From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

From Bataille to Badiou Lignes: The Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 54

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DAVID WALKER University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 39 Sara Kippur and Lia Brozgal, Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today 40 Lucille Cairns, Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel 41 Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France 42 Katelyn E. Knox, Race on Display in 20th- and 21st Century France 43 Bruno Chaouat, Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism 44 Denis M. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations 45 Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A Cultural History 46 Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

47 Jason Herbeck, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean 48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation and the Postfrancophone Lyric 49 Colin Davis, Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing 50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary 51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel 52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod, Locating Guyane

A drian M ay

From Bataille to Badiou Lignes: The Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017 From Bataille to Badiou

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2018 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2018 Adrian May The right of Adrian May to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-043-8 epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-825-0 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vii A Note on Abbreviations A Note on Translations

viii ix

Introduction – Lignes: An Intellectual Review after the Death of Both Intellectuals and Reviews

1

1 French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism: Bataille and Blanchot in the 1930s

25

2 The Communism of Thought: Reviews and Revolution in the 1960s with Blanchot and Mascolo

60

3 Immoral, Impure, Atheist Artists? Developing a neo-Nietzschean Critical Ethos for the Twenty-first Century 94 4 Breaking the Consensus: Immigration and la pensée unique 129 5 Power without Politics: Domination Theory and the Crises of Capitalism

159

6 Combatting the Crisis: Reconstructing Political Agency from Rousset and Foucault to Rancière and Badiou

185

7 Excluded from Thought? Lignes, Literary Conservatism and Identity Politics

218

Conclusion – Lignes: The Preservation of French Radical Thought 256 Appendix 1: Lignes Editorial Board Members

267

Appendix 2: Lignes Issue Titles

269

vi

From Bataille to Badiou

Lignes Articles Cited

273

Other Works Cited

285

Index

303

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

This book could not have happened without a wide range of support from various figures over the years. The unflagging attention and empathy of Martin Crowley, alongside his uncompromising integrity and critical insight, have been invaluable. Sincere thanks also to Michel Surya for his time and indulgence in the project. Emma Wilson and Ian James provided constant and generous support and inspiration and, alongside Martin, formed the intellectual heart of the vibrant and engaging French Department at Cambridge of which it was a pleasure to be a member. This book would not have existed without the precious help and input of Simon Swift, Timothy Mathews and Patrick ffrench, who provided my first academic models to follow. Discussions with friends and colleagues throughout the years have been hugely influential: special thanks to Lisa Jeschke for her constant input, critical comments and repeated proofreadings. Edmund Birch, Giovani Mennegalle, Laura McMahon and those at the Twentieth Century Research Seminar at Cambridge fostered this project through its crucial stages. Many thanks to my readers and proofreaders, Jonathan Davis, James Wishart, Jeff Barda, Juliette Feyel, Liran Razinsky, Rosalind Harvey, Nathan Dize and Cassandra Lovejoy. All errors of course remain my own. This book was written with the support of an AHRC Doctoral award, for which I am very grateful. My thanks also to the empathetic and incisive editorial team at Liverpool University Press for welcoming this book into their collection.

A Note on Abbreviations A Note on Abbreviations

To facilitate the identification of works appearing in the review’s pages, throughout the book references to articles appearing within Lignes will be abbreviated in the form (L.issue number.year, page number) for articles in the first series, and (LNS.issue number.year, page number) for articles in the second series: so an article appearing on page 23 of issue 6 of the first series is L.6.1989, 23, and an article appearing on page 63 of issue 14 of the second series is LNS.14.2004, 63. Full references can be found in the list of Lignes articles cited at the end of this volume.

A Note on Translations A Note on Translations

As this book is aimed not only at French studies scholars, but also at introducing Lignes to a more broad, non-French-reading audience interested in ‘French Theory’, where possible I have used published English translations for citations. Otherwise, all translations within the text are my own. When published translations have been drawn from articles which originally appeared in Lignes, I have also included the reference to the review in the form noted above.

Introduction Lignes: An Intellectual Review after the Death of Both Intellectuals and Reviews Introduction

‘Paris is today the capital of European intellectual reaction’: this was Perry Anderson’s verdict in 1983 (32). Whilst the 1960s had seen France produce some of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century (not least among them Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault), the subsequent generation seemed politically and intellectually more conservative. Two years previously, France had elected François Mitterrand and his Socialist Party (PS) to power to initial waves of euphoria. Yet by 1983 the relationship had already soured, as the socialists abandoned their attempts to create a more egalitarian society to instead embrace the liberal economic orthodoxy that characterised the 1980s. Government spokesman Max Gallo famously lamented the ‘silence of the intellectuals’: though not wishing to openly criticise the PS at this early stage, many intellectuals felt unable to be enthusiastic about the party’s new direction and deserted the government in droves. The end of a period of extraordinary theoretical and revolutionary fervour was symptomatically marked in 1983 as the radical review Tel Quel mutated into the more religiously orientated L’Infini. Even a cursory glance at book titles from this period attests to a sentiment of gloom: Félix Guattari described the 1980s as The Winter Years (1986), whilst Jean-François Lyotard wrote the headstone for the Tomb of the Intellectual (1984). With proclamations of their demise appearing everywhere, intellectuals started to become objects of academic study. Jean-François Sirinelli formed his influential research group on the history of intellectuals in 1985: ‘Removed from a pedestal and placed beneath the historian’s magnifying glass’, the intellectual

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From Bataille to Badiou

had become ‘an historical object best viewed with retrospective vision’ (Brewer, 1997, 18). As a consequence, reviews, the favoured publishing organs of French intellectuals, also seemed threatened. A marked decline in their quality and quantity was frequently noted, and organisations such as Ent’revues (1986) and L’Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (1988) were created both to preserve their archives and to provide financial support to those still battling on. Yet it seemed futile to try and stem the tide: eulogies for the deaths of both intellectuals and reviews remained constant refrains throughout the 1990s. Subsequently, a familiar narrative became established: just as the ‘French Theory’ inspired by thinkers of the 1960s started to dominate humanities departments in American and British universities, la pensée 68 was subject to a concerted backlash in France.1 Furthermore, chastened by the revelations of Stalinist repression contained in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1974), penitent intellectuals abandoned radical politics for a more sober stance as responsible participants in a consensual liberal democracy. Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect:

1 A note on terminology. Throughout this book the term ‘French Theory’ will refer to the (principally) American reception of the post-structuralist and post-modernist thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s and their subsequent deployment in new disciplines including postcolonial, gender and queer studies. As will become clear, the entire Lignes project is, in part, an attempt to defend the intellectual legacy of a certain broad church of twentieth-century French thought that can loosely be grouped under the term la pensée 68. As used here, the term encompasses not only the thinkers of deconstruction and philosophies of difference (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Levinas), but also earlier and later French neo-Nietzscheans (from Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to Michel Foucault and Gilles Delezue), the heterodox Marxism of the post-war period (Edgar Morin, Kostas Axelos, Dionys Mascolo, Guy Debord), the (post-) structuralist Marxists surrounding Louis Althusser (Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière) and, lastly, the gamut of literary writers and critics who were inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger and participated in the radical reviews of the 1950s and 1960s (Roland Barthes, Bernard Noël, Jacqueline Risset). I will use ‘post-structuralism’ to refer more specifically to a tighter generation of French thinkers of the 1960s (including, principally, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault). ‘Structuralism’ will be used to refer to the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the more rigid strains of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The only ‘postmodern’ thinker referred to in any depth here will be Jean Baudrillard. However, I am not arguing for a strict demarcation of various thinkers within these camps, but merely attempting to simplify references to these tendencies and their relationship to Lignes.

Introduction

3

French Intellectuals 1944–1956, described by the author as an ‘essay on intellectual irresponsibility’ (1992, 11), was a characteristic rereading of post-war French thought through this lens. Such accounts are far from inaccurate: the politics of certain intellectuals, and the apologetic accounts of Soviet brutality they produced, can make uneasy reading in retrospect. Yet in their haste to reclaim the moral high ground, critics, both in France and abroad, often abandoned those aspects of French thought which continued to pose difficult questions for academics and democratic societies alike. Furthermore, the ubiquity of this narrative of political irresponsibility and intellectual decline also frequently occludes what happened after the 1970s. Whilst seminal studies of post-war reviews such as Tel Quel, Critique, Les Temps modernes and Cahiers pour l’analyse have all highlighted the role of reviews as crucibles of thought and praxis, few detailed scholarly accounts have made an in-depth examination of French intellectual culture since the 1980s. Contemporary French thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy remain hugely influential and extensively discussed as individual thinkers, but their emergence is rarely considered within the wider cultural milieu that intellectual reviews continue to provide – the principal gap which this book seeks to fill. In this respect, Lignes becomes an extraordinarily fruitful object of study. This intellectual review has appeared three times a year since 1987, covering art, literature, philosophy and (especially) politics. Furthermore, even a cursory glance at its publications and contributors makes plain the degree of continuity that exists between Lignes and the theoretical generation of the 1960s. Though the review is largely unknown in England and America, and to date no scholarly work has treated it as an object of study, translations of significant works first published by Lignes as part of its series of monographs have in fact resonated widely: one need only name Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008) and The Communist Hypothesis (2010), Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) and Maurice Blanchot’s Political Writings 1953–1993 (2010) to get a sense of the significance of the intellectual tradition the review has been fighting to maintain. And, despite the continued French hostility to la pensée 68 and the supposedly significant decline in review culture, Lignes has managed to persist for over 30 years, making it an excellent witness to the mutating cultural and political field in France since 1987. Examining Lignes, then, is a useful way both to elucidate the contemporary French intellectual context and to explore areas of French thought thus far unexamined in the American and British academy. This

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From Bataille to Badiou

book aims to demonstrate the persistence of a certain French radicalism in Lignes, whilst introducing several significantly understudied figures (not least Lignes editor Michel Surya) to a wider public. More broadly, the nexus of political, social, cultural and intellectual concerns contained within Lignes provides a unique perspective on the historical period from the 1980s to the present. The globalisation of democratic governance and the dearth of left-wing responses to neoliberalism profoundly altered political debate. One of the most recurrent concerns for Lignes is the growing Europe-wide consensus that immigration has become a perennial problem, exacerbated by the return of the extreme right and the constant threat of financial crises. Although the review’s strategies of contestation may have shifted, Lignes has maintained a largely intransigent political stance in the face of this European liberal consensus. The review surveyed, with growing alarm, the mutation of cultural debates, which from the libertarian spirit of the 1960s were increasingly guided by a return to traditional Western religious (or secular) values, especially when contrasted to the perceived threat of Islam. Lastly, with the rise of digital mass media and the declining role of high art in the public sphere, Lignes found itself caught between nostalgia for the virtues of authentic literary writing and a more contemporary embrace of popular culture, identity politics and the production of a democratised media landscape. These, then, are some of the most pressing issues of our modern world, and the reactions of intellectuals to this newly globalised political and cultural arena has been constantly played out in the pages of Lignes. For a young scholar such as myself (I was born in 1985, just two years before Lignes was created), this book therefore represents more than simply a study of an intellectual review: it is an account of Europe throughout my lifetime, and a re-examination of how we got to where we are today. Intellectuals and Reviews – A Potted History Firstly, however, it is important to at least attempt to define the two main entities on which the analysis of this book rests: intellectuals and reviews. Both remain somewhat slippery prey; even after 30 years of researching intellectual culture, Jean-François Sirinelli still admits that a workable definition of ‘the intellectual’ eludes him (2009, 136). Can all university professors, teachers and writers be classed as intellectuals, as sociologists would perhaps claim? Pierre Nora, like many, would disagree,

Introduction

5

arguing that ‘the classic sociological criteria for defining intellectuals […] are aberrant’ [les critères de la sociologie classique pour définir les intellectuels […] sont aberrants] (1980, 9). Instead, Imogen Long defines an intellectual as ‘someone who uses the expertise acquired in their own domain, whatever that line of work may be, literature, art and science, to speak out in the name of others to overturn injustice and the violation of rights’ (2013, 5). This emphasis on a specialism is key: whilst literary writers used to be the intellectuals par excellence, today they tend to be university researchers and scientists. Whilst their day job may earn them their credibility, however, it is what intellectuals do outside of work that matters. Rather than an actual person who could be sociologically quantified, intellectuals appear when they speak to the wider population. The term ‘intellectual’ thus refers ‘to a symbolic construct, a subject position within a particular mode of discourse’ (Brewer, 1997, 18). The ‘intellectual’ only emerges in public, through an act of speech or writing, when she draws on a position of authority generated through knowledge and research to make an intervention in current affairs. And whilst the Lignes issue devoted to tentatively defining the intellectual produces no unanimous response, Alain Brossat’s assertion that the intellectual is a function rather than an identity seems to provide the most common accord (L.32.1997, 41). For this particular book, then, the initial problem of defining an intellectual appears to be neatly elided by stating that an active participation in French review culture is the key intellectual function that will be privileged. Reviews themselves, however, are also notoriously difficult to pin down. The birth of the twentieth-century intellectual, often said to have occurred during the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), was made possible in large part thanks to rapid developments in print media and the widespread distribution of newspapers, open letters and manifestos which this allowed. New media facilitated the emergence of the intellectual, yet reviews differ from newspapers and magazines, which tend to have a frequent and regular publication cycle: thin avant-garde publications (like the Surrealist manifestos) tend to appear rarely and sporadically, whilst the thick prestige reviews I am interested in here usually appear monthly at most, but often over a much slower publication cycle, sometimes being published only once a year. For Paul Virilio, this slowness is a virtue of reviews, allowing them to interact with their historical moment in a more reflective, distanced and contemplative manner when compared to the frenetic, reactive nature of the mass media (1996, 47). Reviews are also marked by a certain position on what Parker and Philpotts

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From Bataille to Badiou

call the ‘autonomous’ and ‘heteronomous’ poles of the cultural field: they are seen as free from economic and marketing concerns because ‘the disavowal of commercial success is viewed as a precondition for purely literary [or intellectual] recognition’; and they cultivate an air of heteronomy as they often stake a claim to a ‘heretical’ stance on ‘established, or mainstream, positions, espousing artistic experimentation and independent critical thought over normative conformity’ (2009, 5). However, this apparently distinctive space in the cultural field seems under threat, as competitive market conditions increasingly foist financial concerns onto reviews. What is more, as the controversial, critical ‘essayism’ that defined reviews has since ‘achieved mainstream ubiquity’, the specificity to which they could once lay claim has recently been described as ‘increasingly invisible’ (Forsdick and Stafford, 2013, 8): what today differentiates intellectuals from journalists or bloggers? Yet if the intellectual can be described as a function rather than an essence, what principally characterises intellectual reviews might also be their functional role in consecrating theoretical movements or intellectual milieus. Throughout the French twentieth century, the editorship of, or collaboration with, an intellectual review was the principal way of gaining widespread public recognition. Anna Boschetti’s account of the relationship of mutual dependency between Jean-Paul Sartre and Les Temps modernes is a characteristic example (1988), but virtually all of today’s well-known French intellectuals passed through at least one high-profile journal on the way to fame. As Forsdick and Stafford note, when compared with the more short-term interests of commercial magazines, an intellectual review usually conceives of itself as having a certain kind of mission, a project which it then launches into the future ‘with the distinct aim of seeing it evolve intellectually and creatively’ (2013, 10). Reviews could therefore be defined by the interventions they make in intellectual culture. Régis Debray demonstrated that all of the famous French ‘isms’ were supported and developed within their own review(s), from ‘personalism’ (Esprit) through ‘existentialism’ (Les Temps modernes) to ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism’ (Critique and Tel Quel), not excluding the eponymous Annales school of historical research (1979, 86). Paul Thibaud therefore concluded that when ‘the intelligentsia has to re-examine its position […] one sees remarkable new reviews being born’ [l’intelligentsia doit réexaminer sa position […] on voit naître des revues marquantes] (1977, 519). To date, this has not changed, despite the claims of the demise of both intellectuals and reviews; the 1980s merely saw the launch of a different, more liberal

Introduction

7

and consensual form of review, and by the turn of the millennium more combative reviews were once again appearing in high volumes. Reviews still play a fundamental role in intellectual positioning and theoretical rejuvenation. Instead of trying to define these chameleonic cultural actors, it seems more useful to chart a few of the major historical tendencies of intellectuals and their reviews throughout the twentieth century to better situate Lignes as it headed into the new millennium. La Revue blanche (1889–1903) is frequently cited as the model for the rest of the twentieth century’s reviews, and it was principally aesthetically orientated. After the nineteenth century’s emphasis on art for art’s sake, the journal provided an exhaustive panorama of the best art and literature of the period, and collaborators included Apollinaire, Proust, Mallarmé and Verlaine. La nouvelle revue française carried on this legacy from 1908, attempting to represent a broad chapel, free from sectarianism and with a common thread of literary quality. Yet rather than being wholly apolitical, it was the literary output and participation in such reviews that granted these writers a weighty, public authority from which to support political interventions. Mixing a ‘pessimism concerning the world’ with an ‘optimism concerning the writer’s capacity to transcend the world’, these écrivains saw the act of literary writing as providing them a kind of universal insight and critical perspective unavailable to others (Boschetti, 1988, 100). Whilst it was Émile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’, published in the daily newspaper L’Aurore in January 1898 as a staunch defence of Alfred Dreyfus, which did the most to found the new figure of the French intellectual, literary reviews such as La Revue blanche were also a hotbed of Dreyfusards and played a significant role in turning public opinion. This ‘universal’ or ‘classic intellectual’ thus used her particular authority as a writer to ‘address those in power’, ‘to mould public opinion’ and to ‘enlighten’ based on her ‘special competence’ as ‘a universal conscience’ that transcended ‘dogmatic particularism’ (Brewer, 1997, 16). Such a model remains paradigmatic today: despite the subsequent suspicions of transcendental universal values and the diminution of the authority of writers as a form of social conscience, Gérard Noiriel claims that intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard-Henri Lévy still often don the garb of the universal intellectual (2006, 192). It was the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century which moved away from a sense of objective universalism to instead engage intellectuals in more partisan politics. This progression is clear even in the titles of Surrealist reviews, from Littérature (1919–1924) to La

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From Bataille to Badiou

Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929), and then again to Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–1933). Surrealism was latterly placed in the service of the revolution, and artistic autonomy was increasingly sacrificed to the communist project. Though he never joined the Communist Party himself, Georges Bataille, often depicted as the dark side of the Surrealist project, followed a similar trajectory in the 1930s, from the more scholarly if satirical Documents (1929–1930) to the overtly anti-fascist Contre-Attaque (1935–1936). These vanguard postures, which attempted to mobilise art and literature to form a militant countercultural or even revolutionary movement, heavily influenced later reviews in the 1960s (notably Tel Quel). This emphasis on a ‘collective adventure’ also inspired Sartre in the post-war period, yet in attempting to regain the political centre ground he abandoned the subversive marginality of the avant-garde to reclaim some of the broad ‘social responsibility’ of the universal intellectual (Marx-Scouras, 1996, 12). In Les Temps modernes (1945–present) he advocated a political engagement of both the writer and his work, yet remained wedded to the notion of a universal conscience. In the immediate post-war period, Sartre still principally referred to écrivains rather than intellectuals (Surya, 2004b, 21), and like Zola he drew his authority from the figure of the writer as an insightful observer. Yet rather than neutral, objective spectators, the popular imagination now firmly associated intellectual engagement with the political left. As Noiriel observes, at this point intellectuals like Sartre still tended to eschew a university career in favour of a sense of literary autonomy (2006, 97), but the balance between writers and professors was soon to shift. As the post-war turned into the Cold War, the room for subtle, detached intellectual positions became ever-more constrained, Sartre eventually rallying to the communist cause. The role that communists had played in the French resistance was a significant draw, and the engaged intellectual was turning more simply into a militant. At the time, such militancy often meant adherence to the dogmatic French Communist Party (PCF) and its review Lettres françaises (1941–1972), and the growing hold of Zhdanovism in the 1950s stifled freedom of expression and creative thought. 2 However, following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev’s denunciation of his predecessor in 1956, the PCF’s hold on the French intellectual left began to fracture. New, heterodox Marxist reviews began to proliferate, such as Socialisme 2 For an excellent account of this period, see Surya (2004b, 140–204).

Introduction

9

ou barbarie (1949–1967) and Arguments (1956–1962), the home of Heideggerian Marxism. Marxist economic emphases on the means of production began merging with philosophy, sociologists such as Henri Lefebvre added a cultural dimension with their critiques of everyday life and Roland Barthes mixed literary and cultural criticism with the new discipline of semiology. Other new reviews, such as Bataille’s Critique (1946–present), were set up in an attempt to cover the very best in intellectual and academic research across all disciplines, turning into a hotbed of interdisciplinary discussion and fomenting the wider development of structuralism. The stage was being set for the theoretical explosion of the 1960s, which saw the emergence of internationally renowned thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Whilst still often inspired by writers, and with a lot of experimental writing being produced in this period, literature itself was nevertheless becoming a more marginal concern for militant and scientific thinkers in this period: in Tel Quel (1960–1982), for example, authority now principally stemmed from the theoretical constructs derived from texts rather than from literature itself. Furthermore, whilst thinkers such as Derrida subsequently became famous in the anglophone world primarily in literature departments, contemporary critics have complained that there has been ‘an exaggeration of the influence of neo-Nietzschean and neo-Heideggerian tendencies’ in this period (Hallward, 2012, 3). These thinkers tended to focus more on conceptual deconstruction, linguistic play and semiotics, emphases which were more easily assimilated into literature departments than the more empirical, structuralist, psychoanalytical sciences. The focus on the more literary inclined thinkers has thus occluded the importance of the more explicitly scientific reviews, such as the combination of Althusser and Lacan found in Cahiers pour l’analyse (1966–1969). As critical interest turns towards these more scientifically orientated reviews, the diminishing importance of literature in French intellectual culture during this period becomes increasingly clear. Subsequently, this fecund period, named by Patrick ffrench as The Time of Theory (1995), has been criticised for creating an ‘upper intelligentsia’ which was essentially elitist and exclusionary, leaning heavily on opaque language borrowed from a broad range of technical disciplines (Thibaud, 1977, 523). Following the growing backlash from around 1975, there was a marked decline in the use of theoretical jargon and excessive neologisms. Furthermore, if between 1960 and 1975 intellectual reviews were clearly differentiated by their trenchant ideological positions, they

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From Bataille to Badiou

were also then vulnerable to shifts in the wider political climate. The mutation in intellectual culture with which this Introduction began will be discussed further in Chapter 1, as a frustration with high theory and a suspicion of revolutionary vanguardism led to a crisis of confidence amongst intellectuals as to their role. Many thinkers denounced their radical pasts and converted to a more pragmatic, liberal, democratic and consensual political stance, returning to a clearer discursive style in the process. Nevertheless, the theoretical moment had consecrated a definitive shift towards philosophy and the university as the principal sites of intellectual legitimation, rather than literature. The crisis of confidence in the 1970s led to a plethora of new definitions of what the intellectual should be. Characteristic of the move towards a model of knowledgeable savants rather than universal literary consciences was Michel Foucault’s definition of the ‘specific intellectual’. Rather than a general presumption of universal wisdom and moral superiority, a specific intellectual would use detailed knowledge of particular subjects to intervene in concrete problems raised by the emerging social struggles (Eribon, 2007, 37). Rather than taking power from the state or fomenting a revolution, the scope of such interventions thus tended to be more limited and aimed at modifying the relationship between governors and the governed: in the 1980s, the focus was principally on anti-racism, human rights and immigration. Intellectuals also supposedly began to take a back seat: rather than being the spearheads and spokespersons of political struggles, professors now were échangeurs, conduits facilitating the distribution of information (Noiriel, 2006, 231). This intellectual functioned less through reviews than organisations, such as Foucault’s Groupe d’information sur les prisons and Médecins sans frontières. These autonomous groups published their own brochures and used the mass media as a communicational relay. However, it is interesting to note that whilst sociology only rose to prominence as the dominant mode of specific intellectual activity in the 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had created his review Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975. This is the review that would slowly build the knowledge base, reputation and network of ­collaborators which made him one of the principal actors of the 1990s. In stark contrast, the ‘media intellectual’, born in 1977, gained legitimation ‘not because of a corpus of work which underpinned their political intervention, but via a popularisation of their work’ (Drake, 2002, 164). The phenomenon of the ‘new philosophers’ is well documented, and these media-friendly thinkers produced easy-to-read,

Introduction

11

yet overly simplistic anti-totalitarian polemics which the public found refreshingly at odds with the complex theoretical works of the preceding years. Of interest here is that this was another new intellectual configuration which seemed to bypass review culture entirely. Bernard-Henri Lévy, often seen as the media mastermind behind the rise of the new philosophers, already controlled a monograph collection at Grasset and had many mass-media contacts, and so he already had an outlet for the marketing and dissemination of his works. Television also played a central role, the new philosophers’ frequent appearances on Bernard Pivot’s Apostrophes famously cementing their rise to fame. Notably, however, Lévy would in fact later create his own review, La Règle du jeu, in 1990, suggesting that he still valued reviews as a source of prestige and influence. The tangential relationship between these new types of intellectual and reviews could suggest that the latter were losing their importance. Yet reviews played a major role in the emergence of the most significant new intellectual figure of the 1980s, one variously called the ‘committed observer’ (Jennings, 1997, 75), the ‘democratic intellectual’ (Mongin, 1994) or the ‘responsible intellectual’ (Goslan, 2004, 299). After the dismantling of the Marxist-structuralist left, the liberal thinker Raymond Aron became exemplary for his ‘modesty, moderation, lucidity and moral clarity’ (Jennings, 1997, 75). Rather than operating on one side of a strict ideological divide, Aron emphasised the need for discussion and mediation, basing pragmatic and reasoned decisions on the consultation of experts and hard evidence. Supposedly free of ideological hang-ups, responsible intellectuals were then resolutely reformist, privileging expertise and commentary over engagement (Juilliard and Winock, 1996, 388). As we shall discuss in Chapter 1, reviews such as Paul Thibaud’s Esprit, Aron’s Commentaire and Pierre Nora’s Le Débat were essential in popularising this new intellectual stance which would then dominate the 1980s. Although seemingly less radical, reviews thus remained a key means of cultural renewal, creating lasting changes in French intellectual and political culture. The emphasis on consensus proffered by Le Débat led Gérard Noiriel to pejoratively label these newly liberal thinkers ‘government intellectuals’ (2006, 120). Through their reviews’ connections to think tanks, such as the Fondation Saint-Simon, and their close relationships with journalists, business figures and politicians, intellectuals were increasingly welcomed into the most powerful institutions in modern France. Yet as the favoured posture of a French intellectual in the

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From Bataille to Badiou

past was the lone rebel contesting all and any institutional authority, such governmental collaboration is sometimes viewed as a submission (Eribon, 2007, 68), a domestication (Surya, 2000) or simply a desertion of the radically critical function of the intellectual. In his study of the participation of intellectuals in the development of public policy, Jeremy Ahearne presents several cases, such as that of Philippe Meirieu, whose active participation with the French state sent his credibility ‘into freefall’ (2010, 22). Government collaboration could sometimes be a process of intellectual suicide. Ahearne argues that the heroic image of the ‘individualist and anti-authoritarian’ French intellectual has become so powerful that it masks the role which many thinkers have had in shaping government policy, either through direct participation in policy initiatives or through their soft-power ability to steer public debates in certain directions (2010, 1). Once the PS gained power in 1981, many intellectuals had to choose whether to continue with their radically oppositional stance or to embrace the challenge of ruling, developing a ‘responsabilised’ stance that proffered pragmatic policies to concretely change people’s lives. That intellectuals post-1980 were willing to collaborate with the government and industry shows the extent to which the cultural landscape had changed with the rise of Le Débat. Ahearne is therefore correct to want to move the popular image of French thinkers beyond the clichéd and polarised binary of intellectuals versus the state. Nevertheless, this dichotomy still presents a powerful image in France. If the ‘government intellectual’ is not a rigorous, sociological category, the term remains useful, not least because it is a distinction largely held by Lignes contributors, who remain wary of governmental collaboration and thus position themselves to the left of the Socialist Party. As reviews such as Le Débat encouraged the cultivation of a greater awareness of modern science within the intellectual and political community, literary debate became even more of a rarity. After historians, among them François Furet and Pierre Nora, had dominated the intellectual scene of the 1980s, the 1990s saw a new shift as the social sciences, especially sociology, took pride of place. Yet after the consensual quietism of the 1980s, the recourse to statistical expertise became heavily politicised as the decade progressed, especially by Pierre Bourdieu and his new publishing arm, Raisons d’agir, and review, Liber (1989–1998). The wave of new social movements between 1995 and 1998 politicised large swathes of the populace, and a plethora of anti-globalisation organisations began to proliferate. As the new millennium arrived, this newly militant atmosphere further produced

Introduction

13

multiple new militant publications such as Vacarme (1997–present), Contretemps (2000–present) and Multitudes (2000–present). Reviews once more became a major conduit for intellectual activism. Marx, who had been banished from intellectual discourse since the end of the 1970s, slowly made a comeback. Tied to global anti-capitalist struggles, in recent years France has seen the emergence of the ‘radical intellectual’ (Noiriel, 2006, 100), as thinkers such as Alain Badiou combined the position of the engaged militant with a more mediafriendly, international style. Through publishers such as Verso (with its ‘Radical Thinkers’ book series), the figure of the radical intellectual has been familiar in England and America for many years, but the hegemonic grip of the liberal consensus on French intellectuals, coupled with a dose of anti-Americanism, delayed their emergence in France. Lignes had a large role to play in their eventual appearance, as it published Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy in 2008 to widespread media clamour. There was a debate over whether radical intellectuals were a symptom of a genuinely widespread political change: Adam Garuet described the radical, chic et médiatique intellectual as a relatively harmless figure who merely gave the media something different from the consensual and responsible fare offered by most contemporary thinkers (2009). Nevertheless, whilst even sympathetic critics such as Noiriel are cynical of what they see as the vulgar American posture of ‘radicality’, these figures have at least opened up debate in post-financial crisis France as economic inequality has once again become a hot topic. Furthermore, through collaborations between Lignes and Verso, they have instituted a greater communicational relay between the French and Anglo-American spheres. French reviews have a tendency to remain ‘a specifically French, Parisian phenomenon’ (ffrench, 1995, 44): this radical transnationality may challenge such parochialism, whilst further opening up the French intelligentsia to the Americanised ‘French Theory’ it has been hostile to for so long. These, then, are some of the key tendencies of intellectual activity over the last century. As we shall see, Lignes engages positively or negatively with all of these traits, reminding us that intellectuals and reviews can perform several different roles or functions simultaneously. As Noiriel argues, from Zola’s day to the present, the main conduit of intellectual activity has been and remains the public petition (2006, 187), and Lignes has published many such documents. And, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, whilst the resistance of intellectuals like Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to engaged literature was certainly

14

From Bataille to Badiou

influential for Lignes, contributors to the review also include such militantly engaged figures as Daniel Bensaïd. There are also examples of Foucauldian specific-intellectual activity in the review, and Chapter 6 details contributors’ sans-papiers activism. Whilst Lignes cultivates a sober withdrawal from the sphere of the ‘telly-intellectuals’ (LNS.23– 24.2007, 41), ‘radical’ figures like Badiou have created high-profile scandals with more ‘mediatic’ figures such as Alain Finkielkraut. The general shift from the literary to the scientific in intellectual culture seems to have affected Lignes to some extent: the emphasis on knowledge and specificity seems to have favoured ‘specialisation’, and has thus led to a rise in monothematic special issues. These were already reasonably common in the 1960s as a means to boost sales, Sylvie Patron noting that special issues of Critique sold 4,000 rather than 1,000 copies (2000, 140). Yet this trend has increased so that most issues of reviews are today almost completely monothematic, Surya noting that contemporary readers are more interested in themes than in the movement of a plural review month by month (2007, 36). Such a shift is perhaps symptomatic of a format that has moved closer to the academy and specialised research to survive within a hostile publishing climate. Nevertheless, although Surya laments the fact that few Lignes contributors still want a more literary format (2010a, 82), écriture remains a privileged activity for some participants, and literature has returned as an important point of investigation in recent issues. Approaches to the Review Form Before moving on to Lignes, a few notes on methodology. When critical interest turned towards reviews in the 1990s, two general scholarly approaches emerged: the sociological and the quasi-biographical. Jean-François Sirinelli pioneered an adapted structural constructivism that combined Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological emphasis on distinction, cultural capital and media relays with a stress on intellectual sociability – the places and manners in which the intellectual world networked. Such accounts situate intellectuals within an intellectual field of competing positions and prestige, examining the development of political networks and publishing enterprises as part of a wider struggle for cultural hegemony. Such studies often involve statistics of sales figures, graphs demonstrating the types of articles published and charts displaying the relationships between publications and institutions. They also

Introduction

15

emphasise the cultural capital of intellectuals based on their social background, education and literary or academic prestige. Half of Anna Boschetti’s The Intellectual Enterprise (1988), for example, is devoted to the emergence of Jean-Paul Sartre as the intellectual with the most cultural capital in the post-war period to then explain how his review, Les Temps modernes, was able to set the intellectual agenda for the next ten years. However, this approach is more suited to reviews aiming directly at establishing a cultural hegemony: as Lignes occupies a more marginal position in the field, the struggle over status seems less relevant. It was Surya’s heavyweight biography of Georges Bataille that accrued him the cultural capital to launch Lignes, and the review has since retained a sense of marginal integrity through the consistent quality of its contributors and their contributions. Indeed, the review’s desire to remain a radically critical voice on the outside of the institutional sphere is in itself a strategy of distinction. Nevertheless, a fully sociological approach to a publication such as Lignes seems to miss much of the intellectual specificity of what makes it interesting. This book will instead explore the review’s position in the field through the manner in which Surya established a link between the intellectual heritage adopted by Lignes and the review’s subsequent political engagements, an examination for which the second approach is more suitable. The quasi-biographical method was first used by Francis Mulhern in The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’. Mulhern described his book as an attempt ‘to understand the journal in its material specificity: not as a serially published “big book” but as a practice that unfolds in time’ (1979, ix). Scrutiny is depicted as an evolving entity much like a person with its own identity, a newborn thrown into a particular context that develops either with or against its own era. There are two main angles of research in this vein: the development of the unique ideas contained within the review over time, and the review’s critical rapport and cultural political stance with or against its own epoch. Of the monographs devoted to Tel Quel, for example, Patrick ffrench’s The Time of Theory (1995) focuses on this legendary radical review as a fecund laboratory of ideas, the cutting edge of the emerging post-structuralist ‘theoretical terrorism’. By contrast, Danielle Marx-Scouras (1996) emphasises the review’s more materialist, cultural politics, focusing on how its use of art and literature did or did not coalesce with wider Marxist or revolutionary projects. This book tends towards the latter approach in attempting to demonstrate how and why Lignes adopted certain positions at crucial historical moments, and the political stakes at root in the kinds of

16

From Bataille to Badiou

thought championed by the review. Of principal interest is precisely the use value of literature and engaged intellectuals in an era in which the horizon of revolutionary possibilities seems to be forever receding. More recent monographs, such as Stephen Parker and Matthew Philpotts’ comprehensive and groundbreaking account of Sinn und Form (2009), successfully combine elements of the two approaches. As they argue, ‘journals demand to be viewed not so much as neutral vessels for the publication of pieces by various authors, but rather as institutions in cultural life possessing shared generic properties, distinct from books on the one hand and newspapers on the other’ (3). They provide an elegant breakdown of the functioning of a review into seven component parts: 1) The founding conception or core ethos of the journal; 2) The journal’s cultural historical context; 3) The journal’s specific institutional supports, from political organisations and publishing houses to a loose literary circle; 4) The pivotal strategic and managerial role played by its editors; 5) The journal’s contributors; 6) The journal’s distinctive textual and compositional dimension as a composite and serial literary work; 7) The journal’s readership and reception.

Parker and Philpotts dedicate an in-depth chapter of their long and dense work to each one of these elements to give a rounded portrayal of the journal and its development over time. The scope of the present book is not large enough to do Lignes justice with a similar range of detail. Furthermore, given that no academic work on Lignes exists, that the review is not widely read outside of France and that this book is aimed at a broader audience of non-French studies scholars who are nevertheless still interested in the stakes of Theory, the approach taken here must also be largely expository in its attempt to represent the broad range of work contained within the review. Detailed textual analysis or conceptual probing is largely eschewed to give a sympathetic account of the mechanics of the arguments presented in Lignes to familiarise readers with the review. Such an account is deemed to be the necessary foundation on which further work on this intellectual milieu could be based, but limits the scope for material analysis on the review itself. Chapters 1 and 2 establish the review’s historical context through Lignes’ own rereading of French intellectual life in the 1930s and the 1960s, a

Introduction

17

reading which starkly positions it against its own era in the late 1980s. Chapter 3 then goes on to explore the review’s neo-Nietzschean critical ethos, particularly emphasising Surya’s role. The impact of the large reshuffle of the editorial board in the new millennium is discussed in Chapter 6. I will also attempt to introduce the review’s key contributors, and to demonstrate how their work either reinforces or diversifies the review’s core self-image or ethos. Less attention will be paid to the review’s supporting structures (mostly independent publishing houses and French cultural institutions), the material composition of the review and its marginal readership (made up of several hundred subscribers). What this book adds to Parker and Philpotts’s schema, however, is the use of the review as a tool of cultural historical analysis. Rather than just examining the impact of the historical context on the review, I also wish to explore what Lignes can tell us about French culture and society over the last 30 years. As Judith Surkis notes, there has been a recent combination of intellectual and cultural history into one and the same field (2014, 96). Intellectual history was, for a period, devalued, as cultural studies tended, for politically important reasons, to eschew the old emphasis on literary or intellectual elites to instead focus on subcultures, popular culture and the lives of ordinary people. Now, however, cultural studies is increasingly turning its lens onto the ‘socio-political concerns’ that ‘have sometimes been marginalized in intellectual history’ (Surkis, 2014, 103). The rising interest in material cultures has also led to a renewed emphasis on reviews as physical objects and the history of reading and reception (Burke, 2008, 68). And whilst French historians often avoided the term ‘culture’ to focus on mentalités, collectives or l’imaginaire sociale, some excellent studies of intellectual culture are coming out of this nexus of research, especially by François Cusset (2008a) and Julian Bourg (2007). Building on such works, chapters 3, 4 and 6 especially aim not only to situate contemporary French thought within its explicit historical moment, but to help contribute to the wider discipline of French cultural studies in the new millennium. Debates in Lignes are taken as the starting point to investigate wider shifts in French culture, contrasting its articles with other media publications and contextualising its stance within the wider historical, political or social moment. The evident danger of such a reading is that one ends up explaining intellectual ideas as solely the product of their historical moment, overdetermining the independence of thought and independent thinkers. As François Dosse argues, such a reading needs to be undertaken ‘in a way that refuses the apparent

18

From Bataille to Badiou

alternative between an internalist reading of works and an externalist approach’ that privileges historical contexts and sociological networks (2004, 335). What I hope to have achieved is to explain the stakes of Lignes in its contemporary moment whilst differentiating the positions of its contributors from those of others around them, demonstrating the uniqueness and contingency of their own particular stance. One major problem when trying to depict the history and development of a review, however, is the tendency to fix it as a single entity with one unique voice, rather than to depict it as a plural platform collecting together a plethora of positions. Reviews produce a dynamic mode of thinking, with many contributors providing a fecund plurality of responses. Despite different degrees of conceptual homogeneity, the assumption that the political line of a review can be treated as a self-sufficient object tends to be reductive. Parker and Philpotts use a comparison to fractal geometry ‘to capture the distinctive textual topography of the journal’ (2009, 281) and ‘to resolve the inherent tension between compositional complexity and compositional coherence’ (324). And, as we shall see, Surya himself attempts to theorise Lignes as a constant oscillation between a review with a particular position and an open space of diverse thought in constant motion. This book therefore attempts to attend to the multiplicity of positions in Lignes. The proper name ‘Lignes’ will be used in a manner which seems to designate a definite group with commonly shared positions, yet such references are only meant to indicate tendencies within the Lignes milieu, shared by enough contributors to be significant without implying a concrete position shared by all. ‘Lignes’ will be used as a singular noun as the review as object becomes more than the sum of its individual contributors, and the dynamic of thought the review produces is unique to its own manner of composition, yet each usage of this noun refers to a loose and shifting grouping of some of the review’s contributors, whose significant individual stances will also be delineated throughout. Similarly, given space constraints, only certain key themes have been treated; these have been selected in an attempt to give a representative account of the review, but inevitably such choices were affected by the author’s own particular interests. For a sense of what has been left out, the reader is encouraged to peruse the list of Lignes’ thematic issues provided in the Appendix: issues on messianic thought, the human-animal relationship, anarchy and the role of art in prison are just some of the topics which could not be covered in depth in these pages. There are unfortunate consequences of studying one review in detail, especially given the intensity of the affective ties periodicals can create

Introduction

19

amongst their readership. Philippe Forest was criticised for being too close to the Tel Quel milieu to be genuinely critical, as his Histoire de Tel Quel (1995) twists and turns in its attempts to prove the critical wisdom of even Philippe Sollers’s most absurd decisions (Hourmant, 1996, 122). Whilst attempting to avoid apologetics, the aim of this study is to present, as clearly as possible, the ideas contained within Lignes. Such a detailed understanding requires a degree of sympathetic reading and explication. Furthermore, when other reviews are discussed in Lignes, they are usually used as foils against which Surya’s review defines itself oppositionally; as a result, publications such as Esprit and Le Débat appear in Lignes in a somewhat caricatured form, defined by their worst aspects. An effort has been made to avoid assuming such caricatures in this book, but to give an equally empathetic account of Lignes’ contemporaries would require reading them in equally comprehensive depth, something simply not possible within the scope of this study. Furthermore, as the entire Lignes project is to some extent a revision of twentieth-century intellectual history, the narrative produced in explaining the review’s trajectory is always already bound up with this review’s own position-taking in the field. The reader is therefore advised to view the depiction of reviews other than Lignes with a degree of reservation. Lastly, Jean Starobinski notes that, for its contributors, a review usually has a constant face: that of the friend who is also the editor (1996, 8). This seems to be especially true of Lignes, in which Michel Surya has always been the dominant figure. During the first series, editorial duties were split roughly between Surya, Francis Marmande and Daniel Dobbels, yet Surya’s voice remained the most prominent. Furthermore, the larger editorial board inaugurated in the new millennium is strictly not décisionnaire (Surya, 2007, 30): members can suggest themes that the review could tackle, and subsequently these editors often play a large role in constructing the individual dossiers, but Surya always has the final say. Surya is little known in the anglophone academy, except for his award-winning biography of Georges Bataille, first published in 1987 and translated in 2002. Yet alongside editing Lignes for nearly 30 years (in itself a considerable achievement), Surya has published six fictional works, five volumes of literary criticism, five volumes on political domination, a history of revolutionary post-war French thought and a collection of essays on Bataille, whilst also editing and prefacing many republished works by this now canonical author. Surya is a major French intellectual figure long overdue closer anglophone attention.

20

From Bataille to Badiou

Yet, as with the review, ‘Michel Surya’ is himself a tricky object of study. He frequently states that Lignes is not the review he would like it to be, but a review that the epoch has created in its image (LNS.23– 24.2007, 12). The minor role of fiction and poetry in the review (Surya, 2010a, 82), and the later emphasis on communism over anarchism (Surya, 2009b, 55), are merely two examples of Surya ceding his own desires to the wider demands of Lignes’ contributors and today’s political and publishing climate. Surya stresses that he is not in total agreement with everything that appears in Lignes, and so his stance cannot be strictly aligned with the review. Care is taken to disentangle Surya’s views from those of Lignes at large but, given the prominence of his voice in shaping the review, there can be no strict division between the two. Meadow Dibble-Dieng has argued that editing a journal is in itself ‘a distinct form of writing, one we must increasingly learn to read’ (2013, 224). Other than when referring explicitly to his monographs or articles, references to ‘Michel Surya’ should be perceived as an attempt to read him as an editor-writer, one whose life has been devoted to fostering Lignes as its own autonomous and plural entity, rather than simply as an independent individual. Lignes: From Bataille to Badiou Alongside some methodological considerations, the above has briefly sketched the history of both intellectuals and reviews through the twentieth century. A more detailed historical account will be given in chapters 1 and 2 to situate Lignes within the intellectual field at the moment of its creation in 1987. Yet these chapters have a dual function, as they also elucidate the review’s construction of its own intellectual genealogy, focusing on the response of key thinkers to two major historical moments – the 1930s and the 1960s. Chapter 1 examines the political engagements of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in the face of fascism. Returning to events occurring half a century before the creation of Lignes may seem an excessive act of historicisation. However, Lignes’ editors Surya, Marmande and Dobbels were key figures in establishing the known narrative of these events and, confronted with the rewriting of intellectual history that accompanied the rise of liberalism in the 1980s, the production and defence of their version of Bataille’s and Blanchot’s political pasts was one of Lignes’ primary tasks. Furthermore, many of the review’s contributors returned

Introduction

21

to the 1930s to develop their own intellectual and political positions. Bataille’s dual critique of liberal democracy and fascism programmatically orientated Lignes’ future political stance, as well as laying the groundwork for the literary neo-Nietzschean intellectual critical ethos which characterised the review’s first series. Blanchot was a more problematic figure: although obviously hugely influential for la pensée 68, throughout the 1980s and 1990s revelations concerning Blanchot’s pre-war ties to fascist and anti-Semitic groups seriously challenged his intellectual legacy. As we shall see, Lignes was long caught between defending Blanchot’s intellectual record and remaining circumspect in condemning his political past. Chapter 1 concludes by examining the review’s recent issue, Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot, in which this thorny problem is finally addressed. Chapter 2 covers important issues dedicated to Blanchot, Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo. Throughout the 1990s, Lignes undertook a significant process of documentation and contextualisation to restore the lost narratives of the trio’s intellectual engagement, and went a long way to elucidate their influence on later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The models of intellectual engagement and cultural politics provided by their activities throughout the 1960s also directly influenced Lignes: debates surrounding the concept of friendship, heterodox communism, new modes of intellectual solidarity and the relative autonomy of art and literature all feed into contemporary contributors’ own thought. Blanchot’s aborted Revue internationale (1960–1965) also became one of the most influential predecessors for Surya’s own review. Lastly, Lignes’ relationship to the period of high theory is examined, as its different historical moment and intellectual genealogy tempered its embrace of transgressive and revolutionary aesthetics, despite the review sharing a literary canon similar to that of Tel Quel. Crucially, a significant line of tension is also opened up between the more theoretical and philosophical communism of Blanchot, and Mascolo’s own more materialist, revolutionary and anti-liberal stance. This fault line remains inherent in Lignes, as its first series is dominated by neo-Nietzschean thinkers keen to avoid dogmatic, divisive and pragmatic politics, yet its second series sees the increased participation of ex-Althusserians and Trotskyists more intent on relaunching a programme of communism to offer a direct challenge to liberal-democratic governance. Central to Surya’s enterprise is to hold these two intellectual vectors in constant tension, rather than attempting to resolve one in favour of the other.

22

From Bataille to Badiou

The subsequent two chapters focus more specifically on the first series of Lignes (1987–1999). If Surya is reluctant to ascribe specific positions to the review, Chapter 3 investigates several thematic issues from its first series to elucidate what could be described as its literary neo-Nietzschean critical ethos. More intriguingly, this chapter explores how such an ethos, fomented in the radical libertarian climate of the 1960s, needed adapting to the contemporary world after the 1980s. As documented above, literature played a less central role in intellectual culture in the 1980s onwards, and so whilst the review continued to espouse autonomous artistic values and the importance of writing as a mode of thought, literature itself remained a more marginal presence within Lignes. Additionally, with the collapse of grand political narratives and increasing fears of communist totalitarianism, the review embraced a deconstructive or post-foundational insistence on the arbitrary nature of all identities against any claims of national, racial, religious or cultural authority. Nevertheless, with a resurgent extreme right growing in France, the extent to which this post-foundational ontology could be politicised directly against nationalism became questionable. Similarly, following Nietzsche’s emphasis on the death of God, the review initially harboured an aggressively anti-religious stance. However, as laïcité (secularism) was increasingly mobilised against France’s Islamic minority, the review felt compelled to soften its stance, weaving a protection of stigmatised populations alongside a critique of institutionalised religious power. Lastly, Surya lamented the rise of moralising critical discourses across the cultural and political spectrum, emphasising a Nietzschean immorality in contrast. Yet the review sometimes adapted its moral stance in tandem with the times, as seen most clearly surrounding the issue of paedophilia. Rather than a total and resolute immoralism, the review instead seems to argue for total artistic freedom in creative works, but otherwise a sense of personal responsibility in the public realm. This chapter, then, demonstrates the tempering of the review’s radically libertarian neo-Nietzscheanism as Lignes developed a certain sense of editorial responsibility. The shift of the review’s political concerns, from the rise of the extreme right to a critique of the electoral left, is tracked more explicitly in Chapter 4. The rise of low-level racism and anti-Semitism, coupled with a theoretically advanced far right, were initial problems for the review. Pierre-André Taguieff’s account of neo-racism provided a significant first step in developing a counter-discourse but, as Taguieff himself shifted towards a neoconservative republican defence of

Introduction

23

European culture, the review turned increasingly to Étienne Balibar’s class-based analysis for a more coherent response from the Marxist left. Whilst the rise of the FN remained a perennial concern for Lignes, towards the end of the 1990s, and with the emergence of the new social movements, the review increasingly attempted to take stock of how the global dominance of financial capitalism was hamstringing the electoral left. Lignes temporally housed alternative policy debates, yet it was principally the activism surrounding immigration and the sans-papiers that was retained heading into the new millennium. The combination of the sociocultural and economic impacts of migration would dominate the review’s concerns in the new millennium. Taking its cues from the review’s heightened attention to the structures of global capitalism, Chapter 5 examines the presence of domination theory in Lignes. Post-war Western Marxism has been accused of an overly aesthetic focus; here, Lignes contributors, from Michel Surya to Anselm Jappe, attempt to restore an economic aspect to Frankfurt School theories of political domination. Surya had frequently lamented the growing moralisation of intellectual and critical discourses, and in his landmark text, De la domination, he argued that capitalism itself had attempted to render itself unimpeachable by shifting the terrain of the debate from political to moral issues. Yet critics inside Lignes, such as Daniel Bensaïd and Frédéric Neyrat, were concerned that Surya’s take on domination theory was too totalising, depicting capitalist power as an all-encompassing panopticon without any exterior refuge. With Jean Baudrillard’s more playful accounts of a fractal, virtual economy also seeming dated and naïve following a series of serious economic crises, the review reread Guy Debord to construct a new conception of structural alienation which provided a surprisingly prescient account of contemporary economic problems. The prognosis was pessimistic, however, and the trappings of domination theory – a relentless pessimism that leaves no grounds for positive, pragmatic politics – still left many of the review’s contributors frustrated. In contrast to the pessimism elicited by domination theory, Chapter 6 focuses on the review’s renewed search for active political agency in the new millennium. The second series of Lignes (from 2000 to the present) saw the construction of a new editorial board and a new intellectual genealogy, including Trotskyist figures such as David Rousset and a plethora of former Althusserians. This chapter continues the account of Lignes’ political concerns, notably around immigration and the proliferation of legal detention centres. Discourses of securitisation and

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From Bataille to Badiou

crisis were opposed by Lignes as the review drew more on the works of David Rousset and Michel Foucault than those of Giorgio Agamben; the former were seen to both articulate the threat of the rising use of states of exception and also allow forms of micropolitical agency to emerge in response. Stronger forms of prescriptive politics were proffered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, but their total rejection of parliamentary processes also caused divisions in the review’s milieu, posing the question of the role of the intellectual under liberal democracy. However, by 2012 the continued rise of the FN and the seemingly abject failure of the PS to provide an adequate response to Sarkozy’s aggressive neoliberalism left the review in a quandary, seemingly giving up on both the ballot box and any pragmatic alternatives. Whilst the majority of the book thus reads Lignes sympathetically, Chapter 7 takes a more critical stance by examining the tensions within the review’s rejection of identity politics and thus staging a comparison between anglophone French Theory and Lignes to detect what remains unthought in its pages. The chapter begins by considering the kinds of cultural politics the review’s defence of a certain kind of exceptional literary production entails. If literature is seen as a space of radical thought, the subjects often excluded from this realm of thinking, not least women and ethnic minorities, seem to undermine the universal significance of such a literary project. Yet, despite its hostility to recent mobilisations of republican ideology, Lignes as a review would find it hard to justify a programme of positive discrimination. The chapter goes on to examine why. Whilst the political and intellectual stakes of postcolonial theory are assumed by Lignes, there is a distinct discordance concerning issues of cultural identity. The benefits of nuancing the review’s stance on identity politics will be explored via the debates over parity and the PACS civil partnerships and the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at Alain Badiou. It will be suggested that a more affirmative stance on minority struggles may help the review extend its lifespan into the future without eradicating the negative tensions, productive to thought, that continue to emerge through Lignes. The book then concludes by tying together the individual narratives of Lignes’ progression to examine the stakes of its intellectual project over the last 30 years, as well as lauding its significant successes. From Bataille to Badiou, and back again, how has the review’s neo-Nietzschean intellectual trajectory changed over time, and where does this leave the institution of the intellectual review heading into the twenty-first century?

chapter one

French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism Bataille and Blanchot in the 1930s French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a foundational figure for Lignes. In 1987, having published Michel Surya’s George Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre, Frédéric Birr asked Surya to head a new literary review for Éditions de la Libraire Séguier. Surya accepted, and recruited to the editorial board Francis Marmande, a jazz enthusiast who had recently published his doctoral thesis on Bataille. The first five issues of Lignes carried an epigraph from Bataille, numerous articles and two entire issues of Lignes were subsequently dedicated to him, and to date ten original Bataille texts have been republished in the Lignes book collection. Surya is keen to stress that Lignes is not strictly une revue bataillienne (LNS.23–24.2007, 35). However, Surya, Marmande and their review have done much to document, preserve and defend Bataille’s intellectual legacy, and their interpretation of his life and work remains the best introduction to the periodical’s critical and political approach. Crucially, whilst Bataille was long suspected of harbouring fascist sympathies in the 1930s, the Lignes editors have spent the last 30 years vigorously defending his political record, remobilising Bataille’s dual critique of liberalism and fascism in the 1980s. By intervening in the historical reception of Bataille, the review also justified its own critical position in the present. The third and final recruit to this initial editorial board was the choreographer and art critic Daniel Dobbels. Dobbels was close to the milieu surrounding Maurice Blanchot, and throughout the 1990s Lignes was therefore able to republish extensive documentation of Blanchot’s political activities in the 1950s and 1960s in the company of Marguerite

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From Bataille to Badiou

Duras, Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo. Whilst by then consecrated as his generation’s most important literary critic, the emphasis placed on Blanchot’s political engagements was a significant move by Lignes at the time. Given that Bataille and Blanchot were close friends, and that both were influential precursors for the post-structuralist generation, Lignes was frequently associated with them. Blanchot’s direct influence on Lignes was more tangential than the programmatic manner in which Bataille’s thought structured the review. Nevertheless, Blanchot’s major role in twentieth-century French intellectual culture strongly affected the position which Lignes would come to occupy. Drawing attention to Blanchot’s political past also left the review in an awkward situation, however: whilst his activism in the 1960s sat comfortably within the radical left, in the 1930s Blanchot had been a militant journalist for the extreme right. He not only wrote for, but edited and financed, publications that were openly anti-Semitic, entreating their readers to violently resist Blum’s Popular Front in favour of a nationalist revolution with fascistic overtones. Most of Blanchot’s post-war readers had been unaware of his past, but during the 1980s and 1990s these facts were slowly coming to light. How could a journal like Lignes, so committed to combatting the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in the late 1980s, be noticeably protective of an author guilty of precisely these associations? Compounding matters further, Bataille’s activities in the 1930s were also coming under increasing scrutiny; although he moved in heterodox communist and revolutionary circles, the violent rhetoric which Bataille used in organisations such as Contre-Attaque and the College of Sociology seemed to express admiration for the powerful energies unleashed by fascism. Retrospectively, doubts began to be cast over Bataille’s and Blanchot’s intellectual credentials and legacies. The heated debates surrounding the past political commitments of Bataille and Blanchot were particularly significant given the predominating intellectual climate at the time. The decade spanning 1977 to 1987 was characterised by a backlash against the previously fashionable strains of Marxist and structuralist theory, and the Heidegger affair in 1987 renewed the critical focus on the relationship between French thought and fascism. Those seen to be thinking in the wake of Bataille, Blanchot and Heidegger, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, were treated with increasing hostility; even worse were publications, like Lignes, which seemed to also draw inspiration from the political, rather than merely philosophical, legacies of these figures. Surya’s commitment to the integrity of thought meant that the review

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developed an almost pedagogical mission to explore the true stakes of French philosophy beneath the surface of the polemic that subsequently developed. Explaining why Lignes continued to document, defend and develop the works of Bataille and Blanchot therefore becomes central to delineating not only the review’s position in the field, but also the intellectual history it was consciously trying to construct and inherit. This chapter will therefore mediate between three key periods: the 1930s, the 1980s and the present critical moment. It will first describe the context surrounding Lignes’ creation in the late 1980s, a climate crucial to understanding the significance of the review’s political and critical stance. Second, it will explore how Surya and Marmande’s readings and republications of Bataille’s texts from the 1930s both distanced Bataille from charges of fascism and programmatically orientated the review’s own approach to current events. Lastly, it will deal with the thorny issue of Blanchot’s fascistic journalism from the 1930s. In an atmosphere of polemic hostility, Lignes generally held back from the scurrilous debates surrounding Blanchot in the 1980s and 1990s, presenting instead a portrait of his laudable post-war politics, which will be elaborated in Chapter 2. However, the review’s ‘friendly silence’ came to an end with the 2014 special issue Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot, and Surya and Jean-Luc Nancy have since done much to clarify the circumstances and intellectual consequences of Blanchot’s participation with the extreme right. Bataille and Blanchot thus continue to play a central role in the review right up to the present moment. The 1980s – Les années d’hiver Two closely related political and publishing phenomena came to a head in 1977 to make this year indicative of a turning point in French intellectual culture: the hysteria surrounding the term ‘totalitarianism’, and the emergence of the ‘new philosophers’. The exposure of Soviet labour camps in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1974) had had a huge impact in France as it received mass-media attention and sparked virulent debates. Yet the book revealed nothing particularly new: in France, figures like Boris Souvarine before the Second World War, and David Rousset after, had already produced compelling evidence of the gulags’ existence. Furthermore, in the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, no one could realistically claim to be unaware of Soviet repression. Significantly, there was a notable lag

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in the popularisation of Solzhenitsyn’s book, the media debate only accelerating in 1977, three whole years after its French translation was published. As Michael Scott Christofferson convincingly demonstrates, the furore surrounding the book was a crutch for a wider cultural transformation, and the hysteria surrounding ‘totalitarianism’ that resulted was rooted in domestic politics. In the approach to the legislative elections of 1978, the right-wing vote was split between President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s liberal centrism and Jacques Chirac’s Gaullist party, Le Rassemblement pour la République (RPR). As a result, the growing popularity of the union between the Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) made the prospect of French communists playing an active role in a coalition government increasingly likely. Members of the modernising ‘second left’ [la deuxième gauche] were committed to driving Marxism out of French politics and disentangling the more liberal PS from its radical partner. The intellectual review Esprit, for example, saw this as ‘a battle between themselves and the PCF for the soul of the PS’ (Christofferson, 2004, 125). The Gulag Archipelago would come to play a central role in eroding the PCF’s governing credentials. In 1975, Esprit organised a political colloquium to sharpen its anti-totalitarian rhetoric and encourage the idea that, if in power, the PCF posed a grave, dictatorial threat to the French Republic. From 1977, under new editor Paul Thibaud, Esprit’s title page always carried a manifesto against totalitarianism, exaggerating the threat to France posed by the PCF. Esprit’s programme was incredibly successful, and with its allies it managed to produce ‘a near-consensus behind the position that totalitarianism is the inevitable product of revolutionary projects and discourses’ (Christofferson, 2004, 185). Despite having been ahead in the polls, the Union of the Left came second in the 1978 elections. Notably, this was also the first election since 1939 in which the PS had received more votes than the PCF; the slow decline of the PCF has since prevented it from playing a significant role in French politics. The popularity of the charismatic François Mitterrand, now head of the PS, allowed him to corral the diminished PCF into a less threatening ‘Common Programme’. Still under pressure from Chirac’s RPR, the rising unemployment and inflation caused by the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 further undermined Giscard’s credibility, and Mitterrand was subsequently able to win the 1981 presidential and legislative elections. The Socialist victory was initially a moment of jubilation. With all talk of classes and workers removed from the Common Programme, intellectuals instead embraced

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the second left’s emphasis on social movements such as feminism, gay rights and immigration. Nevertheless, the relationship quickly soured: the PS failed to support Poland’s dissident Solidarity movement when it was brutally repressed in December 1981; and, by 1983, after the initial failures of their Keynesian economic programme, the PS undertook an astonishing U-turn to embrace the liberal free-market orthodoxy which would come to characterise European integration. Once in power, the party also professionalised itself and severed its ties to the radical social movements which had fomented its electoral success. The disenchantment of the intellectual left was clear, Jean Baudrillard symptomatically describing the PS as providing only the simulacrum of an alternative (1985, 77). This disillusionment would only grow over the following years, Didier Eribon retrospectively describing this moment as the start of a conservative revolution at the heart of the PS, an inexorable intellectual, political and even existential drift to the right (2007, 19). This political phenomenon coincided with a wider shift in publishing culture. A raft of large-scale acquisitions of independent publishers, led principally by the Hachette group, intensified commercial competition in the publishing sphere. Editors began to privilege short, polemical essays rather than hefty academic tomes, which facilitated the rise of the ‘new philosophers’. This new generation of thinkers represented themselves as political dissidents resisting both political and theoretical radicalism, often claiming to be repentant soixante-huitards and adding to the general anxiety regarding totalitarianism. They unequivocally linked progressive attempts to eradicate inequality to totalitarianism, and pitted Enlightenment and republican values against the moral relativism and abstraction of la pensée 68. Positing themselves against both Marxism and the high-theoretical structuralism of the previous generation, the ‘new philosophers’ produced accessible polemics and saturated the mass media with their presence. Therefore, whilst the likes of André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy ‘offered rather simplistic and extraordinarily pessimistic political philosophies, they were enormously successful’ (Christofferson, 2004, 156). Although ostensibly on the side of the new, modernising left, Tamara Chaplin argues that ‘many of their positions were actually drawn from the repertoire of the right’, catalysing a ‘right-wing renewal’ in France (2007, 159). For Lignes, it was this rightward drift in both the political and intellectual spheres that dominated French intellectual debate from the 1980s into the new millennium. The dismantling of the emancipatory programmes of the radical left

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From Bataille to Badiou

heralded a move towards a more reactive defence of civil liberties, and after the ‘new philosophers’ the stage was set for more conservativeminded thinkers. François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (1978) played a central role in imposing historians as the most prominent intellectuals of the 1980s, and blurred distinctions between the electoral left and right by attacking the Jacobin revolutionary heritage. Not only did Furet attack Marxist historical analysis, he portrayed as dangerous any political voluntarism aiming to produce a more equitable society: the French Revolution was placed under the same totalitarian auspices as Marxism and structuralism. The implications for the present were also made clear: the Revolution was over, and a more liberal tradition of democratic consensus, civil liberties and gradualism was to be embraced. Whilst historians such as Tony Judt lamented that, in France, liberalism had ‘disappeared from the political canon of the left’ (1992, 232), in the 1980s it made a significant resurgence, aided by references to Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles de Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant. Furet and company moved the French debate closer to anglophone models of democratic liberalism, yet still emphasised universal republican values over what was seen as the shallow, consumerist individualism of America. Via his connections to editors, journalists and politicians, and his creation of the influential think tank La Fondation Saint-Simon, Furet constructed a significant network of what Gérard Noiriel polemically labelled ‘government intellectuals’ due to their proximity to parliamentary circles (2006, 130). This group of thinkers would subsequently play a very important reorientating role, intellectually legitimating the liberal political climate. In 1980, Furet’s colleagues Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet created Le Débat, the review that would most clearly mark the intellectual sea change now underway. It lambasted the polemics of the 1960s to stress the need for a reasoned consensus; in its first issue, Nora argued that it was necessary to destroy the current crop of French intellectuals in order to enforce a democratic revolution (1980, 12). Marxists and post-structuralists were seen as intransigently dogmatic and non-consensual thinkers, and so as a result many of the old intellectual guard, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, were absent from Le Débat and Esprit. Nora lauded this new liberal and consensual form of debate as a normalisation of French intellectual life, yet Françoise Gaillard argued that consensus ‘functions more as a regulatory idea for conservative thought’ (1998, 66). We must be careful when depicting this ‘liberal moment’ in French

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thought as homogenous and reactionary: as Sawyer and Stuart argue, thinkers participated in this liberal revival ‘from a wide spectrum of political positions from left to the right’ and so it ‘was never about realising a unified liberal project’, but instead a question ‘of rethinking the question of democracy’ (2016, 5). Claude Lefort, for example, used liberalism and totalitarianism to rethink democracy from a Marxist standpoint, coming to some of the same conclusions as Lignes contributors. As we shall discuss in Chapter 3, the artistic liberty desired by Lignes contributors also largely relied on a fundamental basis of liberal freedoms. What frustrated the review was not only what the emphasis on anti-totalitarianism excluded from that which was now ‘thinkable’ in France, with Marxism and la pensée 68 pushed to the margins, but also the increased level of collaboration between intellectuals, politicians and the business world. Such a debate cuts to the heart of what it may mean to be an intellectual in France: whilst some see the responsibilisation of intellectuals through their participation in the day-to-day running of the state as a positive development, most in Lignes would argue that compromising ideals for pragmatism (what Surya calls ‘domestication’) blunts the radically critical function of thought. Nevertheless, prevailing attitudes had definitively shifted, and intellectuals on the left who disagreed with the newly liberal PS were seen as irresponsible dreamers, if not closet dictators. By 1989, Raymond Aron’s Commentaire, another liberal review formed explicitly to dismantle the radical left, could comfortably claim that he and his liberal allies had ‘won’, having exorcised Marxism from French intellectual and political life (Rieffel, 1993, 257). These, then, are the reasons for the political passivity and disorientation of the 1980s, a period infamously characterised by the ‘silence of the intellectuals’ and which Félix Guattari named ‘the winter years’ (1986): Esprit’s inflated anti-totalitarian discourse drove intellectuals away from Marxism; the ‘new philosophers’ demonised structuralism and popularised a simplified, humanist, dissident stance; Furet and Le Débat imposed a newly conservative, liberal-republican hegemony; and the PS betrayed its base in the radical social movements to embrace economic liberalism. This was the period into which Lignes would be born and against which it would orientate itself. In addition, 1987 would also mark the culmination of a series of scandals surrounding intellectual complicity with fascism, which further exacerbated the critical climate that Lignes would come to inhabit.

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The Obsession with French Fascism Victor Farías’s Heidegger et le nazisme (1987) should not have provoked a media storm: Heidegger scholars already knew that the German philosopher had joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and that, until at least the following year, he had wanted to be the movement’s official philosopher. Furthermore, Farías’s popular account of this period has since been described as ‘laughable’ for its lack of rigour (Geroulanos, 2007, 38). Yet this sensational book became an international event, launching the ‘Heidegger affair’ that would have severe ramifications in French and American academic circles. It fuelled already present anxieties concerning the complicity of many intellectuals either directly with Nazism or indirectly with proto-fascistic ideologies, and the consequences of such complicity for la pensée 68. This would be especially troubling for Lignes as suspicions were cast on Bataille and Blanchot. In France, the impact of Heidegger et le nazisme was inflated by its mobilisation in a wider project of intellectual delegitimisation led by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. Although they distanced themselves from the ‘new philosophers’, the two were associated with Le Débat and essentially continued that review’s assault on the previous theoretical generation. In the mid-1980s, Marxism now spurned, they instead turned their attention to a loose grouping of French Heideggerians. Ferry and Renaut’s La Pensée 68 (1984) had already associated post-structuralism with the radical and supposedly irresponsible political generation of 1968. The Heidegger affair three years later only confirmed their suspicions regarding the politically suspect nature of la pensée 68, and they expanded their argument in Heidegger et les modernes (1988). Ferry and Renaut’s grouping of ‘French Heideggerians’ was problematic: although thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot were certainly influenced by – if also critical of – Heidegger, Michel Foucault’s relationship to Heidegger was tangential at best. What tied these thinkers together was their common tendency to deconstruct any notion of an essential human nature or a stable and coherent subject, making them all ‘anti-humanist’ thinkers. Ferry and Renaut’s emphasis on the term ‘anti-humanist’ suggested that these thinkers focused on abstract structures rather than real people, implying the lack of empathy which supposedly facilitated their fascistic tendencies. Once again, the stakes of this debate were political as well as philosophical, Ferry and Renaut critiquing post-structuralism to

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shore up the new liberal-republicanism of Le Débat. In La Pensée 68 they explicitly welcomed the new emphasis on democratic consensus, asking: ‘If freely consented to and discussed, what is so terrible about such a consensus?’ (1990a, 229). By contrast, they criticised the group ‘gathered around Jacques Derrida’ for having ‘irrevocably chosen their side’ as anti-democratic French Heideggerians (1990b, 2). They argued that ‘anti-humanist’ thought posited the autonomy of the subject as an illusion: ‘After Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, it is philosophically impossible to return to the idea that man is the owner and controller of his actions and ideas’ (Ferry and Renaut, 1990b, 17). Therefore, as long as post-structuralists resisted a return to the autonomy of an individual subject, such a philosophy was ‘radically incompatible with the minimum of subjectivity needed for democratic thinking’ (Ferry and Renaut, 1990b, 17). Subsequently, as Geroulanos summarises, Ferry and Renaut strongly suggested that ‘an honestly leftist position had to now confront its debt to Heidegger and reject him’, jettisoning Derrida, Foucault and Nancy along with him (2007, 47). The Heidegger affair resonated with other debates occurring in America. Further revelations had emerged concerning Paul de Man’s anti-Semitic writings during the Second World War; as de Man was associated with the Yale School of deconstruction, this was taken as further evidence of an intrinsic link between la pensée 68 and fascism. Against the ascendancy of French Theory, at that time the most prevalent trend in American faculties, its opponents undertook what François Cusset describes as an ideological crusade (2008a, 176). For example, in a series of inflammatory works Richard Wolin complained that French thought was ‘storming the ramparts’ of the academy (2004, 9), having earlier declared that, after Heidegger and de Man, deconstruction ‘can hardly seem an entirely innocent affair’ (1992, 275). As with Ferry and Renaut, such sensational texts tended to overemphasise the link between Heidegger and later thinkers, ignoring the critical stance post-structuralists took towards Heidegger to better discredit them. The concern with French fascism then turned towards other figures, such as Bataille and Blanchot, who had participated in extreme political movements in the 1930s and were central to the development of la pensée 68. French scholars had already begun to explore these links: following a brief mention in Eugen Weber’s Action française (1962), Loubet del Bayle’s Les Non-conformistes des années 30 (1969) more firmly inscribed Blanchot within right-wing militant milieus. In 1976, the review Gramma was the first to reproduce some of Blanchot’s pre-war

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From Bataille to Badiou

articles, and began to establish a Blanchot bibliography in an attempt to exhaustively locate all of his (often anonymous) journalistic texts. Yet Blanchot’s ideological attachment to the far right remained vague and, as it took until the late 1990s for the first comprehensive Blanchot biographies to appear, the absence of concrete facts fuelled a climate of suspicion and hostility. Blanchot supporters, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, were placed in a difficult situation: Blanchot’s fictional and philosophical legacy was important for their work, but they were also loath to defend anything resembling fascism. The two attempted to edit an issue of Cahiers de L’Herne devoted to Blanchot’s politics in 1984 but, given the vociferous manner in which Blanchot was being denounced at the time, they felt restricted as to what they could say publicly. Finding it impossible to mediate between defending Blanchot’s legacy and condemning his politics in such an aggressive climate, the project was shelved. Subsequently, as Surya has recently stressed, the important process of historical revision was often undertaken by those already holding literary, philosophical or political grudges against Blanchot and his successors, and so balanced and informed accounts were rare (LNS.43.2014, 5). A key example on the American side was Jeffrey Mehlman: whilst he described his Legacies of Anti-Semitism as ‘exploratory rather than accusatory’ (1983, 3), he became embroiled in a debate with Mathieu Bénézet for specifically labelling Blanchot an anti-Semite. Characteristically, Mehlman’s target was broader than just the French thinkers complicit with fascism in the 1930s, and his chapter on Blanchot also implicated a vague ‘Foucault-Glucksmann nexus’ of French thinkers with fascistic positions (1983, 18). Once more, a text ostensibly about the 1930s also targeted la pensée 68. Retrospectively, the link seems tenuous: Foucault and the ‘new philosopher’ Glucksmann were very different thinkers, the influence of Blanchot on either was minimal, and Mehlman’s association of them with fascism rested on similarities between their rhetorical styles, rather than conceptual or ideological attachments. Nevertheless, Mehlman’s text was mobilised in French debates, appearing in Tel Quel as part of Philippe Sollers’s campaign to overexpose Blanchot’s past to harm his intellectual legacy. Tel Quel had always had an uneasy relationship with Blanchot but, come the 1980s and its turn towards American liberalism, the review became actively hostile. Many intellectuals, then, also attacked Blanchot as part of their wider delegitimation of the post-structuralist generation whilst arguing in favour of liberal republicanism. The Manichean climate often meant

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that partisans felt compelled either to defend or attack Blanchot and la pensée 68 together, without quarter. Lignes was thus also placed in an awkward position, and throughout most of its existence the review remained circumspect regarding Blanchot’s 1930s politics. Georges Bataille had similarly long been suspected of fascistic tendencies: as Surya noted, many of those he had interviewed for his biography had simply assumed that Bataille was a fascist (cited in Stoekl, 1990, 181). Bataille, too, then came under closer scrutiny in the 1980s. Exemplary of the polemics that followed, Bataille’s one-time collaborator Boris Souvarine came out 50 years after the fact to describe Bataille as fascinated by Hitler and capable of Nazi prose (cited in Marmande, 2011, 43). Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Bataille was generally portrayed as an ‘irresponsible thinker’ who was ‘hostile to democracy’ and ‘seduced by fascism’ (Besnier, 1995, 13). Once more, the targets of such criticisms were broader than simply Bataille’s political rhetoric in the 1930s. Although Bataille had never been suspected of anti-Semitism, Mehlman’s Legacies concluded by shifting the focus onto Bataille, claiming that French Theory had ‘lived lavishly’ on Bataille’s ‘conceptual baggage’ (1983, 90). Once again, a whole raft of post-war thinkers became politically suspect by association. In France, Daniel Lindenberg’s Les Années souterraines (1937–1947) exceeded its remit to discuss the war years in France to subsequently attack Bataille’s post-war review Critique as a bastion of French Nietzcheanism and Heideggarianism (1990, 124). In its heyday, Critique was the most theoretically advanced para-academic journal in France. Perhaps more so than Tel Quel, Critique had played a pivotal role in making the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and company widely read and highly influential; Lindenberg, a member of the Esprit editorial committee, here associates Bataille and Blanchot with post-structuralism to portray the latter as a new and dangerous form of nihilism, a reading which Surya characterised as aggressive and ignorant (L.13.1991, 129). In an already hostile intellectual atmosphere, the Heidegger affair added fuel to the fire by associating fascism, along with communist totalitarianism, with la pensée 68. Whilst Lignes was not particularly invested in protecting Heidegger himself, thinkers of this post-structuralist generation, such as Derrida, Foucault and Nancy, were important to the review, as were their forbears Blanchot and Bataille. The climate provoked by the Heidegger affair limited what the review felt it could publish regarding Blanchot, especially given that so much of his past still remained unknown. Bataille was another matter, Surya’s detailed

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From Bataille to Badiou

intellectual biography of Bataille being precisely the text that led to the creation of Lignes. Yet this book did not silence the critics: indeed, Wolin comments that its republication with Gallimard in 1992 provoked ‘a major scholarly debate over Bataille’s relationship to fascism’ (2004, 344). Surya always maintained that Bataille staunchly rejected fascism and so, rather than remain silent, Lignes attempted to respond to critics with a rigorous documentation and analysis of Bataille’s actions in the 1930s. As well as the many monographs published outside of the review by collaborators such as Surya, Marmande, Bernard Sichère and Jean-Michel Besnier, when Lignes launched its own book collection in the new millennium it reprinted several Bataille texts from the 1930s with prefaces that contextualised Bataille’s positions at the time. These texts demonstrated the extent to which Bataille remained a programmatic thinker for Lignes, and why his positions were anathema to the newly dominant liberalism of the 1980s. As William Pawlett has recently argued, even if Bataille’s distantiation from fascism ‘is clear and consistent’, much of his work ‘cannot be reconciled with the secular liberal perspective of some of his critics’ (2013, 125). It is Lignes’ critical positioning against this liberal-republican consensus that the review’s championing of Bataille most clearly articulates. Bataille in the 1930s: Affective Politics between Fascism and Liberalism In the contemporary period, when liberal democracy is rarely seriously challenged as the dominant mode of governance, the violence with which Bataille and Blanchot railed against the elected representatives of the 1930s can seem shocking. Indeed, it is this vehement rejection of the political establishment that France’s new liberal thinkers chastised Lignes for indulging. Olivier Mongin, editor of Esprit, argued that, as Bataille enthusiasts, ‘the editors of Lignes are hardly passionate about democracy’ [les animateurs de Lignes n’ont guère de passions pour la démocratie] (1990, 92). Comparing the violence employed by Bataille in denouncing democracy to fascism was a manner of delegitimating Lignes’ criticisms of liberalism in the present. In response, the Lignes editorial board banded together in defence of Bataille, whilst pointing out that the sense of anti-parliamentarianism was very different in the 1930s to today (L.14.1991, 92). The political turbulence of pre-war Europe is easy to underestimate in retrospect. Jean-Michel Besnier

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notes that whilst today intellectual discourse is ‘generally unaffected by the vertigo of militancy, in the 1930s it was accompanied by a moving fascination for action’ (1990, 170). With the Great Depression weakening European governments’ capacity for action, the vacillation of the League of Nations when faced with the fascist threat led many to conclude that violence was the only appropriate response. The apathy inspired by liberal democracy led to positions which sat uneasily within the traditional left-right parliamentary divide, producing an array of ‘non-conformist’ movements that often combined elements of the extreme right and the radical left. As a result, the Lignes defence of Bataille was twofold: firstly, they differentiated his actions from the muddy conflations of non-conformism and fascism to demonstrate the integrity of his 1930s politics; secondly, they reinvigorated his dual critique of fascism and liberalism which, when shorn of its violent rhetoric, afforded the review a critical purchase on the contemporary moment. The 1930s was Bataille’s only period of active political engagement. Whilst in 1929–1930 he had edited Documents as a ludic war machine against André Breton’s Surrealism, the gravity of European politics caused a shift in Bataille’s tone, from ‘an extravagant happiness to gravity and anguish’ [une extravagance heureuse à la gravité, à l’angoisse] (Surya, 2009c, 65). He met Boris Souvarine in 1931 and began participating in his discussion group, Le Cercle communiste démocratique, which united heterodox Marxists who were heavily critical of the Soviet Union. Preceding The Gulag Archipelago by 40 years, Le Cercle communiste démocratique wrote many articles stressing the extraordinary numbers of people being imprisoned and killed in the USSR. Bataille, then, came to the extreme left from a non-conformist angle, one equally critical of Stalin as of liberal democracy. As Surya notes, from this point on Bataille would never confuse the principals of communism with the reality of Stalinism (2012, 69). Subsequently, Lignes tended to favour heterodox Marxists and has always distanced itself from admiration for the USSR. It was Souvarine’s review, La Critique sociale, in which Bataille developed his early political essays. In the new millennium Lignes reprinted La Notion de dépense (2011) and La Structure psychologique du fascisme (2009), key texts first published in 1933 which made the orientations of Bataille’s subsequent political activities clear. Here, Bataille railed against ‘utility’ as the guiding concept for rational discussions of human behaviour. Underpinning liberal ideology, he argued, is a faith in the capacities of rational individuals to make decisions in their best interest, decisions which will also ultimately benefit society as a whole.

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For Bataille, liberalism therefore encourages a form of ‘servitude’ to utilitarian reason which he found intolerable. Instead, he highlighted the existence of a range of wasteful activities, such as war, religious cults, art and non-reproductive sex, which occur outside of the restricted economy of the useful. These modes of expenditure were ‘heterogeneous’ social forces which acted against the homogenising influence of bourgeois morality and rational social organisation. Utilitarian thought left Bataille cold as it relied on isolating problems from their surrounding social and psychological context: henceforth, his thought aimed at bridging the distinctions between science, art and politics. It was precisely this blurring of boundaries that worried liberal-minded critics in the 1980s. Since 1980, Jürgen Habermas had been describing Bataille, Foucault and Derrida as neo-Nietzschean ‘young conservatives’. At the root of the dispute was Habermas’s notion of liberal modernity. From Max Weber, Habermas had inherited a conception of modernity as a mode of thought that relied upon the differentiation of separate spheres of judgement. As Mark Hunyadi explained in Lignes, the cognitive (science), aesthetics (art) and the juridicomoral (social norms) were now autonomous spheres, and anything that threatened the distinction between pure reason, practical reason and aesthetic judgement was seen as anti-modern (L.7.1989, 13). By relativising values and emphasising the aesthetic and material dimensions of communication, Habermas saw neo-Nietzschean thought as an assault on the Enlightenment legacy and a threat to modern liberalism. This was an argument taken up by those trying to delegitimate la pensée 68, as Wolin, Ferry and Renaut similarly argued that Derrida, Foucault and company celebrated a cult of paradox that rejected discursive clarity in favour of an anti-liberal, anti-modern aestheticism (Ferry and Renaut, 1990b, 110). By situating itself firmly within Bataille’s intellectual lineage, Lignes embraced French neo-Nietzschean thought and its more materialist approach to understanding political reality. As we will discuss in subsequent chapters, the review was suspicious of the liberal emphasis on the rational capacities of the individual, the transparency of communication and the normative establishment of consensus. Politics could be conflictual, dissensual, subjective and irrational. In the 1930s, fascism was the worst example of such a politics: but the important question for Bataille became whether explicitly affective politics were always fascist, or whether politics is inevitably affective. Typically, Habermas denounced Bataille’s ‘admiration’ for fascism (1987, 218), his ‘militant communism’ (1987, 227) and his advocacy of

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an aesthetic sovereignty of ‘groundless or “pure” leadership’ (1987, 220). By contrast, Lignes’ republications of his early political essays demonstrate that Bataille’s disdain for authoritarian leaders was already clear. In La Structure psychologique du fascisme, Bataille disapprovingly noted that both fascism and feudal monarchism relied on military and religious power to oppress the population. He recognised that fascist discourses employed a mystical celebration of racial purity, and that this would have disastrous consequences in the coming conflicts. Therefore his opposition to a repressive regime of racial segregation led by a charismatic dictator was clear. However, influenced by sociology, psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology, Bataille posited that there was ‘a need for immeasurable loss which is endemic to the existence of a social group’ [un besoin de perte démesurée qui existe à l’état endémique dans un groupe social] (2011, 22). Drawing an analogy with psychoanalysis, Bataille described unproductive heterogeneity as the unconscious of the social body, whose consciousness would therefore be constituted by useful homogeneity. These heterogeneous forces drove people to act in wasteful and potentially self-destructive manners, and the more these irrational needs were repressed by homogenous society the more likely a violent eruption became. As the intrusion of the heterogeneous on the homogenous social field was inevitable, for Bataille the pressing issue became the form this eruption would take. If not actively affirmed, this latent heterogeneity could manifest itself in a violently reactionary manner (e.g. fascism). Taking account of the non-rational, psychological, material and aesthetic needs and impulses of humankind was necessary to understand man as a social and political animal, and especially to understand the dangers of fascism. Compared to the apathy inspired by liberal democracy, for Bataille the unconscious fascination with heterogeneity explained how fascism captivated its adherents whilst also producing a high level of overtly homogenous dedication and subservience. Bataille was clearly impressed, and believed that only a political movement which elicited the same fervour from its members could counter the growing fascist threat; however, rather than accumulating power, Bataille wanted to allow the heterogeneous forces thus unleashed to run their own course. It was therefore Bataille’s ‘barely veiled admiration for the energy and vitality’ of fascism that enabled critics such as Richard Wolin to claim that Bataille was himself a fascist (2004, 173). One example mobilised by critics to demonstrate Bataille’s proto-fascistic leanings was the novel Le Bleu du ciel, published in 1954 but written in the mid-1930s. The novel

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famously concludes with a couple making love in a grave whilst fascist storm troopers enter the city below. Carlo Ginzburg described the novel’s ‘morbid, intimately guilty attraction for the mortuary rites of Nazism’ (1990, 143). For Lindenberg, the novel presented ‘a succession of strong images which underline, at the very least, the obvious aesthetic superiority of national socialism’ [une succession d’images fortes qui soulignent à tout le moins l’évidente supériorité esthétique du national-socialisme] (1990, 60). However, since 1985, Lignes editor Francis Marmande has continually justified Bataille’s close attention to the seductive qualities of fascism. He argued that rather than Bataille’s transgressive and subversive texts, right-wing ideologies tended to emphasise moral purity and cleanliness. Marmande thus argued that Bataille’s works generally satirised the puritanical nature of moral conservatism and allowed one to penetrate the strange and unexplored aspects of humanity’s subconscious necessary to understanding fascism’s attraction (2011, 190). He also stressed that Le Bleu du ciel needed to be read strictly within its historical perspective: the novel was written alongside analytical texts which were heavily critical of fascism. Marmande suggested that the novel replaced a projected theoretical work, Le Fascisme en France, which Bataille subsequently abandoned (1985, 222). Le Bleu du ciel is a fictional, rather than theoretical, account of the seductive power of fascism; instead of a rational description, the novel produces an experiential and affective representation of the aesthetic and psychological attractions of fascism, blurring the boundaries between art, politics and science. Marmande therefore reads Le Bleu du ciel as representing a bad omen of what could happen to Europe, demonstrating both the seductive nature of fascism and the dangers of failing to resist. The novelistic form conveyed the force of this attraction more immediately than an essay could. Bataille’s subsequent political mobilisations were guided by the principle that only an active embrace of heterogeneity would suffice to combat the fascination with fascism, either via a violent revolt (Contre-Attaque) or by producing powerful counter-myths (Acéphale, The College of Sociology). The Lignes republications of Bataille’s early articles programmatically demonstrate Bataille’s motivations for his subsequent activism. Coupled with his critique of economic rationality, his political endeavours were henceforth a dual attempt at ‘countering the action of the extreme right in France’ and ‘launching a critical attack on democratic liberalism’ (ffrench, 2007, 24). As Chapters 4–6

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demonstrate, these three aims would subsequently form the critical heart of Lignes’ political stance throughout its 30-year history. In 1936, with unemployment rising and the Great Depression leaving European states ill-positioned to combat the mounting fascist threat, Bataille felt compelled to intervene. Temporarily reconciled, he and André Breton created the group Contre-Attaque in January 1936. Broadly Marxist and internationalist, Surya argues that most on the intellectual left could subscribe to Contre-Attaque’s politics; what alienated some was the tone inspired by Bataille (2013, 8). To produce an effective counter-offensive to fascism, Bataille wanted to unleash the affective exaltation of fascism, mobilising the same energies unleashed by Hitler yet directing them away from authoritarian politics. His desire for an active political virility against a passive government shared common ground with journalists from the extreme right at the time, including Maurice Blanchot: both were anti-democratic and anti-capitalist, and both saw violent action as necessary to combat the League of Nations’ apathetic response to fascism. The key difference was that Contre-Attaque was also vehemently anti-nationalistic, and Bataille argued that any power it received ‘must be placed in the service of humanity’s universal interest’ (Surya, 2002, 221). In prefacing the republication of the Contre-Attaque bulletins, Surya highlights the following programmatic statement from Bataille: ‘Father, Country, Boss, this is the trilogy which serves as the basis of the old patriarchal society and today’s fascist dog whistling’ [Père, Patrie, patron, telle est la trilogie qui sert de base à la vieille société patriarcale et, aujourd’hui, à la chiennerie fasciste] (2013, 24). The influence of Bataille’s language on Surya is clear. In a text decrying finance capitalism and French nationalism in the mid-1990s, Surya draws on Bataille’s rhetoric to denounce at once claims of financial, national and familial exclusivity: ‘The owner of profit: the boss. The owner of the earth: the country. The owner of the name: patrimony!’ [Le propre du profit: le patron. Le propre de la terre: la patrie. Le propre du nom: le patrimoine!] (L.24.1995, 14). As Chapter 3 shows, Lignes celebrates the impropre over the propre, an anti-essentialist stance emphasising the shared nature of human existence and identity that encourages a broad-based solidarity against private appropriation and exclusive communities. Here we simply note that, once stripped of their calls to violence, Bataille’s intransigent critiques of capitalism, liberalism, nationalism and fascism are then reactivated in the review 50 years later, sometimes almost word for word. Bataille’s brief moment of direct political activism was short-lived,

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however. By April 1936, the fragile alliance between Bataille and Breton had been broken and Contre-Attaque dissolved. Its failure drew Bataille away from public platforms towards more localised, community-based endeavours with both The College of Sociology and his new pseudoreligion, Acéphale. Whilst Bataille found fascist ideology repugnant, he was convinced that Hitler and Mussolini had discovered liberalism’s weakness by exploiting mythology to manipulate the populace. With liberal democracy seemingly too weak to resist charismatic dictators, Bataille saw a need to replace their new myths of racial purity and national belonging with powerful counter-myths. This era marks a turning point in Lignes’ relationship with Bataille’s politics. Whilst Surya continues to defend Bataille’s intentions during this period, his actions become more questionable and his subsequent work on myth becomes useful for the review in a more negative, rather than positive manner. From 1937 to 1939, alongside Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, Bataille’s College of Sociology turned its attention to studying the notion of the ‘sacred’ as that which binds a community together. The College was also a militant enterprise: its aim was to mobilise sacred sociology as a form of social contagion, a way of producing and disseminating the new myths that would form a community of opposition to fascism. That the College was a success can be surmised by the expanded range of collaborators during its second year, projected speakers including Jean Paulhan, Denis de Rougement and Walter Benjamin. Yet the audience was politically mixed, including some major figures from the far right like Thierry Maulnier and Drieu La Rochelle. Critics such as Esprit’s Lindenberg therefore described it as a reactionary new right in the making (1990, 78–9). These tensions were also expressed within the College. Whilst for Bataille the mobilisation of myth involved pitting fascism against fascism, for Walter Benjamin the use of prefascist aestheticism only exacerbated the general fascistisation of politics already underway. It is for denying the ambiguity of Bataille’s activities during this period that Surya’s Georges Bataille received the most criticism. Denis Hollier, generally sympathetic, argues that Surya is too sensitive when it comes to Bataille’s ‘equivocal’ relationship to fascism: Surya ‘goes on the defensive each time he meets (or even anticipates) an accusation’, trying too hard to prove that ‘nothing was more foreign and even opposed to fascism than the thinking of Bataille’ (1990, 4). Yet, as Hollier argues, fighting fascism with fascist means is ‘literally equivocal’ (1990, 7). Hollier reprimands Surya for downplaying such ambiguity,

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but largely because he knows that Bataille should not need defending: he considered a close reading of Bataille’s texts enough to prove that he was not a fascist. Surya’s staunch defence of Bataille in 1992 was a function of the intense critical scrutiny his politics were being placed under at the time: as with Blanchot, the vitriol with which Bataille was being attacked made anything other than a wholehearted defence a difficult position to articulate. However, Jean-Luc Nancy’s reformulation of the political via Bataille also carried a critique of the College, and was subsequently highly influential for Lignes. The ambiguities of Bataille’s mobilisation of myth are perhaps best represented by his concurrent project, the secret religion Acéphale. The attempt to create a religion signalled the broadening of Bataille’s targets since Contre-Attaque: whilst the former was solely orientated against fascism, Acéphale challenged the three monocéphalités of fascism, communism and Christianity (Surya, 2012, 68). Bataille no longer considered these forms of social organisation distinct as all three relied on a form of transcendental leadership of which God was the paradigmatic example. Consequently, Bataille decided that only another religion could provide an anti-authoritarian counter-myth. Little concrete information is known about the religious rites involved in Acéphale because participants were sworn to secrecy, although notoriously one of their goals was rumoured to be the enactment of a human sacrifice (with Bataille the proposed first victim). This macabre side to Acéphale has since then only fuelled critical claims that Bataille’s legacy is tainted by barbarous impulses, with Sartre famously calling Bataille a ‘new mystic’ (Besnier, 1995, 13). The Nietzschean overtones of this new religion also exacerbated the fears that Bataille was promoting a form of proto-fascistic authoritarianism. The religion’s public face, the review Acéphale, devoted an issue entirely to Nietzsche. Yet here, Bataille was specifically attempting to rescue Nietzsche’s legacy from the National Socialists. Texts explicitly demonstrated the mutual incompatibility of Nietzsche with fascism, emphasising his contempt for anti-Semitism accompanied by Bataille’s own ‘telling elegy to multiracialism’ (Surya, 2002, 238). However, Bataille’s more egalitarian reading of Nietzsche was often undermined by his associates at the time, notably Roger Caillois. Whilst Bataille was distinctly anti-authoritarian, privileging waste, inutility and the dissipation of accrued power, Caillois was more bullish, strongly embracing the Nietzschean will to power, which tallied with a fascistic aggression and elitism. Ginzburg described Caillois’s ‘fantasies about an

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aristocratic community composed of merciless, tyrannical individuals’ (1990, 143). That figures from the extreme right attended the College, alongside the more aggressive rhetoric of Bataille’s co-conspirator Caillois, added to the confusion surrounding Bataille’s political sympathies. Lignes, then, isolated Bataille from his more compromised associates. Caillois is entirely absent from Lignes, and the review’s publication of a previously lost Bataille lecture, La Sociologie sacrée du monde contemporain (2004), continues to separate Bataille’s contributions to the College. Where Denis Hollier’s edited volume, Le Collège de sociologie 1937–1939, places Bataille’s and Caillois’s contributions side by side, here Bataille speaks alone. Whilst Bataille’s rhetoric in the lecture is undoubtedly that of a preacher, his account of Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism as three new monarchies relying on xenophobic nationalism and war-mongering to rally popular support is politically unambiguous. In her introduction to the Lignes republication, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi emphasises that Bataille promotes a tragic figure of man, extremely conscious of his mortality and finitude and so incapable of becoming a fascist (2004, 12). This sober awareness of the fragility of human life was privileged by Bataille over the more fascistic emphasis on the Übermensch proffered by Caillois. The Lignes republications therefore directly demonstrated that, as Surya and Marmande had been arguing since the 1980s, Bataille’s intentions were noble even when his actions were ambiguous. Equally important for the review, however, was Bataille’s own retrospective denunciation of his mobilisation of mythology. Marmande argues that Bataille was aware of the equivocal nature of his actions in these years, describing them as an ‘ideology of combat […] which is to say, by definition, a necessary error’ [idéologie de combat (…) c’est-à-dire, par définition, une erreur nécessaire] (2011, 34). Bataille renounced these attempts, recognising that he had been naïve to think that a small, elite group of thinkers could unleash the powers of myth to counter fascism. The famous lecture Discussion sur le péché, given in 1944 in the presence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot and reprinted by Lignes in 2011, notably contains both a critique and a repudiation of Acéphale (Sichère, 1999, 55). Bataille now realised that myth, or indeed any form of what Patrick ffrench calls ‘collective representation’, tends to elicit a desire for a social totality that can lead towards a community fascistically turned in on itself and hostile to outsiders (2007, 20). Furthermore, as Bataille’s analysis of Hitler demonstrated, leaders created a mythic aura around themselves to foment a group of exclusive and homogenous acolytes: as a result, ‘all groups

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with a leader would thus be fascist’ (ffrench, 2007, 45). Marmande thus argues that all of Bataille’s post-war thinking was orientated around a notion of sovereignty which was conversely considered a refusal of power (1985, 109). The true sovereign is the one who can relinquish control over himself and events, and simply be in the world as it is. Surya stresses that this conception of sovereignty is one of Bataille’s core principals, and yet it is still to secure its posthumous recognition (2012, 98). Lignes therefore published La Souveraineté (2012) as a stand-alone monograph for the first time with a view to consecrating it. Documentation provided by Lignes testifies to both the political unambiguity of Bataille’s intentions to oppose fascism and his later rejection of his affective communities. Whilst this documentation was mostly undertaken by Surya and Marmande, the most influential development of political thinking via Bataille would come from another important Lignes contributor, Jean-Luc Nancy. Alongside his colleague Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy’s Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (1980–1984) aimed to examine the impact of philosophy with, and on, the political. They considered this task important precisely because of the nefarious mobilisations of philosophical thought in the twentieth century, notably Heidegger’s Nazism. Whilst they emphasised that their interest was in le politique (the grounds of possibility for politics) rather than la politique (the real decisions of day-to-day governance), Nancy and LacoueLabarthe asserted the relevance of the contemporary conjuncture to their project. Precisely at the moment when reviews such as Esprit and Le Débat were touting the merits of liberal democracy and consensual discussion, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argued that democratic regimes were being undermined by apathy and a lack of participation. The reason, they surmised, was that politics was caught in a double bind. The totalitarian results of Soviet rule, coupled with the postmodern collapse of grand narratives, had disqualified revolutionary discourses of human progress or enlightened improvement (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1981, 16). Yet once these teleological narratives were lost, all that remained was the domination of political economy, reducing politics to a banal form of financial management which they described as a soft form of totalitarianism. Although imperceptible, a liberal, capitalist ideology of responsible governance, crisis management and consensus had become ubiquitous (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1983, 188). As Ian James argues, this conception of soft totalitarianism is closer to political ‘hegemony’ than an authoritarian state, and Nancy and LacoueLabarthe stress the differences between this ‘soft’ totalitarianism and

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Nazism (2006, 171). Yet they use this controversial term for two reasons. Firstly, drawing on Bataille and the Situationists, and against Le Débat, they criticise the homogeneity of a spectacularised politics in which the mass media manufactures a supposedly widely held consensus. Secondly, they analyse the emergence of totalitarian regimes as a direct response to the apathy generated by liberal democracy, as national identity is mobilised to re-energise the populace and foster a sense of belonging. It is this reciprocal dynamic between the crisis of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism which, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, makes attempts to separate the two overly simplistic. This is also why Bataille’s and Blanchot’s texts from the 1930s remain of interest, as the 1980s were seen to be witnessing a similar resurgence of the democratic lassitude that had previously allowed the rise of fascism. By the 1990s, the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the rise of Berlusconi would be seen by Lignes as two examples of the inability of liberal democracy to prevent the return of fascistic populism. This thread is continued in La Communauté désœuvrée (1983), as Nancy returns to Bataille’s conception of myth as that which binds a community together. Nancy argues that there are two kinds of community, those based on myths and those based on what he calls ‘the non-identity of shared finitude’ (James, 2006, 196). For Nancy, myth becomes simply ‘a language or discourse which allows the world of shared finitude to be known and understood in specific ways which would in turn dictate the manner in which we live and interact together within political and communal structures or institutions’ (James, 2006, 196). He argues that the constitution of any political community is somewhat arbitrary, unjustifiable and exclusionary, potentially tending towards the dangers of totalitarianism. Myths attempt to absolutise these contingent political grounds, in the worst cases with violent consequences. Yet such grounding is also unavoidable: national borders and cultural identities form the basis of all contemporary nation states. What Nancy calls for, then, is a constant praxis to destabilise dominant myths, a reminder that all community is arbitrarily founded and that all finite beings share an equal right to existence. This reading does not call for an end of politics tout court, but a constant interruption which dissolves and then reforms figures, highlighting the temporary nature of all political formations. When they heard that Nancy was returning to think politics via Bataille and Heidegger, hostile critics such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Richard Wolin ‘sounded an alarm’, perpetuating the concern that

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post-war French thought remained contaminated with fascism (Wolin, 2004, 164). Yet James argues that rather than a worrying neo-fascism, Nancy presents ‘a sober renunciation of foundationalist attitudes’ (2006, 201). Here, Nancy’s position was close to that of other thinkers of the ‘liberal moment’, such as Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, both of whom also subscribed to ‘an anti-foundationalist social ontology’ and believed that there could ‘be no definitive knowledge of the origin of society’ (Rosenblum, 2016, 70, 73). Yet, rather than Marx or Constant, ffrench notes that, for Nancy, it was ‘Bataille more than anyone else’ who provided this critique of political mythology (2007, 139). Nancy relies on Bataille in a negative moment: his renunciation of mythological communities. Many Lignes contributors were influenced by Nancy’s conception of the political, and Chapter 3 further explores how this neo-Nietzschean anti-foundational and anti-essentialist position is folded into the review’s critical ethos. Since the 1980s, then, Lignes’ editors have been arguing that Bataille remains a ‘lucid, compromised and unavoidable witness’ [témoin lucide, compromis et peu évitable] (Marmande, 1985, 221) of the 1930s. Subsequently, whilst the review avoids the violence of his rhetoric, it is keen to stress that his intentions were laudable, even if his methods could equivocally mirror those of fascism. Bataille programmatically orientates the review’s critique of liberal democracy and the rise of the Front National, placing them within a radical left unaffiliated to communism. In the following chapters, Bataille’s major influence on Surya and the review’s cultural politics and resistance to moralism will be discussed, as will Lignes’ continued clashes with more liberal and conservative publications such as Esprit and Le Débat. First, however, we turn to the review’s response to the revelations concerning Maurice Blanchot’s past. Bataille’s friend since the 1940s, Blanchot was likewise a formative influence on the generation of writers that coalesced around Lignes. Given Blanchot’s association with far-right and anti-Semitic milieus in the 1930s, the fact that Lignes openly supported his post-war political activities compounded suspicions that the review was indulging fascist writers. The review’s alliance with Blanchot’s friends initially led to an awkward discretion regarding his troubled political past, a tacit silence only fully broken with the belated yet thorough exposé of 2014.

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Blanchot in the 1930s: la surenchère journalistique? By the mid-1980s, the main details of Blanchot’s activities in the pre-war period were coming to light. Born into a wealthy, Catholic and monarchist milieu, Blanchot gravitated towards radical right-wing circles such as Action française when he moved to Paris in his twenties. From 1931 he was responsible for international affairs at Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, later becoming the editor-in-chief of this daily newspaper affiliated to far-right business and intellectual elites. Blanchot’s articles on National Socialist Germany were lucid, however, stressing the danger posed by Hitler. At Le Rempart, managed by the Jewish nationalist Paul Lévy, Blanchot was one of the first to denounce the anti-Semitic persecutions beginning in Germany. His political outlook was shaped by his ‘virulent opposition to the woolly internationalism of the League of Nations’, and he became increasingly exasperated as Hitler’s expansionism remained unchecked (Hill, 1997, 24). It was with Combat (created in January 1936) that Blanchot’s rhetoric became fervently nationalistic, calling for a revolutionary erasure of the entire political class to save France. Blanchot felt that Blum’s Popular Front was unlikely to be able to fend off Hitler, and he characterised it as ‘a band of degenerates and traitors’ [une bande de dégénérés et de traîtres] (Bident, 1998, 81). Whilst Combat claimed restraint, rejecting what it called ‘vulgar anti-Semitism’ in favour of a ‘reasoned’ anti-Semitism, from 1937 Blanchot financed and edited its propaganda machine, L’Insurgé, which ramped up the rhetoric. Blum was routinely lambasted in anti-Semitic cartoons for which the staff (Blanchot included) was accused of provoking violence and murder. Blanchot’s tone became one-dimensionally hyper-patriotic: his international outlook was now intransigent, and democracy, communism, fascism, and anti-fascism were all rejected in favour of an impossibly idealised France. For Lignes, resolutely anti-fascist and intolerant of anti-Semitism, there was already much to condemn. Yet it was placed in a difficult position: during the contentious debates of the 1980s and 1990s, critics tended to either defend or attack Bataille and Blanchot in unison. The two had become firm friends during the Second World War, and since then their ideas were often seen as comparable (Albert Camus had argued that Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure was an exact translation and commentary of Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur). As both were influential figures for the post-structuralist generation, and both were accused of fascist sympathies, it became common to yoke their activities together.

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Given the energy that Lignes was expending to defend Bataille, they were therefore also wary of attacking Blanchot. After Nancy and LacoueLabarthe’s Blanchot issue of Cahiers de l’Herne failed to materialise, an issue of Lignes on Blanchot’s politics was planned. However, balancing sympathetic but critical responses was an imposing task, few willing contributors were found and the project was shelved until 2014. Consequently, not much is said of Blanchot’s 1930s journalism in early issues of Lignes. In his article opening the dossier Maurice Blanchot et La Revue internationale (1990), Roger Laporte recorded his discomfort when publicly questioned about Blanchot’s links to the far right: ‘I only replied, in a too dogmatic manner, that evidently, as my interlocutor knew well, there was no relationship between Blanchot’s thought and anti-Semitism’ [Je répliquai seulement, de manière trop dogmatique, qu’il n’y avait, mon interlocuteur le savait bien, évidemment aucun rapport entre la pensée de Blanchot et l’antisémitisme] (L.11.1990, 18). Laporte notes that his response is insufficient: however, the rest of this issue is only concerned with Blanchot’s literature and 1960s political writings, with no further mention of the 1930s. Lignes editor Dobbels was facilitating the republication of significant documents from the 1960s that required the participation of Blanchot’s friends, including Dionys Mascolo and the family of Robert Antelme: maintaining this support also entailed being circumspect regarding overt criticism of Blanchot. Elsewhere, tacit support for Blanchot can be read into Lignes’ response to the Heidegger affair. In Lignes’ second issue (February 1988), the reproduction of an Éric Weil article from 1947 historicises the debate to show how much was known about Heidegger’s Nazism even then, and Jean-Michel Palmier delineates the factual errors of Farías’s Heidegger et le nazisme. Most significantly, an article by Dobbels drew heavily from Les Intellectuels en question, a text in which Blanchot asserted that Heidegger’s favourable statements regarding Hitler were indefensible. At a moment when Blanchot was himself being accused of anti-Semitism, his heavy presence in Dobbels’s piece is a gesture of support, emphasising that Blanchot had already been criticising Heidegger’s fascist sympathies before the eruption of the ‘affair’. Crucially, Les Intellectuels en question also contains passages marked by Blanchot’s own personal trajectory from anti-Semitic milieus in the 1930s to an empathetic concern for Judaism in the 1980s: ‘From the Dreyfus affair to Hitler and Auschwitz, it has been confirmed that it is anti-Semitism (alongside racism and xenophobia) which has most strongly revealed the intellectual to himself’

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[De l’affaire Dreyfus à Hitler et à Auschwitz, il s’est confirmé que c’est l’antisémitisme (avec le racisme et la xénophobie) qui a révélé le plus fortement l’intellectuel à lui-même] (Blanchot, 1996, 55). This has been read as an oblique reference to his own past, and an admission that the Holocaust played a central role in reorienting his post-war politics and ethics. By citing Blanchot, Dobbels suggests that Lignes is placing faith in Blanchot’s own ethical probity, and that this is an adequate renunciation of his past. However, as we shall see, Surya in particular would later cast doubts on the extent to which Blanchot really took responsibility for his actions in the 1930s. As the polemical atmosphere continued into the 1990s, critics remained divided, even as more facts relating to Blanchot’s past were revealed. Two French biographies appeared in the mid-1990s, by Philippe Mesnard (1996) and Christophe Bident (1998), whilst Leslie Hill’s Extreme Contemporary (1997) also sketched Blanchot’s political biography. The facts narrated by all three were relatively similar, yet the interpretations of Blanchot’s motivations varied. Mesnard assumed that Blanchot was always anti-Semitic, suggesting that, as he could no longer be overtly anti-Semitic after the Holocaust, he instead channelled his disgust towards substitute objects such as large crowds, the multitudes, and public space in general (1996, 227). Bident criticised this as an overreading which, starting with the assumption of Blanchot’s anti-Semitism, detected signs of it everywhere (1997, 50). Instead, Hill and Bident assumed that Blanchot was innocent of anti-Semitism until proven otherwise, adding that ‘no evidence of any real substance has ever been produced’ that Blanchot held intrinsically anti-Semitic views (Hill, 1997, 36). Hill and Bident both argue that Blanchot underwent a period of ‘much self-criticism and scrutiny’ at some point between 1937 and 1947 that would completely change, rather than merely repress, his political extremism (Hill, 1997, 50). After the war, Blanchot became associated with the radical left, but exactly when, why and how this conversion took place remained unclear. Still, critical responses to Bataille and Blanchot remained intrinsically linked: if you defended one, you defended the other. Denis Hollier, more of a Bataille specialist, also defended Blanchot by questioning whether his extreme rhetoric was less a symptom of his own anti-Semitism or instead owed more to ‘journalistic exaggeration’ [la surenchère journalistique] (1996, 934). In his hostile biography of Blanchot, Mesnard additionally argued that Bataille, too, was probably seduced by fascism (1996, 77), whereas in Lignes Bident expressed his desire to defend

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Bataille, as well as Blanchot, from his aggressive critics (L.27.1996, 199). Symptomatically, Mesnard contributed four articles to Lignes before his Blanchot biography appeared, but none after 1995 – whereas Bident became a key contributor from 1995, producing nine articles in six years. We can therefore see distinct critical blocks forming: those attacking Bataille, Blanchot and their intellectual legacies, and those (including Lignes) defending them. Whilst Blanchot’s actions in the 1930s were never condoned in the review, nor were they openly interrogated during its first series, and contributors hostile to Blanchot (Mesnard) were replaced by Blanchot’s friendly critics (Bident). However, by 2014 Surya retrospectively conceded that some of Bident’s attenuating claims in favour of Blanchot were no longer tenable (LNS.43.2014, 14). In 1996, Jean-Michel Rabaté argued that, to end the controversy, all of Blanchot’s writings should be republished, especially as he believed that ‘Blanchot does not really have to be embarrassed about his past’ [Blanchot n’a pas vraiment à rougir de son passé] (1996, 921). Lignes had undertaken a similar approach of documentation and contextualisation with Bataille, but little had appeared of Blanchot’s pre-war journalism. Instead, Lignes produced dossiers of Blanchot’s left-wing political writings from the post-war period. Whilst Blanchot was characteristically seen as a reticent author shunning all public engagements, here the review brought to light his activities from protesting against the Algerian war to his involvement in May ’68. These dossiers will be discussed further in the next chapter, but crucially the attempt to portray Blanchot as a laudable political thinker in the 1960s, coupled with the review’s reticence regarding his 1930s journalism, placed it in an uneasy critical position. Steven Ungar charitably suggested that Surya was ‘presumably unaware’ of Blanchot’s past (1995, xviii). Other, less sympathetic critics would simply accuse Lignes of attempting a cover-up, Mesnard complaining that Blanchot was being protected by a network of friendly critics (1996, 38). Surya had, in fact, republished excerpts from Blanchot’s 1930s articles in the 1987 edition of Georges Bataille, but removed them from the 1992 edition. He argues that this was done to keep the book focused on Bataille (LNS.43.2014, 14), but by this point Lignes had also published its first Blanchot issue, made possible only by collaborating with Blanchot’s friends. Presumably, Surya strategically wished to maintain amicable relations with this milieu. Lignes would therefore maintain a policy of friendly silence into the new millennium. After the intensity of the late 1990s, there was somewhat of a caesura in the Blanchot debate. With the critical climate cooling, in 2007 Surya

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admitted that, alongside Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the review’s inability to produce an issue tackling Blanchot’s journalism in the 1930s remained a uniquely significant failure for Lignes (LNS.23–24.2007, 29). In 2011, a flurry of publications suggested that it was finally time to return to the issue, as Nancy’s Maurice Blanchot, passion politique, Lacoue-Labarthe’s Agonie terminée, agonie interminable: sur Maurice Blanchot and Surya’s Sainteté de Bataille all treated Blanchot’s political commitments to some extent. By this point, Dobbels was no longer on the Lignes editorial board, Blanchot and Mascolo had died, and Monique Antelme, Blanchot’s staunchest defender, would pass away in autumn 2012. The subsequent introduction to Lignes’ 2014 Blanchot issue is an admission that the review had indeed played a part in the network of friendly defence surrounding Blanchot. Surya notes that Blanchot’s friends had also been the friends of Lignes: ‘For this reason first of all, Lignes would not have wanted to fall into agreement with Blanchot’s “enemies”, even if in this case they would have been right’ [Pour cette raison d’abord que Lignes n’aurait pas voulu tomber d’accord avec les ‘ennemis’ de Blanchot, quand bien même ceux-ci eussent-ils en cela eu raison] (LNS.43.2014, 13). Hostile critics had justly wanted to discuss Blanchot’s past, but Lignes had felt unable to do so. Included in this new issue was also David Uhrig’s critique of the Lignes publication of Blanchot’s Écrits politiques (2003), a collection that consisted only of works from the post-war period. Uhrig complains that whilst Blanchot’s post-war political texts are treated as écrits containing genuine political thought, the journalistic articles from the 1930s are considered mere documents without any intrinsic value (LNS.43.2104, 128). He continues by criticising the tendency to mention the existence of Blanchot’s 1930s texts only once they are inscribed in a retrospective narrative which explains the positive merits of his post-war engagements (LNS.43.2014, 127). In these accounts, Blanchot’s more palatable political positions after the war render his pre-war texts mere mistakes, follies of youth which he later corrected and atoned for. Lignes clearly maintained such a position, and so the publication of Uhrig’s article, and the 2014 issue in general, represents a moment of confession and self-critique for the review. Uhrig’s piece also contributed significant new factual detail concerning Blanchot’s actions. Whilst it was evident that by the 1950s Blanchot had undergone a major political conversion, what had remained uncertain in the 1990s was at what point this conversion had taken place. Bident had suggested that by 1938 Blanchot had distanced himself from his former far-right milieus and was himself being attacked in the anti-Semitic

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press for his proximity to Paul Lévy, therefore clearly isolating him from all suspicions of fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism (1998, 101). Bident notes a lapse of several months in late 1937 during which Blanchot published nothing, deducing that he was recovering from tuberculosis in Cambo-les-Bains. Bident suspects that this prompted a period of introspection for Blanchot in which the tensions latent in his writing (not least between L’Insurgé’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and Blanchot’s friendships with Emmanuel Levinas and Lévy) became manifest. Although Blanchot continued to publish his literary chronicle in Le Journal des débats up until 1944, Bident believed that Blanchot never again signed a political text for the extreme right after 1938, ending his allegiance then (1998, 107). However, in 2011 Uhrig found articles written by Blanchot in Aux Écoutes, July 1940, in which Blanchot not only militated in favour of Pétain’s rise to power, but also expressed support for the institutional coup d’état that followed (LNS.43.2014, 137). This detail is significant: as well as displaying Blanchot continuing his far-right trajectory up until at least 1940, it suggests that Blanchot had misled friends, like Roger Laporte and Dionys Mascolo, who were his main defenders in the 1980s. In letters to critics, such as Mehlman, and also in his preface to Mascolo’s À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (1993), Blanchot had written accounts of his wartime activities which attempted to minimise the level of his involvement in Pétainist circles. His claims to have been a member of Jeune Vichy only to play fascism against fascism, and to have been closer to the resistance member Jean Paulhan than the collaborator Drieu La Rochelle, are now questioned, Surya noting that Blanchot’s accounts of this period are filled with ‘attenuations, euphemisms, fudges’ [atténuations, euphémisations, défaussements] (LNS.43.2014, 27); Uhrig simply calls them autofictions (LNS.43.2014, 129). Blanchot, who had been critical of Heidegger’s silence regarding his adherence to Nazism, subsequently seems to have also attempted to cover up his own involvement, prompting Surya to highlight his hypocrisy. Contrary to Rabaté’s suggestion, it instead seems to be the case that Blanchot was indeed embarrassed about his past. Uhrig’s revelation of Blanchot’s support of Pétain was the only new fact contributed by Lignes.1 However, the rest of the issue aimed to add conceptual clarity to the critical record of Blanchot’s activity, taking to task the attenuating details contained in accounts by Hill, Bident and 1 Uhrig’s article had also previously appeared in H-France in 2011, making this revelation in itself far from novel.

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even Mesnard. With regards to whether or not Blanchot was himself anti-Semitic, David Amar finds one example in which Blanchot seemed to be theorising his own anti-Semitic response to the ‘Jewish question’ (LNS.43.2014, 147), but crucially the debate is shifted away from what Blanchot was to what he did. L’Insurgé was a militant newspaper for an anti-Semitic milieu which Blanchot both edited and financed. Anti-Semitism was a structural lynchpin in L’Insurgé’s ideological orientation, and Blanchot’s pieces sat comfortably within the paper as a whole. Furthermore, L’Insurgé was not simply a periodical publication. Against Bident, Hill and Mesnard, who all claimed that Blanchot’s idealistic texts were too abstract to lead to a pragmatic political programme, Uhrig argues that L’Insurgé had a considered and coherent project (LNS.43.2014, 131). Rather than just journalists, those around L’Insurgé were an activist group with a practical agenda, organising public meetings and demonstrations. And, as Uhrig demonstrates, Blanchot not only welcomed the rise of Pétain, but had also actively militated for him to receive maximal powers. There was additionally a real physical threat behind Blanchot’s words. In July 1936, Combat called for the assassination of Popular Front members, with Blanchot designating Albert Sarraut, Pierre-Étienne Flandin and Georges Mandel as targets; Mandel was eventually killed by a Vichy militia in 1944. Whether Blanchot was actually an anti-Semite, then, is overshadowed by the fact that he produced anti-Semitic texts within an activist milieu, members of which were charged with criminal offences for encouraging violence. Rather than ‘non-conformism’, François Brémondy suggests that Blanchot’s behaviour here was properly fascist (LNS.43.2014, 79). The claim is bold, but adds significant conceptual clarity with regard to Blanchot’s activities at this time. But what were the consequences of this clarity? Blanchot himself had written: ‘The more importance one accords to Heidegger’s thought, the more it is necessary to try and elucidate the sense of his political engagement in 1933–1934’ [Plus on accorde d’importance à la pensée de Heidegger, plus il est nécessaire de chercher à élucider le sens de l’engagement politique de 1933–34] (1996, 11). Similarly, Lignes had set considerable stock in Blanchot’s more laudable political engagements in the 1960s, and now had to decide whether his 1930s ‘fascism’ undermined the integrity of these later texts. Mesnard had already suggested that there were certain symmetries between Blanchot’s 1930s and 1960s political texts (1996, 252). Now, Surya comments that whilst he finds the 1960s articles admirable for their political orientation, the confluences

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between the rhetorical structures and the manic intransigence of the preand post-war texts (such as the prevalence of the term refus) undermine attempts to separate the two completely (LNS.43.2014, 53). This does not entirely contradict Hill’s and Bident’s accounts, which suggested that, after the war, Blanchot’s thought developed into a mature practice of writing turned towards an ethical embrace of alterity and responsibility, jettisoning nationalism and anti-Semitism. It does, however, suggest the persistence of a certain political extremism that continued to intrude upon Blanchot’s more ethical register in his later writings. The presence of a continued exceptionalism, in which Blanchot withdrew from any existing community to claim an aristocratic authority, seems to jar with his later ethical commitment. In La Communauté désavouée (2014), a book directly tied to the Lignes re-evaluation of Blanchot, Nancy also notes that, despite Blanchot’s emphasis on writing as a neutral space welcoming the voice of the other, Blanchot the writer also cultivated an elevated posture and a disdain for society, the state and the law (2014, 127). He notes the aristocratic distinction Blanchot drew between ‘the writer (the figure Blanchot wanted to, and thought he did incarnate) and other intellectuals’ [l’écrivain (la figure que Blanchot pense et veut incarner) et les autres intellectuels] (2014, 127). Surya agrees, highlighting that during the 1960s Blanchot stressed the specific responsibility and authority of écrivains in political interventions (LNS.43.2014, 52). Basing a particular intellectual authority on literary works was the strategy used by intellectuals from Zola up until Sartre, but Blanchot and Bataille were usually seen as eschewing this position. Yet Blanchot’s posture as a withdrawn writer was also partly responsible for the literary cult that formed around him: his extreme reserve created a mythical aura, intimidating others and granting his words an extraordinary weight. Blanchot’s intransigent refusal of political reality, his calls for an impossibly pure political revolution, his disdain for the vulgarities of day-to-day governance and the assumption of a personal, literary authority, were equally present in the 1960s texts as in those of the 1930s. Nancy usefully describes Blanchot as prey to a right-wing anarchism, one that rejected all political and social organisation, whilst accruing for himself a sort of sovereign, intransigent authority (2014, 127). That Lignes and associated ‘friends’ of Blanchot thus produced significant and critical new readings should hopefully bring new levels of conceptual clarity to the debate and move it beyond the previously Manichean critical divide.

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Notably, the kind of personal authority for which Blanchot is criticised here suggests a notion of sovereignty directly opposed to Bataille’s desire to let authority dissipate. Just as Lignes separated Bataille from Caillois, Surya has also been keen to disassociate the legacies of Blanchot and Bataille. As well as close friends, Blanchot has typically been seen as one of Bataille’s ‘most attentive readers’ (ffrench, 2007, 108). Yet, as ffrench adds, if Bataille’s legacy ‘is pursued or played out in Blanchot’s writing, this will be on Blanchot’s terms’ (2007, 112). After Bataille’s death in 1962, Blanchot became an authoritative interpreter of his texts, yet the interpretation he gave of Bataille has increasingly been called into question. The most controversial text is La Communauté inavouable (1983), in which Surya emphasises that what is presented is strictly Blanchot’s own theory of community, despite his pretentions to explicate citations drawn from Bataille (2012, 95). Surya argues that Bataille is being aggressively appropriated by Blanchot for politically expedient ends. After the failure of Blanchot’s return to politics in the 1960s, Surya notes that ethics replaced politics in Blanchot’s thought, and Emmanuel Levinas is the name through which Blanchot atoned for his former radicalism (the revolutionary 1960s included). Levinas was a Lithuanian thinker who attempted to unite existentialism with Judaic thought to describe the infinite ethical demand that forbids us to harm the Other. Blanchot had been friends with Levinas since the 1920s, but only in later life did his thought play a major role in Blanchot’s writing. Surya therefore argues that, in a period in which both Bataille and Blanchot’s 1930s politics were coming under scrutiny, Blanchot attempted to temper the violence of both of their pre-war texts by using Levinas to emphasise the ethical rather than political stakes of their writings. It is in La Communauté inavouable’s first half that Blanchot draws most extensively on Bataille, and Surya laments the lexical violence which Blanchot inflicts on Bataille’s archive in the process. He argues that Blanchot cites from across Bataille’s œuvre without due attention to the shifts in the latter’s thinking over time. This flattening of his thought makes it more amenable to manipulation. In citations drawn from Bataille, Blanchot replaces certain words to convey a more Levinasian register, and so terms like l’être, l’autre, autrui, le proche and le prochain – all alien to Bataille – appear. For example, Surya highlights a passage where Blanchot cites Bataille’s description of seeing ‘a fellow man die’ [son semblable mourir] (Blanchot, 1988, 9 [1983, 21]); yet in his subsequent commentary, Blanchot replaces semblable with autrui, changing the citation’s register and meaning. As Surya glosses, for the

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Bataille of the 1930s sacrificial death was the violent act that drew a restricted, convulsive community together, whereas Blanchot’s lexical shift implies that humankind’s shared finitude founds a radically open community of ethical responsibility (Surya, 2012, 101). Surya argues that Blanchot was attempting to simultaneously whitewash his own and Bataille’s pasts, drawing Bataille’s 1930s texts on community into a Levinasian terminology and euphemising his references to violent sacrifice or scatological obscenity (2012, 100). Blanchot pre-emptively defends himself from charges of manipulating Bataille, claiming that one cannot be faithful to the thought of Bataille without responding to the historical changes since the 1930s. He notes that, after the Second World War, the attempts to form a fusional, affective community now repelled Bataille (Blanchot 1988, 7). As we have noted, Bataille did indeed renounce his mobilisation of mythology in the 1940s. For Blanchot, this justified the abandonment of political communities for the ethical research he was now undertaking, and he argued that, as someone who was haunted by the search for a new hyper-morality, Bataille would have concurred with this position. Yet many critics have already noted ‘the absence of a direct relation between Bataille and Levinas’, making the conflation of the two which Blanchot is attempting here difficult (ffrench, 2007, 113). More strongly, Surya argues that Bataille would have found Blanchot’s ethical claims idealistic, and laments the ‘insipid’ result produced by this mixture of Bataille and Levinas (2012, 103). Surya clearly disagrees with Blanchot’s reading of Bataille, and seeks to distance Bataille from this whitewashing as it implicitly suggests that Bataille, like Blanchot, had something to be ashamed of. Whilst Blanchot’s journalism from the 1930s is now presented as proto-fascistic and complicit with anti-Semitism, Surya has spent nearly 30 years arguing that Bataille’s actions before the war were exemplary. Surya has therefore recently been attempting to decouple Bataille from Blanchot in order to have them appraised on their own, individual actions. Whilst in the late 1990s Lignes cleaved more towards Bident than Mesnard in defending Blanchot, Surya’s position now appears closer to Mesnard’s: Blanchot’s silence is seen as a fault in itself, the rhetoric of the 1960s texts is retrospectively troubling, and the 1930s articles are depicted as straightforwardly fascist. The only aspect of Mesnard’s account not shared by Lignes is the overreading of anti-Semitism throughout Blanchot’s œuvre, and details of Blanchot’s collaboration in 1940 have since been added by Uhrig. Above all, a conceptual clarity has been

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brought to the debate, largely thanks to a drive to move beyond Blanchot’s own misleading representations of events. If Bataille remained the most lucid commentator of the 1930s for Lignes, Blanchot became the most symptomatic of the seductive dangers of fascist thought. Bataille contra Blanchot? The period of Lignes’ creation in 1987 was one characterised by a backlash against la pensée 68. After attacking the theoretical abstractions and totalitarian leanings of the 1960s, accusations of fascism were mobilised against those critical of the newly consensual republican climate, and those inspired by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in particular. Bataille was a foundational figure for Lignes, and the review was immediately implicated in defending his political record. Surya and Marmande attempted to show that, even when Bataille’s mobilisation of affective politics in the 1930s was close to a fascistic methodology, his anti-fascist sympathies were clear. His critical stance can also be seen as programmatic for Lignes’ subsequent political position, being situated on the unaffiliated radical left and enacting a dual critique of both fascism and liberal democracy. Following chapters will explore other aspects of Bataille’s influence on the review, such as his portrayal of literature as a space of absolute liberty and the importance of an amoral critical stance. Cleansing Bataille’s political reputation also necessitated distancing him from his more questionable collaborators, especially Roger Caillois and Maurice Blanchot. Yet whilst the intellectual debate surrounding Bataille and Blanchot remained highly charged during the 1990s, Lignes largely remained silent regarding Blanchot’s pre-war politics. Recently, however, with ties to Blanchot’s milieu no longer pressing, the review has been much more overtly critical, condemning his pre-war activities as emphatically fascist and also noting the persistence of such an extremism in his 1960s texts. Therefore, whilst Nancy’s rereading of the political through Bataille is highly influential for Lignes, Nancy is also keen to stress that his politics here owed nothing to Blanchot (LNS.43.2014, 169). Unlike Bataille, Blanchot’s pre-war politics were impossible to recuperate into Lignes, even in a negative moment. However, Nancy stresses that there is still some use in returning to Blanchot’s texts from this period. He argues that the questions which Blanchot was posing in the 1930s are now more relevant than ever: Blanchot had had confused

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premonitions of the democratic deficit to come in the 1980s, but had not known how to respond in an appropriate manner. Today, Nancy considers that ‘the confidence in democracy itself is too quickly or too simply assumed to be well founded’ [la confiance dans la démocratie, elle, s’est trop vite ou trop simplement assurée de son bien-fondé] (2014, 157). Thinking through the 1930s, when democracy was not so self-evident, can still be an instructive process when considering contemporary politics. So whilst Blanchot is not a paradigmatic political thinker for Nancy, the way he experienced the paucity of democracy before the war is symptomatic of the wider issue of democratic legitimacy today. Once again, this probing of democratic possibilities was itself symptomatic of the liberal moment of the 1980s; as we shall continue to explore, Lignes’ intellectual genealogy, from Nietzsche and through Bataille and Blanchot, will shape its differing responses to these particular concerns. It can seem, then, that Bataille is the privileged thinker for the editorial board of Lignes, with Blanchot initially tolerated, then excoriated. However, the scrutiny under which Blanchot’s politics has been placed is, perversely, a testament to his persistent importance for the review. The dossiers produced by Lignes of Blanchot’s 1960s texts provide a valuable meditation on notions of friendship, community and cultural politics, and the conception of literature presented by the review owes as much to Blanchot as it does to Bataille: these, then, are the subjects of the following chapter.

chapter two

The Communism of Thought Reviews and Revolution in the 1960s with Blanchot and Mascolo The Communism of Thought

When delineating the contours of an intellectual milieu, often the first step is to outline its philosophical, political or literary influences to explain how it came to occupy its position in the cultural field. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, with Lignes the establishment of such a genealogy is not only necessary but also part of the review’s explicit project. Whilst Michel Surya’s Georges Bataille and subsequent Lignes publications did much to elucidate the 1930s, Surya’s next major monograph was La Révolution rêvée (2004), an account of intellectual activity from 1944 to 1956. Surya’s stated aim was to rescue this period of intellectual history from the rewriting undertaken by liberal historians since 1989 (2004b, 17). As a prime example, Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect (1992) had presented all intellectual engagements on behalf of the communist cause as shocking for their ‘insouciance in the face of violence, human suffering, and painful moral choices’ (1992, 3), stressing the ‘moral inadequacy’ and ‘intellectual irresponsibility’ of many French thinkers (11). Surya’s book covered exactly the same period as Judt’s and, rather than outright condemnation, his aim was to place such intellectual engagements back into their original context, restoring the movements of thought found in post-war reviews in order to make sense of the ideological commitments of his predecessors. La Révolution rêvée was initially meant to cover the entire post-war period up until 1968, but the high level of detail unearthed through Surya’s close reading of intellectual reviews made this an imposing task. Yet the work on the late 1950s and 1960s was carried out in another

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manner by Lignes, especially with the significant dossiers devoted to Maurice Blanchot and La Revue internationale (September 1990), Robert Antelme (January 1994) and Dionys Mascolo (March 1998). As Antelme, Blanchot and Mascolo were unaffiliated to the official strains of the dominant post-war movements of Surrealism, communism and existentialism, many of their texts and actions had faded into obscurity: through Lignes, their joint history of post-war engagement was restored. Having met during the resistance, joined and then left the PCF by 1948, Antelme and Mascolo began theorising a heterodox Marxism free from Soviet dogma. In the 1950s, Mascolo launched his own anti-colonial initiatives and contested Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 with his review Le 14 juillet. Blanchot joined Mascolo in this endeavour, becoming one of the key figures in drafting the famous ‘Manifesto of the 121’ against the Algerian war. The group then tried to launch an ambitious intellectual journal, La Revue internationale, in the early 1960s, and enthusiastically participated in May 1968 until the close of this period of revolutionary fervour. Many documents related to these activities had remained unpublished or anonymous: the special issues of Lignes brought them to light for the first time. Yet, as well as documenting the past, Surya stresses that this pedagogical project was also a means ‘to think in the past the questions that Lignes was posing me in the present’ [penser au passé les questions que Lignes me posait au présent] (LNS.23–24.2007, 34–5). The 1960s were of especial interest to Surya as a time in which intellectual activity, and especially the importance of reviews, was being actively theorised. Blanchot’s Revue internationale is described by Surya as the model which most inspired Lignes (LNS.23–24.2007, 38). This chapter will thus reassemble the narrative of the activities of Antelme, Blanchot and Mascolo restored by Lignes, whilst highlighting their role as intellectual precursors for the review. Alongside the function of the intellectual, their debates over the relationship between art and politics, the efficacy of cultural interventions and the relative autonomy of the aesthetic continue to influence Surya’s thinking on politics and literature. Lastly, to explain the ruptures as well as the continuities between Lignes and the 1960s, the historical gap between the two will be traversed via a comparison to Tel Quel. This legendary theoretical review shared a similar canon of literary influences to Lignes, but came to very different conclusions regarding the revolutionary efficacy of literature. Once these historical genealogies are concluded, we can examine the responses of Lignes to contemporary events in the following chapters.

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A Friendship of Solidarity, a Communism of Need In 1942, Dionys Mascolo, a Sicilian autodidact inspired by Surrealism, was editing Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure and Blanchot’s Faux pas for Gallimard. He also met Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Antelme, and the three of them joined François Mitterrand’s resistance cell in 1943. Antelme was caught and arrested in 1944, leading to his deportation to Buchenwald, Gandersheim and eventually Dachau. After the liberation Antelme, on the verge of death and in quarantine, was discovered by Mitterrand, who undertook a rescue mission with Mascolo to bring him home to Paris. Antelme’s testimony of his incarceration, L’Espèce humaine (1947), has since become one of the canonical works of Holocaust literature. Duras returned to her wartime diaries to write about Antelme’s capture and return in La Douleur (1985). On Duras’s request for documentation, Mascolo rediscovered several letters from Antelme from 1945 which he then published in Autour d’un effort de mémoire (1987). Notably, this was the year of Lignes’ creation, and in its first two issues Mascolo’s friend Daniel Dobbels heralded the book’s publication. This signalled the beginning of Lignes’ re-examination of the political and intellectual legacy of this milieu. Dobbels stressed that the experience in the camps had installed in Antelme the idea of a liberal communism (L.2.1988, 106): in a Cold War period dominated by the Manichean alternatives of Soviet orthodoxy and American liberalism, Antelme desired a more appropriate third way between the two. As Surya notes, most initial responses to the Holocaust were surprisingly optimistic: humankind would learn to become better from this experience, and both Marxists and existentialists rushed to reclaim the word ‘humanism’ as their own (2004b, 221–4). Rather than this progressive sense of humankind’s constant improvement, Antelme’s experience suggested a more regressive, minimal conception of human nature. In the camps, deportees were progressively stripped of their humanity, suffering such degradation that they became almost unrecognisable, whilst their captors revealed the extremes of cruelty humans which were capable of inflicting on each other. However, that human beings persisted as such despite such degradation was, for Antelme, proof of their immutability: ‘He can kill a man, but he can’t change him into something else’ (1998, 220). This, however, was all that could be said of human nature:

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The calling into question of our quality as men provokes an almost biological claim of belonging to the human race. After that it serves to make us think about the limitations of that race, about its distance from ‘nature’ and its relation to ‘nature’; that is, about a certain solitude that characterizes our race; and finally – above all – it brings us to a clear vision of its indivisible oneness. (1998, 6)

The only quality one could ascribe to humankind was its resistance to annihilation, a universal quality shared by victims and executioners alike, with whom Antelme developed a profound solidarity. In the letters published by Mascolo in Autour d’un effort de mémoire, Antelme names this solidarity ‘friendship’: ‘I do not think friendship as a positive thing, as a value, but something more, I mean as a state, an identification, and therefore as a multiplication of death’ [je ne pense pas l’amitié comme une chose positive, je veux dire comme une valeur, mais bien plus, je veux dire comme un état, une identification, donc une multiplication de la mort] (Mascolo, 1987, 23). As Martin Crowley glosses, Antelme ‘mobilised the key notion of unconditional recognition of the other, uses friendship as the name of this recognition, and articulates a model of solidarity or fraternity which is defined not by resemblance but by openness’ (2003, 53). Antelme’s structure of friendly solidarity was to become the guiding principle behind Mascolo’s political endeavours. In the 1994 Lignes dossier, testimonies from Antelme’s friends, such as Jean-Louis Schefer, demonstrated how closely Antelme’s daily comportment corresponded to such a conception of friendship: ‘I was moved by the weight injected into the words Robert used in conversation, words that demanded only truthfulness in return and a concern for justice’ (Dobbels, 2003, 226 [L.21.1994, 198]). Contemporaries were inspired by Antelme’s unostentatious generosity, his ethical attentiveness to justice and his modesty of expression, a self-effacement which allowed others the freedom of speech and decision. Mascolo likewise attests that Antelme’s experience changed the lives of those around him: the house on La Rue Saint-Benoît shared by Mascolo, Antelme, Duras and, later, Edgar Morin became a communal space, open to all and in which all personal projects were suspended in favour of the collective (1987, 69). The group swiftly became politicised: the house harboured an informal Marxist study group, and Mascolo was determined to develop an alternative communism of which Antelme would be the secret inspiration (1987, 79). Duras had joined the PCF in 1944; Mascolo and Antelme followed after the war, but tensions would lead to their rapid exit. The Soviet

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gulags already made Antelme’s membership barely tenable. He was initially reluctant to draw attention to this issue, rejecting a call from David Rousset to denounce the existence of Russian camps as it would fuel anti-Soviet propaganda (LNS.3.2000, 190). After he left the party, however, Antelme declared that communism had become ‘smothered, disfigured, covered with the blood of its crimes’ (Dobbels, 2003, 26 [L.21.1994, 116]). Further conflict was brought about by a shift in the PCF’s cultural policy, as intellectuals were instructed to follow the USSR’s doctrine. Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Soviet Central Committee, decreed in 1946 that all art, except for socialist realism, was anti-communist and decadent. Although the PCF initially resisted Zhdanovism, by August 1948 it fell into line and Surrealist writers like Raymond Queneau and Michel Leiris were strictly defined as bourgeois enemies. Documents published by Lignes demonstrate that Mascolo and Antelme vigorously protested this suppression of literary freedom (L.33.1998, 27). They had recently met Elio and Ginetta Vittorini, striking up a lifelong friendship. Elio had just published his ‘Lettera a Togliatti’, in which he defended the relative autonomy of culture against this new Zhdanovist orthodoxy. Antelme and Mascolo were subsequently chastised by PCF chiefs for interviewing Vittorini in Les Lettres françaises, and in response they lambasted this new approach to cultural politics as inefficient, sectarian and a misunderstanding of the nature of ideological combat (L.33.1998, 26). By 1949, the existence of the Soviet gulags and the PCF’s sclerotic attachment to Zhdanovism forced Antelme and Mascolo out of the party and towards an unaffiliated and heterodox Marxism. Intellectual thought within the PCF was being ‘hamstrung by the philosophical pretentions of Stalin’, whilst those abandoning the party in the 1950s rejuvenated French Marxism through a renewed attention to the concept of ‘alienation’ found in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (Poster, 1975, 39). The notion that capitalist production alienated humankind from its authentic essence created a conceptual bridge between Marxism, French existentialism and the Surrealists’ desire to disrupt bourgeois rationality. Largely forgotten today, Mascolo’s Le Communisme (1953) was one of the first major works of post-war heterodox French Marxism. Although Mascolo was inspired by the Surrealists, especially André Breton, Antelme’s experience had tempered his enthusiasm for their emphasis on the magical and the marvellous to focus instead on material human suffering and need. L’Espèce humaine has been described by François Dominique as a

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thoroughly materialist work: against a body-soul dualism, it posits the here and now as the only existing world, hence ‘all the famous treasures of the soul are only so much smoke before the words which say “hand”, “face”, “nakedness”, “bread”’ (Dobbels, 2003, 172). Building on Antelme’s absolute materialism and the Hegelian Marxism of Edgar Morin’s L’Homme et la mort (1951), Mascolo concluded that the satisfaction of human needs was communism’s principal goal: ‘communism is the movement of the satisfaction of material needs. The man of need, homo necessitudinis, is its basis. This movement is materialist, revolutionary, and conforms to theoretical Marxism’ [le communisme est le mouvement de la satisfaction des besoins matériels. L’homme de besoin, l’homo necessitudinis, en est le fondement. Ce mouvement est matérialiste et révolutionnaire, et conforme au marxisme théorique] (1953, 8). Mascolo’s major theoretical innovation was to argue that intersubjective communication and recognition were also material human needs. It was Antelme’s conception of friendship as a state of universal identification that best described humanity’s infinite need for recognition. Alongside the abolition of material inequality, intersubjective communication therefore became a communist goal for Mascolo: ‘It should really suffice to break the silence to begin to speak of communism’ [Il devrait plutôt suffire de sortir du silence pour se mettre à parler du communisme] (1953, 41). Yet this was not communication as the simple exchange of information. Note the qualification above: it should be enough to simply break the silence to speak of communism, but for Mascolo the majority of everyday language, impoverished by bourgeois liberalism, caused one to speak without really saying anything. Speech was another form of labour, and it, too, had been alienated by capitalist production. Authentic communication should go beyond the platitudes of everyday speech, but should also come from a place of subjective or material lack, revealing humankind to be nothing other than a being in, and of, need. Contra the PCF, Bataille, Blanchot, Queneau and Leiris were exemplary writers for Mascolo: They have never written anything that shows that they have forgotten the existence of that which is simply possible, of that which isn’t said, that which isn’t sure, that which is not yet known, recognised, named, studied, and which nevertheless exists, is lived, followed, demanded or simply felt as a lack. [Ils n’ont jamais rien écrit qui manifeste qu’ils aient oublié l’existence de ce qui est simplement possible, de ce qui ne se dit pas, ce qui n’est pas sûr,

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From Bataille to Badiou de ce qui n’est pas encore connu, reconnu, classé, nommé, étudié, et qui existence cependant, est vécu, poursuivi, exigé, ou simplement ressenti comme un manque]. (1953, 52)

Critics have lamented that Mascolo’s ‘markedly anti-rationalistic gnosis’ made for more of a ‘confessional’ than political work, one tending towards a humanist ‘quietism’ (Kofman, 1985, 114–15). Yet, politically, the goal for Mascolo remained a global communist revolution. However, as conditions in France were far from revolutionary, artists instead had their own specific role in inaugurating and propagating authentic communication. As Crowley glosses, artists did not have an ‘immediate tactical value’: aesthetic discourses were unlikely to bring about a tangible political change any time soon. However, ‘a politically and metaphysically authentic poetics’ could disrupt everyday language and generate subjectivities more prone to revolutionary action in the future (2006, 146). This was the relatively autonomous political role that art could play outside of the PCF’s orbit. Le refus anonyme Mascolo was also seeking to define a specific role for the intellectual, and throughout the 1950s became much more actively engaged as a militant. The republication of various tracts, letters, articles and notes in Lignes (March 1998) reveals his subsequent trajectory. The publication of Le Communisme had extended the reach of the Saint-Benoît network, and in 1955 Mascolo formed the Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, whose meetings were attended by Jean-Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire. Pursuing more theoretical endeavours, in 1957 he also formed the Cercle international des intellectuels révolutionnaires. Collaborators included the libertarian-socialist Claude Lefort from Socialisme ou Barbarie, who wished to abandon the Party form to focus on workers’ councils and self-management. ‘SouB’ was formed through an explicit critique of Trotskyism and also championed a return to the ‘young Marx’ of alienation over political philosophy. The same applied to fellow collaborator Kostas Axelos, one of the most influential theorists of French Heideggerian Marxism in the 1950s; for Axelos, Heidegger’s metaphysics augmented Marx’s too limited definition of alienation. Axelos was the editor of the Arguments book series and, as he desired an ‘open, fragmentary, multi-dimensional, poetic, planetary thought’, he also embraced philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche (Poster,

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1975, 223). Edgar Morin, a close friend of Mascolo and another of the circle’s collaborators, was also a founder of Arguments. Significantly, this broad review encompassed sociology and economics, articles on the third world, culture, language, the contemporary novel and articles by Roland Barthes (another of the review’s editors) on semiology, encompassing the sort of disciplinary plurality Mascolo was aiming for. Lastly, the group included some, such as Jean Duvignaud, who wrote for Maurice Nadeau’s more Trotskyist, vanguard literary review Les Lettres nouvelles (Stafford, 1998, 32). Therefore, alongside his former ties to Surrealism, Mascolo can be seen to be playing a pivotal role in connecting various heterodox Marxist thinkers throughout this period in an attempt to collaboratively develop a diverse yet coherent long-term theoretical project. Defections from the dogmatic PCF had produced an inventive but fragmented left. Following a trip to Poland, where Mascolo detected a communal sensibility lacking in France, he realised that without collective action French intellectuals were ‘proletarianised’ (1993, 121). Rather than a new Party or political programme, therefore, Mascolo’s aim was to inaugurate a permanent and collaborative debate between revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all cultures (1993, 75). To achieve this intellectual unity, Mascolo wanted his own theoretical review. Mascolo and Jean Schuster subsequently edited three issues of Le 14 juillet in 1958 and 1959, but, rather than engaging in theoretical elaboration, the review was an active attempt to resist Charles de Gaulle’s return to power. As the Algerian war descended into violent chaos, the former Governor General Jacques Soustelle seized power in Algeria and demanded that de Gaulle be made French President to suppress the Algerian resistance. Whilst de Gaulle’s return was largely welcomed by the public and democratically legitimate, figures on the left worried that his demand for six months of emergency powers and the creation of a new, Fifth Republic could lead to an autocratic state supported by the military. Mascolo and Schuster asserted their support for Algerian independence and declared de Gaulle’s new government illegal. Opening Le 14 juillet, Mascolo acknowledged that, given de Gaulle’s popular support, their refusal of the situation was vain: nevertheless, it remained a show of determination to clearly state ‘I cannot – I could never accept this’ [je ne peux pas – je ne pourrai jamais accepter cela] (Mascolo, 2004, 82). Furthermore, this was not simply a nihilist rejection of political reality, but a gesture to reunite the dispersed left: ‘Against all, this is not solitude. This means a certain manner of being together, plurally. We

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are less alone than ever’ [Envers et contre tous, cela n’est pas la solitude. Cela se dit d’une certaine manière d’être ensemble, à plusieurs. Nous sommes moins seuls que jamais] (2004, 83). If the first and last word of this position was an emphatic ‘No’ to de Gaulle, it was an affirmative no, one which concealed a hidden ‘Yes’ to the solidarity and friendship that could end intellectual dispersion. By not attaching a positive programme to this outright negation of the status quo, a broad, non-exclusionary platform of solidarity was sought. This was the first attempt to articulate the kind of negative community suggested by Antelme’s friendship on a wider scale. Whilst Bataille had supported Mascolo’s anti-colonial initiatives, he subsequently wrote to Mascolo to denounce this new stance as futile (1997, 483). Despite his friend’s reticence, this was Blanchot’s point of entry: on reading the first issue of Le 14 juillet, he immediately sent Mascolo a letter expressing his complete agreement. Blanchot’s own contributions to Le 14 juillet gave him an opportunity to critique his former nationalism, self-reflexively commenting that ‘the colonial reaction is a movement of despair (just as the nationalist upsurge is a form of distress)’ (Blanchot, 2010, 13). This was, therefore, a disavowal of his pre-war politics, ascribing his former nationalism to a symptom of severe distress. Yet his article, ‘Le Refus’, also developed ideas found in his pre-war writings: outright refusal of political reality had already been a feature of his 1930s texts, and a certain intransigent extremism intrudes on these later articles. Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference in the tone of Blanchot’s response to Mascolo: When we refuse, we refuse with a movement free from contempt and exaltation, one that is as far as possible anonymous, for the power of refusal is accomplished neither by us nor in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak. (2010, 7)

Here is a rejection not just of nationalism, but of any exclusive community, and Blanchot later described communism as ‘that which excludes (and excludes itself from) every already constituted community’ [ce qui exclut (et s’exclut de) toute communauté déjà constituée] (L.33.1998, 148). This impersonal protest wishes to effect a universal contestation by accommodating a plurality of voices. Whilst this remained an intransigent refusal, the emphasis on weakness rather than contempt aimed at creating a disaggregated communal structure, open primarily to those on the political margins. As Crowley states, ‘United, solidary, not yet

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together, this community of refusal also exists through the absence of foundation which this refusal claims, or rather through its poverty, the divestiture in which it seeks to found itself (without founding itself)’ [Uni, solidaire, pas encore ensemble, la communauté de refus l’est aussi de par l’absence de fondement dont le refus se revendique, ou plutôt par la pauvreté, le dessaisissement dans lesquels il cherche à se fonder (sans se fonder)] (2004, 113). In Robert Antelme (2004), his significant contribution to the Lignes collection, Martin Crowley also stressed how much Blanchot’s theoretical work in the late 1950s and 1960s was heavily influenced by Antelme. Subsequently, given Blanchot’s influence on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Antelme himself remains a residual presence in texts such as Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993) and Politiques de l’amitié (1995). For instance, Blanchot’s emphasis on an inclusive solidarity that does not coalesce into a community is most clearly present in Derrida’s frequent use of the disjunctive sans: in Spectres de Marx, Derrida’s ‘New International’ was envisioned as a platform for a global critique of capitalism ‘without status, without title, and without a name […] without a party, without country, without national community’ and ‘without common belonging to a class’ (1994, 85). Such formulations are described by Crowley as inconceivable without the Blanchot of the refus period, and so also without Antelme (2004, 113). The Lignes dossier on Antelme, and subsequent monograph publications, therefore revealed the extent to which Antelme had exerted a subterranean influence on an entire generation of French thinkers. Crowley’s own Lignes-published L’Homme sans (2009) similarly drew on Bataille, Antelme, Blanchot, Mascolo, Derrida, Nancy and Jacques Rancière both to define a humanity without qualities open to the kinds of universal solidarity envisioned by Antelme, and to emphasise humans as creatures of material need as developed by Mascolo in Le Communisme. Crowley’s work for Lignes, then, is paradigmatic both in its concern to preserve and contextualise otherwise forgotten intellectual legacies, and then to further pursue these lines of philosophical and political enquiry. Lignes also tried to remobilise Mascolo’s contestation of the Fifth Republic in its own contemporary moment. In 1990, it republished Le 14 Juillet in its entirety to coincide with the centenary of de Gaulle’s birth. Surya was firm in his unwillingness to celebrate such an event: ‘The commemoration would hypostatise a hybrid, two-headed figure, half-Gaullist, half-Petainist’ [La commémoration hypostasierait une figure hybride, bicéphale, mi-gaulliene, mi-pétainiste] (1990, 9). Whilst

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the creation of the Fifth Republic was contested in 1958, Surya argues that since no one seemed to question its existence in 1990 everyone had become implicitly Gaullist. François Mitterrand, once close to Mascolo’s circle, had originally promised to abolish the presidential role if he were elected, but abandoned this policy once in power. Early articles in Lignes critiqued this stance, especially after Mitterrand’s 1988 re-election campaign during which he relied on his personality rather than offering concrete policies (L.3.1988, 35). De Gaulle had presented himself as the strong leader France needed, and as such the constitution of his Fifth Republic was seen by Lignes as providing the ideological blueprint for the years to come. The review’s analysis was prescient: heading into the new millennium, the tendency was towards strengthening, rather than contesting presidential authority, especially under Nicholas Sarkozy. Dobbels was equally convinced that such strong, nationalist presidents would only aid the far right (1990, 7–8); the Front National received between 20 and 30% of the vote in some cantons in 1990, and the party’s relentless rise was also a key characteristic of the next 25 years. In republishing Le 14 juillet, then, Lignes wished to both reactivate the constitutional debate of 1968 and highlight its concerns regarding presidential populism. In one last echo of Blanchot’s refus at the turn of the millennium, Surya once more attempted to unite a dispersed left in the Lignes issue Désir de révolution (February 2001). Unlike the 1960s, in the contemporary moment a real desire for revolution seemed lacking, and so instead Surya proposed the term refus as a possible common denominator with which to forge a broad-based solidarity (LNS.4.2001, 7–10). The call largely failed, however: Étienne Balibar argued that it may be easy to refuse bourgeois society, but harder to transform global capitalism (11–15); Michel Löwy preferred collective, subversive actions to individual statements of refusal (119–24); and Jean-Luc Nancy described such refusals as too pure and too simple (131–41). This Lignes issue therefore demonstrated the still fractured nature of the intellectual left in 2001, and also the difficulty of sustaining a refus without a common cause or positive programme. By contrast, seven years later Alain Badiou’s call to unite the left around the word ‘communism’ was both more successful and more controversial, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Influenced by Antelme’s friendship, and Blanchot and Mascolo’s non-exclusive political organisations, Surya has described his preference for Lignes to provide an open space for political discussion rather than a fixed position (LNS.23–24.2007, 9). Even if Surya’s attempt to rally

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people around the term refus failed, the review generally maintains a relatively open stance by negatively critiquing the present without providing too much of a prescriptive, positive programme. However, at moments of evident political tension, such as the new social movements in the mid-1990s or the financial crisis of 2008, the review took a much more clearly fixed oppositional stance before relaxing back into a more contemplative plurality. In addition, when it comes into contact with the real world, Lignes is often forced to alter its radical critical negativity, as we shall see, for example, concerning religion in Chapter 3. Surya has therefore described a constant oscillation occurring in Lignes, one that shifts between providing an open space and a more concrete political position (1999a, 290). This oscillation will be pursued throughout the following chapters; here, we will examine how further inspiration for Lignes came from Mascolo and Blanchot’s next venture, La Revue internationale. Plural Speech In 1960, the trial of Francis Jeanson, the leader of a network providing aid to the Algerian Liberation Front, was about to commence, marking an escalation of tensions in France over Algeria. Mascolo decided to intervene publicly, and began drafting what would become the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’ (often called the ‘Manifesto of the 121’). As Zakir Paul argues, given that there was a ‘total lack of institutionally sanctioned political discourse in favour of Algerian national independence’, the intellectual initiative was significant, and signatories included Jean-Paul Sartre, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Claude Simon (2010, xxxix). Although the Manifesto was collaboratively written, Blanchot provided the title, and thus the strong emphasis on the right to insubordination, rather than the duty. As another of Mascolo’s negatively formed communities, in not obliging signatories to subscribe to a prescriptive programme they sought to find minimal common ground for a broad-based opposition to the war. Whilst Blanchot’s role in the Manifesto is now known, early drafts published by Lignes demonstrate that the majority of the composition was undertaken by Mascolo and Jean Schuster and, whilst lacking this stress on rights over duties, their early drafts still entreat people to disrupt the French military operation through civil ­disobedience (L.33.1998, 79–83).

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The Manifesto was immediately banned by the French state, yet it caused a media scandal and became pivotal in changing public opinion. Subsequently, Blanchot wrote to Sartre arguing that the real success of the Manifesto was its open, communal structure, a kind of solidarity predicated on its impersonal force (L.11.1990, 218). Blanchot saw the collaboratively written manifesto as a unique form of political speech which allowed the articulation of a plurality of voices. He wanted a new form of intellectual review to support this intellectual plurality and, as Sartre was unwilling to alter the form of Les Temps modernes, alongside Mascolo and Vittorini, from 1960 to 1965 Blanchot concentrated his efforts on creating La Revue internationale. The project was highly ambitious and never materialised, aside from an issue ‘zero’ appended to the Italian newspaper Il Menabo. Lignes (September 1990) therefore made many of the texts and surrounding documentation available for the first time, demonstrating both the theoretical scope of the endeavour and its influence on Surya’s own review. The fundamental conviction of La Revue internationale was that, in a globalising world, every national problem was also an international concern. Editorial committees were therefore established in France, Germany and Italy for a trilingual publication, with contributors sourced from around the world.1 Texts would be individually composed but collectively edited and translated, then presented anonymously so that every contributor became responsible for assertions which they had not written. Again, the review aimed not so much at a common standpoint as developing a plural structure by accommodating multiple voices, revealing the differences and distances between each. Rather than overtly political texts, Blanchot advocated a literary approach to current affairs, defining contributors to La Revue explicitly as écrivains. As Leslie Hill summarises, literature was not storytelling for Blanchot and, unlike Mascolo, he did not value it for its ‘richer potential for communicativeness’ (1997, 92). Instead, Blanchot championed literature for its ability to challenge any ‘stable ethical or political foundation’, a form of writing conceived of as contestation or questioning. As a result, the form 1 The French editorial board was made up of Blanchot, Mascolo, Antelme, Maurice Nadeau, Roland Barthes and Louis-René des Forêts; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Uwe Johnson, Gunther Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Martin Walser were the German contingent; and in Italy, Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Francesco Leonetti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia. Iris Murdoch was contacted to find contributors from England, Richard Seaver in the US and Leszek Kolakowski in Poland.

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of La Revue internationale was to be its most radical gesture. Blanchot wanted it to cover everything, to ‘say the “world” and everything that takes place in the world’ (2010, 60 [L.11.1990, 185]). However, this did not mean indiscriminately writing about anything and everything, but rather extricating the novelty of an event ‘where the whole is at stake’ (Blanchot, 2010, 57 [L.11.1990, 180]). The central spine of La Revue internationale was to be ‘Les Cours des choses’, a series of fragmentary texts of only one or two pages in which significant global events would be represented through a literary style of writing that did not construct a monolithic narrative of history: events would be treated by multiple authors in different manners, pluralising the historical record. As Bident describes, poetry would guide the review’s politics, and fragments would construct the totality (1998, 407). This literary approach to politics was not without its difficulties. Writing to Bataille, Blanchot described a double movement in response to politics: one dialectical, which gestures towards decisive action; the other non-dialectical, which ‘is not at all concerned with unity and does not tend towards power (to the possible)’ [ne se soucie pas du tout de l’unité et ne tend pas au pouvoir (au possible)] (Blanchot in Bataille, 1997, 595–6). In theory, Blanchot’s literary writing had attempted to create a space in which authority was dissipated and identities were challenged, a space welcoming alterity and infinite possibilities. Yet the reawakening of Blanchot’s political impulse drew him back towards current events which, rather than this speculative probing, seemed to demand precise and concrete interventions. These were, then, two divergent vectors with differing discourses: ‘One names the possible and wants the possible. The other responds to the impossible’ [L’un nomme le possible et veut le possible. L’autre répond à l’impossible] (Bataille, 1997, 596). Blanchot admitted that there seemed to be an unresolvable tension between political and literary responsibility and, as previously discussed, he was not always successful at mastering his desire for a personal authority in his political writings. Nevertheless, with this new review he sought a form of cultural politics that would unite the two vectors: ‘Elements of a solution do exist, though: one of the tasks of the review should be to explore them in more detail’ (Blanchot, 2010, 59 [L.11.1990, 183]). Hill notes that Blanchot’s 1950s literature had been progressing towards fragmentary rearrangement rather than linear narratives, and this new, political project reinforced this literary impulse. Because such fragments were not part of a dialectical unity, but were instead a way ‘to affirm writing as a response to the threat and promise of the future’, perhaps

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the review could draw together the two vectors of intellectual responsibility (2012, 26). This literary emphasis caused tensions within the review’s milieu, however, and the French texts were received with both bafflement and hostility by their international collaborators. Elio Vittorini complained that the repeated treatment of the same events was tedious, whilst Blanchot stressed that such a repetition was a crucial component of infinite plurality (L.11.1990, 269). Furthermore, Vittorini argued that what the French called écriture was actually philosophy, a dated form of ontological research which aimed to revalorise Heideggerian metaphysics (L.11.1990, 274). The influence of Heidegger on Blanchot’s writing has been frequently noted, and Blanchot himself would portray his writing as a form of ontological research. Contrary to Heidegger, however, instead of an attempt to unveil the true essence of Being through literature, Blanchot would argue that his writerly practice was an attempt to infinitely question any such essentialism. What frustrated Vittorini, and others, was how little such an approach seemed to bridge the gap between literature and politics: could an effective form of cultural politics really be produced from ontological contestation? That Vittorini references Blanchot’s texts as particularly baffling seems pertinent: Mascolo and Vittorini had previously held comparable positions on aesthetics and politics, and the disaccord here revolves around this overtly Blanchotian conception of literature. This is one of the first signs of a latent tension between Mascolo and Blanchot. Whilst Mascolo was increasingly wedded to a revolutionary materialism, Blanchot’s communism has been described as primarily theoretical (Holland, 1995, 190). The divide between Mascolo and Blanchot over textuality and materialism deepened in the following years. Affirming the importance of Blanchot’s meditations on the fragmentary nevertheless, in the new millennium Lignes republished ‘Le Nom de Berlin’, a Blanchot text destined for La Revue internationale. Here, Blanchot presents Berlin as an exemplary case in which the totality of an object can only be apprehended fragmentarily, the city having been literally fragmented by the Berlin Wall. This prompts further speculation on the nature of fragmentary writing, which is described by Blanchot as: a patient-impatient, mobile-immobile method of research, and also the affirmation that sense, the entirety of sense, could not be immediately within us and what we write, but that it is still to come and that, questioning the sense, we grasp it as the becoming and what will come. (Blanchot, 2010, 74 [LNS.3.2000, 132])

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Once again, writing is depicted as an endless process: ‘Every fragmentary word, every fragmentary reflection demands this: an infinite reiteration and an infinite plurality’ (Blanchot, 2010, 74 [LNS.3.2000, 132]). Commenting on ‘Berlin’ in Lignes, Christophe Bident argued that the construction of the Berlin Wall was a concrete manifestation of the fundamental political desire to isolate and separate different communities, demarcating zones of inclusion and exclusion. Whereas politics is seen as essentially divisive, Blanchot’s writing was emphasised as an open space of interrogation. Thus, states Bident, Blanchot tried to neutralise ‘the algebraic or electrically polarised difference which would consist in attributing a + and a – to each side of a division’ [la différence polaire, algébrique ou électrique qui consisterait à attribuer un + et un – de chaque côté de la frontière] (LNS.3.2000, 143). What Blanchot thus provided for Lignes was a way of reconsidering intellectual engagement that still granted the writer a degree of responsibility, but which refused Sartrean authority and instead created ‘a place in which each and every person could come to occupy’ [une place que chacun peut venir occuper] (LNS.3.2000, 146). Blanchot’s position here could be seen as foreshadowing the emphasis on liberal pluralism against dogmatic political polemics championed by Le Débat in the 1980s. Yet Le Débat’s political liberalism emphasised individual rather than collective responsibility, and whilst the end of the Cold War led to an exaggerated confidence in liberal democracy as the best form of governance, Blanchot’s infinite questioning would want to probe the very foundations of contemporary politics and nation states. Blanchot would be closer here to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claude Lefort than to François Furet or Pierre Nora. Notably, the republication of ‘Berlin’ appeared at a turning point for Lignes. It was printed in the third issue of the new series (October 2000), the first number to include an expanded editorial board after the departure of Daniel Dobbels and with Francis Marmande also soon to leave. As discussed further in Chapter 6, the new editorial board cemented a more militant stance within the review, with greater participation from former Althusserians. Yet it is important to note that this more militant intellectual heritage did not wholly supplant the neo-Nietzschean genealogy represented by Bataille and Blanchot. Whilst, between 2002 and 2012, more politically than literary minded figures, such as Alain Badiou, Alain Brossat and Jacques Rancière, would dominate the review’s more militant stance, Bataille and Blanchot

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would return as key concerns, and Surya attempted to hold these two different intellectual trajectories in a productive tension. Such a tension is most clearly demonstrated in the issue Le Nouveau désordre international (October 2003), as it opens with contributions from Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou. Nancy’s opposition to the 2002 American invasion of Iraq is clear, as he states that this was not a war with Iraq, but one inflicted upon Iraq. Extending his meditations to the wider Middle East, he adds that there is nothing left to say regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and perhaps it was time for concrete gestures of reconciliation to take place (LNS.12.2003, 8). These declarative statements therefore seem to demand action. However, Nancy proceeds to challenge such certainties, noting that simply denouncing American imperialism is a reactionary response given the lack of genuine alternatives, and so overtly anti-American rhetoric should be avoided. Philosophy had a different task: The philosopher, by contrast, has much to do with questions posed in entirely fresh ways, truly shaking their foundations, such as: What is a ‘world’? What is a ‘people’? What is ‘capital’? What is ‘power’? What does ‘politics’ mean? And ‘religion’? [Le philosophe, en revanche, a fort à faire avec des questions remises entièrement en friche, véritablement de fond en comble, telles que: qu’est-ce qu’un ‘monde’? qu’est-ce qu’un ‘peuple’? qu’est-ce-que le ‘capital’? qu’est-ce que le ‘pouvoir’? que veut dire ‘politique’? et ‘religion’?] (8)

Nancy’s text thus straddles Blanchot’s two vectors, initially seeming to name the possible and call for action before challenging its own discourse in the vein of ‘Berlin’ (which Nancy had translated from Italian in 1983). Nancy calls this a philosophical, rather than a literary, task, but his sense of questioning and contesting received certainties is comparable to Blanchot’s. Badiou’s text follows immediately after Nancy’s and, in stark contrast to this open-ended questioning, recommends ‘the concentration of thought on a problem whose formulation could seem very singular, even extraordinarily narrow’ [la concentration de la pensée sur un problème dont la formation peut sembler tout à fait singulière, voire extraordinairement étroite] (LNS.12.2003, 30). As will be discussed in Chapter 6, Badiou’s critical method relies on precisely the mathematical polarisations that Blanchot eschewed. Badiou’s process requires Manichean separations, explicitly designating the good and bad sides of a political divide and articulating a precise sequence of actions that should follow; rather than questioning, militant philosophers should

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prescribe how the world should be. The contrast to Blanchot’s approach is clear, and in the following years Badiou would reach new levels of public fame, largely through the books published by Lignes. Therefore, at the start of a period in which Lignes became more closely associated with Badiou’s militant prescription, the publication of ‘Le Nom de Berlin’ indicated that this other, Blanchotian mode of thinking remained an important intellectual legacy for the review. Whilst Surya is not always the most sympathetic reader of Blanchot, his admiration for La Revue internationale is unqualified, calling it the project that most influenced Lignes (LNS.23–24.2007, 38). The importance of reviews for Mascolo and Blanchot is certainly clear. Surya stresses that most of Blanchot’s political texts were written ‘in reviews and for reviews. In the movement of thought which reviews allow’ [dans des revues et pour des revues. Dans le mouvement de pensée que permettent les revues] (in Blanchot, 2003, 8). Mascolo also argued for the specificity of periodical texts, requesting that all pieces for La Revue internationale be ones which authors would not have thought of writing had the review not existed. Rather than pieces already published elsewhere, Mascolo wanted texts that had been deliberately developed with the review’s fragmentary and literary structure in mind (L.11.1990, 223). When the review stalled and Vittorini suggested that they publish a book instead, Mascolo declined, arguing that books did not allow for the same kind of movement of thought. For Mascolo, the failure of what he called the communisme de pensée was a blow: ‘To write all alone is necessary and inevitable. It is also sad, and maybe frivolous’ [Écrire tout seul est nécessaire, inévitable. C’est triste aussi et peut-être frivole] (L.11.1990, 300). This idea of the movement of thought produced by reviews is equally important for Surya. Whilst La Révolution rêvée was not explicitly a history of post-war reviews, it relied heavily upon them as a key source, sites in which thought could be seized collectively and in motion (2004b, 14). Surya’s methodology analysed texts within the moment in which they appeared, tracking the development of certain words, concepts and positions day by day in an attempt to trace the flow of ideas. Consequently, Surya later claimed that he wanted Lignes to produce not ‘the possibility of a new movement, but a new possibility of movement’ [la possibilité d’un mouvement nouveau, mais une nouvelle possibilité de mouvement] (LNS.23–24.2007, 10). The review’s name reflects this attempt, suggesting the desire to forge new paths or lines of flight within stagnant political and intellectual discourses. Lignes represents both the

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non-dogmatic, open plurality desired by Antelme’s friendship and the attempt to renew a collective and creative intellectual culture. Echoing Mascolo, Surya notes that such a plural inventiveness requires a tension between writing alone and thinking together: I emphasise, as strongly as possible, both the effectively collective character, ‘collectivist’ even (let’s risk this word here, play with it), of such an enterprise of thought, and its irreducibly singular character, ‘individualist’ (for the counterpart of ‘collectivist’), solitary, even. Of this I am convinced: it is alone that we think together. [Je souligne à la fois, et autant que faire se peut, le caractère en effet collectif, ‘collectiviste’ même (osons le mot ici, amusons-nous avec) d’une telle entreprise de pensée, et son caractère irréductiblement singulier, ‘individualiste’ (pour faire pendant à ‘collectiviste’); solitaire même. C’est seuls que nous pensons ensemble: j’en suis convaincu]. (2010a, 78)

Yet Surya also laments the difficulty of maintaining such motion today, as readers seem less interested in the movement of a review than in particular, isolated and static themes (2007, 36). Indeed, whilst early issues of the review contained various thematic dossiers alongside book reviews and short, fragmentary pieces on current events, over time Lignes has increasingly tended to produce monothematic issues directed by specialists in their respective fields. Whilst such single-topic issues allow a certain problem to be investigated in depth, they encourage readers to purchase only those of particular interest to them rather than subscribing, and they operate more as individual book collections rather than a review in motion. Nevertheless, Surya’s persistence with Lignes for nearly 30 years demonstrates his commitment to the review form and the motion of thought which it can still produce, as this book hopes to demonstrate. Inspired by Antelme and Mascolo, Blanchot’s own formulations of what an open and plural cultural politics might look like has left evident traces both in how Surya theorises his own review and in the kinds of intellectual interventions produced by Lignes contributors, such as Jean-Luc Nancy. The conclusion to this chapter will draw out some further consequences for Lignes. Here, we return to the 1960s, and May ’68 in particular, an episode which drove a clear wedge between Blanchot’s and Mascolo’s conceptions of material and textual politics. The emphasis on textuality will then be traced through the review Tel Quel, followed by a consideration of Surya’s rereading of Bataille, Blanchot and Mascolo in the present.

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Theory as Material Force After five years, the editorial team of La Revue internationale disintegrated. Aside from disagreements over its literary style, the difficulties of international collaboration and securing stable publishers in each country also proved to be intractable. Blanchot was especially disappointed with this failure, yet his spirits were revived when May ’68 provided another forum for communal politics. Whilst Blanchot, Mascolo and company played a minor role in the wider events, they offered their solidarity to the students and embraced the liberated atmosphere of revolutionary optimism. Within the occupied Sorbonne University, Duras, Mascolo, Antelme, Blanchot and others formed Le Comité d’action étudiantsécrivains, a collective which continued to meet every day well into July. Tracts, manifestos and articles composed for the bulletin Comité appeared in Lignes on the thirtieth anniversary of May ’68. Once again, the group produced ‘neither a programme, nor a platform, nor a political line’ [ni programme, ni plate-forme, ni ligne politique] (Mascolo, 1993, 340). Yet rather than Blanchot’s Revue internationale and its more literary, theoretical communism, this Comité more closely represented the culmination of Mascolo’s materialist conception of intellectual activity. In Le 14 juillet, Mascolo had argued that intellectuals needed to participate within a broader social base: rather than politics prescribed by an elite, ‘the political organisation of the world is henceforth the work of each and every person’ [l’organisation politique du monde est désormais l’œuvre de tous et de chacun] (152). This implied the intellectuals embedding themselves within the general population. Furthermore, building up towards the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, Mascolo believed that, with general levels of education rising, the intelligentsia could now exert a powerful influence on the government which, if strategically deployed, could not be ignored. This proved prescient, as the ‘Manifesto’ did have a considerable public impact. Therefore, whilst the PCF continued to denigrate intellectual activity as bourgeois, Mascolo believed that, when endowed with popular support, intellectuals could have a tangible influence. Citing Marx, he stated the following: The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force when it grips the masses. [L’arme de la critique ne saurait remplacer la critique des armes. La force matérielle ne saurait être renversée que par la force matérielle.

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From Bataille to Badiou La théorie elle aussi devient force matérielle lorsqu’elle pénètre les masses]. (L.33.1998, 170)

For Mascolo, theory became a material force in May ’68. Rather than through Blanchot’s conception of plural speech, Mascolo wanted the intellectual to become anonymous as an organic part of the masses. Whilst before 1968 the intellectual spoke on behalf of the voiceless, here the intellectual collective became ‘a microcosm of the people’ which experienced ‘the impersonal revolutionary demand’ [un microcosme du peuple (…) l’exigence révolutionnaire impersonnelle] (Mascolo, 1993, 31). Practically, this required genuinely collaborative political statements, and Duras described the hellish process of collective writing in which, after hours of painstaking revisions, individual concerns were purged and the community began to function (Mascolo, 2004, 326). This was a concerted attempt to break down what were perceived to be individualistic, bourgeois subjectivities, prompting participants to become a ‘stranger to everyone and to themselves’ [étranger à tous et à soi] (338). However, by early 1969 the Comité was disbanded precisely because individual conflicts had crept back in; Mascolo commented that it had become a bickering family simply airing their dirty laundry (L.33.1998, 176). Nevertheless, for a brief moment a truly communal political organisation was lived. The republication of documents attesting to this communal anti-individualism is part of Lignes’ response to the retrospective denigration of May ’68 by politicians, the mass media and philosophers. Both la pensée 68 and the events of May ’68 were scapegoated for a process of cultural transformation that had been two decades in the making. Kristin Ross has described how, since the 1950s, France’s booming economy had allowed it to undertake an ‘accelerated transition into Fordism’ and embrace an American-style mass culture (1995, 3). Whilst the societal changes that resulted were the product of two decades of gradual change, May ’68 dramatically highlighted the rupture of a new generation with more traditional French culture and values, and so subsequently ‘all the problems and dissatisfactions’ associated with this cultural transformation were blamed on the student revolt and its intellectual accompaniment (Ross, 1995, 3). Therefore the ‘new philosophers’ made it fashionable to portray oneself as a repentant soixante-huitard who had once believed in the revolution but who now saw that republican liberalism was the only responsible path. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut associated la pensée 68 with the student revolts in order to blame them both for indulgently valorising ‘the cult

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of private happiness and the very liberal pursuit of individual projects’ over social responsibility (1990a, xxii). Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ère du vide (1983) also lamented the rampant consumerism and individualism of the 1980s, laying the blame on the 1960s. Therefore, alongside its supposed indulgence of communism and fascism, la pensée 68 was also charged with propagating a bad form of American liberalism, one indulging the hedonistic pursuit of self-satisfaction and little concerned with republican values. There was in fact an ‘accelerationist’ moment in the early 1970s, when Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Œdipe (1972), Lyotard’s Économie libidinale (1974) and Baudrillard’s L’Échange symbolique et la mort (1976) combined the avant-garde embrace of transgression of societal norms with the deregulation of capitalist flows to claim that a new, communal emancipation would be unleashed from this nascent neoliberalism (Noys, 2010, 5). Deleuze and Guattari’s work in particular has been seen to be ‘in dangerous consonance with new forms of capitalist accumulation’ (Noys, 2010, 2). Yet these authors quickly spotted the dangers of the current neoliberal order and repudiated these stances, Lyotard later calling Économie libidinale an ‘evil book’ (1984, 7). La pensée 68 was again being blamed en bloc for structural changes to the global capitalist order. Nevertheless, denigration of May ’68 continued right up to Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in 2007, when he claimed that it had imposed an intellectual relativism and cynicism on France, noticeably lowering political and moral standards in the country ever since (Gordon, 2008, 143). In response, Lignes increasingly defended both May ’68 and la pensée 68. The republication of the Comité documents aimed at demonstrating that at least some soixante-huitards were also opposed to the American individualism which Blanchot later called ‘the weak-minded conception of everyday liberalism’ (1998, 18). Crucially, against the culturalist readings of May ’68 which saw the events as simply a manifestation of the hedonistic desires of a new generation of affluent teenagers, Daniel Bensaïd emphasised the strictly political aspects of the revolts, noting that France also witnessed its biggest ever wave of industrial strikes in the same months (L.34.1998, 58). Ten years later, Lignes published Bensaïd and Alain Krivine’s 1968: Fins et suites (2008), a collection of articles written on successive anniversaries of May ’68 which document both the growing conservative backlash against the events and the contemporary political importance they still retained. The dossier on Mascolo in 1998 was another such manner of celebrating the political

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legacy of the 1960s, contextualising the student movement within wider shifts of Marxist and revolutionary theory. Although documents pertaining to a second issue of Comité appeared in 1969, this was the end of Blanchot’s political participation alongside Antelme and Mascolo. Mascolo’s revolutionary materialism was becoming increasingly incompatible with Blanchot’s more literary endeavours. In Sur le sens et l’usage du mot ‘gauche’ (1955; Lignes edition 2011), Mascolo had argued that there was no such thing as an electoral left: the difference between the parliamentary left and right was merely one of opinion, and so this left, as a simple reaction to the right, remained a certain kind of bourgeois activity (2011, 11). The true measure was to know if one was an abstract idealist or a genuine materialist, and then to match one’s actions to one’s politics. For Mascolo, electoral politics would never do enough to combat the insatisfaction of human needs: only a revolution would suffice. Mascolo’s committed materialism is therefore one in which ideas and actions coalesce, suggesting that literary and intellectual activities are in themselves insufficient without revolutionary activism. In May ’68, rather than the emphasis on sexual or cultural liberation, Mascolo continued to insist that the real problem was the electoral left’s attachment to a system of formal democracy that was complicit with capitalist exploitation (L.33.1998, 165). In Lignes, Alain Brossat noted that May ’68 committees were in fact steeped in a collective, participative democratic culture (L.34.1998, 35). Rather than the European consensus surrounding liberal democracy, the legacies of participatory democracy and Workers’ Councils were defended as ways of countering the current democratic deficit. This critique of formal democracy was reactivated in Lignes’ second series in the debates between Badiou and Bensaïd over the strategic value of parliamentary politics, discussed in Chapter 6. Furthermore, we should note here Mascolo’s privileging of the insatisfaction of human needs over sexual liberation. Chapter 7 will discuss to what extent Lignes has ignored gender and sexuality issues in favour of contesting economic inequality. Mascolo also took a clear line against Maoist conceptions of a cultural revolution, arguing that there is no such thing as a culturally revolutionary act. For Mascolo, the revolution would arrive from outside of culture, through a political movement which would then retrospectively give culture a new, revolutionary sense (Mascolo, 2004, 337). Situationist discourses fed into May ’68, and Mascolo absorbed their claims that cultural products were being recuperated by the capitalist system. For Mascolo, culture was reinforcing rather than challenging

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the government and, given that public broadcasting was controlled by the state, Mascolo called for a boycott of public media. With intellectuals devolved into the masses and theory becoming a material force, politics was now communicated through friendship: without books, without even the need for a review, the revolution was seen by Mascolo as a contagious force, propagating itself through clandestine speech (L.33.1998, 141). Art retained its relative autonomy, but Mascolo now granted it a distinctly secondary status. Whilst Surrealists such as Paul Éluard claimed that their radical poetry could only ever serve revolutionary ends, for Mascolo this illusory aesthetic liberty was a distraction from material inequality. Instead, during a trip to Cuba in 1967, Mascolo was surprised to see three breeder bulls and an anti-aircraft gun appearing in an art gallery alongside the expected paintings. Rather than absorbing these ready-mades into an imaginary realm of art, their appearance in the gallery pierced the crushing boredom of the museum and forced material reality to intrude onto aesthetic concerns. The Cubans’ material needs (milk) and revolutionary might (anti-aircraft guns) imbued art with a concrete immediacy that suggested the possibility of a more active artistic communism: material, political reality gave art its significance, not the other way around (Mascolo, 1993, 294). Most notably, this materialist aesthetic drew Mascolo away from Blanchot’s literary communism. As the Comité disbanded in 1969, Mascolo retrospectively commented that writers (explicitly naming Bataille and Blanchot) were luxuries: ‘irreplaceable luxuries, but luxuries all the same from the point of view that we should take’ [d’irremplaçables luxes mais des luxes tout de même du point de vue qui se doit d’être le notre] (L.33.1998, 142). Mascolo implicitly placed Bataille and Blanchot on the side of an aesthetic idealism, and against Blanchot’s ‘theoretical’ communism he stressed his commitment to materialism. Although Blanchot and Mascolo remained friends, they would never again engage in concerted political activity together as they had between 1958 and 1968. Whilst Mascolo continued to pen militant, materialist political interventions, Blanchot retreated back into writing, replacing politics with ethics as he turned towards Emmanuel Levinas and Judaic thought. Whilst Blanchot has long since been consecrated as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation, Mascolo remains a rare reference in French or anglophone academia. Lignes makes a case for the subterranean intellectual legacy of Mascolo, Marmande arguing that Barthes, Deleuze and Lacan, amongst others, would propagate Mascolo’s ideas

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without really knowing it (L.34.1998, 48). The sense of communism as a material affect circulating amongst bodies was certainly the experience Deleuze would take away from May ’68, and in letters to Mascolo from 1988, republished by Lignes, Deleuze asserted that Blanchot’s and Mascolo’s conception of friendship had been influential on his own (L.33.1998, 222–6). Yet perhaps even more so than Blanchot, the term écriture became ‘attached’ to Barthes (Stafford, 1998, 31), and Barthes’s ‘aestheticized essayism’ (Stafford, 1998, 87) and emphasis on ‘literary contestation’ (Stafford, 1998, 119) in the 1960s seems closer to Blanchot than to Mascolo’s materialist revolution. Similarly, any confluence between Mascolo and Lacan is more likely to come from their shared intellectual debt to Bataille than any direct transmission between the two. Instead, it appears that the legacy of the more militant, later Mascolo is more easily located in Lignes’ second series, between Badiou and Bensaïd as they try to relaunch the political legitimacy of the term ‘communism’. Fearing arrest after his major involvement in May ’68, Bensaïd took refuge in Duras’s apartment where he met Antelme, Mascolo and Blanchot. After Lignes exhumed these documents, Bensaïd was reminded of this period of his life and began to cite Mascolo more frequently. Mascolo became an exemplary figure of the communist militant, especially for the manner in which he stressed that ‘communism’ was the most precise term ‘to designate the stakes of the epoch’ [pour désigner l’enjeu d’une époque] (LNS.32.2010, 192). Subsequently, Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis once again attempted to provide this term as a positive political orientation, a later lecture citing Mascolo directly. Therefore, whilst the first series of Lignes is dominated by Nancy’s and Blanchot’s emphasis on the negative constitution of open and non-exclusive political communities, the second series sees the renewal of Mascolo’s more prescriptive and avowedly communist programme. Over the course of 20 years, the milieu which originally formed around Duras’s house on La Rue Saint-Benoît left Lignes a rich seam of thought to draw from. Yet throughout the 1960s this heritage also became increasingly divided. Mascolo, more militant, saw art as autonomous but also secondary to a strongly engaged, revolutionary politics, whereas Blanchot posed a vector of thought that resisted the closure of signification and of national communities, stressing the ethical demands of writing over action. This tension traverses Lignes’ entire history, and the neo-Nietzschean and former Althusserian strands of la pensée 68 will be explored in the coming chapters. Before moving on to Lignes, however,

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to fully ascertain the influence of Blanchot and Mascolo’s milieu on the review, the gap between the 1960s and the 1980s must first be traversed, a journey most fruitfully made via a comparison to the legendary intellectual review Tel Quel. Transgression from Tel Quel to Lignes Although Tel Quel is rarely mentioned in Lignes, when one compares their literary and philosophic canons it is evidently one of the review’s closest predecessors. Between 1960 and 1983, this famous intellectual journal pioneered theories of textuality, aided the rise to fame of Derrida and Foucault, and also did much to secure the posthumous critical receptions of writers such as Bataille and Antonin Artaud. However, Tel Quel was also notoriously dogmatic and terroristically jargonistic, becoming a divisive presence in intellectual circles. Coming after the moment of ‘high theory’, Lignes was less jargonistic, preferring a more sober and clear discursive style, and the Mascolo dossier demonstrated the wariness in Lignes regarding its predecessor: in 1971, Mascolo sent a letter to La Quinzaine littéraire complaining of the exploitation of Bataille, Breton and Artaud in certain intellectual circles since May ’68, clearly referring to Tel Quel (L.33.1998, 193–4). Mascolo’s letter was sent at the height of Tel Quel’s efforts to mobilise transgressive literary works for a revolutionary cultural practice. In Lignes, further removed from the atmosphere of sexual liberation and the lifting of taboos in the 1960s, transgression is seen as a more intimate, personal experience with little progressive social efficacy. There are historical and conceptual reasons for the different readings of Bataille and cultural politics proffered by Tel Quel and Lignes, which will be delineated below. Lastly, working through these issues once more in the new millennium, Surya mediates between Bataille, Blanchot and Mascolo to arrive at a more nuanced account of the relationship between politics and art in the contemporary moment. Bataille and Blanchot played a significant role in the post-war period for their opposition to Sartre’s conception of engaged literature. For Bataille, writing was a space of absolute liberty that should not serve useful ends, and for Blanchot it was an opaque space of ontological and conceptual contestation removed from daily life. Whilst Sartre’s Les Temps modernes set the intellectual agenda in the immediate post-war period, by the 1960s the rise of structuralism and textual

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theory prompted a reformulation of the straightforward link between art and politics implied by engagement. In 1960, Tel Quel initially seemed to renew the call for art for art’s sake to move beyond Sartrean engagement. Yet Danielle Marx-Scouras argues that Philippe Sollers, one of Tel Quel’s principal editors, also harboured a desire to resurrect ‘the literary modernity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ with a belief that autonomous art was in itself a progressive force (1996, 17). Additionally, Tel Quel’s interest in Bataille and Artaud privileged texts which explored bodily experiences, madness and the subversion of conventional morality. Influenced by Bataille’s notion of pure expenditure, both writing and sexuality were seen as unproductive, wasteful forces which society either suppressed or channelled towards useful ends. Drawing also on Sade, Kafka, Joyce, Céline and Pasolini, Tel Quel occupied this marginal space of literature to examine and challenge the moral and cultural limits of contemporary society. As ffrench summarises, Sollers’s most consistent contention throughout the review’s history was that ‘society is neurotic in its repression of its foundation’, and literature was a key means to both diagnosing and curing such neuroses (1995, 100). Furthermore, ffrench argues that Tel Quel’s political position subsequently oscillated depending on the strength of its faith in literature as a means of subverting ideology, and hence how far ‘the application of a logic of transgression’ could be pushed (1995, 62). In 1968, in a position inspired by the PCF but also still close to that of Bataille, Sollers claimed that writers had no socially useful function. However, by the 1972 Cérisy conference on Bataille and Artaud organised by Tel Quel, Sollers was asserting instead that writers had a specific role to play in enacting both an artistic and a political revolution (1973, 9–12). Literary experimentation was seen as directly fomenting revolutionary subjects, giving avant-garde artists an effective and active role to play. Tel Quel had entered its Maoist phase and embarked upon the kind of Cultural Revolution decried by Mascolo: hence his protests against Sollers’s utilisation of writers for ideological arguments that Bataille would not have supported. The tone of Tel Quel became increasingly terroristic and hectoring during this period, Mascolo lamenting the ‘unfathomable misery of these repetitive dogmatisms’ [insondable misère de ces dogmatismes successifs] (L.33.1998, 200). Nevertheless, if the gulf between Mascolo and Tel Quel around 1971 is clear, retrospectively it is also evident that the faith of both parties in theory or literature as materially revolutionary forces was misguided. Tel Quel overestimated

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the social impact which transgressive literary works could have, whilst Mascolo also overemphasised the success of the revolutionary moment of May ’68 when, in 1970, he claimed that the ruling class was ideologically close to defeat (L.33.1998, 189). The failures of the theoretical and literary avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s would in turn temper Lignes’ own pretentions in this domain. Surya argued that, although the idea of forming a new avant-garde was tempting, it was a historically dated proposition. Those attempting to resurrect such vanguards, such as the neo-Situationists, simply exposed themselves to open ridicule: ‘One probably couldn’t be less political than them’ [On ne pouvait pas être moins politiques qu’eux, sans doute] (LNS.23–24.2007, 11). If literature, theory or Lignes itself was to have any sort of political impact, it would not be as a revolutionary vanguard. Marmande came to a similar conclusion after exploring the historical exhaustion of transgressive aesthetics. Literary transgression is described by Marmande as directly linked to the period of the historical avantgardes from Surrealism to Tel Quel. Yet, as capitalism accelerated and increased its ability to assimilate threatening subcultures into its cycles of production, transgression was itself commercialised (think, for example, of the commercialisation of punk): ‘In the richest societies, where an exemplary rule of the total spectacle is unfolding, sexuality no longer seems to be a breach which opens out onto the unknowable’ [Dans les sociétés les plus riches où se démontre une loi parfaite du spectacle total, la sexualité n’apparaît plus comme la brèche qui ouvre à l’inconnaissable] (L.36.1999, 30). The problem with Tel Quel’s politics of transgression was what ffrench calls its ‘trans-historical’ analysis of literature: the review’s cultural politics was formed during a certain 1960s conjuncture in which social mores were changing radically. Tel Quel developed a political strategy for a moment that soon passed, quickly rendering their subversive actions passé. For Marmande, the fashionable marketing of subcultures and the conservative backlash against May ’68 all conspired to blunt the progressive potential of Tel Quel’s cultural politics. Shorn of its revolutionary aspects, by the late 1970s Tel Quel abandoned its revolutionary ambitions and literature instead came to be seen as a way of allowing negativity to be integrated within, rather than challenging, the symbolic order, becoming ‘in some way curative’ rather than ‘a subversive avant-garde’ (ffrench, 1995, 201–2). Consequently, ffrench argues that the ‘political and psychoanalytical encounters’ of Tel Quel had failed, ‘while the experience of literature’ would remain constant (1995, 90). Lignes tacitly took this knowledge

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on board: psychoanalytic readings of literature are largely absent from the review, which also resists a strong politicisation of literature. Lignes shares with Tel Quel a similar appreciation of modernist and socially subversive authors, Surya citing Proust, Kafka, Musil, Joyce, Borges, Broch, Artaud, Beckett, Celan, Sartre, Genet, Flaubert and, centrally, Blanchot, Bataille and Klossowski (LNS.38.2012, 5). Furthermore, Mathilde Girard notes the continuing focus on limit texts from Tel Quel to Lignes, the latter also privileging texts that explore themes of childhood, madness, sainthood, crime, perversion and cruelty (LNS.38.2012, 64). However, the point of such limit texts is no longer their socially or psychologically subversive potential. Instead, Marmande and Surya frequently quote Bataille’s defence of Sade, in which he argued that obscene texts should not be censored so that they can tout dire: as Marmande glosses, Bataille was not arguing that reading Sade was socially useful or could produce progressive political action, but that it at least revealed something of human behaviour in exploring its furthest limits (L.36.1999, 22). Conceptually, Michel Foucault’s Preface à la transgression (1963; Lignes edition 2012) also warned against Tel Quel’s politicisation of transgression. Foucault argued that transgression could not be placed dialectically into the service of politics as it relied on both crossing a limit, but also on reinscribing this limit as a taboo in itself. Marmande endorsed this reading, opening his article on transgression with this Foucauldian definition: Transgression (violation, sin, fault in the Latin of the Church) is the deliberate movement by which a limit (juridical, moral, religious) is confronted – in other words, designated. It neither effaces nor abolishes it. [La transgression (violation, péché, faute, en latin d’église) est le mouvement délibéré par lequel une limite (juridique, morale, religieuse) est affrontée – autrement dit, désignée. Il ne l’efface ni ne l’abolit]. (L.36.1999, 6)

Citing Foucault, Marmande also describes transgression as the affirmation of a partage (‘sharing’, but also ‘division’) (L.36.1999, 27): this is suggestive of the ontological, rather than sociocultural readings of transgression that would become prevalent in Lignes in the new millennium. Such a conception, heavily influenced by Nancy as well as Foucault, is prominent in the Lignes issue Nouvelles lectures de Georges Bataille (May 2005). Nancy had argued that, in emphasising the

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transgressive and obscene aspects of Bataille’s writing, many critics ‘have hammed it up compared to what were, in spite of everything, Bataille’s restraint and sobriety’ (1990, 60). Rather than as a dissolute exhibitionist overtly flouting social and moral norms, Bataille was a relatively private individual who was more interested in discreet moments of ecstatic experience. Experiences of violence or sexual abandon were extreme examples of moments in which rational thought was waylaid in an affective intensity. Yet, more soberly, these experiences highlighted the subject’s lack of self-sufficiency or holistic integrity, making it clear that humans are always inhabited by, and at prey to, external forces. Even our ‘own’ consciousness is bound up with other socially imbricated beings. The affirmation of sharing noted by Foucault, then, would be a sense in which transgression becomes the ontological recognition of our co-belonging in the world. Subsequently, in the 2005 Lignes issue on Bataille, Nancy and Foucault are mobilised against Tel Quel’s emphasis on the subversion of social conventions to describe Bataille’s transgressions as ontological experiences: such an ontology portrays a conception of être as a being in excess of itself, locating its borders only in exteriority and in contact with others. The subversive aspects of Bataille’s œuvre are not entirely ignored, Lina Franco in particular discussing Bataille’s scatological practice of writing (LNS.17.2005, 194). But, on the whole, if Bataille’s life is described by Sylvie Trécherel as a search for the most complete form of liberty possible (LNS.17.2005, 218), this is a personal and intimate, rather than collective endeavour, conceptually represented by this shift from a sociocultural to an ontological notion of transgression. Lignes would therefore endorse Mascolo’s hostility towards Tel Quel’s political mobilisation of Bataille, seeing it as politically, historically and conceptually flawed. In his book on the novelist and Lignes contributor Bernard Noël, Le Polième (2011), Surya once again works through these issues. Crucially, Le Polième appeared in the same year that Lignes republished Mascolo’s Sur le Sens et l’usage du mot ‘gauche’: echoing Mascolo’s claim that the only real left was one of revolutionary action, Surya states that, for Noël, ‘politics is revolutionary or it is nothing’ [la politique est révolutionnaire ou qu’elle n’est pas] (2011, 16). Yet Surya argues that this strong sense of politics has been eroded by the depoliticisation of liberal consensus and the reliance of governments on responsible economic management: from Nancy in the 1980s to Lignes in the present, then, the erosion of politics due to the pressing demands of managing the economy continues to be a recurring concern. In his poetry,

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fiction and critical essays, Noël traced and historicised the development of literature and liberalism beyond 1968. His novel La Château de Cène was banned in 1969 as a crime against public morality. However, when it was subsequently published in 1975, Noël argued that it was because European governments now had less need to physically repress a docile populace: transgression was a spent force and outright censorship was no longer necessary. Instead, liberal democracies had begun to employ a strategy of sensure, censorship with an ‘s’. Rather than a censorship which would ban controversial works, sensorship instead works by stripping words of their sense and mollifying or recuperating their contestatory potential. For Noël, ‘we live in a bourgeois world where the vocabulary of indignation is exclusively moral’ [nous vivons dans un monde bourgeois, où le vocabulaire de l’indignation est exclusivement moral] (Noël, 2011, 22); this frustration with moral discourses will be further discussed in Chapter 3, but for Noël it represents the replacement of Marxist dialectics and political debate with technocratic governance and a socially normative consensus. This is a frequent contention in Lignes, and in terms of the trajectory outlined in this chapter the desire to prevent the foreclosure of language and meaning is represented in literature by Blanchot and in philosophy by Nancy. Régine Detambel has argued that there are two ways to combat sensure: direct action in the public sphere as a militant, and the more clandestine approach of poetic writing (2007, 90). Detambel notes that Noël had done his part as a militant, fighting censorship laws and providing aid to the FLN in the 1950s. But culture also has an infrapolitical role in combatting sensure. Noël was heavily influenced by Bataille and Blanchot, and so argued that literature should not be servile to political constraints. However, Surya comments that Noël’s work is nevertheless pervaded by a political joy and a communist intimacy, a register which infused the political communities of Mascolo and Blanchot in the 1960s but which is missing from much contemporary discourse (2011, 65). For Surya, whilst a writer should not concern herself with the practical political implications of her work, writing can contain an essential liberty from which the left can derive its own political principles (LNS.43.2014, 46). Surya argues that whilst Noël has never committed his writing to the service of a particular political goal, the infusion of his work with a communist joy and intimacy means that everything he has written has been profoundly engaged in propagating and encouraging this essential liberty. In a subtle distinction, Surya goes on to contrast Rimbaud with Marx, stating that for Noël it is

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‘life that should be changed, rather than the world which should be transformed’ [la vie qu’il faudrait changer, davantage que du monde qu’il faudrait transformer] (2011, 64). Just as transgression was seen to act on an ontological rather than social level, the infra-political impact of literature also operates on an intimate level: rather than the aesthetic shocks or transgressive gestures that would awaken the slumbering masses into a revolutionary fervour, at best literature presents a form of personal liberty that could become collective, without providing the means to politically produce such a collectivity. Whilst using the work of Noël to articulate this position, Surya ascribes it to a combination of Bataille’s, Blanchot’s and Mascolo’s influence: following the discussion elaborated in this chapter, schematically we could identify the revolutionary politics with Mascolo, the work on language with Blanchot and the demand for an absolute, personal liberty with Bataille. Lignes – An Intellectual Review Heading into the Twenty-first Century Through the significant dossiers published by Lignes throughout the 1990s, this chapter has traced the political lives of Robert Antelme, Dionys Mascolo and Maurice Blanchot in the post-war period. Antelme’s redefinition of friendship as a form of broad-based political solidarity played a formative role in a philosophical discourse much more frequently associated with Jacques Derrida and Blanchot. Antelme subsequently influenced the political activities of Mascolo and Blanchot, from Mascolo’s theorisation of Le Communisme, through the rejection of Charles de Gaulle in Le 14 Juillet to the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, La Revue Internationale and May ’68. In its own contemporary moment, Lignes republished Le 14 Juillet to reignite the debate over the structure of the Fifth Republic in an attempt to break the consensus forming around liberal republicanism in the 1990s. May ’68 was then celebrated by the review as a moment in which other forms of participatory democracy could be implemented to combat the growing democratic lassitude and apathy affecting European parliamentary politics. Furthermore, models of cultural politics throughout the post-war period were probed by Lignes to better situate its own approach. Blanchot identified two contrary vectors of intellectual activity which the review attempted to keep in tension. In the following chapter, the neo-Nietzschean critical ethos suggested by Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy will be explored; rather

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than dogmatic politics, here an anti-essentialist and anti-identitarian probing and questioning of received wisdom is championed, one in which writing should be granted an absolute liberty. Mascolo, on the other hand, seemed to move beyond the relative autonomy of literature to place art within a more materialist political struggle. As the review enters the new millennium and more militant contributors, like Alain Badiou, attempt to launch a more active communist project, Mascolo’s materialist and anti-parliamentary politics return. Most significantly for Surya and Lignes is perhaps the legacy of Blanchot’s Revue internationale. Whilst Lignes is a more political than literary review, Blanchot’s model provides a less straightforwardly ‘engaged’ stance towards current affairs, Surya defining Lignes as more of an open space rather than a defined and concrete position. Sharing Blanchot’s and Nancy’s concern with the perceived dangers of revolutionary programmes, political action is conceived of as provisional, uncertain and conjunctural. Therefore, just as Mascolo’s projects attempted to form a minimal common ground of agreement and avoided divisively programmatic statements, the first issue of Lignes did not even contain an editorial, let alone a mission statement or a collective declaration. Like Mascolo, Surya wanted his review to foster the movement of thought rather than create a defined movement, and so avoiding a strict editorial line was one way of keeping Lignes in motion. Surya thus emphasises that, with Lignes, he is not trying to form a closed community. Yet a review necessarily remains a communal endeavour, mediating between solitary writing and a joint articulation of thought: it is alone that we think together. A review is a space of sharing, as solitary authors appear side by side on its pages, coming into contact only at their articles’ borders. The vicissitudes of independent thought within a collective project is the principal source of interest when it comes to reviews, and this book will continue to track them in subsequent chapters. However, alongside the literary and philosophical inspiration from Blanchot and Nancy, it was also a sign of the times to stress the absence of a political project in the 1980s and 1990s. Intellectuals surrounding Le Débat had called for an abandonment of radical political polemics and progressive programmes in favour of a consensual approach to liberaldemocratic consensus. In the late 1970s, Sollers himself rallied to the new philosophers’ stance of intellectual dissidence, entailing a ‘rejection of the very idea of a project and of the idea of a collective group called Tel Quel’ (ffrench, 1995, 235). Across Europe, even stridently militant

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journals such as the New Left Review undertook such transformations when faced with the collapse of the USSR, the inauguration of the American New World Order and the pessimism of the conjuncture of 1989. As Duncan Thompson notes, the ‘abandonment of a driving political project’ led editor Perry Anderson towards a new ‘pluralism’ without the ‘presumption of any automatic agreement’ (2007, 158). An open format and a rejection of vanguardism and dogmatism were widespread responses to the wider intellectual disorientation experienced in the face of an unopposed global liberalism, and so the innovative pluralism suggested by the name Lignes was also a symptom of the era’s ideological confusion. This reactive pluralism was replaced by a more tightly militant stance for some intellectuals as they detected a movement out of the ‘1989’ conjuncture: in France, the social movements of 1995 marked the start of this process, and chapters 4 and 6 will document the more active politicisation of Lignes in response. Surya has admitted that Lignes sometimes became the position that it did not want to be (LNS.23–24.2007, 20). With the review’s intellectual heritage mapped, the following chapter turns towards its first series to demonstrate how, in contact with current events, other intellectuals and rival reviews, the coagulation of such a position began to take place.

chapter three

Immoral, Impure, Atheist Artists? Developing a neo-Nietzschean Critical Ethos for the Twenty-first Century Immoral, Impure, Atheist Artists?

Given the intellectual heritage now delineated, what kind of review did Lignes become? The twentieth century had already provided many influential models. Following the example of Bataille’s para-academic Critique, a review which concerned itself with presenting an objective and politically neutral account of cutting edge research from all fields, the first issue of Lignes deliberately opened without a mission statement or manifesto. Surya later emphasised his desire for Lignes to represent an open space rather than a defined position. However, Frédéric Birr had initially asked Surya to form a literary review, and so this open format was, from the very start, very different to the scholarly neutrality of Critique. Between the politically engaged Les Temps modernes and the primarily aesthetic La Nouvelle revue française, Maurice Blanchot’s Revue internationale had provided a model for a community of writers which produced a plurality of positions (rather than objective neutrality) on current affairs with a view towards an incisive, if fragmentary and literary, perspective on the contemporary world. And, as we shall see, although literature did not play as large a role in Lignes as Surya would have liked, an emphasis on literary écriture heavily influenced its moral and philosophical stance. In their account of the German review Sinn und Form, Parker and Philpotts stress the importance of ‘the founding conception or core ethos of the journal’ (2009, 5). It is often hard to pin down precisely what the ethos of a journal is (especially that of a review such as Lignes, which made no explicit declaration of intent). Rather than a set of guidelines, an ethos

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can be a tacitly understood mode of thinking common to a certain group; comparing it to Bourdieu’s notion of a habitus, Parker and Philpotts liken an ethos to a ‘feel for the game’, a ‘practical sense’ that ‘inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to rules’ (2009, 6). This implicit ethos may be difficult to define, but once it develops it makes a significant contribution to the crystallisation of a review’s identity: ‘Once established, the habitus of the journal exerts a considerable influence across all its anatomical dimensions, as individual practice in those dimensions is adjusted towards the defining ethos of the journal’s own tradition’ (2009, 6). The development and coagulation of some sort of identity is inevitable when a regular body of contributors to a review becomes established and, though seemingly quite vague, the term ‘ethos’ is both flexible and precise enough to attempt to designate that which unites an otherwise disparate group of thinkers. The intellectual heritage examined in the previous two chapters has demonstrated the importance of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot for Lignes, and the review’s privileging of these figures had already generated a series of affiliations and conflicts which positioned Lignes within the wider French context. Yet Surya is always keen to stress that Lignes is not solely a Bataillian review (LNS.23–24.2007, 35); Bataille is but one of many influences. Instead, as I will outline in this chapter, the Lignes ethos that developed throughout its first series may be characterised as broadly neo-Nietzschean. This should come as no surprise: of the two French Nietzschean ‘moments’ of the twentieth century, the first involved the literary and artistic avant-gardes of the 1930s (including Bataille), and the second the rise of French philosophy inspired by Nietzsche in the 1960s and 1970s (notably including thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault). Thinkers from this period were not all necessarily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche in the same way and, whilst some openly admitted to inheriting the German thinker’s intellectual legacy, others were more circumspect and the influence was more tacit. Yet, as we shall see, some of the key features of what became known as ‘French neo-Nietzscheanism’ seem to describe precisely the general critical ethos promoted by Lignes during its early years – until, that is, the review’s second series saw a marked increase in the participation of former Althusserian Marxists and more militant contributors, who altered the critical tone somewhat. The charge of neo-Nietzscheanism became a pejorative assignation in the 1990s. After Heidegger and Marx had been widely discredited,

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Alain Ferry and Luc Renaut once again led the charge against the intellectual forbears of la pensée 68 with their edited volume Why we are not Nietzscheans (1991 [1997]). A new philosophic generation lambasted French Nietzscheans for their ‘excessive and irresponsible political stances’ (Schrift, 1995, 103); their ‘immorality’ and rejection of Western Enlightenment and religious values; their pernicious relativism in claiming ‘that there are no “truths”, only “interpretations”’ (Schrift, 1995, 107); and their ‘stylistic excess’ and ‘hyper-linguisticism’, which led to ‘absurd’ conclusions (Schrift, 1995, 111). Whilst defending French Nietzscheans from Bataille to Jean-Luc Nancy, Lignes initially also tried to accommodate these newly dissenting voices to foment a wider philosophical plurality. An early issue included a laudatory dossier on Jürgen Habermas, a thinker known for vigorously denouncing French neo-Nietzscheanism, yet whom Surya nevertheless described as one of the most significant voices in contemporary philosophy (L.7.1989, 8). However, as the critical backlash against la pensée 68 continued to grow, the review soon felt forced to choose a side: after Ferry and Renaut’s latest broadside in 1991, Habermas was never again mentioned in a positive light, and the Nietzschean ‘philosophies of suspicion’ were staunchly defended from further assaults from Alain Renaut who, in Le Débat, launched a vociferous attack on Derrida’s International College of Philosophy (see Lignes issue 35 [1998] for the review’s trenchant response in defence of Derrida, the College and la pensée 68). A Lignes issue devoted to Nietzsche in 2002 subsequently sought to delineate another Nietzsche, one explicitly opposed to Ferry and Renaut’s negative portrayal (LNS.7.2002, 5). In their introduction, Surya and Nancy emphasised that they were not explicitly trying to delineate a strict Nietzschean dogma, one with defined adherents and a programmatic orientation. They were, however, searching for a gai savoir capable of gaining critical purchase on the here and now, a ‘Nietzsche for us, a Nietzsche for a world on which the shadow of a dead God still weighs so heavily’ [Nietzsche pour nous, Nietzsche pour un monde sur lequel pèse toujours si lourdement l’ombre du Dieu mort] (LNS.7.2002, 5). Retrospectively, this search has animated the review from its first issue, and all the negative characteristics identified in French neo-Nietzscheanism by Ferry and Renaut were challenged by positive, if sometimes tacit, counterparts in the review’s early critical ethos. The review’s Nietzscheanism had its own, particularly French inflection, with a strong emphasis on literary language and non-conformist autonomy. The review largely defended the post-structuralist

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‘philosophies of suspicion’ of the 1960s, arguing that the destabilisation of meaning they produced could not simply be ignored. Yet it is notable that the linguistic excesses of the textual terrorism associated with Tel Quel are absent. Rather than conceptual deconstruction and the infinite proliferation of jargonistic neologisms, the review preferred a literary emphasis on the thick, opaque nature of writing and the material construction of sense. Whilst Ferry and Renaut preferred logical analysis and rational communication to the introduction of aesthetic style into philosophy, Lignes contributors argued that language was an immanent and material mode of communication, open to the play of form and desire. Running alongside the more conceptual work of Jacques Derrida, Lignes rediscovered and continued the work of the thoughtful écrivains of the 1960s and 1970s, those who subjected philosophy to the sensuality of language rather than rationally deconstructing the logical aporias of the Western canon. Through writers such as Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Nietzsche became emblematic of the philosopher-artist, one as concerned with aesthetic style as with philosophic argumentation. This more writerly Nietzscheanism also meant that the review valued what Parker and Philpotts call ‘predominantly autonomous literary values’ (2009, 15). Against social conformity, Lignes privileged the heterogeneous refusal of social or moral norms. The late 1980s were described by Surya as penitent and puritanical, characterised by a growing moralisation, nationalism and a return to religion that Lignes clearly opposed (LNS.23–24.2007, 17). The review’s developing ethos became especially clear in the early thematic issues lamenting the ‘new moral order’ (June 1988, June 1991), proclaiming a staunch, atheist irréligion (June 1989), and emphasising the anti-nationalism and anti-essentialism of a relational identity codified by the ‘impure’ and the ‘improper’ (February 1995). Nietzsche’s death of God was described as destabilising any transcendent, fixed meanings which, rather than fomenting a dangerous current of relativistic nihilism, liberated humans from religious guilt to unleash a materialism of desire and positive capabilities, promoting an immoral critical and aesthetic stance free to explore all aspects of human nature. Anti-essentialism, anti-nationalism, anti-rationalism, irreligion and immorality were thus the negative terms of the review’s literary critical ethos, championed as necessary stalwarts of the philosophical modernity ushered in by Nietzsche. However, Lignes’ initially staunch neo-Nietzscheanism was challenged as it came into contact with the real world, and the task of relaunching a new Nietzsche for our times was problematised. As Parker and Philpotts

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note (regardless of Surya’s intentions for the review to remain as open as possible), each new issue of a review creates a ‘new intervention’ and always represents some form of ‘position-taking’ (2009, 5). In contact with other reviews and intellectuals, a journal’s outlook becomes more contrasted and thus more strongly defined. The editors themselves are also ‘educated by the journal’ (Parker and Philpotts, 2009, 216), the interaction between their personal views and values and the institutional sphere they encounter reshaping their sense of editorial and political responsibility. Julian Bourg (2007) has characterised France’s post-war years as a period during which the revolutionary, libertarian politics of the 1960s shifted towards a concern for moral responsibility and ethics in the 1980s. Similarly, Lignes’ aesthetic, libertarian politics were rooted in the 1960s, and yet, whilst it attempted to resist the moralisation of discourses the ethical shift encompassed, the review’s ethos was still directly affected by the changing sociopolitical climate. As we shall see, the anti-essentialism promoted by Jean-Luc Nancy was politicised by Surya against the rising nationalism of the Front National. Fethi Benslama also noted that migrants were psychologically in need of some kind of stable self-identity, and so argued against a total dissolution of identity, instead encouraging migrants to appropriate fictional, composite identities for themselves. The privileging of a literary materialism is theoretically maintained, but the style of the review nevertheless tended increasingly towards a discourse of political clarity and academic expertise to suit its contemporary readership. The legacy of Nietzsche’s staunch atheism became tempered as the main target of republican laïcité shifted from Catholicism to Islam, as Lignes then came to see Muslims as a stigmatised minority in need of protection. Lastly, whilst the review continued to purvey a critically amoral stance on art and literature, scandals surrounding paedophilia also demanded a certain personal, moral responsibility to which the review tacitly adhered. Instead of a total 1960s libertarianism, one could see the Lignes ethos begin to have more in common with a responsible liberalism than the review’s contributors and editors might care to admit. By the mid-1990s, then, the review’s critical stance had become increasingly defined as it negotiated a variety of complex debates within its own pages, in opposition to other reviews and in response to developments in France and abroad. This chapter thus assesses Lignes’ success in adapting its neo-Nietzschean literary ethos to suit the intellectual and political climate heading into the twenty-first century.

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L’Impur, L’Impropre – Difference and Identity French neo-Nietzscheanism, developed by Bataille in the 1930s and reinvigorated in the 1960s by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, was considered by many Lignes contributors to be the foundation of philosophical modernity. As we have seen, la pensée 68 was being subjected to a political and philosophical backlash, and in an early issue of Lignes Surya lamented the emergence of significantly more conservative modes of thinking since the ‘new philosophers’ had appeared in 1977. He summed up the reactionary tendencies of contemporary French thought as mobilising a series of ‘returns’ to past moral and conceptual certainties, included the privileging of immutable values over interpretive meaning, moral norms over transgressive play, the family over seduction, the nation state over nomadism, rationality over art and the useful over the wasteful (L.6.1989, 9). Surya specifically discussed Alain Finkielkraut’s La Défaite de la pensée and Michel Henry’s La Barbarie (both first published in 1987, the year of Lignes’ first issue). Surya argued that both books exaggerate the feeling of a growing cultural crisis in hyperbolic prose as a means of demanding a return to the supposedly forgotten heritages of Enlightenment thought and Judaeo-Christian values. This desire is characterised by Surya as essentially a nostalgic return to a Europe before Nietzsche announced the death of God (L.2.1988, 207). Henry’s main target was structuralism and Foucault, and he blames ‘the explosion of science and the destruction of the human being’ for ‘the new barbarism’ (2012, 2–3). Finkielkraut likewise attacked the structuralist paradigms of the previous intellectual generation, but his book was much more sweeping in its denunciation of the present, including popular culture. After Claude Levi-Strauss and Foucault, Finkielkraut complained that the ‘realities we had assumed to be natural were now to be treated as historical phenomena’ (1988, 59). By relativising and de-essentialising traditional Western values, he argued, Nietzschean thinkers tended to ‘exalt the rather dizzy uncertainties of cultural fluidity over the fixed virtues of cultural rootedness’ (1988, 111). By ‘denouncing the deep-seated inhumanity of humanism’, postcolonial thought and ‘proponents of the multi-cultural society’ had delegitimised Europeans’ ‘natural preferences’ for their family, nation and Western culture (Finkielkraut 1988, 64, 95). Finkielkraut subsequently blamed this philosophical relativism for the abandonment of a rich and enlightened cultural heritage in favour of a superficial and childish

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mass culture: because computer games were ‘infantile’, rock music was designed to ‘abolish memory’ and cartoons had ‘overwhelmed the conversation’, adults were suffering from a process of ‘de-intellectualisation’ (1988, 125, 127, 130, 128). The solution to this cultural malaise was a reinvigoration of the humanist philosophies and classical culture of nineteenth-century France, a nostalgic desire for a return to moral and conceptual stability tinged with a discrete nationalism that would become much more prominent in Finkielkraut’s thought over the coming years: ‘France is much more than Frenchness. The vital elements in her heritage are not unconscious determinants governing behaviour, or characteristic and inherited ways of life, but rather values offered to man’s intelligence’ (1988, 101). In Lignes, Finkielkraut’s former doctoral supervisor, René Schérer, expressed his astonishment at his student’s explicit and total contempt for modernity (L.3.1988, 128). Yet, besides the clear conservative and nationalist cultural politics suggested by Finkielkraut, Surya’s main concern is the intellectual regression which such positions represent, asking: ‘Of what is thought afraid of?’ [De quoi la pensée s’effraiet-elle?] (L.2.1988, 203). Why were French thinkers still so concerned with burying what many in Lignes saw as the most productive and progressive elements of la pensée 68? Additionally, whilst Finkielkraut’s book received widespread media coverage, Surya lamented the silence surrounding Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Oubli de la philosophie (1986). Alongside Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy was one of the principal French neo-Nietzscheans of the period, and the most significant for Lignes. In L’Oubli de la philosophie, Nancy very explicitly defended the gains of post-humanist thought against the ‘new philosophers’, noting that, throughout the history of philosophy, every truly innovative, productive thought had been met with such a reactionary desire to return to supposedly stable, immutable and concrete signifiers such as ‘man, the subject, communication, rationality’ [l’homme, le sujet, la communication, la rationalité] (Nancy, 1986, 24). Instead, Nancy affirmed that deconstruction was now an integral part of Western thought, an unavoidable questioning of previous intellectual certainties that could not be undone. This, argued Nancy, was the lasting significance of Nietzsche’s death of God: the impossibility of transparent, guaranteed meanings, authoritative origins and clearly demarcated identities. This impossibility was simply a condition of modern thought that had to be reckoned with; there could be no naive return to the rational humanism of the nineteenth century.

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Pre-emptively answering Surya’s question, Nancy argued that what Finkielkraut and company feared was the supposed impossibility of making sense after this deconstruction of stable values and signifiers: All the modern problematics surrounding difference arouse protests from these ‘thinkers of the return’, who see in them the destruction or frustration of identity, and of the very possibility of identifying anything at all. The return proposed is always a return to the One. This is to misunderstand that difference is not opposed to identity: it makes identity possible, and in inscribing difference at the heart of identity, it exposes it to the following possibility – that its sense cannot be identical to its being. [Toutes les problématiques modernes de la différence attirent les protestations des penseurs du retour, qui y voient une destruction ou une frustration d’identité, et de la possibilité d’identifier quoi que ce soit. Le retour se propose toujours comme un retour à l’un. C’est méconnaître que la différence ne s’oppose pas à l’identité: elle la rend possible, et en inscrivant cette possibilité un cœur de l’identité elle l’expose à ceci, que son sens ne peut pas lui être identique]. (1986: 98–9)

If identity is differential (I can only identify what I am in contrast to what I am not), it is already relational, always already bound up with others. Identity is also excessive, impossible to delimit in language (I am always more than what can be said about me). Identity is then non-identical but, crucially, not unidentifiable. Prefiguring his seminal text Être singulier pluriel (2000), Nancy concludes that ‘we are the plural which does not multiply a singular’ [nous sommes le pluriel qui ne multiplie pas un singulier] (1986, 101). Identity is composite, an open, fluid mobility that does not reduce the individual subject to an undifferentiated morass but acknowledges complexity, multiplicity and the porous borders of our shared origins. Identity is impure because multiple, and improper because shared. This emphasis on a plural, composite and divided identity was consecrated in the Lignes issue L’Impur/L’Impropre (February 1995), one of the key thematic issues of the review’s first series. French neo-Nietzschean thought of the 1960s and 1970s is thus often characterised as a ‘philosophy of difference’. Following Nietzsche’s desire to lay waste to any fixed, transcendental meanings, all identity had to be defined and differentiated against other composite and relative identities. As we saw in Chapter 2, the depiction of human nature as fundamentally lacking proper qualities was central to Antelme’s conception of political solidarity. Embracing the composite nature of beings, accepting that they were the property of no one, was also therefore the grounds on

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which Lignes promoted an ethic of ontological impurity, one designed to ‘combat all kinds of identitarian sclerosis’ [lutter contre tout type de sclérose identitaire] (L.24.1995, 107–8). For Lignes, this strident anti-essentialism represented both the heart of philosophical modernity and an implicit political orientation against nationalism and in favour of multicultural tolerance. Building on Nietzsche and the subsequent deconstruction of the 1960s, thinkers such as Nancy, Surya and Fethi Benslama modulated this emphasis on identitarian difference in slightly different ways. In Lignes, Nancy described the relationship between being and identity as an éclat [burst], a dissolution between interiority and exteriority that nevertheless preserves the borders of the singular subject (L.25.1995, 296). He defined this as a kind of constitutive, ontological violence at the heart of all beings. Identitarian conflict and physical violence, by contrast, is ‘what is born when this burst and this explosion within the origin cannot be tolerated’ [ce qui naît de ne pas supporter cet éclat et cet éclatement dans l’origine] (L.25.1995, 297). In other words, violence can always erupt when people attempt to assign fixed and exclusive identities to particular groups, instead of accepting that identity is differential, shared and relational. In Lignes articles from this period, Nancy optimistically argued that, over the course of the twentieth century, discourses of racial, ethnic or national purity were dissipating and people were beginning to recognise ‘a foreignness that is more intimate to them than any being-self or being-at-home-in-the-self’ [une étrangeté qui lui est plus intime que tout être-soi ou que tout être-à-soi] (L.35.1998, 45). The works of Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas were characteristic of this movement, but the Lignes dossier consecrated to the poet Edmond Jabès is also symptomatic of this perspective given Jabès’s self-description as ‘l’étrange-je’ [the-strange-I], a play on the word étranger [foreigner]. Richard Stamelman, amongst others, thus explored Jabès’s aesthetic ontology of non-belonging and his visceral repugnance for all forms of communal or familial rootedness, characteristics that made Jabès the perfect poetic accompaniment to the philosophies of difference (L.16.1992, 102–4). Despite the eruptions of identitarian violence in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Front National in France during this period, Nancy thus remained hopeful that, beyond an obsession with identity, a global sense of co-presence, sharing and spacing was being progressively and positively articulated. Philosophies of difference were also then seen to be a means towards a progressive anti-racism, as will be discussed in the following chapter.

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Surya was much more pessimistic, and mapped this discourse of impropriety (the lack of proper qualities) more explicitly onto the contemporary French political context. With the FN propagating discourses of national purity and the propre, Surya much more staunchly mobilised the impropre as a political tool for a strident anti-nationalism. The conceptual difference between the proper and the improper was equated to the left-right political cleavage: ‘The right thinks (and this is what makes them right-wing) that we belong to our origins, that we identify ourselves in them’ [Les droites pensent (c’est ce qui les fait être de droite) que nous appartenons à notre origine, que nous nous identifions à elle] (L.34.1998, 10). Those on the left, by contrast, ‘belong to a movement in which we try to abandon them’ [nous appartenons au mouvement qui nous en fait faire l’abandon]. Via Bataille, Surya summarised and dismissed the obsessions with belonging and ownership that characterise capitalism, nationalism and conservatism: ‘The owner of profit: the boss. The owner of the earth: the country. The owner of the name: patrimony!’ [Le propre du profit: le patron. Le propre de la terre: la patrie. Le propre du nom: le patrimoine!] (L.24.1995, 14). Surya’s ‘left’ would thus be against the ownership of capital and the means of production, against national borders and land ownership, and would embrace cultural plurality and impurity. Politically, this impropriety is theorised most concretely in Lignes by Étienne Balibar who, as discussed in the next chapter, defines citizenship not as a consequence of where one is born, but as a result of active participation within a certain national community. The combination of a Marxist internationalism with this Nietzschean anti-essentialism would form the political heart of Lignes, especially concerning immigration. Surya’s politicisation of the propre and the impropre is much stronger than Nancy’s. As discussed in Chapter 1, Nancy’s anti-foundationalist perspective was wary of any coagulation of fixed identities into a defined political community as all such foundations are arbitrary and can tend towards violent identitarian politics. Surya divides the population into ‘us’ and ‘them’ much more clinically, producing a communal identification of ‘the left’ as whatever is against ‘the right’ and its claims of propriety. In an attempt to form a political community wishing to abandon essential qualities, this could be seen as another negatively constituted community, a community of refus without a didactic political programme beyond this very resistance to essentialism. Given that a political community without some kind of communal identification is impossible, Surya’s more strident mobilisation of Nancy’s thought could

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also be read as a strategic movement towards such a negative community, well aware of its own residual impossibility. Any such negatively defined community will always be compromised and contaminated by contact with the real world, as more explicit political stances are required and groups of support and opposition inevitably form. The review’s adoption of a stridently oppositional stance against the rise of the extreme right is one such example. This chapter will examine the review’s other attempts to develop a negative critical stance (surrounding irreligion and immorality, for example) which also necessitated more concretely defined and exclusive positions after contact with the real world. If some sort of position is going to become the property of the review, however, discursive strategies such as Surya’s, which describe a movement towards a negative community if not its eventual realisation, at least attempt to form a minimal, rather than maximal form of positioning. Fethi Benslama, a professional analyst, professor at Paris VII and long-term Surya associate, produced an even more pragmatic account of differential identity, emphasising the importance of some degree of self-identity for psychological stability. A French-speaking Tunisian, Benslama was heavily influenced by Derrida’s and Nancy’s deconstructions of origins. However, he also argued that globalisation, through a widespread flux of migrant populations and the hegemony of European languages, had led many people to feel that they were being dispossessed not only of their own language, culture and religion, but even ‘the possibility of grasping an authentic image of their self’ [la possibilité de saisir l’image propre de soi-même] (L.24.1995, 35). Whilst Benslama was also concerned about the potential for discourses of the propre and national identity to lead to sectarian violence (citing National Socialist Germany, Rwanda and post-Soviet Eastern Europe as examples), he argued that identity itself cannot be completely jettisoned: for many, une vie dépropriée [a disappropriated life] without any sort of assumed identity is simply not liveable. Alongside his contributions to Lignes, Benslama edited the journal Cahiers Intersignes (1991–2003) which attempted to theorise the interaction between Western and Islamic thought via psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Much of his professional activity as an analyst involved helping young immigrants who had recently relocated to France fit into their new national culture. The necessary leap from an Islamic to a broadly Christian, Western culture led to the collapse of psychological reference points for some of these youngsters. Benslama aided them with this disorientation by encouraging them to create new poles of signification and attachment

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for themselves, redefining who they were both within their new national context and with reference to their former cultural heritage (1994, 67). Benslama called this ‘transpropriation’, a negotiation between multiple national and cultural identities. This was not a choice between the propre and the impropre, but ‘their dialectical relationship, part integration, part complementarity, part (impure) coupling’ [leur rapport dialectique, partiellement leur intégration, partiellement leur complémentarité, partiellement leur accouplement (impur)] (L.24.1995, 55). These composite identities will inevitably be fictional. One of the most violent features of Western cultural imperialism for Benslama was that European modernity rests on the acknowledgement that all texts inaugurate their own fictional legitimacy: deconstruction had argued that an all-encompassing textuality undermined all claims to absolute and originary authority. In his Une Fiction troublante (1994), Benslama thus described the visceral reactions unleashed by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses as resulting from a clash between a playful and deconstructive Western textuality and the fixed significations of ancient Islamic manuscripts, sympathetically noting the almost terroristic nature of the Western challenge that globalisation had forced upon the religious authority of Islam (17). Yet Rushdie’s novel also espoused the value of self-liberation, encouraging people to take control over both the grand narratives of history and religion and the story of their own lives. By rewriting Islamic myths in a novel that also represented multicultural London, Rushdie exposed ‘the pulverised fiction of common origins’ [la fiction de l’origine commune pulvérisée] (1994, 21). If religious texts, national borders and personal identities are all to some extent fictional, each individual can reinterpret them for his own processes of self-becoming, recreating psychological poles of attachment in newly productive and healthy ways. Whilst Nancy therefore emphasised the fragmentation of identity, Benslama’s psychoanalytic approach was more attentive to the subjective desire for identification and attempted to rebuild the subject’s sense of self by negotiating between plural cultural traditions. Benslama’s sensitivity to the violence which Western culture could inflict upon others would also influence Lignes, especially the review’s appreciation of the psychological suffering caused by the stigmatisation of Islamic migrants in France. This would subsequently temper its originally aggressive neo-Nietzschean critique of religion, discussed below. Against the imagined returns to European humanism and cultural conservatism promoted by ‘new philosophers’ such as Alain Finkielkraut,

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Lignes thus defended neo-Nietzschean thought as the unavoidable fulcrum of philosophical modernity. An ethic of ontological impurity and impropriety was one of the key themes of the review’s first series, although the impropre would be modulated slightly differently by the review’s contributors. For Nancy, l’impropre underlined his resistance to any form of communal identification; for Surya, it negatively designated a community of ‘the left’ combatting nationalism and parochial interests; and for Benslama, it indicated the fictional nature of all identity, allowing a psychological approach to transpropriation for recent immigrants to France. Yet as well as the review’s philosophical debt to Nietzsche and deconstruction, Lignes also mined a literary tradition of Nietzschean writers who promoted a material, sensual approach to writing, identity and thought. Écriture: Sensual Philosophy and Base Materialism The Derridean deconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s is often characterised as a destructive project, one that challenged guaranteed certainties and dismantled any firm, critical apparatus with which to construct new, concrete concepts. To an extent this is already a misreading, as the differential logic implied by deconstruction was not meant to make identity impossible, but to multiply and thicken its possible designations. Yet whilst Derrida had a very singluar and writerly idiom, his philosophical programme remained largely conceptual, concerned with identifying the critical aporias lying dormant in the history of Western philosophy. Other philosophers of the period, such as Vladmir Jankélévitch, were much more concerned with the thick, sensual materiality of language than with dismantling its conceptual implications. Following his death, Lignes issue 28 (May 1996) was dedicated to Jankélévitch. Claude Imbert-Vier explored the tactile, intuitive nature of his thought: Precise speech is exclusive; it isolates and individualises, breaks the solidarity between things and suspends becoming to instead fix essences. Subtle speech concentrates, in a global sense, an energy of particular or possible significations, which diffuse slowly by impregnating or flavouring terms without one being able to assign a fixed term to this diffusion. [La parole précise est exclusive, isole et individualise, rompt la solidarité des choses entre elles, suspend le devenir pour fixer des essences. La parole subtile concentre dans un sens global une énergie de significations particulières ou possibles, qui se diffusent lentement par imprégnation

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et ‘savouration’ sans que l’on puisse assigner un terme à cette diffusion]. (L.28.1996, 69)

Derrida’s major heir, Jean-Luc Nancy, also moved beyond deconstruction to become increasingly interested in the multiplication and proliferation of sense. Revisiting Descartes, Nancy argued that there was never a general ‘ego’ as some sort of stable, consistent thinking object, but a singular, material being which received and emitted thick, sensual impressions: There is no ‘ego’ in general, only the one time, the occurrence and occasion for a tone: a tension, vibration, modulation, colour, cry, or song. Always, in any case, a voice, and not a vox significativa, not a signifying order, but the timbre of the place where a body exposes and proffers itself. (2008, 27)

From Le Sens du monde (1993) onwards, Nancy explored how the exposed body receives and creates sensorial impressions and meaning, be it though writing, film, art, or simple physical presence. We can see, then, a concern amongst Lignes contributors with philosophy as not just a disembodied conceptual exercise, but an investigation into the material sensuality of existence and thought. An array of writers and thinkers from the 1960s and 1970s, though less famous than Derrida, Nancy and company, had also spent these decades exploring the nature of sense through literary writing. Alongside Bernard Noël, one fundamental writer for Surya was Jean-Noël Vuarnet, who had been largely forgotten in France following his suicide in 1996 and remains practically unread in England and America. The review eventually dedicated an issue to Vuarnet in March 2016, but Vuarnet and his generation had inspired Lignes from its very first issue. Although the texts thus discussed here are recent, they are belated explorations and theorisations of a writerly attitude and idiom which was familiar to the Lignes contributors who matured in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside his fiction, and several books on female saints and mystics, for Lignes Vuarnet’s most important texts were Le Discours impur (1973) – described by Alain Jugnon as ‘the book of books’ of the 1970s (LNS.49.2016, 49) – and Le Philosophe-artiste, which first appeared in 1977 but was republished by Lignes in 2004. This latter credits Nietzsche as the thinker who both invented and best incarnated the figure of the philosopher-artist, but Vuarnet constructed a lineage of such figures running from Heraclitus and the Presocratics, through Giordano Bruno, Sade and Kierkegaard, to Nietzsche, Bataille and Klossowski. For these

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thinkers, philosophy is not conceptually idealistic or Platonic: thought is not subordinated to an idea of Truth that in some way transcends or supersedes the physical expressions of thinking (2004, 10). Thought was this dense, thick and opaque expression, which could then never have a single, unified meaning, as each experience of thought was itself materially situated and different. Vuarnet, then, perhaps best incarnated the aesthetic, anti-rational thought decried by Habermas. Habermas complained that neo-Nietzschean theorists had a tendency to characterise Enlightenment thought simply as instrumental reason, an approach that reduces language to solely the exchange of isolated and useful ideas: in Le Discours impur, Vuarnet argued precisely this, articulating the need for a critical practice to combat ‘the alienation of a language used as if it were money to be exchanged’ [l’aliénation d’un langage utilisé comme monnaie d’échange] (1973, 54). As a result, Vuarnet promoted an aesthetic approach to thought which he described as half-literature, half-critique (2004, 7). Such a writing would be an impure and materialist mixture of ‘scientific observation, literary storytelling, political strategising and all kinds of invention’ [l’observation scientifique, la fabulation littéraire, la stratégie politique, l’invention sous toutes ses formes] (2004, 12–13). Vuarnet therefore embraced what Habermas saw as the dangerous aesthetic relativism of postmodernism in which genre distinctions were submerged into the general realm of ‘thought’. For Habermas, texts could not contain ‘both literary value’ and ‘philosophic cogency’ (Norris, 1990, 65); critics such as Vuarnet were instead explicitly developing a writerly idiom in which both intermingled. There were no essential qualities or stable concepts for philosopher-artists, who were therefore characterised chiefly by their style (Vuarnet, 2004, 14). Rather than conceiving of philosophy as a Heideggerian aletheia (an unveiling of Truth), Vuarnet stated that philosopher-artists were more concerned with the coextensive immanence of thought within the world (2004, 10) – thought should transform, rather than represent, the world. This was an overtly materialist conception: ‘The field of action of such philosophers should lose in depth what it gains in expansion: their sights are not on another world, but on the one down here’ [Le champ d’action de tels philosophes devrait perdre en profondeur ce qu’il gagnerait en extension: leur visée n’étant pas l’outre-monde mais l’ici bas] (2004, 10). It is this emphasis on the immanence of thought that differentiates Vuarnet from Derrida: in Lignes, Thierry Tremblay noted that both were innately concerned with breaking down the strict divisions between different categories and

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modes of thought, but that Vuarnet was more concerned with aesthetics and materialist affects than with the deconstruction of abstract concepts (LNS.49.2016, 17). In one form or another, this materialism informed the approach of many Lignes contributors. Although Surya notes that Vuarnet himself was not particularly interested in directly politicising this materialist form of writing (LNS.49.2016, 5), his references were still those of the 1970s libertarian moment and thus carried political implications. In a true Nietzschean assault on traditional values, Vuarnet argued that religion, family and work were the philosopher-artist’s primary obstacles to overcome (2004, 17). Thus, in Lignes, linking blasphemous subversion to politically progressive thought, Vuarnet stated that Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Marivaux and Fontenelle were all socially inventive, contestatory atheists and remorseless libertines (L.6.1989, 90). As political strategising was described as a manner of aesthetically transforming the world, Marx’s materialism was preferred to Hegel’s philosophising, and Mao’s linking of poetry and revolution resonated more with Vuarnet than Heidegger or Plato (Vuarnet, 2004, 15). Vuarnet asserted, however, that he preferred the utopic, creative and inventive side of socialism (Fourier and Feuerbach) to the Marxist scientism that focused on economics and productivity. Whilst, as we shall see in coming chapters, other Lignes contributors are very much materialists in a Marxist sense, here I would like to focus on this more aesthetic, Nietzschean materialism. In Le Discours Impur, Vuarnet made it clear that, rather than the trinity of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which was central to much thought of the 1960s and 1970s, he instead found greater inspiration in ‘the emergence of an opacity that must be identified as […] writing’ [l’émergence d’une opacité qu’il faut nommer (…) l’écriture] (1973, 238). In Lignes, Mathieu Bénézet hailed the generation of writers in the 1960s and 1970s who created what he called ‘the novel of language’ [le roman de la langue] (L.36.1999, 39). Between the abstract formalism of the nouveau roman and the terroristic, theoretical excesses of the Tel Quel novel, these writers used literature to explore the corporeal nature of thought, using words as dense, material and desiring signifiers. Just as Surya was keen to resurrect forgotten or maligned thinkers of the 1930s–1960s, he also intended Lignes to preserve and develop the legacy of literature from this period. Of the generation of authors discussed by Bénézet in Le Roman de la langue (2002), alongside Vuarnet, Jacqueline Risset, Roger Laporte, Bernard Noël, Edmond Jabès and Pierre Guyotat were all published by Lignes at some point.

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Against the instrumentalised language of philosophy (2002, 21), for Bénézet these writers demonstrated the obstacles to clear enunciation brought about by the dense, opaque, sensual and exhausting aspects of language, and they emphasised the desiring materialism of this writing process in contiguity with Marxism and psychoanalysis. The Lignes issue Littérature & Pensée of 2012 further explored this materialism of literary thought. As situated inside a conscious subject, thought was described by Laurent Evrard as having ‘a thickness, a space, a duration’ [une épaisseur, un espace, une durée] (LNS.38.2012, 267). This materiality extended beyond the brain and body, however. Via Bataille, Philippe Hauser described literature as an almost mystical form of participation with the wider world in which ‘the subject and the object identify with each other […] mutually attracting each other to better transform themselves, to increase what one could call their ontological density’ [le sujet et l’objet s’identifient (…) s’attirent mutuellement pour mieux transformer, pour accroître ce qu’il faudrait appeler leur densité ontologique] (LNS.38.2012, 20). There is, then, a certain impersonality of thought, an imposition on the thinking subject from the outside world. Bénézet and LacoueLabarthe note that writing relies on ‘that which is intimated’ [ce qui est intimé], this verb implying both an intimacy to thought but also an external, suggestive process which exposes the porous borders of inside and outside (LNS.38.2012, 80). Rather than a solipsistic mental space, thought is located in a material subject, yet it is always exposed to, and operated on, by exteriority. Surya has thus described his thought as ‘mla pensée’ (2010b, 64): there is a resistance to claiming ownership of thought, ‘mla’ expressing a decentred self both possessing, and being dispossessed by, thought. Above all, for Jacques Brou, thinking is simply difficult and exhausting: there is ‘a general resistance to thought’ [une résistance générale à la pensée] (LNS.38.2012, 60). There is, then, an emphasis on the process of thinking, rather than the resulting thoughts. As James Brusseau has argued, the suggestion that ‘philosophic thinking is worth more than any truth’ is characteristic of Nietzsche’s ‘decadent’ thought (2005, 42). Decadent thought is the ‘madly impatient pursuit’ of thinking (2005, 98), a desire at the heart of literary-philosophic activity: French Nietzscheanism is not a sober, astute theoretical state and further it’s not something negative, not something that should be defined with words like distrust or suspicion. Instead, and positively, it is a human need that Nietzsche felt and Deleuze felt and that both communicated as writers, as how they wrote. (2005, 98)

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A thought of desire and a desire for thought drive this endless, difficult and exhausting practice of writing. This is precisely the experience presented in Surya’s second novel, L’Éternel Retour (2006), which opens with the narrator declaring: ‘I put myself at the mercy of thought. I want to experience it’ [je me mets à la merci de la pensée. Je veux en faire l’expérience] (2006, 11). Featuring two protagonists, significantly discussing Nietzsche, the novel has been described as philosophical dialogue (Nichanian, 2010, 107), but the conversation is not as clearly structured as this suggests: the two interlocutors are frequently drunk, overheated, weak and tired, and their affective states influence their respective thoughts; convictions are fleeting, the narrator rejecting the conclusions he derived the night before; the ownership of ideas is contingent, the narrator noting that Dagerman frequently spoke in his place and vice versa; and thinking occurs most effectively when attention is captivated, led astray by an obsessional (and implicitly eternal) return to the same ideas. The novel is in itself relentless, featuring two long sections of around a hundred pages with no paragraph breaks, and the text is presented in a dark, dense, bold typeface: the material burden of sustained thought is thus passed on to the reader. Whilst the novel therefore represents the material processes of thought, it also pushes such a task onto the reader, who likewise experiences the confusion, fatigue and complexity of trying to unravel these different threads of Nietzsche’s thought through two equally burdened interlocutors. This material imbrication of literature and thought was central for Lignes from its very beginning. Blanchot and Mascolo had stressed the particular responsibility of writers to think, and in Le Roman des revues Mathieu Bénézet argues that, today, Lignes is the sole review to uphold this legacy (2012, 21). For Surya, this literary materialism has a very particular purpose. In an article republished by Lignes, Vuarnet linked the impurity of literary language to a bas matérialisme, a low materialism derived from Bataille and subsequently espoused by Surya (LNS.49.2016, 156). Whilst, contra Habermas, Surya contends that philosophy and literature can never be entirely separated, he also argues that ‘the possibilities of thought are not, in effect, entirely contained within philosophy’ [la possibilité de la pensée n’est pas, en effet, contenue toute dans la philosophie] (LNS.49.2016, 8). In L’Imprécation littéraire, Surya adds that philosophy is ashamed of, and thus runs away from, the base realities of material existence (1999c, 14). From Sade to Bataille, on the other hand, literature has been given the imperative task to say everything [tout dire], and therefore for Surya it is literature’s unique

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role to think through all of those material experiences that philosophy is too ashamed to discuss. For Lignes, literature should then explore limitexperiences such as madness, cruelty and sexuality. Such a concern can be seen in Surya’s own fiction. Philippe Hauser argues that Surya’s short story Exit (1988), which depicts an anonymous sexual encounter taking place in public, is an attempt to represent ‘the relationship between fucking and thinking’ [les rapports de la baise et de la pensée] (2010, 59). Literature thus compensates for the tendency of philosophy to be drawn towards pure, conceptual and transcendent clarity (the high), by thinking through the impure, dense and immanent opacity of matter (the low). This, then, is a key focus for Lignes’ literary materialism, one rooted in a Nietzschean anti-transcendentalism which privileges the immanence of thought through the affected body and the density of language. In truth, however, the literary ambitions of Lignes failed to a certain extent. Literary texts only appear infrequently in the review, and almost never in the second series: only one issue has ever been devoted solely to creative writing (May 2001). Surya laments this fact, but notes that the majority of Lignes contributors and readers preferred the review’s emphasis on essays over literature. This is a sign of the times regarding the diminishing importance of writing for French intellectual reviews. Influential literary reviews still exist, and there are vibrant contemporary poetry scenes in France, but écriture no longer plays the central role in intellectual debates that it used to. Furthermore, whilst early contributors, especially Daniel Dobbels, sometimes wrote with an elliptical, poetic style, the review’s emphasis on contemporary politics often necessitated a lucid clarity. Texts could be trenchantly materialist and political, as well as intellectually rigorous, but the recourse to the frequent neologisms and theoretical jargon of the 1960s and 1970s was jettisoned. Early issues had a more irreverent tone, most notably with Francis Marmande’s blackly ironic commentaries on contemporary social mores or Jean Baudrillard’s playful accounts of transgressive sexuality. Yet the style of the review changed over time, firstly losing its compositional plurality. The chroniques of current affairs, which one could compare to the Revue internationale’s section ‘Le cours des choses’, disappeared around 1990; likewise, the book reviews which closed all of the early issues were suspended from 1997 onwards. The ludic or ironic tone would also dissipate, especially in the second series, as the review became more tightly linked to an academic audience and issues became increasingly monothematic, often put together by experts

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in the field rather than generalist écrivains. Rather than the plural forms of writing and disparate themes the review used to treat, the style and tone of the review became more homogenous and academic, somewhat against Surya’s wishes. Yet theoretically, the relationship between bodily experience and thought still united Surya, Dobbels and Marmande in the review’s first series, and was shared by many early contributors, such as Jean-Paul Curnier, Bernard Noël and Jean-Luc Nancy. Whilst literature would take a back seat during the review’s more militant phase (roughly spanning 2002 to 2012), its thematic importance remained and recently returned in the issues on ‘Literature and Thought’ (May 2012) and Jean-Noël Vuarnet (March 2016). Recent issues have also seen a plethora of new contributors who are also literary writers, such as Alain Hobé, Jacques Brou and Philippe Beck. The interplay between writing and philosophy is of paramount importance to Surya, and persists throughout the entirety of Lignes’ history. And, most crucially, the ethos of this literary heritage remains strong throughout. Alongside what Parker and Philpotts call ‘predominantly autonomous literary values’ (social non-conformity, immoralism, freedom of expression and so on) (2009, 15), the insistence that writing is in itself a dense, opaque and situated manner of thinking can be seen to inform the review’s philosophical and political materialism. As we shall see below, however, the 1960s aesthetic libertarianism which this desiring materialism demanded (one anti-family, -moral conventions and -social conformity) was tempered somewhat into what could conceivably be compared to a more normative political liberalism. From Aggressive to Pragmatic Irréligion For Surya, the return of the religious seemed to underpin all the reactionary thought of the 1980s (L.6.1989, 9). Initially, Lignes vigorously resisted the return of religion to French intellectual life, considering Nietzsche’s famous proclamation of the death of God to be of continued relevance. The review made its intentions clear by situating itself within a lineage of secular thinkers and writers with the Irréligion issue in June 1989. This dossier was above all characterised by irreverence and provocation: many of the texts republished by Lignes, such as Alfred Jarry’s ‘La Passion considérée comme une course de côte’ [The passion considered as a hill climb], heavily satirised religious piety. Artaud, for

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example, wanted to spit on ‘the ignoble and pederast name of Jesus Christ’ [le nom ignoble et pédérastique de Jésus-christ] (L.6.1989, 25). Jean Schuster described the Abrahamic religions as three cancers blighting the planet (L.6.1989, 64). Elsewhere, a long excerpt from Sade’s ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains!’ [Frenchmen, one more effort if you want to be Republicans!] is quoted on the links between Christianity and political domination. The issue was clearly a combative and inflammatory riposte to the return of religion to French thought and politics. And, once again, Nietzsche was central. In an excerpt from the Antichrist, Nietzsche argued that Christianity had rendered its believers ‘sick’ to ensure their faith in a fiction (L.6.1989, 154). The implication was that religion had distorted humankind’s perception of the world, and so the death of God had increased our rational powers and ushered in a reign of secular modernity. Rather than the irrationalism of which neo-Nietzschean is often accused, Lignes presented Nietzsche as opening up the possibility of a rational philosophy freed from repressive religious dogma. Marmande noted that some Lignes contributors were alarmed at the aggressive tone of the review’s irreligion, Vaclav Jamek describing it as a form of arrogant triumphalism (L.8.1989, 38). Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, however, evinced a less aggressive embrace of the cultural legacies of religion once they had been shorn of their authoritative dogmatisms. Bailly is enthusiastic about the remnants of Christianity: ‘Religion overturned is above all the offering of a mass of sense’ [La religion renversée, c’est d’abord une masse de sens offerte] (L.6.1989, 43). Once the authority of religion is diminished, its positive contributions to aesthetics and philosophy can be shared by non-believers, and a wealth of texts and artworks were now open to plural and inventive interpretations. Nancy’s later deconstruction of Christianity extended this stance. Christianity produced a new ‘mode of being in the world’ (Nancy 2012, 3): monotheistic gods being characterised principally by their absence, Nancy argued that monotheism therefore boiled down to a form of atheism, producing the kind of Western subjectivity which has now been globalised and henceforth cannot be ignored. It is instructive to compare Nancy’s approach to Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto: whilst Onfray promoted a similar ‘deconstruction of Christianity’, his relied on demystifying religion to prove its total irrelevance (2007, 59), whereas Nancy’s project assumes that Christianity cannot simply be bypassed as it residually but fundamentally structures our planetary existence. Most of Nancy’s work in this vein occurs outside of Lignes,

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but it is important to signal that the early aggression towards Christianity was not shared by all contributors to the review. The review’s relationship to religion would undergo a major change when the emphasis of French debates shifted from Christianity to Islam. The Irréligion issue appeared in June 1989, just months before the eruption of the foulard [headscarf] affair. The opposition to Muslim students wearing headscarves in schools resurrected, and significantly reoriented, the term laïcité. As Jean Baubérot notes, laïcité had been primarily mobilised during the French Revolution in opposition to Catholicism, which at the time essentially held a monopoly on education. By the 1980s, with the education system largely secularised, all that remained was ‘a still smouldering conflict over public subsidies for private schools’ as more than 90% of these were Catholic (2009, 190). Once Mitterrand’s government gave up its plans to abolish private schools in 1984, the word laïcité almost became superfluous, since it seemed as if all the battles surrounding the term had been resolved. The foulard affair, however, changed all of this. In October 1989, three students – Leïla, Fatima and Samira – were sent home from school for wearing traditional Islamic headscarves after the headmaster had declared that these religious garments had no place in a secular institution. This implied a rereading of laïcité: previously, the term implied that schools should teach the values of republican universalism without forcing religion onto pupils, but what students actually wore was irrelevant. Now, however, pupils wearing ostentatious religious items of clothing were seen as posing a threat to the secular environment which schools were meant to provide. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin initially tried to de-escalate the debate, leaving it up to the independent discretion of schools as to whether to ban headscarves. Any remaining disputes were resolved by the Conseil d’État [Council of State], which held a ‘more or less reasonable’ position that, as long as they were not being mobilised as part of a deliberate provocation, headscarves were acceptable (Ahearne, 2014, 16). Whilst France’s Muslim population had been slowly growing for years, to date it had lacked a specific, public visibility; with the headscarf affair, however, ‘this Muslim presence burst suddenly and notoriously into public perception’ (Ahearne, 2014, 14). The issue escalated in the years that followed in conjunction with other global and national fears regarding Islam. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses (1989), and the threats made to Taslima Nareen which forced her to leave Bangladesh after her novel Lajja appeared

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(1993), made the conflict between freedom of speech and Islamic fundamentalism a global talking point. The electoral victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria in 1992, and then the attacks on the twin towers in New York in 2001, made political Islam seem like a real global threat, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) helped to popularise a narrative that pitted Western democratic values against an uncivilised Islamic enemy. In France, these broader concerns over the presumed incompatibility of Islam with Western values crystallised around the term laïcité, which thus ‘semantically thickened to become a national identity marker increasingly exploitable across the political spectrum’ (Ahearne, 2014, 23). Some worried that this use of laïcité distorted its initial revolutionary intentions. As Mathy argues, ‘Islam is a minority religion in France, a kind of informal, loose federation of communities and places of worship’, and as such ‘bears little resemblance to the Catholic Church of a century ago’ (2011, 196–7). Rather than a struggle against the hold of a powerful Catholic Church over the French population, laïcité now seemed to be further stigmatising an already disenfranchised minority group. Lignes would share these concerns. The first sign of resistance to Jopsin’s relaxed stance on headscarves was the petition signed by Régis Debray, Elisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut, Elisabeth de Fontenay and Catherine Kintzler, ‘Profs, ne capitulons pas’ (1989). They accused the government of cowardice and called on true republicans to stand up to this encroachment of religion into civic life. Debray and company advocated a hard-line interpretation of laïcité in which religious symbols in their entirety should be banned from schools. Throughout the 1990s, the debate punctually returned to the public sphere following more controversial incidents at schools, discourses of laïcité developing into what Mathy describes as a republican ‘fetish’ (2011, 186) and Ahearne calls ‘obsessive’ (2014, 30). Thus when, in 2004, following the Stasi report, all religious symbols were eventually banned in schools, there was already ‘an understanding across society as a whole of laïcité as something primarily repressive and as a tool to be directed principally against Islam’ (Ahearne, 2014, 24). In 2016, with the ban imposed on wearing burkinis (Islamic swimwear with a built-in veil) on several beaches in the south of France, this tacit targeting of Muslims was made explicitly clear. Again, the usual discourses of laïcité and the banning of religious symbols were heard, but this time the mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, explicitly stated that it was only Islamic beachwear that needed to be removed. Whilst this concern for

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laïcité initially belonged to the left (principally championed by Debray and the National Republican movement), in the new millennium it was firmly embraced by Chirac and Sarkozy’s UMP (which changed its name to Les Républicains in May 2015). By the 2010s, secularism had become one of the key terms for the FN and other far-right groups, such as Bloc Identitaire, in their protest against the increasingly high-profile presence of Muslims in France. In retrospect, although the foulard debate did not occupy much space within the review, Lignes seems to have had a prescient awareness of the pejorative turn laïcité would take. Before the foulard debates began, the review was happy to accommodate republican defences of laïcité, an interview between Debray and Finkielkraut affirming that the Republic was to be embraced as a pedagogy of secular values (L.5.1989, 68), and Franck Lepage similarly calling for a resurrection of the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution (L.6.1989, 126). Yet whilst Debray was a frequent early contributor to Lignes, he virtually disappeared from the review’s pages following his hard-line stance on headscarves. Whilst Lepage continued to contribute, the emphasis of his articles shifted from a staunchly pro-laïcité republicanism to a critique of the PS’s cultural policy. Therefore, although the review largely avoided the foulard debate, it is clear that most contributors thought that the new mobilisation of laïcité was stigmatising and racist, Marmande referring to its adherents’ ‘clownish morality’ [moralité bouffonne] (L.8.1989, 44). Later, Surya would add that although he had no personal ‘taste’ for headscarves, the level of hostility the debate was producing was completely out of proportion to the matter in hand (LNS.33.2010, 105). What is more telling is that the review’s previously aggressive atheism became markedly more temperate. Attacks on Christianity virtually disappeared, except when the religion was allied to far-right politics or played an active role in blocking gay rights (LNS.45.2014, 37). And, more crucially, as the balance of power had shifted to make France’s Muslim minority the target of laïcité, the review stopped championing the term and resisted stigmatising accounts of Islam. For instance, and again in stark contrast to Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, the review opposed essentialising discourses of the religion which characterised all Muslims as violent fundamentalists. Onfray openly denounced ‘the Muslim thirst for blood’ and argued that the passages which ‘justify and legitimize holy war’ in the Qur’an outweighed those promoting ‘tolerance’, making Islam a closed, archaic and intrinsically dangerous religion (2007, 197–8). By contrast, Yadh Ben Achour argued in Lignes that the emphasis placed

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on jihad by contemporary fundamentalist groups is merely one of many possible readings of the text (L.25.1995, 160). He contextualised the rise of fundamentalism as dependant on a variety of economic, cultural, international and psychological factors, and argued that when the context of Islam changes, the meaning of its religious texts can also change. Such interpretations resist essentialising Islam as a ‘barbaric’ religion, and instead emphasise that, like all texts, religious writings can be put to different political and moral ends depending on their interpretation and the historical moment. The decision to downplay the review’s early emphasis on irréligion and to avoid generalising assumptions about Islam are politically conciliatory decisions made by Surya and the review’s contributors to align themselves with what they saw as the more progressive and egalitarian strains of French society. This did not mean maintaining a blindness towards the crimes carried out in the name of Islam, or a complete unwillingness to criticise its religious leaders. In general, criticism of Islam usually came when defending freedom of speech, as Lignes vigorously contested most forms of censorship. Yet, even in these cases, a softening of tone is again noticeable. In a petition defending Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa demanding his death for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1988, Lignes’ condemnation is unequivocal. The review published a petition, written by Michel Leiris, defending Rushdie’s freedom of speech and stating that ‘Fundamentalism is a constant menace for the life of the mind’ [Le fanatisme est une menace constante pour la vie de l’esprit] (L.6.1989, 135). Yet Christophe Bident later specified that the real issue was not Islam itself, but the dangerous conflation of spiritual authority and political power in countries like Iran (L.26.1995, 99). Fundamentalism is seen as an ideologically inflexible subservience of politics to religion, and it is this, rather than religion tout court, that needs to be opposed. This qualified condemnation of politicised religion returned a few years later when defending Taslima Nasreen. The Bangladeshi author was in exile following the publication of her novel Lajja (1993), a book which described in detail Muslim violence, especially towards Hindu women. The novel has since been criticised for its ‘lack of balance’; in solely blaming Muslims for the violence in Bangladesh, it became a ‘propaganda tool’ for Hindu extremists to vindicate their own violent reprisals (Deen 1995, 92–5). Nevertheless, in France, Nasreen made more non-partisan expressions of atheism, denouncing the use of political violence in the name of religion in general, and Marmande praised

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her for the moderation of her expression (L.24.1995, 191). In Lignes, Nasreen stressed that personal faith is not the problem: I am not waging a war on believers. But those who use religion to secure power, those who use it to annihilate society, those who use it to create inequality between men and women […] yes, I am at war with them. [Je ne livre aucune bataille contre les croyants. Mais ceux qui se servent de la religion pour s’emparer du pouvoir, ceux qui l’utilisent pour anéantir la société, ceux qui y fondent une inégalité entre les hommes et les femmes (…) oui, je suis en guerre contre ceux-là]. (L.24.1995, 192)

Rather than religious faith itself, most responses to this scandal in Lignes followed Nasreen’s lead and criticised the religious institutions which oppressed women or served to maintain financial and political inequality. Instead of denouncing radical Islam, Monique ChemillierGendreau argued that it was more important to alter contemporary geopolitics by hastening Palestinian liberation and nourishing Algerian democracy, these being two concrete steps which could be taken to prevent societies moving towards what she called the ‘impasse’ of fundamentalism (L.24.1995, 205). So we can clearly see a softer tone with regard to believers that, rather than criticising Islam as a religion, is more attentive to the geopolitical structures of power which it affects. By the new millennium, the review’s unequivocal defence of freedom of expression had become strained almost to breaking point. In November 2006, Robert Redeker, a major contributor to Les Temps modernes, published an article in Le Figaro in which he complained that Muslims were trying to impose their rules on French society (examples ranging from girls wearing the veil in schools to the banning of G-strings on the Paris plage). His rhetoric became more extreme as the article progressed, as he described the Qur’an as an intrinsically violent book and Muslims themselves as ‘a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarism’ [une foule hystérisée flirtant avec la barbarie] (Redeker, 2006). As a result of this provocative article, Redeker received death threats and had to go into hiding, gaining the support of the majority of French intellectuals in the process. Yet in Lignes, Fethi Benslama practically apologised for having to defend Redeker. Through gritted teeth he asserted everyone’s right to free expression, yet he was more critical of the stigmatising tone of Redeker’s article, which he saw as ruining ‘the essential link between liberty, dignity and alterity’ [ce lien essentiel de liberté-dignité-altérité] (LNS.21.2006, 245–6). This text was a petition written under the auspices of Benslama’s

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organisation Manifeste du Libertés. Benslama formed Manifeste du Libertés in 2004 as a forum for the critique of Islamic fundamentalism by those who considered themselves Muslims in a cultural sense, but who opposed the dogmatic turn the faith was taking in some places. The organisation had come out strongly in favour of protecting freedom of speech, Tewfik Allal publishing an article in Charlie Hebdo in February 2006 defending the magazine’s caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the Redeker affair, which happened soon after this incident, tempered this unconditional defence of freedom of speech, and the repetitive nature of these cases over the years has left Benslama frustrated with this way of framing the debate. Benslama evidently condemned the 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices. However, in interviews after the events, he called the discussion surrounding freedom of speech a lure: cartoonists in France are not being censored, and the cartoons were merely a pretext for a terrorist attack that was part of a wider war waged against the West.1 The real issues were geopolitical in nature, be it the instability of the Middle East or the racial tensions experienced within France itself. The subsequent attacks in Paris that November, and in Nice the following year, confirmed this theory, as they were unrelated to freedom of speech issues and were instead simply exercises in pure terror. The Lignes issue devoted to terrorism in 2015 contained a moving piece by Georges Didi-Huberman describing the rehabilitation of Simon Fieschi, a webmaster at Charlie Hebdo who survived the attacks. The review therefore empathised with the human suffering caused by the events. However, Lignes offered no unconditional support for Charlie Hebdo, displaying no ‘Je Suis Charlie’ logos and providing no defence of the magazine’s editorial decisions. Rather than freedom of expression, this Lignes issue on terrorism was more concerned with the rise in state surveillance and anti-terror legislation that resulted from the increase in tensions, the digital technologies that allowed both Islamic State to propagate viral videos and America to control deadly drone strikes, and the worrying rise of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in France which was seen to be fuelling a resurgent extreme right. Within this framework, the provocations of Charlie Hebdo were not condemned, but nor were they seen as particularly useful, feeding as they did into existing political resentments. 1 ‘Fethi Benslama “Le mot islam peut signifier aussi bien la paix que le salut”’, http://www.humanite.fr/fethi-benslama-le-mot-islam-peut-signifier-aussi-bien-lapaix-que-le-salut-571555 [accessed 29 September 2016].

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Whilst Lignes was therefore concerned with the potentially illiberal aspects of fundamentalism, the review’s early, neo-Nietzschean goading of religion was swiftly abandoned when it became clear that the future victims of laïcité would be France’s Islamic minority. Instead, the review attempted to critique religion only when it manifested itself as politically, morally or aesthetically repressive, and it became equally hostile to those stigmatising Muslims in a stereotypical or essentialist manner. Whilst the review is therefore generally anti-censorship, it has also increasingly had to consider the responsibility that publishing words and images entails. Surya noted that Blanchot’s journalistic texts from the 1930s made it clear that, during this period, Blanchot had ‘considered that thought was inconsequential; perfectly amenable to circumstances and opinion’ [tenu la pensée pour inconséquente; pour parfaitement assujettissable aux circonstances et à l’opinion] (LNS.43.2014, 9). The review’s Nietzscheanism, by contrast, did not produce the kind of relativist nihilism for which critics of postmodernism often lambasted it. Instead, and contrary to Blanchot, the review emphasised that words and images do historically and socially mean something, that they can cause or ease violent tensions, and that therefore people should assume an attitude of personal responsibility when it comes to what they say and publish. The review could not, then, condone deliberately inflammatory images and texts solely in the name of freedom of speech. And, as we shall now see, the review also tacitly supported a sense of personal responsibility when it came to people’s private lives. Immorality The last aspect of the review’s neo-Nietzschean critical ethos which I wish to identify here was a distinct hostility towards moralising discourses. The palpable return of religion in the late 1980s was accompanied by heightened moral tensions. Two years into Mitterrand’s first presidency, Marc Roy articulated the concerns of many that ‘a certain “moral order” has been eroded’ [un certain ‘ordre moral’ a été ébranlé] (1983, 1597). Abortion laws had been relaxed, sex education was introduced to schools, homosexuality was legalised and laws to combat sexism were drafted. In Les Temps modernes, Roy congratulated the government for producing progressive legislation in advance of popular opinion, but also predicted a conservative backlash from those who blamed the government for the degradation of moral standards. And indeed, Lignes subsequently

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lamented the new moralisation of public discourses that followed, in the first instance with regard to art and literature. However, Surya also identified this rise in moral criticism as part of a general moralisation of international discourses in the late 1980s and 1990s, including the justification of the Gulf War on moral rather than political grounds. This was indicative of the climate of the time; as Julian Bourg notes, the turn to morality in the 1980s ‘unquestionably corresponds to the retreat of the political vision of the world that had crystallized around the idea of revolution’ (2007, 9). As politics receded in the consensual liberal climate, morality and ethics filled the void left in its wake. These new discourses were also an explicit reaction to the perceived ‘moral relativism and nihilism of French theory’, a key point for the anti-Nietzscheanism of the new generation (Bourg, 2007, 11). One of Lignes’ principle antagonists in this period was the left-wing Catholic review Esprit, and especially its editor, Olivier Mongin. By contrasting Lignes’ immoralism to Esprit’s moralism, the distinct nature of Surya’s review can be ascertained, but we can also note its own subtle conformity to shifting moral norms. From Bataille, Surya derived two core principles regarding literature: firstly, that, as a heterogeneous force, it should remain completely free from any political or moral constraints; and, secondly, that literature should say everything possible about humankind, especially entering where philosophy feared to tread. The increased frequency to which literary texts were subjected to moral criticisms, from the 1980s onwards, was thus especially troubling for Surya. Esprit critics, such as Tzvetan Todorov, were seen as particularly guilty of this. Extrapolating from his recent articles, Surya argued that, for Todorov, ‘only a virtuous intelligence brings freedoms with it’ [seule une intelligence vertueuse est porteuse de libertés] (L.13.1991, 115). Todorov implied that only good people could produce good works, and that literature should be both an aesthetic object and a shining moral example. In desiring this unity of the good and the beautiful, Todorov held that the moral behaviour of an author impinged upon the quality of the work: he therefore attacked George Orwell not for his politics, but for his marital infidelities (L.13.1991, 115). In the same vein, Jean-Philippe Domecq and Jean Molino attacked the supposedly seedy and debasing bodily materialism of contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp. In Lignes, Georges Didi-Huberman expressed his frustration with the level of art criticism in Esprit. 2 Didi-Huberman 2 See Esprit volumes 173 (July–August 1991), 179 (February 1992), 185 (October 1992).

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described the constant affective tonality of their articles, which conveyed a sense of disgust and anger and revealed the ressentiment motivating these texts; there is frequent recourse to excremental language to denigrate displeasing works, Duchamp being referred to as l’homme de l’urinoir (L.22.1994, 34). Esprit was also increasingly alarmed by the sexual imagery contained in many contemporary artworks and novels. In 1989, Mongin’s ‘L’Art de la pudeur’ commented on Claude Alexandre and Pierre Bourgeade’s L’Ordre des ténèbres, a collection of black-and-white photographs of sadomasochistic activity. Mongin compared it to works by Bataille, Genet and Noël which similarly assaulted the public sphere with a blatant disregard for others’ sensibilities, using overt displays of deviant sexuality as ‘a tool of intimidation’ [un instrument d’intimidation] (1989, 31). For Mongin, pudeur [discretion] was a public virtue (38). For Lignes, such moral critiques of art only served to limit or repress what should be art’s principal function: the ability to say everything there is to say about human nature and behaviour. Mongin’s ‘L’Art de la pudeur’ touched on another sensitive issue, however, as he described intellectuals attempting to justify paedophilia by ‘taking themselves as pedagogues who reinvent education to better protect infancy and the freedom of mores’ [se prenant pour le pédagogue qui réinvente l’éducation pour mieux sauver l’enfance et la liberté des mœurs] (1989, 36). Here, Mongin is tacitly referring to both a recent René Schérer article in Lignes, and Schérer’s own involvement in ‘l’affaire du Coral’ of 1982. Schérer’s and Mongin’s articles appeared towards the end of a transitional phase in discourses surrounding paedophilia. In the wake of the 1960s’ sexual revolution, ‘calls for legitimizing intergenerational relations were taken seriously by eminent figures on the French intellectual-political left’, this being seen as one of the last frontiers of the battle for sexual liberation (Bourg, 2007, 204). Whilst often overlooked today, after 1968 there were in fact strong ties between gay liberation and pro-paedophilia activists in both France and America. Magazines such as Gai pied soir credited the emergence of queer culture for both a general defence of sexual liberation and also ‘the challenging of a repressive education which stunts children’s desires and impulses’ [la contestation d’une éducation répressive qui brime les désirs et les pulsions des enfants] (Ambroise-Rendu, 2003, 37). Even more mainstream publications investigated such themes, Libération carrying adverts for the Paedophile Liberation Front and Le Monde favourably reviewing Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer’s Co-ire

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(1976), praising them for ‘not hiding the fact that children’s bodies – sexualised, desiring, desirable, ludic – interest them’ [ne cachant pas que le corps des enfants – sexué, désirant, désirable, ludique – les intéresse] (cited in Ambroise-Rendu, 2003, 38). Schérer had fallen in love with his student Hocquenghem in 1962, and as such had begun to reconsider the boundaries of pedagogical relationships; Hocquenghem himself had also described youth as a marginalised sexual group in Le Désir homosexuel (1972), contesting the idea that intergenerational sex was necessarily abusive. The milieus supporting such stances were somewhat troubling: as Julian Bourg notes, those pushing hardest for change ‘were exclusively men’ (2007, 206); and whilst Schérer and Hocquenghem were worried about unproblematically introducing infants into sexually active relationships, some of their associates, like Gabriel Matzneff, openly produced advice for grooming children, noting that ‘the chances of seducing a child in a broken home were better than in a tightly knit one’ (Bourg, 2007, 208). Nevertheless, intellectually sophisticated accounts in favour of a sexual revolution that would include teenagers and perhaps even infants were being produced. Subsequently, when in 1977 Hocquenghem and Schérer campaigned for a full decriminalisation of homosexuality and the lowering of the age of consent to 12, petitions in support were published in Le Monde and Libération and received signatures from Foucault, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, amongst others. The Coral affair broke out in 1982. Already, the early 1980s ‘saw a marked decline in the public legitimacy of arguments for intergenerational relations’. The AIDS crisis prompted ‘a reconsideration of sexual ethics’, and ‘the reassertion of cultural conservatism’ by Thatcher, Reagan and, to an extent, Mitterrand accelerated this shift in tone (Bourg, 2007, 219). The decriminalisation of homosexuality and the lowering of the age of consent to 15 had also pacified the main demands of the militant movements of the 1970s. A series of scandals was about to further delegitimate the calls for extending the sexual sphere to minors. Le Coral was a product of the 1960s, an experimental lieu de vie (psychiatric institutions inspired by Lacan and Guattari as compassionate alternatives to asylums) that, in autumn 1982, was accused of harbouring a Europe-wide paedophile network. These accusations, which rested almost entirely on faked documents and photographs, are now widely recognised to be an attempt to discredit the Socialist government. Culture Minister Jack Lang was suspected of a variety of lurid offences, despite the fact that he had never set foot in Le Coral.

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Schérer, who had visited the centre, was also accused of inciting minors to sexual activity, though all charges were eventually dropped. Given this transitory moment in public discourses of paedophilia and the falsity of many of the accusations, the Coral affair significantly muddied the debate and provided no conclusive or satisfactory resolution. It did, however, turn the debate towards notions of sexual abuse rather than sexual liberation. Although activists in the 1970s claimed to be speaking on behalf of sexually repressed infants, the opinions of children were rarely solicited; by the 1990s, attention had shifted to the victims of abuse. Mireille Dumas’s 1995 television programme Bas les masques was a watershed moment as, alongside the statistical evidence of thousands of cases of child abuse, for the first time the French public could see and hear first-hand testimonies from those who had been abused. This concluded the process of ‘a fundamental mutation in the history of social mores’ [une mutation fondamentale dans l’histoire des mœurs], ending any notion that sexual activity with minors was still publicly acceptable (Ambroise-Rendu, 2003, 39–40). Such a shift is noticeable in intellectual reviews, Esprit being a prime example. In response to the Coral affair, the review’s ire was directed towards the mass media, which acted like judges morally condemning those who were in fact falsely accused (Mongin and Fatela, 1983, 190). Whilst not arguing in favour of relationships with minors, Pierre Mayol followed this piece in Esprit by stating that 12-year-old adolescents are in a state of ‘erotic maturation of an intensity which they have not known before’ [maturation érotique d’une intensité qu’ils n’ont pas connue]; consequently, the accusations being levelled at Le Coral were described as hypocritical and moralistic given adults’ own desires to explore their sexuality (1983, 193–5). Crucially, Mongin argued against a too-facile conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia, stressing that they are very different phenomena (Mongin and Fatela, 1983, 190). However, as we have seen, by 1989 Mongin was much more critical of Schérer, and in ‘L’Art de la pudeur’ he also compared sadomasochistic communities to paedophile rings as both supposedly constituted totalitarian microsocieties (34). He argued that just as there is a non-reciprocal relationship between an adult and a child, sexual relationships based on violence and masochism are also part of a ‘master-slave dialectic’ which, for Mongin, made them equally contemptible. Therefore, having abandoned a more open and tolerant perspective expressed in 1983, by 1989 Mongin was conflating two very different sexual activities to deem both morally repugnant in a much more openly moralistic manner.

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There was also a discreet shift in what Lignes was prepared to print. In 1988, Schérer argued that the hysterical overuse of the term ‘paedophile’ in the moralistic mass media meant that the question as to whether the exclusion of children from sexuality is ethically or morally justifiable now could not even be asked (L.3.1988, 137). Following the ostracism and media lynching to which Schérer was subjected after the Coral affair, Lignes displayed an ethic of hospitality towards a marginalised figure. Yet, notably, whilst Schérer had not revised his former position on lowering the age of consent, later arguing that his only error had been to underestimate the strength of the opposition such a suggestion would unleash (Schérer and Lagasnerie, 2007, 173), this argument itself does not appear in Lignes. Solidarity is thus shown to an author whose freedom of self-expression is being challenged, but his most controversial argument is not made in the pages of the review. The issue of paedophilia only returns once more to Lignes, in 2003. Stéphane Nadaud, a practising child psychologist, commented on the ‘Pédo-Philie’ chapter of the infamous 1973 Trois Milliards de pervers issue of the review Recherches, edited by Félix Guattari. This issue was immediately banned on publication and Guattari prosecuted for outraging public decency largely because of this chapter. The Trois Milliards de pervers issue was recently reproduced online, but the controversial chapter on paedophilia was deliberately omitted. Nadaud states that it was right to do so, describing the chapter as ‘particularly abject in its apologetics regarding “pedagogical pederasty”’ [particulièrement abject dans l’apologie qui est faite du ‘pédagogico-pédérastique’] (LNS.10.2003, 92–94). Lignes’ friendship for Schérer was clear, and he continued to contribute to the review on other subjects. Yet the lack of space given to the age of consent in 1989, the subsequent silence on paedophilia in Lignes and then the denunciation of the ‘pédagogico-pédérastique’ stance in 2003, displays something of a participation with, rather than a resistance to, changes in social mores. Julian Bourg described the changing tone regarding child sexuality as an encounter of 1970s radicalism with the ‘reality principle’, and a similar process seems to have affected the position of Lignes regarding immorality (2007, 222). This also raises questions of a review’s responsibility. Jeremy Ahearne argues that, when intellectuals get involved with public policy, they pass from a ‘pre-responsibilised intellectual attitude’ to one in which they take greater responsibility for their political positions (2010, 81). One could argue that editing a review such as Lignes also imparts a similar responsibilisation. We have already noted a sense of caution when

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stigmatising migrants and Muslims; similarly, whilst Lignes’ immoralism recommends a critical and aesthetic practice free of moral criteria and supports the freedom of expression, the review sometimes shies away from controversial incitement or provocation. In the aesthetic realms of art and literature, the demand that one say everything on human nature proscribes a moralising approach to both creation and criticism, and Lignes has published novels of a sexually explicit nature. Yet whilst the review also wishes to remain circumspect when imposing guidelines on people’s private lives, there is a sense in which the radical libertarian impulse of the 1960s and 1970s is somewhat reined in today. We can see a similar structure in the review’s stance regarding illegal behaviour. In the introduction to Violence en politique (May 2009), Surya states that whilst Lignes is questioning whether violent actions in resistance to the French state are legitimate, it ‘does not seek in itself to encourage them’ [ne cherche pas en soi à les encourager] (LNS.29.2009, 8). This does not mean that the review never condones illegality; it openly encouraged the harbouring of illegal immigrants as a form of solidarity and civil disobedience in the new millennium (LNS.26.2008, 167). There is a difference, then, between encouraging acts of violent and non-violent illegality, implying an unstated code of editorial responsibility. Likewise, immorality seems to be openly advocated in aesthetic productions and cultural commentary, whilst other actions in people’s private lives are generally left to the responsible discretion of individuals. Libertarians or Liberals? Throughout this chapter we have examined the review’s neo-Nietzschean critical ethos inherited from Bataille in the 1930s and forged in the literary heteronomy and radical libertarian atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s. A philosophical anti-essentialism, a literary materialism, an aggressive irreligion and a refusal to bow to moral and social conventions defined the baseline stance of Lignes in its early issues. However, as we have seen, as the libertarian climate of the 1960s morphed into the more conservative and reactive 1980s, and despite its aims to resist the intellectual and moral sea change underway, in some respects Lignes tacitly modified this ethos to adapt to the new political context. Migration and the relationship between France and its Muslim population would become central issues for the review, and this is clearly one area in which its aggressive secularism and emphasis on freedom of

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expression were reined in to avoid further stigmatising and excluding marginalised groups. Although a radical freedom is still firmly defended in the arts and cultural criticism, a tacit sense of personal responsibility in people’s private lives, and editorial responsibility regarding what should and should not be published, is far from the nihilistic attitude for which neo-Nietzscheanism is commonly criticised. Lastly, and most notably, regarding paedophilia, it is clear that to some extent the review is a product of its times, and in some areas has moved with the prevailing moral and political consensus of what is acceptable. In 2007, Surya acknowledged that the artistic, transgressive libertarian spirit that the review would prefer to espouse is only possible in a society that guarantees ‘the basic political principles of a boundless liberty’ [les principes politiques élémentaires de la liberté sans borne] (LNS.23– 24.2007, 21). The subversive, ‘supplementary’ liberties which the review wished to represent were only possible if more, simple, ‘ordinary’ liberties were honoured. This significantly clarifies the review’s position regarding the liberal revival of the 1980s. In many ways, some of the review’s core values (freedom of expression, freedom of identity and sexuality, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, individual responsibility, secular government, internationalism) are precisely those of liberalism. What Lignes resented were the illiberal aspects of the 1980s ‘liberal moment’, as the ferocious anti-totalitarianism banished from public debate an array of political and intellectual discourses which were important to the review. The literary materialism discussed in this chapter, and the political materialism it relies on elsewhere, were also at odds with the liberal emphasis on scientific, technocratic expertise and communicational rationality. The emphasis on consensus mollified political polemics and – although the free-market economics of liberalism were rarely championed in France – the social and egalitarian aspects of the liberal project seemed to be being eroded in favour of a rights-based individualism and a shrinking state. As the review developed throughout its lifespan, the rise of the far right, untrammelled free-market liberalism and the transformation of a restrictive consensus into an enforced securitisation around discourses of crisis placed these ordinary liberties increasingly under threat. The political response of Lignes to these political challenges is the focus of the next three chapters.

chapter four

Breaking the Consensus Immigration and la pensée unique Breaking the Consensus

Lignes was formed at the peak of the consensual climate, the lack of staunch political debate producing what François Cusset described as an ‘atonal’ level of debate (2008b, 118). During the 1986 legislative elections, the left openly argued for the end of ideologies and the burying of class war; the result was a victory for the right, and the first period of cohabitation between President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. The euphoria of Mitterrand’s first presidential victory had long since abated, and the subsequent campaign for his re-election in 1988 was described in Lignes as a soporific non-event (L.3.1988, 32). Mitterrand’s ‘Lettre à tous les Français’ was supposed to be an election manifesto, yet over its 59 dense pages it delivered no pragmatic political measures, let alone a promise to overturn the right-wing policies of the past two years. Instead, between the slogan ‘Generation Mitterrand’ and his posture as Tonton, the nation’s kindly uncle, Mitterrand portrayed himself as a regal patriarch above the fray of party politics. Back in power, the professionalised PS increasingly saw itself as a cohort of experts: technocrats governing a free-market economy in the best interests of the country. With such an absence of polemics, people began to find it hard to differentiate between the PS and Chirac’s RPR: according to a Sofres poll from 1988, two years of cohabitation and a presidential campaign entirely lacking in tension had led 56% of the French population to believe that the ideological divide between left and right was now a thing of the past (Cusset, 2008b, 140). Thus, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the French political landscape seemed to have entered a pacified space of triumphant and consensual liberalism. Further periods of governmental

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cohabitation in the 1990s would make the differences between the PS and RPR seem ‘more apparent than real’ (Hargreaves, 2007, 176). Yet anxieties surrounding race, immigration and a resurgent far right soon disturbed this surface calm. Alec Hargreaves claims that, during this period, immigration was ‘the only policy issue where a majority considered the left and the right to be divided by major differences’ (2007, 176). This cleavage appears most clearly with the emergence of the Front National, a political party that would only gain in strength through the period of Lignes’ existence. Its brand of anti-immigrant nationalism was the principal early political concern for Lignes, and Pierre-André Taguieff’s analysis of the extreme right’s shift from an essentialist to a cultural form of racism was a crucial first theoretical step for the review. The foulard affair in 1989 was central to shifting the debate surrounding immigration from a social and economic platform towards one of cultural difference and national identity. Mainstream political parties adopted this cultural stance on migrants, and the rise of a new National Republican movement in defence of laïcité would be the particular French variety of growing European anxieties surrounding multiculturalism and the role of Islam in contemporary society. Previously contestatory voices on the left closed ranks with the government’s tough stance on migration, and any opposition to the government was lambasted as irresponsible angélisme [wishful thinking]. The trajectories of Pierre-André Taguieff and Régis Debray, initially close to Lignes before rallying to more conservative republican stances, are symptomatic of this trend. Yet despite a high degree of policy continuity between the left and right, the nationalistic turn of some politicians and intellectuals began to expose the fragility of the supposed liberal consensus. Lignes was concerned with actively breaking this consensus, becoming more critical of the parliamentary left and mining alternative, Marxist analyses of the contemporary situation. Étienne Balibar’s emphasis on class, alongside race and nation, became a corrective to Taguieff’s later nationalistic French republicanism. Balibar’s stress on connecting the cultural to the social and economic then bore fruit as the new social movements erupted between 1995 and 1998, with migration, unemployment and the welfare state all primary concerns. Widely seen as heralding a return of both the left-right political cleavage and intellectuals to centre stage, the new protests against economic liberalism and the creation of the sans-papiers allowed Lignes to articulate an oppositional stance to the intrinsically related debates of social welfare and immigration. And, significantly, the tensions created at the turn of

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the millennium finally fragmented France’s liberal consensus: whilst neoliberalism was often referred to as la pensée unique due to the ruling classes repeated claims that there was no alternative, its negative social effects were becoming increasingly exposed and widely unpopular. In its place, a resurgent French nationalism and securitisation in the face of terrorism began to overtake the liberal emphasis on the rule of law and individual rights. Pierre-André Taguieff and Neo-racism Rather than the political future, it seemed to be the past that haunted France in 1987, with debates surrounding the memory of both the Holocaust and Vichy dominating the media. Alongside the Heidegger affair, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark eight-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah and the Klaus Barbie trial brought the legacy of fascism very much to the forefront of public attention. Barbie, known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for torturing prisoners of war and deporting French Jews to concentration camps, had been extradited to France in 1983 to stand trial for war crimes. The lawyer for the defence, Jacques Vergès, used the publicity storm surrounding the trial as a means to make wider, controversial claims. He attempted to relativise Barbie’s offences by comparing them to French colonial activities in Algeria, an argument that was concurrently being mobilised by the French ‘New Right’ to attenuate the painful memories of Vichy collaboration. As Christopher Flood has noted, such historical revisionism was a central concern of the far right in the 1980s, with the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen infamously calling the Holocaust a mere historical ‘detail’ (2005, 222). Revisionism became part of a Gramscian strategy, supplementing political action with a ‘meta-political struggle to achieve ideological dominance in the cultural sphere’ (Flood, 2005, 226). To this end, the FN created both a theoretical journal, Identité, and publishing houses such as Éditions Nationales. Lignes was alarmed by the ground that this far-right revisionism seemed to be gaining: Surya incredulously noted that in the trial of Paul Touvier, another Nazi collaborator, the Vichy regime was described as ‘a constellation of “good intentions” and political animosities, rather than as a system of rigorously coherent ideas’ [une constellation de ‘bons sentiments’ et d’animosités politiques, qu’un système d’idées rigoureusement enchaînées] (L.16.1992, 55). The FN’s attenuating discourses (the ‘good sentiments’ of Vichy) were

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insidiously entering mainstream discussions. In response, articles in Lignes by Jean Jacob, amongst others, closely analysed the theoretical sophistication of the New Right to better produce effective counterdiscourses (L.15.1992, 117). The encroachment of the FN impacted public discourses surrounding migration and national identity. In 1981 Mitterrand had supported the ‘right to difference’ of France’s immigrant minorities, yet by 1984 the official position of the PS had shifted from a multicultural embrace of difference to a greater emphasis on the successful integration of immigrants into French society. In the late 1980s, Chirac’s Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, inaugurated a discussion over whether children of immigrants should automatically become citizens at 18, or whether the parties in question should have to actively request citizenship. Pasqua’s subsequently proposed bill was initially unsuccessful, but the debate was seen as a significant break with the French tradition in which nationality was a question of legal status, not ethnicity. The very term ‘immigrant’ newly implied prejudicial racial connotations: as Jacques Rancière commented, where one used to talk of ‘immigrant labour’, the second word was now dropped, and so ‘today’s immigrant is first a worker who has lost his second name’ (1999, 118). This is one example of the shifting terrain of debates in the 1980s from economic or political issues into the field of cultural identity. The concerns of (implicitly non-European) migrants were now seen as vastly different from those of native French workers, this gap allowing ‘the violent intrusion of new forms of racism and xenophobia into our consensus regimes’ (Rancière, 1999, 117). Lignes thus became concerned with what it saw as the growing fascistic tonality of discourses surrounding immigration, asking whether the proposed changes to the Nationality Code would implicitly rely on racially defining citizens (L.2.1988, 6). Pierre-André Taguieff was initially a crucial Lignes collaborator in this sense, as he had been developing a significant, new analysis of neo-racism since the early 1980s. His La Force du préjugé (1988) described two types of racism: heterophobia, a fear of biological difference; and heterophilic neo-racism, which abandoned discourses of racial purity in favour of an emphasis on cultural difference and cultural essentialism. Those from other races were no longer seen as necessarily inferior, just different, and if these differences could not be assimilated into Western societies then it would be better for such cultures to remain separate. Whilst Taguieff’s emphasis on the mutual exclusivity of heterophobic and heterophilic racisms has been seen as too rigid (public expressions of heterophilic

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racism often being merely a politically correct mask for a deep-seated heterophobia) (Lloyd, 1998, 11), the value of Taguieff’s analytical work was rarely in doubt: in Lignes, even Louis Sala-Molins, later a vociferous critic of Taguieff, admitted to relying on Taguieff’s work for his university teaching (L.13.1991, 151). In Lignes, Taguieff argued that this new form of heterophilic racism could only enter into politics through the mediation of a nationalist movement (L.4.1989, 35). This, then, was the current role and threat posed by the FN and the New Right. As overtly heterophobic racism had become socially unacceptable, Taguieff argued that Le Pen had begun to euphemise his racism, discussing ‘culture’ and ‘national identity’ rather than ‘race’ (L.4.1989, 51). Taguieff and his milieu identified this new discursive strategy as a Europe-wide phenomenon, and they contributed to important early Lignes issues on the extreme right in France and Europe (October 1988) and the German far right (September 1989). For example, the Italian Nuova Destra party was seen to have co-opted anti-racist discourses, claiming that multicultural liberalism was the real totalitarianism of the 1980s (L.4.1988, 176), and the German Neue Rechte similarly avoided overtly racist discourses, instead aiming for political respectability by allying themselves with the more publicly acceptable anti-nuclear and ecological movements (L.4.1988, 137). Yet, despite the value of these early contributions, Lignes’ relationship with Taguieff became philosophically and ideologically strained. Firstly, Taguieff often blamed structuralist (Lévi-Strauss) and post-structuralist (Levinas) thinkers for the rise in neo-racism, arguing that philosophies emphasising the recognition of the Other and the right to difference were being instrumentalised by racist individuals or collectives (L.12.1990, 36). He was not always wrong: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s controversial 1971 UNESCO lecture, ‘Race and Culture’, is frequently cited as an example of structuralist thought tending towards neo-racism. Here, Lévi-Strauss argued that, rather than culture being determined by race, the problem should be turned on its head and race should be seen as merely ‘one function among others of culture’ (1987, 15). People of similar genetic racial characteristics might belong to completely different cultural milieus, and as ‘hippies’ seemed to experience the same kinds of ‘repulsion and even hostility’ usually reserved for racial minorities, Lévi-Strauss surmised that cultural rather than racial particularisms were to blame for prejudices (1987, 21). Yet Lévi-Strauss warned that the development of a ‘global civilisation’ would destroy ‘those old particularisms’ (1987, 23). Globalisation, as a homogenising force that eradicates cultural differences, ‘spells doom’

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for the creative potential of humankind (1987, 24). Furthermore, tolerance of difference was of course important, but such a tolerance was also said to require ‘relative equality and sufficient physical distance’ (1987, 21); without these, Lévi-Strauss suggested that racism was not created by ‘wrong ideas’ about others (1987, 20), but was instead an understandable response to the dilution of specific national cultures and the unbearable proximity of the Other. He concludes that, without a drastic ‘change in the course of history’, globalisation can only continue to increase the tensions which lead to racial hatred (1987, 24). Agreeing with Taguieff in this instance, Étienne Balibar is also critical of Lévi-Strauss’s supposition that the ‘mixing of cultures and the suppression of cultural distances’ could lead to both ‘the intellectual death of humanity’ and even threaten our ‘biological survival’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 22). For Balibar, this discourse is indeed serviceable for the kinds of ‘differentialist racism’ which Taguieff had identified: whilst race is now seen as a cultural rather than natural phenomenon, the aggressive response which humans are meant to innately feel when faced with cultural difference is still seen as natural. This reading therefore ‘naturalises not racial belonging, but racist conduct’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 22). In assuming that ‘tolerance thresholds’ and ‘cultural distances’ are necessary to avoid interethnic conflicts, such readings attempt to show how racist responses to difference are in fact natural responses to cultural difference. And, indeed, this lecture was eventually politically mobilised by the right, as Nicolas Sarkozy explicitly referenced Lévi-Strauss ‘to defend an assertive policy of cultural intransigence’ in 2007 (Ahearne, 2014, 109). More problematic for Lignes was Taguieff’s hostility towards deconstruction. In the issue Penser le racisme (December 1990), he charged Jacques Derrida and especially Emmanuel Levinas with promoting a weak cultural relativism which enabled heterophilic racism and provided no tools for combat: In short, deconstruction takes dubious conceptions to pieces, but in doing so leaves nothing at all intact. It empties out pseudo-scientific certainties, but at too high a price, and without any capacity for self-correction; by hollowing out the void of sense and values, it leaves minds diminished. [Bref, la déconstruction met en pièces les conceptualités douteuses, mais n’en laisse pas moins les choses en l’état. Elle fait le vide des certitudes pseudo-scientifiques, mais elle le fait au prix fort, et sans capacité d’autocorrection, en creusant le vide du sens et des valeurs, et en laissant les esprits démunis]. (L.12.1990, 51)

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There is an extent to which Lignes shared this critique of deconstruction: rather than the emphasis on linguistic play, the dismantling of binary oppositions and the identification of aporias, thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy were instead looking to reconstruct more tangible theories of the creation of sense. In the new millennium, the review would also appear slightly more hostile to the legacy of Taguieff’s main target, Emmanuel Levinas: Surya lamented Blanchot’s insipid rereading of Bataille through Levinas, whilst Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière argued that Levinas’s emphasis on an ethical injunction not to harm the Other precluded the construction of a more conflictual political agency. Nevertheless, as discussed in the previous chapter, the ethic of impurity and the construction of plural, differential identities supported by the majority of Lignes contributors were derived directly from the post-structuralist legacy, thus pitting Taguieff against the review’s major intellectual heritage. Alain David’s introduction to Penser le racisme explicitly praised Levinas and Nancy for opening the passage to the anti-racist thought which contributors to this issue were trying to develop, one that emphasised the welcoming of the Other to combat cultural separation and segregation (L.12.1990, 14). Unlike Levi-Strauss, David did not see difference as a threat to identity or an innate reason for hostility. Affirming cultural differences was not necessarily seen to segregate communities into fixed blocks and sclerotic identities (although, as Chapter 7 discusses, the review was still wary of actively embracing identity politics). In general, the Lignes ethic of impurity stressed constant and frequent mixing, the destabilisation of all communal groups and boundaries, and the singularity of every individual. Taguieff’s position also led to practical tensions with anti-racist activists. He denounced the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA) as ineffective for its emphasis on multiculturalism and difference. Whilst former LICRA representative Alain David vigorously defended the organisation’s record inside Lignes and maintained the review’s stance on embracing impure identities and constitutive difference (L.37.1999, 149), for Taguieff the proposed solution was a greater stress on republican integration instead of trying to embrace multiculturalism. Taguieff’s attack on the xénophilie of Emmanuel Levinas started a trend that pitted the leftist support of multiculturalism against the intellectually superior values of the French Republic. Yet deconstruction had also prompted a critique of Enlightenment philosophy, European colonialism and French republicanism in particular.

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Alain David described the elision of racial and sexual difference in Western metaphysics as ‘a generalised whitening’ [un blanchissage généralisé] (L.12.1990, 11): the être of French universal thought was often implicitly a white European male. Another latent tension between Lignes and Taguieff, then, emerged over France’s intellectual and colonial past, as Taguieff attacked Louis Sala-Molins. Sala-Molins had published a critical edition of Le Code Noir (1987), exposing what he described in Lignes as the ‘utilitarian genocide’ of French colonial rule (L.3.1988, 16). The Code Noir, operational from 1685 to slavery’s abolition, decreed how slaves should be treated on plantations and formalised their lack of rights; article 44 even denied that slaves were human, openly stating that they should be considered as pieces of furniture (Sala-Molins, 1987, 178). Surya called Sala-Molins’s work necessary, and claimed that it proceeded in ‘a manner which captures the sense of how Lignes tries to think history’ [une façon qui a le sens de ce qu’essaie de penser Lignes de l’histoire] (L.3.1988, 10). Sala-Molins also broadened his critique, accusing famous Enlightenment thinkers, normally considered foundational anti-racist thinkers, if not of complicity with slavery, at least of being unconcerned with its effects: for example, he critiqued the ‘I couldn’t care less attitude’ [je m’en-foutisme] at the root of Rousseau’s and Montesquieu’s ideas about Africa (1987, 251). Subsequent Lignes publications continued the deconstruction of colonial Western values, including Lacoue-Labarthe’s La Réponse d’Ulysse et autres textes sur l’Occident (2012), Sala-Molins’s Esclavage et réparations: la lanterne des capucins et les loupiotes des pharisiens (2014) and a translation of Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel and Haiti (2006), the latter of which builds on Sala-Molins’s critique to rescue ‘the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it’ (Buck-Morss, 2009, 74). At the time, Sala-Molins’s republication of Le Code Noir was controversial, and major historians advised him against republishing it lest it tarnished the reputation of the French Republic. Taguieff agreed, accusing Sala-Molins of encouraging anti-Western attitudes and also fomenting anti-white racism (LNS.12.1990, 39). Taguieff was beginning to invest in republican values as a bulwark against the barbarous influences coming from abroad, and thus saw Sala-Molins’s critical revisionism as a threat to France’s intellectual and political past. Besides his increasing hostility to the anti-racist left, however, it was when Taguieff seemed to openly express support for the New Right that he was severed from Lignes entirely. His Sur la Nouvelle droite (1994) was criticised for ‘showing insufficient hostility towards the

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New Right, especially to Alain de Benoist’, as well as demonstrating an ‘excessive slippage from theoretical argument to castigation of the inadequacies of his fellow antiracists’ (Flood, 2004, 359, 366). Scholars have since praised Taguieff’s book for his ‘impressively painstaking research into the ND [nouvelle droite] and his assessment of its developments up to the late 1980s’ (Griffin, 2000, 240). The New Right was a key figure in the ideological relegitimation of the far right from the 1960s onwards, and Roger Griffin asserts that the organisation was ‘a deliberately modernised form of fascism, and a fully fledged member of the ideological family of the extreme right’ (Griffin, 2000, 241). Yet Taguieff believed Alain de Benoist’s claims that, from the moment he began publishing his cultural review Krisis in 1988, he was no longer interested in politics and was henceforth an apolitical and harmless commentator. Griffin agrees that in this sense de Benoist can seem to ‘resemble disaffected “liberal” cultural critics such as Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal, who criticise the deficiencies and contradictions of actually existing liberalism without suggesting an alternative’ (2000, 233). Yet he also warns that, throughout the 1990s, de Benoist continued contributing to extreme-right publications, and his writings still referred to an organic, Western European community which was waiting to replace cosmopolitan democracy (2000, 236). Other intellectuals were not fooled by de Benoist’s claims of political neutrality, and publicly warned Taguieff. In an ‘Appel à la vigilance’ launched in Le Monde (13 July 1993), written by Roger-Pol Droit and signed by 40 intellectuals including Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Revel, Taguieff was criticised as someone who, by entering into a dialogue with the far right, had become seduced by its arguments (Droit, 1993, 9). So, by Sur la Nouvelle droite, Taguieff’s placement on the political spectrum seemed ambiguous at best, as he showed more sympathy and understanding to de Benoist than to the anti-racist left. Taguieff’s later association with National Republicanism by the late 1990s made things clearer, and he drifted further rightwards in the new millennium, Surya emphasising that Taguieff now self-identified as a neoconservative (LNS.23–25.2007, 45). Despite Taguieff’s criticisms of Levi-Strauss, he himself moved closer to recommending cultural segregation with a tacit emphasis on the superiority of French republican values over those of migrant communities. Étienne Balibar’s analysis, developed most fully in Race, Nation, Classe, gives us some sense as to how this occurred, and provided Lignes with an alternative, Marxist theory of nationalism and racism.

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Étienne Balibar – Race, nation, classe As Taguieff’s importance for Lignes faded, Étienne Balibar came to be increasingly relied upon, both for his Lignes articles and his books, Race, nation, classe (with Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988) and Les Frontières de la démocratie (1992). A former student of Louis Althusser who collaborated on the Reading Capital project alongside Jacques Rancière in the 1960s, Balibar subsequently published articles in Lignes outlining his theoretical split from Althusser in the late 1970s (L.32.1997, 14–25) and his attempts to reconcile Marxism with Derridean deconstruction (LNS.23– 24.2007, 183–208). Balibar thus labels his thought a conjunctural and deconstructive post-Marxism, one that avoids overarching systems and theoretical certainties to instead critically respond to concretely situated moments. Nick Hewlett therefore describes him as lacking ‘a unified system or worldview’ (2007, 118). Balibar, however, situates his own approach as one that makes precise interventions within the tradition of Western Marxism and, seen in this light, the specificity of his thought and its consistent political claims become clearer. Balibar agreed with Taguieff that the development of ‘an effective anti-racism’ was essential but, rather than an end in itself, for Balibar it was a necessary precondition for reconstructing a class-based ideology from which to launch a politically progressive, materialist struggle (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 13). In contrast to Taguieff, then, Balibar insisted on the necessity of beginning the analysis of anti-immigrant racism with the concept of class (1992, 11). In doing so, he carefully distinguished between ‘xenophobia’ and ‘intolerance’, which are described as individual responses to cultural and racial difference, and ‘the ubiquitous nationalism and racism of the modern world’ which are institutionally ingrained in nation states in the wake of imperialism (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 6). Whilst the former are mere personal prejudices that can be overcome locally, the latter are structural forces that require a concerted and international political effort to combat. In contrast to the claims of republican universalism, Balibar suggested that the only real universal is the global market (1999, 40). Yet, rather than seeing the economy as a single, homogeneous force that dictates social relations, he stressed the independence of, and interrelationship between, ‘social units’ and this ‘economic unity’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 6). The economic impacts on the social principally through what is commonly known as the ‘division of labour’: yet, rather than simply the atomisation of production processes (i.e. a factory assembly line),

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for Balibar the division of labour names the deterritorialising effects of capital and its ability to erode social cohesion as the fierce competition for jobs and material goods turns increasingly smaller groups against each other. The organisation of human society into relatively stable ‘collectivities’ is therefore threatened by this universal drive of capital. Balibar argued that the division of labour would have destroyed all social bonds if reactive formations (such as nation states or religious and ethnic communities) had not responded to preserve a degree of social cohesion (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 7). Economic and social history is not, then, a linear progression in which pre-commodity communities uniformly developed into a market society, but is instead ‘a history of the reactions of the complex of non-economic social relations, which are the binding agent of a historical collectivity of individuals, to the de-structuring with which the expansion of the value form threatens them’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 8). One such reaction was the creation of fictive ethnic or national identities. Filtered through an institutional nationalism that converts local, low-level xenophobia into a latent, state-sanctioned racism, Balibar argued that it is these identities that have produced the conflicts over immigration in the present. Whilst Balibar therefore argued that Taguieff was right to identify a new, culturally racist discourse, for Balibar it was not deconstruction or philosophies of difference that were to blame; instead, neo-racism was merely a new, politically correct discourse through which to continue to justify the structural racism built into the identity of nation states. Subsequently, whilst Taguieff argued for a strengthening of republican values to combat racism, Balibar saw this recourse to the Republic as part of the problem. French republicanism was conceived as a pedagogical programme, ordaining France with a universal mission to educate the human race. This form of colonial racism, predicated on the superiority of the West, has thus been ‘anchored in material structures […] of very long standing’ as simply part of the French ‘national identity’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 291). A focus on the progressive qualities of French republicanism reinstates a cultural-racial hierarchy, as the integration of non-Western immigrants into French society is seen ‘as progress, as an emancipation’ from their implicitly more barbaric heritage (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, 25). This position implies that it is other, non-Western societies that, through their inability to assimilate to democratic norms, are the true fomenters of prejudice and intercultural hatred. In seeing neo-racism as primarily cultural, there is a temptation to analyse it as simply a prejudice or an archaic sentiment which can be countered by

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the ‘civilising’ effects of Western liberal education: we can think, for example, of how discourses of laïcité are mobilised to defend Muslim women from their own repressive religion. It was this latent belief in the superiority of Western values that facilitated Taguieff’s shift from a critique of neo-racism to proximity to the New Right. Instead, by differentiating personal xenophobia from institutional and nationalist racism, Balibar’s class-based analysis tends towards internationalism rather than a stronger emphasis on national identities (Balibar, 1992, 31). Balibar was thus praised by Surya for providing the right approach to integrate and theorise current events and immigration rhetoric into an overarching political programme (L.16.1992, 192). His Marxist counterpoint to Taguieff’s culturalist approach was articulated in Lignes from the very beginning. Balibar’s conjunctural approach was flexible enough to recognise that nationalism was not always a negative programme, highlighting its importance in anti-colonial struggles (L.17.1992, 26). However, the invisible manner in which international liberalism remained a ‘western nationalism’, one which, for Balibar, was still an imperial project, and thus responsible for the kinds of anti-migrant racism proliferating in Europe, was seen as more pernicious (L.17.1992, 25). Balibar notes that there has always been a cultural, rather than simply racial aspect of racism (notably with anti-Semitism), and argues that policies aiming at integration or assimilation are essentially culturally conservative attempts to maintain the status quo (L.2.1988, 9). As Balibar considered multiculturalism nothing to be afraid of, he supported the development of an autonomous sans-papiers activism which overtly embraced, rather than tried to hide, the cultural difference of France’s migrant populations. Against the revisions to the Nationality Code, Balibar also argued strongly for a citizenship based on contractual participation and cooperation rather than ethnicity or nationality, a stance pointing towards the transnational citizenship generally preferred by the review. And, as we shall discuss in Chapter 7, Balibar’s embrace of both a deconstructive approach to identity that avoids essentialising cultural or racial differences, and a strategic approach to politics which also supports the rights of minority struggles, perhaps also makes him the most flexible synthesiser of the neo-Nietzschean and neo-Marxist currents in the review. Therefore, whilst Taguieff was useful to the review when analysing the discursive strategies of the far right, the deconstructive Marxism of la pensée 68 was seen as more effective at undermining the latent nationalism and racism at the heart of the rising trend of neo-republicanism.

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Vers le fascisme? Another source of positive political inspiration for Lignes was the legacy of the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s. With the rise of the Front National, the spectre of fascism seemed to continually haunt the review, France and Europe more broadly. In 1984, Laurent Fabius stated on television that, regarding immigration, Jean-Marie Le Pen was asking the right questions but giving the wrong answers, a moment Lignes identified as the beginning of the far-right party’s legitimisation. The FN subsequently had Marie-France Stirbois elected as a députée to the National Assembly following a by-election in Dreux in November 1989. The new Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, panicked in response, and altered his previously conciliatory position on immigration, infamously declaring that France ‘could not shelter all the misery of the world’ [ne peut accueillir toute la misère du monde] (L.21.1994, 32). In 1988, Guattari and Donnard had already written in Lignes of the rise of what they called neo-fascism and ‘a real weakening of the moral and imaginary status of foreigners living in France’ [une véritable précarisation du statut moral et imaginaire des étrangers vivant en France] (L.2.1988, 16). Marmande’s darkly satirical chronicles of micro-fascism subsequently charted the changing attitudes to immigrants and minorities, such as the prevailing anti-Arab vitriol heard in Parisian taxis (L.4.1988, 106). A 1991 report by La Commission nationale consultative de droits de l’homme confirmed Marmande’s suspicions, noting that whilst physical racial violence had not increased, ‘there had been a significant increase in acts of “symbolic” racial violence’ (Silverman, 1999, 55). An increase in the prejudicial use of language, a significant rise in hostility towards minorities, an emphasis on national identity and a toughening of the immigration laws combined to make Lignes concerned about a return of fascism. These concerns were clearly articulated in the issue Vers le fascisme? (March 1992). In his introduction, Surya acknowledged that fascism was a loaded word, but argued that it was being used deliberately to dramatise the question raised: given that a growing minority were sympathetic to neo-fascist parties, what would it take for Europe to become fascist in the majority (L.15.1992, 9)? Critics saw the review’s recourse to discourses of fascism as excessive: Esprit’s Olivier Mongin attacked Lignes for its ‘return to history’ instead of a focus on the progressive spread of democracy in the present (1990, 93). Nevertheless, American academics were also keen to point out that debates surrounding immigration in the

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early 1990s held ‘striking’ similarities, as well as key differences, to those of the 1930s (Scullion, 1995, 32). Part of the frustration with anti-fascist discourses of the period was that they punctured the triumphalism of liberal democracy being propagated by certain historians. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a sense that Western democratic values had won a significant and lasting victory that would usher in a period of perpetual peace. In Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), the twentieth century was portrayed as a battle between the West and communism, a struggle now convincingly won by American liberalism. As Surya complains, this reading minimises the massive role of fascism in the European twentieth century, and omits the fact that it was not the communist East which was defeated in the Second World War, but Western European nationalism in the form of Nazism (L.8.1989, 65). Surya notes that this is not a politically neutral reading: Fukuyama was on the payroll of the US State Department, and his argument that a mutually affirmative economic and political liberalism had peacefully brought about the end of history was part of America’s campaign to impose a New World Order (L.8.1989, 58). Crucially, Lignes contributors such as Surya and Enzo Traverso noted that Fukuyama’s articles were translated and published in Raymond Aron’s liberal review Commentaire. Alongside Esprit and Le Débat, the anti-totalitarianism of reviews like Commentaire was undergoing an ideological mutation now that the threat of communism was receding, and in the early 1990s they began celebrating the global victory of liberalism. In France, anti-fascism was often linked to communism. François Furet’s Le Passé d’une illusion (1995) blamed the glorification of anti-fascist resistance narratives for legitimating Stalinism and prompting intellectual blindness to the gulags. Such critiques of anti-fascism also tended to argue that too much had been said about Nazism’s crimes, and not enough about those of communism. Anglo-American historians have described this as ‘not only inaccurate, but bizarre’, especially in the French context, where ‘the crimes of Communism have been widely and often wildly publicised by its enemies from the beginning, while before 1980 very little was said about the Holocaust’ (Aronon, 2003, 238). For example, Aronon notes that Stéphane Courtois’s controversial introduction to Le Livre noir du communisme (1997) manipulated statistics to ‘demonstrate that Communist regimes have victimised approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis’, implying that communism had been

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and remained the greater threat (2003, 236). Why the attempt to create a hierarchy of totalitarianism, in which communism is seen as significantly worse than Nazism? Carolyn Dean argues that, for many French thinkers, fascism represented ‘a particular historical moment of suffering’: now that this moment had passed, it posed no further threat (2006, 64). Communism, however, was conceptually tied to the French Revolution by thinkers such as Furet, and thus would remain a menace ‘as long as there are men and women committed to a particular univocal truth and a levelling and retributive justice’ (Dean, 2006, 59). In this reading, communism has a utopian ideological motivation which remains potent; Nazism, by contrast, was a historical aberration which liberal democracy was capable of resisting. As a result, anti-communism is still a political necessity, whilst anti-fascism is anachronistic. As we saw in Chapter 1, by contrast, Lignes, via Bataille and Nancy, linked democracy and fascism in a reciprocal dynamic, and therefore it was difficult to separate them in quite such a clean manner. By 1994, Mongin would be forced to admit that the anti-totalitarian discourse, launched primarily by Esprit, had rested on an overly optimistic vision of democracy (1994, 98). The violent ethnic civil wars in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, coupled with the rise of Berlusconi in Italy, confirmed for Lignes that neo-fascism was indeed a problem for both Eastern and Western Europe. Marmande subsequently stated that whilst even friendly commentators saw Vers le fascisme? as an exaggeration of the problem, Berlusconi’s victory in Italy demonstrated that fascistic attitudes were also present in Western Europe (L.22.1994, 5). Jacqueline Risset, constantly monitoring Italian politics for Lignes, noted that following Berlusconi’s election there was an increase in homophobic assaults and a public resurgence of fascist symbols (L.22.1994, 16). Mongin had criticised Lignes’ supposed tendency to ignore the differences between Eastern and Western Europe, arguing that the true germs of neo-fascism were restricted to Eastern Europe. However, Lignes remained attentive to geographical specificities: two issues, Europe centrale: nations, nationalités, nationalismes (June 1990) and Yougoslavie: penser dans la crise (September 1993), took a look at individual countries in depth, inviting intellectuals from within these national contexts to provide an informed perspective. For Gérard Raulet, these issues were important as they demonstrated a specific departure of Eastern European politics from the normative divide between left and right (L.20.1993, 12). Since any organised opposition was decimated by the USSR, and dissidence provided no

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positive programmes for after communism’s collapse, Eastern Europeans were left with a generalised ideological disorientation which facilitated the rise of populist, nationalist and ethnocentric parties. Yet there were also key similarities between east and west, Western European countries such as France also experiencing a degree of ideological confusion as many left-wing parties abandoned socialism for liberalism, reducing the difference between the electoral right and left. The result was a similar rise in populism in east and west, with both seeing a rise in discourses of national identity, historical revisionism, racism and anti-Semitism. One strategy common to both was the manipulation of the mass media: Berlusconi’s Finivest allowed ‘a conflation of the integrated spectacle […] and totalitarian regression [l’amalgame entre spectaculaire intégré (…) et régression totalitaire] (L.22.1994, 17), whilst Slobodan Milosevic had also used television as an efficient means of manipulating the population (L.20.1993, 19). Eastern and Western European nationalisms were then placed on a continuum by Lignes, rather than isolated as two distinct phenomena. Whilst the anti-totalitarian logic propagated by Mongin’s Esprit left many intellectuals deeply divided in the face of Eastern European nationalism, Lignes’ more conjunctural approach resulted in a greater coherence in their response, especially to the crisis in the Balkans. Lignes therefore continued the dual programme of countering the action of the extreme right in France whilst critiquing democratic liberalism, reactivating the anti-fascist programme launched by Bataille in the 1930s. The concern with the rise of the far right would remain central to the review, which notably devoted issues to the new extremeright parties and terrorist attacks between 2014 and 2016. That since the 1980s the FN’s vote share has only increased vindicates the review’s perspicacity on this issue. However, in the intervening period it was the global adoption of economic liberalism that came to concern the review most as, following Balibar, contributors worried about the desolidarising effects which capitalism was having on society. As such, the review’s concern about immigration-related issues turned its attention progressively towards the economy and the sans-papiers, shifting from a critique of the nationalist right to one contesting the paucity of the Socialist Party’s political programme.

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Breaking the Consensus: la pensée unique Lignes’ early focus on right-wing ideologies had always been accompanied by a critique of the electoral left, but this criticism intensified leading up to the new social movements of 1995 to 1998. Initially, the responses of contributors to the Republic were diverse: whilst Debray and Lepage eulogised French republicanism as a tradition simply in need of rejuvenation, some more pessimistic editorials argued that the Fifth Republic had deviated so far from its ideals that it was now indefensible (L.3.1988, 3). Alongside the loss of identity many felt as the PS embraced economic liberalism, the popular role of the president and the professionalisation of politics were key areas of debate. Daniel Dobbels initially remained an enthusiastic supporter of Mitterrand, and he declared himself scandalised by Thierry Pfister’s polemical Lettre ouvert à la génération Mitterrand qui marche à côté de ses pompes (1988). Pfister denounced the idea of a ‘Generation Mitterrand’ as merely the inauguration of a cult of personality, one that assumed that because Mitterrand was a ‘socialist’, all policies sanctified by him were also automatically socialist by association (1988, 12). Instead, Pfister claimed that, once elected, all Mitterrand and the PS cared about was keeping power, abandoning their principles, ensuring the reproduction of elites and presiding passively over the right-wing drift of French society. Mitterrand’s campaign for re-election was notable for its lack of a political programme, and instead seemed to rest on his personal appeal and promoting a sense of stability. Dobbels initially thought that the hostility to Mitterrand was misplaced, claiming that the president was one of few members of the PS capable of stopping its conversion to economic liberalism and right-wing immigration policies (L.3.1988, 102). Yet France’s subsequent cooperation with America in the Gulf War marked a significant change. Intellectual opposition to the war was fairly marginal. Tom Bishop comments that ‘the French public gave massive support to Mitterrand’s policy’, and the ‘few outrageous articles’ that appeared opposing the war, largely in L’Autre journal, created ‘nothing more than a small fuss’ (1995, 27). In a Lignes editorial, though, the Gulf War was seen as an event that had irreversibly severed the review’s remaining support for Mitterrand and the PS (L.14.1991, 9). Henceforth, it was no longer enough to critique the electoral left; instead, the review felt obliged to ‘make an effort to imagine how one could be on the left differently’ [faire l’effort d’imaginer comment être de gauche autrement] (L.14.1991,

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9). Subsequently, it seems that the editorial board as a whole, Dobbels included, had withdrawn its support from Mitterrand. Criticism of the technocratisation of government had been growing for some time. In Lignes, Gérard Soulier referred to La Fin du politique (1975), in which Pierre Birnbaum saw conflict as being erased by the professionalisation of modes of governance by specialists which, alongside the growing apathy of the general population, had rendered the idea of active participation in universal suffrage a mere ‘illusion’ (1975, 258). Echoing Mascolo’s refus of Gaullism, Soulier saw the French situation as coupling this technocratisation with a powerful and unchecked presidential role, producing a césarisme rather than democracy (L.3.1988, 35). As Didier Eribon (2007) has since described, following its ascent to power, the PS cut its ties with the activists who played a considerable role in its election, instead relying on professional graduates from Sciences Po and the École normale d’administration [enarques]. In Lignes, Lepage’s articles from the 1990s demonstrated this dismantling of the militant left in action. Social workers who had been building up effective working practices and ties to local communities lost funding for long-term projects. Instead, the PS redirected money to individually organised cultural programmes in which citizens were encouraged to express themselves apolitically rather than organise socially (L.19.1993, 49). Didier Eribon also criticised this type of direct funding, stating that it actually encourages the kind of depoliticisation it is meant to tackle: ‘individualised individuals will, for the most part, raise the most “immediate” problems – ones rarely elaborated collectively’ [les individus individualisés soulèveront la plupart du temps des problèmes ‘immédiats’ – rarement élaborés collectivement] (2007, 64). Lepage argued that the subsequent delegitimisation of activist associations had been methodically organised by a professionalising PS, and thus a powerful motor for social change was lost at the same moment that a modernising second left embraced economic liberalism (L.21.1994, 58). The left became even harder to distinguish from the right, especially following Jacques Chirac’s victory in the 1995 presidential elections. Chirac installed Alain Juppé as Prime Minister, signalling the RPR’s definitive break from Gaullism for liberalism; that both major parties now openly embraced free-market economics and fiscal austerity (la pensée unique) furthered the sentiment of a narrowing of electoral options. Rather than a party interested in social welfare, the PS now represented a vaguely ‘cultural’ way of being, one supposedly predicated on liberal tolerance but shorn of its egalitarian goals (Cusset, 2008b, 334).

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Yet the economic consensus surrounding la pensée unique was soon radically challenged by the new social movements. In October 1995, Juppé announced reductions in healthcare benefits which hit the retired and the unemployed hard, prompting huge resentment as 80% of the French population opposed the plans. Yet it was Juppé’s decision to cut the pension provision to railway workers which prompted the biggest strike waves in France since May ’68, many seeing these cuts as presaging the future desiccation of the welfare state; Juppé was eventually forced to retire the proposed reforms. Yet the next year saw further disruption, this time over changes to the Code de la nationalité. In 1993, cohabiting with a seriously ill President Mitterrand, RPR Prime Minister Édouard Balladur was left a relatively free hand to toughen immigration policy. The Pasqua laws, proposed in June and passed in November, ‘cut family reunion, restricted acquisition of citizenship, increased arbitrary police power, and made it virtually impossible for refugees to enter France on humanitarian grounds’ (Sowerwine, 2009, 397). A keenly contested feature was the replacement of automatically renewable ten-year residency permits with conditional one-year permits. Some previously long-term immigrants were now seen as irregular migrants, some individuals even becoming stateless as a result. The bill thus created the sans-papiers, immigrants who had entered France legally but could not now be officially regularised, and were left occupying a non-place between legality and illegality. In March 1996, after growing unrest, hundreds of sans-papiers occupied the church of St Ambroise in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement, and the police attempts to forcibly remove them produced violent scenes which scandalised the public. After two hunger strikes intensified their protest, the sans-papiers’ cases were reviewed, but only 48 out of 315 were regularised. Following the occupation of further churches, Juppé seemed unsure what to do: after initially suggesting a new anti-racist law, he instead allowed Jean-Louis Debré to institute new legislation which made it illegal for French citizens to shelter sans-papiers in their homes and compelled them to announce their presence to the authorities. This was a highly unpopular law, one which Daniel Bensaïd criticised as strongly reminiscent of the ordonnance of 10 December 1941 which declared the sheltering of Jews to be illegal (L.31.1997, 12). Chirac called snap legislative elections in April 1997 to reassert his authority, but as the FN ate into the right-wing vote, gaining nearly 20%, Lionel Jospin’s plural left won a majority. Instead of prompting a softer stance, the Interior Ministry was given to the PS’s popular Jean-Pierre Chevènement ‘so that the party would swallow harsh measures’ on

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immigration (Sowerwine, 2009, 407). In September, Chevènement issued a memorandum that was supposed to regulate all the sans-papiers, yet the proposals were ‘criticised for reproducing some of the legal dead ends that had created the sans-papiers in the first place’: by 1999, only 50% of the 140,000 new applications for regularisation were successful, leaving a huge number remaining in an administrative black hole and ensuring that activist opposition continued (Raissiguier, 2010, 27). With the RPR and the PS following the same policies on migration, review’s such as Vacarme encouraged people to undertake a new form of non-governmental politics which was radical, but not revolutionary (Cusset, 2008b, 189). The last major protests in this cycle included what Bourdieu termed ‘the social miracle’ of a return of activism by the unemployed (Waters, 2003, 104). Although they had played only a minor role in the 1995 movements, organisations such as Agir ensemble contre le chômage (AC!) had been arranging a growing number of marches against unemployment and social exclusion since 1994. In March 1997, AC! organised a march to Amsterdam involving 50,000 people, and the winter of 1997 to 1998 saw a host of occupations, demonstrations and symbolic protests across France. In response to the occupations, the PS ‘unreservedly condemned the actions’ as ‘illegal and unrepresentative’, and Jospin issued an order to evacuate all public buildings (Waters, 2003, 109). Protests continued, however, and by July 1998 a new bill had been passed attempting to curtail social exclusion. Rejecting the commonly used term exclus, however, many protests had begun to take place under the banner of the sans [the without], allowing the unemployed and the homeless to express a greater solidarity with other deprived groups (most obviously the sans-papiers). By the end of this cycle of protests, then, new forms of solidarity movement to the left of the PS had emerged which linked economic, social and immigration issues as a unified concern. And, despite increasing policy continuity between the governmental left and right, widespread public dissatisfaction put pressure on the liberal consensus which, by the turn of the millennium, would be definitively shattered. Lignes and the New Social Movements The new social movements were widely credited for a rejuvenation of the French left and the return of the engaged intellectual onto the political landscape, most prominent among them Pierre Bourdieu. Yet whilst intellectual support for the movements was forthcoming early

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on, frustration at the continued disruption and pressure from the re-elected PS in 1997 prompted an intellectual realignment that further fragmented the radical left from the modernising second left. In La Rupture sociale (October 1996), Lignes editorials expressed satisfaction that the movements were dividing and radicalising the left: ‘This dossier has wanted to assume the existence of such a rupture. To welcome it, first of all’ [Ce dossier a voulu faire l’hypothèse d’une telle rupture. Pour s’en féliciter, d’abord] (L.29.1996, 6). Francis Marmande was openly enthusiastic, declaring that 14 years of ‘Mitterrandian hypnosis’ [hypnose mitterrandienne] had come to an end (L.27.1996, 18). For him, the middle-class origins of the movements demonstrated a profound shift in public sympathies, as the users of public services showed solidarity with the strikers (L.27.1996, 17). In a celebration of anti-establishment behaviour, Marmande could only declare himself happily in solidarity with the electoral left (which he called ‘the right of the left’ [la droite de gauche]) since it was opposed to these movements (L.27.1996, 13). The social movements were embraced by Lignes as a new forum for political action, situating the review to the left of la droite de gauche. The movements had widespread support: a survey in 1997 suggested that 92% of the French public was ‘highly favourable to the notion of solidarity with people in need’ (Waters, 2003, 123). A series of high-profile books, such as Viviane Forrester’s La Horreur économique (1996), popularised and made accessible arguments against neoliberalism, galvanising resistance by precisely naming the global forces at work and making the capitalist system seem less self-evident. Yet whilst the regional presses tended to be empathetic towards local struggles, the national mass media, closer to Parisian governmental circles, was by and large seen as a powerful influence discrediting the social movements (Mathieu, 2011, 93). Libération, Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur generally defended Juppé’s economic reforms and saw the social protests as irresponsible for ignoring the opinions of experts. Given the growing social unrest, it is perhaps no surprise to find that in the 1990s sociologists were the intellectual figures approached most often by the media to comment on current events, a departure from the prominence of historians in the 1980s. Yet although sociology in this period is most commonly associated with the radical Pierre Bourdieu – whose La Misère du monde (1993) made him the prime example of a ‘specific intellectual’ supporting the social movements – it was in fact Alain Touraine who was the pivotal figure in the centre-left debate: between 1995 and 2002, five of the 20 most commonly

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featured academics in Le Monde were from Touraine’s Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologique.1 Most of these thinkers were publicly associated with the second left, represented by Esprit and La Nouvelle Observateur, which underscored the need for the French state to curtail welfare expenditure to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. Despite his initial interest in the labour movements of the 1950s and 1960s, Touraine had concluded that class war was no longer the means to a more egalitarian society. He argued that new struggles should be ‘about the defence of personal liberty, security and dignity’, and so, rather than economics or politics, only those protests with a ‘moral dimension’ counted as real social movements (Bell, 2000, 132). This placed Touraine in an interesting minority in French intellectual circles, as he pleaded in favour of the promotion of distinct cultural identities (be they racial, religious, sexual or gendered) which in France is often seen as a dangerous form of communautarisme. Touraine henceforth saw cultural alienation as the most important struggle of our era, arguing that economic progress since the 1950s had rendered redundant those movements defending social welfare, benefits and employment. Therefore, in his edited collection Le Grand Refus, Touraine argued that the social movements of 1995 were blind expressions of intransigent refusal which offered no practical solutions for an economy that needed modernisation (1996, 8). The subsequent essays in the collection frequently complained of a return of intellectual terrorism on the part of those defending the protesters, such intellectuals neglecting the new ethic of consensual responsibility expected of them. Lignes did not particularly welcome the new prominence of sociologists. Laurence Bell has described how the social sciences began to see a new role for themselves ‘in the service of a new technocracy’ (2000, 115), and the review’s hostility to such a development is clearly articulated in the issue Crise et critique de la sociologie? (November 1999). Here, contributors lament the purely pragmatic nature of the discipline of sociology for those who decide to follow ‘the gentle slope towards the therapeutic vocation of the technocrat’ [la pente douce d’un technocratisme à vocation thérapeutique] (L.38.1999, 8). Balibar had also attacked academic sociology for its essentialist approach, which often tended to reify social groups as cultural identities at the expense of class distinctions, giving the impression that class-based antagonisms had 1 These were Michel Wieviorka, Marie-Victoire Louis, Fahrad Khosrokhavar, Yvon Le Bot and Alain Touraine See Jeanpierre and Mosbah-Natanson, 2009, 180.

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been resolved (1992, 193). There are a few kind words for Bourdieu in Lignes, Jean-Christophe Bailly welcoming the publication of La Misère du monde (L.19.1993, 21) and Françoise Proust praising the coherence and perseverance of his political engagements (L.32.1997, 109). Notably, Lignes also republished an interview with Bourdieu from Le Monde in which the sociologist argued that the delegitimation of la pensée 68 was as dangerous as the decimation of the welfare state (L.15.1992, 34). The review thus distanced itself from the official institutional and academic sociological endeavour, but embraced Bourdieu’s alliance with figures such as Derrida and Balibar as intellectuals re-emerged as contestatory voices opposing the governmental consensus. Furthermore, despite Touraine’s denunciation of an attitude of sterile refusal from within the social movements, genuine alternatives were being discussed and developed. The alter-globalisation movement Attac, emanating from Le Monde diplomatique, redefined itself as an association dedicated to public education to broaden support and understanding. Countless discussion groups, conferences and workshops proliferated across France, discussing economic liberalism and critiquing EU treaties. This period of effervescence created a rarity in Lignes as the review subsequently housed social and economic policy debates, a level of practical discussion hitherto unknown in its pages. A key article is the transcription of Luc Carton’s third ‘Séminaire de recherche sur l’éducation populaire’. Carton attempted to empower the population by questioning the use of language by politicians and the media both to mask their ideological beliefs and to assert that budgetary austerity was the only option. Carton tackled several policy areas in which a lack of funding was ostensibly assumed to be the problem, but which he analysed differently (L.29.1996, 80): in schools, for example, the problem was not a lack of money but a generalised overqualification of the populace; transport had been run as a private enterprise, but should be a public service; and a Europe-wide Tobin tax on financial transactions was proposed to curb inequality. Drawing on Carton, and introducing what would become a major theme of Lignes’ second series, Lepage criticised the discursive manner in which, ‘with the complicity of the media, “crisis” has been erected as an intellectual fashion permitting the justification of social, cultural and economic choices’ [la ‘crise’ s’est installée avec la complicité des médias comme mode intellectuel permanent de justification des choix sociaux, culturels et économiques] (L.29.1996, 91). Generally, Lignes tends to avoid detailed policy debates, seeing this

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as more of a governmental or activist role than a genuine intellectual function. Concerns are expressed in the review that participating with the pragmatic realpolitik of governance can be a form of intellectual domestication. Sami Naïr was an excellent example of exactly this process. Initially, Naïr was wary of intellectual cooperation with the government, claiming that intellectuals become ‘domesticated’ by such contact and lose their critical integrity (L.19.1993, 33): instead of negotiation, Naïr encouraged people to challenge the government through active processes of resistance (L.32.1997, 101). He was one of the staunchest opponents of the government’s toughening stance on immigration, as demonstrated by his Lettre à Charles Pasqua (1994). Yet, in 1997, as part of a strategy to quell intellectual opposition by integrating its most critical voices, Naïr was hired by the PS as an advisor on immigration issues, printed a renunciation of his former stance in Le Monde (13 October 1997) and argued that the Chevènement laws were a progressive step forward (L.35.1998, 166). In Lignes, Surya and Pierre Tévanian expressed their disappointment that Naïr now largely relied on the moral arguments he had previously repudiated: he now stated that illegal immigration encouraged polygamy, and that the Debré laws banning the sheltering of clandestines were necessary measures to stop criminals keeping sex slaves in their homes (L.34.1998, 157). He was now linking immigration to crime and delinquency, strategies which Lignes had been opposing for years. As noted in the introduction, Jeremy Ahearne’s Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France is rightly critical of defining intellectuals solely by their ‘opposition to the State and to the processes of public policy’ (2010, 12). The degree of responsabilisation they undergo when they must make pragmatic decisions that affect people’s lives can bring a necessary degree of realism to intellectual debate. In this case, however, Naïr’s astonishing U-turn, effected in a matter of months, to become essentially a government spokesperson and then a European MEP in 1999, was more disconcerting for the review. Despite the review’s wariness of policy debates, given that the social movements were being denigrated by much of the media, intelligentsia and the political class, Lignes decided to support this ferment of political thought and activism. The importance for Lignes was not so much the content of the policies being discussed, but that they were being discussed by public individuals, creating new forms of engagement outside of the political sphere and attempting to restore sovereignty to the people. Lignes would therefore remain much more firmly attached to the forms of social activism and non-governmental agency that

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emerged from the movements. Christophe Aguiton described how the new movements, such as AC! and Tous ensemble, were more combative in taking protests out into the streets, circumventing the traditional trade unions, who were more comfortable with negotiating with the government (L.29.1996, 69). The extension of the movements’ collaborators to include the unemployed as well as workers was seen as key to reknitting the social solidarities eroded by what Balibar theorised as the division of labour; Aguiton stated that the movements were enlarging the common front of opposition to the government, these higher levels of solidarity preventing the government from playing public service users against providers (L.29.1996, 67). Elsewhere, the activist potential of ordinary citizens is privileged. Lepage praised the collective Adret’s Résister, a book born from the December 1995 movements which reproduced interviews with 22 ordinary people who had, in their professional capacity, pragmatically resisted the encroachment of neoliberalism. For Lepage, against a media discourse which emphasised the complexity of international economic issues in order to keep readers perplexed, this text clarified the issue by demonstrating concrete modes of resistance which anyone could undertake (L.31.1997, 67). Sophie Wahnich retrospectively appraised and quoted extensively from various petitions, articles and slogans produced by the movements, concluding approvingly that ‘popular speech exists, and it is strong’ [la parole populaire existe, elle est forte] (L.37.1999, 174). The emphasis here, then, is the political action people can take in everyday life, in contrast to the growing apathy surrounding the electoral sphere. The frustration existing with political parties became more generalised. Significantly, the future participation of Alain Badiou with Lignes was prefigured by the appearance of Sylvain Lazarus, his colleague in the Organisation politique. Lazarus saw the social movements as the end of the historical sequence of consensus represented by cohabitation and Le Débat, and the start of a sequence of prescription, a form of extra-parliamentary militant politics further discussed in Chapter 6 (L.30.1997, 172). Lazarus was correct to note the fragmenting consensus. Economic liberalism has rarely been popular in France, and even the staunchest defenders of the ‘liberal revival’ of the 1980s were at pains to distance themselves from what was seen as an American free-market individualism and consumer culture. Yet by the close of the 1990s, it became apparent that the right and left had accepted economic liberalism as the only way forward, whilst the promise of a reinvigoration of democracy seemed to have been betrayed as the will of the

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people was seemingly being ignored. As we shall see in Chapter 6, Lignes felt that the notion of a reasoned consensus had been replaced by crisis management as the new model of government. The sans-papiers vs New Republicans Most significant for the new theories of active political agency discussed in Chapter 6 were the struggles of the sans-papiers. Whilst the major newspapers openly opposed the Debré laws (those coercing French citizens to inform the authorities about clandestine immigrants), Lignes contributors Pierre Tévanian and Sylvie Tissot noted a clear disparity between different sections of Le Monde and Libération: in the ‘society’ pages, both papers were outraged by the negative consequences of this new legislation, yet, in the politics sections and the editorials, the government’s policies were supported or even criticised for not going far enough to stem immigration (1998, 7). So, whilst some socially concerned journalists reflected the French population’s growing concerns with the plight of the socially excluded, the overt stance of the mainstream media generally supported the governmental line. Alongside Tévanian and Tissot, Daniel Bensaïd was one of the key figures in Lignes’ absolute position in favour of regularising the sans-papiers. Head of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, Bensaïd was a major figure on the Trotsykist left who invested in the new social movements, embracing this new critical élan whilst attempting to imbue them with a sense of militant organisation and longevity; in 2000, he created the new review Contretemps specifically to forge links between activists and intellectuals. For Bensaïd, from Pasqua to Chevènement, both the right and left had begun producing discriminatory and xenophobic legislation (L.31.1997, 12). Having shifted from the early 1980s’ emphasis on the ‘right to difference’, the government was ostensibly now trying to promote greater social integration, yet Bensaïd argued that by creating new sans-papiers, separating families with forced expulsions and stigmatising immigrants by designating them as a genuine social problem, they were in fact fracturing social cohesion (L.31.1997, 13). Bensaïd linked the struggles of the sans-papiers to the wider social movements, returning to a logic of class war to displace the debate from one pitting the French nation against immigrants to one between the possessors and the possessed (L.31.1997, 16), combining

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economic, social and immigration issues in a manner paradigmatic for Lignes. Members of the second left suggested that Bensaïd’s, Tévanian’s and Tissot’s impassioned defences of migration were an excessively emotional appeal in favour of irresponsible policies, a stance which became known as angélisme. Bensaïd did not dispute that his stance was motivated by empathy for the sans-papiers, but added that happily this was one of those moments in which both head and heart agreed on the necessity of defending migrants’ rights (L.31.1997, 14). As opposition to government policy increased and the consensual climate creaked, outspoken intellectuals were more vociferously attacked for not falling into line. The tag of angélisme implied that intellectuals opposing the government relied solely on a laudable but ill-informed sense of moral duty, and thus were guided by an ‘ethic of principles’ rather than an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (L.34.1998, 167–70). Tévanian and Tissot critiqued the discourse of intellectual angélisme both in Lignes articles and their Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits (1998), essentially continuing Taguieff’s discourse analysis of the FN but extending its range of targets to include the mainstream media. They investigated the statistics to puncture the idea that it was irresponsible for France to accept more migrants. Tévanian and Tissot noted that in 1996 both Italy and Spain regularised 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants, that the US did this regularly without public uproar, and that in France such numbers would represent only 0.3% of the population, figures that hardly seemed to justify the claim that such migrants would constitute an insurmountable financial and demographic burden. They also historicised the newly politicised discourses surrounding immigration: in 1973, even right-wing newspapers such as Le Figaro and Nation argued that there was no immigration problem and yet, despite levels of migration in 1998 remaining relatively stable and not significantly higher than in 1973, by the turn of the millennium even left-wing papers like L’Humanité or Libération would not support such claims (1998, 7). Such an historicisation supported Lignes’ stance that attempts to recuperate voters from the FN had led to an ‘astonishing’ continuity between rightand left-wing governments (Tévanian and Tissot, 1998, 7). Lignes was also concerned with the manner in which the debate was becoming embroiled in issues of France’s national identity. Le Monde’s lively ‘Horizon – Débats’ section invited intellectuals to debate immigration policy, and therefore presented both pro- and anti-migration positions but, as the most frequent contributors were

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Alain Finkielkraut and Régis Debray, there was a tendency towards the ‘National Republican’ position in favour of controlling immigration and against regularising the sans-papiers (Jeanpierre and MosbahNatanson, 2009, 174). National Republicanism had its origin in Debray’s 1989 anti-foulard petition, but crystallised as a movement with the creation of the Fondation Marc Bloch in 1998. It was characterised by its opposition to both the EU and America, and a nostalgia for the Third Republic. Over the past 20 years, National Republicans ‘have emphasised the importance of the nation as a vital form of cultural mediation and a prerequisite to citizenship’, arguing both that multiculturalism is a threat to civic harmony and that political mobilisations by minorities are dangerous (Guérard de Latour, 2015, 256). As noted in Chapter 3, Lignes quickly abandoned appeals to laïcité and the Republic as contributors worried that these terms would lead to an assimilationist stance on immigration which canalised nationalist, racist and Islamophobic sentiments. The review’s anxieties seemed confirmed in their reading of Debray’s next National Republican appeal, ‘Républicains n’ayons pas peur’, this time co-signed by Max Gallo, Jacques Juilliard, Blandine Kriegel, Olivier Mongin, Mona Ozouf, Anciet Le Pors and Paul Thibaud (Le Monde, September 1998). Here, the group worried that migration was undermining republican values, leading to a rise in crime and a breakdown of society. For example, Lignes lamented that, in the petition, an increase in rapes was noted as occurring in areas ‘where irregular immigration is the most common (poverty and unemployment comprised)’ [où l’immigration irrégulière est la plus répandue (pauvreté et chômage obligent)] (L.37.1999, 110). For the authors of the appeal, republicans simply needed to abandon their fear, stand up to these nefarious intruders and install a firmer police presence amongst immigrant communities to prevent such crimes. In Lignes, Pierre Tévanian criticised their assumption that there was an evident link between immigration and rising crime levels (L.37.1999, 110). The parenthetical placement of the qualifications of poverty and unemployment suggested a direct link between immigration and rape which, for Tévanian, was racist, his Lignes article instead arguing that social deprivation was the real determinant leading to a rise in crime (L.37.1999, 109). For Lignes, republicanism became unwelcomely attached to notions of French cultural superiority and an exclusion of social groups with different values throughout the 1990s. National Republican texts were characterised as ‘offensive, bellicose, defending right-wing ideas whilst claiming to be on the left, and authorising

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positions in the name of the Republic’ [offensifs, belliqueux, défendant des idées de droite tout en se réclamant de la gauche et en s’autorisant de la République] (L.37.1999, 102). The aim of Lignes throughout this period was then twofold: to dismantle the arguments of the ‘necessary’ and ‘responsible’ nature of the government’s immigration policy, and to emphasise the erosion of solidarity produced by such discourses. The increasing stigmatisation of intellectuals still opposing the government showed the weakening consensus surrounding la pensée unique, and the linking of nationalism and republicanism moved the debate away from the liberal rule of law towards the more conservative, aggressive neoliberal state that would develop under Nicolas Sarkozy. Lignes thus echoed and embraced the popular support for the social movements, especially in their more radical aspects. As the second left rallied behind the re-elected PS in 1997, Lignes remained within the radical left and countered the mainstream discourses of the national newspapers and reviews such as Esprit. It favoured non-parliamentary political action as disappointment with the PS grew. Thinkers more orientated towards social policy solutions, such as Luc Carton and Christophe Aguiton, would only pass through Lignes, as the review remained less consistently wedded to these kinds of practical discussions than more activist publications like Vacarme. The more intransigent contributors, such as Sophie Wahnich, would remain, however, and activism supporting the more overtly anti-governmental sans-papiers’ struggle would predominate in the review’s second series. Crucially, the solidarity surrounding the sans, and the linking of immigration, unemployment and economic precariousness, would provide Lignes with its focus in the new millennium, as it conceptualised the socially excluded as the vanquished (vaincus) of neoliberal capitalism, rather than mere victims of unfortunate circumstances. From Consensus to Crisis From its earliest issues, Lignes was always concerned that making immigration a national identity or republican issue would cede too much ground to the far right. After the review’s early emphasis on extremeright discourses and the legacy of fascism, guided by Taguieff, Balibar’s more Marxist elaboration of neo-racism as part of wider social and class conflicts in the face of capitalism shifted its attention to the relationship between the electoral left and the global spread of neoliberalism. Lignes

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took a more oppositional stance and moved towards the radical left, more closely associating itself with activist, Trotskyist milieus as well as those looking for solutions outside of the party political framework. This broader realignment would be confirmed in the second series as the editorial board was radically reshuffled, and Lignes distanced itself further from the PS. As Perry Anderson notes, the end of the millennium caused a more general and profound break from the ‘liberal hegemony’ of the 1980s, a consensus placed under stress ‘by the tensions pitting multiculturalism and republicanism against each other, and the resistance of opinion to the virtues of the market’ (2009, 174). Crucially, whilst up until the 1980s references to the Republic played a relatively minor role in French post-war politics, by the new millennium the recourse to republicanism became ubiquitous. As Mathy notes, the notion of the Republic now ‘filled the space left vacant by the retreat of the revolution’, yet there remained a ‘semantic vagueness of the republican signifier’ (2011, 134, 137): the Republic was being used to justify positions right across the political spectrum. The left was staunchly divided between cultural pluralists and hard-line republicans, and even the far right began mobilising republican terms to justify its nationalist programme. Migration and laïcité were the arenas in which this debate was most clearly played out: although there remained a large degree of continuity in government policy between the right and left, the justifications of these policies became harder to articulate as the consensual climate broke down into bitter recriminations. Chirac and Sarkozy increasingly resorted to an aggressive rhetoric of nationalism and securitisation to recoup voters from the FN, as crisis replaced consensus as the paradigmatic mode of governance. Although Chirac ostensibly returned as a Gaullist president, the expansion of neoliberal economic policies continued. In the following chapter, we follow Lignes as it attempts to sharpen its critique of financial capitalism, before returning to migration-related issues in seeking new forms of extra-governmental political agency to counter growing state securitisation in the new millennium.

chapter five

Power without Politics Domination Theory and the Crises of Capitalism Power without Politics

By the mid-1990s, the financial markets were generating a vast reserve of wealth for France, the value of the CAC40 rising from 225 to 2,700 billion francs between 1983 and 1993. Yet, at the same time, there was a growing inequality between rich and poor. François Cusset notes that the number of households living in poverty was increasing twice as fast as the population (2008b, 169). As wave after wave of corruption scandals rocked the political and business establishment, citizens began to feel that the liberal governance of the country was working well for the elites, but not for the wider population. Questions were also raised as to the amount of control the governing class actually had over globalised capitalism. At the end of his presidency, with figures of those without work holding steady at over 10%, Mitterrand said that his greatest regret was ‘to have been powerless to end, or even to alleviate, the scourge of unemployment’ (Maclean, 1995, 72). Thus, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello stressed, moving into the twentyfirst century, governments have ‘witnessed virtual stagnation when it comes to establishing mechanisms capable of controlling the new forms of capitalism and reducing their devastating effects’ (2007, xvi). The eruption of the new social movements in 1995 was a direct expression of popular frustration with the globalisation of liberal capitalism and a sense that la pensée unique had been foisted upon France without being subjected to an open political debate. Around the turn of the millennium, a vast array of new reviews sprung up to both support the new social movements and theorise

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new, pragmatic critiques of economic liberalism. Alongside the calls from Le Monde diplomatique to inaugurate a global Tobin tax, Sarah Waters has shown how new intellectual and activist reviews, such as Mouvements (founded 1998), Multitudes (2000), ContreTemps (2000), Chimères (1987) and Vacarme (1997), ‘increasingly acted as a “political avant-garde” constructing new analytical categories and a framework for leftist opposition’ either during or just after the new social movements (2012, 94). Waters includes Lignes in her list of such activist reviews but, interestingly, Lilian Mathieu’s similar account included Savoir/agir (2007) but not Lignes (2011, 84). As this suggests, the position of Lignes within activist milieus was ambiguous. Michel Surya often refers to the political pessimism of Lignes, and the review’s wariness regarding collective political action meant that it was initially not an obvious source of support for the new social movements. As we have seen, once the movements had demonstrated their capacity to mobilise popular support and make real inroads into breaking the dominant liberal consensus, Lignes became much more supportive. Yet outside of this period of real effervescence, discussions of social policy are not often found within the review’s pages. Early articles by Antonio Negri had presaged the emergence of new forms of activism, as in 1989 he argued that social movements were about to enter into a new cultural and political phase (L.5.1989, 86), later emphasising the growing importance of theories of the event (L.8.1989, 98). However, whilst Negri thus anticipated the participation of Alain Badiou in the review’s second series, there is a general scepticism towards the efficacy of public protests throughout Lignes’ first series. Instead, drawing on the Situationists, Francis Marmande (L.13.1991, 16) and Philippe Mesnard (L.16.1992, 17) both argued that spectacular protests could only ever be subsumed and pacified by the political-media apparatus, nullifying the capacity of individuals to intervene meaningfully in a politically blocked situation. Surya went further, suggesting that capitalism was eroding the political agency not only of citizens, but of the government itself: capitalism was equated with domination, a form of control which he defined as ‘power without politics’ [le pouvoir sans la politique] (2009a, 18). In Lignes, there is a swathe of contributors heavily indebted to what has been called domination theory, including thinkers stretching from the Frankfurt School (especially Theodor Adorno), via Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard right up to Michel Surya and the fourth-generation Frankfurt School theorists Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz. Yet the major theses of domination theory emerged between the 1930s and

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the 1960s, and as such they rarely take account of the developments of financial capitalism after the 1970s. This chapter charts the development of domination theory in Lignes, from the emergence of the new social movements in 1995 to the 2008 financial crisis, to ascertain how the review updated this theoretical genealogy for its contemporary moment. Domination theory represents capitalism as a form of all-encompassing, hegemonic control which subsumes the entire political field and leaves little room for political agency. It developed from the artistic critique of bourgeois rationality and economic logic at the turn of the twentieth century. As Ben Agger argues, ‘the central logic of domination in Western civilization hierarchizes the productive and valuable over the non-reproductive and valueless’ (1992, 8): in opposition, Georges Bataille had railed against utility in favour of the pure waste of heterogeneity, and the Surrealists pitted artistic liberty and aesthetic communication against the rational, utilitarian logic of the bourgeois. Domination theorists formalised these more aesthetic or sociological insights within a Marxist framework by a ‘broadening of Marx’s concept of the alienation of labour into their larger category of domination’ (Agger, 1992, 9). Not only were workers alienated from the means of production, but people were also treated as objects and thus alienated from their own genuine wants and needs. Citizens were also robbed of any authentic political agency by a mass-cultural apparatus which canalised their desires and manipulated their opinions. Theorists thus blamed the ‘ever-tightening links between political economy and culture’ for a deepening of ‘false consciousness’, the ideology of late capitalism pervading ‘the very interior of human personality’ (Agger, 1992, 131–2). Written in this vein, Surya’s series of books, De la domination, presented a powerful indictment of the moral hegemony of capitalism in which the very existence of capitalism is not questioned as long as financial actors are seen to be well-behaved. Surya claimed that in demanding greater transparency not just for the financial markets, but in the lives of everyday citizens, domination wished to control ever-more intimate areas of our private lives, turning society into a global panopticon. In this, Surya was influenced not only by Michel Foucault, but also by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard was an important early contributor to Lignes, yet his lack of a strong economic analysis began to erode his critical credibility in the mid-1990s. Critics of Surya and Baudrillard also suggested that their vision of domination was too totalising as their readings implied that humankind was completely alienated from its very essence and incapable of escaping capitalist

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ideology. A Lignes issue on Guy Debord in 1997 was symptomatic of a shift away from Baudrillard back towards the Situationist thinker, who was increasingly read through a Marxist lens which gave a more coherent account of the recent developments of the financial markets. Lignes contributor Anselm Jappe retooled the concept of alienation to refer solely to humankind’s inability to control the capitalist system it had created. This is shown to be a significant theoretical advancement for domination theory, updating it for the twenty-first century. Jappe’s collaborators, Groupe Krisis, began to be regular contributors in the new millennium, and published several volumes in the Lignes book series. Robert Kurz, Krisis’s central theorist, deployed this updated domination theory to predict both the 2008 financial crisis and its subsequent unfolding, giving significant credibility to the group’s analysis. However, this chapter will conclude by highlighting several continuing concerns with the approach of domination theory: notably the fact that it allows for very little (if any) political agency in resistance, and especially no solutions to mitigate the negative effects of the financial crisis in Europe. Chapter 6 will then explore an opposing trend in Lignes, one desperately seeking out new forms of activist agency to combat the growing inequalities of globalised liberalism. Opacity, Transparency and Exposure Throughout the review’s first series, pitting opacity against transparency was a frequent refrain. In programmatic fashion, Stéphane Zagdanski’s ‘L’Enfer limpide’ set the stage for many of the coming debates: he privileged literary obscurity and impurity over Habermasian philosophies of rational communication (L.9.1990, 161); noted that man is ontologically impure, problematising attempts to set up transparent ethnic or national boundaries; worried that increased surveillance would only aid the government to expel illegal immigrants (L.9.1990, 170); and celebrated the British legal recourse to habeas corpus for not seeing humans as merely statistically existing beings, but bodies with a thick, existential corporeality (L.9.1990, 169). Crucially, however, just as Boris Groys stated that glasnost [transparency] was deployed in Soviet campaigns as a measure against corruption (L.1.1987, 36), Zagdanski asserted that, for economic liberalism, transparency would also supposedly be a guarantee of democracy (L.9.1990, 153). The comparison between transparency as a Soviet model of totalitarian

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control and a keystone of liberal democracy is not meant to be complimentary; the concern is that by rendering society wholly transparent, it can be controlled and dominated more easily. In France, calls for transparency in the business and political realm became widespread as the PS became embroiled in a series of compromising corruption scandals: 20 million euros disappeared from a state-sponsored development fund in 1984; ‘l’affaire Urba’ uncovered illegal party funding, ‘l’affaire Elf’ insider trading, ‘le scandale des écoutes’ unlawful surveillance; and, in addition, the French secret services bungled an operation against the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, whilst the government botched its response to the distribution of HIV-contaminated blood. The Bouchery report in 1992 described corruption as a gangrene affecting the entirety of French society, and proposed a widespread moralisation through transparency to restore public confidence. The scandals kept on coming, however, and by 1994 over 100 public figures were being investigated in connection with over 60 different affaires (Cusset, 2008b, 180). These scandals were not only undermining the integrity of the PS, but also demonstrated the extent to which the party seemed enamoured of the personal profits to be made from capitalism. In response, Surya reoriented the political focus of Lignes to attempt to take stock of the extent to which financial capitalism was hamstringing the progressive left (LNS.23–24.2007, 32). Issues such as La Gauche gâchée (February 1989), Capitulation? (December 1989) and Logiques du capital (January 1993) prepared the groundwork, and the late 1990s saw an intensification of this focus. Surya’s editorials in this period culminated in the first volume of his De la domination series, Le Capital, la transparence et les affaires (1999b). Surya’s point of entry was the manner in which this new discourse of transparency was undertaking a moralisation of domination (1999b, 15). He described the mobilisation of transparency as ‘the biggest operation of ideological justification even undertaken by domination’ [la plus grande opération de justification idéologique jamais entrepris par elle] (1999b, 8). In response to the affaires, by claiming to render itself more transparent, ‘domination’ suggested that it would police itself by weeding out the few bad apples who were illegally manipulating liberal capitalism to their own advantage. In this manner, the capitalist system hoped to become unimpeachable, transparency working to make this ‘power without politics’ appear innocent of all crimes (Surya, 1999b, 15). The few ministers and CEOs found guilty in the affaires were simply the price

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that capital was willing to pay to appear moral, and then to maintain its global hegemony. Surya argued that the political debate was being elided by shifting the debate onto the moral terrain of demonstrably good behaviour: in the mass media, capitalism was rarely critiqued as a system producing gross inequality. By shifting the focus onto compliance and regulation, a policing operation the financial institutions claimed they themselves would undertake, discussions as to whether capitalism was itself the problem were sidelined. The financial markets were subsequently portrayed as essential to the smooth functioning of contemporary nation states. For Surya, this meant that a healthy financial market was often conflated with the concept of democracy itself, despite the fact that the power wielded by the markets was actually undermining democratic agency. When people talked about democracy, what they often actually meant was capitalism: hence ‘it is in the name of democracy that democracy will be liquidated’ [c’est au nom de la démocratie qu’on liquidera la démocratie] (Surya, 1999b, 27). Frédéric Lordon, an economist for Le Monde diplomatique, took up Surya’s critique of transparency in the years that followed, and would eventually contribute to Lignes in 2012. Lordon corroborates Surya’s perspective from an economist’s viewpoint. Following the Asian financial crisis, which began in Thailand in 1997 and threatened to bring down the global economy, Lionel Jospin created the Conseil d’analyse économique to bring together economists and policymakers to shape future responses to market instability. Olivier Davanne’s report, Instabilité du système financier international, recommended greater Western surveillance of developing countries and blamed the opacity of foreign markets (especially in Asia) for the crisis. Whilst noting that the serious crises of the twenty-first century would most likely erupt from within Western markets, Davanne advised that all that was required to mitigate such future catastrophes was better bank supervision and a greater degree of transparency (1998, 9). Progressive measures, such as the institution of a Tobin tax, were roundly rejected. Lordon demonstrated that, by 1999, the call for greater transparency had become unanimous in international financial circles, but added that such calls had yielded few tangible results (2001, 7). Whilst Enron and Worldcom were, as Surya predicted, weeded out as bad apples, general financial structures remained unchanged, and a larger, global financial crisis loomed in 2007. Sarkozy’s response to this crisis, however, was simply ‘the indefatigable call for “transparency”’ [l’increvable appel à la ‘transparence’] (Lordon, 2007).

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Surya’s critique of transparency operated on two levels. Firstly, transparency legitimated the status quo of liberalised capitalism, a system which was perpetuating ever greater financial crises. Secondly, he noted that the discourse of transparency was also misleading: the forces of domination were in fact frequently anonymous, and the complex practices of global financial transfers remained relatively opaque for most of the population (1999b, 28). Lordon went further, arguing that opacity is an intrinsic aspect of financial capitalism. He states that, during the 1950s and 1960s, some degree of transparency was still possible as Keynesian economic policies produced relative security and predictable outcomes. Yet the subsequent deregulation of financial markets since the mid-1970s produced what he calls a ‘hermeneutic turn’ in economics (1997, 12). Now, the success of economic policies relied more on the prevailing ‘tonal’ atmosphere and the ‘faith’ of the markets rather than the concrete, measurable effects of such policies (2001, 9). If the markets believed a policy would fail, capital fled and the policy failed. Rather than the clear, objective data which allowed the rational decision-making on which liberal thought relied, market behaviour now needed to be divined through a murky, dense and opaque field of interpretation and faith. Furthermore, greater market transparency can in fact have disastrous consequences. For example, Lordon notes that the publishing of profit warnings had disproportionately negative results: some firms in the autumn of 2000 lost between 10% and 20% of their value after openly admitting that they would not recoup the profits the market expected of them (Lordon, 2001, 11). The ostensible demands for greater transparency were therefore seen as disingenuous: if the system were completely transparent, there would be less scope for the new financial products and activities, such as spread betting, which created so much extra wealth for the markets. As Lordon notes, ‘more opacity means more derivatives’ [plus d’opacité, plus de dérivatif] (2007). So, whilst institutions were superficially supporting greater transparency, this was dismissed as a lure allowing them to propose a ‘solution’ (transparency) which would cost nothing and inconvenience no one (Lordon, 2001, 7). Firms could claim to be attempting to weed out the bad apples in their midst, make certain practices more visible and then carry on with business as usual, reaping huge profits from a complex network of financial packages which remained inaccessibly opaque to most. In the financial sphere, then, strategies opposing the discourse of transparency with a counter-discourse of opacity made little sense, the opacity of financial

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information being the motor for much of this wealth creation in the first place. Surya’s critique exposed the moral hypocrisy of these discourses, but the proactive resort to opacity it suggested was not a satisfactory response with regard to the techniques used by international financial markets. Surya’s critique of demands for greater transparency spread beyond the financial sector, however, and examined the attempt to impose transparency upon aspects of everyday life. Whilst discourses of financial transparency were seen as a mask, distracting people from the intrinsic opacity of financial domination, the wider populace was being encouraged to follow this ‘moral’ example and render themselves transparent to domination. Surya notes that the effects of structural unemployment since the 1970s were exacerbated by the neoliberal privatisation of public services, austerity measures rendering proportions of the global workforce superfluous. Work, and even any alternative to work, seemed to be disappearing. This created a new political problem: what to do with those restless masses which domination no longer needed to employ (1999b, 96)? With an idle army of the unemployed, a campaign was launched to regulate and securitise the nation. Alongside the ideological campaign of moralisation, then, this new regime of transparency also necessitated ‘the biggest policing operation ever undertaken by domination’ [la plus grande opération de police jamais engagée par lui] (Surya, 1999b, 43). By encouraging people to copy capital’s moral example of ostentatiousness and render themselves transparent, domination could then easily identify those who did and did not belong to the socially productive order, and expel or imprison those who did not (Surya, 1999b, 38). Two trends were identified by Surya in 1999 that have only accelerated since: the rise of reality television, social media and digital video technology through which subjects voluntarily render their lives entirely visible; and the securitisation of migrant and suspect populations, with increasingly illiberal detention policies and retention centres proliferating in Europe. For Surya, these two trends coalesced into an intensifying web of social domination in the Foucauldian vein of the panopticon (1999b, 60). These concerns with transparency and surveillance were common in the mid-1990s. Mark Poster retrospectively discussed similar anxieties regarding reality TV, a medium centred around ‘increasing the surveillance of the participants’ and thus ‘strengthening the grip of neoliberal capitalism on the population’ (2009, 80). Such voluntary offering up of ourselves for the state’s visibility has been coupled with

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the harvesting of big data: ‘Add to this constellation of exhibitionism the unconscious, unintentional contribution of people to databases through credit card purchases, long-distance and mobile phone calls and we have what I have called a super-panopticon’ (Poster, 2009, 85–6). Contributors to Lignes likewise concretely noted how social and corporeal bodies were being over-coded into bodies of knowledge with an exaggerated focus on visibility: Jean-Louis Brigant critiqued the ‘social mathematics’ of opinion polls which attempted to make the desires of the electorate transparently available for manipulation (L.3.1988, 117); for Jean-Paul Curnier, forcing immigrants to ‘integrate’ into French society was an attempt to strip away their opacity as mysterious others, rendering them visible and controllable (L.19.1993, 29); and Jean-Jacques Delfour focused on the generalisation of a surveillance culture in which CCTV produced an emphasis on visible crimes in public spaces, demonising street crime over white-collar financial crime which is harder to visualise (L.27.1996, 161). Daniel Dobbels referred readers to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, in which the violence done to bodies by capital is not just material, but significatory: ‘Capital therefore also means: a system of over-signified bodies’ (Nancy, 2008, 111). Surya theorised this desire for the social body to not only expose itself, but to be this exposure without remainder, to be completely transparent to domination. Domination theory had been expressing concerns about such total control over the social body since the 1950s; Surya’s addition here is to argue that discourses of moralisation and transparency, extending from the financial sphere to people’s intimate lives, were the most recent attempts by domination to legitimate its power and mollify political opposition. Yet critics of domination theory argue that it is often too vague, describing a situation in which power is both everywhere and nowhere. Although Surya defines domination as power without politics, with the rise of financial capitalism at its root, it can still be argued that there remains ‘a lack of specificity about both the concept of domination and possible emancipatory routes left open to us’ (Agger, 1992, 33). The widespread use of the image of the panopticon suggested a society of undifferentiated and total surveillance without any refuge or exception. Surya purveys this pessimistic view, arguing that ‘there is no exteriority to which one can flee from the domination which has known how to make it everyone’s desire to remain within it’ [il n’existe pas d’extériorité où fuir la domination qui a su faire que le désir de tous soit d’y demeurer] (1999b, 60). However, published by Lignes five years later, Frédéric Neyrat’s Suréxposés produces a more nuanced account of contemporary

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domination, one that uses ‘exposure’ as a mediating term between transparency and opacity to provide a differential account of surveillance and control. Writing in 2004, and so after the attacks on the World Trade Center had exacerbated the securitisation of Europe’s borders and anti-terror legislation, Neyrat agreed that the level of regulation to which the population was being subjected was unprecedented. There was a blurring of boundaries between discourses of immigration and terrorism, and a ‘preventative’ identification of dangerous groups to be monitored or apprehended even before any infraction had been committed (2004, 252). Yet, as he notes, this meant that only certain population groups were being placed under this increased level of surveillance, whilst others remained relatively unsupervised. There was an attempt to monitor the global fluctuations of migrant groups, but for Neyrat this did not amount to a total and all-encompassing biopolitical surveillance (2004, 251). Some citizens are designated as safely within the national, social sphere and others are designated as threats to be monitored or removed from territory. Quoting Didier Bigo, instead of a totalising, Foucauldian pan-optique, Neyrat describes this state of affairs as a ban-optique in which certain groups are more exposed to surveillance than others (2004, 252). Such a designation helps to specify the new forms of governmental control that led to the explosion of semi-legal administrative retention centres on French soil, discussed further in Chapter 6. The term ‘exposure’, drawn from Jean-Luc Nancy, mediates between transparency and opacity by measuring not just degrees of visibility, but also exposure to certain threats, perhaps usefully reconnecting these representational and cultural discourses back to concrete political struggles. For Nancy, the ontological nature of being is relational, is always a being-with, and from this simple model of interrelationality we can expand towards an analysis of an increasingly imbricated global context as political, economic and environmental causes on one side of the globe have profound effects on the other. Yet, for Neyrat, this exposure to one another has become an ‘overexposure’ [surexposition] (2004, 209): globalisation, having reached the limits of the actually existing globe, is becoming an increasingly intensified phenomenon, a colonisation of ever-more intimate spaces which is ‘the effect of a reflux of the world back onto the world’ [l’effet du reflux du monde sur le monde] (2004, 20). For Neyrat, such an intensification has led to the creation of a generalised ‘global biopolitical harm’ [tort bio-politique mondial]. He argues that it is not just people’s living conditions that

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have become precarious, but the possibility of life itself that is threatened due to the variety of exacerbated risks to which different population groups are exposed under neoliberal globalisation (2004, 209). However, Neyrat notes that there is a danger with this notion of exposition, especially with the focus on a potential environmental catastrophe. Such discourses tend to create a sense of urgency that aims to unite everyone in fighting a common problem, eradicating class distinctions and other differential tensions: ecological urgency thus often masks economic exclusion (2004, 211). So, although Neyrat argues that we are all inevitably exposed, these levels of exposure are differentiated: ‘the global harm concerns every one – qualitatively and quantitatively differently – but without exception’ [le tort mondial concerne chaque un, différentiellement, qualitativement et quantitativement – mais sans exception] (2004, 214). From Neyrat’s account, one can derive a position of broad-based social solidarity as we are all vulnerably exposed to risk, but also a differentiated political position which attempts to respond to various interrelated questions of exposure: who is visibly, legally, environmentally, financially, mortally or economically exposed, to what are they exposed, and should they be exposed to these risks? Such a differential nuancing also poses questions of domination or political agency: who has the capacity to act, where and how, and on behalf of which other disenfranchised actors? Rather than a vague, all-encompassing and untouchable domination, Neyrat’s account reintroduces specific political questions and struggles, expressing concerns with the encroachment of governmental control and repression whilst also suggesting means and sites of resistance. Surya’s Le Capital, la transparence et les affaires therefore usefully updated domination theory approaches from the 1960s to deal with the expansion of global financial markets in the 1990s. Surya linked his concern with the moralisation of literature and politics to what he saw as an equally pernicious moralisation of capitalism. Whilst economists such as Lordon corroborated the cynical use to which transparency had been put within an intrinsically opaque financial sector, critics have also described Surya’s approach as too totalising, producing an apocalyptic account of biopolitical control that cannot be avoided or resisted (Bensaïd, 2011, 87). Frédéric Neyrat’s use of exposure, and the shift from a panoptical to a banoptical model, suggests ways of moderating the more exaggerated claims of domination theory and rediscovering forms of political agency. Further problems with domination theory emerged in Lignes, especially regarding the concept of ‘alienation’. These

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concerns were subsequently addressed as the review began privileging Guy Debord over Jean Baudrillard, and adopted the analysis of the German Groupe Krisis. From Baudrillard to Debord Surya notes that De la domination was written in close proximity to Lignes collaborator Jean-Paul Curnier, who himself professed a life-long friendship and intellectual complicity with Jean Baudrillard (LNS.31.2010, 7). Baudrillard was an important early contributor to Lignes, appearing in its very first issue. His ludic tone and relish for the transgressive and the controversial were hallmarks of Lignes early on. Yet whilst William Pawlett argued that Baudrillard seemed to become more relevant to the anglophone academy after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers (2007, 5), Lignes’ references to Baudrillard became fewer, and more attention was given to the analyses of Guy Debord. Although the issue dedicated to Baudrillard after his death in 2007 was warm in tone (Le gai savoir de Baudrillard, February 2010), Surya noted that its purpose was not simply to pay homage to the deceased: ‘It is rather about testing the extent to which the work he left behind is still active’ [Il s’agit bien plutôt de tester combien l’œuvre qu’il a laissée est active encore] (LNS.31.2010, 5). With few remaining disciples and no real ‘school’ forming around his œuvre, the issue as a whole tends to suggest that Baudrillard had left behind little of use. He is instead seen as a symptomatic figure of a cultural left that abandoned political economy to then overemphasise the role of linguistic signs and symbols in theories of postmodern play. Consequently, the review turned back to Guy Debord to provide a more explicitly Marxist critique of capitalism, and a new approach to the concept of alienation. Baudrillard had enrolled at the University of Nanterre in 1966, and was in the sociology department from which the student revolts of May 1968 originated. He was taught by Henri Lefebvre and was heavily influenced not only by the Situationists but also by Georges Bataille and Roland Barthes. Though he participated in the events May ’68, he soon moved away from the Marxism which informed much of the student movement and critiqued the political and social conservatism of the PCF. Lignes reproduced an article from 1976 in which Baudrillard celebrated Bataille’s ‘aristocratic’ critique of a Marxism, which only tried to make capitalism socially useful rather than revelling in expenditure

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(LNS.31.2010, 151). For Bataille, and thus for Baudrillard, this was too restrained a critique of political economy, which only wanted to improve the functioning of global capitalism rather than more radically embracing waste and heterogeneity. From The Mirror of Production (1973) onwards, Baudrillard thus abandoned Marxism and focused on the signs of the cultural sphere, his critique ‘fuelled by the belief that sign value and the code were more fundamental than such traditional elements of political economy as exchange value, use value, production, and so on in constituting contemporary society’ (Kellner, 2009, 22). Western Marxism since the 1930s was already largely ‘aesthetic’ rather than economic, but postmodern theorists, like Baudrillard, would be blamed for accelerating this trend to substitute ‘cultural for economic radicalism’ (Agger, 1992, 132). What remained influential for Lignes was Baudrillard’s inheritance of a certain Situationist and Foucauldian claim that whatever is represented can be controlled. Thus, rather than his focus on simulacra, the concept for which he is most famous for in the anglophone academy, Baudrillard is praised in Lignes for his concern over appearance and disappearance, his desire to protect intimacy, secrecy and the intangible nature of social relations (LNS.31.2010, 34). Marxism was thus further critiqued by Baudrillard as it ‘tends to assume the unproblematic or transparent nature of the category of the social’ (Pawlett, 2007, 84). In addition, in the Lignes issue Crise et critique de la sociologie (November 1999), Baudrillard the sociologist was pitted against more empirical researchers: sociology was likewise condemned for trying to render intangible social rapports transparent, doing violence to the opaque social fabric. Baudrillard shared Surya’s concerns that the forces of domination, aided by academic disciplines such as sociology, were coercing the population to overexpose themselves to become easier to police. With the rise in moral discourses and a generalised surveillance of the population, for Baudrillard in the 1990s: A spirit of moral terrorism presides over the body, all the more so now that it is supposedly ‘liberated’. The body must be put on a diet, it must be exercised, it is enjoined to drink at least eight glasses of water and eat five portions of fresh fruit or vegetables a day. (Pawlett, 2007, 93)

As a form of resistance, Baudrillard privileged what he called ‘the masses’. The masses had ‘no sociological reality’, nothing to do with any really existing population (Pawlett, 2007, 85). Instead, they were representative of social opacity, of the general resistance of mankind to classification

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and regulation. In a similar manner to Surya’s account of the social panopticon, Baudrillard commented that: ‘The masses are incited to speak, to participate and interact, they are polled and consulted, they are flattered by the media and politicians […] and all that is required in return is that they be social, that they are cultured, educated and responsible’ (Pawlett, 2007, 88). The masses resisted, however, be it through their very silence, withdrawing into the private sphere, or even through forms of parodic hyper-conformity. If the worst for Baudrillard was ‘total, systemic transparency’ (Pawlett, 2007, 111), opacity was figured as a site of resistance to the invasive powers of classification and social normalisation mobilised by domination. In Lignes, Olivier Jacquemond thus highlighted one of Baudrillard’s central maxims: ‘to live happy, let’s live hidden’ [pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés] (LNS.31.2010, 83). The parallels with Surya’s De la domination are clear. Yet, come the mid-1990s, in a period marked by the rise of the new social movements and a renewed desire to form a coherent political opposition to economic liberalism, Baudrillard’s work started losing favour. Whilst Lignes initially embraced his ludic and playful tone, his ‘ludicrous’ texts were increasingly seen to contain ‘elementary errors and wild arguments’ (Rojek and Turner, 1993, ix). He was seen to be becoming popular because his work emulated, rather than critiqued, contemporary life. In Lignes, Véronique Bergen thus lamented that Baudrillard’s thought provided a ‘degree zero’ of critical incision (LNS.31.2010, 48). The injunction to ‘live hidden’ from capitalism was increasingly seen as a form of political quietism, and his later privileging of suicide as the only radical response to capitalism demonstrated that such a stance produced little but an indifferent nihilism (Pawlett, 2007, 46). Above all, by privileging the cultural superstructure over the material base of the economy, Baudrillard’s analysis of capitalism was seen to be significantly flawed. In the 1990s, Baudrillard claimed that capitalism had reached a new ‘fractal’ stage of value (L.18.1993, 35), one in which ‘the realm of mobile and speculative capital has achieved so great an autonomy that even its cataclysms leave no traces’ (Baudrillard, 1993, 27). Financial capital (and its satellites, debt and unemployment) had become so virtual that it was now in orbit above the planet, so unreal that its crises would no longer tangibly impact the real world. People were living in an ‘age of weightlessness’ (Baudrillard, 1993, 31), an excessiveness of capital ‘fundamentally far more original than all our old political utopias’ (Baudrillard, 1993, 35). Baudrillard was reading the economy as a surface of codes and signs, rather than as the material conditions

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of global existence. Yet problems of debt, unemployment and capital flow were increasingly weighing on France. James Becht argued in Lignes that, by ignoring Marx’s fundamental materialism, Baudrillard had only a superficial and idealistic conception of how markets really functioned (L.34.1998, 150). The subsequent prevalence of Debord over Baudrillard in Lignes can be traced explicitly to this need for a more materialist analysis of global capitalism in the twenty-first century, especially after the financial crisis erupted in 2008. Such an analysis would arrive with Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz, fourth-generation Frankfurt School theorists from the German Groupe Krisis who became regular contributors to Lignes in the new millennium. Structural Alienation Although Lignes contained references to La Société du spectacle from its earliest issues, the review’s initial reception of Debord was ambiguous. In the issue devoted to him (May 1997), Jean-Paul Curnier characterised Debord principally by his desire to destroy the historical avant-gardes; for Debord, art had become autonomous and elitist, and so its self-suppression was necessary before art and life could be mutually reconstructed. The activities of the Situationist International were depicted as mostly ludic and corrosive, a form of intensified negativity with little political value. Whilst admiring his brute insubordination, Curnier argued that there was nothing in Debord that remained theoretically useful (L.31.1997, 101). Indeed, in this issue only Michel Löwy stringently defended Debord’s theoretical rigour, stressing that Debord was first and foremost a Marxist with a fully fledged critique of capitalism (L.31.1997, 162). Lignes contributors James Becht and Anselm Jappe subsequently developed this position, reworking Debord’s concept of alienation to suit the financialised society of the twenty-first century. Debord’s primary insight was to identify a growing social malaise: The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way is now widespread; but this is experienced rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say. (1990, 4)

Debord blamed this sense of powerlessness on ‘the society of the spectacle’, which was responsible for ‘a concrete manufacture of alienation’ (2013,

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16). But what, exactly, did this ‘alienation’ consist of? Confusion has often been rife. The most superficial readings of Debord suggest that he was simply talking about media manipulation: vapid mass cultural products and television produced a docile and distracted population whilst adverts encouraged people to buy products they did not really want. Alienation, then, was a form of false consciousness, a psychological manipulation of human beings to produce passive, conformist consumers. Demands for more ‘authentic’ or ‘literary’ communication, from Mascolo and Blanchot to Surya and Noël, can be partly seen as a response to the degradation of language and consciousness in the mass media sphere. In this argument’s more radical extensions, new technologies of representation have begun to erect a screen between people and the world, distorting existence and projecting back a virtual image of inauthentic reality. Thus, in the work of Baudrillard, the virtual realm of spectacle has ended up replacing the real entirely, creating a wholly simulated world in which nothing is authentic. According to Becht, such readings result from an insufficiently Marxist interpretation of Debord (L.34.1998, 139), and Jappe likewise criticises those who saw Debord as simply a ‘less well-known Marshall McLuhan’ (1999, 2). Although moments of La Société du spectacle do focus excessively on visual cultures and the effects of the mass media, Debord explicitly stated that the media is only the spectacle’s ‘most glaringly superficial manifestation’ (2013, 12). Neyrat concludes that the term ‘spectacle’ was therefore a misleading choice on Debord’s part, as it only encouraged such confusion (2004, 110). Instead of this emphasis on representation and the spectacular, Jappe focuses on the economic and structural definition of alienation that can also be derived from Debord. The rediscovery of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness was largely responsible for the popularity of the concept of alienation in the 1950s and 1960s. The newly cultural definitions of alienation suggested that capitalism had radically altered humankind on a fundamental level; through the marketisation of every aspect of daily life, a commercial and utilitarian logic had now pervaded humanity’s very core, rendering individuals incapable of spontaneous affect and genuine relationships untainted by capitalist relations. Humankind’s access to reality had been stymied so radically that people were incapable of realising the extent of their subjugation to capitalism. Such readings have been criticised as too totalising, exaggerating the extent to which individuals’ consciousnesses can be manipulated by capitalism. Jappe blames such readings on Lukács’s conflation of ‘alienation’ with

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‘reification’ or ‘objectification’ (1999, 26). For Marx, the reification of social relations meant that, under capitalism, people were often treated as if they were commodities. Yet Daniel Bensaïd agrees with Jappe that, for Lukács, it was individuals themselves who actually became commodities, objects without an authentic consciousness (2011, 87). Lukács has been compared to Heidegger, as here alienation affects the individual on the very ‘ontological level of life’ (Postone and Brennan, 2009, 311). The claim that capitalism alienates people from their very essence as independently thinking beings is a bold one, but it actually underpins many popular counter-cultural discourses that describe everyday workers as ‘robots’, ‘slaves to the man’ or unthinking ‘zombie consumers’ and ‘one-dimensional men’. For Jappe, Bensaïd and Nancy, the ontological reading of alienation powerfully overstated the level of domination that capitalism exerts on people: in this view, only a complete revolution and the creation of a non-capitalist system of production would restore human nature to its ‘essential’ state. Bensaïd notes that this notion of alienation requires ‘a common, authentic human essence which has been lost in the world of appearances’ [une commune essence humaine authentiquement perdue dans les apparences du monde] (2011, 54). For Nancy, however, deconstruction had undermined any such recourse to notions of an essential or authentic humankind with proper qualities to be alienated from (L.35.1998, 47). Nancy thus states that Situationist theory must be reread to erase any residual essentialist claims in Debord’s work. There are indeed moments in Debord’s texts in which he seems wedded to a romantic notion of an authentic, natural human essence that has been eroded by false representations, and he especially argues that mankind has a constitutive need for community. Both Jappe and Becht must concede that some sort of attachment to an authentic human nature is residual in La Société du spectacle. Instead, however, they deliberately jettison this residual essentialism to produce a Marxist Debord shorn of this latent romanticism, and they do this by focusing on a structural, economic reading of alienation. Jappe’s most significant contribution is thus to redefine alienation as a purely structural feature of the capitalist economy, one which hinders humankind’s ability to control its own economic and political destiny. Jappe thus rereads La Société du spectacle as a detailed Marxist analysis of the means of production. As increasingly automatised production methods rendered workers superfluous, new strategies came to be needed to deal with ‘the organisation of redundant labour’ (Debord 2013, 24).

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Meanwhile, to achieve the levels of consumption needed for capitalism’s survival, leisure time was also commodified: hence the marketisation of counter-cultures and creative industries as capitalism saw the profitable potential of artistic subversion. The economy began to rely on an expanded service sector to produce ever-more impressive spectacles to entertain the masses. Yet Jappe argues that these spectacles were not created primarily to pacify the population, but to feed the needs of the economy, which needed people to do something and to spend money on services. This automatisation of production mirrored a second, more profound process: the automatisation of the ever-more complex global system of financial capitalism. Debord described the spectacle as ‘the technical realisation of the exile of human powers into a beyond’ (2013, 10). Essentially, having created capitalism, humans were becoming increasingly incapable of controlling it, and it is specifically this ‘autocratic reign of the commodity economy’ that Debord refers to as ‘alienation’ (Jappe, 1999, 11). Debord thus described ‘an all-powerful economy’ which had ‘lost its reason’: capitalism had declared ‘open war on humanity, attacking not only our possibilities for living, but our chances of survival’ (1990, 39). For Debord, this untameable economy, which seemed less and less conducive to allowing all of humankind to thrive, explained the feelings of helplessness and disorientation produced by capitalism. Furthermore, as capital replaces human needs with its own need for relentless economic growth, decisive change will never come from within the system. Debord concluded that humankind’s structural alienation from the economy could only be overcome by a revolutionary restructuring of social relations outside of a capitalist economy. The merit of this structural definition of alienation is therefore that it seems more aptly suited to our contemporary moment. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue in The New Spirit of Capitalism, in the years following the student protests of May ’68, many of the students’ and workers’ demands related to the more culturally orientated readings of alienation seemed to have been met. In the 1950s and 1960s, cultural critiques of Fordism lamented the conformity and lack of diversity inherent in mass-produced goods and services, the boredom and unfulfilling nature of work on production lines, and the strictures of bourgeois familial structures. In the new millennium, by contrast, Liberation, and especially sexual liberation; autonomy in personal and emotional life, but also in work; creativity; unbridled self-fulfilment; the authenticity of a personal life as against hypocritical, old-fashioned social

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conventions – these might seem, if not definitively established, at least widely acknowledged as essential values of modernity. (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, 419)

By contrast, Boltanski and Chiapello note that ‘we have witnessed virtual stagnation when it comes to establishing mechanisms capable of controlling the new forms of capitalism and reducing their devastating effects’ (2007, xvi). Whilst the counter-cultural critiques of alienation have to a large extent been placated by the new cultural diversity and autonomy granted by economic liberalism and the culture industry, economic inequality remains rife and nation states seem increasingly powerless to alleviate the negative effects of financial capitalism. Jappe and Debord would therefore argue that this form of structural alienation remains the major problem for contemporary politics. Krisis and Crisis This structural alienation from the means of production had direct consequences on the well-being of the population. As summarised by Boltanski and Chiapello: ‘Late entry into working life and the substitution of ad hoc jobs for modes of integration that open up the prospect of a career have gone hand in hand with a development of short-term commitments in private life’ (2007, 423). In Lignes, the anxiety and anomie of short-term living was described as both social and economic précarité [precariousness]. Sylvia Klingberg interviewed young factory workers who had never known permanent, full-time employment and thus could only ever envisage their jobs as temporary, destabilising both the solidarity of the workforce and the living conditions of its members (LNS.15.2004). Yves Dupeux commented on industry chief Laurence Parisot’s claims that love, health and life are all precarious, so why should work not also follow this law? Dupeux stated that this was the ideological core of neoliberalism: precariousness, c’est la vie (LNS.25.2008, 77). Zygmunt Bauman argued that, without a sense of long-term continuity, the formation of a stable and healthy identity is impossible (LNS.6.2001, 20). One key indicator of the psychological damage being done by such precariousness was rising suicide rates: whilst suicide used to be most prevalent amongst the elderly, recent years have seen the peak age of men committing suicide fall to between 35 and 45 as their working conditions deteriorate. In his Lignes published monograph, Suicide et sacrifice, Jean-Paul Galibert states that as more

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than 10,000 people commit suicide in France every year, contemporary society should be seen as one that ‘produces’ suicides (2012, 11). Lignes linked this economic and social precariousness to the migrant crisis. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison argued that the government was taking advantage of the poor economic situation both to demonise migrants for aggravating working conditions and to hinder migrants’ ability to stay in France as much as possible, essentially forcing them to leave the country (LNS.26.2008). Debord, who lived in Italy in the 1970s, argued that in distilling the social contradictions of the entire world, and linking economic impoverishment to police repression, Italy was fast becoming the model mixture of a bourgeois and bureaucratictotalitarian society. La Société du spectacle had delineated two modes of spectacular domination: the diffuse mode prevalent in Western capitalist countries and the concentrated form pioneered in Nazi Germany and the USSR. By Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1990), however, Debord was arguing that ‘integrated spectacle’, pioneered in Italy, was the globally dominant mixture of these two different modes (1990, 8). This did not connote a global victory of liberal capitalism over totalitarianism, but the integration of overtly repressive modes of population control into Western democracies. For Lignes, the increasing securitisation of immigration, discussed in the next chapter, was a perfect example of the mixture of the liberal rule of law and overt repression described by Debord. Above all, however, Debord’s presentiments of the economy declaring war on human beings were most clearly realised for Lignes with the 2008 financial crisis. In the issue Le devenir grec de l’Europe néolibérale (October 2012), Lignes contributors emphasised that the needs of the financial markets were seen to be politically more pressing than those of actual people: in 2012, when 30% of the Greek population was living below the poverty threshold, the EU concentrated on saving the banks, protecting financial institutions over people. Rather than ‘false consciousness’ or ‘objectification’, this is the real structural signification of contemporary alienation: whilst the needs of the market were served relentlessly, no solution was proposed to tackle the human cost of the crisis. The anarchic nature of capital accumulation and circulation had overruled society’s ability to organise itself according to its own needs, and capitalism was now clearly acting against the interests of the bulk of the population. In a phrase worthy of Debord, Amador FernandezSavater stated: ‘We are not anti-system; the system is anti-us’ [Nous ne sommes pas anti-système, le système est anti-nous] (LNS.39.2012, 156).

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After Lignes published Krisis’s Manifeste contre le travail in 2002 – a text which shares many features with the current debates surrounding the end of work, particularly Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (2015) – the onset of the financial crisis led to a closer collaboration of Lignes with Groupe Krisis. Notably, however, whilst others were optimistic about the possibilities of an ecological capitalism or the creation of a universal basic income to solve the economy’s structural problems, Groupe Krisis were much more sceptical about any attempts to save what they saw as an inherently moribund capitalist system. Whilst Jappe was the most frequent contributor to Lignes, Robert Kurz was the main theorist of the group’s Wertkritik [value-form critique]. Whilst many critics had identified external limits to capitalist expansion (such as the dual threats of resource depletion and ecological catastrophe), it was the notion of an internal limit to capitalism that made Wertkritik more alarming. In this reading of Marx, not only is there a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, but the amount of value that can be extracted from labour is also falling. The more efficient the production methods, the lower the intrinsic value of an hour of labour time. For Kurz, this trade-off between productivity and value means that the global economy is unsustainable in the long term. As Debord argued, the increased mechanisation of production not only renders more and more workers superfluous, but value itself is ‘eroded by the overdeveloped economy’ (2013, 26). Capitalism can mitigate such falls in value by diversifying production and expanding the service economy, but for Kurz this merely delays the moment at which value drops below breaking point. Kurz identifies the third industrial revolution, that of micro-electronics, as this breaking point, as it has made workers redundant at a faster rate than capitalism has been able to develop new markets and locate new sources of value. André Gorz agreed that this limit had been reached because the massive volume of capital which the financial services traded across the globe far surpassed the mass of material capital which produced value in the real economy (2008, 26–7). Debord had similarly argued that the automatisation of capital ‘must at the same time be its defeat’ (2013, 27). Yet Debord’s reasons for this ‘inevitability’ were more Freudian than Marxist: once real needs were eliminated, capital would need to invent pseudo-needs to sustain consumption and thus unleash the destructive power of unconscious desire onto the market, driving it to ruin (2013, 30). Therefore, Kurz’s theorisation of this explicitly economic internal limit to capitalism was his principle theoretical advance from Debord.

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Kurz’s analysis of crises subsequently differs from Debord’s. For Debord, revolutionary action is needed as the constant intervention of the state is capable of mitigating the long-term effects of crises: no radical change will happen, therefore, without some form of uprising. For Kurz, capitalism cannot be cured and will self-destruct even without this revolutionary agency. Each major crisis sustained by global capitalism has happened at a greater level of accumulation and productivity, and so at a lower level of value, than those of the past (Kurz, 2011, 7). In the nineteenth century, through colonial expansion, capitalism could still spread itself into undiscovered global markets to shore up a deficit in value. During the 1930s, Fordism accelerated production and Keynesian public spending stimulated growth to drag the global economy out of depression. Subsequently, the response to the 1970s’ stagflation was a policy of inflation based on credit supplied by the state, creating a global deficit in value that only a deregulated financial sector could temporarily mask. Rather than a scourge ruining the global economy, financial capital has therefore actually allowed the artificial survival of capitalism beyond its expiry date. However, Kurz argued that, after 2008, there no longer existed any new mechanism that would permit the resolution of the crisis at the level of productivity now attained (2011, 9). There may be brief economic rebounds but, without a genuinely novel way to accumulate value, an irreversible decline had set in. Groupe Krisis therefore posed serious questions for the left, and for Lignes. For starters, it argued that because labour no longer has any intrinsic value, there is no longer any point in continuing the class struggle (Groupe Krisis, 2002). Trade unions are declared to be useless, as unless strikes lead to a new, widespread and effective social movement, all they can really achieve is propping up the ailing labour economy (Kurz, 2011, 20). Krisis also bolstered Lignes’ arguments against parliamentary participation, Jappe noting that, given the incapacity of governments to reform capitalism meaningfully, it made no real difference whether Nicholas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal was elected (LNS.25.2008, 57). Furthermore, as capitalism makes people less rather than more capable of overturning it (the poverty and precariousness of the lives of most rendering them less able to find the time to participate in collective resistance), Jappe is also dubious regarding Badiou’s voluntaristic form of subjective agency, claiming that what we must emancipate ourselves from is the very idea of a revolutionary subject (LNS.23–24.2007, 267–8). Structural adjustments to capitalism are also deemed insufficient: moderate solutions from the anti-capitalist left, such as a Tobin tax

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to redistribute the wealth generated from financial transactions, are attacked by Jappe because a better distribution of wealth would not solve these intractable structural problems (LNS.23–24.2007, 265). As for recent theories of an economy of décroissance or a return to agrarian values and organic production, these prompt only a morality based on frugality which would be unable to feed the world on a global scale (Kurz, 2011, 21). For Kurz, the only solution is to remove the provision of socially necessary services from the circuits of monetary exchange (2011, 23). Jappe is more pessimistic, his first contribution to Lignes suggesting that humankind can only watch the demise of its own economic system from the sidelines, completing the process of its own total alienation (LNS.23–24.2007, 274). How valid is the analysis of Wertkritik? There is disagreement even from those close to Kurz. Many members of Krisis jettisoned the internal limit of value to recognise only an external, ecological limit to capitalist expansion: in 2004 Kurz left Krisis to form the new group Exit! (Kurz, 2011, 113). André Gorz eventually supported the majority of Kurz’s analysis, but was more optimistic about the potential of small, self-sustainable communities to radically transform social relations (2008, 35). Moishe Postone, the American theorist closest to Kurz, argued that there ‘is nothing linear about capital’s development’, implying that, given moments of real crisis, capitalism can backtrack from technological advancements to recover more primitive and valuable levels of production (Postone and Brennan, 2009, 322). After a period of contraction and recession, the value of production would have increased again and capitalism could be placed back on its feet. David Harvey stressed that rather than an actual lack of value, the real problem was ‘over-accumulation’ (2006, 195); Badiou agreed, noting that the 2008 crash was a classic crisis of overproduction that in no way spelled the end of capitalism (2011b, 15). Outside of Marxism, neoclassical economists, who see value as being set by a process of market negotiation rather than as something inherent to labour time, would bypass the debate entirely: the monetary value of labour cannot be reduced to nothing if the market decides otherwise (Kunkel, 2014, 17). Such explicit critiques of Wertkritik do not appear in the review itself, yet the analysis of Groupe Krisis is far from unanimously accepted. In the 2012 issue on the European crisis, some contributors still posed economic, monetary solutions to what Jappe saw as a crisis in value: Maria Kakogianni advocated an economic décroissance (LNS.39.2012, 207), Claude Calame an eco-socialism (LNS.39.2012, 35). Frédéric

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Lordon argued that Greece should default on its sovereign debt, quit the euro and regain control of its own currency and central bank. Although this would not solve the country’s long-term problems, it would provide the conditions for a possible resolution in the mid-term (LNS.39.2012, 66). The PCF’s Elisabeth Gauthier suggested the formation of a new party, one that would fight for a social, democratic, feminist and ecological Europe of solidarity (LNS.39.2012, 182). Livio Boni was less confident in state governance, suggesting instead that people intransigently take over those social tasks which the state has abandoned and run them autonomously (LNS.39.2012, 136). Balibar argued that the whole European Union needed to be completely refounded. All these contributors’ pragmatic solutions demonstrate an implicit rejection of the conclusions of Wertkritik, even if they do not explicitly tackle the Krisis analysis on its own terms. Furthermore, even if the Krisis prognosis is accurate and capitalism is doomed in the long term, for many Lignes contributors there remained a wider political argument to be held in the present. Contributors such as Bensaïd were keen to seek out new, emerging political forms of political agency; similarly, Mario Persichetti criticised these apocalyptic accounts of an unavoidable crisis for savaging all alternatives and demotivating activist resistance (LNS.9.2002, 201). Furthermore, the lack of positive options could also encourage acquiescence to Europe’s financial elites’ claims that there was no alternative but governmental austerity to save capitalism. Le devenir grec de l’Europe néolibérale (October 2012) opposed this passive acceptance of crisis management and, as in the late 1990s, Lignes once more housed discussions of social and economic policy. The review also repoliticised the debate. Within Europe, smaller states were described as being bullied by the larger ones: Italy and Spain were treated generously, as countries seen as being too big to fail, but Portugal, Ireland and Greece were forced to accept stimulus packages with punitive interest rates and enforced austerity measures. As such measures closely resembled the strategic adjustment packages foisted onto Latin American countries by the IMF in the 1990s, this imposition is described as a neocolonial policy (LNS.39.2012, 29). The media discourses propagated to defend such actions were also criticised. Alongside the widespread stigmatisation of the Greek population as lazy, wasteful and averse to paying taxes, the country itself was targeted: an article in Le Monde asked, ‘Is Greece a European country?’ [La Grèce est-elle un pays européen?]. This discourse of Europeanism was deemed a new form of exclusion and racism (LNS.39.2012, 115). Germany, by

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contrast, was portrayed as driving the euro’s economic policy, and thus it was this nation’s ‘obstinacy’ that was threatening to ruin the European project (LNS.39.2013, 76). Balibar stressed that it was important to avoid nationalistic sentiments and stereotypes in such debates, but nevertheless agreed that, by maintaining interest rates and economic policies favourable to the German economy, German unemployment was being exported to Greece (LNS.39.2012, 53–4). The political argument therefore concerned how the fall in living standards provoked by the financial crisis was going to be distributed across Europe. Should Greece be shouldering the worst consequences of what was a worldwide catastrophe? The petition published in Lignes, ‘Save the Greek people from their saviours’ [Sauvons le peuple grec de ses sauveurs], suggested that the review believed otherwise. Whilst the theoretical debate as to whether capitalism had met its end in the long term would continue, the review’s approach here suggested focusing on alleviating the human costs in the present moment, rather than economic compromises. Pessimism or Politics? Surya has noted that Lignes’ approach to contemporary politics is often seen as deeply pessimistic (LNS.25.2008, 5). Although the new social movements in the mid-1990s produced a short-lived and effervescent debate over social policy in Lignes, their most lasting effect was to cement the review’s shift in focus from the perils of the extreme right to the economic domination that had stymied the progressive left. From Adorno, Baudrillard and Debord to Lignes contributors Surya, Jappe and Kurz, capitalism was depicted as a form of power without politics, as liberal economics dominated contemporary society and the financial markets became more important than a population increasingly subjected to precarious employment and social exclusion. Via the discourses of transparency, Surya usefully highlighted the erosion of political opposition to capitalism as the debate moved onto the moral terrain of compliance and good behaviour. His analysis was inspired by Jean Baudrillard who informed the review’s tendency to privilege social opacity over sociological clarity, and whose ludic and subversive tone characterised early issues of Lignes. Yet Baudrillard was subsequently deemed insufficiently Marxist to provide a workable critique of financial capitalism, and Debord’s concept of ‘alienation’ was resurrected to describe humankind’s incapacity to control the

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global monetary system it had created. Such a definition made several important steps in updating 1960s domination theory for the review’s contemporary moment, moving the debate from the cultural sphere back towards political economy. However, just as critics found Surya’s account of a panoptic society too totalising, Jappe and Kurz also left many readers feeling powerless in the face of a society seemingly doomed to fail. Wertkritik may have produced a more economically coherent form of domination theory, but it still provided no manner of political agency to push back against the nefarious consequences of capitalist expansion. Whether or not the Krisis prognosis is accurate, other Lignes contributors would argue that the fallout from the financial crisis could still be managed in different ways. Political questions remained as to who should bear the brunt of capitalism’s failings, provoking a lively, Europe-wide debate in the review. Furthermore, throughout the review’s second series, a new cohort of militant, activist thinkers tried to reverse the pessimistic tendency in Lignes. Through the review, they sought to form new modes of political agency capable of resisting the general climate of lassitude when faced with the enormity of global crises. This, then, is the subject of the following chapter.

chapter six

Combatting the Crisis Reconstructing Political Agency from Rousset and Foucault to Rancière and Badiou Combatting the Crisis

The year 2015 was particularly bleak for France: it began on 7 January, when the Kouachi brothers entered the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, killing 11 and wounding another 11, and closed on 14 November, as several groups of gunmen slaughtered 130 people around Paris, most of them concentrated in the Bataclan concert venue. François Hollande announced a state of emergency, granting the French state exceptional measures such as reinforced border controls, restricting freedom of movement, curfews and increased powers to stop, search and place potential suspects under house arrest. Declaring the country at war, the president gave advanced warning to the Council of Europe of France’s intention to contravene the European Convention on Human Rights. These measures were almost universally accepted, with 551 of 558 National Assembly representatives voting in favour of their extension and 91% of the population voicing support. Yet, writing in the London Review of Books, Lignes contributor Didier Fassin was concerned that, due to its constant extension, the state of emergency was becoming permanent. Legislation was indeed being planned to write these exceptional new measures into the constitution and to make them applicable to all potential criminals, not just those suspected of terrorism. Fassin worried that France was becoming a ‘police state’ (2016), and crucially asked why these emergency measures, which were not implemented in Spain or London after their respective terrorist attacks in 2004 and 2005, were not only accepted but popular in France.

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The groundwork for this broad securitisation of French politics had been undertaken since the new millennium and had been a growing concern for Lignes, demonstrated by their two issues devoted to ‘The Politics of Fear’ (Politiques de la peur, October 2004) and ‘Crisis as a Method of Government’ (La Crise comme méthode de gouvernement, October 2009). As the consensual climate of the 1980s fractured in the new millennium through increasingly acrimonious debates surrounding national identity, immigration and la pensée unique of free-market liberalism, presidents began acting more unilaterally and aggressively in what they saw as the nation’s best interest. This shift is best characterised by the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, under whom Jeremy Ahearne describes the transition of the French parliamentary right from a statist, conservative Gaullism to one embracing values such as ‘competition, mobility, innovation, risk and consumption’, alongside the ‘more belligerent and divisive’ versions of traditional right-wing discourses of rootedness, national preference and security (2014, 7). To mask the economic insecurity unleashed by Sarkozy’s unabashed neoliberalism, public concern was diverted to an emphasis on the need to reinforce national security. Lignes therefore worried that a generalised sentiment of crisis (surrounding bird flu, the environment, the economy, national identity and terrorism) seemed to be encouraged by the government since this allowed it to take exceptional measures which would not normally have been accepted. Simultaneously, major changes within the Lignes editorial board at the turn of the millennium significantly altered the review’s political tone. Daniel Dobbels and Francis Marmande left after the third and seventh issues of the new series, respectively, leaving Surya the only remaining original member. The editorial board was henceforth in a state of flux, as the Appendix to this book demonstrates. New members were initially long-term Lignes contributors of a neo-Nietzschean tendency, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Fethi Benslama, Jean-Paul Curnier, Bernard Noël and Jacqueline Risset. Yet perhaps the most influential new addition to the board was Alain Brossat, who would play a major role in assembling at least ten future Lignes dossiers on themes such as political violence and amnesty, social and racial fault lines, immigration and illegal detention. Through Brossat’s intellectual milieu, contributors to Lignes more frequently included militant activist and radical thinkers, often former Maoists or ex-Althusserians such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Alongside this new militant legacy of la pensée 68, the review undertook a more active search for forms

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of political agency situated outside of the governmental sphere as a means to combat the submersion of debate under a generalised climate of securitisation. This chapter thus explores the evolution of this new militancy, first through the reconfiguration of the review’s intellectual genealogy via David Rousset. Rousset had been one of the first not only to draw attention to the existence of Soviet camps after the Second World War, but also to the possibilities of democratic states resorting to repressive exceptional measures. Rousset inspired Alain Brossat to historicise the Holocaust as a horrific but by no means unique deployment of camp technologies, and Lignes places France’s own use of migrant retention centres within a twentieth-century history of illegal detention. Lignes became concerned that such exceptional measures further eroded public sovereignty, securitisation measures exacerbating the political apathy generated by consensus. In a wider context, Giorgio Agamben became the paradigmatic thinker of ‘states of exception’, yet he was only partially embraced by Lignes due to reservations concerning how his work can be seen to normalise the use of exceptional measures. Michel Foucault was preferred instead, as his thought allowed for new forms of micropolitical resistance. If the discussion of policy alternatives generated by the social movements was muted, sans-papiers activism remained an exemplary form of such micropolitics for Lignes, especially when it concretely manifested Jacques Rancière’s conception of an eruptive and dissensual politics. However, this chapter goes on to question whether Rancière’s micropolitical interventions do enough to challenge the global framework of liberal capitalism. By contrast, Alain Badiou produced a more holistic, worldwide strategy, and provided the strongest theory of a political subject, provoking a debate over the strategic value of the word ‘communism’ and the efficacy of extra-parliamentary political practices in the face of continued disenchantment with the PS. Nevertheless, this cycle of increased militant action and pragmatism seemed to draw to a close again in 2012, the return of nationalism, terrorism and an impending sense of crisis returning Lignes to its habitual pessimism. The Securitisation of Immigration After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, it became commonplace to argue that the liberal freedoms to which Western populations had become accustomed could only be guaranteed

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by ramping up security: securitisation became the condition for the existence of liberty (Lemke, 2011, 47). In the political sciences, ‘securitisation’ has, since the 1990s, come to describe ‘a process whereby urgent “security issues” or “threats” are identified or “constructed” in order to mobilise opinion and constitute legitimacy and authority for the means of dealing with that “threat”’ (Neal, 2009, 335): the issue is successfully securitised ‘if the relevant audience accepts this claim and thus grants to the actor a right to violate rules that otherwise would bind’ (Wæver, 2000, 251). Lemke argues that this is essentially a depoliticising strategy, as securitisation ‘takes reality as the norm’ and improvises quick-fix solutions whilst failing to address any long-term socioeconomic and political problems (2011, 47). For Lignes, it became clear throughout this period that immigration had become a securitised issue. The tensions surrounding migration and national identity, explored in Chapter 4, erupted to have a significant impact on the 2002 presidential elections. As many voters simply assumed that Lionel Jospin would reach the second round, they used the first round as a protest vote. Jean-Marie Le Pen then shocked France by leapfrogging Jospin to take second place in the first round; despite a vociferous backlash, the FN candidate still received nearly 20% of second-round votes. Re-elected president, Jacques Chirac’s subsequent cabinet was most notable for the appointment of Nicholas Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior. Attempting to undermine Chirac, Sarkozy initially opposed the ban on the foulard and sought to ‘nurture French institutional Islam’ (Ahearne, 2014, 19). The accord with the Muslim community soon soured, however, and, following the banlieue riots in 2005, Sarkozy provoked disenfranchised French youth with anti-Muslim rhetoric and references to the socially excluded as racaille [scum]. Some on the French left sympathised with the rioters, Surya arguing that these youths were expressing, by the only means available to them, the frustration that they were not treated as ordinary, ‘universal’ French citizens (LNS.19.2006, 6). Instead of the rioters, Rada Iveković argued that it was the government and the media who framed the riots as an ethnic and religious conflict, rather than as a more traditional social protest (LNS.19.2006, 72). Yet other intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut, rallied behind Sarkozy, stating that France’s problems were caused by ‘blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity’ (Sowerwine, 2009, 427). There was a growing mobilisation of popular anti-immigrant sentiment, which the government seemed intent on exacerbating. Sarkozy had realised the political expediency of this

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tension: his tough stance on immigration and crime was now designed to recoup FN votes in his favour. Sarkozy’s approval rating soared, and he succeeded in taking 6.5% from the FN’s electorate in his 2007 presidential victory. Once in power, he created the new Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development, an invention calculated not to de-escalate but to ‘maintain the sense of this crisis’ (Ahearne, 2014, 110). Sarkozy had realised that ‘with each deportation he gained more votes on the right than he lost on the left’ (Sowerwine, 2009, 430–1), and thus he set the new ministry yearly expulsion targets, formalising the ambient pressure to find new minorities to exclude. In Lignes, Éric Fassin highlighted the new transitivity of stigmatising discourses, which could now shift to target different groups as and when it became politically expedient to do so. In Grenoble in 2010, Sarkozy set his sights on France’s Romani population, les roms, associating them directly with problems of immigration, educational failure, parental abstention, nomadic lifestyles and delinquency. As Fassin notes, government figures, such as Minister of Defence Hervé Morin, made suggestive references to the roms replacing Muslims as France’s favourite scapegoats (LNS.35.2011, 115). Lignes saw these processes as proof that public discourse had been moving ever-more rapidly to the right since the 1980s, a development that Laurent Margantin argued had been deliberately orchestrated by politicians, intellectuals and journalists (LNS.19.2006, 54). Yet if co-opting some of the FN’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was meant to neutralise Le Pen’s party as an electoral force, the strategy failed: in the 2012 elections, a resurgent Marine Le Pen scored 17.9%. As Lignes had argued since the 1980s, the attempt to canalise the FN vote by providing softer versions of its policies seemed only to strengthen its electoral base in the long term. For Lignes, the problem was not immigration but the increasing lack of solidarity in contemporary society as economic liberalism, individualism and chronic structural unemployment turned neighbours and rival groups against each other. Although Chirac ostensibly returned to a Gaullist statism in his second term, his prime ministers, Alain Juppé and Dominique de Villepin, were appointed to deliberately continue the now-entrenched economic liberalism. Sarkozy much more openly embraced an aggressive, competitive market ideology one of whose fundamental principles, for Lignes, was the development of a precariat class: ‘la précarité, c’est la vie’ (LNS.25.2008, 77). Yves Dupeux highlighted the vicious circle created by chronic unemployment, which also then made working conditions more precarious: employers

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could take advantage of the pool of desperate workers in competition with each other to offer lower wages and temporary contracts without providing future security (NS.25.2008, 71). Economic liberalism has rarely been popular with the French electorate, but it was only in the new millennium that the negative effects of economic precariousness really started to be felt. Yet, instead of providing support to the losers of this market economy, the victims of la pensée unique were increasingly labelled benefit scroungers or racaille prone to violence. To deal with public unrest, the poorest members of society were being designated a menace to society (LNS.15.2004, 51). Lignes emphasised that the new discourses stigmatising migrants, from Muslims to the roms, were a result of the economic pressures Europe was facing: government policy was now ‘to justify the socioeconomic and juridical inequalities built upon ethnicised differences’ [justifier les inégalités socio-économiques et juridiques construites sur les différences ethnicisées] (LNS.35.2011, 173). For some in Lignes, the ever-shrinking difference between the PS and Sarkozy’s Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) was confirmed when Hollande continued to expel the roms after his election in 2012. The consensual liberalism of the 1980s, emphasising civil liberties and technocratic expertise, had thus been replaced by both the left and the right in the new millennium through the mobilisation of a migration crisis to stifle the public debate on an aggressive neoliberalism. Lignes explored how the most significant consequence of the stigmatisation of migrants was the rising use of retention centres and draconian expulsion policies. Yet whilst the domination theories discussed in the previous chapter suggested that little could be done to prevent this expansion of unfettered capitalism, other thinkers in Lignes sought to reinvigorate new forms of active political agency, especially surrounding immigration policy and the sans-papiers. Inspired by a new editorial board, a return to David Rousset in the year 2000 highlighted the militant change in trajectory that the review was beginning to effect. Exceptional Legality: Rebuilding Camps In the years preceding the millennium, Alain Brossat had been publishing Lignes articles about worldwide genocides and the usage of concentration camps throughout the twentieth century. He had taught a yearly course on global genocides and massacres at the University of Evry, and was a member of Terra, an interdisciplinary network studying the ethnic

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origins of migratory populations. In 1996 he published L’Épreuve du désastre, a text in which he returned to Arendt and Foucault to delineate a universal analysis of twentieth-century genocides and mass murders. In these years, Lignes published an issue placing Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Armenian Genocide side by side (October 1995), another presenting the proceedings of conferences on political violence and disappearances in Latin America (May 1995) and articles on Srebrenica and Sri Lanka (L.29.1996, 17–30) and Rwanda (LNS.15.2004, 134–43) to further this international historiography of political extermination. The review was beginning to view Auschwitz as a paradigmatic event: rather than unique and unrepeatable, the use of concentration camps was found to have occurred throughout the twentieth century and often to be worryingly compatible with democratic politics. David Rousset was a key thinker in this regard. The second issue of the new series (May 2000) was dedicated to Rousset. He is not widely known in anglophone academia, and is normally mentioned for his works depicting the time he spent in Nazi concentration camps, L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946) and Les jours de notre mort (1947). Critics such as Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (2011) acknowledge the influence of Rousset’s analysis of the concentrationary universe on Hannah Arendt, as he linked the camps to colonial and capitalist enterprises, yet his subsequent political activities and writings, from the 1950s to the 1970s, are rarely examined. Surya described Rousset’s intellectual and philosophical trajectory as irreproachable, and he very deliberately solicited Rousset to appear in Lignes’ first issue in 1987 (LNS.23–24.2007, 39). Yet it is the later dossier devoted to Rousset that directed the review’s new political impetus: documenting Rousset’s long-standing campaigns against the global use of concentration camps, Lignes was thus inspired to investigate, contextualise and theorise the use of retention centres in contemporary France. Whilst Robert Antelme’s experience of the camps led him to develop a broad-based solidarity with humankind and a rejection of political dogma, Rousset’s stance was more explicitly Marxist. A former Trotskyist, Rousset became increasingly critical of the USSR and appealed to ex-deportees to join him in exposing Russian concentration camps, forming the Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire (CICRC) in 1950. Rousset argued that, whilst unrivalled in scale, the Holocaust should not be seen as an isolated event: camps had a history, had existed before the war and continued to be used across the globe. Crucially, what he called the ‘concentrationary regime’ was not

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restricted to totalitarian regimes, but was an evil which continued to haunt liberal democracies. Annette Wieviorka has argued that Rousset’s commission against the concentrationary regime was only moderately successful, as its analysis did not penetrate the public consciousness to the extent that Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would in the 1970s (1997, 10). Yet the documents assembled in Lignes, largely drawn from the CICRC’s own review, Saturne, demonstrate that it undertook politically effective interventions throughout the 1950s, including the suppression of certain Russian camps, improvements in camp conditions in Tunisia and promises extracted from the Spanish government that it would soon close its Macronissos camp. Rousset could thus claim that the commission had saved ‘thousands’ from detention (LNS.2.2000, 173). Furthermore, Rousset’s last two major works, La Société éclatée (1973) and Sur la Guerre (1987), adapted a Marxist historical approach to demonstrate how concentration camps came to exist. Daniel Bensaïd explained that, for Rousset, the decomposition of classes and their transformation into a mass constitutes the fertile ground for totalitarianism (LNS.2.2000, 123). Rousset’s ‘Le Sens de notre combat’, an article summarising the first eight years of the CICRC’s activities, noted the public’s general indifference to the structure of the global economy: whilst people seemed outraged by the camps, few seemed to question whether liberal democracy was combatting or facilitating their existence. With developing nations under pressure to follow Western models, Rousset argued that it was difficult to convince others of the virtues of liberalism ‘if one has not also unambiguously denounced and rooted out the anti-democratic deviations of the West’ [si l’on n’a pas sans ambiguïté dénoncé et pourchassé les déviations anti-démocratiques en Occident] (LNS.2.2000, 226). Against the triumphalism of the American New World Order after 1990, Bensaïd thus praised Rousset’s materialist interpretation of history and the problems it raised regarding the unquestioned adoption of liberal models in all circumstances, noting that Rousset’s work provided conceptual tools to think through tragedies like those of the Balkans (LNS.2.2000, 121). Explicitly pitting Rousset against the new philosophers (Glucksmann) and conservative historians (Furet), Bensaïd reclaimed the value of a Marxist approach to history, suggestive of the analysis of contemporary politics to come throughout Lignes’ second series. Anti-democratic practices in Western states needed as close an examination as the crimes of fascism and communism, and the relationship between capitalist exploitation and detention centres needed to be articulated. Rousset’s critical approach can thus be seen as

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a more Marxist version of Bataille’s twin aims to combat the excesses of both liberal democracy and fascism. Rather than as unique tragedies, this broader framework attempted to theorise genocidal practices alongside economic hardship. For Brossat, both victims of genocides and the economically impoverished become mere bodies to be managed or disposed of, allowing for ‘the schizophrenic co-presence of an all-encompassing democracy with a new order of terror’ [la co-présence schizophrénique du tout-démocratie et d’un nouvel ordre de la terreur] (L.29.1996, 27). Totalitarian states and liberal democracies are both seen to dehumanise, exclude and eradicate surplus population groups in different ways. Furthermore, France’s colonial past is directly linked to the most pressing political issues of the day: the politicisation of immigration and the integration of minorities. Whilst Europe once exported an idea of human equality based on universal rights, the West’s excluded figures were now those in most pressing need of such rights. Securitisation procedures meant that such rights were being gradually eroded in Europe, the prime example being the use of retention centres. Alongside Mathilde Girard and Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Brossat edited the Lignes issue Les Étrangers indésirables (May 2008) to highlight the rising French utilisation of retention centres, centres de rétention administrative (CRAs): holding spaces for migrants which, because they were not technically part of the national territory, became non-places outside of the normal jurisdiction of national civil liberties and rights (LNS.26.2008, 6). At the time, CRAs were rarely discussed in the mass media, having at first been hidden from the general public; when their existence was known, their conditions were often occluded. This Lignes issue was, then, a paradigmatic example of a review’s ability to raise awareness of obscured debates whilst placing them within a detailed contextual and theoretical framework. As we shall see, the government continuously walked a tightrope between legality and illegality, searching for loopholes and enacting exceptional legislation to slowly legitimate repressive migration practices. The following account builds on Lignes articles and shows how academic research has since corroborated its account of the rising use of retention centres. In 1974, a disused warehouse in Arenc, Marseille, was found to be housing an illegal detention centre, clandestinely run by the French state. A campaign successfully closed what was widely seen as a ‘camp’, yet this paradoxically precipitated the development of legal frameworks to legitimise retention centres. Giscard was unable to implement the

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legislation legalising retention centres, but Mitterrand managed to pass it in 1981 during the euphoria that greeted his presidency, and the first legal centres opened in 1983. To quell opposition, the PS emphasised that these facilities would respect civil liberties and, therefore, rather than a backwards step towards the age of camps, they represented ‘progress for deportees’ rights’ (Richard and Fischer, 2008, 587). However, this also marked the end of the Socialists’ liberal approach to immigration, and cemented the governmental logic that the ‘successful integration’ of legal immigrants required ‘the repression and deportation of the undocumented ones’. Henceforth, ‘the legitimacy of border control […] was taken for granted’ by the French government (Richard and Fischer, 2008, 587). Lexical shifts were enacted to make such processes appear more acceptable. In 2001, the word rétention was adopted in place of détention, and in 2004 the EU took an explicit decision to avoid using the word ‘camps’ in any of its immigration discussions or documents. There has also been an international increase in the use of the term déplacé instead of refugié (globally, in 2008 there were 13 million ‘refugees’ but a staggering 50 million ‘displaced persons’): unlike refugees, states have no legal obligation to shelter displaced persons, thus facilitating their removal from the territory (LNS.26.2008, 42). The participation of independent agencies in the retention process helped to normalise such procedures. The organisation Cimade was initially formed as a protest group demanding Arenc’s closure, but, from 1983, it was consulted on the construction of legal centres and became part of their enforcement. Now working closely with the government, Cimade had to accept the desirability of the principle of border control and the deportation. Cimade continues to provide important legal services for migrants and critically monitors conditions. Lignes highlighted its explosive report in 2006, which made the bold and shocking comparison between CRAs and concentration camps (LNS.26.2008, 5). As one of few agencies allowed inside CRAs, Cimade is an important source of information and a check on governmental powers. Yet, for Lignes, its participation also gives these obscure centres the appearance of transparency and ethical probity. The French state subsequently traded this legal legitimacy, and the improved conditions in retention centres, for tighter immigration controls and securitisation measures. Independent monitoring and transparency seemed to guarantee that rights were being respected, and lists were drawn up detailing the minimum standards for facilities to be provided in the centres; by authorising the retention of families, restricting access to legal counsel and exponentially increasing

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the number of camps, however, the participation of Cimade also enabled ‘the whole deportation process to become massive and thoroughly repressive’ (Richard and Fisher, 2008, 591). European governments also attempted to circumvent the legal frameworks they had been compelled to install. Globally, there has been an increased use of ad hoc detention, long tunnels and remote locations which deliberately separate detainees from legal services. In France, small, temporary and mobile locaux de rétention have developed alongside CRAs. A hotel room can suddenly be turned into an extralegal zone of detention, raising many of the same problems as Arenc in the 1970s. As there is no official list of these locaux de rétention, it is difficult for a deportee’s family, friends or legal counsel to locate him or her, and detainees are often denied access to lawyers or medical assistance (Richard and Fischer, 2008, 592). As Christian Vollaire argued in Lignes, as these hidden centres often go unreported, there is a relationship between the ostentatious liberalisation and legalisation of detention practices and their concurrent obfuscations and obstructions of the law (LNS.26.2008, 43–5). Sometimes, the democratic process is entirely elided, notably through the increased ‘agencification’ of the EU. Agencies are ‘efficient’ as they allow ‘technocratic decision-making in relative remoteness’, often free from the constraints of parliamentary debate or democratic approval (Riekmann, 2008, 22). For Lignes, Frontex was the most worrying of such agencies. Set up to coordinate European border policy and encourage collaboration between EU countries’ border patrols, Frontex was seen to have exceeded its mandate as an information provider to now actively undertake policing operations outside of the EU: in one example, a Senegalese man planning to enter Europe clandestinely was arrested by Frontex in Senegal whilst still a free citizen within his own national borders, eroding both Senegal’s national sovereignty and criminalising this individual before any illegal activity had taken place (LNS.26.2008, 135). Thus, whilst legal challenges sought to make the retention process more transparent and respectful of migrants’ rights, other measures, often outside of democratic process or intentional law, sought to recoup the losses imposed on the government elsewhere. The concerns expressed in Lignes’ Les Étrangers indésirables issue have thus been supported and echoed in scholarly accounts of migration practices from political scientists, urban geographers and sociologists. The review’s exposé of the facts was then situated within a more theoretical account of the effects of these securitisation policies on

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European democracies, placing its analysis within the new intellectual lineage embraced by Lignes, from Rousset to Brossat. The shifting legal boundaries produced by securitisation were analysed by Lignes in terms of a growing use of exceptional measures: once seen as exceptional, the irregular detention of migrants was becoming routine (LNS.26.2008, 5). CRAs, then, became a paradigmatic use of what Giorgio Agamben theorised as legalised ‘states of exception’. Agamben vs Foucault: The State of Exception With Homo Sacer (1998) and State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben became an ‘intellectual star’ (Lemke, 2011, 53). His radicalisation of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault seemed to precisely articulate global politics after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and Lignes was especially quick to examine State of Exception following the publication of its French translation in 2002. Whilst the value of Agamben’s work was emphasised, Lignes contributors Brossat, Maria Muhle and Jacques Mucchielli anticipated the critiques of anglophone scholars, such as Jeffrey Nealon (2008), who instead found the later Foucault a more flexible thinker. For Lignes, it was Foucault who most helped to situate the emergence of retention centres within a framework of neoliberal globalisation, and also allowed for a less pessimistic, more active sense of potential agency in response to such exceptional measures. Agamben argued that, in the past, exceptional measures had only been instituted during ‘periods of political crisis’ but, especially after 9/11, they had increasingly become ‘the dominant paradigm of government’ (2005, 1–2). Drawing on Carl Schmitt, Agamben saw the National Socialist Third Reich as the principal modern pioneer of the state of exception, carrying out ‘a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but also of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben, 2005, 2). However, Agamben also examined comparable acts in other countries, including Britain’s Defence of the Realm Act and the ‘unlimited power to take all measures necessary to guarantee the security and neutrality of Switzerland’ granted to the Swiss Federal Council in 1914 (2005, 16). Yet exceptional measures were not solely instituted during wartime: Agamben noted that merely ‘the metaphor of war’ was becoming enough of a justification to produce a state of exception (2005, 21). The precedent set by the ‘War on Terror’ thus

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became particularly troubling, as the perennial threat of terror could now be used as a reason to declare oneself at war and within a state of exception. Notably, after the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, Hollande explicitly stated that the country was now at war to justify the state’s exceptional measures. Such practices are commonly called a ‘state of exception’ [Ausnahmezustand] in German, whereas in Italian and French, ‘emergency decrees’ or instituting a ‘state of siege’, and in anglophone countries, ‘emergency powers’ or ‘martial law’ are the more standard terms. However, if, as Agamben argues, ‘terminology is the properly poetic moment of thought’, by highlighting the ‘State of Exception’ as the paradigmatic term of our era, he precisely named this contemporary global phenomenon (2005, 4). The resulting enthusiasm for Agamben’s work derived from a widespread sentiment that this poetic naming precisely identified a pernicious global trend. Such explicit naming of a general state of exception is doubly useful when supposedly one-off measures become normalised. For example, in their monograph published by Lignes, Robert Harvey and Hélène Volat demonstrated that most of the exceptional measures codified in the USA PATRIOT Act had become permanent or indefinitely extended, despite many of them contravening the US Constitution’s fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendments (2006, 25–6). Harvey and Volat noted that the infinite prolongation and normalisation of such measures meant that the term ‘exception’ had become completely devoid of sense (2006, 119). However, in Lignes, Mucchielli argued that it is precisely when exceptional measures become the rule that poetic or hyperbolic figurations of the state of exception are necessary, the very term helping to focus resistance against the encroachment of illiberal practices into daily life (LNS.10.2003, 131). Agamben’s major achievement was, then, to bring the banalisation of securitisation sharply into focus, encouraging those concerned about France’s use of retention centres not to give up their opposition when such measures were rendered legal. Yet many Lignes contributors found Agamben’s approach too totalising. Agamben explained that the Roman figure, homo sacer, represented both the social pariahs who were excluded from the social order and the king, the unimpeachable source of sovereign power. Agamben thus argued that all societies were founded both on the exclusion of certain individuals and an exceptional and arbitrary source of power. An absolute sovereign is the foundational principle of political power, and Agamben concluded that ruling through exceptional

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powers was thus the dormant possibility of all democracies. Rather than a terrifying abnormality, the state of exception is merely the tendential extremity of all power, the exception inevitably having to be incorporated into the constitution. In Lignes, Muhle noted that making this archaic example the transcendental origin of all juridical law meant that Agamben saw only one structure repeating itself in all examples of exceptionality (LNS.9.2002, 185). Seeing camps as the extension of an exceptional logic inscribed within democracy, Agamben thus focused on the continuities between contemporary immigration policies and the Holocaust (LNS.26.2008, 18). Agamben also explicitly took Foucault to task for the absence of the Holocaust or totalitarianism in his work, noting that Foucault ‘never dwelt’ on these ‘exemplary places of modern biopolitics’ (1998, 4). Brossat agreed that Foucault’s analyses tended to stop at the borders of catastrophe, Foucault instead focusing on the governmental mechanisms that tend towards totalitarian measures rather than their most obviously violent and horrific manifestations (1996, 162). Yet this does not mean that Foucault’s thought cannot account for such extremes. As Jeffrey Nealon clarifies, a focus on National Socialist concentration camps would be ‘an “expensive” site of analysis for Foucault’ as it could give the impression that power is ‘inherently totalising’, an ‘abomination pure and simple’ (2008, 100). Whilst power can be this, the later Foucault generally emphasised the productive, positive aspects of power relations as well as the negative: power produced agency as well as repression. Avoiding the Holocaust as representative of exceptional measures could then be seen as a strategic decision. Unlike Agamben, Foucault was not interested in creating an overarching theory of contemporary political domination through the state of exception; instead, he analysed in detail the specific, concrete practices engaged in by both nation states and their subjects, seeking out internal contrasts, differences and micro-variations as well as wider, global trends. As such, a representation of a biopolitical realm in which politics is a fluid, practical task, and in which resistance remained possible, was more attractive to Lignes than Agamben’s exaggerated sense of politics as a sovereign exception inaccessible to the people. For Foucault, there are not one but two regimes of law: the sovereign (as analysed by Agamben) and the biopolitical. Of these, only sovereign law draws its power from the exception, whilst mechanisms of biopolitical control are democratically mediated by the state and popular consensus. Towards the end of his life, Foucault also became interested in economic liberalism, the

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system which is, for Muhle, the primary reason for social exclusion today (LNS.9.2002, 185). Mucchielli stressed that biopolitical measures tend to want to integrate all of those under their control into society, attempting to bring all citizens under the umbrella of the state. However, economic constraints on the nation supposedly limit the number of individuals that can be sustained by this system, and so there is a contradictory impulse to push those deemed not worthy of protection – generally a country’s most recent migrant populations – outside of the national borders (LNS.9.2002, 165). This is the banoptique logic described by Frédéric Neyrat (see Chapter 5), as states select those deemed worthy of protection and those worthy of total surveillance or expulsion. This is why Brossat cautions against seeing CRAs as simply identical to concentration camps. Jacques Rancière noted that as nation states are increasingly incapable of controlling the circulation of capital, they instead resort to taking a bigger hand in the circulation of people (LNS.34.2011, 120). Against Agamben, then, Brossat argues that we are not still in Rousset’s era of concentration camps because CRAs are not motivated by a wholly death-driven thanatopolitique: rather than being constructed solely to kill, camps are storage points, part of an economic logic demanding the circulation of bodies and the shifting of cheap excess labour around the globe to where it can best be exploited (LNS.26.2008, 5–19). Lignes thus integrated a Foucauldian analysis of CRAs into an international economic framework, aligning it with Balibar’s class-based depiction of contemporary racism and the division of labour. Although clearly repressive, CRAs are less like a tool of genocide and ethnic cleansing than part of a state’s attempts to negotiate between the free movement of labour demanded by liberalism and the demands of its citizens for jobs and national security. So, against Agamben’s sacralisation of sovereign power, which seems to allow for no active resistance, for Lignes it was Foucault who suggested possible models of political agency. Brossat held that Foucault liberated revolutionary hopes not only from a reliance on an idealised proletariat, but also from the aim of capturing the nation state, allowing for extra-parliamentary forms of politics to emerge. Foucault saw new, micropolitical struggles becoming possible with the appearance of unforeseen actors such as the sans-papiers, asylum seekers, the long-term unemployed and the youth of the banlieues. Rather than one unique political front opposing the current regime, these actors produced locally condensed micro-battles, Foucault’s participation in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons being a key example. Rousset

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is perhaps the paradigmatic figure of this specialist intellectual, arguing in his letter to former deportees that they are ‘specialists’ of the concentrationary universe and so should put this specific knowledge to work (LNS.2.2000, 159). In this sense, Foucault and Rousset appear to have had a belated legacy: as François Cusset argues, much activism since the 1995 social movements, and intellectual theories of extra-parliamentary agency developed from the late 1980s onwards, seem to be indebted to Foucault’s conception of micropolitics (2008b, 192). For Lignes, a return to Rousset allowed a militant response that linked genocides like the Holocaust to contemporary immigration policies through an international and universal analysis exploring the economic and political dynamics that made such exceptional measures possible. Against Agamben, the review resisted sacralising this kind of sovereign power, and instead looked towards Foucault’s model of micropolitical engagements to examine how local struggles could be effective modes of resistance. Building on the social movements of 1995, it was the activism of the sans-papiers that best represented this kind of micropolitical struggle. This chapter now examines the convergence between Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensual politics and the reality of sans-papiers activism, before finishing with an examination of Alain Badiou’s attempt to canalise the enthusiasm of existing struggles back into a more holistic programme with his ‘communist hypothesis’. Jacques Rancière and the sans-papiers Following Foucault, the question for Lignes in this period became what stronger theorisations of political agency were possible? Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou subsequently played a significant role in Lignes’ second series. As Nick Hewlett notes, their theories are particularly effective as ‘a critique of the professionalisation, cynicism, elitism and depoliticisation’ of Western parliamentary democracies (2007, 112). Both former Althusserians, their mature philosophies were formed during the PS’s conversion to neoliberalism in the 1980s, a period in which they became disenchanted with the state. Subsequently, militant activism outside of the state seemed to be the only viable option for progressive politics. Outside of the parliamentary sphere, ‘each of their systems is a way of enabling politics to take place, or detecting it and encouraging it where it does’ (Hewlett, 2007, 143). This made them both well-suited to Lignes’ reconceptualisation of political agency in

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the new millennium. For Rancière, politics is the process of combatting political exclusion by proactively enacting a situation of greater equality. Like Dionys Mascolo, Rancière sees formal democracy as a regulatory rather than emancipatory regime, and he therefore equates the state with the ‘police’ as a force geared towards maintaining the status quo. Instead, real politics occurs outside of parliament through the voicing of the voiceless, when those previously not heard begin to make their presence felt and subsequently force through changes which regulate their inclusion into society as a whole. In terms which are paradigmatic for Lignes, Rancière calls ‘consensus’ the transformation of politics into a normative police (LNS.8.2002, 41). In opposition to the consensual climate of the 1980s, he thus wanted to restore the conflictual and dissensual nature of politics. One central concern for Rancière and Lignes was the role of humanitarianism in depoliticising global conflicts. Rancière argued that the figure of the ‘absolute victim’ had led to the moralisation of humanitarian actions, including those surrounding issues of immigration and asylum (LNS.8.2002, 44). Alongside David Rousset, a rereading of Hannah Arendt was key for Rancière’s repoliticisation of human rights. Having herself been detained in France as an étranger indésirable, Arendt emphasised how much access to human rights depended upon having national citizenship. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she argued that it is refugees, those most fundamentally in need of protection, who are denied human rights, as they have no recognisable citizenship through which to demand them. Therefore ‘the presumably sacred and inalienable rights of man are shown to be entirely alienable’; as Balfour and Cadava stress, Arendt held that human rights ‘do not precede political ones’, and discourses of victimisation will not, by themselves, be enough to restore rights to those deprived of them (2004, 280–1). CRAs are a key example of this: as legal non-places, technically outside the national jurisdiction even when within the national borders, those detained in these centres have no access to human rights until formally granted citizenship. However, the creation of a strong, active political subjectivity is not incompatible with discourses of human rights. As Martin Crowley argued in his Lignes-published monograph, what needs to be bypassed is the conservative nature of the model of victimhood (2009, 164–6). Radicalising Arendt, Rancière conceives human rights as ‘the rights of those who make something of that inscription, who decide not only to “use” their rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of the power of the inscription’ (2004b, 303). Subjects denied rights

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can create a dissensus in the public sphere by acting as if they had the rights granted to normal citizens. As Dimitra Panapoulus summarised in the pages of Lignes, human rights need to be seen as prescriptions rather than norms: not just descriptions of which rights should exist, but axioms describing actions which assume that these rights are already granted (LNS.19.2006, 181). In terms of humanitarian aid, if ‘those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact’ their human rights, others can ‘inherit’ them and ‘enact them in their place’, often without the participation of the actors they are purporting to represent (Rancière, 2004b, 308). By seeing those without rights as victims to be protected, the humanitarian consensus becomes ‘the attempt to get rid of politics by ousting the surplus subjects and replacing them with real partners, social groups, identity groups, and so on’ (Rancière, 2004b, 306). As we saw above, although it was one of the key groups fighting for the conditions of migrants, Cimade also tacitly accepted the consensus that migration was a problem and that border control was legitimate, eroding migrants’ rights to claim citizenship on French soil. A rejection of the status of the ‘victim’ is, then, also a resistance to the passive submission to humanitarian assistance. For thinkers in Arendt’s wake, such as Brossat and Rancière, there is a need for political actors to emerge in situations normally managed via ‘apolitical’ humanitarian intervention. Rather than victims, Mucchielli called refugees ‘the vanquished’ [les vaincus] of history (LNS.9.2002, 156). In a key issue of Lignes, Vainqueurs/Vaincus (May 2002), Surya emphasised that the contemporary tendency to talk about victims and perpetrators rather than winners and losers, conquerors and the vanquished, is symptomatic of a widespread depoliticisation of global conflict (LNS.8.2002, 5). The victims of global conflicts need to be pitied and sent humanitarian aid, but an active attempt to turn these defeated groups into political actors with their own agency is a rarer phenomenon. Rephrasing such events in terms of a conflict restores the antagonisms which are neutralised by discourses of victimhood, and allows the potential formation of a political subject. Crucially, alongside the physical violence which results from conflicts, Surya also stressed the plight of those who have been vanquished economically. Those suffering famine, for example, are often portrayed as victims of a humanitarian crisis rather than of the excessive deregulation of the market (LNS.8.2002, 6). Global capitalism is thus described by Surya as a form of structural violence which leaves many citizens defeated both politically and economically. This linkage

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of economic and political conquest forms an analytical framework in which post- and neocolonial tensions can be related back to issues of immigration, fiscal austerity and neoliberalism in France. The promotion of the figure of the vaincu over the victim is thus a strategic move to emphasise how people came to be dominated, and what kind of political agency they could form in response. In Lignes’ pages, Jean-Paul Dollé noted that the sans-papiers represented the most significant example of economic victims rebranding themselves as active agents (LNS.21.2006, 199). Critics have also noted the confluence of Rancière’s political theory with sans-papiers activism: as Sandro Mezzadra puts is, if ‘politics exists only as the subjectification of a part with “no part”’, it is difficult not to read Rancière’s theory through the lens of the sans-papiers as they are ‘the most obvious candidates to occupy the role’ (2011, 135). Immigrants in France are regularly held up by scholars, such as Vittorio Longhi, as an exemplary case of subjects changing from being ‘passive victims’ to ‘new, conscious social agents, capable of fighting for their own rights’ (2013, ix). During the wave of social movements in the mid-1990s, rather than referring to themselves as illegal immigrants or clandestins, migrants consciously adopted the term sans-papiers as a new identity, one that overtly identified them as legitimate presences rendered illegal only through bureaucratic incompetence. Instead of hiding from the authorities, they chose to assert their presence, stating that they were sans-papiers of French creation, that they had reason and purpose to be in France, and that they were not leaving. In 2009, some sans-papiers created the Ministry for the Regularisation of all the Sans-Papiers, a symbolic move demanding mutual recognition from government ministers. French sans-papiers also participated in an open letter entitled ‘To Our Sisters and Brothers in Africa: A Common Struggle for the Freedom of Movement and the Right to Stay’, in which they affirmed that they were positive social protagonists rather than victims. Crucially, they also began contesting discourses of integration. In the republican framework, the onus is on the immigrant to learn French and to assume traditional customs: integration means that the migrant must successfully assimilate into society as it currently stands. Increasingly, however, demonstrations organised by the sans-papiers were ‘marked by a distinct cultural presence that included foreign-language placards, music, dress, and performance’, insisting on both cultural difference and national belonging (McNevin, 2011, 107). They now pushed the symbolic parameters of French society, demanding not simply integration but the

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right to actively and dynamically change the social fabric of France. As Rancière argued in Lignes, it is normally up to the state ‘to decide who does and who does not belong to the class of those who have the right to be here’ [de décider qui appartient ou n’appartient pas à la classe de ceux qui ont le droit d’être ici] (LNS.34.2011, 122). This essentially translates as the power to allow or suppress certain identities on French soil. The sans-papiers attempted to assume for themselves the ability to define which identities could or could not belong to the national demos. For Rancière, as for Badiou, to dire le monde is not to describe the world, but to prescribe it (LNS.19.2006, 169). The developing protests of the sans-papiers are, then, an excellent example of a group instantiating a new division of the sensible, demanding not just recognition but that they be accepted as they are, intransigently appearing in public in all their cultural difference rather than merely requesting permission to invisibly integrate. This is the stance taken in the petition published in Lignes, ‘Nous ne sommes pas des modèles d’intégration’. The state had offered €3,000 prizes for individuals who had undertaken outstanding processes of social integration via exemplary participation in French civic, cultural, economic or sporting life (LNS.27.2008, 209). The signatories, including intellectuals, a Renault executive and the French rapper Saïdou Dias, rejected this notion of exemplary integration: We, the descendants of slaves who arrived in the postcolonial migrations, who come from the so-called ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods, refuse to have our personal trajectories, our academic, social or professional achievements instrumentalised […] in order to stigmatise those of us who took paths other than that of ‘successful integration’. [Nous, issu-e-s de l’immigration postcoloniale, des quartiers dits ‘sensibles’, descendant-e-s d’esclaves, refusons que soient instrumentalisés nos parcours personnels, nos réussites scolaires, sociales ou professionnelles (…) en vue de mieux stigmatiser ceux des nôtres qui ont pris d’autres chemins relevant moins de ‘la bonne intégration’]. (LNS.27.2008, 209)

Against instituting a norm of the ‘good immigrant’, they affirmed solidarity with those who live differently: notably with both those who choose, or choose not, to wear a foulard. As well as demanding the regularisation of the sans-papiers, more radically the petition claimed the right to subversive behaviour accorded to any other ordinary citizen (LNS.27.2008, 211). Under a regime statistically under pressure to expel

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migrants, any minorities found acting out could see their non-standard behaviour used as a pretext for expulsion, whereas so-called ‘FrenchFrench’ citizens can behave as strangely or subversively as they wished: illegal behaviour could result at worst in jail, but not expulsion and the revocation of citizenship. By demanding the right to non-normative behaviour, a right granted to ‘native’ French citizens, minorities were asserting their claim to equal citizenship in exemplary fashion. Some more activist contributors to Lignes, such as Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, tried to support the sans-papiers in their development into active subjects. Grandmaison published the collection Douce France (2009) in collaboration with the organisation Le Réseau éducation sans frontières (RESF).1 As well as publicly revealing illegal state practices, such as the expulsion of minors, the RESF set up support committees for teenagers threatened with deportation, providing them with advice, a supportive presence in tribunals and, if necessary, intervening physically at airports to prevent expulsions. Pierre Cordelier, another RESF activist, suggested that Lignes readers could shelter children faced with expulsion in the petition ‘Nous les prenons sous notre protection’ (LNS.26.2008, 165). Article L622-1, passed in 2005, made it illegal for anyone to provide direct or indirect aid to someone entering, remaining or passing through France illegally: as Longhi argues, such laws render even solidarity a ‘real crime’ (2013, 56). Cordelier therefore encouraged people to openly inform the government that they had broken this law by housing individuals without the required papers (LNS.26.2008, 167). This provided both active support for the migrant individual in question, but was also an overt performance of civil disobedience challenging the state. Such micropolitical interventions were effected on a case-by-case basis. However, as Miriam Ticktin astutely observes, the sans-papiers soon encountered the ‘power of global capitalism’, an obstacle they ‘have not been entirely successful in challenging’ (2011, 44). Subsequently, if the sans-papiers are often seen as the exemplary figures of Rancière’s dissensual politics, does their failure to challenge current neoliberal policies also have ramifications for Rancière’s theory? Anne McNevin notes that, whilst many of the sans-papiers initiatives have had positive results (usually the regularisation of several thousand migrants), ‘their activism works to contest citizenship in only the most elementary way’ (2011, 115). Successful regularisations wrung from the Sarkozy 1 See http://www.educationsansfrontieres.org/ [accessed 2 August 2014].

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administration only further provoked the government’s ire; in response, Sarkozy introduced even more restrictive measures for those new migrants wishing to enter the country. Working alongside trade unions such as the Confédération générale du travail, the sans-papiers shifted the debate onto the terrain of labour by demonstrating their market value: black market labour produced economic benefits for France, sometimes almost single-handedly keeping sectors like catering afloat. By doing so, the sans-papiers secured regularisations for those who worked in industries with specific labour shortages. Yet this also legitimated the prevailing consensus that immigration was only justifiable when economically useful, and was otherwise an unacceptable social burden. The citizenship they acquired therefore remained ‘an essentially commercial citizenship’ (Mezzadra, 2011, 128), predicating their presence on their economic use value and not on broader arguments in favour of transnational citizenship or global solidarity. Furthermore, Sandro Mezzadra emphasised that there ‘is no capitalism without migration’ (2011, 125), and that the existence of clandestine employment in the ‘informal economy […] is in many aspects emblematic of the present phase of globalisation’ (2011, 131). As Ticktin recounts, workers have claimed that it is ‘so much easier to find work on the black market’ and that, once they actually have papers and a legal right to remain in the country, finding legitimate work is almost impossible (2011, 43). Therefore, just as Lignes emphasised the economic function of CRAs, Mezzadra argues that contemporary regimes do not solely desire the ‘exclusion’ of migrants, but instead seek to ‘exploit the elements of excess’: by maintaining migrants in a state of illegality, states can undertake ‘a process of differential inclusion’ (2011, 131), regularising only an economically acceptable number of exceptional workers whilst maintaining a cheaper reserve army of illegal labour. With this in mind, contesting migration laws solely with a commercial logic could be seen as actively buying into the logic of contemporary liberal states which essentially support freedom of movement when it works for their economy. The sans-papiers, then, have often been a privileged example for intellectuals and scholars, Lignes included, both because of the radical challenge they posed to the republican model of citizenship and because they seemed to promise a new form of effective action. However, the extent to which such actions have done much to substantially alter European immigration policy is debateable. Furthermore, Mezzadra adds that such an exclusive focus on the struggles of irregular migrants has also meant that the problems of ‘regular’ migrants are often ignored

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(2011, 124). For Rancière, if politics is the production of a people that is different from the population that is seen, named and counted by the state (L.30.1997, 43), the amelioration of the lives of those legal migrants already counted by the state needs to find some other outlet, presumably within those operations of parliamentary democracy to which Rancière refers as the ‘police’. This perhaps signals the limit of Rancière’s conception of eruptive politics in which hitherto unaccounted-for groups demand recognition; often, such seemingly marginal groups can be fully integrated without fundamentally changing the social order. Nation states are operating within an internationalised neoliberal framework in which a certain amount of both legal and illegal immigration is seen as an economic boon, and the growing conservative nationalism can be mobilised to divide and expel the remainder. As many of the above examples suggest, the local successes of activists often merely displace the problem: an amelioration of the conditions in CRAs encouraged the state to increase the unmonitored use of mobile locaux de rétention whilst tightening border controls; and the regularisation of a small number of sans-papiers led to tougher entry requirements for other migrants and reinforced the precariousness of the cheap labour desired by multinational companies. The micropolitical struggles of activists and intellectuals have undoubtedly aided a minority of people to become political actors and take more active control over their livelihood. Yet, as Crowley argues, there is also an urgent need to ‘denounce the production of deprivation as a technique of domination’ [dénoncer la production de la déchéance comme technique de domination] (2009, 159). This is a much broader, global task than these local actions can undertake in isolation. Ticktin notes that the sans-papiers did articulate their struggle ‘at the level of the global political economy’ and were attentive to these ‘new forms of imperialism’ (2011, 45–6): the problem was not their theory, but developing forms of activism that could fundamentally challenge the global neoliberal structure. To conclude this chapter, we turn to Alain Badiou, a thinker who managed to gain a large, mass-media audience, to step outside of the more restricted milieu of reviews and therefore mobilise ‘the idea of communism’ as a means to powerfully unite micropolitical struggles into a broader contestatory movement.

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Alain Badiou – Political Subjects and Political Organisation Returning to the voluntarist Marxism largely abandoned in French thought since the 1980s, Alain Badiou reaffirmed that philosophy’s task was not just to interpret the world but to transform it. After the deconstruction of the individual subject, Badiou reconstructed a transindividual theory of the Subject as a powerful site of agency. Positioning his work against the philosophies of difference, which often began with a negative concern for the violence which mankind can do to Others (Levinas), in Ethics Badiou stated that ‘Man is to be identified by his affirmative thought’ and his ‘positive capability for Good’ (2001, 16). This was a deliberate shift away from the humanitarian aim of protecting others to a focus on the productive possibilities of all people. For Badiou, such capabilities are best mobilised when individuals combine to compose a Subject. As summarised by Peter Hallward, a Subject emerges following an Event, an absolute novelty which ‘breaks fundamentally with the prevailing routine’ (2003, 107). A new Truth enters the world which thus suggests ‘impersonal, rigorous, and universal’ implications that need implementing by a Subject (Hallward, 2003, 143). A Subject, then, is not simply an ordinary individual, but the composition of elements ‘that respond or “connect” positively’ to an Event: groups of people, demonstrations, publications, art, graffiti or other cultural manifestations, strike waves, new technological developments, etc., can all be composite elements of a Subject (Hallward, 2003, 141). Events happen within Badiou’s four generic regimes of Truth: Science, Art, Love and Politics. The fascination with discovering the unknown, the creative dedication to artistic forms or the life-changing nature of an intense relationship can all produce an Event. This chapter, however, focuses on politics to emphasise that one way of reading Badiou’s theory is as a philosophic account of activism: the subjectivity of militancy. For Lignes, this posed two key questions: firstly, in a period dominated by the Sarkozy presidency, neoliberalism and securitisation, what could be achieved in the absence of an Event? and, secondly, what role should parliament and the state play in politics? As two of the review’s key thinkers during this period, both producing several monographs for Lignes in the new millennium, Badiou’s debates with Daniel Bensaïd provoked particularly revealing responses. Bensaïd had clearly been influenced by Badiou in the 1990s. Le Pari mélancolique (1997) referenced Badiou’s four generic regimes of truth when stating that it is political events, scientific inventions, artistic

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creations and amorous encounters that make previously unknown figures of possibility appear (1997, 295). In the period of political disenchantment following the winter years of the 1980s, theories allowing for the sudden resurgence of revolutionary activity were attractive to Bensaïd. However, he became more sceptical of Badiou’s thought after the new social movements in the mid-1990s saw more concrete and tangible manifestations of political contestation emerge. He began to criticise Badiou’s ‘sacralisation of the evental miracle’, and argued that relying on the emergence of such miraculous ruptures precluded the possibility of proactive political strategising beforehand (2004, 97). Ernesto Laclau agreed, calling ‘religious conversion’ the paradigmatic form of Subject formation for Badiou (2004, 132). For Badiou, people are only passionately drawn into a political Subject after a major event (the typical example being May ’68). Yet, as Laclau notes, this idea of conversion is too wholesale, as ‘social agents share, at the level of a situation, values, ideas, beliefs etc.’ that predate an Event and predispose their (non-)participation in such an Event (2004, 135). Other factors thus contribute to the formation of a political Subject, whether it be the political predisposition of actors to a certain cause, a change in cultural and economic circumstances, or a more gradual process of political education and parliamentary reforms. Critics such as Hewlett have thus agreed with Bensaïd and Laclau that, in relying on the eruption of an unpredictable Event, Badiou’s theory ‘leaves the political analyst in a passive, rather ineffectual position’ (2007, 58): if one just has to wait for an Event to happen, what can the intellectual do in the meantime to provoke real change? Responding to Bensaïd, Badiou noted that, soon after the French publication of L’être et l’événement in 1988, thinkers such as Deleuze, Nancy and Lyotard had quickly made him realise that his ‘purely ontological characterisation of the Event’ was in fact impossible (2009, 361). Such an ex nihilo appearance of an Event was, he agreed, miraculous, and lacked a fundamental structure of contextual support. Hallward has since noticed that, by 2003, Badiou was already describing how ‘the Subject “appears” over time, over the course of a more articulated process’, rather than via this more instantaneous creation from nothing (2003, 145). Philosophically, Badiou theorised this in the sequel to L’être et l’événement – Logiques des mondes (2006) – in which the ‘principle innovation’ was a move beyond ‘the rigid opposition between situation and Event’ (Badiou, 2009, 361). Whilst this modification of his theory of the Event occurs in the middle of a dense philosophical œuvre, which

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only Badiou’s most dedicated followers would have read, Lignes allowed Badiou the opportunity to filter his altered theory through contemporary political affairs in a more accessible format to reach a wider public. From 2002 onwards, Badiou’s contributions to Lignes demonstrated a precise role for the intellectual in the absence of Events, his articles developing into the Circonstances book series (an emulation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations series, and therefore also a clear return to the figure of the engaged intellectual). Badiou’s Le Réveil de l’histoire (2011) argued that an Event ‘does not emerge from nothing’ [n’émerge pas de rien]; instead, there are indicators of a possible future event that can be traced (Badiou, 2011b, 97). Once detected, if these traces are subjected to processes of intensification, contraction and localisation, an Event can be forced, this being the principle task of militant activism (Badiou, 2011b, 98). As an example, Badiou draws on the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria in 2011, known as the ‘Arab Spring’. Despite recognising the striking novelty of these uprisings, Badiou claims that they did not yet constitute an Event. The Egyptian and Tunisian rebels had succeeded in turning the initially nihilistic and reactive revolts into a pre-political popular uprising (Badiou, 2011b, 55), and so talk of a reawakening of history was justifiable as these movements opened a distinctly novel historical sequence (Badiou, 2011b, 61); however, for Badiou these uprisings remained essentially negative as they lacked the affirmative element of an ‘Idea’ to guide the process towards the radical novelty of an Event (2011b, 63). Badiou goes on to suggest that ‘communism’ could have supplied that Idea. This emphasis on programmatic orientation is Badiou’s form of political strategising. Crucially, his first two articles for Lignes both open with a section entitled ‘Méthode’, clearly setting out the intellectual’s political role (LNS.8.2002, 9; LNS.9.2002, 10). When faced with current events, such as the attacks on the World Trade Center, philosophy is not concerned with the affect of a situation, but its name (LNS.8.2002, 10). Firstly, a name determines a Subject, in this case those rallying to the US; secondly, it supports various predicates, such as the conflation of terrorism with Islam (LNS.8.2002, 11); lastly, it entirely determines the direction of the current historical sequence, as here the ‘War on Terror’ replaced the previous ‘Cold War’ sequence. Badiou subsequently noted that philosophy should generally not accept the most popular, predominant names: these usually represent particular, rather than universal interests, and are therefore under the control of established powers and media propaganda (LNS.8.2002, 11).

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What follows is an attempt to ‘force’ the situation, not by physically changing its state but by changing the language surrounding the situation. Rather than Blanchot’s conceptual questioning and probing of fundamental questions, opening up an infinite plurality, Badiou’s work on language is about narrowing down options. Like a mathematician trying to isolate different aspects of a problem step by step, Badiou’s axiomatic thought is oriented towards simplification and binary oppositions to ‘split’ any given situation into two. As well as resisting the dominant names provided by the state, philosophy must ‘rationally reconstitute the reserve of affirmative infinity which each project of liberation demands’ [reconstituer rationnellement la réserve d’infinité affirmative que tout projet libérateur exige] (LNS.8.2002, 34). One method is the designation of new names: so, for example, rather than the vague emphasis on the anonymous individuals excluded from society, the explicit naming of the sans-papiers helped to bring a new political Subject into being. The next step is the declaration of precise and rigorous political orientations (LNS.9.2002, 24). These ‘prescriptions’ are targeted and specific statements that not only demand a maximal sense of justice, but attempt to institute it. Between 1995 and 2007, Badiou’s Organisation Politique (OP) mobilised the axiom ‘All those who are here are from here’ [Tous ceux qui sont ici sont d’ici] to directly inaugurate a form of active citizenship. Legal and illegal migrants were described as participating in French social life, and therefore were already ‘here’ and as deserving of the status of citizen as the naturalised French. Badiou has, then, developed a distinct methodology for intellectual activity: sequences are precisely named, subjects located, axioms developed and prescriptions derived that will give the necessary clarity for a directed political agency to develop in the hope of triggering an Event. Badiou’s OP was created as a political platform that was explicitly not a party. The USSR had demonstrated the dangers of a vanguard party dictating politics from on high, and the failure of the PS in the parliamentary sphere in the 1980s had left Badiou further disillusioned with the party form. Nevertheless, some of the OP’s activities seem to share the weaknesses of Rancière’s dissensual agency. Despite its strident anti-parliamentarianism, many of the OP’s concrete protests relied on convincing either companies or the state to ratify its desired goals (better wages and working conditions, or the regularisation of sans-papiers). The OP did not therefore seem to live up to its pretentions as a radical new form of political action, some commentators comparing it to a traditional trade union that needed the state

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as a collaborative interlocutor. Since the dissolution of the OP in 2007, however, through Lignes Badiou has been attempting a broader, international intervention by reinvesting in the word ‘communism’. Without the explicit orientation afforded by names like communism, Badiou states that emancipatory politics is presented in a purely negative manner (2011c, 11). As discussed in Chapter 2, Blanchot attempted to articulate a community around a constitutive negativity, for example via the logic of the sans. Yet Badiou argues that this is not enough, and so from the Lignes publication of De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (translated as The Meaning of Sarkozy in 2008) onwards, he continually affirmed that the ‘Communist Hypothesis’ was the only true egalitarian political project remaining. Given its tarnished reputation, however, Badiou aimed to divorce the word communism from the history of existing socialism. As Surya notes, Badiou emphasised that the name ‘communism’ was a hypothesis or an idea representing the desire for emancipation (2009b, 54). Surya himself would prefer the term ‘anarchism’ over ‘communism’, but concedes that the former term has never mobilised a mass movement to the same extent as the latter (2009b, 55). In this sense, ‘communism’ does not name a final goal or an ideal society, but rather ‘the universal vocation contained in a localised stage of the politics of emancipation’ [la vocation universelle contenue dans une étape localisée de la politique d’émancipation] (Badiou, 2011c, 11). Bensaïd agreed that, as a regulatory strategic hypothesis, the name ‘communism’ could provide the affirmative political orientation that was missing from pseudo-events such as the Arab Spring and the banlieue riots. Despite the strategic differences between Badiou and Bensaïd, this level of agreement testifies to the timeliness of Badiou’s agenda: just six years after the muted response to the Lignes issue Désir de révolution? (February 2001), the prevailing mood had shifted towards a much stronger embrace of radical politics. More broadly, Badiou’s mobilisation of ‘communism’ struck a chord with both intellectuals and the public. De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? sold 60,000 copies, 30 times more than Lignes expected, creating the ‘Badiou phenomenon’ in the French media (Garuet, 2009, 149). Badiou followed this success with the more programmatic L’Hypothèse communiste (2010), and three conferences on ‘The Idea of Communism’, co-organised with Slavoj Žižek, were held in London (2009), Berlin (2010) and New York (2011). Badiou’s success was accompanied by a publishing boom, as books on Marxism proliferated after the financial crisis, and this ‘opened the way for a reactivation of the strong link

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between radical philosophy and politics’ (Žižek and Douzinas, 2010, ix). By 2011, Badiou therefore claimed a measure of success for his endeavour as the word ‘communism’ had rediscovered its aura in debates surrounding political emancipation (2011a, 7). Badiou was using Lignes, and the subsequent media attention, to relaunch the affirmative Idea he felt was lacking in global political struggles, this being the most ambitious example of his intellectual strategy to tackle neoliberalism in an internationally articulated manner. With Badiou’s enhanced fame, however, came an equally vociferous backlash from those seeing him as a dogmatic relic of the 1960s radical left, critics within Lignes including Gérard Bensussan, Bernard Sichère, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Marc Goldschmit, Jean-Loup Amselle and Jean-Luc Nancy. Yet the most fecund debate for Lignes involved the exchanges between Badiou and Bensaïd on the value of parliamentary politics. As contemporary nation states are ruled by capitalist democracies, in Lignes Badiou rejected the idea that voting is the free expression of opinions; instead, he stressed the essential ‘conservatism’ of voting (LNS.9.2002, 14). Since he sees nation states as essentially controlled by a minority of oligarchs and vested bourgeois interests, for Badiou the ballot box will only ever guarantee that everything will continue as before. Railing against formal democracy in the wake of Sartre and Mascolo, Badiou asserted that ‘Voting is abdicating’ [Voter, c’est abdiquer] (LNS.9.2002, 30). Therefore, for Badiou, any new communist sequence would have to be fully divorced from the existing mechanisms of state power (2011c, 20). Notably, in L’être et l’événement, Badiou constructed a mathematical ontology in which the state of a situation (implying also the political nation state) is a categorically conservative force incapable of bringing about genuine change: developing his philosophy in the context of the consensual shift to the right in the 1980s and 1990s, Badiou responded by ontologising his frustration with parliamentary politics in a philosophy in which the state can never change without outside interference. Crucially, this pitted him in stark opposition to neo-Trotskyists (such as Bensaïd) who argued in favour of a renewed and democratised party. Bensaïd described Badiou, in his stubborn resistance to even considering electoral politics as a viable battleground, as being misanthropically disenchanted (2008, 350). Worse still, his theory of the Subject was in danger of lapsing into a pure political voluntarism which overstated the political impact which individuals could have without wider structural support. In contrast to the self-effacement of the intellectual promoted by Robert Antelme,

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Badiou was very clearly returning to a model in which intellectuals created a political vanguard to direct the rest of the population. By contrast, as a long-time leader of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), Bensaïd firmly believed in political parties. He argued that both reform and revolution had their time and place, yet in the present moment parliamentary democracy appeared to be the inescapable horizon of contemporary politics. Without parties, there simply was no politics for Bensaïd (2001, 203). Rather than extraparliamentary groups, such as Badiou’s OP, Bensaïd held that only a political party could provide the necessary structure and framework to ensure the long-term duration and memory of ephemeral events and to conjugate individual trajectories within a broader, collective and effective apparatus. Subsequently, Bensaïd’s conversion of the LCR into the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) in 2009 was an attempt to translate the explosion and effervescence of the new social movements into electoral gains. In Lignes, against the review’s prevailing parliamentary pessimism, he argued for the potential efficacy of a party of militants in nourishing the principles of democratic life (LNS.25.2008, 100). Furthermore, whilst Badiou is often criticised for his abandonment of a Marxist critique of political economy and his lack of concern for social welfare, alongside Olivier Besancenot in the NPA Bensaïd had to develop concrete policy proposals. They aimed to anticipate social and environmental needs through democratic planning (Bensaïd and Besancenot, 2009, 24), proposing the nationalisation of the automobile industry, a significant rise of the minimum wage, the provision of a roof for all citizens, heavy taxation of petrol and the relaxation of intellectual property laws. Although Lignes did not participate directly in such policy debates, it interviewed Bensaïd at the launch of his new electoral platform in 2008, providing an opening to this sphere and maintaining a tangential link to this form of collective agency. Bensaïd was not around to guide the NPA into their first electoral campaign, however, as he passed away in January 2010: a Lignes issue was dedicated to him and his work, in which Surya called him a friend of the review (LNS.32.2010, 5) and Badiou praised him as ‘a distant companion’ [un compagnon lointain] (LNS.32.2010, 21). However, the divide between Badiou and Bensaïd on the value of the parliamentary sphere continued to split contributors to the review. Leading up to the 2007 presidential election, Lignes collaborator and future editorial board member Alain Jugnon published Avril-22: ceux qui préfèrent ne pas, a collection of texts arguing against the very process of voting,

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which included Lignes contributors Badiou, Surya, Belhaj Kacem, Sichère and Brossat. Jugnon’s article ‘Voter, pourquoi? c’est la question. Voter: pour qui? ce n’est pas la question’ directly influenced the title of the subsequent Lignes’ inquest five years later: Non pas: Voter pour qui mais: pourquoi voter? [Not: Who to Vote for, but: Why Vote?] (February 2012). About 55% of responses were in favour of voting, with 45% against. Catherine Paoletti, Charles Alunni and Edith Azam repeated Badiou’s denigration of formal democracy and capitalist oligarchies; Fabien Tarby resurrected Mascolo’s call to dismantle the Fifth Republic; whilst Jean-Loup Amselle and Jean-Paul Curnier referred to the EU and the post-crisis technocratic governments in Greece and Italy as further examples of the current democratic deficit. As a consequence, numerous contributors drew on Rancière’s championing of a dissensual activism as a more important task than voting. Bensaïd’s former collaborator, Isabelle Garo, conversely argued that voter abstention was in itself the problem, and others claimed that they would be happier to vote if blank or spoiled ballots were actually counted so as to register their protest. The majority of those who did vote, like Laurent Margantin, admitted that they did so principally to avoid the worst, rather than through any particular feeling of optimism; significantly, many argued that it did in fact matter who was in charge, the FN or the PS, Bush or Obama, and that the impact this could have on people’s daily lives was worth overcoming your personal or ideological disdain for the ballot box. When the presidential elections of 2012 arrived, without Bensaïd and further harmed by the departure of the charismatic Besancenot, the NPA only received 1.15% in the first round, a dramatic reduction from the LCR’s 4.1% in 2007. Yet there was reasonable success for the Front de Gauche (formed from splinters of the PS and the NPA), Jean-Luc Mélenchon taking fourth place with 11.1%. For Hewlett, these results suggested that ‘the politics of liberalism […] have worn very thin’ (2012, 418–19). However, Marine Le Pen’s FN was the real winner of the popular vote with 17.9%. François Hollande and the PS were eventual winners, but again perhaps only by integrating the increasingly tough stance on immigration into their own programme. As Sudhir Hazareesingh notes, ‘the most popular Socialist in the first two years of the Hollande administration was the hard-line Interior Minister Manuel Valls, whose profile bears a troubling resemblance to that of Nicholas Sarkozy – right down to the stigmatisation of the Roma community’ (2015, 266). Sarkozy was immensely unpopular with Lignes, becoming the first president to have an issue devoted to him: the satirical

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Dictionnaire critique du ‘Sarkozysme’ (October 2010). Yet a year into Hollande’s presidency, Lignes argued that not much had changed. For Surya, the political stigmatisation and exclusion of the roms signalled a degree of policy continuation that totally undermined the notion of a regulatory alternance between the right and left (LNS.41.2013, 5–6). The issue Ce qu’il reste de la politique (May 2013) replayed the frustrations of Pourquoi Voter, again with around 50% of contributors rejecting the notion that the parliamentary sphere provided any authentic political action. The disenchantment with the PS, originating from the 1980s, has thus clearly not abated, and the failure of any alternative parties on the left to gain a parliamentary foothold has instead led to a constant questioning as to what kind of political agency is really provided from the electoral process. Perpetual Crisis, Perpetual Pessimism In his introduction to Décomposition recomposition politiques (May 2008), Surya argued that this drive to locate new forms of political agency was an attempt to go against the grain of Ligne’s default critical pessimism (LNS.25.2008, 5). As this chapter has argued, in their various ways, Rousset and his Trotskyist inheritors (Bensaïd), alongside Foucault and the ex-Althusserians (Rancière and Badiou), all developed political positions designed to emphasise the capabilities of ordinary people and their ability to make informed, effective and progressive interventions. The sans-papiers struggle was seen as one of significant strategic importance, both as a form of politics which conformed to Rancière’s theories and also one which enjoyed a certain amount of success. Yet it could be argued that this kind of action has yet to substantially address the problems of global capitalism. As a result, a form of stronger agency with a more focused political orientation was sought between Badiou and Bensaïd. Rather than the negatively constituted communities of Blanchot, Badiou is here much closer to Mascolo’s attempts to give the word communism a positive, affirmative sense to orientate action: Badiou makes this link explicit by referring to ‘le sens et les usages du mot “Communisme”’ [the meaning and uses of the word ‘Communism’] (2011a), a clear parallel to Mascolo’s Sur le sens et l’usage du mot ‘gauche’ (2011). Alongside Badiou’s intervention being received with enthusiasm from some quarters, the 2012 election results also suggested a repolarisation

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of the electorate. Despite the strong showing for Mélénchon, however, the past few years for Lignes have been characterised by a return to the review’s initial pessimism. Bensaïd died in 2010, Brossat left the review’s editorial board in 2011, and interventions from Badiou, Rancière and the more actively engaged militants have since declined. The most recent political issues of Lignes have focused on the resurgence of the far right, anti-Semitism and homophobia (October 2014), the recent terrorist attacks (October 2015), and the historical legacy and pernicious returns of France’s historical fascist movements (May 2016). In many ways, then, it feels as if the review has come full circle, returning to its early concerns with fascism. With the terror attacks in Paris and Nice further ratcheting up racial and religious tension, the FN rode ‘a wave of economic and cultural populism’ as the only party ‘enjoying some momentum’ (Hazareesingh, 2015, 263). A poll published in Le Monde (3 June 2016) saw Hollande favoured by only 14% of the electorate, Sarkozy by 21% and Le Pen the clear frontrunner at 28%. In retrospect, the years between 2002 and 2012 feel like a more positive, militant hiatus in Lignes’ history. Perhaps, then, the most pertinent feature discussed in this chapter was not the resurgent left-wing activism, but the anxieties surrounding further securitisation, ruling through crisis management and the return of Sarkozy and a belligerent right. The issues of national and cultural identity, first raised in Chapter 4, have only been exacerbated, the ban of burkinis on French beaches in the summer of 2016 providing the latest instance of a struggle between multiculturalism, Islam and French republicanism. To conclude this study, the following chapter therefore critically analyses Lignes’ thorny relationship to issues of identity politics and cultural expression.

chapter seven

Excluded from Thought? Lignes, Literary Conservatism and Identity Politics Excluded from Thought?

A constant tension has haunted the last 30 years of French political and cultural life: how to square universal republicanism with an increasingly multicultural French society. From the foulard affair in 1989 to the burkini ban on French beaches in the summer of 2016, it is France’s Muslim population that has borne the brunt of discourses of cultural difference and assimilation. Yet, in France, identity politics in general is often treated with a variety of negative responses, from suspicion to hostility. Attempting to campaign on behalf of ethnic, religious, sexual or gendered minorities is often seen as a form of divisive communautarisme and a threat to the French social fabric. This general resistance to identity politics often seems particularly strange when viewed from the anglophone world, where the struggle for minority rights is a contested but still normalised form of political mobilisation. For those interested in post-war French thought it can seem even stranger, given that much of the conceptual apparatus that fuelled minority studies in the UK and North America was provided by French thinkers of the 1960s. The new disciplines of postcolonial theory, gender studies and queer theory were heavily impacted by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Significantly, just as French Theory was being popularised in the anglophone academy, the intellectual backlash in France from the mid-1970s onwards meant that ‘the mere possibility of discussing theory was virtually banished’ (Cusset, 2008a, 309). As a result, whilst the canon wars waged in American humanities departments and French

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thinkers were blamed for an assault on tried and tested academic values, French institutions were virtually immune to the challenges posed by French Theory. Though it has since become ‘something of a commonplace’ to assert the French resistance to postcolonial studies and queer theory, these disciplines have slowly begun to establish themselves in France (Forsdick and Murphy, 2009, 8). As well as the introduction of specialist journals (such as Genre, sexualité & société and Études coloniales), the review of the International College of Philosophy, Rue Descartes, has been particularly open to French Theory. Activist reviews with an international and theoretical outlook, such as Multitudes, also express their interest in subaltern, minority, postcolonial, gender and queer studies. Even ‘the French resistance to cultural studies’ is somewhat diminishing (Downing, 2012, 227), as demonstrated by this book’s extensive use of François Cusset’s work. Nevertheless, the open affirmation of distinctive cultural differences remains difficult to articulate publicly in France, both theoretically and politically. Lignes, as one of the French reviews with the closest ties to la pensée 68, could be expected to cleave closer than most to anglophone approaches to identity issues. The review was wary of stigmatising France’s Muslim minority and quickly abandoned discourses of laïcité when they became overtly nationalistic and Islamophobic. Petitions in the review also supported the right of migrants to openly display their cultural difference rather than assimilate invisibly into French national culture. Yet Lignes’s strategic defence of minority populations did not necessarily lead to a wholesale embrace of identity politics. In the issue Identités indécises (October 2001), Surya highlighted a division among the contributors between those who believed there was a deficit of identitarian discourses in France and those who thought that overemphasising identity risked suffocating singularity (LNS.6.2001, 6). For the most part, those in favour of cultivating a stable sense of identity, such as Zygmunt Bauman, argued that this was a necessary response to the destructuring effects of neoliberalism and the precariousness of the labour market (LNS.6.2001, 12). Fethi Benslama had similarly stressed migrants’ need to redefine new poles of psychological attachment when acclimatising to a new cultural context. The arguments in favour of ‘identity’ tended, then, to emphasise the psychological benefits of a stable self-identity, rather than stressing the desirability of a political struggle for minority rights. This issue contained some of the very few articles on feminism and gender published in Lignes – Catherine Malabou on Judith Butler (LNS.6.2001, 150–75) and Rada Iveković on

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the gendered nature of nationalism (LNS.6.2001, 128–48) – but such articles remained rare. Throughout this book, several sources of the review’s wariness regarding identity categories have been identified: republicanism, post-foundational politics, domination theory and a potentially exclusionary literary exceptionalism. Firstly, although Lignes abandoned republican discourses early on, a latent republicanism remained in the writing of some contributors. Daniel Bensaïd was pro-immigration and supported policies of positive discrimination to help migrants settle in. However, Alex Callinicos noted a ni-nisme (a neither-nor-ism) regarding overt displays of cultural difference such as the foulard, which after closer inspection turns out to be ‘his default position when confronting conflicts over identity’ (2008, 158). Bensaïd avoided a strongly partisan stance on cultural difference, preferring not to comment on identity issues if at all possible. Callinicos argues that this attitude betrays ‘the influence of the Republican ideology’ on Bensaïd (2008, 159), and this is not uncommon in Lignes. For some, this influence is latent, but for others, such as Alain Badiou, it is much more explicit. Badiou held that politics should be blind to particularity and predicated on the kind of universal rights championed by the initial republican project, and he developed this stance into his own philosophical universalism via St Paul (discussed further below). Secondly, the anti-foundationalism of deconstruction undermined the legitimacy of any exclusive community. Jean-Luc Nancy warned that identity politics can always tend towards the totalitarian extermination of the Other, and the return of interethnic violence to the Balkans in the 1990s confirmed these fears. Lignes’ perennial concern with fascism made it particularly sensitive to mobilisations of national identity. The review’s embrace of the impropre also suggested a deep-seated anti-essentialism. Identity is always relational, shared and infinitely differential, and so any attempts to fix or name it can do a kind of ontological violence to being’s intrinsic singular-plurality. Foucault, a major influence for the review, had likewise argued that discourses of identity entrap the subject within repressive power relations, and so instead many contributors privileged opacity and a Deleuzian ‘becoming imperceptible’. For Michel Surya and Jean Baudrillard, for example, identity is thus simply another form of biopolitical control. Domination wishes to render the populace transparently identifiable to better police society, and so ‘to live happy, let’s live hidden’ [pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés] (LNS.31.2010, 83). What this chapter wishes to stress first of all, however, is the perhaps

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more surprisingly exclusionary nature of Lignes’ literary aesthetic. George Bataille’s emphasis on the heterogeneous outsiders of society can lead to a novel representation of those not normally represented in art, but its stress on the exception, the absolutely singular, can also preclude broader social solidarities. The anarchic, libertarian freedom which art is seen to necessitate is largely personal, not collective, and therefore not conducive to wider identity struggles. Furthermore, a residual romanticism remains in the review’s conception of what authentic writing is. Lignes’ laudable support for minor French literary currents can, on the part of some contributors, also shade into a culturally conservative hostility towards mass culture and the popular, sometimes aligning the review with some of its opponents on the political right. A tension thus runs though Lignes between those who, following Theodor Adorno, seek a withdrawal from the masses and the popular to defend authentic art, and those, like Walter Benjamin, who embrace the political potential of mass cultural forms. For the latter, Jacques Rancière and Pier Paolo Pasolini become emblematic figures who suggest that abandoning notions of literary authenticity and exclusivity could overcome this latent cultural conservatism and align the review’s literary stance more sympathetically with its broad political orientation. Additionally, whilst not deliberately exclusionary, the autonomous literary stance of some contributors has marginalised the works of women and francophone writers. Just as the French literary sphere was less affected by the ‘anti-canonical impulse’ which shook up anglophone departments in the 1980s (Stam and Shohat, 2012, 93), Lignes’ own literary canon remains largely modernist, European and male. Yet if, as Surya stresses, literature is a privileged space in which to think everything, what kind of thought is the review promoting if it seems to focus only on certain kinds of writing and experience, especially when the exclusions in the aesthetic realm also cross over into the review’s general critical output. Whilst not trying to essentialise thought (women and ethnic minority groups do not necessarily think differently), these exclusions could go some way to explaining Lignes’ ambivalence towards certain postcolonial, gender and sexual identity issues. After outlining the possible exclusions which the Lignes approach to literature might then entail, this chapter further probes the review’s relationship with identity to explore what remains unthought in its pages and what resources it contains to think differently. It suggests that, via a strategic essentialism promoted by contributors such as Étienne Balibar, identity politics could have shaped a more positive programme in the

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review. Whilst the concerns of trapping thought into locked identitarian concerns are real, strategic essentialism appears to provide a route to positively fight for minority rights and representation without necessarily breaking broader solidarities and whilst preserving fluid singularities. Using the Israel-Palestine conflict and gender politics as two concrete examples, the chapter goes on to suggest ways in which Lignes already had the resources necessary to positively mobilise a strategic essentialism to provide more incisive interventions into certain public controversies, combatting the unintentional exclusions which the review’s literary and philosophic stances, outlined below, have arguably allowed to exist. Authentic Literary Exceptionality Critics have described a certain ‘purism’ in French literary circles, one which assumes that highly mediatised novels, such as Frédéric Beigbeder’s 99 francs, cannot be authentic literature by virtue of their popularity, even if the fact that they treat contemporary themes might make them both literally and literarily more interesting (Reyns-Chikuma, 2008, 455): note, for example, the consternation provoked by Michel Houellebecq winning the Prix Goncourt in 2010. Such a purism can certainly be detected in those Lignes contributors who see little value in popular fiction, Bertrand Leclair lamenting the success of Beigbeder and Christine Angot, for example (LNS.44.2014, 71). The introduction to a Lignes issue on contemporary literary criticism (June 2014) complained of the ‘indexation of art and thought to the canons of general entertainment’ [indexation de l’art et de la pensée aux canons du divertissement général] (LNS.44.2014, 5): the brute enjoyment of mass culture was seen to be being privileged above the quality of authentic literature. Worse still was the ‘disparagement, even pejorative accusations of elitism for practices of research previously called “formalist” or avant-garde’ [dépréciation, voire péjoration (accusation d’élitisme) des pratiques de recherches, naguère dites ‘formelles’ ou d’avant-garde] (LNS.44.2014, 5). Authentic art and literature were being ignored, mass culture was being privileged and a dictatorship of opinion and marketing was sidelining genuine critical thought. Yet to complain about this situation seemed to automatically render one an ‘elitist’, out of touch with the common reader. Such laments attest to a genuinely changed cultural and literary landscape. In a Lignes dossier on the publishing industry (May 2006), professionals described the raft of mergers and acquisitions which had

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led to many independent publishers being subsumed into vast holding companies who privileged maximising profits over cultivating minor literary talents. Leclaire sees the mutation of books into consumer products as ‘exemplary of the new modes of economic domination over our existence’ [exemplaire des nouveaux modes de domination de l’économie sur nos existences] (LSN.44.2014, 67). The literary landscape in France has certainly changed, but Jérôme Vidal from Éditions Amsterdam also argued that the dangers for independent publishers were being over-exaggerated (LNS.20.2006, 20). The French state has demonstrated continuing support for cultural industries (by, for example, imposing fixed book prices and providing benefits for part-time cultural workers), meaning that independent publishers can remain profitable (LNS.20.2006, 11). Whilst Lignes itself has struggled to survive, it has had support from the Centre national du livre and the Conseil régional d’Île de France which has ensured its continued publication. Surya is relatively sanguine regarding the commercialisation of publishing, describing it as merely the natural movement of capital, and so he refuses to simply blame the market for any supposed decline in publishing standards (LNS.20.2006, 6). Beyond the very real economic threats to literary production, the root of what seems to be a certain cultural conservatism in some Lignes contributors needs further elaboration. Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot once more provided two main sources for a theory of literary exceptionalism in Lignes. Firstly, in Bataille’s sovereign conception of literature, writers depend upon a fundamental liberty to tout dire, saying anything and everything to expose all aspects of human behaviour. Sylvie Trécherel emphasised that Bataille’s literature represented the search for the most complete liberty possible (LNS.17.2005, 218). Art should not, then, be subservient to ideological or political ends, economic pressures or the homogenising effects of social conformity. Laurent Margantin likewise preferred Dada to Surrealism, as the former eschewed the political ambitions of the latter and was only interested in an anarchic personal liberation (LNS.16.2005, 148–9). This total aesthetic liberty can still be discreetly political, Surya suggesting that this fundamental freedom would lie at the heart of any revolutionary society. As articulated in Le Polième, this political supplement to art operates on an infra-personal, individual level: a Rimbaudian injunction to change life rather than to transform society (2011, 64). This nevertheless remains a largely personal, anarchic libertarian ideal rather than a collective emancipatory programme, and

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shorn of its political ambitions it can also suggest a withdrawal from the social scene entirely. In Lignes, Michel Hirsch argued that, in the absence of a genuinely emancipatory programme beyond consumer capitalism, Theodor Adorno similarly concluded that the only political alternative was to create the biggest possible distance between singular beings and the existing order (LNS.11.2003, 98). Defending personal liberty subsequently meant getting as far away as possible from the homogenising influences of mass culture. These positions imply that society and the common are bad, and the individual and the singular are good. There is a long line of cultural exceptionalism here, one that privileges the marginal as creative and authentic and disparages the mainstream as homogenous and inauthentic. In the eighteenth century, this exceptionalism was based around the figure of the Romantic genius, a singular individual endowed with a greater than normal capacity for sensibility and invention. By the end of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde was declaring that art was the most intense mode of individuality ever known: artists were the most singular of beings, distinguishing themselves from society through their personal brilliance and creativity. In the early twentieth century, avant-garde groups such as the Surrealists similarly railed against the stifling effects of a homogenous bourgeois culture, characterising themselves as geniuses but also as social outcasts. Carolyn Dean thus traced the transition of the romantic genius into the ‘metaphorical criminal’ or ‘outlaw’ through the avant-garde embrace of madness and violence (1992, 206). Twentieth-century experimental literature, then, tended to revel in the subversive or the taboo, from Bataille’s erotic fiction to Tel Quel’s emphasis on writing from the limits. Lignes continues this tradition, Mathilde Girard asserting that it prefers literary texts that explore the marginal themes of childhood, madness, sainthood, crime, perversion and cruelty over those of everyday experiences (LNS.38.2012, 64). Individual liberty is now located at society’s extremities, in its outcasts and rule breakers, rather than the average person working a nine-to-five job. Michel Surya picks up this thread in his Matériologies volumes of literary criticism which, applying Bataille’s bas matérialisme and enthusiasm for heterogeneity to literature, still rest on a similar discourse of exceptionalism. Humanimalités (2004a) charts the degradation of the integral human being through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of Dostoyevsky, Genet, Bataille, Rilke, Michelstaeder and, especially, Kafka. For Surya, a double movement

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had occurred: the Holocaust shook the foundations of what could be considered human nature and, as this idealised idea of humanity crumbled, fiction revealed the similarities between people and animals. Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ did not suggest that Gregor Samsa had lost his humanity in becoming an insect, but instead that humans were themselves integrally bestial too. Through these bestial figures, Surya hailed the emergence of a literature that represented the socially excluded, a heterogeneous and deidealised social body made up of ‘all the marginal and unproductive social phenomena, the rebellious and parasitic, the indifferent or sumptuary’ [tous les phénomènes sociaux marginaux ou improductifs, rebelles ou parasites, indifférents ou somptuaires] (2004a, 200). One could see this as an inclusive mode of criticism: Surya lambasts Marx for his moral disdain of the lumpenproletariat, and, rather than seeing alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes and the unemployed as counter-revolutionary degenerates, Surya prefers literature to be free from such moral condemnation (2004a, 197). Yet this bas matérialisme can also be a form of exclusion, as everything that is homogeneous (the ordinary) is scorned. This is in itself a strict, if inversed, moral standard. For example, Surya approvingly notes that Bataille claimed that as soon as workers joined a trade union, they entered into the world of the organised and the homogeneous, essentially becoming bourgeois and losing their sovereign radicality (2004a, 199). Surya likewise makes a virtue out of the exception, idealising those who are so socially marginal and exceptional that they cannot even been named, let alone represented: absolute singularities escaping any form of discursive capture (2004a, 202). Surya argues that this bas matérialisme is not idealising the low in a simple inversion of standards, but operating a process of abaissement [lowering] in which everything high is brought down to earth: a vulgar materialism debasing all rarefied values to embrace the base materiality of being. Nevertheless, the emphasis placed on writing from the margins still implies a lack of interest in the everyday human, the masses who, elsewhere, would be politically supported by Lignes. The stress on absolute alterity and the aggression towards any sort of definable identity also isolates critical interest in pure moments of exceptional individualism from which no social solidarity is possible. Some Lignes contributors have also begun to question the heroisation of marginal figures inherited from the Surrealist generation. Discussing his recent work on Antonin Artaud in Lignes, Jacob Rogozinski asserts: ‘The time has come to stop the ritual celebration of the mad poet who

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would not be such a great poet if he were not mad’ [Il est temps d’en finir avec la célébration rituelle du poète fou qui ne serait pas un si grand poète s’il n’était pas fou] (LNS.38.2012, 94). From the Romantics, and through the Surrealists to Gilles Deleuze, Rogozinski argues that the celebration of madness has led to a distorted idolisation of the marginalised. Whilst marginal figures should not be morally condemned, Rogozinski adds that madness can be a hellish experience for artists like Artaud. Insanity prevented Artaud from writing, rather than providing divine inspiration, and it was only by recovering his sanity somewhat that he was able to continue his artistic endeavours. Rogozinski thus argues against seeing the exceptional as the only ‘real’ writers, stating that an emphasis on extreme marginality can cause as much harm as good. The second kind of literary exceptionalism privileged in Lignes is drawn more from Maurice Blanchot. Discussing the radical fiction of the 1960s, Jean Ricardou distinguished between l’écriture d’une aventure (an essentially mimetic account of a radical experience), and l’aventure d’une écriture (formally experimental works in which the process of writing was itself the experience) (1967, 111). The former corresponds more closely to Bataille, Artaud and the limit-texts of marginal lives; the latter includes the nouveau roman, the Tel Quel novel and the works of Maurice Blanchot. Whilst the ‘writing of an adventure’ celebrated the suffering of marginal artists, the ‘adventure of writing’ is no less invested in a sense of sacrificial exceptionality. For Blanchot, the author sacrificed herself to literature. Authors renounced their authority over their own text, and instead entered into a space of literature from which the novel emerged. Drawing on Heidegger, such fiction was often described as a cheminement [wandering]; through the writing process, a provisional and fictional je emerged to guide the text on a journey through fictional space. Thus, with Blanchot, rather than narrating experiences of madness or suffering, it became the writer himself who was subjected to violence, sacrificing his identity for textual productivity. Despite claiming to renounce the authority of the artistic genius, a residual romanticism remained within this gesture. Through the author’s sacrifice, the authenticity of literary devotion remained attached to the text itself. Compared to popular commercial or genre fiction, this authentic écriture is privileged as a rare and exceptional self-sacrifice which approaches the limits of the self, thought and expression. For Lignes, Roger Laporte (1925–2001) was the most significant heir to Blanchot’s literary project, and the review published his Le Carnet posthume (2002), Lettre à personne (2006) and a collection

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of essays devoted to him, Pour Roger Laporte (2006). Yet just as celebrating Artaud’s madness was problematised, the violence which Laporte inflicted on himself through his self-sacrificial project was also troubling. Alain Veinstein argued that each of the key writers for Laporte (Blanchot, Char, Kafka, Hölderlin, Proust, Artaud) had engaged their lives in a fundamental risk (2006, 58): a total devotion to literature, rejecting everything else. Laporte called his fictional output a biographie, but, rather than recording his life, his aim was to explore ‘the experience of writing’ (Maclachlan, 2000, 1). Losing himself to the text, the author ‘Roger Laporte’ was a double that only existed in literary space. However, this writing, paradoxically, had real-life consequences, Lacoue-Labarthe noting that Laporte’s later texts referred to a Christ-like passion or suffering (2002, 16). In sacrificing himself to writing, Laporte practically refused all the elements of an ordinary life in what Lacoue-Labarthe described as an ‘atrocious self-mutilation’ [automutilation atroce] (2006, 11–13). Laporte considered his œuvre complete after he had written Moriendo in 1983, yet whilst writing itself was described as a form of torment, worse still was his ceaseless desire to carry on writing after the end of his literary project: ‘The Passion is perpetual’ [La Passion est perpétuelle] (Laporte, 2002, 30). Laporte’s dedication to a Blanchotian writing was heroic, and he created a significant body of work which was admired by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacoue-Labarthe. Yet his posthumous publications in Lignes also demonstrated the immense emotional toll of his sacrifice to writing. Once again, the celebration of heroic exceptionality both excluded more prosaic everyday life experiences and was itself a violent process. Both these forms of literary exceptionalism demand a total personal freedom, either from social conventions or from social existence in general. Only literature emanating from these exceptional circumstances is deemed worthy of the label écriture in Lignes. Works such as John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses have critiqued the disdain of some literary figures for mass culture that can result from such postures. Yet both routes to literary exceptionality championed by Lignes are coherent with its own definitions of the function and nature of literature. If, as for Surya, literature is a seen as a distinct realm in which to explore those areas of human nature where philosophy is afraid to tread, a literary bas matérialisme, exposing the undiscovered margins of life, is a logical response. And for the Blanchotians, if writing is conceived as a form of ontological research in the wake of Heidegger, the resistance

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to genre or commercial fiction, less concerned with linguistic and conceptual exploration, makes sense. Lignes, and Surya in particular, is also a generous supporter of marginal writers who would struggle to be published elsewhere. Though his work is held in high critical esteem, Roger Laporte is estimated to have only about a thousand readers (Lacoue-Labarthe, 2006, 13). Alongside works by Laporte, Surya, Bernard Noël and Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Lignes has published books of poetry and prose by Jean-Michel Reynard, Christine Lavant, Hervé Carn, Jacques Roman, Robert Canterella and Baptiste Moorman, none of whom are established writers or commercial successes. An issue of Lignes in May 2001 was dedicated to publishing short texts by young and minimally published authors; some of these, such as Alain Hobé, Jean-Christophe Valtat and Laurent Evrard, subsequently became valuable contributors. The review’s devotion to certain kinds of literature is necessary for such writing to be produced and read; the formation of a literary community, even if premised on a degree of cliquish exceptionality, is often necessary for certain kinds of works to develop. In Lignes, Bernard Sichère goes even further, to make a case for the use value of a certain aesthetic elitism: the pleasure and fecundity of high art is often precisely derived from its rejection of mass-cultural forms, and thus Sichère welcomes writers, such as Sade, who were ‘horrible aristocrats’ (LNS.14.2004, 150). In his recent On Pretentiousness, Dan Fox makes the similarly persuasive argument that a degree of exclusivity foments a desire to be different, to create works unlike any created before. Pretentiousness, or literary elitism, is thus valuable and necessary as ‘the engine oil of culture’ (Fox, 2016, 121). Lignes itself is a marginal publisher struggling for financial survival. As Perry Anderson argues, the context of contemporary capitalism shifts the terrain of the debate somewhat. To an extent, it is the case that cultural struggles today are no longer structured by a dichotomy between high art and mass culture, the popular and the elite, but between ‘the market and those who command it’ (Anderson, 1998, 106). Lignes certainly does not exert any form of economic power, and its continued existence is in itself a remarkable achievement. All of the above simply to say that, although Lignes is only interested in a small coterie of contemporary writers, this is not in itself reason enough to charge it with accusations of elitism and anti-popular snobbery. The review’s literary concerns are supportive of marginal writers, and a certain left-wing moralising over elitism and inclusivity can be as frustrating as it is critically astute. However, as discussed in Chapter

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1, the attachment of these kinds of literary authority to a political programme is where this exclusionary posture becomes problematic. Despite his more communal endeavours in the decade spanning 1958 and 1968, Blanchot’s entire political trajectory was largely guided by this very sense of aristocratic exceptionality, as the writer disdained any social organisation or normative rules in favour of his own sense of personal authority. Rather than an amoral neo-Nietzschean libertarianism, Jean-Luc Nancy argued that this attitude led Blanchot to a right-wing form of anarchism in which no politically existing reality would ever match the writer’s radical idealism (2014, 127). Blanchot’s political trajectory is fairly unique within the Lignes milieu, but there are varying levels of contempt for mass culture in the review, Jean-Paul Curnier aggressively asserting that popular entertainment is only good enough for the rubbish bin (LNS.3.2000, 60). The mixture of this writerly exceptionalism with politics can encourage a contempt for the everyday and for all existing political structures, placing some of Lignes’ literary-minded contributors in an uneasy proximity to their political opponents. Consumerist Cretins vs Cultural Critics A significant concern for some Lignes contributors was the integration of an aesthetic exceptionalism into domination theory, producing a curious strain of anti-popular Western Marxism. Jean-Paul Dollé worried that inspirational figures for the review, such as Marx, Nietzsche, the Surrealists and the Situationists, all nurtured ‘a robust contempt’ for ordinary individuals (LNS.7.2002, 169). The stress on aesthetic singularity was adopted by the domination theory of the 1930s to the 1960s. However, rather than dominant bourgeois culture, in the post-war period the main enemy became the mass media, and thus increasingly it was the products of popular culture which were derided for encouraging passive, homogeneous and unthinking behaviour. Herbert Marcuse’s L’Homme unidimensionnel, for example, posited an opposition between ‘a free consciousness, capable of knowing its own desires’, on the one hand, and ‘the man of “advanced industrial civilization”, “cretinised” and “standardised” by mass production’ and ‘wholly subject to needs manipulated by others’, on the other (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, 443). Boltanski and Chiapello argue that this denigration of mass

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culture seemed more acceptable in the 1950s, when it opposed a fairly homogenous cultural sphere. After the post-Fordist diversification of the leisure industry, however, ‘culture’ now accommodates a huge diversity of tastes and so seems less standardised and restricting. Cultural studies and sociology have since demonstrated that those ‘who are supposed to be mindless followers of mass culture’ have in fact been engaging in ‘politically self-conscious and creative dimensions’ of consumption all along (Williams, 2011, 178): cultural consumers are not necessarily passive or unthinking. Furthermore, Pierre Bourdieu deconstructed the notion of authentic ‘high art’ by arguing that taste is merely the ‘deciphering of a code that has been inculcated but does not know itself to be such’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, 453). The strict distinction between ‘art’ and ‘mass culture’ is, then, a learned taste for one over the other, and so arguments berating others for their embrace of ‘low’ culture merely betray the bourgeois tastes of the critic. Boltanski and Chiapello therefore called for a resistance to the ‘hard-line elitism’ that ‘resurfaced strongly in the 1980s’ (2007, 420). In his unfinished Lignes manuscript on theories of the spectacle, Daniel Bensaïd agreed that disparaging mass culture also entailed a superlative social contempt for the ‘people’, the workers, consumers and spectators that were his political base (2011, 20). Discourses of literary exceptionality, from the romantic genius to the Surrealist outlaw, had, however superficially, at least been attached to progressive or utopic political outlooks; in the contemporary moment, by contrast, these elitist expressions of contempt for the popular are more often howls of despair, harbouring nostalgic desires to return to some cultural golden age. Without a progressive project for art, the cultural conservatism of some of its contributors has at times placed Lignes in an uneasy proximity to some of its political opponents. For example, the domination theorist Anselm Jappe argued that, since they can no longer escape the ‘dictatorship’ of economic interests, art and culture have been entirely commercialised, producing a generalised ‘tittytainment’ lacking any aesthetic or intellectual merit (2011, 218–20). He compares culture and art to sweet and bitter tastes: sweet tastes are immediately palatable, whereas the body must learn to love the bitter; art should be difficult to prompt a more sophisticated aesthetic response and mental cognition of the world (2011, 246). Although developed through very different intellectual genealogies, Jappe’s position here is virtually identical to Alain Finkielkraut’s cultural conservatism, as Finkielkraut also associated ‘the debasement of classical culture’ with an ‘infantilisation’

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of the population (Silverman, 1999, 99). As Jappe himself argues that art lacks any real critical gravitas in the present moment (2011, 251), he seems to have no grounds to argue so strenuously for a strict programme of high aestheticism as a progressive force. Shorn of this optimistic political project, his denigrations of popular culture begin to seem as nakedly contemptuous as Finkielkraut’s. Similarly, in the 1990s, Jean Baudrillard appeared in Alain de Benoist’s review Krisis and shared a platform with the New Right to attack contemporary art. A debate over the relative merits of postmodernism had become politicised, with the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen complaining that contemporary art was undermining not only traditional aesthetic criteria but also French values (L.22.1994, 62). Whilst in Lignes Georges Didi-Huberman defended contemporary art from its critics, in Krisis Baudrillard denigrated postmodernism and described art as a hyperbolic mirror of our society: in a world ‘dedicated to indifference, art can only add to this indifference’ [voué à l’indifférence, l’art ne peut qu’ajouter à cette indifférence] (1997, 16). Baudrillard and de Benoist seemed to share a culturally conservative position in which modern art, from Duchamp to Warhol, had encouraged a directionless society lacking authentic values. Although Baudrillard would not make the subsequent step embraced by de Benoist – relaunching a nationalist project to rediscover authentically Western values – as with Jappe’s proximity to Finkielkraut, the cultural conservatism of certain Lignes contributors often made some of their cultural critiques indistinguishable from those of their political opponents. Étienne Balibar therefore denounced the circularity and sterility of trying to distinguish between high art and mass culture, questioning ‘the ambiguity of the political groupings it gives rise to’ [l’ambiguïté des regroupements politiques auxquels elle donne lieu] (L.32.1997, 176). Subsequently, in a moment of (relative) calm between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the banlieue riots in 2005, Lignes dedicated several issues to rereading important moments in its intellectual and cultural heritage. Through the issue Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin (May 2003), two distinct groups can be identified in the review: those drawing a firm (and hierarchical) distinction between autonomous high art and mass culture, and those more willing to grant art a relative proximity to commercial culture and mobilise it in wider cultural-political struggles. Surya argued that the review was not attempting to pit Adorno against Benjamin, but instead to think through their approaches to cultural politics together (LNS.11.2003, 3). Nevertheless, most contributors to this

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particular issue favoured Benjamin for his willingness to embrace new mediums (such as the cinema and photography) as vehicles for workingclass politics: Alain Naze, for example, praised Pasolini’s neo-realist films for embracing ‘l’espoir benjaminien’ that cinema could allow workers to directly represent themselves and so generate a new class consciousness (LNS.17.2005, 99). Adorno, by contrast, was often characterised by an aristocratic withdrawal from the masses, Michel Hirsch noting that his disdain for popular cultural and social conformity led to a desire to ‘create the greatest distance possible between singular beings and the existing order’ [créer la plus grande distance possible entre les êtres singuliers et l’ordre existant] (LNS.11.2003, 98). Thus, as Perry Anderson summarises, both Brecht and Benjamin had ‘looked towards a revolutionary art capable of appropriating modern technology to reach popular audiences’, whilst Adorno saw the ‘autonomy and abstraction’ of high modernism as ‘the only true refuge of politics’ (1998, 48). The hopes of both Benjamin and Adorno were disappointed, as neither mass culture nor autonomous art seem to harbour revolutionary potential in the present and both are almost wholly submerged in consumer capitalism. Benjamin’s position remains the more sympathetic for many, however, as the ‘culture of modernism’ celebrated by Adorno was ‘inescapably elitist’, an ‘art cast in a heroic mould’ which ‘was constitutively oppositional’ and rejected ‘conventions of taste’ (Anderson, 1998, 63). In Lignes, then, Michel Besnier referred to Adorno’s retreat from mass culture as the desire for a conservative revolution (LNS.4.2001, 22), and Michael Hirsh stated that Benjamin’s thought is ‘more compatible with our intellectual desires and the spirit of our time’ [plus compatible avec nos désirs intellectuels et avec l’esprit de notre temps] (LSN.11.2003, 76). By and large, whilst Surya is clearly sympathetic to his theoretical project, Adorno is rarely positively referenced in the review, especially by the more activist milieu of the second series which would place itself on the side of the people rather than a cultural elite. If it tends to be those primarily interested in literature who are the most culturally conservative in Lignes, contributors discussing the plastic arts, film and music tend to be more open to mass culture’s political potential: Francis Marmande interviews musicians who argue that rap has inherited jazz’s counter-cultural critique of Western society (L.35.1998, 21); Mathilde Girard praises rave culture for providing radical spaces of anarchic fraternisation (LNS.16.2005, 143); and Jean-Christophe Valtat examines the DIY ethos and critique of neoliberalism purveyed by American post-hardcore bands such as Fugazi

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(LNS.16.2005, 121). Although none of these accounts unproblematically accept commercial music as an effective political force, they reject the claims that mass culture is unthinking, homogeneous and wholly recuperated into capitalist ideology. Referencing the ethic of impurity elaborated in Lignes, Jean-Pierre Salgas instead called for an art combining the poetry of the academic publisher POL with more popular contemporary rap music (L.22.1994, 97). In Lignes’ first series, then, contributors like Balibar and Salgas argued for an aesthetic stance that moved beyond a strict hierarchy between authentic art and mass culture. The participation of more militant and Benjaminian thinkers in the second series, such as Alain Brossat, Alain Naze, Christian Prigent and Jean-Louis Déotte, allowed the review to articulate a new position which was both less contemptuous of mass culture and more comfortable with politicising art. Crucially, Jacques Rancière reversed the terms of the debate by suggesting that the forms which art and culture take are not intrinsically responsible for political action, but that art needs to be externally politicised. Firstly, he notes that there are no predictable political effects from certain artistic techniques: formally, ‘there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue’ (2004b, 61 [LNS.19.2006, 157]). High art formalism is not necessarily more political than mass cultural forms. Secondly, even if art deliberately challenges contemporary political norms, there is no guarantee that a work’s appearance will connect to a really existing political movement: ‘If this politics coincides with an act of construction of political dissensus, this is something that the art in question does not control’ (Rancière, 2004b, 62 [LNS.19.2006, 157]). Rather than making political art, Rancière suggests that art has to be politicised retrospectively by inserting it into a particular discourse: ‘It is up to the various forms of politics to appropriate, for their own proper use, the modes of presentation or the means of establishing explanatory sequences produced by artistic practices rather than the other way round’ (2004b, 65 [LNS.19.2006, 163]). Philosophical or critical discourses are part of the process through which aesthetics can change what can be thought or expressed politically: ‘I think that a theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about’ (Rancière, 2004b, 65 [LNS.19.2006, 163]). Rancière suggests here that reviews perhaps have more of a hand in shaping the political discourses surrounding art and culture than the works themselves. For those Lignes contributors more comfortable with politicising

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aesthetics, Pier Paolo Pasolini typified this intellectual role. As stated by Christian Prigent in Lignes: ‘More than as a writer or a filmmaker, Pasolini is the name of a certain type of intellectual activism’ [Plus que celui d’un écrivain ou d’un cinéaste, Pasolini est le nom d’un certain type d’activisme intellectuel] (LNS.18.2005, 29). Pasolini’s idiosyncratic career saw him produce works in many different mediums and genres: his early popular novels such as The Ragazzi (1955) represented Italy’s sub-proletariat, whereas the unfinished Petrolio (1992) was an austere and experimental critique of liberal capitalism; and whilst his early films built on the Italian neorealist tradition and The Decameron (1971) was one of the largest box office grosses in the post-war period, Theorem (1968), Pigsty (1969) and Salò (1975) were some of the most difficult and subversive films ever produced in Italy. Pasolini therefore created a mixture of accessible, popular, radical and avant-garde works depending on the critical effects he wanted to produce. What unites all of these works was Pasolini’s attempts to foment critical discussion and cultural commentary around them to educate cultural consumers. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci, Pasolini believed that artists and intellectuals had a key role in the left’s struggle for cultural hegemony. Not only did his works tackle social and political issues, but, if he felt they were not being received in the right manner, he was also unafraid to denounce them: famously, his ‘Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life’ described his disgust at the manner in which sexual liberation had been canalised by capitalism, prompting him to disavow the celebration of human sexuality in his Trilogy of Life and to produce the cold, cruel sadism of Salò. Pasolini created the politicised discourses that would surround his works, and continuously attempted to promote a wider public debate through the media. His own review, Officina, was an important bulwark of the 1950s, and in the 1970s, whilst writing a regular column for the widely circulated daily Il Corriere della Sera, he continued to publish small and collaborative reviews. As Alain Naze argues, Pasolini shifted throughout his career from speaking about the people, to speaking to the people, to finally allowing the people themselves to speak, encouraging his young protégés to participate in the many publications through which he fostered critical dialogue (LNS.18.2005, 93). By the end of his life, he was noted for his omnipresence in television debates, round tables and panel discussions, never turning down an opportunity to argue his case publicly. Pasolini is therefore exemplary of Rancière’s contention that the creation of a discursive climate is the necessary corollary of works to foment culturally effective interventions. Pasolini demonstrated that both

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popular and high art forms could be successfully married to a political programme, depending on their reception by a particular sociocultural context. Reviews can therefore play an important role. Although the embrace of Pasolini and activist cultural politics was mainly shared by the more militant, Benjaminian contributors to Lignes, the insertion of art and culture into wider debates had in fact been the tacit modus operandi of Lignes since its inception. Surya was of course wary of politicising literature: for example, after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, he argued that, in becoming an explicitly political issue, The Satanic Verses had transformed into something other than literature (L.21.1994, 7). Indeed, in the many political debates surrounding the novel, in Lignes and elsewhere, the qualities of Rushdie’s writing were rarely considered: it was the scandal caused by The Satanic Verses that was of interest. Likewise, in Lignes’ reaction to Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, no contributors discussed the novel itself; even more so than with Rushdie, it was Nasreen herself who was ‘the text produced and deployed’ in the debate (Ghosh, 2000, 40). These novels did not create their political impacts alone, but rather became embroiled in a certain fabricated political discourse. The Satanic Verses became an international incident not because the novel contained ‘the most blasphemous thoughts expressed by a Muslim’ (Pipes, 2004, 17), but because Ayatollah Khomeini mobilised it as part of an anti-Western crusade. In Nasreen’s case, public outrage was similarly ‘engineered’ by the Bharatiya Janata Party explicitly ‘to stir up trouble’ (Deen, 2006, 95). Following Rancière, here the art did have political content, but this only resulted in worldwide debates after its retrospective reception and mobilisation. Surya’s argument that, on these occasions, the works involved become something other than literature allows him to maintain a distinction between autonomous art and cultural politics. This suggests that the tensions in the review between maintaining high art as an autonomous sphere or integrating it into cultural political struggles need not be resolved: writing can remain a sovereign space free from worldly concerns for the artist, but cultural reviews can drag writing into sociopolitical debates to make them something other than autonomous art. Strategically, however, if mass culture can also be mobilised in this sense, and the strict divide between high art and low culture has become less politically tenable, the review could also decide to rein in the more contemptuous attitudes of some contributors towards mass culture to encourage broader social solidarities. In the second series, Lignes contributors less concerned with aesthetic

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autonomy were more comfortable with directly mobilising articles on or by artists with political manifestos and movements. For example, Nicholas Klotz discussed how his films documented the travails of immigrants (LNS.26.2008, 152–60), and the review follows this with Pierre Cordelier’s petition in favour of housing the sans-papiers (LNS.26.2008, 161–7). Since 2003, the review’s own book collection has also increased Lignes’ capacity to instigate cultural-political discussions, the impact of Badiou’s De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? being the most prominent example. Continuing its concern with migration issues, Mahmoud Traoré’s account of his clandestine immigration from Dakar to Séville, ‘Dem ak Xabaar’: partir et raconter (2012), was also a major publication. Crucially, books by Stéphane Nadaud on gay parenting (2006) and Geneviève Fraisse on feminism (2014) were the review’s only in-depth engagements with gender and sexuality issues, the book collection allowing Lignes to experiment with the identity issues not afforded space in the review itself. These later publications signal what has, intentionally or accidentally, been excluded from Lignes, both from its stance of literary exceptionality and its philosophical suspicion of identity politics. Excluded from Thought, Invisible in the Republic If literature is conceived by Surya as a privileged sphere for la pensée, the question remains as to the significance to thought of the omissions from the review’s literary canon. Historically, Lignes is generally interested in a (largely French) modernist body of male écrivains from Proust to Genet, with Bataille, Blanchot, Sade and Artaud being the most frequent references. The absence of comparable female writers, especially Marguerite Duras, is notable. Chloé Delaume was the only woman published in the Lignes issue dedicated to creative writing, and Christine Lavant is the only woman in the poetry collection. The absence of female perspectives is even more significant when contrasted with the literature privileged by the review. For example, whilst Bataille’s emphasis on heterogeneity has been adopted by queer theory as an assault on social homogeneity and heteronormative values, his fiction has been criticised for its ‘generally unedifying treatment of women’ (Downing and Gillett, 2011, 95). Downing and Gillett argue that women are often associated with either death or God in Bataille’s fiction, positing them as an essentialised Other that is intrinsically

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threatening to male subjectivity. As a result, a typically misogynistic binary of men attempting to dominate women pervades Bataille’s ‘unreconstructedly phallic’ eroticism (Downing and Gillett, 2011, 95); despite the experimental nature of his fiction and the unorthodox sexual encounters they portray, Bataille’s work can therefore still be situated in a long tradition of patriarchal normativity and control, rather than the subversive transgressions by which it is often characterised. Much the same could be said of Bataille’s literary heirs. Some Lignes contributors have begun to question the gender normativity of this literary heritage, Martin Crowley noting the homosocial fraternity represented by Blanchot’s communauté and his reliance on conventional stereotypes of femininity (LNS.43.2014, 227–8). Yet even the kinds of fiction privileged by the review may be intrinsically gendered. Perry Anderson argues that the abandonment of high modernism meant that ‘a significant range of hitherto excluded groups – women, ethnic and other minorities, immigrants – gained access to the postmodern forms, broadening the basis of artistic output considerably’ (Anderson, 1998, 63). Yet Lignes has very little time for postmodern fiction. Mathieu Bénézet and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, are especially hostile towards the autofiction which became prevalent in France from the 1980s, pejoratively describing it as égographie (LNS.38.2012, 85). The Blanchotian conception of sacrificing authorial identity is clearly significantly opposed to more straightforwardly autobiographical narratives. Yet autobiography and life writing have been important feminist genres. Paying attention to the everyday experiences of women’s lives has been part of wider processes of consciousness raising and feminist activism, but it is precisely these mundane realities which are often explicitly omitted by the literary exceptionality championed by Lignes. In addition, the review has published next to nothing when it comes to francophone literature from outside the Hexagon. This is of a piece with the French reception of postcolonial theory, one less concerned with the literary exploration of the former colonies than anglophone scholars. Despite French academia’s reported disdain for postcolonial theory, ‘political and intellectual activism’ related to colonial issues has been rife in France for many years (Stam and Shohat, 2012, 104); intellectual reviews have themselves been a hotbed of postcolonial approaches, and the internationalism of Lignes, and its broad concerns with immigration and global population movements, is no exception. Lignes also critiques the epistemic violence of Western thought, from Alain David’s lament of the ‘generalised whitening’ of metaphysics (L.12.1990, 11) through to

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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s posthumous collection La Réponse d’Ulysse et autres textes sur l’Occident (2012). Whilst Lignes therefore embraces the political and intellectual stakes of postcolonial thought, what Stam and Shohat call the ‘literary bent’ of anglophone approaches is absent (2012, 93). Anglophone postcolonial scholars tend to focus on creative works, either producing new readings of Western literary classics or mining the literary cultures of the former colonies to discover alternative literary traditions. Global studies of francophone literature have therefore appeared ‘in spite of metropolitan French indifference and hostility’ (Stovall and Abbeele, 2003, 3), French researchers tending instead to prefer empirical, historical research. In France, there remains an attachment to a specifically French (and Parisian) literary milieu which lacks the ‘anti-canonical impulse’ of the anglophone academy (Stam and Shohat, 2012, 93). Lignes is thus no different to the majority of Parisian publishers, retaining a largely modernist, European literary canon. There are two further reasons for what can seem to be Lignes’ indifference towards a postcolonial embrace of literary diversity. For the more militant group of contributors in the review’s second series, such as Brossat and Badiou, positively embracing diversity can often misleadingly obfuscate political conflicts. Peter Hallward, inspired by Badiou, has identified the affirmative embrace of alterity as ‘the predominant tendency of cultural studies in general and of postcolonial criticism in particular’ (2001, xix). In embracing cultural diversity, postcolonial literature is often portrayed as a palliative for increasing racial tensions. Édouard Glissant’s ‘unflagging advocacy of a creolising world of Diversity and Relation’ and an ‘unpredictable process of hybridisation’ is one example (Bongie, 2009, 91). Lignes shares much common theoretical ground with Glissant, who also emphasised the impure and composite nature of identity and the fundamental opacity of language and social relations (Bongie, 2009, 91). As discussed in Chapter 3, early contributors, influenced by deconstruction, also saw the consecration of being’s fundamental alterity as a riposte to growing racial tensions. What is more problematic for Lignes is the celebration of métissage [hybridity] that often accompanies these discourses. Hybridity positively represents the multicultural nature of contemporary civilisation and the mixing of identities, traditions and influences it entails. For Lignes contributors like Brossat, however, hybridity does not result from innocent transcultural encounters but from political conquests; the uncritical celebration of hybridity can ‘render unnameable the wrongs

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suffered by the vanquished of these histories’ [rendre innommable le tort subi par les vaincus de cette histoire] (LNS.6.2001, 43). Hallward likewise argues that there is no ‘inherently or automatically progressive politics’ to be gleaned from cultural hybridity (2001, xix). Presenting a harmonious multiculturalism is all well and good but, in this reading, it does little to actually ameliorate social tensions and is thus in itself not worth championing as an effective motor of change. Hallward thus calls for ‘a sharp conceptual break between culture and politics’, adding that ‘cultural politics’ is a ‘disastrous confusion of spheres’ (2001, xix). This stance is reminiscent of Mascolo, who argued that without an effective materialist politics, literature remains merely a luxury. The review’s resistance to an uncritical celebration of world literature could be framed as a suspicion of the erasure of violence which this appropriation of minor voices could entail. Rather than deliberately producing global literature to represent an ever-smaller world, Lignes is more concerned with analysing the postcolonial global flows of capital and migrants to emphasise the divisive political struggles still shaping the planet. The review’s concerns about the suffocating constraints of fixed identities also make it wary of the effects of positive discrimination in the literary field. For example, Cécile Kovacshazy was excited by the militant tendencies she discovered in works of Romani literature, but she also worried that her own enthusiasm for – and labelling of – the genre ‘Gypsy Literature’ reinforced essentialist discourses (LNS.35.2011, 164–6). This was especially worrying at a time when Sarkozy was subjecting French roms to a specifically ethnic targeting. In Branding the ‘Beur’ Author, Kathryn Kleppinger examined this difficult dynamic; labelling themselves beur authors, this group gave itself a distinct cultural and political identity, but it also pigeonholed their writing, which was then ‘always expected to be about immigrants rather than about humanity as a whole’ (2015, 14). Whilst French writers since Zola have been meant to represent universal human interests, beur authors are commonly seen to represent only specific community interests and to present an exoticised insight into French urban life. That these works were also hugely popular also meant that they were ‘largely ignored by French literary critics and by French academia’ who regarded them as a popular niche genre rather than works of universal literary significance (10). Yet it is possible to broaden the range of literature one reads without necessarily having to overtly and reductively categorise them as works from ethnic or gendered minorities. Given his emphasis on literature and la pensée, Surya would surely agree with Hallward that literature

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is a realm of ‘thought-ful freedom’ (2001, 334). For Hallward, if not a mode of cultural politics, this nevertheless legitimates the demand to read widely, including from the former colonies, to expand the range of thought to which one is exposed. Lignes, however, tends to rely only on the contemporary French literary scene for such thought, rather than seeking out non-Western alternatives. It is not my intention to simply condemn Lignes for not representing minority opinions, which in itself can be an uncompromising form of left-wing moralising. Rather than just berating Lignes for a lack of literary diversity, it is important to measure the consequences of these exclusions on the review’s thought. Positively, rather than assuming that French intellectuals can accurately analyse global politics from the comfort of their sofa, Lignes issues on Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Italy, Algeria, Latin America, the Arab Spring and Greece all relied principally upon thinkers and activists based in the countries in question. This is a deliberate attempt to avoid Lignes remaining ‘a specifically French, Parisian phenomenon’, as reviews such as Tel Quel had been in the past (ffrench, 1995, 44), and thus the review has a fairly diverse base of contributors and perspectives from around the globe. Notably, however, Lignes is guilty of the frequent blind spots noted by Forsdick and Murphy, as the Middle East and North Africa garner much more attention than sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific (2009, 24). The exclusion of women from the French intellectual sphere is more notorious, Imogen Long noting that, in Jacques Julliard and Michel Winnock’s dictionary of French intellectuals, only 40 of 550 entries are women (2013, 11). Whilst there has been some improvement in this area over the years, Lignes conforms to type in its largely male cohort of contributors: in the review’s first ten issues, only 5% of contributors were female, whereas in the last ten issues this figure has risen to just over 20%. Without suggesting that women or other minorities essentially think in different ways, the review’s emphasis on the material and situated nature of thought would imply that, as minority groups experience life in a concretely different manner, these experiences might garner different thought processes and reveal other aspects of daily life not represented in the review’s current output. Implicitly, then, a more diverse range of contributors would have something to add to the review’s literary ambitions to say everything about existence. Whilst not deliberately exclusionary, there is surely a correlation between the lower tally of female contributors and the historic invisibility of

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gender issues in Lignes more broadly. Notably, debates surrounding the institution in 2000 of parity laws (which attempted to equalise the gender balance in parliament), the creation of civil partnerships (PACS) in 1999 and the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013 received little detailed coverage in Lignes despite ‘at least a decade of widely publicised debates’ (Robcis, 2004, 111). Marxists have often rejected identity politics as a distraction that takes attention away from the real problem of capitalism: identity issues are cultural, not economic, and so of secondary importance (Stam and Shohat, 2012, 105). As we have seen in chapters 4 and 6, Lignes succeeded in yoking racial and cultural identity issues to the economy as immigration and neoliberalism were analysed as one imbricated problem. Gender and sexuality are harder to weave into a broader anti-capitalist rhetoric, and so were rejected by critics like Badiou for being lower down on the ‘hierarchy of importance’ (Badiou and Finkielkraut, 2010, 39). There has been a shift in this regard as of late, alongside the rise in female contributors. Crucially, Fraisse’s Les Excès du genre, the first book on gender issues in the Lignes collection, welcomes the end of the contempt and condescension that was once poured on feminism in France, affirms the radicality of a constructivist approach to gender, and praises new forms of feminist activism, from Pussy Riot in Russia to the joint march of sex workers and veiled women in France under the banner les putains du féminisme (2014, 72). This championing of activism in favour of cultural difference and collective rights, supported through Lignes publications, suggests a new direction for the review, one that notably also embraces popular culture and direct identity activism. Developing this strand could also be an aid in overcoming the latent republicanism of many contributors. Although the review abandoned hard-line republican stances after the foulard affair, some contributors are still overly hostile to any identity politics on republican grounds. Allowing a strategically essentialist embrace of identity politics, whilst attaching these struggles to more universal and economic political goals, may be a route to finally abandoning Lignes’ latent republican leanings. Jean-Loup Amselle is the review’s most straightforwardly republican contributor at present, as demonstrated by his Lignes publications L’Ethnicisation de la France (2011) and L’Anthropologue et le politique (2012). Amselle argues that as soon as specific ethnic groups are identified, ‘nothing then prevents the hypothesis that they are minorities who are impossible to absorb’ [rien n’interdit de faire l’hypothèse de minorités impossibles à absorber] (1996, 170): for Amselle, the recognition of

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racial or cultural differences automatically tends to produce racism. As a result, whereas in the US and the UK ‘multiculturalism’ normally describes a contemporary global space shared by different cultural communities with varying degrees of harmony, Amselle sees it as a prescriptive programme that causes the fragmentation of society (2012, 117). Whilst arguing that this model has been more successful in America, Amselle asserts that multiculturalism has failed in France as it has led to a rise in racism and the reinforcement of ‘white’ identity (2011, 30–1). It is this negative conception of multiculturalism which leads to ‘the anti-communautariste rhetoric’ that is ‘almost an obsession among some French intellectuals’ (Revenin, 2012, 169): any positive assertion of cultural difference is seen to ghettoise that community by separating it from the rest of society. Amselle notes approvingly that Pierre-André Taguieff denounced the 1990s anti-racist movements because the positive promotion of racial identities caused social fragmentation (Amselle, 2011, 54). Yet it was precisely this logic that led Taguieff away from the activist left – and away from Lignes. That Taguieff’s hostility to cultural difference returns to Lignes emphasises the fact that identity politics remain problematic for the review. Rada Iveković, by contrast, sees the privileging of republicanism over multiculturalism as a provincial French particularism rather than as a progressive universalism (LNS.19.2006, 80). One major criticism of universal republicanism is that it ‘refuses in principle to recognise differences that separate citizens from one another’ (Boyle, 2012, 276). Once there are instances of discrimination on the ground, the recourse to abstract, universal values can merely obscure these concrete tensions. For example, many argued in Lignes that, were the roms not identified as a distinct group, they could not be racially targeted. Yet the fact was that they were being subjected to discrimination, and so a more active intervention seemed necessary. Étienne Balibar argued that a strategic choice needed to be made between two struggles, one majoritaire, one minoritaire: the former would use discourses of universal human rights to alter global legislation, whilst the latter would seek to raise the consciousness of a common identity amongst the roms to produce solidarity and pressure the EU into acting on specific acts of prejudice (LNS.34.2011, 143). Both routes had pitfalls, and so Balibar concluded that the roms had to strategically invent the combination of the two which would be most effective (LNS.34.2011, 144). His response here suggests a nuanced use of strategic essentialism, one which ‘although it denotes a strong identity politics, also points out its contingency’ (Lépinard, 2007,

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394). Critics such as Amselle rejected strategic essentialism, arguing that it seemed a hopelessly compromised position when faced with the recent rise in fundamentalist ideologies (2008, 146–7). However, in particular instances, with specific goals, others would argue that it is an effective strategy. Adopting an identity to argue for specific rights is not necessarily incompatible with strategically fighting for broader egalitarian and universal goals. Below, two situations in which such an approach could have been mobilised in Lignes are explored. Firstly, one of the biggest controversies surrounding Lignes’ second series was the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against Alain Badiou following the publication of Circonstances 3: Portées du mot ‘ juif ’ (2005). The row largely resulted from Badiou’s staunchly pro-Palestinian stance and his argument that Jewish particularism, especially the exploitation of memory, was a fault that needed correcting through a strictly universal politics. The flaws of Badiou’s strategic universalism will be contrasted to Judith Butler’s own strategic essentialism, suggesting an alternative political stance that nevertheless still sits squarely within Lignes’ own intellectual and literary heritage, before the chapter examines the review’s relationship with gender and sexuality issues. The Badiou Controversy: Universal or Strategic Essentialism? Lignes’ first issues were marked by a concern with the legacy of the Second World War, the Holocaust and a worrying return of anti-Semitism. In this, the review was symptomatic of its era; since the 1980s, there has been a much discussed ‘memory boom’ in France, one which Henry Rousso notes was ‘developed in parallel with the growing preoccupation with the recent past, and mainly with recent human catastrophes such as the Holocaust’ (2016, 26–7). Following a rise in Holocaust denial, the French government felt compelled to protect the memory of these events: the Gayssot law in 1990, the first of the French ‘memory laws’ [lois mémorielles], made Holocaust denial illegal. Although this first law was relatively uncontroversial, it nevertheless launched an ‘inflationary process’ in which more and more laws were deemed necessary (Ahearne 2014, 101). After a 1999 law recognising the Algerian war, and another describing slavery as a crime against humanity in 2001, in 2005 FrenchAlgerian harkis (those Algerians who had fought the FLN alongside the French) also demanded their ‘right to memory’, and the government passed a law – later repealed – decreeing that colonialism be remembered

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for its positive accomplishments. Often referred to as the ‘memory wars’, this sequence of events heralded ‘a particularisation and ethnicisation of memory’ which was ‘premised on the rejection of the grand universal narratives of old’ (Silverman, 2013, 17). Recognising that this inflationary process had now gone too far, in 2008 the French government agreed to stop passing lois mémorielles. One of the most controversial debates remains the political use of the Holocaust. In L’Épreuve du désastre, Lignes contributor Alain Brossat complained of the overuse of narratives of victimisation, but in particular he insisted that Israel had excessively manipulated the memory of the Holocaust to justify its staunch defence of a Jewish homeland. Carolyn Dean contextualised this text amongst wider discourses of ‘exorbitant’ Jewish memory, and complains of Brossat’s aggressive ‘rhetorical hammering’ of Israel (2006, 69). For Dean, Brossat’s description of Zionism as ‘an ideology of genocide’ is a position so extreme that it can only stem from a deep-seated anti-Semitism (2006, 71–3). As it was discussions over the Holocaust that had launched the ‘memory wars’, Brossat blamed ‘Jewish memory’ for the subsequent escalation of ethnicised conflicts over historical recognition. As L’Épreuve du désastre argued against all discourses of religious or ethnic victimisation in favour of a political universalism, Brossat’s extreme position nevertheless remained politically coherent, and even Claude Lanzmann, a hostile critic of Brossat’s staunch anti-Zionism, admits that he cannot ascribe this view directly to anti-Semitism (1998, 225). Yet the hostility towards Israel and the aggressive tone of some contributors signalled a tension between Jewish identity and universalism that would return with Alain Badiou. In the French intellectual context within which Badiou’s text arrived, the already heated debates around Israel and Palestine were further exacerbated for several reasons. Verbal and physical anti-Semitic incidents had been rising in France: Lignes has been concerned about this increase since the late 1980s, and the Kantor Centre of Tel Aviv University stated that, in 2012, France witnessed more anti-Semitic incidents than anywhere else in the world. This new anti-Semitism is often fomented by a political anti-Zionism: ‘It attributes a range of crimes to Israel and by extension to all Jews’, the perpetrators often being ‘descendants of North African immigrants to France’ who ‘are themselves very often the victims of racism and xenophobia’ (Samuels, 2016, 107). For this reason, those concerned with defending France’s stigmatised Muslim minority are often wary about condemning this new anti-Semitism:

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Badiou has thus been attacked for his ‘systematic minimizing’ of the violence done towards France’s Jews to avoid criticising French citizens of North African descent (Samuels, 2016, 110). Yet this has also led to pro-Palestinian activists being lumped together as a group of ‘fascists, Muslims and leftists’ in a ‘brown-green-red alliance’ whose criticisms of Israel are automatically assumed to be anti-Semitic (Cohen, 2009, 24). Edgar Morin, for example, referred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a ‘cancer’ and was found guilty of ‘judeophobic’ comments in 2005, although he was subsequently acquitted (Cohen, 2009, 31–2). Furthermore, rivalries in the French intellectual community, stretching back to the Maoist years from 1968 to 1975, have also contributed to the polarisation of the debate. As Maoists abjured their former political radicalism and drifted back towards the liberal centre ground in the late 1970s and 1980s, many rediscovered religion. Jonathan Judaken describes how many ‘soixante-huitard Jews’ then became ‘critical of French political traditions in reclaiming Jewish Orthodoxy’ (2006, 278). Those who remained on the hard left, such as Badiou, often blamed the religious conversions of these thinkers for their political U-turns. There was also a rivalry over the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Benny Lévy supposedly tried to convert Sartre to Judaism, claims exacerbated by the publication of L’Espoir maintenant (1991), an interview with Lévy in which Sartre stressed ‘the importance to non-Jews like himself of the Jewish concept of the coming of the Messiah’ (Judaken, 2006, 208–9). This caused massive rifts between Sartre’s followers, some of whom were outraged by Lévy’s supposed corruption of a vulnerable old man. Since Claude Lanzmann took over the editorship of Sartre’s Les Temps modernes in 1986, the review has also been seen to be staunchly pro-Israel, which confirms for some the suspicions that Sartre’s engaged, existential atheism was being undermined by the Judaic turn in French thought (Lindenberg, 2010, 41). Feeling betrayed, Badiou subsequently referred to Benny Lévy as a ‘sectarian rabbi’ (LNS.30.2009, 199); Lévy responded by calling Badiou the most prominent anti-Jewish philosopher in France (LNS.20.2009, 178). Whilst there are distinct and prominent groups of pro-Israeli intellectuals (often conservatives like Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre-André Taguieff), Badiou’s subsequent references to them as a ‘Jewish media cabal’ are deeply unhelpful and rest on traditional anti-Semitic tropes (Samuels, 2016, 111). Yet, similarly, when even cautious critics reference Badiou’s ‘justification of violence against Jews’ (Samuels, 2016, 110), or state that Badiou thinks that Israel should be ‘eliminated’ (Kritzman, 2013, 149), their choice of

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terms suggests a degree of physical violence towards Jews that is simply not present in Badiou’s texts. The escalation of the rhetoric in France, especially amongst intellectuals already prone to polemical debates, is a primary cause for most of the following controversy. The political claims of Circonstances 3 were, if controversial, not anti-Semitic. As with Brossat, Badiou’s position towards Israel is overtly hostile, referring to it as a neocolonial state responsible for the oppression of Palestinians (2005, 13), yet he deplores the rise in anti-Semitism that results from Middle Eastern tensions (2005, 9). As he believes that the conflict is intractable largely because of the religious divide, Badiou supports a one-state solution, a democratic, universal and non-religious state (2005, 16). This would not require the relocation of populations, but the inauguration of a new multicultural state structure that would move Israel beyond a fixed and exclusive identitarian politics as a specifically Jewish state (2005, 15). Badiou’s approach becomes more problematic over issues of cultural identity. Generally, he is more tolerant of cultural particularity than many French critics. In Saint Paul, Badiou argues that rather than a representative of Christianity’s ‘suspiciousness toward Jews’ (2003, 4), Paul’s ‘relation to Jewish particularity is essentially positive’ (2003, 102). For Badiou, Paul’s famous statement that there is ‘neither Greek nor Jew’ does not imply that these identities no longer exist, for ‘the fact is that there are Greeks and Jews’: inevitably, ‘there are differences’ (2003, 98). Instead, it means that truth is universal and valid for ‘all the nations’, rendering such particularisms politically irrelevant (2003, 103). This is not, therefore, an assault on cultural particularity. Indeed, Badiou argued against banning the foulard from schools, considering matters of clothing or custom to be politically irrelevant, and he describes the mobilisations against the foulard as a symptom of ‘French identitarian fanaticism’ (2003, 9). However, when it comes to Judaism, Badiou tends to dissociate the religion from its cultural heritage. As Sarah Hammerschlag explains, in the early twentieth century, French thinkers tended to associate Judaism with ‘exile, up-rootedness, and alienation’, a stance based on the ‘essentialised and accidental simplification of a very real historical people’ (2010, 262–3). Yet the idealised conception of a Jew-withoutqualities subsequently became ‘a trope with a history in its own right’, mobilised by Sartre and then by Levinas as exemplary of an anti-essentialist community, Levinas suggesting that the ‘deracination’ of Judaism ‘should be venerated’ (Hammerschlag, 2010, 263). Via Blanchot

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and Edmond Jabès, this trope is one of the roots of the suspicion of ‘communal fusion’ we have also explored in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. As Brémondy has recently argued in Lignes, this interpretation of Judaism is in itself debatable (LNS.43.2014, 114) and Derrida had reprimanded both Lacoue-Labarthe and Blanchot for the idea that Judaism represented a complete break with all mythological origins (LNS.43.2014, 115). Derrida cautioned French thinkers against reducing a very rich, plural and diverse religious heritage to its apparently singular rejection of rootedness and cultural essentialism. In Circonstances 3, Badiou takes this notion of an ‘intrinsically Jewish’ nomadism to an extreme, making this rootlessness the only remaining Jewish quality (Hammerschlag, 2010, 266). Arguably, he thus depicts a Jew ‘robbed of any religious content’ (Kritzman, 2013, 150). Furthermore, Badiou notes that whilst many groups have been persecuted, such as the roms, homosexuals, communists and the mentally ill, the Jew is ‘the name of names’ (2005, 40), the master signifier for persecution in general rather than a particular cultural and religious group. Elsewhere, stating that Israeli policy has led to a Palestinian diaspora, Badiou argues that these stateless, nomadic Palestinians are now the real Jews (2005, 27). Lastly, in response to the accusations of anti-Semitism, Badiou states that, as a universalist philosopher contesting particularism, he is himself the best representative of Jewish nomadism: ‘le juif, c’est moi’ (2006, 747). Badiou thus sets ‘the Jew’ up as the perfect example of his extreme universalism, only to berate real-life Jews who do not live up to this ‘philosophical purity’ (Samuels, 2016, 114). Via a series of lexical shifts, he empties out Judaism of any religious or cultural content, uses the name as a signifier of universal politics, then applies it to Palestinians and himself as opposed to Israel in a manner that can be seen to be ‘insensitive’, at best (Hammerschlag, 2010, 265). May ’68 provides another famous example from recent French history of secular individuals claiming a Jewish identity. Protesting the arrest of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose radical politics the extreme-right paper Minute had blamed on the fact that he was a German Jew, crowds of students brandished banners claiming ‘We are all German Jews’. This was ‘a gesture that communicated resistance to the dynamics of group identification’, exploding the boundaries of what being German and Jewish meant, but it was done as a demonstration of solidarity (Hammerschlag, 2010, 264). It is an act that remains paradigmatic for French thinkers as a way to universalise struggles that could otherwise remain locked in identity politics: one could call this ‘strategic universalism’. Yet Badiou’s

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‘Le juif, c’est moi’ operates differently: instead of expressing solidarity, it implies a rebuke to those who remain attached to the cultural heritage which this strategic universalism attempts to erode. Following Maurice Samuels, rather than calling Badiou anti-Semitic, one could argue that his stance here is one that unintentionally produces anti-Semitic effects (2016, 108). He ends up berating those attached to their Jewish cultural identity and, as the debate became increasingly heated and insults more vociferously traded, his aggressive rhetoric became more amenable to mobilisation in actually anti-Semitic discourses. Badiou and Brossat are part of a wider, more militant milieu that is staunchly pro-Palestinian, a stance represented in more activist reviews such as Asylon(s) and Drôle d’époque. There have been open criticisms of Badiou and Brossat in Lignes, Amselle denouncing their depiction of Israel as a neocolonial state (LNS.23–24.2007, 178). Nevertheless, when Badiou was accused of anti-Semitism following the publication of Circonstances 3, Lignes came to his defence, Surya noting that his review was not known for publishing either anti-Semitic books or authors (LNS.30.2009, 208). Marc Goldschmit was also removed from the Lignes editorial board after accusing Badiou of anti-Semitism. The review was concerned with rising anti-Semitism in Europe from its very first issue, and Surya has also attempted to ensure that Lignes remains relatively non-partisan on the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The only Lignes issue dedicated to the conflict was entitled Penser la paix, penser l’impossible [Thinking peace, thinking the impossible] (March 2015); in the introduction, Henri Cohen Solal emphasised that this was a space of mediation, one encouraging dialogue, cooperation and non-violent resistance to counter the exploitation of fear and hatred that have escalated the conflict (LNS.46.2015, 5–10). In contrast to more militant reviews, Lignes’ stance has been one of editorial responsibility, of trying to calm the polemical nature of this intractable debate and not to provoke further anti-Semitic effects by the trading of insults and vitriol. Judith Butler provides a different, mediating account, a useful counterpoint as someone also steeped in anglophone French Theory. Like Badiou, she has been referred to as a ‘well-known anti-Semite’ for her criticisms of Israel (Benhabib, 2013, 150), and thus opens her book Parting Ways by contesting the notion ‘that any and all criticism of the State of Israel is effectively anti-Semitic’ (2012, 1). Arguing that ‘cohabitation is not a choice, but a condition of our political life’ (2012, 23), Butler is also in favour of a unified, secular state in Palestine ‘that would eradicate all forms of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity,

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race, and religion’ (2012, 208). In contrast to Badiou, however, Butler deploys a strategic essentialism, rather than a strategic universalism. One of Butler’s aims is to demonstrate that there are ‘Jewish resources for the criticism of state violence’ and also ‘values of cohabitation with the non-Jew’ (2012, 1). She argues that it is important to sever the connections between Judaism, Zionism and Israel (2012, 3), yet asserts that a critique of Israeli policy through Jewish thought at least contests Israel’s assumed right to act on behalf of all Jews. Butler therefore suggests that a critique of Zionism is necessary not only from a secular, universal standpoint, but also in the name of Judaism, so as not to cede this ground to political Zionism. To overcome the tension between universal and essentialist positions, Butler thus champions a deconstructive ‘self-departure’, arguing that ‘dispersion is the mode in which Jews have in fact survived’, not just geographically but as ‘an ethical modality’ (2012, 5–6). This argument is similar to Badiou’s, but Butler stresses that this dispersal of identity ‘is not the same as self-annihilation’ (2012, 5). For Butler, ‘it does matter that I arrive at these particular values and principles through a specific formation, specifically, my schooling and early childhood formation within Jewish communities’ (2012, 20): Butler’s particular Jewish heritage has marked her subjective formation and subsequent thought. Whilst French discourses of universalism could see this as problematically close to communautarisme, Butler argues that no universal mediation can ever be free of a culturally specific subjectivity. Butler’s strategic essentialism recognises cultural particularity whilst attempting to arrive at positions of universal political relevance. In this particular context, it seems to be a more sensitive and convincing approach than Badiou’s strategic universalism. This, then, is a strong example of a political position upheld by many at Lignes (the preference for a one-state solution in Israel) being concomitant with a strategic use of essentialism. The review’s emphasis on the materiality of thought, which only exists within a concretely situated subject, also seems to chime with Butler’s assertion that there is never any pure universal. This platform suggests Lignes’ ability to situate a form of identity politics that articulates the materially different experiences of multicultural and gendered existence, whilst escaping the trap of reifying identity categories into strict, exclusive ghettos or stereotypically reductive straightjackets.

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Essentialism with a Vengeance: Parity and PACS The lack of appreciation for strategic essentialism in Lignes is mirrored by the virtual absence of considerations on gender and sexuality. There is hostility towards those embracing positive discrimination, Jean-Loup Amselle criticising the PS for ‘courting’ visible minorities such as women and homosexuals (2012, 110–11). Yet focusing on gender and sexuality provides a different image of the PS, one which counters the remorselessly negative depiction found in Lignes. In France, ‘public policies have favoured both women’s entrance into the workplace and their opportunities to access quality child care’, write Mousli and Roustang-Stoller, emphasising that ‘the State can certainly be thanked for this’ (2009, 3). And, although the parity debate began in the early 1990s, the campaign accelerated after 1996 when the PS enshrined the goal of parity in its programme and ensured that 30% of its candidates in the next election were women (Bereni, 2007, 197). It was Mitterrand who decriminalised homosexuality in 1982, Jospin who instituted the PACS and Hollande who legalised gay marriage. The PS can thus be seen as progressive on gender and sexuality issues, in contrast to the negative emphasis placed on its economic and immigration policies in Lignes. Yet gender and sexuality issues rarely take centre stage in the review. Key figures in French gay and lesbian studies do contribute to Lignes, including Stéphane Nadaud and Éric Fassin, yet, although Fassin is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, his main Lignes contributions to date are written in defence of migrants’ rights rather than sexual politics. Nadaud’s and Fraisse’s books aside, neither feminism nor gay rights have been deemed important enough to warrant their own issue of Lignes in its entire 30-year history. Lignes has shown some interest in ‘the adventure of fags and dykes in the 1970s’ [l’aventure, dans les années soixante-dix, des pédés et des gouines] (LNS.10.2003, 91–2), especially the activities of Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer in the Front homosexuel d’activité révolutionnaire. Nadaud also edits the volumes of Félix Guattari’s writings published by Lignes, continuing the review’s interest in the revolutionary moment of the 1960s. This period fits with Lignes’ preference for transgressive or anarchic libertarianism and personal emancipation. Subsequently, the AIDS crisis had a significant impact on the intellectual sphere in France, causing Foucault’s and Hocquenghem’s deaths and halting political momentum. When gay activism returned in the 1990s, it was more reform-oriented than revolutionary, and Lignes was less enthused by the new stress on

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governmental cooperation and normalising homosexual relationships. Sexual politics enthused the review in periods when it seemed a more socially transgressive force, but it was more wary of the normative claims that gay rights and gender legislation would entail, hence perhaps its lack of coverage on gender and sexuality issues in general. There has been some growing frustration with this stance recently, however: Fassin stated that he voted for the PS to facilitate gay marriage (LNS.41.2013, 53), and René Schérer articulated his annoyance at being chastised by Badiou for making the same decision (LNS.41.2013, 132). Yet the debates sparked by parity and the PACS, as well as important policy issues, had significant conceptual ramifications. For the former campaign to be successful, activists needed to integrate parity into the universal republican framework. Whilst a constructivist account of gender was originally suggested, by the late 1990s parity advocates defined gender difference as an essential, and therefore also universal, human quality. Binary sexual difference was essentialised through structural anthropology and psychoanalytic theories (Levi-Strauss and Lacan) in which gender was ‘described as an immutable principle prevailing over all other differences (e.g. class, age, ethnicity, race, etc.)’ (Bereni, 2007, 201). Politicians increasingly referred to the ‘symbolic order’ to justify parity, yet the use of this term was confused, being ‘variously employed to designate sexual difference, society at large, language, culture, or thought’, or ‘all of these at once’ (Robcis, 2004, 18). The essentialism propagated by parity campaigners was problematic, however. Firstly, as fundamentally different to men, women were ‘supposed to bring something else to politics, such as a concern for “care” issues’, reinforcing gendered stereotypes (Mousli and Roustang-Stoller, 2009, 7). Secondly, by emphasising the universality of gender above all other differences, parity campaigners deliberately set themselves apart from other disadvantaged minorities: ‘the relationship between feminism and antiracist movements has been marked by several rendez-vous manqués’, and the parity campaign was another such occasion (Lépinard, 2007, 385). Crucially, the parity strategy also caused tension with the concurrent PACS campaign. Sylviane Agacinski’s Politique des sexes, mixité et parité (1998) was a key moment in turning a constructivist campaign into a strongly essentialist one. Agacinski encouraged psychoanalytic attacks against the PACS, arguing that same-sex parenting would disrupt the symbolic order; gay marriage could promote the idea of homosexual families, an idea Agacinski considered a negative challenge to traditional family values. Subsequently, Irène Théry’s report

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to the PS on the viability of the PACS in 1998 stated that ‘it could be dangerous to deny the consequences biological difference between parents has on filiation’, casting the PACS as a threatening harbinger of same-sex parenting (Johnston, 2008, 697). This caused rancour amongst pro-PACS activists, Didier Eribon calling Agacinski homophobic for her tendency to portray heterosexual parents as ethically superior to homosexual parents (2007, 26). The medicalisation and psychologisation of sexual issues in France was already pronounced, with psychoanalytic journals more prone to discussing gender and sexuality than those in the humanities (Revenin, 2012, 166); the essentialist discourses surrounding parity reinforced this institutional prevalence. It has been argued that the use of the ‘deconstructive’ and ‘dis-identificatory’ approaches of queer theory and strategic essentialism may have led to a less divisive campaign (Celestin, DalMolin and Schehr, 2008, 4). ‘Queer engages with positionality, not identity’, and it is therefore more conducive to inclusive, rather than exclusionary politics (Downing, 2012, 228). Notably, Lignes’ only interventions on this issue gestured towards this approach. In May 1999, Benslama and Surya stated that, whilst psychoanalysis demonstrated that sexual difference plays a role in the formation of the human subject, biology is not destiny: identity is subverted by the linguistic order and as such ‘differentiates itself from everything and differentiates everything, infinitely’ [se différencie de tout et différencie tout, infiniment] (L.37.1999, 119). Against the idea of a binary and immutable gender identity, then, Surya and Benslama’s comments are suggestive of the positional plurality accommodated by queer. In 2001, Catherine Malabou contributed a critical comparison of Butler and Agacinski, largely arguing in favour of Butler’s performative, constructivist approach to gender that is not necessarily tied to sex (though she did concede that Butler’s theory is weak on maternity issues) (LNS.6.2001, 172). Lignes’ rare comments on this issue countered strongly essentialist claims, and Nadaud’s knowledge of Guattari’s anti-Lacanian micropolitics could also have disrupted these rigid accounts of the ‘symbolic order’. The review could then have challenged both the rigid essentialism of the parity campaign alongside republican universalism, instead occupying a middle ground of a strategic essentialism that could challenge for positive rights for minority groups whilst still broadly aiming at universal political goals. Such a strategic approach does not seem alien to the positions which Lignes adopts elsewhere. As we saw in Chapter 3, Surya manipulated Nancy’s notion of the impropre to make it explicitly political, defining

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a community of the left who fought to erase communal identification. This seems to be a parallel move to the kinds of deconstructive, strategic essentialism outlined above. In addition, Didier Eribon argued that he generally preferred to invent new modes of living and new rights, rather than merely adopting old ones, and so admitted that the PACS campaign had initially failed to excite him (2004, 12). Yet, whilst it was easy to dismiss it as conformist and reformist, he decided that if this was the fight most conducive to positive progress in the contemporary period, he would support it unconditionally (2004, 14). He allowed his politics to be modified by the demands of the particular contemporary context. Surya came to a similar conclusion regarding Lignes: ‘it would be what the epoch made of it and not what it made of (with) its epoch’ [elle serait ce que l’époque ferait d’elle et non ce qu’elle ferait de (à) l’époque] (LNS.23–24.2007, 12). It remains to be seen what the future makes of Lignes, but the review certainly contains the intellectual resources to mobilise strategic essentialism in a variety of French identity debates (from gay marriage to the ongoing foulard and burkini sagas) in the coming years should it choose to do so. Future Lignes This chapter has traced a certain resistance to identity politics throughout the history of Lignes. A literary exceptionalism is at the heart of the review’s most elaborately theorised aesthetic stance, one which, although not explicitly calculated to exclude women and other minorities, did little to ensure their inclusion either. There are good reasons to support certain kinds of literary writing over others, and no one should be beholden to publish works not of interest to them, but the consequences of these exclusions should be probed. Indifference to popular culture is not the same as aggressive contempt, however, and the scorn for everyday life found in some contributors was also exposed, alongside the questionable political groupings to which this cultural conservatism can give rise. Instead, the newer, more militant orientation of the review has conceptualised a more active role which Lignes could (and in fact does) play in cultural politics, an intellectual activism best represented by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The resources within the review for a more active embrace of strategic essentialism were explored. The review’s book collection has been particularly useful for introducing and theorising new modes of political agency not given sufficient space in the

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review, and the attention to gender, sexuality and identity issues there may well soon cross over more concretely into the review. Lignes does indeed seem to be entering into something of a transitional moment. Whilst recent issues devoted to Bataille, Blanchot and the extreme right are strongly reminiscent of the review’s first series, a new generation of contributors seem to be opening Lignes up to new avenues. This generational aspect might be crucial for the review’s survival: Jean-Marie Domenach noted that reviews tend to remain politically relevant only for a single generation of 20 years (1986, 22), and Régis Debray agreed that they can only keep going beyond 20 or 25 years by undergoing a significant metamorphosis (1979, 87). Lignes successfully reinvigorated itself at the turn of the millennium with a new editorial board and monograph series, and the review has now reached its thirtieth year, in itself a considerable achievement. The appearance of many new contributors, alongside the departure of Brossat and the return of Marmande to the editorial board in 2011, suggests that the review is in a process of renewing itself to stave off the generational redundancy that can be the fate of such publications. If intellectual reviews are still to play a role in the construction of the French political, social and aesthetic fabric, their ability to continue to do so may rest on the relevance their arguments are felt to have in contemporary life. On gender issues, Éric Fassin argues that ‘if minoritarian questions are today the political questions par excellence, this is precisely because they interrogate our definition of the political’ [les questions minoritaires sont aujourd’hui des questions politiques par excellence, c’est précisément parce qu’elles interrogent notre définition de la politique] (2009, 15). The growing number of Lignes books and contributions tackling identity issues is perhaps a positive sign that the review is attempting to represent the concerns of its contemporary era, and especially the French youth. One frustration is often the injunction to choose either identity or class-based politics. Marxists such as Badiou have privileged class war over identity whilst, as we saw in Chapter 4, Alain Touraine abandoned his faith in the workers’ movement to declare only those movements concerned with identity to be valid in the contemporary period. There was palpable and justifiable frustration with the PS in the 1980s as the modernising second left seemed to abandon its goals of economic equality to become a purely cultural left interested only in minority rights. Yet this does not have to be an either/or scenario, and Balibar in particular suggests a flexible, conjunctural approach in which various strategies are appraised and the most politically expedient and effective

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one chosen at any given moment. This seems a fecund and reasonable position. Balibar is the Lignes contributor closest to articulating the use of strategic essentialism, as he materially evaluates different possible political approaches and suggests the best mixture at a certain political moment, rather than relying on hard and fast rules of engagement. Lignes tends to respond more positively to identity issues when it can integrate them into its overarching economic and political concerns. The review managed to do so with immigration issues, as it tied the toughening of migration legislation to the economic challenges being faced by nation states. Marxist feminists have yoked gender imbalance to capitalist exploitation, which would provide further grounds for such intersectional integration. Crucially, in the recent issue on the (once more) resurgent far right, the political realignments caused by the vicious backlash to the institution of gay marriage are discussed. Unlikely alliances between Muslims and Christians, the political right and the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, are seen to be causing an alarming confluence of anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-feminist discourses (LNS.45.2014, 6). Family values once more mobilised huge crowds in opposition to gay marriage, and so a positive embrace of gender and sexual liberation could be more firmly attached to a programme of resistance to the far right. Additionally, as noted at the opening of this chapter, issues of cultural identity, especially surrounding Islam, also remain extremely tense in the contemporary French landscape. Although Marine Le Pen failed to convince the electorate that her militant defence of French values was the necessary response in the 2017 presidential elections, identity politics will be of continued and significant importance in the national debate. How Lignes, and France more broadly, responds to these questions will be one of the defining features of the coming political years.

Conclusion Lignes: The Preservation of French Radical Thought Conclusion

In a recent Lignes inquest into the state of French politics, Éric Fassin lamented the fact that he is now considered an ultragauchiste, whereas he had always considered himself to be centre-gauche. In response, he protests: ‘It is the political landscape that has changed (not me!), in ceaselessly carrying itself to the right’ [C’est le paysage politique qui a changé (pas moi!), en se déportant sans cesse vers la droite] (LNS.41.2013, 53). This statement also neatly characterises Lignes’ position over the last 30 years, as its political convictions varied surprisingly little whilst a drift towards the right inexorably continued all around it. Many cultural commentators have confirmed the sentiment that there has been a ‘rightward (and downward) shift in Gallic thinking’ (Hazareesingh, 2015, 246). For example, if throughout the twentieth century there was a general (if unfounded) assumption that intellectuals tended to be left-wing, such an impression was challenged in February 2007 as a Nouvel Observateur cover boldly asked if the intellectuals were now turning to the right: ‘Les intellos. Virent-ils à droite?’ As Bernard Noël wrote in its twentieth anniversary issue, the existence of Lignes has done little to stem the rightward flow of its epoch: instead, the modest goal of the review ‘is neither to convince nor to win, but to keep it in check’ [n’est pas de convaincre, ni de gagner, mais de tenir en échec] (LNS.23.24.2007, 298). We are now in a position to gauge the contribution of Lignes over the past 30 years. Although the review has always occupied a marginal position in the French intellectual landscape, its achievements have been

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no less significant for that. Principally, Lignes must be credited for its dogged preservation of la pensée 68 in an era of French thought which often seemed devoted to its eradication. For Lignes, the intellectual genealogy represented by this broad definition can be divided roughly into two branches: the neo-Nietzscheans and the former Althusserians. The neo-Nietzscheans dominated the first series, which was originally oriented by the review’s defence of Georges Bataille from his liberal critics. Following the Heidegger affair, the links between Bataille, la pensée 68 and fascism were coming under intense scrutiny. Given that Bataille’s thought programmatically oriented many of Lignes’ early concerns, cleansing his record of fascist sympathies was a crucial step towards legitimating the review’s neo-Nietzschean project. Although it was the Tel Quel generation that first turned attention towards Bataille, much of what we now know about Bataille’s life and work is due to the diligent efforts of Lignes’ editors and contributors, Michel Surya and Francis Marmande above all. Maurice Blanchot proved a thornier problem for the review, given the unclear nature of his political commitments in the 1930s. The review initially chose to emphasise Blanchot’s post-war political texts and actions for the radical left. The Lignes dossiers on Blanchot, Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo were some of the most significant issues of the first series, preserving texts that would otherwise have been lost for posterity and restoring an intellectual legacy of 1960s engagement that profoundly influenced later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. Lignes contributors were among the first to represent Blanchot as an important post-war political thinker; no less important, then, was the recent issue heavily condemning his participation in proto-fascistic and anti-Semitic milieus in the 1930s. The 2014 Blanchot issue of Lignes was the most explicit exposé of his political past from those critics considered to be his friends. This issue should go a long way to ending the interminable controversy surrounding Blanchot’s past, allowing the critical debate to move on to more fruitful terrain. The review’s return to the French thought of the 1930s and 1960s was part of a wider attempt by Surya to revalorise an intellectual project which was being marginalised during the liberal moment of the 1980s. The defence of Bataille allied Lignes with a broader preservation of French neo-Nietzschean thought, and not least the work of one of the review’s most prestigious collaborators, Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy’s deconstructive anti-essentialism and post-foundational political thought heavily influenced the review’s embrace of the impropre over the propre:

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wary of any fixed identities and the formation of exclusive political communities, Lignes remains staunchly anti-nationalist and open to cultural difference. Symptomatically, like many other left-wing reviews of the post-Cold War era, Lignes was also initially cautious regarding collective political enterprises and militant vanguardism, preferring instead an open, discursive plurality. The changing European political context, especially the perennial resurgence of the far right, would force the review to become more trenchantly oppositional in the course of its lifespan, however. Similarly, other aspects of the review’s initial literary neo-Nietzschean critical ethos also had to be altered when faced with contemporary events. The initially aggressive atheism of the review was swiftly abandoned when it was clear that the new targets of laicité from 1989 onwards would be France’s Muslim minority. And, whilst Surya was clearly frustrated with the moralising tone, justifying everything from vicious attacks on modern artists to the Gulf War and financial capitalism, the review still tacitly moved with the times on some moral issues, such as the acceptability of paedophilia. Lignes’ responsible critical approach demonstrates that French neo-Nietzscheanism does not necessarily promote an amoral nihilistic relativism: although the review often argued in favour of a total artistic liberty, it also emphasised that the absence of moral absolutes necessitates a greater degree of personal responsibility. Just as Julian Bourg characterised the shift from the 1960s to the 1980s as one From Revolution to Ethics (2007), we can detect a parallel shift in French neo-Nietzscheanism from the libertarian spirit of the 1960s to a more liberal emphasis on rights and responsibilities in the 1980s. Literature continued to play a significant role for a small group of contributors to Lignes throughout its history, although creative writing never featured as heavily in the review as Surya would have liked. The books published and celebrated by the review sat squarely within a tradition of black erotica from Sade to Bataille (the writing of an adventure) and the more formally experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s (the adventure of writing). Writing represented a space of fundamental liberty for the review, where heteronomous and libertarian values were still allowed free play. Writing was significantly theorised by the review as a materialist experience of thought, one necessarily filling in the gaps left by the more puritanical discipline of philosophy. Alongside a need for political clarity in worrying times and the palpable exhaustion with jargonistic textual terrorism by the start of the 1980s, this emphasis on the materiality of sense rather than the abstract

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deconstruction of concepts differentiated Lignes from the legacy of Jacques Derrida. This literary form of sensual deconstruction provides a slightly different image of radical thought and writing in France in the 1960s and 1970s than the focus on more philosophically trained ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers has usually produced to date, and this literary heritage is worth exploring in further depth. The review therefore also played an important role in publishing and supporting minor literary works that would not have appeared with more commercial publishers. Yet a degree of cultural conservatism or contemptuous exceptionalism can be detected throughout the review’s literary stance. It is perhaps partly this attitude, which runs contrary to the political aspirations of other contributors, which prevented literature from playing a more central role in Lignes. This is also a sign of the times: as critics like Perry Anderson and Frederic Jameson have noted, contemporary culture privileges the visual and the digital over the textual, and literary fiction simply does not have the same central position in cultural debates it held during the modernist period (Anderson, 1998, 60). Many newer Lignes contributors also saw Benjamin’s pragmatic approach to cultural politics as being more in tune with their era than Adorno’s withdrawn elitism. Rather than reifying autonomous art as wholly separate from a degraded mass culture, Pasolini was seen by some as a model of intellectual activity, producing experimental aesthetic products but deliberately inserting them into wider cultural and political debates. Indeed, Lignes mobilised works of art for exactly these purposes from its very first issue, and so, even when not theorised as such, it has often seen books, films and artworks as ‘packets of forces’ through which to influence public debates (L.32.1997, 103). Lignes’ first series also saw the collaboration of Trotskyists, such as Daniel Bensaïd, and deconstructive Marxists, like Étienne Balibar. These two in particular stressed a materialist politics to the left of the Parti Socialiste, and, as the review became increasingly frustrated with the electoral sphere, it sought the closer collaboration of former Althusserians to articulate stronger accounts of activist agency. Alain Brossat was one of the key inclusions to the new editorial board of Lignes’ second series, and he brought more militant figures into the review’s pages. Michel Foucault became a more frequent reference, and the review housed more activist, specialist intellectual activity, especially in favour of migrants’ rights. Keen to foment divisive dissensus rather than liberal consensus, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière pitted themselves against the negative ethics and the wariness regarding

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political communities found in the neo-Nietzschean heritage. Both emphasised the emergence of new, extra-parliamentary political actors. Rancière’s disruptive subjects emerge when those previously uncounted by the current order force themselves to be counted and included, the sans-papiers being the primary example. Badiou attempted to repolarise politics through the explicit creation of binaries, antagonisms and, hopefully, genuinely novel events. After the financial crisis in 2008, there was a publishing boom surrounding books on Marxism and radical philosophy, prompting the phenomenal success of Badiou’s De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? and his transformation into a media celebrity. Significantly, after 30 years, the implicit ban imposed on communist and Marxist thought since 1977 was lifted by the close of 2007, with Lignes playing a large role in this wider cultural transformation. The neo-Nietzschean and former Althusserian currents of la pensée 68 sometimes pulled in contradictory directions. This can be seen most clearly by contrasting Blanchot to Badiou, the former encouraging a constant probing, questioning and complication of any received political discourse, the latter turning everything into an explicit binary, an us-against-them position, to force a problem towards a resolution. Yet such a polarity is inscribed into Lignes’ intellectual genealogy in the form of Blanchot’s two vectors of political activity, one naming and proscribing the possible, the other demanding the impossible (Bataille, 1997, 596). It has been part of the constant fecundity of Lignes to hold these two vectors in constant tension, rather than resolving one in favour of the other. The creation of the Lignes book series, first with Éditions Léo Scheer and now as the independent publisher Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, has allowed Surya to publish over 150 works of literature, philosophy and criticism to date. Alongside new monographs written by regular Lignes contributors, Surya has used this collection to extend his pedagogical project of preserving and recontextualising la pensée 68, and republished works are often accompanied by new explanatory prefaces. The most significant volumes include nine monographs by Georges Bataille, many of which were previously unpublished as stand-alone volumes (most significantly La Souveraineté); Maurice Blanchot’s Écrits Politiques (1958–1993), now translated and expanded for Fordham University Press; the first independent publication of Michel Foucault’s influential essays Les Hétérotopies and Préface à la transgression, alongside the previously unpublished Le Corps utopique and a Dialogue with Raymond Aron; an unpublished conversation (both in print and on DVD) between Jacques

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Derrida and Jean Baudrillard after 9/11; and numerous other posthumous volumes by Dionys Mascolo, Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Châtelet, Daniel Bensaïd, Jean-Noël Vuarnet and Paule Thévenin. The reputation of Lignes as a willing supporter of la pensée 68 has also led to several joint editorial ventures. The review has developed a working relationship with l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), a large archive of contemporary French literature and thought in Caen. This collaboration has produced several volumes of previously unpublished collections of Félix Guatarri’s writings and letters; a posthumous volume of articles by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; a transcript of the seminal meeting between Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and Hans-Georg Gadamer in 1988 in response to the Heidegger affair; and an extensive collection of letters between Georges Bataille and Éric Weil as they founded the influential review Critique. Lignes’ more radically militant phase also led to closer ties with the Anglo-American publisher Verso: Alain Badiou’s Circonstances series, including the phenomenally successful De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, were quickly translated into English to an equally enthusiastic reception, and Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s three conferences on The Idea of Communism were jointly supported by both publishers. When one includes the many articles by Lignes contributors, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, that have subsequently been published in translated volumes, one begins to get a sense of the significant scope and impact which Surya’s marginal review has managed to exert on the reception of French thought across the globe. And if, as some commentators believe, the quality of French thought has declined since its heyday in the post-war period, Lignes continues to publish some of France’s most incisive and relevant contemporary representatives. There are also signs that the review is undergoing another period of transformation, reinvigorating its critical apparatus to sustain itself into the future. As noted in the previous chapter, Lignes seems to be paying more attention to identity and minoritarian politics, especially gender and sexuality issues. There is more the review could do in this regard, and both expanding the kind of literature it privileges and broadening its base of contributors could breathe new life and critical vigour into Lignes. Another sphere in which Lignes is showing a belated interest is the environment. For the majority of the review’s lifespan, when ecological concerns were not entirely ignored they were often disparaged as either a myth or a distraction from economic inequalities. Arno Münster’s Pour un socialisme vert (2012) was the first expansive

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ecological manifesto to appear in Lignes, and positive appraisals of eco-socialism have since appeared from Claude Calame (LNS.39.2012, 13–38) and Pierre Sauvêtre (LNS.41.2013, 127–131). Félix Guattari’s Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie? (2014) more firmly tied ecological issues into the review’s intellectual heritage in la pensée 68. And, more radically, texts such as Calame’s Avenir de la planète & urgence climatique (2015) participate in the deconstruction of the binary between nature and culture. This destabilisation of the distinction between man and his environment builds upon the rapprochement of the human and the animal in the Lignes issue Humanité animalité (February 2009) and Surya’s Humanimalités (2004). Such accounts bring Lignes closer to contemporary new materialist thinkers, such as Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour, who attempt to theorise a truly post-humanist body politic, radically decentring human consciousness and agency to conceptualise the coexistence of all things. Crucially, in the introduction to the recent Lignes issue on new materialisms, Martin Crowley roots these new theoretical approaches very much in the heritage of both Louis Althusser and Georges Bataille (LNS.51.2016, 5). Therefore, as well as continuing Lignes’ more traditional work by developing and extending the works of key intellectual predecessors, this issue extends the review towards the anglophone world by including articles by two French thinkers who have been extensively discussed in recent years, Catherine Malabou and Bernard Stiegler. Lignes has survived for nearly 30 years, and has witnessed a period of not only extraordinary change but also surprising continuities. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that, even in philosophy, its main focus has always remained politics (symptomatically, the only issue of the review dedicated to Jacques Derrida (May 2015) was devoted entirely to his politics). The review was born in the dying years of the Cold War, yet the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent spread of liberal capitalism changed the geopolitical map in one fell swoop. However, since the late 1980s, to various extents and in different manners, both Western and Eastern Europe have experienced comparable political challenges: the collapse of the traditional left as progressive politics was hamstrung by the competitive needs of globalised capitalism, and a rightward drift in political discourses as concerns over immigration and a resurgent nationalism slowly filled the political vacuum created. Such a political shift was volatised as the Cold War was replaced by an apparent clash of civilisations between the West and the Islamic world. A new era defined by terrorism and securitisation was signalled most obviously by

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9/11. France is one of the European countries most obviously suffering the effects of such a conjuncture, with François Hollande proving to be the most unpopular French President ever, the Front National receiving support from up to 40% of the population in recent polls, and a spate of terror attacks, from Paris to Nice, precipitating the country into a state of panic and anxiety ahead of the 2017 elections. Although these problems feel very contemporary, something new and distinctly threatening, reading Lignes from start to finish produces a compelling narrative of how France has arrived at this point today. The central, political core of the review has remained astonishingly coherent and consistent throughout its history: from Bataille to Badiou, a degree of continuity exists in the desire to combine a resistance to the French far right with a critique of democratic liberalism. In warning against the dangers of recalcitrant identity politics based on firm ethnic or religious divisions, whilst attempting to theorise ways of overcoming the democratic deficit felt by many European populations, Lignes continues to mine issues of the upmost importance for our age. Although the review pitted itself strongly against the ‘liberal moment’ of the 1980s, Lignes actually championed many of the key tenants of liberalism, including freedom of expression, freedom of identity and sexuality, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, individual responsibility, secular governance and internationalism. What it resisted was, first of all, the intellectual backlash against Marxism and la pensée 68 that characterised the anti-totalitarian aspect of the liberal moment. Furthermore, the liberal confidence in the free market to shape a society that served humanity’s interests was never shared by the review. Scholars of the liberal moment have noted that ‘neo-liberalism failed to attract widespread support within a French intelligentsia that was increasingly open to liberal ideas in the 1970s and 1980s’ (Sawyer and Stewart, 2016, 13). Yet from Mitterrand’s U-turn on Keynesian policies in 1983 to the Sarkozy presidency, the replacement of Gaullist statism with neoliberal economics has been the inexorable drift of government policy, realising ‘the worst nightmares of those who were understandably suspicious of sleeping with the enemy’ (Sawyer and Stewart, 2016, 5). Most Lignes contributors, whether Marxists, anarchists or libertarians, were already deeply sceptical about the capitalist system. Yet from the mid-1990s onwards, the review saw the necessity of sharpening its critique of international financial capitalism and its impact on the parliamentary left. From Surya, through Baudrillard and Debord to Anselm Jappe and Groupe Krisis, contributors made significant attempts to update

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the previously aesthetic strains of domination theory for an era of globalised financial capitalism. Surya was keen to stress that the political legitimacy of capitalism should still be a matter of public debate rather than reduced to a moral debate about responsible governance and good behaviour. Groupe Krisis’s definition of structural alienation also successfully moved cultural Marxist approaches back towards political economy, suggesting that the current capitalist system was both out of our control and declaring open war on humanity. However, domination theory as a whole was criticised by other contributors for failing to provide concrete political solutions to economic inequality, especially after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. One criticism of Lignes is that, in its desire not to compromise intellectual thought through governmental collaboration, it has not engaged closely enough with the institutional nature of contemporary governance and finance. For instance, Badiou and Ranciere’s theories of dissensual agency were accused of bypassing the sphere of political economy almost entirely (Žižek, 2004, 75). On the other hand, it was the rare moments of activist effervescence (the new social movements between 1995 and 1998 and the period after the 2008 financial crisis) during which the review really housed pragmatic alternative policy debates. Surprisingly, the former Trotskyists, such as Daniel Bensaïd, and Western Marxists, like Étienne Balibar, were the most invested in developing concrete political strategies that mediated the demands of the people with the electoral sphere and existing institutions. It was through Balibar that the review hosted its only issue dedicated to the European Union (February 2004), and this dossier, prepared for the review Transeuropéennes, only appeared in Lignes as a gesture of goodwill following the financial collapse of the former review. The EU has otherwise only been lambasted in Lignes for its immigration policy and treatment of Greece after the financial crisis. Yet, as Europe continues to face a severe migration crisis which further fuels the nationalistic tensions already rife in a post-Brexit EU, greater European collaboration will surely be at the root of any satisfactory solution. Whether one feels that the EU is far from perfect or that institutional collaboration is a form of domestication, the review’s most fundamental concerns are tied up with the organisation of Europe’s political future, and this surely merits further discussion within the pages of Lignes. Above all, however, the review’s most coherent critique of liberalism was that its adherents were overconfident that it would be enough to stave off the return of nationalism and the far right. The review has, in

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this sense, shown itself to be a prescient and invaluable witness to its era. The 1930s were used as a moment of contrast and comparison to examine how a perceived democratic deficit produced a rise in populism and unleashed dangerously nationalistic or racist passions. From David Rousset to Étienne Balibar, contributors theorised the destructuring impact of free-market capitalism as international competition and chronic unemployment turned social groups against each other. In this reading, liberalism’s focus on individualism rather than broad social solutions to economic inequality would only heighten, rather than alleviate, such fragmentation. Furthermore, Brossat and Rancière noted that as the ability of states to control the flow of capital decreased, their need to control the flow of populations increased, fomenting the concern with migration and the rising use of retention centres across Europe today. Throughout Lignes’ history, then, it has also been sensitive to the political mobilisation of racist or xenophobic discourses. It immediately sensed the Islamophobic direction which the new discourses of laicité would take, vigorously protested changes to the nationality code, lamented the xenophobic stress on national identity increasingly taken up by both left and right, and demonstrated the transitory nature of stigmatising discourses which targeted Muslims, disaffected banlieue youth and the roms whenever politically expedient. Whilst the disproportionate public noise generated by the foulard and the burkini often seems strange to those outside of France, in this sense it is merely the localised symptom of the tensions being felt by the majority of Western states over the last 30 years as they struggle to balance the demands of free trade and the free movement of labour with public distress regarding rising economic inequality and falling living standards. Lignes has not been able to seriously change this train of events. Yet, as a witness to the fragmentation of the consensual climate of the 1980s, as economic and migratory pressures eroded the progressive potential of the liberal moment and instead inaugurated a period in which crisis seemed to become the paradigmatic mode of governance, the review does at least provide a coherent orientation for the contemporary critic to make sense of the prevailing trends in European politics. Lignes has outlived the lifespan that could have been reasonably expected of it. This book has demonstrated its intellectual importance and cultural contribution throughout its 30 years, largely due to the dedicated efforts of its principal editor, Michel Surya. Lignes is also proof of the continued significance of this cultural format in the French media landscape. Reviews are still flourishing in France, largely thanks

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to the financial support of the state and a variety of cultural organisations. Contrary to repeated claims of their demise, this book has also demonstrated the persistence of a wide array of intellectual types, from those more concerned with literary autonomy and creative freedom, through militant or engaged intellectuals and media commentators, to committed specialists developing effective and concrete interventions on behalf of causes such as migrants’ rights. Whilst famous thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou continue to receive a great deal of attention in anglophone humanities departments, there remains a densely populated intellectual sphere in France that receives precious little attention. Studies of 1960s reviews, such as Tel Quel, revolutionised how academics viewed French intellectual culture from that period; if today the general feeling is that the quality of French thought is diminishing, this book stakes a claim on the continued relevance of intellectual reviews and suggests that, on further examination, there is much of continued significance and interest for the rest of the world.

appendix one

Lignes Editorial Board Members Editorial Board Members

The initial editorial board remained stable throughout the review’s first series, and was much more fluid in the second. Below are all members of the editorial board, past and present, in the order in which they joined. Michel Surya (all issues) Daniel Dobbels (November 1987–May 2000) Francis Marmande (November 1987–October 2001, October 2011– March 2015) Fethi Benslama (October 2001–present) Jean-Paul Curnier (October 2001–present) Bernard Noël (October 2001–October 2015) Alain Brossat (October 2001–June 2011) Jacqueline Risset (October 2001–October 2002, October 2003, May 2004–October 2014) Jean-Luc Nancy (October 2001–February 2007) Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (October 2001–October 2002, March 2008– October 2010) Enzo Traverso (October 2002–present) Jacob Rogozinski (March 2008–present) Jean-Paul Dollé (March 2008–June 2011) Daniel Wilhem (March 2008–June 2011) Georges Didi-Huberman (May 2008–present) Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison (May 2008–October 2013) Marc Goldschmit (May 2008–May 2009)

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Véronique Bergen (October 2008–present) Jean-Loup Amselle (October 2011–present) Martin Crowley (October 2011–present) Boyan Manchev (October 2011–present) Marc Nichanian (October 2011–present) Mathilde Girard (June 2014–present) Alain Jugnon (June 2014–present) Frédéric Neyrat (June 2014–present) Sophie Wahnich (May 2016–present) February 2007–Support Committee This was a one-off committee made up of those who supported the review during the transition from Éditions Léo Scheer to the creation of Nouvelles Éditions Lignes as a self-publishing enterprise. Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Daniel Bensaïd, Fethi Benslama, Alain Brossat, Esther Cohen, Martin Crowley, Jean-Paul Curnier, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jean-Paul Dollé, Jacques Dupin, Marc Goldschmit, Robert Harvey, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Claude Louis-Combet, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Noël, Mario Perniola, Christian Prigent, Jacqueline Risset, Jacob Rogozinski, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Enzo Traverso, Daniel Wilhelm

appendix two

Lignes Issue Titles Issue Titles

First Series (Volumes 1–14 published by Éditions de la Libraire Séguier, 15–38 by Éditions Hazan) Vol. 1 (November 1987): Gorbachev, Zakhor, Celan, Figures politiques: masques et parodies Vol. 2 (February 1988): Autour du code de la nationalité, Révisionnisme – Négationnisme, Heidegger en question, La pensée: état provisoire des lieux, Nationalismes et identités. Vol. 3 (June 1988): Fin du politique ou nouvel ordre moral? Vol. 4 (October 1988): Les extrême-droites française et européenne Vol. 5 (February 1989): La Gauche gâchée, Judaïsme et République, Benveniste: une découverte spectaculaire Vol. 6 (June 1989): Éloge de l’irréligion Vol. 7 (September 1989): Jürgen Habermas, L’extrême-droite allemande, Chaïm Perelman, Populisme en argentine Vol. 8 (December 1989): Capitulation? Vol. 9 (March 1990): Nouvel antisémitisme en France, Jacques Derrida, L’enfer limpide Vol. 10 (June 1990): Europe centrale: nations, nationalités, nationalismes Vol. 11 (September 1990): Maurice Blanchot et La Revue internationale Vol. 12 (December 1990): Penser le racisme Vol. 13 (March 1991): La Guerre Vol. 14 (June 1991): De Gauche, autrement, La revanche morale, Céline, Picasso, Sade Vol. 15 (March 1992): Vers le fascisme? Lefebvre, Axelos, Mascolo, Heidegger

270

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Vol. 16 (June 1992): États de la langue (poésie et politique), Hommage à Edmond Jabès, Mascolo, Heidegger, Proust, Benjamin Vol. 17 (October 1992): Utopie, les lieux où l’art … Vol. 18 (January 1993): Logiques du capitalisme, L’unique tradition matérialiste, Géophilosophie de l’Europe, L’art, fragment Vol. 19 (May 1993): L’action, l’engagement, De l’antisémitisme aux judéophobies: retours, détours, nouveaux parcours, I Vol. 20 (September 1993): Yougoslavie: penser dans la crise Vol. 21 (January 1994): Le peuple appelé, Robert Antelme, présence de L’Espèce humain, Paul Celan – Nelly Sachs, Salman Rushdie Vol. 22 (June 1994): États de l’Italie, Le part de l’art, Le Mal radical Vol. 23 (October 1994): Italie, Archives en France Vol. 24 (February 1995): L’impur, l’impropre, États de l’Italie, Pour Taslima Nasreen Vol. 25 (May 1995): Violence et politique Vol. 26 (October 1995): Auschwitz et d’Hiroshima, Arménie, Rushdie, Violence et torture Vol. 27 (February 1996): Les Ambassadeurs (Art et pensée en prison) Vol. 28 (May 1996): Vladimir Jankélévitch Vol. 29 (October 1996): La rupture sociale (Décembre 1995), Archives en France: transparence et opacité (II), Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: Le sens d’une rencontre, Le MAC mis à nu Vol. 30 (February 1997): Algérie-France: regards croisés, La rupture sociale (suite) Vol. 31 (May 1997): Sur tous les fronts, Guy Debord Vol. 32 (October 1997): Les intellectuels tentative de définition, par eux-mêmes. Enquête. Vol. 33 (March 1998): Avec Dionys Mascolo Vol. 34 (May 1998): Le devenir de mai, 1848 Vol. 35 (October 1998): Haine de la nostalgie, Le Collège International de Philosophie Vol. 36 (March 1999): Résistance de l’art, des arts résistants, Heiner Müller Vol. 37 (May 1999): Disparition de la gauche Vol. 38 (November 1999): Crise et critique de la sociologie

Lignes Issue Titles

271

Second Series (Volumes 1–21 published by Léo Scheer, 22–51 by Nouvelles Éditions Lignes) Vol. 1 (March 2000): Sartre-Bataille Vol. 2 (May 2000): David Rousset Vol. 3 (October 2000): Guyotat – Artaud – Blanchot – Bataille – Antelme – Rousset Vol. 4 (February 2001): Désir de révolution Vol. 5 (May 2001): Littérature de la cruauté Vol. 6 (October 2001): Identités indécises Vol. 7 (February 2002): Un autre Nietzsche Vol. 8 (May 2002): Vainqueurs/Vaincus – un monde en guerre Vol. 9 (October 2002): De la possibilité politique et des politiques possibles Vol. 10 (March 2003): Le Principe d’amnistie, Les droits des vaincus Vol. 11 (May 2003): Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin – Maurice Blanchot 1907–2003 Vol. 12 (October 2003): Le nouveau désordre international, Georges Bataille Vol. 13 (February 2004): L’Europe en partage Vol. 14 (May 2004): Penser Sade Vol. 15 (October 2004): Politiques de la peur, Le retournement du monde Vol. 16 (February 2005): Anarchies Vol. 17 (May 2005): Nouvelles lectures de Georges Bataille Vol. 18 (October 2005): Pier Paolo Pasolini – littérature, cinéma, politique Vol. 19 (February 2006): Le Soulèvement des banlieues, Alain Badiou & Jacques Rancière Vol. 20 (May 2006): Situation de l’édition et de la libraire Vol. 21 (November 2006): Ruptures sociales, ruptures raciales Vol. 22 (May 2007): Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Vol. 23–24 (November 2007): Vingt années de la vie politique et intellectuelle Vol. 25 (March 2008): Décomposition recomposition politiques Vol. 26 (May 2008): Les Étrangers indésirables – immigration, retentions, expulsions Vol. 27 (October 2008): Temps historique, temps messianique

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Vol. 28 (February 2009): Humanité animalité Vol. 29 (May 2009): De la violence en politique Vol. 30 (October 2009): La Crise comme méthode de gouvernement Vol. 31 (February 2010): Le gai savoir de Jean Baudrillard Vol. 32 (May 2010): Daniel Bensaïd Vol. 33 (October 2010): Dictionnaire critique du ‘Sarkozysme’ Vol. 34 (February 2011): L’exemple des roms. Les roms, pour l’exemple. Vol. 35 (June 2011): Le Rebut Humain (et Les Roms, Seconde partie) Vol. 36 (October 2011): Monde arabe: rêves, révoltes, révolutions Vol. 37 (February 2012): Non pas: voter pour qui, mais: pourquoi voter? Vol. 38 (May 2012): Littérature & pensée Vol. 39 (October 2012): Le devenir grec de l’Europe néolibérale Vol. 40 (February 2013): Le manifeste entre la littérature, art et politique Vol. 41 (May 2013): Ce qu’il reste de la politique (De sa parole, de sa promesse, de son action …) Enquête, Mai 2012–Mai 2013 Vol. 42 (October 2013): La Pensée critique contre l’éditorialisme Vol. 43 (Mars 2014): Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot, 1930–1993 Vol. 44 (June 2014): Situations de la critique, Sade Vol. 45 (October 2014): Les nouvelles droites extrêmes, Jacqueline Risset Vol. 46 (March 2015): Penser la paix, penser l’impossible: le conflit israélo-palestinien Vol. 47 (May 2015): Derrida politique Vol. 48 (Octobre 2015): Les Attentats, La pensée, Sartre et le droit Vol. 49 (March 2016): Une Philosophe-artiste: Jean-Noël Vuarnet Vol. 50 (May 2016): Fascisme, antisémitisme, musulman, collaboration, colonialisme Vol. 51 (October 2016): Quels matérialismes? Pour quels mondes? Vol. 52 (February 2017): Vouloir l’impossible Vol. 53 (May 2017): Imre Kertész Vol. 54 (October 2017): Ici et maintenant – Lignes 1987–2017 Vol. 55 (February 2018): Fini, c’est fini, ça va finir: Abstentionnisme, populisme, dégagisme, marchisme

Lignes Articles Cited Articles Cited

L.1.1987 Groys, Boris. ‘Perestroïka, glasnost et post-modernisme’, trans. Jacqueline Lahana, 34–43 L.2.1988 ‘Avant-propos [Autour du code de la nationalité]’, 6 Balibar, Étienne. ‘L’avenir du racisme’, 7–12 Guattari, Félix, and G. Donnard. ‘Nationalité et citoyenneté’, 13–16 Dobbels, Daniel. ‘Une mémoire sans abandon (2)’, 96–108 Weil, Éric. ‘Le cas Heidegger’, 139–51 Palmier, Jean-Michel. ‘Heidegger et le national-socialisme’, 152–82 Faye, Jean-Pierre. ‘Heidegger, l’État et l’Être’, 183–93 Dobbels, Daniel. ‘Fonds perdus (notes prises en marge du livre de Victor Farías)’, 194–9 Surya, Michel. ‘Demains et la peur’, 203–12 L.3.1988 ‘Éditorial [Fin du politique ou nouvel ordre moral?]’, 3–5 Surya, Michel. ‘Avant-propos au texte de Louis Sala-Molins’, 10 Sala-Molins, Louis. ‘Le racisme et le microscope’, 11–31 Soulier, Gérard. ‘La politique sans fin’, 32–45 Debray, Régis. ‘La machine aux aménités. Entretien avec Daniel Dobbels et Francis Marmande’, 100–7 Brigant, Jean-Louis. ‘Le principe d’indifférence’, 115–20 Schérer, René. ‘La double racine du nouvel ordre moral’, 121–41 L.4.1988 Taguieff, Pierre-André. ‘L’identité nationaliste’, 14–60 Marmande, Francis. ‘Un discret tressaillement charnel’, 106–21 Schönekäs, Klaus. ‘La “neue Rechte” en République Fédérale d’Allemagne’, 126–55

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Ferraresi, Franco. ‘Le droit radical dans l’Italie d’après-guerre’, trans. Catherine Habib, 162–80 L.5.1989 Debray, Régis and Alain Finkielkraut. ‘La République est-elle en train de mourir? (débat)’, 66–85 Negri, Antonio. ‘Gauche et coordinations ouvrières (Nouveaux mouvements sociaux)’, 86–96 L.6.1989 Surya, Michel. ‘Éditorial [Éloge de l’irréligion]’, 8–10 Artaud, Antonin. ‘L’histoire vraie de Jésus-Christ’, 13–28 Bailly, Jean-Christophe. ‘Les allures tristes d’un chromo’, 41–6 Schuster, Jean. ‘Contre les acolytes de Dieu et les Judas de l’athéisme’, 64–7 Vuarnet, Jean-Noël. ‘Tout, excepté pénitence’, 81–94 Lepage, Franck. ‘Du blasphème en démocratie: la gauche qui pense contre la gauche qui croit’, 118–34 ‘Pétition: pour Salman Rushdie’, 135 Sade, D.A.F. ‘La religion [excerpt from La philosophie dans le boudoir]’, 140–54 Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘L’antéchrist [excerpt]’, 154–6 Jarry, Alfred. ‘La passion considérée comme une course de côte [excerpt from La Canard sauvage]’, 158–61 L.7.1989 ‘Présentation [Jürgen Habermas]’, 8 Hunyadi, Mark. ‘La souveraineté de la procédure. À propos de la pensée politique de Jürgen Habermas’, 11–27 L.8.1989 Marmande, Francis. ‘Chez nous soyez reine’, 37–53 Surya, Michel. ‘La fin de l’histoire: une bouffonnerie’, 54–73 Negri, Antonio. ‘Le temps de l’intempestif’, 90–9 L.9.1990 Zagdanski, Stéphane. ‘L’enfer limpide. Essai sur la transparence, l’impureté et la démocratie’, 153–72 L.11.1990 Laporte, Roger. ‘Tout doit s’effacer. Tout s’effacera’, 13–21 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘La gravité du projet …’, 179–81 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Une revue peut être l’expression …’, 181–3 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Revue sans division …’, 183–4

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Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Mémorandum sur “Le cours des choses”’, 185–6 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 December 1960’, 218–20 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Letter to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 14 March 1961’, 222–4 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Letter to Uwe Johnson, 1 February 1963’, 268–72 Vittorini, Elio. ‘Letter to Louis-René des Forêts, February 1963’, 272–5 Mascolo, Dionys ‘Letter to Francesco Leonetti, 17 December 1963’, 294–300 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Letter to Elio Vittorini, March 1965’, 300–1 L.12.1990 David, Alain. ‘Présentation [Penser le racisme]’, 9–15 Taguieff, Pierre-André. ‘Réflexions sur la question antiraciste’, 15–52 L.13.1991 Surya, Michel. ‘Présentation [La guerre]’, 9–12 Surya, Michel. ‘Moralisation à marche forcée’, 111–35 Sala-Molins, Louis. ‘Science blanche et blanco-biblisme’, 152–5 L.14.1991 ‘Présentation [De Gauche, autrement]’, 9–10 Dobbels, Daniel, Francis Marmande and Michel Surya. ‘L’espace, comme une taupe (entretien)’, 83–103 L.15.1992 Surya, Michel. ‘Éditorial [Vers le fascisme?]’, 7–10 Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Démocratie effective et contre-pouvoir critique (entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit et Thomas Ferenczi)’, 36–44 Jacob, Jean. ‘L’offensive théorique des droites classiques (la guerre scolaire continue)’, 117–25 L.16.1992 Surya, Michel. ‘Paul Touvier, états de la langue, langues de l’État’, 47–57 Mesnard, Philippe. ‘Le souci de la limite’, 78–87 Stamelman, Richard. ‘De l’étrangeté et de l’hospitalité du livre’, 101–8 Surya, Michel. ‘Lectures’, 191–6 L.17.1992 Balibar, Étienne. ‘Internationalisme ou barbarie’, 21–42 L.18.1993 Baudrillard, Jean. ‘La puissance de l’illusion (Entretien avec Daniel Dobbels et Michel Surya)’, 34–48

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L.19.1993 Bailly, Jean-Christophe. ‘Loin des tribunes’, 15–22 Curnier, Jean-Paul. ‘L’embarras du choix’, 23–32 Naïr, Sami. ‘L’avenir commence aujourd’hui’, 33–8 Lepage, Franck. ‘Aux circonstances, pour qu’elles s’aggravent …’, 39–54 L.20.1993 Raulet, Gérard. ‘Avant-propos [Yougoslavie: penser dans la crise]’, 7–13 Djuric, Ivan. ‘Serbes et Croates. Que faut-il faire maintenant?’, 14–29 L.21.1994 Surya, Michel. ‘Présentation [Le peuple appelé]’, 5–8 Naïr, Sami. ‘Droite-gauche, gauche-droite’, 29–34 Lepage, Franck. ‘Le gai social’, 57–83 Antelme, Robert. ‘Les principes à l’épreuve (1959)’, 112–18 Various. ‘Autour de Robert Antelme. Témoignages – Entretiens’, 175–202 L.22.1994 Marmande, Francis. ‘Avant-propos I [États de l’Italie]’, 5–7 Risset, Jacqueline. ‘Notes sur un changement de paysage’, 13–17 Didi-Huberman, Georges. ‘D’un ressentiment en mal d’esthétique, suivi de Post-scriptum (1994): du ressentiment à la Kunstpolitik’, 21–62 Salgas, Jean-Pierre. ‘Et in Canada Egoyan’, 84–99 L.24.1995 Surya, Michel. ‘L’impur, l’impropre: Avant-propos’, 7–14 Benslama, Fethi. ‘La dépropriation’, 34–61 Bident, Christophe. ‘Dans une ruse de la passion’, 92–108 Marmande, Francis. ‘Avant-propos [Pour Taslima Nasreen]’, 191 Nasreen, Taslima. ‘Quand tout est changé pourquoi conserve-t-on les religions?’, 192–5 Chemillier-Gendreau, Monique. ‘Existe-t-il un droit d’écrire?’, 200–5 L.25.1995 Ben Achour, Yadh. ‘Violence et politique en Islam’, 159–73 Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Violence et violence’, 293–8 L.26.1995 Bident, Christophe. ‘Peut-on être Rushdie?’, 95–109 L.27.1996 Marmande, Francis. ‘Les banlieues favorisées’, 12–20

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Delfour, Jean-Jacques. ‘La vidéosurveillance et le pouvoir du voir (Du panoptisme comme modèle de société)’, 151–71 Bident, Christophe. ‘Georges Bataille après tout, sous la direction de Denis Hollier’, 199–202 L.28.1996 Imbert-Vier, Brigitte. ‘La faveur de l’instant’, 61–70 L.29.1996 ‘La rupture sociale (Décembre 1995)’, 6 Brossat, Alain. ‘La confiance perdue dans le monde’, 17–30 Aguiton, Christophe. ‘Perspectives du mouvement du décembre 1995’, 64–76 Carton, Luc. ‘Décembre 1995: Mouvement social et immobilité politique’, 77–88 Lepage, Franck. ‘Grammaire de la résignation’, 89–105 L.30.1997 Rancière, Jacques. ‘La cause de l’autre’, 36–49 Lazarus, Sylvain. ‘Les mouvements présentent la politique, les organisations la prescrivent’, 170–80 L.31.1997 Bensaïd, Daniel. ‘De la suite dans les idées’, 11–22 Lepage, Franck. ‘Note de lecture: Résister’, 67–8 Curnier, Jean-Paul. ‘À reprendre depuis le début’, 91–110 Löwy, Michel. ‘Consumé par le feu de la nuit (le romantisme noir chez Guy Debord)’, 161–9 L.32.1997 Balibar, Étienne. ‘La contradiction infinie’, 14–25 Benslama, Fethi. ‘Parfois’, 32–7 Brossat, Alain. ‘Lémures et gens bien’, 41–9 Naïr, Sami. ‘La puissance du négatif’, 96–102 Proust, Françoise. ‘La politique de la pensée’, 106–12 Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Untitled [Les intellectuels]’, 102–4 Balibar, Étienne. ‘Une culture mondiale?’, 171–202 L.33.1998 Antelme, Robert and Dionys Mascolo. ‘Rapport au cercle des critiques sur les questions de la littérature et de l’esthétique (1948)’, 25–39 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Appel en faveur d’un cercle international des intellectuels révolutionnaires’, 74–8

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Mascolo, Dionys and Jean Schuster. ‘Projet pour un jugement populaire et premières mesures exécutoires’, 79–83 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Une illusion très générale’, 141–3 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Le communisme sans héritage’, 147–8 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Les communistes de salut’, 163–6 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘La théorie, force matérielle’, 168–72 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Je tiens à t’informer moi-même’, 175–6 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Projet d’adresse aux masses intellectuelles’, 187–91 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Communication au sujet d’Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille et André Breton’, 193–4 Mascolo, Dionys. ‘Carnets. Extraits’, 197–206 Deleuze, Gilles, and Dionys Mascolo. ‘Correspondance, 1988’, 222–6 L.34.1998 Surya, Michel. ‘Le cartel des droites’, 5–18 Brossat, Alain. ‘Émeute sans meute. Fidélité à l’événement et ascèse cognitive’, 21–40 Marmande, Francis. ‘Langue de Mai, belle de Mai’, 41–51 Bensaïd, Daniel. ‘Sous les pavés, la grève’, 52–65 Becht, James. ‘De Guy Debord à Jean Baudrillard. Détournements de Marx’, 138–55 Tévanian, Pierre and Sylvie Tissot. ‘Avant, après (le savant, le politique). Lettre ouverte à M. Sami Naïr, à propos de revirement et de consensus (Précédée d’une introduction de M. Surya)’, 156–65 Tévanian, Pierre and Sylvie Tissot. ‘Dictionnaire des idées reçues sur l’immigration (extraits)’, 166–90 L.35.1998 Shepp, Archie. ‘Quelque chose autre (Entretien avec Francis Marmande)’, 14–21 Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Changement de monde’, 42–52 Naïr, Sami. ‘À propos de l’immigration (réponse à Lignes)’, 154–68 L.36.1999 Marmande, Francis. ‘Écritures de la transgression. Transgression des formes depuis Ubu Roi (1896)’, 6–37 Bénézet, Mathieu. ‘Écrire encore. 1997’, 38–47 L.37.1999 Tévanian, Pierre. ‘Quelques remarques sur l’idéologie national-républicaine’, 102–16 Benslama, Fethi and Michel Surya. ‘Différence et souveraineté’, 117–20 David, Alain. ‘Militants, encore un effort’, 146–59 Wahnich, Sophie. ‘Bribes d’émotions (populaires)’, 160–84

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L.38.1999 Jeudy, Henri-Pierre. ‘Présentation [Crise et critique de la sociologie]’, 7–8 LNS.2.2000 Bensaïd, Daniel. ‘La raison des déraisons. De La Société éclatée à Sur la guerre’, 115–28 Rousset, David. ‘Au secours des déportés dans les camps soviétiques. Un appel aux anciens déportés des camps nazis’, 143–60 Rousset, David. ‘Nous avons arraché des milliers d’hommes à l’enfer des camps [1956]’, 173–82 Rousset, David. ‘Le sens de notre combat [1959]’, 202–27 LNS.3.2000 Curnier, Jean-Paul. ‘Le Noir du vivant, la cruauté, encore’, 53–70 Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Le nom de Berlin’, 129–34 Bident, Christophe. ‘Politique de Blanchot et l’abstraction concrète’, 142–8 Antelme, Robert. ‘“J’accepte sous conditions” (Réponse à David Rousset)’, 187–91 LNS.4.2001 Surya, Michel. ‘Désir de révolution: Présentation’, 7–10 Balibar, Étienne. ‘Sed intelligere’, 11–15 Löwy, Michel. ‘Révolution désirable et possible’, 119–24 Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Untitled [Désir de révolution]’, 134–41 LNS.6.2001 Bauman, Zygmunt. ‘Identité et mondialisation’, 10–27 Brossat, Alain. ‘Métissage culturel, différend et disparition’, 28–52 Iveković, Rada. ‘Le sexe de la nation’, 128–48 Malabou, Catherine. ‘Quel genre de femme êtes-vous? Du côté de l’identité sexuelle’, 150–75 LNS.7.2002 Dollé, Jean-Paul. ‘La liberté souveraine’, 162–79 LNS.8.2002 Surya, Michel. ‘Présentation [Vainqueurs/Vaincus – Un monde en guerre]’, 5–6 Badiou, Alain. ‘Considérations philosophiques sur quelques faits récents’, 9–34 Rancière, Jacques. ‘Le 11 Septembre et après: une rupture de l’ordre symbolique?’, 35–46

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LNS.9.2002 Badiou, Alain. ‘Considérations philosophiques sur la très singulière coutume du vote, étayées sur l’analyse de récents scrutins en France’, 9–35 Mucchielli, Jacques. ‘Toute la misère du monde …’, 152–77 Muhle, Maria. ‘Biopolitique et pouvoir souverain’, 178–93 Persichetti, Paolo. ‘Des siècles de domestication de la violence?’, 205–34 LNS.10.2003 Nadaud, Stéphane. ‘Mais où est donc passé le chapitre IV de Trois milliards de pervers?’, 75–98 Mucchielli, Jacques. ‘Le corps du délit’, 116–33 LNS.11.2003 Surya, Michel. ‘Présentation [Adorno et Benjamin]’, 3 Hirsch, Michael. ‘Adorno après Benjamin. Politiques de l’esprit’, 76–98 LNS.12.2003 Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Bilan succinct de la prétendue guerre avec l’Irak’, 7–8 Alain Badiou. ‘Fragments d’un journal public sur la guerre américaine contre l’Irak’, 9–31 Rancière, Jacques. ‘De la guerre comme forme suprême du consensus ploutocratique avancé’, 32–9 LNS.14.2004 Sichère, Bernard. ‘Sade, l’impossible’, 141–58 LNS.15.2004 Vollaire, Christiane. ‘Modulations politiques et manipulations sécuritaires de la peur’, 45–52 Klingberg, Sylvia. ‘Ils ont habitué les ouvriers à avoir la trouille’, 119–33 Coret-Metzger, Laure. ‘Au Rwanda, dix ans âpres’, 134–43 LNS.16.2005 Valtat, Jean-Christophe. ‘Et la loi a gagné …’, 115–27 Girard, Mathilde. ‘Cela se peut-il encore’, 128–47 Margantin, Laurent. ‘Dada ou la boussole folle de l’anarchisme’, 148–59 LNS.17.2005 Franco, Lina. ‘Il faut vouloir vivre les grands problèmes, par le corps et par l’esprit’, 193–205 Trécherel, Sylvie. ‘Georges Bataille, la pensée d’un style’, 209–18

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Index Index

Le 14 juillet 61, 67–70, 91 Acéphale 40–4 Acéphale 43 Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 10 Adorno, Theodor 160, 183, 221, 224, 231–2, 259 Agacinski, Sylviane 251–2 Agamben, Giorgio 24, 187, 196–200 Agir ensemble contre le chômage (AC!) 148, 153 Aguiton, Christophe 153, 157 Alexandre, Claude 122 Algerian War 51, 67, 71, 131, 243 alienation 64, 66, 108, 161–2, 169–70 structural alienation 23, 173–8, 181, 183, 264 Allal, Tewfik 120 Althusser, Louis 2, 9, 138, 272 Althusserians in Lignes 21, 23, 25, 84, 95, 186, 200, 216, 257, 259–60 Alunni, Charles 215 Amar, David 54 Amselle, Jean-Loup 213, 215, 241–3, 250 anarchism 20, 212, 263 right-wing anarchism 55, 224 Anderson, Perry 1, 93, 148, 228, 232, 237, 259 Angot, Christine 222 Annales 6

Antelme, Monique 52 Antelme, Robert 21, 26, 49, 72, 79, 82, 84, 91, 191, 213, 157 influence on Lignes’ thought 61–5, 68–70, 101 anti-essentialism see essentialism anti-Semitism 22, 33, 120, 140, 144, 217, 255 Alain Badiou and 24, 243–8 Georges Bataille and 34, 43 Maurice Blanchot and 21, 26, 34, 47–57, 257 Apollinaire, Guillaume 7 Arab Spring, the 210, 212, 240 Arendt, Hannah 191, 201–2 Arguments 9, 66–7 Aron, Raymond 11, 31, 142, 260 Artaud, Antonin 85–8, 123, 225–7, 236 Asylon(s) 248 Attac 151 L’Aurore 7 L’Autre journal 145 Aux Écoutes 53 Axelos, Kostas 2, 66 Azam, Edith 215 Bachmann, Ingeborg 72 Badinter, Elisabeth 116 Badiou, Alain 2–3, 13–14, 24, 135, 163, 170, 180–1, 186, 204, 236, 259, 260–6 accusations of anti-Semitism 243–9

304

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and communism 70, 84, 92, 187, 200, 207, 210–13, 216, 260 compared to Jean-Luc Nancy 75–7 on identity politics 220, 238, 241, 251, 254 on parliamentary politics 213–17 theory of the subject 208–10 Bailly, Jean-Christophe 114, 151 Balibar, Étienne 2, 23, 70, 103, 144, 180–1, 153, 231, 233, 259, 261, 264–5 analysis of racism 130, 134, 137–40, 157, 199 on identity politics 221, 242, 254–5 on the EU 182–3 Balkans conflict 46, 144, 192, 220 Balladur, Édouard 147 banlieue riots, the 188, 212, 231 Barbie, Klaus 131 Barthes, Roland 2, 9, 67, 72, 83–4, 170, 227 Bataille, Georges 2, 8, 13, 15, 19–21, 24–7, 32–52, 55–60, 62, 65, 68–9, 73, 75, 78, 83–91, 94–6, 99, 103, 107, 110–11, 122–3, 127, 135, 143–4, 161, 170–1, 193, 221, 223–6, 236–7, 254, 257–8, 260–3 Baudrillard, Jean 2, 23, 29, 81, 112, 220, 231, 261 and domination theory 160–2, 170–4, 183, 263 Bauman, Zygmunt 177, 219 Beauvoir, Simone de 124 Becht, James 173–5 Beck, Philippe 113 Beckett, Samuel 88 Beigbeder, Frédéric 222 Belhaj Kacem, Mehdi 213, 215 Ben Achour, Yadh 117 Bénézet, Mathieu 34, 109–11, 237 Benjamin, Walter 42, 231–5, 259 Bennett, Jane 262

Benoist, Alain de 137, 231 Bensaïd, Daniel 14, 23, 81, 202, 218, 259, 261, 264 and communism 84, 212 and domination theory 169, 175, 182, 230 and migration policy 147, 154–5, 220 and parliamentary politics 82, 213–17 as reader of Alain Badiou 208–9 Benslama, Fethi 98, 102, 104–6, 119–20, 186, 219, 252 Bensussan, Gérard 213 Bergen, Véronique 172 Berlusconi, Silvio 46, 143–4 Besancenot, Olivier 214–5 Besnier, Jean-Michel 36, 232 Bident, Christophe 48, 50–57, 73, 75, 118 Bigo, Didier 168 Birnbaum, Pierre 146 Birr, Frédéric 25, 94 Blanchot, Maurice 2, 3, 25–7, 102, 135, 246–7, 254, 257, 260 and literature 13, 111, 124, 223, 226–9, 236–7 and politics 20–1, 41–62, 65, 68–85, 121 comparison with Alain Badiou 211–12, 216, 260 critical reception of 32–6 influence on Lignes 88–95 Bloc Identitaire 117 Blum, Léon 26, 48 Bolshevism 44 Boltanski, Luc 159, 176–7, 229–30 Boni, Livio 182 Borges, Jorge Luis 88 Bourdieu, Pierre 7, 10, 14, 30, 95, 137, 148, 230 and activist sociology 12, 148–51 Bourgeade, Pierre 122 Brecht, Bertolt 232 Brémondy, François 53, 247

Index Breton, André 37, 41–2, 64, 85 Brigant, Jean-Louis 167 Broch, Hermann 88 Brossat, Alain 5, 82, 202, 215, 217, 254 as militant influence on Lignes 75, 186–7, 233, 238, 259 on Israel 244, 246, 248 on migration and retention centres 190–9, 265 Brou, Jacques 110, 113 Bruno, Giordano 107 Buck-Morss, Susan 136 burkini ban, the 116, 217–18, 253, 265 Butler, Judith 219, 243, 248–9, 252 Cahiers de L’Herne 34 Cahiers Intersignes 104 Cahiers pour l’analyse 3, 9 Caillois, Roger 42–4, 56, 58 Calame, Claude 181, 262 Calvino, Italo 72 Camus, Albert 48 Canterella, Robert 228 capitalism 23, 41, 69–70, 103, 144, 157–84, 187, 190, 202, 205–6, 216, 224, 228, 232, 234, 241, 258, 262–5 Carn, Hervé 228 Carton, Luc 151, 157 Celan, Paul 88 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 86 centres de rétention administrative (CRAs) 193–6, 199, 201, 206–7 Césaire, Aimé 66 Char, René 227 Charlie Hebdo 120, 185 Châtelet, Gilles 261 Chemillier-Gendreau, Monique 119 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre 147–8, 152, 154 Chiapello, Eve 159, 176–7, 229–30 Chimères 160 Chirac, Jacques 28, 117, 129, 132, 146–7, 158, 188–9 Chomsky, Noam 137

305

Christianity 43, 104, 114–17, 236, 255 Catholicism 48, 98, 115–16, 122 Cimade 194–5, 202 Cixous, Hélène 218 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 247 Cold War, the 8, 62, 75, 210, 258, 262 College of Sociology 26, 40, 42 colonialism 131, 135–6, 139, 180, 191, 193, 243 anti-colonialism 61, 68, 140 neo-colonialism 182, 203, 246, 248 post-colonialism 2, 99, 204, 218–19, 221, 237–9 Combat 48, 54 Comité 79–83 Commentaire 11, 31, 142 Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire (CICRC) 191–2 communautarisme 150, 249 communism 43, 142–4 and intellectual engagement 8, 21, 28, 38, 47–8, 60–84, 90 and totalitarian crimes 22, 35, 37, 192 as an orientating term for the left 20, 92, 187, 200, 207, 210, 212–16 Constant, Benjamin 30, 47 Contre-attaque 8, 26, 40–3 Contretemps 13, 154, 160 Coral affair, the 124–6 Cordelier, Pierre 205, 236 Courtois, Stéphane 142 Critique 3, 6, 9, 14, 35, 94, 261 La Critique sociale 37 Crowley, Martin 63, 66, 68–9, 201, 207, 237, 262 Curnier, Jean-Paul 113, 167, 170, 173, 186, 215, 229 Dada 223 Davanne, Olivier 164 David, Alain 135–6, 237

306

From Bataille to Badiou

Le Débat 11–12, 19, 96, 142, 153 and liberal consensus 30–3, 45–7, 75, 92 Debord, Guy 2, 23, 160 and structural alienation 173–80, 183, 273 comparison to Jean Baudrillard 170, 173 Lignes issue on 162 Debray, Régis 6, 254 and new republicanism 116–17, 130, 135, 156 Debré, Jean-Louis 147 Debré laws 152–4 Deconstruction 2, 9, 33, 97, 100–9, 114, 134–9, 175, 208, 220, 238, 259, 262 Delaume, Chloé 236 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 9, 30, 124, 209, 226 and May ’68 81, 83–4 as neo-Nietzschean thinker 95, 99, 110 Delfour, Jean-Jacques 167 Déotte, Jean-Louis 233 Derrida, Jacques 1, 2, 9, 21, 85, 91, 124, 134, 137, 151, 218, 227, 247, 257, 259, 261, 262 as neo-Nietzschean thinker 95–108 as representative of la pensée 68 26, 30–8 Maurice Blanchot’s influence on 69 Descartes, René 107 Dias, Saïdou 204 Didi-Huberman, Georges 120, 122, 231 dissensual politics 38, 187, 200–5, 211, 215, 233, 239, 264 Dobbels, Daniel 20, 62, 70, 112, 145–6, 167 and Lignes editorship 20, 52, 75, 113, 186 and Maurice Blanchot 25, 49–50 Documents 8, 37 Dollé, Jean-Paul 203, 229 Domecq, Jean-Philippe 122

domination theory 19, 23, 45, 114, 159–84, 190, 198, 220, 223, 234–40, 264 Dominique, François 64 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 224 Dreyfus affair 5, 7, 49–59 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre Eugène 42, 53 Droit, Roger-Pol 137 Drôle d’époque 248 Duchamp, Marcel 122–3, 231 Dumas, Mireille 125 Dupeux, Yves 177, 189 Duras, Marguerite 26, 62–3, 79–80, 84, 236 Duvignaud, Jean 67 Éditions Amsterdam 223 Éluard, Paul 83 Enlightenment, the 29, 38, 96, 99, 108, 135–6 environmentalism 271–2 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 72 Eribon, Didier 29, 146, 252–3 Esprit 6, 11, 19, 150, 157 and anti-totalitarianism 28–31, 45, 47, 141–5 and moralism 122–3, 125 critical of la pensée 68 35–6 essentialism 130–2, 150, 175, 236, 239 anti-essentialism 41, 47, 74, 92, 97, 103, 117–18, 121, 127, 140, 220 strategic essentialism 221–2, 241–3, 246–55, 257 ethics 124, 150, 155, 194, 252 Alain Badiou’s criticisms of 135, 208, 249, 259 France’s 1980s ethical turn 98, 122, 258 Lignes and 102, 106, 120, 135, 237 Maurice Blanchot’s ethical turn 50, 55–7, 72, 83–4 Robert Antelme and 63 ethos 16–17, 21–2, 47, 91, 94–8, 113, 121, 127, 232, 258

Index Études coloniales 219 Evrard, Laurent 110, 228 existentialism 6, 29, 56, 61–4 Exit! 181 Fabius, Laurent 141 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta 44 Farías, Victor 32, 49 fascism 20, 131, 167 George Bataille’s critique of 21, 24, 27, 37–47, 50–1 Lignes and 26, 36, 58, 137, 141–3, 192–3, 217, 220 Maurice Blanchot and 48, 53–5 relationship to French thought 26, 31–6, 81, 257 Fassin, Didier 185 Fassin, Éric 189, 250–1, 254, 156 feminism 29, 182, 219, 236–7, 241, 250–1, 255 Fernandez-Savater, Amador 178 Ferry, Luc 32–33, 38, 80, 96–7 Feuerbach, Ludwig 109 ffrench, Patrick 9, 15, 44, 47, 56–7, 76, 87 Fieschi, Simon 120 Le Figaro 155 Finkielkraut, Alain 188, 245 and cultural conservatism 99–101, 230–1 and republicanism 116–17, 156 as new philosopher 14, 29, 105 Flandin, Pierre-Étienne 54 Flaubert, Gustave 88 Fondation Marc Bloch 156 Fondation Saint-Simon 11, 30 Fontenay, Elisabeth de 116 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 109 Forêts, Louis-René des 72 Forrester, Viviane 149 Foucault, Michel 1, 2, 9, 24, 124, 161, 216, 218, 220, 227, 250, 259, 260 as neo-Nietzschean thinker 95–9 as representative of la pensée 68 26, 32–8

307

concept of the specific intellectual 10 contrasted with Giorgio Agamben 187, 191, 196–200 on transgression 85, 88–9 foulard affair, the 115–17, 130, 156, 188, 204, 218, 220, 241, 246, 253, 265 Fourier, Joseph 109 Fox, Dan 228 Fraisse, Geneviève 236, 241, 250 Franco, Lina 89 Frankfurt School 22, 160, 173 French Theory 2, 13, 24, 258 hostility towards 33–5, 122, 218–19 Freud, Sigmund 2, 33, 109 Front de Gauche 215 Front homosexuel d’activité révolutionnaire 250 Front National (FN) 23–4, 47, 70, 98, 102–3, 117, 130–3, 141, 144, 147, 155, 158, 188–9, 215, 217, 231, 263 Frontex 195 Fugazi 232–3 Fukuyama, Francis 142 Furet, François 12, 30–1, 75, 143, 192 Gai pied soir 123 Galibert, Jean-Paul 177 Gallimard 36, 62 Gallo, Max 1, 156 Garo, Isabelle 215 Gauchet, Marcel 30, 47 Gaulle, Charles de 61, 67–70, 91 Gaullism 28, 146, 158, 186, 189, 263 Gauthier, Elisabeth 182 gay rights 29, 117, 123, 236, 250–2, 255 gender studies and politics 2, 52, 218–9, 236–7, 241–3, 250–5, 261 Genet, Jean 88, 123, 224, 236 Genre, sexualité & société 219 Girard, Mathilde 88, 193, 224, 232

308

From Bataille to Badiou

Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 28, 193 Glissant, Édouard 238 Glucksmann, André 29, 34, 192 Goldschmit, Marc 213, 248 Gorz, André 179, 181 Gramma 33 Gramsci, Antonio 234 Grandmaison, Olivier Le Cour 178, 193, 205 Grass, Gunther 72 Groys, Boris 162 Guattari, Félix 1, 31, 81 Lignes publications by 3, 141, 262 sexual politics of 124, 126, 250, 252 Gulf War, the 122, 145, 258 Guyotat, Pierre 109 Habermas, Jürgen 38, 96, 108, 111, 162 Harvey, Robert 197 Hauser, Philippe 110, 112 Hegel, G. W. F. 39, 65, 109 Heidegger, Martin 2, 46, 53–4, 95, 108–9, 175, 226–7 French Heideggerianism 9, 66, 74 Heidegger affair 26, 32–3, 35, 45, 49, 131, 257, 261 Henri-Lévy, Bernard 7, 11, 29, 46 Henry, Michel 99 Heraclitus 107 Hill, Leslie 48, 50, 53–5, 72–3 Hinduism 118 Hirsch, Michel 224, 232 Hitler, Adolf 35, 41–2, 44, 48–50 Hobé, Alain 113, 228 Hocquenghem, Guy 123–4, 250 Hölderlin, Friedrich 227 Hollande, François 185, 190, 197, 215–17, 250, 263 Hollier, Denis 42, 44, 50 Holocaust, the 50, 62, 131, 142, 187, 191, 198, 200, 225, 243–4 Houellebecq, Michel 222 L’Humanité 155 Huntington, Samuel 116 Hunyadi, Mark 38

Identité 131 Il Menabo 72 Imbert-Vier, Claude 106 immigration 4, 10, 29, 130, 132, 139–41, 144–58, 168, 186–207, 215 Lignes on 23, 103, 137, 178, 220, 236–7, 241, 250, 255, 262, 264–65 L’Insurgé 48, 53–4 intellectuals 1–2, 30, 119, 137, 240, 266 and identity politics 240–2, 245 and Nicholas Sarkozy 188–9 definition of 4–14 engaged intellectual 8, 14, 16, 148–50, 209–14, 224, 227, 255, 259, 266 government intellectual 11–12, 30 intellectual history 17–18, 60 intellectual responsibility 11–12, 31, 60, 64, 150–2, 264 intellectuals and the left 28–9, 31, 64, 66–85, 91–3, 130, 144, 155–60, 256 media intellectual see new philosophers on paedophilia 123–7 radical intellectual 13–14 specific intellectual 10, 14, 149, 200, 259, 266 universal intellectual 7–8, 55 intellectual reviews 61 conceptions of 3, 14–20, 77–8, 92–5, 112–3, 128, 254 history of 1–2, 5–14, 159–60, 265 responsibilities of 125–7, 193, 233, 235, 241 Iraq war, the 76, 231 Islam 4, 22, 98, 130, 188–90, 210, 217–8, 235, 244, 255, 262 Fethi Benslama on 104–5 Lignes revised position on 115–21, 127, 156, 219, 265 Islamophobia 120 Iveković, Rada 188, 219, 242

Index Jabès, Edmond 102, 109, 247 Jacob, Jean 132 Jacquemond, Olivier 172 Jamek, Vaclav 114 Jankélévitch, Vladmir 106–7 Jappe, Anselm 23, 160, 162, 173–84, 230–1, 262 Jarry, Alfred 113 Jeanson, Francis 71 Johnson, Uwe 72 Jospin, Lionel 115, 147–8, 164, 188, 250 Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires 48, 53 Joyce, James 86, 88 Judt, Tony 30 Past Imperfect 2–3, 60 Jugnon, Alain 107, 214–15 Juilliard, Jacques 156 Juppé, Alain 146–9, 189 Kafka, Franz 86, 88, 224–5, 227 Kakogianni, Maria 181 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 118, 235 Khosrokhavar, Fahrad 150 Kierkegaard, Søren 107 Kintzler, Catherine 116 Klingberg, Sylvia 177 Klossowski, Pierre 88, 107 Klotz, Nicholas 236 Kolakowski, Leszek 72 Kovacshazy, Cécile 239 Kriegel, Blandine 156 Krisis 137, 231 Krisis, Groupe 162, 170, 173, 177–84, 263–4 Kristeva, Julia 218 Krivine, Alain 81 Kurz, Robert 160, 162, 173, 179–84 Lacan, Jacques 2, 9, 83–4, 124, 251–2 Laclau, Ernesto 209 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 2, 100, 257 Lignes publications by 146, 238, 261 on fiction 110, 247

309

on Maurice Blanchot 34, 49, 52 on Roger Laporte 227–8 thinking politics via Georges Bataille 45–7 laïcité 22, 98, 115–17, 121, 130, 140, 156, 158, 219 Lang, Jack 124 Lanzmann, Claude 131, 244–5 Laporte, Roger 49, 53, 109, 226–8 Latour, Bruno 262 Lavant, Christine 228, 236 Lazarus, Sylvain 153 Le Bot, Yvon 150 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 131, 141, 188–9, 231 Le Pen, Marine 215, 217, 255 Le Pors, Anciet 156 Leclair, Bertrand 222–3 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 170, 261 Lefort, Claude 31, 47, 66, 75 Leiris, Michel 42, 64–5, 118 Leonetti, Francesco 72 Lepage, Franck 117, 145–6, 151, 153 Lettres françaises 8, 64 Lettres nouvelles 67 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2, 251 on cultural difference 133–5, 137 Levinas, Emmanuel 2, 102, 208, 246 relationship with and influence on Maurice Blanchot 53, 56–7, 83 Pierre André Taguieff’s critiques of 133–5 Lévy, Benny 245 Lévy, Paul 48, 53 Liber 12 liberalism 4, 20, 24–5, 30–1, 34, 36–42, 62, 65, 75, 80–1, 90, 93, 98, 113, 128–31, 133, 137, 140, 142, 144–46, 151, 153, 157, 160, 162, 172, 177, 186, 189–90, 192, 198–200, 203, 208, 213, 215, 219, 241, 263–65 as la pensée unique 131, 146–7, 157, 159, 186, 190 Libération 123–4, 149, 154–5

310

From Bataille to Badiou

libertarianism 4, 22, 66, 88, 98, 109, 113, 127–8, 221, 223, 258, 263 Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) 154, 214–15 Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémistisme (LICRA) 135 Lindenberg, Daniel 35, 40, 42 Lipovetsky, Gilles 81 Lisnard, David 116 literary exceptionalism 220–30, 236–7, 253, 259 Littérature 7 London Review of Books 185 Lordon, Frédéric 164–5, 169, 182 Louis, Marie-Victoire 150 Löwy, Michel 70, 173 Lukács, Georg 64, 174–5 Lyotard, Jean-François 1, 81, 209 Malabou, Catherine 219, 252, 262 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7 Man, Paul de 33 Mandel, Georges 54 ‘Manifesto of the 121’ 61, 71, 79, 91 Maoism 82, 86, 109, 186, 245 Marcuse, Herbert 229 Margantin, Laurent 189, 215, 223 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de 109 Marmande, Francis 83, 112, 141, 143, 149, 160, 232 and Lignes editorship 19, 25, 75, 113, 186, 254 on Georges Bataille 20, 27, 36, 40, 44–5, 58, 257 on religion 114, 117–18 on transgression 87–8 Marx, Karl 2, 47, 79, 90, 95, 173, 225 Althusserian Marxists 95 and Alain Badiou 208, 212, 214 and domination theory 160, 162, 170–5, 179, 181, 183, 229, 264 and identity politics 241, 254–5 critical reception of Marxism 11, 13, 26, 28–33, 90, 260, 263

heterodox Marxism 8–9, 47, 61–7, 82 Marxism 14, 23, 41, 103, 109–10 Marxism of David Rousset 191–3 Marxism of Étienne Balibar 130, 137–8, 140, 157 Mascolo, Dionys 2, 21, 26, 49, 52–3, 61–92, 111, 124, 201, 213, 215–16, 239, 257, 261 Matzneff, Gabriel 124 Maulnier, Thierry 42 May 1968 51, 61, 78–87, 91, 147, 170, 176, 199, 247 Mayol, Pierre 125 McLuhan, Marshall 174 Mehlman, Jeffrey 34–5, 53 Meirieu, Philippe 12 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc 215 Mesnard, Philippe 50–4, 57, 160 Michelstaeder, Carlo 224 Milosevic, Slobodan 144 Minute 247 Mitterrand, François 1, 28, 62, 70, 115, 121, 124, 129, 132, 145–7, 149, 159, 194, 250, 263 modernism 88, 221, 232, 236–8 Molino, Jean 122 monarchism 39, 44, 48 Le Monde 123–4, 137, 149–56, 182, 217 Le Monde diplomatique 160, 164 Mongin, Olivier 36, 122–5, 141–4, 156 Montesquieu, Charles de 30, 109, 136 Moorman, Baptiste 228 Moravia, Alberto 72 Morin, Edgar 2, 63, 65, 67, 245 Morin, Hervé 189 Mouvements 160 Mucchielli, Jacques 196–9, 202 Muhle, Maria 196–9 multiculturalism 99–102, 105, 130–1, 140, 156–8, 217–18, 238–9, 242, 246, 249

Index Multitudes 13, 160, 219 Münster, Arno 261–2 Murdoch, Iris 72 Musil, Robert 88 Mussolini, Benito 42 Nadaud, Stéphane 126, 236, 250, 252 Nadeau, Maurice 67, 72 Naïr, Sami 152 Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 3, 21, 135, 167, 168, 175, 220, 247, 257, 261, 266 as neo-Nietzschean thinker 96, 100–7, 113–14, 186 as representative of la pensée 68 26, 32–5 contrasted with Alain Badiou 76–8, 209, 213 influence on Lignes 84, 88–90, 92, 98, 100, 143, 252, 257 on Maurice Blanchot 27, 34, 49, 52, 55, 58–9, 70, 229 thinking politics via Georges Bataille 43, 45–7 Nasreen, Taslima 118–19, 235 Nation 155 nationalism 32, 41, 44, 55, 68, 90, 130–1, 137–44, 157–8, 187, 207, 220, 262–4 anti-nationalism 97–8, 102–3, 106 internationalism 48, 103, 128, 237 Naze, Alain 232–4 Nazism 142–3, 178 intellectuals and 32, 35, 40, 44–6, 49, 53 Negri, Antonio 160 New Left Review 93 new philosophers 10–11, 27–32, 80, 92, 105, 192 New Right 131–7, 231 new social movements, the 12, 23, 71, 130, 145–8, 154, 159–62, 183, 209, 214, 264 Neyrat, Frédéric 23, 168–9, 174, 199

311

Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 32, 33, 53, 59, 66, 129, 180, 196 French neo-Nietzscheanism 2, 9, 21, 38, 94–6, 229, 257 neo-Nietzschean ethos of Lignes 17, 21, 22, 24, 47, 75, 91, 96–114, 121–2, 127–8, 258–60 Noël, Bernard 2, 107, 109, 113, 123, 174, 186, 228, 256, 261 Michel Surya on 89–91 Nora, Pierre 4, 11–12, 30, 75 Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) 214–15 Le Nouvel Observateur 149 Nouvelle droite see New Right Onfray, Michel 114, 117 Organisation Politique (OP) 153, 211–12, 214 Orwell, George 122 Ozouf, Mona 156 Palmier, Jean-Michel 49 Panapoulus, Dmitra 202 Paoletti, Catherine 215 Parisot, Laurence 177 Parti Communiste français (PCF) 8, 79, 86, 170, 182 diminuation in the 1970s 28 post-war Zhdanov dogmatism 61–7 Parti Socialiste (PS) 1, 12, 117, 215 corruption within 163 disenchantment with 187, 211, 216, 154 gender and sexuality policies 250–2 liberalisation of 24, 28–9, 31, 129–30, 145–6, 200 migration policies of 132, 190, 194 response to new social movements of 147–9, 152, 157–8 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 72, 86, 221, 232, 234–5, 253, 259

312

From Bataille to Badiou

Pasqua, Charles 132, 147, 154 Paulhan, Jean 42, 53 la pensée 68 2, 21, 84, 186 hostility towards 4, 29, 31–5, 38, 58, 80–1, 96, 257 Lignes’ defence and adoption of 99–100, 140, 151, 219, 257, 260–73 la pensée unique see liberalism Persichetti, Mario 182 Pétain, Philippe 53–4 Pfister, Thierry 145 Pivot, Bernard 11 Plato 66, 108–9 post-colonialism see colonialism post-modernism 2, 108, 121, 231 post-structuralism 2, 6, 15, 26, 32–5, 48, 96, 133, 135, 259 Proust, Françoise 151 Proust, Marcel 7, 88, 227, 236 Pussy Riot 241 queer theory 2, 218–19, 236, 252 Queneau, Raymond 64–5 La Quinzaine littéraire 85 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 51, 53 racism 22, 49–50, 144, 182, 242, 244 anti-racism 10, 102 neo-racism 130, 134–40, 157, 199 Rancière, Jacques 2, 3, 24, 69, 75, 132, 135, 138, 186, 199, 259–61, 265 and dissensual politics 187, 200–7, 211, 215–7 and the politics of aesthetics 221, 233–5 Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) 28, 129–30, 147–8 Raulet, Gérard 143 Reagan, Ronald 124 Recherches 126 Redeker, Robert 119–20 La Règle du jeu 11 Le Rempart 48 Renaut, Alain 32–3, 38, 80, 96–7

republicanism 24, 58, 130, 135–40, 145, 203, 206 and identity politics 217–18, 220, 241–2, 251–2 and laïcité 98, 115–7 Fifth Republic, the 67–70, 91, 135, 215 liberal republicanism 29–34, 36, 80–1, 91 National Republicanism 117, 130, 137, 154–8 Third Republic, the 156 Le Réseau éducation sans frontières (RESF) 205 Resnais, Alain 71 Revel, Jacques 137 reviews see intellectual reviews revolution as intellectual goal 1, 8, 10, 15–16, 21, 26, 55, 61–91, 98, 109, 122, 148, 158, 175–6, 180, 199, 209, 214, 225, 232, 258 French Revolution, the 115, 117 hostility to the Jacobin revolutionary heritage 28, 30, 45, 143 industrial revolutions 179 sexual revolution 123–4, 250 La Révolution surréaliste 7–8 La Revue blanche 17 La Revue internationale 21, 49, 61, 71–9, 91–4, 112 Reynard, Jean-Michel 228 Ricardou, Jean 226 Rilke, Rainer Maria 224 Rimbaud, Arthur 90, 223 Risset, Jacqueline 2, 109, 143, 186 Rocard, Michel 141 Rogozinski, Jacob 225–6 Roman, Jacques 228 Rougement, Denis de 42 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 136 Rousset, David 23–4, 27, 64, 187, 190–2, 196, 199–201, 216, 265 Roy, Marc 121

Index Royal, Ségolène 180 Rue Descartes 219 Rushdie, Salman 105, 115, 118, 235 Sade, D. A. F. 86, 88, 107, 111, 114, 228, 236, 258 Saint-Simon, Henri de 109 Sala-Molins, Louis 133, 136 Salgas, Jean-Pierre 233 sans-papiers 14, 23, 130, 140, 144, 236 as emblematic of dissensual politics 187, 199–207, 211, 260 protests of 147–8, 154–7, 190, 216 Sarkozy, Nicolas 24, 70, 81, 117, 134, 157–8, 164, 180, 186, 188–90, 205–6, 215–17, 239, 262 Sarraut, Albert 54 Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 8, 15, 43–4, 55, 66, 71–2, 85, 88, 124, 210, 213, 245–6 Saturne 192 Sauvêtre, Pierre 262 Savoir/Agir 160 Schefer, Jean-Louis 63 Schérer, René 100, 123–6, 250–1 Schmitt, Carl 196 Schuster, Jean 67, 71, 114 Scrutiny 25 Seaver, Richard 72 second left, the 28–9, 146, 149–50, 155, 157, 254 Second World War, the 27, 33, 48, 57, 142, 187, 243 securitisation 23, 128, 131, 158, 166, 168, 186–8, 193–7, 208. 217, 262 Séguier, Éditions de la Libraire 27 Sichère, Bernard 36, 213, 215, 228 Simon, Claude 71 Sinn und Form 16, 94 Situationists 46, 82, 87, 160, 162, 170–1, 173, 175, 229 Socialisme ou barbarie 8–9, 66 Solal, Henri Cohen 248 Sollers, Philippe 19, 34, 86, 92

313

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Gulag Archipelago 2, 27–8, 192 Soulier, Gérard 146 Soustelle, Jacques 67 Souvarine, Boris 27, 35, 37 Srnicek, Nick 179 Stalin, Joseph 64 denunciation by Khrushchev 8, 27 Stalinism 2, 142 states of exception 24, 185–7, 193, 196–200 Stiegler, Bernard 262 Stirbois, Marie-France 141 structuralism 2, 6, 9, 29–31, 85, 99, 133 Surrealism 8, 37, 61–2, 67, 87 La Surréalisme au service de la révolution 8 Surya, Michel 4, 8, 12, 14–15, 17–23, 25–7, 31, 60–2, 69–72, 76–8, 85, 92–104, 106–7, 109–13, 117–18, 121–2, 127–8, 131, 135–7, 150–2, 186, 188, 191, 202, 212, 214–16, 231–2, 235–6, 239, 248, 252–3, 257–8, 260–5 on domination 160–74, 183–84 on Georges Bataille 34–7, 41–7 on literature 87–91, 219–28 on Maurice Blanchot 50–8 Taguieff, Pierre-André 22, 130–40, 155, 157, 242, 245 Tarby, Fabien 215 Tel Quel 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 21, 34, 35, 61, 76, 92, 240, 257, 266 compared to Lignes 85–9, 97 novels of 224, 226 Les Temps modernes 3, 6, 8, 15, 72, 85, 94, 119, 121, 245 terrorism 131, 185–7, 193, 197, 210, 262 anti-terror legislation 158 moral terrorism 171 terrorist attacks on France 120, 144, 217, 263 theoretical and textual terrorism 15, 85–6, 97, 109, 150, 258

314

From Bataille to Badiou

Tévanian, Pierre 152, 154–6 Thatcher, Margaret 124 Théry, Irène 251 Thévenin, Paule 261 Thibaud, Paul 6, 11, 28, 156 Tissot, Sylvie 154–5 Tocqueville, Alexis de 30 Todorov, Tzvetan 122 totalitarianism, 22, 125, 133, 162, 178, 192–3, 198 liberal anti-totalitarianism 11, 27–31, 58, 128, 142–4, 263 Jean-Luc Nancy on 45–6, 220 Touraine, Alain 149–51, 254 Tous ensemble 153 Touvier, Paul 131 Transeuropéennes 264 Traoré, Mahmoud 236 Traverso, Enzo 142 Trécherel, Sylvie 89, 223 Tremblay, Thierry 108 Trotskyists 66–7, 191 in Lignes 21, 23, 158, 213, 216, 259, 264 Truffaut, François 71 Uhrig, David 52–4, 57 Ungar, Steven 51 Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) 117, 190

Vacarme 13, 138, 157, 160 Valls, Manuel 215, 255 Valtat, Jean-Christophe 228, 232 Veinstein, Alain 227 Vergès, Jacques 131 Verlaine, Paul 7 Verso books 13, 261 Vidal, Gore 137 Vidal, Jérôme 223 Villepin, Dominque de 189 Vittorini, Elio 64, 72, 74, 77 Vittorini, Ginetta 64 Volat, Hélène 197 Vollaire, Christian 195 Vuarnet, Jean-Noël 97, 107–11, 113, 228, 261 Wahnich, Sophie 153, 157 Wallerstein, Immanuel 134, 138–8 Walser, Martin 72 Warhol, Andy 231 Weber, Max 38 Weil, Éric 49, 261 Wieviorka, Michel 150 Wilde, Oscar 224 Williams, Alex 179 Wolin, Richard 33, 36, 38–9, 46–7 Zagdanski, Stéphane 162 Zola, Émile 7–8, 13, 55, 239