Georges Bataille's Diagnosis of Fascism and Some Second Opinions

Abstract

Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within. Georges Bataille, 1938. I Georges Bataille's essay The Psychological Structure of Fascism dates from the year 1933. It is a densely written and perspicacious attempt to render commensurable the phenomenon that had emerged and triumphed in Italy and Germany by proposing in little more than twenty pages a comprehensive explanatory model. My discussion sets out to place it in its philosophical, rather than its political context, stressing its dependence on the vulgarized Nietzscheanism of the twenties and thirties, whilst not losing sight of the tensions within ~at~,ille's thought which this creates.Bataille's essay embodies the fascination which political power at its crudest and most charismatic can exert over sophisticated thinkers and also something of the helplessness of philosophical abstraction before such realities as the rise of Mussolini and ~~xtler. A problem inherent in my analysis is that it is much easier to demonstrate the philosophical lineage of Bataille's essay than to specify what derives directly from the political situation in France particularly, and Europe generally, at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. The fact remains, however, that Bataille chose to translate his dilemmas into an idiom that, combines concepts from Freudian psychology with others taken from both the Hegelian and Nietzschean traditions of philosophy. While Bataille's method can reveal much of the phenomenon of Fascism, it also tends t,o mask or simplify certain political realities, for the text itself ---~ at NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIV LIB on June 24, 2015 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Immunochemical quantification of cytochrome P450IA and IIB subfamilies in the livers of metyrapone-treated rats. Relevance to the ability of metyrapone to prevent the loss of cytochrome P-450 in rat hepatocyte culture

“…Purification of cytochromes P450 and preparation of antibodies Cytochrome P450IA and IIB subfamilies were purified from the livers of groups of 12 male rats which had been treated with BNF or PB for 3 days, using the method described by Guengerich et al [5]. The exact procedure employed in this laboratory has been described in detail [6]. Antibodies to these isoenzymes were raised in half-lop rabbits by injecting 1 mg of the isoenzyme preparation emulsified in 800,l of Freund's complete adjuvant at two intramuscular, one subcutaneous and one intraperitoneal sites.…”