°Refusal and désistance of the political
Below is a fragment from Lacoue-Labathe’s contribution to a 1980 seminar on Les fins de l’homme, which sought, as he put it, to “question of the links which indisociably unites the political with the philosophical.” The excerpt is from Retreating the Political. It clearly takes place as a response to what, in the 1980s at least, took the form of a dispute between Marxism and deconstruction.
But, since the effort of enshrining these philosophical/political camps is only functional to either/both the academy and sects - which is to say, to a certain priesthood, in both cases - the fragment might otherwise be read as the moment when the intersections (but also tensions) between - as I put it some time back - the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal were explicitly put. Lacoue-Labarthe:
I believe profoundly in the necessity of the ‘retreat of the political’, at least insofar as it is defined – in an initial sense – as a ‘retiring’ of the political (and that is to say of politics and the world henceforth determined, in quasi-exclusive fashion, as political). On condition of not immediately referring this ‘retreat’ to the current political situation (in France, for example, to the type of ‘rehabilitation’ which has followed May ‘68, with all the phenomena of dejection, of weariness, of disarray, which it supposes); on condition, also, of taking all the requisite precautions as regards the unity and homogeneity of the philosophical (and of the political); on these conditions, then, it is still necessary, for all that, to take account of the fact that, in the modern age, the unconditional (or, as Arendt puts it, ‘total’) domination of the political, whether it is achieved and realised or not, represents, in every instance and in all its forms, the completion of a philosophical programme. In the political, it is the philosophical which today holds sway – which is equally to say: technology, in the sense in which Heidegger intended (even if, as I am firmly convinced, the concept or the essence of this remains unquestioned). Historiographically – and that is to say, historically – a limit has been reached, and this is the totalitarian fact as it accompanies the movement of philosophy drawing to a close. Which does not mean that the gulag is in Hegel or Birkenau is in Nietszsche, but that we have to cease denying the actuality of the various modes of completion of the philosophical: from the Party State to psychological dictatorship.
[…] the deconstruction of the political does not only imply work: a course of action is still needed (the choice of words in this instance is unfortunate, but I can think of no others). And, above all, a refusal is needed: a refusal of the intimidation which, because it is ‘regarded as sacred’, is exercised today by the political and which forces anyone whatsoever (and, a fortiori, anyone who works in or on the basis of philosophy) to be accountable, to show their hand, to intervene, to commit themselves, etc. Just look, for example, at the type of discourses Derrida’s ‘retreat’ has triggered.
It is true that the intimidation of which I am thinking – but here, it is my own ‘position’ that I am putting forward, and I am only involving myself – is, before anything else, that exercised by Marxism insofar as it still represents, I believe (and I believe that it is indispensable to say this), the most powerful of political theories or ideologies – at least in France, and that is to say in Europe as well.
By speaking this way, I know that I am going to shock. There is, in France for instance, a vague consensus: deconstruction (’Derrideanism’, even) is, at least tacitly, ‘of the left’. This is a sort of unspoken agreement. And on the other hand, the domination of the ‘everything is political’, to say that it is in any way ‘against’ Marxism is to fuel the opposition: bourgeoisie, Capital, the right (whether new or not), etc. But I am taking the risk – which, providing one shows even the slightest clarity, is not one – for two reasons:
1. I am not persuaded that one does deconstruction (including the undoubtedly deconstructive element that Marxism also conceals) any service in keeping Marxism sheltered from it: if there is in Marxism an onto-theology of the proper and of appropriation or of reappropriation (of the appropriation or reappropriation of man), of self-production and effectuation, if there is a ‘metaphysics of Marx’ (as there is a ‘metaphysics of Nietzsche), why should it be untouchable? And if certain presuppositions, for example those which are at work in the theory (of the ‘withering’) of the State, derive from a (far too) simple critique and reversal of Hegel or from the acceptance of contestable models (the Jacobin model, among others), in the name of what do we pass silently over this?
2. There existed, and there still exists, a revolutionary critique of Marxism and its ‘realisations’ – and that is to say, for what is of the most immediate concern here, a critique of all that follows from the Leninist reorientation: Soviet ’socialism’ and, in Western Europe, the organisations and the parties which drew on this with a greater or lesser degree of strictness.
I am alluding here to the various ‘Councilist’ currents (in France, the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarisme‘ group, for example, or the Situationist International), which, their role in the events of ‘68 notwithstanding, cannot be ignored. Whatever are or have been my philosophical reservations regarding the Councilist theses (most notably, their focusing unduly on what could indisputably lead to ‘Marxist metaphysics’, and on the motif of self-organisation, and that is to say on the conception of the proletariat as Subject), it does not alter the fact that they represented and that they can still represent the only ‘provisional politics’ (as one speaks of ‘provisional morality’) faced with the disastrous consequences of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ (but it is even worse than that), the pressure of which, direct or not, has invariably ended in the preservation or the consolidation, over the last forty years, of bourgeois power. Without speaking, of course, of the colonisation of Eastern Europe, of the repression of all acts of open revolt (Poznan, Budapest, etc) or, more generally, of Soviet imperialism – which is every bit equal to that of America.
There. This is obviously a little quick but it should, all the same, serve to open the discussion. […]
