This is the big lie, and the great disaster of
politics: to place politics on one side and life on the other, on one side what
is said but isn’t real and on the other side what is lived but can no longer be
said. There are the speeches of the Prime Minister and, for a century now, the
barbed satire of the Canard enchaine.
There are the tirades of the great militant and there’s the way he treats his
fellow human beings, with whom he allows himself to conduct himself all the more miserably as he takes himself to
be politically irreproachable. There is the sphere of the sayable and the
voiceless, orphaned, mutilated life. And that takes crying out because it no
longer serves any purpose to speak. Hell is really the place where all speech
is rendered meaningless. What is called ‘debate’ nowadays is just the civilized
murder speech. Official politics has become so manifestly a repugnant sphere of
deception that the only events still happening in that sphere reduce down to a
paradoxical expression of hatred of
politics. If Donald Trump is truly a figure of hatred it’s because he is first
and foremost a figure of the hatred of politics. And it’s this hatred that
carries him to power. Politics in its totality is what plays into the hands of
the National Front. . .
If the stalking of criminals and the orgy of judgment and punishment are so
popular nowadays, it’s because they provide a momentary ersatz innocence to the
spectators. But since the relief doesn’t last, it’s necessary to blame, punish,
and accuse over and over again – to maintain the illusion. Kafka explained the
success of the detective story in the same way:
Detective stories are always concerned
with the solution of mysteries that are hidden behind extraordinary occurrences.
But in real life it’s absolutely the opposite. The mystery isn’t hidden in the
background. Quite the contrary! It stares one in the face. It’s what is
obvious. So we do not see it. Everyday life is the greatest detective story
ever written. Every second, without noticing we pass by thousands of corpses
and crimes. That’s the routine of or lives. But if, in spite of habit,
something does succeed in surprising us, we have a marvelous sedative in the
detective story, which presents every mystery of life as a legally punishable exception.
It is a pillar of society, a starched shirt covering the heartless immorality
which nevertheless claims to be bourgeois civilization.
So it’s a matter of jumping outside the circle of killers . . .
The characteristic texture of any society results
from the way humans are pulled into it, by
the very thing that separates them: self-interest. Given that they participate
as individuals, as closed entities, and thus always provisionally, they come together
as separate. Schopenhauer offered an arresting image of the consistency peculiar
to social relations, of their inimitable pleasures and of the ‘unsociable human
sociability’:
“On a cold winter’s day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm
and keep from freezing. But soon they felt one another's quills and moved
apart. When the need for warmth brought them together again, their quills again
forced them apart. They were driven back and forth at the mercy of their
discomforts until they found the distance from one another that provided both a
maximum of warmth and a minimum of pain. In human beings, the emptiness and
monotony of the isolated self produces a need for society. This brings people together,
but their many offensive qualities and intolerable faults drive them apart
again. The final distance that they finally find that permits them to coexist
is embodied in politeness and good manners.”. .
.
The fragments that constitute us, the forces inhabiting us, the assemblages we
enter into don’t have any reason to compose a harmonious whole, a fluid set, a
moveable articulation. The banal experience of life in our time is characterized
rather by a succession of encounters that undo us little by little, dismember
us, gradually deprive us of any sure bearings. If communism has to do with the
fact of organizing yourselves – collectively, materially , politically – this is
insofar as it also means organizing ourselves singularly, existentially, and in
terms of our sensibility. Or else we must consent to falling back into politics
or into economy. If communism has a goal, it is the great health of forms of life.
This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the
disjoined members of our being, in touch with life. One can live a whole life
without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence
is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins,
instead of giving form. After the miracle often encountered, relations can go from
wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually
gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allow themselves
to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term.
In sharp contrast to that to that, there are the inherited methods of activist
construction, so grossly defective, so exhausting, so destructive, when they
are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge of self-renunciation but
on the attention given to the smallest action. It’s a question of our plane of
perception and hence our way of doing things. A practical matter. What the
perception of entities– individual or collective – bars our access to is the
place where things really happen, where the collective potentials form and fall
apart, gain strength or dissipate. It’s on that plane and only there that the real,
including the political real becomes legible and makes sense. To live communism
is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong to, but to
deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means cutting certain
ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the smallest things . . .the particular
happiness of any ‘commune’ reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a
certain quality of ties, the radiant energy of each fragment of world that it
harbors – good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to individual
and collective confinement, adios to the reign of narcissism. “The one and only
progress,” wrote Franco Fortini, ‘consists and will consist in reaching a higher
level, one that is visible and visionary, where the powers and qualities of
every singular existence can be promoted.” What is to be deserted is not ‘society’,
or ‘individual life’, but the dyad they compose. We must learn to move on a different plane.
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