Fascism, Passibility, and the Unsettled Unconscious

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist.

What does “passibility” look like in a time of genocide and fascism? In discussing “passibility,” I refer back to this Lyotardian term, through Avgi Saketopoulou's articulation of this as a capacity for greater risktaking and risk tolerance, the ability to relinquish “the ordinary ways in which boundaries are patrolled in everyday life” (Saketopoulou, 2023), to create a surrender to the absolute unknown in oneself, a position of untethering and a release from conservatism, so that transformation and new translations of oneself can occur. Saketopoulou describes this experience for the exigent sadist as always fleeting and temporary.

When genocide's excess is now considered part of the rhythm of everyday reasonable violence, our ability to psychically contain becomes impossible. The air feels brittle and tense all the time. We have become accustomed now to the ways that reasonable violence grinds on, becomes transmitted to us through the algorithm, and just as easily disappears from the news cycle—a fate somehow worse than the fact itself. Reasonable violence now looks like the many ways human flesh can become hollowed out, pulverized, and turned into ash. Reasonable violence is what Israel and its Western allies can inflict on a Palestinian in the world today without the need to report on it. A mother screaming, “My six children who couldn't fit in our tent now all fit in the palm of my hand.” A father asking about his dead six-year-old child and being handed a bag instead, “They gave me a bag that had 18 kilos of body pieces. I'm burying the pieces, and I don't know whether some are my son Ali or not.”. The designation Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. The loss of eye and limb from an exploded pager. Those who survive will be known by their amputations.

Swedish Marxist writer Andreas Malm has called what is h