off, does anything remain of his economics in an age in which production is no longer the extension of human physical effort – as were the energies exerted in the nineteenth century – but instead, with cybernetics, an extension of the brain, of logic? Does Marx belong to an outmoded technological era, or does his work contain a way of conceptualizing “living labor” that continues to be effective? I believe that this must be approached in a free and open manner, now that power is no longer at stake here. We can reread his work freely and tranquilly, in the same way we would do for Spinoza or Kant.
Next, in addition to determining up to what point Marx is untouched by the deviations that claimed to follow from his thought, we must also determine to what extent he did justice to the specificity of the political realm. I had doubts about this after the events in central Europe. Is there not in Marx the prejudice (in the strong sense of the term) that there is no history proper to the political and that the latter is nothing but an effect of the history of economics? I believe that important segments of the history of Europe have not been sufficiently considered. I have in mind the history of free cities – Italian, Flemish, Hanseatic – and not simply those of English parliamentary democracy. There is perhaps a properly political history of liberty which overlaps and intersects with the history of the relations between labor and capital. And, based on this, there may be an evil specific to politics that is not necessarily the expression of the economic evil of exploitation, an evil that would stem from the very exercise of power. A certain silence of Marx on this aspect has created a breach in which openly Machiavellian uses of power have been swallowed up.
Finally, on the symbolic level of signs, language, and norms – a level that is foundational in its own way – do we not encounter the limit of an explanation referring back to Marx? For example, if mechanization did not develop in Antiquity, it was not only because there were slaves, but also because in that period work was not valued as the expression and the means of human education and development. Is it not only once labor has become fundamental to the education of the human species that its emancipation will be called for? This question concerns the place of technologies in relation not only to the political realm but to the symbolic realm as well. This is the domain that was the most deeply concealed by Marxism after Marx. I condemn this period for its occultation of the profound resources of Marx’s work, the essential content of which was hidden behind a very ideological vision serving to justify a power which itself was in no way grounded in the great texts of Marx.
In Oneself as Another you reserve the term “ethics” for the “aim of an accomplished life” and the term “morality” for “the articulation of this aim in norms characterized at once by the claim to universality and by an effect of constraint.”6 You write: “‘From you,’ says the other, ‘I expect that you will keep your word’; to you, I reply: ‘You can count on me.’”7 In this way, do you think you have succeeded in articulating the contradiction between the claim to universality of human rights and duties on the one hand, and the singularity of each individual on the other?
Today we have models of universalities that have nothing to do with that proposed by Hegel, or any other philosophy of history. We have the model of the American philosopher, John Rawls, with his theory of justice. Or that of the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, with his ethics of communication and argumentation. What is universal is the capacity for argumentation, independent of the content of the arguments. Today the problem is no longer linking the universal to the singular but rather the abstract universal to the historical. This debate finds one of its expressions in the rebirth of nationalism. On the one hand, nationalism seduces by the concrete richness of its content, its mores, its practices, its shared convictions, and ultimately by its purely ethnic identity. On the other hand, a purely abstract conception of universality leaves us unsatisfied. One of our great contemporary problems lies in connecting this abstract universal with the history of communities. On one side, we find the tradition of the social contract, which is an abstract reality, and on the other, the tradition of shared communities, which are concrete realities.
There are parts of the world where this dilemma has not yet reached maturity or where it is not even perceived at all. Whether this is in Yugoslavia or in other conflicts of the same type, we lack a sense of history in this regard. In our geopolitical era, we are judging within the framework of a political morality born in 1945. At that time, we made a sort of pledge, implicit throughout all of Europe, that we would no longer treat one another as we had previously done in world wars. However, there is a part of Europe where this message was not received, and it continues to behave as we had up to 1945. I am also thinking of Algeria, confronted with two forms of corruption, that of the FIS [Front islamique du salut] and that of the FLN State [Front de libération nationale]. In regressive situations such as these, faced with grave moments of disaster, only a few committed individuals, only a few indomitable consciences, are responsible, in reality, for the future of civilized society. For me, conviction is the response to crisis: my place is assigned, the hierarchy of preferences compels me, the intolerable transforms me from a timid or disinterested spectator into a person of conviction, who discovers in creating and creates in discovering. The lucidity of our gaze does not spare us from engagement in protest or from the will to repair breaches.
Your philosophical thought seems to me to be based more on a reinterpretation of Kantian republicanism than on an act of religious faith. For, if every person is to be considered an end in himself or herself and not a means to an external end, does this not presuppose that in reality it is otherwise? Have you not asked yourself whether what is left unexamined in this Kantian precept is not, deep down, the exploitation of one person by another?
In one of his political writings, Kant speaks of “unsocial sociability.” On the judicial level, the law, and on the political level, the Rule of Law [l’État de droit], serve to make possible the coexistence of beings whose desires and interests are often in conflict. The fact that we aren’t at one another’s throats, that we accept to live together, constitutes a minimum of consensus. Conflict is not, for all that, absent from the scene inasmuch as, individually or collectively, we have competing interests. Contemporary society is increasingly conflictual because it is increasingly complex. Conflict is not a misfortune, but a structural element in a society in which, as the diversity of projects never ceases to grow, a rule of the game that will make coexistence possible is ever more urgent. This future, however, raises in return the entirely new question regarding the people who are excluded from this rule of the game. The result of this exclusion is a form of poverty completely unlike the poverty of the nineteenth century, which was placed along the same scale as wealth. Today inclusion and exclusion are incommensurable. I want to express how politically disturbing I find the increasing numbers of people who are socially excluded. There are people who are totally outside, even outside of any alternative, and this is without precedent. I have frequently worked with people like the ATD Fourth World [Agir Tous pour la Dignité Quart Monde]. There is now a fringe of marginal people who are no longer members of the social contract. How are they to be integrated? By helping them to find work, housing? But, precisely, looking for work or housing implies that one belongs to the social body. This is a big question posed to Western societies: can they integrate everyone? I don’t know if this is inscribed within the Marxist framework or if, instead, exclusion has taken the place of exploitation. In the latter case, are the same descriptions, the same explanations, the same remedies still valid?
It remains to be seen whether exclusion takes the place of exploitation or whether it is the form of exploitation pushed to extreme, something like the modern version of the old concept of Lumpenproletariat about which so many contradictory things have been written…
I am thinking here of a text that was fundamental, despite its narrowness and its excesses – the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The hypothesis is that the proletariat are part of the social circle because they had to organize themselves into a class among the other classes. Those excluded today are no longer capable of forming a class. They are “outsiders” [“hors classe”]. This raises new questions concerning parliamentary democracy, majoritarian democracy. There now exists
