Gilles Deleuze famously wrote that ‘[a] snake’s coils are even more intricate than a mole’s burrow’ (PP, 182). The serpent represents the mode of functioning of ‘control societies’ in which institutions have lost both their relevance and their capacity to stratify, enclose and enshrine. If Deleuze’s premonitions are to be taken seriously (as they should be), we would need to consider the possibility of molecular formations or pseudo-planes of immanence replacing the rigid stratifications that were once the mark of twentieth-century fascisms. Given that new forms of domination breed – and will breed – from within control societies, we would need to ask what it would mean to cease thinking of fascism as a molehill, as a closed system with identifiable spaces and practices of command, internment and murder. What would it mean instead to think of it as a serpent that does not hold captive, but kills through immanent undulations and modulations, rapid and flexible variations, and the extended execution of the Final Solution?

The question necessarily emerges from the present-day context that is marked, on the one hand, by growing indifference to the plight of others, and on the other, by the alarming resonance that far right discourses find in societies across the globe. Our indifference to those who incur social death is manifest at the molecular level, at the level of the streets we walk, as we step over the extended limbs of those stranded on the pavement, turning our heads not to notice. But we have also become apathetic to the fate of migrants, drowning in hundreds in the Mediterranean, or to black bodies being shot, or neighbours being evicted, or colleagues losing their contracts for failing to comply with the grant-hunting requirements of the neoliberal university. The eruption of Covid-19 on the global scene might have temporarily equalised our exposure to the forces of nature or of life in the barest sense, but new categories of ‘disposable bodies’ are now being constituted at great speed.