[...] But the reason why both work is that they describe situations in which reality had itself gone psychotic. As Ballard has observed, the Nazi delirium was one of those moments when the distinction between the internal and the external world no longer held: hell has erupted on earth, there is no escape, no future, and you know it...

Downfall is fascinating because it closely and I'm assuming meticulously documents the 'line of abolition' that Deleuze-Guattari claim is constitutive of Nazism. For Deleuze-Guattari, who borrow the idea from Virilio, the Nazis' scheduled auto-annihilation - 'if are defeated, better that the nation should perish' - was less a forced contingency than the realization, the very consummation, of the Nazi project. Deleuze-Guattari's account might be dubious empirically (it was certainly hotly contested in intense discussions last night at Towers of Infinite Thought), but the great service it provides for cultural analysis may not be the idea that Nazism is suicidal, but the thought that the suicidal, the self-destructive is Nazi.