Garrison Davis
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari quote an excerpt from Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto, which contains fascist speeches and ordinary conversations from Nazi Germany.
The quote they include is eerily similar to the visuals of Trump as the suicidal penguin.
Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives.
In reality, we are not marching forward.
We are reeling, staggering.
Our beloved Fuhrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness.
How can we poets, who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him?"
Deleuze and Guattari then write, "...suicide is presented not as a punishment, but as the crowning glory of the death of others.
The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague so-called ideological determinations.
We prefer to inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements."
which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations.
They always contain the stupid and repugnant cry, long live death.
Even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction."
Virilio calls this a psychosis which governs its entire politics of production.
And he writes that the replacement of the American industries of the automobile and the cinema with the military-industrial complex, quote, does not involve a rational, functional, or useful choice, but rather entirely psychological, or rather psychopathological.
It stems from contempt for and abandonment of productive rapport with the milieu.
Every investment is made to escape from it, unquote.
For contemporary reference, go check out the stock price of Palantir.
And on the larger economic and international level, Trump's tariffs, his trade wars, and the self-destruction of the United States' geopolitical standing are all expressions of this suicidal state in action.