Imane Khelif, Immediate Transcendence, and Fascism

Setting the Stage: Imane Khelif and Fascists

The response to Imane Khelif has largely been of a fascist nature. Many superficial signals support this assessment, but it would be ironically shallow to leave it at that. To name some of the signs, many of the attacks on Khelif appear misogynistic insofar as they’re undertaken on the basis that Khelif doesn’t embody the supposedly right kind of womanness. Many of them are racist insofar as Khelif is treated as biologically different from supposedly good white people (or whatever race is the “good” race—take your pick). Khelif’s nationality might lead some to attack her on the basis that they might assume her to be too Muslim for their liking. A non-white, non-Christian, non-white woman boxer, beating people up for a living could appear like a likely target for, for instance, a neo-Nazi.

The attacks on Khelif are over the strange, absurd, and unsubstantiated claim that Khelif is a man, was a man, or is too much like a man to rightly compete in women’s boxing at the Olympics. Khelif, the argument might go, isn’t womanly enough to be a woman fighter. In order to have fistfights with other women, Khelif ought to present herself as a more womanly woman. To those who make this argument, Khelif doesn’t appear womanly enough. If Khelif isn’t womanly enough, then she shouldn’t be allowed to box with other womanly women boxers. On the face of it, one could rightly note that such an argument is transphobic. The issue of trans rights in sports has, for several months, been a contentious one, but, for the moment, I will set that issue aside. By analyzing Khelif’s exemplary case, I will focus on the role that appearances play in fascists’ way of orienting themselves toward the world and interacting with it.

What makes the problematization of Khelif important for understanding the current state of politics is what Khelif, as an object of social discourse, might tell us about fascist epistemology and its broader sociality. The controversy with Khelif began after Italian boxer Angela Carini quit her fight with Khelif after a mere 46 seconds. Leading to Khelif’s Olympic bout with Carini, there had been minimal controversy around the supposed question of Khelif’s gender. In 2023, after having defeated Russian boxer, Azalia Amineva, Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s (IBA’s) World Boxing Championship. At the time, the IBA was run by Putin ally Umar Kremlev and had as its sole sponsor Russian state-owned oil company Gazprom [1]. Khelif’s disqualification was announced on the basis of an unsubstantiated “gender eligibility test.” No reporting demonstrates what this test is supposed to have entailed, what, exactly, it was supposed to have tested, or that it even actually took place. Since then, the IBA has been criticized for corruption, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that it no longer recognized the IBA. With regard to Khelif’s gender, she was born a girl, has always been cisgender, and, without wanting to make a claim with regard to any social or political relevance of these factors, no reporting shows Khelif to have a Y chromosome or abnormally high testosterone. Of course, the point here isn’t to affirm anything about Khelif but, instead, to say that, even by gender essentialists’ own standards, Khelif is, and always has been, by all appearances, a girl or a woman.

One sees a paradox in the field of analysis. In the first place, why ought fascists to attack, rather than the institution as a whole, a particular woman boxer? The whole phenomenon of women’s boxing appears antithetical to the “traditional” [2] gendered concepts that have always been so precious to fascists, so why should fascists distinguish a supposedly inappropriately masculine—or supposedly trans—woman from women boxers who don’t appear to embody fascists’ conception of femininity? The uproar over Khelif, obviously, is not one that’s emerged from nowhere and from nothing.

The Fascist Political Economy of Hate

The issue with Khelif has a particular history. Over the decades, wealthy donors have constructed and mobilized a political economy of fear and hatred [3]. More recently, the fascist propagandists employed in this political economy of hate have made trans rights into a potent object for recruiting and mobilizing the masses. In Khelif’s case, fascist celebrities and fascist institutions have sacrificed Khelif’s personal vulnerability (because if Khelif were a wealthy white Christian, fascists wouldn’t choose her to pillory) for the supposedly greater good. Fascists deem Khelif a so-called “deviant” and articulate her mischaracterized figure to the evil lurking forces that invisibly appear to be running amok as they supposedly so often do.

Even when fascists understand the vulnerable other to be merely a tool of powerful evil forces, they often deem the vulnerable other’s threat to be too great to ignore. Fascists’ collective unity is defined against the vulnerable other whose difference makes the other both untrustworthy and unworthy of protection. Their otherness—their marginality—that makes them vulnerable to the bloodthirsty and interpersonally uncaring masses makes them, from the fascist’s point of view, liable to be deemed that which they say they are not. If one counts themselves among the community of “normal” and “natural” national citizens, then the weird and/or abstract otherness that eludes the flat national rhizome of appearances cannot be explained or trusted. Deviance, by this account, can only be a threat empowered or a threat from which “real” citizens distance themselves by whatever means. In the fascist mind, trusting the threatening other would be foolishly reckless.

In Khelif’s case, the wealthy worldwide elites and technocrats who run the globalist institutions of and around the Olympics serve as the backdrop against which fascist declarations of foul play appear. On the one hand, any fascist can claim how obvious it is to them, according to their socially-constructed conception of gender, that Khelif is a man. Look at how many trusted authorities and people with “common sense” are pointing it out. No matter what you liberals say, we know the truth. On the other hand, the more that the liberal media, the IOC, the national government, Hollywood celebrities, and scientists and university professors proclaim that Khelif is a woman—and that those who claim otherwise are deemed to be merely deplorable, morally bankrupt numbskulls—the more the fascist at home might feel even greater conviction that something to do with Khelif is awry. They just feel it [4].

In “Affective Economies,” Sara Ahmed uses far-right examples to show that the social repetition—the mimesis—of the relation between object and emotion both stabilizes the social conception of the object and intensifies the social expression of the strong emotion associated with the object [5]. The production, distribution, and reproduction of the signifier’s associations cause, Ahmed writes, a kind of compounding by which the collectivity’s mode of perception ossified [6]. Consider the example of an object toward which people in a community feel strongly: the collectivity begins to share an orientation toward the world that is mediated not by reality’s complexities, nuances, and dynamism so much as by an appearance that’s become convincing through its pervasion and the shared practices formed around the object’s appearance. If everyone’s practices toward and around the object entail particular assumptions about the object, then those assumptions might appear to be confirmed when those practices work in people’s accomplishments of intended goals. But, this perspective can easily be based on misrecognition. Writing of anti-black racism, Ahmed states, “[T]he other is only read as fearsome through a misrecognition, a reading that is returned by the black other through its response of fear, as a fear of the white subject’s fear” [7]. Ahmed notices that misrecognition, engendered by fear, helps to constitute racism’s social dynamics, but misrecognition as a feature of capitalist social dynamics runs deeper in capitalist and liberal sociality than just forms of identity-based hatred.

Misrecognition is in no way foreign to understandings of liberal and capitalist sociality—for instance, in Marx’s commodity fetishism, Guy Debord’s spectacle, and Lacan’s Imaginary Order. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, by which “the capitalist social relation of value takes ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’” [8], relates masked object relations to social relations, turning commodities into bearers of social power. By this notion, people understand external and supposedly “immediate” appearances—in the form of use-values and otherwise—to frictionlessly and completely represent things and their self-possessed capacities. Guy Debord extends this idea in The Society of the Spectacle, asserting that “the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible and subjugates all reality to appearance” [9]. The spectacle, as a system of social relations, entails reality’s reduction to immediate appearances. This spectacle, then, characterized by images that mediate social relations, relates closely with Lacan’s Imaginary Order, wherein identifications with idealized images lead one to form an illusionary sense of self, others, and things [10]. If, for Marx, commodity fetishism entails fantasy—as in “the fantastic form of a relation between things”—then, the Imaginary Order is commodity fetishism’s Lacanian domain. Identification, from the beginning, Lacan writes, is, misidentification, and recognition is misrecognition [11]. The Imaginary Order’s illusory coherence and the spectacle’s domination of reality create a shared, yet superficial, perception of social cohesion, masking deeper social alienations and reinforcing systemic hierarchies and divisions. These illusions are made partially real, in some sense, as people put them into practice.

As people repeat social practices, Ahmed shows, those practices gain social stability and intensity. The collectivity’s shared sense of intensity, or transcendence, is a function, then, of the collective investment of emotion (cathexis) in shared objects. The repetition of intense emotions around shared objects binds the collectivity through the sharing of emotions related to those objects. The collective sharing of intense emotions compels subjects to continue to engage with the community in their shared emotional intensity. This shared intention to intensify emotion characterizes transcendent social practices. The substance of these relations, then, bonds people both horizontally with one another and vertically through the transcendence afforded by the object. Fascist sociality is, then, largely predicated on a kind of immediate transcendence.

Theodor Adorno, following Sigmund Freud, once noticed this phenomenon of collective transcendence with regard to the fascist’s identification with the leader [12]. Adorno grounds his insight in the case of fascist agitator Martin Luther Thomas. In The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, Adorno analyzes fascist agitator Thomas’s rhetorical patterns [13]. Thomas assembles messages from capitalist and liberal subjective wreckage—the function of modern forms of fragmentation [14]—saturates them with paranoia, and disseminates them to susceptible masses. For Thomas, feeling is believing [15], and his rhetorical intensification of fear simultaneously integrates the subject vertically with their leader and horizontally with their national community [16].

To compensate for painful modern contradictions, some fearful subjects are prone to invest in nationalism’s formal, empty, and ahistorical unity. From the point of view of liberal sociality this makes sense: if liberal social forms entail the fragmentation of people’s lived temporalities [17], or, forms of daily life, leading to discontentment, then liberalism’s persistence must necessitate forms of social synchronization like those found in nationalism [18]. At the heart of nationalism, one finds what Roger Griffin calls the “palingenetic myth”—the idea of a more glorious national past [19]. Such a valorizing myth doubly caricaturizes, or fetishizes: “We” are different from “them,” and “their” proximity threatens “us.” The fascist agitator oscillates between messages of paranoia of national threats and palingenetic hope for the repetition of a glorious national past. Through the mass distribution of a buffet of invented nationalist symbols, rituals, and narratives, nationalism’s purveyors provide means for national coherence. Facing modern fragmentation and unpredictability, would-be fascists choose the warm blanket of one-sidedness: the national citizen over the foreigner, the strong over the weak, the normal over the deviant. Fascism’s nationalist intensity and governmental difference, then, depend on the change in social significance of modern forms of fragmentation.

While Adorno points out that the führer principle constitutes fascists’ horizontal and vertical social bonds, I argue that this epistemological quality characterizes fascist sociality somewhat more broadly. It’s not only the overwhelming love of the führer that bonds one fascist to another as they collectively bond with the leader. Instead, fascists’ most-repeated and most intensely emotional associations play an important role in how fascists collectively orient themselves toward the world. Consider the role of the racial other. The fascist hatred toward the Jew is based on nonsense, but that nonsensical (mis)understanding is widely shared and intensely felt. Fascists’ parades, show trials, daily fascist spectacles, and Jew-hating rituals entail the social intention of intensifying emotion together. How and why the nonsensical hatred comes to be popular is a matter to be discussed on another occasion, but what’s clear is that fascists’ emotionally intensified objects form the ground for fascists’ uncritical understandings, their broad conformity, and their passionate and self-sacrificial dedication to the cause of the collectivity’s survival, dignity, and even dominance.

Immediate Transcendence and Fascist Sociality

Some of the first criticism after Khelif’s bout with Carini came from sports announcers from the freshly-refascized Italy [20]. Soon after Khelif’s victory, transphobic posts from anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, anti-trans and formerly-beloved author J. K. Rowling, and supervillain billionaire goof-dork Elon Musk posted untrue transphobic social media posts, after which the issue went viral. The nature of the discussion was predictable. Mostly, the claim was simply that Khelif was a man and that it’s unfair for her to compete in women’s boxing. Scholars and journalists have run themselves ragged in efforts to make sense of the so-called “post-truth” world of contemporary discourse—especially far-right discourse [21]—but what can be clearly said is that Khelif is not, and never has been, a man, so one must ask how and why, especially when the confirmation of this fact is so readily available, much of the popular discourse entails the assumption that Khelif actually is a man. Earlier, I pointed out that, by gender essentialists’ expressed standards, Khelif is a woman. No available evidence suggests that Khelif is a man and all available evidence suggests that she has always been a girl or woman, so how can one explain why it is that those on the far right claim that Khelif is a man? When every means of establishing Khelif’s gender suggests that she is a woman and not a man, why is it that those on the far right insist that she is a man?

I claim that far-right sociality is characterized by the compulsion of appearance over reality. Any substantiation of the fascist’s own avowed criteria for how to establish one’s gender is unlikely to prevail in establishing the truth over the fascist community’s consensus. For the fascist, truth is always, necessarily obvious and undeniable. If, as Karl Marx writes, “The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” [22], then fascists’ sense of reality is abstract. Instead of understanding the truth of the world according to various forms of mutually-reinforcing verifications, the fascist sees reality as that which is there, immediate, and present. Fascist reality is flat; there is no reality in tension with appearance. There’s only that which is, right there, in front of you to touch and immediately confirm. The world is an indifferent rhizome, and our values, concepts, patterns, and shared phenomena and things like scale are “the actor’s own achievement,” as someone once wrote. For the fascist, abstractions and universals are mere conveniences and pragmatics that index the really real substance underneath. Substance produces ideas; neither are they two sides of the same coin nor do things go in both directions. Science, the economy, the “material,” nature, and the physical(ly strong) can—in opposition to the theoretical, (ironically) “abstract,” philosophical, critical, speculative, and religious—be real. Reality goes in one direction and not the other, and, for the fascist, there is never any distance between truth and reality. What you see is what you see. Of course, how one begins to perceive the real stuff is necessarily a matter of social construction, but don’t tell that to fascists and their friends.

Another paradox: this kind of abstract reification is intensified through consensus—through the degree to which it’s shared in the fascist community. On the one hand, the immediate seems to be the immediate—the unmediated—so what ought consensus have to do with it? If the immediate is that which no one and nothing mediates, then the idea that consensus helps to determine what counts as immediate appears as a contradiction. On the other hand, the appearance of the immediate is always conditioned—i.e., mediated—by social categories and understandings, so the collectivity’s understanding must bear on what the fascist perceives. Because of the fascist’s shallow form of perception, the fascist construction of any object can articulate something economic to something religious, especially as both can entail a shared form of transcendence.

To return to Khelif, her social significance is limited and likely fleeting, but her case exemplifies the fascist tendency toward immediate transcendence. In rhizomic fascist society, all values and all concepts elude criticism. Flatness precludes negation. The terms of engagement with reality permit only the rhizome’s uniformity. The fascist tendency to render the world into the flat surface of appearances leaves the fascist to affirm that which superficially appears to be the case and leaves the fascist lacking the logical resources necessary to negate that which might not, or even should not, be the case. In “The Fascism of the Potato,” Alain Badiou writes, “Negation of morality, cult of natural affirmation, repudiation of antagonism, aestheticism of the multiple, which outside of itself, as its subtractive political condition and its indelible fascination, leaves in abeyance the One of the tyrant: one prepares for the kowtow, one is already bowing down” [23]. In fascist society (and in pre-fascist society), there is no ethics because ethics is a practice that entails critical contestation. In the absence of critical engagement, antagonism is mere troublemaking—disorder. Difference is made into nothing more than the beautiful diversion of difference for difference’s sake or diversity merely for unmediated, or criterialess, diversity’s sake. The affirmation of all that is (supposedly, “nature”)—at the expense of the possible negation of difference—makes all that the authoritarian, for instance, does perfectly valid and good. For this reason, the fascist subject who detects that something is wrong cannot give up on society’s most-repeated signifiers—those having to do with “real” things like gender, race, the economy, and so on. The fascist rejects the system’s outcomes but not its basic assumptions—that you should work hard, that you should obey the law, that you should be normal, that capitalism is good, and so on. The world is as it appears to be, and only the (magical) drama of powerful, evil forces can explain its corruption.

While this flattening renders the world into a single apparent surface, fascists’ inevitable encounters with real differences can only be explained by way of immediate, unmediated transcendence of that which is affirmed to be the normal and good case. In order to explain those differences which supposedly ought to not be the case, fascists must construct, distribute, and reproduce fantastical and exaggerated binaristic conceptions of otherness, so fascists think in Manichaeist, black-and-white, unmediated moralistic terms. In the absence of the rational means necessary to negation and criticism, fascists often opt for excising unwanted and frightening difference rather than for explaining, or negotiating over, that difference. Fascists eagerly protect the imagined pure goodness of their fascist (more prospective than actual) reality.

In such a world of reality flattened into a transparent surface, the virus of hatred of whatever vulnerable person or group spreads quickly along well-worn channels of oft-repeated signifiers and intensified emotions. Perhaps, in the context of a tree constituted by incommensurable dimensions, the virus can be treated more patiently and critically in such a way as to reintroduce the depths of truth’s consideration to the flat, smooth surface of the fascist rhizome.

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[1] So, we’re dealing with multiple dimensions of fascism.

[2] To be clear, many fascists’ gender traditions are no more than five minutes old.

[3] To be clear, one could think of this as the production and maintenance of what Louis Althusser called the “Ideological State Apparatuses” and the distribution of their products. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation”, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 232-72.

[4] For the fascist, counterintuitive explanations for what’s wrong with the world are often more felt than seen or understood. See, for instance, Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

[5] Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies”, Social Text 22(2), pp. 117-39.

[6] The term “mode of perception” comes from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 104.

[7] Sara Ahmed, “Affective Communities,” p. 126.

[8] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, New York: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 165.

[9] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Red & Black, 1970, ¶ 50.

[10] Misrecognition of the self first occurs in what Lacan calls “the mirror stage”. Misrecognition of objects occurs in the case of objet petit a (the object of one’s desire), which, for Lacan, represents only the fantasy of desire’s fulfillment. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Écrits, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp. 75-81, and Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus”, in Écrits, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp. 575-84.

[11] See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”.

[12] See Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, 1987, pp. 124-6, and Sigmund Freud, “Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’”, in Mass Psychology and Other Writings, New York: Penguin, 2004, pp. 45-51.

^[13] Theodor Adorno, The Psychological Technique Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

[14] See Samo Tomšič, “No Such Thing as Society? On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond”, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33(2-3), 51-71 and Massimiliano Tomba, “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority”, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23(1).

^[15] Theodor Adorno, The Psychological Technique, p. 89.

^[16] Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” pp. 124-5.

[17] Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” New German Critique 11: pp. 22-38.

^[18] In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that nationalists view themselves as part of a large, relatively homogeneous community of people—most of whom the nationalist has never met. Where nationalism functions, it binds people together who might otherwise never think of themselves as bound together. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso, 2016.

^[19] Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, New York: Routledge, 2006.

[20] Count: three fascisms.

[21] A useful analysis of contemporary far-right lying can be found in Anna-Karin Selberg, “The Contemporary Art of Lying”, Public Seminar, New York: The Editorial Board of Public Seminar, 2020, https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-contemporary-art-of-lying/.

[22] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 101.

[23] Alain Badiou, “The Fascism of the Potato”, The Adventure of French Philosophy, New York: Verso, 2012, p. 201.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (pp. 124-126), New York: Continuum, 1987.

Adorno, Theodor. The Psychological Technique Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies”, Social Text 22(2), 117-39.

Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso, 2016.

Badiou, Alain. “The Fascism of the Potato”, The Adventure of French Philosophy, New York: Verso, 2012.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2002.

Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics”, New German Critique 11, 22-38.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Red & Black, 1970.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’”, in Mass Psychology and Other Writings (pp. 45-51), New York: Penguin, 2004.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus”, Écrits, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp. 575-84.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in Écrits (pp. 75-81), New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Lepselter, Susan. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, New York: Penguin, 1976.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin, 1993.

Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism, New York: Routledge, 2006.

Selberg, Anna-Karin. “The Contemporary Art of Lying”, Public Seminar, New York: The Editorial Board of Public Seminar, 2020, https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-contemporary-art-of-lying/.

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Shaun Terry is a graduate student in University of California, Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness department. His research is on the relationship between capitalism and fascism.