To Conclude (with a Poet)
In defining a political truth, I rather left to one side the phrase real presentation (of the generic power of the multiple). Yet this is an essential point in the rioters’ consciousness. How many Egyptians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Yemenis, Bahrainis (the great forgotten ones: the American base there is too big), Syrians, and then Greeks, Spaniards, and also Palestinians and Israelis, have said in recent months, in their different languages and with various nuances, something basically like this: ‘The representation of my country by its state is false! All of you – powerful Westerners or ascendant Chinese, or brothers from vilified countries – listen to us, look at us! In this square, on this avenue, we are presenting to you our real country, our authentic subjectivity!’
All the attempts to reopen History, from which this short essay hopes to derive some initial instruction, aim to subtract themselves, through an unprecedented, sweeping collective gesture, from the representation of the site where they have occurred – a representation constantly fictionalized by the state. The intention is to replace this representation by a kind of pure presentation.
The Spanish movement of the indignados is at once a sincere, active and yet very limited imitation of the historical riots in Arab countries. To demand ‘real democracy’, as opposed to bad democracy, does not create any enduring dynamic. In the first place, it remains much too internal to the established democratic ideology, too dependent on the categories of the West’s crepuscular domination. As we have seen, in the reopening of our history, what is involved is the organization not of a ‘real democracy’, but of the authority of the True, or of an unconditional Idea of justice. Secondly, we must both salute and criticize the category of indignation, courageously and (as we know) successfully launched (and this is a positive symptom) by Stéphane Hessel. He was absolutely right to invite our young people to inquire, to go and look, never to shield their eyes from the countless crimes of contemporary capitalism. He was right to say: ‘Really take a look at what’s going on in Gaza, in Baghdad, in Africa, and also at home! Break with the “democratic” consensus and its sanctimonious propaganda.’ But being indignant has never sufficed. A negative emotion cannot replace the affirmative Idea and its organization, any more than a nihilistic riot can claim to be a politics.
Even so, among the great virtues of the Spanish riot was the striking, instructive simultaneity between the occurrence of a real presentation (the rallying of the country’s vibrant youth in a Madrid square) and a representative phenomenon (a crushing electoral victory by the Spanish right, well-known for being particularly reactionary). Simply in order to maintain itself, the movement immediately had to proclaim the utter vacuity of the electoral phenomenon, and hence of representation (‘these people don’t represent us’), in the name of the presentation it incorporated. In today’s conditions, and in a new idiom, the Spanish movement reiterated the great truth of late June 1968 in France: ‘Elections are a con!’
There is a lesson here: the possibility of a political truth, on the one hand, and the perpetuation of the representative regime, on the other, occurred in the Spanish conjuncture in theatrical fashion, combining seeming simultaneity and declared disjunction. Deleuze would have said that what we have, as between state and mass movement, is a disjunctive synthesis of two theatrical scenes. Disjunctive, because in a massive popular event what inevitably arises is a detachment from state representation. Any real movement, especially when its blind mission is to reopen History, maintains that what is merely visible should not be considered genuinely given; that one should know how to be blind to the self-evidence of representation so as to have confidence in what is happening, what is being said, here and now, about the Idea and its implementation.
The movement is forever being asked: What is your programme? But the movement does not know. In the first instance, it wants to want; it wants to celebrate its own dictatorial authority – dictatorial because democratic ad infinitum – when it comes to statement and action. It subordinates the results of action to the value of the intellectual activity of action itself, not to the electoral categories of a programme and results. Organized, it will maintain this type of discipline while extending it to enduring questions of strategy and tactics.
On these two points we shall borrow our conclusion from René Char.
Fragment 59 of Feuillets d’Hypnos declares: ‘If man didn’t sometimes close his eyes tightly, he’d end up not seeing what’s worth looking at.’ Yes indeed! Let us close our eyes tightly, and our ears too, in our complete indifference to everything content to persevere in its being, everything exhibited and declared by the state and its servants! Finally free – which means in the service of a truth – let us then see not what is represented to us, but what is purely and simply presented.
And fragment 2 says the same thing in a different way: ‘Don’t linger in the rut of results.’ Representation is the regime of the result; the state has nothing but results on its lips; politicos always fight promising that, unlike their opponents, they will ‘deliver results’. That the rhetoric of the result is a rut means this: when History reawakens, it is the reawakening that matters; it is what is to be saluted; its rational consequences are what must be invested in by the Idea. This is valid by itself. As for the results, we shall see.