VI World History

The human is in history and not history in the human.

Due to a mental, and not only mental, habit, due to a historical behav­iour with its provenance and roots, we almost naturally distinguish two domains in the totality of what is and is done: nature and history.

Everything has not only its history, but also its prehistory.

What exactly does the stationary state of what we designate as belonging to prehistory or remaining outside history indicate? How far does the muta­tion produced by writing go?

There is no first catastrophe that one can grasp.

It is in a horizon of apparent scarcity that human history is inscribed.

The common origin of humanity is no more problematic than its common aim. At the antipodes of the same planet, diverse types are searching for their past and future archetype.

What does Holderlin hear and see when he writes: ‘So the word came from the East to us.’ Calling: is it an oriental word?

Orientalism is an occidental product.

The Greeks remain apart in all universal history.

The Graeco-Roman, the Judaeo-Christian, the European-modern, the global-planetary, each of these paths (and ways) remains dominated by Latin, the Roman.

History is history of the dead, the living and the surviving.

Every told history contains a great deal of fiction.

Would history - as ‘science’ - let us recognise the ‘human’, more than the past and the present?

Doesn’t history teach you, at least, that it doesn’t teach you very much?

Insofar as it is the work of memory, history is forgetting, conquests are made on the basis of losses, continuity is crossed in dotted lines by discontinuity.

As one knows, one does not know how things would have gone, if they had gone otherwise - if they could have gone otherwise.

History remains always partisan and partial, both in its actual unfolding and in its theorisation.

Ceaselessly, one rewrites general history and all particular histories.

Is it not we who constitute, through historical knowledge, the historical becoming which, however, constitutes constituting knowledge? For there is neither historical facticity nor perfect restitution of the historical event.

What kind of link links historical episodes (in historical becoming and knowledge) to historical destiny? What kind of play unites the ephemeral and the consistent-inconsistent weight of actuality to the durable and to historiality?

Important events are rarely noticed on the spot. Often events appearing as historical are only anecdotal.

To foresee who will be in the future the great people of the present, that is, of the past, is not easy.

History proves visionaries both correct and incorrect, several at the same time.

Time and history take their time.

Human life - personal and generic, individual and historical - needs some theatricality to unfold. That suppressed, it is like pulling the boards out from underfoot: it then falls down the trapdoor.

One cannot live only with the big; one also needs the small and - especially - the average. (How annoying is this question for the distinction between big, small and average!)

The Manichaean myth - on a dualistic and essentialist basis - of good and light struggling against evil and darkness to defeat them, has a hard life.

To confront historical becoming itself, humanity seems to have, appar­ently, only two great schemes of explanation and comprehension.

The problematic motor of historical development remains in suspense. Moreover, it breaks down, as often happens with motors. Why and in view of what does it move and set itself into movement? Categories such as mate­rial needs, the search for happiness, the aspiration to well-being or the real­isation of freedom, the deployment of ideas and ideals, even ideologies, no longer function victoriously or with enough yield. But nevertheless: history is mondialised and is, so to speak, on the move towards..., even though - and because - all foundation withdraws itself.

History is not a person, a woman: therefore neither goddess nor whore, as well as goddess and whore, ‘she’ imposes epochally - that is to say in man­ifestation and withdrawal, the presence and absence of the visible and the invisible in suspension - her games and the transgressions that are part of it provoke currents and counter-currents, establish and dislocate organisations and structures, never free of unquietness and mayhem. Her waves surge. Certainly. But how? By drawing cycles, do they make everything emerge, sink and resurface in and through an ‘eternal’ - namely omnitemporal - return in the circle or spirals of time? This return is then the return of what? Of the ‘Same’? Which one? Would the path of history not rather follow an evolution, would it not rather indicate a progress - sinusoidal, of course, and dialectical? From the prehistoric and the extrahistoric, from the savage, the primitive and the archaic (one may call them as one pleases), to the oriental and the Asian and from these to the Greek light - constitutive act of what history is for us - and to the Roman ordo, through the revelation and organ­isation of Judaeo-Christian life, up to European modernity which embraces in its mixture the whole planet and equally monopolises Mexican, African, Islamic, etc., histories - somewhat anecdotal - does not the triumphant and operative schema, expressing moreover the path travelled, stand out? Whoever denied it would be stupid or evil or suspect.

Does the wheel, by accomplishing ‘identical’ turns around its hub, advance the chariot?

All the regressions are part of the march.

It is inevitable that in all domains beings and things follow the slope of least resistance.

By surpassing the linear schema and the cyclic schema, if not history itself, by plunging the diachronic succession into a sort of synchronic struc­ture, could a third, so-called structural schema embrace realities and histor­ical possibilities? By erecting an allegedly global system and partial systems, by formulating a combinatory code and getting lost in the symbolic read­ings and arrangements of messages that combine themselves and produce ‘sense’, by relying more on permanence and permutations than on changes and transformations, and by constructing a system of signs and homologies, does this structural and structuralist grasping embrace history or does it let itself be embraced by it? Does not this schema miss the passages and the transpositions as well as the secrets of the diverse languages, even while including certain quasi-permanent dominants? Is it the unification of histor­ical thought, attentive to change, and anthropological thought, construct­ing structured and formalised ensembles, that will birth a wider and deeper, but always partisan and partial, schematisation of world history, able to constitute and dissolve human and history?

Does the interplay between movement and the logical system and move­ment and the historical system, conditioning and defining each other, sup­port a privileged reading?

There is the logical course of a history (whatever it may be) and the his­torical course of a logic (whatever it may be).

How to unite or separate the permanent themes and motives - in historical time - and their particular historical colourings?

Event and structure habitually correspond: the event reveals a foundation.

To privilege the variants, to privilege the constants, are two unilateral modalities which wait for their assumption.

The problem of temporal-historical succession remains fundamentally unthought. The play of the articulation of temporality and historicity escapes us.

Everything corresponds to history - and not to the simple philosophy of history, heiress of Christianity - but this correspondence is not linear or unilateral.

When the vice tightens, then reason in history appears at work, set to work - justificatory, overflying the event and running after it, limping.

It is almost always about exposing oneself to the closest and most powerful task, the most distant commitment.

Not only the general historical and social states are important, but also their concrete modalities, their occasional determinations, their situational and situated conditions.

Even those who do not get their hands dirty do not keep their hands clean.

It would be necessary to conduct, as completely as possible, an economic and political, social and historical analysis, with the greatest lucidity tol­erated (above all by who undertakes it). To analyse the productive forces and relationships of production, the relations of (individual, state, national, social) property, the mechanisms of commerce, exchange and distribution, to comprehend the nature, the regimes, the forms, the organisations and the functions of work. To unpeel the play of prices, money, finances and distri­bution of profits, revenues, wealth. To settle the standard of living of differ­ent classes, layers, castes and their relationship to power, administration, management, control, decisions and executions. To explicate the role of the State, governing and oppositional parties, police and justice. To enlighten the balance of power, both nationally and internationally, strategic positions and behind-the-scenes secrets. To examine the diverse forms of belief, reli­gious and moral, the derivatives of religiosity and the presence of rites, cults and myths. To shine daylight on the deployment and the utilisation of all cultural sectors: informative, literary and artistic, scientific and educational, ideological (manifest and latent). To explain the lives of humans - private and public - their psychological movements - individual and collective - their ways of speaking and thinking, working and struggling, loving and dying, playing - admitted or subliminal. To interpret all the interpretations.

The questions trouble. The questions posed to history and through history are in effect troubling. We want to be at once demystified, disenchanted and reassured, secured. Is this possible? The massive and univocal voices which bring solutions and draw lines of conduct carry, for historical moments and epochs, without failing to break. Human life seems to want to maintain itself on planet earth and conquer other heavenly stars. Why? The old ontological and metaphysical question: what is being, why is it there? swerves to the historical and anthropological question: why does the human being want to live and survive, at what price, how does it want to avoid - or accelerate - the disaster? Destructive atomic energy and its utilisation timidly pose this otherwise decisive problem. The joint game of conservation and destruction, the desire for life and the call of death, is only very artlessly played. Life flows into moulds: couple, family, amical and social bonds, organisation of work, institutions of civil society, activities of distraction, leisure and culture, State (national, multinational, global). Too much putting into question, contesta­tion, interrogation, problematising experience, openness render life almost impossible; too much pseudo-certainty, assurance and security flatten it. Trapped between the ‘too much’ and the ‘not enough’ in a world where all models, prototypes of action and passion fail, we fail too, while building and disintegrating. Sometimes, a singular suspicion of a same and other possibility grips us. In our post-historic march without aim and without ‘end’.

More and more a question arises: why not let the plays of platitude, banal­ity, vulgarity and mediocrity surge up as such? Themselves signs of... and signs towards... Why not arrive at a sort of eulogy of the trivial, the every­day, the common? Is not everything in the average, blends, mixes, mixtures, interpenetrations? From Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, the power of the prose of the world and of life still escaped, which sweeps along and assimilates critics, integrates and emasculates revolts, digests and monopo­lises romantic dreams and nostalgic and anticipatory visions. Besides, the old impulses were not so pure either. Critics, visionaries, analysts, therapists and prophets succumb to a certain naivety. Such big children. Total disaliena- tion, the superhuman, poetically liberated or harmoniously channelled eros, the time of being, are and remain nostalgic, restorative and futuristic, and do not accept the greyness of the world. History seems devoted to writing a very long grey page. When and how will it be turned? History does it all for us to adhere to it and to us. We are educated, work, love, play, to make our­selves recognised, to enjoy, aspire to a - certain or uncertain - recognition and reconciliation, to make history. But we die, and history opens onto an emptiness and a nothingness always to be filled (by whom? through what?). Without avoiding dangerous questions, without optimism or pessi­mism, without hypercriticism and without conformism, without hope and hopelessness, illusions and disillusions, without lamentations, consolations and heroic or tragic gestures, do we not have to continue to live and survive, always beginning again, like animals conscious, or almost, of our finitude, animated and devastated by thought. Without all that... But with what? What remains? We are neither completely dead nor completely alive. As such, we can only test the finitude of history and historicity, of time and temporality, of the human being and the being of the world.

As a somewhat unsuccessful experiment, humanity is a test rather of weakness than of strength.

Every epoch has a constantly revisable structure. Especially for the nerv­ousness of the occidental human and for the precipitation of the human that (pur)sues it.

What is culture? we ask, when it becomes a problem. It is that which links together the great powers - myths and religion, poetry and art, politics, philosophy, science and technique - linking them to the ensemble of the elemental forces - language and thought, work and struggle, love and death, play - thus informing the totality of the word and action of humans and conforming them to a model. Culture is a system - a structure - organising economic forces and relations, the powers of political domination - master-slave relations - family and erotic relations - relationships between man, woman, children - as well as symbolic and ideological codes - myths, religions, language - just as much as artistic, scientific and philosophical creations, into a whole. It leaves vague its initial, governing and ultimate presuppositions, illuminated from time to time by thought; it does not question the principles that animate its tradition. What is the relationship between civilisation and culture, and is civilisation the final and mortuary culmination of culture, as a certain cultural tradition wants it?

Culture had its high points before the cult of culture and culturalism established themselves. It was highly formative before the agitation of cul­tural affairs and journalistic pamphleteering, which takes over everything, installed themselves. If the circus of futilities and cultural varieties becomes more and more subtle and coarse, it does not mean that the worm was not already in the fruit. All the cultural worms and all the fruits now amal­gamate in a cultural eclecticism and syncretism, which, by abolishing the initiatory paths and the elites, open the door wide for culture; so that, passing through that door, it leaves the stage? Those who are only talented, and who only want to direct and transmit directives, cannot assume direc­tions, seize the posts of communication, information, deformation, becom­ing functionaries of the culture business: they open themselves to what is reserved for us, while hiding it from us. Thus the course of culture - not so tired - is played on the whole surface of the earth. Culture generalises itself, universalises itself, mondialises itself. Occidental European culture meets all other cultures, and all, under its leadership, interpenetrate, combine, socialise, planetarise. Global culture, planetary culture, mass culture are slogans - thus comprising corollaries of institutions - that do not know what the question is. They complete a process. Our civilisation and our culture, which are and are not ours, give off a heavy and slightly nau­seating scent of Alexandrianism. The Hellenistic world closed off an - ancient - world, which another world should succeed. While for us other little humanists - as shrinking and shrunken humanism enters the phase of its surpassing - everything plays out over the whole surface of the globe, all concerning a united and unique world. Our confusion is ecumenical and universal. This generalisation of culture will probably go on until every - or almost every - individual is at once producer and consumer of cultural goods, living in the vast museum - cemetery, cradle and nursery - of world culture that will play the inexhaustible combinatory - although used up - of all the forms - past, present, future - and all the contents - multiple and variously connected - of culture. When one will soon be able to spend a holiday in an artificially constructed Babylonian city, reading Taoist texts in paperback, listening to Tibetan music, watching outer-space experiments on the television screen and following on transistors the results of a football match and those of a political congress, while we will play during the day to reconstruct scenes of prehistoric life, and indulge in the evening in games with electronic machines, when everyone will more or less write prose and poetry, participate in theatrical and psychotherapeutic psychodramas, paint abstract and pictorial paintings, and will have the elements of a mobile architecture, then a step has been taken: indeed, the cultural combinatory is destined to amplify and complicate itself. However, the generalisation of culture, as it has been understood so far, already indicates the end of culture. Generalisation and end usually go together. Because through its universali- sation and cybernetisation - retroactively, actually, prospectively - culture no longer obeys a prototype, a model. Becoming multifaceted and informal, it no longer proposes a definite schema for speech and action, dreams and passions, works and leisure. Going in every direction, it becomes at once insignificant and designifying. It gives no more answers to saying and doing: it is no longer formation, it becomes information and communication. When it was culture, it already avoided the crucial questions: it did not pose them, nor pose them to itself: it proposed answers. More and more, it brings up questions, itself becomes questionable, put into question. It begins to be unable to offer any answers. In the process of being completed and on the eve of a mutation - although it still must be conquered by the Third World, the underdeveloped countries, those who aspire to it - it globalises itself and generalises itself - flattering little or more than a few cultural particularities, folkloric reservoirs preserved in a vacuum - universalises itself and massifies itself - at once highly diversified and mediatised as well as popular and vulgar - it democratises, socialises, in short, integrates itself - creaking - into the play of planetary errancy. The planetary erring takes over all cultures and all culture, invigorating and emasculating them, totalising them and letting them burst into sparks. It demands from those that it fashions, and who imagine they fashion it, not that they conform to a model - it certainly also requires a conformism, but this conformism is vague and empty, even if oppressive - but rather that they open themselves to planetary errancy, planning, platitude, that they play the game that transforms all the high places, where the spirit blew - excuse the obscenity of the term - into touristic or scholarly places, places that are common or unreachable for average efforts until they manage to access them. Thus the end of historical and global culture, in and through its generalisation, poses the problem of surpassing the said culture, its decrees and secrets, its mystique and its mystifications, its processes and idleness. Will we never­theless enter the phase of a new radicalism? Let’s not be uselessly naive. End and overcoming of inherited, transmitted and reconquered culture might almost mean: entry into the game. The game of what? Not the game of a stupid ludic activity. Ludus also designated the school. It would conse­quently be about entering the school (of the play) to learn to play the play, which ‘commands’ and orders all ancient - so also future - so-called cul­tural activities and passivities. Someone - Nietzsche, if you want to know everything - said of the ancient Greeks: superficial through depth. Are our post-cultural plays of all sorts plane, planed, flat, levelled - through depth?

Have we actually reached the brink of cultural saturation?

All culture implicates - and is based on - a lot of mystifications.

Commonplaces are places where people meet without much trouble.

There are hollow and insignificant periods in history. It is not always easy to separate them from others.

The extreme will to radical transformation - product of and producing technical power - allying construction and destruction, can it lead towards the time of the end of historical time, with history - allied to our hopes and our plans - having ended, meaning that nothing radically new and decisive can emerge any more? Can the historical, namely metahistorical, becoming unfold like a stagnant and grey river, carrying with it conquests, satisfac­tions and recognitions, dismal, acclimatised, devastated? Can its fabric be formed from the repetitive and indifferently inventive succession - thus also repeating the differences - of little joys and little pains, limited and cir­cumscribed, which will be regulated and restitched with the help of all the artificial resources of a technics as flattening as conquering? On earth and on the other stars that we would like to populate, is not this same history completed, which will continue to be dull, monotonous, lukewarm, hollow, exhausted? It is only when the world has painted its greyness in greyness that the owl of Minerva will take flight - at dusk - to recognise and paint - with grey on grey - what is. Where does it come from that we now live this vision, even if we clear it of every past regret and every too systematic anticipation?

Little by little we are led to the threshold of the problem concerning the end of history - the visible aspect of finitude tout court. Hegel glimpsed the question of a - possible and real - end of history, though he absorbed time and history into spirit, somehow out of time. ‘This’ which is out of time con­tains time in this way. Despite this call for eternity and this recall of infin­ity, the problem found itself nevertheless posed. Although the theoretical and practical tasks were not yet planetarily and universally realised - will they ever be? - history had already unfolded in principle what has yet to unfold. Nietzsche asserted and predicted the reign of the last humans - who live the longest, aspiring to a levelled happiness since they have lost every star, wanting to appropriate it. What can the end of history and the end of humans nevertheless signify? Is there then no more of the new? And where could it come from? Would it have been already? The new always flows in the currents and channels of the old, and overflows it; conjointly, it is interpreted according to what precedes it and will follow it. One can inter­pret it according to the old and predict that the new will become like the old. Each can be subsumed under the other. The old informs the new and conversely, several times. The old renews itself and the new ages - multiply. Ancestors and descendants call themselves and are made differently. So all the world ‘knows’ all - except what happens without its knowledge. Ignoring its knowledge and its ignorance. Genetic and structural perma­nences are strong, individually and socially; renovations equally possess their hard-hitting forces. Their games will assimilate the revolts more than the revolutions - infinitely rarer - in the course of a history which does not manage to constitute itself in history and to harmonise the ancestral popular and the out-of-phase advances.

Very slowly, despite or because of precipitation and acceleration, we enter the phase of metahistory and post-humanism. Whether we like it or not. Whether we want it or not. To continue to insist and to exist as humans in a finished history, that is our task, while preparing the passage at the same time. Questioning, contemplative and halting thought almost grasps the step to take; political action, lukewarm or fanatic, always obsessed, must in its own way effectuate it. Do logos and praxis, thought and action, saying and doing, remain irreconcilable, despite all the work of dialectics and concomitant chitchat, despite all the syntheses more unilateral than bilateral, despite all the juggling and prestidigitations, despite all the wishes and appeals?

End of the human and end of history signify the end of the human and history as all-powerful theoretical principles, end of a certain philosophy of history and anthropology, based on a philosophy of preliminary history and anthropology; but, when interrogated more brutally, do they signify the end of the human and of history as ontological and epistemological key concepts, or as ancient realities in becoming, already terminated in some way, having reached their end, their aim and their purpose, and pursuing them again with a view to generalised realisation. Human and history seem to find their end in the human sciences as a constituent-constituted and resolved-dissolved subject-object. End, then, or thought of the end? Fictive end of an effective fiction or effective end? End does not mean cessation but completion that endures.

The end of history can just as well occur as an administered fiesta as a dreary ceremony. The two ‘forms’ can conjugate, mingle, alternate, etc.

In a completed history, would the human find itself reintegrated into this nature which it opposed? Would it still be nature, if it knew itself?

Perhaps it will prove, both on the plane of historical knowledge and on that of historical becoming, that history was only an interpretation of the human adventure.

Everything happens as if there had never been radicality. Was it always an abstract luxury? Isn’t everything in the mixture, the arrangements and the compromises? The most extreme investigations and aspirations get crushed by the game of space and time within which extremes touch, fertilise and abolish themselves. Everyone aspires to - starts moving towards - a general­ised well-being that lacks a sufficient reason for being. Unless this well-being can do without a reason for being, it does not ‘exist’. Technics and science, sport and comfort, culture and phantasmagoria solicit us. The voids are filled by a flight into the anodyne imaginary - at the risk of being mortalising - passably devoid of humour and fantasy.

Metaphysics, equally ontotheology, philosophy, or general, formulated and implicit theory, dies, explicated in sciences and technics, and it is not the philosophy of history, sociology and anthropology which can revivify it. They pay back money in their own coinage - put into circulation by treasur­ers and counterfeiters. Everything in the twentieth century breathes a certain boredom, a disenchantment. Even and especially for its distractions and its leisure. Boredom is the dull, dreary form of unconfessed anxiety, which con­ceals itself in the zones of unconsciousness, bad faith, false consciousness and concealed doings. For everything, there are reasons for and against, nothing escapes the derision - sometimes, however, beings and things, dreams and thoughts hurt us (to what point?) - and we live as if waiting for a surpassing of derision. The technical civilisation cannot find its style. The ‘measure’ is not yet full. We still have a lot of eclipses to record. Not ideas, nor ideals, nor models, nor prototypes, nor examples, offer themselves to us, except in the inevitable misunderstandings; however, we still live in this world and in the world, big and little world, so rich and so poor, in this life that chases itself more than it continues. We work the fields, we build metropolises and necropolises, we work the sea, we populate the sky.

Is it from multiple, combined and antagonistic actions that something like a logic of history results?

The degree of opposition and reconciliation of which an epoch is capable lies in the intersection of necessity and chance. Conflicts and integrations are opposed, but most often they compose.

What is the logic or dialectic of world history, what is its schema and its path? Especially if we do not reduce it to a pure or mixed logos, or to a pure or complicated contingency. How to establish this work and its reading? A posteriori? Post festum? A priori, but afterwards? What does the flight of Minerva’s bird manifest when night falls? An a priori and morning task, preceding the festival and the sobering-up? More questions. To which are joined - often inadvertently - those of radical contingency, chances and necessities, those relating to the multidimensional interpretation of a text, of which we lack - forever - the pages. Humans and societies set goals indefinitely returned to an elastic and rubbery time. Significations and orders arise and resound, mobilise and land, heavily damaged. How to inhabit the urban and human landscape without turning it into a wild or acclimatised nightmare, illuminate it without burning it? Inhabit? Is that what it is still about?

Perhaps, though it is in no way certain, it would be time to pose the question of the schema and the path of world history a little differently.

Without granting sense an excessive importance and without wallowing in nonsense, without clinging to the true face and without crying about the absurd. By simultaneously grasping the two faces of the same coin, its usage and its counterfeits. In not living history either as a place - even future - of happiness, nor only as a grotesque masquerade. What is left? That of which we are the leftovers and ferments. What has been said many times repeats itself at all levels, and gets tested and tired out again.

Does the planetary era inaugurate another era, or does it merely complete the change of somewhat archaic modernity into ultramodernity? Whoever would say the one or the other would be right, but would not pronounce the decisive judgement, if decision there is, the passage itself remaining undecided.

The path of history - oriented and disoriented - accomplishes, in becoming world, an itinerancy, an errancy, makes limits and aims emerge, accomplishing itself in and accomplishing the spirals of time - past-present­future - and recognises that too strong words often tend to burn in illu­minating, killing what they ‘should’ illuminate and render habitable. The little pawns and great pioneers of historical becoming cannot circumvent accidents. The world powers pass through precise moments of action, trans­port, import, export, are exported. Stripped of ‘all’ mythological or realistic nostalgia - frozen - for the originary, not denouncing in the course of history a series of falls and losses, no longer scaffolding a positive or negative escha­tology, progressive or apocalyptic utopia, however attentive to the losses and the forgettings, the memories, the possibilities, the conquests and the anticipations - let’s hit the road. Neither redemption nor disaster, as such, is waiting for us for the moment. Even the final annihilation withdraws from our hasty grasp.

Let’s learn to bury, with dignity and stealth, every schematic schema, by giving it the honours of war and defeat. Consequently, in what name to act? An embarrassing question; a brutal answer: depending on what acts on us. Do otherwise! Since we want to live and survive, let’s continue and start again. The same errors, the same and other styles. Embarked on the odyssey, we have to experience that an odyssey does not only signify departure and casting off, but also return and repair. Neither the cult of one or the collec­tivity or personality, nor the cult of no man’s land and impersonality are able to bless our voyage. Nonetheless, we voyage. With a fixed trajectory and adrift. Our passage is effected. We continue and start again. Action imposes itself as necessary, never leaves with the fortuitous. Simultaneities escape us: among others, the simultaneity of the human and the world. The dia­lectic evades it by presenting it. The at the same time, in and ‘against’ time, escapes. Action activates us. We set it in motion. Insensible - or almost - to its irony and its humour. It dictates to us its imperatives, imperious for the moment. Necessary and, so to speak, inevitable, it urges us to act to form, transform, deform. Whoever would deny it would be foolish or malicious. And it denies all its protagonists by confusing them. Then to act according to what? The question as well as the answer remains brutal: according to what acts on us, that is to say, according to what imposes itself on us as a task to accomplish, according to the pressing needs of the historical moment and of its productive constellation, according to our fibres, our guts and our consciousness - overwhelmed by our unconscious, our bad faith, our lies, our false consciousness, ‘ours’ and those of others.

Individuals, members of society, collectivities and fragments of the world, we will have to live the efforts and the vanity, to productively socialise, so to speak, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and that of Heraclitus, to face nihilism and to experience it until it is defeated by itself. Those who hold will hold, the others will be swept away, but the line of division between the strong and the weak, the victors and the defeated can only remain floating. We will have to search, between gaiety and sadness, without overflowing with life and without too much death drive - if we want the play to continue - for a sober style of life, love, language, death. What will we do with the ornamen­tal that is always only ornamental, except when it becomes it? And rituals? In the midst of gigantic technical scaffoldings and the combinatory of tech­nical mediations, will we manage to build stone by stone the finitude of the human, history, the world?

For a very long time (Plato), the world has been interpreted as a construc­tion of the moral order.

That which could be called the ethical problem poses itself as a human problem, a historical problem, a political problem, although no kind of solu­tion emerges. Existing Hebrew-Christian, bourgeois (idealistic and conform­ist) and socialist ethics rule as a living and dead queen over equally dead and living behaviours. No other lifestyle seems to manifest itself, and experimen­tal lives remain too stricken and astray. Human life certainly needs a tech­nique of life, but in this case powerful technique does not solve the problem. Although it poses itself and does not pose itself in terms of success or failure, it concerns the attachment to life, which is and will undoubtedly be more and more a problem. Humans have a tendency to live beyond their forces, which propel them and break them. Simultaneously, they let themselves be captured by the power of inertia. Human life needs structures, continuity and rules for the game, but must not all hope for a society or life reconciled with itself remain utopian? When neither moralism, nor immoralism, nor amoralism, nor the ethics of dissolution, constitutes a ‘solution’, how could a problematic ethics deploy itself? What frames and what rules contain and rule the play of the human?

Morals, called with more dignity ethics, ensure something like the restricted conservation of the individual and the species. The moral order chokes the psychomotor and generating forces of history.

The ethics of failures and omissions is also to be explored, exposed, exploded. Without neglecting the ‘fact’ that the origin of all responsibility is dominated by what is - what there is - of the irresponsible.

Everyone, groups and communities, always has a certain code of honour, often unconfessed and not explicated, which regulates their ethical conduct and undergoes distortions.

Every ethical norm faces the test of its victory and its defeat.

From ancient hedonism, the people - it is no longer envisaged as a pop­ulace which follows the masters, except by arrant reactionaries - pass into modern pragmatism.

Cynicism is grafted onto a dream of innocence.

To put into question everyday life in all its systematic disparity always remains a task to be fulfilled. The fear of the everyday becomes more and more a major fear.

Neither the ethics of disorder nor the contrary ethics - the former already being the contrary of the latter - cease to be ruinous and ruined.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>Is it possible to remain situated beyond good and evil?

Problematic ethics are yet to be elaborated.

At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth, extraordinary attempts took place to forge another lifestyle than that of ordinary morality, to live an experimental and ecstatic, wide and deep life, not conforming to ruling norms. Facing madness and sui­cide, sometimes succumbing to it, certain thinkers and artists, men and women, searched for the bonds uniting friendship and love, thought, art and life. This search for another attitude, however, did not succeed even in creating islands on the ocean, and was swallowed up. Dominant forces and forms dominated human weakness more and more. The human animal, working animal, social animal, was regulated. The economic, political, psychological, ethical and ideological powers gained the upper hand. Hegel emerged triumphant from the crisis, human and social life remaining enclosed in his frame: from the principally monogamous family, through the institutions of civil society, to the State. The outsiders were crushed or retreated to the ranks. Marxism, Freudianism, Surrealism con­tributed greatly to this restoration, to the maintenance of the status quo, relegating dissatisfaction and revolt to the well-fenced domain of utopia and imagination. Could a new - productive - jolt of these foundations, by finding again the momentum of previous shocks, manifest its formative force and propose other lifestyles?

In any case - with all the power of the errant truth of individual and social ethics, with all its incoherencies and inconsequences - the behaviour of the being called human is taken over by the worldly ethics - Judaeo-Christian, egoist, bourgeois, liberal and individualistic, altruis­tic, socialist and collectivist, since, for the moment, there seems to be no other - which wants to safeguard human and society from internal and external dissolutions. Its annihilated prescriptions appear to turn against us when we transgress them, and yet we cannot identify ourselves with them. To what will this pressure and this suspension of the ethical problem lead?

That the evolution of manners aims towards a certain liberalisa­tion does not authorise us rightly or wrongly - and rather wrongly - to either brandish the word of liberty, or let us be obsessed by abstract liberalism.

What gives itself as justice is a justification. The march of history does not accomplish itself in the direction of liberty, but towards a certain uncertain liberalisation.

Does the acuteness of the situation appear more clearly to the eyes of the most disadvantaged?

To exercise in particular contestation on erotic and political terrains - particularly pressing - yet without neglecting other terrains, however, which are equally important.

Extreme erotic, political lucidity would make landscapes uninhabitable.

Society cannot bear frankness. Sincerity is dissolving. Tearing off masks and piercing the secret of role play is not tolerated.

Braving society does not go beyond a certain point: the court, the prison, the clinic and the asylum are there to stop certain attempts (which will often be recognised much later). To effectively counter society, each time present, it is necessary to launch a guerrilla war dis­mantling all the positions in an unexpected way, rather than a fron­tal attack, in an underground and clairvoyant action of sustained breadth, not on basely tactical considerations, but on Sioux ruses.

Life, while remaining neoclassical, would seek - as it seems - to become innovative.

Do you ask yourself with enough force: where will the new style of life come from?

No society can live if it does not maintain order and discipline - in a more or less repressive manner.

Neither crisis nor criticism manages to make an edifice shake in its foundations.

To crises correspond, generally, restorations.

The harmless, libertarian and anarchistic dream of a non-repressive society is infantile and almost completely inoperative, simplistic and old- fashioned, eluding the play of historical and social powers that can only channel human forces and weaknesses.

Society is forced to bully certain things and certain aspects of everything to maintain civilisation.

To let the administration of things follow the government of humans is a utopian dream, which artificially separates two sides of a single organisation.

For today and tomorrow the problem of the government of humans and things continues and will continue to pose itself in an increasingly complex way. Who sees clearly? Every dream, sweet or violent, more or less anarchistic, anarchic or libertarian, will inevitably break against the hard necessity of a planning organisation, thus repressive and channelling, a techno-bureaucratic administration, a more or less rigid or flexible regi­mentation of the whole of life: from the couple to the State and its staff. Revolts themselves will be cornered by this dynamic status quo, combining tradition and modernity. The centres of decision will be more and more fixed and shifting, themselves taken into the play of what they pretend to regulate by assigning its place and trajectory, between everything and nothing. Envisaging the world as a gigantic self-production, product of a kind of spontaneous generation, and the human as the precious and laugh­able result of the same self-production, we sometimes believe that we see in the total self-management of humanity a new position and solution of the historical and political problem. Self-management, however, dodges the question of the Same, the-errancy-and-the-play of the history of the world and of the human in and as historical time.

Can those who manage and those who are managed be one, or is this the very distinction that will otherwise be surpassed?

More than individual, private, freedom, more than independence, humans seek their taking-in by the social group, their insertion into the collectivity.

The human community, social and historical, that humans have hoped for, not being realised, means one flees again towards a new imaginary or deplores the absence of realisation of the old.

Will the motor of average actions cease to be the individual and egotis­tical search for profit, whatever it may be, will the collective and altruistic search for the good as well-being replace it? Is not collectivism the gen­eralisation and the surpassing, the extension of individualism? Isn’t the distinction egoism-altruism somewhat, if not very, fake?

Different personal motivations can inscribe themselves in the same gen­eral impulse and converge. Collective behaviours are the result of individual behaviours and are at the same time different from them.

Universal history - which is not the place of temporal felicity; so-called eternal felicity belongs to omnitemporal history - sacrifices on its altar - also desacralised - a good number of profound works - sometimes even the most noble - that may be individually existentially precious. The primacy of the existential is the exaggeration of subjectivity understood anthropologically - anthropology being the last stage of accomplished metaphysics, the human itself becoming the last figure of the absolute - in the phase where individu­ality, subjectivity and existence become little planets, which, without their own light, turn, disoriented and exasperated, in search of their sun.

The grains of sand also function in the mechanisms of world history: they can show certain aspects by breaking them.

An unemployed negativity could be employed to disrupt many positive employments.

Unveiling the contradictions inherent in society is a game which the human cannot and must not renounce.

Everything is society’s fault, one often hears. Of whom and of what is this nourishing and murderous society composed?

As a second nature, society absorbs everything.

Comprehended in too broad a way, society and the social are and encom­pass absolutely everything; comprehended in too narrow a way, they are only one sector. They are a common ground for all that grows on it, but this ground is also constituted by what grows on it and fertilises it.

What imposes itself must also be socially imposed.

Historical becoming has been conceived sometimes as a process of degeneration in relation to a real or mythical past, to a sort of originary and positively good initial model (golden age, lost paradise, primitive happi­ness, etc.), sometimes as a history full of sound and fury signifying nothing (was it conceived in this case?), sometimes as a gradual approximation, a series of successive stages, with stops and setbacks, as an imperfect realisa­tion, translating more or less, in its own way and even in betraying it, in the present time, a directing form, a model orienting the becoming (reign of ends, liberty, etc.), sometimes as a militant march towards the model projected into the future that - even if it is informal - will lead to the - always - happy and final future solution, to the accomplishment of the model (eschatological myths, utopian ideologies, etc.). To break with this type of philosophy of history, which relays the theology of history, if not with the philosophy of instructive and/or complaint history, has not yet devolved to the historian thought of historians and philosophers, as long as they do not think history.

Even the imaginary does not escape finitude. Rich and kaleidoscopic, apparently free in every sense, it remains atrociously limited and condi­tioned, while also constituting an enormous reserve of reveries, disappoint­ments, possibilities and impossibilities. Two major projections characterise the historical and futuristic imaginary (projections that often mix and com­bine). Two models, each of them referring to the other, dispose more of us than we dispose of them: a biocosmic, physiocratic model, which includes all that is, in nature and history, as an organic development, and an artisanal, artificial, technocratic model, which includes all that is done, in nature and history, as a product of a more or less mechanical activity. The first pro­jection takes root in a nostalgia for global nature and draws, not without regrets for lost naturality and animality, a future state of reconciliation with nature. In this neo-Edenic world, cosmic elements, plants, animals and humans will frolic and play with innocence for all that we, since the myth of the lost paradise and nostalgia for the golden age, imaginarily lack. Let’s call it naturalistic, this idyllic projection aiming at a semi-identity between human and nature, by reintegrating history as a kind of nature from whence it emerged. The second - complementary - projection is frankly technicist. Tensing towards a Promethean and mechanised future state, sinking its roots into the mythological dreams of the domination of nature, it sees, with or without optimism or pessimism, a robotised and cybernetised world of the future, ruled from top to bottom by machines and technical machineries. From celestial mechanics to human psychobiology and to the machines of political and cultural games, all will be ruled by the same power. These two ‘visions’, one paradisiacal, the other sometimes a little ameliorist but above all infernal, remain depressing in their candour. A more abstract and informal landscape could however attract some of our decentred attention. A landscape abolishing both everyday life and the absolute, letting the concrete and the imaginary keel over in the direction of an imaginary elud­ing itself almost as such and drowning reality. A panhuman and democratic kingdom confusing seriousness and ridicule, blurring the cards of those who make the decisions and those who execute them, could unfurl at its heart the enormous and versatile reign of a mechanics of games, a machinery of all the possible games, in which we could - sufficiently schizophrenically, mas­sively, fragmentarily and on several planes simultaneously - take part, not according to what is flatly called destiny, but according to what is our mortal part, and which is partially revealed and devolved to us.

Nostalgia for origins has something aristocratic and residual, and futuris­tic anticipation has in it hope for progress. The one and the other however link the past to the future, sacrifice to one of the dimensions of time and are sacrificed in the perpetual present which is only a bridge.

Humans and societies do not seem able to live and develop without utopia, without ideology, without eschatology: these render the - always bad - present bearable regarding a future which will be better and which will realise what was originally in the distant past, in effective or mythical reality, and will be, in anticipation, good. Thus is grafted onto this reading of time - which does not facilitate a higher and more wholistic deciphering and comprehension of time - this need for constitutive or regulatory utopia, ideology, eschatology. They permit actuality to be liveable and comprehen­sible in relation to a norm offering the measure for what takes place, bridging the gap between nostalgia and anticipation, permitting the elaboration of a critique of contemporaneity as function of a schema and a projection, and refer to a ‘model’ that has never existed before. The unrealisable character of this ‘project’ is not very disturbing: it is moreover made to reassure. From the idea, a passage to the ideal and from it to (utopian and eschatological) ide­ology is effectuated. Projection of what is implicated in effective space-time, ideology blocks a lucid theory of practice, masks practice, informs and myth­ologically distorts the deployment of time, and makes believe that there is a solution to the historical problem of humanity that resolves conflict and recovers the game of errancy. The mythological dimension of utopia, ideol­ogy and eschatology can combine very well with techno-scientific aims, up to becoming inseparable from them.

The religious and political utopias - of Christianity and socialism, among others - judge what is in the name of what is not (what is no longer or not yet) and what finally cannot be such as they see it. Gravity however finds its

role: it marks the end of grand principles, it is their end that installs what no longer needs the means in play.

All historical design is realised only by an action which turns it in a certain way against its intention, to effectuate it and to contradict it - by making it become world and by devastating it - through a boring or violent realisation that only constitutes an approximation.

Humans want to struggle against the negative aspects of situations, while not discerning in them the other side of what they consider positive.

Individual history articulates itself on the conscious and the unconscious of world history, and historicity on the unconscious and the conscious of individuals.

The reciprocity of perspectives between singular, individual, personal life, and universal, social, world history, makes us think that the individual in its individual history travels so to speak the whole path of world history.

The domination of planetary technics (genitive, subjective and objec­tive) poses the problem of unity and diversity in a, let’s say, new light. Will it make us unlearn ethics and politics? It seems to embrace the constructive powers and the destructive powers that traverse it too. It lets all the significations and all the signs enter into a combinatory which makes no sense beyond itself. This is its play. And it is in it the play­thing. Technics opens an immense field and reduces possibilities, con­fuses the practical and the poetical and then poses us the question: what happens when words keep quiet? Have we spoken too much so far, and do we have to learn, through our chatter and agitating and soothing speech (propaganda), slogans, cliches, literary constructions and reflexive houses of cards, the - or at least a certain - silence? What succeeds - no doubt obeying a necessity - imposes itself and cracks anew. What is not successful could be stillborn or reappear. Precursors, we listen to them or sacrifice them, accept and refuse them, reinvent them. The small circles which maintain certain requirements - with preliminary sectarianism and confusion - have equally their role to play. In the whirling of the great Circle: which stops in its course - itself immobile? - and mobilises in its turning motion - resting in rest? - all encircled human vitality and anxiety. The balance of losses and profits is never established ‘fairly’, although a certain immanent and balanced justice redistributes a lot of things; running after profit and consumption, we consume beings, things and ourselves.

The historical age of the world is no longer idyllic or heroic, but rather bourgeois-and-socialist.

The - vigorous and young - phases of ascending dynamism are closely linked to others.

What is and what wants to go forwards all over the earth - and towards the heavens: the dynamic thrust of the existing, the need for food, drink, shelter, clothing, erotic need and the need for security, the need for will to power and problematic enjoyment, the need for arrangement and man­agement, conservation, expansion and destruction, the need for beliefs and hopes, the need for culture and play - and finally an obscure but pressing need for the ‘all’ and the ‘rest’, for totality and residues.

Inexhaustible, needs remain finite.

It is by no means decided if the economic determination of the historical nature of the human is universally predominant.

The role of money - effective and imaginary - is still to be dismantled and demonstrated, if not abolished.

The aim of historical evolution sometimes seems (in the eyes of its pro­tagonists) to be to free the human from needs, by satisfying them. Finite but unlimited - and undefined - are all existing and created needs satisfiable? Yet what are the elemental needs, and the others?

Productivity could well be one of the ultimate traps set for us.

After the era of creation and genius opens the era of production and sus­picion. Suspicion of what? Of the game?

It takes a long time for an epoch to discover and invent its style. Feverishly, but in vain, modernity seeks its own.

Friendly and erotic encounters, couples and the family, relationships, medi­ations and social institutions, forms and forces of power and its contestation (implicated or, rarely, out of frame), administration and the State that also manage cultural affairs, are and remain, with all the involuntary humour and irony that they can imply, the rules and regulations almost necessary for historical and human play. These rules are at the same time unregulated, without ever being peremptory. Through them and their contestations could be posed the question of the very Game itself whose rules they are, for the use of small and big children. The rules and the stakes. Perhaps it is still too early to address this question: what plays the games. Would all human and historical follies and aberrations be absorbed and reabsorbed, situated and recuperated, in a sort of universal wisdom that would let the always non-final reconciliation ‘surpass’ the tragicomedy to be put again into question and march towards a new reconciliation, new because already originary? See! By whom? For whom? As an aspect of the totality or as ‘the’ fragmentary totality itself? Will we circumvent or override the wait?

Historical reason is a reason of State.

To transform the world, to change life, to intervene in the course of the world, of beings and of things, to make it mutate - in the interior of the cycle of revolutions and restorations that turn and return - to change the world by changing oneself, changed by the world that changes, what could all this mean? Is it about transforming the - inevitable? - course of the world? Whatever we do, are we not part of it? Is it about transforming the world, about changing life, according to a certain aim? But doesn’t this aim itself emerge in the process of the transformation of the world, in the changing of life? Isn’t it provoking and provoked? Isn’t it taken over and conquered by the world it wanted to conquer? Do not all transformations and all changes as well as the active agents, which advocate and precipitate transformation and change, remain inherent to the world and to life? The world transforms itself. Life changes. Thanks to whom? To anonymous heroes? To eponymous heroes? The march of the game pursues itself and always starts again, mobilis­ing and shattering protagonists and accomplices. To transform the world, to change life, emerges like a call, makes us attentive and open, until the circle of oblivion closes over the project - imperfectly consumed, imperfectly sur­passed. What is, however, the norm or measure of perfection once the world of (idealistic) representation is imperfectly abolished? Will presence, signal­ling absence, take the step? Isn’t also the grasping of beings and things in the chiaroscuro of presence-absence only one of the configurations of the play? In the penultimate analysis, words and activities, beings and things, manifest as working on behalf of the dominant organisation of the world and life. We are therefore forced to accept that everything continues, revolts, cuts and ruptures included, as well as dominances and latencies. One always tries to reveal the hidden history and to comprehend the system, to unveil the problems of the modern world and to indulge in a unitary criticism of all the aspects of the way of life and the totality of the world. This effort plays a productive role, when it can, demands permanent revolution and neglects the power of reformism. It claims generalised self-management: the conscious direction of all by all. Is this wish enough to transform the world, to change life? Commercial and spectacular society also takes it over, emasculates it and leaves it in a wishful state, or offers it piecemeal and false possibilities for action. All the novelties, even and especially when they announce a surpassing - but when will the surpassing itself be problematised until its surpassing? - are brought back to order, which nevertheless they fertilise, and the dominant, revolutionised and reformed lifestyle absorbs adventures and openings, even when it would be put into question by them. Can a new total game be reinvented and pass into the history of human society, constituting more and other than the nega­tion produced by the system? Can the increasing dissatisfaction which goes along with the increasing accumulation of goods, unblock a horizon which does not remain dreamed, imagined, represented, projected? In other words, is it devolved to humans who make history without knowing what they are doing - made by it - to take it under their voluntary and conscious domina­tion? To pose the questions in this way, doesn’t it already open the field, after the loss of illusions and disillusions, to sobering answers?

To live with serenity and courage the course of the world and human things - individual ‘and’ historical - doesn’t come without difficulty, when everything pushes us towards flights - forwards and backwards.

Does the absolute exigency impose respect or is it suspect? Catholic Church and Jews, University and liberal Bourgeois, Communists and devi­ant Groups plead on it and stamp on it. Let’s auscultate the vibrations and interpret them. Attentive to stagnation. Recording the continuations.

The planetary era combines enrooting and uprooting. Everything begins to soar, attached and detached, to float, prisoner of breaking waves, drifting both in small havens and on the vast ocean, flying in the air and flying over the earth to which it remains strongly bound. But the most general frame, as panoramic as possible, contains all the framings and all the frame­works, enframes all that soars - itself also planing, scaling up and scaling down - without being able to be envisaged from the point of view of Sirius.

Although everything becomes plane, it does not sit on the same plane.

Why did they lean on the optimism of facade and principle and on the de facto pessimism of their contemporaries - humans and societies?

Are not all the alliances ‘impure’, mixing lines and fronts?

One should be equally sensitive to the sensibility of humans and epochs, to their ways of feeling, believing, saying and doing, living and dreaming, loving, working, struggling, dying, playing.

In centuries to come, all historical becoming would aim at achieving a problematic point, were it only a stage towards what, to some extent, had already been achieved.

We all live in the anticipation of this storm, while one has done everything, for twenty-five centuries, to not allow it to break.

The industrial age, with its expansive materialism, is in no way cleared of idealistic chimeras. On the contrary.

Between the Christian, bourgeois and socialist world, will there be more continuity than rupture?

Communism succeeds Christianity. It aims to assimilate it.

Even for Marxism, after the materialistic reversal of the reversed (and materialised) world, these are the thoughts that will lead the world.

No society succeeds in thinking itself. Does it at least manage to think others?

Often one has the impression that one must become flatter, more banal, simpler, to be able to bear the complexification of the world.

To rise up against the established order is part of the established order and/or leads to the installation and restoration of an established order.

Global civilisation, techno-scientific and industrial and not pre­paring a hypothetical post-industrial era, the society of production and consumption, the civilisation of well-being, poor in its opulence, mass culture, all this spirit of the time - whether it is played by more or less democratic and pluralistic regimes, or by more or less autocratic and uni­tary regimes, matters little here, since the regimes, with their divergences and variants, come together - leads to a capitalo-socialism of the State, to a sort of bureaucratic collectivism which tends to develop in a straight line despite the sinuous paths, in progressing and in unifying the diversities of which certain modalities will persist. The progressing and progressive evolution, with relapses, of course, forms the logic and the dialectics of economic, social, historical and political development: it aims at the dom­ination, the exploitation and the administration of the earth. Will this evolution continue linearly for a very long time, as it seems, or will it expe­rience cuts, ruptures and mutations that are for the moment unforeseeable? Once again, is it after the party, or the debacle, that one will recognise what presided over its unfolding?

Will the global unity, once realised, split up anew?

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">What will be the plot and what will be the drama of the violence con­tained in the rules of the game, and, breaking them, lacking space in a stale and insipid organisation, the violence aimed at overturning successes, stale­mates and failures?

What develops in the margins of the dominant text is part of the global context and can one day inscribe itself in the text.

In everything there are unmentionable details.

Permanent contestation is what, on the daily agenda, simmers under the daily (and almost nightly) agenda. Globally, does it want the subversion of the global system and can it contribute to, if not effectuate, it? Permanent contestation and structured system are linked by a game where the first can dissolve the second, where the second can recover the first. The technical society - of production and consumption - is attacked both by the right, in the name of bourgeois humanism, and by the left, in the name of Marxist socialism. It is proclaimed inhuman, mechanical, empty, alienating. To what end, however, does this double criticism lead, which deals with both permanent contestation and the structured system?

The tocsin sounds for us the hour of post-revolutionary societies, the hour of reforms, may they be revolutionary, masking and masked. Let us however not forget that all human history, which begins neither with the logos (word and thought) alone, nor solely with praxis (action), but with the thrust of need and desire - in suffering and anxiety - with a stammering language and thought, with a productive work of life and survival - in pain and struggle - that history then from its beginnings - or: from the beginning? - is the play of all this, and makes its way - neither thanks to the reason that governs the world (as Hegel thinks), nor through the future of its structuring and structured procession (economic, social, political and legal forces and forms, manners, morality, ideology, art, religion, philosophy, science), which must lead it to the reign of universal satisfaction, recognition and transparency (as Marx and Marxism want it) - towards what it already had attained as modern and global history, that is to say its completion and its end that endure, the definitive end (the stop) not being foreseeable, without it being excluded that historical humanity does not manage to complete itself and runs aground on the way.

History, as such, does not know of radical and total rupture, of effective and absolute ending, of fundamentally new beginning.

What will be the agent of the next historical transformation, reform or revolution, which will change the rules of the game? From where will the power of negativity come, not the abstract negation, but the determining and determined, produced and productive negation, and the force of contes­tation? What social element will be the carrier? What will be its theoretical and practical perspective? Will global society reabsorb all radical question­ing? What will become of the extra-social, asocial, anti-social movements of negation, of individuals, of groups and of communities denying the dom­inant world, contaminated by it and contaminating it? Will the ferments of negativity shift from social alienation to psychic alienation? Do the intelli­gentsia, the rebellious, the young, the neurotics, the deviants incarnate the ‘bad side’ of history, which corrupts good positivity? Where will the residual forces which accumulate on this side open onto? Will they explode in open daylight?

There is no society without its forms and forces of deviance.

Simple deviance is an indispensable negative complement to the establishment, the era of the Welfare State and the privatisation of the masses.

That which exits the ranks most often re-enters them.

There are certainly demands maintained upon better-being but there is no programme - theoretical or practical - of any kind and any colour that would aim at a beyond of better-being, of ‘well-being’.

The struggles for or against strengthen the style of what imposes itself before being denied. As for what lacks style?

Each time a model gives itself as the model, one sees that it is only a type of model.

What is popular, losing its organic and communal traditions, becomes vulgar while waiting for its petty-bourgeois and planetary assumption.

Neither those who cry out for their abolition, nor those who wish for their restoration, their maintenance and their perpetuation manage to pose the problem of the elites - that is to say, the ‘elect’ among those called - of the planetary area.

Every epoch remains characterised by its games.

Does a power succumb to external attacks or internal weaknesses?

What does necessary evil mean? In historical opposition to what good?

Everything goes as it can go and not as it ‘should’ go.

To oppose to effective absurdity a feeling, if not a thought of the absurd, often combines with the love of change for change.

The organisation of relations of command, as flexible and democratic as they may be or become, could never satisfy everyone, especially those who do not want to command or be commanded.

No demagoguery can overcome the problem of hierarchy. Self­management, if it could effectively solve it, remains - for the moment only? - abstractly programmatic and concretely deficient. We should not underestimate the abyss - more than the ditch - that separates historical anecdotes and historical actions.

Doesn’t every people have the government that it deserves? That is to say, isn’t it governed in general by the most representative representative of the moment?

Those who dominate and govern are equally governed and dominated.

Historical decisions are always made ‘for’ and not by the collectivity.

Does not history confront and confuse accomplices - even when they violently confront each other - more than the culpable? The game of history also plays tricks on the tribunal of history.

The world seems to be already so old that the most revolutionary novel­ties age quickly, quickly rejoining the old and renewing it.

Those who trigger revolutions are in general the first victims.

The difference between the right and the left must be explored in all directions, on all levels, by all languages.

The distribution of the political card game - conservative or reactionary right, reformist or progressive centre, revolutionary left - is pretty con­fused. Those who regret an old - mythic - order, elapsed and condemned; those who feel a certain anxiety facing the void that nothing fills and who try to save - or renovate - the furniture to remedy in a little way the evils; those who, despite everything, speak in the name of a utopia very approximately realised and realisable; those with whom all this is strongly muddled up - logos and praxis mixing, remaining separated, contradicting each other - all, to varying degrees and in spite of or because of the various verbalisms and activisms, remain complementarily struck by stupor before the arraignment of history.

When things turn to the right, one needs a vigorous turn to the left.

Progressive platitude can very advantageously replace bourgeois platitude.

The historical and political task, present and precise, consists of being socialist and leftist - situated on the ‘wrong’ side, through which history passes, and nevertheless is to be thought.

What is good about radical socialisation, full of compromise, is not that it will solve the problems, but that it will open them.

In the combat of two adversaries, each of whom wants to deny, to contradict the other, it is the excluded third, the middle, which triumphs over the alternative: onto-logically and historically. Example: between classical capitalism and prophesied socialism a third way is established. This third way is not only the ‘fallout’ of the third kind of (Spinozistic) knowledge, foreseen by the third eye of the third human.

A regime is spreading in world history that does not fall under either classical capitalism or prophesied socialism. An economically, politically and ideologically mixed regime, offering something like a third way, unless this way turned out to be an impasse. Another, third ‘solution’ that would be neither bourgeois capitalism nor bureaucratic socialism, is such a ‘solution’ not conceivable?

With a childish naivety and as if they knew nothing of the ruse of history, historical humans always believe that the decisive hour is approaching.

The Occident is in search of the style of its agonal agony. Having reached the summit, do humans and civilisations aspire to descend?

On the horizon of the agony of our civilisation, no replacement civilisa­tion appears.

The collective humanity of tomorrow: what a beautiful ‘subject’ of ques­tioning, on the condition that one interrogates it from an angle.

The bourgeoisie, even ‘socialised’, proved to have a life almost as long as the peasantry. Its forms survive it.

Technical and industrial planetary society, society of production­consumption, worldwide model - without model - carries the negative of its own myth and its own more-than-real directing efficiency, lives and knows an expansion, not despite but because of being mortal and supporting and fomenting the dream, the desire and the thought of its negation, its contra­diction, its annihilation, by at once integrating them, blocking them and freeing them. It feeds on the spectacle of its double, balances the antago­nisms, the powers of affirmation and those of contestation, constrains all its agents and patients into the same acts and ills, allows the same discrepan­cies. Where does a certain delay remain? In comprehension relating to the transformative action, or inversely?

The great conquerors of this world accomplish their conquests with a vic­torious sadness, their eyes dreamy, and strained, not towards the other world, but towards what surpasses and dislocates the empire and the influence of every worldwide enterprise, however sparkling it might be.

The historical hero, as long as there is one, will be a polarising being, sit­uating, as much as if not more than situated, able to offer a general line and a centre of gathering, by fertilising several contradictory tendencies, moving against the current, causing great as well as small, positive and negative pas­sions as well as diverse and adverse reactions and interpretations. Because it is a fundamentally ambiguous being.

The great humans (one must add, historical, without forgetting their little history) disturb the habitual judgements of their contempo­raries. Exceptional, they can be poorly integrated, these integrators. They are neither young nor old; their youthful fire is as old as the wisdom of the world. They appear as situated above the common feel­ings of mortals. Cynical and naive, daring and indifferent to so-called common opinion. They live and act as if life were empty of the hope which keeps ordinary humans alive, carried by this hopelessness and another hope.

Is only what is replaced destroyed?

Intermittently, diverse minorities will incessantly enter the stage.

In all objectification, is there not alienation? Haven’t we known this for a long time?

Alienation, deracination, strongly existing, give us the illusion that there was a state preceding them.

It begins: the denunciation of alienation as being itself an alienation. We enter the second stage: alienating and alienated alienation.

It is a characteristic of the modern human to manipulate ever more with products whose mechanism they hardly know; simple example: money, radio-television.

If every epoch is possessed by its own kind of greatness, what is the great­ness of ‘ours’?

The faith in the redeeming future and the fear of some kind of hell, which ancient cults nourished, and which nourished them, are socially replaced, the ancient deities dead. There comes now an indefinitely deferred future happiness and a historical and social dread regarding the march to the worst. In a state of permanent suspension.

Property and appropriation are stubborn.

The historical dream of a general will transcending the will of all requires an analysis in a watchful state.

Democracy is also something that can and must be put radically into ques­tion, regarding both its concept and its functioning.

Tyranny and democracy are less separable than one might think. Look at the totalitarian states of the planetary era.

In the democracy of indistinctions, certain distinctions do not totally cease to play.

Doesn’t the aspiration to a certain aristocracy work within every aspira­tion to democracy, even though the latter wants to abolish the former?

A radical and worldwide hybrid, a universal and total racial mixture, seems to impose itself to give a new physical, psychic and intellectual vigour to the human species, some of the unities which compose it being overde­veloped and tired, others remaining underdeveloped and not sufficiently differentiated.

lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt; line-height:112%'>Do not the most elaborate conquests lead to the less elaborate positions? Does not the most differentiated indicate, to that which remains inert and compact, the path to its future?

Producing means, more and more, producing what lets itself be reduced to the consumable. Production and reproduction are intimately linked and perhaps lead, through what offers itself to consumption, to the opening to the game and of the game.

By entering the period of ultramodernity, history will complete - incompletely - the premises of modernity.

Neo-modernism is an ultra-phase of neo-archaism.

The future social organisation lacks models and prototypes. So?

Through its successes and failures, the century threatens us with desiring only its own dreams.

Convergence does not mean: identity.

The era of organisers will be superimposed on the era of computers.

‘Absolute knowledge’ and ‘total praxis’ cross their fires.

The province is a place where the sound of the steps of those who walk fades away; it can nevertheless give birth to walkers. The entire world becomes an enormous province, without capital.

All the alliances cease to be frontal - if they ever were - and become broken, fluid, mobile, apparently contradictory.

If to speak and ‘express yourself’, according to the current expression, it is necessary to have an alphabet, a vocabulary and a syntax available - by forging them - the current epoch does not succeed in saying what constitutes it; however, it plays it.

Each century forges the theory of what it does. It becomes in its turn a means that accentuates the ‘evil’ it is supposed to battle.

Historical humans and human societies attain something other than what they aim for.

There are histories that do not know an ending.

Is what is established, in spite of and with some apparent contrary accents, the general organisation of hopelessness, excluding all hope and despair?

The children’s choir will always sing happy songs for civil or military armies on the march.

Whole centuries can live very well without proper thought.

The ruse of history and the irony of fate overthrow the solutions which hide the fact that there is no solution.

Immediate effectiveness and long-term effectiveness are not confused, although they may momentarily coincide.

Can world history, which is so important and embraces all, be rebutted, refused or refuted?

The iron dice of battles decide wars, which do not decide much any more, inseparable from the periods of peace which lead there anew - in the middle of the cold wars and the armed peaces - until the distinction between war and peace is erased.

A people can support so much more than a human or a group of humans and survive so many tests.

The ruse of history ‘betrays’ all good intentions.

We do not leave our children the world which we have made, but the one which made us.

The humans of this epoch of world history believed they were attending and participating in the expiration of an old world and the gestation of a new one. They were not suspicious enough of the ruse of passages.

The presumption of each epoch is to believe itself end and beginning.

Docility and revolt are not so inseparable.

After a great catastrophe, those who remain are counted and settle their - the? - accounts.

Successive conquests do not form a simple or complex cumulative process.

This obsession with progress has something downright regressive.

Waste, residues, collapses, failures accompany every enterprise and often constitute revealing signs.

The society to which we belong, and to which many generations will still belong, does not cease - in the West as in the East - being a society of exploitation: of the human, of things - of the totality of beings.

You could not do otherwise: Planetarians of all countries, unite!

In the midst of the planetary unity, all is and remains piecemeal. Not for­getting the maintaining and resurgence of certain traditional forms.

A great deal of ‘automatic’ rites are called to spread.

History - even accelerated - runs behind what has already preceded it.

The nineteenth century was the century of discourse oriented towards completion, conclusion. The twentieth century was a century of compromise.

In the heart of the citizens of an advanced industrial world, nostalgia slumbers for an idyllic, rural, archaic and feudal country life.

Technicist society will make humans face an immense problem: their ennui.

Every revolt and revolution splits itself: one wing maintains the banner of freedom and the imaginary, while the other organises with discipline and repression.

Every historical force which struggles against another divides itself into two (at least).

Each revolution gives itself as unique and exemplary, first and last. The preceding revolutions were in its eyes only a failed sketch, a distant pro­phetic announcement. The mystique of the revolution pays a heavy tribute to mythology and ideology, transforms politics into secular religion, ignores the return of the repressed and forgets the fact that it is always one class that makes the revolution and another that profits from it, that the great revolu­tions at once succeed and fail, since every revolution constitutes a revolution, a circle, better, a sinusoidal movement, a spiral, and that it cannot, there­fore, avoid the restoration. After the first revolutionary episodes, the author­ity of the State reinforces itself, and reformist prose follows revolutionary poetics. So the permanent revolution reveals itself impracticable: a series of mixed and permanent reforms replace it. The revolution however persists as a requirement, and certain movements of revolt are accomplished. Will not all be recovered again by the course of the world?

Is the era of revolutions closed for the developed countries, which effected the conquests of the bourgeois French Revolution (its socialist extensions see daylight in the technically underdeveloped countries for which Marxism has become the lever for their modernisation and industrialisation)? Doesn’t the era of reforms - were they revolutionary - succeed it?

Can there be partial reforms concerning only a segment without the whole being touched? Yet, no reform is sufficiently total.

There is never a single problem to solve. No particular problem is the key to all the others. The problems run all together and, altogether, they know fragmentation.

Did not every tragedy have an ending?

Destiny has become history, and history has become play. Since the transgression of sense puts an end to the tragedy of human existence and his­torical becoming. Does this mean that the tragic disappears from the history of each human and the history of humans? Since the theatricality and the democratic kingdom of representation are already as abolished.

It does not suit the epigones to have great political ambitions.

Precise and concrete becoming remains ‘unforeseeable’, however clearly one can see - or believes that one can see - its outlines form. Will it unfold as an indefinite progress? As a temporal return of the-same-and-the-different? Will it know relapses? Will it generate something new? It presents itself as impossible to foresee like a progressive line that prolongs itself. The enigma of the return withdraws from apprehension. Falls are never where one expects them. The new is, by definition, impossible to predict. The decays and rebirths emerge as a surprise, albeit prepared, and so render extremely problematic every grasp of the future that is beyond the plans of our enterprises.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">The history of the worldwide game resides in repetition and transforma­tions, in restarts and continuations, in stops and reboots, and it seems to exclude major collective suicides.

The century will little by little let itself be invaded by fatigue.

Let’s start preparing the funeral of the twentieth century.

To leave the twentieth century, we have only to accomplish a few steps more.

To surpass the twentieth century, it is necessary to surpass its foundations and their consequences.

At this moment all that happens smells or stinks of the twentieth century, readies itself to enter the third millennium - always after Jesus Christ - and does not think that, by entering it, it readies itself to exit it.

Never has humanity spoken so much about itself. It is as if it suspects - very obscurely - how things happened until now. Henceforth?

Those who address above all future generations know it. They inaugurate the planetary era, which succeeds modernity - by precipitating it in the broad and slow process of its completion - the planetary era marking the beginning of the end of philosophy and history, which - in the generalised disease, the permanent crisis and the organisation of remedies - establishes itself not as truth and sense, but as a play of worldwide errancy.

What are the most noble products of history? Evidently, poetry and art.