The frogs croak in the sound and the fury amid the swamp, the reeds, and the rushes, a frightful mixture of mud and stagnant water: chaos.
Thus rings the primitive social state, always clamoring, although sometimes inaudible, beneath every order and terror: Hobbes called it the war of every man against every man, Plato and La Fontaine called it democratic, while Aesop said: anarchy.1 No force prevails over any other.
The chaos comes from the group as such: every frog, to make itself heard, croaks as loudly as it possibly can.
A meteor falls from the skies. Try to hear the roar of the aerolith forcing its way through the flames, departing the stars for the lower strata of the air and hitting the beach, making it shake: thunder itself would pass for a tree frog’s “brekekex” next to that. The earthquake’s regular waves harmonize those, wild and small, of the chaos. In order to impose silence on the noise produced by each frog, a much greater noise than that made in sum by the collective swamp is necessary. Thus rings the falling beam.
Thunderbolts and volcanoes silence crowds, and the tumult of floods or deluges swallows them up. The external world is announcing that it exists to the social world, which only hears itself.
The swamp keeps silent while listening to he who holds the microphone and shouts, or ignites the roaring motor, the cannon, the atomic bomb. While this latter is sleeping, immobile on its launch ramp, the frogs, little by little climb onto its shoulders, emboldened and reassured.
Here’s the first statue, thus named because it stabilizes after a frightening excursion; silent too after having produced a terrible noise. Careful it doesn’t awaken. Here’s the meteor, a shapeless rock come from out of the sky and made out of an unknown metal, an obelisk, a black stone, a piece of wood, a mass.
The collectivity knows only itself and gives itself only itself as object, its noise, its relations, its streets and its swamp, its glory, its power, its politics, its hatreds. The collectivity is fed by and makes its clamors its delights, deaf to the noises of the world, blind to its light, insensible to its calls. And suddenly a terrible din dominates the croaking; the aerolith, via gravity, is falling from the skies. Then the collectivity recognizes, for a moment, the existence of another world. The world as such can be heard through this, the world of stars, of heavy bodies, of lightning, volcanoes, and flooding rivers. The water is rising in the swamp, independently of the croaking, and the meteor falls here or there. The collective places itself in the presence, for the first time, of an object. Of the law of falling bodies.
Here’s the first object: a beam whose mass has nothing to do with the crowd nor with the rushes, a rock bearing no relation to the mud of the marsh. Come from elsewhere since simply issuing from the world. The object lies before the frogs, foreign. Extraordinary because perfectly natural.
The social sciences precede the physical sciences.
Whether they stay in their holes, beneath the waters, or venture to jump onto the shoulders of the beam, the frogs croak, that’s all. The chaos of the croaking signifies nothing as far as I know, and I find La Fontaine’s Jupiter to be divinely intelligent in understanding that this noise asks first of all for a king, then a king who moves, and lastly a third one who’s good-natured and gentle enough not to kill or devour them.
The beam falls; the group finds the object.
A crane advances, devouring the frogs; the group finds a predatory living creature.
Jupiter listens and sends, it is said, the wood or the bird of prey.
The frogs croak, not doing anything, for their cries can’t do anything for anything. The group makes noise and discovers before it, outside it, independent of it, either the inert material object of the external world or an animal of another species who feeds on tree frogs like a Frenchman with foreign customs, or the divinity, Jupiter himself.
Does society, the collectivity, drunk with noise, understand the object, subject or god, transcendent in relation to them, but that they—noisy—endlessly say they produced themselves?
The small joist, immobile, suffers an anthill of frogs to swarm over it. The crane, mobile, passing over them, makes them suffer and kills them. A thousand subjects weigh on the king; the king weighs on a thousand subjects, multiplicity covering unity or the one dominating the multiple. Just as the crane kills the batrachians, must it be understood as well that the beam remains immobile like a corpse that’s been put to death by the crowd of frogs?
The turnaround happens instantaneously, the way the Tarpeian Rock borders on Capitoline Hill and the role of the condemned does that of the tyrant. Three verses, in the middle of the fable, suffice to pass from the stiffened beam victim below the cries to the predatory bird that abuses and kills. In the middle of the reversal—the point of the cone downward, the apex of the nappe upward—La Fontaine says that Jupiter had had enough. As though he were in the beam’s place, as though the crowd had jumped from the shoulder of the king onto the head of the god.
Here therefore is, in fact, a trinity, a god in three persons, King Jupiter and his two envoys or metamorphoses, the beam and the crane: object, subject; inert, living; below, above; good-natured and gentle, cruel; passive, active; lying down, standing; immobile, moving. Can the law for the transformation be discovered? Does a god find itself between the living subject and the inert object?
Before a lecture, recital or a play, it sometimes happens that the person who is going to appear in public experiences what’s called stage fright. But what happens to a team before a decisive game? Each person, separately, may be afraid, but the anxiety of everyone sometimes drives the group to surpass itself. Does the collectivity feel something? I don’t know, but I see quite well that it dissolves, that from the first minutes nothing was going right any longer, that the team wasn’t coming together as though stage fright was paralyzing it, the team as team even more than each of the individuals. It collapses or improves for the same reason.
We don’t understand what that means and master this collective panic poorly. It lives in the midst of us, outside each of us, in the group, in such a way that you can place it, depending on the meaning given the first person plural pronoun, outside us and inside us, outside the individuals and in the team itself. This curious position of something, here anxiety, defines the us, the collective in general.
The instinctive work of the leader consists in taking that place; blindly, great politicians know and frequent it and, being from there, lead the group, use or abuse power. They remain individuals but something in them leaves in order to occupy the place that’s exterior to individuals but interior to the collective. So the leader carries the anxiety and the team flies to victory. He does indeed possess a double body, personal and social: let no one give orders who doesn’t know how to discorporate.
A man can inhabit that place but an object can as well—when the king of the frogs is transformed into a beam—what I have in the past called a quasi-object. The ball flies amongst us, outside of each person who receives it but abandons it to the others, between everyone. It plays the role of leader and no doubt reminds us of the head of the king, of the body cut in two, double, characteristic of those we call our leaders and put at our head. A hundred quasi-objects circulate in collectivities, like the slipper of pass-the-slipper, giving birth to exchange: ball, money, pledges, slaves, women; here we’re back to subjects, winners or victims.
The object changes into the subject and conversely.
When you gather in my name and pray, I will be there in the midst of you.2 The empty, absent, blind, unfindable place, the black hole of the group, which wouldn’t exist without that gap, God himself doesn’t consider it beneath himself to descend amongst us to occupy that spot, invisible, hidden, nonetheless present, deeply moving. He sends us his only son, spirit made flesh, assassinated flesh, messiah–victim, anointed king, transubstantiated on the eve of his death into that bread object we pass from one to the other to share it, eat it and offer it to our neighbor who consumes it in turn and gives it. Man, leader, present and absent, doubly incorporated, chief and wretched condemned man, become quasi-object, lastly object, discovering the law of transformation for all things occupying said place, God integrates the set of solutions to that inexhaustible mystery which is the meaning given to “us.”
We come into a temple, a church, or cathedral, a public place whose parvis is swarming with a crowd. We turn to the east where the colossal statue is glistening, tranquil, far away, in the shadows, like a monstrance, surrounded by two contemplative cherubim. No one enters the holy of holies where it reposes, absent or present; only the priests penetrate the sanctuary or choir and climb to the altar; only the elite chosen for their worth and dressed in the colors of the flag have the right to tread upon the cut-out rectangle, a paradoxical place for a thing that manifests another world that would possess the laws, the authority, the rules of transformation.
What thing? The statue of the king or leader, the object rock or the subject Peter, the marble that’s nonetheless easy to break so that everyone can take a precious piece of stone, bread, money, gold, or ball, the subject but non-subject since object, sovereign but immobile like a little joist, all-powerful and wretched, the object or quasi-object, circulating, vibrating, living, the quasi-subject, lastly the god shining with the light of a black body that’s exterior and interior to a strange place, the statue again, the immanent and transcendent answer to that infinite, unbroken conversation that obliges us to ask ourselves who we are when we live together and which none of us knows how to answer except the open and mute mouth of that statue, in the shadows, amid our secret prayers and the chaos of our cheering.
Can one do without god so as to reach the object beyond the political?