Timelines: The Two Arcs (2022)

Translator’s Introduction

This is the third chapter of Chronologies du présent, a collection of essays published in 2022 based on a series of lectures given by Sylvain Lazarus in 2018. Crisis and Critique published other excerpts in “Subjective Singularities”, including the Introduction by Claire Nioche, the first lecture on “The Two Classisms”, the fifth chapter on the titular “Subjective Singularities”, and the Conclusion on “The Subjective Without Organization”. We have also published the fourth chapter, “May ‘68: Politics and History”, in this issue.

The major choice I’ve made here is to translate chronologie as “timeline”. In the edition published by Crisis and Critique, Robert St. Clair opted for “chronicle”, even though in French the direct translation of chronicle would be chronique. Chronologie, on the other hand, translates directly to chronology or timeline, and this aligns more with Lazarus’s conceptual terminology. After all, the concept of politics as sequential is central to his theoretical project. In this essay, he offers the concept of chronologie to stitch together the various sequences he writes about, including the classist, Bolshevik, and dialectical modes of politics which collectively stand in for the Paris Commune, Russian Revolution, and Chinese Revolution, as we commonly understand them. His intervention in this essay is to place these sequences within a larger timeline, which he calls “the arc of revolutions”. Thus the title of this essay.

What I call the arc of revolutions spans from the French Revolution (1792) to the 1920s—the final spasm of the German Revolution.

Within the Marxist lineage of the category of revolution, the French Revolution occupies an ambiguous place. It is absent from the cycle of referential revolutions, on account of its non-proletarian character. This fails to take into account the question of the state in the experience of the French Revolution.

At the time of the UCF(ml), in the 1970s, I argued for the reality of a “global ideological history” punctuated by the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century, October and the Cultural Revolution: the presence of a Communist Party was decisive in these events. In the 1980s, during the time of l’Organisation politique, with the category of “historical mode of politics,” I gave a prominent place to the French Revolution within an approach to politics that was no longer classist, Marxist, or Leninist, but grounded in the statement “people think” and the possibility of a “politics of interiority.” I focused on major upheavals where a possibility emerged for the masses, the people, what I now call people (gens).

In the approach I will attempt here, the revolution will be understood through its organic link with the state.

The Arc of Revolutions

From the point of the systematic destruction of the old state and the invention of a new state form, the category of revolution runs from the era of the French Revolution to the years following the end of World War I. From the early 1920s onward, with the bloody failure of the German Revolution, the workers’ councils, and the implementation of a terrorist state in the Soviet Union, the arc closes. The worker, popular version of communism is crushed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat and the question of communism were extremely present in the socialist organizations which, through splits, became the communist parties. The Bolshevik Communist Party was founded in March 1918, and the French Communist Party at the Congress in Tours in 1920. The Chinese Communist Party was created in 1921.

1920: the crushing of popular workers’ communism and the triumph of state communism in the USSR. If the 20th century was not the century of revolution, it was the century of party-states.

I had addressed this point about the party-state in “The Three Regimes of the Century”.¹ Today, I would say: the party-state is contemporary with the state without revolution. That is to say, with a time where the category of revolution is closed.

I therefore distinguish two great sequences: the first, which I call the arc of revolutions, spanning from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s; and a second arc, running from 1920 to the present, which I name the arc of the party-states. For me, the so-called “revolutions” after 1920 fall within the sequence of the arc of the party-states.

The Chinese “Revolution” of the Long March (1934–1935) already marks a displacement from the category of revolution to that of revolutionary war, which continued until the creation of the People’s Republic of China. What is called the Chinese “Revolution” is therefore a revolutionary war. With the “line” of protracted war and the creation of red bases, the revolutionary war distinguishes itself from the earlier category of revolution, which practiced the insurrectionary destruction of the state.

As for the Cultural Revolution, particularly in its workers’ phase, that of the Shanghai Commune (1966), its objective was to combat the bourgeois line within the party, a line that wanted the restoration of capitalism and the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) wanted to put into practice, within the Chinese Communist Party, an effective workers’ leadership, or “proletarian leadership” in its own terms. The Cultural Revolution intervened at the end of a long internal struggle, which began as soon as power was seized in 1949. It took place within the party-state², against the “bourgeois orientation.” Its historicity is that of the party-state. The GPCR’s antagonistic object is the bourgeois line within the party: it is therefore not anti-party. It was a gigantic recovery, of a political-ideological rectification of the party-state, in which workers and youth were at the forefront, massively; and they were at the forefront on both sides, divided into two camps, that of Mao Zedong and that of Liu Shaoqi.

In the common usage of the word “revolution,” any mass uprising is a revolution. My thesis is that there are major historical positives that do not fall under the signifier “revolution.” Unless we say that revolt and the creative power of people are signed, everywhere and always, by the word “revolution.” I do not think so. National liberation struggles and guerrilla movements also do not fall under the category of revolution in the sense that I understand it, which in no way diminishes their historical importance.

In no way can the GPCR be compared to the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, nor to that of 1917; those aimed at the destruction of the state. The Cultural Revolution does not set itself the objective of destroying the party-state. It seeks to rectify it, to reform it.

The arc of revolutions thus conjoins state and revolution in the following form: the revolution destroys the existing state. Its constitutive relationship to the state is destruction: the destruction of the absolute monarchy in 1792, the destruction of the bourgeois state in its political, legal, and economic forms by the Paris Commune in 1871, and the radical destruction of Tsarist structures in 1917. It is this insurrectionary and popular destruction of the state that characterizes and identifies the arc of revolutions. I say precisely: insurrectionary and popular destruction. A revolution occurs when the establishment of a new form of state is subordinated to this destruction and articulated with it. It is not the same when armed units, even if they are part of the people’s army, seize power and install new mechanisms of power and social order, as in 1949 with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.

The Arc of Party-States

After 1920, the concept of revolution as the destruction of the state is exhausted. The question of the state, in the form of the party-state, remains central and increasingly obscure, while revolution in the sense of the insurrectionary and popular destruction of the state is, in fact, no longer referential nor effective.

I would like to note one point: among revolutionary Marxists, the theoretical corpus on the question of the state, that of Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), has not, in my view, been renewed by either Lenin or Mao Zedong.

For Engels, the state is the product of the fact that class contradictions are antagonistic. Consequently, the dictatorship of the proletariat, by abolishing property and classes, will tend to cause the state to wither away. Lenin subverts the theory of spontaneous consciousness with his proposition on antagonism What Is To Be Done?, but he fully embraced Engels’s propositions in The State and Revolution. I believe that, in Marxist-Leninist thought, there has been no theoretical or problematic innovation on the state since Engels. Althusser already wrote:

Marxist theory says almost nothing about the state, ideology and ideologies, politics, or the organizations of the class struggle (their structure and functioning). This is a “blind spot” that undoubtedly testifies to the theoretical limits Marx ran into, as if he were paralyzed by the bourgeois conception of the state, politics, etc., to the point of reproducing it only in a negative form (critique of its legal character). Blind spot or forbidden zone, the result is the same. And this is important, because the tendency toward communism finds itself blocked (or unaware of itself) in everything concerning these “regions” or these problems.³

And Mao, you might ask? With Mao, however, there are significant innovations on the concept of contradiction. Principal and secondary contradictions, and contradictions within the people that are resolved by methods other than the violent and destructive ones used for antagonistic contradictions. Similarly, against Stalin, Mao affirms the persistence of class struggle under socialism and even within the party itself.

Why not consider these innovations as a new theory of the state? Because they are major innovations on the theory of the party and not on the theory of the state; even so, it is indeed a party-state: a party-state that found itself in power after victoriously leading a revolutionary war. The profile of the Chinese party-state is profoundly different from that of the Soviet party-state. The ruptures are of two orders. The first rupture is confidence in the masses, and what Mao calls the major importance of the mass line: the thesis that “the masses have immense power of enthusiasm for socialism.” Or again: “the masses are the true heroes.” When, on Mao’s initiative, the Chinese Communist Party decided to support the peasant wars (Why Can Red Power Exist in China?, 1927), it took into account, alongside the peasants, another subject of history, one that was not that of the urban workers’ insurrections of the Third International. The second rupture between Mao and Stalin is a vision of the state stemming from the experience of the liberated areas — particularly that of Yan'an — on the “great differences” (relations between city and countryside, relations between manual and intellectual labor, relations between men and women) and the idea that progressive politics works to reduce these great differences rather than accentuate them. These new references of the Chinese Communist Party do not hide the fact that, starting in 1949, it was a party-state.

The fact is that the question of the state cannot be resolved by the party —which was the Leninist position, a position with which the Cultural Revolution was unable to achieve a stabilized break. The essence of the party is that of command, authority, and competence.

In the strict sense, I am referring to the “party-state” after the seizure of power. Before the seizure of power, the party is subordinate to the revolutionary power of the masses; it does not have state power. The mass instances, for their part, are necessarily territorialized: think of the sans-culotte sections, the clubs of the Paris Commune, the soviets of Petrograd and Moscow... The revolutionary capacity of the masses is confronted by the territorialized forms of its organization. However, unity of command, in the form of the party or revolutionary headquarters, seeks to impose itself. Unity of command is necessary for insurrection or people’s war, and this unity of command must be structured. The question of the state arises from the very beginning of both the insurrection and the people’s war. This goes hand in hand with a single leadership that can become a national leadership.

Beginning in 1920, with the destruction of the soviets, the Communist Party of the USSR appropriated the question of the state under the alibi of class and the alibi of its proletarian character; the party held the line of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus of the withering away of the state. The party affirmed itself as expressive of the working class as a revolutionary proletariat. Class identity, embodied and expressed in the soviets, is then monopolized in the space of the party. Mao would attempt to renew the “spirit” of the party with the categories of masses and mass line, and the pursuit of class struggle within the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In a text from the 1830s, Clausewitz indicated:

Considering that the concept of the state has only become a reality in recent centuries, that supreme power has reinforced and that distinct elements have regrouped into a whole, we can easily understand that the very approximation of classes and their gathering into the unity of the state has brought out all the more this diversity of rights and duties from where tension arises.⁴

What must be emphasized is that “tension,” in the text, designates the Revolution. State and revolution are the categories under which the question of central power was posed during and after the French Revolution.

I think we need to reexamine the history of the twentieth century, of contemporary France, in light of this thesis regarding the lapsing of the category of revolution with the end of the arc of revolutions. So far, the progressive approach to the question of the state is still formulated on the basis of what are considered deviations, ruptures, and rifts in the system of order, domination, and the paradigmatic command of state power. But rifts, deviations, and ruptures do not in themselves constitute “antagonism with the entire existing political and social order” (Lenin)⁵, and the destruction of the state is not constitutive of these processes of deviation, rupture, mobilization, movement, revolt...

This was obvious in 1936, a great popular movement that had no revolutionary ambitions. Moreover, as I have often explained, the Popular Front was a refusal to confront the effective historicity of the year 1936, which was not one of paid leave and union rights (however legitimate and honorable those objectives may be) but rather one of war approaching on all sides and already underway in Spain. I have always drawn a link between 1936, where the social question overshadowed the national question, and the invasion and national disaster of the exodus of 1940.

In 1946, the PCF’s abandonment of the thesis of the revolutionary destruction of the state, with the peaceful transition to socialism, consummated the fundamental rupture with Leninism even further. It is wages, pensions, social protection, public services... that become its sole points of reference. These are those of the state order, of the parliamentary systems of the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

But 1968, too, is not a booster to the real of the radical antagonism that would require the violent destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.

Communism, that specter which, according to Marx and Engels, haunted Europe in 1848, the working-class struggle leading to the withering away of classes and the state, is a set of theses, of statements that we today can say are inaccurate. October took place; the withering away of the state did not, and communism even less so. In my view, there is a dual requirement. The first is to submit Marxism-Leninism to its own propositions. The Manifesto, 1848. What Is To Be Done?, 1902. The State and Revolution, 1917. More than a century has passed; we must test the propositions of Marxism-Leninism against actual historical experience. The second requirement is not to reflect on what might have happened but did not, in the mode of “the process was mishandled but we must maintain the same hypotheses.” In my view, these are conclusive experiences: why is this conclusive? The key issue is not the experiment that took place, but the utopian character of the idea that the attempt should be repeated under the same statements. It is the repetition that is utopian. It is not easy to argue this point because a political experiment bears no resemblance to a scientific experiment. At the center of a political experiment, the subjectivity of an offensive mass situation is always original, unprecedented. It is an invention. The inventiveness of the masses is the decisive factor. Maoism can be understood as an awareness of the inventiveness of the masses from within Marxism-Leninism, which, in my view, does not preclude the fact that it must be closed. I wrote in 2008:

The closure and saturation of Maoism is an absolutely necessary endeavor in my view. We must open up Maoism to an operation comparable to what I had called post-Leninism. What is at stake is a non-classist approach to politics. We must divide Mao Zedong, splitting him between political prescriptions and philosophical-rational arguments. A complex question. I have often thought, while reading him, that Mao Zedong very skillfully juxtaposed political prescriptions on the one hand, and rational arguments rooted in materialism and dialectics on the other. This is what enabled him for a long time to cite Stalin even though his decisions were clearly antithetical to the Stalinist vision of politics. One might object to the importance for Mao himself of philosophy in the singular form of Marxist philosophy. One might further object that, as Mao himself asserted, there is an organic link between politics and dialectical materialism, also known as philosophy. Can there be a line of argument for the prescription that is in the same language, the same intellectuality as the prescription itself? Or is the discourse presenting politics always different from that of the prescription, always of a different order? If we are no longer within the space of historical materialism, what is the order of this discourse of presenting the rationality of the prescription? The rationality of exposition is a point of support for the rationality of organization. If historical materialism was the rationality of exposition and pedagogy of the prescription, it also becomes a referent for the question of organization. In this regard, the question of post-Maoism is entirely that of post-communism. We must accept the political lapsing of communism and advance its saturation by drawing on current political processes.⁶

Today, a few committees and philosophers, clinging to the term “communism,” continue fearlessly to look for signs of it, to search for clues to the revolution, to announce for tomorrow what the revolutions of the 20th century sought and did not find, and thus to announce for tomorrow what should have happened yesterday or the day before, without, however, saying why it did not happen, or even saying what happened instead of what was supposed to happen.

The need to confront what really happened — in the USSR and China in particular — is necessary and pressing. I maintain that there are conclusive experiences which, while failing to settle the question of what is true, do allow us to settle the question of what is false, of what is inaccurate. The entire apparatus — classes, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, withering away of the state, communism — collapses with the experience of the USSR and China.

Obviously, my intention is not to discredit what took place, to switch camps, or to deny myself. This formidable and courageous revolutionary history of the 20th century marks a decisive step forward: the question of freedom, equality, justice, and peace. Freedom, equality, justice, and peace, denied and combated by existing state apparatuses, were not made possible by the new spaces of state communism that emerged from the revolution.

If what I am suggesting is valid, how can we take a position on the state today, when we no longer have access to the category of revolution or the full set of Marxist categories? What I propose is to approach the question of the state in relation to the relationship of people to the state: starting from points of rupture, rifts, or deviations from the order, but also from coalescence; not only from dissidence, but also from acquiescence. To reflect not only on disorders and revolts, but on this massive and pregnant reality of the partial adequacy of consciousnesses with the state order.

The vote is remarkable: improbable, given that everyone knows exactly what political parties, politicians, and electoral promises are; and yet the vote takes place. My thesis is the following: people vote against all odds, because the state is necessary. And if the state is necessary, many conclude that one must be part of it, which is precisely the point of membership. We have the freedom to dissociate the two propositions: “the state is necessary,” which does not imply that one must “be part of it.” The common formulation of membership is that there is a right to the rule of law: citizenship. Essentially, citizenship is to affirm that the state is necessary and that one must “be part of it”; it is to affirm at the same time that the state is order and command, and that one must submit to order and command because the state is necessary.

I return to the question of revolution. Let us consider this: what if revolutions had been aleatory opportunities?

If we accept this proposition, then the question of the state will be disentangled from that of revolution. Revolution and its categories are no longer the lens through which to analyze the state, just as the theory of the state is no longer capable of accounting for revolution. It becomes clear, then, that Marxist concepts can no longer be invoked: classes, class struggle, dictatorship.

Thus, to separate: there is revolution as an opportunity, and then there is the question of the state — including the question of the state as it presents itself in that singular opportunity that is a revolution.

In one of his writings, Lenin offers a characterization of revolution that illustrates the pragmatic method I would like to employ. In 1920, Lenin maintained that revolution occurs when those who are governed no longer wish to be governed, and those who govern can no longer do so:

For a revolution to take place, it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realize that they can no longer live as they once did and to demand change. For the revolution to take place, the exploiters must be unable to live and rule as they did before. It is only when “those at the bottom” no longer want to, and “those at the top” can no longer continue to live in the old way, that the revolution can triumph.⁷

It is therefore also a matter of government, and of a serious crisis of government. A crisis in which unexpected figures emerge; unexpected and heterogeneous to the previous state apparatus. Revolution would thus be an aleatory opportunity for a different form of government, in the wake of the exhaustion of previous forms of government. When those who are governed no longer wish to be governed and when those who govern can no longer do so, a new form of government emerges, with renewed inspiration and foundations, as well as renewed bases of power.

The hypothesis of aleatory opportunities commits us to renouncing, with regard to state power, not only historical materialism but also historical rationalism, and any philosophical vision of the meaning of History. Let us say, in line with this pragmatic approach, that there is the state and its power, and let us abandon any theory of the state’s origins and its ends. The 18th century was fruitful in this regard. In the 19th century, the Communist Manifesto added to a theory of origins (class struggle) a theory of ends: a classless society.

We can hypothesize that the nature of power is not rational, stemming from what I call an obscure pragmatism. This obscure pragmatism of power corresponds to other forms of popular pragmatism that seize the occasion of a crisis, a moment of powerlessness, or a lapse in power, sometimes without the actors, and this point is important, without knowing where these aleatory opportunities lead or what will emerge from them.

In 1791, Saint-Just published The Spirit of the Revolution and the Constitution of France. After arguing in the preface that “the French Revolution is not an isolated event; it has its causes, its consequences and its end: this is what I have attempted to develop”⁹ he argues in chapter one that “revolutions are less an accident of arms than an accident of laws.”⁸ It is the notion of accident that I retain. Saint-Just understands laws in the sense used by Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws. I can therefore argue that Saint-Just, when speaking of an accident of laws, is in fact speaking of an accident of government. The accident of laws is an accident of government insofar as a government is invested through laws: “it is true that tyrants perish through the weakness of the laws they have undermined,” writes Saint-Just.¹⁰

We can agree, to return to the category of revolution, that the accident opens to the aleatory because it opens to an obscure beginning. Tocqueville, in an 1838 essay, The Social and Political Condition of France Before and After 1789, later published alongside The Old Regime and the Revolution, writes:

There has probably never been a revolution more powerful, more rapid, more destructive, and more creative than the French Revolution [...]. It regulated, coordinated, and legalized the effects of a great cause [by which Tocqueville means equality, ed.] rather than being that cause itself.

He adds further:

Everything the Revolution accomplished would, I have no doubt, have been accomplished without it; it was merely a violent and rapid process by which the political order was adapted to the social order, facts to ideas, and laws to customs.¹¹

What becomes of the category of accident in relation to Tocqueville’s theses? According to him, the Revolution itself can be considered an accident, since “everything the Revolution did would have been done, I have no doubt, without it.” More precisely, the Revolution “was nothing more than a violent and rapid process” of adaptation. The accident, then, is the violent modality of adaptation. The thesis of aleatory opportunity is an anti-perspectivist and ahistorical, even anti-historical, thesis.

Tocqueville’s vision is more comparative, since the question he poses is “but why did this Revolution, prepared everywhere, threatening everywhere, break out in France rather than elsewhere?”.¹² We find this inquiry in a very beautiful text by Clausewitz:

Our opinion, therefore, is that the French Revolution was born of two essential causes. The first is the tension between social classes, the highly privileged situation of the nobility, the great dependence, and, one might well say, in part, the severe oppression of the peasant class; the second is the disorder, favoritism, and wastefulness in the administration of that government.¹³

Where do we find the category of accident, or aleatory opportunity, here?

In France [...], the old structures collapsed and are gone forever; because once an organic form is broken, it may well be patched up, but it will never again become a truly organic whole. Moreover, the masses shattered the specter that governed them with arbitrary authority and established a mixed form of government. It was easier to break the old structures, already under heavy strain, than to create a new form of government, and it was predictable that after a violent revolution, there would be a long period of trial and error and more than a decade would be lost assimilating basic concepts before a form of government capable of taking root remained.¹⁴

What Clausewitz calls the “long process of trial and error” is the sequence succeeding the aleatory opportunity of the accident.

In the spring of 1917, Lenin was in Switzerland; he had not yet returned to Russia. In one of his interventions, he said—I quote from memory: “What will happen in Russia? Will the Soviets retain power? Will the bourgeoisie prevail? Will the tsar return?” He adds: “No one knows, and no one can know.” It is on this “no one can know” that I base the category of the aleatory, and what I call non-perspectivism, anti-historicism. If the February Revolution is an accident, what it opens up is obscure, absolutely.

Can Revolution and the State be Separated?

For a long time now, ever since my work on politics in interiority¹⁵, I have proposed separating politics from revolution, arguing that the lapsing of the category of revolution forces us to deploy the question of politics in an entirely different way.

In separating revolution from the state, along with the notion of aleatory opportunity, I am attempting to distinguish mass initiative and action from their consequences regarding the question of power and the state. I am seeking a non-finalist approach: not to qualify an event or situation solely in terms of its consequences, but to try to identify it in and of itself. From a strictly historicist perspective, this is impossible, because it is argued that the intelligence of events is constituted by their succession: while every significant mass action has effects on the state and triggers reactions, it cannot be reduced to these state effects. The event, the mass impulse, and improbable conjunctions create situations that are either described or understood through their effects and consequences. And this is what I call the historicist, causal, and finalist perspective, in the sense that one movement will be crushed and another will lead to the fall of the powers that be. Finalistic, in the sense that, all things considered, it is within the space of state power that what has taken place is said to reverberate. This approach is intellectually powerful. It is History, as the state’s mode of thought. In the face of this history, the state’s mode of thought, we can propose another thought, the thought of people.

To try to think beyond the historicist vision, I propose the hypothesis of the non-reciprocity of antagonism. The relationship between state power and that which is heterogeneous to it is antagonistic; it must reduce what it considers heterogeneous either through corruption, through repression, or through a combination of the two. The state’s response to what is heterogeneous to it is violence: in the face of this, what is to be done?

Marxism argued that in the face of this state violence, which is class violence, one must oppose another form of class violence, itself antagonistic, namely proletarian violence, whose strategic aim is the destruction of the bourgeois state. This hypothesis is no longer valid once we assume the lapsing of the category of revolution. This is precisely what I propose to call the non-reciprocity of antagonism.

I take it for granted today that “revolution,” in the sense in which the word was understood until the early twentieth century, no longer has any contemporary consistency. That its sequence is closed. It was a powerful form of intellectuality, a form of subjectivity and political practice. Politics is always sequential, specific to a time. And when that time draws to a close, the categories, the referents, and the logics of that sequence are also swept away in that closure. It is not a matter of erasing the has-taken-place. I insist on this point. Nor is it a matter of remaining under its intellectual and ideological rule, but of providing ourselves with the means to keep up with the characteristics and demands of the present. Machiavelli advised the Prince to adjust his power to act “according to the quality of the times”.

Revolution was the political and historical form devised to address the question of the state. The category of revolution and all the thoughts associated with it articulated the conception of politics and the conception of the state. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the lapsing of the category of revolution became, in my view, inescapable, I wondered whether this lapsing entailed the lapsing of the category of politics. Should one maintain that politics exists only when it conveys an alternative theory of the state (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie/dictatorship of the proletariat)? Could a politics without an alternative theory of the state be formulated? This question remains relevant today. Is it possible to have a theory of the state that does not amount to a proposition about the “good state”?

How can we avoid being confined, within the space of parliamentarianism, to a critique of parliamentarianism? And, within the space of the state, to a critique of the state? Unless we introduce the subjective capacity of people, there is no way out of these questions; there are only simulacra.

A major displacement was therefore proposed as early as the 1980s, one that I still believe is relevant: shifting from the register of the alternative state, or even the “good state,” to the question: what might a politics look like that seeks to construct itself not within the realm of the state but within what I have called the point of people and their subjective singularities?

This rupture is significant because its essential gesture consists in basing politics on the subjective capacities of people (when such capacities exist, for they are not a constant or a permanent feature), capacities that are not ruled by their discourse on the state, but by what is possible on the part of the people. When such capacities exist and take shape, they confront the state, not because they embody an alternative vision of the state, but because they embody principles. It is therefore by no means a matter of ignoring the question of the state, but of acknowledging that it can no longer be made the source and the stake of forms of subjectivation on the side of people. And that it is absolutely necessary to articulate other subjective and political spaces.

What did the category of revolution allow, and what does its lapsing no longer allow? The category of revolution created its own sequentiality in terms of the destruction of the state apparatus. With the lapsing of revolution, is there no longer any operator on the future of the state that serves as an indicator of the power of the masses, of the people?

Translated by Cam West