ABSTRACT

Contemporary versions of evil demonise modern "fascists", "totalitarian threats", and "Hitlers". As if not obscure enough, fascist evil has been equivocally linked with perversion. This book reveals that both fascism and perversion implicate the non-symbolisable kernel in politics, which becomes the source of their mystification. It argues that the fascist does not take the same discursive position as the pervert does, regarding this symbolic gap. The author develops a new rhetoric, de-pathologised and de-ideologised, regarding the structure of the so-called pervert, introducing new vocabularies and directions for psychoanalytic research that further distance the pervert, or whom he calls the "extra-ordinary subject", from fascist politics and, instead, exposes his diachronic "fascist" isolation from the social edifice. This reveals the fruitful alternatives that can stem from a "return to Freud cum Lacan", which supports a flexible on-going reformulation of psychoanalytic knowledge.

part I|101 pages

Fascism and Perversion

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

The perverse refractions of fascism: a retrospective

chapter Three|14 pages

1970s–1980s: Neo-Freudian perspectives

chapter Four|23 pages

1990s: The surfeit of fascist jouissance

chapter |3 pages

Part I: Conclusion

part II|62 pages

Discourse

chapter Five|25 pages

Power and mastery through the Lacanian prism

chapter Six|12 pages

The Lacanian discourse 1

chapter Seven|15 pages

Three masters, three systems of domination

chapter |2 pages

Part II: Conclusion

part III|76 pages

Ethics

chapter |3 pages

Introduction

Imagine the law: domination and the ethics of desire

chapter Eight|25 pages

Sade with Kant and Eichmann

chapter Nine|15 pages

Ethics and guilt

chapter Ten|25 pages

From imaginary to democratic ethics

chapter |2 pages

Part III: Conclusion

part IV|66 pages

Politics

chapter Eleven|26 pages

Beyond the fascist Utopia

chapter Twelve|15 pages

Exfra-ordinary anxiety

chapter Thirteen|15 pages

Negating disavowal

chapter |2 pages

Part IV: Conclusion