Gender Disgussed

16     However, it is important not completely to conflate fascism, patriarchy, and othering. As Lynda Hart observes in Fatal Women, the formation of subjectivity is based on the process of othering, on the establishment not only of an ego position different from the (m)other, but also on the differentiation from the "alien" within:

If the "I" is produced through the expulsion of waste products, this process can be understood as a kind of elemental "othering," a construction of subjectivity based on excluding or expelling the "alien" within. The body makes waste in order to constitute itself as autonomous, sovereign, pure. The formation of subjectivity is thus a process that occurs not between discrete subjects but rather through the concealment of differences that exist within the subject. (98)

17     What differentiates fascism, literary or other, from more "benign" othering as part of the formation of subjectivity or community identity is the former's totality.[5]Cf. Butler, "For a Careful Reading": "It might be clarifying [. . .] to consider that whereas every subject is formed through a process of differentiation, and that the process of becoming differentiated is a necessary condition of the formation of the 'I' as a bounded and distinct kind of being, that there are better and worse forms of differentiation, and that the worse kinds tend to abject and degrade those from whom the 'I' is distinguished [. . .]. That an 'I' is differentiated from another does not mean that the other must become structurally homologous to the 'I' in order to enter into community with that 'I.' At the level of political community, what is classed for is the difficult work of cultural translation in which difference is honored without (a) assimilating difference to identity or (b) making difference an unthinkable fetish of alterity" (139-40). Although it is equally important not to conflate the blind spots of antifascist texts with fascism itself, Sartre's treatment of alterity does fit the description Carroll gives of the gender ideology and the literary fascism of the French writer Drieu la Rochelle:

Such an ideology is constituted by the project to establish both genders as distinct and totalizable identities, to make man as such or woman as such either an ideal type or the representative of absolute negativity, of a pathological deviation from and threat to the norm or ideal represented by the other. If this is so, no approach that accepts such distinctions and the hierarchies they impose, no matter which term is privileged or how vigorously the masculinist ideology of fascism is opposed, can effectively undermine the ultimate gender ideal of literary fascism: to be 'total.'" (169-170)

Sartre establishes a strict gender dichotomy and poses both female and male identity as stable and essential. Woman is represented as a negativized threat to the norm represented by man. It is the totality, the absoluteness, of the representation of gender in Sartre that is reminiscent of the patriarchy's extreme outgrowth in fascism.

Abjection

18     In "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur," Sartre moreover discusses collaboration as an illness ("une maladie"; see above "contamination"), "un fait de désintégration" (46), an extreme danger exerted by the foreign Other and its collaborators resulting from the disintegration of the French nation. In Sartre's essay, collaborators are described as threatening the purity, the clean and proper nature of the symbolic inside with abject contamination, Kristevan excess ("déchet," 48, 49) and, according to Sartre, they therefore have to be ab-jected.

19     Kristeva's psychoanalytical essay establishes an analogy between the perceived threat to the body politic and the imagined threat to the organic body and the self traditionally associated with it. She theorizes the threat of ego dissolution, of disintegration, of a falling back into a pre-oedipal state of non-differentiation. Following the anthropologist Mary Douglas' influential work, Purity and Danger, it can be argued that our understanding of complex social formations and views of social order and cohesion take as their model our interpretations of the structure of living organisms. As Tina Campt has outlined, Douglas' "work theorizes how the perceived danger of bodily pollution and aspirations to purity and its maintenance symbolizes the relationship between parts of society and mirrors desires for hierarchy, symmetry and homogeneity in the larger social system" (no pag.). Within the cultural and historical context discussed in this essay (France and Germany during the 1940s), the symbolically constructed boundaries of the body politic of the nation are imagined and represented as analogous to (equally symbolically constructed) bodily boundaries. These boundaries are involved in the constitution not only of national, but also of racial (or rather raced/racialized) and gendered forms of identity (Aryans vs. non-Aryans, men vs. women). As we will see in the brief analysis of Sartre's homophobia that follows and my longer discussion of the gender ideology in Sartre's work, the national body politic itself is clearly gendered (as well as raced or racialized, although race is not the primary focus of this essay). In brief, the notion of bodily boundaries and the perceived consequences of their transgression and violation in social terms are at the heart of Kristeva's theory of abjection. The extreme fear of contamination of the Volkskörper, in its literal as well as figurative sense, is characteristic of literary and non-literary texts from the era of National Socialism. Although Sartre critiques exactly this fear of contamination (by the Jewish body) in Réflexions sur la question juive (40), the same fear is found in his "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?".

20     What is most threatening, of course (as the Lynda Hart quote cited above already showed), is that the Other is really first and foremost inside — inside the symbolic system and inside the ego — and that this threatening inside can only be "projected" outside.[6]I am using the term "projection" in quotation marks, because, as Theweleit (94-95) points out, it is indeed problematic when used in reference to the subjects of his analysis, the protofascist Freikorps members. Sartre as well establishes a link between collaboration and the collaborator's "inner nature," which is latent but manifests itself under the right circumstances (43). Sartre's collaborators, in other words, were already subject to the disintegration of the self before they succumbed to the integrative forces offered them by Nazism (which provided them with what Theweleit calls an "ego armour"). Sartre describes this inner nature as inherently traitorous. The repression he consequently advocates is clearly reflective of the simultaneous repression and controlled incitement of feminized libidinal drives in patriarchal society. As Theweleit has demonstrated, fascist thinking takes this fear of the (feminized) inner drives and the ensuing repression and controlled incitement to its most acute level. Whereas Sartre argues that the collaborator tries to kill off "the human" in himself ("anéantir l'humain en lui et chez les autres," 60), he (Sartre) does not seem to be aware that his own article, submitting to a rigidity and restrictiveness reminiscent of fascist texts, targets inner human nature and its disintegrative pull as the very source of the described problem (collaboration). Without elaborating further, Sartre advocates repressive laws that would keep what he describes as the femininized drives of democracy ("un ennemi que les sociétés démocratiques portent [. . .] en leur sein;" 60) under control: "il convient qu'on fasse enfin des lois restrictives: il ne doit pas avoir de liberté contre la liberté" (60). On the intrapsychic level, the mechanism — the repudiation of the Other — is the same for both the collaborator as described by Sartre, and for Sartre himself. This mechanism also finds expression in Sartre's dualistic and hegemonic language, when he consistently refers to the collaborator as an essential(ist) "il," who is then continuously — but, as I have shown, ultimately in vain — opposed to the "nous" of the article.