antagonist

My goal today is to describe an intellectual operation which I have named – for reasons that, I hope will become convincing, the idea of communism. Without doubt, the most delicate moment in that construction is to determine whether it is the most universal idea or whether one must declare it as an Idea, not only with regard to true politics (and in that case, the Idea is that of communism), but with regard to trivial truth (and in that case the Idea is an contemporary reprise of that what Plato dares us to transmit under the names of eidos or idea, or even more precisely the Idea of the Good). I implicitly leave unexplained a good part of that universality, in order to be as clear as possible with regard to the Idea of communism.

The ‘Idea of communism’-operation requires three elementary components: a political component, a historical component and a subjective component.

First the political component. It’s about what I name a truth, a political truth. On my analysis of the Cultural Revolution (a political truth, as it goes), a commentator of the English journal The Observer believed to be able to say that, solely by taking into account my positive report on an episode in Chinese history (for him, naturally, a sinister and deadly chaos), one could congratulate oneself with the English empiricist tradition which ‘has vaccinated [the readers of The Observer], against all complacency in the face of the despotism of ideocracy’. In sum, he congratulated himself with the dominant imperative in today’s world: “Live without the Idea”. For his pleasure, I will commence by saying that, after all, one can describe the purely empirical method as a true politics: it is a concrete sequence and dated where it has risen, existent and disappearing a practice of a new thing of collective emancipation. One can even provide examples: the French Revolution between 1792 and 1894, the People’s War in China between 1927 and 1949, Bolshevism in the Soviet Union between 1902 and 1917; and, unfortunately for The Observer, they will like this even less than my other examples: the Great Revolution of the Cultural Proletariat in any case between 1965 and 1968. Having said that, formally, that is to say, philosophically, we are speaking here of a truth procedure, in the sense that I have given the term since Being and Event. I will return to this in a bit. Let us note quickly that all truth procedures prescribe a Subject of that truth, a Subject who, even empirically, cannot be reduced to an individual.

Next, the historical component. The dating by time: a truth procedure is inscribed in the becoming-universal of Humanity, under a local form, given its spatial, temporal and anthropological support.  Labels like “French”, or “Chinese” are the empirical indices of that localization. They clarify why Sylvain Lazarus speaks of “historical modes of politics”, and not of simply “modes”. In fact there is a historical dimension to a truth, just as there ultimately has been a universal one ( in the sense I’ve given to that word in my Ethics for example, or in my Saint Paul. Or as ‘eternal’ which is how I prefer to say in Logics of Worlds or Seconde manifeste pour la hilosophie). One can see in particular that within a type of determined truth (politics, but also love, art or science) the historical inscription includes relations between different truths, and thus is situated within different points of general human times. There exists in particularly retroactive effects of a truth under other truths that have been created before it. All this requires a transtemporal disposition of truths.

Finally the subjective component. It concerns the possibility for an individual, defined as a simple human animal, and cleanly distinguished from the Subject, to decide to become part of a political truth procedure. To become, to create oneself entirely a militant of that truth. In Logics of Worlds, and in simpler terms in Second Manifest for Philosophy, I describe that decision as an incorporation: the individual body and all that it entails with his thought, affects, his potential acts, etc., become on of the elements of another body, the body-of-truth, a material existence in a given world of a truth within becoming. That is the moment where an individual announces that he can cross over the limits (of egoism, rivalry, finitude…) imposed by individuality (or animality, which is the same thing). It is even possible while remaining the individual he is, it also becomes, by incorporation, an active part of a new Subject. I name that decision, that will, a subjectivation. Generally speaking, a subjectivation is always the movement by which an individual fixates the site of truth with regard to his proper, vital existence and of a world where that existence is deployed.

I name Idea an abstract totalization of three primitives. A truth procedure, a historical belonging and an individual subjectivation. One can immediately give a formal definition of the Idea: an Idea is the subjectivation of a relation between the singularity of a truth procedure and a Historical representation. In our case, one will say that an Idea is the possibility for an individual, to comprehend that his participation in a singular political process (his entry into the body-of-truth) is also in a certain sense a historical decision. With the Idea, an individual, as an element of a new Subject, can realize his belonging to a movement of History. The word “communism” has during two centuries (since the Babeuf’s  “Community of Equals” until the eighties of the previous century) been the most important name of an Idea situated in a emancipatory or revolutionary political field. To be a communist, was to be without doubt to be a militant of the communist Party in a particular country. But at the same time it meant to be one of the million agents of a historical orientation of Humanity in its entirety.  Subjectivation binds , within the element of the Idea of communism, a local belonging to a political procedure and the immense symbolic domain that marches Humanity towards it collective emancipation.