from Donald A. Landes, review of Andrea Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Springer, 2015)

Understanding "Trump" demands  a radical reconceptualization of that which is evoked and simultaneously  suppressed by the use of the term human nature; a reconnaissance of the territory simultaneously evoked and suppressed by use of the term racism;  and a recognition of the genetic ontology that is the core of the "Trump" phenomenon: ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense. 

Figure 3 provides the theoretical fields that turn the merely empirical into a plane of immanence.  What is required is a deeper understanding of the relationship between Donald Trump's performances, the crowd reactions, the history of the Republican Party, and the role of media in the performance of the psychological processes of projection and identification that are the essence of mass politics.  (Lowndes)

The Trump performances tap into and give expression to the heart of darkness that is itself both a product of civilization and something, perhaps more deeply rooted, that is amplified by civilization (Melanie Klein*), worked up sometimes into a frenzy of rage and other-direct hate.  The rhetorical violence of Trump rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump himself as a therapeutic object--become deeply intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts: Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment, psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense, Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's concept of  transcendental violence. 

On the far right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex.  Rage and pornography (Ted Cruz's bathroom attack ad against Trump).  Sex and violence in various covert as well as overt forms make up the entirety of the rhetorical field of populist Republicanism.  Lee Atwater has provided us with the pragmatics for the production of this Republican rhetoric; Jacques Lacan its concept.  Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland) and Jan T. Gross (Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland) have provided us with descriptions of what can be achieved when this deep and unquenchable rage is turned into action by political leaders.
A concept of pseudo-speciation is required to make sense of the two-party discursive field.  We are dealing here with different orders of being (and simultaneously with ontological instability: Simondon's metastability) having nothing to do with genes and everything to do with history and culture, culture and power, power and the reactions to power.

So much for the (bourgeois Christian**) myth of the people, that haze of the unspoken unthought givenness of "man" at the core of philosophies of "liberation".  In place of the people, specific genetic ontologies.  In place of the stability of forms, metastability and contingency.  This site is the antidote to the progressive/Marxist presupposition of progress, and of its presuppositional matrix of Cartesianism and materialism.  "Man is the as yet undetermined animal." (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, III, 62)  The undetermined animal?--or should we say today, determined in so many ways, all impossible.  So many axes of crisis.  One of these--ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense--is the inner logic, the genetic ontology, of that phenomenological bundle called "Trump".  Trump the orchestrator of the spirit of revenge, playing with his crowds, giving voice to and legitimizing a dark, pulsing insufferable rage, a pent-up fury, a hatred of . . . everything. 

Looking Back.  The Fate of Post-Paleolithic Ontologies:
the wreckage of socialism, the persistence of fascism, and the triumph of nihilism

Figure 3 presents the sources necessary to investigate the psychological-emotional, cultural-historical dimensions of homo sapiens in the post-speciation era.  Figures 4 and 5 summarizes the texts and concepts necessary to evaluate the cognitive performativity of political actors, including participants in rallies and man in the street interviewees.  Figure 6, Topologies of the Two-Party System, enables one to see at a glance the two-party discursive field in its entirety.  The statements of newscasters, political spokespersons, analysts, and citizens are performances that are generated by the deep structures, the genetic ontologies, of modern life.  Genuine thought is rare.  Figure 6 presents the inner logic of the scripts of politics.  Figure six, when seen as a challenge to the citizen to take a meta-cognitive stance toward media, can become an instrument of Bildung, individuation, and cognitive development.  If this is done, even the most inane statements become not merely food for thought, but occasions for self-development, and thus an element in a new kind of politics.  One need not be a  passive spectator of the media spectacle: One can be an active critic.

Figures 2 through 6 represent an unfolding of the implications of Nietzsche's insight that "Man is the as yet undetermined animal."  But history has not only caught up with me; it has moved, with the rise of Trump, far beyond my expectations.  Don't get me wrong.  This question of ressentiment that Nietzsche formulated is at the core of the vast literature on fascism, whether or not these authors cite Nietzsche.  Robert O. Paxton, in his Anatomy of Fascism, foretold the rise of Trump.  After all, the fascist cultural-linguistic and psychological modality is not something that is characteristic only of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  Anatomy of Fascism was  published in 2004.  The Tea Party "movement" began in early 2009 following the inauguration of President Barak Obama.  Yet in the excerpt linked above (foretold) Paxton provides a pithy and preternaturally accurate description of what was to come.

Years before the rise of Trump, I began assembling several web pages made up of materials available over the internet:

Trump is primarily about the genetic ontology ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense.  Only secondarily is it about the circumstances under which this genetic ontology can be mobilized into a force of political significance.  And while


From the outset of his campaign Trump signaled that he would transcend the usual boundaries limiting the performance of ressentiment.  His initial foray into the performance of racism took the form of an attack on the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship.  He didn't say, "who the fuck is that n*gg*r in the White House": he performed that sentiment in the usual code language.  The media, deeply complicit in the racist performativity at the core of American politics, did not challenge Trump on the obvious intent of his performance.  Instead they played along.

But Trump's open attacks on Muslims and Hispanics puts him in the camp of fascism.  Fascism does not merely demonize whole groups of people.  It seeks their elimination through ethnic cleansing and genocide, and its violence is transcendental: its very appeal is its lawlessness, its brutishness.  [see disussion with Paxton on Trump re. fascism: Is Donald Trump a Fascist?  Yes and no, By Isaac Chotiner, in Slate.com]

Trump doesn't challenge anti-Muslim questioner at event   Rochester, New Hampshire spet 18, 2015("We need this question. This is the first question."  In New Yorkese: we need this q like we need a hole in thehead   Trump is taken aback by the question, shwoing that the dialectic had begun

  Note Atwater's explanation of the way in which the issue of "taxes" in the GOP's rhetorical context functions as "Nigger, nigger."  Republican denunciations of "Hillary Clinton", seen as the extension of "Obama", thus are not issue-related.  It is the ultimate expletive, the synonym for the unspeakable: N . . . . . r.  Watch Trump rallies closely.  The audience is usually unfocused, almost bored in  the haze of broken English spoken by Trump.  Bored, restless, talking among themselves, cognitively not there, but waiting for the punch line, the expletive, the primitive, hate-filled denunciation.  Then they wake up, some more slowly than others, as they catch on, and howl their delight, only to subside into a state of not being.  This the pundits refer to as "energy."  This is, ontologically speaking, some really primitive stuff.  This is why media discourse on the real-world economic grievances of white men simultaneously get it and miss it completely.  They are finally being forced to address what has been a trend obvious for decades, but not discussed in the media until the breakdown of elite control of public discourse in the primary campaigns of 2016.  What they miss is the deep structure of this rage; the cognitive primitiveness of its expression; the centuries long history of ressentiment as the inner logic of ultra-nationalism and fascism and racism