Translated from the French. Read the original.
To
Domi,
Louis,
Michel,
René
How small the world is, people sometimes say, in a tone of wonder at the coincidences of the destiny that arranged it all. The world is not small. And destiny does not explain the ghetto of impromptu reunions. The class struggle, yes. There are so few of us, in this bourgeoisie! What is so surprising, then, about our constantly ending up among ourselves? That is precisely what a social class is. The same individuals, who have the same tropisms, the same places, the same women, the same words, the same intentions, and who conform to models of exploiters. So there is nothing surprising about the world being so small.
By contrast, Domi, Louis, Michel, René and I, aware of the truths of class, know how circumstantial our complicity, our friendship, our union are, how accidental with regard to the persons, but also how historical, philosophical, metaphysical, human with regard to the persons’ intentions. We constantly lose our footing in the face of pressures, and constantly we succumb to consumer society. But in our most dizzying falls, we see our class complicity as a rappel rope, and the concept saves us from moral degradation. The other degradations have long since been consummated. Social democracy triumphs. We hate it.
Preface
Understand me clearly: the aim here is to explain friendship and to measure the effects of intersubjectivity within the framework of the class struggle. For friendship is one of the components of intersubjective relations. That is what I want to talk about. There is undeniably a dogged insistence in me on pushing class analysis—in the Marxist-Leninist sense—at every turn. I do not believe there are any limits to this analysis. I would even say: the principle behind the exercise of class analysis rests on the postulate: nothing ineffable can remain. One of the political objectives of social democracy is to keep the notion of love[1] (and its practice) in the world of the unsaid.
Another objective of social democracy is to refer to friendship as an inaccessible pathology, on which the worst political affinities will come to find support, along the lines of: fascists adore one another.
The problem is that friendship is lived as class complicity. A certain number of individuals, of different social origins (this matters little here), establish an objective and subjective consensus—said and unsaid—on the basis of which pacts of intervention and non-intervention are signed. It is this process of setting things in place, and the axes around which my personal friendships revolve, that matter to me.
Why undertake a text on such a subject? It all comes down to my specific nature as a writer. It is certainly the best that I can—by my own pretension—offer. “De l’amitié” thereby becomes one friendly act among others. A somewhat irritating intellectuals’ subterfuge. But in what way would this approach be more blameworthy than Louis painting a picture while thinking of René? We all know, then, that it is René’s picture, and the shamelessness of claiming it is just as complete. Admittedly, if one holds to this idea, Michel has never written anything for anyone, strictly speaking. But here we touch on the personal problem of Michel, who does not state his intentions, even though they are normally implicit.
In fact, friendship in the bourgeois sense (that is, the one that covers us) is the amalgam of diverse subjectivities, all issuing from different class strata. Each of us exercises the same, or roughly the same, critical spirit on our class determinations, and we systematically propose a collective synthesis of them. So as, finally, to produce overdeterminations, which are like conditions of metaphysical, pathological possibility.
Insofar as we manage to produce these overdeterminations, to that extent we find the means to bear the unbearable; for logically, going by our cataclysmic analyses, we should all have committed suicide. From this point of view, friendship works as a saving complicity. This is banal, and effective. The banality diminishes when one notes the deliberately stated will to intellectualism and to Marxism-Leninism. It is then no longer merely a matter of protecting bewildered and unhappy individualities, but also of elaborating—by way of this friendship—a Marxist-Leninist philosophy that will owe nothing to social democracy. That is where our friendship is more endearing than others, where it is more important, where it goes beyond the very notion of friendship, to the point of arriving at an implicit political charter, of the utopian type, since we all lay claim to communism without really determining its nature.
One must clearly grasp this function of multiple and complex exchanges, this “potlatch,” classic in itself, new in its practice, because of our respective destinies—original in spite of everything—and also because of our class positions.
Our saving complicity holds good at every level. It is what creates among us a balance that is at once quite superficial—seen from outside—and tremendously unifying—seen from inside. All of us have accepted an implicit political charter, as I was saying earlier. None of us has clearly stated it. We have clues, certainly. Louis’s paintings, Michel’s books, my writings, Domi’s convictions, René’s actions, so many elements for assessment[2]. But one need only trace the history of our disagreements to see that the implicit has very often played its tricks. This is one of the problems of the school of thought, which is in fact a current that has never objectively found a taker. It is in pairs that we have reflected on the reality of the others. We even have an almost morbid predilection for conceptual reflection on the reality of the others. This conceptual function, which we exercise at will, is one of the surest catalysts of our common ideas. It will have to be analyzed later on, in detail. Here I would rather devote myself to reflecting on the consequences of this practice.
First, it must be admitted that reflecting in pairs is easier: no difficulty in getting together as two, easy to talk about those who are absent; a mechanism of verbal complicity that operates to the full. What is more, if one imagined the reverse, namely a meeting of everyone to talk about everyone, it is obvious that no one would come. Simply because we have other things to do, and because the idea, programmed in this way, is absurd. Conversely, this means that our reflections in pairs are apparently improvised. No agenda, but that one is always the same. Thus, step by step, the opinion each has of the others gets communicated, and beliefs take shape about the personality and convictions of each. A process that is, once again, banal, one that would be found anywhere else, but remarkable here because of—or rather: thanks to—the conceptual level at which we place ourselves. Thus, if Christian divorces, we recognize—having talked about it, each in turn, with one another—the failure of the petty-bourgeois shopkeeper who wanted to transgress his origins by marrying the daughter of a fallen nobleman, herself turned liberal middle bourgeois. Among us, one emancipates oneself through work, and not through ass.
Likewise, it will be understood that Louis has his daughter make her communion, because in his region the religious constraints of Catholic agricultural societies cannot be transgressed, etc. It is the quality of our analyses that raises our friendship, in every sense of the term. It is the implacable character of our reflections in pairs that gives it its richness and its interest. Otherwise, we would have given up long ago.
We all live, each of us, in an abnormal isolation, too strong to concede anything to silliness. Occasional disagreements have very often proved it: better to burn our bridges with one another than to waste time on swings of friendship that are perhaps inevitable, but banal. From this point of view, René’s role is singular. His function is precisely to avoid ruptures: he himself has fallen out with no one. He is the maintenance substrate, the vector of communication through which information will pass, whatever happens. Beyond the apparent weaknesses this implies, René’s role is to allow ruptures elsewhere. He endures. He would not have wanted to choose this function. Who could have—in fact, among us—taken it on?[3]
If friendship can be defined as class complicity, intersubjective relations, their declensions and their circumstantial specificities remain to be brought to light. Each time, each of us plays a role, at each level, according to his personal objectives and his means. A banal remark, once again, but one that becomes interesting—once again—when one recalls that Louis paints or that Michel publishes books. In short, we each have our specialty, even if the others—in order to keep up, necessarily—are bound to be competent. Moreover—inevitably—competition is at work. If we take music, for example, Domi, René and Louis are in competition. When it comes to written conceptual elaboration, Michel and I are in competition, etc. Conversely, some of us may have private preserves: Louis painting, me poetry, Domi the Eastern Bloc countries, etc.
What counts here is the “ground” we manage to cover. Precisely what I called earlier: the circumstantial specificities of the declensions of our class complicity. It is a somewhat complicated formula—I concede—but it encompasses the whole problem.
Chapter I: The Dreary Desert of the Concept
“The concept,” a magic word if ever there was one, among us. At times it has explained everything. We know its practice well. But—as far as I know—none of us has analyzed the psychological mechanisms, nor, for that matter, the history of its advent among us.
There exists—we often say—“a level of the concept.” It is an expression we use at the beginning of a sentence, like the signal, the indication of a “trick”: “at the level of the concept, this means that…” there is therefore an epistemological threshold, a domain, a practice. One cannot see how—from a philosophical point of view—to avoid an Althusserian-type analysis in explaining this “At the level of the concept.” It belongs to structuralism. Another word launched—by Michel, that one—: structure. We say, “It’s the structure,” just as we say, “At the level of the concept.” At bottom, the one refers to the other, as it happens.
What does this cover, among us?
To understand as well as possible, elementary reflexes: we must trace the history. If the word “structure” was promoted—among us—by Michel, the word “concept,” it seems to me, half belongs to me. Even if now, today, the question of the ownership of these terms is of no importance (even derisory), the fact that they are historically marked by personalities seems significant to me.
To go on being Althusserian, we must admit that—especially among us—these two terms cover a practice. From this point of view, the title of Michel’s thesis: “L’Etre et le Code”[4] seems to me to issue quite directly from this practice. I no longer know who chose it (was it Domi?), but it is far more evocative for us than for anyone else. Besides, if one keeps strictly to the content of the thesis, the title “L’Etre et le Code” does not at all state the apparent axis (apparent: I insist) of the work. “L’Etre et le Code” is an a posteriori title. I would even say: it is probably the result of the consensus of our friendship and of our perception of Michel’s conceptual work that gave rise to this title. It is as in the Courts of Miracles. There is someone, somewhere, who is responsible for the new names, who prescribes the words.
That is why—rather than starting from the content of Michel’s books—it seems quicker to me to analyze the objective relations that exist between analyses of the Marxist-Leninist type and what we ourselves call “the concept.” In fact, we confine ourselves, initially, to doing class analyses. That is the sense in which we say we are Marxists and communists. It is to that ideology that we refer, and none of us has ever—not ever—repudiated this reference at any point. But on the other hand—systematically—we do not hesitate:
- either to decode the circumstantial,
- or to borrow notions from other ideologies.
This twofold remark is worth digging into.
First, we do not hesitate to decode the circumstantial. It is even the prime mover of our friendship, the first historical cause of our complicity: the revelation, the experience, the practice of the fact that this is possible. Today, we have forgotten the exhilaration, the real pleasure we took in conceptually decoding the circumstantial. We do it now because it is the condition sine qua non of our intellectual health. But yesterday… the Old Navy[5], Domi, Michel and I. It was in that café and with those three that the practice of conceptual decoding took shape.
From this point of view, we should perhaps, right away, act out the piece “the sprinkler sprinkled” and reflect on the consequences of this elaboration of the practice of conceptual decoding for the members of the group.
Domi—who was, playfully, at the origin of conceptual decoding—was certainly too young for what he had launched. From a philosophical point of view, the synthesis took place between the orthodox Marxist (Michel) and the idealist Hegelian (Domi). I myself was at the time no more than an observer—a wheel-sucker. But for all three, one and the same consequence: the crossing of what we have called “the dreary desert of the concept,” as Hegel says.
What is it, then, the dreary desert of the concept? It is that not everything can be decoded with impunity. The “sudden” (in the psychological sense) appearance of reality, of the most immediate realities, is paid for with a de facto isolation: the social class denounces the denouncers; the denouncers perceive themselves in their class truth; the “conceptualizing” denouncers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Hence friendship—our friendship—born of the crossing of a common desert. Even though we have all joined—more or less—the French Communist Party, even though we have all found new friendships—more or less—we have remained the ones from the beginning, still just as few and, I would say—without overstatement—still just as alone, because of the concept. But this “dreary desert of the concept” did not produce the same effects on each of us. And the group, which had a certain shape at the time, now has another shape. Louis claims it has “broken up.” In a sense, of course. But did it ever exist? One must beware of these phases of transition, during which mediations are restructured so as to lead to relations that may in fact keep the same ontological character. The circumstantial is not the realm of events.
In short, we will have to come back to the effects produced on each of us by the advent of the concept. For the moment, it remains to situate more clearly what is meant by: “practicing the concept.” Abstract as this notion may seem to ourselves—as to anyone—its technique is every bit as concrete.
The “concept” consists in asking the question, about everything: what is the mode of production? Who profits from it? Where does the working class stand in all this? What share of surplus value is involved? Where does communism stand? This practice must be understood as a psychological attitude, an awakening of tension, what I often repeat to myself, the way one savors a piece of candy: class hatred. It is class hatred that motivates conceptual practice. It is to the extent that I resist, from my isolated individuality, the oppression of the dominant ideology that I will succeed in decoding reality. It is because we make no concessions to the immediate meanings of capitalist society that we have been led to seek another system of reference. Admittedly, we have pledged allegiance to Marxism-Leninism. And it is in this perspective that we work. But it is because we make no concessions to the immediate meanings of Marxism-Leninism that we have been led to conceptualize. Now, how are we to explain that even Marxism-Leninism has not been accepted by us as a matter of course? It is that—while being sincerely communist—we have those petty-bourgeois refinements of mind that make us rise up in indignation before the epistemological obstacles that communist intellectuals have conceded to academic thought. Why did Marxism stop at the theory of personality? Why is there no philosophy of intersubjectivity? Why does Michel’s work remain in the shadows? Why is it that I do not get published? Why is Louis’s painting in the back of his shop? Etc. It is in the face of these self-evident facts of capitalist injustice that class hatred forces us to reflect, because there is here a challenge to our equilibrium, is there not? That is what counts: pathology. To avoid madness, immediate suicide, renunciation, there had to be a system of references that would explain this failure of each of us and justify our marginality[6]. This system of reference is contained in what we call “the concept.” That would be worth little if the only guarantee of the existence of the “concept” lay in this assertion: “we tell you that the concept exists.” But in reality three things considerably enhance its existence.
First, it must be repeated, so that no one forgets it: we call ourselves communists. A priori, we are not alone, and if people like us remain pro-Soviet (the touchstone of communism, for us), it is because we are numerous. One will do well to recall Michel’s “Ah! At last!” when the Russians entered Prague[7].
Next, Michel and I “write” the concept. Michel has published, and that reinforces the existence of the concept.
Finally, how many times—in our respective private lives, whether to astonish, or to make a woman succumb,[8] or to vanquish the adversary, etc.—have we “exercised the concept” on this or that event, from which we drew the deeper meaning, with a satisfaction or a rage that leave one dumbfounded when one remembers them? The impact of such an exercise on our circle carries considerable weight.
Indeed, it is probably this impact that is today the surest guarantor of its existence, at the circumstantial level. For—for me in any case—the practice of the concept is indispensable, the way others practice judo (and indeed there is something of that in it).
It is this enhancement of the concept—via communism, written texts and our circle—that has given it its strength. Not forgetting personal satisfaction, that is, the solipsistic thought according to which “I am right.” This counts enormously, because psychological mechanisms are not ignored and they come into play here, as elsewhere.
Finally, one will recall the possibilities—I would say: divinatory ones—that the concept provides. As in politics, when the PCF sees this or that event coming, we are able to know what is going to happen to this or that person, or this or that country. If we take the trouble, we can see the future. The sweet delectation of the mentally ill. And yet… the fact is that historical prospects are sometimes discernible. The challenge is to believe… that they are not! A protective reflex against overdeterminism.
And that is indeed one of the most frequent objections we receive, if not one of the most sincere and one of the best founded: so you believe—we are told—that there is a “destiny”? In the sense that there is a class destiny, yes. That is precisely what conceptual analysis makes it possible to bring to light: the structure of reference, the historical grounds, the objective constraints. Freedom exists, insofar as the overdeterminations are known, brought to light. That is as Kantian as can be, but so it is. Which is why we all love sport: it is the individualist collective expression of the summation of contingent rules, so that the truth of going further may come to pass.[9]
This “class destiny”—we all live it differently. But we all live it.
Chapter II: The Politics of the Revolutionary Baby
The most irritating thing—and the most fascinating—about the concept and its practice is certainly its apparently mechanistic character. As a system for decoding class determinations, the concept will leave nothing, anywhere, to chance. That does not exist. There is no chance. What purpose could it possibly serve? Interest always overdetermines the word, the gesture, the intention, the event, the slightest event. The mechanisms that are then brought to light are of a terrible banality. Thus some now claim that the slip—gestural or lingual—is provoked, as the result of a disturbance, in order to say that disturbance without expressing it directly. We do not believe that. The slip is—for us—just as meaningful as what is said. As something unsaid, it already reveals much more. But—what is more (for the Lacanians got there before us)—the slip is made deliberately, as a political power play, in order to succeed, by these small means, in traumatizing the other, who—perceiving the slip and believing it to be a disturbance—feels guilty about the other’s failing and succumbs. For every relationship is a perpetual equilibrium that never ceases to be lost, until strength is exhausted, until the persons hate one another.
Thus the slip is a politico-worldly manifestation, for us. It is with unparalleled doggedness that we believe this. What else would the slip be for? Were it univocal, the whole human race would become idiotic as a result: why make slips, then, if it serves no purpose? And if it does serve a purpose—which psychoanalysts admit—it certainly does not serve merely to be a slip in itself. Something valid in and of itself: no. One must be much, much braver than that and at last dare the unavowable: admit at last that we all control ourselves perfectly and that all of us play overdetermined socio-political roles! The worker who injures himself injures himself deliberately. It is not an accident. It is a suicide. Always. He injures himself because he no longer wants to protest in any other way. He measures exactly the consequences of his act, buries them within himself, then injures himself. And the pain only masks the betrayal he has just committed with regard to the union, political, class struggle. He is in pain, he no longer thinks of anything else, he is pitied—and not rejected. He gets his class betrayal accepted—perfectly acceptable in itself—by way of pain. People see his pain and do not think of the political consequences of his act. Admittedly, it is the pressure from the bosses, the ignominy of the exploitation of man by man, that is at the origin, that drove him to the injury, that is the undeniable cause of the injury. In general. But this particular injury, in this place, at this hour—it is this particular worker who decided to inflict it on himself. He knows his machine very well, or conversely, he knows that he does not know the machine, but he conceives the damage it is going to do to his flesh, and he wants it so.
He is terribly at the end of his rope, and rather than appealing to his union to set off a work stoppage that will lead him to improve his living conditions, he injures himself. Or perhaps he injures himself because, although he did appeal to his union, it proved powerless to improve his living conditions. His horizon is doubly blocked: downward, by the employers. Upward, by a unionism that has run out of breath. He knows, however, that he must stop if he does not want to crack. Yet he cracks, so that the horror of the situation may end. It is absurd and tragic.
The culprit, the one who concealed this mechanism, is Sartre. It is Sartre who, with existentialism, so long delayed the advance of thought along the paths we are tracing. It is Sartre who opened the doors to social democracy. It is Sartre who invented patametaphysics, which would have it that the worker has “cultured the relationship he has with the machine, to the point of sacrificing a part of himself in this exchange with the Other, thingified in his renunciation of the society that crushes him.” It is ridiculous, and designed to divert the suspicions of the Marxist-Leninists, who now have the job of refuting Sartre before they can gain access to the concept. It is vile. But it works. René keeps close company with Sartre. Is he a Sartrean, after all? He was, as we all were. He is perhaps a Sartrean as a humanist. From the standpoint of thought, he is not. Nevertheless, René brought in the Sartrean notions and the need to reflect on them. Michel is a Marxist, in the sense of overall orientation. For the rest, Michel follows his own thinking. Domi is a Hegelian, period. Louis has no philosophical culture. He has no need of it: he gained access to the concept straight from his fishmonger’s shop! I am a Kantian by origin, then a Hegelian, a Marxist, a Clouscardian by training.[10]
It is the clash of these personalized cultures that gave birth to this phenomenon of acculturation that we call the concept.
The concept is first of all a protest, a psychological refusal, an epistemological break. What I recalled earlier under the expression “dreary desert.” Then it is the systematic work of reconsidering meanings. Now, one of the domains hitherto denied to conceptual reflection (and particularly protected) is the domain of intersubjectivity. It is one of the points of imputation of our common reflection. We must speak of it here, dwell on it.
The bourgeoisie needs it, it is what saves it—that something ineffable should remain (I am very attached to this idea. I have not had the opportunity to talk about it much with the others. Yet I am sure there is a profound discovery behind it). So: something ineffable. In particular—very particularly—relations between persons at the subjective level (like friendship, precisely, for example) are systematically designated by all currents of thought as imponderable. These relations, which, to simplify, we call among ourselves intersubjectivity, are the refuge of freedom, for the bourgeoisie. Friendship—we were saying—but also love, sensibility, tension… all the components of the subjective are, in our view, datable, analyzable, criticizable, conceptualizable.
What is the point of claiming to be unable to do so? To preserve a no man’s land where all women and all men can take refuge and find—by claiming this freedom—the freedom to escape, individually, and globally at the level of a social class, the objective constraints of the mode of production. It is a sophism, the simplicity of whose trickery calls for a little attention, as always in such cases: by promulgating an epistemological prohibition, the bourgeoisie makes everything unacceptable possible in general. The principal unacceptable being, above all, the division of social classes, the exploitation of man by man, capitalist society. I have always been astounded in my daily life—far more than Louis, Michel, René or Domi—by this extraordinary submission to the dominant ideology. My excess and my belligerence know no measure. And very often I tell myself that if this submission is possible, it is because the ineffability of intersubjective relations is accepted. Everything rests on that. It is the pathos of the social classes that forbids the revolutionary explosion. The hope of at last receiving, once more, a woman’s gaze, a child’s smile, makes the most clear-sighted consciences back down.
Now, we have undertaken the immense task—I say this without overstatement—of overriding the epistemological prohibition, of admitting that nothing ineffable exists, and of reflecting on intersubjective relations the way one reflects on the operating system of an airport, seen from the control tower. The working tool is the concept. The line of research is: the intersubjective is determined by the political. Every intersubjective act is worldly. All worldliness is expressed class will. This is where the mind balks, refuses to admit, and rears up. What is the point? The truth is already there.
Our very loves, the darkest and most concealed, have been dissected, mauled, and rightly so. We know why, when, how, whom we love, with a bitter aftertaste, because nothing, despite everything, can prevent sincerity, that is to say that nothing can prevent what we feel and what crushes us. Feelings are a curious business which, even unveiled, disemboweled, closed, goes on badgering the soul with violence and depth. Knowing—in the sense of the concept—is nothing, though, compared with what we actually live. If I know that I love this woman—in the sense of the concept—that changes nothing: I love her! But the derision, the magnitude, is stronger, precisely because I know that I love her and why I love her.
For me, it is poetry and music[11] that saved me. For René, it is sport and writing; for Domi, it is music and teaching; for Michel, it is writing and sport. For Louis, it is painting and music. We all have our tricks for saving ourselves, with music as a common trait, but they are tricks, and the rescue is detestable.
This revelation of politico-worldly mechanisms has shaken us considerably and made us evolve, for fifteen years now.
Philosophical, psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical, materialist, economic research stimulated us tremendously, precisely through its multidisciplinary character. At a time when multidisciplinarity was not even mentioned, we were at the Old Navy confronting the field of each of these disciplines, so as to manage to extract a common, operational framework, which we called the concept. It was exhilarating, it must be said. It had to be done. Everything went into it, all our cultures, all our readings, all our borrowings. A tremendous game of acculturation. Putting it into practice was also worth its weight in gold: everything went into it, from the slightest bistro detail that the Old Navy offered us, to this or that international situation, or this or that pathological sign in this or that 100-meter runner. We succeeded. We had to: we rejected the dominant thought of the day, namely Sartre, Althusser, Balibar, Lacan and others, not to mention layabouts like Reich, Guettari, Marcuse and company, whom I personally could not care less about and whom, besides, I have not even read. Just leafed through. That is enough: they all say the same thing. Michel, in “Néo fascisme et idéologie du désir,” has moreover amply shown an example of conceptualization as we understand it, without any need here to go back over that quarrel of schools. Besides, I do not believe that pamphlet was necessary. Michel was irritated by Guettari and Deleuze. It is silly. There are better things to do. Me, I don’t give a damn. I was talking recently with someone who was asking me to explain this notion of the concept. At that moment, a child started crying next door. Peculiar cries, for they had a calm density, which clearly expressed the baby’s distress, but they remained very restrained, considered. No panic could be heard, but rather the expression—through the cry—of an irritating disturbance that one would nevertheless manage to master alone. There was a strength in those cries, which said: “I’ll pull through: but, friends, I’ve just had a problem, that’s for sure.” So I immediately decoded this cry, explaining what I have just written. Then I pushed further, pointing out that it would be perfectly possible to communicate with this baby, to exchange brief pieces of information about his situation as a baby. It would be enough to take one’s time, to associate a certain number of words, objects and gestures with one another in order to convey assessments. It would take time, but it is possible. I mean exactly this: it is a matter of communicating with this baby at the metaphysical level, by way of the organic. The baby is perfectly capable of speaking about auto-genetics. He is particularly well placed to do so! He can make assessments of his own development. That is what he knows best. It is not a question of talking with him about the situation of the Kurds in Iran, but about what he knows. That is to say: himself. To push the point, I said that if, for example, one calmly associated the pleasure of the bottle with a book—whose purpose one has first indicated, by leafing through it, by reading it, etc.—the baby will thereafter permanently associate the fabulous pleasure of the bottle with the pleasure of reading, even if he has only a confused idea of reading. Everyone knows that. Starting from this idea, I said that ideally children ought to be raised this way. But that there are two obstacles. The first is of a moral order: which objects would be allowed in? For if I associate a bottle and a book, well and good. But if I associate a pistol and a bottle, there is a problem. But that is a matter for civil society and is not very important. The greatest obstacle lies elsewhere; for it will be objected: “How horrible! Why, what you are doing there is monstrous! That poor little baby. He is not a machine. Let him develop, this innocent creature, as things come.” In short: there is an ineffable, an imponderable, an element of chance. As we now know, this sequence erects that epistemological barrier; what we draw from the concept has the means to go further. Here, conceptual analysis is sharp and clear: there are no innocent creatures. There is no spontaneous development. The baby is already hyper-politicized. He knows what he is doing. He is innocent of nothing at all, because those around him immediately proceeded to his ideological integration. How? Well, precisely by communicating with the baby through the association of words, objects and gestures. As with the book or the pistol. Only, everything is concealed, unspoken. For two reasons: if it were said, the epistemological prohibition that protects the bourgeoisie would collapse of its own accord. And above all it would be necessary to justify, term by term, all the information communicated to babies, that is to say the political intention behind it. Now this political intention is the division of society into social classes, the exploitation of man by man, capitalist society, social-democratic intersubjectivity.
Let us imagine the reverse; namely, that I am going to communicate to the baby, as quickly as possible, that Marxist-Leninist notion which is class struggle, economic exploitation. How could I go about it? By associating, for example, the pleasure of the bottle (that is the base, the element of reference for the baby) with the difficulties of earning money. To that end: bottle, pleasure/money, pain/money–bottle. Through a series of obvious associations, I show that money is hard to earn, the bottle is hard to buy, the pleasure is there to be taken.
Thus the baby learns the difficulties I have in earning some cash, the difficulties I have in earning his bottle, and the pleasure—absolutely contradictory, then—that there is in drinking the bottle.
At this point of exchange—which will be granted to be particularly politicized in relation to the development of objective information that the baby possesses for the time being—what can happen?
Let us analyze the consequences term by term. For the baby, nothing special on the face of it: he has quietly integrated data, like a computer. However, an enormous difficulty may arise: he perceives the monstrous contradiction of capitalist society. Why not? It is possible. Indeed, how is he going to accept the fact that the bottle provides pleasure, while money, and therefore the bottle, are so hard to obtain? He realizes that something is wrong at that level. He loves his father or his mother, who gives him the bottle. He can see that the pleasure of the bottle is individualistic, since the person who gives it to him has suffered to obtain it. He can see that he is satisfied by the other’s dissatisfaction. The conflict is open. There is a 95% chance that he will lose the pleasure of eating. He contents himself with taking sustenance, because he also knows that he must feed his body so that the organism may pursue its development. Still by the same procedures, he is given the information that all is well, that is to say that it is normal to end up with the pleasure/bottle dissociation. One can drink one’s bottle without getting a kick out of it: the body is being fed. Then the baby raises—de facto—the question: “when can I get my kicks? when is pleasure possible with impunity?” Answer: at his level of intellectual and organic development, in only one way: physical effort. He is taught to do gymnastics. Or to shake a rattle so as to extract from it a meaningless noise that he is made to love (whereas this noise is, moreover, often hideous); he will be made to shake a rattle for the pleasure one can derive from sensorimotor coordination, for the pleasure of balance, of physical balance, for the pleasure of the material act in itself.
But—for babies always pull through—the important, serious, crippling consequences lie elsewhere.
With regard to capitalist society, what has happened? First, parents who would engage in this kind of experiment are monstrous, people would say. Is a baby a test tube? Next, conducting experiments might just about pass (“you are free to do what you like in your own home, even if we, for our part, find that vile”), but to take advantage of a poor innocent in order to instill political ideas in him and, worse, revolutionary, communist ideas! Not to mention the fact that the child later on, thus awakened to class consciousness, runs the risk of being particularly marginalized.
Good. We have carried the conceptual analysis of the case of the revolutionary baby through to the end.
I will now raise the question of how, then, bourgeois capitalist society goes about—for its part—forming its social-democratic babies? It does just as we—for our part—would like to do it in order to form revolutionary babies.
But it does not say so, of course.
And even the most sincere and most orthodox communists would not for anything in the world admit that babies ought to be raised this way. Why? Well—they say—because babies are pure innocence. Why do they say that? Because the dominant ideology compels them to believe it. We, for our part, assert that babies are not innocent at all. They are scoundrels[12] like everyone else, who have a highly effective politico-organic approach. The proof: he goes on doing practically nothing until the age of 18, living shamefully at the expense of the productive forces. I mean: shamefully, not because they do not work. That goes without saying: there is no question of putting babies to work. Shamefully, because the scheme of a baby, and later on the scheme of a child, of an adolescent, is to accept social democracy outright, because it suits him. That is where he is scandalous. For later on the signs of the inadmissible character of exploitation on the part of man will appear over and over again, and he will refuse them so that his cushy position may last, his own personal exploitation.
I was saying a moment ago: capitalist society forms social-democratic babies just as we would like to be able to form revolutionary babies. To get this idea across, I would like to go back to the example of the bottle and the pleasure the baby derives from it, and to see in this case how bourgeois ideology gets through even by way of the working class. For the working class protects its babies as the bourgeoisie or the peasantry protects its own: they are poor innocent beings, and there will be time enough to teach them the harsh realities of life. I find that, unfortunately, babies receive a very thorough political training from the very first day of their lives. And as this training is social-democratic, it cannot be denounced, since it rests on the principle that nothing of the kind takes place. The bigger the lie, the better it goes down.
Let us see how.
The baby receives his bottle. Pleasure provided. Associated with the mother’s smile, with the calm surroundings. Communicating the idea that food belongs to an unproblematic universe. Consumption must be immediate, and foodstuffs have no origin, no history, no value. No one raises the question of where they come from and what efforts they required in order to be obtained. Some work, others consume, and that goes without saying. The trick is done. The training in the exploitation of man by man has gone through, been integrated, accepted. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
If what I have just said seems banal, it is nevertheless (if one wished to be indignant, as the bourgeois were a moment ago about the revolutionary baby) just as vile and inadmissible as dissociating pleasure and the bottle through an understanding of the difficulties one has in earning one’s living![13]
Term by term, for us, then, the concept makes it possible to analyze things. All the results of this analysis rest—as I was telling him earlier—on the principle of the political. That is what political means: the understanding of the overdetermining mechanisms of intersubjectivity, and this intersubjectivity itself.
Chapter III: Love, Vertigo of Pathos
Love is comprehensible and livable only as a political act, a politico-worldly act. The concept serves to bring its real meanings to light. For—at the level of intersubjectivity, that is—it may just about pass that the baby be sacrificed on the altar of class struggles, but that anyone could so much as suggest that love obeys laws, overdeterminations, …! Madman, they will say.
Well, no.
We believe that love is a class stereotype.
This belief is one of the forces that bring us closest together. That is why I speak of it here in particular. Conceptualization—as a principle of reflection—the political and the worldly—as results of the exercise of this principle of reflection—there you have the three foundations of our intellectual substratum and so, there you have the ideological ground on which our friendship is established. But love, like sports, the arts, children, death, work—these are so many themes of reflection (and no longer principles) on which we have made great headway.
Of course, whether it be Michel in his work, and more particularly in “L’Etre et le Code,” or I myself in certain texts[14], we have set out the academic results of this research. That is not what I would like to return to here. I would rather speak again of a more personalized approach to love. Personalized in a sense at once anecdotal and pathological.
Because our failures in this area are a tremendous catalyst. We are all divorced, all with a child, except Michel, of course, who for his part had failed before us. It must be said in his defense that he has perhaps been reflecting for longer! One should not imagine, however, that any one of us has—by who knows what miracle—managed to escape sentimentality. But none of us has escaped, either, the conceptual analysis of his sentimentality. I wanted—more than others—to play love to the hilt as a class transgression (for that is essentially what it is about: given the barriers of class, two people make the absolutely idealist hypothesis that it will be possible, through and within intersubjectivity, to cross these class barriers). I am the son of restaurant owners, the well-to-do middle merchant bourgeoisie, from the colonies, expelled from Morocco and therefore fallen. Lashed in my pride, broken in my sensibility as a petty bourgeois of the propertied right, I—through the cultivation of the negative—first reconstituted a center-left persona who seeks to emancipate himself through intellectualism. That is my (banal) profile as a young man of 18. Close by (in the sociological, politico-worldly sense) a young woman from a nobility of the sword that had fallen to the well-to-do middle bourgeoisie: the father an architect and president of the Rotary. The one was falling downward—more or less—the other was falling upward.
An encounter of convergent class interests, but a divergent social history: the insurmountable hatred of the nobility of the sword for the merchant bourgeoisie. An attempt to subsume this class hatred under the pathos of love, so as to offer respectively: to her, recognition through intellectualism (essentially a philosophical and poetic function); to him, recognition through ennoblement, at least moral.
As soon as social democracy had exerted enough pressure on the two of us, notably by relaunching the slogan “Consume!” every day, the little intellectual clerk hardened in his class positions and the salon lady opened herself to pleasure. The fundamental divergences resurfaced. Pathos could not subsume the objective truths. Intersubjectivity retreated before the political stakes and the historical significance of a sentimentalist overdetermination of class struggle. Love gave back its shirt and the concept reclaimed its rights.
This same analysis could be made for each of us. No matter. We must return to the mechanisms, or rather to a few mechanisms, of this pathological function.
In “Populations et Subsistances”[15], I analyzed what we call coexistence.
We have never let go of this analysis. We believe in it. Michel’s work says as much on its side, and anyone who took the trouble to meet us would experience it.
But this quick analysis certainly lacks an interpretation of the impact. That famous notion, on which we worked at very great length. The impact is the moment of choice, the moment when the couple forms. For even granting that class prescriptions weigh enormously on whether couples form or come apart, the choice of a spouse still remains to be explained. “The impact” is the key word that sums up, for us, the theory of the choice of spouse that we developed.
The impact is the tacit acceptance, by two people, of an acculturation of subjectivities, in order to attempt the impossible: the transgression of the objective. One need only measure the extraordinary time spent—take into account the manifold convolutions, to have one’s suspicions aroused. People’s availability can only be understood and justified as an act of consumers, of extortioners, of non-producers. How else is it to be understood? The impact is the felt hypothesis that “this is possible.” It is the acceptance of the vertigo of pathos. Unfortunately, this acceptance is not univocal. It is also political. In the tacit recognition of common pathological interests, there are also, on both sides, dramatic unspoken things: the pursuit of sexual pleasure, for the fleeting and derisory satisfactions it can bring; the automatic concealment of personal mechanisms, safeguard reflexes; the immediate and puerile construction of a worldly and conceited being; the patent intention of diverting the will toward the social democracy of happiness; the de facto renunciation of class hatred, the hatred that guarantees objective consciousness; the repeated betrayal of intimate convictions, so that harmony may come about, etc. And finally, above all, the politico-worldly dissociation of pleasure and reproduction, the cultivation of sterility, the institutionalized elaboration of non-productive ejaculation, the absence of childbearing. Unless, on the contrary[16]… But that is worse!
Now we, for our part, wanted to tear ourselves away from this secret intimism in order to understand its structure. We had our cases before our eyes. We dissected them.
How many nights did we spend, Michel and I for example, going back second by second over the slightest start of the woman he had then decided to love? The gradual revelation that class struggle is the driving force of intersubjective rapprochements was fascinating, painful, then tragic for Michel. What could we have done. What would be the use of imagining a sturdier system than ours. We have tested them all! Does anyone believe that one sacrifices the extraordinary vertigos of pathos out of the masochism of rather conceited intellectuals, so as to prefer isolation to affective exchange. One must remember the universal stakes to understand our attitude.
None of us has given up sexual relations. That is not the point. There is not, behind this, some cold asceticism or other that would rest on the despair of impotence. Idiotic and ridiculous. We have simply acknowledged the mechanisms of the dominant ideology by way of the relations between the sexes. Never mind the MLF, the women’s war and so on. Those are merely epiphenomenal manners. The advance of the MLF is localized, circumstantial, benefiting first and foremost class strata that seek to emancipate themselves. Rightly so, of course. But class strata. But emancipation through consumption. The recognition of bodies in the salons, where the signs of belonging to a politico-worldly clique are constantly demanded. It is with tremendous reluctance that we look upon love, and if by chance we come to say those words, there is in us something like a renunciation of the struggle, and the bittersweet irony that comes from the fact that one is tirelessly repeating the watchwords of an outmoded nobility, from which the bourgeoisie stole its most beautiful culture: courtliness.
When the productive forces manage to ensure an equilibrium of the mode of production—whatever it may be—the profiteers (having cornered the surplus value) devote themselves to the cultivation of the intersubjective. The institutional mark of this project (devoting oneself to the cultivation of the intersubjective) is courtliness. Courtliness is the commonly accepted idea that the exploitation of man by man is possible.
The project of holding the mode of production at a distance, in what it has that is mechanistic and hyper-constraining, can be realized if a regrouping takes place around this idea. This regrouping will effectively be achieved when each and every one has submitted to the rules of courtliness. The step toward the ideological acceptance of the exploitation of man by man is the step taken toward courtliness. This being secured, the first exploitation is in itself accomplished. For the organization of this mere courtliness already required that an exploitation take place. Individuals and means had to be allocated to that end. From the moment of access to courtliness, everyone becomes integrated into a universe of non-producing consumers who have made the political decision to live off profits. Then, this project being secured, each must confront the intersubjectivity of the other, that is to say the constantly signified awareness that the availability of freedoms must be structured, shaped, harmonized, so that courtliness may be surpassed and each may thereby gain access to the world.
The hubris of the psyche can be controlled only in relation to the values of work. Any other control is superfluous, ephemeral. So, rather than ceaselessly succumbing to pleasure—whose terrible sanction would be uncontrolled demographic growth, thereby dispersing capital—the profiteers are going to dissociate procreation and sexual relations. A marvelous diversionary operation. Courtly love is the immediate riposte. There is no longer any need to submit to demographic regulating mechanisms. What is the point of having twelve children, since quality supplants quantity? One has twelve children when one fears that infant mortality will leave only one standing. One has a single child—two to be safe—when one knows that the objective material conditions of the social class ensure a maximum of survival.
After this child, long live pleasure! Long live the freedom of pathos! Let us fill the passing time with what will require the least outside contribution: love. Then one gives oneself over to the daily discovery of the de-mechanization of productive relations. Thus this disalienation of intersubjectivity is the alienation of all the other subjectivities still subject to the determinisms of production. Love as the first freedom of intersubjectivity lives in this contradiction. It is at once a cry of victory, hubris of the psyche, and a mark of class, domination by profiteers. This double character will prevent it from flourishing. It is indeed love, but courtly love. That is to say, the most immediately watered-down form of the psyche. It is no longer a matter of hubris, but of controlling the excesses of an intersubjectivity that has not attained universal freedom.
And the non-profiteers will endlessly ape these class behaviors, hoping to find through identification a fragment of the pleasures of the non-producers. Love then becomes, and forever, the tempering of the pathological effects of this first possible freedom. The whole culture of love, courtly culture, tends to supply the signs of the domination of intersubjectivity. The emotion felt in the amorous encounter says exactly: “This is how far I am stirred with you. That is how far you are stirred with me. Let us now reconstitute—starting from this disturbance, this rupture—our broken intersubjectivities. Let us tell each other endlessly how balanced we nevertheless are, despite this imbalance.” Courtly manners become the indications of self-control and class control. The metaphysics of possibles is stifled, and one confines oneself to evoking the virtual possibility of access to perfect love, that is to say to the love of a society without social class. Myth becomes the expression of this evocation, the mark of contradictory intersubjective freedom.
The myth of impossible love lies in the very principle of love. Myth is a model of behavior, as nostalgia for an inaccessible future and as the anticipated history of the intersubjective freedom forbidden by class decision.
But no one recoils forever before the aspiration to freedom. Thus, individually, attempts at access to intersubjectivity in itself, stripped of class constraints, will be born, from generation to generation. The first system of the passions—courtly love—will be called into question and the model of behavior combated. We have all been its victims. Thus the myth is enriched by authentic acts of attempted liberation. It will live on thereby, for the failure of love affairs inevitably reminds the protagonists that social classes watch over the destinies of their members. The cycle of the passions will then be definitively elaborated, and no individuality will any longer be able to hope to escape its systematization. Tristan and Yseult have definitively killed Tristan and Yseult. The forms of love will be run through in vain, and the reduction of each of the stages to the fleeting pleasures of sexual exchanges will be a constant danger for this imprisoned intersubjectivity. Coitus interruptus, amplexus reservatus, will prove the perfect mastery of the senses and the body, the summit of a mechanistic culture that no longer has any reason to exist because it is the class behavior of profiteers, a prohibition on intersubjectivity in itself.
The derisoriness of the virtual pseudo-freedom of amorous behaviors will denature the depth and the reality of the psyche. The sign of freedom will not be the expression granted to love as revealed intersubjectivity, but on the contrary the sign of freedom will be the expression refused to love!
The frivolity of sexual relations and the negation of the passions will give the pathological illusion of a victory of progress. Libertinism replaces the seriousness of the passions and of the union of beings. It is because the exploiters were unable to constitute, establish and safeguard a system of the passions that intersubjectivity is foundering. Soon debauchery, that is to say the most elementary and the pettiest of sexual freedoms, appears as the garish manifestation of the gratuitousness of amorous attempts. It is the route of passage to the negation of the reality of the passions. The failure is consummated. Happiness was not to be hoped for, starting from the exploitation of man by man.
All this we know, and we know it only too well.
Chapter IV: The Metaphysical Hatred of Children
There are no sciences of education. There is no practical organization for taking care of children. Quite the contrary: the whole of capitalist practical organization tends to push children away, and they then become the objective burden of a hyper-individualized microcell. How could one even claim that, in this extreme closeness, love and esteem for one another do not arise. That is inevitable. But at the same time the awareness of the contradictions gradually grows, and with it comes the metaphysical hatred of children.
Except for Michel—as I was saying already—we have children. Why? It is certainly very embarrassing for us. For it must also be stressed that in René’s case, as in mine, these children are in our charge, after divorce.
Nothing could be understood unless one explains at the same time what we call the private property of the sexes, the system of transmission of capital, and this metaphysical hatred of which I have just spoken.
We are absolutely convinced that the flourishing of love can be fulfilled only in the constitution of a family, with at least one child. Childbearing is a socio-political culmination, the test of an organic potential, an ontological act. An inevitable step. For if love is a tremendous catalyst of the interests of class strata, it is also the intersubjective condition of possibility of: “Will we have the courage to give life and then to shoulder it?” It is an answer to this question, an idealist stance, an expressed will to shoulder it. And it is from this intentionality, from this class vow, from this politico-worldly confrontation, from this play of the derisory and the objective that the act of procreation comes. A leap is made. When, how, why. We are by no means naive enough to believe that procreation is accidental. What purpose would that serve. Childbearing is a pawn in the strategy of intersubjective exchanges. It is a political power play. It is the roundabout route of passage toward the future.
If we have a child—which is a very serious matter—it is because I love her, and that is the proof of it. Our love is powerful enough to give life. That is the idealist hypothesis, the retroactive sanction, the one that prevails as the unsaid.
Finally, the third and last illusion that comes to disturb the sexual game: that glance caught like a sledgehammer blow, which is the stupid revelation that these three illusions exist and that no one is fooled. Then consciousness may protest and live out its calvary face to face. The sexual game becomes a spectacle of these three illusions, like praying mantises.
For there is no positive culture of sexual exchange. Today it is nothing but the codification of what is most immediately consumable in capitalist consumer society.
How does one make love in the socialist countries. That is certainly one of the most serious questions for me, for I do not see—in the current state of my information—any system of sexual exchange other than the one put in place by the bourgeoisie.
The fact remains that childbearing is the a posteriori justification of these sexual exchanges, the transgression of the infernal circle of the derisory, the finalization of this means, the fulfillment. But this is known and lived as such. The metaphysical hatred of children is not far off. It is an inevitable consequence.
All the more inevitable since the maternal instinct does not exist. Once the child is there, the truth of his irreducible objective presence remains to be shouldered. What else is there to do? And his organic autonomy makes the protagonists’ motivation unbelievable. Consciousness loses its footing before the leap it has made the couple take. The passage from idea to act is irreducible. The necessity that love dictate its intersubjective laws is proven.
It now remains to shoulder this child daily, practically, technically. Never mind the rest, at this minute. But nothing prepares one for this. The culture of education does not exist. It is nothing but empirical approximation. The horror grows. And the woman sinks into the perpetually constraining maelstrom of the struggle against the spontaneous expansionism of auto-genetics. The child grows, and with him grow his independence and his dependence, the constant renewal of powerlessness and ignorance, the reiterated adjustment of individualism to individualism.
Then, before this double contradiction, before this absurd power play of the subjective (love), which generated the objective, and before this powerlessness of adults to do the elementary—the gesture that saves that organ-being which the baby is—then there blossoms the self-evidence that the baby should not have existed, and hatred settles in. Hatred of all that. Hatred of the subjective lie. Hatred of the capitalist class organization that makes education vile, hatred of the absurd. Hatred of hatred. And the mind makes a terrible metaphysical leap, wallows in this cry of despair that can take no more; but the practical love of this useless and ridiculous child, whom no one explains, grows stronger, a safeguard love, a reflex of self-preservation. Does anyone think one makes this kind of observation with pleasure. One does not confess the unconfessable without shuddering. We shudder. Yet what can we do about it. As always in such cases, scandalized by this confession, people will come brandishing their good conscience, the proofs to the contrary, and they will go: “You are mad! The mother loves her child, the father is happy, and the happiness of procreation is sincere, immense, natural.” On that score, nothing to object to. Of course everything exists. Everything, and the metaphysical hatred too, which one regrets with a backhand sweep of one’s morality. Which exists nonetheless. What matters here is to admit the truth of this feeling and then to move on to something else. It is enough simply to know.
Chapter V: Freedom, Banal Originality
For the bourgeoisie protects women, personalities and babies with the same relentlessness it puts into protecting capital. The one could not go without the others. What is at stake is the protection of the objective by the intersubjective. Insofar as we live in a world of illusions, where the ineffable and the unsaid preside over destinies, to that extent capitalist society endures. This must be explained, and our respective sorrows told in relation to it. Let us take an example. Every couple that forms pledges itself to originality. Namely: “I will do for you what no one has ever done. You will see, we will make discoveries like no others and everything will be unique and renewed,” etc. In this affirmation one must see the intention and the objective, which are quite distinct. The intention is: to make the sublime shimmer, in order to convince. The objective is the satisfaction of intersubjective needs. The mere fact that the argument “everything will be unique” is repeated by everyone and across all social classes is in contradiction with the substance. When two beings swear to each other to be like no other and claim to be living something original, they are immediately ridiculous in their banality. And yet it works. One cannot decently claim that these two beings are convinced of their originality. By what miracle would they not know that millions of others say the same sentence? What makes it possible for them to utter these words is the hope of corresponding—in this banality, by conforming to it—to an accessible model of consumption. By saying “everything will be unique between us,” the couple is telling itself: “We will be so banal that, you will see, we will make it.” Whatever anecdotal forms the couple chooses to indicate its banal originality, an anatomical description of them has been made, at least by some artistic current or other.[17] The couple is then indeed saying: “Here is the model of intersubjective behavior to which we are going to conform.”
The fact of having chosen the ineffable in order to say it “in negative,” without saying it, is not accidental. The ineffable has a polyvalent mechanical function. Let us examine this mechanism in detail. By saying: “We will be unique,” the couple is in fact saying: “We will be banal, according to this model.” And it adds: “Above all, let us lie to ourselves. For to admit that we are going to do the opposite of what we claim would be absurd. So that this complex and mechanistic situation, so that this obedience to the models of intersubjective behavior, does not stifle us, let us throw Noah’s cloak over this aberration and affirm, in agreement with universal ideology: love is ineffable. There are no sciences of the intersubjective. Do not try to understand what we do or say, since precisely the very nature of our behavior is irrational, inaccessible to understanding. The very nature of love is to escape analysis. And for good reason! Every epistemological barrier is a class barrier. This one like any other.
But then what is this model of banal originality for. To give the illusion of intersubjective freedom. For this illusion, this intersubjective freedom, is not worth much. It can therefore be given away. The other freedom, the true one, would rest on the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. As long as private ownership of the means of production and distribution exists, love—deeply felt and sincerely lived by each and every one—is only one of the mechanisms designed to make people believe that they are still breathing an air of freedom. For—isn’t that so—they will do everything to a people, kill it, decimate it, cut off its gas, electricity, water, gasoline, but they will never be able to prevent two beings from loving each other in spite of everything and love from being stronger than all that.
It is to be feared that love is an integral part of all that. But then—people will say with a fierce anger, exacerbated toward us—but then: what do you do—you mechanistic and desiccated Marxist-Leninists—what do you do with desire, with tenderness, with sexual pleasure, with mutual esteem, with everything that makes up the true richness of two sincere beings?
Yes, what to do with it? Knowing—conceptually—this reality does not prevent us from personally falling in love, does not prevent me, for example, from writing poems that are nothing but a powerless attempt to renew the models of behavior. It in no way prevents any of us from loving. We are just a little more derisory perhaps, a little more complicated certainly, a little more contradictory for sure than anyone else. Since we are telling you that we love! You are surely not going to put our intentions on trial? You are in no position to: love is—according to you—ineffable. And above all, love is love because unconsciously each and every one lives (for want of knowing it) this mechanism. Everyone lives this machination of universal ideology. Everyone lives this contradiction, this lie, this absurdity, this banal originality. And love is then defined as the unspoken, unconscious revelation, as the model according to which it is possible to live the fact that it is inaccessible! “I love you. Ours will be a banal originality. It is absolutely contradictory. How horrible. We will never be able to satisfy our deep, real, sincere desire for intersubjective exchanges. Let us be silent. Let us accept. That is what love is. That is precisely it. Let me lose myself in you, let the vertigo of pathos carry us away, and above all let us speak of it no more!”
Must we now despair of communism? Can anyone here, in this world below, still believe in it? For it is known that intersubjective relations in socialist countries are identical. Or at any rate, it is not known whether anything at all has really changed, since, on the one hand, there are no sciences of intersubjectivity to diagnose it and, on the other hand, one may hypothesize that if intersubjective relations had changed, it would be known. In short, whatever the intersubjective relations in socialist countries may be, it does not seem[18] that changes in kind have taken place.
The communist project is first of all—or else: was first of all—economic. I would say economistic.
The gradual awareness of the mechanisms of exploitation under the capitalist regime, their denunciation, the struggle to escape them rested on the Marxist, then Marxist-Leninist, idea: freedom will come from the collectivization of the means of production and distribution. A fantastic project, which presents several monstrous difficulties that are well known:
- a mode of production is not built in five minutes. The “long term” demands terrible self-denial,
- the coalition of the non-communist countries is out of all proportion to anything one could have imagined. It considerably slows down development,
- the mistakes made by the socialist countries tend to be distorted and amplified. Another brake.
- Lastly, we will say—and this is where, it seems, something new must be added to what has been familiar ground until now—that the communist project of organization made no provision for the elaboration of a science of the intersubjective. In other words, the socialist regimes offer no substitute models for bourgeois intersubjectivity. One may rightly reply: “the elaboration of intersubjectivity is a long process and in enormous part the result of artistic elaboration, which helps to institutionalize forms of behavior. Let time do its work.” Yes and no. Are revolutionary babies being raised over there? Do people love for reasons other than to mask conflicts between class strata? Have they eliminated those universal ideologies that rest on the ineffable?
Well, we will be told. A fine state you’re in! So it’s despair for you, a dead end?”
To that, two things must be said in reply.
What is determining in the last instance is economic organization. For there, without any doubt, the communists are right, and private property—whatever it may be—must be struck down, with violence if need be. The capitalist regimes must be overthrown and replaced by socialist regimes. On that score alone, we do not despair.
But—and this is the second answer—there is indeed—in the present state of the struggles—reason to despair of escaping the banal originality of intersubjective freedom.
Let there be no confusion: objective freedom, the freedom given ipso facto by the collectivization of the means of production, is irreducible, inevitable, necessary, and we wish for it with all our hearts. But we do not know what the nature of the corresponding intersubjective freedom will be, and we very much fear that it will be of a banal originality. Therein lies our universal despair. And yet we still say, forcefully: “Let’s go! Let’s go and see.” What do our intellectuals’ worries matter! Compared with the tremendous hope that—on this precise point of banal originality—we are making a… conceptual error! Love, as we know, is the vertigo of pathos.
So is intersubjective freedom.
The fact remains that here we are, each one of us, facing these realities, and that our sorrows run deep. We react to them differently. In view of these realities, and given our different origins, we have—each one of us—built up defenses.[19]
Louis—who is a fishmonger by trade—eats brown rice, listens to music, paints, goes walking in nature, does Egyptology and loves a woman.
René—who is a restaurateur by trade—eats at any hour, anything at all, listens to music, reads detective novels, writes, does sports (jogging, tennis) and loves a woman.
Michel—who is a professor of philosophy—always eats the same things in the same place, writes, reads L’Équipe (as René does, for that matter), does sports (jogging) and loves no one but himself.
Domi—who is an auxiliary teacher—does not eat, reads, listens to music, loves a woman and is involved in politics.
Me—who am a journalist—I am on a diet, write, listen to music, love a woman.
These biographies, in their dryness, deserve a good mark: they say everything! Still, some explaining is called for, if only for the pleasure of amusing ourselves with this exercise in style.
Louis, then. Fishmonger. A commercial function that might seem puzzling, given everything one has just read. How can a fishmonger come into play at this conceptual level? In that he is self-taught.
He made himself on his own, and our friendship accelerated a process of coming to class consciousness. The obvious contradiction lies in the fact that Louis is a capitalist, mindful of his corporatist advantages, a Corsican to boot, which only reinforces the Poujadist aspect of his economic function. Particularly sharp in business, Louis certainly draws advantage from undeniable skills as a negotiator. Now, a communist like all of us, he is also a painter. A great painter, we swear it. Musicologist. Egyptologist. Unbridled consumer of brown rice. What, then, is all this? What is Louis for? From a strictly Marxist point of view, he shows that the merchant bourgeoisie is capable of acceding to the models of behavior and consumption of a wealthy bourgeoisie that was already aping the nobility: music, woman, painting, hobby, etc. It’s all there. If he so wished, everything could be class mannerism, and his renown would be considerable, in his town. His political consciousness, the conceptual approach he has to his situation, forbids him to act in this way. And—for each of the specialties he has chosen—he acts in desperation, that is to say for the culture he derives from it and not for the social prestige he could derive from it. Admittedly, in the strict sense, this is false. Thus he will use his musical knowledge to impress a woman. Thus he will hold an exhibition of paintings in his hometown. There is a quest for social prestige. But compared with what he could get out of it! In fact, Louis is a painter, a great painter certainly. That is no doubt his first historical function. He has been working for twenty years and more, and he undoubtedly attains a full flowering.[20] The balance of his personality rests on that. He eats brown rice after selling fish (he earns a very good living), goes off walking in the Corsican countryside, comes back to listen to Boulez and to paint a landscape the way one makes a military map, in the abstract or in the ideal, and—with prodigious acuity—between two poems that I write to him, discusses over the telephone the latest conceptual significations of our respective convolutions. It must be said—for the sake of understanding—that we are all scattered across the country and that never—never, mind you—have the five of us found ourselves gathered in one and the same place! Only this summer of ’79 were we within some 50 km of one another. But what purpose could it possibly have served to bring us together, beyond what our friendship, beyond what our class complicity already does?[21]
Louis has a function of communication, of mailbox, among us. He passes on news about moral and physical states, the point reached in intellectual development. He reads, receives and keeps my personal “journal,” a series of letters that I have been sending him more or less regularly for years. He also serves—more or less—as a financial relay for René, who—as we shall see—[can do nothing about it, ?- p.37].
Louis’s social success, his painting, his personality, not to mention music, Egyptology and the rest, carry weight and count.
René, then. Restaurateur. A commercial function that might seem puzzling, given everything one has just read. How can a restaurateur come into play at this conceptual level? In that he is self-taught. He made himself on his own, and our friendship accelerated a process of coming to class consciousness. The contradiction lies in the fact that he cannot manage to be a good tradesman!
A musicologist every bit as much as Louis, René is, by choice of personality, a dilettante. A companionable, somewhat careless man, he now has to provide for his own needs, and this bores him. Keener on listening to Parker, reading a Série Noire, watching a France–All Blacks match or going for a jog than even on writing a book or reflecting, just like that, on this or that concept. Fantastically indifferent to drawing-room manners, he resists in his own way by plunging into love affairs of disarming complexity and by maintaining with the whole world relationships in which goodness is the first component. For René is good, wants to be, remains so, whatever the cost. That is his function among us: he is mercy! He is a haven of peace in hatred!
One must understand that he met Louis, that I met Domi, that he introduced me to Louis, that I introduced him to Domi, who knew Michel, that I met Louis through René, that René met Domi through me, that Michel met René and Louis through Domi. All this more than twenty years ago now.
Adding that René is my brother. But that matters little here. Consanguinity has no affective significance at the level of the concept. Louis and René form a duo. The same pronounced taste for music. Both live in the same region. Self-taught. Tradesmen. The difference: money. One has it, the other does not. But as is well known, a capitalist does not shudder at human misery, and Louis yields to René’s requests only when pushed to the extreme. Their game on this level is rather obscure, and I do not know exactly whether they themselves know where they stand.
René’s worth lies essentially in the strange fascination he can exert through his mere availability. He is the man you can call for help and who will come. This function of a subjective intervention squad is one we ourselves do not call upon. But we know that he often answers when those around him need him, and nothing would surprise us more than to learn that he is not in full action. His objective function is certainly to serve as mediator between the various class strata, which end up in frictions, always inevitable. He is the man of political conciliation, via the affective and détente. He is the one who will know how to overdetermine a situation of rupture, by putting forward peace, harmony and reconciliation.
He has had failures because his systematism is in the image of the nature he has created for himself: phlegmatic and supple. It is, all in all, a rather banal role, yet a remarkable one, insofar as neither he nor we are fooled by his social-democratic character. René will want no part of a fierce class struggle. And yet he knows only too well that it is inevitable. He dresses the wounds of individuals in this combat, he soothes hatreds, he dissolves conflicts, with obstinacy. He is good, in the Christian sense, first and foremost. That is how he is. He must have kept from his Sartrean readings a firmly rooted hint of existentialism.
Michel is another matter. A terrible individual. Professor of sociology. Author of three books. Former sprinter. Former school monitor (13 years, I believe). An exaggerated Tarn accent. Excess in philosophy as in life. A relentless solitude. A village in the southwest where—shut in with his mother—he nurses, with metaphysical obstinacy, gigantic rages against social democracy. Kept at arm’s length for years in a grayish Paris lycée, he has become “everything”—as he says himself—that is to say, holder of a State doctorate. From his purgatory he has kept the nitpicking of a little nobody, an irritating stinginess and the certainty that he will one day be an associate professor. Broken one fine morning—pneumothorax—by a chimerical Latin Quarter love, he harbors a justified hatred of women and an atrocious terror of not having been able to be conceited. Having lost his body at the end of a 200-meter race in which he fell (it was in L’Équipe, for he was the favorite), he has made a religion of his physical fitness, which he maintains through relentless jogging and strange diets. He has set up his offices in numerous cafés, where he writes with the tip of a ballpoint pen on sheets from squared exercise books. In Paris, he lodges in a hotel at 23 francs a night, where he finds silence and the awestruck consideration of the landlady, who calls this white-haired gentleman “the philosophy professor” and knows him by no other name. He reads L’Équipe assiduously, France Soir so as to miss nothing of the ambient sociology, and Le Monde to keep abreast of the moods of the bourgeoisie.
He has only one constantly avowed objective: at last (after so many years as a monitor) not to work, and to publish his books. His determination on this last point is colossal, and in Paris he works like an ox to achieve it. Catalyst—through his ideas and his gift of the gab—of the group’s ideas, he has distinctive relationships with each of us, in which his roles are imprecise and his objectives unavowed. He must have kept from his peasant origins the distrust of the countryman, and the city dweller repels him. Very close to each of us, he has had idylls with each of us, then fallen out, except with René, whom he calls “PéPé” and masters with a great deal of softness, thanks to that very softness. Withdrawn into himself, by himself, for himself, he remains anchored in affective life with us, the way a good swimmer sometimes likes to find a beach, but one who can go on to the next. Hot-tempered and furious, he blasphemes against the human race, and misanthropy makes him lose his way even against us. He is grandiose and derisory. With René, he has sports in common (René was a very good swimmer, a French champion). Otherwise, with the others—and even with René—he has nothing in common, save the concept. He is a pure product of conceptual friendship. It chains him, padlocks him, ensnares him and rivets him. As it is his daily bread, only our class complicity can make him feel secure.
Fortunately we are here, for he would be dead. With me he has—apart from practical differences: “salt,” at the table—conceptual differences that will mark our future, for I know him to be a metaphysician and am wary of it.[22] But perhaps, after all, he is right. Then our complicity will be definitive. We have kept a tremendous past in which, for whole nights, we searched for the objective determinations of intersubjectivity, which we partly found, which he worked out and wrote up. On which I am still working.
There is no worse city dweller than the little rural clerk come to Paris who—a marvelous Stalinist—finds himself the butt of the social-democratic derision of the Latin Quarter. For that alone, he deserves the best. Above all, one must not take away from him that extraordinary humor and a human warmth that he knows how to give to those he values.
Lastly, one will grant him—among lots of other things—the extraordinary power of immediately decoding immediacy. Only class hatred can make one understand that. We understand.
Domi next. He is unquestionably our biggest worry. Of frail constitution, he tracks life as some track the wild beast, and he does not come out of it the physical winner. Gifted, highly gifted, torn from quietude by disquiet, thunderstruck by Hegel, East Germany and music, he has fits of vertigo in existence that alarm us. An auxiliary teacher, although he is a sublime pedagogue, capable of dictating texts to fourth-graders for two years if need be, without ever opening a book, because he knows them by heart. He knows all of Parsifal and all of Wagner, the second movement of Mozart’s K524 and the capital of any country. Of an orthodox communism, he ought to have written at 18 and did not because of Rimbaud, that vile ultra-leftist bastard whom I personally detest and who should be replaced in school textbooks by Vallès, for the content, the poetry remaining worth taking. So, since writing draws no thought out of him, he rummages through his daily life to spit fire, and he spits out his lungs and his guts along with it.
Is he lonelier than the loneliest of us? It is possible, because we have all put together a social status that suffices, but he has been carried off by a gust of wind in which he does not take the time—he is wrong—to look for support. What a waste of talent he is, all by himself, teaching five classes a day, on every subject, and sweeping marveling students along in his wake. Today he runs from lycée to lycée, and his son Youri—like the Russian—trembles with loving him so much, so much does he himself tremble at being in the world!!
He brought us Hegel and a conception of music, not to mention a sagacity in reflection that bursts out with machine-gun delivery. His Hegelianism is highly decisive for understanding the federation we form around the concept. Admittedly, Michel was already a Hegelian. But René’s Sartrism, Louis’s empirio-criticism, my Kantianism did not hold out long against the Hegelo-Marxism of Domi and Michel. It is undoubtedly thanks to their doggedness that things moved forward for us. What is more—an enormous advantage—it allowed Michel to read nothing of Hegel, since Domi had done so. I remember that extraordinary remark, one fine evening when Michel picked up—as if inadvertently—the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” reluctantly skimmed a few lines of it, then exclaimed, as if stupefied, in his exaggerated accent, from Tarn et Garonne: “But this confirms what I say!” A just return of the reversals of this world. Now, that is thanks to Domi. He would no doubt need a patron who would skillfully provide for his thirst for reading and for music, as well as for women, with whom he must be kept supplied like any mortal. He would thus be much more in harmony with reality, which seems—because of capitalism—to keep him at a distance. If what binds him most to Michel is the abstract, faith in the USSR and love of nature (Domi has a car, he drives Michel around), he is bound to René by the goodness René gives, and even more so to Domi, whom he loves, as the Christians (those of the lions) could probably love one another. Music brings them together, of course, and the fact that René is a refuge. That is Domi’s salvation. Louis and Domi: the pooling of talent, one producing and the other having remained virgin. Music, certainly, and as Domi is a pedagogue, it is Louis who learns, since he is self-taught.
As for me, my morbid pathos separated us, at a time when my demonism was being exercised on my idiocy, and since then the reality of our conceptual truths has tended to bring us closer, without our being able, however, really to find each other again, for I am a beast of burden, and that keeps away from me what is, in him, an ontological dilettantism. Let us move on. Lastly, me. State doctorate in sociology in progress at the Hautes Études. Master in philosophy, editor-in-chief of a professional journal intended for professionals. I grew up in the fear of having nearly been an idiot. That marked me. At first I witnessed with stupor the arrival of the concept and the formation of this gang of five. In fact, I was the first to know Domi, in a lycée schoolyard, where I ruled the roost because I was the local thinker. I introduced Domi to René, who introduced him to Louis. Domi pulled Michel out of the Old Navy for us, as he saw fit, the way one pulls folklore out of a hat. The synthesis gave us. I did not know much then. But I learned. And the terror I have kept of having nearly been a moron still whips me on, to such a point that I flog my brain and my pen until I drop dead. I do indeed write terribly, since this text will be the fourteenth book done by me, all unpublished, for I fear publishers like the plague, being convinced that they are there only to prevent people like me from writing.
I am the poet of the gang, for I believe in poetry and I have already written 6 collections, some of which are very beautiful, I know. Music, of course, like all of us. I have undertaken to record all of Mozart on cassette (thanks to France Musique). I am getting there. I have just decreed 1981 a Mozart year for myself. I will write a book about him. Sports, of course, like each and every one of us, and perhaps—because of my obstinacy in being a poet—a more pronounced taste for women, and more particularly for the one I love.
One dependent child. I am a divorced father. Like René. But René entrusts his to others. I carry mine single-handedly. To each his own technique, and this is no reproach.
Unable to accept my condition as a petty bourgeois, I have kept from Sartre an unhappy consciousness, which I smother in appalling excesses. I once drew (in “Mot à Mot”) a portrait of myself that I had better give again, for it has the undeniable advantage of bearing down on my faults: “Himself, I tell you! Made of flesh and blood, of errors and hatreds, of glories and dissimulation, of darkness and brutal awakenings that pierce the pale whiteness of children’s truths; himself, surly, shaggy and ugly in his soul, a frenzied gnawer at bourgeois quietude; himself, greedy, excessive and content, carrying his cries of revolt into the future, insurgent in the evening, voracious in the morning, preoccupied with sex, gluttonously amorous in bed, breaking the silences, with a piano concerto fit to knock the horns off music! Master of every household, puerile and rebellious, a disarming smile, the tactics of a professional of intersubjectivity, lying and generous, like hundred-franc whores, a vodka drunk, in bed by eight. Himself, reckoning his future, at full speed, unbridled, at the end of his rope, accelerating himself every day.”
For the others, I am certainly the strongest dynamic synthesis (which partly explains this text). Indeed, on the Poujadist side, I own a newspaper, and the fishmonger and the restaurateur (Louis and René) understand that. But I am also an intellectual. The pedagogue and the researcher (Domi and Michel) have to acknowledge it. Lastly, I express and I catalyze obstinately, with a labor power no one suspects.
Michel once said on the sly that I resolved political problems through the affective. In any case, I hold it for certain that my writer’s pathos is worth its weight in gold for the five of us. Not to mention the 650 pages of “Subsistances et Populations,” the hyperrealist counterpart (as an exemplification) of “L’Être et le Code.” It has nothing pathological about it, but on the contrary, it is very academic.
Chapter VI: So This Is About Me
Biographers always have a sense of modesty. This is to be understood in the bourgeois sense, and the confession of failings, according to turpitudes, embarrasses the good conscience of both the writer and the public. Others, very Sartrean, play Jean Genet and tell all, for complacent catharses in which the lewd and the two-bit salon go astray, Latin Quarter and rue de Rennes style.
Has there ever been, anywhere, a conceptual autobiography? Now that would make a stir! A consciousness stripping itself bare, in the name of the interests of class hatred, so that it may at last be known, and so that from the learned balance of talent truths may emerge about unspoken intersubjectivity.[23] For it is on this ground that we come together, with the undeniable concern not to tell each other our respective truths, for fear of boredom, of the consequences for our friendship, for fear of being idiotic and conceited, which one so easily is when one lets go of the idea of class struggles. In fact, it is enough not to forget it and, on the contrary, to push all its consequences to the extreme.
So this is about me.
I am no doubt a liar and a dissembler, excessive, lecherous, loudmouthed, selfish, alcoholic, pretentious and tyrannical.
This can be explained.
Liar and dissembler. More, much more a dissembler. What is at issue here is the power of dissimulation as intersubjective organization. The power of dissimulation is considerable. Made of cultures, it allows the unrepressed substitution of one personality for another personality. One feeling—whose sincerity in itself is not to be called into question—can replace another, without that changing much. It is disarming. So I can love this woman from the depths of my soul and hide eight daily mistresses from her! So I can talk with a far-rightist, take up his words and carry myself like him, even though I am a communist! So I can tell my mother that I am well, while horrible fits of vertigo are shaking me! It is enough to smile, to say, to appear. What is at issue here is not the banality of the human soul but, on the contrary, strategies for the intersubjective use of this banality. For what purpose can this power of dissimulation serve, with regard to the exploitation of man by man? It serves to prove to each individual that the other does not necessarily have the same objective references. It says that the ineffable is a class truth, which persons hold as the absolute weapon of freedom. It says very precisely that if I—as a person among other persons—can conceal the most obvious, then the ineffable decidedly exists and nature has arranged things very well. It says that lying, deceit, the theft of sincerity, the crime against trust are possible, without any sanction stopping them. It says that we are free to be vile and that everything can be concealed, in the world of intersubjectivity. A world of allusion, of approximation, of manufactured respect, of illusion. A world where references, touchstones, criteria do not exist. A world of impunity, of the triumph of the strongest in sentiment. Everything is permitted there, including dissimulation. That is fascinating. It is bewildering. It is almost inhuman. A criminal who has slit the throats of two children and cut off the feet of an old man who was weeping and begging for mercy may be perfect company at my home today, a fine talker, attentive and fascinating when he broaches Mozart, so gentle with me, who respect and love him! But what is this intersubjective world that has been manufactured? What are these human relations from which no flashes of fire burst forth when the vile vies with the vile? What courtesy! What propriety!
But rest assured: Rimbaud smashed knickknacks at Verlaine’s on the same basis. The gestures of an ultra-leftist, an idiot’s excesses, an unhappy little boy discovering the obvious.
I am not going through growing pains. I am making a conceptual assessment of a component of social culture. There is a step between the two. And moreover, like everyone else (by what miracle could one escape it?) I exercise this power of dissimulation. The only problem as far as I am concerned: I have never been able to get used to it! And when, exercising this power, I deceive the woman or the man I love, my reason totters and I fear the worst for the future. That is all. And I do not make a fuss about it. Anyone who states his faults is defending himself against having them. I defend myself tooth and nail, with arrogance. I would like not to have any.
There is in me the undeniable, morbid concern to make myself loved beyond what is admissible. I have excess everywhere, even in my wishes to appear to have none. Excess, in my case, is the strength to exaggerate the banal, with a regularity and a will out of the ordinary. It is a challenge, a way of expressing an imbalance and a refusal, by a means that is, all in all, puerile. And then there is the hope of astonishing, and that in this way people will find me again. For if there is one form of wealth I love to consume, it is the attention of others, so that my social death may not exist. Does anyone here wish to go unnoticed? Then he does not understand me. For a fire—like a political damnation—drives me ceaselessly to hook my audience, and so that in this hypertense performance no one ever tires or turns his head away. That is what excess is for.
But what for, people will ask? I do it only out of the need thereby to go beyond the norms of behavior of my social class. I mean my moral prison, the padlock of the petty bourgeois, the grandiloquence of the ridiculous, the fear of being common. It is conceited, pretentious and terrible. It is even probably also due to a family defect, for we are all like that, pieds-noirs without measure, tribes in pseudo-revolt. But if there were occasion to sink into a genteel everydayness, would I manage it? I do not know, never having tried. And yet one must understand: up almost every day at 5-6 in the morning, I do not stop working, and working hard, until 8-9 in the evening, at which point I go to bed with dog-like regularity, to sleep. My son, who often watches me go off to bed, knows this. (He is nine years old.) And so do those around me, who no longer disturb me after that hour. I live like this year in, year out. I spent four years in Paris at a stretch, without leaving the city and without vacations, in this excess of regularity and seriousness. The movies, TV, the theater, concerts, evenings with friends, meetings, receptions: nothing does any good. Still nothing does. I am a social monk, and meeting the human race revolts me, because of class hatred, which ceaselessly drives me to suffer when I keep silent. What is the good of bothering others with my excesses of lucidity? One must know how to remain sociable. How could I lose consciousness? In lechery and alcohol.
Here and now I must speak of this, because bed and vodka play a considerable role in my life.
At what moment did I come to know that death[24] was not cowardice? I have to brush against it in my reflections for what is to come to be understood. I have walked miles and miles looking at the whores on the sidewalks and reflecting on the condition of women. I went up, irritated by the price and feverish and furious and terrible with desire. I have no excuses. Besides, I am not looking for any. I did it cleanly and do not regret it. But woman remains a nagging preoccupation for me. On two counts: for the pleasure of the senses and for conceptual analysis. I will not deny the exaggerated infatuation I have for the things of the bed. The point is that, in my view, two principles must preside over sexual relations: first, the fact of managing to make love implies ideological disarmament, the peace of consciences, a halt to class struggles. The subterfuge is enormous. But there it is. For how else could it be done? The sexual act implies the actualized vertigo of the pathos of bodies, the renunciation of confrontation, and it is, on the contrary, the implementation of a peaceful coexistence, and the cultivation and the flourishing and the protection of that culture. We know full well that there is something superfluous in it, harmony on the cheap. But I, for my part, know that I go at it and that I do not shirk the task. If the sexual act implies ideological disarmament, it also presupposes—as a corollary—no restraint whatsoever. Every amorous gesture—I mean sexual, here—is acceptable. There are so few of them anyway! And it is their limitative character that makes an absurdity of them, if one sets bounds to them!
So then, disarmed and without restraint: then the relationship with a woman fascinates me. There is lechery in it insofar as, in order to renew—this impossibility of renewing—I would like the loss of reason to be repeated endlessly, like a suicide of myself and of my guilt. Perhaps, after all, it is age, or simply this immoderate love for the woman I love, that makes me tip over in this way into the excess of sex, as others fall into gluttony.
Alcohol—and vodka more precisely—has an equivalent effect, but in solitude. And when I try to stupefy myself with alcohol and succeed, I believe I have won a day over I know not what, and it is as absurd as for the lowliest drunk. Yet I am not one, for it makes me ill and I give it up regularly, with an icy indifference toward my organism, which craves it.
So we believe neither in the love of babies, nor in the ineffable of love, nor in universal coexistence, nor in “freedom” either. We believe in friendship, in the concept and in communism. We believe that we are awfully isolated, awfully few. But I, for my part, know that it is normal to crack. What sincere, honest communist has—in recent times—withstood the boat business? You know, those North Vietnamese thrown to the sharks from the deck of the “boat people.” We, for our part, know full well that these are the worst rabble of North Vietnam, of Chinese origin, certainly in favor of the Maoist invasion, and who, after the conflict, were fleeing a country incapable of holding them back, for having been bombed for decades. The “boat people” taught us nothing. The grandmothers and the children who drown, yes, of course. But whose fault is it? Who are these people who die? Notorious anticommunists, terrified at the idea of staying. Did the North Vietnamese push them to leave? They did not hold them back. With what means? You move back into your home after decades of absence, you do the accounts and you realize that the one who stayed has robbed the till. Are you going to hold him back? If he throws himself into the river while you are rebuilding the house that is collapsing on your family, are you going to run to his rescue? It was vile to give the North Vietnamese this choice to make. It was vile to take advantage of these real tragedies to tarnish their image. The bigger the lie, the better it goes down. I know communists who turned in their cards after that. What can you do? We knew perfectly well that it would work. But what a mockery. To lose a communist in these conditions is to see social democracy take a giant step, and the right triumph, and freedom, that banal originality, settle in a little further in the camp of the dominant social classes. What do I care, then, about fighting again and again against this power of social democracy? With what means? What do I care about the New Right? There is in me a renunciation in the face of the declared will to strike down the concrete universal. I no doubt prefer to work on a denser and more thorough conceptual elaboration, with the hope of managing at last one day to… extend our class complicity.
A whole social class one day entered the universe of feelings, in the twelfth century.[25] Since then it has never ceased to cultivate them, as the culmination of a remarkable and definitive pleasure. It was the wonder of a paradise of incredible resources that was given. There was in it not only the inexhaustible potential of the refinement of intersubjectivity, but also the possibility of dangling before civilizations, before peoples, before immense social classes—which would be deprived of it—its existence.
Then everything collapsed before the promise, consented to, of letting other persons come into it, other individuals, other groups, other classes, other peoples. The images, given with the powerful backing of works of art (and there are some beautiful ones!) of prodigious multiplicity; the minute description of the universe thus made accessible; the groundswell that then shakes everything; all this and its perpetual relaunching mean that the proposals of another (communist) world come too late, within the framework of an unequal battle of propaganda means. Lastly, I would say that the government of the world unfortunately belongs to those who were the first to find that there existed, beyond the world of production (though codified by it), a world of intersubjectivity in which to dwell as before a tale of Ali Baba.
What irony, though! For today it is no longer possible to overturn the values of intersubjectivity. The social-democratic program is enormous, credible, exhilarating, since it puts forward this idea: “Let us open the gates of horn, of steel, of fire, of glory and of delirium of intersubjectivity.” The PCF submits to it, because people are going to say to themselves: “beyond the economy, or beyond the working classes, there still exists a fabulously complex world of exquisite refinement. It is the metaphysics of social classes.” Then throats tightened, hearts sank, and the soul underwent a terrible blossoming, in the debauchery and the clearance sale of historical, ontological and moral values. They no longer wanted any communist society, because the promise is not kept over there. There has been a lie, since over there it is the same intersubjectivity! And the capitalists, extraordinarily sensitive to these nuances that confer power, half-opened at that precise moment the intersubjective world inhabited by the propertied classes. At the same time, to finish convincing, to throw into panic, they suppressed certain images of the pleasures of this intersubjective world! A subtle policy of management, but so effective! Meanwhile, men saw the musicals come to an end, that unequaled reflection of happiness and tenderness, while there rose in men’s hearts the hope of gaining access to it!
The fiercest revolutionaries have given in. “What,” the strongest man says to himself, “would I then no longer have the chance to take Scarlett O’Hara in my arms, against a reddened sky, to burn her with my lips, her, thrown back, bosom bared, sublime and yielding beneath me?” Some of the strongest revolutionaries have capsized under the blows, when consciousness, horribly tortured by this dilemma, came to weigh in the balance, with moments of sublime pathos, the cold, skeletal and sadly misunderstood form of the communist universe, where love is nothing more than the love of the capitalist countries. Just go and explain to a sincerely militant non-communist that the world of Russian pleasure, the world of communist sexuality, is superior to the world of American pleasure, to the world of American sexuality! Go ahead. You’ll let me know how it goes! For that reason, I believe that communism will be neither for me nor for my child. Something has been rotten in the state of convictions, and it is social democracy. Yet I remain, on the threshold of this historic moment, sincerely communist and pro-Soviet. That says it all. But what desolation!
Chapter VII: Art, So That Excess May Be Codified
Art is the expression of contradictions, the bringing to light of confrontations, the culture of transition from the intersubjectivity of groups to the intersubjectivity of classes, the hardening of original positions, the liquidation of peaceful coexistence, in order to elaborate and institutionalize another semiology. Art plays a considerable role for us. Music, writing and painting above all. Along with the taste for nature and for sport, which are their immediate counterparts for us. And the considerable impacts that a melody by Parker, a performance by Horowitz or a concerto by Mozart can produce—that counts as a milestone.
Art is the letting-go of the ideological impulse. It is what tells not only of the disarray of an outdated class consciousness, but also of the behavioral model of the future profiteers. It is the site of the elaboration of the intersubjectivity of coexistence, under the social-democratic capitalist regime. Elsewhere, it will tell of hatred, struggle and the strength of the revolution. Right here, for us, it tells of our pacifism, the means we have chosen in order to remain.
Intersubjectivity, class complicity, friendship need a whole network of reference that will appear as the call, the sign of a resumption, the return to pleasure, the common ground. The first culture of signs, the first ideology, for the capitalist mode of production as for us, is music, a school of sensibility, a refinement of the senses, until there comes about a synthesis between the instrumental and the vocal, the accomplishment of a first cultural policy. It is because a harmonization of intersubjectivities takes place by way of chromaticism that music can become a school of sensuality, of sensibility, of the flourishing of subjective complicities. The exploiters know this only too well, they who forbid instrumental practice. The “diabolus in musica” allows the organum to supplant polyphony, until the dictatorship of the single tone, which imposes itself everywhere today, as it always has. In spite of everything, the two schools, elitist and popular, will come to be juxtaposed, to the point of forming two distinct schools within which sensuality and sensibility will not be able to flourish in the same way. The popular school will remain a school of clandestinity, of the forbidden and of bewitchment, whereas the elitist school will remain a school of the flourishing of sensations, of expression and of the dominant. The contradiction is terrible, impossible to live with. Rhythm is the recollection of what has already been lived. Rhythm does not speak the ineffable, and it makes it possible to recover what is most natural, most paganist in intersubjectivity. But vocal evocation is a universality of what is most secret, through what is most immediately perceptible.
If one wishes to do a little history, one sees that the motet, the first form of discant, presents itself at first as the most formal synthesis of the various class interests. The edifice of sound draws its value from its complexity, and polyverbalism—that is to say, the simultaneous juxtaposition of several songs—is a brutal response to the need for a support for intersubjective continuity. But objective class distinctions progressively tend to make each interest autonomous. Popular song and bourgeois song part ways. Music then becomes at once the evocation of a possible peaceful coexistence and the negative observation, said, stated, of the cleavages within the population. Then music becomes equivocal. Song, the contribution of an explicit content, the denunciation of the unsaid, the overcoming of the ineffable, is inevitable, indispensable.
(If—in Casablanca—René discovers a new record, he will call Louis to have him listen to it, over the telephone. Domi knows all of Wagner, of Debussy or of Mozart, which he accompanies on the transverse flute, on any theme. I have a taste for keeping what I listen to, and that is how I have a wicked sonata by Horowitz performed by Horowitz, or a [p tique ?p52] by Mozart performed by Richard Strauss, or the last JATP with Parker, some hard-to-find Villa-Lobos. Michel listens. Louis is a tremendous collector.)
But the transmission of semiology maintains class divisions. Art is the specific form of the renewal of the consumption of the privileged. It is art that brings the code of the signs of possible consumption and that will enable the privileged as a whole, beyond regionalist compartmentalization, to homogenize this attitude and by this means to attain class behavior. Love will be the first beneficiary of this decisive contribution. By giving concrete form to the system of sexual relations, writing will at last allow reference to a class code, which would be accepted as such. Intersubjectivity then no longer has to strive toward an ineffable, the condition of possibility of its very existence. On the contrary, intersubjectivity is violated, breached, explicitly brought to light, and the rationality of behaviors is imposed. Writing tends to supplant the unsaid, so that the reign of objective determinism may come about. What had appeared as the triumph—on the intersubjective level—of the privileged (namely the psyche and its flourishing) finds itself, with literature and poetry in particular, reduced to a minor codification serving no longer the culture action of intersubjectivity, but the interests of a class eager to find as quickly as possible the unifying themes of its possibilities.
The first theme, the most unifying, the most immediately admissible, the least distancing from original behaviors, but also the most denaturing, is the theme of sexual consumption. For in the eyes of dominant art, above all of social-democratic art, this sexual consumption counts no longer for what it is, the procreative act, principle of life and survival, a privileged moment in itself, but as the contingent occasion of a source of pleasure and the fixation point of the ideology of desire. The privileged who abandon production discover that the universe of consumption is fabulously rich, it being understood that the first and most immediate act of consumption, the most natural and the least structured—coitus—is already in itself the occasion of a fabulous frivolity and the intersubjective possibility of an inexhaustible semiology. Henceforth the privileged will never again abandon this semiology, and never will the ideology of desire go beyond the primitive stage of the evocation of coitus. Even if the texts become more complicated, even if they momentarily stray from this evocation, it is the better to return to the lost paradise.
What is painting?[26] It is, in an even more roundabout way, the letting-go of the ideological impulse, that is to say, the making available of a sensibility and a technique. This making available is done so that other social and political behaviors may come about. Painting, like art in general, is meant to show the sensibility of others that different ways are possible and that this difference is not an isolation, a quarantine. But painting has the power to arrest definitively—like photography—a moment, a presence of a thing that makes the difference. Poetry and writing in general are, on the contrary, the perpetual race, the impossible attempt to pin down. So the aim of writing must not be to arrest, but to give chase perpetually to this impossibility of arresting. Finally and above all, painting—unlike photography—makes it possible to play with colors on moments of difference. Then everything takes on a new power, because the painter’s function is to reinvest matter in order to inflect the cultural charge of colors. So that the colors that yesterday spoke precise answers (hope green, blood red, sun yellow or deathly white) today deliver a new impact. Painting then becomes the subtle, arduous and joyful hunt for meaning. The cultural charge of colors explodes. Each one’s pathological heritage is worked in depth toward a new rhythm, a new balance of the colors among themselves. It is this blood red of yesterday, caught in this white bursting with life, that will make this sun yellow go out, and so on. The picture becomes a success when this subtle balance of the colors’ meaning can no longer be decoded and a harmonization has been established whose secret mechanism is no longer determinable. One then no longer knows whether today’s meaning has overturned yesterday’s, and all that counts is this strange success that evokes who knows what. This painter then has two possibilities. He remains abstract, and this power to evoke the renewal of the meaning of colors suffices. One knows that something is there, but what? Or else the painter turns to the figurative and, himself panicked by the evanescence of meaning, he rediscovers scenes that politicize his renewal. The advantage is certain: the political situation soothes, and one lets a thousand evocations slip away, because one believes one has understood.
When the painter turns to the figurative but does not soothe for all that, there is a masterpiece. When the painter remains abstract and soothes, there is a masterpiece. (Abstract painting is already the renunciation of God, of political parties and of Mommy, because it is a “modern” find.) And then painting is also very much the rupture of space. There exist depths, surfaces, lines and horizons that we have within us and that we can sometimes find again. The painter must speak of these ruptures of space, so that in a good whirl, in a fall, in a subjective ramble, a harmonization of volumes and lines suddenly tells the imperceptible geometry of feelings, and so that in this movement found there on the canvas one may recognize the precise curve of inner happiness, the movement of a rending, or some hidden figures of hatred and passion expressed to oneself alone and which terrify, in memory.
Whatever the artistic technique chosen—painting, writing or something else—one must not resist the call within oneself, however futile, however puerile this call may be. But I do say: within oneself. And then, as soon as this something that comes from within surges up, it must be muzzled by technique and work, so as to shove it at all costs into the canvas, into the page, into meaning, and so that what nags incessantly may at last cease: the will that relentlessly strives to express the beautiful.
There exist infinite realities, placed at the disposal of humankind insofar as the means of subsistence are secured, endlessly renewed realities such as listening to music, looking at painting, the considerable vertigo of writing, the exhilaration of sport, the fullness of friendly solidarity, the excitement of the inner discovery of one’s own capacities, and finally a subjective power of oneself, which obstacles help to amplify. But there are also the great ruptures of consciousness, the dramas of lucidity, the terrible glimpses of one’s own past, the disgust at duplicity, so easily accessible, the panic before destitution and the indifference before this panic, the long string of the setbacks of men who move toward ideas after having refused to be satisfied with what is immediately accessible. We have worked hours for this, for this, and now we know no one who has the right to say “change!” Ah! Those who say “change!” in front of a canvas that one has completed by dint of labor, they may be the ambassadors of power, but in any case they are surely the henchmen of Satan!
Art is that which tears so deeply within us when, to the certainty of our powerlessness to escape our solitude, there is added the precise, exact, surgical awareness of not having the strength to live otherwise. There is a marvelous quest that leads one to find, in the tender solicitude of a woman or of a friend, oblivions, quietudes. At least for the infinite pleasure of a woman whom we love and who holds us in her arms, with conviction, honesty and personality, at least for that we do not too much regret the colossal subjective labor it demands. What a quest, though. An exhaustion of energy is not enough: damnation would have it that the flattest, most banal forms be perpetually, tirelessly renewed thanks to ever more conviction, sincerity, innovation and terror of failure. At times, what matters other than this human warmth that a work of art gives off, after one has thought about it, dreamed of it for so long? It is a dishonor to reason, but so be it. One must lose oneself in puerile vows and repeat, like a novice, tremendously slow and convinced “I love you”s, in order at last to draw closer, edified by oneself, stunned by this rehashing, to the desire of the other and to the happiness that the certainty of being accepted in this banality provides. What does it matter to us, individuals, if in our startled, stupefied subjectivity we feel amorous raptures, with our heads full of meaning and the quest for this “happiness,” that is to say, the torture of oneself? Ah! Yes, anguish. And I saw it withdrawing its claws from my soul, with droplets of blood falling to the ground. And something like a black mist was rising around this cheap photo-novel scene that aestheticism never stops propelling.
Ah! Anguish. It is a first-rate diversion, which must nevertheless be kept up, more or less, to make it remain in the depths of ourselves, for fear of not knowing what to replace it with. Like everyone, I have had oddities striking my weary brain as evening came on. But never has anguish taken on that gigantic magnitude that killed Edgar Poe, Gérard de Nerval, Charlie Parker, Picasso, Adamov and Socrates.
Excess, that is what art must codify: class transgression. Excess is indispensable. There are illegal excesses. They seek sanctions in civil society and the attentive compatibility of institutionalized objectivity. But there are non-Rimbaldian excesses that want to owe nothing to illegality. We are incensed with Rimbaud. That guy did a crazy amount of harm. What is that, the “derangement of all the senses”? It is Nerval at Doctor Blanche’s, it is Nerval in the rue de la vieille lanterne, the rope around his neck, at -19°.
Rimbaud is the master of leftism and Sartre his twentieth-century adapter. For Rimbaud resents his mother, work, the dominant ideology, stupidly. To be against that, to join the communist party, to live a battle of lucidity, to state the positions taken at the moment one must, fine. That is enough. No individual knows what the dominant ideology is, except a few gods indifferent to their knowledge, who drink whisky and vodka to forget what they have seen.
No, excess is indispensable, if it is the fixed expression of the awareness of the impossible in subjective relations. This is not to be understood as meaning that subjective relations escape the dominant ideology. Exactly the opposite. The freedom granted (subjective freedom, which is infinite) must be pushed to the extreme.
For example: Louis has the idea for a canvas. He knows the colors, the forms, the rhythm, the overall balance. Very well. And now the canvas must be done two, three, four times, to the point of blowing one’s sensations apart. Likewise for a pathological “vein” in poetry: it must be exploited for months, for years, one must drive oneself mad with the obsession of its exploitation. There is no pleasure and no success except in the other, floored by excess, unable to go one better.
Likewise music: it is Boulez who tunes his orchestra—during the intermissions—like a modern piece, which redoubles Wagner. Without excess, we would know nothing. It would be tearing a part of ourselves out of us. We want to fall upward and, in the struggle with what we love, to find an enormous foothold. We could no longer stop. Only humor can speak the passions aloud. All the rest must be excessive, aesthetic.
Chapter VIII: The Chemistry of Work
Work alone provides the scale of values sufficient for an objective assessment. It is insofar as each of us works that we find points of definitive agreement. But, a contrario, our differences grow thicker with our personal approaches. That is because we know full well how each of us invests in this scale of values.
Louis started at 12, pushed by his father, who was then naturally exploiting an available productive force. What did school matter to him? At table, Louis served the wine to the father, and the father would have knocked him senseless if he had not. That is perhaps why Padre Padrone is detestable. It is a ridiculous film, in which the confrontation of class strata, the son’s will to political emancipation, leaves no chance to the father’s onto-politics. What use, then, is this clash of personalities, when gaining access to an understanding of realities automatically makes it possible to go beyond it? If the chosen work leads to a brawl deep in an Italian village, it is because the chosen work creates values of conflict, where petty-bourgeois hatred serves as motivation. Work (and its quality) is measured by the extent of the subjective balance it brings about and—we would say—by the degree of conceptualization it makes it possible to reach.
It is work that is the right measure of reality. It is the kind of work that grounds modes of reflection. It is the felt objective necessity of earning one’s living that gives value to reflections. All the rest is all well and good, but intellectual salon convolutions. The professions of the parents, those of the children, tell class history very precisely and reveal—clinically—the subjective choices that are made.
A fishmonger up at six to meet the boats, reeking of the smell of the boats, confronted with the will of a normally narrow-minded family, cornered in the back of a shop in a coastal town that does not know how to develop its industry or its population, Louis gradually takes the business in hand. It is because he succeeds as a fishmonger that he will then succeed as a Marxist-Leninist. It is because he holds the values of work—moral and financial—that he can spare some of his time to go toward the elaboration of what he is not.
But any shopkeeper who is somewhat B.O.F. seeks in intellectualism and aestheticism a social redemption.
Keeping to a strict scenario, this fishmonger differs in no way from other fishmongers. Yet several facts suffice: Louis is a Marxist-Leninist, a communist, a painter, a musicologist, an Egyptologist. That is enormous. Through Marxism-Leninism—through the concept in the sense in which we understand it—he distances himself from his social function, decodes his immediate environment, politicizes his commitment and rediscovers our class complicity. Through communism, he states his hopes and his choices publicly. He is a cell secretary. That has great resonance in his town. Through painting, he redeems his commitment as a capitalist shopkeeper. It is in the afternoon that he paints, and this pastime of the jaded and frivolous bourgeois has become for him a craft that he has practiced for 20 years, with undeniable successes.
Music is at once the exercise of financial power—a hi-fi system and a collection of some 20,000 records—and the flourishing of an exceptional ear, of an uncommon musical memory and of the culture of a relentless autodidact.
Through Egyptology, finally—he works in the evenings—he gains access to pseudo-academic study, which his autodidacticism would otherwise deny him; he reveals himself a researcher, in the strictest sense.
It is the harmonization of these opposites, the juxtaposition of the fishmonger and the painter, of the Marxist-Leninist and the Egyptologist, of the communist and the bourgeois, that creates his confused and terrible personality, which tells of disarray and strength.
It is—once again—quite different for Michel. Son of a country schoolteacher, of a worker who would leave the marital home, he does for his mother what any good son would do: he studies. Physically gifted, he also tries by that means to attain a higher social status. He goes in for sports: rugby and sprinting. Paris is for him an obligatory stage for his studies. Shut away in the capital, he falls into the hands of the administration. He will remain a study-hall monitor in a lycée for more than eleven years. The deed is done: class hatred can flourish. Avoiding the choices of the Petit Chose, he takes up residence in a seedy hotel and sets up his quarters in a bistro: the Old Navy, boulevard Saint-Germain. Then begins for him a double working life, in which hallucination mingles with the sordid. When he leaves the lycée children, he lingers at the café, opens some shabby sheets of graph paper and writes “L’Etre et le Code,” subtitled: le procès de production d’un ensemble très capitaliste.[27] 625 pages wrested from the Latin Quarter, amid sneers and jeers. He holds out. A pro-Soviet communist out of honesty, he will remain in the heart of the Latin Quarter, in May 1968, as fiercely faithful to his orthodox Marxism-Leninism as a dam is to a river. Thrown out of phase by the impossible juxtaposition of his work as an intellectual and his work as a monitor, he forges himself an iron administrative will and conceives, in his madman’s head, academic plans that will come true. He earns a state doctorate in sociology, becomes assistant professor, then associate professor, then professor. In the meantime he publishes a savage pamphlet against social democracy: “Néofascisme et idéologie du désir,”[28] then “le frivole et le sérieux.”[29] He goes on writing, because the sheet of graph paper open on the bistro table is an integral part of his universe. At the university, he groups his classes into a single day, so as to be able to go back afterward to his village in Tarn et Garonne, go jogging and watch TV. From his years as a tutor at a neighborhood lycée he has kept a chauvinism about work that is appalling. He is stingy, because every penny has cost him, and his avarice is proverbial among us.
Sublimated by the evident contradiction between his past and his present, Michel becomes a little more pro-Soviet, as with all of us, a little more withdrawn into himself, like all of us, and his academic advent does not change his inner convictions: he wants to work little, to distrust the world even more, in the civil sense of the term, and to look after himself, because otherwise no one will. He knows it well, and his struggle is individualized, Poujadized and sublimated by the lump of rancor he has stuck in his throat and in his history. Work has not fulfilled him. It has made him live, and live so little! Now work must pay. Michel earns his living with his head; it is not for nothing. That’s Golden Skull. The state claws at his scalp. And he, who is a Leo, must bend his back and let the administration scrape out his brains. He is in his death throes.
With Domi, it is more tragic. There is, moreover, in him, as soon as one approaches him, an extraordinary dimension, in the sense that he, for his part, would be incapable of doing something normal that soothes and satisfies. There is something of a social squall in him, and his anarchism is quite literal: his house is in disorder, because that is his own order.
Locked out of the Colonies, where his father was a civil servant, he returns to metropolitan France to pursue in Paris the Sorbonne higher studies of a spoiled bourgeois, but one whose family no longer quite has the means. So here he is, a sponger, a madcap, whimsical and of a nineteenth-century romanticism that Nerval would have appreciated and that the Latin Quarter regards with a jaded eye.
He does not work. He reads, listens to music, talks, and his culture and his ideas are brilliant. And genius he does have!
Too much. Overgifted, he loses his footing, because the values of production are flouted, ridiculed, scorned. He sinks into a puerile socio-political demonism. His professional life topples. He is going to die. He dies all the time, and his balance explodes every weekend in jazz concerts that last until five in the morning or in walks through the Valois, in the footsteps of Rousseau, flute to his lips and Hegel in his pocket. He is made for doing nothing and does not manage it. Paris crushes him.
Driven by the need to exercise his pedagogy, he leaves for the provinces to create a private school, where he takes on all the classes. It is certainly for him an unprecedented adventure, outsized and doomed to failure. He flees to Africa where, still teaching, he is once again dying of an intellectual and political isolation that strengthens him—if that were possible—in a communism and its orthodoxy. Then he returns to Paris, where he is now a powerless auxiliary teacher, madly in love with the GDR, with Furtwängler and Hölderlin, tossed between his son, his friends, his outbursts and illnesses that wear him out.
Why does he not write? Everything is there, for him. What got blocked one day, so that now not a single line has come? He plays the flute, the piano and probably any instrument, if he wanted to, but he does not produce. The vertigo of worldliness assails him, and he would have liked a society to exist in which discourse sufficed in itself and in which, by this means, his socio-political role would be institutionalized. Domi does nothing but talk. That must be understood in every sense, good and bad. One thinks, of course, of Socrates. Indeed, Socrates’ masterstroke will undeniably have been to find himself an errand boy, a scribe, a clerk of Plato’s stature. Domi would need the head of an academy, who would give his courses on the basis of the broad lines that he would trace. Socrates was whimsical and dismaying, Domi is a communist. That is his own drama, which keeps him out of the salons, where he could be all the rage and where he would be fed at will. One does not introduce orthodox Marxist-Leninists into boudoirs. Besides, they would not come. The leftists are already there, and places are at a premium, and they guard the entrances.
René is yet another dimension. Work is simply not made for him, and yet God knows he slogs away! He earns his living with disarming doggedness, because he has no particular aptitude. Son of restaurateurs (like me, since I am his brother), expelled from Morocco, who had to rebuild their lives and their business, he was struck by lightning three times over. First, sport shook him. A great swimmer, several times champion of France, with the sensitivity of one flayed alive, he never embraced the “circus,” and already something was wavering in him when, on the contrary, he should have—rightly—triumphed. The sports press made a great deal of him. Those “little René will grow big”s—that shakes you. The Algerian War crucified him. Having gone off for “military service,” he stays there three and a half years, kept away from the Joinville battalion by the Nation mindful of its champions. He has a cushy war, he who for nothing in the world could have killed, let alone Algerians! The whole thing ends in a nasty expulsion from Morocco, which was gaining its independence. These three blows marked him for life: sport, Algeria, Morocco. Three battles that he lost, very much against his will. He will never quite regain his balance. What’s the use? There are descents into hell from which carrion, bandits, fighters or chiefs come back up. He comes back up merciful, atheist, good, humane. That is talent. He will never let go of his line of conduct. He makes it a component of his personality. So what is work for him? The deliberately made choice to put a place at the table and a bed at the disposal of whoever wants them, by way of assistance. René is work for the sake of private, metaphysical help; scoundrels could live off him. Our friendship probably protects him, and around him one sees only beings who deserve, and who pay for in talent, in humanity, in real needs, in kindness, what he offers. And he is a restaurateur because his parents were, because he knows how to do it and because the table is automatically set for those who come. He supplements his income, in winter, by fishing for sea urchins. He sets out alone into the sea, dives down and comes back up, and so on, pulling across the water an immense basket of floating wire mesh, and the more he dives, the more the scene fills with the unreal, the fantastic, the grotesque and the sublime. He suffers from toothache—like many pieds-noirs –: the underwater pressure torments his cavities, he sometimes suffers agonies. He has, moreover, had almost his whole mouth redone. He left his jaw in the seaweed, down at the bottom.
Once out of there, he sprawls in an armchair, a cigarette in his mouth and L’Équipe in hand, and he softens, liquefies, mellows, while waiting for the dramas of existence, which assail him. He listens to music, he reads thrillers, writes songs with one of his guitarist friends—José—and a few detective novels, which few of us have read. When he gets too fat, he sets off on insane runs, in which he sheds his kilos, and here we go again.
He earns his living in order to give it to others. Work is for him a solution of social and metaphysical continuity: the gift of food. He is a Marxist-Leninist with irony and pain, for Stalin grieves him. He is a communist on the quiet, in the calm effort of his softness and of his slow determination. He too—like Domi—would not have suffered from an intelligent patron who would have known how to use his talent as a diplomat of intersubjectivity for universal ends. Work does not bring him much. As a dilettante, he would have remained good, just and frivolous.
Finally, me. Driven out of foolishness by the expulsion from Morocco, I, immediately after a troubled adolescent crisis, sank into work the way one clings to a tree in a forest that one has just crashed into head-on, in a frantic race. I am pinned to labor. It is a practical relationship for me. Sitting up in bed at 5-6 o’clock in the morning, five minutes later I am at my worktable, bed made, washed, dressed, breakfast eaten, and I write. Afterward, I do the housework, look after my son and go to the newspaper (I am editor-in-chief) until six o’clock. Back home, housework, dinner, bed. It starts again in the morning and once more I write. I write some more. Books, poems, plays, essays. But also a bachelor’s degree in letters, a master’s in philosophy, a state doctorate in sociology (in progress), a student at the Hautes Études, not to mention, of course, the newspaper articles and the letters to Louis, who is my “journal.”
I am a Marxist-Leninist, a communist, a member of the PCF for 10 years, out of die-hard commitment and conviction. I live alone with my son and that is enough for me: work galvanizes me.
Chapter IX: Death
We are all going to die one day. Who will be the first to go? I will not withstand the loss of one of you.
What is it for, death? It is a due date. But the inequality of social classes before it is sordid. Material and moral comfort—even prefabricated, above all prefabricated, wrested as surplus values are from the working man—comfort softens death. One is in a nice warm smell of central heating, and the doctor bustles about. One knows there is no recourse, but what does it matter? One is accompanied, attended to. And then, one leaves capital… the people, the relatives, the others are there, and one hears their impatience counting the sums, the assets, the possibilities, and one understands why one has existed, and one has no regrets, because one leaves something behind. And the maid or the governess or God knows who will have their share too, and the world is marvelously ordered. The child is justified in his duration, and the expected departure overwhelms him: he does not know how to weep and be content at the same time, and this imbalance that shows through in his lips, in his hands that come to rest on the sheet, in the horror, all this can be seen, and what a force death is then! One has created everyone’s emotion, and in the ambient noise one perceives the burden that the approaching absence will be. A woman trembles at the foot of the bed and all murmur, weep a little, and people bustle and bustle around the corpse of oneself. Even if illness, a car accident, idiotic stupidity is the cause, even if the pains are monstrous, with a kidney rotting or a heart giving out, even if the ailment is tragic, there is in the death of the rich the unshakable satisfaction that the transmission of capital is taking place, and that the flow of surplus values will continue, and that the accumulation of profits will be maintained, and that this struggle of bourgeois life has its meaning, and that the economic order knows how to integrate this disappearance of bodies, since it integrates its consequences, namely inheritance. And the heirs bustle around the dead man.
In the attention paid to the tragic, to the irrevocable, the weight of realities stabilizes and one draws up the balance sheet: the balance sheet of affection, of relationships, and the cash balance sheet. It is the operating account, the net profits, after deduction of all charges, a balance, which turns out figures, positive, negative, monstrously precise. Superb, the deaths of the rich, of the well-off.
What will our death be for? Will we have the patience to wait? Who will be near us? We have never talked about that among ourselves. It is not a subject for reflection. It is not a subject. Who will be near the other? To tell him what? What is to be done? Neither rich, nor holding the power of ideology, nor recognized, nor necessary, we are not useless for all that. We have not prepared our death, because we do not know exactly, with regard to historical perspectives and the class struggle, what we are for.
Against the current, braced against the irremediable advance of social democracy, there is no major interest in holding on to us.
Perhaps in the GDR or in the USSR, faced with our disarray, a local cell would give us a circumstantial death, with glasses of wine, kind words and well-turned remarks on the fate of the capitalist countries. Why not flee there to prepare a death of that kind?
Why not commit suicide? Because at a certain moment in life, the pleasure is immense, the balance positive, so one lies down on a bed, one checks the general order: the child of age, texts written, those close to one forewarned, the world indifferent, and—a doctor alerted who will discover a clean corpse—one kills oneself calmly, in the act of strength of having chosen one’s departure. It is the choice that counts, the freedom to go, positivist rationalism.
Why not?
What is to be done with an old man, anyway? They will not have tomorrow the patience we have today. Today, youth bursts in our heads, and this dynamism of bodies and minds sweeps away everything sordid. There is not yet any slowness, any trembling, any heaviness, any terror of age. Just a premonitory vision. Just some acquaintance with the old people of today. What can one say to those old people? To those we are close to? To those who cling to us? How to die with them? Ours is an extraordinary life, a shared strength, out of the ordinary, overpowering. The flashes of our reflections, the striking power of our ideas, all that is due to us in the kingdom of the living, which we have wrested in struggle, our respective tendernesses, the happiness of our sensibilities offered to what we love, the ideological reality we represent, our portraits that are in the eyes of others, the woman who pampers us, music, in short everything, everything tells of our extraordinary life, our strength. Death is nothing, now. It is not for us. We do not talk about it. Does anyone here feel like dying? Let him raise his hand!
How we ought to draw closer to old people, to give them our strength, our ideas about death. That would be useful. We should be the bedside specialists. Men whose trade is the absurdity of sitting down, with an old man’s twisted hand in one’s hand, and there, smiling, saying that it is nothing, making fun, waiting for the other’s death. We would know how to do that, I am sure of it. But there are so many old people! It would rather have to become institutionalized. Custom would then require that, every week, one be near a being who is dying. It would go without saying and could only begin at 18. People would fight terribly to lower the age of attendance at death to 16, with formidable reasons.
Thus, every week, without necrophilia, one would be near a dead person, by way of assistance. That would be useful! The dead would have the curious pleasure of not knowing their companion.[30] The doctor would keep the list of the neighborhood’s weekly available people, and it is he who would call, an hour or two—if possible—before the passing. Then one would go three doors down, to sit near an old woman who trembles and who would say: “Ah! At last!” With exasperation in her voice, because she would be disappointed to end up with that one, and in this fit of temper that would make her forget everything, she would go. The whole thing takes only a few minutes, and the living forces would rub shoulders with the forces that are dying, and we would be useful.
Whereas today, it happens amid a well-bred indifference, and it is only by chance, as if by inadvertence, that the news of a death is passed on, shared, learned; it strikes harder, all the harder since the news is indifferent, whereas it should obviously have been received very attentively.
Reread in 1994. Approved.
Christian Riochet
Reread in 2009. Approved.
Christian Riochet
Notes
[1]. This is so important to me that I will come back to this problem specifically. Cf. Chapter III
[2]. Cf. chapter V: freedom, banal originality.
[3]. For more on the respective roles, one should refer to chapter V.
[4]. State doctorate in sociology. Published by Mouton. 1974.
[5]. Latin Quarter bistro
[6]. On this point, read chapter V.
[7]. Let the anti-Stalinists rest assured: we are not stupidly Stalinist.
[8]. Cf. chapter III: love, the vertigo of pathos.
[9]. Cf. chapter VII.
[10]. Cf. Chapter V.
[11]. Cf. chapter VII: “art, so that excess may codify itself”
[12]. “scoundrels,” in the sense that they deliberately accept.
[13]. I am not speaking of those who—having no difficulty earning their living—therefore have no effort to make in order to lie to babies. Those people are even less concerned with explaining how and why they are exploiters.
[14]. “La Condition Féminine” in La Pensée no. 179, February 1979, for example.
[15]. Subtitle “Histoire de la production et de la reproduction,” 540 pages, unpublished.
[16]. Cf. the chapter “Children.”
[17]. Cf. the chapter on the artistic function, chap. VII: “Art, so that excess may be codified.”
[18]. Let us insist: it does not seem.
[19]. For banal originality would—quite obviously—like to standardize. So—of course—we are originals.
[20]. Read the conclusion
[21]. Read the conclusion
[22]. I wrote about him an introduction to “L’Être et le Code” entitled “La logique du concret,” which already says this. It is unpublished.
[23]. The finest of its biographies is, of course, “Les Misérables,” and the other, Hegel and his work.
[24]. Cf. Chapter IX
[25]. Text published in Le Monde of December 28, 1978 pages of, entitled: “je reste pourtant communiste.”
[26]. The text that follows is taken from a letter written by me to Louis on September 9, 1978.
[27]. This text appeared in 1972, from Éditions Mouton.
[28]. Published by Denoël in 1976.
[29]. Published by Éditions Libres/Hallier in 1979.
[30]. It must be understood here that we are speaking of the dead who die alone. The poor. There is no major interest in attending the rich dead, who have no need of intruders.