Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 2004, 15-16

POLYGRAPH

NUMBER 15/16

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE & POLITICS

IMMANENCE, TRANSCENDENCE, AND UTOPIA Issue Editors: Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez

'f . . �.�IJ .

Jean-Luc Nancy

IMM/TRANS

Arturo Leyte

LEAVING IMMANENCE

Alberto Moreiras

I NFRAPOLITICS AND IMMATERIAL REFLECTION

.

Kenneth Surin

POST-POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP

Slavoj Ziiek

THE BECOMING-OEDIPAL OF GILLES DELEUZE

Alain Badiou

THE FLUX AND THE PARTY

Bruno Bosteels

LOGICS OF ANTAGONISM

Mladen Dolar

KAFKA'S VOICES

Alenka ZupanCic

INVESTIGATIONS OF THE LACA NIAN FIELD

Robert Spencer

TRADITION AND TRANSCENDENCE

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

IMMANENCE AND (ITS) INTERRUPTION

POLYGRAPH

NUMBER 15/16 (2004)

CONTENTS

J)�-' S ') f70Ib/f� -j ! �

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE It POLITICS

IMMANENCE, TRANSCENDENCE, AND UTOPIA Introduction: Neither Immanence nor Transcendence

Issue Editors: Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez

3

Marta Hernandez Salvan Imm/Trans

11

Jean-Luc Nancy -

Editorial collective

Laura Balladur Janelle Blankenship Rodger Frey Simon Krysl Alex Ruch Abby Salerno Matthew Wilkens Advisory board

Rey Chow, Brown University Manthia Diawara, New York University Jane Gaines, Duke University Lawrence Grossberg, UNC-Chapel Hill Michael Hardt, Duke University Fredric Jameson, Duke University Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University Andrew Ross, New York University General sponsors

Duke University

Program in Literature The Center for International Studies Marxism and Society Group Graduate and Professional Student Council

UNC-Chapel Hill

University Program in Cultural Studies

Acknowledgements

The follOWing departments and programs of Duke University have generously supported the publication of Polygraph 15/16: English, Film and Video, Latin American Studies, Romance Studies, and Women's Studies.

Information

Polygraph is published annually. Send all

Leaving Immanence: Art from Death

correspondence to

Arturo Leyte

Polygraph Art Museum 104, Box 90670 Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Fax: +1 919 684 3598 E-mail: [email protected]

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Post-Political Citizenship

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

59

Slavoj Zizek The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus

Distribution and Ubiquity Distribution. ISSN 1533-9793. Copyright © 2004 by Polygraph. All rights reserved. Individual authors retain copyright to their essays.

75

Alain Badiou Logics of Antagonism: ty" ar P e th d an x u Fl e h "T 's u io ad B in la In the Margins of A

On the cover

All images reproduced by permission of the artist.

47

Kenneth Surin

Polygraph is distributed through DeBoer

Spine: Elizam Escobar, Odiseo Paranoico (detail), c. 1986. Acrylic, collage, and text on canvas, ?" x 72" (repeated three times).

33

Alberto Moreiras

For more information, including the current call for papers and submission guidelines, see http://www.duke.edu/web/ polygraph.

Back: Elizam Escobar, Sujeto Muerto con Ceiba [Dead Subject with Ceiba Tree], 1992. Ink on paperboard, 10" x 1 2\4".

13

93

Bruno Bosteels •

Kafka's Voices

109

Mladen Dolar Investigations of th\ Lacanian Field: Some Remarks on Comedy and Love

131

Alenka Zupancic Tradition and Transcendence: Postmodernity's Entanglement in Immanence

Robert Spencer

1 47

Immanence and (Its) Interruption: Critical Reconstellations

Juan Carlos Rodriguez Contributors

169

Introduction: Neither Immanence nor Transcendence

193

Marta Hernandez Salvan

What is the primordial question of any possible political phi­ losophy today? This volume intends to open up the debate among some of the various philosophical tendencies that de­ rived from the different post- Marxisms of the seventies, and many other strands of thought that arose more directly from within poststructuralism and their endeavor to think through the crisis of the epistemological and political subject, as Ken­ neth Surin would have it. 1 Our present conjuncture is the result of the global dominance of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation, especially after the disappearance of the social­ ist regimes, and the end of a bipolar geopolitical order. One could thus claim that we now live in a post-ideological era dominated by an order of global flexible accumulation. Tak­ ing into account this conjuncture, it is perhaps not unfathom­ able to think that our post-ideological era has contributed to the disintegration of the political subject and to the withering of most of its former social practices of emancipation. The intention behind this volume is to create a dialogue between two philosophical traditions in their current evolution and their attempt at theorizing the present political conjuncture. Namely, the ontological Idealist tradition that begins with Kant and the Spino zan immanentist ontology.2 Let me briefly summarize the theoretical questions raised by each one of these traditions, because it is key to understand that the po­ litical discourses that stem from each one of the two tradi­ tions have a fundamental theoretical split whose origin can be found in their ontological premises. I. Freedom and Necessity

The Kantian Idealist tradition posits a fundamental ontologi­ cal duality between being and reason, and between freedom and necessity. Natural laws are beyond human reason, where­ as the moral law depends on individual choice. This is why every being is at the same time free and bound. The principle

..

Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

Marta Hernandez Salvan

Introduction

4

of difference is based upon this paradox between the freedom of moral law and the nece�s t: imposed by natural laws. The philosophical quandary posed by the im­ . . possIbIlIty of bnngmg together freedom and necessity in synthetic reason becomes a key i �sue for the Idealist tradition that comes after Kant. In this sense, Hegelian . dIalectics are an attempt to integrate the necessary laws of reason and freedom in the name of th� Absolute Sp rit. The concept of absolute spirit in fact manages to encom�ass the Idea of n ecesslty and freedom at once, by positing an entity which is . not subjected to a supenor power outside of it. What this means is that the absolute spirit is like ant s transcen e�tal subject, a being whose reason is not contingent upon the arbltranness of a dlVlne power. It is an entity whose existence is indepen­ dent of any o �her cause . Y �t, at t e same time the Absolute Spirit is determined by natural laws msofar as .It IS subjected to the laws of time and space. This means, fo � example, that it can be subjected to a notion of time defined as a progression (bIrth/death) or as a teleology. This is precisely why for Arturo Leyte and Jean -Luc Nancy only the event of death can interrupt the dialectical determination of the work of art. For Schelling, as we know, the absolute was represented by art. For Leyte and Nancy the work of art produces a space of absolute identification between the observer and the work of art that can only be interrupted temporarily by the ev�nt of death. In Glas, Jacques Derrida's book on Hegel, Derrida makes use of the stam a� a �et�phor to escribe the fact that the determinant limit of a concept is almost mfimte m Hegel. In the same work, Derrida suggests that there is a parallel , between Hegel s Aujhebung and the Lacanian notion of castration, and that both of them have a paradoxical nature. Castration is a process that leads to a subjection to the law of the father, the symbolic law; yet at the same time, it is also a process of subjectification. How to recover the spatial and temporal dimension of difference between free­ dom �nd determination? How to think about difference? How to think about sin­ gulanty? How to capture the spatio-temporal dimension of interruption of the ab­ solute? These are some of the fundamental questions that we have inherited from the Kantian Idealist tradition. Most importantly, these are some of the essential qu�stions guiding the articulation of our contemporary political theories. Derrida . mamtal�s that Hegel's logic cannot be deconstructed conceptually, because that would �lmply be a conceptual displacement of the dialectical logic from an outside. Such dIsplacement could only take place from a transcendental power outside the structure. Yet, neither Derrida nor Deleuze would ever accept the existence of a �ranscendental power o�tsi e the structure. The dialectical logic can thus only be l�terrupted by an excluslOn mherent in the formation of the structure. Such exclu­ SlOn can only exist as an excess:

�

�

�

� :

�

�

�

II n'�st �as sur q�'o� intervienne conceptuellement dans sa logique. Pour Ie falre 11 fa�dralt deplacer conceptuellement l' articulation conceptuelle­ : chez lUl mamfeste-entre Aufhebung, castration, verite, loi, etc. II faut faire apparaitr � des forces de resistance it la negativite speculative, et que ces for­ , ces de reSIstance ne constituent pas it leur tour des negativites relevables ou relevantes. En somme un reste qui ne soit pas sans etre un neant: un reste qui ne

5

soit.4 For Derrida there is no possibility to interrupt the logic of the absolute or of the law from a conceptual point of view, for that would also be a conceptual refram­ ing of the notion of the law. The very difficult task that is left to us, is a demand to find the possibility to resist negative speculation with a non subsumable negativ­ ity. I believe that this is, for example, the task at hand in Alberto Moreiras's essay, "Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection:' Departing from the imperial sovereignty of the Spanish Inquisition as an example of a biopolitical procedure to ensure that people cooperate in their own domination, Moreiras's essay questions the possibili­ ties for the suspension of a biopolitical narration of history in relation to the pos­ sibilities of immaterial labor. In order to articulate his response, Moreiras takes issue with Mauricio Lazzarato's notion of immaterial labor. Lazzarato thinks that there are two ways to look at the relationship between immaterial labor and production. Immaterial labor can be caught within the capital relation and therefore reproduce the structures of domination. On the other hand, immaterial labor may create a new relationship between production and consumption and promote values that could never be normalized by the apparatus of command within the system of production. Both responses are nihilistic in nature, which is also to say that they are messianic. Moreiras takes Lazzarato's proposition seriously in seeking to understand whether immaterial labor marks or fails to mark the final subsumption of living time into labor power. He then argues that there are two fundamental uses of history. For him, the biopolitical use of history is the sovereign use of history, the one that allows us to understand that if history is always a biopolitical history, then there is no outside to the biopolitical relation to history. The second use of history is what Moreiras calls a useless use, the infrapolitical use of history. "This use without use-says Moreiras­ has to do with un-working the determinations of the first use. If the characteristic procedure of the first use of history is the capture of life by the political, the capture of life by the sovereign relation, the characteristic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the principle of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the deproduction of the use of history:' Is the uncanny power of Nancy's medusa as poignantly terrifying as the useless use of history? It is precisely this brief and sud­ den emergence of the Lacanian Real what opens up the possibility of interruption of the historical structure. As we know, the Lacanian Real is the inherent exclusion of the symbolic structure, the excess of the structure. The Real is, in Bruno Bosteels's words, the point of the impossible that vertebrates the symbolic. Yet, the Real can never be taken as a radical exteriority, it is always an intrinsic exteriority. The same goes for the radical-democratic orientation, which is based on the essential lack of the social bond. Such lack is always an inherently intrinsic exteriority of the power structure, rather than a transcendental exterior force. Radical democracy is based on the necessary and impossible fullness of society. Therefore there is a lack, something which is present and absent at the same time. The primary presence of such a lack articulates itself through empty signifiers, and the hegemonic operation consists in a discursive articulation of those signifiers to wider discursive totalities. We can thus conclude that none of these logical operations are ever based on the existence of a ..

6

Introduction

transcendental force determining the structure from a radical outside. II. An Absolute without Negation

This volume also intends to take issue with the Spinozist-Deleuzian notion of poli­ tics as a field of pure immanence. In their contemporary version these politics are embodied by the two complementary logics of Empire and the Multitude as they are outlined in the two respective homonymous books co-authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their critiques of Empire, most scholars have focused on the limitations of the power of resistance of the multitude. In this volume for example, Bosteels alludes to the theoretical challenges of articulating the multitude, and he points out that one should try to relate it to some of its historical equivalents such as the mass or the people. Bosteels argues that the concept of the multitude belongs to a long genealogy that is defined as what according to Badiou is "a canonical state­ ment, which holds that the masses make history, posits in the masses precisely this vanishing irruption of which political philosophy only tells the always belated, and always torn storY:' 5 The problem with the notion of the multitude as it appears to be grounded in Paolo Virno's account-Bosteels argues-is that having forsaken with the subject altogether it seems almost impossible to envision how such a politics could theorize about a political actor. I would add further that the problem rather lies in the dangerous liaison between the notion of the multitude and the mass, which is by the way the ghost that returns in Badiou's acrimonious article "The Flux and the Party:' As we know, the goal of the multitude is like the goal of any other mass that fights for its emancipation to form a community of sorts. What differenti­ ates the multitude from its predecessors is that it has no telos. One could argue that the multitude is a radically new concept insofar as it distances itself from the Chris­ tian images of so many other emancipatory discourses in which the goal is to tran­ scend the corruptions of the world by arriving at a pristine paradise. The multitude is rather a political space organized within the ontology of Empire: "The name that we want to use to refer to the multitude in its political autonomy and its productive activity-Hardt and Negri tell us-is the Latin term posse-power as a verb, as activ­ ity. . . . [Plosse is the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in an ex­ pansive, constitutive process:'6 In this sense, it is true that the multitude is a notion that bears no relation with the Leninist idea of the vanguard, nor with any anarchic notion of mass. It bears similarities nevertheless to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the multiple singular potentialities insofar as they are generated in the virtual field, which is the field of production. More important, however, is to note that from the ontological point of view, Empire and the Multitude form a singular substance. What is a singular substance? This notion is genealogically linked to Deleuze and especially to Spinoza. The substance for Deleuze is distinct and not different, because the notion of difference entails a numerical distinction. Numbers set limits and therefore they are defined by an external cause. The numerical distinction in Deleuze is not real, it is only a formal distinction because the substance can only have an internal cause. This actually emphasizes, according to Hardt, the fact that Deleuzian difference is not relational. Against Descartes and following Spinoza, Deleuze wants to eliminate any negative aspect of the real distinction. Negativity

Marta Hernandez Salvan

7

is inherent in the relational character of difference for Descartes, whereas for De­ leuze and also for Negri and Hardt "distinction would be a better term for defining the singularity of being" precisely because the notion of distinction as they under­ stand it does not have a relational character? The singularity of being is key to un­ derstanding the ontology of the multitude. "How can we conceive of the absolute without negation?" asks Hardt.8 According to Hardt, only the Spinozan principle of the singularity of being is conducive to an understanding of an absolute without negation. As we argued above, singularity is not defined by an external cause, and therefore it does not have any limitations that may define it by negation. A lack of a negative determination does not make singularity indeterminate, because accord­ ing to Deleuze, singularity is determined by an internal cause. "The singular-says Hardt-is remarkable because it is different in itself'9 "It would be false, then-he adds-to set up an opposition between singular being and determinate being. Sin­ gularity is and is not determination. In other words, Spinoza's be�ng, the unique sub ­ . stance, is determinate in the sense that it is qualified, that it is dIfferent. However, It is not determinate in the sense of being limited:'l0 What follows from this is that the principle of immanence has to exclude negativity because negativity is that which limits being, that which makes it tend towards transcendence. Hardt explains at length how Deleuze's substance is singular and internally de­ termined, or remarkable and absolute. According to Hardt the fact that Deleuze ad­ dresses determination is what allows his theory to be nondialectical. He also shows how immanence denies any form of eminence or hierarchy in being due to the principle of the univocity of the attributes, which requir� s th�t bei�g be expressed equally in all of its forms. Hardt argues that what Deleuzes explanatIOn makes clear is that Spinoza's ontology, a combination of immanence and expression, is not sus­ ceptible to the Hegelian critique of the dispersion and the "progressive loss" of be­ ing. Therefore both empire and the multitude are an all-inclusive substance where no subjectivity stands outside. Since we can only imagine the multitude as an abso­ lute, however, it is not clear how we may differentiate it from the mass. In this sense, I would tend to agree with Badiou's analysis of Deleuze's ontology.l1 Badiou argues that Deleuze is rather a philosopher of the metaphysics of the One, and not a phi­ losopher of the multiple. To reach the one, is what Badiou calls the democracy of de­ sire: "Une seule et meme voix pour tous Ie multiple aux milles voix, un seul et meme Ocean pour toutes les gouttes, une seule clameur de l'Etre pour tous les etants:'12 If we only hear the unique and absolute sound of one voice, how could we account for the singularity of the voice or for the lack of it? If there is only one voice, is there only one desire? Whose desire is it? How can we tell the progressive desire from the non progressive one? In this sense, it is important to remember Surin's essay, a� d . of the ThIrd especially his final conclusion, in which he criticizes the pragmatIsm Way and argues for the need to trace a non-negotiable line between the left and the right. If this is true, it seems that the multitude is a dangerous concept. Although, if we were to push this issue a little bit further, one could also argue that given our present conjuncture it might be necessary to redefine what do we understand by the left. That is precisely what Slavoj Zizek accomplishes in his essay on Deleuze. Zizek's article is a very nuanced critique of Deleuze, in which he praises the first ..

8

Marta Hernandez Salvan

Introduction

Deleuze of the Logic of Sense and criticizes his intellectual alliance with Felix Guat­ tari. Zizek argues that Deleuze's ontological system relies on two divergent logics, the logic of Becoming and the logic of Being. The logic of sense and the immate­ rial becoming as sense-event poses a radical gap between generative processes and their immaterial sense-effect. Sense-event is thus a sterile space, where nothing is produced. On the other hand, Deleuze posits the logic of becoming as production of Beings. Zizek makes a Lacanian reading of Deleuze against the grain, in which he draws a parallelism between Lacan's objet petit a and Deleuze's quasi-cause. The notion of quasi-cause is what prevents a regression into reductionism by arguing that in every determination there is an excess. Zizek's intent is to privilege Deleuze's logic of sense and thus to show that such logic is embedded in a materialist geneal­ ogy, rather than an idealist one. In this task Zizek shows how Deleuze's quasi-cause goes through the same inherent process of contradiction as Hegelian actualization. Through his Lacanian reading of Deleuze, Zizek shows how the quasi-cause plays the role of the phallic signifier and how Deleuze's last project stems from an ide­ alist argumentation because it argues that a virtual intensity generates a material reality. Through a coup de force Zizek then shows that the category of the sense­ event has its own autonomy, and that this is what proves Deleuze's real compromise with materialism. He thus proves that Deleuze and Guattari's leftist organization of molecular groups stems from an idealist subjectivism, whereas the sterility of the sense-event is indeed the real site for a political struggle: "What if the domain of politics is inherently 'sterile; the domain of pseudo-causes, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality?"'3 Doesn't the sterile domain of pseudo­ causes function in the same logical manner as Moreiras's infrapolitical use of history or Nancy's work of art? The dull, dingy, and uncertain obstacle that terrifies the philosopher is certainly present in most of the theoretical accounts to be found in this issue. This is certainly terrifying, especially if our contemporary political theory cannot grapple with the uncertainty of such terror. This is especially pressing now, more than ever, in the wake of this past U.S. presidential election. It is now, I believe, that we are left with the difficult and urgent task of defining what the left is today, for us, for all of us. •

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1

Kenneth Surin, "Post-Political Citizenship;' in this issue.

2

Both Kenneth Surin and Arturo Leyte give very good accounts of the genealogies of these two philosophical traditions in this issue.

3

Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), 20.

4

Ibid., 53.

5

Bruno Bosteels, "Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's 'The Flux and the Parti" in this issue.

6

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 407.

7

Michael Hardt, An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 60.

8

Ibid., 62.

9

Ibid., 63·

10 Ibid., 67· 11 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: La Clameur de l'are (Paris: Hachette, 1997). 12 Ibid., 20.

Deleuze;' in this issue. les Gil of pal edi -O ing om Bec e "Th ek, Ziz voj Sla 13

•

9

Imm/Trans Jean-Lue Naney

I tried to write for you a very short essay on your theme, "im­ manence and transcendence:' I give up because the topic is necessarily elusive. If indeed immanence designates being subsisting in itself [en soi], this being defines in and of itself an exterior against which it subsists autonomously. Sub-sist­ ing [sub-sister] implies being situated beneath some other thing. A substance is substance of . . . that of which it is a sub­ stance, and, as the case arises, of its accidents. A subject sub­ jeetum is subject of . . . its acts, its states of consciousness, etc., unless it has become in a sense forgotten, "subject" to the authority that rules over it. As subsistence, immanence opens onto an inevitable exterior. On the contrary, transcendence designates not the sub­ ject but the act, the movement that crosses the limits of sub­ sistence. But we have just seen that substance opens itself beyond its limits, risking its own subsistence: if it no longer opened, it would dissolve rather than remain poised on its acts and attributes. But the transcendental act happens nowhere, because outside substance only the order of the act exists, hence some­ thing of transcendence itself, or the order of the attribute, it­ self accidental and inconsistent. Transcending can be nothing but a tautology: transcendence transcends, and leads to noth­ ing. (One sees then that immanence immanates [immane], nothing more.) If transcendence leads to transcendence, it is immanent to itself. If immanence subsists as henchman without either acts or overtures, it dissolves in itself. On either side, a radical and absolute implosion of the thing or notion exists. Transcen­ dence immanatizes itself [s'immanentise] , like a bad infinite running behind its ghost, immanence undoes itself, like a rot­ ting corpse. Ghost and rot are the last two and unending figures of transcendence and immanence. Neither one exists. Existing, existence, ignores ghosts and rot, two ways to represent death as a state. But death is not a state. Death is not: as such it can -

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Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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ImmlTrans

emerge, as indeed it does emerge. Death, mere death removes any speculation on "immanence" and "transcen­ dence:' In death, substance or act disappear. Simultaneously, however, death forms the only passage of subsistence outside itself. Subsistence rids itself of the envelope that maintains it subsisting (thus subsistence rids itself of that under which it sub­ sisted) and develops into ek-sistence, or into "sistence" outside itself. Into insistence, so to speak. Either within or through death (for death is but a slim barrier) the "sisting" insists far from any sub-sistence or con-sistence. "Transcendence" now be­ comes "immanence;' turned inside out like the finger of a glove. I could say as much for what we call the "work of art:' How do we recognize such a work? Only by the following: That faced with it, we do not stay faced, but we meet, we strike, we are struck, we lose our envelope just as this thing, the work, loses its own-its forms, its mannerisms [ manieres]. We develop within it as it does within us. We enter and exit. We are always in this in-between [entre-deux] of it and us. Rather quickly we understand there is about as much an "it" as there is an "us" (or "me"). There is-There is only reality that neither immanates nor transcends: that's the obstacle-the good-obstacle or the bad-obstacle, but the chock, the chocking obstacle against what is neither within nor without, but an erected barrier: death, birth, love, spoken word [parole] . There we strike, we are struck. We do not remain in ourselves, we do not leave ourselves. Just in between: we get a bump, a bruise, a blood clot. Being gets out of there swollen, tumescent, distended. Neither fluid such as water immanent to water, nor leaping such as a dolphin transcending waves. Rather dull, dingy and uncertain like a Medusa between two waters. Admittedly, that Medusa terrifies the philosopher . •

Translated by Laura Balladur. The original French text is available on the Polygraph Web site at http;llwww.duke.edulweblpolygraph.

Leaving Immanence: Art from Death Arturo Leyte

I

When, in concluding his Critique ofPractical Reason and sum­ ming up his vision of reality, Kant expresses admiration for only two things-"the starry sky above me and the moral law within me"l-surely he is drafting the final such conceptual image in a terminal line of thought. Indeed, just a few years later the image will come to define an exhausted territory to which Kant will never return.2 Today we might recognize the territory as that of "difference": the difference between, vari­ ously, "nature" and "spirit"; "necessity" and "liberty"; "nature" and "history" or, why not, the difference between the ancient metaphysical binaries of being and thinking. But if this is the case, Kant's elegant statement turns out to be at the same time a requiem for difference. In fact, his philosophy overall may be interpreted as the last concerted attempt to reconstruct a constitutive difference within human reason, locating the le­ gality of the physical uni,:,erse above this reason; moral legal­ ity within it. Yet if something like Kant's cumulative philosophy can be understood in this endeavor, it is because in it Kant already both perceives and attempts to avert a danger: philosophy's transformation into "critique" coincides with this move. Cri­ tique is then marshaled against totalizing reason precisely be­ cause the former presumes an irreconcilable duality between "practical reason" and "theoretical reason;' in turn further divided into sensibility and understanding: that is, critique presupposes that philosophy itself can be seen as the result of a fundamental duality between the empirical and the tran­ scendental, which is to say between the ontic and the onto­ logical. Yet, crucially, a cominon territory is lacking for the conjunction of these two: difference remains difference, and no ancillary third sector is ceded space between the two. This does not mean that there cannot be unity within the differ­ ence marking, for example, practical and theoretical reason or understanding and sensibility, but merely that this unity Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

14

Leaving Immanence

cannot be known-cannot, indeed, be a subject for philosophy. As Kant writes about the constitution of knowledge in the introduction to his first Critique, the two branches-sensibility and understanding-have a "common root:' "unknown" to us.3 This "unknown" character is owed not to human limitation, but is, rather, a facet of the very constitution of reason as finite reason. The unity of reason remains beyond the possibilities of knowledge. This is not the place to rehearse how the idealist interpretation of Kant, against himself, did away with difference as constitutive of critical philosophy. Suffice it to say that from Idealism onward the field will be dominated by attempts to encounter precisely the very unity so impossible for Kant-that between the starry sky (Na­ ture) and moral law (Spirit). Indeed, such unity will come to define philosophy. The idealism of Schelling and Hegel begins by calling this sought-after unity "the abso­ lute:' rendering philosophy simply the research into the constitution and exhibition of this absolute. Both theoretical and practical strategies are involved, to a certain extent, in this pursuit, in very different ways: for underpinning the theoretical in­ vestigation of the absolute will be the problem of its real apparition in the world, such that the absolute, far from being merely an idea-as the term "Idealism" might suggest -is in fact the problem of its own exhibition or realization, which in the last instance is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical. In or around 1800 (that is, just a few years after Kant had marveled at his starry sky and moral law) a still young Schelling proposed an initial name for this much debated and troubling territory where unity-where the absolute-was speculated to reside. This name, which from the very beginning aspired to designate very real grounds, was Art.4 If Descartes, at the dawn of modernity, found God to be the only link between the res extensa (nature, the starry sky) and the res cogitans (law); if, much earlier, the discipline uniting the physico-natural and the ethico-human had been Logic, here, in a rupture of modern tradition, the role of God and Logic was taken up, however provisionally, by Art. This was possible because the artwork marries the unconscious activity of nature and the conscious activity of the spirit, producing a unity that is the work itself. The artwork thus unites the two spheres while retaining an independence from its constitutive parts, an independence that is, moreover, objective-objective in the sense that it is physical, material, visible. The work of art is thus not only the union of the natural and the spiritual, but also of the material and the formal, the real and the ideal. In short, art becomes the absolute under a different name, insofar as it unites the productivity of nature with the activ­ ity of the spirit. Art is, then, production. If all this is true from an Idealist standpoint, a single problem presents itself: the absolute realized as art is at once very real and unknowable, for there can be no concept of it. The absolute becomes the work of art and material synthesis of the universal and the singular, and yet it cannot be known. The history of Idealism will be the history of just this conquest of the absolute, beyond Kantian difference. This conquest-or the path to the absolute, as Hegel will explicate it5-will itself also be the absolute, the medium within which all possibilities are brought into play. And if this absolute is identified with a unity located, at the turn of the nineteenth century, in art, but also with a totality to be procured,6 it seems plausible to imagine that this

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conquest of the absolute-itself nothing other than conquest-might be realized by politics as well as by art. Conquest of the absolute-which amounts to a demand that the absolute be realized-is effected by permeating not just intermediary space (the "between" bridging the starry sky and moral law), but all space, with a single aim of assuring that the absolute prevail as that which it is, ab-solutum, detached [des-ligado] from everything, devoid of relation with anything. This occupation of space simultaneously constitutes the liquidation of difference: the starry sky and the moral law are forced to fit within the same unity. The unity is the horizontal line of time, where there is neither above (starry sky) nor below (moral law within), but rather "history" moving from nature (itself the transit from the inorganic to the organic) to spirit (transit from mythical forms of consciousness to self-consciousness.) In other words: history or transit or unity coinciding with what is; with being, never again to be understood as a substance pitted against a thought. Substance and thought rather meet, however violently at times, in this line or history outside of which nothing can be, nor can be produced. Substance and thought, or ideas and things, come to be understood only as elements or materials, at times discrete, at times indistinguishable from this absolute. This is the absolute that may be termed "subject": that is, that which subtends, identified simultaneously as unity (again, between starry sky and moral law, between nature and spirit) and as totality (all the singular cases, all differences, are elements of the everything). To propose a subject at the margins or indeed outside of this absolute (again, subject) is, then, a deceptive move obfuscating the transformative possibilities at­ tributed that subject. The difficult truth of the matter is that this "horizontal" ab­ solute, which eliminated the "verticality" within which was still recognizable the above of the sky and the below of the human, could be called history, even "human history:' For in this axial switch, time has been reduced to the same infinite line of history. Time here is the time of the line and of the conquest of this line, until even this distinction becomes irrelevant. In this blurring oflines (indiferencia], and from the moment any segment of the line is made equal to and interchangeable with any other, even the very infinitude of the line may be suspended without altering a thing. Any given segment can come to represent the everything, just as one thing becomes absolutely interchangeable with another because it represents the value of the totality. Thus the very notion of the "other" may dissipate; and without an other, how is one to speak of the self [el uno?] The singular, then, is to be only "one instance" of the absolute, such that the singular can only continue representing and reiterating the absolute through the construction of series, a serial reproduction that needs to take account of [de cuenta de] this inexhaustible absolute. But the absolute turns out to be the result, not the theme of such serial reproductions; better, the absolute is the serial reproduction of instances. So what value can the singular have? What singular is contained in the work of art? And what singular results from a political action? Can one, indeed, speak of singularity? If art and politics, via different paths and perspectives, come to instantiate the absolute (even more so, perhaps, than contemporary science, which rather lives in this immediate identification with reality), then the two must contain a tendency

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to instantiate the absolute such that all becomes art and politics: thus one witnesses a simple urge to convert all artistic activity or political action into yet one more move of transformation, as well as a more elemental conflation of art and politics as soon as the territory of difference (the "between") is characterized by an inability to distinguish between starry sky and moral law. Political acts, including military ac­ tion and war in general, can consequently also be considered supreme works of art, because both are realizations, performances. If such equivocations were evident in the aftermath of so fearsome an event as 9/11, perhaps overlooked was the fact that the inability to differentiate testified to a simultaneous indifferentiation between the real and the ideal, an indifferentiation which Idealism held up, let us not forget, as the very realization of the absolute. Hence the current difficulty in determining what constitutes a work of art, and, sim­ ilarly, what constitutes a true political action or decision, with everything oflate be­ come a potential art object or intervention or political gesture. The extension of the legal into all aspects of life, including those most private, is only one confirmation of the latter: surely for a long time now absolute seriality has meant that even sexual relations between individuals have the potential to be juridically catalogued (hence, adjudicated) or to be considered a work of art, however bad, and to be exploited as such, albeit only as pornography. Indeed, it is not pornography's industrial, mercan­ tile expansion within the (still?) private sphere, but rather its interiorization which constitutes its triumph, a triumph that is nothing more than a signal, at times bright, at other times dim, of the absolute: that is, of the subject, of that which is; that which desires to impose itself objectively. Given all this, should we be surprised by the multiplication and leveling of ar­ tistic genres? Indeed, the ever-greater blurring of painting and photography or of photography and architecture, as well as the almost total lack of distinction between "things" (which can no longer be considered simply as real) and what constitutes le­ gitimate materials for sculptures, in turn often realized as "performances" or instal­ lations, is merely proof of this bleeding of everything into everything else. Proof too of that ultimate confusion (read identification) between art and politics summed up in the creation of a sculptural masterpiece from the wreckage of a downed airline (a political act?) in which three hundred persons perished? Besides, of course, the palpable good fortune of not having become the fiery stuff of the event, the spectator's purchase on the crash consists only in televised im­ ages and remains in a museum. But to what end such a piece? To reflect on terror? Is not the very distinction terror/reflection already evidence of a fundamental error in not comprehending that no thought remains outside terror's sphere-which is, again, nothing but the line or absolute that recursively demands serial action, be it as artistic production or political action? If, indeed, the only exception is owed to a capricious kismet that selects some people to be spectators of art (e.g., the remains of the crash) and others, victims (whose photographic remains alone are salvage­ able), perhaps the logical conclusion is already anticipated in the act (artistic or political?) of making the body and its transformations the supreme work of art. So, anyway, seems to be the case of the work of Italian -Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abromovic, who proclaims her own body to be the best and only

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available material.s In this perhaps scandalous, perhaps honest attempt to link the materials of art with the body of the artist, and the observer of the artwork with the work itself, is revealed a recognition of inescapable destiny, as well as the intuition, perhaps, that the final move remains the definitive assimilation of the death-event as material for art (as it already may be for spectacle) and, to be sure, for politics. This does not mean that photographic or material memento mari, like those from the Lockerbie crash, would in some quasi-archaic sense exemplify art's ultimate ex­ pression, but rather that in death itself resides this artistic reality, whenever death, both actually transpired or recounted, ceases to be something private and becomes a political, or at least a statistical, phenomenon (as if there were a difference). Earlier, the reality of death had perhaps defined the "between" of the Kantian starry sky and moral law, for this differentiation was nothing more than the expres­ sion of finitude, comprehended through death. Yet it is also the case that at the core of the Kantian project stirred a longing to reproduce nature's infinitude and regularity in the specter of "the moral law in me:' particularly as these qualities were brought into relief against the perceived fragility and vulnerability of human action. And it is Idealism, as we have seen, that will claim to construct that human infini­ tude which we now identify with repetitive artistic activity and infinitely repeated political actions that may well be, on the whole, little more than mere administra­ tion. The fact that Idealism finds in art, albeit via contorted paths, a synthesis of the absolute and a substitute for logic9 should not imply a consequent demonization of art. The question merely arises of how it happened that art came to play such a role. A quick answer is that art was at least partially so enabled because it assumed responsibility for the recuperation of that enormous "empirical reign" to which Hegel alludedlO in 1801; because it was able to conquer and elevate to the status of pure thing an empirical reality that had previously appeared only as the shadow of the concept. Yet this absolute elevation would paradoxically end up liquidating the thing, now become "merely" a work of art-that is to say, merely a copy, pace Plato's hoary legacy. That copies would come to so constitute reality as to appear to be its true elements is an outcome of the same process by which every thing, its use value irrelevant when not reviled, has become the stuff of exchange. Still, it was not possible to banish fully from the core of artistic or political activ­ ity a revolutionary element aspiring to transform reality, without the simultaneous recognition that such a transformation was already at work outside of all conscious action. Once the line is recognized as the subject (i.e., the absolute), the details of who it is that possesses knowledge [canace1, who decides or who creates becomes derivative, turning the revolutionary element emanating from art or politics into the most active operator of the absolute, structured by its destiny: an immanent, unlimited time that excludes nothing. Could not one well understand the revolu­ tionary transformation at work in late nineteenth century painting, particularly that produced by Cezanne and the Impressionists onward (inheritors of a Romantic and post-Romantic tradition dating to the work of Gericault), from this fatal perspec­ tive?" How indeed should these artists be understood, if not through Monet's obses­ sive series in which he reproduced, for example, the Cathedral at Rauen or Waterlil-

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Leaving Immanence

ies? What impossibility is concealed in the refusal to paint "in one fell swoop;' as it

were, the reality hidden in the cathedral or in the aquatic plants? If Velazquez or Rembrandt had chosen such themes, they would have somehow superimposed upon the reality of multiple perspectives a single, perhaps absolutely synthetic one.l2 But the Impressionists were without a single subject for painting, because in the intervening time all had become potential matter for art, which is to say there were no more "exemplary" themes. A pastoral scene, a cathedral, a dance, a street, any figure (card player, florist, bourgeois, prostitute, invalid) was equal fod­ der for art, because any thing now arose from and returned to the same immanent reality, which we might name, however grandiloquently, "time:' What the Impressionists painted was thus no longer a single thing, but an im­ age produced "in" time, impossible to reproduce without reproducing all its mo­ ments. Hidden in the grandiose transformation presumed by such painting was also a profound slavishness to the temporal reality the painting attempted to reproduce, as if to escape from such temporality were metaphysically impossible. And, to a certain extent, it was: because "metaphysically;' that is, beyond the reality presented us, is nothing. Everything remains on this side of a division for which "this side" no longer signifies one among many, but rather the "everything" Hegel identified with truth.'3 Did such painting actually constitute a triumph over classical art? If so, did the triumph consist in anything beyond responding to a new era? Of course, if it was a triumph, it was one indebted to an idealist philosophy, paradoxically buried, os­ tensibly "overcome" in the inversion of metaphysics undertaken by such apparently diverse figures as Compte and Marx, but whose result-the concept of absolute time-constitutes the original horizon from which emerges all political action and creative acts. Indeed, it is the burying of the difference between starry sky and moral law that yields the new time, now "absolutely" human; now, we might say, "imma­ nently" human, with respect to which one can and indeed must situate (a situating which in this context signifies production) "everything:' But this everything has, in turn, to be reduced from multiplicity and dispersion to the unity of immanence through the recognition of a common nature of all things, comprising: their com­ mon dependence on infinite time; their character as single moments within con­ tinual succession; their constitution as mere images fixed fleetingly amidst perma­ nent flux; and, finally, a recognition that every thing is produced only as part of an immanent ex/change of being( s) [cambio immanente del ser].'4 In short, something very similar to Marx's crucial observation in Capital that the true nature of things is not properly being but exchange value. In any case, the debate rages on within the arts, mainly because art aspires to encounter singularity and not merely interchangeable moments, or better, because art aspires to encounter "the moment:' Hidden in the obsessive creativity of Monet's repeated painting of the cathedral at Rouen and his reduction of the thing to dis­ crete moments throughout the day (morning, noon, evening) lies the danger of the simultaneous dissolution of singularity. Why, for example, choose only those par­ ticular moments (morning, noon and evening are, in the end, merely extra-tempo­ ral categories for fixing time) and not all the omitted moments between morning

19

and noon, and noon and evening? Hence the paradox that, if taken to its logical extreme, the Impressionist project (as illustrated to a certain extent in the Waterlil­ ies) produces the dissolution/multiplication via absolute fragmentation of the same reality the Impressionists intended to reproduce. Masked behind the obsession to paint reality, then, lies the obsession to reproduce the infinite capacity of the gaze that observes this reality; lies, indeed, the obsession to realize [darse cuenta de] ab­ solutely a regarding consciousness, unaware that in so doing consciousness itself, far from being grasped, succumbs to never-ending flux. Does art then truly rescue singularity? Or does it not rather confirm that the singular is merely an intranscendental moment, an excuse to reproduce the only reality that is, an infinite one that immanently reproduces itself without asking permission of anyone? Such questions hold within them art's liberatory potential, but also its potential enslavement to a reality no longer in possession of either a "beyond" or even of a characteristic theme to which to appeal for justification and legitimacy. Onto this uncertain terrain, unclear of whether reality can be known or transformed, or whether instead one simply reproduces a path towards a bad infinity within which singularity disappears, opens the twentieth century, whose true inauguration is difficult to date. In any case, the battles of the nascent twen­ tieth century derive from the Idealist project to realize the absolute; to achieve the indifferentiation between starry sky and moral law, between the natural and the human. Thus the century may have begun with the Impressionist endeavor, which, in struggling for a definitive singular image, finishes by unwittingly consuming the temporal absolute. Alternatively, one might pinpoint the century's beginnings in the exhaustive and anonymous labor of a Van Gogh who between 1888 and 1889 obses­ sively painted more than one hundred and fifty paintings, one of which in particular has been singled out. II

When, in 1899, Vincent Van Gogh painted his Starry Night,'5 surely he did not know how far he was from the aged Kant who had calmly marveled at his own "starry night" a hundred years before. But anyone who glimpses the painting today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York-that same city in which, for a few moments in 2001, history, politics, and art came together in a flash of violence and terror­ may perceive that Van Gogh's sky, rather than representing some Kantian Above, through a strange effect almost constitutes the foreground of the painting, making it difficult to distinguish an above and a below. The "below" in the painting indeed almost serves as an excuse to point out that the sky is not located above but rather to the fore, occupying our field of vision. No longer a celestial firmament, the sky is merely a figure differentiated from the earth by palette, not perspective, a distinc­ tion aimed to expose all difference as earthly. Starry Night does not return us to the serene, distant, Kantian sky, much less to ancient representations of a divine firmament. With its horizontal representation of sky and earth it seems rather to remind us that we are always already within the line of time. But the intense, concentrated, even optimistic rendering of sky and earth demarcates a decisive difference between the two spheres that also seems intended

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Leaving Immanence

to remind us that not everything is the same. Indeed, even the painting's impossible sky, next to a more conventional rendering of land, suggests that "sky;' albeit no longer the Kantian one, warrants distinction, even if everything now remains very much of this earth. It is not a suprasensible but a sensible sky, a sign that even in the sole world remaining to us, difference does exist and all is not absolute. Van Gogh's painting may perhaps also be interpreted as an unintentional invitation to exit the absolute, to leave the "being inside" that immanence signifies. It could, then, be a coming outside [un salir de dentro), not to go on to some "other" place, which in any case does not exist, but rather as a path of permanent leavetaking. In this sense, Starry Night may define a resistance. But of what does this resistance consist? In the same year that Van Gogh painted his Starry Night in Provence, a philoso­ pher was born in Germany who was to borrow from Van Gogh's ''A Pair of Boots" in an attempt to rescue a singular event "outside of" and "beyond" the absolute flux to which, nonetheless, Van Gogh himself was often attentive-namely, Martin Hei­ degger.'6 Heidegger's work, inflected by Van Gogh's, ever remains an articulation of a resistance that permits one to see things in another light. We should recognize this "other light;' in the face of the dark shadow of immanent absolute time, as the light of the starry night, and, therefore, as the light of death. If, from the perspective of the infinite, death can only be considered as a spuri­ ous moment or element, non-transcendental, accidental and disposable; if, from such a perspective, death is merely a defect that contradicts the light and transpar­ ency of the absolute, insistently demanding that everything appear, then Van Gogh's painting may also come, via different means, to recall this light of death, announc­ ing that life and death and all is at stake at least in a small difference in color: that if there is something singular, it will not be individual substance, but rather a lattice of sky and earth, and of artist (doubling as the figure of man more generally) and the gods who have disappeared.'7 The singularity of the painting eliminates any meta­ physical beyond because it parades this metaphysics before it, so that one may also see that there is nothing more and that, if a God is to be conjured at all, it will be through the struggle between the light of the sky and the darkness of the earth, so doing away with the tyrannical insistence underpinning science and industry that every thing appear. Only thus can art continue being art, distant from this insistent demand for ap­ pearance, for art as a reducible thing; singularity in service of the universal. But is the vague notion of some kind of singular outside of the universal indeed possible? That is, is any "singular" possible outside of the relationship singular-universal, if the universal itself can only be identified with the immanent absolute? If it is, such a singularity would have to have another name and above all another character. Yet again the same problem surfaces: if we are in the absolute-of which our partial, immediate and localized gaze is proof, we ourselves representing mere "instances" of this totality-how is it even possible to pose the question of an "other" that would not be at once another instance of the absolute? For to formulate, project or rec­ ognize an other, whether as an artwork or as a political act, might not be anything more than an inadvertent confirmation of the power of the absolute. It is quite possible that in a work of art like Starry Night a battle is being played

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out over whether such resistance can be successfully engaged or whether, on the contrary, the artwork merely indexes one more "instance" of the totality; whether through art the gaze may again recognize a thing in the wake of its reduction to a mere instance of the absolute, or whether this is no longer possible. But how, exactly, might a given artwork (painting, sculpture or architecture) better reveal a thing's own finitude? Only through an ability to reveal its "nothingness" [su nada): not "emptiness;' but what was described above as "the light of death;' or what might also now be termed "the time of death;' as opposed to that of the absolute. When Hegel declared the future (and so, in a way, the death) of art in his 182829 University of Berlin Lectures on Aesthetics, in which he deemed art to be "past;',8 he must have been aware of the advent of the reign of the absolute, within which the artwork would no longer appear as the sole, singular representation of the real. In other words, Hegel was conscious of the end of a metaphysics that had differentiated the sensible and the empirical portions of a concept (recall the still metaphysical Kantian separation of nature's sky and human law), for in the new metaphysical absolute the sensible is only a momentary expression [un momento) of this concept and has, therefore, only a subaltern and derivative characteristic. The death of art, it follows, is but one more example of the death of metaphysics, here understood as the disappearance of difference. But this means that if art hopes to mobilize itself against this disappearance of singularity, it has to produce a requisition for differ­ ence within itself. Yet this difference can no longer be the classical one of metaphys­ ics (namely, the difference between the sensible and the intelligible, between the thing and the idea), for in the wake of Idealism idea and thing have been melded into a new figure, containing both empirical and conceptual elements and bound up with the notion of infinite time. Indeed, in immanence, such shopworn metaphysi­ cal differences disappear. But what would a demand for difference look like when we are already within the time of the absolute? Hegel himself offers a clue, for even as he proclaimed art's eclipse he amended the meaning and reach of his judgment: faced with the death of art, he proposed death for art [la muerte para el arte) , or death in support of art [en favor del arte) , rephrased in the article's title as "art from death:' Hegel's amended formulation takes death to be a necessary condition of the very emergence of the singular "other" that, in turn, the artwork might reveal. This does not mean that death constitutes a theme within the artwork; rather, the formulation grants death­ which is not a concept, but not even really a fact or an act-its constitutive role in the emergence and consummation of the work of art itself. The mortal attributes of the artwork in the face of its immortalizing reduction to museum material would be only a weak expression, only one further consequence, of this principle. All this means that while it is not necessary that death appear in any one of its multiple representations in order to play so constitutive a role, it does define the status of the work, in the same way that death, for Hegel, truly defines the state of being. Still very far from his 1828 proclamation, yet the Hegel of the 1807 Phenom­ enology of Spirit seems, oddly, to lurk distantly behind the sense of death alluded to here: already in the Phenomenology he insists on the rupture and "unreality" of death ("the most dreadful")'9 as constitutive of the life of the spirit in the face of the •

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apparently absolute power of knowledge. Certainly not in the traditionally Idealist sense in which a figure must die in order for a self-opaque, in-itself absolute to be consumed; nor in the sense of some kind of permanent dialectical death that would function as a mechanism of reality. But Hegel did seem to endorse the notion of a decisive [de-cide} state of death, which is to say a "finite" state. We might understand this idea as the idea that death's revelation in a work of art demonstrates this negative, unreal component by exposing the work's intrinsic finitude more than any immanent process through which it might be supposed that death "must appear"-for if death must appear, than it is no longer death. The ac­ cession of an infinite time has, in deeming death a kind of necessary defect, made it into a statistically predictable obligation, simultaneously eroding its character as something constitutive. Yet a recognition of finitude will have necessarily to reckon with the insistence on death, which, in Hegelian terms, is decisive for the constitu­ tion of spirit. We do not have to agree fully with Hegel's understanding of spirit to make use of his characterization of death in articulating a philosophy and art based on a search for finitude beyond the dialectical relation finite-infinite (knowing full well we can­ not get outside the infinite horizon in which we always already find ourselves.) A philosophy of finitude must by definition contest the infinity of the vulgar notion of time as an uninterrupted continuum in which all occurs; yet this contestation must also be aware that neither art nor philosophy, however much they may wish to, can escape it. Finitude should, then, be understood provisionally as "interruption" -in­ terruption of the immanent process. But if by the interruption of immanence­ which itself constitutes a totality by permanently aspiring to the definitive union of all singular instances, to the universal happening of all elements-is understood the appearance of "transcendence;' transcendence must mean something very different than merely the opposite of immanence. Again we find ourselves moving between tyrannical opposites (finite/infinite, transcendence-immanence/singular-universal) that impede, if not make impos­ sible, our vision of a finitude, transcendence and singularity "outside of" or "on the margin of" that line in which infinity, immanence and the universal prevail. Tran­ scendence here does not then mean a "step towards the transcendent;' but rather "finitude" and "difference:' This finitude cannot but be that indicated by death, a fin­ itude that hurls us outward (including outside of the absolute). Because one cannot exit immanence ("indwelling, inherent; abiding in"), the all that is. One cannot exit through the door of death-which comes to mean, indeed, that there is no death, but only disappearance or redistribution. So death conceived in transcendence has to be a "definitive" death and not simply a reorganization of a positivity. It has to be, that is, unreality, negativity and fissure in the Hegelian sense, yet no longer in the service of an immanent totality. If one indeed may even speak of an "all;'20 it is in the sense in which death defines all existence, conferring upon it a unity: there is noth­ ing more total than the totality realized when death occurs, an occurrence which is the definitive sign that there is existence, and not merely a succession of moments. From these conclusions follows a familiar series of connections between the re­ ality of existence and of death, as if the two were inseparable. While we are accus-

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tomed by metaphysics to gather from the idea of "an infinite being" [un ser infinito} that something survives us beyond death, in fact, when being [el ser} remains linked to existence, such survival ceases to have meaning: not because in some trivial sense we cannot imagine that time continues incessantly, but because such an image proves nothing-or perhaps better, it shows up nothingness to be emptiness. Rather than engage this way of conceiving nothingness (as emptiness), an alternative ap­ proach would put the "work" back into work of art instead of considering it one more instantiation of infinite time. What would such an approach consist of? Might Van Gogh tell us? In Starry Night only the opposition between the paradoxically illuminated night skies and a darkened earth appears. Nothingness is neither the one nor the other, but rather the struggle between the two, a struggle which precisely does not appear, just as the affirmation of existence is sustained by a permanent tendency-or pos­ sibility-to desist. This possibility, for the Heidegger who observed the paintings of Van Gogh, is nothingness [Ia nada}. Nothingness, but not emptiness, which is the name the infinite reserves for declaring that outside of it effectively remains noth­ ing. Here then, in the phenomenological conception of existence, finitude means "transcendence": not searching for a "transcendent" beyond that would save us from finitude by the grace of the infinite, but rather transcendence as that movement which traverses, and thus unites, an origin and an end, a "from" whence a thing moves "towards" its arrival point. It describes the union of an origin and a desti­ nation, or perhaps it describes the "all"-an all of existence, which can only come delimited by death. Death is this nothingness that forever accompanies the "all" of existence and which is opposed to what it is not: infinite totality. So we are speaking here of two senses of totality: the "all" which delimits death, and the totality of being that, in modernity, appears as a succession of all figures, all referring to the same thing, among which are included consciousness, modes of production or states of nature. It should also be clear that only out of the first kind of totality could emerge an event able to resist immediate incorporation into the absolute. In truth, this event is existence, but what resistance can it put up when to exist has come to mean merely to transpire in time? Perhaps the artwork-and more concretely, Starry Night-re­ veals that we can understand "time" as something different than uninterrupted oc­ currence, but not as that moment "captured" in any painting either. We can instead realize that the moment contains within it the battle of time: time as battle [com­ bate.} Starry Night may convey the finitude of time, or time as event as opposed to time

as the mere succession of moments. Unlike others from the period, the painting does not depend on another version of itself representing the same reality minutes, hours or days later. Likely this is because the painting assumes that "reality itself" is a false metaphysical category even the most meticulous reproduction of series could not salvage. So representation is not necessary for finitude and the death inherent to it, just as time does not need representation. There is "death" precisely because there is no continuity, real or artistic, in that the painting reflects the struggle between day and night (and so represents a "moulting;' a change, but not serialization) and

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Arturo Leyte

between light, protagonist of the sky, and shadow, here the property of the earth. In the painting, as in Heidegger's phenomenology, death is not to be under­ stood as an event that will come and that can be registered. Similarly, time cannot be represented or conceptualized, for neither is it a fact or an action [un hecho] . Therefore any concept of being or time that concerns immanence remains absolutely suspended between parentheses. So too must be any utopic definition of the future (of the human project), realizable or not. If utopia is represented as a more or less happy destination or end, it is because an uninterrupted line has been assumed in which "it" (utopia, happiness, the supreme) can, or must, occur. But in that case a content has already been given to possibility, and time has, as it were, been forced to accommodate this possibility: the future has been forced. In such a scenario time ceases to be itself and becomes whatever the subject wants and decides must occur (although even this subject is more like a phantasm of a subject: he who wants to locate inside himself the process of what is; unlimited continuity.) Occurrence then ceases to be "being:' becoming instead an effect of whoever decides. If one takes this "he" to be the subject, necessarily invested with content, it be­ comes clear that utopia depends essentially upon "him:' perhaps because by subject we continue to understand a kind of consciousness (a mixture of thought and will) that reproduces the image of a Christian creator God whose understanding encom­ passes the course of the world. Such utopic thought does not shed, then, its divine nature, however human the utopia itself may be, in the same way that the reality of immanence remains an inferior (earthly, sensual, secularized) version of divin­ ity-only now it is not the suprasensible but the sensible pole of metaphysics that governs and directs. Indeed, to complicate things further, the metaphysical division between sensible and suprasensible is redoubled: if things, effects, finished products are primary, the suprasensible-metaphysical is the principle of productivity situated behind it all, the immanence according to which all occurs. At issue is the old Spi­ nozan distinction between a productivity (natura naturens) and a product (natura naturata), but elevated to a general understanding of totality, a totality outside of which nothing fits because outside of which is nothing-not even death, which ac­ cordingly turns out to be only the transformation of one product (e.g., the human being) into another (e.g., a corpse.) This transformation has nothing to do with the alternations of night and day or death and life. In the end, behind these changes lies no organizing metaphysical principle such as immanence, for there is no organizing principle beyond infinitude, itself not a principle but the sphere of difference: the difference between that which appears and that which underlies appearance. Heidegger variously names this sub­ tending something sense, temporality, and nothingness, names that refer to truth, understood as the struggle between the darkness of earth and the lightness of the sky. Yet these names-sense, temporality, and nothingness-are not principles in an organizing metaphysics or of a supreme cause; nor, indeed, are they principles at all, but merely names for finitude and its nature. For temporality signifies "ex-stasis:' that is, a permanent "being outside" (outside of immanence; dwelling outside the uninterrupted line of time, for example); time is not a process or substance within which things occur. Yet it is also a permanent sign that one cannot be in the present, 21

25

for the same reason that one cannot be in the future or in the past, because funda­ mentally "to be in" [estar en],22 with respect to time, is an impossible operation (just as, to be sure, it is impossible to "be in" the unconscious or "in" consciousness, no matter how much consciousness may seem an irreproachable, Cartesian given.) On the contrary, one must precisely understand another mode of being [estar] that is perhaps Being [ser] : namely, being as not-being, or ex-stasis, because only in this way can one attend to an original nature of time, that same nature that has re­ mained underlying and occluded in the vulgar conception of infinite time, at whose end we are to find an earthly paradise, be it divine or human. As its constitution is temporal, "finitude" means being outside this continual present, instead allowing in the movement from future to past the emergence of a present that consists of reiter­ ated not -being. One might point out paradoxically that if the most potent versions of utopias retain an element of the unrealizable (or at best of the not yet realized), they are no different than finitude, which constantly escapes us. Because finitude, perhaps, as that which is most foreign to immanence, turns out to be the unattain­ able itself. It is so in various ways: to begin with, finitude is conceived from an understanding of immanent time, a time only God (or the utopic human paradise in its political or aesthetic form) can interrupt. But finitude is above all unattainable because of its very constitution-because it is not a something, but rather a permanent not-be­ ing-anything, a permanent being-outside-of, indeed, it is unreality, negativity, dif­ ference. Not the difference among a multiplicity of things, but rather the difference between the insistence that things appear and prevail, and the temporal constitu­ tion of these things, which is this nothingness, this permanent desistance which ac­ companies even the most splendid moment of an objective thing. The nothingness negates any notion of objectivity, but by the same operation has already decentered any subjectivity in advance. Objectivity and subjectivity would in this way come to be only figures and products of immanence itself, products that could even achieve totality-but only because they no longer retain any relation with finitude, or because they run up against this other sense, delimited by death, 'of an "all" that does not aspire to totality but is found in the constant struggle against it. The triumph-if we wish to use such terminology-of this totality of being would constitute, paradoxically, the triumph of metaphysics, particularly according to that version which pits an infinite princi­ pal (immanence) against its ultimate products. So if "utopia" means anything, it must be a "privileged" finite product; a "state" as it were (a period or segment of the absolute) that through its own apotheosis would also come to coincide with that which formed it: that is, with the principle of immanence. Thus would be attained a supreme state, or the supreme triumph of a political figure, or even the apotheosis of multiplicity, in its multiple and multiplied truth, outside any kind of unity. But all this would continue to be a multiplicity of all moments: infinite presentation, or its equivalent in metaphysical terms, complete coincidence of multiplicity and unity. For when total multiplicity is conquered, a however-superfluous unity appears, accompanied by absolutely achieved reconcili­ ation-albeit a reconciliation that produces permanent fissures, wounds and cru-

26

Leaving Immanence

elty, which could well be taken as simple derangements necessary for the greater alignment. III

Two senses of the "all" may be gleaned from the argument thus forth: one in which "all" is understood to be the absolute totality of time, tied to an immanence borne of the liquidation of Kantian metaphysical difference, and another in which "all" is bound up with an insistence on death as the "all" of existence, eventually legible as constitutive of the artwork. The latter holds only so long as art continues to posit an arena in which finitude's possibility is entertained, and so long as it does not give itself over to the reproduction of the infinite. This will not be easy, since every pos­ sibility, including that of a call for finitude, emerges from the limitless continuum, from the all-one or the absolute. Behind any of these alternatives lies a different sense of truth that may or may not be disclosed in art; to find out to what degree it is one might turn to the con­ temporary art world and ask whether the reproduction of all possible moments and perspectives of a thing presents its truth any more adequately than does an exclusive and finite representation of the same. A finite representation, in its refusal to make "all" appear and in its recognition of the inability to represent the very nothingness that makes possible the artwork's emergence, permits something incomparable and irreducible to occur. Certain modern art experienced this contradiction in extreme forms: it is possible, for instance, that the Cubist attempt to represent reality masked a yearning for finitude that would come, nevertheless, to fatally reiterate infinity. That is, although the attempt to disarticulate figure in order to present all its per­ spectives within a single glance might appear a finite (non-serialized) rendering, one also detects a "Cubist" suspension of time in this move; an attempt to dominate time. But can, then, this suspension be interpreted as finitude? Picasso himself, having achieved a certain totality of discrete yet connected fig­ ures in Guernica, recognized that his series of Meninas was the only possible re­ sponse to Velasquez's painting of the same name, which had managed to convey in a single image the complex, conclusive demarcation of finitude. It would be precipi­ tous ' however, to suggest that Velasquez, in distinction from Picasso, was a painter of finitude. The matter is more complicated, because Velasquez, like the great classi­ cal artists, surely only hoped to represent in a finite way . . . infinitude, whose repre­ sentation might be called "beauty:' Today, when the only infinitude worth examin­ ing is that of an infinite time (and not of an imagined or created exterior reality), beauty-assuming that the term still has any meaning-signifies something un­ known. Irritation at this unknown provokes an attempt to master it. How? Perhaps by ensuring that "all"-all things, including the ugly-be beautiful. If the field of "design" -less internationalist than totalizing in its spread-was the first to strive for this ugly-duckling conversion by recuperating objects from daily life to expose them in their perfect cleanliness, if not beauty (witness the use of steel and polished materials), what has succeeded it may well be an attempt to make all (every thing; everything) into image. Image consequently predominates over things, in accordance with an immanence interested more in the images of

Arturo Leyte

27

substances than in the protean substances themselves, which for their part have lost any inherent resistance to such a transformation. Surely the reduction of reality to film is the great interiorized image of one sense of Being in which the director ought to figure as the supreme god. But since in the meantime God has died, the true director becomes, instead, the camera (industry), in whose service, to be sure, one finds screenwriters, technicians and actors. Given these parameters, the disappearance of the great cinema of auteurs, already a relic of the old twentieth century,23 comes as no surprise. Nor is it enough to say that cinema today is merely industry and business, because this very affirmation oc­ cludes the meaning of "industry" itself, whose best approximation can be found in the German concept of Ge-stell,24 serving in the cinematographic example to point precisely towards the camera (ultimately, a machine), which can virtually film ev­ erything without discrimination. The example rehearses the old metaphysics within which the all-seeing human eye is blind to itself; if one understands, moreover, that this eye was at one point the ego cogito, at another point the ego vola, and at still another the very machinery of scientific, political or artistic transformation, one may also understand that infinite time is precisely that which produced a certain metaphysics based on the liquidation of irreducible difference. The new metaphysics, which is the seamless combination of a camera that never ceases to register reality and a reality that can only be registered as image, is purely positive and recognizes "nothing" [no reconoce 'nada'] outside it. Even art exists within this conceptual horizon, although perhaps if finitude (no longer identifiable as the mere realization of a given image) were recognized, and succeeded in banish­ ing the very image of the work, art might eventually return something of the thing beyond its mere image. This is not a call to squeeze one's eyes shut against image, but to see in a way dislodged by the infinite (and mimetically divine) eye that ac­ companied a metaphysical (even when allegedly post-metaphysical) way of seeing. But can one so easily eliminate infinite time? Like it or not, it is the dominant hori­ zon, and finitude may only consist in recognizing as much.25 At the risk of seeming melodramatic, one might say, as Sartre did about freedom, that we are sentenced not so much to death as to an infinity that does not let us to die, and which constitutes the horizon and point of departure even for finitude. This infinitude may be manifested variously, to be sure; we have here considered two instances: the political infinitude of the market (everything, to be a thing, must traverse it) and art's infinitude (everything, to be acknowledged, must lay claim to a rendered, designed [diseiiado] figure.) Of course, the two perspectives do not co­ incide precisely: the market enjoys a success that art (as design) cannot match. But this does not mean that art ceases harboring such aspirations, designing the ugly and horrifying, not to say bad, in an attendant reclaiming of ugliness. The ugly can rival the beautiful only by insisting on its presentation and reproduction in an ac­ ceptable form. Quickly the two poles become homologous and, finally, interchange­ able: the beautiful and the ugly are forced to coexist because in the end there is no difference [no hay diferencias.] The banalization of the bad, representations of disfiguration and repetitious scenes of death and pain (mainly sickness and physical or psychological torture) are not in fact the products of an attempt to make negativ-

28

Leaving Immanence

ity appear, but products of a definitive attempt to conjure the absolute, the infinite. This demand for the infinite, which depends on an egalitarian acknowledgement of difference-an acknowledgement that validity resides in multiplicity (which does not imply unity, except in the way that this unity is the pure affirmation of multiplic­ ity)-is obliged to elude or even to liquidate the possibility of death (death is always "possibility"). Certain contemporary art has, ironically, served as some of the best means by which to carry out such a project. When even Cubism is too metaphysical, given that it never stopped seeking essences (the geometrical figure that would expose the "thing itself" beyond its appearances), the solution must come from infinitely multi­ plying these appearances to the point ofleaving the spectator/observer/subject sus­ pended and annulled in the same reiteration of appearances (surfaces). The ultimate goal of advertising then may lie not so much in the spectator's persuasion by image as in the mutual confusion of spectator and image [se identifiquen J , achieved either by a spilling outwards of consciousness or a flooding of the interior with images. In both cases an interior/exterior duality is posited that manages to survive precisely with the goal of being overcome. The image ends up constituting the definitive and undifferentiated zone of encounter between he who sees and that which is seen, such that it does not make sense to speak of this "between:' In a period in which the great modern oppositions are dissolved (truth/falsity in scientific paradigms, good/bad within moral paradigms, and beauty/ugliness in the arts) at least one sec­ tor of art has comes to coincide with advertising, confirming this tendency towards the definitive liquidation of the paradigm interior/exterior and its replacement by the demand that all be exterior. But even this idea of exteriorization, allegedly manifested in transparent democ­ racy as against the prior opacity of the mandarin's or aristocrat's chambers, masks its danger: that everything be exteriorized may also imply that all comes under con­ trol and surveillance, eliminating the possibility of even thinking subversion [de la subversion pensadaJ . Because "to think" is still, today, an interior activity. The demand for exteriority occurs then via a liquidation of thought (here by "thought" I understand the possibility of an "other" project alternative to the constitutive and established order) and, once more, of death, which is neither interior or exterior, but rather a limit. It is, in effect, a demand that death also appear objectually in order that it be subjected to control. So it is not surprising that those who govern prefer to pit terrorism against thought, for terrorism always ends up reducing everything to objects, often to remains (corpses or wreckage)-in any case to observable, evalu­ able things. And if something can be evaluated it is more easily controlled. Terror­ ism, in this sense, is not at all revolutionary; instead it confirms the very immanence of the system. And for this reason will surely not be eradicated. It is no coincidence that political terror surfaces during roughly the same period in which philosophy insists on the absolute. Actually existing politics naturally must address this terror, and they do so by multiplying it as an artistic, even attractive, image. Much has been written about the fascination that terrifying images incite, yet it is worth pointing out that our morbid curiosity is borne not from an acceptance of death but because only through familiarity with death can we excuse ourselves

Arturo Leyte

29

from its reality. Can Warhol's series on the electric chair be understood in any other way? Or his series on traffic accidents?26 Do not, perhaps, the two series constitute a preemptive act of sympathetic magic, reminiscent of the ritual sacrifices of ancient religions staged to convince that death is but a transitory stage? And in the end, are the two series indeed much different than those Warhol did of Campbell soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, or Mao Tse Tung? Do not all respond to the same principle: namely, that everything appear in a multiplied form so as to exhaust its existence? Warhol's undertaking is the inverse of Picasso's Cubist rifling amongst the en­ trails of image. The empty geometric structures of the Cubist figure are rendered in repeated surfaces, as if such iteration announced that that is all that is, that there is no internal structure. Picasso may have more or less consciously continued to search for a truth, while Warhol knew that no such truth was possible, or was only possible as the infinite or serialized reiteration of the same thing, since finally there is no such thing. If there is a thanatic impulse in Warhol's series of electric chairs it is no less present in the series of Campbell soup cans.27 But is it really a thanatic im­ pulse, or is it better an attempt to disarm death by inviting it to the party? The series of traffic accidents and electric chairs register death's inert but objectual appearance: death turned into a packaged object; turned into image. An image of this nature finds itself in the service of the absolute (and of tranquility), but not of finitude: it reveals nothing final, it reveals not nothingness but rather an event not at all out of the ordinary, just as a sexual act or a dose of heroin need not be extraordinary, but merely repetitious, so deactivating any intrinsic nothingness, power and echo of death. Warhol, unlike Monet, did not have to time his work to capture the light at different hours of the day, since in the intervening seventy-five years all the day's hours had been equalized, just as the difference between life (Campbell's Soup) and death (Electric Chair) had come to be the same, equal; in any case, equally useless. Death disappears when it is reduced to an electric chair or even to a corpse, and an object instituted in its place. But death, Heidegger tells us, is not a thing, not even a thing to be discovered in the end. On the contrary, its reality as existential and not substantial accompanies finite life like nothingness or tempor�lity, defining it. The idea that death is not a thing to be measured by statistics but a finitude, as defined by Heidegger, can be­ come a sign of revolutionary possibility. But is death possible? And, consequently, is politics possible? Politics is fundamentally only possible within a horizon of fini­ tude. Beyond this there is merely administration, with which the political has often been confused: if the concentration (extermination) camp was possible, it was so because already politics had been confused with Administration. And Administra­ tion, when realized, means the administration of death as much as of any other function. Behind it resides the conviction that there is to be a final, inert reconcili­ ation that has overcome all negativity whatsoever. If death constitutes the supreme expression of this negativity, the reduction of death enables the goal of a full ad­ ministrative coincidence of all possibilities: the reign of an affirmative multiplicity which hides nothing, and in which all has been exposed, all has been (or is hoped to be) rendered transparent.

30

Arturo Leyte

Leaving Immanence

Yet pain, opaque, always remains at the end of the day, in the solitude of one's room, at least for those who have not tried to overcome it through a visit to the doc­ tor or analyst. Pain has been swept under the rug of remedy, and hidden by attempts to do away with mourning. But the abandoned starry sky of Kant, which "no longer lights any solitary wanderer's path;'28 has not, in the meantime, been substituted for by a happy or safe earth. On the contrary, the baleful solitude of the new world fills the sails of so much positivity.

11

13 Hegel. See notes 5 and 6 above. 14 The Spanish "cambio" can mean both change and exchange. 15

Translated by Rachel Price.

1

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•

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•

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•

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•

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•

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2

Georg Lukacs already perceived as much when he opened his Theory of the Novel with the sentence "happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths-ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars:' Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 29.

3

"By way of introduction or anticipation, we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root:' Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Nor­ man Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), 61 (a15 b29).

4

This crystallization is developed by Schelling above all in the final chapter of his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, whose title reads: "Art as an Organ and Document of Philosophy:'

5

"Because of this necessity, the way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness" G. W F. Hegel, Phenom­ enology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 56. This idea dominates the introduction more generally.

6

"The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development:' Hegel, op. cit., 11.

7

The 1988 crash of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died.

8

"I had to make the limits of the body the fundamental theme in my work" ["dass die Grenzen des Korpers das Grundthema meiner Arbeit bilden musste"]; see http://www. wdr.de/tv/nachtkultur/dokumentation120010117/abramovic.html.) The quotation is re­ produced in the work of Felix Duque, "El terrorismo nuestro de cada dia:' ["Our Daily Terrorism"] in the Spanish magazine SILENO 13 (Madrid, 2002): 109.

9

See Arturo Leyte, "El arte como organo y documento de la filosofia" ["Art as Organ and Document of Philosophy"] , La Ortiga 33/35 (Santander, 2002), and "Arte y Sistema" ["Art and System"] forthcoming (from a talk given in Belo Horizonte, Brazil). ' 10 "Beyond the objective determinations effected by the categories remains a gigantic em­ pirical reign, that of sensibility and perception, an absolute aposteriority for which is signaled no apriority . . ." G. W F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems ofPhilosophy, from the Spanish, Diferencia entre el sistema de filosofia de Fichte y el de Schelling (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1989), 4. (Also in Madrid: Tecnos, 1990, 5.)

Jan Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh (Amsterdam and New York: J. M. Meulenhoff/ John Benjamins, 1996), 401.

16 As is well-known, this is one of the motives Heidegger recreates in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975] , 15-87).

•

The complete phrase reads, "Two things fill the mind with an ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Although many English translations leave out the "me:' it seems important to include the emphasis present in the German.-Trans.

Arturo Leyte, "Razon ilustrada y arte" ["Enlightenment Reason and Art"] SILENO 13 ' (2002).

12 Although perhaps Rembrandt or Velazquez would have understood "perspective" as something very different than what it would later come to mean.

•

•

31

17 One will recognize in this description the interpretation that Heidegger puts forth in his essay "The Thing:' In Heidegger's thesis, the thing is interpreted as "frameness" or a cross between mortals and immortals, earth and sky. See also Arturo Leyte, "Figuras Construc­ tivas del Paisaje" ["Constructive Figures in Landscape"] SILENO 11: 17' 18 This citation is reproduced by Heidegger in his "Origin of the Work of Art:' where he writes: "In all these relationships art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest voca­ tion, something past" (80). 19 "Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all the things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being:' (Hegel, Phenomenol­ ogy, 19) 20 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, chapter 1 of the second section. The reference to this sense of "all" refers to that chapter of the work in which Heidegger develops his interpre­ tation of death. 21 For the problematic of temporality presupposed here, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, particularly paragraph 65, "Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care:'

•

22 Spanish has two verbs for being, ser and estar; estar is used for temporary, conditional and locational attributes, ser being reserved for more enduring or essential characteris­ tics.-Trans. 23 Fredric Jameson considers the films of the great auteurs to be mainly signs of the decline or extinction of the modernist movement: "abstract expressionism, existentialism in phi10sophy the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or ' the modernist school of poetry . . . all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them:' Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1. 24 The German term "Ge-stell" was frequently used by Heidegger in many of his writings. It appears decisively however in two in particular: "The Question Concerning Technology"

32

Leaving Immanence and "The Principle of Identity:'

25

This, at least, is suggested in Spanish philosopher Felipe Marzoa's thesis, elaborated in his book Heidegger y su tiempo [Heidegger and His Time 1 (Madrid: Aka!, 1999).

26 Andy Warhol, Death and Disasters, The Menil Collection (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1988). 27

Fredric Jameson has lucidly perceived that the thematization of death in these series no longer occurs on the level of content. But he doesn't finally articulate that if this thanatic impulse corresponds to the "deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them" (9), what is revealed is perhaps not death but its absence and the impossibility of its apparition in a reality that reduces exclusively to external sur­ faces. In the last instance, the photographic negative is also a positive presence to which all is reduced: color is dissipated in the negative, but to reveal the positive of the surface.

28 Lukacs again reminds us that "Kant's starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights the any solitary wanderer's path (for to be a man in the new world is to be solitary)" (36).

Infra politics and Immaterial Reflection Alberto Moreiras

I

Mauricio Lazzarato defines immaterial labor as "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the com­ moditY:" Immaterial labor, not understood as labor proper in older modes of production, is today the task of a "mass intellectuality" whose presence defines "the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within societY:'2 Academic intellectual labor, whose sense it is to determine the uses of history for every one of the existing disciplines or fields of knowledge, and thus to help " [define and fix] cultural and ar­ tistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion;'3 must be understood within a contemporary division of labor which is itself established by the prevailing mode of production. If it is true that, as Lazzarato says, on the one hand, "the concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an en­ largement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication, and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity;' 4 and if it is simul­ taneously true, on the other hand, that "what modern man­ agement techniques are looking for is for 'the worker's soul to become part of the factory;" and thus "the worker's personal­ ity and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organiza­ tion and command;'s then we are facing a strong biopolitical cathexis on the very conditions of intellectual labor in the present. We must wonder whether any attempt to elaborate a new disciplinary subjectivity-that is, whether any attempt at revising the conditions of disciplinary knowledge-is not always already overdetermined by the subjection to organiza­ tion and command which is a consequence of the regulatory techniques of university management. Lazzarato seems to offer two responses: one optimistic, and the other pessimis­ tic. According to the pessimistic response, given the fact that what is peculiar to immaterial labor is not the production of commodities to be "destroyed in the act of consumption" but Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

34

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

rather of commodities that can "enlarge, transform, and create the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer;' then immaterial labor produces "a social relationship" that reveals "something that material production had 'hidden; namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation:'6 Within this determination any possibility of intellectual labor, since intellectual labor is today by definition bound by the conditions of production that define mass intellectuality, cannot go beyond promoting the social relation­ ship as reproduction of the capital relation: every new production of subjectivity would be condemned to be nothing but the acquiescing response to the system of production's principles of organization and command. But Lazzarato also offers an optimistic response, having to do with the pos­ sibility of linking the production of subjectivity to a new praxis of meaning. For Lazzarato there is a possibility of genuine innovation in the fact that every act of immaterial production proposes "a new relationship between production and con­ sumption:'7 Such a relationship can only be appropriated and normalized by the system of production, but it can never be pre-determined by it. "The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life pro­ duce:'s Lazzarato suggests that the struggle against work can promote values that would not be recoverable by the apparatus of organization and command within the system of production. These values could then develop the "social cycle of immate­ rial production"9 in ways that would outflank the capital relation itself. According to the old historian Henry Charles Lea, the Spanish Inquisition was "a power within the State superior to the State itself'lO That power is biopolitical power, understood as the power of capture and subjection oflife to political control, that is, the power of political animation of life, the subjection of life to the sover­ eignty principle. The power to subject life to sovereignty is in every case the power within the state superior to the state itself-an excess or supplement to the state without which there would be no state.'l Whence that excess? A properly materialist answer would consist of saying that, to the extent that the power within the state is state power, even when it exceeds itself, any power within the state superior to the state itself would come from another state, following a genealogical structure. A certain confluence between the work of Michel Foucault and that of Martin Heidegger might allow us to arrest the regression ad infinitum implied in that answer. Thus we could posit the ultimate origin of the genealogical structure in the Roman world, and particularly, and perhaps surprisingly, in the hegemonic structure of imperial domination in Rome. In his class lectures from the 1942-43 winter semester, in his seminar on Par­ menides, Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperialli'12 Hei­ degger's diagnosis, although thoroughly connected with the situation at the time (i.e., with the turning point in World War II represented by the German defeat at Stalin­ grad) and with a thoroughly ideological vision of German destiny, is not meant only for Nazi Germany.'3 On the contrary, it encompasses the totality of the history of the West, regarding which Heidegger had thought that the Nazi movement offered the possibility of a renewal. If to think the political is to think it as Romans, imperi­ ally, and if that comes to be, according to a Nietzschean genealogy, the "history of

Alberto Moreiras

35

an error;'l4 then we must find a non-Roman determination of the political: perhaps counterimperial, or non-imperial. The possibility of thinking a non-Roman, non­ imperial determination of the political goes through an understanding of the nature of that power within the state superior to the state itself that Lea associates with the Spanish Inquisition. This is not an arbitrary hypothesis: Heidegger himself says it, in passing, almost unintentionally. But I will dwell on it briefly. This issue is not so remote from Lazzarato's interest in finding out whether it is possible to suspend the very mechanisms of organization and command through an attempt at a non-predetermined mode of intellectual production-unpredeter­ mined by history, and insurgent against determined history. Heidegger's own notion of "originary thinking;' as developed in Parmenides, seeks an interruption of deter­ mined history, which he associates with the dominance of the Roman West.'5 All of it would have to do with a decisive event. Heidegger does not hesitate to call it "the genuine event ofhistorY;',6 in the sense that there is no other, more important single event, but also in the sense that it constitutes history as we know it: the event of his­ tory. The event is the Latinization of the Greek notion of truth. "What is decisive is that the Latinization occurs as a transformation of the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Roman domain of history. This transformation is distinctive in that it remains concealed but nevertheless determines everything in advance:" 7 It is only a few pages later, in direct connection with this transformation of the essence of truth, that Heidegger mentions the Spanish Inquisition-only once in his Parmenides seminar, and perhaps in the totality of his work: Such change is ever the most dangerous, but also the most enduring, form of domination. Since then, the Occident has known of pseudos only in the form of falsum. For us, the opposite of the truth is the false. But the Romans did not only lay the foundation of the priority of the false as the standard meaning of the essence of untruth in the Occident. In addition, the con­ solidation of this priority of the false over pseudos and the stabilizing of this consolidation is a Roman accomplishment. The operating force in this accomplishment is no longer the imperium of the state but the imperium of the Church, the sacerdotium. The "imperial" here emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of c;ommand here resides in the essence of eccle­ siastical dogma. Therefore this dogma takes into account equally the "true" of the "orthodox believers" as well as the "false" of the "heretics" and the "unfaithful:' The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperi­ um. By way of Roman civilization, both the imperial! civil and the imperial! ecclesiastical, the Greek pseudos became for us in the Occident the "false:' Correspondingly, the true assumed the character of the not-false. The es­ sential realm of the imperial fallere determines the not-false as well as the falsum. The not-false, said in Roman fashion, is the verum.'8 To speak critically of the Spanish Inquisition during the Winter Semester of 1942-43 in Freiburg is not particularly banal, above all when such a reference to the Inquisi­ tion, which was the direct antecedent of the National Socialist administrative ap-

36

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

paratus for the "final solution" concerning the elimination of an enemy social body, the "Jews;' presents the Inquisition as a symptom of the great error in the history of the West: literally, thefalsi-fication of the essence of truth, which is also thefalsi-fica­ tion of the political. Heidegger is attempting to think of a counter-falsification of the political following a non-imperial and counter-Roman path. If it is true, then, that the Roman imperial, as a power within the state superior to the state itself, is the falsi-fication of truth, that is, the understanding of truth on the basis of the notion of the false, and if it is true that such falsi-fication is essen­ tially related to the capture and subjection of life to political control; if it is true that falsi-fication is in this realm the essence of biopolitics as a strategy of domination, then it is necessary first to understand falsi-fication better, and therefore its relation with the hegemonic structure of imperial domination. I will sum up Heidegger's analysis. Falsum comes from fallere, "to bring about a downfall;' "to cut" or "to hack" in the sense of bringing to a fall. Heidegger asks: "What is the basis for the priority of fallere in the Latin formation of the counter-essence of truth?" And he responds: "It lies in this, that the basic comportment of the Romans towards beings in general is governed by the rule of the imperium. Imperium says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this oc­ cupation to hold command over it, and so to have the occupied as territori" 9 In the juxtaposition of imperare and hacking or felling we understand both the essence of the political as the power to command and the falsi -fication of truth (that is, once again, the understanding of truth as the mere negation of the false, the brought to a fall, what has been felled) as the very principle of hegemonic power. Heidegger does not use the word "hegemony;' but one can hear nothing else in his definition of imperial power. Because what is false is what has been felled, brought to a fall, what is false has been eliminated from the principle of territori­ alization. It is, in a paradoxical sense, not subjected to command-no longer sub­ jected to command. Eliminated from the reach of command, it is also eliminated from life. In life, subjected to the imperial circumscription, one can only have the not-false, and it is this non-falseness that will be administered according to hege­ mony's principle of organization and command. "To be superior is part and parcel of domination. And to be superior is only possible through constantly remaining in the higher position by way of a constant surmounting of others. Here we have the genuine actus of imperial action . . . . The great and most inner core of the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination:'20 Roman hegemony, the imperial principle of the political under which we still think the political, is, for Heidegger, the apparatus for the territorialization of command according to which what is not susceptible of hacking, of felling, of being brought to a fall, of simple elimination from life can still collaborate in its own domination: this is the biopolitical passion, the principle of subjection of life to sovereign cap­ ture, the animation of life under criteria of subjection to command in the name of the essential falsi-fication of the true, which is precisely the power within the state

Alberto Moreiras

37

superior to the state itself. As to Foucault, I am concerned with his project to establish a "history of truth;' or rather a history of the "politics of truth;' whose Heideggerian trace is not always sufficiently noted.21 In the five-lecture series delivered at the Pontifical Catholic Uni­ versity of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, which was published under the title "Truth and Juridical Norm;' Foucault, talking about fields of knowledge, refers to the types of inquiry that " [b1 eginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries . . . sought to establish truth on the basis of a certain number of carefully collected items of tes­ timony in fields such as geography, astronomy, and the study of climates:'22 In par­ ticular, Foucault says, it is on the basis of these inquisitorial procedures that "there appeared a technique of voyage-as a political, power-exercising venture and a cu­ riosity-driven, knowledge-acquiring venture-that ultimately led to the discovery of America:'23 The relation to Heidegger makes itself obvious here. For Foucault the Inquisition, developed in the Middle Ages through administrative procedures directly inspired in the Carolingian revival of imperial Roman structures and in po­ litico-spiritual procedures already existing in the Church, in the Roman curia, is not only the principle ofbiopolitical action proper but also a grave historical event: "The inquiry that arose in the Middle Ages would acquire extraordinary dimensions. Its destiny would be practically coextensive with the particular destiny of so-called 'European' or 'Western' culture"24 The juridical forms that were derived from the inquisitorial model became "absolutely essential for the history of Europe and for the history of the whole world, inasmuch as Europe violently imposed its dominion on the entire surface of the earth:'25 Inquisitorial practices were imperial in the Heideggerian sense also inasmuch as they operated a complete inversion regarding the other juridical tradition that was active at the heart of medieval Europe: the Germanic tradition, which followed the principle of the test, and which constitutes the foundation of feudal law. For Fou­ cault, "in feudal law, disputes between two individuals were settled by the system of the test. When an individual came forward with a claim, a contestation, accus­ ing another of having killed or robbed, the dispute between the two would be re­ solved through a series of tests accepted by both individuals and by which both were bound. This system was a way of proving not the truth, but the strength, the weight, the importance of the one who spoke";26 "a procedure of inquiry, a search for the truth, never intervened in this type of system:'27 Through the inquisitorial system the representative of power would abandon the feudal system of tests and proceed to adjudicate justice, not just in terms of criminal acts but also for every dispute related to property, rent, taxes, and economic administration, on the basis of the absolute subjection of the involved parties to a rule of sovereignty. Hence, Foucault says, political power in this system becomes "the essential personage:'28 "On arriving at an appointed place, the bishop would first initiate the inquisitio generalis . . by questioning all those who should know-the notable, the elders, the most learned, the most virtuous-about what had happened in his absence, espe­ cially if there had been transgressions, crimes, and so on. If this inquiry met with an affirmative response, the bishop would pass to a second stage, the inquisitio specialis, the special inquisition, which consisted in trying to find out who had done what, .

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

in determining who was really the author and what was the nature of the act";29 "this model-spiritual and administrative, religious and political-this method for managing, overseeing, and controlling souls was found in the Church: the inquiry understood as a gaze focused as much on possessions and riches as on hearts, acts, and intentions. It was this model that was taken up and adapted in judicial proce­ , dure [by royal authority] : 30 This juridical form constitutes a decisive intervention in political history and in the history of the political at the level of what Foucault will term toward the end of his lecture series "infrapower:' Infrapower, a power in the state superior to the state itself, names "not . . . the state apparatus, or . . . the class in power, but . . . the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest leve!:'31 The inquisition as biopolitical procedure initiates the vast process of the subjec­ tion oflife to imperial command that would become characteristic of modernity. At stake is to ensure that individuals cooperate in their own domination, following the structure of hegemonic command: "bare life;' to use Giorgio Agamben's expression in Homo Sacer, that is, the life that can be killed without murder or sacrifice, is false life in the Heideggerian sense, and it is ambivalently excluded from the biopolitical operation.32 Everything else dwells in non-falseness, that is, subjected to administra­ tive imperial command. It dwells in self-subjection as the mode of service to a rea­ son that becomes co-extensive with political calculation. As Heidegger puts it, "the imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination. The 'taking as true' of ratio, of rear, becomes a far-reaching and anticipatory security. Ratio becomes counting, calculating, calculus. Ratio is a self-adjustment to what is correct:'33 Foucault's infrapower is the political apparatus composed of the institutions whose mission is to "take charge of the whole temporal dimension of individuals' lives:'34 Genealogically conditioned by the Heideggerian history of "imperial falsi­ fication;' within late capitalism, infrapower rules over "the conversion ofliving time into labor power and labor power into productive force:'35 Infrapower institutions are, "in a schematic and global sense, . . . institutions of sequestration."36 To reduce or destroy the reach of the sequestering institutions and their hegemonic command is to attack infrapower, that is, to move toward a non-imperial practice of the po­ litical, an infrapolitics, one could call them, in the sense that they place themselves or find their appropriate site not at the level of hegemonic struggle but beneath it, below their (imperial) ground. "

Given the undecidability between Lazzarato's two positions, namely, either that it is possible to produce social values that are not pre-determined by the system of production or that it is not possible to overcome the biopolitical conditions accord­ ing to which every production of subjectivity is always already normalized by the system, any reflection on the uses of history is contained within a nihilistic perspec­ tive. In the Heideggerian interpretation, nihilism is not one: it always comes as two, the first one being imperfect nihilism, and the second accomplished nihilism. For Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's Nachlass, there can be no imperfect or

Alberto Moreiras

39

"proper" nihilism except from the perspective of "fulfilled" or accomplished nihil­ ism.37 At the same time, however, there can be no accomplished nihilism unless we posit an imperfect form of it. In an essay titled "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin;' Agamben deploys the Heideggerian motif on the basis of an intriguing exchange between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Kafka. For Agamben the difference between the two nihilisms has to do very pre­ cisely with a dilucidation of "the hidden structure of historical time itself'38 Agamben introduces an additional complication when, following both Benja­ min and Scholem, he mentions that nihilism and messianism are or come to the same thing: If we accept the equivalence between messianism and nihilism of which both Benjamin and Scholem were firmly convinced, . . . then we will have to distinguish two forms of messianism or nihilism: a first form (which we may call imperfect nihilism) that nullifies the law but maintains the Nothing in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity, and a second form, a perfect nihilism that does not even let validity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka, "succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing:'39 The difference between both perspectives on nihilism, between the two nihilisms or the two messianisms, is small: a matter of a "small adjustment;'4o a slight displace­ ment. Understanding the hidden structure of historical time would have to do with being able to operate that small adjustment, which would mean: the small adjust­ ment launches us into a form of accomplished nihilism/messianism. This is, in our context, to take a decisive position concerning the status of "the power within the state superior to the state itself;' that is, of infrapower, and hence also concerning the very conditions of immaterial labor. Does immaterial labor in our times, in other words, mark the final subsumption ofliving time into labor power? There are two fundamental uses of history that might adequately reference Lazzaratds two positions, or even the difference between the two faces or two deployments of nihilism or messianism. According to the first use, the most obvious one, the most dominant, the sovereign use, the use that allows us to understand, for instance, the Inquisition under the figure of sovereignty, or sover­ eignty under the figure of the state, history is always biopolitical history, and hence always immersion and capture by the sovereign relation. We could call this first use "relational surrender;' to adapt Eric Santner's expression.41 In relational surrender, the subject of immaterial reflection surrenders into relational life, surrenders into sovereignty. This is both a form of imperfect nihilism/messianism, and also a form of Lazzarato's first hypothesis, and it understands and deploys an understanding of history as the temporalization of the capture of life by the political. But there is a second use, a literally useless use that might not quite match Laz­ zarato's second hypothesis. The latter's progressivism is excessively caught up in the notion of the production of new values, that is, in a notion of productive subjectiv­ ity that is structurally unable to overflow the system of production precisely be­ cause all it can do is to establish a relation with it. Productive subjectivity, defined in

40

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Lazzarato on the basis of "forms of life:' is always already biopolitical, and perhaps more so than ever at the moment it attempts to change the dominant conditions of biopolitics. This use without use has to do with un-working the determinations of the first use. If the characteristic procedure of the first use of history is the capture of life by the political, the capture of life by the sovereign relation, the characteris­ tic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the principle of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the de-production of the use of history. This is still a messianic nihilism or a nihilistic messianism. This "overturning" of the first use, the "redemption" that Benjamin promises as precisely a redemption regarding the infinite biopoliticization of life, is still a use, even if a useless use, and it is still therefore under the gaze of the political-but in a very especial form, that is, in an infrapolitical form.42 Agamben solves the Benjamin/Scholem exchange into a diagnosis of the history of the present that is a prelude to the embrace of accomplished nihilism as a refusal of the structures of institutional sequestering: Today, everywhere, in Europe as in Asia, in industrialized countries as in those of the "Third World:' we live in the ban of a tradition that is perma­ nently in a state of exception. And all power, whether democratic or to­ talitarian, traditional or revolutionary, has entered into a legitimation crisis in which the state of exception, which was the hidden foundation of the system, has fully come to light. If the paradox of sovereignty once had the form of the proposition "There is nothing outside the law:' it takes on a per­ fectly symmetrical form in our time, when the exception has become the rule: "There is nothing inside the law"; everything-every law-is outside law. The entire planet has now become the exception that law must contain in its ban. Today we live in this messianic paradox, and every aspect of our existence bears its marks.43 Agamben has in mind Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of history: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task:'44 In the Eighth Thesis Benjamin in turn refers to Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, which defines sovereignty as the power to decide on the state of exception.45 From Lea's sentence on the Inquisition, the Inquisition appears as a sovereign body insofar as it is a power within the state superior to the state itself-the sovereign body has the power to suspend the law from within the site of the law, hence it lives simultane­ ously within and outside law. Like the Messiah: also He reveals the hidden structure of the law, and suspends the law indefinitely or infinitely. The Inquisition is the ni­ hilistic-messianic truth of our time, allegory or literality of a state of exception more legal than the law, that is, a sovereign relation that absolutely requires relational surrender. For Agamben, "we can compare the situation of our time to that of a pet­ rified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, 'the state of exception in which we live."'46

Alberto Moreiras

41

But Benjamin says that when we reach a concept of history that understands and accounts for the paradox of sovereignty (simultaneously hiding and revealing the exception in the law), what Jacques Derrida quoting Montaigne calls "the mystical foundation of authority;'47 then we will be able to produce "a real state of exception:' Again, two states: the state of exception "in which we live;' that corresponds to the biopolitical use of history, and that other useless and enigmatic "state of real excep­ tion:' on which any possible redemption depends. Between both the need for an infrapolitical "small adjustment:' only possible after reaching a concept of history that gives us its subterranean or hidden foundation. Agamben quotes Scholem's letter to Benjamin where Scholem comments on Benjamin's essay on Kafka. "Scholem defines the relation to the law described in Kafka's novels as 'the Nothing of Revelation; intending this expression to name 'a stage in which revelation does not signify, yet still affirms itself by the fact that it is in force. Where the wealth of significance is gone and what appears, reduced, so to speak, to the zero point of its own content, still does not disappear (and Revelation is something that appears), there the Nothing appears:"48 Validity without significa­ tion: the zero point of the sense of the law, but thus also appearance of the law in its messianic and sovereign force. The Inquisition is also validity without signification: imperfect nihilism. Eric Santner comments on this passage at length in On the Psycho theology of Everyday Life. If there are two uses of history, and if the first use is a petrified use through which the validity without signification of the law weighs in as imperfect nihilism, weighs in like the Inquisition does in the history of Spain and of the West; if the second use is infrapolitical and it moves in the direction of a new and "real" state of exception, an accomplished nihilism that unworks history by dwelling in the excess that is not just the condition of possibility of the sovereign relation but also the condition of possibility of its destabilization, Santner seeks the second. The first is for him "relational surrender:' He calls the second "unbinding the fantasy:' using Lacanian categories that have been foregrounded in the work of Slavoj Zizek. To traverse the fantasy is to undo the relational fantasy that captures us for and into subjective surrender. Santner calls "exodus" the redemptive possibility of undoing the relational fan­ tasy that keeps "life captured by the question of its legitimacY:'49 In dialogue with Agamben's interpretation of Scholem's phrase "validity without signification:' Sant­ ner thinks that "the dilemma of the Kafkan subject-exposure to a surplus of va­ lidity over meaning-points . . . to the fundamental place of fantasy in human life. Fantasy organizes or 'binds' this surplus into a schema, a distinctive 'torsion' or spin that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to US:'50 Exodus is then "the possibility of recovering, of 'unbinding: the disruptive core of fantasy and converting it into 'more life: the hope and possibility of new possibili­ ties:'51 In other words, it is the possibility of an openness to "the surplus of the real within reality:'52 an openness to the awareness of infrapower within power. Exodus is infrapolitical consciousness, which means: it is only from within sequestration by the infrapower apparatus, as it determines the individual site of experience of the sovereign relation in every case, that it becomes possible to dislodge from it.

42

Alberto Moreiras

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Perhaps we are not too far from Lazzarato's second hypothesis. For Santner, "the very dynamic that attaches us to an ideological formation is . . , the site where the possibility of genuinely new possibilities can emerge:'53 Sant­ ner repeats an old postulate of Marxism, according to which only capitalism can produce the weapons for its own overcoming. He does not mention the Derridean "hauntological" reading of Marx, but he nevertheless appeals to it in order to estab­ lish that, for both Franz Rosenzweig (the thinker that, along with Freud, is the main object of interpretation in Santner's book) and Marx, "relations of exchange-and that means all socio-symbolic systems through which what is individual acquires a general and generic value/identity-always leave a remainder, an insistent and troubling surplus for which no equivalent value can be posited. And for both think­ ers, this troubling surplus that for the most part functions as the driving force of the symbolic system can become the locus of a break with it, a site where the possibility of unplugging from the dominance of the sovereign/general equivalent can open:'54 But in Santner, and in Benjamin, and in Marx according to Derrida, that redemptive and revelatory possibility is a messianic possibility. The interruption of fantasy, the unbinding of the traumatic nucleus that sustains us as distorted and captured life in subjection to infrapower, is messianic intervention. Fantasy, the traumatic nucleus, Benjamin says in a passage quoted by both Santner and Agamben, will vanish "with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it:'55 The passage from imperfect to accomplished nihilism is a matter of infrapoliti­ cal orientation towards the small adjustment. The text of deconstruction insists on this small adjustment as fundamental to its own strategy. The difference between any messianism and the messianic is in Derrida the minimal difference that insti­ tutes the messianic as the very possibility, which then becomes the necessity, of a po­ litical orientation for deconstruction, and over and over again the minimal basis for decision. In deconstruction's idiom, granted that the very conditions of possibility for justice are also the conditions of its impossibility, granted that "the impossibility of justice for all is the possibility of any justice at all;'56 and the impossibility of hos­ pitality the only opening for hospitality, of friendship for friendship, and so forth, an orientation to the infrapolitical opening is an orientation towards the conditionless condition that rules over the fact that the aporetic structure obtains. Aporia, that is, nihilism obtains. The difference between an imperfect and an accomplished experi­ ence of aporia is the difference between understanding aporia as an end of thinking or understanding it as an opening for reflective thinking, which is also an opening for infrapolitical practice there where the suppression of aporia (for instance, in all imperfect messianisms) reinforces the inordinate or exorbitant violence of biopo­ litical, imperial hegemony. How, then, does the messianic relation, as orientation towards the small adjust­ ment, affect the decidability of Lazzarato's two hypotheses on politico-intellectual practice, on immaterial reflection? The messianic relation is only the promise that accomplished messianism, the passage from imperfect to accomplished messian­ ism, can bring about a small adjustment. It is only a promise. The perfect Nothing of the promise is the other face of the Nothing of revelation that constitutes the

43

imperfect nihilism of Kafka's parable according to Benjamin. Can the mass intel­ lectuality of the present move toward the unworking of imperfect nihilism? Can it move toward an infrapolitical or non-imperial understanding of the political? Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperially:' Inquisitorial infrapower, the power within the state stronger than the state itself, the power of the fantasy that binds the traumatic nucleus of domination with our own invest­ ment in self-domination (the marrano problem par excellence)-those are sites for the Benjaminian overturning, and accordingly the sites where an infrapolitics can develop that would already think politics against imperial politics, in a non -Roman way, against the falsi -fication of world. Through falsi- fication worlding is no longer the terror or the joy of unconcealment but rather relational surrender. In relational surrender the political relation is nothing but a relation of power. Foucault says that one of the tests or ordeals of the old Germanic tribal order was the ordeal by water, "which consisted in tying a person's right hand to his left foot and throwing him into the water. If he didn't drown he would lose the case, because the water didn't accept him as it should; and ifhe drowned he had won the case, seeing that the wa­ ter had not rejected him:'57 But there must be a way to win this ordeal beyond the chiasmatic alternative: if you lose the case, you lose your life. If you win the case, you lose your life. Why have it at all? Infrapolitics is nothing but the (search for a) non-inquisitorial exodus from such a conjuncture. •

I wish to thank Marta Hernandez and Juan Carlos Rodriguezfor their comments on the original Spanish version of this essay, which have guided many of the revisions. •

1

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

al Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato, "Im material Labor;' in Radical Tho ught in Italy: A Potenti ss, 199 6), ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Mi nneapolis: University of Minnesota Pre 133·

2

Ibid., 133, 134·

3

Ibid., 133.

4

Ibid., 140.

5

Ibid., 134·

6

Ibid., 138.

•

•

7

Ibid., 146.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid., 147·

lan, Mil Mc k: Yor w (Ne ies enc end Dep nish Spa the in tion uisi Inq The , Lea rles 10 Henry Cha 19 22 ), 35 7. , 190 6-0 7) is still lan Mil Mc k: Yor w (Ne s. vol 4 in, Spa in tion uisi Inq the f o tory His A 's 11 Lea been made out­ an extremely valuable reference on the Inquisition, but its scholarship has Escandrell me tolo Bar and a uev lan Vil ez Per n qui Joa See ch. ear res g nin rve inte by dated drid: Biblioteca Bonet, eds., Historia de la Inquisici6n en Espana y Am erica, 3 vols. (Ma contem­ d dar stan the for 3) 199 s, iale tor uisi Inq os udi Est de o ntr /Ce nos stia Cri s de Autore Foucault, The porary reference work. In terms of biopower and biopolitics, see Michel York: Vmtage, w (Ne rley Hu ert Rob s. tran n, ctio odu Intr An 1 e um Vol ity. ual f o Sex . History

44

Alberto Moreiras

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection 1990), 135-41, and Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 253-63, among other texts in his later work. Giorgio Agamben takes up those Foucaultian concepts in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

12 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1992), 43. 13 For the connection between Heidegger's Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad see Ag­ nes Heller, "Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad:' Graduate Faculty Philosophy Jour­ naI 19.2/20.1 (1997): "The winter semester ended in January or February. The Soviet army had closed the circle around the German army in Stalingrad at Christmas 1942. Germany had lost the war. Few knew this; Heidegger was one of those who did. This is easy to decipher from the text of the Parmenides lectures" (248). Heidegger's overwhelming pre­ occupation with Germany is turned into a preoccupation with modernity as such in the establishment of an equivalency between Germany and the West, particularly after the failure of the National Socialist regime-for Heidegger already clear in the mid-1930s. For the politico-philosophical context, see Frank H. W. Edler's "Heidegger's Interpretation of the German 'Revolution:" Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 153-71, and "Philosophy, Language, and Politics: Heidegger's Attempt to Steal the Language of the Revolution in 1933-34:' Social Research 57.1 (1990): 197-239. See also Theodore Kisiel, "Situating Rhe­ torical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical (1923-1925: The French Occupy the Ruhr:' Existentia 9 (1999): 11-30, for the political background to Heidegger's commitment to reactionary practice. But the crucial book on Heidegger's notion of a second Revolu­ tion within Nazism in favor of an originary philosophy of autochthony and rootedness and Heidegger's subsequent, post-Germany's defeat developments is Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots. Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 2003). See also Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For an excellent use of Heidegger's Parmenides regarding geopo­ litical thinking today, see William S. Spanos, America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 53-63 passim.

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Lon­ don: Penguin, 1990), 5l. 15 For originary or primordial thinking see Parmenides, 6-10. See also Heller, op. cit., 249 passim. And, generally, Bambach, op. cit.

16 Heidegger, Parmenides, 42.

45

and Power' Revisited:' 30-54.

22 Foucault, "Truth:' 49· 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 34· 25 Ibid., 40 . 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 45· 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 Ibid., 86-87.

ut ho l wit kil to d tte mi per is it ich wh in ere sph the is ere sph ign 32 For Agamben "the sovere life that is, t ha -t life red sac d an , ice rif a sac ng ati ebr cel ut tho wi d an committing homicide sphere:' Homo s thi in ed tur cap en be has t tha life the is dice rif sac t no t may be killed bu

Sacer, 83. 33 Heidegger, Parmenides, 50. 34 Foucault, "Truth:' 80. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid. 37 See volume 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991) for his major dilucidation of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism. On the difference between nihilisms see, for instance: "Nietzsche's metaphysics is nihilism proper . . . Nietzsche's metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism . . . . By means of the entanglement of nihilism in itself, nihilism first becomes thoroughly complete in what it is. Such utterly completed, perfect nihilism is the fulfillment of nihilism proper" (203)·

38 GiorgiO Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benja­ min:' in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 168. 39 Ibid., 171. 40 Ibid., 174·

iversity of Chicago Un o: ag hic (C e, Lif y da ery Ev of gy olo the cho Psy the On 4 1 Eric L. Santner, Press, 2001), 90.

18 Ibid., 46.

d from we rro (bo se sen nt ere diff y htl slig a in " ing ork nw "u of n 42 Agamben refers to the notio 61. , cer Sa mo Ho in t) ho nc Bla ice ur Ma d an y nc Na uc n-L Jea

19 Ibid., 44.

43 Agamben, "Messiah;' 170.

20 Ibid., 45.

44 Quoted ibid., 160. 45 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 1-15. Agamben had already referred to Schmitt's state of exception in Homo Sacer (8-19; 26-42), but he develops its implications in Stato di eccezione. Homo Sacer 2.1 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

17 Ibid.

21 Michel Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms:' in Power: Essential Works ofFoucault 19541984, vol. 3, ed. and trans. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2000), 13. On the relations between Heideggerian thinking and Foucault, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in particular Milchman/Rosenberg, "To­ ward a Foucault/Heidegger Auseinandersetzung;' 1-29, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, "'Being

46 Agamben, "Messiah;' 17] .

46

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

47 Jacques Derrida, Acts ofReligion , ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 20 01 ), 22 9. 48 Agamben, "Messiah;' 16 9.

Post-Political Citizenship

49 Santner, op. cit., 30 . Santner does not mention the wo

rk of Paolo Virno' although h'IS use of th word "exodus'" IS necessarily indebted to Vi rno's "Virtuosity and Revolution. The PohtlCal Theory of Exo dus;' in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in . . Italy.. A Potential PoiztlCS (Mmneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 19 96 ) , 18 9 210. S antne rs ' and V"lrnos ' ' uses 0f the term are for the most part hetero geneous. 50 Santner, op. cit., 39. .

�

Kenneth Surin

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5 1 Ibid., 40. 52 Ib id ., 74. 53 Ibid., 8l. 54 Ibid., 96 -97. 55 Quoted in Santner, 12 2 and Agamben, 174. 56 I am indebted to Martin Hagglun d for this form ul

57 Foucault, "Truth;' 38 .

ation in a personal communication.

There is a conventional wisdom in the history of philosophy regarding the more or less intrinsic connection between the metaphysical-epistemological project that seeks an absolute ground for thought or reason, and the philosophico-political project of finding a ground in reason for the modus operandi of a moral and political subject. According to the lineaments of this well-seasoned narrative, the essential congruence be­ tween the rational subject of thought and the complemen­ tary subject of morality and politics was posited by Plato and Aristotle, and this unity between the two kinds of subject then found its suitably differentiated way into the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel (among many others). The core of this narrative is expressed by the somewhat Kantian proposition, characteristic of the Enlightenment in general, that reason provides the vital and indispensable criterion by which all judgments concerning belief, morality, politics, and art are to be appraised; so that reason is the faculty that defines and regulates the thinking being's activity, while this activity is in turn the essential means for reason's deployment in any thinking about the world, for the thinking being's capacity to describe and explain the world in ways that accord fundamentally with reason's precepts, and this precisely because reason is the irreducibly prior and en­ abling condition of any use of this capacity. Reason, in oth­ er words, constitutes the thinking being, and the activity of this being in turn enables reason to unfold dynamically (to provide a somewhat Hegelian gloss on this initially Kantian proposition). In the topography of this unfolding of reason, both thought and politics find their foundation. The philosophical tradition provides another way of de­ lineating this connection between the subject of thought and the political subject, one that also derives its focal point from Kant. Using the distinction between a subjectum (i.e., the thing that serves as the bearer of something, be it consciousness or some other property of the individual) and a subjectus (i.e., the thing that is subjected to something else), the tradition Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

48

Post-Political Citizenship

has included among its repertoire of concepts a figure of thought taken from medi­ eval philosophy that hinges on the relation between the subjectum and the subjectus. Etienne Balibar, in his fascinating but problematic essay "Citizen Subject;' uses this distinction to urge that we not identify Descartes' thinking thing (res cogitans) with the transcendental subject of thought that very quickly became a decisive feature of modern epistemology. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Balibar, because the human being is for Descartes the unity of a soul and a body, and this unity, which marks the essence of the human being, cannot be represented in terms of the subjectum (presumably because the subjectum, qua intellectual simple nature, can exist logically without requiring the presupposition of a unity between soul and body).l As the unity of a soul and a body, the human individual is not a mere intel­ lectual simple nature, a subjectum, but is, rather, a subject in another quite different sense. In this other different sense, the human individual is a subject transitively related to an other, a "something else;' and for Descartes this "something else" is precisely the divine sovereignty. In other words, for Descartes the human individual is really a s�bje�tus, and never the subjectum of modern epistemology (which in any case owes Its dIscovery to Locke and not to Descartes). For Balibar, therefore, it is important to remember that Descartes, who in many ways is really a late scholastic philosopher, was profoundly engaged with a range of issues that had been central for medieval philosophy, in this particular case the question of the relation oflesser beings to the supreme being, a question which both Descartes and the medieval philosophers broached, albeit in differing ways, under the rubric of the divine sov­ ereignty. The Cartesian subject is thus a subjectus, one who submits, and this in at least t:"o ways t�at were Significant for both Descartes and medieval political theology: (1) th � subject submits to the Sovereign who is the Lord God; and (ii) the subject also YIelds to the earthly authority of the prince who is God's representative on earth. As Descartes put it in his letter to Mersenne (April 15, 1630): "Do not hesitate I tell you, to avow and proclaim everywhere, that it is God who has established the laws of nature, as a King establishes laws in his Kingdom:'2 From this passage, and from his other writings, it is clear that the notion of sovereignty was at once political and �heological for Descartes, as it had been for the earlier scholastic philosophers. This IS not the place for a detailed discussion of Balibar's argument, which in addition to being a little sketchy is also not entirely new-Leibniz, Arnauld, and Malebranche had long ago viewed Descartes, roughly their contemporary, as a follower in the f?otste�s of Augustine who found philosophy's raison d'etre in the soul's contempla­ . tIon of ItS relatlOn to God, and who therefore took the dependence of lesser beings on the supreme eminence as philosophy's primary concern.3 But if John Locke is deemed by Balibar to be the inventor of the modern concept of the self, who then is �he real au�ho� of the fully-fledged concept of the transcendental subject, if Balibar . IS nght to mSlst that it is not Descartes? The true culprit here, says Balibar, is not Descartes, but Kant, who needed the concept of the transcendental subject to ac­ count for the "synthetic unity" that provides the necessary conditions for objective . expenence. Kant chose to foist onto Descartes something that was really his own "discovery;' and with Heidegger as his more than willing subsequent accomplice

Kenneth Surin

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in this dubious undertaking, the outcome of this grievous misattribution has been momentous for our understanding (or lack thereof) of the course taken by the his­ tory of philosophy.4 Kant however was about more than just the "discovery" of the transcendental subject. The Kantian subject had also to prescribe duties for itself in the name of the categorical imperative, and in so doing carve out a realm of freedom in nature that would enable this subject to free itself from a "self-inflicted tutelage" that arises when we can't make judgments without the supervision of an other, and this of course includes the tutelage of the King. The condition for realizing any such ideal on the part of the enlightened subject is the ability to submit to nothing but the rule of reason in making judgments, and so to be free from the power of the des­ pot when making one's judgments entails a critical repositioning of the place from which sovereignty is exercised: no more is this place the body of the King, since for Kant this "tutelage" is stoppable only if the subject is able to owe its allegiance to a republican polity constituted by the rule of reason and nothing but the rule of rea­ son. Whatever criticism Balibar levels at Kant for the (supposed) historical mistake he made with regard to Descartes, the philosopher from East Prussia nonetheless emerges as a very considerable figure in Balibar's account. For Kant also created the concept of a certain kind of practical subject, one who operates in the realm of freedom, and this practical subject, whose telos is the ultimate abolition of any kind of "self-inflicted tutelage;' had to destroy the "subject" of the King (i.e., the subjectus of Descartes and medieval political theology) in order to become a "self-legislating" rational being. Kant therefore simultaneously created the transcendental subject (i.e., the subjectum of modern epistemology) and discredited philosophically the subjectus of the previous philosophical and political dispensation. The real philosophical adversary of Kant is of course Hobbes. Hobbes stated the crux of the principle of sovereignty when he asserted that if the sovereign is the ori­ gin oflaw, then no law can bind the sovereign, and thus the State. The only basis for the functioning of the State is the decree of the sovereign, and force is effectively the determinant of the relation that the sovereign has to his subjects, or to other sover­ eigns. The sovereign does not derive his authority from the State, since the State only exists by virtue of the insuperable authority that emanates from the sovereign. The sovereign is necessarily the animating principle underlying all authority, and hence a subject's refusal of the authority of the sovereign is the subject's refusal of its own authority, and thus of itself. As Hobbes puts it, the sovereign is "the Publique Soule, giving Life and Motion to the Commonwealth:'5 The subject's authority, provided it is not usurped or feigned, can only be the authority of the sovereign, and a subject's disowning of the sovereign's authority is thus necessarily a nullification of the very ground of the subject's own authority.6 The unavoidable concomitant of this posi­ tion on the character of sovereignty is that the State can have only one sovereign, who therefore represents all the people (so that his acts are willy-nilly their acts as well), and all associations within the commonwealth are based on the principle of the State and the sovereign who gives the State its raison d'etre.7 Against Hobbes' absolutizing of the Sovereign, Kant asserts that "the people too have inalienable rights against the head of state . . . . For to assume that the head of state can neither make mistakes nor be ignorant of anything would be to imply that he receives divine

50

Post-Political Citizenship

inspiration and is more than a human being:'B The concomitant of Kant's philosophical evisceration of the "subject" of the King was thus the political emergence of the republican citizen, who from 1789 onwards would supplant the subjectlsubjectus of the previous epoch. In the process, Des­ cartes' philosophical world of subjects who submit to the laws of God and King was dislodged by Kant's world of "self-legislating" rational subjects who engage in this legislation precisely by adverting to the notions of right and duty. This new subject is the embodiment of right and of the operation of practical reason (right being for Kant the outcome that can be guaranteed only by the proper use of practical reason), and furthermore the subject is considered a citizen to the extent he/she embodies the general will, in which case the only laws worthy of the name are those framed to reflect "the united will of the whole nation:'9 Sovereignty is thus glossed by Kant through a recasting of the Rousseauan social contract. Laws are rationally promulgated only when they exemplify the general will, and this exemplification of the general will is possible only if there is a perfectly just civil constitution. The outcome, as the philosophy textbooks tell us, was a crucial separation of the earthly from the heavenly city. However, if Kant is the inaugurator of the Citizen Subject, then for Balibar Michel Foucault is the great theorist of the transition from the world of kingly �nd divine sovereignty to the world of rights and duties determined by the Sta�e a�� Its apparatuses, and Balibar concludes his essay with the following obser­ . vatIon: :As to whether thiS figure [the Citizen Subjectl like a face of sand at the edge of the sea, is about to be effaced with the next great sea change, that is another ques­ tion:' Perhaps it is nothing more than Foucault's own utopia, a necessary support for tha� utopia's facticity.lO I would like now to address the Foucauldian question left by Bahbar for future consideration, and pose the question of the current destination or fate of the Citizen Subject. To do this we have to look again at Kant. The reason that constitutes the subject is perforce a Transcendental Reason. The Ka�tian inflection here is not accidental, because the reason that grounds the . sub� ect IS �ot a reason that can be specified within the terms of the activity of the s �b)ect: thiS reason is the basis of this subject's very possibility qua subject, and by virtue of that, reason is necessarily exterior to the subject. Reason in this kind of em­ ployment is thus the activity of a single and universal quintessence whose object is . reason Itself, so that reason has necessarily to seek its ground within itself, as Hegel noted.ll Reason, by virtue of its self-grounding, is perforce the writing of the Abso­ lute.12 The subject's ground, which has to reside in Reason itself, is therefore entirely and properly metaphysical, and any crisis of Transcendental Reason unavoidably becomes a philosophical crisis of the subject. Kant himself was the first to realize this, though it was left to his philosophical successors in the movement known as early Romanticism (Friihromantik), to make the acknowledgment of this crisis of Transcendental Reason into a starting-point for philosophical reflection. With Nietzsche however the hitherto radical figure of the transcendental subject is propelled into a crisis, and with this crisis the fundamental convergence between the �etaphy�i��l-epistemological subject and the philosophico-political subject is dellled plaus�blhty. We �ll know from the basic textbooks in the history ofphilosophy that reason, msofar as It operates on both the understanding and the will, is placed

Kenneth Surin

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by Nietzsche entirely within the ambit of the Wille zur Macht, so that power/ desire b ecomes the enabling basis of any epistemological or moral and political subject, thereby irretrievably undermining or dislocating both kinds of subject. As a result of the intervention represented by Nietzsche, truth, goodness, and beauty, that is, the guiding transcendental notions for the constitution of this epistemological and moral and political subject, are henceforth to be regarded merely as the functions and ciphers of this supervening will to power. The same conventional wisdom also assures us that Marx and Freud likewise "undid" the two kinds of subject and thus undermined even further any basis for their essential congruence. The constellation formed by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud (and their successors) shows both the tran­ scendental subject and the ethico-political subject of action to be mere conceptual functions, lacking any substantial being (Kant of course having already argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that the subject of thought is not a substance). This hackneyed narrative about the collective impact of the great masters of suspicion is fine as it goes; what is far more interesting, however, is the story of what had to come after Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, of what it is that was going to be done with the ruins of the epistemological and moral and political subject who ostensibly had reigned from Plato to Hegel before receiving its quietus in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is interesting that Balibar, who is perhaps almost as resolute a Marxist as anyone could be in these supposedly post-Marxist days, appears not to take on board Marx's critique of bourgeois democracy in "Citizen Subject;' but in­ stead regards Foucault as the thinker who more than any other registered the crisis of this Subject. Be that as it may, it is hard to deny that the transcendental subject of modern epistemology suffered calamitously at the hands of Nietzsche (and Hei­ degger after Nietzsche), and that political and philosophical developments in the twentieth century cast the Citizen Subject adrift in a rickety life-boat headed in the direction of the reefs mapped by Foucault. But can the course of this stricken life-boat be altered, and the functions and modes of expression typically associated with the Citizen Subject be reconstituted in some more productive way, so that this Subject, or its successor (but who would that putative successor be?), would be able to meet the political and philosophical demands generated by the presently emerging conjuncture? Here one senses a cer­ tain ambivalence at the end of Balibar's essay, a wish that Foucault was perhaps not going to be right when it came to a final reckoning of the fate of the Citizen Subject, and that new and better times will somehow come to await a radically transformed Citizen Subject. But what could the shape and character of this new life for the Citi­ zen Subject be? Balibar has an emphatic proposal: the Citizen Subject will live only by becoming a revolutionary actor. I want to take Balibar's proposal as the starting-point for the conclusion of this paper. Whatever Foucault may have said about the supersession of the post-classical episteme, and the death of Man-Citizen that accompanied this supersession (I take Foucault's Man-Citizen to be coextensive with Balibar's Citizen Subject), it is obvi­ ous here that the subsequent mutation of classical liberalism into a globalizing neo­ liberalism and the disappearance of socialism to form the basis of a new conjunc­ ture-a conjuncture which some have called the "post-political" politics of the time

52

Post-Political Citizenship

after 1968-represents an added inconvenience for the already punishing trajectory taken by this Citizen Subject or Man-Citizen. The culmination of this trajectory in the "post-political" politics of the last few decades seems at one and the same time to reduce the weight of the critique represented by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud (the subject's apparent superfluity in this "post-political" dispensation undermines the very need for its critique; with the effacement of the object of critique, critique also finds itself fading into nothingness), while at the same time making more urgent the question of the ontological status of the subject of this "post-political" politics (is it still some kind of vestigially effective subject, a barely breathing remnant of the Man-Citizen of Foucault's modern episteme or Balibar's Citizen Subject of the time after 1789?); and if so, what powers (if any) reside in this brute remnant, or are we left today with nothing for the metaphysical constitution of the possibility of poli­ tics but the sheer acknowledgement of the power of the body, the power of bare life (as proposed by the thinkers of the "inoperative" community and the community to come), or the appeal to some kind of undeconstructable justice coming from the outside of any totality (as proposed by Derrida and his epigoni), etc.? We don't have to hear too much along these lines in order to recognize that the practices and orders of thought associated with the "societies of control" delineated by Deleuze, and those of the domain of the biopolitical identified by Foucault and others each derives their saliency from this "post-political" conjuncture. Also important here is the attempt by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to outline a form of constitutionalism that is not indebted to the metaphysics of classical (and for Spivak, Western) politi­ cal sovereignty. What kind of political subject, if any, can continue to exist in the conjuncture of a "post-political" politics, and has this subject to possess an intrinsic connection to the political sovereignty that grounded the classical Citizen Subject? The invention of something different to put in place of the system of representa­ tions that has governed thinking about ethnicity, race, clan, nation, sovereignty, and patrimony-these representations being the linchpins of an episteme or mentalite that has prevailed since 1789 or 1492 (these markers are emblematic of course)-will have of course to be a vast, collective undertaking, perhaps extending over several generations. The suggestion here is not so much that these notions have necessarily to be dispensed with; but that they be rethought and placed in the service of a dif­ ferent vision of the future, a different salvation even. Here I agree with Tom Nairn that it is difficult to conceive of the swift and outright elimination of the "nation" of modern nationalism. The forces and the desire named "nationalism" can probably be transformed over the longer haul into the vehicle of the "civic nationalism" that Nairn and others have advocated, but its demise in the shorter term seems rather improbable. To state the obvious: the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a United States hegemony and replaced the antagonism between capitalism and bureaucratic socialism with a whole series of struggles between competing brands of capitalism, and here the outcome is uncertain, as indicated by the current and ongoing recession, or "jobless recovery" as it is now being called. Moreover, there seems to be a more active role in the international system for regional as well as local states, and these are accompanied by new mechanisms of cultural identifica-

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tion that are tied to regions or sub-regions rather than nation-states (such as the various "separatisms" associated with the Basques, Catalonians, Ulster Protestants, Chechens, Kurds, Corsicans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Kashmiris, Eritreans).13 What we are likely to see here is the coexistence of the transnational with the interlocal, with the nation-state having an altered but still significant function as the mechanism that coordinates the flows between the transnational and the interlocal. Concep­ tions of sovereignty and citizenship have of course been changing with these trends. Important here is the shift from government to governance and meta-governance, as large-scale official state apparatuses are dismantled or deemphasized, and govern­ ing becomes more and more a matter of organizing flows between multiple agen­ cies and networks of power and information (governance), and of providing the "axioms" to integrate and coordinate all these systems and movements (i.e., meta­ governance).'4 In such a world notions of citizenship and nationality have become more flexible and compartmentalized, and so we have lotteries for American green cards, Caribbean countries putting citizenship up for sale, and so on. What concepts are going to be needed for this rethinking of a different politics, a different political future? The list of these concepts is going to be pretty long, but it would include something like a transindividualization of desire of the kind that Warren Montag has associated with Spinoza. And then there is the monumentally intractable matter of sovereignty. Here it is important to note that acknowledging the seeming indispensability of the nation -state in the current political dispensation is simply not symmetrical with the demand that we ("we" being philosophers of the political) conceptualize outside the order of the State. For we can conceptualize outside the order of the State whilst still acknowledging the current indispensability of the nation-state; just as we can acknowledge the current political indispensability of the nation -state without heeding the imperative that we conceptualize outside the order of the State or sovereignty. In talking about this conceptualization, a promising starting-point is Rousseau's proposition that a certain miraculation or occultation occurs when sovereignty is exercised, namely, that individuals surrender to the sovereign a certain fundamental plenitude of being possessed by them in the state of nature, in return for which they emerge as public citizens. Marx had his own version of this occultation or "miracle:' As he pointed out, capital has perforce to reconstitute social subjects and market . participants (and non-participants), who by virtue of this reconstitution become the agents and bearers of its "substance" as they come to be constrained by capital and its allied organizations, even as they exercise varying degrees of command on capital's behalf. It is therefore a historically defined manifestation of constituent power that defines capitalism and its agents. This manifestation of constituent power serves as the model of realization for capital-it is the nexus, at once social and politi­ cal, which invests everything with (a productive) desire before a capitalist regime of accumulation can come to possess its enabling conditions. Capital's constituent power is the power of a basic disempowerment, an undermining of living labor, and it is this debilitation of living labor that enables capitalism to come into being and to reconstitute itself.15 It is axiomatic here that the project of liberation must therefore shape itself as a countervailing strength (in the manner akin to Spinoza's

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potentia) that severs any propensities for liberation from the grip of this original disempowerment that incapacitates living labor in order to make capitalist accumu­ lation possible. Capitalism, and this is the powerful insight announced by Deleuze and Guattari, only arises because the power that would prevent it from emerging, the power of what amounts to an "ur-liberation" antecedent to any "actual" libera­ tion, has already been neutralized by the prior violent installation of the forms of social cooperation that will in turn allow capital to emerge as a full-blown economic assemblage. These forms of social cooperation are precisely those responsible for the emergence of the public citizen, the Citizen Subject, so that there is a royal road which leads from Rousseau to Foucault. This in turn poses the critical question of the organization of constituent power which enables the possibility of this liberation to be stated. How are we begin to think the thought that subtends this occultation in which the Citizen Subject emerges? Of course the state and sovereignty are enabling conditions for this emergence, but if there is anything to be learnt from the papers given yesterday, it is that it is not enough to conceptualize the exteriority that lies beyond the State.,6 Constituent power resides in this exteriority, taking the form of the enemy/friend dyad of Schmitt's which is the enabling condition of the political, or the multitudo in Spinoza, which, as Warren Montag and Jon Beasley-Murray pointed out in the question-and-answer session yesterday, is really antecedent to this or that manifestation of state power or sovereignty. So it is not sufficient to con­ ceptualize the exteriority or surplus that lies beyond the state; the conceptualization of this pure exteriority or surplus has itself to be conceptualized in a higher order reflection. Before the State, before power and politics, there is this enabling surplus or pure exteriority. But before this enabling surplus or exteriority there is . . . ? Using very broad brush strokes, we can state this meta-theoretical thesis in terms of the history of philosophy. If Kant and Hegel, the State-thinkers par excel­ lence, enable us to conceptualize the lineaments of the State's form and character­ istic dispositions, then this conference has indicated that the exemplary thinkers of the State's exteriority are Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Schmitt. The thinking of this exteriority or excess, associated so far with Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Schmitt, however demands in turn its own conceptualization. But this concep­ tualization will necessarily be of something that is non-denumerable and indeed non-spatiotemporal, since it does not consist of countable elements or ordered rela­ tions. Friends and enemies can be counted, but what makes their becoming possible at the conceptual level is not countable, however. The place of this thinking cannot therefore be systematized nor can it take the forms of testable hypotheses or em­ pirical predictions. And yet it is a place that already exists, as indeed it has to, since friends and enemies and the political already exist. A becoming friend or a becom­ ing enemy must have its own conditions of possibility, moments of possibility which are eternal while simultaneously enfolding space and time, and in so doing provid­ ing the becoming friend or becoming enemy with their point of accession into the spatiotemporal domain, or more precisely, the domain of the actually political. The metaphysical or theological traditions have a term for this becoming-possible of becoming, namely, the Aeon or Kairos, an indefinite and therefore unmasterable time that makes possible the unfolding of events. An unmasterable time, but also

Kenneth Surin samething

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that without itself being spatial enfolds a place, the place of the becom. .J11g of this event or that event. Interestingly enough, It was the rned'laeva1 theoioglan ' . D uns Scotus who first defined this concept, the concept 0f a h aecceltas or h aeccel'ty, from potent!'al'Ity to to designate the possibility of an event's becoming as it moves . act. Scotus rightly perceived that the movement from potentIal'Ity to � ct can�ot b � a single event or indeed several linked events, since it is s.i�ply impoSSIble to Ident�fy the very point at which potentiality ceases to be potentlahty and �anages to re�llZe itself in act, to complete or exhaust itself in act. The only alternative, therefore, IS to view the connection between potentiality and act as an infinite series of oscillations between potentiality and act, and to then say that the event is constituted as the outcome of these unceasing oscillations. The event-whether it is being-friend, or being-enemy, or being-tyrant, or being-corrupt, and so on-emerges not from a perm� nent or stable co� dition, b�t . . rather from a mixed conceptual regime that embodIes dIfference, vanatlOn, devI­ ation, and inflection. To see how such an unavoidably mixed conceptual regime would work, it has to be acknowledged from the outset that there is no unitary conceptual operation which subtends a being-friend or being-enemy or being-cor­ rupt or whatever. These are images of thought, and as such they a:e the product of . quite specific conceptual or theoretical operations. Sometimes an lII�ag� of thought is formed by a process of augmentation, as when the image-concept IS hke a broken porcelain vase which is missing a few pieces that have to be recovered in order to re­ store it to its original shape; and sometimes an image-concept needs to have some­ thing subtracted from it, especially when it misleads us into thinking t�a� it contains . everything that can be seen or which needs to be seen. The dlffere� tlatmg la� or of concept-image creation therefore necessarily underlies the theoretlCal operatlon of delineating the space from which the figures of the political emerges. Bu: the la��r of concept-creation, philosophy in other words, is itself always irreducl�ly P ?htl­ . cal, and depending on the character of this conceptual labor it can contam Wlthm itself its own "revolutionary becoming" (if one may use a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari). What then can we say, in conclusion, about post-political citizenship (this paper's original subject)? Very briefly, in a time when citizenship ca? incre�singly be bought and sold, and when the forms of sovereignty are bec�mmg va�lable, �nd the state itself is best conceptualized as an assemblage of projects, no mterestmg problems-I was tempted to say no interesting philosophical ��oblems-a�e posed . by these modulations of the post-political. But the post-pohtlcal IS preClsely the . form of the political today, and so more important, much more Importa�t, than the task of defining and describing post-political citizenship is the one whIch asks of the body politic how if at all it is going to take politics beyond the lin��� e?ts of this post-political. Relevant here is the following passage from SlavoJ. Zlzeks The Ticklish Subject:

The best formula that expresses the paradox of post-politics is perhaps Tony Blair's characterization of New Labour as the "Radical Centre": in the old days of "ideological" political division, the qualification "radical" was re­ . served for either the extreme Left or for the extreme RIght. The Centre was,

50

Post-Political Citizenship

by definition, moderate: measured by the old standards, the term "Radical Centre" is the same nonsense as "radical moderation:' What makes New Labour (or Bill Clinton's politics in the USA) "radical" is its radical aban­ donment on the "old ideological divides;' usually formulated in the guise of a paraphrase of Deng Xiaoping's motto from the 1960s: "It doesn't matter if a cat is red or white; what matters is that it actually catches mice:" in the same vein, advocates of New Labour like to emphasize that we should take good ideas without any prejudice and apply them, whatever their (ideologi­ cal) origins. And what are these "good ideas"? The answer is, of course, ideas that work. It is here that we encounter the gap that separates a political act proper from the "administration of social matters" which remains within the framework of the existing sociopolitical relations: the political act (interven­ tion) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work. To say that good ideas are "ideas that work" means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works (if, for example, one spends too much money on education or healthcare, that "doesn't work;' since it infringes too much on the conditions of capitalist profitability). One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the "art of the possible": authentic politics is, rather, the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible-it changes the very parameters of what is considered "possible" in the existing constellation.'7 In other words: the first task (and there will be countless others of course) of the citi­ zen who is launched on a trajectory beyond the post-political is to find the resources of power and hope that would enable us to insist that there is a non-negotiable line, or maybe it is a chasm, between the political left and right, and that such notions as "the radical center" are vapid fictions. Philosophical labor is no substitute for this practical-political labor of the citizen, but it is its necessary complement. This is a prolepsis to the task of breaking the hold of the now pervasive Law and its support­ ing institutions and frameworks . •

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1

2

3

57

Kenneth Surin

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•

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Etienne Balibar, "Citizen Subject;' in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 33-57. In another work, Balibar goes on to argue that it is Locke and not Descartes who invents the modern con­ cept of the self as that which the "you" or the ''1'' possesses. Balibar, Identite et difference (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Rene Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 28. Also in Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1987), vol. 1, 145. Balibar refers to this letter on page 36 of "Citizen Subject:' The importance of the Augustinian tradition for Descartes is stressed in Stephen Menn, "The Intellectual Setting;' in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33-86; see especially 69. See also Nicholas Tolley, "The Reception of Descartes' Philoso-

phy:' The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1992), 393-423. 4

According to Balibar, the notion of the transcendental subject arose from Kant's modi­ fication of the Cartesian cogito, with the Lockean self beginning a second trad"l�lOn that circumvents Kant before ending up with William James and Bergson. See Bahbar, " Je/ moi/soi;' Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

5

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230. First published 1651.

6

Ibid., 122.

7

Ibid., 155-56.

8

9

ImmanueI Kant, "On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right (Against Hobbes ):' in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambn'dge: C ambridge University Press, 1991), 84. Immanuel Kant, "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice:" in Political Writings, op. cit., 71.

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10 Balibar, op. cit., 55. Balibar says a great deal more about the Cartesian and me ieval-theo­ logical subjectus than can be indicated here, rightly pointing ut that a notIon that had evolved over seventeen centuries from Roman times to the penod of the urop an bso­ lute monarchies is not easily encompassed in a single definition. He also nghtly llldlCates that the supposed novum of the Citizen Subject has to be regarded with some SkeptIC1S , . . since under the aegis of bourgeois democracy thIS subject was always gOlllg to retalll some traces of the old subjectus.

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'0

e Difference For Hegel's (early) view on the operation of "speculative" reason, see his between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. Horton S. Hams and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 88. For excellent commentary o this aspect of Hegel's relation to Kant, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A BIOgraphy (Cambndge. Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160ff.

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12 The essential correlation between Reason and the Absolute e tails that every oper ti n . of consciousness, practical as much as theoretical, is necessanly one whlch falls Wlt�lll . the remit of the Absolute. The subject of thought then has to be the subject of morahty and politics and vice versa-a connection previously established y Kant when he moved . . from the First to the Second Critique, that is, from the subject s understandlllg to the subject's willing and acting.

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·13 Bob Jessop, "Capitalism and its future: remarks on regulation, government and gover­ nance:' Review of International Political Economy 4 (1997), 561-81. 14 Ibid., 574-75.

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15 The great recent theorist of this exercise of constituent power is of urse Antonio egri . Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. MaurlZla Boscagh (Mlllne . apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Originally pubhshed as II potere costltuente, saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Carnago Varese: Sugar Co., 1992).

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16 A version of this paper was presented at the conference "Thinking Politically" held at Duke University, October 24-26, 2003.-Ed. 17 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 198-99.

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze Slavoj Zizek

•

In his "transcendental empiricism;' Deleuze gives to Kant's transcendental dimension a unique twist: the proper tran­ scendental space is the virtual space of the multiple singular potentialities, of "pure" impersonal singular gestures, affects, and perceptions that are not yet the gestures-affects-percep­ tions of a pre-existing, stable, and self-identical subject. This is why, for example, Deleuze celebrates the art of cinema: it "liberates" gaze, images, movements, and, ultimately, time it­ self from their attribution to a given subject-when we watch a movie, we see the flow of images from the perspective of the "mechanical" camera, a perspective which does not belong to any subject; through the art of montage, movement is also abstracted/liberated from its attribution to a given subject or object-it is an impersonal movement which is only second­ arily, afterwards, attributed to some positive entities. Here, however, the first crack in Deleuze's edifice appears: in a move which is far from self-evident, Deleuze links this conceptual space to the traditional opposition between pro­ duction and representation. The virtual field is (re)interpreted as that of generative, productive forces, opposed to the space of representations. Here we get all the standard topics of the molecular multiple sites of productivity constrained by the molar totalizing organizations, and so on and so forth. Under the heading of the opposition between becoming and being, Deleuze thus seems to identify these two logics, although they are fundamentally incompatible (one is tempted to attribute the "bad" influence which pushed him towards the second logic to Felix Guattari). The proper site of production is not the virtual space as such, but, rather, the very passage from it to constituted reality, the collapse of the multitude and its oscillations into one reality-production is fundamentally a limitation of the open space of virtualities, the determination/ negation of the virtual multitude (this is how Deleuze reads Spinoza's omni determinatio est negatio against Hegel) .

Polygraph 15116 (2004)

60

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles De/euze

!

The ine of Deleuze proper is that of the great early monographs (the key ones . bemg Difference and Repetition and The Logic ofSense) as well as some of the shorter introductory writings (like Proust and Signs and the Introduction to Sacher-Masoch1). In his la�e work, it is the two cinema books which mark the return to the topics of The LogIc of Sense. This series is to be distinguished from the books Deleuze and Guattari co-wrote, and one can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of De­ leuze (and, also, the political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a "Guat­ tarized" Deleuze. It is crucial to note that not a single one of Deleuze's own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze "in himself" is a highly elitist author, indiffer­ ent towards politics. The only serious philosophical question is thus: what inher­ ent imp asse caused Deleuze to turn towards Guattari? Is Anti-Oedipus, arguably , Deleuzes worst book, not the result of escaping the full confrontation of a deadlock via a simplified "flat" solution, homologous to Schelling escaping the deadlock of his Weltalter project vi� his shift to the duality of "positive" and "negative" philosophy, or Habermas escapmg the deadlock of the "dialectic of Enlightenment" via his shift to the duality of instrumental and communicational reason? Our task is to confront again this deadlock. Was, therefore, Deleuze not pushed towards Guattari because ua tari presented �n alibi, an easy escape from the deadlock of his previous posi­ . es Dele�zes conceptual edIfice not rely on two logics, on two conceptual tIon . ? OppOSItions, whIch coexist in his work? This insight seems so obvious, stating it seems so close to what the French call a lapalissade, that one is surprised how it has not yet been generally perceived: 1. On the one hand, the logic of sense, of the immaterial becoming as the sense-e�ent, as the effect of bodily-material processes-causes, the logic of the radlCal gap between generative process and its immaterial sense-ef­ fect: "multiplicities, being incorporeal effects of material causes, are im­ passible or causally sterile entities. The time of a pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the temporal dimension of this impassibility or sterility of multiplicities:'2 And is cinema not the �l�imate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming? The cinema image IS mherently sterile and impassive, the pure effect of corporeal causes, although nonetheless acquiring its pseudo-autonomy. 2. On the other hand, the logic of becoming as production of Beings: "the emerge �ce of metric or extensive properties should be treated as a single . . process m whIch a contmuous virtual spacetime progressively differenti­ ates itself into actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures."3 ay, in his analyses of films and literature, Deleuze emphasizes the de-substantial­ lzat�.on of affects: in a work of art, an affect (boredom, for instance) is no longer attnbutable to actual persons, but becomes a free-floating event. How, then, does this impersonal intensity of an affect-event relate to bodies or persons? Here we �ncoun�er the same ambiguity: either this immaterial affect is generated by interact­ mg bodIes as a sterile surface of pure Becoming, or it is part of the virtual intensities ou� of which bodies emerge through actualization (the passage from Becoming to Bem�). So, on the one hand, Manuel DeLanda, in his excellent compte-rendu of De­ leuzes ontology, affirms the logic of the "disappearance of process under product:'

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Slavoj Zizek

61

the logic which relies on a long (also Hegelian-Marxist!) tradition of "reification": "This theme of the disgUising of process under product is key to Deleuze's philoso­ phy since his philosophical method is, at lea�t in part, designed to overcome the o ­ , . jective illusion fostered by this concealment. 4 A� , t e proper level of produc�lOn IS . also unambiguously designated as that of vlrtualItles: m and beneath the constituted reality, "the extensive and qualitative properties of the final product:'5 one should discover the traces of the intensive process of virtualities-Being and Becoming re­ late as Actual and Virtual. How, then, are we to combine this unambiguous affirma­ tion of the Virtual as the site of production which generates constituted reality, with the no less unambiguous statement that "the virtual is produced out of the actual"?

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Multiplicities should not be conceived as possessing the capacity to actively interact with one another through these series. Deleuze thinks about them as endowed with only a mere capacity to be affected, since they are, in his words, "impassive entities-impassive results:' The neutrality or sterility of multiplicities may be explained in the following way. Although their diver­ gent universality makes them independent of any particular mechanism (the same multiplicity may be actualized by several causal mechanisms) they do depend on the empirical fact that some causal mechanism or another actually exists . . . . [Tlhey are not transcendent but immanent entities. ' " Deleuze views multiplicities as incorporeal effects of corporeal causes, that is, as historical results of actual causes possessing no causal powers of their own. On the other hand, as he writes, "to the extent that they differ in nature from these causes, they enter, with one another, into relations of quasi-cau­ sality. Together they enter into a relation with a quasi-cause which is itself incorporeal and assures them a very special independence:' . . . Unlike actual capacities, which are always capacities to affect and be affected, virtual af­ fects are sharply divided into a pure capacity to be affected (displayed by impassible multiplicities) and a pure capacity to affect. 6 The concept of quasi-cause is that which prevents a regression into simple reduc­ tionism: it designates the pure agency of transcendental causality. Let us take De­ leuze's own example from his Cinema 2: The Time-Image: the emergence of cin­ ematic neorealism. One can, of course, explain neorealism by a set of historical circumstances (the trauma of World War II, etc.). However, there is an excess in the emergence of the New: neorealism is an Event which cannot simply be reduced to its material/historical causes, and the "quasi-cause" is the cause of this excess, the cause of that which makes an Event (an emergence of the New) irreducible to its historical circumstances. One can also say that the quasi-cause is the second-level, the meta-cause of the very excess of the effect over its (corporeal) causes. This is how one should understand what Deleuze says about being affected: insofar as the incorporeal Event is a pure affect (an impassive-neutral-sterile result), and i �sofar as something New (a new Event, an Event of/as the New) can only emerge If the chain of its corporeal causes is not complete, one should postulate, over and above the network of corporeal causes, a pure, transcendental capacity to affect. This, also, is why Lacan appreciated so much The Logic of Sense: is the Deleuzian quasi-cause

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Slavoj Ziiek

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

not. the exact equivalent of Lacan's objet petit a, this pure, immaterial, spectral entity whIch serves as the object-cause of desire? One should be very precise here in order not to miss the point: Deleuze is not af­ firming a simple psycho-physical dualism in the sense of someone like John Searle· he is not offering two different "descriptions" of the same event. It is not that th� same process (say, a sp�ech activity) can be described in a strictly naturalistic way, :s a ne�ro�a�, and bodIly process embedded in its actual causality, or, as it were, from withm, at the level of meaning, where the causality ("I answer your question because I understand it") is pseudo-causality. In such an approach, the material­ corporeal causality remains complete, while the basic premise of Deleuze's ontol­ ogy is precis�ly that corporeal causality is not complete: in the emergence of the . New, somethmg occurs WhICh cannot be properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. Quasi-cause is not the illusory theatre of shadows, like a child wh? thinks �e is magically making a toy run, unaware of the mechanic causality whICh effectIvel� does th� wo�k-on the contrary, the quasi-cause fills in the gap of corporeal causaitty. In thIS stnct sense, and insofar as the Event is the Sense-Event . . quaSI-cause IS non-sense as inherent to Sense: if a speech could have been reduced to its sense, then it would fall into reality-the relationship between Sense and its designated reality would have been simply that of objects in the world. Nonsense is that w�ich �aintains the autonomy of the level of sense, of its surface flow of pure becommg, WIth regard to the designated reality ("referent"). And does this not bring us back to the unfortunate "phallic signifier" as the "pure" signifier without signi­ fied? Is the Lacanian phallus not precisely the point of non -sense sustaining the flow of sense? Thi� bri�gs �� to the topi � �f "Deleuze and psychoanalysis": what Deleuze pres­ ents as ?edIp.u� IS. a rather ndICulous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacans pOSItIon. In the last decades of Lacan's teaching, topics and subtitles like "au-dela de I'Oedipe;' "I'Oedipe, un reve de Freud;' etc., abound; not only this, but Lacan even pre�ents the very figure of Oedip �s at Colonus as a post-Oedipal fig­ . ure, as a figure beyond the OedIpus complex. What, then, if one conceives of the �acanian "obverse of the Oedipus" as a kind of Deleuzian "dark precursor" mediat­ mg between the two series, the "official" Oedipal narrative of normalization on the one side, and the pre-subjective field of intensities and desiring machines : on the othe � sid:? What if it is this th�t Deleuze desperately tries to avoid, this "vanishing medIator betwe.en �he two. senes? What one should do is thus to repeat, apropos of I?ele�ze,s reductIOlllst readmg of (the Freudian) Oedipus (his other uncanny excep­ tIOn, . m term� of a .botched, simplistic interpretation), the same gesture as the one that Imposes Itself m relation to Hegel. In today's theory, especially in Cultural Studies, reference to Oedipus is often reduced to the extreme of a ridiculous straw-man: the flat scenario of the drama of the child's entry into normative heterosexuality. In order to fulfill this rhetori­ cal function, the Oedipus complex has to be ascribed a multitude of inconsistent functions. Let .me quote the fo�!owing typical passage (which will tactfully be al­ lowed to r�mam anonymous) : In the Oedipal scenario, the young boy desires to conquer hIS mother sexually in order to separate himself from her and begin to '

63

al xu s se hi r, he s fat hi oy str de t us m he d, ee cc su to m rOw as an adult. In order for hi e th te ra pa se to is n tio nc fu g" tin tra as "c e os wh r he fat e th t ompetitor:' So, it is no ­ ne ta ul sim gs in th t en ist ns co in e re th do to s ha y bo e th boy from his mother. In fact, t ha . W er th fa s hi oy str de d an r, he m fro lf se m hi ously: conquer his mother, separate : ty ic � pl im an eli eg H rl pe ro its in e siv er bv su ng � hi et m � � Jerry Aline Flieger did7 is so ng en ov sc dI e) , (r ry to rn te n la uZ ele D to in ck ba us she reinscribed-retranslated Oedip e em pr su e th n, io at liz ria ito rr te de of t en ag ic ad m no a ;' in it an "abstract machine of it lim e th r fo s nd sta ho w f" ol w ne "lo e th ll ca case of what Deleuze and Guattari : ely tiv ec eff d, . An de tsi ou its ds ar w to t" gh i fl of ne "li a the pack of wolves, opening s hi ed w llo fo ) rm te e th of es ns se th bo (in dly in does Oedipus-this stranger who bl y wa s, by ve ol w an m hu of ck pa e th of it lim e m tre ex trajectory-not stand for the r, (o e on al g in ish n fi e, nc rie pe ex an m hu of it of realizing, acting out, the utter lim ad de g in liv a , ad m no ss ele m ho a y, all er lit , as n) ow s rather, with a pack of exiles of hi n ia uz ele D e th s, lu al ph of t ep nc co e th on re among humans? One should focus he ­ un "Th n: io tit pe Re d an e nc fere if D in d ce du tro in r;' so term for which is "dark precur le, sib vi in an by ed ed ec pr e ar ey th t bu , es iti ns te in nt re ffe di derbolts explode between in th pa r ei th es in rm te de ch hi , w e) br m so r eu rs cu re imperceptible dark precursor (p , e th is r so ur ec pr rk da e th , ch su s A g d: te ia gl advance, but in reverse, as though inta signifier of a meta- difference: r so ur ec pr e th , es nc re ffe di of s rie se o tw s, Given two heterogeneous serie by . r, ne an m is th In es nc re ffe di e es th of r to ia nt re plays the part of the diffe r: he ot an e on to n tio la re te ia ed m im to in em virtue of its own power, it puts th , ds or w r he ot in " nt re ffe di tly en er iff "d e th or e it is the in -itself of differenc to nt re ffe di s te la re ch hi w nt re ffe di lfse e th difference in the second degree, s­ vi es m co be d an le sib vi in is es ac tr it th pa e th e different by itself. Becaus e th by d re ve co d an er ov d ele av tr is it at th ible only in reverse, to the extent at th an th r he ot e ac pl no s ha it , m ste sy e th in ith phenomenon it induces w is it s: ck la it ch hi w at th an th r he ot y tit en from which it is "missing;' no id its s ck la it as e" ac pl its in ng ki ac "l is ch hi w e on e precisely the object x, th own identity.9 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops this concept through a direct reference to the Lacanian notion of "pure signifier": there has to be a short -circuit between the .two series, that of the signifier and that of the signified, in order for the effect-of­ sense to take place. This short-circuit is what Lacan calls the "quilting point;' the direct inscription of the signifier into the order of the signified in the guise of an "empty" signifier without signified. This signifier represents the (signifying) cause within the order of its effects, thus subverting the (mis)perceived "natural" order within which the signifier appears as the effect/expression of the signified. And, effectively, the relationship of Deleuze to the field generally designated as that of "structuralism" is much more ambiguous than it may appear. Not only is the key notion of "dark precursor" in The Logic of Sense directly developed in Lacanian structuralist terms; at the same time, Deleuze wrote "A quoi reconnait-on Ie structu­ ralisme?" a brief, concise, and sympathetic account which, precisely, presents struc­ turalism not as the thought of fixed transcendent Structures regulating the flux of

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The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

experiences, but as deploying a consistent theory of the ro le of nonsense as the gen­ erator of the flux of sense.lO Furthermore, Deleuze here explicitly refers to (and de­ velops in detail) the Lacanian identification of this signi fier as phallus." How, then, are we to read his later obvious "hardening" of the stan ce towards "structuralism?" Why is the very Lacanian reference of the "dark precur sor" reduced to the status of a "d�rk p:,ecursor" in the later Deleuze's thought, turn ed into a kind of "vanishing medIator whose traces are to be erased in the finished result? Perhaps it is all too hasty to dismiss Deleuze's endors ement of "structuralism" as a feature belonging to an epoch when he was not yet fully aware of all the con­ sequences of his basic position (thus, the "hardeni ng" would be conceived of as a necessary radicalization). What if this hardenin g is, on the contrary, a sign of "regression;' of a false "line of flight;' a false way ou t of a certain deadlock which resolves it by sacrificing its complexity? This, perh aps, is why Deleuze experienced his collaboration with Guattari as such a "relief" : the fluidity of his texts co-writ­ ten with Guattari, the sense that now, finally, thin gs run smoothly, is effectively a fake relief-it signals that the burden of thinking w as successfully avoided. The true enigma is hence: why does Deleuze succumb to th is strange urge to "demonize" structuralism, disavowing his own roots in it (o n account of which one can effec­ tively claim that Deleuze's attack on "structuralis m" is enacted on behalf of what he got from structuralism, that it is strictly inhere nt to structuralism )? Again, why must h e deny this link? Is the Fr�u�ian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpre­ .tIve appropnatIOn) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the mul titude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me matrix: the matrix of the exploSive open ­ ing up of the subject onto the social space? Undergoing "symbolic castration" is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network Oedip us the operator of deterrito rialization. However, what about the f�ct that, nonetheless, Oedipus "focuses" the initial "polymorphous perversity" of dnv�s �nto the mother-father-and-me coordina tes? More precisely, is "symbolic castratIOn not also the name for a process by means of which the child-subject enters the order of sense proper, of the abstractio n of sense, gaining the capacity to abstract a quality from its embeddedness in a bo dily Whole, to conceive of it as a p ec��ing no longer attributed to a certain substance-as Deleuze wou ld have put it, red n o longer stands for the predicate of the red thing, but for the pure flow of be ­ coming-red? So, far from tying us down to our bo dily reality, "symbolic castration" sustains our very ability to "transcend" this reality and enter the space of immaterial Becoming. Does the autonomous smile which su rvives on its own when the cat's bo dy disappears in Alice in Wonderland also not stand for an organ "castrated;' cut off from the body? What if, then, phallus itself, as the signifier of castration, stands for such an organ without a body? Is this not a further argument for the claim th at Deleuze's quasi- cause is his name for the Lacanian "phallic signifier?" Recal l how, according to Deleuze, the quasi-cause "extracts Singularities from the presen t, and from individuals and per­ sons which occupy this present;'12 and, in the sam e movement, provides them with their relative autonomy with regard to the intens ive processes as their real causes, -

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Slavoj Zitek

65

and sterile effects with their morphogenetic impassive power-is these ing oW d en . " fier IS ' , " b not exactly that sym IC castratIon w l' movement of 0 " ( h ose slgm double thiS . . . . " 1e, �orpod ff , f the impasslve-stenle Event IS cut 0 , extracte ro ItS Vlfl First, � s)? h allu P aI , causal base (if "castration" means anything at all, it means thiS). Then, thIS flow re . is constituted as an autonom us fi e ld of ItS own, t�e auton�my 0f the Event � o f Sen se. ,lI1COrp oreal symbolic order with regard to ItS corporeal embodIments. Symbolic castration;' as the elementary operation of the quasi-cause, is thus a profoundly . ' "If we since it answers the basic need of concept, any matena I'1St analYSls: erialist mat are to get rid of essentialist and typological thought we need some process through which virtual multiplicities are derived from the actual world and some process through which the results of this derivation may be given enough coherence and autonomy. The problem, of course, is the following one: the minimal actualization is h�re onceived as the actualization of the virtual, after its extraction from the precedmg ctual. Is, then, every actual the result of the actualization of the preceding virtual (so that the same goes for the actual out of whic� the actualized vir�ual was ex­ . tracted), or is there an actual which precedes the virtual, smce every Virtual has to be extracted from some actual? Perhaps the way out of this predicament-is the virtual extracted from the actual as its impassive-sterile effect, or is it the productive process which generates the actual?-is the ultimate, absolute ide�tity of the two operations, an identity hinted at by Deleuze himself when �e descnbed the opera­ . �l) and, tion of the "pseudo-cause" as that of virtualization (extractIOn of the vlrtu simultaneously, minimal actualization (the pseudo-cause confers on the Virtual a . what minimum of ontological consistency). What if, as we know from Schellmg, makes from the field of potentialities an actual reality is not the addition of some raw reality (of matter), but, rather, the addition of pure ideali� (of lo�os)? Kant himself was already aware of this paradox: the confused field of ImpressIOns turns into reality when supplemented by the transcendental Idea. What this fundam�n­ . tal lesson of transcendental idealism means is that virtualization and actualization are two sides of the same coin: actuality constitutes itself when a virtual (symbolic) supplement is added to the pre-ontological real. �n othe� words, t�e very extracti�n of , the virtual from the real ("symbolic castration ) constItutes reality- actual reality IS "13

�

the real filtered through the virtual.

, ,ItS task . The function of the quasi -cause is therefore inherently contradICtory: is, at one and the same time, to perform a push towards actualization (endowing multiplicities with a minimum of actuality) and to counte: actualiza�ion by way of extracting virtual events from the corporeal processes whICh are the�r causes. One should conceive of these two aspects as identical: the properly Hegelian paradox at work here is that the only way for a virtual state to actualize itself is to be su�p�e­ mented by another virtual feature. (Again, recall Kant: how is a confused multiplic­ ity of subjective sensations transformed into "obj �ctive" reality? It happ�n� �hen t�e , subjective function of transcendental synthesis IS added to thiS multI�I JClty.) �IS is the "phallic" dimension at its most elementary: the excess of the virtual which sustains actualization. And, this reference to the phallic signifier also enables us to answer one of the standard reproaches to the Lacanian notions of phallus and

66

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

castration: the idea that they involve a kind of ahistorical short -circuit, that is to say, the complaint that they directly link the limitation serving as a condition of human existence as such to a particular threat (that of castration) which relies on a specific patriarchal gender constellation. The next move is, then, usually the one of trying to get rid of the notion of castration-this "ridiculous" Freudian claim-by way of claiming that the threat of castration is, at its best, just a local expression of the global limitation of the human condition, which is that of human finitude, experi­ enced in a whole series of constraints (the existence of other people who limit our freedom, our mortality, and, also, the necessity to "choose one's sex"). Such a move from castration to an anxiety grounded in the very finitude of the human condition is, of course, the standard existential-philosophical move of "saving" Freud by way of getting rid of the embarrassing topic of castration and penis envy ("who can take this seriously today?"). Psychoanalysis is thus redeemed, magically transformed into a respectable academic discipline that deals with how suffering human subjects cope with the anxieties of finitude. The (in)famous advice given to Freud by Jung when their boat approached the coast of the U.S. in 1912 (that Freud should leave out or at least limit the accent on sexuality, in order to render psychoanalysis more acceptable to the American medical establishment) is resuscitated here. Why is it not sufficient to emphasize how "castration" is just a particular instance of the general limitation of the human condition? Or, to put it in a slightly differ­ ent way, how should one cut off the link between the universal symbolic structure and the particular corporeal economy? The old reproach against Lacan is that he conflates two levels, the allegedly neutral-universal-formal symbolic structure and the particular-gendered-bodily references; say, he emphasizes that the phallus is not the penis as an organ, but a signifier, even a "pure" signifier-so, why then call this "pure" signifier "phallus?" As it was clear to Deleuze (and not only to Lacan), the notion of castration answers a very specific question: how does the universal sym­ bolic process detach itself from its corporeal roots? How does it emerge in its relative autonomy? "Castration" designates the violent bodily cut which enables us to enter the domain of the incorporeal. And, the same goes for the topic of finitude: "castra­ tion" is not simply one of the local cases of the experience of finitude- this concept tries to answer a more fundamental "arche-transcendental" question, namely, how do we, humans, experience ourselves as marked byfinitude in thefirst place? This fact is not self-evident: Heidegger was right to emphasize that only humans exist in the mode of "being-towards-death." Of course, animals are also somehow "aware" of their limitation, of their limited power, etc.-the hare does try to escape the fox. And yet, this is not the same as human finitude, which emerges against the background of the small child's narcissistic attitude of illusory omnipotence (of course, we do in­ deed say that, in order to become mature, we have to accept our limitations) . What lurks behind this narcissistic attitude is, however, the Freudian death drive, a kind of "undead" stubbornness denounced already by Kant as a violent excess absent in animals-which is why, for Kant, only humans need education through discipline. The symbolic Law does not tame and regulate nature, but, precisely, applies itself to an unnatural excess. Or, to approach the same complex from another direction: at its most radical, the helplessness of the small child about which Freud speaks is not

Slavoj Zizek

hysical helplessness, the inability �o provide for one's need� , b�t a h�lplessness in h e face of the enigma of the Other s desire., the. �elpless fascmatlO� �lth the e�cess of the Other's enjoyment, and the ensuing mabIhty to account for It m the avaIlable terms of meaning. When Roman Jakobson wrote on phonemes and the bodily grounding of lanfree­ the and res gestu died een embo betw gap al cruci the on ed focus he , ge gua . . . 11 n s "�astratlOn." ca Laca what gap IS S -thI emes phon of ork netw olic symb ing float Jakobson's crucial point is that it is only the signifier, not meaning, WhIC� can do this job of deterritorialization: meaning tends to revert to our concrete hfe-world embeddedness (the premodern anthropomorphic mirroring of interior and exte­ rior is the attitude of meaning par excellence .) So, the phallus, far from signaling the rootedness of the symbolic in our bodily experience (its territorializatio n), is the "pure signifier" and, as such, the very agent of de-territori�liz�tion. �ere, Jak�bson introduces the key dialectical notion of secondary groundmg m bodIly expenence: yes, our language shows overall traces of this embodiment (the word "locomotive" resembles the profile of an old steam locomotive; the word "front" is formed in the front of our oral cavity, and the word "back" in the back of it-and so on and so forth). However, all of these are reterritorializations against the background of the fundamental cut which is the condition of meaning.'4 This is why the anthropomor­ phic model of mirroring between language and the human body, the reference to the body as a fundamental frame of reference for our understanding, is to �e aba� ­ doned-language is "inhuman:' (The process thus has three phases: (1) pnmordial territorialization as the "assemblage of bodies" -an organism marks its surround­ ings, its exchanges with it, in a texture of affective inscriptions, tattoos, etc.; (2) de­ territorialization-passage to the immaterial, virtual production of sense-marks are freed from their origins (enunciator, reference); (3) reterritorialization-when language turns into a medium of communication, pinned down to its subject of enunciation whose thoughts it expresses, to the reality it designates.) So, what is symbolic castration, with the phallus as its signifier? One should begin by conceiving of the phallus as a signifi� r-which means ,;;hat? Fr�m}he tra­ ditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects that not only symbohze power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effective�y exercisi�g power-if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, hIS words WIll be taken as the words of a king. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them in order to exert power. As such, they "castrate" me: they in­ troduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (i.e., I am never fully at the level of my function). This is what the infamous "symbolic castration" means: not "castration as symbolic, as just symbolically enacted" (in the sense in which we say that, when I am deprived of something, I am "symbolically castrated"), but the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mandate. Castration is the very gap b� ­ tween what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate which confers on me thIs "authority. " In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it i� synony­ mous with power; it is that which confers power on me. And, one has to thmk of the phallus not as the organ which immediately expresses the vital force of my being,

f

68

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

my virility, etc., but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask which I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia-phallus is an "organ without a body" which I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever becoming its "organic part;' namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.15 And, consequently, does the mysterious reappearance of the notion of "wound" in late Deleuze not function as a kind of "return of the (Lacanian) repressed"? "A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtu­ ality always within a milieu (plane or field):'16 "My wound existed before me" -i.e., the very "event" of my existence is grounded in symbolic castration. One should therefore problematize the very basic duality of Deleuze's thought, that of Becom­ ing versus Being, which appears in different versions (the Nomadic versus the State, the molecular versus the molar, the schizo versus the paranoiac, etc.). This duality is ultimately overdetermined as "the Good versus the Bad": the aim of Deleuze is to liberate the immanent force of Becoming from its self-enslavement to the order of Being. Perhaps the first step in this problematizing is to confront this duality with the duality of Being and Event, emphasizing their ultimate incompatibility: Event cannot be simply identified with the virtual field of Becoming which generates the order of Being-quite the contrary, in The Logic of Sense, Event is emphatically as­ serted as "sterile;' capable only of pseudo-causality. So, what if, at the level of Being, we have the irreducible multitude of interacting particularities, and it is the Event which acts as the elementary form of totalization/unification? Deleuze's remobilization of the old humanist-idealist topic of regressing from the "reified" result to its process of production is telltale here. Is Deleuze's oscilla­ tion between the two models (becoming as the impassive effect; becoming as the generative process) not homologous to the oscillation, in the Marxist tradition, be­ tween the two models of "reification?" First, there is the model according to which reification/fetishization misperceives properties belonging to an object insofar as this object is part of a socio-symbolic link, as its immediate "natural" properties (as if products are "in themselves" commodities); then, there is the more radical young Lukacs (et al.) notion according to which "objective" reality as such is something "rei­ fled," a fetishized outcome of some concealed subjective process ofproduction. So, in exact parallel to Deleuze, at the first level, we should not confuse an object's social properties with its immediate natural properties (in the case of a commodity, its exchange-value with its material properties that satisfy our needs). In the same way, we should not perceive (or reduce) an immaterial virtual affect linked to a bodily cause to one of the body's material properties. Then, at the second level, we should conceive objective reality itself as the result of the social productive process-in the same way that, for Deleuze, actual being is the result of the virtual process of becoming. Is this opposition of the virtual as the site of productive Becoming and the vir­ tual as the site of the sterile Sense-Event not, at the same time, the opposition of the "body without organs" (BwO) and "organs without body" (OwB)? Is, on the one hand, the productive flux of pure Becoming not the BwO, the body not yet struc-

Slavoj Ziiek

69

tured or determined as functional organs? And, on the other hand, is the OwB not from its embeddedness in a body, like the the VI'rtuality of the pure affect extracted . , . that persists alone, even when the in Wonderland Cheshire cat s body Alice in lile sl1 longer present?: "'All right; said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, e inning with the end of the taili and e�ding with the grin, ,:"hich rem�i� ed some thought . e after the rest of it had gone. Well! I ve often seen a cat WIthout a gnn, tIm . ' I ever saw m my I·e ue.1 m Alice ; , but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thmg This notion of an extracted OwB reemerges forcefully in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in the guise of the gaze itself as such an autonomous organ no longer attached to a body.17 These two logics (Event as the power w�ich generates .re.ality; Event as t�e sterile, pure effect of bodily interactions) also mvolve two prlVlleged psychologi­ cal stances: the generative Event of Becoming relies on the productive force of the "schizo;' this explosion of the unified subject in the impersonal multitude of desir­ ing intensities, intensities that are subsequently constrained by the Oe�ipal matrix; the Event as sterile, immaterial effect relies on the figure of the masochIst who finds satisfaction in the tedious, repetitive game of staged rituals whose function is to postpone forever the sexual passage a l'acte. Can one effectively imagin� a s.tronger contrast than that of the schizo throwing himself without any reservatIOn mto the flux of multiple passions, and of the masochist clinging to the theater of shadows in which his meticulously staged performances repeat again and again the same sterile gesture? . . The philosophical background of this tension in Deleuze provIdes a CruCial key here. When, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze deploys the two geneses, transcendental and real, does he not thereby follow in the steps of Fichte and Schelling? Fichte:s starting point is that one can practice philosophy in two basic ways, ide�list and Sp� ­ nozan: one either starts from objective reality and tries to develop from It the genesIs of free subjectivity, or one starts from the pure spontaneity of the a�solute SU.b! ect . and tries to develop the entirety of reality as the result of the Subjects self-posItmg. The early Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism goes a step furthe: by claiming that, in this alternative, we are not dealing with a choice: t�e t,,:o optIOns are complementary, not exclusive. Absolute idealism, its claim of the IdentIty of Sub­ ject and Object (Spirit and Nature), can be demonstrated in two wa�s: one either develops Nature out of Spirit (transcendental idealism, a la Kant and FIChte), or one develops the gradual emergence of Spirit out of the immanent movement of Nature (Schelling's own Naturphilosophie). However, what about the crucial new �dvance achieved by Schelling in his Weltalter fragments, where he introduces a thIrd term into this alternative, namely, that of the genesis of Spirit (logos) not out of nature as such-as a constituted realm of natural reality-but out of the nature offin God himself as that which is "in God himself not yet God;' the abyss of the pre-ontologi­ cal Real in God, the blind rotary movement of "irrational" passions? As Schelling makes clear, this realm is not yet ontological, but, in a sense, more "spiritual" than natural reality: a shadowy realm of obscene ghosts which return again and again as "living dead" because they failed to actualize themselves in full realit!.18 To risk an anachronistic parallel, is this genesis, the pre-history of what went on m God bef�re he fully became God (the divine logos), not effectively close to the quantum physICS

��

0

70

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

notion of the state of virtual quantum oscillation preceding constituted reality? And, effectively, what about the results of quantum physics? What if matter is just a reified wave oscillation? What if, instead of conceiving waves as oscillations between elements, elements are just knots, contact points, between different waves and their oscillations? Does this not give some kind of scientific credibility to De­ leuze's "idealist" project of generating bodily reality from virtual intensities? There is a way to conceptualize the emergence of Something out of Nothing in a materialist way: when we succeed in conceiving this emergence not as a mysterious excess, but as a release-a loss-of energy. Does the so-called "Higgs field" in contemporary physics not point precisely in this direction? Generally, when we take something away from a given system, we lower its energy. However, the hypothesis is that there is some substance, a "something;' that we cannot take away from a given system without raising that system's energy: when the "Higgs field" appears in an empty space, its energy is lowered further.'9 Does the biological insight that living systems are perhaps best characterized as systems that dynamically avoid attractors (i.e., that the processes of life are being maintained at or near phase transitions) not point in the same direction, which is towards the Freudian death drive in its radical opposi­ tion to any notion of the tendency of all life towards nirvana? Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final "relaxation" in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. "Death drive" as "beyond the pleasure principle" is this very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension. One should thus get rid of the fear that, once we ascertain that reality is the in­ finitely divisible, substanceless void within a void, "matter will disappear:' What the digital informational revolution, the biogenetic revolution, and the quantum revo­ lution in physics all share is that they mark the reemergence of what, for want of a better term, one is tempted to call a post-metaphysical idealism. It is as if Chesterton's insight into how the materialist struggle for the full assertion of reality, against its subordination to any "higher" metaphysical order, culminates in the loss of reality itself: what began as the assertion of material reality ended up as the realm of pure formulas of quantum physics. Is, however, this really a form of idealism? Since the radical materialist stance asserts that there is no World, that the World in its Whole is Nothing, materialism has nothing to do with the presence of damp, dense mat­ ter-its proper figures are, rather, constellations in which matter seems to "disap­ pear;' like the pure oscillations of the superstrings or quantum-vibrations. On the contrary, if we see in raw, inert matter more than an imaginary screen, we always secretly endorse some kind of spiritualism, as in Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which the dense plastic matter of the planet directly embodies Mind. This "spectral material­ ism" has three different forms: in the informational revolution, matter is reduced to the medium of purely digitalized information; in biogenetics, the biological body is reduced to the medium of the reproduction of the genetic code; in quantum phys­ ics, reality itself, the density of matter, is reduced to the collapse of the virtuality of wave oscillations (or, in the general theory of relativity, matter is reduced to an effect of space's curvature). Here we encounter another crucial aspect of the opposition idealism/materialism: materialism is not the assertion of inert material density in

Slavoj Zitek

71

its h umid heaviness-such a "materialism" can always serve as a support for gnostic spiritualist obscurantism. In contrast to it, a true materialism joyously assumes the "disappearance of matter;' the fact that there is only void. With biogenetics, the Nietzschean program of the emphatic and ecstatic asser­ tion of the body is thus over. Far from serving as the ultimate reference, the body los es its mysterious impenetrable density and turns into something technologically manageable, something we can generate and transform through intervening into its genetic formula-in short, something the "truth" of which is t�is abstra� t g�� e�ic formula. And, it is crucial to conceive the two apparently opposite " reductions diS­ cernible in today's science (the "materialist" reduction of our experience to neuronal processes in neurosciences, and the virtualization of reality itself in quantum phys­ ics) as two sides of the same coin, as two reductions to the same third level. The old Popperian idea of the "Third World" is here brought to its extreme: what we get at the end is neither the "objective" materiality nor the "subjective" experience, but the reduction of both to the scientific Real of mathematized "immaterial" processes. The issue of materialism versus idealism thus gets more complex. If we accept the claim of quantum physics that the reality we experience as constituted emerg­ es out of a preceding field of virtual intensities which are, in a way, "immaterial" (quantum oscillations), then embodied reality is the result of the "actualization" of pure event-like virtualities. What if, then, there is a double movement here?: first, positive reality itself is constituted through the actualization of the virtual field of "immaterial" potentialities; then, in a second move, the emergence of thought and sense signals the moment when the constituted reality, as it were, reconnects with its virtual genesis. Was Schelling not already pursuing something similar when he claimed that, in the explosion of consciousness, of human thought, the primordial abyss ofpure potentiality explodes, acquires existence, in the middle of created posi­ tive reality-man is the unique creature which is directly (re)connected with the primordial abyss out of which all things emerged ?20 Perhaps Roger Penrose is right: 1 2 there is a link between quantum oscillations and human thought. So, what if we conceive of Deleuze's opposition of the intermixing of material bodies and the immaterial effect of sense along the lines of the Marxist opposition of infrastructure and superstructure? Is not the flow of Becoming superstructure par excellence-the sterile theater of shadows ontologically cut off from the site of material production, and precisely as such the only possible space of the Event? In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposes the revolutionary enthusiasm to the sobering effect of the "morning after": the actual result of the sub­ lime revolutionary explosion, of the Event of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, is the miserable utilitarian/egotistic universe of market calculations. (And, inciden­ tally, is not this gap even wider in the case of the October Revolution?) However, one should not simplify Marx: his point is not the rather commonsensical insight into how the vulgar reality of commerce is the "truth" of the theater of revolutionary enthusiasm, "what all the fuss really was about:' In the revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over "the day after" -as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as

72

Slavoj Zizek

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, continuing to haunt the

emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized. The excess of revolution­ ary enthusiasm over its own "actual social base" or substance is thus literally that of an attribute-effect over its own substantial cause, a ghost-like Event waiting for its proper embodiment. It was none other than G. K. Chesterton who, apropos of his critique of aristocracy, provided the most succinct Leftist egalitarian rebuttal of those who, under the guise of respect for traditions, endorse existing injustice and inequalities: "Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one:'22 Here, we can discern in what precise sense Deleuze wants to be a materialist­ one is almost tempted to put it in classic Stalinist terms: in opposition to the me­ chanical materialism which simply reduces the flow of sense to its material causes, dialectical materialism is able to think this flow in its relative autonomy. That is to say, the whole point of Deleuze is that, although sense is an impassive sterile effect of material causes, it does have an autonomy and efficiency of its own. Yes, the flow of sense is a theater of shadows, but this does not mean that we should neglect it and focus on "real struggle" -in a way, this very theater of shadows is the crucial site of the struggle; everything is ultimately decided here. William Hasker perspicuously drew attention to the strange fact that critics of reductionism are very reluctant to admit that the arguments against radical reduc­ tionism are false: "Why are so many non-eliminativists strongly resistant to the idea that eliminativism has been conclusively refuted?"23 Their resistance betrays a fear of the prospect that, if their position fails, they will need reductionism as the last resort. So, although they consider eliminativism false, they nonetheless strangely hold onto it as a kind of reserve ("fall-back") position, thereby betraying a secret disbelief in their own non-reductionist materialist account of consciousness-this being a nice example of a disavowed theoretical position, of the fetishist split in theory. (Is their position not homologous to that of enlightened rational theologians who nonetheless secretly want to keep open the more "fundamentalist" theological position they constantly criticize? And, do we not encounter a similar split attitude in those Leftists who condemn the suicide-bomber attacks on the Israelis, but not wholeheartedly, with an inner reservation-as if, if "democratic" politics fails, one should nonetheless leave the door open for the "terrorist" option?) Here, one should return to Badiou and Deleuze, since they really and thoroughly reject reductionism: the assertion of the "autonomy" of the level of Sense-Event is for them not a com­ promise with idealism, but a necessary thesis of a true materialism. And, what is crucial is that this tension between the two ontologies in Deleuze clearly translates into two different political logics and practices. The ontology of productive Becoming clearly leads to the Leftist topic of the self-organization of the multitude of molecular groups which resist and undermine the molar, totalizing systems of power-the old notion of the spontaneous, non-hierarchical, living mul­ titude opposing the oppressive, reified System, the exemplary case of Leftist radical­ ism linked to philosophical idealist subjectivism. The problem is that this is the only model of the politicization of Deleuze's thought available: the other ontology, that of the sterility of the Sense-Event, appears "apolitical:' However, what if this other

73

uze ch Dele whi , of own its of tice prac and c logi tical poli a lves invo also ogy ontol 1915 when, in in in Len like eed proc , then not, we uld Sho e? war una was elf hims el-not to his di­ Heg to rned retu , he tice prac nary lutio revo w ane nd grou to der or e ther , e way sam in the if, at Wh ic? Log his , to arily prim but, , ings writ tical poli y rectl n ctio dire in this st r hint fi The ? here ed over disc be to tics poli n uzia Dele r othe an is l orea le corp coup the een betw llel para oned enti dy-m alrea the by ided prov be may re/s u­ uctu astr infr ple cou t rxis Ma old the and g min of beco flow ial ater imm ses/ cau of lity dua le ucib irred the both unt acco into take ld wou tics a poli such re: uctu perstr "obj ective" material/socio-economic processes taking place in reality as well as the ain dom the if at Wh er. prop c logi tical poli the of nts, Eve nary lutio revo of sion xplo e of politics is inherently "sterile;' the domain of pseudo-causes, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? •

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Translated into English as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty by Jean McNeil (New York: G. Braziller, 1971).-Ed.

1

2

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002) , 107-8.

3

Ibid., 102.

4

Ibid., 73-

5

Ibid., 74.

6

Ibid., 75.

7 8

See Jerry Aline Flieger, "Overdetermined Oedipus;' in A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Bu­ chanan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999 ). Gilles Deleuze, Difef rence and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ), 119·

9

Ibid., 119-20.

10 Gilles Deleuze, "A quoi reconnait-on Ie structuralisme?;' in Fran�ois Chatelet, ed., Histoire de la philosophie, tome 8: Le XXeme siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1972), 299-335 (written in 1967); English translation, "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?;' published as an ap­ pendix to Charles J. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 258-82. And one is tempted to claim that Deleuze's turn against Hegel is, in a homologous way, a turn against his own origins-recall one of Deleuze's ear­ ly texts, his deeply sympathetic review of Hyppolite's reading of Hegel's Logic, reprinted in Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 191-95. •

11

See Deleuze, "Structuralism;' 277-78. For a more detailed account of the link between "dark precursor" and phallus, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 227-30.

12 The Logic of Sense, 166. 13 DeLanda, op. cit., 115· 14 See Roman Jakobson, On Language (Cambridge: Belknap, 1995). 15 From the strict Lacanian perspective, objet petit a and the phallic signifier are, of course, not identical-but the elaboration of this distinction would take us too far here. 16 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31-32. For this reference to the notion of wound in Deleuze, as well as for many other precious

74

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze suggestions, I am deeply indebted to the perspicuous commentary to my text by Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez.

The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus

17 One of the metaphors for the way mind relates to body, that of a magnetic field, seems to point in the same direction: "as a magnet generates its magneticfield, so the bra in generates its field of consciousness:'(William Hasker, The Emergent Self [ Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199 9], 190 .) The field thus has a logic and consistency of its own, although it can

Alain Badiou

persist only as long as its corporeal ground is here. Does this mean that mind cannot survive the body's disintegration? Even here, another analogy from physics leaves the gate partially open: when Roger Penrose claims that, after a body collapses into a black hole, one can conceive the black hole as a kind of self-sustaining gravitation al field-so even within physics, one considers the possibility that a field generated by a material object could persist in the object's absence. (See Hasker, 232 .) 18 See F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (Albany: SUNY Press, 200

0).

19 For a more detailed reference to the "Higgs field:' see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Ziiek, The Pup­ pet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: MI T Press, 200 3). For a popular scientific explanation, see Gordon Kane, Supersymmetry (Cambridge: Helix Books, 200 1). 20 See Schelling, op. cit. 21 See Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 22 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 127. 23 Hasker, op. cit., 24.

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So tempting to give a warm round of applause. Yes, yes! Read on: "It is a question of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relationship with the exploited masses or the 'weakest links' of a given system. Do these masses or these links act in their own place, within the order of causes and ends that promote a new socius, or are they on the con­ trary the place and the agent of a sudden and unexpected irruption?'" Could Deleuze and Guattari be dialecticians? The revolutionary dialectic as theory of discontinuities and of scissions, as logic of catastrophes-that's it, after all: the order of causes assigns no place where a rupture could take hold. No quantitative cumulation incorporates a new quality, or counts the latter's limit among its number of terms, even though quality is, necessarily, produced as the limit. True, the revolutionary crisis is an irruption oflarge mass­ es into history.2 The revolution is "a sharp turn in the lives of vast popular masses:'3 Deleuze-Guattari echo this here, with a touch of pedantry and vain Latinisms that stick to the soles of these nomads weighed under their baggage ("promoting a new socius;' you call that cute?). Any Marxist-Leninist -Maoist learns in school (cadre school,4 of course) that the Parisian workers, the soviet peo­ ple, the Hunan farmers, and the young workers of Sud-Avia­ tion in May ' 685 one day rose in revolt; and he knows better than anyone that whoever pretends having read, in his men­ tal horoscope, the good news in its precise sequence, merely wants to justify by this lie, after the fact, his personal defeat in the heat of the moment. Marxists-Leninists precisely base their particular energy and unvarying persistence on two facts: "Where there is oppression, there is revolt:' But it is the revolt that, at its own hour, passes judgment on the fate of the oppression, not the other way around. •

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"One has reason to revolt against reactionaries:' The popular and prole­ tarian revolt is the reason of the bourgeois oppression, it is what gives reason, it is our reason.6 True class revolt, in essence, surprises. It is a war by surprise, the generic brutality of scission. How could the established rule of the old (including the revolutionary old) put up with a deduction of what tends to break it asunder? How many people have we not seen enraptured by the fact that "no one could have foreseen May '68"! I even suspect that the ascent of the anti-Oedipus and all the fabrications about the pure mysteries of Desire take off from this question. The question is, strictly speak­ ing, stupid. Can one imagine a "foreseen" May '68? And by whom? Who does not see that the unforeseeable constitutes the essential historical power of May '68? To baptize this unforeseeable "irruption of desire" is about as soporific as opium. This baptism, however, is not innocent. It stages the entrance of the irrational. Unforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift [derive], my son, and you will make the Revolution. It'� been quite a while now since Marxist-Leninists ceased to identify the ratio­ nal WIth the analytically predictable. The dialectic, the primacy of practice, means first and foremost affirming the historical objectivity of ruptures. Masses make His­ tory, not Concepts. No one can ever really know precisely how, and in which work­ shop, a revolutionary (anti-union) strike began. Why Tuesday and not Thursday? The masses' gesture closes one period and opens another. What was dividing itself reversed its terms, the working class viewpoint takes over. A local, dialectical ra­ tionality opens for itself a new space of practice. The revolt condenses one rational t�me . a�d deploys the scission of another. The revolutionary process of organiza­ tion IS Itself reworked, recast, penetrated and split by the primacy of practice: "The composition of the leading [dirigeant] group . . . should not and cannot remain en­ tirely unchanged throughout the initial, middle, and final stages of a great struggle:' (Mao).7 The material objective base of everything (the revolutionary class practice) is never quite exhausted in that to which it gives rise. Revolutionary history renounces Hegelian circularity, imposes periodization, the uninterrupted by stages: one se­ quence's rationality cannot absorb the practical rupture from which the sequence deploys itself as such. The rupture can be thought in its dialectical generality. His­ torically, it is only practiced. Concept, strategy and tactic, organization, all have the solidity of a sequence; but behind them lies the historical new, that which founds the sequence and which the concept within the sequence necessarily leaves outside itself as its remainder. Masses make history-practice comes first in respect to the­ ory. There is, therefore, a leftover of "pure" practice, the historical rupture as such, which historical materialism and theory will not be able, integrally, either to deduce or to organize any longer, because their deductions and their organizing principles presuppose it as fact. What remains, however, is neither the cause nor the hidden essence.8 It is not at all unknowable: it is an infinite historical source, at least throughout a histori­ cal period governed by the same principal contradiction (bourgeoisie/proletariat).9 The "remainder" is that which, in the periodizing scansion (Commune, October, •

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Cultural Revolution . . . 10) , deploys such force of rupture that the long work of rup­ tures to come is needed to clarify the historical contribution of the masses, which is what sustains and what carries forward theory and organization, in an infinite ap­ proximation that is itself always split (battle of the two roads ) .11 Who doesn't see that practice, by the Shanghai workers in 1967, of the "workers' commune" slogan returns to the practical, historical, inexhaustibility of the Paris Commune? And at the same time, the positive development of this slogan, in the new form of the three-in-one revolutionary committee, carries this return forward.l2 From Paris 1871 to Shanghai 1967, revolt is the furnace [fond] , the great produc­ tion of class. From a just idea dismembered to a continental rupture, everything is there. The furnace of the class break, revolt, is without hearth and home [sans feu ni lieu] .

The good fortune of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary has never been his ability to predict and assign the revolt, but rather the irreparable suddenness of its storm.'3 Whatever weapons the Marxist-Leninist has assembled for the people-of organization, doctrine, prevision, patience, compactness of the proletariat-he will be judged according to his capacity to have them all taken away without warning by those who, suddenly rising up, are indeed destined to have them, but as a rule for later. The revolt surprises Marxists-Leninists and their organization too. It must sur­ prise, by a new kind of surprise. For the Marxists-Leninists must stand precisely where the surprise will slam right into them. The revolutionary, who profession­ ally prepares himself for the mass rising, for the revolt's irruption, obviously can never be ready enough. Only for him does the historical "not ready" have a rigorous meaning, since what is ahead is for him alone, class struggle professional, what he ceaselessly prepares for. But he is not ready: were he ready, how could he have left the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, the sole asset of this preparation, in reserve? The Marxist-Leninist, who analyzes, predicts, directs, who alone knows the revolutionary potential at each moment, is precisely the one to ask the question of the revolt's hour. What is at stake, for the Marxist-Leninist organization, is not to change the "it was for later" of its prevision, an approximating reserve of tactical composure, into the repressive "it's too early" of the Right. Here, its identity is played out all at once. Marx before the Commune: the Parisian proletarian uprising is bound to fail, but I stand unconditionally by its side; its real movement instructs and reworks through and through the theory of my (correct [juste]) prevision: the historical fail­ ure, the proletarian uprising, works and displaces my prevision. It criticizes my pre­ vision, even though it is correct, because it is correct.'4 Mao and the peasant revolt of 1925-1927: the peasant revolt-very good. Fun­ damental. Our tactical application of the primacy of the proletariat, as urban in­ surrection, must explode into pieces. The peasants in revolt teach us that it is not the demand of the countryside, but the proletarian uprising that is premature. The masses' violent rupture carries this rationality to come: the encirclement of cities by the countryside.'5 The Marxist-Leninist leader [dirigeant] is the one who sunders and splits him-

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self, between the objective form of the rational revolutionary preparation and the unconditional and unconditionally immediate reason of the masses' revolutionary revolt, that which Lenin called the actual moment. May my enlightened preparation break apart and be verified by the fire of irrefutable historical unpreparation: such is the essence of Marxist -Leninist direction, the direction of the party! There is no other direction but of the new. The old is managed, it is admin­ istered, it is not directed.16 The revolutionary direction scrutinizes the conflicted state of things,17 the class struggle, the clues accumulated during the proletariat's revolution in process. From there the leadership [direction] systematizes a guiding prevision that is both strategic and tactical. Let us take an example: since 1970, the revolt of the 0.S.18 puts to work a dispersed program of class against capitalist hier­ archy. Condensing this program as soon as possible, formulating combatant slogans that have its originary class power, we put ourselves forward, granted. But such an advance is but the point where a new assault wave is received and accumulates. Who clings to it too tightly, forever stays behind: with the Renault of '73 when it is about the Renault Of '75.19 The same goes for analytical prevision: there is a capitalist crisis today, there will be an anti-capitalist revolt. This is Marxism. So, let's get ready: propaganda, worker schools, popular committees on anti-capitalist direct action. But where and on what will the masses make their violent judgment bear? This must be studied quite closely, enumerating the practical hypotheses, half-living in the work of the masses. Then and only then will the unexpected breach, armed with this previous work on itself, taking along the skeletal frame of a sketched organization, carrying its directing virtuality [virtualite dirigeante], draining and reworking the Marxist­ Leninists' strategy, tear down the oppressive web as far as it can. A correct Uuste] line is the open road to the most powerful striking force of the proletarian irruption. The party is an instrument of knowledge and of war in an ever-widening space of maneuver and irruption. A correct line, a vanguard organi­ zation, an iron discipline, an organic relation [liaison] to the popular masses, a con­ stant exercise of Marxist-Leninist analysis,20 reclaimed and unraveled and reworked to the most minute detail, carried forward to the shadow of the trace of the new; the bark of class struggle pressed down to its imperceptible acid; everything interpel­ lated by directives: all of this-the party-is needed for the revolutionary revolt to strike completely, past the meshes [of the situation], into the historical unicity of the new. The directive activity of the party must be tireless, perfect, exhaustive; as the unexpected revolt and the unicity of the revolutionary hour will demand of it that it be split again, beyond anything it could and in fact did foresee, and, inevitably constrained by the new of the class that casts it forward. At which point proletarian thought filters through and gathers anew, itself establishes its kingdom, before de­ stroying it again: "There is no construction without destruction" (Mao).21 To which we add: without construction, there is no destruction - before destroying it there where nothing can be deducted or managed any more. Marxism-Leninism and the idea of the class party go further than the anti-dia­ lectical moralism of the theoreticians of desire. Moralism, yes, and of the dullest kind. Look at the two-column chart with which these jingly subversives would like

Alain Badiou

79

u s to conclude: "The two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty, the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power; the one by these mo­ lar structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics, the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations; the one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images that come to fill the field of imma­ nence peculiar to this system or this aggregate, the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows, inventing their own non-figurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring­ production; and, to summarize all the preceding determinations, the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups:'22 And this would be called "beyond Good and Evil" perhaps? All this cultural racket, all this subversive arm-pumping, only to slip us, at the end, that Freedom is Good and Necessity Evil? Freedom, and by the way, what Freedom? "Subject-group:' Freedom as Subject. Deleuze and Guattari don't hide this much: return to Kant, here's what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost. For quite a while, I wondered what was this "desire" of theirs, stuck as I was between the sexual connotations and all the machinic, industrial brass they covered it up for that materialist feel. Well, it's the Freedom of Kantian critique, no more, no less. It's the unconditional: a subjective impulse that invisibly escapes the whole sensible order of ends, the whole rational fabric of causes. It's pure, unbound, ge­ neric energy, energy as such. That which is law unto itself, or absence of law. The old freedom of autonomy, hastily repainted in the colors of what the youth in revolt legitimately demands: some spit on the bourgeois family. The rule of the Good, with Deleuze, is the categorical imperative upright again, by means of an amusing substitution of the particular for the universal: always act so that the maxim of your actions be rigorously particular. Deleuze would like to be to Kant what Marx is to Hegel, Deleuze flips Kant upside down: the categorical im­ perative, but a desiring one; the unconditional, but materialist; the autonomy of the subject, but like a fluid flux. Sadly, turn Kant, and you will find Hume, which is the same thing-and Deleuze's first academic crushes. Critical idealism has no obverse and no reverse, that's even its very definition. This is the Mobius strip of philosophy. On the toboggan of Desire, the head bobs down and up again, until it doesn't know one side from the other, object from subject, any more. All in all, that this be the Good or that, Evil is just a reversible matter of mood, with not much consequence: always act so that the maxim of your action does not, strictly, concern anybody.23

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Marxism-Leninism thinks of otherwise forceful "schizzes;' ones that secure themselves otherwise to the material of history. The unity of opposites, the impos ­ sibility to grasp the One except as the movement of its own scission; the step-by­ step struggle against all figures of reconciliation (two fuse into one: the essence of revisionism in philosophy); the refusal of all static dualisms, such as the moralism of desire, a structuralism full of shame. Yes, this is quite different from the catechism of the System and the Flux, the Despot and the Nomad, the Paranoiac, and the Schizo, all that, under the colorless banner of a freedom, invisibly leaks out [coule] its sterile other side. It is so different that a major historical object, like a class party, completely evades the "schizo" grip precisely since it concentrates dialectical divisions to the extreme. The "schizos" imagine they are done with the concept of representation. The party "represents" the working class: it is Theater, image, territorial subjection. Obviously it must end with the Great Despot. Bourgeois party, indeed, revised party: one facet, separately undecipherable, of the party as one in two. This theater is a necessary threat from the inside, as the party is itself split. Short of that, it is a cadaver. "If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end" (Mao).24 More than any other historical object, the party is one in two: the unity of the pOlitical p:oject of the proletariat, of its state-project, the project of its dictatorship. . thIS sense, yes: apparatus, hierarchy, discipline, renunciation. And so much And In the better. But at once, also, the historical flip side: the essential aspiration of the masses, whose organ, whose iron hand is the party, to the non-State, to commu­ nism. Which is what gives the party, as direction, all of its strategic content. The party directs the withering of what it must direct (the State, the separation of politics). The party's only proletarian reality is the turbulent history of its own self-dissolution. "Concern yourself with the affairs of the State!;' says Mao to the vast masses.25 And this is the party's word, as communist party, precisely. The State is the serious matter, the central matter. The petit-bourgeois leftist wallows into the mass movement and parades there with delight. But when matters turn to power, t� the S�ate, when matters turn to dictatorship (because all state-power [etatique] is dlCtatonal), see how he gets all furious, clamoring loudly of the Right to Desire. He is even relieved: the shameful electoral rallying of all the "leftists" to the Mitterand­ Marchais clique proves this, shows their appetite for bourgeois parliamentary poli­ tics, this dictatorship that squashes the people, but in the end lets all the intellectuals babble as they wish. In the end, the "leftist" political daydream is a mass movement that proceeds straight on until it is joyfully proclaimed that the State has quietly faded away. And since confusion belongs, invariably, to the thought of the vacillat­ ing classes, it will come as no surprise that this speaks both the true and the false. The false, for the most part: the State is the only political question. The revolu­ tion is a radically new relation of the masses to the State. The State is construction. A rupture without construction is the concrete definition of failure, and most often in the form of a massacre: the Paris Commune, the Canton Commune, the anarchists of Catalonia . . . .

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The true, nonetheless: it is true that the mass movement engages in a necessary dialectic with the State. Between the two there is no continuity, but rather unity of opposites. If the State is a proletarian State, the contradiction can be of the non­ antagonistic type.26 If it is a State of exploiters, the contradiction is antagonistic at heart. But in either case a contradiction exists, and a severe one, in that the masses cannot concern themselves with the affairs of the State other than by pushing the State, brutally or organically, towards its own dilution; by pushing the great dichoto­ mies of the State, city and country, agriculture and industry, manual and intellectual labor, the military and the civilians, nation x and nation y, to pure and simple dis­ appearance.27 The masses take hold of the State with the communist design [visee] [set on] its withering away. Any other way and we can be sure that it is the State that takes hold of the masses: bourgeois State, party infected by the bourgeoisie. Actually, each great revolt of the working and popular masses sets them invari­ ably against the State. Each revolt takes position against one power and in the name of another, of one thought as a step toward the dilution of the state. Each extensive revolt, across its specific contents (the school, the country, factory hierarchy), is an anti-state proposition. This is what puts the party through torture, while the masses' anti-state proposi­ tion has no other chance, no other way out than to see its summons succeed, the summons it addresses to the party or to that which takes the party's place. It is here that the party (which, as apparatus, as a real historical object, nourishes its own permanent prevision toward power, toward the State), summoned to fall into temporary blindness by another political thought, the one that brings out the anti­ state challenge [sommation] of the masses, must overcome its own fear. Here it will always .be eager to say "it is too early:' And there is barely the time to fall over into what has already opened up, as another sequence of political thought. Look at "The Crisis has Matured;' this literally inspired, work of Lenin.28 The passage from "it is too early" to "it is almost too late" solders in one block these pages where Lenin puts his resignation from the Central Committee on the scales. Brutally bound together, we have: 1. The unforeseeable constraint exerted by the popular uprising, accelerat­ ing practically in days. 2. The rational prevision of the party, itself in turn split into: . a. the wait-and-see approach [attentisme] of the Central Committee majority (it is too early) b. the Leninist anticipation (only immediate insurrection brings the prevision of the party on par with the violent practice of the masses; the masses in revolt broke with the State: they summon us to direct, to practice our proper kind of rupture-the order of insurrection­ or become nothing. If we reject the insurrection, from one day to the next we, the great Bolshevik party, become leftover riffraff). Lenin says: there is a peasant uprising. "It is incredible, but it is a fact:'29 This objec­ tive "incredible" does not surprise us, Bolsheviks, who analyze the class struggle. Kerensky's government protects capitalists and landowners, it oppresses the peasant masses that hoped to be liberated. But the only revolutionary question is this: will

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our broad theoretical prevision (our lack of astonishment) let itself be transformed, revolutionized, by the truly incredible reality of the peasant uprising? How will the party carry forward its correct prevision under the unforeseeable historical con­ straint of the irruption of popular forces? How will it formulate, in the direction of the vast masses, that which hits it in the face, this divided, sundered, immediate realization of what was given in the organized calm of Marxist knowledge? To this question, Lenin replies: immediate insurrection, whose signal, whose time, whose urgency, are in truth fully fixed by the movement of the masses, by concrete his­ tory. Meanwhile, so as not to infringe upon their necessary system of causes, ends and deadlines, the majority in the Central Committee persist in their perpetual "it is too early:' sheltering thus their Marxist prevision from the storm. And Lenin, intuitively at the very heart of the popular rising, beside himself with rage, liter­ ally slashes through the party, bombards it with all that history demands: " [TJhere is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee and among the leaders of our Party which favors waiting for the Congress of Soviets, and is opposed to tak­ ing power immediately, is opposed to an immediate insurrection. That tendency, or opinion, must be overcome. Otherwise, the Bolsheviks will cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a party. For to miss such a moment and to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery. "30 The source of all the party's strength, against "sheer treachery" and self-destruc­ tion, lies in this: it is the party to whom history addresses its summons, the party that must remain steadfast as the movement escalates, the party whom the revolt questions as regards direction. You who have foreseen all and were thus at the heels of the irruption, what good is it to us now that you're close by? Will you remain close, or will you let yourself be left behind by this for which you said you were ac­ countable? Lenin is, here, the question cast from within by the revolutionary practice of the masses (the unforeseen, rupture) to the party's vocation to direct (prevision, proj­ ect). This is the party as one in two, the working class itself as one in two: its appara­ tus on one side, its anti-state focus on the State on the other. From one to the other, the vertigo in the movement of history comes from the scission between a settled tactical rationality and a rupture that demands more than political rationality; that demands plunging into what the masses opened. Insurrection, Lenin will say, is an art. Not a science, an artY The party always directs the proletarian transition. The party is the dialectic. Its proper effect is the creative scission of the masses and the State as a directed process, as dictatorship of the proletariat. The party is a being of the thresholds [lisieresJ . It holds out amidst the tearing apart [ecartelementJ of the foreseeable theoretical, and the unforeseeable practical, of the project and the revolt, of the State and the non-State. "Fusion of Marxism­ Leninism and the working-class movement:' the classics would say.32 "Fusion" is a metaphor, it too must be divided. The party is the process of dialectical division of Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian movement. It is their torn encounter [ren-

Alain Badiou

con tre ecarteleeJ, always to be remade. Between Marxism-Leninism and the prole­

tarian movement, there is no coincidence (neither spontaneism, nor theoreticism), nor is there simultaneity: theory is in advance, but the movement of the revolution­ ary revolt is in advance of this advance. Marx did say "dictatorship of the proletariat" before the Paris Commune. But the Commune, which enacts this slogan, is no less a decisive advance on the question of this dictatorship. Yes, between Marxism-Leninism and the workers' movement there is unity, but it is a unity of opposites. The Marxist-Leninist party is the existence of this opposi­ tion [contrarieteJ. The party is that blind spot from which the proletariat grasps its own class practice, sorts it out, purifies it, concentrates it and prepares another stage of its war, a stage realized, however, by the masses, not by the party, so that what the party apprehends is always both in front of it (the project) and behind it (the revolt), but never exactly on the same plane. The party is the ever transposable [depla�ableJ organization of the proletarian present, as the split unity of the prevision and the assessment. That is what Mao means to say: "The masses are the real heroes, while we our­ selves are often childish and ignorant.33 "The mastery of Marxism-Leninism is the essence of communist direction. It is the solidity of science. But it is also childish and ignorant, if it believes history can be done by delegation, by representation, if it believes it can sidestep the heroic wisdom of the masses, the wisdom given in their irruption, in their practice, without appeal. And Stalin: he emphasizes that the party certainly does direct, but at the same time it is part of the working class, its detachment. 34 Detachment is something quite different from representation, it is the opposite: the proletarian party is the opposite of an image. The party is what cuts, what detaches. It is a body of the class at its cut: a threshold [lisiere J . The party has an essential historical instability. This is why it is constantly threat­ ened from within by bourgeois forces of restoration, which take hold on the separ­ ateness [separeJ of the party. The party, which concentrates the directive force of the proletariat, is also its latent weakness, its worst threat. Repress the revolt in the name of the prevision; smother the new in the name of legitimacy; crush the living pres­ ent, give in to the shadows, abandon the mobile threshold; put up the State against the vigorous communism of the masses: the bourgeoisie does not cease to work on the party's essential instability. What makes Stalin and Mao great proletarian leaders, aside from their differ­ ences, which are enormous, is, among other things, the conviction that the prole­ tarian project is ever to be reconquered, ever unstable and corroding from within; the conviction that all inertia tends towards restoration; that there is no place for mechanical adjustment. Lenin, Stalin, Mao critique ever more profoundly the reac­ tionary mechanism, the pacifism, the treachery of wait-and-see in the form of re­ formism and revisionism. The party, according to which the proletariat adjusts itself to its own class practice in terms of the project, in terms of state-construction, must be adjusted in turn: since the party is where the greatest burdens accumulate as well. Against this threat, nothing but a counter-threat will do. From here on, Stalin and Mao part completely, but this divergence lies within the history of the proletariat,

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within the dialectical movement of Marxism- Leninism. Stalin saw only one possible counter-threat: terror, everywhere. Be tirelessly wary, above all of the party (practically exterminated in the thirties) then of the masses as well, at the slightest suspicion of softness or resistance, during the mag­ nificent industrial upheaval. Mao set out from the same idea: the transition submits this dialectical object, the party, to a severe test. And it is a long transition: "A very long period of time is needed to decide 'who will win' in the struggle between socialism and capitalism:'35 But the answer turns Stalin's upside down. The answer is this: have tireless confi­ dence, above all in the masses (confidence in the masses is the central element of the counter-threat), then in the party too, and especially in the torn correlation of the two: proletarian cultural revolution, which is at the same time an assault of the masses, their anti-state focus on the State, against the reactionary stabilizers of the party, and the reconstitution, regeneration, revolutionization of the party itself as instability, as threshold, as dialectical inductor of communism.36 To these astounding dialectics of history, to these unstable objects, these pro­ letarian risings of unheard-of violence and richness, what do the little professors oppose, from their ambush full of desire? What do they oppose, here as well, to the toil ofprevision and of revolt immersed at the deepest in the workers' divisions, which constitutes the unparalleled affirma­ tive power of Maoist militants? What can they capitalize on against these thoughts, real in themselves, ever recast and traversed through and through by proletarian interpellations? Is there anything of value [equal to1 the project of letting the idea of the party be torn from one's hands by the masses, that which, in France, is not yet established, not yet decided upon, but still to be proposed and remade? What kind of "desire" will ever equal the one deployed throughout the profound entanglements and countercurrents of our history, the one Marxist-Leninists formulate: to hand back to the working class the question of its communist party of the new type?37 What is the final word of these hateful adversaries of all organized revolutionary politics? Read: to complete "this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds:'38 In effect, to seep out like pus. In the end, such maxims are innocent. Look at them, these old Kantians who pretend they're playing at scattering the trinkets of Culture. Look at them: the time is nigh, and they're already covered in dust. •

Translated by Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl. Originally published as "Le flux et Ie parti: dans les marges de L'Anti-Oedipe," in Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, eds., La Situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, Cahiers Yenan no. 4 (Paris: Maspero, 1976): 24-41. Hav­ ing introduced the early '70S philosophical conjecture in France, the collection brings together interventions against Deleuze ("Deleuze en plein"), Lacan and Lacanians ("Sous Lacan"), and Dominique Lecourt for the Althusserians ("La compagnie d'Althusser"). Badiou's essay is the first in the Deleuze intervention. The translators wish to thank Bruno Bosteels, Roland Fergu­ son, Eva Poskocilova, Ingo Schaefer, and Alberto Toscano, whose help made the translation and the notes possible. •

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a (New ni re ph zo hi Sc d an m lis ta pi Ca ' us . ip ed i-O nt A , and F e'I'IX Guattari ze eu I e D es ill G 1 htly modified) . ig sl n tio la ns ra [t 7 37 ), 77 19 g, in ik V York: . n tIO lu vo Re n ia ss Ru e th f o y . or ist ce" to the H fa re "P e Se . y's sk . ot Tr ev L IS On sI es pr . The ex 2 /arch'Ive/ rg s.o st xl ar m w. w w :// tp ht . at e lin on ) 32 . . (19 30) m Max Eastman's translation (19 d'laI ectlC, m Bah e t e or pl ex to e ac pl e th t no is is Th trotsky/works/ 193 0 - hrr/choo.htm, 0f ty Ul m t" n co h e d t an ) ( s e ur pt ru e th of lty ve cal no . diou's Maoist writings, between the radi . for �ere d ar eg sr di ist aO M n ee tw be or , ce en qu se Communist history beyond any single d fidelity to ) an 90 ), 75 19 , ro pe as M : is ar [P n, io ct di ra words (see Badl'ou'S Theorie de la cont eter (P y. t IS or h' IS h' t f e ag gu la e th p e a that m � � the slogans, to the words and phrases . so _ ilo ph d an ry to ls of n tlo e dl�u s conc � Ba in ge an ch g in su en e th t ou ts in po d ar Hallw ess, 20 03 ), Pr ta so ne m M of lty rs ve m U is: ol . ap ne in ' U. A SubiJ ect to Truth (M phy- m BadlO th'IS vocab u0 f t en em el ch ea le ib ss po or ul ef us it e 49-so.) Rather than to assign-wer . g.-Tr. m t' n w s U a d" lO B f 0 e ur at fe is th of te no lary, let us merely take 2S l. vo ., ed ish gl En h , 4t ks or W ed ct lle Co lution" (July 19 17 ), vo Re e th of ns so es "L n, ni Le 3 ified ). od m n tio sla an [tr 9 22 ), 64 19 s, er ish bl Pu ss (Moscow: Progre ad­ ty ar (p s" ol ho sc e dr "� to , nd ha e on e term. It refers, on th � d de vi di a is es dr ca de e ol Ec 4 ols ( 7th ho sc rm fo re al ic lit po e t ly al c i if ec sp or re school, weekend cadre school, etc.) er the May aft ed m na d an 68 19 m up t se n, tio lu vo Ma Cadre Schools") of the Cultural Re , It nd ha r he ot e th on r; bo la l ua an m d an l 66 directive on the integration of intellectua eanmg m al tu ac e Th :' ol ho sc s es in us "b , ly al c i if mes "school for managers" or more spec Tr. .re tu ec nj co al ic lit po oic or st hi e th will change with ion near at vi A dSu at 14 ay M on e ac p I o k to ce Fran . S The first factory occupation of 19 68 n. Work­ tIO lu vo re e th d re te en t ia ar et ol pr e th e un ' N antes. H ere, as 1'n the Shanghai Comm the f 0 I ro t on on t en ns co t h ou it w ke ri st � indefinite ers occu ied the factory and declared follo ­ e th m ce an Fr ss ro ac t ep sw at th e rik st ral . union le dership, inaugurating tli e gene . y, mt t e nl ta en om m if y el iv e eff , ed ss pa s te an � ing weeks. Control over the city of N ts en u st d an rs ke or w n e tw be n io at er tli er "co-op �. , hands of the revolutionary forces. W he as a 68 19 ay M on ns IO Sit pO es on s es pr ex ed will or working-class hegemony is accent

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g. on ed Z ao M to ed ut ib tr at ns io at ot qu Both . , . u yo u Jl na , po ya u yo Ii a N [ e" nc ta sis re is 1. "Where there is oppression, there ive: some us el IS se ra p e t of in ig or e th e, nc fankimg) . For all its future resona ed us ao M l. al at gs tm n w s ao M in be t no Chinese sources suggest its source may to �e­ d ue m nt co It ): 65 19 9, y ua an (J ow Sn � the phrase in his interview with Edgar - the Jomt es a pl ll of to m ed rc fo as w d an n � � cur during the Cultural Revolutio h of ut So , " le rv te m e Th . na hi C to t si vi 72 ,: Communique from Richard N ixon's 19 e West th m s er ap sp w ne l ra ve se in ed ar pe ap the Mountains to North of the Seas:' ouse, 19 71 ), H m do an R : . rk Yo ew (N n tio lu vo Re . repnnted l'n Snow, Th e Long an d IS . t C ommu m Jo e th r Fo 4· 20 ge pa on s ar 19 1- 22 3 The quotation in question appe B ll t e at St t of en t a ep D d an S 4): 72 19 3, nique, ee Peking Review 9 (March reat Umo G e Th s ao M e se e, nc re fe re r ie rl ea (March 20 , 19 72): 3S -3 8. For an slat an tr ), 19 19 4, t us ug -A 21 y ul (J 4 2n) lu the Popular Masses" (Xiangjiang ping R S, 19 78 ), JP : on gt m rl (A 1 l. vo 9, 94 -1 17 19 , ng . in Collected Works of Mao Ts e- Tu e C I­ Th · 87 ): 72 1 ch ar -M ry ua an (J 49 ly er and in Stuart R. Schram, China Quart gdahan e. on zh m /m om .c fa ng go w. w w :// tp ht at nese original is available online htm. against lt v re to ed ifi st ju t is "I or " es ri na tio ? 2. "One has reason to revolt against reac III hi S 19 39 se ra ph e th ed lll cO ao M . 11] u �,an yo . nan' es" [Du l' fia"ndo' ngpa i, zaof reactlO

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The Flux and the Party "Stalin is our Commander" speech, made in Yenan to celebrate Stalin's 60th birth­ day: "There are innumerable principles of Marxism, but in the last analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: 'To rebel is justified.' For thousands of years everyone said: 'Oppression is justified, exploitation is justified, rebellion is not justified.' From the time when Marxism appeared on the scene, this old judg­ ment was turned upside down, and this is a great contribution." (Renmin ribao, September 20, 1949, translated in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought ofMao Tse-Tung, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 427-428.) The thought is attributed to Marx, its elaboration into doctrine and into reality to Stalin. In 1966, the phrase appeared on two big character posters in Beijing (Peking Review 37 [September 9, 1966 ] : 19-21). The extended version used here comes from Mao's reply. ("A Letter to the Red Guards ofTsinghua University Middle School;' [August 1, 1966], trans­ lated in Stuart Schram, ed. and intro., John Chinnery and Tieyun, trans., Chair­ man Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956-1971 [New York: Pantheon,

1974], 260-261.) See Badiou's analysis of les trois sens du mot "raison" [three senses of "reason"] in Theorie de la contradiction: "The phrase says all according to the dialectic: a simple that divides it­ self. What concentrates this division, what supports it, while apparently occulting it, is the word 'reason': there is reason, the revolt has reason, a new reason stands up against the re­ actionaries. Through the word 'reason; the phrase says three things, and the articulation of the three makes up the whole" (21). The revolt is reason, practice is primary to theory. . Marxism formulates the reason of the revolt, beyond its particular causes: the cumulative wisdom of the masses through history, the antagonism that underlies the obstinacy of the revolt. But the revolt "has reason" also in the practical sense: the proletariat will win. The revolt will "bring to reason" [rend raison], settle accounts with the explOiters for all opp ession. The phrase bespeaks, then, the split fusion of the objective and the subjective, of Wisdom and perspective: the "fusion of Marxism and the real workers' movement" ar­ ticulates the two. The knowledge (Marxism) summed in this very phrase is the reason of the revolt, the for-itself of the proletariat, where the revolt returns to reinforce itself. That the revolt has reason against reactionaries is, finally, the core of the sentence, the "internal condition of truth": not, as it may appear, a selective limit imposed upon it as an after­ thought. Revolt has reason in contradiction and scission, in criticism and self-criticism, ever against those who keep things the same.-Tr.

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Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods ofLeadership" (June 1, 1943), Selected Works, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 118.- Tr. See also Badiou, Theorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 217. In Bruno Bosteels's translation: "I posit that there exists no intrinsic unknowable. This can be said clearly with Mao: 'We can learn what we did not know.' Except to add that what we did not know before was determined as leftover from that which just came to be known, at the crossover of the movement without a name by which the real poses a problem and the retroaction, named kno ledge, that offers a solution." Mao's quote is from his "Report to the Second Plenary SeSSIOn of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (1949), Selected Works, vol. 4 (Beijing: FLP, 1965), 374. We are thankful to Bruno Bosteels for this reference.-Tr.

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See Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937), chapter 4, "The Principal Contradiction and the Principal Aspect of a Contradiction;' Selected Works, vol. 1 (Beijing: FLP, 1965), 331336.-Tr. 10 Ellipses here and throughout are Badi ou's.- Tr.

Alain Badiou 11

Antagonistic contradictions under dictatorship of the proletariat are expressed in the . art as the battle of two roads (socialist and capitalist), two classes (proletanat and ou geoisie), and two lines (revolutionary and revisi ist . '?wo roa s" were first ta en . b peasants and the agricultural development, m the sOCIahst educatIOn movement. In t e "23 articles" of January 14, 1965, Mao spoke of the "power-holders in the party that go the capitalist road." (Only much later were Peng Zhen and iu Shaoqi named.) For he 23 articles, see Richard Baum and Frederick C. Tewes, Ssu-Ch ing: The Socla/zst EducatIOn Movement of 1962-1966 (China Research Monographs, UC Berkeley Center for Chmese Studies, 1968), app. F, 120. The concept is omnipresent in the Cultural RevolutIOn: see the CC circular of May 16, 1966 (Peking Review, May 19), as well as the "Decision of th e CC CCP Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution;' in K.H. Fan, The Chl-. nese Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 162-182. Being antagonist, the scissions in the party allow no middle road; any "goIden middle" is always on side of the reaction.-Tr.

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12 The 1967 Shanghai People's Commune, announced on February 5, marks the entr� of the industrial proletariat into the Cultural Revolution, the beginning of the revolutIOn as seizure of power. In January, the rebel worker groups seized the party paper, forced reorganization of the party committee and proceeded to assume the onditions of pro­ .. duction themselves from wages to organization of labor. (Both BeIJmg rebel students and revolutionary i tellectuals of the Cultural Revolution leadership were at the birth of the rebellion, the Shanghai "directives" were soon affirmed by Mao and the central party organs, as well as reannounced in the central press: a split unity of the workers and t e . party in control of revolutionizing the state.) For the ongmal texts, see K. H. Fan, op. CIt. . The Paris Commune example had been invoked throughout the Cultural RevolutIOn, including the 1966 "Sixteen Point" Central Committee decision (Fan, 169). In Shanghai, to reannounce this history was also to speak of the March 1927 Shanghai Com une, crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's coup. The objective contradiction between Shanghm and Commune, the local and the universal, the promise of an industrial center that effectlvely . fragments the proletariat and the political demand of workers s workers reappeared m . 1967. Real "contradictions among the people" were not resolved m the selzure: temporary . workers-peasants or youth forced from the city by lack of work-contmued to challenge new power structures. Within the totality of the country (of state o er) the chances of : . the revolution remained undecided: any weakness on its part, contmumg mSlde struggles between various workers' organizations, a failure of production, could and would be used by the structures and tendencies it ruptured. The name lasted a ere three weeks. After Mao's interventions, the Commune's steering committee became Shanghai. RevolutIOn­ ary Committee" and in the "triple alliance" [sanjiehe] of mass rebel organizations, the . army, and the cadres, the relative weight of the latter two displaced the rebels. Agamst the sense of "totalitarian expropriation" of a workers' revolt (howe er abstract " fragmented, and isolated), Badiou sees, consistently with his argument agamst Deleuzes anarchism, an invention of political form in the concrete conjecture.-Tr.

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13 As Mao writes in "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" (1930): "How then should we interpret the word "soon" in the statement, "there will soon be a high tide of revolution"? This is a common question amo g c mrades. Marx­ ists are not fortune-tellers. They should, and indeed can, only mdlCate the general direction of future developments and changes; they should not and cannot fix the day and the hour in a mechanistic way. But when I say that there will soon b e a . . high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatICally not speakmg of somethmg which in the words of some people "is possibly coming;' something illusory, un-

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Ihe Flux and the Party attainable and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea whose mast -head can already be seen from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother's womb:' See his Selected Works, 1.127.-Tr.

14 Aside from The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1988) itself, see Marx's letters to Ludwig Kugelmann on the Paris Commune, April 12 and 17, 1871 (on­ line at www.marxists.org), as well as Lenin's introduction to the letters. In Commune de Paris: une declaration politique sur la politique (Paris: Les Conferences du Rouge-Gorge, 2003), Badiou recapitulates Marx and Brecht on the Commune, as well as the Chinese "reactivation" of the Commune between 1966 and 1971, before proceeding to the "logic of the Commune;' in terms of his Logic of Worlds. Our thanks to Bruno Bosteels for this information.-Tr. 15

On the peasant revolt, see Mao Zedong's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan;' Selected Works, 1.23-59. "Encircle the cities by the countryside" [nongcun baowh chengshi] defines Mao's con­ ception of the guerrilla war. The metaphor, taken from the weiqi table game, dates to 1930 or earlier (the struggle against Li Lisan and the tensions with the Comintern); Mao de­ veloped it in his 1938 anti -Japanese war writings. (On Protracted War, Selected Works, vol. 2 [Beijing: FLP, 1965] , §54, 146-147; Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, idem, 79-112; the report to the 6th Plenum of the 6th CC CPC, "On the New Stage;' ex­ cerpted in Stuart Schram, ed., The Political Thought ofMao Tse-tung, 288-90.) Lin Biao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War;' written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the victory in the anti-Japanese war (Renmin Ribao September 3, 1965; English by Foreign Language Press, 1965) applies it as a global-political directive, in a double sense: every­ where, liberation struggles are peasant struggles, making the Chinese military strategy pertinent generally; through the allegory of "cities and villages of the world;' encirclement becomes a sweeping notion of world revolution. The allegory originates with Bukharin and the Comintern program of September, 1928: Mao had projected the strategy's global­ political pertinence, in Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan (102), without relying on the trope.-Tr.

16 As Bruno Bosteels has pointed out to us, the opposition of management [gestionJ and politics proper (what here is direction) returns in Badiou's later writing, after the Mao­ ist works, as well. See Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12. Analogous oppositions, or "occlusions;' are then posited regarding other truth procedures: sexuality and love, culture and art, technology and science.-Tr. 17 The wordplay of "Etat" and "etat" ("State" and "state [of the situation]") is prominent in Badiou's later work. The main explanation is found in "L'etat de la situation historico­ sociale;' meditation 9 of L'Etre et l'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 121-128.-Tr. 18 Ouvriers specialises, unskilled workers. o.S., mostly immigrant workers, were key in the Maoist mobilizations in post-May France.-Tr. 19 Strikes of the o.S. at Renault-Billancourt, in March-April 1973 and at Renault, of truck drivers in the spring and of line workers in December, 1975. See Laure Pitti, "Greves ouvr­ ieres versus luttes de l'immigration: une controverse entre historiens;' in Sylvain Lazarus, ed., Anthropologie ouvriere et enquetes d'usine, Ethnologie fram;aise 31/3 (2001): 465-476. The general context of the change is the incoming economic crisis on the one hand, and the "unity" of the electoral, revisionist Left-long dreamt about and for this reason all the

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more disappointing-after 1972 on the other. The victorious 1973 strike brough forward the rupture between the demands and the strategies of the w rkers and the umon . This . antagonist contradiction, of the union demand for negotiatIOns an t e or ers non­ negotiable claim to "equal pay for equal work;' the demand for the objectIve sta dard of hierarchy, and the claim that the workers determine what is e ual to what, contmued to determine the sequence of proletarian struggle throughout the 70S. Both a refinement of hierarchies (granting a place on a wage ladder to all, including the former O.S.) and a continuing workers' pressure against them ensued from the stnke.-Tr.

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20 See Lenin, "'Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder" (1920) Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 23.-Tr. 21 Mao Zedong, "On New Democracy" (January 1940), Selected Works, 2.369 and else­ where.-Tr. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 366-367 [trans­ lation modified] . r on se us th Al is nt Ka of wn do e sid up g in rn tu 's ze 23 The obvious subtext regarding Deleu . Be n ns tra , arx M r Fo 's ser us th Al e Se l. ge He of al ers Feuerbach's-and early Marx's-rev e Brewster . ns tra l, ta pi Ca ing ad Re d an 9 -3 35 ), 69 19 , ne Brewster (London: Allen La ct p as l lpa nC pn e th ao M th wi g in riz eo th , re he (London: NLB, 19 70 ), 39 and passim. Elsew lme se es p re e th n o sh as ou di Ba , 2) -8 70 , on cti of contradiction ( Theorie de contradi Is ph lo o­ eo rg ou -b tit pe or n er od tm os "p low fel d an of inheritance that links Deleuze , Samt e th to o and Proudh n, ni ku Ba , rg bu m xe Lu h ug ro th ath m er aft '68 phers of the well as s, on ctI di ra nt co y ar nd co se d an al cip in pr If Max" Stirner of The German Ideology. ce on the en va ui eq in ed at ul tic ar e ar , on cti di ra nt co ss . as both aspects of the principal, cla Ident . No a str ab an th pe ca es l ca gi lo no is e er th en th . abstract axis of "domination;' es tak e Sir De al. aw dr th wi , er th ra , or lt" vo "re e revolution is then possible, ju st subjectiv posed to op r, he ot ch ea or irr m y ch ar an d an m lis ra tu the place of Stirner's "egoism;' struc the dialectic and history.- Tr. 1.3 17. - Tr. , ks or W ted lec Se , on cti di ra nt Co On , ng do Ze 24 Mao Review g kin Pe in 66 19 st, gu Au 10 on ng iji Be in s" se as m 25 Mao's statement at "meeting the Tr. 34 (August 19 ,19 66 ): 9 [translation modifie d] .in Contradicsm ni go ta An of e ac Pl he "T 6, r te ap ch , on cti di 26 Se e Mao Zedong, O n Contra tion;' Selected Works, 1.3 43 -3 45 .- Tr. , com­ to th pa e th on e m co er ov be all sh ich wh ie] 2 7 "Three major distinctions" [san da chab and Len­ e) m m ra og Pr a th Go e th f o e qu iti Cr e th d an sto munism. After Marx (in the Manife C, CP e th f ee itt m m Co l ra nt Ce e th of au re Bu in (State and Revolutio n) , see the Political , gust 29 , Au s, ea Ar l ra Ru e th in es un m m Co s le' op Pe "Resolution on the Establishment of ral R volu­ ltu Cu e th ri du , as ll we as , 22 ): 58 19 , 16 r be 19 58 , Peking Review 29 (S eptem g of tm ee M e th at lk Ta or ) 66 19 , 21 ly Ju ( " re nt tion, Mao's "Talk to the Leaders of the Ce 9 online at l. vo , ks or W ted lec Se ), 67 19 9, ry ua Jan ( p" ou : the Central Cultural Revolution Gr ere th ts, hc f n co ss cla to al r ve n ra "T : es rit w ou , www.maoism.org. In Theorie du sujet, Badi . between es nc re ffe di r ajo m e re th e es th s, nt ria va in are these great millenary structural ­ la l tu ec ell nt d an l ua an m n ee tw , re tu ul city and country, between industry and agric IOn) . lat ns tra s �ls ste Bo o un Br (m ish ol ab to m ai bor-which it is communism's entire and sh pen ish bl ta es re to cy en nd te e th s se us sc di ou di In his forthcoming Ie Siee/e, Ba One e Se a. m Ch ao M stpo in "ad ro t lis ita ap "c e the dichotomies-corresponding to th tp://culturemaht 4, ne hi ac M re ltu Cu in e lin on o, an sc To rto Divides into Two;' trans. Albe

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The Flux and the Party

fus e into one" [he er er yl] of Yang Xianzhen stands precisely against the Marxist-Leninist "one divides into two:' The controversy is relevant to the struggle between two roads, to the USSR as well as to all "post -capitalism" convergence theories. Regarding theory and practice, the history of Marxism is full of fusions of opportunist practice and theory in no tension with it. (Badiou takes up Yang's philosophy of "reconciliation" in Theorie de la contradiction, 61-66. See also "New Polemic on the Philosophical Front: Report on the Discussion Concerning Comrade Yang Hsien-chen's Concept that 'Two Combine into One;" Peking Review 37 [September 11, 1964]: 9-12 and "Theory of 'Combine Two into One' is Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism;' Peking Review 17 [April 23, 197 1] : 6-11.) In France, the concept of "fusion" emerges, as classical, in French Maoism and across the '60S conjecture: Badiou or Althusser use it without having to quote. (See note 7 above; Althusser, For Marx,16; Althusser, "Marx dans ses limites;' Eerits philosophiques et poli­ tiques, vol. 1 [Stock/IMEC, Paris 1994], 371-387-) In the opening blurb in the Yenan collection volumes (not in the present one), Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus ask: "from what the anti-revisionist struggles in China and Albania are, what is to be retained, and transformed, to battle revisionism in France? What way is to be taken, here and now, so that Marxism and the real workers' movementfuse?" [empha­ sis in the original]. New French misreadings have also appeared, from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to Deleuze. Georges Peyrol's "Potato Fascism" ("Le fascisme de la pomme de terre;' La Situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, 42-52) takes up the mistranslation "one becomes two;' on whose basis Deleuze and Guattari, in "Rhizome;' do away with the dialectic. We thank Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on these points.-Tr.

chine. tees.ac. uk! Cmach/Backissuesl jo041Articles/badiou.htm. -Tr. 28 Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured" (October, 1917), Collected Works, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov �nd George Hanna, 4th English ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 74-85. Slavo' izek has taken up the play of "too early" and "almost too late" in "Repeating Lenin" (on .lacan.com) and ' Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism;' his post­ lme at , face to Lukacs s A Defence of HIstory and Class-Consciousness": Tailism and the Dialectic trans. Ester Leslie (London: Verso, 2000), 162-166. See also Badiou's Theorie du sujet 18 and following. The account follows John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, ch p. 3, onlme at www.bartleby.com.-Tr.

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29 "In a peasant country, nd under a revolutionary, republican government which enjoys the support of the Soclal st-RevolutlOnary and Menshevik parties that only yesterday . dommated petty-bourgeOIs democracy, a peasant revolt is developing. Incredible as this is, it i a fact." "The Crisis has Matured;' n Lenin uses the phrase many times ("The AgrarIan Program of the First Russian Revolution;' 1907; "A good resolution but a bad speech;' 1913; "Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade;' 1918, and other s).­ Tr.

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30 "The Crisis has Matured;' 82. Italics in Lenin's original.-Tr. 31 "What has the Party done to study the disposition of the troops, etc? What has it done to conduct the insurrection as an art? Mere talk in the Central Executive Committee and so ' on!" Lenin's note to "Crisis Has Matured;' 83n.-Tr. 32 Throughout the history of Marxism after Marx and Engels, "fusion of Marxism and prole­ tarian practice;' t e Leninist version of the "unity of theory and (revolutionary) practice;' punctuates M rxlst t� ory of organization. The latter is the threshold of Marxist thought and Commumst polItIcs: here, m the concept of fusion, theory comprehends their scis­ SIOn, their contradiction. Lenin determines the working class party through the fusion . of sOClahsm and the working class movement in "The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement" (1900 ) Coll cted Works, trans. Jo Fineberg and George Hanna, vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress, 972), 368; 1\ Retrograde Trend m Russian Social-Democracy" (1899 ), idem., 257, and in Left - i g Communism, an Infantile Disorder;' 23-4 . Rosa Luxemburg's polemic with Lem m rgamzational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" concerns the content of thIS notIOn above all. See Lenin's "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party" Collect Wo ks, v�l. 7 (Moscow: Progress, 1972) , 203- 425. Luxemburg's 1904 text, � m the 1934 edltlOn, IS vaIl le online at ww.mar w xists.org. Mao Zedong first discusses . the otlOn m the late 30S ( The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War [1938 ] , Selected Works, 2.209 and passim). It comes to the fore in the rectification movement of 1 42, a st uggle against those who both theorize instead of organizing work and a ply fore gn SovIet models onto Chinese practice. The same concept, rather than :, . . mere SlmficatlOn of Marxism, remains at stake: the concrete determination by Chinese r vol tionary practice reconstitutes, rather than to negate the universal claim. "Dialec­ , tlZlng a concept of the legalist philosopher Han Fei Zi (280- 233 BCE) , Mao uses the metaphor of the fusion between an arrow and a target ("Rectify the Party's Style of Work" [February 1, 1942] , in Selected Works, 3.38, 42). Yet the concept the two characters name is contr diction (mao dun) : in Han Fei Zi, the logical contradiction of an arrow that pierces anythmg and a target that cannot be pierced, in Mao, two opposites that both repulse and presuppose each other. As Badiou insists here, "fusion" is not immediate unity, it does not oppose the general dialectical law of "one divides into two" [YI fen we; er], to which he has remained faithful. See "One Divides into Two:' The concept must be divided: in the . major controversy on the Cultural Revolution philosophical front, the revisionist "two

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33 Mao Zedong, "Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys" (1941), Selected Works, 3.12.-Tr. 34 Joseph Stalin, "On the Problems of Leninism" (1926), Problems of Leninism (MoscoW: FLP, 1940), chap. 5, 132 and passim; online as "Concerning Questions of Leninism" at www.marx2mao.org. Stalin quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" (1919), Col­ lected Works, vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 388.-Tr. 35 Stalin's theory of transition in "On the Problems of Leninism" quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" to this effect. The quotation here is from Mao Zedong's "Speech at the CPC National Conference on Propaganda Work" (March 12, 1957), in Selected Works, vol. 5 (Beijing: FLP, 1977), 423 [translation modified] . See also On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (February 27, 1957), Selected Works, 5A09.-Tr. 36 "We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing:' Mao Zedong, On the Co-operative Transformation ofAgriculture ( July 31, 1955 ), Selected Works, 5.188 . In his "Critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" (195 8), in A Critique of Soviet Economics, trans. Moss Roberts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977 ), Mao writes that "Stalin's book from first to last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people . . . . The basic error is mistrust of ,

•

the peasants (135) :'-Tr. 37 Revolutionary, not parliamentary, party as subject. The project of the "party of a new type" is a constant concern in Badiou's Maoist, militant thought, beginning from his po­ litical work from within the Parti socialiste unifie. See Badiou, H. Jancovici, D. Menetrey and E. Terray, Contribution au probleme de la construction d'un parti marxiste-Ieniniste de type nouveau (Paris: Maspero, 1970), as well as Theorie du sujet, 38. The concept itself was developed by Lenin at the 1912 Prague party conference that refused the party model of Western Social Democracy and split the Bolshevik party from the Mensheviks. It has

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received its canonic formulation in History of the CPSU(b): Short Course (New York: In­ ternational Publishers, 1939), 138-142, 172. English online at www.marx2mao.org. The instance and concept of the party, so central here, are put aside in further devel­ opment of Badiou's philosophy-if indeed the logic of abandoning them does not compel the transformations-as well as in his politics today. See Peter Hallward's "Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou;' app. to Hallward's translation of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil (London: Verso, 2001), 95, but also the theses Qu' est-ce que I'Organisation Politique (Paris: Le Perroquet, 2001) and online at www.organisation­ politique.com.) Yet, (Groupe pour la Fondation de) I'Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Leniniste, Badiou's Maoist organization, did not consider itself a party even be­ fore it "re-began;' shedding some of its Maoist legacy, as Organisation Politique. As A. Belden Fields observes in his Trotskyism and Maoism in France and the United States (chap. 3 , online at www.maoism.org): .. The UCFML has made no claim to be a party. as have the other two organizations [Parti Communiste Marxisie-Leniniste de France, PC­ MLF, and Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire (marxiste-leniniste), PCR(m-I ) ] . In fact, it has not even claimed to be a 'union' yet, but a 'group' for the formation of a 'union: It has readily admitted that it does not yet have a mass base which would entitle it legitimately to refer to itself as a party. It also questions the legitimacy of the PCMLF and the PCR(m­ I) so doing:' Many thanks to Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on this point.-Tr. 3 8 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti- Oedipus, 38 2.

Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's liThe Flux and the Party" Bruno Bosteels

Introduction: Philosophy as the Struggle Against Revisionism

•

Alain Badiou's early Maoist text, "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus;' is part of a 1977 collection of polemical interventions titled The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front. Published by members of the so-ca�led . orgamza­ Yenan-Philosophy Group, itself part of the MaOIst tion UCFML, or ( Groupe pour la fondation de) ['Union des Communistes de France Marxistes-Leninistes, these interven­ tions tackle the state of philosophical thinking around the mid-seventies in France by targeting Lacan (in the guise of Jacques-Alain Miller's "Matrix" and Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau's The Angel: Ontology of RevolutIOn) and AI­ thusser (in the guise of Dominique Lecourt's little book on the "Lysenko affair") no less than Deleuze and Guattari (Anti­ Oedipus and the short text "Rhizome" that would soon there­ after become the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus). The main thrust of the polemic states that a new revisionist mode of thinking has taken hold of philosophy-a mode of think­ ing that, whether in the name of writing, science, the bod!, or desire and its libidinal flows, abandons the harsh questIOns of political organization and the class struggle in favor of an . abstract and purely formal dualism that, by droppmg the ref­ erent of the proletariat and its party vanguard, directly op­ poses the masses to the State. "Everywhere to substitute the couple masses/State for the class struggle: that's al� there is to . . , it:' part of the collective opening statement reads; The pOIIh­ . cal essence of these 'philosophies' is captured in the followmg principle, a principle of bitter resentment against the entire history of the twentieth century: 'In order for the revolt of the . masses against the State to be good, it is necessary to r�)ect the class direction of the proletariat, to stamp out MarXIsm, Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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to hate the very idea of the class party:'" The result of such arguments is either the complete denial of antagonistic contradictions altogether or the jubilatory recogni­ tion of a mere semblance of antagonism. "They dream of a formal antagonism, of a world broken in two, with no sword other than ideology;' whereas a complete understanding of emancipatory politics would involve not just the joy and passion of short -lived revolt, but the painstaking and disciplined labor of forcing the exist­ ing contradictions of a particular situation, whether they are antagonistic or not, in the direction of a generic truth: "They love revolt, proclaimed in its universality, but they are secondary in terms of politics, which is the real transformation of the world in its historical particularity:" On the philosophical front, therefore, one urgent task for the authors of this polemic involves precisely the struggle against such revision­ ist tendencies. For Badiou and his Maoist comrades, this is the lesson to be drawn from the militant sequence between 1968 and the onset of a backlash in 1972, with the so­ called Common Program of the Left in France. "Everyone, including the Maoists, is after all called upon today, after the Cultural Revolution and May ' 68, to take a stance, to discern the new with regard to the meaning of politics in its complex ar­ ticulation, its constitutive trilogy: mass movement, class perspective, and State;' the opening statement reads, continuing: "Such is clearly the question of any possible philosophy today, wherein we can read the primacy of politics (of antagonism) in its actuality:') Is this still the primordial question for any possible philosophy today, the reader might ask, nearly thirty years later? In the remarks that follow, I want to argue that Badiou's current thought with regard to politics, despite a sharp distanc­ ing from the idea of the party and its underlying debts to the dialectical mode of thought and action, remains to a large extent inscribed within the framework of presuppositions, if not the terminology, that articulate masses, classes, and the State. The key to this articulation, as should already be obvious from the preceding lines, is the notion of antagonism, particularly as developed by Mao in "On Contradic­ tion" and "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People;' as well as in their systematic reformulation by Badiou, first in Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology and then even more abstractly in the footnotes to The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic. A first set of questions might thus concern the fate of an­ tagonism in Badiou's later works. As I have tried to elaborate elsewhere, the treat­ ment of antagonism in terms of division or scission and the forced return upon a divided situation bespeaks a logic of social change that remains almost entirely valid for these later works as well.4 Badiou's Maoists texts, moreover, not only illuminate his later thinking in ways that are very different from what an isolated reading of Being and Event, for example, would produce, but, for all their shocking bluntness, polemics such as the ones fought out in The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front also continue to prove invaluable, or they regain much of their initial urgency today, nearly thirty years later, when for Deleuze and Guattari we might substitute the names of Hardt and Negri, for Lacan, that of Zizek, and for Althusser-Lecourt, those of Laclau and Mouffe-not to omit Derrida and the stubborn legacy of Hei­ deggerianism.5 Whether or not these figures represent the front line of the philosophical battle

9S

e activ his s after y year man even ou, Badi for that mind in keep ld shou we y, toda ist sion nst revi agai gle strug its in ed n defi to be s inue cont hy osop phil od, peri t aois M '6 er ism: Rath sion revi nst agai ggle stru the is hy osop phil of nce esse "The s: tion evia d than to consider this period over and done with, perhaps we should entertain the e s mor fact seem in ou Badi y. tenc ofla a stage in red ente has past the that esis h ypot h and more inclined of late to bring these latent continuities out into the open, pre­ cisely in an attempt to answer inquiries such as my own, for example, regarding his e -on oach ic appr raph riog ly histo pure a e, efor ther d, avoi us Let ism. Mao to s debt that would reduce the significance of texts such as Badiou's early article on Deleuze, now translated here for the very first time, to that of being a dusty and slightly em­ barrassing museum piece. Instead, I will rely on Badiou's thought in general, and try to demonstrate the timeliness of the translated piece in particular, by taking up three basic orientations in the logic of antagonism as developed in political thinking today.7 This will allow us to begin reading Badiou's work as a polemical intervention that cuts diagonally across the divisions between immanence, transcendence, and totality. Immanence and the Life of the Multitude

The first orientation is the Spinozist - Deleuzian one that underlies the notions of immanence and the multitude as expounded by radical Italian political philoso­ phers such as Paolo Virno and Toni Negri. The latter, we are told, is now working with Michael Hardt to prepare the follow-up for their bestselling Empire, a second tome simply to be titled Multitude. Its follow-up but also its complement: indeed, there is a relation of reciprocity and resistance at the same time, without dialectical negation, between the multitude and the concept of Empire as developed by Hardt and Negri. Inside and against the imperial logic, like its photographic negative yet without allowing any of the familiar dialectical topics of "the outside within;' there inevita­ bly emerges the specter of the multitude. Better yet, Empire always has been an im­ possible project to control the creative mobility and desire of the multitude, whose vital constituent force should therefore be considered ontologically anterior to all the attempts at its mediation on behalf of constituted power, whether in terms of the market and globalization, in the name of the people, or by the State. From this inexhaustible fountain springs what I would call the politico-ontological optimism and unapologetic vitalism that characterize Hardt and Negri's brand of material­ ism: "The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges:'8 When facing a massive work such as Empire, the crucial task of the reader can­ not consist simply in evaluating the prophetic power of Hardt and Negri's book, written long before the global war on terror, by comparing their theses with the current situation. In fact, it is never a question of deciding whether a political phi­ losophy is relevant, let alone applicable, to a given situation. Following the principle that guides Badiou in his Abridged Metapolitics, the task is rather the other way around: to study which conceptual instruments philosophy must elaborate in order

Logics ofAntagonism

to register in its midst the effects of what is happening, in the streets and elsewhere, as a new figure of the present. A metapolitical approach thus puts philosophy under condition, under the condition of "a" politics (une politique), rather than continuing to define "the political" (Ie politique) together with the advantages and disadvan­ tages of various regimes of state power, as has been the obsession of most hitherto existing political philosophies. As Badiou writes, "By 'metapolitics' I understand the effects that a philosophy can draw, within and for itself, from the idea that real politics are themselves exercises in thinking. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which pretends that politics is not thought, so that it falls to the phi­ losopher to think 'the political:"9 Politics is an exercise in practical thinking in its own right. In order to think, the process of a true politics fortunately does not have to wait for the philosophers. Two indications might suffice to show the magnitude of the task of a metapoliti­ cal approach in relation to the work of Hardt and Negri. First of all, we should fur­ ther reconstruct the complete and undistorted genealogy behind the concept of the multitude. The novelty of this actor is in fact highly questionable. As Badiou writes in Can Politics Be Thought?, "From Rousseau to Mao, a canonical statement, which holds that the masses make history, posits in the masses precisely this vanishing ir­ ruption of which political philosophy only tells the always belated, and always torn, storY:'l0 The real question, then, concerns the ways in which we should articulate the notion of the multitude, not only with the modern ideas of the people and the nation-state, as both Negri and Virno propose, but also with the traditional Marx­ ist, or Marxist-Leninist, triad of masses, classes, and the State. Here Badiou's early hypothesis might still be valid, namely, that the multitude today presents the masses without classes, whereas the tradition of the revolutionary left, from Lenin to Mao, always supposed that the party would organize the masses into a common front by way of the class struggle. Even if Badiou nowadays refuses the visible form of the party, he is relentless in his insistence that politics is inseparable from some form of organization: "Political organization is necessary in order for the intervention, as wager, to make a process out of the trajectory that goes from an interruption to a fidelity. In this sense, organization is nothing but the consistency of politics:'ll By focusing on the tension-which is never really antagonistic, except in name only­ between Empire and the multitude, Hardt and Negri in a sense re-actualize an older opposition, the one that opposes the masses directly to the state apparatus, without any mediation through class interests, social contradictions, or their concentration into the political act proper. Second, and to make the same point in a different way, we should perhaps ask if the multitude does not run the risk of becoming the slogan of an anarchic and speculative leftism of sorts, in the sense in which Lenin talks of leftism as the in­ fantile disorder of communism-unless, of course, the category of the multitude gives way to new and lasting forms of organization, in an ongoing series of wagers on the capacity for thought and action of the many. Therein lies the importance of debates such as the ones that surround the antiglobalization movement in Seattle or Genoa, the forums in Porto Alegre, or the protests and uprisings in Argentina and Bolivia-to mention but a few recent cases. Do these new forms of mobilization

Bruno Bosteels reV1've

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the idea of direct democracy? Do they mark the end of the political, ifby the )olitical today we understand the war games of global capitalism that leave even the I arliamentary rule in a position of either impotent ally or irrelevant opponent? The ypothesis, rather, would be that these searching forms of organization indicate �he beg inning of a new political sequence, one � ar�ed by the closure and ��austJon . orgalllzatlOn that dommated politICs for at of the party as the privileged form of least two centuries. A corollary of this hypothesis would explain the contemporary resurgence of various forms of speculative ultra -leftism in so-called radical politi­ cal philosophy today: In a situation of rampant conservatism and blunt reactionary policies such as the ones that rule in the USA or Italy, when new forms of political organization are either lacking or still insufficiently articulated, the most tempt­ ing posture is indeed one of radical left-wing idealism or adventurism. Convers:ly, whenever the question of organization is actually raised, the old specters of Lenm­ ism, of democratic centralism, of party discipline and the critique of trade-union­ ism and social-democratic reformism, inevitably raise their ugly head again. Hardt and Negri barely allude to these questions in their conclusion. "We need to investigate specifically how the multitude can become a political subject in the context of Empire;' they posit in their short last chapter. "Recognizing the potential autonomy of the mobile multitude, however;' they continue, "only points toward the real question. What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and rede­ fined as a positive, political power:'12 Hardt and Negri's book, in the meantime, does not pretend to be the umpteenth messianic version of the passage through purga­ tory-through the rule of Empire-so as to arrive at redemption-at the potential­ ity of the multitude. Even so, the book does not always avoid the pitfalls of what we might call "good (bad) conscience;' which in the sixties and seventies would have been discussed in terms of the dialectic of the Hegelian-Lacanian beautiful soul. At least Virno, in his Grammar of the Multitude, seems much more subtle and astute in this regard, while recognizing the profound ambivalence of the multitude, capable of the best and the worst: "The multitude is a form of being that can give birth to one thing but also to the other: ambivalence:'J3 By starkly opposing the constituent force of the multitude to its mediation by the constituted power of Empire, no matter how flexible the latter's regime of control is made to appear, Hardt and Negri finally end up repeating a familiar scheme that contrasts the purity of insurrection and im­ manence to the equally pure power of transcendence and the established order. The counterposing of Empire and multitude thus appears to repeat previous dualisms such as those of capital and labor, order and anarchy, power and resistance, or even, at bottom, the old Kantian dualism of necessity and freedom, as Badiou argues in his early article on Deleuze. What this scheme wins in speculative radicality, how­ ever, it looses in terms of its specific metapolitical effectiveness to think through the present political situation. The key to understanding the non-dialectical relation of reciprocity, or the disjunctive synthesis, between Empire and the multitude is in reality an idea that De­ leuze, Negri and Hardt all borrow from Foucault. This is the idea not only that there can be no power without resistance, but also, and more importantly, that resistance is ontologically prior to power itself. "Even more, the last word on power holds that

�

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resistance comes first;' Deleuze writes in his Foucault: "Thus, there is no diagram that does no� contain, aside from those points it connects, other relatively free or unbound pomts, elements of creativity, mutation, resistance; and we should start fr�m these, perha� s, to understand the whole:" 4 Badiou himself, in fact, proposes . . thIS very Idea m hIS early attack against Deleuze, quoting directly from Chairman Mao: "Where there is oppression, there is revolt;' to which Badiou adds, "But it is the revolt that, at its own hour, passes judgment on the fate of the oppression, not the other wa.r around:' '5 With Negri and Hardt, however, this understanding . of p �wer an� resistance qUIckly leads to the conclusion that, even though there is nothmg outsIde of Empire and, hence, all hitherto existing political philosophers have gone astray when they continue to presuppose the existence of such an outside Empire no�etheless c�n always at the same time be read as a sign of the potentialit of the multItude. Agamst the claim that any sort of external aid or extension, such as the vanguard party, would be needed to guarantee the effectiveness of the current struggl�s, this log�c leads to the almost perverse conclusion that the more power and oppresslOn there IS, t�e better are the chances for resistance and revolt: "Perhaps the . more caplt�l extends ltS global networks of production and control, the more pow­ . of revolt can be:" 6 Following this logic, to be sure, there is erful any smgular pomt nothing that we cannot hope for nowadays! In Deleuze: "The Clamor of Being;' a book which in many ways rephrases the a:g��ent from "The Flux and the Party" in strict ontological terms and without the VitrIolic attacks, Badiou describes the Deleuzian orientation and method in terms �f a logic of th� double signature. Every entity that from the point of view of enti­ ties, or of CO� stItuted power, appears to be a stable, molar identity, can also be read at the same time as the sign of Being, as the event of virtualization of the actual and �ctualization �f the virtual, that is, in political terms, as constituent power. Intuitive m an ontologIcal sense, the method consists in following this itinerary back and fort� bet�ee� the two poles, without loosing the power of univocity in the hands ?f d�alectIcs. From A as entity to B as Being, then from B as Being to A as entity, . mtUItlOn concatenates thought to things as copresence of a being of simulacrum . a�d of a simula �rum of Being:" 7 Everything that exists thus presents itself as doubly �Igne?, dependmg on whether it is read as entity or as Being, as thing or as event, as Id�ntIty or as becoming, as Empire or as multitude. This explains the radiant opti­ �llsm of Hardt and Negri in Empire. Indeed, if we adopt the principle of reversibil­ Ity, not o�ly do�s the new global order confirm the flexible rule of pure immanence, t��s makmg Spmoza into the quintessential philosopher oflate capitalism, as Slavoj .�Izek often repeats by way of a critique, but the all-powerful rule of Empire itself, m a sense, also always bears witness to the vitality of the multitude that sustains its rule. To give but one especially eloquent example of this logic from Empire:

;

�rom one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects

It to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, �rom what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy IS reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vital-

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ity of the multitude-as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.'s Without mediation or negation, Empire and multitude stand opposed as two signs of a gaze that is no longer dialectical but perhaps merely hermeneutical. The whole p oint almost seems to be to read Empire in terms of the multitude, and vice-versa. Real change is hereby reduced to a mere reversal or shift in perspectives. There is no need, therefore, to wait for the second volume of Empire, announced under the title Multi tude, since all the interpretive clues to understand the latter already coincide, point for point, with the clues that serve to read the former. This logic, in which antagonism is transmuted into a principle of immanent reversibility, explains both the strength and the weakness-and thus, perhaps, the remarkable international success-of Hardt and Negri's book. Their enormous force lies precisely in the combination of two equally irrefutable interpretive gestures: by declaring the real subsumption of labor into capital, oflife into biopolitics, they are capable of filling the trash can of history with all those modern conceptions of poli­ tics that still rely on an antagonistic contradiction between inside and outside, be­ tween old and new, between friend and enemy; but by affirming the reversibility, or the intuitive unity, between power and resistance, between Empire and multitude, they are at the same time capable of overcoming the pessimism of the intellect with the purest optimism of creativity, which is but the ontological name of life itself. In this orientation, finally, the notion of antagonism does not vanish completely, at least not in name, but it can no longer be understood in the context of older dialectical categories such as the qualitative accumulation of contradictions into an explosive antagonism, for instance, in the theory of the weakest link in Lenin, in the theory of structural causality and overdetermination in Althusser, or in the theory of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions in Mao. Negri's work, inciden­ tally, has undergone dramatic changes in this regard over the last few years. Going against "the ABC of revolutionary dialectics;' Negri and Hardt thus reject any inter­ pretation of resistance in terms of a theory of the weakest link in the imperial chain: "In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an 'outside' to power and thus no longer weak links-if by weak link we mean an external point where the articula­ tions of global power are vulnerable:" 9 By contrast, as late as in his "Tw.enty Theses on Marx;' Negri still advocated the highly orthodox idea that revolutionary change takes place wherever and whenever contradictions accumulate into a strategic node and thus become antagonistic: ''Actually, the fabric of the present is an enormous node of strategic contradictions-it is like a boiling volcano which multiplies the ex­ plosions and fluxes;' whereby "the strategic contradictions of development show, or better, produce and institute a new antagonistic subjectivity. All this does not come about in a deterministic way, but instead it is the fruit of a process dominated by the multitude, which exalts its own power in freedom:'20 Even in the case of this earlier formulation, however, Badiou's central question regarding Deleuze and Guattari cannot be resisted: ''All this cultural racket, all this subversive arm-pumping, only to slip us, at the end, that Freedom is Good and Necessity Evil?""

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Transcendence and the Real as Act

� second orientation, one that gave rise to a new theory of radical democracy pre­

cls �ly b� p�tting the recognition of antagonism at the center of political philosophy, d �nves It � Impetus from �he le�acies of Lacan and, to a lesser extent, of Heidegger (via Dernda) that for a bnef whtle, during the late eighties and early nineties, found a common �round in the work of thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek. From this perspective, the field of the political appears as a pre� carious social totality, articulated on the basis of a vanishing term whose function in this whole is similar to that of Being for Heidegger or of the Real for Lacan. The event of Being, in the deconstruction of ontology, gives its origin to the history of metaphysics; this origin, however, only offers itself by withdrawing itself at the same �ime and as such it is irreducible to the continuous unfolding of history. The Real, m psychoanalysis, is the point of the impossible that vertebrates the symbolic order; the Real itself, however, is that which absolutely resists symbolization. It is in a similar way that the place of power appears in the radical-democratic orientation. Whether it is called lack, difference, or antagonism pure and simple, the founding term around which the social order is constructed is an empty term; better yet, it is an absent cause that completely vanishes into its effects. Following Claude Lefort's ;;ell-known thesis about the empty, unoccupiable place of power in democracy, Zizek thus writes that "the Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a so­ ciopolitical order in which the People do not exist-do not exist as a unity, embod­ ied in their unique representative. That is why the basic feature of the democratic order is that the place of Power is, by the necessity of its structure, an empty place:' 22 Only by remaining empty does the place of power in democracy make possible the regime of democratic representation; this place itself-like the center of Empire for Hardt and Negri, by the way-is a non-place or blank space that is impossible to repr�sent, much less to embody in a particular historical subject-whether the pro­ letanat, the party, or the charismatic leader. In an extreme reading, even civil society no longer offers a valid alternative, insofar as it would do no more than reiterate the illusion of a unique and indivisible bond in eternal opposition to the apparatus of the State. The structure of radical democracy paradoxically displays its greatest force at the point of its greatest weakness, when it endlessly exposes the fragility of its Achilles' heel. It articulates the field of the social following the principle of a lack of founda­ tion, which is �oth, a�d �t the same time, the condition of possibility of democracy . and the condition of ItS ngorous impossibility. This idea of democracy is radical, in other words, not because it inaugurates a return to the root of the human essence or to the stable ground of some ultimate truth but, to the contrary, because it aban­ dons �ny �r�:ens �on to found politi�s on a principle of substantive power. "Society . no such thmg as society:' is the first slogan of the thinkers doesn t eXist, or , there IS of radical democracy, a slogan obviously inspired by the Lacanian axiom: "There is no such thing as a sexual relationship."23 Several years before Laclau and Mouffe would consolidate this reading in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the Lacanian real is in :�ct already understood in a political key in Badiou's Theory of the Subject, so that , If the real of psychoanalysis is the impossibility of the sexual as relationship,

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the real of Marxism states: 'There is no class relationship: What does this mean? It can be said otherwise: antagonism:'24 For the radical-democratic orientation, too, this means that politics is not based on the plenitude of the social bond, but on its essential lack, due to the unbinding, or the dislocation, of the social whole by an in trinsic exteriority, which others might call subalternity. It does not rely on a previ­ ously established identity but on the constitutive alterity of any social formation. As Roberto Esposito writes, "Democracy is that which guards alterity, which does not give illusions or consolations, which does not dream terrible conclusions: the one, im manence, transparency:'25 Above all, radical democracy is not grounded in the sovereignty of the people as demos, but robs the ground from beneath any preten­ sion to derive a politics from the immediate, organic or substantial self-presence of a given community. Such self-presence is nothing but the eternal referent of myth. All too often, however, this radical-democratic view of antagonism limits itself to assuming, as in a kind of death drive, the inherent impossibility of the symbolic order of a given society. The project seems able to formulate itself only in terms of a categorical imperative that obliges us to recognize the intrinsic negativity of the so­ cial, as though the task consisted merely in learning to live with the impasse-with­ out opening a passage through it. As Zizek states most eloquently: In this perspective, the 'death drive: this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to 'overcome: to 'abolish' it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it. 26 Metapolitically speaking, this mode of recognizing the constitutive nature of an­ tagonism tends to be the only actual political experience, other than really existing parliamentary democracies, capable of being thought in the categories of the radi­ cal-democratic orientation. Badiou often repeats how all political philosophies stand under the condition of a specific politics. The only effective politics behind the concept of radical democ­ racy, however, seems to reside in the double parliamentary-electoral game, in the in­ terminable conversation achieved by means of the vote and the public debate; often reduc�d to mere opinion-polls. In order not to identify themselves with the glaring limits of really existing democracies, then, the proponents of radical democracy sometimes have recourse to an aesthetic analogy in a paradoxical and necessarily violent presentation of the void of power in the midst of democracy (or the political) itself. By way of such aesthetic figurations, this political philosophy transcends the framework of what can be thought objectively in history or in the social sciences. This alternative could be called arch-aesthetic, if we accept the explanation offered by Badiou in his reading of Wittgenstein: "I say arch-aesthetic, because it is not a question of substituting art for philosophy. It is rather a question of posing within the scientific or propositional activity the principle of a clarity the (mystical) ele­ ment of which is beyond this activity, and the real paradigm of which is art. It is a question therefore of firmly establishing the laws of the sayable (the thinkable), in

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such a way that the unsayable (the unthinkable, which in the final instance is given only in the form of art) be situated as 'upper limit' of the sayable itself'2? Aside from this arch-aesthetic alternative, there only remains the desire to repeat the power of an absolutely radical act in an imitation, within philosophy, of the revolutionary act itself-as when Benjamin seeks to "blast open" the continuum of history, or when Nietzsche, calling himself dynamite, pretends to "break history in two:' The desire for a radical act in this case can be called arch-political, if once again we take into account the explanations given by Badiou: "The philosophical act is arch-political in the sense that it seeks to revolutionize humanity at a more radical level than the calculations of politics;' as in the case of Nietzsche, who "proposes to make formally equivalent the philosophical act as an act of thinking with the explosive potentiality that is apparent in the politico-historical revolution:'28 The arch-aesthetic and the arch -political versions of the radical act, however, are never far removed from the kind of speculative ultra-leftism already found in the first orientation. Scission and the Symptomatic Torsion of Truth

For Badiou, both these orientations must be carefully avoided. His early polem­ ic against Deleuze already indicates that a political truth arises neither by purely intuiting the vital immanence of the multitude behind the oppressive machinery of power, nor by merely recognizing the structural fact of antagonism as the hard kernel of the real in the midst of everyday reality. Neither the immanence of pure life nor the transcendence of the death drive can account for the possibility of real change in a given situation. And yet, this is the only question that really matters for Badiou. Not only: what is being, on the one hand, and what is the event, on the other? But: what truly happens between ordinary configurations of the multiple of being and their supplementation by an unforeseeable event? This means to think of the truth of an event as an immanent excess from the point of view of the initial situation: "It is thus an immanent break. 'Immanent' because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else-there is no heaven of truths. 'Break' because what en­ ables the truth-process-the event-meant nothing according to the prevailing lan­ guage and established knowledge of the situation:" 9 Badiou thus agrees with those contemporary Lacanians who affirm the structural necessity of an exclusion inher­ ent in the formation of any subject-precisely the kind of "outside within" rejected in the Spinozism of Deleuze or Hardt-Negri. As Lacan had written in his Ecrits, and Badiou quotes this line approvingly in his Theory of the Subject: "The subject stands in internal exclusion to the object:'3o For Badiou, however, no truth actually comes out of this structural fact without also involving a symptomatic torsion of the opening situation from the point of view of its unnameable excess. Whether this process is described in terms of destruction and purification or, more recently, in terms of subtraction and disqualification, the point is that the logic of the constitu­ tive outside in and of itself remains an empty and purely structural scheme without the supplementary effort of a forced return to the initial situation. "It is a process of torsion, whereby a force reapplies itself to that from which it emerges by way of con­ flict," Badiou wrote in Theory of the Subject: "All truth is new, even though its spiral also means repetition. What puts the innovative break into the circular inflection?

Bruno Bosteels

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A

certain coefficient of torsion. Therein lies the subjective essence of what is true: th at it is distorted:'3! Badiou's principal concern, in other words, is not with a pristine opposition of being and event. Whenever he does seem to establish such a divide as that between truth and knowledge, or between being and event, these should not be taken as two alre ady separate dimensions, which moreover only his critics transcribe with capi­ tals. Rather, from the point of a subjective intervention, they stand as the extremes of an ongoing process of detachment and scission. Despite a recurrent temptation by the Mallarmean wager, Badiou is rarely taken in by the absolute purity of truth as a voluntaristic and self-constituent decision in the radical void of the undecidable. To the contrary, much of his philosophical work is guided by the hypothesis that the opposition between being and event, as well as that between structure and subject, far from constituting in turn a structural given that would merely have to be rec­ ognized, hinge on the rare contingency of a process, an intervention, a labor. Truth as an ongoing process, moreover, actively destroys the premise of a simple face-off, no matter how heroic or melancholy, between an established order of being and the untainted novelty of an event-between place and force, or between necessity and freedom. Was this not, after all, the most stringent Maoist lesson to be drawn from the events of May ' 68 and the Cultural Revolution according to Badiou himself? If we take this point of view a step further, even Badiou's later philosophy as systematized in Being and Event begins to revolve around two key concepts-the symptomatic site of an event and the forcing or torsion of truth-which his critics tend to ignore, but which in fact sum up his contribution to a forgotten tradition of the materialist dialectic. In ontology, the event is defined, not just in terms of a pure self-belonging cut off from the situation, but as an event for a given situation as de­ termined by its symptomatic site: "There is an event only in a situation that presents at least one site. The event is tied, in its very definition, to the place or point that concentrates the historicity of the situation:'32 The site of an event is symptomatic of the situation in its totality for the same reasons that in the earlier days explained the qualitative accumulation of contradictions into an antagonistic node. Except that today, after the obscure sequence from the late sixties to the mid-seventies, such antagonism can no longer be read off directly from a sociological an4lysis of the structure, rather it is the result of a subject's intervention and fidelity to the events of politics themselves. Antagonism, scission, or the fundamental twoness at the heart of politics, can no longer be determined objectively, but must be produced through the labor of chance interventions: What is being sought after today is a thinking of politics which, while deal­ ing with strife, having the structural Two in its field of intervention, does not have this Two as an objective essence. Or rather, to the objectivist doctrine of the Two (classes are transitive to the process of production), the political innovation under way attempts to oppose a vision of the Two 'in terms of historicity: which means that the real Two is an event-related production, a political production and not an objective or 'scientific' presupposition.33 There is little doubt in my mind, in any case, that the idea of the event's site is a con-

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tinuation, in ontology, of the search for a certain dialectic in which every term Or multiple, even the otherwise unfounded multiple of the event, is internally marked by the structure of assigned spaces in which this multiple is placed. Otherwise, with­ out the logic of scission and torsion, the ontological discourse risks leading us back to a false structural or ultra-leftist scheme, insofar as the event would constitute a pure vanishing insurrection of the void which founds the structure of being and which merely stands revealed in the immeasurable excess of the state of a situation over this situation itself. An event, however, is not pure novelty, revolt, and insur­ rection, but it is tributary to a situation by virtue of its specific site; "The idea of a turnabout whose origin would be a state of the totality is imaginary. All radical transformative action originates in a point, which is, within a situation, the site of an event:'H Even Badiou's later thought remains dialectical, in other words, by rejecting such stark opposition between being and event in favor of the specific site through which an event is anchored in the ontological deadlock of a situation that only a rare subjective intervention can then unlock. "We have seen;' he writes, "that not every 'novelty' is an event. It must further be the case that what the event calls forth and names is the central void of the situation for which this event is an event:'35 A subject's intervention, moreover, cannot consist merely in showing or recog­ nizing the traumatic impossibility, void, or antagonism around which the situation as a whole is structured. If such were to be the case, the dialectic would remain pro­ foundly idealist-its operation delivering at most a radical, arch-aesthetic or arch­ political act that either renders visible the unbearable anxiety of the real itself, or ultimately calls upon the annihilation of the entire symbolic order in a mimicry of the revolutionary break, which can then perfectly well be illustrated with examples drawn all the way from Antigone to Hollywood. Badiou's thought, by contrast, seeks to be dialectical and materialist in understanding the production of a new truth as the torsion, or forcing, of the entire situation from the precise point of a ge­ neric truth, as if the latter had already been added successfully onto the resources of knowledge available in this situation itself. Despite Zizek's objections, the aim of the generic extension and the subsequent forcing of the situation is profoundly anti­ Kantian. It is not a question of treating the truth of what is otherwise indiscernible in a given situation merely on the level of a regulative idea so as to avoid provoking a "disaster" but quite the opposite, so that the "as if" here becomes key to a violent forcing of the existing situation itself: "The idea is thus to see what happens when, by force, one 'adjoins' this indiscernible to the situation:'36 Without the subsequent process of forcing based on such a generic extension of the initial situation, further­ more, the Real that resists symbolization will only have been the site of a possible truth, but it is not already the given truth of the situation itself. In fact, the Real in this case would merely indicate a structural impossibility and not even an event's site whereby the regular structure of a situation becomes historicized. The subject, finally, is a laborious material process that requires a putting to work of an event. It does not come to coincide, in a purely formal act of conversion or a mere shift in perspective, with the impasse of the structure as with the real kernel of its own impossibility-say, through the traumatic symptom, with which a subject can only identify after traversing the ideological fantasy. At best, to acknowledge or experi-

105

ence this radical impasse, as in the case of antagonism for the radical-democratic orientation, is still only the inaugural act of subjectivization bereft of any subjec­ tive process; at worst, it is actually that which forever blocks and radically obscures the consequential elaboration of a new truth. For Badiou, a subject emerges only by opening a passage, in a truly arduous production of novelty, through the im­ passe-forcing the structure precisely there where a lack is found-so as to make generically possible that which the state of the situation would rather confine to an absurd impossibility. In a famous Chinese saying, frequently invoked in the course of the Cultural Revolution, this means nothing if not to bring the new out of the old. To force a new consistent truth out of the old order of things from the antagonistic point where our knowledge of the latter is found wanting .

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An initial version of this paper wasfirstpresented under the title "The Future ofAntagonism"for the Program in Literature and the Center for European Studies at Duke University (February 19, 2002). For this invitation and the ongoing dialogue surrounding this and other discussion texts, I want to express my lasting gratitude to Alberto Moreiras. Thanks are also due to the participants in the long special seminar on Badiou and politics that followed the day after the talk, and to the Polygraph collectivefor inviting me to contribute this piece as an introduction to the translation of Badiou 's text. •

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Groupe Yenan-Philosophie, "Etat de front;' in La situation actuelle sur Ie front phi­ losophique (Paris: Fran-

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Transcendence, and Utopia (2004)

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Polygraph 11: Margins of Global Culture

(1999)

Lawrence Grossberg, George Yudice, Grant Farred, Rey Chow, Coco Fusco Polygraph 10: Legislating Culture (1998)

Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdiou, Brian Massumi Polygraph 8/9: New Metropolitan Forms

(1996)

Peter Hitchcock, James Holston, Antonio Veneziani Polygraph 6/7: Marxism Beyond Marxism?

(1994)

Fredric'Jameson, Rey Chow, Paula Rabinowitz Polygraph 5: Contesting the New World

Order (1992)

Antonio Negri, Arjun Appadurai, Immanual Wallerstein Polygraph 4: Post-Colonial Cultures of Resistance (1990)

Edward Said, Kenneth Surin, Mahasweta Devi

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