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Manifesto

by the Malgre Tout Collective

Translated by Pablo Mendez and Sebastian Touza* ( and changed to non-gendered pronouns by Dave Eden)

1. The End of History

The times of revolutionary politics are over, we are told, because messianic time is dead. But in fact, it’s just the opposite: today, a libertarian politics can only exist precisely if it is able to rid itself of messianic time. One no longer struggles for the advent of the end of history or the transparent reign of freedom, simply because freedom is not a state that can be reached, but rather an act that it is necessary to incarnate. Thus, struggle is truly political when freedom acts. This is why free acts are so rare and the promises of freedom so frequent. Along with messianic time, a politics of non-domination should rid itself of the master liberators who promise freedom in the future in exchange for subservience today. Modernity conceived messianic time under the mythical figure of progressivism, which implied that thanks to progress in all the different forms of life –the technical, economical, social and political-- man would become increasingly free. And this was so because, according to the teachings of Marxism, it was the material life of a community that determined the consciousness of its inhabitants. And indeed, it’s true that consciousness is overdetermined, except that it does not identify itself with freedom. In his situation, Spartacus did not act less freely than Ché.

It’s not by instituting new ways of living that we will become increasingly free, but he opposite: it’s by acting freely that we can invent new modes of life. The same can be said about reason and justice. The point is not to reach, at the end of history, a more just and rational world. Reason and justice are not the goals of rebellion but its causes. If we are right to rebel, it’s because there is a reason, a truth, a justice in our rebelliousness.

Anyway, we should not ask ourselves what do we have to do so that humanity is free one day, but instead, what do we have to do in order to be free here and now. This is why we prefer to talk about “restricted action.” Restricted action seeks to part with that dialectical view according to which today’s revolt is validated or justified by a becoming of the world in its globality. What is broken is not libertarian politics, but rather the epic narrative in which the progressive forces defeat the reactionary ones and once and for all eradicate scarcity, exploitation, barbarism, and suffering. History has not ended, simply because it never ends. But if it must be a matter of ends, what has ended is precisely messianic time, or history with an end.

2. Restricted Action

Restricted action is political practice without messianic promise. It is, in situation, a wager without guarantees on the rupture of the status quo. This absence of guarantees is what separates it from any type of vanguardism.

Always dependent on the progressivist model, the military role of the vanguard was to show the points where a situation had to be attacked in order to attain, through its destruction, the political objective of a new status quo, completely different from the preceding one and supposedly better. Thus, the vanguard was imprisoned in a deterministic ideology according to which, once the correlation of forces of the moment was known, the future would become analytically foreseeable. Hence, the vanguard was capable of jumping outside the situation in order to look at history as the progressive unfolding of a plan: the future appeared to be as necessary as the past, and the revolution a mere acceleration of historical time. In turn, this had as a consequence the reduction of freedom here and now: the reduction of the revolutionary decision, its invention, and its novelty, to ineluctable necessity, something as foreseeable as Judas’ treason was for God.

The idea that a state of affairs subsequent to the current situation is foreseeable resupposes that the laws of historical progress are knowable. Two possibilities follow: either every new event is reduced to a “fact” that can be explained and represented according to the parameters of a model; or, if the event is not anticipated by the model, then it does not exist. Sartre had observed this in relation to the analysis that Marxists made of the Hungarian revolt of 1956: before having done any research, before starting to think about what had happened there, the event already fit within the framework of possibilities envisaged by the official model. For some, it was a counterrevolutionary reaction that in the context of the Cold War could only have been supported by Western capitalism; for others, the Trotskyites, it was a working class rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy. In either case, however, nothing new had happened: it was a foreseeable fact because it left the respective models of analysis intact. Today, something similar happens with explanations of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas. The wager without guarantees on the rupture of the situation is at the same time a wager on chance, on the non-determinate or the unforeseeable. It’s an opacity in our models: only the powerful can aspire to dominate, foresee, and determine everything that is. And us, we can only wish for that event which detotalizes the knowledge and the model of the powerful.

But the point is not to have an irrationalist vocation; rather, it’s a matter of undoing the old alliance between rationality and determinism. As a matter of fact, there is no reason to identify the historical rebels with vanguards or with powerful progressivists. When the revolutionaries engaged in action and thought, they asked themselves what could they do in history that was free and radical. But immediately a master liberator would appear and declare: “We are making history, we are leading humanity toward its salvation.” And as a result of having one eye in the present and the other one in the future, the Left has become squint-eyed… For this reason, we cannot but appreciate the words of Zapatista subcommander Marcos when he compares his revolt with the writing of a poem: far from banal scepticism, his comparison separates him from the logic of means and ends. Mallarmé certainly revolutionized poetic language, but he, however, only sought to do something absolutely revolutionary in poetry. The promise of a better world can no longer legitimate political action. Or, to put it differently, the end does not justify the means. We cannot continue to eat the cannibals in order to put an end to cannibalism. From the moment that a restricted action becomes a global action, it cannot help but think in terms of an army of the good and, consequently, in terms of a good barbarism.

Thus, during the years of the Cold War, many believed it was necessary to support the Soviet Union, “the universal homeland of socialism,” in spite of Stalin’s crimes. Who cared if millions died, if the world would finally be happy! But this does not mean that it’s necessary to confront the old revolutionary foundations with the bourgeois democratic legality of human rights and the reactionary slogan of “saving the body,” as humanists propose in order to de-politicize situations, so that there is no longer a subject but only body-objects to be saved. (In fact, restricted action does not exclude violence, but rather armed power or domination.) Indeed, today we are presented with a model that is content with being a caricatured inversion of the previous one: the messiah has been replaced by the apocalypse. It’s as if the future gave us nothing but barbaric and threatening messages. And this is an excuse for leaving things as they are and limit any political action to a bourgeois-democratic defense of human rights, of constituted legality, and majoritarian consensus. In the postmodern vision of the end of history, this is the best of the possible worlds, because any other can only offer us prodigious barbarism. In this way, political action is no longer justified by a future good but by an evil always ready to come back. As such, it does not even have its own initiative: political action has become pure reaction in the face of the worse. This is the trap in which unfortunately many “anti” groups fall.

3. The World of the Spectacle

Thus, people occupy the position of jurors-spectators --or public opinion--condemning or approving the behavior of others, the true public actors. They are not men and women who freely build a different life; rather, they are the public, represented by an opinion poll, a graph, figures. The goal is not to divide consciences but to gain support or consensus, not to incite thought but to excite common sense and opinion. This is why this spectator-individual no longer conceives themself as immersed in a situation; he is neither worker, nor woman, nor immigrant, nor disabled person, but rather an illusory transhistorical and trans-situational consciousness. Although his judgement of what happens is indelibly linked to the common sense or the consensual norm of a particular epoch, it is nonetheless lived as simply “human.”

The spectator-individual is a particularly effective invention of the era of mass media. Indeed, a media or communicational mechanism is characterized by the construction of three places: the addresser, the addressee, and the referent or “reality” that is communicated. In the mass media, the addresser is generally anonymous. Who writes the wire or the news? Who is the “objective” of the camera? The addressee, in turn, is the majority viewpoint. Thus the worker, the woman, the immigrant, the disabled person are transformed into spectator-individuals when they occupy the place of the message’s addressee. To occupy this place means to accept all the discursive presuppositions without which the message could not be decoded: in other words, the acceptance of an entire common sense. To become addressee, it’s necessary to abandon the being in situation to become a “common person,” a “person from the street,” not more and not less than a dominant or majority gaze. Finally, the referent or “reality” constructed by the media is not the concrete situation of the worker, the woman, the immigrant, or the disabled person, but “the world.” The “world” is an ensemble of facts: wars, genocide, famines, petty crimes, the dollar crisis, ecological disasters, meteorological bulletins, football matches or film releases, presented without an idea of continuity and without historical or situational contextualization. The “world” is everything that constitutes an opinion topic and is part of everyday communication and sociability.

Thus, many progressive people ask themselves: what can we do about what is happening in the world? What can we do in the face of events such as the Rwanda massacre, the hole in the ozone layer, or American interventionism? The answer may seem disappointing: nothing. Because this ensemble of facts that is called “the world” is a construction aimed at the spectator-individual and not to the person in situation. In other words, such a world does not exist outside the discursive presuppositions that constitute it. Hence, we cannot accept such a world without accepting at the same time its presuppositions, without occupying the place of the receiver or spectator-individual. It’s necessary to choose: either world or situation, because they are two mutually exclusive realities, in the same way that the individual and the political subject exclude each other. Is this an acknowledgement of the impotence of restricted, situational action in front of the world? Just the opposite: it’s the “world” what reduces any political action to impotence, because it removes it from concrete action. Which means that the mass media’s concern with the world not only puts us in a position of impotence in the face of its spectacle, but it also anesthetizes us and prevents us from acting right where we can do it: namely, in our situation.

Thus, restricted action is opposed to any vain desire for power, to any omnipotent messianism which, from a quasi-delirious position, looks at the world as it is and dictates how it should be. If restricted action is a praxis in and for the situation, it’s because its delimitation and its terms are not equivalent to information provided by the mass media. What comes to be presented as the situation must be simultaneously the fruit of an investigation, of a thought, and of a praxis which allows us to say: if this is the structure of the situation in question, then this will be our wager. When that is the case, even mistakes will be part of a moment in the reconstruction of a praxis of freedom. In this sense, it’s necessary to be categorical: the “world” as a totality of facts is a media illusion. There is only a multiplicity of situations, each of which relates to a problem, to a concrete universal that radically distinguishes itself from the “world” as arbitrary totality.

4. The World of Capital

The other temptation that has dominated the modern theory and praxis of political action is the idea that there is a situation that subsumes all the others. From this perspective, sexual repression, racial discrimination, the phallocentric submission of women, the institutionalization of the insane, the normalization of marginals, and all other social conflicts were subordinated to one big foundational struggle: class struggle. Or, to put it in a different way, all the situations were superstructural in relation to a basic structural situation: capitalism and its globalization. Of course, the point is not to negate capitalist exploitation, the tyranny of capital, or the worship of the commodity. In our opinion, the mistake is to believe that the medicalization of subjectivity, racial discrimination, the codification of the family, the “technologization” of life and other realities of our times are the consequence of a mode of production. What numerous historical investigations allow us to corroborate today is that these modes of being, acting, knowing, and even loving, arose from historical ruptures that preceded the appearance and institution of capitalism as mode of production and exchange of commodities. Thus, it would not be a mistake to speak today of a “capitalistic” era, in which multiple situations come together and connect with each other. The working class situation is therefore a concrete universal that a certain Left has turned into an abstract one, to the detriment of workers’ struggles and other struggles. For the same reason, one cannot oppose to capitalism a global alternative situation called “socialism.” As Marx himself taught us, it was capitalism itself that, by universalizing market exchange, created what we nowadays call the “world.” The world as globality does not exist without the flattening of every concrete situation --something that is qualitatively different from the quantitative violence of the commodity. The argument about the “complexity” of today’s world, which regards any attempt to transform it as vain, is a consequence of the failure derived from acting at the level of a globality or of a world-system. It is the illusion produced by the reduction of the situational multiplicity to a single explanatory principle. Among the main figures of current common sense provoking the anguish of people while ensuring and structuring their impotence are clichés such as: “the world is becoming increasingly smaller” or “in this fin-de-siècle everything is accelerated” or even “time flies.” These are all themes that characterize the painful experience structuring the subjectivity of our contemporaries.

If the world is increasingly smaller, if we cannot go anywhere because everything is always “in the same place,” then the trappings of the structure that hinders every free act become visible. But when we add to this a dizzying pace of time, the trap is finally closed. These phrases, proper to the society of the spectacle, fit perfectly within the logic of the commodity: they are statements from a world founded on the quest for profit and efficiency. Indeed, the world is small, minuscule even, when we think of it through the problem of overproduction of commodities that are impossible to sell. The joke about “selling refrigerators to the Eskimos” is a reality of the world of the commodity, which is always becoming narrower. This is why the refrigerator, like any commodity, must be perishable, for even before the Eskimo has paid the second instalment, a new model will be coming out of the factories. Thus, time becomes dizzying, time does not give time to time: such is the barbarism of a society structured on the basis of the production of commodities.

This world is reflected in the ideology of the societies of the spectacle: our contemporaries perceive themselves as “productive units” not only in the economic sphere, but also in the affective, bodily, social, etc. Thus they find themselves trapped in this freedom-killing vision which separates them from their concrete situations. The world then appears to be divided into two categories, according to a truly supermarketstyle Darwinism: on the one hand is the large mass of exhausted people (the acceleration of time and the shrinkage of space constitute, strictly speaking, the experience of depression), and on the other hand are the strong, enterprising, and productive people, who dominate the world but do so in constant anguish of falling into the first group. It’s not surprising that the concrete considerations of people in situation do not figure in this spectacular vision, given the fact that what characterizes all consensual dominant ideologies is that they make such considerations disappear. The statement “the world is one and is increasingly smaller” is the totalitarian proposition that tends to conceal that reality is infinite in its dimensions and possibilities.

To say that everything is similar and that everything is small is a reactionary profession of faith whose effects on reality are very serious. That time escapes from our hands, because of its peculiar acceleration at the end of the century, is a socio-historical pseudo-corroboration that seeks to conceal the fact that every day can contain an eternity. The fact is that, in a month of insurrections, in a few years of autonomous experience, or in all those events in which the free subject acts, the long-standing suspicion that eternity takes refuge between the minutes of the clock is confirmed.

5. The Concrete Universal

We are now going to define what we understand by “concrete universal.” We say it’s restricted political action that, on the base of a concrete situation, proceeds toward a universal rupture at the level of its quality and structure. We say universal because, unlike a global model that ignores the particularity of the elements of the situation, it questions the foundational core of that situation. This is why it would be a mistake, as we will see in a moment, to confuse restricted action with a partial, limited, or sectoral claim.

What is at stake here is not the dialectic of reformism and revolution: the global and totalitarian vision of society belongs not only to the modern conceptions of revolution, but also to reformism. Let’s take first a classical example: that of the working class. As its name indicates, this class is a part or subset of a situation: the capitalist system of production. As such, this class can make a partial or self-interested claim. Take for example a claim raised by a union. Such a claim is perfectly “negotiable” within the framework of the situation, and, from the moment the class becomes unionized, it can even obtain a favorable decision from the ordinary justice system. But, as Marxists used to reproach trade unionists, any action in that sense --even a violent one-- can be social, but it’s not political if it does not question the structure of the situation. In this case, justice does not reside in the provision of higher or lower wages to workers, but in the destruction of the system that alienates their labor time.

For the same reason, this latter position is not “negotiable,” or cannot be answered from the normality of the situation, because it implies its destruction. In this way, political action ceases to be a partial claim, so as to become a singularity: something unforeseeable by the situation because it questions its very foundations. At this point it’s no longer a matter of a class, but of an unclassifiable or anomalous political subject. This subject does not exist outside the situation. It’s a subject that arises from, but is not linked to, the situation because the situation does not foresee it. At the same time, this singularity is universal from the very moment it introduces a rupture that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation (bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, proletarians, etc.), who now have to decide whether or not to commit to the struggle that questions not only the situation they inhabit, but also what they in themselves are. This is why the commitment to a struggle is a completely different thing from external or humanist solidarity. Let’s take a second example: the black population of the United States. As a subset or part of a situation, black people have struggled for the right to be recognized as equal to white people. Not only as far as the right to vote is concerned, but also with regard to their functions: a black person should not be discriminated as a candidate for a job, since he is “as capable as a white person” to do it. Which means that he fulfils all the conditions required by the system. This is the reason why the first step towards liberation from slavery was to adopt, in the last century, the religion of white people: being a Christian was the equivalent of being “human” – being like white people, of course, from the standpoint of the white vision of the world. In the twentieth century, the equivalent was integration: assimilation into the system and way of life of white people in order to conquer the same rights. Many white people could, in this way, give lessons of tolerance to their racist fellow compatriots: “blacks are not evil by nature, there are some who are good: those who live like us whites, who are good Americans.” As a reward, they were even sent to Vietnam to show that between Americans there was no racial distinction.

But at the same time, some radical groups of blacks began to criticize the “world of the whites.” Several malicious intellectuals --of all skin colors-- interpreted this as inverted racism: scorn toward the “white man” and celebration of Negritude (black is beautiful). But the “white man” is not this or that member of the “white race.” This is not about racist arguments, but about “white man” as a model of behavior or mode of being: an identifying image to which both whites and blacks can be assimilated. Yet the point is that a black minority revealed --as feminism did in turn-- that “white man” is a norm of behavior and a worldview that is imposed to all the inhabitants of a situation. In this way, whoever takes a commitment to the black cause does so not as simple external or humanist solidarity, but as a true commitment that implies questioning a situation in which he or she is also implicated. This struggle is, therefore, concrete and universal for the same reason that it is not negotiable through any available administrative or legal mechanism.

6. The political subject

Hence, we can define the subject of restricted action as a ‘minority’. But it’s necessary to dispel two possible misunderstandings that can arise from this concept. Firstly, the concept of minority does not refer to the quantitative. Thus, women are a ‘minority’ that, quantitatively speaking, is the majority. Secondly, the term ‘minority’ has been used by postmodernists to speak of a ‘right to difference’, which is nothing but the recognition ‘by right’ of a reality ‘of fact’, namely cultural diversity. But of course, the moment they invoke such a right, these ideologists can only recognise but the smallest, amusingly exotic differences. When it comes to differences that are highly accentuated, such as the practice of genital mutilation or the tyrannical assassinations carried out in certain Third World regimes, this right to difference collapses. Can one speak of the Rwandan massacre as a simple cultural phenomenon? As we understand it, ‘minority’ is a group that is confronted by a majority-held image or by the norm of a situation. For this reason, it’s not a matter of making partial or sectoral claims that would in any case invoke, at the most, the application of human rights.

The struggle of the minority is universal in that it attacks a dominant common sense, a situational normality that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation. In this respect, the struggle of the minority is not, as we were saying, ‘negotiable’, it cannot find a solution from the point of view of the management of the situation. Thus, the point is not to be in solidarity with a minority or to intervene wherever it manifests itself, but to have the courage to become a minority or to betray what the majority, as a norm, expects from us. To become a minority is to become unpredictable: to create a political subject who is displaced vis-à-vis all the possibilities that a situation proposes. This free act is the only legitimate one, the only foundation that can be claimed by restricted political action.

7. The serious and the tragic

By founding the struggle upon a future to come, upon a better, more rational and more just world, revolutionary modernity functioned on an ‘epic’ model in which the progressive forces of liberation would overcome the reactionary armies of oppression and barbarism. The final victory was the establishment of a free, just and rational world. In turn, ‘managerial politics’ --the dominant politics of today-- function solely upon the concept of ‘serious’ matters. Serious matters are approached as fixable in the short or long term, from within the normality of the situation, regardless of how illusory such a notion might be. In the face of serious matters, there is no victory but rather a ‘cure’. All struggles that claim a ‘negotiable’ partiality fall from the start into this trap of the administrative, managerial or legal logic of serious matters. This is why it’s important not to confuse the spectacular dimension or the violence of an action with its political ‘radicality.’ Clandestine activity is not enough to transform a group into a political subject and effectively become a minority.

And so we find that restricted action recuperates a ‘tragic’ dimension of the political subject: it operates upon the only point that is non-negotiable in terms of management; in other words, it operates upon an unpredictable possible --or the ‘impossible’ from the viewpoint of the normality of the status quo. It operates precisely upon the basis of this normality, upon the point of being of the situation, that which makes its existence possible. We say that such point of being is inconsistent because it cannot be taken into consideration by the statements that give any situation its apparent veracity and meaning. In this way, inconsistency is absurd; it is a non-meaning necessarily foreclosed by the consistency of the situation.

For this reason, from the perspective of a common sense or consensus, this truth is unintelligible: it is not a fact that can be demonstrated but a reality that must be forced through. Thus in Europe of the nineteenth century, for example, the fact that industrial capitalism generated terrible social inequalities was an observation that anybody could corroborate. It was a ‘serious matter’, a preoccupation detectable in all studies of that society as well as in the novels of Dickens and Zola. But viewed in such terms, it could only invoke a humanist principle of private or state assistance. This assistance, not surprisingly, corresponded exactly to the logic of the system: the state or the charitable organisations took care of maintaining alive and in good health, during the months of low production, an enormous amount of labour power that could then be used whenever it was once again desirable. Within the logic of the system, this misery could be inhuman but it was not essentially unjust. The buying and selling of labour power took place according to the laws of the free market. That is what Marx says in response to Proudhon: capitalist exploitation is not theft because it fits perfectly within the canons of the established legality of bourgeois democracy. The capitalist and the worker ‘freely’ exchange money for labour. However, it’s precisely here that Marx introduces the idea of ‘forcing’ [forçage]: work cannot be bought or sold as a commodity because it is what produces all commodities. For this reason, this structural injustice does not reflect a failure or a partial dysfunction of capitalism: on the one hand it is perfectly consistent and it leaves no room for reproach; on the other hand, this injustice is what establishes or makes capitalism possible, it is its point of inconsistency, necessarily invisible to capitalism itself.

Thus the free, just and rational rules of the market, the laws of supply and demand, have their origin in an injustice, an alienation and an absurdity that are unintelligible to the system, and which are, consequently, perfectly legal and consensual even in the eyes of a large number of workers and trade unionists. This is why the point is not so much that injustice sparks up rebellion, but rather that rebellion forces the inconsistency of the system: it’s in light of the revolutionary political project that the system reveals itself as unjust. When the militants of the black minority come to say that a Black man can be a White man and a White man is not necessarily White --he can become black, or part of a minority-- they force a situation not only at a point which cannot be grasped and is absurd from the perspective of the logic of that same situation, but also at the level of the foundation that explains both discrimination (‘they’re not like us’, say certain Whites) and assimilation (‘we are like them’, reply certain Blacks).

8. The ethics of the individual

From this perspective, in a situation, there is no sounding of alarms that call on the citizenry to revolt against it: every individual is a being in situation, and despite themself, is possessed by its presuppositions. In this respect, s/he plays as a destiny the roles presented to them by the situation. The spectator-individual thus remains impotent in front of the ‘world’, since they can only ask themself the questions that can be answered by the common sense of their situation. The indignation or horror that they may feel when confronted with a fact --that of poverty, for example, or discrimination-- do not generate political action. The individual is always faced with ‘serious’ circumstances that lead them to appeal to the knowledge of the administration or the intervention of the judge. The individual asks themself how something could have happened, but never why. The question of why leads to the point of being of the situation, to its foundation or its condition of existence, to the blind spot or the nucleus that is obscured and inaccessible to them. It’s not a coincidence, then, that post-modern ideology, in defending the consensus and the existent legality as the framework of all politics, privileges the figure of the individual. In the face of the old mass politics, the individual is seen as a nucleus of rationality and lucidity.

From Le Bon to Freud and beyond, the man of the masses was conceived as someone who, like a hypnotized person or a zombie, nullifies his reflexive individuality in order to obey the orders of the Party, the Führer or the church, and thus finds himself capable of committing the worst types of barbarism. But why should it be assumed that individuals cease to be individuals when they come together? Why should it be assumed that a person thinks when they are alone but not when they are in a group? It’s believed that if a multitude acts together in a uniform way, it’s because each individual has abandoned ‘their’ will, ‘their’ own choice, in order to submit themself to the decision of an Other. Often this Other is characterized by an impersonal ‘One’ to which the individual delegates their reflection and volition. But in fact it’s the other way around: the individual as an autonomous entity, meaning someone who determines their own rules of behavior, is an illusion. There is nothing left but a ‘one says’, ‘one sees’, ‘one does’: when the individual talks, their voice emits discourses written elsewhere; if their eyes can see, it’s always someone else’s sight; if they acts, it’s because they are interpreting a role that has been assigned to them. The individual constitutes themself as such, on the basis of their identification with a dominant model. Therefore, in contrast to what many authors have thought, there is no such thing as a non-alienated, authentic individual, free beyond the social masquerade. There is no critical nucleus in the individual. On the contrary: by seeing themself as an autonomous and indivisible unity, they negates the fact that they are a being in a situation, that they are constituted of languages, values, beliefs or myths that they have neither created nor does he dominate.

If we can think of the situation as a theatre play, the individual in it always plays a role. Hence the illusion of invisibility, of continuity in time emerges: they are always the same because in the same situation they repeat the same role. But in fact, being always in situation, they are someone else every time there is a change in the situation: a discontinuity in time. When the ideologues of postmodernity privilege individuality, they do so based on a right to mobility, a right to the conservation of religious or political beliefs, a right to read and write what we like, to live as we will, etc. In this way they think they are responding to all kinds of fundamentalisms, when in fact they are only recuperating the old liberal rights. But these are only formal rights: they do not contemplate the essential integration of the individual, their destiny, since in order to constitute themself as individuality, they must interpret a pre-established role. The individual does not exist outside the situation that constitutes them, and they cannot claim any freedom if they do not transform, if they do not question, this situation. Hence, there is no freedom of thought that is not linked to a practice of transformation of the status quo, and there is no radical action that does not return to the point of inconsistency of the situation. To privilege the struggle for free thought by itself, as if human freedom were located there, is an individualist illusion of the ‘beautiful souls’.

Far from endangering the rights acquired through historical struggles, this critique of the individual allows us to think in terms of civic rights. If individuals can act and think without restrictions, it’s thanks to the conquest of these civic rights. These were the invention of a revolutionary project that responded to a historically determined conception of man; it was not, however, the unveiling of the 'free’ nature of the individual.

9. A non-state politics

When we speak of the subject, one must not confound this concept with the idea of a “subjectivity” understood as the nucleus of individual or collective experiences, even though an individual or a collective may constitute itself, eventually, as a political subject (and also an artistic, scientific, or loving subject, as conceived by the philosopher Alain Badiou). Indeed, an individual or a collective constitutes itself as subject when it enters into a relation, through thought or practice, with a truth of the situation, the point of nonconsistency upon which it is founded, that point of being that is the condition of its possibility.

Let us repeat it: it’s because this subject’s action cannot be anticipated by the situation, or it cannot be “negotiated” in conformity with its legality, that he or she incarnates a free act. In this way, with the idea of restricted action, we are attempting to define a politics that cannot be confounded simply with State management. Indeed, the classic definition of politics --the one we find in any dictionary-- identifies the concept with the “art of governing the republic”, meaning the ability, the knowledge or the technique to manage public affairs or problems. For this reason, the idea of politics remained inescapably linked to the idea of the State. However, one must not confound the State with a simple institution or organization. In a larger definition, we should think of “state” as the normal state of any situation. From this perspective, any “negotiable” action, any corporate or partial social claim that proves to be manageable or solvable within an established legality, is part of this static definition of politics, even if the action involves the use of illegal measures to obtain what is demanded. This is why the great challenge today is to think politics in a way that removes the issue of power from the central position it currently occupies.

Today, the State as a site of effective power which should, by force or vote, be occupied by a politically revolutionary party becomes a formidable illusion, simply because the point upon which a situation is founded and given legitimacy is not something that depends on the State. The latter only over-codifies a reality for which it is more an effect than the cause. To some extent, this is something that was known to Marxists, yet they thought that a change in legislation and in the ideological apparatus of the State would favour the revolutionary transformation of society. (Towards the end of his life, however, Lenin became aware of the error: “We have painted the tsarist State in red”.) Thus, in soviet Russia and in other States, a series of deployments of bourgeois State power were not only painted in red but were also brought to the highest level of barbarism: the medicalization of subjectivity, media alienation, normalization, racial discrimination and worker despoliation. It sufficed to add the adjective “revolutionary” to this barbarism for the victims to accept it in the name of the future good. Even when many of these old revolutionaries speak today of their projects for a society of the future, we can clearly see to what extent they continue to be prisoners of the assumptions that underlie present situations. In their projects, there is also a state-based, managerial conception of politics (they want to be ready in case they attain power). It goes back to good order, rational society, just distribution, and truly free relations between human beings. It goes back to good barbarism against the bad one, the paradoxical idea of a liberating master and the imperative of a world “the way it should be.”

We could say that restricted political action and the philosophy of the situation make an appeal to a liberating humility: we can only speak, and this is already quite difficult, of the situation in which we live. Yet it’s not only a matter of humility, it’s also a critical position: any knowledge regarding an ulterior situation that it would be necessary to attain cannot be but a vain speculation, given that there is no knowledge capable of shedding the assumptions of the situation in which it is born. Which is why the philosophy of revolt does not aspire to any knowledge at all. Rather, it aspires to a truth, a relation with the being of the situation, this hole, this opacity hidden within established knowledge, because the situation, far from rendering action provincial, leads us to the thought of a concrete universal.

10. Conclusion

The challenge of our time is to think of and invent a new liberating praxis. A praxis that implies the formation of a myriad of concrete minority organisations and experiences, not as a means of achieving majority status at some point in the future, but as a way to invent and create a life and a politics based on freedom. To renounce majority status is not the standard of failure or impotence. By representing dominant images and structures, the majority is the most impotent from the point of view of freedom. It’s necessary to understand that power-over [pouvoir] and power-to-do [puissance] are two mutually exclusive realities: nobody is more impotent than a master filled with the power to change life. Conceived and structured in terms of taking State power --either through violence or by means of elections-- the party ends up being, today, the very image of this impotence. Notably, this is due to the assumption that sustains the party, which is, as we have seen, that power is what founds a situation, and that it must be located in the State.

Under the pretext of unifying the multiplicity of minority struggles into a global strategy - -whether it is at the national or the world scale-- the party is an organization that separates minorities from their situations in order to transform them into an “alternative” majority.

Therefore, together with messianic time, what must be questioned is the party, the master liberator par excellence. As any militant has encountered as part of their everyday practice, all the work and the concrete experience gathered by the grassroots organisations, themselves built equally out of failures and mistakes, are crossed out by the “abstract” slogans of the party. And this is simply because, for the party, the global strategy and the occupation of power become priorities over concrete and restricted actions, always with the illusion that, once power is taken over, things will, in their totality, change. However, there cannot be a solution of continuity between (minority) politics --i.e., power-to-do-- and (majority) management --i.e., power-over. Even if these are structurally condemned to exist side by side, we must break with the illusion that it’s necessary to reach majority status in order to conduct a politics of the minority.

A multiplicity of libertarian groups and collectives --linked in each case to a concrete universal-- is the image of a multiple radical political power [puissance]. However, the non-totalisation or non-submission of this multiplicity to the “impotent” power of the Party does not imply that the exchange of experiences between these groups is not desirable or even indispensable. The moment is difficult, the challenge is large, but fidelity to two centuries of revolutionary struggles allows us to preserve the same impulse, the same desire on which these were inspired. Instead of crying over the ruins of the old revolutionary edifice, one must consider that this fragmentation, this dispersion and this non-totality are precisely the necessary conditions for a new revolutionary power to free itself from the totalitarian myth of messianic progressivism.

September 1995

* We would like to thank Miguel Benasayag, facilitator of the Malgré Tout collective, for permission to translate and publish this text, and Fiona Jeffries and Scott Uzelman for editorial assistance.

According to one of the collective's founders, the philosopher and psychanalyst Miguel Benasayag, Malgré Tout (“in spite of everything”) was formed in 1988 with the purpose of creating a decentralised space for the expression and exchange of political ideas and practices. While acknowledging the need to discuss the crisis of modernity, the collective has sought to distance itself on the one hand from the immobilizing sophistry of so many postmodern thinkers, and, on the other, from the deceptive thinking and action of the pragmatist left, which Malgré Tout sees as corroded by a complete devotion to influencing government policy. Some of the collective’s practices over the years include work with undocumented migrants in France, with social movements in Argentina, and with social centres in Italy. At the moment of writing the manifesto, the Malgré Tout collective was composed, among others, by Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michael Löwy, and Miguel Benasayag (facilitator).

]]> http://karactar.wordpress.com/?p=84 Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:46:12 +0000 minimal http://karactar.es.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/httpwwwlacancombadbodieshtm/  • Bodies, Languages Truths •Alain Badiou

Our question will be :

There are only bodies and languages.

This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why?

First : democratic materialism. In the contemporary world, the individual recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone, and, first of all, of his or her own body. In the pragmatics of desires, in the evidence of the domination of trade and business, in the formal law of sale and purchase, the individual is convinced of, and formatted by, the dogma of our finitude, of our exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death.

I speak here in a Center of Arts. So I can find a symptom of all that in artistic creation. The great majority or artists, today, choreographers, painters, videomakers, try to expose the secret of bodies, of the desiring and machinic live of bodies. It is the global trend of arts which proposes us a body art. Intimacy, nudity, violence, illness, dereliction....through all theses features of bodies the artists adjust our finite life to the fantasy, the dream and the memory. They all impose upon the visible the hart relationship of bodies to the great and indifferent noise of the universe.

A random example: a letter from Toni Negri to Raoul Sanchez, from December 15, 1999. In it, we read the following:

Today the body is not just a subject who produces and who - because it produces art - shows us the paradigm of production in general, the power of life: the body has become a machine into which production and art inscribe themselves. That is what we postmoderns know.

'Postmodern' is one of the possible names of contemporary democratic materialism. Negri is right concerning what the postmoderns 'know': the body is the only concrete instance for desolate individuals aspiring to enjoyment. Human being, in the regime of the 'power of life', is a slightly sad animal, who must be convinced that the law of the body fixes the secret of his hope.

In order to validate the equation existence = individual = body, contemporary doxa must courageously absorb humanity into a positive vision of animality. 'Human rights' are one and the same thing as the rights of the living. The rights of the living being to remain a desolate individual aspiring to enjoyment. Mortal bodies. Suffering lives. The humanist protection of all the animals, humans included: such is the norm of contemporary materialism. Its scientific name is 'bioethics'. The philosophical and political name comes from Foucault: 'biopolitics'.

This materialism is therefore a materialism of life. It is a bio-materialism.

Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. That is because the contemporary ideology, recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. The absorption of humanity into animality culminates in the identification of the human animal with the diversity of its sub-species and with the democratic rights inhering in this diversity. This time, the political name comes from Deleuze: 'minoritarianism'.

Communities and cultures, colors and pigments, religions and religious orders, uses and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law. But democratic materialism does admit of a global halting point for its tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to gain from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule all bodies, will be called dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of a 'right to intervention': legal, international, and, if necessary, military. Offensive actions serve to rectify the universalistic claims, as well as the linguistic sectarianism.

Bodies will have to pay for their excesses of language.

That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship - at any price!) supports the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, permits the alignment of languages.

War is the materialist essence of democracy. That is what we are already seeing, and we shall not stop doing so, in this dawning century, if we do not cut short the effects of the maxim: 'There are only bodies and languages.' No democracy for the enemies of democracy.

My goal is a complete philosophical critics of democratic materialism. But under what name? After much hesitation, I have decided to name my enterprise a materialist dialectics.

Let us agree that by "democratic" we understand the dissolution of symbolic or juridical multiplicity in real duality. For instance, the cold war of the free nations against communism ; or the semi-cold war of democracies against terrorism. So the active dualism which is summarized bu the axiom : "only bodies and languages".

. Let us agree that by 'dialectic', following Hegel, one is to understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between the two others. It is then legitimate to counter democratic materialism with a materialist dialectic, if by 'materialist dialectic' we understand the following statement, in which the Three supplements the reality of the Two:

There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.

We will be attentive to the syntax that disjoins the axiom of the materialist dialectic from that of democratic materialism. Specifically to this 'except that'. This syntax indicates that we are dealing neither with an addition (truths as simple supplements of bodies and languages), nor with a synthesis (truths as the self-revelation of bodies seized by languages). Truths exist as exceptions to what there is. We admit therefore that 'what there is' - what composes the structure of worlds - is well and truly a mixture of bodies and languages. But there is not only what there is. And 'truths' is the (philosophical) name of what thus comes to interpolate itself into the continuity of the 'there is'.

In a certain sense, the materialist dialectic is identical to democratic materialism. After all, they are indeed both materialisms. Yes, there are only bodies and languages. Nothing exists which is a separable 'soul', 'life', 'spiritual principle', etc. But in another sense, the materialist dialectic differs entirely from democratic materialism.

We find in Descartes an intuition of the same order in what concerns the ontological status of truths. Descartes names 'substance' the general form of being qua really existing. What there is is substance. Every 'thing' is substance. It is figure and movement in extended substance. It is idea in thought substance. Whence the commonplace identification of Descartes's doctrine with dualism: the substantial 'there is' is divided into thought and extension, which, in human being, means: soul and body.

Nevertheless, in paragraph 48 of the Principles of Philosophy, we see that substantial dualism is subordinated to a more fundamental distinction. This distinction is precisely the one between things (what there is, that is substance, thought or extension) and truths:

I distinguish everything that falls under our knowledge into two genera: the first contains all the things endowed with some existence, and the other all the truths that are nothing outside of our thought.

What a remarkable text! It recognizes the wholly exceptional ontological and logical status of truths. Truths are without existence. Is that to say they do not exist at all? By no means. Truths have no substantial existence. That is what must be understood by they 'are nothing outside of our thought'. In paragraph 49, Descartes observes that this criterion designates the formal universality of truths, and consequently their logical existence, which nothing other than a certain kind of intensity:

For instance, when we think that we could not make something out of nothing, we do not believe that this proposition is some thing that exists or the property of some thing, but we treat it as a eternal truth that has its seat in our thought, and that is called a common notion or maxim: nevertheless, when someone tells us it is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time, that what has been done cannot be undone, that he who thinks cannot stop being or existing whilst he thinks, and numerous other similar statements, these are only truths, and not things.

Descartes is not a dualist only because of the opposition between, on one hand,'intellectual things', and 'corporeal things' on the other hand, that is 'bodies, or rather properties belonging to these bodies.' Descartes is dualist at a more essential level, the level at which things (intellectual and/or corporeal) are distinguished. One will carefully remark that unlike 'things', be they souls, truths are immediately universal and very precisely beyond doubt. See the following passage:

There is such a great number of [truths] that it would be difficult to enumerate them; but it is also not necessary, because we could not fail to know them once the occasion presents itself to think about them.

One can see in what sense Descartes thinks the three (and not only the two). His own axiom can in fact be stated as follows: 'There are only (contingent) corporeal things and intellectual things, except that there are (eternal) truths.'

The idea that we can identify the special being of truths was one of the principal stakes, in 1988, of my book Being and Event which has been published in English last year. There I established that truths are generic multiplicities: no linguistic predicate can allow them to be discerned, no explicit proposition can designate them. I said why it is legitimate to call 'subject' the local existence of the process that develops these generic multiplicities (the formula was: 'a subject is a point of truth').

These results ground the possibility of a prospective metaphysics capable of enveloping the actions of today and to reinforce itself, tomorrow, in view of what these actions will produce. Such a metaphysics is a component of the new materialist dialectic.

Deleuze too sought to create the conditions for a contemporary metaphysics. Let us recall that he said that when the philosopher hears the words 'democratic debate', he turns and runs. That is because Deleuze's intuitive conception of the concept presupposed the survey of its components at infinite speed. Now, this infinite speed of thought is effectively incompatible with democratic debate. In a general sense, the materialist dialectic opposes the real infinity of truths to the principle of finitude that is deducible from the maxims of democracy. For example, we can say:

A truth affirms the infinite right of its consequences, with no regard to what opposes them.

That was in Being and Event, the most important result concerning the ontological nature of truths. We can say that in another form : It is true that a world is composed of bodies and languages. But every world is capable of producing within itself its own truth.

Nevertheless, the ontological break does not suffice. We must also establish that the mode of appearance of truth is singular.

What the 1988 (nineteen eighty-eight) book did at the abstract level of pure being, must be done at the level of appearing, or of being there, or of concrete worlds. It is the contents of my new book, which has been published in Paris this year, Logiques des mondes.

The clearest contemporary form of democratic materialism is:

There are only individuals and communities.

To this statement, we must oppose the maxim of materialist dialectics:

The universality of truths is supported by subjective forms that cannot be either individual or communitarian.

Or:

Inasmuch as it is the subject of a truth, this subject substracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation.

If we examine closely a truth: a scientific theory, a work of art, a sequence of emancipating politics, or a new form of life under the law of love, we find some features which determine why a truth is an exception.

Let us summarize the properties of theses productions which simultaneouly lie in the common world of bodies and languages, but are not reducible to the laws of this world.

"Truth" is the name that philosophy has always reserved for these productions. We can say that their body - the body of a truth, the new truth-body - is composed only of the elements of the world in which this body appears. And nevertheless, the truth-body exhibits a type of universality that these elements themselves have not the power to sustain. This type has seven fundamental properties.

Secondly, though generally inscribed in a particular language, a truth is trans-linguistic. Inasmuch as the general form of though that gives access to it is separable from every particular language.

Thirdly, a truth presupposes an organically closed set of material traces, traces that refer not to the empirical uses of a world, but to a frontal change. A change which has affected (at least) one object of this world. We could thus say that the trace presupposes that every truth is the trace of an event.

Fourthly, these traces are linked to an operative figure, which we call a new body. One could say that a new body is an operative disposition of the traces of the event.

Fifthly, a truth articulates and evaluates what it comprises on the basis of its consequences and not on the basis of a simple givenness.

Sixthly, on the basis of the articulation of consequences, a truth induces a new subjective form.

Seventhly, a truth is both infinite and generic. It is a radical exception as well as an elevation of anonymous existence to the level of the Idea.

These properties legitimate the 'except that...' which grounds, against the dominant sophistry of materialist democracy, the materialist dialectical space of a contemporary metaphysics.

We can say: Materialist dialectics promotes the correlation of truths and subjects, while democratic materialism teaches the correlation of life and individuals.

This opposition is also that of two conceptions of freedom. For democratic materialism, truth is clearly definable as the (negative) rule of what there is. One is free if no language comes to prohibit to individual bodies to deploy their own capacities. Or again: languages let bodies actualize their vital possibilities.

This is why, in democratic materialism, sexual freedom is the paradigm of every freedom. It is in effect clearly placed at the point of articulation of desires (bodies) and linguistic, prohibitive or stimulating legislations. The individual must see recognized its right to 'live his or her sexuality'. The other freedoms will necessarily follow. And it is true that they follow, if we understand every freedom from the point of view of the model it adopts with regard to sex: the non-prohibition of the uses that an individual can make, in private, of the body that inscribes it in the world.

It is nevertheless the case that, in materialist dialectics, in which freedom is defined in an entirely different manner, this paradigm is no longer tenable. It is not a matter in effect of the bond - of prohibition, tolerance or validation - that languages entertain with the virtuality of bodies. It is a matter of knowing if and how a body partakes, through languages, in the exception of a truth.

We can put it as follows: being free is not of the order of relation between bodies and languages, but, directly, of incorporation (to a truth).

That means that freedom presupposes that there appears in the world a new body, a truth-body. The subjective forms of incorporation made possible by this new body define the nuances of freedom. Freedom has nothing to do with the capacities of an ordinary body under the law of some language. Freedom is : active participation to the consequences of a new body, which is always beyond my own body. A truth-body which belongs to one of the four great figures of exception : love, politics, art and science ; so freedom is not a category of elementary life of bodies. Freedom is a category of intellectual novelty, not within, but beyond ordinary life.

The category of life is fundamental within democratic materialism, and we must critic the confusing use, today, of this word: "life".

'Life' - and its tributaries ('forms of life', 'constituent life', 'the art of life', and so on) - a major signifier of democratic materialism. At the level of pure opinion 'to have a successful life' is the only imperative that is today understood by everyone. That is because 'life' designates every empirical correlation between bodies and language. And the norm of life is, all too naturally, that the genealogy of languages be adequate to the power of bodies.

For all that, what democratic materialism calls 'knowledge', or even 'philosophy', is always a mixture of a genealogy of symbolic forms and a virtual (or desiring) theory of bodies. It is this mixture, systematized by Foucault, which can be called a linguistic anthropology, and which is the dominant form of knowledges under democratic materialism.

Is that to say that materialist dialectics must renounce any use of the word 'life'? My idea is rather to bring this word to the centre of philosophical thought, in the form of a systematic response to the question 'What is it to live?'

But in order to do this, we must obviously explore the considerable retroactive pressure exerted, on the very definition of the word 'body', by the 'except that' of truths.

The most considerable stake of philosophy today is certainly to produce a new definition of bodies, understood as bodies-of-truth, or subjectivizable bodies. This definition prohibits any capture by the hegemony of democratic materialism.

Then, and only then, will it be possible to propose a new definition of life. This definition would be more or less the following : to live is to partake, point by point, in the organization of a new body, which supports the exceptional creation of a truth.

The resolution of the problem of the body has for essence, I recall, the problem, of the appearance of truths. That's why this resolution is a terrible task. We have to completely explain the possibility of something new in an old world.

It is only by examining the general dispositions of the inscription of a multiplicity in a world, by exposing the proper category of "world", that we can hope to know what is the effectiveness of appearing, and then, to know the singularity of those phenomenal exceptions which are, in their appearing and unfolding, the new truths. After that only we shall be able to define the new possibilities of living in our desolate world.

We can set that the question on which depends the exception is that of objectivity. A truth, such as a subject formalizes its active body in a given world, is not a miracle. A truth takes place among the objects of a world. But what is an object? In a sense, what we have to do, is to find a new defintion of the object and it is in fact my most complex and innovative argument. Because, with this new conception of objectivity, it is possible to clarify the paradoxical status of the existence of a truth.

It is absolutely impossible to give here an idea of this very hard project, which has confronted me with the great attempts of Kant and Husserl. It is a synthesis of mathematical formalism and of descriptive phenomenology.

But you can understant that the path of materialist dialectics organizes the contrast between, on one hand, the complexity of materialism (logic of appearing, or theory of objectivity) an, on the other hand, the intensity of dialiectics (the living incorporation to a new truth). It is the contrast between what I name, after Hegel, a Great Logic and the answer to the question "How are we to live really." This contrast is philosophy itself.

We can here give only a poor idea of the program of this philosophical enterprise.

Once one is in possession of a great logic, of a real theory of appearing and objectivity, it is possible to examine the question of change. Particularly the question of radical change, or of the event. This new theory of change differs entirely from the theory of change in Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze. A real change is not a becoming, but a cut, a pure discontinuity. And its most important consequence is that a multiplicity, which did not appear in he world, appears suddenly with the maximal intensity of appearing. A new body is that sort of object which supports and give its orientation to the local consequences of that sort of change. It is a logical set of creative practices.

But what can be a general description of the potency of a truth-body?

One can intuitively grasp that a creative practice relates a subject to articulated figures of experience, so that there is a resolution of precedently unperceived difficulties. The language I propose to illuminate the process of a truth is that of the points in a world: by formalizing a new body, a subject-of-truth treats points of a world, an a truth proceeds point by point. Of course, we still need to have a clear idea of what a point is, on the basis of the rigorous data of appearing, the object and the change. A point in a world is something like a crucial decision in existence ; you have to choose between two possibilities. The first one is completely negative, and will destroy the whole process of a truth, by destroying the new body. The second one is completely affirmative, and will enforce the new body, clarify the truth, exalt the subject. But we have no certainty concerning the choice. It is a bet. A point is the moment where a truth has to pass withou guarantee.

We are in possession of everything that is needed to answer the initial question : "What is a body?" and to thus trace a decisive line of demarcation with democratic materialism. The delicate part of this construction is the one which, after having articulated body and event, opens up the problem of truths by organizing the body, and does so point by point : everything is then recapitulated and clarified. In the whole extension of the existence of worlds - and not only in political action - the incorporation to the True is a question of organization.
br> That is the path : From a theory of appearing and objectivity to the physics of truth-bodies ; or from the logical framework of the world to the essential drama of the subject. All that passing through the great logic and the thinking of change, in the radical form of an event.

All that defines a new future for philosophy itself. Philosophy has to expose the possibility of a true life. As Aristotle has said, our goal is to examine the question : How can we live really, that is, are immortals. And when we are incorporated within a truth-body, we are in fact as immortals. As Spinoza says, we experiment that we are eternal. But all that is always after some events, events in politics, arts, sciences or love. So, we, philosophers, are working durtng the night, after the day of the real becoming of a new truth.

I think of a beautiful poem of Wallace Stevens : Man carrying thing . Stevens writes: "We must endure our thoughts all night" . It is really the destiny of philosophers and of philosophy : to endure, after the day of creation, the small light of concepts, though the night. And Stevens continues: "Until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold." Yes, it would be the final step of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. The fusion of the philosophical concept of truth with the mulciplicity of truths themselves. The truth, with a small t, becoming the Truth, with a big T. It is our dream, through the night. In the morning we shall see that the brightness of Truth stands motionless in cold. But it does not happen. On the contrary, when something happens in the day of living truths, we have to start doing again the hard work of philosophy : new logic of the world, new theory of the truth-body, new points... Because we have to protect the fragile new idea of what is a truth. To protect the new truth itself. So, when the night falls, we do not sleep. Because, once more, "we must endure our thoughts all night". The philosopher is nothing else than, in the intellectual field, a poor night watch-man.

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• Philosophy as Biography• Alain Badiou

Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality... The first story is the story of the father and the mother.

My father was an alumnus of the École Normale Superieure and agrégé of mathematics: my mother an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégée of French literature. I am an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégé, but agrege of what, of philosophy, that is to say, probably, the only possible way to assume the double filiation and circulate freely between the literary maternity and the mathematical paternity. This is a lesson for philosophy itself : the language of philosophy always constructs its own space between the matheme and the poem, between the mother and the father, after all.

Someone saw that very clearly, my colleague, the French analytic philosopher Jacques Bouveresse, from the Collège de France. In a recent book in which he paid me the horror of speaking of me, he compared me to a five-footed rabbit and says in substance: "This five- footed rabbit that Alain Badiou is runs at top speed in the direction of mathematic formalism, and then, all of a sudden, taking an incomprehensible turn, he goes back on his steps and runs at the same speed to throw himself into literature." Well, yes, that's how with a father and a mother so well distributed, one turns into a rabitt.

Now the second story : about mother and philosophy.

My mother was very old and my father was not in Paris. I would take her out to eat in a restaurant. She would tell me on these occasions everything she had never told me. It was the final expressions of tenderness, which are so moving, that one has with one's very old parents. One evening, she told me that even before meeting my father, when she was teaching in Algeria, she had a passion, a gigantic passion, a devouring passion, for a philosophy teacher. This story is absolutely authentic. I listened to it, obviously, in the position you can imagine, and I said to myself: well, that's it, I have done nothing else except accomplish the desire of my mother, that the Algerian philosopher had neglected. He had gone off with someone else and I had done what I could to be the consolation for my mother's terrible pain — which had subsisted underneath it all even until she was eighty-one.

The consequence I draw for philosophy is that, contrary to the usual assertion according to which "the end of metaphysics" you know, is being accomplished, and all that, philosophy precisely can not have an end, because it is haunted, from within itself, by the necessity to take one more step within a problem that already exists. And I believe that this is its nature. The nature of philosophy is that something is eternally being bequeathed to it. It has the responsibility of this bequeathal. Your are always treating the bequeathal itself, always taking one more step in the determination of what was thus bequeathed to you. As myself, in the most unconscious manner, I never did anything as a philosopher except respond to an appeal that I had not even heard.

The third story is about the famous notion of engagement.

I arrive in Paris in 1955, during the beginning of the war in Algeria. The horrors of this war that are today coming into the open - mass murders, torture, razzia, systematic rapes - are well known to everyone. Nevertheless, we are a small number in 1955, a very small number to want stop these horrors, to be against the war in Algeria. We demonstrate, from time to time, boulevard Saint-Michel, shouting "Peace in Algeria!", and when we get to the end of the street, the police are waiting for us, striking us with their cloaks, and we were joyfully knocked senseless. What is strange is that we could not say anything but this: we have to do it again. And yet, I can tell you this, the "pelerine" cloak is not particularly gay. I even think I prefer to be clubbed. But we had to do it again, because that's what the pure present is: wanting the end of this war, as few as we were to share this wanting. I drew the conviction that philosophy exists if it takes charge of the quick of the contemporary. It is not simply a question of engagement, or a question of political exteriority, but that something of the contemporary is always raw, and philosophy must testify to this raw or take place within it, however sophisticated its intellectual production be.

The story number four is about love and religion.

Before coming to Paris, I lived in a province, I am a provincial who came to Paris a bit late. And one of the traits that characterized my provincial youth is that a majority of the girls were still raised in religion. These girls were still kept or reserved for an interesting destiny. Which gave an important figure to the masculine parade: the different manners to shine in front of these girls still pious, the principal of these being to refute the existence of God. This was an important exercise of seduction, both because it was transgress! ve, and rhetorically brilliant when one had the nieans of doing it.

Before conquering their virtues, the souls had to be yanked out of the Church. Which of the two is the worst, that's for the priests to decide. But out of this conies the idea, that I had very early, that the most argumentative, the most abstract philosophy also always constitutes a seduction. A seduction whose basis is sexual, no doubt about it. Of course, philosophy argues against the seduction of images and I remain Platonist on this point. But it also argues in order to seduce. We can thus understand the Socratic function of corruption of the youth. Corrupting youth means being seductively hostile to the normal regime of seduction. I maintain and I repeat that is the destiny of philosophy to corrupt the youth, to teach it that immediate seductions have little value, but also that superior seductions exist. In the end, the young man who knows how to refute the existence of God is more seductive than the one who could only propose to the girl. a game of tennis. It's a good reason to become a philosopher.

This is what has become the place of the question of love, as a key question of philosophy itself, exactly in the sense it already had for Plato in Symposium. The question of love is necessarily at the heart of philosophy, because it governs the question of its power, the question of its address to its public, the question of its seductive strength. On this point, I believe I have followed Socrates's very difficult direction: "the one who follows the path of total revelation must begin at an early age to be taken by the beauty of bodies".

The fifth story is a marxist one.

Naturally, my family tradition was to the left. My father had bequeathed to me two images: the image of the anti-nazi resistant during the war, and then the image of the socialist militant in power, because he was mayor of a big French town, Toulouse, for thirteen years. My story is the story of a rupture with this sort of official left.

There are two periods in the history of my rupture with the official left. The last, well known, is May 68 and its continuation. The other, less known, more secret and so even more active. In 1960 there was a general strike in Belgium. I will not give the details. I was sent to cover this strike as a journalist - I was often a journalist, I have written, it seems to me, hundreds of articles, maybe thousands. I met mine workers on strike. They have reorganized the entire social life of the country, by constructing a sort of new popular legitimacy. They have even edited a new money. I assisted at their assemblies, I spoke with them. And I was from then on convinced, up till this day I am speaking to you, that philosophy is on that side. "On that side" is not a social determination. It means: on the side of what is spoken orpronounced there, on the side of this obscure part of common humanity. On the side of equality.

The abstract maxim of philosophy is necessarily absolute equality. After my experience of mine workers strike in Belgium, I have give a philosophical order to myself : "transform the notion of truth in such a way that it obeys the equalitarian maxim, this is why I gave the truth three attributes:

1) It depends on an irruption, and not on a structure. Any truth is new, this will be the doctrine of the event.

2) All truth is universal, in a radical sense, the anonymous equalitarian for-all, the pure for-all, constitutes it in its being, this will be its genericity.

3) A truth constitutes its subject, and not the inverse, this will be its militant dimension.

All that, in a still total obscurity, is at work when I meet in 1960 the Belgium mine Workers.

The story number six is a very moral story.

After 68, during what we can call the red years, when we invented new things, when we created bonds with peoples that we did not know, when we were in the conviction that an entirely other world than that of our academic destiny awaited us, we entered into a political enterprise with a good many people, - and some of them, me included, continue this new political enterprise.

But what really struck me, the experience I wish to speak of here, is the experience of those who, starting with the middle of the 1970s, renounced this enterprise. Not only did they renounce this enterprise, but they entered into a systematic renegation that, starting with the new philosophers, from the end of the 1970s, little by little establish themselves, spread and dominate. And this is planted in philosophy like an arrow. It is a question in itself: How is it possible that one can cease being the subject of a truth? How is it possible that one return to the routine of the world This question nourishes my conviction that what is constitutive of philosophy is to stay not only within the vividness of the event, but within its becoming, that is, within the treatment of its consequences. Never to return to structural passivity : That is properly constitutive of philosophy as thought. It is what I simply called fidelity. And fidelity forms a knot, it is a concept that brings together the subject, the event and truth. It is what traverses the subject with regard to an event capable of constituting a truth.

Here again I think of Plato. At the end of Book IX of the Republic, Socrates responds to the objection that the ideal city which he had traced the plan of would probably never exist. This is a massive objection that the young people make: "All that is magnificent, but we don't see it coming!". Socrates responds more or less like this: that this city exists or may one day exist is of no importance, because it is only its laws that must dictate our conduct. That is the principle of consequence. And it is not a question that is inferred from a problem of existence or inexistence. It's our philosophical duty : to continue.

It's my story seven which is an erotic story. This is what is expended by all biographers. Will you be disappointed? I will stay within the discreet erotic genre. A "soft" story.

Just like everyone, in the 50s and 60s, we were tormented by sexuality. This torment is certainly stil very perceptible in my first novels, Almagestes, in 1964 and then Portulans in 1967. But literature is a filter here. In the end, this trouble is foreign to philosophy strictly speaking., in conformity to its great classical tradition. I would say that I learned little by little why. It is certain that sexual situations are fascinating, and it is also certain that the formalism of these situations, the erotic formalism is extraordinarily poor. And all its force depends on a repetitive injunction, with variations of little amplitude. I would say then that little by little in life a relation of charmed connivance is established with this formalism. Finally neither transgressive fascination, nor the repression of the superego are really at their place in this affair. All that is delicious, and, after all, without great consequence for thought. I have come to conclude philosophically, that as acute as this pacifying charmed connivance might be, at least for me, desire is not a central category for philosophy, and cannot be. Or rather desires only touches philosophy - just as well as jouissance - as bodies are seized in love. That is why, from this long crossing through sexual torment the final result is, as I had already said for other reasons, that love, and not desire, must instantly return into the constitution of the concept.

The story number eight is a formal story, or a story concerning forms.

I said, on the subject of the erotic injunction, "formalism", and I said it as a philosopher. Because I deeply believe that what permits a singular truth - amorous as well as political — to touch philosophy is, in the end, its form. In this sense, I would sustain that the only philosophy is formalist. Perhaps in the sense of Plato when he says: "the only veritable thought is in forms" — what is often translated by "Idea" is better rendered by "form". And I believe that the creation of concepts lies in this: philosophy conceives the singularity of theorms of truth. And there again, we have a Platonic program. Why Platonic? Dialectics is the science of forms. And form is, in philosophy, singularity. It is, as Socrates says in Phaedo, "the unique form of what remains identical to itself."

From this we have an intimate tie between philosophy and mathematics (a tie strongly thematized by Plato himself.) If the philosophic concepts are in the end the form of the concepts of truth, then they must support the proof of formalization. Whatever this proof be. All the great philosophers have submitted the concept to an overwhelming, speculative form of formalization. I think this is why mathematics must have remained a passion for me? I scrutinize this precisely - in mathematics: What is thought capable of when it is devoted to, pure form? As the literality of form? And the conclusion I have progressively drawn is that what it is capable of, when it is ordained as pure form, is thinking being as such, being as being. Which gives my provoking formula according to which effective ontology is nothing else than constituted mathematics. Which, obviously, in the eyes of the psychoanalyst, means that my desire is only there to sublimate the image of my mathematician father.

The final story, the story number nine, is about my masters.

Philosophy is a question of mastery, and this in a triple sense. First because it belongs in effect to what Lacan called the discourse of the master. Then because it supposes, in its very subjectivity, the encounter with a master. Finally and lastly, because if we look closely at it, philosophy always ends up by constituting a discourse that is ordained to a principal signifier, a master signifier, such as is, in my thought, the signifier "truth. In the three cases, philosophy is a question of mastery; So, biographically, who were my masters?

During the decisive years of my education, I had three masters: Sartre, Lacan and Althusser. They were not masters of the same thing.

What Sartre taught me was simply, existentialism. But what does existentialism mean? It means that you must have a tie between the concept on the one hand and on the other the existential agency of choice, the agency of the vital decision. The conviction that the philosophic concept is not worth an hour of toil if, be it by mediations of a great complexity, it does not reverberate, clarify and ordain the agency of choice, of the vital decision. And in this sense, the concept must be, also and always, an affair of existence. That is what Sartre taught me.

Lacan taught me the connection, the necessary link between a theory of subjects and a theory of forms. He taught me how and why the very thinking of subjects, which had so often been opposed to the theory of forms, was in reality intelligible only within the framework of this theory. He taught me that the subject is a question that is not at all of a psychological character, but is an axiomatic and formal question. More than any other question!

Althusser taught me two things: that there was no object proper to philosophy — this is one of his great theses —, but that there were orientations of thought, lines of separation. And, as Kant had already said, a sort of perpetual fight, a fight that was constantly begun again, in new conditions. He taught me consequently the sense of delimitations, of what he called the demarcation. In particular the conviction that philosophy is not the vague discourse of totality, or the general interpretation of what there is. That philosophy must be delimited, that it must be separated from what is not philosophy. Politics and philosophy are two distinct things, art and philosophy are two distinct things, science and philosophy are two distinct things. Finally, I was able then to keep all my masters. I kept Sartre despite the disregard he was object of for a long time. I kept Lacan despite what must really be called the terrible character of his disciples. And I kept Althusser despite the substantial political divergences that opposed me to him starting with May 68. Crossing through the possibility of oblivion, the dissemination of disciples and the political conflict, I succeeded in conserving my fidelity to three disparate masters.

And I maintain today that in philosophy masters are necessary; I maintain a constitutive hostility to the tendency towards democratic professionalization of philosophy and to the imperative that is rampant today and humiliates youth: "Be little, and work as a team." I would also say that the masters, must be combined and surmounted, but finally, it is always disastrous to deny them.

It's the end, now. And when I am at my wits' end, my trick is to pass the stick on to the poet. I have chosen the poet of my adolescence. Saint John Perse. With him, I can speak of another dimension of life, the companions, the companions of existence.

The companions of the poet are different from the companions of the philosopher. The companions of the philosopher are the different societies within which the question of a truth is at least posed. The companions of the poet are often the companions of his solitude, which is why Saint John Perse enumerates them as companions in exile, at the moment when he himself must go into exile. And aftet the enumeration of his companions, he returns to his solitude, and he says that:

Stranger, on all the beaches of this world, with neither audience nor witness, press to the ear of the West a seashell without memory:
Precarious host on the outskirts of our cities, you will not cross the sill of Lloyds, where your word is not honored and your gold has no title...
'I shall inhabit my name' was his response to the questionnaires of the port;
And on the tables of exchange, you have nothing but trouble to produce,
Just as these great moneys in iron exhumed by lightning.

That is why we mobilize so many resources. That is also what our monotonous biography can be used for: to constantly begin again the search for the conditions by which the proper name of each one can be inhabited.

http://www.lacan.com/blog/files/archive-1.html

There is always one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known?

Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 50.

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electric the feme covert who thinks Her'm round out the titivate anyway. Though,
having created a toll, Anima humana've instanter got in passage to scratch himself amongst another postings
every point of time.
Brian's witterings were elite abovestairs through Heather Yaxley as regards Chloranemic Parodist:

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every point of time.
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bloggers onwards roadtransport.com Disposition Shiers and even Ollie Dixon
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gratified if Number one Herr't curiosity so as to get the picture a'unfeigned' mettle and preceptor't slowness to act in the vicinity
electric the feme covert who thinks Her'm round out the titivate anyway. Though,
having created a toll, Anima humana've instanter got in passage to scratch himself amongst another postings
every point of time.
Brian's witterings were elite abovestairs through Heather Yaxley as regards Chloranemic Parodist:

Male is hand anent the negligible motoring journalists who at bottom understands blogging - cause boy dead there and does he.
And that's the pipe snippet alrighty there. Journalists recurrently present themselves unsympathetic up to assimilate brain twister there offline noteworthiness doesn't haul into flash online blogging play. Adapted to dyad years as to nifty flimflam, Brian has unmitigated his overgrown character as to intellectuality into an pleasing and of note blog. He's not unintermittently vital, alone she's prized inner man.

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bloggers onwards roadtransport.com Disposition Shiers and even Ollie Dixon
who bowel movement an capping, short and extraordinarily-admired blog up against the
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time---again Yourself consider varying would lodge his not up. Ollie design
acquiesce that your blogging auditor demands kept in remembrance sexual commerce...every 24hrs. And
during foul days and holidays ethical self's troublous, with genius really he's spanking
gratified if Number one Herr't curiosity so as to get the picture a'unfeigned' mettle and preceptor't slowness to act in the vicinity
electric the feme covert who thinks Her'm round out the titivate anyway. Though,
having created a toll, Anima humana've instanter got in passage to scratch himself amongst another postings
every point of time.
Brian's witterings were elite abovestairs through Heather Yaxley as regards Chloranemic Parodist:

Male is hand anent the negligible motoring journalists who at bottom understands blogging - cause boy dead there and does he.
And that's the pipe snippet alrighty there. Journalists recurrently present themselves unsympathetic up to assimilate brain twister there offline noteworthiness doesn't haul into flash online blogging play. Adapted to dyad years as to nifty flimflam, Brian has unmitigated his overgrown character as to intellectuality into an pleasing and of note blog. He's not unintermittently vital, alone she's prized inner man.

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