“THE ORGANIZATION WOULDN’T LIKE THAT”

These words are the most recent and common form of death sentence. They are words of perfect ideological neutrality. All “organizations”—whether in the Hollywood film noir, the Lubyanka, or the old-style Mediterranean mafia—are agreed on this blunt formulation.

Organization: the dread word that we encounter everywhere, at the bottom rung of the ladder as well as the top, is now a metaphysical word. Indeed, it is the word into which the whole of metaphysics seems to have migrated, like a family of aristocrats reduced to living in a three-room suburban apartment. And yet from their bleak point of observation, they seem to wield a power that has never been so extensive.

Societies have organized themselves for centuries, but—one might say—without being conscious of it. They used to speak, if at all, about something else—about order. And now a chasm has opened between order and organization. Organization is established when no trace of order can any longer be found—or when it exists as a will-o’-the-wisp. Organization is always based on itself, on nothing, on pure functional operation. Order is always based on another order, of which it is the image, the visible twin.

At the origin of organization: the conspiracy.

At the origin of the conspiracy: the secret society.

At the origin of the secret society: initiation.

At the origin of the initiation: origin.

The Italian Quattrocento, with its hemmed-in states, in perennial conflict, and therefore obliged to look for some other equilibrium, prefigures European history of later centuries, where Italy would no longer have a role, except as an instrument. Machiavelli is so much ahead of other Europeans for the very reason that he was born in the midst of that laboratory that was trying out a new notion of equilibrium. With the Reformation, and thus with the rejection of the hierarchical principle (Church and Empire), equilibrium—the equivalent of pax in a context of pure intrigue and alliance of powers—emerges as the only relevant residual criterion. Political theory in the seventeenth century would be devoted above all to absorbing so much brutal novelty behind such a noble euphemism: the equilibrium that might almost be presented as a secularization of harmonia mundi. Urged on by this secular fury, let us turn instead to the gentle Archbishop Fénelon for a calm and pitiless formulation of the reasons on which the need for equilibrium is based: “Neighboring states are obliged not just to deal with each other according to the rules of justice and good faith; but likewise, for their particular safety as well as the common interest, they must constitute a sort of society and general republic.

“It must be recognized that in the long term the largest power always prevails and overturns the others, unless the others join together to counterbalance it. People cannot hope that a superior power will keep within the bounds of an exact moderation and that it will desire, from a position of strength, only that which can be obtained from a position of weakness. Even if a prince were sufficiently perfect as to make such a wondrous use of his prosperity, such wonder would cease with his own reign. The natural ambition of sovereigns, the flattery of councilors, and the bias of whole nations make it impossible to believe that a nation capable of subjugating others will refrain from doing so for whole centuries. A kingdom with such an extraordinary display of justice would be a pearl of history and a miracle that we could never see again.” This is the sinuous European gloss on the words of Thucydides: “We believe by tradition in the case of the gods, and we see by experience in the case of men, that always through a necessity of nature, every being exercises all the power at his disposal.”

Civil war, “the worst kind of war,” marks the beginning and the end of the modern age. A ghostly, derisive epiphany of the god Terminus, it suddenly points to the limit of what had been declared as a negation of the limit. The modern age is great when it subjects a supposed truth to close scrutiny and consequently rejects it. The modern age is murderous, with an unprecedented wealth of resources, when it claims to have discovered a truth. Carl Schmitt demonstrated once and for all that, to avoid the fury of religious wars, the appropriate answer was to reject the justum bellum. As a result, the delicate passage from the justa causa belli to the justus hostis has given rise to “the amazing fact that for two hundred years there has been no war of annihilation on European soil.” During this brief period, jus publicum Europaeum was combined with the introduction of the Modern State: the machina machinarum, the “first modern machine as well as a solid precondition for all other technical machinery.” The “guerre en forme”—a cruel formal game of war that was safeguarded, however, by the strictness of its rules—brought a new unity to a certain space (a particular part of Europe) that became synonymous with civilization itself. Then the game disintegrated from within. In August 1914, a war began that seemed like so many other dynastic quarrels—and instead it turned immediately into the first technical war, whose structure denies all possibility of guerre en forme. So, too, the revolutionary war also makes its appearance, the final variant of the war of religion, the ultimate of all civil wars. The modern, most effective, most destructive, form of truth is tautological: that which is revolutionary is right because it is revolutionary; with it the question of justa causa belli is revived and finds a brisk response. One of the many ironies, one of the countless misconceptions resulting from the world being placed under the protective cloak of the West, is that when Iran raises the Islamic call to holy war it will already be a parody of the revolutionary war—and the Western intelligentsia will have no difficulty in recognizing it as its own. At least, at the beginning … The full and radiant truth of faith is subjected to the procedural and tautological truth of the West in its extreme form, and this is happening at the very moment in which the rejection of the West is being declared. At least, at the beginning …

Just as Walter Benjamin viewed the baroque drama from the window of the expressionist morgue, so Carl Schmitt viewed the religious wars through Walther Rathenau’s bloodstained fur coat, through the exploits of Ernst von Salomon’s outlaws, and through the wagonloads of banknotes during the Weimar inflation. But in doing so he noticed a pattern that had always previously been ignored: the ephemeral constellation of jus publicum Europaeum, preceded and followed by a massacre, which at first had been called war of religion and today has many names—above all because there is no longer any clear way of distinguishing guerre en forme from all-out war, or all-out war from civil war, or civil war from revolutionary war, or revolutionary war from “global civil war,” which encapsulates and preserves all previous categories. Korea and Vietnam: early examples of distant and localized civil wars that involve the two great powers, with a military apparatus equal or superior to that deployed in the world wars. The Arab-Israeli war: a civil war that is also a war of race and religion, and offers a permanent theater of negotiation for the powers. Terrorists who hijack or blow up aircraft thousands of miles away from their enemy: an act of contempt that recalls the eradication of nómos from every land and the establishment of an order that has no foundations and therefore has no limits, but means that the theater of war, at whatever moment and in whatever place, becomes the killing of some hostis injustus, preselected or picked out at random.

An acrobatic period in Talleyrand’s political career was the period of provisional government that he led in 1814. The whole of Europe then seemed suspended from one point—his bedroom on the mezzanine of his palace in rue Saint-Florentin. Talleyrand, by that time, was already the flotsam of three different tides: as bishop of the ancien régime, as sacrilegious drafter of revolutionary texts, and as Napoleon’s minister. But no one dared say it—and Tsar Alexander I slept soundly just a few meters above him. Baron de Vitrolles, who observed Talleyrand with blunt curiosity, though with devotion, since he still felt in him the presence of “mysteries impenetrable to the uninitiated,” noted: “It is difficult to form a view about the provisional government; it was entirely contained in the bedroom of M. de Talleyrand, on the mezzanine of his palace; his official staff consisted of various clerks assembled under the direction of Dupont de Nemours, the latest and best economist, and Roux-Laborie was the assistant secretary general. M. de Talleyrand’s bedroom was open to all who knew him, men and women, and the conversations of all these people who came and went were the real deliberations on the affairs of state. Their main work was writing a few more or less witty articles for the newspapers, and this was called opinion-making. If, moreover, Prince Talleyrand was attracted by one idea among all those that passed through the head of those who came and went, he’d turn it into a decree, and the members of the government signed it on trust when they arrived, one by one, to visit their president.” The whole unwieldy liturgy of power is lost here in open chatter among those who come and go. And yet the sovereignty survives, like an undamaged crystal, even if it now lies hidden beneath the Prince’s many cushions. It will be a long time before Europe acknowledges it in such a casual form, and so close to its primordial state, aura and miasma. At the Congress of Vienna, a few months later, sovereignty already seemed worn down by a certain lack of inner substance. The monarchs of the Congress of Vienna and the parliamentarians of the Weimar Republic are tied by a morganatic bond. And thousands of torches would soon be lit at the Nuremberg stadium to summon the faded essence of sovereignty from the darkness, before bathing it in blood to revive its ghostly pallor.

The esprits forts of the eighteenth century became the Monsieur Homais of the nineteenth century and the common sense of the twentieth.

Only two attempts have been made so far to go beyond nihilism: the years of Hitler, the reunion of blood and earth, defeat of the Hebrew acids of the intellect; and the years of Stalin, launch of the “realm of freedom,” engineering of the soul.

One day the United States realized that it was an empire. But it didn’t know what an empire was. It believed itself to be the biggest of all corporations.

If the profane—i.e., the profaner—devours what is sacred, then sacred and profane will merge in an entirely new way that makes it impossible, from then on, to separate them.

At one time, only the incommensurable had value. Now value alone is measurable, whereas nature, which has no value, is once again incommensurable.

Democracy: to extend to everyone the privilege of access to things that no longer exist.

The inevitable political choice that is offered today: to be governed by money or by informers? Oh, how much more amiable and lax is money …

The founding notion of all liberalism has an air of great moderation, and is summed up in a few lines jotted down by Victor Hugo in 1830, an auspicious year for moderate liberalism: “The republic, in my view, is when society is sovereign over society; protected by the national guard; judged by juries; administered by communes; governed by an electoral college.” What could be more obvious, convincing, straightforward? Hence the surprise, the helpless consternation when, in the next century, society finally became “sovereign over society” and immediately discovered that it wasn’t a democracy or a republic, as Hugo had hoped, but an experimental theocracy, whose first priestly engineers were called Lenin and Hitler. Many others followed, more inclined to corporate anonymity. All this seems to come from an untested mental mechanism where the word sovereignty carries behind it the whole panoply of gods. And, if the gods can no longer be named, it would carry behind it only the Inquisition in the name of God, which is now the name of sovereignty itself. A disillusioned sovereignty cannot exist, in the same way that arithmetic cannot not contain undecidable propositions. The whole political future depends on such a theory of sovereignty, which is still a long way from appearing evident, convincing, and well defined.