Garrison Davis

This desire can be channeled through the politics of fascism, which allow for violent, paranoid manifestations of repressed internal contradictions, which attempt to be resolved through death.

But fascism itself is a contradiction between a primitive war machine and a stable state apparatus.

And the way that tension is released is also self-destruction.

In the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, they discuss the ways in which fascism and totalitarianism differ.

They write that totalitarianism is a state affair made up of material components that overmanage society.

Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a state army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the state to the totalitarian stage.

Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative.

Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine.

When fascism builds itself a totalitarian state, it is not in the sense of a state army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the state."

This analysis from Deleuze and Guattari is building off of an essay by the French writer Paul Virilio called The Suicidal State, where Virilio argues that in fascism, the state is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal.

An evolution of the state that, quote, "...no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress,"

but rather non-progress and terror, founded on the repulsion and fear of all development in this civil domain, unquote.

This repulsion and fear were manifested in the accelerated destruction of state institutions during the first few months of Trump's second term and Doge's scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies.

Virilio writes that during the disappearance of public service, quote, infrastructures of service are reduced as the wiretaps of the Wehrmacht are restored.

Colonial geometry of decolonialization, unquote.

So, as the federal government rescinds public services, the everyday presence of the federal government is reduced to masked armed agents in the streets, disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians, while the president fights in court for the ability to deploy the military against American citizens within our own territory.

During the tension of total war or total peace, Virilio says, the system expands and reproduces itself, a material process without an end, but no longer without limits.

To quote the Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle, the suicide state, quote, is not just a manager of death.

It is rather the ongoing agent of its own catastrophe, the maker of its own explosion.

To be more precise, this new state mixes the death management of entire sectors of its own population with an ongoing and risky flirtation with its own self-destruction, unquote.