jasonadams (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jasonadams) wrote,@ 2006-03-11 16:35:00 |
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Recalling L'Acéphale: The Events of May '68 as Nonlinear History
When did the 'Events of May '68' begin and, if we are to take seriously the arguments of Manuel DeLanda, when really, might we say that they came to an 'end'? Recently, that infamous insurrection, in which students and workers alike shut down the country and reopened the schools and factories under council-based directly-democratic control, has returned with a certain abruptness to the daily narratives of mass media outlets covering the political scene in France, where radical politics seems to have made something of a comeback in a manner that, as in that infamous uprising some four decades prior, has to a great extent called into question the continued viability of the modern 'citizen-subject' as much as the increasingly outdated political order that gave birth to it. Initially, the Events flashed up as metaphoric comparison to the thousands of unemployed immigrant youth rioting against marginalization and overwhelming uemployment in France's suburbs, while more recently they have shown up as historiographical explanation for the simmering discontent of young nationals in the cities and especially colleges, including the Sorbonne itself where grad students are being faced with financial aid cuts and the imposition of unpaid 'internment' teaching positions. As one recent article points out, the common theme angering these groups that otherwise have little contact seems to be that of 'precarity', the neoliberal structural adjustments that are rapidly undoing the final partitions of first and third world, not only on the global political map of nation-states but also in the the global cities, its increasingly volatile counterparts where to an extent not yet imaginable in 1968, multitudes of differently-situated peoples are in an almost absurdly analagous situation, are living 'together alone'. What I am suggesting is that ironically enough, the neoliberal capitalist project and its corollary information technologies (such as the Ipod and the laptop computer), are increasingly producing the phenomena of what Paul Virilio calls 'multiple solitude', which may also be creating in 'dialectical' fashion, the very conditions for what Georges Bataille had imagined during the fascist period in Vichy France as community without identity, a political body without a 'head' (by which it might be given 'order'), or what Maurice Blanchot, in his late reflections on the community which its 'members' "deny belonging to" refers to as "The Acéphale Community".
"Communism, by saying that equality is its foundation and that there can be no community until the needs of all men are equally fulfilled...presupposes not a perfect society but the principle of a transparent humanity essentially produced by itself alone, an 'immanent' humanity (says Jean-Luc Nancy). This immanenence of man to man also points to man as the absolutely immanent being because he is or has to becomes uch that he might entirely be a work, his, and in the end, the work of everything...this reciprocity betweeen communism and individualism, denounced by the most austere tenants of counter-revolutionary thought (de Maistre, etc.) as well as by Marx, leads us to question the very notion of reciprocity. Howeer, if the relation of man with man ceases to be that of the Same with the Same, but rather introduces the other as irreducible and - given the equality between them - always in a situation of dissymetry in relation to the one looking at the Other, then a completely different relationship imposes itself and imposes another form of society which one would hardly dare call a 'community'...and this is precisely what happened to Georges Bataille who, after having tried for more than a decade, in thought and in practice, to fulfill the exigency of community, did not find himself alone, but exposed to a community of absence...Each member of the community is still not only the whole community, but the violent, disparate, exploded, powerless incarnation of the totality of beings who, tending to exist integrally, have as corollary the nothingness they have already, and in advance, fallen into...it meant breaking with the law of the group, the law that had constituted it by exposing it to that which transcended it without that transcendence being other than the group's, i.e., to the outside which was intimacy of the group's singularity. In other words, the community, by organizing and giving itself a project, the execution of a sacrifical death, would renounced its renuciation of creating a work, be it a work of death, or even the simulation of death. The impossibility of death in its most naked possibility (the knife meant to cut the victim's throat and which, with the same movement, would cut off the head of the 'executioner'), suspended until the end of time the illicit action in which the exaltation of the most passive passivity would have been affirmed" (14).
Might we say then, that Blanchot's reflections on The Unavowable Community provide something of a basis for reading unpredictable, agonistic convergences emerging today in the late period of globalization, in a form that has in the past several years been referred to as 'multitude', but which might be more appropriately formulated otherwise, perhaps even without a positive sign as such, a community which one does not affirm, that one 'denies belonging to'? Certainly the work is one of the most outstanding of its kind, asking the question of how it is that the incompleteness at the root of every being, one that cannot possibly be fulfilled from union with another, throws into disarray the totalizing horizon of modern political identity, and thus opens every 'community' to its inevitable failure to 'represent'. Interestingly, Blanchot points out that in Bataille, the emphasis is not so much self-forgetting in the Dionysian frenzy of the group, as it is on the impossibility of realizing oneself in that frame alone, since there is always an insufficiency at play in the self, one that despite all illusions to the contrary cannot ever be filled. In fact, his argument is that the whole point of attempting community is to be repelled by it, such that oneself is called into question, even on the most radical of levels, such as by "my presence for another who absents himself by dying...[since] a man alive, who sees a fellow-man die, can survive only beside himself...that is what founds community [because] there could not be a community without the sharing of that first and last event in which everyone ceases to be able to be just that (birth, death)" (9). Indeed, it is only in death that the impossibility of 'community' is made clear, the danger of finitude itself as basis of being-in-common as a 'community that is not a community', 'the community [that] is not the place of Sovereignty' (12) - which is precisely what Bataille experienced in the Surrealist and Contre-Attaquegroups he would quickly leave (Blanchot would thus find the latter "another group worth studying in detail for what made its urgency of such a nature that it could subsist only through struggle rather than through its non-active existence...[existing] in a way, only in the streets (a prefiguration of what happened in May '68), that is, outside", 13). Thus rather than the 'sur-philosophy' that Blanchot argues lead Heidegger to momentarily make himself available to totalitarianism, the emphasis is not an an insurrection of organized violence, but an insurrection of thought - not a state-commune, but a literary commune, whose exemplary moment was L'Acéphale.
Recently, Giorgio Agamben has come to the fore as the most formidable critic of the identitarian logic of the modern state apparatus, which he brings to its most politically suggestive degree in The Coming Community, an essay clearly influenced by the dialogue on community between Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, which as we saw above, ultimately goes back to Bataille. For Agamben, the movement of globalization is leading everyone away from their citizen, immigrant and other state-originated identities, and toward a new form of subjectivity that he calls the "whatever-being", an ungeneralizeable singularity "which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic." The whatever-being exists outside of the distributed categories of identity and is thus always a figure in excess of the coding processes in which guilt becomes internalized as the soil of one's identity. Such a being he argues, is demonstrated most eloquently in the contemporary figure of the refugee, who is "perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time...in which one may see…the forms and limits of a coming political community." Such a community would be one in which, in a Heideggerian mood, "the being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone is divine", an ontology of radical equality. Agamben's vision is resonant today, particularly with the events of the past several months amongst young workers and students, because the whatever-being is what we are all increasingly becoming, "a single planetary bourgeoisie…which is the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction". As in the unspoken alliance between the riots in the French suburbs and the occupation of the Sorbonne, the suggestion is that the community of singularities will eventually emerge through "a struggle between the state and the non-state (humanity)" and will be "mediated not by any condition of belonging, nor by the simple absence of conditions, but by belonging itself. Thus "what the state cannot tolerate in any way... is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity…wherever these singularities demonstrate their being in common…sooner or later the tanks will appear."
"Communism, by saying that equality is its foundation and that there can be no community until the needs of all men are equally fulfilled...presupposes not a perfect society but the principle of a transparent humanity essentially produced by itself alone, an 'immanent' humanity (says Jean-Luc Nancy). This immanenence of man to man also points to man as the absolutely immanent being because he is or has to becomes uch that he might entirely be a work, his, and in the end, the work of everything...this reciprocity betweeen communism and individualism, denounced by the most austere tenants of counter-revolutionary thought (de Maistre, etc.) as well as by Marx, leads us to question the very notion of reciprocity. Howeer, if the relation of man with man ceases to be that of the Same with the Same, but rather introduces the other as irreducible and - given the equality between them - always in a situation of dissymetry in relation to the one looking at the Other, then a completely different relationship imposes itself and imposes another form of society which one would hardly dare call a 'community'...and this is precisely what happened to Georges Bataille who, after having tried for more than a decade, in thought and in practice, to fulfill the exigency of community, did not find himself alone, but exposed to a community of absence...Each member of the community is still not only the whole community, but the violent, disparate, exploded, powerless incarnation of the totality of beings who, tending to exist integrally, have as corollary the nothingness they have already, and in advance, fallen into...it meant breaking with the law of the group, the law that had constituted it by exposing it to that which transcended it without that transcendence being other than the group's, i.e., to the outside which was intimacy of the group's singularity. In other words, the community, by organizing and giving itself a project, the execution of a sacrifical death, would renounced its renuciation of creating a work, be it a work of death, or even the simulation of death. The impossibility of death in its most naked possibility (the knife meant to cut the victim's throat and which, with the same movement, would cut off the head of the 'executioner'), suspended until the end of time the illicit action in which the exaltation of the most passive passivity would have been affirmed" (14).
Might we say then, that Blanchot's reflections on The Unavowable Community provide something of a basis for reading unpredictable, agonistic convergences emerging today in the late period of globalization, in a form that has in the past several years been referred to as 'multitude', but which might be more appropriately formulated otherwise, perhaps even without a positive sign as such, a community which one does not affirm, that one 'denies belonging to'? Certainly the work is one of the most outstanding of its kind, asking the question of how it is that the incompleteness at the root of every being, one that cannot possibly be fulfilled from union with another, throws into disarray the totalizing horizon of modern political identity, and thus opens every 'community' to its inevitable failure to 'represent'. Interestingly, Blanchot points out that in Bataille, the emphasis is not so much self-forgetting in the Dionysian frenzy of the group, as it is on the impossibility of realizing oneself in that frame alone, since there is always an insufficiency at play in the self, one that despite all illusions to the contrary cannot ever be filled. In fact, his argument is that the whole point of attempting community is to be repelled by it, such that oneself is called into question, even on the most radical of levels, such as by "my presence for another who absents himself by dying...[since] a man alive, who sees a fellow-man die, can survive only beside himself...that is what founds community [because] there could not be a community without the sharing of that first and last event in which everyone ceases to be able to be just that (birth, death)" (9). Indeed, it is only in death that the impossibility of 'community' is made clear, the danger of finitude itself as basis of being-in-common as a 'community that is not a community', 'the community [that] is not the place of Sovereignty' (12) - which is precisely what Bataille experienced in the Surrealist and Contre-Attaquegroups he would quickly leave (Blanchot would thus find the latter "another group worth studying in detail for what made its urgency of such a nature that it could subsist only through struggle rather than through its non-active existence...[existing] in a way, only in the streets (a prefiguration of what happened in May '68), that is, outside", 13). Thus rather than the 'sur-philosophy' that Blanchot argues lead Heidegger to momentarily make himself available to totalitarianism, the emphasis is not an an insurrection of organized violence, but an insurrection of thought - not a state-commune, but a literary commune, whose exemplary moment was L'Acéphale.
Recently, Giorgio Agamben has come to the fore as the most formidable critic of the identitarian logic of the modern state apparatus, which he brings to its most politically suggestive degree in The Coming Community, an essay clearly influenced by the dialogue on community between Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, which as we saw above, ultimately goes back to Bataille. For Agamben, the movement of globalization is leading everyone away from their citizen, immigrant and other state-originated identities, and toward a new form of subjectivity that he calls the "whatever-being", an ungeneralizeable singularity "which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic." The whatever-being exists outside of the distributed categories of identity and is thus always a figure in excess of the coding processes in which guilt becomes internalized as the soil of one's identity. Such a being he argues, is demonstrated most eloquently in the contemporary figure of the refugee, who is "perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time...in which one may see…the forms and limits of a coming political community." Such a community would be one in which, in a Heideggerian mood, "the being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone is divine", an ontology of radical equality. Agamben's vision is resonant today, particularly with the events of the past several months amongst young workers and students, because the whatever-being is what we are all increasingly becoming, "a single planetary bourgeoisie…which is the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction". As in the unspoken alliance between the riots in the French suburbs and the occupation of the Sorbonne, the suggestion is that the community of singularities will eventually emerge through "a struggle between the state and the non-state (humanity)" and will be "mediated not by any condition of belonging, nor by the simple absence of conditions, but by belonging itself. Thus "what the state cannot tolerate in any way... is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity…wherever these singularities demonstrate their being in common…sooner or later the tanks will appear."
