A FEW EXPLOITS OF THE IMAGINARY PARTY
“Not a party, but perhaps a new kind of partisans,
who would abandon the classical kinds of agitation
to instead make highly exemplary disturbing gestures.”
At the time of writing, the first phase of the critical metaphysicians’ activity can be considered complete. Its dominant trait was experimentation. In general we expected nothing to come of our actions except for us alone. It was most often about interrupting the predictable course of behaviors at a selected point in social space-time, of creating situations where the truth of our era would be forced to unveil itself. Such aims were opportunely in accord with our strength and capacities; and, like them, they have now been surpassed. Thus our victory or our defeat can’t really be measured in the ordinary terms of effectiveness; after all, up to the present we have voluntarily situated ourselves outside of those terms.
The situation that the critical metaphysicians started from was no less than the bankruptcy of the ensemble of modern political practices. Demonstrations hence have become incapable of demonstrating anything that the Spectacle hasn’t already said, and from one year to the next have progressively taken on the dimensions of a fastidious ritual, offered as an amusement to the benevolence of the dominant chatter, and to the emissaries of the various city authorities. Strikes, for decades now, have only served the sinister function of punctuating the low water marks of “democratic life,” and are only any good for occasionally stirring up the monochromatic festering of the rotting union system. And so, organized scandal has ended up withdrawing in the face of domination’s having liquidated all objective morality, meaning, and effectiveness. From this observation was born the naïve hypothesis of the first critical metaphysicians, who considered that if the most modern procedures, properly speaking, were today also the most worn out, it followed logically that the most ancient would also prove the newest. The first consequence drawn from this cursory analysis was the decision to try out the use of sermons, which, as we know, Gramsci devoted more than a little time to over the course of his detention. The first “sermon to the Blooms” was thus put on the agenda for the 15th of May, 1998, at 2 pm, in Sorbonne square. At the pre-set time, then, a critical metaphysician, for lack of a pulpit, climbed up on a statute of the pitiful Auguste Comte and began to harangue those present. Well aware of the deafening heights of human sleep that our contemporaries have climbed to in spite of so many slips and falls, we gave a tone of invective to the oration for the majority of its length. Either way at least, we didn’t expect any real awakening to happen. Indeed, it was far from being obtained on that occasion, but we couldn’t feel any grief about having been excessively conciliatory or anything, as can be seen from these few extracts:
“These gentlemen order you to smile; France Telecom swears to you that it will make you simply love the year 2000; the SNCF [French train company] explains politely that you can’t act like you’re at home when you’re on its platforms; your prime minister orders you to work, and you go without saying a word into this landscape of infamy… You were wrong to think that you were safe from everything in your humid and glacial withdrawal into private life, where the walls drip with muck; and that’s how – agglomerated into clusters, overcome with trembling, terrified, bald and scrawny - the phantoms have put you at their mercy. You, the Shivering Ones, the Kneeling Ones, the Cave Dwellers, you the Cowards, the Frightened Slaves. It’s time for you to come out of your holes. You are truly sinister.”
“…It takes you eighty years to die of the absurdity of an existence where you’ve ended up confusing subjective life with the banal irony of your caprices. You work, you consume, and between these two unchanging poles of the empire of nothingness, you just wish to be allowed to sleep. You think that’s living!? … We aren’t counting on you ever forgiving yourselves for having to such an extent and for such a long while failed to know real life; and we expect you to do that all the less since this whole society has sworn to never pay for anything but alienation, and lavishly so. The most blinkered among you will then flatter yourselves that they are being reasonable while refraining of course from making the humiliating admission that if they think for themselves it’s just that they’ve been thought for by others. Some will certainly condemn us for being unjust. Because, after all, they’re suffering from the present state of things. They certainly do suffer, but their suffering touches no one and evokes no compassion because they’re martyrs of nothing, nothing but themselves, which isn’t much. The misery that their nullity and finiteness imposes on them is itself null and finite; it’s not a human misery, it’s an animal’s. The most refined among you will condemn the domination and tyranny of a handful of corrupt leaders, and wink knowingly. But indeed your submission is the whole reality of the world of domination. It’s not you and the “system,” its dictatorship, its poor people, and its suicides. It’s just you in the system, subjugated, blind, and guilty. We reproach you for your harmlessness.” And then the preaching ended with these words, the consequences of which were immediately felt: “Show us that you are not the subjects of your actions. But if you are, I hope you die of your indifference.”
Unable to refuse such a radiant chance to play the innocent bystander, a good number of passers by stopped and, hearing what was happening, a few tried to applaud the spectacle. But the weight of the insults they received in response dissuaded them from persisting in their effrontery. Unfortunately, by and large the spectators weren’t gifted with enough of an attention span to be able to listen to a speech much longer than an ad spot. So, quite soon they had to give up trying to use us as entertainment, and went off to listen to some group of failed musicians who, a few meters away, were offering infinite comfort with some music that sounded like a dog food ad. A little while after our sermon, there was a demonstration by some bikers whose pride had been wounded by an odious ministerial decree, which for a few moments blocked Saint-Michel boulevard, and the indifference they were treated to for it was comparatively less sustained. Thus, it seems that among our contemporaries people are somewhat more sensitive to the noise of motors than to calls for truth. “Indifference,” wrote the divine Hello, “is a hatred of a kind all its own: a cold, lasting hatred that hides itself from others and sometimes from itself behind an air of tolerance, since indifference is never real. It is hatred coupled with a lie.” Later on, in his work Mankind, he added: “death, indifference, and separation are three synonymous words.”
> Considering:
1 – All the inexhaustible perseverance that the French Philosophy Society [SFP] has shown ever since it has held sway to ensure that “dangerous thoughts be put aside until their poisons evaporate” (Nizan),
2 – The universal stakes involved in the conflict between our chthonic comrade Raguet and the president of said society, Bernard Bourgeois,
3 – The person of Jean-François Raguet himself, that raw artist of agitation, who for the great edification of the centuries will remain the inventor of the dig-it-ist dialectic and more generally of a Weltanschauung founded on coupling the principles of Hi-Lo poker and projective geometry, which also forms the foundation that as the perpetual secretary of the Commission for the Repression of Anti-Philosophical Activities he has made it our duty to uphold in a good number of circumstances, in keeping with the line of the Politburo of the Shit-Fuckers’ International (IFM),
4 – that said comrade was among us that day,
5 – that an objectively perfectly random chance gave rise to the SFP having one of their superfluous meetings at the nearby university at 4 pm on the Saturday in question,
the critical metaphysicians could not, without infringing upon their duties, do otherwise than to support comrade Raguet, and second him in the distribution of his tract We’re not fucking around anymore! Total war on these dogs! Let no one be mistaken: the sympathy we might feel towards comrade Raguet in no way prejudices our agreement with his obligations (Jean-François Raguet persists in believing that he can infiltrate and undermine the French Communist Party all by himself), or with his theoretical positions; this is a man who speaks a totally different language. We feel that the reproduction here of the first paragraph of his tract as well as the last gives the reader rather a good idea of its content and spirit:
“What?! 30 years and 10 days ago, May 4th, 1968, I was one of the first seven students to be sent to jail by the De Gaulle regime, when Georges Pompidou was prime minister and you, Bernard Bourgeois, were a professor at the Sorbonne and the president of the board of admissions at the college of Philosophy, and you think you can impress me now by threatening me with exclusion from the University because I insulted you? Revolting pig! Pathetic little shit! Count your pellets, cretin, because you’re made like a rat! You didn’t have to distort the facts! And since you have distorted the facts and have been caught red handed, of course now you want to try to flail about defending yourself ignorantly. You’re just sinking deeper in the shit, you fuck; you’re predictable like clockwork, you abortion. But tell me, you filthy bastard, once you’d kick me out, how did you think you were going to make me shut up? […]
I’d like to piss in your hair-part, but you’re too low for that, Bernard Bourgeois, you snotty eruption on a termite’s anus! Go ahead and hold your head high as long as you can. A surprising clinical case you are – an aberration like you really does belong in one of the formaldehyde jars in the Dupuytren museum as an archetype of the perfect specimen of a mother fucker.” (We note that since then, the sordid maneuvering of the abovementioned Bouregois worked out for him, because Jean-François Raguet was indeed suspended from the University for one year.)
By a reflex that points out what they really are rather well, these gentlemen “philosophers,” thus having encountered some difficulty making good on their right to speculate innocently, quite naturally called their security guards, and then, faced with the diffuse impotence of the latter, they called the police. Thus could they unrestrainedly free themselves from their mask of vain and pretentious clowning. And although there was already something fishy about anyone with even the slightest illusions about the decrepit state of the University, that “grand, tender, warm free-masonry of useless erudition” (Foucault), it has now become abundantly clear: its sleep is the sleep of death.