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Title: Theses on the Imaginary Party Author: Tiqqun Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: communization, insurrection, the invisible committee, insurgency Source: Tiqqun 1
“The moral and political significance of thought only appears in those
rare moments of history where “Things fall apart; the center cannot
hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”; where “The best lack all
conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”. In
these crucial moments, thought ceases to be a marginal affair to
political questions. When the whole world lets itself be carried away
without thinking by what the many do and believe, those who think find
themselves exposed, because their refusal to join with others is patent
and becomes thus a sort of action.”
— Hannah Arendt, Moral Considerations
in the historic period where Domination imposes itself as dictatorship
of visibility and of dictatorship as visibility, in a word as Spectacle.
Because there is at first but the negative party of negativity, and
because of an inability to liquidate this, the sorcery of the Spectacle
consists in rendering invisible the expressions of negation — and this
goes as well for the liberty to act as for suffering or pollution — its
most remarkable character is precisely to be reputed as nonexistent, or,
to be more exact, imaginary. However, it is of this and exclusively of
this that one speaks of without stop, because it is that which each day
makes a little more visible the failures of the proper functioning of
society. But one keeps from pronouncing its name -can one pronounce its
name, in any case?- as one fears to invoke the devil. And in this, one
does well: in a world so manifestly become an attribute of Spirit,
enunciation has a regrettable tendency to become performative.
Inversely, the nominal evocation, even here, of the Imaginary Party
merits equally well as its act of constitution. Up to the present, that
is to say up until its naming, it could not be more than what was the
classical proletariat before knowing itself as proletariat: a class of
civil society that is not a class of civil society, but which is rather
its dissolution. And in effect, it only composes itself to this day of
the negative multitude of those who do not have a class, and do not want
to have one, of the solitary crowd of those who have re-appropriated
their fundamental non-appearance in commodity society under the form of
a voluntary non-participation in it. At first, the Imaginary Party
presents itself simply as the community of defection, the party of
exodus, of fleeing reality and paradoxically as subversion without
subject. But this is not its essence just as dawn is not the essence of
the day. The richness of its becoming is yet to come and can not appear
except in its living rapport with that which produced it, and which now
disclaims it. “Only those who have the vocation and the will to make the
future can see the concrete truth of the present” (Lukacs, History &
Class Consciousness).
incessantly. The spectacle has no other ministry than to hinder,
relentlessly, its manifestation as such, that is to say its becoming
conscious, that is to say its becoming real; because then it would have
to admit the existence of this negativity of which it is, in so much as
the positive party of positivity, the perpetual de-negation. It is thus
in the essence of the Spectacle to cast the opposing camp as a
negligible residue, to make of it a total nothing, and which comes to
the same thing, to declare it criminal and inhuman in its entirety,
under the pain of having to know itself for a criminal and a monster. At
bottom, it’s why there are in this society but two parties: the party of
those who pretend that there is but one party, and the party of those
who know that there are in truth two. Already from this observation, one
will know to recognize our party.
for reasons that explain themselves without difficulty. Certainly, it
would be truly harmful to public order that this be apprehended for what
it is really: the supreme eventuality of which the preparation for, and
the adjournment of, inwardly work in a continual movement all human
groupings, and of which peace is not in the end but a moment. It follows
identically for the social war of which the combats can remain at their
paroxysm perfectly silent and, so to speak, colorless. One only divines
them from a sudden rejuvenation of the dominant aberration. Dispositions
taken, one must recognize that battles are exaggeratedly rare, compared
to casualties.
to which what is unseen does not exist — esse est percipi — that the
Spectacle maintains the exorbitant and planetary illusion of a fragile
civil peace, of which the perfection demands that we leave it to spread
in all domains its gigantic campaign of the pacification of societies
and of the neutralization of their contradictions. But its foreseeable
failure is logically inscribed in the simple fact that this campaign of
pacification is still a war- certainly the most terrible and destructive
that ever was, because it is lead in the name of peace. It is besides
one of the most constant traits of the Spectacle that it does not speak
of war but in a language where the word “war” does not appear more than
a question of “humanitarian operations”, “international sanctions”,
“maintaining order”, “safeguarding the rights of man”, of the fight
against “terrorism”, “sects”, “extremism”, or “pedophilia”, and above
all this, the “process of peace”. The adversary no longer carries the
name of enemy, but in revenge they are placed outside the law and
outside of humanity for having broken and disturbed the peace; and each
war lead to the end of conserving or spreading the positions of economic
or strategic force will have to call on a propaganda which transforms it
into a crusade or the last war of humanity. The lie upon which the
Spectacle reposes demands that is be thus. This non-sense reveals,
besides a systematic coherence and a shocking internal logic, that up to
now this apparently apolitical and at the same time anti-political
system does not help existing configurations of hostilities nor does it
provoke new regroupings among friends and enemies, because it does not
know how to escape from the logic of the political. Those who do not
understand war do not understand their own times.
hatred of the political, and it is in this that resides its greatest
vexation as the project of eradicating it is itself still political. It
greatly wants to speak of law, economy, culture, philosophy, the
environment, and even of politics, but never of the political.
Invariably, this negation takes the form of a naturalization, of which
the impossibility finds itself denounced in an equally invariable
fashion by periodic crises. Classical economy and the century of
liberalism that corresponds to it (1815–1914) constituted a first
attempt, and a first failure, of this naturalization. The doctrine of
utility, the system of needs, the myth of a “natural” auto-regulation of
the market, the ideology of the rights of man, and parliamentary
democracy are to be numbered as means that were put in place in this
time to that end. But it is indisputably in the historic period opened
in 1914 that the naturalization of commodity dominance reveals its most
radical form: Biopower. In Biopower, the social totality which little by
little autonomized itself came to take charge of life itself. On one
side, it oversaw the politicization of biology: health, beauty,
sexuality, and the available energy of each individual each year reveals
more clearly the managerial responsibility of society. On another side,
it is a biologization of politics that operates: ecology, the economy,
the general repartition of “well-being” and “care”, growth, longevity
and aging of the population impose themselves as the principal chapters
by which one measures the exercise of power. This, of course, is only
the appearance of the process, not the process itself. In reality, that
which it concerns is to rely upon the false evidence of the body and
biological life, the total control of behaviors, of representations and
rapports between humans, that is to say, at bottom, to force everyone to
consent to the Spectacle out of a supposed instinct of conservation.
Because it founds its absolute sovereignty on the zoological unity of
the human species and upon the immanent continuum of the production and
reproduction of “life”, Biopower is this essentially murderous tyranny
that exercises itself upon everyone in the name of all and of “nature”.
All hostility to this society, whether it is that of the criminal, the
deviant, or the political enemy, must be liquidated because it goes
against the interest of the species, and more particularly the species
of the criminal, the deviant, and the political enemy. And it is thusly
that each new diktat that restrains a little more already derisory
liberties pretends to protect everyone against themselves, in opposing
the extravagance of its sovereignty to the ultima ratio of naked life.
“Pardon them, they know not what they do” says Biopower as it takes out
its syringe. Certainly, naked life — the point of view where human life
ceases to be distinct from animal life — has always been the point of
view of commodity nihilism considering humans. But it is at present all
manifestations of transcendence, of which the political is a shattering
form, all intentions of liberty, all expressions of metaphysical essence
and of the negativity of humans are treated as a malady that must, for
the common happiness, be suppressed. However, the penchant for
revolution — an endemic pathology for which a campaign of permanent
vaccination has not yet come to pass — certainly explains itself by the
unhappy coincidence of an at-risk heredity, excessive hormonal levels
and the insufficiency of a certain neuro-mediator. There could not be
politics inside of Biopower, but only against Biopower. Because Biopower
is the achieved negation of the political, veritable politics must
commence by freeing itself from Biopower, that is to say to reveal it as
such.
humans, erects itself facing them and oppresses them; and it is
precisely in this that Biopower is a moment of the Spectacle, just as
the physical is a moment of the metaphysical. It is thus an iron
necessity which, from even the smallest detail apparently the most
simple, the most immediate — the body — condemns the present
contestation to place itself on the metaphysical plane or to be nothing.
Therefore neither could it be included, nor similarly perceived in the
interior of the Spectacle nor of Biopower, like the rest of all that
which throws into relief the Imaginary Party. For the hour, its
principal attribute is its factual invisibility in the heart of a mode
of commodified unveiling that is assuredly metaphysical, but factually
metaphysical singularly in that it is the negation of metaphysics, and
first of itself as metaphysical. But, the Spectacle abhors a vacuum, it
cannot bring itself to disclaim the massive evidence of these
hostilities of a new type which agitate, ever more violently, the social
body; it is necessary in other words that it mask this. Thus it comes
back to multiple occult forces to invent pseudo-conflicts always more
empty, always more fabricated and themselves always more violent, in so
much as anti-political. It’s upon this heavy equilibrium of terror that
rests the apparent calm of all the societies of late capitalism.
exactly the party of the political, because it is the sole one which can
designate in this society the metaphysical labor of an absolute
hostility, that is to say the inner existence of a veritable rupture. By
that, it takes the path of an absolute politics. The Imaginary Party is
the form which politics assumes in the hour of the collapse of
Nation-states, of which we know from henceforth to be mortal. It
dramatically calls to mind to any State that is not senile, or
sufficiently exuberant, the total assertion that the political space is
not, in its reality, distinct from physical, social, cultural, etc.
space; that in other terms and according to an old formulation,
everything is political, or at least is so for power. At this point,
politics appears rather as the All of the spaces which liberalism
believed it could, predicate by predicate, fragment. The era of Biopower
is the moment where domination comes to apply itself to the body, until
the individual physiology takes a political character, in spite of the
ridiculous alibi of biological naturality. Politics is thus more than
ever the total, existential, metaphysical element in which is packed all
of human liberty.
of commodity society, which we agree has lasted only too long. It is at
the planetary level that we see diverge in always greater proportions
the map of the commodity and the territory of the human. The spectacle
puts in place a worldwide chaos, but this “chaos” only manifests itself
in the from now on proven inaptitude of the economic vision of the world
that has never understood human reality. It has become evident that
value no longer measures anything: accounting turns to emptiness. Work
itself has no other object than to satisfy the universal need of
servitude, and Money has finished by leaving itself to be earned by the
nothingness it propagates. At the same time, the totality of old
bourgeois institutions, which rest on the abstract principles of
equivalence and representation, have entered into a crisis which they
seem too fatigued to recover from: Justice no longer manages to judge,
Teaching no longer teaches, Medicine no longer heals, Parliament no
longer legislates, Police no longer force respect for the law, nor does
the Family even raise children. Certainly, the exterior forms of the
ancient edifice remain, but all life has quitted it definitively. It
floats in an intemporality always more absurd and always more
perceptible. To deceive the world about the mounting disaster, the
Spectacle still arrives from one time to another to sport the symbols of
parade, but no one comprehends them anymore. Their magic fascinates none
but the magicians. Thus, the National Assembly has become a historic
monument, which excites nothing more than the stupid curiosity of
tourists. The Old World offers to our view a desolate countryside of new
ruins and dead carcasses that wait for a demolition that does not come
and could yet wait for eternity, if no one had the idea to undertake it.
Never has there been the project of so many celebrations, and never,
too, did their enthusiasm appear more false, more faint, and more
forced. Even the crudest rejoicing no longer takes place without a
certain air of sadness. Contrary to appearances, the perishing of the
ensemble is not so much organ after organ; it decomposes and corrodes,
not, for the rest, in some observable positive phenomenon, but rather in
the general indifference that has been unchained; indifference that
procures the clear sentiment that no one judges themselves to be
concerned by this, nor in any fashion have they decided to remedy it.
And as “before the sentiment of collapse of all things, to do nothing
but to await patiently and blindly the crashing of the old edifice so
full of fissures and attacked in its roots and to leave it destroyed by
its crumbling scaffolding is contrary to wisdom as much as to dignity”
(Hegel), we see, in certain signs that do not permit the discernment of
the mode of spectacular unveiling, preparation for the inevitable exile
outside “the old edifice so full of fissures”. Already, masses of silent
and solitary humans appear, who choose to live in the interstices of the
commodity world and who refuse to participate with what they once had a
rapport with. It is not solely that the charms of the commodity leave
them stubbornly unenthused, it is moreover that they carry an
inexplicable suspicion for all that is linked to the universe that it
fashioned and that now is collapsing. At the same time, the ever more
patent malfunctionings of the capitalist state, become incapable of any
integration with the society upon which it imposes itself, guarantees in
its midst the necessary temporary subsistence of spaces of
indetermination, zones of autonomy always more vast and always more
numerous, where there is sketched an ethos for a whole infra-spectacular
world that seems at dusk, but that in truth is at dawn. Some forms of
life appear in which the promise goes well beyond the general
decomposition. In all respects, this resembles a massive experience of
illegality and clandestinity. There are moments where one already lives
as if this world no longer existed. During these times, and as a
confirmation of this bad omen, we see the despairing tensing and
contractions of a world that knows it is to die. One speaks of the
reform of the republic when the time of republics has passed. One speaks
still of the color of flags, when it is the era of flags themselves that
has passed. Such is the grandiose and mortal spectacle that unveils
itself to those who dare to consider their time from the point of view
of its negation, that is to say from the point of view of the Imaginary
Party.
violence and grand disorders. The permanent and generalized state of
exception is the sole fashion in which commodity society can maintain
itself as it has accomplished the undermining of the specific conditions
possible for installing itself durably in nihilism. Certainly,
domination still has force — physical force as well as symbolic force —
but it does not have more than that. At the same time as the discourse
of its critique, this society has also lost the discourse of its
justification. It finds itself before an abyss, which it discovers is
its heart. And it is this truth, noticeable everywhere, that it
travesties without stop in embracing in all dialogue “the language of
flattery” where “the content of the discourse that the spirit has with
itself and upon itself is the perversion of all concepts and of all
realities, is the universal trumpery of itself and of others, and the
impudence of enunciating this trumpery is for this the highest truth”
and where “the simple consciousness of the true and the good...can say
nothing to this spirit which does not know them and does not say them”.
In these conditions, “if the simple consciousness at last claims the
dissolution of this whole world of perversion, it can not all at once
demand of the individual to reject this world, because Diogenes himself
in his barrel was conditioned by it; besides this demand posed to the
singular individual is precisely that which passes for wrong, because
wrong consists in worrying about oneself in so much as singular...the
demand of this dissolution can only address itself to this same spirit
of culture”. One recognizes there the true description of the language
that henceforth domination speaks in its most advanced forms, when it
has incorporated into its discourse the critique of consumer society, of
spectacle and their misery. “Culture Canal+” and “Inrockuptibles” give,
in France, passing but significant examples. It’s more generally the
scintillating and sophisticated language of the modern cynic, who has
definitively identified all usage of liberty as the abstract liberty to
accept everything, but in his own manner. In his gregarious solitude,
the shrill consciousness of his world prides itself on its perfect
powerlessness to change it. It finds itself similarly mobilized in a
maniacal fashion against the consciousness of self and against all quest
for substantiality. A world such as this “knows all become estranged
from it, knows being-for-itself separated from being-in-itself, or that
what is aimed at and the goal separate from truth” (Hegel), in other
terms that, all in dominating effectively, attaches itself to the luxury
of knowing overtly its domination as vain, absurd and illegitimate,
calls against it as the only response to what it states the violence of
those who, having been mutilated by it of all rights, draw their rights
from hostility. One can no longer reign innocently.
becomes mad and pretends to a tyranny of which it no longer has the
means. Biopower and the Spectacle correspond, as complementary moments,
to this ultimate radicalization of the commodity aberration that seems
its triumph and preludes its loss. In the one and the other case, it is
a question of eradicating from reality all that, in it, exceeds its
representation. At the end, an unchained caprice attaches itself to this
ruined edifice, which tries to tyrannize and weaken without delay all
that dares to give itself an independent existence outside of it. We are
there. The Society of the Spectacle has become untreatable on this
point: it is necessary to participate in the collective crime of its
existence, no one must be able to claim to reside outside it. It can no
longer tolerate the existence of the colossal party of abstention that
is the Imaginary Party. It is necessary to work, that is to say to hold
oneself in all readiness at its disposition, to be mobilizable. To reach
its ends, it uses in equal measure the most vulgar means, like the
menace of hunger, and the most insidious, like the young woman. The
faded old tune of “citizenship” which spreads everywhere with regard to
everything, and to nothing, expresses the dictatorship of this abstract
duty of participation in a social totality that is in all ways
autonomized. It is in this manner, even with the fact of this
dictatorship, that the negative party of negativity comes little by
little to unify and acquire a positive content. Because the elements of
the multitude of the indifferent who mutually ignore one another and who
do not think to be of any party, find themselves equally exposed to this
unique and centralized dictatorship, the dictatorship of the Spectacle,
of which the salariat, the commodity, nihilism and the imperative of
visibility are not but partial aspects. It is therefore domination
itself that imposes on them, on those who would have been content
volunteers of a floating existence, to recognize themselves for what
they are: rebels. “The contemporary enemy does not cease to imitate the
army of Pharaoh: they hunt down the runaways, the deserters, but never
arrive at preceeding them or confronting them” (Paolo Virno, Miracle,
virtuosity and deja-vu). In the course of this exodus, some
unprecedented solidarities constitute themselves, friends and brothers
reassemble behind the new lines of the front that they designate, and
the formal opposition between the Spectacle and the Imaginary Party
becomes concrete. There develops thus, among those who take note of
their essential marginality, a strong sentiment of belonging to
non-belonging, a sort of community of Exile. The simple sensation of
estrangement in this world metamorphosizes in accord with the
circumstances into intimacy with estrangement. Flight was nothing more
than a fact become a strategy. Now “flight, says the thirty sixth
stratagem, is the supreme politics”. But hence, the Imaginary Party is
already more than solely imaginary; it commences to know itself as such
and marches with slowness towards its realization, which is its ruin.
The metaphysical hostility to this society has from now on ceased to be
lived on a purely negative mode, like the casual indifference to all
that could come upon it, a refusal to play, or the forced failure of
domination by rejection of domination. It takes a positive character and
by this is so perfectly worrying that power is not wrong, in its
paranoia, to see terrorists everywhere. It’s a frigid, cold hatred, like
of an inflammation, that for the hour does not express itself overtly or
theoretically, but rather by a practical paralysis of all social
devices, by a mute and obstinate ill-wishing, and by the sabotage of all
innovation, all movement and all intelligence. There are crises nowhere,
there is only the omnipresence of the Imaginary Party, of which the
centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere, because it operates
on the same territory as the Spectacle.
positively, as the work of the Imaginary Party, as the work of
negativity, that is to say the human: in such a war, all who deny one
party, subjectively, do but objectively rally to the other. The
radicalism of the times imposes its conditions. As long as there is the
Spectacle, the notion of the Imaginary Party is that which renders
visible the new configuration of hostilities. The Imaginary Party claims
the totality of those who in thoughts, words or acts conspire to the
destruction of the present order. The disaster is its work.
specter, to an invisible presence, to the fantastical return of the
Other in a society where all otherness was suppressed, to a separate
accounting for all that was generalized. But this bad dream, this idea
of suicide that passes by the head of the Spectacle, can not delay — in
respect to the character, itself imaginary, of the present social
production — engendering its reality as consciousness becoming practice,
as immediately practical consciousness. The Imaginary Party is the other
name of the shameful sickness of shaken power: paranoia, which Canetti
too vaguely defined as “the malady of strength”. The despairing and
planetary deployment of always more massive and sophisticated techniques
to control public space materializes in a piquant fashion the madhouse
insanity of wounded domination which still pursues the old dream of the
Titans for a universal state; when it is no more than a dwarf among
others, and upset with that. In this terminal phase, it speaks only of
the fight against terrorism, delinquency, extremism and criminality,
because it is constitutionally forbidden to explicitly mention the
existence of the Imaginary Party. Besides, this represents for it, in
combat, a certain handicap, because it can not designate its fanatics to
hate “the veritable enemy that inspires an infinite courage” (Kafka).
reasons, in respect to the direction of historical development. It is a
fact that at the point where we have arrived in the process of
socialization of society, each individual act of destruction constitutes
an act of terrorism, that is to say it objectively aims at the entire
society. Thus, at the extreme of suicide that manifests itself in a
gesture where death and liberty blend, which delimits, suspends, and
annuls the sovereignty of Biopower — and which acquires by that the
meaning of a direct derogation of domination — sees itself thus delight
a strong force of consummation, of production and reproduction of its
world. Similarly, when the law rests on nothing more than its
promulgation, that is to say on force and caprice, when this enters a
phase of autonomous proliferation, and atop it all, when no ethos is no
longer contained in it, then all crime must be comprehended as a total
contestation of a solidly ruined social order. All murders are no longer
the murder of a particular person- if such a thing as a “particular
person” is still possible- but pure murder, without object or subject,
without culprit or victim. It is immediately an attempt against the law,
which does not exist, but wishes to reign everywhere. From now on, the
tiniest infractions have changed their meaning. All crimes are become
political crimes, and it is precisely this that domination must at all
costs make occult, to veil from all that an epoch has passed, and that
political violence, this living corpse, comes to demand the reckoning of
all the forms that one does not know it in. It is in this manner, of
which the Spectacle could have an intuition, that as the Imaginary Party
manifests itself it is escorted by a certain trait of blind terrorism.
Certainly, one can interpret this as the moment of the interiorization
by all developed commodity societies of the negation that they hold in
an cathartic but illusory exteriority of “really existing socialism”,
but it is there however its most superficial aspect. It is also
permitted for each to diminish the insoluble character by certifying the
general rule that “a political unity can not exist under the form of res
publica, of the public, which finds itself put into question each time
that it creates a space of non-publicity which is an effective disavowal
of this publicity”. It is certainly not rare, thus, that certain take
the Party as “disappearing in the shadow, but transforming the shadow
into a strategic space from whence come the attacks which destroy the
place where until now imperium manifested itself, which dismantle the
vast background of official public life, that a technocratic
intelligence would not know to organize” (Carl Schmitt, Theory of the
Partisan). It is a constant temptation, in effect, to conceive the
positive existence of the Imaginary Party under the familiar species of
the guerrilla, of civil war, of partisan warfare, of a conflict without
a precise front or a declaration of hostilities, without armistice or
peace treaty. And by these many aspects, it is verily a question of a
war that has nothing behind its acts, its violence, its crimes, and
which appear to have no other program, on this point, than to become
conscious violence, that is to say conscious of its metaphysical and
political character.
of its vision of the world no less than from strategic considerations,
say anything, see anything, nor understand anything of the Imaginary
Party, of which the substance is purely metaphysical, the particular
form under which the latter makes irruption into visibility is the form
of catastrophe. The catastrophe is that which reveals, but cannot be
revealed. By that, one must understand that the catastrophe does not
exist save for the Spectacle, of which it is the sudden and unalterable
ruin of all its patient labor to make pass as a world that which is only
its own Weltanschauung; that besides signals by this that it is
incapable, like all that is finished, of understanding destruction. In
each “catastrophe” it is the mode of commodity unveiling that finds
itself unveiled and discontinued. Its character is in evidence as it
flies into pieces. The totality of categories, of which it enforces the
use, fear an exploding reality. Interest, equivalence, calculus,
utility, work, and value are put to flight by the non-assignability of
negation. Therefore the Imaginary Party is known in the Spectacle as the
party of chaos, crisis, and disaster.
fulguration, those of the Imaginary Party work to hasten the advent of
this by any means. The axes of communication are for them privileged
targets. They know how infrastructures that “are worth billions” can be
destroyed in an audacious coup. They know the tactical weakness, the
points of least resistance and the moments of vulnerability of the
opposing organization. They are besides freer to choose what will be the
theatre of their operations and act at the point where the smallest
forces can cause the greatest losses. The most troubling, as one
interrogates them, is certainly that they know all of this, without
however knowing that they know it. Thus, an anonymous worker at a
bottling plant pours cyanide “just like that” in a handful of cans, a
young man assassinates a tourist in the name of the “purity of the
mountain” and signs his crime “Le MESSI”, another “without apparent
reason” blew out the brains of his petit-bourgeois father on his
birthday, a third opens fire on the wise herd of his school comrades, a
last “gratuitously” threw bricks at cars launched on the lively allure
of the highway, when he did not burn them in their parking lots. In the
Spectacle, the Imaginary Party does not appear as the work of humans,
but of strange acts, in the sense understood by the Sabbatean tradition.
These acts themselves are not however connected with one another, but
systematically held in the enigma of the exception; one would not have
the idea to see in these manifestations a unique and similar human
negativity, because one does not know what negativity is; at bottom, one
does not know any longer what humanity is, nor even if it exists. All
this stands out in the register of the absurd, and at this price: there
is nothing much that does not stand out. Above all, the Spectacle does
not want to see there that so many attacks are directed against it and
its ignominy. Ergo, from the spectacular point of view, the point of
view of a certain alienation of the state of public explanation, the
Imaginary Party is resumed into a confused ensemble of gratuitous and
isolated criminal acts of which the authors possess no sense, similar to
the periodic irruption in visibility of the always more mysterious forms
of terrorism; all things which finish all the same, in the end, by
producing the disagreeable impression that one is shielded from nothing
in the Spectacle, that an obscure menace weighs on the empty order of
commodity society. Indisputably, the state of exception becomes
generalized. No one can any longer pretend, in one camp as in the other,
to security. This is good. We know at present that the denouement is
close. “Lucid saintliness recognizes in itself the necessity of
destruction, the necessity of a tragic issue” (Bataille, The Guilty).
Imaginary Party makes readable is marked essentially by asymmetry. We
have no business, presently, with the dispute of two camps that compete
for the conquest of the same trophy around which, all things told, they
find themselves. Here, the protagonists move on such perfectly strange
planes, one from the other, that they do not meet except at very rare
points of intersection, and everything accounted for, by the whim of a
certain chance. But this strangeness is itself asymmetrical: because,
for the Imaginary Party, the Spectacle is without mystery whereas for
the Spectacle the Imaginary Party must remain forever a mystery. From
this follows a strategic consequence of the first importance: while we
can without problem designate our enemy, which is besides by essence
designatable, our enemy cannot designate us. There is no uniformity in
the Imaginary Party, because uniformity is precisely the central
attribute of the Spectacle. Thus it is from now on that all uniformity
must feel itself menaced and, with it, all that it represents as
currency. In other terms, the Imaginary Party knows nothing but its
enemies, not its members, because its enemies are precisely all those
who one could know. Those of the Imaginary Party, in re-appropriating
their Bloom-being, have re-appropriated the anonymity with which they
were constrained. In so doing, they turn against the Spectacle the
situation it forced on them and use it as a condition of invincibility.
In a certain manner, they will make this society pay for the
imprescriptable crime of having stolen from them their name—that is to
say the knowledge of their sovereign singularity and by that of all
properly human life—to have excluded them from all visibility, all
community, all participation, to have thrown them into the indistinction
of the crowd, into the nothingness of ordinary life, into the mass in
which homo sacer is suspended, and to have walled off from their
existence the access of meaning. It is from this condition, in which the
Spectacle would like to maintain them, that they depart. It is perfectly
insufficient, and at the same time significant of a certain intellectual
impotence, to remark that, in this terrorism, innocents receive the
chastisement “of being nothing, of being without destiny, to have been
dispossessed of their name by a system, itself anonymous, of which they
become thus the most pure incarnation. In that they are finished social
products of an henceforth globalized abstract sociality.” (Baudrillard).
For, each one of these murders without motive and without designated
victim, each one of these anonymous sabotages constitutes an act of
Tiqqun, that executes the sentence that this world has already
pronounced against itself. It returns to nothingness that which Spirit
has already quitted, to death those who do not live but rather survive,
to the ruin of that which has for so long been no more than ruins. And
if one must accept for these acts the absurd qualifier of “gratuitous”
it is because they do but lead to manifest that which is already true,
but still occult, to realizing that which is already real, but not known
as such. They add nothing over the course of the disaster, they record
and notify.
tied to an identity; that this always presents itself, in spite of its
colossal designs, under the detritus of a perfect Bloom, voila that
which is fit to unleash the paranoia of power. Johann Georg Elser, of
which the bomb attempt November 8, 1939 in Munich did not spare Hitler
save for a small favor of fate, furnishes the model of that which, in
the years to come, will plunge commodity domination into an ever more
sensible fright. Elser is the model Bloom, if ever such an expression
did not express a crippling contradiction. In him all evokes neutrality
and nothingness. His absence from the world was complete, his solitude
absolute. His banality was itself banal. The poverty of spirit, the lack
of personality and insignificance were his only attributes, but they
never became conspicuous. When he recounts his life as a handyman, it is
in the manner of an impersonality without bottom. Nothing kindled
passion in him. Politics and ideology left him equally indifferent. He
neither knew what Communism was, nor what National-Socialism was, and he
was however a worker in Germany in the 1930’s. And when the “judges”
interrogated him on his motives for an act into which he put a year and
minute care to prepare, he came only to mention the augmentation of
deductions upon the salary of workers. He even declared he did not have
the intention to eliminate National-Socialism, but solely a few men that
he judged evil. It is such a being that missed saving the planet from a
world war and unparalleled suffering. His project rested on nothing but
his solitary resolution, which his existence had denied, to ravage that
of which he was the inexpressible enemy, that which represented the
hegemony of Evil. He took his right only from himself, that is to say
from the shattering absolute of his decision. The “Party of Order” will
have to face, and already faces, the multiplication of such elementary
acts of terrorism that it can not understand nor foresee, because they
authorize themselves from nothing but the unshakeable sovereignty of
metaphysics, of the crazy possibility of disaster that each human
existence carries in itself in infinitesimal doses. Nothing, not even
glory, can shelter from such eruptions, which aim at the social in
response to the terrorism of the social. Their target is as vast as the
world. Thus, all that employs itself in residing in the Spectacle must
forevermore live in terror of a menace of destruction, which no one
knows whence it emanates, nor what it concerns, and of which one can
just barely guess that it wants itself to be an example. In similar
actions of brilliance, the lack of discernable goal is necessarily a
part of the goal itself, because it is by this that they manifest an
exteriority, a strangeness, an irreducibility to the mode of commodity
unveiling, because it is in this way that they corrode it. It is a
matter of spreading the unease that makes humans metaphysicians and the
doubt that cracks, level after level, the dominant interpretation of the
world. Thus it is in vain that the Spectacle credits us an immediate
goal, if it isn’t maybe the hope to provoke a more or less durable
breakdown in the whole of the machine. Nothing is more similar to
abolishing the totality of the world of administered alienation than one
of those miraculous suspensions where all the humanity that the
Spectacle habitually eclipses brusquely returns, where the empire of
separation is defeated, where the mouths rediscover words which they
must, and where humans are reborn in regard to their fellow humans and
to the indistinguishable need that they have of one another. Domination
sometimes takes many decades to completely recover from a single one of
these moments of intense truth. But one gravely mistakes the strategy of
the Imaginary Party to reduce it to the pursuit of catastrophe. One does
not misunderstand any less in crediting to us the infantilism of wanting
to pulverize, in one blow, who knows which general quarter where power
finds itself concentrated. One does not assault a mode of unveiling like
a fortress, even if the one can usefully lead to the other. Hence, the
Imaginary Party does not aim for a general insurrection against the
Spectacle, nor even for its direct and instantaneous destruction. Rather
it arranges an ensemble of conditions such that domination succumbs as
quickly and as largely as possible to the progressive paralysis to which
its paranoia condemns it. Although it does not abandon at any moment its
designs to achieve this itself, its tactic is not to attack from the
front, but in the same action to hide itself, to orient and to hasten
the issuance of the malady. “It is this that is fearful for the holders
of power that it does not recognize: not letting itself be seized, being
the dissolution of social facts as well as the restive obstinacy to
reinvent in itself a sovereignty that the law can not circumscribe”
(Blanchot, The Shameful Community). Impotent faced with the omnipresence
of this danger, domination, which feels itself more and more alone,
betrayed and fragile, has no other choice but to extend control and
suspicion to the totality of a territory of which, however, free
circulation resides the vital principle. It can encircle its “gated
communities” with as many guardians as it would like, the ground will
continue no less to slip out from under its feet. It is in the essence
of the Imaginary Party to everywhere carve up commodity society, even at
its foundation of credit. Its dissolving practice knows no other limit
than the collapse of what it undermines.
that tend to ruin the imperium of bloody peace as their form. Because
their form is that of an hostility with no specific object, of a
fundamental hatred that wells up, without respect for any obstacle, from
a most unreachable interiority, from unaltered depths where humans
maintain a veritable contact with themselves. That is why there emanates
from them a force that all the chatter of the Spectacle cannot manage to
hold back. Japanese children, whom one might justly consider the most
intense avant-garde of the Imaginary Party, have forged certain words to
designate these absolute fits of rage, where something in them that is
not them, indeed, something much greater than them, takes hold. The
best-known formula is mukatsuku; at the origin it meant “to have
nausea,” that is, to be possessed by the most physical of metaphysical
sensations. In this special rage there is something sacred.
itself, before the massacres, crimes and catastrophes that besiege it,
before this inexplicable mass that accumulates, with noting the
extension of a gap in its vision of the world. Besides, it expresses
without evasion: “one would like that this violence be the fruit of
misery, of great poverty. It would be more easy to admit to” (Evenement
du Jeudi, September 10 1998). As one can observe with a disarming
regularity, its first movement is to advance an explanation at all
costs, as it must ruin all that upon which it could repose in theory.
Thus, when the pathetic Clinton is summoned to give reasons for and to
draw the consequences of the Beautiful Gesture of Kipland Kinkel,
exemplary Bloom by all accounts, he found nothing responsible save “the
influence of the new culture of films and violent videogames”. In so
doing, he made note of the transparence, of the insubstantiality, and of
the radical liquidation of the subject by commodity domination and
publicly recognized that the tragic robinsonnade upon which this
pretends to found itself, the juridical irreducibility of the
individual, is no longer tenable. He ingenuously saps even the principal
of commodity society, without which law, private property, the sale of
labor power, and until now what has been called “culture”, read all the
more like literary fantasy. It would still prefer to sacrifice the whole
edifice of its pseudo-justification rather than to penetrate the reasons
and nature of its enemy. Because otherwise one must grant to Marx that
“the coincidence of the transformation of surroundings and of human
activity or of the transformation of man by himself can only be seized
and rationally comprehended as revolutionary praxis”. Then, for a second
time, we return to this confession that it tries at present to efface;
it is the painful moment where it exhausts itself in ridiculous
epilogues upon the inexistent psychology of the Bloom that has turned to
action. In spite of these interminable considerations, it does not
arrive at defending itself from the sentiment in the trial, which is, at
bottom, that it itself is judged, and that society takes the place of
the accused. It is too evident that the origin of its gesture is nothing
subjective, that it is simply a part, in its saintliness, of the
objectivity of domination. On this point, it comes all the same to
confess, from its very lips, that verily it is a social war that it has
business with, without clarifying, however, which social war, that is to
say who the protagonists are: “the authors of these mad acts, these new
barbarians, are not all head cases. They are most often very ordinary
people” (Evenement du Jeudi, 10 September 1998). From now one it is this
last rhetoric of an absolute hostility, where it presides over the
naming of the enemy who is declared a barbarian and rejected as outside
of humanity, which tends to impose itself in a universal fashion. To
wit, it is now possible to hear, in the midst of a beautiful period of
social peace, such and such a potentate of public transport proclaiming
“we are going to reconquer territory”. And in fact, we see the spread
everywhere, under forms most often painted over, the certitude of the
existence of an un-nameable interior enemy, which pursues a continuous
action of sabotage; but this time, unhappily, there are no more kulaks
to “liquidate as a class”. One would be wrong, thus, to not subscribe to
the paranoiac point of view, which supposes behind the inarticulate
multiplicity of protests in the world a singular will armed with black
designs: because in a world of paranoiacs, it is the paranoiacs who are
right.
even if in fact the inverse produces itself—in effect, it’s rather the
Imaginary Party which holds in its aura the Spectacle-- this suspicion
betrays that while it has qualified these acts of destruction as
“gratuitous”, it has not said everything. It is glaring that the
ensemble of misdeeds that one attributes to “lunatics”, “barbarians”,
“irresponsibles” all contribute in adjacent ways to a unique
unformulated project: the liquidation of commodity domination. In the
last instance, it is always a question of objectively rendering its life
impossible, from propagating unease, doubt and mistrust; to make, in the
modest measure of the means of each one, as much harm as possible.
Nothing can explain the systematic lack of remorse in criminals, if not
the mute sentiment of participating in a grandiose work of devastation.
From all evidence, these people, in themselves insignificant, are the
agents of a severe, historical and transcendent reason that advertises
the destruction of the world--that is to say, the accomplishing of its
nothingness. The sole refinement of those conscious fractions of the
Imaginary Party is the fact that they do not work towards the end of the
world, but the end of a world. This difference could, when the moment
comes, leave a sufficient place to the most reasoned hatred. But this is
without consequence for the Imaginary Party itself, which must remain
the next figure of Spirit.
this Spanish war where the spectacular occupier is ruined by stationing
troops and material, and where a rampant dialectical paroxysm in the
terms of which “the force and the importance of irregularity are
determined by the force and the importance that the regular organization
puts in place” (Carl Schmitt), and inversely. The Imaginary Party can
count upon this constant: that a handful of partisans suffices to
immobilize all the “Party of Order”. In this war that the present
abandons itself to, there remains nothing of a jus belli. Hostility is
absolute. The “Party of Order” itself is not reluctant to recall from
one time to another: it is necessary to operate as a partisan wherever
there are partisans—it suffices to know what prisons have become in the
last decade, and how diverse police forces have in the same time taken
the habit of proceeding with “marginals”, to comprehend that such a
watchword can signify bloody caprice. Thus, as long as commodity
domination subsists, those of the Imaginary Party must expect to receive
from it consideration as criminals to be dealt with, or as partridges to
be shot down, depending on the circumstances. The disproportion of
weapons and punishments that it already brandishes against them does not
join itself to any conjuncture of political repression, it is
consubstantial with what it is, and with what its enemy is. What
expresses this is the simple fact that the Imaginary Party contains in
its principle the negation of all that upon which commodity domination
erects itself, the negation that will manifest itself in action before
manifesting itself as discourse. Different from the revolutions of the
past, the coming insurrection does not call upon any secular
transcendence save the continued disappearance of so many regimes of
oppression eager to justify themselves that end up by being hated. At no
moment does it pretend to draw its legitimacy from the People, from
Opinion, from the Church, the Nation, or the Working Class, even under
an attenuated form. It founds it cause on nothing, but this nothingness
it knows to be identical to being. That its crimes evidence such a
miraculous sovereignty, this proves that it inscribes itself in no
particular transcendence, residing dead; rather that it roots itself in
Transcendence itself, and that without intermediary. It is by this that
it represents for the capitalist State the most considerable peril that
it has ever seen facing it. That which hereafter acts as an obstacle
does not contest this or that aspect of rights, nor this or that law, it
attacks rather that which precedes all laws, the obligation of
obedience. Worse still, the partisan of the Imaginary Party develops in
the most complete violation of all the existing rules without ever
having the sentiment of transgressing them, acting in disdain of them.
They do not oppose themselves to rights, they depose them. It aspires to
a superior justification to all the written and unwritten laws: the text
without a law that it is. It thus renews the absolute scandal of the
Sabbattean doctrine, which affirmed that “the accomplishing of the law
is its transgression”, and left it behind. It itself constitutes, in so
much as it is the living abolition of the ancient law which shares,
divides, and separates, a scrap of Tiqqun. It responds to the state of
exception by the state of exception, and thus returns the whole
juridical edifice back to its sad unreality. Finally it represents no
one, and not from a lack, but on the contrary by excess, by the refusal
of even the principal of representation. Starting from the fundamental
irreducibility of all human existence, it proclaims itself as
non-susceptible to representation, as the un-representable, but also as
the un-representing. Analogous in this to the totality of language, or
of the world, it defies all concrete equivalencies. Such an Imaginary
Party that renders all monuments to law infamous from its origin as a
Roman fiction takes the capitalist State back to the ranks of an
association of criminals only more consequential, more organized and
more powerful than others. This presumes nothing of any social
disorganization: Chicago in the 1920’s was administered in an exemplary
fashion. As we see, the Imaginary Party is also fundamentally anti-state
and anti-popular. Nothing is more odious to it than the idea of
political unity, if not maybe obedience. In the present conditions, it
can be nothing other than the non-party of the multitude because, as the
contemptible Hobbes remarked aptly, “when the citizens rebel against the
State, they are the multitude against the people”.
in the epoch in suspension, at the same time as the invisibility of this
negativity, it is necessary to understand it inseparably from the notion
which lets itself dread the positive content of all the practices of
which the Spectacle can grasp only the negative, that is to say that
which they are not. As it qualifies “the crisis of politics” the massive
defection from the vile, established political space, “the crisis of
culture” the obstinate indifference that welcomes all the shocking waste
that season after season of modern art elaborates, “the crisis of
education” the growing refusal of scholarly incarceration, “ the
economic crisis” as the mute resistance to capitalist modernization and
the always spreading refusal to work, “the crisis of the family” the
resolute sacking of the unhealthy nuclear family, “the crisis of social
ties” that which is nothing other than the rejection of alienated social
relations and spectacular mores, it remains blind before this “silent
revolution... which is not visible by all eyes, that our contemporaries
are the least capable to observe, and that is as difficult to paint in
words as to conceive”. It ignores that “the spirit of the time, growing
slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates
one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That
it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and
there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established
order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all
these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual
crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of
the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a
single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world”
(Hegel). As it sheds its skin, it is true, the snake remains blind.
blind spot of the un-representable of which the Spectacle is
atavistically incapable of a sole glimpse; this is because the Imaginary
Party is, in all its aspects, only the political consequence of the
positivity of which Metaphysical Critique is the concept and the Bloom
the representation. When the Bloom, this creature that is not
administrated by any social determination other than negativity and of
which Hannah Arendt, identifying it a little too quickly with the
mass-man, held “isolation and lack of normal social relations” for the
principle characteristic, becomes besides the dominant human type of the
world, commodity society discovers that it has no more hold on the
subjectivities that it has, however, entirely formed and that it, in
following its proper course, has thus engendered its fitting negation.
In a privileged manner the sphere of sociology shows the failure of
products made for domination: the Bloom is everywhere, but sociology
does not see it anywhere. Similarly, it would be vain to wait for
sociology, as if it could ever give any indication of the effective
existence of the Imaginary Party, which the essence is, for it,
extraterrestrial. It is there, be it said in passing, that but one of
the aspects of the death of sociology, which has definitively outlasted
this socialization of society, which takes away equally well the
socialization of sociology. In this trial it loses itself in realizing
itself, finds itself ridiculed as separate science by its guinea pigs
themselves, who meanwhile have been forced to become their own
sociologists. In this manner, since that central, unique, and
undifferentiated instance, the Spectacle has taken charge of the
continued secretion of all social codes, and the social sciences from
Weber to Bourdieu save and share only the weight of their lies. With the
death of sociology, it is a total failure of classical social critique
founded upon sociology and as sociology that, in collapsing, reveals its
perfidious and servile essence. This critique is no longer at the level
of the epoch, it is neither apt to describe nor to contest. This task
henceforth returns to Metaphysical Criticism.
by friends and enemies of the dominant order, to be like a continuous
line. To this representation one must hereafter substitute the image of
circular and innumerable frontlines, of which each holds in its interior
space-time human communities, practices, languages absolutely
disobedient to commodity domination, and which the latter, according to
its immanent logic, besieges without lapse. All that contributes to
maintaining the ancient representation belongs to the camp of the enemy.
The first consequence of this new geometry of the struggle concerns the
form of the propagation of subversion. We have no more business, in face
of a world of authoritarian commodities, with an advance, company after
company, in a straight line — of the poor, the workers, or the wretched
of the earth — but to a contagion similar to the succession of
concentric circles on the surface of a mercury droplet when it is
touched. Here, the effect of mass as in the past is identically attained
by the intensity of that which is lived at the moment of collapse. It
follows that the elementary revolutionary subject is no longer a class,
or the individual, but the metaphysical community, whatever be its
degree of exile— that’s what evidences, by default, the fundamentally
insignificant character and unimportance, in the Spectacle, of all
personal adventure, of all private history. The good surveyor does not
judge it exaggerated to reduce the world in its ensemble to miniscule
and dispersed centers, because all that is not them, all that does not
give to life a particular and shared existential content is, behind the
lifeless charade of appearance, dead. Each one of these metaphysical
communities awakens to a harsh world where humans can no longer meet
save on the basis of the essential, and constitute, in the midst of the
desert, an exclusive pole of substantiality. All knowledge that does not
possess its own laws, all simple superficiality is excluded in it.
There, conditions create themselves in which the Absolute can recover
its temporal pretensions; possibilities that we have lost since the
Millenarist uprisings and messianic Jewish movements of the 17^(th)
century open themselves. Whatever one says, the acute demand of a new
force and language feel themselves become illuminated well beyond the
misery of the present. And it is precisely this that the forces of
decomposition fear, who promise so many excessive favors to those who
will consent to renounce themselves in order to be liked. The Imaginary
Party does at first only designate the positive fact of this multitude
of zones fully autonomous from commodity domination experiment hic et
nunc, to the spreading disappearance of the alienated Common, the last
convulsions of a social organisms in the process of perishing, and of
the proper forms of Publicity. Until now, there had never been
federation save for intellectualizing. And what binds them is not in
effect, in the first case, more than a passive character: these are
communities in which the meaning and form of life dominates that of life
itself, where the duty to be had been elevated until incandescence. They
share thus the same metaphysical substance, but they do not yet know it.
It is only under the dark auspices of the common persecution by the
global domination of the commodity that condemns them to come to know
themselves for what they are: fractions of the Imaginary Party. There is
in this process something ineluctable: the resistance of these
communities to the generalized accounting expressly designates them to
the steamrollers of the reigning abstraction. But in the end the only
identifiable effect of this oppression is that these independent
universes are led, one by one, and by their enemy no less, to leave the
immediacy of their particularity by which they receive, over the course
of combat, their universal character. And it is in the same proportion
where this enemy is nothing other than a permanent labor of negation of
metaphysics that they accede to the consciousness of what unites them:
not the affirmation of a metaphysical particularity, but of the
metaphysical as such. This tie, all in not being certainly immediate, is
nothing formal, nothing constructed, but rather it is something anterior
of all liberty, and upon which it is founded: existential hostility,
absolute and concrete, to the nihilism of the commodity. It follows from
this that the Imaginary Party does not converge towards a general will,
contrary to all that was called a “party” in the past, because it
already shares the Common, identified here with language, with Spirit,
with the metaphysical, or again to a politics of finitude- all these
terms become in the circumstances so many pseudonyms of a sole
Indescribable. To say that the cohesion of the Imaginary Party is of a
metaphysical order does not thus mean to evoke anything other than this
everyday war of which each one among us finds themselves always already
engaged and which opposes the thorough negation of all aspects of life.
On this point, the necessity of its unification imposes itself on all
its elements, as identical to its becoming conscious: “The struggle is
between the modern world, for one part, and for another part all the
other possible worlds.” (Peguy, Notes conjointes). All those who, liking
truth but certainly not the same truth, agree to ravage the despotism of
the derisory metaphysics of the market attach themselves to the
Imaginary Party. But the movement in which unity produces itself is also
that by which differences pose and solidify themselves. Each specific
community in the fight against the empty universality of the commodity
knows itself, bit by bit, as specific and raises itself to the
consciousness of its specificity, that is to say it diffuses itself by
the universal and understands its reflection. It writes itself into the
concrete generality of Spirit, from which there progresses, amongst all
the celebrated figures, the bacchanal where all irreducibilites are
intoxicated. Fragment following fragment, the reappropriation of the
Common undertakes itself. In this manner in the heat of combat, the
nomadic ballet of communities acquires the complex and architectonic
structure of a system of metaphysical castes of which the principle
could be none other than play, that is to say the sovereign
consciousness of Nothingness. Each metaphysical kingdom slowly learns
the frontiers of its territory on the continent of the Infinite. At the
same time, a common generality constitutes itself, that contains in it
all the different totalities of regional commonalities, that is to say
that it is the tracing of their trimming. One can foresee that with the
approach of victory those of the Imaginary Party will fight no more
battles to defeat an enemy that is at any rate diminished, so much as to
at last be able to give free reign to their metaphysical disagreements,
that they well intend to exhaust physically and by play. In this, they
are the fierce advocates of violence, but of an agonistic violence,
highly ritualized and rich in meaning. As one can see, and it would be
wrong to be deceived, the triumph of the Imaginary Party is equally its
ruin and disintegration.
has nothing in common with all that could be elaborated in classical
political philosophy. If one had to give it an ancestor, it would be
necessary to call to memory that which was fugitively sketched in rare
and precious moments of insurrection, in Soviets, in Communes, in the
Aragon collectives of 1936–1937, or in the secret schools of the
Kabbala, that of Safed, for example. Each time that this last came to
force a way onto the ingrate stage of History, the consequences were
limitless. Few among those who lived in instants where this one — making
break forth in pieces all the amputated and circumscribed forms of
Publicity — let itself be glimpsed, were subsequently even to endure the
sight of the world as it left those whose eyes had sustained the
unequalled aurora of the restitutio in integrum of Tiqqun. But at
present by a necessary consequence of evolution, in so much as it
progresses in all the developed capitalist societies, one has never
known this thing save in the violent fractures that silently install
themselves in the calm and for their duration as unperceived, in so much
as their forwardness seems to be self-evident. Truly a curious
spectacle, that of a world where the dominant forms of existence know
they have been, according to the concept, surpassed, and yet persist in
existing, as if nothing had happened; meanwhile, on this side the
extreme alienation of Publicity imposed by the Spectacle, and as
counterweight, we see dawn, yet mingled with the contrary principle, a
humanity of which meaning is the exclusive nourishment, although
corrupted. Free of the necessity to produce, liberated from the chains
of cloistered work, fragile worlds compose themselves for which elective
affinitive are all and servitude nothing. The ruins of the metropolis
already contain nothing more of living than fluid aggregations of
individual humans who, finding no reason for alienation, bypass it in
all directions. The slavery of humans in the Spectacle seems no less
extravagant to them than their liberty is incomprehensible to the
slaves. In the suspension of their existence, the problems of the world
cease to be problematic, it has become the material in which they live.
Language no longer appears to them as a laborious exteriority that must
be internalized to then apply it to the world, it has become the
immediate substance of that world. At no moment does their action detach
itself as separate from their words. One understands thus that the
Spectacle, where politics and economics remain abstractions separated
from metaphysics, represents for them a prior form of Publicity. But it
is in fact all the old petrified dualisms that, in the substantive
continuity of meaning, abolish themselves. In the midst of these rich
totalities of meaning, full and overt, eternity finds itself lodged in
each instant and the entire universe in each of its details. Their
world, the city, shelters them as an interiority, while their
interiority has taken on the dimensions of a world. They are already, in
a partial, provisional, and sadly reversible manner, in the “restoration
of the broken unity of the real and the transcendent” (Lukacs). But for
the caprices of domination, their life leads itself to the realization
of all human potentialities that it contains. This next figure of
Publicity corresponds to the maximum deployment of this, that is to say
that it espouses language without the least restraint, that it is the
language, just as it knows silence. With it, essence is no longer
distinguishable from appearance, but humanity has ceased to confound
these with itself. With it, Spirit has its Rest, and attends in peace
its own metamorphoses. Language is there the unique law, new and
eternal, that goes beyond all past laws of which it was certainly the
material, but in a crystallized state. If the ancient forms of Publicity
bring themselves up in more or less equilibrated constructions, more or
less harmonious, this one is on the contrary horizontal, labyrinthine,
and topological. No representation can surpass it on any point; all its
space advertises being explored. As to the operational articulation of
the Imaginary Party, in regard to the innervation of the world, this is
not assured by any system of vertical delegation, but in a mode of
transmission itself inscribed in the limitless horizontality of
language: that of the Example. The geographical plane of the world of
Tiqqun in no way signifies the abolition of values and the end of all
human pursuit of exploration. Only, it is by “the authority of the
prototype and not the normativity of order” (Virno) that it is permitted
to humans, as it already is to fractions of the Imaginary Party, to
impose their excellence. The map of the world that we draw is nothing
other than the map of Spirit. And it is at present this Publicity of
Spirit that, on all sides, overflows the party of nothingness, of which
the idiocy and baseness become each day more ferocious and more
intolerable. We will put an end to it, inevitably.
the Imaginary Party and freedom henceforth devastates entire regions of
the social space. There it decrees measures of protection of which have
been common only in world conflicts: curfews, military escorts,
methodical information gathering, control of weapons and communications,
putting into trusteeship whole sectors of the economy, etc. The humans
of our time march straight to an immeasurable fear. Their nightmares are
peopled with tortures that no longer belong only to the domain of
dreams. Now, one speaks of pirates, of monsters, and of giants. Tied to
the progress of a universal sentiment of insecurity, facial expressions
bear the evidence of a fatal and continued accumulation of small nervous
fatigues. And as each epoch dreams the following, little sultans emerge
suddenly and dispute amongst themselves the control of a public space
already reduced to the space of circulation. The weakest spirits give
themselves over to insane rumors that no one is in a position to confirm
or deny. Tenebrous infinities have filled the distance that humans have
left amongst one another. Each day make a little more clear, in spite of
the growing obscurity, the lugubrious profile of civil war where no one
knows who does and does not fight, where confusion is limited by death
alone; where nothing is assured, in the end, but worse to come. We thus
hold ourselves, on this side of all growth, in the evidence of the
disaster, but nothing can restrain our glances going to the beyond. Thus
it seems that these are the “birth pangs” which no new epoch has the
right to preserve itself from. Those who sharpen their glance to
distinguish in the night the nearby combat of giants discover that all
this desolation, all these dull echoes of cannon, all these faceless
screams are not, in fact, but of the lone, hideous Titan of commodity
domination which in its bloody delirium struggles, howls, burns, and
tramples; to insure that we want its hide, it hurries off nonsensical
orders, rolls on the ground and finishes by hitting with all its weight
the walls of its living-room. In the profundity of its folly, it judges
that the Imaginary Party is only the obscurity that surrounds it, and
that this must be abolished. To hear it, it seems to have had it with
this territory of wrongdoing that persists in never coinciding with the
map, and already it menaces it with the worst reprisals. But in
proportion as the day exhausts it, no one listens anymore, its closest
subjects themselves lend no more than an absent-minded ear to this
capering old lunatic. They act as if to listen, and then they wink at
one another.
evolution, because it is already practically, that is to say the
existence in fact, of its dissolution and transcendence. Consequently,
it is not a question for it of taking power, but solely of making
domination fail everywhere, by durably making it impossible for its
apparatus to function—the temporary character, and even the fugitive
places, of the contestation that operates under the banner of the
Imaginary Party explain themselves by this: it is guaranteed to never
become a power itself. This is why the violence it has recourse to is of
a totally different nature than that of the Spectacle, and this is also
why it fights alone in obscurity. While commodity domination unleashes
its “empty liberty”, its “negative will which has no feeling of
existence save in destruction”(Hegel), so long as its pointless violence
aspires to nothing but the infinite extension of nothingness, the
exercise of violence by the Imaginary Party, although unlimited, only
attaches itself to the preservation of forms of life that power prepares
to alter, or already menaces. From thence comes its force and its
incomparable aura, from thence also comes its richness and its absolute
legitimacy. Even in the midst of the offensive, it is a violence of
conservation. We rediscover here the dissymmetry of which we have
spoken. The Imaginary Party does not pursue the same end as domination,
and if they are concurrent, it is that each one among them wants to
destroy that which the other attempts to realize; with this difference
however, that the Spectacle does not want more than that. That the
Imaginary Party should come to the end of commodity society and that
this victory should be irreversible will depend on its faculty of giving
intensity, greatness and substance to a life free of all domination, no
less than the aptitude of its conscious fractions to make this explicit
in their practice as much as in their theory. It is to be feared that
domination would yet prefer to the eventuality of its defeat a
generalized suicide where it will be at least assured of bringing with
it its adversary. From one end to the other, it is a bet that we make.
It belongs to history to judge if what we undertake is but a beginning
or already an end. The Absolute is in history.