Gender and the Abject in Sartre — Page 3:
11 In his standard work on German fascism, Männerfantasien, Theweleit examined early-twentieth century European fascism as the extreme manifestation of the pervasive, constitutive fear of alterity in patriarchal society. Fascism is thus not external to Western society, but a logical extension and continuation of its fundamental, constitutive traits. The present essay supports this argument of continuity by pointing to the similarities between Sartre's language and the proto-fascist texts studied in Männerfantasien. Theweleit not only analyzed the psychic constitution of proto-fascist men, but repeatedly also emphasized the dialectical implication of antifascist critiques in fascist thinking.
Fascism as the Absolute Other
12 Similar to Jospin's statement quoted at the beginning of this essay, Sartre's "Qu' est-ce qu'un colloborateur" (1945), although published more than fifty years earlier, asserted that collaborators with the German occupation force had no real links to contemporary France (48): "soutenu par des armées étrangeres, il [le collaborateur] ne pouvait être que l'agent de l'étranger" (50). In a by now famous misspelling, Sartre wrote the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach's name with a z, thereby emphasizing Brasillach's ideological ties with Nazism and, again, the "foreignness" of this association. As Russell Berman notes, "[t]his was perhaps no naive error but at least a significant lapsus if not a calculated effort to represent the collaborator as a traitor, as if the French intellectual could have greeted the Nazis only by surrendering his native identity and aiding an emphatically foreign power" (xi).
13 The assumption that fascism is categorically "other," i.e., historically and culturally different from French culture, pervades Sartre's essay. Historically, in addition to this perception of fascism as alien to Western modernity, two myths in particular still pervade our interpretation of fascism and modernity: that fascist cultural production was homogenous and artistically inferior, and that modern art heroically resisted totalitarian ideologies.[3]In this context Henry Rousso speaks of "the myth of resistancialism" (<em>Vichy</em> 20-21). The problematic concerning the relationship between modern art and fascism, and between fascism and anti-fascism, is one of the main concerns of this essay.
14 Sartre's essay is one of the most celebrated expressions of an earlier generation that denied any native French involvement in fascism and established fascism as the absolute Other. Whereas Carroll equates fascism with "the ideology of masculine superiority radicalized or even absolutized" and "a symptom of a deep fear [. . .] and violent rejection of nonsubservient or nonidealized women" (148), this essay seeks to transcend the emphasis on the biological sexes as fixed categories of identity and specifically a stable concept of the biologically female that plagues not only Sartre's work[4]With regard to Sartre, Judith Butler writes: "Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrian frame of signifying subject and signified Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate." Butler understands gender as "a <em>relation</em> among socially constituted subjects in specificable contexts. This relational or contextual point of view suggests that what the person 'is,' and, indeed, what "gender 'is,' is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined. As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations" (<em>Trouble</em> 10)., but also Theweleit's somewhat essentialist study.
15 If the process of othering, the repudiation of alterity, is at the heart of fascism, the dichotomy that Sartre attempts to establish between himself and the fascist Other, and by implication between France and German Nazism, collapses. If, as Theweleit has argued, fascism is an extreme manifestation of what latently underlies patriarchal societies, forming their foundational discriminatory structure, France, like any patriarchal society, then bears the roots of fascism within it. The electoral successes in France of the Front National, whose politics consist mainly in "othering" immigrants and other (non-white) races, corroborate this point.