Slavishness

Have you ever heard yourself speak as a master? You recognise it: it is the voice with which you berate yourself; it says: work harder, account for yourself, time is running out. It speaks in you and you hear as you speak the masterful voice which reaches to the heart of what you are. Which repeats itself such that you present yourself to the world as an orderly, responsible individual who finishes tasks on time and gets the job done. The voice of a master? Rather the voice of a slave who would make a slave of himself. But is it that simple?

Castells claims the new social movements are movements of identification. Doesn’t militancy require that vigilance, that work of autonomy such that a group can maintain itself in the demand around which it forms itself? But I wonder whether such identification doesn’t endanger another kind of relation – not work this time but what is called worklessness (Bataille, Nancy, Agamben …) Another kind of militancy (but is it a militancy?): the group that labours to keep a difference intact, a lapse in the work of identification. Why? Because work was complicit in what makes the world too boring, too serious, a world of masters and slaves …

Is this what Surrealism sought to overturn? It called for a revolution of thinking, of everyday life as much as a determined political project (campaigning against the Kif war, contributing to journals of the far Left, collaborating on intellectual work with Trotsky). The same, perhaps, in some of the groups in the Events of May 1968 (the Movement of the 22nd of March).

Two kinds of militancy: the struggle to overcome the contradiction, the public struggle to destroy the present injustice. Then a private struggle – intense communication: the life of men and women struggle to overcome the model of interpersonal relations (the friends at the rue Saint-Benoit …) (But also, somewhere else (but is it private or public?): the artwork.)

The public, the private: Surrealism holds the dream of struggling on both fronts. On the one side, the public presence, a life lived on the streets and in the cafes; on the other, the encounters between the Surrealists (and Nadja …) What holds them together? Is it possible to hold them together? The transformation required: the subordination of the voice of identification – that voice you sometimes hear in yourself speak, stern, impatient – to a kind of difference. Where it is a matter of working such that worklessness does not disappear.

Perhaps it is to this play of work and worklessness to which the work of art already attests. Now I am thinking of the peculiar forms of art which question their own conditions of possibility – the poem of the poem (Holderlin), the poem as the Open (Rilke), but then also the novel that is a search for itself (Kafka’s The Castle, Blanchot’s The One Who was Standing …) (And then, why not, films that are looking for themselves (Tarkovsky’s Mirror)). But what kind of examples are such works to any kind of militancy?