Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee‘s previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” Now emerges at a time when the Invisible Committee’s contestation has found echoes throughout the West, with a collapse of trust in the police, an inept weariness on the part of the political system, a growing urgency for opposition, a return of the theme of the Commune, a vanishing distinction between radicals and citizens, and a widespread refusal on the part of the citizen to be governed. As farcical political elections continue to unfold worldwide like a line of tumbling dominoes, and governments increasingly struggle to reclaim a legitimacy that has already slipped out of their grasp, Now clarifies the Invisible Committee’s attitude toward all such elections and their outcome: one of utter indifference. Now proposes a “destituent process” that charts out a different path to be taken, a path of outright refusal that simply ignores elections altogether. It is a path that calls for taking over the world and not taking power, for exploring new forms of life and not a new constitution, and for desertion and silence as alternatives to proclamations and crashes. It is also a call for an unprecedented communism—a communism stronger than nation and country.

Originally published by Ill Will Editions. The Invisible Committee are an anonymous fragment of the imaginary Party. First published as Maintenant in May, 2017. Translated by Robert Hurley.

Note: Enough is Enough is not organizing any of these events, we are publishing this text for people across the US and Europe to be able to see what is going on and for documentation only.

The Invisible Commitee: Now

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Content:

Tomorrow Is Cancelled

Fifty Shades Of Breakage

Death To Politics

Let’s Destitute The World

End Of Work, Magical Life

Everyone Hates The Police

For The Ones To Come

No more waiting.

No more hoping.

No more letting ourselves be distracted, unnerved.

Break and enter.

Put untruth back in its place.

Believe in what we feel.

Act accordingly.

Force our way into the present.

Try. Fail this time. Try again. Fail better.

Persist. Attack. Build.

Go down one’s road.

Win perhaps.

In any case, overcome.

Live, therefore.

Now…

Tomorrow Is Cancelled

All the reasons for making a revolution are there. Not one is lacking. The shipwreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of falsehood, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, galloping misery, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse—we are spared nothing, not even being informed about it all. “Climate: 2016 breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces, the same as almost every year now. All the reasons are there together, but it’s not reasons that make revolutions, it’s bodies. And the bodies are in front of screens.

One can watch a presidential election sink like a stone. The transformation of “the most important moment in French political life” into a big trashing fest only makes the soap opera more captivating. One couldn’t imagine Koh-Lanta with such characters, such dizzying plot twists, such cruel tests, or so general a humiliation. The spectacle of politics lives on as the spectacle of its decomposition. Disbelief goes nicely with the filthy landscape. The National Front, that political negation of politics, that negation of politics on the terrain of politics, logically occupies the “center” of this chessboard of smoking ruins. The human passengers, spellbound, are watching their shipwreck like a first-rate show. They are so enthralled that they don’t feel the water that’s already bathing their legs. In the end, they’ll transform everything into a buoy. The drowning are known for that, for trying to turn everything they touch into a life preserver.

This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world. There’s nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can be said about him, he’s already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he’s proud of it. Even the creators of South Park are throwing in the towel: “Its very complicated now that satire has become reality. We really tried to laugh about what is going on but it wasn’t possible to maintain the rhythm. What was happening was much funnier that what could be imagined. So we decided to let it go, to let them do their comedy, and we’ll do ours.” We live in a world that has established itself beyond any justification. Here, criticism doesn’t work, any more than satire does. Neither one has any impact. To limit oneself to denouncing discriminations, oppressions, and injustices, and expect to harvest the fruits of that is to get one’s epochs wrong. Leftists who think they can make something happen by lifting the lever of bad conscience are sadly mistaken. They can go and scratch their scabs in public and air their grievances hoping to arouse sympathy as much as they like; they’ll only give rise to contempt and the desire to destroy them. “Victim” has become an insult in every part of the world.

There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now. It’s no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public personalities who “do communication,” it’s every self-entrepreneur that this society wants to turn us into who practices the art of “public relations.” Having become an instrument of communication, language is no longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies. Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to distort things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become universal. One doesn’t shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses “offer jobs.” The surveillance cameras are “video-protection devices.” The executioners complain that they’re being persecuted. The traitors profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand, and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counterpoint, the perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of others. In all quarters it’s only a question of preserving or extending one’s interests. In return, the world is filling up with silent people. Certain ones of these explode into crazy acts of a sort that we’ve seen at briefer and briefer intervals. What is surprising about this? We should stop saying, “Young people don’t believe in anything anymore.” And say instead: “Damn! They’re not swallowing our lies anymore.” No longer say, “Young people are nihilistic,” but “My lord, if this continues they’re going to survive the collapse of our world.”

The exchange value of language has fallen to zero, and yet we go on writing. It’s because there is another use of language. One can talk about life, and one can talk from the standpoint of life. One can talk about conflicts, and one can talk from the midst of conflict. It’s not the same language, or the same style. It’s not the same idea of truth either. There is a “courage of truth” that consists in taking shelter behind the objective neutrality of “facts.” There is a different one that considers that speech which doesn’t commit one to anything, doesn’t stand on its own, doesn’t risk its position, doesn’t cost anything, is not worth very much. The whole critique of finance capitalism cuts a pale figure next to a shattered bank window tagged with “Here. These are your premiums!” It’s not through ignorance that “young people” appropriate rappers’ punch lines for their political slogans instead of philosophers’ maxims. And it’s out of decency that they don’t take up the shouts of “We won’t give an inch!” by militants who are about to relinquish everything. It’s because the latter are talking about the world, and the former are talking from within a world.

The real lie is not the one we tell others but the one we tell ourselves. The first lie is relatively exceptional in comparison with the second. The big lie is refusing to see certain things that one does see and refusing to see them just as one sees them. The real lie is all the screens, all the images, all the explanations that are allowed to stand between oneself and the world. It’s how we regularly dismiss our own perceptions. So much so that where it’s not a question of truth, it won’t be a question of anything. There will be nothing. Nothing but this planetary insane asylum. Truth is not something one would strive towards, but a frank relation to what is there. It is a “problem” only for those who already see life as a problem. It’s not something one professes but a way of being in the world. It is not held, therefore, nor accumulated. It manifests itself in a situation and from moment to moment. Whoever senses the falseness of a being, the noxious character of a representation, or the forces that move beneath a play of images releases any grip these might have had. Truth is a complete presence to oneself and to the world, a vital contact with the real, an acute perception of the givens of existence. In a world where everyone play-acts, where everyone puts on a performance, where one communicates all the more as nothing really is said, the very word “truth” produces a chill or is greeted with annoyance or sniggers. Everything sociable that this epoch contains has become so dependent on the crutches of untruth that it can’t do without them. “Proclaiming the truth” is not at all recommended. Speaking truth to people who can’t take even tiny doses of it will only expose you to their vengeance. In what follows we don’t claim in any instance to convey “the truth” but rather the perception we have of the world, what we care about, what keeps us awake and alive. The common opinion must be rejected: truths are multiple, but untruth is one, because it is universally arrayed against the slightest truth that surfaces.

All year long we’re pummeled with words about the thousand threats that surround us—terrorists, migrants, endocrine disruptors, fascism, unemployment. In this way the unshakeable routine of capitalist normality is perpetuated—against a background of a thousand failed conspiracies, a hundred averted catastrophes. As to the pallid anxiety which they try, day after day, to implant in our heads, by way of armed military patrols, breaking news, and governmental announcements, one has to credit riots with the paradoxical virtue of freeing us from it. This is something that the lovers of those funeral processions called “demonstrations,” all those who taste, over a glass of rouge, the bitter enjoyment of always being defeated, all those who give out a flatulent “Or else it’s going to blow up!” before they prudently climb back into their bus, cannot understand. In a street confrontation, the enemy has a well-defined face, whether he’s in civilian clothes or in armor. He has methods that are largely known. He has a name and a function. In fact, he’s a “civil servant,” as he soberly declares. The friend, too, has gestures, movements, and an appearance that are recognizable. In the riot there is an incandescent presence to oneself and to others, a lucid fraternity which the Republic is quite incapable of generating. The organized riot is capable of producing what this society cannot create: lively and irreversible bonds. Those who dwell on images of violence miss everything that’s involved in the fact of taking the risk together of breaking, of tagging, of confronting the cops. One never comes out of one’s first riot unchanged. It’s this positivity of the riot that the spectators prefer not to see and that frightens them more deeply than the damage, the charges and counter-charges. In the riot there is a production and affirmation of friendships, a focused configuration of the world, clear possibilities of action, means close at hand. The situation has a form and one can move within it. The risks are sharply defined, unlike those nebulous “risks” that the governing authorities like to hang over our existences. The riot is desirable as a moment of truth. It is a momentary suspension of the confusion. In the tear gas, things are curiously clear and the real is finally legible. It’s difficult then not to see who is who. Speaking of the insurrectionary day of July 15, 1927 in Vienna, Elias Canetti said: “It’s the closest thing to a revolution that I have experienced. Hundreds of pages would not be enough for describing all that I saw.” He drew from that day the inspiration for his masterwork, Crowds and Power. The riot is formative by virtue of what it makes visible.

In the Royal Navy there was this old toast, “Confusion to our enemies!” Confusion has a strategic value. It is not a chance phenomenon. It scatters purposes and prevents them from converging again. It has the ashy taste of defeat, when the battle has not taken place, and probably will never take place. All the recent attacks in France were thus followed by a train of confusion, which opportunely increased the governmental discourse about them. Those who claim them, and those who call for war against those who claim these attacks, all have an interest in our confusion. As for those who carry them out, they are very often children—the children of confusion.

This world that talks so much has nothing to say: it is bereft of positive statements. Perhaps it believed it could make itself immune to attack in this way. More than anything else, however, it placed itself at the mercy of any serious affirmation. A world whose positivity is built on so much devastation deserves to have what is life-affirming take the form initially of wrecking, breaking, rioting. They always try to portray us as desperate individuals, on the grounds that we act, we build, we attack without hope. Hope. Now there’s at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We’re not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is a form of waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present—in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare oneself in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless. It’s to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It’s wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It’s a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we’re no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We’re daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It’s an avoidance of now. But there isn’t, there’s never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to understand that it too used to be a now. It’s to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it’s because now is the time of decision. It’s the locus of the “I accept” or the “I refuse,” of “I’ll pass on that” or “I’ll go with that.” It’s the locus of the logical act that immediately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. “In the end,” things will change; “in the end,” beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let’s go on this way, let’s remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn’t seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.

Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They’re still restrained by so many things. They feel held back because they’ve made the choice, but the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize, to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.

The epoch belongs to the determined.

Fifty Shades Of Breakage

“Nothing’s right anymore,” say the poor losers. “Yes, the world’s in a bad state,” says the conventional wisdom. We say rather that the world is fragmenting. We were promised a new world order, but it’s the opposite that’s occurring. A planetary generalization of liberal democracy was announced but what is generalizing instead are “the electoral insurrections” against it and its hypocrisy, as the liberals bitterly complain. Zone after zone, the fragmentation of the world continues, unceremoniously and without interruption. And this is not just an affair of geopolitics. It’s in every domain that the world is fragmenting, it’s in every domain that unity has become problematic. Nowadays there is no more unity in “society” than there is in science. The wage-work system is breaking up into niches, exceptions, dispensatory conditions. The idea of a “precariat” conveniently hides the fact that there is simply no longer a shared experience of work, even precarious work. With the consequence that there can no longer be a shared experience of its stoppage either, and the old myth of the general strike must be put on the shelf of useless accessories. In like manner, Western medicine has been reduced to tinkering with techniques that break its doctrinal unity into pieces, such as acupuncture, hypnosis, or magnetism. Politically, beyond the usual parliamentary messing around, there’s no more majority for anything. During the conflict in the spring of 2016, precipitated by the loi Travail, the most astute journalistic commentary noted that two minorities, a governmental minority and a minority of demonstrators, were clashing in front of a population of spectators. Our very ego-self appears as a more and more complex, less and less coherent puzzle, so that to make it hold together, in addition to pills and therapy sessions, algorithms are necessary now. It’s pure irony that the word “wall” is used to describe the solid stream of images, information, and commentary by which Facebook attempts to give a shape to the self. The contemporary experience of life in a world composed of circulation, telecommunications, networks, a welter of real-time information and images trying to capture our attention, is fundamentally discontinuous. On a completely different scale, the particular interests of the elite are becoming more and more difficult to posit as the “general interest.” One only has to see how hard it is for states to implement their infrastructure projects, from the Susa Valley to Standing Rock, to realize that things aren’t working anymore. The fact that now they have to be ready to bring the army and its special units into the national territory to protect building sites of any importance shows rather clearly that these projects are seen for the mafia-type operations that they are.

The unity of the Republic, that of science, that of the personality, that of the national territory, or that of “culture” have never been anything but fictions. But they were effective. What is certain is that the illusion of unity can no longer do its work of fooling people, of bringing them into line, of disciplining them. In every domain, hegemony is dead and the singularities are becoming wild: they bear their own meaning in themselves, no longer expecting it from a general order. The petty supervisory voice that allowed anyone with a bit of authority to ventrilocate for others, to judge, classify, hierarchize, moralize, to tell everyone what they need to do and how they need to be, has become inaudible. All the “need-to’s” are lying on the ground. The militant who knows what must be done, the professor who knows what you need to think, the politician who will tell you what is needed for the country, speak in the desert. As things stand, nothing can match the singular experience where it exists. One rediscovers that opening oneself to the world doesn’t mean opening oneself to the four corners of the planet, that the world is there where we are. Opening ourselves to the world is opening ourselves to its presence here and now. Each fragment carries its own possibility of perfection. If “the world” is to be saved this will be in each of its fragments. As for the totality, it can only be managed.

The epoch takes amazing shortcuts. Real democracy is buried where it was born two thousand five hundred years before with the way in which Alexis Tsipras, scarcely elected, got no rest until he had negotiated its capitulation. One can read on its tombstone, ironically speaking, these words of the German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schauble: “We can’t let elections change anything whatsoever.” But the most striking thing is that the geopolitical epicenter of the world’s fragmentation is precisely the place where its unification began under the name “civilization,” five thousand years ago: Mesopotamia. If a certain geopolitical chaos seems to be taking hold of the world, it’s in Iraq and Syria that this is most dramatically demonstrated, that is, in the exact location where civilization’s general setting in order began. Writing, accounting, History, royal justice, parliament, integrated farming, science, measurement, political religion, palace intrigues and pastoral power—this whole way of claiming to govern “for the good of the subjects,” for the sake of the flock and its well-being— everything that can be lumped into what we still call “civilization” was already, three thousand years before Jesus Christ, the distinguishing mark of the kingdoms of Akkad and Sumer. Of course there will be attempts at cobbling together a new denominational Iraqi state. Of course the international interests will end up mounting harebrained operations aimed at state building in Syria. But in Syria as in Iraq, state-directed humanity is dead. The intensity of the conflicts has risen too high for an honest reconciliation to still be possible. The counter-insurrectionary war that the regime of Bashar Al-Assad has conducted against his population, with the support that we’re aware of, has reached such extremes that no negotiations will ever again lead to anything like a “new Syrian state” worthy of the name. And no attempt at people-shaping—the bloody putting into practice of Brecht’s ironic poem after the workers’ uprising of 1953 against the new Soviet regime in East Germany: “The people through its own fault/ Has lost the confidence of the government/ And only by redoubling its efforts/ Can it win it back/Would it not be easier then/ For the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one?”—will have any positive effect; the ghosts of the dead won’t let themselves be subdued by barrels of TNT. No one who’s given some thought to what the European states were like in the time of their “splendor” can look at what still goes by the name of “state” these days and see anything other than failures. Compared to the transnational powers, the states can no longer maintain themselves except in the form of holograms. The Greek state is no longer anything more than a conveyor of instructions it has no say in. The British state is reduced to walking the tightrope with Brexit. The Mexican state no longer controls anything. The Italian, Spanish, or Brazilian states no longer appear to have any activity beyond surviving the continuous avalanches of scandal. Whether on the pretext of “reform” or by fits of “modernization,” the present-day capitalist states are engaging in an exercise of methodical self-dismantling. Not to mention the “separatist temptations” that are multiplying across Europe. It’s not hard to discern, behind the attempts at authoritarian restoration in so many of the world’s countries a form of civil war that will no longer end. Whether in the name of the war against “terrorism,” “drugs,” or “poverty,” the states are coming apart at the seams. The facades remain, but they only serve to mask a pile of rubble. The global disorder now exceeds any capacity to restore order. As an ancient Chinese sage put it: “When order reigns in the world, a fool can disturb it by himself alone; when chaos takes hold of it, a wise man cannot bring back the order by himself alone.”

We are the contemporaries of a prodigious reversal of the process of civilization into a process of fragmentation. The more civilization aspires to a universal completion, the more it implodes at its foundation. The more this world aims for unification, the more it fragments. When did it shift imperceptibly on its axis? Was it the world coup that followed the attacks of September 11? The “financial crisis” of 2008? The failure of the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009? What is sure is that that summit marked a point of irreversibility in this shift. The cause of the atmosphere and the planet offered civilization the ideal pretext for its completion. In the name of the species and its salvation, in the name of the planetary totality, in the name of terrestrial Unity one was going to be able to govern every behavior of each one of the Earths inhabitants and every one of the entities that it accommodates on its surface. The presiding authorities were within an inch of proclaiming the universal and ecological imperium mundi. This was “in the interest of all.” The majority of the human and natural milieus, customs, and forms of life, the telluric character of every existence, all that would have to yield before the necessity of uniting the human species, which one was finally going to manage from who knows what directorate. This was the logical outcome of the process of unification that has always animated “the great adventure of humanity” since a little band of Sapiens escaped from the Rift Valley. Up till then, one hoped that the “responsible parties” would come to a sensible agreement, that the “responsible parties,” in a word, would be responsible. And surprise! What actually happened at Copenhagen is that nothing happened. And that is why the whole world has forgotten it. No emperor, even of the collegial sort. No decision by the spokespersons of the Species. Since then, with the help of the “economic crisis,” the drive toward unification has reversed into a global everyone-for-themselves. Seeing that there will be no common salvation, everyone will have to achieve their salvation on their own, on whatever scale, or abandon every idea of salvation. And attempt to lose oneself in technologies, profits, parties, drugs, and heart-breakers, with anxiety pegged to one’s soul.

The dismantling of all political unity is inducing an evident panic in our contemporaries. The omnipresence of the question of “national identity” in the public debate attests to this. “La France,” a world-class exemplar of the modern state, is having an especially hard time accepting its consignment to the junkyard. It’s obviously because “feeling French” has never made so little sense that what we have in the way of ambitious politicians are reduced to embroidering endlessly on “the national identity.” And since, despite those glorious “1500 years of History” which they keep harping on, no one seems to have a clear idea what “being French” might mean, they fall back on the basics: the wine and the great men, the sidewalk terraces and the police, when it’s not quite simply the Ancien Regime and the Christian roots. Yellowed figures of a national unity for ninth-grade manuals.

All that is left of unity is nostalgia, but it speaks more and more loudly. Candidates present themselves as wanting to restore the national greatness, to “Make America Great Again” or “set France back in order.” At the same time, when one is wistful for French Algeria, is there anything one can’t be nostalgic about? Everywhere, they promise therefore to reconstruct the national unity by force. But the more they “divide” by going on about the “feeling of belonging,” the more the certainty spreads of not being part of the whole they have in mind. To mobilize panic in order to restore order is to miss what panic contains that is essentially dispersive. The process of general fragmentation is so unstoppable that all the brutality that will be used in order to recompose the lost unity will only end up accelerating it, deepening it and making it more irreversible. When there’s no longer a shared experience, apart from that of coming together again in front of the screens, one can very well create brief moments of national communion after attacks by deploying a maudlin, false, and hollow sentimentality, one can decree all sorts of “wars against terrorism,” one can promise to take back control of all the “zones of unlawfulness,” but all this will remain a BFM-TV newsflash at the back of a kebab house, and with the sound turned off. This kind of nonsense is like medications: for them to stay effective, it’s always necessary to increase the dose, until the final neurasthenia sets in. Those who don’t mind the prospect of finishing their existence in a cramped and super-militarized citadel, be it as great as “La France,” while all around the waters are rising, carrying the bodies of the unlucky, may very well declare those who displease them to be “traitors to the Nation.” In their barkings, one only hears their powerlessness. In the long run, extermination is not a solution.

We mustn’t be disheartened by the state of degradation of the debate in the public sphere. If they vociferate so loudly it’s because no one is listening anymore. What is really occurring, under the surface, is that everything is pluralizing, everything is localizing, everything is revealing itself to be situated, everything is fleeing. It’s not only that the people are lacking, that they are playing the role of absent subscribers, that they don’t give any news, that they are lying to the pollsters, it’s that they have already packed up and left, in many unsuspected directions. They’re not simply abstentionist, hanging back, not to be found: they are in flight, even if their flight is inner or immobile. They are already elsewhere. And it won’t be the great bush-beaters of the extreme left, the Third Republic-type of socialist senators taking themselves for Castro, a la Melenchon, who will bring people back to the fold. What is called “populism” is not just the blatant symptom of the people’s disappearance, it’s a desperate attempt to hold on to what’s left of it that’s distressed and disoriented. As soon as a real political situation presents itself, like the conflict of the spring of 2016, what manifests itself in a diffuse way is all the shared intelligence, sensitivity, and determination which the public hubbub sought to cover over. The event constituted by the appearance, in the conflict, of the “cortège de tête” has shown this rather clearly. Given that the social body is taking on water from all sides, including the old union framework, it was obvious to every demonstrator who was still alive that the feet-dragging marches were a form of pacification through protest. Thus from demonstration to demonstration one saw at the head of the processions all those who aim to desert the social cadaver to avoid contracting its little death. It started with the high-school students. Then all sorts of young and not so young demonstrators, militants, and unorganized elements, swelled the ranks. To top it off, during the 14th of June demonstration, entire union sections, including the longshoremen of Le Havre, joined an out-of-control head contingent of 10,000 persons. It would be a mistake to see the taking over of the head of these demonstrations as a kind of historical revenge by “anarchists,” “autonomists,” or the other usual suspects at the end of demonstrations, who traditionally find themselves at the tail of marches, engaging in ritual skirmishes. What happened there, as if naturally, was that a certain number of deserters created a political space in which to make something out of their heterogeneity, a space that was insufficiently organized certainly, but rejoinable and for the duration of a spring, truly existing. The cortège de tête came to be a kind of receptacle of the general fragmentation. As if, by losing all its power of aggregation, this “society” liberated from all quarters little autonomous kernels—territorially, sectorially, or politically situated—and for once these kernels found a way to group together. If the cortège de têtesucceeded finally in magnetizing a significant part of those combating the world of the loi Travail this is not because all those people had suddenly become “autonomous”—the heterogeneous character of its components argues against that—it’s because, in the situation, it had the benefit of a presence, a vitality, and a truthfulness that were lacking in the rest.

The cortège de tête was so clearly not a subject detachable from the rest of the demonstration but rather a gesture, that the police never managed to isolate it, as they regularly tried to do. To put an end to the scandal of its existence, to reestablish the traditional image of the union march with the bosses of the different labor confederations at its head, to neutralize this cortège systematically composed of young hooded ones who defy the police, of older ones who support them or free workers who break through the lines of riot police, it was necessary finally to kettle the whole demonstration. So at the end of June there was the humiliating scene around the basin of the Arsenal, which was surrounded by a formidable police presence—a nice demoralization maneuver arranged jointly by the labor unions and the government. That day L’Humanité would run a front page story on the remarkable “victory” the demonstration represented—it’s a tradition among Stalinists to cover their retreats with litanies of triumph. The long French spring of 2016 established this evident fact: the riot, the blockade, and the occupation form the basic political grammar of the epoch.

“Kettling” does not simply constitute a technique of psychological warfare which the French order belatedly imported from England. Kettling is a dialectical image of current political power. It’s the figure of a despised, reviled power that no longer does anything but keep the population in its nets. If it’s the figure of a power that no longer promises anything, and has no other activity than locking all the exits. A power that no one supports anymore in a positive way, that everyone tries to flee as best they can, and that has no other perspective than to keep in its confining bosom all that is on the verge of escaping it. The figure of kettling is dialectical in that what it is designed to confine, it also brings together. It is a site where meet-ups take place between those who are trying to desert. Novel chants, full of irony, are invented there. A shared experience develops within its enclosure. The police apparatus is not equipped to contain the vertical escape that occurs in the form of tags that will soon embellish every wall, every bus shelter, every business. And that give evidence that the mind remains free even when the bodies are held captive. “Victory through chaos,” “In ashes, all becomes possible,” “France, its wine, its revolutions,” “Homage to the families of the broken windows,” “Kiss kiss bank bank,” “I think, therefore I break”: since 1968, the walls had not seen such a freedom of spirit. “From here, from this country where it’s hard for us to breathe an air that is more and more rarefied, where each day we feel more like foreigners, there could only come this fatigue that eroded us with emptiness, with imposture. For lack of anything better, we paid each other in words, the adventure was literary, the commitment was platonic. As for tomorrows revolution, a possible revolution, who among us still believed in it?” This is how Pierre Peuchmaurd, in Plus vivant que jamais, describes the atmosphere that May 1968 swept away. One of the most remarkable aspects of the fragmentation that’s underway is that it affects the very thing that was thought to ensure the maintenance of social unity: the Law. With the exceptional antiterrorist legislation, the gutting of the labor laws, the increasing specialization of jurisdictions and courts of prosecution, the Law no longer exists. Take criminal law. On the pretext of antiterrorism and fighting “organized criminality,” what has taken shape from year to year is the constitution of two distinct laws: a law for “citizens” and a “penal law of the enemy.” It was a German jurist, appreciated by the South American dictatorships in their time, who theorized it. His name is Gunther Jacobs. Concerning the riffraff, the radical opponents, the “thugs,” the “terrorists,” the “anarchists,” in short: all those who don’t have enough respect for the democratic order in force and pose a “danger” to “the normative structure of society,” Gunther Jacobs notes that, more and more, a special treatment is reserved for them that is in derogation of normal criminal law, to the point of no longer respecting their constitutional rights. Is it not logical, in a sense, to treat as enemies those who behave as “enemies of society”? Aren’t they in the business of “excluding themselves from the law”? And so for them shouldn’t one recognize the existence of a “penal law of the enemy” that consists precisely in the complete absence of any law? For example, this is what is openly practiced in the Philippines by its president Duterte, who measures the effectiveness of his government, in its “war against drugs,” by the number of corpses of “dealers” delivered to the morgue, which were “produced” by death squads or ordinary citizens. At the time of our writing, the count exceeds 7,000 deaths. That we’re still talking about a form of law is attested by the questions of the associations of jurists who wonder if in this instance one might be leaving the “rule of law.” The “penal law of the enemy” is the end of criminal law. So it’s not exactly a trifle. The trick here is to make people believe that it is applied to a previously defined criminal population when its rather the opposite that occurs: a person is declared an “enemy” after the fact, after being phone-tapped, arrested, locked up, molested, ransomed, tortured, and finally killed. A bit like when the cops press charges for “contempt and obstruction” against those they’ve just beaten up a little too conspicuously.

As paradoxical as this assertion may appear, were living in the time of abolition of the Law. The metastatic proliferation of laws is just one aspect of this abolition. If every law had not become insignificant in the rococo edifice of contemporary law, would it be necessary to produce so many of them? Would it be necessary to react to every other minor news event by enacting a new piece of legislation? The object of the major bills of the past few years in France pretty much boils down to the abolition of laws that were in force, and a gradual dismantling of all juridical safeguards. So much so that Law, which was meant to protect persons and things faced with the vagaries of the world, has instead become something that adds to their insecurity. A distinctive trait of the major contemporary laws is that they place this or that institution or power above the laws. The Intelligence Act eliminated every recourse for dealing with the intelligence services. The loi Macron, which was not able to establish “business secrecy,” is only called a “law” by virtue of a strange Newspeak: it consisted rather in undoing a whole set of guarantees enjoyed by employees—relating to Sunday work, layoffs or firings, and the regulated professions. The loi Travail itself was only a continuation of this movement that had started so well: what is the famous “inversion of the hierarchy of norms” but precisely the replacement of any general legal framework by the state of exception of each corporation? If it was so natural for a social democratic government inspired by the extreme right to declare a state of exception after the attacks of November 2015, this was because the state of exception already reigned in the form of the Law.

Accepting to see the world’s fragmentation even in the law is not an easy thing. In France we’ve inherited nearly a millennium of a “rule of justice”—the good king Saint-Louis who meted out justice under the oak tree, etcetera. At bottom, the blackmail that keeps renewing the conditions of our submission is this: either the State, rights, the Law, the police, the justice system—or civil war, vengeance, anarchy, and celebration. This conviction, this justicialism, this statism, permeates the whole set of politically acceptable and audible sensibilities across the board, from the extreme left to the extreme right. Indeed, it’s in line with this fixed axis that the conversion of a large portion of the workers’ vote into a vote for the National Front occurred without any major existential crisis for those concerned. This is also what explains all the indignant reactions to the cascades of “affairs” that now go to make up the daily routine of contemporary political life. We propose a different perception of things, a different way to apprehend them. Those who make the laws evidently don’t respect them. Those who want to instill the “work ethic” in us do fictitious jobs. It’s common knowledge that the drug squad is the biggest hash dealer in France. And whenever, by an extraordinary chance, a magistrate is bugged, one doesn’t wait long to discover the awful negotiations that are hidden behind the noble pronouncement of a judgment, an appeal, or a dismissal. To call for Justice in the face of this world is to ask a monster to babysit your children. Anyone who knows the underside of power immediately ceases to respect it. Deep down, the masters have always been anarchists. It’s just that they can’t stand for anyone else to be that. And the bosses have always had a bandit’s heart. It’s this honorable way of seeing things that has always inspired lucid workers to practice pilfering, moonlighting, or even sabotage. One really has to be named Michea to believe that the proletariat has ever sincerely been moralistic and legalistic. It’s in their lives, among their own people, that the proletarians manifest their ethics, not in relation to “society” The relationship with society and its hypocrisy can only be one of warfare, whether open or not.

It’s also this line of reasoning that inspired the most determined fraction of the demonstrators in the conflict of the spring of 2016. Because one of the most remarkable features of that conflict is the fact that it took place in the middle of a state of emergency. It’s not by chance that the organized forces in Paris who contributed to the formation of the cortège de tête are also those who defied the state of emergency at the Place de la Republique, during COP21. There are two ways of taking the state of emergency. One can denounce it verbally and plead for a return to a “rule of law” which, so far as we can recall, had always seemed to come at a heavy price in the time before its “suspension.” But one can also say: “Ah! You do as you please! You consider yourselves above the laws that you claim to draw your authority from! Well, us too. Imagine that!” There are those who protest against a phantom, the state of emergency, and those who duly note it and deploy their own state of exception in consequence. There where an old left-wing reflex made us shudder before democracy’s fictitious state of exception, the conflict of the spring of 2016 preferred to counterpose, in the streets, its real state of exception, its own presence to the world, the singular form of its freedom.

The same goes for the world’s fragmentation. One can deplore it and try to swim back up the river of time, but one can also begin from there and see how to proceed. It would be simple to contrast a nostalgic, reactionary, conservative, “right-wing” affect and a “left-wing,” chaos-inflected, multiculturalist postmodernism. Being on the left or on the right is to choose among one of the countless ways afforded to humans to be imbeciles. And in fact, from one end of the political spectrum to the other, the supporters of unity are evenly distributed. There are those nostalgic for national greatness everywhere, on the right and on the left, from Soral to Ruffin. We tend to forget it, but over a century ago a candidate presented himself to serve as a universal form of life: the Worker. If he was able to lay claim to that, it was only after the great number of amputations he required of himself—in terms of sensibility, attachments, taste or affectivity. And this gave him a strange appearance. So much so that on seeing him the jury fled and since then he wanders about without knowing where to go or what to do, painfully encumbering the world with his obsolete glory. In the time of his splendor he had all manner of groupies, nationalists or Bolsheviks even national-Bolsheviks. In our day we’re observing an explosion of the human figure. “Humanity” as a subject no longer has a face. On the fringes of an organized impoverishment of subjectivities, we are witness to the tenacious persistence and the emergence of singular forms of life, which are tracing their path. It is this scandal that they wanted to crush, for example, with the jungle of Calais. This resurgence of forms of life, in our epoch, also results from the fragmentation of the failed universality of the worker. It realizes the mourning period for the worker as a figure. A Mexican wake, moreover, that has nothing sad about it.

To think that, during the conflict of the spring of 2016, we saw something unthinkable a few years ago, the fragmentation of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) itself. While the Marseille CGT used its tonfas against the “young people”, the Douai-Armentieres CGT, allied with the “uncontrolled ones,” came to blows with the Lille CGT security crew, which is more hopelessly Stalinist. The CGT Energie called for sabotage of the fiber optic cables in Haute-Loire used by the banks and the telephone operators. During the whole conflict, what happened in Le Havre bore little resemblance to what was happening elsewhere. The dates of demonstration, the positions of the local CGT, the caution imposed on the police: all this was in a sense autonomousfrom the national scene as a whole. The CGT in Le Havre passed this motion and called the police forces and the prefect to advise them of it: “Every time a student is summoned to police headquarters, it’s not complicated, the port will shut down!” Le Havre had a happy fragmentation. The frictions between the “cortège de tête” and the union security personnel led to a remarkable improvement: the strictly defensive position of many of the CGT security services from then on. They would cease to play a police role in the demonstrations, no longer beating on the “autonomists” and handing the “crazies” over to the cops, but would focus instead solely on their section of the procession. An appreciable, perhaps long-lasting shift, who knows? Despite the communique condemning “acts of violence,” a must after the demonstration against the National Front at Nantes on February 25, 2017, the CGT 44 had organized for that occasion together with Zadists and other uncontrollables. It’s one of the fortunate effects of the spring 2016 conflict, and one that will definitely worry some people on the side of the government as well as inside the unions.

As something endured, the process of fragmentation of the world can drive people into misery, isolation, schizophrenia. It can be experienced as a senseless loss in the lives of human beings. Were invaded by nostalgia then. Belonging is all that remains for those who no longer have anything. At the cost of accepting fragmentation as a starting point, it can also give rise to an intensification and pluralization of the bonds that constitute us. Then fragmentation doesn’t signify separation but a shimmering of the world. From the right distance, it’s rather the process of “integration in society” that’s revealed to have been a slow attrition of being, a continuous separation, a slippage toward more and more vulnerability, and a vulnerability that’s increasingly covered up. The ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes illustrates what the process of fragmentation of the territory can signify. For a territorial state as ancient as the French state, that a portion of ground is torn away from the national continuum and brought into secession on a lasting basis, amply proves that the continuum no longer exists as it did in the past. Such a thing would have been unimaginable under de Gaulle, Clemenceau, or Napoleon. Back then, they would have sent the infantry to settle the matter. Now, a police operation is called “Caesar,” and it beats a retreat in the face of a woodland guerrilla response. The fact that on the outskirts of the Zone, buses of the National Front could be assaulted on a freeway in the style of a stage-coach attack, more or less like a police car posted to a banlieue intersection to surveil a camera that was surveilling “dealers” got itself torched by a Molotov cocktail, indicates that things have indeed become a little like the Far West in this country. The process of fragmentation of the national territory, at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, far from constituting a detachment from the world, has only multiplied the most unexpected circulations, some far-ranging and others occurring close to home. To the point that one tells oneself the best proof that extraterrestrials don’t exist is that they haven’t gotten in touch with the ZAD. In its turn, the wresting away of that piece of land results in its own internal fragmentation, its fractalization, the multiplication of worlds within it and hence of the territories that coexist and are superimposed there. New collective realities, new constructions, new encounters, new thoughts, new customs, new arrivals in every sense, with the confrontations arising necessarily from the rubbing-together of worlds and ways of being. And consequently, a considerable intensification of life, a deepening of perceptions, a proliferation of friendships, enmities, experiences, horizons, contacts, distances—and a great strategic finesse. With the endless fragmentation of the world there is a vertiginous increase in the qualitative enrichment of life, and a profusion of forms—for someone who thinks about the promise of communism it contains.

In the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call “communism”: it’s the return to earth, the end of any bringing into equivalence, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the defeat of subsumption, of abstraction, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire a proper name—their proper name. Every creation is born of a splitting off from the whole. As embryology shows, each individual is the possibility of a new species as soon as it appropriates the conditions that immediately surround it. If the Earth is so rich in natural environments this is due to its complete absence of uniformity. Realizing the promise of communism contained in the world’s fragmentation demands a gesture, a gesture to be performed over and over again, a gesture that is life itself: that of creating pathways between the fragments, of placing them in contact, of organizing their encounter, of opening up the roads that lead from one friendly piece of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between worlds. It’s true that the world’s fragmentation disorients and unsettles all the inherited certainties, that it defies all of our political and existential categories, that it removes the ground underlying the revolutionary tradition itself: it challenges us. We recall what Tosquelles explained to Francis Pain concerning the Spanish Civil War. In that conflict some were militia, Tosquelles was a psychiatrist. He observed that the mental patients tended to be few in number because the war, by breaking the grip of the social lie, was more therapeutic to the psychotics than the asylum. “Civil war has a connection with the non-homogeneity of the Self. Every one of us is made up of juxtaposed pieces with paradoxical unions and disunions inside us. The personality doesn’t consist of a bloc. If it did, it would be a statue. One has to acknowledge this paradoxical thing: war doesn’t produce new mental patients. On the contrary, there are fewer neuroses during war than in civil life, and there are even psychoses that heal.” Here is the paradox, then: being constrained to unity undoes us, the lie of social life makes us psychotic, and embracing fragmentation is what allows us to regain a serene presence to the world. There is a certain mental position where this fact ceases to be perceived in a contradictory way. That is where we place ourselves.

Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure—Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that its one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the contemporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked façades of the old hegemonies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn’t get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on “the real,” reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentions, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there’s no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorporated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don’t feel like we belong to a “Google humanity,” but that’s fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of “users,” we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the “rulers of tomorrow”: fragmentation is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d’etre.

The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be “linking up the entire world,” what they’re actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more “friends” when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn’t transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this “society” collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.

Death To Politics

If politics were only the politics of “politicians,” it would be enough to turn off the TV and the radio to no longer hear it talked about. But it so happens that France, which is the “country of human rights” only for show, is well and truly the country of power. All social relations in France are power relations—and in this country what has not been socialized? So that there is politics at every level. In the associations and in the collectives. In the villages and the corporations. In the milieus, all the milieus. It’s at work everywhere, maneuvering, operating, seeking appreciation. It never speaks honestly, because it is afraid. Politics, in France, is a cultural disease. Any time people get together, no matter what’s at issue, no matter what the purpose is and provided it lasts for a while, it takes on the structure of a little court society, and there is always someone who takes himself for the Sun King. Those who reproach Foucault with having developed a rather stifling ontology of power in which goodness, love of one’s neighbor, and the Christian virtues have a difficult time finding their place should reproach him rather with having thought in an admirable way, but perhaps in a way that was a bit too French. France thus remains a court society, at the summit of the State even in the milieus that declare its perdition the most radically. As if the Ancien Regime, as a system of mores, had never died. As if the French Revolution had only been a perverse stratagem for maintaining the Ancien Regime everywhere, behind the change of phraseology, and for protecting it from any attack, since it’s supposed to have been abolished. Those who claim that a local politics, “closer to the territories and the people,” is what will save us from the decomposition of national politics, can defend such an insanity only by holding their noses, because it’s evident that what they offer is only a less professional, cruder, and, in a word, degenerate version of what there is. For us, it’s not a matter of “doing politics differently,” but of doing something different from politics. Politics makes one empty and greedy.

This national syndrome obviously doesn’t spare the radical militant milieus. Each little group imagines it is capturing parts of the radicality market from its closest rivals by slandering them as much as possible. By lusting after the “pieces of the cake” of others, it ends up spoiling the cake and smelling of shit. A clear-headed and completely unresigned militant recently gave this testimony: “Today, I know that disinterested militancy doesn’t exist. Our upbringing, our schooling, our family, the social world as a whole rarely make us into well-rounded and serene personalities. Were full of hurts, existential issues to be resolved, relational expectations, and it’s with this “inner baggage” that we enter into a militant life. Through our struggles, we’re all looking for “something else”, for gratifications, recognition, social and friendly relations, human warmth, meaning to give to our life. In most militants this search for gratifications remains rather discreet, it doesn’t take up all the space. In certain persons, it should be said, it occupies a disproportionate space. We can all think of examples of militants constantly monopolizing the talk or trying to control everything, of others putting on a performance or always playing on peoples’ feelings, of others who are especially sensitive, very aggressive or peremptory in the ways they express themselves… These problems of recognition, gratifications, or power seem to me to explain single-handedly the majority of conflicts in the radical groups […] In my view, many apparently political conflicts mask conflicts of ego and between persons. That’s my hypothesis. It’s not necessarily correct. But from my experience, I have the strong feeling that something else is at play in the meetings, the mobilizations, the radical organizations, “something else” than the struggle properly speaking, a veritable human theater with its comedies, its tragedies, its smooth marivaudages, which often push the political objectives which supposedly brought us together into the background.” This country is a heartbreaker for sincere souls.

Nuit debout, in Paris, was many things. It was a rallying point and a starting point for all sorts of incredible actions. It was the site of wonderful encounters, of informal conversations, of reunions after the demonstrations. By offering a continuity between the leapfrog demonstration dates which the union confederations are so fond of, Nuit debout enabled the conflict triggered by the loi Travail to be something altogether different, and more, than a classic “social movement.” Nuit debout made it possible to thwart the mundane governmental operation consisting in reducing its opponents to powerlessness by setting them at odds with each other, under the categories of “violent” and “non-violent.” Although it was rechristened “Place de la Commune,” the Place de la Republique was not able to deploy the smallest embryo of what was Commune-like in the squares movement in Spain or in Greece, to say nothing of Tahrir Square, simply because we didn’t have the strength to impose a real occupation of the square on the police. But if there was a fundamental defect of Nuit debout from the start, it was, on the pretext of going beyond classic politics, the way in which it reproduced and staged the latter’s principal axiom according to which politics is a particular sphere, separate from “life,” an activity consisting in speaking, debating, and voting. With the result that Nuit debout came to resemble an imaginary parliament, a kind of legislative organ with no executive function, and hence a manifestation of powerlessness that was sure to please the media and the governing authorities. One participant sums up what happened, or rather what didn’t happen, at Nuit debout: “The only shared position, perhaps, is the desire for an endless discussion […] The unsaid and the vague have always been privileged to the detriment of taking a position, which would be selective by definition, hence supposedly non-inclusive.” Another offers the following appraisal: “A succession of speeches limited to two minutes and never followed by any discussion could not fail to be tiresome. Once the surprise had worn off at seeing so many people excited about expressing themselves, the absence of anything at stake started to empty these meetings of the sense they appeared to have. […] We were here to be together, but the rules separated us. We were here to exorcise the curse of our respective solitudes, but the assemblies gave the curse a glaring visibility. For me the assembly should be the place where the collective is experienced, felt, explored, confirmed, and finally, if only in a punctual way, declared. But for that, it would have been necessary for real discussions to occur. The problem was that we didn’t talk to each other, we spoke one after the other. The worst of what we meant to avert on the Place unfolded there in a general incomprehension: a collective impotence that mistakes the spectacle of solitudes for the invention of an active collective […] A conjuration of blockades finally got the better of my patience. The key person of our committee, no doubt without any intentional ill-will on her part, had a special gift for discouraging with all sorts of logistic and procedural quibbles every attempt to reintroduce some stakes into the functioning of the assemblies.” And finally: “Like many others, I sometimes had the impression that there was a kind of opaque power structure that furnished the major orientations of the movement […] [that there was] another level of decision-making than that of the ordinary assemblies.” The microbureaucracy that ran Nuit debout in Paris, and that was literally a bureaucracy of the microphone, was caught in this uncomfortable situation that it could only roll out its vertical strategies hidden behind the spectacle of horizontality presented each day at 6 pm by the sovereign assembly of emptiness that was held there, with its changing walk-on actors. That is why what was said there basically didn’t matter much, and least of all to its organizers. Their ambitions and strategies were deployed elsewhere than on the square, and in a language whose cynicism could be given free reign only on the terrace of a hipster cafe, in the last stage of intoxication, between accomplices. Nuit debout showed in an exemplary way how “direct democracy,” “collective intelligence,” “horizontality,” and hyperformalism could function as means of control and a method of sabotage. This might seem dreadful, but Nuit debout, nearly everywhere in France, illustrated line by line what was said about the “movement of the squares” in To Our Friends, and was judged to be so scandalous by many militants at the moment of its publication. To the point that, since the summer of 2016, every time an assembly begins to turn in circles, and nothing is said beyond a rambling succession of leftist monologues, there’s almost always someone who will shout, “No, please! Not Nuit debout!” This is the huge credit that must be granted to Nuit debout: it made the misery of assemblyism not just a theoretical certainty but a shared experience. But in the fantasy of the assembly and decision-making there’s clearly something that escapes any argument.

This has to do with the fact that the fantasy is implanted deeply in life, and not at the surface of “political convictions.” At bottom, the problem of political decision-making only redoubles and displaces to a collective scale what is already an illusion in the individual: the belief that our actions, our thoughts, our gestures, our words, and our behaviors result from decisions emanating from a central, conscious, and sovereign entity— the Self. The fantasy of the “sovereignty of the Assembly” only repeats on the collective plane the sovereignty of the Self. Knowing all that monarchy owes to the development of the notion of “sovereignty” leads us to wonder if the myth of the Self is not simply the theory of the subject that royalty imposed wherever it prevailed in practice. Indeed, for the king to be able to rule from his throne in the middle of the country, the Self must be enthroned in the middle of the world. One understands better, therefore, where the unbelievable narcissism of the general assemblies of Nuit debout comes from. It’s the thing, moreover, that ended up killing them, by making them the site, in speech after speech, of repeated outbursts of individual narcissism, which is to say, outbursts of powerlessness.

From “terrorist” attacks to the Germanwings crash, people have forgotten that the first French “mass killer” of the new century, Richard Durn, at Nanterre in 2002, was a man literally disgusted with politics. He had passed through the Socialist Party before joining The Greens. He was an activist with the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits d’homme). He had made the Genoa “alter-globalization” switch in July of 2001. In the end, he had taken a Glock and, on March 27, 2002, opened fire on the municipal council of Nanterre, killing eight elected officials and wounding nineteen others. In his private journal he wrote: “I’m tired of always having in my head this sentence that keeps repeating: ‘I haven’t lived, I haven’t lived at all at the age of 30.’ […] Why continue pretending to live? I can only feel myself living for a few moments by killing.” Dylan Klebold, one of the two conspirators of Columbine High School confided to his notebooks: “The meek are trampled on, the assholes prevail, the gods are deceiving […] Farther and farther distant…That’s what’s happening…me and everything that zombies consider real…just images, not life. […] The zombies and their society band together and try to destroy what is superior and what they don’t understand and what they are afraid of.” There you have some people who clearly took revenge instead of continuing to stew in their resentment. They dealt death and destruction because they didn’t see life anywhere. A point has been reached where it’s become impossible to maintain that the existential pertains to private life. Every new attack reminds us: the existential has a power of political eruption.

This is the big lie, and the great disaster of politics: to place politics on one side and life on the other, on one side what is said but isn’t real and on the other what is lived but no longer can be said. There are the speeches of the prime minister and, for a century now, the barbed satire of the Canard enchaine. There are the tirades of the great militant and there’s the way he treats his fellow human beings, with whom he allows himself to conduct himself all the more miserably as he takes himself to be politically irreproachable. There’s the sphere of the sayable and the voiceless, orphaned, mutilated life. And that takes to crying out because it no longer serves any purpose to speak. Hell is really the place where all speech is rendered meaningless. What is called “debate” nowadays is just the civilized murder of speech. Official politics has become so manifestly a repugnant sphere of deception that the only events still happening in that sphere reduce down to a paradoxical expression of hatred of politics. If Donald Trump is truly a figure of hatred it’s because he is first and foremost a figure of the hatred of politics. And it’s this hatred that carried him to power. Politics in its totality is what plays into the hands of the National Front, and not the “casseurs” or the banlieue rioters.

What the media, the card-carrying militants, and the governments cannot forgive the so-called “casseurs” and other “black blocs” is: 1. proving that powerlessness is not a destiny, which constitutes a galling insult for all those who are content to grumble and who prefer to see the rioters, contrary to any evidence, as infiltrated agents “paid by the banks to aid the government”; 2. showing that one can act politically without doing politics, at any point in life and at the price of a little courage. What the “casseurs” demonstrate by their actions is that acting politically is not a question of discourse but of gestures, and they attest this down to the words they spray paint on the walls of the cities.

“Politique” should never have become a noun. It should have remained an adjective. An attribute, and not a substance. There are conflicts, there are encounters, there are actions, there are speech interventions that are “political,” because they make a decisive stand against something in a given situation, and because they express an affirmation concerning the world they desire. Political is that which bursts forth, which forms an event, which punches a hole in the orderly progression of the disaster. That which provokes polarization, drawing a line, choosing sides. But there’s no such thing as “politics.” There’s no specific domain that would gather up all these events, all these eruptions, independently of the place and moment in which they appear. There’s no particular sphere where it would be a question of the affairs of everyone. There’s no sphere separate from what is general. It suffices to formulate the matter to expose the fraud. Everything is political that relates to the encounter, the friction, or the conflict between forms of life, between regimes of perception, between sensibilities, between worlds once this contact attains a certain threshold of intensity. The crossing of this threshold is signaled immediately by its effects: frontlines are drawn, friendships and enmities are affirmed, cracks appear in the uniform surface of the social, there is a splitting apart of what was falsely joined together and subsurface communications between the different resulting fragments.

What occurred in the spring of 2016 in France was not a social movement but a political conflict, in the same way as 1968. This is shown by its effects, by the irreversibilities that it produced, by the lives that it caused to take a different path, by the desertions it determined, by the shared sensibility that is being affirmed since then in a part of the youth, and beyond. A generation could very well become ungovernable. These effects are making themselves felt even in the ranks of the Socialist Party, in the split between the fractions that polarized at that time, in the fissure that condemns it to eventual implosion. Social movements have a structure, a liturgy, a protocol that define as excessive everything that escapes their bounds. Now, not only did this conflict not cease to outstrip all the constraints, whether political, union, or police in nature, but it was basically nothing but an uninterrupted series of surges. An uninterrupted series of surges, which the old worn-out forms of politics tried hopelessly to catch up with. The first call to demonstrate on March 9, 2016 was a bypassing of the unions by YouTubers, where the former had no choice but to follow the latter if they meant to preserve some reason for being. The subsequent demonstrations saw a continual overrunning of the processions by “young people” who positioned themselves in the lead. The Nuit debout initiative itself went beyond any recognized framework for mobilization. The free marches starting from the Place de la Republique, such as the “aperitif at [Prime Minister] Valls’ house,” were a spillover from Nuit debout in their turn. And so on. The only “movement demand”—the repeal of the loi Travail—was not really one, since it left no room for any adjustment, for any “dialogue.” With its entirely negative character, it only signified the refusal to continue being governed in this manner, and for some the refusal to be governed period. No one here, neither from the government nor among the demonstrators, was open to the least negotiation. Back in the days of the dialectic and the social, conflict was always a moment of the dialogue. But here the semblances of dialogue were simply maneuvers: for the state bureaucracy and the union bureaucracy alike, it was a matter of marginalizing the party that was eternally absent from all the negotiating tables—the party of the street, which this time was the whole enchilada. It was a frontal shock between two forces—government against demonstrators—between two worlds and two ideas of the world: a world of profiteers, presided over by a few profiteers in chief, and a world made up of many worlds, where one can breathe and dance and live. Right at the outset, the slogan “the world or nothing” expressed what was at issue in reality: the loi Travail never formed the terrain of struggle, but rather its detonator. There could never be any final reconciliation. There could only be a provisional winner, and a loser bent on revenge.

What is revealed in every political eruption is the irreducible human plurality, the unsinkable heterogeneity of ways of being and doing—the impossibility of the slightest totalization. For every civilization motivated by the drive toward the One, this will always be a scandal. There are no strictly political words or language. There is only a political use of language in situation, in the face of a determinate adversity. That a rock is thrown at a riot cop does not make it a “political rock.” Nor are there any political entities—such as France, a party, or a man. What is political about them is the inner conflictuality that troubles them, it’s the tension between the antagonistic components that constitutes them, at the moment when the beautiful image of their unity breaks into pieces. We need to abandon the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program, project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made, and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The nearby doesn’t mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local. It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar—the prehensible and comprehensible. It’s not a spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being neighbors doesn’t always make us close. It’s only from contact that the friend and the enemy are discovered. A political situation does not result from a decision but from the shock or the meeting between several decisions. Whoever starts from the nearby doesn’t forgo what is distant, they simply give themselves a chance to get there. For it’s always from the here and now that the far away is given. It’s always here that the distant touches us and that we care about it. And this holds true in spite of the estrangement power of images, cybernetics, and the social.

A real political force can be constructed only from near to near and from moment to moment, and not through a mere statement of purposes. Besides, determining ends is still a means. One uses means only in a situation. Even a marathon is always run step by step. This way of situating what is political in the nearby, which is not the domestic, is the most precious contribution of a certain autonomous feminism. In its time, it threw the ideology of entire leftist parties, armed ones, into a crisis. The fact that feminists subsequently contributed to re-distancing the nearby, the “everyday,” by ideologizing it, by politicizing it externally, discursively, constitutes the part of the feminist legacy that one can very well decline to accept. And to be sure, everything in this world is designed to distract us from what is there, very close. The “everyday” is predisposed to be the place which a certain stiffness would like to preserve from conflicts and affects that are too intense. It’s precisely that very cowardice that lets everything slide and ends up making the everyday so sticky and our relations so viscous. If we were more serene, more sure of ourselves, if we had less fear of conflict and of the disruption an encounter might bring, their consequences would likely be less disagreeable. And perhaps not disagreeable at all.

Let’s Destitute The World

Even though 80% of French people declared that they no longer expect anything from the politicians, the same 80% have confidence in the state and its institutions. No scandal, no evidence, no personal experience manages to make a dent in the respect owed to the institutional framework in this country. It’s always the men who embody it who are to blame. There have been blunders, abuses, extraordinary breakdowns. The institutions, similar to ideology in this respect, are sheltered from the contradiction of facts, however recurrent. It was enough for the National Front to promise to restore the institutions to become reassuring instead of troubling. There’s nothing surprising in that. The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it. And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility of the real, an ultimate stabilization of phenomena. If the institution suits us so well, it’s because the sort of legibility it guarantees saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever, from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the same as choosing not to exist. It’s to resign from life. In reality, what we need are not institutions but forms. It so happens, in fact, that life, whether biological, singular or collective, is precisely a continual creation of forms. It suffices to perceive them, to accept allowing them to arise, to make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis. A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form. A work is a form. A profession is a form. Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms.

Except that, voila, we are in France, the country where even the Revolution has become an institution, and which has exported that ambivalence to the four corners of the world. There is a specifically French love of the institution that must be dealt with if we wish to talk again about revolution one day, if not make one. Here the most libertarian of the psychotherapies has seen fit to label itself “institutional,” the most critical of the sociologies has given itself the name “institutional analysis.” If the principle comes to us from ancient Rome, the affect that accompanies it is clearly Christian in origin. The French passion for the institution is a flagrant symptom of the lasting Christian impregnation of a country that believes itself to be delivered from that. All the more lasting, moreover, as it believes itself to be delivered. We should never forget that the first modern thinker of the institution was that lunatic Calvin, that model of all the despisers of life, and that he was born in Picardy. The French passion for the institution comes from a properly Christian distrust towards life. The great malice of the institution idea is in its claiming to free us from the rule of the passions, from the uncontrollable hazards of existence, that it would be a transcendence of the passions when it is actually just one of them, and assuredly one of the most morbid. The institution claims to be a remedy against men, none of whom can be trusted, whether the people or the leader, the neighbor or the brother or the stranger. What governs it is always the same idiocy of sinful humanity, subject to desire, selfishness, and lust, and who must keep from loving anything whatsoever in this world and from giving in to their inclinations, which are all uniformly vicious. It’s not his fault if an economist like Frederic Lordon can’t picture a revolution that is not a new institution. Because all economic science, and not just its “institutional” current, has its basis finally in the lessons of Saint Augustine. Through its name and its language, what the institution promises is that a single thing, in this lower world, will have transcended time, will have withdrawn itself from the unpredictable flux of becoming, will have established a bit of tangible eternity, an unequivocal meaning, free of human ties and situations—a definitive stabilization of the real, like death.

This whole mirage dissolves when a revolution breaks out. Suddenly what seemed eternal collapses into time as though into a bottomless pit. What seemed to plunge its roots into the human heart turns out to have been nothing but a fable for dupes. The palaces are vacated and one discovers in the prince’s abandoned jumble of papers that he no longer believed in it all, if he ever had. For behind the façade of the institution, what goes on is always something other than it claims to be, its precisely what the institution claimed to have delivered the world from: the very human comedy of the coexistence of networks, of loyalties, of clans, interests, lineages, dynasties even, a logic of fierce struggles for territories, resources, miserable titles, influence— stories of sexual conquest and pure folly, of old friendships and rekindled hatreds. Every institution is, in its very regularity, the result of an intense bricolage and, as an institution, of a denial of that bricolage. It’s supposed fixity masks a gluttonous appetite for absorbing, controlling, institutionalizing everything that’s on its margins and harbors a bit of life. The real model of every institution is universally the Church. Just as the Church clearly does not have as its goal leading the human flock to its divine salvation, but rather achieving its own salvation in time, the alleged function of an institution is only a pretext for its existence. In every institution the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is re-enacted year after year. Its true purpose is to persist. No need to specify how many souls and bodies must be ground down in order to secure this result, and even within its own hierarchy. One doesn’t become a leader without being basically the most ground down—the king of the ground-down. Reducing delinquency and “defending society” are only the pretext of the carceral institution. If, during the centuries it has existed, it has never succeeded at these things—on the contrary—this is because its purpose is different; it is to go on existing and growing if possible, which means tending to the breeding ground of delinquency and managing the illegalities. The purpose of the medical institution is not to care for people’s health, but to produce the patients that justify its existence and a corresponding definition of health. Nothing new on this subject since Ivan Illich and his Medical Nemesis. It’s not the failure of the health institutions that we are now living in a world that is toxic through and through and that makes everyone sick. On the contrary, we’ve seen their triumph. Quite often, the apparent failure of the institutions is their real function. If school discourages children from learning, this is not fortuitously: it’s because children with a desire to learn would make school next to useless. The same goes for the unions, whose purpose is manifestly not the emancipation of workers, but rather the perpetuation of their condition. What could the bureaucrats of the labor unions do with their life, in fact, if the workers had the bad idea of actually freeing themselves? Of course in every institution there are sincere people who really think they are there to accomplish their mission. But it’s no accident if those people see themselves systematically obstructed, are systematically kept out of the loop, punished, bullied, eventually ostracized, with the complicity of all the “realists” who keep their mouths shut. These choice victims of the institution have a hard time understanding its double talk, and what is really being asked of them. Their fate is to always be treated there as killjoys, as rebels, and to be endlessly surprised by that.

Against the slightest revolutionary possibility in France, one will always find the institution of the Self and the Self of the institution. Inasmuch as “being someone” always comes down finally to the recognition of, the allegiance to, some institution, inasmuch as succeeding involves conforming to the reflection that you’re shown in the hall of mirrors of the social game, the institution has a grip on everyone through the Self. All this couldn’t last, would be too rigid, not dynamic enough, if the institution wasn’t determined to compensate for its rigidity by a constant attention to the movements that jostle it. There’s a perverse dialectic between institution and movements, which testifies to the former’s relentless survival instinct. A reality as ancient, massive, and hieratic as that, inscribed in the bodies and minds of its subjects for the hundreds of years the French state has existed, could not have lasted so long if it had not been able to tolerate, monitor, and recuperate critics and revolutionaries as they presented themselves. The carnivalesque ritual of social movements function within it as a safety valve, as a tool for managing the social as well as for renewing the institution. They bring it the flexibility, the young flesh, the new blood that it so cruelly lacks. Generation after generation, in its great wisdom, the state has been able to coopt those who showed themselves amenable to being bought off, and crush those who acted intransigent. It’s not for nothing that so many leaders of student movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of the institution as mask.

Breaking the circle that turns our contestation into a fuel for what dominates us, marking a rupture in the fatality that condemns revolutions to reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron cage of counter-revolution—this is the purpose of destitution. The notion of destitution is necessary in order to free the revolutionary imaginary of all the old constituent fantasies that weigh it down, of the whole deceptive legacy of the French Revolution. It is necessary to intervene in revolutionary logic, in order to establish a division within the idea of insurrection. For there are constituent insurrections, those that end like all the revolutions up to now have ended: by turning back into their opposite, those that have been made “in the name of ”—in the name of whom or what? the people, the working class, or God, it matters little. And there are destituent insurrections, such as May ‘68, the Italian creeping May and so many insurrectionary communes. Despite all that it may have manifested that was cool, lively, unexpected, Nuit debout—like the Spanish movement of the squares or Occupy Wall Street previously—was troubled by the old constituent itch. What was staged spontaneously was the old revolutionary dialectic that would oppose the “constituted powers” with the “constituent power” of the people taking over the public space. There’s a good reason that in the first three weeks of Nuit debout, Place de la Republique, no fewer than three committees appeared that gave themselves the mission of rewriting a Constitution. What was re-enacted there was the old debate that’s been performed to a full house in France since 1792. And it seems there’s no getting enough of it. It’s a national sport. There’s not even any need to spruce up the decor to please today’s taste. It must be said that the idea of constitutional reform presents the advantage of satisfying both the desire to change everything and the desire that everything stay the same—it’s just a matter, finally, of changing a few lines, of symbolic modifications. As long as one debates words, as long as revolution is formulated in the language of rights and the law, the ways of neutralizing it are well-known and marked out.

When sincere Marxists proclaim in a union leaflet, “We are the real power!” it’s still the same constituent fiction that is operating, and that distances us from strategic thinking. The revolutionary aura of this old logic is such that in its name the worst mystifications manage to pose as self-evident truths. “To speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy.” It’s with this risible lie that Toni Negri begins his book on the subject, and he’s not the only one to trumpet these kinds of inanities that defy good sense. It’s enough to have opened the pages of Constitutional Theory by Carl Schmitt, who can’t exactly be counted among the good friends of democracy, to realize the contrary. The fiction of constituent power suits monarchy as well as it suits dictatorship. Doesn’t that pretty presidential slogan, “in the name of the people,” say anything to anybody? It’s regrettable to have to point out that Abbe Sieyes, inventor of the disastrous distinction between constituent power and constituted power, that brilliant sleight of hand, was never a democrat. This is what he said in his famous speech of September 7, 1789: “The citizens who appoint representatives refrain and must refrain from making the law themselves: they do not have any particular will to impose. If they dictated wills, France would no longer be this representative state; it would be a democratic state. The people, I repeat, in a country that is not a democracy (and France cannot be one), the people cannot speak, cannot act, except through its representatives.” If to speak of “constituent power” is not necessarily to speak of “democracy,” both these notions do, however, always lead revolutions into a cul-de-sac.

Destituere in Latin means: to place standing separate, raise up in isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down, deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space that it forms. Its characteristic gesture is exiting, just as the typical constituent gesture is taking by storm. In terms of a destituent logic, the struggle against state and capital is valuable first of all for the exit from capitalist normality that is experienced therein, for the desertion from the shitty relations with oneself, others, and the world under capitalism. Thus, where the “constituents” place themselves in a dialectical relation of struggle with the ruling authority in order to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to disengage from it. It doesn’t abandon the struggle; it fastens on to the struggles positivity. It doesn’t adjust itself to the movements of the adversary but to what is required for the increase of its own potential. So it has little use for criticizing: “The choice is either to get out without delay, without wasting one’s time criticizing, simply because one is placed elsewhere than in the region of the adversary, or else one criticizes, one keeps one foot in it, and has the other one outside. We need to leap outside and dance above it,” as Jean-Francois Lyotard explained, by way of recognizing the gesture of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. And Deleuze made this remark: “Roughly speaking, one recognizes a Marxist by their saying that a society contradicts itself, is defined by its contradictions, especially its class contradictions. We say rather is that in a society everything is escaping, that a society is defined by its lines of escape […] Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon.” It’s not a question of fighting forcommunism. What matters is the communism that is lived in the fight itself. The true richness of an action lies within itself. This doesn’t mean that for us there’s no question of the observable effectiveness of an action. It means that the impact potential of an action doesn’t reside in its effects, but in what is immediately expressed in it. What is constructed on the basis of effort always ends up collapsing from exhaustion. Typically, the operation that the cortege de tete causes the processional setup of union demonstrations to undergo is an operation of destitution. With the vital joy it expressed, the rightness of its gesture, its determination, with its affirmative as well as offensive character, the cortege de tete drew in all that was still lively in the militant ranks and it destituted demonstrations as an institution. Not with a critique of the rest of the march but something other than a symbolic use of capturing the street. Withdrawing from the institutions is anything but leaving a void, it’s suppressing them in a positive way.

To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it. It’s not to criticize it—the first critics of the state are the civil servants themselves; as to the militant, the more they criticize power the more they desire it and the more they refuse to acknowledge their desire—but to take to heart what the institution is meant to do, from outside it. To destitute the university is to establish, at a distance, the places of research, of education and thought, that are more vibrant and more demanding than it is—which would not be hard—and to greet the arrival of the last vigorous minds who are tired of frequenting the academic zombies, and only then to administer its death blow. To destitute the judicial system is to learn to settle our disputes ourselves, applying some method to this, paralyzing its faculty of judgment and driving its henchmen from our lives. To destitute medicine is to know what is good for us and what makes us sick, to rescue from the institution the passionate knowledges that survive there out of view, and never again to find oneself alone at the hospita