The Great Refusal

[1] Philosophy is constituted by its refusal of sexual desire, from the moment when Socrates refused the advances of Alcibiades to the diagnosis of this “sickness” of philosophy by Nietzsche. Since this diagnosis a slow reversal has taken place – a refusal of this refusal of sexuality – and the embrace of new philosophies of desire. On the one hand, the asceticism of philosophy now leads a hidden existence, concealed within the fastidious technical research programmes of analytic philosophy. On the other hand, we have the embrace of desire, perversion, and jouissance by libidinal materialists, certain Lacanian liberationists, and all those “thinkers” of excess, transgression and subversion; slogans as perfectly at home in modern advertising as they are in “thought.” The great refusal is precisely a refusal of these two symmetrical and complementary orientations. In fact they must be regarded as two deviations from the correct line of theory: the right-wing deviation of an attenuated asceticism and the left-wing deviation of a triumphalist but hollow celebration of desire.
[2] At the limits of each of these deviations stands a figure: Origen, the church father, at the limit of asceticism, and Sade, the libertine without reserve, at the limit of desire. In the case of Origen his self-castration indicates the fantasy of an end to all desire gone to an extreme, but also an absolute refusal of desire, and of the world, a purity that resists all worldly corruption. Ambiguous and inaccessible his experience is the deviation of an ascetic attempt to embody the Angel and to singularise the Angel in a new figure of mastery (the Church Father, precisely) – although an ambiguous one. It will be the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that will restore this figure of asceticism as the eternal Rebel: the people, that is to say, the proletariat. It therefore frees Origen’s self-castration into the new figure of rigorous self-criticism. Sade stands at the other pole as the “scandalous” philosopher of desire (Philosophy in the Bedroom); but so feted by his disciples that, as Bataille noted so long ago, he becomes a capitalised object of exchange. The writing which he cried tears over the loss of is now incarnated on the Internet, as long as you pay by credit card for 120 days. Does Sade have any use-value? Only perhaps in his apathy, composed of satiation, exhaustion and boredom, and giving birth to a new asceticism of jouissance.
[3] Sade was used by philosophy to give birth to the “porno-world.” We have been “liberated” into this world and the philosophers of desire are its ideologues. This is a world in which pornography loses its place at the limits of the writable and becomes the mode of writing, the mode of representation. The flesh blocks rebellion in the name of the rebellion of the flesh. All that world provides us with are the semblants of liberation: sexual freedom (that is the freedom to only ever be sexual); new sexualities (as miserable as the old); subversion (as long as it is within the limits of reacting against hegemonic heterosexuality), the celebration of the flesh (as long as it is the right flesh, young enough or malleable enough to the demands of the market). Its material base is “sexuality,” a material structured by philosophy even as philosophy recedes into sterility. Sex-positive, sex-negative: Tweedledum or Tweedledee, always circulating as the inscription within philosophical space and the porno-world as its correlative.

[4] Origen and Sade remain, despite their problematic status vis-à-vis philosophy, the reference points for the great refusal: a double refusal and a double transvaluation. The result will be a theory that sets itself to destroy the porno-world and its base in the material of sexuality. This detachment is not a new asceticism although it will resemble it, even less is it some sex-positive discourse that concedes to porno-chic. Pornography, in all its violence, disgust, misogyny and horror, is more accurate and truthful than the prophets of “sexual happiness,” fascinated by the surfaces of the porn-world. Instead to be without-philosophy is to be without-sexuality. Not neuter, castrated, or asexual, but with the theoretical knowledge that there is only jouis-sans. The porno-world is the production of a fantasy of complete jouissance, either to be refused (in the name of a reactionary religiosity) or to be embraced (as a world of machinic assemblages of desire, for example). To destroy this world involves the destruction of this support (of jouissance), this relation (to jouissance), which denies the lack of a sexual relation. Without this destruction or subtraction of the faith in the semblant of a fully present jouissance there is no possibility of not remaining in the porno-world.
[5] The great refusal is the stripping away of the all the semblants of (full) jouissance. For the neo-Platonists of the Italian Renaissance stripping away of the worldly involved two (linked) series of metaphors: those of ascent to the One (via ladder, etc.), and those of destruction of what exists (flaying, etc.). That is to say, in the language of Alain Badiou, the twin practices of subtraction and destruction are the twin practices of without-philosophy, contrary to the world and the sexed/sexualised body. What is essential here, although it can no longer be thought under the terms of a “practice,” is self-criticism (as criticism of the self). First this will involve the subtraction of the people from the porno-world (“ascent”), and then the destruction of that world (“flaying” the semblant). This will be an askesis (which is not, as Foucault pointed out, an asceticism) of the theorist as an askesis of a (lacking) jouissance. The paradox is of stripping ourselves of the semblant that we lack, without then conceding to another Master. This must be an eternal practice of rebellion against sexuality as the infernal blockage of all rebellion – a kind of chastity of theory and the theorist in the name of the great refusal of all that links us to the world and (its) (pro)creation.

Orginally published as Editorial 4, Sans-philosophie.net (2006)

Anarchy–Without–Anarchism

[1] WE declare war on God and the State, the alpha and omega of philosophy and the world, in the name of anarchy-without-anarchism. We are radically antinomian – abandoning the law in all its forms, including that of its withdrawal – this is what makes us anarchist. To be anarchist is to reject anarchism as the miserable discourse of “radical opposition.” All that it offers is another wisdom, and we know that wisdom always conceals a master. The anti-politics of anarchy-without anarchism does not exist but insists in the recurrence of an absolute rupture with the world and its law – the anarchist invariant – at Alamut, at Münster, and all the other unknown and unnamed places of its emergence.

[2] We are the heretics, apostates, false messiahs, deserters, non-believers, and nihilists, who immediately realise life outside the law on the body of the earth. Everywhere today we see how the self-styled “left-wing” of philosophy has sutured itself to the religious under the sign of the theological. Our heresy is an attack on this suturing through the heretical use of religion as an inquiry into all that breaks with the law and the world. We are, in Bataille’s admirable term, atheological.

[3] The world is always disciplined and organized, minimally in its very regime of appearance, its imaginary configuration. This is then reproduced at every level by operations of power, and the monotony of power it always offers us the same world: hierarchical, ordered, segmented, regimented, and lawful (even if that law is only the law of value). We will not be disciplined or organized.

[4] This reproduction of organization and discipline becomes most ridiculous in the existence of “revolutionary organizations.” The comedy is even greater today when we see ex- or post- Marxists trying to live without the “Party-form,” as if the anarchists had not left it behind long ago. This farce is betrayed by the fact that these radical politicians cannot give up on the figure of the militant, the offspring of organization. Deprived of the Party the militant remains the vector of representation, the figure of alienated revolt, playing the allotted role of activist. In this way the militant provides the model imposing discipline, so that the people will conform to the fantasmatic constructions of “radical” politics. We refuse to conform to representation and we will not play our allotted role.

[5] Of course we know full well that the philosophers and politicians, if we can tell them apart, will judge anarchy-without-anarchism as spontaneist, voluntarist, ultra-leftist, infantile, or just merely gestural. Their judgements only serve to confirm that it cannot be recognized under the law of discourse, which is to say the law of the semblant. We do not fear the predictable diagnoses of the psychoanalysts either, who will find our rebellion to be paranoid, delusional, or Oedipal. They never understood Schreber’s rebellion: his choice to become a whore of God rather than a representative of the law.
For these police of the spirit the spectre of anarchy, in its truly antinomian form, evokes disaster: fundamentalism, terrorism, frenzied mysticism. But these are merely the ideological modes of antinomian anarchy, or the appearance imposed on it by power. We prefer to have faith in total revolt without fear of “totalitarianism.”
All that power can imagine is an apocalypse that purges the world of the people, but never of power itself. Our “apocalypse” is the invariant of subtraction from the world and from power. We are not asking to be authorized by philosophy or any other discourse, and if we take up the concepts of philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis it is only to use as weapons against them. Our indifference to the world will not succumb to the temptation of discourse.

[6] This indifference forms itself as a proletarian asceticism. It would be a mistake to see this as having anything to do with the spirit of sacrifice as preached by the managers of Capital, or with the persistent sickness of philosophy. Rather it is an activity of detachment that seeks out and destroys all instances of mediation, particularly the primary mediation through money as the general equivalent. If the notion of spiritual poverty as a category makes any sense to us then it does so only as the destruction of money as mediation.

[7] We also mortify the mediations of power that are lodged within us: the fear of death, the compulsion to sexual and social reproduction, and all the incitements of desire. Such mortification is not a matter of the exercise of the will but a self-criticism that breaks all of these attachments to the flesh. We extinguish the will because it is merely another attachment that always destines us to the world as the place of its realisation.

[8] Ontology is the philosophical operator of power and the law – the last instance of attachment to the world. All that the ideologists of contemporary anti-capitalism and its movements can imagine is a revised Spinozism: a reactive counter-ontology. This counter-ontology opposes the constituent power (puissance) of the multitude to the constituted power (pouvoir) of the State and Capital, leaving us only with the grid of power itself and the actualisation of lines of flight. Is it really impossible to imagine the refusal of power as such? We refuse the blackmail of ontology through a freedom irreducible to being. This freedom is the freedom to attack power at every point, never in the name of another power or in its obverse, resistance. Why should we give a name to our attack? To foreclose nomination in the symbolic is what leads to the return in the real, not as psychosis but as real rebellion.

[9] This return in the real is not a matter of praxis, which is only ever worldly. As Rainer Werner Fassbinder economically expressed this: “I don’t throw bombs, I make films.” We don’t throw bombs, we theorise.

[10] Anarchy-without-anarchism is nothing – nothing but the recurrent detonation of this series of ruptures.

Originally published as Editorial 11, Sans-philosophie.net (2006)