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Anti-fascism operates as the exceptional framing through which we are asked to suspend our social explanation of dysfunction, and the manufacture of criminality; we are asked to abandon our comprehension of the processes by which irredeemable bastards, life's embodiment of unremitting failings, are formed. Instead, it is required that we adopt the state's gaze and judge this particular end-result as the cause of itself. Of all the socially conditioned ideological formations in the world, the fascist is the only one held responsible for its own existence. The figure of the fascist becomes the pretext for the left's suspension of its account of deprivation and the exertion of its right to expropriate punitive power. From the anti-fascist standpoint, there is is nothing to be said of 'fascists', the only available response is to drop bombs on them. In other contexts, type-profiling is repudiated as 'body shaming' and 'normalisation' but anti-fascism is an assumption of extraordinary powers... over the bad other, it awards itself the right to use all available fascistic measures. Where fascists are registered as a 'type', a set of fixed and identifiable, categorised traits, then it seems only logical within the frame of its policing discourse that they should be liquidated as a type. All means of dehumanisation are legitimate under the exigent pressure of the state of exception.

To be sure, the man in the photograph, like a lot of us, is relatively ill-made and physically articulates the impoverishment of his circumstances. It must be assumed that his failure in life is the reason he has attended a fascist demonstration. Damage and suffering, unprocessable loss and humiliation, the compulsion to repeat a return to types and orderings, all the character traits of Reich's 'little man' and of critical theory's 'authoritarian personality', are present in him. They are the traits that collectively act as the sine qua non of subjective fascism, this is what industrialisation and the trauma of industrialised war does to people. We learn without surprise for example that those voting Le Pen in the French presendential elections, once voted communist... and we also learn, again without surprise, that the leftist candidate Mélenchon is 'capturing' votes from Le Pen. The 'little men' thrown up by industrial democracy are ever-responsive to the most recent stimuli of ideology - as raw material for leftism and fascism they are qualitatively interchangeable. Nobody with a living soul will shed a tear for a punched fascist, or a fascist looked down upon with disdain, or a stabbed fascist or a summarily executed fascist but the question set by nihilist communism remains: what is it that constitutes subjective anti-fascism as an instrument of actually existing fascism?