I. In 1999, a journal based in Paris and calling itself TIQQUN published an essay with the title “Theses on the Imaginary Party.” The journal’s exotic name was derived from a Hebrew word used in the Lurianic and Sabbatean kabbalistic traditions to mean “repair” or “restitution.” It was claimed the name was in fact neither a collective signature nor even the title of the journal itself, but the name for the objective historical process the pages of the journal bore witness to. This process was nothing less than “muffled advance of the Imaginary Party” whose acts of sabotage and whose dissemination of terror in the margins of a contemporary spectacular form of domination were deciphered as so many “anonymous acts of Tiqqun,” actions heralding the imminent and catastrophic overturning of that same domination. The Imaginary Party is the name for a novel form of antagonism that emerges in the space evacuated by the previous form of social war: the frontal battle between class enemies, the civil war between proletarian monstrosity and vampiric Capital.  The journal speaks instead of a “coming rebellion [la rebellion qui vient]” appealing to no form of transcendence that can be socially and historically identified, no determined cause in the name of which it revolts. This rebellion will be a properly “metaphysical” insurrection, whose possibility will not be found lurking in the existing technical composition of labor and the production process. The emergence of the Imaginary Party signals, to the contrary, the definitive dissipation of the social substance; and this dissipation, paradoxically enough, is deemed the condition itself for the unleashing of a communist politics.

The vision of the communist process proposed by the group is strange enough. With the imminent collapse of the spectacular mode of domination, the Imaginary Party will turn its attention away from this enemy in order to elaborate the internal dynamics of the Party itself, the circulation of energies among the “metaphysical communities” and forms-of-life that people it. “It is foreseeable,” the essay concludes, “that as victory approaches, the men of the Imaginary Party will no longer enter into battle in order to dispatch an enemy whose powers are already so weakened, but instead to give free reign to their metaphysical disputes [differends], which they intend to have out both physically and through play.” Now, some two years later, the journal will return to this passage from the antagonism between the spectacle and the Imaginary Party to the agonistic, sovereign play between metaphysical communities in another long essay, this time with the provocative title Introduction to Civil War. Here again, we encounter a strange, agonistic figure of communism in which the sharing of the common takes the form of the sovereign play—physical, violent—between communes or forms-of-life defined not by a shared substance, predicate or common production but by the discrete organization of affective and ethical intensities: by existential or ethical differences that can be mediated by no juridical or organization mechanisms. This play between forms-of-life is now given a seemingly misleading name: “civil war.” The elliptical movement of this text, in fact, is suspended between two propositions or theses. First, a definition of civil war: “Civil war is the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of their co-existence” (P10). And, then, just pages later, this minimalist definition of communism: “I call ‘communism’ the real movement that elaborates, everywhere and at every moment, civil war” (P30). Spliced together, these two propositions produce this formula: communism is the elaboration of the play between and among forms-of-life.

In the only genuinely critical engagement with the writings of TIQQUN and its latter-day mutation “The Invisible Committee” to date, Alberto Toscano underlines the importance of this introduction of the figure of the commune into contemporary discussions around the renewal of the communist legacy.[i] The commune, he notes, is not only a form of organization to be used strategically within a given field of forces; it is just as much a form-of-life, a mode of existence and an “ethical disposition.” And yet what is lacking in TIQQUN’s specific deployment of this form, he argues, is its refusal to examine the contemporary forms of production and the composition of labor, resulting in a “Manichean opposition” between the theme of collective experimentation, at once political and ontological, opened by the attention to forms-of-life, and the dispersed but still localizable sphere of metropolitan production. As a result, the proliferation of communes envisioned at the end of The Coming Insurrection and, by extension, the metaphysical disputes between forms-of-life proposed by TIQQUN’s agonistic communism,[1] fail to draw upon possibilities that are “immanent to the resources of immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism.” In a similar vein, Michael Hardt has recently distinguished two tendencies within the recent renewal of the communist hypotheses: those who, like Alain Badiou who emphasize the problems of cultivating subjective capacity and those who, like Antonio Negri and Hardt himself, look toward the internal dynamics of objective social processes in order to seek out immanent possibilities of social transformation.[ii] Insisting on the continuing relevance of analyzing the technical composition of labor for clues to the political and subjective capacities available for proletarian initiative—first and foremost, forms of struggle and of organization—Hardt argues that any viable renewal of the communist project must begin with a critique of political economy and an examination of already existing tendencies within capitalism: in the form of property, on the one hand, and the organization of the labor process, on the other. Here and in his most recent book with Negri, Commonwealth, he insists on the immanent nature of these possibilities and on the increasing proximity of a communist mutation. The emergence of the paradigmatic nature of immaterial property, whose internal structure no longer obeys the logic of scarcity, and the increasingly autonomous production of the “common” outside of capital both point to possibilities that are already actual. In conclusion, Hardt argues that the common created by new forms of immaterial labor is, ultimately, subjective capacity itself: that is, not the production of commodities or of surplus value, but—and this is Hardt speaking—“forms-of-life.”

II. I want to keep this correlation between the common and the form-of-life that Hardt proposes in mind as I turn back to TIQQUN and their characterization of communism as the elaboration of the play between forms-of-life. To do this, I want to quickly formalize their own characterization of the form-of-life as it is presented in the first section of Introduction to Civil War.

We begin with bodies. There are forms-of-life because a body is never neutral. A form-of-life is what makes a body lean one way or another, what makes it fall in with some bodies and fall away from others. To be affected by a form-of-life is, then, to take sides; it is to favor one side rather than another, to be attracted by some bodies and repulsed by others. Forms-of-life are sensibilities, configurations of the sensible. They are worlds, differentiated by the difference between their logics of appearing.  A consensus orders the internal composition of a form-of-life; between them, dissensus reigns. This dissensus is irreducible. It does not prevent the liaison between worlds; it is what makes possible the  play between and among them. This process, the distribution of bodies according to their partiality results in the formation of parties that are, to use the minimal definition of the political found in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, “existentially something different and alien” and whose concrete, real relations can be mediated neither by “a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”[iii] In Introduction to Civil War, TIQQUN call this original inflection of a body’s course that makes it swerve toward other bodies, its clinamen. The theory of the constitution of forms-of-life is, therefore, rigorously materialist. As Lucretius and the atomistic tradition more generally contend, what precedes the formation of a world is merely the void and the bodies or atoms that rain down in parallel through it. Bodies encounter one another only with the intervention of an event that cannot be explained on the basis of the existing elements, the void and its bodies. This event, the deviation that makes bodies come together and, if their coming together takes hold, form a world is without reason and without why. Its occurrence can be explained neither on the basis of pre-existing conditions nor with reference to a final cause. The aleatory encounter between modies is, nevertheless, an irreducible fact, preceding any decision or choice. Freedom takes this form: either renounce one’s form-of-life and flee it, or assume this form-of-life in order to draw out it most inward possibility and, through a strategy of intensification, seek out its point of exhaustion.

A singular form-of-life’s force of existence is determined both by its internal composition and by its encounters with other forms-of-life: that is, by the “metaphysical disputes” and the “civil war” elaborated between and among them.   Two bodies affected by a single form-of-life experience community. An encounter between two forms-of-life resulting in the elevation of communities degree of existence is friendship. Conversely, an encounter—like all encounters, contingent, unforeseeable, unavoidable—resulting in the elevation of one form-of-life’s power and the diminution of the other’s is enmity. For TIQQUN—in a gesture synthesizing Schmitt and Spinoza—this sphere of friendship and enmity, this space of good and bad encounters, is the sphere of the political. Its elaboration is the process of communism. “Civil war,” then, is the expansion of the area of friendship and enmity; it is, more precisely, a movement immanent to the Imaginary Party, an endless sequence of encounters that, at each instant, redistributes degrees of power according to the nature of those encounters and the quality of the affects that circulate within and among the parties involved.  These sequences are less productive than aesthetic in nature, would work out, in detail, “the whole gamut of highly differentiated affects and all the crisply defined degrees of intensity that can arise when bodies come into contact” (24gA). The relation between forms-of-life can be described as the “play” between them because their relations are contingent, dependent on an encounter that can never be entirely anticipated; but this play must be elaborated in order that the consequences of an encounter are worked out, drawn out, refined, patiently and deliberately detailed. Because each form-of-life is defined is a singular distribution or sharing out of the sensible, what must be elaborated are differences in affective and tonal sensibilities, the entire scale of possible tonal variations that circulate within and between forms-of-life. These encounters are always open to the possibility of conflict, violence and even war since what is at stake is the elaboration of a difference, the distribution of degrees of power.

III. The ontological considerations of the first section of Introduction to Civil War are followed, in the second and third sections, with a history of the modern State told from the perspective of what they call, at one point, the “ontological obviousness of civil war.” This history, unfolding over the course of four centuries, arrives at a crucial, catastrophic point, dated by the text at around 1940:

Ultimately the “state-ification” of the social had to be paid for by the socialization of the State, and thus lead to the mutual dissolution of both the State and society. What THEY called the “Welfare State” was this indistinction (between society and state) in which the obsolete State-form survived for a little while within Empire. The incompatibility between the state order and its procedures (the police and publicity) expresses itself in the current efforts to dismantle the Welfare State. And so, on the same note, society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion. (P47)

The importance of this historical argument outlining the transition to imperial governance is found not in the by-now banal and obvious thesis concerning the exhaustion of the State-form. What is at stake in this argument is a second, and more catastrophic, consequence: the volatilization and dissipation of the social substance itself, the dispersion of the conflictual unity of civil society in favor of a “continuous biopolitical tissue.” This argument represents the synthesis of two theses concerning the modern State. On the one hand, that of Carl Schmitt, who in the late 1920s and early 30s developed a theory of the “total state,” defined by the increasingly airtight identification of state and civil society and the resulting dispersion of the political itself, formerly monopolized and localized in the state, across the social surface. The total state, whose “soft” and “hard” variants are the social democratic welfare state and the fascist corporate state—their difference is one of degree, not kind—would make every point of the social tissue, whether it be the production and distribution of wealth or the sexuality and well-being of its population, a site of potential intervention and exercise of state power. Such a scenario politicizes everything; in turn, state power, immanent to a society it once hovered above in a claimed stance of neutrality, is revealed to be less a mediator and management of social conflicts than a party to those conflicts themselves, an agent in a low-intensity social war with no clearly identifiable front. On the other hand, and more importantly, there is the integration of Foucault’s theories on governmentality, specifically two theses. First, the immanence of power to society or a population results both in the absolute indiscernibility of state and society and, consequently, the supplanting of the institutions of civil society and their mediating function with an accumulation of apparatuses [dispositifs] and flexible norms that have no internal rationality and whose deployment is justified by no reason other than the maintenance of control over a determined point in this post-social bipolitical fabric. Second, the moment power becomes immanent to society, the nature of power itself mutates. Rather than acting on a given set of identities, desires and interests in view of organizing, training, managing or suppressing their energies, power assumes the task of producing those identities and desires itself. And yet, and here is the final phase of TIQQUN’s argument, contemporary imperial governance does not produce identities but ruins them; it steps in the moment the anthropological conditions of liberalism—the individual subject as a locus of interest—begin to decompose, producing in its wake not the individual but the “dividual,” the statistical deviation, the citizen as a calculable factor of risk. Imperial governance is founded, then, on these two conditions: the decomposition of the anthropological conditions of liberalism, the individual invested with interests, on the one hand, and the dissipation of the social or civil society, on the other.

IV. The most provocative theoretical intervention in Hardt and Negri’s most recent work is their insistence on the asymmetry between the social and the common and, by extension, between socialism the public ownership and management of the production process on the one hand and communism as the definitive collapse of the property form itself and the emergent autonomous production of the common. And yet the distance between Hardt’s proposal and that found in TIQQUN is easily located: in the absence of the problematic of production in TIQQUN, as Toscano has underlined, and the corresponding lack of any attention to so-called “immanent” possibilities of social transformation in their work. This lack of attention, is however, a direct consequence of the historical thesis cited above, a thesis Hardt himself at one point broadly shared: the withering, or rather, the implosion of the social itself and its replacement by a biopolitical “tissue” held together by networks of dispositifs and norms. The social as a system of needs founded both on the abstraction of socially necessary labor and the isolation of labor-power as the sole source and measure of value gives way to a profusion of apparatuses and techniques—the regime of work being the most crucial of these—whose function is the pure and simple implementation of discipline or command, without any pretense to mediate social contradictions and measure out the social substance. Production can only be, if we accept this historical analysis, the production of control: that is, precisely, the production of subjectivity. It is with this turn of events that it becomes necessary to distinguish the individuation of forms-of-life from the production of social relations, to draw a line of demarcation between the disputes between and among different configurations or distributions of the sensible—poles of affective intensity—and what Hardt calls the “sharing of resources” and the “modes of co-operation” characteristic of the relatively autonomous production of biopolitical capitalism.

In 1914, in his rage at the opportunism and social chauvinism of the Second International, Lenin thundered that the “the only correct proletarian slogan” was “turn the present imperialist war into civil war” (“War and Social Democracy”). TIQQUN, in a perverse way, do nothing more than repeat this slogan. They, too, with Lenin, cry “Let us raise the banner of civil war.” But between them lies the abyss between two imperialist wars and two figures of civil war. Civil war will no longer be the prelude to a socialization of production and the institution of worker self-management, nor will it play itself out in the asymmetry between dual powers or in the insurrectionary seizure of the productive forces and the machinery of state as a weapon in a war to destroy the class enemy.  What they propose, instead, is a resurfacing, amidst the ruins of the social—a wreckage induced by the socialization process itself—of the political as such, that is to say, communism as the “play” between forms of life. This play will be less the ludic “playing with power” that characterized, according the Situationists, the joyous disorder of the Paris Commune than the disciplined “elaboration” of differences of power among communes. Civil war, then, as a highly refined game of alliances and avoidance; communism, then, as an art of distances.

In the fourth book of Spinoza’s Ethics, we read that a specific affect will endure as long as it is not “checked or destroyed by a contrary affect which is stronger than the affect which is to be checked” (EIVP7). Spinoza’s theory of finite modes considers these modes—that is, these collective bodies—in their dynamic interaction, in which their limits are defined by “mutual constraint,” that is, by the pressures they exercise on each other. The internal organization of a mode, the internal relations between its parts, varies at each instant, without these variations necessarily inducing changes in the mode’s characteristic structure. At each instant, then, a mode expresses a force of existence, a degree of power; to this degree of power corresponds an affective tenor, and with each variation in power, we endure a change in the sensible texture of existence, a change in the way we are what we are. It is Spinoza’s communist ontology that forms the horizon of TIQQUN’s identification of “communism” with the real movement that “elaborates, everywhere and at every moment, civil war.” I want to conclude, however, with a final remark about this term “civil war,” a term that has always been, since Plato, a conceptual thorn in the side of political thought. Some philological attention is necessary. For the term civil war referred to in the title is, in the first place, an abusive translation of the Greek stásis, a notoriously equivocal word signifying at once position, stability and stasis as well as movement, overturning and, in a political register, “insurrection, upheaval, rebellion, civil war (στάσις ).” If we turn to Nicole Loraux’s magisterial study of the signifier stásis, we are asked to heed the following precautions: “We need a language that can avoid referring to the notion of civil war, which I have used and will continue to use for lack of a better term. In bellum civile, the ‘vast mutuality’ of the Roman city is thought within the substance of war. Stasis is something different” (Divided 107-08). Stasis is neither sedition, secession or outright war between citizens. It is, as Loraux, beautifully formulates it, “movement at rest, a front that does not yield and introduces into the city the paradoxical unity that characterizes the simultaneous insurrection of two halves of a whole” (ibid.).[v] This definition identifies civil war or stasis as both the free space within which forms-of-life can encounter one another as well as the principle or rule governing their articulation. Forms-of-life are parties whose “simultaneous” insurrection alone ensures the paradoxical wholeness of the common space they share or partake in.

[1] I say by extension, but among the major differences between TIQQUN and Coming Insurrection is that the “communities” of the former are not organizational forms, but forms-of-life, that is, modes of existence.

[i] “The War Against Preterrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection,” Radical Philosophy 154 (2009).

[ii] Michael Hardt, “On the Common in Communism”

[iii] Concept of the Political, 27.

[iv] Citation of English translation of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, pp. 28-29n

[v] “As Moses I. Finley notes simply and forcefully, stasis refers etymologically only to a position; that the position should become a party, that a party should be constituted for the purpose of sedition, that one faction should always call forth another, and that civil war should then rage is a semantic evolution whose interpretation should be sought not ‘in philology but in Greek society itself.’” (24)

[vi] “[E]veryone must take a side, for this is the only way to re-create a totality out of the divided city—that is, through the remainderless engagement of all its members—and the only way to glue the antagonistic halves back together. The apathetic citizen will thus be deprived of his rights as a citizen—he will be politically dead—as if stasis had taken on the role of civic duty. Neutrality does not exist” (103).

Negri, on his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s:

“I was fundamentally a communist, and there I found myself in front of a world of bureaucrats […] We were taken to some sort of sanatorium on the Black Sea, which was full of Communist bureaucrats who did nothing else but pig out” (In Praise of the Common, p. 50).

From Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War:

“My own moral ambitions will therefore not exceed the following formulation: spread a certain ethos of civil war, a certain art of distances.” (Thesis 31)

AND

“Every form-of-life tends to constitute a community, and a community tends to constitute a world. Each world, when it thinks itself—when it grasps itself strategically in its play with other worlds—discovers that it is structured by a particular metaphysics which is, more than a system, a language, its language. When a world thinks itself, it becomes infectious. It knows the ethos it carries within, and it has mastered, within a domain, the art of distances.” (Thesis 76)

From Alain Badiou, “Politics as a Truth Procedure”:

“Politics puts the State at a distance, in the distance of its measure. The resignation that characterises a time without politics feeds on the fact that the State is not at a distance, because the measure of its power is errant […] Freedom here consists in putting the State at a distance through the collective establishment of a measure for its excess. And if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure up to it.”

From Gopal Balakrishnan’s excellent “intellectual portrait” of Carl Schmitt:

“Political identities like ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ are not simply roles in an economic system based on waged labour, but opposing solidarities forged in a series of historic battles. The escalation of a conflict beyond a certain level of intensity generates new clusters of claims and counter-claims […] Experiences of life-and-death struggles, even when they are vicarious and imagined, crystallize into stereotyped, opposed and distinct ‘ways of life’, generating zones of contention which cease to be explicable in terms of a simple conflict of interests.” (The Enemy, pp. 106-07)

In 1932, Carl Schmitt publishes The Concept of the Political. The very fact that the book was written at all bears witness to a crisis in the concept, a kind of washing out or eclipse of a notion whose essence, at that moment, had to be re-decided. Crisis, the word and the thing, calls for a decision, for the drawing of a line of demarcation. The political must once again be isolated from its rivals and pretenders: religion, morality, aesthetics, culture, the social or economic. But this crisis is not only historical. It is, at it were, built in to the notion of the political, a structural possibility or defect that becomes clearer or retracts in given historical conjunctures. For unlike its rivals, the concept of the political has no content of its own, no internally differentiating elements that allow one to clear delineate the friend-enemy polarization that minimally defines it from, for example, the class warfare that structures so-called civil or bourgeois society. As Schmitt discretely but consistently underlines through this short tract, the difference between the political and its others is not a difference of kind but of degree, or, better, a difference in intensity. If on the one hand Schmitt delimits the sphere of the political by identifying the political entity or actor with the state and the state with a territory, he also and in the same movement asserts unequivocally that any type of structural antithesis, be it religious, cultural or economic, can assume a political character is the antithesis undergoes a polarization, that is, if it undergoes a leap or surge in intensity. “The political,” he writes, “can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors […] It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind…” (CP 38, my emphasis). Later, Schmitt refers to Hegel’s dialectic of quantity and quality to reframe this concept of intensive difference, characterizing it as an “expression of the recognition that from every domain the point of the political is reached and with it a qualitative new intensity of human groupings” (CP 62); in the following lines, Schmitt explicitly refers to the logic of class antagonism, that is the conversion of social division into political, class, war. The movement of dialectical intensification implies that political antagonism is both a continuous with and radical separate from the array of antitheses whose polarization it is. The political, in short, is characterized by a movement that transforms a contradiction into an antagonism. What distinguishes these two conflictual impasses is that the first maybe be resolved through mediation, whether logical or juridical, while the second bears witness to an existential conflict that is irreducible. Antagonism means war, rather than resolution, becomes possible. But war here refers less to the possible deployment of weapons than that a difference has become existential or, to use a slightly different term, ontological in nature.

There is another logic of intensification in Schmitt’s essay, historical in nature this time. As an intervention in a specific historical conjuncture, the book develops a polemic on two fronts, against two seemingly opposed but secretly allied contemporary threats: the hyper-politicization of what Schmitt’s calls the “total state” and the depoliticization characteristic of 19th century liberalism. These two threat enter into a kind of chiasmus. If the hyper-politicization characteristic of the contemporary “total state,” whose two modalities or thresholds of intensity are the quantitative total state of the social democratic Welfare state and the qualitative total state of fascism corporatism of the Italian type, leads in fact to a form of depoliticization, Schmitt argues that the pretense to depoliticization characteristic of liberalism is, in fact, an “unusually intense way of pursuing politics” (CP 21n2; my emphasis). In the first instance, hyper-politicization, it is the site of the political that is dislocated. Not, in fact, because of the increasingly uncertain relation between political entities and territorial confines, but in the more troublesome sense of a loss of structural localization. For the total state, unlike what Schmitt calls Hegel’s “universal” state, does not remain a removed enough from the conflicting forces of civil society to pretend to mediate between and among them. The total state witnesses a tendency toward the perfect identity of state and society, such that every aspect and element of what the liberal paradigm left to the autonomy of civil society now becomes a possible site of state intervention and, therefore, political conflict. “In such a state,” Schmitt argues, “everything is at least potentially political” (CP 22). This identity between state and society is also a confusion. Insofar as the state becomes a part and party of the society it once claimed merely to mange or regulate, the state can be said to both wither away and metastasize, both disappear into the social while simultaneously absorbing or devouring it. This confusion is both hyper- and de-politicizing in its effects. But this depoliticization is, in turn, different than the claims of liberalism—and, we should add, contemporary neo-liberalism—which, in pretending to reduce all political antagonisms to either economic or moral categories, competition or the struggle between good and evil, “degrades,” Schmitt intones, the “enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but utterly destroyed.” By outlawing or denying—in the Freudian sense of Verneinung—the existence of the political as the site of enmity and war understood as irreducible existential antagonism, by denying those elements who block or complicate its imperial ambitions the status of enemies, the peculiar “liberal” form of war becomes “unusually intense and inhuman” (CP 36) a war of extermination against those who mere existence is intolerable.

A passage from a text entitled “Silence and its Beyond,” from the first issue of the journal Tiqqun, published in 1999. This text helps us to follow out the implications of the journal’s title, a term drawn from the Kabbalistic doctrine of Isaac Luria and developed in the teachings and, precisely, actions of the apostate Messiah of the 17th century, Sabbatai Zevi:

…these carnages, suicides and diverse disorders, all these strange acts that offer us new encouragement concerning the market civilization’s degree of decomposition and, consequently, the muffled advance of the Imaginary Party…

The term “tikkun” or tiqqun indicates, in the Lurianic doctrine, the practice of rectification or repair, the restoration of the creation through a specific act: the lifting of the fallen “sparks” of the divine from the demonic shells into which they descended and are contained. The teaching of Zevi, as formalized in the writings of Nathan of Gaza, interprets this practice in terms of what Scholem called “Redemption through Sin,” which requires the messiah to descend into the pits of impurity in order to restore the sparks that had become trapped in demonic matter. The method required to retrieve these sparks is the systematic undertaking of “ma’asim zarim,” strange or bizarre acts whose objective is the deliberate violation of traditional halakhic practice, that is, the ritualized transgression of the Torah. Zevi is known to have methodically practiced the violation of dietary laws, cancelled fast days, and so on. And, most importantly, he quickly converted to Islam, seemingly under pressure from the Turkish imperial forces. But the Sabbatian tradition immediately began to understand his apostasy not as a worldly or pragmatic contingency, but as a necessary and ultimate act of transgression, the final demonstration of the messianic nature of Zevi’s actions.

The Sabbatian doctrine of “strange acts” appears on several occasions in the first volume of Tiqqun. But the nature of acts described are primarily, as the citation above attests, acts of seemingly “gratuitous” violence undertaken by “normal” citizens of what is here called, broadly speaking, “market society” or “market civilization,” and whose specific mode of domination is characterized bya  threading together of the paranoiac logic of the Spectacle—which refuses or is incapable of identifying its true enemy, the “Imaginary Party,” viewing the acts of the latter, its “carnages,” as so many isolated, criminal acts without reason—and the emergence of a form of power that is biopolitical in nature (in which life and power are said to increasingly coincide, with the resulting biologization of the political and the politiciziation of the biological). It is precisely the normalness of these citizens, totally unremarkable, apolitical, with no relative social mark, no class belonging—they are what Tiqqun calls so many “Blooms”—that makes their sudden, seemingly unmotivated acts of destruction so disturbing. The case of Kip Kinkel—the inspiration, it should be said, for a novel by Dennis Cooper—returns on several occasions. Kinkel is an “exemplary Bloom,” we are told, and his actions, the incomprehensible murder of his parents and the shooting of 27 of his schoolmates (two of which were to die as a result), are themselves exemplary. They are, along with a host of other “elementary acts of terrorism” drawn from the daily press and compiled by the journal, “anonymous sabotages [that] constitute an act of Tiqqun.”

These acts are characterized as novel in form, and are assimilated to what is here called “new types of hostility.” There is something of an argument in place, quite fragile, which interprets these acts not only in terms of Sabbati’s doctrine of strange acts, but the “miraculous sovereignty” of the great Criminal in Benjamin, or more pertinently, Bataille’s theory of sovereignty. The argument goes that the process of socialization in market societies has reached the point where no act can be isolated from the social totality; as a result, every crime, no matter how senseless or unmotivated, represents not simply the violation of determined legal statute, but an attack on the law as such.

My sense is that this type of analysis—this identification of “senseless” violence in biopolitical democracies—is meant to evoke the for us classical trope of the “action d’eclat” (Baudelaire’s “Mauvais Vitrier,”) the “acte gratuite” (Gide) or the Surrealist praise of Vache’s and Rigaud’s suicides, the surrealist act par excellence being to fire randomly into a crowd and so on. Sartre spoke of a “the permanent practice of violence” and even spoke of adopting “violence as a method of thought” when referring to the Surrealists. (He also compared the practice of anonymity, the anonymous, unsigned act, with the street violence Action Francaise’s “cagoules” and the hooded, invisible empire of the KKK.) One is tempted, instead, to make reference to a text like the Situationist International’s “The Bad Days will End,” which also interprets the proliferation of seemingly unintelligible acts of sabotage among workers and urban youth as new forms of “hostility” that indicate a transformation both in the contemporary form of power and the mode of hostility it brings about. But the SI was very careful to describe these apparently gratuitous acts of sabotage as initiating a new cycle of struggles centered not, as in the first days of the workers’ movement, on the destruction of the machines of production, but as a direct attack on the “machines of consumption,” specifically the technologies of communication and the systems of public and private transport.

Finally, the “justification” for these acts is found, the journal suggests, in the fact that these partisans of the Imaginary Party—imaginary because the Spectacle can only deny its existence—are the unwitting agents of an historical “reason” and the executors of an historical task, namely the annihilation of this world which is itself founded on nothing: in short, the “completion” of its nothingness, its fulfillment and overturning. It is here, then, that we can locate two “layers” within the Imaginary Party: between those who are its unwitting agents, and those who form the “conscious factions” of the Party: first and foremost, Tiqqun itself, or what in the second issue of the journal, on the final page of the essay “Introduction to Civil War” is called “the Invisible Committee,” that is, “a determined faction of the Imaginary Party, it’s revolutionary-experimental pole.”

“The Invisible Committee,” in its turn, will reappear in 2007, with the book The Coming Insurrection (here, in “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” we hear tell of a “coming rebellion” [la rebellion qui vient]).