Lacan's Milieu

It was his contacts with Alexandre Koyre, Henry Corbin, Alexandre Kojeve, and George Bataille that introduced Lacan to modern philosophy and set him reading Husserl, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger. Without this widening of his frontiers, as well as his encounter with the surrealists, Lacan might have been imprisoned forever within the confines of psychiatry and an academic understanding of Freud.
 

Prologue

[Koyre’s ideas on the history of science were splendidly exemplified in his studies of Galileo, begun around 1935 . . .The science of Galileo rejected all finalist explanations of the universe and brought the idea of a hierarchically ordered cosmos a step closer to destruction. The notion of a infinite and autonomous universe undermined traditional proofs of the existence of God, banished man from his place at the center of creation, and forced him to seek for God within himself. Medieval man had lived in a space where the truth was ‘given’ in the form of revealed religion. But the man of the new Galilean order, who Descartes bade “philosophize as if no one had ever philosophized before,” found himself in a space where thought reigned supreme and thought was lodged in him. The closed, finite, hierarchical world of the Middle Ages was being replaced by a limitless universe in which man stood alone, save for his reason, his uncertainty, and his dismay. The philosophical parallel to this scientific isolation is to be found in Descartes’s cogito, subjected to the opposing poles of truth and freedom. The individual is free, he has nothing to lean on outside himself; and he has to confront a truth  to which no existing authority  has set any bounds.

Such meditations on the birth of modern science  and the status of the cogito had originated in the great philosophical shake-up brought about by Husserl, Koyre’s former teacher. Knowledge of Husserl’s theories had been gaining ground in France since the 1920s. Husserl’s phenomenology asserted that nothing could be known for certain except my existence as a thinking being.  At the cogito stage, being must be reduced to the I who is thinking, i.e., to the being of the ego. Hence the notion of phenomenological reduction, which posits the primacy of the ego and of thought and goes beyond ordinary experience to see existence as consciousness of the world. If the existence of the world presupposes that of the ego, phenomenological reduction makes my existence consciousness of the world. The ego then becomes transcendental, and consciousness becomes intentional, since it is directed at something. As for ontology, that is an egology in which, if my idea of an object is real, then the object itself is real. Thus the ego acquires a sense of the other or of the alter ego, through a series of experiences that define transcendental inter-subjectivity as the reality out of which each individual ego emerges.

In ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’ [1935], Husserl showed how the quest for inter-subjectivity could save the human sciences from inhumanity.  In other words, by saving the ego from scientific formalism, transcendental phenomenology was preserving the possibility of a science of man in which the ego could be seen as life itself. So, in the face of the rising tide of barbarism and dictatorship that was threatening the peace of the West, Husserl’s phenomenology appealed to the philosophical consciousness that Europe had inherited from antiquity and that found an echo in men and women who wanted to be free to govern their own lives:

“There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility towards the spirit and into barbarity, or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through the heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness.”


 Husserl’s writings made it possible to situate the tragic side of existence and the flaws in being within the individual, thus striking a decisive blow at the popularity of Bergsonian optimism about the possibilities of ego. The resulting critiques of the idea of progress led sometimes to the rejection of democratic values in favor of a return  to the original roots of being and sometimes to a notion of nothingness, or void, a tragic symbol of the finiteness and mortal end of a human existence devoid of all transcendency. But Husserl’s philosophy did offer modern reason two escape routes. One lay in refocusing Western spirituality  on a philosophy of experience and the individual; in France this path was followed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The other solution was to construct a philosophy based on knowledge and rationality, as did Alexandre Koyre, Jean Cavailees, and George Canguilhem. Lacan would follow a middle course between the two which involved both a new exploration of the subject – i.e., of individual experience – and an attempt to define a form of rationality based on a deeper knowledge of the Freudian Unconscious.]

Be all that as it may . . .

Koyre’s views on the evolution of science were in tune with the work of historians who in 1929, led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, had started the review ‘Annales histoire economique et sociale. As early as 1903, in the Revue de synthese founded by Henri Berr and Charles Simiand had challenged the positivist methods of Earnest Lavisse and Charles Seignobos and advocated the destruction of the three graven images of orthodox history: the idol of politics, which required events affecting society as a whole to be reduced to the conscious decisions and deeds of the princes of this world; next, the idol of individuality, which limited the story of all mankind to just the lives of the famous; and last, the idol of chronology, which favored a linear narrative made up of strings of facts supported by sacrosanct “documents.”

It is no coincidence that Annales, which would give birth to a new school of history , was founded  not only in the same year as the Wall Street crash but also at the time that the Husserl revolution was preparing a philosophical rethinking of the question of human existence. At the heart of both the historical and the philosophical movements lay deep doubt about the idea of progress as inherited from  eighteenth-century philosophy. Not only had any descriptive history based merely on stirring battles and idealized heroes been rendered obsolete by the recent horrors of Verdun, but these new perceptions of the complexity of “real” and living history ruled out restricted or simplified theories purporting to explain past phenomena,. So instead of Manichean representation of events, Bloch and Febvre and their friends aimed at creating a vast multiple history that would include the study of lifestyles, habitats, attitudes, feelings, collective subjectivities, and social groups. All these would combine in an epic narrative that could bring a whole era back to life in the reader’s imagination. The pioneers of this new history were encouraged in their task by researches in three other fields: the teachings of Vidal de la Blache, who had freed geography from its obsession with administrative divisions and changed it into a largely visual science studied in the field; the work of Emile Durkheim, who had transformed sociology from mere fact collecting into a study of structural patterns; and developments in economic history.

The Annales revolution tended in the direction of a temporal and spatial deconstruction of the subject not without analogy in Husserl’s philosophy and Einstein’s theory of relativity. In this new type of history, man, immersed in the infinite duration of the “long term”, was master of his fate no more. Torn between a social and a geographical time dimension no longer limited to his own personal experience, he was nonetheless denied any place in a universal nature, since nature was now ‘relative,’ varying from one culture and one period to another.

The cultural relativism of the “Annalists,” together with their condemnation of narrative history with a patriotic or nationalist stance, challenged the high-handed assumptions that made Western civilization see its history in terms of progress: a progress based on the colonization of “minority” cultures. The new historians didn’t reject the heritage of the Enlightenment  philosophy, but they did apply it to different ends. Their object was not so much to reassess “reactionary,” “primitive,” “barbaric,” or prejudice-ridden forms of social organization as to find a new way of thinking about difference and identity, sameness and otherness, reason and unreason, science and religion, error and truth, the occult and the rational. And the demand for relativism, and for an end to the idea that one civilization is superior to another, made possible a new universalism, able to create a living encyclopedia of human societies by incorporating into history the work of other sciences –psychology, sociology, and ethnology – now also expanding rapidly.

Febvre’s attitude to the possibility of a history of philosophy can be best seen in a review he wrote in 1937 of a book by Georges Freidman on the current crisis concerning the idea of progress:


It struck me that it would be useful to compare the history of philosophy as written by philosophers with the way we historians proper deal with ideas when the occasion arises. And having done so I was dismayed at how often ‘historians proper” are content just to describe new concepts as though they were generated spontaneously, without any reference to their different economic, political, and social backgrounds; as if they were produced by disembodied minds living unreal lives in the sphere of pure ideas.

Instead of showing lone eccentrics spinning  atemporal systems of thought out of their own entrails, Febvre’s history of ideas would deal in real people inventing new thoughts, whether consciously or unconsciously, by means of the outillage mental (intellectual apparatus) of their age.

The idea of mentality, or mental outlook, revived in the work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, had first been used to compare the pre-logical thought systems of children and “primitive” peoples with the more abstract functioning of the modern, “Western” mind. But in the 1930s the notion acquired a structural tinge through the use of the phrase outillage mental. Whether in Marc Bloch’s ‘symbolic representations,” Lucien Febvre’s “psychic universe,” or Alexandre Koyre’s ‘conceptual structure,” the aim was always to definer a model of what was thinkable at any given period, using the categories of perception, conceptualization, and expression then available for the organization of individual and collective thought.


All this reflected a French approach to the structural analysis of human societies that could be seen in Jacques Lacan as early as 1938 and that a new intellectual generation would take up again twenty years later in the light of Saussurian linguistics

End Game for the Saudi Kingdom of Arabia by Christopher Davidson

Even in the most bearish scenario of a fully moth-balled US shale oil industry, a consensus began to emerge that such reversals would only be temporary as even modest future price rallies would soon see idled rigs roaring back to life. Moreover, with such new technologies spreading across the world, shale and other new oil production methods were thought to unlikely to remain a US-phenomena for much longer. In this sense Saudi Arabia had already lost its long-held status as the world’s sole ‘swing-producer’ capable of influencing prices on its own. Further eroding the kingdom’s historically privileged position in Western policy circles, the impact of the new oil era on its domestic economy was beginning to undermine rapidly its ability to keep recycling oil revenues back to its Western allies. Certainly even in the most bullish scenarios of oil; prices eventually trebling or quadrupling, it became evident that Saudi Arabia would soon have little or no surpluses left to keep financing its historically massive arms purchases or overseas investments.

Already there were signs that Riyadh’s difficulties were going to jeopardize its standing as the US’s primary Middle Eastern client. With several indications by the end of 2015 that Saudi Arabia had either begun to withdraw or had begun to consider withdrawing some of its holdings in US  treasury bonds.  In something of warning shot for Saudi Arabia, within weeks of these rumors the first ever mainstream media coverage of these secretive investments began to appear, with former and current US officials calling  for more details on the true extent of the kingdom’s investments in the US – an unpalatable prospect for a regime presiding over millions struggling with unemployment and poverty.

As a series of unprecedented Bloomberg reports described, the bond purchases had been part of a special agreement reached between Saudi Arabia and the US after the 1973 oil price shocks, which allowed them to remain above scrutiny and not fully included  in the Department of the Treasury’s otherwise comprehensive breakdown of more than a hundred other sovereign investors. “It’s mind boggling they haven’t undone this special agreement, its hard to justify such special treatment at this point,” argued one former  Dept. of Treasury assistant secretary in January 2016.

In March 20-16, following a fresh flurry of 9/11- related accusations about Saudi Arabia in the mainstream media, Saudi Arabian officials became a bit  threatening, telling US lawmakers that if US courts too any further 9/11-related actions against the Kingdom, then Riyadh would be ‘forced to sell; up to $750 billion [sic] in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts. A few weeks later the Saudi foreign minister  warned  that such actions could cause ‘an erosion of investor confidence in the US.”

Unfazed, on 17 May 2016 the Senate unanimously passed a bill allowing the families of the 9/11 victims to sue the state of Saudi Arabia for any role it may have had in the attacks. Perhaps coordinated, just five days earlier one of the 9/11 Commission members came forward in what was described ass the ‘first serious public split among the ten commissioners since they issued their 2004 reports.’ John F. Lehman claimed ‘there was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people working in the Saudi government.” He also revealed that the commission had been aware of ‘at least five Saudi government officials who were strongly suspected of involvement in the terrorists’ support network’ and that although ‘they may have not been indicted . ,. .they were certainly implicated . . .there was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.” More cautiously, two other commissioners also stated that ‘when it comes to the Saudis, we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of what happened on 9/11,’ and that ‘lines of investigation pursued by Congress were never adequately explored by the commission.”

Less than twenty-four hours before the Senate’s vote, and this time almost certainly in co-ordination, the Department of the Treasury chose to respond to a Bloomberg freedom of information request and finally ended forty-three years of secrecy on Saudi Arabia’s treasury bonds which, unsurprisingly, had already declined by 6% from January to March 2016.

Straining the relationship further, the new oil dynamic and mounting pressure on Riyadh was also beginning to raise the prospect that Saudi Arabia might finally have to ‘de-peg’ its riyal currency from the US dollar. Throughout 2015 speculation grew that the kingdom would eventually have little choice in the matter, as it would inevitably need some fiscal autonomy and a currency devaluation inn order to buy breathing space. Indeed, having run out of options, oil-exporting Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan had already done that, while rumors whirled that other ‘petro states’ would soon follow suit. By January 2016 the riyal was certainly more volatile, hitting an all-time low against the dollar in forward markets and with the Saudi Central Bank then warning all commercial banks in the kingdom against betting on future currency depreciation. Sensing the danger PointState Capital’s Zachary Schreiber revealed that he was shortening the Saudi riyal. As he saw it, the kingdom’s economy would be ‘structurally insolvent in two or three years,” its central bank’s asset sheet was ‘much lower than expected,’ and any selling of the Aramco ‘golden goose’ would be insufficient to meet the deficits.’

How exactly Saudi Arabia’s dramatically changing fortunes would factor into the US Middle East policy was not clear, as for some the existence of a functioning Saudi state was undoubtedly still perceived as the best option, not the least for the exploitation of its remaining hydrocarbon resources at a time when its stricken economy and major assets were about to be prized open by foreign investors. Furthermore, for those who saw the Saudi-Iran stalemate and the associated sectarian conflict as the best way to retain regional balance, the survival of Saudi Arabia as a military power was obviously preferable, especially if, as already seemed the case, it could be left to its own devices on the battlefield and corralled into further wars of attrition. Hinting at his support for such a strategy, in an exclusive conversation with the Atlantic published in March 2016, Barack Obama agreed with his interviewer that he was less likely than his predecessors ‘to axiomatically side with Saudi Arabia in its dispute with arch rival, Iran.’ He also called on Riyadh ‘to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace with Iran.’ Moreover, he described how ‘sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on their own or decisively win on their own,’ but made it clear that if this meant the US needed ‘to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores’ then this would ‘be in the interest neither of the US nor of the Middle East.”

Not all, of course, have seen things this way, as the US and other Western powers have long planned for the prospect of the Saudi state’s collapse and, of course, how best to benefit from it. Undoubtedly by the late 2015 there were stronger signs than ever that influential elements in the West believed the kingdom must soon be framed as a former ally and perhaps even a rogue state. Riding on a relentless media wave of ‘Saudi-bashing’ articles and even denunciations of the US-Saudi alliance in the New York Times and Washington Post editorials, numerous officials and politicians, including US presidential hopefuls and British opposition leaders, all began to stake out their anti-Saudi positions.

Providing additional indications of this shift of mood, in January 2016 the British government announced it was launching a full investigation into the foreign funding and support of jihadist groups in Britain. As something that had never happened before, even after 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings, the British press predicted its findings were likely to lead to a stand-off with Saudi Arabia. Beyond Britain, the German government also seemed to be hedging its bets, with Vice Chancellor  Sigmar Gabriel telling the media that ‘the Saudi regime poses a danger to public security through its support for Wahhabi mosques around the world’ and that ‘we have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over.’

More subtly there is evidence that Western intelligence agencies had also begun to harden up their positions and were more willing to spill the beans on Saudi Arabia. In December 2015, for example, German intelligence uncharacteristically issued a statement declaring that Saudi Arabia was ‘destabilizing the Arab World’ and that its deputy crown prince was pursuing an ‘impulsive intervention policy.’ Starkly different to all previous public Western criticism of Saudi Arabia, it did much to shift opinion further against Saudi Arabia. Equally out of place. A few weeks later a length report in the New York Times that was ostensibly focused on Saudi Arabia’s support for CIA-backed rebels in Syria, but in fact went much deeper. Citing unnamed former diplomats and intelligence officials, it not only reminded readers of the kingdom’s role in financing the Afghan jihad but also printed the first mainstream acknowledgement of Saudi intelligence’s old “Safari Club’- an organization that used to run covert and black operations in Africa on behalf of several other countries. Going further, it also made the allegation that a former Saudi ambassador to the US had personally helped fund the Nicaraguan contras and broker the Iran-Contra deal.

If the large body of existing proof of Saudi Arabia’s activities does end up being more widely publicized, and Western governments are obliged to take action, there are it seems only limited options available to them beyond publically chastising the kingdom or perhaps imposing Iran-style sanctions. Destroying it from the outside, or mounting a Henry Kissinger-style ‘teaching it a lesson’ operation, appear distant prospects, especially given the West’s proxy-based Middle East Policy. Much more likely in this scenario is for Saudi Arabia to be maneuvered into a position in which existing regional forces are more able to degrade it from within and, if necessary, eventually destroy it. Naturally the 2008 long war re[port had considered such an outcome, with its scenario of a ‘major Muslim state going bad’ having specified the prospect of jihadist as launching a successful ‘fundamentalist uprising’ in Saudi Arabia.

In this sense, the Islamic State (of its next incarnation) may be poised to serve another important strategic function, so it is undoubtedly one of the best placed organization to drive a wedge through Saudi Arabia. AS discussed, the Islamic State not only enjoys a significant support base within the kingdom, including elements of the religious establishment, but any Saudi sponsors that it has seem to be much more diffuse and some steps removed from the sort of state-backed institutions that had historically helped finance al-Qaeda. Moreover, in the etes of many of the country’s more restive conservatives, the Islamic State’s ideologies and seductive sectarian rhetoric offer something  of a purer and more consistent vision of an ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic state than that currently being administered by the financially and militarily struggling al-Saud regime and its McKinsey-advised deputy crown prince.

The divisions certainly run deep, with fifty-two senior Saudi clerics, including associates of the royally appointed Council of Senior Scholars, and some with millions of Twitter followers, jointly issuing a pointedly sectarian statement in October 2015 asking the public to ‘answer the call to jihad’ and go to Syria to ‘aid the oppressed and the mujahideen.” Although neither the Islamic State nor any other group was mentioned by name, it was still a significant step as it brazenly undermined a 2014 Saudi decree that had designated such entities s terrorist organizations and had criminalized any attempt by Saudi citizens to go and join them. Only a few months later, a former preacher at Mecca’s Grand Mosque declared that ‘we follow the same thought as the Islamic State . . . we do not criticize the thought on which it is based.’ Reflecting on who actually started it all, however, he latter suggested that ‘intelligence agencies and other countries may have helped it to develop,, providing them with weapons and ammunition, and directing them.’ Soon after this, with the Western media reporting on a ‘flurry of new fundraising campaigns in Saudi Arabia in the wake of an Iraqi army advance on the Islamic State stronghold in Fallujah, even a spokesman for the kingdom’s ministry of interior admitted that ‘you can not control the sympathies of the people.”

From the Islamic State’s perspective, much as al-Qaeda had eventually seen it, the destabilization and the the occupation of Saudi Arabia would be a grand prize given its resources and control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Though not a priority in the early days, with Iraq and Syria as the main focusm\, by 2015 Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had nonetheless begun to increase the pressure on Riyadh. Most of the Islamic State’s early attacks on the kingdom were aimed at the Shia minority in the East or the ‘rejectionist Ismailis’ in the South in an effort to underscore its better anti-Shia credentials and prove al-Saud weak. But more worryingly for Riyadh there were soon also a number of attacks on Saudi military and security targets, with a mosque frequented by special forces being blown up in August 2015, and two Saudi generals assassinated separately on the northern and southern borders, along with numerous killings and car-bombings in other cities across the kingdom. By early 2016, the frequency of such attacks had noticeably increased, with repeated gun battles taking place in and around Mecca, Bishah, and even outside the capital.

Unable to mount a convincing response to the Islamic State’s challenge and the rather asymmetrical nature of the threat, Riyadh has done little more than make mass arrests of suspects hooping at least some are key Islamic State operatives, along with issuing hollow warnings that the Saudi government will sue those who dare to compare the kingdom to the Islamic State. Meanwhile, the al- Saud regime has been goaded further by the Islamic State, which has issued maps depicting the country as a future governorate – Wilayat Najd – and has released numerous propaganda videos laying claim to Mecca. More provocatively, and something of a departure from earlier attacks on Houthi  targets in Yemen, the Islamic State also began to target Saudi-liberated Aden. By late 2015 Saudi-led forces were being killed in coordinated suicide bombings while wave of assassinations commenced, including  that of the city governor. In January 2016 the Islamic State even mounted an assault on the presidential palace while President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi was still inside it.

In these circumstances Saudi Arabia’s riskiest move would be to end up militarily confronting the Islamic State, either in Yemen or even worse by taking the fight to its heartlands in Syria and Iraq. With little chance of overall victory, especially if the Islamic State morphs into a more diffuse insurgency, and with Riyadh having to sustain a concurrent struggle against Iran and its allies, such a campaign would only serve to weaken the kingdom further. Nonetheless, for those who seek the demise or further debilitation of Saudi Arabia, it is certainly possible that Riyadh may buckle under pressure, as many of its concerned citizens have been calling for firmer action, while numerous Western officials and politicians have demanded it takes a more active role in cleaning up its own backyard. As US secretary of defense Ashton Carter contended, the kingdom and its Gul allies needed to stop complaining and to ‘get into the game,’ while Obama implied Riyadh was a ‘free rider’ on US foreign policy.

By the beginning of 2016 it seemed at least some senior Saudi officials had begun to think the unthinkable, with cautious statements made that the kingdom would consider deploying thousands of special forces troops to Syria to ‘fight the Islamic State.” Although the proviso was made that this would only take place under the banner of an ‘international US-led coalition,’ and even though Washington was already aware that the Syrian and Iraqi armies had managed to begin clawing back at least some territory from the Islamic State, the prospect of direct Saudi intervention, no matter how potentially calamitous and unnecessary, still seemed to be music to the US’s ears. As a Department of State spokesman put it, “We welcome this proposal by the Saudis to intensify their efforts by introducing some sort of ground elements into Syria . . .[but] exactly what that’s going to look like and how that’s going to play out I just don’t think we can say right now.”

Alea iacta est?

Who Funds The Islamic State by Christopher Davidson

In solving any mystery, at least with regard to an organization as wealthy and capable as the Islamic State, perhaps the second most important question that needs to be asked after qui bono is qui solvit or ‘who pays?’ After all, not only has the Islamic State proven itself capable of procuring or buying advanced weaponry that has been more than a match for its adversaries, but , as demonstrated, it was also able to set up very quickly public services for a population of several million along with  an extensive network of public sector employment, and, so it would seem, a subsidy system far more generous than that of any of the states or groups it has been supplanting. In this sense almost overnight the new caliphate was able to establish some of the same sort of allocative state structures, albeit more modest, than one might find in the oil-rich rentier state Gulf Monarchies. But puzzlingly, of course, this new Islamic proto-rentier state does not seem to have the kind of sustained access to the billions of dollars in export revenues it would really need to pay for everything.

To forestall or undermine a real investigation into ISIS funding, most efforts through the latter part of 2014, and most of 2015, duly concentrated on building up a ‘self-funding narrative for the Islamic  State. In many ways this was a better orchestrated repeat of an earlier attempt to do the same for al-Qaeda in the weeks following 9/11. The self-funding narrative was also applied to Abu Musab al- Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006 and then ultimately to the same Islamic State in Iraq that Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi was to join and eventually lead. In particular, a classified  US intelligence report from October that year cited by the New York Times stated that al-Zarqawi’s Sunni insurgency had  managed to become ‘self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its US patrons.’  Declining to take the document at face value, on this occasion the Times made sure to interview a number of independent analysts, one of whom described the report’s findings as ‘imprecise and speculative’ while another noted ‘the absence of documentation of how the authors of the report arrived at their estimates.’[Lengthy testimonies by former veteran jihadists published by Oxford University since, has helped exposed such facile self-funding narratives].

Adopting much the same template as the 2006 US intelligence document after the Islamic State’s dramatic capture of Mosul in 2014, a slew of analysis pieces and think-tank reports have tried to build up a similar self-funding  narratives. Mostly fueled by tidbits of gossip from the intelligence community or heavily recycled factoids only loosely checked at the point of origin, these have collectively, though mostly unwittingly, served to distract attention from the real networks responsible for boosting and then sustaining the Islamic State’s coffers.

First out of the starting blocks was the Brookings Institution, with a report published by its Qatar branch in November 2014 practically being a reproduction of the 2006 assessment. Of ISIS’s multiple sources of funding, these were understood to ‘include oil, gas, agriculture, taxation, extortion, kidnapping for ransom, black market antique selling, and other illicit trades.’ In an excellent article for Middle East Policy, Ahmad Hashim rightly cautioned against ‘many unverified statement’s about the sources of the Islamic State’s funding but nonetheless made no mention of possible external sponsors and instead simply put forward oil, tax, and extortion as the most likely explanations.

With the consensus quickly building, by March 2015 the Washington Post was confident enough to support the lede “It’s all about oil and extortion.” Neither the article nor its accompanying video included any discussion of possible donor networks. Similarly in May 2015 the New York Times broke down ISIS financing with extortion, bank looting and oil representing the lion’s share, again with no mention made of external sponsorship. In December 2015, the director of the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence told a British audience that  “ the Islamic State has  made more than $500 million from black market oil sales and looted between $500 million and $1 billion from bank vaults captured in Iraq and Syria… ‘unlike many other terrorists groups, the Islamic State derives a relatively small share of its funding from donors abroad.” Even as late as January 2016 the defense editor of the Daily Telegraph still felt comfortable in coming to the same conclusion adding that ‘a Saudi initiative to fund moderate Muslim leaders could prove vital in curbing the growth of Islamist-inspired terrorism.’

There is no doubt that the activities briefly cited in such reports have been generating at least some income for the Islamic State. According to a local activist’s account, for example, the organization was said to have been collecting 2.5 percent of all proceeds from business owners under the guise of zakat or obligatory religious charity.  The same sources did, however, acknowledge that the zakat was then being used for services. But most of the more widely circulated claims, including those put forward by US and British officials, that the Islamic State has been enriching itself by running a punishing tax heavy regime, have simply made no sense, not least given the organization’s need to boost its popularity, but also in view of its efforts to provide local businessmen with a fairer and more consistent fiscal system than those found in neighboring territories.

Likely derived from comments made by Iraqi lawmaker and one-time CIA asset Ahmed Chalabi, Fox News came up with a surprisingly accurate figure of $429 million that had been supposedly looted from Mosul’s central vaults. Quickly gong viral, the narrative went mostly unchallenged, and US officials waited for more than a year before acknowledging that the Mosul Central Bank had in fact not been pillaged and that the Islamic State kept it open for several months, while even continuing  to pay the salaries of its staff. Indeed, as the Financial Times noted, ‘Not a single witness account has emerged of the Islamic State making off with any money, and the executives and employees from among twenty private banks and fifteen government bank branches in Mosul say there is no evidence that militants stole any money. Adding more to the picture, in May 2015 the chairman of Jordan’s Capital Bank revealed in an interview that his Mosul branch was still going strong, having been completely unaffected by the Islamic State’s presence. He also remarked that everything was ‘business as usual’ in Mosul and that the ‘lifestyle of the people’ was also unchanged.

Neither is there any evidence that the Islamic State issued a ruling permitting the removal of organs from apostates in order to save the lives of Muslims and it seems unlikely that such activity could really have been serving as a major source of income. A bit more credible, it seems, has been the idea that the Islamic State is doing a healthy trade  in selling off  Iraqi and Syrian antiquities.  By Spring 2015 Interpol estimated that $100 million a year was being made in this way, with its database having logged more than five thousand missing artifacts. Using archives of satellite imagery of archeological sites to investigate these claims, a Dartmouth College anthropologists determined that antiquities were certainly being stolen, but that the activity was actually more widespread in areas controlled by Syrian rebels and Kurdish groups.

Of all the self-funding explanations, the most convincing has been that the Islamic State operates a lucrative black market oil-smuggling network. No other combination of funding sources is  enough to explain the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to which the organization seemed to have access. By the summer 2014 descriptions began to circulate of the new caliphate being effectively a “petro state” on the basis that it had cut out the oil middleman and was receiving as much as $25 to $60 a barrel from oilfields in its possession. Others, meanwhile, claimed that ISIS was generating between $3 and $5 million a day from an estimated daily production of eighty thousand barrels. For the next six months, more or less every Islamic-State –related article that appeared in the Western media recycled at least one of these statistics, but in almost every case offered no further evidence.

Only in February 2015 did the Department of Defense officials acknowledge that oil was unlikely to be the Islamic State’s main income stream. Within a few weeks the G7’s intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force managed to reach the same conclusion, stating that although ‘the Islamic State has been engaging in energy-related commerce’ there was no sound estimate in existence for its revenues and that the trade ‘had probably diminished in importance,’ though some US officials persisted with claims that oil continued to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Islamic State. Nonetheless, as the secretary general of the Union of Arab banks described, a number of banks in the Middle East had been coming under increased scrutiny by the US because, as he put it, the Department of the Treasury knows that the Islamic State ‘needs constant funding, unlike al-Qaeda, which may require a small amount of money to conduct specific operations.’

By September 2015 the self-funding myth seemed to be coming to an end, with the Department of the Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorism financing admitted that the Islamic State had ‘immense wealth’ and was a ‘sprawling international network with tentacles across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. After describing this latter scenario to them, more than ninety percent of the author’s interviewees on this topic agreed it was accurate, although a substantial number pointed out that the tentacles were actually going into the Islamic State rather than coming out of it.

Given their ideological similarities and the demonstrable strategic value of the Islamic State to their foreign policies, some have naturally suggested that the organization is the latest baby of conservative Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait (in addition: Oman, UAR,  Dubai and the Gulf Cooperation Council generally). Indeed, in the context of the well-documented roles of some of their state-backed bodies in the earlier financed al-Qaeda, along with known permissiveness of their security and judicial institutions towards al-Qaeda operatives, this has been  both a reasonable and logical inquiry. Getting the ball rolling just a few weeks after the Islamic State arrived in Mosul,  former M16 director Richard Dearlove told an audience that he had no doubt that wealthy Saudis had ‘played a central role in the Islamic State’s surge into Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria.. Going further, he pointed to a Riyadh-led sectarian plot by noting that in the immediate wake of 9/11 a senior Saudi had once warned him that ‘the time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally be God help the Shia.” A few months later US vice president Joe Biden waded in, telling a gathering at Harvard University that ‘the biggest problem the US faces in dealing with Syria and the rise of the Islamic State is America’s allies  in the region.” Adelfattah Sisi has used these disclosures as an opportunity to pin Islamic State funding on Qatar, the backers of his Muslim Brotherhood enemies.” In Kuwait, despite the government’s public efforts that aim to show it is at least its trying to do something about the Islamic State, MP’s such as Faisal al-Duwaisan have continued to claim that ‘parties in Kuwait are contributing to the Islamic State and have warned that ‘if the government does nor educate its children. . . the Islamic State would be in Kuwait in less than two years.

Understandably, such high profile and widely read accusations have greatly unnerved those who still seek to protect the reputation of the Gulf monarchies.

Shadow Wars; The Secret Struggle for the Middle East by Christopher Davidson, Chapter 9.

The Pleasure and Bliss of the Text by Roland Barthes

[The pleasure of the text ‘for me’, for Roland Barthes- individual- and therefore by degrees, recondite.]

No “thesis” on the pleasure of the text is possible; barely an inspection (an introspection) that falls short. Eppure si gaude! [yet he rejoices]. And yet, against and in spite of everything, the text gives me bliss*.

At least some examples? One envisions a vast, collective harvest: bring together all the texts which have given pleasure to someone and display this textual body in something like the way in which psychoanalysis had exhibited man’s erotic body. However, it is to be feared that such a labor would end explaining the chosen texts; there would be an inevitable bifurcation of the project: unable to speak itself, pleasure would enter the general path of motivations, none of which would be definitive (if I assert some pleasures of the text here, it is always in passing, in a very precarious, never regular fashion). In short, such a labor could not be written. I can only circle such a subject – and therefore better to do it briefly and in solitude than collectively and interminably; better to renounce the passage from value, the basis of the assertion, to values, which are effects of culture.

As a creature of language, the writer is always caught up in the war of fictions (jargons), but he is never anything but a plaything in it, since the language that constitutes him (writing) is always outside-of-place (atopic); by the simple effect of polysemy (the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase) the warrior commitment of a literary dialect is dubious from its origin. The writer is always on the blind spot of systems, adrift; he is the joker in the pack, a mana, a zero degree, the dummy in the bridge game: necessary to the meaning (the battle) but himself deprived of fixed meaning; his place, his (exchange) value, varies according to the movements of history, the tactical blows of the struggle: he is asked all and/or nothing. He himself is outside exchange, plunged into non-profit, the Zen mushotuka, desiring nothing but the perverse bliss of words (but bliss is never taking: nothing separates it from satori, from losing.) Paradox: the writer suppresses this gratuitousness of writing (which approaches, by bliss, the gratuitousness of death): he stiffens, hardens his muscles, denies the drift, represses bliss: there are very few writers who combat both ideological repression and libidinal repression (the kind, of course, which the intellectual brings to bear upon himself: upon his own language).

No significance (no bliss) can occur, I am convinced, in mass culture (to be distinguished, like fire from water, from the culture of the masses, for the model of this culture is petit bourgeois. It is characteristic of our (historical) contradiction that significance (bliss) has taken refuge in an excessive alternative: either in a mandarin praxis (result of an extenuation of bourgeois culture), or else in an utopian idea (the idea of a future culture, resulting from a radical, unheard-of, unpredictable revolution, about which anyone writing today knows only one thing: that, like Moses, he will not crossover into it).

For hours on end I read Zola, Proust, Verne, The Count of Monte Christo, the Memoirs of a Tourist, and Sometimes even Julian Green. This is my pleasure, though everyone can testify that this pleasure of the text is not certain: nothing says that this same text will please us a second time; it is a friable pleasure, split by mood, habit, circumstance, a precarious pleasure (obtained by a silent prayer addressed to the Desire for ease, and which that Desire can revoke); when the impossibility of speaking about this text from the point of view of positive science (its jurisdiction is that of critical science: pleasure is a critical principle.)

This is my pleasure but not my bliss: bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness (easy? Not at all: nine times out of ten, the new is only the stereotype of novelty.) The bliss of the text is not precarious, it is worse: precocious; it does not come in its own good time, it does not depend on any ripening. Everything is wrought to to a transport at one and the same moment. This transport is evident in painting, today’s painting: as soon as it is understood, the principle of loss becomes ineffective, one must go on to something else. Everything comes about; indeed in every sense everything comes - at first glance. The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.

Emotion: why should it be antipathetic to bliss? It is a disturbance, bordering on collapse: something perverse, under respectable appearances; emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses, for it contradicts the general rule that would assign bliss a fixed form: strong, violent, crude: something inevitably muscular, strained, phallic. Against the general rule: never allow oneself to be deluded by the image of bliss; agree to recognize bliss wherever a disturbance occurs in amatory adjustments (premature, delayed, etc.): passionate love as bliss? Bliss as wisdom (when it manages to understand itself outside its own prejudices.

If it were possible to imagine an aesthetic of textual pleasure, it would have to include: writing aloud. This vocal writing (which is nothing like speech) is not practiced, but it is doubtless what Artaud recommended. Let us talk about it as if it existed.

In antiquity, rhetoric included a section which is forgotten, censored by the classical commentators: the action, a group of formula designed to allow for the corporeal exteriorization of discourse: it dealt with a theater of expression, the actor-orator ‘expressing”: his indignation, his compassion, etc. Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an act: the art of guiding one’s body(whence its importance in Far Eastern theaters). Due allowances being made for the sounds of language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in the perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony; the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today in the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the “grain” of writing) and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animals muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.

*   Richard Miller  has come up with the readiest plausibility by translating jouissance ( for the most part: Barthes himself declares the choice between pleasure and the more ravaging term to be precarious, revocable, the discourse incomplete) as “bliss”; but of course he cannot come with “coming”, which precisely translates what the text can afford. The Bible  they translated calls it “knowing” while the Stuarts called it “dying”, the Victorians called it “spending,”  and we call it “coming.”… Pleasure is a state, bliss (jouissance) an action, and both of them, in our culture, are held to be unspeakable, beyond  words. Here for example is Willa Cather, a writer Barthes never heard of, putting in a plea of nolo contendere, which is, for all its insufferable air of customary infallibility, no more than symptomatic:

The qualities of a first-rate writer cannot be defined, only   experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first rate. One can catalogue all the qualities that he shares with other writers, but the thing that is his very own, his timbre, this cannot be defined or explained any more than the quality of a beautiful speaking voice can be.

In the puritanism of our expressivity, what can be said is taken to be no longer experienced, certainly no longer enjoyed.

Philippe Desan's Anti-Liberal (Historicist) Rant

“A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid. My style and mind alike go roaming.”- Montaigne

[This is certainly the sense I took Essays when I originally read them many years ago. I had no certain knowledge of the times  in which Montaigne wrote, their original political purpose, nor the various  revisions and additions he made in the 1582, 1588  editions or the 1592 one he was working on when he died. I suppose I did have something of a philosophical or moral purpose in mind but it was the  ruminative style of the book that captured my interest and gave me the most pleasure its 'subversive' aspect, by comparison to contemporary prose styles, as did Doughty’s “Travels in the Arabian Desert” or whatever works I have read by  Derrida. I like it when I am not sure what an author is up to, I welcome discursive mayhem, as it might be called, as long as it is NOT stupid: a litany of half-formed thoughts and impossible inferences characteristic of so much of the public discourse these days - in the era of Trump). Here’s Desan’s rant, from Chapter 11 of his biography, Montaigne’s Political Posterity]:

“ The twentieth century has been largely occupied with determining what made Montaigne a modern and fundamentally secular scholar. Why are the Essais considered the first great text of modern philosophy, a work foreshadowing the arrival of Descartes on the scene of metaphysics. This question seems more interesting than ever. In fact, the idea of Montaigne’s modernity is not a recent one; every century has commented on it and explained it in its own way. It refers to our ability ceaselessly to reinterpret works from the past and too re-appropriate these objects so that they can be adapted to our current concerns. To do that, we accommodate  the texts to our present human condition, which is perceptible in our everyday life, on a moral level and in our cultural and scientific practices. Determining Montaigne’s modernity is supposed to consist in locating in the Essais what we have become today. As if the questions that the author of Essais asked were also our questions. There is no need to say that such a procedure can be gratifying, because it offers proof of a development or an implacable evolution towards progress and wisdom. Montaigne has finally been appropriated by philosophy.

The message is simple: the individual triumphs and always liberates himself from systems of thought that prevent him from expressing his most personal convictions. Montaigne is supposed to be the best proof of this unconditional freedom of the subject and of the victory of private judgment over systems or schools of thought. The birth of philosophy is supposed to coincide with a certain conception of of individual liberty and its expression. Modern liberal thought and discerns in Montaigne the starting point in its history. This is notably in the case for readings that see in the Essais a quest for freedom, that is, and intellectual posture that gives priority to freedom of thought and freedom of expression to the detriment of political action, which is deemed to be inessential and is thus relegated to the background. But let us make no mistake: most of the strictly philosophical readings of Montaigne are the expression of a form (unconscious) ideological appropriation that aims to place the universal subject on a pedestal, to the detriment of its historical and political dimension. The risk has always been that a philosophical Montaigne would be universalized at the expense of the political Montaigne whose writing situates him in his period and demands to be read in its immediate historical context This kind of philosophical  appropriation serves principally to reassure us by giving us the illusion of irresistible progress towards a better life in which the individual blossoms and finally asserts himself in all the complexity of his subjectivity. Confronted by this utopia of a Montaigne father of universal thought, it is essential to warn readers against  the  danger of a strictly philosophical approach that reinforces the myth of a universal subject.

Before becoming a modern author, Montaigne was necessarily an author of his own time. Historicizing his thought is hardly fashionable in a time when everything is supposed to converge at the present moment – as if history, since Antiquity, had been nothing more than a long phase preparatory to our period in which everything suddenly takes place. The ahistorical view of human thought lets us glimpse an ideology that conceives history only as a state of the present and systematically de-historicizes the thought of earlier centuries. Economic liberalism has forced systems of thought to adapt in order to relate them to the only possible view of its own notion of universal progress, of which  modernity is supposed to be the outcome. The best texts of the past would be the ones that include germs that prefigure our present human condition. This idea of an evolution of thought is in itself a problem of which Montaigne seems to have been fully aware: his interpretation of today- the moment when he was writing- never surpassed the one he had offered the day before. Still in the spirit of this liberal appropriation of Montaigne, he has even been seen as the first blogger, as if it were impossible to read Montaigne without relating him to our present activities, even the most insignificant ones. Montaigne’s modernity is said to be his anticipation of Twitter or Facebook, and even the invention of the “selfie.” The question that arises is how one is supposed to read Montaigne outside his history. Is it really necessary to reify Montaigne in our social networks and universalize the Essais as a blog of modernity?

There is no doubt that what appeals to us in Montaigne is his hyper-subjectivity with regard to a world that is increasingly objectified and globalized. For this reason, in the last ten years, Montaigne has become a truly ‘global’ author, bringing him sudden, worldwide celebrity. He is no longer regarded as a specifically  French or European writer and his thought has become internationalized and universalized. His readership has expanded world-wide and the Essais are now accessible in more than thirty-five languages,. Most often, the freedom of judgment, outside schools, is emphasized in order to prove that the subject can always understand the world by himself. His self-sufficiency of the subject, removed from his historical reality, is the trap par excellence of many contemporary commentaries on the Essais. We might say that in Montaigne the reader finds too few actions, but too many reflections. We like to see in him in the moment of introspection, of withdrawal and self-sufficiency. The possibility of a theoretical truth of the world confirms the dominant ideology, because it isolates the subject from his social and political environment. Montaigne, in retirement in his tower, anticipates Descartes closed up in his stove. Each in his own way, Montaigne and Descartes are said to have left the world to give us philosophy. This idea, which seek to essentialize  human experiences, expresses  expresses an abandonment of politics, because it transforms all reflection into a mediation in which action is relegated to the crowds or the masses who agitate outside good sense, and usually without good reason. By doing away with time, philosophy has separated itself from its history in order to produce the illusion that human beings are stable [their identities ‘fixed’]. Montaigne’s universality is supposed to save us from modernity’s insecurity. That is how Montaigne has been emptied of his political dimension, in the name a modernity  without history that refers us to a view of man as powerless to effect the events that surround him and has no solution other than to take refuge in his inwardness (his interieur), or in Montaigne’s case, in his tower, his inner fortress (fort interieur).

But the events of Montaigne’s life exercise an incontestable influence on the composition of the Essais. On the basis of that obvious  fact, I have undertaken to trace the practices, rules, decorum, ritualism, etiquettes, conventions, habits and customs that governed the milieus Montaigne frequented. Where is was not possible to verify particular attitudes and actions, I have appealed to the habitus of orders, clans, families, clienteles, and the constituted bodies; social and political practices that emerged from the rivalry between the different social orders out the importance of corporatist and clientelist behaviors, notably in the parlementary, diplomatic, and administrative milieus in Bordeaux, without forgetting Montaigne’s accession to the middle-level nobility of Guyenne, the outcome of the Eyquem family’s long social ascent. As an ambassador extraordinaire, representative, mayor and governor of Bordeaux, negotiators between Henry III and Henry Navarre, and as a man the Catholic League imprisoned  ‘as a reprisal,” Montaigne constantly saw himself as a political actor and navigated between different groups, sometimes abandoning his natural allies to join his former enemies . . . no matter what the author of the Essais says about it, his public life remains inseparable from his private life, because after many trials and tribulations during the civil wars, it was his political efforts (essais en politique) that enabled him to find the right tone for a literary and philosophical genre that prefigured modernity."

Mayor of Bordeaux by Philippe Desan

A brief glance at Montaigne’s everyday routine as mayor of Bordeaux has allowed us to see the diversity of his activities and the amplitude of his ambitions during the years 1581-85. Although he had begun his term ( by the appointment of King Henry III) with an open political affinity that placed him resolutely on the side of the nobility to which he belonged, political reality on the ground quickly led him to adopt a pragmatic politics that often contradicted his own convictions and aristocratic aspirations. It was only after 1585 that his political career was considerably compromised, though not entirely halted. The failure of the negotiations between Henry III and Henry of Navarre pushed Montaigne to the sidelines. His subdued passage through the mayor’s office in Bordeaux led him to glimpse a new orientation for his literary activity. Thus the third book of Essais- written after this experience as mayor- offers us several testimonies to his recent disillusionment with offices and honorific rewards.

Montaigne shows an attitude that is critical of but no less grateful to the ‘duties of honor’; and ‘civil restraint,’ because he had entered politics as the result of a favor or reward ( not only the King’s but his more wealthy noble patrons). On this point, the addition of the word recompense (reward) in the Bordeaux Copy is revealing:

Now I hold that we should live by right and authority, not by recompense. How many gallant men have chosen rather to lose their lives rather than own them! I avoid subjecting myself to any sort of obligation, but especially any that binds me by a debt of honor. I find nothing so expensive as that which is given me and for which my will remains mortgaged by the claim of gratitude, and I more willingly accept services that are for sale. Rightly so, I think: for the latter I give only money, for the others I give myself. The tie that binds me by the law of honesty seems to me much tighter and more oppressive than is that of legal constraint.

What conclusion can we draw from Montaigne’s two terms as mayor of Bordeaux? The economic situation at the times of the War of Religion greatly influenced his contemporaries’ judgment. In October 1585, Gabriel de Lurbe sketched a rather critical  picture of the city’s economic activity. According to him, the city and the region were in a wretched state, but he admits that the religious conflicts were largely responsible for this crisis.

A few people spoke out to reproach Montaigne for his political weakness and lack of involvement in the everyday affairs of the mayor’s office. He was a decent manager, but no one ever saw him as a visionary. Some read the Essais in the light of Montaigne’s administrative functions. For example, in his Entretiens, Guez de Balzac recounts the following anecdote:

Our man tried to persuade us that the selfsame Montaigne had not much success as mayor of Bordeaux,. This news did not surprise Monsieur De La Thibaudiere, and he remembered well that in my presence he had one day told Monsieur De Plassac-Metre, the admirer of Montaigne who praised him that day to the disadvantage of Cicero: you can esteem your Montaigne more than our Cicero all you want: I could not imagine a man who knew how to govern the whole earth was not worth at least as much as a man who did not know how to govern Bordeaux.

The author of the Essais did not contradict his criticism “Some say that my administration passed without a mark or a trace. That’s a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much.” Montaigne could have done more, but the political price would have been higher. The acceleration of public life resulted in the multiplications  of negative judgments  after Montaigne’s two terms as mayor, but most of these reproaches ignored the necessity of political stability in times of political and religious troubles – his constant preoccupation for social stability was perhaps less visible for his critics but no less essential for Montaigne. In politics, Montaigne never felt at ease with quantifiable results. He always defended the qualitative to the disadvantage of the quantitative, even if it made him seem nonchalant and indolent. “Some say about  this municipal service of mine (and I am glad to say a word about it, not that it is worth it, but to serve as an example of my conduct in such things) that I went about it like a man who exerts himself too weakly and with a languishing zeal; and they are not all that far from having a case.” Haste was never his strong point, and he almost always us favored reflection and the status quo.

Montaigne’s role was more of an intermediary than that of a leader. He was expected to promote dialogue between Navarre and the king, under Matignon’s supervision, nothing more. From the outset, he had been chosen mayor of Bordeaux to calm people down and slow somewhat the rhythm of political action in the region. And on this point Montaigne had succeeding in calming things. It should not be forgotten that, as a “Protestant,” Henry Navarre was forbidden to sojourn within the city walls. None-the-less, he was the uncontested political and military leader in the southwest because he had succeeded in gaining the support of an appreciable number of members of the middle-level nobility  (including a number of Montaigne’s relatives).

Montaigne considered the mayor’s office as a privileged space that could have positive repercussions on the national scale, and on this point he was not wrong. Aware of the reproaches being made against him, he nevertheless said that his conscience was clear and that he felt he had done his duty: “I did not leave undone, as far as I know, any action that duty genuinely required of me.” However, this claim- made shortly after the fact, since Montaigne expressed it in the 1588 edition of Essais- still shows a trace of bitterness. As had been the case fifteen years earlier in the parlement of Bordeaux, Montaigne was unable to avoid personal conflict,.. The mayor’s office had never been a goal in itself, because managing the city remained rather distant from his conception of public life (the King’s envoy to the Pope is the position he was angling  for just before his appointment as mayor). From the moment that his administrative function allowed him to acquire visibility on the national level, he distanced himself from the jurats, (members of the municipal body- judges of fact rather than law) to play in the big leagues and try to influence politics on the national scale. In his slow , round-about return from Italy he took up his duties as mayor almost a year late, and detached himself from activities related to the office before the end of his second term. Montaigne was engaged full time in the work of this office a little more than two years out of the four he held it. Thus as we might expect for a mayor of the fifth largest city in France who managed to be absent half the time, his record of achievement is rather slim. The political situation in Guyenne might have required greater attention, but Montaigne – in the course of 1585- had finally ceased to believe that he could influence the state of affairs that was constantly being redefined by the various episodes of a merciless war between the Catholics and Protestants.

Montaigne’s service as mayor was a failure so far as the reconciliation between Henry III and Henry Navarre was concerned. The duke of Guise and his supporters had not made this rapprochement any easier. The edict of Nemours issued on July 7, 15855 made Navarre an outlaw. When Montaigne left the mayor’s office, nothing remained of the compromises envisioned a few months earlier. The end of his term as mayor marked the beginning of a new chapter in the Wars of Religion. The division between Catholics and Protestants was greatly exacerbated by the rise in power of the duke of Guise, who was now acting on his own. The house of Lorraine was gaining the ascendant among the people, and particularly among the bourgeois in the large cities. Montaigne- and his moderate Catholic position-  was sidelined by the omnipresence of the Catholic extremists. The rise of this third party upstaged him and complicated his plans.

[ As mayor, Montaigne had defended the bourgeois merchant classes  against the prerogatives of 1) Catholic nobles who controlled two strong fortresses with armed retinues within the city, 2.) the lesser noble magisterial classes of which he was a member 3) the king’s commissioners appointed from the parlement in Paris who deemed to arbitrate  legal and mercantile matters  and, 4)  Royal concessions that deprived the city of its tax revenues. He reported to the King’s military governor in Guyenne whose own power  was circumscribed by the great Lords of the region both Catholic  and Protestant- got that? The practical concerns of his administration were regulating the wine trade, proper certification of the various crafts, warehousing, and harbor control, managing city ‘militia’, removing garbage and sewage from the streets and  provision for the poor- about  20% of the population- J.S]

In the third book of Essais, Montaigne inserted a chapter devoted almost entirely to his experience in the public sphere. “On husbanding your will” (III:10) answers many of the questions and reproaches that were addressed to him by his friends and contemporaries regarding his management of the city or his style of governance. Montaigne explains himself, presenting an image that is distinguished from the realpolitik often formulated at the time, first of all by Machiavelli. This chapter was for the most part written immediately after his service as mayor, when he returned to his chateau after having been on the road for almost six months, keeping away from the plague that was raging in Guyenne.

 [ It was also becoming more and more dangerous to travel once the eighth war of religion had begun because the roads were taken over taken by deserters, foreign mercenaries and highway robbers. Since Montaigne’s own estate was as ‘the hub’ of the war in Guyenne, and having barely escaped with his life on at least two occasions, Montaigne would soon be forced to flee with his wife and a few servants in a comparatively destitute state since his fields were sacked and famine stalked the land]

Montaigne admits that he could sometimes seem detached from the responsibilities  incumbent on him “I do not engage myself easily. As much as I can, I employ myself entirely upon myself” ( he actually set up a special office in Bordeaux where he could withdraw somewhat from incessant demands upon his time but often simply removed himself to his own estate). He developed an individualist position with regard to social relationships: “My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves," or again: ‘The main responsibility of each of us is his own conduct.” This judgment after the fact is an understandable reaction. Montaigne’s setbacks in politics forced him to work out a theory of turning inward on himself. That was when what modern criticism learned to appreciate in him was born: an introspection that allows the subject to judge and ‘ “taste” himself.

Not being able to list or comment on his successes as an administrator and politician, Montaigne begins to talk about himself, for lack of a better subject. His political defects thus naturally became human qualities. For example, he confesses his lack of commitment, which he transforms into a positive attribute : “I do not know how to involve myself so deeply and so entirely. When my will gives me over to one party, it is not with so violent an obligation that my understanding is infected by it. In the present broils of this state, my own interest has not made me blind to either the laudable qualities in our adversaries or those that are reproachable in the men I followed.”

Montaigne failed in politics because he was “too human; that, at least, is the idea he would like to spread. His unconditional confidence in people is supposed to have caused him to be deceived. In the same way, his alleged difficulty in conceiving people as aggregates or groups sharing a single ideology is supposed to be revealed as a disadvantage for someone who  felt at ease only in individual relationships. He was never a party man, and his personal judgment was ill adapted to political platforms or positions based on unnatural alliances. Ultimately, Montaigne was a lone wolf in his political behavior. The Essais allowed him to invert his experience and to emphasize the positive flip side of a coin that had been considerably tarnished by his experience as a public man . . .

If people have sometimes pushed me into the management of other men’s affairs, I promised to take them in hand, not in lungs and liver; to take them on my shoulders, not incorporate them into me; to be concerned over them, yes; to be impassioned over them, never. I look at them, but do not brood over them.

Montaigne notes that by nature, people like to serve, continuing on the theme of voluntary servitude that had fascinated him in La Boeti : “Men gives themselves for hire”, he  writes, but in doing so they lose their judgment and freedom. But we might wonder about his election to a second term as mayor. Did he not owe it to the temporary alliances he was able to form – in a purely political way- with the bourgeoisie?  Did he realty think that chance alone made it possible for him to be elected? ”Fortune willed to have a hand in my promotion, "he wrote. However, this remark is contradicted by reality. Even if politics always involves a element of chance, since Machiavelli we know that the essence of politics  consists in minimizing  the role played by fortune in order to increase the role played by free will. Whatever he says, Montaigne knew Machiavelli well enough to be aware of this fundamental rule in politics.

 Montaigne engaged in a literary exercise that consisted in producing a theory of detachment when faced with the proximity of events: “We never conduct well the thing that possess and conduct us." For Montaigne, when a politician is called upon to serve, he must become a technician or a technocrat:

He who employs in it only his judgment or skill proceeds more gaily. He feints, he bends, he postpones entirely at his ease according to the need of the occasions; he misses the target without torment or affliction, and remains intact and ready for a new undertaking; he always walks bridle in hand. In a man who is intoxicated with a violent and tyrannical intensity of purpose we see of necessity much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him away. These are reckless movements, and, unless fortune lends them a hand, of little fruit.

 Moving things along without becoming too involved is in a way a good manager’s modus operandi. What was perhaps only a character trait thus becomes a political  philosophy .Being reproached for inaction became a mark of honor for Montaigne, who criticized those who act without having weighed the consequences of their actions. The author of Essais thinks that “most of our occupations are low comedy,” scenes independent of one another and of limited value in the tragedy of the Wars of Religion. . .

We must play our part duly, but as part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor what is foreign is our very own. It is enough to make up our face, without making up our heart.

 After his political career was over Montaigne wrote;

For my part, I stay out of it; partly out of conscience (for in the same way that I see the weight attached to such employments, I see also what little qualification I have for them) partly out of laziness. I am content to enjoy the world without being all wrapped up in it, to live merely an excusable life, which will merely be no burden to myself or others.

After 1588, Montaigne even claimed to have always been motivated by the search to discover the character of men he made met in the course of his public service. The political realism of the time was based on the Machiavellian principle that gave priority to appearances over reality. Montaigne very early opposed this modern paradigm of politics and defended the possibility of judging human actions in a general way, apart from particular actions and words. This idealism with regards to politics was nonetheless contrary to his experiences as mayor of Bordeaux, four years during which he had shown realism and political pragmatism. Despite this Machiavellian apprenticeship, Montaigne persisted in believing in a form of sincerity that transcended history and its events, leaving to others what he called ‘The chicanery of the Palace of Justice.

[Thus the contradiction in Montaigne’s political philosophy, at once the humanist and the technocrat, a man who judges by universal standards of virtue abstracted from History, and the man who plays ‘lazily’ in the mirage of current circumstances.]

You must not consider whether your action or your word may have another interpretation; it is your true and sincere interpretation that you must henceforth maintain, whatever it costs you. Your virtue and our conscience are addressed; these are not parts to be put behind a mask. Let us leave these vile means and expedients to the chicanery of the Palace of Justice.

After the first year as mayor in which he was rather proud to have been a ‘nonmayor’, Montaigne rapidly caught up with the political game, hoping to make use of his position to seek further responsibilities on the national level. He did his best to administer a  city  that could serve him as a springboard to higher office on a national level and secure the title to nobility wrestled from the obscurity of the merchant class from which his  grandfather had come. Confronted by the rising power of regional parlements, the mayors office was supposed to serve as a counter-authority to provide a firmer basis for royal power and to emphasize Montaigne’s competence as a proven negotiator ([a notion that  was the prime motive behind the first editions of Essais]. His mission was to be Matignon’s eyes and Henry III's herald in a city that had a long tradition of administrative and political independence, indeed even of uprising against royal authority. The Wars of Religion had only poisoned  a situation that had been tense for generations and Montaigne had not succeeded in imposing his conception of politics. He did not regret any of his decisions, and ended up attributing success – and his failure – in politics  to chance.

Leaving office after two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne felt that he had performed his function well. If he had been able to do it over again, he would have made exactly the same decisions.  A good administrator judges things on the spot, while a humanist puts things in a universal perspective. The two positions were thus irreconcilable, and that is perhaps why Montaigne’s municipal service can be considered a failure. Too humanist to become a good manager, and too concerned with resolving current problems to leave a mark on the political history of his time. Montaigne did not succeed in establishing his way of seeing of politics during his time as mayor of a municipality riven into pressure groups defending irreconcilable interests and ideologies. The practice of politics led him to discover what he called his “natural disposition” and the self could then be constructed on the ruins of politics.

Barthes and Foucault by Tiphaine Samoyault

Though not an intimate friend, Roland Barthes  had attended a seminar by Jacques Lacan and had a few sessions with him in 1975 during the period when Lacan was seeing an average of ten patients  per hour twenty working days a month.  Barthes’ texts at the time, however, were imbued with psychoanalysis and he was familiar with Lacanian terminology due primarily to the influence of Julia Kristeva. His “On Leaving the Cinema’ sees the state of someone coming out of a movie as a kind of hypnosis, but also refers to two major Lacanian concepts: the trio of ‘RSI’ (‘Real, Symbolic, Imaginary’) and the mirror stage. ‘The Real’ knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks; the imagine alone (the image-repertoire) is close, only the image is “true” (can produce the essence of truth). Barthes played with these concepts, appropriating or distancing himself from them according, as he habitually did, what they meant ‘for me’, which is what he always asked his readers and students to do with  texts, lectures and seminars.

Lacan had established the psychoanalytic milieu in which anti-establishment intellectuals operated  in France during the 60s and 70s. In many respects Foucault and Barthes took different approaches in their studies; Foucault was primarily interested in history- the archaeology of ‘things’- Barthes in literature and writing . . .

The difference in style between Barthes and Foucault is [also] evident in the way they spoke and  wrote. Their inaugural lectures and their seminars at the College de France have often been compared and contrasted. This is an interesting parallel: in Barthes inaugural lecture, while setting out his own course, he also brings his discourse in direct dialogue with Foucault’s lecture, ‘The Order of Discourse’, delivered inn 1970 and published in 1971. In 1975, like Foucault, Barthes raised the question of the relations between        of the relations between spoken language and power. Foucault listed the ways in which ‘in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance elements, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.’ According to Foucault, discourse is always a violent exercise against things, especially as it is generally a discourse in the thrall of a certain doctrine. Barthes picks up these three themes, the spoken words, power and violence., and links them to the problem of having to maintain a discourse  (the subject of the seminar he gave at the College between January and June). ‘Since, as I have tried to suggest, this teaching has as its object discourse taken in the inevitability of power, method can really bear only on the means of loosening, baffling, or at the very least, of lightening this power.’ These words are almost a literal repetition of the definition of teaching that Foucault gave in his inaugural lecture: ‘a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its forms of power and knowledge,.’ The oppression that this gesture presupposes is high-lighted in Barthes’ own lecture: ‘To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate, it is to subjugate.’

Although the research  the two men were to pursue, set out as a program in their lectures, was quite different, they had a similar position: their relation to discourse, to the theatricality of the spoken word, was uneasy. But Barthes went much further than Foucault in extending the field of action, of violence in language as a whole: “But language- the performance of a language system- is neither reactionary nor progressive, it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.’ This statement –‘over-the-top, exaggerated, scandalous, almost crazy’, could not be understood as it is literally untenable. On the linguistic level it is meaningless. On the logical level it radically reduces speaking subjects to the language itself. On the ideological level it picks up on the fashionable presumption, treating any manoeuver of authority as ‘fascist.’ The remark shocked everyone from the start and has since given rise to many attempts to explain it .For some it is  a symptom of stupidity; for others, a provocation. It has also been read as an attempt to go one better than Foucault. . .

Perhaps Barthes point simply concerned the salutary difference of literature as writing, which resists discourse, even if this requires playing tricks with language. That he should do on in an aphoristic, assertive way was typical,  he would always begin by affirming something before qualifying it. What is more surprising is that he was succumbing to a stereotype of the age, when he was usually so quick to demystify them. In other respects, Barthes was simply extending to language he  had long been making about the spoken word, its arrogance, its will to mastery, its authoritarian character. The radical nature of the formulation was in line with the radical nature of the response one can bring to language, namely, according to Blanchot, silence: either mystical singularity, described by Kierkegaard to describe Abraham’s sacrifice as ‘ an action unparalleled, void of speech, even interior speech, performed against the generality, the gregariousness, the morality of language’; or else ‘the Nietzschean  “yes to life”, which is a kind of exultant shock administered to the servility of speech, to what Deleuze calls its reactive guise.’ Compared to these sublime gestures, which presuppose a belief that Barthes did not possess, literature appears as the sole place where language outside power can gain a hearing. And it is here that Barthes replies to Foucault: the forces of freedom which are in literature depend not on a writer’s civil, person, nor on his political commitment – for he is, after all, only a man among others- nor do they even depend on the doctrinal content of his work, but rather on the labor of displacement he brings to bear upon the language.’ He takes up the notion that has been so crucial since Writing Degree Zero, the ‘responsibility of form’, to  set out the scope of this ‘loosening of power’. The Lecture, which began by hailing the College de France as a place ‘outside the bounds of power’, thus ends with this program of literature as a renunciation of all the servilities of language.

Letting go of power was also the basis for a form of teaching leading to research, to a quest, and not to knowledge or a fixed language. As opposed to the theatrical character of the lecture delivered from on high (also denounced by Foucault in The Order of Discourse), what is needed is a form of the spoken word that registers its own disquiet, that preserves its transitory, uncertain status, aware of itself and of the unease that had afflicted the academic system since May 1968.”

Neither Foucault nor Barthes were happy with the ‘high society’ aspects of lectures which ‘turned teachers into performing animals.’ Both resisted having some of their lectures published,. Barthes wrote that he thought ‘part of a life’s activity should always be set aside for the ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes, it’s the necessary share of the Rejected Monument.’ Never-the less some of their lectures have been published. Even if both Barthes and Foucault prepared their lectures with great care, we need read them with the awareness that they are tentative  in nature; to hear the repetitions and corrections, the tone and grain of the voice. Reading the courses or listening to their recordings also brings out the differences in style.

Foucault spoke in a lively, sometimes staccato way; Barthes spoke slowly, in a voice that was at once clear and deep. In particular, Foucault based his discourse on the retrospective gesture, on the archaeological method, going over things that he had already said, correcting and accentuating ideas as he engaged in new readings and new dialogues. Barthes’ teaching, conversely, was entirely forward-looking, based on a fiction or a fantasy. The disquiet occasioned by going back over something is not the same as the disquiet of desire. The former deepens what is already there, and is still concerned with producing knowledge; the latter goes beyond the given, and endeavors to displace knowledge through the ‘for me.’ These two distinct forms of disquiet find an expression in the way the two wrote their books, rejecting systems in very different ways. Foucault undermined them by deconstructing them; Barthes renounced them by scattering them in fragments. What brings them together is the analysis (explicit in Foucault, implicit in Barthes) of the importance of the process of subjectivation.


Their difference, and their sporadic differences of opinion, lay less in theoretical divergence than in ways of being. Barthes paid a great deal of attention to his appearance and the context in which he lived his life, and had a profound love of music, Foucault showed a large degree of indifference to clothes, food, the décor of life. He claimed to like music, but he was not dreamy enough (being more sensitive than sentimental) to need it. Foucault demonstrated exuberance and generosity in all he did, in his coming out as a homosexual, in his commitment to prison reform, in the affirmation of the positions he took, Barthes presented himself in his singularity and his rejection of hysteria. His benevolence was perceived by all, but it did not have the same energy as Foucault’s generosity. It could appear, to those that did not see the fictional dimension of the posture, as a withdrawal into his ‘self’. It is was not always easy for other people to see the difference between ‘living in accordance with literature’, as Barthes put it in ”Fragments pour H”, and living in accordance with the norms that generally regulate our relations with others. Most people who knew Foucault and Barthes preferred Foucault – he was more unbridled, more generous, more amusing. At a party, in the café, Barthes, especially as he grew older, would often seem bored or distracted and might leave early.

As Barthes legitimacy as an intellectual an scholar grew he was increasingly in demand as a thesis supervisor. H supervised doctorates and was  very often invited to sit on examining boards (between fifteen and twenty per anum in the years preceding his entry into the College de France. Indeed, it was on one of these juries that Marty first met Barthes. ‘Barthes had started by saying he would have liked to writes this thesis, which had caused something of a stir in the audience. Then he continued his patient and benevolent reading.’ The archives preserve most of the thesis reports that Barthes meticulously composed and that indicate how much time he spent on reading student work. He was generous in his comment and listened closely to what the candidates were saying. But he mainly tried to be fair, not hesitating to formulate a criticism when necessary, when a candidate confused a word with a referent or merely juxtaposed different disciplines or used puns too systematically – Barthes claimed to be impermeable to these puns even when it was a student in his own close circle.


Barthes almost always began his report with a declaration of modesty, saying that he was not a specialist, emphasizing the personal, improvised nature of his considerations, leaving it to the other members of the jury to pronounce on the scientific relevance of certain projects. He spoke of the ‘feeling of solidarity’, or even ‘complicity’ that he could sometimes feel for a particular piece of work. He often noted that he would not stand in front of the work as a whole to pass judgment on it, but merely indicate a few individual points at which the work overlapped his interests, He liked to unveil, behind the institutional postulation that the work submitted, its ‘clandestine’ posture of desire and liberty. For example, in discussing Michel Chaillou’s thesis on L’Astree, he noted that in just one point did ‘this piece of writing pick up something of the trappings of the institution-paradoxically enough, the bibliography: ample, varied, surprising.” He told Raymond Carasco that his thesis, the freedom of whose montage he admired, was ‘a kind of Festival”. He congratulated Chatel Thomas, who had written a thesis on Sade, for not having sought results, but to write a reading: she had produced a ‘very fine text, a very successful text.’ He also recognized the breadth, the responsibility and the power of the work Christian Prigent had done on Ponge. He admired they way Lucette Finas had overstepped structural analysis. Sometimes, albeit rarely, he would express his own inclinations. When Denis Viart was defending his thesis on Andre Gide’s early work – Barthes was there with Julia Kristeva and Hubert  Damisch- he noted, ‘I must  in any case take into account my own relation to Gide, which h is not indifferent- but it is enigmatic. So with regard to you I feel esteem and closeness, but also the hiatus of a little difference.”

All this time-consuming and, after all, rather obscure labor shows how seriously Barthes took his job as a teacher.

Barthes; A Biography, Tiphaine Samoyault. Translated by Andrew Brown; Polity, 2017, mostly from Chapters 15 &16