at emancipation by economism or the national state.
As for subversive negation, indeterminate, anarchistic and destructive of knowledge (without replacing it), this has led to a recuperation by literature, philosophy and ideology, including institutionalized psychoanalysis.32
For nearly a century and a half now, theoretical thought in France has remained below its theoretical possibilities, below political practice and events: the revolutions of 1848, 1871 and 1968 (not forgetting the ‘liberations’ of 1919 and 1944). These political events already go beyond (supersede) both reality and political reflection. Thought in France dwells on illusory brilliance, diversions that lead it only into a siding. Marx had already noted this backwardness, due to ‘deep’ causes and reasons that he saw as not unique to this country. French thought sometimes hurls itself into the verbal depths of philosophy separated from practice. It then rediscovers the Cartesian logos, attached to the cogito, the thinking ‘subject’, which suits an isolated knowledge, a subjectively abstract intellectuality. In the age of Descartes, the philosophical thesis of the thinking subject had a subversive edge; it was bound up with an individualism on the offensive and with an understanding of practice (social and political). Three centuries later, it is simply a convenient escape route.
Or else this thought falls into journalism, accepting or presupposing the confusion between information and cognition. A passionate and passive interest is taken in what happens far away: in Russia, Spain, China, Italy, Czechoslovakia, in the Third World, in Chile, etc. These experiences, generally unfortunate, are expected to provide a recipe applicable to France. Little attention is paid to what is happening close at hand, under our own eyes. It is forgotten that for Marx and Engels, France was the ‘classic’ country of revolutions, and that political practice here runs ahead of thought.
When the German philosophers, at the start of the nineteenth century, sought to reflect theoretically on what was happening outside their own country, in the rest of Europe, they made up for German backwardness instead of aggravating it. They gained a theoretical function and exercised this, down to Marx and Nietzsche. Besides, nothing happened at home that had great theoretical significance, and even Bismarck’s role was only to adapt to a new situation, the Napoleonic model of the state, as elaborated by Hegel.
The weakness of French thought is striking, even after the Commune of 1871 – until the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century. Revolutions in France, from the first successful one down to the latest abortive one of 1968, have failed to arouse political reflection and critique (implying the critique of politics). The devious combat between a France openly reactionary in both thought and daily life – a Byzantine France – and the France of boldness (sometimes fuite en avant) has never ceased.
13) We now come to the title phrase, ‘kingdom of shadows’. What does this mean? It did not proclaim an unconditional apologia for the works discussed here.
Hegel saw and foresaw the omnipresence and omnipotence of the state. He described its rationality, borne by definite social classes and strata: middle class, bureaucracy, technocracy, army, political apparatuses, etc. He even described the deadly boredom that results from this: the shadow on earth of the sun of the Idea and the gloomy edifice of the state. The satisfaction of the Spirit that had completed its task, the satisfaction of all needs by appropriate work and objects, the satisfaction of the conscious ‘subject’, and the self-satisfaction of everything that had reached its plenitude, could only produce a flat and heavy bourgeois happiness: possession extended to the absolute. Hegel thus declared his science and his own wisdom to have reached its twilight, along with the whole of philosophy. Knowledge, like the owl of Minerva, emerged only as night was falling. The state? It was the old age of the world, the end of history and creative consciousness, an exhaustion proclaimed and provoked by philosophy, by the system, by knowledge and wisdom. As for philosophy, it painted ‘grey on grey’. This greyness has what one might call a privileged symbol and symptom: the death of art, an illusion of youth and human folly.33 After youth and maturity, the third age brings the process to a close, in a final equilibrium.
Unlike Hegel, Marx did not take as his principle and starting hypothesis the ‘real’, the accomplished, but rather the possible. He developed the reasons for revolutionary possibility and its entry into the real by overturning it. He thus sought to rationally establish faith in the possible. Like the Gallic cock that he celebrated in his youthful writings, he trumpeted the eternal dawn, the immortal youth of the Revolution. What in fact has been ‘realized’? The shadow, the very opposite of the possible proclaimed by Marx, and this with its own signboard, its own vocabulary. Nothing of what proclaimed its end has actually reached this. Not even the old philosophy! Nowhere has the working class conquered the status of political ‘subject’ (collective and revolutionary), carrying society beyond politics. Was Hegel right? Yes, but on all sides there are phenomena of disassociation to be seen, of corruption, of the rottenness of the centralized state; everywhere there is opposition, appeal, differences and decentralizations. Everywhere state structures are shaking and then reconstructed. And yet, if we can see in every part of the world a tendency towards what Marx proclaimed, nowhere has this tendency indicated anything but a poorly traced path, an uncertain horizon. Hence the immense disappointment already sensed by Marx himself: ‘Dixi et salvavi animam meam.’
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