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Title: Theses on the Terrible Community Author: Tiqqun Date: 2001 Language: en Topics: alienation, activism, community, community organizing, pessimism, nihilism, insurrectionary Source: Retrieved on 02/26/2016 from http://terriblecommunity.jottit.com/
Everyone knows the terrible communities, whether because theyâve spent
some time in them or because theyâre still there. Or simply because
theyâre still stronger than the others, and so some of us have still
partly remained in them â while at the same time being outside of them.
The family, the school, work, prison â these are the classical faces of
this contemporary form of hell, but they are the least interesting
because they belong to a bygone depiction of commodity evolution, and
are at present merely surviving on. There are some terrible communities,
however, that fight against the existing state of things, and that are
simultaneously quite attractive and much better than âthis world.â And
at the same time their way of approximating truth â and thus joy â
distances them more than anything else from freedom.
The question that arises for us, in a final manner, is more of an
ethical than a political nature, because the classical forms of politics
are at the low water-mark, and their categories are leaving us, like the
habits of childhood. The question is whether we prefer the possibility
of unknown dangers to the certainty of the present misery. That is,
whether we want to go on living and talking in accord (in a dissident
manner, of course, but always in accord) with what has been done up to
now â and thus with the terrible communities â or whether we want to
really put to the test that little part of our desires that culture has
still not managed to infest with its cumbersome quagmire and try to
start out on a different path â in the name of a totally new kind of
happiness.
This text was born as a contribution to that new journey.
Or, the history of a story
âThereâs something to having had a poor and short childhood, something
to that lost happiness that one never does find again; but thereâs also
something to todayâs active life, to its little, incomprehensible, yet
always present vivaciousness, which one would never be able to kill.â
F. Kafka
âLay roses in the abyss and say: âhere is my thanks to the monster that
didnât manage to swallow me.ââ
F. Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments
âWhatever has for a time been understood has also for a time been
forgotten. To where no one perceives anymore that history has no eras.
In fact, nothing happens. There are no more events. Thereâs only news.
Look at the characters that sit at the summits of empires. And turn
around Spinozaâs words. Thereâs nothing to understand. Only to laugh and
to cry.â
(Mario Tronti, Politics at Twilight)
The time of heroes is over. The epic space of pronouncements that we
love to say and hear, which speak to us of what we could be but are not,
has disappeared.
The irreparable is now our being-thus, our being-nobody. Our
Bloom-being.
And it is from the irreparable that we must depart, now that the most
ferocious nihilism holds sway even in the ranks of the rulers.
We must depart, because âNobodyâ is Ulyssesâ other name, and because no
one should care to go back to Ithaca or to be shipwrecked.
It is no longer time to dream of what we will be, what we will make, now
that we can be everything, now that we can do everything, now that all
our power is granted us, with the certainty that our forgetting of joy
will prevent us from making any use of it.
This is where we must get free or let ourselves die. Humanity is indeed
something to be transcended, but to do so we must first listen to what
is most exposed and most rare about humanity, so that its remains are
not lost in passing. Bloom, that pathetic residue of a world that never
ceases to betray and exile him, demands to go out armed; Bloom demands
exodus.
But most often he who departs never rediscovers his own, and his exodus
becomes exile once again.
All voices come out from the depths of this exile, and in this exile all
voices are lost. The Other does not welcome us, it sends us back to the
Other inside of us. We abandon this world in ruins with no regrets and
no pain, pressed on by a vague feeling of urgency. We abandon it like
rats abandoning a ship, but without necessarily knowing whether itâs
moored to the pier. Nothing ânobleâ about this flight, nothing grand
that can bond us to one another. In the end, we are alone with
ourselves, because we havenât made the decision to fight but merely to
preserve ourselves. And thatâs still not an action; it is but a
reaction.
A crowd of people fleeing is a crowd of solitary people.
Not to find oneself is impossible; fates have their clinamen. Even at
the threshold of death, even in absence from ourselves, others never
cease to come up against us on the liminal terrain of flight.
We and the others: we separate ourselves out of disgust, but we do not
manage to reunite ourselves by choice. And still, we find ourselves
united. United and outside of love, uncovered and with no mutual
protection. We were such before our flight, and such have we always
been.
We donât just want to escape, even if we have indeed left this world
because it appeared so intolerable to us. No cowardice here: we have
gone out armed. What we wanted was to not fight against someone anymore,
but to fight with someone. And now that we are no longer alone, we will
quiet this voice from inside us; we will become companions to someone,
and we will no longer be the undesirables.
We will have to force ourselves, we will have to hold our tongues,
because though no one has wanted us up to now, things have now changed.
No longer to ask questions, but to learn silence, to learn to learn.
Because freedom is a kind of discipline.
Speech advances, prudently; it fills in the spaces between singular
solitudes, it swells human aggregates into groups, pushes them together
against the wind; effort reunites them. Itâs almost an exodus. Almost.
But no pact holds them together, except the spontaneity of smiles,
inevitable cruelty, the accidents of passion.
This passage, similar to that of migrating birds, to the murmur of
wandering pains, little by little gives form to the terrible
communities.
On why schizophrenia is more than just an illness
And how, while dreaming of ecstasy, we end up self-policing.
We are told: anyway, does schizophrenia have a mother and father? We
regret to have to say no, it does not have any as such. It only has a
desert, and the tribes that live there, a full body and multiplicities
that cling to it.â
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The terrible community is the only form of community compatible with
this world, with Bloom. All the other communities are imaginary, not
truly impossible, but possible only in moments, and in any case never in
the fullness of their actualization. They emerge in struggles, and so
they are heterotopias, opacity zones free of any cartography,
perpetually in a state of construction and perpetually moving towards
disappearance.
The terrible community is not only possible, it is already real, and is
always already there in acts. It is the community of those that stay
behind. It is never there potentially, it has no future or becoming, nor
any ends truly outside of itself nor any desire to become other than
what it is, only to persist. It is the community of betrayal, because it
goes against its own becoming, it betrays itself without transforming
itself or transforming the world around it.
The terrible community is the community of Blooms, because within it all
desubjectivation is unwelcome. Anyway, to enter it, it is first
necessary to put oneself in parentheses.
The terrible community does not ek-sist, except in the dissent that at
certain moments passes through it. The rest of the time the terrible
community is, eternally.
In spite of this, the terrible community is the only community one can
find, since the world as the physical place of what is common and of
sharing has disappeared, and thereâs nothing left of it but an imperial
sectoral distribution of police to travel across. Even the lie itself of
âmankindâ no longer finds any more liars to affirm it.
The non-men, the no longer men, the Blooms, no longer manage to think,
as they once could, since thought was a movement within time, and the
consistency of the latter has now changed. Moreover, the Blooms have
renounced dreaming; they live in organized dystopias, placeless places,
the dimensionless interstices of a commodity utopia. They are flat and
one-dimensional since, unable to recognize themselves anywhere, neither
in themselves or in others, they canât recognize either their past or
their future. Day after day, their resignation effaces the present. And
these no-longer-men populate the crisis of presence.
The time of the terrible community is spiraloid and of a muddy
consistency. It is an impenetrable time where the planned-form and the
habit-form weigh on lives, leaving them paper-thin. One might define it
as the time of naĂŻve freedom where everyone does what they want, since
the times wouldnât permit anyone to want anything aside from whatâs
already there.
One might say that it is the time of clinical depression, or rather, the
time of exile and prison. It is an endless wait, a uniform expanse of
disordered discontinuities.
The concept of order has been abolished in the terrible community in
preference for the effectiveness of force relations, and the concept of
form to the profit of the practice of formalization, which, having now
grip on the content that itâs applied to, is eternally reversible.
Around false rituals, false timeframes (demonstrations, vacations,
âmission accomplisheds,â various assemblies, meetings, more or less
festive), the community coagulates and formalizes itself without ever
taking form. Because form, being sensitive and corruptible, exposes
becoming.
Within the terrible community, informality is the most appropriate
medium for the disavowed construction of pitiless hierarchies.
Reversibility is the sign under which all events that take place within
the terrible community happen.
But it is this reversibility itself, with its solemn procession of fears
and dissatisfactions, which is really irreversible.
The time of infinite reversibility is an illegible time, non-human. It
is the time of things, of the moon, of animals, of the tides; not of
men, and even less of the no-longer-men, since the latter no longer know
how to think about themselves, while the former still manage.
The time of reversibility is but the time of what cannot know itself.
Why donât men abandon the terrible community, one might ask? An answer
could be that itâs because the no-longer-a-world world is still more
uninhabitable than it is, but such an answer would mean falling into the
trap of appearances, into superficial truths, since the world is woven
of the same agitated non-existence that the terrible community is; there
is among them a hidden continuity which, for the inhabitants of the
world as well as for those of the terrible community, remains
indecipherable.
What must be remarked, instead, is that the world draws its minimal
existence, which allows us to decipher the substantial non-existence in
it, from the negative existence of the terrible community (as marginal
as it may be), and not the contrary, as one might believe.
The negative existence of the terrible community is in the last resort a
counter-revolutionary existence, since in the face of the merely
residual subsistence of the world, the former is content to claim a
greater fullness.
The terrible community is terrible because itâs self-limiting while at
the same time it rests in no form; this is because it doesnât know
ecstasy. It reasons with the same moral categories that the
no-longer-a-world world does; at least it has the same reasons for doing
so. It knows about rights and injustices, but it always parses them on
the basis of the lacking coherence of the world it opposes. It
criticizes the violation of a right, brings it out into the light of
day, brings attention to it. But who was it that established (and
violated) that right? It was the world, to which the terrible community
refuses to belong. And to whom is its discourse addressed? To the
attention of the world that it denies. What does the terrible community
want, then? The improvement of the existing state of things. And what
does the world desire? The same thing.
Democracy is the cell culture medium of all terrible communities. The
no-longer-a-world world is the world where the primordial and founding
dispute at the root of politics is erased to the benefit of a management
vision of life and the living: biopolitics. In this sense, the terrible
community is a biopolitical community, since its mass and quasi-military
unanimity is also based on the repression of the foundational dispute at
the root of politics, the dispute between forms-of-life. The terrible
community cannot permit the existence of a bios, an unconforming life
lived freely, within it; it can only permit survival within its ranks.
Just as well, the hidden continuity between the biopolitical tissue of
democracy and the terrible communities has to do with the fact that
argument is abolished therein by the imposition of an unanimity which is
at the same time unequally shared and violently enclosed within a
collectivity which is supposed to make freedom possible. It happens,
then, paradoxically, that the ranks of biopolitical democracy are more
comfortable than those of the terrible community; the space of play, the
freedom of subjects, and the constraints imposed by the political-form
find themselves to be inversely proportional in a biopolitical
regime/system of truth.
The more a regime of biopolitical truth claims to be open to freedom,
the more it will be policelike, and furthermore, by delegating to the
police the task of repressing insubordinations, it will leave its
subjects in a state of relative unconsciousness and quasi-infancy. On
the other hand, in a regime of biopolitical truth, where PEOPLE claim to
realize freedom while never discussing its form, PEOPLE will demand that
those who participate in it will introject the police into their bios,
on the powerful pretext that they have no choice.
Choosing the individual pseudo-freedom granted by biopolitical
democracies â whether out of necessity, out of play, or out of a thirst
for enjoyment â is equivalent, for someone whoâs part of a terrible
community, to a real ethical degradation, since the freedom of
biopolitical democracies is never anything more than the freedom to buy
and be sold.
In the same way, from the perspective of the biopolitical democracies
unified to form the Empire, those who take sides with the terrible
communities move out of the political system of commodity exchange
(management) to a military political system (repression). By shaking the
specter of police violence, biopolitical democracies are able to
militarize the terrible communities, and make the discipline within them
even harder than it is anywhere else; this achieves the production of a
spiral growth which is supposed to make the commodity preferable to the
struggle; to make the freedom to circulate, so warmly recommended by the
police and commodity propaganda â âmove on, nothing to see here!â â to
the freedom to see something else, a riot for instance.
For those who accept bartering off the highest freedom, the freedom to
struggle, for the most reified freedom, the freedom to purchase,
political democracies have, for the past twenty years, organized very
comfortable places for biopolitical entrepreneurs, who are necessarily
quite hip/âplugged inâ â what would they be without their networks,
after all? Until fight clubs proliferate universally, start-ups,
advertising firms, hip bars, and cop cars will never stop spreading
everywhere in exponential growth. And the terrible communities shall be
the model for this new direction of commodity evolution.
Terrible communities and biopolitical democracies can co-exist in a
vampire-like relationship because the two are lived either like
no-longer-a-world-worlds or like worlds with no outside. Their
being-without-an-outside is not some terrorist conviction shaken at the
subjects that take part in biopolitical democracy or in the terrible
community to guarantee their loyalty, but rather, it is a reality to the
extent that these are two human formations that intersect one another
almost entirely.
There is no conscious participation in biopolitical democracy without
unconscious participation in a terrible community, and vice-versa.
Because the terrible community is not just the community of social or
political protest, the militant community, but also tends to be
everything that seeks to exist as a community within biopolitical
democracy (the company, the family, the association, the group of
friends, the adolescent gang, etc.). All such communities tend to be
terrible communities to the extent that all sharing without purpose, all
endless sharing (in both senses of âwithout end/to no endâ) is an
effective threat to biopolitical democracy, which is based on such total
separation that its subjects are not even individuals anymore, but
simply dividuals, split between participating in two necessary, yet
contradictory things; their terrible community and biopolitical
democracy. And one or the other of those must inevitably be participated
in clandestinely, basely, incoherently.
The civil war, which is expelled from all publicity/advertising, has
taken refuge inside of dividuals. The front lines, which no longer pass
through the fine milieu of society, now pass through the fine milieu of
Blooms. Capitalism demands schizophrenia.
The imaginary party is the form that this schizophrenia takes when it
goes on the offensive. Youâre in the Imaginary Party, not when youâre
neither in a terrible community nor in biopolitical democracy, but when
you act to destroy both of them.
What disintegrates disintegrates, but canât be destroyed. However, life
among the ruins is not only possible but effectively present. The
superior intelligence of the world is in the terrible community. The
health of the world as a world, as persisting in its state of relative
decomposition, thus resides in the enemy that has sworn to destroy it.
But how can it destroy this adversary if not at the price of its own
disappearance as an adversary? It could constitute itself positively, we
are told; give itself a foundation, make itself some laws of its own.
But the terrible community has no autonomous life; nowhere does it find
access to becoming. It is simply the final ruse of a world in
decomposition to survive just a little bit longer.
on why we often desire what makes us miserable (to where we often come
to regret the good old days of arranged marriages)
and on why women donât say what they think.
We also talk about the insufficiency of good intentions.
Warning! This chapter is dangerous reading, since it attacks everybody.
Jocasta: What is exile? What does the exiled person suffer from?
Polynices: From the worst of all evils: not having the right to
parrhesia.
Jocasta: It is the condition of slaves, not being able to say what one
thinks.
Polynices: And to have to bow to the idiocy of those in chargeâŠ
Jocasta: Yes, thatâs it: act the fool among the fools.
Polynices: Out of interest, we force our temperament.
Euripides, The Phoenicians
Parrhesia is the dangerous, emotional (affective) use of discourse, the
act of truth which questions power relations as they are hic et nunc in
friendships, politics, and in love. The parrhesiaste is not he who tells
the most painful truth so as to break the bonds that unite the others,
who anchor themselves in the refusal to accept that truth as
unavoidable. He who makes use of parrhesia, before all else, puts
himself in danger through a gesture wherein he exposes himself within
the chainlinks of relationships. Parrhesia is the act of truth which
escapes abstract/cursory perspectives.
Where parrhesia is not possible, beings are in exiled, and they act like
slaves. Even if for its inhabitants the terrible community is like a
cathedral in the desert, within it one endures the most bitter exile.
Because, as an omnilateral war machine which must keep a vital
equilibrium of a homeostatic nature with what is external to it, the
terrible community cannot tolerate the circulation of any discourse
dangerous to it within its ranks. In order to perpetuate itself, the
terrible community needs to relegate danger to the exterior: itâs the
Outsiders, the Competition, the Enemy, the cops. And so the terrible
community applies the strictest discourse-policing within itself, and
becomes its own censorship.
Where the mute speech of repression makes its voice heard, no other
speech has the right to a place, to such an extent that it is cut off
from immediate effectiveness. The terrible community is a response to
the aphasia that all biopolitical regimes impose, but it is an
insufficient response, since it perpetuates itself by internal
censorship, and is thus still symbolically salaried by/approving of the
symbolic patriarchal order. It is thus often just another kind of
police, another place where one can remain emotionally illiterate or in
a state of infantile minority, on the pretext of external threats.
Because children are not so much those that do not speak as those that
are excluded from the games of truth.
The no-longer-a-world world, this squared off / gridded world, lives in
a pathetic self-celebration that PEOPLE still call âSpectacle.â The
Spectacle chews away at all doubts, and reduces consciousness to an
anesthetic passivity. What biopolitical democracy demands of
consciousness is that it assist in destruction, not as effective
destruction, but as spectacle. Whereas the terrible community demands to
assist in destruction as destruction, and thus to make it alternate with
short periods of collective reconstruction so as to make it last.
There is no discourse of truth, there are only devices of truth. The
Spectacle is the device of truth that manages to make all other devices
of truth operate to its benefit. Spectacle and biopolitical democracy
converge in the acceptance of any system of false discourse proffered by
any type of subject at all, so long as it allows the continuation of the
armed peace in force. The proliferation of insignificance aims to
totally blanket the whole of what exists.
The terrible community knows the world, but doesnât know itself. Thatâs
because in its affirmative aspect it is, of a stagnant, and not a
reflective, nature. On the other hand, in its negative aspect, it
exists, insofar as it denies the world and thus denies itself, since
itâs made in the latterâs image. There is no consciousness before
existence, and no self-consciousness before activity, but there is above
all no consciousness in the activity of unconscious self-destruction.
From the moment that the terrible community perpetuates itself by acting
under the hostile gaze of others, by introjecting/unconsciously adopting
that gaze and setting itself up as an object, and not the subject, of
that hostility, it can only love and hate out of reaction.
The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades.
The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate
together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one
another, they do not know one another.
The terrible community is traversed by all kinds of complicities â and
how could it survive otherwise? â but, unlike the case of the ancestors
it claims to descend from, in no case do these complicities determine
its form. Its form is, rather, one of SUSPICION. The members of the
terrible community are suspicious of one another because they donât know
anything about themselves or about each other, and because no one among
them knows the community heâs part of; itâs a community with no possible
narrative, and thus an impenetrable community, and one that can only be
experienced in immediacy; but it is an inorganic immediacy that reveals
nothing. The displays that take place in it are mundane and not
political: in everything, even the heroic solitude of the
window-smashing rioter, what one experiences there is bodies in
movement, rather than any kind of coherence between said bodies and
their discourse. Thatâs why clandestinity, balaclavas, the games of
nit-picking, simultaneously fascinate and fool people: the provocateur
cop is a window-smashing rioter tooâŠ
âWeâre dealing with an apparatus of total and circulating suspicion,
because there are no absolute points in it, no threshold to it. The
perfection of surveillance is a sum of malice, of ill wills
[malveillances].â
(Foucault on the Panopticon)
Nevertheless, since there are complicities in it, the members of the
terrible community assume that thereâs a plan/project to it as well, but
that itâs being kept secret from them. Thatâs where the suspicion comes
from. The mistrust, the suspicion that the members of the terrible
community have towards one another is far bigger than that which they
have towards the rest of the worldâs citizens: the latter in effect
never hide that they have a lot to hide; they know what image theyâre
supposed to have and give to the world that theyâre part of.
If in spite of its internal panopticism the terrible community doesnât
know itself, thatâs only because it is unknowable, and to that extent it
is as dangerous for the world as it is for itself. It is the community
of anxiety, but it is also the first victim of that anxiety.
The terrible community is a sum of solitudes that watch over each other
without protecting each other.
Love between members of the terrible community is an inexhaustible
tension, which feeds off what the other hides and does not reveal: its
banality. The very invisibility of the terrible community to itself has
permitted it to love itself blindly.
The public, external image of the terrible community is what least
interests the community itself, since it knows that itâs deliberately
faked. Equally pathetic is its image of itself, the specific publicity
that the community deploys within it, but that no oneâs duped by.
Because what holds the terrible community together is precisely that
which is found underneath its publicity, which it lets its members read
between the lines and hardly lets anyone outside understand. It is
informed by the banality of its private existence, by the emptiness of
its secret and the secret of its emptiness; also, in order to perpetuate
itself, it produces and secretes the public community.
The banality of the private life of the terrible communities hides
itself away, because that banality is the banality of evil.
The terrible community doesnât rest upon itself, but in the desire that
what is external to it has towards it, and which inevitably takes the
form of misunderstandings.
The terrible community, like all human formations in advanced capitalist
society, operates on a sado-masochist economy of pleasure. The terrible
community, unlike everything that is not it, does not admit to its
fundamental masochism, and the desires it participates in organize
themselves on the basis of this misunderstanding.
What is âferalâ in effect whips up a certain desire, but that desire is
a desire for domestication, and thus for annihilation, in the same way
as an ordinary creature, comfortably seated within its everyday life, is
erotic only to the extent that one would like to make some atrocious
stain or mark upon it. The fact that this emotive metabolism remains
hidden is an inexhaustible source of suffering for the members of the
terrible community, who become incapable of evaluating the consequences
of their emotional gestures (consequences that systematically contradict
their expectations). The members of the terrible communities thus
progressively unlearn how to love.
Within the terrible community, emotional education is based on
systematic humiliation, and the pulverization of its membersâ
self-esteem. No one must be able to believe themselves to be a carrier
of that kind of affectivity which would have the right to a place inside
the community. The hegemonic type of affectivity inside the terrible
community corresponds, paradoxically, to what is seen outside of it as
the most backwards form. The tribe, the village, the clan, the gang, the
army, the family; these are the human formations universally
acknowledged as being the most cruel and the least gratifying, and yet
in spite of all they persist within the terrible communities. And in
them, women must take on a kind of virility that even males disclaim now
in biopolitical democracies, all the while seeing themselves as women
whose femininity has lost out to the masculine fantasy dominant at the
very heart of the terrible community: the fantasy of plastic âsexyâ
woman (in the image of the Young-Girl, that carnal envelope) ready for
use and consumption by genital sexuality.
In the terrible communities, women, because they cannot actually become
men, must become like men, while remaining furiously heterosexual and
prisoners of the most worn-out stereotypes. If nobody has the right, in
the terrible community, to say the truth about human relations, thatâs
doubly true for women: any woman that undertakes parrhesia within the
terrible community will be immediately classed as just some hysteric.
Within all terrible communities, we experience a surprising silence on
the part of women. The terrible communityâs pathophobia in effect often
manifests itself as the indirect repression of any female speech, which
is foreign and disturbing because it is the speech of flesh. Itâs not
that women are made to shut up; itâs simply that the limit-space
bordering madness where their words of truth could come out gets
discretely erased a little more every day.
âItâs not that women have a hard time carrying out actions; they were
indeed more courageous, more capable, more prepared and had more
conviction than the men did. They were just given less autonomy on the
level of initiatives: it was as if there was an instinctive difference
that came out in the preparation and collective discussion of the work
to be done, and their voices counted less.
âThe problem was in the group: it was the anodyne behavior, the unsaid,
or even just someone blurting out âshut up!â in the middle of a
discussion⊠This shitty kind of discrimination wasnât the result of any
a priori decision, it was rather something that had been brought in from
outside, something partly unconscious, something that came about without
anyone really wanting it. Something that couldnât be resolved by any
ideological declaration or rational choice.â
I. Faré, F. Spirito, Mara and the Others.
Because the terrible community is based on surreptitious relationships,
it ends up inevitably sinking into the most residual and âprimitiveâ
kinds of relations. Women in the terrible community get assigned to the
management of concrete things, to everyday matters, and men to violence
and leadership. In this oppressive, devastating reproduction of obsolete
sexual clichés, the only possible relations between men and women are
relations of seduction. But since generalized seduction would make the
terrible community explode, it is strictly confined to the heterosexual
and monogamous couple-form, which dominates in it.
âItâs true that gangs are undermined by highly differentiated forces
which set up internal centers of the conjugal and familial type within
them, or of the governmental type, which allow them to enter into a
completely different kind of sociability, replacing the herd affect by
family emotions or State intelligibility. The center, or internal black
hole, takes on the primary role. It is there that evolutionism can
progress, in this adventure that thus comes about in human groupings
when they reconstitute a group familism, or even authoritarianism, a
kind of herd fascism.â
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Friendships as well, within the terrible community, re-enter the
stylized, underdeveloped imaginary world proper to all monogamous
heterosexual society. Because interpersonal relations must never be
discussed and are supposed to âgo without saying,â the question of
man-woman relationships doesnât get approached, and is systematically
resolved âlike in the olden days,â that is, in a proto-bourgeois and
proletarian-barbarian manner. Friendships thus remain rigorously
monosexual, with the men and women mingling in an irreducible
foreignness that allows them, once the right moment comes, to eventually
comprise⊠a couple.
Familism does not in any way imply the existence of real families; on
the contrary, its mass diffusion arises at the very moment that the
family as closed entity bursts, contaminating with its fallout the whole
sphere of relations which up to then escaped it. âFamilism,â says
Guattari, âconsists in magically denying the social reality, avoiding
all connection with real flows.â (The Molecular Revolution). When the
terrible community, to reassure us, tells us that itâs basically just
âone big family,â all the arbitrariness, the confinement, morbidity and
moralism that have always gone hand in hand with the family institution
over the course of its historical existence are brought back into play;
except that now, on the pretext of saving us, all of that is imposed on
us less the institution; that is, without our being able to denounce it.
Humanityâs share of humiliation and degradation consists in the
obligation they are made to assume to constantly exhibit their
capacities by some form or other of mannish/viriloid performance. The
countertype has no place in the emotional economy of the terrible
community, where in the final analysis only stereotypes prevail; only
the Leader, in fact, is objectively desirable. All other positions are
untenable without the implicit avowal of a fundamental incapacity to
exist in a singular sense; but the deviations from the stereotype are
ceaselessly fed by the pitiless emotional metabolism of the terrible
community. When the countertype, for instance, seeks to be freed from
itself, it will be violently pushed back in the solitary confinement
chamber of its âinsufficiency.â The scapegoat-countertype operates as a
kind of circus mirror deforming everyone, which reassures them while
disturbing them.
Implicitly, one remains in the terrible community because of oneâs not
being either the Leader or the countertype, whereas these latter two
remain in it because they donât have any choice.
Each terrible community has its Leader, and vice-versa.
The Leader doesnât need to affirm himself; he can even play the role of
the countertype or joke ironically about virility. His charisma doesnât
need to be of the competitive/high-performance type, because itâs
objectively attested to by the terrible communityâs biometric desire
parameters, and by the effective submission of other men and women. The
terrible community is a community of cuckolds.
The fundamental sentiment that bonds the terrible community to its
Leader isnât one of submission, but of availability, that is, a
sophisticated variant of obedience. The time of the terrible communityâs
members must permanently be filtered through the screen of availability:
sexual availability towards the Leader, physical availability for the
greatest variety of tasks, emotional availability to undergo whatever
kind of injury from the inevitable distraction of others. In the
terrible community, availability is the artistic introjection of
discipline.
Both the desire of the Leader and the desire to be a Leader know
themselves to be damned to inevitable defeat. Because the Leaderâs woman
(no one fails to figure out) is the only one that isnât fooled by his
seductive masquerading, to the extent that she sees the nothingness
behind it every day: the private life of the rulers is always the most
miserable of anyoneâs. In fact, within the terrible community the Leader
is desirable like a sophisticated and haughty woman is in biopolitical
democracy. The sexual desire that men and women feel towards the Leader,
which wraps him in so intense an aura that it brings all gazes to
spontaneously turn towards him, is none other than a desire for
humiliation. One wants to strip the Leader naked, to see the Leader,
without his dignity, really satisfy the solemn procession of the desires
he excites â and prevail. Everyone hates the Leader, like men have hated
women for millennia. At root, everyone wants to tame the Leader, because
everyone hates the loyalty given him.
EVERYONE HATES HIS OWN LOVE FOR THE LEADER.
The personal, in the terrible community, isnât political.
The Leader is most often a man, since he acts in the name of the Father.
He who sacrifices himself acts in the name of the father. The Leader is,
in effect, he who perpetuates the sacrificial form of the terrible
community with his own sacrifice, and weighs upon others with his
demands that they too make sacrifices. But since the Leader is not a
Tyrant â while all the same being in every respect highly tyrannical â
he does not openly tell others what to do; the Leader does not impose
his will, he lets it impose itself by secretly guiding the desire of
others, which in the final analysis is always simply the desire to
please him. To the question, âwhat should I do?â the Leader will respond
âWhatever you want,â since he knows that his existence within the
terrible community in fact prevents others from wanting anything but
what he wants.
He who acts in the name of the Father cannot be questioned. Where force
sets itself up as an argument, discourse withdraws into small talk and
idle chatter, or into making excuses. As long as there is a Leader â and
his terrible community â there will be no parrhesia, and men, women, and
the Leader himself will remain in exile. The Leaderâs authority cannot
enter into the discussion as long as the facts prove that people love
him while at the same time detesting their own love for him. It may
happen that the Leader will put himself in question, and thatâs when
another will take his place, or when the terrible community, now left
headless, dies of a heart-rending hemorrhage.
The Leader really is the best of his group. He doesnât usurp anyoneâs
place, and everyone knows it. He doesnât have to fight to win consensus,
since itâs him who sacrifices the most, or is the most sacrificed.
The Leader is never alone, since everyoneâs behind him, but at the same
time he is the pure picture of solitude itself, the most tragic and
duped figure in the terrible community. It is only by virtue of the fact
that he is already at the mercy of the cynicism and cruelty of others
(those who are not in his shoes) that the Leader is at times truly loved
and cherished.
On the reasons for the existence of the hated ones and how todayâs
brothers become tomorrowâs enemies.
On the discreet charm of illegality and its hidden traps.
The terrible community is a post-authoritarian power apparatus. It
doesnât have any bureaucracy or constraint about it in appearances, but
the fact that it produces so much verticality within its informal nature
it needs to take recourse to archaic configurations, the bygone roles
that still survive in the congested crevices of the collective
unconscious. In this sense the family is not so much its organizational
model as it is its direct antecedent in the production of informal
constraint and of the indissoluble cohabitation of hatred and love.
As post-authoritarian formations, the corporations of the ânew economyâ
constitute terrible communities in the fullest sense. And no one should
see any contradiction in the similarity between capitalismâs
avant-gardes and the avant-gardes of its opposition: they are both
prisoners of the same economic principle, the same need for efficiency
and organization, even if they set themselves up on different terrain.
They in fact serve the same modalities of the circulation of power, and
in that sense they are politically quite near one another.
The terrible community, in that sense similar to biopolitical democracy,
is a device that governs the passage from potential to action among
dividuals and groups. Within this device, only the ends and the means to
attain them appear, and the means to no end that surreptitiously preside
over this process never appears because it is none other than ECONOMY.
The roles, rights, possibilities, and impossibilities are distributed
within it on the basis of economic criteria.
As long as the terrible community uses its enemyâs economic performance
practices as an alibi to justify its own, it will never escape a single
one of its impasses.
âStrategy,â that hobbyhorse of terrible communities, in reality only
betrays the incestuous proximity between critique and its object, a
proximity which most often ends up becoming a familiarity â a family
relation even â one so tight that itâs difficult to untangle them.
The aimed-for demands, insofar as they donât involve destroying the
context that gave birth to them, or in other words, the exposures of the
gearworks of power that donât seek to demolish them, end up sooner or
later going down the poetry-less path of management, and thus bring us
back to the roots of all terrible communities.
Informality, in the terrible community, is always ruled by a very rigid
implicit distribution of responsibilities. It is only on the basis of an
explicit modification of responsibilities and their priorities that the
circulation of power can be modified.
The terrible community is the continuation of classical politics by
other means. I call âclassical politicsâ the politics that puts at its
center a closed subject, one that in its right-wing variants is full and
sufficient unto itself, and, in its left-wing variants, a subject that
is in a state of contingent incompleteness due to circumstances to be
transformed so as to regain a kind of monadic sufficiency.
The terrible community, in the end, canât exclude anybody, because it
doesnât have any explicit laws or form. It can only include.
In order to renew itself, it must thus gradually destroy those who are
part of it, on pain of complete stagnation. It lives off sacrifice,
since sacrifice is the condition for belonging to it. That alone, after
all, is the basis for its membersâ ephemeral and reciprocal trust in
each other. If it were otherwise, would it have such a great need for
action? Would it deserve such a dedication to its renewal through such
frenetic agitation?
The less a community feels the sensation of its own existence, the more
it will feel the need to actualize its own simulacrum outside itself, in
activism, in compulsive gathering, and finally in permanent, metastatic
self-accusation. The nearly insatiable collective self-critique that
both the management of the avant-gardes and the groups of informal
neo-militants more and more visibly give themselves over to, shows
clearly enough how decisively weak their feeling that they exist is.
Certain terrible communities of struggle were founded by the survivors
of a shipwreck, a war, or any kind of devastation at all, as long as it
had a certain breadth of impact. The survivorsâ memory is thus not the
memory of the vanquished, but the memory of those that were made to sit
out the fight.
For this reason, the terrible community is born as an exile within an
exile, a memory at the heart of forgetting, an incommunicable tradition.
The survivor is never he who was at the center of the disaster, but he
who managed to keep out of it, who lived on the margins of it. In the
time of the terrible community, the margin has become the center and the
concept of a center has lost all its validity.
The terrible community has no foundation because it has no consciousness
of its beginning and has no fate; it records itself as it goes along,
like something that was always already past, and so it only sees itself
through othersâ eyes, through repetitions, anecdotes: âdo you remember
that time whenâŠâ
10
The terrible community is a present that passes by and does not
transcend itself, and thatâs why it has no tomorrow. It has crossed the
faint line that separates resistance from persistence, the deja-vu of
amnesia.
The terrible community only feels its own existence when it has crossed
over into illegality. And anyway, all sado-masochistic human exchanges
outside of commodity relations are devoted in the end to illegality, as
the violent metaphor for the surreptitious misery of this era. Itâs only
in illegality that the terrible community perceives itself and ek-sists,
negatively of course, as something outside the sphere of legality, as a
creation freeing itself from itself. While never recognizing legality as
something legitimate, the terrible community has nevertheless still
managed to make the negation of it the space of its existence.
The terrible community forms fleeting alliances with the oppressed on a
masochistic basis, even if it means finding itself quickly put back in
the unassumable role of the sadist. It thus accompanies the excluded
down the road of integration, and watches them distance themselves, full
of ingratitude, and become that which it had wanted to defeat.
(on being deprived of secrecy. Remorse â Infamy).
The strength and fragility of the terrible community is the way it
inhabits risk. In effect, it only lives intensely when it finds itself
to be endangered. This danger has to do with the remorse of its members.
This remorse â from the point of view of the hated â is far from being
illegitimate since he who has regrets is he who has had an
âilluminationâ: under the gaze of the inquisitorâs suspicious eye, it
suddenly recognizes itself as a member of the suspected project. It
affirms a truth that it has never really lived out, one that it hadnât
even thought that any such inquisition would require of it.
All repenters are essentially mythomaniacs (just like those who claim to
have seen the virgin Mary); they act out their own schizophrenia for
authority. In so doing, they become individuals, but without having
faced up to their dividuality; they think themselves â or rather theyâd
like to think themselves â to finally be in the right, to be coherent.
They exchange their real past complicity for a non-existent complicity
with the same enemy as always; they take themselves for the enemy. And
this becomes effective as soon as they start to repent/regret things, it
should be said in passing. But the hated ones can only trade out their
unconscious and moderately destructive sado-masochism for another
sado-masochism, which this time is consciously and ethically
disgraceful. They sacrifice the duplicity of the schizophrenic only to
fall into that of the traitor.
âWomen were treated like sex objects, except when they were
participating in actions; then they were treated like men. Only then
were there any kind of equal relations. They often did more than the
men, they really had more courage. âŠAnd thatâs how, for the first time,
the traitor problem arose: because of the groupâs insensibility. âŠHella
and Anne-Katrine said nothing about me; I was the only one in the group
that didnât get busted. I had a different kind of relationship with
them; it was the great love they both had for meâŠâ
Bommi Baumann, How It All Began
Once the repenter has revealed the truth about the terrible community,
he is condemned because the community lives off the ignorance of its
secret, and is protected by its shadow instead of protecting it. The
shameful secrets of the terrible communities end up in the indifferent
mouths of the Lawmen, and the surrounding hypocrisy that had maintained
them pretends not to have known those secrets. The accomplices of
yesterday are scandalized, and enter their future hatedness as an
informer or deserter.
And so, pedophilia, spousal rape, corruption, mafia-style blackmail â
which were all accepted as founding behaviors of the dominant ethos
until just yesterday â are today denounced as criminal behaviors.
The need for justice is a need for punishment. And here we can see the
full flowering out of the common, sado-masochistic roots that rule over
the ethical conformity of terrible communities and their unspoken bond
with the Empire.
(On being deprived of danger: legalization â the betrayal of ideals)
The embrace that holds together the ruins of biopolitical democracies,
the grip of biopower, resides in the possibility of depriving terrible
communities of their freedom to live in risk at any given moment. This
is done with a double move: a simultaneous movement of subtraction and
repression, either: violence, and addition-legitimation, or:
condescension. By these two movements biopower deprives the terrible
community of its space of existence and condemns it to persistence
because it is biopower that delimits the zone that will be reserved for
the terrible communities. By operating in this way it transforms utopia
into atopia, and heteropia into dystopia. Localized and clearly
identified, the terrible community, which does all it can to escape any
mapping, becomes a space like any other.
It is by synchronizing the muddy and informal time of the terrible
community to the temporality outside it that biopower deprives the
terrible community of the space of risk and danger. It is enough for
biopower to simply recognize the terrible community for it to lose the
power to break the well-ordered course of the disaster with the eruption
of its clandestinity. From the moment that the terrible community falls
under the same head as so many other cracks in publicity, it is
immediately located and territorialized within a place
outside-of-legality which is immediately encompassed as something
outside.
Once again it is the invisibility of the terrible community to itself
that puts it at the mercy of a unilateral recognition with which it
cannot interact in any way.
Though the terrible community refuses the principle of representation,
it does not for all that escape it. The terrible communityâs
invisibility to itself makes it infinitely vulnerable to the gaze of
others, since, and this is well-known, the terrible community only
exists in the eyes of others.
One enters the terrible community because anyone who goes looking in the
desert finds nothing else. One traverses the rickety and provisional
human architecture. At first one falls in love. And upon first entering
it one feels that it was built with tears and suffering, and that it
needs still more in order to go on existing, but that doesnât matter
much. The terrible community is above all a space of self-sacrifice, and
thatâs disturbing; it awakens the âreflex of concern.â
But relationships within the terrible community are all worn out;
theyâre not so young anymore (alas!) when we arrive. Like the pebbles in
the bed of a fast-flowing creek, the gazes, gestures, and attention have
already been eroded, consumed. Somethingâs tragically amiss in life
within the terrible community, since indulgence doesnât have any place
in it anymore, and friendship, so often betrayed, is only granted with
an oppressive stinginess.
Whether we like it or not, those who pass through, those who enter in,
pay for the misdeeds of others. And those theyâd like to love are
already quite visibly too damaged to give an ear to their good
intentions.
âIt will pass in timeâŠâ And so the mistrust of others has to be
defeated, and more precisely, one must learn to be mistrustful like the
others in order that the terrible community might yet open up its
emaciated arms. And it is by oneâs capacity to be hard on the new
initiates that one demonstrates oneâs solidarity with the terrible
community.
âThis cruelty could be found in their laughter, in what made them happy,
in the way they communicated with one another, in the way they lived and
died. The misfortune of others was their greatest source of joy, and I
asked myself whether in their minds that reduced or increased the
probability that they might see that misfortune strike they themselves.
But personal misfortune was in fact not so much a probability but a
certainty. Cruelty was thus inherently part of them, of their humor,
their relationships, their thoughts. And yet, so great was their
isolation as individuals, that I donât think they could ever have
imagined that their cruelty had any effect on others.â
Colin Turnbull, The Iks
In the terrible community one always arrives too late.
The terrible community draws its strength from its violence. Its
violence is its true logic and its true challenge. But it does not
arrive at an understanding of the consequences, since instead of making
use of it to charm people, it makes a use of it to drive away everything
that is outside of it, and to rip apart that which is inside of it. The
extreme justice of its violence is undermined by its refusal to examine
the origins of that violence, because though PEOPLE say that it does, it
doesnât come from a hatred of the enemy.
The terrible community is a hemorrhagic community. Its temporality is
hemorrhagic, because the time of heroes is a time lived out as if it
were a lapse, a degradation, a missed chance, a deja-vu. Beings do not
make events take place therein, but wait for them as spectators. And in
this waiting their life bleeds out in an activism thatâs supposed to
occupy and prove the existence of the present until itâs totally
exhausted.
Rather than talking about passivity here, we should talk about a kind of
agitated inertia. Because no position presents itself as definitively
acquired in the decomposition of the social body for which biopolitical
democracy is a synonym, a maximum inertia and a maximum mobility are
also possible in it. But in order to permit mobility, a âstructure of
movementâ has to be put in place to constitute an architecture that
people can traverse. In the terrible community, this is done with the
use of singularities that accept inertia even if in so doing they make
the community possible and radically impossible at the same time. The
Leader alone has the thankless task of managing and regulating the
unobtainable balance between the inert and the agitated.
To the precise extent that the terrible community is based on the
division between its static and mobile members, it has already lost its
bet; it has failed as a community.
The faces of the inert ones bring up the most painful memories for those
who have passed through the terrible community. Fated to teach something
that they themselves have not managed to take on, the inert ones often
watch over others like melancholic policemen stationed on the edges of
desert territories.
They live in a space that certainly does belong to them, but since it is
structurally public, they are just there, at each moment, just like
anyone else is. They cannot demand the right to a place in that space,
because the prior renunciation of such a right was what allowed them to
get there in the first place. The inert ones live in the community like
homeless people living in the train station, but every step treads upon
them, because they themselves are the train station, and its
construction is congruent with the construction of their lives.
The inert ones are hopeless, absent-minded angels, who having found no
life in any recess of the world, have taken up residence in a place of
passage. They may immerse themselves in the community for a certain
indeterminate period of time, but their solitude is infinitely
impervious.
Everybody knows those who still remain there. They are appreciated and
detestable, like anyone who takes care of and remains in places where
others live and pass through (the nurse, the mother, the old folks, the
public park watchmen). They are the false mirror of freedom, they, the
regulars, the slaves of an abnormal servitude that fills them with a
resplendent light: the fighters, the diehards, those with no private
life, no peace. They end up seeking the rage they need for the fight in
their mutilated lives; they attribute their wounds to noble and
imaginary battles, when theyâve really just hurt themselves by preparing
themselves for them to the point of exhaustion. Truth be told, theyâve
never had the chance to go down into the field of battle: the enemy does
not acknowledge them, and takes them for simply some kind of
interference, and with its indifference to them pushes them to madness,
to ordinary insignificance, to suicidal offensives. The alphabet of
biopower lacks the letters to spell their names; for it, they have
already disappeared, but remain like restless phantoms. They are dead,
and survive only in the transit of the faces that traverse them, upon
which they get more or less of a grip, with whom they share their table,
their bed, their struggle, until the passers-by leave, or until they
themselves begin to fade and remain there, becoming the inert ones of
tomorrow.
âMany of the women in the groups had had experience as employees or
secretaries. They brought all the efficiency of professionalism with
them to the groups when they left work. Nothing had changed for them
from that perspective, aside from the fact that they were now
undertaking armed struggle. âŠThe meetings were the housesâ vital and
center, their center of âmeaning.â For the rest, since the material
conditions of everyday life focused entirely on the external struggle,
there were no problems. We make enormous shopping runs to the
supermarket, and when weâd ensured that weâd have food and somewhere to
sleep, there werenât any internal issues.â
I. Faré, F. Spirito, Mara And The Others
The most dead and the most implacable of the inert ones are those who
have been abandoned. Those whose friend or lover had left them stay
behind, because all thatâs left of the person that had disappeared
remained in the terrible community, and in the eyes of those who had
seen him or her there. Someone whoâs lost the person he or she loves has
nothing left to lose, and often they give that nothing to the terrible
community.
ââŠthe war against an external enemy pacifies those who are engaged in
the same struggle, more or less by a forced necessity; belonging to a
group unified by absolute revolt does not leave any room for differences
or internal struggles; fraternity becomes indispensable daily bread in
those moments when the deepest contradictions are not exploding.
Internal pacification is a moment of asepsis projected on the gigantic
screen of the struggle âagainst.ââ
I. Faré, F. Spirito, Mara And The Others
The horizon, for militants, is the line towards which they must always
march. Because all the ones theyâve lost are over there somewhere, far
away.
a few prescriptions for transcending the present misery: non-exhaustive,
non-programmatic mentionsâŠ
âOh, my brothers, my children, my comrades; I loved you for all my anger
but didnât know how to tell you, I didnât know how to live with you, I
couldnât manage to reach you, to touch your cold souls, your deserted
hearts! I found no words of good cheer, no living words to force your
chests full of air with laughter! I had lost the vicious rage to see you
stand up, the rage to gaze upon you with open eyes, I had lost the
language to express to you my refusal to see you growing old before
having really lived at all, letting down your arms without having lifted
them first, going down without having wanted to go up. I wasnât strong
enough to fight off sleep, to keep it from throwing you out of the world
and out of time, to drive it far away from you, because myself in turn,
season by season, I too was weakening; I felt my limbs softening, my
thoughts coming apart, my anger disappearing, and your non-existence
winning me overâŠ
J. Lefebvre, The Consolation Society
Whatever it may be, the terrible community is like everything else,
because it is in everything else.
Biopolitical democracy and terrible community â the one insofar as it is
a self-evident part of the distribution of force relations, and the
other insofar as it is the effective substrate beneath immediate
relations â constitute the two poles of the present domination. To where
the power relations that rule over biopolitical democracies cannot,
properly speaking, realize themselves without terrible communities,
which form the ethical groundwork for that realization. More precisely,
the terrible community is the passionate form of this self-evidence,
which alone allows it to be deployed in concrete territories.
In the final analysis it is only by means of the terrible community that
the Empire manages to parse the most heterogeneous social relations
semiotically in the form of biopolitical democracy: in the absence of
terrible communities, the social self-evidence of political democracy
would have no body upon which to exert itself. None of the phenomena
where the archaic and the hypersophisticated are entangled within the
Empire (neo-slavery, globalized prostitution, corporate neo-feudalism,
human trafficking of all kinds) can be explained without reference to
that mediation.
This in no way means that thereâs any kind of subversive value to the
gestures of destruction aimed at the terrible community. As a regime of
effectuation of that self-evidence, the terrible community has no
vitality of its own. Thereâs nothing about it that puts it into any kind
of condition to morph into anything else, to put beings in a
dramatically changed relationship to the state of things; nothing to be
saved. And itâs a fact that the present is now so completely saturated
with terrible communities that the emptiness that any partial, voluntary
rupture with them comes to be filled in again with a terrifying
quickness.
If it is therefore absurd to ask what to do with the terrible
communities, since theyâre always already made and always already in a
process of dissolution, and reduce to silence all internal
non-submission (parrhesia and everything else along with it), it is on
the other hand of vital importance that one understand in what concrete
conditions of solidarity the biopolitical democracies and terrible
communities might be destroyed. A certain kind of perspective on them
has to be taken up, a âthiefâs gaze,â which from the interior of the
apparatus materializes the possibility of escaping it. Sharing this
gaze, the most lively bodies will bring about that which the terrible
community, even in spite of itself, blindly exudes: its own dissolution.
Because the terrible communities are never really duped by their own
lie, they are just attached to their blindness, which allows them to
subsist.
We have given the name of terrible community to all milieus that are
constituted on the basis of the sharing of the same ignorances â and
also the ignorance, it so happens, of the evil that produced them.
Vitalist criteria, which would consider the malaise felt inside a human
formation as the touchstone for seeing a terrible community in it, are
quite often inoperable. The most âsuccessfulâ of terrible communities
teach their members to love their own failings and to make them
likeable. In this sense, the terrible community is not the place where
one suffers the most, but just the place where one is the least free.
The terrible community is a presence within absence, because it is
incapable of existing in and of itself, but only relative to something
else, something outside of it. It is thus by unmasking not just the
compromises or failures, but the surreptitious family relations of the
terrible community that we can abandon them as false alternatives to the
dominant socialization. It is by turning its slanderous schizophrenia â
âyouâre not only with us; youâre not pure enoughâ â back into a
infectious schizophrenia â âeveryone is with us too, and that is what
will undermine the present orderâ â that the members of the terrible
community can escape the double bind that theyâre walled up in.
Itâs not by getting rid of some particular leader that one can get free
of the terrible community; the vacant place will soon be taken up by
another, because the Leader is merely the personification of everybody
elseâs desire to be led. Whatever anyone may say, the Leader
participates in the terrible community much more than he leads it. He is
its secretion and its tragedy, its model and its nightmare. It only
takes the emotional education of each person to subjectivize and
desubjectivize the Leader differently than he himself does. Desire and
power are never chained to any particular unique configuration; itâs
enough just to make them waltz together to throw their whole dance out
of whack.
Often, a certain skeptical look is enough to demolish the Leader as such
in a lasting way, and in so doing, to destroy his place.
All the weakness of the terrible community has to do with its closure,
its incapacity to get out of itself. Since itâs not a living whole, just
a wobbly construction, it is as incapable of acquiring an interior life
as it is of feeding it with joy. And thus the mistake of having confused
happiness with transgression is paid for, because it is by starting from
the latter that the system of unwritten, and thus all the more
implacable, rules of the terrible community continually re-form
themselves.
The fear of ârecuperationâ so typical of the terrible community can be
explained as follows: it is the best justification for its closure and
moralism. On the pretext that âwe wonât sell out,â we prohibit ourselves
from understanding that weâve been bought off already so that weâll stay
where we are. Resistance, here, thus becomes retention: the old
temptation to chain beauty to her sister, death, which made the
Orientals fill their birdcages with magnificent birds who would never
again see the open skies, which made jealous fathers keep their
prettiest daughters locked away at home, and the greedy to fill up their
cupboards with gold bullion, finally ends up invading the terrible
community. So much imprisoned beauty withers away.
And even the princesses shut away in their towers know that the arrival
of prince charming is but the prelude to spousal segregation, that what
must be done is to abolish both the prisons and the liberators at the
same time, that what we need isnât programs for liberation but practices
of freedom.
No escape is possible from the terrible community without the creation
of an insurrectionary situation, and vice-versa. Now, far from preparing
insurrectionary conditions, the definition of the self as an illusory
difference, as a substantially other being, is but a conscience-related
remnant determined by the absence of such conditions. The demand for a
coherent identity for each person is equivalent to the demand for a
generalized castration, a diffuse self-policing.
The end of the terrible community coincides with its opening to events:
and it is around events that singularities aggregate, and learn to
cooperate and touch one another. The terrible community, as an entity
animated by an inexhaustible desire for self-preservation, filters all
possibilities through the sieve of compatibility with its existence
instead of organizing itself around their outpouring.
This is why all terrible communities have a defensive conspiracy
relationship with events and conceive of their relationship with the
possibilities in terms of production or exclusion, always tempted as it
is by the optional possibility that it might master them, always
secretly drawn by their totalitarian latency.
âA manâs worth is not determined according to the useful labor he
supplies, but according to the contagious force that he has to draw
others into the free expenditure of their energy, their joy, and their
lives: a human being is not merely a stomach to be filled but an excess
of energy to be lavished.â
(Bataille)
We know from experience that in passionate life â and thus in life
itself â nothingâs paid for, the one that wins out is always the one
that gives the most, the one who knows how best to enjoy it. Organizing
the circulation of other forms of pleasure means feeding a power that is
the enemy of all the logic of oppression. It is true, then, that in
order to not lose power one must have a lot of it.
Counterposing to the combinations of power another register, one of
play, is not equivalent to condemning oneself to not being taken
seriously, but to making oneself the bearer of another economy of
expenditure and recognition. The margin of enjoyment that exists within
the games of power feeds off reciprocally exchanged sacrifices and
humiliations, the pleasure of commanding is a pleasure one pays for, and
in that sense the model of biopolitical domination is completely
compatible with all the religions that flayed the flesh, with the work
ethic, with the prison system, just as much as commodity and hedonist
logic are compatible with the absence of desire that such logic
mitigates.
In reality the terrible community never manages to contain the potential
becoming inherent in each and every form-of-life, and thatâs what
permits it to damage their internal force relations, and question even
powerâs post-authoritarian forms.
All human aggregations that set themselves up in an exclusively
offensive or siege-related perspective is a terrible community.
To finish with the terrible community, we must first renounce defining
ourselves as the substantial âoutsideâ of what, in so doing, we create
as an âoutsideâ â âsociety,â âcompetition,â âthe Blooms,â or whatever
else. The true âelsewhereâ left to us to create cannot be sedentary; it
is a new coherence between beings and things, a violent dance that gives
its rhythm to life, cadenced at present by the macabre rhythms of
industrial civilization, a reinvention of play between singularities â a
new art of distances.
Evasion is like opening a sealed-off door: first you get the impression
that your eyes have to adjust to a shorter distance; then you take your
eyes off the horizon and start arranging the details in order to get
out.
But evasion is simply escape: It leaves the prison intact. What we need
is total desertion, an escape that simultaneously annihilates the whole
prison.
There is no individual desertion, properly speaking. Each deserter takes
away with him a bit of the troopsâ morale. By his simple existence, he
is the refusal in acts of the official order, and all the relationships
that he enters into are contaminated by the radical nature of his
situation.
For the deserter itâs a matter of life or death, and the relationships
he enters do not fail to know his solitude, his finiteness, nor his
exposedness.
The fundamental presupposition of a human aggregation freed of the grip
of the terrible community is a new conjugation of these three
fundamental coordinates of physical existence: solitude, finiteness, and
exposedness. In the terrible community, these coordinates come together
on the plane of fear along the axis of the imperatives of survival.
Because it is fear that supplies the necessary consistency to all the
phantoms which accompany an existence folded under those imperatives â
in the first rank of which fall the phantom of penury which is so often
introjected as the a priori, supra-historical horizon of the âhuman
condition.â
In his Presentation of Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze demonstrates that beyond
the psychiatric fixation of masochism on perversion and the caricature
of the masochist in the sadist counter-type, Masochâs novels stage a
systematic game of the disparagement of the symbolic order of the
Father, a game which implies â that is, which presupposes it at the same
time as it puts it into acts â a community of affections transcending
the sharing of bodies between men and women; all the elements that
comprise the masochist scene converge in the sought-after effect: the
practical ridicule of the symbolic order of the Father and the
deactivation of its essential attributes â the indefinite suspension of
grief and the systematic rarefaction of the object of desire.
All devices which aim to produce among us a personal identification with
practices characterized by domination are equally intended â even if it
is not their exclusive intent â to produce in us a feeling of shame, the
shame of being ourselves as much as just of being a human being, a
resentment that aims to make us identify with domination. And itâs this
shame and resentment that supply the vital space for the continual
replication of the order and action of the Leader.
Here we find confirmation of the existence of the inextricable nexus
between fear and superstition which is seen at the dawn of all
revolutions; between the crisis of presence and the indefinite
suspension of grief, between the economy of need and the absence of
desire. We say that in passing, and only to remind the reader of how
deep the stratification runs within the process of subjugation that
upholds the existence of the terrible community at the present time.
In what way can we generalize âMasochâs game,â and, dismissing the
choice between domination and submission, evolve towards a human strike?
In what way can the act of playing with the nexus of domination produce
a transcendence of the theatrical staging phase, and leave an open range
for the free expression of practicable forms-of-life?
And, to return to our original question, in what way can such
forms-of-life once again bring together solitude, finiteness, and
exposedness?
This question is a question for a new kind of emotional education to
address, one that will inculcate a sovereign contempt for all positions
of power, undermine the injunction to desire it, and liberate us from
the feeling that we are responsible for our whatever-being, and thus
solitary, finite, and exposed.
No one is responsible for the place they occupy, only for their
identification with their own role.
The potential of every terrible community is thus a potential to exist
inside of its subjects in its absence.
To free ourselves from it, weâll have to start by learning to inhabit
the gap between us and ourselves, which, left open, becomes the space
filled by the terrible community.
Then, to free ourselves from our identifications, to become unfaithful
to ourselves, to desert ourselves.
Training ourselves to become the space for such a desertion for one
another,
Finding in each encounter a chance to decisively subtract ourselves from
our own existential space,
Measuring to find that only an infinitesimal fraction of our vitality
has been removed from us by the terrible community, and been installed
within the enormous machinery of devices,
Feeling in ourselves the foreign being that has always already deserted
us, who gives us the basis for all possibility of living out solitude as
the precondition for encounters, finiteness as the precondition for
unprecedented pleasures, exposedness as the precondition for a new
geometry of passions,
Offering ourselves as a space of infinite flight,
The masters of a new art of distances.