Is Existentialism closer to Anarchism than Marxism?

written by William L. Remley

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Every philosopher must run the gauntlet of time. Philosophical ideas fall in and out of favor, but the acid test is whether we continue to debate a philosopher’s ideas long after they have left the scene. The anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s birthday in 2019, almost forty years since his death, was an appropriate moment to look back on the legacy of a philosopher whose work helped to define an era, and whose ideas continue to resonate with the political climate today.

Professor Richard Falk places Sartre alongside Noam Chomsky and Edward Said as one of the few individuals worthy of the title ‘public intellectual’. Yet towards the end of his life, even as Sartre moved further in the direction of political engagement, he lamented that his politics were not radical enough; perhaps that is why Sartre’s political philosophy is so highly disputed.

Since the publication of Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, scholars have largely interpreted Sartre’s political philosophy as ‘existential Marxism’: a critical appropriation of Marxism. Sartre encouraged this reception by often professing his affinity with Marxism, even stating that existentialism was parasitic to Marxism, a point he later retracted. But commentators who emphasize the influence of Marx overlook the signs of Sartre’s skepticism. Far from being a supporter of the French Communist Party, he rejected outright the dogmatic Marxism of dialectical materialism underpinning its ideology.

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“If one reads my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist.”

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While Marx’s influence is overemphasized, the role of anarchism deserves far more airtime than it currently gets. Sartre said it himself: “if one reads my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist”. Not only do Sartre’s anarchist undertakings underscore his political positions, from his earliest writings all the way through to the post-war period, they also provide a far more radical foundation for his ideas.

The clearest anarchist element in Sartre’s political thought is the pursuit of a society free from authoritarianism. In the early 1950s, Sartre began sketching out his vision for an ideal society, brought about by the overthrow of existing systems of oppression through revolutionary activity. In the Critique, Sartre argues that the authority-oppression paradigm is made possible by institutionalization, where groups become conditioned to eschew individual freedom, adopting serialities and their concomitant social impotence. Individual freedom is immobilized by this process but not vanquished; the potential to reform as a group-in-fusion and direct their praxis towards an ideal survives.

Sartre’s anarchist contemporaries condemned institutions which were based on coercion and authoritarianism. The state and centralized authority received the brunt of their scrutiny, with many believing that the state was illegitimate, had no right to exist, and its abolishment would eliminate many social evils. The same concerns can be seen today in the activities of the Occupy Movement, the Invisible Committee, and the Tarnac 9, all of which have come to be known as Insurrectionary Anarchism. Sartre’s account of group formation demonstrates that not only did he share such concerns about coercion and authority, he argued forcefully against the oppression of institutionalized authority long before contemporary anarchists took up the cause. Sartre’s revolutionary solution likewise entailed the eradication of the existing order.

Yet it is the degree of coercion that interested Sartre most. The philosopher’s critique of the state was that it attempted to convert human beings into automata, extending the machine metaphor to associate institutionalized bureaucracy with nefarious analytic reason. In his view, the practico-inert surrounds and conditions human existence through its seen and unseen apparatuses, representing a servitude to mechanical forces designed to quash individual freedom.

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“I have always been in agreement with anarchists, who are the only ones to have conceived of a whole man to develop through social action and whose chief characteristic is freedom”.

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In place of a state, anarchism advocates peaceful coexistence based on social freedom and our capacity for mutual aid, cooperation, respect, and communal relations. Sartre agreed, arguing that only individuals are sovereign, but that humans are united to each other and the world around them through their interactions, particularly in the workspace. According to Sartre, work is an essential attitude of human reality, founded on a need to collaborate with others based on an agreed mutual dependence. As he pointed out, “I have always been in agreement with anarchists, who are the only ones to have conceived of a whole man to develop through social action and whose chief characteristic is freedom”. While the individual is paramount, dependency prompts the being-outside-ourselves which is essential to Sartre’s concept of selfhood.

Sartre conceived the relation between humans and elements in the social sphere as ‘interest’. Interest is a univocal relation of interiority that provides the connection for humans to their environment. In contrast, subjectivity is derided as an abstraction: a verdict compelling everyone to willingly carry out the commands pronounced by society. For Sartre, interest is not our subjective, interior decisions concerning our existence; rather, it is the discovery of our being-outside-ourselves. There are no innate ideas or fixed essences, no ‘wheels in the head’ that direct our actions, as Max Stirner suggested. Instead, we are at all times situationally determined by others.

The final element of anarchist thought which I argue is echoed in Sartre’s political philosophy is the immediate and practical proposal for change: a socio-political theory that embraces, among other things, a notion of praxis. Indications of this praxis are embraced by anarchists today, including the decentralization of political and economic authority, worker self-management, and freedom of expression. There are several themes which reappear consistently throughout Sartre’s work, and the theory of praxis has to count among the most prevalent.

One of the foundational aspects of the Critique is Sartre’s desire to expose the profound dialectical relationship that unites praxis to the outside world. And on reviewing Sartre’s earlier work, we see that the intent of revolution is not only to alter the world, but to re-create our collective situation. In order to accomplish this task, praxis becomes essential, since praxis not only constitutes individual authenticity, it also eradicates the impotency of the practico-inert.

But what does Sartre mean by praxis? While the concept is somewhat nebulous, it should be understood as the historical whole determining our power at any given moment as it conditions our attitude toward an entire plethora of dichotomies, such as the possible and impossible. This occurs because praxis prescribes the limits of our actions as well as our possibilities for a future. For Sartre, the collectivity is faced with a choice to submit to the course of the world or contribute to the shaping of it. The force separating these paths is action. Action forces the individual to contextualize the event within a future possessed by everyone.

Having explored all of these shared traits, one thing is certain; Sartre’s political philosophy extends far beyond Marxism. Intrinsically linked to anarchist thought, Sartre believes that only bureaucratization, decentralization, and democratization, where the dominant forces renounce their grip on the social structure, can overcome the hegemonic, hierarchical, and oppressive nature of contemporary society.

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SOURCE: https://iai.tv/articles/sartres-anarchist-philosophy-auid-1242

The post Sartre’s Anarchist Philosophy appeared first on Void Network.

In the wake of the organised left and the demise of working class self-identity, communisation offers a paradoxical means of superseding capitalism in the here and now whilst abandoning orthodox theories of revolution. John Cunningham reports from the picket line of the ‘human strike’.


As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such-machine, such-and-such-knowledge. – The Invisible Committee, Call, 2004

The critique of capital, and speculation around the form and content of communism, always seems to oscillate between a historical materialist science on the one hand and the elaboration of new forms of subjectivity and affectivity on the other. Even Marx, while infinitely more familiar as a close analyst of capital, had early moments of Fourier style abandon when he attempted to elaborate the more mutable subjective content of a communist society. The dissolution of wage labour would make

it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…[ii]

This suggests a society wherein circuits of affectivity are established that are no longer based upon the exigencies of value production – even if I personally prefer communist utopia as idleness to Marx’s endless activity. Of course, this is one of the rare instances where Marx speaks in the future tense, leaving aside the messiness of the transition from capitalism. Recently, a series of texts from the milieu around the French journal Tiqqun – primarily Call, How is to be done?, The Coming Insurrection – have reintroduced this question of the subjective content of communism in a way that might restore a speculative aspect to the critique of capital.[iii] These are not theoretical texts per se, more inspirational ‘How To’ manuals for the elaboration of communisation as subjective and conceptual secession from both capital and the Left. As Call states, ‘Nothing can happen that does not begin with a secession from everything that makes this desert grow.'[iv] This discursive distance from the more traditional ultra-left positions on communisation is also reflected in dense, poetic prose that establishes an affinity with possible precursors in revolt such as Dada, Surrealism and Bataille. The development of the thesis of communisation within the ultra-left was always part of an attempt to shift away from the traditional programmatic forms of the party and the union towards an engagement with forms of resistance rising immanently from the social relation of capital, such as wildcat strikes. What might be at stake in a restating of the question of communisation as radical subjectivist secession against the often discredited ideological formulas of anti-capitalist milieus?

It’s best to consider this question alongside the series of texts presented by Endnotes that ably document the continued elaboration of communisation within the French ultra-left by presenting a series of texts by Gilles Dauvé and Theorie Communiste.[v] Both are rooted in the diverse groupuscles of the French far left in the 1970’s that shared a fidelity to 1968 of whom Debord and the Situationists remain the most renowned.[vi] Dauvé and Theorie Communiste retain a commitment to communisation but diverge sharply around questions of agency and history. What remains under-theorised in both Dauvé’s humanist Marxism and Theorie Communiste’s more recently formulated Marxist structuralism is any real problematisation of the production of subjectivity within capital. An insertion of this question might illuminate the impasse faced by these more hermetic theoretical critiques of capital. In sketching out the contours of contemporary theories of communisation, a constellation composed of questions around subjectivity, negation, history and utopia emerges. Does a reconsideration of communisation open up new perspectives and different possibilities, given the gap between the cramped space revolutionary milieus find themselves in and any genuine expectations of radical change? Or is even discussing communisation at this time akin to scraping a toothache with a fingernail, pointless utopianism in the face of the constantly mutating social relation of capital?

Before answering this question, though, what is communisation? The term immediately evokes various social experiments and revolutionary endeavours from the Paris Commune and utopian socialist communities in the 19th century through to various counter-cultural attempts to reconstitute social relations on a more communitarian basis such as the squatting scene in the 1970s and ’80s. The Tiqqun strand – henceforth to be known as ‘The Invisible Committee’ after the eponymous signatories of The Coming Insurrection – draws upon this long history of secessionist antagonism. They posit communisation as essentially being the production, through the formation of ‘communes’, of collective forms of radical subjectivity. This destabilises the production of subjectivity and value within both capital and more traditional forms of political organisation, eventually leading to an insurrectionary break. ‘Commune’ in this instance is not necessarily a bunch of hippies aspiring to a carbon free life style. In The Coming Insurrection a commune is almost anything that ‘seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation’, ranging from wildcat strikes to Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977, and innumerable other forms of collective experimentation.[vii]





While not completely missing the point, there is a danger of this understanding obscuring the specificity of ‘communisation’ as a concept and form of praxis that, as Endnotes trace out, emerged within the post-’68 ultra-left milieu and then later within insurrectionist anarchism through Alfredo Bonnano. A minimal definition of communisation would be, as Dauvé and Francois Martin wrote in 1972 in an early formulation, the following:

Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power… . All past movements were able to bring society to a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money… it will tend to break all separations.[viii]

This simultaneous destruction of value production alongside the thoroughgoing transformation of social relations as an immanent revolutionary process presupposes the negation of wage labour. The proletariat rather than being embodied in work and its valorisation, whether through wage labour or workers organisations, becomes the agency of self-abolition. Communisation would mean no more proletariat immediately, not after some interminable period of proletarian state or workers council management.

For Dauvé, here writing with Karl Nesic, communisation is the potential result of the dialectical opposition between living labour and the inhuman agency of capital. As he states

‘Subject’ and ‘object’ don’t exist separate from one another. A crisis is not something exterior to us that happens and forces us to react. Historical situations (and opportunities) are also made of … our actions or inactions.[ix]

Dauvé rejects theoretical determinism in favour of a more realistically indeterminate historical trajectory, where the only invariants within capital are humanity, alienation, exploitation and resistance. For Dauvé, communisation has been a possibility since 1848, as against the strict periodisation of Theorie Communiste.

Theorie Communiste’s position is that due to the shift in production to a second phase of real subsumption, post 1960s, capital and labour power are imbricated in a reproductive circuit.[x] Communisation as the self-abolition of the proletariat is only now a possible horizon due to the dissolution of the organised, programmatic parties and unions of the traditional left. Their unveiling in the 20th century as the necessary managers of the production of value has subsequently led to the inability of the proletariat to constitute an opposition to capital through their self-identification as workers. Stripped bare of any sense of voluntarist agency and subjectivity, what is left is the fact of structural exploitation and increasing proletarianisation that possibly leads to communisation. This dialectical synthesis without any reconciliation was impossible in previous phases of capital where revolution was inexorably tied to labour and the production of value.

Bracketing off the question of political agency and subjectivity in favour of historical structuralism, waving goodbye to the multitude and other spectral forms, is a welcome dose of anti-humanism. However, Theorie Communiste seem too eager to remove any subjective agency from oppositional politics. There’s a pessimism underlying their evacuation of any possibility in history that is an inversion of the classic 20th century social democratic Marxist paradigm of an inexorable movement towards communism. Too much value is fixed on the movement of history towards real subsumption of capital rather than evaluating history as composed of discontinuous breaks, fractures and events. One such might be the Paris Commune.

In its brief existence, the Commune prefigures many of the themes in contemporary discourse around communisation as both an immanent process of attempting to construct a non-state public sphere and an insurrectionist outburst that broke with the slow advance of 19th century commodity capitalism. Marx grasped that the ‘whole sham of State mysteries and State pretensions was done (away) by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working people’ and that the aim of the commune was the ‘expropriation of the expropriators,’ the dissolution of class and property.[xi] While the commune was primarily political it indicated for Marx the intertwined nature of revolutionary change, abolishing the separation between the economic and political and at certain conjunctures being wedded to insurrectionist force. For Marx the ‘great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence’, but he believed it gestured towards social emancipation in the limited measures, (such as the appropriation of disused workshops), it was able to undertake in its brief existence.[xii] He wrote that ‘…the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party…'[xiii]

Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, the juxtaposition of past and present in order to break the frozen reified image of both, provides a way of asking what resources an event such as the Paris Commune might offer the present.[xiv] This does not pose the existence of an invariant human subject as much as (re)examines the past in light of the present and restores an actuality and potentiality to history. For instance, Badiou has read the Paris Commune as ‘what, for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements’ establishing a template for ‘a declaration to break with the left.'[xv] Badiou sees this as a model for both a subjective intervention against capital and a communism subtracted from the state. The ‘Invisible Committee’ constantly refers to the Paris Commune in a similar fashion making suggestive juxtapositions throughout The Coming Insurrection. The Paris Commune is present in the text as a constant reminder of the barbarism that the French republic is founded upon, the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ that’s all too easily effaced by the empty continuum of history as the onward march of capital.[xvi]

A theory and practice formed in the still tempestuous wake of May ’68-wildcat strikes – the refusal of work, the proliferation of left groupuscles – and conditioned by this event, communisation posits an escalation of the destruction of commodity production as a millennial break. Concepts such as this, formed at a particular conjunction of forces and material conditions, can easily decline into ideology or, at best, a regulative idea that has little to do with actual social struggle in the present once that moment has passed. All of these different theories of communisation emerge from a sense of a cramped discursive and political space. Post 1968, this cramped space might be viewed as the all too obvious limitations of the traditional workers’ movement, specifically the Communist Party and its affiliated trade unions, in abetting the state suppression of the events alongside, of course, commodified social relations. In terms of the continued elaboration of communisation in the present, such a cramped space, given the weakness of the institutional left, might be composed of the post-Seattle ‘anti-capitalist’ movement itself, or at least its remnants. This movement has given rise to what Tiqqun describes, in How is it to be Done?, as the ‘desire killing demonstrations’ that ‘no longer demonstrate anything but a collective absence’.[xvii]

This ‘collective absence’ is not so much a lack of organisation for the ‘Invisible Committee’ as a plenitude of organisational forms that serve to divert antagonism into reformist or activist dead ends, constructing milieus that are concerned with their own self-perpetuation as fetishised organisational structures. At best, these attempt symmetrical conflict with capital rather than more asymmetrical tactics of withdrawal, diffusion and sabotage. For me, this ‘collective absence’ in contemporary forms of activism and militancy is all too apparent in those constrained ideologies, such as the identity politics, that dominate much of contemporary ‘radical’ politics. Hence, contemporary anti-capitalism is riddled with a ridiculous anarchist, ecological and socialist moralism that masks itself as a politics. This critique of militancy is prefigured in Dauvé and Martin’s early 1970s observation that the ‘communist movement is anti-political, not a-political.’ Dauvé and Martin grasp communism as inherently social and immanent to capital while rejecting the traditional role of the militant who ‘interferes in these struggles to bring the communist gospel’.[xviii] It’s this anti-political strand, the negation of contemporary political forms or what Jacques Camatte termed ‘rackets’ that I find most constructive, in a destructive way, within theories of communisation.[xix] Nick Thoburn, in his book Deleuze, Marx and Politics, argues that cramped political and discursive spaces, composed of both traditional organisational forms and capital as a social relation, are productive of innovative attempts to reassemble lines of flight from available resources. These clear a space and allow the articulation of previously ignored demands and the formation of oppositional subjectivities.[xx] Or more succinctly, all the strands of communisation are attempting to dissolve the worker as worker into a more diffuse antagonistic subject.

The Invisible Committee’s complex assemblage of ultra-leftism and situationist theory has operative within it just such an attempt to produce new forms of political subjectivity, Agamben and Foucault playing a theoretically pivotal role. To inspire secessionist communisation seems an odd fate for Agamben, a philosopher who is most famed for the melancholic framing of contemporary subjectivity within the parameters of ‘bare life’, the passive residue of the human subject under biopolitical sovereignty.[xxi] The reduction of humanity, through political sovereignty, to classes, identities and subjects such as citizen, worker or migrant is essentially based upon the exception that is ‘bare life’. Opposing this, Agamben’s concept of ‘form-of-life’ or ‘whatever singularity’ is utilised by the Invisible Committee to suggest a political subjectivity that isn’t contained within the parameters of ‘bare life’ and an identifiable subject.[xxii] As they note ‘I become a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.'[xxiii] Sounds esoteric, but it’s worth emphasising the explicit relation to labour power that ‘whatever singularity’ retains in its element of the refusal of the role of worker. Agamben writes that ‘form-of-life’ is

a life … in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.

And in this case it’s the power, or Potenza, to refuse wage labour and hence challenge the extraction of value from living labour. This ‘irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty’ is an emancipation from producing value towards the potentialities of an inseparability between activity and subject.[xxiv]

This inoperative collective political subject takes the form of ‘Human Strike’ within the Invisible Committee’s radical subjectivism. In How is it to be Done? ‘Human Strike’ is the point where the human subject as constituted within capital breaks down and refuses or simply ceases to function, a ‘Luddism of the human machinery that feeds capital’.[xxv] This is a Bartleby style refusal that responds to the (re)production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism throughout the entire social field by valorising negativity and dysfunction. The Coming Insurrection highlights an advertising slogan, ‘I AM WHAT I AM’, and sarcastically but accurately notes, ‘Never has domination found such an innocent sounding slogan.'[xxvi] An individualism that is the subsumption of affective qualities within the circuits of capital. The individual is nothing but the residual effects of an incorporation of identities promulgated through the apparatuses of production, consumption and leisure. The real subsumption of the human by capital presented in the Coming Insurrection begins to resemble a bad day commuting to work. This production of subjectivity is what Foucault termed ‘governmentality’, wherein power is not only repressive and disciplininary but also creates the conditions for the production of value, encouraging forms of subjectification that channel creativity and affective identification towards the valorisation of capital.[xxvii]

As Theorie Communiste point out, what produces a blockage within the Marxist humanism of Dauvé is a view of subjectivity within capital as something produced purely through the repression of an invariant humanity. Granted, this Marxist humanism still has a radical import around unleashing the potentiality of the human outside of the wage relation but there’s little problematisation of the forms of subjectivity. However, in attempting to embrace a rigorous anti-humanism, Theorie Communiste fall prey to simply evacuating any notion of subjective agency as being a soppy romanticism in favour of economic determination. This reinforces the hermetic nature of such critique as relatively divorced from the experiences of everyday life.

None of this is a particularly new problematic, given the proliferation of theories of radical subjectivity since at least György Lukács, but the Invisible Committee restate this critique in a way that restores a sensual apprehension of what might be at stake in any form of oppositional politics. The image of a proliferation of communes as ‘a power of production’ that is ‘just incidentally relationships of production’ establishes what is best termed desiring production.[xxviii] It arises through assemblages of communised spaces, knowledge, means, bodies and desires that establish a refrain between them, displacing the secessionist collective from capital and those identities such as ‘worker’ or ‘migrant’ that are fixed within it. This could produce a blockage within the flows of value production as information and commodity in what the Invisible Committee, again taking their lead from Agamben, theorise as the ‘metropolis’; the undifferentiated, sprawling non-place of contemporary biopolitical capital.[xxix] This process of blockage is expressed in The Coming Insurrection thus:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable … Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks.[xxx]

Does this simultaneous production of subjectivity and disruption of value production posit ‘whatever being’ as a new form of political agency? As the model of an actualised Fourierist utopia, or even as an allegory of the production of oppositional politics this seems fine, but communes form an insurrectionist phantom organisation, a piloting machine that is more or less organically formed through the act of secession, constituting an avant-garde of the disaffected and voluntarily displaced. A residual aristocratism emerges alongside a phantom vanguardism that is revealed in the formulation ‘Making the paralyzed citizens understand that if they do not join the war they are part of it anyway.'[xxxi] These communes that, for the Invisible Committee, are immanent in the present but not formalised encompass any number of spaces and collectivities, from proletarian to counter-cultural and illegal. Squats, wildcat strikes, riots, rural collectives, any bunch of the disaffected or excluded (re)appropriating the neighbourhood. At its best this carries within it an involuntary viral diffusion of communal and subjective disaffiliation from capital as a social relation. At its worst they all end up sharing within the insurrectionist thematic voluntary renunciation and conscious refusal. For me this loses something of the negativity of the more primordial ‘human strike’ hinted at, that refuses as much as an involuntary reaction to unbearable social relations, as through a conscious act of will. There’s an import to ‘human strike’ that restores an actuality to the ways that depression for instance might function as both a sign of vulnerability and site of resistance. As the Coming Insurrection notes ‘depression is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a side-step towards a political disaffiliation.'[xxxii] Rather than the insurrection, it’s this awareness that most productively marks the Invisible Committee off from more conventional radical milieus. What Camatte termed the real subsumption and domestication of the human by the community of capital here turns to speculative forms of resistance.[xxxiii]

The Coming Insurrection has had the dubious distinction of having reached the exalted heights of Fox news with a text extolling communisation, due to the controversy following the Tarnac 9 case in France. As an ironic confirmation of the Invisible Committee’s attachment to Debord’s notion of the spectacle, it is also proof that the hysteria of projected insurrectionism is more than met by the hysteria of the spectacle. This commitment to insurrectionism by the Invisible Committee underlines the value of the more sober assessments by Dauvé and Theorie Communiste. In a well balanced engagement with Call, Dauvé writes that there is lack of ‘an analysis of the present social movement, the fights, the retreats and the resistances to the world of waged labour, the strikes, their appearance, their frequent failure, their absence sometimes…'[xxxiv] This criticism of secession is well founded and it is this very material awareness of the instauration of capital as a social relation that is lacking in the more voluntarist exhortations towards insurrection. There is a correlation here with the post-Autonomist theory of exodus formulated by Paulo Virno as a strategy of refusal and subjective break with capital. This can give rise to a pre-emptive theoretical negation of any role as worker, suspending the fact that for most people a shit job is a necessity and the only exodus is the weekend.[xxxv]

Nevertheless, the re-inscription of a political agency as negation is refreshing when compared to the inclusivity of concepts such as Negri’s ‘multitude’. It’s in keeping with a line of active nihilism that permeates the theoretical production of the Invisible Committee. As opposed to Negri, where such an affective turn by capital is replete with immanent possibility, the production of subjectivity within contemporary capital is presented as part of the destruction of experience, what Call terms ‘the desert’. Almost nothing is exempted from this line of negation that runs from the micro-politics of an ‘existential liberalism’ that produces the individual through to all forms of politics, including anti-capitalism. The ‘desert’ is a form of passive nihilism endlessly replicating exchange-value, the obscure disaster of what both Benjamin and, in his footsteps, Agamben have conceptualised as the evacuation of experience by the shock and vacuity of the commodity.[xxxvi]

The response of the Invisible Committee is to accelerate this nihilism through a series of inversions such as the valorisation of gangs and illegalism – a heightening of the anti-sociality of contemporary capital. As such they are part of a current within French anarchism that runs from the Bonnot gang through to the Situationists and Os Cangaceiros. The latter, a group of post-’68 proletarian illegalists rejected leftist politics and its armed struggle variants in favour of tactics such as sabotaging railways in solidarity with prison revolts. Or, as they stated succinctly ‘of shitting on this world with its prisons.’ There’s always a risk with such illegalism that it reifies something like gang culture in a simple inversion of spectacular hysteria, but at least the Coming Insurrections evocation of the November 2005 revolt in the banlieues restores a sense of agency to what were routinely decried as criminal acts within mainstream politics. In the fairly early Tiqqun text ‘Theses on the Imaginary Party’, this illegalism extends to random acts of violence produced by the subjective forms of spectacular commodity capitalism and its evacuation through shootings, suicides, etc..[xxxvii] This aspect is most certainly an avant-garde provocation similar to Breton’s simple surrealist act of firing into the crowd, though it is not necessarily lightly mean; indeed, it generalises the sense of crisis that the Invisible Committee wishes to instill. In an oblique comment, Agamben references this active nihilism as ‘the irreparable that allows the coming of the redemption’, a messianic opening into forms of political agency that refuses the exigencies of political sovereignty.[xxxviii] Such an active nihilism posits a joyful destruction as necessary in order to break with contemporary society’s immersion in the commodity form. The Coming Insurrection notes that ‘[a]nnihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task …’ and that ‘fucking it all up will serve… as the last collective seduction.’ In embracing this they connect via some punk rhetoric to the destructive impulses of both the political and artistic 20th century avant-gardes.[xxxix]

What relation might this active nihilism have to the more general economic violence of communisation as the suspension and destruction of production? Communisation in whatever form, always seems caught in a tension between an immanent supersession of capital, the gradual proliferation of struggles that breach the limits of party, self management and workplace organisation, and the radical break, the institution of what Benjamin termed ‘the real state of exception’ in opposition to the state of exception imposed by the sovereignty of the state.[xl] This two-fold rhythm of communisation is paralleled by the tension, that’s evident in any attempt to theorise and practise it in the present, between a subjective activity and a more objective analysis of capital. Marx’s concept of Gewalt might be a good way to grasp the imbrication of different forms of force and power within communisation.[xli] Luca Basso reads Gewalt, a complex term meaning both violence and power, as being present in Marx’s formulation of the originary violence of capital as primitive accumulation, a violence that is repeated politically by the state as the imposition of wage labour. He quotes Étienne Balibar as characterising it as ‘violence of economics, the economics of violence’, violence being immanent to capital as exploitation.[xlii]

Attempts to formulate communisation contest this by positing an oppositional Gewalt that would break with capital politically and economically. Given the day to day Gewalt of contemporary capital it is not surprising that there are attempts to formulate projects of secession which, however doomed to failure, seem necessary as breathing spaces. Overstated as insurrectionary projects, such secession is a little optimistic as to its chances of even escaping capital, never mind overcoming it. Simultaneously, the theoretical analysis of Theorie Communiste and Dauvé/Nesic seems lacking in the necessary juncture of events to make anything other than potential interventions. Pessimism in the face of contemporary capital’s ability to adapt would probably be the best approach, but pessimism tempered with an awareness of the subjective and theoretical possibilities offered by the various theories of communisation. Benjamin wrote that ‘The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere.'[xliii] Maybe in this complex allegorical figure something like the use value of theories such as communisation resides.

John Cunningham coffeescience23 AT yahoo.co.uk is a sometime writer and occasional wage labourer who lives in South London


Footnotes

i Anonymous, Call, 2004, UK, no imprint, p.66. PDF available here: http://zinelibrary.info/call

ii Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996, p.54.

iii Tiqqun was a French journal published between 1999 and 2001. The term is the French transliteration of a Hebrew/Kabbalistic word for redemption, an obvious reference towards the Benjamin and Agamben influenced model of messianic politics to which this strand of communisation subscribes. There were two issues and associated books such as Theorie du Bloom, Theorie de la Jeune Fille and later texts such as The Coming Insurrection. More Tiqqun and related material is available at the following: http://www.tiqqun.info/; http://www.bloom0101.org/tiqqun.html ; http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html . A good article on the Tarnac 9 case and the controversy around The Coming Insurrection is Alberto Toscano’s ‘The War Against Pre-Terrorism’ available at http://slash.interactivist.net/node/11805

iv Call, op. cit., p.33.

v Endnotes, Brighton, UK, 2008. For texts and ordering details see the following: http://endnotes.org.uk/ . The introduction is a great account of the genealogy of communisation in the French ultra-left though it doesn’t engage with Tiqqun.

vi For further details on the milieu out of which communisation arose, this interview with Giles Dauvé is useful: http://www.riff-raff.se/en/7/gd_corr.php

vii.The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. Recently published by Semiotext(e) the book has been circulating on the internet for some time and is also available here: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/ Page references refer to the pdf available from the above (p.102).

viii Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, London: Antagonism, 1997, p.36. Originally published 1974 by Black and Red, Detroit, USA.

ixDauvé and Nesic, ‘Love of Labour, Love of Labour Lost…’ in Endnotes, op. cit., p.152.

xSee ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Endnotes, ibid, p.155 and the afterword in Endnotes for details of the position that Theorie Communiste take towards Dauvé and their elaboration of communisation from conditions of contemporary ‘real subsumption’. Also Riff-Raff 8 has a good series of texts around TC 11. See, http://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/at

xi Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977, p.176; for the phrase ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, p.75.

xiiMarx, ibid, p.81.

xiii Marx to Dr Kugelman [London] April 12, 1871], text available here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm

xiv See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Harper Collins, 1992, p.245.

xvAlain Badiou, Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p.272-273.

xvi The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.88 and p.130. A further suggestive connection is in the text ‘To a Friend’ wherein the 19th century revolutionary Auguste Blanqui is presented as an inspirational ‘conceptual persona’ containing the unfulfilled potentiality of the past. The text is available here: http://libcom.org/history/auguste-blanqui

xvii Tiqqun, How is it to be Done?, 2008 reprint see http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html

xviii Dauvé and Martin, op. cit., p.39.

xix Jacques Camatte, ‘On Organization’, in This World We Must Leave, New York: Autonomedia, 1995, p.19. Camatte is an important precursor to much of the Invisible Committee’s anti-politics both in his rejection of orthodox radicalism and the tendency towards secession that he expressed by moving towards primitivism. Given that he started as an ultra- left follower of Bordiga, Camatte might be the missing link between the different strands of communisation.

xx Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Taylor and Francis, 2003.

xxi Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

xxii Georgio Agamben, Means Without End, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p.3.

xxiii How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.5.

xxiv Agamben, 2000, op. cit. p.3. When Agamben speaks of power in this context it has more in common with the Italian term Potenza, usually linked to a sense of potentiality than force or violence as sovereignty.

xxv How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.16.

xxvi The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.31.

xxvii Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.184-85

xxviii Call, op. cit., p.67.

xxix See, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm

xxx The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p. 111.

xxxi How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.17.

xxxii The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.34.

xxxiii Camatte, op. cit., p.39.

xxxiv Dauvé and Nesic aka Troploin issued this in response to the initial publication of Call, one of the few instances, to my knowledge, of any overt communication between the post ’68 communisation theorists and their later descendants around Tiqqun. Thanks to Adeline Mannarini for translation. See, http://troploin0.free.fr/ii/index.php/textes/19-communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite . Tiqqun have disavowed any connection with other ultra-left currents with Julian Coupat, one of the founders of Tiqqun saying recently that ‘the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than inoffensive volumes of Marxology’. This seems like a classic avant-garde tactic of breaking with precursors, though there are undoubted differences. The interview is available here: http://www.notbored.org/julien-coupat.html

xxxv Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996, p.189- 213.

xxxvi Benjamin, op. cit., especially ‘The Storyteller’, p.83 and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p.152 and Agamben, Infancy and History, London: Verso, 2007, p.13.

xxxvii Os Cangaceiros, A Crime Called Freedom, Portland: Eberhardt Press, 2006, p.85. For Theses on the Imaginary Party: http://libcom.org/library/theses-imaginary-party

xxxviii From Agamben’s 2001 postscript to the Italian edition of the Coming Community: http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html

xxxix See ‘The Problem of the Head’, http://libcom.org/library/problem-head , a Tiqqun text that illuminates their relation to avant-gardes from Surrealism to the Red Brigades.

xlWalter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 1, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard, 1996, p.236.

xliLuca Basso, ‘The Ambivalence of Gewalt in Marx and Engels: On Balibar’s Interpretation’ in Historical Materialism 17 (2009), p.215-236.

xlii Ibid, p.220.

xliii Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 2, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard, 1999, p.541.

Source: http://www.metamute.org/

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Here are the responses to the questions that Isabelle Mandraud and Caroline Monnot posed in writing to Julien Coupat. Placed under investigation on 15 November 2008 for “terrorism,” along with eight other people interrogated in Tarnac (Correze) and Paris, he is suspected of having sabotaged the suspended electrical cables of the SNCF.

Translation of very recent interview with Julien Coupat given some days before his release.

Interview with Julien Coupat

Q. How are you spending your time?

A. Very well, thank you. Chin-ups, jogging and reading.

Q. Can you recall the circumstances of your arrest for us?

A. A gang of youths, hooded and armed to the teeth, broke into our house. They threatened us, handcuffed us, and took us away, after having broken everything to pieces. They first took us into very fast cars capable of moving at more than 170 kilometers an hour on the highways. In their conversations, the name of a certain Mr Marion (former leader of the anti-terrorist police) came up often. His virile exploits amused them very much, such as the time he slapped one of his colleagues in the face, in good spirits and at a going-away party. They sequestered us for four days in one of their “people’s prisons,” where they stunned us with questions in which absurdity competed with obscenity.

The one who seemed to be the brains of the operation vaguely excused himself from this circus by explaining that it was the fault of the “services,” the higher-ups, all kinds of people who want [to talk to] us very much. Today, my kidnappers are still free. Certain recent and diverse facts attest to the fact that they continue to rage with total impunity.

Q. The sabotage of the SNCF cables in France was claimed [by someone] in Germany. What do you say about that?

A. At the moment of our arrest, the French police were already in possession of the communique that claimed, in addition to the acts of sabotage that they want to attribute to us, other simultaneous attacks in Germany. This communique is inconvenient to the police for a number of reasons: it was mailed from Hanover, drafted in German and sent to newspapers in the Outer Rhine area exclusively; but it is especially inconvenient because it does not fit the framework of the mediatic[1] fable about us: a small nucleus of fanatics bringing the battle to the heart of the State by hanging three iron bars on the cables. From then on, they took care to not mention this communique too much, either in court or in the public lie.

It is true that the sabotage of the train lines lost much of its mysterious aura as a result: now it would be a matter of simple protest against the transportation of ultra-radioactive nuclear wastes to Germany over railroads and denunciations (made in passing) of the great rip-off known as “the crisis.” The communique concludes with a very SNCF-like “We thank the travelers on the trains concerned for their understanding.” What tact there is among these “terrorists”!

Q. Do you recognize yourself in the phrases “anarcho-autonomous circle of influence” and “ultra-left”?

A. Let me resume what I was saying. In France, we are currently living through the end of a period of historical freezing, the founding act of which was the accord reached in 1945 by the Gaullists and the Stalinists to disarm the people under the pretext of “avoiding a civil war.” The terms of this pact can be formulated thus: while the Right will renounce its overtly fascist accents, the Left will abandon all serious revolutionary perspectives. For four years, the advantage of Sarkozy’s clique has been the fact that it unilaterally took the initiative by breaking this pact and renewing “without apologies” the classics of pure reaction concerning the insane, religion, the West, Africa, work, the history of France and national identity.

Faced with a power at war that dares to think strategically and divide the world into “friends,” “enemies” and “negligible quantities,” the Left remains frozen, as if sick with tetanus. It is too cowardly, too compromised and, more than anything else, too discredited to offer the least resistance to a power that it doesn’t dare treat as an enemy and that, one by one, snatches away the sly devils [les malins] among its ranks. As for the extreme Left (Besancenot, for example): whatever its electoral results, and even if it has emerged from the groupuscular state in which it long vegetated, it hasn’t a more desirable perspective to offer than Soviet gray that has been slightly retouched in Photoshop. Its destiny is to deceive and disappoint.

Thus, in the sphere of political representation, the established power has nothing to fear from anyone. And certainly not the union bureaucracies, which are more corrupt than ever and now importune power [for help]. They do this, they who have danced an obscene ballet with the government for the last two years! In such conditions, they only force that can put a check on the Sarkozy gang, its only real enemy in this country, is the street, the street and its old revolutionary penchants. During the riots that followed the second part of the ritualized plebiscite of May 2007, only the street knew how to rise to the occasion. In the Antilles, during the recent occupations of companies and factories, it alone knew how to make another voice heard.

This summary analysis of the theater of operations was soon to be confirmed in June 2007, when the intelligence agencies published — under the bylines of journalists working under orders (notably for Le Monde) — the first articles bringing to light the terrible peril that is placed upon all social life by the “anarcho-autonomes.” To start, one attributed to them the organization of spontaneous riots, which, in so many towns, saluted the “electoral triumph” of the new president.

With this fable of “anarcho-autonomes,” one has sketched out the profile of the menace to which the Minister of the Interior is docilely committed to give a little flesh and a few faces by organizing targeted arrests in mediatic police raids. When one can no longer contain what overflows, one can still assign it a case number and incarcerate it. Thus, the case of the “rioter,” in which the workers of Clairoix, urban youths, student blockaders and anti-summit demonstrators are dumped pell-mell — this is certainly an effective move in the current management of social pacification — permits the State to criminalize actions, not existences.[2] And it is indeed the intention of the new power to attack the enemy, as such, without waiting for him to declare himself. Such is the vocation of the new categories of repression.

Finally, it hardly matters than no one in France recognizes him or herself as “anarcho-autonomous” or that the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than inoffensive volumes of Marxology. Moreover, the recent fortunes of the term “ultra-left,” which have permitted some journalists to catalogue the Greek rioters of last December without striking a blow, speak to the fact that no one knows what the ultra-left was nor even that it ever existed.

At this point — and in the anticipation of outbursts that can only be systematized in the face of the provocations of a hard-pressed global and French oligarchy — the utility of these categories to the police must no longer be debated. Nevertheless, one cannot predict whether “anarcho-autonomous” or “ultra-left” will finally carry off the favors of the Spectacle and relegate a totally justified revolt to the inexplicable.

Q. The police consider you the leader of a group on the point of tipping over into terrorism. What do you think about that?

A. Such a pathetic allegation can only be the work of a regime that is on the point of tipping over into nothingness.

Q. What does the word terrorism mean to you?

A. Nothing allows one to explain why the Algerian Department of Intelligence and Security, suspected of having orchestrated — with the knowledge of the DST[3] — the wave of attacks in 1995, is not classed among the international terrorist organizations. Nothing allows one to explain the sudden transformation of “terrorists” into heroes in the manner of the Liberation, into partners suitable for the Evian Accords, into Iraqi police officers and “moderate members of the Taliban,” according to the most recent sudden reversal of the American strategic doctrine.

[It means] nothing, if not sovereignty. It is the sovereign in this world who designates the terrorist. He who refuses to take part in this sovereignty will take care not to respond to your question. He who covets a few crumbs will comply [with the question] promptly. He who doesn’t suffocate from bad faith will find instructive the case of the two ex-“terrorists” who became the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the Palestinian Authority, respectively, and who — to top it all off — were both given Noble Peace Prizes.

The fuzziness that surrounds the designation “terrorist,” the manifest impossibility of defining “terrorism,” does not affect several provisional lacunae in French law: terrorists are at the source of this thing that one can define very easily: anti-terrorism, for which “terrorism” forms the pre-condition. Anti-terrorism is a technique of government that thrusts its roots down into the old art of counter-insurrection, so-called “psychological warfare,” to be polite.

Anti-terrorism, contrary to what the term itself insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, but is the method by which one positively produces the political enemy as terrorist. By means of a wealth of provocations, infiltrations, surveillance, intimidation and propaganda; by means of the science of mediatic manipulation, “psychological action,” the fabrication of both evidence and crimes; by means of the fusion of the police and the judicial; and by means of the annihilation of the “subversive menace” by associating the internal enemy, the political enemy — which is at the heart of the population — with the affect of terror.

In modern warfare, the essential aspect is the “battle for hearts and minds” in which blows are permitted. The elementary procedure here is invariable: individualize the enemy so as to cut him off from the people and from communal reason; display him in the costume of a monster; defame him, publicly humiliate him, incite the vilest people to heap their spit upon him; encourage hatred of him. “The law must be utilized simply as another weapon in the arsenal of the government and, in this case, represents nothing other than a propaganda cover to get rid of undesirable members of the public. For maximum efficiency, it would be suitable that the activities of the judicial services are tied to the war effort in the most discrete fashion possible,” advised Brigadier Frank Kitson (former general in the British Army, theoretician of counter-insurrectionary war), who knew something of the subject.

Once is not a pattern: in our case, anti-terrorism has been a flop. In France, one isn’t ready to let oneself be terrorized by us. The prolongation of my detention for a “reasonable” period of time is petty revenge, quite comprehensible due to the means mobilized and the depth of the failure; as comprehensible as the petty fury of the [intelligence] “services,” which since 11 November [2008] have through the press attributed to us the most fantastic misdeeds and stalked our comrades. How this logic of reprisals has seized control of the minds of the police and the small hearts of the judges, this is what the cadenced arrests of those “close to Julien Coupat” will have had the merit of revealing.

It is necessary to say that certain people are using this affair to extend their lamentable careers, like Alain Bauer (a criminologist), for example; others are using it to launch their latest ventures, like poor M. Squarcini (the Central Director of Domestic Intelligence); while still others are trying to rehabilitate the credibility that they’ve never had and never will have, like Michele Alliot-Marie.[4]

Q. You come from a very well-to-do background, which oriented you in another direction. . .

A. “There are plebes in all classes.” (Hegel).

Q. Why Tarnac?

A. Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you, I fear.

Q. Do you define yourself as an intellectual? A philosopher?

A. Philosophy was born like chatty grief from original wisdom. Plato already heard the words of Heraclitus as if they had escaped from a bygone world. In the era of diffused intellectuality, one can’t see what “the intellectual” might make specific, unless it is the expanse of the gap that separates the faculty of thinking from the aptitude for living. Intellectual and philosopher are, in truth, sad titles. But for whom exactly is it necessary to define oneself?

Q. Are you the author of The Coming Insurrection?

A. This is the most formidable aspect of these proceedings: a book integrally versed in the case histories of instructional manuals, in the interrogations in which one tries to make you say that you live just as described in The Coming Insurrection; that you protest[5] as The Coming Insurrection advocates; and that you sabotaged train lines to commemorate the Bolshevik coup d’Etat of October 1917. Because this idea is mentioned in The Coming Insurrection, its publisher was questioned by the anti-terrorist services.

In French memory, one hasn’t seen power become fearful of a book for a very long time. Instead, one had the custom of believing that as long a leftists were preoccupied with writing, at least they weren’t making revolution. Assuredly, times change. Serious history returns.

What founds the accusation of terrorism where we are concerned are suspicions about the coincidence of thought and life; what founds the accusation concerning the association of evil-doers is the suspicion that this coincidence couldn’t have been the result of individual heroism, but communal attention. Negatively, this means that one does not suspect any of those who sign their names to so many fierce critiques of the system of putting the least of their firm resolutions into practice; the insult is strong enough. Unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and this whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially repressive [policiere] character of the author’s function.

On the other hand, I am a reader. Re-reading it, just last week, I better understood the hysterical bad temper that, from high up, motivates the State to hound its presumed authors. The scandal of the book is that all that figures in it is rigorously, catastrophically true and it does not cease to prove itself true, little by little, each day. Because what proves itself, under the outward appearance of this “economic crisis,” this “collapse of confidence,” and this “massive rejection of the ruling classes,” is indeed the end of a civilization, the implosion of a paradigm, namely, that of the government, which rules everything in the West — the relations of beings to themselves no less than to the political order, religion or the organization of business. At all levels of the present, there is a gigantic loss of mastery that no word-games [maraboutage] by the police will be able to remedy.

It is not by skewering us with prison terms, microscopic surveillance, judicial supervision and prohibitions upon communication because we might be the authors of these lucid findings that one will make what has been found disappear. The characteristic of truth is that it escapes, barely enunciated, from those who formulate it. Governments: it doesn’t accomplish anything if you send us to jail; quite the contrary.

Q. You’ve read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Does this analysis still seem pertinent to you

A. The prison is indeed the dirty little secret of French society, the key to and not the margins of the most respectable social relations. What is concentrated in the prison is not a pile of wild barbarians, as it pleases some people to think, but in fact the ensemble of the disciplines that weave together so-called “normal” existence outside. Supervisors, the canteen, soccer games in the courtyard, one’s use of time, divisions, camaraderie, fights and ugly architecture: one has to have been in prison to take the full measure of the carceral in the school, the “innocent” schools of the Republic.

Envisioned from this impregnable angle, prison isn’t a pit [repaire] for society’s failures; instead, current society is a failed prison. The same organization of separations, the same administration of misery through shit,[6] TV, sports and porno reigns everywhere else, but much less methodically than in prison. To conclude: these high walls only hide from view this truth of explosive banality: there are lives and souls, entirely equal, who drag themselves along on both sides of the barbed wire, and because of it.

If one avidly tracks down the testimonies “from the inside” that finally expose the secrets that the prison conceals, it is done to better to hide the secret that the prison is: the secret of your servitude, you who are reputedly free, while its menace weighs invisibly on each of your gestures.

All of the virtuous indignation that surrounds the black hole [la noirceur] of French prisons and their suicide rates; all the crude counter-propaganda of the penal administrators who bring on camera the disciplinarians [des matons] devoted to the well-being of the detainees and the metal-plated directors who are concerned with the “meaning of the penalty”; in sum, all of the debate on the horror of incarceration and the necessity of humanizing detention is as old as the prison system itself. It is part of its efficacy, which permits the State to combine the terror that the prison must inspire with the hypocritical legal status of “civilized” punishment. The little system of prison-based spying, humiliation and violence [de ravage] that the French State uses more fanatically than any other State in Europe isn’t even scandalous. The State pays for it a hundred times over in the banlieus, and this, from all the evidence, is only a beginning: vengeance is the hygiene of the plebes.

But the most remarkable imposture of the judicial-penal system certainly consists in pretending that it exists to punish criminals when, in fact, it only manages illegality. Any boss — not just the boss of Everything — any president of a general council — not just the President of Hauts-de-Sein — any cop knows that illegality is necessary for the correct performance of his or her trade. In our time, the chaos of the laws is such that one would do well to not seek to make the laws respected too much and the drug enforcements agents [les stups] should stick to regulating trafficking and not repressing it, which would be social and political suicide.

The discussion is not — as the judicial fiction would have it — between the legal and the illegal, between the innocents and the criminals, but between the criminal whom one judges suitable for prosecution and the criminal whom one leaves in peace, as the general powers of society require. The race of the innocents was wiped out long ago, and the penalty is not what condemns you to justice: the penalty is justice itself; thus, it isn’t a matter of my comrades and I “claiming our innocence,” despite what is ritualistically repeated in the press, but trying to derail the hazardous political offensive that these vile proceedings constitute. These were some of the conclusions to which the mind is brought by re-reading Surveiller et Punir in prison. Of course, one isn’t suggesting, given what the Foucaultians have done with the works of Foucault for the last twenty years, that they should spend some time in jail.

Q. How do you analyze what has happened to you?

A. Enlighten yourself: what has happened to us, to my comrades and I, will also happen to you. This is the first mystification by power: nine people are prosecuted in the framework of a judicial proceeding against an “association of evil-doers in connection with a terrorist enterprise,” and they must be particularly concerned by these grave accusations. But there is no “Tarnac Affair,” no “Coupat Affair,” no “Hazan Affair” (Hazan published “The Coming Insurrection”). What there is, is an oligarchy that is very wobbly and becomes ferocious like any power when it feels itself to be really threatened. When his views no longer elicit anything among the people other than hatred and scorn, the prince has no other support than the fear that he inspires.

What there is before us is a bifurcation that is both historical and metaphysical: either we pass from a paradigm of government to a paradigm of living, at the price of a cruel but deeply moving revolt, or we allow the instauration at the planetary level of an air-conditioned disaster in which — under the yoke of a “simplified” management — an imperial elite of citizens and marginalized plebeian classes coexist. Thus there surely is a war, a war between the beneficiaries of the catastrophe and those who are accustomed to a less skeletal idea of life. One has never seen a dominant class commit suicide willingly.

The revolt has conditions, but not causes. How many Ministries of National Identity, lay-offs, raids of those without proper papers or those who are political opponents, young people beaten up by the police in the banlieus, and ministers threatening to deprive diplomas from those who dare to occupy their schools are necessary before one decides that such a regime — even if installed in power by an apparently democratic plebiscite — has no reason to exist and only merits being brought down? It is a matter of sensitivity.

Servitude is the intolerable thing that can be tolerated indefinitely. Because this is a matter of sensitivity and this sensitivity is immediately political — not that it wonders “Who should I vote for?” but “Is this incompatible with my existence?” — it is, for power, a question of anesthetizing the response [to the second question] through the administration of ever more massively distracting doses of fear and stupidity. And there where the anesthesia no longer works, this order, which has united against it all the reasons for revolt, tries to dissuade us by stuffing us into a small, tight-fitting [ajustee] terror.

My comrades and I are only a variable in this adjustment. One suspects us like so many others, so many “youths,” so many “gangs,” of having no solidarity with a world that is collapsing. On this one point, one doesn’t lie. Fortunately, this heap of swindlers, impostors, industrialists, financiers and prostitutes; this entire Mazarin’s court full of neuroleptics, Disney versions of Louis Napoleon, and Sunday shows that grip the country for an hour lack an elementary sense of dialectics. Each step that they take towards total control brings them closer to their fear. Each new “victory” with which they flatter themselves spreads a little further the desire to see them defeated in their turn. Each maneuver that they figure comforts their power ends up rendering it detestable. In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.

(Published in Le Monde on 25 May 2009 and translated by NOT BORED! 27 May 2009.)

[1] There is no adequate English equivalent for mediatique, which not only refers to the media, but to the spectacular, as well.

[2] There could be typos in or words left out of the original French. The context suggests that the case of the “casseur” allows the State to criminalize existences and actions.

[3] The French FBI.

[4] Minister of the Interior.

[5] vous manifeste can also mean “demonstrate” and “reveal yourself.”

[6] English in original.

more info:

http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html

http://www.tiqqun.info/
http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/v21/tiqqun.php
http://info.interactivist.net/node/3556

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