The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 68
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14. On the protecting force coming from the work of Genet, the ‘always-already-dead’ [ toujours-déjà-mort] that allowed its entrance in literature: ‘When I sign, I am already dead … To write for the dead, out of them, who have never been alive: this is the desire (formulated for example in The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, but unceasingly refrained [ rengainé] elsewhere) that is interrogated and resounds here as glas in order finally to insinuate [ laisser entendre] the unheard, the illegibility of an already that leads back to nothing present any more, even were it past. The “I am therefore dead. I am a dead man who sees his skeleton in a mirror …” of the Miracle of the Rose is not just one proposition among others’ (Derrida 1986: 19, emphasis in the original).
15. This space where the woman has to invent a language, reconquer her body, her n sexes, is also this space that was explored relentlessly by the writer Claire Lejeune.
16. ‘Reading, I discovered that writing is endless. Everlasting. Eternal. Writing or God. God the writing. The writing God’ (Cixous 1991: 23). ‘I’ve never written without God. Once, it was reproached to me. But the gods, I said, are the ghosts of writing, it is its pretext and its promise. God is the name of everything that has not yet been said’ (Cixous 2003: 101).
17. The oeuvre of Hélène Cixous does not stop perturbing the sheer stability by reinforcing the ‘not-being-able-to-write’ in its possibility, hence affirming together and with the same intensity the obligation to devote herself to write
[ se vouer au phraser] and the prohibition entailed to this task. We can quote for instance: ‘I do not want to write on mum. One must do it. One must not do it.
Mum resists transfiguration’ (Cixous 1999: 49). Also, ‘I am coming to let you know that I am leaving … One must not say it, I will not be able to, one must not say that one must not say it, this is the law … in the same breath that [the ghost] said “not a word” – he says it. The law that wants him to say nothing. He says everything … Would I be a ghost! I could already see myself. I will forget the law when I will state it to you, I will not write the book that I am writing, I will write the book that I do not write’ (Cixous 2008: 65–6).
18. See the appendice ‘Thoth and Writing’ of The Exile of James Joyce (Cixous 1972: 726–37).
References
Balibar, E. (2003), ‘Structuralism: a destitution of the subject?’, Differences, 14: 1, 1–21.
Cixous, H. (1972), The Exile of James Joyce, New York, NY: David Lewis.
Cixous, H. (1982), ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark’, New Literary History, 13: 2, 231–51.
Cixous, H. (1991), ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cixous, H. (1996), The Newly Born Woman, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Cixous, H. (1999), Osnabrück, Paris: Des femmes.
Cixous, H. (2003), L’Amour du loup et autres remords, Paris: Galilée.
Cixous, H. (2008), Ciguë, Vielles femmes en fleurs, Paris: Galilée.
Cixous, H. (2010a), ‘Volées d’humanité’, in Rêver croire penser. Autour d’Hélène Cixous, ed. B. Clément and M. Segarra, Paris: Campagne Première.
Cixous, H. (2010b), Double Oubli de l’Ourang-Outan, Paris: Galilée.
Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2000), Proust and Signs, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2002), Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York, NY: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (2004a), ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), ed. D. Lapoujade, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), pp.
170–92.
Deleuze, G. (2004b), ‘Hélène Cixous, or writing in strobe’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), ed. D. Lapoujade, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), pp.
170–92.
Deleuze, G. (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, New York, NY: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2007), Dialogues, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy? , New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1986), Glas, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, J. (2001), ‘Structure, sign, and Platy in the discourses of the human sciences’, in Writing and Difference, London: Routledge, pp. 351–70.
Derrida, J. (2006), H. C. for Life, That Is to Say …, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Frank, M. (1989), What is Neostructuralism? , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963), Structural Anthropology, New York, NY: Basic Books.
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Chapter 20
Politics in-between Nihilism and History1
Corinne Enaudeau (trans. Benoît Dillet and Jacques Enaudeau)
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In ‘Energumen capitalism’, the review of Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard (1977) hits three birds with one stone. First, he is looking for other dissident interlocutors than those of Socialisme and Barbarie – the group with whom he shared the Marxist critique of Stalinism, Trotskism and Maoism, as well as militant activism, in particular during the Algerian war. Then, he sets out to guide the radicalism of Deleuze and Guattari back to a less simplistic conception of institutions (family, State, money), which supposedly immobilise
the nomadism of flows. Finally, Lyotard starts to suspect his own ‘critical’
position. The history of revolutions and of independence struggles belies
the divide between a free and enlightened world and its subjugated and
alienated other. In 1974, Libidinal Economy recuses with a violent extremity the illusion of an elsewhere free of the incriminated evil (Lyotard 1993). And in 1998, the year of Lyotard’s death, he repeats in Soundproof once more that evil is first the confusion of good and evil, the weaving of two opposing voices coming to bear meaning in a single statement. To him injustice is a
very real political fact, but evil increases twofold when ‘the people freely elects its tyrants, the exploiter dresses as the civilizer, and the radiant future deports and assassinates its supporters’ (Lyotard 2001: 32, translation modified),2 such as Nazism, capitalism and Stalinism, respectively.
Let us forget the wish for companionship expressed in ‘Energumen
capitalism’. It is Deleuze’s habitus to disregard discussions (including those on Marx and Freud) that do not create concepts. It is with Baudrillard that Lyotard would discuss market society, until Baudrillard’s loss in the ‘specu-lar’ game of his concern for injustice. Later on, Lyotard forms a relationship with Derrida, first as part of the Jan-Hus association in 1981, then through the discussion on extermination during the conference on ‘The ends of
Man’ and during the creation of the Collège international de philosophie.
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radicalism and Derrida’s ‘radical-socialism’ (in the sense proposed by Jean-Michel Salanskis)3 would prevent them from bonding politically, as Lyotard
had with Pierre Souyri over the course of fifteen years (Lyotard 2006).
Let us therefore come back to this double movement of grounding oneself
in Marxist political economy while refusing the Manichaenism of a ‘critical’
position. Is it possible to challenge ‘the attempt to moralize politics … incarnated by Marxism’ (Lyotard 1988b: 300) and still support a resistance to
the market’s inhumanity [ inhumanité marchande]? Such a double constraint is so uncomfortable that it would be easier to drop one of the terms, which was precisely the ground for breaking up Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1964 and the reason why Lyotard was misunderstood. In his demand to embrace this
paradox, Lyotard complicates the conception of ‘politics’ and muddies the
water regarding his position and the side to which he belongs. Lyotard thus retains a form of ‘nihilism’, a cloud of irrationality where confusion reigns in French Thought, from Deleuze to Derrida, and Foucault to a lesser extent.
Let us attempt to bring light to this so-called nihilism. Lyotard insists
that it is the product of capitalism itself, of its perfect indifference to every subject matter, be it physical or mental, as long as it can take an accountable and exchangeable form and be the source of profit. This is not an anecdotal feature of our world: it presents itself as ‘globalisation’ and appears to offer, in terms of history, a ‘development’. Since the axiom of capital and the
success of ‘growth’ are for now presupposed in any political arbitration, no social, educational, cultural or ecological decision can be made that does
not comply with mercantile efficiency. Here are the facts. It is ‘economic’ if you will, to the extent that exchangeable goods make up the whole of what
is real. It is ‘existential’ – if this word were not so distant from Lyotardian vocabulary – since it absorbs the full range of existence (including discourse and affects) thanks to a growing ability to move profitable investments. The circulation of numerical units with no other limit than the axiom of winning commutativity is, Lyotard argues, the only ‘realist’ domain nowadays
(Lyotard 1993: 219–20, 226). The ‘loss of the object’ and the ‘loss of reality’
mean that only exchange matters – not what is exchanged – and that one
should pay off the transaction, and discharge oneself all the more promptly that it increases profitability. The ‘nihilism’ of capitalism is the realism of the market: the negation of all values apart from gain, money being in that regard the best merchandise when one wants to sell the temporal advance
that was bid on it (Lyotard 1988a: §245–52, 175–8). But one would be wrong, according to Lyotard, to infer from this ‘nothingness’ a promised or lost
sense of fulfilment. That is another kind of nihilism: one not of capital-
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‘sovereignty’ [ du propre] and of an existence appropriate to itself; it is the wail about lost meaning.4
Nihilism was first, for Lyotard, a reading of the real learned from
Marxism, yet exceeding Marxism by its religious premise, and that consists
in turning the given into a set of signs that forms an order other than itself.
This absent signifier is as much the ‘hidden God’ of Christianity as the
‘inorganic body’ invoked by the Grundrisse of Marx (Lyotard 1993: 130–1).
Lyotard calls ‘nihilism’ in the 1970s this corresponding structure in which the real’s value resides in what it lacks, in a nothingness that encompasses everything. The difficulty for him is to untangle oneself from this nihilism that condemns [ déjuge] the real in accordance to an absent authority, without falling back into the ‘critical’ trap that turns the real into the adversary to be eliminated. But also without falling prey to a monism celebrating
amor fati. Another meaning is sometimes given to ‘nihilism’, not without increased ambiguity, to refer to a Nietzscheism present in Libidinal Economy as a devaluation of any value. Leaving aside the fact that this designation contradicts Nietzsche’s word and spirit, Lyotard denounced as early as in
1979 (in Just Gaming) the self-sufficiency of the real that he had affirmed five years earlier in opposition to the thinking of lack. While it is true that human reality does not suffer from a lack of ownership or of an ontological lack supposedly affecting it, it does suffer from a default of justice, felt and condemned from a deontological perspective. It was this faculty – to be
violently affected by an injustice and to feel the duty to do it justice – that had led Lyotard to his militant engagement and union involvement in the
early 1950s. He may have appeared to forget it during the ‘pagan’ moment
of his theoretical orientation, between 1974 and 1979. But once he had come back to his original standpoint, he did not depart from it again. Thus it only adds to the confusion to talk of his ‘nihilism’. One surely implies by this that the coupling of good and evil in the same act entails a renunciation of both the ability to judge their difference as well as to act. Error. Lyotard was able to help the Algerians by ‘carrying their cases’5 while denouncing the political bureaucracy in the making in their ‘revolution’ and the new non-colonial
exploitation that it presaged (Lyotard 1989: 36).
For Lyotard, capitalism is the globally ambivalent fact. The educated humanist judges the law of equivalence as distressing, in that it only knows of activities through their translated forms: ‘M-C-M’. She is right. But far from giving the world the silence of a cemetery, this economic law instead
makes the world brim with activity. It produces and enables the circulation of ‘goods’ that anyone wishes to enjoy. In order to accomplish its performances, this economic law requires an intellectual reasoning that, in spite Untitled-2 445
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of constraining conditions, is in itself a source of enjoyment. The fact that market society weaves together contentment and misery, intelligence and
the lack of culture, license and serfdom, excitement and depression, is the inconvenient paradox that political critique denies. For this duplicity forbids the separation of good and evil that a politics of emancipation would
require. The equivocality of the market reality affects as much the decision of instituted political authorities as its evaluation by those who depend upon them – I will come back to this point. When considering, furthermore, that
every country is virtually included in ‘development’ and is capable of an
‘emergence’ that we cannot straightforwardly deplore, then critical thinking seems to lose the ideological criteria from which it draws its legitimacy.
Can politics still work towards a form of justice while ignoring its criteria and its content? This is the challenge to which Lyotard must rise, at the
risk of being accused of nihilism when forbidding himself from judging the
unjust while in the end tolerating injustice itself. The passage is therefore narrow since, according to him, modernity presents another kind of nihilism: to postulate a lack of ownership of men (called alienation by Marx)
which history would aim to abolish. Modernity is voluntarist: men should
be led to a self-ownership that is called liberty.
The utopia of political freedom was paradoxically designed, according to
Reinhart Koselleck (1988), in the shadow of an absolutist state that imposed the dissociation of public good and personal salvation as a consequence of
the Wars of Religion.6 Tolerance was first this movement of locking self-realisation and salvation away within subjective interiority, without authorised social objectification. In this retreat, secret societies conceived the idea of a free state that the French Revolution enacted. As a result, political ambition was renewed with the desire for a public salvation that Christianity had abandoned.
The Christian story has been the first one, according to Lyotard, to make
the narrated reality the history of the narrative voice itself. The narrative declares: ‘the drama that I recount is mine’ (Lyotard 2001: 28), of my
serfdom and liberation. The outbreak of this voice in the narrative signals the zero point where history changes, where what is narrated (substance)
identifies itself to the one narrating it (subject); the zero point that triggers the promised accomplishment. Without this conversion of history into
historicity and of the substantial becoming into the subjective becoming, the course of time could not take the birth of Christ as a starting point. Without the French Revolution declaring the Year I of the Republic, the (re)activated
[ recommencée] history of collective salvation would have never received any
‘evidence’, nor would the promise of an earthly emancipation have had this
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fate. The Revolution would be this event of a moral consciousness giving
itself objectivity and universality, in constituting itself as a collective and autonomous subject called ‘the general will’.
The French Revolution is an object of melancholic fidelity. Fidelity is
good, claims Lyotard, it gives an account of our debt regarding sufferings
and of the duty to repair the injustices, which revolutions were aiming to do.
Melancholia proceeds from the mourning of this impossible subject that is
a free humanity, as well as from the grief felt when facing the incommen-
