To sum up, there are three figures of the subject: faithful, reactive, obscure.
They are so many formal arrangements of the letters ε, C and π (the trace, the body, the present) and the signs —, /, ¬, = and ⇒ (the bar, erasure, negation, extinction and consequence). These arrangements formalize the subjective figure, without thereby designating its synthetic usage, since the required operations—for instance negation or implication—are included in this formalization.
Having said that, we have seen how the effective concern of a figure of the subject is the present as such. The faithful subject organizes its pro-duction, the reactive subject its denial (in the guise of its deletion) and the obscure subject its occultation (the passage under the bar). We call destination of a subjective figure this synthetic operation in which the subject reveals itself as the contemporary of the evental present, without necessarily incorporating itself into it.
Must we therefore conclude that by ‘subject’ we will understand, under the condition of a trace and a body, that which is destined to produce a present, to deny it or to occult it? Yes, of course, save that a supernumerary destination is at play if we no longer examine each figure separately, but rather consider the complexity of the subjective field in its historical scansion. We are referring to resurrection (of a truth), which we must now introduce.
To begin with, we should note that the contemporaneousness of a figure of the reactive or obscure type depends on the minimal production of a present by a faithful figure. From a subjective point of view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because there is revolution that there is reaction. We thereby eliminate from the living subjective field the whole ‘left-wing’ tradition which believes that a pro-gressive politics ‘fights against oppression’. But we also eliminate, for example, a certain modernist tradition which believes that the criterion for art is the ‘subversion’ of established forms, to say nothing of those who wish to articulate amorous truth onto the fantasy of a sexual emancipation (against ‘taboos’, patriarchy, etc.). Let’s say that the destinations proceed in
a certain order (production → denial → occultation), for reasons that formalism makes altogether clear: the denial of the present supposes its production, and its occultation supposes a formula of denial.
For example, the nouveaux philosophes, who denied the present of com-munism (in its ideal sense) and preached resignation to capitalist-parliamentarianism, could only exist because of the revolutionary activism of an entire generation between 1966 and 1976. And the occultation of every real becoming by the US government and the ‘Islamists’ (two faces or two names of the same obscure God) could only take place on a terrain prepared by the denial of political communism. Formally, in order to have
¬ ε, one needs ε; to have π——, it is useful to have π; to inscribe C ⇒ (¬ε ⇒ ¬¢), one requires ¢, and so on. One might then believe that the schema for the figural destinations is the following:
If this schema is incomplete, it is because the formal excess makes us forget what the present is a present of: of a truth, whose exposition in appearing is operated by the subject, or of which the subject is the active logical form. But this truth itself abides in the multiform materiality in which it is constructed as the generic part of a world. Now, a fragment of truth inserted under the bar by the machinery of the obscure can be extracted from it at any instant.
No one can doubt that the revolt of Spartacus is the event which originates for the ancient world a maxim of emancipation in the present tense (the slave wants to and can decide to be free to return home).
Equally, no one can doubt that—weakened by the denial of too many
fearful slaves (reactive subject) and finally annihilated in the name of the transcendent rules of the City (of which slavery is a natural state)—for the masses of slaves this present succumbs to a practical oblivion lasting many centuries. Does that mean that it’s disappeared for good, and that a truth, as eternal as it may be, can also, having been created in history, slip back into nothingness? Not so. Think of the first victorious slave revolt, the one led by the astounding Toussaint-Louverture in the Western part of Santo Domingo (the part that is today called Haiti). This is the revolt which made the principle of the abolition of slavery real, which conferred upon blacks the status of citizens, and which, in the exhilarating context of the French Revolution, created the first state led by former black slaves. In sum, the revolution that fully freed the black slaves of Santo Domingo constitutes a new present for the maxim of emancipation that motivates Spartacus’s comrades: ‘The slaves want to and can, through their own movement, decide to be free’. And this time, the white owners will be unable to re-establish their power.
Now, what happens on 1 April 1796, when the governor Laveaux—an energetic partisan of the emancipation of the slaves—gathers together the people of Cap, together with the army of insurgent blacks, to offset the counter-revolutionary manoeuvres of certain mulattoes, by and large supported and financed by the English? Laveaux calls Toussaint-Louverture to his side, names him ‘deputy governor’ and finally, and above all, calls him ‘the black Spartacus’. French revolutionary leaders were men nourished on Greek and Roman history. Laveaux was no different, and neither was Sonthonax, also a great friend of Toussaint-Louverture. Of course, in January 1794, the Convention, during a memorable session, had decreed the abolition of slavery in all the territories over which it had jurisdiction; consequently, all the men living in the colonies, without distinction of colour, were decreed citizens and enjoyed all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. But Laveaux and Sonthonax, faced with a violent and complex situation in which foreign powers intervened militarily, months before, and answering only to themselves, had already taken the decision to declare the abolition of slavery then and there. And it is in this context that they saluted the ‘black Spartacus’, the revolutionary leader of the slaves about to be liberated, and the future founder of a free state.
More than a century later, when in 1919 the communist insurgents of Berlin, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, brandished the name of ‘Spartakus’ and called themselves ‘Spartakists’, they too made it so that
the ‘forgetting’ (or failure) of the slave insurrection was itself forgotten and its maxim restored—to the point that the sordid assassination of the two leaders by the shock troops of the ‘socialist’ Noske (Luxemburg was battered with rifle-butts, her body thrown into the canal, Liebknecht shot and dumped in a morgue) echoes the thousands crucified on the Roman roads.
As proof of this reappropriation in the following decades, one will refer to the denial of the affirmative sense of the revolt in the subtly reactive portrait that Arthur Koestler makes of Spartacus. We know that Koestler—
a kind of Glucksmann of the forties with some talent to boot—after having been a Stalinist agent during the Spanish war, projects into his novels his personal about turn and becomes the literary specialist of anti-communism. The first of his renegade novels, The Gladiators (1939), trans-lated into French in 1945 under the title Spartacus, portrays a slave leader placed somewhere between Lenin and Stalin. In order to introduce a modicum of order into his own camp—a sort of utopian city whose tormented leader he represents—he is in fact forced to use the Romans’
methods and in the end to order the public crucifixion of dissident slaves.
This interpretation is answered in the fifties by Howard Fast’s affirmative novel, Spartacus, revived by the film which Stanley Kubrick drew from it, in which Kirk Douglas plays the hero in a moving humanist version of the story.
It is clear that political truth, fragmentarily borne by Spartacus and interminably occulted by the bloody triumph of Crassus and Pompey, is here dragged under the bar only to be re-exposed in the appearing of modern communist convictions and their denial; just as it was in Santo Domingo, in the global exhilaration provoked by the application, during the French Revolution, of universal egalitarian principles. This means that, together with the truth of which it is the correlate (‘Slavery is not natural’), the subject whose name is ‘Spartacus’ travels from world to world through the centuries. Ancient Spartacus, black Spartacus, red Spartacus.
We will call this destination, which reactivates a subject in another logic of its appearing-in-truth, resurrection. Of course, a resurrection presupposes a new world, which generates the context for a new event, a new trace, a new body—in short, a truth-procedure under whose rule the occulted fragment places itself after having been extracted from its occultation.
Another striking example is to be found in the prodigious mathematical discoveries of Archimedes, who, from out of the discipline of geometry, anticipated the differential and integral calculus in formally impeccable
writings. It is pretty much certain that in the West (the Arab history of the question is far more complex)—in particular because they were subjected during the entire scholastic period to Aristotle’s obscure hostility to Platonic ‘mathematism’—these writings (from the third century BC, let’s not forget) became unreadable, in a very precise sense: they were in dis-cord with all the subjective formalisms, and it was therefore impossible to articulate them to the present. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the reading of Archimedes illuminated the revitalization of mathematics, and later of physics. It is no exaggeration to say that, inter-secting the reconstitution of an essential Platonism, for example that of Galileo (‘The world is written in a mathematical language’), the writings of Archimedes served in their own right to instruct numerous generations of scientists. This gap of almost twenty centuries is cause for thought and chimes with what I said in the preface: every truth is eternal; of no truth can it be said, under the pretext that its historical world has disintegrated, that it is lost forever. That which suspends the consequences of a truth cannot simply amount to a change in the rules of appearing. An act is needed, of denial or occultation. And this act is always captive to a subjec-tive figure. But what an act has done in the world, what a subjecsubjec-tive figure has engineered, can be undone in another world by another act, which articulates another figure. Galileo’s production in physics, or the pro-duction of Pascal or Fermat in mathematics, inscribe into the textual body that bears the trace of the new an entire reactivation, an entire updating to the present of this denied and occulted Archimedes, of whom there only remained, like inalterable objects, some opaque jottings. Therefore we will say that every faithful subject can also reincorporate into the evental present the fragment of truth whose bygone present had sunk under the bar of occultation. It is this reincorporation that we call resurrec-tion. What we are dealing with is a supplementary destination of subjective forms.
With regard to every genuine present, one can rightfully hope that a new present, by activating de-occultation, will make that present’s lost radiance appear at the salvific surface of a body.
Accordingly, the complete schema of figures and destinations is this:
Taken in its entirety, the schema of figures and destinations is thus a circulation of the present, which is to say an empirical historicization of the eternity of truths.