Georges Bataille’s theory of fascism provides a unique framework for understanding the psychological and structural dynamics of authoritarian regimes. His analysis, rooted in the tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity, explores how societies maintain control through hierarchical structures and sacred symbols of authority. Fascism, as Bataille describes it, thrives on a dualistic structure of sacred purity and impurity, employing violence, sovereignty, and emotional effervescence to consolidate power.
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a French philosopher, writer, and social theorist known for his exploration of sovereignty, transgression, and the limits of human experience. His work spans multiple disciplines, blending philosophy, anthropology, economics, and literature to challenge conventional understandings of power, desire, and violence. Bataille’s key contributions include his theories on the sacred, excess, and the psychological structure of fascism, where he analyzes how hierarchical authority sustains itself through ritualized violence and exclusion.
His book The Accursed Share (1949) introduces the concept of general economy, arguing that societies are driven by excess energy that must be expended, often through war, sacrifice, or luxury. In The Psychological Structure of Fascism, he dissects how fascist regimes manipulate sovereignty and the sacred to maintain absolute control. Bataille’s ideas influenced post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, making him a pivotal figure in 20th-century critical thought. His work remains essential for understanding the intersections of power, ideology, and human irrationality.
The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a compelling case study for this theoretical lens. Claiming to champion anti-imperialism and rooted in a religious ideology, the regime has constructed a system of control that mirrors many of the characteristics Bataille outlines. Central to its power structure is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a military-religious entity that enforces ideological conformity, suppresses dissent, and projects the regime’s power both domestically and internationally. The IRGC serves as the linchpin in a state apparatus that combines military dominance with claims of divine authority.
This essay argues that the Islamic Republic functions as a fascist regime under Bataille’s framework. By examining the role of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the regime’s religious underpinnings, it will highlight how anti-imperialist rhetoric is used to justify a totalitarian structure. The analysis will delve into the psychological and structural aspects of this system, demonstrating how the regime maintains control and enforces its vision of sovereignty.
Bataille’s Theory of Fascism
Bataille conceptualizes fascism as a societal mechanism that thrives on a duality between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Homogeneous elements are the structured, rule-bound aspects of society, such as production, laws, and the bureaucratic state. In contrast, heterogeneity encompasses everything outside this structure—violence, sacredness, emotional intensity, and the irrational. Fascist regimes harness these heterogeneous forces to destabilize and then reconstitute societal structures, often elevating a leader or institution as the embodiment of sovereignty.
At the core of this framework is the idea that fascism uses emotional effervescence and collective identification to consolidate power. Leaders are exalted as sacred figures, transcending the ordinary. They command loyalty not through rational governance but through their ability to symbolize an overwhelming force that unites the masses under a single, hierarchical order. Fascism, according to Bataille, also operates through exclusion, designating certain groups or ideas as impure and dangerous, thus reinforcing the purity of the in-group.
Violence is central to this dynamic. For Bataille, violence is not just physical but symbolic—a tool to affirm sovereignty and enforce hierarchical dominance. This violence is justified through appeals to higher principles, often couched in terms of sacredness, nationalism, or existential threats. Fascist regimes rely on this interplay between the sacred and the profane to maintain their legitimacy, projecting an aura of transcendence while suppressing dissent.
This theoretical lens reveals how fascism functions not merely as a political system but as a psychological and social order that reshapes the very fabric of a society. The interplay between sovereignty, violence, and sacredness provides the foundation for understanding how regimes like the Islamic Republic sustain their power.
A Fascist Formation
The Islamic Republic of Iran exemplifies many of the characteristics Bataille associates with fascism, particularly through the central role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Founded to safeguard the Islamic principles of the 1979 revolution, the IRGC has evolved into a dominant force that permeates every aspect of Iranian society. It operates as a military-religious entity tasked with enforcing ideological conformity, eliminating dissent, and projecting the regime’s power domestically and abroad.
The IRGC functions as the regime’s embodiment of sovereignty, combining religious legitimacy with a militarized structure. It directly controls significant economic resources, media channels, and security apparatuses, rendering it an autonomous power center within the state. Its leaders, often elevated to near-mythical status, symbolize the fusion of divine authority and military dominance, key features of Bataille’s heterogeneous realm. The Corps is not just an enforcer of policy but a producer of the emotional and ideological intensity required to sustain the regime’s vision of itself as sacred and unchallengeable.
The IRGC also exemplifies Bataille’s concept of violence as both physical and symbolic. Domestically, it suppresses protests, imprisons dissidents, and silences opposition media, justifying these actions as necessary to protect the nation’s Islamic aspect of the revolutionary purity. Externally, it supports militias and paramilitary groups across the region, portraying these actions as a sacred struggle against imperialism. This dual role of enforcing internal homogeneity while projecting external heterogeneity highlights the Corps’ pivotal position in the regime’s structure.
The regime’s reliance on the IRGC reveals its fundamental instability. As Bataille suggests, fascist systems depend on the continuous mobilization of heterogeneous forces to mask the contradictions within their homogeneous foundations. The IRGC’s dominance is both a reflection of the regime’s power and a symptom of its inability to reconcile its revolutionary rhetoric with the realities of governance. This duality underscores the extent to which the Islamic Republic mirrors Bataille’s description of fascist formations, driven by sacred violence and hierarchical dominance.
The Islamic Republic, in its process of reconstruction and political stabilization, established undemocratic and even anti-democratic institutions—such as parallel power structures like the Basij and the IRGC, the Supreme Leadership, the Assembly of Experts, the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Council. Over time, these institutions became barriers, systematically blocking any path toward democratic transformation.
Religion as a Tool of Sovereignty
In the Islamic Republic, religion functions as the ideological foundation for its sovereignty, intertwining with the state apparatus to create a theocratic power structure. The regime leverages Shi’a Islam not only as a spiritual guide but as a political weapon, positioning itself as the custodian of religious authenticity. This use of religion mirrors Bataille’s conception of the sacred, where the divine becomes a tool for unifying the collective under an authoritarian order.
The Supreme Leader, as both a religious and political figure, embodies the fusion of sacred authority and temporal power. Elevated above ordinary governance, the Supreme Leader is portrayed as the ultimate source of legitimacy, immune to criticism or accountability. This sacralization of leadership reinforces the regime’s control, creating a dynamic in which dissent is not merely political but heretical. Such a framework aligns with Bataille’s assertion that fascist sovereignty relies on an emotional and symbolic resonance that transcends rational governance.
The regime’s religious claims are also weaponized to justify exclusion and violence. Those who oppose its rule—whether women’s rights activists, ethnic minorities, or political dissidents—are labeled as threats to the purity of the Islamic order. This aligns with Bataille’s view of the sacred as dualistic, capable of inspiring reverence while simultaneously justifying repression. By framing its enemies as profane or impure, the Islamic Republic legitimizes its coercive measures as acts of divine justice.
Externally, religion becomes a means of asserting moral superiority. The regime positions itself as the vanguard of an Islamic anti-imperialist movement, using this narrative to mobilize support and suppress alternative ideologies within the so-call it Muslim world. This ideological claim serves to project the regime’s sovereignty beyond its borders, constructing a transnational identity that reinforces its internal legitimacy while expanding its influence. This interplay between religious authority and political power illustrates how the Islamic Republic operationalizes Bataille’s notion of the sacred to maintain its dominance.
Some sociologists argue that when discussing the sacred nature of politics in Iran, it is essential to emphasize that despite their ideological and religious rhetoric, both Supreme Leaders over the past four decades have acted pragmatically when faced with challenges to their rule. Ruhollah Khomeini’s acceptance of the “poisoned chalice” to end the war with Iraq, and Ali Khamenei’s call for “heroic flexibility” in negotiations with the U.S. to ease sanctions are clear examples of this pragmatism, which undermines the supposed sanctity of their rule.
However, the principle of maintaining political power—what Khomeini himself called the most sacred obligation—should not be overlooked in any analysis. This principle grants the Supreme Leader a pragmatic position, yet it does not strip him of his sacred status.
In reality, the past four decades have seen the rise of a non-democratic religious oligarchy sustained by an uneven and dysfunctional form of capitalism. This system reflects some of the most regressive pre-capitalist cultural traits, entangled with fragmented social layers, heterogeneous networks, and autonomous spheres of influence. Despite these contradictions, the regime has skillfully adapted to its interaction with Western modernity, ensuring its survival through calculated maneuvering.
Anti-Imperialism and Fascism
The Islamic Republic’s claim to anti-imperialism serves as both a justification for its domestic repression and a tool for regional expansion. Under the pretext of resisting Western hegemony, the regime has crafted an ideological framework that positions itself as a revolutionary force, not just for Iran but for the broader Muslim world. However, as Bataille’s theory suggests, this anti-imperialist rhetoric functions less as a genuine liberationist project and more as a mechanism for sustaining hierarchical power through the manipulation of emotional and ideological fervor.
The regime’s anti-imperialist discourse follows a pattern common in fascist movements: defining an external enemy to consolidate internal unity. The United States, Israel, and Western institutions are portrayed as existential threats, creating a permanent state of mobilization that justifies authoritarian rule. This manufactured crisis reinforces the sacred status of the state, aligning with Bataille’s observation that fascism thrives on an opposition between purity and contamination. By externalizing all threats, the regime absolves itself of responsibility for economic failure, corruption, and domestic unrest, redirecting social frustrations toward a distant enemy.
More significantly, anti-imperialism becomes an ideological export. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, particularly its Quds Force, extends the regime’s influence beyond Iran’s borders by supporting allied militias and political factions in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. These interventions are framed as part of a sacred struggle against oppression, a narrative that merges religious legitimacy with militaristic expansionism. Bataille’s analysis of fascist sovereignty helps explain this phenomenon: the regime must continuously engage in conflict to sustain its claim to transcendence. Without an ongoing external battle, the ideological foundation of the state risks collapse, revealing the contradictions between its revolutionary image and its authoritarian reality.
This non-socialist anti-imperialist posture also serves to co-opt Orientalist and Stalinist trends, allowing the regime to attract sympathizers who confuse and mistake its rhetoric for resistance. The ones who see the struggles inside Iran purely as conspiracies by the West, especially the United States, rather than arising from the people’s understanding and lived experience. In doing so, they deny the people’s agency, and their struggle gets erased in favor of the Islamic Republic’s rivalry with other states, particularly the West.
However, as Bataille’s framework makes clear, true revolutionary change is incompatible with a system that relies on hierarchical violence and exclusion. The Islamic Republic’s use of anti-imperialism thus mirrors the fascist strategy of mobilizing mass sentiment for the preservation of an elite power structure, rather than for emancipation.
One of the defining features of fascism is its effort to dissolve class struggle by either violently crushing labor movements or integrating them into state-controlled structures. Fascist regimes do not tolerate independent organizations that could mobilize opposition, especially those representing workers. Instead, they create their own labor institutions—nominally representing workers but functioning as mechanisms of state control. The Islamic Labor Councils and the Worker House Party are two examples of state-structured and repressive organizations that serve as extensions of the government and secret police in controlling and suppressing workers.
integrating C.L.R. James and Edward Said
C.L.R. James, in his historical materialist approach, emphasized the agency of oppressed peoples in shaping history, resisting both colonial domination and local despotism. Unlike static, Eurocentric narratives that treat the colonized as passive objects, James highlighted how imperial subjects actively navigated, manipulated, and sometimes internalized imposed structures. Applying this methodology to the Islamic Republic reveals how the regime has not only responded to Western imperialism but has also appropriated Orientalist frameworks to reinforce its own fascistic order.
Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism exposes how Western discourse constructs the East as irrational, religious, and despotic, reinforcing a binary where the West represents reason and progress while the East remains bound by tradition and authoritarianism. The Islamic Republic, rather than rejecting this framing, has embraced and weaponized it. By positioning itself as the embodiment of an “authentic” Islamic order, the regime plays into the very discourse that historically justified colonial domination. It accepts the premise that the Middle East is inherently religious and patriarchal but rejects the notion that Western intervention is needed to “civilize” it.
This process can be understood as reverse Orientalism, where the Islamic Republic adopts the caricature imposed by the West but reinterprets it as a mark of resistance rather than backwardness. It amplifies perceptions of religiosity and patriarchy, insisting that secularism, democracy, and gender equality are foreign impositions designed to weaken the Islamic world. Classical Orientalism viewed these traits as signs of inferiority, while the regime reframes them as sources of cultural superiority. In this framework, repression is not seen as a failure of governance but as a defense of identity.
Western fictions have aided this ideological maneuver. Popular media, literature, and policy discourse often depict the Middle East as an arena of perpetual religious conflict, reducing political struggles to sectarianism rather than material conditions. This erases class struggle, labor movements, and feminist activism, simplifying the region’s political landscape into a contest between Islamic fundamentalism and Western intervention. The Islamic Republic exploits this myth, presenting itself as the inevitable counterweight to Western imperialism, thriving on the false binary of submission to the West or allegiance to a theocratic order.
The propaganda pushed by Iran’s regional and Western rivals, meant to tighten the pressure on the regime, has become one of the most destructive tools for repression. It feeds into the regime’s own story—the tale of a foreign enemy’s conspiracy—while erasing the people’s agency.
This internalization of Orientalist logic enables the regime to co-opt anti-imperialism and distort it into a tool for repression. By positioning itself as the only viable alternative to Western hegemony, it delegitimizes secular, socialist, and revolutionary movements that challenge both imperialism and domestic authoritarianism. The very framework that once justified colonialism—the idea that the East is fundamentally different from the West, ruled by spiritual and immutable forces—is now used by the Islamic Republic to suppress internal dissent. Those advocating democracy, gender equality, or labor rights are cast as agents of Westernization, reinforcing the binary Orientalism originally constructed.
This dynamic allows the regime to manipulate global anti-imperialist movements. Many Western leftists, shaped by their own internalized Orientalism, view Iran through a dogmatic narrow lens where opposition to the U.S. automatically translates into anti-imperialist resistance. Just as Western Orientalists reduced the Middle East to an exoticized, religious space, some factions of the left reduce the region to a battleground where the only choice is between Western imperialism and its most visible opponent—ignoring the working-class movements, feminist struggles, and democratic forces resisting both.
James’s method rejects these false binaries. His study of the Haitian Revolution demonstrates that anti-imperialism is not about choosing between colonial rule and a native elite but about the self-emancipation of the oppressed. Applied to Iran, this perspective exposes the Islamic Republic’s claim to anti-imperialism as a myth that serves a militarized ruling class. The Revolutionary Guard and the Supreme Leader are not resisting imperial domination but using Orientalist logic to justify their own tyranny. Their survival depends on sustaining the illusion that the only alternatives are submission to the West or allegiance to authoritarian rule.
By integrating James’s methodology with Bataille’s critique of fascism, it becomes clear that the Islamic Republic is not merely reacting to Western hegemony but actively reproducing the ideological conditions that sustain it. It thrives on exclusion, purity, and sacred violence—the same forces defining fascist movements—while exploiting fabricated or real Western imperialism’s failures to bolster its legitimacy. An anti-imperialist critique must reject both the Orientalist framing of the Middle East as inherently religious and hierarchical and the regime’s self-serving use of that discourse.
Conclusion
Bataille’s analysis of fascism provides a powerful framework for understanding the Islamic Republic of Iran, particularly through the role of the IRGC and the regime’s manipulation of religious and anti-imperialist rhetoric. The IRGC, as both a military and ideological force, embodies the fusion of sacred violence and hierarchical power that Bataille identifies as central to fascist formations. It enforces the regime’s dominance domestically through repression while projecting its sovereignty beyond Iran’s borders under the guise of revolutionary struggle.
My discussion here focuses exclusively on Bataille’s theory as outlined in The Psychological Structure of Fascism. Naturally, a comprehensive analysis of the fascist structure of the Islamic Republic requires a broader examination of its various dimensions. At the same time, Bataille’s framework can also be extended to certain political figures, parties, and movements in the West or East, though that is beyond the scope of this text.
For example, leaders such as Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, Kim dynasty, Orbán, Erdoğan, and Le Pen or AFD party in Germany and… all fit within a similar categorization under this analytical model. However, the purpose of this essay was not to map global political trends but to establish a methodological approach for understanding the specific conditions in Iran. The regime’s fusion of militarized authority, religious sanctification, and anti-imperialist rhetoric does not merely serve its domestic power but also aligns with broader ideological patterns that sustain authoritarian rule worldwide.
In The Psychological Structure of Fascism, Bataille explores the idea of the sacred, which includes both divine purity and its violent, impure counterpart. Christianity, in his analysis, often represents a structured, hierarchical form of the sacred that has been assimilated into homogeneous society, whereas fascist movements tend to revive a more violent and ecstatic form of sovereignty.
Bataille briefly mentions Islam in the context of total power, comparing it to fascism. He refers to the early Islamic Caliphate as a historical example of the sudden formation of a totalizing authority, describing it as a fusion of military and religious power that relied on no prior state structure. This comparison suggests that he viewed the rise of Islam as an instance of sovereignty rooted in affective effervescence and militarized sacred authority, similar to fascist movements in their formative stages. However, he does not engage in a deeper critique of Islamic theology or history beyond this structural comparison.
Bataille also touches on religious sovereignty in relation to monarchy, particularly in reference to divine right kingship, where the ruler is positioned as a sacred figure. While he does not reduce Christianity to fascism, he does analyze how religious structures can serve as mechanisms of authority, especially when they align with militarized power. His analysis of religion focuses less on theological doctrines and more on how the sacred functions within political and social structures.
Religion, far from being a purely spiritual force, operates as a mechanism of control. The Supreme Leader stands as the ultimate embodiment of sovereignty, existing above law and accountability, while religious doctrine is mobilized to justify violence against dissenters. By framing opposition as impure or heretical, the regime turns repression into a sacred duty, aligning with Bataille’s understanding of fascist power as reliant on the duality of the sacred: exaltation for the in-group, annihilation for the enemy.
What you think?