6

Riot, Event, Truth

Readers will appreciate that the value we have assigned to the current riotous reawakening of History stems from the possibility it secretes of opening out onto political loyalties not motivated by a desire for the West.

What guarantee can we have that the event, the historical riot, actually generates this possibility? Who will protect us from the all too real subjective power of the desire for the West? No formal response can be given here. Meticulous analysis of the long and tortuous process underway in the state will be of no real help. In the short term, it will issue in elections without truth. What we must carry out is a patient, meticulous inquiry with people in search of what, at the end of an inevitable process of division (for it is always the Two that is the bearer of truth, not the One), will be affirmed by the movement’s irreducible fraction – namely, some statements. Statements that cannot be dissolved in Western inclusion. When they exist, these statements are easily recognizable. And these new statements are a precondition for conceiving a process of organization of figures of collective action, which will signal their political becoming.

It is already quite something to note that in the Egyptian historical riot – the most important and consistent of all – nothing indicates a massive desire for the West. Those who day after day have read the banners of Tahrir Square in the Arab language have noted, often to their great surprise, that the word ‘democracy’ virtually never features. Apart from the unanimous ‘Clear off!’, the key elements are as follows: the country, Egypt; the restoration of the country to its uprisen people (hence the ubiquitous presence of the national flag), and thus precisely the end of its servility to the West and its Israeli component; an end to corruption and the monstrous inequality between a handful of corrupt elements and the mass of ordinary workers; the desire to build a welfare state that will put an end to the terrible poverty of millions of people. All this can much more readily be integrated into a major new political Idea, in accordance with what I have called ‘movement communism’, which is specific to all movements of this kind, than into electoral artifices – a trap set by the old historical oppressor.

I can summarize all this in a language at once more abstract and simpler. In a world structured by exploitation and oppression masses of people have, strictly speaking, no existence. They count for nothing. In today’s world nearly all Africans, for example, count for nothing. And even in our affluent lands the majority of people, the mass of ordinary workers, basically decide absolutely nothing, have only a fictional voice in the matter of the decisions that decide their fate. Only a simultaneously remote and ubiquitous oligarchy manages to link successive episodes in people’s lives via a unified parameter – namely, profit, off which that oligarchy lives.

Let us call these people, who are present in the world but absent from its meaning and decisions about its future, the inexistent of the world. We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity. This is exactly what people in the popular rallies in Egypt were saying and are still saying: we used not to exist, but now we exist, and we can determine the history of the country. This subjective fact is endowed with an extraordinary power. The inexistent has arisen. That is why we refer to uprising: people were lying down, submissive; they are getting up, picking themselves up, rising up. This rising is the rising of existence itself: the poor have not become rich; people who were unarmed are not now armed, and so forth. Basically, nothing has changed. What has occurred is restitution of the existence of the inexistent, conditional upon what I call an event. In the knowledge that, unlike the restitution of the inexistent, the event itself is invariably elusive.

Definition of the event as what makes possible the restitution of the inexistent is an abstract but incontestable definition, quite simply because the restitution is proclaimed: it is what people are saying in the here and now. What do we observe objectively? The determination of a site plays a decisive role: a square in Cairo acquires global fame in the space of a few days. It is imperative to note that, during a real change, we witness the production of a new site which is nevertheless internal to the general localization that is a world. Thus, in Egypt the people who had rallied in the square believed they were Egypt; Egypt was the people who were there to proclaim that if, under Mubarak, Egypt did not exist, now it existed, and them with it.

The power of this phenomenon is such that – a truly remarkable thing – the whole world concurs. Throughout the world it is accepted that the people who are there, in this site which they have constructed, are the Egyptian people in person. Even our governments, even our submissive media, who are trembling behind the scenes, who are asking how they are going to do without their servant-despots in strategic countries like Egypt, have on their lips nothing but the ‘democratic uprising of the Egyptian people’ and assure it, hats off, of their support (while preparing, still behind the scenes and at the hallowed end of an electoral masquerade, a ‘change’ to something identical).

So the rioters who have gathered in a Cairene square are the ‘Egyptian people’? But then what becomes of the democratic dogma, sacrosanct universal suffrage? I know full well that, behind the façade of unfailing support for the rioters, lies hidden fear and, ultimately, strong pressure for a rapid return to a reliable pro-Western state order. But even so! Isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it – horror! – the advent of a new conception of politics when on all sides one salutes, as if it stood for the whole, the metonymy of Egypt constituted by people rallying in a square, with their mass democracy, their unity of action and their radical banners? For even if they are a million strong, that still does not represent many of the 80 million Egyptians. In terms of electoral numbers it is a guaranteed fiasco! But this million, present in this site, is enormous if we stop measuring political impact (as in voting) by inert, separated number.

We old timers knew this at the end of May 1968. There had been millions of demonstrators, occupied factories, sites where assemblies were in permanent session; and with that De Gaulle organized elections which resulted in a chambre introuvable of reactionaries. I remember the amazement of a number of my friends, who said: ‘But we were all on the streets!’ And I replied: ‘No, certainly not, we weren’t all on the streets!’ For however big a demonstration is, it is always a tiny minority. Its power consists in an intensification of subjective energy (people know they are needed night and day; enthusiasm and passion are everywhere), and in the localization of its presence (people rally in sites that have become impregnable – squares, universities, boulevards, factories, and so on).

Once transported by intensity and compacted by localization, the movement, which is always utterly minoritarian, is so certain of representing the country’s people in their entirety that no one can publicly deny that it does in fact represent them. Not even its enemies, who are as secret as they are determined. This proves that such a scenario – historical riots which open up new possibilities – contains an element of prescriptive universality. The complex of localization, which constitutes a symbol for the whole world, and intensification, which creates new subjects, entails massive adherence, to which anyone who is an exception is immediately suspect – suspected of being hand-in-glove with the old despots.

It is then much more appropriate to speak of popular dictatorship than democracy. The word ‘dictatorship’ is widely execrated in our ‘democratic’ environment. All the more so in that the rebels legitimately brand the corrupt despots as ‘dictators’. But just as movement democracy, which is egalitarian and direct, is absolutely opposed to the ‘democracy’ of the executives of Capital’s power, which is inegalitarian and representative, so the dictatorship exercised by a popular movement is radically opposed to dictatorships as forms of separated, oppressive state. By ‘popular dictatorship’ we mean an authority that is legitimate precisely because its truth derives from the fact that it legitimizes itself. No one is the delegate of anybody else (as in a representative authority); for what they say to become what everyone says, nobody needs propaganda or police (as in a dictatorial state), for what they say is what is true in the situation; there are only the people who are there; and those who are there, and who are obviously a minority, possess an accepted authority to proclaim that the historical destiny of the country (including the overwhelming majority comprising the people who are not there) is them. ‘Mass democracy’ imposes on everything outside it the dictatorship of its decisions as if they were those of a general will.

Rousseau’s sole shortcoming in The Social Contract is the concession he makes to electoral procedures, whereas he demonstrates in the most rigorous fashion that the parliamentary system, representative democracy (this form of state was nascent in England in Rousseau’s time), is nothing but an imposture. Why should the ‘general will’ emerge in the form of a numerical majority? Rousseau does not succeed in clarifying this issue, and for good reasons: it is only during historical riots, which are minoritarian but localized, unified and intense, that it makes any sense to refer to an expression of the general will.

I shall call what occurs in them, for which ‘expression of the general will’ is Rousseau’s term, by a different philosophical name: it is the emergence of a truth – in this particular case, of a political truth. This truth concerns the very being of the people, what people are capable of as regards action and ideas. It emerges – this truth – on the edge of an historical riot, which extricates it from the laws of the world (in our case, from the pressure of the desire for the West) in the form of a new, previously unknown possibility. And the assertion (and then, as we shall see, the organization) of this new political possibility is presented in an explicitly authoritarian form: the authority of truth, the authority of reason. Authoritarian in the strict sense, because, at the start at any rate, the fact that there is an absolute justice in the historical riot is what no one is entitled publicly to ignore. And it is precisely this dictatorial element that enthuses everyone, just like the finally discovered proof of a theorem, a dazzling work of art or a finally declared amorous passion – all of them things whose absolute law cannot be defeated by any opinion.