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Title: Introduction to Civil War Author: Tiqqun Date: September 2001 Language: en Topics: civil war, insurrectionary, Tiqqun Source: https://illwill.com/print/tiqqun-introduction-to-civil-war Notes: Aside from minor modifications, this is the translation produced
We decadents have frayed nerves. Everything, or almost everything,
wounds us, and what doesnât will likely be irritating. Thatâs why we
make sure no one ever touches us. We can only stand smaller and
smallerâthese days, nanometricâdoses of truth, and much prefer long
gulps of its antidote instead. Images of happiness, tried and true
sensations, kind words, smooth surfaces, familiar feelings and the
innermost intimacy, in short, narcosis by the pound and above all: no
war, above all, no war. The best way to put it is that this whole
preemptive, amniotic environment boils down to a desire for a positive
anthropology. We need THEM to tell us what âmanâ is, what âweâ are, what
we are allowed to want and to be. Ultimately, our age is fanatical about
a lot of things, and especially about the question of MAN, through which
ONE[1] sublimates away the undeniable fact of Bloom.[2] This
anthropology, insofar as it is dominant, is not only positive by virtue
of an irenic, slightly vacuous and gently pious conception of human
nature. It is positive first and foremost because it assigns âManâ
qualities, determined attributes and substantial predicates. This is why
even the pessimist anthropology of the Anglo-Saxons, with its hypostasis
of interests, needs and the struggle for life plays a reassuring role,
for it still offers some practicable convictions concerning the essence
of man.
But weâthose of us who refuse to settle for any sort of comfort, we who
admittedly have frayed nerves but also intend to make them still more
resistant, still more unyieldingâwe need something else entirely. We
need a radically negative anthropology, we need a few abstractions that
are just empty enough, just transparent enough to prevent our usual
prejudices, a physics that holds in store, for each being, its
disposition toward the miraculous. Some concepts that crack the ice in
order to attain, or give rise to, experience. To make ourselves handle
it.
There is nothing we can say about men, that is, about their coexistence,
that would not immediately act as a tranquillizer. The impossibility of
predicting anything about this relentless freedom forces us to designate
it with an undefined term, a blind word, that ONE has the habit of using
to name whatever ONE knows nothing about, because ONE does not want to
understand it, or understand that the world cannot do without us. The
term is civil war. This move is tactical; we want to reappropriate, in
advance, the term by which our operations will be necessarily covered.
Whoever does not take sides in a civil war is struck with infamy, and
loses all right to politics.
â Solon, The Constitution of Athens
The elementary human unity is not the bodyâthe individualâbut the
form-of-Iife.
The form-of-life is not beyond bare life, it is its intimate
polarization.[3]
Each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a
leaning, an attraction, a taste. A body leans toward whatever leans its
way. This goes for each and every situation. Inclinations go both ways.
GLOSS: To the inattentive observer, it may seem that Bloom offers a
counterexample: a body deprived of every penchant and inclination, and
immune to all attractions. But on closer inspection, it is clear that
Bloom refers less to an absence of taste than to a special taste for
absence. Only this penchant can account for all the efforts Bloom makes
to persevere in Bloom, to keep what leans his way at a distance, in
order to decline all experience. Like the religious, who, unable to
oppose another worldliness to âthis world,â must convert their absence
within the world into a critique of worldliness in general, Bloom tries
to flee from a world that has no outside. In every situation he responds
with the same disengagement, each time slipping away from the situation.
Bloom is therefore a body distinctively affected by a proclivity toward
nothingness.
This taste, this clinamen, can either be warded off or embraced. To take
on a form-of-life is not simply to know a penchant: it means to think
it. I call thought that which converts a form-of-life into a force, into
a sensible effectivity. In every situation there is one line that stands
out among all the others, the line along which power grows. Thought is
the capacity for singling out and following this line. A form-of-life
can be embraced only by following this line, meaning that: all thought
is strategic.
GLOSS: To latecomerâs eyes like ours, the conjuring away of every
form-of-life seems to be the Westâs peculiar destiny. Paradoxically, in
this civilization that we can no longer claim as our own without
consenting to self-liquidation, conjuring away forms-of-life most often
appears as a desire for form: the search for an archetypal resemblance,
an Idea of self placed before or in front of oneself. Admittedly, this
will to identity, wherever it has been fully expressed, has had the
hardest time masking the icy nihilism and the aspiration to nothingness
that forms its spine.
But the conjuring away of forms-of-life also has a minor, more cunning
form called consciousness and, at its highest point, lucidityâtwo
âvirtuesâ THEY prize all the more because these virtues render bodies
increasingly powerless. At that point, THEY start to call âlucidityâ the
knowledge of this weakness that offers no way out.
Taking on a form-of-life is completely different from the striving of
the consciousness or the will, or from the effects of either. Actually,
to assume a form-of-life is a letting-go, an abandonment. It is at once
fall and elevation, a movement and a staying-within-oneself. what I am.
âMyâ form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am.
GLOSS: This statement performs a slight shift. A slight shift in the
direction of a taking leave of metaphysics. Leaving metaphysics is not a
philosophical imperative, but a physiological necessity. Having now
reached the endpoint of its deployment, metaphysics gathers itself into
a planetary injunction to absence. What Empire demands is not that each
conforms to a common law, but that each conforms to its own particular
identity. Imperial power depends on the adherence of bodies to their
supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control over them.
âMyâ form-of-life does not relate to what I am, but to how, to the
specific way, I am what I am. In other words, between a being and its
qualities, there is the abyss of its own presence and the singular
experience I have of it, at a certain place and time. Unfortunately for
Empire, the form-of-life animating a body is not to be found in any of
its predicatesâ big, white, crazy, rich, poor, carpenter, arrogant,
woman, or Frenchâbut in the singular way of its presence, in the
irreducible event of its being-in-situation. And it is precisely where
predication is most violently appliedâin the rank domain of
moralityâthat its failure fills us with joy: when, for example, we come
across a completely abject being whose way of being abject nevertheless
touches us in such a way that any repulsion within us is snuffed out,
and in this way proves to us that abjection itself is a quality.
To embrace a form-of-life means being more faithful to our penchants
than to our predicates. than another is as meaningless as asking why
there is
Asking why this body is affected by this form-of-life rather something
rather than nothing. Such a question betrays only a rejection, and
sometimes a fear, of undergoing contingency. And, a fortiori, a refusal
even to acknowledge it.
GLOSS α: A better question would be to ask how a body takes on
substance, how a body becomes thick, how it incorporates experience. Why
do we sometimes undergo heavy polarizations with far-reaching effects,
and at other times weak, superficial ones? How can we extract ourselves
from this dispersive mass of Bloomesque bodies, from this global
Brownian motion where the most vital bodies proceed from one petty
abandonment to the next, from one attenuated form-of-life to another,
consistently following a principle of prudenceânever get carried away,
beyond a certain level of intensity? In other words, how could these
bodies have become so transparent?
GLOSS ÎČ: The most Bloomesque notion of freedom is the freedom of choice,
understood as a methodical abstraction from every situation. This
concept of freedom forms the most effective antidote against every real
freedom. The only substantial freedom is to follow right to the end, to
the point where it vanishes, the line along which power grows for a
certain form-of-life. This raises our capacity to then be affected by
other forms-of-life.
A bodyâs persistence in letting a single form-of-life affect it, despite
the diversity of situations it passes through, depends on its crack. The
more a body cracks upâthat is, the wider and deeper its crack
becomesâthe fewer the polarizations compatible with its survival there
are, and the more it will tend to recreate situations in which it finds
itself involved in its familiar polarizations. The bigger a bodyâs crack
grows, the more its absence to the world increases and its penchants
dwindle.
GLOSS: Form-of-life means therefore that my relation to myself is only
one part of my relation to the world.
The experience one form-of-life has of another is not communicable to
the latter, even if it can be translated; and we all know what happens
with translations. Only facts can be made clear: behaviors, attitudes,
assertionsâgossip. Forms-oflife do not allow for neutral positions, they
offer no safe haven for a universal observer.
GLOSS: To be sure, there is no lack of candidates vying to reduce all
forms-of-life to the Esperanto of objectified âcultures,â âstyles,â
âways of lifeâ and other relativist mysteries. What these wretches are
up to is, however, no mystery: they want to make us play the grand,
one-dimensional game of identities and differences. This is the
expression that the most rabid hostility toward forms-of-life takes.
In and of themselves, forms-of-life can be neither said nor described.
They can only be shownâeach time, in an always singular context. On the
other hand, considered locally, the play between them obeys rigorous
signifying mechanisms. If they are thought, these determinisms are
transformed into rules which can then be amended. Each sequence of play
is bordered, on either edge, by an event. The event disorders the play
between forms- of-life, introduces a fold within it, suspends past
determinisms and inaugurates new ones through which it must be
reinterpreted. In all things, we start with and from the middle.
GLOSS α: The distance required for the description as such of a
form-of-life is, precisely, the distance of enmity.
GLOSS ÎČ: Every attempt to grasp a âpeopleâ as a form-of-lifeâ as race,
class, ethnicity, or nationâhas been undermined by the fact that the
ethical differences within each âpeopleâ have always been greater than
the ethical differences between âpeoplesâ themselves.
Civil war is the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of
their coexistence.
War, because in each singular play between forms of-life, the
possibility of a fierce confrontationâthe possibility of violenceâcan
never be discounted. Civil, because the confrontation between
forms-of-life is not like that between Statesâa coincidence between a
population and a territoryâ but like the confrontation between parties,
in the sense this word had before the advent of the modern State. And
because we must be precise from now on, we should say that forms-oflife
confront one another as partisan war machines.
Civil war, then, because forms-of-life know no separation between men
and women, political existence and bare life, civilians and military;
because whoever is neutral is still a party to the free play of
forms-of-life; because this play between formsof-life has no beginning
or end that can be declared, its only possible end being a physical end
of the world that precisely no one would be able to declare; and above
all because I know of no body that does not get hopelessly carried away
in the excessive, and perilous, course of the world.
GLOSS α: âViolenceâ is something new in history. We decadents are the
first to know this curious thing: violence. Traditional societies knew
of theft, blasphemy, parricide, abduction, sacrifice, insults and
revenge. Modern States, beyond the dilemma of adjudicating facts,
recognized only infractions of the Law and the penalties administered to
rectify them. But they certainly knew plenty about foreign wars and,
within their borders, the authoritarian disciplining of bodies. In fact,
only the timid atom of imperial societyâBloomâthinks of âviolenceâ as a
radical and unique evil lurking behind countless masks, an evil which it
is so vitally important to identify, in order to eradicate it all the
more thoroughly. For us, ultimately, violence is what has been taken
from us, and today we need to take it back.
When Biopower starts speaking about traffic accidents as âviolence on
the highways,â we begin to realize that for imperial society the term
violence only refers to its own vocation for death. This society has
forged this negative concept of violence in order to reject anything
within it that might still carry a certain intensity or charge. In an
increasingly explicit way, imperial society, in all its details,
experiences itself as violence. When this society hunts down violence
everywhere, it does nothing other than express its own desire to pass
away.
GLOSS ÎČ: THEY find speaking of civil war repugnant. But when THEY do it
anyway, THEY assign it a circumscribed place and time. Hence you have
the âcivil war in Franceâ (1871), in Spain (1936â39), the civil war in
Algeria and maybe soon in Europe. At this point one should mention that
the French, exhibiting the emasculation that comes so naturally to them,
translate the American âCivil Warâ as âThe War of Secession.â They do so
to demonstrate their determination to side unconditionally with the
victor whenever the victor is also the State. The only way to lose this
habit of giving civil war a beginning, end and territorial limitâthis
habit of making it an exception to the normal order of things rather
than considering its infinite metamorphoses in time and spaceâis to
shine a light on the sleight of hand it covers up.
Remember how those who wanted to suppress the guerilla war in Columbia
in the early â60s preemptively gave the name âla Violenciaâ (the
Violence) to the historical period they wanted to close out?
The point of view of civil war is the point of view of the political.
When, at a certain time and place, two bodies affected by the same
form-of-life meet, they experience an objective pact, which precedes any
decision. They experience community.
GLOSS α: The deprivation of such an experience in the West has caused it
to be haunted by the old metaphysical phantasm of the âhuman
communityââalso known under the name Gemeinwesen by currents working in
the wake of Amadeo Bordiga. The Western intellectual is so far removed
from any access to a real community that he has to confect this amusing
little fetish: the human community. Whether he wears the Nazi-humanist
uniform of âhuman natureâ or the hippy rags of anthropology, whether he
withdraws into a community whose power has been carefully disembodied, a
purely potential community, or dives head-first into the less subtle
concept of âtotalâ manâthrough which all human predicates would be
totalizedâit is always the same terror that is expressed: the terror of
having to think oneâs singular, determined, finite situation; this
terror seeks refuge in the reassuring fantasy of totality or earthly
unity. The resulting abstraction might be called the multitude, global
civil society or the human species. Whatâs important is not the name,
but the operation performed. All the recent inanities about THE
cybercommunist community or THE cyber-total man would not have gotten
off the ground without a certain strategic opportunity that opened up at
the very moment a worldwide movement was forming to refute it. Letâs
remember that sociology was born at the very moment the most
irreconcilable conflict ever witnessedâthe class struggleâemerged at the
heart of the social, and this discipline was born in the very country
where the struggle was most violent, in France in the second half of the
nineteenth century. It was born as a response to this struggle.
Today, when âsocietyâ is nothing more than a hypothesis, and hardly the
most plausible one at that, any claim to defend this society against the
supposed fascism lurking in every form of community is nothing more than
a rhetorical exercise steeped in bad faith. Who, after all, still speaks
of âsocietyâ other than the citizens of Empire, who have come or rather
huddled together against the self-evidence of Empireâs final implosion,
against the ontological obviousness of civil war?
There is no community except in singular relations. The community
doesnât exist. There is only community, community that circulates.
There can be no community of those who are there.
When I encounter a body affected by the same form-of life as I am, this
is community, and it puts me in contact with my own power.
Sense is the element of the Common, that is, every event, as an
irruption of sense, institutes a common. The âbodyâ that says âI,â in
truth says âWe.â
A gesture or statement endowed with sense carves a determined community
out of a mass of bodies, a community that must itself be taken on in
order to take on this gesture or statement.
When two bodies animated by forms-of-life that are absolutely foreign to
one another meet at a certain moment and in a certain place, they
experience hostility. This type of encounter gives rise to no relation;
on the contrary, it bears witness to the original absence of relation.
The hostis can be identified and its situation can be known, but it
itself cannot be known for what it is, that is, in its singularity.
Hostility is therefore the impossibility for bodies that donât go
together to know one another as singular.
Whenever a thing is known in its singularity, it takes leave of the
sphere of hostility and thereby becomes a friendâor an enemy.
For me, the hostis is a nothing that demands to be annihilated, either
through a cessation of hostility, or by ceasing to exist altogether.
A hostis can be annihilated, but the sphere of hostility itself cannot
be reduced to nothing. The imperial humanist who flatters himself by
declaring ânothing human is foreign to meâ only reminds us how far he
had to go to become so foreign to himself.
Hostility is practiced in many ways, by different methods and with
varied results. The commodity or contractual relation, slander, rape,
insult, and pure and simple destruction all take their places
side-by-side as practices of reduction: even THEY understand this. Other
forms of hostility take more perverse and less obvious paths. Consider
potlatch, praise, politeness, prudence or even hospitality. These are
all what ONE rarely recognizes as so many practices of abasement, as
indeed they are.
GLOSS: In his Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes,
Benveniste was incapable of explaining why the Latin word hostis could
simultaneously signify âforeigner,â âenemy,â âhost,â âguest,â and âhe
who has the same rights as the Roman people,â or even, âhe who is bound
to me through potlatch,â i.e. the forced reciprocity of the gift.[4] It
is nevertheless clear that whether it be the sphere of law, the laws of
hospitality, flattening someone beneath a pile of gifts or an armed
offensive, there are many ways to erase the hostis, of making sure he
does not become a singularity for me. That is how I keep the hostis
foreign. It is our weakness that keeps us from admitting this. The third
article of Kantâs Towards Perpetual Peace, which proposes the conditions
for a final dissolution of particular communities and their subsequent
formal reintegration into a Universal State, is nevertheless unequivocal
in insisting that âCosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of
universal hospitality.â[5] And just recently, didnât Sebastian RochĂ©,
that unacknowledged creator of the idea of âincivilityâ and French
fanatic of zero tolerance, that hero of the impossible Republic, didnât
he give his most recent (March 2000) book the Utopian title The Society
of Hospitality?[6] Does Sebastian Roché read Kant, Hobbes and the pages
of France-Soir, or does he simply read the mind of the French Interior
Minister?
Anything we usually blanket with the name âindifferenceâ does not exist.
If I do not know a form- of-life and if it is therefore nothing to me,
then I am not even indifferent to it. If I do know it and it exists for
me as if it did not exist, it is in this case quite simply and clearly
hostile for me.
Hostility distances me from my own power.
Between the extremes of community and hostility lies the sphere of
friendship and enmity. Friendship and enmity are ethico-political
concepts. That they both give rise to an intense circulation of affects
only demonstrates that affective realities are works of art, that the
play between forms-of-life can be elaborated.
GLOSS α: In the stockpile of instruments deployed by the West against
all forms of community, one in particular has occupied, since around the
twelfth century, a privileged and yet unsuspected place. I am speaking
of the concept of love. We should acknowledge that the false alternative
it has managed to impose on everythingââdo you love me, or not?ââhas
been incredibly effective in masking, repressing, and crushing the whole
gamut of highly differentiated affects and all the crisply defined
degrees of intensity that can arise when bodies come into contact. In
this set of false alternatives, love has functioned as a way to reduce
the extreme possibility of an elaborate working out of the play among
forms-of-life. Undoubtedly, the ethical poverty of the present, which
amounts to a kind of permanent coercion into coupledom, is due largely
to this concept of love.
GLOSS ÎČ: To give proof, it would be enough to recall how, through the
entire process of âcivilization,â the criminalization of all sorts of
passions accompanied the sanctification of love as the one true passion,
as the passion par excellence.
GLOSS Îł: All this of course goes only for the notion of love, not for
all those things it has given rise to, despite itself. I am speaking not
only of certain momentous perversions, but also of that little
projectile âI love you,â which is always an event.
I am bound to the friend by some experience of election, understanding
or decision that implies that the growth of his power entails the growth
of my own. Symmetrically, I am bound to the enemy by election, only this
time a disagreement that, in order for my power to grow, implies that I
confront him, that I undermine his forces.
GLOSS: This was the brilliant reply of Hannah Arendt to a Zionist who,
after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem and during the subsequent
scandal, reproached her for not loving the people of Israel: âI donât
love peoples. I only love my friends.â
What is at stake in confronting the enemy is never its existence, only
its power, its potentiality. Not only can an annihilated enemy no longer
recognize its own defeat, it always ends up coming back to haunt us,
first as a ghost and later as hostis.
All differences among forms-of-life are ethical differences. These
differences authorize play, in all its forms. These kinds of play are
not political in themselves, but become political at a certain level of
intensity, that is, when they have been elaborated to a certain degree.
GLOSS: We reproach this world not for going to war too ferociously, nor
for trying to prevent it by all means; we only reproach it for reducing
war to its most empty and worthless forms.
I am not going to demonstrate the permanence of civil war with a
starry-eyed celebration of the most beautiful episodes of social war, or
by cataloguing all those moments when class antagonism achieved its
finest expressions. I am not going to talk about the English, Russian or
French revolutions, the Makhnovshchina, the Paris Commune, Gracchus
Babeuf, May â68 or even the Spanish Civil War. Historians will be
grateful: their livelihoods arenât threatened. My method is more
twisted. I will show how civil war continues even when it is said to be
absent or provisionally brought under control. My task will be to
display the means used by the relentless process of depoliticization
that begins in the Middle Ages and continues up to today, just when, as
we all know, âeverything is politicalâ (Marx). In other words, the whole
will not be grasped by connecting the dots between historical summits,
but by following a low-level, unbroken, existential sequence.
GLOSS: If the end of the Middle Ages is sealed by the splitting of the
ethical element into two autonomous spheres, morality and politics, the
end of âModern Timesâ is marked by the reunification of these two
abstract domainsâas separate. This reunification gave us our new tyrant:
THE SOCIAL.
Naming can take two mutually hostile forms. One wards something off, the
other embraces it. Empire speaks of âcivil warsâ just as the Modern
State did, but it does so in order to better control the masses of those
who will give anything to avert civil war. I myself speak of âcivil
war,â and even refer to it as a foundational fact. But I speak of civil
war in order to embrace it and to raise it to its highest forms. In
other words: according to my taste.
I call âcommunismâ the real movement that elaborates, everywhere and at
every moment, civil war.
At the outset, my own objective will not be obvious. For those familiar
with it, it will be felt everywhere, and it will be completely absent
for those who donât know a thing about it. Anyway, programs are only
good for putting off what they claim to promote. Kantâs criterion for a
maximâs morality was that its public formulation not prevent its
realization. My own moral ambitions will therefore not exceed the
following formulation: spread a certain ethic of civil war, a certain
art of distances.
The history of the state formation in Europe is a history of the
neutralization of differencesâdenominational, social, and
otherwiseâwithin the state.
â Carl Schmitt, âNeutralitĂ€t und Neutralisierungenâ
The modern State is not defined as a set of institutions whose different
arrangements would provide a stimulating pluralism. The modern State,
insofar as it still exists, defines itself ethically as the theater of
operations for a twofold fiction: the fiction that when it comes to
forms-of-life both neutrality and centrality can exist.
GLOSS: We can recognize the fragile formations of power by their
relentless attempts to posit fictions as self-evident. Throughout Modern
Times, one of these fictions typically emerges as a neutral center,
setting the scene for all the others. Reason, Money, Justice, Science,
Man, Civilization, or Cultureâ with each there is the same
phantasmagoric tendency: to posit the existence of a center, and then
say that this center is ethically neutral. The State is thus the
historical condition for the flourishing of these insipid terms.
Etymologically the modern State stems from the Indo European root st-
which refers to fixity, to unchangeable things, to what is. More than a
few have been fooled by this sleight of hand. Today, when the State does
nothing more than outlive itself, the opposite becomes clear: it is
civil warâstasis in Greekâthat is permanence, and the modern State will
have been a mere reaction process to this permanence.
GLOSS α: Contrary to what THEY would have us believe, the historicity
specific to the fictions of âmodernityâ is never that of a stability
gained once and for all, of a threshold finally surpassed, but precisely
that of a process of endless mobilization. Behind the inaugural dates of
the official historiography, behind the edifying epic tale of linear
progress, a continuous labor of reorganization, of correction, of
improvement, of papering over, of adjustment, and even sometimes of
costly reconstruction has never stopped taking place. This labor and its
repeated failures have given rise to the whole jittery junk heap of the
ânew.â Modernity: not a stage where ONE comes to rest, but a task, an
imperative to modernize, frenetically and from crisis to crisis, only to
be finally overcome by our own fatigue and our own skepticism.
GLOSS ÎČ: âThis state of affairs stems from a difference, which too often
goes unnoticed, between modern societies and ancient societies, with
regard to the notions of war and peace. The relation between the state
of peace and the state of war has been, if one compares the past to the
present, exactly reversed. For us peace is the normal state of affairs,
which warfare happens to interrupt; for the ancients, warfare is normal,
which peace happens to bring to an end.â âĂmile Benveniste, Le
vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes
In both theory and practice, the modern State came into being in order
to put an end to civil war, then called âwars of religion.â Therefore,
both historically and by its own admission, it is secondary vis-Ă -vis
civil war.
GLOSS: Bodinâs The Six Books of the Commonwealth [1576] was published
four years after the St. Bartholomewâs Day massacre, and Hobbesâ
Leviathan of 1651 eleven years after the start of the Long Parliament.
The continuity of the modern Stateâfrom absolutism to the Welfare
Stateâshall be that of an endlessly unfinished war, waged against civil
war.
In the West, the unity of the traditional world was lost with the
Reformation and the âwars of religionâ that followed. The modern State
then bursts on the scene with the task of reconstituting this
unityâsecularized, this timeâno longer as an organic whole but instead
as a mechanical whole, as a machine, as a conscious artificiality.
GLOSS α: What couldnât help but ruin all organicity of customary
mediations during the Reformation was the gulf opened up by a doctrine
professing the strict separation between faith and deed, between the
kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, between inner man and outer
man. The religious wars thus present the absurd spectacle of a world
that travels to the abyss just for having glimpsed it, of a harmony that
breaks apart under the pressure of a thousand absolute and
irreconcilable claims to wholeness. Indeed in this way, through
sectarian rivalries, religions introduce the idea of ethical plurality
despite themselves. But at this point civil war is still conceived by
those who bring it about as something that will soon end, so that
forms-of-life are not taken on but given over to conversion to this or
that existing patron. Since that time the various uprisings of the
Imaginary Party have taken it upon themselves to render obsolete
Nietzscheâs remark from 1882 that âthe greatest progress of the masses
up till now has been the religious war, for it proves that the mass has
begun to treat concepts with respect.â[7]
GLOSS ÎČ: Having run its historical course, the modern State rediscovers
its old enemy: âsects.â But this time it is not the State that is the
ascendant political force.
The modern State put an end to the trouble that Protestantism first
visited on the world by taking over its very mission. By instituting the
fault between inner self and outer works identified by the Reformation,
the modern State managed to extinguish the civil wars âof religion,â and
with them the religions themselves.
GLOSS: Henceforth there shall be on the one hand an âabsolutely free,â
private, moral conscience and on the other hand public, political action
âabsolutely subject to State Reason.â And these two spheres shall be
distinct and independent. The modern State creates itself from nothing
by extracting from the traditional ethical tissue the morally neutral
space of political technique, sovereignty. Such creative gestures are
those of a mournful marionette. The further away men have moved from
this foundational moment, the more the meaning of the original act is
lost. It is this same calm hopelessness that shines through in the
classical maxim: cuius regio, eius religio.[8]
The modern State renders religions obsolete because it takes over for
them at the bedside of the most atavistic phantasm of metaphysics: the
One. From this point forward the order of the world will have to be
ceaselessly restored and maintained at all costs, even as it constantly
slips away from itself. Police and publicity[9] will be the purely
fictive techniques that the modern State will employ to artificially
maintain the fiction of the One. Its entire reality will be concentrated
in these techniques, through which it will ensure the maintenance of
Order, only now that of an outside order, a public order. And so all the
arguments it advances in its own defense will in the end boil down to
this: âOutside of me, disorder.â Quite untrue: without it, a
multiplicity of orders.
The modern State, which purports to put an end to civil war, is instead
its continuation by other means.
GLOSS α: Is it necessary to read Leviathan to know that âbecause the
major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereign, he that
dissented must now consent with the rest, that is, be contented to avow
all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest.
[...] And whether he be of the congregation or not, and whether his
consent be asked or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be
left in the condition of war he was in before, wherein he might without
injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.â[10] The fate of the
communards, of the Action Directe prisoners or the June 1848 insurgents
tells us plenty about the bloody origins of republics. Herein lies the
specific character of and obstacle to the modern State: it only persists
through the practice of the very thing it wants to ward off, through the
actualization of the very thing it claims to be absent. Cops know
something about this, paradoxically having to apply a âstate of law,â
which in fact depends on them alone. Thus was the destiny of the modern
State: to arise first as the apparent victor of civil war, only then to
be vanquished by it; to have been in the end only a parenthesis, only
one party among others in the steady course of civil war.
GLOSS ÎČ: Wherever the modern State extended its reign, it exploited the
same arguments, using similar formulations. These formulations are
gathered together in their purest form and in their strictest logic in
the writings of Hobbes. This is why all those who have wanted to
confront the modern State have first had to grapple with this singular
theoretician. Even today, at the height of the movement to liquidate the
nationstate system, one hears open echoes âHobbesianism.â Thus, as the
French government finally aligned itself with a model of imperial
decentralization during the convoluted affair of âCorsican autonomy,â
the governmentâs Interior Minister resigned his position with the
perfunctory pronouncement: âFrance does not need a new war of religion.â
What at the molar scale assumes the aspect of the modern State, is
called at the molecular scale the economic subject.
GLOSS α: We have reflected a great deal on the essence of the economy
and more specifically on its âblack magicâ aspects.[11] The economy
cannot be understood as a system of exchange, nor, therefore, as a
relation between forms-of-life, unless it is grasped ethically: the
economy as the production of a certain type of forms-of-life. The
economy appears well prior to the institutions typically used to signal
its emergenceâthe market, money, usury loans, division of laborâand it
appears as a kind of possession, that is, as possession by a psychic
economy. It is in this sense that the true black magic exists, and it is
only at this level that the economy is real and concrete. This is also
where its connection with the State is empirically observable. By
flaring up like this the State ends up progressively creating economy in
man, creating âManâ itself as an economic creature. With each
improvement to the State the economy in each of its subjects is improved
as well, and vice versa.
It would be easy to show how, over the course of the seventeenth century
the nascent modern State imposed a monetary economy and everything that
goes along with it in order to glean fuel for the rapid development of
its machinery and its relentless military campaigns. Such work has
already been performed elsewhere. But this approach only scratches the
surface of the linkage between the State and the economy.
The modern State means, among other things, a progressively increasing
monopoly on legitimate violence, a process whereby all other forms of
violence are delegitimized. The modern State serves the general process
of pacification which, since the end of the Middle Ages, only persists
through its continuous intensification. It is not simply that during
this evolution it always more drastically hinders the free play of
forms-of-life, but rather that it works assiduously to break them, to
tear them up, to extract bare life from them, an extraction that is the
very activity of âcivilization.â In order to become a political subject
in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will
make it such: it must begin by casting aside its passions (now
inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now
contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more
presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to
become a political subject each body must first carry out its own
autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject
will thus be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice.
The essential function of the representation each society gives of
itself is to influence the way in which each body is represented to
itself, and through this to influence the structure of the psyche. The
modern State is therefore first of all the constitution of each body
into a molecular State, imbued with bodily integrity by way of
territorial integrity, molded into a closed entity within a self, as
much in opposition to the âexterior worldâ as to the tumultuous
associations of its own penchantsâwhich it must containâand in the end
required to comport itself with its peers as a good law-abiding subject,
to be dealt with, along with other bodies, according to the universal
proviso of a sort of private international law of âcivilizedâ habits. In
this way the more societies constitute themselves in States, the more
their subjects embody the economy. They monitor themselves and each
other, they control their emotions, their movements, their inclinations,
and believe that they can expect the same self-control from others. They
make sure never to get carried away where it might prove fatal, and stay
cooped up in a room of their own where they can âlet themselves goâ at
their leisure. Sheltered there, withdrawn within their frontiers, they
calculate, they predict, they become a waypoint between past and future,
and tie their fate to the most probable link between the two. Thatâs it:
they link up, put themselves in chains and chain themselves to each
other, countering any type of excess. Fake selfcontrol, restraint,
self-regulation of the passions, extraction of a sphere of shame and
fearâbare lifeâthe warding off of all formsof-life and a fortiori of any
play established between them.
And so the dense and doleful intimidation of the modern State produces
the economy, primitively and existentially, through a process that one
could trace back to the twelfth century, and to the establishment of the
first territorial courts. As Elias has pointed out exceedingly well, the
most emblematic example of this incorporation of the economy was the
induction of the warrior class into the society of the court, beginning
with the twelfth-century codes of courtly conduct, then primers on
civility, prudence, and manners, and finally with the rules of courtly
etiquette at Versailles, the first substantial realization of a
perfectly spectacular society in which all relations are mediated by
images. As with all the forms of wild abandon on which medieval
knighthood was founded, violence was slowly domesticated, that is,
isolated as such, deprived of its ritual form, rendered illogical, and
in the end cut down through mockery, through âridicule,â through the
shame of fear and the fear of shame. Through the dissemination of this
self-restraint, this dread of getting carried away, the State succeeded
in creating the economic subject, in containing each being within its
Self, that is, within his body, in extracting bare life from each
form-of-life.
GLOSS ÎČ: â[T]he battlefield is, in a sense, moved within. Part of the
tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the
struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being.
[...] [T]he drives, the passionate affects, that can no longer directly
manifest themselves in the relationships between people, often struggle
no less violently within the individual against this supervising part of
themselves. And this semi-automatic struggle of the person with him or
herself does not always find a happy resolutionâ (Norbert Elias, âState
Formation and Civilizationâ).[12]
As has been witnessed throughout âModern Times,â the individual produced
by this process of economic embodiment carries within him a crack. And
it is out of this crack that his bare life seeps. His acts themselves
are full of cracks, broken from the inside. No self-abandon, no act of
assumption can arise where the Stateâs campaign of pacificationâits war
of annihilation directed against civil warâis unleashed. Here, instead
of forms-of-life, we find an overproduction branching out in all
directions, a nearly comical tree-like proliferation of subjectivities.
At this point converges the double misfortune of the economy and the
State: by caching civil war inside each person, the modern State put
everyone at war against himself. This is where we begin.
The founding act of the modern Stateâthat is, not the first act but the
one it repeats over and overâis the institution of the fictitious split
between public and private, between political and moral. This is how it
manages to crack bodies open, how it grinds up forms-of-life. The move
to divide internal freedom and external submission, moral interiority
and political conduct, corresponds to the institution as such of bare
life.
GLOSS: We know from experience the terms of the Hobbesian transaction
between the subject and the sovereign: âI exchange my liberty for your
protection. As compensation for my unwavering obedience, you must offer
me safety.â Safety, which is first posed as a way to shelter oneself
from the prospect of death menaced by âothersâ takes on a whole new
dimension during the course of Leviathan. From Chapter xxx: âby safety
here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments
of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to
the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.â[13]
Depending on the side of the crack from which it is seen, the Stateâs
method of neutralization sets up two chimerical, distinct and
interdependent monopolies: the monopoly of the political and the
monopoly of critique.
GLOSS A: Certainly on the one hand the State claims to assume the
monopoly of the political, of which the well-known expression âmonopoly
on legitimate violenceâ is merely the most vulgar indication. For the
monopolization of the political requires the degradation of the
differentiated unity of a world into a nation, then to degrade this
nation into a population and a territory. It requires the disintegration
of the entire organic unity of traditional societies in order to then
submit the remaining fragments to a principle of organization. Finally,
after having reduced society to a âpure indistinct mass, to a multitude
decomposed into its atomsâ (Hegel), the State assumes the role of artist
giving form to these raw materials, and this according to the legible
principle of the Law.[14]
On the other hand, the division between private and public gives rise to
this second unreality, which matches the unreality of the State:
critique. Of course it was Kant who crafted the general motto of
critique in his What is Enlightenment? Oddly enough the motto was also a
saying of Frederick II: âYou are allowed to think as much as you want
and on whatever topic you wish; as long as you obey!â Mirroring the
political, âmorally neutralâ realm of State Reason, critique establishes
the moral, âpolitically neutralâ realm of free usage of Reason. This is
what is meant by âpublicity,â first identified with the âRepublic of
Lettersâ but quickly appropriated as a State weapon against any rival
ethical fabric, be it the unbreakable bonds of traditional society, the
Cour des Miracles, or the language of the street. Thereafter another
abstraction would respond to the Stateâs abstract sphere of autonomous
politics: the critical sphere of autonomous discourse. And just as the
gestures of State reason had to be shrouded in silence, the idle chatter
and the flights of fancy of critical reason will have to be shrouded in
the condemnation of these gestures. Critique would therefore claim to be
all the purer and more radical the more it alienated itself from any
positive grounding for its own verbal fabrications. In exchange for
renouncing all its directly political claims, that is, in abdicating all
contestations of the Stateâs monopoly on politics, critique will be
granted a monopoly on morality. It will now have free reign to protest,
as long as it does not pretend to exist in any other way. Gesture
without discourse on the one hand and discourse without gesture on the
otherâthe State and Critique guarantee by the techniques specific to
each (police and publicity, respectively) the neutralization of every
ethical difference. This is how THEY conjured away, along with the free
play of forms-of-life, the political itself.
GLOSS ÎČ: After this it will come as little surprise that the most
successful masterpieces of critique appeared exactly where âcitizensâ
had been most fully deprived of access to the âpolitical sphere,â
indeed, to the realm of practice as a whole; when all collective
existence had been placed under the heel of the State, I mean: under the
French and Prussian absolute monarchies of the eighteenth century. It
should scarcely surprise us that the country of the State would also be
the country of Critique, that France (for this is what we really mean)
would be in every way, and even often avowedly, so perfectly at home in
the eighteenth century. Given the contingency of our theater of
operations, we are not averse to mentioning the constancy of a national
character, which has been exhausted everywhere else. However, rather
than show how, generation after generation, for more than two centuries,
the State has produced critics and the critics have, in turn, produced
the State, I think it more instructive to reproduce descriptions of
preRevolutionary France made during the middle of the nineteenth
century, that is, shortly after the events, by a mind at once detestable
and quite shrewd:
âThe government of the old regime had already taken away from the French
any possibility, or desire, of helping one another. When the Revolution
happened, one would have searched most of France in vain for ten men who
had the habit of acting in common in an orderly way, and taking care of
their own defense themselves; only the central power was supposed to
take care of it.â
âFrance [was] the European country where political life had been longest
and most completely extinct, where individuals had most completely lost
the practical skills, the ability to read facts, the experience of
popular movements, and almost the very idea of the people.â
âSince there no longer existed free institutions, and in consequence no
political classes, no living political bodies, no organized political
parties with leaders, and since in the absence of all these organized
forces the direction of public opinion, when public opinion was reborn,
devolved uniquely on the philosophes, it was to be expected that the
Revolution be directed less by certain particular facts than by abstract
principles and very general theories.â
âThe very situation of these writers prepared them to like general and
abstract theories of government and to trust in them blindly. At the
almost infinite distance from practice in which they lived, no
experience tempered the ardors of their nature.â
âWe had, however, preserved one liberty from the destruction of all the
others; we could philosophize almost without restraint on the origin of
societies, on the essential nature of government, and on the primordial
rights of the human species.â
All those injured by the daily practice of legislation soon took up this
form of literary politics.â
âEvery public passion was thus wrapped up in philosophy; political life
was violently driven back into literature.â
And finally, at the end of the Revolution: âYou will see an immense
central power, which has devoured all the bits of authority and
obedience which were formerly divided among a crowd of secondary powers,
orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals, scattered
throughout society.â âAlexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the
Revolution, 1856[15]
If certain theses such as âthe war of each against eachâ are elevated to
the level of governing principles, it is because they enable certain
operations. So in this specific case we should ask: How can the âwar of
each against eachâ have begun before each person had been produced as
each. And then we will see how the modern State presupposes the state of
things that it produces; how it grounds the arbitrariness of its own
demands in anthropology; how the âwar of each against eachâ is instead
the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern
State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the
universal reign of hostility.
GLOSS α: Hobbes used to joke about the circumstances of his birth,
claiming it was induced after his mother had experienced a sudden
fright: âFear and I were born twins,â as he put it.[16] But to my mind
it makes more sense to attribute the wretchedness of the Hobbesian
anthropology to excessive reading of that moron Thucydides than to his
horoscope. So let us instead read the patter of our coward in a more
appropriate light:
âThe true and perspicuous explication of the Elements of Laws, Natural
and Politic [...] dependeth upon the knowledge of what is human nature.â
âThe comparison of the life of man to a race [holdeth]. [...] But this
race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor no other garland, but
being foremost.â â Hobbes, Human Nature, 1640[17]
âHereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. For WAR
consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of
time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.â
âAgain, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief,
in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all.â â
Hobbes, Leviathan[18]
GLOSS ÎČ: Here Hobbes gives us the anthropology of the modern State, a
positive albeit pessimistic anthropology, political albeit economic,
that of an atomized city-dweller: âwhen going to sleep, he locks his
doors,â and âwhen even in his house, he locks his chestsâ
(Leviathan).[19] Others have already shown how the State found it in its
political interest to overturn, during the last few decades of the
seventeenth century, the traditional ethics, to elevate avarice, the
economic passion, from the rank of private vice to that of social virtue
(cf. Albert O. Hirschmann). And just as this ethics, the ethics of
equivalence, is the most worthless ethics that men have ever shared, the
forms-of-life that correspond to itâthe entrepreneur and the
consumerâhave distinguished themselves by a worthlessness that has
become ever more pronounced with each passing century.
Rousseau thought he could confront Hobbes âon how the state of war
springs from the social.â[20] In so doing he proposed the Noble Savage
in place of the Englishmanâs ignoble savage, one anthropology to replace
another, only this time an optimistic one. But the mistake here was not
the pessimism, it was the anthropology, and the desire to found a social
order on it.
GLOSS α: Hobbes did not develop his anthropology merely by observing the
problems of his age: the Fronde, the English Civil War, the nascent
absolutist State in France, and the difference between them. Travelogues
and other reports from New World explorers had been circulating for two
centuries already. Less inclined to take on faith âthat the condition of
mere nature (that is to say, of absolute liberty, such as is theirs that
neither are sovereigns nor subjects) is anarchy, and the condition of
war,â Hobbes attributed the civil war that he observed in âcivilizedâ
nations to a relapse into a state of nature that had to be averted using
any means possible.[21] The savages of America and their state of
nature, mentioned with horror in De Cive as well as in Leviathan,
furnished a repulsive illustration: those beings who â(except the
government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural
lust) have no government at all, and live at this day in [a] brutish
mannerâ (Leviathan).[22]
GLOSS ÎČ: When one experiences thought in its barest form, the interval
between a question and its answer can sometimes span centuries. Thus it
was an anthropologist who, several months before killing himself, gave a
response to Hobbes. The age, having reached the other side of the river
of âModern Times,â found itself fully enmeshed in Empire. The text
appeared in 1977 in the first issue of Libre under the title âArcheology
of Violence.â THEY tried to understand it, as well as the piece that
follows, âSorrows of the Savage Warrior,â in isolation from the
confrontation during the same decade that pitted the urban guerrilla
against the old dilapidated structures of the bourgeois State,
independently from the Red Army Faction, independently from the Red
Brigades and the diffuse Autonomia movement.[23] And yet even with this
craven reservation, the texts of Clastres still create a disturbance.
âWhat is primitive society? It is a multiplicity of undivided
communities which all obey the same centrifugal logic. What institution
at once expresses and guarantees the permanence of this logic? It is
war, as the truth of relations between communities, as the principal
sociological means of promoting the centrifugal force of dispersion
against the centripetal force of unification. The war machine is the
motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely
on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there
is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is
war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is
society-for-war.â
âHere we are once again brought back to the thought of Hobbes. [...] He
was able to see that war and the State are contradictory terms, that
they cannot exist together, that each implies the negation of the other:
war prevents the State, the State prevents war. The enormous error,
almost fatal amongst a man of this time, is to have believed that the
society which persists in war of each against each is not truly a
society; that the Savage world is not a social world; that, as a result,
the institution of society involves the end of war, the appearance of
the State, an anti-war machine par excellence. Incapable of thinking of
the primitive world as a nonnatural world, Hobbes nevertheless was the
first to see that one cannot think of war without the State, that one
must think of them in a relation of exclusion.â[24]
The inability of the Stateâs juridico-formal offensive to reduce civil
war is not a marginal detail rooted in the fact that there is always a
pleb to pacify, but appears centrally in the pacification procedure
itself. Organizations modeled after the State characterize as âformlessâ
that which within them derives in fact from the play of forms-of-life.
In the modern State, this irreducibility is attested to by the infinite
extension of the police, that is to say, of all that bears the
inadmissible burden of realizing the conditions of possibility of a
state order as vast as it is unworkable.
GLOSS α: Ever since the creation of the Paris Lieutenancy by Louis XIV,
the practices of police institutions have continuously shown how the
modern State has progressively created its own society. The police is
that force that intervenes âwherever things are amiss,â that is to say,
wherever antagonism appears between forms-oflifeâwherever there is a
jump in political intensity. Using the arm of the police ostensibly to
protect the âsocial fabric,â while using another arm to destroy it, the
State then offers itself as an existentially neutral mediator between
the parties in question and imposes itself, even in its own coercive
excesses, as the pacified landscape for confrontation. It is thus,
according to the same old story, that the police produced public space
as a space that it has taken control of; that is how the language of the
State came to be applied to almost every social activity, how it became
the language of the social par excellence.
GLOSS ÎČ: âThe aim of oversight and provisions on the part of the police
is to mediate between the individual [Individuum] and the universal
possibility which is available for the attainment of individual ends.
The police should provide for street-lighting, bridge-building, the
pricing of daily necessities, and public health. Two main views are
prevalent on this subject. One maintains that the police should have
oversight over everything, and the other maintains that the police
should have no say in such matters, since everyone will be guided in his
actions by the needs of others. The individual [der Einzelne] must
certainly have a right to earn his living in this way or that; but on
the other hand, the public also has a right to expect that necessary
tasks will be performed in the proper manner.â âHegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right (Addition to paragraph 236), 1833[25]
At each moment of its existence, the police reminds the State of the
violence, the banality, and the darkness of its beginnings.
The modern State fails in three ways: first, as the absolutist State,
then as the liberal State, and soon after as the Welfare State. The
passage from one to the other can only be understood in relation to
three successive corresponding forms of civil war: the wars of religion,
class struggle, and the Imaginary Party. It should be noted that the
failure here is not in the result, but is the entire duration of the
process itself.
GLOSS α: Once the first moment of violent pacification had passed, and
the absolutist regime was established, the figure of the embodied
sovereign lived on as the useless symbol of a bygone war. Rather than
favoring pacification, the sovereign instead provoked confrontation,
defiance, and revolt. It was clear that the taking on of this singular
orm-of-lifeââsuch is my pleasureâ[26]âcame at the cost of repressing all
the others. The liberal State corresponds to the surpassing of this
aporia, the aporia of personal sovereignty, but only the surpassing of
it on its own ground. The liberal State is a frugal State, which claims
to exist only to ensure the free play of individual liberties, and to
this end it begins by extorting interests from each body, so that it can
attach them to these bodies and reign peacefully across this new
abstract world: âthe phenomenal republic of interestsâ (Foucault).[27]
It claims it exists only to keep things in good order, for the proper
functioning of âcivil society,â which is absolutely a thing of its own
creation. Intriguingly, the glorious age of the liberal State,
stretching from 1815 to 1914, would come to coincide with a
multiplication of apparatuses of control, with the continuous monitoring
and widespread disciplining of the population, and with societyâs
complete submission to the police and publicity. âI have drawn attention
to the fact that the development, dramatic rise, and dissemination
throughout society of these famous disciplinary techniques for taking
charge of the behavior of individuals day by day and in its fine detail
is exactly contemporaneous with the age of freedomsâ (Foucault).[28]
Security is the primary condition of âindividual freedomâ (which means
nothing, because such a freedom must end where that of others begins).
The State that âwishes to govern just enough so that it can govern the
leastâ must in fact know everything, and it must develop a set of
practices and technologies to do it. The police and publicity are the
two agencies through which the liberal State gives transparency to the
fundamental opacity of the population. Witness here the insidious way in
which the liberal State will perfect the modern State, under the pretext
of needing to penetrate everywhere in order to avoid being everywhere in
actuality, that in order to leave its subjects alone it must know
everything. The principle of the liberal State could be stated like
this: âIf control and discipline are everywhere, the State does not have
to be so.â âGovernment, initially limited to the function of
supervision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is not
happening according to the general mechanics of behavior, exchange, and
economic life. [...] The Panopticon is the very formula of liberal
governmentâ (Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics).[29] âCivil societyâ is the
name given by the liberal State for that which is both its own product
and its own outside. It will not be surprising then to read that a study
on French âvaluesâ concludes (without seeming to sense the
contradiction) that in 1999 âthe French are increasingly attached to
personal freedom and public orderâ (Le Monde, November 16, 2000). Among
the morons who respond to polls, that is, among those who still believe
in representation, the majority are unhappy, emasculated lovers of the
liberal State. In sum, âFrench civil societyâ only indicates the proper
functioning of the set of disciplines and regimes of subjectivization
authorized by the modern State.
GLOSS ÎČ: Imperialism and totalitarianism mark the two ways in which the
modern State tried to leap beyond its own impossibility, first by
slipping forward beyond its borders into colonial expansion, then by an
intensive deepening of the penetration inside its own borders. In both
cases, these desperate reactions from the Stateâ which claimed to
encompass everything just as it was becoming nothingâcame to a head in
the very forms of civil war the State claims preceded it.
Ultimately the âstate-ificationâ of the social had to be paid for by the
socialization of the State, and thus lead to the mutual dissolution of
both the State and society. What THEY called the âWelfare Stateâ was
this indistinction (between society and state) in which the obsolete
State-form survived for a little while within Empire. The
incompatibility between the state order and its procedures (the police
and publicity) expresses itself in the current efforts to dismantle the
Welfare State. And so, on the same note, society no longer exists, at
least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of
norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered
tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which they prevent
its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this
desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.
GLOSS α: There is an official history of the State in which the State
seems to be the one and only actor, in which the advances of the state
monopoly on the political are so many battles chalked up against an
enemy who is invisible, imaginary, and precisely without history. And
then there is a counter-history, written from the viewpoint of civil
war, in which the stakes of all these âadvancements,â the dynamics of
the modern State, can be glimpsed. This counter-history reveals a
political monopoly that is constantly threatened by the recomposition of
autonomous worlds, of non-state collectivities. Whenever the State left
something to the âprivateâ sphere, to âcivil society,â whenever it
declared something to be insignificant, non-political, it left just
enough room for the free play of forms-of-life such that, from one
moment to the next, the monopoly on the political appears to be in
dispute. This is how the State is led, either slowly or in a violent
gesture, to encompass the totality of social activity, to take charge of
the totality of manâs existence. Thus, âthe concept of the healthy
individual in the service of the State was replaced by that of the State
in the service of the healthy individualâ (Foucault).[30] In France,
this reversal was already established prior to the law of April 9, 1898
governing âAccident LiabilityâIn Which the Victims Are Workers
Practicing Their Professionâ and a fortiori to the law of April 5, 1910
on retirement plans for peasants and laborers, which sanctioned the
right to life. In taking the place, over the centuries, of all the
heterogeneous mediations of traditional society, the State ended up with
the opposite of its aim, and ultimately fell prey to its own
impossibility. That which wanted to concentrate the monopoly of the
political ended up politicizing everything; all aspects of life had
become political, not in themselves as singular entities, but precisely
insofar as the State, by taking a position, had there too formed itself
into a party. Or how the State, in waging everywhere its war against
civil war, above all propagated hostility toward itself.
GLOSS ÎČ: The Welfare State, which first took over for the liberal State
within Empire, is the product of a massive diffusion of disciplines and
regimes of subjectivation peculiar to the liberal State. It arises at
the very moment when the concentration of these disciplines and these
regimesâfor example with the widespread practice of risk
managementâreaches such a degree in âsocietyâ that society is no longer
distinguishable from the State. Man had thus become socialized to such
an extent that the existence of a separate and personal State power
becomes an obstacle to pacification. Blooms are no longer subjectsânot
economic subjects and even less legal subjects. They are creatures of
imperial society. This is why they must first be taken on as living
beings so that they may then continue existing fictitiously as legal
subjects.
Therefore the sage takes his place over the people yet is no burden;
takes his place ahead of the people yet causes no obstruction. That is
why the empire supports him joyfully and never tires of doing so. It is
because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position
to contend with him.
â Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The history of the modern State is the history of its struggle against
its own impossibilityâthat is, the history of its being overwhelmed by
the profusion of techniques it has deployed to ward off this
impossibility. Empire is, to the contrary, the assumption of both this
impossibility and these techniques. To be more exact, we will say that
Empire is the turning inside out of the liberal State.
GLOSS α: We have, then, the official history of the modern State, namely
the grand juridico-formal narrative of sovereignty: centralization,
unification, rationalization. And also there is a counter-history, which
is the history of its impossibility. You have to look into this other
historyâthe growing mass of practices that must be adopted, the
apparatuses put in place to keep up the fictionâto grasp a genealogy of
Empire. In other words, the history of Empire does not take up where the
modern State leaves off. Empire is what, at a certain point in time
(letâs say 1914), allows the modern State to live on as a pure
appearance, as a lifeless form. The discontinuity here is not in the
passage from one order to another, but cuts across time like two
parallel but heterogeneous planes of consistency, just like the two
histories of the State.
GLOSS ÎČ: When we speak of a turning inside out, we are referring to the
final possibility of an exhausted system, which folds back onto itself
in order, in a mechanical fashion, to collapse in on itself.
The Outside becomes the Inside, and the Inside now has no limits. What
was formerly present in a certain defined place now becomes possible
everywhere. What is turned inside out no longer exists in a positive
way, in a concentrated form, but remains in a suspended state as far as
the eye can see. It is the final ruse of the system, the moment when it
is most vulnerable and, at the same time, most impervious to attack. The
operation whereby the liberal State is imperially folded back can be
described as follows: The liberal State developed two sub-institutional
practices that it used to control and keep at bay the population. On the
one hand, there was the police in the original sense of the term (âThe
police keeps watch over the well-being of men [...] the police keeps
watch over the livingâ [N. De La Mare, TraitĂ© de la police, 1705]) and,
on the other hand, publicity, as a sphere equally accessible to all and
therefore independent of every form-of-life. Each of these instances or
agencies is in fact a set of practices and apparatuses with no real
continuity other than their convergent effects on the populationâthe
first on its âbody,â the second on its âsoul.â All that was needed to
consolidate power was to control the social definition of happiness and
to maintain order in the public sphere. These concerns allowed the
liberal State to remain thrifty. Throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the police and publicity developed in a way that
both served and yet exceeded the institutions of the nation-state. It is
only with World War I that they become the key nexus for how the liberal
State is folded up into Empire. Then we witness something curious. By
connecting them to each other in view of the war effort, and in a manner
largely independent of national States, these subinstitutional practices
give birth to the two super-institutional poles of Empire: the police
becomes Biopower, and publicity is transformed into the Spectacle. From
this point on, the State does not disappear, it is simply demoted
beneath a transterritorial set of autonomous practices: Spectacle,
Biopower.
GLOSS Îł: The liberal hypothesis collapses in 1914, at the end of the
âHundred Yearsâ Peaceâ that resulted from the Congress of Vienna. When
the Bolshevik coup dâĂtat occurred in 1917, each nation found itself
torn in two by the global class struggle, and all illusions about an
inter-national order had seen their day. In the global civil war, the
process of polarization penetrates the frontiers of the State. If any
order could still be glimpsed, it would have to be super-national.
GLOSS ÎŽ: If Empire is the assumption of the modern Stateâs
impossibility, it is also the assumption of the impossibility of
imperialism. Decolonization was an important moment in the establishment
of Empire, logically marked by the proliferation of puppet States.
Decolonization means: the elaboration of new forms of horizontal,
sub-institutional power that function better than the old ones.
The modern Stateâs sovereignty was fictional and personal. Imperial
sovereignty is pragmatic and impersonal. Unlike the modern State, Empire
can legitimately claim to be democratic, insofar as it neither banishes
nor privileges a priori any form-of-life.
And for good reason, since it is what assures the simultaneous
attenuation of all forms-of-life, as well as their free play within this
attenuation.
GLOSS α: Amidst the ruins of medieval society the modern State tried to
reconstitute this unity around the principle of representationâthat is,
on the presumption that one part of society would be able to incarnate
the totality of society. The term âincarnateâ is not used here
arbitrarily. The doctrine of the modern State explicitly secularizes one
of the most fearsome operations of Christian theology: the one whose
dogma is expressed by the Nicene Creed. Hobbes devotes a chapter to it
in the appendix of Leviathan. His theory of personal sovereignty is
based on the doctrine that makes the Father, Son and Holy Ghost the
three persons of God, âmeaning that each can play its own role but also
that of the others.â This makes it possible for the Sovereign to be
defined as an actor on behalf of those who have decided to âappoint one
man or assembly of men to bear their personâ and thus âevery one to own
and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth
their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which
concern the common peace and safety, and therein to submit their willsâ
(Leviathan).[31] If, in the iconophilic theology of Nicea, Christ or the
icon manifests not the presence of God but his essential absence, his
sensible withdrawal, his unrepresentability, then for the modern State
the personal sovereign manifests the fictive withdrawal of âcivil
society.â The modern State is conceived therefore as a part of society
that takes no part in society, and can for this reason represent it as a
whole.
GLOSS ÎČ: The various bourgeois revolutions never tampered with the
principle of personal sovereignty, insofar as an assembly or leader,
elected directly or indirectly, never deviated from the idea of a
possible representation of the social totality, i.e. of society as a
totality. As a result, the passage from the absolutist State to the
liberal State only managed to liquidate the one personâthe Kingâwho
liquidated the medieval order from which he emerged, and whose last
living vestige he seemed to be. It is only as an obstacle to his own
historical processes that the king was judged: he composed his own
sentence, his death the period at the end of it. Only the democratic
principle, promoted from within by the modern State, was able finally to
bring down the modern State. The democratic ideaâthe absolute
equivalence of all forms-oflifeâis also an imperial idea. Democracy is
imperial to the extent that the equivalence among forms-of-life can only
be implemented negatively, by preventing, with all the means at its
disposal, ethical differences from attaining in their play an intensity
that makes them political. This would introduce lines of rupture,
alliances and discontinuities into the smooth space of demokratic
society that would ruin the equivalence of form-of-life. This is why
Empire and demokracy are nothing, positively, other than the free play
of attenuated forms-of-life, as when one speaks of an attenuated virus
that is used as a vaccine. In one of his only texts on the State, the
Critique of Hegelâs âPhilosophy of Rightâ Marx in this way defended the
imperial perspective of the âmaterial State,â which he opposed to the
âpolitical State,â in the following terms:
âThe political republic is democracy within the abstract form of the
state. Hence the abstract state-form of democracy is the republic.â
âPolitical life in the modern sense is the Scholasticism of popular
life. Monarchy is the fullest expression of this estrangement. The
republic is the negation of this estrangement within its own sphere.â
â[A]ll forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that
reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.â âIn true
democracy the political state disappears.â[32]
GLOSS Îł: Empire can only be understood through the biopolitical turn of
power. Like Biopower, Empire does not correspond to any positive
juridical framework, and is not a new institutional order. It instead
designates a reabsorption or retraction of the old substantial
sovereignty. Power has always circulated in microphysical, familiar,
everyday, material and linguistic apparatuses. It has always cut across
the life and bodies of subjects. What is novel about Biopower is that it
is nothing more than this. Biopower is a form of power that no longer
rises up over against âcivil societyâ as a sovereign hypostasis, as a
Great Exterior Subject. It can no longer be isolated from society.
Biopower means only that power adheres to life and life to power. Thus,
from the perspective of its classical form, power is changing radically
before our eyes, from a solid to a gaseous, molecular state. To coin a
formula: Biopower is the SUBLIMATION of power. Empire cannot be
conceived outside of this understanding of our age. Empire is not and
cannot be a power separated from society. Society wonât stand for that,
just as it crushes the final remnants of classical politics with its
indifference. Empire is immanent to âsociety.â It is âsocietyâ insofar
as society is a power.
Empire exists âpositivelyâ only in crisis, only as negation and
reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because it is
impossible to get outside it.
GLOSS α: The imperial regime of pan-inclusion always follows the same
plot: something, for whatever reason, manifests its foreignness to
Empire, or shows itself trying to escape from it, trying to have done
with it. This state of affairs constitutes a crisis, and Empire responds
with a state of emergency. It is at this passing moment, during one of
these reactive operations, that THEY can say: âEmpire exists.â
GLOSS ÎČ: It is not that imperial society represents an achievement, a
plenitude without remainder. The space left free by the deposing of
personal sovereignty remains just that, empty vis-Ă -vis society. This
space, the place of the Prince, is currently occupied by the Nothing of
an imperial Principle that materializes and comes into focus only when
it strikes like lightning at anything pretending to remain outside of
it. This is why Empire is not only without a government, but also
without an emperor: there are only acts of government, all equally
negative. In our historical experience, the phenomenon that comes
closest to this state of affairs is still the Terror. Where âuniversal
freedom ... can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is
left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destructionâ
(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 359).
GLOSS Îł: Empire functions best when crisis is ubiquitous. Crisis is
Empireâs regular mode of existence, in the same way that an insurance
company comes into being only when thereâs an accident. The temporality
of Empire is the temporality of emergency and catastrophe.
Empire is not the crowning achievement of a civilization, the end-point
of its ascendent arc. Rather it is the tail-end of an inward turning
process of disaggregation, as that which must check and if possible
arrest the process. Empire is therefore the katechon. ââEmpireâ in this
sense meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the
Antichrist and the end of the present eonâ (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of
the Earth, 59â60). Empire sees itself as the final bulwark against the
eruption of chaos, and acts with this minimal perspective in mind.
At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodie recollection of the
entire, frozen history of a âcivilization.â And this impression has a
certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilizationâs last
stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it
sees its life pass before its eyes.
With the liberal State being turned inside out into Empire, ONE has
passed from a world partitioned by the Law to a space polarized by
norms. The Imaginary Party is the other, hidden side of this turning
inside out.
GLOSS α: What do we mean by Imaginary Party? That the Outside has moved
inside. This turning inside out happened noiselessly, peacefully, like a
thief in the night. At first glance, it seems nothing has changed, ONE
is simply struck by the sudden futility of so many familiar things, and
the old divisions that can no longer account for what is happening are
now suddenly so burdensome.
Some nagging little neurosis makes ONE still want to distinguish just
from unjust, healthy from sick, work from leisure, criminal from the
innocent and the ordinary from the monstrous. But letâs admit the
obvious: these old divisions no longer have any meaning.
It is not as if they have been suppressed, though. They are still there,
but they are inconsequential. The norm hasnât abolished the Law, it has
merely voided the Law and commandeered it for its own purposes, putting
it in the service of its own immanent practices of calculation and
administration. When the Law enters the forcefield of the norm, it loses
the last vestiges of transcendence, from now on functioning only in a
land of indefinitely renewed state of exception.
The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law.
There is no visible Outside any moreânothing like a pure Nature, the
Madness of the classical age, the Great Crime of the classical age, or
the Great classical Proletariat with its actually-existing Homeland of
Justice and Liberty. These are all gone, mostly because they have lost
their imaginary force of attraction. The Outside is now gone precisely
because today there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical
tissue. Madness, crime or the hungry proletariat no longer inhabit a
defined or recognized space, they no longer form a world unto
themselves, their own ghetto with or without walls. With the dissipation
of the social, these terms become reversible modalities, a violent
latency, a possibility each and every body might be capable of. This
suspicion is what justifies the continuous socialization of society, the
perfecting of the microapparatuses of control. Not that Biopower claims
to govern men and things directlyâinstead, it governs possibilities and
conditions of possibility.
Everything that had its source in the Outsideâillegality, first of all,
but also misery and deathâis administered and therefore taken up in an
integration that positively eliminates these exteriorities in order to
allow them to recirculate. This is why there is no such thing as death
within Biopower: there is only murder and its circulation. Through
statistics, an entire network of causalities embeds each living being in
the collection of deaths his own survival requires (the dropouts, the
unfortunate Indonesians, workplace accidents, Ethiopians of all ages,
celebrities killed in car crashes, etc.). But it is also in a medical
sense that death has become murder, with the proliferation of âbrain
dead corpses,â these âliving deadâ who would have passed away a long
time ago if they werenât kept alive artificially as organ banks for some
absurd transplant, if they werenât being kept alive in order to be
passed away. The truth is that now there is no outside that can be
identified as such, since the threshold itself has become the intimate
condition of all that exists.
The Law sets up divisions and institutes distinctions, it circumscribes
what defies it and recognizes an orderly world to which it gives both
form and duration. The Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what it
outlaws. The Law says its outside. The inaugural gesture of the Law is
to exclude, and first of all its own foundation: sovereignty, violence.
But the norm has no sense of foundation. It has no memory, staying as
close as possible to the present, always claiming to be on the side of
immanence. While the Law gives a face and honors the sovereignty of what
is outside it, the norm is acephalousâheadlessâand is delighted every
time a kingâs head gets cut off. The norm has no hieros, no place of its
own, acting invisibly over the entirety of the gridded, edgeless space
it distributes. No one is excluded here or expelled into some
identifiable outside. What is called âexcludedâ is, for the norm, just a
modality of a generalized inclusion. It is therefore no longer anything
but a single, solitary field, homogenous but diffracted into an infinity
of nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain
the play between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of
intensity. In this space, an ungraspable agency of totalization reigns,
dissolving, digesting, absorbing and deactivating all alterity a priori.
A process of omnivorous immanentizationâreducing everything to
nothingâdeploys itself on a planetary scale. The goal: make the world
into continuous biopolitical tissue. And all this time, the norm stands
watch.
Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal, but everything must be
normalized. What functions here is a positive paradigm of power. The
norm produces all that is, insofar as the norm is itself, as THEY say,
the ens realissimum. Whatever does not belong to its mode of unveiling
is not, and whatever is not cannot belong to its mode of unveiling.
Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as such,
but reduced to a simple default in relation to the norm, a hole to mend
into the global biopolitical tissue. Negativity, this power that is not
supposed to exist, is thus logically abandoned to a traceless
disappearance. Not without reason, since the Imaginary Party is the
Outside of the world without Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged
at the heart of a world rendered continuous.
The Imaginary Party is the seat, and the siege, of potentiality.
GLOSS ÎČ: There is no better illustration of how the norm has subsumed
the Law than to consider how the old territorial States of Europe
âabolishedâ their borders after the Schengen Agreement. This abolition
of borders, which is to say the abandonment of the most sacred aspect of
the modern State, does not mean of course that the States themselves
will disappear, but rather it signals the permanent possibility of their
restoration, if the circumstances demand it. In this sense, when borders
are abolished, customs checkpoints in no way disappear but are extended
to virtually all places and times. Under Empire borders come to resemble
what are called âmobileâ customs checkpoints, which can be placed,
impromptu, at any point within a territory.
Empire has never had any juridical or institutional existence, because
it needs none. Unlike the modern State, which pretended to be an order
of Law and of Institutions, Empire is the guarantor of a reticular
proliferation of norms and apparatuses. Under normal circumstances,
Empire is these apparatuses.
GLOSS α: Every time Empire intervenes, it leaves behind norms and
apparatuses that allow the crisis site to be managed as a transparent
space of circulation. This is how imperial society makes itself known:
as an immense articulation of apparatuses that pump an electrical life
into the fundamental inertia of the biopolitical tissue. Because the
reticular gridwork of imperial society is always threatened with
breakdowns, accidents and blockages, Empire makes sure to eliminate
resistances to circulation, liquidating all obstacles to penetration,
making everything transparent to social flows. Empire is also what
secures transactions and guarantees what might be called a social
superconductivity. This is why Empire has no center: it makes it
possible for each node of its network to be a center. All we can ever
make out along the global assemblage of local apparatuses are the
condensations of forces and the deployment of negative operations that
ensure the progress of imperial transparency. Spectacle and Biopower
assure not just the intensive continuity of flows, but the transitive
normalizationâ their being made equivalentâof all situations as well.
GLOSS ÎČ: There are no doubt âoverwhelmedâ zones where imperial control
is denser than elsewhere, where each small segment of what exists pays
its due to the general panopticism, and where at a certain point the
population can no longer be distinguished from the police. Inversely,
there are also zones where Empire seems absent and lets everyone know it
âdoesnât dare set foot there.â This is because it calculates, weighs,
evaluates and then decides to be here or there, to show up or withdraw,
all for tactical reasons. Empire is not everywhere, and nowhere is it
absent. Unlike the modern State, Empire has no interest in being the
summit, in being the always visible and resplendent sovereign. Empire
only claims to be the last resort in each situation. Just as there is
nothing natural about a ânature parkâ created by the administrators of
artificialization who have decided it is preferable to leave it
âintact,â so too Empire is present even when it is effectively absent,
present as withdrawn. Empire is such that it can be everywhere. It
resides in each point of the territory, in the gap between normal and
exceptional situations. Empire has the power to be weak.
GLOSS Îł: The logic of the modern State is a logic of the Law and the
Institution. Institutions and the Law are deterritorialized and, in
principle, abstract. In this way, they distinguish themselves from the
customs they replace, customs which are always local, ethically
permeated, and always open to existential contestation. Institutions and
the Law loom over men, their permanence drawn from their transcendence,
from their own inhuman self-assertion. Institutions, like the Law,
establish lines of partition and give names in order to separate and put
things in order, putting an end to the chaos of the world, or rather
corralling chaos into the delimited space of the unauthorizedâ Crime,
Madness, Rebellion. And both Law and Institutions are united in the fact
that neither has any need to justify itself to anyone, no matter what.
âThe Law is the Law,â says the man.
Even if it does not mind using them as weapons, as it does with
everything else, Empire knows nothing about the abstract logic of the
Law and the Institution. Empire knows only norms and apparatuses. Like
apparatuses, norms are local. They take effect in the here and now
insofar as they function, empirically. Norms hide neither their origin
nor their reason for existingâthese are to be found outside the norms
themselves, in the conflicts which give rise to them. What is essential
today is not some preliminary declaration of universality that would
then strive to enforce itself. Attention must be paid to operations, to
the pragmatic. There is indeed a totalization here as well, but it does
not emerge out of a desire for universalization. It takes place through
the articulation of apparatuses, through the continuity of the
circulation between them.
GLOSS ÎŽ: Under Empire we witness a proliferation of the legal, a chronic
boom in juridical production. This proliferation, far from confirming
some sort of triumph of the Law instead verifies its total devaluation,
its definitive obsolescence. Under the regime of the norm, the Law
becomes but one instrument among many for retroactively acting on
society, an instrument that can be as easily customizedâand subject to
reversal of senseâas all the others. It is a technique of government, a
way of putting an end to a crisis, nothing more. What the modern State
elevated to the sole source of rightâthe Lawâis now nothing more than
one of the expressions of the social norm. Even judges no longer have
the subordinate task of qualifying facts and applying the Law, but the
sovereign function of evaluating the opportunity such and such a
judgment affords. The vagueness of laws, which increasingly have
recourse to the nebulous criteria of normality, are no longer seen as
hindering the lawsâ effectiveness; to the contrary, this vagueness
becomes a condition for the survival of these laws and for their
applicability to any and every case that might come before them. When
judges âlegislate from the benchâ and the social is increasingly
juridicized, they are doing nothing other than ruling in the name of the
norm. Under Empire, an âanti-mafiaâ trial does nothing but celebrate the
triumph of one mafiaâthe judgesâover anotherâthe judged. Here, the
sphere of Law has become one weapon among others in the universal
deployment of hostility. If Blooms can only connect and torture one
another in the legal terms, Empire by contrast doesnât take well to this
same language, nevertheless making use of it from time to time when the
opportunity is right; and even then it continues to speak the only
language it knows, the language of effectiveness, of the effective
capacity to re-establish the normal situation, to produce public order,
the smooth general functioning of the Machine. Two increasingly similar
figures of this sovereignty of effectiveness make their presence felt
thus in the very convergence of their functions: the cop and the doctor.
GLOSS Δ: âThe law should be used as just another weapon in the
governmentâs arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a
propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For
this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to
be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible.â âFrank
Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping
(1971).
âCitizenâ is anything that shows some degree of ethical neutralization,
some attenuation that is compatible with Empire. Difference is not done
away with completely, as long as it is expressed against the backdrop of
a general equivalence. Indeed, difference is the elementary unit used in
the imperial management of identities. If the modern State reigned over
the âphenomenal republic of interests,â[33] Empire can be said to reign
over the phenomenal republic of differences. It is through this
depressing masquerade that all expressions of forms-of-life get conjured
away. Imperial power stays impersonal because it has the power that
personalizes. Imperial power totalizes because it is itself what
individuates. We are dealing not so much with individualities and
subjectivities, but with individuations and subjectivationsâ transitory,
disposable, modular. Empire is the free play of simulacra.
GLOSS α: Empireâs unity is not imposed on reality as an extra,
supplementary form. It comes about at the lowest level, on a molecular
scale. The unity of Empire is nothing other than the global uniformity
of attenuated forms-of-life produced through the conjunction of
Spectacle and Biopower. Its unity is more a moiré pattern than
multicolored: made up of differences, but only in relation to the norm.
Normalized differences. Statistical deviations. Under Empire, nothing
forbids you from being a little bit punk, slightly cynical, or
moderately S & M. Empire tolerates all transgressions, provided they
remain soft. We are no longer dealing with a voluntaristic a priori
totalization, but with molecular calibrations of subjectivities and
bodies. â[A]s power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on
whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualizedâ (Foucault,
Discipline and Punish).[34]
GLOSS ÎČ:
âAnd the whole inhabited world, as it were attending a national
festival, has laid aside its old dress, the carrying of weapons, and has
turned, with full authority to do so, to adornments and all kinds of
pleasures. And all the other sources of contention have died out in the
cities, but this single rivalry holds all of them, how each will appear
as fair and charming as possible. Everything is full of gymnasiums,
fountains, gateways, temples, handicrafts, and schools. And it can be
said in medical terms that the inhabited world was, as it were, ill at
the start and has now recovered. [...] the whole earth has been adorned
like a pleasure garden. Gone beyond land and sea is the smoke rising
from the fields and the signal fires of friend and foe, as if a breeze
had fanned them away. There has been introduced instead every kind of
charming spectacle and a boundless number of games. [...] Therefore
those outside your empire, if there are any, alone should be pitied
since they are deprived of such advantages.â âAelius Aristides,
âRegarding Rome,â 144 CE
From here on out, citizen will mean: citizen of Empire.
GLOSS: In the Roman empire, citizenship was not limited to Romans. It
was open to anyone who, in each province of the Empire, demonstrated a
sufficient ethical conformity with the Roman model. Citizenship, in its
juridical sense, merely corresponded to someoneâs own labor of
self-neutralization. As you can see, the term âcitizenâ does not belong
to the language of the Law, but to that of the norm. All appeals to the
citizen are, and have been since the French Revolution, emergency
measures: a practice that corresponds with a state of exception (âthe
Homeland is in danger,â âthe Republic is threatened,â etc.). The appeal
to the citizen is therefore never an appeal to a legal subject, but an
injunction imposed on the legal subject to go beyond itself and give up
its life, to behave in an exemplary fashion, and to be more than a legal
subject in order to remain one.
The only thought compatible with Empireâwhen it is not sanctioned as its
official thoughtâis deconstruction. Those who celebrated it as âweak
thoughtâ were right on target. Deconstruction is a discursive practice
guided by one unique goal: to dissolve and disqualify all intensity,
while never producing any itself.
GLOSS: Nietzsche, Artaud, Schmitt, Hegel, Saint Paul, German
romanticism, and surrealism: deconstructionâs task is, apparently, to
produce fastidious commentaries targeting anything that, in the history
of thought, has carried any intense charge. This new form of policing
that pretends to be a simple extension of literary criticism beyond its
date of expiration is, in fact, quite effective in its own domain. It
wonât be long before it has managed to rope off and quarantine
everything from the past that is still a little virulent within a cordon
sanitaire of digressions, reservations, language games and winks, using
its tedious tomes to prevent the prolongation of thought into gestureâin
short, to struggle tooth and nail against the event. No surprise that
this wave of global prattle emerged out of a critique of metaphysics
understood as privileging the âsimple and immediateâ presence of speech
over writing, of life over the text and its multiplicity of
significations. It would certainly be possible to interpret
deconstruction as a simple Bloomesque reaction. The deconstructionist,
incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world,
being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence
his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with
bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities
that still affect him at allâbooks, texts, films, and musicâbecause
these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see
anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees
what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read.
Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him
purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more
than dubious appeals to authority. There is something militant about
deconstruction, a militancy of absence, an offensive retreat into the
closed but indefinitely recombinable world of significations. Indeed,
beneath an appearance of complacency, deconstruction has a very specific
political function. It tries to pass off anything that violently opposes
Empire as barbaric, it deems mystical anyone who takes his own presence
to self as a source of energy for his revolt, and makes anyone who
follows the vitality of thought with a gesture a fascist. For these
sectarian agents of preventive counter-revolution, the only thing that
matters is the extension of the epochal suspension that fuels them.
Immediacy, as Hegel has already explained, is the most abstract
determination. And our deconstructionists know well that the future of
Hegel is Empire.
Empire perceives civil war neither as an affront to its majesty nor as a
challenge to its omnipotence, but simply as a risk. This explains the
preventive counter-revolution that Empire continues to wage against
anyone who might puncture holes in the biopolitical continuum. Unlike
the modern State, Empire does not deny the existence of civil war.
Instead, it manages it. By admitting the existence of civil war, Empire
furnishes itself with certain convenient means to steer or contain it.
Wherever its networks are insufficiently intrusive, it will ally itself
for as long as it takes with some local mafia or even a local guerilla
group, on the condition that these parties guarantee they will maintain
order in the territory they have been assigned. Nothing matters less to
Empire than the question, âwho controls what?ââprovided, of course, that
control has been established. As a result, not reacting is, in this way,
still a reaction.
GLOSS α: It is amusing to see the absurd contortions Empireâs incursions
require of those who want to oppose Empire but are skittish of outright
civil war. The imperial operation in Kosovo was not directed against the
Serbs but against civil war itself, having become all too visible in the
Balkans. And so the good souls of the world, compelled to take a
position, were forced to side with either NATO or Milosevic.
GLOSS ÎČ: On the heels of Genoa and its scenes of Chilean-style
repression, a high-ranking official of the Italian police offered this
touching admission to La Repubblica: âLook, Iâm going to tell you
something thatâs not easy for me and that I have never told anyone.
[...] The police arenât there to put things in order, but to govern
disorder.â
Ideally, the cybernetic reduction would posit Bloom as a transparent
conductor of social information. Empire would gladly represent itself,
then, as a network in which everyone would be a node. In each of these
nodes, the norm makes up the element of social conductivity. Even before
the circulation of information, a biopolitical causality passes through
it with more or less resistance, depending upon the gradient of
normality. Each nodeâcountry, body, firm, political partyâis held
responsible for its resistance. This is even the case to the point of
the absolute non-conductivity, to the point of the refraction of flows.
The node in question will then be declared guilty, criminal, inhuman,
and will become the object of an imperial intervention.
GLOSS α: Because no one is ever depersonalized enough to be a perfect
conductor of these social flows, everyone is alwaysalready, as the very
condition of survival, at fault in the eyes of the norm, a norm that
will only be established after the fact, after the intervention. We call
this state a blank blame.[35] It is the moral condition of the citizen
of Empire. It is the reason why there are, in fact, no citizens, but
only proofs of citizenship.
GLOSS ÎČ: The networks informality, plasticity, and opportunistic
incompleteness offer a model of weak solidarity from whose loose bonds
imperial âsocietyâ is woven.
GLOSS Îł: What is finally made clear by the planetary circulation of
responsibilityâwhen the world is cross-examined to the point where even
ânatural disastersâ are perpetrated by some guilty partyâis how all
causality is essentially constructed.
GLOSS ÎŽ: Empire has the habit of launching âpublic awareness campaigns.â
These amount to a deliberate heightening of the sensitivity of those
social sensors alert to this or that phenomenonâthat is, in the creation
of this phenomenon as a phenomenon, and in the construction of the
causal chains that allow for its materialization.
The jurisdiction of the imperial police, of Biopower is limitless, since
what it must circumscribe and put a stop to does not exist at the level
of the actual but at the level of the possible. The discretionary power
here is called prevention and the risk factor is this possible, existing
everywhere in actuality as possible, which is the basis for Empireâs
universal right to intervene.
GLOSS α: The enemy of Empire is within. The enemy is the event. It is
everything that might happen, everything that might disturb the mesh of
norms and apparatuses. Logically therefore the enemy, in the form of
risk, is omnipresent. And concern is the only acknowledged reason for
the brutal imperial interventions against the Imaginary Party: âLook how
ready we are to protect you, since as soon as something exceptional
happensâobviously without taking into account quaint customs like law or
jurisprudenceâwe are going to intervene using any means necessaryâ
(Foucault). GLOSS ÎČ: There is obviously a certain Ubuesque quality to
imperial power, which paradoxically seems ill-fit to undermine the
effectiveness of the Machine. In the same way, there is a baroque aspect
to the juridical framework under which we live. In fact, it seems vital
to Empire that it maintain a certain amount of permanent confusion
around enforced rules, rights, and the various authorities and their
competencies. It is this confusion that enables Empire to deploy, when
the time comes, any means necessary.
It is no use distinguishing between cops and citizens. Under Empire, the
difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any
moment each citizen of Empire can, through a characteristically
Bloomesque reversal, reveal himself a cop.
GLOSS α: Foucault dates back to the second half of the eighteenth
century the origin of the idea that âthe delinquent is the enemy of
society as a whole.â Under Empire, this notion extends to the totality
of the reconstructed social cadaver. Both for himself and for others,
and in virtue of his status as blank blame, each person is a risk, a
potential hostis. This kind of schizoid situation explains the revival,
under Empire, of mutual monitoring and informing, of policing both
within and among citizens. For it is not only that the citizens of
Empire denounce anything that seems âabnormalâ to them with such fervor
that even the police can no longer keep up, it is that they sometimes
denounce themselves in order to have done with the blank blame they
feel, so that their still unresolved status, and the uncertainty as to
their membership within the biopolitical tissue, might be cleared up
with the fell swoop of judgment. And it is through this mechanism of
generalized terror that all risky dividuals are everywhere pushed out,
quarantined, spontaneously isolatedâall those who, being subject to
imperial intervention, could bring down with them, through capillary
action, the adjoining links in the network.
GLOSS ÎČ:
ââHow would you define the police?
The police come from the public and the public forms a part of the
police. Those on the police force are paid to devote all their time to
carrying out their duties, but these duties are equally those of all
their fellow citizens.
âWhat is the primary role of the police?
They have an expanded mission, focused on the resolution of problems,
what is known as âproblem-solving policing.â
âHow do you measure the effectiveness of the police?
The lack of crime and lawlessness.
âWhat specifically do the police take care of?
The problems and concerns of the citizens.
âWhat determines the effectiveness of the police?
The cooperation of the public.
âHow do you define professionalism in a police force?
An ability to remain in contact with the population in order to
anticipate problems.
âWhat opinion do the police have of judicial proceedings?
They are one means among many.â
âJean-Paul Brodeur, Professor of Criminology, MontrĂ©al. Quoted in Guide
pratique de la police de proximité [Practical Guide to Community
Policing], Paris, March 2000.
Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element
of the biopolitical tissue is safe from intervention. The electronic
archiving of the world, generalized traceability, the fact that the
means of production are becoming just as much a means of control, the
reduction of the juridical edifice to a mere weapon in the arsenal of
the normâall this tends to turn everyone into a suspect.
GLOSS: A portable phone becomes a black box, a mode of payment a record
of your buying habits, your parents turn into snitches, a telephone bill
becomes a file on your acquaintances: the whole overproduction of
useless personal information ends up being critically important simply
because at any moment it is usable. This available is what bathes every
gesture in the shadow of threat. That Empire leaves this information
relatively unexploited indicates precisely its own sense of security,
how little, for now, it feels threatened.
Empire is scarcely thought, and perhaps hardly thinkable, within the
western tradition, that is, within the limits of the metaphysics of
subjectivity. The best THEY have been able to do is to think the
surpassing of the modern State on its own grounds. This has spawned a
number of unsustainable projects for a universal State, whether in the
form of the speculations on cosmopolitan right that would establish
perpetual peace, or as the ridiculous hope for a global democratic
state, which is the ultimate goal of Negriism.
GLOSS α: Those who cannot manage to imagine the world except through the
categories allotted to them by the liberal State, commonly pretend to
confuse Empire, here denounced as âglobalization,â with one or another
super-national organization (the IMF, the World Bank, the wto or the UN,
or less often NATO and the European Commission). From counter-summit to
countersummit, we see our âanti-globalizationâ movement consumed more
and more by doubt: What if inside these pompous edifices, behind these
proud facades, there WAS NOTHING? Intuitively they realize that these
grand global shells are empty, and this is, moreover, why they besiege
them. These palace walls are made from nothing but good intentions. They
were constructed each in their time as a reaction to some world crisis,
and since then have been left there, uninhabited, unusable for anything,
to serve, for example, as a decoy for the dissenting herds of Negriism.
GLOSS ÎČ: It is hard to understand what someone is driving at when, after
a lifetime of disavowals, he asserts in an article tided ââEmpire,â The
Ultimate Stage of Imperialismâ that âin the current imperial phase,
there is no more imperialism,â[36] or when he proclaims that the
dialectic is dead and that we must âtheorize and act both within and
against Empire at the same timeâ: someone who takes by turns the
masochistâs position of demanding that these institutions dissolve
themselves and that of imploring them to exist. And so, one should not
begin with his writings, but with what he has actually done. Even when
it comes to understanding a book like Empireâa certain variety of
theoretical mishmash that achieves in thought the same ultimate
reconciliation of all incompatibilities that Empire dreams of realizing
in deedsâit is more instructive to observe the practices that claim to
represent it. In this way, in the discourse of the spectacular
bureaucrats of the White Overalls, the phrase âpeople of Seattleâ has
been replaced, for some time now, with âmultitude.â âThe people,â Hobbes
reminds us, âis somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one
action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a
multitude. The people rules in all governments. For even in monarchies
the people commands; for the people wills by the will of one man; but
the multitude are citizens, that is to say, subjects. In a democracy and
aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude, but the court is the
people.â[37] The entire Negrian perspective boils down to this: to force
Empire to take on the form of a universal State, by staging the
emergence of a so-called âglobal civil society.â Coming from people who
have always aspired to hold institutional positions, who thus have
always pretended to believe in the fiction of the modern State, the
absurdity of this strategy becomes clear; and the evidence to the
contrary in Empire itself acquires historical significance. When Negri
asserts that the multitude produced Empire, that âsovereignty has taken
a new form, composed of national and supranational organisms united
under a single logic of rule,â that âEmpire is the political subject
that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power
that governs the world,â or again that â[t]his order is expressed as a
juridical formation,â he gives an account, not of the world around him,
but of his own ambitions.[38] The Negrians want Empire to take a
juridical form, they want to have a personal sovereignty sitting across
from them, an institutional subject with which to enter into contract or
take over power. The âglobal civil societyâ that they call for merely
betrays their desire for a global State. Sure, they proffer some proof,
or what they believe to be proof, for the existence of a coming
universal order: the imperial interventions in Kosovo, in Somalia, or in
the Gulf, and their spectacular legitimization in âuniversal values.â
But even if Empire could endow itself with a fake institutional facade,
its actual reality would still remain concentrated in worldwide police
and publicity, or, respectively, Biopower and Spectacle. The fact that
the imperial wars present themselves as âinternational police
operationsâ implemented by âintervention forces,â the fact that war
itself is put outside the law by a form of domination that wants to pass
off its own military offensives as little more than domestic
administration, that is, as a police and not a political matterâto
ensure âtranquility, security, and orderââall this Schmitt had already
anticipated sixty years ago, and in no way does it contribute to the
gradual development of a âright of the police,â as Negri would like to
believe. The momentary spectacular consensus against this or that ârogue
State,â this or that âdictatorâ or âterroristâ only validates the
temporary and reversible legitimacy of any imperial intervention that
appeals to this consensus. The restaging of degraded Nuremberg Trials
for any and every reason, the unilateral decision made by the national
judiciaries to judge crimes that have taken place in countries where the
judiciaries are not even recognized as such does not confirm the
advancement of a nascent global right, but the complete subordination of
the juridical order to a state of emergency wrought by the police. In
conditions like this, it is not a question of agitating in support of a
salutary universal State, but instead of demolishing Spectacle and
Biopower.
As we are beginning to recognize, imperial domination can be described
as neotaoist, since it is only in this tradition that it has been
completely thought through. Twentythree centuries ago a Taoist
theoretician asserted the following: âMeans the sage employs to lead to
political order are three. The first is said to be profit; the second,
authority; and the third, fame. Profit is the means whereby the peopleâs
hearts are won; authority is the means whereby to enforce orders;
denomination is the common way linking superior and inferior. [...] this
can be said to abolish government by means of government, abolish words
by means of words.â[39] Mincing no words, he concluded: âIn the perfect
government, inferiors have no virtueâ (Han Fei Tzu).[40] Indeed
government is quite likely perfected.
GLOSS: There are those who have wanted to describe the imperial period
as a time of slaves without masters. Even if this is not entirely false,
it would be better to describe it as a time of Mastery without masters,
of the nonexistent sovereign, like Calvinoâs nonexistent knight, who was
nothing but an empty suit of armor. The place of the Prince remains,
invisibly occupied by the principle. There is in this both an absolute
rupture with and a fulfillment of the old personal sovereignty: the
Masterâs greatest dismay has always been to have nothing but slaves for
subjects. The reigning Principle carries off the paradox to which
substantive sovereignty had had to yield: to have oneâs slaves be free
men. This empty sovereignty is not, properly speaking, an historical
novelty, even if it is in the West. The task here is to break with the
metaphysics of subjectivity. The Chinese, who established themselves
outside of the metaphysics of subjectivity between the sixth and third
century BCE, at that time formed a theory of impersonal sovereignty that
is not unhelpful for understanding the current motives of imperial
domination. Closely associated with this theory is the name of Han Fei
Tzu, the key figure in the school known as âlegalism,â although this is
misleading as his contributions concern more the norm than the Law. His
teachings, today collected under the title âThe Tao of the Sovereign,â
are what motivated the founding of the first truly unified Chinese
Empire, and what brought an end to the period of the âWarring States.â
Once the Empire was established, the Emperor, the Châin sovereign, had
the works of Han Fei burned in 213 BCE. Only in the twentieth century
was the text unearthed, a text that had prescribed the practices of the
Chinese Empire at the very moment it was collapsing.
Han Feiâs Prince, he who holds the Position, is Prince solely because of
his impersonality, because of his absence of qualities, because of his
invisibility, his inactivity; he is only Prince to the extent that he is
absorbed in the Tao, into the Way, into the flow of things. He is not a
Prince in the sense of a person, he is a Principle, a pure void, that
occupies the Position and dwells in non-acting. For a âlegalistâ Empire,
the State should be completely immanent to civil society: âkeeping the
state safe is like having food when hungry and clothes when cold, not by
will but by nature,â[41] explains Han Fei. The function of the sovereign
is here to articulate the apparatuses that will make him unnecessary,
that will allow cybernetic self- regulation. If, in some respects, the
teachings of Han Fei evoke certain formulations from liberal thought, it
refuses their false naïveté: the teachings present themselves as a
theory of absolute domination. Han Fei exhorts the Prince to abide by
the Way of Lao Tzu: âHeaven and Earth are ruthless; they treat the
myriad creatures as straw dogs. The sage is ruthless; he treats the
people as straw dogs.â[42] Even his most faithful ministers must know
how insignificant they are in the eyes of the Imperial Machineâthe same
ministers, who only yesterday believed themselves mastersâmust dread
that some crusade to âmoralize public lifeâ might swoop down on them,
some craving for transparency. The art of imperial domination entails
being absorbed in the Principle, fading away into nothingness, seeing
everything by becoming invisible, holding everything by becoming
ungraspable. The withdrawal of the Prince is here nothing but the
withdrawal of the Principle: establish the norms by which beings will be
judged and evaluated, make sure that things are named in the
âappropriateâ way, regulate rewards and punishments, govern identities
and attach men to them. Keep to this and remain opaque: such is the art
of empty and dematerialized domination, of the imperial domination of
withdrawal.
âTao exists in invisibility; its function, in unintelligibility. Be
empty and reposed and have nothing to do. Then from the dark see defects
in the light. See but never be seen. Hear but never be heard. Know but
never be known. If you hear any word uttered, do not change it nor move
it but compare it with the deed and see if word and deed coincide with
each other. Place every official with a censor. Do not let them speak to
each other. Then everything will be exerted to the utmost. Cover tracks
and conceal sources. Then the ministers cannot trace origins. Leave your
wisdom and cease your ability. Then your subordinates cannot guess at
your limitations.
âKeep your decision and identify it with the words and deeds of your
subordinates. Cautiously take the handles and hold them fast. Uproot
othersâ want of them, smash othersâ thought of them, and do not let
anybody covet them. [...] The Tao of the lord of men regards tranquility
and humility as treasures. Without handling anything himself, he can
tell skilfulness from unskilfulness [sic]; without his own concerns of
mind, he can tell good from bad luck. Therefore, without uttering any
word himself, he finds a good reply given; without exerting his own
effort, he finds his task accomplished.â â Han Fei Tzu, âThe Tao of the
Sovereignâ[43]
âThe sceptre should never be shown. For its inner nature is
nonassertion. The state affairs may be scattered in the four directions
but the key to their administration is in the centre. The sage holding
this key in hand, people from the four directions come to render him
meritorious services. He remains empty and waits for their services, and
they will exert their abilities by themselves. With the conditions of
the four seas clearly in mind, he can see the Yang by means of the Yin.
[...] He can go onward with the two handles without making any change.
To apply them without cessation is said to be acting on the right way of
government.
âIndeed, everything has its function; every material has its utility.
When everybody works according to his special qualification, both
superior and inferior will not have to do anything. Let roosters herald
the dawn and let cats watch for rats. When everything exercises its
special qualification, the ruler will not have to do anything. [...]
âThe way to assume oneness starts from the study of terminology. When
names are rectified, things will be settled. [...] Therefore, he
promotes them through an examination of names. [...]
âIf his own wisdom and talent are not discarded, it will be hard for him
to keep a constant principle of government. [...]
âThe ruler of men should often stretch the tree but never allow its
branches to flourish.â â Han Fei Tzu, âWielding the Sceptreâ[44]
All imperial strategiesâwhether the spectacular polarization of bodies
toward various suitable absences or the constant terror THEY doggedly
maintainâseek to ensure that Empire never appears as such, namely, as
party. This peculiar kind of peace, this armed peace characteristic of
imperial order, is felt to be all the more oppressive because it is
itself the result of a total, mute, and continuous war. The stakes of
the offensive are not to win a certain confrontation, but rather to make
sure that the confrontation does not take place, to eliminate the event
at the source, to prevent any surge of intensity in the play of
forms-of-life through which the political might occur. It is a huge
victory for Empire if nothing happens. Faced with âwhatever enemy,â
faced with the Imaginary Party, its strategy is to âreplace the events
that one would like to be decisive but which remain unpredictable (i.e.
battle) with a series of minor but statistically consistent actions that
we call, by contrast, non-battleâ (Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la
non-bataille, 1975).[45]
Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an
environment that is hostile to us.
New form of community, asserting itself in a warlike manner. Otherwise
the spirit grows soft. No âgardensâ and no sheer âevasion in the face of
the masses.â War (but without gunpowder!) between different thoughts!
And their armies!
â Nietzsche, âPosthumous Fragmentsâ
All those who cannot or will not conjure away the forms-of-life that
move them must come to grips with the following fact: they are, we are,
the pariahs of Empire. Anchored somewhere within us, there is a
lightless spot, a mark of Cain filling citizens with terror if not
outright hatred. This is the Manichaeism of Empire: on one side there is
the glorious new humanity, carefully reformatted, thrown open to all the
rays of power, ideally lacking in experience, and oblivious to
themselves until they become cancerous. These are citizens, the citizens
of Empire. re. And then thereâs us. Usâit is neither a subject, nor
something formed, nor a multitude. Usâit is a heap of worlds, of
sub-spectacular and interstitial worlds, whose existence is
unmentionable, woven together with the kind of solidarity and dissent
that power cannot penetrate; and there are the strays, the poor, the
prisoners, the thieves, the criminals, the crazy, the perverts, the
corrupted, the overly alive, the overflowing, the rebellious
corporealities. In short, all those who, following their own line of
flight, do not fit into Empireâs stale, air-conditioned paradise.
Usâthis is the fragmented plane of consistency of the Imaginary Party.
Insofar as we stay in contact with our own potentiality, even if only in
thinking through our experience, we represent a danger within the
metropolises of Empire. We are whatever enemy against which all the
imperial apparatuses and norms are positioned. Conversely, the resentful
ones, the intellectual, the immunodeficient, the humanist, the
transplant patient, the neurotic are Empireâs model citizens. From these
citizens, THEY are certain there is nothing to fear. Given their
circumstances, these citizens are lashed to a set of artificial
conditions of existence, such that only Empire can guarantee their
survival; any dramatic shift in their conditions of existence and they
die. They are born collaborators. It is not only power that passes
through their bodies, but also the police. This kind of mutilated life
arises not only as a consequence of Empireâs progress, but as its
precondition. The equation citizen = cop runs deep within the crack that
exists at the core of such bodies.
Everything allowed by Empire is for us similarly limited: spaces, words,
loves, heads, and hearts. So many nooses around the neck. Wherever we go
quarantine lines of petrification spring up almost spontaneously all
around us; we feel it in how they look and act. The slightest thing is
all it takes to be identified as a suspect by Empireâs anemic citizens,
to be identified as a risky dividual. There is a never ending haggling
over whether we will renounce the intimate relationship that we have
with ourselves, something for which they have given us so much flak. And
indeed, we will not hold out forever like this, in this tormented role
of the domestic deserter, of the stateless alien, of such a carefully
concealed hostis.
To the citizens of Empire, we have nothing to say. That would mean we
shared something in common. As far as they are concerned, the choice is
clear: either desert, join us and throw yourself into becoming, or stay
where you are and be dealt with in accordance with the well-known
principles of hostility: reduction and abasement.
For us, the hostis is this very hostility that, within Empire, orders
both the non-relation to self and the generalized non-relation between
bodies. Anything that tries to arouse in us this hostis must be
annihilated. What I mean is that the sphere of hostility itself must be
reduced.
The only way to reduce the sphere of hostility is by spreading the
ethico-political domain of friendship and enmity. This is why Empire has
never been able to reduce this sphere of hostility, despite all its
clamoring in the name of peace. The becoming-real of the Imaginary Party
is simply the formationâthe contagious formationâof a plane of
consistency where friendships and enmities can freely deploy themselves
and make themselves legible to each other.
An agent of the Imaginary Party is someone who, wherever he is, from his
own position, triggers or pursues the process of ethical polarization,
the differential assumption of forms-of-life. This process is nothing
other than tiqqun.
Tiqqun is the becoming-real, the becoming-practice of the world. Tiqqun
is the process through which everything is revealed to be practice, that
is, to take place within its own limits, within its own immanent
signification. Tiqqun means that each act, conduct, and statement
endowed with senseâ act, conduct and statement as eventâspontaneously
manifests its own metaphysics, its own community, its own party. Civil
war simply means the world is practice, and life is, in its smallest
details, heroic.
The defeat of the revolutionary movement was not, as Stalinists always
complain, due to its lack of unity. It was defeated because the civil
war within its ranks was not worked out with enough force. The crippling
effects of the systematic confusion between hostis and enemy are
self-evident, whether it be the tragedy of the Soviet Union or the
groupuscular comedy.
Letâs be clear. Empire is not the enemy with which we have to contend,
and other tendencies within the Imaginary Party are not, for us, so many
hostis to be eliminated. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
Every form-of-life tends to constitute a community, and as a community
tends to constitute a world. Each world, when it thinks itselfâwhen it
grasps itself strategically in its play with other worldsâ discovers
that it is structured by a particular metaphysics which is, more than a
system, a language, its language. When a world thinks itself, it becomes
infectious. It knows the ethic it carries within, and it has mastered,
within its domain, the art of distances.
For each body, the most intense serenity is found by pushing its present
form-of-life to the limit, all the way to the point where the line
disappears, the line along which its power grows. Each body wants to
exhaust its form-of-life and leave it for dead. Then, it passes on to
another. This is how a body gets thicker, nourished with experience. But
it also becomes more supple: it has learned how to get rid of one figure
of the self.
There where bare life was, the form-of-life should come to be. Sickness
and weakness do not really happen to bare life in its generic sense.
They are affections that touch, in a singular way, specific
forms-of-life, and are scripted by the contradictory imperatives of
imperial pacification. If we manage to bring everything THEY exile to
the confused language of bare life back home to the terrain of
forms-of-life, we can invert biopolitics into a politics of radical
singularity. We have to reinvent the field of health, and invent a
political medicine based on forms-of-life.
Under the current conditions imposed by Empire, an ethical grouping has
to turn itself into a war machine. The object of the war machine is not
war. To the contrary, it can âmake war only on the condition that they
simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social
relationsâ (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus).[46] Unlike an army or
revolutionary organizations, the war machine has a supplemental relation
to war. It is capable of offensive exploits and can enter into battle;
it can have unlimited recourse to violence. But it does not need this to
lead a full, complete existence.
This is where the question of taking back both violence and all the
intense expressions of life stolen from us by biopolitical democracies
has to be posed. We should start by getting rid of the tired idea that
death always comes at the end, as the final moment of life. Death is
everyday, it is the continuous diminution of our presence that occurs
when we no longer have the strength to abandon ourselves to our
inclinations. Each wrinkle and each illness is some taste we have
betrayed, some infidelity to a form-oflife animating us. This is our
real death, and its chief cause is our lack of strength, the isolation
that prevents us from trading blows with power, which forbids us from
letting go of ourselves without the assurance we will have to pay for
it. Our bodies feel the need to gather together into war machines, for
this alone makes it possible to live and to struggle.
It should now be clear that, in the biopolitical sense, there is no such
thing as a ânaturalâ death. All deaths are violent. Both existentially
and historically speaking. Under the biopolitical democracies of Empire,
everything has been socialized, and each death is inserted into a
complex network of causalities that make it a social death, a murder.
Today, there is only murder, whether it is condemned, pardoned, or, most
often, denied. At this point, there is no longer any question about the
fact of murder, only about how it happens.
The fact is nothing, the how is all. The proof is that facts must be
qualified beforehand, in order to be facts. Spectacleâs genius is to
have acquired a monopoly over qualifications, over the act of naming.
With this in hand, it can then smuggle in its metaphysics and pass off
the products of its fraudulent interpretations as facts. Some act of
social war gets called a âterrorist act,â while a major intervention by
NATO, initiated through the most arbitrary process, is deemed a
âpeacekeeping operation.â Mass poisonings are described as epidemics,
while the âHigh-Security Wingâ is the technical term used in our
democraciesâ prisons for the legal practice of torture. Tiqqun is, to
the contrary, the action that restores to each fact its how, of holding
this how to be the only real there is. A death by duel, a fine
assassination, or a last brilliant phrase uttered with pathos would be
enough to clean up the blood and humanize what THEY say is the height of
inhumanityâmurder. In murder more than anything, the fact is absorbed by
the how. Between enemies, for example, no firearms are allowed.
This world, is pulled between two tendencies: Lebanonization and
Swissification. These tendencies can coexist and alternate zone by zone.
Indeed, these two seemingly opposed yet reversible tendencies represent
two ways of warding off civil war. After all, before 1974, wasnât
Lebanon nicknamed the âSwitzerland of the Middle Eastâ?
In the becoming-real of the Imaginary Party, we will no doubt cross
paths with those ghastly parasites, the professional revolutionaries.
Even though the only beautiful moments of the last century were
disparagingly called âcivil wars,â they will no doubt still denounce in
us âthe conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the revolution by a
civil warâ (Marx, The Civil War in France).[47] We do not believe in the
revolution, we believe a bit more in âmolecular revolutions,â and
wholeheartedly believe in the differentiated ways of taking up civil
war. The professional revolutionariesâwhose repeated disasters have
hardly discouraged themâ will first of all smear us as dilettantes and
as traitors to the Cause. They will want us to think that Empire is the
enemy. We will answer Their Stupidity by pointing out that Empire is not
the enemy, it is the hostis. It is not a matter of defeating Empire, it
has to be annihilated; and if need be we can do without their Party,
following the advice of Clausewitz on the subject of popular war: âA
general uprising, as we see it, should be nebulous and elusive; its
resistance should never materialize as a concrete body, otherwise the
enemy can direct sufficient force at its core, crush it, and take many
prisoners. When that happens, the people will lose heart and, believing
that the issue has been decided and further efforts would be useless,
drop their weapons. On the other hand, there must be some concentration
at certain points: the fog must thicken and form a dark and menacing
cloud out of which a bolt of lightning may strike at any time. These
points for concentration will, as we have said, be mainly on the flanks
of the enemyâs theater of operations. [...] They are not supposed to
pulverize the core but to nibble at the shell and around the edgesâ (On
War).[48]
The preceding phrases will usher in a new era that will be shadowed, in
ever more tangible ways, by the threat of a sudden unleashing of
reality. At some point, the âInvisible Committeeâ was the name given to
the ethic of civil war expressed in these pages. It refers to a specific
faction of the Imaginary Party, its revolutionary-experimental wing. We
hope that with these lines we can avoid some of the cruder inanities
that might be formulated about the nature of our activities and about
the era just now dawning. Canât we already hear this predictable chatter
in the opinion held of the Muromachi period at the end of the Tokugawa
shogunate, described so well by one of our enemies: âThis era of civil
wars, precisely because of its turmoil and the swelling of its out-sized
ambitions, turned out to be the freest ever known in Japan. All sorts of
shady figures let themselves get caught up in it. And this is why so
many have stressed the fact that it was simply the most violent of
erasâ?
FRENCH FORCES OF THE INTERIOR
PARIS REGION
Order of Requisition
In accord with the Parisian Liberation Committee, a decision has been
made in favor of the requisition of one tenth of the official stocks of
gasoline and of all hidden reserves.
Moreover, all stocks of sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate will be
made available to the heads of the French Forces of the Interior at
every level that is to carry out the requisition with the aid of every
movement, force, and representative of the resistance.
The following is for the purpose of making anti-tank, anti-armored car,
etc. incindiary bottles.
Composition of an incindiary bottle:
Combine ingredients until completely mixed.
Enclose the bottle in a paper cone that is strongly glued together and
sprinkled generously with chlorate on the interior.
When the bottle breaks upon its target, the acid and the chlorate will
combine to ignite the mixture and set the targeted vehicle on fire.
August 21, 1944
Le COLONEL
Regional Head of the F.F.L. Signed: ROL
</quote>
[1] The French indefinite pronoun ON is translated several ways
depending on context: âit,â âwe,â âtheyâ and, at times, âone.â The word
appears frequently here in all capitals, indicating a special emphasis.
We have on occasion decided to translate ON as âTHEY.â In doing so, we
echo the conventions of certain French translators of Heideggerâs Being
and Time, who render Das Man by âlâOn.â Heideggerâs English translators
propose âthe âThey.ââ But this solution is inadequate, and at times we
have simply used âONE,â in the sense of âsomeone.â
[2] Modeled in part after Leopold Bloom from James Joyceâs Ulysses,
âBloomâ is a conceptual persona who figures prominently in the work of
Tiqqun. See in particular Tiqqun, Théorie du Bloom (Paris: La Fabrique,
2004), from which we extract a provisional description: âLast man, man
on the street, man of the crowds, man of the masses, mass-man, this is
how THEY have represented Bloom to us: as the sad product of the time of
multitudes, as the catastrophic son of the industrial era and the end of
enchantments. But in these designations we also feel a shudder, THEY
tremble before the infinite mystery of the ordinary man. Everyone senses
that the theater of his qualities hides pure potentiality: a pure power
we are supposed to know nothing aboutâ (16â17).
[3] To be polarisé can mean to be obsessed with something or someone;
more generally, it refers to the convergence of a field of energy or
forces around a single point. When in English one speaks of a
âpolarizingâ figure or event, it indicates the production of
irreconcilable differences between groups or parties. Here, the term
evokes a process in which a body is affected by a form-of-life in such a
way as to take on a charge that orients it in a specific manner: it is
attracted by certain bodies, repulsed by others.
[4] Ămile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo- europĂ©ennes,
tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 87, 92â94.
[5] Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 328 [AK 8:357].
[6] Sebastian Roche, La societĂ© dâhospitalitĂ© (Paris: Sew, 2000).
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128.
[8] âWhose realm, his religionââa Latin expression meaning whoever is
sovereign dictates the religion of the land.
[9] PublicitĂ© is connected to the German Ăffentlichkeit and means
âpublic sphereâ or âpublic opinion.â The German root offen- suggests
openness, clarity, transparency and manifestness. Yet instead of
translating publicitĂ© as âpublic sphere,â which carries specific
connotations in political theory, we use âpublicity,â following the
convention established by Kantâs translators. Note however that
âpublicityâ does not just mean advertising in a narrow sense, but rather
the whole sphere of âpublicnessâ
[10] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 112.
[11] See âOn the Economy as Black Magicâ Tiqqun 1 (1999).
[12] Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), 375.
[13] Hobbes, Leviathan, 219.
[14] The quotation is probably a reference to one of the two foll owing
passages: âthe simple compactness of their individuality has been
shattered into a multitude of separate atoms,â in G.WF. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 289; or, âas a simple undifferent iated mass or as a crowd
split up into atomic units,â in G.WF. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy
of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 343.
[15] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume 1,
trans. Alan Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Pââ, 1998), 243, 242,
197, 198, 98.
[16] The reference is to lines 24â28 of Hobbesâ verse autobiography: âMy
native place Iâm not ashamed to own; I Thâill times, and ills born with
me, I bemoan. / For fame had rumourâd that a fleet at sea, / Would cause
our nations catastrophe. / And hereupon it was my mother dear / Did
bring forth twins at once, both me and fearâ (Hobbes, Leviathan, Irv).
[17] Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Human
Nature and de Corpore Politico with Three Lives (Oxford: Oxford
UniversityPress, 1999), 21, 59.
[18] Hobbes, Leviathan, 76, 75.
[19] Ibid., 77.
[20] The phrase refers to the Rousseau text of the same name, âQue
lâĂ©tat de guerre naĂźt de lâĂ©tat social,â in Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Oeuvres complĂštes, vol. III (Paris: Galdlimar, 1964), 601â612. The
English translation is available in variant form as âThe State ofWar,â
Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. III, trans. Christopher Kelly and
Judith Bush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 61â73.
[21] Hobbes, Leviathan. 233.
[22] Ibid., 77.
[23] For these two essays see Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence,
trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), 139â200.
[24] Ibid., 166â167.
[25] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 262â263.
[26] âTel est mon bon plaisir,â a reference to âcar tel est notre bon
plaisir,â the expression instituted by Francis I and used by monarchs
when signing law.
[27] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College
de France, 19781979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 200B), 46.
[28] Ibid., 67.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Michel Foucault, âThe Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of
Anti-medicine?â trans. Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., et al., Foucault Studies
1 (December 2004): 5â19, 6.
[31] Hobbes, Leviathan, 109.
[32] Karl Marx, Critique of Hegelâs âPhilosophy of Rightâ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 31, 32, emphasis Tiqqun.
[33] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 46.
[34] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vrntage, 1977), 193.
[35] âFaute blanche.â This phrase can evoke âcarte blancheâ or âblank
check.â In these cases, the term âblancheâ refers to something
unspecified, a quantity of money or an offense, crime or âfault.â
[36] Antonio Negri, âLâEmpire,â stade suprĂȘme de lâimpĂ©rialisme,â Le
Monde Diplomatique (January, 2001): 3.
[37] Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 250.
[38] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), xii, xi, 3.
[39] Han Fei Tzu, Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Vol. II, trans. W. K.
Liao (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1959), 229, 324. Some pas sages have
been modified in accordance with the French translation Tiqqun uses.
[40] Han Fei Tzu, Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Vol. I, trans. W. K.
Liao (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1959), 58.
[41] Ibid., 262.
[42] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Knopf, 1994),
53.
[43] Han Fei Tzu, Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Vol. I, 32â33, 34.
[44] Ibid., 52â53, 54, 61.
[45] Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975), 78.
[46] Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 423,
emphasis removed.
[47] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr,
1998), 117.
[48] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Parer
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 482, 480â481.