Peter Engelmann I suggest we begin by talking about your intellectual career, which began with Althusser and followed a structuralist approach, though you soon moved away from this. You could describe your political concern and outline your research on the social movements of the nineteenth century, and explain how you proceeded from there to develop a new perspective on politics and art. After that I’d ask you to explain the major lines of your current critical thought and its theoretical foundations.
Jacques Rancière Agreed.
PE So let’s start from your encounter with Althusser. Perhaps you can talk about how you ended up collaborating on Reading Capital,1 and why you subsequently distanced yourself from that structuralist interpretation of Marx. Or perhaps you want to go even further back?
JR Well, in 1960 I started at the École Normale Supérieure, where Althusser was teaching at the time. I was a young man who had first become acquainted with Marxism more through reading existentialist or religious texts, because in France it was mainly Jesuits who had written good theoretical texts about Marx.
PE You were a Jesuit?
JR I wasn’t a Jesuit, but back then there were practically no theoretical texts on Marx that had been written by communists. And the texts with the most detailed commentary on Marx were by Jesuits, especially Père Calvez, who had written a very extensive book entitled Karl Marx.2 It was he who introduced many readers to Marx’s thought by trying to uncover its philosophical dimension, taking an interest in the young Marx’s beginnings and showing the continuity of his thought. And there was Sartre too, through whom I also became acquainted with communism. Sartre pursued a philosophical, existentialist approach that heavily emphasized the problematics of praxis and alienation. But then I went to the École Normale Supérieure, where Althusser questioned this approach on the grounds that it didn’t concentrate on the real Marx. He explained that the young Marx on which the commentaries focused was the ideological, pre-scientific Marx, and that one should abandon this existentialist discourse. That was the moment when structuralism emerged, and Althusser’s reading forced me to abandon my first approach to Marx. I had pursued it with great enthusiasm and become something of a specialist in early Marx, and I had also written a final dissertation on the subject. I attended Althusser’s seminars on Capital, which were intended to show the rupture between the young and the later, mature Marx. Althusser’s concern was to rediscover Marx’s true theory, which would form the point of departure for rethinking the revolution – but above all to enlighten all the young ‘petty bourgeois’ who lived in such ignorance of the system’s laws that they couldn’t help going astray. This insistence on the theory of ideology was at the core of Althusser’s thinking. And structuralism reinforced a scientistic reading of ideology theory, namely that all people were trapped in an illusion out of structural necessity, and science was needed in order to free them. I followed this direction, which, in a sense, also corresponded with the position of a young student at an elite university. Essentially there was a kind of Marxist aristocracy back then.
PE At the École Normale Supérieure?
JR Yes. You could say we were the best students, the best philosophers, and Marxists at the same time! We were conscious of our role as the intellectual avant-garde. Then came May 1968, a movement that ensued in a way that totally contradicted Althusser’s theory, a movement that consisted of students who should really have been knee-deep in petty bourgeois ideology, with no ability to develop a scientific, Marxist, proletarian consciousness. It was this movement that triggered an enormous subversive movement all over the country, extending to all walks of life. So in 1968 one had the impression of a complete rupture between the Marxist scientistic theory previously adhered to and the reality of this movement, the reality of workers’ revolts, people’s revolts, youth revolts. From that point on I began to criticize this structuralist Marxism, and all the more so when the University of Vincennes was founded after 1968.
PE How did this university come into existence?
JR Essentially, one can say that the state gave the radical leftists and the Marxists a university of their own. A university where one could truly practise Marxist, structuralist, semiological science. Those who were there had two choices: either one played along – and Althusserianism was the theory for entering into this schema, as it were – or one didn’t want to be co-opted, and refused to be the Marxist poster-child of bourgeois culture. In my case that led to a critique of all the theoretical preconditions from which people had been proceeding until then. I decided on a critique of Althusser, and of all theories which claimed that Marxist science had to help those people who live in a state of illusion to attain consciousness. Then I told myself that to test my critique I would have to take on a historical study that would allow me to gain a genuine understanding of labour history, and of history from the bottom up. So I set about doing work on the labour archives, about the period in which Marx began to write.
PE That was in the early seventies?
JR Yes, that was around 1972, 1973. I thought that there had probably been a wasted opportunity for an encounter, or let’s say, a lack of understanding between Marxist tradition and the labour tradition.
PE You went to the archives and became a historian?
JR Yes, I actually became a historian.
PE And you visited archives in France and Amsterdam?
JR Primarily French archives, later some others too. In Amsterdam I went to the archive of the Institute of Social History, but spent much of my time at the National Archive. I researched in the archive collections of the various utopist groups, especially those of the Saint-Simonists and the Icarian workers. But my great discovery was the documents of Gauny, a carpenter from the nineteenth century who was a Saint-Simonist. As if by a miracle, he left behind boxes full of documents that have survived – and one always says that the voices of the people remain unknown and leave no traces! There were eight boxes at the archive, with texts, letters, poems, the collected writings of a Saint-Simonist carpenter who had experienced the nineteenth century as a writer. Here someone ‘from below’ had left traces! Proceeding from all these archival collections, especially those of the carpenter, I began to undertake a critique of my own position. I was searching for a true workers’ thinking, or people’s thinking, whose foundations lay in the culture of the people, the workers. It then became clear to me that the workers’ activism had come about through an attempt to liberate themselves from a particular workers’ identity that was defined by domination.
PE To become part of the bourgeoisie?
JR To reach a way of thinking and of perceiving the world where one no longer thinks as a worker, but rather begins to have a share in all forms of culture and thought which the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and the different factions of the ruling class had hitherto claimed for themselves. What I ultimately discovered was that the class struggle and all conflict phenomena aren’t simply a head-on opposition between a class with its culture, its ideology and its interests on the one side and a different class on the other side. Many of these phenomena were essentially problems of boundaries; there was the will of these workers to emerge from a kind of captivity and become fully fledged subjects of a shared world. That was evident on many different levels, for example in the fact that strikes were organized on the basis of argumentation. Suddenly, strikes were no longer just expressions of a balance of power, but became something like assertions of intellectual ability, an ability to argue and to discuss a situation. They proved that it wasn’t a matter of being stronger, it was a matter of carrying out sensible actions. It was the same with the will to write poetry, for example. The bourgeoisie, the great writers, said to the workers, ‘Write folk songs!’ But the workers wanted to write tragedies, not folk songs. So I was interested in all these phenomena relating to boundaries and transgression.
PE You discovered that the political struggle, the class struggle, was at once a kind of cultural struggle among those who wanted to be accepted into a culture from which they’d previously been excluded? Is that how one could see your political perspective?
JR But one shouldn’t get too fixated on the concept of culture, which is a rather complicated concept. At any rate, what I actually discovered was this intellectual and aesthetic dimension of class struggles. The class struggle was originally the struggle to gain access to a particular lifeworld (monde vécu) from a different lifeworld. That can be expressed in culture, because culture is a form of connection to an existing unity. But what the class struggle really calls into question is one’s belonging to a class as the assignment to a particular presence in the world, a particular perception of the world, a particular language. Essentially the class struggle contains the will to emerge from the alleged situation that one thinks as a worker, acts as a worker and sees the world as a worker.
I genuinely think that this dimension, which I called ‘aesthetic’, is very important. ‘Aesthetic’ not in the sense of viewing works of art, but rather in the strong sense of one’s relationship with the perceived world. That was extremely important for me, and led to a very unusual philosophical habilitation thesis that I published as a book called Proletarian Nights.3 It was a philosophical thesis, yet didn’t contain a single philosophical thesis, a single argument. There were only stories, narratives, a kind of montage of letters, poems, workers’ newspapers and pamphlets that tried to give an account of this struggle on the boundary between two worlds. This montage tried to render visible the fact that the revolution was, in a sense, first of all an aesthetic, a sensual matter. I called this book Proletarian Nights because it seeks to make visible the efforts these people undertook to escape the simplest and most immediate form of coercion that burdened their lives, which dictates that if someone works all day, they have to sleep at night so that they can carry on working the next morning. One could say that the emancipation of the workers begins where the workers decide not to sleep but to do other things: to read, to write, to gather at night. That was a very important point, and it allowed me to define both my view of politics and my view of aesthetics.
PE I remember that this aesthetic aspect was never addressed in East Germany. Being a communist or a socialist was always based on an intellectual construction. One had to follow the programme without any feelings: feelings and culture were considered forms of manipulation.
JR Yes.
PE When did you write your habilitation thesis?
JR In the late seventies. I took the viva in 1980 and published it the following year. It was a very peculiar subject, and I ended up somewhere else entirely. It was a habilitation thesis, but dealt with nothing but stories. It was a subject that neither the philosophers nor the historians wanted.
PE You had a position in Vincennes at the time?
JR I took a position in Vincennes in 1968. The university was set up in a completely different way, with different hiring procedures from the usual ones where one had to appear before a committee. Instead, a number of heads of department had been selected and they were free to hire the staff they wanted.
PE And Michel Foucault was one of them?
JR Yes, he was head of the philosophy department.
PE Everyone at the philosophy department was appointed in the same way?
JR Originally everyone in Vincennes was chosen that way, by heads of department who were given a completely free hand to put together their teams. But that was only the case the first time, because it was shortly after May 1968. After that, rules were formulated, which was why later on, when I wanted to get a professorship, I had to appear before the normal university committees, and they made it very clear to me that I, not being a philosopher, had no place there. So I became a professor not of philosophy but of aesthetics, because the philosophy committee consisted of very reactionary people who had been swept aside by 1968, as it were, who had been humiliated by the fame of Derrida, Foucault and Althusser and could now take revenge.
PE It’s interesting that aesthetics was significant in that field too.
JR I never had any problems as a teacher in Vincennes. I always taught there without anyone telling me what work to do or demanding an account of what I was doing. Though one did have to appear before a national committee to get the professorship. Now there were two different committees: a philosophy committee, which didn’t want me, and an aesthetics committee, which wanted to hire me as a professor. That was in 1990. I stayed in the same place, at the same philosophy department, but as professor of aesthetics and politics. That was the institutional side of things. So essentially I was in a situation where, after following my own path, I tried to see what connection there might be between the path I had taken and issues of philosophy or political philosophy. That gradually led me to draw conclusions from my work with regard to philosophy and what people called political theory. I wrote a number of books, like The Philosopher and His Poor,4 in which I tried to develop a genealogy of the proletarian concept based on Marxist theory or Bourdieu’s sociology, and going all the way back to Plato. I wanted to show that philosophy too is based on an original separation of two souls – souls of gold and souls of iron. I tried to investigate the relationship which philosophy had established between three figures in Plato’s time: the philosopher, the worker and a third figure whom Plato calls the ‘sophist’ and Marx the ‘petty bourgeois’. It’s a figure who supposedly always disturbs the good relationship between those on the right and those on the left, between those on the side of thought and those who stand on the side of labour. So I tried to write a philosophical genealogy of this relationship between the ‘head people’ and the ‘hand people’ and a third category of people, who can be sophists, artists, petty bourgeois or ideologues, and who, throughout this entire tradition, bring confusion into the good order of things. That’s the subject of my book The Philosopher and His Poor.
PE When was it published?
JR 1983. Later on, people started asking me about the connection between my work and politics, to political philosophy and daily political affairs. So I started – slightly against my will – to write about politics, political theory and philosophy and democracy. For roughly ten years I pursued a line of thought that led to Disagreement,5 published in 1995. In that book I tried to translate my work on workers’ emancipation back into classical concepts from political philosophy, or to locate it within the relationship between philosophy and politics. The idea of the book developed from three points that form a triangle. One of the corners of the triangle consisted in my investigations of workers’ emancipation. The second corner was a study on the origin of political philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. The third was the political and ideological situation of the 1980s and 1990s. That was the time when the Soviet Union collapsed and Fukuyama formulated his theories about the end of history and about universal democracy. In France, it was the start of the consensus, that is, the rapprochement, between the positions of the right and the left, with the growth of a kind of shared economic and political doxa. In that situation of consensus, in France especially, there were a number of theories and books – the studies by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, for example, who stated that we had finally rid ourselves of the class struggle, the labour movement and all that social business, and could henceforth return to real political philosophy. People at the time referred most of all to Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Aristotle to oppose the topics of social struggle with an emphasis on the common good and coexistence. They presented these Aristotelian themes which had been taken up again by Strauss and Arendt. So it was a situation in which, roughly speaking, we had consensus as state practice on the one hand, and on the other a culture of political consensus which claimed to be returning to true political philosophy – referring back very emphatically to classical philosophy. Ultimately, it boiled down to justifying the most commonplace government actions with brilliant philosophical references. So those were the three corners of the triangle: the emergence of a consensus; classical philosophy, which was used to justify it, and which I suggested reading in a different way; and finally my work on workers’ emancipation. Starting from there, I tried to rethink what we call ‘political’ and to show that politics is not a thinking that considers how to organize the individuals in a community, but rather a dispute about the nature of this community.
In reality, political is dissensual, conflictual; one shouldn’t simply understand it as a conflict between groups, but as a conflict of worlds. From the start, as soon as Aristotle defines the political animal, he contrasts human language and the animal’s voice. And that’s precisely where the fundamental conflict lies: whom does one see as a speaking creature, and who is a noisy animal? That was the whole problematics of workers’ emancipation. It was about people who were seen as noisy animals and wanted to make themselves heard as speaking creatures. So I thought it was necessary to rethink the conflict and to locate the essence of the conflict in the origins of political thought itself. I worked through Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of democracy once again to show that, since its beginnings, philosophy has tried to convince us that politics is a conflict between two groups; there is one world reserved for those people who are made for politics, and one world for all the rest. I countered that with the argument that politics in the real sense exists precisely when those from the other side participate in it. So there’s an entire tradition of political philosophy which asserts that politics is made by people who are qualified to conduct politics. But the opposite is the case: politics begins to exist with democracy. What’s democracy, if not the fact that people hold power without having any special qualifications to exercise that power? The starting point is the conflict which leads to people with no privilege of birth, of science or of money making themselves heard as the true subject in spite of everything.
PE That’s the beginning of politics?
JR Yes, that’s the beginning of politics. I was interested in the fact that what we call ‘political philosophy’ was always a way to put an end to this beginning, and to shift things back to their rightful places.
PE And that’s been the case since Plato?
JR Yes, since Plato. Plato tries to justify the power of those who are qualified to govern the state. For me, the original problem of political philosophy and the tradition of what one calls ‘political’ lies in the liquidation of democracy. Because democracy is the power of all, no matter who they are, the power of the people who have nothing. Democracy is the true politics, because politics begins precisely when the people whom one assumes are not made for it start taking care of the community’s concerns, making decisions, explaining and showing that they can do it, that they have the ability to do it. Our modern governments essentially rest on the idea that power belongs to everyone, that there is an ability possessed by everyone; at the same time, this idea is only invoked to confer power on people who supposedly have the ability to command, to know.
PE Is that the basis for your critique of representative democracy?
JR Not quite. I said that democracy exists when a power is asserted which is the power of all, no matter who they are; the origin of the representative system, on the other hand, lies in the fact that the monarchist, aristocratic system included a representation of those who allegedly had the ability to participate in community matters. In France, for example, there was the monarchy and the so-called estates, that is, groups like the nobility and the clergy, which were supposedly representative. They didn’t represent the populace but a class, a force that had a say in community matters. Democracy and representation originally followed completely separate logic. Democracy is the power of all, no matter who they are, which was expressed especially in the principle of drawing lots for public offices in Attic democracy. At the start of Attic democracy, offices were held for very short periods of six months or a year, with very frequent renewal. The lot determined who took a particular office. I don’t make any value judgement about that, I simply point out what the original principle of democracy was. The principle of representation is an aristocratic principle which states that there are certain social classes which have more weight than others, and must be represented. That still existed in the nineteenth century in the form of census suffrage, in which only those who paid a certain amount of taxes were allowed to vote. Modern universal suffrage is a compromise between these two principles, which are antagonistic principles. Ultimately, the question is in what direction this relationship takes effect, whether it acts in favour of the ability of all, no matter who they are, or does the opposite, favouring the reproduction of those people who presume themselves to be able and competent to control the affairs of the community.
PE You say that the principle of democracy was based on leaving the allocation of political functions to chance by drawing lots. Is that system still feasible in a more complex world? Take nuclear facilities: can one control or guarantee the security of such facilities on the basis of this principle?
JR I think that control over technology and decision-making power in the name of the community are two completely different things. Let’s take France as an example, where each former president is supposedly meant to initiate the new one into the secrets of the nuclear weapons code. That’s purely formal: neither one of them actually controls the technical processes any more than we do. The increasing complexity of the sciences and technology is not directly connected to what the government calls competencies, because ultimately no one knows where the competence of our rulers comes from. One could say that their primary competence is the competence of people who have succeeded in acting cleverly inside their party, first and foremost by driving out the rivals within the party. So the competence of these people is in no way more valuable than the competencies one needs to practise all sorts of other professions.
PE I completely agree with you. Every day we witness the incompetence of politicians who hold public office and purport to be competent in the areas for which they are responsible. Nonetheless, if we leave aside the complexity of our technology, there’s still the complexity of our social organization. I myself wouldn’t be able to make any decisions about areas that are important for the life of the community. But maybe those are two different things?
JR Yes, those are two different things. If one looks at what’s happening in many very complex organizations nowadays, it becomes clear that they’re often run by people who are there because they’re close to power and have influence. All these complex organizations ultimately function thanks to the knowledge of those who work there. I have a son who worked for the French railway company for a while, so for a giant machinery. Now all of these machineries are usually run, even in the private sector, by people who are friends of power. The power changes, but this form of complicity doesn’t change. And all these organizations would be thrown into a complete state of disaster if the people at the lower levels didn’t do their work properly. One has to see that. In a sense, the democracy of intelligences is realized in actual practice. It gets covered up by the social hierarchy, but it exists in actual practice. Because all these big organizations only function thanks to the competencies that exist at all levels of the hierarchy – except, often enough, at the top.
PE I’m not sure I follow you; you mean that there’s a democratic principle in all these organizations?
JR All these organizations function thanks to the spread of abilities among all those who work in the organizations, often at the middle or lower levels.
PE They’re specialists …
JR Yes, they’re specialists in administration, bookkeeping, technology. Complex organizations function primarily through this knowledge, which isn’t management knowledge but technical knowledge, and through people taking responsibility at all levels. Very often it’s not the highest level that coordinates, guides and keeps everything running.
PE But at the same time, it’s this highest level that makes decisions if there’s a crisis, with farreaching consequences …
JR Yes, in a certain sense they too confirm the thesis that sounds so scandalous when I utter it; namely that the real political power is the power of the ‘incompetents’, that is, the power of people who have no special competence. They involuntarily confirm the thesis that there is no such thing as genuine political competence. They too practise the competence of the incompetent. Essentially, the question is who the ‘incompetent’ are who should govern, which ultimately means whether the power of the incompetent is the broad power of the collective intelligence spread throughout society, or rather the power of a small group of people whose main competence is that of having the means to attain power.
PE Let’s get back to democracy, to the beginnings of democracy with its principle of distributing public offices and to the rejection of a principle of representation. Your view is that democracy came from the people, from people without specific competencies.
JR Those are indeed the origins of democracy. Historically speaking, democracy began with the abolition of aristocratic privileges. In Athens there was initially a tradition in which power was held by families who were considered original, autochthonous, who were supposedly descended from some god (laughs). Democracy began with the undoing of their power, with the denial of their descent, their property, their social status, and with the assertion of a power that was the power of all, no matter who they were. That’s all I’m saying, and here too, I’m not setting up any norms. I’m trying to find out what these concepts mean, and that was why I went back in history. If one wants to understand democracy, one mustn’t start from the speeches of contemporary political representatives who purport to embody democracy; one must try to trace their genealogy and to recognize that what we call democracy is, in reality, a combination of two principles: a democratic principle and an oligarchic principle.
PE What characterizes the oligarchic principle?
JR One could say that the oligarchic principle is the principle of a permanent confiscation of democracy. It’s more the principle of what I have called ‘police’.
PE So then politics is a concept that belongs in the democratic milieu?
JR It’s not a matter of milieu. For politics to exist, there first has to be a specific form of power, a principle of power, that constitutes something other than the power of the master over his slaves, the boss over his workers, the head of the family over his family, the teacher over his students. There has to be a form of power that differs from all other forms of power: economic, familial, pedagogical and so forth. Now the democratic principle is the only one that embodies this demand of politics – a power that constitutes the power of all, no matter who they are, which is a completely unique force precisely because it is not the power of a particular class, a particular authority. So one can say that the democratic principle and the political principle merge into each other. Only the democratic principle, that is, the principle of a rule of all, no matter who they are, corresponds to the idea of a pure political power. All powers that exist are, in reality, mixtures of this power of all, no matter who they are, with powers of descent, of wealth, of knowledge or of a particular caste that reproduces itself.
PE So we’re dealing with two different principles and two different ways of functioning, but they exist at the same time?
JR …which always mix, sometimes more and sometimes less. That’s why, for democracy truly to exist, there have to be people’s authorities in the current regimes which are autonomous in relation to the regime of representation.
PE So you develop a conception of democracy and politics directed against the oligarchic logics that threaten democracy and politics from the start?
JR Yes, one could put it like that. One could say that the existence of politics is always conflictual, and never based on anything like consensual organization or delegation. We live under regimes that purport to be regimes of consensual delegation, but in reality what we call ‘politics’ is a conflict between two antagonistic principles. As in every conflict, the advantage can lie on one side or the other.
PE So you’re suggesting a model opposed to that of current politics, and to what one usually means by the word ‘politics’. There’s a second important element in your thought, namely aesthetics. Just as you established a new definition of politics, you also suggested a new perspective on art and aesthetics. Before we bring these two areas together, let’s trace the development of your aesthetic perspective a little.
JR If one wants to attempt a genealogy of all that, one has to go back to the work on workers’ emancipation that I pursued in the seventies. In that work, I developed something from this emancipation which I called the aesthetic dimension, the striving to live in a different sensual world. I commented most of all on the texts of the carpenter Gauny, in which he describes his working day in a splendid villa where he’s laying a parquet floor. He’s in a situation of class struggle, one could say: he’s selling the labour of his hands to provide a boss with profit and an owner with something useful. And there’s a moment in his description when he says that he moves his gaze away from the work of his hands. His gaze wanders to the window and takes in the perspective, the buildings, the gardens around him. It’s essentially something like Kant’s disinterested gaze. For me that was the concrete application of Kant’s disinterested gaze, it’s certainly not the aesthete’s gaze at a beautiful painting, which forgets the class struggle. On the contrary: in a sense, the class struggle begins with the ability of the gaze to separate itself from the hands; that is, the worker makes themselves the material, concrete, aesthetic owner of this world in which they sell their labour power. My thought is that emancipation already begins there. This form of appropriation presupposes that one changes one’s gaze, that the gaze is no longer there simply to accompany the work of the hands, but rather goes in a different direction. That’s also connected to a dissociation of the body. There’s a worker’s body, which is made for a particular thing, namely to sell one’s labour every day, make a living, sleep at night, rest and then start again the next day. At a certain point, however, this body is dissociated, the gaze separates from the hands, and the worker’s body takes on the gaze of an aesthete, the thinking of an aesthete. This also means that the hand will ultimately change its function; it will start writing, writing poems, writing texts.
This attainment of a disinterested aesthetic practice gives a completely new meaning to the canonical texts of aesthetics. Let’s recall that in the second paragraph of the Critique of Judgement, Kant examines the way in which the exterior of a palace should be viewed in order to reach an aesthetic judgement. He says one can point out that this palace was built with the sweat of the people and for the vanity of the rich, but that the aesthetic judgement consists in leaving this aside, adopting a disinterested gaze and asking oneself if one finds this palace pleasing or not. In a sense, this is what happens to the gaze of the worker who mentally takes possession of the space surrounding them. That’s an important point, especially as I was writing Proletarian Nights when Bourdieu’s Distinction came out, a book that had enormous influence.6 Distinction explains that the idea of the aesthetic judgement is simply the consecration of bourgeois taste as free taste, and that working people can only have a taste born of necessity. In Bourdieu’s view, the free aesthetic judgement is a privilege of the bourgeois, the intellectual, the aesthete. Consequently, aesthetics is a form of grand mystification which seeks to make people forget that every class has judgements, modes of perception and attitudes that are determined by its situation. For me, Bourdieu’s thesis is essentially the same as Plato’s thesis that every person, with their own way of being, should stay on the side where their conditions have put them. So emancipation begins when people decide not to stay on their side anymore. Bourdieu’s thesis of the radical opposition of tastes along class lines, and hence the thesis that the aesthetic judgement is no more than a philosophical mystification to fool the petty bourgeoisie and give them the illusion of having a share in the universal, was highly influential.
PE You, on the other hand, didn’t agree with Bourdieu’s argumentation.
JR No, because his thesis completely contradicted what my work on workers’ emancipation had taught me, namely that reaching an aesthetic attitude is the basis for the possibility of social upheaval, as it marks the beginning of the emergence from the sensual situation in which the people are imprisoned. So it was very important to me to understand this fact. Around that time, I was in a second-hand bookshop one day and by coincidence – because coincidence has always played an important part in my life – I stumbled on a book by Schiller that I didn’t know: On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The significance of these letters, which were published in 1795, in the middle of the French Revolution, lies in the fact that they put the whole of Kantian aesthetics into a kind of political perspective. It wasn’t a book in favour of the revolution, but it did insist on what one could call the egalitarian dimension of aesthetic experience, on the idea of creating a new form of humanity on the basis of a kind of revolution of the senses. The definition of the sensual ability that Schiller calls ‘ludic drive’ [Spieltrieb] leads to the ruin of the old hierarchy, because the hierarchies between intelligence and sensuality or form and matter are, in a sense, symbolizations of a social hierarchy in which there are culture people on the one hand and nature people on the other, people of reason on one side and people of emotion on the other. That’s my own reading of Schiller, of course, which comes from the side of experience, the side of workers’ emancipation. From there, I reflected on what was going on during this aesthetic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
This political dimension of the aesthetic played an important part in my thinking. Aesthetics isn’t the theory of art, the theory of beauty, the observation of beauty. ‘Aesthetics’ defines itself first of all as a way of experiencing a sensory state which has abandoned the hierarchies that normally organize sensory experience, such as the hierarchy between sensuality, which receives, and the mind, which organizes; or between intelligence, which determines, and the hands, which obey. One can say that these hierarchical ways of organizing experience are at once political and social forms. This very important principle underlies the connection between aesthetics and politics that I have tried to describe. From that moment, I thought that the aesthetic is not a theory of art or beauty, but rather an entire regime of experience. I connected two things: the idea of aesthetic experience as egalitarian experience and what I have called the ‘regime of identifying art’. This distinction between regimes became increasingly evident while working on the threshold between literature and history. For example, one speaks very generally of ‘literature’, but literature is actually a recent concept that appeared around the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and served the purpose of viewing the works that were created or conceived in other categories – those of poetry or rhetoric. In the same way, one speaks very generally of ‘art’, but the concept of art as we use it is one that probably didn’t exist before the end of the eighteenth century. One says that Plato excluded art, but Plato doesn’t exclude art – Plato doesn’t know art. Plato knows arts, technai, and he decides which are good and which are not, how they should be applied and what purposes they should serve. Before the concept of art in the singular appeared, there was a distinction between types of art, of technique, of knowledge – especially the contrast between the free arts and the mechanical arts, and this contrast in fact relates not to the content of the arts, but fundamentally to the kind of people practising the arts.
PE Is that where the real distinction lies?
JR Let’s say, the old distinction was based on the kind of person who was assigned one activity or another. To come back to Aristotle again: in Book Eight of the Politics, he explains very well that there are activities which are bad for free men because they deform the body, but also because they are too specialized. For example, he says that a free man mustn’t practise an art too skilfully, because that would amount to a profession – and a profession is suitable for an artisan, but not a free man. So I pointed out that the fine arts are essentially heirs of the free arts, which are primarily activities fit for free people, people with free time – in contrast to all the artisanal activities, which are occupational activities. These sensual and social separations were simultaneously the reason why art didn’t exist as a general category, as it does today. If one considers things from a historical perspective, it becomes clear that there are essentially three possible attitudes towards what we call a work of art, for example a Greek statue.
First of all, one can view it as the image of a god. Then one asks oneself if one has the right to make statues or depictions of the gods. One knows that the answer could be negative. And one also asks oneself if this image represents the god and his attributes well, and expresses a good doctrine. I call that the ethical regime of images; one finds it in Plato, but it also showed itself when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Some people called them part of humanity’s world cultural heritage, but for the Taliban they were images, idols that one treats the same way as Christians treated statues of gods or the Protestants treated Catholic images: one destroys them.
In the second regime, which I call the representative regime, one decides that there are forms of imitation which are legitimate in their field, which have their own legitimacy. When Aristotle wrote the Poetics or the authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote treatises on the poetic arts, what else were they doing but creating a kind of law, a law of imitations that dictates what a poem should be like, what a work of art should be like, why and how one should make it, what audience one makes it for, what feeling it’s meant to evoke. So there’s a kind of legislation which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but also has contemporary forms – especially for those arts which address themselves to a larger audience, as they say. It’s a legislation that one can call normative, it dictates which purposes the works must obey in order to be works of art. Voltaire, for example, in the eighteenth century, took every single tragedy by Corneille, criticized its scenes and said, here the prince isn’t behaving the way a prince should, there the princess is acting like a chambermaid, or there the general isn’t speaking the way a general should speak. Or take the Hollywood producer of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: he stands in front of his screenplay or his film; he organizes previews with a representative audience and cuts out whatever he feels doesn’t correspond to the sensuality and expectations of his audience. That’s what I call a representative regime: a regime in which there’s a form of legitimacy, and thus a form of legislation.
PE In what way does the representative regime define the representative dimension of a work of art and its legitimacy?
JR In the representative regime, a statue is a depiction that one will judge with reference to a number of internal norms, but these norms always supposedly represent the sensuality of an audience. That’s ultimately why the so-called classical representative regime is always based on the idea of a human nature. Obviously this human nature is in reality the nature of a selected and restricted audience, but this regime is always based on the idea that the rules of art correspond to the laws that guide sensuality. A representative film proceeds from the idea that a work of art is an imitation, but an imitation isn’t simply a copy; it possesses an autonomy. Aristotle, for example, says that a tragedy is a succession of actions that follows necessities or probabilities. In the Renaissance, for example, the art of writing was the dominant art which painting took as its model. Therefore, a painting had to be structured in a similar way to a plot and obey certain rules of disposition and proportion. And in the eighteenth century, the question arose whether dance should be taken up into the ranks of the arts, whether it tells a story, whether it’s a succession of actions and causes. One can call that the logic of representation, which is a logic in the autonomous sense, but at once remains very closely tied to a hierarchical order of the world. This regime is based on an idea of what is supposed to be depicted, how and for whom, and what form it should take. One could think of the classical theories of drama, for example, and their distinction between tragedy and comedy, which is based on the fact that tragedy depicts nobles and comedy ordinary people. Or one looks at the hierarchy among types of painting in the eighteenth century: history painting was at the top and genre painting right at the bottom. Here we see once again that the differences aren’t technical, but that the hierarchy corresponds to the hierarchy of the subjects, that is, that there is really a very close connection between an artistic hierarchy and a political or social one. That characterizes the representative regime.
Then I analysed what happened over a longer period, between the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth. One can say that this period saw the birth of what I call the aesthetic regime. It’s a regime in which the entire hierarchical order of representation is questioned and this leads to a paradoxical situation. The paradox is that the aesthetic regime will define a specific sphere of art in which the arts no longer exist, but rather art. That begins with Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity. A title like History of the Art of Antiquity sounds banal, but it was the first time that anyone spoke of the ‘history of art’ in the singular. Before that there were histories of artists, somewhat in the manner of Plutarch, histories of great men, moralizing histories of great personalities, but no history of art. So, suddenly, art appeared as a concept in the singular that defined a sphere of specific experience which no longer obeys the same rules as other spheres of experience. It was also the time in which people began to exhibit paintings in museums simply as paintings, the portrait of a prince or a scene belonging to this or that genre. It was the time in which there would be rooms full of Italian paintings, of Dutch paintings, presented quite simply as paintings. Essentially, the works of art were freed from their function of illustrating faith, showing the greatness of great men, decorating their palaces. This enabled the emergence of art in the true sense, but at the same time, because one was no longer in the representative dispositif, there were no more norms to dictate what was a good or bad artistic subject, what should or should not be accepted into the ranks of art.
As long as one is operating within a representative legislation, one can decide what isn’t art. In the aesthetic regime, however, though art suddenly exists as a sphere of experience, there is now no longer a criterion for acceptance, one could say. Gradually one arrives at the situation we know today: anything can be taken up into art. At the start of the nineteenth century, people echoed Wordsworth’s statement that the intimate feelings of a farmer are just as interesting as the feelings of a noble lady. Speaking of Murillo’s beggar boys, Hegel called it an ideal painting on the grounds that these little beggars enjoyed the same freedom as the gods of Olympus. Flaubert would later say that there is no such thing as noble subject matter – that there is no subject matter at all, in fact. Then all the forms of painting developed that were closely connected to the simple pleasures of the people. Gradually, as we know, everything found its way into the museums; one arrived at the point where people complained that one could find all manner of things in the museums – buckets of glue, heaps of coal, cans of soup, whatever! In a sense, I try to show that there is a fundamental logic of the work in all this. So I’m not in agreement with the great distinctions between an ‘explosion of modernity’ around 1900 on the one hand, which resulted in the end of representation, in the autonomy of the work and in medium specificity, and the ‘collapse of classical modernity’ in the 1960s on the other hand, Pop Art, the breaking-down of the boundary between great art and popular or commercial art, and so on. I don’t agree with that analysis. It’s the same underlying logic at work, the logic of a regime characterized by a fundamental tension between the existence of art as its own mode of experience on the one hand, and the possibility that anything can become a work of art on the other hand. I try to question the established opinions on modernity and postmodernity. In the case of abstract painting, the existence of an abstract painting is preceded by the existence of an abstract view of painting as a condition. An abstract view of painting initially developed in the art criticism of the nineteenth century, a view that forgets the narrative of the painting, the subject matter, in order to regard the painting as a totality of events of painterly material. If an abstract painting is possible, it’s the result of this process. At the same time, one sees that this abstract painting is only one form among many other forms that became possible through this transformation of one’s view. So one can’t say that the appearance of Kandinsky’s or Malevich’s abstract compositions marked a radical historical rupture.
PE So your analysis doesn’t correspond to the classic pattern of art-historical periodization, the established definition of modernity and the separation of modernity from postmodernity. Could you explain your periodization more precisely against this background, with reference to the distinction between the representative and aesthetic regimes?
JR One can say that the representative regime began to develop with Aristotle’s Poetics, that it renewed itself with all the poetics and treatises that were written in the Renaissance, and was consecrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the formulation of veritable laws of imitation, a classification of forms and an entire set of rules. One can say that this regime defined the laws of what one called the fine arts and literature. At any rate, the aesthetic regime set itself apart from the representative regime by defining a rupture, with the result that on the one hand there was henceforth art rather than the fine arts, but on the other hand there were no more norms to decide what belonged to art and what didn’t. That brought the reign of the representative order to an end. The modern schema, in the Greenbergian sense, identifies representation and figuration, but that doesn’t apply. Representation is not figuration. Representation is essentially a hierarchical logic which states that we are allowed to depict one thing but not another, and that one should depict actions or figures in accordance with the forms that are suited to them – to reserve tragedy for great men and comedy for the common people, for example, or genre painting for the peasants and great history painting for the nobility. That defines the representative order, which was questioned. It declined very slowly, starting in the late eighteenth century. In my opinion, that’s what characterizes representation, and it has nothing to do with the reductive opposition of figuration and abstraction.
In the course of the nineteenth century, an abstract view developed bit by bit, an aesthetic view of works that are figurative, created within the framework of representative logic. One has to understand that in the nineteenth century people were starting to look especially at works from the seventeenth century in a new way. Recall all the commentaries by art critics who travelled to the Netherlands. They looked at the paintings by Rubens, by Rembrandt, and they saw them with new eyes: no longer as depictions of this or that subject matter, but as something like events in painterly material. I think that the anti-representative revolution began at that time, not between 1910 and 1920, when people started painting abstract pictures. It took place very slowly, starting at the end of the eighteenth century, with the transformation of the view, including the view of works from the past, because the aesthetic regime is a regime in which one sees the works of the past in a new, different way.
I also examined the question of the realist novel from this perspective. The simplistic modernity that arose in the forties viewed the novel of the nineteenth century as an apologist for representative logic – because it’s realistic. I would argue that the opposite is true, because from the exact moment when one accords the same significance to a peasant girl as to a princess, one is no longer in the representative regime. One special trait of the nineteenth-century novel is a form of descriptive focalization that no longer has anything to do with the representative order, the view from above. One sees that in all the criticisms from the reactionaries of the nineteenth century, who complained that the writers were dealing with little things and describing little people. There’s a text by a critic of Flaubert who expresses his disgust at how much time Flaubert spends telling the stories of all these lowly people, and instead praises the novel of former times, of the seventeenth century, which was for noble people and depicted noble people whom the common folk only ever saw through the windows of their carriages. One descends from the carriage, somewhat like the way Mao says that one dismounts from a horse, and enters the life of the people, which also presupposes a kind of focalization, of closer view, which already amounts to the collapse of the proportions of the representative order. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, then, the realism of the nineteenth century was by no means an apologist for the representative order. It was its collapse, because it was the collapse of all the proportions and conventions on which that order was based.
PE Now I’d be interested to hear how the relationship between aesthetics and politics is envisaged in the respective art regimes.
JR I tried to show that the aesthetic regime is a paradoxical regime from the start, because, on the one hand, it defines something like a specific sphere of art, and on the other hand, it destroys any boundary between this aesthetic sphere and the sphere of life in general – hence this double tension that exists in the aesthetic regime. The idea that art creates its own unique sphere, with its own laws and its own mode of existence, was contained in Schiller’s idea of the aesthetic education of man from the start. He developed the idea of a kind of vocation, a form of aesthetic experience that is destined to become something like a form of holistic experience of life, and even of coexistence. One sees how the idea of an aesthetic education of humanity appeared here, and one sees how it was immediately taken up by Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin when they wrote The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism. They defined something like the programme for an aesthetic revolution, the unification of philosophy and the people; they formulated a kind of embodiment of thought in the sensual forms of collective existence and placed them in opposition to the idea of the state, the organization of collective life by the state. One also finds this idea in Marx’s early texts, where he argues for the human revolution against the political revolution. Essentially, this is the idea that there is a sensual constitution of the community that opposes the organization of the community via the state, via legislation and decrees. It returned with great force in the early twentieth century, especially in the art of the Soviet avant-garde.
So, contrary to the notion of modernity as a separation of art and everyday experience, one sees that the idea begins to emerge of an identity between the forms which produce art and the forms of a new collective life. I tried to show that especially using Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera, as well as the posters that were used to advertise the film.7 One sees how a form of art appears which no longer defines itself as a creation intended for consumption by individuals, but as identical to a new community’s forms of constitution. Here one sees the contrast between aesthetic logic and representative logic: those whom one calls artists of the avant-garde don’t want to make art in the service of politics or create works of art, but rather create forms of life. Vertov’s film sees itself not as an instrument in the service of a political line, in the service of communism, but as something that’s already an expression of communism in sensual terms, proceeding from all the everyday activities that are connected via montage and will form a sort of communal, egalitarian and dynamic fabric of sensual life. So what does one see here? The Soviet authorities will say this is formalism, and demand that artists create works which are in the service of the party, depict real problems of life and help people recover from their work. So, on the one side there’s a form of art that wants to break down the boundaries between art and life, art and politics, work and recreation, leisure and work – that’s aesthetic logic – and on the other side we have representative logic, the logic of those who lead and who say that art is a special practice, and that artists must place themselves in the service of political goals which are set elsewhere.
PE The communist party follows representative logic?
JR Yes, absolutely. Whereas communist artists follow aesthetic logic. They inscribe themselves into a continuity which transcends the differences between economic and state forms. The idea of aesthetic education has led to numerous interpretations. Hölderlin spoke of an aesthetic church – we can assume that, at the time, he probably meant a small community of the elect. Then throughout the nineteenth century there was genuinely the idea of a new form of revolution, one that wasn’t simply a change of government, of laws, but really the constitution of a form of sensual, collective fabric of community. The idea that the revolution isn’t simply a change of government, of laws, of institutions, but a transformation of the forms of perception, of activity, of emotions, is one that arose repeatedly between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as an attempt to conceive of the forms of art as new forms of existence. That’s not unique to the Soviet revolution, but the Soviet artists played a major part in it, because they had the feeling that they were truly creating a new, communal world. Essentially they were following the idea of aesthetic revolution, the idea that would give them their role within incipient communism. It’s the idea that the revolution is above all a revolution of the forms of life, of the sensual universe, and of how to perceive it and act within it. That’s why I emphasized the importance of the connection to space, the role of the angled line, the diagonal, as a suspension of the relationship between above and below, and at the same time, a form of spatial pointer that’s already directed at the future and has been absorbed by its time.
So one reaches a point where there’s an artistic avant-garde that isn’t an avant-garde in the military sense – people marching forwards – but rather consists of people seeking to create a sensual reality of communism, in a world where the party says that communism will come in five, ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty, two hundred years as long as one follows the plans correctly and if the party’s strategy of gradually creating the material conditions for communism succeeds. On the one side, strategic logic says that one has to create the material foundation for communism first, and on the other side, aesthetic logic says that to get there, communism must always already be there and exist as a way of experiencing sensual perception. Soviet artists tried to create this mode of experience in a very ambiguous way. In Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, for example, the everyday activities in a city are composed together to form a great symphony of movement. So at the end of the film, this great symphony of movement, which is the symphony of new life, is presented in the evening in a cinema to those who appeared in it: they are shown the ordinary activities which they carried out during the day as the living reality of communism. They watch it like an audience, with a somewhat ambiguous gaze, where one wonders if they’re aware of setting up communism, or if they’re amused by the thought that they’re setting up communism. I tried to emphasize that ambiguity.
PE Does theoretical communism belong to a revolutionized regime?
JR In a sense, communism is a combination of two logics. A representative logic, where one first has to create the foundation of communism – the coming communism as a result of consistently following the right path. At the same time, in the idea of communism found in the early texts of Marx, one finds the idea that in communism one is no longer in a regime that separates means and ends. What characterizes the old order in these early texts by Marx? That labour is not a way of perfecting the essence of the human being, because labour in capitalism is simply a way to earn a living. At the same time, one can say that people don’t realize their essence in their everyday activities, so one locates the essence of the human elsewhere: in religion, in the state and in other forms of alienation. The idea of revolution is the idea of eliminating this relationship of externality between ends and means, and ensuring that the essence of the community is already realized now in everyday activities. In a sense, the idea of communism consists in the fact of people directly realizing the principle of human community in their everyday activity, whereas, from a strategic perspective, that might only happen in billions of years, as Mao says. For the Soviet artists, it already exists now in a certain sense. The everyday activities that Vertov filmed and put together already constitute, very simply and factually, the essence of community realized in everyday activity. With regard to Vertov’s film, one can say on the one hand that communism is already there, and on the other hand, that it’s there, but only as theatre.
PE The artists realize this early Marxian idea.
JR You could say that.
PE The people don’t.
JR Yes and no; because the artist depicts the activities of everyone, no matter who they are. Before that film, Vertov had made one called A Sixth Part of the World, which consists mostly of pictures that were made in Asia, and which show people who aren’t modern at all – goatherds in the furthest reaches of Asia, nomads in the steppes of the north, or Eskimos. He takes all these disparate activities of workers, farmers, nomads, shepherds, hunters, and puts them together. These activities, the activities of everyone, become the sensual fabric of communism. So the people is not the authority that’s already there, which the artists find; instead, there’s an activity which is the activity of all. One could say that the artist views themselves simply as the one who puts all these activities together to show that all of them, arranged together, already form the reality of a new world.
PE So one can find embodiments of this idea, or this reality, everywhere?
JR Yes, one can say that.
PE But the reality for the majority of people in the Soviet Union was a different one; there was civil war from the start …
JR Yes, there was civil war from the start, but when it finished, with the New Economic Policy (NEP), a situation came about in which it was no longer the fighting people in the foreground, but rather multiplicity, the mosaic of activities that one can put together to show communism as a living reality. They were no longer in the time of the civil war, they were in the time of the struggle for production.
PE Was the struggle for production experienced in other ways?
JR One can think of the struggle for production in different ways: in the form of instructions that were given by the party and passed on to the base, or, as in these films, as a symphony of movement.
PE I think one could also find documents which show that the people genuinely experienced production in this different way. I sensed that too during my childhood, in that idealistic period in East Germany.
JR That’s precisely why it’s uninteresting to conceive of it simply in terms of manipulation and illusion. In a sense, there’s a continuity to my work in that, in the critique of a particular idea of illusion. One can always say that life is an illusion, but at the same time, one passes through a large number of sensual states in which one actually perceives the world in different ways. Hence aesthetic freedom, the famous aesthetic freedom, isn’t just the freedom of the neoliberal subject; it’s a form of concrete experience. Even if one can always say afterwards that a form of concrete experience is illusory, it doesn’t change the fact that it was always concretely undergone as experience. One has to be standing on the outside to be able to say that it’s merely illusion, manipulation, semblance.
PE So are you trying to preserve, or recover, the memory of the experiences which people had, in their specific particularity?
JR Yes, one can say that I’m trying to preserve the reality of that experience. Because, in spite of everything, the reality of what people experience can’t be reduced to the explanation for this experience that one tries to supply. In spite of everything, history is made from what people really do, try out and feel. Afterwards, when one looks at a period of twenty or thirty years, one can always show that what they did served this or that cause, and that they weren’t doing what they thought they were at all. But those explanations aren’t ultimately interesting. What’s always interesting is to reveal the potential, the ability, that’s at work in these forms of experience. And that’s what I try to do in my analysis of workers’ emancipation when I reflect on all these experiences: I try to preserve the positive element, the emancipatory potential, the fact that people are living differently. Let me repeat: in that work, I don’t simply view workers’ emancipation as the fact of fighting for a better future, but as the fact of already living a different present.
PE Emancipation isn’t limited to the individual worker?
JR Of course not.
PE As I understand it, that applies to everyone. So the people working as artists are people who have resisted the forms of determination in our capitalist system, and feel they are maintaining this difference?
JR Ultimately, emancipation always consists in stepping out of the role one has been assigned, and showing an ability characterized by the fact that it’s a shared one.
PE I think this perspective is the reason for the success of your work among young people.
JR I hope so!
PE Because they feel threatened by having to assume roles that are assigned to them, and which they don’t want.
JR Naturally emancipation isn’t the emancipation of a particular class. That’s essentially the important thing.
PE Emancipation forges ahead in aesthetic activities, but also in …
JR … all social activities, of course.
PE … all social activities that aren’t yet fixed. That’s where the idea of communism being presented once again today as a response to the symptoms of economic and social crisis in Western capitalist democracies – by Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek, for example – differs completely from your idea of emancipation.
JR I’m not entirely sure what the idea of communism is. I did take part in a colloquium on the subject,8 but it wasn’t defined there. I don’t see a communism of the future being defined positively in these colloquia, these texts. I think that if there’s a communist idea that makes sense as an idea, it’s the idea of a world based on these practices of emancipation, that is, the idea that there is an intelligence shared by everyone, no matter who they are, which one must try to put into action. I can understand the communist idea as the idea of putting a joint capability into action, in the face of a world whose hierarchy is based on the difference between those who know and those who don’t, those who pursue their humble work in their corner and those who have a view of the whole. Can that really determine the programme of a political party or an organized vision of the future today? I don’t know.
PE But that has nothing to do with the project of realizing an idea from the nineteenth century.
JR No, it actually doesn’t. I think there are several approaches. There’s certainly this idea of a joint capability that organizes the shared world, and there are historical models of communism based on the idea that social evolution creates the material foundation for communism. From the moment when people were confronted with the historical evidence that social evolution doesn’t create the historical conditions for a realization of the joint capability of its own accord – what happens to communism then? I confess that I don’t know. Today one can say that one has to be a communist, because capitalism is truly ugly. Agreed. But that doesn’t envision any plan for a future society. Among the authors who follow this idea today, I haven’t yet found a single plan that goes in this direction.
PE Not even a start?
JR No, nobody is developing a strategy for developing a future society. That’s what I tried to say at that colloquium: in a sense, Badiou doesn’t say any more about communism than I do. Certainly one can say that his communism is likewise based on the idea of a shared intelligence, even if he turns it into a Platonic idea. But beyond that idea, is the flag he waves anything more than a flag? How does it work? What purpose does it serve? What does it demand for the future? I really don’t know.
PE Does your description of this approach to re-establishing the idea of communism allow for the idea that its way of functioning might follow the logic of the representative regime?
JR I don’t think so, because the communism they propose is a kind of symbol. It’s not part of a logic that could show us how to achieve communism. I think this communism remains aesthetic, in the sense that it remains a notion these authors have about coexistence, and isn’t at all a plan for the realization of a communist society.
PE A question we haven’t yet discussed is the history of communism, which I think mustn’t be passed over. In my opinion, we’re making it too easy for ourselves if we cling to the idea that there was a flawed realization of communism. The only justification for re-establishing the idea of communism is this ‘communist experience’, which is opposed to a politics of representation. All other forms have been corrupted.
JR Restoring the honour of the term ‘communism’ entails remembering all the crimes that were committed in the name of communism, as well as a comparison with all crimes committed in the name of democracy, humanism and civilization. Essentially, it’s the idea of a balance – one draws the balance of the crimes in order to say that ultimately everyone committed some, and consequently all that is meaningless. I don’t particularly like these balance-drawing arguments. What’s more interesting is to uncover the potentials – of both the democratic and the communist forms – to realize a joint capability. That’s more interesting than focusing on the criticisms. Some people want to revive the communist idea as a response to this democracy, which is used to justify military interventions and invasions like in Iraq. That ultimately leads to re-valorizing communism as a historical reality with the justification that democracy too has been guilty of crimes. That kind of justification is uninteresting. What matters is to reveal the emancipatory core in all forms that one has experienced.