At its strategic conclusion, like many tracts of the left, To Our Friends is suggestively vague. (It would be an interesting exercise in militant iconoclasm to strip anarchist and Marxist essays of their final paragraph. An anthology of them would certainly be indigestible.) Yet again, in the absence of a determinate target it is to the elusive concreteness of ‘life’, of ‘where one is’ that the text turns, to the promissory empiricism of enquiries, conspiracies, and local consistencies, and to the general question of alliances, here nicely articulated as translation. In asking how to build a force that is not an organisation, the move is also to warm, concrete abstractions, but abstractions nevertheless – and ones whose political valence is difficult to think as univocal: the increase of ‘power’, as a site of ‘discipline’; and ‘joy’; the different proportions of ‘spirit’, ‘force’ and ‘wealth’, whose prudent handling should avoid the disproportions of the armed avant-garde, the sect of theoreticians and the alternative enterprise (p.238). Happiness is more or less the book’s last word, and, like all ethical truths which are not tied to forms-of-life, this too cannot but taste somewhat thin or sound somewhat hollow, unless it is a screen on which to project the spirit, force and wealth of our own localised struggles. The slippage to abstract morality, to a rhetoric that could never really be spoken among friends, is not a problem for the Invisible Committee alone. It is our condition – a condition many of whose ideological pitfalls and fantasies are tracked down in this book with severity and insight. That such a bracing discourse, and the untold acts that shadow and relay it, should need a foothold is perhaps inevitable. That this foothold is a vitalism of sorts might not surprise. If confidence is not drawn from the contradictions of structure, from the logic of your own domination, where else then than lived experience and sensibility? The authors would do well to heed Franco Fortinis dialectical rejoinder to Adorno’s glum dictum: ‘No true life but in the false’. Which also means no true life in and for itself, for, as Lukács had already observed in The Theory of the Novel, the notion of life as it should be cancels out life.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 01:32:05 +0000
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