If the award were reserved for someone most remarkable for holding onto individual personhood, Trump would not be in the running. Rather, the award would go to the woman who survived the most extreme objectification imaginable, and yet remained powerfully, compellingly herself: Gisèle Pelicot.

This week, the trial of Gisèle’s husband Dominique concludes, alongside those of 50 of the 75 men he filmed raping his wife. Throughout the 10 years of this grotesque betrayal, Dominique Pelicot would drug Gisèle unconscious by dosing her with crushed sedatives in food or drink, then invite men he met online to abuse her sexually. He filmed the rapes and filed them meticulously on his computer, alongside the rapists’ names and obscene descriptions of the acts. His crimes were only discovered after he was caught filming up a woman’s skirt in a shop, and police checked his hard drive.

Ten years. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the betrayal. The discovery has devastated the Pelicot family, sending shockwaves of horror in all directions. Much has already been written about its connection to misogyny, and to the slippery slope pornography follows toward atrocity, especially once turbo-charged by online competition for clicks. Women all over the world share a sense of outrage at Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse. But while Dominique Pelicot’s actions are mercifully not common, what he sought in engineering the violation of his unconscious wife represents an amplified and sexualised pattern that pervades our modern world. The only reason this is difficult to see is that, more often than not, such violence is more humdrum than grotesque.

There is a distinctive form of violence inherent in treating people, animals, and the world as mere objects, in order to use them to our own ends. The philosopher Martin Heidegger characterised this as a kind of epistemological violence which he called Gestell, usually translated as “enframing”. Far more than a set of tools or techniques, for Heidegger, enframing represented the essence of technology: a mindset in which the world is not encountered in its full being, but merely a set of resources standing ready to be used. To Heidegger it was an aggressive act to re-order the world conceptually in this way. He called it a “challenging-forth”, that obliterates that thing’s ability to be fully itself.

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This enframing, combined with the camera’s more literal framing, is what produces the pervasive objectification feminists have long protested against in the porn industry as a vector for violence against women — even when all performers say they have consented. By definition, someone filmed or photographed taking part in sexual acts is not in relationship with you, but is rather reduced to a resource for you to use. The result is a form of media content that normalises intimate objectification and abuse, even before you get to the industry’s many abusive and exploitative practices.

For one of its second-order effects is to normalise a parodic model of relations between the sexes, polarised between pure agency (typically the male performer, often subjecting his female partner to violent or degrading acts) and a psychically evacuated, vacant passivity now conflated with “femaleness”. On this model, being a woman isn’t a distinctive way of being a human person, but a state of radical psychic emptiness and de-personalisation from or with which relationship is impossible.

And to the extent that this model then shapes real-world relations and identifications, it further forecloses the possibility of relationship. Women trapped in this model embrace their own objectification. The OnlyFans porn star Lily Phillips, for example, recently filmed herself being perfunctorily gang-banged over a 14-hour period by 101 strangers. Phillips seemed to embrace her own experience as object: she told YouTube documentary-maker Josh Pieters that she was “only good for one thing”, dissociated for much of the stunt, and could only remember about five of the men who had sex with her. Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to act out violence and domination — or still darker explorations, as with Pelicot and his fellow-rapists.

Other men again fetishise this parodic femininity for themselves, with many then arguing that this is simply what being a woman is. The transgender writer Andrea Long Chu notoriously made this argument, proposing that femaleness means enframing oneself: “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. Chu acknowledges that these views and desires are shaped by porn, declaring: “sissy porn did make me trans”. To become “female” in this sense represents, for Chu, a kind of “suicidal ecstasy” of psychic evacuation: pure identification with one’s own enframing, metonymically represented by “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”.

Even where this mode of relating is supposedly consensual, it provokes deep unease. We only need look at the furore that has surrounded Phillips’ stunt. As for Phillips herself, she claimed the event was her fantasy and that she enjoyed it — but broke down in tears afterwards. Even the men who turned up to use her begged for relatedness, Phillips reported, but were briskly sent on their way. Thus Phillips’ enframing of herself even extended to the male participants, creating an industrial conveyor-belt of impersonal rutting for the hungry OnlyFans camera frame.

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But if this seems shocking, we should consider that perhaps it’s only the extension of this logic to humans that is at all new. Industrial factory farming has enframed and objectified animals like this for a good half-century, viewing living creatures as mere production units. Such unfortunate animals lead only short, miserable lives of fear and pain, with little or no scope for natural behaviour, before they are slaughtered on another conveyor belt. The same objectifying principle applies, too, to animals used as test subjects for medical or other experiments: a practice that usually occurs behind many layers of security, obfuscation, and meticulous cognitive dissonance, for the straightforward reason that if conducted in the open, it would be recognised as monstrous.

The closest I’ve ever come to this world was a temp job in my twenties, as an administrator in a university science laboratory that included animal research subjects. The “BRU” or “Biological Resources Unit” was always spoken of in hushed tones in the office; I recall the atmosphere during one monkey experiment (I made sure not to learn the details) was an indescribable, repressed horror. We all knew something terrible was happening, but saying so was impossible. We all sensed the violation entailed by “challenging-forth” a sentient primate as mere thing — as “biological resources”, stripped of sentience and reduced to usable living matter.

And if we recoil from the use of monkeys or other laboratory animals in this way, we rightly recognise that to enframe a human is an atrocity. Those totalitarian regimes whose political project entailed the reduction of political prisoners or ethnic outgroups to slaves, things, broken minds, mere “resources” or dead bodies rightly call forth the term “evil”; perhaps nowhere more grimly than in Nazi Germany. The Austrian philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, for example, has described his own experience of the thoroughness with which the concentration camps were designed to erode prisoners’ ability to think of themselves as human beings rather than things. And in the laboratories of Josef Mengele, imprisoned humans were vivisected as mere “biological resources”. If the technological mindset has a heart of darkness, that is surely near its core.

It is not my intention to claim direct moral equivalence between factory farming, vivisection, concentration camps, and the crimes of Dominique Pelicot and his co-rapists. But the type of violence is the same across all these, for all that it differs in degree, and in how tolerated it is culturally. In each case, some kind of value is extracted from living beings — a value released by ignoring, deliberately eroding, or chemically suppressing that sentience and refusing what the philosopher Martin Buber would call an “I/Thou” relationship, in favour of an “I-It” one in which there is only the agentic self and the object. Once enframed as an “it” in this way, factory-farmed pigs cease to be pigs, with their own instincts and behaviours, and become merely potential kilos of meat. Monkeys become “biological resources”. A woman becomes a sex toy. A woman — married for 38 years, with all the richness and complexity and trust accrued over that time — becomes an unconscious thing, to be used by strangers.

And perhaps what is most unnerving about the Pelicot case is how clearly it reveals that for some, this violence itself is the point. For that laboratory, using the monkey as a thing was regarded as an unfortunate necessity in research. We look away from factory farming as a regrettable trade-off for affordable protein. But Dominique Pelicot exposes the reality that for some, foreclosing relationship and reducing a “thou” to an “it” is not a means to an end, but the end itself, with its own thrilling charge of power and pleasure. If Mengele’s laboratories represent a dark heart to the technological mindset, this must surely be its cold loins.

Against this moral economy of loveless violation, Gisèle Pelicot’s extraordinary heroism lies in having rejected the framing, and her own enframing. Throughout the trial, she held onto her own human personhood. She refused anonymity. She insisted that all the videos of her rape should be played, and that her rapists should face her. And she told reporters: “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”

The monstrous crime of Dominique Pelicot, and of the men who joined him, was to engineer Gisèle Pelicot’s dehumanisation for their own sexual enjoyment: chemically reducing her to the pure passivity and cognitive obliteration required for parodic “femaleness” on the Andrea Long Chu template. They sought to make her a thing. It was a profound evil, and their punishment is richly deserved. But Gisèle Pelicot would not be enframed. She would not be made a thing. She survived her violation; she insisted on being seen; she remains defiantly human. What she has endured is beyond imagining. That she has endured, while remaining fully a person, is her triumph.

Predictably, the Left derided MAGA Communists as “dangerous” and, of course, “fascist”. But when everything is fascist, it’s hard to take that epithet seriously. Indeed, if they’d bothered to look closer, the movement’s progressive critics may have learned something. For in reality, MAGA Communism is only a more forceful and meme-ified version of the modern Left. If it’s on the path to Fascism, it’s only because the rest of the Left lit the way.

MAGA Communism is led by a pair of the 20-something American political activists Haz Al-Din (often referred to as “Haz”) and Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle began his political career as a teenage environmentalist, praised by Teen Vogue and Reader’s Digest in 2017 as among the most inspirational young people working to “save the earth”. Within five years, however, he was describing himself as a “Maoist” and denouncing environmentalism as “anti-human” on his now banned YouTube channel. While Hinkle’s politics smack of controversy-courting and opportunism (he’s known for praising Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei), Haz is the more intellectual of the two although he shares similar political fandoms. His voluminous internet output includes several hundred tweet-treatises on why the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin provide the necessary foundations of Marxism and, thus for Haz, MAGA Communism. While MAGA Communism is allegedly rooted in Marxism, Haz asserts that the latter is absent in contemporary Leftism.

The movement consists mainly of niche agitations on social media, live streams and blogs which rail against imperialism and Zionism. Hinkle, in particular, has ridden the wave of anti-Israel sentiment after October 7. “Drop a like if you’re an American who SUPPORTS HAMAS,” he tweeted in May to his 2.7 million followers.

So far so Leftish. But unlike the Left, they are anti-identity politics, fervently pro-Russia and see the rise of Trump not as a sign of Fascism reborn, but as a unique opportunity to reawaken American communism. They are adamant, however, that this does not amount to support for the magnate-turned-politician. While Hinkle blamed the “deep state” for Trump’s recent assassination attempt and said he was “praying for President Trump’s full recovery”, it’s really Trump’s supporters who they’re excited about. For Haz, the rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 “marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of”. From a Left that long ago abandoned the working class for cultural issues and feigned kindness, their rejection of identity politics, gravitation towards MAGA and proclivity for edgy slogans like “FEMINISM IS CANCER” elicits horror. But dig a little deeper and things get murky.

Haz’s love affair with Dugin and Heidegger as intellectual torchbearers of Marxism hints at a much deeper affinity between both camps than either is perhaps willing to realise. At first glance, the ideas of these philosophers would seem far removed from the contemporary Left. According to Haz, Heidegger, who “finally initiated the revolution” to “emancipate the Western mind”, fuels “paranoia” amongst the Left due to the fact that he is “nearly equally infamous for [his] affiliation to German Nazism”. Instead, according to Haz’s account, the modern Left and wokeness are indebted to liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment. “Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society, even the definition of gender,” he writes. Such philosophical scepticism was upheld as an ideal during the Enlightenment.

But what this story misses is that the Left long ago abandoned the universalism of the Enlightenment, dismissing it as Eurocentric and racist: “Enlightenment-style Western democracy is… the source of black people’s subordination,” argued Richard Delgado, one of the founders of critical race theory. “Racism and enlightenment are the same thing.” With its now marked antipathy towards the French Revolution and its associated Age of Enlightenment, the Left has many of the same preoccupations as the “fascists” they accuse everyone else of being. What’s more — and here is where the Left’s embarrassment ought to kick in — it shares this hatred of the French Revolution with actual Fascism as a historically specific phenomenon, which sought to contain the forces of mass society that the French Revolution unleashed.

In its shift from upholding liberal reason to exalting authenticity, the Left today actually owes more to Heidegger than Marx or the liberal tradition in which the latter was enveloped. Heidegger’s thought was a key inspiration to French philosophers of the Sixties and Seventies as they searched for an alternative to a Marxist tradition that appeared discredited by Stalinism. His criticisms of Western philosophy for stripping the world of meaning provided a theoretical foundation for subsequent generations of ecological, postmodern and postcolonial thinkers.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with authenticity and critique of modernity was attractive to a Left seeking deeper, more rooted forms of existence as an antidote to the superficiality of liberal capitalism. But it was also what led Heidegger to support Nazism, in which he saw the ability to restore a sense of being-in-the world to the German people. Heidegger believed that the existential resolve of individuals could be harnessed to fulfil the historical destiny of the Volk.

Similarly, the Left has increasingly rejected the inauthenticity, consumerism and rootlessness of the West, seeking instead an authentic subject in struggles abroad. So too has Hinkle said that what attracted him to Dugin is his glorification of Russian culture, which he sees “as an antidote to corrupted values in the West”. For Haz, the major conflict today is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie “but between the ‘establishment’ and the ‘people’”. He frequently slips into the language of “soil”, gravitating toward movements “coming from the soil and the roots” of a country, and rejecting in particular the oppression of a people by “foreign” or “globalist” masters.

Like most of the Left then, the MAGA Communists are anti-Western and critical of liberalism and its attendant individualism. They instead want to undertake an exercise of communal ontology — that is, rethinking man as a “communal being”. According to Haz, “Dugin is necessary for Marxism” because he specifies the “communal being which is the premise of Scientific Socialism”. Indeed, one of his critiques of Heidegger is that his conception of mankind, Dasein, leaves too open the possibility of individualism: “While Dasein is thrown into a given community, as an established horizon of being, it acquires an authentic relationship to Being only through the exercise of individual will.”

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Ironically, this puts Haz in the same camp as arch-genderist, Judith Butler, who said in a 2021 debate in true Heideggerian style: “We need a radical social ontology. We need to rethink selfhood — its boundaries, its openings — to have a completely different ethics and a politics of care.”

Yet this rejection of individualism is a rejection of precisely where Marxism is most powerful, and most powerfully overcomes the excesses of the modern Left. It’s a basic Marxist point that if the individual isn’t free then neither is society. Unlike wokeness, which often advocates subordinating individual freedoms to the good of some group identity or grievance, Marxism envisions a society where individuals flourish without the constraints of race, class or gender. In its critique of individualism, MAGA Communism fails to understand a key tenet of the philosophy it claims to expound.

What is so frustrating about MAGA Communism is that it actually gets quite a bit right. The founders slaughter liberal sacred cows like the European Union, proliferating LGBT+ identities, and the coup of the Left by sneery PMC-types “who are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism”. So it is strange that, by following thinkers like Heidegger and Dugin, they should be so willing to throw themselves into the same abyss of romantic reaction from which Fascism itself emerged, and into which the Left has increasingly tossed itself. The Left might have enough sparks of self-consciousness not to draw on someone like Dugin, but their penchant for grounding their politics in the supposed authenticity of the “other” — indigenous people and the growing ranks of the “marginalised”— echoes Dugin’s critique of western liberal modernity. Dugin and the MAGA Communists just have the nerve to bring the “other” home.

Still, the search for the authentic subject elsewhere remains palpable. Lost in a world that seems fake and alienated but with no hope of changing it, today’s Left continually searches for connection to something “real”. Hence, MAGA Communists share with some of the Left an obsession with Hamas. “Al-Qassam fighters are true sons of the soil,” writes Haz. It’s too late for the US, but at least over there, they can enact their fantasies of booting out the cosmopolitan rootless oppressor.

These are, of course, ideas that were best left buried in the 20th century. Indeed, even if one acknowledges the fearless thoughtfulness behind the spiky MAGA Communist facade, it’s clear such fearlessness can lead to one of history’s most famous dead-end pathways. Offering connections to our innermost longings — like spiritual re-enchantment or that “arbeit macht frei” — can easily be turned against us. Even in the bowels of the internet, it’s a lesson that shouldn’t be forgotten.