Desiring Fascism, Sterile Aesthetics
September 20, 2025
Adrienne Rich once offered a concentrated and sharp critique of Susan Sontag's seminal essay, "Fascinating Fascism."¹ Rich argued that Sontag made a factual error when discussing the reception of Leni Riefenstahl's films by feminists, thereby implying a kind of "rehearsal" relationship between feminism and fascism. She also pointed out that Sontag failed to adequately emphasize a gender perspective and feminist critical consciousness in her discussion of fascism and related phenomena, thus failing to successfully establish the connection between sexuality and politics. Finally, she criticized the essay for devolving into an intellectual game, lacking emotional intuition. Sontag's response was quite forceful. She denied the accusations of factual error and female chauvinism and pointed out that the real disagreement lay in whether it is necessary to analyze historical subjects with feminist critique as the core. Sontag reflected that while feminist passion is often correct, it can be too general, overlooking the complexity of specific contexts. She warned that abstracting emotion from its historical context and elevating it to a supreme principle risked reproducing the very logic of fascism. Sontag concluded by emphasizing the necessity of respecting historical complexity and acknowledging the need for "intellect" and even responsible authority.
I do not intend to judge who was right or wrong in this debate, but rather hope to use it to complicate the arguments within feminism (Sontag herself was undoubtedly a feminist) and to pay particular attention to the significant shift in her thought from her early to middle period. The Sontag of the "Fascinating Fascism" era might have been questioned by the Sontag of the "Against Interpretation" and "Notes on 'Camp'" period. The important question is: what led this avant-garde aesthetician, who once championed a "new sensibility" as her standard, to turn towards a form of cultural criticism that places greater emphasis on political and ethical contexts?
In fact, "Fascinating Fascism" is not only the starting point of this debate but also a key text for understanding the mechanisms of fascism. It leads me to believe that fascism's mechanism of operation is to awaken a kind of technical erotics through an iconography constructed around healthy bodies, the ideal nation, and authentic bloodlines. This eroticism yearns for the sublime of late-Romantic rhetoric, an endless ascent towards a mystical peak, and is closely related to a kind of ecstatic ritual. By mobilizing and then regulating this eroticism, fascism transforms ecstatic rituals and sublime aesthetics into extreme obedience and endurance, including group loyalty (the overwhelming adoration in rallies resembling a collective orgasm), a unity that scorns criticism and difference, and an extreme glorification of beauty, courage, life, and death. "A utopian aesthetics (identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism (sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers). The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a 'spiritual' force, for the benefit of the community."² In other words, this is a two-step "asceticism": first mobilization, then reconfiguration. Thus, this fascist form of libidinal economy can be called a desiring machine; it both liberates and tames desire, allowing it to circulate among bodily organs, social institutions, and technical systems, continuously unleashing productivity while simultaneously reappropriating it through coding and reinvestment.³ This structure is both political and technical, making it imperative that any anti-fascist artistic strategy must contend with it on a logic of energy.
If the fascist desiring machine is based on production and reinvestment (a form of surplus desire), then a non-fascist art must abolish this surplus to counter its iconography: an art of exhaustion, enervation, and dispassion; an aesthetics of anorgasmic or post-orgasmic depletion; an aesthetics of degeneration that stands opposite to vitality. This aesthetic exhausts itself in deliberation and self-reflection; desire dries up rather than overflowing. Therefore, it is a critical art, an art that refuses to be consumed by passion and thus departs from the aesthetics of Georges Bataille⁴—an art of reason, repetition, and reflexivity.
Fascism detests this critical art of exhaustion, degeneration, and muscular weakness, as shown by Goebbels's cry: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit." The radical break between contemporary and modern art lies precisely in the waxing and waning of the sublime spirit and vital energy. By modern art, I refer to art, led by Abstract Expressionism, that worships the heroic artist's vitality and demands the viewer's intoxicated immersion and experience of pleasure. This type of art represents an overflow and excess of energy, harboring a fascist potential. Even more contemporary examples, such as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, can be included in this category.
In contrast, contemporary art withdraws from passion, demanding the ultimate exhaustion of rational activity in a tiresome manner. This desexualized art brings about an ontological fatigue, a ruin of energy, and it is upon this ruin that we shall rebuild.
1. Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, March 20, 1975.
2. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972.
4. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, 1957.
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