In English there is an ambiguity in the word “subjection.” It can denote the way lives are made into subjects and thus are given subjectivity, but also the way lives are subjected to domination and thus are subjugated. That both subjectivity and subjugation ambiguously coincide in “subjection” tells us that the forms within which life is lived are never far away from the forms through which life dominates and is dominated, that the positive formation of life is always nearby the negative possibility of constraining it.¹ What must be confronted in our fascist moment then is not simply the proximity between subjectivity and subjugation, but rather the degree to which fascism has made subjugation the very ground of subjectivity, to which domination itself has been embraced as the foundation of social life.

Within the cultural and political conditions of fascism, there are two complementary forms of subjectivity which arise to organize experience. The first is formed as an attachment to domination, a desire to join with fascism’s expanding devaluation and disposal of life as a means of no longer being exposed to it. This form of subjectivity sees migrants being disappeared by ICE and then identifies with the officers, sees the poor sleeping on the street and then becomes enamored with the rich, sees protestors be smothered with tear gas and then celebrates the police, and sees the genocide unfolding in Palestine and then embraces the IDF. As it becomes readily apparent to everyone that ever more of life is subjugated, abandoned, and exposed to death, this form of fascist subjectivity offers refuge by giving people the freedom and permission to dominate, or at the very least to identify with and make clear that you are on the side of those who do. The reality of one’s own inevitable death remains unimaginable, and so what is imagined instead is that death itself can have power held over it.

The second form of subjectivity is coupled with the first, but has its relation to domination inverted. If the first form of subjectivity identifies with having power over other lives, this second form identifies with its own powerlessness. This form of subjectivity under fascism organizes itself on the premise that domination constitutes the natural order of things, that it cannot be lived against but only lived with. Within this subjective position, the generalized immiseration of life, the degradation of working conditions, the militarization of neighborhoods, and the destruction of the Earth all appear not as a history full of ongoing conflicts and struggles but only as destiny and fate. To be in however many ways a victim, to be afraid and defeated and at times paranoid, thus come to be understood as inherent parts of what it means to exist in the world. While the first form of subjectivity gravitates towards dominating and the second towards being dominated, both are in the end defined by their acceptance of domination as a fact of life, as a reality which must be endured.

While these two subjectivities formally oppose one another, they nonetheless remain conconstitutive and coexist in varying degrees. Even those who hold the most power in fascist society, who order around their stormtroopers and draw up plans for concentration camps, nonetheless feel themselves to be the victims, to be in some way violated by those they now seek to violate. Those who hold the least power in fascist society, who live beneath the boots of many others, nonetheless harbor fantasies of revenge and domination, dreaming that one day the tables will be turned and that those who now are at the top will be dragged to the bottom to be stomped upon too. What both of these subjectivities ultimately share in common is the understanding that every encounter and relation between lives is essentially a question of dominating or being dominated, that in each instance life has the potential only to be master or slave, perpetrator or victim. Fascism is nothing other than this complete impoverishment of life based on the understanding that living with others concerns only living above or beneath them.

As I’ve expanded upon elsewhere, in order to understand how subjugation arises as the foundation of subjectivity in fascist society we need a third term: spectacle.² A society in which all of life has come to be premised upon dominating and being dominated is only possible when life has already been totally atomized, when each person has come to understand themselves as an isolated individual which must fend only for themselves and survive on their own. It is this atomization coupled with a background of immense suffering and death which compose the conditions for fascism, both of which arise from the spectacular conditions of our time. Lives all watch individual screens filled with individualized feeds of content, and thus have their own isolated experience of a world within which suffering and death expand ever more totally across life as whole. In one moment this spectacle makes a show of all of the death and suffering which have come to be so abundant in our world, flashing between videos of bombed out ruins and fleeing refugees, of people left abandoned and enemies of the state being eliminated. In the next moment it features theatrical violence staged and edited for social media, bringing detention camps, immigration raids, and militarized police further into view alongside state officials who give speeches and pose in uniforms. In both cases, individuals see a dominated world, and then reimagine how their own isolated lives must be lived within this generalized domination that they see as inseparable and indistinguishable from reality itself.

The spectacle thus begins as something sensual but then quickly bleeds into the subjective, creating an experience of the world that gives form to ways of living within it. On the surface of experience, the spectacle appears banal and boring, as simply another minor detail of everyday life alongside advertisements, streaming shows, memes, and dating profiles. But beneath the surface, severe damage is inflicted upon the deepest depths of existence, saturating the subjective forms within which we live and can imagine living. The immense creativity and potentiality of life thus is compressed and collapsed into a sense that life revolves around and depends only upon who has power over whom. What is a fascist society if not this perpetual degrading and debasement of life, this equating of every possible social relation with domination? If any way out of this situation remains, it involves nothing less than a pursuit of ways of life which are not reducible to dominating nor to being dominated but rather are concerned with all of what it means and could mean to live, ways of life which entail not only an exit from but the eventual destruction of this world premised upon domination.