ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a retrospective and comprehensive scrutiny of various discursive arguments about fascism and its links to perversion. In recent theoretical literature, Slavoj Zizek and Juliet Flower MacCannell drew on Lacanian psychoanalysis as a critical medium for dissecting postmodern theoretical currents or lifestyles, as well as modernist considerations. In a number of texts, MacCannell has produced a narrative that exposes the relation of fascist politics and ethics to the central Lacanian notion of jouissance. The comparison of fascism with femininity, in terms of access to jouissance, reveals in both cases a surfeit of enjoyment. Fascism appears as a breach in oedipal model, in analogy with perversion that violates the oedipal law. If post-Marxism asserts the absolute irreducibility and particularity of political struggles to any single determining instance—the inherent contradictions of the capital, for example—Lacanian psychoanalysis argues precisely the opposite.
