Sara Ahmed, in her book Complaint! theorizes the “non-performative discourse” as an administrative technique used by institutions to manage complaints addressed to them (in this case, Ahmed focuses on complaints about discrimination, harassment, or sexual assault). While performativity envelops institutional acts of language that, by rigorously following a procedure, do what they say by the mere fact of saying it, the non-performative is a saying that in its saying dispenses with the doing, as in statements like “we take your feedback into account,” “we share your concerns,” or “we are working to improve the quality of your wait.”
What is the interest of such a notion? Why invent a new concept instead of simply labeling these discourses as “lies”? Because it is neither a mismatch between words and things nor a true intention to deceive others, but an intrinsic separation of our time, a profound vocal alienation, a globalized disengagement of human language. The lie refers to an ethical (ethico-theological) notion, while the phenomenon in question concerns precisely the disappearance of the ethical bond of the speaking being with its speech, as language that engages, making the lie possible as an authentic experience of language: an experience of the rupture of a commitment that cannot leave intact the being who experiences it.
In the experience of lying, there is, in an absolutely inseparable manner, the operative idea of a common bond in Truth itself: we owe others (to creatures, to use the theological term) the Truth since, like these others, we owe the gift of Speech to Truth itself (i.e., to God). To lie is certainly to commit a wrong against others, but above all, it is to harm Truth itself. This is how the non-performative is that facet of human language that proliferates in what some have called the “desert of civilization,” that is, the space opened by this civilizational turn that philosophy has named “the death of God,” the twilight of performativity and the effectiveness of speech, the reign of chatter, empty phrases, the general decline of illocutionary force.
Take the example of the Israeli soldier who, preventing a journalist from filming Zionist settlers vandalizing humanitarian aid convoys destined for the people of Gaza, responds to his complaint about the illegality of what he was filming, after threatening him with arrest, by saying “we’ll arrest them too” (which is never done). This is only a lie from the journalist’s powerless, indignant point of view. From the soldier’s perspective, however, it is not a lie because there is no experience of lying. This is a kind of anesthesia of language, and it is something other than the “banality of evil” which still honestly claims that orders come from “above” or that “we can’t do anything about it”: the Israeli soldier knows he has the power to stop what he sees, and he knows he simply has no intention of doing so, but from his point of view he owes no truth to anyone, no more than he owes a lie in the name of a principle of “doing a harm for a (greater) good” (besides, Israeli soldiers are not particularly secretive when it comes to showing their exactions, for example, on the internet).
It is in this sense that there is no longer any experience of lying: in the desert of civilization, there is neither lying nor honesty. This is not “post-truth,” since truth is still venerated as an idol, but there is in the contemporary experience of language the idea that truth does not suffer from not respecting a commitment since, anyway, one is already disengaged in one’s relationship to language (thus truth appears as something distant, abstract, insensitive, purely conceptual and intellectual). This anesthesia of language defines the current discursive relations of “civilians” with administrators, various officials, and especially the police: when this anesthesia is at work in cases of police violence, it is in vain, and out of impotence, that one tries to attribute a lie to elicit indignation: the truth is elsewhere! Truth can no longer be the other of the lie but the other of the anesthesia of language. This revolutionary truth is what the Avant-garde must embody, and it can give voice to it only in a truly sensible speech… and sensibly true.
In his book published this year by La Fabrique, Lenin and the Weapon of Language, Jean-Jacques Lecercle reminds us that “according to [Lenin], a revolutionary situation has two characteristics: the rulers can no longer govern as before, and the governed no longer want to be governed as before. In other words, a generalized crisis is needed, particularly a political crisis among the ruling classes, for a revolutionary situation to emerge.” (op. cit., p. 9). To speak of revolution today, and to do so in truthful and effective language, implies identifying the crisis of the now. If the question of this crisis is not resolved in an impartial description of the conjuncture but in taking sides, in an irreducible commitment, and in a concrete strategic proposition, it is because it demands that its enunciation occur in an Avant-garde speech, that is, through the organizational modality that manages to break out of the temporality of delay, to have a head start, to no longer suffer events but to coincide with them in their entirety: in such speech, “the polemic vigor does not only function to weaken the adversary’s discursive position, it functions to return to the truth” (Ibid, p. 37).
Thus, if the prospect of a left-wing front against the far right creates an organizational situation, a (dis)position of enunciation, such that it is no longer possible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, for example, about Palestine, then we must say what is: this is an obstacle to the construction of the coming Avant-garde. But the Palestinian national liberation struggle is one of the current phenomena that, by raising its own question, reveals institutional chatter for what it is, and the institutions, the States, come unhinged and then more easily reveal themselves in their nudity (and here is a clue to think now about the crisis we are in).
To identify what blocks the constitution of a liberating Avant-garde, we must ask the following question: why is it so difficult for all members of the “contestation” to adopt a relevant enunciative position, that is, to “move from morality […] to politics” (Ibid, p. 45)? Such an enunciative position (I choose to call it avant-gardist) as opposed to the types of discourse characterizing the variety of rearguards that have proliferated since the neoliberal counter-revolution, clinging to the field of the extreme left and extra-parliamentary spaces, and have since never ceased to persevere in their impotence. Indeed, these rearguards, even as they try to emulate the avant-gardes of the past, find themselves unable to connect and hold together the two types of discourse characteristic of any political Avant-garde: Propaganda and Agitation (in the first, the theoretical achievements are explicit, while they are at least partially implicit in the second); thus the rearguards often succumb to the temptation to sacrifice one for the other, trying to do propaganda in a vacuum and without grip in a situation (therefore no longer propaganda, but a sort of sectarian recruitment) or to do agitation without any clear political idea or strategic direction, but “agitation is not enough” (Ibid, p. 82), and that is why real slogans are needed instead of empty slogans; when the rearguards try to do both, they do so without managing to connect them, and the situation escapes them.
In Agitation and Propaganda, language-as-weapon (the agonistic dimension of speech) and language-as-communication (the irenic dimension of speech) are fully united: for this reason, Agitation and Propaganda cannot be detached from a historical situation, and what ties Propaganda and Agitation to each other is thus the same knot that connects them to the situation: the slogan. The question of the slogan, which ties together Propaganda and Agitation, Saying and Doing, Strategy and Tactics (i.e., the strategic direction in its unity and the variety of tactical possibilities), runs through the intrinsic politics of the Avant-garde.
If I use Jean-Jacques Lecercle, it is because in his reading of Lenin he seeks to extract a pragmatics of the slogan, that is, a “pragmatics of illocutionary force” (Ibid, p. 20) modeled on the slogan, and from this, it is possible to derive an idea of the Avant-garde that identifies it in its enunciative position: “It appears […] that slogans do not have a fixed meaning […] but only take on meaning in a specific conjuncture (linguists would say ‘in situation’). […] For if the slogan did not function to exert a force (linguists would say ‘an illocutionary force’), it would have a stable meaning, that of describing the historical situation contemplated at a distance by the historian. If one must adapt to the ‘turn’ of history, it is because the slogan does not simply state the reality of the moment but contributes to this moment of which it is, as an expression of a [taking sides], a constituent part” (Ibid, p. 41-42). Indeed, the History of the Avant-garde is not the History of the historian. The slogan coincides with its enunciation situation, does not follow it, is not late in the situation itself.
Thus, the slogan embraces the situation, turns it into a genuine moment of truth, and plays in it the role of a kind of immanent verdict. However, this verdict is not articulated through a judicial, institutional, and codified language, but through a political discourse, a decisive and destinational discourse. If there is indeed a illocutionary force of the Revolutionary Vanguard, it lies in the fact that the destruction of the enemy cannot occur without a total speech act, a speech act that encompasses everything within it and rises to the level of History, becoming History itself. It is this Becoming-History that gives meaning to the idea, today taboo, of ‘Historical Destiny’.
One cannot dialectically maintain until the end an abstract separation between a historical level and a conjunctural level. The enunciation of the revolutionary slogan, just, effective, and triumphant, in the critical moment, becomes the moment itself, and this transformation from part (the intervention) to whole (the situation) extends to the entire History. This is how one can make intelligible the historical moment of the Vanguard. Without a notion of Historical Destiny, one cannot distinguish the Vanguard from the rearguards that trail behind History. Jean-Jacques Lecercle does not dialectically resolve to the end the abstract dichotomy between the (irenical) truth of avant-garde speech and the agonistic dimension of language (the ‘weapon of language’).
To further advance the reflection (to think even of a weapon of truth itself), one must bring in Agambenian reflections on the power and efficacy of language, as found in works such as ‘The Archaeology of the Oath’ or ‘The Adventure’. Then one can extend the theorization of the position of the Vanguard as encompassing a self-narrative that the Vanguard constructs for and by itself, which effectively makes itself Destiny and makes itself History (makes itself historical destiny). One will then understand in what sense the destinational History of the Vanguard distinguishes itself from the History of historians, since the latter is expressed in the modalities of a descriptive language (thus in a language lagging behind its object, a language that does not itself presuppose what it talks about): the History of the Vanguard is an adventure (not in the romantic-fascist sense, but in the medieval-Agambenian sense) that is told by it and in it in the modalities of a constructive, creative language, hence, of a speech ahead of its time, a speech that tends to coincide with its crucial moment in the enunciation of the revolutionary slogan. Thus, for the fascists, a true vanguard is out of reach, as they are confined to the limitations of national novels (those whose elaboration in the 19th century validated the usefulness of the intellectual body of historians for modernity).
The absurdity and impotence of discourses that call for less speech and more action are symptomatic of the absence of a Vanguard (which is why these discourses still belong to the realm of chatter). Thus, the coming Vanguard can only arise in response to this situation as well. “In polemics, the antonym of truth is not falsehood or error, but what Lenin calls the ‘phrase’, including the revolutionary phrase, when one deceives with words, when one takes refuge in abstractions and obscures the truth, that is, the reality of the situation, thereby rendering speech ineffective. […] Lenin emphasizes here the importance of ideological struggle: the bourgeoisie does not only exercise its domination through physical violence of repression, but through the sweet violence of sugary water of apparently consensual phrases. […] The truth is then the solvent, vinegar, and gall of this intoxication.” (Ibid, p. 100-101).
If the avant-garde statement engages in itself and through itself the Vanguard, it is also because with each change of slogan corresponds a real reorganization (the Vanguard is consistent!). If the Vanguard opposes the institution, and is not one, it is because the latter inherently slows down any possibility of reorganization (this is the danger of bureaucratization). If “strategy commands to advance, [while] tactics can impose a temporary retreat,” the prolonged absence of a revolutionary Vanguard and strategic direction ultimately produces a situation where the absence of an alternative to tactical retreat is intensely felt, and this then appears increasingly less ‘temporary’.
This irresponsibility is symptomatic of a separation, a disengagement. This separation between the speaking being and their speech, this disengagement from language, is what, following the steps of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, allows us to renew the Marxist notion of alienation: all forms of alienation that have occupied Marxist thought (alienation between oneself and one’s image, between oneself and one’s activity, between oneself and the fruit of one’s labor, between oneself and one’s environment) can be traced back to this fundamental alienation of language.
The illocutionary force of the Vanguard breaks with alienation, does not dissolve into performativity (that is, into institutionalization, regulation, and proceduralization of the felicity conditions of illocutionary force). Revolution is not ‘performed’. It is thus good to recall that the ‘revolution at the ballot box’ is a contradiction in terms. There is no democratic procedure for Revolution, and any attempt of this kind reduces to a ‘performance’. This is what gave correctness, during the workers’ movement, to the expression ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: Revolution involves immediate decisions, non-procedural ones, thus it is always a dictatorial act in the strong sense of the term (without implying hierarchy, since the latter draws its illocutionary force from an instituted performativity). The power of enunciating truth from a Vanguard position depends on illocutionary force, which depends on the form of political life on which the Vanguard is organized: in this sense, the avant-garde enunciation position coincides with the organization itself as the true organization is always self-organization of life which is done in and through the communized word (a vocal communism!).
As for Lenin’s statement, which had to “overcome the old habits, the old routines inherited from the old regime” (Ibid, p. 96), the upcoming Vanguard must overcome the pitfalls that have preceded it, from the former workers’ movement to political ecology. What remains today of union struggles is, ultimately, social dialogue, and even radical ecology has ended up being absorbed in the non-performativity of all institutions. The Truth of the Vanguard is not an established dogma but a historical truth in the fullest sense. The triumph of the revolutionary Vanguard consists in bridging the gap between Reality and Truth. The Vanguard is partisan in that it speaks truth about Truth: it identifies its pure partiality with Truth itself, and in saying this it is still its partiality, that is to say Truth itself, that it achieves. Thus, the Vanguard cannot, without being mistaken and dissolved, fall into cynicism: language is not for it a “simple instrument of persuasion and manipulation” (Ibid, p. 97), and it is not so much that it has a speech, rather it is its speech; it engages in its speech in that it is what it says and thus it manages to say the truth of the situation in the situation.
Under a dictatorial government, ‘freedom of expression’ disappears precisely because speech becomes dangerous for the government again, whereas democracy is a form of governmentality that bases its stability and legitimacy on the general neutralization of language, that is, on the global exhaustion of illocutionary force. This is why Jean-Jacques Lecercle is correct to note that the dominant ideology presents language as mere ‘instrument of communication’ (democratic debate!), even though he is mistaken in emphasizing the word ‘communication’ and leaving the word ‘instrument’ unexamined.
‘Freedom of expression’ reduces what language talks about to ‘opinions’ that can only be expressed in an impotent groan, like the growl of an animal. When it comes to genocide, there is no room for opinions: only positions to be taken. If the Palestinian issue represents a genuine institutional crisis, it is because the language regime of all institutions finds itself at an impasse: institutions prove unable to use their non-performativity to rid themselves of this issue (unlike ecology). This is why the democratic governance of the Republic itself shows its limitations and can be effectively questioned from there. This is why mapping the breaking points, that is, the points where institutions truly lose their means, includes a strategic dimension crucial to understanding the civilizational crisis we are currently experiencing: stating this crisis, speaking about it accurately, is the irreducible prerequisite for the creation of the Vanguard to come.
The weakest link in governmentality reveals itself to us primarily in the breaking points of Western institutions, the points where they lose their composure: obviously, there is anti-Zionism, to the extent that the point where institutions depart from their posture of impartiality concerns not so much the question of a Palestinian state as the destruction of the state of Israel and the removal of Israeli nationality as an intrinsically colonial legal category (and it seems crazy today to suggest the possibility that, in an authentically decolonial situation, anti-colonial Jews could want and be able to (re)become Palestinians). Joseph Massad was right to recently emphasize that European states that have recognized a Palestinian State have not withdrawn their recognition of the State of Israel; but there is also the question of schools (and perhaps we could generalize to Public Services), to the extent that a part of the so-called radical left has been able to support the riots for Nahel from June-July 2023, with the specific exception, and formulated as such, of the attacks carried out against the schools.
What these two limits of the institutional political field reveal in their own way are the points where the apocalyptic collapse of the foundations of the Republic (those for which the left devotes its idolatry, or its fetishism) and, globally, Western democracies are foreseen. Returning to the question of anti-Zionism, the example of Germany is striking since the existence of the Zionist entity, its legitimacy, and the trial in Jerusalem (alongside that in Nuremberg), form an arrangement that establishes the legitimacy of the current German state: that is to say, the idea that, fundamentally, Nazism is indeed a thing of the past, and that democracy can start over if a rupture with fascism is enacted in History, if the verdict has already been pronounced for a long time. In this context, the German ban on Varoufakis is not surprising: moving even slightly in an anti-Zionist direction already undermines the formal foundations of the German state.
It is not the same thing to say that fascism can return and that it has never collapsed, that it has only mutated, even partially going into standby, and the idea of a clear break between fascism and democracy should have already been seriously questioned if lessons had only been drawn from the Chilean, Indonesian, and Spanish experiences after their post-fascist democratic transitions, facilitated by the overall victory of neoliberalism.
An impotent language is a false language, politically false, even when it produces technically accurate sentences. We think it is on this last point that Jean-Jacques Lecercle reaches his theoretical limit, confusing his materialism with realism in terms of logical reference: fully true language, that is to say avant-garde speech, assumes its insoluble interlacing with the world as such: the world is never like an object in front of language, as if one preceded the other. This is why language reduced to the status of an instrument (of communication, description, explanation, or advertising dissemination) has nothing more to say. What do we have to say? If “language is communism in action” (Ibid, p.27), then, for the Communist Vanguard, to say communism is to say language itself, to say the extent and depth of its power.
“Here lies the difference between the correct slogan and the false slogan, which merely sticks to ‘opinion’, that is to say, sticks to dominant ideology. It must therefore argue for itself and defend itself […]. It states the conjuncture, that is to say, the political situation, […] the slogan is not only correct, it is adjusted, which means that it is not only capable of stating the conjuncture but also of stating its exact moment. Here, the strategy-party […] becomes a tactical-party [and can] deploy the possibilities of alliance, with their compromises potentially, that the moment implies. Finally […] the slogan is not only correct and adjusted, it is true. […] There is therefore a truth of the conjuncture […] and the slogan must enable the masses to tell the truth of the situation.” (Ibid, p. 62-63) As long as, in the field of revolutionary politics, we think of the role of language in the model of the advertising slogan, we will be unable to surpass the limits imposed on us by the surrounding ideology.
The right slogan ‘speaks to people’, it is said… okay… but what does it say? Does it have anything to say at all? The authentic slogan is not a mere slogan. The ‘incorporeal transformation’ that the effective and triumphant revolutionary slogan operates on the event, is that this event becomes the slogan itself. Where Jean-Jacques Lecercle contradicts himself (and this testifies to the core of dominant ideology that the theorist will be tempted to retain, even if supposedly in the name of materialism and formalize it as such), is that the conjuncture, or situation, cannot precede the slogan if the latter cannot content itself with describing the slogan: retaining a denotative realism within the theorization of the pragmatics of the slogan, is to think the slogan according to the temporality of delay, that is to say, in the paradigm of defeat.
Suppose the effective and triumphant slogan cannot be late. In that case, it is because it is a speech act which, in its being, is a political intervention inseparable from the intervention-enunciation situation, and which goes so far as to coincide with it: the effective revolutionary slogan is a part that becomes the whole: intervention in the event becomes the whole of the event and nothing is left to chance, intervention in the situation becomes the situation itself. It is in this sense that the Vanguard gives itself a historical destiny. This is the reason for the inevitable “prophetic tone” (Ibid, p. 78) of avant-garde speech.
Suppose we must think together about the (dis)position of enunciation organization of the partisan Vanguard and the enunciation-intervention situation of the revolutionary slogan. In that case, it is because this is the only way to think of historical destiny in a manner that is compatible both with the true sense of dialectical materialism (as a philosophy that does not reduce History to the mechanical effects of a natural or ahistorical force) and with advances in philosophy of language. What does the Vanguard do with its language? It gives itself a destiny (finds its destinal voice). The historical destiny of the Vanguard is not an abstract denial of chance (in the name of a mysterious force that we would call ‘Progress’) but the resumption of contingency itself in the totality and indivisibility of the avant-garde speech act.
This is therefore very different from the fascist use of the word ‘destiny’ since the latter cannot help but revert to a concept of historical-natural determination, since this ideology wants to rely on a presumption of superiority (in Race, Nation, Caste, Civilization, the West, etc.) that would make their victory inevitable, or, conversely, their defeat… Indeed, the poverty and impotence of this pseudo-destiny encloses fascists in the limitation of self-justification, in terms, respectively, of ‘reconquest’ or ‘self-defense’, and this diminishes their political power, even when they have tried to reclaim the idea of revolution in national-socialist or nationalist-revolutionary syntheses. The idea of a revolutionary historical destiny cannot resolve the question of political violence, neither as a simple end in itself, nor as a means that would otherwise be justified by an end (these are the two positions that fascists cannot surpass) but with a speech act so total and powerful that in it the abstract division between ‘end’ and ‘means’ is rendered inoperative. This is how fascism as a political tradition (even as it was formed in rupture with the impotent and backward attitude of reactionaries to embrace a certain modernism) has never truly been able to rise to the level of the Vanguard and remains despite everything in the quagmires of the Rearguard.
Here is what we can gather from all this: The revolutionary camp must never succumb to the obsidional temptation, that is, to consider itself a besieged fortress, nor should it think of itself as the revenge of a lost paradise: this is why, when required, it must become avant-garde, and not rearguard. The obsidional anti-fascism of the left, which during the 20th century (particularly in France), was one of the most devoted accomplices to the murder suffered by the idea, nonetheless so strong and meaningful, of a revolutionary historical destiny (and therefore of the Vanguard), to the benefit of pseudo-tactics (in institutions as in the streets) and the general decline of any strategic perspective. This must be said all the more as the European elections have revived the macabre impulses of convergence, of left-wing unity, and other vacuities: tactics without direction, and compromises without strategy (including on the reformist level) are the unavoidable horizon of the left since the death of the workers’ movement. Basta!
Didon Proclas, 13th of June 2024, Paris.