We live in a world in which a totality of domination is increasingly being established that is based on the anonymised supremacy of constraints and on a grip on life organised under this premise, on biopolitical technologies of domination in which a nihilism of power is revealed, which no longer pursues any idea. Paradoxically, the focus on self-preservation, on bare survival, cannot even guarantee this.
In this world that is disintegrating, ideas of fascism, liberalism, conservatism, communism or anarchy only appear in the mode of their own parody.
Since we have no political proposal to make, no new idea to offer in place of the old ones, our starting point at the moment can be no other than the no, the non in the face of what is.
Historically, it was the task of the left to articulate this no to the prevailing conditions. However, this congress would probably never have come about without the three major ruptures of recent times, which for me also mark a decisive break with the left in Germany:
– the failure of the left in the face of the corona pandemic and the state measures: its cowardice, its focus on survival by complete willingness to suspend life, its servile spirit, its lack of political analysis, its lack of willingness to stick to the chances that arise, its contempt for any desire for freedom
– the failure in the face of the war in Ukraine, the dull choice in favour of one side or the other of an imperial conflict, the inability to break with state reason yet again, the abandonment of an anti-militarist standpoint and the renunciation of political analysis
– the failure of the left in the face of the war in Gaza, the impossibility of an anti-national perspective, the inability to analyse the conflict, but to introduce a left position that would be anything other than the duplication of national narratives
These three failures of the left may be the occasion for the subjective break with it, but the reasons for the break lies deeper. They point to the inability, perhaps even impossibility, of seriously articulating a left project today in such a way that it opens up the horizon of a possible break with the prevailing conditions, i.e. points not only to the necessity but also to the possibility of a different world.
I come from the so-called left of the (social) movements and was a member of the Interventionist Left for 10 years. The above-mentioned ruptures were also revelatory moments in that they not only revealed the strategic and analytical weakness of the movements, but also its inability to articulate a political project or to deal with the lack of a project itself politically, to find a way of dealing with its own weakness. Instead, this inability is attempted to be covered up by a permanent bustle in which activism replaces analysis and strategy. This is precisely how what is called the radical left becomes part of the spectacle that takes place largely in the field of social media and the associated image production.
Wherever an attempt is still being made in the German Left to formulate something like a comprehensive strategy, this strategy cannot work without an imaginary revolutionary subject that is invoked: the workers, the precarious, the migrants, queer people, who are assumed to have an objective interest in changing conditions and with whom or in whose name politics is now to be made or legitimised again, without being sufficiently aware of the pitfalls of representative politics, and that in times when the movements on the streets, the protagonists of the riots that are taking place worldwide today, make it clear that they reject all representation. Thus the Non strikes back at all those who want to speak „in the name of…“.
So when we come together today for a Non-Congress, the Non should mean saying no to every rash attempt at solutions by those who have more answers than questions, in order to finally be able to open up the space for questions. However, such questions cannot simply be derived from the here and now of our given experiences.
This is why we need a historical perspective: Alain Badiou has proposed periodising the history of the idea of communism according to three events that have opened up the possibility of a fundamentally new one, events of truth in which a subject is constituted whose task it is to remain faithful to this truth. Such subjects move beyond representation, beyond identities, and cannot simply be invoked or produced through purposeful processes. For Badiou, these events are the Commune in Paris, the Russian Revolution and 1968, each of which marks a new period. They are all associated with failure: The Commune in its failure to prevent the defeat and the murder of its subjects that accompanied it, the Russian Revolution in the fact that the price of organising its truth was the betrayal of this truth and the destruction of the subjects that could be bearers of this truth.
The failure of 1968 is marked by the fact that the rebellion not only against the political and economic forms of domination, but also against the cultural forms that hold the subjects socially captive, questioned and even abolished the old forms of Oedipal domination. However, the imperative of domination by fathers and masters has been replaced by a new imperative, the imperative of enjoyment: domination has not been shaken off, but installed in the minds of the subjects. Under capitalist conditions, the alleged freedom of choice has become the compulsion to make the right choice and to affirm it. The rejection of external discipline has turned into self-control. The imprisonment by external constraints and conventions into the imprisonment of our minds, souls and bodies by the norms we choose and to which we submit. The liberation of identities into which we are forced from outside, into the compulsion to determine our own identity and then to become identical with it.
This reorganisation of domination has created the conditions for the ecological regime of accumulation in which we find ourselves today and has shaped the subjects that this regime needs. If we want to counter this with the Non, then we have to look for a starting point beyond it: Because the organisation of collectives, cooperatives, self-determination and self-management, creativity and empowerment have all proven to be commodifiable. And we cannot simply assume that they carry a potential for resistance and liberation if they are organised by those subjects who practice voluntary submission and self-control on a daily basis.
Now that it has been possible to appropriate the emancipatory awakenings of 1968 and turn them into a seemingly inexhaustible resource for the modernisation of capitalism, the question of what we can do to counter the prevailing conditions arises anew: can we continue to hold on to a liberation project as the liberation of all? What remains of the modern hope that people are capable of taking their history into their own hands and leading it to a good end? And, if we no longer want to talk about the horizon of such grand narratives, how can we find an alternative to not allowing the horizon of our questions, possibilities and limits to be determined and limited by the totality in which we live?
It is also because we have no ideas as to what a new answer to these questions might be that takes the aporias of modernity seriously and pushes them beyond themselves that we have invited you to a NON-Congress, in which we want to hold on to an antagonism that we find so difficult to articulate both practically and theoretically. So it’s also a non congress because we believe that many things that would classically characterise a left congress are not possible: a public intervention, finding a common strategy, a process of organising, planning joint actions…To do all this anyway simply because political necessities demand it of us would be to not take our own questions seriously. Not doing it, however, must be done in such a way that it does not mean our surrender to the superiority of circumstances.
The Non Congress is therefore a place where the splinters can be collected, a place for the dissatisfied, the clueless, the questioning, not for the resigned: it is therefore about organising a political congress in times in which we believe that a political congress is impossible, indeed, in which we question the possibility of politics itself.
The end of the forms of left-wing politics that we are familiar with makes the question of how the political, the revolution as an interruption of the prevailing order, could be thought of with renewed urgency. In times when power is increasingly constituted biopolitically as the rule over bare life, politics only seems possible in the struggle for a life that resists this biopolitical grip. In this sense, the question of politics becomes not only a question about the possibility of people living together well, but also about the possibilities of life itself, beyond its mechanisation and biopolitical subjugation.
This means looking for places in which something of such a life appears, a life that eludes administration and containment just as much as the simulation of life that takes place in the virtual. We believe we can discover something of this desire for life in the global uprisings that have flared up with renewed intensity around the world since the beginning of the millennium. Not only in the rage that they hurl at the prevailing conditions, but also in the possibilities that arise in them to break open the organisational forms of everyday life that dominate our lives and to allow new forms of organising and reproducing life to appear for a brief moment, we recognise something of the horizon that opens up in the break with the given.
Last but not least, the discussion about the uprisings of the non-movements, which are no longer classical social movements because they are not a political demand of the population or a part of this population, inspired us to organise a Non Congress: not because we imagined that we could address and call together the non-movements in this way. But because we think that we have to ask for these real movements that are capable of interrupting, at least for a moment, the ruling order.
In this reference to the non-movements, however, we must avoid the mistake of turning them back into the revolutionary subject to which we want to relate our politics. Rather, the non-movements refer to the rejection of a reproduction of politics, identities and democracy, to the renunciation of all representation and reveal the emptiness of the spectacle that takes place before our eyes every day in the sphere of the public and the political. To use them to fill the void to which they refer would be to misunderstand the questioning of identities.
The non, which we will be talking about over the next few days, also points to the fact that we have to search for a beyond of identities. Perhaps nothing else reveals the constitution of the domination we are dealing with more clearly than its ability to create an immense diversity of identities, categories and pigeonholes that come across as offer and suggest freedom because they enable a choice, indeed want to force us into this choice. Be what you are, be what or who you want to be, but really, be who you think you are! – is its seductive offer.
This offer of identity, with its temptation to commit ourselves to an ideal that lies within us and chains us to what we are and have become, prevents us from reaching the limits of what is possible and conceivable, from opening up a horizon that breaks open all categories and thus creates a disorder in which the world can be reassembled.
So let us dare the non
– beyond our entrenched concepts
– beyond the clinging to identities
– beyond the compulsion to constructive positivity
Let us face up to the spreading emptiness and finally dare to ask questions to which we do not yet know the answer!