Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In 1935 Georges Canguilhem published a pamphlet titled Fascism and the Peasants, which he had written for the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals, a group formed by the Parisian intelligentsia in reaction to the fascist attempt of seizing political power in France one year earlier.[1] That early work by one of the most distinguished figures in the venerable French tradition of historical epistemology warned against the fascist agrarian ideology represented in France by the Greenshirts and their leader, Henri Dorgères.[2] It made explicit that the Greenshirts’ back-to-the-land project—with its slogan “D’abord la terre!” (“The land first!”)—was in fact a very modern project that essentialized peasant culture and replaced the multiplicity of living things that thrived in the French countryside with normalized entities. Canguilhem denounced the Greenshirts as a fascist move to control peasants’ lives and subordinate them to a centralized state.[3]

Michel Foucault, perhaps Canguilhem’s most influential commentator, noticed that it was no coincidence that several epistemologists were active antifascists and members of the French Resistance after Hitler’s invasion of the country in 1940.[4] Jean Cavaillés (the philosopher who founded the resistance network Libération), shot by the Nazis in 1944, was later celebrated by his colleague and friend Canguilhem as a “philosopher-mathematician loaded with explosives.”[5] Canguilhem himself joined Libération in 1943 and fought as a partisan in the mountains of Auvergne. The continuity between secluded theoretical scholarly work and armed resistance against fascism was clear to Foucault: epistemologists, through their questioning of modes of reasoning, had a privileged understanding of fascism as a totalitarian attempt to control every dimension of life, an extreme case of biopolitics.[6] If Canguilhem dealt with rationality through concepts such as “the pathological” and “resistance,” he could not avoid being on the front line against political regimes that promised to totally eliminate the chance of error, which, according to his views, constituted the possibility of life itself. The confrontation with fascism was thus central in establishing an epistemological tradition that questioned forms of thinking about and tinkering with life.

This book takes up that tradition to explore fascism as biopolitics. Building on Canguilhem’s and Foucault’s conviction that management and control of life were central to fascism, it follows an alternative track.[7] It investigates the making and growing of animals and plants embodying fascism. It details how technoscientific organisms designed to feed the national community envisaged by fascists became important elements in the institutionalization and expansion of the regimes of Mussolini, Salazar, and Hitler. The point is not to replace humans with non-humans in explanations of historical change, but to extend the notion of biopolitics and suggest that we must seriously integrate the latter in history to be able to understand how social collectives came into being and how they evolved.[8] Fascist collectives were not only formed through the interventions in human life identified by Foucault and his disciples—hygiene, reproduction, and race.[9] They also included organisms that breeders of plants and animals produced through new practices of the sciences of heredity—life forms as important as human bodies in making fascism.

For such purposes Canguilhem’s pamphlet holds a few more precious insights. First, it deals simultaneously with the agricultural policies of the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, emphasizing the continuities between those two regimes and the ideology of the French Greenshirts. Second, and perhaps more important, it includes in its discussion of fascism the new varieties of wheat that increased yields at the expense of milling properties. Canguilhem establishes a direct relation between large farmers’ interests in increasing productivity through new strains of wheat and the appearance of a generic fascist discourse promising the nation’s attachment to the land while ignoring the diverse concrete situations that constituted the peasant world. This book builds on Canguilhem’s attention to specific technoscientific organisms to explore the historical dynamics of fascism. In part I, wheat, potatoes, and pigs will guide us through the early stages of the institutionalization of fascism in Italy, Portugal, and Germany. In part II, sheep, cotton, coffee, and rubber will take us into the violent colonial expansion of the three regimes in Africa and in eastern Europe.