Bataille was an admirer of fascism and believed it was the noblest form of political rule.

Here, the analysis must begin with an examination of Bataille’s essay, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” often rightly hailed as a theoretical breakthrough in our understanding of the mass psychological appeal of modern authoritarian rule. Yet, the essay also contains a barely veiled admiration for the vitality and energy of the existing fascist states, especially when contrasted with the decadence and inertia of the contemporary European democracies. Bataille purveys a critique of parliamentarianism that is as zealous as anything one finds in the work of Carl Schmitt. Parliamentary decision-making, he claims, partakes wholly of the order of the homogenous. It aims solely at co-optation, the elimination of difference. As such, it is purely instrumental and serves primarily to suppress the breakthrough of heterogeneous elements that threaten to explode the normative bases of the given economic and political order. As Bataille observes, in a striking anticipation of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s association of “consensus” and “terror”: “The reduction of differences in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity.60 Bataille can perceive no fundamental differences between the conduct of political and economic life in modern democratic societies, insofar as both are examples par excellence of homogeneity – this despite the fact that discussion aims at mutual understanding, whereas economic activity is goal-oriented and utilitarian. Given this curt dismissal of the institutional bases of democracy, it comes as little surprise that Bataille glorifies the role played by fascism in modern political life as a type of breakthrough of the heterogeneous. For Bataille, “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. Opposed to democratic politicians, who represent in different countries the platitude inherent to homogeneous society, Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.”62 What he admires about these men and the movement they represent is that they embody “a force that situates them above other men,” which accounts for their “sovereignty.” Yet, he also esteems greatly their thoroughgoing antagonism to law: “the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action.”63 Here, the parallels with Schmitt’s critique of bourgeois legal positivism are of course profound. Both Schmitt and Bataille view the institution of law as the consummate embodiment of the spirit of bourgeois rationalism. It symbolizes everything they detest about the reigning social order: its prosaic longing for security, its unrevolutionary nature, its abhorrence of “transcendence,” its anathematization of the vitality and intensity one finds in the “exception” (Schmitt) or “transgression” (Bataille). Moreover, for Bataille the system of law merits especially harsh treatment insofar as it signifies a type consecration of the profane order of things, as such, it stands as an impediment to contact with the heterogeneous or the sacred. Bataille concludes his endorsement of fascist politics with the following encomium: “Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle situated above any utilitarian judgment.” As opposed to the bourgeois order of life, which, with its utilitarianism and its legalism, merely sanctifies “the prose of the world,” fascism offers a new political aesthetic, the return, as it were, of an aesthetic politics: a type of politics that reintroduces the long lost elements of charismatic leadership (in Bataille’s terms, “sovereignty”), violence, and martial glory. It is, moreover, a politics that facilitates a great emotional cathexis between leaders and masses, a point which Bataille emphasizes repeatedly. For one of fascism’s great attributes is that it “clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces” – forces capable of guaranteeing a measure of collective solidarity, which have been banished from a society in which the division of labor and rationalization reign supreme. In sum, fascism serves to reintroduce a type of ecstatic politics into the forlorn and disenchanted landscape of political modernity, a politics that aims at the creation of a quasi-Nietzschean ecstatic community.