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Title: Beyond Good and Evil! Author: Daniel Colson Date: early 2000s Language: en Topics: criticism and critique, morality, Nietzsche Source: Retrieved on February 18, 2011 from https://web.archive.org/web/20170208120636/https://raforum.info/spip.php?article3477&lang=fr Notes: Translation by Jesse Cohn.
I am radically in disagreement with Philippe Corcuff (Charlie Hebdo n°
548, 18/12/2002). Anarchism does not authorize half measures. That is to
say its major inspiration indeed comes from nihilism and from a
relativism or an absolute subjectivism, justifying the point of view of
the Nazi, the libertarian banker, the Stalinist prosecutor as well as
that of the revolutionary autogestionnaire syndicalist, and he should
then reject it radically. That is to say its autogestionnaire and
federalist subjectivism and perspectivism indeed contain a true
alternative to the failures of all the other forms of socialism and it
is then necessary to examine the anarchist project attentively and
without half measures, to endorse it or to refuse it.
In following Corcuff, let us stop on what seems to be the most
scandalous point, but also the point which is most decisive, concerning
the anarchist dimension of Nietzsche (but especially of Spinoza, in
fact) : the refusal of the distinction between good and evil, and its
replacement by the distinction between what is good and what is bad for
a given being, in which, as the anarchist Ernest Coeuderoy writes, “when
each one fights for his own cause, no one will need to be represented
any longer”. It is not certain that Corcuff is not led, in his
criticism, to be satisfied once again to the half-measures which so
often ensnare emancipatory movements in the governmental drifts of
socialism, whether they take the hard form of the immoral and oppressive
dictatorships of state socialism or the apparently gentler form of
rallying wholeheartedly to the existing capitalist order.
The first of the half-measures one finds, to begin with, in the way in
which Corcuff can recognize at the same time that the distinction
between good and the evil is at the foundation of all the oppressive
transcendences (God and his priests or imams, the State and its judges,
Capital and its commercial logic, Science and its apparent
determinisms), but while at the same time he is afraid to see this
distinction radically replaced by an immanent evaluation of what is good
and what is bad for human beings. However, in this matter more than
others, half measures are impossible. Even in a homeopathic dose, even
in dotted lines, the transcendence of good and evil, truth and
falsehood, always tends to impose the domination of its priests, its
leaders, its scientists, its parties, its States and its judges, its
more or less violent compromises with the existing order. The
emancipatory struggle has no choice. A radically immanent emancipatory
movement must be developed, founded on federalism, the free association
of free forces, self-management, the capacity of beings (whether
individual or collective) to determine for themselves the reality of the
values which link them, without relying on any external authority, on
any external regulation.
Corcuff’s second half measure concerns his reading of the anarchist
project. Our “libertarian social democrat” (undoubtedly too much a
“social democrat” and insufficiently “libertarian”) is right to
emphasize how much anarchism, Nietzsche, and Spinoza challenge any
transcendence, any categorical imperative, any external law. But he does
not understand in what respects anarchism — like Nietzsche and Spinoza —
is always committed to an ethical evaluation of the quality and value of
the forces which motivate communities and human beings, an evaluation
entirely internal to these forces, an immanent judgement, particularly
demanding, which proceeds directly through the processes of association
and disassociation of emancipatory forces, by the selection and
federation of the forces able to make an emancipated world prevail.