Nazi-Fascism and Anal Repression

NAZI -FASCISM AN D AN AL REP RESSI ON FROM THE BODY AND REVOLUTION IN MARX: D E AT H , T H E D E V I L , A N D A N A L I T Y by L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O Translated from the Italian by M A T T H E W Z U N D E L 66 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O Even though Carlo Emilio Gadda admits that fascism arrived “after capital’s financial backing,”1 he nonetheless offers a historically inaccurate assessment of fascism’s emergence: he interprets fascism as a return to Eros in its unconscious and animalesque forms and Eros’s subjugation of the Logos’s motives, while, in reality, Eros is, in this case, strictly governed by the repressive Logos of advanced capitalism. Following Freud, Adorno rightly emphasizes that during the process of Nazi-Fascist massification, “those who become submerged in masses are not primitive men,” even if they “display primitive attitudes contradictory to their normal rational behavior;”2 therefore “as a rebellion against civilization, fascism is not simply the reoccurrence of the 1. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eros e Priapo: da furore a cenere (Milano: Garzanti, 1967), 17-18. [All translations of Gadda are mine as there exists no English translation of Eros and Priapus: From Fury to Ashes.— Trans.] 2. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), 122. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 67 3. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 122. 4. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922), 127. archaic but its reproduction in and by civilization itself.”3 This reproduction has one of its deep reasons in the hypnotic relationship between the masses and the leader (here one might recall Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician), so that this suggestive leader, this hypnotist awakens in the subject a portion of his archaic heritage which had also made him compliant towards his parents and which had experienced an individual re-animation in his relation to his father; what is thus awakened is the idea of a paramount and dangerous personality, towards whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible.4 With this last text of Freud, the erotic connection that ties leader (master) to herd (servants) through hypnotic suggestion, reveals itself as a relation that dialectically places its docile herd in a passive homosexual, and obviously an alienated, situation because it insists on the phallicism of the leader. This is an aspect that also emerges in Gadda’s text which, also for its captivating style, is second only to Reich’s Mass Psychol- 68 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O ogy of Fascism in its investigation of the phenomenology of the depths of fascism, and very effectively evokes its basic vertical-phallic hierarchy. In Gadda’s own words, Mussolini “came to believe [. . .] that he was the only erect genital available in the piazza, the only thinking brain capable of howling from the balcony.”5 “He was, after all, the dominant generating organ—the phallus: primary, proprietary, paternal.”6 Thus, the fascistized masses are profoundly structured by a scotomization of the feminine and of the alienated anal, lured as they are by the alienation of the penile, which appears as phallic, in the magician that controls the masses: “At the time everything was male and Martial: even the tits of your wet nurse, and the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes, and the vagina and the vulva. The virile vulva of the Italian woman.”7 Through the conflictual return of the repressed, the fascist phallic absolutization has its own other in alienated femininity, since “Mussolini subjugates his crowd by way of its feminine aspect, its feminine flesh.”8 Moreover, it has its truth in alienated anal erotism, since “something vulvaceous” is “always sutured into the praise or in the 5. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 60. 6. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 73. 7. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 73. 8. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 86. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 69 9. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 89. 10. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 126. 11. [This is an allusion to the so-called “Historic Compromise,” which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) initiated with the center-right Democratic Christian (DC) party in the mid-1970s in order to gain traction in parliament. The move was widely criticized by youth movements and the extra-parliamentary left, who saw it as antithetical to Communism’s revolutionary goals. —Trans.] denial that men make to their morals and corporals.”9 Mussolini’s phallic authority could not have imagined that there are passive female tendencies even among men, since in fascist society “even the men have ovaries and a uterus, they are more uterine and more ovarian than the women.”10 Thus, fascist phallicism is inextricably connected and dialectically opposed to alienated homosexuality in the animalesque form of the servile adoration of the phallus. Even today there is the risk of a deepseated (and, perhaps, unconscious) fascism. That risk can even, perhaps, be found in the political parties draped in red, which do not repudiate the phallic (bureaucracy) hierarchy nor do they break with the homogeneity of alienated society and its INSTITUTIONS. On the contrary, they proclaim to want to be crutches for such institutions, to whose continuation these parties contribute the prospects of compromise and religiously preach for sacrifices from the masses, who are invited to save the assets of capital and to await the revolution after their death.11 Even the people who would declare themselves to be democratic and antifascist 70 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O (and maybe subjectively and politically they are) retain a phallic paternalism, which makes for a relentless spy. Therefore, they belong to deep fascism, next to the fascisticized masses (males and females equalized in their passivity in front of the leader) who, not finding real motives; that is, values; that is, other contents, which would serve the flag, which would be the motive and the value of their being, […] attach themselves to the first word or to the first image that occurs in their brain: which is almost always the name and the image of a dipstick. I mean a dipstick déguisé; a dipstick travestito; a disguised and cross-dressed dipstick; a sublimated dipstick in the Homeland of Dipstick, in the Dipstick of the Holy Family, in the Dipstick of the Integrity of the Race [...], in Italy’s Immortal Dipstick Destinies [...], in Our Marvelous Dipstick Alpines [...], in the Dipstick-People [...], etc. etc.12 And, we might add, in the Dipstick-Institutions! Diverted desire is one of the deep wellsprings of Nazi-Fascism: 12. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 124. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 71 The libido as sexual energy is the direct investment of masses, of large aggregates, and of social and organic fields. We have difficulty understanding what principles psychoanalysis uses to support its conception of desire, when it maintains that the libido must be de-sexualized or even sublimated in order to proceed to the social investments, and inversely that the libido only resexualizes these investments during the course of pathological regression. Unless the assumption of such a conception is still familialism—that is, an assumption holding that sexuality operates only in the family, and must be transformed in order to invest larger aggregates. The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat, and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows.13 Certainly the role of Hitler as an individual was negligible, but it remains fundamental inasmuch as it helped crystallize a new form of this totalitarian machine. Hitler can be seen in dreams, in deliriums, in films, in 72 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O the contorted behavior of policemen, and even on the leather jackets of some gangs who, without knowing anything about Nazism, reproduce the icons of Hitlerism. [...] The conjunction, in the person of Hitler, of at least four libidinal series, crystallized the mutation of a new desiring machinism in the masses. [...] [Between them] is perhaps the essential point, a racist delirium, a mad, paranoiac energy, which put him in tune with the collective death instinct released from the charnel houses of the First World War. What almost everyone refuses to acknowledge is that the fascist machine, in its Italian and German forms, became a threat to capitalism and Stalinism because the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in it. By re-territorializing their desire onto a leader, a people, and a race, the masses abolished, by means of a phantasm of catastrophe, a reality which they detested and which the revolutionaries were either unwilling or unable to encroach upon. For the masses, virility, blood, vital space, and death took the place of a socialism that had too much respect for the dominant 13. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 292-293. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 73 14. Felix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist,” in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972-1977, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 165, 168. meanings. And yet, fascism was brought back to these same dominant meanings by a sort of intrinsic bad faith, by a false provocation to the absurd and by a whole theater of collective hysteria and debility.14 If Nazi-Fascism is diverted desire, one understands how, by way of capital, Nazi-Fascism has not been eliminated by Hitler’s suicide, or with Mussolini’s execution: Alongside the fascism of the concentration camps, which continue to exist in numerous countries, new forms of molecular fascism are developing: a slow burning fascism in familialism, in school, in racism, in every kind of ghetto, which advantageously makes up for the crematory ovens. Everywhere the totalitarian machine is in search of proper structures, which is to say, structures capable of adapting desire to the profit economy. We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: “Fascism will not make it again.” Fascism has already 74 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O “made it,” and it continues to “make it.” It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire. [...] Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire.15 Certainly phallicism was a predominant characteristic of classic Nazi-Fascism (Mussolini and Hitler), but it was accompanied by narcissism and sadism16 as instruments for coming to power over masses that had been schizophrenized by Nazi-Fascism. 15. Guattari, “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist,” 171. 16. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 131-146. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 75 17. Gadda, Eros e Priapo, 131. 18. Karl Abraham, “Oral Erotism and Character Formation,” in Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1979), 401. 19. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 132. More precisely, sadian aggressivity, by Nazi-Fascism “artificially assembled,”17 by revealing it as the tragic and macroscopic phase of anal repression, proves by way of oral and anal Sadism, the contiguity of its leader-phalluses with Hegel’s cannibalistic and destructive master. Their longing to experience gratification by way of sucking has changed [in the regressions to the oral-Sadistic stage] to a need to give by way of the mouth, so that we find in them [...] a constant need to communicate themselves orally to other people. This results in an obstinate urge to talk, connected in most cases with a feeling of overflowing. [...] Their principle relation to other people is effected by the way of oral discharge.18 “The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others.”19 But the borders between orality and anality are not—in this regard—really traceable and the oral discharge is also configurable as anal: 76 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O That there are certain connections between anal erotism and speech I had already learnt from Prof. Freud, who told me of a stammerer all whose singularities of speech were to be traced to anal phantasies. Jones too has repeatedly indicated in his writings the displacement of libido from anal activities to phonation. Finally I, too, in an earlier article (“Über obscöne Wörte” [“On Obscene Words”]), was able to indicate the connection between musical voice-culture and anal erotism.20 However, the deviated oral-anal erotism of charismatic leaders like Hitler or Mussolini obtains this discharge by towering over their crowds on their phallic pedestals. Here, too, they also communicate through their GAZE. “The most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is aroused” are “visual impressions.”21 To do this mainly requires a hypnotist, that asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him. [...] 20. Sándor Ferenczi, “Silence is Golden,” in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 251. 21. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works, 156. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 77 22. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 125. The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look. But it is precisely the sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an intermediary between his people and Jehovah, since the people could not support the sight of God.22 Children, primitives, the masses, neurotics (the obsessive ones: the religious), all, with varying degrees of difference, have an analogous relationship with the GAZE of the father-god-dictator. And this relationship is a particular type of love relationship: From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative; no 78 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal.23 Like Thomas Mann in Mario and the Magician, Norman Brown has also attracted attention to fascism as an erotic-hypnotic alienated relationship established by the GAZE. “The command to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to withdraw all interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the hypnotist [who] is based on the natural property of a look. [...] The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in the eyes.” [...] Identification with the representative person, whom we “look up to,” takes place through the eye. In psychoanalytic jargon, the super-ego is based on “incorporation through the eye” or “ocular introjection”; it is the sight of a parental figure that becomes a permanent part of us; and that now supervises, watches us. [Remember that the crowd, in front of Hitler 23. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 114. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 79 24. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body. Reissue of 1966 Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 122–123. [Here Norman O. Brown includes quotes from Freud, Group Psychology, 96, and Géza Róheim, Animism, Magic, and the Divine King (New York: A.A. Knopf & Co., 1930), 149.— Trans.] and Mussolini’s platform, can be found below, like a child in front of their father.] In other words, the super-ego is derived from the primal scene. The primal scene is the original theater; parental coitus is the archetypal show; the original distance is between child and parent. [...] “Theaters and concerts, in fact any performance where there is something to be seen or heard, always stands for parental coitus.” It is in the primal scene that we learn to take vicarious pleasure in events of which we are only passive spectators.24 It is, à la Brecht, a non-alienated theatre where the tragedy of Nazi-Fascism (and other tragedies as well, ones that are more current, like the millions of “democratic publics” watching-suckling the televisual phallus) is performed. It is a theatre based on the absolutization of the eye (testicle) in addition to the alienation of critical power, and therefore where the Oedipal drama can take place. In a history and a society in which citizens are reduced to spectators, in a purely “theatrical” alienated collective—alas!— Oedipal theatre makes sense. It is a sense 80 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O founded on the alienated eye: “The spectator is a voyeur. The desire to see is the desire to see the genital; and the desire to see is the desire to be one; to become what you behold; to incorporate the penis of another; to devour it through the eye.”25 “Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of attention by one sense only.”26 “The interplay of all the senses [...], the polymorphism of the senses, polymorphous perversity, active interplay” becomes scotomized and in its place the opposite of polymorphous perversity becomes absolutized, “the abstraction of the visual, obtained by putting to sleep the rest of the life of the body.”27 It all adds up: Oedipus-Mussolini-Hitler are the gaze, castrated from the rest of corporality; a pars pro toto that pretends to be a totality. Polymorphism is cancelled out by the phallus: by mediating castration one enters into the tragedy of the society of representation, in which pomp (whether hitlerian, mussolinian, or televisually ‘democratic’) can be summarized like so: 25. Brown, Love’s Body, 124. 26. Brown, Love’s Body, 121. 27. Brown, Love’s Body, 121. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 81 The exhibitionism of the phallic personality (the huge genital, the royal lingam) is fraudulent; an imposture, or imposition on the public; theater. The actor needs the audience to reassure him that he is not castrated: yes, you are the mighty penis; the Emperor’s New Clothes. To force the audience to give this reassurance is to castrate, have coitus with, the audience: the phallic personality needs a receptive audience or womb. 28. Brown, Love’s Body, 125. Separately, both actor and audience are incomplete, castrated; but together they make up a whole: the desire and pursuit of the whole in the form of the combined object, the parents in coitus.28 And indeed, Nazi-Fascism represents itself from a restrictively ideological familist perspective. Capital is behind it, jostling Oedipus’s marionette. The tragedy is even more grim with Nazism. Alienated homosexuality appears in it in three ways: under the guise of the exaltation of militarized Arian homoeroticism, 82 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O under the politically motivated process of condemning Röhm’s homosexuality with that of the SA (night of the long knives), and above all with the elimination, in the Lager, of non-integrated homosexuality. In the only Konzentrazionlager in Auschwitz, where “ten-thousand people were passing through the gas chamber daily and not less than three million people according to the Commandant’s own calculation, were killed in this and in other ways,”29 there were certainly prisoners who were uniquely stigmatized, even with special badges, among them “a triangle [...] pink for homosexuals.”30 It is certainly not a coincidence that Hess, the Gauleiter of Auschwitz, would call the Lager (where “dirty” Jews, homosexuals, and antifascists were eliminated) the “anus of the world.” The repression of the anal as dirt and homosexuality (and by way of an alienated homosexuality, the Nazi one) here touches on repression’s most tragic outcome. Between all of the monuments that commemorate the Nazi-Fascist massacres, why is there not one dedicated to the homosexual slaughtered by the Nazis? 29. Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes. (London: Greenhill Books, 2002) 30. Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 83 31. [Here Parinetto refers to one of a series of the politically motivated massacres that hit Italy in the 1970s (giving the decade its nickname, “Years of Lead”) in his hometown of Brescia, also known as the Piazza della Loggia Bombing. The event took place on May 28th 1974 and a neo-fascist terrorist group was thought to be involved; however, the case remained open until 2008.—Trans.] 32. The entire message can be read on page three of l’Unità, published on May 29th, 1974. Maybe because there is not even one dedicated to the commemoration-execration of the witches’ stakes. Because even now a deep bond exists in reality between current capitalism and that of Nazi-Fascism: the repression of anality. Neo-fascism’s massacres gorily demonstrate this. Was it a coincidence that the same day of the Brescia Massacre (eight dead and about a hundred wounded), a message reached local authorities and newspapers from secret neo-fascist associations?31 In the name of “Italy of the Caesars and the last of the Caesars,” and in defense of the “healthy segment of the people,” the message sentenced people defined as “jewish dogs [...] to the final solution [...] for having corrupted the youth, for having had relations with young people replete with homosexuality, detained, used, prostituted, and have made wretched young people use drugs, so as to subject them to their depraved desires.”32 It’s obvious that it is not possible to establish a precise link between this document and the perpetrators of the massacre. Yet, it is symptomatic of the reemergence of the mentality of neo-Nazi-Fascism by way of the juxtaposition of Judaism and homosexuality, 84 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O as well as their condemnation to (!) the infamous Nazi “final solution,” which was consummated in the death camps. It is symptomatic in the same way that the Italian Social Movement [MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano], by publishing a manifesto in which it rejected any responsibility for the massacre, stigmatized the main suspect for the atrocious attack (whose “confession,” however, has little credibility)33 by defining him as a “crazy pathological liar, crook, peddler of stolen paintings, homosexual, common delinquent, probably from a communist family and upbringing.”34 The same “concept” is taken up by Giorgio Almirante, for whom “the only self-confessed guilty party for the massacre could not be a member of the MSI because he is a ‘noted pederast,’ and our party is the only one that is truly antihomosexual.”35 Therefore, the neo-fascist party openly claims to depend on homosexuality, since it posits itself on a negation of homosexuality, and for this same reason recognizes that without negating homosexuality the party wouldn’t exist! However, it is worth analyzing their cited antihomosexual declarations. 33. On this point see: Achille Lega and Giorgio Santerini, Strage di Brescia, potere a Roma (Milano: Mazzotta, 1976). 34. See the poster displayed in Brescia on the occasion of the 1975 regional elections produced by the Italian Social Movement and the National Right [DN, Destra Nazionale], signed by Saipem Cassino Roma 1975. 35. Lega and Santerini, Strage di Brescia, 93. [Giorgio Almirante was an Italian politician belonging to the National Fascist Party (PNF, Partito Nazionale Fascista) in the 30s and 40s before helping to found the MSI in 1946. He served as Secretary General of the MSI from 1969-1987.— Trans.] N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 85 In the MSI manifesto homosexuality (associated with communism instead of Judaism) is associated with madness, to thievery, to common delinquency: it is therefore a crime. I’m not trying to suggest, here, that the context of elaboration of the message cited above and that of the MSI’s manifesto are the same. I simply want to emphasize that the vocabulary used by both documents registers a profound homogeneity of views, which gives rise to a stigmatization of homosexuality that has its direct forefather in the ideology that presided over the massacres of the Nazi death camps. It is no wonder that in a city in which a very bloody massacre comes to fruition under the cover (at least apparently so) of similar ideologies, still today homosexuals are often brutally persecuted and beaten, as they say, in their traditional meeting spots (like Parco del Castello). Nazi-Fascism, before its political associations, is born in the depths of society’s own psychological fabric. A society that does not even succeed in being neo-capitalistically permissive is necessarily operational within neo-Nazi-Fascism: just look at Pasolini’s assassination and all those who, less visible than he, have died without even being recognized by the news. The germ of fascism can be found wherever homosexuality is persecuted, in whatever manner it may occur; even if the stigmatizer claims themselves to be anti-fascist. 86 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O t ra n s lato r’s n ot e: Luciano entitled The Notion of Alienation in Parinetto (1934-2001) published Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx (1968), The Body and Revolution in Marx: and a study of Marx and religion, Death, the Devil, and Anality in 1977, entitled Neither God nor Capital: when both Italian Marxist philos- Marx, Marxism, Religion (1976). The ophy and politics were in crisis. It Body and Revolution in Marx cri- was a moment when the Italian tiques the mechanisms of social Communist Party (PCI) was under and psychic repression built into heavy scrutiny by the energy of a the orthodoxy of the Italian polit- growing wave of extra-parliamen- ical left, a repressive architectonics tary movements on the left. Pari- not unlike that of fascism itself. netto preferred to characterize To understand the target of himself as a “marxian,” rather than this critique, one must understand a Marxist or a communist, believ- the position of the Italian left at ing that Marx provides insight not the time of publication. The PCI only into the functions of capital, gained but also the inherent relational- during the resistance movement considerable strength ity of the human subject. He dis- against the Italian Social Republic tanced himself from what was, in from 1943 to 1945, and despite not his view, the rigidity of dialectical having won an electoral majority materialism and the consequent in the elections of 1946 and 1948, masculinist attitudes of many it was influential in the cultural Italian Marxists in those years by politics of postwar Italy. Between working extensively on Marx’s phi- the late 1940s and the 1970s, Italy losophy of nature and the human. underwent a period of dramatic Prior works include a conceptual economic development, making exposition of alienation in the it a leading European industrial German philosophical tradition, power, and causing a major shift N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 87 in the development of various emancipation and morality, and a industries, including automobile, way to work towards progressive film, and television production. As political gains: “We [. . .] want to postwar capitalist modes of pro- push forward certain criteria which duction flourished, the PCI held are not only economic but also onto its electoral power as the moral, of a working class which second-largest political party in does not want to imitate the bour- the country (after the center-right geoisie but which wants to acquire Christian Democrats), and the a new, more collective and more largest communist party in West- fraternal way of living.” i ern Europe. They maintained this Such policy positions were, for position in government until the Parinetto, a betrayal of the com- end of the 1970s, thus forcing the munist promise of true emancipa- party to respond to radical cultur- tion. The capitalist-driven culture al and lifestyle shifts as a result of postwar Italy was dangerous, of over three decades’ worth of he thought, not only because it economic development. The PCI turned workers into consumers, preached personal austerity as a but because it turned the commu- combative measure to the trans- nist party into a religious institu- formation of Italy’s mass culture tion that incorporated bourgeois and the morally dubious capital- moral procedures of religious di- ist-driven economies dacticism. In Parinetto’s formula- that resulted. In a 1978 interview, tion, the PCI had become like the pleasure the PCI’s economic spokesperson, Church preaching to its “believers:” Giorgio Amendola, framed this The sale of Marx brought out by strategy both as a form of personal revisionists has in turn become, i. Cited from David Forgacs, “The Communist Party and Culture,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, edited by Zygmunt Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 103-104. 88 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O by an irony of history, RELI- and German Ideology), and putting GION: so much so that one of them in conversation with Freud- the major spokespeople of this ian psychoanalysis. In doing so, his revisionistic arguments are in dialogue with church, Saint Amendola, has electorally won those thinkers who deeply influ- been able to address workers enced the New Left: Wilhelm Re- (transformed into believers) with ich, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman a Lutheran homily concern- O. Brown. Moreover, Parinetto ing the faith built into needless found key interlocutors in Deleuze sacrifice, without guarantees, and Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus: “without opposition,” waiting Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) for god-capital to demonstrate shapes many of his arguments in its arbitrary benevolence and this book. save them.ii Parinetto’s philosophy is thus attuned to a current of thinking Parinetto wanted to break up often described as Marxist hu- the revisionist rhetoric touted manism, insofar as he centers his by the PCI in order to advance a analysis on the concept of a sub- heterodox reading of Marxist rev- ject through the relational matrix olutionary theory. This he did by of the body, rather than decenter- revisiting Marx’s early polemical ing subjectivity within the project writings on the human (e.g. The of emancipation (for which Louis Economic and Philosophic Man- Althusser’s antihumanist structur- uscripts of 1844, The Holy Family, al Marxism provocatively argued). ii. Luciano Parinetto, “Premessa,” in Corpo e rivoluzione in Marx: morte diavolo analità (Milano: Mimesis, 2015), 23. The emphases are Parinetto’s and the translation is mine. Notably, the theme of religious orthodoxy is a core focus of Parinetto’s oeuvre, dealt with at length in his The Notion of Alienation in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx and Neither God nor Capital mentioned above. Unfortunately, none of this work is yet available in English. N A Z I - F A S C I S M A N D A N A L R E P R E S S I O N / 89 In so doing, Parinetto’s focus on corporeality—the erotic, the per- the body also departs from that of verse, sexuality, anality—elements Marxist-Leninists, such as Mario either neglected by Marxist philos- Tronti in Workers and Capital, who ophy, or temporally relegated to view the body in terms of labor “after” the revolution. power—a predominantly masculine concept. Marxist-Leninists To date there exists no introduction to, or study of, Parinetto’s retained the rigidity of a social vi- philosophical thought in English. sion split between base, structure, Even in Italy, Parinetto is almost and superstructure, maintaining entirely unknown, even though that issues relating to gender and both his journalistic and philo- sexuality would be resolved after sophical output was prolific. His the revolution. Parinetto is largely memory has survived in large part in agreement with Italian feminist through the editorial and authorial critiques of this view: a revolution efforts of Nicoletta Poidimani and that does not consider the capac- Manuele Bellini, both of whom ity of the female (or in Parinetto’s were Parinetto’s students at the view, the perverse, “transsexual”) University of Milan.iii In describing body, does not a revolution make. her teacher, Nicoletta Poidimani Parinetto turns away from these has quoted the Greek philosopher predominant positions, Diogenes: “Some people were as well as many Italian feminist laughing at him because he was thinkers, in order to bring out the walking backwards beneath the repressed and abject elements of portico. Diogenes replied: ‘Aren’t Marxist iii. Of interest here are three volumes that introduce and explicate some of the main themes of his work: Nicoletta Poidimani, ed., Luciano Parinetto: l’utopia di un eretico (Milano: Mimesis, 2005); Manuele Bellini, ed., Corpo e rivoluzione. Sulla filosofia di Luciano Parinetto: con la bibliografia complete della sua opera (Milano: Mimesis, 2012), and Manuele Bellini, Dialettica del diverso. Marxismo e antropologia in Luciano Parinetto (Milano: Mimesis, 2018). 90 / L U C I A N O P A R I N E T T O you ashamed to reproach me for dissent from commonly held phil- walking backward; you who walk osophical assumptions and styles. backward through life’s journey?’” Drawing on German idealism, En- Parinetto often relied on this lightenment philosophy, alchem- quote in his teaching, she writes. ical thought, and contemporary For him, it “underscores the peda- postmodern critique, Parinetto’s gogical function of the ‘other’ (di- writing attempts to loosen the verso), who mirrors other people’s rigidity of theoretical orthodoxy. ‘normality,’ which he understood His most enduring and imaginative as misery. And he would make engagements are with Marx. this point while walking backward, signifying his own alterity with his matthew zundel is a doctoral body, with this bodily gesture.” iv candidate in Italian Studies at NYU. In this short excerpt from the They are currently writing their dis- resplendent The Body and Revo- sertation on the use of perversion lution in Marx, it is precisely the as a political concept in philosoph- perverse body, a body that devi- ical writing and social movement ates from a “normal” path, which materials from Italy during the figures as Parinetto’s central point 1970s. More broadly, their research of concern. interests incorporate questions of gender and sexuality, cultural luciano parinetto (1934-2001) studies, affect, and critical theory, was an Italian philosopher, poet, alongside performance, literature, and music and literary critic. He and film cultures in Italy. taught philosophy at the University of Milan, and is remembered by his students as a “heretic” for his iv. Poidimani, “L’utopia di un eretico,” 7. Translation mine.