Brown v Agamben

V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this.

Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity.

One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.”

There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct. Finally, there is the added question of Agamben. I again agree, but would like to ask how far Brown’s critique can be extended. I have read Homo Sacer, and various political-theory mobilizations of Agamben, and find the whole thing, to say the least, confused, distasteful, and not a useful way to think about politics. There are issues of disciplinary division of labor here—Brown correctly points to the differing imperatives and skill-sets of literary scholars and historians approaching this material—and perhaps one answer is that Agamben is useful for what literary scholars do, and not for what historians do. This is never a very satisfying conclusion, and all the less so in a world of perfectly transparent (but still foreboding) disciplinary fortifications. I had thought that Agamben was increasingly becoming a reference-point among historians and theorists—perhaps I can interpret Brown’s intervention as a sign that I was mistaken? I suppose there is a deep divide here, between, we might say, those who think that we humans speak language, and those who think that it speaks us. Maybe this is too much a 1975-vintage way of seeing things, or at least of expressing them, but it does seem to me that the fundamental difference between Brown and Baucom, for instance, is there. They look at the same thing, and the one sees the struggle for communities, fragile and fleeting, but real; the other sees the de-realizing force of commodity fetishism and in a tone of high moralism allows a-historical discourse to disintegrate human being.

the charms of charles dickens

MR. BOUNDERBY being a bachelor, an elderly lady presided over his establishment, in consideration of a certain annual stipend. Mrs. Sparsit was this lady's name; and she was a prominent figure in attendance on Mr. Bounderby's car, as it rolled along in triumph with the Bully of humility inside.

For, Mrs. Sparsit had not only seen different days, but was highly connected. She had a great aunt living in these very times called Lady Scadgers. Mr. Sparsit, deceased, of whom she was the relict, had been by the mother's side what Mrs. Sparsit still called 'a Powler.' Strangers of limited information and dull apprehension were sometimes observed not to know what a Powler was, and even to appear uncertain whether it might be a business, or a political party, or a profession of faith. The better class of minds, however, did not need to be informed that the Powlers were an ancient stock, who could trace themselves so exceedingly far back that it was not surprising if they sometimes lost themselves - which they had rather frequently done, as respected horse-flesh, blind-hookey, Hebrew monetary transactions, and the Insolvent Debtors' Court.

The late Mr. Sparsit, being by the mother's side a Powler, married this lady, being by the father's side a Scadgers. Lady Scadgers (an immensely fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher's meat, and a mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen years) contrived the marriage, at a period when Sparsit was just of age, and chiefly noticeable for a slender body, weakly supported on two long slim props, and surmounted by no head worth mentioning. He inherited a fair fortune from his uncle, but owed it all before he came into it, and spent it twice over immediately afterwards. Thus, when he died, at twenty-four (the scene of his decease, Calais, and the cause, brandy), he did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated soon after the honeymoon, in affluent circumstances. That bereaved lady, fifteen years older than he, fell presently at deadly feud with her only relative, Lady Scadgers; and, partly to spite her ladyship, and partly to maintain herself, went out at a salary. And here she was now, in her elderly days, with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows which had captivated Sparsit, making Mr. Bounderby's tea as he took his breakfast.

The above text, from the beginning of Part One, Chapter Seven, of Dickens' Hard Times, is copied from the Gutenberg site, and can also be found on pages 46-47 of the Penguin edition.

new guard old order?

A dialog/interview with Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou, (h/t Goldhammer).

This dialog is not especially substantial, but it does allow me to form an opinion about Finkielkraut. A negative opinion. His strongest objections to Badiou are, first, the smearing of Sarkozy with Pétain and, second, making ‘the enemy’ a central political category, and therefore, according to Finkielkraut, doing away with the concept of legitimate opposition, paving the way for totalitarianism. I am sympathetic with the first. Badiou is, sometimes, guilty of a certain rhetorical brinksmanship in associating Sarko and others with the great and obvious moment of French racism. On the other hand, he’s got a story about how this works, would even claim that it isn’t a rhetorical connection at all, but a conceptual one. What’s more, certainly Finkielkraut is absolutely as guilty of the same rhetorical strategy, this time with the obvious evil of totalitarianism. The second point, that of conceiving politics as struggle against an enemy, bears some thinking about. I’d want to go back and look at what Badiou says. But I think the two are talking entirely past one another. Badiou is talking about the political situation, whereas Finkielkraut is talking about parliamentary politics.

Badiou’s accusation that Finkielkraut is essentially providing a gentile intellectual cover to anti-Muslim racism—comparable to gentile anti-Semitisms of the past—is a strong one. Not knowing particularly well Finkielkraut’s public persona and statements, I can’t be much of a judge. But I am not impressed that the one specific stand Finkielkraut prides himself on taking in the name of abstract justice during this interview is in defense of Roman Polanski. It’s almost as though, according to Finkielkraut, Polanski is a latter-day Dreyfus, and the radical leftists are too blinded by his class to come to his defense in the name of universal justice. Ridiculous.

The dialog is profoundly depressing. It reduces to Finkielkraut accusing Badiou of being a crypto-Stalinist (or, totalitarian), and Badiou accusing Finkielkraut of being a crypto-Nazi (or, racist ideologue). The question becomes who is more likely to one day be held responsible for justifying putting people in camps of one kind or another. It is evidence that, despite the conscious efforts of both these intellectuals to escape the paradigms of 20th century politics, they are, at least when boxed together, totally unable to do so.

girls girls girls

The women were splendidly represented. Besides Louise, Austria sent little Dworzak, a charming little girl in every respect; I fell quite in love with her and whenever Labriola gave me a chance, eloped with her from the entanglements of his ponderous conversation. These Viennoises sont des Parisiennesnées, mais des Parisiennes d’il y a cinquante ans. Regular grisettes. Then the Russian women, there were four or five with wonderfully beautiful leuchtende Augen, and there were besides Vera Zasulich and Anna Kulischoff. Then Clara Zetkin with her enormous capacity for work and her slightly hysterical enthusiasm, but I like her very much. She has ascended the Glärnisch, a mountain full of glaciers, a very severe effort for a woman of her constitution. Altogether I had the happy lot to fall from the arms of one into those of the next and so on; Bebel got quite jealous—he, the man of the ‘Frau’, thought he alone was entitled to their kisses!

This is from a letter written by Frederick Engels to Laura Lafargue (his daughter), dated 21 August 1893, and is part of a description of the Third International Socialist Working-Men’s Congress, which had taken place earlier that month. Engels was 72 years old at the time of writing. It can be found on pgs 182-3, V. 50 of the Collected Works (2004). It is not immediately clear to me what language this letter was written in--but it must be marked somewhere. See also the review of a biography of Engels in the October 22 New York Review of Books.

A universal yet disinterested sympathy

In the preface to Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri define for us several of their key concepts. First of all, the common. It is most obviously ‘natural’ resources (such as air), but is “also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (viii). It will be argued that contemporary forms of capitalism are caught in a trap: they rely on the common, but are able to generate profit only by capturing—privatizing—the common and thereby destroying its productive capacities. Ultimately, it will be argued, this most recent cycle of capitalist accumulation has little to do with the production of wealth, and more with the seizing of previously common wealth, something like a new enclosure. What do we call this new regime of production over which capital is struggling so paradoxically to retain control? It is the biopolitical. The authors say that, “the ultimate core of biopolitical production…is not the production of objects for subjects as commodity production is often understood, but the production of subjectivity itself” (x). Biopower is what the authors call the control that capital attempts to exert over this new form of production. New or renewed concepts will be required, the authors say, to understand the new situation. They identify at the outset the two central such concepts: poverty and love. Many more concepts will be added to these by the end of the book, in particular Spinoza’s conception of joy, but corruption is mobilized as an idea with philosophical content, and in the very last pages of the book we find a particularly grisly figuring of revolutionary laughter.

The authors have, in the past, been accused of idealistic (in a non-technical sense) messianism. They take a more ‘realist’ tone here, saying, “we…believe that…intellectual force is required to overcome dogmatism and nihilism, but we insist on the need to complement it with physical force and political action. Love needs force to conquer the ruling powers and dismantle their corrupt institutions before it can create a new world of common wealth” (xii). The issue of force and violence is treated relatively openly by Hardt and Negri. In essence, their position is that the multitude must withdraw from capital, and that this act of force will doubtless require the support of violence, just as—and they return to this example more than once—the Jews could not leave Egypt without some violence, the Pharaoh would not let them go. How, then, do they define this multitude that must perform an exodus from capital? They say, “the multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common” (xii-xiii). The multitude has as yet only a shadowy existence. It is, on the one hand, the economic foundation of the current structure of capital—but on the other hand, it does not yet exist as a political form. The project of this book, then, after Empire and Multitude, is to articulate the “political construction of the multitude with Empire” as an “ethical project” (xii). The authors are fully engaged in the Leninist critique of revolutionary thought that fails to think the transition between present possibilities and the future. They say, “the becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude. We will have to discover the passage from revolt to revolutionary institution that the multitude can set in motion” (xiii).

Such an ambitious project might be vulnerable in many ways. I expect to be thinking about it for some time to come. For now, on the heels of my reading, I have a few questions, or challenges.

It is crucial for Hardt and Negri’s argument that the biopolitical economy does not suffer from scarcity. Industrial production, on the other hand, was ruled by scarcity. What does scarcity mean? Here it refers not so much to the problem of ‘not enough,’ but rather to the fact that something owned by one person cannot be owned by another. This is to say that while scarcity certainly can mean the absolute dearth of, for instance, food, it also refers to a whole system of ownership. The industrial economy is ruled by prices, which are determined, at least in theory, by supply and demand—scarcity. The biopolitical economy, for Hardt and Negri, is in a sense defined by the tendency towards immaterial production. Immaterial products, unlike cars, can be in principle enjoyed by an unlimited number of people. A television show, once produced, is infinitely repeatable and distributable. This means, for Hardt and Negri, that the biopolitical economy is essentially an economy of the common—a concept that replaces the bourgeois/capitalist notion of a division between public and private. Various pieces of empirical evidence are brought in at this point, for instance the increasing reliance of economic value on ‘externalities,’ paradigmatically in real-estate.

Biopolitical production, enabled, we might say, by the trend in the direction of the immaterial, is centrally defined by the production of subjectivities. I would like to understand better the relation between these immaterial products and subjectivities. Subjectivity is, in a certain sense, an immaterial product. But there are other immaterial products that may be, in the hands of a bricoleur, turned into subjectivities. Biopolitical production draws on and expands the common. Yet, I wonder if we might not find a logic of scarcity at work in the production of subjectivities through the common as well. Contrary to the Jeffersonian image (the flame of my candle is not diminished when you use it to light your candle), it seems to me that subjectivities, in as much as they are conceived as identities, are necessarily exclusionary. In the game of identity, this is to say, my candle (or really, our candles) signifies less if you have one as well.

This objection may be a failure of revolutionary imagination on my part. Certainly, Hardt and Negri discuss the various traps into which identity politics falls. Chapter 6.1, “Revolutionary Parallelism” is a wonderfully lucid exposition of how to differentiate the essentially parallel revolutionary identity politics from the many competing non-revolutionary identity politics. The goal is to get beyond the “frequent embarrassment that accompanies reproducing the catalogue race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. (The ‘and so forth’ is especially embarrassing)” (343). In essence, the distinction is that identity politics is bad when it in the end only re-enforces the identity around which it organizes. It is good (revolutionary) when its practice and goal are the dissolution of that identity. The paradigm here is obviously the proletariat, supposedly the only class that makes revolution in order to eliminate itself. For Hardt and Negri (specifically against Zizek), it is patently obvious that certain kinds of feminism, for instance, also seek to dissolve the category of woman, and are therefore revolutionary. The distinction here would be between the essentializing practice of certain feminisms, (although Hardt and Negri don’t mention it, we could say Cixous’ écriture feminine) and the destabilization practiced by queer theory (they do give us the positive example: Butler). Hardt and Negri find a similar division between essentializing black nationalisms and those forms of black radicalism that ultimately transcend these racial categories. Fanon, for instance, rather than simply affirming the blackness that has been denigrated, sees that in the end it will be necessary to destroy both whiteness and blackness. This whole chapter, in my view, is both brilliant and entirely correct.

So what am I doing talking about exclusionary identities? In the context of queer theory, we get the quote from the Anti-Oedipus: not 2 sexes, not 0 sexes, but n sexes. All that I am saying is that even in a world with n sexes, there is no reason to think that it will not be possible to make a commodity out of each singularity in the multitude, thereby reintroducing the logic of scarcity into what had been the paradise of the common. No doubt this objection springs from a smearing-together of important distinctions, or a misunderstanding of the goal. Perhaps the authors would simply shrug—the point isn’t that everything will be perfect, but rather that the problems will be new. Does it even make sense to speak of the commodity in the era of biopolitical production? I see no reason why we can’t, although the concept would need some elaboration in order to be applied to subjectivities—no doubt this work has already, somewhere, been done.

Commonwealth is an enormous and lucid synthesis not only of post-Revolutionary social thought, but also of the last two generations of academic critical theory. Together with Empire and Multitude, we have on our hands a thoroughgoing attempt to renew the empirical, philosophical, and political gambit of Marxism. This trilogy is not a philosophical treatise, nor a political program, nor a study of economic morphology. It is certainly also not a ‘theoretical intervention.’ Indeed, what I admire most about this body of work is precisely the fact that it dares to be empirico-political rather than simply theoretical and philosophical—this is what connects it to Marx and the best tradition of theoretical political writing. I mean by this that the authors begin with a given conceptual framework, and critique and expand these concepts, replacing them as necessary, with resources drawn not only from the observed world, but from what they judge to be the edge of the world in its becoming. This is a fancy way of saying that the authors have examined the evidence and made a bet about the direction in which it is pointing, and staked themselves philosophically and politically on this judgment. It seems to me that the language of wager is appropriate here in a way that it generally is not in situations that are primarily philosophical, empirical, or political.

It would be very interesting to look at Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth as a trajectory. For one thing, Commonwealth opens with a round denunciation of the contemporary obsession with sovereignty, an obsession that, it seems to me, has a great deal to do with the analysis of sovereignty undertaken in Empire. If this first book was, perhaps justly, criticized for being messianic about revolution, the same cannot, or ought not, be said of Commonwealth. We have there a remarkably clear and honest gaze into the abyss of revolutionary violence. I am even surprised that the authors were as willing to condone violence as they seem to be. The last sentence of the book is “they will be buried by laughter.” This, together with the image of the apocalyptic Exodus, is strong stuff. Similarly, the reintroduction of corruption as a meaningful category is slightly alarming. It is none the less necessary, because it allows the authors to provide guidelines for distinguishing between good and bad forms of the common—the movement of their thought here is in many ways parallel to Alain Badiou’s ‘negative’ account of evil. This parallelism, together with a renewed attention to the evental nature of revolutionary action is something that I believe was missing from Empire. Verifying this, and examining the ways in which the geopolitical changes since the era of Empire (although Commonwealth argues that no major structural changes have in fact taken place in that time) have changed the authors’ conception of the world, would I think be instructive. These, though, are projects I can’t undertake at the moment.

Schlesinger on violence

For reasons having to do with dissertation research rather than contemporary politics, a friend of mine forwarded to me the text of a commencement speech given by Aurthur M. Schlesinger, jr. It was delivered in 1968, on the day Robert Kennedy was shot. The text I have was published in Harper’s magazine (August, 1968, pp. 19-24) under the title, "America 1968: The Politics of Violence," and is available in their (subscription only) archive. The bulk of the speech is devoted to criticizing those on the New Left—in particular Herbert Marcuse—who, Schlesinger says, have contributed to the creation of an environment in which violence, for instance assassination, seems like a good choice. Schlesinger is especially horrified by Marcuse’s rejection of free speech and ‘tolerance.’ For Schlesinger, it is the role of the “intellectual community” to be the custodians of reasoned debate, and the intellectuals of the New Left are going down a disastrous path in rejecting this traditionally leftist role. Here are some extracts, not selected to be representative.

The world today is asking a terrible question—a question which every citizen of this Republic should be putting to himself: what sort of people are we, we Americans?

And the answer which much of the world is bound to return is that we are today the most frightening people on this planet.

...

We cannot blame our epidemic of murder abroad on the wickedness of those who will not conform to our views of how they should behave and how they should live. For the zeal with which we have pursued an irrational war suggests the internal impulses of hatred and violence demanding outlet and shaping our foreign policy to their ends.

We must recognize that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark, intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as if a primal curse had been fixed on our nation, perhaps when we first began the practice of killing and enslaving those whom we deemed our inferiors because their skin was another color. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.

We are also, at our best, a generous and idealistic people. Our great leaders—Lincoln most of all—have perceived both the destructive instinct and the moral necessity of transcending destruction if we are going to have any sort of rational and decent society. They have realized how fragile the membranes of our civilization are, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composition, so tense in its interior relationships, so cunningly enmeshed in underground fears and antagonisms, so entrapped by history in the ethos of violence.

...

We can no longer regard harder and violence as accidents and aberrations, as nightmares which will pass away when we awake. We must see them as organic in our national past; we must confront them; we must uncover the roots of hatred and violence and, through self-knowledge, move toward self-control.

...

Let me make it clear that I am not talking about the student uprisings of recent weeks. I have no question that on balance the world stands to gain from student protest.

...

Surely there is little more pathetic than the view that violence in American society will benefit the left. A limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change; but, if the left, through the cult of the deed, helps create an atmosphere which destroys the process of democracy itself, the winners will be those who use violence best, and they will be on the right.

Harper’s, in their October issue, published two letters objecting to so much as the publication of this speech, and one short one praising it. Harper’s stands accused by Harley McAdams of having “assisted this most pompous of our ‘intellectuals’ in another one of his fatuous diatribes thinly disguised as an analysis of violence.” John Van Laer, on the other hand, with an appointment in the Psychology department at Hunter College, says, “if there is any national sickness today, its most dramatic symptom is the universal outcry that unthinkingly fastens the blame for every hideous act of some demented Arab irredentist, Bulgarian refugee, Czech defector, or Cuban extremist on American society and institutions.”

literary anarchism

L’insurrection qui vient, with authorial credit given to the ‘comité invisible,’ was published in 2007 in France, and was rapidly translated into English and put online. It was officially published in English, I believe late in the summer through MIT press under the title, The Coming Insurrection. The French version, of course, is online—I think you’re obliged to pay for the ‘professional’ English translation. I remember picking up a copy of this in a bookstore last year in Paris. I’d not heard of it, and decided, after a little while, not to buy the thing. I wish that I could remember what pointed me toward the thing more recently—possibly news about the trial associated with it in France. My knowledge of activist pamphlets like this isn’t enormous, but still it seems to me that this is recognizably of the same genre as, say, Paul Lafargue’s Le droit à la paresse [1883]. I’m sure this has been written about other places already, summarized and critiqued, no doubt with a more sophisticated eye than my own. Still, here is my account.

First of all, how does the text work? It first diagnoses the blockages and dilemmas of the contemporary situation, and then presents us with a sort of program of auto-organization and sufficient practical advice to put the aspiring insurrectionist on the right track. The first 80 pages are devoted to the diagnosis, which proceeds chapter by chapter starting with the booby-traps of the contemporary search for and failure to achieve stable selfhood, moving ‘up’ through an analysis of interpersonal relations, work, contemporary geographies, economics as science, the ideology of ecology, and finally at the highest level of abstraction, western/capitalist civilization and its decadent relativism. The great weight of the critique is directed, finally, at our inauthentic and alienated situation. These are not at all the words the authors use, but in the end it is what they mean. The disaffection of modern life, its various schizophrenias, are really the driving, bitter, force behind their prose. I am extremely suspicious of such foundations, especially when they are matched with this kind of language:

Le Français est plus tout autre le dépossédé, le misérable. Sa haine de l’étranger se fond avec sa haine de soi comme étranger. Sa jalousie mêlée d’effroi pour les ‘citées’ ne dit que son ressentiment pour tout ce qu’il a perdu. Il ne peut s’empêcher d’envier ces quartier dits de ‘relégation’ où persistent encore un peu dune vie commune, quelques liens entre les êtres, quelques solidarités non étatiques... (20)

There is a reality to the “jalousie mêlée d’effroi” described here, but I’m not convinced that it is any different from a similar emotion expressed often enough in the European past for the racial other. Proximity changes things, but this the comité invisible doesn’t enter into. I am in general extremely hesitant—for reasons that might, again, be traced to a certain 19th century history—to accept arguments that hinge on an acceptance of the idea that ‘their lives are better,’ that those fully committed to the socio-economic system should somehow envy those who, for one reason or another, usually historical racism, are forced to its edges. I am curious to see how Hardt and Negri negotiate this over the course of Commonwealth, since I can see already how much importance they give to the function of ‘the poors’ in the generation of new subjectivities, which are themselves integral to production in a system of biopower, and are perhaps biopolitically useful. Similarly, I’m hesitant to take Zizek’s embrace of the favella as anything other than a desperate grab for an outside. I prefer Hardt and Negri’s approach in that regard. I hope to find time soon to read Jacques Rancière’s Le philosophe et ses pauvres, which I imagine will be useful in thinking about this. At any rate, I’m not impressed by what seems to me to be more or less a romanticized vision of this particular kind of ‘outside.’

One might ask, who are you to judge what is true and what is not true of the cités under discussion? It’s a good question that also has the virtue of raising my next point about L’insurrection qui vient. It is very much about France. It is not just that the example above invokes “le Français.” There is a significant criticism of French universalism, and then, again, an odd recapitulation of it. Because of France’s position at the origin of the nation-state, especially the revolutionary nation-state, it is especially hard, we are told, for French people to understand that it must be given up. The special situation created by the massive and intrusive French state is recognized as several points and on several levels. At many places, comparisons are made to the US, examples drawn from the US—so we might read this as one more example of the French understanding themselves in a US mirror—but there is relatively little consideration of the potentially global nature of the problems on which the bulk of the text focuses. Perhaps this is because their solution is radically local. Despite the specificity, there’s a sufficiency of pleasing ideological analysis here. I especially liked the “Troisième circle,” which analyzes the political function of work (I prefer that word to ‘labor’ in this context). Also, the “Septième cercle,” on ecology, was good. They say, “tant qu’il y aura l’Homme et l’Environnement, il y aura la police entre eux” (65). I can only agree that environmental problems cannot be thought about constructively while the fiction of ‘the Environment’ as something with a real and somehow natural existence separate from humans is so powerful. There is no natural environment. There is no a-historical environment. Conservationism would be better off, or at least on more intellectually secure footing, without a mystical, essentially fundamentalism, conception of ecology.

Simply put, the path for revolutionary action recommended by this book is to organize small, self-sufficient, affectively bound groups through which actions, of all kinds, can take place. These groups are called communes. At first, the communes are to build up their capacity for autonomy, and to increasingly refuse to participate in the broader socio-economic-political system. At the beginning, this means petty fraud, dumpster-diving, and the like. Squats of the sort that thrived for a time in post-89 Berlin are, I imagine, the model here. Of course you cannot live off the fat of the land for ever. Learn basic mechanical and electrical engineering, learn first aid. Learn to grow your own food—it is considered crazy that such a small percentage of the world’s population is in charge of food production, this will certainly change. This autonomy, which is an ongoing project, is to begin immediately. The passage is a basic statement of the worldview presented in the book:

Ne plus attendre, c’est d’une manière ou d’une autre entrer dans la logique insurrectionnelle. C’est entendre à nouveau, dans la voix de nos gouvernants, le léger tremblement de terreur qui ne les quitte jamais. Car gouverner n’a jamais été autre chose que repousser par mille subterfuges le moment où la foule vous pendra, et tout acte de gouvernement rien qu’une façon de ne pas perdre le contrôle de la population. (83)

Again, though, the basis of this mobilization is essentially psychological. By the end of the ‘destructive’ part of the book, we are to understand that it is the deep relativism of capitalist civilization which marks it above all for destruction. It cannot sustain truth. So, naturally, the place to begin revolutionary action is truth. Well, what does this mean? “S’attacher à ce que l’on éprouve comme vrai.” Events generate truth. We are told that even “le sentiment de vivre dans le mensonge est encore une vérité,” and therefore enough to begin to build upon (85). This is indeed, I think, a theory of the event, of truth, and then of a militant truth-procedure. So, yes, we are back again to Badiou.

I am not sure, in the end, how to evaluate this pamphlet. It has many virtues. Of course it is not a treatise. It is a piece of propaganda, intended to mobilize a particular sector of the social hierarchy. The theory of social change it presents is catastrophist. The system is at an impasse, and all we can do is refuse until the whole thing crumbles. Things will be better after it crumbles because then at least we will have soil and our friends. In the 1890s, a distinction was made between literary anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. If such a distinction were operative today, I would put this tract in the former category because in the end it is concerned not with the structures of society, but with crafting a certain kind of subjectivity.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.

Imposed

À partir du XIXe siècle, ce sont plutôt les dimensions de la finitude qui vont plier le dehors, constituer une “profondeur,” une “épaisseur retirée en soi”, un dedans de la vie, du travail et du langage, dans lequel l’homme se loge, ne serait-ce que pour dormir, mais inversement aussi qui se loge dans l’homme vigile “en tant qu’être vivant, individu au travail ou sujet parlant.”

This is from page 104 of Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault. It is easy to say that such and such a thinker, such and such a book, ‘imposes itself’ upon one. I am increasingly coming to believe that Foucault’s work imposes itself upon me between the 19th century world that I study and the 21st century world in which I live.

Mules and Historiographers

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,--straight forward;-----for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,--he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;-----but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: for if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid.

from Chapter XIV of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Sociology and Psychoanalysis

The August number of MIH also includes an essay on Marcel Gauchet by Samuel Moyn. It has been my policy, here, to mostly refrain from discussing the work of contemporary historians and in particular those in my field. This is related to my reluctance to write anything here that touches too closely on my dissertation work.

Moyn is an excellent historian. I have read both of his books and several essays. The combined quality and quantity of his output is both inspirational and more than a little disheartening. I am more than willing, therefore, to follow him past 1968, out of areas I have myself studied, and into the later part of the 20^th century. I will say hardly anything, though, about the content of this essay, only that it is an excellent example of the kind of 'contextual philology,' if I remember the phrase correctly, that he's been doing for some time.

In terms of the work I have been doing now, what I want to ask of this essay is a name: Durkheim. He increasingly seems to me to be central to 20^th century French thought. This essay convinces me that, for instance, other things could be said of Durkheim and the ‘self’ than Jerrold Seigel says in his book. Durkheim opened certain terrains that it is not far wrong to say Foucault and others exploited. So, a wishlist: Durkheim and the self, Durkheimian sociology and psychoanalysis, and finally a historically sensitive treatment of Foucault and Durkheim. I wonder if there is less discussion of a legacy of Durkheimian thought than there is of, say, Bergsonian thought, is that many of Durkheim’s immediate students went on to become boring and responsible moderate socialist and progressive liberals? Alternate paths, for instance the underbelly that is the ethnographic-surrealist current, had no interest in being progeny of such a father? What does Bataille say about Durkheim? I’ve no idea. Does Foucault talk about Durkheim anywhere at any length?

But these are my own questions, not Moyn’s. I look forward to the book of which this essay, presumably, will be some part.

Failed Counterrevolutionaries?

Bonner, Robert E. “Proslavery Extremism Goes to War: The Counterrevolutionary Confederacy and Reactionary Militarism.” Modern Intellectual History, 6, 2 (2009), 261-285.

My copy of the August issue of MIH has finally arrived. I have never before been subscribed to a professional journal. Reading articles in bound form, and marking them up in this bound form is oddly exciting. No doubt it’ll soon wear off.

Bonner’s essay is an informative summary of the kinds of arguments being made by some very extreme pro-slavery publicists in the late 1850s, in the crucial winter of 1860, during, and finally after the war. I have virtually no historiographical context for this—although if I had pursued my old counter-revolutionary studies path I no doubt would. Bonner’s point seems none the less pretty clear. He wants to document the existence and nature of this particular militaristic, authoritarian and explicitly counterrevolutionary wing of Confederate thought. What is the point of all these descriptors? The point is that given the radicalizing power of the actual outbreak of hostilities, a hearing could be had for individuals who were not claiming a ‘purer’ American republic, but rather wanted to overturn the entire revolutionary project. Their theory of politics, in great conservative tradition, held that the state should be representative of society rather than an egalitarian or any other force for changing it. But these publicists (for obvious and bad reasons I don’t want to call them intellectuals) were not the mainstream. Indeed, for me the most interesting aspect of the material that Bonner presents is the way in which it highlights a difficulty fundamental to any attempt to bring race into politics. In the North American context, I think it is fair to say that race has been constructed as binary. In this way, a firm racial hierarchy can be established while none the less insisting on a kind of egalitarianism within ‘whiteness.’ There are obvious logic problems here. A more rigorous form of racism implies a biologically determined hierarchy articulated densely through society. This seems to me to be a fundamental tension in racist discourse, one that is liable to be found (perhaps it is, I don’t know) in all attempts to actualize racial hierarchy in the political realm. Indeed, I wonder if it might be argued that any hierarchical system not tending toward the destruction of all egalitarian impulses cannot properly be called racism. No egalitarianism at all, only the racially best in charge, articulated to the level of the individual. Given the way the 19th century was, this was obviously going to point toward militarism—in which, it should be pointed out, the same problematic of hierarchy and equality only repeats itself—and political authoritarianism. Bonner’s essay shows that indeed it did, and in the Confederacy was sharply at odds with what was otherwise a rights-based rhetoric. Bonner’s closing point, made for reasons of space rather obliquely, is that within the rich field of Confederate memory, most of these radical discourses have little place. What remains, though, as it were to haunt the memory of Confederate war dead, is a certain form of authoritarian militarism.

Incipient (voyeuristic) liberalism

Zizek is generally at least stimulating. He manages to pose problems. Indeed, he has the courage at least to pose the obvious questions and face the obvious objections. As he says in a recent piece (May-June, 2009) in the New Left Review, "if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?" Indeed. In this short essay, “How to Begin from the Beginning”—which is at least half a retelling of Lenin’s ‘last struggle’ with Stalin and bureaucracy—Zizek does briefly suggest the basis on which he thinks that revolutionary politics should now be set. He says, “All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat.”

In the current configuration, there are four principle immanent antagonisms that seem like sources of potential catastrophe “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” Zizek doesn’t say this, but I imagine that these four broad categories can be arrived at by a simple content analysis of popular culture. Those things that scare us the most are understood to be somehow related to these immanent antagonisms. Fictions reveal them to us in utopias and distopias, apocalypses and period pieces.

Only the fourth of these four areas of potential catastrophe has the potential for universality, for Rancière’s ‘part of no part.’ In other words, the other forms of antagonism can all be managed in various ways by the many mechanisms developed by liberal democracy—rather than true democracy—and its culture for this very purpose. Zizek says,

“The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”

Such are the last lines of the essay. I know that Zizek’s intention was radical, but it seems to me that, in essence, what he has just said is that it is only the ghettoized, only those most radically excluded by modernity, who are able to hold up to us a mirror of our own possible futures if we do not successfully moderate rampant capitalism through the judicious use of liberal, humanist reformism. The favelas, in this passage, are not a call to revolution, but a reminder that we do indeed have physical, psychological, and intellectual comforts worth defending. The ‘preventative action’ he invokes at the end does not sound like a revolution, it sounds more like a justification for another bailout. “In a way, we are all excluded...” surely this sounds just like the kind of “In a way, we are all different...” mindlessness against which Zizek supposedly stands? I see no relation whatsoever between Lenin’s dilemmas in the first part of the essay, and the (albeit very brief) analysis of the present situation in the last part. Perhaps Lacano-Leninism has in fact finally run out of ideas.

Theoretical man

Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to state openly that searching for the truth meant more to him than truth itself; thereby the fundamental secret of science is revealed, much to the astonishment, indeed annoyance, of the scientifically minded. Admittedly, alongside this isolated recognition (which represents an excess of honesty, if not of arrogance), one also finds a profound delusion which first appeared in the person of Socrates, namely the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinct which belongs inseparably to science, and leads it to its limits time after time, at which point it must transform itself into art; which is actually, given this mechanism, what it has been aiming at all along.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 15. [In the Cambridge edition edited by Geuss and Speirs, pg 73.]

Gender, the Parasitical State, and Revolution

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is, it is often asserted, a classic. It is as rewarding a document for a meta-reading, or a history of reception, as any—see Donald Reid’s 2007 essay in Modern Intellectual History for just such a project. But before a scholarly survey of this kind can be properly appreciated, the text itself should be read because the reception history of a work is more interesting when one understands how complex the thing is all on its own.

The Brumaire recounts in some detail the period from February of 1848 to the days just following Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2nd, 1851. The tone is one of bitter invective and scorn; the mode is very often satire. The question, of course, was how what began as a proletarian revolution could end in a cheap, tawdry, strong (but really weak)-man dictatorship. Today the spectacle of a revolution descending into tawdry authoritarianism is so banal as to be declared often enough a law of history. At the time, in France, certainly dictatorship was associated with revolution, but it should be born in mind that if 1789 eventually lead to military dictatorship—Napoleon’s empire—it did so first by passing through a Jacobin period that had the highest possible ambitions, and that Napoleon himself was easy to see as a world-historical genius. Marx’s task, then, writing in the 1850s, was to understand and explain the path revolution had taken, and indicate what might be the consequences, theoretical and practical, of this revolution.

By way of introducing what Marx says about the interrelated issues of the state and the class base of Louis Napoleon’s power, and considering the relation of this to Marx’s other work, I would like to make a rhetorical, or metaphorological, point that I feel smells strongly of a certain outmoded style of criticism, and that perhaps has already been made.

The famous opening passages of the text catalogue symbolic borrowings of various revolutions from history—these borrowings go from narratives to costumes. Marx puts language in a central position here. Indeed, he makes the learning of a language the metaphorical bridge from the faintly ridiculous actual history of these borrowings to an imagined revolution: “Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently”(32).[1] In the case of the 1848 revolution, however, farce is in the air. Marx’s satire holds what is, what is said, and what ought to be, up for inspection. Louis Bonaparte is a con man running a nation as an emperor in order to pay his own debts. Everything is tawdry and small in comparison to past revolutions. If the Brumaire has become a central text for interpretation of Marx’s understanding of ideology, it is because he pays so much attention here to language and its power, perception and reality—to the essential emptiness, or lack, that drives the logic of public political discourse.

I would like to suggest that we link this obsession with farce, the tawdry, the small, and the emptiness and corruption of discourse, with Marx’s occasional, throw-away comparisons of politics and sex. There are a few remarks in the text, not central to the argument, but which in good post-structuralist fashion, I would like to suggest might provide a key to its rhetoric. It need hardly be said that Marx’s sexual politics are not those of the politically correct 21st century. First, famously, we have, “it is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken [by Louis Bonaparte] unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force”(36). In reference to the eventual arrival of Odilon Barrot at the head of a ministry, a position he had sought for many years, Marx says, “he brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted” (49). Later on, more obliquely, discussing the accumulation of small bribes by which Bonaparte purchased the loyalty of the army, we find a similar trope, “hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonored. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude” (116). Finally, and again veiled, there is the gender imaginary implied in the joke Marx makes discussing the duping of the peasants about the merits of the newer Napoleon, who perhaps does not really have a right to the glorious name he bears. Louis Bonaparte arrives protected by the Napoleonic (law) Code, under which “all inquiry into paternity is forbidden” (118).

The point here isn’t the boring simple-feminist one that Marx had reprehensible, perhaps Victorian, views about virtue and chastity, corruption and promiscuity. The point is rather the (I hope more sophisticated) sort of one made by gender analysis. The same set of idealist beliefs Marx had about the virtue of women slide over into politics, and seem also to govern the relationships he perceives between political action and social foundation. Louis Bonaparte is a weak and self-interested individual who finds the social foundation of his power in the conservative elements of the least-organized class, the small-holding peasantry. If he himself is a member of the lumpenproletariat (the members of which, it should be pointed out, typically have low moral standards), and if he draws his personal army from their ranks, his support in the larger society comes from what is essentially his seduction of a simple—but morally reprehensible—class. The smallholding farmers are only half a class, although they share the physical make-up of a class, in other words are united by a similar relation to and means of production, they lack the intellectual or superstructural unity, the community, that forms a class. Marx ends his breathtaking single-paragraph analysis of this sector of society thus:

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state.(p. 117)

It must be admitted that this description is not unlike a certain 19th century idea of woman—who would, if admitted into the homosocial community of politics, only drag unfreedom into it by acting simply as the proxy of her husband or her priest.

Louis Bonaparte is not the only object of Marx’s scorn in the Brumaire. The fragmented and indecisive bourgeoisie also comes in for much abuse. (It should be indicated here that a good point of comparison with Marx’s analysis of the political dynamics of these years is Maurice Agulhon’s book on the Second Republic. Agulhon, like Marx, sees the Republic as caught, paralyzed, between the twin dangers of popular uprising and monarchism; unlike Marx, he has, or is able to express, more respect for the political perspicacity of Louis Bonaparte in allowing each faction to believe what they liked about him, playing them off against one another). The source of Marx’s scorn, though not of his hostility, is the failure of the bourgeoisie to insist on the alignment of its economic and its political power. Marx heaps invective on the bourgeoisie because, fragmented as it is, it effectively renounces political life—which for Marx is the power to act (108)—in the hope of thus securing its economic creature comforts. That is, the bourgeoisie falls away from its ideals and prostitutes itself out. Sexual and political virtue are confounded.

Now, I will want to wait and see how Marx’s analysis of this period appears in his later, post 1870 writings on France, but it seems possible to assert that this confusion of virtues makes it difficult for Marx to see the potential of what Louis Napoleon had done. When Marx looked at the new regime, he seems largely to have seen only the socially marginal, the classless, and therefore corruption that is coded sexually—for instance in his reproduction at the end of the piece of the quip about the specific difference of the new regime: “France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men” (126). I understand that the Brumaire was referred to in the 1930s as a tool for understanding the rise of Fascism, seen then as a classless gang of petty criminals grabbing power from the weak and divided bourgeoisie. Is it permissible to suggest that this kind of analysis makes sense only when one cannot fully appreciate the power of political rhetoric because one is trapped in a sexist grounding of moral virtue on physical innocence? The purity of the physical must be certain, or there can be no moral (which is to say, spiritual) force? Could this be a sort of cruel irony whereby the sexist assumptions of progressive rationalism prevented it from seeing the enormous power and danger of fascist demagoguery? Or perhaps this is going much too far. It would none the less perhaps be interesting to see if previous feminist readings of the Brumaire (which must exist, but which I know nothing about) move in this direction.

The above is a little unfair to Marx in that he does not base his entire analysis of Louis Napoleon’s power base on the staging of an act of sexual violence. Marx’s treatment of the nature and tendencies of the French state is also crucial here. What I find most productive here in terms of a Marxist vision of French history is how close Marx comes to describing the state as itself a sort of class. The material reality of this seems to have made a great impression on Marx. The president, as head of state, has the power to fire and appoint 500,000 bureaucrats, which is to say that 1.5 million individuals (the families of the appointees), owe their daily bread to him personally (44, 67-8, 115, 122). According to Marx, during the Second Republic, the president makes a strong contrast with the national assembly, “While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city...He is the elect of the nation...The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one” (45). [2]

Marx’s analysis of the French state and the role it plays in Louis Bonaparte’s ascension must have an important role his broader interpretation of 19th century French history. (Clearly expressing Marx’s position here also provides a crucial substratum for reading Lenin—indeed, it seems to me now that I must go back and re-read State and Revolution to see precisely what it was that Lenin adds to Marx, and what he merely renames). The great centralizing bureaucratic apparatus of the French state—and Tocqueville would agree with Marx here—developed first under the absolute monarchy, and in the sequence of revolutions in the earlier part of the century, always served as the tool of the rising bourgeoisie (115-116). This has been the history of the state, “this executive with its enormous bureaucratic machinery of state...this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore...All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it...Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission” (115-116). The state, if it is conceived as a monstrous parasite, must of course have a host. It must also have support, “state power is not suspended in mid-air” (116), the cohort of bureaucrats themselves are not enough support. Here we return to the above-mentioned small-holding peasants, the formless class seduced, with the aid of the Napoleonic legend, into supporting Louis Bonaparte.

The discussion above of the curiously directionless nature of the small peasants is important here. If these peasants exist in no sense as community or organization, and are a group only by virtue of the similarity of their employment (that is, their position relative to the means of production), then the state as it is described by Marx is precisely the opposite of this. It is entirely organization, and has no material substrate whatsoever. It is an unproductive parasite. The opposition isn’t highlighted by Marx, and has, we might say, a poetic content rather than anything else. It is one more sign that the end is near.

Terrell Carver, in his brief accompanying note calls the Brumaire a “consolation.” In what sense? In the sense that Marx attempts to show some progressive result to the catastrophe of having such a nonentity as Louis Napoleon rise to power. Marx says,

It’s plain as day: ‘all Napoleonic ideals’ are ideals of the undeveloped smallholding in its heyday, but for the smallholding that has outlived this, they are an absurdity. They are merely hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, ideas into spectres, befitting dress into preposterous costumes. But the parody f the empire was necessary to liberate the bulk of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state and society. The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralization which is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. When, disappointed with the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will cease to believe in the smallholding, the whole edifice of state erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain the chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries. (p. 123)

The whole course of revolution, Marx suggests, can be read as a ‘heightening of the contradictions’ in a political sense. In the whole period up until the coup in 1851, revolution had “developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it” (115). That is, the purification of executive power represented by Louis Bonaparte is a necessary stage in the development of the consciousness of the rural population before an urban proletarian revolution can be successful.

Here is the basic inspiration for Leninism, although my sense is that Lenin made explicit the important additional step that it would be necessary for the proletariat to seize and use the full force of the bureaucratic machinery of state built by the bourgeoisie in order to eliminate the bourgeoisie. Here, also, is a theory on the level of the political that is structured much in the same way as an ‘economist’ Marxian theory of revolution. Based on Capital alone, one might well think that Marx’s theory of revolution was largely limited to the developing contradictions between the means of production and the relations of production (property). Perhaps the overlap I see here is the famous ‘dialectic’ applied to both realms. Or perhaps my reading of Marx is clouded by my reading of Lenin. Yet it seems that Marx is here posing his characteristic theory of social change as contradiction driven evolution-then-revolution in a manner that leaves economic change almost entirely out of the picture. No doubt much effort has been made by other more accomplished exegetes of Marx than this one, to make the two versions line up.

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[1] I am reading from the Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, published through the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. It seems to me that this earlier passage mentioning the learning of a language must certainly be read as the first part of another, more famous passage a few pages on: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future...Past revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase” (32). That is, we might say, the revolution is in fact taking place only when the form of what takes place is no longer drawn from the textbook of the past, but arises out of immediate necessity.

[2] These passages suggest two areas of comparison. The first is with the history of suffrage in France, in particular the intellectual-philosophical history approach to it taken by Pierre Rosanvallon. Another is to compare Marx’s analysis of the concept and physical reality of sovereignty in this and perhaps other texts with the current obsession with the idea, drawing primarily on Schmitt and Agamben, in contemporary Theory. Having mentioned Schmitt, I’d like to record my impulse, which will go unfulfilled here, to compare what he says about the parliamentary system in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy to the various critical noises Marx makes here. The sentiment Schmitt identifies is supposed to be shared by the right and left—what relation does that fin-de-siècle and interwar manner of thinking actually owe to the Brumaire?