Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution

From "Subjective and Objective" (April 15, 1975)

May 1968

A definition: We will call subjective those processes relative to the qualitative concentration of force.

Let me emphasize that these are practices, real phenomena. The party is something subjective, taken in its historical emergence, the network of its actions, the novelty it concentrates. The institution is nothing but a husk.

Correlatively, we will call objective the process whereby force is placed and is thus impure.

Inasmuch as it concentrates and purifies itself qua affirmative scission, every force is therefore a subjective force, and inasmuch as it is assigned to its place, structured, splaced,¹ it is an objective force.

More exactly, we will say: the being of force is to divide itself according to the objective and the subjective.

If you take a bird's-eye view of May '68, you will see in it a new and qualitatively irreducible breath or aspiration; you will see in it this exceptional and radically new point of concentration which is the establishment of thousands of young intellectuals in the factories, together with the minimal apparatus for this concentration (the Maoist organizations). You will also see in it the remarkable weakness of this concentration and this apparatus, the insurmountable dilution of the rebellion into peaceful, vindicating, infrapolitical figures. You will see in it the defensive maneuver, for the sake of the fixity of the splace, comfortably agreed by the representatives of the government and the representatives of the unions, between Pompidou and Séguy. May '68 is really only a beginning, and continuing the combat is a directive for the long run.

You can thus observe, at one and the same time, the objective force of force and its subjective weakness. Everyone in the strike and in the street for a precious and, in its own way, immortal commencement. But seven years later, the subjective future and concentrated restricted action of all this is held up by very few, in the midst of the sepulchral atmosphere of the programme commun and the prayers of Mitterrand, that mortician's assistant.

This amounts to saying that the subjective aspect of our adversary's force is itself still in a very good state. This is something the revolutionaries never managed to learn. Most of them think they are the only subject and represent the antagonistic class to themselves as an objective mechanism of oppression led by a handful of profiteers.

The bourgeoisie is in no way reducible to the control of the state or to economic profit. The Cultural Revolution also enlightens us on this point when it designates the bourgeoisie in conditions where industry has been entirely nationalized and the party of the proletariat dominates the state. The bourgeoisie makes politics, it is engaged in the class struggle. This engagement does not take place only from the angle of exploitation, or from that of coercion, whether it be legal or terroristic. The bourgeoisie makes a subject. Where then does it do this? Exactly like the proletariat: among the people, working class included, and I would even say, since we are dealing with the new state-bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the working class especially included.

The imperialist bourgeois are a handful, of course, but the subjective effect of their force lies in a divided people. There is not just the law of Capital, or the cops. To miss this is to stop seeing the unity of the splace, its consistency. It is to fall back into objectivism, whose inverted ransom, by the way, is to make the state into the only subject—whence the antirepressive logorrhea.