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Télévision grecque et carnages ‘sociaux’ à répétition : résistance symptomale ou sursaut spéculatif ?

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For a time, between 1945 and the 1980s, we Westerners managed to live better than the first generations of uprooted people, that is to say, to protect ourselves a little from the destitute disaster of modernity, and this at the low price of two nicely industrial and formidably carnivorous world wars. Now we feel, we know well from a knowledge that our conscience most often refuses, that the global social mega-machine has ceased to spare us. After having moved the manufacturing heart of its working class to the periphery, the social mega-machine starts to butcher its very loyal administrative strata of employees, even public ones: the Greek television affair is only the latest carnage, but let’s bet that it will be forgotten, starting with the Greeks themselves, as soon as Kronos devouring his sad children strikes elsewhere tomorrow. The inability to form a discourse, to carry out an analysis of the global situation from the point of view of a simple preference for life, is due to the dereliction of what W. Benjamin called the tradition of the oppressed — which was in fact a tradition of refusing oppression. 

In other words, the windowpanes that open to our serf arbiters on the cold light of a course apparently outside the ever thicker walls of our value-producing dungeons form rosaries that are being chained to the rhythm decided by the docile service of Information. 

We (at least: the intellectuals whose playground is precisely that of the conditions of the modern social game) no longer have the initiative in the elaboration of the image of this course. Thus, we are dismayed by the announcement of each convulsion, occurring within our own European walls, of a system in the process of decomposition, as if it were bad weather news, while waiting for it to pass. For any answer and for the most ‘bold’, it would be necessary to restore the authority of a ghostly state. But the state has been since the beginning of capitalism only « the executive committee of the bourgeoisie », and can only support an industrial economy substituting itself for autonomous productive associations, thereby sawing off the living branch on which it and this economy rest. The chained life is the only fuel of this robotic economy, which it nevertheless cheerfully exhausts. But it pleases us more to believe that we are suffering from the inadequacies of a benevolent whipping father as a state than to know that we have been thrown into the jaws of the ogre without return. The great Other has a tough skin, which would ultimately guarantee the great living adventure from its hazards. 

bioCide and PhiloSoPhiCal baroud d’honneur 

According to Artus and Virard, capitalism is in the process of destroying itself, and this would be the best thing that has happened since the appearance of homo sapiens if it did not involve in its loss an enormous part of the biosphere, including an enormous part of humanity. It is not a question of pleading for the maintenance of capitalism, nor for its precipitation into the abyss: capitalism neither requires nor fears any plea. It will continue until the abyss and, at this point, it would be far-fetched to continue to place one’s trust in the therapeutic power of speech, as if the latter could still stop the infernal mechanism of the global social mega-machine. It would have been necessary that this word be massively, intensely required and professed in proportion, as in the origins of the industrial world. Not that anything other than the word liberates, therefore, but there is heavy reason to doubt from now on that the snippets that take the place of it are of any efficiency to « overcome the unbreakable rock » of the effective reality, according to the word of Hegel. 

The philosophy does not try to embellish the evil, its activity, productive of no fabricat, consists in effects of truth; its action, as activity, which lies in the service of the discourse, releases possibilities of existence exalting beyond the miserable level to forced course. But its offer only meets an artificially maintained official demand, the current misery having on philosophy the advantage of familiarity and the more or less shaky arrangements that this familiarity allows. It would be a medicine without patients, whereas the psychic armor making misery delectable somatizes the symptom thus made available to medicine. 

Psychotherapies, whatever they are, certainly claim to answer the individual ambition (or even that of the family unit, the department, the service etc.) to untie the skeins of whole bodies, or at least to contribute to restore locally, for these bodies, the maximum practicability of globally impracticable conditions, as if civilization as a whole was not also quietly sinking; far be it from us to deny the relative efficiency of its advice in relieving arrangements of the inimical territory. Purely medical elements can also participate in these global rehabilitation strategies for the individual or other small entities. But a philosophical medication of politics is not satisfied with these accommodations by which small ensembles temporarily extract a little or even a lot of decency from the general indecency and is only concerned with drastic rearrangements, on a necessarily less modest scale. This is why, since it does not provide small-scale expedients, even if they are occasionally saving, it has never treated anyone in particular, except as an imaginary game, a view of the mind; this is also why no one asks it for anything, or so few people. 

However, therapies only treat patients who are ready to be cured and therefore already on the road to recovery. It is true that in a climate — in the stable sense of geography — where aggression is the norm to the point of disappearing from the field of perception, any normally satisfying activity, even if it is professional (all those jobs that are in essence foreign to command and value, when they survive or reinvent themselves), acts as therapy. 

However, it must be noted that philosophy only concerns small populations that are rather protected from great violence; but the sensitivity that sharpens in relative ease reinforces the allergy to the worst of the ordinary and calls for more powerful medication, more heady efforts of thought. 

Without doubt, philosophy, the one that continues to fill large audiences, most often resembles a cheap psychology, which it likes to ape advantageously when it does not merge with the history of ideas. But the harshness of its real pharmacopoeia, which would be suitable for large groups (and even, failing that, for less large groups, at least more capable than the restricted circle of the family nucleus of forming a circle of utilities sufficient for their existence) — this harshness explains why no possible elective politics can, without sabotaging itself, take on the task of administering it. The appropriate medication would be too bitter for the taste of the public, which knows about painkillers. Between the seduction of the crowds and the bitter joy of true perseverance, philosophy does not hesitate. Radicals in politics will always fail precisely because of this hesitation. They will dilute the truth of their demands in the sweet waters of flattery (it’s going to be alright), pretending to seduce, while professing the horribile dictu of the apocalypse: in other words, if they don’t say anything very different, why should we trust them rather than the patent professionals? But when they stick to truths that liberate in thought only, who would dare, who would wish to embrace their adventurous swerve? 

the call to reSiSTanCe as an imPortance 

The resistance that global capitalism is now encountering in fits and starts to dismember its own imperial society by means of its provincial governments is symptomatic. In other words, never, from partial rejection to partial rejection, is the real object of the dispute named; only the resources of the language made available by the system itself are mobilized to denounce the particular wrongs. The general harm finds expression only in spite of the ventriloquism act in which the great general robot employs his victims all day long, whose bodies are ‘spoken’ rather than taking over the word. These victims, as victims, give up receiving these bodies at the very moment when the blows they strike at the portal of an impregnable consciousness resound. The ordinary consciousness refrains from the coming of the rival body in its castle, even though its slips betray their insistence. 

Of course, this dumbing down is undermined by the simple declaration of a general strike. The mute individual bodies are experienced through the artificial dermas of the partial pseudo-bodies (or ‘corporatists’) under whose compartmentalized surface the industrial functioning would like to asphyxiate them. It is a single body that strikes through these pseudo-bodies and, beyond the mega-body on general strike, the giga-body composed of all the distant bodies participating in this strike in a way that is not the strike. This mute but reactive body is no longer one of those partial mechanical bodies shaped by capital for its own purposes. Even if one would like to give tribal or village proportions to the common bodies, the human giga-body, whose formation is perhaps reversible, feels for the time being in each of its movements; it is its discomfort that one would like to disperse in a multitude of local pains, neglecting that such pain then such other one still relates to the test of only one and the same deputy. The general strike manifests the unity of this mute body, or loquacious only in the language it speaks as a ventriloquist, that of what kills it. 

According to Reclus, humanity was nature come to self-awareness. Now, civilized man, but even more radically, modern man, makes of this advantageous cephalic distortion a principle of sovereignty, that is, strictly speaking, of indifference to natural powers, beginning with his own. As if the relegation of the predatory threat weighing on man and the human domestication of the wild in general authorized this humanity, beyond the hunting pact of preservation (which is basically only the « artificialized » version of the « natural » predation), to dispose until exhaustion of what is only the remainder of the nature, and not the nature all short. 

But in the demented enterprise by which the main human organization, in prey to the intoxication of excess, comes to suppress without taking care of its conditions of existence, a wild social body is knotted, transversal, through a solidarity of species which covers all the mutinous nature, speaking and not speaking, most often unconscious, against its own ransacking. Thus, we cannot help but feel ashamed of our own actions. conditions of existence, to put it Deleuze-style, when a riot breaks out « elsewhere », in Istanbul, in Thessaloniki, in Stockholm, in Tottenham, always somewhere in France, everywhere in the United States, everywhere in Brazil now, but everywhere in China too, for a long time and despite the informational blackout; when, « elsewhere », workers, in a more modest way, retaliate according to the agreed ways to a brutal dismissal 

We participate « right here ». It is our own giga-body that we experience from now on when it is moved « elsewhere ». The sadistic, exterminist mastery that man (white, male, Western and modern) has arrogated to himself over the rest of nature, starting with all the other human natures, has made the latter, nolens volens, consciously solidary of all the manifestations of the great total organism. 

We maintain the hypothesis that the Greek workers protesting in this general strike against the closure of public television, whether or not it is their own enterprise, are not expressing nostalgia for a lost paradise. The deterioration of the situation does not make them bless the previous state, only the arrangements that they have patiently elaborated to make it the least intolerable possible. However, their suffering, once duly translated to their use, is only addressed to the approved social doctors. Their treatment will be purely medicinal; there will be no discursive therapy. The therapy for which the workers contribute has no need of thought, whose silent riot is closer than a thousand hours of talkative negotiations. 

Intellectuals have and can only have a role in their own eyes, in the eyes of their community, and that role is not to maintain and push the phenomenal expression of resistance into the piped language of power, tolerating as resistance only the demand for the status quo — in this case, for the maintenance of public television. That’s why they reveal their participation in this gigantic body of few words by supporting the general strike by which the Greek workers themselves, who are not all the victims of the day, reveal theirs. But it is also why this role, which is to take the floor in order to formulate, when at least it is a question for them of social criticism, the conditions of a decent life, of the life that they try to lead with their « colleagues » but also with other players of the spirit and with whoever tries to persevere in the joyful slope of activities or actions adequate to its essence — that is why this role cannot be limited to redouble the chattering mutitude of the big general body where a residual life is buried, even by the confusion of the sympathy expressed.

Jean-François Gava,

Scientific collaborator and substitute lecturer in philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles, is the author of several books, including Autonomie ou capital (2011, Chromatika) and L’Hypothèse communaliste (Anibwe, 2012).

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