NORMS BEHAVING BADLY

Normopathy Today

It is clear now, one-year into the second coming of Donald Trump, that the normative international order in place since World War II has been breached. Trump recently pronounced that he doesn’t need to follow international law because all that counts is his “own morality.”¹ The context was his shakedown of Venezuela to grab its oil. The same day saw him shamelessly lying about the murder by ICE of a woman in Minnesota, even though anyone with the inclination to open their eyes could plainly see the lie in a widely distributed video. Trump’s paean to morality notwithstanding, the norms of individual behaviour associated with the well-tempered enlightenment subject, not to mention the bourgeois subject of capitalism’s erstwhile Protestant ethic with its putative embrace of moderation, have similarly eroded. This was clear as early as Trump’s first run for the White House, when he bragged about being entitled to “grab pussy” at will or even randomly shoot someone on Fifth Avenue with impunity. The fact that Trump’s “morality” embraces abuse, braggadocio, and blatant lying, and seems to be modeled more on mafia methods than the historical norms of personal and presidential behaviour – and that this is greeted not with objurgation but with cheers from his underlings and supporters – attests that the world has lurched into a postnormative order.

Postnormative, did I say? And yet … what are presented as traditional norms of behaviour are being rigidly and violently reimposed. This is not only the case in Trump’s United States, but in keeping with its America First pride in itself, the United States has taken the forefront, vaunting itself as an obligatory example to be followed. A taboo has been placed on teaching the history of slavery and racism in schools and universities. DEI and critical race theory are banned. Anyone suspected of clinging to the idea that systemic racism exists is hounded, doxxed, and placed on Turning Point USA watch lists, if they aren’t directly removed from their jobs. The enforcement of civil rights law is suspended. The federal government is being purged of people of colour deemed to be progressive. Arts bodies are under pressure to sanitize their programs of the taint of any representations of non-white Americans and their cultures on the grounds that it is “racially divisive.” Electoral maps are being effectively racially gerrymandered. Majority non-white communities are having their federal funding reduced or arbitrarily withheld. In a word, whiteness is being reimposed as the normative standard, with a vengeance. In the area of gender, the situation is similar. There is no need to keep enumerating examples. They are well known and out in the open; nothing is hidden. Suffice it to say that masculinist supremacism and anti-LGBTQ+ heteronormativity are having a heyday. The people behind Project 2025, buoyed by the success they have had in their efforts at stripping government of its social welfare duties to reduce it to the extent possible to its repressive functions, have launched a new initiative to return women to the home. Among their suite of proposals are a “bootcamp” for young women to train them in how to limit their horizons to reproductive duty under the command of their husband, the allocation of an extra vote share in political elections to the male head of heterosexual breeding households, and restrictions on the right to divorce.²

These governmental trends are buttressed by convergent tendencies in the civil sphere. Frankly misogynist and homo- and transphobic influencers are ascendant online and count among the most followed, particularly among young men. True men are “based”: intolerant to racial, gender, and ideological difference. Unencumbered by the bounds of civility, and even of the law, they claim a male birthrate to vent, belittle, and attack. They are stoked by anti-progressive politics of reaction, to which they give muscle. They train its live-wire reflexes. Some go literally into training, as part of the growing proto-fascist militia movement. Accusations of “toxic masculinity” are met with counter-accusations of “toxic empathy.”³ Empathy is what is wrong with the world. It is endangering the nation. It makes people weak and indecisive. Once considered a necessary ingredient to normative behaviour, it is cast as an emasculating defect. The right to gleefully break norms of behaviour is asserted – in the name of imposing the norms all the more rigidly on others. The based elect are exempt from them.

The idea of exemption sets the stage for understanding how these two contrasting movements – a postnormative turn and a violent reimposition of norms in a reflux of ur-normativity– go together. What they don’t do is go together in principle. It is not fundamentally a question of principle, which means that it is not fundamentally a question of ideology (although ideology obviously enters into such orchestrated initiatives as Project 2025). The cultural condition in which these contrasting movements and their corresponding formations co-operate is best defined as an affective regime: a regime of reaction pivoting on the ascription of enemy status to social and political others within an atmosphere of perceived existential threat. As I have written about this extensively elsewhere, I will not repeat the analysis here.⁴ I would like instead to address the more limited question of how postnormativity and ur-normativity work together as facets of the same process, which can be generally designated as “normopathic.”

Working together is a pragmatic question. Formations that are not vertically integrated by a coherent structure of meaning and logical assertion that subsumes, unifies, and homogenizes them, can still practically co-function. They can join forces through a processual coupling of their operations, making them heterogeneous components of the same working machine. What is required is not a unity that overcomes their difference, but a component of passage that oscillates between them to effect an operative coupling. The operative coupling brings them into each other’s orbit. Coming to revolve around each other, they fall into a rhythm orienting them in the same general direction. They form a conjoint tendency governed by a shared terminus: an end that speculatively beckons them. In the present context, that attractor is summed up in the order-word “America First,” with all that it performatively implies. Here, the component of passage is exemption. Or better, exception. Exceptionality does not figure here as a cognitively well-formed idea ideologically adhered to. It is the enabling condition for MAGA-oriented movement, to which a body’s life dynamic is affectively adjoined. This is not in spite of, but as a function of the vagueness and polyvalence of the order-word indexing the reactive attractor.⁵ It is because of its polyvalence that a performative like “America First” can adjoin differently opinioned and differently situated bodies to the same general tendency, in a concertation of their individual differences.

Trump does not have an ideology. His followers are not ideologically interpellated by him. They are not won over by his ideas through cognitive persuasion. They are affectively interpellated by his person. By that I do not mean that they identify with him. Trump is nothing if not fickle. He does not have the coherence of thought or action or the consistency of conduct to form the basis for a positive identification. His discourse is not a coherent progression of ideas. It is a semi-aleatory “weave,” as he calls it.⁶ His actions also weave. He sallies, retreats, reverses, re-reverses, swerves, and dodges with dizzying speed. Each swerve is accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness storm of tweets with no through-line, one and the same tweet often contradicting itself. Their lack of consistency gives them more the impression of a stream of semi-consciousness, following affective rather than logical or semantic principles of composition. The one constant is reaction: hatred-against, disparagement, retribution, resentment, all as part of a relentless drive to ascribe enemy status to others. It is this reactive stream of affective expression, serving for enemy-making, that Trump’s supporters fall in with. They do not identify with him. They adjoin their own affective postures and their streaming expression to his, reprising the dynamic of which he is possessed. They double his dynamic, in their own small way. They operatively reiterate his process, in their own right – leaving all the differences intact between the coastal billionaire born to money and the middle American born to economic struggle in a rapidly changing economy systematically geared to the prerogatives of the former. Exception is the operator of Trumpians’ adjunction to Trump’s defectively structured, yet remarkably processually effective, personing.

Trump governs by exception, in something not unrelated to Carl Schmitt’s sense. He claims the right to decide in the exception, which is to say in his own breach of the instituted norms of government (attempting to overturn an election, ignoring the constitutional roles of the Congress and the military, undermining the judicial system, dismantling the administrative state, and practicing large-scale corruption on his own, his family’s, and his closest corporate supporters’ behalf). He gives himself license to decide in the breach, which is one with the inconstancy of his person. He personally embodies exception, placing himself above the law with the Napoleonic pronouncement, “if the president does it, it is not illegal.”⁷ His personal fiat fickly lays down the law.

Fickleness: a stereotypically feminine characteristic that has led a number of commentators to underline that Trump does not embody the steeliness of the traditional strongman. He exudes vulnerability, and whines and obsesses over hurt feelings. Then he limbers his thumbs and extracts from his agitation a tweet-borne fiat that performatively lays down the law. His embodiment of what are traditionally coded as feminine characteristics, including his proclivity for the decorative detail, led one of his strongest celebrity supporters (Roseanne Barr) to call him “the first woman president of the United States.” He has frequently been tagged as a “Karen.”⁸ This is the correlate on the individual scale of his personality of power on the governmental scale. He claims exemption from rightly embodying the gender norms he imposes on his enemy others, by the same token by which he claims exception to the rules of government.

The norm is for the other, the enemy. The imposition of the norm is a mechanism of power, disciplining those whose tendencies are governed by different, incompatible attractor states. The norm is a weapon to channel them into involuntary submission to the reactive attractor of Trumpworld. A Trumpworld influencer can be gay, as long as they act as an enforcer for male supremacist norms and the heteronormativity implicit in them (case in point, Milo Yiannopoulos). They can be a rapist and trafficker of women, and receive the honour of a presidential pardon (case in point, Andrew Tate). They can even be non-white, as long as they serve whiteness (Tate again, and any number of other biracial, black, and brown MAGAites). Highly professional women can fill key roles outside the home in government, media, and nonprofits, with the same proviso (too many to name). There is even a transgender influencer who has attained social media celebrity and earns an enviable livelihood shilling for the MAGA anti-trans, “there are only two genders” agenda (Blaire White).⁹ In short, bodies adjoined to and miming Trump’s reactive dynamic are exempted from observing the norms they impose on others. They can claim their own exceptionality, mirroring Trump’s, which mirrors that attributed to the nation by America Firsters. Obeisance to the regime of reaction, and participation in it across scales, is a get-out-of jail-free card – sometimes literally.

This turns the idea of identification on its head. Trumpians do not identify with Trump according to a principle of sameness; they recognize their self-proclaimed difference, their specialness, in his. They do not act in accordance with his ideas in a reflective act of doctrinal conformity; they performatively affirm their own exceptionality by affirming his. They do not subscribe to a strict code of conduct, but rather his taking license gives them license.¹⁰ Their relation to Trump is a transitivity of character: their adjunction to the reactive regime he impersonates conveys, through the component of passage of exception, the self-proclaimed superiority of his person. Adjoined to his person, Trump followers transitively participate in that character. Together they make America first. Trump doesn’t legitimate his decisions; rather, the exceptional inconstancy of his decisions license the performance of superiority, by rights unshackled from everyday norms.¹¹ MAGA is transported by a postnormative drive that is in a sometimes uncomfortable alliance with its Christian Nationalist wing, which seems to be more deformed by it than capable of reforming it. After all, the decidedly un-Christlike idea of “toxic empathy” came from that milieu. This is the kind of Christianity that says “suffer the children” (and anyone else who doesn’t buckle down) … and then leaves it at that. Certain extreme elements of the MAGA movement, for example groypers and certain sectors of the militia movement, dispense with the fraught appeal to normatively punishing religion, going full-force postnormative, with an avowedly amoralist stance.

The postnormative condition does not leave the norm behind. It reveals normativity as the exercise of power it has always been.¹² Liberalism, with its favoring of “soft” power, disguised the power dynamic. It presented it as a right-thinking, in voluntary acquiescence to the good, as codified in a rule-based order. Michel Foucault had another name for it: docility. His genealogy of the modern subject demonstrates that the norm, as internalized by the bourgeois subject, is a product of a vast social machinery of disciplining bodies into docility.¹³ Docility, whose pen name is “social contract.” The contemporary right’s revival of the punishments of hard power is aimed at sweeping aside this superficial cover for obligatory inculcation, in favor of outright compulsion: naked decision that strikes like fiat and operates in sovereign exception, beholden, in Schmitt’s words, to “no program, no ideal, no norm, no expediency.”¹⁴

The normal is typically thought of in the shape of a bell curve. In the normative condition of liberal-democratic regimes, normality designates the hump in the statistical middle of a curve that plots distributions of variations in the shape of a sine wave. The distribution is thought to naturally settle around the golden mean of a majoritarian centre rising in the middle. If conditions change in a way that affects the distribution – for example when improved social welfare increases longevity – the centre shifts, and a new normal is recognized. Michel Foucault calls the operations of power attending to the norm in this adaptive regime normalization. Normalization practices the softer art of inculcating obligatory docility rather than nakedly forcing conformity. The regime of normalization was preceded in Foucault’s vocabulary by the hard regime of normation.¹⁵ This is the transcendent ur-form of the norm that obtained in the sovereign societies of the monarchical period preceding the liberal nation-state, and has always featured in doctrinaire religious thought. In a regime of normation, rather than extracting the norm from naturally-occuring variations in the social field, the norm is pre-fixed. It overhangs the social field in sovereign conceit, swooping down on it to overcode bodies. It is an ideal that wraps itself around bodies’s behaviour to imprint its form on them. It functions in the manner of a mold. Its ideal form is applied to life, forcing conformity to its frame. In today’s MAGAite postnormative condition, there is a return to the ur-norm and its forced conformity. The monarchical form of the norm returns as an archaism with a contemporary function. (In what follows, the term norming will be used to refer to the production of normativity in general, encompassing both normalization and normation, as well as their blurring, as described below).

The complication is that in this postnormativity, the ideal centre does not hold. Exceptionality, and the license that comes with it, makes it quaver. Bodies adjoined to the Trumpian dynamic, exempted from forced conformity, can flit from one band on the spectrum to another. It’s as if the sine wave begins to move. For the chosen adjoined, it begins to oscillate quasi-chaotically across the spectrum, like a restless cursor cycling through settings. Each individual can tune to a wave-length, as if their body were a radio dial of power dynamics. Where each body falls in with the cursor to adjoin itself to a setting depends on the strength and complexion of its own sense of exceptionality and the brand and grade of license it arrogates for itself. Taken together, in quasi-chaotic fluctuation, these tunings to adjunction precipitate the sine wave into a motion blur. The spectrum is affected by a kind of Doppler effect, bringing different gradations into dynamic continuity with each other.

This quasi-chaos of deciding licentiously in the exception, in oscillation around an ideal center of forced conformity: this is normopathy. Normopathy: a pathology of the normal. But normality as such can already be said to be its own pathology.

The term “normopathy” was coined in the psychological literature to refer to people who take normality to the extreme.¹⁶ They are, the description goes, incapable of transgression. They follow rules to excess. They are afraid of newness. Their lives are drab. They box themselves into a predictability so self-regimented that it can hardly be called living. This 1950s-style problem of the excessive internalization of the norm is not ours. Our problem is not normativity taken to an extreme, it is that the extreme is normalized. Our problem is a postnormativity of the reactive kind that imposes rigid normation, most lavishly on others, precisely as punishment for their being otherwise: for embodying nonstandard modes of life; for expressing emergent modes of existence that might colour-in a new spectrum of human potential. New genders, new sexualities, becomings-away from heteronormativity. Emergent expressions of self-valorizing cultural becomings in escape from the colonial framework of racialization integral to the norm of whiteness. Neurodiversities demonstrating a wider and wilder world than the perceptually and cognitively truncated neurotypical norm would have it. Ultinmately, these escapes, these becomings, are the threat that most terrifies the affective regime of reaction. Under postnormative conditions, normopathy cursors across the spectrum, in a tireless quest to ward off this threat by whatever means necessary, with the forced conformity licensed by exception increasingly becoming the default setting. On the motion-blurred spectrum, every setting, from the dead-center of conformation though varying degrees of license, from internalization to reactive venting, becomes a degree on the spectrum of normopathy. As Georges Canguilhem put it in his classic work The Normal and the Pathological, “the pathological is homogeneous to the normal.”¹⁷ He cites Nietzsche: “it is the value of all morbid states that they show us under a magnifying glass certain states that are normal – but not easily visible when normal.”¹⁸ Today’s postnormativity is the cultural condition under which the continuity between the pathological and the normal comes out into the clear, no magnifying glass required. It is what is patently disclosed when the norm is revealed to be an operation of power.

Fernand Deligny, a precuror to the neurodiversity movement, referred to normal subjects, those falling toward the center of the traditional bell curve, or the kind of person we would call neurotypical – in a word “normies” as the “based” derisively call them – as “instituted persons.”¹⁹ The phrase highlights that the normal on the individual level is an overcoding of the life of the body by modes and standards of behaviour that are institutionally propagated and regulated according to preset categories. The body is inducted into an inculcated patterning according to its assigned category. Swept up in that category-driven movement, a body’s trajectories through the world are pre-formatted to stay within certain parameters. The body’s patterns of connection with the world and with others are configured into a set of authorized permutations, contained within certain limiting parameters. Deligny calls this pre-configuring of relational connections “conjugation.”

The resonance with “conjugal” is not an accident. Conjugal relation centred on the home and reproduction is the attractor state for norming. The family kernel of the conjugal pair forms the gravitational center around which a normed body’s possible relational permutations are duty-bound to revolve. Reproductive pairing is accorded the highest value, gold standard of relation. The kernel of the nuclear family is considered the basic building block of society, sine non qua of civilized order.

Extra-family relations radiate outward in concentric circles of progressively lesser importance, first to family friends, then to neighbours, then to the wider community, and finally to the nation. Beyond the borders of the nation this so-called “order of love” apparently stops, or fades to such an extent that it all but fades away. It was already pruning back en route. The “circle of moral concern” delineated by this “order of love” was menacingly described by Vice President J.D. Vance upon his ascent to that office. His discourse makes it clear that it only extends to neighbours to the extent that they are like-minded (i.e., do not eat your pets²⁰ ), that it extends to the wider community idealized as a harmonious extension of the family, and to the nation as securitized “home land” – a badly disguised reference to the ethno-nation as ancestral cradle of the family.²¹ This order of relation, extrapolated from the conjugal, cuts off at the border. But it has chopped away at relation long before it reaches that limit, shaving off the unlike-minded, the dissonant and dissident, and the other. All fall outside the circle of moral concern, like so many chips from the swing of the normative axe.

The process of norming under this regime of conjugation is a cutting machine. It places the life of the body on the chopping block. Its axe is the imposition and enforcement of the reductive social categories that standardize what are considered to be traditional social roles and acceptable cultural types. Its cutting-off of bodies not-to-type and intractable to those roles, in the name of the normal, in fact creates the conditions for the postnormativity of which it is a part. By ejecting the unlike-minded, the dissonant, and the other outside the “circle of moral concern” it exposes them to opprobrium and punishment. It provides moral cover for repression and aggression, in ways that go all the way to the most uncivil(ized) MAGA extreme. The “order of love” is in the closest of symbioses with systemic hatred. Rather than founding an ethical order worthy of the name, it powerfully corroborates Canguilhem’s observation that the normal is in continuity with the pathological. The normal is an aspect or dimension of a normopathic complex, in the same way that mind is an aspect or dimension of a psychosomatic complex. Just as psychosomatics approaches the mind as being in continuity with body, normopathics approaches the normal as being in continuity with the pathological. (The same logic could be applied to the civilized and the barbaric; also a twinning.)

The use of “pathological” here is not a metaphor. Pathology is the reduction of life force. Life potential comes of relation. The human is born to absolute dependency in a body squirming with radical receptivity to the outside and other. This radical receptivity to relation forms the basis for its life-long growth-process of exploring its potential with conatus – with a striving to carry a body’s capacities to be and to act to higher powers, in a process also carrying its powers to feel to greater intensities. By hollowing out bodies’ relational potential, norming pares down life potential. This qualifies normality, in and of itself, as a form of pathology. The difference is best considered one of degree on the same spectrum, not one of kind.²² Even in liberal varieties more dull-bladed than Vance’s neo-normation, the process of norming cuts away at the field of potentials. It curtails. It prunes possibilities – for example, of chosen family, of invented forms of kinship, of kinship beyond the human, of interplays of multiple relationality irreducible to any dialectic of the two, of the creativity of dissonant modes of embodied existence contriving to co-habit the world on the strength of their differences, not in spite of them, without being called upon to check them at the door of standardized inclusion.

If we adopt the point of view of normopathics, we can no longer understand the pathological as a breaking of the rules, a deviation from the norms of health or correct behaviour, or a failure to live up to standard. It obliges us to recognize normality as a meek case of normopathy. This is what the “based” say of the “normies”: that they are merely stunted normopaths, too curtailed, too weak, too strongly overcoded, to attain the exalted postnormative state that exempts them, the based, bestowing upon them an exceptionalism by virtue of which they alone are equal to the tasks of the day. They alone can do it

Processually speaking, to say that the normal and the pathological are on the same spectrum as different degrees is to say that there is no normality pure and simple, and no pathology pure and simple. They nest in each other, call to each other, exchange characters. They can undergo conversion from one to the other, under the action of a component of passage, or pass from one degree to another of their complexity (in the sense of their forming a complex). They are fellow-travellers. This forbids us to consider the criminal, the deviant, the sub-standard as the opposite of normal in any pure or simple way. From the most liberal of normalization to most rigid regime of normation, they are foils for the normal, which needs them to have something to define itself against. They are part of its system. They are co-constitutive of its structure.²³ They belong, albeit in a different capacity, to the same limitative system of conjugation, united under the same banner of reaction.

This introduces the most difficult challenge posed by the analytic of normopathy. What is the alternative to the machinery of normopathy, if it already operatively includes its opposites?

The alternative is not an opposite. It is an outside. It is another spectrum, circled by different horizon. It doesn’t have to do with the abnormal, but with the anomal, as in “anomalous” (deriving not from the Latin root norma,meaning “percept, rule, carpenter’s square,” but from the Greek anōmalos, meaning “not smooth, uneven, rough, irregular” as in, there’s the rub).²⁴ One name for the anomal is neurodiversity, understood as the self-affirmation of nonstandard modes of existence constituting worlds of perception and carrying worlds of value all their own. Another name for it is blackness, in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s sense, where it does not directly denote Black people as an identified group of beings occupying a recognized compartment of the social, and is not strictly indexed to skin colour, but refers instead to the “paraontological” condition of an “undercommons”: an informal field where differentials bubble to form integrals and derivatives of previously unknown mintage, affirming unprototyped emergences, expressing powers of cultural becoming and the becoming of cultures, beyond compare. Or again, the anomal can be called “trans,” in the way queerness can be construed as not being the opposite to straight genderings, but as a realm of its own that moves “trans-to-gender” as an overcoding categorical complex tasked with the reciprocal functions of norming and pathologization.²⁵

All of these creative outsides are in the key of affirmation. All are anathema to reaction, and resistant to it. Together they compose a postnormativity fundamentally at odds with and actively in resistance to the affective regime of reaction that governs the Trumpian postnormative. MAGA normopathic postnormativity is synonymous with rapidy fascisizing conditions. By fascisizing conditions I mean the ascendance of diverse tendencies moved by the influence of the same attractor state, describing the limit of reaction raised to its highest power. That attractor state lies in palimpsest behind “America First,” beckoning, through it, toward full-fledged fascism. The alternative field is plied by a counter-attractor. That attractor is synonyous with antifascism, not as an organization (which it has never been, in spite of the Trump administration treating it as one for the purpose of tarring it with the category of domestic terrorism), but as a region of becoming, one with the efflorescence of new forms of life.

It was asserted above that normativity was a category-driven power operation. The movements stirring the field of alternatives is also not simply the opposite of power. They are power formations of another colour, operating in their own modes, with their own processual couplings among them. They are counterpowers. They are counterpowers of feral becoming, against norming’s domestication of being-an-embodiment-of-a-pregiven-category.

The traditional notion approaches normopathy as an individual condition. The reason I started this discussion with Trump and postnormativity as a cultural-political condition was to emphasize that the individual is never just that. We saw how Trump supporters’ life dynamic is adjoined to the person of Trump, and how a component of passage produces a transitivity between them, making them analogues of each across the scales of the governmental and the individual. Individuals individuate into their own variation on the theme, beckoned by the same attractor state but advancing as a function of their own exceptional reactions. The machine is of collective individuation: individuals becoming-together, in concertation and correlation. The individual considered separately is a fiction. In point of processual fact, it is always a derivative, a precipitate of a collective dynamic. The social and political are immanent factors in the ontogenesis of the individual. The process of individuation is political through and through.

The response to norming must be equally political. It is necessary to take seriously that norming always involves the overcoding of bodies by categories structuring a conjugation, or instantiating a matrix of permutations. Conjugation, permutation: there is a logic to it. The logical is political. The kind of logic involved is the Aristotelian category, based on the difference-reducing principle of identity and the segregative rule of the excluded middle. The principle of identity states that a thing is all and only what it is – erasing becoming and the aberrant movement of the in-between states it necessarily passes through. The principle of the excluded middle states that a statement is either true or false, with no third option. This erases the creativity of fabulation that drives becoming. Fabulation knows no such limitations. It is insubordinate to the principles of identity and mutual exclusion. As a power, it is a power of the false. The power of the false is the engine of new truths: the pragmatic truth of bodies performing the emergence of new forms of life.²⁶ I believe that it is one of our greatest political tasks to develop and deploy a logic of mutual inclusion, guided by a principle of differentiation, beyond the categorical pale. A logic of differential mutual inclusion would affirm the process of universal variation that is the driving principle of life and the cosmos, as it should be of thought.²⁷ Short of this, our thinking will habitually recur to identity and the segregations imposed by its partner principle of the excluded middle. Witness cancel culture.

The received categorical logic understands value only as the standard (ideal or norm) against which bodies are judged and vetted. An alternative logic of mutual inclusion must fundamentally reformulate what value can be, for a non-normative ethics attending an antifascist postnormative condition. The component of passage integral to the kind of postnormative condition that the logic of mutual inclusion allows us to envision is not exceptionality fostering reactive tendencies, but a supernormal tendency that counteractualizes the norm: that affirms powers to become-other incubating immanent to the norm’s field of application, in its undercommon belly, emerging to convert it into a movement of its own surpassing.²⁸

Value, by Gilbert Simondon’s definition, is the force, immanent to the field regulated by a system of norms, that capacitates norms’ conversion into a new system.²⁹ It is inevitable that if the form this surpassing takes succeeds in settling into the world, its settlement will regrow norms protective of its parameters of operation and conducive to its survival. A new round, driven by a self-regenerating supernormal tendency, will then ensue. Pressure will build for a next surpassing of the new, and already aging, norms. The overcoming of normativity is not once and for all. It is an iterative phasing between alternative states, expressing different dimensions, in an oscillation characteristic of ontogenesis. Or, dare we say, cosmogenesis. Its time is not now. It is always coming. Its time is the eternal return of the self-renewing aim at intensity of experience, regulatory principle of the world’s creative advance.³⁰

1. David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’,” New York Times, January 8, 2026.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html

2. Brianna Tucker and Jacob Bogage, “Heritage Paper on Families Calls for ‘Marriage Bootcamp,’ More Babies,” Washington Post, January 8, 2026.https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/08/heritage-report-promote-marriage-births/

3. David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times, February 13, 2025.

4. See “Some Points about Contemporary Fascism,” Critical Inquiry, 52, no. 1 (2025): 151-159; The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025); Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary (Colchester/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2025). https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Massumi-AntifascistVocabularly-Web.pdf.

5. On the order-word, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 76-85.

6. Shawn McCreesh, “Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius,” New York Times,September 22, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/us/elections/trump-speeches-weave.html

7. “Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly tried to argue that if the president does it, it’s not illegal,” following in Richard Nixon’s footsteps. Trump riffs on this using a Napoleonic formulation: “if it saves the country, it is not illegal” (his version of Napoleon’s “He who saves the country violates no laws”). Trump considers himself, of course, the only person who can save the country. “Only I can do it” was a refrain of his campaigns. Doina Chiacu, “Trump: If it Saves the Country, It is Not Illegal,” Reuters, February 15, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-if-it-saves-country-its-not-illegal-2025-02-16/

8. Kevin Polowy, “Roseanne Barr Calls Donald Trump ‘The First Woman President of the United States’,” Yahoo! Entertainment, September 25, 2020. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/roseanne-barr-donald-trump-first-woman-president-of-the-united-states185444921.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNhLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFsmE-iEfOXenmcRYuEOTsSWYacVQYcwJ5ccLx4A4AqPwU7wERUiwV7BuXq1zdZLNsqQm-oU8g4VNo6mB7pj841MQfGKCdgtstWb_sb7BPjHi7q7enQrMcREiGW4QnJ3OQnSR0LAkNfmg8Q2-N6ukeUY1EZdld7TL_t6uVk-6ZLi. In a perspicacious analysis of Trump’s body image, Bruce Bennett observes in Trump “a certain ambiguity of gender that is normally submerged beneath his leering misogyny”; “Trump’s Body,” Sociological Review, November 18, 2016. https://thesociologicalreview.org/collections/2016-us-election/trumps-body.On gender and Trump/MAGA, see also Massumi, The Personality of Power, 32-37, 41-46.

9. Jesús Rodriguez, (Blaire White), “Blaire White is Trans, MAGA and Extremely Online. It’s a Living,” Washington Post, January 23, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2026/01/23/blaire-white-maga-trans-influencer/

10. “I feel liberated,” said a “top banker” quoted in the Financial Review. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy” without fear of getting cancelled … It’s new dawn.” “Some Wall Streeters,” the article continues, “also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals.” “Wall St. Bankers ‘Feel Liberated’ in MAGA Land,” Financial Review, January 15, 2025. https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/is-corporate-america-going-maga-20250115-p5l4g3.

11. The shift from the legitimation of policy decision (as part of statecraft) to the licensing of exception (in rule by tweet) is well captured, in a related context, in a phrase of Reza Negarestani’s: “an exit from justificatory exposure, a portable exemption that can be adapted to multiple resentments” (he is speaking of the license neo-reactionary Nick Land’s philosophizing bestow upon his accelerationist followers). “Rational Inhumanism vs Landian Anti-Humanism,” December 28, 2025, https://tripleampersand.org/rational-inhumanism-vs-landian-anti-philosophy/. On license and exception, see also Massumi, The Personality of Power, 10-17, 37-41, 50-54.

12. Returning to the governmental level, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney dramatically announced the reveal in his speech at Davos responding to Trump’s drive to take over Greenland. He said out loud what had been taboo for world leaders to say. The traditional story was that the rule-based international order that Trump was taking a jackhammer to had created an equal playing field and protected the weak from domination by the strong. This, Carney indicates, was little more than a consensual fiction. The world had been “living with a lie. … We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” In a word, the late, lamented norms of international relations were working parts of a power structure maintaining the hegemony of the strongest nations. Reading a bit between the lines, under a NATO backstopped by the US, the “middle powers” like Canada were honorary members of the club of the strong. Now that they can no longer ake for granted that they will remain under that umbrella, they face the stormy fact of their relative weakness in the world. The consensual fiction has suddenly expelled them out from under its protective cover. So now they have to learn to “take the world as it is.” “Read Mark Carney’s Full speech on Middle Powers Navigating a Rapidly Changing World, CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350.

13. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 135-169.

14. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 47.

15. On normalization versus normation, see Michel Foucault Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009), 85. For a genealogy of the historical shift from normation to normalization, see Michel Foucault, see Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004).

16. The concept of normopathy was coined by psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall in her “Plaidoyer pour une certaine anormalité,” Revue française de psychanalyse 36, no. 3 (1972): 345-358, and later in the book A Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York: Routledge, 1992). The term was subsequently adopted by Christopher Bollas, who related it to his own category of “normotic illness”; “Normotic Illness, in M. G. Fromm & B. L. Smith, eds, The Facilitating Environment: Clinical Applications of Winnicott’s Theory (New York: International Universities Press, 1989), 317–344. It is institutional analysts Jean Oury and Félix Guattari who begin to inflect the concept toward the sense developed here. Jean Oury, “Le pré-pathique et le tailleur de pierre,” Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, 40, 1 (fall 2000): 1-7 (”we are all normopaths, and that’s the most incurable thing of all,” 1). Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 72.

17. Continuity is a tricky concept. It actually does not obey the distinction between degree and kind in any frameable way. Each degree marks a qualitative difference, making the spectrum a scale of continuous qualitative variation. There is a central region belonging to each degree where its qualitative difference shows. But on either side, any number of other variations may intercalate themselves between that region of clear expression and the next, just like any number of geometric points are interposed between any point and the next. Whether we speak of a difference in degree or a difference in kind in any given instance is a matter of perspective (how the spectrum is to be taken up). This means that it is legitimate to speak either of difference in degree or difference in kind, as long as it is remembered that both are takes on a formation that cannot be finally characterized as either, but only as a “multiplicity” (in Bergson’s sense): a set of ultimately inseparable variations on the same character (colour, for example; or the many hues of reaction).

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), section 47 (March-June 1888), 29.

19. Fernand Deligny, Œuvres (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2007), 932. Cited in Erin Manning, The Being of Relation(Bristol: Intellect, 2025), 29.

20. Huo Jingnan and Jasmine Garsd, “J.D. Vance Spreads Debunked Claims about Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets,”NPR, September 10, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5107320/jd-vance-springfield-ohio-haitians-pets. Vance freely admitted the story was a lie, justifying himself not by its accuracy but its political efficacy. Edward Hellmore, “JD Vance Admits He is Willing to ‘Create Stories’ to Get Media Attention,” The Guardian, September 15, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lies-haitian-immigrants .

21. Vance was severely rebuked by Pope Leo XIV for misunderstanding Augustine and the role of the order of love, or ordo amoris, in Catholic thought. The pope focused on the exclusionary force of Vance’s version. Jason DeRose, “Pope Rebukes Vance Over Migrant Deportations and Refutes Vance’s Theology,” NPR, February 11, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-48194/pope-rebukes-trump-over-migrant-deportations-and-refutes-vp-vances-theology. Certain Christian progressive influencers, such as James Talarico, also fight against the Vancean ethics of exclusion. But the point remains that Vance’s version extrapolates a tendency that rides the order of love like a dark passenger, ensconced in its field of implicit presupposition. It constitutes a tendency that cannot be easily excised. Religious morality may struggle against it, but it rides on, like a tick whose head is buried in to the quick.

22. Continuity is a tricky concept. It actually does not obey the distinction between degree and kind in any frameable way. Each degree marks a qualitative difference, making the spectrum a scale of continuous qualitative variation. There is a central region belonging to each degree where its qualitative difference shows. But on either side, any number of other variations may intercalate themselves between that region of clear expression and the next, just like any number of geometric points are interposed between any point and the next. Whether we speak of a difference in degree or a difference in kind in any given instance is a matter of perspective (how the spectrum is to be taken up). This means that it is legitimate to speak either of difference in degree or difference in kind, as long as it is remembered that both are takes on a formation that cannot be finally characterized as either, but only as a “multiplicity” (in Bergson’s sense): a set of ultimately inseparable variations on the same character (colour, for example; or the many hues of reaction).

23. On the co-constitutive “ex-inscription” of opposites in the makeup of the categories they ostensibly undermine, see Brian Massumi, “The Trials of the Man-Standard,” Substack, August 21, 2025. https://brianmassumi.substack.com/p/the-trials-of-the-man-standard.

24. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, 73. See Gilles Deleuze and Féllix Guattari’s take-up of the concept of the anomal in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 243-249.

25. On blackness in the sense at stake here, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). For an account of neurodiversity in its relation to blackness that is consonant with the approach developed here, see Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless(Durham: Duke University Press, 2020) and The Being of Relation. On “trans-to-gender,” see Calvin Warren, “Calling into Being: Tranifestation, Black Trans and the Problem of Ontology,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2 (May 2017): 266-274; and Brian Massumi, “The Trials of the Man-Standard.”

26. On fabulation and the powers of the false, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126–55; and Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 95–96.

27. A significant portion of my books The Personality of Power and Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary is dedicated to the critique of the general idea in the guise of the Aristotelian category and the development of guiding concepts for a counter-logic of differential mutual inclusion.

28. On the supernormal tendency, see Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) and Brian Massumi, “The Supernormal Animal,” in Couplets (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 119–32. In On the Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem appeals to the “insatiable” tendency of the human to “always exceeds [its] needs” (97) and transcend itself in the “establish[ment] of a new order” (117). “It is normal,” he writes, “to break norms and establish new ones” (95). In What Animals, I use the concept of the supernormal tendency to assert that this is not only true of the human, but applies to all living things. What normative thought fails to take into account is this self-defining creativity of modes of existence.

29. Simondon defines value in terms of intensification and becoming. Value, he says, is “the amplificative capacity for transfer contained in the system of norms” thanks to which one “system of norms can be converted into another system of norms” as part of “an axiomatic of becoming.” (375). “Values can be conceived as linked to the very birth of norms” (376). A becoming – the emergence of a new mode of existence – generates its own system of norms, in the sense of creating the operative parameters and regulatory principles of its own continuance. Its continuance is metastable, which is to say that it lies in a fragile equilibrium between its phasing in as a new system and its phasing out in its senescence. The passage from one such phase to another is a transduction: a transfer of an organizing impulse across the threshold separating different orders. In my own thinking, the transductive impulse goes by the name of the “supernormal tendency” mentioned in note 21. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

30. The “aim at intensity and variety” is the “teleology of the universe,” Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas(New York: Free Press), 1967. A non-normative ethics requires an ethico-aesthetic theory of value. This is the project to which my next book is dedicated: Brian Massumi, Beyond Compare: The Colour of Value (forthcoming, Polity Press). On the “ethico-aesthetic paradigm,” see Guattari, Chaosmosis.