Lignes

Le nazisme serbe* n'est pas un objet d'« importation » depuis Ie national-socialisme allemand, qu'il a servi et imite. II est plutôt I'expression extrême de I'esprit de bourg, c'est-à-dire de son paradoxe fondamental.


Traduction de l'extrait du serbocroate par Rada Iveković


* Extrait du livre de Konstantinović,  Filosofija palanke (La Philosophie de bourg), 1969, rééd. Nolit, Belgrade, 1981, pp. 366-397. Traduction anglaise du livre The Philosophy of Parochialism, Edited and with an Introduction by Branislav Jakovljević, Translation by
Ljiljana Nikolić and Branislav Jakovljevic, University of Michigan Press (forthcoming 2021). Sur Konstantinović, voir aussi Rada Iveković, Autopsie des Balkans. Essai de psychopolitique.  A lire ici : http://radaivekovicunblogfr.unblog.fr/2009/10/30/autopsie-des-balkans-essai-de-psychopolitique-livre/

The unaligned French left from the 1950s onwards re-read Marx from a variety of viewpoints, imbricating Heideggarian existential concerns with Freudian analyses of libidinal desire, Saussurian linguistics and Levi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism. The proliferation of theoretical revues in this period, and the influence of thinkers such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, combined to produce the intellectual ferment that would produce the ‘time of theory’  in the 1960s. By charting the work and reception of Bataille and Blanchot from the 1930s to the 2010s, May provides an expansive overview of key shifts in French intellectual culture throughout the period. He displays not only how Bataille and Blanchot effected a focus on transgressive writerliness in French post-structuralist thought seeking to question dogmatic Marxism, but also how that same post-structuralist thought came to be de-historicized and disqualified as immoral “French theory” both by right-wing fractions in American academia and by newly liberal French thinkers. Via a detailed reading of Lignes, the chapter develops a complex overview of the political alignment of what is now known as “theory” in its context, carefully attending to the material conditions of the emergence of such thought within France’s fertile revue culture.

Controversy has surrounded Maurice Blanchot from the 1980s to today. Whilst claims of excessive formalism, obscurity and radicalism were often levelled at his generation, the Blanchot controversy has been sustained by the failure of critics to dispassionately appraise his 1930s political commitments. However, recent interventions by Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Surya and Lignes could end thirty years of stifled debate.

Lignes is a current French intellectual revue and publisher created in 1987. Sharing influences, interests and contributors with Tel Quel, one could cite Lignes as its successor, but with significant qualifications: Lignes adopts an intellectual trajectory passing through Blanchot, Antelme and Mascolo, generally ignored by Tel Quel; Lignes articles are more sober compared to Tel Quel’s textual terrorism; and its editor, Michel Surya rejects postures of vanguard aesthetics and group formation. Surya acutely theorizes his own revue, itself an interesting contribution to a conception of intellectual circles. Drawing heavily on Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-communal spacing, Surya tries to avoid Lignes becoming a closed, exclusive academic clique and project, fostering instead an open space. Yet Lignes develops a strong identity through an intellectual heritage running parallel with, yet counter to, Tel Quel. Against a backdrop of the ‘normalisation’ of French philosophy from the mid-70s, I will show how Lignes: a) preserves and extends la pensée 68 (publishing Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou, etc), b) traces a distinct intellectual genealogy through the 60s than that of Tel Quel and c) fosters a closer relationship between theory and practice into the 21st Century, not least by understanding itself as intellectual spacing, rather than a circle.

This paper derives from my doctoral project on the contemporary intellectual revue Lignes, created in 1987. My thesis aims to produce an account of the French intellectual left over the last 25 years, filling in significant gaps in current Anglophone scholarship. Today, my scope will be more limited: I will introduce Lignes and its editor Michel Surya, who, known primarily for his biography of Georges Bataille,  has amassed a considerable oeuvre spanning fiction, literary criticism, intellectual history and political analysis. Of particular interest here is his concern to theorise his own revue and the kind of space for thought it provides, from which I will develop a conception of Lignes as a repository of traces, functioning via constellations of proper names.

This paper derives from my doctoral thesis on the contemporary revue Lignes and the French intellectual left over the last 25 years. In particular, here I wish to explore both Jean-Luc Nancy’s influence on, and participation with, Lignes as a space for politics and philosophy, thought and action, and the tensions between these frontiers.
Created by Michel Surya in 1987, the impact of La Communauté désoeuvrée is clear his conception of the revue as a space of intellectual comparution: not a fusional community of writers with a univocal position, but a jointly articulated and collective presentation of singular responses to common concerns. Nancy’s collaborations with Jean-Christophe Bailly to de-ontologise community have been especially utilised by Lignes, penetrating into its discussions of Europe, racism, the new social movements, The Satanic Verses and aesthetic fragmentation.
Yet Nancy often argues that philosophy should retreat from politics, so his participation in Lignes alongside the likes of Badiou, Rancière and Balibar is perhaps surprising. Some of his sharpest political texts have been published in Lignes, but also some of his most cautionary. Lignes published original Nancy essays such as ‘La pensée dérobé’, and he personally edited an entire issue on Nietzsche. Yet his place in the revue was never comfortable: a onetime member of the editorial board, and despite stressing his intellectual and personal friendship for Lignes, he resigned in 2007, stating that since there was no, and should be no political project for a revue in the contemporary period, revues themselves no longer have a function. Whilst Nancy occupies a privileged position in the intellectual genealogy constructed by Lignes, especially in the wake of Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot, the increasingly militant tone of the more recent issues made him clearly anxious, and impelled him to distance himself from this milieu to which his own thought had played such a pivotal role.
This paper, then, will examine the tensions inherent in Nancy’s participation, and subsequent non-participation, in a specific arena of intellectual and political thought: what for Nancy constitutes the role and remit of philosophical thought, and what crosses over to the political? What, within the political, are legitimate actions and interventions, given Nancy’s aversion to exclusive communitarian positions and clearly defined subjective identifications? What types of writing are appropriate to each? These are the frontiers I wish to probe.

La construction de toute identité, qu'elle soit pensée comme religieuse, culturelle, linguistique ou autre, se fait au moyen d'une définition préalable des rapports sociaux des sexes. II en va de même de l’identité dite ethnique et/ou nationale.
II sévit dans toutes les sociétés, toute proportion gardée, une certaine ségrégation des sexes. C'est aussi ce que certains appellent le genre. Cette séparation est certes beaucoup plus présente dans les sociétés dites traditionnelles, elle n'en reste pas moins très présente, à divers degrés, dans les sociétés modernes. Or, Ie sexe n'est peut-être que cela: une scission première de/dans la pensée elle-même, un partage existant avant qu'elle ne (se) réfléchisse. II s'agit d'un partage de la raison, auquel correspond en même temps Ie partage entre la nature et la culture.
***
Le présent article (à ne pas confondre avec le livre du même titre publié par Léo Schéer, Paris 2003) fut tiré du manuscrit de livre en cours de rédaction à l'époque, Nation et différence des sexes. Ce dernier, une fois terminé, ne trouva d'éditeurs qu'en tant que coupé en deux comme
Le sexe de la nation, Paris, Eds. Léo Scheer 2003,  351 pages. Chapitres en ligne : : http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article1059.html
&
Dame Nation. Nation et différence des sexes, Ravenna, Longo Editore 2003, 264 pages. Chapitres en ligne : http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article1059.html

Through the contemporary intellectual review Lignes, this article charts the responses to neoliberalism and crisis of Michel Surya, Frédéric Lordon and Frédéric Neyrat. In the mid-1990s Surya critiques discourses of transparency which attempt to morally justify financial capitalism. The economist Lordon corroborates Surya’s account of the cynical use of ‘transparency’ within financial milieus, noting that the market’s wealth is generated by opacity. Yet Surya’s account spreads beyond the financial sector, suggesting that the demand for transparency creates a generalized atmosphere of surveillance and ostentation, implying that an opaque withdrawal from the public sphere is a mode of resistance. Also publishing in Lignes, Neyrat moves beyond the potentially sterile binary of transparency and opacity to suggest ‘exposure’ as a mediating term measuring both degrees of appearance and disappearance, and  the exposure of individuals to concrete threats such as debt, harm, surveillance and expulsion. Such conceptual texts are anchored in comparisons to UK Uncut, Occupy, le comité invisible and the black bloc.

The thesis takes the French revue Lignes (1987-present) as its object of study to provide a new account of French intellectual culture over the last twenty-five years. Whilst there are now many studies covering the role of such revues throughout the twentieth-century, the majority of such monographs extend no further than the mid-1980s: the major novelty of this thesis is extending these accounts up until the present moment. It is largely assumed that a reaction against the Marxist and structuralist theories of the 1960s and 1970s led to embrace of liberalism and an intellectual drift to the right in France from the 1980s onwards: whilst largely supporting this account, the thesis attempts to nuance this narrative of the fate of the intellectual left in the following years by showing the persistence of what can be called a politicised 'French theory' in Lignes, and a returning left-wing militancy in recent years. In doing so, it will both reveal under-studied aspects of well-known thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, as their thought develops through their participation in a collaborative, periodical publication, and introduce lesser known thinkers who have not received an extended readership in Anglophone spheres. Lignes also argues for the continued persistence and relevance of the thought of a previous generation of thinkers, notably Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo, and the thesis concludes by examining the potential role 'French Theory' could still have in France. Furthermore, as revues provide a unique nexus of intellectual, cultural, social and political concerns, the thesis also provides a unique history of France from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2007 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. Much of the thesis is concerned with contextualising intellectual debates within a period characterised by the moralisation of discourses, a return of religion, the global installation of neo-liberalism and the eruption of immigration as a controversial European issue. From a relatively theoretical and politically stable position to the left of the Parti socialiste, Lignes therefore provides a privileged vantage point for the mutations in French social and cultural life throughout the period.