From The Coming Insurrection

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Seventh Circle

“We are building a civilized space here”

The first global slaughter, which from 1914 to 1918 did away with a large portion of the urban and rural proletariat, was waged in the name of freedom, democracy, and civilization. For the past five years, the so-called “war on terror” with its special operations and targeted assassinations has been pursued in the name of these same values. Yet the resemblance stops there: at the level of appearances. The value of civilization is no longer so obvious that it can brought to the natives without further ado. Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word “security.” And it is well known that democracy can be dissolved in pure and simple “emergency” edicts – for example, in the official reinstitution of torture in the US, or in France’s Perben II law.

In a single century, freedom, democracy and civilization have reverted to the state of hypotheses. Our leaders’ work from here on out will consist in shaping the material and moral as well as symbolic and social conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or less validated, in configuring spaces where they can seem to function. All means to these ends are acceptable, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the most repressive. This is a century in which democracy regularly presided over the birth of fascist regimes, civilization constantly rhymed – to the tune of Wagner or Iron Maiden – with extermination, and in which, one day in 1929, freedom- showed its two faces: a banker throwing himself from a window and a family of workers dying of hunger. Since then – let’s say, since 1945 – it’s taken for granted that manipulating the masses, secret service operations, the restriction of public liberties, and the complete sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were appropriate ways to ensure democracy, freedom and civilization. At the final stage of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police protocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words: “We’re building a civilized space here.” There’s nothing more to say, everything has to be destroyed.

Though it seems general in nature, the question of civilization is not at all a philosophical one. A civilization is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what rules, takes possession of, colonizes the most banal, personal, daily existence. It’s what holds together that which is most intimate and most general. In France, civilization is inseparable from the state. The older and more powerful the state, the less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The French state is the very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects. Thus it should come as no surprise that in their deliriums psychiatric patients are always confusing themselves with political figures, that we agree that our leaders are the root of all our ills, that we like to grumble so much about them and that this grumbling is the consecration that crowns them as our masters. Here, politics is not considered something outside of us but as part of ourselves. The life we invest in these figures is the same life that’s taken from us.

If there is a French exception, this is why. Everything, even the global influence of French literature, is a result of this amputation. In France, literature is the prescribed space for the amusement of the castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom. That’s what gives rise to all the obscene winks exchanged, for centuries now, between the statesmen and men of letters in this country, as each gladly dons the other’s costume. That’s also why intellectuals here tend to talk so loud when they’re so meek, and why they always fail at the decisive moment, the only moment that would’ve given meaning to their existence, but that also would’ve had them banished from their profession.

There exists a credible thesis that modern literature was born with Baudelaire, Heine, and Flaubert as a repercussion of the state massacre of June 1848. It’s in the blood of the Parisian insurgents, against the silence surrounding the slaughter, that modern literary forms were born – spleen, ambivalence, fetishism of form, and morbid detachment. The neurotic affection that the French pledge to their Republic – in the name of which every smudge of ink assumes an air of dignity, and any pathetic hack is honored – underwrites the perpetual repression of its originary sacrifices. The June days of 1848 – 1,500 dead in combat, thousands of summary executions of prisoners, and the Assembly welcoming the surrender of the last barricade with cries of “Long Live the Republic!” – and the Bloody Week of 1871 are birthmarks no surgery can hide.

In 1945, Kojeve wrote: “The “official” political ideal of France and of the French is today still that of the nation-State, of the ‘one and indivisible Republic.’ On the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the country understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the political anachronism of the strictly “national” idea. This feeling has admittedly not yet reached the level of a clear and distinct idea: The country cannot, and still does not want to, express it openly. Moreover, for the very reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national past, it is particularly difficult for France to recognize clearly and to accept frankly the fact of the end of the ‘national’ period of History and to understand all of its consequences. It is hard for a country which created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of nationalism and which exported it to the whole world to recognize that all that remains of it now is a document to be filed in the historical archives.”

This question of the nation-state and its mourning is at the heart of what for the past half-century can only be called the French malaise. We politely give the name of “alternation” to this twitchy indecision, this pendulum-like oscillation from left to right, then right to left; like a manic phase after a depressive one that is then followed by another, or like the way a completely rhetorical critique of individualism uneasily co-exists with the most ferocious cynicism, or the most grandiose generosity with an aversion to crowds. Since 1945, this malaise, which seems to have dissipated only during the insurrectionary fervor of May 68, has continually worsened. The era of states, nations and republics is coming to an end; this country that sacrificed all its life to these forms is still dumbfounded. The firestorm caused by Jospin’s simple sentence “the state can’t do everything” allowed us to glimpse the one that will ignite when it becomes clear that the state can no longer do anything at all. The feeling that we’ve been tricked is like a wound that is becoming increasingly infected. It’s the source of the latent rage that just about anything will set off these days. The fact that in this country the obituary of the age of nations has yet to be written is the key to the French anachronism, and to the revolutionary possibilities France still has in store.

Whatever their outcome may be, the role of the next presidential elections will be to signal the end of French illusions and the bursting of the historical bubble in which we are living – and which makes possible events like the anti-CPE movement, which was puzzled over by other countries as if it were some bad dream that escaped the 1970s. That’s why, deep down, no one wants these elections. France is indeed the red lantern of the western zone.

Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on an M1 Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top volume. It’s the tourist lost on the Mongolian plains, mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his only lifeline. It’s the CEO who swears by the game Go. It’s the young girl who chases happiness in clothes, guys, and moisturizing creams. It’s the Swiss human rights activist who travels to the four corners of the earth to show solidarity with all the world’s rebels – provided they’ve been defeated. It’s the Spaniard who couldn’t care less about political freedom once he’s been granted sexual freedom. It’s the art lover who wants us to be awestruck before the “modern genius” of a century of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism, all competing to see who could best spit in the face of civilization. It’s the cyberneticist who’s found a realistic theory of consciousness in Buddhism and the quantum physicist who’s hoping that dabbling in Hindu metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throws sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the “spiritual” technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control, insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment. So it goes with all the great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining themselves through artifices that contradict these fictions point by point.

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten onto places, behaviors, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything about the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behavior, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end.

Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a suitable enemy in every empty dogmatism, in whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism, or Neo-Nazism: anyone who, like Westerners, mistakes provocation for affirmation.

At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that refuses to see that what we’re faced with is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation. It’s even become a contemporary strategy to critique this society in the vain hope of saving this civilization.

So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be able to rid ourselves of it just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of civilization, from its clinical death. In and of itself, it can only be of interest to historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilization, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.

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