PRÁCTICA PEDAGÓGICA

What relation can a patrician of ancient Rome entertain with the alarming news that beset him regarding the slaves’ revolt? Or a Vendean bishop learning of the dethronement and imprisonment of the king? It cannot be a question, as in the case of the frightened slave or of François Furet, of a simple reactive subjectivity, which denies the creative power of the event in favour of a deleted present. We are obviously required to conceive an

abolition of the new present, considered in its entirety as malevolent and de jure inexistent. It is the present itself that falls under the bar and it does this as the effect of a sovereign action, invoked by the subject in his prayers, lamentations or curses.

We obviously obtain a schema of the following kind:

( ) π

The production is neither that of the present nor of its deletion, but instead that of the descent of this present into the night of non-exposition.

Is this to say that all we have here is a return to the past? Once again, we need to offer a twofold answer. In part, the answer is obviously yes. What the patricians and bishops want is no doubt the pure and simple conserva-tion of the previous order. In this sense, the past is illuminated for them by the night of the present. But, on the other hand, this night must be pro-duced under the entirely new conditions which are displayed in the world by the rebel body and its emblem. The obscurity into which the newly produced present must be enclosed is engineered by an obscurantism of a new type. For example, it is futile to try to genealogically elucidate contemporary political Islamism. This is particularly true of its ultra-reactionary variants, which rival Westerners for the fruits of the oil map through unprecedented criminal means. This political Islamism represents a new instrumentalization of religion—from which it does not derive by any natural (or ‘rational’) lineage—with the purpose of occulting the post-socialist present and countering the fragmentary attempts through which emancipation is being reinvented by means of a full Tradition or Law. From this point of view, political Islamism is absolutely contemporary, both to the faithful subjects that produce the present of political experimentation and to the reactive subjects that busy themselves with denying that rup-tures are necessary in order to invent a humanity worthy of the name—

reactive subjects that parade the established order as the miraculous bearer of an uninterrupted emancipation. Political Islamism is simply one of the subjectivated names of today’s obscurantism.

That is why, besides the form of the faithful subject and that of the reactive subject, we must give the obscure subject its rightful place.

In the panic sown by Spartacus and his troops, the patrician—and the Vendean bishop, and the Islamist conspirator, and the fascist of the thirties—systematically resorts to the invocation of a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God,

Race. . .) from which it follows that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, as a consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed.

Invoked by the priests (the imams, the leaders. . .), the essential Body has the power to reduce to silence that which affirms the event, thus forbidding the real body from existing.

Transcendent power tries to produce a double effect, which can be given a fictional expression in the figure of a Roman notable. First of all, he will say, it is entirely false that the slaves want to and can return home.

Furthermore, there is no legitimate body that can be the bearer of this false statement. The army of Spartacus must therefore be annihilated, the City will see to it. This double annihilation, both spiritual and material—which explains why so many priests have blessed so many troops of butchers—is itself exposed within appearing, above that which is occulted, namely the present as such.

If we write as C (without erasure) the full body whose transcendence covers the occultation of the present, we obtain the matheme of the obscure subject:

C⇒(¬ε⇒¬¢) π

One can see how this matheme articulates the paradox of an occultation of the present which is itself in the present. Materially, we have the radical novelties which are ε and C. But they are wrested from their creative subjective form (ε/¢, the faithful subject) and thereby exposed in appearing to their total negation—of a propagandistic type for ε, of a military or police-like kind for ¢ (for the examples we’ve chosen). The most important foreseeable effect of this is the occultation of ε as truth.

Without question, the obscure subject crucially calls upon an atemporal fetish: the incorruptible and indivisible over-body, be it City, God or Race.

Similarly, Fate for love, the True without admissible image for art and Revelation for science correspond to the three types of obscure subject which are possessive fusion, iconoclasm and obscurantism. But the goal of the obscure subject is to make this fetish the contemporary of the present that demands to be occulted. For example, the sole function of the God of conspiratorial Islamism is to occult the present of the rational politics of emancipation among people, by dislocating the unity of their statements and their militant bodies. This is done in order to fight for local supremacy with ‘Western’ powers, without in any way contributing to political

invention. In this sense, C only enters the scene so that the often violent negation of ¢ can serve as the appearing of that which is occulted, the emancipatory present π. The fictive transcendent body legitimates the fact that the (visible) destruction of the evental body consigns the pure present which was woven by the faithful subject, point by point, to the invisible and the inoperative.

The reader will find in Section 8 some additional considerations on the operations of the obscure subject. The crucial thing here is to gauge the gap between reactive formalism and obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful break (which it calls ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished present (a present that reaction calls ‘modern’). Moreover, this instance of the subject is itself borne by the debris of bodies: frightened and deserting slaves, renegades of revolutionary groups, avant-garde artists recycled into academicism, old scientists now blind to the movements of their science, lovers suffocated by conjugal routine.

Things stand differently for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present which is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it de-articulates in appearing the formal data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. Thus, what bears this body is directly linked to the past, even if the becoming of the obscure subject also crushes this past in the name of the sacrifice of the present: veterans of lost wars, failed artists, intellectuals perverted by bitterness, dried-up matrons, illiterate muscle-bound youths, shopkeepers ruined by Capital, desperate unemployed workers, rancid couples, bachelor informants, academicians envious of the success of poets, atrabilious professors, xenophobes of all stripes, Mafiosi greedy for decorations, vicious priests and cuckolded husbands. To this hodgepodge of ordinary existence the obscure subject offers the chance of a new destiny, under the incomprehensible but salvific sign of an absolute body, whose only demand is that one serves it by nurturing everywhere and at all times the hatred of every living thought, every transparent language and every uncertain becoming.

The theory of the subject thus contains three distinct formal arrange-ments. Of course, the general subjective field is necessarily inaugurated by a faithful subject, so that the point-by-point work of consequences may be visible as pure present. But generally, from the first signs that we have been

accorded the gift of a present, the reactive and obscure subjects are already at work, as rivals and accomplices in weakening the substance of this pres-ent or occulting its appearance.