For Philippe: The Conversation Resumed (Ten Years Later)

Foreword

Over the course of nearly thirty years of work in common, between Philippe and I, politics was always present. Our philosophical, literary, and artistic interests were all delineated against the background of a conviction: what matters is transforming the world. Like many in our generation, we shared [partagions] this conviction—let us call it generally and vaguely Marxist—while, at the same time, we were bereft of specific political commitments after the end of the war in Algeria and the ever so complex episode of 1968. In '68, we experienced at once the strongest political intensity and the strongest rejection of all ongoing political practices. There was no longer any party or group that could meet our expectations. Thus, we sought to think through what was possible for a politics that was disappearing before our eyes. In France, the presidencies of Pompidou followed by Giscard d'Estaing were symptomatic of a stalemate, and while we did not know how far it could go, we already felt the grips of a world undergoing profound change. This is why in 1981 we founded the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political [Centre de recherche philosophique sur le politique] (the use of the masculine noun ["le politique," the political, rather than the feminine "la politique," politics,] seemed important to us).

At the same time, we had different stories and almost opposite temperaments. Philippe firmly adhered to the revolutionary line that sought to discover the true meaning of what perhaps Lenin, and surely Stalin and Hitler had distorted [dénaturé] in the name of revolution. The seizure of power, the destitution of the State and its Committees formed his horizon, and sometimes his impassioned desire: he explained to me how power had to be taken. For me, this was a utopian and romantic dream. I was more interested in once more asking what constitutes the "common," without clearly distinguishing between the properly political register and the anthropological (or ontological) register of "Mitsein."

Philippe considered me a "social-democrat" and I would respond that he was an anarchist dreamer. Sometimes these discussions were quite lively. At the same time, each of us knew quite well that the only real question was to redefine or rethink the very idea of politics.

In the Center that we created in '81, with the events in Poland (Solidarność [Solidarity] was active beginning in 1980) it appeared that the model of a combination split between "civil society" and the "State" would find much success, as was the case throughout Western Europe. Philippe and I agreed entirely that we must reject this way of resolving (or aggravating) the problem. We dissolved the Center. But it was also a way of recognizing that the task was left in the lurch [restait en plan].

In the years that followed—across the threshold marked by 1989—we would confront a different situation: one of a growing decomposition [désagrégation] of not only any revolutionary perspective, but of any leftist perspective, and an enclosure in the logic of globalization. Philippe remained just as vehement as before, and I remained just as convinced of the necessity of rethinking the common—but both of us sensed that what "politics" [la chose "politique"] refers to was becoming less and less consistent.

Today, nine years after his departure, I never think of politics (or, for that matter, anything at all) without discussing with him.

Resuming the Conversation

The State found itself pulled between two declines: one that pursued economic power, and another that sought a critique of "political economy," which is ultimately to say the modern mode of politics. Meanwhile another circumstance had come to reinforce this tendency. The States that were named "totalitarian" after a certain period of time were no longer States in the classical sense. They arose from an entirely different logic: that of the party, in the sense of a formation not destined to seize control of the State (in short, in the way that factions or rival princes would in former times) but to constitute a body that...