Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Thu Sep 2 00:15:14 PDT 1999


G'day Yoshie,

And sorry to Doug for number 1 000 002, coz here it comes. I reckon Peter Starr's 'Failed Revolt' excerpt is very interesting, but I also reckon there's not a soul on this list who couldn't have written what he wrote in half the space with twice the accessibility. All that glitters is not Scruton, I reckon. And why give credit to Lacan for something he lifted from Freud or Marcuse (Thanatos).

And what's 'misprision', anyway?

And have people always hissed and jeered at tennis players who hurt their shoulder and can't play on? The tabloids are quite cross with you New Yorkers about our Pat's reception, y'know. Didn't see it (strictly football and cricket, me), but I heard it on the radio. Seems a bit off, dunnit?

Cheers, Rob.


>>From Peter Starr's _Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68_
>>(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995):
>
>***** The purpose of this book (_Logics of Failed Revolt_) is to explore
>the effects of this fascination [with revolution _as_ repetition] on a
>significant portion of that body of literary, philosophical, and
>psychoanalytic work that we in America have come to know as French theory.
>More precisely. it is to examine the strategically central role played by
>a series of commonplace "explanations" for the failure of revolutionary
>actions -- or what I call "logics of failed revolt" -- in representative
>texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous,
>Jacques Derrida, and others. My study focuses on a twelve-year period
>defined by the revolutionary events of May 1968, a period beginning with a
>resurgence of leftist activism in 1965 and ending with the massive
>abandonment of Marxist models exemplified by the "New Philosophy" debates
>of 1976 and 1977. For the threat of repetition endemic to the project of
>modern revolution, the danger that (in Barthes's words) "afterward" would
>simply slip back into "before," has arguably never received more explicit
>theoretical formulation than it did in France of the late 1960s and early
>1970s....
>
> In the texts I shall be examining here, as in so many others of the
>period in question, the modern fascination with revolution as the agent of
>historical repetition habitually expresses itself through one of three
>broad genetic scenarios. According to the first, or what I call the
>"logic of specular doubling," revolutionary action is doomed to repetition
>because revolutionaries invariably construct themselves as mirror images
>of their rivals. Derived from Lacan's work on narcissistic aggressivity
>in the mirror stage, and with significant roots in nineteenth-century
>anarchist polemics, this logic is commonly conflated with a second logic,
>a "logic of structural repetition," that I trace to a structuralist
>misprision of the critiques of Stalinist bureaucracy articulated by such
>forerunners of the French New Left (_le gauchisme_) as Cornelius
>Castriadis and Claude Lefort. Roland Barthes gives voice to this logic
>when he speaks, in a passage from _The Pleasure of the Text_, of a
>"structural agreement between the contesting and the contested forms"....
>Complementing these logics of structural repetition and specular doubling,
>one often finds various "logics of recuperation," whereby specified forms
>of revolutionary action are said to reinforce, and thus to be co-opted by,
>established structures of power. The heuristic imperative to distinguish
>among these commonplace logics of recuperation, specular doubling, and
>structural repetition is all the more compelling, I shall argue, because
>in recent theoretical usage they are eminently gregarious structures,
>prone to keep company with one another through (often unspoken) relations
>of implications.
>
> My project is a threefold one. First, it is to trace the genealogy
>of the logics of failed revolt as a constellation of theoretical
>commonplaces with direct political implications. Second, it is to use
>those logics as what the French call "des révélateurs" -- to look beyond
>remarkable consistencies in their formulation and application to the ways
>they might serve to disclose and to highlight (to develop, in the
>photographic sense) fundamental differences in their respective political,
>psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist, or "semanalytic" contexts.
>Finally, it is to subject the logics of failed revolt to the Lacanian
>question "Where is it that _it_ [_ça_] satisfies them, tricks like that?"
>in order ultimately to explore (or begin to explore) the cultural
>determinants of a theoretical moment largely shaped by the events of May
>1968.... (2-3)
>
> Considered in light of earlier accounts (by Cornelius Castoriadis,
>Jean-Paul Sartre, and others) of the inevitable betrayal of a revolution's
>aims through the process of its institutionalization, the...logics of
>failed revolt appear strikingly impoverished. As with most received
>ideas, they are not wholly false. Yet,...they attain their easy
>iterability and mythic power at the price of significant simplification.
>At the heart of such logics one typically finds absolutist conceptions of
>Power and Mastery, linked to an eternalist elision of all
>positive...historical effects. The significance of these logics for
>French theory of the immediate post-May period thus had less to do with
>their truth value than with their ability to catalyze two broad types of
>secondary gain. On the one hand, they allowed theorists to work over the
>trauma attendant to the perceived failure of May '68 by theorizing its
>eternal necessity; the work of former Maoists turned New Philosophers
>Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau exemplifies this dynamic. On the other
>hand, these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes,
>Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing field as an impasse
>in order to justify significant displacements of political energies
>(including a politicization of the literary text). (7)
>
> ...[N]ineteenth-century anarchists typically responded [to
>Marxists] wth a logic of substitution [i.e. "any figure that sets itself
>up as an alternative to the Master risks becoming a Master in its turn"].
>Thus, as early as 1846 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon replied to Marx's request
>that he participate in an international network of socialist
>correspondents by cautioning Marx against falling into "the contradiction
>of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, having overturned Catholic
>theology, set about in a great flurry of anathema and excommunications to
>institute a Protestant theology".... Elsewhere, with an apodictic
>assurance that came to be characteristic of anarchist discourse, Proudhon
>glossed his claim that "communism has simply turned property's artillery
>against the army of property"...by remarking that "the slave always apes
>his master".... Bakunin would later take up this notion of a slavish
>mimicry, inscribed as it were in the very nature of political power, when
>he complained of Marx and the other "doctrinaire revolutionaries" that
>"they are enemies only of the existing authorities, because they want to
>take their place, enemies of the existing political institutions because
>these preclude the possibility of their own dictatorship".... (17).
>
> But the ultimate function of these conjoined logics of specular
>doubling and structural repetition is to serve as an argumentative alibi,
>as a pretext (in both senses of the word)....Lefort sets the stage for the
>enunciation of an explicitly revolutionary position...through the gesture
>of dismissing back to back the practice of specular rivals....Or, more
>precisely, since it is [according to Lefort] the will to territorialize
>that characterizes the domain of revolution as repetition ("where speech
>and action are assigned residence, where one must have one's place"),
>Lefort will use the logics of repetition as foils not to a revolutionary
>position per se. but to the advocacy of a new atopian space, of that
>"non-place" where, as he writes, "the possible is reborn." This practice
>of constructing the political as a specular impasse in order ultimately to
>justify the vision of a revolutionary _non lieu_ was itself, as we shall
>have ample occasion to verify, a commonplace (a _lieu commun_) in
>theoretical discourse of the period centered around May '68. (28)
>
> In retrospect, it was the very refusal to organize the forces of
>revolution that would seem to have guaranteed the failure of May as a
>revolutionary moment. "The minority in the May events," Castoriadis
>writes in a 1986 essay, "could perhaps have become a majority if it had
>gone beyond proclamations and demonstrations. But that implied a
>different sort of dynamic, into which it clearly neither wanted nor was
>able to enter"....In order to avoid that fall back into hierarchy and
>seriality that Sartre had theorized as the necessary result of attempts to
>organize the revolution, they refused that organizational force, that
>Archimedean lever, by which alone a system of _autogestion_ might have
>been implemented.
>
> If all strategic action implies turning elements of an established
>system back against that system, taking off one's gloves (in Régis
>Debray's metaphor) to enter into struggle with "the prose of the world,"
>the student revolutionaries opted rather to keep "their hands clean --
>just enough to get them cut off. Deliberate purity, more suicide than
>accident"...."The May Movement," Alain Touraine concluded shortly after
>the events, "was creative only in what prevented it from succeeding, its
>spontaneity".... (29)
>
> Neither left nor right....By 1960 this neither/nor structure had
>long been associated with a series of...attempts to think one's way
>outside political bipolarities, most recently by such forerunners of the
>French New Left as Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. But it could
>be argued that dismissing the parties to the Cold War back to back, as
>Lacan would explicitly do later in this same seminar [on Ethics], was also
>at the time an eminently Gaullist gesture.
>
> Ultimately, however, the neither/nor structure implicit in Lacan's
>chiastic impasse is only indirectly political. First and foremost, it is
>a reflection of Lacan's principle of neutrality or nonintervention, his
>renunciation of all respective therapeutics; "_ne uter_," Catherine
>Clément reminds us in evoking this principle, means "neither one nor the
>other"....Behind Lacan's apparent refusal to cast his lot for the fools
>[left-wingers in Lacan's lexicon] or for the knaves [right-wingers in the
>same], we must read that mistrust of analytic power that had led him to
>stress the analysand's quest for the truth of his or her desire over the
>analyst's power to effect a cure.... (70)
>
> ...Human desire is an impasse [as such by definition -- for Lacan
>desire functions much like the concept of scarcity in economics],
>specifically a tragicomic one. But as an impasse desire opens out onto
>the infinite process of its unfolding through the production of what Lacan
>called, in another context, "impasse-bound detourings"....The only true
>"solution" to the impasse that is human desire, in other words, was to
>"supplement" or "develop" it through deployment of specific impasses
>endlessly conjured forth and conjured away [much like the _Fort/Da_ game
>of marketing and consumerism] -- in the process of training future
>analysts or, as Lacan would insist in the final years, in writing [or in
>becoming an ironic consumer]. It is in this sense that one could say of
>politics [or pace Lacan, of capitalism] what Lacan said of sexual
>relations, that "insofar as it doesnt work, it works nonetheless".... (73)
>
> [Lacan characterizes] Freud as an antiprogressive humanitarian:
>
>Freud was perhaps not a good father, but he was neither a crook nor an
>imbecile. That is why one can say of him two things which are
>disconcerting in their connection and their opposition. He was a
>humanitarian -- who after checking his works will contest that? -- and we
>must acknowledge it, however discredited the term might be by the crooks
>on the right. But, on the other hand, he wasn't a simpleton, so that one
>can say as well, and we have the texts to prove it, that he was no
>progressive [_progressiste]....
>
> Having conjured away the neither/nor structure implicit in the
>chiastic doubling of fools and knaves with a story of personal bliss [or
>_jouissance_ "in the gap or fissure that splits the subject caught between
>foolish desire and knavish realism," p. 71], Lacan had thus revived that
>structure in references to Freud. Neither (rightist) crook nor (leftist)
>fool, Freud occupies the puzzlingly oxymoronic space of the
>antiprogressive humanitarian. ["Within a Freudian frame, however, the
>principal model for conceptualizing the process whereby normative
>structures are perfected through the recuperation of transgressive
>tendencies is the superego in its double role as both the agent and the
>product of repression. The eternalist logic of a formulation like "since
>in denouncing it I reinforce it" ('it' being 'the misery of the world' in
>Lacan's _Television_) clearly owes more to this model than to more
>historically grounded analyses of capitalist hegemony in the Gramscian
>mold." p. 57]
>
> ...Lacan's excursus on the "political sense" of that ethic
>entrusted to Freud's heirs leads him...to the neutralizing practice of
>telling the truth "step by step" so as to avoid the metaphysical knavery
>of those who would tell the truth about truth. And yet it is a "yearning"
>for just such a truth [that is] left in Lacan's patient "by the
>formulations of this seminar"....In the opening of this chapter I
>suggested that it was Lacan's relentless critique of the demand for the
>One (truth, meaning, system, Revolution, etc.) that caused him to focalize
>the desire for the One; Lacan became the "subject presumed to know," in
>other words, by virtue of his attempts to undermine the image of the
>analyst as one who knows....That he was in fact fully aware of this
>specific instance of Möbius logic is clear from the present passage....
>(74) *****
>
>Yoshie



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