This evening I would like to talk about what happened on Friday 13 November; what happened to us, what happened to this city, to this country, and ultimately to this world.
First of all I’d like to say in what state of mind I think we should speak of what is an atrocious tragedy: because, obviously, as we know, and as is being dangerously hammered home by the press and by the authorities, the function of affect, of sensible reaction, is inevitable in this kind of situation, and in a certain sense indispensable.
There is something like a trauma, the feeling of an intolerable exception to the regime of ordinary life, an unbearable irruption of death. This is something we all feel, and which we can neither contain nor subject to criticism.
But all the same, we must know—and this is the starting point for considering what I call our state of mind—that this inevitable affect, in these kinds of tragic circumstances, exposes us to many risks, risks that I would like to enumerate, so as to indicate what my method here will be.
I see three principal risks to which, following this drama, the unadulterated domination of trauma and affect exposes us.
The first is that of authorizing the state to take pointless and unacceptable measures, measures which, in reality, function only for its own profit. The state is abruptly brought to the fore and for a moment rediscovers, or thinks it has rediscovered, its function of symbolic representation, as the guarantor of the unity of the nation, and other such postures.
Which allows us—and I’ll come back to this—to perceive in the senior staff a rather sinister but undeniable enjoyment of this criminal situation. In such conditions, we must all the same maintain a certain measuredness. We must remain capable of discriminating, in what is done, in what is pronounced, between that which is inevitable and necessary, and that which is useless and unacceptable.
This is the first precaution that I think is necessary: that of remaining measured in regard to—let me say once again—the both inevitable and indispensable nature of affect.
The second risk of this domination of the sensible, let’s call it that, is the reinforcing of identitarian drives. This, also, is a natural mechanism. Obviously, when a family member dies in an accident, the family regroups, pulls together and, in a certain sense, reinforces itself. In recent days, we have been assured, indeed they tell us again and again, with the tricolor flag in hand, that a horrific massacre on French territory can only reinforce national sentiment. As if trauma automatically referred us back to an identity.
Hence the words ‘French’ and ‘France’ are heard from every quarter, as a self- evident component of the situation. Well, let’s ask the question: How so? What actually is ‘France’ in this affair? What do we speak of when today we speak of ‘France’ and the ‘French’? In reality, these are very complex questions. We absolutely must not lose sight of this complexity: the words ‘France’, ‘French’, today have no simple, self- evident meaning.
Moreover, I think that we must make the effort, precisely against this identitarian drive which would incorporate the terrible event into a sort of false pretext, to remind ourselves that such terrifying mass murders have happened and are still happening every day elsewhere in the world. Yes, every day, in Nigeria and Mali, very recently indeed, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Syria….
It’s important also to remember that, just a few days ago, two hundred Russians were massacred in a sabotaged airplane, and that in France, emotions didn’t run particularly high about it. Perhaps the supposed ‘French’ identify all Russians with the wicked Putin!
I think it’s one of the fundamental tasks of justice to always broaden, as far as possible, the space of public affects, to struggle against their identitarian restriction, to remember and to know that the space of misfortune is a space that we must envisage, ultimately, on the scale of all of humanity, and that we must never retreat into declarations that limit it to some identity or other. Otherwise,
misfortune itself ends up attesting to the notion that what counts are identities. Now, the idea that what counts in a misfortune is only the identity of the victims is a perilous perception of the tragic event itself, because inevitably, this idea transforms justice into vengeance.
Obviously, the temptation to vengeance, with this type of mass criminal act, is a drive that seems natural. The proof of this is that, in our country, which always boasts of its rule of law, but which rejects the death penalty, the police, in the type of circumstance that we have seen here, kill the murderers as soon as they find them, without—make no mistake—without any kind of trial; and that no one, it seems, takes offence at this.
However we must remember that vengeance, far from being an action of justice, always opens up a cycle of atrocities. Long long ago, the great Greek tragedies opposed the logic of justice to the logic of vengeance. The universality of justice is the contrary of familial, provincial, national, identitarian vengeance.
This is the fundamental subject of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.
The identitarian outcome of tragedy is that one opens oneself up to the danger of conceiving the search for the murderers as a pure and simple vengeful hunt: ‘We will kill those who killed’. Perhaps there is something inevitable in the desire to kill those who have killed. But there is certainly nothing to celebrate in it, nothing to proclaim and sing out as if it were a victory of thought, of spirit, of civilization, or of justice.
Vengeance is a given that is primitive, abject, and, what’s more, dangerous— the Greeks taught us this a long time ago.
From this point of view, I would also like to voice my disquiet about things that have been hailed as self-evident. For example: Obama’s declaration. It didn’t amount to much, this declaration. It came down to saying that this terrible crime was not only a crime against France, a crime against Paris, but a crime against all of humanity.
Very good, quite right. But President Obama doesn’t make such a declaration every time there is a mass murder of this kind: he doesn’t do so when such things take place far away, in an Iraq become incomprehensible, in a hazy Pakistan, in a fanatical Nigeria, or in a Congo at the heart of darkness. So the statement contains the idea, a supposedly self-evident idea, that this wounded humanity lives in France, and doubtless also in the US, rather than in Nigeria or in India, in Iraq, in Pakistan, or in Congo.
In truth, Obama wanted to remind us that, for him, humanity can above all be identified with our good old West. And that one can therefore say: humanity = the West—we hear this, like a basso continuo, in many declarations, whether official or journalistic. One of the forms of this unacceptable identitarian presumption takes the form, to which I shall return, of the opposition between barbarians and the civilised.
Now, it is scandalous, from the point of view of the most elementary justice, to let it be understood, even if not deliberately, even indirectly, that there are parts of humanity that are more human than others; and I fear that, in this affair, this is what has been done and continues to be done.
I think we need to break with the habit that is very much present, including in the way in which things are told, presented, arranged, or on the contrary are killed, redacted, yes, we must lose the habit, almost embedded in the unconscious itself, of thinking that a death in the West is terrible but that a thousand deaths in Africa, in Asia, or in the Middle East, or even in Russia, is ultimately no big deal.
This is of course the heritage of colonial imperialism, the heritage of what we call the West, that is, the advanced, civilised, democratic countries: the habit of seeing oneself as representative of all humanity and human civilisation as such. This is the second danger that lies in wait for us, if we react on the basis of our affects alone.
And then there is a third danger, which is to do exactly what the murderers want—that is to say, to obtain a disproportionate effect, to occupy the scene interminably in anarchic and violent fashion, and ultimately to create in the entourage of the victims a passion such that, in the end, one will no longer be able to distinguish between those who initiated the crime and those who suffered it.
Because the aim of this kind of carnage, this type of abject violence, is to arouse in the victims, in their families, their neighbours, their compatriots, a sort of obscure subject, I’ll call it that, an obscure subject at once depressed and vengeful, a subject constituted by the nature of the crime as a violent and almost inexplicable strike; but one that is also homogeneous with the strategy of its sponsors.
This strategy anticipates the effects of the obscure subject: reason will be lost, including political reason, affect will take the upper hand, and in this way one will spread everywhere the couplet of dejected depression (‘I’m stunned’, ‘I’m shocked’) and the spirit of vengeance, a couplet that will leave the state and the official avengers free to do anything whatsoever. Thus, in accordance with the desires of the criminals, this obscure subject will reveal that it is capable in its turn of worse, and in the end will have to be recognised by all as symmetrical with those who organised the crime.
So, to counter these three risks, I think that we must manage to think what has happened. Let’s set out from a principle: nothing that anyone does is unintelligible. To say ‘I don’t understand’, ‘I’ll never understand’, ‘I can’t understand’, is always a defeat. We can’t leave anything in the register of the unthinkable.
It is the vocation of thought, if we want to be able, among other things, to oppose that which we declare unthinkable, to think it. Of course there are absolutely irrational, criminal, pathological behaviours, but all of these constitute objects of thought like any others, which do not leave thought lost or unable to take stock of them.
The declaration of the unthinkable is always a defeat of thought, and the defeat of thought is always precisely the victory of irrational and criminal behaviours.
So I will try to give you a comprehensive elucidation of what has happened. In a certain way I will treat this mass murder as one of a number of current symptoms of a grave malady of the contemporary world, of this world as a whole, and I will try to indicate the exigencies or the possible paths for a long-term recovery from this sickness, of which the proliferation of these kinds of events in the world is a particularly violent and particularly spectacular symptom.
This aim of giving a comprehensive elucidation will govern the sequence of my exposition, its logic.
First of all I’ll try to go from the situation of the whole world as I see it, as I believe it can be thought synthetically, to the mass crimes and to the war which, on the part of the state, has been pronounced or declared.
And then I will track back from there, in an inverse movement, toward the overall situation, no longer as it is, but as we must desire that it becomes, as we must will and act in order that such symptoms might be banished.
In a first stage, then, we’ll move from the general situation of the world to the event we are concerned with; and then we’ll go back from the event to the world situation as we have clarified it.
This there-and-back movement should allow us to indicate a certain number of necessities and tasks.
It will comprise seven successive parts. So it will take a while!
The first part will present the objective structure of the contemporary world, the general framework of what is happening, what has happened here, but is happening elsewhere almost every day.
It is the objective structure of the contemporary world as it was established starting in the eighties, in the last century. Where is our world in all this, from the point of view of what has been—at first insidiously, then quite overtly, and then relentlessly—put into place over the last thirty years or so?
Secondly, I will examine the major effects of this structure of the contemporary world upon populations, their diversity, their entanglement, and their subjectivities.
This will make way for my third point, which concerns the typical subjectivities that are thereby created.
For I believe that this world has created singular subjectivities, characteristic of the period. As you will see, I distinguish between three typical subjectivities.
The fourth part, which will bring me close to the primary object of this exposition, will bear upon what I would call the contemporary figures of fascism.
As you will see, I think that the perpetrators of what happened in Paris deserve to be called fascists, in a renewed, contemporary sense of the term.
Once we reach this point, then I’ll go back in the other direction, towards what we must do to change the world, so that such criminal symptoms may be banished. The fifth part will therefore be dedicated to the event itself, in its different component parts. Who are the killers? Who are the agents of this mass murder? And how can we describe what they did?
Sixthly, we will have the state’s reaction and the shaping of public opinion around the two words ‘France’ and ‘war’.
The seventh part will be entirely dedicated to the attempt to construct a different thought, that is to say to subtract ourselves from this shaping of public opinion and from the reactive orientation of the state.
It will bear upon the conditions, clarified by this entire trajectory, of what I would call a return to politics, in the sense of a return to the politics of emancipation, or the return of a politics that refuses all inclusion in the schema of the world from which I set out.
Structure of the Contemporary World
I want to talk about the structure of the contemporary world such as I see it and, of course, such as it will help us to clarify what is at stake here. I think that one can describe it, in broad brushstrokes, by way of three themes, themes that are profoundly intertwined, entangled with one another.
Firstly—and this may seem like a crushing banality, but in my view, the consequences of this banality are far from having been drawn: for thirty years now, what we have seen is the triumph of globalised capitalism.
This triumph is first of all, and in a particularly visible way, a return to a sort of primitive energy of capitalism, in the form of what is known by the contestable name of neoliberalism, and which is in fact the reappearance and the rediscovered efficacy of what has always been the constitutive ideology of capitalism, namely liberalism.
The ‘neo’ is not necessarily justified. I don’t think that what is happening is as ‘neo’ as all that, when we look at it closely enough. In any case, the triumph of globalised capitalism is a kind of rediscovered energy, the return of an uncontested capacity to display, now quite overtly and, if I might say so, without any shame whatsoever, the general characteristics of this very particular type of organisation of production, of exchanges, and ultimately of entire societies; and also its claim to be the only reasonable path for the historical destiny of humanity.
All of this, which was invented and formulated around the end of the eighteenth century in England, and which subsequently dominated unchallenged for decades, has been rediscovered with a sort of ferocious glee by our masters of today.
When globalised, it takes on a somewhat different inflection. Today we have a capitalism explicitly installed on a new scale, the planetary scale. Which is what makes globalised capitalism not only a capitalism that has rediscovered its solvent energy but one that, also, has developed it in such a way that, right now, we can say that, considered as a global structure, capitalism exercises a practically unchallenged mastery of the whole of the planet.
The second theme is the weakening of states. This is a rather subtle consequence of the first, but one whose identification is wholly pertinent here.
As you’ll know, one of the most widely mocked themes of Marxism has been that of the withering away of the state. Marxism announced that the reorganisation of the state, following the revolutionary destruction of nation-states dominated by capitalism, would ultimately deploy, through a powerful collective communist-type movement, a society without a state, a society which Marx called that of ‘free association’.
Well, today we are seeing a wholly pathological phenomenon, namely a capitalist process of the withering away of states. It is a fundamental phenomenon today, even if it is masked by the subsistence, which will probably continue for a lengthy historical period, of state poles of substantial power.
But in truth, the general logic of globalised capitalism is to have no direct or intrinsic relation to the subsistence of national states, because its deployment today is transnational. The multinational character of large companies came to light during the sixties. But since that time, these large companies have become transnational monsters of an entirely other nature.
Finally, the third theme is what I would call the new practices of imperialism, the forceful modes of action, if I can put it that way, of the global extension of capitalism, the new figures of imperialism—that is to say, of the conquest of the planet qua basis of capitalism’s existence and profit.
I’ll take up these themes one at a time.
