Translating the century

These thirteen lessons on the twentieth century were originally intended to be accompanied by a facing English translation. Rights and ownership intervened to foreclose that possibility. In the spirit of that original project, and by way of introduction, I would like nevertheless to include in this monolingual edition a reflection born of the initial plan that I shared with Alain Badiou. Since the lectures to follow aim to cleave as stringently as they can to the century's own propositions, it might be pertinent to ask what the century itself has to say about the question of language in general, and of bilingualism in particular.

While in many respects the century's philosophy has been marked, bar a few renegades and ‘extremists’ (I have in mind especially that brilliant and sombre Neo-Parmenidean from Trieste, Carlo Michaelstadter and his 1910 book La persuasione e la rettorica), by something like an apotheosis (if not a proto-theology) of language, an equation of philosophical with linguistic reflection (from the pedestrian propositions favoured in Cambridge to the tellurian homilies of Todtnauberg), the century's wordsmiths have been far more sceptical, experimental, or even despairing about the powers of language, be it ordinary or prophetic.

In concordance with the ever-increasing and often austere attentions that the arts of the century lavished upon ‘medium’, though perhaps with far more intimate and contorted repercussions, poets and novelists multiplied the ordeals undergone by linguistic material; just to consider the conventional armature of punctuation, so brilliantly explored by Adorno, the century's literature enacted both its suppression (Beckett's How It Is comes to mind) and its seemingly erratic, ‘agrammatical’ proliferation (see, for example, the stories of Arno Schmidt).

However, this endemic manipulation or flaunting of conventions was always accompanied not just by a reflective purification of medium (the belaboured narrative of aesthetic modernism) but by a veritable hatred of language. From William Burroughs's disquisitions on the ‘word virus’ and the prospects of an ‘electronic revolution’, to the sundry experiments (seldom compelling) in concrete poetry, language was attacked for being the very substance of convention itself, for its complicity with man's enslavement to utility, for its participation in the more or less surreptitious political control of human action and publicity. The twentieth century was also, after all, the century of prodigious, ramified investigations into the complicities between recording and control, inscription and domination.

Part of Samuel Beckett's enduring force lies precisely in the unique and exacting way in which his work combines, on the one hand, a formidable experimentation with syntactical and elocutionary devices and, on the other, a deep-seated, programmatic mistrust of the written word. Beckett channels these seemingly disparate demands through the strategy of bilingualism and self-translation (moving in the inverse linguistic direction, the obvious comparison would be to Nabokov's aristocratic delight in the infinitely layered fashioning and manipulation of linguistic worlds, with its labyrinthine complexity and ludic attention to detail – an aesthetic demeanour mostly untrammelled by the tortures of the Beckettian voice).

One doesn't have to (though one certainly should) frequent The Unnamable or the Texts for Nothing in order to get a taste of Beckett's intimate hatred of language (a hatred entirely proportionate to, and exacerbated by, his heterodox erudition). Already in his notorious letter to Axel Kaun of 1937, Beckett writes (originally written in German, I give this quotation in Martin Esslin's translation):

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested.

Note the urgency with which Beckett raises the question – which his entire work will endeavour to answer – of the capacity of literature to be as worthy of its time as the other arts (which only intensifies the irony of depicting the task of literature in an anticipation of Lucio Fontana's punctured, ‘spatialist’ canvases, or even Alberto Burri's burnt plastic openings). It is almost as if the burden of literature were compounded by this ‘vicious nature of the word’, as if the purification of its material required even riskier operations than those of the other arts (because the writer is ensnared or possessed by his own medium, constitutively incapable of abandoning it). Hence the call for a creative, resourceful hatred, an ‘efficient misuse’.

Beckett's much debated bilingualism is part and parcel of this programme, which he brilliantly dubbed as that of ‘literature of the unword’. A programme, it should be noted, which he adamantly distanced from that of Joyce. In Joyce's perversely erudite ‘corruption’ of the English language, the young Beckett (in his single extended essay of ‘criticism’, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce’, from Disjecta) already discerned something that would end up serving as the counter to his own linguistic strategies of ‘leastening’ and ‘worsening’: a saturation and corporealization of language, the transformation of the store of universal language into an inexhaustible, quasi-somatic reservoir of affective materials, symbolic allusions, delectable opacities.

Now, it is telling that from his beginnings as a writer – the period where he brashly laid down some of the ethical and aesthetic parameters that would later silently guide his punitive regimen of experimentation – Beckett already formulated the question of writing, and of his relationship to Joyce, in terms of what was to be done with the English language. First of all, he saluted Joyce's disdain for the ersatz humanist search after a universal tongue, in terms of his kinship with Dante: ‘They both saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal language. If English is not yet so definite a polite necessity as Latin was in the Middle Ages, at least one is justified in declaring that its position in relation to other European languages is to a great extent that of mediaeval Latin to the Italian dialects.’ For both there was no access to a universal language, but only a universalizing gesture: the invention of a language bearing a determinate relation to the multiplicity of spoken tongues and the capacity for thought and speech. Beckett paints Joyce in the image of Dante, saying of the latter: ‘He wrote a vulgar that could have been spoken by an ideal Italian who had assimilated what was best in all the dialects of his country, but which in fact was certainly not spoken nor ever had been.’

The operation of linguistic universalization in Joyce is therefore not depicted in terms of the idealization of a canon, but rather of an all-embracing impurification: ‘Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death.’ But, crucially, Joyce's anti-abstractive opting for a full, almost synaesthetic language, which tries to turn ‘the terrible materiality of the word surface’ into a kind of pulsating flesh in which ‘form is content, content is form’, a language that is ‘not about something [but] that something itself’, is ultimately viewed by Beckett as an image of purgatory, a continuous, multi-directional, infinitely variegated space where ‘a flood of movement and vitality’ drives ‘the vicious circle of humanity…without culmination’.

In such a domain there is no room for the nihilating desire of the hater of language, holes are not punched in language; on the contrary, language is constantly filled, multiplied, nourished (Joyce's somatic language remains the worthiest rival of Beckett's voices in the dark). Whence the crucial allusion to the subject of purgatory in the closing line of Beckett's 1928 essay: ‘And the partially purgatorial agent? The partially purged.’ Arguably, it was a dissatisfaction with this partial purging within a joyfully corrupted, garrulous English that partly drew Beckett to the bilingual stratagem, the purification of his thought in the transit between languages, the attempt to stop the vicious and natural adherence of language to speaker. Bilingualism conceived not as a machine for hybridization, but as a way of fighting the intimate compulsion of an irrevocably conventional speech; (self-)translation as a minutely calibrated filter for language, moving against the ease and obviousness of expression – the project to de-saturate language is certainly one of Beckett's great contributions to a century that was not averse, especially in its waning years, to think of itself as a purgatory.

Transcriptions, as it were, of public speech, these lessons and their English rendering do not seek to imitate or reproduce the century, or even to be ‘that something itself’; rather, as befits a pedagogy of conviction that must of necessity abhor nostalgia, it is a matter of conveying moments and inventions that were simultaneously refractory to interpretation and addressed to everyone, over and above linguistic affiliation. This universal address does not however exempt us from reflecting, in light of the hurdles and spurs that cultural and linguistic particularities presented to the subjects of the century, on the effects of the planetary hegemony of the ‘new Latin’, whether ‘official’ or otherwise. The problems that Beckett some seventy years ago discerned in Finnegans Wake – What is to be done with the English language? How can it be creatively manipulated, stripped or reconfigured? Can it be universalized against its status as the ‘common currency’ of global transactions (but also without slipping into platitudinous and reactionary jeremiads against ‘Americanism’ or ‘globish’)? – are still with us today.

Philosophical soundings of the century's molten subjective core, these lessons wager that the century's wilful compulsion to treat the intractable can be matched, in view of other, future passions, by the lucid transmission of moves and motivations that lay beyond the pale of consensual discourse and conversation; in other words, that philosophy can become a non-autochthonous space where the dark desires of the century can be rendered trans-parent to thought, or, to invert Beckett, where they may finally be abstracted to life.

I am grateful to Roberto Toscano, Lorenzo Chiesa, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Bruno Bosteels, Michael Dutton, Donald Fanger, John Malmstad, Justin Clemens, Michelle Speidel and Sebastian Budgen for their timely help with issues of expression, reference and translation at various junctures during the preparation of this manuscript. Special thanks to Ray Brassier for his thorough examination of an earlier draft and his numerous and vital suggestions, and to Nina Power for her corrections on the final version. I am also grateful to Alice Brett and the staff at Polity for their fine work on this project.

Alberto Toscano

The translator and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Gallimard, Paris for the extract on p. 205 from Paul Eluard, ‘Joseph Staline’ in Hommages, included in Oeuvres complètes, 1913–1953 (Gallimard, 1968).
Harcourt, Inc. for the extracts in chapter 8 from Anabasis (Section VIII) by Saint-John Perse, translated and with a preface by T. S. Eliot (1970).
Methuen Drama, A & C Black for the extracts in chapter 10 from The Decision by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett in Collected Plays: Three (Methuen, 1998).
University of Nebraska Press for the extract in chapter 2 from Mad Love by André Breton, translated by Ann Caws (1988). First published in French by Éditions Gallimard.
Oxford University Press for the extract on p. 199 from The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy by Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Oxford University Press, 1973); and extracts from the poems of Osip Mandelstam, from Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (Penguin, 1986).
Persea Books for the extract in chapter 8 from the Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger. Translation copyright © 1972, 1980, 1988, 1994, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York).
Princeton University Press for the extract on p. 207 from Paul Valéry, ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’, translated by James R. Lawler, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews (Princeton University Press, 1956–1975).
Simon & Schuster for extracts from the poems of Osip Mandelstam, from Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (Penguin, 1986).
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make suitable arrangements at the first opportunity.

1
Search for a method

What is a century? I have in mind Jean Genet's preface to his play The Blacks.¹ In it, he asks ironically: ‘What is a black man?’ Adding at once: ‘And first of all, what colour is he?’ Likewise, I want to ask: A century, how many years is that? A hundred? This time, it's Bossuet's question that commands our attention: ‘What are a hundred years, a thousand years, when a single instant effaces them?’² Must we then ask which is the instant of exception that effaces the twentieth century? The fall of the Berlin wall? The mapping of the genome? The launch of the euro?

Even supposing that we could manage to construct the century, to constitute it as an object for thought, would this be a philosophical object, exposed to that singular will which is the will to speculation? Is the century not first and foremost a historical unit?

Let's be tempted by the mistress of the moment: History. History, which is presumed to be the unshakeable support for any politics whatsoever. For instance, I could plausibly make the following claim: the century begins with the war of 1914–18 (a war that includes the revolution of October 1917) and comes to a close with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This is the short century (seventy-five years), a strongly unified century. In a word, the Soviet century. We construct this century with the aid of historical and political parameters that are both thoroughly recognizable and entirely classical: war and revolution. Here, war and revolution are specifically connected to the ‘world’. This century is articulated, on the one hand, around two world wars and, on the other, around the inception, deployment and collapse of the so-called ‘communist’ enterprise, envisaged as a planetary enterprise.

It's true that others, equally obsessed with History (or with what they call ‘memory’) count the century in an entirely different fashion. I can easily follow their lead. This time, the century is the site of apocalyptic events – events so ghastly the only category capable of reckoning with the century's unity is that of crime: the crimes of Stalinist communism and the crimes of Nazism. At the heart of the century lies the Crime which provides the paragon for all the others: the destruction of the European Jews. This century is an accursed century. The principal parameters for thinking it are the extermination camps, the gas chambers, massacres, tortures and organized state crime. Number intervenes as an intrinsic qualification. The reason is that once the category of crime is linked to the state, it designates mass murder. The balance sheet of the century immediately raises the question of counting the dead.³ Why this will to count? Because, in this instance, ethical judgement can only locate its real in the devastating excess of the crime, in the counting – by the millions – of the victims. The count is that point at which the industrial dimension of death intersects with the necessity of judgement. The count is the real which is presupposed by the moral imperative. The union of this real with state crime has a name: this century is the totalitarian century.

Note that the totalitarian century is even shorter than the ‘communist’ century. It begins in 1917 with Lenin (some would happily have it begin in 1793, with Robespierre,⁴ but then it would grow far too long), reaches its apex in 1937 with Stalin and 1942–5 with Hitler, and to all intents and purposes comes to an end with Mao Tsetung's death in 1976. It lasts about sixty years – provided one ignores exotic survivors like Fidel Castro, or certain marginal and diabolical resurgences, such as Islamic ‘extremism’.

Nevertheless, it is possible, for one coldly straddling this short century in all its lethal furore or seeking to turn it into the object of memory or contrite commemoration, to think our epoch historically in terms of its result. When all's said and done, the twentieth century would be the century of the triumph of capitalism and the global market. Having interred the pathologies of an unbridled will, the happy correlation of a Market without restrictions and a Democracy without shores would finally have established that the meaning of the century lies in pacification, or in the wisdom of mediocrity. The century would thereby express the victory of the economy, in all senses of the term: the victory of Capital, economizing on the unreasonable passions of thought. This is the liberal century. This century – in which parliamentarianism and its support pave the way to the triumph of minuscule ideas – is the shortest of them all. Beginning, at the earliest, after the seventies (the final years of revolutionary fervour), it lasts only thirty years. A happy century, they say. A rump century.

How can we meditate philosophically on all this? What can we say, in accordance with the concept, about the interlacing of the totalitarian century, the Soviet century and the liberal century? It's no use at this point picking some kind of objective or historical unity (the communist epic, radical evil, triumphant democracy…). For us philosophers, the question is not what took place in the century, but what was thought in it. What did the men of this century think, over and above merely developing the thought of their predecessors? In other words, what are the century's un-inherited thoughts? What was thought in the century that was previously unthought – or even unthinkable?

My method will consist in extracting, from among the century's productions, some documents or traces indicative of how the century thought itself. To be more precise, how the century thought its own thought, how it identified the thinking singul-arity of the relation it entertained with the historicity of its own thought.

To clarify this issue of method, allow me to raise what nowadays is a provocative, or even forbidden, question: What was the thought of the Nazis? What did the Nazis think? There is a way of always leading everything back to what the Nazis did (they undertook the extermination of the European Jews in gas chambers) that completely precludes any access to what they thought, or imagined they were thinking, in doing what they did. But ref-using to think through what the Nazis themselves thought also prevents us from thinking through what they did, and consequently forbids the formulation of any real politics that would prohibit the return of their actions. As long as Nazi thinking is not itself thought through it will continue to dwell among us, unthought and therefore indestructible.

When some say, casually, that what the Nazis did (the extermination) is of the order of the unthinkable, or of the intractable, they forget something crucial: that the Nazis both thought and treated what they did with the greatest care, the greatest determination.

To maintain that Nazism is not a form of thought, or, more generally, that barbarism does not think, is to abet a process of surreptitious absolution. It is one of the guises taken by today's intellectual hegemony, encapsulated in the slogan ‘there is no alternative’, what the French call la pensée unique. This is really nothing but the promotion of a politics without an alternative, a politique unique. Politics thinks, barbarism does not, ergo no politics can be barbarous. The sole aim of this syllogism is to hide the otherwise evident barbarity of the capitalist parliamentarianism which presides over our current fate. In order to escape this obfuscation we must maintain, in and by the century's testimony, that Nazism itself is both a politics and a thought.

Some will retort: ‘You refuse to see that Nazism – and Stalinism by proxy – is above all a figure of Evil.’ On the contrary, I maintain that by identifying them as forms of thought (or politics) it is I who finally accord myself the means to judge them, and you who, by hypostasizing judgement, end up protecting their repetition.

In fact, the moral equation that identifies the Nazi (or Stalinist) ‘unthinkable’ with Evil amounts to nothing more than a feeble theology. We have inherited a long history, after all, that of the theological equation of Evil and non-being. If, in effect, Evil is – if Evil enjoys a positive ontological status – it follows that God is its creator, and therefore responsible for it. To absolve God, Evil must be denied any being whatsoever. Those who affirm that Nazism is not a form of thought, or that it is not a politics (unlike their ‘democracy’), simply desire the absolution of thinking, or of politics. That is, they wish to conceal the deep and secret bond between the political real of Nazism and what they proclaim to be the innocence of democracy.

One of the century's truths is that the democracies allied in war against Hitler were more or less unconcerned with the extermination. Strategically speaking, they were at war with German expansionism, not at all with the Nazi regime. Tactically speaking (in the timing of the offensives, the choice of bombing targets, the commando operations, and so on), none of their decisions aimed at preventing, or even limiting, the extermination. This was the case even though, from an early date, they were perfectly aware of what was taking place.⁵ Today we can say the same thing as we witness our democracies – utterly humanitarian when it comes to bombing Serbia or Iraq – displaying an almost total lack of concern for the extermination of millions of Africans by AIDS, a disease that can and is effectively brought under control in Europe and America. But for reasons of property and economics, reasons stemming from commercial law and the priority of investments – for imperial reasons, reasons that are entirely thinkable and indeed are thought – medication will not be provided for dying Africans. Only for white democrats. In both cases, the century's real problem is to be located in the linkage between ‘democracies’ and that which, after the fact, they designate as their Other – the barbarism of which they are wholly innocent. What needs to be undone is precisely this discursive procedure of absolution. Only thus will we be able to construct some truths about the matter at hand.

The logic of these truths presupposes that we determine their subject, in other words, that we identify the actual operation at work in the denial of this or that fragment of the real. That is what I will attempt to do with regard to the century.

My idea is that we stick as closely as possible to the subjectivities of the century. Not just to any subjectivity, but precisely to the kind of subjectivity that relates to the century itself. The goal is to try and see if the phrase ‘twentieth century’ bears a certain pertinence for thinking, in a manner that goes beyond mere empirical calculation. Thus, we will adopt a method of maximal interiority. Our aim is not to judge the century as an objective datum, but rather to ask how it has come to be subjectivated. We wish to grasp the century on the basis of its immanent prescriptions; to grasp ‘the century’ as a category of the century itself. Our privileged documents will be the texts (or paintings, or sequences…) which evoke the meaning that the century held for its own actors; documents which, while the century was still under way, or had only just begun, made ‘century’ into one of their keywords.

In this way, we might manage to replace the passing of judgements with the resolution of some problems. The current moral inflation means that, on all sides, the century is being judged…and condemned. My aim is not to rehabilitate the century, but only to think it, and thus to show how it is thinkable. What should primarily arouse our interest is not the century's ‘worth’ before a court of human rights whose intellectual mediocrity bears comparison with the juridical and political mediocrity of the International Criminal Tribunal set up by the Americans. Instead, let us attempt to isolate and work through a few enigmas.

To conclude this lesson, I will address one of these enigmas, whose significance is hard to underestimate.

The twentieth century kicks off in an exceptional fashion. Let us take the two great decades between 1890 and 1914 as the century's prologue. In every field of thought these years represent a period of exceptional invention, marked by a polymorphous creativity that can only be compared to the Florentine Renaissance or the century of Pericles. It is a prodigious period of excitement and rupture. Consider just a few of its milestones. In 1898, Mallarmé dies, shortly after having published the manifesto of modern writing, Un coup de dés jamais… In 1905, Einstein invents special relativity (unless he was anticipated by Poincaré), together with the quantum theory of light. In 1900, Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, providing the psychoanalytic revolution with its first systematic masterpiece. Still in Vienna, in 1908, Schoenberg establishes the possibility of an atonal music. In 1902, Lenin creates modern politics, a creation set down in What is to be Done? This period also sees the publication of the vast novels of James and Conrad, the writing of the bulk of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and the maturation of Joyce's Ulysses. Mathematical logic, inaugurated by Frege, with the contribution, among others, of Russell, Hilbert and the young Wittgenstein, together with its sister discipline, the philosophy of language, takes hold both on the continent and in the United Kingdom. Now witness, around 1912, how Picasso and Braque undermine the logic of painting. Husserl, with solitary obstinacy, elucidates phenomenological description. In parallel, geniuses such as Poincaré and Hilbert – heirs to Riemann, Dedekind and Cantor – give a new foundation to the very style of mathematics. Just before the war of 1914, in Portugal, Fernando Pessoa sets some Herculean tasks for poetry. Cinema itself, having been invented only recently, finds its first geniuses in Méliès, Griffith and Chaplin. The list of wonders populating this brief period could go on and on.

But this period is immediately followed by something resembling a long tragedy, whose tone is established by the war of 1914–18: the tragedy of the unfeeling manipulation of human material. There is certainly a spirit of the thirties. As we shall see, it is far from being sterile. But it is as violent and monolithic as the spirit of the beginning of the century was unbridled and inventive. The sense of this succession confronts us with an enigma.

Or perhaps a problem. Let's ask ourselves this: The terrible thirties, forties, or even fifties – with their world wars, colonial wars, opaque political constructions, vast massacres, gigantic and precarious undertakings, victories whose costs are so astronomical one is tempted to call them defeats – is all this in relation (or non-relation) with the luminous, creative, and civilized inception that the first years of the century seem to represent? Between these two periods, there is the war of 1914. So what is the meaning of this war? Of what is it the result, or the symbol?

There is no hope of resolving this problem unless we keep in mind that the blessed period before the war is also that of the apogee of colonial conquest, of Europe's stranglehold over the entirety of the earth, or very nearly. And therefore that elsewhere, far away but also very close to everyone's conscience, in the midst of every family, servitude and massacre are already present. Well before the war of 1914, there is Africa, delivered over to what some rare witnesses and artists will call an upright conquering savagery.⁶ I myself gaze with dread upon that Larousse dictionary of 1932, passed on to me by my parents, wherein, under the heading – viewed as universally unproblematic – of the hierarchy of races, the skull of the black man is positioned between that of the gorilla, on the one hand, and the European, on the other.

After two or three centuries of the deportation of human meat for the purpose of slavery, conquest managed to turn Africa into the horrific obverse of European, capitalist, democratic splendour. And this continues to our very day. In the dark fury of the thirties, in the indifference to death, there is something that certainly originates in the Great War and the trenches, but also something that comes – as a sort of infernal return – from the colonies, from the way that the differences within humanity were envisaged down there.

Let us grant that our century is the one – as Malraux put it – in which politics turned into tragedy. What was it at the beginning of the century, during the golden inauguration of the belle époque, that prepared this vision of things? Basically, from a certain point onwards, the century was haunted by the idea of changing man, of creating a new man. It's true that this idea circulates between the various fascisms and communisms, that their statues are more or less the same: on the one hand, the proletarian standing at the threshold of an emancipated world, on the other, the exemplary Aryan, Siegfried bringing down the dragons of decadence. Creating a new humanity always comes down to demanding that the old one be destroyed. A violent, unreconciled debate rages about the nature of this old humanity. But each and every time, the project is so radical that in the course of its realization the singularity of human lives is not taken into account. There is nothing there but a material. A little like the way in which, for practitioners of modern art, sounds and forms, torn from their tonal or figurative harmony, were nothing but materials whose destination needed to be entirely recast. Or like the way formal signs, divested of any objective idealization, projected mathe-matics towards an automated completion. In this sense, the project of the new man is a project of rupture and foundation that sustains – within the domain of history and the state – the same subjective tonality as the scientific, artistic and sexual ruptures of the beginning of the century. Hence it is possible to argue that the century has been faithful to its prologue. Ferociously faithful.

What is intriguing is that today these categories are dead and buried, that no one gets involved any more with the political creation of a new man. On the contrary, what we hear from all sides is the demand for the conservation of the old humanity and of all endangered species to boot (our ancient wheat included) – when it is precisely today, with the advent of genetic engineering, that preparations are under way for a real transformation of man, for the modification of the species. What makes all the difference is that genetics is profoundly apolitical. I think I could even say that it is stupid, or at least that it doesn't represent a form of thought, but, at best, a technique. Thus, it is perfectly coherent for the condemnation of the Promethean political project (the new man of the emancipated society) to coincide with the technical (and ultimately financial) possibility of transforming the specificity of man. This is because such a change does not correspond to any kind of project. We learn of its possibility from newspapers; that we could have five limbs, or be immortal. And all this will come to pass precisely because it is not a project. It will happen in accordance with the automatism of things.

In short, we are living through the revenge of what is most blind and objective in the economic appropriation of technics over what is most subjective and voluntary in politics. And even, in a certain sense, the revenge of the scientific problem over the political project. Science – therein lies its grandeur – possesses problems; it does not have a project. ‘To change what is deepest in man’⁷ was a revolutionary project, doubtless a bad one; it has now become a scientific problem, or perhaps merely a technical problem, in any case a problem that allows for solutions. We know how, or at least we will know.

Of course, we could ask: What is to be done about the fact that we know how? But to reply to this question we require a project. A political project: grandiose, epic and violent. Believe me, inane ethical committees will never provide us with an answer to the following question: ‘What is to be done about this fact: that science knows how to make a new man?’ And since there is no project, or as long as there is no project, everyone knows there is only one answer: profit will tell us what to do.

Ultimately, and right to its very end, the century will indeed have been the century of the emergence of another humanity, of a radical transformation of what man is. In this respect it will have remained faithful to the extraordinary cognitive ruptures that marked its initial years – though it will have shifted, little by little, from the register of the project to that of the automatisms of profit. The project will have killed many. Automatism likewise, and it will continue to do so, but without anyone being able to name a culprit. Let's agree – so that we may then seek an explanation – that this century has served as the occasion for vast crimes. But let's immediately add that it's not over, now that criminals with names have been replaced by criminals as anonymous as joint-stock companies.

Notes

1 The Blacks, like almost all of Genet's texts after the first novels (that is, all the texts following the publication of Sartre's massive Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr), is a crucial document on the century, insofar as it articulates the relationship between white Westerners and what we could call their black historical unconscious. Similarly, The Screens attempts to make theatre out of the terrifying colonial war in Algeria. It does not do this in terms of anecdotes, but on the basis of what unfolded within the war in terms of subjects. It is the sole attempt of its kind, with the exception of Guyotat's splendid and solitary Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, which turns the war into a sort of materialist poem, akin to that of Lucretius.Genet's literary attempt culminates in what I consider his masterpiece, Prisoner of Love. This time we're dealing with a work of prose rather than a theatrical piece. Prisoner of Love elevates to eternity a crucial moment in the Palestinians' war against Israel, and also, with the Black Panthers, a moment in that secret and perpetual civil war which we call the United States.

3 That the enumeration of the dead constitutes a balance sheet for the century is what the ‘new philosophers’ have been arguing for more than twenty years; they who've endeavoured to subject all thinking of politics to the most regressive ‘moral’ injunction. The recent publication of The Black Book of Communism must be regarded as an altogether ill-timed, historicist appropriation of this regression. Nothing of what is broached in that publication, under the catch-all name of ‘communism’, regarding political experiences that differed vastly in both their inspirations and their stages – and which, moreover, spanned seventy years of history – is in the least bit intelligible if we stick to this balancing of accounts. The enormous massacres and pointless loss of life that did in fact accompany some of these political experiments remain absolutely subtracted from all thinking if we adopt the methods of The Black Book, which after all claims to be devoted to them. Yet what is not subjected to thinking insists, endures. Contrary to what is often said, it is thought that forbids repetition, not memory.

5 For the information transmitted to the Allies concerning the process of extermination and the gas chambers, see in particular the crucial work by Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz (Robson, 2006) (originally published as I Cannot Forgive).This reading should be complemented by Cécile Winter's article, entitled ‘Why the Word Jew is Unpronounceable’, now published in my Circonstances 3, and to be included in Steven Corcoran's translated collection of my articles, Polemics (Verso, 2006). Among other things, Winter's article comments upon the way in which the editing of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah cuts through Vrba's testimony.The fundamental book on the stages of the genocidal project remains Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols (Holmer and Meier, 1985).For a comprehensive picture of the problems posed to thought by the balance sheet of Nazi politics, as well as by the revisionism which bases itself on the denial of the gas chambers, the reader should consult the collective volume edited by Natacha Michel: Paroles à la bouche du present. Le négationnisme: histoire ou politique? (Words in the Mouth of the Present. Negationism: History or Politics?) (Al Dante, 1997).

Copyright page

Translating the century

Dedication

1
Search for a method

Notes