Institute for Conjunctural Research

Maison Marx

2011-06-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

In an old newspaper, I come across a photo of the Paris Commune. It shows part of the barricade in rue de Batignolles, near place Clichy; in the middle of the street, five mortars and three bronze cannons, and behind some saplings (which despite le temps des cerises have yet to sprout leaves) a low building with clear curtains behind its poor windows. Above, repeated twice in large characters, the number of the street and its social reason: 57 - Au nouveau né. Maison Marx.

It seems like a joke. A little crass, I'd say, like chance ones usually are. What could the owner or shop-keeper of 'Everything for the baby' know about it, he who shared the same last name from Alsace or the Rhine with that other one, Karl, who during those days, in London, scanned dispatches from the insurrection?

On their mounts, the three little muzzle-loading cannons of proletarian desperation. Au nouveau-né. Ninety years ago. In Simbirsk, Vladimir Ilych had turned twelve months on April 22. It's been forty-three years since those babies won. (For us too, but not here.) Who is celebrating his first years, now? Desperation and hope, more than any wisdom, are truly invincible...

Franco Fortini, '[Maison Marx. 1960]', in L'ospite ingrato, 1966.

Hate those who gently lead into nothingness

2011-06-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

Franco Fortini

Translating Brecht

All afternoon
a thunderstorm hung on the rooftops,
then broke, in lightning, in torrents.
I stared at lines of cement, lines of glass
with screams inside them, wounds mixed in and limbs,
mine also, who have survived. Carefully, looking
now at the bricks, embattled, now at the dry page,
I heard the word
of a poet expire, or change
to another voice, no longer for us. The oppressed
are oppressed and quiet, the quiet oppressors
talk on the telephone, hatred is courteous, and I too
begin to think I no longer know who's to blame.

Write, I say to myself, hate those
who gently lead into nothingness
the men and women who are your companions
and think they no longer know. Among the enemies' names
write your own too. The thunderstorm,
with its crashing, has passed. To copy
those battles nature's not strong enough. Poetry
changes nothing. Nothing is certain.

(tr. Michael Hamburger)

La Crisi

2011-01-10T16:21:00.001-08:00

Weitermachen!

2010-11-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

STUDENT PROTEST IS NONVIOLENT NEXT TO THE SOCIETY ITSELF

Herbert Marcuse

The present campus unrest must be seen in the context of a deep-rooted protest against the established society, its immoral and illegal war in Vietnam, its glaring inequality and injustice, its general aggressiveness and hypocrisy. The following remarks refer to this context only; therefore other cases of legitimate police intervention (such as enforcement of civil rights legislation against segregationists) are not mentioned.

There are instances where the intervention of the police on campus would be justifiable even according to the standards of the Left: when human life is endangered, and when there is the possibility of serious bodily injury; also in the case of willful destruction of facilities and materials serving the educational purposes of the university (libraries, etc.). To the best of my knowledge, such destruction is no part of the strategy and tactics of the New Left.

The occupation of buildings and the disruption of “business as usual” are, in my view, no reasons for police intervention. Such temporary violations of Law and Order must be judged in the light of the crimes against which they try to draw attention – the continued slaughter in Vietnam and the continued oppression of racial and national minorities. Compared with this normal daily violence which goes largely unpunished and unnoticed, the student protest is nonviolent.

New York Times Magazine (May 4, 1969)

Racism and Abstraction

2010-07-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

Paul Berman, tireless fustigator of crypto-totalitarian useful idiots spawned by the long tail of the bad 60s, has composed another righteous tract, this time it seems attacking fifth columnists on the 'left' - those notorious socialists Garton Ash and Buruma - for being soft on seductive 'moderates' like Tariq Ramadan, who cunningly conceal the green bacillus of world-conquering Islam under the facade of reasonableness. To spare the reader the soul-crushing déjà-vu of actually reading this sterile screed, the publishers have kindly summarised it in the cover image - which neatly resolves, in the affirmative, the scholasto-aesthetic question: 'Can abstract art be racist?'

The straight white lines on the right, broken up by the evil green Islamist shard, leading to the culpable disarray of the white lines on the left...

As we all know, communism was the Islam of the twentieth-century and Islam is the communism of the twenty-first. Both are driven, at their core, by the blessed rage for abstraction, and their fantasmatic union would signal the total and utter implosion of all things Western, reasonable and good. Below, my friends, care of our guest artist Bat (aka al-Lissitzky), is the dialectical image that haunts the nightmares of Berman & co.

Daniel Bensaid RIP

2010-01-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

Farewell to one of the most generous and supple minds in the communist Left.

Before we had a religion of History telling us: there will be a final struggle and we will necessarily win. Now we must get rid of the fetishes, of this religion of History, accept uncertainty and adopt a profane politics as strategic art.

A sober and combative legacy worth honouring and continuing.

Philosophy and Psychology: Badiou interviews Foucault (1965)

2009-12-17T03:34:00.000-08:00

From the educational programme L'enseignement de la philosophie, on which see Tamara Chaplin Matheson, 'Embodying the Mind, Producing the Nation: Philosophy on French Television', Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2) (2006): 315-341.

Jameson Symposium

2009-10-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

Follow this link for videos and mp3's of the symposium for Jameson's reception of the Norwegian Holberg Prize. The elusive Perry Anderson (ending on a rare note of uplift), Michael Löwy and Wang Hui feature.

The Thrill of Détente

2009-08-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Having made my first ventures to the cinema in the days of Glasnost, my memories of the aesthetics of détente are very much those of a depressing and integrated spectacle: Yanks and Russkis brought together to tame the Ay-rab enemy, in Iron Eagle II, or showing Soviet muscle-bound discipline and good ol’ American maverick can-do joining forces against crime, like the to-be-Gubernator and James Belushi in Red Heat.

But the pre-Reagan détente produced a rather odd and charming genre-of-one, Don Siegel’s ‘détente thriller’ Telefon, which I was lucky enough to see recently. With an obsessively malicious Don Pleasance as a rogue Stalinist agent dead set on unleashing a formidable array of ‘sleepers’ on the US (there is one sublime moment, captured above, where he appears in a disguise that resembles nothing to so much as a peroxyded Guy Debord), Tyne Daly as the probability-obsessed friend of the machines (clunky statistical ‘super-computers') who repeatedly upstages her patronising CIA bosses and Charles Bronson’s impassive Soviet Beruf playing off of Lee Remick’s chatty double-agent, this is a peculiarly entertaining film – not least in an innuendo ending (innuending?) that doesn’t take the great power rapprochement as an excuse to reinforce authority, but to evade it. (The film, as far as I know, also contains the first truck bomb attack on an American military establishment, 5 years before Beirut – see the trailer below.)

Turn Out the Lights

2009-08-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

'shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc. applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.'

Enlightenment, as defined in the 1973 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

The Monstrous Architecture of Revolution

2009-08-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

It is perhaps unsurprising that the horror of political upheaval, of plebeian uprisings and the destruction of the old regime in the name of a new order, can be so transfixed by space and architecture, by threats to the material embodiment of order. Writing an admonitory 'Letter to a Noble Lord' in 1796, warning him of the beast across the channel, Edmund Burke added to his customary attacks on the mathematical and philosophical abstractions of revolutionary geometricians, with their grids destroying all custom, territory and religion, an attack on those 'chymists' who - limitless perversion! - conspired to turn the ruins of lordly manors into the ammunition for bombing more of the aristocracy's holdings to dust.

Their geographers, and geometricians, have been some time out of practice. It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares. That figure has lost the charms of it's [sic] novelty. They want new lands for new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the republick that find him a good subject, the chymists have bespoke him after the geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his Grace's lands, the chymists are not less taken with his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention in it's [sic] present state; but properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have calculated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and his trustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist Inigo Jones, in Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish; and well sifted, and lixiviated, to chrystalize into true democratick explosive insurrectionary nitre. Their Academy … [has] computed that the brave Sans-culottes may make war on all the aristocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth, out of the rubbish of the Duke of Bedford's buildings.

Half a century later, interrupting the historical narrative of Les Misérables to discuss the revolution of 1848, Victor Hugo too linked the horror of the uprising to its 'architectural' manifestation. His account of the barricades of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an inadvertent paean to revolutionary salvagepunk, represents the other side of the reaction to the architecture of revolution - not destruction as abstraction and eliminative materialism, but the construction of an incomprehensible, monstrous edifice, the mass turning all the objects and ornaments of the reigning order into components of a frightening citadel, 'with a red flag affixed to it':

Of what was it built? Of the material of three six-storey houses demolished for the purposes, some people said. Of the phenomenon of overwhelming anger, said others. … Everything had gone into it, doors, grilles, screens, bedroom furniture, wrecked cooking-stoves and pots and pans, piled up haphazard, the whole a composite of paving-stones and rubble, timbers, iron bars, broken window-panes, seatless chairs, rags, odds and ends of every kind – and curses. It was great and it was trivial, a chaotic parody of emptiness, a mingling of debris. … The shouting of orders was to be heard, warlike song, the roll of drums, the sobbing of women, and the dark raucous laughter of the half-starved. It was beyond reason and it was alive; and, as though from the back of some electric-coated animal, lightning crackled over it. … It was a pile of garbage, and it was Sinai.

Prophet Davis

2009-07-29T03:02:00.000-07:00

"An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. I am claiming, in other words, that Wovoka offers us a neo-catastrophist epistemology for reinterpreting Western history from the standpoint of certain terminal features of the approaching millennial landscape. He invites us to reopen that history from the vantage point of an already visible future when sprawl, garbage, addiction, violence, and simulation will have overwhelmed every vital life-space west of the Rockies. This is Turnerian history, if you will, stripped down to its ultimate paranoia: the West become Los Angeles. For those who retain the Ghost Dance tradition, this end point is also paradoxically the end point of renewal and restoration. It is through this black hole that the West will disappear into the singularity of catastrophe, only to emerge, on the other side, with streams full of salmon and plains black with bison."

Mike Davis, 'White People Are Only a Bad Dream...' (1999), in Dead Cities, New York: The New Press, 2003, 31.

Burn your Baedeker!

2009-07-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

We love ideas grafted with violence onto facts, and we enjoy the disparities between what we would like to achieve and what we actually achieve. (Dinamo, May 1919)

In Italy’s tricolor there’s also red … this red, dilated until it rudely dominates the other two colours … gives the real sense of the limits and ends towards which our revolutionary action must be channelled. (Mario Carli, La testa di ferro, 1920)

Italian futurism’s political thrust (kinetic virility or macho ballistics being one of the movement’s staple tropes) is likely to elicit, from those who like their avant-gardes pasteurized, some variant of disavowal: one might evoke a cooptation by fascism born of the aesthete’s naivety toward the realities of politics, or stress the paroxystic marginality of artists to the vicissitudes of social conflict, or push the role of futurism as a precursor to artistic vanguards whose ideology sits diametric to that of Mussolini, namely constructivism. Striking, though vaguely discomfiting evidence of the latter can be found, for instance, by comparing Carlo Carrà Futurist Synthesis of War, as published in 1914 and then (in the Italian tricolore) in 1918, with El Lissitsky’s deservedly more famous 1919 agit-prop poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.

Readers of Benjamin’s endlessly quoted essay on technological reproducibility will doubtless be familiar with the place of the futurist poetry of aerial bombardment in the analysis of the aestheticization of politics as the mark of fascism, and its bamboozling of the masses, drawn into thuggish jouissance at the spectacle of their own appearance and of the total state’s reactionary violence. But what of the actual politics under-girding this aestheticization? A first glimpse can be caught in the lettering of the futurist’s red wedge plunging into the green front of Italy’s World War I nemeses. Beside the chromatic confusion (the diagram inverts the colours of the Italian flag, but also makes it seem as if Italy is attacking… itself), the verbosity of the futurist’s variant (logorrhoea already serving as a demarcation from the percussive mots d’ordre of Lissitzky) is an index already. In the piercing camp of freedom, futurism and Italy, we find the other 7 ‘poet-peoples’, against the forces of barbarism and passatismo (an obsessive presence in the futurist lexicon, which my dictionary amusingly renders as ‘fogydom’): Austria, Germany and Turkey. Serbian temerity, Belgian industriousness, Montenegrin independence, French explosiveness and elegance, Russian impregnability and power, and Japanese resoluteness are among the qualities which join Italy’s amorphous but supreme trait (‘all of the forces, all of the weaknesses of GENIUS’ – strange echoes of the tone of Berlusconi’s bedroom perorations). The enemies are instead united by a litany of pejoratives (from methodical plagiarism to professorial pedantry, with Turkey = 0).

This bombastic rhetoric of ethnic characteristics indicates the ideological field whence futurism emerged: modernist nationalism. A recent study published in Italy by Emilio Gentile – known in the Anglophone world as a prominent recent historian of fascism and proponent of the (dubious) totalitarianism-as-political-religion thesis – which tries to set the record straight on the season of ‘political futurism’ (1914-1920) starts precisely from this theme, which Gentile (not to be confused with the Italian fascist and idealist philosopher shot by the partisans) traces in strands of pre-futurist political and social thought. “La nostra sfida alle stele”. Futuristi in politica (Our Challenge to the Stars: Futurists in Politics) is a rich resource for moving beyond the commonplaces about futurism and fascist politics.

Futurism drew from the same ideological environment of nationalists like Enrico Corradini and Mario Morasso the idea that Italy needed to slough off the past and be reborn as a fully modern power, one which could harness affective and technological energies to throw Italy, still smarting from its colonial rout at Adua, from the periphery back into the seething maelstrom of imperial conquest, industrial growth and cultural advancement. Modernist nationalism was explicitly vitalist in kind. Corradini would write of modernity as determined by ‘maximum intensity, maximum velocity and therefore the maximum effort for the maximum acts of creation and destruction’. Liberalism and its ‘democratic constrictions’ had to be left behind. In order to do this, Italy needed to overcome its sluggish reliance on Catholic morality, the comforting heritage of Roman greatness and its reputation as a land of ease, lax hedonism and tourism. Morasso, author of a book by the eloquent title of L'imperialismo artistico, called for the incineration of those Baedeker guides that ‘make us waste an entire day in front of four shards of filthy Etruscan crockery’, and for embracing the spirit of ‘infinite conquests’ (by a strange twist of semiotics, when the Germans bombed Bath in 1942, they dubbed it a 'Baedeker bombing raid'...). ‘Italianism’ was to be combined with an aggressive vitalism and the all-round acceleration of cultural change, to make up for Italy’s peripherality and retardation.

Marinetti et al. only intensified this hatred for everything that stank of stagnant culture, memory and heritage. They called for ‘hygienic forgetting’. In their text ‘What is Futurism: Elementary Notions’, they proclaim that to be a futurist in art one must: ‘hate ruins, museums, cemeteries, libraries, culturalism, professorialism, academicism, the imitation of the past, purism, longueurs and meticulousness’. A futurist can’t stand the opera, but he (though there were futurist women, a sub-Nietzschean misogyny is pretty much invariant across the texts, though the futurist also called for universal suffrage before many more ‘liberal’ types…) loves ‘concert-cafés where the spectators smoke, laugh and collaborate with the actors without grave solemnity and monotony’. We already have here one of the points on which, until their melancholy abandonment of the political arena and consequent defanged continuation under Mussolini, political futurists could never truly reconcile themselves with the neo-classical monumentality ('monumentomania'), cult of Rome and idolatry of tradition that came to constitute much of the ambivalent aesthetics of fascism in power. For Marinetti instead, ‘the annoying memory of Roman greatness should be erased by an Italian greatness a hundred times larger in magnitude’, in the image of a ‘beautiful dreadnought’. As one slogan went: ‘Let us abolish history’. Another called for ‘death to the dead’. The legacy of Rome was to be paved over, with American asphalt. As Boccioni would write: ‘our extremely violent affirmations of faith in modernity’ express ‘the need to become brutal, rapid, precise; the need to Americanize ourselves, entering the overpowering vortex of modernity’. This Americanization also coloured the futurist’s somewhat Stirnerian libertarianism, their scorn for established authorities, the Church, standing armies, the police, and any arbiter of moral probity. This tendency too came up against the fascist’s programme which, in making pacts with capitalists and the clergy, both defended (as ever, in a quite contradictory manner) the authority of tradition and threw the squadristi (and, once it conquered power, the police) against workers and unions.

Where the futurists certainly did both presage and prepare fascism, aside from their penchant for spectacular and thuggish ‘actions’ (namely in support of Italy’s entrance into WWI), was in the type of anti-humanist machismo with which they cheerlead for Italian imperialism. Imperialist modernism could indeed serve as another appellation for the amalgam attempted by futurism. In 1913, after the conquest of Lybia (only the beginning of a brutal history of campaigns, masterfully analysed by the Italian historian Angelo del Boca, in the light of which futurism well deserves the Zizekian title of ‘the poetry of ethnic cleansing'), Marinetti would affirm, in Florence’s Teatro Verdi: ‘The word Italy must dominate the word freedom'. It was with spirit that the futurists also threw themselves, once Italy joined the Allied Powers, into WWI, making alliance there with the peculiar martial and political phenomenon of arditismo, and giving birth to arditofuturismo (arditi were famously reckless shock-troops, said to go over the breach armed with grenades and daggers alone: a number of the arditi ended up joining Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento, but others, in a phenomenon dubbed arditismo rosso, joined with communists and socialists, bravely fighting the fascists in Parma in 1922 for example, as narrated in a fine book by the 'autonomist' experimental novelist Nanni Balestrini).

Particularly unsettling, at least in the case of Marinetti, was the manner in which the boisterous mechano-vitalist fantasies of war and destruction segued so seamlessly into his actual experience of war. Marinetti’s war diary might lead one to conclude that futurism is the first truly sociopathic avant-garde:

The airplane in flames has fallen among the wire mesh in our line of resistance. The smoke chokes me. The wood the flesh the bones the fat and the aluminium burn. A leg without a foot still bandaged is already charred and half in ashes. The arm that grips metal shows a roasted elbow the colour of varnished mahogany. The elbow makes me think of the bone of a lamb leg well cooked on the spit. Among the contorted metal the tubes turned into tie-knots and the rusted wire mesh the gutted fuel tank and on top a fully uncovered brain boiling and frying. It makes me think of a delicate little machine all little nickel and silver tubes too oiled and greased full of steam. I take an aluminium tube and we descend.

In the social turbulence that followed the end of the war, the futurists tried, with the founding of the Italian Futurist Party, to enter politics directly. Though like all the other nationalists they abhorred the emasculated internationalism and pacifist egalitarianism of liberals and socialists, they sought, despite their absence of real party structure – being instead a loose federation of groups and personalities, in keeping with their antagonistic libertarianism – to operate as separate from other nationalists, maintaining their own ideological pole. This was true of their intervention in the poet D’Annunzio’s short-lived coup and founding of a republic in Fiume (itself a bizarre nationalist instance of the politicisation of aesthetics; the picture below shows Marinetti and other futurists as legionnaires volunteers for D'Annunzio), and even when, after various mutual approaches, they threw their lot in with Mussolini, it was to be a short lived experience, for reasons already mentioned. Despite their nationalism and imperialism, the futurists could not subject their vision of a conflictual, kinetic and modernised Italy to the authoritarianism, social conservatism and ‘statolatry’ of Mussolini, nor could they stomach the pacts with the Vatican and a culturally defunct bourgeoisie. Their ‘hyper-intransigent and integral anti-clericalism’ viewed any compromise with Catholicism as repugnant. Their individualism – what might be termed their violent dandyism – could only view fascist organicism with disgust.

When the social chaos of 1919 came around, many futurists, despite their anti-egalitarianism, nevertheless tacked left, imagining, in a Sorelian vein, an alliance of sorts between futurist petty bourgeois intellectuals and insurgent workers, in some kind of nationalist syndicalism. As the futurist review La Testa di Ferro asserted: ‘We are certain that, if the intellectual proletariat will understand the new times and will be able to link up with the manual proletariat in its struggle for emancipation, not only will it remain, in a new regime, at the place that it occupies, but it will be infinitely more appreciated and it will not find itself in the dangerous and humiliating position of serving as a buffer between capitalism and labour’. Having already greeted the Russian Revolution, for its violent modernity if not for its levelling intentions, some futurists now called for the abolition of capitalism, distancing themselves from Marinetti’s call in Democrazia futurista for a modernising ‘Italianness’ that would leave the political economy untouched (in this same book, Marinetti anticipated one of the guiding motifs of Berlusconismo, when he wrote of ‘the administration of a great business [azienda] which is called fatherland belonging to a great association called the nation’ – l’azienda Italia is one of il Cavaliere’s favourite expressions, and he is also, like Marinetti, very fond of reference to Italian ‘elasticity’ [duttilità] and genius for ‘improvisation’). Marinetti himself, in his 1920 book Beyond Communism (pictured at the beginning), having abandoned the fasci di combattimento because of Mussolini’s monarchism and conservatism, turned toward a sui generis kind of libertarian anarchism, against fascism’s transformation of the futurist slogan of an ‘Italian revolution’ into a restoration of the state for the sake of the bourgeoisie. Mario Carli, who comes out of Gentile’s book as the main advocate of political futurism, would underscore ‘what a dose of anarchism there is in the futurist conception of the world, which would like to abolish all the useless and unjust things: dynasties and prisons, the papacy and law courts, parliament and privileges, archaeology and broadsheets’. This is why, in his estimation, the futurists ‘had always chided fascism for its irreducible refractoriness to social and trade-union problems’.

Such protestation were dead letter, though, as Carli and his comrades' attempt to gain traction with the left of the fascist movement failed and the collapse of D’Annunzio’s national-modernist experiment in Fiume brought the season of political futurism to an end (though Carli would continue into the thirties with his doomed attempt to promote 'left-wing' fascism). Futurism’s institutional alignment with the fascist state thus emerges from Gentile’s book not as political but as post-political, as the sterile compromise of a movement which shared much of the nastiest dimensions of fascism (imperialist ideology, glorification of violence, warmongering, misogyny) but could not, in its political prime, stomach Mussolini’s compromises with Catholicism and Capital, as well as the fascists’ promotion of an organic state that made a mockery of the aggressive, anarchistic and accelerationist individualism advocated by the futurists. As Gentile notes: ‘The political adventure of futurism came to an end with the return to art.’ As recent retrospectives intimate, futurist art, which once seemed obsolete, keeps itself alive because the moment to realise it was missed. Fortunately, some might add.

On Canada and the Ownership of the Means of Production

2009-06-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

An intriguing editorial in the mainstream Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, 'The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama', on Leo Panitch, the mirage of the Obama solution, and the current fortunes of Marxism. This line raised a smile: "Marxism has been out of favour so long, even its jargon sounds refreshing."

Gaddafi, Anti-Colonial Performance Artist

2009-06-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sticking strictly to the spectacular level, I've always had a soft spot for the Colonel's sartorial genius, his predilection for women-only teams of bodyguards, even his tent installations, clearly a wry commentary on the Serpentine Pavillion. But this might just be his best performance to date. Dressed like an improbable villain in a Leslie Neilsen comedy, he greets our national gnome wearing a large, and clearly homemade, framed picture of the anti-Italian guerrilla leader Omar al Mukhtar, the Lion of Desert. Take that, Nicolas Bourriaud.

Bronstein on the Underground, or, The Religion of Capital

2009-05-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

"Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extremely cultic that ever existed. Within it, nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult."
- Walter Benjamin, 'Capitalism as Religion' (1921)

"I am the Immeasurable Spirit of the civilized world; my body has innumerable forms and is manifold. I live in and pervade everything that is bought and sold. I am active in every article of merchandise; none has, besides me, any separate existence. I shine in gold and stink in dung; I ferment in wine and am poison in vitriol. I live in everything. Man sees, feels, smells and tastes my body, but my spirit is finer than ether, and is still less comprehensible to the senses. My spirit is CREDIT. It needs no tangible body to manifest itself."
- Paul Lafargue, The Religion of Capital (1887)

"The car of the subway is jammed. At the station strong-bodied attendants pushed the passengers in the stomachs with their knees in order to be able to shut the steel doors of the cars. . . . The working population of New York has left today another part of its life's energy in the temples of Capital. Some of the people have become weaker; others have grown richer. In the subway are those who have become weaker. The color of their faces is greyish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim. . . . Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation. . . . What are they trying to find in this miserable, degrading chewing? . . . When an infant, exhausted from hunger and crying, is pathetically moving its dull eyes, and there is no milk in the mother's breasts or in the bottle, the mother pushes a rubber nipple into the child's mouth— and the child sucks it desperately. . . . For a while it deceives itself by the movement of its own lips. ... Thus it is with these people in the subway. . . . Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid. ... It has therefore adopted measures. ... It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws. . . . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital."
Leon Trotsky, "Chewing Gum in the Subway" (Novy Mir, 10 March 1917)

On the Physical Effect of Philosophy

2009-05-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

"The Stoic philosopher Posidonius gave an example of the medicinal powers of philosophy when he experimented on his very own person in the presence of the great Pompei ... he was able to overpower a violent attack of gout by means of a lively attack on the Epicurean school; the attack of gout went down to his feet, never having been able to reach his heart and his head. And so he proved the immediate physical effect of philosophy..."

I. Kant, 'Announcement of the Near Conclusion of a Treaty for Eternal Peace in Philosophy' (1796), in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. P. Fenves, p. 83.

The capitalist swine at our door

2009-04-28T07:28:00.001-07:00

Mike Davis, with a characteristic blend of systemic mediation, apocalyptic poetry and a plea for the necessity of socialism.

Or, how 'the Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty' reveals 'the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production', and how the 'Ponzified risk management' of capitalist disease control is no match for a planetary socialist rationality.

Lenin's testament, or, When money will indeed be shit

2009-04-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

[An homage to the Socialist Lavatory League]

Reading recently the late Georges Labica's defense of Lenin's utopian moment in the acts of the 1975 Cerisy colloquium on utopian discourse (quite a gem), I encountered this superb quotation from 'The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism', a Pravda article from late 1921, where Lenin argues for the necessity of market "reformism" while keeping the horizon of real communism in full view:

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world. This would be the most “just” and most educational way of utilising gold for the benefit of these generations which have not forgotten how, for the sake of gold, ten million men were killed and thirty million maimed in the “great war for freedom”, the war of 1914-18, the war that was waged to decide the great question of which peace was the worst, that of Brest or that of Versailles; and how, for the sake of this same gold, they certainly intend to kill twenty million men and to maim sixty million in a war, say, in 1925, or 1928, between, say, Japan and the U.S.A., or between Britain and the U.S.A., or something like that. But however “just”, useful, or humane it would be to utilise gold for this purpose, we nevertheless say that we must work for another decade or two with the same intensity and with the same success as in the 1917-21 period, only in a much wider field, in order to reach this state.

In his Memoirs, Nikita Khruschev, recalling a dinner with American capitalists in New York, returns to Lenin's concrete and (e)sc(h)atological utopia, clearly rejoicing in the ease with which he can profane the yankee religion:

One old man, who was quite decrepit, but who was very wealthy and influential, as I was told, kept asking how much gold we produced and why we didn’t trade with America for gold. … I said: “Mr. So-and-So (I don’t remember his name), I will answer your question about gold. Are you familiar with the statement made at one time by our leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that we should hold onto our gold for the time being? At a certain stage of development of human society [Lenin said] gold will lose its value, and therefore gold should be kept in reserve, to make public toilets out of. That’s what we’re keeping our gold for, and when the time comes and communist society has been established, gold will lose its value as a means of exchange, and then, to carry out Lenin’s testament, we will use gold to decorate the public toilets under communist society. That’s why we’re holding on to our gold.” (Nikita Khruschev, Memoirs of Nikita Khruschev, volume 3: Statesman [1953-1964], edited by Sergei Khruschev, Penn State Press, 2007, pp. 178-9.)

One possible definition of communism: that society which, by carrying out Lenin's testament, will both verify Freud's contention, in 'Character and Anal Eroticism', that money is shit*, and free us from the scatological neuroses of the value-form, as well as from the "retention" of gold.

* "In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought predominate or have persisted - in ancient civilizations, in myth, fairy-tale and superstition, in unconscious thoughts and dreams, and in the neuroses - money comes into the closest relation with excrement. We know how the money which the devil gives his paramours turns to excrement after his departure, and the devil is most certainly nothing more than a personification of the unconscious instinctual forces." (S. Freud)

'And he himself had become unplaced'

2009-04-02T15:43:00.001-07:00

I have often felt unsettled, and further unmoored from national allegiance (were that possible or necessary), upon visiting those uncanny establishments where compatriots caught between languages, in some kind of congealed gastronomic time, serve food that somehow connotes 'Italianness' here in Albion. But I never thought metaphysical insight could be garnered from such locales, until coming across this remarkable passage from Conrad's The Secret Agent:

On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation that patrons of the place had lost in frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private characteristics. And this was strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution. But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability. Neither was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially. They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them. But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere outside those special establishments. One never met these enigmatical persons elsewhere. It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night. And he himself had become unplaced.

Conjunctural TV: David Harvey on the G20 and the Crisis

2009-04-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

The right to the City

2009-04-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

In the stringent materialist spirit of ‘not telling oneself stories’, K-punk and Owen (and here) raise some urgent questions about the coherence and efficacy of actions such as yesterday’s ‘G20 Meltdown’ (fated to be followed by today’s G20 muddle-through). I am fully in sympathy with the suggestion that struggles at the point of appearance, so to speak, are hamstrung at best and spectacularly functional at worst, and that action at the point of production must play a crucial part in any viable strategy of opposition and emancipation. But there’s also a danger in thinking that factory struggles can have anything like the role they did at high points of struggle in the past, not just because of transformations in what the autonomists used to call the technical composition of labour, but because the physiognomy of the present crisis requires articulating forms of struggle that concern claims lying beyond the wage (housing, debt, credit, pensions, health, etc.). David Harvey’s recent intra-Marxist challenge to think the specificity of financial struggles is very significant in this respect. The whole piece is very much worth reading, but this passage in particular deserves rumination (and organisation):

There is another point we have to consider, which is that labour, and particularly organised labour, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to the failure of Marx and how he set up the problem. If you say to yourself the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism, and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting that or setting it up, labour has never been at the forefront. Labour has been at the forefront of the labour market and the labour process, which are important moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles that have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles.

The concrete demands which have been voiced, such as those formulated by Robin Blackburn in the New Left Review, go in this direction. The question is of course that of which forces, and with what means, could even begin to fight for such transitional, reformist policies (rather than angrily demand or blandly petition).

It’s rather trite, but it seems only new forms of syndicalism/trade-unionism, decoupled from the legacy (and legality) of merely sectoral or corporativist struggle, and entirely separate from party structures, could build a transversal front for a kind of radical reformism. I think this would require quite a revolution in the mindset and modes of action currently employed by unions. (Incidentally, this also concerns the question of ‘climate change’ the response to which, if it is not to elicit a dubious plea to the benevolence of State or Capital, will require real participation by organised workers and citizens, lest ‘solutions’ mean ‘restructuring’ individuals into obsolescence: Soylent green capitalism.)

On a lesser note, though evading the kettle, and the specularity of which it is a part, would be wise, I think there’s still a glimmer in gatherings like yesterday’s of a crucial aspect of any politics, what Harvey, again, has called the ‘right to the city’, a right which ‘is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves’.

In a more lyrical vein, the Italian critic Furio Jesi wrote the following lines, in a brief political pamphlet on Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre written in the wake of May ’68 (incidentally, it is from Jesi that Agamben lifted his notion of ‘anthropological machine’, as deployed in The Open):

You can love a city, you can recognise its houses and its streets in your most remote and secret memories; but only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt like an haut-lieu [a high place] and at the same time your own city: your own because it belongs to one but at the same time also to others; your own because it is a battlefield you and the collectivity have chosen; your own, because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended and in which every act has its own value, in its immediate consequences.

A mere glimmer, I repeat, since yesterday’s vaguely ludic presidium was mostly marked by an odd combination of observation-overload, (kettle-enforced) tedium, uneasy wait for ‘something to happen’, and carnivalesque gestures which, at least in my jaded eyes, did not really transfigure the City’s space. But the ‘hysterical’ dimension, or better the anxiety of not really knowing what one wants (or what ‘it’ – the protest, the crowd, the event – wants), need not be cause for despair. The challenge, as ever, will be to combine a reflection on concrete claims (rather than demands) and the forces that might bear them, a new politics of popular interests capable of channeling what will otherwise turn into ugly reaction, with the creation of spaces where some kind of utopian inquiry and experimentation can take place. We don’t know what we want (exactly, yet), but it’s never too early to struggle to change ourselves (and what we want, or need) by changing our cities and workplaces (whether factories or otherwise).

When Do We Start Fighting?

2009-02-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

A play on the Weather Underground now on at the Courtyard Theatre. I'm curious how they'll choose to represent "a misguided orgy of bomb-making".

Market Stalinism

2009-01-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

It stops short of comparing John Denham to Joseph Stalin, but new research suggests that the Universities Secretary presides over a Whitehall regime that has much in common with the old Soviet system. A paper suggests that the "new managerialism" of higher education shares many of the pitfalls and dysfunctions that blighted the Soviet state. The argument is made by Hugo Radice, visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds' School of Politics and International Studies, in a paper titled "Life after death? The Soviet system in British higher education".

In universities and in the Soviet Union, he writes, "however apparently rational, orderly and comprehensive the plan looked at the top of the hierarchy, in its implementation the different levels of the system often pulled in different directions, with the result that objectives could often be met only by mobilising 'off-plan' resources". He likens the Higher Education Funding Council for England to Gosplan, the Soviet committee responsible for economic planning, and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, which Mr Denham heads, to the Soviet state's political masters.

The rest here.

Beyoncé avec Marx

2009-01-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

What's the sound of an imminent economic crash?

Apparently, low beat variance, as in Beyonce's frantically monotonous paean to matrimonial security (against the crisis?) Single Ladies (Put a Ring On it).

"According to findings by Phil Maymin, professor of finance and risk engineering at New York University, the more regular the beat on Billboard's top singles, the more volatile the American markets. After studying decades of Billboard's Hot 100 hits, Maymin found that songs with low 'beat variance' had an inverse correlation with market turbulence. Which is to say, the more regular the song, the crazier the stock market."

And who said the base does not determine the superstructure?*

[*We should of course oppose the idealist deviation that it's "as if certain hits can cause market shake-ups", much as it would be a great weapon in the sonic arsenal of revolutionaries.]

Ultime Hyper Totale Gauche

2008-12-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

N°9 - Ultime Hyper Totale Gauche (La Parisienne Libérée)
Uploaded by laparisienneliberee

A little ditty inspired by the recent arrests of a commune of youths, among whom young anarcho-situ friends of Agamben, for the terrorist conspiracy to... delay the TGV. The dossier for the prosecution mainly consists in the following tome, allegedly written by one of the conspirators: The Coming Insurrection, by the Invisible Committee (pdf, in French). A review of sorts will follow. It is worth noting that these activists, who among other things ran a grocery store and a bookshop in the small rural village of Tarnac (hence the moniker Tarnac 9), have managed to get the unanimous solidarity of the local farmers and town-dwellers. Though not too enamoured of revolutionary anti-urbanism or agro-anarchism myself (the response by the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste's O. Besancenot, according to whom 'we need more trains, not less' does tug at some Bolshevik strings, though his 'condemnation' rang very hollow) there's certainly something to be learned in such strategies. For information and a petition (which somehow strikes me as being at odds with their own modus operandi of uncompromising negation of the endemic spread of "collaborators" and the "total mobilisation" of contemporary managerialised and spectacular democracies), see here.

Down with the nu-bureaucrats!

2008-12-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ben for bringing me the glad tidings that my alma mater is now being occupied, in the wake of staff revolt. When I was there a dozen years ago, a rather less coherent Mobilization got mired in identity politics (though I still have fond memories of the Habermasians at the Graduate Faculty putting up dazibaos calling for "ideal communicative situations" as their undergraduate students publically denounced them for sexism and called for a mandatory Queer Studies course. Oh postmodernism, how quaint you seem today...). I suppose "the Crisis" has a way of focussing the political imagination.

The Religion of Capital

2008-12-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

In his splendid 1882 satirical critique of political economy, The Religion of Capital, Paul Lafargue put the following words in the mouth of a fictional English statistician:

Now, then, the only religion that answers the needs of the moment is the religion of Capital. … Capital is the true, only and omnipotent God. He manifests Himself in all forms and guises. He is found in glittering gold and in stinking guano; in a herd of cattle and in a cargo of coffee; in brilliant stores that offer sacred literature for sale and bundles of pornographic etchings; in gigantic machines, made of hardest steel, and in elegant rubber goods. Capital is the God whom the whole world knows, sees, smells, tastes. He exists for all our senses. He is the only God that has yet to run into an atheist.

As political-economic atheism becomes ever more attractive, and our senses more skeptical, it seems that in Detroit, elaborate liturgies have been aimed at trying to resurrect Fordism.

Readers of the World, Unite!

2008-12-03T04:30:00.000-08:00

The Atheism of Fools, or, There is Certainly No God: Now Start Worrying and Change Your Life

2008-10-21T15:13:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought Badiou was over-egging the dialectical pudding with all his talk of "democratic materialism" ("there are only bodies and languages"), this: "a reassuring god-free advert". In the midst of economic crisis, imperialist wars, catastrophic inequality, et caetera, the "brights" and "secularists" now see it fit to besmirch the fine tradition of godlessness by pimping for conformity, low-intensity hedonism and a truly unbearable lightness of being.

Faced with this capitulation to a smug petty-bourgeois ethos, any self-respecting atheist would rather keep company with the ravers, enthusiasts and fanatics. Or the more tragic amongst our lot. They might provide us with less "reassuring" words:

Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
- The Book of Job

"I shit on God, if he does not do my bidding."
- Thomas Müntzer (as reported by Melanchton)

"If God is dead, everything is permitted." (Dostoyevsky) / "If there is no God, nothing is permitted." (Lacan)

Or perhaps something slightly more poetic and invigorating from Bataille:

"Revolt - its faced distorted by amorous ecstasy - tears from God his naive mask, and this oppression collapses in the crash of time. Catastrophe is that by which a nocturnal horizon is set ablaze, that for which lacerated existence goes into a trance - it is the Revolution - it is time released from all bonds; it is pure change; it is a skeleton that emerges from its cadaver as from a cocoon and that sadistically lives the unreal existence of death" (from 'Sacrifices').

Probably won't fit on the side of a bus, but it has a better chance of proselytising for the persistence of the negative than this finitude-mongering campaign.

The Old Guard on the New Crisis, pt. 2: Mario Tronti, Politics at Work

2008-10-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

To accompany and offset Alain Badiou's Lacano-cinematic disquisitions on the spectacle of the credit crunch, here is a translation of Tronti's recent intervention in "il manifesto", to announce a series of workshops and debates on the current politics of work. Aside from representing a moment of salutary rigour and lucidity in the general wasteland of the Italian Left, it is worth noting that it bears two points of affinity and three points of dissension with Badiou's own salvo. On the first count, it (a) sees fit to resuscitate a language of the people and the popular in a time of supposed multitudinous dissipation, and (b) views the crisis as being internal to the strategies and impasses of the capitalist class and not implicated in the dynamics of class struggle. On the second count, Tronti differs from Badiou in (c) continuing - I think rightly - to pose the problem of exploitation as the analytical key to this situation, (d) being rather more mistrustful of the thinking of the "people" - even hinting at an anthropology of general embourgeoisement, and (e) calling for the formation of a broad-based party of the working people. Perhaps the juxtaposition between this renascent popular frontism and Badiou's distance from the state should not be viewed as an alternative, as much as an antinomy. While both fail to fully persuade as political prescriptions, they certainly identify crucial questions any contemporary anti-capitalist project needs to face.

It is time to engage in a new research project. Our theme is: work and politics. Yes, because it is a novelty to concern ourselves with this theme. It says a lot about the condition we find ourselves in. What until some time ago was an old conviction has today become an entirely new realisation: either the workers constitute a political force or they do not exist. And the political inexistence of the workers is of course the problem of the Left, but it is also the problem of society and the state, it is the real theme behind the crisis of civilization. If we don’t put it in these terms, we will not find the compass that we seek in order to orient ourselves in the open seas of world-capitalism, once again thrown into turmoil by affairs that are entirely its own.

This is what it hurts to see today: that the class adversary is not in good shape, that it is unable to provide for the majority of its subalterns, and that nevertheless its problems are entirely relative to the relationships between its internal parts. At base, labour-power too was an internal part of capital, but when it took off the uniform of the producer of surplus-value and donned the outfit of the realiser of political value, it threatened, as we used to say, the constituted order, hinting at something other and beyond. Now instead capitalist contradictions are only ever settlings of accounts between sections of the dominant forces: financialisation against real economy, liberalisation versus regulation and vice versa, market and/or state, world distribution of energy resources and therefore pieces of the world against other pieces of the world, but still within a single thought of social relations: the bosses – whether private or public – rule, and the workers comply.

Bringing the theme of work back on the political agenda. How? With whom? The answer to the last question seems obvious: with the workers themselves. Getting to know them again, these unknowns. Getting them to speak again, these mutes. Bringing the place of work back into the non-places of today’s politics. Empirical inquiries are not lacking. We are not starting from zero. Thankfully, the social sciences exist, data and numbers are not lacking, investigations have been carried out with regularity, the latest one by the metalworkers’ union, FIOM. What’s missing? A political interpretation: serious, lucid, realistic, non-ideological, non-conventional, non-electoralist.

The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.

What is to be done about the exploitation of work? Do we put up with it, hiding it like dust under the carpet of good manners, or do we start once again to condemn it, showing that it is what objectively and materially unifies the current form of fragmented labour? Is it not true that today the social figure of the exploited brings together the worker in the great factory, the employee of the small service company, the precarious call-centre worker, the college graduate baby-sitter, the teacher or professor commuting while she awaits a permanent post, the labourer risking his life in one of the many thousands of subcontracted firms, the immigrant construction worker, the part-time researcher technician and the scandalously underpaid, or even not paid, contract lecturer, all the way to the self-employed worker filing his tax returns who, compared to rest, has the privilege of exploiting himself? We could go on and on. Asking what worker means after the working class is the same thing as wondering what the Left is after the workers’ movement. This is well and truly an epochal problem.

If it is true that the political centrality of the mass-worker has been replaced by the political centrality of the mass-bourgeois, then a great anthropological question poses itself on the terrain of human labour. The ideological hegemony of the Right – your boss’s interest is your interest, and you should do things on your own and not with others – does not stop before the factory gates, just like it doesn’t wait in front of the entrance to the home, where the holy family dwells. It enters, penetrates, invades, conquers, seizing hold of the soul – if there is no body of collective forces that pushes it back, countering it with the reasons of an organised solidarity. The material condition of subaltern labour – whether dependent or autonomous, stable or precarious – must now face up to this politically unprecedented situation, that the middle classes no longer need to be a separate social stratum, because they have become a diffuse democratic mentality. This is an illusory veil which the presence of an alternative horizon, both credible and practicable, has the duty to rend asunder.

But who today denounces the evils of society? A few precious experiences among social movements, some isolated scholarly gadflies, the odd papal homily, some praiseworthy grassroots philanthropy. What is lacking is the powerful voice of a subject that counts, and that makes its authoritativeness count, armed with consensus and thought. Work and politics is the point from which to begin once again to weave the interrupted thread of a new fabric of organisation. Around this point everything can be born, in terms of discourse and multiple experiences, but without it nothing will be born. It is first and foremost a political-cultural battle.

[Pictured: Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Gaspare de Caro, Toni Negri]

We are working in the furrows of a great tradition. But this is only a temporary surrogate, while we await the return of the initiative into the hands of practical politics. Of course, we need to make workers speak, even through new forms of co-research. But we must also start speaking about workers again, with programmes and projects that concern them directly, existentially. And here the forms in which practical politics is currently organised on the Left do not work, they do not respond to the command that the theme of work and politics should trigger in the operational machine. The latest disheartening events tell us as much. The Partito Democratico spoke of something else, the Arcobaleno didn’t speak to anyone, and it will not suffice to cloister oneself in a generous heretical sect of the refounders of communism in order to resolve this problem.

An alternative Left that for the time being closes ranks around the field of work is necessary, and we must therefore make it possible. But this too must be thought and practiced as a passage rather than a point of arrival. Once upon a time we used the formula ‘the world of labour’. Now we sometimes say ‘the world of labours’: not that much has changed when it comes to the fact that whatever world we’re dealing with, we need representatives and forms of representation adequate to it. To put it bluntly, so that everyone will understand, we need a great political force, a popular Left, rooted in the real country, with mass confidence – social before it is electoral – a mass party of working men and women, with the political pride to name the matter at hand in this way. Then, we might even lose some battles, but at least we’ll know that we’re there fighting a just war.

Kein Komment

2008-08-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

2008-08-11T01:59:00.000-07:00

Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Eternally here,
we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be.
Beyond that aim we differ in all.
We differ on the form of the national flag (we would have done well if we had chosen o living heart of mine, the symbol of a simple mule).
We differ on the words of the new anthem
(we would have done well to choose a song on the marriage of doves).
We differ on the duties of women
(we would have done well to choose a woman to run the security services).
We differ on proportions, public and private.
We differ on everything. We have one aim: to continue to be.
After fulfilling this aim, we will have time for other choices.

From State of Siege.

Curriculum mortis

2008-08-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

One of the more pervasive phenomena in the current cod-neoliberal academic dispensation is CV inflation: as available jobs dwindle down to Kafkian levels of postponement and implausibility, the miserable Träger of academic capital are obliged not just to overfulfil the plan, but to record - with the exacting eye of a Big Other meting out his next-to-last judgment - every single one of their productive acts. The only sins are sins of ommission. It is not that we have moved beyond measure, far from it, rather that, to paraphrase Badiou, the distance between academic representation and intellectual presentation is immesurable - precisely because acts of measuring are everywhere. In this sense, the passage from the RAE to the REF, from periodic and measured measurement (however skewed, prejudiced and instrumental to various hierarchies and supremacies) to permanent and ubiquitous measurement cannot but result in a kind of Stakhanovism of immaterial labour, which like its Stalinist forebear exceeds all rationales of instrumentality, and cannot but generate a permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety (since there is no standard, no amount of work will ever make you safe).

As Lyotard presciently noted in Libidinal Economy (courtesy of No Useless Leniency):

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the marker and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from the forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough.

This pathology (not absent from the very act of describing it, bien sur) is especially evident when we experience, sometimes painfully, the gap between the CV & its mortal bearer. The question that creeps up on you is: why do we still need these imperfect bodies, with their nervous stuttering unease? Why this not-so-vanishing mediator between CV and power-point?

In one of his most remarkable texts, 'Historical Materialism', in Il Ricordo del Presente, Paolo Virno comments on Marx's insight that capital seeks in the worker the only thing that it cannot advance itself: non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity.

Each time that it seeks to procure labour power, capital runs into a living body. This last, in itself, does not count for anything from an economic perspective, but is the ineliminable tabernacle of what certainly does matter: "labour as subjectivity". The living body, without any dowry other than pure vitality, becomes the substrate for productive capacity, the tangible sign for productive capacity, the objective simulacrum of non-objectified labour. If money is the universal representative of exchange value, life is the extrinsic equivalent of the only use value "not materialized in a product". ... Saying that, there remains the crucial question: why is life as such taken charge of and governed? The answer is unequivocal: because it forms the substratum time of a faculty, labour power, which possess the autonomous consistency of a use value. The productivity of labour in act is not in play here, but rather the exchangeability of the potential for labour. By being bought and sold, this potentiality carries the receptacle from which it is inseparable, that is, the living body; more, it shows itself as an accomplished object of knowledge and government (of innumerable and differentiated strategies of power). It remains clear that life, taken as the generic substratum of potentiality, is an amorphous life, reduced to a few essential metahistoric traits. Biopolitics is a particular and derivative aspect of the inscription of metahistory in the field of empirical phenomena; an inscription, we know, that historically distinguishes capitalism.

Rather than a straightforward locus of reappropriation or sensuous expression, the body becomes a privileged placed on which to read the abstract inscriptions and very real pathologies that characterise capital's penal colony. And perhaps among the reasons to struggle against the horror, discomfort and mediocrity wreaked by the current forms of abstractions is also the fact that they force us into such embarrassing and confounding experiences of our own bodies, our own lives, our own potentialities as inhabited by the undead compulsion to overproduce.

Marxism and Religion

2008-08-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

"To help work for Marxism would be to repay our gratitude to Buddha for his suffering in all his aeons of existences for the benefit of mankind."

- U Nu

Antinomies of the Capitalist Libido

2008-06-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex."

William F. Buckley

The monopoly of violence

2008-06-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

"Just what I needed, is a college boy. ... What's your degree? ... Sociology? You'll go far. That's if you live. ... Just don't let your college degree get you killed."

Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, 1971

[This is the epigram to Cop in the Hood, a sociologist's "participant observation" of the Baltimore police force, part of the bibliography for a co-written piece on The Wire, devaluation and spatio-temporal fixes - hopefully the first installment of a Marxian HBO trilogy alongside Deadwood and primitive accumulation and the Sopranos and... waste management?]

Schopenhauer and the Komodo Dragon, or, The Dark Side of Vitalism

2008-06-13T01:11:00.000-07:00

"Yunghalm relates that he saw in Java a plain far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battlefield; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large turtles, five feet long and three feet broad, and the same height, which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs, and are then attacked by wild dogs (Canis rutilans), who with their united strength lay them on their backs, strip off their lower armour, that is, the small shell of the stomach, and so devour them alive. But often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs. Now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times, year out, year in. For this, then, these turtles are born. For whose guilt must they suffer this torment ? Where fore the whole scene of horror? To this the only answer is : it is thus that the will to live objectifies itself."

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 2: Supplements to the Second Book)

Cf. John Vidal, from yesterday's Guardian:

I have seen hell, and it is indisputably on Rinca Island in Indonesia. This Komodo dragon-infested spot is where three British divers who got caught in a rip tide washed up last week. Far from being "misunderstood" reptiles who only "occasionally" attack humans, as my G2 colleague Jon Henley described them afterwards, the Rinca dragons engage in what must be the vilest animal practices ever witnessed by man. I met three particularly nasty ones last year. We had walked past a few harmless-looking dragons sunning themselves in the bush or lurking under the stilts of houses, and were not beyond thinking we could be friends when we reached a water hole. A large buffalo was lying on its side, clearly having been brought down by two 6ft dragons and one that was even larger. The three reptiles were crawling over it, and during the next 24 hours they proceeded to eat it alive.

The first dragon had grabbed it by its testicles and was starting to chew its way into the body from below. The second dragon was slowly forcing the buffalo's head open and was going down its throat. The third was, as they say, going in the back door. To make an already grisly scene far worse, the whole slow-motion kill was being conducted in deep mud. After a few hours all was black - apart from the blood that occasionally bubbled up from the muddy depths, the white saliva that sometimes oozed from the buffalo's mouth and the bright, flickering forked tongues of the three dragons, which were forever darting around. Slippery things slithered slowly over other slippery things until it was hard to tell whose tail was whose, where one body started and another stopped and who was doing what to whom. The smell was fetid, the heat intense. Every so often the buffalo shuddered and tried to rise. Was it really still alive? We watched from a few feet away, our guide armed only with a stick, transfixed and disgusted like us. Our stomachs heaved. The buffalo continued to twitch.

We left and returned several times; each time the horror was more complete. The next day, two Americans told us that the three dragons had got deep inside the buffalo, which was still twitching.

Profondo Rosso (Italian Prog, '68-'78)

2008-06-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, reading a somewhat pulpy but rather intriguing chronicle of the Red Brigades, I found out that the kidnapping of Christian Democrat party president Aldo Moro, in 1978, was almost scuppered when one of the kidnappers, an ex-Potere Operaio member by the name of Germano Maccari, left the apartment where they were holding Moro... to sneak into a Santana concert. Ever since, I've been puzzling about the connections between Italy's red decade of movementism, feminism, autonomism and (counter-)terrorism ('68-'78) and music.

The political novelty of French May '68 was famously far ahead of its capacities for cultural, and especially musical innovation, as this Gauche Proletarienne ditty exhaustively proves. The German scene over the same period, on the other hand - whether in Guru Guru's links to the SDS or CAN ("communism, anarchism, nihilism") - seems at least in part to suggest that unmoored from the need to express politics, because steeped in its everyday presence, rock might find other ways of being political, or indeed progressive.

Until recently, my only knowledge of the Italian prog scene amounted to a passion for The Best Italian Band of All Time. Spurred by a drunken chat with the fine post-workerist economist Andrea Fumagalli, who sang their praises, it seems that the Italian band Area (International POPular Group), cut a middle swath between the French populism of content over form and the German eschewal of political message in a transfigured everyday (CAN as 'anarchistic community'). Witness Area's rather twisted fusion rendering of the Internationale to follow on the Tuvan one in the earlier post.

Or their track from their Arbeit Macht Frei album (the Nazi slogan has often been referred to by the autonomist left in Italy to dispute the constitution's declaration that Italy is "a republic founded on work", for the sake of the strategy of refusal of work), on the Palestinian Black September (in the interval between the song their Greek singer Demetrios Stratos declares the need to "abolish the distinction between music and life"):

A more PCI-prone band, Stormy Six, very much liked by the composer Luigi Nono and part of Henry Cow's Rock in Opposition, took a slightly more doctrinaire line with the rousing folk-rock anthem Stalingrado ("a woman of granite lives on a thousand barricades / on the icy roads the crooked cross knows it will find Stalingrad in every city"):

P.S.

A future post I'm sure will have to deal with Italian post-punk in the counter-revolution of the late 70s and 80s, when bands such as CCCP Fedeli alla Linea (trans. Faithful to the Line) flourished (above: the cover of their seminal album "Affinities and Divergences between Comrade Togliatti and Us: On Reaching Maturity").

Somos todos monos con memes

2008-06-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

(Salvador Dalì, Six apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano, 1931)

We are all monkeys with memes. This felicitous dubbing of Richard Dawkins for a Spanish TV interview has stayed with me, a comical appendix to his utterly unworkable concept. That said, interpellated by Poetix, to further another such "meme" (or meh-meh, as I like to pronounce it in Spanish) here go my Seven Songs of Spring.

1. The Tuvan Internationale
This throat-sung call for the proletariat of the steppes to rise up against their sedentary oppressors, should accompany every political march. It might, to quote Mario Tronti, "once again make capitalists scared".

2. Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words"

One of the most infinitely, wrenchingly sad blues songs I know, recorded in March 1930. Capable even of instilling in R. Crumb "a love for humanity".

3. Battles, "Leyendecker"

Somehow a band featuring the drummer from Helmet and the son of Anthony Braxton fills a niche. I like its cheery relentlessness.

4. Om, "Pilgrimage"

This is probably a substitute for my fantasy of having the complete Sabbath with the rhythm section alone. Irrationalism writ large of course - wish it had been out when I was in my stoner teens. I might have even appreciated the Song Remains the Same effects on the fire in the video...

5. Madvillain, "Monkey Suite"

Somos todos monos con memes.

6. Jedi Mind Tricks, "Outlive the War"

Just remember, you "get laced with the Luger / If you sympathize with the Hellenization of Judah". From an Islamist Italian-American from Philly (Vinnie Pazienza, great name) and my favourite DJ, the wonderfully named "Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind".

7. Atahualpa Yupanqui, "El Poeta"

A great communist folk-singer from the pampas of Argentina.

The Duty to Hate

2008-05-18T04:15:00.000-07:00

"Today's Italy is destroyed just like the Italy of 1945. Or rather, the destruction is certainly more severe, since we don't find ourselves among the ruins, however harrowing, of houses and monuments, but among 'ruins of values': humanistic 'values', but what is more important, popular values."
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere luterane, 1975)

Lenin's Tomb has some important elements of analysis on the current catastrophic conjuncture of anti-Gypsy pogroms, neo-fascist revanchism and general abjection on the Italian peninsula. I think it's also worth thinking about what this may indicate about the Left's apparent paralysis and impotence. (The following lines are written with a healthy dose of national Selbsthass having just returned from the Italian north-east, where the oasis of comradeship and communist intellectuality I found myself in didn't alas compensate for the truly baleful environing political and social climate.)

First, we should not discount the role of organized crime, the Neapolitan camorra, in its role as para-government, in channelling discontent into these pogroms, following on its manipulation of the infamous garbage crisis in Naples earlier on in the year. There is a tradition of both organized crime and the far Right riding and manipulating discontent of popular and marginal strata in the South (in the historical absence of the levels of organized communist factory politics in the North): the most extreme case being the 1970-1 revolt in Reggio Calabria - in which Left groups such as Lotta Continua belatedly tried to intervene (they did, however, produce an excellent film-inquiry with Pasolini on this uprising).

Whether in Naples or in the working-class areas of Rome where it's the fascists who organize house occupations, one of the elements of the crisis of the Left is its patent incapacity, so to speak, to organize resentment. Preferring to concern itself primarily with the cultural or the international it has, at least in places like Rome, abandoned many of its traditional constituencies to the government's relentless authoritarian rhetoric of "security" and to the more obscene violence it serves as a cover for. Of course, in figures like Roman mayor Alemanno the obscene underside and the "legitimate" face of power have purely and simply fused. While in the 1970s groups like Lotta Continua or Potere Operaio actually used (à la Panthers) to provide "security" in areas abandoned by the state ("proletarian patrols"), the Left now works almost solely by lobbying, advocacy and representation (the latter no longer, since it has been foreclosed from the parliament - and soon from Europe, if "Veltrusconi" has its way in raising the cut-off point for European elections).

Contrary to the pitiful Rifondazione debate on non-violence, and the often saccharine humanism that accompanied it, it is in losing its "duty to hate" (to quote Georges Labica's formulation) and its capacity to mould and direct inchoate fear & negativity in emancipatory directions, that the Left has given up its terrain to the Right (Alleanza Nazionale leader La Russa noted at their most recent conference that with the radical Left gone from parliament only they, the fascists, would stand up for the workers... - this is also Alemanno's line, and it seems to be working, nevermind the fact that they are in a coalition whose main effect will be to intensify "insecurity" in all its forms...).

There have been countervailing tendencies, importantly among them the self-organisation of migrant workers (a considerable march in Verona just a few days ago), and a number of localized battles (against the expansion of the US base in Vicenza), but the incapacity to really connect, for instance, with the fury in factories at the astronomical levels of deaths on the job in Italy, has been pitiful. In any case, and at the risk of falling into a somewhat hydraulic model (or a mediaeval theory of political humours) it seems that a Left incapable of moulding and channelling the "sad passions", resentment, hatred, fear, or, to put it with Benjamin (himself quoting Pierre Naville), of "organizing pessimism" cannot but fade into oblivion and insignificance.

The Two Nihilisms

2008-02-20T04:10:00.000-08:00

The artificial is always a copy of a copy, which should be pushed to the point where it changes its nature and is reversed into the simulacrum (the moment of Pop Art). Artifice and simulation are opposed at the heart of modernity, at the point where modernity settles all its accounts, as two modes of destruction: the two nihilisms. For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm - the most innocent of all destructions, the destruction of Platonism." Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

La crainte des classes

2008-01-21T06:15:00.000-08:00

"The acrid smell of fears hangs over the City. I've never seen fear like this," said David Buik, strategist at Cantor Index.

The Refusal of Work as an Evolutionary Strategy

2008-01-13T16:23:00.000-08:00

One expositor of Cartesian philosophy, Antoine Le Grand, refers to the opinion "of some people of the East Indies, who think that Apes and Baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not for fear they should be employed and set to work". (Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, p. 102.)

Nietzsche, Class Racism and the Fantasies of Europe

2007-10-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

The attempt to unify Europe and to turn it into the ruler of the Earth … is not placed at the margins of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but at its centre.
- Karl Löwith, European Nihilism

The homogenizing of European man is the great process that cannot be obstructed: one should even hasten it. The necessity to create a gulf, distance, order of rank, is given eo ipso – not the necessity to retard this process.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 898

Europe United Against Itself

What would Nietzsche make of the preamble of the TCE, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, signed in 2004? This evidently facetious question is meant to indicate just how alien Nietzsche’s diagnosis and prognosis of Europe, together with his conceptual persona of the ‘Good European’, is from the reformist homilies that preface the treaty, especially once it was controversially purged of its specific reference to Christianity. The treaty sets out by declaring that it draws its inspiration from ‘the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law’. Could there be a more exhaustive enumeration of all that Nietzsche perceives as the engine of European decadence, its succumbing to slave morality after ‘the last great slave rebellion which began with the French revolution’? (Beyond Good and Evil, § 46) Wouldn’t Nietzsche perceive this as the constitution of the untouchable ‘Chandala’, of the ‘non-bred human being, the hotchpotch human being’ (The Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Improvers of Mankind’, p. 68), when it states that it will continue on Europe’s path of progress and civilization for the sake of ‘the good of all its inhabitants, including the weakest and most deprived’? This is the ‘unmanly’ Europe castigated by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, the one which suffers from the ‘bad taste’ of indulging in pity and ‘a pathological sensitivity and receptivity to pain’ (Beyond Good and Evil, § 293).

There is no congruence between the consensual, gradualist image of a united Europe offered by today’s capitalist parliamentarianism and Nietzsche’s insistent attempts to think Europe as a site both of decadence and transvaluation, indeed, we could even say that in Nietzsche’s work we may locate an anticipatory diagnosis of the impasses of such a Europe. My argument however is that this Nietzschean critique, useful as it may prove in undermining the vapid self-confidence of a rudderless Europe, must in turn be taken apart, and radically criticized for its reliance on a whole host of arbitrary, reactionary and sterile themes and affirmations – chief among them the notions of rank and mastery, and the treatment of the agonies and birth-pangs of civilization as a psycho-cosmic drama detached from the vicissitudes of historical struggle and of what we may call the ‘uneven and combined development’ of nihilism. More succinctly, it will be argued, following Domenico Losurdo’s recent work on Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel, that though we can still cherish Nietzsche thought’s for its destructive-diagnostic insight, at the level of programme and prognosis it represents a dead end.

But what does European unification mean for Nietzsche? In Beyond Good and Evil, he identifies a Europe whose leaders and peoples are willfully ignoring the tendency towards, and need for, unification. We encounter here one of the relatively invariant themes in Nietzsche’s thought, his contempt for what he calls ‘the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has induced, and still induces, among the people of Europe’ (Beyond Good and Evil, § 256), which, joined to the ‘demagogic character and an intention of influencing the masses’ (Human, All Too Human (I), § 438), accounts for the baleful state of late nineteenth-century Europe. It is against the myopia of populist politicians and their doomed ‘separatist’ policies that Nietzsche affirms that ‘Europe wants to become one’ (Beyond Good and Evil, § 256). What does this unification signify? First of all, it is important to keep in mind that it is in the works of a disparate republic of geniuses (‘Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer’ and even a rehabilitated Wagner) that the ‘new synthesis’ is prepared and the ‘European of the future’ is anticipated experimentally. Secondly, the suggestion that these towering figures are media for the tormented birth of Europe indicates that Nietzsche’s concept of Europe is not primarily political, or geopolitical, but ‘spiritual’. Speaking of his precursors of the European man, Nietzsche writes: ‘In all the heights and depths of their needs, they are related, fundamentally related: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art’ – this is a Europe, of course, whose destiny remains unwritten and uncertain. Third, for Nietzsche European unity is a question of rank: these great thinkers, as he put it, taught ‘their century … the century of the crowd! – the concept “higher man”.’

The synthesis of a spiritual Europe for the sake of the production, or enhancement, of a higher breed of men – this is what lies at the basis of Nietzsche’s passion for European unification. But, of course, Nietzsche does not shirk back from a political, or rather archipolitical, understanding of Europe – if we understand ‘archipolitical’, following Alain Badiou, as that which qualifies a declaration which can only manifest itself in a ‘subjective exposition’ (and ultimately in Nietzsche’s final political delirium) because, having no event as its condition, it presumes that politics can arise from the act of thought alone, and is thereby incapable of ‘distinguishing its efficacy from its announcement’ (‘Casser en deux l’histoire du monde’, p. 14. In ‘Who is Nietzsche?’ (p. 4), Badiou provides the following definition: ‘Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical act, of which he is at once the prophet, the actor, and the name, aims at nothing less than at breaking the history of the world in two. I would say that this act is archi-political, in that it intends to revolutionise the whole of humanity at a more radical level than that of the calculations of politics. Archi-political does not here designate the traditional philosophical task of finding a foundation for politics. The logic, once again, is a logic of rivalry, and not a logic of foundational eminence’.)

In his European Nihilism a text written in 1939 in his Japanese semi-exile and significantly subtitled ‘Considerations on the spiritual antecedents of the European war’, Karl Löwith identified Europe as the key concept in Nietzsche’s conception of a new ‘ordering’ that would overcome the impasses of nihilism. Thus, he writes:

‘The great goal for Nietzsche is the spiritual and political dominion of Europeans over the earth. To force Europe to this ‘great politics’, which is at the same time a ‘war between spirits’, it must be confronted with the question ‘whether its will to down-going “wills”’, that is what is at stake is whether Europe will overcome its own nihilism, once again willing itself as a whole and as something decisive. This active and ‘ecstatic’ nihilism is a powerful impetus and a hammer that obliges the degenerate nations and the Russians to surrender, and creates a new order of life.’

What is specifically archipolitical in Nietzsche’s stance, once again following Badiou’s definition, is the identification between Europe and himself. As Löwith puts it: ‘The fate of Europe coincides in Nietzsche’s thought and sentiment with himself’. But, beyond this coincidence, what are the modalities of political unification envisaged by Nietzsche? If we avoid the position of a ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ that would regard all of Nietzsche’s pronouncements as metaphorical – a choice that invariably emasculates him, turning him into a Rortyan liberal ironist or an eclectic anarchist – it is difficult to deny that Nietzsche’s vision of Europe is one based on the emergence of a radical hierarchy that could give a form to Europe’s political chaos, breaking asunder national populisms for the sake of a new continental ordering. As Löwith notes, in order to forge the single, decisive will necessary for such a great politics, now ‘that the time of the small politics of nationality is past’, Nietzsche envisages the necessity of ‘a dominant caste with long-term aims, capable of taming the masses to this end’.

Nietzsche, Democracy and ‘Class Racism’: Racialisation Without Race?

The political horizon of a united and fiercely hierarchical Europe of breeding and affirmation is dialectically linked to another connotation of Europe which for Nietzsche poses both the danger of a depleting passive nihilism and the opportunity for a kind of post-Christian regeneration. Democratisation is thus, in Derridean parlance, a kind of pharmakon, or at the very least an occasion to be seized in the battle against so-called ‘slave morality’. But how could the levelling occasioned by ‘democratisation’ presage anything affirmative? After all, one of Nietzsche’s invariant convictions seems to be the one regarding the need for social stratification (and more brutally, slavery) for the sake of cultural enhancement and the intensification of spiritual life. As he writes in Human, All Too Human: ‘A higher culture can arise only where there are two different castes in society: that of the workers and that of the idlers, those who are capable of true leisure; or more strongly expressed: the caste of those who are forced to work and the caste of those who are free to work’ (Human, All Too Human (I), § 439). This seemingly obvious lesson from ancient Greece and Indian caste-society, which Jacques Rancière has relentlessly deconstructed, is further specified by Nietzsche in the aphorism, also from Human, All Too Human, entitled ‘My Utopia’: we read there that a ‘better-ordered society’ would be one wherein ‘the hard labour and exigencies of life would be assigned to the one who suffers least from them’.

That is, there is a difference in kind, or difference of nature, registered at the level of sensitivity between the dominant and the dominated, the lords and the slaves. Nietzsche’s utopia is thus a naturalised translation of these pre-political sensitivities and competencies into a social order understood primarily, it should be noted, at the level of the division of labour (and of the division of labour into the manual and the intellectual). But how could the levelling process that appears to accompany the ‘evolving European’ permit such a political translation of differences of nature? And, most importantly, isn’t such an identification of essential political types in tension, if not stark contradiction, with Nietzsche unsparing assault on the metaphysics of a doer behind the deed, a subject behind the action in The Genealogy of Morals, something which could also be said for his treatment of Europe as spirit and subject?

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, allegedly considering Europe’s ‘democratic movement’ sine ira et studio, diagnoses a process of blending and deterritorialisation: ‘The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions under which races originate that are tied to some climate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu’ (Beyond Good and Evil, § 242). But Nietzsche’s hopeful gaze, as ever, is not turned towards the collective effects of this ‘physiological’ transformation, but to the kinds of possibilities such a transformation affords for the breeding of a new type of creative and affirmative human. The future European man in the making is thus ‘an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man … a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction’. But Nietzsche is too disabused, too materialist an aristocratic thinker to consider that the emergence of his new type could do without the deep-seated and frequently brutal inequalities that accompany higher, ‘affirmative’ cultures.

Thus, for the process of European unification and democratisation really to present an escape from the mere dilution of cultural energies, to offer new values, which is to say new hierarchies, then it needs, unwittingly, to generate a new stratification. And this is exactly what Nietzsche posits: ‘The very same conditions that will on the average lead to the levelling and mediocratization of man – to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal – are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality’. Thus the new adaptive and affirmative type will be accompanied in Europe by ‘the production of a type that is prepared for slavery’ in the shape of ‘manifold garrulous workers who will be poor in will, extremely employable, and as much in need of a master and commander as of their daily bread’. In linking democratisation with a new tyranny, Nietzsche thus repeats an argument encapsulated in § 956 from The Will to Power: ‘The same conditions that hasten the evolution of the herd animal also hasten the evolution of the leader animal’. In other words, the ‘pathos of distance’ might be reborn through the very physiology of levelling: this is Nietzsche’s hope for Europe, as a land where the order of rank could identify a transnational Herrenvolk, or master-race, supported by the ranks of an insensitive, enslaved sub-proletariat. Losurdo has argued that this vision of a class and/or race aristocracy whose members celebrate themselves as equals is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century thought, pitilessly cutting across the putative divide between 'liberals' and 'conservatives'.

It is a hope that was already present in Nietzsche’s presentation of the conceptual persona and archipolitical figure of the ‘Good European’ in Human, All Too Human. In § 475 of that book Nietzsche salutes the ‘destruction of nations’ and the emergence, on the basis of nomadism and ‘continual crossbreeding’ of a new, mixed race, the European. He engages in a strong analysis of the demagogic uses of nationalism by ‘princely dynasties’ and ‘certain commercial and social classes’ and presents such a European unification as the only cure against the sickness of anti-Semitism, which is a corollary of pathological fanaticism and manipulative policies surrounding the nation. Is this seemingly ‘progressive’ anti-nationalism at odds with the relentless insistence on rank-ordering and breeding? Does this paean to ‘crossbreeding’ remove Nietzsche’s associations with nineteenth-century racism and Social Darwinism?

Trying to move beyond Lukács’s schematic and frequently untenable treatment of Nietzsche’s anticipations of imperialist ideology and his ‘indirect apologetics’ for capitalism, the Italian Marxist historian of ideas Domenico Losurdo has recently proposed a manner of conceptualising the persistence of a thinking of race and hierarchy in Nietzsche without falling into the patently contradictory activity of presenting him as a German nationalist or an anti-Semite. In his Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel, Losurdo makes an important conceptual distinction between what he calls ‘horizontal racialisation’ and ‘transversal racialisation’. The first of these relates to the essentialist identification of certain nations or groups as simply and invariably superior or inferior. But Nietzsche, as his diagnosis of European democratisation makes patent, can have no truck with a mere reiteration of populist, traditional ‘sectarian’ drives. On the contrary, as his futural and eugenic schemas imply, the generation of new evaluative hierarchies and the breeding of new types cut across – specifically, by way of ‘crossbreeding’ – received national and racial distinctions. But what does remain invariant in this process is precisely the idea of rank and the naturalisation of inequality that Nietzsche had already outlined in his ‘utopia’ from Human, All Too Human.

The core element of Nietzsche’s practice of differentiation within the process of European levelling and hierarchical separation is, according to Losurdo, the racialisation of class, a racialisation which is traneversal inasmuch as it cuts across customary distinctions between races and nations (German, French, Jewish, etc.): ‘The constant element in the Nietzsche’s complex evolution is the tendency to racialise subaltern classes’, which are treated alternatively as a barbarian caste of slaves, a fanatical rabble, a collection of instruments of labour for the dominant classes, a crowd of ‘semi-bestial’ beings, or a motley crew of failures and biological rejects. Nietzsche thus partakes of the tendency within Western liberal and anti-revolutionary thought which treats workers as speaking tools (instrumentum vocale, as in the works of Edmund Burke) or ‘biped tools’ (Sieyès). It is for this reason that a crossbreeding of ‘higher men’, of elites derived from the most varied ‘nations’ is perfectly compatible in Nietzsche with, as Losurdo puts it, ‘an international civil war, which transcends state borders, and witnesses “civil” European elites jointly battling the threat posed by “barbarians”, whether internal or external to the West’. We can thus see why Christianity and socialism represent for Nietzsche a conjoined nemesis, especially inasmuch as Christianity crystallises ‘the collective rebellion of everything downtrodden, wretched, ill-constituted, under-privileged against the “race”.’ (Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Improvers of Mankind’, p. 69)

In this respect, Nietzsche’s thinking can be recontextualised in terms of a long tradition of anti-socialist nineteenth-century thinking which depended, as Étienne Balibar has shown, on the ‘institutional racialisation of manual labour’. This is a position, we might also note, which rests on a nostalgic and utterly insufficient understanding of the relationship between cultural ‘enhancement’, exploitation and the division of labour – note the constant references to Nietzsche to systems of hierarchy and caste where the combination of stratification, homogeneisation and class conflict proper to the nineteenth-century European context would be averted. It is in this sense that Nietzsche’s vision of a unified and hierarchical Europe, in which internal domination would presage external power, is a phenomenon of the ‘’new racism of the bourgeois era’, a racism which ‘has as its target the proletariat in its dual status as exploited population … and politically threatening population’. It is worth noting that Balibar regards contemporary racism not only as constantly overdetermined by class struggle, but sees its very origins in notions of caste.

Perhaps the driving reason behind Nietzsche’s partaking of this form of anti-socialist nineteenth-century class racism – which, as Losurdo painstakingly chronicles, accompanied Nietzsche ever since his trauma at the apocryphal burning of the Louvre by the Communards in Paris – is his inability to distinguish between a levelling equivalence and an innovative and ‘transvaluing’ equality. As Montinari has judiciously argued, against Lukács, a certain suspicion if not critique of equality as a political category was even shared by the likes of Engels, and it might be noted that Nietzsche himself was more acquainted with a bland, Christian socialism than with the more affirmative and uncompromising aspects of the Marxist and communist movement. It is interesting to note however that Nietzsche’s handling of the problem of the proletariat in his own work is never capable of breaking out of the alternative between necessary subordination (such as in his speculations about the necessary ‘Sinification’ of the European working class), on the one hand, and colonial expansionism via the working or lumpen elements of the European population, on the other. Thus, in Daybreak, a seemingly rousing attack on the mechanisation of the labour-force and ‘impersonal enslavement’, and a critique of the idea of a social-democratic discipline of the working-class in view of future victories, ends up with nothing but a kind of social-imperialist epic, in which Europe is expanded and renewed by ‘an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either a slave of the state or the slave of the party of disruption’. Hence the slogan: ‘Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be better for it!’ The criminal degeneration of the working-class will thus, in Nietzsche’s imaginings, give rise, as European virtues go a-wandering across the globe to a ‘wild beautiful naturalness and be called heroism’ (and Europe itself might make do with ‘numerous Chinese’ with their ‘modes of life and thought suitable to industrious ants’ and even give Europe some Asiatic perseverance via crossbreeding) (Daybreak, § 206).

Beyond European Universalism

In Nietzsche’s musing on the ‘impossible class’, as in his thoughts about tyranny, slavery and democratization, or his fervent anti-nationalism, we encounter an important archipolitical theme in his work: the need for Europe somehow to separate itself from itself. This theme gives rise to a whole host of peculiar oscillations and contradictions. Thus, Christianity is deemed to be a kind of Oriental illness, a symptom of slave revolt or untouchable morality polluting (alternatively) a Greek, Roman or Jewish European, or Western, matrix. We also see a drive for geographical exodus which translates a need to break with the decadent dialectic of ‘European nihilism’ and the political options (liberalism, socialism, nationalism, populism) it gives rise to. More interestingly, towards the end of his conscious life, Nietzsche increasingly tests out the possibility of the superiority of other civilisational lineages over against Europe. In his treatments of Islam, or Hinduism – all of which are explicitly anti-liberal, hierarchical and frequently misogynist – he considers the possibility that an affirmative culture might entirely separate itself from the Christian, Western heritage. As he writes in The Anti-Christ: ‘Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. … For in itself there should be no choice in the matter when faced with Islam or Christianity, as little as there should be when faced with an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given in advance: no one is free to choose here. One either is Chandala or one is not… “War to the knife with Rome! Peace, friendship with Islam!’ (The Anti-Christ, p. 196). Though this Islam may be purely ‘semiotic’ (as Ian Almond argues in a piece on Nietzsche’s phantasmatic infatuation with Islam), a mere signifying counterpart and provocation, it does reveal to us two things: one, the fact that as Nietzsche’s work progresses any identity to the archipolitical or philosophical concept of Europe, or indeed the West, is thrown into doubt; two, that the hierarchical invariants of his thinking remain determining in his evaluation of cultures: as he writes in his notebooks, the superiority of Arabs and Islam lies for him in the fact that we are dealing with a world ‘where man believes in order of rank and not in equality or equal rights’.

Despite the rather unsavoury reasons for this civilisational dislocation, it is nevertheless true that in its extreme consequences we could say, following the Italian philosopher Biagio de Giovanni, that Nietzsche’s thought brings into crisis ‘the self-representation of Europe’, and with Losurdo, that Nietzsche strikes a potent blow against the Christian imperialism that in his epoch (let us recall that the Berlin Conference and the scramble of Africa under the cover of anti-slavery morality takes place in 1884) seeks to justify Europe’s ‘civilising mission’, and destroys the genealogical myth of Europe and the West, whether Christian-Aryan-Germanic or the Hebrew-Christian-Greek-Occidental one. But the aim, consistently with Nietzsche’s work is to destroy not just the hypocritical universalism that is harboured in such saccharine ideologies which cloak the fundamental brutality of imperialism, but to jettison universalism altogether. In this respect, it is interesting to note, by way of conclusion, that non-European anti-colonial intellectuals, such as Aimé Césaire Fanon, found in Nietzsche a potent tool for a critique of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called ‘European universalism’ and a recasting of that universalism and humanism on a planetary scale. Edward Said’s description of Fanon’s relationship with Freud, Marx and Nietzsche in Culture and Imperialism is of interest here: ‘In the subversive gestures of Fanon’s writing is a highly conscious man deliberately as well as ironically repeating the tactics of the culture he believes oppressed him’. He treats his predecessors as ‘of the West – the better to liberate their energies from the oppressing cultural matrix that produced them. By seeing them antithetically as intrinsic to the colonial system and at the same time potentially at war with it, Fanon performs an act of closure on the empire and announces a new era’.

References

Ian Almond, ‘Nietzsche’s Peace with Islam: My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend’, German Life and Letters, 56, 1 (2003): 43-55.

Alain Badiou, ‘Casser en deux l’histoire du monde’, Les conférences du Perroquet, 37 (1992).

Alain Badiou, ‘Who is Nietzsche?’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 11 (2001): 1–11.

Étienne Balibar, ‘“Class Racism”’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 1992.

Stefan Elbe, ‘“Labyrinths of the Future”: Nietzsche’s genealogy of European nationalism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 7, 1 (2002): 77–96.

Biagio de Giovanni, La filosofia e l’Europa moderna, Bologna: il Mulino, 2004.

Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Mazzino Montinari, ‘Nietzsche Between Alfred Bäumler and Georg Lukács’, in Reading Nietzsche, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffman, New York: Vintage, 1989.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Gary Handwerk, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage, 1994.

Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, 2004.

From the Criticism of Heaven to the Government of Heaven

2007-09-17T03:32:00.000-07:00

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate.

Far from absurd or totalitarian, as Newsweek and the partisans of a return to Tibet's friendly feudalism would have you believe, this initiative might be regarded as another sign that the PRC is far ahead of the pack in carrying to its utmost consequences the precepts of what Foucault called "governmentality", stripping it of any residuum of transcendence. Chinese officials, after all, have defined their regulation of the Dalai Lama's inscrutable sovereignty as "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

The tyranny of the letter

2007-06-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

'We can't have you use the name Lévi-Strauss. Here, your name shall be Claude L. Strauss.' I asked why and they said, 'The students would find it funny, because of the blue jeans.' And so I lived in the U.S. for many years with a mutilated surname.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, De près et de loin

Fred Astaire meets Frederick Taylor

2007-05-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

With the aim of developing a more sustained inquiry on the new managerial dementia, and at the prompting of Monsieur K-Punk, I offer the reader this veritable gem which just landed in my inbox: I have removed sundry institutional identifiers and the proper names of the contingent personifications of this increasingly deranged logic of "performance". I have not added a single word. Honest.

STAFF DEVELOPMENT in conjunction with the DANCE MOVEMENT THERAPY programme would like to invite you to this teambuilding workshop with a difference. Using innovative techniques developed by Laban and Lawrence and Lamb to understand patterns of movement and their behavioural significance in the workplace, this workshop will apply a creative approach to explore an issue of interest to staff - how to make the most of difference and work better in teams.

Background
Rudolph Laban and Frederick Lawrence pioneered this study in the 1940s, observing manual workers' movements which they termed the 'industrial rhythm'. Lamb, who began as their apprentice before setting up his own consultancy, took this work forward to observe white collar and managerial workers, developing a theory of Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA) which has since been widely used in organisations for management development:

'It was...this matching of movement against decision-making model that enabled a leap to be made from observing operatives and workers on the plant floor to looking at managers.' (Lamb, 'Development of Movement Pattern Analysis.' in Moore, C-L. 'Movement and Making Decisions: The Body-Mind Connection in the Workplace' ( 2005) New York:Dance Movement Press)

Intrigued? Experience it for yourself by signing up for the workshop:

Aim:
To demonstrate how creative work using visual and kinaesthetic tools can deepen awareness of self and other whilst taking over the necessary roles as a team member or as the leader of a team. By offering alternative conceptual skills the main aim is to improve the cooperation and communication in a team.

Objectives:
* Explore simple movement exercises individually, in pairs and in small groups
* Begin to identify personal movement preferences and recognise others' strengths and differences
* Learn basic Laban movement observation and analysis principles
* Consider own relationship to personal preferences and role expectations in a team
* Develop small group work skills through creation of an 'ideal' working environment, identifying ground rules. Utilise visual and kinaesthetic resources to assist this process and ultimately create a 'moving tableau'
* Raise awareness of personal and group's relationship to current working environment and identify action plan for improvement
* Discuss and evaluate process throughout the workshop to clarify learning points and growing (self-)awareness

Archives of May

2007-05-20T03:59:00.000-07:00

For the delectation of grammophiliac militants and militant grammophiles, the May Events Archive. Among the gems are facsimiles of Servir le Peuple, the pamphlet of the Union des jeunesses communistes (marxiste-leniniste), SI #11, and some architects enragés.

...the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity...

The Imperative of Sedition (In Memoriam John Brown)

2007-05-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

"Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth to-day? John Brown loved his neighbour as himself. He could not endure therefore to see his neighbour, poor, and unfortunate or oppressed. This natural sympathy was strengtHened by a saturation in Hebrew religion which stressed the personal responsibility of every human soul to a just God. To this religion of equality and sympathy with misfortune, was added the strong influence of the social doctrines of the French Revolution with its emphasis on freedom and power in political life. And on all this was built John Brown's own inchoate but growing belief in a more just and more equal distribution of property. From this he concluded - and acted on that conclusion - that all men are created free and equal, and that the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."

W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909)

"We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space; but let some significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbours. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands. Our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye, a city of magnificent distances."

Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

Les cibles douces

2007-05-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

v. 2.1 of Soft Targets, a fine anomalous compendium of the poetic and the militant is now out: civil war, sedition, double power, "new geometries of hostility", Arno Schmidt, Mssrs. Badiou and Bourdieu, yet another polemogenic outing by S/Z, and Lohengrin in Leningrad...

Petropolitics / Retropolitics

2007-05-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

Peak oil, energy conflicts, resource wars, blood for oil, great games, grand chessboards, returns of geopolitics and oil grabs: the politics of oil is infused by rival modes of political simplification – whether critical or governmental. Recent writings on the politics of oil seem bewitched by the idea of the curse of oil as a kind of temporal curse, by oil as the viscous element that mires us in supposedly outmoded forms of politics. But why is petropolitics so often lived and portrayed as a kind of retropolitics, as burdensome weight on the very possibility of political innovation?

In his brilliant, panoramic presentation on ‘carbon democracy’ at the recent Oil and Politics symposium – tracking the shift from the sites of class struggle in the coal economy, and its miner-transport worker-dock worker alliance, to the politics of petroleum, which flowed through Europe on the back of the Marshall Plan – Tim Mitchell mentioned Sartre’s idea of oil as ‘capital bequeathed to man by other living beings’ (and we could muse here about Sartre as a philosopher of oil, on which more at the end). In this respect it is of more than anecdotal interest that writing a film-script about the tragic aporias of political freedom and revolution in 1946, a film originally entitled Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) and now called L’engrenage (translated as In the Mesh, but more literally The Mechanism), Sartre would choose the predicament of a subaltern oil-rich nation to dramatise a politics in which freedom is condemned to repetition, in which actors who want to dirty their hands with change cannot but eventually submit to the demands of the international and the constraints of the practico-inert, and finally to betray novelty.

In 2003, responding to the apparent rebuttal of his notion of ‘Empire’ by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and seeking to conjure away the spectre of a resurgent imperialism, Michael Hardt opted for a pastiche of Marx: his vision was that of a coup d’état within Empire, an 'Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush', which is to say an attempt to attain a kind of monarchical monopoly over the power-structures of capital, after the hegemonic multilateralism exercised by Bush pére and Clinton. As he wrote, in a 'venal vein, the efforts to control the vast oil fields in Iraq and the Middle East certainly recall numerous imperialist wars to accumulate wealth, such as the British attempts a century ago in the Boer War to gain control of the great South African gold mines – blood for gold yesterday, blood for oil today. Despite these resemblances, however, the old imperialisms do not help us understand what is central in our contemporary situation'. Though few analysts of our political situation would hazard that we are in the throes of a mere cyclical repetition of the imperialism of yore, the notion that we are simply experiencing a fleeting fit of unilateralism, a glitch of sorts in the general tendency towards an increasingly deterritorialised and postnational configuration smacks of wishful thinking and appears heuristically toothless.

The international political developments following Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 and the military campaigns begun (or in the case of Iraq, intensified) in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, have been greeted by many, be it with enthusiasm or bemusement, as a revenge of realism, an imposition of the tried-and-true tenets of power-politics after the market-driven multilateralism and human rights rhetoric of the Clinton years. More specifically, and with particular reference to the politics of oil, numerous commentators have latched on to the idea of a return of geopolitics. Michael Klare, for instance, defines geopolitics as 'the contention between great powers and aspiring great powers for control over territory, resources, and important geographical position, such as ports and harbours, canals, river systems, oases, and other sources of wealth and influence'. Borrowing from Neil Smith, we could speak of 'a vicious resuturing of politics with geography’. Just as German expansionism and the US entry into the war triggered a surge in the buying of Atlases and in the popular American geographical imagination, as Smith tells us in American Empire, so today green zones, Sunni triangles, the al-Shatt waterway or the silhouettes of Caspian pipelines grace our broadsheets.

The US Army journal, for instance, sees fit to resuscitate the naval geopolitics of Alfred Thayer Mahan (baptiser of the ‘Middle East’) in order to enlighten its readers about China's 'Oil Obsession' and its strategic conundrum: how to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which currently witnesses 80% of its oil traffic, and avert a remarkable military and strategic weakness.

Or consider the kind of mental horizon, or geopolitical imagination, behind these lines from the Baker Institute’s Task Force Report on America’s Energy Security: 'An accident on the Alaska pipeline that brings the bulk of North Slope crude oil to market would have the same impact as a revolution cutting off supplies from a major Middle East producer. An attack on the California electric power grid could cripple that state’s economy for years, affecting all the economies of the Pacific Basin. A revolution, in Indonesia would paralyze the liquefied natural gas (LNG) import-dependent economies of South Korea and Japan, affecting domestic politics and all of their trading partners’ . Emphasis mine.

To what extent can the link between oil and politics, and more specifically oil and war (or political violence more generally) be captured by a geopolitical vocabulary? Now, much as geopolitics may have appeared as an anachronistic intruder in a conceptual arena dominated by debates on human rights, governance, and economic globalisation, it cannot be said that it was ever off the agenda – far from it. As Peter Gowan argues, the apparent obsolescence of geopolitical discourse after the demise of the Soviet Union hid a renewed concern with classical geopolitical issues exacerbated by the collapse of the Cold War as a principle of equilibrium. Among certain American intellectuals and strategists the collapse of the USSR was viewed not just as an opportunity to extend political and economic hegemony, but also as a grave potential threat. After all, the absence of a need for protection threatened partially to unmoor Western Europe and Japan from their relative subordination to US economic and foreign policy. The end of the rationale behind what Gowan calls the 'protectorate system', which made for the unipolarity of the capitalist world now confronted the US with a dilemma: 'Should it pull back from the protectorate game in Europe and let Europe float free? Or should it instead attempt to rebuild the security dependence of Western Europe, mindful of the fact that such rebuilding could only be achieved by extending the system of hub-and-spokes protectorates much further East, deep into the heartlands of Eurasia? In short, it would mean extending US unipolar unilateralism to the entire globe'. Even the so-called humanitarian intervention of the 1990s in the Balkans cannot be regarded as immune to such geopolitical considerations – as the persistent American military presence in the area testifies.

As Gowan notes, contrary to the image of a humanitarian multilateralism that had left such debris of the Cold War behind, there was remarkable consensus across the American political spectrum, and within the Clinton administration itself, regarding these geopolitical stakes. In 1993, Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake summarized this in the slogan 'From Containment to Enlargement'. In 1995, Zalmay Khalilzad, neo-con point-man, former ambassador in occupied Iraq and one of the figures behind the infamous Wolfowitz Doctrine synthesized in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance report, wrote a RAND corporation paper entitled 'From Containment to Global Leadership'. Two of the sub-sections make the focus of Khalilzad’s proposals evident: 'hedge against reimperialization in Russia' and 'discourage Chinese expansionism'. Not only do such aims express a consensus among many policy analysts across the partisan divide, but they have a specifically geopolitical character, inasmuch as they repeat one of the commonplaces of geopolitical discourse: the strategic centrality of Eurasia. In the first half of the 20th century, British geographer Halford Mackinder had formulated the idea of the core of Eurasia, what he called the ‘Heartland’, as the pivot of geopolitical contention – he’d captured this idea in the following motto: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Africa-Eurasia]; Who Rules the World-Island commands the World’.

Mackinder’s vision was contested by Nicholas Spykman, who instead saw the crucial geostrategic prize as the Rimland, those territories – including Europe and the Middle East, which border the Eurasian core. Spykman, anticipating a post-war consensus, wrote in America’s Strategy in World Politics that US policy should be 'directed at the prevention of hegemony'. Coining a counter-motto to Mackinder’s, he presented the winning strategy thus: 'Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world'.

Returning to the contemporary implementation of geopolitics, the link between energy issues, geopolitical strategy and economic hegemony straddles tactical political and partisan disputes in the US. Consider for instance the influential musings of Zbigniew Brzezinski on the significance of Eurasia, or what he calls The Grand Chessboard, for a post-Cold War US strategy. Once again, the persistence of the prevention of hegemony – rather than the open affirmation of dominance – reveals itself as a constant of America’s foreign policy from the Monroe doctrine to the Bush doctrine; a prevention which is geographically modulated and specified, not just in terms of the inhibition of powerful rivals but also, and at times especially in terms of the required openness of territories to flows of capital and flows of energy (such that the Carter Doctrine formulated in 1980, responded to any threat to the 'free movement of Middle East oil' as an 'assault on the vital interests of the United States of America'). Such suggestions seem to bolster the link between petroimperialism and ecoliquidity. For Brzezinski in particular this invariant theme of the prevention of hegemony takes a classical geopolitical, which is to say Eurasian, focus. As he writes in The Grand Chessboard, 'it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. … For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia ... America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained'. Following very closely in Mackinder’s footsteps, Brzezinski goes on to emphasise that Eurasia is 'geopolitically axial', that 'a power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions', namely inasmuch as 'Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources'. It is thus imperative for the US to identify possible Eurasian competitors and their elites which could cause a 'shift in the international distribution of power' and 'formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above...'.

Despite the fact that Brzezinski tends to prioritise the velvet glove over the iron fist, he is open about the imperial coordinates of such a project: 'To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together'. Like for Mackinder, it is the regional cohesion of Eurasia (the coming together of the barbarians, so to speak) which poses a threat, all the more so because of the conjunction of rising energy consumption and Asian economic development which 'is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea'. Prevention of hegemony and openness are once again bound together, inasmuch as 'America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it'. Now, though it may be disputed whether the implementation of the so-called Bush doctrine has entailed the 'comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy’ that Brzezinski called for – he himself seems to vigorously object, as evidence by his trenchant criticisms over the preparations for war in Iran – the link between the flow of oil, American unipolarity (rather than unilateralism per se), and geopolitical design cannot be easily dismissed.

Some, such as Michael Klare, who speaks of the possibility of a 'new cold war in south-central Eurasia', have viewed a link between this vision of geopolitical supremacy and energy as the sufficient reason for the fortunes of recent American foreign policy. As he writes in a 2003 article precisely entitled 'The New Geopolitics', 'American leaders have embarked on the classical geopolitical project of assuring US dominance of the most important resource areas, understood as the sources of power and wealth. There is an ideological consistency to what they’re doing, and it is this geopolitical mode of thinking. … Against this background, it can hardly be questioned that the purpose of the war in Iraq is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia so as to insure and embed American power and dominance in this region vis-à-vis these other potential competitors'. In this regard, for the likes of Klare, a geopolitical constant interacts with the absolute and produced forms of scarcity that afflict a global oil industry plagued by an imbalance between increasing demand and increasing capacity to generate a new, or at least more intense species of inter-imperialist rivalries: resource wars. To paraphrase Hobson’s classic Imperialism, we would have moved from capitalism in general as the 'economic taproot of imperialism' to oil as the energetic taproot of imperialism and of coming inter-imperialist conflicts. It is worth noting here that the discourse of geopolitics and that of resource depletion have a profound affinity, to the extent that they’re both founded on a notion of closure: just as geopolitics in its formulations by Raztel and Kjellen depended on the notion of a finite planet whose political surfaces could be recombined but not expanded, so the discourse of resource finitude or scarcity (which was already contained in that of geopolitics) feeds on the image or myth of a zero-sum game. It is also important to remark here that much of the Marxist discourse on imperialism, which depends not just on the existence of non-capitalist territories but on the possibility of intensively opening up productive resources does not necessarily depend on such a notion of a finite politics.

Whether as one of the driving ideological motors behind the neo-con revolution and its less radical forebears, or as a privileged source of its critique, this resurgence of a geopolitical imaginary – which the nineties had largely viewed as dead and buried – has encountered important adjustments and critiques. To begin with the idea of a geopolitics of oil as founded on the control of oil leaves rather open the issue of how such a control might be exercised, especially if we consider that access, pricing or the enhancement of extractive capacity are neither easily garnered through military-territorial means, nor is it in the least clear how a 'national' differential advantage could be drawn from a resource whose centrality lies precisely in its capacity to fuel an intensely integrated global economy. Here the geopolitical comes into friction with the geoeconomic, or, to use the terminology of Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey, the territorial logic of power and the capitalist logic of power demonstrate that they do not always work in concert. Many authors concerned with the debate over imperialism and American hegemony have indeed asked whether the kind of geopolitical horizon projected by the likes of Khalilzad or Brzezinski is really of a piece with the geoeconomic desiderata of the US government or of dominant fractions of US capital. For Immanuel Wallerstein, for instance, writing in The Decline of American Power, three elements of the oil industry are key for US strategy: participating in profits of the oil industry, control over the price, and access of supply. The US wasn’t to be unduly worried on any of the three counts and the gains to be made of marginal importance vis-à-vis losses. Others, such as Cyrus Bina have pointed out that the internationalization of the oil industry entails that any direct politics of preferential access through military means is off the agenda. For Bina, as for Wallerstein and many others, it is a weakening of hegemony – in a broad political, economic and ideological sense – and not a thirst for resources that pushed America to war. Given his view of the oil industry as globalised, post-cartelised and beyond what he calls ‘administrative pricing’ from the purely energetic angle America’s political behaviour is anachronistic, just as the response which sees it as a kind of ‘oil grab’. The transformations of the oil industry have rendered ‘physical access, pre-arranged inter-company allocation, and indeed administrative pricing and control of oil redundant’. It might also be worth noting, as Gareth Stedman Jones did some years ago in an excellent article on US imperialism, that it is not occupation or colonisation but rather the Open Door policy, inaugurated in 1899 in China as a kind of continuation of the Monroe Doctrine, and a constant all the way to the Carter Doctrine on the Middle East, that marks out the specificity of US imperialism.

Praising Hay, the initiator of the Open Door policy, Woodrow Wilson declared: ‘If we are not going to stifle economically, we have got to find our way into the great international exchanges of the world. … The nation’s irresistible energy has got to be released for the commercial conquest of the world’.

Of course, much of the critical consensus on US policy is based on the notion that its flagging commercial and productive energy, joined with its increasing material need for energy is what has pushed some ideological tendencies within the US establishment into catastrophic geopolitical fantasies. These fantasies, breeding a kind of imperialism of decline, are not just catastrophic, but deeply contradictory: if the singularity of American-led economic imperialism is to 'make the world safe for capitalism', so to speak, then the pursuit of an open pre-emptive geopolitical design – of the kind which would join its Iraq venture and its overall system of bases with the aim of a geostrategic intervention into the Rimland of Eurasia– cannot but appear as hardly functional to US interests.

So is Harvey’s riff on the geopolitical mottos mentioned above – 'whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the future' – a dead end? Does it really make sense for the a declining US power to 'ward off that competition and secure its own hegemonic position [by controlling] the price, conditions, and distribution of the key economic resource upon which those competitors rely'? Only if we think (a.) that the oil industry allows such forms of control, (b.) that the securing trumps the backlash against such a brazen geostrategic gambit, and (c.) that it is evident what the interest of America or 'US capital' tout court might be. According to John Bellamy Foster, the neo-con 'attempt to create a US-led global imperium geared to extracting as much surplus as possible from the countries of the periphery, while achieving a "breakout" strategy with respect to the main rivals (or potential rivals) to US global supremacy. The fact that such a goal is irrational and impossible to sustain constitutes the inevitable failure of geopolitics'.

But how are we to deal both with the return and with the failure of geopolitics? With the insistence and very real effects of its projection of the world and onto the world (e.g. the US basing strategy), as well as with its deeply fraught and contradictory nature? One interesting tack is to question the efficacy and pertinence of the brutal simplification of the socio-political dynamics of energy that it operates, to bring to the fore the myriad agents, relations, and precarious assemblages that give oil its political substance (a line taken by other papers in this conference, especially by Tim Mitchell and Andrew Barry). Another, perhaps closer to the political economy debates on imperialism I’ve touched on, involves questioning the very notion of 'national interest' or 'national capital' that underpins the geopolitical imaginary of states and their critics. In their provocative and theoretically innovative book The Global Political Economy of Israel, Nitzan and Bichler try just such a move by questioning what they term 'the familiar straitjacket of aggregates' and the 'Hobbesian anthropology' that views the politics of resources in terms of national interest. Looking specifically at the 'differential accumulation' of capital, the authors suggest that in the period following the upstream nationalization of oil in the Middle East (what they call the period of limited as opposed to free flow) 'Middle East conflicts were the main factor "regulating" the differential accumulation of the Petro-Core'.

Rather than accepting the policy discourse of national interest they point to the differential advantage accrued by a faction of dominant capital – rather than capital tout court – what they refer to as the 'Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition' through the 'energy conflicts' of the Middle East (a claim they accuse RETORT of plagiarizing). It is the power exercised by such a coalition vis-à-vis its capitalist rivals (for instance the Technological capital that rose to prominence with the new economy), which determines the interest in apparently geopolitical conflicts.

A very different attempt at questioning the return of geopolitics can be found in the very recent collection Oil Wars, edited by Kaldor, Karl and Said. Pitting the multilateralist discourse of governance, stakeholders and human rights against the stark imperatives of geopolitics, Kaldor et al. speak neither of resource wars nor energy conflicts but of new oil wars. Rather than attacking the imperialist aims of the US, these essays, which take the final form of policy suggestions, view the carrying out of 'old wars' as both anachronistic and counterproductive. As the case of Iraq appears to prove, while the US may think it is operating in an old-school geopolitical arena, it has mired itself in a new war. Such a war is 'associated with weak and sometimes ungovernable states where non-oil tax revenue is falling, political legitimacy is declining and the monopoly of organized violence is being eroded. In such wars, the massive rents from petroleum are used in myriad ways to finance violence and to foster a predatory political economy'. Carrying out old wars in new war scenarios is thus seen as the main category mistake that has led the US into its current predicament. Despite the salutary reminder of the failure of the geopolitical imaginary when it is faced by non-state actors and criminal political economies, such a multilateralist proposal falls short on a number of counts.

First of all, it has the tendency to treat the geopolitical as a mere illusion that can be evaded by good policy choices and proper ‘governance’. In so doing, it also seems to exculpate imperialist ventures and to take their ‘good intentions’ at face value. Second, it appears entirely oblivious to the specific ways in which multilateralism – understood in terms of the coordination of dominant governments, corporations, international organizations and so-called civil society – is a very determinate product of Cold War and post-Cold War unipolarity, specifically in terms of ‘democracy promotion’ as part of a certain hegemonic agenda (see Nicolas Guilhot’s The Democracy Makers). Third, it puts the weight on the victims of war rather than on its perpetrators – as in a typical sentence ‘on the eve of the invasion, Iraq showed all the signs of irreversible state failure’ (they were asking for it, weren’t they?). Fourth, and finally, by linking the new oil wars to the idea of an ‘oil/rent-seeking/conflict cycle’, Kaldor et al. even as they demystify the ‘magical’ powers of oil, engage in myth-making of their own: oil, as a kind of retropolitical substance, seems to determine polities into the pre-modern temporality of fate (cycles), a temporality from which persistent colonial and imperial intervention is written out. Moreover, the account is also based on a very common moralization of capitalism which stigmatizes always-already failing petro-states by viewing them as states which bypass the pedagogical virtues of production. In their terms, oil is pernicious for economies because of the manner in which it engages in a ‘de-linking between wealth and work’ (something which is hardly the province of oil states alone, since it could be said to characterize highly financialised capital as such). Thus, while the novelty of the oil wars might allow us to break from the geopolitical obsession, it also fosters a deeply unhistorical and mystifying vision of oil as a kind of fate which only the stewardship of ‘responsible’ governments, NGOs, and civil society can forestall. The escape from retropolitics thus risks leaving us with an anti-politics, under the guise of ‘governance’.

To conclude, perhaps the only way to escape an oscillation between a multilateral governance and a unipolar geopolitics which are often indistinguishable, is to rediscover, as Tim Mitchell suggested we do in his presentation, the politicizing effects of oil, the manner in which it both catalyses and congeals forms of democratic action and resistance. In order to do this, we also need to think about the link between oil and violence outside of the often mystifying domain of ‘national interests’. Returning to Sartre, we might then choose to reflect on how the notion of scarcity so closely linked in the recent period to oil might be seen as a driving force in the conflictual character of oil. As Sartre writes in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, ‘in so far as anyone may consume a product of primary necessity for me (and for all the Others), he is dispensable: he threatens my life to precisely the extent that he is my own kind; he becomes inhuman, therefore, as human, and my species appears to me as an alien species’. The politicisation of finite resources can thus link indispensable resources to dispensable men, humanisation to dehumanisation, such that violence ‘is that of freedom against freedom through the mediation of inorganic matter’. While scarcity is both produced and reproduced in ever new forms, and is not necessarily the cause for open conflict, it does mean that ‘the relations of production are established and pursued in a climate of fear and mutual mistrust by individuals who are always ready to believe that the Other is an anti-human member of an alien species; in other words, that the Other, whoever he may be, can always be seen by Others as “the one who started it”.’ In order to break the link between the retropolitics and petropolitics, or between Hobbesian violence and oil, it will also be necessary to reflect on the manner in which the economy of oil perceived as an economy of scarcity may be the bearer of virulent forms of dehumanisation and antagonism.

Le Joli Mai

2007-05-07T05:03:00.000-07:00

Liquidate '68, or, The Obscure Subject of French Politics

2007-05-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

"In this election," Sarkozy proclaimed, "we’re going to find out if the heritage of May 68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever." While the voicing of political principle and its antagonistic distillates may be an increasing rarity in our world, where enmity is naturalised (and racialised) by the imperatives of “national security” or violently, if antiseptically, outsourced to lands failed and threatening, it is heartening to see our Gallic neighbours revel in the performance, if not always the reality, of political struggle. Far from interest rates or pensions being mobilised to prod the swing voter into action, Sarkozy has seen it fit to evoke the spectre of 68 to dramatise the stakes of the upcoming second round. As if the tiresomely descried stagnation, or worse degeneration, of France rested on the inexhaustible effects of that fated date.

So much so that Sarko is now presenting his presidency as a chance, forty years on, retroactively to karcheriser the mutinous streets of the Latin Quarter and all of the heterogeneously hideous effects they spawned. Whence the catchy slogan: ”I want to turn the page on May 1968”. His political biographers even tell us that only his mother held him back, at the age of 13, from joining in the pro-De Gaulle march against the students and workers. It might be tempting to simply regard this as an obligatory passage for reactionary politics within the context of France, and an attempt to swing Paris back, after the banlieue riots, CPE protests and mobilization against the Constitution, to its status as “the capital of European reaction” (Perry Anderson). But I think Sarkozy’s wish to liquidate 68 – to repave the French political imaginary and erase the very memory of those events prior to their (inevitably depressing) fortieth anniversary – bespeaks a harsher form of subjectivity than a merely reactionary one.

Despite the presence of the insufferable André Glucksmann, epitome of reactionary subjectivity in Alain Badiou’s recent Logiques des mondes, alongside Johnny Hallyday and, alas, Charlotte Rampling, in Sarko’s entourage, the figure of the reactive subject is still too mild to properly identify la singularité Sarkozy. Taking François Furet as emblematic of this kind of subjectivity, Badiou sees reaction as a manner of starkly denying the necessity of rupture embodied in a political event (e.g. the French Revolution) but nevertheless incorporating some of the novelties it carries in a narrative where radical subjectivity and collective action are simply hysterical and catastrophic gestures that, at best, give rise to changes which the gradual and reasonable unfolding of historical development would have led to anyway. The event, and the implacable fidelity to its consequences, are futile, obstacles to the very principles they seek to realise (in this respect, the American pragmatist hostility to John Brown and anti-abolitionist politics is a perfect example of reactionary subjectivity).

Now, the obscure subject is made of different mettle. Its aim is not to neutralise novelty by incorporating some of its effects and despairing of its needless excess. Rather, political obscurantism is aimed at radically negating the new present that a faithful subject has arduously brought into being. As Badiou puts it, it “systematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race…) whence it derives that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed”. In this case, Sarko’s gambit is that the very act of liquidating the divided body of 68 may help in conjuring up the full body of a morally rearmed French nation. His ultimately sinister “Ensemble, tout est possible” (insofar as the body of this ensemble is brought together by the exclusion of immigrants, soixante-huitards, racaille, and so on) is thus infinitely distant from the slogan of the 1995 French protests: Tous ensemble. While Sarko is still functioning within the ambit of reactive politics (capitalist parliamentarianism) his tendencies, following Badiou’s useful formalisation are obscure:

It is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls “modern”). … Things are very different for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming.

Sarkozy’s negationist hatred of course can’t be directed at political novelty itself – which in any instance has been squandered by much of the Left and systemically next-to-obliterated by years of neo-liberal Restoration – and much less at a living political subject, but, in a typical show of the obscurantist mindset, is directed at an eclectic set of noxious predicates and phenomena, a “divided body” indeed – inasmuch as division is the spectre that seems to haunt all political discourse around this election. Thus 1968 is the proverbial “quilting point” for “welfare dependency, fraud, thievery, egalitarianism”, “moral and intellectual relativism”. It is the deep cause of a "moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc”. In order to disinter and re-bury the body of political subjects in revolt, what better than to portray 1968 as the very absence of principles? Also Sprach Sarko: “The heirs of May 68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent”. Values, hierarchy, morality – all moribund, all to rise again into the full body of the Republic once the canker of 1968 is finally excised. In order to mobilise the electoral hordes for his counter-revolutionary revolution he is even willing to depict 68 as a kind of ethical catastrophe that made possible the “excesses of financial capital”, “golden handshakes” and “rogue bosses” (alas, this take on 1968 has been put forward by less obnoxious sources: the otherwise excellent Adam Curtis, for instance, in his spurious attack on Laing’s anti-psychiatry in The Trap, or Debray, who in the NLR’s issue on the 10th anniversary of 1968 portrayed it as a vanishing mediator of sorts for American hedonistic capitalism).

This blessed rage for order does indeed seem to confirm one of Badiou”s hunches, to wit that an event and the faithful subject it catalyses do not just generate an independent trajectory, but reshape the whole of “subjective space”, forcing both reactionaries and obscurantists to develop their positions in relation to it.

But what of Royal, her camp, and the culprits of this decades-long moral malaise, the soixante-huitards? On one level, Royal seems to have responded by laying claim to that legacy, having earlier even flirted with the thought of Jacques Rancière. She responded to Sarko with a show of fidelity, saying that “May 1968 is 11 million workers who obtained the Grenelle accords, the right of women to access to contraception, a wind of freedom against a totally closed society”. Leaving aside the fact that the Grenelle accords, negotiated by Chirac, were held in contempt by much of the rank-and-file and all the Maoist and Trotskyst Left, another statement of Royal’s should also be kept in mind: she has in fact accused Sarkozy of trying to provoke “another 1968”. In this second sense, closer to the reactive one in Badiou’s terminology, 1968 stands in for disorder, social crisis, and a conflict that must be averted at all costs by the forces of reformism. It is not in any way the cipher for a moment of political invention, for the possibility of a radical restructuring of society. The tenor of the “Left” replies is also symptomatic. The irritating Cohn-Bendit predictably rehashes his long-time anti-communism to brand Sarkozy’s liquidationism as “Bolshevik” and, in perfect Euro-liberal form, praises 68 for its “liberation of the autonomy of individuals”. Many of the rest emphasise the “values” of freedom and autonomy, but in the guise of a salutary infusion of joy, pleasure and mobility into the polity, not in terms of a radical alternative to the status quo.

Alas, in the absence of real fidelity, it is to be hoped that soft reaction will prevail over venomous obscurantism…

UPDATE: Bensaid and Krivine of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire on "The Hatred of 68"

The Question Concerning Technology

2007-02-04T15:15:00.001-08:00

How does it stand with the spinning of a propeller? It might spin all day long, yet nothing actually happens here. But when the airplane brings the Führer to Mussolini in Venice, then history happens.

Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dew Wesen der Sprache (1934)

Se ha muerto el hijo de puta. Viva Chile!

2006-12-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

Fanatismus Redux

2006-12-11T06:21:00.000-08:00

Fanaticism: A Brief History of the Concept

The Success of Biopolitical Islam?

2006-08-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

Epigraphs for a post to come:

Hizbollah has trumped both the UN army and the Lebanese government by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars - most of it almost certainly from Iran - into the wreckage of southern Lebanon and Beirut's destroyed southern suburbs. Its massive new reconstruction effort - free of charge to all those Lebanese whose homes were destroyed or damaged in Israel's ferocious five-week assault on the country - has won the loyalty of even the most disaffected members of the Shia community in Lebanon. ... But for now - and in the total absence of the 8,000-strong foreign military force that is intended to join Unifil with a supposedly "robust" mandate - Hizbollah has already won the war for "hearts and minds". Most householders in the south have received - or are receiving - a minimum initial compensation payment of $12,000 (£6,300), either for new furniture or to cover their family's rent while Hizbollah construction gangs rebuild their homes. The money is being paid in cash - almost all in crisp new $100 bills - to up to 15,000 families across Lebanon whose property was blitzed by the Israelis, a bill of $180m which is going to rise far higher when reconstruction and other compensation is paid.
- Robert Fisk

As guerrilla warfare increasingly adopted the characteristics of biopolitical production and spread throughout the entire fabric of society, it more directly posed as its goal the production of subjectivity - economic and cultural subjectivity, both material and immaterial. It was not just a matter of "winning hearts and minds," in other words, but rather of creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of interaction. In this process we can discern a tendency toward moving beyond the modern guerrilla model toward more democratic network forms of organization.
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Sense Certainty and Terror

2006-08-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

VYSHINSKY: Accused Bukharin, were you with Khodjayev at his country place?

Bukharin: I was.

VYSHINSKY: Did you carry on a conversation?

Bukharin: I carried on a conversation and kept my head on my shoulders all the time, but it does not follow from this that I dealt with the things of which Khodjayev just spoke; this was the first conversation...

VYSHINSKY: It is of no consequence whether it was the first or not the first. Do you confirm that there was such a conversation?

Bukharin: Not such a conversation, but a different one, and also secret.

VYSHINSKY: I am not asking you about conversations in general, but about this conversation.

Bukharin: In Hegel's Logic the word "this" is considered to be the most difficult word....

VYSHINSKY: I ask the Court to explain to the accused Bukharin that he is here not in the capacity of a philosopher, but a criminal, and he would do better to refrain from talking here about Hegel's philosophy, it would be better first of all for Hegel's philosophy....

Bukharin: A philosopher may be a criminal.

VYSHINSKY: Yes, that is to say, those who imagine themselves to be philosophers turn out to be spies. Philosophy is out of place here. I am asking you about that conversation of which Khodjayev just spoke; do you confirm it or do you deny it?

Bukharin: I do not understand the word "that." We had a conversation at the country house.

(As quoted and discussed in Alain Badiou, Théorie du sujet, pp. 329-30.)

Year Zero: Faciality

2006-06-08T14:17:00.002-07:00

Towards a Psychological Economy of the Book

2006-05-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

It has been said of money that it is a commodity like any other, which is already a great mistake. But, were one to say that books are commodities like others, one would be making a far graver mistake. To class books among riches is to confuse what pertains to intelligence with what pertains to need or will. The value of a book is an ambiguous expression, because each of its copies, to the extent that it is tangible, appropriable, exchangeable and consumable has a venal value which expresses its degree of desirability, but, in itself, as essentially intelligible, inappropriable, unexchangeable, and inconsumable, which does not mean indestructible, it possesses a scientific value, which expresses its degree of credibility, without counting its literary value, which signifies its degree of expressive seduction. But, whether considered as product or as teaching, a book is capable of allying itself with other books or of combating them. There is no book, considered as a teaching, which is not made with other books, often given in the bibliography, and among which there are some of which one can say that it is made for them, because it confirms and completes them. Moreover, there is also no book which is not made against other books.

Gabriel Tarde, Psychologie économique, Tome I, Paris, F. Alcan, 1902

Badiou's Anti-Dialectics

2006-05-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Must an emancipatory politics of antagonism steal its tools from the laboratories of its nemeses (Hobbes, De Maistre, Heidegger, Schmitt, Junger...)?

Though persuaded that there is often more to be gained from an (abstract) acquaintance with revolutionary conservatives than with reformists liberals, I think it also remains imperative to, as it were, draw the line between "our" way of drawing the line and theirs.

Badiou puts the point persuasively, if somewhat elliptically, in this excerpt from The Century:

I have insisted on the singularity of the theory of the Two, which drives the intellectual life of the century in all its domains. This is an anti-dialectical Two, a Two without synthesis. Now, in every demonstration of fraternity there is an essential Two: That of the ‘we’ and of the ‘not-we’. The century arranges the confrontation between two manners of conceiving the not-we. Either one sees it as a polymorphous formlessness – a disordered reality – or else one sees it as an other we, an external and consequently antagonistic subject. The conflict between these two conceptions is fundamental, setting out the dialectics of the anti-dialectical. If in effect the ‘we’ relates externally to the formless, its task is that of formalising it. Fraternity becomes the subjective moment of the in-formation of its formless exterior. According to this model of antagonism, one will declare things like: The apathetic must be rallied to the Party; the left must unite with the centre to isolate the right; the artistic avant-garde must find forms of address perceivable by everyone. But then the century sees itself as a formalist century, in the sense that any we-subject is a production of forms. In the end this means that access to the real is secured through form, as was argued by the Lenin of What is to be Done? (the party is the form of the political real), by the Russian ‘formalists’ after the Revolution, by the mathematicians of the Bourbaki school, or, as we’ve already demonstrated, by Brecht and Pirandello. If, on the contrary, the ‘not-we’ is necessarily always already formalised as antagonistic subjectivity, the first task of any fraternity is combat, the object of which is the destruction of the other. One will then announce that whoever is not with the Party is against it, that the left must terrorise the centre to defeat the right, or that an artistic avant-garde must seek out dissidence and isolation so as not to be ‘alienated’ within the society of the spectacle.

At the heart of the century, and for reasons pertaining to the anti-dialectics of any primordial duality, the properly dialectical contradiction between formalisation and destruction plays itself out. It is this contradiction that Mao gave shape to, in an altogether innovative text, by distinguishing the antagonistic contradictions – which are in fact anti-dialectical or without synthesis – from the contradictions within the people, which bear on how the antagonistic contradictions themselves are to be dealt with, and in the end concern the choice between formalisation and destruction. Mao’s essential directive is never to treat the ‘contradictions at the heart of the people’ in an antagonistic manner, to resolve the conflict between formalisation and destruction by means of formalisation.

This is perhaps one of the most profound lessons, but also one of the most difficult, that the century has bequeathed to us.

The Young Trotsky Discovers the Class Basis of Zombies

2006-05-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

"Another scene he was to remember was that of a group of labourers coming from the fields, in the twilight, with uncertain steps and with their hands stretched out in front of them - they had all been struck by night-blindness from undernourishment."

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (Verso, 2003), p. 9.

Carl Schmitt and the Death of Politics

2006-05-13T18:59:00.000-07:00

In his forthcoming The Century, Alain Badiou proposes that, in order to bypass the specular innocence which liberalism produces by branding Nazism as a kind of unthinkable Evil and absolute Crime, and to avail ourselves of effective means to make its return impossible, we should think through National Socialism as a form of political thought. In this respect, it is worth looking at one of the rare instances of a rigorous (juridico-political) ‘internal’ formulation of National-Socialism, Carl Schmitt's 1933 essay State, Movement, People.

That these theses arose from an attempt to counter the dissolution of the political in the plurality of interests, a tendency coextensive with the doctrine of liberal parliamentarianism, qualifies Schmitt’s thought not only as an exemplary case of the 20th century’s practical and speculative limitations but also as a necessary point of transit for any thorough reckoning with the contemporary standing of the problem and the place of politics.

Schmitt’s concept of the political is indeed an offspring of the century, and indirectly, of the trenches that gave rise to the (otherwise incommensurable) literary gestures of the likes of Karl Kraus and Ernst Jünger. We could even say that Schmitt’s project lies in the transformation of the intensity of combat into the condition for a critique of the cacophony of doxa and the masquerade of petty interests. If the question governing Schmitt’s thought can be stated as What is a political entity?, then it is a question firmly rooted in the paradigm of war, but precisely in a war whose political character requires reassertion. This much is starkly stated in The Concept of the Political: The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid. The dissolution of the political in the impurity or intensity of violence is countered by Schmitt with the thesis that only in the assumption of war as possibility does politics attain autonomy. But can the political withstand this variation on the paradigm of war, without once again being overcome by the opacity of violence? Any answer must turn to the structure, the topology of the Schmittian position.

Given that the categories of the political must themselves remain autonomous, it appears that the only ‘substance’ of the political entity, the friend, is its standing as the instance of a ‘dualisation’: the friend declares itself in the same act whereby it declares its enemy; it decides itself and its other. Politics is born of the Two, the Two of the possibility of killing. Again and again, Schmitt will affirm that this ‘dualisation’ is unique and autonomous – whilst any opposition can be politicized by the possibility of killing, the substance of the political can never be drawn from anywhere other than the decision, from the ‘insubstantial’ possibility of killing.

This stance is informed by Schmitt’s abiding disdain for any abstract normativity, his insistence on the fact that the political (and its juridical effects) can only be thought in situ. Now, the Hobbesian consequence is that whilst there is indeed a political entity, the friend, more specifically, the state of the friend, there is no political domain. If politics is conflict, dualisation, then it depends on the decision regarding the Two, but this very decision precludes any experience of the political. Paradoxically, once the political, in the form of the state of friends and/or of the state sovereign, determines itself in dualisation, it disappears as a domain.

The political is not merely the drawing of the line which distinguishes friend and enemy, norm and exception, it is in a sense this line itself, and nothing but this line. The political itself, like the sovereign, becomes what Schmitt called a ‘borderline concept’. In a sort of transcendental topology of the political (later carried over into the realm of geopolitics, as in the post-war The Nomos of the Earth), the political decision is the one that decides upon the domain (in Schmitt’s fundamentally reactionary framework: the state) but precisely insofar as the domain itself must be made safe from the extremity of conflict. This liminal autonomy of the political turns into the death of politics. The political is the dark side of the state, a state predisposed to the disposing of men.

But defining the political at the limits of the state is not enough. Even if the basic entity, the object of Schmitt’s juridico-political inquiry remains the state, the political entity only arises in the situated response to the question: Who decides? For a thinker for whom intensity was not a category of the new, danger becomes the only criterion of true decision. The political decision, and therefore the political entity, thus appears to possess two sides, two moments. Firstly, is there danger? Must the norm be suspended to cope with this danger? This beckons the figure of the sovereign. Secondly, who is dangerous? Who reveals the possible need to kill? Thus appears the enemy (and the friend). Note that both these questions presuppose the existence of the political entity. The political decision as such presupposes itself, it is the real, extreme, possibility of its ‘normal’ substance. And indeed, without this substance the coincidence of friend and sovereign in the bosom of the state, which, for Schmitt, constitutes the problem of democracy, would not obtain. Schmitt’s adherence to the Nazi party, crowned by the publication in the same year of State, Movement, People , signals the recognition of a solution, in a concrete situation, as he would have it, of a set of theoretical difficulties.

The first addition to Schmitt’s position, as evidenced by the title, is the tripartite distinction which distinguishes the political subject (the NSDAP and the SA), its administrative-institutional apparatus (the State), and the non-political body politic (the population). Whilst all three constitute the State in the extended sense, this is a first determination of the very subject of politics. Who decides? The party, for the people, through the State. The reciprocal determination of these three components radically enhances the scope of the political. The new, in the form of a global suspension of the norm in favour of permanent norm-making, irrupts into Schmitt’s thinking. Once the exception becomes a state, the decision is no longer exceptional. But the problem remains, how is the political decision a decision of the political entity for the political entity. Or, how is Nazism to be a ‘sovereign democracy’? Schmitt’s solution, that is, the Nazi solution, is, with the party as subjective element of political action, to equate the sovereign with the Führer, the friend with the race. Whence the heading of the crucial fourth section of Schmitt’s essay, The Principle of Leadership [Führerprinzip] and the Identity of the Race: Fundamental Concepts of National-Socialist Right. If the political is, in the last instance (and in the Nazi case, in every instance) a matter of the decision on enmity, and such a decision must be made in situation, not according to abstract principles or transcendent norms, then the right based on this decision must be based on the transitivity, or, more strongly, the immanence of sovereign and friend. This is indeed exactly what is stated in the 1933 essay with regard to the Führerprinzip: It is a concept of an immediate contemporaneousness and of a real presence. For this reason it includes, as a positive requirement, an unconditional racial identity (Artgleichkeit) between the Führer and the partisans. On racial identity rests the continual and infallible contact between the Führer and the partisans as well as their reciprocal fidelity.

The affirmation of the political, with enmity and exception as its specific traits, thus culminates with the National-Socialist thesis of the identity of Führer and race. It is at this apex of course that the political must, once again, become indiscernible from its opposite, that the autonomy of the political becomes the sovereignty of the biopolitical. To counter the concrete interests cloaked in the abstractions of liberalism with the real possibility of the political decision, Schmitt must, while inadvertently confessing the strictly political, decisionistic character of the Nazi state, naturalize the political, so as to draw from the concrete situation the substance of right. Whether in conservative or totalitarian garb, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political in terms of the rights of exception collapses into a depoliticization, into an obliteration of antagonism as complete as it is radical. Is this the price to be paid for thinking the political in situation? Are the primacy of the political and the affirmation of conflict doomed to such a catastrophic destiny? The fact that Schmitt’s theories, and his decision of fidelity to National-Socialism, were founded on a critique of the very liberalism that today reigns hegemonic makes facing his legacy all the more urgent. To do so demands that an emancipatory politics determine its own criteria of antagonism, and its own criteria of decision, to both counter and cut with the fundamentally statist, ethnocratic and transcendent criteria of Schmitt's vision of the political.

ADDENDUM: Some interesting reflections on Schmitt, the law, and in/determinacy at Law and Disorder (April 02, 2006 entry).

2006-05-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

2006-04-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

Spectacular Interpellation

2006-04-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

Readying myself for the seemingly inevitable return, or rather regurgitation, of il Cavaliere once L'Unione cock it up, I am whiling away my afternoons with Paul Ginsborg's useful Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (Verso, 2004). Alongside the narrative of the systematic project of cultural mutation (or, in Pasolini's more rebarbative terms, "anthropological genocide") that allowed Berlusconi to engender a nation (well, half at least) of Last Men (and women - 44.8% of housewives voted for Forza Italia alone in 2001), there are gems such as the following, culled from an article by Alberto Moravia (of The Conformist fame) in il Corriere della Sera:

Television, I think, is something like sleeping or eating: a physiological need, which reading obviously isn't. In any case, the record for the disassociation that television produces between me as pure image and me as a writer came some days ago in Verona. In the main square of the city, a girl came running up to me and exclaimed: 'How happy I am to make your acquaintance: who are you?'

The Proletariat Wasn't Born in a White Vest

2006-04-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

An extract from a 1934 piece by Brecht. I've translated it (from a French version, alas) for inclusion in a book by Badiou. A beacon of communist-nihilist optimism to shine on these dark times.

Briefly: when culture, in the midst of its collapse, will be coated with stains, almost a constellation of stains, a veritable deposit of garbage;
when the ideologues will have become too abject to attack property relations, but also too abject to defend them, and the masters they championed, but were not able to serve, will banish them;
when words and concepts, no longer bearing almost any relation to the things, acts and relations they designate, will allow one either to change the latter without changing the former, or to change words while leaving things, acts and relations intact;
when one will need to be prepared to kill in order to get away with one’s life;
when intellectual activity will be so restricted that the very process of exploitation will suffer;
when great figures will no longer be given the time needed to repent;
when treason will have stopped being useful, abjection profitable, or stupidity advisable;
when even the unquenchable blood-thirst of the clergy will no longer suffice and they will have to be cast out;
when there will be nothing left to unmask, because oppression will advance without the mask of democracy, war without the mask of pacifism, and exploitation without the mask of the voluntary consent of the exploited;
when the bloodiest censorship of all thinking will reign supreme, but redundant, all thought having already disappeared;
oh, on that day the proletariat will be able to take charge of a culture reduced to the same state in which it found production: in ruins.

Yule galore

2005-12-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

Exergue

2005-11-30T16:54:00.000-08:00

The three inter-linked essays below - the last of which is a text from the recent conference "Is a Politics of Truth Still Thinkable?" - are the first drafts of a bicephalous project on (1.) the political and religious genealogy of fanaticism, as both concept and accusation, and (2.) the recomposition of a communist politics. Conjectures and refutations, in the words of a nemesis, are welcome. Further drafts, entropy allowing, will follow, together with tangential notes and reflections.

A.T.

Mao and Manichaeism

2005-11-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

‘The Rebel will be beyond sex or will not be at all’: this lapidary statement adorns L’Ange (1976), one of the most elusive and extreme works to issue from the political and intellectual experience of French Maoism. In the attempt to retroactively account for what they regard as the drastic separation between their own militancy and the ambient theme of liberation, whether sexual or otherwise, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau try to delineate what they call the forms of cultural revolution, to be sharply distinguished from the intra-systemic ideological revolution that does not target the very existence and discourse of mastery – a position they polemically ascribe to the libidinal materialism of Lyotard and the schizoanalysis of Deleuze-Guattari.

In so doing Jambet and Lardreau turn toward the monastic practices of early Christianity, to the Manichean themes of the ‘hatred of sex’, ‘hatred of work’ and ‘hatred of thought’. The question, posed against the lucid and caustic political scepticism of Lacan, is the following: Can there be a form of revolt that does not turn into mastery, i.e. that is cultural and not ideological? A real separation of the Rebel from the Master?

The dualistic ontological matrix of this concept of revolt, however, undergoes an extensive critique in their later collaboration Le Monde (1978) and particularly in Jambet’s treatment of the barbarous will to purity of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. On the basis of this short-circuit between Christian asceticism, May 1968, and the ravages of Cambodia, I will try to address the following questions: Does the barbarous issue of dualistic or ‘angelic’ revolt militate in favour of a certain fatalism concerning the eternity of mastery? Or must we instead replace the distinction between cultural and ideological revolution with a more articulated concept of resistance? Finally, can we formulate a political concept of desire that obviates the alternative between the equivocal celebrations of libidinal materialism and the horizon of a completely desexualised revolt?

The narcissism of renegades?
The spectres of recuperation, repetition and imitation have always haunted the various ideologies of resistance, at least those not all too happy to celebrate the joys of ambivalence and the hybrid, those for which resistance is not just the name of a minimal inflection – a torsion, a distance, perhaps even a perversion – in the densely articulated space of hierarchies, partitions and dominations. In order to make a contribution to specifying what resistance may mean today, whether the term is even applicable or operative, what its minimal lineaments may be, I would like to turn to a relatively minor, if, as I hope to argue, symptomatic, episode in the vicissitudes of this concept: the intellectual trajectory that led some figures emerging from the current of French Maoism, first, to formulate an ideology of pure revolt, or absolute resistance, countering the complicities of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics vis-à-vis the perennial mechanisms of power and oppression; second, to revise the latter theory of ‘angelic’ or non-dialectical revolt into a tragic theory of morality, separating the resistance exemplified by moral protest and the defence of human rights from any notion of revolt, now considered ‘barbaric’ – thus adopting, despite all protestations to the contrary, the key thesis of the nouvelle philosophie, as instigated and ‘produced’ by Bernard-Henri Lévy, to wit, that there is a bloody thread running straight from Das Kapital to the Gulags, and that it is philosophy’s collusion with mastery and the state that lies behind the ‘totalitarian’ disasters of the 20th century. The aforementioned trajectory is encapsulated in two works arising from the collaboration of Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, philosophers schooled at the École Normale at the time of the May events, and militants in the Gauche Prolétarienne, the most visible of the post-68 Maoist organisations, famously supported by Foucault and Sartre against the censorship of its newspaper, La cause du peuple. The GP disbanded in 1974 after its increasingly patent inefficacy on the shop-floor and its last-minute retreat from the option of armed struggle. It would be easy, and perhaps even useful, to reduce the two works in question, L’Ange and Le Monde, to mere effects of an exquisitely Parisian sequence, which led a few children of the elites, ‘the little princes of the University’, as Lacan sardonically noted, into a spectacular but ineffectual, and misinformed, embrace of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, through a period of inevitable disappointment, into an equally overblown and narcissistic exploitation of their personal failures for media effect, and, finally, to the collaboration with the increasingly hegemonic ideology of human rights and humanitarian interventions, still with us today – witness the pro-Bush pronouncements of André Glucksmann, ex-GP member, and author of arguably the most prominent work of the nouvelle philosophie, The Master Thinkers. Such a micro-sociology of the upper class normalien militant might have its attendant joys, especially for the Francophobe among us, but I won’t indulge in it here. Indeed, everything that needs to be said regarding the role of Jambet and Lardreau in what one might be inclined to call an ‘objectively reactionary’ ideological phenomenon, as agents of a functional anti-revolutionary doxa, is economically encapsulated in two texts from the time: Gilles Deleuze’s scathing interview ‘Concerning the new philosophers and a more general problem’, and, Dominique Lecourt’s ‘Dissidence or Revolution?’. Besides their role in stifling any philosophical and conceptual experiments by engendering a new journalism of ideas, and their participation in the Cold War theme of ‘human rights’ forwarded by the then Carter administration in the United States, the function of the nouveaux philosophes amounts to the relentless and public enunciation of two theses, which are, according to Deleuze: ‘THE revolution must be declared impossible, uniformly and always’ and ‘the only possibility of the revolution, for the nouveaux philosophes, is the pure act of the thinker that thinks it impossible’. It is easy to see how the conjunction of these two theses made the nouveaux philosophes both into a perfect and willing pawn in the stakes of the Cold War and allowed them to maintain their privileged point of enunciation as tragic renegades of communism (in a kind of farcical Parisian reprise of the ‘god that failed’ generation of Koestler et al.). Though perhaps inevitably reaching some of the same conclusions, I would like to go against the grain of Deleuze’s analysis and provisionally extricate the work of Lardreau and Jambet from its historical and ideological coordinates, in order to assay its use in reconsidering the theme of resistance. First, I would like to consider their attempt to think the ‘autonomy of revolt’. Against any dialectics of system and insurgency, power and resistance, Lardreau and Jambet try to think what an absolute form of revolt could be, one that isn’t simply the reiteration, under a different guise, of the eternal reality of mastery. This is what is encapsulated in the distinction between ideological and cultural revolution, a theme that is accompanied by a trenchant polemic against any form of sexual liberation, or of politics of desire, which is condemned as the exemplary form of a recuperable revolt. What I would like to consider is the profound ambivalence of such a ‘manichean’ notion of revolt, which both provides a potent critique of the distracting fantasies of freedom and expression forwarded by a certain kind of libidinal materialism and serves as the antechamber for a position, presented in Le Monde, which, by making the realisation of revolt into the site of absolute crime, ‘provisionally’ accepts the eternity of inequality for the sake of a politics of protestation, one which, alas, cannot but serve a certain kind of master (the Western master of human rights and liberal democracy, the master of the lesser evil, the lesser master).

Lacan against the naturalists
As I have mentioned, the wager of Lardreau and Jambet, in the first phase of their work, at the volatile cusp between Maoist extremism and resignation to the ‘world’, is that of thinking a pure revolt, a revolt that would not be a mere functional epiphenomenon quickly reabsorbed into the eternal history of domination. But this wager is profoundly determined by ‘failure’, which is why the attempt to forge an ontology of revolution, an ontology of the ‘other world’ of revolt under the sign of the Angel (we will see in a moment why the figure bears this name), is first and foremost an operation of radical doubt, of unsparing critique. Specifically, the failure of the political sequence that takes the name of ‘cultural revolution’ – in China through the re-imposition of order and reforms (marked by the opaque death of Lin Piao), as well as the cult of Mao, in the French microcosmos through the triumph of the reaction and the impasse of armed struggle – seems to leave Jambet and Lardreau with two ideological options that would take stock of 68 without simply writing off its occurrence as a non-event: (1) a radicalization of the figure of the revolt, which would found itself on an unsparing critique of all collusion with the apparatuses and discourses of domination; (2) a transformation of the Manichean event of revolt, of the hope in the elimination of all mastery, into a capillary thinking of localized resistance and desiring production, an endemic micropolitics for which 68 signals the systematic evasion of the classical alternative between equality and non-equality, domination and non-domination. The critical purification of revolt – whereby either revolt will be autonomous and non-recuperable, or it will not be – and the fierce attack on the second option are inextricably linked (see the subtitle of L’Ange: Pour une cynégetique du semblant). The missing link is Lacan. Lacan’s systematic scepticism vis-à-vis the events of 68 is thus raised to the level of a purifying filter for the ideology of revolt: in order to foreswear all collusion and all recuperation one must not only move beyond Lacan, but also go through Lacan: revealing the entirely illusory character of libidinal revolt in order to prepare the way for a real revolt. Or, to use a striking motto from L’Ange: ‘To follow Mao, one must be a Lacanian!’ The crucial element in this purification through polemic, such that the messianic wait is coextensive with the obliteration of semblance, is a certain understanding of Lacan’s formulation of the ‘discourse of the Master’. In its distilled (and wilfully impoverished) version by Jambet and Lardreau, this entails the notion that (1) a master-less society is impossible, (2) all desire is dictated by a certain relationship to signification, meaning that (2a) all desire is sustained by the lack of its object and (2b) all desire, and all enjoyment, is ultimately dictated by the master. Of course, the critical and political efficacy of this thesis, which makes no distinction between master-as-signifier and master-as-political-agency depends on the premise that reality is through and through discursive. As Lardreau writes: ‘There is no nature, there is only a discourse on nature’; ‘the real is nothing but discourse’; ‘the world is a fantasy [fantasme])’. It is the crucial error of naturalism, whether ‘trivial’ or ‘libidinal’, to deny these psychoanalytic theses and therefore deceive the subject into thinking and acting as if desire could be realised (liberated or expressed), as if the absence of mastery could be attained through a particular use of sex. What is more, the sin of such naturalism is, in bypassing Lacanian pessimism, simultaneously to evade the problem of the necessity of revolt (which is the correlate of the eternity of mastery). In other words, to dissolve the problem of domination (linguistic, political) into a flux of desire indifferent to any separation between the dominator and the dominated. It is also to evade the crucial question posed by Lacan, which is that of the complicity of philosophy with the discourse of the master, which he formulates as follows: ‘Qu’est que la philosophie désigne dans toute son evolution? C’est ceci – le vol, le rapt, la soustraction à l’esclavage, de son savoir [son savoir-faire], par l’opération du maître’. The constraints imposed upon desire by psychoanalytic discourse lead Lardreau and Jambet to a stark conclusion, the only possible path to evade the pessimistic truth of psychoanalysis (‘the discourse of the Master is eternal, since being a Master, is being a Master of discourse’), to wit, that ‘One must do exactly the opposite of what is said by the discourse of liberation, one must totally disjoin sex and rebellion.’ Sex, or more precisely sexual desire in its subjection to a form of signification which is the basis of mastery (‘la fonction de signifiant sur quoi s’appuie l’essence du maître’), is something that cannot be liberated, since it is precisely through and through constituted by discourse. The only hope for Jambet and Lardreau (to remain Maoists, in the sense of partisans of absolute revolt, of the end of domination) is thus to subtract revolt from any reference whatsoever to sex. Whence the necessity to pose three distinctions: of the body from sex, of thought from reason, of discourse from the discourse of the master. The angelism of revolt translates precisely this sexlessness, and the idea that ‘the rebel thinks’ passes over into a ‘correction’ of Lacan: in order not to reduce revolt to the mere grunting of a bestialized subject, to a grotesque theatre of victimized affect, or an unreasonable discourse, a thought of revolt must be possible. The paradoxical conclusion, to our ears, is of course that desire and revolt are incompatible. The Sadeian and libidinal naturalists (materialists) engage in the culpable obfuscation of this incompatibility, which leads to their peddling of a semblance of revolt, a perversion complementary to the maintenance or even intensification of the power of the master (for instance by creating, through the illusion of subversion, ever more sites for the extraction of surplus-value). What does the semblance of revolt (or resistance or subversion, we’ll consider the terms to be equivalent for the time being) consist in? It consists in trying to bypass the necessary but artificial closure of Mastery lucidly registered in politics by Hobbes and in the unconscious by Lacan, by introducing a link between desire and nature. Basically, the existence of nature is at the basis of the semblance of revolt. This is the reason for Jambet and Lardreau’s penchant for Hobbes and Lacan over Locke and Sade (not to mention the object of their most vicious diatribe: Lyotard): the former lucidly state both the eternity and the (discursive) artifice of mastery, without trying to fix it in any natural signs or processes. It is clear that we are here confronted with a struggle in theory against one of the effects of 68, the promotion of a libidinal materialism marked by a return to Sade, a return which attempts to discern in Sade some kind of anti-authoritarian content.

The hatred of sex
L’Ange begins in a starkly autobiographic if highly poeticized tone, as a tale of a conversion suspended between the failure of a project and the resurgence of order and new, false prophets, on the other. Quotations of Saint Peter and Beckett, a ring of desperation, mentions of sleepless nights and shattered lives. In the midst of this wave of weakness and reactions a call: ‘We will not let ourselves be Schereberianised.’ The conversion was no psychosis, something must be retained: ‘And we know that duplicity must be refused, that there are two paths and that they find one another repugnant, that we must not be apostates, but neither must we go further in our imperfect conversion: against all powers and dominations, maintain the hope that another world, despite everything is possible. To designate the possibility no other image came to us but that of the Angel.’ Why turn to Christianity at the very point when a conversion has failed, especially since the authors say that, following Lacan, ‘the fact that God ex-sists means that he is not’? Because, Jambet and Lardreau contend, to elucidate the failure and remain faithful to the possibility of a politics of non-domination, whilst eschewing the semblance of liberation provided by the libidinal materialism of the likes of Lyotard and Deleuze-Guattari, one must undertake an enquiry into the forms of cultural revolution, in order to think how the practical repudiation of authority (their baseline definition of cultural revolution) can transform itself or be transformed into another discourse of mastery and other, perhaps more brutal, forms of domination. The central essay in L’Ange, Lardreau’s wonderfully entitled ‘Lin Piao as Will and Representation,’ is thus precisely an investigation into (primitive) Christianity as a formal matrix for cultural revolution, one bearing certain crucial isomorphism with a specifically Marxist-Leninist cultural revolution and also some profound lessons about its paradoxes and limitations. In a certain sense, which we might compare with the recent work of Badiou, Žižek Zizek or Agamben, Jambet and Lardreau put forward the thesis that Christianity is the eternal model of cultural revolution. Their specific aim in this comparative exercise in forms of anti-authoritarian subjectivation is linked to a twofold relation to Lacan: one the one hand, as Lardreau writes, ‘he is the only one thinking today, the only one who never lies, le chasse-canaille’ (in other words the antidote to the semblance of liberation and reality of capitalist perversion allegedly peddled by the likes of Lyotard). On the other hand, if ‘another world’ – not a better or gentler world, but a world without a master – is possible, if an ‘angelic revolt’ is not a contradiction in terms, then Lacan’s transcendental pessimism must be punctured. The strategy is to divide revolution, to divide division itself, as it were, between cultural and ideological revolution. The will to absolute purity is the law of cultural revolution. This means of course, that from the vantage point of the order that such a revolution intends to abrogate the cultural revolution simply does not exist – in Christianity, purity in the extreme is just a cloaked prelude to an easily classifiable debauchery (as is the case with pilgrimages in which the sexes mixed), in politics, a master-less society is simply the cover or antechamber for another form of domination, so that one might as well eschew the dangers of a purification that cannot but issue into impurity. The distinction between the two is given in the difference drawn between the penchant of ideological revolution for symbolic castration, accepted inasmuch as it is a negation of the negation and thus a position of the good, and the real castration of the heretic, or cultural revolutionary, which is a pure subtraction without return and is thus theologically equated by the ‘ideological’ church with evil itself. In Jambet’s later ‘Reflection on the new state of Cambodia’ written in 1978 against Lardreau and Jambet, and Badiou’s, own paeans to the taking of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 (Badiou’s were not retracted, of course, as Jambet pointedly remarks). Jambet gives this definition of the crux of ‘cultural revolution’: ‘To have done with mastery is to abolish all its attributes, without letting even one of them subsist. There is in the very essence of rebellion, in its definition, this will to radically exhaust the ground of mastery. Among the imperatives that any social master cannot see disappear there is above all the obligation for his flock to reproduce […] furthermore, there is the obligation to produce and to respect a certain quantity of knowledge’. I shall return in a moment to the analysis of the regime of Pol Pot in terms of this characterization of revolt. Turning back to the question of Christianity, which Lardreau in L’Ange approaches in the Foucaultian terms of the practices of early heretic sects, the key elements of its cultural revolution are accordingly the refusal of sex (of pleasure, family and sexual difference) and the refusal of work, foregoing the imperative of the master, that his flock, or his cattle – Lardreau pointdely uses the word bétail – produce and reproduce, in all senses of the term, from the physiological to the economic. Having made the distinction between the cultural revolution (abolition of the master) and the ideological revolution (replacement of the master by another, dissimulation of the master), Lardreau points to the monastery as the site of conversion of cultural into ideological revolution (a conversion which is actually the shift from one history or world to another, on the basis of the dualistic matrix affirmed at the outset); from the errant, asexualised errancy of pilgrimage, into a fixation to the land, the schedules of work and the sexual division of mature monasticism; and finally, the partition between those with the vocatio and those without, against the uncontrolled contagion of the revolutionary ideal. Beyond the example of Christianity, and with specific reference to the pseudo-revolution that they espy in the liberationist themes of 68, sex-pleasure is viewed as a key operator in the transformation of cultural revolution into ideological revolution, trading in the abolition of mastery for a re-valuation of morality – whether as liberation or repression is entirely indifferent from the standpoint of revolt. For Lardreau thus, hatred of sex is viewed as an escape from this genre of systemic blackmail. It is in this light that he reads the multiple debates about the role of chastity: specifically, within cultural revolution sexual difference is to be abolished, in order for the master to have no hold, thereby producing a kind of militant indifference or indiscernibility – far more powerful than immorality – against both nature and the Church. The key is to render oneself useless to mastery. Virginity and the mixing of bodies in pilgrimage and asceticism are thus an obstacle to the control and partition of the sensible – not the kind of negation that can be easily manipulated, not a functional excess. But alas, the hatred turns into legislation, the master of reproduction cannot but localise its practice, dampening its effects. This is what happens in ideological Christianity, whose institutions are aimed at warding off the threat, indicated by Lardreau, of a sexless mass of pilgrims, without sexes, names, places, entirely improductive, a smooth sterile mass with no grip for power. Leaving aside the question of knowledge, of the revolutionary hatred of knowledge (the third target of the heretic/revolutionary), it is worth pointing out the importance of the theme of the hatred of work. In the analysis of monasticism this follows a parallel path to sex, moving from a kind of mystical otium to the obligation of work, whereby the anti-social cultural revolution of the desert monks is transformed into the ideological revolution that merely changes the ancient partition of the vita activa (manual labour) and the vita contemplativa (intellectual labour) into the convergence of spiritual probity and the obligation of work within the parameters of institutionalised monastic life.

Year zero
The theme of work becomes particularly enlightening if we turn to Jambet’s discussion of Cambodia in Le Monde, and the manner in which it links to the shift from the distinction between cultural and ideological revolution to the one between cultural revolution (or rebellion tout court) and terrorism. The Khmer are presented first as the ‘purest’ attempt in the lineage of purification, being to Marxist-Leninism what it is to Proudhonian anarchism, to wit, an accusation that its predecessor has not gone far enough in the destruction of the old, that its revolts have been mere deferrals, displacements of hierarchy that do not attack the principles of exploitation and oppression at their source. Jambet follows his statement about the essence of revolt, with a simple thesis, that had already been presented in L’Ange. In the earlier book, under Lardreau’s pen, and referring to the voluntary abjection and baleful ignorance of the disciple, the ascetic servility of the monk, it took the following form: ‘Once it is no longer commanded by the hatred of the Master, but rather to obedience, the Hatred of Thought [or the repudiation of knowledge] becomes the abject subjection to the thinking of Authority’. Such abject subjection, compounded by the terroristic obliteration of bodies, of any point of resistance, is what Jambet will glean from the witness accounts and party documents of the Kampuchean ‘organisation’, Angka, about which he writes, ‘non-knowledge becomes at once the single knowledge of the authority of Angka’. What explains this reversal of cultural revolution into the terror of authority? For Jambet, the explanation is, in the abstract, a simple one and is contained in the following theorem: When revolt conserves one of the attributes of the Master it engenders the maximal State. In other words, when cultural revolution leans on the absolutization of one element – in the case of Cambodia, the generalisation of the imperative of production, a generic work imposed upon an anonymous mass of ‘equals’ (the reversal of proletarian purity into the sombre repetition of the Asiatic mode of production), accompanied by the destruction of pleasure and the obliteration of scientific knowledge – it entails the most absolute authority, the elimination of any material support for practices of resistance, or, what’s more, for any subjectivation alternative to the subjection to the imperative of masterlessness. Or, to link Jambet’s discussion to the question of capitalism, the elimination of exploitation, working through the secret Master – Pol Pot as Brother Number One, the Angka (or Organisation) as the inapparent, anonymous entity that masters masterlessness – is converted into the most absolute and ruthless oppression imaginable. But is this alternative, between a blind fidelity to the fury of purification, and the acceptance of some variety of liberal democracy as the only material for resistance, really compelling?

Beyond the lesser evil
The question negatively posed by the trajectory that goes from the nouvelle résistance of the Gauche Proletarienne to the sexless autonomy of revolt of L’Ange to the resignation to worldly morality of Le Monde is the following: must the attempt to escape from the logics of failed revolt, in its three branches, structural repetition, specular doubling and recuperation, end up in mysticism and/or resignation to a liberal-capitalist status quo? Or, to borrow from Jacques Rancière, is it possible to move from the logics of failed revolt and the autonomy of revolt to the seemingly more nuanced, but ultimately more powerful, affirmation of the existence and intelligibility of logical revolts? Jambet and Lardreau’s work finishes with a kind of mystical realism: some Masters are better than others, in this world, and the only revolt is a spiritual revolt, an inner revolt. Irony of history whereby the Maoist Lacanian turns into the sombre cousin of the Rortyan liberal ironist (or the nephew of Koestler’s Yogi), dejectedly adjudicating the lesser evil between Kerry and Bush, and retreating into a spiritual foyer intérieur to be seized by the light of Molla Sadra or the icy depths of Lautréamont. So is this another reason to give up on the fanaticism of revolt, or on its possible autonomy? I think we can answer no, and for two reasons. The first has to do with Lacan: does his teaching really reduce to the moral evaluation of masters, the sober knowledge of the lesser evil? The second has to do with Marx. First, with Marx avec Lacan as it were: Jambet and Lardreau evade the problem of surplus value, of the plus-de-jouir as something that might affect the nature of mastery. Second with Marx the militant: in order to evade the dialectics of mastery, not only must Jambet and Lardreau sing the praises of real castration, they must obliterate the real political problem of dialectics, the one indicated by the Maoist formula ‘One divides into two’: what kind of organization, what kind of political subject, can effect a determinate separation from the capitalist order, in such a way as to constitute a generic part, a realization of non-domination? It is only by thinking the determinate subtraction, through organization, from mastery that one can actively think a way out of the moral blackmail of the ‘lesser evil’. However, to think such a subtraction, to think an ideology of revolt, a communist politics, which would be adequate to our conjuncture, it is of the greatest importance to consider the specificity of capitalism, even in terms of the theory of discourses forwarded by Lacan. Two options. The first is Lacan’s own in Seminar XVII. There, we are confronted with the specificity of capitalism (and real socialism) as variations on the discourse of the master, in Lacan’s terms as the ‘modernised discourse of the master’, which, following the originary expropriation of the ‘know-how’ of the slave effected by philosophy, puts knowledge (S2) in the place of mastery, or agency. The second can be found in Zizek’s Tarrying with the Negative, with specific reference to the Khmer Rouge. Zizek’s first point is that it is not the master-signifier per se, but rather a supposedly saturated network of knowledge, without lack and without transcendence, which is the key to contemporary capitalism. Whence the infamous thesis that Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism (this could be well adapted to DeLanda and our belated fascination with cybernetics). So are the Khmer really, as Jambet and Lardreau argue, actually a realisation of the autonomy of the rebel, such that we would be obliged to renounce revolt for a moral attitude of ‘lesser evil’? Zizek’s answer is no. Movements like the Khmer Rouge must be understood as a brutal solution – an ‘infinite judgment’, in Hegelese – to the intrinsic antagonism that defines the political framework late capitalism, between the formal emptiness of liberal democracy (Badiou’s capitalo-parliamentarianism) and the survivances of ‘traditional elements’ (in this respect the Pol Pot’s Angka is the specular opposite of contemporary Salafism), in other words in terms of ‘the constitutive antagonism of today’s capitalism’. Apropos of the Khmer (and of their Peruvian counterparts, Sendero Luminoso), Zizek notes the following: ‘The result of this desperate endeavour to surmount the antagonism between tradition and modernity’ which paradoxically unites ‘the most radical indigenist antimodernism (the refusal of everything that defines modernity: market, money, individualism…) with the eminently modern project of effacing the entire symbolic tradition and beginning from a zero-point’ is ‘a double negation: a radically anti-capitalist movement (the refusal of integration into the world market) coupled with the systematic dissolution of all traditional hierarchical social links, beginning with the family (at the level of “micro-power”, the Khmer-Rouge functioned as an “anti-Oedipal” regime in its purest, i.e. as the ‘dictatorship of adolescents”, instigating them to denounce their parents)’. But this means that considering the Khmer as the truth of the barbarous angel – in other words, the idea that any attempt to realise and totalise the dissemination of vanishing events of revolt, is nothing but (radical) evil incarnate, and the reason for the adoption of the ‘kindest’ master – is a fundamental mistake, which ignores the systemic horizon of their emergence (just as it ignores the sequence of historical conditions: Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘secret’ bombing of the Cambodian countryside). As Zizek notes, the Khmer, like Sendero, and, in complementary respect the various forms of Islamic militancy dubiously identified under the banner of Al Qaeda, ‘are an integral part of the notion of late capitalism: if one wants to comprise capitalism as world-system, one must take into account its inherent negation, “fundamentalism”, as well as its absolute negation, the infinite judgment on it.’ The open question of course, which is no way solved by any kind of Leninism of the act, of the kind lately forwarded by Zizek, is the following: what is a subtraction from the material and discursive reality of late capitalism, which wouldn’t simply amount to a symptom? An answer to this question, I think, would lead us to conclude that the ideology of resistance as well as that of pure revolt are insufficient, to the very extent that a true subtraction demands a new thinking of organization. To end with a provocation, we might be wiser to reflect on the partisan and institutional history of the Church, as Badiou enjoins us to do in his Théorie du sujet, than to persist with the subjective logics of the act, conversion and heresy.

Bibliography

François Aubral and Xavier Delcourt, Contre la nouvelle philosophie, Paris, Gallimard, 1977

Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l’idéologie, Paris, François Maspero, 1976

Gilles Deleuze, ‘À propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un problème plus general’, originally published as a free supplement to Minuit 24, May1977, now in Deux régimes de fous et autres textes, Paris, Minuit, 2003

Peter Dews, ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault’, Economy and Society 8.2, May 1979, pp. 127-171

Michel Foucault, ‘La grande colère des faits’ and ‘Pouvoirs et stratégies’ (interview with Jacques Rancière) in Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988, Paris, Gallimard, 2001

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire – Livre XVII. L’envers de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1991

Robert Linhart, ‘Western “dissidence” ideology and the protection of the bourgeois order”, in Power and Opposition in Post-revolutionary societies, London, Ink Link, 1979

Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L’Ange, Paris, Grasset, 1975

Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Le Monde, Paris, Grasset, 1978

Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy since 1968, including the essay ‘Dissidence or Revolution?’ [1978] (London: Verso, 2001)

Jacques Rancière, Les scénes du people, Lyon, Éditions Horlieu, 2003

Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68, Stanford, CA, Stanford UP, 1995

Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC, Duke UP, 1993

Religion and Revolt

2005-11-30T16:24:00.000-08:00

The notion of the Messiah could take root outside of Judaism only in the communistic form of the Christian community, of the crucified Messiah. It was only by faith in the Messiah and the resurrection that the communistic organization could establish itself and grow as a secret league in the Roman Empire. United, these two ideas-communism and belief in a Messiah-became irresistible. What Judaism had vainly hoped for from its Messiah of royal lineage was achieved by the crucified Messiah from the proletariat: he subjugated Rome, made the Caesars kneel and conquered the world. But he did not conquer it for the proletariat. In the course of its victorious campaign the proletarian, communistic mutual aid organisation was transformed into the world’s most powerful machine for mastery and exploitation. This dialectical process is not unprecedented. The crucified Messiah was neither the first not the last conqueror who ended by turning the armies, with which he had conquered, against his own people, subjugating and enslaving them. Caesar and Napoleon also emerged from democratic victories.

Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (1908)

1. Political Theology Today
Let’s begin with a thesis that we can hazard as the encapsulation of a certain Maoist sequence in French philosophy, going from the notorious ‘events’ of 1968 to the publication of Badiou’s Peut-on penser la politique? in 1985: The rebel is the one who gives rise to the exception. Or, in a cruder variant: the rebel is the exception. In either case, the sovereign’s decision, the decision of and for the state, is made in the wake of and against the irruption of the rebel, the subject (whether singular or collective) of revolt. I am echoing, of course, Carl Schmitt’s now infamous thesis, from his Political Theology, ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception,’ a thesis he identified as the distillate of a process of secularization whereby the concepts of politics relayed the categories of theology – illumined, like the latter, by the extreme case, preoccupied, like the latter, with the themes of authority, will, subjection and evil.
Can the recent resurgence in Christian, and more specifically Pauline, models of subjectivation and militancy warrant a characterization in terms of ‘political theology’? Are we, as I’ve begun to suggest, dealing with an inversion of the customary concerns of political theology (the reactionary science par excellence, one might argue); the excavation of a Biblical counter-discourse, to paraphrase Foucault, that would provide the wherewithal to invent new figures of universality and/or subversion after the much vaunted retreat of politics? In a more critical vein, are the propositions extracted from the exhumation of the militant corpus of the Christian faith to be accorded the status of secularized doctrines, with all the historical-metaphysical pessimism and suspicion that entails?
The more or less explicit links made between this Pauline turn and the figureheads of a putatively secular notion of politics and of revolt – whether Marx as a thinker of class in Agamben’s Il tempo che resta or Lenin as a thinker of organization in Badiou’s Saint Paul – beg the question: Are we now confronted with the more or less ironic confirmation of the renowned reactionary thesis of communism as secularized eschatology – not just with the confirmation, but with the proud assumption of this thesis? Given that the gap between the phenomena of revolt, political organization, and militancy, on the one hand, and religious or theological discourse, on the other, is the privileged site of ideology critique in the Marxist canon, is the formal or rhetorical equivalence drawn between commitment and conversion, universality (or communism) and messianism, a mere elision of that key problem? The disincarnate and often wildly rhetorical debates around this renaissance of Christian militancy sometimes make it seem as if we weren’t dealing with a field that has already, at least ever since Engels’s writing on Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants’ War been richly ploughed, thematised, critiqued.

2. Invariance of Revolt
In 1975, Alain Badiou, in the Yenan imprint at the Editions Maspéro of the organization he led, the UCFML (Groupe pour la formation d’une Union des communistes de France, marxiste-leniniste), published the first in a series of pamphlets on dialectical materialism, Théorie de la contradiction, to be followed by the collaborative De l’idéologie the next year. Where ex-Maoists (from the Gauche Prolétarienne) like Christian Jambet and Guy Ladreau drew their metaphysical balance sheet after, as they tellingly put it, ‘having hit bottom,’ Badiou set down, in painstaking and resolute detail, the philosophical groundwork of a Marxist-Leninist theory of revolt. The primacy of revolt – that is, the primacy of practice – is in fact the militant leitmotiv of Badiou’s writings in the seventies. This is especially true of Théorie de la contradiction, a terse speculative commentary upon Mao’s dictum ‘it is always right to revolt against the reactionaries’ (to which should perhaps be added the corollary by Lin Piao, recently quoted by Badiou in his afterword to Peter Hallward’s collection Think Again: ‘the essence of revisionism is the fear of death’). In it, we read the following: ‘Revolt does not wait for its reason, revolt is what is always already there, for any possible reason whatsoever. Marxism simply says: revolt is reason, revolt is subject. Marxism is the recapitulation of the wisdom of revolt.’ It is on the basis of this equation between political practice and antagonism that Badiou can write: ‘The real is not what brings together, but what separates. What happens is what disjoins’ [Le réel n’est pas ce qui rassemble, mais ce qui sépare. Ce qui advient est ce qui disjoint].
Here we must hear the materialist thesis that the faktum of revolt – or in Badiou’s more recent discourse the irruption of the event or dysfunction of a transcendental regime – comes first, subjectivation second. Moreover, to the extent that any structure of placements, any represented situation, is in a sense the fallout from or recuperation of its forceful dislocation by a subject, ‘resistance is the secret of domination’. Badiou comes closest to a dualistic matrix of the political, such as the one propounded by Jambet and Lardreau in their l’Ange (1975), in stating that the reason of revolt is an invariant, ‘deep and inextricable’; the refusal of mastery constitutes a subjective given that precedes Marxism and any causal or structural analysis it may provide. There is an ontological anteriority of revolt, an autonomous power of egalitarian opposition which operates like a trans-historical constant.
Following the Maoist thesis that division is the very essence of dialectics (‘One divides into two’), Badiou’s theory of contradiction is founded on the asymmetry of the terms of the contradiction, purifying force, on the one hand, the system of places, on the other. But, and here lies the key point, no angelic purity is given beforehand and neither can we put our hopes in a simple epiphany mechanically emerging from the ruins of the old. As Badiou writes in the Théorie du sujet: ‘in every contradiction, force manifests its impurity through the aleatory process of its purification’. In the Théorie de la contradiction, the thesis of the rightness of revolt (or of the justice of the new) is linked by Badiou to a whole partisan theory of consciousness and truth, whereby both Marxism as a science of social formations and the objective historical reality of revolts are doubled by, and indeed find their reason in, the conscious assumption of the tasks of revolt in organisation and directive, in short, in a party. Marxist truth, he starkly states, ‘is that wherein revolt finds its reason in order to demolish the enemy’ and, in a tone absent, for all intents and purposes, from his latest works, declares that it repudiates all equality before truth.
In Badiou’s work of the 70s but also in his most recent production, subject names precisely that point through which what is impossible in a given situation is forced into possibility: ‘A subject is a point of conversion of the impossible into the possible. The fundamental operation of a subject is to be at the point where some impossible is converted into possibility’ (Théorie axiomatique du sujet, unpublished manuscript, p. 8). On the basis of this minimally dialectical thesis we can ask: is the fundamental structure of mastery or of the discourse of mastery an invariant, such that the only change given is a change in the occupant of its eminent place? If there is a qualitative element in this change what are the criteria for evaluating it? Are they immanent, or rather based on some external criterion (morality, for instance)? In his 70s writings, whilst wary of the leftism of simply posing the purity of revolt, Badiou’s focus on novelty qua purification entails some unequivocal statements that seem to approximate to the thesis of the political theology of revolt stated at the outset of this article.
‘To the nothing new under the sun the thinking of revolt opposed the ever new insurgent red sun, under the emblem of which the unlimited affirmative hope of rebellious producers engenders ruptures’; ‘There are radical novelties because there are corpses that no trumpet of Judgment will ever reawaken’; ‘To resolve is to reject. History has worked best when its dustbins have been better filled’; ‘The field of Marxist knowledge is always in ruins – all truth is essentially destruction’; ‘There is no veritable revolutionary thought but for the one that takes the recognition of the new all the way to its unavoidable obverse, the old must die. […] Not just death but the dispersion of the ashes’. The last, for instance, in one of Badiou’s most pertinent examples, is the way in which colonialism should die, consigned to eternal forgetting. Cultural revolution is hereby affirmed as anti-memory. The paradox openly assumed by Badiou, in which I think is encapsulated what I have elsewhere called his communism of separation, is that the destruction of inequality, the obliteration of mastery has dualistic asymmetry (class struggle, in short) as its condition.
This paradox is therefore that of the necessity to master the path to masterlessness, to dominate domination in order for non-domination to arise – the paradox, to give its obvious classical Marxist topos, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what then, we may ask, of Christian Jambet’s sober observation, partly aimed at Badiou, that the theme of anti-memory, of the Year Zero so famously linked to the killing fields of Cambodia, depends on the most radical hypostasis of Mastery, on a discourse reduced to the inscrutable secrecy of an unknowing command to work and submit to anonymity, coupled, inevitably perhaps, with the most pointless and exorbitant practices of confession – witness the practices at the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh? In response to such objections, we could recall that one of the key theses in Badiou, reading Mao, is that it is not the primary contradiction, the one of exploiters and exploited, from which novelty emerges, but rather from a ‘secondary’ contradiction, from a separation or division within the camp of the primary contradiction itself – from the partisan truth of a faction, for instance, which separates itself in order to separate out (or subtract) a real which is denied by the state of the situation. It is transforming this secondary contradiction into a primary one which is the formalization of the act of revolt.
The critique of ‘anarchism’, from the attacks on Stirner (or Sancho) in the German Ideology to Badiou’s own invectives against Deleuze-Guattari in both Theory of Contradiction and the article ‘The Flux and the Party’, is founded precisely on the denial of anarchism’s key thesis that the politics of power, of struggles over the place of domination or the discourse of mastery, are merely quantitative shifts that leave the eternal reality of oppression untouched – establishing another dualist but non-dialectical matrix which consigns one to a marginality that colludes with mastery in a semblance of subversion. The opposition to the dualistic matrix of Jambet and Lardreau’s ‘angelic’ thesis – which begins as a defence of revolt and ends up in the false alternative between Kissinger and Khmer Rouge – is thus based on one of the inaugural gestures of Badiou’s thought, the critique of structuralism for the sake of a twofold dialectics of force and place, in which antagonism is asymmetrical, and the forcing of a subject in the place of mastery (the dictatorship of the proletariat) is by definition a qualitative change (I say by definition in the sense that what marks out a subject is that, as an included part forcing itself upon the whole, it engenders qualitative change, and what defines qualitative change is conversely the presence of subjective action).
In these early writings, Badiou can be found arguing that the presence of subjectivity changes the nature of violence itself. Inasmuch as the dialectics of a real revolt introduces qualitative novelty into a situation – such that ‘The State, which is to say the concentrated form of all phenomena of domination, no longer even has the same name’ – it divides death itself, into what is incorporated and metamorphosed under a new law (symbolically reinscribed) and what is simply abrogated. In purely structural phenomena devoid of novelty, in which it is only a quantitative shift of places that is at stake, be it colonialism or WWI, the drive to conserve and continue is accompanied for Badiou by enormous violence, in his stark words: ‘When nothing changes, men die.’ It is precisely the lack of asymmetry, the ultimately non-antagonistic basis of the massive antagonisms that appear to deploy themselves on the battlefield which mean that such ‘structural’ antagonisms depend on pure quantitative triumph, and are thus cumulative, non-creative, interminable, bloody and sterile.’ In brief, then, against the opposition of resistance and power, Badiou proposes a political dialectics of structure (materialist) and tendency (dialectical). Needless to say, it is very difficult indeed to see either reinscription or dialectics at work in the obstinate carnage perpetrated by the Pol Pot’s Angka. Death was clearly not divided by novelty in Democratic Kampuchea and the character of its ‘change’ remains deeply obscure.

3. Political Theology Today: Slight Return
The very title ‘political theology of revolt’, as I hinted at the outset, is meant to bring into relief one of the questions which, posed by Schmitt, seems to have gone lost in the critical evaluation of a supposed turn or return to Christianity. Inasmuch as it is patent that such a turn is motivated by a political, or even ideological, deficit and not a theological need we seem to be faced with at least three options.
The first option is that revolt is to be thought of in terms of the secularization of theological categories, specifically as a secularization of the kind of apocalyptic equality that calls upon the dominated to traverse and abolish the structures of iniquity and worldly corruption, as a forced anticipation of, or preparation for, the promised kingdom of humanity. In this sense the political theology of revolt is the hidden, but perhaps primordial counterpart, within the subjective matrix of Christianity, of the submission to worldly authorities and the temporality of the wait attached that is attached to it. Saint Paul, as the original debates and proclamations surrounding the peasant revolt prove, is the name for the metastable conjunction of these two theologies. Herein, theology is simply the unsurpassable framework of our political thought. This thesis is conservative, fatalistic.
The second option is to argue that theology is merely an apparently seamless constriction, imposed by the interest of the dominant class, over the subjective practices of revolt. This, to some extent or another is the classical thesis of historical materialism, for which theology is in the main nothing but an obstacle, an epochal distortion of class struggle, determined by the particular state of the relations of production and their statist correlates,. This can be more or less virulent in its repudiation of the theological, considering, with Marx, a possibly positive function in religious-revolutionary enthusiasm, or, with Engels, seeing religion either as an iron mask over class struggle or as traversed by a debilitating double truth (such that Thomas Müntzer, at the helm of his armed league of peasants, could not voice what the real content of his practice was).
The third option is to argue that the form of revolt, or the form of cultural revolution, as such is indifferent to the distinction between the political and the theological. This is the stance of Lardreau and Jambet, who put forward the Manichean thesis of the two worlds, implying that Lin Piao and the early Christian desert monks are essentially subjects of the same transhistorical injunction to have done with mastery, whilst the Catholic Church and Deng Xiaoping likewise stand united on the side of mastery. Since the history of revolt and the history of mastery (the latter being a discontinuous, vanishing or even foreclosed history) are essentially separate from one another and indifferent to the politics/theology distinction the subject of revolt does not enjoy any kind of dialectical articulation with ideology and thus escapes any thesis of secularization.
Badiou’s own contribution to this debate is tellingly formulated by way of a commentary on Engels’ writings on the German Peasants’ War, and specifically on the articulation between religion, revolt and ideology. Still within the categorial ambit of the historical materialist, Marxist-Leninist tradition, Badiou’s theory of communist invariants is essentially articulated around two arguments.
(1) Aspirations for radical equality, for the annihilation of property and state, are present throughout the history of politics, revealed in the intermittence of revolts, in the specific figures of the antagonism between domination and the dominated. A key thesis here is that the exploited have always known they’ve been exploited, that the height of ideology is precisely the thesis that ideology is efficacious through and through. Revolt is primary, indeed, as Badiou writes, the universal agent of transformation is the revolutionary revolt of the masses. Thus, communist invariants are essentially disjoined from any economic teleology and constitute the spontaneous thought of the masses in the face of the structured objectivity of exploitation, as represented by the dominant ideology. There is, in other words, an ‘immediate intelligence’ of communism, which constitutes the antagonistic thought of the masses, the force of their resistance, and which is unrepresentable from the point of view of the state.
(2) These communist invariants are only realised with the constitution of the proletariat, that is, with the advent of that figure that signals the transformation of the masses (and not the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, etc.) into the revolutionary class. The communist invariants, which until then had been structurally destined to defeat – (a) expressed in the language of domination and (b) serving the needs of another class – are now themselves directed by the party and guided by the divisive analysis of class. This conjunctural opportunity is, in the eyes of Badiou and Balmès, absolutely new, and bound to the fact that the invariants are no longer a demand of equality heterogeneous to the order of representation, but, albeit foreclosed, are structurally transitive to this order. In other words, with the advent of capitalism the unrepresentable force that had driven revolt up to that point is capable, by means of the antagonistic conjunction of masses, class, and party, to assume its role as the foreclosed source of order, to take power in the clear knowledge that ‘resistance is the secret of domination.’
Now, this figure of revolt, crystallised in what the authors refer to as the ‘communism of production’, is entirely sustained by the historico-political notion of realisation, whereby the unrepresentable excess that has always driven revolt can constitute itself not just an intermittently recurring force, but, through class-antagonism and the appropriation of production, emerge as a transitional representation of the unrepresentable, as a dictatorship of the proletariat. Whilst this position is not the ‘classical type’ of a classist politics – as testified to by the eternity of the invariants and the decisionist character of the antagonism directed by the party, which evacuates the teleological dimension of classism, the idea of the party as ‘midwife’ of communism – it does accord to class a crucial role, to wit that of providing the dialectical articulation of the unrepresentable demands of resistance (‘the eternity of the equal’) and the law which structures and orders representations (in this case the ideological expression of the relations obtaining under capitalism). The transitivity of the excess (in the guise of resistance) to the structural totality (the capitalist mode of production and its ideological component) is crucial here; it sustains, in the domain of historical becoming, what Badiou will later refer to as the Marxist hypothesis, which posits the task of egalitarian politics as the domination of non-domination.

4. The Revolution of the Common Man: Excursus on the German Peasants’ War
‘Anno domini 1525, at the beginning of the year, there was a great, unprecedented upheaval of the Common Man throughout the German lands’, thus we read in Stumpfs Reformationschronik, the attestation of what Marx too would call ‘the most radical fact of German history’. Badiou’s early assessment of this fact, whilst providing the occasion for formulating his theory of communist invariants, and tending toward the most positive characterization possible of the part played by non-ideological subjectivity in such a revolt, nevertheless seems to follow the Marxist vulgate in declaring the material and historical necessity of its failure. Thus the standoff between his early dialectical materialism and the angelic philosophy of plebeian resistance, of the kind put forward by Jambet and Lardreau, seems to recapitulate another philosophical debate, the one which saw György Lukacs, in his History and Class Consciousness, provide a scathing critique of Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer: Theologian of the Revolution. Whilst Bloch certainly did style himself a Marxist, his positing of an Ubique – a trans-historical, mystical kernel of revolt that Marxism actualized despite itself, and which was only being unearthed by what he regarded as the ‘religious element’ in the Russian revolution – is not unlike the ‘thesis of the Angel’, of the juxtaposition of the world of the Rebel and the world of the Master, of cultural revolution and ideological revolution, offered by Lardreau and Jambet in their l’Ange.
The stark repudiation of mastery in the 1525 revolt, despite the customary references to the Pauline requirement to respect worldly authorities, is patent. Michael Gaismair, revolutionary leader in Tyrol and the author of a truly astounding and lucid plan for the constitution and economic structure of a non-capitalist republic in Switzerland, wrote of creating a union of ‘masterless men’. Müntzer, whose statement Omnia sint communia is the very emblem of communist invariance, even took this repudiation of authority into theological terrain, arguing in his theology of crucifixion that the ascetic assumption of suffering was akin to a becoming God and even bridging the gap between scatology and eschatology. As Luigi Parinetto notes in his fine if idiosyncratic La rivolta del diavolo, in Melanchton we find transcribed what was allegedly one of his enemy’s favourite formulae: ‘I shit on God, if he does not put himself at my service like he did with Abraham and the Prophets.’ Mannheim plausibly argues in Ideology and Utopia that the revolts of 1525, inasmuch as they are motivated the apocalyptic sermons of the likes of Müntzer are anarchistic (‘leftist’ in Badiou’s parlance), not socialist: ‘Chiliasm considers the revolution as a value in itself; it is not at all a means to attain a rational purpose, but rather is conceived as the only creative principle in the present.’
For Lukacs, who includes his critique of Bloch’s Müntzer within a broader attack on the insufficiencies of any revolutionary humanism, the problem of the peasants’ revolt is the problem of starting from man in Christianity and the gospels. This entails either the conservative ontology of a moral defence of the status quo, the political theology of authority mentioned above; or a utopian response which is itself split into apocalypse as the global annihilation of empirical reality, on the one hand, or the ascetic ontology of the saint, on the other. Any relaxation of utopia, as in the collapse of cultural into ideological revolution mapped by Lardreau and Jambet, equals the capitulation to conservatism, a capitulation which Lukacs contends is written into the very undialectical fabric of the utopian instinct. Revolutionary utopianism is mired in undialectical humanism, a ‘consumption communism’ (of the kind some have accused Hardt and Negri of peddling, incidentally). It depends on the idea that an unblemished internal life could be awakened independently of man’s concrete historical life, that we could simply organise the exodus from the apparatuses of production and reproduction impinging on the realisation of a non-dominated human essence. What’s more, Lukacs reaffirms the Weberian thesis that this revolutionary messianism was not by chance developed in the heartlands of capitalism, and was thus but the preparation for a subjection to the imperatives of capital: ‘For the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and blood, with a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism’ (p. 192). The target of Lukacs polemic is thus the ‘irreducible quality and unsynthesized amalgam of the empirical and the utopian’ that he finds obscured by the elemental vigour of Müntzer.

But closer inspection of the way in which the religious and utopian premises of the theory concretely impinge upon Müntzer’s actions will reveal the same ‘dark and empty chasm’, the same ‘hiatus irrationalis’ between theory and practice that is everywhere apparent where a subjective and hence undialectical utopia directly assaults historical reality with the intention of changing it. Real actions then appear – precisely in the objective, revolutionary sense – wholly independent of the religious utopia: the latter can neither lead them in any real sense, nor can it offer concrete objectives or concrete proposals for their realisation. When Ernst Bloch claims that this union of religion with socio-economic revolution points the way to a deepening of the ‘merely economic’ outlook of historical materialism, he fails to notice that his deepening simply by-passes the real depth of historical materialism. When he then conceives of economics as a concern with objective things to which soul and inwardness are to be opposed, he overlooks the fact that the real social revolution can only mean the restructuring of the real and concrete life of man. He does not see that what is known as economics is nothing but the system of forms objectively defining this real life. The revolutionary sects were forced to evade this problem because in their historical situation such a restructuring of life and even of the definition of the problem was objectively impossible. But it will not do to fasten upon their weakness, their inability to discover the Archimedean point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown, and their predicament which forces them to aim too high or too low and to see in these things a sign of greater depth.

Crucially, Lukacs hold that is strictly impossible for the individual to exit the situation of reification, especially through an affirmation of inner freedom which is merely the utopian counterpart of a frozen empirical realm. The species, or even Gattungswesen, as a mythologized individual, is also incapable of such a feat. ‘And the class, too, can only manage it when it can see through the reified objectivity of the given world to the process that is also its own fate’ (p. 193). Lukacs thus concurs to some extent with Badiou, though the latter, in order not to hold what he thinks is the untenable thesis of the complete unconsciousness of revolt to itself – that is in order to affirm a pre-proletarian or pre-revolutionary political space not entirely under the thrall of ideological dissimulation – put forward his theory of communist invariants. Like the latter he also provides a strong critique of the leftist deviation which emerges in a certain political theology of revolt, which depends on the dualistic matrix of the utopian and the empirical, or the Angel and the Master.
But do any of these stances really do justice to the relation between politics and theology in the peasants’ war? Much of the recent work on that ‘radical fact’ testifies against the Marxist tenets behind the work of Lukacs and Badiou – inasmuch as the latter, in order to bolster the logical singularity of the proletariat as class subject must overplay the importance of theology in that historical event (and, we might add, in other events too), thus skating over its invention of its own modalities of political thought and subjectivity. This is what emerges in part, from the work of the historian Peter Blickle, who attacked the primarily East German, Engels-derived thesis of 1525 as an ‘early bourgeois revolution’ as untenable, countering with the thesis of the revolution of the common man: according to this thesis the peasants’ war was a transversal alliance, across classes, as well as across the division between those who were to suffer the impositions of princely absolutism and, we should add, following Parinetto, the joint destructive political effects of the rise of monopoly capital, personified by the figure of Jacob Fugger (or Fucker, as Luther preferred to call him) – an explicit nemesis of figures like Gaismair. Here the figure of the common man is neither an invariant doomed to failure, nor a mere unwitting vehicle for the irruption of a bourgeois revolution, nor even a theologically overdetermined figure that substitutes for the proletariat as the only subject conscious of its own revolt and that revolt’s conditions – it is instead a political configuration in its own right, in which the religious element does not play the overweening ideological role ascribed to it by many interpreters. It is worth noting here that the preference for a preacher like Müntzer over a far more articulate political agitator like Gaismair is an index of the refusal to immanently think the political mode of the 1525 revolts, preferring to immerse it into a political-theological matrix dominated by the themes of ideology, secularization and the invariance of communist utopia – leading to the overestimation of the theological debates over the Reformation in the genesis of the peasants’ revolt and the fascination with the theological-political juxtaposition of Luther and Müntzer.

5. Nihil novi sub sole?, or, Left and Right Deviations in Political Theology
One of Badiou’s early dialectical theses, put forward most forcefully in his reading of Hegel at the beginning of the Theory of the Subject (in seminars overlapping with the publication of the Theory of Contradiction) is that totalitarianism doesn’t exist, being what he calls a pure structural figuration with no historical reality, the idea that there is only the collapse of supposed novelty into the nihil novi sub sole of the eternal order and inevitability of mastery and hierarchy (the right wing, or structuralist stance) or a powerless, suicidal, leftism, a novelty so absolute it cannot get its hands dirty with realisation (the anarchist or libidinal materialist capitulation to mastery and semblance of revolt). The thesis of totalitarianism is essentially bound to this dualistic matrix so prominent in the work of Jambet and Lardreau as well as André Glucksmann: the state and the plebe (but no proletariat), the master and the angel (but no subject).
Badiou turns to the history of the church in order to illustrate this critical point. Indeed, he argues that the Hegelian dialectics of division is entirely organised around the reciprocal torsion and determinations of the relationship between the Father, with which Badiou schematizes force, and the Son, with whom he schematizes place. Both dualistic anarchism (i.e. there is pure force without process) and the fatalistic idea of a perennial structural repetition (i.e. there is a structure of places free of force), are thus presented as the by-products of the process of division itself, or, more precisely as the arrests in the process of division that, according to Badiou, moves through the figures of Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. The ‘leftist’ deviation and the ‘rightist’ deviation are thus equivalent not in their manifest content, which is indeed reversed, but rather in the fact that they both deny the dialectics of force, the real process of determination – they both freeze division, turning contradiction into opposition. Within the history of the Church, the rightist heresy of Aryanism collapses the passion of the Christ into the statement that ‘the Son is only a creature’, that is, Christ is human and there is no link between the infinite and the finite (that he was only a place, not an intrinsic division or determination of the force of God). The ‘leftist’ heresy of Gnosticism, in the contrary, de-dialecticizes the resurrection, stating that ‘God has never descended into the world’, that the Christ is absolutely divine and cannot be endowed with a real body. ‘Just as much as the peaceable and reasonable hierarchical order of the Aryans, this ultra-leftist heresy, obsessed by the pure and the original, violently oriented toward Manichaeism, blocks the dialectical fecundity of the message.’ In the axiom of the council of Nicea, the split identity of God and Christ, Badiou recognizes the key need for a dialectical thinking of revolt, to always think the identity in division of force and place, the work of purification and not the reality of purity. It is not the least of the interests of Badiou’s early texts that a philosophy of revolutionary rupture also presents itself as a defence of orthodoxy, of a living orthodoxy that must continually separate itself from its non-dialectical fallout.
The passage, after the publication in 1985 of Peut-on penser la politique?, to a non-dialectical theory of political subjectivation, generic equality and truth, whilst it might allow us to think the autonomous modality of political subjects such as Geismair’s ‘common man’, nevertheless leaves in abeyance what I would in the earlier work appears as the problem of realisation: without the historical a priori of the proletariat and its logical power the eternity of communism cannot be translated into the reality of communism, cannot be fully subjectivated. Does this mean that we remain in the inevitably ideological grip of masks and displacements, inasmuch as the communist invariants are always included within a particular ideological conjuncture and can never find their ‘proper’ expression? Or are we indeed to leave behind the entire problem of ideology, and of the religious and theological mediations of politics, for the sake of a renewed attention to the autonomy of politics?

A Brief History of Fanaticism

2005-11-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

"Who writ the histories of the Anabaptists but their enemies?"
- Richard Overton, leveller

Wherever we look, the attempt to bind – in an emancipatory manner – political action and truth has been confronted with the accusation of fanaticism. Indeed, we could say that any attempt to evaluate the theoretical and organisational manifestations of a politics of truth, or even its most basic preconditions, cannot afford to circumvent the circulating idea of egalitarian politics as a properly fanatical pursuit, a denial of mediation and representation, in short, as a type of practice that would simply secularise (in some acceptation of this fraught and layered notion) certain theological, cultic or even archaically ritual motifs. Though the refrain and reproach of fanaticism (and related concepts of millenarianism, chiliasm, and political messianism) is manifestly entangled with the ‘classical’ critique of totalitarianism and Terror, it is of special interest because of its concern with political subjectivity and what it sees as the religious matrix of uncompromising or ‘true’ political action. Rather than merely engaging in historico-political categorisation and condemnation, the notion of fanaticism aims to reveal the transcendental and epistemological errors that underlie any attempt at a robust linkage of politics and truth. Indeed, unlike totalitarianism and Terror, fanaticism is perhaps primarily a question concerning the thinkable. I would thus like this brief investigation of some of the tropes and signature events of the critique of fanaticism to serve as a propedeutic to answering the question under whose banner we are speaking today. To answer it, hopefully, in the affirmative.

In so doing, I’m concerned with fanaticism as an abiding object of horrified fascination, but also, more generally, as a symptom of a poverty of analysis and imagination, bound to the wish to remain within a closed horizon defined by the mastery of differences and finite possibilities afforded by our political common sense. The field of history, and of the theses proffered to account for certain key conjunctions of politics and truth, most often in a religious or spiritual vein, is crucial in this respect. ‘Fanaticism’, when ascribed to singular subjects or movements, is a political and historical judgment, a judgment which incorporates the idea that an egalitarian politics of truth is in some sense a-historical and therefore anti-political. The ‘point at which theology and social protest intersect’, as the historian Peter Blickle refers to it, thus remains one through which a politics of truth must pass, if only because its adversaries and detractors have set up their tribunals there long ago.

The equation of egalitarian and primary communist politics under the rubric of fanaticism is hardly a recent fact. Edmund Burke famously spoke of an ‘epidemical fanaticism’, which, in continuity with the peasant depredations, or levellings, of the Anabaptists of Munster, afflicted an anti-clerical revolutionary France – asking ‘to what country in Europe did not the progress of their fury furnish cause for alarm?’ In this respect, we might observe that the theory of fanaticism is the reactionary obverse of what Badiou and Balmès termed ‘communist invariants’ in their 1976 text on ideology. The Cold War saw a rich, if monotonous seam of tracts and analyses focussing on fanaticism as the subjective determinant, affect, cognitive position or ethical stance which uncovered a supposed continuity between mediaeval millenarian uprisings and communism. Norman Cohn’s seminal The Pursuit of the Millennium, used as a resource even in anti-systemic works such as Vainegem’s, is canonical in this respect and remains a reference – even for authors such as Anatol Lieven, who seek to unearth the millenarian roots of contemporary American nationalist fanaticism. In an erudite, albeit nouveax-philosophical vein, we could cite Dominique Colas often shrill but instructive Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. In such books, fanaticism designates a form of anti-representational, millenarian politics. Or rather, inasmuch as politics is identified with civil society, and with the maintenance of certain ‘natural’ levels of inequality and distinctions of culture, ethnicity and identity, fanaticism – and its supposed search for an absolute and incarnate truth – is designated as violent anti-politics par excellence. Of course, many other texts could be considered, for instance J.L. Talmon’s influential The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, with its analysis of a continuity between the French revolution and 20th century ‘totalitarian movements’ in terms of a concept of political (or totalitarian) messianism. More to the point perhaps, is the indication of the fundamental continuity between the anti-communist denunciation of political fanaticism – also present within the philosophical field in Merleau-Ponty’s attack on Sartre’s ultra-bolshevist decisionism – and the proponents of ‘radical democracy’. Ernesto Laclau’s endorsement of Cohn’s work on the millenarian character of communism in the concluding passages of New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time is more than symptomatic in this respect, inasmuch as he considers the millenarian tendency to betoken a ‘limitless representability’, that famous transparency of the social which Marxist and revolutionaries have allegedly sought, ravaging the world with their impossible, hysterical demands. Laclau’s use of Cohn is also revealing inasmuch as it shows the reversibility or coincidence within the notion of fanaticism between anti-representation – in what Kant in the Critique of Judgment regarded as the delusion to SEE the infinite in a positive presentation – and total representation, such that perfect, i.e. unmediated representability, is indistinguishable from the death of representation.

As Colas notes, of course, the reproach of fanaticism, and its oppositional pairing with civil society, runs throughout modernity – featuring in such works as Leibniz’s Theodicy, Voltaire’s Muhammad, or Fanaticism and more recently, John Paul II’s Centesimus annus. However, following Colas’ lead, we shall focus on the reception of the salient episode in this peculiarly monotonous history and focus principally on three moments: the historical and theoretical debates around the German Peasants’ War of 1525. The principal source for the trope of fanaticism may in fact be found in the ideologue of Protestantism and companion of Luther, Philipp Melanchton (in a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics from 1529), though crucially, for the anti-communist and ‘postmodern’ revisionism which has been with us since the late 70s, it is a theme which is given its philosophical droit de cité in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and other writings, where we encounter the crucial distinction between the mania of fanaticism, at once iconoclastic and idolatrous, and the admissible madness of political enthusiasm – a distinction which has received significant treatment in the writings of Lyotard and Arendt, among others. As for Islamism, which I shall touch upon with respect to Foucault, it is no mystery that it has supplanted communism as the main object of that epithet – thus returning us to some of the less savoury aspects of the Enlightenment excoriation of fanaticism, witness Voltaire.

The philosophical history of fanaticism is an instructive one. What we need today are antidotes to the role of the concept of fanaticism as a kind of negative talisman, a tool for exorcism: rather than accepting the image of a fanatical invariant, and of a trans-historical divide between the partisans of fallibility and the partisans of the absolute (and of partisanship itself), disactivating the lure of fanaticism from within might permit us to lay the groundwork for a position that might do justice to instances of uncompromising egalitarian politics, without disfiguring them as simple instances of a metaphysical temptation. As I shall indicate in the conclusion, to leave behind the lure of fanaticism, we need to leave behind the terms of the juxtaposition between the critique of representation and the ‘critique of the critique of representation’. From a historical, and not just philosophical level, this means treating the political subject not the merely at ideational level (where the blind affect of fanaticism is the centrepiece) but in terms of its specific conditions of emergence and organisation.

‘Anno domini 1525, at the beginning of the year, there was a great, unprecedented upheaval of the Common Man throughout the German lands’, thus we read in Stumpfs Reformationschronik, bearing witness to what Marx too would call ‘the most radical fact of German history’. Since the reaction to the supposedly delusional politics of messianic truth at the heart of this upheaval is the locus classicus of the discourse on fanaticism, I’d like to dwell here on some of the theoretical responses to it. These orbit, for the most part, around the character of the German Peasants’ War as a manifestation of what Alain Badiou, in D’un désastre obscur, has dubbed ‘the eternity of communism’ – of a politics of truth based on a hypothesis of non-domination, i.e., on axiomatic equality (as encapsulated in the statement ‘men think’, les gens pensent) and the systematic dismantling of any mastery over truth. In this respect, the conservative or reactionary tradition that has reiterated its attacks on a supposed political fanaticism for the past 500 years is perhaps to be grasped first and foremost as an attack on the possibility of a thought that would refuse a mastery or authority over truth and its partition, as a putting of truth in its proper place and a termination of any socially efficacious ‘raving with reason’ (to use Kant’s term) – an attack on a politics of truth which, as Badiou himself put it in Peut-on penser la politique?, might seek to make inegalitarian statements impossible.

Reading the proclamations, drafts and constitutions collected in compendiums such as the recent The German Peasants’ War, we can say that the drastic repudiation of mastery in the 1525 revolt, despite the customary references to the Pauline and Lutheran requirement to respect worldly authorities, is patent and that this – rather than the ruleless, deep-seated and brooding passion of Schwarmerei as Kant would have it – is the key to these political movements. Of course, Thomas Müntzer, whose statement Omnia sint communia (let everything be in common) is perhaps the emblem of Badiou’s communist invariance, did take this repudiation of authority into passionate theological terrain, proposing, in his theology of crucifixion, that the ascetic assumption of suffering – and the desire, as he put it in his reading of Daniel, to make oneself insane in what is most intimate – was akin to a becoming God. This utter repudiation of mastery went to the extent of bridging the gap between scatology and eschatology. Melanchton thus transcribes what was allegedly one of his enemy’s favourite formulae: ‘I shit on God, if he does not put himself at my service like he did with Abraham and the Prophets.’ Yet, when the likes of Michael Gaismair, revolutionary leader in Tyrol and the author of a an astoundingly lucid programme for the constitution and economic structure of a non-capitalist republic in Switzerland, write of creating a union of ‘masterless men’ – in terms of a rupture with the order of authority and privilege, rather than an ascetic and fanatical rapture – we can begin to see that the theme of fanaticism might be cloaking the reality of a communist politics in the state of mind of a communist apocalypse.

The figure of Müntzer, recently resurrected in the historical novel Q., also features in History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács articulates an unsparing critique of Ernst Bloch’s utopianism – as manifest in the latter’s 1919 book, Thomas Müntzer: Theologian of the Revolution. Whilst Bloch was unequivocal about his Marxist allegiance, Lukács, adamant about the non-substitutable role of the proletariat in a historical materialism, attacked the former’s positing of an Ubique – a trans-historical, mystical kernel of revolt that Marxism actualised despite itself, and which was only being unearthed by what Bloch regarded as the ‘religious element’ in the Russian revolution. For Lukács – who inserts his critique of Bloch’s Müntzer within a broader assault on the shortcomings of any revolutionary humanism – the problem of the peasants’ revolt is the problem, inherited from Christianity and the gospels, of starting from man. This entails either the conservative ontology underlying a moral defence of the status quo, i.e. the Pauline-Lutheran political theology of authority mentioned above; or a utopian response which is in turn split into apocalypse as the global annihilation of empirical reality, on the one hand, and the ascetic psychology of the saint, on the other. In this Christian speculative Leftism, as it were, relaxation of utopia equals the capitulation to conservatism, a capitulation which Lukács contends is written into the very undialectical fabric of the utopian instinct. Revolutionary utopianism is thus mired in an undialectical humanism, as well as what he dismisses as a ‘consumption communism’. Such a millenarian communism depends on the idea that an unblemished internal life could be awakened independently of man’s concrete historical life, that we could simply organise the exodus from the apparatuses of production and reproduction impinging on the realisation of a non-dominated human essence. What’s more, Lukács reaffirms the Weberian thesis whereby it is no accident that such a revolutionary messianism developed in the heartlands of capitalism, and was thus but the preparation for a subjection to the imperatives of capital. As he puts it:

For the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and blood, with a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism (192).

The target of Lukács’s polemic is thus the ‘irreducible quality and unsynthesized amalgam of the empirical and the utopian’ that he finds obscured by the elemental subjective vigour of Müntzer. Bloch-Müntzer is guilty of the wishful, fanatical sin of trying to see the truth of revolution without wielding the tools of change in the scientifically propitious moment. As he says: ‘it is trapped in the same “dark and empty chasm”, the same “hiatus irrationalis” between theory and practice that is everywhere apparent where a subjective and hence undialectical utopia directly assaults historical reality with the intention of changing it’. Providing a Marxist twist to the critique of fanatical immediacy proper to the post-Kantian tradition, Lukács argues that, contrary to Bloch’s hopes for a vivifying fusion of the religious with the socio-economic, Müntzer’s proclamations merely show that social actions are ‘wholly independent of the religious utopia’. In making this argument, Lukács, who also contends that Bloch underestimates the depth of the restructuring of life called for by historical materialism, nevertheless remains faithful to the Engelsian orthodoxy: the revolt is an anachronism; for it, a definition of the problem of emancipation was ‘objectively impossible’. Crucially, Lukács holds that is strictly impossible for the individual to exit the situation of reification, especially through an affirmation of inner freedom which is merely the utopian counterpart of a frozen empirical realm. The species, or even Gattungswesen, qua mythologized individual, is also incapable of such a feat. ‘And the class, too, can only manage it when it can see through the reified objectivity of the given world to the process that is also its own fate’ (p. 193).

The figure of Müntzer and his peasant hordes also haunts Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, where millenarian fanaticism or chiliasm is presented as the paradigm, or zero-degree of utopia, defined as: ‘A state of mind … incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs’, and, significantly, as a state of mind, or situationally transcendent idea, which strives towards some kind of realization. For Mannheim there are 4 types of utopia: chiliastic, liberal, conservative, and socialist-communist, with the first two characterised by a kind of indeterminism or a notion of contingency (fanatical and decisionist in the first case, regulative and deliberating in the second) and the latter two by a determinateness or a notion of necessity (inert in the first case, transformative in the second).

Chiliasm is the zero-degree of utopia inasmuch as it is pitted against the old order in a total and uncompromising manner (to the point of pushing for a veritable exodus from the world). Its conjunction with the ‘social question’ amounts to a historical explosion:

The decisive turning-point in modern history was … the moment in which “Chiliasm” joined forces with the active demands of the oppressed strata of society. The very idea of the dawn of a millennial kingdom on earth always contained a revolutionizing tendency, and the church made every effort to paralyse this situationally transcendent idea with all the means at its command (190).

What’s more, this moment, in which ‘Chiliasm and the social revolution were structurally integrated’ (190) is the birth of modern politics, ‘if we understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with the fatalistic acceptance of events as they are’ (191). The chiliasm of Müntzer, John of Leyden and their epigones, in other words, is for Mannheim the first anti-systemic movement, and modernity is not born of a secularization of politics but, as he puts it, of its spiritualization.

One of the features of modern revolution … is that it is no ordinary uprising against a certain oppressor but a striving for an upheaval against the whole existing social order in a thorough-going and systematic way (195n2).

Mannheim’s distinction between utopia and ideology is also a possible antidote against the pervasive the trope of fanaticism – which depicts ‘religious’ revolts as delusions, anti-political explosions of the social or failures of mediation. Utopias such as the peasants’, according to Mannheim, ‘are not ideologies, i.e. they are not ideologies in the measure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming the existing historical reality into one more in accord with their own conceptions’ (176). Far from being reducible to a kind anti-representational frenzy, the chiliastic utopia is best seen as a creation of a new temporality by determinate social strata in a process which is formative of political consciousness. Contrary to what he condemns as the ‘liberal-humanitarian prejudice’ that politics is a matter of ideas and representations, such a transformation mobilises a political affect which is pre-representational without necessarily being anti-representational. What is more problematic in Mannheim is the unwillingness of thinking through the specifically political forms and political demands of this religious politics (among which are the Christian Unions and the peasant assemblies). This disavowal of organisational thought – dominant in most analyses of millenarian political movements – once again manifests itself in the fatal attraction for Müntzer, the apocalyptic preacher, over any other leader in the wars against the German lords.

The limitations of Mannheim’s sociology are especially evident in terms of the question of time:

It is the utopian element … which determines the sequence, order, and evaluation of single experiences. This wish is the organising principle which even moulds the way in which we experience time. The form in which events are ordered and the unconsciously emphatic rhythm, which the individual in his spontaneous observation of events imposes upon the flux of time, appears in the utopia as an immediately perceptible picture, or at least a directly intelligible set of meanings (188).

In other words, the time of revolution is wholly subordinated to the static and visible time of utopia, a time of synchronic apperception of the future. Political time is stifled by the supposedly primary role of subjective time, of a mindset or world-view. This inattention to the specific organisations, prescriptions and constituent processes undertaken by these putatively religious movements – and the documentary record is a rich and surprising one – means that the link between ideas, religion and social protest is ultimately read internally in terms of a suspension of time and externally or methodologically in terms of a variant of the philosophy of history. On the first count Mannheim plausibly argues that not ideas but ‘ecstatic-orgiastic energies’ were at stake in the revolt’s spiritualization of politics, and that chiliasm is marked by a ‘tendency always to dissociate itself from its own images and symbols’ (193). But in so doing he reduces his own image of the peasant revolts to the cognitive state of ‘absolute presentness’ (193), where there is ‘no inner articulation of time’, and in which revolution is ‘the only creative principle of the immediate present’ (196). On the second count, though not replicating the ideas of an ‘anachronism’ of the peasants’ war which features in much of the literature, Mannheim still argues that ‘every age allows to arise (in differently located social groups) those ideas and values in which are contained in condensed form the unrealized and the unfulfilled tendencies which represent the needs of each age’ (179).

But do such of these stances really do justice to the relation between politics and theology in the peasants’ war and similar events? Do they not simply reaffirm one of the constants in the diagnosis of fanaticism – the depoliticising idea of a historical anachronism, an epistemological misfit between religious form and political or social content? Much of the recent historical work on the ‘radical fact’ of 1525 argues against such an appraisal and what can be seen as a fallacious overestimation of the theological or spiritual element in so-called chiliastic politics. In this respect it goes against the grain of some Marxist readings, from Engels on the ‘early bourgeois revolution’ to Badiou’s ‘communist invariants’, via Lukács, which in order to bolster the logical singularity of the proletariat as class subject must overplay the importance of the mask of theology in historical events such as 1525 – thereby skating over the invention of modalities of political thought and subjectivity which are not merely immature social forces whose impossibility of translating themselves into political action bursts into history through the visionary violence of a fanatical project.

This is what emerges from the work of Peter Blickle, who counters Engels’ idea of an ‘early bourgeois revolution’ with the thesis of the ‘revolution of the common man’: according to this thesis the peasants’ war was a transversal alliance, across class groupings, to maintain urban independence and peasant autonomy in the face of the concentration of princely power and the devastations wrought by the rise of money capital, personified by the figure of the banker Jacob Fugger – an explicit nemesis both of Luther and of peasant leaders like Gaismair (the insult fucker was allegedly first used by Luther to attack said banker). Here the subjective figure of the common man is neither an invariant doomed to failure, nor a mere unwitting vehicle for the irruption of a bourgeois revolution, nor even a theologically over-determined figure that substitutes for the proletariat as the only subject conscious of its own revolt and that revolt’s conditions – it is instead a political configuration in its own right, in which the religious element does not play the overweening ideological role elsewhere ascribed to it.

In his essay ‘Social Protest and Reformation Theology’, Blickle investigates the war in terms of ‘the mutual dependence of Reformation theology and social protest’, asking the following questions: ‘(1) where and how is social protest articulated; (2) how does it stand in relationship to Reformation theology, and (3) what consequences arise from the possible combination of these two movements’? Contrary to the single-minded focus on the fanatical form taken by the politics of those groups and movements which triggered the peasants’ war of 1525, Blickle is attentive to the manner in which seemingly pragmatic and specific demands are combined with religious themes and citations from Biblical authority – which are accorded the function of minimal if perennial criteria of justice. As he puts it: ‘concrete economic and social demands are arranged within a vindicatory nexus with “the Word of God” and “the Gospel”’ – via the use of certain ‘logograms’ (4) proper to religious discourse. This articulation is divided by Blickle into positive protest, via the Gospel and towards a more just socio-economic order; and negative protest, via the Gospel and away from the socio-economic order altogether (what he calls “the exodus from history”). Justice and exodus. It is the vindicatory nexus which here not only has legitimising force but manages to make converge the urban protests of guilds with the demands of peasant communities and assemblies:

It provides the basis for urban and rural anticlericalism, with its cutting-edge against the monasteries and orthodox clergy; it legitimises the demand for communal autonomy, exemplified in the call for the right to decide issues of correct religious doctrine, to elect the minister and to allocate tithes; and it is ultimately made the yardstick of social and political order (8)

through the theme of the common weal or brotherly love. Urban demands in the German context primarily centre on representation and religious freedom, peasant demands around economic equality and autonomy. According to Blickle, reference to the Gospel allowed the putting forth of demands which would have been impossible with the prior form of legitimation (reference to the ‘old order’), such as the abolition of serfdom (9). There is thus a definite sequence, both causal and chronological, from urban to rural to chiliastic (or Anabaptist) – inasmuch as ‘the very experience of transforming Reformation theology into political practice was a necessary pre-condition of Anabaptist, negative protest’ (11). Negative, ‘fanatical’, protest – which takes the form of separation of the community of the faithful and Müntzer’s proclamation of a ‘total reversal of the secular order’ is thus seen to follow from a failed reformation in the city and military defeat in the countryside.

Interestingly, it is scripture which here, contrary to some of its later fundamentalist transformations, results in a negation of dogma and doctrinal authority. Most significantly, behind this oppositional and revolutionary use of Biblical ‘logograms’, which opened the way for a traversal of the town and city distinction in the figure of the common man, there lay the development of new political and organisational, as well as military forms (such as the Christian Union), institutional inventions that force us to move beyond the purely ideational and historico-philosophical interpretation of these phenomena crystallised in notion of fanaticism and related concepts of millenarianism and chiliasm.

If the German Peasants’ War, or revolution of the common man, is really the founding moment of modern politics, what is the role of the trope or accusation of fanaticism and of the theorization of political millenarianism in the estimation of contemporary political events?

With a certain inevitability, Foucault’s chronicles of the Iranian revolution, written for Il Corriere della sera, have been recently republished, in appendix to a volume whose equally inevitable subtitle is ‘Gender and the Seductions of Islamism’. The dossier presented in this book covers all the themes I’ve introduced herein: the spiritualization of politics (a term Foucault uses repeatedly), the figure of Müntzer (who Foucault mentions together with Savonarola and Cromwell in writing about Khomenei), the matter of the temporality proper to religious politics (he speaks of the ‘continuous impatience’ which drives political Shi’ism) and, of course, the accusation of abetting fanaticism (forcefully put to Foucault in the pages of Le Monde by an Iranian woman dissident). Throughout these texts – which are not devoid of the kind of two-dimensional ‘plebeian’ anti-Marxism of the nouveaux philosophes, with whom he sympathised with at the time – Foucault tries to resist and provoke what he sees as a typically Occidental supercilious dismissal of religious politics. He highlights the importance, within the mounting social turmoil in Iran, of a religious resistance to what he calls the ‘modernisation-corruption-despotism’ series, explicitly trying to resist the capture of the situation in Iran by the ‘millenarian concept’ of fanaticism (708). Foucault also counters some of the more naïve or platitudinous responses to the spiritualization of politics and its relation to the social. In a typically acerbic remark, he says:

Do you know the phrase that makes the Iranian sneer the most, the one that seems to them the stupidest, the shallowest, the most Western? “Religion is the opium of the people.” Up to the time of the current dynasty, the mullahs preached with a rifle by their side in the mosques (201).

Shi’ism is thus seen by Foucault not as inertial form, as the ideology that true revolutionaries need to cloak their discourse in, or even as a simple common vocabulary for popular aspirations. Religion is viewed not as a mask or vehicle but, somewhat in the terms used by Blickle to deal with the 1525 revolt – and indeed, in another passage on the subject, Foucault makes the analogy entirely explicit, writing of the Anabaptists – as a veritable crystallising force, inasmuch as it represents ‘a mode of social relations, a supple, and widely accepted, elementary organisation, a way of being together, a manner of speaking and listening, something which allows people to comprehend one another and will together’.

In his 1977 preface to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Foucault had uttered the following directive for what he famously called a non-fascist ethics of thought: ‘Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action’ (xiv). It is thus striking to see, how, at certain moments in his reports, and for all the micro-political methodology elsewhere employed, with its techniques, technologies, discourses and dispositifs, Foucault turns to one of the most classical forms of the grounding of political truth, the collective will. Explicitly sidelining the occidental prism of power struggles and political intrigues – not to mention the unabashedly ‘representational’ discourse of legal religious authority which was Khomenei’s crucial innovation – Foucault depicts in the Iranian revolution one of those insurgencies of the ‘plebs’ so dear to the anti-party, anti-Marxist, renegade Maoist rhetoric of the nouveaux philosophes. Whence the constant theme of a religious mass against the State. At the very time that he was lecturing in the Collège de France on the molecular administrative practises of governmental biopolitics, he encounters mass religious politics – and not political Islamism per se – as a peculiar realization of a kind of unmediated Rousseauian scene.

Faced with the advance of the revolution, Foucault asks himself whether the idea of Islamic government is to be seen as a reconciliation, contradiction or the threshold of a novelty? (694). His intuition was that the supposed absence of a classical political programme driving the revolutionary uprising was matched by the strength of will, ‘the collective will of a people’ (746) – ‘an abstraction in political philosophy encountered for the first time in the flesh’. Tellingly, Foucault seems to elide the idea that Iran manifested a finally embodied Rousseauianism with the provocative notion that this appearance of the popular will in a religiously articulated uprising was a general strike against politics. Or, more precisely, that it demonstrated a political will not to allow any grip within the uprising for politics as it is classically understood. The question for Foucault then, who remains rather pessimistic on this count, is that of knowing when this popular or general will, this spiritual plebeian irruption, was to be replaced by the instrumental exercise of politics.

It is undeniable, rereading the Corriere articles, that the supposedly non-representational will of this ‘spiritual politics’ exerted a massive fascination on Foucault. So that, despite himself, and in order to flee from the specific rationality of the historical materialist explanations he was opposing at the time, Foucault too fell prey to the lure of fanaticism, witness the following statement:

It is the same protest, the same will which is expressed by a doctor from Tehran and a mullah from the provinces, by a petrol worker, by an employee of the post office and by a student under her chador (715).

Khomeini – like Müntzer, but possibly through a far graver misunderstanding of the former’s ‘art of governing’ – is dramatised as attacking the very scene of politics, in ‘the first great insurrection against planetary systems, the most modern form of revolt and the maddest’ (716). In this short-circuit between an immovable spiritual leader and a convergent mass, the limit-concept of a totally anti-systemic politics, born with the German Peasants’ War and its intimations of negative protest, scuppers the attempt to think, in a determinate and organised form, the nature of a politics of truth. The anti-Marxist stance – which leads Foucault to argue that there is no classical social or political revolution at stake in Iran, no evident class struggle, social contradictions or political vanguard – together with the methodological focus on an eventality indifferent to consequences crystallises in a return, via a reference to François Furet, to the dichotomy and disjunction of revolt and revolution; a temporal and subjective asymmetry between the domain of social contradiction and change, on the one hand, and the specific (spiritual) intensity of the political act. Religion, no longer an ideology or a space of conciliation, is here ‘the vocabulary, the ritual, the atemporal drama wherein one could lodge the historical drama of a people which puts its existence on a balance with that of its sovereign’ (746). It is this which allows Foucault to endorse the mythic figure of a revolt of the people against the power, in a ‘bond between collective actions, religious ritual and act of public right or law’ (748) which suspends history:

Because it is thus “outside history” and in history, because everyone puts his or her life on the line, we can understand why uprisings have easily found in religious forms their expression and dramaturgy. Promises of the beyond, return of bygone periods, wait for the saviour or empire of the last days, undivided reign of the good, all of this has constituted for centuries, where the form of religion allowed it, not an ideological costume, but the very way of living uprisings (791).

Iran thus dramatises for Foucault a definitive refusal of the analytical schemas of either liberal or Marxist thought, or of ‘Western’ thought tout court, the irruption of a different ‘regime of truth’ (753). Reconnecting with a tradition whose roots lie in Stirner, revolt is seen by Foucault as the point of insertion of subjectivity within history, a protest against any notion of political ‘evolution’ or progress, such that a spiritualization of politics is read, via a projection onto Shi’ism, as a total, internal revolution (an inner exodus of the kind promoted in Müntzer). As Christian Jambet notes, for Foucault:

It is a matter not of the politics of a future State, but of the essence of an uprising, of the ‘spiritual’ politics that makes it possible, and this is, consequently, a ‘transcendental’ interrogation: under what conditions can a culture determine a revolt, on the basis of an experience and a hope marked by ‘events in the sky’?

Foucault’s customary method of ‘microanalysis’ is thus inflected in an explicitly non-teleological and indeed (contrary to the usual image of his thought) anti-strategic sense, witness Foucault’s motto: ‘be respectful when a singularity rises up, intransigent when power violates the universal’ (794). It is here, in the fantasy of a mass anti-systemic singularity, of a primal capacity for resistance against which revolution is a mere rationalist domestication, that lies Foucault’s subjection to the trope of fanaticism – not in a supposed collusion with ‘Islamism’ or in some dubious sort of homosexist Orientalism, as the authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution contend.

If a politics of truth is indeed to be thinkable we need to move beyond the Scylla of denunciation – fanaticism as the ideology of a failed or anachronistic politics, as anti-representation, as a way, following Lukács, of violently vaulting the hiatus between a humanistic idea and an unjust order – and the Charybdis of enthusiastic assumption of a politics of pure singularity or exodus. Moving beyond the trope of fanaticism, is, I believe, a condition sine qua non for the formulation of a politics of truth. Such a suspension of the denunciatory and mythological machine of fanaticism involves confronting three decisive issues:

A. The legacy of Kantianism
Inasmuch as the condemnation of fanaticism – as well as of the ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic’ politics of truth that supposedly rest on the fanatical subreption, the delusion of pure presentation – achieves its modern canonical form in Kant, to what extent must we surpass the very transcendental parameters in which Kantianism poses the question of truth (or rather of truths – moral, scientific, political)? It is this question which organizes the differend staged at the end of The Ticklish Subject by Žižek between Lacan and Badiou. Is the non-totalization of being, which defuses the very problem of fanaticism, to be understood in terms of the ‘specific mode of human finitude’ (conceived, allegedly, in psychoanalytic and not merely anthropological terms), or is it rather to be grasped via what Badiou terms a mathematical secularization of the infinite – of an infinite which is not the delusional aim of political truth, but its starting point in the axiom of equality? My own sympathy for the second stance is in part driven by the limits of the Kantian opposition between a defensible political enthusiasm and a disastrous or terroristic fanaticism, as it features in the works of Lyotard and Arendt, among others. Part of this suspicion lies in the fundamental limitation of the category of enthusiasm to the figure of the political spectator – explicit in Kant’s and Arendt’s reading of the French revolution – and the impossibility within the Kantian horizon of thinking a political (rather than a moral) subject, and therefore a political (rather than a moral or scientific) truth, in terms other than a regulative notion of the human species.

B. The question of political versus historical time
Whether in the form of an immediate revelation of time in the fanatical vision of the future kingdom, a suspension of time in the intense act of revolt, or an outright denial of time, the vision of politics that shadows the notion of fanaticism seems unable to temporalise political truth. In this regard we could argue that Badiou’s suggestion that we think a properly political time, the time of sequences, periodisations and ‘historical modes of politics’ might be a way out of the oscillation between the apocalyptic suspension of time, on the one hand, and the neutralisation of politics and truth within a dense, historical time, on the other. Whilst such a treatment of political time in interiority, as it were, might bypass the problems of political anachronism which have bedevilled much historical materialism (see Lukács above), it always risks overcompensating by drawing a separation, at once stark and opaque, between politics and history, the truth of the subject and the profane density of the world. In brief, this is the problem of the relation to be entertained between a politics of truth and the entire tradition of dialectical thought, be it negative, messianic or materialist, for which the articulation of politics and history is of paramount concern. This distinction between politics and history in what concerns truth leads us to the final issue.

C. The problem of separation
Ever since Luther and Melanchton, the tradition of anti-fanatical thought, or what Colas calls the ‘critique of the critique of representation’, has rested on a defense of the separation between the city of men and the city of God. In more contemporary and secular writers such as Arendt, who have transformed the critique of fanaticism into a critique of totalitarianism, this immunising, demarcationist impulse is translated – still as a way to ward off the totalizing drive of a fanatical perception of truth – into a distinction between the social and the political, a distinction which in Arendt’s case is the object of, if not fanatical, at the very least obsessive concern. To what extent must a politics of truth maintain such demarcations, even or especially, as in the case of Badiou, when it moves beyond the Kantian framework? In what sense do there remain traces within such a politics of truth of a preoccupation with the possibility of a terrorising, unlimited truth – of the possibility for truth to overstep its proper bounds and generate what Badiou has termed a political disaster? Perhaps we could end by saying, in a more affirmative vein, that in the face of the line of thought running from Luther to our Kantian contemporaries, a politics of truth needs to construct what we could call its own protocols of limitation, protocols which are not over-determined by the fear, or better, the terror of fanaticism.