“We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: ’Fascism will not make it again.‘ Fascism has already ’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 micro-political economy of desire which is 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.” — Felix Guattari, “Everybody wants to be a fascist”

“The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism.” — Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”

This meeting is less concerned with establishing a definitive definition of contemporary fascism. Rather, we aim to discuss its mechanisms and media from two perspectives. The first perspective draws on the concept of a “micropolitics of desire [désir]” developed by the schizoanalyst Félix Guattari. In a text of the same name, originally delivered as a lecture in 1973 at a conference on “Psychoanalysis and Politics” in Italy, Guattari outlines an “analytic-political” approach that refuses to separate individual from social problems. His hypothesis about a close connection between fascism and desire—positioned, for Guattari, at the center of the production of subjectivity—is tied to the assumption of new, mutating forms of fascism that continuously adapt desire to the logic of late capitalist profit economies. The second perspective focuses on the relationship between the current fascist turn in late capitalist political and social formations—particularly its manifestations in Germany—and (digital) mediation. How can we account for the fascistization of everyday media practices? What kinds of affective economies do these practices produce—and how? What might an affective politics of resistance—or a non-fascist desire—look like in response to the modalities and ethologies of digital fascism and its profit strategies? Why is it, above all, gender and queer media studies approaches that are able to adequately describe the media of the fascistization of life today?