„Our strength lies in this certainty: we have no future to sell, only a present to play with. It’s the priests who sell the future.
„From those who do not intend to succumb even to the terrible haunting of their own powerlessness, and from those alone, there is still everything to expect, and first and foremost the overcoming of powerlessness.“
Cesarano, Ce que taire ne se peut.
My contribution is based on the question „Is this the end of politics? I believe that such a question reflects a concern that is imperative for all those who evolve in a milieu that claims to be part of a so-called revolutionary or radical tradition. This concern is undoubtedly linked to the impossibility of not recognizing that capital has indeed totalized the world, that it is continuing to do so, and that its latest mutations have produced a „crisis of objectivity“ from which no one seems to be escaping. By crisis of objectivity, I mean that all the modern exteriorities to the totality on which the various revolutionary projects of the 19th and 20th centuries were formulated have lost their quality of exteriority (labor, use value, economic crisis, the proletariat, nature, etc.). Their ontological relevance, that is to say their capacity to grasp reality, structured revolutionary debate. Today, not only are they increasingly declared as integrated, but because of what Cesarano already called in 1973 the development of a self-critical capital, the very debate that gave all its consistency to a so-called revolutionary milieu is beginning to lose its reason of being as it becomes displaced, open and spectacularized. In other words, the public space instead of seeing itself attacked by and from an infrapublicity, publicity has come to encompass the latter. This means that it’s extremely difficult to reopen such a debate, even if we were to question the foundations of a tradition to which we claim to belong. Indeed, in order to do so, we are increasingly bound by the frameworks of public debate, and in particular that of social networks, which, and without necessarily being part of it, imply a perpetual valorization of the self, a valorization whose content is predefined on the basis of speculation about spectators‘ expectations. The revolutionary then finds himself no more different than anyone else in this world. Either he gives up, feeling urgently impelled to action while convinced of the vanity of his gesture. He can still try to theorize his withdrawal. So he’s not so different from all the alternatives, the newages and the quiet quitters. Either he converts himself to capital’s latest form of life: the gambler. The gambler believes in nothing but his own capital, which he seeks to grow as much as possible. He sees himself as a portfolio of assets. His contradiction lies in the fact that he must necessarily assume what he denies, namely one or more totalities in which such assets can be exchanged, and he is assuming that everyone is playing the same game as he is, although it is a zero-sum game. He has thus acquired a certain truth, namely a disillusionment with action or inaction, and the reduction of these to being no more than more or less effective strategies for increasing his wealth at the expense of others. So, the question: „Is this the end of politics?“ bears witness to a concern : how is it possible not to remain stuck in a painful in-between position, without converting ourselves in gamblers ? In an attempt to answer this, I’ll try to translate it into three other questions, both theoretical and existential: „is revolution still possible?“, „if so, can political activity still be public?“ and „can I hope to appear, to myself and to others, from an existence primarily defined by politics?“.
I. Is revolution still possible?
a. If I may, I’d like to try here to understand the notion of revolution as Jacob Taubes understands it, meaning that as an apocalyptic, a transformation of the world in its totality, the replacement of one world by another, and the revelation of such a process. This apocalyptic politics implies both the destruction of the existing and the construction of something else. Since Marx, such a movement has been associated with the proletariat. Yet there is no doubt that the world of workers has failed to impose itself against the world of capital since the 1920s. In fact, the only historical occurrence of one or more worlds being replaced by another is the very process of capital itself. In the course of its development, capital has constantly undermined all the presuppositions that gave rise to it, replacing them with its own universal foundations. The latter are constantly challenged by the very process of capital’s movement, so that it becomes this apocalyptic power, at once destructive and constructive. In recent years, for example, the slow and difficult replacement of economics by ecology, the deployment of increasingly invisible, dual and omnipresent technologies, and the accumulation of situations conducive to a potential world war, have all served to illustrate capital’s new revolutionary tendency: to rid itself of its modern metaphysical presuppositions, namely the separation between nature and culture, which now prevents it from pursuing its process of totalization. From capital’s point of view, the hereafter corresponds to disaster. Its eschatology is therefore purely negative, because the actualization of this hereafter exists only to deepen its domination. The process of capital can thus be seen as the revelation of a permanent revolution, in which both the destruction of the world and its maintenance are instituted.
This revolutionary process, this eschatology, is the fruit of policies, that is to say of strategies for organizing life by various fractions of capital, sometimes allied, sometimes opposed. There’s nothing automatic about this, and there’s no clear-cut plan for capital. In this sense, it’s not the end of politics. The general motion in which we can barely escape from, that is, this readiness to be available, is never unrelated to the announcement of disaster. All the political practices we see in the public sphere, even those that oppose the organization of life by the fractions of capital, are mobilized in the name of such an announcement. For it is only the reference to such an announcement that makes them legitimate, gives them a reason, an impression of concreteness. They cannot do without such legitimacy. The replacement of worlds by the totality of capital has produced a context shared by all, a common humanity from which it has become inaudible to detach oneself. In this way, politics shows itself in its most mobilizing aspect, in its cultic characteristic. We confuse the apocalyptic scenario of capital – the objective possibility of the end of the world through earthly limits and a new world war – with the apocalypse of our time: the revelation of revolutionary capital as the only transcendence that can be sincerely experienced. Such transcendence is not a new truth, but the truth of the untrue, its effectivity.
Asking the question „Is this the end of politics?“ bears witness to two things: on the one hand, the difficulty of considering a political practice outside the urgency imposed by the scenarios of the fractions of capital; and, on the other, the difficulty of envisaging a non-eschatological politics when the apocalypse is realized by the very process it was traditionally intended to bring down. All this forces us to distinguish between two types of politics: one eschatological, which has historically been incapable of invoking the other world to which it referred in order to reject the here below, and which now, in order to maintain itself, can only accept the other world invoked and realized by capital. The second, which I find difficult to name even today, is above all a politics of experience. It is rooted in the goal it sets itself, not from another world, but solely „from the life of the ephemeral“, from an attention to what is here. As attention, it finds its reasons first and foremost in the present. But the present is illuminated by the past, not as something given, to be preserved or rediscovered, but as something to be conquered, which never tires of being redefined, and which exists only in relation to what is living. From the future, or from elsewhere, it can hope for nothing. It envisages only the worst, to ward it off in the present, and find joy. It therefore recognizes an objectivity that imposes itselg on all in the totaliztion process. But this truth is purely a negative objectivity to which no one can really claim. iFor the rest of this intervention, I’ll try to focus on this politics of experience, and not on eschatological politics, which I’ll mobilize solely for negative purposes.
2. Abandoning public space?
So I’ve begun to answer the question „Is this the end of politics?“ Yet my answer to the question „Is revolution still possible?“ is unclear. Nothing says that the politics of experience is a revolutionary politics, at least not for the moment. This non-answer, that is to say the answer that proposes: revolution has been and continues to be achieved by capital, is absolutely unsatisfactory for the present desire for communism, as it is for all those who in the past had the passion to change the world.
I believe we are at a moment when such a question cannot be clearly answered in a public sphere. Not because revolution is „something we can’t talk about“, but because it is no longer something that can be grasped within the sphere of publicity. Historically, publicity has been constructed as the place where the bourgeoisie exercises counter-power to the aristocracy. It is the space where all private individuals, who form a public, address themselves to the state power and to each other. It is consubstantial with the creation of the market and the alienation of exchange. It has claimed, often quite effectively, to be the space of a critique of power in the name of a general interest, of the universal. As a result, throughout history, it has had to include an ever-widening range of populations over whom power is exercised. In reality, I think it’s important to recognize that the universal has always been the polite and hypocritical representation of the desire of a particular interest to subsume the others. Today, the public sphere still enjoys such prestige, despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly apparent to all as the reign of manipulation. The only way for publicity to maintain it self as a hegemonic space for the expression of the entirety of human speech is to turn courtesy into an immense heap of cynicism. All those who do not play the game will gradually be excluded.
The question of revolution, whether since Fascism in Italy and Germany or the Popular Front in France, has been banished from Publicitiy. It has therefore been almost 100 years since it has existed in this space. 1968 and the years that followed in Italy were the most successful attempt to bring this issue back into the public arena. It could be said that, at that moment, because the revolutionary process of capital was clearly becoming the replacement of one world by another, a final jolt took hold of these worlds in an attempt to publicly criticize it in the name of the category of the universal. Today, the crisis of objectivity in which we find ourselves translates precisely into the impossibility of continuing to refer positively to the universal, which implies a total disjunction of political activity – which is not eschatological political activity – from the public sphere.
In such a situation, a politics of experience can only be clandestine toward public and social life. Such clandestinity is not its aim, but the consequence of what some have called the real subsumption of capital over society. In such a situation, political activity is no longer driven by the bourgeois freedoms of public expression and opinion. The only thing left to do is to organize the encounter.
It has to be said that the notion of encounter has become something of a password. My friends and I see it as a solution to stagnation, hypocrisy and cynicism. It becomes a reachable event, achievable without any public pretention. It is what overflows the capitalist imposed relationships and what, here, opens up to the possible without utopia; it strengthens us. Encounter is therefore a realistic starting point. And this realism comes from precisely from a clear-sightedness not only of our own powerlessness, but also of our need and desire not to wallow in it. This need for encounter makes all the more sense in view of the fact that, since the health policies of 2020, the separation that generally appeared as a consequence of reification processes has turned out to be something consciously organized on a global scale.
However, we can already detect a certain „solutionism“ in the mystique of the encounter, as the encounter often becomes the meagre, unsharable spoils of life’s ups and downs. It can’t be organized like teambuilding managers or marriage agencies. In this respect, the encounter is also what, in our own defeats, gives us the ultimate reason not to question the redoubling of the world in which we’ve just participated: since at least „we made encounters there“. More comically, both China and the city of Tokyo have created their own dating apps for 2023 and 2024, while in France and Germany we hear a few voices proposing a Ministry of Friendship. If the politics of experience corresponds strategically to a politics of encounter, meaning that to ensuring that, as Andy Merrifield defines it and as described for the recent demonstrations in Iran, the bodies that encounter each other do so under the modality of a chain encounter (one encounter leads to another, which in turn leads to more, etc.), two things need to be put to work:
a. The first is a negative definition of the organization of the encounter. What it cannot be in order to prevent itsefl from being an eschatological politic.
The organization of encounters cannot seek to recreate, in a more restricted setting, an alternative publicity to publicity. It cannot be a debate parallel to the debate on the universal, it cannot be an attempt to build an alteruniversal. Because the very concept of the universal implies a struggle against any other concept of the universal. By setting itself the goal of redefining such a notion better than capital does, it will, whether it likes it or not, enter into competition with official advertising. In the end, it would be no more than a space for building a counter-hegemony to the current hegemony. Its only end would be to replace the hegemony against which it seeks to exist. To achieve this, it would have to be represented, and so we would return once again to eschatological revolutionary politics. And, because no one would have the strength to really compete with official publicity, it could only appear as a joke. Moreover, the organization of the encounter cannot be an alterpublicity, because as an „underground“ public space it provides a geography, a dimension, where negative experiences of the world can be capitalized on. It creates an extension of the market where every being becomes a potential gambler and every body a capital with multiple potentialities. The desire to be part of it, the valorization of the self and the transfer of assets built up over many years in one environment to another, less radical one, are very common things that I think it’s important to dispense with. The question remains: how can we avoid doing this?
b. One way to start answering it is to make a distinction within the strategy of organizing encounters between good encounters and bad encounters. In other words: not every encounter is a good one. It’s not a question of organizing just anything with just anyone. Deleuze, in his Spinoza Philosophie pratique, perhaps points us in the right direction.
„The individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofat as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to joins with whatever agrees withi his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good ? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one’s own powerlessness and enslavement everywhere, one’s own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable event to encounter oneself.”
To sum up these quotations, the difference between those who have good encounters and those who have bad ones lies in the fact that the former exist in such a way that he has taken the time to analyse and feel the chemical composition of the world he is living it and furthermore it’s own chemical composition.
So, asking the question of a good encounter means not necessarily linking the organization of the encounter to the immediate constitution of a group or collective, as we are always doing. Even if the world of the capital is urging everyone to do something about the coming disaster or is urging everyone to convert into a gambler, there is a need, in order to build strengths to take a step back. It’s really a question of establishing (or listening to) in everyone, but first and foremost in ourselves – as a body – a capacity that could be defined as an art of distinctions and distances between what is good or bad for us, as an examination of our affections and our own power to affect. And I say „listening in ourselves“, because it seems to me that the inability to say „I“ in our circles is generally where all expectations are disappointed. Out of our rejection of liberalism, we’ve blinded ourselves to the construction of egos, which would magically disappear as soon as a group or collective was created. I think this is a mistake. To put it another way, the organization of encounters, as a political act, requires us to subsume politics under an ethology, meaning that to make possible encounters between things that suit each other. This implies that there is nothing to hope for from the encounter. It is good or bad in itself, it increases or diminishes our power, it gives strength or not to the eternity of what we might call a form of life. The organization of the encounter is the slow, patient elaboration of a common language, different from that of capital, which makes sense not on its own, but because of the experience of its elaboration. The search for truth no longer makes sense in relation to another, hegemonic truth, but in relation to the very construction of relations between beings. There can therefore be several truths, without these necessarily seeking to destroy or subsume the others.
Revolution can therefore no longer appear in the public sphere unless it appears as its destruction. As destruction, it is the establishment of a plan of immanence, the one of forms of life. To put it another way: revolution is nothing more than the moment when publicity is transformed into civil war. In a way, if the politics of experience leads to such a thing, it might because it is still an eschatology. But, since the world to come, civil war, is already here and is covered by publicity, revolutionary political activity is relegated to the background, to something that is not the most important, or as something that is not the primary goal but the consequence. In other word, the revolution remains, but there is no such thing as the revolutionary as a form of life.
3. Paradoxically, while it may be a question of starting with oneself – without ever taking this to be a political end – it may not be a question of charging the totality of one’s existence with political significance. The question of the end of politics bears witness to the ultimate anxiety of the militant, the citizen or even the militant in bad faith (i.e., the militant who has been militating since the critique of militancy), who sees in such an end the eternal return of the question „why am I here?“ However, if we follow what I’ve just said, a politics of experience cannot afford a public existence; it is forced into a certain clandestinity, which necessarily implies appearing as such only selectively, sporadically, outside our various social existences. These are not just alibis or covers, but the whole that structures the opportunities to meet, or rather what can enable us to meet without having to hide. This means abandoning the situationist mythology of perfect coherence between political activity and everyday existence. Such a quest for coherence has been the constant source of widespread dissatisfaction among all the individualities who populate radical milieu. This does not mean, however, that a critique of everyday life schould not be maintained, or that we accept all compromises. This distinction is both theoretical and strategic, so that the organization of encounters is not the organization of bad encounters.
Theoretically, a form of life that is purely political is easily identified with the one of capital, and like it, claims to have a meaning outside of its own context, a form of life that in itself reveals a claim to the universality of its form, and therefore invariably remains locked into the slave who can only make bad encounters. These forms of life that capital has both produced and relies on for its own reproduction can be understood as the concrete elaboration of humanity. The absolutization of the individual as an empty abstraction outside the context of the totality formed by all the other individuals on the planet. This is the „human“ form of life. The inability to grasp oneself, alone or with others, outside of a context of totalization corresponds to a formulation of the politic insidiously eschatological.
Finally, strategically – and I’ll end with this – disjunction from the public sphere is a question of security. The cynicism with which our time now appears to us will soon call into question all the liberal democratic presuppositions that relatively protected all those who declared revolutionary discourses. The politics of experience and its strategy of encounters do not need to express themselves publicly, but they cannot accept immobility and solitude. It is to painfull to accept this world, and to be alone within it. We can not afford to put in danger what is still possible, in a more or less liberal context,: moving to meet those with whom there is still something to say, with whom an encounter is possible. Finally, the disjunction between politics and the public sphere may well increase the chances of good encounters, as the ethology could no longer be focused only on speeches and intentions uttered in public, but on what is actually done.
[Translation from French]