Further Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution

"Love What You Will Never Believe Twice" (June 9, 1979)

Belief and confidence.—How Yukong moved the mountains.—From yesterday to today.—Nihilism and fatalism.—The division of confidence.—"And yet, this is the eve."

1

If belief poses the possibility of salvation, and consequently the potential eternity of the subject in a splacement that is finally real, confidence is concentrated in the fidelity to courage, conceived as the differential of a recomposition that is more porous to the real, less exposed to the law.

At the two extremities of Marxism, you will find the following theses:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

"Marxism implies manifold principles, but, in the final analysis, they can all be reduced to a single sentence: 'It is right to revolt against the reactionaries'" (Mao, ubiquitous quotation during the Cultural Revolution).

The first thesis may sustain you in the belief that communist consciousness will necessarily emerge, since the succession regulated by the contradictory becoming of a mode of production makes it so that, beyond capitalism, there is only the association of free workers and the reign of the principle "to each according to their needs." Stripped to its bare bones, this certainty entails that at the end of the development of productive forces, we encounter the withering away of the State. And such a certainty is all the more acceptable when one considers that an entire scientific apparatus confers on it the dignity of a modern belief.

But the laws of algebra are imprescriptible, and it is indeed a Marxist algebra at work in political economy. From the standpoint of the subject, if it exists, the scientific serenity of economism necessarily issues into the following kind of lyrical declarations:

Oh our fatherland! You are our powerful anchor. In order to defend your dignity, we fast. When we are gripped by hunger, We think of you And all our pain vanishes. Oh President Mao! You are the red sun that lights up our hearts. Following your teachings, we fight a frontal battle against the enemy. When we suffer terrible torture, We think of you And our body stops aching!

("41 Red Hearts Forever with President Mao," Beijing, 1968)

Why? Because entrusting [confier] the becoming of justice to being means that the Just is a man. Only the superegoic humbling of oneself can put a stop to the imminent certitude of the objective end of the law.

The belief in productive fate and the cult of personality are two sides of the same historical ethics. Stalin gives us its fusional version: five-year plans and the Little Father of the people make belief into the same fixed point and organize the one and only planetary praise. The Cultural Revolution is this ethics in its disjoined state. In the name of Mao, one thunders against Liu Shaoqi's "theory of productive forces." Yet nothing less than the absoluteness of a thought was needed in order to fight the absoluteness of productive capitals. Belief against belief. It was even required to seek out the adversary on his own ground and to show how a complete submission to Mao's thought multiplied the production of tomatoes, as in a materialist renewal of the miraculous draught of fish, or made it possible to build a ten-thousand-ton freighter, barehanded, in a shipyard hardly equipped for the assembling of simple boats. See, for instance, Selected Philosophical Essays by Workers, Farmers, and Soldiers (Beijing, 1972).

Above all, do not believe there is any hint of irony in what I am saying. Caught in the real movement whereby the communist recomposition furiously gropes its way, these texts carry a dialectical and moral greatness against which the contentment of our miseries cannot raise any objection. The fact is that subjectivation submits to the discourse of belief in order to shatter the obstacle.

The relation to the obstacle is the criterion of delimitation...