Peregrinations Law, Form, Event: The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine 9780231887908

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PEREGRINATIONS Law, Form, Event

Previously Published Wellek Library Lectures Harold Bloom

The Breaking of the Vessels

Perry Anderson

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

Frank Kermode

Forms of Attention

Jacques Derrida

Memoires for Paul de Man

J. Hillis Miller

The Ethics of Reading

Jean-François Lyotard

PEREGRINATIONS Law, Form, Event

The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

1988

Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey Copyright © 1988 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lyotard, Jean-François. Peregrinations : law, form, event. (The Wellek library lectures at the University of California, Irvine) Bibliography: p. 1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. 3. Socialism. I. Title. II. Series. B29.L93 1988 194 87-34151 ISBN 0 - 2 3 1 - 0 6 6 7 0 - 8 Printed in the United States of America Hardback editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Editorial Note

vii

Acknowledgments

xix

1. Clouds

1

2. Touches

16

3. Gaps

28

Afterword: A Memorial of Marxism, translated by Cecile Lindsay

45

Bibliography, compiled by Eddie Teghiayan

77

EDITORIAL NOTE The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory are given annually at the University of California, Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute. Critical Contemporary Theory Institute David Carroll, Director

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WANT H E R E to express my gratitude to the Theory Group at the University of California, Irvine, and in particular to Murray Krieger and David Carroll, who so kindly invited me to give these Wellek Library Lectures in May of 1986. My acknowledgment is not academic. It belongs to the feeling that Aristotle called philia, shared friendship, affinity. These lectures were written directly "in English," at least in my English. David Carroll generously agreed to transform this idiolect into a language acceptable to speakers of English. This is a tiresome and difficult task, a kind of "rewriting" that makes him co-responsible for these texts. There is not yet any accepted name for this function, which falls between translator and co-author (a function that is, in spite of this, destined to develop, given the "Babelism" of all research in the Humanities). Let's call it co-writer. To thank him would be very little. One does not clear oneself of a gift of language. The first gift of English was given to me by Andrée LyotardMay. The debt is unpayable.

PEREGRINATIONS Law, Form, Event

CHAPTER ONE

CLOUDS

WHEN I WAS eleven or twelve, let us say at an age when I was supposed to be old enough to be able to program my life, my feelings as to what I wanted to be wavered. I wanted either to become a monk (especially a Dominican), a painter, or historian. Three years later I actually began to write poems, essays, short stories, and, later still, a novel. After reading the manuscript of the novel, the only woman in whom I had confidence decided I was not a true writer. I gave it up immediately. I presume the novel had a chance of being something like a Nouveau Roman, since Michel Butor and Roger Laporte were my classmates at the Sorbonne. In any case, since I soon became a husband and a father when I was still really only old enough to be a son, I was compelled by this drastic situation to earn a living for a family. As you can see, it was already too late to pronounce monastic vows. As for my artistic career, it was a hopeless wish because of an unfortunate lack of talent, while the obvious weakness of my memory was definitely discouraging my turn toward history. Thus I became a professor of philosophy at a lycée in Constantine, the capital of the French dei

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partment of East Algeria. (In order to spare you any trouble, I should mention that I was not born in Algeria.) I went to Constantino in 1950. Did this mark the end of something or the beginning of something else? The question is a central, classical issue for narratology. In the "Querelle de Pindare," which was a part of the "Querellc des Anciens et des Modernes," it happened that as zealous a supporter of "les Anciens" as Boileau defended the beautiful disorder permitted by the "rule of no rules" that the poetics of the Pindaric ode implied. Against such textual fuzziness, the main advocate for the "Modernes," Charles Perrault, made the following claim: With such disorder "there would be neither beginning, nor middle, nor end in a work, though the author might think that his text was all the more sublime for being less reasonable."1 Perrault, in the name of the modern, is obviously for order and definite beginnings, middles, and ends. Even the story I am in the process of narrating reveals that any narrative whatsoever begins in the middle of things and that its socalled "end" is an arbitrary cut in the infinite sequence of data— although the feature of an action being stopped in the middle was for a long time not a part of narrative. Tragedy (let me take it as a narrative for a while) and epic basically posit a point of departure, an oracle, for instance, and a point of arrival, defined in terms of the accomplishment of the oracle. The decay of epic or the decline of tragedy, assuming this to be the case, implies the end of periodic rhythm as such. Time then ceases to be organized as respiration according to a process of inhalation and exhalation which inserts a moment of life between two silences or zero points. In the twilight of tragedy, time is no longer, as Hölderlin wrote, the rhyming of end with beginning. In the Anmerkungen zum Oedipus, the German poet unveils the secrets of the spinning of time, which it might make sense to see as a recurrent feature of modernin'. He writes: "At such a moment [the decline of tragedy, the moment of Oedipus], man forgets both himself and the God, and, undoubtedly in pious wisdom, he turns away like a betravor—At the extreme limit of distress, . . . man forgets himself because he is entirely in

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3

the moment; [he forgets] the God because he is nothing but time, and both are unfaithful, time because at that moment it spins on itself and beginning and end no longer let themselves bv rhvmed in it at all."2 The delusion that we are able to program our life is a part of an ancient fidelity to something like a destiny or destination, as if we were called by somebody or something, let us say, by an author— and this includes ourself as a hidden author—called, finally, by authorization, to perform the role he (or it) has written on our behalf. Even the early doubts I experienced could easily be inscribed in a process of destiny under the tide "The years of formation." Wasn't the care with which I tried to direct my life the sign that I was spending my "Lehrjahre" in search of a vocation which could appear as properly mine, and wasn't the eagerness itself a part of the sought-after vocation? Not too bad, such an arrangement with time! But it undoubtedly conceals something dishonest. It forgets the grand forgetting pointed out by Hölderlin: God and man both unified and divided, each of them split off from the other, back to back. That is to say: time no longer rhyming with time and the illness of time now incurable. I assume you are sensitive to the monastic tone of the above declaration. There is no monk who does not wonder whether God is turning his face or his back to us. Particularly monks belonging to the same order as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Obviously I had read all the novels of Dostoevsky before I became a professor of philosophy. Also all the works of Bernanos, which fascinated me by their exposition of the way a tortured skepticism is tied up with faith. There is something of the rigor of a religious order in the status of a civil servant teaching philosophy to the young citizens of the French Republic. In the Dialogue des Carmélites by Bernanos the spiritual attempt to give oneself up completely into God's hands, as exemplified by the character of the Mother Superior, is counterbalanced and perhaps equalized by the severe exactitude the official of the Republic uses in applying the civil law. As you very well know and as I concede, the two laws differ the one from the other to the same degree that Saint Augustine's City of God differs from

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Michelet's History of the French Revolution or Condorcet's Tableau des progres de l'esprit humain. Nevertheless, in both cases, functions are referred to the law; they imply suspicion, criticism, even despair toward the law, and they require militancy, courage, and the sacrifice of self on behalf of the law. Now let us recall the answer Claude Simon gave to the question asked by a representative of the Union of Soviet Writers: How do you imagine the task of writing? Simon answered: It consists in trying to start a sentence, to continue it, and to finish it. Such a statement explains what I mean by monkish status. Here is the labor of speech entering language in the middle in order to disclose the idiom it wants. Intransitively, to write is to seek, through the destination of writing. Even if there is neither a need nor a demand for writing any sentence, if no god addresses the writer any prescription to write anything, the necessity to begin, continue, and finish sentences, or better, phrases, remains. You can add: be it by writing or otherwise. I mean that to be in love with a woman, to will that she gives you the child she desires to give you, to arrange your life in order to make possible a life in common with her and the child—that also is a way of "phrasing." Do you ask how monkish are the qualities required to perform such a trivial plot? I shall reverse the stakes: no plot is trivial if it is performed according to the calling of law. You have noticed, I assume, that I am embarrassing both myself and you by evoking my early relations to the law. The plan I propose for the present lectures is, in my eyes at least, thoroughly transpicuous. The original request to lecture, which came from Frank Lentricchia care of David Carroll, asked me to define my "position" in the field of criticism and the path which led me to this position. By having confessed my first three wishes as to what I wanted to be, I have actually given the program of these lectures, making these topics that I have presumably dealt with from my youngest days. The monk seems to be suggested by the law, the painter by forms and colors, the historian by events. But if you were to conclude from this programming that I am now in the process of giving a first talk on ethics, a second one on esthetics, and the third on pol-

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itics, you might not just be wrong but even worse your comments might be trivial. I evoked my early years (with considerable embarrassment) to suggest rather that all three entitites are active, unavoidable, in the three fields with the same force, even if not present in the same way. In other words, the tripartite division is in no way either a division into genres or sections of academic philosophy or a sort of real estate allotment cut up in the large field of thinking. Some have said that my work offers an eclectic look at the overlapping boundaries between esthetic, political, and ethical territories. That is correct on the condition that, having assumed that understanding is a real estate agency, the critic would have the charge of constructing the sort of building called "theory" inside the circumscription assigned to him. Terms like position, the German Setzung, or road and route make sense only in this case. I would like to plead that if I am unable to take a position this is due not to a bent toward confusion—at least I hope not—but to the lightness of thoughts. Peter Handke wrote (in the screenplay for the film "Left-Handed Woman") something like the following: Remember that there is no space in this world and that everyone has to bring his own space with him. This is still too self-centered for me, and I would prefer that he had written: there is no space in general, and everything brings its space with it; a place takes place by itself. Thoughts are not the fruits of the earth. They are not registered by areas, except out of human commodity. Thoughts are clouds. The periphery of thoughts is as immeasurable as the fractal lines of Benoit Mandelbrot. Thoughts are pushed and pulled at variable speeds. They are deep, although core and skin are of the same grain. Thoughts never stop changing their location one with the other. When you feel like you have penetrated far into their intimacy in analyzing either their so-called structure or genealogy or even poststructure, it is actually too late or too soon. One cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached. I guess Wittgenstein had a thought [a cloud?] like that in his mind when he elaborated the idea of language games, which are in

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no sense games played by people using specific languages as instruments. Quite the opposite, for Wittgenstein explains that the rules regulating games are unknown to the players and that no one learns to use language by acquiring a knowledge of its grammatical or lexical aspects as such. Rather everyone learns by groping around in the stream of phrases like children do. If necessary, Wittgenstein concedes, thoughts or, even better, phrases allow themselves to be distributed into families. Being granted a family is nothing other than belonging to a set of elements which is focused on one element from among all those in the infinite network or texture of what the English language accurately calls "relatives." Accordingly, thoughts are not our own. We try to enter into them and to belong to them. What we call the mind is the exertion of thinking thoughts. In declaring that my purpose here is focuscd on three entities—law, form, and event—I am just pointing out the three poles to which I have always been attracted in this inquiry into thoughts, an inquiry that defines something like a self in progress. Sometimes one of these poles is predominant, sometimes another. Even worse, when I seem totally committed to a line of force coming from any one of these poles, I am actually not, for I am also looking to the side at the other lines and inhabited by a kind of jealousy mixed with eagerness. I would like to take up all the fields of attraction at the same time. The impossibility of succeeding takes the form of an inhibition, as everyone attempting to think knows. I then have the experience of how radically powerless I am to penetrate clouds of thoughts. As a pretender to being a philosopher and a writer, I confess I have no chance of avoiding being a shammer. There is no genuine thinking without a sense of indignity. The only way of recovering a bit is by arguing how ineluctable it is for thinking to be situated here and now and to be confronted with only one situation at once. Finally, what is threatening in the work of thinking (or writing) is not that it remains episodic but that it pretends to be complete. The idea that thinking is able to build a system of total knowledge about clouds of thoughts by passing from one site to another and accumulating the views it produces at each site—such an idea

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7

constitutes par excellence the sin, the arrogance of the mind. It implies that thinking has the capacity to be identified with the object to which it refers, as if the gap between thinking and the object could ever be bridged. In avoiding such a paranoiac attempt to identify thought and object, my mind is working in accordance with Kant's suspicion of what he called the Streben of reason, the zeal that pushes thinking beyond the limitation of infinitely deferred time. As postponement itself, time does not allow the full synthesis of the moments or positions the mind crossed through in approaching a cloud of thoughts or, a fortiori, the sky. Time is what blows a cloud away after we believed it was correctly known and compels thinking to start again on a new inquiry, which includes the anamnesis of former elucidations. Being the opposite of the Hegelian notion that time is a concept, time for Kant is the challenge that thinking has to take up; it is its self-deferring, its "differer." Let me interrupt this argument to say that according to Aristotle Being does not give itself as such, but only through different aspects or categories. Being is definitely elusive. Time is the name of that elusion and the reason we have to call the objects to be thought clouds. With this metaphor I am describing nothing but the condition of thinking insofar as it takes into account the principle of relativity it is affected by. Such a description does not induce any skepticism, even if the defenders of rationality try to persuade us that it does. It inspires only the principle of the endless pursuit of the task of discussing clouds. In this sense, guides such as Sterne, Diderot, and Proust are no less helpful than Einstein or Heisenberg. Each gives us an illustration of the rule oudined by Claude Simon: as a matter of fact, to start, continue, and finish a phrase, at least to try to do this, constitutes thinking or writing in its "entirety." For instance, I am trying to begin to phrase my course along a path that has led me to the position I am supposed to be in right now. You have observed that I have not achieved the goal of beginning. If I were to achieve it, I would have to be placed at the end of the beginning, outside of narrative, at that point where start and finish are supposedly observable, that is, in a tragic oracle as the pattern of timeless, absolute reference. And in that case I would

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be delighted to be able to give the oracle, the key sentence, of my peregrination. Reflecting on the definitive turning away of God and man from each other, Hölderlin suggests that the real drama enacted by Oedipus does not consist in accomplishing the destiny prescribed to him by the Oracle of Apollo, it consists in surviving this accomplishment, in outliving the completion of the notion of his life as Leibniz would have said. With the end of the plot ascribed to Oedipus a beginning becomes possible for a form of thinking that is in accordance with the essence of time. Such a beginning takes place each time a phrase occurs. This is what I have tried to conceive of with the notion of le différend and by developing the idea that all linkage between phrases is open. There is a necessity for a phrase to be linked with the event as a happening. Even a silence, being a phrase, is a way of linking. Each time there are many different possible ways of linking phrases, so that each moment is a beginning in the middle of time. I would like to distinguish the two ways of respecting time and Being that are implied in the two tragedies of Oedipus. The first is the fidelity to destiny. I call the second probity, an ability to be responsive to slight changes affecting both the shape of the clouds you are trying to explore and the path by which you approach them. Imagine the sky as a desert full of innumerable cumulus clouds slipping by and metamorphosing themselves, and into whose flood your thinking can or rather must fall and make contact with this or that unexpected aspect. Probity is being accessible to the singular request coming from each of the different aspects. It is a sensitivity to singular cases. Kant calls it reflection. He calls reflective judgment the synthesis we are able to make of random data without the help of preestablished rules of linkage. I am sure you are sccretly objecting to the metaphor of clouds as a much too idealist insight into the problem of what is the ontological status of the indetermined things with which we have to deal. In naming these objects thoughts I suggest that each thinking consists in a re-thinking and that there is nothing the presentation of which could be said to be the "premiere." Every emergence of something reiterates something else, every occurence is a recur-

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rencc, not at all in the sense that it could repeat the same thing or be the rehearsal of the same play, but in the sense of the Freudian notion of Nachtraglich, the way the first offense touches our mind too soon and the second too late, so that the first time is like a thought not vet thought while the second time is like a not-thought to be thought later. Now what about law in these circumstances? I have so far been using expressions like "to accede to the request," "to try to enter into," "thinking as an exertion," "the indignity implied in thinking," "probity," etc. All these expressions refer to the idea that there is something like a call to which thinking has to be sensitive and responsive. After all, why shouldn't we remain deaf and sluggish in the flood of thoughts? I must confess that in the distant past I spent a few years studying several doctrines that support the notion of indifference: the Epicurean ataraxia, the Stoic apatbeia, the extreme Stoic adiaphora, the Zen not-thinking, the Taoist nothingness, etc. My M.A. dissertation was entided Indifference as an Ethical Notion. At that time, the end of the forties, Freud remained unknown as a philosopher. So as part of my investigation I turned to the great inquiry into madness written by Pierre Janet, De I'angoisse a I'extase (From Anxiety to Extasis,) a book whose ontological strength seemed to me unquestionable at the time. Nowadays I am inclined to detect in this early melancholia not only the effects of the particular severity with which "my" Oedipus complex was wiped out, but mainly the passage through nihilism and the radical skepticism Hegel describes as the unavoidable first step into philosophy. As for the second step, there is no security, so that it would be less presumptuous to say that indifference is nothing other than the groundlessness of Being which constandv exerts a fascinating threat over thinking and writing. In the excellent French translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo,3 a Zen treatise on the Japanese Quattrocento, I found the following statement which I have translated from the French: ' T o say many things brings many troubles, to say few things has little force." In keeping oneself from both saying many things and saving few things, what should one say? A little later on, he [the monk] says: "Go into the grass, make like the wind" (p. 99). Remember that two of Claude

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Simon's novels are entitled respectively The Grass and The Wind. Translated into my idiom, the Dogen's answer would sound like: "Place oneself in the flood of clouds, disappoint the call for knowledge, disavow the desire to grasp and appropriate thoughts." It would be prejudicial to classify this prospectus under the heading of the death instinct, whose complement is the trivial occidental ideal that life is activity, willfulness, exploration, conquest. And the prejudice of all prejudices consists in opposing agitation to stillness. The ways the law makes itself apparent to us may be antinomical— no matter, it is the law. It may prescribe either to act energetically or to remain still and silent. We do not know what it prescribes, the law is only prescription as such. In English and in French the term means both a directive or an ordonnance and a time limitation in the application of a rule. The law prescribes a something, a "I don't know what," and at the same time it prescribes itself: it forbids and prevents us from identifying with it and profiting from it. The other observation I would like to make on this subject has to do with the extent of the law. I attended Lacan's seminars in the mid-sixties, and there I learned that the objects desire has need of must remain unknown to consciousness and that the moment of fulfillment of desire is supplemented by grief, anguish, resistance, and denial. I myself felt a bit resistant to Lacan's teaching. It has taken me over twenty years to understand this resistance. It has nothing to do with the concept "A," the big A in Lacan's schema. On the contrary, this concept seems to me to supply a foundation for the split between desire and demand, that is to say, between what Lacan calls the Real, which is relevant to the order of desire or the "Id," and the Imaginary, which belongs to the economy of Ego demands. The anger I felt against Lacan's reading of Freud was related to the third term, the Symbolic, to which the entire field of language and knowledge belongs. According to such a distribution, knowing turns out to be framed in the exclusive form of a theory, that is, as a network or structure of oppositions between signifiers. And in addition, all the other modes of, say, expressions (or phrases) have to be thrown down into the Imaginary, which is

CLOUDS

the term of the lure. Consequently, forms, the different modes of the organization of data into time and space, the rhythms of sounds, the correspondances of timbres, the rhymes of colors and luminous values, the compounding of lines, surfaces and volumes, and writing as an art—all of these would be considered as formations produced by the unconscious with the aim of fulfilling demands and deluding desire. Incidentally, in such a schema, to apprehend such forms and appreciate them, as we once used to say, by feeling pleasure or pain, which is merely taste, would offer nothing but an occasion to be deceived by "our" unconscious. I considered this to be an emergency situation and that something had to be done to save a place for beauty and sentiment, given the imperial preference granted by the Lacanian system to the concept. Presumably that was the main incentive motivating the inquiry into the issue of forms that Discours, figure (1971) constituted. Today I wonder if the answers provided by this book were not themselves too convenient, and that it remains too close to a conception of the unconscious coming direcdy from Freud. My present reluctance will be explained later. A consequence of the prevalence of the pattern of structure in the representation of how to understand clouds of thought and how to answer the appeal of the law was in particular the prejudice that the only genuine mode of describing esthetic forms had to be semiotic analysis. Such analysis could be flexible, incorporating ambiguities and paradoxes, as it was in Freud's reading of dreams and art works, or it could be and occasionally was rigid like a dogma: I remind you, for instance, of the Barthesian Elements of Semiology.4 Structuralist enthusiasm could lead to the simple reduction of sensuous forms to conceptual structures, as if understanding were the unique faculty qualified to approach forms. As a follower of MerleauPonty, I felt that this overrationalism was like a "rationalization," that it, an irrationalism. I needed a rationality more respectful of the various aspects of thinking, a multiple rationality timorously outlining the conditions for a re-reading and re-writing of Kant's division of reason. While I was peregrinating amidst thoughts, an

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idea was beginning to take form in me that the law does summon thinking but in different, incommensurable ways. We definitely have to explore clouds o f thoughts. No indifference is possible or, better yet, indifference as such is a mode o f answering the appeal. The desire to explore is the duty we are committed to by the law. Now it could be that several, very many ways are available to fulfill this duty. Moreover, such a diversity would be more respectful o f the constitutive withdrawal o f the law than the exclusive privilege arrogated by theory. These things, however, were not so evident then as they seem to be today. At that time, the end o f the sixties, criticizing the overor pseudo-rationalism o f structuralism could easily have resulted in a turning away from the force o f the law once again. This is a ticklish point in the present anamnesis. I think every writer or thinker carries in him or herself as a particular temptation the weakness or the possibility o f ignoring that he or she is committed to a "I don't know what." Thus, he or she may trace its path among clouds o f thoughts as if not only the tracing but the commitment to trace were not due to an appeal. The summons I was talking about before is the effect o f neither the will nor necessity. It is not under our control, and we are not entirely determined by it. T o be called or obliged has nothing to do with being compelled by an explicit formulation or a set o f tendencies closely linked together and allowing no space for hesitation, doubt, and criticism over their own meaning. (I am thinking here o f hysterical fantasma, for instance.) On the contrary, the "evidence" that we have to take on the burden o f the linkages between thoughts or phrases does not mean that we ever master them. The content o f the law being basically unexplicit, this implies that we have to try to accomplish it as well as we can, as Claude Simon has said. In that effort we are guided only by feelings. We have to judge that this way o f exploring is better than that way, having agreed that in this judgment we can have no recourse to any unequivocal criteria. We know how hard it is to discriminate between feelings because there is no way to quantify their extension or connotations. From this one can conclude that one can approach them

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only in terms of the tensive and occasionally irresistible quality of feelings. I took such a position in writing Economic libidinale (1974). I used to say that it was my evil book, the book of evilness that everyone writing and thinking is tempted to do. I wouldn't dare say that Economic libidinale was an expression of boisterous despair like Le Neveu de Rameau unless it were clear that this was apart from the respective value of each text. Both have in common the dizziness that can take hold of thinking when it becomes aware of how groundless all the criteria are that are used to respond to the requirements coming from the law. But besides Diderot's genius, there is one other noticeable difference between the two texts: while Diderot's dialogue staged the unfaithfulness of the character of the Neveu, my prose tried to destroy or deconstruct the presentation of any theatrical representation whatsoever, with the goal of inscribing the passage of intensities directly in the prose itself without any mediation at all. The project was quite naive and a little compulsive. It induced a manner of acting out, the relationalization for which (now it was my turn to rationalize) was the pretension to make writing so bent and flexible that no longer would the representation of errant feelings but their very presentation be performed in the flesh and blood of words. My only law, therefore, was to try to be as receptive as possible to emerging impulses, be they of anger, hate, love, loathing, or envy. I struggled desperately to mold the text according to the extreme opposite qualities of these movements. The readers of this book—thank God there were very few—generally accepted the product as a rhetorical exercise and gave no consideration to the upheaval it required of my soul. They were certainly correct to do this, but I could still pretend to myself that I had achieved my goal to the extent that the dominant position given to the forms of writing or style could indicate nothing other than how impossible any argumentation, any debate over the socalled content was, and how all that was possible was the opportunity to like or dislike the signifiers of the text. Thus the book did perform the ruin of the hegemony of conceptual reception. Compared with the supreme sin of consumptive structures, Eamomie li-

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bidinale could be considered an honorable sinful offering. In general, its rare readers disliked the book, which passed for a piece of shamelessness, immodesty, and provocation. Although it actually was all that, the question remained and has remained since whether Being is shameful, or, as is usually thought, modest or well-mannered. What about hysteria, especially hypochondria, as a mode in which Being or the law can be divined? Was not such a risk, I mean the risk of a hysterical form of Being, taken by Dionysian paganism? In reading the "Hysterical Ontological Manifestos" and meeting their author, Richard Foreman, 5 several years later, I had the chance to debate this point with him. Like Diderot's, Foreman's advantage over me was that he was convinced of how necessary it is to put intensities on stage and how very little relevant it is to perform their presentation in flesh and blood in the text. There was something outrageous with respect to Being in my attempt to equate it with the text. The scandal lay in the claim that writing holds the position, no matter how uncertain, of the law. Nothing other than parody could follow from such a claim. For sure, it would have been wiser to represent the parody as Diderot did than to act it out. Unfortunately, I was not enough of a dialectician to develop the argument of how unavoidable deference or deferring is. Rather I was too suspicious and respectful of the withdrawal or retreat of Being to allow myself to recover from the skeptical disease through a dialectical cure. We know from a recent study by Suzanne Gearhart how easy the recuperation of the Nephew's misery into the Hegelian Aufhebunjj can be. 6 Once again this question is related to the flmction and rhythm of time. Deferring being unavoidable and identification being a delusion, at least a process of termination, or even worse, of accumulation, must be rejected. The humor involved in the Nephew's metamorphosis, and, if you will permit me to say it, in the libidinal skin inflated by my Economic, might just be a wiser approach to Being, which is in retreat, than the project of building a totalizing theory. Finally, if I may say so, I hope I was not so careless in describing the metamorphoses of Eros and Dionysus that I gave the impression that I was a pagan monk standing on the stage itself. Hysterical

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anxiety signals not that the god is too far away but that he is too close, even if it is with his back turned as Hölderlin said. "Intimacy with the gods without seeing their faces" would not be too farfetched a description of Economie libidinale. Unfortunately, following nothing but the intensities of affects does not allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff. Because everything has value according to its energetic force, the law might not exist and the monk might be really a devil, the situation I was confronted with in reading Thomas Mann's Doktor Faust us twenty years ago. In purchasing unheard of forms, the hero, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, is led into hell, indicated by the fading away of the properly human receptivity to natural sounds and holy voices, which is symbolized by both his self-destruction and the fall of his community, Germany, totally devoted under Nazism to the esthetization of ethics and politics. The monk I tried to become should have reminded himself that the polymorphic paganism of exploring and exploiting the whole range of intensive forms could easily be swept away into lawful permissiveness, including violence and terror. Of course I had not yet recovered from the temptation of indifference.

NOTES 1. Charles Perrault, Discours sur la poésie en général et l'ode en particulier (Amsterdam: E. I. G. Gallet, 1719). 2. Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe/Remarques sur Antigone (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1965), p. 65. 3. Dôgen, Shóbògenzo, Nakamura and de Geccattv, eds. and trs. (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1980). 4. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, trs. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 5. Richard Foreman, "Hysterical Ontological Manifestos," in Kate Davy, ed., Plays and Manifestos (New York: New York University Press, 1976). 6. See Suzanne Gcarhart, T h e Dialectic and Its Aesthetic Other: Hegel and Diderot," Modern Language Notes, 5 (101):5 (December 1986).

CHAPTER TWO

TOUCHES

F R O M T H E peregrination I tried to reconstruct yesterday it might be concluded that I had to pay a specially heavy tribute to the law before being able to acknowledge it and defer to it, in both senses of deference. For sure, it could be pleaded that paying tribute to the law is already acceptance of the law. . . . For the fifteen years before the crisis, so to speak, of Economie libidinale, all my time and energy had been devoted to "working," as we used to say, in a radical group whose name constituted a sentence and was the same as that of the review it published: "Socialisme ou Barbarie," which means, and it is not useless to be precise about this today, "either socialism or barbarism." It was a very small political and theoretical organization engaged in criticizing the established forms of class struggle as well as the established forms of socialism such as anarchism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism, both in their practice and their theory. People like Castoriadis and Lefort were among the founders of the group, which included American, Spanish, German, and English workers and intellectuals who had

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broken away from the Trotskvist Fourth International at the end of World War II. I am not going to tell you here the story of the group. (See the "Afterword," entided "A Memorial of Marxism," for a part of this story and for an account of both my relation to and "différends" with the group.) A sense of how important to my soul my allegiance to the cause of combatting exploitation and alienation was can be gotten from the fact that for fifteen years I neglected all forms of activity and sensibility other than those directly connected to this cause. In particular, I gave up all writing except notes and studies on political topics that were published either in our review or in a mimeographed paper we gave out to workers early in the morning at the gates of factories or on the occasion of demonstrations. Writing was authorized only as a contribution to the common struggle. To come back to real (?) writing in the mid-sixties was a sign that my militancy had passed and another mode of legitimation was being searched for, was perhaps the searching process itself. The sacrificial aspect of this commitment to political reflection and praxis is obviously related to monastic obedience. At the same time, the old wish to be in touch with the stuff concrete history is made of and my eagerness to be open to events were also evident in this attitude. The years spent in studying the psychological, ethical, and philosophical aspects of indifference were concluded by writing a handbook entided "Manual" in honor of Epictetes's Encheiridion, whose last sentences indicated how crucial it had become for me to investigate the realm of so-called reality, especially in terms of social interrelations, inasmuch as they imply goals to be pursued in conflictual ways. And you can imagine, then, what a break the Second World War brought about in the poetic, introspective, and solitary way of thinking and living that I had been used to up to that point. It gave me the chance to participate as a first-aid volunteer in the fight for liberation in the Paris streets in August 1944. The barricades and the handbook were contemporary. I would like to call an event the face to face with nothingness.

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This sounds like death. Things are not so simple. There are many events whose occurrence doesn't offer any matter to be confronted, many happenings inside of which nothingness remains hidden and imperceptible, events without barricades. They come to us concealed under the appearance of everyday occurrences. To become sensitive to their quality as actual events, to become competent in listening to their sound underneath silence or noise, to become open to the "It happens that" rather than to the "What happens," requires at the very least a high degree of refinement in the perception of small differences. It is not a matter of concentrated attention. On the contrary, we can be guided in this area by the observations Freud made about the way the psychoanalyst should listen to his patient's discourse during the session. The right way, Freud writes, is to pay (it is still a question of payment) this discourse "equally floating attention." In order to take on this attitude you have to impoverish vour mind, clean it out as much as possible, so that you make it incapable of anticipating the meaning, the "What" of the "It happens. . . ." The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as "directly" as possible without the mediation or protection of a "pre-text." Thus, to encounter an event is like bordering on nothingness. No event is at all accessible if the self does not renounce the glamour of its culture, its wealth, health, knowledge, and memory. Nietzsche wrote that the truth approaches on the legs of a dove. Let us make ourselves weak and sick the way Proust did, or let us all fall truly in love, just enough to listen to doves landing silendy. In this condition, Cezanne remains motionless while his sight endlessly scans the Montagne Sainte Victoirc, waiting for the emergence of what he called "small sensations," which are the pure occurrences of unexpected colors. There is a close connection between this idea of an event and the question of matter or existence. What Paul Cezanne is in debt to is not the organization of forms, nor even the landscape as a realistic subject; it is the "something" that may occur under or on his eyes if they make themselves receptive enough to it. This "something" is a quality of chromatism, a color timbre. To achieve this is a mat-

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ter of a "passivity" without pathos, which is the opposite of either the controlled or unconscious activity of the mind. Neither aggressive autonomy nor spontaneous fantasy permits such a glance. We have to make our condition that of a suspicious, exacting receiver, with reception focused on the unmistakeable, uncanny "fact" that "there is" something here and now, regardless of what it is. It is as if something hidden inside the Montagne Sainte Victoire, say Being, or that entity Kant calls "the X in general," was playing in a game against the painter by making "moves" with chromatic material, and as if the artist had to compete with it by putting touches of oil or watercolor down on the canvas. Sometimes a move exposes a purple, at other times a yellow modulation of the atmosphere soaks through. If you consider the whole series of Montagne Sainte Victoire's painted by Cezanne, your eyes rove over the whole range of a color game "the X" plays with the artist, each acting with and against the other in both complicity and rivalry, each of them trying to baffle the other by unexpected moves and shades. This is a singular way of exploring this cloud of thought whose proper name is the Montagne Sainte Victoire. Its singularity lies in how irrelevant for painting pictures are such values as meaning, consistency, likelihood, recognition, indentification—one's only concern is to glance at the birth of colors, like the dawn of a cloud on the horizon. The equivocity of the English term "touch" brings together perfecdy the idea of an agonistic, loving contact between the flesh of the painter and what Merleau-Ponty called the flesh of the world and the connotation of a singular style. You are all aware of the priority Cezanne gave to color over form. The form is achieved, he writes, when color is at its fullest. The design is merely alluded to by the disposition of shades. The "fall" of one plane upon another, as Cezanne used to say, is not to be traced for it does not exist. It must be suggested to the eves only as a set of possible courses among the colors, the mapping out of which is the charge of sight. With this reversal of the classical hierarchy of the components of painting, that is, of design and color, the art of the painter turns into a strategy of being receptive to the

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matter of sensations, to the existence rather than the essence of the painted subject. Such an ascetic attitude indicates a sort of conversion of the aims of art, which, I am tempted to say, is not irrelevant to the question of the law. No longer is the mastery of forms the first task of a work like Cezanne's; on the contrary, the goal is to become dependent on the "matter" hidden in the "data." As you know, decisive currents in the arts will spring from this change: for instance, minimalism in painting, happenings and performance art, pauper music, lyrical abstractionism. The ethical aspect of this mutation is evident in texts such as John Cage's Silence or A Tear from Monday.1 We may already see it in the comparisons used by Cezanne in his letters: "I am working stubbornly, I am catching a glimpse of the Promised Land. Shall I be like the great leader of the Hebrew people or shall I be permitted to enter it? . . . Could Art be a holy ministry requiring pure, totally devoted people?"2 So what about history and politics? I would be delighted to be able to tell you that there is no difference between the ascetism that makes the painter's eye receptive to color and the acute sensitivity to immaterial events that is required of and developed by a historical and political attitude. In any case, such an analogy is to be found governing the first steps Merleau-Ponty made into the historicalpolitical field. It certainly directed the research that Claude Lefort did on the political condition in his reading of Machiavelli's work. For my part, I think there is no identity between the two fields. Just an analogy is permitted and only on the condition that it be explicated. You understand that the problem bears on the basic relations politics can have with art. Undoubtedly both belong to the process of thinking that Kant called reflective judgment, which implies the ability of the mind to synthesize data, be it sensuous or socio-historical, without recourse to a predetermined rule. Accordingly, thinking advances through clouds by touching them as enigmatic cases, the reason for which—their "what they are"—is not given with them, with their "that they arc occurring." We have just given a sketch of this situation in terms of Cezanne's attitude before the mountain. Presumably there are no more criteria in politics than

TOUCHES

in esthetics. We have to "listen" here and there to the manifold contingency of data, be it chromatic or anthropological. It is not a matter of how numerous, small, or unstable the clouds of colors or motivations are, nor how overwhelmed thinking is amidst thoughts. No, the point is that a painter does not have as his goal to know the essential definition of colors, either per se or as they are compounded in the landscape in which he is going to be emerged. Nor does the politician try to have as complete knowledge as possible, the knowledge a scientist could have, of the situation in which he is implicated. The knowledge he needs is nothing but a part, a moment in a process of action. The stakes of politics are definitely not to know something but to change something, and the stakes of art are to make something that has been given to one's sensibility and is transferable to others. I am merely arguing that both art and politics are excepted, although in different ways, from the hegemony of the genre of discourse called cognitive. In Kant's terms, such an exception means we have no use for the sort of judgment he called determinant judgment. The problem at the heart of the latter is the following: a concept being defined, one must find the available cases to be subsumed under it and so doing begin to validate the concept. In other words, understanding possesses a rule of explanation and is trying to select references to which it can be applied. This is a formidable way for wandering through thoughts; it is the way called science with its considerable effects on the side of applicability, effects which both require and induce, as you know, the establishment of a new, half-natural, half-artifical world. Thus, this gives the techno-scientific universe, the Heideggerian Gestell, as the modern way for thinking to be related to Being. In spite of the triumph of determinant judgment in the contemporary world (in the values of programming, forcasting, efficiency, security, computing, and the like), other games or genres of discourse are available in which formulating a rule or pretending to give an explanation is irrelevant, even forbidden. In particular this is the case with esthetic judgment, with taste. No concept, no external finality, no empirical or ethical interest is involved in the reception by the imagination of sensations coming from so-called data.

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There are only the most humble syntheses, which are unavoidable if something is to be received, if even a small diversity of elements is to be apprehended as a unity, if past data are to be maintained in an "as-if presence," that is, if there is to be even a minimal memory or, rather, as Husserl says, Retention. (We shall return to the problem of synthesis later.) And thus, thanks to the reduced, ascetic functioning of imagination, pure pleasure can result from the harmony the "subject" feels between how the imaginative synthesis actually works and how understanding could eventually operate (but does not actually operate) on these imaginative products. The conceptual rule under which the data could be subsumed must remain inactive. In offering only a horizon for explanation, the forms gathered by the imagination suggest an infinite number of possible comments and investigations. According to Kant (and Cezanne), the purity of the esthetic feeling, that is, the quality of being cut off from any concept and interest, is guaranteed better by a situation in nature than by a human work of art. In the latter case, we are justified in suspecting that in producing that work the artist has explicitly intended to produce pleasure in the receiver (viewer, listener, etc.), perhaps even computing the effects like Edgar Allan Poc does in his commentary on The Raven, and in this way deluding the reader by interfering in the production of his pleasure by means of a conceived purpose. At the other extreme, the worst that a natural scene can be assumed to do in terms of interfering with the purity of taste is to send us messages: and even if this is assumed to be the case, these supposed messages would still be formulated in a ciphered language, which Kant calls "ein ChifFrenschrift," the code of which is bevond the reach of our understanding. The historial world presents at least a comparable complexity according to Kant in the sense that it allows us to approach it alternately in terms of cognitive, ethical, and esthetic judgments. At this moment I would like to insist on the issue of how time is determined, if I can say that, in the social sciences as opposed to the esthetic feeling of events. The knowledge of social realities gives us a network of constant relations between elements that are here called

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factors. As is the case in the natural sciences, this sort o f relationship is timeless. It may include temporal conditions, but time itself is then considered only one factor among many. We place the hands of the clock in the zero position, which is arbitrarily selected with regard to "real" time, so that in determining the effects we have observed, we can take account o f the number o f moves around the dial the hand has made by the end o f the period o f observation. As you know, this procedure implies that time is grasped only inasmuch as it is movement, that is, in its correlation with space, and assumes that the movement o f time is regular and continuous. In this approach, time is nothing but one component among others in a conceptual synthesis which determines the scicntific rule by which effects are regulated. It is the time spent on professional qualifications, in making a profit from capital investments, the time o f the succession of demographic generations. We can say that such time is money. Money is presumably nothing else but the abstract reserve of time in general, be it spent on production, circulation, or the use o f goods and services, insofar as it is computed in terms of the unit o f mean social time presumed necessary to produce, circulate, and use anything in the contemporary context. Now what about the time o f the so-called context itself? It is no longer the time that a human community has or doesn't have at its disposal for managing whatever business it has. It is rather the time in which the community lives, changes, grows, declines, and alters its own conditions, in particular, the condition o f time. Is this time susceptible to a scientific approach given by determinant judgments? The answer is trivial: yes, but only insofar as phenomena can be treated as referents for an "objective" discourse. If you arc going to talk about time as the medium o f life (including your life), you must resort to metaphors: comparing it with astronomical terms in speaking of the "dawning" and "setting" o f empires, with geographical "sources" and "currents" in speaking o f activities, opinions, and the like, with the biological "growth" or "decline" o f exchanges, power, or products, or even their "health," "birth," "death," or "crisis"—all o f these terms denoting natural movements. From Plato to Spengler, thinking all-inclusive, immanent time

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has been aided by such analogies. They suggest how irrelevant determinant judgment is in respect to what Husserl called "die lebendige Gegenwart," the living present or presence. Even when Hegel writes that time is a concept, the logic required by this concept is not at all in conformity with the functioning of determinant judgment, which Hegel criticizes as an abstraction and which he ascribes to both Aristotle's and Kant's logics. The concept able to play the part of time must include contradiction instead of excluding it as it had seemed reasonable to do since Aristotle. By reasonable I mean that it is both consistent with reason and that it makes consistency an attribute of reason. But how can opposite properties referring to the same entity be consistent the one with the other? In this sense the logic exhibited by the Science of Logic is not at all logical in the Aristotelian sense but paralogical, and Hegel's so-called science has nothing to do with what we call scientific logic. In fact, in introducing paradoxes into conceptual work, Hegel bends understanding to make it include the inconsistencies of time and mixes determinant judgment together with features taken from reflective judgment. What supports the entire dialectical construction is a rhetorical and sophistic figure, the image of the reciprocal involvement of the oak tree and the acorn, which represents the unavoidable involvement of each moment in the moments coming "before" and "after." This inconsistency of "living" time can be summarized in a formula I found in a paper a young scholar, Jean Schneider, sent me several years ago: every moment is transitory (or transitional), and we can indicate this property with the following formula: t = dt, with the moment indicated by the letter t. The letter d as you know is the symbol of the derivative function. It could also be the symbol of difference, of deferring. Coming back to the comparison of politics with art, it would be convenient to remember that the primary temporal art, or the art produced by time, is music. And it is important to insist that like the arts of visible forms, two divergent ways of dealing with sounds in time are possible: either to use the rules of harmony, melody, composition, instrumentation, and the like in order to make the

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cars capable of mastering the occurence of sounds; or, at the opposite extreme, to use whatever means possible to knock hearing off its track, in general, to keep it from giving any accounting at all. I have attempted to analyze this alternative in an essay entitled "Acinema," in Des dispositifi pulsionneb, (1973), which is devoted to the other principal temporal art, film. One might say that the second approach is focused on the destruction or, better, the deconstruction of a notion that is constitutive of the first approach. I am thinking of the idea of resolution. Without developing this notion in any technical way, let me just say that it refers to the termination of a tension, even a discord, between sounds or sequences of sounds, thanks to their final combination in a common chord. Hegel's idea of a result, dcr Resultat, is very close to the principle that a piece of time, either musical or ontological, must be resolved. It is as if time and the sonorous material it carries with it have to be closed off after a crisis which would actually be the moment of time itself. It is unnecessary to point out how much such a notion of organized time belongs to the Holderlinian idea of an end rhyming with a beginning, that is, to the classical notion of destiny. Once he has discovered that he has killed his father and married his mother, the "modern," experimental musician is going to start on his way without the goal of concluding or resolving his experiences, but rather with the intention of becoming unencumbered enough to meet events. Perhaps an analogous modesty (or ascetic pride) could also become the rule in political affairs. Just one example given by the young professor of philosophy arriving at Constantine, Algeria. After the university, he had decided to complete his philosophical education by reading two authors who had been forgotten by the academic (republican) program: Karl Marx and Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately for the latter, he began with the former at the same time as he was involved in both workers unions and the principal movements for the liberation of Algeria. Fascinated by the theoretical and practical power of dialectical materialism, this freshman in radical militancy was naturally convinced that a society as con-

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tradictory as Algerian society, one in which injustices were so flagrant, couldn't avoid resolving its aporia, no matter the means it would take or the amount of time this resolution might take. In calling the impending uprising a resolution, he was predetermining it in terms of the following either/or alternative: either, if it happens, it will be a resolution, or, if it is not a resolution, it will not happen. This alternative is constructed according to the principle of dialectical formulation that everything that happens happens thanks to its meaning. This example is given to make it clear how a fixed theoretical approach to contemporary realities can prevent thinking from scanning the situation sincerely (as in the case of the painter); the stronger the will, the worse one hears. You could argue that the young militant turned out not to be wrong after all, for the Algerian insurrection was going to ignite and spread, and the war of liberation would succeed several years later. That is correct. I cannot deny that from the general picture of the world at that time the idea of a great process of decolonization could be induced. But in the first place, a general process is one thing and a specific case is another, and you know how specific the case of Algeria was. In the second, liberation was not to be desired as a resolution but to be performed as an action. And third, being a critical practitioner of Marxism, I was used to scrutinizing what kind of "liberation" would be allowed by the presumed dialectical necessity, which was supposed to give me the criteria for judging such a situation. For eight years I wrote the Algerian chronicle in Socialisme ou Barbaric. Disputes flared up among comrades as to whether our group should support the Algerian revolution. According to our refutation of political and trade unionist organizations—be they reformist, Stalinist, or Trotskyist—for being impediments obstructing the free development of popular struggles, and according to our demand for the real, direct control of workers of their own affairs (in the line of the "Counsel Communist" wing, the same one Lenin had criticized in his pamphlet against the "Leftism" of Pannekoek), we asked: should the Algerian Liberation Front be supported by us or not? During those years I came to the conclusion that the onlv posi-

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tion that had a chance of being correct was hopelessly contradictory. Yes, the Algerians have the right, even the duty, to become free and be recognized as a free community with its own name and equal to others—so we must support their struggle. Nevertheless, that struggle has no chance o f instituting any o f the principles o f worker democracy, and it will not fail to produce a new class society under the control of a bureaucratic military leadership—so why should we give our support to the coming to power o f new exploiters? Living these contradictions, the young militant began to think that the Algerian liberation was not and could not be the resolution of social contradictions; it was rather their transference (or deference) into other forms, and in the first place, into the contradictory condition he experienced as a militant. It is a delusion to give a meaning to an event or imagine a meaning for an event by anticipating what that event will be in reference to a pre-text. But it is indeed impossible to avoid this way o f thinking completely, because it offers security against the calls or touches of the "big X." Unfortunately, no pre-determination exempts any thinking from the responsibility o f responding to each case. In other words, to respond to a case without criteria, which is reflective judgment, is itself a case in its turn, an event to which an answer, a mode o f linking, will eventually have to be found. This condition may be negative, but it is the principle for all probity in politics as it is in art. I am also obliged to say: as it is in thinking.

NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Weslevan University Press, 1961); A Tear from Monday (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968). 2. Paul Cézanne, Correspondance (Paris: Grasset, 1937).

CHAPTER THREE

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TODAY, THE THIRD day of our peregrination, I am going to be, as they say, a little more technical than I have been. (Technical: I have not time to comment on the use of this term in a philosophical context. Remember simply that the Greek techne is both art and what we call technology. Remember also that technology always means new technology.) After having emphasized the similarity between esthetics and politics that is rooted in the privilege each of them must give to reflective judgment— to the "touch"—it is time to complicate a bit our approach by opening up gaps inside what is certainly a too thick cloud of thought in order to do away with the delusion of consistency and to make ourselves receptive again to more intricate events. The question is: is it possible to respond to the political and the esthetic in the same way—that is, in terms of an ability to be sensitive to a "It happens . . ."—when, on the one hand, what is at stake in politics, is doing something, and, on the other, what is at stake in esthetics and art is feeling something oneself or making other people feel something? 28

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You know that in Kant's criticism such a difference results from nothing less than the heterogeneity with which Kant separates the faculties one from the other, not only in terms of their specific aims but also in terms of their modes of operation. I mean by "operation" that a set of rules or a priori principles must be observed by any judgment which really claims to be a judgment and that those principles are not identical in the claims of judging beauty and judging morality. They are the conditions of the legitimation of the different types of judgments. These conditions can be conceptualized. They become objects of concepts inasmuch as the criticist approach must determine them in order to establish the legitimacy of a judgment claiming to be correct in its field. Now, even if criticism implies in its technique the conceptualizing of the a priori conditions for judging, it does not follow from this that all a priori conditions must necessarily be concepts. We may have a concept whose object is also a concept; it may also happen that by means of a concept we take hold of something, say a cloud of thoughts, which is not a concept at all. It may even be the opposite of a concept. You know that in the Third Critique Kant analyzes the a priori conditions allowing us to recognize that a judgment is properly esthetic under conditions, which, if they are considered to be active in the judgment of taste and not only objects of critical analysis, must be properly non-conceptual. But what are they? When you judge something to be beautiful, your judgment is a genuine judgment of taste: 1) if it involves neither an empirical, theoretical, nor practical interest; 2) if in spite of its singularity (you judge in your own way a specific case at a specific moment and in a specific place), its content immediately requires that everyone else agree with it before any argumentation; 3) if the pleasure you experience in the feeling of beauty does not involve or indicate any concept of its purpose, unlike the comfort we may feel with the fulfillment of a need; 4) if you suggest that the taste you express is not what Kant calls a "problematic" judgment, i.e., a determination that positions its object as neither necessary nor even real but only possible, but rather a quasi-apodictic judgment according to the sort

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of necessity Kant calls "exemplary." This is not a logical necessity of the kind, "something the contrary of which is impossible," but is, let us say, a necessity to be taken on by everyone rather than already be the result of an argument. It is a sentence not yet demonstrated but rather to be assumed by everyone confronted with the same object or situation. Considering all of these transcendental features determining taste, one cannot fail to be impressed by how Kant emphasizes the immediacy of judgment in the case of the beautiful. Indeed, the pleasure the subject feels "results" from the affinity between, on the one hand, the way its imagination works while it presents forms, rhythms, etc. on the occasion of perceiving an object and, on the other, the way its understanding could (and only could) operate on these forms to give them a conceptual rule. But such an affinity can never be determined and even less predetermined as such. Taste gives no material to be programmed. For if it were programmable, then the result would be an objective knowledge of the object, since knowledge is achieved with the actual subsumption of perceived matter under a category of understanding through the mediation of a schema. Therefore, the affinity between understanding and imagination constituting esthetic pleasure can only be felt. This pleasure consists of the reciprocal excitement of the faculty of presentation and the faculty of understanding as pure capacities. In other words, the beautiful, Kant says, "induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it."1 It gives too much to think, if by thinking one understands only understanding. Nevertheless, or rather, therefore, this gift of endless thinking that is offered by the beautiful is also immediately given in the form of the actual feeling. In each of the features determining taste, there is a medium or an "instance" which must be excluded. Its absence is emphasized by such Kantian expressions as "pleasure without interest," "purposiveness without the representation of a purpose," "universality without a concept." With the withdrawal of the concept itself in the judgment of taste, it would not be irrelevant, even if it is in a manner a bit too close to that of Merleau-Ponty, to

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represent the subject committed to the affairs of beauty according to Kant as a minimal subject, as a barely subjective subject. This assumes that the process of subjectification requires as its supreme synthesis, what Kant calls "pure aperception," that all representation be referred to the "I think," the Ich denke, and that this reference is the privilege of understanding according to the "Deduction of Categories" in the First Critique. In the idiom that is mine in the present context, "I think" means that all the thoughts that come to thinking while it is wandering among clouds must be reported in terms of a unique point from which the landscape as a whole can be embraced. That is the "I." I recently tried to explore this strange, hateful formation by studying the works of a famous painter, Arakawa, who just happens to be Japanese-American.2 And yet I suppose I have always had the dream of being able to describe a peregrination among forms freed from such a stable point, even if I don't know why. The deconstruction of fantasy, le fantastne, carried out in a chapter of Discours, figure reveals how impossible it is to discover a solid structure of something like a self behind the stage of dreams or symptoms. I would place in the same line of thought the inquiry in the same book into the benefits to artistic production of what Freud calls "uncathectic energy," lying in reserve in the psychical apparatus as a capacity to use forces, motions, drifts not yet invested in or bound to determined objects. It is unnecessary to remind you that in Economic libidtnale what is practically its unique, not to say obsessive theme is this same intuition developed under the names of "intensity," "free displacement," "conducting body," "ephemeral skin or film," which in addition is supposed to be relevant not only to the individual but also to the domain of the community. The idea of the paradoxical hinge, which dominates my analysis of Marcel Duchamp, 3 is a form of the same obsessive concern with open "space-time" in which there are no more identities but only transformations. LcDifferend (1983) tries to give an ontological and linguistic (or, better yet, "sentential," "phrasic") status to what Arakawa calls the "blank," connecting in this way with my notion of "blank skin" in Le Mur du Pacifique (1979). It's the emptiness, the

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nothingness in which the universe presented by a phrase is exposed and which explodes at the moment the phrase occurs and then disappears with it. The gap separating ojie phrase from another is the "condition" of both presentation and occurences, but such a "condition" remains ungraspable in itself except by a new phrase, which in its turn presupposes the first phrase. This is something like the condition of Being, as it is always escaping determination and arriving both too soon and too late. These days, while I am still presumably guided by the same claustrophobia, I find it necessary to study in the Kantian approach to taste what under the name of "productive imagination" is the disclosure of such a free, open receptiveness to clouds—let me even say, to Being—thanks to the immediate affinity of esthetic forms with feelings. What is at stake in the reading of the Third Critique I am proposing is, in my eyes at least, of prime importance insomuch as it implies that the interpretation Heidegger gives of the "I think" as time itself cannot be sustained.4 It seems to me that Heidegger did not take into account the special approach to imagination and sensitivity delineated in the Critique of Judgment, confining himself only to a reflection on the cognitive function of sensitivity as it is analyzed in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason.5 In short, my difference from or my "différend" with Heidegger bears on the question of synthesis. In his "Preliminary Observation" opening "Of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding," Kant distinguishes among three kinds of synthesis that are supposed to be necessary in order to present objects to knowledge: the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, of reproduction in the imagination, of recognition in the concept. The first one is the most elementary, I would like to say, the poorest. Being assumed by Kant that the "matter" of perception is both in time and space a pure discontinuity of colors, sounds, "touches," and the like, the so-called "apprehension," the first of the syntheses, consists in gathering together in a unique intuition the manifold data presenting itself to be received. In such an initial synthesis there are two operations required: one is to seize or touch "das Durchlaufen der

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Mannigfaltigkeit," which is the flow of the manifold; the other is "die Zusammennehmung desselben," that is, the bringing together, the gathering, the comprehension of this flow. This is the synthesis of pure "apprehension." It would be totally impossible to answer whether this double operation of both having and witholding diachrony consists itself in a unique, instantaneous intuition if the mind was not able to retain this situation and re-present it again—notwithstanding the fact that the data is no longer present in the present. This second "fastening onto" Kant calls the synthesis of reproduction, and he puts it in charge of imagination. Please take note of how much the function of imagination is thus confined to the task of re-producing something that was already given in a previous instant, the task of an elementary remembering, the same task that Edmund Husserl will call "retention." Finally, once the synthesis of reproduction has made it possible for the intuitive "object" to be grasped outside of the diachronic flood, it belongs to the understanding to recognize it through an ultimate synthesis, the synthesis of recognition which opens the way to knowledge proper. The latter consists in collecting and dispatching the intuitive units within the frame of either causality, purposiveness, reciprocal relationship, or the like, that is, under such and such a category of understanding. The point is that what Kant calls a "schema" in the First Critique is nothing other than these elementary, preconceptual syntheses insofar as they prepare and shape the data to be grasped and subsumed under the categories of understanding. At the extreme limit of the scries of syntheses taking place between data and knowledge, Kant finally positions a principle or power of synthesizing in general, which he calls the "transcendental aperception," a pure, original, and immutable "consciousness." Regardless of whether such a "consciousness" exists or not, it is an agency that is logically necessary and thanks to which all "manifoldness" or diversity can be gathered together in a unit. The question remains as to which faculty Kent gives this power of unifying. Sometimes he makes understanding responsible for

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synthesis in general, sometimes imagination. In the first instance it seems possible to identify this power as the "I think" itself. For the T represents the ultimate entity, even if an empty one, able not only to gather together any diversity, but also able to reflect it in its mirror and to make it conscious and knowable. If, on the contrary, the faculty operating in the transcendental aperception is the imagination, there is no longer the occasion for an "I," because what is at stake in the process of synthesizing is to make possible not a self-conscious knowledge of data but a feeling of the innumerable forms in which the data can be synthesized. This is the very shift that takes place between the First Critique and the Third Critique. In the latter, Kant explains that to put colors, sounds, etc. together in a form as in art or esthetic perception (and not in a schema as in science) indeed implies purposiveness, but no "I" is able with concepts to answer the question of what the purpose sought after is. Once the imagination is freed from the charge of knowledge, it works not only in a reproductive but also in a productive manner. It reveals an ability to present to the mind unexpected forms on the occasion of perceiving phenomena, to enrich and enlarge the synthetic apprehension of perceptive matter. I would say that it discloses a number of clouds, the thinking of which still remains to be done. Remember that the imagination according to Kant "induces much thought." 6 In The Critique ofJudgement, Kant calls it the faculty or Kraft of presentation (Darstellung) and not of representation (Vorstellung). Considering the status of the "I" and from its point of view, it could be said that the work of presentation no longer requires the "I think," which was necessary for making phenomena understandable. If what is at stake is the multiplication of the ways of gathering data in order to present new forms and enjoy them, then something like a "It is felt that . . . " would be sufficient to guide the imagination through the flood of possible forms. Is it possible to imagine the following? In the stream of sensitive clouds, no "I" swims or sails; only mere affections float. Feelings felt by no one, attached to no identity, but making one cloud be "affected" by another. Now let us come back to the question of how unlikely events

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occur in the ethical and/or political fields as compared with the esthetic field. I do not claim that there is no esthetic feeling in politics. On the contrary, I shall develop that aspect of the question later. The difference between the fields I have in mind has to do with the specific way the law makes itself felt in the "ethical" genre. I hope you will agree with me without developed argumentation that the ethical approach is basically relevant, although not sufficient, to deal with everything we call political. The most obvious reason for this is that every political deliberation and decision, either explicidy or implicidy, involves a reference to and, as much as possible, an answer to the issue of what "we" ought to be or become in the present circumstances. The "we" at stake here thus designates a community whose existence belongs to the determination of what we ought to be or become and indeed to the determination of how to do it. It makes no difference here what the content of the answer is: whether "we" ought to be rich, equal, or competitive, transparent, patriotic, or free. Whatever the question, an obligation is implied in it. Even if the obligation is pervaded by the contextual aspects of the situation, that is, even if the obligatory aspect is concealed beneath pressing necessities, it still remains that so-called reality has a chance of appearing as a hindrance only insomuch as it impedes purposiveness and delays for a moment action being taken in response to the question of what we ought to be or become. Here, without further explanation, I shall call the law the fact that there is a question or that we are questioned about what we ought to become and what we ought to do to become it. That fact Kant calls a "factum rationis," the indisputable fact that practical reason is an apriori transcendental condition for any morality whatsoever. It is a pure obligation, a duty, not one, however, to do this or that, but rather the pure "fact" of duty, of being obliged. Although necessity implies that the will has by definition no alternative, obligation basically allows the will to refuse to do this, to prefer to do that, to hesitate. In any case, neglected or not, scoffed at or not, duty remains. Kant gives the name respect, Achtung, to this transcendental "presence" of the law to thinking, regardless of the form of action thought about. Now such a "presence" occurs

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negatively to the empirical subject in the form o f a coercion, "tin Zwang," which brings suffering along with it in that it has no consideration for self-love, kindness toward the self, self-satisfaction, or arrogance, and which thus does away with the presumptuousness o f the self. By " s e l f " I mean here the empirical, concrete " I , " the ego which is definitely involved in its own "pathological" interests. It being assumed that the will o f such a self is the desire for self, the call coming from the law cannot affect it otherwise than by thwarting and dismissing it. You probably feel that this description insists t o o much on the distressing dimension o f the ethical experience. B u t all the expressions I used to describe it are Kant's. They make it possible for us to discriminate with precision between the ethical reception o f an "it happens" and its esthetic reception. T h e latter is distinguished as a pure pleasure while the former touches the empirical ego by depriving it o f its own self-satisfaction. T h e crucial difference between them lies, however, in which faculty is relevant in each case. Esthetic pleasure has nothing to do with and owes nothing t o what Kant calls the faculty o f desire: it has nothing to d o with the fulfillment o f any need whatsoever, whether empirical, that is t o say, "pathological," or transcendental, that is, ethical. On the contrary, when it is taken in a practical sense, an event confronts a material will involved in needs, expectations, values, motivations, and the like: in short, in passions. It is such a great and diverse amount o f "stuff," and by that I mean such a great quantity o f empirical notions, that it is useless and hopeless t o anticipate any peace, any release or relaxation o f the will, that is to say, any pleasure, in meeting the law and obligation. I f the gap between the law and self-enjoyment is as deep as it is thematized in Kant's text, this is an effect o f its status as a transcendental practical concept. F o r the law commands us t o behave so that, or as if, the maxim o f our will could become a principle for legislating a universal community o f reasonable beings. It does not tell us what we have to do, just that we must behave according to it, whatever our behavior, whatever we "decide" to do. Therefore, there would be no ethical occurence i f thinking were

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not advised o f the idea o f universal freedom. That is to say that the practical reception o f an event presupposes that the event is confronted with this idea and measured in terms o f it. Now, an idea of reason is a concept in which it is impossible to subsume any empirical given, and thus it is basically different from a concept o f understanding. And according to this definition, an idea can be called an undetermined concept. The subsumption o f causal behavior under the idea o f universal freedom being most likely impossible, it follows that the evaluation o f how ethically good the reception o f an event and the behavior derived from it are must remain problematical. The solution to the problem is deferred to a further judgment, whose value will be deferred to still another judgment in its turn. In the practical field, any judgment must itself be judged, so that we are always wandering through the thick o f the stream o f evaluations and guided only by a respect for an undetermined law. T o be led by a concept o f pure reason acting on the will is quite different, therefore, from synthesizing forms from material data using free imagination. I would like to make you sensitive to this difference by emphasizing how heterogeneous the communities in each case are. You know that Kant introduces the principle of a "sensus communis" as being required in esthetic judgment insofar as it also involves a claim for universality. In this claim lies the difference between pure taste and a mere idiosyncratic, particular, contingent, motivated preference or inclination. It is trivial to say that to love Cezanne's paintings is not the same as liking spinach or beans. Now we know that the universality required by pure taste cannot be gained by means of a concept that deals with the contents of the judgment o f taste. It should be sought only in the form o f a demand. If my taste is actually to be taken as a genuine esthetic taste, everyone else must be able to experience the same feeling on the occasion o f the same object. In other words, the feeling o f beauty requires that it be shared universally. But how actualizable is such an undertaking if taste, far from being a conceptual judgment implying a synthesis o f recognition, uses, as we said, in its evaluation of forms only the first two syntheses o f apprehension and repro-

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duction and adds to them a free synthesis of production? Immersed in its affections, the so-called subject is unable to articulate by means of concepts the judgment implied in its feeling of beauty and turn it into an argument accessible to every reasonable mind. The esthetic community, therefore, remains, as Kant puts it, only an Idea, or as I would say, a horizon for an expected consensus. Kant uses the word "promise" in order to point out the non-existent status of such a republic of taste (of the United Tastes?). The unanimity concerning what is beautiful has no chance of being actualized. But every actual judgment of taste carries with it the promise of its universalization as a constitutive feature of its singularity. Let us consider now several contemporary ideas of communication: Habermas' theory of Diskurs considered as the Idea of reasonable unanimity, Karl Otto's Apel's thesis according to which intersubjective argumentation gives us the ultimate foundation for reason, and even Richard Rorty's claim that the only rationality available to us is to be found in the unforced agreement reached through free discussions or "conversations." I am amazed by how irrelevant the pragmatics they all use is to the Kantian antinomy of the judgment of taste, an antinomy which explains both the ineluctability and the irrelevance of disputing what is beautiful. I mean that by taking seriously into account the main characteristic of reflective judgment, which is not simply involved but maximized (or minimalized) in taste and which is to judge without a concept, one is led to the idea that the community required as a support for the validity of such judgment must always be in the process of doing and undoing itself. The kind of consensus implied by such a process, if there is any consensus at all, is in no way argumentative but is rather allusive and elusive, endowed with a special way of being alive, combining both life and death, always remaining in statu nascendi or moriendi, always keeping open the issue of whether or not it actually exists. This kind of consensus is definitely nothing but a cloud of community. And what then about the ethical community? Emmanuel Levinas, whose books were my companions for twenty years, would say that it is a community of hostages, each of them being in a state of

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dependency to others or, more precisely, to the capital Other (what I call the law). And the latter, otherness, is both present in and hidden behind the face o f the others. In this definition, the practical community would not be any less elusive than the esthetic community, since the decision as to whether people's behavior is motivated by an empirical interest, on the one hand, or whether it testifies to the transcendency of obligation, on the other, would always have to be deferred, as it is by Kant. Nevertheless, to assign such similarity of status to esthetic and practical communities must be challenged as a delusion. Insofar as the latter presuppose the Idea, even if undetermined, o f the causality o f will freed from empirical motivations, and even though it gives rise to endless suspicions and disputes, argumentation remains possible and necessary over what evaluation to give to the case to be judged. Moreover, one can say that the more numerous the disputes, the arguments, the dialectical and rhetorical attempts to convince and persuade others, the more developed the responsibility to the moral idea is, the more mature is what Kant calls the "culture of the will." So it would not be absurd to sketch out something like progress in this field to the extent that more and more situations previously considered to be natural and above suspicion, let us say instinctual or habitual, become objects o f judgment and deliberation. As the common inheritance is more and more measured in terms o f the law of freedom, the uncertainty about previously held beliefs increases, and the social network becomes more fragile, insubstantial, flimsy (and I would like to add for Gilles Deleuze's sake, gossamer—he loves the word, and I promised him I would use it). In the political field, menaced as it is by urgent necessities, a sign of such progress can be found in the extension in people's mind of republican principles. There is nothing in the history o f the arts that resembles such progress. It is definitely irrelevant to argue that the Eiffel Tower is either more or less beautiful than the Tower of Pisa. It seems as if beauty does not allow for any development in history. There could be no such thing as esthetic progress toward the formation of a republic o f taste. Unless . . . , unless what? Unless beauty and the notion o f taste

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linked to it were not the only way of being responsive to esthetic events. I have been studying the topic of the sublime for the last five years, especially as it appears in The Critique of Judgement. In wandering through this material in this way, I have found evidence that this problematic massively commands the issue of the arts today. More important for us right now, I think that it traces the way for thinking to get in touch with clouds of thoughts or, in different words, with the prime mode in which Being is "given" (and ungiven) in the frame of mind we call modernity. As it is analyzed by Kantian criticism, the feeling of the sublime, which is the sublime feeling, has several features that are relevant to my present interests. It is impossible and would be obtrusive to develop them at length here. Allow me simply to make two brief observations. First of all, the sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is— it is a mixture of pleasure and pain. The entrance of suffering into esthetic feeling must be understood as a shadow cast over imaginative work by an Idea of reason. Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations. For example, situated too close to the side of a pyramid, the eye of a viewer is unable to synthesize its magnitude in a glance, that is, in a unique intuition. Kant writes: "It loses as much on one side as it gains on the other," when the eye wanders along this line. Or, another example, confronted with the fury of a storm, empirical, self-serving motivations reveal their own incapacity to subdue the outbreak of natural forces. There is a failure in the synthesizing function of either the imagination or the will. You would think that such a situation would produce only fear or flight. On the contrary, it can produce a pleasure mixed with "terror," as Burke put it. This pleasure comes from the use of reason. While the imagination cannot synthesize and intuitively present the form because it is too big to be comprehended in one instant, the mind discovers that it can conceive of something like the infinite. "Absolute greatness" is only an Idea of reason, but it is in comparison with it that the vain efforts of the imagination can be

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felt as deeply moving. As for the sublimity of force, the dynamic sublime, the impotencv of the empirical will can be felt as a pleasure to the extent that it reveals the presence of an independent causality which is incommensurable with any natural force: it is the causality of freedom. Now the second feature. According to what I have just said, it is possible to sketch out a strange esthetics in which what supports the esthetic feeling is no longer the free synthesis of forms by the imagination, as was previously described, but the failure to synthesize. This lack of synthesis as concerns the faculty corresponds to such names as "das Unform" or "die Formlosigkeit," unform or formlessness, as concerns the object. It does not mean that the object must be monstrous, only that its form is no longer the point of esthetic feeling. One result of this is that such a feeling can no longer be called taste. And another is that it is no longer immediate. It requires the mediation of an Idea of reason. There is no sublime, therefore, without the development of the speculative and ethical capacities of the mind. With the esthetics of the sublime it can be argued that a kind of progress in human history is possible which would not be only the progress of technology and science available to mankind. It is indeed not a progress of the beautiful, of the taste of beauty, but of the responsibility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively "presented" in the formlessness of such and such a situation which could occur. The French Revolution, for example, committed a monstrous amount of injustices, crimes, murders, and ended with the Terror. It nevertheless received everywhere an enthusiastic reception from a great variety of people. How was it possible? Kant's answer is that people were educated and refined enough in moral ideas to feel the presence of and respond to the attraction of the Idea of freedom within the disorders. This enthusiasm constitutes an event, a Beqebenheit, which is the sign (the sijjnum, the Zeichen) that mankind is in progress toward the better. I know there is something dangerous and threatening in this description: it has the capacity to transform the worst into the best. In fact, I think that the Hegelian Aufhebung, sublation, could be

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considered to have its roots in the Kantian Erhaben, the sublime. I also think that the Hegelian oak tree is a complete perversion of the Kantian acorn. Never mind, that is another question, and I do not plan to deal with it today. On the other hand, I would like to insist on a consequence of the split implied by the Kantian analysis of the sublime. It signifies the retreat of the immediate apprehension of forms previously under the charge of sensitivity and a way for the ideas of reason to dominate the ideas of imagination. It then looks as if space and time, the pure forms in which concrete, visual, plastic, and musical forms are traditionally synthesized by the faculty of presentation, are in the process of being eliminated, wasted even, and as if the task of constituting phenomena has to pass under the regulation of reason. In his Remarks on Oedipus, Hölderlin wrote: "At the outer limits of distress, there remains nothing more than the conditions of time or space" (p. 65). The so-called crisis of foundations which has been disturbing mathematics, physics, and mechanics for the last century arises out of such a questioning of the conditions of time and space. It is not by chance that the scientific dispute has been focused on the question of whether conceptions of space, number, and motion are based on intuitive syntheses, or whether they are constructed out of concepts in an axiomatic, artifactual theory'. In the arts, the so-called vanguard movements in painting, architecture, music, sculpture, and mise-en-scene have been driven by the same anxiety or perhaps even a more dramatic form of anxiety, as they have to do with the immediate sensuous formation of places and moments. It is obvious to me that the main trends in so-called modern or contemporary art, that is, abstraction and minimalism, have their reason for being in the failure of pure imagination to provide artists the forms they need. That is the basic condition for an esthetics of the sublime: time and space are approached in terms not of givens but of thoughts, the mere presentation of things driven away by the generalization of the media and the closure of thought on itself, the images and sounds we confront having already been thought insofar as they have been calculated. This is the retreat of Being, Heidegger would have said, but in opposition to the Heideggerean idea of a decline,

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I would argue that this retreat takes a path that allows the artist to search for other forms by means of new technologies, if they are taken as Tecbnai. I think that the question at stake in art today is whether a programmed synthesis allows the artist to invent new forms which were not possible with the immediate contact with socalled nature. An idea of nature is definitely useless, irrelevant. This does not mean that art is finished; only esthetics as such is finished. We must find new paths in order to approach new artistic clouds and new clouds of thoughts. POSTSCRIPTUM Another word, an afterword, on the question of consensus. The disagreement I have with German and Anglo-American philosophers about this point bears on how a community today could be considered to be vital. I think that it is a mistake to emphasize the question of communication, for communication "occurs" only under the very conditions that are those I find myself in today among you: that is, having to use a foreign language in order to make my thinking, such as it is, understandable to you. Communication is a question of translation. One can be translated, one can translate himself or herself. In any case, translation is the transference from one idiom, be it national or personal, to another. This "conveyance" implies many problems on all the "levels" of language: from the phonetic and literal to the most subtly connotative. At bottom, the definition of a language is that it can be translated into another. So that it is irrelevant, I think, to worry about communication, as if its lack were the stumbling block to the existence of human communities. The very question of communicabilitv concerns those phrases that are not properly speaking sentences but above all feelings. To "feel" the beautiful, for instance, implies the existence of the promise of a community, a sensus communis, which is only an Idea. To "feel" the sublime presupposes a capacity to feel the call from either the speculative or the practical Idea of reason. It seems to me that we

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are now entering into a form of "being together" in which the receptivity to Ideas is more and more required. One could call it a situation of increasing complication or complexity. Since it is a technoscientifxc complexity, it obviously requires more and more sophisticated argumentation. But what about the complication of feelings? The split between the faculties inscribed in the esthetics of the sublime is the sign of a complication or complexity in sensibility. It is the same with modern and contemporary arts. They require an infinite number of commentaries, each of which has to be taken in turn as a work of art, that is, has to be felt and commented on. The network formed by all these phrases, for which no common code exists, becomes more fragile in proportion to its increasing complexity. It seems to me that the only consensus we ought to be worrying about is one that would encourage this heterogeneity or "dissensus."

NOTES 1. The Critique of Judgement, James Creed Meredith, tr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 178-79. 2. See "Longitude 180 E or West," in Arakawa (1984). 3. Les Transformateurs Duchamp (1977). 4. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, James S. Churchill, tr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). 5. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, F. Max Miiller, tr. (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 21-43. 6. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 175.

AFTERWORD

A MEMORIAL OF MARXISM: FOR PIERRE SOUYRI (Translated by Cecile Lindsay)

THE ONLY testimony worthy of the author of Révolution et contre-révolution en Chine1 is the one I cannot give him: it would be to write the history, in Marxist terms, of the radical Marxist current to which he belonged, and in particular the history of the group which published in France the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, and subsequendy the newspaper Pouvoir Ouvrier, from just after World War II until just before 1968. It would be to show by this history how his analysis of the class struggle in China is above all a contribution to the critique of bureaucracy which was developed by the group during that period. And it would thus be to minimize in my testimony or omit from it everything that did not contribute This essay originally appeared in Esprit (January 1982), 61(1), as "Pierre Souvri: Le Marxisme qui n'a pas fini." It is included here to give a more detailed account of one as pea of the peregrinations described in the other essays, that of a iiffbmd with Marxism.

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to the construction o f a portrait o f the class struggle apart from which, in his eyes, his work could have no meaning. I f I am n o t able t o d o this, it is n o t because I do n o t k n o w that history o r the theses o f that radicalism. I participated in the former at the same time as S o u y r i , and t h e latter were for a long time part o f b o t h o f o u r lives. T h e impossibility does n o t reside there. It derives first o f all f r o m the fact that I am n o t a historian. I t is n o t a q u e s t i o n o f " s p e c i a l i z a t i o n , " o f academic disciplines. O b v i o u s l y , I lack the expertise, the knowledge, the fine tuning o f the m i n d t o the m e t h o d o l o g y ; but above all, I lack a certain way o f i n t e r r o g a t i n g and situating w h a t is being spoken o f in relation t o what o n e is saying. T o be b r i e f , let us call this the postulate o f realism. T h a t w h i c h the historian recounts and explains had to be real; otherwise what he is d o i n g is not history. As in legal r h e t o r i c , e v e r y t h i n g is o r g a n i z e d in order t o explore the clues, p r o d u c e p r o o f s , and induce t h e belief that the o b j e c t , the event, o r the man n o w absent were indeed o n c e there j u s t as they are b e i n g depicted. T h e o p p o s i n g party against w h o m the historian argues with all his f o r c é is n o t easy to b e a t ; it is death, it is the f o r g e t t i n g which is the death o f death itself. And if he expends so much energy t o make us hear his heroes, it is in o r d e r t o preserve, in the life o f o u r memory, what has disappeared f r o m the o t h e r life. W o u l d I have written these pages i f S o u y r i were alive? H o w e v e r , I c a n n o t m a n a g e t o make this pious activity my o w n , t o share the historian's c o n f i d e n c e in its ends, t o believe in the fidelity o r the plausibility o f that which is, in any case, only a representation. I c a n n o t m a n a g e t o f o r g e t that it is I, the historian, w h o makes my man speak, and speak t o m e n he did not know and t o w h o m he w o u l d n o t necessarily have chosen to speak. I f I write: S o u y r i was b o t h m o d e s t and inflexible, he hated to be put in the s p o t l i g h t — w h i c h is t r u e — t h e n I immediately betray him, I put him in the s p o t l i g h t , and I k n o w that he must be o b j e c t i n g t o this with the full force o f his ret o r t , which was c u t t i n g . T h e Greeks were r i g h t ; there is a hu-

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miliation o f the dead, they have much to reproach the living, who never stop misusing their memory. Souyri would not forgive me for botching the great fresco in which his work, beginning with his book on China, had its place; and he knew as I do that I am not able to paint it. It was precisely his work which should have succeeded in painting it. He would more readily forgive me for speaking o f him on the condition that I do not hide the fact that it is done in my own way, and that I do not claim to decide whether my picture is or is not realistic. Another reason which must be added to the previous one to prevent me from testifying properly is less personal and perhaps o f greater scope. The history of this Marxist radicalism ought to be thought and written in its own language, which was that of Souyri. It was no longer mine fifteen years before his death, and to speak it today would add a useless political imposture to the inevitable betrayal by memory. So-called divergences which were in fact a profound differend had long before fractured the former solidarity of friendship and comradery. In 1966,1 resigned from "Pouvoir Ouvrier," one of the two groups resulting from the schism of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" in 1964. In September, I sent Souyri a copy of my letter of resignation, "so that it cannot be said that the one with whom I entered the group was the last to know that I am leaving it." Admitted together in 1954 to take part in the practical and theoretical activities of the group that published the journal Socialism ou Barbarie, we had during those twelve years devoted our time and all our capacities for thinking and acting to the sole enterprise of "revolutionary critique and orientation" which was that o f the group and its journal. We had even kept up the habit, developed after our first meeting in late 1950, of getting together on our own, or writing to each other, in order to debate as much as necessary all the political questions which we happened to confront through experience or reading. Nothing else, with the exception of love, seemed to us worth a moment's attention during those years. He answered me in October in a letter full o f painful humor. He affirmed that our divergences dated from long before, di-

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vcrgences so deep that he considered it pointless to try to resolve them. He attributed to me the project o f elaborating a new philosophy o f history, one which he felt he had every reason to fear would be eclectic and idealistic, even though I might be unaware o f it. He added: " T h e problems we confront are, in my eyes, neither ill-posed nor insoluble within the framework o f Marxist concepts. . . . " There followed several lines in which he pastiched the grand political style. My future seemed to him, in sum, to be necessarily peaceful; a stage o f my life was ending, I was leaving the service o f the revolution, I would do something else, I had saved my skin. As for him, he knew himself to be bound to Marxist thought as though to his fate, without, however, being unaware that it was no longer, and perhaps had not for a long time been, "the thought that reality seeks." He prepared himself for the perhaps pointless solitude that the search for truth required o f him. We saw each other again, never as political men engaged in common or parallel undertakings, even in ' 6 8 , but rather as long-lost friends. These encounters were the occasion for cheerful and bitter reminiscences, shared like a common good and scorned like a vain remedy for divorce. Sometimes brief and violent conflicts erupted: on terrorism, on the situation o f capitalism, on the "final solution," on the scope o f the opposition movement . . . Neither o f us wanted to pretend, concede, or flatter—but neither wanted either to break off irrevocably. We did not confront head on what confronted us, but the conversation, as though carried by a constant wind, pushed every subject toward that reef, and it was necessary to tack in order to avoid it, while still signaling that one had seen it and had done nothing more than contain one's anger. I felt myself scorned for the direction I had taken, as I knew we had scorned the intellectuals and politicians who had retired from class combat or who were blind to its stakes. He knew that I felt this, and drew from it no advantage or guilt. On his side, he must have felt both impatience and weariness at sensing that I was irritated by his obstinacy in preserving intact the problem o f history and society

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such as wc had received it from Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg, Trotsky, and Pannekoek, and in wanting to resolve it exclusively within the theoretical and practical framework of Marxism. I believe that our différend is of some importance for an understanding of the present. It was not only personal, and it was not only conceptual. What was at stake seemed to be knowing whether "with" Marxism—and with which Marxism?—one could still understand and transform the new direction taken by the world after the end of the Second World War. This was open to debate, which was most definitely the case in our group, and between us. But in what language should it be debated, and in what language should it be decided? The debate had to do with content: class struggle in modern capitalism, the drop in the rate of profit, imperialism and the third world, the proletariat and the bureaucracy, etc.; but what was at stake was the way of expressing those contents. How could the means of expression known as Marxism put itself into play and debate about itself as though it were just one content among others? The problem was one of logic. A différend is not a simple divergence precisely to the extent that its object cannot enter into the debate without modifying the rules of that debate. Our différend was without remedy from the moment that one of us contested or even suspected Marxism's ability to express the changes of the contemporary world. We no longer shared a common language in which we could explain ourselves or even express our disagreements. And yet each of us had in principle sufficient knowledge of the partner's idiom to be able to translate into his own idiom what the other was privately saying to himself about him, and sufficient experience and friendship to know that he was thereby betraying the other. Marxism had probably been for both of us a universal language, capable even of accepting within itself, under the name of dialectical logic, the rupture and opposition of universals which were abstractions, and the paradoxical and infinite movement by which they are concretely realized. We had known, by experience and reflection, and each of us differently, what it is to be enclosed within a particular life and point of view, within a

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particular language, and to be able to get out only through conflict and paradox. But now it was dialectical logic itself, with its still irrefutable operator, the anti-principle of contradiction, that was in the process of becoming a simple idiom. The machine for overcoming alterity by negating and conserving it, the machine for producing universality out of particularity, had for one of us—for me, as it happened—broken down. In the language of the dialectic since Hegel, this blockage was a portend of my imminent relapse into the thinking of the understanding, and into the logic of identity. I knew this, but the fact was that this risk, and the concomitant danger of political regression of which the Marxists warned, had ceased to frighten me. And what if, after all, the philosopher asked himself, there wasn't any Self at all in experience to synthesize contradictorily the moments and thus to achieve knowledge and realization of itself) What if history and thought did not need this synthesis; what if the paradoxes had to remain paradoxes, and if the equivocacy of these universals, which are also particulars, must not be sublated? What if Marxism itself were in its turn one of those particular universals which it was not even a question of going beyond—an assumption that is still too dialectical—but which it was at the very least a question of refuting in its claim to absolute universality, all the while according it a value in its own order? But then, in what order, and what is an order? These questions frightened me in themselves because of the formidable theoretical tasks they promised, and also because they seemed to condemn anyone who gave himself over to them to the abandonment of any militant practice for an indeterminate time. For Souyri, that is, for me when I would try to speak of myself in Souyri's language, the cause for my "relapse" seemed obvious: I again became that which I had tried in vain to stop being—a good petit-bourgeois intellectual reconstructing in his head for the thousandth time after others a vain palace of ideas, and who, believing he was freeing himself from dialectical logic, only fell all the more inevitably into eclecticism. That his judgment of it was as severe as this, I had every reason to assume; I knew he thought that we have significance only through what we think and do in the immense

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war between exploiters and exploited, and that in these matters, the affection one has for someone must not be heeded. Certainly, his sympathies, indifferences, and hostilities were not based on his theoretical and political principles; he could keep a tenderness and fidelity for very old friends who had remained communists, or he could frankly dislike comrades from our group. In the domain of thought, however, a person was right or wrong, refutable or irrefutable. Not even the dearest friend was excepted from this rule; he had to hear without reserve what Souvri believed to be true, he had to argue his refutation with reasons and proofs. A general conversation, where ideas that were not yet tried were put to the test, soon took on the form of a dialectical joust, even an eristic exercise. He liked to provoke his interlocutor by confronting him with the arguments of an advocate of revolution. A sensitive and absentmjnded man in daily life, he could press on to the point of cruelty in discussion. Half in parody, half in sincere anguish, he thus reminded others and himself that there is no tolerance for the mind that forgets its only goal, the destruction of exploitation by thought and by acts. The dialectic was his way of thinking, a component part of the dialectic he tried to uncover in things. Theoretical experience proceeded for him like a practice of contradiction, just as contradiction formed for him the nervure of historical realitv. But on my side, this perserverance in thinking and acting according to the dialectic, as if for forty years the revolutionary movement had not suffered one failure after another—which Souyri moreover had no trouble admitting because that was the very thing he wanted to understand—seemed to me to be more and more alien to the exigencies of thought. Was one able to think, after these failures, without recognizing in them, first of all, the failure of a way of thinking? And in this latter case, did the "failures" of the revolutionary movement really deserve to be called that? Capitalism had succeeded, after twenty-five years and a war without precedent, in coming out of the crisis of the thirties without the proletariat of the developed countries having seized the opportunity to take power. The revolution of 1917 had on the contrary given birth to new relations of exploitation. That was true and intolerable. But in thus

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characterizing this period of history, did not Souyri's Marxism hide from itself its own failure? Did it not project in the form of an accursed reality its own inability to understand the nature of what was at stake in the contemporary world? If in fact the stakes were not the suppression of relations of exploitation, the failure was only that of the thought that claimed the opposite. (And I knew what Souyri would say to that: if those are not the stakes, then all is vain, and it matters little to me.) But how to know this? And even, how to discuss it, first of all? This suspicion, which made me drift imperceptibly and which separated me from Souyri, was no more arguable than a withdrawal of affective investment is explainable by reason, so that the essence of the différend could not be said. In what language would I have been able to dispute the legitimacy of the Marxist phrase and legitimize my suspicion? In Marxist language? That would have amounted to recognizing that that language was above suspicion, and that the Marxist phrase was legitimate by its very position, even though I might contest or refute it. The idiom was more important than the referent; it seemed to be the very stakes of the différend. Now, according to what rules can we debate the rules to adopt for the debate? Some good souls think that this difficulty can be remedied by means of dialogue. But what are the rules of this dialogue? The same thing goes for the dialectic. The drift which separated me from Souyri made me measure the extent to which a différend is not a contradiction, even in the dialectical materialist sense. For our différend did not, in my eyes, affect mutually exclusive propositions which could each still be expressed by dialectical logic, and which that logic was supposed to synthesize. The alteration affected that logic itself. Perhaps reality did not obey one unique language, I told myself; or rather—and this was worse—the obstacle was not that there could exist several languages in reality, for after all, languages are translatable into one other, and their multiplicity so little hinders the universality of a meaning diat the translatability of an expression is instead the touchstone of that universality. No, the multiplicity that constituted an obstacle to dialectical logic had to be analogous

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to the one that distinguishes the genres o f discourse. One might well transcribe a tragedy into a soap opera, a news item, a Broadway comedy; the intelligible schema o f the action might well remain identical to itself from one version to another (this can be ascertained, moreover, only if it is formulated in a theory, which is yet another genre o f discourse), but in every case what is tragic in the original version is lost. It seemed to me that the discourse called historical materialism caused its referent, historical reality, to speak in the language o f class struggle. Now, this latter was a genre o f discourse, and it had its rules, o f course, but its rules prohibited me, precisely, from treating it as a genre, because it claimed to be able to transcribe all genres—or, what amounts to the same thing, to be able to say everything about its referent. Our differend. took on its full amplitude for me when it appeared to me that there was no symmetry between our respective situations. At least I supposed it to be so, and I can only suppose. Souyri must not be having too much trouble, I would say to myself, diagnosing what was happening to me. He did not have to overturn his way o f thinking, he still had the ability to make the distinction, which was never fixed, o f course—he was not a dogmatist—but which was always possible in principle, between what does and does not merit consideration in the struggle o f ideas; between what continues to will the concrete emancipation o f the exploited as its end, and what ceases to will it. With the critical Marxism which was his own, he always had at his disposition an apparatus for reading facts as symptoms, and my miniscule adventure, which had no importance, did not in any case escape its jurisdiction. Such was not the case for the one whom Marxism seemed to abandon. A sort o f uneasiness or inhibition came over him at the same time as the reasons to argue began to escape him, and he began to lose the use o f the dialectic. What was the point o f refuting the other, the Marxist, if the logic o f reality was not, as he had believed, governed by contradiction? How could an argument prove that one is more a "realist" then he? And in the name of what could it be done, if it were not certain that a subject which is the victim o f a radical wrong—the proletariat—awaited this refutation

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in the unconscious of history, like a reparation that was due it? And finally, according to what logic was one to argue, if it were true that between the Marxist phrase and others, the contradiction was not analyzable or dialectizable, like between the true and the false, but rather a difference or a différend to be noted, described, meditated, like that between genres which are equally possible and perhaps equally legitimate? What other name could I oppose to that of the proletariat, what other logic to that of the dialectic? I couldn't tell; or rather, I began to think that it was not in fact a question of opposition. In this way, the différend took a paradoxical turn. It filled me with anger, but also left me stupefied. I found myself without words to speak, without words to tell myself what Souvri's attachment to the Marxist mode of thought could mean and be worth. And what is more, I could still, in his place and in his genre of discourse, demolish my own irresolution; but I did not see how, in what genre, in what place, which should have been my own, I could attack his certainties. It seemed to me, in an obscure and indistinct way, that I must not hasten to overcome this dissymetrv or to reestablish a parity of incomprehension. Only by my not mourning my powerlessness could another way of thinking be sketched out, I thought without justification, just as at sea a swimmer incapable of opposing the current relies on drifting to find another way out. Thus I did not want or was not able to develop by means of a critique, and bring to a "theoretical" conclusion, something which was at first only a faint and disagreeable insinuation: the suspicion that our radical Marxism was not the universal language. The page where Souvri's name was inscribed in this language had not been turned. It was not a question, for me, of refuting theses, of rejecting a doctrine, of promoting another more plausible one, but rather of leaving free and floating the relation of thought to that Marxism. What took place as a result of this prudence was not, initially, what I expected, but rather at first glance the opposite. I did not immediately acquire a new way of thinking, but an occasion soon made me discover that there was in that vaguely outmoded discourse called Marxism—certain of whose expressions were even be-

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ginning to be unpronounceable for me, just as the flowers of a rhetoric can wilt-something, a distant assertion, which escaped not only refutation, but also decrepitude, and preserved all its authority over the will and over thought. This occasion was provided me by the schism which in 1964 brought about the divorce between, on the one hand, a "tendency" directed most notably by Castoriadis, who was to continue the publication of the journal Soctalisme ou Barbaric, and on the other hand, a group of comrades, some resolutely "Old-Marxists," and others who were uncertain but who shared a common mistrust of the "tendency." This latter group intended to devote itself to building a proletarian organization and would continue to publish the monthly newspaper Pouvoir Ouvrier. The schism came at the end of a long collective reflection. In 1959, shortly after the discussion on revolutionary organization had ended in the withdrawal of the minority faction, Castoriadis had submitted for discussion a group of theses which implied not only a profound reorientation of our politics, but also a questioning of the very language in which it was possible to describe and intervene in the contemporary world. 3 1 felt myself to be close to these theses, open to their argumentation, because I could believe that they formulated in a clear manner the suspicions and misgivings of which I have spoken. The theses were the following: that the revolutionary movement can expect nothing from struggles centered on claims of an economic nature, controlled by "worker" bureaucracies; that the question of labor has ceased to be central when there is "full employment" in all the developed countries; that the unions have become "tools of the system"; that "official political" life now arouses only the apathy of the "people"; that, apart from production, the proletariat has ceased to appear "as a class having its own objectives"; that "the dominant classes have succeeded in controlling the level of economic activity and in preventing major crises."4 Those were assertions that were easily verifiable, it seemed, in those periods of regular growth of capitalism in the most developed countries. And it seemed reasonable to conclude that under those conditions, if there were a revolutionary project, it would have to find its mainspring

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in a contradiction other than the one Marx described in Capital. Indeed, how could the elevation of the organic composition of capital, bringing about a drop in the rate of profit, have been able to continue providing the revolutionary perspective with an objective foundation if it was clear that the expected social and economic effects were neutralized by the functioning of modern capitalism? From Lyon, Souyri communicated to me in December 1959 his "perplexity" before the "novelties" presented by Castoriadis. He pronounced himself profoundly hesitant from a theoretical point of view, "never so hesitant in many years, since the break with Trotskyism." He needed more time in order to make up his mind, along with additional information and explanations. He cautioned me: "Are you fully aware of the meaning, in regard to the Marxist 'tradition,' of the concept that Castoriadis is developing on capitalism? He said enough to frighten me, but not enough to convince me. Those who already have a set opinion are very lucky." And then suddenly he added: "Is it necessary to resign? I have reflected, hesitated, debated many contradictory ideas. Finally, everything that opposes me to this group derives from the fact that it does not have a proletarian character." I had more reason to be surprised by this abrupt question than by the warning that preceded it: he was asking for a delay for theoretical reflection, and yet he was thinking about resigning then and there for reasons that were not theoretical but rather concerned the group's social composition and organizational functioning. In the course of the years 1960 and 1961, his perplexity gave way to the conviction that the description of modern capitalism presented by Castoriadis was erroneous. The temptation to leave was replaced by the resolve to prevent the group, as much as possible and from within, from hastily taking a stand by voting on the adoption of Castoriadis's theses: "I find that by asking me to take a stand—and I must not be the only one—they are asking me to decide on a 'scientific' problem of crucial importance about which, finally, I know very little. I find it deplorable in this situation to be exchanging epithets like paleo- and neo-Marxist. Polemics can only result in serious and useless disagreements within the group." As for the

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content, he declared, in the same letter from January 1960, his "fear that Castoriadis is taking as an accomplished fact a consolidation of capitalism which is only a tendency destined to confront new contradictions, and that he is confusing an economic stage with a durable and stable transformation." This conviction was to orient all his work in the years that followed: he reexamined in detail the analyses of the contradictions of capitalism made by the Austro-Marxist theoreticians Hilferding, Luxembourg, Lenin, and Boukharin; he began studying the enormous amount of social and economic literature on the functioning of contemporary monopolistic State capitalism; he set out to elaborate as fully as possible the contradictions that would not fail to result from this functioning. After 1967, he concluded the "Remarques sur les contradictions du capitalisme," which serve as the Introduction to Impérialisme et bureaucratie face aux révolutions dans le tiers-monde, with the following provisional diagnosis: Considering the system in its global functioning and concrete configuration, and from the point of view of its intrinsic dialectic, it remains legitimate to posit that the contradictions which are in the process of developing out of the growth of the present productive forces prepare—on the level of the relations of imperialist domination as well as on the level of the antagonisms of Capital and Labor and of the specific relations between the State and monopolizing capital—the disintegration of the relative equilibrium which capitalism has achieved in surmounting the crisis of 1930.5 In this text, his conviction shone through that the history in progress and to come was continuing and would continue to obey contradictions that neither the monopolizing groups nor the state bureaucracies could succeed in controlling. After the first great depression (1874—1896), overaccumulation had found its "solution" in the remodeling of capitalism into imperialism; the second (1930-1950) had motivated its remodeling into monopoly State capitalism, thanks to the so-called mixed economy. But the new arrangement did not have the means to ward off the next crisis of

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overaccumulation that would be brought on by the very "growth" it would have encouraged; this is what the premonitory text of this Introduction explained, fifteen years ago now. I admire today its somber perspicacity, when capitalism, now engaged in a new depression due in particular to overcapitalization, is indeed blindly searching for, at once, the expedients (perhaps war) and the new structures which will allow it to again put off the date o f its ruin. This was not what I was sensitive to at the time of the schism. For to that, I could object, and did in fact object, that the tableau was probably true, but what difference did it make if there were no revolutionary movement capable, ideologically and organizationally, of orienting the struggles, which would not fail to occur as a result of the new contradictions, toward the radical solution of those contradictions? The movement had never been as weak as at that time, in the early sixties; crushed by its own offspring, Stalinism, it had never so little realized what might have been, from then on, a radical solution to capitalist contradictions. Souyri asked himself the same question, but it was not for him a matter o f objection. T o Castoriadis who would say: there is no longer an objectivity leading to the ruin of capitalism; the problem o f the revolution is that o f critical subjectivity, Souyri would answer: indeed, that has always been the problem of the revolution, but it has also always been posed in objective conditions which are those of the contradictions of capitalism, and which are independent of that subjectivity. Even when this subjectivity does not become critical, the objective dynamics go their own way, blindly. I f revolutionary consciousness is incapable o f destroying the capitalistic relations of production, then those relations produce their necessary effects, at first euphoric when their consolidation has just taken place, but soon redoutable when the contradictions resulting from this very consolidation explode. It is not because we are powerless that capitalism is stabilized to such an extent. If we are unable to make socialism out of it, then it will make without us what it is in its logic to make: miserv that is both uncultivated and "developed"—barbarism. I could not understand his obstinacy in wanting to understand how capitalism, and with it the entire world that it had attracted

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into the orbit of its movement, was to perish for lack of a conscious interruption of its course. At stake in this obstinacy was not, at any rate, the preservation of the security which the status quo of proven methods and received doctrines furnishes for the mind. It was suspiciously unjust to call Souyri a paleo-Marxist because he thought that there is a dialectical logic in capitalist objectivity. I suspected that the "tendency" represented by Castoriadis wanted to bury something with objectivism, and this something is perhaps not matter for refutation or revision or something that can decline, whatever may be the transformations undergone by the reality of the fact of capitalist development. In the conflict between the innovators and Souyri, the concern to protect thought and life from anguish was surely not on the side of the latter. I am trying today to understand why, in spite of the différend which opposed me to Souyri and the sympathy I had for the majority of the theses presented by Castoriadis, I found myself, at the time of the 1964 schism, with Souyri in the group which opposed Castoriadis. And also why, in May 1968, while I was working one morning with some comrades from the Movement of March 22 on the draft of a tract intided "Your Struggle Is Ours," when one of the former comrades of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" who had gone over to the "tendency," and whom I respected, came to get me from a nearby hall so that I could participate in the elaboration of the Movement's platform, which the Movement had entrusted to the direction of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" and ICO {Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières), I answered him stupidly: No, I don't have confidence in you. All in all, that was not an especially important event, and it was not an especially strong motive; I attach no particular importance to it. It was something like a lapsus. There was something that did not let itself be corrupted by the wealth of argumentation that the "tendency," and especially Castoriadis, expended in order to explain and justify- the new orientation. Nothing was lacking from the argumentative panoply of these comrades, and yet this saturation revealed a lack, the same one that the philosopher senses on reading certain texts of Hegel: the disappointment coming from exhaustiveness. I am speaking of

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tone and method, for as to its content, it was rather existential. They were cleaning up Marxism, giving it new clothes. The old contradiction of Capital, judged to be economistic, was thrown out. A new contradiction—social, this time, and almost ethical—between directing and executing was designated as the right one. I certainly believed, along with the comrades o f the "tendency," that the world was changing, but in the framework of capitalistic relations of production, and thus without the disappearance o f the extraction of surplus value, exploitation, and necessity. They were disguised as something else, but it had to be that subjection, in respect to a non-dominated objectivity, persist for one part o f society, and thus also for the whole. Ethics is bom of natural suffering; the political is born from the supplement that history adds to this suffering. We had not left the realm of the political. But those were platitudes. Who would not have agreed? The "tendency" protested that it was not claiming the contrary. What, then, was lacking in its argumentation? No one among the opposition that we formed was able to say at that time. Let us call it complexity, the différend, the point of view o f class. That was perhaps the thing that my différend with Souyri, and paradoxically the retreat of Marxism for me, had revealed as more fundamentally political than any divergence, the thing within which divergences took form. If Capital had been the critique, or a critique, of political economy, it was because it had forced the différend to be heard where it lay, hidden beneath the harmony, or at least beneath the universal. Marx had shown that there were at least two idioms or two genres hidden in the universal language of capital: the MCM spoken by the capitalist, and the CMC spoken by the wage earner. The speaker of one idiom understood perfectly well the speaker of the other, and each idiom was translatable into the other; but there was between them a difference which operated in such a way that in the transcription of a certain situation, experience, or referent expressed by one in the idiom of the other, this referent became unrecognizable for the first one, and the result of the transcription became incommensurable with the initial expression. The "same" thing, a day of work, said in the two genres, be-

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came two things, just as the "same" affective situation which is tragic for one of the protagonists can be a melodrama for the other. And as I had discovered in my différend with Souyri, this incommensurability was not symmetrical, but rather unbalanced. One of the idioms proposed itself as able to say what the "same" situation was, to explain how it was indeed a question of the "same" referent on both sides. It thus presented itself not as one party in a suit, but as the judge, as the science in possession of objectivity, thereby placing the other in the position of stupor or stupidity in which I had found myself, confining the other within the subjective particularity of a point of view that remained incapable of making itself understood, unless it borrowed the dominant idiom—that is, unless it betrayed itself. Inasmuch as there was in Marxism a discourse which claimed to be able to express without residue all opposing positions, which forgot that différends are embodied in incommensurable figures between which there is no logical solution, it became necessary to stop speaking this idiom at all, and I assented to the direction taken by the "tendency" in this respect, despite Souyri's opposition. But he had known long before me that the question did not reside there. One could certainly make this critique, but all one had refuted by doing so was the dogmatism in Marxism, and not Marxism itself. Some speculative satisfaction was perhaps derived from this, but one surely lost that thing which, righdy or wrongly, remained in Souyri's eyes attached to the name of Marxism. This thing that I call here the différend bears in the Marxist "tradition" a "well-known" name which gives rise to manv misunderstandings; it is that of practice or "praxis," the name par excellence that theoretical thought misinterprets. Souyri was not mistaken; he was not confusing Marx with Hegel. If there exists a class practice, and if at the same time the concept does not give rise to practice, it is because universality cannot be expressed in words, unless it be unilaterally. The roles of the protagonists of history are not played out in a single genre of discourse. Capital, which claims to be the universal language, is, by that very fact, that which reveals the multiplicity of untranslatable idioms. Between these latter and the law

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of value, the différend cannot be resolved by speculation or in ethics; it must be resolved in "practice," in what Marx called critical practice, in an uncertain struggle against the party which claims to be the judge. If "Socialisme ou Barbarie" had had a decisive importance for Souyri, it is because, coming out of the Second World War, after a period of class collaboration and at the outset of the cold war, its founders had dared to point the weapons of radical critique at what seemed necessarily to be most invulnerable to this critique, and even untouchable by it. As early as the second issue, Castoriadis had demonstrated that the relations of production in Russia implied the exploitation of the labor force by a new dominant class.6 The society born of the first proletarian revolution was not more harmonious than bourgeois society. "Marxism" played there the role of the dominant idiom; it had become, there, the genre of discourse of the bureaucracy. Souyri had had another notable sign that the group had a class point of view without blinders with the publication, in the earliest issues of the journal, of the French translation of Paul Romano's The American Worker. Written in the genre of testimony, it stressed the incommensurability of the "same" experiences, depending on whether they are spoken in the idiom of the owner or the foreman or in that of the workers; and it did so without concern as to whether one side or the other spoke or did not speak "Marxist." In the height of Jdanovism, the affirmation seemed a provocation. In this refound radicality there was a cry of deliverance: before the war, Trotsky had let it be suspected that the proletariat was perhaps not capable of carrying out the practical critique of the society of exploitation; it was first necessary, said "Socialisme ou Barbarie," to affirm Trotskyism's own inability to carry out its theoretical critique. Marxist analysis remained valid despite immense defeats undergone by the labor movement since the thirties and the domination of Stalinism. And that which, with Marxist analysis, escaped decrepitude, was not only the idea of reconstituting an international organization disencombered of the hestitations of Trotskyism, not only the perspective of a new "grand political line"; it was above all the emancipation of the critical capacity, the reaffir-

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mation that the class point of view was to spare no object, and that the principal task of revolutionaries was to detect the différend everywhere, even where it was hiding under simple divergences. Marxism had been for Souyri, as for many others, the only decisive way of responding to the challenge posed by capitalism to freedom and to the meaning of history; it did so by making conflict resurface there where it had been smothered. Why did the freedom to work mean the subjection of the wage earner, upon pain of death? Why did the development of the capacities of production here bring about their underdevelopment elsewhere? Why was the advance of technologies accompanied by the alienation of workers? Why did the increase in buying power not redistribute money? Why did the multiplication of the means of communication go hand in hand with the ruin of social networks and the solitude of the masses? Why peace and why war? Why did the progress of knowledge have as its counterpart the deculturation of the ordinary man? Not only were we able to understand all that thanks to Marxism, we were also able to hope to modify the course of capitalism, perhaps to put an end to it, by placing the force of radical critique at the disposition of the struggle of the oppressed, and on their side. But to these paradoxes—as classic as capital itself—another scandal was added, and it was our generation's lot to have to recognize it and make it cease. It was, under the very trappings of the workers' movement, the general inversion of the meaning of the organs it had given itself: unions contributed to regulating the exploitation of the labor force; the party served to modulate the alienation of consciousnesses; socialism was a totalitarian regime; and Marxism was no longer anything but a screen of words thrown over real différends. More than one shrank before the formidable task of recognizing and denouncing these perversions, and preferred to wait for history to take care of it in their place—which is exacdy what those concerned did in the suburbs of Poznan or Warsaw, in the heart of Budapest, or deep in the Chinese countryside. It was a time of lightening revelations, it was a generation of irresolutes and laggards. But Souyri, who in 1942 was seventeen years old, became a member of the clandestine Communist Party of the department of

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Aveyron, had responsibilities in the FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans) underground of the Aveyron and the Tarn, and then resigned from the Communist Party at the end of August 1944; he made contact with Trotskyites and ex-members of the POUM (Parti Ouvrier d'unification marxiste), joined the Fourth International in 1946, made inquiries into the R D R (Rassemblement Démocratique et Révolutùmairé) in 1948, finished his history studies in Toulouse in 1949 and abandoned the Trotskyites and the Third Force, and took his first teaching position in Philippeville, Algeria, in September 1949. Some good souls might have said that he skipped steps; the fact is that the challenge presented by Stalinism to truth and freedom had struck him with full force, and he sought with all his strength a way out that would not be dishonorable. He hadn't a moment to lose. He loved Rimbaud, Mayakovski, Benjamin Péret. There were many of us who came to teach in North Africa upon leaving the university. What each of us was looking for there is hardly important here; what is certain is that Souyri, when I met him at Constantine after a union meeting to which he had listened in silence, had over most of us—over me at any rate—the advantage of already knowing from experience and reflection what constitutes a class point of view, and of not being disposed to let himself be deluded by anything that would tend to make him forget that point of view. The argument that to criticize the left is to be on the right— so frequent in communist propaganda at that time and so favored by intellectuals, young and not so young, for whom the whole political stakes were to make themselves hated by their bourgeoisie— left him indifferent. He knew that "left against right" is not a class point of view and that the true différend is much more subtle, requiring at once more intellectual scruples and more resolve. He brought the greatest possible meticulousness to everything that could be discussed in the area of tactics, strategy, analysis, or political philosophy, sometimes in the register of tragic anguish and sometimes in that of epic irony. Nor did he disdain resorting to the resources of farce. On occasion, we had together the very best uncontrollable laughs ever, both political and nonpolitical in nature. He was cheerful and satirical, like the truly anxious. His intellectual activity was

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always under affective tension, but this tension was protected by a usage, at once parodic and spontaneous, of the great genres of poetics and of classical rhetoric. In short, he intimidated me. His Marxism was not academic, it was not one possible interpretation of the matter of history, nor was it a true doctrine; it was the form of sensibility, the schema of imagination, the rhetoric of affections, the analytic and dialectic of concepts, the law of the will. Far from offering to the mind the closed tranquility of an established knowledge or a pragmatic guide, it was the proper name of his anxiety; it provided him all the opportunities to put again into question what he believed he had imagined, felt, known, and identified. Those of our generation and those who followed us have only barely encountered the corpse or the ghost of Marxism, the ready-made thoughts of a party or a bureaucratic State put in the place of thought, securing it with its dogmatic, vulgar, and prudent phrases. I had the good fortune, while the great century of Marxism was already declining, to learn, by meeting Souyri, that the historical and materialist dialectic could not be just the title of a university chair or a responsibility in a political bureau, but rather the name of a form of resolve. He taught me resolve at the moment when I was searching for it, after too many years of a work of mourning or in incubation. Like many French historians, and with the incredulous irony of a Lenin, he taunted the philosophers: you do no more than state problems. Well, there was one problem and he wanted to resolve it. The rest was futile. The presumption of intelligence to speak of everything to everyone must be abandoned; let it inquire instead into the tragic stupidity of that which has no words to make itself understood, nor any law to justify itself. It was necessary to descend into the substrata of necessity, to seek out there the meaning of the most irrational of historical effects. It was not enough to construct the comprehensible and complete tableau of reality; one had to listen to the obscure passions, the arrogance of leaders, the sadness of workers, the humiliation of peasants and of the colonized, the anger and bewilderment of revolt; the bewilderment, too, of thought. One had to find again the thread of class in the imbroglio of events,

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to reconstruct the dialectic o f the needs, interests, and beliefs behind the declarations and acts o f the powerful, to orient and reorient oneself endlessly in respect to one pole: the destruction of exploitation. And one had to critique everything that goes about this badly or not at all, in order to get to the bottom o f it and understand why it is thus. The tasks which awaited a radical Marxist critique just after the Second World War, and which "Socialisme ou Barbarie" enumerated in its program since its beginnings did not take Souvri unawares. T o critique the class structure of Russian society and o f all bureaucratic societies; to analyze the dynamics o f the struggles in underdeveloped countries; to understand the function of ideology, beginning with Marxism itself, and the role of the party, including the Bolshevik party, in the formation of a dominant class; to take up again the critique o f the State on the basis of what had happened in Europe in the last thirty years (fascism, Nazism, Stalinism)—he was already devoting himself to all this. He was prepared to travel as far as necessary. I embarked with him on this journey, and, after three years o f shared rumination where he taught me everything except what the Algerians themselves taught me, we found ourselves together on board "Socialismc ou Barbarie." Then when it became evident that capitalism, once its production and market capacities were restored, had finally come out o f the long depression begun in 1930 and had restarted the process o f extended accumulation, new pitfalls appeared, new realities opposed their opacity to our Marxism: the reorganization of capitalism into bureaucratic or State monopolistic capitalism; the role of the modern State in the so-called mixed economy; the dynamics o f the new ruling strata (bureaucratic or technocratic) within the bourgeoisie; the impact o f new techniques on work conditions and on the mentality of workers and employees; the effects of economic growth on daily life and culture; the appearance of new demands by workers and the possibility o f conflicts between the base and the apparatus in worker organizations—all the traits, in sum, whose analysis was to provide material, several years later, for the theses of the "tendency" and for the schism o f the group, while at the same time

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leading Souyri, in his stubborn search for an irrefutable refutation of those theses, to the most complete isolation. But in the meantime, the fact is, as we now know, that many of these traits of Eastern and Western societies were analyzed and understood at that time, traits which others "discovered" twenty or thirty years later without, however, being able to bear the revelation ideologically and even psychically. The accounting that was made gradually over the course of these fifteen years was implacable.7 Once Stalinism was identified as the ideology of a dominant class, and totalitarianism as the political mode of domination proper to that class, a radical critique could no longer expect anything from labor organizations that obeyed, to the letter or loosely, the dictates of this class, or reproduced its traits. Nor was there anything to expect from intellectuals who believed themselves to be Marxists because they read Marx and disliked bosses. We were watching for the smallest signs of a differend between the proletariat and the bureaucracies which spoke in its name. There were many of them, and they were conspicuous, as are all proletarian victories: the riots of East Berlin starting in June 1953; then, in the course of the year 1956, the Poznan insurrection in June, the Polish October, and the revolution of worker Counsels in Hungary in November; and from May to June 1957, the unrest in all of China which shook the party apparatus. By publishing, in 1958, Souyri's article entided "La Lutte des classes en Chine bureaucratique," our group demonstrated once again that the differend between the "communist" bureaucrats and those they exploited was no longer in doubt, at least for the interested parties themselves, and that the former no longer occupied the comfortable situation that had been theirs before the death of Stalin. But we also directly attacked the idolatry, with its disguised conservatism, of a displaced Stalinism which attempted to shelter the Chinese domain from a radical Marxist critique, and which was called Maoism. Rereading this study today, one recognizes there the effrontery and the mirth that Marx once claimed as the right of the true against the Prussian censure, except that the censure flouted here was that of the president of China exercised in the West thanks to the zeal he had en-

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countered in some intellectuals (Sartre was backsliding), and except, too, that the différend to be revealed was hidden this time under the farcical figure of "non-antagonistic contradictions." At that time, "Socialisme ou Barbarie" had only one voice, and it spoke the idiom of those whom oppression habitually reduces to silence and who were then making themselves heard. And Souyri's voice joined in. His resolve, as I said, was turned against the "tendency" when it became necessary to analyze the contradictions of bureaucratic capitalism, and when he thought he saw in its theses signs which for him announced the abandonment o f the class struggle: that is, the loss of comprehension and will. For the thing that engendered history also sought to have itself forgotten, and the understanding had to muster all its forces in order to discern the thing's every effect in the infinite disorder o f the givens; reason needed all its forces to elaborate the general process o f the contradictions that the thing could not fail to produce; the will needed all its strength to focus itself without distraction on the destruction of that thing. That thing was the sole reality, the whole reality, but it never stopped disguising itself. It was the unconscious of humanity; the question was one of listening to it, o f finding its expression, o f suppressing it. Everything which, in the course o f our thoughts, contributed to its omission, even tendentiously, was refutable, refuted, and scorned. Souyri lampooned all this with names like innovation, fantasies, reformism, Sorbonnish deviation. Each was always an accommodation of the thing: futile, illusory, and necessarily destined to abort. Even injustice was not the appropriate name with which to designate the thing. He said to me during a last dispute over terrorism: "Justice, I don't like that word." Because that thing was, in his eyes, such that one could not overcome it with just intentions or institutions. Irreparable in individual consciousnesses alone, and by individual wills alone, it was the intolerable source from which human history drew its non-sense and its sense. It was what made the course of things into a tragic necessity at the same time as it offered to the will the faculty for reversing this course, thanks to the memory o f the experiences it had caused and the knowledge o f the processes

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by which it had expressed itself; but thanks above all to the deepening of the differend it provoked. Souyri had found in Marx words to name this irrefutable thing; exploitation was one of them. He could not turn his mind away from it. It alone was worth the limidess expenditure of all intelligence and all will. One could not be reconciled with oneself, be happy and discerning, enjoy life, as long as it was there. It was misfortune, malady, and the promise of death weighing on the species. And it was not the "natural death" that saves the spirit, but rather the misery that exhausts it, condemns it to repetition, abuses it, and eliminates it. Exploitation: that might appear to be a classic category of the critique of political economy, a dialectical necessity, an outmoded conception of the movement of history. In the eyes of certain readers or certain comrades, Souyri may have passed for the champion of an old-style Marxism, of economism, of necessitarianism, and also of centralism because of his suspicions in respect to spontaneism. To place confidence in the spontaneity of the masses was, in his eyes, a bit like counting on the unconscious alone for emancipation from neurosis. The evil done by exploitation went so deep that one could not hope to draw from the forces of human nature something with which to combat what oppressed it. Denaturation was at the origin of history; one would not get out of it by reestablishing a state of humanity anterior to the division into classes, a state which is moreover entirely imaginary. One would get out of it, rather, by organizing the supreme denaturation that was called socialism, of which capitalism bore within itself only the contradictory possibility. One had to listen to the unconscious of history, the experience of the struggles, just as one lends an ear to the patient; but one also had to defend that experience against whatever, within it, worked to distort it. As for economism and necessitarianism, they could be imputed to Souyri only if one forgot that people do not do what they want and what they think, but something else that they do not want, that they conceive of with difficulty, and to which they are chained

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by a logic which exceeds them; and only if one forgot that this subjection cannot disappear as long as the thing motivating it is not suppressed. This is why, in Souyri's eyes, it was impossible that capitalism could in any way succeed in definitively controlling its own functioning and in freeing humanity from necessity. In the so-called relations of production, it was not only the extraction of surplus value that entered into contradiction with its realization; it was the autocreation of humanity through work which reversed into its own destruction. Capital, because it was the name of an inexpiable crime against freedom and dignity, was by essence incompatible with any recognition of what it is, and with any effective mastery over what it does. Those who believed the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to be capable of effecting a definitive stabilization of the economic system by means of institutions expressly created for that end forgot that this thing, like the unconscious, thwarts any contractual rationality. Parliamentary democracy, social reformism, mixed economy, "modern capitalism" according to Castoriadis: all certainly changed the conditions of the differend, displaced the class struggle, allowed certain hidden realities to appear, but at the cost of hiding other realities, and without suppressing the reasons for the blindness. I think that Souyri conceived of the resistance of capital to revolutionary critique and intervention as similar to the resistance of the unconscious to analysis. Socialism was not an improvement of economic and social functioning, a more just redistribution of the fruits of labor; it was the alternative—the only one—to the barbarism immanent to the development of capitalism. Nothing could guarantee its coming. Only one thing was sure: that the alternative would not disappear with the development of capitalism. Just as the neurosis contains within itself—if we are to believe Freud—the clue to a therapy, but does not itself lead to its application, so socialism was not inside capitalism like a seed but like "an opportunity to be seized." Against the objectivism of a Kautskv, Souvri made his own the critique proposed by Rosa Luxembourg: "If socialism is not, in due time," he wrote, "torn from the flanks of the old

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society' by the decisive action of the masses, then the whole society will regress towards barbarism.. . . Marxist theory is no longer only a science, delivering up objective knowledge of the laws of a historical process oriented toward economy, but also a critique of the real elaborated from a class point of view, with the purpose of awakening the masses to consciousness of their historical task and of opening the way to revolutionary practice."9 All thought was threatened by the forgetting of this point of view. I even wonder if Souyri didn't think, deep down, that one thinks only in order to better forget it. He wanted to think in order to draw it out. If one concealed the immemorial thing, it would eventually catch up with the amnesiac—whether it be called Empire, bourgeois republic, socialist State, party, or thinker—and destroy it. In the beginning, he had let me read, more for my guidance than for my opinion, the manuscript of a study written in the late forties or early fifties on the question of slavery in Rome and on decadence: the Empire being born from the stifling of the class struggle which had developed under the Republic, and succumbing because it had repressed it. A brief tableau, he said. This forceful sketch of ancient Bonapartism had nevertheless enlightened me. Decadence was the somber idea that hung over Souyri's intellectual and militant activity, like that of the group and perhaps like that of any revolutionary: the idea of a society where the différend was so well smothered that its manifestations could no longer be anything but wild, sporadic, inconsistent; a society where the thought and organization indispensable to "seizing the opportunity" of socialism, upon the occasion of such a disorder engendered by the contradictions of the system of exploitation, abandoned their tasks because they met with no echo. The "fear" that he felt as early as 1960, when faced with the first formulation of the theses of the "tendency," was for him a signal of sorts that the end had come: the most radical thing in die world, in terms of a theoretical critique of contemporary capitalism, accepted, tranquilly and even flatteringly, the idea that this radical critique no longer had any roots in objectivity. The différend took

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place only between consciousnesses which were by definition equal and free; it was thus no longer a différend, but just a debate. The unconscious of history was thereby denied. Now, he held it as certain that by means of such a denial, which was precisely what the system needed, history would come entirely under the regime of that unconscious, and that humanity would undergo the inevitable contradictions of a capitalism which had reached the stage of State monopoly or bureaucracy, having lost with the class point of view the means of assuming a critical consciousness of its fate, and of escaping it. He immersed himself in the meticulous study of the mechanisms which would not fail to elicit the next worldwide depression. Death surprised him at the moment when he was identifying this event's premonitory symptoms in reality.10 He would have felt only a bitter consolation if he had seen more, perceiving nowhere the signs of a critical, organized intelligence capable of confronting the crisis and the reactionary course that it would not fail to imprint upon the movement of history. Already in 1968 and later, he would have argued, the efforts made by the student and intellectual avant-garde to win the workers over to the opposition movement had had no result, while the objective conditions—those of a relative stability of the capitalist economies—had been favorable to that movement. Would it not be even worse in the case of a general crisis? I shall not discuss here his reasons for thinking this or his perspectives on it. His absence and our différend oblige me to remain silent. I have testified here to what I can evoke without betrayal, this différend itself, which betrayed each one of us to the other, and in which I experienced, to my surprise, what in Marxism cannot be objected to and what makes of any reconciliation, even in theory, a deception: that there are several incommensurable genres of discourse in play in society, none of which can transcribe all the others; and nonetheless one of them at least—capital, bureaucracv—imposes its rules on the others. This oppression is the only radical one, the one that forbids its victims to bear witness against it. It is not enough to understand it and be its philosopher; one must also destroy it.

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Souvri thought, quite logically, that if it is not the victims of capital and bureaucracy—their "others," the exploited, the oppressed—who end their silence and begin to testify by themselves, then what we, the intellectuals, might think of it all has only the importance of a theoretical point of honor and the value of a Utopia. It is thus that the last sentence of Le Marxisme après Marx must be understood: "In fact, Marxism, which is in its essence a theory of class struggle, could be atacked at its core only if one succeeded in demonstrating that the world has gone beyond the divisiveness which inhabits it. Then, Marxists could no longer avoid recognizing that their doctrine was only the mask of a Utopia."11 In what logic could the end of the différend be demonstrated? In the logic of Marxism it is not demonstrable. But on the other hand, one can judge the différend to be insurmountable in the capitalist system without, however, awaiting its suppression—as Marxist doctrine at least would have it—through the seizure of power by a party/class which is the subject of history. Marxism is then the critical intelligence of the practice of the divisiveness, in both senses: it declares the divisiveness to be "outside," in historical reality; the divisiveness "within" in, as a différend, prevents this declaration from being universally true once and for all. As such, it is not subject to refutation: it is the disposition of the field which makes refutation possible.12

NOTES I. The book (Paris: Editions Christian Bourgeois, 1980) has a history which PierreFrançois Souyri recounts elsewhere. Its writing must have begun in the early fifties. Studies on the subject followed in the early sixties, and the last articles about China are from 1968. It is a question, in this work, o f encompassing the history not only o f modern China, but also o f the People's Republic after 1949. In a letter o f January 1960 addressed to me, Souyri wrote: "I have all the same made some drastic decisions about China. Since one cannot be forever running after current events, I have decided to divide my work in two and publish a first volume which will stop at the 1949 revolution. I am putting the last touches on it now. I think that I will have finished it all by spring, and I will try to

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A MEMORIAL FOR MARXISM have it published at the beginning of summer." He noted that the size of the text had made it impossible to realize his original intention to publish it in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. The manuscript was submitted to a Paris publisher. It came back with comments aimed for the most part at divesting it of its "polemical" tone and even of its terminology. Souvri was asked in particular to rewrite, in this direction, the appendix to the first chapter. He forced himself to do this, but the rest remained unchanged, and the whole thing was put away and forgotten. I often reproached him later for this neglect, accusing him of being responsible for having allowed Maoism to develop among French students, something his book would have prevented. He laughed at this childish idea. After one of our last meetings, he nevertheless declared that he would take up the text again and publish it. Of the three appendixes on revolutionary China, the first two were published in Socialisme ou Barbaria, in numbers 24 (May-June 1958) and 30 (April-May 1960), respectively; the last is taken from articles written between 1965 and 1967 and collected in the booklet Impérialisme et bureaucratie . . . (see further on). They give an idea of what the second volume envisioned by Souvri would have been. The other published texts are: Impérialisme et bureaucratie face aux révolutions Jans le tiers monde, with a collection of nine articles written for the mimeographed monthly newsletter Pouvoir Ouvrier between 1965 and 1967, with a previously unpublished introduction and conclusion. This collection was published in booklet form as a mimeographed supplement to the January 1968 issue of Pouvoir Ouvrier: Le Marxisme après Marx (Paris: Flammarion, "Questions d'histoire," 1970). Among the articles and notes he contributed regularly to the Annales ESC, some are more than clarifications: "La Crise de mai" (JanuaryFebruary 1970); "Quelques aspects du marxisme aujourd'hui" (September-October 1970); "Marxismes et marxistes" (on books by Lcmer, Haithcox, Harris and Palmer, and Paillet); and "Variations dans le marxisme" (November-December 1972); "Révolutions russes et totalitarisme" (on books by Liebman, Avrich, Medvedev, David Rousset, Solzhenitsvn, and Martchenko) (March-April 1976); "Histoire et théorie économiques" (on books by Boukharine, Varga, and Mandel) (February-March 1979).

2. Claude Lefort and the comrades who maintained after 1958 the publication of the bulletin Informations et liaisons ouvrières, which subsequently became Informations et correspondance ouvrières. Lefort's positions had been stated in a text entitled "Organisation et parti," published under his name in Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 26 (November-December 1958); those of the majority were published in a text signed by Paul Cardan, entitled "Prolétariat et organisation," and published in numbers 27 and 28 of the same journal (April-Mav and Julv-August 1959). 3. This "platform" was published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, nos. 31 and 32 (December 1960-February 1961) under the title "Le Mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne." 4. The expressions in quotation marks are taken from the introductory resume of

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the text mentioned in the preceding note, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 31, pp. 51 5. Souvri, Impérialisme et bureaucratie, p. xviii. 6. Pierre Chaulieu, "Les Rapports de production en Russie," Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 2 (May-June 1949), pp. 1-66. 7. The study published by Claude Lefort in Socialisme ou barbarie, no. 19 (JulySeptember 1956), entitled "Le Totalitarisme sans Staline—l'URSS dans une nouvelle phase," is now a classic model of what was formulated at that time on bureaucracy. 8. Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 24 (May-June 1958), pp. 35-103. 9. Souvri, Le Marxisme après Marx, p. 22. 10. See, for example, the report on the book by Ernest Mandel, "Le Troisième Age du capitalisme," Annales ESC, no. 2 (February-March 1979), pp. 379-81. 11. Souvri, Le Marxisme après Marx, pp. 113-114. 12. Algeria scarcely appears in this testimony. It had for me the importance of something that initiates one directly into the political; such was not the case for Souvri. I have preferred not to run the risk of interposing my experience between the reader and Souyri's Algeria.

CHECKLIST OF WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Compiled

by Eddie

Teghiayan

Writings by Jean-François Lyotard 1948 "La Culpabilité Allemande." Review of Die Schuld/rage: Ein Beitrag sur deutschen Frage, bv Karl Jaspers. L'Age Nouveau, (1948), 28:90-94. "Nés en 1925." Les Temps Modernes (May 1948), 3(32):2052-2057.

1949 "Texte." Imprudence (March 1949), 3:78-82. 1952 Review of The Changing Culture ofa Factory, bv Elliot Jaques. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (1952), 12:179-181. 1954 La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.

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1955 Review of Le Mouvement ouvrier en Amérique Latine, bv Victor Alba. Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-September 1955), 3(17):72-77. [Under the name: F. Laborde.] 1956 "La Bourgeoisie nord-africaine." Socialisme ou Barbarie (December 1956-Februarv 1957), 4(20): 188-194. [F. Laborde.] La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? 2d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956. "La Situation en Afrique du Nord." Socialisme ou Barbarie (Januarv-March 1956), 3(18):87-94. [F. Laborde ]

1957 "Les Comptes du gérant loyal." Socialisme ou Barbarie (Julv-Scptember 1957), 4(22): 148-151. [F. Laborde ] "Note sur le Marxisme." ["Le point de vue d'un non-marxiste."] In Alfred Webcr and Denis Huisman, eds., Tableau de la philosophie contemporaine, vol. 3 of Histoire de la Philosophie Européenne de 1850 à 1957, pp. 55-61. Paris: Fischbacher, 1957. "Nouvelle Phase dans la question algérienne." Socialisme ou Barbarie (March-Mav 1957), 4(21): 162-168. [F. Laborde.]

¡958 "La Guerre 'contre révolutionnaire,' la société coloniale et le Gaullisme." Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-August 1958), 5(25):20-27. [F. Laborde.] "Mise i nu des contradictions algériennes." Socialisme ou Barbarie (Mav-June 1958), 4(24): 17-34. [F. Laborde.]

1959 "La Contenu social de la lutte algérienne." Socialisme ou Barbarie (December 1959February 1960), 5(29): 1-38. La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? 3d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. 1960 "L'Etat et la politique dans la France de 1960." Socialisme ou Barbarie (April-Mav 1960), 5(30):45-72. "Le Gaullisme et l'Algérie." Socialisme ou Barbarie (December 1960-February 1961), 6(31):24-32. 1961 "L'Algérie sept ans après." Socialisme ou Barbarie (December 1961-Februarv 1962), 6(33):10-16. "En Algérie, une vague nouvelle." Socialisme ou Barbarie (April-June 1961), 6(32):6272

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La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? 4th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961. "Signification et travail." Sorbonne: Intergroupe de Propédeutique, 1961. Mimeograph. 1963 "Algeria." Ian Birchall, tr., International Socialism (Summer 1963), 13:21-26. A shortened version of "L'Algérie évacuée" (1963). "L'Algérie évacuée." Socialisme ou Barbarie (March-Mav 1963), 6(34): 1 - 4 3 . 1964 La Fenomenologia. 2d ed. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1964. Spanish translation bv Aida Aisenson de Kogan of La Phénoménologie. "Les Formes de l'action." Co/wrr de Philosophie (1966), 2 - 3 : 1 3 - 2 5 . Genshogaku. Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1965. Japanese translation by Takahashi Nobuaki of La Phénoménologie "Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs." Review of La Pensée sauvage, by Claude Lévi-Strauss Annales E.S.C. (Januarv-February 1965), 2 0 ( l ) : 6 2 - 8 3 . See Claude Lévi-Strauss (1979). La Phénoménlogie. Que sais-je? 5th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. 1967 A Fenomenologia. Säo Paulo: Difusâo Europeia do Livro, 1967. Portuguese translation by Mary Amazonas Leite de Barms of La Phénoménologie. La Fenomenologia. 3d ed. Caudemos de Eudeba, no. 31. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1967. Spanish translation bv Aida Aisenson de Kogan of La Phénoménologie. La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? 6th éd. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Review of Temps et langage, bv André Jacob. L'Homme et la Société ( Julv-September 1967), 5:220-224. 1968 "Préambule à une charte." Esprit (August-September 1968), 36(373):21-25. See Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud ( 1973) :22-29. "Le Travail du rêve ne pense pas." Revue d'Esthétique (1968), 21:26-61. Sec Discours, figure (1971):239-270; "The Dream-Work Does Not Think" (1983). 1969 "A la place de l'homme, l'expression." Review of Pour l'homme, bv Mikel Dufirenne. Esprit (July-August 1969), 7-8(383):155-178. La Phénoménologie. Que sais-je? 7th éd. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969. "La Place de l'aliénation dans le retournement Marxiste." Les Temps Modernes (August-September 1969), 25(277-278):92-160.

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See Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973): 78-166. "Un Marx non marxiste." Le Monde (March 3 0 - 3 1 , 1969), 7530:15. Reprinted in Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (I973):36-46, with certain excisions restored. 1970 "L'Eau prend le ciel.' Proposition de collage pour figurer le désir bachelardien." L'Arc "Bachelard" (1970), 4 2 : 3 8 - 5 4 . See Des Dispositifs pulsionnels ( 1973) : 157-178. (With Dominique Avron and Bruno Lemenuel.) "Espace plastique et espace politique." Revue d> Esthétique (1970), 2 3 ( 3 - 4 ) : 2 5 5 - 2 7 7 . Sec Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973) :276-304. "Nantcrre: Ici, maintenant," Les Temps Modernes (April 1970), 26(285): 1650-1665. "Notes sur la fonction critique de l'oeuvre." Revue d'Esthétique, (1970), 23(3-4) :400414. See Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973):230-247; Driftworks (1984):6983. "Oedipe juif." Critique (June 1970), 26(277):530-545. See Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973): 167-188; "Jewish Oedipus" ( 1977); Driftworks (1984):35-55. "Sur la théorie." Interview with Brigitte Devismes. VH 101 (Summer 1970), 1 : 5 5 65. See Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973):210-229; "On Theorv: An Interview," in Driftworks (1984): 19-33. 1971 Discours, figure. Collection d'esthétique, no. 7. Paris: KJincksieck, 1971. Contents: Le Parti pris du figural:9-23. Signification et désignation:25-160. Dialectique, index, forme:27—52. Récessus et surréflexion:53-72. Signe linguistique?73-89. Effet d'épaisseur dans le système:91-104. L'Epaisseur au bord du discours: 105-116. Le Non et la position de l'objet: 117-129. Appendice: S. Freud, la (dé)négation:131-134. L'Opposition et la différence:135-160. Veduta sur un fragment de l^histoire" du désir: 163-208. L'Autre espace:209-387. La Ligne et la lettrc:211-238. "Le Travail du rêve ne pense pas":239-270. Connivences du désir avec le figural:271-279. Le Désir dans le discours:281-326. Fiscours, digure, l'utopie du fantasme:327-354.

WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT L Y O T A R D

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Retour, auto-illustration, double rcnvcrscment:355-387. (With Dominique Avron.) "'A few words to sing* Sequenza III." Musique en Jeu (1971.), 2:30-44. See Derive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973):248-271.

1972 "Capitalisme énergumène." Review of Capitalisme et schizophrénie: l'Anti-Oedipe, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Critique (November 1972), 28(306):923-956. See Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1973):7-52; "Encrgumen Capitalism" (1977); Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (I980):7-49. " 'En finir avec l'illusion de la politique': Un Entretien avec Jean-François Lyotard." Interview with Gilbert Lascault. La Quinzaine Littéraire (May 1-15, 1972), 140:1819. "Plusieurs silences." Musique en Jeu (November 1972), 9:64—76. See Des Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 8 1 - 3 0 3 ; Des Dispositifi pulsionnels (1980):269-290; "Several Silences," in Dnftwork (1984):91-110. "Psychanalyse et peinture." In Encyclopaedia Universalis, 13:745-750. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1972. See "Freud selon Césanne," in Da Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1973):71-94; Des Dispositifi pulsionnels (1980):67-88. 1973 "L'Acinémar Revue d'Esthétique (1973), 26(2-4) :357-369. See Des Dispositifi pulsionnels (1973):53-69; "Acinéma" (1978); Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1980):51-65. "Contribution des tableaux de Jacques Monory à l'intelligence de l'économie politique libidinale du capital dans son rapport avec le dispositif pictural." In Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, éd., Nouvelles Figurations 1960/1973, pp. 154-238. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/18," 1973. Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/ 18," 1973. Contents: Dérives:5-21. [Sec Driftworks (1984):9-17.] Préambule à une charte:22-29. Désirévolution : 30-35. Un Marx non marxiste: 36-46. Cadeau d'organes:47-52. [See Driftworks (1984):85-89.] Principales tendances actuelles de l'étude psychanalytique des expressions artistiques et littéraires:53-77. La Place de l'aliénation dans le retournement marxiste:78-166. Oedipe juif:167-188. [See Driftworks (1984):35-55.] Nanterre: Ici, maintenant: 189-209. Sur la théorie:210-229. [Sec Driftworks (1984): 19-33.] Notes sur la fonction critique de l'oeuvre:230-247. [See Driftworks (1984):6989.]

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"A few words to sing" Sequenza 111:248-271. Leçon d'impouvoir:272-275. Espace plastique et espace politique:276-304. Le 23 mars:305-316. Des Disposici pulsionnels. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/18," 1973. Contents: Capitalisme énergumène:7-52. L'Acinéma:53-69. Freud selon Cézanne:71-94. La Dent, la paume:95-104. [See "The Tooth, the Palm" (1976).] Esquisse d'une économique de l'hyperréalisme:105-113. Adorno come diavolo: 115-133. [See "Adomo as the Devil" (1974).] Sur une figure de discours: 135-156. 'L'Eau prend le ciel.' Proposition de collage pour figurer le désir bachelardien:157-178. Petite économie libidinale d'un dispositif narratif: La Régie Renault raconte le meurtre de P. Overney: 179-224. En attendant Guiffrey (Quatre pièces pour un abstrait):225-236. La Peinture comme dispositif libidinal:237-280. Plusieurs silences:281-303. [See Dnftworks (1984):91-110). Notes sur le retour et le capital:304—319. "En attendant Guiffrey." L Art Vivant (May 1973), 39:6-7. See Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1973):225-236; Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1980):215-226. "Esquisse d'une économique de Phyperréalisme." L'Art Vivant (February 1973), 36:912. See Des Disposais pulsionnels ( 1973) : 105-113; D o Dispositifs pulsionnels ( 1980) :99107. La Fenomenologia. A. Cecchini, ed. Florence: D'Anna, 1973. Italian translation of La Phénoménologie. "Les Filles machines folles de Lindner." L'Art Vivant (July 1973), 41:8-9. "Notes sur le retour et le Kapital," and "Discussion." In Pierre Boudot et al., Nietzsche aujourd hui. Vol. 1: Intensités, pp. 141-157, 175-190. Proceedings of a conference held July 1972 at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisv-la-Salle. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/18," 1973. See Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1973):304-319; Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1980):291-305. "La Peinture comme dispositif libidinal." Documents de travail et pré-publications. Centro Intemazionale de Semiotica e di Linguistica, Università di Urbino (Aprii 1973), Series F(23):l-31. 1974 "Adomo as the Devil." Robert Hurley, tr. Telos (Spring 1974), 19:127-137.

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See "Adorno come diavolo," Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1973):115-133; Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (1980): 109-125. Afterword. "Ante diem rationis." In Boris Eizvkman, Science-fiction et capitalisme. Critique de la position de désir de la science, pp. 225-243. Collection Repères. Sciences humaines, idéologies, no. 9. Tours: Marne, 1974. "Biblioclastes." L'Art Vivant (March 1974), 47:9-12. "Coïtus reservatus." Review of La Vie sexuelle dans la Chtne ancienne, bv Robert Van Gulik. Critique (January 1974), 30(320):3-13. See Economie libidinale (1974):241-251. "La Confession coupée," and "Discussion." In Georges Raillard, éd., Butor, pp. 124— 146, 147-169. Proceedings of a conference entitled "Approches de Michel Butor" held June 24-July 1, 1973 at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisv-la-Salle. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/18," 1974. See "Faux-fuyant dans la littérature," in Rudiments païens ( 1977) :81—114. Economie libidinale. Collection "Critique." Paris: Minuit, 1974. "Par-delà la représentation." Preface to the French translation of The Hidden Order of Art bv Anton Ehrenzweig. L'Ordre caché de l'art: Essai sur la psychologie de l'imagination artistique bv Anton Ehrenzweig. Francine Lacoue-Labarthe and Claire Nancy, trs. Collection Connaissance de l'inconscient, no. 22. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. See "Beyond Representation" (1975). 1975 (With Gilles Deleuze.) "A propos du département de psvchanalvse de Vincennes." Les Temps Modernes (January 1975), 30(342):862-863. "Beyond Representation." Jonathan Culler, tr. Human Context (1975), 7 ( 3 ) : 4 9 5 502. See "Par-delà de la représentation" (1974). "Considérations préliminaires à une histoire païenne: Notes sur la déchristianisation." In Vers une esthétique sans entrave: Mélanges offerts à Mikel Du fraine, pp. 2 5 5 287. Collection Esthétique. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/ 18," 1975. See "Futilité en révolution" in Rudiments païens (1977): 157-212. "De l'apathie théorique." Critique (February 1975), 31(333): 254-265. See "Apathie dans la théorie," in Rudiments païens (1977):9—31. "For a Pseudo-Theory." Moshe Ron, tr. Tale French Studies (1975), 52:115-127. Cf. "La Théorique en tant que libidinale" and "Corps, textes conducteurs," in Economie libidinale (1974):292-311. "L'Important, ce sont les intensités, 'pas le sens.' Entretien avec Jean-François Lyotard." Interview with Christian Descamps. La Quinzaine Littéraire (Januarv I 15, 1975), 2 0 1 : 5 - 6 . "In cui si considerano certe pareti come gli elementi potenzialmente cèlebi di alcune macchine semplici/ Considerations on Certain Partition-Walls as the Potentially

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Bachelor Elements of a Few Simple Machines." In Marc Le Bot et al., Lì Machine Cèlebi: Tati/The Bachelor Machmes: Texts, pp. 98-109. New York: Rizzoli, 1975; Berne: Kunsthalle, 1975. "Où l'on considère certaines parois comme les cléments potentiellement célibataires de quelques machines s impics/Wo bestimmte Trennwände als potentielle Junggcselknclemente einfacher Maschinen betrachtet werden." In Marc Le Bot et al., JunggeselUnmaschtnen: text/Les Machines célibataires: textes, pp. 98-109. Venice: Alfieri Edizioni d'Ane, 1975. "Marcel Duchamp ou le grand sophiste." Review of Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif: Essai de mythanalysc du grand verre, bv Jean Clair. L'Art Vivant (March-Mav 1975), 56:34-35. Le Mur du Pacifique. With Toil by Michel Vachev, preceded by an introduction and Le Mur du Pacifique bv Jean-François Lyotard. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975. "Que le signe est hostie, et l'inverse; et comment s'en débarraser." Review of La critique du discours, by Louis Marin. Critique (November 1975), 30(342): 1 H i l l 26. Sec "Humour en sémiothéologie," in Rudiments païens ( 1977):32-59. 1976 "Un Barbare parle du socialisme." Bernard-Henry Lévy interviews Jean-François Lyotard. Le Nouvel Observateur (January 19-25, 1976), 584:52-53. "Che cosa è in gioco nelle lòtte féministe." In Annuario 1976—La Biennale di Venezia. Eventi del 1975. A cura dell Archivo storico delle ani contemporanee, pp. 925-932. Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1976. Italian translation by Giovanni Cacciavillani. Title in French: "Un Enjeu des luttes des femmes." See "Féminité dans la métalangue," in Rudiments païens (1977): 213-232; "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles" (1978). "L'Incorporéité de l'Allemagne." Quel Corps? (1976), no. 6. "Une Lettre de M. Jean-François Lyotard." Le Nouvel Observateur (April 12-18, 1976), 596:3. "Petite mise en perspective de la décadence et de quelques combats minoritaires à y mener." In Dominique Grisoni, ed., Politiques de la philosophie, pp. 121-153. Collection "Figures." Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976. See "Expédient dans la décadence" in Rudiments païens ( 1977) : 115—156. La Phénoménologie. Que-sais-je? 8th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. See La Phénoménologie (1954). "Puissance des Traces, ou contribution de Bloch à une histoire païenne." In Gérard Raulet, ed., Utopie-Marxisme selon Ernst Bloch: Un Système de l'inconstructible: Hommages à Emst Bloch sur son 90e anniversaire, pp. 57-67. Collection critique de la politique. Paris: Payot, 1976. See "Rétorsion en théopolitique," in Rudiments païens (1977):60-80. Sur cinq peintures de René Guijfirey. Paris: Galerie Stevenson and Palluel, 1976. "Sur la force des faibles." L'Art "Lyotard" (1976), 64:4-12. "The Tooth, the Palm." Anne Knap and Michel Benamou, trs. Sub-Stance (1976), 15:105-110.

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See "La Dent, la paume," Da Dispositift pulsionnels (1973):95-104; Da Dispostttfi pulsionnels (1980):89-98. 1977 "Energumen Capitalism." James Leigh, tr. Semiotexte (1977), 2 ( 3 ) : l l - 2 6 . See "Capitalisme énergumène" (1972). Instructions païenna. Collection Débats. Paris: Galilee, 1977. "Inventaire du dernier nu." In Marcel Duchamp, Vol. Ill: abécédaire: approcha critiques, pp. 86-109. Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1977. "Jewish Oedipus." Susan Hanson, tr. Genre (Fall 1977), 10(3):395-411. Sec "Oedipe juif" (1970); for revised translation see Driftworks (1984):35-55. "Leçon sur la condition secrète des langues. Genre didactique." Erres (1977), 3 4:69-74. See "A Lesson Concerning the Secret Nature of Languages" (1978). "Narrations incommensurables. Réponses à des questions de Patrick de Haas." Interview with Patrick de Haas. Art Press International (December 1977), 13:19. Das Patchwork der Minderheiten: Für eine herrenlose Politik. Internationale Marxistische Diskussion, vol. 69. Berlin: Merve, 1977. German translation bv Clemens-Carl Härle of a selection of essays. Contents: Kleine Perspekrivierung der Dekadenz einiger minoritarer Gefechte, die hier zu fuhren sind: 7-51. ["Petite mise en perspective de la décadence et de quelques combats minoritaires à v mener" (1976); "Expédient dans la décadence" Rudiments patens (1977):115156.] Ein Einsatz in den Kämpfen der Frauen:52-72. ["Che cosa e in goco nelle lotte feministe" (1976); "Féminité dans la métalangue" Rudiments païens (1977):213232.] Uber die Stärke der Schwächen:73-92. Macht der Spuren oder Ernst Blochs Beitrag zu einer heidnischen Gesc h i c h t e t - 1 3 . ["Puissance des Traces, ou contribution de Ernst Bloch à une histoire païenne" (1976); "Rétorsion en théopolitique" Rudiments païens (1977):60-80.] Récits tremblants. Illustrated by Jacques Monorv. Collection Ecritures/Figures. Paris: Galilée, 1977. Rudiments païens: Genre dissertatif. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/ 18," 1977. Contents: Prière de désinsérer:7-8. I. Apathie dans la théorie:9-31. II. Humor en sémiothéologie:32-59. III. Rétorsion en théopolitiquc:60-80. IV. Faux-fuyant dans la littérature:81-114. V. Expédient dans la décadence: 115-156.

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VI. Futilité en revolution: 157-212. VII. Féminité dans la métalangue:213-232. VIII. Dissertation sur une inconvenance:233-246. All except the preface and essay VIII have been published before. Thev have all been little or much modified here. Les Transformateurs Duchamp. Collection Ecritures/Figures. Paris: Galilée, 1977. T h e Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène." Joseph Maier, tr. In Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello, eds., Performance in Postmodern Culture, pp. 8 7 - 9 8 . Theories of Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Milwaukee: Center for Twentieth Centurv Studies, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. Madison: Coda Press, 1977. 1978 "Acinéma." Paislev N. Livingston, tr., in collaboration with the author. Wide Anßle (1978), 2(3):52—59. "L'Acinéma." In Dominique Noguez, ed., Cinema: Théorie, lectures, pp. 3 5 7 - 3 6 9 . 2d ed. Paris: Klincksieck, 1978. See "L'Acinéma" (1973). "L'Approche psychanalytique." In Jacques Havet, ed.. Tendances principales dt la recherche dans Us sciences sociales et humaines, part 2, vol. 1 : Sciences anthropologiques et historiques: Esthétique et sciences de l'art, Mikel Dufrenne, ed., pp. 6 8 1 - 6 9 6 . Paris: Mouton; New York: La Have, 1970-1978. See "Principales tendances actuelles de l'étude psychanalytique des expressions artistiques et littéraires," in Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud ( 1973):53-77. "L'Autre dans les énoncés prescriptifs et le problème de l'autonomie." In Christian Delacampagne, ed.. En Marge: IX)ccident et ses "autres," pp. 237-256. Collection Présence et Pensée. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978. Economia libidinale. Florence: Colportage, 1978. Translation into Italian bv Mario Gandolfi of Economie libidinale (1974). "L'Endurance et la profession." Critique (Februarv 1978), 34(369): 198-205. "Gorgias." Art Press International (1978), 20:25. ' Intensitäten. Internationale Marxistische Arbeieten, no. 75. Berlin: Merve, 1978. A selection of essavs translated into German bv Lothar Kurzawa and Volker Schaefer. Contents: Ein Barbar spricht vom Sozialismus. Ein Interview von B.-H. Levy mit J.-F. Lvotard:7-13. ["Un barbare parle du socialisme." Bernard-Henrv Lévv interviews Jean-François Lyotard" (1976).] Bemerkungen über die Wiederkehr und das Kapital: 1 5 - 3 4 . ["Notes sur le retour et le capital," Des Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1973):304—319 ] Adorno come diavolo:35-58. [Des Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1973): 115—133.] Über eine Figur des Diskurses:59-92. ["Sur une figure de discours," Des Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1973): 135—156.] Energieteufel Kapitalismus:93-151. ["Capitalisme énergumène," Des Dispositifs pulsionnels ( 1973):7-52.]

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"Jean-François Lyotard: De la fonction critique à la transformation; entrevue par Jean Papineau." Interview with Jean Papineau. Parachute (Montreal) (Summer 1978), 11:4-9. "A Lesson Concerning the Secret Nature of Languages. (Teacher's Manual)." Ian McLeod, tr. Oxford Literary Review (1978), 3 ( l ) : 3 5 - 3 7 . See "Leçon sur la condition secrète des langues. Genre didactique" (1977). "Notes on the Return and Kapital " Roger McKeon, tr. Semiotexte ( 1978), 3(1):44— 53. See "Notes sur le retour et le Kapital" (1973); Des Dispositifi pulsionnels ( 1973):304-319; Des Dispositifi pulsionnels (1980): 291-305. "Notes préliminaires sur le pragmatique des oeuvres (en particulier de Daniel Buren)." Critique (November 1978), 34(378): 1075-1085. "On the Strength of the Weak." Roger McKeon, tr. Semiotexte (1978), 3 ( 2 ) : 2 0 4 214. "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles." Deborah J. Clarke, Winifred Woodhull, and John Mowitt, trs. Sub-Statue (1978), 20:9-17. See "Féminité dans la métalangue," in Rudiments païens ( 1977):213—232. 1979 A Partire da Marx e Freud. Preface by Gianni Vattimo. Milan: Multhipla, 1979. Italian translation by Maurizio Ferraris of Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973). Apathie in der Theorie. Internationale Marxistische Diskussion, no. 88. Berlin: Merve, 1979. A selection of essays translated into German bv Clemens-Carl Härle and Lothar Kurzawa. Contents: Heidnische Unterweisungcn:7-71. [Extract from Instructions païennes (1977).] Apathie in der Theorie:73-95. [See "Apathie dans la théorie," Rudiments patens (1977):9-31.[ Abhandlung über eine Unschicklichkeit:97-111. [See "Dissertation sur une inconvenance," Rudiments patens (1977):233-246.] (With Jean-Loup Thébaud.) Au juste: conversations. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Collection "Critique." Paris: Minuit, 1979. "Conversazione con Lyotard." Interview with Gianfranco Baruchello. Filmcritica (Rome) (November-December 1979), 30(300) :426-429. Discurso, figura. Foreword bv Federico Jimenez Losantos. Colección comunicación visual. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1979. Spanish translation by Josep Elias and Cariota Hesse of Discours, figure (1971). Economia libidinal. Madrid: Saltes, 1979. A Spanish translation by Rocio Alberdi Alonso of Economie libidinale (1974). "Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs." In Raymond Bellour and Catherine Clément, eds., Claude Lévi-Strauss: Textes de et sur Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 4 9 - 9 2 . Idées, no. 382. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

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See "Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs" (1965). "Jean-François Lyotard dans la société 'post-moderne.'" Interview with Christian Dcscamps. Le Mondi (October 14-15, 1979), 10795:xvi. "La Micrologie de Lascault, ou la grandeur du petit." Review of Voyage d'automne et d'hiver, by Gilbert Lascault. La Quinzaine Littéraire (Mav 1 6 - 3 1 , 1979), 302:8-9. Le Mur du Pacifique. Ligne fictive. Paris: Galilée, 1979. Sec Le Mur du Pacifique (1975). "L'opera come propria prammatica," and "Discussione." Egidio Mucci and Daniela De Agostini, trs. In Egidio Mucci and Pier Luigi Tazzi, eds., Teoria e pratiche della critica d'Arte, pp. 8 8 - 9 8 , 9 8 - 1 0 9 . Proceedings of a conference in Montecatini held in May 1978. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. "Petites Ruminations sur le commentaire d'art." Opus International (Winter 1979), 70-71:16-17. Preface. "Pour faire de ton fils un BaruchcUo." In Gianfranco Baruchello, L'Altra casa: planches, pp. 9 - 1 5 . Collection Ecritures/Figures. Paris: Galilée, 1979. "Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren." Thomas Repensek, tr. October (Fall 1979), 10:59-67. "The Psychoanalytic Approach." In Mikel Dufrenne, ed.. Main Trends in Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art, pp. 134-149. Main Trends in the Social and Human Sciences, no. 3. New York: Holmes and Meir, 1979. See "L'Approche psychanalytique" (1978). "That Part of Cinema Called Television: An Assessment of Television." Framework (Norwich, England) (Autumn 1979), 11:37-39. ig8o A Fenomenologia. Lisbon: Ediçôes, 1980. Portuguese translation by Armindo Rodrigues of La Phénoménologie. Des Dispositifs pulsionnels. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980. A second edition of Des Dispositifs pulsionnels ( 1973). Contents: Avertissement : i - iii. 1. Capitalisme énergumène:7-49. 2. L' Acinéma:51-65. 3. Freud selon Cézanne:67-88. 4. La Dent, la paume:89-98. 5. Esquisse d'une économique de Phyperréalisme:99-107. 6. Adorno come diavolo : 109—125. 7. Sur une figure de discours: 127-147. 8. "L'Eau prend le ciel." Proposition de collage pour figurer le désir bachelardien.149-169. 9. Petite économie libidinale d'un dispositif narratif: La Régie Renault raconte le meurtre de P. Ovemev: 171-213. 10. En attendant Guiffrey:215-226.

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11. La Peinture comme dispositif libidinal: genre parlé improvisé: 227-267. 12. Plusieurs silences:269-290. 13. Notes sur le retour et le capital:291-305. A new introduction is included in this new edition. "Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma." In Maurice Ölender and Jacques Sojcher, eds., La Séduction, pp. 93-100. Colloques de Bruxelles: Conference held at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels at L'Abbaye de La Cambre, Bruxelles, November 30-December 2, 1979. Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1980. Fenomenologija. Belgrade: Beogradski izdava28cko—grafickj zavod, 1980. A Yugoslav translation bv Mir]ana Zdravkovic of La Phénoménologie. "Le Jeu de l'informatique et du savoir." Interview with Yannick Blanc. Dialectiques (1980), 29:3-12. "Logique de Lévinas." In François Laruelle, ed., Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, pp. 127-150. Collection Surfaces, no. 2. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980. La Partie de peinture. Illustrated bv Henri Maccheroni. Cannes: Editions Marvse Candela, 1980. Sur la constitution du temps par la couleur dans les oeuvra récentes d'Albert Aymé. Paris: Traversière, 1980. "Tromeur." La Quinzaine Littéraire (June 15-30, 1980), 327:20-21.

1981 "Analyzing Speculative Discourse as Language Game." Geoff Bennington, tr. Oxford Literary Review (1981). 4(3):59-67. La condizone postmoderna: Rapporto sul sapere. I nuovi testi, no. 232. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981. Italian translation by Carlo Formen ti of La condition postmoderne (1979). (With Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Jean-Hubert Martin.) In Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed., Daniel Buren: Les Couleurs, Sculptures; Les Formes, Peintures. Paris: Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne; Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981. French exhibition catalog published contemporaneously with English version. "Dinge machen, von denen wir nicht wissen, was sie sind. Ein Gespräch." Basseler Zeitung (May 12, 1981). "Discussions, ou: phraser 'Après Auschwitz,'" and "Débat." In Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Les Fins de l'homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, pp. 283-310, 310-315. Proceedings of the Conference of Le Centre Culturel International de Cerisv-la-SalJe, Julv 23-August 2, 1980. Paris: Galilée, 1981. (With Jean-Piere Dubost.) "Edipo o Don Giovanni? Legittimazione, giustizia e scambio ineguale." Rossella Prezzo, tr. Aut Aut (1981), 182-183:87-103. "Essai d'analvse du dispositif spéculatif." Degrés (Bruxelles) (Spring-Summer 1981 ), 9(26—27).*bl—bl 1. "Introduction à une étude du politique selon Kant." In Luc Ferry et al., Rejouer le politique: Travaux du Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, pp. 91-134.

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