PROLEGOMENA

Osyān | Khuzestan, Iran | October, 2022 | ©Roudabe Panah

I’ll take the liberty here to say that freedom is always clandestine, that truth and justice are as well. And that they are only false semblances and agents of intimidation once they are set up in the public square.

—Pierre Klossowski, Le 14 juillet, #3

What is this “public space” that you invoke? Where is it situated? On what surface does it inscribe itself, and under whose authority do you circulate within it? Are you the surveyor of this hearth? But how could you be, when it is a mere effect, a temporary arrest of flows that congeal just long enough to simulate balance? Aren’t you concerned with pure geometry and management? Are you looking for justice, do you claim to distribute it, to have distributed it? Haven’t you produced just another theater, yet another system? Yet more consensus? Has this “equality” the pretension to liberate the body, at least? If not, what? To regulate it, wretch! In truth it is the realization of a meta-operator on the “skin of the social,” as you would put it, isonomy, bureaucracy.

Reply with questions, tell them: and your democratic discourse, what is it? All your questions have the underlying reference to this discourse, this transparent speech. We will not let ourselves be intimidated by this reference, you know nothing of this equality, and will never know anything of it, we know that it is the weapon of the measurer and the judge, the grip of the center-totalization in the space of movements, the count and the terror. So let’s struggle against the white terror of the “public,” by means of and for the red cruelty of intensities. And we will answer you carefully, not because of some concern to represent your “interests,” but because that will allow us to place this white terror (especially when it presents itself as “participatory,” the most repugnant thing) on our ephemeral skin, and at the same time, to displace, to spread our own force on this mono-face band.

Oh citizens, oh voters, oh aging delegates basking in the full bloom of the ballot, the unregulated, the pulsional, the excessive, the superb, oh partial objects, oh intensities, oh blood, help us now to endure this last, constant assault coming from detestable communication and isonomy, make us more singular than it, give us the stupidity that it has not and spare us that which it has, take us by the arms, undo your “rights,” get erect, carry us off to meet the Medusa of the State, we will laugh in her face, spread out the red, the blue, let’s open out the blue-histre stalk of the throat springing from the white collar, spread out the crimson velvet vocal cavity, opera satin little hard tongues, cerise taffeta large crumpled lungs, violet blue veins, raw linen concertina nerves, impenetrable stretches of silver, gold, chalk, hold all of this under the Medusa’s nose, that is how she will be answered.

The “public space” immobilizes, and this is jouissance. Democracy is the jouissance of immobilization. In this way the disjunctive bar is invested in its proper function of isonomy, since to equalize is to immobilize this into this and that into that: equivalents. When the meson intensifies within theory, this bar is immobilized at the same time in order to separate the private and the public on either side of itself, and is driven by a gyratory motion at such speed that the attribution of the affects it generates to one sphere or another is impossible. Further: it is insofar as it immobilizes that the “center” turns, insofar as it distinguishes “rights” that it sweeps indistinctly. What gives you a hard-on, deliberators, and throws you onto our band, is the chill of the modulated; in fact, of the counted alone, that is, the representable, for the “will” is only a suspect residue of the distinct, translated into a philosophy of the citizen. Stop the flow, you say: get into the forum — this is your pathos. Beautiful and paralysing, medusifying in fact, the severe isonomy that suspends.

The deliberative function is also and at the same time the synthetic function. You say: it is a right, it is not a pulse: for inasmuch as it is a right, it is not a pulse. An old principle resting on a synthesis, since in order to dissociate one side of the “public” from another, we must be on both sides at once. As soon as you deliberate, you unify. Everything that the jurists, for instance, have elaborated under the name of “consent” presupposes this synthesis. A very elementary synthesis, but indispensable to the construction of a consistent social discourse. This discourse requires continuous use: every law increases in pathos in order to separate the legal from the not-legal, it therefore moves forward armed with a cutter, a double-edge, and it cuts. The consistency it thus secures rests on a previously arbitrarily defined acceptability. You are aware of the formal properties of a strict, that is to say an axiomatized, political discourse: the most elementary of the rules which allow the establishment of these properties is binary exclusion: either a voice is acceptable, or it is not.