English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Civil merits and political battles of Frédéric Lordon 0:00 Should the soldier Lordon be saved? By Dominique Pagani.
0:30 So as not to drown the answer to this question in the details of what follows, let us make clear from the outset that it will be positive. The soldier Lordon deserves, and on more than one count, to be protected and saved. Not only because of the merits everyone recognizes in him. Clarity of communication in disciplines reputed to be full of jargon, critical sagacity in the examination of statements, interdisciplinary skills, from the hard sciences to the affects, passing through the strictly philosophical field, unlike specialists locked into their own discipline. Concern for form, in the properly aesthetic sense of the term, in the didactic exposition of subjects that seem least suited to it.
1:04 Few economists have expounded to us the mechanisms of finance and, in particular, of debt, in the form of a drama in verse, and even in alexandrines. These are some of these excellent qualities. As a civilian! But we are especially attentive to the soldier's merit, to his positions taken in the most current political battles. It takes more than a certain bravery to condemn the European treaty, to send back to back the Fed's quantitative easing and the anal retention of the Buba, of which the ECB is merely the front office. More generally, to dare rehabilitate sovereignism, or, to avoid any conflation, the principle of sovereignty, within a movement — that of most of his peers — where this most decisive notion of the social contract had come to verge on obscenity.
1:48 Aren't we going to get our hands dirty picking up this old rag soiled by the National Front's hand? But Frédéric Lordon knows perfectly well that if Le Pen seized it, the way one takes a flag from an adversary's corpse, it was quite belatedly, and by default, without a fight. Far from defending it, the governmental left — that is, the market left, from the Socialist Party to the trotskyist ecologists — had abandoned it to the dustbin of history. And this, in order to satisfy the demands of the formidable federalist pressure whose power had not ceased to grow over the past decades. Those thirty shameful years, as Michel Clouscard had named them. It was easy enough for the far right to pick it up there.
2:23 But our economist does not limit his combat to criticism of the dominant model alone. We know that he pushes his assault to the institutional level by proposing to set a ceiling on the rate of remuneration for shareholders, providing for confiscatory taxation beyond that threshold. Those who wince at the social-democratic coloring of the theorists of regulation will agree that such a measure, from MEDEF's standpoint at the Finance Ministry, would rather be judged a Bolshevik provocation. Finally, Frédéric Lordon knows better than anyone the importance of the theoretical detour in guaranteeing a minimum of efficiency to any desire for practical action.
2:56 He even proposes, yes, him too, a whole program for the refounding of the human or social sciences, laid bare, since the current crisis seems to designate this as opportune, necessary, even urgent — if that term has any meaning at all in the theoretical field. A refoundation meant to accompany, by unifying it, the awakening of what is commonly called the left of the left. And this is precisely where the troubles begin, and where our initial question returns. This progressive refoundation, made possible by the discredit the crisis has inflicted on the dominant liberal model, has become the most crowded forum around.
The scrum of refounders on the left of the left 3:26 People are jostling at the gate in a teeming effervescence where the most disparate factions collide with one another, from the multitudinous eco-anarchism of some to the eco-socialism of others. The most worn-out utopias rub shoulders there with the umpteenth attempt to lay bare the theory of value, the goal of the game being to deconstruct it along the way. This has earned us, through countless recent publications, the great return of Marxist studies which, since Althusser's successful takeover of the PCF's ideological apparatus — with the notable exception of Clouscard's resistance — seemed fossilized in post-structuralist purring, that is, in this case, the exegesis of an author who had nonetheless clearly stated that after millennia of interpretations of the world, at the speed at which capitalism transforms it, one could do something other than eternally replay hermeneutic extensions.
4:15 But let us not begrudge ourselves this pleasure. The virgin, the vivacious, and the beautiful today is not condemned to repeat yesterday. And one may harbor some hope that this renewal of Marxist studies deserves the exclamation borrowed from Hamlet by the author of Capital: "Well grubbed, old mole!" For it is indeed on the left of the left that this fiercely competitive scrum of refounders of every stripe turns into quantum soup, or, if one prefers sporting metaphors, an open scrum. And it is not only politics that is being summoned to reconsider everything from the ground up, but the whole of the human or social sciences, even anthropology, philosophy, and even, as if echoing the question "and God in all this," ontology, that old denial of social being or historical becoming.
4:58 The soldier Lordon is not the last to busy himself on all these redoubts of the ideological front, but the misfortune, for him and for us, is that he is above all not the first. So, like the others, he must jostle to persevere in his being, to keep his place in this free-for-all, in a time that is certainly not that of the Night of the Long Knives, but rather the day of the little penknives. And in the confusion of battle, it happens to him, as to so many valiant skirmishers, to turn savagely on allies, while allying himself with the worst ideological auxiliary of the liberal-libertarian status quo whose death knell this crisis is sounding.
Lordon turns Clouscard into a detractor of consumption 5:30 Thus, after devoting long pages of studious polemic to the assault on the Michéa hill, he has only very few lines left to tackle the ascent of the Clouscardian Himalaya, which he must have mistaken from afar for a simple mound of earth, victim of the optical illusions peculiar to steep terrain. Thus he comes off the rails at the very first foothill, committing contresenses so manifest that assigning them to mere contingency, on the mode of a blunder, seems out of the question. We are speaking of a reader who has rather accustomed us to remarkable critical sagacity, constantly nourished by culture as well as transdisciplinary skills.
6:05 Frédéric Lordon indeed presents Michel Clouscard as a detractor of the consumer society in the manner of Michéa and so many others, whose legitimate desire for consumption on the part of the masses would disturb their sleep. This inversion of meaning chains together two matrix-level contresenses. Clouscard's discourse falls, I quote, "squarely in line with the critique of consumer society." A cranky critique typical of Michéa-esque old codgers, deploring the debauchery of eternal harlequin-clad youth. The critique of the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution is nothing new.
6:37 "A Marxist sociologist, Michel Clouscard, 1928–2009, whose name and work had been fairly well forgotten, makes an astonishing return to the intellectual scene, squarely in line with the critique of consumer society." Worse still, this puritanism of a decidedly uptight sociologist, Clouscard would supposedly attribute to the valorous proletariat, so attached to the frugality of its condition that it managed to escape the sirens' song of the market, refusing the consumerist temptation to stick to modest durable goods. But Clouscard is attached, I quote, "like Michéa, though in different forms, to preserving the purity of the working class, and first of all by showing that the working class is immune to all consumerist temptations."
7:17 "It sticks strictly to the legitimate satisfaction of its needs." End of quote. A truly hallucinated reading that douses with moralizing sauce Michel Clouscard's implacably Spinozist analysis, in which it appears rather that the containment of the working class within the sphere of needs, cut off from the benefits proper to the market of desire, far from being attributable to some working-class virtus or other, is instead an effect of exclusion inherent to class division — that is, to liberal-libertarian rapacity and its extortion of surplus value. If the proletarian is in an ethical situation, this has nothing to do with theology or with moral categories.
7:50 It is, I repeat, the extortion of surplus value that makes the proletarian. This extortion is the very lack of consumption. The reduction of consumption to the mere reproduction of labor power. The objective site of indigence and misery, whereas — paradox of paradoxes — this is the situation of the producer. One could express this relation in the very simple formula: "Extortion of surplus value implies deprivation of consumption for the proletarian equals ethical foundation of the producer's demand, ethical foundation of Marxism."
8:20 End of quote. And since he cites page 55 of Néofascisme, this is indeed the occasion to read it to the end. One could propose this axiom: the progress of the productive forces, under the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, has the effect of exacerbating the contradiction between producer and consumer. The more libido manifests itself among the dominant classes and their clientele of intellectuals, the harder living conditions become for the proletariat. It is two sides of the same coin. In other words, we invert the Marcusian thesis on the relation between libido and production.
8:54 The good libidinality he proposes as liberating is, on the contrary, nothing but the way of life of the upstarts of the new system of profit. And the consumer society in which the proletariat is supposed to be wallowing is nothing but the ideological mask of super-exploitation. In Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, pages 55 and 56, 2013 edition. Faced with this univocity of the analysis, it must be noted that our economist's blunders stem from an initial contresens. "We live in a consumer society" — this shows here its matrix-like function.
Consumer society does not exist 9:25 It is nothing short of strange to see Frédéric Lordon succumb, in fact, to the "Wiederholungszwang," the repetition compulsion, in that he here reproduces the reception of Michel Clouscard within the FN's orbit. The judgment of existence is the same. Clouscard is this whip-wielding father figure of consumerist debauchery. Only the judgment of value — he is right, he is wrong, to whip — opposes them radically. But both parties subscribe to the dominant discourse: we live in a consumerist society. Michel Clouscard is, on the contrary, the first, and to this day the only one.
9:55 A generation before the crisis we are living through, he dared to assert that while there certainly are milieus, strata, even classes that consume, consumer society, as such, exists nowhere. It has never existed except as a falsifying ideological vulgate that runs through the whole of reactionary discourse, from the NPA or political ecology to the FN. He even states, not without irony, that if a consumer society were ever to come into existence, that would be, for once, the divine surprise of realized communism, and that he would then be the first to be part of it.
10:25 To be clear, what Michel Clouscard's genesis of liberal-libertarian ideology denounces is the anti-consumerist discourse of the consumer, such as it could emanate, for example, around the '70s, when some student, having failed his prep classes — which is nothing to be hanged for — but able to count on daddy's funding to retrain in sheep farming in the Ardèche or art pottery in the Drôme, allowed himself to consign to leftist vindictiveness the sole object of his resentment: that old miner from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, CGT member, and no doubt communist too, who, at that very moment, reaching retirement at the last minute, a survivor of silicosis and firedamp explosions, and inaugurating, with one foot in the grave, his first color TV, immediately found himself vilified as a traitor to the Revolution, locked into the over-consumerist cycle of metro-boulot-dodo.
The Atlanticist counter-offensive of the 1970s 11:11 Against this strange, inverted portrait sketched by our economist, let us here borrow the salutary voice of Spinoza: the idea that Frédéric has of Michel expresses rather the state of Frédéric's body than that of Michel's body. What modification could our soldier's body have undergone on contact with Clouscardian expression to end up so lacking in that cool-headedness we so admire in him? So far is it the case that the stakes of the debate lie not where Frédéric Lordon assigns them — that of cold sociological analysis, in the merely theoretical, epistemic, or cognitive field, to speak as his epigones of absolute naturalism do.
11:48 In sliding down the very first slopes of the Clouscardian cordillera, the soldier Lordon fell right onto his most neuralgic wound: the primordial contradiction between, on one side, social and political progressivism in its manifest content, and, for those who look at its latent content, its allegiance to the worst ideological counter-revolution of the postwar era, the one carried out in the 1970s at the acme of the Cold War via the vast Atlanticist counter-offensive to recapture the military, political, economic, social and ideological ground lost for too long to communist subversion — whether internal, the social gains of the Trente Glorieuses, or external, the Soviet bogeyman.
12:27 On the French front, two hypotheses then weighed on this reconquista. On the right, Gaullism; on the left, communism. Two prey not easily dissolved in the Truman-Bush continuity. The old Vichyist right, which no longer hugs the walls the way it did coming out of the carnage, would take charge of the first. It had regained some health, if not reputation, in that grayness of the extreme center between Giscardians and socialists embittered by Algeria's self-determination and de Gaulle's snub to the Holy Alliance, the Brussels Commission, and NATO — for this extreme center is hyper-liberal, hyper-European, Atlanticist, federalist, and regionalist.
13:01 As for lifting the communist mortgage, that would be the business of the forty shameful years. This is how Clouscard designates the Mitterrand generation. We are then in France, the European country where cultural and/or ideological stakes are particularly sensitive and mobilizing. Hegel liked to recall, not without admiring tenderness, that the French wear their hearts on their sleeves. The absolute priority of the Atlanticist counter-offensive on the ideological segment of the front was then to de-Marxify that sleeve. Structuralism, then, in its wake, the post-structuralists and other new philosophers, better suited to the celebrity-loving public, resistant to structural causality and other Borromean knots, would not need to be told twice.
13:40 The philosophical segment of this new anti-popular front would tirelessly hunt down totalitarianism in its most abominable forms. Universalism, humanism, progressivism, Christian-Marxism, thank you uncle Nietzsche, Cartesianism, and of course, supreme infamy, Hegelian-Marxism. Doesn't one paragon of this liquidation foam with rage when he speaks of the "infamous dialectic"? But what good does it do to affect a grand discourse? said Racine. This is not the place to unfold the history of the postwar ideological struggle.
The obscene return of Clouscard and the human sciences 14:12 Michel Clouscard, throughout his publications, never ceased to propose avenues for its intelligibility. But the reader clearly senses that the stakes far exceed a mere quarrel of experts and the epistemic field. So, to the question of why our soldier lost his cool at the mere contact with Clouscardian discourse, we must seek the best answer in the involuntary staging of this quarrel, that is, in the scenography condensed in this best-of-all statements. Open quotation marks: "A Marxist sociologist, Michel Clouscard, 1928–2009, whose name and work had been fairly well forgotten, makes an astonishing return to the intellectual scene."
14:46 End of quote. We can see clearly here that in speaking of scenography, we are not indulging in an imposition of meaning — that cardinal sin in the codex of structuralist inquisition. If Michel Clouscard is climbing back onto the stage, it is because until then, until the crisis, he lay beneath the stage, underground, to the point that he was thought dead, buried, forgotten. And now here he is, poking his nose out — that is, the mole's snout — onto the intellectual scene, thereby fulfilling, to an unbearable degree, the etymology of the phrase "ob-scene."
15:16 We will grant our brave soldier that one would panic for less. Indeed, nothing less than a spectre has haunted the human sciences since their emergence between the Paris Commune and the Great War. A spectre that slipped into their germinal core from the very outset, and which one of Michel Clouscard's most serious quips lucidly identifies: the human sciences were invented to lock down the nascent spread of Marxism. To conjure away the double critical mass. Max Weber's ideal type, Husserl's ante-predicative, Bourdieu's relatively autonomous field, the socius as libido, mother of illusio and other habitus, Deleuze's conatus which owes more to Bergsonian élan vital than to Spinozist mechanism, Althusser's economic determination in the last instance, Foucault's micro-powers.
16:02 Whatever the essential differences among these approaches, which it would be foolish to lump together, they are nonetheless in a relation of equivalence, strictly modulo their historical functions: to reduce the considerable extension of the concepts of mediation and determination worked out by Hegel and Marx against positivism, which retains only natural determination, or, conversely, against mysticism, which refuses all determination. One can finally measure the almost traumatic shock our soldier has undergone. Reading Clouscard was his first contact with the ghost of Marx, whom he had until then known only in the censored, liberal-libertarian-approved form — the philosophical poverty left over after the eviscerating operation performed by Althusser.
16:43 A Marx purged of the infamous dialectic, of alienation, of logical idealism — the only thing capable of ruining the ontological idealism of substance, like a cytoplasm deprived of its Hegelian nucleus. A Marx who will never bore you with economic, social, or historical determination — those dirty, polluting things — except at the Greek calends of the last instance, that is, precisely never. Infrastructural determination, the decisive advance of historical dialectics, the only thing capable of reconciling determinism and freedom, can thus rejoin the empyrean of the neo-Kantian thing-in-itself.
Civil war among the poor and conclusion 17:17 And now, all at once, the soldier Lordon sees this ultra-light Marxism disappear, only to see the hard version rise up in its place. In this way, finally freed of the social threat, the wonderful societal world of free and undistorted competition among Conatuses can finally divide — sorry, deconstruct — those women and men whose class consciousness had at last managed, at what cost, to attain the necessity of uniting: "Proletarians of all countries, unite," the Communist Manifesto had concluded. Clouscard illustrated most closely the effects of this bloody communitarian restoration when he declared that capitalism is the bearer of civil war among the poor.
17:54 Shiite against Sunni, macho against feminist, Serb against Albanian, Corsican against French, young against old, trendy young reactionary against out-of-touch old progressive, Kurd against Iraqi, gay against straight, unemployed against employed. Their list is necessarily unlimited, insofar as every conflict is welcome there provided its motivation is no longer social but societal — that is, more precisely, provided the opposed terms express an irreducible already-thereness, unassimilable to history, to economics, etc. An already-thereness that is natal, naturalist, substantialist — in a word, ontologizing.
18:27 Does not the author of L'Être et le Code go so far as to say that nature, unlike matter, is posterior to history? A triple distinction that, according to him, ought to be included in the elementary school curriculum. And since we are pointing out a few of these obscenities, doesn't he also let drop that those who, in '68, proudly positioned themselves to the left of the Communist Party, were actually embodying those who at the time agitated to the right of de Gaulle? A prophecy sadly confirmed by the record of privatizations to the credit of the trotskyist Jospin, the election to the head of MEDEF of another firebrand, the maoist Kessler, the elevation of the maoist and warmongering Barroso to head of the European Commission, and the swarm of trotskyist French doctors among Bush's most neo-con advisers.
19:08 Michel Clouscard does not say that lib-lib is fascist. He merely analyzes the historical process leading from the leftist flash of lightning to the fascist storm. And if one considers that this reflection was carried out nearly half a century ago, one must admit that, compared to the retrospective models the corpus of the social sciences now multiplies to explain how we got here, Clouscard's historical science can at least claim an unmatched prospective efficiency in terms of predictability. Our mission, then, will be to reassure our hero. He has only had a bad dream.
19:38 Ghosts do not exist. All this is past. The Cold War is over. NATO has won the Battle of Paris. In one generation we have gone from Marx to Nietzsche, from Aragon to Céline, from Merleau-Ponty to Onfray. All is well. Narcissus has liquidated Vulcan. Is it not time, in these hours of a general laying-bare of the social sciences, to read Clouscard more calmly, leaving nature to the physicists? One cannot, of course, immunize oneself against a return of the social repressed, of the spectral mole climbing back up from the dialectical depths toward the ideological surface.
20:08 This crisis is pitiless. But, willingly impassive, things rest before having fiercely matured what stirs beneath. Hölderlin. Dominique Pagani, August 2013, preface to the new edition of Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, Delga editions.
