An Impatient Life by Daniel Bensaid

Author:Daniel Bensaid [Bensaid, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-227-2
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

A journey followed through the various forms of institutional mesh: school, the army, the judicial system, the press, the family. Certain guardians of an imagined orthodoxy criticised me for trying to dissolve the question of the state (to be smashed) into that of a network of powers to be unpicked.

The fifty pages (out of 430) of the final chapter, titled ‘Militant worries’, brought me far more in the way of disputes. Under the pressure of radical feminism and the nascent gay movement, the crisis of the ‘militant ideal’14 became a subject of concern. Under the pretext that ‘everything is political’, a new normative discourse claimed to abolish by decree the distinction between public and private, and imperatively dictate the liberated behaviour of the exemplary militant, male and female. I naturally recognised that a militant who refused to change personal life, beginning with their own, ‘did not bear within them the revolt needed to carry their choice to the end’. But I also suspected, behind the rhetoric of desiring machines, the announcement of postmodern sloppiness: ‘Today people talk of being fragmented: the derisory aspiration of a torn person amazed to see their own splinters fly through the air.’

In a somewhat heroised depiction of the militant adventurer, I cited a passage from Rendez-Vous manqués15 in which Régis Debray pays homage to Pierre Goldmann: ‘Militants do not tell their life stories. Between what has been experienced and what can be spoken, between the personal and the political, there has always been a barrier. Whether accessible or abrupt, militants move through life – including their own – like an iceberg: the greater part is below the waterline.’ This tone, very ‘lonesome cowboy’, brought me a (deserved) thrashing from feminist comrades, in particular the brilliant Frédérique Vinteuil,16 who mercilessly flayed the nostalgias and ambiguities of an enlightened (by candlelight) macho.

She was largely right, but I was not completely wrong. A good quarter of a century later, I remain convinced that it was an illusion, often painful and sometimes deadly, to pretend to strip off the ‘old Adam’ (or the young Eve) by decree, in order to expose them, naked as worms, to the pale lights of the age. Excited by an inflation of the image, the fearsome narcissistic desire for ‘transparency’ and ‘visibility’ was at work.17 The more robust could stand being stripped naked quite well. Others did not survive this.

The discreetly totalitarian formula of ‘everything is political’ has its (little) share of truth, on condition of immediately making clear: to a certain degree and up to a certain point. The division between private and public is certainly a mark of the specific alienation of a commodity society of generalised division and duplicity: each individual is internally split, on the model of the commodity (split into use-value and exchange-value) or of labour (split into concrete and abstract). But this intimate cleavage is also a protection against everyday aggression, against relations of personal submission and dependence, against totalitarian forms of control and domination.

My three years of hibernation in the cocoon of Rouge quotidien immediately followed La Révolution et le Pouvoir.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.