potentially, than any of the regimes of which the
term might generally be used in political science. Politically totalitarian
regimes traditionally dedicate a specific function within the public sphere
to the explicit enunciation of official ideology and to the expression of
collective belief in that ideology (demonstrations, rallies, marches, etc.).
Indeed, under such regimes civil society is often reduced to such explicit
and coercive demonstrations of faith. This is not the case, of course, in
capitalism. The acts of faith that constitute "belief in capitalism are not
extraneous to the operation of capitalism itself. One "believes" in capi-
talism (or at least one did, until neo-conservatism began rendering such
belief an explicit article of faith) by living it. Thus, for example, the visit
of President Bush to the site of the September 11 bombings in New York
City may have given rise to spontaneous shows of patriotism on the part
of the city's fire fighters, but the collective "belief in the system that
was under attack had earlier been better articulated by the city's mayor,
who urged the citizenry not to go out on marches and demonstrations,
but to get back to the business of business, to get back to the work of
shopping. The "totalitarian" aspect of capitalism consists in the fact that
we "believe" by acting—even if we do not wittingly act out of an explicit
belief I do not shop because I consider it my duty, or in explicit defense
of a socio-economic system. What this suggests—and it is this that I retain
from Horkheimer and Adomo—is that the "totality" projected by capital-
ism is all-encompassing because it does not need to construct itself as an
object of faith.
Some have referred to this as the "post-ideological" nature of late
capitalism.^ The need of totalitarian regimes to demonstrate—or stage-
manage—belief in their system paradoxically implies that this belief is
always perilous, always at stake. The totalitarian ability to coerce a demon-
strative belief is undermined by the need of such regimes for belief to be
demonstrated. The explicit nature of totalitarian ideologies—the ability to
articulate a set of core beliefs—is at one and the same time their strength in

3. One sees this tendency already in the early 1960s with the influential work of
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New
York: Free Press, 1962). The concept reaches an apogee of sorts thirty years later in the
famous work of Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, 1992). Fukuyama has, of course, since revisited some of the fundamental tenets of
his earlier work.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 109

the face of a woolly and poorly articulated capitalism, and their weakness
in the face of a capitalism that needs no explicit articulation. Recently,
Slavoj Zizek has refuted, in a masterful manner, the misguided criticism
leveled at poststmcturalist theory that its putative reduction of "reality" to
little more than a series of discourses or textual operations leaves no place
for the critique of ideology. Such critics argue that if we have nothing but
discourse, we have no standard for assessing the tmth content of denota-
tive statements and, therefore, no grounds for distinguishing between truth
and misrepresentation. As Zizek points out, however, what has resulted
from such theories is a new concept of ideology, in which a supposedly
"post-ideological" consumer capitalism would, in fact, exemplify the very
operation of ideology."
In an argument I will retum to later in a quite specific cultural context,
Zizek claims that ideology does not consist in the simple mis-representa-
tion of a fact or reality. Ideology is, instead, the construction of a reality of
which the misrepresentation is itself a crucial and disavowed component.
In other words, if "reality" is x, ideology is not simply any discourse that
misrepresents that reality as y (as the classic theory of false conscious-
ness would have it). Instead, ideology is the condition x, which is made
possible only by the very act of misrepresentation y. Ideology exits the
realm of mere representation (the reproductive realm of the superstmc-
ture) and becomes constitutive, performative, dynamic, and productive.
In such a formulation, ideology follows the logic of disavowal: "I know,
but..." This disavowal is not simply a failure to penetrate to the tmth of
things—an unfinished project of self-enlightenment—but the condition
of possibility of continuing to live at all under the present conditions. In
short, ideology becomes a precondition of individual and collective good
health, rather than the symptom of an illness to be cured. The very theories
that have been held by some as responsible for disempowering a critique
of ideology have, in fact, allowed us to see the operation of ideology in its
new context. This is a position with which Adomo would certainly have
had much sympathy. For Adomo, tmth always inhered in the "split," in
the conscious and unconscious, institutionalized and quotidian separation
of discourses. The tmth is not x, ideology is not 7; rather, ideology is the
condition x that is made possible only by the belief;'. Indeed, y need not
even be a belief, and tends instead to the condition of an action.

4. Slavoj iXick, "The Spectre of Ideology: Introduction," in Mapping Ideology, ed.

Slavoj 2izek (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1-33.
110 ANDREW HEWITT

My example for tracing the ways in which totalitarianism and terror

have realigned themselves in the popular cultural imagination is provided
by David Fincher's 1999 movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt, Edward
Norton, and Helena Bonham-Carter. My consideration of the film tums
as much on its cultural context and reception as it does upon the film
itself as a finished product. In his review, the Los Angeles Times's film
critic Kenneth Turan took exception to what he saw as a proto-fascist
social vision at the film's core.' The ostensible grounds for his criticism
lie in the film's ambiguous romanticization of a paramilitary fraternity
of anti-social anarchists—"Project Mayhem"—^that gathers around the
charismatic leader-figure of Tyler Durden. The interplay within the film
of testosterone-driven anti-social and anarchic behavior and a somewhat
paradoxical obsession with the intemal hierarchical order of the group, a
fascination with weaponry, and a central and crucial leader all figure prom-
inently in the images and understanding of historical fascism popularized
in the age of the History Channel. It is also a characteristic convergence
that we find repeated in present-day right-wing paramilitary—and so-
called "libertarian"—groups. Certainly, popular culture seems to have
taken note of a recent resurgence in this nexus of ideological elements.
Films such as Fight Club and American History X foreshadow a fear of
antisocial and terroristic activity on the right—a fear that we have since
conveniently transposed onto extemal foes. I wish to argue that the film
critic in question—along with countless others who followed his line of
argument—was on the right track, but that the "totalitarian" paramilitary
aspects ofthe film merely made explicit and comprehensible the operation
of a certain "totalitarian fragmentation" that might best be described as
terror. If the film hamesses anarchy to a commitment to strict social hierar-
chy, we should beware of identifying proto- and neo-fascism only with the
second of these ingredients. We need to be alert to the anti-authoritarian
strain of the totalitarian impulse—an impulse that sees in social order an
inadequate and merely secondary reconstruction of a more fundamental
order, intuited only through unmediated and visceral experience.
The narrative of Fight Club (though not its visual representation)
opens with the nameless narrator (Edward Norton), a mild-mannered anti-
hero, on a plane home from a business trip. An insurance adjuster whose

5. Kenneth Turan, review of Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, Los Angeles
Times, October 15,1999. A Google search of Fight Club and the term "fascism" tums up a
bewildering amount of debate about the political position ofthe film.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 111

job it is to visit car crash sites, calculate the rate of failure of car parts, and
weigh the resulting insurance claims against the cost of redesigning the
cars, he is paid to subject bodies—corpses—^to an economic calculation.
On the plane he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic figure who
seems able to express all the fhistrations the meek hero cannot. On arrival
at his home, the narrator finds his building on fire and leams that his own
apartment has blown up for some unexplained reason. In a loving fiash-
back, the narrator meanders through the apartment, Ikea catalog in hand,
ordering articles, as captions and prices float over the screen, tuming the
apartment itself into an illustration from the very catalog from which he
orders. The catalog provides reading matter for a visit to the bathroom, as
our hero continues to consume new items even as he evacuates what he
has already consumed. Capitalism, we are to understand, is an extremely
efficient system of digestion.
At a loss and bereft of all worldly goods, the narrator fishes from his
pocket the card of Tyler Durden, a soap salesman, and calls asking to be
taken in for the night. Tyler lives in an abandoned and dilapidated house
in a deserted, post-industrial part of town. The two become close, with the
narrator becoming gradually, but never explicitly, infatuated with Tyler
(indeed, the degree of the erotic attraction is decidedly higher in Chuck
Palahniuk's 1996 novel than in thefilm).*On their first drunken night out,
Tyler dares our hero finally to vent his anger and punch him. From this
humble beginning, the idea for weekly bare-knuckle fight clubs develops,
and soon an underground set of franchises has fight clubs springing up
nationally, spreading word ofthe famous Tyler Durden. By this point, the
narrator has given up the nine-to-five, blackmailing his boss into offering
him a comfortable early retirement package. Dissatisfied with his life, he
has trouble sleeping and begins attending self-help groups for a variety of
fatal diseases from which he does not suffer. The groups embarrass him at
first, as he is obliged to "share" with fellow sufferers emotions that he is not
feeling. With practice, however, he realizes that he does begin to experi-
ence the necessary emotions, and the groups become a necessary catharsis
to him. He meets another "faker" (Maria, a mess of a femme fatale, played
by Helena Bonham-Carter), whom he despises for threatening to blow his
cover. However when the desperate and self-dramatizing Maria attempts
suicide, Tyler rescues the heavily dmgged woman from her apartment, and
together they begin a torrid affair, whose accompanying noises keep the

6. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

112 ANDREW HEWITT

narrator awake at night. The woman is clearly an interloper in this male

world and is treated accordingly by both men. The narrator is all bile.
Increasingly drawn into Tyler's countercultural world, the narrator
accompanies him on night raids to a liposuction clinic where they secure
the fats necessary for the production of soap. Over time, combatants from
fight clubs begin to show up at Tyler's home and eventually form a para-
military organization—Project Mayhem—^that at first engages in high jinks
at the expense of corporate America (e.g., waiting tables at government
banquets and pissing in the soup) but later grows increasingly violent. The
narrator becomes more and more uneasy at the escalating violence and
the paramilitary turn that the group takes as "recniits" begin tuming up at
his door. Gradually, he is marginalized within the group when he raises a
voice against these developments.
Shortly before the group's planned master-stroke—^the detonation of
bombs in all the skyscrapers in the city center—Tyler goes missing, and the
narrator pursues him across the country in an attempt to halt the plan. The
response of people to the narrator's questions about Tyler's whereabouts
are strangely puzzling, as are Maria's reactions to his intrusive questions
about her liaison with Tyler. Slowly, the realization dawns on the narra-
tor that he and Tyler are, in fact, one and the same person. He has been
planning the terrible attack; he has been having the affair with Maria. His
projection of the Tyler figure as his own doppelganger is a disavowal of
the violent affect that he dare not express otherwise. At the end of the film,
the narrator and Maria are reunited and treated to a top-floor, panoramic
view of the city's spectacular collapse (a directorial tour de force).
It is at just before this point—^when Tyler forces a revolver down his
friend's throat—^that the film opens, the narrative effectively reconstruct-
ing how this moment of confrontation came about. This rather complicated
staging of a suicide exemplifies one central component of my argument
here: namely, that the prevailing fantasies of violence in what we might
loosely term the "postmodern" era—and I shall, as we see, be taking the
1960s as a crucial watershed in this respect—are no longer sadistic ("What
do the victims matter, if the gesture be beautiful?") but masochistic. Fol-
lowing Gilles Deleuze, I argue that such masochism is not merely the flip
side of its sadistic predecessor and counterpart, but an entirely different
regime of power—one that sees in the experience of pain the possibility of
a rupture in the otherwise seamless operation of an apparently "post-ideo-
logical" ideology. While concepts such as sadism and masochism cannot, of
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 113

course, be understood outside of their psychoanalytic framework, it is not

at the level of psychoanalysis that I wish to argue here. One can, I believe,
understand the import of the following distinction delineated by Deleuze
without resorting to the analysis of supposedly "fascist" individuals:

[The masochist's] sadism is a culmination: it is as though expiation and

the satisfaction of the need to expiate were at last to permit the hero what
his punishments were previously intended to deny him. Once they have
been undergone, punishments and suffering allow the exercise of the evil
they once prohibited. Likewise, the "masochism" of the sadistic hero
makes its appearance at the outcome ofhis sadistic exercises; it is their
climax, the crowning sanction of their glorious infamy. The libertine is
not afraid of being treated in the way he treats others. The pain he suf-
fers is an ultimate pleasure not because it satisfies a need to expiate or a
feeling of guilt, but because it confirms him in his inalienable power and
gives him a supreme certitude... .The masochist is able to change into a
sadist by expiating, the sadist into a masochist on condition that he does
not expiate.'

In political terms, one can certainly see how the sadist's violence—a vio-
lence that "confirms him in his inalienable power and gives him a supreme
certitude"—accords with the "totalizing" aspect of totalitarianism. It
centralizes power and renders it absolute. But for the masochist, too, "pun-
ishments and suffering allow the exercise of the evil they once prohibited."
Hardly more comforting, this—a fascism of the little guy that seeks to
secure its legitimacy through the intricate series of contracts and formali-
ties central to the practices of the masochist. If we recall the nature of the
Rousseauian social contract that lies at the very heart of Enlightenment
social theory itself, we cannot but be struck by its "masochistic" tenden-
cies according to the above formulation. The social contract consists of
the surrender of partial individual will to the paradigmatic subjectivity of
the volonte generale, the surrender of the self to the Self, so to speak. The
payoff for the original suffering is participation in the power that represses
and therefore liberates us.
Unlike some—such as Zizek and Eric Santner—I am deeply suspi-
cious of the recent reemergence of the masochistic episteme in a putatively
oppositional form, and of the whole accompanying discourse of redemp-

7. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus In Furs, trans. Jean
McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 39-40.
 114 ANDREW HEWITT

tive violence that can be traced back to the more messianic writings of
Benjamin.' It was a rather different Benjamin who, in his famous (by now,
one might almost say infamous) essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," developed the crucial notion of the "aestheti-
cization of politics." The terms in which that concept is described could
hardly be more pertinent to the visual delights offered by Fincher's film:

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for

the Olympian gods, now is one for itself Its self-alienation has reached
such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism
is rendering aesthetic'

The description, of course, might be tailor-made for the concluding scene

of Fight Club, in which the narrator and Maria—having killed off the
narrator's alter-ego of Tyler Durden but having failed to abort Project
Mayhem's detonation of downtown skyscrapers—stand in awe before
a plate glass window and watch the whole world implode. The camera,
meanwhile, is poised behind them, watching them watching. Voyeurs of
the voyeurism of others, we, the audience, experience in exemplary form
the operation of disavowal: "We know, but..."'" This notion of mankind

8. See Slavoj I'lzek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989); and Eric
Santner, "Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neigh-
bor," in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Ziiek, Eric L.
Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).
9. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 241.
10. The ambiguity inherent in this shot runs through the entire film: the audience's
metacritical distance from the characters' own scopic pleasure is subverted into a second
form of pleasure. The structure of this pleasure is essentially masochistic. Elsewhere in the
film, for example, we share a subversive joke with Tyler—in his evening-time capacity as
movie projectionist—as he splices frames of penises from hardcore pom into family mov-
ies, traumatizing an audience that cannot quite admit or grasp what it thinks it has just seen.
We ourselves become victims of that very gesture, however, when Fincher himself inter-
cuts such a shot into the credits at the films conclusion. (Fincher is rightly famed for his
use of credit sequences.) We are—by this conclusion—both distanced from and implicated
in the film's aestheticization of violence. More than this, we are implicated precisely by
the very gesture of distancing: critique has become a form of affinnation. Our complicity
is the belief >' without which the filmic x would not be possible. The critique of ideology
has become the predominant medium for the propagation of ideology insofar as it fails to
grasp the way in which ideology does not merely represent, but actually operates. This, I
would argue, is the central paradox of Fincher's film and the characteristic gesture of what
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 115

"experienc[ing] its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure" is the very

premise of Fight Club—^the reinvigorating experience of pain as marked
by the bruises and stitches on the protagonists' bodies. In this new config-
uration, however, the terms of Benjamin's analysis are reversed. Whereas
for Benjamin the experience of self-destructive pleasure is a mark of self-
alienation, in Fight Club the experience of pain is precisely the antidote
to alienation. It is as redemption from the world of corporate death that
Norton's character turns to the fight. In a gloss on the film's ethic for a
promotional interview in The Face, Edward Norton characterizes an ethi-
cal reversal central to the film:

"What's being requested is not 'Can I hit you?' but 'Will you hit
me?'...The point is: 'I need to get shaken, I need to feel something. I
need that punch in the nose that wakes me up.'... It's not being proposed
that violence directed outwards has some sort of purgative or cathartic
effect.""

This explanation is intended, at least in part, to disarm tbe critics' suspi-

cion that the film is somehow neo-fascist in its celebration of violence.
No cathartic or expressive value is being ascribed to violence, Norton
assures us. It isn't about hurting others. I wish to argue, however, that
this disavowal of any aggressive intent marks a mode of re-sentiment cen-
tral to the representational system of the "new" discourse of neo-fascism:
affect not as something that is "purged" from the subject by means of a
violent expression, but as something external that "affects"—and, indeed,
effects—^the subject. Norton disclaims a violence perpetrated by the sub-
ject, but he raises the question ofa violence that is necessarily constitutive
o/the subject. Pain is the experience of authenticity reworked not as a
discredited—and potentially aggressive—expression, but as a radically

one might term the new "masochistic" discourse on neo-fascism. We consume the critique
of consumerism: we gaze at Pitt's personally-trained, sculpted body, as it in tum mockingly
gazes at the ubiquitous bodies of underwear models on billboards, to the accompaniment of
Norton's voice-over telling us how "I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms." The masoch-
istic pleasure of the fight club is projected onto the audience: we laugh at the poor suckers
who are unwittingly subjected to inter-spliced snippets of pom, and laugh all the harder
when we realize that we ourselves are the suckers.
11. Norton is a particularly eloquent actor, and his comments are taken from an inter-
view with Craig McLean entitled "Public Enemy Number 1: Edward Norton," The Face.
December 1999, p. 71.
 116 ANDREW HEWITT

physical and aestheticized ethics of bodily impression. There ltirks here the
fantasy of a redemption through the suffering of violence, a fantasy that
today extends, I think, to the broader belief that a confi-ontation witb—or
subjection to—the violence inflicted by anti-Enlightenment ideologues
might somehow redeem liberalism from its own torpor.
The question Fight Club raises with respect to new discourses on
neo-fascism is: what happens to the subject in recent cultural attempts to
re-connect with a more visceral form of "experience"? If the physical body
has become the irreducible core of experience—^the locus of pain—^what
relation does it entertain to metaphysical or even discursive notions of
subjectivity? I would claim that the discourse of "fascinating fascism" that
emerged in the 1960s involved a critique of the category of experience as
a medium for reconnecting with more "authentic" notions of subjectivity.
The cultural engagement with fascism at the time—and the questioning
of the role of affect in political life—actually made possible a theory of
ressentiment that we only now see resurfacing mfin de siecle fiirtations
with neo-fascist iconography or topoi. The new discourse, I propose, expe-
riences metaphysical subjectivity as precisely the thing that stands in the
way ofa new aesthesis. It is the body itself that serves as a final residue of
authenticity. We are reduced to a metaphysics of the physical. Though a
much-touted postmodern irony has left us suspicious of unproblematized
notions of authentic cultural expression—that is, the ability or need of
the subject to express itself and the capacity of language for such expres-
sions—what we are left with is, quite literally, an ideology of impression,
the scarred impressions upon the body that mark its "authentic" engage-
ment in the world.
The invitation extended to the other to infiict pain on me reconfigures
the ethical scenario that Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Mor-
als as the essence of ressentiment: "Every sufferer instinctively seeks a
cause for his suffering," Nietzsche writes, "more exactly, an agent: still
more specifically, a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering—in short,
some living thing upon which he can, on some pretext or other, vent his
affects, actually or in effigy."'^ As described by Norton in his interview,
the ptirgative function of violence is no longer paramount, whereas for
Nietzsche, "the venting of his affects represents the greatest attempt on

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy OfMorals andEcce Homo, trans, and ed.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 127.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 117

the part of the suffering to win relief, anaesthesia—^the narcotic he cannot

help desiring to deaden pain of any kind."'^ If for Nietzsche ressentiment
consists in "a desire to deaden the pain by means of affects," in Fight Club
it has, instead, become the basis for a new aesthetic.'" It is no longer a
question of deadening the pain, but of experiencing it—an aestheticization
that breaks through the anaesthesia of everyday existence. The reduction
of experience to the level of bodily pain suggests a fantasy of direct and
immediate access to the real. At the same time, however, this fantasy of
physical immanence—the subject in, or as, the body—obviously threatens
a certain metaphysical conception of the subject.
Tattered and wounded though they may be, the protagonists experience
their wounds as a mark of authenticity, a physical reminder that they exist.
By refusing to identify with the bodily ideal propagated in advertising,
they champion a fantasy of the "real" body over its symbolic displace-
ments. Riding a bus plastered with the ubiquitous male iconography of
Calvin Klein underwear, Norton's character—through voice-over—^tells
us how "I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms." Confronted with the com-
mercial perfection of the advertised male body, Tyler and the narrator ask
themselves, with an historically inflected sneer, "Is that what a man looks
like?" This is a body that is fixed, made perfect, immortalized, and immo-
bilized on a poster—but implicitly castrated (i.e., "fixed" in more ways
than one). And what is notable about the heroes' reaction is their refusal to
identify with it. Or rather, the film reconfigures the refusal to identify—^the
supposed mark of unique authenticity, the victory of "real" bodies over the
regime of representation—into an identification with the refusal. The phal-
lic power of the monumental male body—an ironically graphic realization
of Adomo and Horkheimer's identification of fascism and capitalism as
twin forms of totalitarianism—is bought at the price ofa castration that the
heroes no longer accept. In this refusal ltirks the fantasy of a power greater
than and irreducible to the "merely" phallic or symbolic.
Elsewhere in Benjamin's writing on fascism—^namely, in his "Theo-
ries of German Fascism"—we find a sketch of a very similar mode of
identification. Here Benjamin analyzes German responses to the traumatic
defeat experienced in World War I and asks, "What does it mean to win or
lose a war?" At the symbolic level, he answers,

13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
 118 ANDREW HEWITT

This meaning says, so to speak, the winner keeps the war in hand. It
leaves the hands of the loser; it says, the winner conquers the war for
himself, makes it his own property, the loser no longer possesses it and
must live without it To win or lose a war reaches so deeply, if we
follow the language, into the fabric of our existence that our whole lives
become that much richer or poorer in symbols, images and sources.'^

If this is so, Benjamin asks, then how is it that Germans of the right can
so obsessively cling to the experience? Having traced the stages traversed
in coming to terms with the loss, he notes that "what finally distinguishes
the latest effort from earlier ones in the process involved here is the ten-
dency to take the loss of the war more seriously than the war itself"'* This
intemalization of loss—this paradoxical affirmation of lack as the very
basis of identity—marks the apotheosis of "the novel assertion that it is
precisely this loss of the war that is characteristically German."" In other
words, rather than re-appropriating "the means of identification" in a revo-
lutionary affirmation of the war's true significance, the fascist internalizes
lack—ontologizes alienation—as the very condition of (German) subjec-
tivity. In the case of Fight Club—we might say, by way of analogy—what
first seems like the dismissive refusal of a merely specular identification
(with the model) in the name of a more authentic (bruised) identity is in
fact an attempt to establish identity through pain as the inchoate experi-
ence of lack. "What's being requested is not 'Can I hit you?' but 'Will you
hit me?'... The point is: 'I need to get shaken, I need to feel something. I
need that punch in the nose that wakes me up."'
Even the fiippant coinage of the term "body fascism" to describe the
culture the protagonists resist—"I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms"
—tells us something about the intended political valence of this scene.
Our authentic heroes favor a visceral, embodied, "real" subjectivity over
the politically suspect lures of the imaginary. They do not need an armored
fascist body to smooth over the fractures of some injured psyche. Like the
soldiers wounded in war, who thereby escape the need to relive the war
as trauma, their bruised bodies serve as the guarantee of an intact psyche.

15. Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays

War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jiinger," trans. Jerolf Wikoff, New German Critique 17
(Spring 1979): 123.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 119

They do not need to imitate some fascist/capitalist ego-ideal in bodily

form; they are "real" men, with all the messiness that might involve. What
is politically troubling here is the facile use made of an iconography in
which the unity of fascism and capitalism offers an easy target. Rather
than simply accepting the "perfect" body as iconically "totalitarian," we
need to be suspicious of ideologies that oppose so glib a totality in the
name of an unacknowledged, more visceral, "real" experience of the body.
Indeed, one might take as a graphic and emblematic example of the kind
of shift I am trying to indicate—a shift away from "totalizing" to "ter-
roristic" configurations of totalitarianism—^the need for culttiral criticism
to move beyond the monumental physical iconography of National Social-
ism, Italian fascism, and Soviet communism. By refusing the sculpted
bodies blandished by consumer capitalism—the eroticized montimental-
ism of Calvin Klein, capitalism's own Amo Breker—^the heroes distance
themselves from a "body fascism" that seems to validate graphically
Horkheimer and Adomo's equation of capitalism and totalitarianism. But
the "fascistic" aspects of a contemporary culture exemplified by this film
operate, in fact, at a quite different level.
The sneer at the Calvin Klein poster on the bus is an easily recogniz-
able political trope. I refuse the capitalist ego-ideal—^the form taken in
the post-cold war era by the totalitarian impulse. While the belief of the
novel's narrator that "we are all part of the same compost heap" might
seem a long way from the pristine angularity of fascist statuary (or metro-
sexual "body fascism"), such a belief—as Lukdcs consistently pointed out
in his critiques of the proto-fascist aspects of Expressionism and in his
theory of fascism in general—has always been a part of fascist ideology."
We have forgotten the proximity of totalitarian thought to the eco-logic
of the compost heap. When the narrator of Fight Club tells us that he
"wanted to put a bullet through the eyes of every panda that wouldn't fuck
to save its species," the affinity of that eco-logic with a mtirderous eugeni-
cism becomes exaggeratedly apparent." Similarly, Fight Club's theme
of consumption and recycling—ordering from the catalog while sitting
in the toilet—is itself reproduced and replicated in the specific form of

18. This is a position developed in the polemical essays of the so-called Expres-
sionism Debate, waged in the exile journal Das Wort in the 1930s, most specifically in
"Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline," Internationale Literatur 1 (1934). The
thesis is developed and brought to a head in GyOrgy Lukdcs, The Destruction of Reason,
trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980).
19. Pahhnmk, Fight Club, p. \23.
 120 ANDREW HEWITT

violence perpetrated by Tyler Durden against the establishment. At night

he raids the garbage skips outside a liposuction clinic to rescue the fats he
needs to produce both soap and explosives. He recycles bodily waste as
an explosive force. This trope has itself been recycled—^this time from the
proto-fascist writings of the Futurist F. T. Marinetti, in whose writings we
find "the plainest, the most violent of Futurist symbols":

In Japan they cany on the strangest of trades: the sale of coal made from
human bones. All their powderworks are engaged in producing a new
explosive substance more lethal than any yet known. This terrible new
mixture has as its principle element coal madefrombones with the qual-
ity of violently absorbing gases and liquids.^"

This ability of the body to produce explosions—in both Marinetti's writ-

ing and Fincher's Fight Club—is politically ambiguous. It exemplifies a
certain romanticization of the power of the somatic: the rendered body
offers up a violent opposition of which the traditional political subject
is no longer capable. In the case of Fight Club, that which is recycled
(reproduced) is that which has been "expressed" (literally, as abject human
fat, that which is extraneous to the self-image of the bourgeois subject
and has been extruded by liposuction). By insisting in our critical theory
upon the importance of the iconic and statuesque body to the self-repre-
sentation of totalitarian regimes, we risk forgetting the bio-political aspect
of totalitarianism. We risk underplaying the political dangers inherent in
taking "nature" as the evaluative benchmark of a political ethic. Access to
a violent somatic experience is taken, here, as proof of access to the real:
biology—^no less than in fascist eugenicism—is truly the bottom line.
If, as Adomo seems to indicate, we can no longer speak in the totalitarian
age of fully formed political subjects, the only hope for resistance seems to
comefromthe somatic itself, orfrommodes of subjectivity abstracted from
the interpersonal realm.^' In effect, the compost heap becomes the model
of community in a putatively "post-political" situation. It is this suppos-
edly post-ideological condition that the new popular cultural discourse on
fascism installs as the very epitome of the new ideology. The predominant

20. F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1971), p. 82.
21. Theodor W. Adomo, "Freudian Theory and the Structure of Fascist Propaganda,"
in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New
York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 118-37.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 121

form in which potentially fascist ideological material enters into popular

culture today is—as it often was in the 1920s—as a form of romantic anti-
capitalism. In light of the oft-proclaimed—and oft-repeated—historical
death ofthe subject, it is the body that must serve as a constant reminder
of silenced affect and as a privileged trope of this romantic anti-capitalism.
The rigid demarcation between self and other that we traditionally link to
the statuesque fascist body has been replaced at the level of the physical
by tropes of a more fluid organicism. Our own conceptions ofthe fascist
imaginary have themselves become fixed almost entirely on the image
ofthe hard, delineated body as the symbol of a hypostatized autonomous
subjectivity under threat. Thus, a certain glib "anti-fascism"—a rejection
of rigid demarcations of self and other—provides safe haven for the coun-
tercultural reconnection with an ecological strain of proto-fascist ideology
that we have too Iong forgotten.
Fight Club's pretension to a critique of consiunerism rests upon a mis-
understanding ofthe operation of fantasy as a socially cohering force. We
might, by way of concluding our consideration ofthe film, encapsulate the
problem in one example of the work of subversion undertaken by Proj-
ect Mayhem. In what seems an tincannily direct lift from Slavoj Ziiek's
1999 essay on fantasy as a political category, the film shows the members
of Project Mayhem tampering with the airplane evacuation information
familiar to all frequent flyers. At the very beginning ofthe film, when the
two heroes first meet, the inanity ofthese brochures—showing passengers
alighting calmly as the plane goes down in flames—has been commented
on. As one of the first interventions of Project Mayhem, urban terrorists
sabotage the printers and distribute to the airlines emergency evacuation
notices that show screaming, terrified people hurling themselves from the
plane in flames and traumatized children preparing to meet their death.
This, we are to understand, is what really happens in plane crashes. To
pretend otherwise is to acquiesce in the ideological anaesthetization that
corporate America perpetrates against us. Zizek has written specifically on
this scenario in another context:

The standard notioti ofthe way fantasy works within ideology is that of
a fantasy-scenario that obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead
of the full rendering of the antagonisms that traverse otir society, for
example, we indulge in the notion of society as an organic whole.... Suf-
fice it to recall the safety instructions prior to the take-off of an airplane.
Aren't they sustained by a fantasmatic scenario of how a possible plane-
 122 ANDREW HEWITT

crash will look?... Is not this 'gentrifying' of a catastrophe (a nice soft

landing, stewardesses in a dance-like style graciously pointing with their
hands toward the 'Exit' signs) also ideology at its purest? However, the
psychoanalytic notion of fantasy cannot be reduced to that of a fantasy
scenario that obfuscates the true horror of a situation. The first, rather
obvious thing to add is that the relationship between fantasy and the
horror ofthe Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it might
seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it
purports to conceal, its 'repressed' point of reference.^^

The film offers the satisfaction of sharing in the unmasking of ideology—

sneering at hyperbolic masculinity along with Brad Pitt, even as his own
body replicates exactly "what a man looks like"—precisely as it reinstates
it both scopically and narratively. The anti-ideological work of the ter-
rorists serves, in fact, to re-instate a notion of fantasy as cover-up. What
we arrive at is the stupidity of those in the know—^the arcane knowledge
of the anti-government survivalists, for example, who "know" what the
government is trying to "hide." This gnostic play of hide-and-seek has
become the predominant epistemological form of what we might call "soft
fascism" in the present day. In purporting to reveal what is hidden to the
unsuspecting public, "libertarian" conspiracy theories in fact obscure what
fantasy always already reveals for us. A critical model of political fantasy
as "obfuscation" or "cover-up" itself in fact covers up potentially fascistic
ideological material that is otherwise all too evident and, more often than
not, all too invested in a logic ofthe evidential. By insisting upon a notion
of ideology as mis-representation, we imply what we cannot articulate in
positive terms—namely, that we would know true representation if and
when we saw it (for example, the terrified passengers burning up in an
airplane).
I have used Fight Club not because I consider it a particularly impor-
tant movie (though it is certainly an extremely good one), but because I
take it as a particularly graphic example of a trend that I have observed
elsewhere in the more strictly delineated political arena. I wish now to
suggest some paths by which this new configuration of fascism and ter-
ror seems to have come about. Saul Friedlander was first to take critical
note, in 1984, ofthe emergence in the 1960s of a new discotirse on fas-

22. Slavoj Ziiek, "Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach," in The

iizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1999),
pp. 92-93.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 123

cism, and he took it as itself an historical phenomenon worthy

Friedlander's study served to periodize the post-war reception of fascism,
arguing that by the mid- to late-1960s, a new discourse of fascism—for
which we might, by way of shorthand, borrow Sontag's famous notion of
"fascinating fascism"—had begun to emerge.^"* This new discourse—to
which Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay on "The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction" stands, in many ways, as unwitting god-
father—stressed representational and aesthetic politics over the specific
historical analyses of Nazi and Fascist crimes that had thus far shaped the
immediate post-war attempt to come to terms with the past. The disadvan-
tage ofthe new discourse was that its focus on ideology as representation
potentially replicated the very depoliticization it claimed to analyze: the
historical horror of fascism consisted, after all, of rather more than just the
"aestheticization of politics" that Benjamin had so famously described in
1936. The great advantage of Benjamin's study, however, lies in its ability
to locate structures of thought and affect that might allow us to analyze
"the fascist within us"—a pressing issue for the New Left ofthe 1960s.
As Friedlander's presentation demonstrates, the fascism debates that
reopened in the mid-1960s, within the new paradigm of "aestheticiza-
tion," were overdetermined. On the one hand, they marked a response to
a constimer culture that finally seemed to have fully enacted the process
of anaesthetization that Susan Buck-Morss reads into Benjamin's essay."
This anaesthetization, moreover, seemed to have resulted in a certain
privileging of specularity as a mode of consumption—as witnessed, for
example, by Debord's infiuential analysis in The Society ofthe Spectacle
(1967), or by the work of filmmakers such as Pasolini, whose putative
analyses of fascism were, in fact, confrontations with the realities of post-
war consumer capitalism. Anaesthetization, then, was primarily identified
with the specular and with constimption. Constimption—the most visceral
of bodily acts—had, by metaphoric extension, become identified almost

23. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: an Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans.
Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
24. Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), pp. 73-105.
25. Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork
Essay Reconsidered," October (1992): 3-41. Her arguments are taken further by Lutz
Koepnick, "Fascist Aesthetics Revisited," M>tfemwm/Aforfe/7i/fy 6, no. 1 (January 1999):
51-74.
 124 ANDREW HEWITT

entirely with a certain mode of capitalist existence. To the extent that

the body's functions had been so radically colonized by such metaphors,
the possibility of revolt seemed to lie in reclaiming an experience ofthe
body, reclaiming the metaphor. I wish to argue that this possibility is prob-
lematized in recent cultural confrontations with the twin totalitarianisms
of capitalism and fascism. As Fight Club nicely demonstrates, we have
entered a new stage in the reception of fascism as aesthetic spectacle. A
generation of theory no longer burdened by the crisis of modernism that
made Benjamin, Sontag, and Friedlander so timely in their different ways,
has begun to emerge and fmd its expression not only in postmodernism,
but also in a reconfigured cultural fascination with fascism. Fight Club
offers a simultaneous critique and instrumentalization of a certain logic of
re-sentiment, a logic that seeks to reproduce as impression the emotional
states that are absent as the cause of its violence. While we might think
of totalitarianism,fi-oma political perspective, as asserting and imposing
a social order that belies real social schisms, we need also to beware of
a quite different politics of ressentiment that seeks to generate affect in
response, to create a kind of "subject effect" in the face of political and
cultural anomie.
In Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion," we find a reconstruction of the conditions of possibility of such
political ressentiment as a mimetic mode of experience: re-sentiment. It
is no coincidence that Benjamin's theory of fascism should derive from a
consideration of modes of representation, since representation is, in a quite
different sense, the organizational principle of democracy. In Benjamin's
analysis, "expression"—perhaps the grounding trope of liberal democracy,
the collective will of civil society expressed at the ballot box—is no longer
a guarantee of legitimacy or meaning, but a mere depoliticized ptirgation
of disgruntled affect. I would argue that the essay takes us beyond the
problematic of representation—which carries an unerringly negative con-
notation in his essay as the form of violent "expression" granted by the
fascists to those whose legitimate needs they ignore—into a consideration
of what he calls "reproduction." It is this newly performative and (re-)pro-
ductive notion of ideology that allows us to understand the articulation
of potentially totalitarian tendencies at the heart of consumer culture, I
believe.
The opposition of "expression" and "representation" is central to
Benjamin's essay. "Fascism," he writes, "attempts to organise the newly
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 125

created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which

the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these
masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves."^* We
should beware of conflating expression with representation or reproduc-
tion, however. Elsewhere in the essay, Benjamin claims that "any man
today can lay claim to being filmed," while complaining that "in Western
Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to
modem man's legitimate claim to being reproduced."^' Reproduction is
something to which we have a "legitimate claim" whereas "expression" is
what we get instead of our "right"—and all this in the context of an analysis
of the political potential of film. In Benjamin's presentation, the so-called
"capitalistic exploitation of the film" would seem to consist precisely
in the replacement of reproduction by expression. Thus, the category of
expression serves as the medium of capitalist repression, a form of repres-
sive desublimation practiced by capitalism as it slips into its post-liberal
stage. It would be wrong to identify fascism in Benjamin's essay with
expression itself, but the possibility of an abreactive expression goes hand
in hand with the suppression of real economic change. The ideological
superstructure is cut loose, so to speak, and tumed over to society's losers
as a form of booby prize. Fascism would, then, not be the emergence of
uncontrolled and irrepressible natural affect into the political realm, but
a particular mechanism for the reproduction of anaesthetized sentiment
as re-sentiment, or ressentiment This, I think, is crucial: we should not
understand affective ressentiment as the explosion of some raw material
into the realm ofa politics that cannot offer it adequate expression. This is
the scenario that Fight Club would have us believe. Ressentiment should
be understood otherwise—as a mimetic mode of experience in which
affect does not precede expression, but where, on the contrary, expression
mimes and recreates the semblance of affect under the conditions of a
modem political and aesthetic anaesthesia. It is the "punch in the nose"
that reminds us we exist. The danger of ressentiment is that it offers the
semblance of an original affect even as that affect is produced by its very
repression. To this extent, ressentiment follows the logic of the simula-
crum, a rehearsal of affect that seeks to leam itself through repetition. I
wish to see the passage from a demand for expression (linked, by Ben-
jamin, to the diversionary political strategy of fascism, and opposed to

26. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," p. 241.

27. Ibid., pp. 231,232.
 126 ANDREW HEWITT

the legitimate demand for "reproduction") to a desire for what we might

call "impression"—^the punch that wakes us up—^as the movement from a
sadistic to a masochistic conception of violence. I would further argue that
this reconfiguration of a politics of impression demands that we rethink
not only our responses to such forms of violence, but also the cultural
paradigms traditionally invoked for characterizing fascism.
I have been suggesting that we need to think the concept of terror
in dialectical relation to the concept of totality. It is a fragmentary or
fragmenting act that derives its legitimacy from its putative status as the
intervention of a more fundamental totality supposedly traduced by the
false totality of the social and political status quo. Of course, used as a
blanket term, "terrorism" clearly erases important distinctions between
what one might broadly call "internal" and "external" threats of violence.
By "internal," I mean threats launched from within a social body ("bring-
ing the war home," as it was called in the 1960s); and by "external," I refer
to terroristic usages of violence enacted upon a society by forces explicitly
foreign and oppositional to it (September 11, for example). I have been
focusing here on the "internal" terror—the threat "from below," so to
speak, that emerges from a certain romanticization of anti-capitalism and
takes shape as a form of critique of the "totalitarian" tendencies inherent
in capitalism itself In an age of globalization, however, such distinctions
as "internal" and "external" do not really hold: the young Muslims who
bombed London's buses and underground in July 2005 were card-carry-
ing, cricket-playing British citizens. Despite these misgivings about the
term, I do believe that both forms of terror are marked by a broader shift in
liberal understandings of violence. I also think that we can trace this shift
to the same nexus of events and ideas that saw the emergence of the "fas-
cinating fascism" paradigm in the 1960s and 70s. The present difficulty
on the left in responding to violence (or its threat, whether from terrorists
or dictators) is the result, I would argue, of a certain "masochistic tum"
in the conception of violence that we can trace to the late 1960s and that
resurfaces today quite explicitly in work of figures such as Zizek.
On the radical left, the possibility of violence and terror was raised
long before the wave of "external" terror that we have now seen on the
streets of New York, Madrid, and London. By way of example, let me cite
a remarkable joint statement issued by the editorial collective of the leftist
German journal Konkret in 1967 on the occasion of the murder by police
of an unarmed peaceful protester against the Shah of Iran's visit to Ber-
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 127

lin. It was this murder that was to rally the student movement into more
direct and radical political violence. Konkret, meanwhile, was a cleverly
populist mix of politics and pom for the chattering classes, whose editor
at the time was Ulrike Meinhof—soon to become infamous as one ofthe
leaders ofthe so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang of urban terrorists. Entitled
"Violence" ["Gewalt"], the article theorizes political violence as

no longer just an exception, serving to prove the rule of non-violence,

but a means that we neither reject categorically, nor use arbitrarily, and
whose methods and revolutionary legitimacy we must first leam to grasp
through theoretical reflection and practical application.^*

In other words, violence cannot simply be seen as a response—^rational

or irrational—to a certain situation that has been weighed and analyzed.
It is, itself, a process of reflection. The rules of violence's application are
learned by the practice of violence itself.
The collective characterizes its position as support for a form of
"enlightening violence" {aujkldrerische Gewalt). The "enlightenment"
pretensions ofthis form of violence—an apparent attempt to square anti-
liberal action with liberal norms of reason—is itself symptomatic of a shift
in the ethical position that violence occupies here. This is a shift that I
would describe as a move from sadistic to masochistic uses of violence.
In his description ofthe epistemology of masochism, Deleuze points out
quite convincingly that

the [sadistic] libertine may put on an act of trying to convince and

persuade; he may even proselytize and gain new recruits But the
intention to convince is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien
to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate.
He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate
that reasoning itself is a form of violence... .The point of the exercise
is to show that the demonstration is identical to violence. It follows that
the reasoning does not have to he shared by the person to whom it is
addressed any more than pleasure is meant to be shared by the object
fi'om which it is derived.^'

28. "Gewalt," Konkret 6 (1968), reprinted in Vorwdrts! Nieder! Hoch! Nie Wieder!
40 Jahre Konkret: Eine linke deutsche Geschichte 1957-1997, ed. Hermann L. Gremliza
(Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 1997), p. 114. (All translations ofthis article are my own.)
29. Deleuze, Mjioc/iwffi, pp. 18-19.
 128 ANDREW HEWITT

Meanwhile "the sadistic 'instructor' stands in contrast to the masochis-

tic 'educator'," for "the imperative and descriptive function of language
transcends itself... in Masoch toward a dialectical, mythical and persua-
sivefiinction."^"As a form of societal and self-enlightenment, this form
of terroristic violence presents itself as pedagogical, a learning process.
Whereas the sadist undermines enlightenment by its own means, the mas-
ochist reinforces its persuasive discourse.
The pedagogical function of violence as understood by the collec-
tive of Konkret—an absurd form of Auflclarung—accords very closely
with Deleuze's description of masochistic violence. Such violence does
not oppose the processes of political reason at all, but sees itself as their
necessary extension. As such, it is a form of pedagogical communication.
The authors argue that it is impossible for the intellectuals and students to
make themselves understood by the revolutionary proletariat: "Only since
we have tentatively begun to speak the language ofthe system itself," they
write, "have the workers been able to understand us.... This language is
the language of violence."^' In this article, violence is explicitly presented
as a form of language—both the language of "the system" and the lan-
guage instinctively understood by the working class. The condescension
of the formulation is matched only by its romanticism. For example, the
authors magnanimously point out that the workers have really been in a
kind of latent dialog with the intelligentsia all along, had we only been
better able to understand the value of proletarian violence "when some
of them punched us in the kisser" (wie einige von ihnen uns jetzt in die
Fresse schlagen) in frustration at our endless talking and abstract theoriz-
ing. The precondition for fluency in the language of terroristic violence
is a masochistic subjection to the violence ofthe proletariat. Violence, in
this romanticized formulation, becomes a form of communication across
classes—a communication in which the working class has long sought to
engage us, if only we had been able to "listen."
As if to make explicit the terms of analysis that I have been using here,
the authors—in an attempt at self-criticism for previously having failed
to collaborate with the working class—^belittle their own earlier anti-vio-
lent stance in the face of state violence: "We were all too grateful for the
opportunity to get beaten up—but this masochism rendered us incompre-

30. Ibid., pp. 19,23.

31. "Gewalt," p. 114.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 129

hensible to the workers."^'' There is a parsing out of sexual and political

pathologies here. According to this logic, while masochism is the modality
ofthe bourgeois liberal, a form of innocent sadism is the healthy (though
often manipulated and misguided) response ofthe working class to its own
repression. Even as they seek to move beyond such masochism, however,
the authors ofthe piece reinstate it rhetorically, referring to "the violence
that daily cripples and represses us, our generation, and our society" as
a "normal, everyday self-rape."" This paradoxically explicit disavowal
of masochism goes hand in hand with an attempt to characterize oneself
rhetorically as victim. The intemalization of repression is referred to as a
"self-rape" {Selbstvergewaltigung), and the term is an apt description of
the rhetorical movement ofthe piece—a masochistic attempt somehow to
own one's own rape.
This is a fantasy that I think we see rehearsed in those recent theories of
redemptive violence that trace themselves back to Benjamin. I re-encoun-
tered a similar logic as I attempted to work through the theoretical stakes
of Zizek's analysis of Fight Club. Picking up Eric Santner's notion ofthe
historical "symptom" as the repetition not of past acts, but of past failures
to act, Zizek posits the necessity of a redemptive revolutionary violence.
Much to his credit, he does not shirk even the most shocking examples to
support his thesis, drawing on the Nazi past for evidence of a violence that
somehow knows its own insufficiency. Thus, he argues:

One should read this Kristallnacht precisely as a "symptom": the furious

rage of such an outburst of violence makes it a symptom—^the defense
formation covering up the void of the failure to intervene effectively
in the social crisis. In other words, the very rage of the anti-Semitic
pogroms is proof a contrario ofthe possibility ofthe authentic proletar-
ian revolution.^'*

He reads "post-Communist outbursts of neo-Nazi violence" in the former

East in a similar vein, as a kind of melancholic recuperation of Commu-
nism's failed anti-capitalist potential. Zizek argues that "although this

32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Slavoj Ziiek, "The Ambiguity ofthe Masochist Social Link," in Perversion and
the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj 2i4ek (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), p. 120.
130 ANDREW HEWITT

Strategy [of revolutionary violence] is risky and ambiguous (it can easily
regress into a proto-fascist macho logic of violent male bonding), this risk
has to be assumed—^there is no other way out ofthe closure ofthe capital-
ist subjectivity."^' Like Brad Pitt sneering at the underwear model—and
I trust that Slavoj would graciously accept the comparison, if not by the
argument that drives it!—Zifck is tendentially identifying subjectivity
with a form of totalitarian closure. Again echoing the protagonists of Fight
Club—a film he obviously admires—^Zizek argues that "violence should
primarily be conceived as self-violence, as a violent reformation of the
very substance of a subject's being. "^* The political stakes, meanwhile, are
stated quite clearly: "Sadism," he argues, "involves a relation of domina-
tion, while masochism is the necessary first step toward liberation.""
Taking Fight Club as my prime example, I hope that I have demon-
strated how there has been a shift in filmic violence away from expressive
and cathartic violence and toward an "impressive" and affective self-vio-
lence. While there is by now a long tradition of thinking sadistic violence
in relation to enlightenment, the relation of such violence to enlightenment
is one of what we might call "parallel negation": its structures—as Lacan
demonstrates—are homologous, but in a parodistic sense, so to speak. With
masochism, the relationship is different. Enlightenment, here, is predicated
upon submission rather than liberation. Deleuze indicates how sadism and
masochism should be thought as distinct epistemological structures rather
than as two terms of a dyad, and it is obviously simplistic to think of
them in terms of active and passive. Nevertheless, I do believe that there
lies a greater danger right now in the intellectual fiirtation with masoch-
ism than in any temptation to sadistic—or expressive—violence. There
is something defiating about the conclusion to Fight Club, something a
little too clever in the revelation that the narrator and Tyler Durden—fol-
lower and leader—are one and the same. But the revelation perhaps tells
us something about what is currently going on at that second level of my
argument here, within the realm of academic theory. If we need to reject
the simple opposition of sadist and masochist as complementary terms
within the same discourse, we can nevertheless think the discourse of
sadism in general as the disavowed projection of the masochist. In other

35. Ibid., p. 116.

36. Ibid., p. 119.
37. Ibid., p. 118.
 MASOCHISM AND TERROR 131

words, the sadist might not be the other who completes my scenario of fan-
tasized violence, but rather the subject position I must myself disavow.^*
The "internal" and "extemal" forms of terror can no longer be separated,
because the latter functions as the disavowed discourse of the former.
If the danger of a "sadistic"—or so-called "black"—enlightenment was
the hollowing out of any positive sense of enlightenment, a "masochis-
tic" episteme, I believe, awaits a dangerous redemption from outside. It
becomes political theology. However, it is only from the perspective of
our own discursive distinction of profane and divine—a distinction that is
itself profane—that the "outside" agent of redemption need be character-
ized in theological terms. Benjamin himself had multiple formulations for
his angel of history—some of which stressed its mundane historical nature
rather more than its angelic one, we should remember. The challenge, I
believe, is to redeem theory from the spell of redemption and the lure of
political theology.

38. Taking up my example ofthe political trajectory of Ulrike Meinhof, it is interest-

ing to note that at diflFerent stages she "identified" both with the perpetrators and with the
victims of Nazi violence. This instability of identification, I want to argue, is necessary
within the logic of terror—a logic that threatens all subject positions.