Nietzsche’s ‘Herd’ Myth

Foucault’s preface to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus gives it the alternate title of Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life – an ‘art of living counter to all forms of fascism’ – and offers a frightening invocation of the ‘fascism in us all’. This will be our entry into the main thrust of this chapter: how we can construct a notion of human nature such that we are not condemned to be forever fighting a deep drive to microfascism as the desire to have all human relations be those of command.

Writing in 1982, Foucault explains how, for a certain time in France (he specifies 1945–65) critical social thought had Marx and Freud as its obligatory reference points, along with ‘the greatest respect’ for sign-systems. This conceptual field was also the underlying border of the usual readings of late 1960s social movements: ‘A war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic repression … had returned and set fire to reality itself: Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light’ (AO, xi–xii). While these two thinkers are certainly present, Anti-Oedipus is not a new Marx–Freud synthesis, Foucault continues; it’s not a new system of thought, a ‘flashy Hegel’. Rather, Anti-Oedipus is an ‘art’, a guidebook helping us address the following: ‘how does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action?’ (AO, xii).

But ‘desire’ has two valences in Anti-Oedipus, fascist and revolutionary, paranoid and schizophrenic, molar and molecular. To achieve the latter, we must defeat the former, which lives as ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (AO, xiii). We must insist, however, that this ‘fascism in us all’, if we are to be faithful to Foucault and to Deleuze and Guattari, must not be an ineradicable part of human nature, but must instead be a historical artefact, an ‘assemblage’.

Hence some of Foucault’s suggestions: be multiple, not totalising; never ‘terrorise’ your readers, never claim to have found ‘the pure order’; be joyous, ‘do not think one has to be sad to be militant’; above all, ‘do not become enamored of power’ (AO, xiii).