tl;dr: when it comes to fighting, there are people who will help you fight and there are people who will not and there are people who will stand in the way. find the people who will help. be loud and clear so they know where you are—focus on them, be encouraged by them, encourage them, work with them. don’t worry about the people who won’t help. they will be of no help even if they are on your side. waste as little energy as possible fighting people who stand in the way, which is to say don’t talk, don’t argue, just get them out of the way of the fight you came for.
we abridged the invisible committee’s theses on the Imaginary Party, reducing it from 20 pages to 10 pages by including what we highlighted when we read this text. in certain paragraphs, we included the surrounding sentences for understandability. we will write an explanatory essay at another moment. for now, do read this, and if certain parts are too confusing, we have linked the full text above; however, the ambiguity is intentional — think about a “legal situation” where this ambiguity might be necessary for the defender. the numbers in bracket correspond to the paragraph number in the original, and for readability given the conditioned 15-60 second timespan of PEOPLE, we split large sections into smaller paragraphs.
here founds the basis of our nomadic nationalist, yet to enter the scene but present all along.
[1]
the Imaginary Party is the particular form that Contradiction assumes in the historic period when Domination imposes itself as dictatorship of visibility and of dictatorship as visibility, i.e. as Spectacle.
the sorcery of the Spectacle consists in rendering invisible the expressions of negation; its most remarkable character is precisely to be reputed as nonexistent, as imaginary.
yet it this that one speaks of exclusively because it is that which each day makes a little more visible the failures of the proper functioning of society.
[2]
the Imaginary Party is the party that tends to become real, incessantly. the Spectacle has no other business than to hinder its manifestation as real because then it would have to admit to the existence of this negativity which it is.
thus, it is in the essence of the Spectacle to cast those who oppose it, the Imaginary Party, as a negligible residue, by declaring it criminal and inhuman. at the bottom, it’s why there are two parties in this society:
i. the party of those who pretend that there is but one party; and
ii. the party of those who know that there are in truth two parties.
[3]
it is wrong to reduce war to the brutal shock of the battle: battles are exaggeratedly rare compared to casualties.
[4]
by pretending as if the unseen does not exist, the Spectacle maintains the exorbitant and planetary illusion of a fragile civil peace. the protection of this fundamental axiom of keeping the unseen imaginary, generates a gigantic campaign of pacification and neutralization of any contradictions.
but this campaign of pacification is still a war, the most terrible and destructive there ever was because it is led in the name of peace. a trait of the Spectacle is that it does not speak of war but in a language where the word “war” does not appear more than a question of ‘humanitarian operations’, ‘international sanctions’, ‘maintaining order’, ‘safeguarding the rights of man’, of the fight against terrorism, sects, extremism, or pedophilia — and above all, the process of peace.
the adversary no longer carries the name of “enemy” but in revenge, they are placed outside the law and outside of humanity for having broken and disturbed the peace. this non-sense reveals a systematic coherence, shocking internal logic; that this does not help existing configurations of hostilities nor does it provoke new regroupings among friends and enemies because it does not know how to escape from the logic of the political.
those who do not understand war do not understand their own times.
[5]
since its birth, Commodity Society has never renounced its absolute hatred of the political — here resides its greatest vexation, that the project of eradicating the political is itself still political. it greatly wants to speak of law, economy, culture, philosophy, the environment, politics, but never of the political.
the century of liberalism of classical economy which corresponds to 1815-1914 was a first attempt and first failure of the naturalization of the negation of the political: the doctrine of utility, the system of needs, the myth of a natural auto-regulation of the market, the ideology of the right of man, and parliamentary procedure were simply means that were put in place in that time for that end.
but in the period that opened in 1914, the naturalization of commodity dominance revealed its most radical form: Biopower. in Biopower, the social totality which little by little autonomized itself came to take charge of life itself.
Biopower oversaw the politicization of biology (health, beauty, sexuality, available energy of individual) and the biologization of politics that operates (ecology, economy, general repartition of wellbeing and care, growth, longevity, aging of the population).
these impose themselves are the metrics for measuring the exercise of power. this is all, of course, just the appearance of the process not the process itself.
in reality, Biopower concerns itself with relying on the false evidence of the body and biological life, the total control of behaviors, of representation and rapports between humans — to force everyone to consent to the Spectacle out of a supposed instinct of conservation. Biopower is this essentially murderous tyranny that exercises itself upon everyone in the name of all and of “nature.”
therefore all hostility to this society must be liquidated because it goes against the interest of the species, as they designate it to be. and it is thusly that each new diktat that retrains a little more already derisory liberties pretends to protect everyone against themselves, in opposing the extravagance of its sovereignty to the ultima ratio of naked life: “Pardon them, they know not what they do,” says Biopower as it takes out its syringe.
the penchant for revolution, an endemic pathology for which a campaign of permanent vaccination has not yet come to pass, certainly explains itself by the unhappy coincidence of an at-risk heredity, excessive hormonal levels, and the insufficiency of a certain neuro-mediator.
there could not be politics inside of Biopower, only against Biopower. because Biopower is the achieved negation of the political, veritable politics must commence by freeing itself from Biopower, i.e. to reveal Biopower as such.
[6]
in Biopower, the physical dimension escapes from humans, erecting itself against us, oppressing us. it is in this that Biopower is a moment of the Spectacle, just as the physical is a moment of the metaphysical. the body condemns the present contestation to place itself on the metaphysical plane or be nothing.
the body’s principal attribute is its factual invisibility in the heart of a mode of commodified unveiling that is assuredly metaphysical, but factually metaphysical singularly in that it is the negation of metaphysics.
but the Spectacle abhors a vacuum, it cannot bring itself to disclaim the massive evidence of these hostilities of a new type which agitate the social body — it is necessary to mask this. thus it comes back to multiple occult forces to invent pseudo-conflicts always more empty, always more fabricated and themselves always more violent, in so much as anti-political.
it is upon this heavy equilibrium of terror that rests the apparent calm of all the societies of late capitalism.
[7]
in this case, the Imaginary Party is the party of the political because it is the sole one which can designate in this society the metaphysical labor of an absolute hostility, i.e. the inner existence of a veritable rupture.
the Imaginary Party is the form which politics assumes in the hour of the collapse of nation-states, of which we know henceforth to be mortal. it is the total assertion that the political space is not, in its reality, distinct from physical, social, cultural, etc space. everything is political for power.
the era of Biopower is the moment where Domination comes to apply itself to the body, until the individual physiology takes a political character, in spite of the ridiculous alibi of biological naturality. politics is thus more than ever the total, existential metaphysical element in which is packed all of human liberty.
[8]
we witness in these gloomy days the final phase of the decomposition of Commodity Society. it is at the planetary level that we see diverge in always greater proportions the map of the commodity and the territory of the human.
the spectacle puts in place a worldwide chaos, but this is a chaos that only manifests itself in the inaptitude of the economic vision of a world that has never understood human reality.
this has become evident in that value no longer measures anything: accounting turns to emptiness. work itself has no other object than to satisfy the universal need of servitude, and Money has finished by leaving itself to be earned by the nothingness it propagates.
at the same time, the totality of the old bourgeois institutions, which rest on the abstract principles of equivalence and representation, have entered into a crisis which they seem too fatigued to recover from: justice no longer manages to judge; teaching no longer teaches; medicine no longer heals; parliament no longer legislates; police no longer force respect for the law; nor does the family even raise children.
certainly the exterior forms of the ancient edifice remain, but all life has quitted it definitively. it floats in an intemporality always more absurd and always more perceptible. contrary to appearances, the perishing of the ensemble is not so much organ after organ: it decomposes and corrodes, not in some observable positive phenomenon, but rather in the general indifference that has been unchained; indifference that procures the clear sentiment that no one judges themselves to be concerned by this, nor in any fashion have they decided to remedy it.
already masses of silent, solitary humans appear who choose to live in the interstices of the commodity world and who refuse to participate with what they once had a rapport with. it is not solely that the charms of the commodity leave them stubbornly unenthused, it is moreover that they carry an inexplicable suspicion for all that is linked to the universe that it fashioned and that now is collapsing.
at the same time, the ever more patent malfunctionings of the capitalist state become incapable of any integration with the society upon which it imposes itself, guarantees in its midst the necessary temporary subsistence of spaces of indetermination, zones of autonomy always more vast and always more numerous, where there is sketched an ethos for a whole infra-spectacular world that seems at dusk, but that in truth is at dawn.
some forms of life appear in which the promise goes well beyond the general decomposition. in all respects, this resembles a massive experience of illegality and clandestinity. there are moments where one already lives as if this world no longer existed.
[9]
the historic period in which we enter is a time of extreme violence and grand disorders. certainly domination still has force, physical as well as symbolic, but it does not have more than that.
at the same time, as the discourse of its critique, this society has also lost the discourse of its justification. it finds itself before an abyss which this society discovers to be its heart. in these conditions, “if the simple consciousness at last claims the dissolution of this whole world of perversion, it can not all at once demand of the individual to reject this world, because Diogenes himself in his barrel was conditioned by it; besides this demand posed to the singular individual is precisely that which passes for wrong, because wrong consists in worrying about oneself in so much as singular the demand of this dissolution can only address itself to this same spirit of culture.”
as Hegel says, “a world such as this knows all become estranged from it, knows being-for-itself separated from being-in-itself.” in other words, all in dominating effectively attaches itself to the luxury of knowing overtly its domination as vain, absurd, and illegitimate, calls against it as the only response to what it states the violence of those who, having been mutilated by it of all rights, draw their rights from hostility: one can no longer reign innocently.
[10]
at this stage, Domination, which feels its life inexorably escaping, becomes mad and pretends to a tyranny of which it no longer has the means. Biopower and the Spectacle correspond, as complementary moments, to this ultimate radicalization of the commodity aberration that seems its triumph and preludes its loss.
the Society of the Spectacle has become untreatable on this point: it is necessary to participate in the collective crime of its existence, no one must be able to claim to reside outside it.
at this moment, the Spectacle can no longer tolerate the existence of the colossal party of abstention that is the Imaginary Party. to reach its ends, it uses unequal measure the most vulgar means, like the menace of hunger, and the most insidious, like the young-woman.
the elements of the multitude of the indifferent who mutually ignore one another and who do not think to be of any party, find themselves equally exposed to this unique and centralized dictatorship, the dictatorship of the Spectacle, of which the salariat, the commodity nihilism, and the imperative of visibility are not but partial aspects.
it is therefore domination itself that imposes on them, on those who would have been content volunteers of a floating existence, to recognize themselves for what they are: rebels.
in the course of this exodus, some unprecedented solidarities constitute themselves, friends and comrades reassemble behind the new lines of the front that they designate, and the formal opposition between the Spectacle and the Imaginary Party become concrete.
there develops thus, among those who take note of their essential marginality, a strong sentiment of belonging to non-belonging, a sort of community of Exile. the simple sensation of estrangement in this world metamorphosizes in accord with the circumstances into intimacy with estrangement.
flight was nothing more than a fact become strategy, the metaphysical hostility to this society has from now on ceased to be lived on a purely negative mode, like the causal indifferences to all that could come upon it, a refusal to play or the forced failure of domination by rejection of domination.
it takes a positive character and by this is so perfectly worrying that power is not wrong, in its paranoia, to see terrorists everywhere. there are crises nowhere, there is only the omnipresence of the Imaginary Party, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere, because it operates on the same territory as the Spectacle.
[11]
each of the failures of this society must thus be comprehended positively, as the work of the Imaginary Party, as the work of negativity that is to say, the human: in such a war, all who deny one party subjectively, objectively rally to the other.
as long as there is the Spectacle, the notion of the Imaginary Party is that which renders visible the new configuration of hostilities.
the Imaginary Party claims the totality of those who in thoughts, words, or acts conspire to the destruction of the present order. the disaster is its work.
[12]
up until a certain point, the Imaginary Party corresponds to a specter, an invisible presence, to the fantastical return of the Other in a society where all Otherness was suppressed to a separate accounting for all that was generalized.
but this bad dream, this idea of suicide that passes by the head of the Spectacle cannot delay engendering its reality as consciousness becoming practice, as immediately practical consciousness.
the Imaginary Party is the other name of the shameful sickness of shaken power: paranoia. the despairing and planetary deployment of always more massive and sophisticated techniques to control the public space materializes in a piquant fashion the madhouse insanity of wounded domination which still pursues the old dream of the Titans for a universal state.
in this terminal phase, it speaks only of the fight against terrorism, delinquency, extremism, and criminality because it is constitutionally forbidden to explicitly mention the existence of the Imaginary Party.
besides, this represents for it, in combat, a certain handicap because it cannot designate its fanatics to hate “the veritable enemy that inspires an infinite courage,” as Kafka puts it.
[13]
however, it is necessary to know that this paranoia does not lack for reasons, in respect to the direction of historical development. it is a fact that at the point where we have arrived in the process of socialization of society, each individual act of destruction constitutes an act of terrorism, that is to say, it objectively aims at the entire society.
thus, at the extreme of suicide that manifests itself in a gesture where death and liberty blend, which delimits, suspends, and annuls the sovereignty of Biopower, sees itself delight a strong force of consummation, of production and reproduction of this world. when the law rests on nothing more than its promulgation i.e. on force and caprice, when no ethos is no longer contained in it, then all crime must be comprehended as a total contestation of a solidly ruined social order. all murders are no longer the murder of a particular person, but pure murder, without object of subject, without culprit or victim.
it is immediately an attempt against the law which does not exist but wishes to reign everywhere. from now on, the tiniest infractions have changed their meaning: all crimes are become political crimes, and it is precisely this that domination must at all costs make occult, to veil from all that an epoch has passed, and that political violence, this living corpse, comes to demand the reckoning of all the forms that one does not know it in.
it is also permitted for each to diminish the insoluble character by certifying the general rule that a political unity cannot exist under the form of res publica, the public, which finds itself put into question each time that it creates a space of non-publicity which is an effective disavowal of this publicity.
thus the Imaginary Party disappears in the shadow, while transforming the shadow into a strategic space from whence come the attacks which destroy the place where until now, imperium manifested itself, which dismantle the vast background of official public life.
it is a constant temptation, in effect, to conceive the positive existence of the Imaginary Party under the familiar species of the guerrilla, of civil war, of partisan warfare, of a conflict without a precise front or a declaration of hostilities, without armistice or peace treaty.
this war has nothing behind its acts, its violence, its crimes, other than pure metaphysical violence becoming conscious of its political character.
[14]
the particular form under which the Imaginary Party makes irruption into visibility is the form of catastrophe. the catastrophe is that which reveals, but cannot be revealed. the catastrophe does not exist save for the Spectacle.
in each “catastrophe” it is the mode of commodity unveiling that finds itself unveiled and discontinued. the totality of categories, of which it enforces the use, fear an exploding reality. interest, equivalence, calculus, utility, work, and value are put to flight by the non-assignability of negation. therefore the Imaginary Party is known in the Spectacle as the party of chaos, crisis, and disaster.
[15]
in the exact proportion as the catastrophe is truth to the state of fulguration, those of the Imaginary Party work to hasten the advent of this by any means.
the axes of communication are for them privileged targets. they know how infrastructures that are worth billions can be destroyed in an audacious coup. they know the tactical weakness, the points of least resistance, and the moments of vulnerability of the opposing organization. they are, besides, freer to choose what will be the theater of their operations and act at the point where the smallest forces can cause the greatest losses.
the most troubling is that they know all this without knowing that they know it. thus, an anonymous worker at a bottling plant pours cyanide “just like that” and signs his crime “Le MESSI,” another “without apparent reason” blew out the brains of his petit-bourgeois father on his birthday, a third opens fire on the wise herd of his school comrades, a last “gratuitously” threw bricks at cars launched on the lively allure of the highway when he did not burn them in their parking lots.
in the Spectacle, the Imaginary Party does not appear as the work of humans, but of strange acts. these acts themselves are not connected with one another, but systematically held in the enigma of the exception.
the Spectacle does not want to see there that so many attacks are directed against it and its ignominy. ergo, from the spectacular point of view of a certain alienation of the state of public explanation, the Imaginary Party is resumed into a confused ensemble of gratuitous and isolated criminal acts of which the authors possess no sense.
indisputably, the state of exception becomes generalized. no one can any longer pretend to security.
this is good. we know at present that the denouement is close.
as Bataille writes in The Guilty, “lucid saintliness recognizes in itself the necessity of destruction, the necessity of tragic issue.”
[16]
the effective configuration of hostilities that the notion of the Imaginary Party makes readable is marked essentially by asymmetry. here, the protagonists move on such perfectly strange planes, one from the other, that they do not meet except at very rare points of intersection and by the whim of a certain chance.
this strangeness is asymmetrical: because, for the Imaginary Party, the Spectacle is without mystery, whereas for the Spectacle, the Imaginary Party remains forever a mystery.
from this follows a strategic consequence of the first importance: while we can without problem designate our enemy, which is by essence designatable, our enemy cannot designate us.
there is no uniformity in the Imaginary Party because uniformity is precisely the central attribute of the Spectacle. the Imaginary Party knows nothing but its enemies, not its members, because its enemies are precisely all those who one could know. those of the Imaginary Party, in re-appropriating their Bloom-being, have re-appropriated the anonymity with which they were constrained.
in so doing, they turn against the Spectacle the very situation which was forced on them, and use it instead as a condition of invincibility. in a certain manner, they will make this society pay for the imprescriptible crime of having stolen from them their name (i.e. the knowledge of their sovereign singularity, their human life) to have excluded them from all visibility, all community, all participation, to have thrown them into the indistinction of the crowd, into the nothingness of ordinary life, into the mass in which homo sacer is suspended, and to have walled off from their existence the access of meaning.
it is from this condition, in which the Spectacle would like to maintain them, that they depart. for, each one of these murders without motive and without designated victims, each one of these anonymous sabotages constitutes an act of Tiqqun that executes the sentence that this world has already pronounced against itself.
it returns to nothingness that which Spectacle has already quitted, to death those who do not live but rather survive, to the ruin of that which has for so long been no more than ruins.
and if one must accept for these acts the absurd qualifier of “gratuitous” it is because they do but lead to manifest that which is already true but still occult, to realizing that which is already real but not known as such. they add nothing to the course of the disaster, they record and notify.
[17]
that its enemy has neither face nor name nor anything that could be tied to an identity, that this always presents itself in spite of its colossal designs, under the detritus of a perfect Bloom, voila that which is fit to unleash the paranoia of power.
the “Party of Order” will have to face, and already faces, the multiplication of such elementary acts of terrorism that it cannot understand nor foresee, because they authorize themselves from nothing but the unshakeable sovereignty of metaphysics, of the crazy possibility of disaster that each human existence carries in itself in infinitesimal doses.
nothing can shelter from such eruptions which aim at the social in response to the terrorism of the social. their target is as vast as the world.
thus, all that employs itself in residing in the Spectacle, must forevermore live in terror of a menace of destruction, which no one knows whence it emanates nor what it concerns, and of which one can just barely guess that it wants itself to be an example.
in similar actions of brilliance, the lack of a discernable goal is necessarily a part of the goal itself. it is a matter of spreading the unease that makes humans metaphysicians and the doubt that cracks, level after level, the dominant interpretation of the world.
thus it is in vain that the Spectacle credits us an immediate goal. nothing is more similar to abolishing the totality of the world of administered alienation than one of those miraculous suspensions where all the humanity that the Spectacle habitually eclipses brusquely returns, where the Empire of separation is defeated, where the mouths rediscover words which they must, and where humans are reborn in regard to their fellow humans and to the indistinguishable need that they have of one another. Domination sometimes take many decades to completely recover from a single one of these moments of intense truth.
but one gravely mistakes the strategy of the Imaginary Party to reduce it to the pursuit of catastrophe. one does not assault a mode of unveiling like a fortress. hence, the Imaginary Party does not aim for a general insurrection against the Spectacle, not even for its direct and instantaneous destruction.
rather, it arranges an ensemble of conditions such that domination succumbs as quickly and as largely as possible to the progressive paralysis to which its paranoia condemns it. its tactic is not to attack from the front, but in the same action, hide itself to orient and to hasten the issuance of the malady.
impotent faced with the omnipresence of this danger, Domination, which feels itself more and more alone, betrayed and fragile, has no other choice but to extend control and suspicion to the totality of a territory of which free circulation resides the vital principle. it can encircle its gated communities with as many guardians as it would like, the ground will continue to slip out from under its feet.
it is in the essence of the Imaginary Party to everywhere carve up commodity society, even at its foundation of credit. its dissolving practice knows no other limit than the collapse of what it undermines.
[18]
it is not so much the content of the crimes of the Imaginary Party that tend to ruin the imperium of bloody peace, as the form of these crimes. because their form is of a hostility with no specific object, of a fundamental hatred that wells up, without respect for any obstacle, from a most unreachable interiority, from unaltered depths where humans maintain a veritable contact with themselves.
that is why there emanates from them a force that all the chatter of the Spectacle cannot manage to hold back. in this special rage, there is something sacred.
[19]
in the face of massacres and crimes and catastrophes that besiege the Spectacle, its first movement is to advance an explanation at all costs, as it must ruin all that upon which it could repose in theory, like when pathetic Clinton was summoned to give reasons for and to draw the consequences of the Bloom named Kipland Kinkel, yet found nothing responsible save “the influence of the new culture of films and violent video games.”
the Spectacle would prefer to sacrifice the whole edifice of its pseudo-justification rather than to penetrate the reasons and nature of its enemy, because otherwise, they would grant to Marx that “the coincidence of the transformation of surroundings and of human activity or of the transformation of man by himself can only be seized and rationally comprehended as revolutionary praxis.”
on this point, it comes all the same to confess that it is a social war that it has business with, without clarifying however, which social war, that is to say, without clarifying who the protagonists are: “the authors of these mad acts, these new barbarians, are not all head cases. they are most often very ordinary people.”
it is now possible to hear “we are going to reconquer territory” and in fact we see this spread everywhere, under forms most often painted over, the certitude of the existence of an un-nameable interior enemy which pursues a continuous action of sabotage; but this time there are no kulaks to liquidate as a class.
one would be wrong to not subscribe to the paranoiac point of view, which supposes behind the inarticulate multiplicity of protests in the world, a singular will armed with black designs: because in a world of paranoiacs, it is the paranoiacs who are right.
[20]
it is glaring that the ensemble of misdeeds that one attributes to “lunatics,” barbarians,” “irresponsibles,” all contribute in adjacent ways to a unique unformulated project: the liquidation of commodity domination.
in the last instance, it is always a question of objectively rendering its life impossible, from propagating unease, doubt and mistrust, to make in the modest measure of the means of each one, as much harm as possible.
nothing can explain the systematic lack of remorse in criminals, if not the mute sentiment of participating in a grandiose work of devastation. from all evidence, these people, in themselves insignificant, are the agents of a severe, historical, transcendent reason that advertises the destruction of the world, that is to say, the accomplishing of its nothingness.
the sole refinement of those conscious fractions of the Imaginary Party is the fact that they do not work toward the world of the world, but the end of a world.
this difference creates sufficient space for the most reasoned hatred.
[21]
those of the Imaginary Party fight irregularly.
it can count upon this constant: that a handful of partisans suffices to immobilize all the “Party of Order.” in this war that the present abandons itself to, there remains nothing of a jus belli. hostility is absolute.
it suffices to know what prisons have become in the last decade and how diverse police forces have in the same time taken the habit of proceeding with marginals, to comprehend that such a watchword can signify bloody caprice.
thus, as long as commodity domination subsists, those of the Imaginary Party must expect to receive from it consideration as criminals to be dealt with, as partridges to be shot down.
the disproportion of weapons and punishments that it already brandishes against them does not join itself to any conjuncture of political repression, it is co-substantial with what it is, and with what its enemy is.
what expresses this is the simple fact that the Imaginary Party contains in its principle, the negation of all that upon which commodity domination erects itself, the negation which will manifest itself in action before manifesting itself as discourse.
different from the revolutions of the past, the coming insurrection does not call upon any secular transcendence save the continued disappeared of so many regimes of oppression eager to justify themselves that end up by being hated.
at no moment does it pretend to draw its legitimacy from the People, from Opinion, from the Church, the Nation, the Working Class, even under an attenuated form.
it founds its cause on nothing, but this nothingness it knows to be identical to being. it roots itself in Transcendence itself without any intermediary.
worse still, the partisan of the Imaginary Party develops in the most complete violation of all the existing rules without ever having the sentiment of transgressing them, acting in disdain of them. they do not oppose themselves to rights, they depose them. it does renew the absolute scandal of the Sabbattean doctrine which affirms that “the accomplishing of the law is its transgression.”
the Imaginary Party represents no one, not from a lack, but by excess, by the refusal of even the principal of representation. starting from the fundamental irreducibility of all human existence, it proclaims itself as non-susceptible to representation, as the un-representable, but also as the un-representing.
as we see, the Imaginary Party is also fundamentally anti-state and anti-popular. nothing is more odious to it than the idea of obedience.
in the present conditions, it can be nothing other than the non-party of the multitude because, as the contemptible Hobbes remarked aptly, “when the citizens rebel against the State, they are the Multitude against the people.”
[22]
the Spectacle qualifies “the crisis of politics” as the massive defection from the vile, established political space; the “crisis of culture” as the obstinate indifference that welcomes all the shocking waste that season after season of modern art elaborates; the “crisis of education” as the growing refusal of scholarly incarceration; the “crisis of economy” as the mute resistance to capitalist modernization and the always spreading refusal to work; the “crisis of the family” as the resolute sacking of the unhealthy nuclear family; and the “crisis of social ties” as that which is nothing other than the rejection of alienated social relations and spectacular mores.
thus it remains blind before this “silent revolution,” it ignores the “spirit of the time” growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrating one fragment after another the structure of its previous world.
[23]
all of the positivity of the Imaginary Party holds itself in the giant blindspot of the un-representable of which the Spectacle is incapable of seeing: this is because the Imaginary Party is only the political consequence of the positivity of which Metaphysical Critique is the concept, and Bloom is the representation.
when the Bloom (a creature not administered by any social determination other than negativity) becomes beside the dominant human type of the world, Commodity Society discovers that it has no more hold on the subjectivities that it has formed, and thus engendered its fitting negation.
in a privileged manner, the sphere of Sociology shows the failure of products made for Domination: the Bloom is everywhere, but Sociology does not see it anywhere.
[24]
up to here, one has very badly figured the frontline, which is shared by friends and enemies of the dominant order to be like a continuous line.
to this representation one must hereafter substitute the image of circular and innumerable frontlines, of which each holds in its interior spacetime human communities, practices, languages absolutely disobedient to Commodity Domination, the latter which besieges without lapse.
all that contributes to maintaining the ancient representation belongs to the camp of the enemy. the first consequence of this new geometry of the struggle concerns the form of the propagation of subversion.
we have no business, in face of a world of Authoritarian Commodities, with an advance in a straight line, of the poor, the workers, the wretched of the earth — but to a contagion similar to the succession of concentric circles on the surface of a mercury droplet when it is touched.
here, the effect of mass as in the past is identically attained by the intensity of that which is lived at the moment of collapse.
it follows that the elementary revolutionary subject is no longer a class or the individual, but the metaphysical community, whatever be its degree of exile — evidenced by the fundamentally insignificant character and unimportance of all personal adventure and all private history, in the Spectacle.
each one of these Metaphysical Communities awakens to a harsh world where humans can no longer meet, save on the basis of the essential, and constitute in the midst of the desert, an exclusive pole of substantiality. all knowledge that does not possess its own laws, all simple superficiality is excluded in it.
there, conditions create themselves in which the Absolute can recover its temporal pretensions; possibilities that we have lost since the Millenarist uprising and Messianic Jewish movements of the 17th century open themselves.
whatever one says, the acute demand of a new force and language feel themselves become illuminated well beyond the misery of the present. and it is precisely this that the Forces of Decomposition fear, who promise so many excessive favors to those who will consent to renounce themselves in order to be liked.
the Imaginary Party does at first only designate the positive fact to this multitude of zones fully autonomous from commodity domination experiment hic et nunc, to the spreading disappearance of the alienated Common, the last convulsions of a social organisms in the process of perishing.
until now, there had never been federation save for intellectualizing. and what binds them is not in effect, more than a passive character: these are communities in which the meaning and form of life dominates that of life itself, where the duty to be, had been elevated until incandescence. they share thus the same metaphysical substance, but they do not yet know it.
it is only under the dark auspices of the common persecution by the Global Domination of the Commodity that condemns them to come to know themselves for what they are: fractions of the Imaginary Party.
in the end, the only identifiable effect of this oppression is that these independent universes are led, one by one (and by their enemy no less) to leave the immediacy of their particularity by which they receive, over the course of combat, their universal character.
what unites them, this tie, is nothing formal, nothing constructed, but rather it is something anterior of all liberty, and upon which it is founded: existential hostility, absolute and concrete, to the nihilism of the Commodity.
it follows from this that the Imaginary Party does not converge toward a general will, contrary to all that was called a party in the past, because it already shares the Common, identified here with language, with Spirit, with the Metaphysical, or again, to Politics of Finitude — all these terms become pseudonyms of a sole Indescribable.
to say that the cohesion of the Imaginary Party is of a metaphysical order does not thus mean to evoke anything other than this everywhere-war of which each one among us finds themselves always already engaged, and which opposes the thorough negation of all aspects of Life.
on this point, the necessity of its unification imposes itself on all its elements, as identical to its becoming conscious: as Péguy says, “the struggle is between the modern world and all the other possible worlds.”
all those who, liking truth but certainly not the same truth, agree to ravage the despotism of the derisory metaphysics of the market, attach themselves to the Imaginary Party.
but the movement in which unity produces itself is also that by which differences pose and solidify themselves. fragment following fragment, the reappropriation of the Common undertakes itself.
in this manner, in the heat of combat, the Nomadic ballet of communities acquires the complex and architectonic structure of a system of metaphysical castes of which the principle could be none other than play, that is to say, the sovereign Consciousness of Nothingness.
each metaphysical kingdom slowly learns the frontiers of its territory on the continent of the Infinite. at the same time, a common generality constitutes itself, that contains in it all the different totalities of regional commonalities, i.e. the tracing of their trimming.
one can foresee that with the approach of victory, those of the Imaginary Party will fight no more battles to defeat an enemy that is at any rate diminished, so much as to at last be able to give free reign to their metaphysical disagreements, that they well intend to exhaust physically and by play.
in this, they are the fierce advocates of violence, but of an agonistic violence, highly ritualized and rich in meaning. the triumph of the Imaginary Party is equally its ruin and disintegration.
[25]
one has never known this aurora of the restitutio in integrum of Tiqqun save in the violent fractures that silently install themselves in the calm and for their duration as unperceived.
truly a curious spectacle, that of a world where the dominant forms of existence know they have been surpassed and yet persist in existing, as if nothing had happened; meanwhile, on this side the extreme alienation of Publicity imposed by the Spectacle, and as counterweight, we see dawn, yet mingled with the contrary principle, a humanity of which meaning is the exclusive nourishment, although corrupted.
free of the necessity to produce, liberated from the chains of cloistered work, fragile worlds compose themselves for which elective affinitive are all and servitude, nothing.
the slavery of humans in the Spectacle seems no less extravagant to them than their liberty, is incomprehensible to the slaves. in the suspension of their existence, the problems of the world cease to be problematic, it has become the material in which they live. language no longer appears to them as a laborious exteriority that must be internalized to then apply it to the world (via dialectics), it has become the immediate substance of that world. at no moment does their action detach itself as separate from their words.
one understands thus that the Spectacle, where politics and economics remain abstractions separated from metaphysics, represents for them a prior form of Publicity. their world—the city—shelters them as an interiority, while their interiority has taken on the dimensions of a world. they are already in the “restoration of the broken unity of the real and the transcendent” (Lukács).
if the ancient forms of Publicity bring themselves up in more or less equilibrated constructions, more or less harmonious, this one is, on the contrary, horizontal, labyrinthine, and topological.
as to the operational articulation of the Imaginary Party, in regard to the innervation of the world, this is not assured by any system of vertical delegation, but in a mode of transmission itself inscribed in the limitless horizontality of language: that of the Example.
the geographical plane of the world of Tiqqun in no way signifies the abolition of values and the end of all human pursuit of exploration. only, that it is permitted to humans, as it already is to fractions of the Imaginary Party, to impose their excellence.
the map of the world that we draw is nothing other than the map of Spirit. and at is at present, this Publicity of Spirit that overflows the Party of Nothingness, of which the idiocy and baseness become each day more ferocious and more intolerable.
we will put an end to it, inevitably.
[26]
without doubt, the war of attrition that the Spectacle leads against the Imaginary Party and freedom, henceforth devastates entire regions of the social space. there it decrees measures of protection of which have been common only in the world of conflicts: curfews, military escorts, methodical information gathering, control of weapons and communications, putting into trusteeship whole sectors of the economy, the environment, etc.
the humans of our time march straight to an immeasurable fear. the weakest spirits give themselves over to insane rumors that no one is in a position to confirm or deny. tenebrous infinities have filled the distance that humans have left amongst one another.
each day make a little clear, in spite of the growing obscurity, the lugubrious profile of civil war where no one knows who does and does not fight, where confusion is limited by death alone; where nothing is assured, in the end, but worse to come.
we thus hold ourselves, on this side of all growth, in the evidence of the disaster, but nothing can restrain our glances going to the beyond. those who sharpen their glance to distinguish in the night the nearby combat of giants discover that all this desolation, all these dull echoes of cannon, all these faceless screams are not of the lone, hideous Titan of Commodity Domination; to insure that we want its hide, it hurries off nonsensical orders, rolls on the ground and finishes by hitting with all its weight the walls of its living-room.
in the profundity of its folly, it judges that the Imaginary Party is only the obscurity that surrounds it, and that this must be abolished.
but in proportion as the day exhausts it, no one listens anymore, its closest subjects themselves lend no more than an absent-minded ear to this capering old lunatic.
they act as if to listen, and then they wink at one another.
[27]
the Imaginary Party awaits nothing from the present society and its evolution, because it is already practically of its dissolution and transcendence.
consequently, it is not a question for it of taking power, but solely of making domination fail everywhere, by durably making it impossible for its apparatus to function.