Vienna Fin de Siècle

Anthropology of the Name
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
TRANSLATED BY GILA WALKER
LONDON NEW YORK CALCUTTA
DAD TAGODE
www.bibliofronce.in
The work is published with the support of the Publication Assistance Programmes of the
Institut franeais
Seagull Books, 2015
First published in French as Anthropologic du nom by Sylvain Lazarus © Editions du Seuil,

1996
First published in English translation by Seagull Books English translation © Gila Walker,
2015
ISBN 978 0 8574 2 230 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Typeset in Dante MT Regular by Seagull Books, Calcutta, India Printed and bound by Maple
Press, York, Pennsylvania, USA
For Victor
Contents
viii Acknowledgement
ix Preface to the English Edition
1 Introduction
9 CHAPTER 1 The Distance Travelled and Categories
48 CHAPTER 2 The Two Statements
69 CHAPTER 3
Thinking after Classism
l l 5 CHAPTER 4 Unnameable Names

167 CHAPTER 5 Time to Conclude
176 Studies
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This book would not have been written without the constant invaluable support of N
atacha Michel.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
The Puzzle and the Enthusiasm
Twenty years after, as Alexandre Dumas would say, and I must admit that, before reading
myself again, this book seemed like a puzzle to me.
Obviously, it is not the book that is at issue but its author. What I am puzzling over is the
status of the preface writer and the author’s astonishment at the poor reader that he is.
And it is to this questioning that I summon myself. I summon myself to come back to the
book
Yet, what I would readily call the site of the book named Anthro- pology of the Name is an
enthusiastic site. Enthusiastic about what? For one thing, about the fact that a new
conception can be opposed to the end of the political and intellectual referents of the great
period that extends from the Russian Revolution to today—a period that I divide into
diflerent sequences—and for which 1968 was a term; for 1968 may well have been a term,
but it simultaneously opened onto the possibility of a beginning.
The enthusiasm is also about the invention of the scquentiality of politics and of saturation
(a method of investigating past politics— Marxism, Marxism—Leninism, historical
materialism—as intellectualities of politics); and it is about the problematic of historical
modes of politics, which identifies the politics that has taken place (ayant cu lieu) or that is
taking place (ayant lieu) as rare and sequential, that is to say, as existing for a lapse of time
that is datable. A historical mode of politics begins and ends.
This is an enthusiastic book about the investigation of thought, the statement that I call
Statement 1, which is People think, and the statement that I call Statement 2, which is
Thought is a relation of the real.
It is enthusiastic about thought when it is possible to say how it is at work when it is at

work. And about, ‘What does thought think when it
x SYLVAIN LAZARUS
thinks?’ (I shall let the cat out of the bag and say right away that the answer to this question
is indicated in terms of ‘reiteration and gaps’.)1
There is enthusiasm as well for finding processes that emerge when we are capable of
saying that we have found what we were looking for. And that what we have found is itself
in a controlled and alert complexity that confirms its credibility.
Thought in Summoning People
This book focuses on thought, politics and the name. If I were to look for the basis of
Anthropology of the Name, for what I call its place or site (le lieu), I would say that it is
constituted in the interlocution with people, which is, in my conception, a ‘certain
indistinct’ (indistinct certain). Let me state right away what I mean by this. My argument,
particularly when it comes to the subject of politics, abandons such characteristically
Marxist-Leninist terms as ‘working class’ or ‘the people’ (which are henceforth subjectively
non-operative) or the expression ‘the masses’ (an essential element of Maoist vocabulary)
in favour of the term ‘people’ (gens) which is a more open category. ‘People’ is an indistinct.
Nothing is prejudged (this is what makes it ‘indistinct’), except their existence (and this is
what makes the term certain). With this new term, nothing is pre- supposed; and such an
attitude involves proceeding by way of inquiry at all times.
The interlocution, therefore, is not with established disciplines and discourses, be it

sociology, philosophy or history—and this is not a sign of contempt. Instead, it points to the
inoperability of these disciplines in the realm of politics and the thought of people. This
means that the politics that I am discussing is in a relationship of separation from—and
autonomy to—the social sciences and philosophy. Separate from history, too. At the time of
the writing of this book, as well as today, to accept the idea of summoning people means to
take leave of the intellectuality of these established fields of knowledge and doctrines
(social sciences, philosophy, history). This is a decisive requirement.
1 See ‘Reiteration and Gaps’, p. 64.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi
The first proposition of Anthropology of the Name is the following: we have to assume the
task of establishing in utterly new terms the expected outcomes and methods of thought
and knowledge, if the interlocution is done with people. What made Anthropology of the
Name—and the writing of this book—possible to begin with was that I devoted myself to
this task. It is not only a matter of a militant’s decision to take the side of workers,
disadvantaged youth, women in poor neighbourhoods, poor farmers, revolts and so on.
The decision is based on the fact that it is precisely from that side and with those elements
that there is matter for thought, and that, at the time of the writing of this book, the
possibility of thinking and of deploying thought existed fully, with all the configurations of
inquiry that an organization has at its disposal. Inquiry is a mainstay of my configuration,
be it of politics or of thought. And this, all the more so insofar as in the statement People
think neither of the two terms is established in itself: we do not know what people are;
neither do we know what thought is; and nothing in these terms designates how to think
thought. All this has to be subjected to a protocol of inquiry. ‘People think’ is, therefore, a
problematic decision.
Evidently, we are not dealing here with an academic or ‘scientific’ approach. This accounts
for the singular expression that states that the thought in question, the thought of people, is
a relation of the real, and not a relation to the real. In the latter formulation, a thought’s
relation to the real is formed from a relation between subject and object that leads to what
I call an objectal thought. To this, Anthropology of the Name opposes a thought ‘in
subjectivity’ in order to qualify the thought of people.
Anthropolog of the Name never ceases to remind the reader of the ‘elsewhere’ (l’ailleurs) of
people’s thought, and one of its recurrent efforts consists in showing the consistency and
the power of this elsewhere.
The Possible
Why did I decide in Anthropology of the Name, where there are no definitions (which
pertain, in my opinion, to scientism) but identifications, Where the crucial notions are not
concepts but categories and where the term ‘statement’ is used to designate not a postulate
but, rather,
xii SYLVAIN LAZARUS
an exploratory assertion? Why then did I decide to propose this particular sort of tightly
argued tractatus articulated around a succession of statements? The reason for this is the
category of the possible. The possible emerges from the statement People think. The
category is not only extremely important in this book, it is more importantly at the origin of
this text. The possible is given in two ways:
— In the statement People think, through their investigations into what I would call
problematical words, the possible arises when they decide on these words. We will see this
more clearly with regard to the word ‘worker’ when it disappears at the time of Frangois
Mitterrand and is replaced by the word ‘immigrant’. The thought of people acts on the
disappearance of the word ‘worker’ and recreates it in new modalities, and in the
framework and through the means of a politics that can make this non-identical
recreation effective. I would say, therefore, that the thought of people functions on the level
of the possible. This stands in contrast to scientistic and positivist thought which
formulates a state of affairs and never a possibility. The state- of-affairs type of conception
is also found in State discourses and their dilution in articles by those journalists who pick
them up.
— In the more common sense of the word ‘possible’, I would say that the way of thinking
that I am proposing is possible. Such a way of thinking thought, of implementing it, by its
practice and its investigation, such a thought is possible. Anthropology of the Name is not
a speculative exposé. It rests entirely on experimenting with the possible in its approach.
Two Facets
Anthropology of the Name has two facets. One is devoted to the investigation of thought;
the other to the investigation of politics. This is why I would sum up the book using two
formulas.
—Anthropology of the Name takes up thought, and this is the first facet, by way of the two
statements, People think and Thought is a relation of the real.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xiii
—Anthropology of the Name takes up politics and its forms of appearance by way of the
thesis of the sequentiality of politics and that of the unnameability of the name of politics.
These two facets are joined by the category of thought.
Politics and Thought
The statement that Politics is of the order of thought is for me the answer, at last
identifiable, to the intellectual caesura of May ’68. It is also an attempt to conceive of
politics after the end of classism, that is to say, after the end of a thought of conflictuality
based on class—a thought that was becoming obsolete at the time. And it is an attempt to
envision politics in a space other than that of the State.
Politics, as I think of it, is not given in the space of an object, whether the object is the State
or the revolution. The end of classism, with which the categories of the State and of
revolution were co-substantial, necessitates positioning politics otherwise. It is in this
sense that politics, as it is understood in Anthropology of the Name, will be called a politics
in subjectivity, and this politics does not function through the objectalities that I have just
mentioned, nor is it constructed through them. This is what I will call a politics in
interiority. It is supported by processes of thoughts that convoke the thoughts of people,
and this politics will itself be called a thought in a very precise sense—a politics Will be
identified by the relation to its thought.
a-l. The Historical Mode of Politics
Let me make myself clear. Politics, in its ascription to the statement People think, gives a
politics in subjectivity and in interiority. In its ascription to the historicity or real
existence of this singular politics, it is grasped as a relation of a politics to its thought. This
is the doctrine of the historical mode of politics. There is a modal existence of politics—
politics in interiority only appears in the form of a mode. To say that politics only exists in a
historical mode of politics is to maintain that politics does not exist in a constant fashion. It
is sequential—which means that it does not exist all the time—and it is therefore rare and
precarious. To identify it involves having recourse to that which was thought and invented
in
xiv SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the sequence. A mode in interiority can be identified by seeking what thought was at work
in the mode. This inventive thought is that of the actors of the given mode and it can, at
times, be invested in a proper name (Louis Antoine Saint-Just, Vladimir Lenin and Mao
Zedong, for example). It creates the categories specific to the mode. These categories are
singular—the space of their existence, of their efl'ectivity and of their functioning is the
space and time of the mode. For, a mode in interiority has a space and a time—it can be
dated, from its emergence to its cessation, and its places can be designated. The categories
of a mode are not useable outside the mode that generated them. They cannot be gener-
alized. They are bound up with the mode—or, in other words, with its specific invention—
and their use and existence are said to be exhausted when the mode ceases.
a-Z. The Place of a Mode

How can the cessation of a mode in interiority be identified and understood? By a second
property of a historical mode of politics. What attests to the reality of a mode is its thought,
to be sure, but it is also its aptitude for creating places of politics. (I will provide
illustrations of this further on.) The mode is not only a thought of the sequence. The
militants or actors of a given mode create what I call places. These sites are the Jacobin
Convention and the sans-culottes, for what I term the ‘revolutionary mode’; the soviets
and the Party, for the ‘Bolshevik mode’; such new processes in the ‘dialectical mode’ as the
invention of the ‘war of the people’ and the ‘revolutionary army’ in the Chinese case. ‘The
army invested with the political tasks of the revolution’ and 'the army in the service of the
people’ are the sites of a mode that I call ‘dialectical’, whose proper name is Mao Zedong.
These sites are not physical places. A place is not a statement of localization; it is, in fact, to
the contrary, a statement of de-localization. A singular politics is identified not by parties,
classes and States but, in the modes in interiority, by forms of presence to itself:
assemblies, processes and other forms of organization. All politics in subjectivity have sites
which are its spaces of crystallization, places where it is deployed and where it manifests
itself. The mode ceases when one of these places disappears. The end of the sequence is its
cessation, the exhaustion of its specific political capacity. It is not its defeat.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xv
And so identifying a mode is being in a position to state—for a mode in progress, when it

exists, and for a closed mode that took place—the thought that is or was invented and
implemented in the sequence. It is in this sense that a politics is a relation to its thought.
b. The State
That politics is a thought, as I said before, is an attempt to think it after the end of classism.
Having stated this provides me with the occasion to specify what I mean when I say that
politics, in my conception, has no object. That politics is a thought is also an attempt to
conceive of politics in a space other than in that of the State, as it was conceived in
Leninism When politics had the State as its ‘object’, in an attempt to replace the bourgeois
State by a proletarian State.
As a great admirer of Lenin, as the inventor of modern politics and of a Party subject to
conditions (of consciousness antagonistic to the social order and existing politics, which
means antagonistic to the State, and of the building of a Party grounded in this
consciousness), an admirer then of the man who introduced consciousness and
consequently the subjective into politics, I was led to examine the difficulties inherent in an
approach in which consciousness is consciousness ofi and hence consciousness of an
object, in this case, the State. The transformation of socialist States into Party-States,
invalidating the thesis of the decline of the State that was supposed to culminate in a
classless, stateless society called ‘communism’, clearly demonstrates (if we avoid
interpreting what has come of the revolutions in terms of trials and errors) that a revolu-
tionary politics that has the State as its object and its objective leads to an impasse. There is
no contradiction between the identification of the mode and calling attention to the
stumbling block constituted by the category of the Party when it is given in the proletarian
State. The combination of proletarian State with the category of Party partly accounts for
the development of the Leninist Party into a State Party. Which brings us to the following
observation: the question of the passage from a proletarian politics to a proletarian State
was resolved only by the Party-State. The Bolshevik mode restores to Lenin and to other
actors of the mode, the categories in thought of politics (mainly the ‘subject
xvi SYLVAIN LAZARUS
to conditions’ where the proletarian capacity is subject to the condition of consciousness,

that is to say, to the condition of stating its own conditions, and is not historically and
socially determined). And there is no contradiction, since the cessation of the Bolshevik
mode is its statifica— tion. Proof of this will be given by applying the method of saturation
to the Bolshevik mode, a method that, briefly summarized for the time being, consists in
circumscribing and discerning the ‘leftover’ (le ‘reste’) or positive remainder of the
Bolshevik mode.
c. Politics Is Thinkable
I will add a comment on method: politics can be thought. In other words, a politics is
thinkable on the condition that it is thought on its own basis, from within itself, and not by
way of other disciplines, be it economics, philosophy or history. This is what a politics in
interiority is.
d. The Prescriptive
In politics, the possible is given in ‘the prescriptive’ which is what conjoins a decision and
a situation. The original conjunction of politics and its doing (son faire), this category
designates the specific and singular character of politics and of its thought in comparison to
other thoughts. The prescriptive is not a given order, nor is it a followed rule or a calcu-
lation, still less the application of a thought to reality. It is the moment of an encounter, an
articulation between situation and decision. In the making of a decision, the prescription
separates and creates a possible. The modalities by which a possibility can emerge are one
of the anchor- ages of the anthropology of the name to the real.
Separation
All politics separate. Karl Marx, for example, separates his doctrine from philosophy (that
of Hegel), and Vladimir Lenin separates politics from history; he gives primacy to
consciousness over history—thjs will be a politics subject to conditions. For my part, I
separate politics from history, that is to say, from Marxism and Marxism—Leninism, on
the one hand, and from the conception that history has time, on the other. I also separate
politics from philosophy and sociology.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xvii
I am against the academicism of the latter disciplines no doubt because they deny my
enterprise but what is infinitely more serious than this is that they dismiss the very idea of
a specific space of intellectuality of people. In Marxism—Leninism, it is the Party that
thinks; in sociology, it is the scholar or the scientist that thinks. The separation with philos-
ophy is what the word ‘thought’ deploys in a different space that I call the space of the
subjective. In short, the break with philosophy is related to the question of thought and the
break with history is related to the question of time. On the latter point, I will call on proper
names: that of Marc Bloch and of Moses Finley.
I am in favour of separation and also of unbinding (déliaison). Unbinding. In the plainest

sense, I am against heterogeneity, Which I call a co-presentation, a ‘thjnking together’ of
two categories, two ascriptions that enter into a composition and participate in a totality
that I do not want. I am a thinker of singularity and the name of Michel Foucault is not
foreign to me. ’
Readers will see the importance in this book of the categories of homogeneous and
heterogeneous. The stakes here are considerable, particularly for politics. The State, in its
own specific order, pertains to the heterogeneous, and it is for this reason that its
foundational register, at bottom, is that of order and violence. The heterogeneous for the
State, the privileged control of the State with regard to the heterogeneous, is to regard, for
instance, what pertains to the market, to the economy, and to the law—governing the
rights of people—as co-thinkable. And this subjects the rights of people to the requisites of
the economy, which are presented as necessities. What results from this co-thinkability is
the One of the State.
It is no doubt a feature of my character to articulate unbinding and separation, and this

allows me to construct the anthropology of the name. The unbinding and the separation
serve as the lattice or network of the puzzle and, seen from a greater distance, they shape it
into a picture.
xviii SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Why an ‘Anthropology’?
A seeming paradox of this book is its title. There is reason to wonder about the absence of
the term politics, given the fact that anyone Who knew me would have thought that, if I
were to write, I would write about politics. And it could hardly have been otherwise since
politics was what I did. It was essential to me. I was, in my own terms, a com- mitted
activist, and, together with Natacha Michel and Alain Badiou, among others, we founded,
successively, a still very Marxist-Leninist organization in 1969, followed by a post-Leninist
organization called the ‘Organization politique’ at the very start of the 19805, informed by
a new approach that I had formulated as a politics in interiority.
The paradox of this book is that, on the one hand (always those two facets), the author is a
political activist who is involved as much in situations of masses (factories,
neighbourhoods, poor farmers, etc.) as in issues of organization and doctrines, and that, in
addition, he conducts an investigation into thought. As a result, the thought of politics and
politics as thought are among the central theses of this book. Yet the title is not ‘politics in
interiority’, or any other variation that would include the term politics, but, rather,
Anthropology of the Name. The propositions on the question of the name have a radical
impact on the approach to what I call thought and cause a series of argued breaks with the
main forms of identifying and grasping a thought, such as an approach based on object and
subject, and dialectics.
But then why ‘anthropology’? Is it because the doctrine of politics that I develop is pitted
against history and that the work of Claude Levi- Strauss, for example, is famously anti-
historicist? No, the reference here is not to Lévi-Strauss, who has a doctrine of thought but
one that we know is unconscious and classificatory, as he discussed in The Savage Mind
(1962) and Totemism (1962). This book is called an anthropology because what I state is
subject to the constraint of inquiry and of an inquiry into what people think. Anthropology,
therefore, to signify the inscription in a disciplinary horizon that is potentially capable of
welcoming, accepting and grasping the subjective. And this unlike the disciplines that I call
scientistic or positivist, for which, if the question of thought is, by chance, taken into
account, is treated in its relationship to the real (to
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xix
objective reality), that is to say, in a relation between a subjective (which is always

regarded With suspicion) and an objective (which is always certain). Anthropology, to
signify that we are taking inquiry as a category of knowledge and treating the subjective.
What we are definitely not doing here is serving up an interpretative or comprehensive

anthropology. Neither are we discussing the particular mythologies of people or trying to
measure the fanciful dimension of what they say.
Quite the opposite. This book rests on two statements. The first is People think. But, in
response to the suspicion of a comprehensive or interpretative anthropology, the second
posits that Thought is a relation of the real. This departure from the usual grammar has a
function— people do not think the real; the real is not as much the ‘object’ of their thinking
as the identifier of their thought.
This ‘of the real’ repudiates all conceptions of a relation of the objective and the
subjective, all forms of objectivism of thought and all forms of positivism. The ‘of the real’ is
a postulate of rationalism. Moreover, and especially, its function is not to constitute the
object of thought, since it is the ‘of the real’ that configures a thought that does not have the
real as its object and, hence, proposes to grasp its contents not by the real but by
thinkability. That the real is said of the real evidences the fact that the first statement is
People think and that this statement, I would say, is self-sufficient. Not only is People think
not a reflexive statement, a representation of reality, but, as I say in this book, ‘What is
anthropological is that the relation of the real does not constitute the identification of the
thought and that the statement Thought is a relation of the real is suspended until the
statement People think is accepted as an identifier of thought rather than as a reflexive
statement.’
There are multiple ways of grasping the real and multiple protocols of knowledge. The aim
of this book is to show that, under certain conditions and in certain processes, Thought is a
relation of the real. One could also say of the real a there-is (un il y a).2 I propose to open
up the
2 It is a matter of arguing that the question of the real could be that of the there-is when we
undertake to invest in it through inquiry.
xx SYLVAIN LAZARUS
question of the contemporary there-is, of how what is said about the there—is is
constituted. It is not at all a question of giving a voice to ‘unheard voices’, to the ‘wretched’,
etc. It is a matter of organizing people by building a difiemnt space together, a genuine
space where dogmatism and exhausted Marxism are left behind and possibilities can be
formulated.
Here thought is in no way a Durkheimian social fact. Through the relation of the real,
Anthropology of the Name turns its back on psychologies of representations. At the same
time, with People think, it keeps the reflexive at a distance.
What the inquiry aims to evidence is the moment of the process in subjectivity. People are
interlocutors, not informants, in the inquiry, and the investigation is a one-to-one
encounter. It is through this encounter that the investigation of What people think, What I
call ‘thinkability’, is possible—‘thinkability’ being the category that designates What is
thought in the thought of people. The anthropologization of the thought of peo— ple is this
shift from a thought that can be said to be nondescript to a thought that is said to be
singular. This is the moment of the subjective. Anthropology (of the name) can then
rightfully designate a discipline whose purpose is to establish and identify subjective
singularities.
Why ‘of the Name’?
But why anthropology ‘of the name’? Obviously because it is a matter of an anthropology of
the name and, moreover, of an unnameable name. The presence of the name in my title
announces the issue of its unnameability.
The reason that nomination is denounced, the reason that it is ruled out is not because it is
related, in the form of a concept, to philosophy Neither is it because naming essentializes.
Nomination is denounced because it is a part of the complex whole, because it is bound to
be embedded in a totality, and totality is the composition of a diversity and a het-
erogeneity which postulates an internal unity. The social sciences are premised by
definition on the totality, for the social is a complex whole. Just think of Marcel Mauss’ ‘total
social phenomena’. Mauss maintained that the category of the social requires the totality—
a thesis that has been widely picked up by other anthropologists and sociologists. He
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxi
brilliantly composed the techniques of fishing and hunting, modes of settlement and
exchange and seasonal variations of the Eskimos within this famous total social
phenomenon—which amounts to thinking of the relevance of representations from the
perspective of a global system.
Therein, to my mind, lies the rub—the subjective is but one component among others,
and, in my opinion, what makes matters worse is that it is intelligible only through the
other components. This is even the essential discovery of Mauss—that the subjective
cannot in any way be thought on its own basis.
A totality is that which proposes to co-think the whole, that is to say, to surmount the
heterogeneous character of the objective and the subjective. The subjective as such
becomes unthinkable in the end. Now if naming is one of the instances of the totality—
which is why I remove one from the other—it is that, in the totality, which is co-
presentation and co-thinkability, names become polysemic and (what I describe) as
circulating. The circulation of a name is its de-singularization.
So co-thinkability leads to the creation of circulating notions, something I also refer to as
philosophemes. If a circulating notion indicates a de-singularized singular element, it is that
an accounting has been established between heterogeneous realms. As is to be expected,
these philosophemes elicit my rejection which is basically a rejection of the heterogeneous.
If I refuse the heterogeneous without lapsing into a thought of the One, it is because I
believe in singular multiplicities. Consequently, in a homogeneous or singular multiplicity,
the name can only be unnameable. And it is unnameable in a thought of politics. The latter
will be thinkable through the category of the historical mode of politics. The category is
nameable and the multiplicity of modes attests to this.
But here I would like to add a comment. I have argued that the name, when it is part of an
approach in terms of a totality, becomes polysemic and circulating. Is this true of any
name? Is it possible to suspend the polysemy of the name? My investigation of thought
strives to do so with regard to what I call the simple name—for example, ‘worker’. Here,
the question of the name leads neither to totality nor to co-thinkability but, rather, to the
prescriptive.
xxii SYLVAIN LAZARUS
A Difl‘erent Way into the Question of the Unnameability of the Name
The question of politics appears twice in Anthropology of the Name in its two facets. On the
one hand, it is discussed in terms of what I refer to as the caesura of May ’68, to which
Anthropology of the Name, as I have already stated, is the answer, at last identifiable. On
the other hand, it is discussed in terms of Leninism and its saturation. It is in terms of the
first facet that politics is said to be rare and sequential, and given in a historical mode of
politics that is identified by a relation to its thought. In terms of the second, the approach to
politics is by way of the issue of the unnameability of the name; the unnameability being
treated, on the one hand, through reiteration and, on the other, through the time of his-
torians. Reiteration will provide us with the method that allows us to proceed or to reach
the unnameability of the name—this will be the problematic of sites of the name. The
examination of the time of historians, for its part, will provide us with the condition
whereby a multiplicity can become homogeneous. Whether we are discussing reiteration
or the investigation of time, it is the question of homogeneous and heterogeneous
multiplicities that is at issue.
It is at this point that the anthropology—in this case, a worker anthropology—comes into
play. Are the factory and the worker figure the places of a mode? To elucidate these points,
we must proceed imme- diater And we will begin by way of saturation.
Saturation, as we know, is a method of examining past politics, those that have lapsed
(entrer en péremption), i.e. those that belong to singular closed sequences which are,
consequently, non-repeatable but not, for that matter, worthless. Indeed, seeing them as
such would amount to a disavowal. The method of saturation allows us to constitute the
intellectuality of a closed form of politics on the basis of its foundational categories, that
is to say, by studying what the thought of the sequence was and by taking its singular
historicity into account. It is in this sense that ‘historical’ is to be understood in the
expression ‘historical mode of politics’. Historicity is history grasped from the standpoint
of the politics, namely, of the mode.
What the method of saturation of a closed mode, or of a mode that has taken place,
highlights (and that I have called its ‘gain’) is the subjective
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxiii
space of a mode or its intellectuality. For example, with the Bolshevik mode of politics, the
notion of Party has lapsed. The fact that with the end of the mode comes the closing of the
deployment of subjectivity does not negate the fact that the subjectivity existed. In other
words, the cessation does not de-subjectivize certain fundamental categories of the mode.
The subjectivity is coextensive with the thought of the mode (it is its intellectuality, which
is thinkable today) and not only consubstantial with the existence of the mode. The fact
that subjectivity is coextensive with the thought of the mode is what is given as a gain in
the method of saturation. Thus, although I have noted previously that Leninism operated a
subordination of history to consciousness (of the antagonism), the gain of saturation is
not to refuse the subordination of history to politics; nor is it to stop considering the
worker figure as the place of a politics in interiority. The class conflict between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which is the organizing principle of Lenin’s thinking and
the substance of classism, is obsolete—an obsolescence that is, incidentally, subjectively
observable since it has no effectiveness any longer. We must then differentiate between the
lapsing of a mode that concerns its sequential nature (the mode is closed and its categories
are exhausted) and the saturation that benefits from the intellectuality of the mode.
Whereas the method of saturation confirms, of course, the lapsing of classism, it also yields
as its end result the worker figure. The reader can now see why the second facet of the
book takes up the space of the factory, in an anthropology and a politics that will make of
the worker figure an essential element in the identification of politics in interion'ty. This
means that, with the factory and the worker figure, what we are dealing with are sites of
politics in interiority.
These sites are means of access to the procedure of the unnameability of the name, as the
discussion of reiteration will demonstrate.
Is a Thought of the Homogeneous Possible?
I am, to be sure, against the heterogeneous. But the question remains: Is a thought of the
homogeneous possible? I have discussed at great length the importance, to me, of
separation. This is no doubt because SCparation holds the possibility of the homogeneous
and the aim
xxiv SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Anthropology of the Name is to work within the homogeneous because it stands in the way
of co-thinkability—a monster with a long history, associated with a progeny of doctrines
of totality and totalization.
This is why I have established a doctrine of reiteration against and instead of the
composition that totality offers, and positivist thought or scientism, wherein the scientist’s
thought is a thought of thought and not a thinkability of what people think. This doctrine
will be a means
of access to the thought of the homogeneous.

The thought of thought, that is, the thought of the scientist, is a re- duplication. Reiteration,
on the other hand, opens thought to its thinkability, to the answer to the question: What
does a thought think when it thinks?
What then does reiteration consist in? Let us take Statement 1: People think. We shall call
People think a simple name. The passage to the thinkability will not occur by the re-
duplication of the simple name but, rather, by a search that opens onto the name and the
places of the name. Reiteration, as we will see—and this is the political step—will be the
source of the unnameability of the name.
Reiteration is the operation by which we shift fiom the question of the name to the category
of the historical mode of politics, which, for its part, identifies politics by its places and, as
we have already seen, by the relation to its thought. A mode, as a category for
apprehending a singular politics, is nameable; the name of the invested politics is not. The
mode is the category of a singular politics that makes the thinkability of the politics
possible in that the work of identifying the places leads not so much to the name as to each
mode as a singular entity, and this is narneable. The work on the mode is undertaken,
therefore, in interiority. And this is the main point: The unnameable designates the
impossible naming in interiority of the name. The unnameable of the name is, therefore,
attested in the reiteration which, rather than duplicating a name, ascribes places to the
category of the mode as a singular entity. This doctrine is thus supported by the critique of
nomination as polysemy and in terms of heterogeneous multiplicities. In a singular
homogeneous multiplicity, the name can only be unnameable.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxv
Multiplicities can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. The key question is to find out

whether the multiplicity of sites in a mode is homogeneous and in what conditions it can be
so.
This question will be put to the test through the thinking of privileged historians: Bloch
and Finley. Why historians? First of all, because my conception of politics is of a politics
separated from history. Then, because the question of time is essential in their discipline. It
is, therefore, on the basis of these two points that the investigation regarding historians is
conducted.
What makes the separation between the thought of politics and historical thought
necessary comes from the fact that it is clear that, notwithstanding the innovations and
merits of these historians, their thinking always leads to a heterogeneous multiplicity and
to what I call sacrificed or polysemic names. In the work of the two aforementioned
historians (even though I say that Bloch transitions out of historicism and is, therefore,
critical of his discipline), the question at issue is not the State but, rather, time. (I previously
identified history as thought- relation-of-the-State.)
Time, in the djfierent forms that it assumes in history, is given in a polysemy. Bloch himself
defines his discipline as ‘the study of human beings over time’ from a material standpoint
and from a subjective standpoint. Bloch’s time offers a space of circulation between the
material and the subjective points of view. Even though he makes use of a category in
consciousness of the subjective—namely, the study of mentalities—it remains nonetheless
a circulating subjective. From this I conclude that, by holding onto time, we remain in a
heterogeneous multiple and in a subjective that is grasped in its co-presence with the
material. The use of the category of time is the source of the polysemy.
Throughout Bloch’s work, including in such admirable books as The Historian’s Craft
(1949) and Strange Defeat (c.1941, published in 1946), the heterogeneous multiplicity
consists in the co-thinkability of continuous 'repeatable’ time, and of discontinuous time
grounded in unicity by the unrepeatable—it is the co-thinkability of historical duration and
evental breaks. The study of Bloch serves to distinguish between heterogeneous and
homogeneous multiplicities. The latter is necessary to a problematic
xxvi SYLVAIN LAZARUS
of singularity in opposition to a problematic of heterogenous multiplicities that de-

singularizes by producing circulating categories and phenomena of co-thinkability.
Separated from history, politics no longer has to do with time but, rather, with the
prescriptive. The evacuation of time and the removal of time as a category effects the
separation of history and politics, thereby breaking With an age-old tradition that saw a
given politics as bound up with a given history and a given history as bound up with a given
politics.
The source of heterogeneity is the notion of time, be it continuous or discontinuous, as it
intervenes in the identification of history as the science of human beings over time. Which
is Why, separated from history, politics has to do with the prescriptive and not with time,
since the prescriptive in politics, I repeat, is the conjunction of a situation and a decision.
Now, the possible in the prescriptive is not an attribute of what will come, any more than it
can be inferred from what is. It is not related to time, not as a prediction nor as a
consequence—it is the eruption of a category in subjectivity that presents a break. The
possible of the prescriptive is not the future in its relationship to a past but, rather, a
difier- ence, a subjective leap. The eEect thereof is that the multiplicity of places unfolds by
a displacement. It is not a movement in the continuous or discontinuous time of historians,
but a subjective leap. The first point in favour of the homogeneity of multiplicity is that the
multiplicity will not be that of time but that of inventions and creations of a singular pol-
itics, that is to say, of a historical mode of politics, that is, of a sequence. The second point in
favour of a homogeneity of places is that they are invented and exist within one and the
same sequence. The places of the unnameable name present a homogeneous multiplicity.
This has two consequences.
First, instead of historical time, we shift into a doctrine of the political sequence, a
sequence that is attested by the existence of homogeneous multiplicities of places.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxvii
Second, it is the multiplicity that is transformed as it becomes multiplicities of places, all
homogeneous because they are in a single sequence, and not in the multiplicity opened by
the polysemy of time.
Finally, and to finish with this point, I would underline that the unnameable name is an
extreme dis-objectification of the subjective. My critics may amicably or teasingly call this
my Parmenidean urge but for me there can be no nomination in interiority from interiority.
Subjective singularity cannot sustain nomination; naming designates it from outside itself,
which brings us back to an externalizing objectivity. Is this Parmenidian? No, it isn’t.
Whatever anyone says, what we have here is actually a thesis of reiteration.
Time to Conclude
In Anthropology of the Name, the question of the subjective is of major importance. This is
the question at the very foundation of the category of thought. It is set forward right from
the start of the book in the ‘Argument’ section, with this essential clause: The only way to
elucidate or to know the subjective is from within the subjective, in other words, 'in
interiority’.
I’ve written that the subjective that leads only to the subjective is a thought. What is the
status of this statement? Is it axiomatic? Given as a leap, and without demonstration, the
move from the subjective (necessarily leading to itself) to thought would seem to pertain
necessarily to the axiomatic. But this is only true if we do not take the shift (la bascule) into
account, a process upon which I will soon gloss. Let us say for the moment that the thesis
on the subjective is found in an ‘axiomatic situation’.
On the other hand, the uses of the subjective as thought are specific to an argumentation,
whether it is a matter of politics in interiority or of the development of the anthropological
inquiry in its investigation of the thought of people, and of workers in particular. It is in this
way that the theory of the subjective is fully developed in Anthropology of the Name. The
rejection of objectality, be it that of science or one that is dependent on another objectality,
given in the form of the State (that I
xxviii SYLVAIN LAZARUS
will describe elsewhere as an adialectical subjective/ objective formation) or attributed to

classes and then to the collective or to communities, the rejection of ascribing thought to an
object is defended at length.
We find here once again what can be called my unbinding impulse. My approach consists in
unbinding the subjective from objectality (scientism), from determination (the material
conditions determine consciousness) and from the collective subject as the necessary
identifier of the subjectivity of its members, with the unwritten thesis that everyone is
adequate to her collective affiliations, and the presupposition that it is impossible not to
have one. All this is given in the form of a dialectic, loose or tight, between subjective and
objective, and for which I have no use.
There is a need then for unbinding and for assuming the separations. This gives rise to a
problematic of the subjective alone, reduced to itself, that leads to the necessity of tackling
it on its own basis. Which leads in turn to categories of thinkability and intellectuality that
test the relevance of the approach to the subjective from Within itself.
The picture that comes to mind when I summarize these points in my construction is that
of a catamaran-type vessel, made with two hulls and a connecting floor. In Anthropology of
the Name, I imagine two floaters: one is thought (and the register of its own thinkability
with the positing of the two statements); the other is the subjective (invested from within
itself). To pursue the image: if the boat does not sink, it is because the support provided by
the two floaters works. This is the case even though Anthropology of the Name discusses
the question of thought systematically and that of the subjective axiomatically.
A cruel objection arises, however. Since Anthropology of the Name clearly indicates that
the subjective without a dialectic, the subjective that refers only to itself, is what I call
thought, does this mean that the subjective and thought are one? Would it be a thought of
the One that is being expounded in my Anthropology of the Name? And am I to conclude,
to extend the nautical image, that Anthropology of the Name has only one floater and will
end up sinking?
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxix
I don’t think so. This seems to be the case only if we disregard the process by which the
subjective becomes thought—ultimately, this process is a shift. The subjective becomes
thought by a shift into thought. There is a shift from the former into the latter in such a way
that the latter is produced by way of a break. The shift of the subjective into thought is,
therefore, an operation that produces something else, namely, thought. The shift of thought
into something else ‘produces’ the prescriptive. And so a Two exists. The Anthropology of
the Name is in no way a doctrine of the One. Thought and the Subjective are definitively the
two floaters.
Is the axiomatic situation of the leap (turning the subjective into a thought) in reality that
of a shift? It is not, because the shift is an operation. The axiomatic situation afiected in the
shift would account rather for its random character and dimension. Because the shift is not
auto- matic—it is, itself, a possible inherent to the subjective. Which leads me to say that
the exact formula should be not so much ‘The subjective shifts into thought’ as ‘The
subjective can shift into thought’. There are no presuppositions or prior conditions for the
shift. It is not an effect but, rather, a rupture and a possibility. The possible, I repeat, is what
leads to a prescription.
People do not always think, and there is not always a politics in interiority; this is the
consequence of sequentiality. What are we to say when the times are dark and the
conjuncture is impoverished or when a thought of politics in new terms, portending a new
sequence, is taking a long time to emerge, and when it seems that no possible exists or that
no possible is turning into a prescription?
Is a calamitous situation the result of a lack of the subjective indexed to itself? I do not think
this is true either. The subjective is always there, just as there are always people, the study
of which can determine, in conjuncture and in new terms, the certain uncertain. What is
lacking rather is the shift. The shift of the subjective into thought does not take place in this
case. A subjective susceptible to be thought from within itself through such a shift is
lacking. But what then is lacking in this lack? What is lacking is the prescription of thought.
xxx SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Must we then wait for better times? Or is it that novel forms of thought and shifting are
now at world In this case, today, 20 years after, What would be at issue is only the current
nature and specific space of the relation between thought and its prescription. Confronted
with our times, as they are, and prompted by the will to continue, we must submit that it is
the content of the shift that has changed. Once again, the subjective exists; thought exists;
the shift remains to be found.
But also, perhaps it is time to turn back to the pages in Anthropology of the Name Where I
maintain that if thought is prescriptive, ‘to think is to prescribe thought, assign it so as to
summon it, compel it so as to test it’. We must then think. At bottom, all thought is
prescriptive. Freedom resides therein.
INTRODUCTION
ARGUMENT
The field of anthropology of the name is constituted by the question that the statement
People think (les gens pensent) puts to thought. The aim of this book is to clarify the
subjective from within the subjective, or, as Iput it, ‘in interiority’, rather than call on
objectivist or positivist referents. Politics in this renewed sense will stand here as an
exemplification of an approach ‘in subjectivity’. Indeed, my fundamental thesis on politics
is that it is of the order of ‘ thought. This is a thesis concerning the character of politics that
is not reducible to any space other than that of politics and the need to think about it in its
singularity.
Politics as Thought or as State?
The proposed thesis concerns, then, the nature of politics. If politics exists, either it is in the
space of the State or it is of the order of thought. To say that politics is in the space of the
State is a definitional proposition—it is defined by its object—as well as an objectivist
one. It indicates that the field of politics is power. To ascribe politics to the State is to
ascribe it to a certain number of registers: that of power, to be sure, but also of parties, of
efficiency and of results. Occupying the State is, then, the main issue of politics. Marxism
asserted much the same thing, except that, for Marxism, the State was meant to be
destroyed. Politics in the field of the State has the noteworthy characteristic of not
presenting itself as thought. Quite the contrary—for it presents itself instead as an objec-
tivity, or, otherwise put, as an objectivist reality. It merges the politics it conducts, politics
in general and the State; and, in order to do so, it asserts the complex character of the
whole. Only by way of law, political science
1 ‘Of the order of ’ is not an approximation. Rather, it aims at designating an ana- lyfical
space but without prejudging the analytical categories.
2 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
and economics can one have access to what is, in this view, an intellectually composite
whole.
Rationalism, which used a process of class analysis and for which the notion of class was
essential—this is what I call ‘classism’—was a proposition of historicization of the State, in
the form of the antagonism, the contradiction and the destruction of the State. And the
end of classism, with its de—historicization of the State, that is to say, the loss of the
prospect of its destruction, proposes its permanence in the form of the consensual State. In
the break with the Parti Communiste Frangais (French Communist Party, PCF) that marked
1968 and that fed Mitterandism, we can see what undergirded the renewal of parliamen-
tarianism in its current form, henceforth stabilized in what can be called the consensual
State.
Decidedly post-classicist and non-programmatic, the consensual State, briefly stated, is not
regulated by State ‘doing’ (lefaire étatique), its policies and its purported technical
expertise and competence. In the past, government discourse with regard to itself was
subordinated to governmental practice, that is to say, to the reality of political decisions.
This discourse, in terms of norms and value (regardless of what one thought of them), drew
on real situations. In this sense, government discourse faced its own prescriptions. The
prescription, in its formal aspect, concerns what could happen based on what is, and it
develops a possibility. Therefore, in its subjectified aspect, it designates that what will
come is in the realm of possibility and not a complete determination or an absolute
contingency. This is what the consensual State undoes. Faced with the absence and
outdatedness of any agenda, and even of an alternative or of a debate, there is no more
discourse about the ‘doing’ (le fairc), which, containing the dimension of State
prescriptions with regard to itself, would make it possible to examine or indict it and thus
do likewise with the politics it practises. This is why we commonly think of ‘consensual’ as
referring to an agreement in public opinion, even to the point of unanimity. The State, by
stifling the ‘doing’, stifles the prescription at work in political decisions and explicitly
proposes to evacuate prescription from forms of consciousness.
INTRODUCTION 3
To say that politics is of the order of thought is an attempt to conceive of politics after the
end of classism and in a space that is not that of the State. But, first and foremost, it is a way
of saying that politics is not given in the space of an object, be it that of the State or that of
revolution.
Politics is posited here as having its own field of thought, which cannot, lest it disappear
altogether, be subordinated to an external field, be it philosophical, economic or historical.
My thesis therefore is that one must think politics from within itself and not from the
perspective of other disciplines. And yet, thinking about it as an object or saying that it is an
object of thought, that it is an object for thought, means slipping back into classism or
statism or science. To think it from within itself involves thinking it ‘in interiority’ (en
intefiofité) in such a way that it never becomes an object. Then it can be thought through as
thought. In truth, politics must be thought as thought if we are to find our way out of the
objectal.z To think it as thought and not as an object is what I call an approach ‘in
subjectivity’ (en subjectivité).
The question that may immediately arise is: Why refer to something that is only in the
realm of the subjective as ‘thought’? One can surely grant me that politics can be thought
otherwise than as an object. If that is so, why not be satisfied With a subjective approach
(en subjectivité)? This will be called politics en subjectivité or en interion'té, and all will
have been said, as long as one is Willing to grant me that a non-objective politics is
possible. But why is the subjective here a thought? To be sure, the subjective does not
reflect the material conditions of existence; it is not in a dialectic with the objective, neither
is it consciousness ‘of’. All this is challenged here as constituting what Will be designated as
objectivism. The reason that the subjective is a thought is that the subjective cannot lead as
such to the subjective. Is there an approach other than one in Which the subjective is
connected to the objective by a dialectic? For the subjective to refer exclusively to the
subjective, it must necessarily be a thought. The subjective that is not connected to the
objective in any
2 'Objective’ refers to an approach; ‘objectal’ to the formation of the object in this approach.
4 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
way whatsoever, this unprecedented subjective, is a thought. This statement is a leap,
without which we remain in the context of pre-existing doctrines. The subjective without a
dialectic is a thought. It is in this sense that politics ‘in interiority’ is a thought. There are
two theses therefore that lead to identifying politics as thought:
1. We are not in an object-based approach. The fundamental thesis here is that politics is
thinkable ‘in interiority’ and this thesis is what makes it a thought. If politics is thinkable,
then it is not an object.
2. Why the non-object is a thought is the whole problem. If thought ‘in subjectivity’ is really
‘in subjectivity’, the subjective in it is not that of a dialectic of the objective and the
subjective. It is entirely subjective. This subjective without a dialectic is what I call
‘thought’.
These two theses make it possible to advance another that derives therefrom—thought, in
the sense that has just been specified, is thinkable.
Singularity
To maintain that politics is of the order of thought establishes politics as a singularity and,
consequently, as falling within the ambit not of generalization or of totalization but of
certain categories of grasping singularity—intellectuality and thinkability.3 Politics as
thought immediately raises the question of knowing what thought we are speaking of and
requires that we identify the singularity of thought that makes thinking politics possible.
Thus, the theses ‘Politics is of the order of thought’ and ‘Politics is thinkable’ are equivalent,
not in generalizing terms but as part of a problematic of singularity, the ultimate point of
which is the characterization of politics as sequential, that is to say, as non—permanent
and rare, within, each time, a historical mode of politics. It is by way of the mode that the
singularity of a politics can be grasped, this singularity being experienced within an
irreducible sequentiality.
3 See Chapter 2.
INTRODUCTION 5
Anthropology of the Name
Accordingly, a new approach to thought and to phenomena of consciousness—that is to

say, to the thought of ‘people’—becomes possible and foundational. The project of an
anthropology of the name is to establish this new approach. The space of an anthropology
of the name can only be constituted on the condition of developing in it a problematic of
singularity with regard to thought, a problematic of singularity of thoughts. This means,
consequently, that it can only be constituted on the condition of developing a problematic
of homogeneous multiplicities.
Questions of politics have long occupied my thoughts and still do. But the project of an
anthropology of the name cannot be reduced to this. There is, however, a statement that
differs from the category that apprehends politics (which is the historical mode of politics):
People think (les gens pensent), which opens onto an investigation of what is thought in the
thought of ‘people’. From the moment that the question that arises is knowing whether
thought is thinkable, we are in the realm of an anthropology of the name and no longer in
the space of a politics. In anthropology, politics is but‘a name. The anthropological
approach includes it but cannot be reduced to it.
Likewise, it would be inexact to maintain that an anthropology of the name is a theory of

the subjective, even though the subjective is at the centre of the undertaking. The singular
position that is mine is to start from the subjective. And it leads to the thesis that ‘thought is
thinkable’. The subjective is the starting point. It requires that the investigation he
conducted from within the subjective itself and that it remain within the space of the
subjective. It is this point—one that will be rationally tested through this investigation—
that permits the statement People think. To try to invest the subjective from within, this
statement is needed. This statement, it should be noted, brings into play not so much the
subjective as thought. Why? As I have already underlined, the SUbjective does not in itself
lead to the subjective. In fact, there is no protocol for acquiring knowledge of the
subjective that does not involve a Shift in direction, either towards objectification or
towards thought. In summary, it can be said that there are two uses of the subjective, no
6 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
matter what forms these uses may take, and they can be highly varied. One consists in
presenting it to something other than itself and dealing with it from the outside (en
cxtérion'té) in a scientific type of approach. The other, which is active in what follows,
involves attempting an investigation en intéfiorité, the condition of possibility for which
involves a shift in direction towards thought—which is posited in our starting statement,
People think—with the consequent requirement of showing that
thought is thinkable.
The purpose of an anthropology of the name is to break with the scientistic and positivist
approach. I am well aware that I am not the first to undertake this critique; it is even
fashionable to do so today. But I do claim a specificity, and that is to apply this critique to
the questions raised by the investigation of thought and to try an approach that does not
end in ascribing forms of thought to a composite whole, in a return to a ter- minal
objectivity.
The anthropological character of my argument pivots on the question of the unnameable
name. The name is unnameable because it is the name of a singularity, a singularity that is
not reducible to anything other than itself, whereas naming inevitably opens to a
generalization, a typology or a polysemy manifesting the existence of a heterogeneous
multiplicity that denies the singularity. The proposition, therefore, is that the name exists,
meaning that singularity exists but it cannot be named, only grasped by what we will see to
be its places (lieux), its locations or sites. Thought delivers names that are unnameable but
that can be grasped by their places. In the final analysis, ‘the name’ in the expression
‘anthropology of the name’ designates the will to grasp singularity without making it
disappear.
Now the sense I attribute to anthropology, in a preliminary approach, is to be a discipline

Whose vocation is to grasp subjective singularities. When the intention is to invest the
thought of thought, that is to say, to grasp the subjective from within, and when the first
statement is People think, we are in the realm of anthropology. An anthropological
character is attached to the statement People think, first of all because we are dealing with
people. This is not a category that is inspired by some form of methodological populism.
‘People’, here, is neither a
INTRODUCTION 7
subject nor an object. It is a ‘certain indistinct’ (indistinct certain) which, for me, designates
a ‘there is’ which is required in an approach that is neither historical nor objective. The
postulate of the capacity of people to think (to be confirmed in the investigation) pertains
to an anthropological space, the aim of which is to establish what is thought in this
thinking.
People think is my first statement, or Statement 1. My second statement, or Statement 2, is

Thought is a relation of the real. It posits the existence of a reality—a requirement for any
rational investigation—and of a non-objectal reality. A multiplicity of rationalisms exists,
every one of which has a Statement 2. Or, to put it otherwise: every rationalism builds its
own category of the real, which is internal to its two statements, taken together as a whole
and as a succession. I would say that philosophy, for instance, is a thought-relation-of-
thought and history is a thought-relation-of-the-State. As for an anthropology of the name,
I will try to establish it as a thought-relation-of-the-real. In effect, the consistency of
Statement 1, People think, is subject to the constraint of Statement 2, Thought is a relation
of the real. Postulating a capacity of people to think is valid only if what is thought in this
thinking is relation of the real. Statement 1 collapses without Statement 2. Without
Statement 2, we remain in a realm of representation, of opinions and of the imaginary, and,
consequently, Statement 1 implodes. It is in this sense that I can say that an anthropology
of thought is in a relation of the real. As for unnameable names, two will be identified in
this book: politics, and the hybrid term ‘worker-factory’.
It is clear upon reflection that any enterprise of knowledge requires multiplicity and
polysemy. Otherwise, we lapse into nominalism. The only possible way of reducing
heterogeneous polysemy—and this reduction alone will allow us to take up the
subjective—is by abandoning the naming of the name, generator of heterogeneous
multiplicities, and applying multiplicity to what, we will see, are the sites of the unname-
able name. Only then can we gain access to a space of homogeneous multiplicity. The dual
configuration of the unnameable of the name and 0f the transfer of multiplicity—either to
the homogeneous multiplicity of the historical mode of politics or to the homogeneous
multiplicity of
8 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the sites of an unnameable name, be it that of politics or of the unnameable name
‘worker—factory’—must be capable of taking up multiplicity without calling on the One.
Mine is not the only approach to be faced with this requirement. There are two figures of
the refusal to call on the One: that of heterogeneous polysemy, and that of unnameabih'ty.
CHAPTER 1 THE DISTANCE TRAVELLED AND CATEGORIES
The anthropology of the name, which takes up thought, politics and the name, is, to my
mind, the response, at last identifiable, to the intellectual caesura of May ’68. For me, as for
many people of my generation, 1968 represents a caesura in the sense that a great
‘eventality’ (événcmcntialité) raises the question, sometimes over a long period of time and
according to complex modalities, about what it brought to a close and what opened with it
and after it. I have travelled over a great distance to answer this question. This is what I will
turn to now in discussing the caesura of May ’68 and my relationship with Leninism. Along
the way, I will set out the method of saturation that sustains the theory of historical modes
of politics up to the category of the prescriptive.
1. THE CAESURA OF MAY ’68
a. The Caesura
The caesura that interests me here is a problematic intellectual caesura that includes but is
not reduced to the thought of politics. What I mean by an intellectual caesura is the effect of
a scansion manifested in the form of a sudden eruption of movements, regarded at the time
as the eruption of history, against the static State. The conviction emerged that the period
was open to revolutionary phenomena. The precariousness 0f the State, revolutionary
efliciency and militant effectiveness seemed manifest. A new worker presentation
developed that accompanied the Worker paradigm as a reference. The scansion of May ’68
is not being evaluated here in terms of State structures or social norms but, rather, With
regard to the field of thought. In the field of thought, the eventality does not operate as an
end to a sequence and the beginning of another bUt as the caesura itself. It is this fault line
that I am examining.
10 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
b. Ideologism
What I designate as an intellectual caesura or as the hypotheses of the thought of ’68

consists in the formulation of a common ground between thought—thought here
designates the type of intellectuality that was operational at the time, particularly in the
social sciences and the humanities— and the thought of politics. The postulation of this
commonality is indicated by the category of ideologism. The posited compatibility between
the thought at work in the social sciences and the thought at work in politics, on the one
hand, and the relationship established between these two and political practice, on the
other, developed in three spaces: thought, the thought of politics, and practice. The
supposed communication between these three spaces forms the complete system of
ideologism. For this system to be possible requires not so much a common core
problematic, such as Marxism, as a circulation of notions, presented as shared but which, in
reality, have a totalizing function and abusively permit a thinkability of the heterogeneity of
the areas. Let us call these notions that form the basis of the compatibility ‘circulating
notions’ (between thought, the thought of politics and practice) or ‘philosophernes’. I will
soon give examples thereof, and we will then see that ideologism, in its reliance on these
circulating notions, triggers a disjunction between thought and practice. The appearance
and movement of this configuration is a caesura.
The caesura has a bearing not so much on the relationships between thought and politics as
on the relationship between thoughts and political practice. The term ‘political practice’
refers then to ‘the doing’ (16 faire) of politics, to singular acts that politics undertakes and
that it constitutes, and does not exclude an investigation of the forms of thought that this
practice develops. If the thought of politics is articulated to the thought of areas of
knowledge and the social sciences, then it is not on the process of practice that it is
exercised. In the case of the articulation, there is a qualitative disjunction between the
thought of politics and practice.
Contrary to appearances that would seem to make of ’68 a praticist sequence, this
qualitative disjunction is in fact at the heart of ideologism.
THE DISTANCE TRAVELLED AND CATEGORIES 11
c. Example of Circulation: Revolt
Let us take a cardinal referent as an example of this qualitative disjunction— the notion of
revolt. Revolt, an essential theme of those years, turns out to be a circulating notion. The
system of the notion’s circulation is as follows—from the standpoint of practice, we will call
‘revolt’ the refusal, protest or denunciation of a situation of command, oppression or
exploitation. Simultaneously, we will maintain that all revolts carry the condemnation of
the mechanisms and logics that spark them: revolts are necessarily anti-authoritarian, anti-
governmental or anti-capitalist. As a result, revolt will be said to be homogeneous with an
anti-capitalist logic and with a form of sociology, namely, Marxist sociology. The notion will
thus circulate, bringing with it a co-thinkability of the category of militant practice with
other areas. Practice becomes thinkable
in the field of the thought of science.
However, although revolt designates what triggers it and clearly indicates what it rises up
against, it has no organic capacity to designate the processes underlying it. The process of
this identification comes within the ambit not so much of science, as a circulating approach
assumes, as of politics.
d. Example of the Category of Capitale

The same observations can be made in the case of the notion of capital. In the system in
terms of three spaces, compatibility requires that a common nucleus be posited. Every
component of this nucleus must be attributable to each of the three spaces. The notion of
capital will be claimed to be transitive to the three: it will be a notion of science, a notion of
the thought of politics, and a category of practice. However, in the reality of militant
practice, the category is that of anti-capitalism, not of capital. And anti-capitalism is
intransitive. It does not lead to economics. It has no status in science. It is, in truth, a
category of political practice and not of Marxist science. It is a form of consciousness, not a
category of science. As we can see, whereas the tendency today is to make everything
political and everything thinkable, thought and politics become heterogeneous by their
very fusion and thus render impossibe a thought specific to politics. This impossibility of a
thought of politics is the ground of ideologism.
12 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
e. Ideologism in Science: The Theory—Practice Couple
The three spaces (thought, the thought of politics and practice) can give rise to different
configurations, which, though they may be distinct or capable of overlapping, are
contemporary and derive from the same matrix. We have examined the three-space
configuration. Another consists in merging two of the spaces, that of the thought of
politics and of practice, under the single heading of practice. This configuration of ide-
ologism operates in a significant way in the sciences, through a singular coupling—that of
theory and practice.
The ideologism then works in the form of a politicization of disciplines. Submitting to the
requirement of ideologism that rests on a compatibility of spaces, the sciences will strive
not to be cut off from political practice and they will apply to themselves ideologism’s
demand to co- present thought and practice. The sciences have to be compatible with
politics. As we have said, ideologism is the fusion of the thought of politics and of thought.
In the case of the sciences, we have a two-term system: thought and practice. This couple
easily accommodates theoreticism as much as practicism, depending upon which of the
two terms the emphasis is more particularly placed.
The fact is that the thought of politics is in excess to this system and cannot be identified
with it. The theory—practice tandem will strive to _reduce this excess. But the singular and,
consequently, the irreducible character of the thought of politics will resurface, either on
the side of theory or that of practice, yielding theoreticism in the first case and activism in
the second. Hence the theory—practice tandem is characteristic not of scientism but of
ideologism.
f. Ideologism and the Problematic of Heterogeneity: The Abandonment of Practice
All problematics that refer to theory and practice and that operate in two spaces, insofar as
they involve a fusion of thought and the thought of politics, are problematics of the
heterogeneous. It is the heterogeneity between the space of thought and that of practice.
Whenever thought and the thought of politics are merged, the thought of politics is
heterogeneous in relation to its practice. Likewise,
when science and politics are merged, no singular thought of politics exists.
Can a thought of practice ever be elaborated? Yes would be the answer according to
ideologism which considers that it can elaborated in a separate thought; hence the need to
render this thought co-thinkable with practice through the use of circulating notions. But to
my mind the answer is no. Practice is a category that is, at bottom, a prisoner of ideologism
and must be abandoned as such. The reasons? Practice and thought, or theory and practice,
duplicate and overlap with the politics- and-history couple. Now, it is the relationship of
politics and history that needs to be re-examined. In effect, for politics, history, along with
economics, has long been the paradigm of science. The theory—practice twosome opens
onto the scientific-theory-and-political-practice-of— history couple. We then find ourselves
in the configuration of history as science and politics as action. If we posit a radical
separation of history and politics, that is, of science and politics, the break-up of the
theory— practice couple and the abandonment of the concept of theory on the one hand
and that of practice on the other confirms the break-up of the space that conjoins politics
and history. This space, it should be noted, was referential, as much for subjectivations—
with consciousness chief among them—as for forms of organization in terms of Party.
These subjectivations and these forms of organization are the ground of the caesura of
’68.
Otherwise put, the general system of convictions in ’68 upheld the existence of a proximity
between the problematics of history, philosophy, economics, sociology and political
practice. Political choices existed in the sciences and all political practice explicitly or
implicitly developed theoretical propositions. Political practice and the different fields of
knowledge intersected.
The chiastic paradigm of science and politics signalled the impossibility of formulating
and locating the singularity of politics. Those were ideologist years—a single set of notions
enabled access to the world, as much of knowledge as of political practice.
The relationship of thinking to practice is therefore the crucial element of analysis in
examining ideologism. It is significant to note that
14 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, in a fruitful antinomy, took up a similar issue.
Althusser tried to separate philosophy and politics and sought a singular identification of
politics, of the subjective and of its thinkability; this is the point of the category of
materialism in his work.1 Sartre, for his part, upheld the fusion of politics with philosophy
through a phenomenology of consciousness.
g. The PCF and the Party Question
Ideologism stood in opposition to the PCP. It could not be interpreted in Stalinistic terms,
as its outlook on science and practice was not a substitute for ‘proletarian science’ and
‘proletarian politics’. In addition, the ideologist hypothesis was opposed to the PCF’s on an
essential point— the question of Party. For ideologism, the relationship between thought
and political practice was no longer the induced and variable effect of a Party that alone
prescribed and enabled thought and political practice and their coordination. This
conception contradicted the Stalinist model that conceives of the Party as the necessary
seat of the circulation between science and political practice. This does not mean that ideo-
logism evacuated the question of the Party; rather, it subordinated or reformulated, or
declared it no longer valid. Ideologism could thus present itself as a break with the Party
view proposed by the PCP. To this, the PCP responded with the accusation of ultra-leftism.
To be sure, the debate between the extreme left and the PCP concerned the historical
situation and its eventual revolutionary character, that is to say, history through the
category of revolution. But, more critically, it was engaged with regard to thought and
political practice, interwoven with which was the question of the Party in its different
versions.
If the analysis of ideologism requires three spaces, the analysis of the debate opposing it to
the PCP is structured around four referents. Two are constitutive of ideologism: thought
and political practice; and two are specific: history and the Party. The latter two referents
take
1 See Sylvain Lazarus, ‘Althusser, la politique et l’histoire’ in the collective work Politique et
Philosophie dans l’a’uvre dc Louis Althusser (Paris: PUF, 1993).
shape in the following questions: Is revolution still a contemporary category? Must
thought be grasped in its class character—otherwise put, in its scientific character—or
through the opportunistic dogmatism of the PCP? Can political practice rely on the
hypothesis of the capacity of the masses or does it aim at containing them? Is the Party the
condition for the circulation of notions or is it the effect thereof? The last question brought
into play a conception of the organization.
The PCF had shown proof of its versatility or, in fact, of its organic opportunism. It had been
Stalinist; it supported Andrei Zhdanov; it rallied belatedly to Nikita Khrushchev; for a
while, it encouraged Roger Garaudy against Althusser; it was ready to reach a hand out to
Christians; and it rediscovered Marxist humanism. From Stalinism, it retained the
conviction that, regardless of content, the Party was the link between political practice and
thought and it defined the common terms.
The PCF’s theoretical opportunisrn largely disqualified it on the intellectual plane; this
discredit impacted the problematic of the Party. And, despite its numerical and
conjunctural importance, the Party elicited as much suspicion as its referents, and its
intellectual and theoretical propositions. The PCF set itself up as a precondition to the co-
thinkability of thought and practice. Ideologism refused this precondition. But the
question of the Party becoming paradigmatic of that of circulation, it came to organize the
other referents and make itself central. The connection between thought, practice and the
Party, set up as an aspiration by all militant groups (Maoist and Trotskyist), raised there-
fore the question of the Party. The debate on political thought came to be subordinated to
it. It was structured around two judgements: the first focused on the PCP, its nature, its
politics, its project in France and the Soviet reality it defended; the second concerned the
nature of the organizational in politics.
h. Organization
Organization was then conceived as an organization of class and, the laws of history being
those of class conflict, as a historical necessity. Without ever exceeding its limits, the
question of the Party came to be caught up in the ideologist configuration of thought and
practice. The
16 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
debate on the nature of the organizational found itself entirely determined by the latter.
The question was: Is the organizational in the area of thought or in that of practice? This
debate is all the more difficult in that whereas, for ideologists, a circulation of notions does
indeed exist, the Party is not the precondition for it.
It was this difficulty and this debate that were to seriously disturb the ideologist
hypothesis, pushing it to an extreme limit and into the labyrinthine. There are, in effect, two
main hypotheses.
Either the organizational is in the realm of thought, in which case, a general doctrine of
organization is required, of the same scope as the great historical and economic doctrines,
and it must aspire to a general theoretical intellectuality. What happens in this case, when
the organizational is ascribed to the realm of thought, is that the other term—practice—is
weakened. Politics finds itself attributed to thought, with practice possessing neither the
organizational nor thought. This is the stance of Trotskyite groups and those on the
margins of the PCF.
Or, according to the other hypothesis, the organizational rests entirely on practice, in
rudimentary forms of organization, through the politics of committees (branch committees,
action committees). In this case—and it is a limit case—there will be a split between
practice (the committees) and thought. The claim of this stance is that it is engaged in a
new type of Party process when in fact nothing is being really constructed aside from
action committees. This is the case for the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left, GP)
which sees itself as exemplary. But, without deploying its own space of intellectuality—
which, being one of the spaces of ideologism, is always subsumed by thought—this latter
type of organization finds itself in the impossibility of making its process effective.
Be that as it may, for this whole alternative branch (action or local committees), there will
be no cumulation. Thus a politics that effects a true break with the PCP is deployed in the
context of a break with thought and with practice, to be sure, but more decisively in the
context of a break with organization. By proving itself to be ineffective, the problematic of
an alternative organization to the PCF remains in the space of ideologism, at the same time
as the organizational question comes
to disturb the ideologist configuration of two terms: thought and practice.
Two types of concrete processes or real experiences illustrate the ‘thought, practice,
organization’ mechanism.
— Such groups as the Trotskyites and the Parti communiste marxiste- léniniste de France
(Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France, PCMLF) maintained the principle of
affiliation or satellization with respect to the PCP. For them, history is referential and has
already taken place. Its terms must be recomposed: worker movement, general strike,
international revolution.
— For other groups, the break with the PCP is brought about in an antagonistic way. These
groups are emblematic of ideologism. This is the case for the Union des Jeunesses
Communistes Marxistes- Léninistes (Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth, UJCML)
and the Comités Vietnam de Base (Vietnam Base Committees, CVB), inspired by the
Cultural Revolution and by the war of the Vietnamese people. On the question of
organization, their references are Leninist; at the same time, they affirm the need for a
new type of Party. These groups cOmbine a loyalty to Leninism with a concern for
contemporary historicity, thereby distributing the two components of ideologism: thought
and practice.
In ideologism, the organizational is manifestly forced to be distributed partly in thought

and partly in practice. Thus it is split and enters into the heterogeneous. Its strong point,
which is the break with the pre- eminence of the Party as it is proposed by the PCP,
becomes its weak point, which is the dissociated character of the organizational, between
thought and practice. For these groups, the question of organization is thus related to a
general theory which is that of Leninism while the practical dimension feeds the new
historicity and is deployed in activism, in committees and in what will be their end—in
movements.
i. Movement as the Last Configuration of Ideologism: Historicist Ideologism
It was the extension of the field of practice, resulting from the emergence of the masses,
along with the desire for a new historicity that
18 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
ruined the schema by introducing the category of movement which led to a de-
ideologization of ideologism and to a weakening of the idea of organization in its Party
form. The category of movement then became prevalent. Combining practice and
organization, movements were regarded as expressing a new dynamic of history, society
and politics. Brand-new situations emerged just about everywhere; not only in factories,
big and small, of men and of women, but also in schools, among agricultural workers,
undocumented immigrants and low- income tenants.
The heterogeneous distribution of thought and practice that characterizes ideologism was
reduced by the category of movement which proposed to replace the heterogeneous
system of thought and practice by a unified system composed of a notion—‘ideology’—and
of an organization, understood as a practical process. The category of movement was
presented as an attempt at reducing the heterogeneous. Movement played a role in
ideologism, in terms of unifying thought and practice; this was a role equivalent to that of
the Party in the problematic of the PCP.
From that point on, movement configured the new space of ideologism by renewing the
use of the category of ideology—the latter came to designate the forms of consciousness of
the movement (in slogans such as ‘dare to vanquish’ and ‘dare to rebel’) and the practical
forms in which the movement was given were transferred to the category of organization.
We then had a space of two terms: ideology and forms of organization. But, in truth, the
movement became the vehicle of renunciation to the thought of politics, providing a weak
alternative and a sem- blance of response to that which was the requirement of the
caesura: the implementation of a radically new configuration of three spaces (thought, the
thought of politics and practice) and of four referents (thought, political practice, history
and the Party). Movement provided a short-lived illusion of a new sequence. Let us call this
new sequence of ideologism ‘historicist ideologism’.
When the category of movement intervenes, there is a renunciation of the problematic of a

new type of Party, that is, of the contradictory distribution of the question of organization
between thought and
THE DISTANCE TRAVELLED AND CATEGORIES l9
practice. This has a twofold effect. First, the renunciation in the field of intellectuality of the
question of organization, which roughly assumes the appearance of an outcome of
Leninism, makes the struggle the primary category of thought and of thought of politics, in
a way that seems to constitute a shift to the Left. Second, practice is ascribed to concrete
forms of movement, that is, to the struggle. Movement effects a shift fiom practice to
organization and from thought to ideology, so that the struggle becomes and remains the
central circulating category This shift is only possible when thought and practice become
thought and practice of the struggle and of movement.
There are, therefore, struggles and they must be supported and pub- licized; this is the
content of the new militant figure. Politics becomes the work of the masses for the
movement and is evaluated by the impetus and support of the struggles of workers, grass-
roots movements and youth. Movements and struggles are subordinated to both political
practice (support, popularization, extension) and ideology. The GP was the organization of
this conviction and this configuration and also an example of its precarious character. Its
collapse, by self-dissolution, signals the collapse of the ideology—organization couple as a
framework for the identification of politics.
In the historicist ideologism supported by the category of movement, a concrete situation
(a given struggle) is explained by the notion of revolt. The struggle and the revolt are both
the situation and the circulating category The struggle is at once the parameter of political
practice and the signifier of a general intellectuality. As a result, the relationship between
a particular struggle and the general intellectuality comes to be a complex question,
connecting a particular situation to a general situation and a general situation to a general
intellectuality.
Several responses have existed in the past and continue to exist today. One is carried, in the
anarcho-syndicalist tradition of worker struggles, by the theme of the general strike. Any
struggle is evaluated in terms not only of its specific character but also by its capacity for
expansion and generalization. The strike is, in itself, its own principle of totalization. The
theme of the exemplary struggle at the beginning of the 19703, WhiCh was to spread to the
struggle of Larzac farmers and to that of the
20 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
steel workers of Longwy, was thought to resolve the dilemma. The situation of the
individual struggle remains unique but its lesson is general—the struggle touches the
whole and what is played out locally is of general significance. The category of support,
rather than that of extension, then became preponderant. La Cause du\people, the organ of
the GP, developed this line of reasoning: it was a matter of class justice in the Bruay-en-
Artois affair? a matter of dignity in the naval yards; and
Geismar’s trial was presented as the trial of Geismat- the fedayeen.3
Thus, from the start of the 1970s, historicist ideologism became dominant among the
currents that claimed to be representative of May ’68, and it was to last, even though it was
diminished in scope and strength, and this despite the relays that the Confederation
frangaise démocratique du travail (French Democratic Confederation of Labour, CFDT)
tried to give it while organizing it for its own purposes, up until the Longwy revolts.4
j. The Transformation of Ideologism into Parliamentarianism
The end of historicist ideologism and the epilogue to it came with the support that was
given to the candidacy of Francois Mitterrand in 1981 and the rallying to
parliamentarianism under a social-democrat reference. The culminating point of historicist
ideologism is therefore parliamentarianism. Evidently, the transition from a particular
situation to a general intellectuality, if it is not that of political consciousness, can only take
place through the agency of the State.
2 The Bruay-en-Artois affair was a high-proflle French criminal case in the 19703
concerning the unsolved murder of a teenage girl, Brigitte Dewévre, from a less- privileged
background in Bruay-en-Artois. After the discovery of the body on 6 April 1972, the notary
Pierre Leroy and his mistress Monique Béghin-Mayeur were charged and incarcerated
while the judge recognized the lack of tangible evidence of their involvement in the
murder. Activists of the Far Left transformed the case into a symbol of class struggle in a
region then affected by the closure of coal mines.
3 Alain Geismer co-led the GP with Benny Levy. In 1970, he was sentenced to 18 months in
prison for reconstituting the dissolution movement.
4 Following the loss of 22,000 jobs in the steel industry—6,500 of them in the Longwy
basin in northeastern France—violent protests broke out injanuary 1979.
What is at issue is the principle of totalization. The dissociation between political practice
and thought, necessarily leading to a heteron- omy between political practice and the
thought of politics, calls for a third term: movement, Party, State. This third term is
necessary to the totality. Indeed, this is the term that ensures the process of totalization. N
o principle of totalization and of transition to the general seems available other than that
of the State. There is a reason for this: ideologism, historicism, parliamentarianism and
totality share the State as the principle of transition to the whole.
A common hypothesis emerges between the outlooks and problematics of the PCF, the GP,
historicist ideologists and Mitterandism of the 19808. Otherwise put, the shift from the
problematic of the Party to that of the movement, and then the shift from the problematic
of the movement to that of parliamentary consensus and the parliamentary State— hence
of the State—maintain a single configuration: that of the division of politics between the
space of its practice (henceforth called the ‘social’) and the space of its intellectuality. All of
these forms of politics pertain to politics in exteriority where categories are circulating and
where the thought of politics is posited from outside politics itself. When posited from the
Party—State, we are dealing with Stalinism; when posited from the State and economics,
separated by capital, we have parliamentarianism. When politics is posited from the
outside and based on history, we are dealing with a case of movement. All forms of politics
in exteriority develop a dialectic of the heterogeneous, and require totality and totalization.
In the years preceding ’68, the Extreme Left criticized the PCP for abandoning the theory of
violent revolution and replacing it with the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism. The
Party was reproached for its reformism, its parliamentarianism—in sum, for its
electioneering. That the PCP is compatible with the parliamentary State, and, conse-
quently, that the parliamentary State is compatible with the politics of the PCF, is of
significance—it substantiates the fact that, for both the PCP and for parliamentarianism,
politics is in exteriority. The PCF turned the Party into the point of exteriority from which
politics is conceived, Whereas the point of exteriority for parliamentarianism, from which
its
22 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
politics is conceived, is the State separate from the economy. Let us emphasize the thesis—
there is a common core problematic between the parliamentary State and the PCP. The
crisis of the PCP in no way invalidates the existence of this core. In fact, the opposite is
true. The critique of Stalinism and that of the PCP require the critique of parliamentari-
anism in view of undertaking an investigation based on the distinction between politics in
exteriority, which requires totalization, and politics in interiority, wherein reuniting the
practice of politics and its thought, and, as a condition, reuniting politics and its thought, is
conceivable.
2. REASSESSING LENINISM AND THE METHOD OF SATURATION
a. Global Ideological History
Vladimir Lenin’s writings have played a very important role in my jour- ney. A major figure
of twentieth-century political thought, I consider Lenin the founder of the modern view of
politics. This proposition does not limit the modernity of politics to Russia at the beginning
of the pre— vious century, to October, or to the first years of the Third International. Ever
since the 1920s, thought on history, the State and then on politics has been marked by
Leninism and the October Revolution. Hence, to think about Leninism is to think about
politics and its intellectuality in the last century.
The first milestone in my interest in Lenin was Eléments pour une théon'e de l’Etat
socialiste (Elements for a Theory of the Socialist State), which I wrote in 1973. Building on
a comparative analysis of the Chinese state and the Soviet state, I proposed a reading of
Lenin, in particular of his State and Revolution (1917), which involved replacing the
opposition ‘capitalism versus socialism’ with the opposition ‘capitalism versus com-
munism’. According to Lenin—who, on this point, remains a faithful reader of Marx and
Engels—the characterization of the transitional phase, in the traditional Marxist sense of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot happen Without communism and without a
classless and hence stateless society. The shift from the transitional phase to communism,
from a society with a State to a stateless society, must be identified from within the State—
and I proposed here the theory of mediations of
the State—but it must take place from outside the State, through the struggle of the masses,
since the State cannot take charge of its own collapse. I defined five mediations of the
State and described them as ‘five great contradictions’: the contradiction between manual
work and intellectual work; the contradiction between the city and the country; the
contradiction between worker and peasant; the contradiction between man and woman;
and, finally, the contradictions between nationalities. I maintained that the reinforcement
of these contradictions went hand in hand with the reinforcement of the State and, thus,
were opposed to the process of its decline; and this, in turn, countered the process of
communism. This was the Soviet path. The Chinese path, that of the Cultural Revolution,
attempted to reduce these contradictions, in particular the first three which the Chinese
called the ‘three great differences’. The Cultural Revolution established that the masses
could take hold of the question of communism by way of these differences. Communism
became a politics open to analysis and concrete monitor- ing. Communism was de-statified
and, thus, returned to an anti-State mass political process, taking on the reduction of State
mediations. The Cultural Revolution provided numerous examples of this. The theme of
communism became a mass political capacity and not the attribute of a Party or a State. The
Soviet experience had discredited the latter and the Cultural Revolution sought to counter
this. I saw Lenin, then, as the figure of the political theoretician of communism. And my aim
was to reread Lenin in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
b. Politics Is Unnameable
I had not yet forged the category of politics as I was to formulate it with the problematic of
the historical mode of politics, wherein politics, far from having structural invariants as its
object or being a particular instance of societies, is deemed objectless, in the strict sense of
the term, and for this reason is said to be ‘in subjectivity’ or ‘in interiority’. According to
this definition, politics is not constant—it is sequential and rare. This conception founds
politics on thought as singular thought and not on classes, history, economics and the State.
Thought is, consequently, and in the precise sense that we will see, a cardinal notion of
24 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
politics inasmuch as it is the fundamental element by which we identify it. I will say,
therefore, that any existing politics has a thought. This is the sense I give to the category of
historical mode of politics. I call ‘mode’ the relationship of a politics to its thought. A
sequence is identified through the identification of this relationship.
As the reader can see, I do not provide definitions—I proceed by theses of existence. There
is politics; politics is of the order of thought, and this compels me to say that it is identified
by the relation to its thought. How are we to understand ‘relation’? As relation and as
distinction; politics is separate from, yet related to, its thought. Thesis 1: politics exists
sometimes. Thesis 2: it is of the order of thought. Thesis 3: politics is unnameable; its total
thought is impossible. All that will be thought are the categories and the places of the
unnameable name.
As a consequence, it is necessary to maintain a separation between Thesis 1 and Thesis 2
under the auspices of Thesis 3. Although the name of politics is unnameable, politics has a
relationship to its thought, which is given in the mode. If the mode is the relation of a
politics to its thought, the question of thought will be internal to politics. Maintaining this
interiority prohibits any reversal, such as the shift from a thought to a politics. In order to
maintain the interiority from thought to politics, any thesis of politics that involves naming
and, thus, shatters the interiority will be rejected. The name of politics will remain
unnameable. The fact that the name of politics is unnameable is what prohibits the subor-
dination of politics to thought and commands that there be a relationship. There are only
categories and sites of the name. It is subject to this condition that politics is thought and
that it is thinkable in its own space.
It is also within this perspective that we must fully understand that politics is subjective.
Subjective politics could be in interiority or in exteriority depending on whether its
subjectivation calls on the State. If it does, it is in exteriority. On the other hand, it is in
interiority when the protocol of subjectivation is taken on entirely within the subjectivity
itself, so that the space of political thought is in a position to be deployed by itself in a non-
dependent relationship to the State.
c. The Distance Travelled, Once More
The question of the subjective and the question of thought were already discussed in
Elements pour une théorie de l’Etat socialiste, with the help of the notion of global
ideological history. I asserted the existence of global periods of politics and proposed a
periodization. The criterion for this periodization was the existence of an eminent
situation; and the latter had revolution as its paradigm: the Paris Commune, the October
Revolution, the Cultural Revolution. At this point, I separated politics and the State, before
having to oppose history and politics. I proposed to call this separation of politics and the
State ‘communism’.
Francois Maspero proposed that I publish this text in his collection ‘Cahiers libres’. I took
the manuscript back to make some corrections and never returned it. Today, it seems to me
that this text stuck to a problematic of the State, of history and of the masses as potentially
capable subjects, and carriers of communism. I-Iistory was that by which I attempted to
keep the question of the State at a distance. Ideological his- tmy designated this
distantiation and its periodization, While indicating the singular character of each instance
of distantiation and of each revolution, and proposing the hypothesis of their cumulation.
The category of historical mode of politics, insofar as it designates politics as sequential, is

obviously opposed to any doctrine of cumulation, be it my own. As for Leninism, my aim is
no longer to fit it into a history, as, for instance, into a global ideological history but, rather,
to occupy its field by a method that I call the method of saturation.
d. The Method of Saturation
The years since ’68 have been years of lapsing (péremption), the lapsing 0f the idea of the
Party, of Marxism—Leninism, of the category of revolution, of socialism and of historical
materialism as political intellectuality. I term the ‘method of saturation’ the examination
from within a body of work or a thought of the lapsing of one of its founding categories. It
is a matter of interrogating the body of work from the stand— point of the lapsing of the
category and of re-identifying it in this new conjuncture. There is a certain intellectual
rigour and relevance in proceeding in this fashion.
26 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
There is intellectual rigour in it because, when tackling a political body of work that once
mattered, the alternative is between disavowal and saturation. In effect, declaring, for
instance, the lapsing of the Leninist problematic of the Party, based on the simple
observation of its historical discredit, without indicating in any way what this lapsing
opens onto or leads to, amounts to a de facto disavowal. This is a known phenomenon—it
involves joining what was formerly the opposing side simply because your own side was
wanting or failed.
But the method of saturation also demonstrates intellectual relevance. Applying the
method of saturation to lapsing categories is a way of using the lapsing to pursue work on
the categories in new terms.
What are they? From where does the lapsing speak? From a new mode? Or from the
standpoint of that which will now be applied and which is the method of saturation? The
method of saturation is a re- questioning of a given historical mode of politics from within
this mode. With regard to a mode, let us differentiate between its historicity and its
intellectuality. The category of intellectuality is identified by the statement There is
thought.’
For the moment, we apply this category to the problematic of modes inasmuch as modes
are at the core of the question of effectiveness and of lapsing.
The category of histon‘city is that which renders the question of State present in the
problematic of politics, and hence of modes, and prevents us from turning modes into
subjective abstractions. It is in this sense that we are to understand that a mode is a
historical mode of politics; there is no such thing as a mode that is solely historical or
solely political, only historical modes of politics. We will call ‘historicity’ history
apprehended from the standpoint of politics, that is, from the standpoint of a mode. The
subjectivation of historical categories (mainly the State—keep in mind that historical
thought is a thought relation of the State—but also classes) is therefore indicated in the
notion of historicity.
5 We will look at this category, and this identification in the context of relations between
intellectuality and thinkability, in Chapter 2.
Obviously, a given historicity ceases with a given mode, since what will come to be,
regardless of the existence of other modes of interion'ty, is random (precisely because of
the doctrine of the rarity of politics), and the spaces of subjectivation of the terms ‘classes’
and ‘State’ will be different (if a new mode is formed). Historicity indicates clearly, then, the
capacity for developing a thought of the State in the space of a mode without this thought
slipping into statism as well as the capacity of modal politics to think the space of the State
without being conflated with it. Thus, historicity, presenting the State in the field of politics,
resolves the terms of this question in the framework of a singular politics and not with
regard to a simple observation of their objectivity—the objectivity is not in any way
operative here simply because it has been observed.
When examining a mode that took place, we are therefore dealing with a closed historicity.
Are we examining this closed historicity from the standpoint of another modal historicity?
Can a closed historicity only be discussed from the perspective of an active historicity and
only as compared with another mode? This is certainly not true, all the more so in that such
an approach would necessarily lead to a doctrine of the good State—comparing historicity
to historicity de-subjectivates the two his— toricities, which means that we are no longer
identifying a singularly from within itself; hence it depoliticizes both historicities and leads
to a formal, abstract and, soon, to a legal problematic of the good State. The refusal to
proceed from historicity to historicity springs from a concern With persisting with the
method of saturation without renouncing singularity—if we have two fields of
subjectivity, either that of the closed historicity is utterly subordinated to the other (this is
the figure of the relationship of Marx to the French Revolution) or, to avoid this, the lapsing
of the mode that took place is imputed to the space of the State, and the reasons for its
termination find themselves transferred to the State. We then defy the principle according
to which a subjective category ceases (and is therefore sequential) and replace it with a
doctrine 0f failure (of a form of State). The path that goes from one historicity to another is
thus obstructed and cannot be that of the method of saturation. It is in this sense that it
will be said that the method of saturation
28 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
consists in the re-examination, from within a closed mode, of the exact nature of protocols
and processes of subjectivation that it proposed. We are then in a better position to identify
what the statements of subjectivation were and the ever singular reason for their
precariousness. The thesis of the cessation of a subjective category and that of the precari-
ousness of politics (which goes hand in hand with the rarity of politics) are not supplanted
by a thesis with regard to failure and a lack of subjectivation. What is being said is that
with the category of historicity, the subjectivation of historical categories is taken into
account. And that what emerges with the saturation, after the lapsing, is not an objective
lapsing of statist, historical objective notions, but a subjective space formed by the
categories, a space that is essential to identify, if only indirectly. This subjective space is
the intellectuality of the mode.
In other words, it is the intellectuality of a mode that gives substance, in the examined
sequence, to the terms ‘State’ or ‘classes’ or ‘eco— nomics’ or to any other historical
concept. The space of subjectivation springs from the intellectuality of a mode, and it is not
because the mode has expired or come to a close that the historicity (of a mode) is given as
the intellectuality of this mode; historicity is at every moment an intellectuality, and this is
why one can shift from historicity as such to intellectuality without involving a tautology
or circular reasoning—the shift is from an intellectuality that is singular in its historicity to
a multiplicity of intellectualities of a single mode, and not to a general intellectuality.
An immediate objection arises. Why are there not a multiplicity of historicities that
correspond to this multiplicity of intellectualities? The reason is the following—although
politics, by way of historicity, is in a position to organize a subjectivation of the State, that
is, to present notions of history in the very movement of grasping politics, politics as
thought is not in any way (and certainly not exclusively) exercised and deployed upon
notions of history. If we are to avoid pushing politics into the arena of history and of the
State, we must acknowledge that the multiplicity of intellectualities is not a multiplicity of
historicities.
We will see this with respect to the Leninist notion of the Party and then with regard to
what I call the ‘worker figure’.
Method of Saturation with respect to the Nation of Party
The lapsing of the Leninist form of the Party is an irremediable fact. Any rereading of What
Is To Be Done? (1902) comes up against this. The question that arises is to find out exactly
what has lapsed. The method of saturation becomes clear—the Party in What Is To Be
Done? is the loca- tion (one of the sites) of a name, the category of which is the Bolshevik
mode. The mode is not a name but the category of a name. I ask the reader, for the time
being, to accept the notions of the name and of places of the name. The Bolshevik mode is
the category of a name whose multiple sites (in 1917) were the Party and the soviets. Let
us consider for the moment only the site of the Party. It is also necessary for us to know
that a mode, insofar as it designates a political sequence, lapses when its locations, or one
of its locations, disappear. The Bolshevik mode thus lapses When the soviets disappear.
The lapsing of the site does not, however, cause the lapsing of the name in a very precise
sense. In effect, the category of the name (the mode) and the sites are in the past. But the
fact that the name had places is maintained—this is the whole significance of the method of
saturation—and it is maintained in the sense that the Bolshevik mode will then exist as
intellectuality. There is a shift from historicity to intellectuality.
Historicity and Intellectuality
As we have said, historical modes of politics begin and cease. The ceasing declares the
lapsing. The mode no longer has historicity. The method of saturation will identify the
thought of politics whose nodal categories have lapsed, by operating a distinction that
constitutes the historicity on the one hand and the intellectuality on the other.
Politics is a thought, and it is‘a singular thought. It is that which I call a thought relation of
the real. There is a singular character of thought and a singular character of the real for
which this thought is a relation. When a mode has come to an end, its singularity as an
active mode, which is its historicity, also comes to an end. The shift to intellectuality is in
no way a Shift to generality or to history; it is a shift to the fact that the cessation of the
mode and the end of historicity do not obvi- ate the fact that the mode took place.
Intellectuality can be termed the ‘haVing-taken-place’ of the mode or, more precisely, of the
places of the
30 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
name. The method of saturation brings out this having-taken-place of the mode that is its
intellectuality and makes its re-identification necessary.
As has already been said, the distinction between historicity and intellectuality is not such
that we only speak of intellectuality from the standpoint of the closing of a mode. If that
were so, we would be working within a doctrine of effectiveness and retrospective thought,
when, in fact, it is only from within the configuration of a mode that we can diag- nose the
lapsing of its founding category.
Likewise, the distinction between historicity and intellectuality is not an objective

distinction. The having-taken-place of the mode does not presuppose that the taking-place
(ayant-lieu) is deprived of intellectuality. It is not a matter of historicity on one hand and
intellectuality on the other, as if historicity would be devoid of intellectuality. There is ‘the
thought of the thought in the effectiveness of the mode’ (Figure l) and ‘the thought of the
thought, the mode having ceased’ (Figure 2). In other words, intellectuality does not
require the historicity to be in the past. The method of saturation will dilferentiate
between, on the one hand, what is thought in the thought at the moment when the thought
took place (Figure l) and, on the other, what was thought in the thought, once the mode is
closed (Figure 2). This is far from a general problematic of thought—the thought of the
thought in figure I and the thought of the thought in Figure 2 are not on the same plane or
on a single continuum. Politics as a singular thought enables the shift to a thought of the
thought that is not a theory of knowledge but, rather, a move to a different singularity.
To fully clarify these points, we must now examine historicity and intellectuality from the
point of view of the thought of politics and of a quality of this thought that is to be relation
of the real. I will explain in a moment what is to be understood by ‘the real’. The protocol of
thought as thought relation of the real is not the same depending on whether we are
dealing with the taking-place or the having—taken-place. The split between historicity and
intellectuality addresses this distinction and is only fruitful if it is not understood as a
simple objective division. Politics as thought relation of the real refers both to a historicity
and to
an intellectuality. Placing the accent on one or the other is not an indication of the
differential substance of politics according to whether it takes place or has taken place, but
it does indicate that the protocol of thought as relation of the real is qualitatively different
in that which takes place and in that which has taken place.
We have made the point of emphasising that the multiplicity of intellectualities is not a
multiplicity of historicities. But what does it mean to say that there is a multiplicity of
intellectualities of a mode and not a unicity or uniqueness of intellectualities? This is the
question that the method of saturation addresses directly, in that it maintains that intel-
lectuality is also related to the taking-place, before the closing. There is a multiplicity of
intellectualities and a unicity of sequence; the non-historicity of a mode does not imply
the historicization of the thought that its investigation deploys.
What is not being maintained, therefore, is that, if the historicity is in the past, its
investigation is only possible within the framework of another explicitly constituted
historicity which thus denies the uniqueness of the sequence—this is a reversal of the
historicist paradigm, with its symbolic of events and its characterization of thought as
dated. The ‘taking of the Bastille’ event is reread indefinitely and the speeches and
declarations made by the actors of 1789 are deemed to have been definitively exhausted
in their time. This was Albert Mathiez’s stance for a time,6 with his assertion that an
explanation of Jacobinism is conditional on being a Bolshevik. Such a doctrine of filiation is
contested here.
My position is the opposite and I can restate it by introducing the category of time that
differentiates the taking-place of places (ayant-lieu des lieux) and the having-taken-place of
places (ayant-eu—lieu des lieux). To put it in everyday terms, one could say that historicity
is anachronic and that intellectuality is contemporary, that there is a discrediting of events
and a proximity of thought. This is a reversal of the afore-cited historicist paradigm with its
symbolic of events and its characterization of thought as dated. Resolving the problem of
the multiplicity ascribed to a mode
6 See Albert Mathiez, jacobinisme et Bolchevisme (Paris: Librairie du Parti socialiste et de

l’I-Iumanité, 1920).
32 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
does not require us to engage in a problematic of the contemporary and the ancient that
cannot go beyond the debate between past and present, the senselessness of which was
demonstrated once and for all by Marc Bloch in The Historian’s Craft (1949). It is,
therefore, out of the question for us to frame the problem here in terms of a thought in the
present and a thought in the past.
The method of saturation does not dismiss the question of a possible contemporary
historicity, but it does not make this question its operator in thought or its condition. It is
at this price alone that historicity is sequential. On the one hand, we have a having—taken-
place that is certain and, on the other, a taking-place that is possible for us. But
intellectuality does not call for another mode—the method in intellectuality calls for the
unicity of the sequence of a mode. There is unicity of the sequence and multiplicity of the
thought of a mode, differentiated by the taking- place and the having-taken-place. The
question is not that of establishing a chronological typology of the time of thought but,
rather, of applying multiplicity to the real.
Resolving the problem raised here involves picking up strictly the statement Thought is a
relation of the real and applying the multiplicity not to thought but to the real. It involves
upholding the thesis of a mul— tiplicity of the real, evidenced through the intermediary,
the filtering and the authority of the statement Thought is a relation of the real. Leninism,
in as much as it is occupied by the Bolshevik mode, gives itself in the multiplicity and not in
the unicity of the real.
There are heterogeneous multiplicities and homogeneous multiplicities. The proposition
of thinking the subjective from within the subjective is in the realm of homogeneous
multiplicity. Conversely, any dialectic of the subjective with the objective indicates a
heterogeneous multiplicity. The prevailing contemporary orthodoxy, which readily
maintains that Leninism was in the past and that nothing of it subsists in any respect
whatsoever (not even tactical), is in line with a logic of multiplicity. ‘Something was’ (State
1) and ‘nothing is left of it’ (State 2), although the name remains. We find ourselves
therefore in a multiplicity of the real. This multiplicity is heterogeneous—it co-presents the
objective and the subjective, for example, classes, economic organization,
forms of consciousness and mentalities. What thought thinks here is a relation of the real
but of a heterogeneous multiplicity—it is a real whose thought is a relation that organizes
the subjective and the objective. In a homogeneous multiplicity, what thought thinks is
entirely on the side of the subjective.
Without the doctrine of homogeneous multiplicities, the differentiation in terms of active
mode and bygone mode is objective. What is at stake in the method of saturation and in the
distinction between historicity and intellectuality is finding out whether it is possible to
develop an approach that is not objectivist to the closure of a mode. This problem
requires an extension of the problematic of the mode, and this consists in applying to it
the category of intellectuality which alone allows for a theory of multiplicity that is not a
multiplicity of historicities. Intellectuality enables the multiplicity of thought as a relation
of the real by relying on the statement Thought is a relation of the real.
If the identification of a mode—by which I mean the difl'erentiation between the having-
taken—place and the taking—place—is not grasped in a historicist way, and provided that
the method of approach is not objectal and scientific, then it opens onto the identification
of a homogeneous multiplicity. The real, as I am proposing it, is the unnameable name and
the multiplicity of places. In the taking-place of the mode, we will say that the real
conjugates historicity and intellectuality and that, once the lapsing is complete, the
historicity falls through. Another real emerges then, one that meets the requirements of a
homogeneous multiplicity, on the condition that the investigation concentrates on the sites
of the name. The real of the closed mode is the place or the places of the name.
But, although we are still involved in the same process of identification of the mode (the
relation of a politics to its thought), the operation of the method of saturation will be to
efiect a separation between politics and the thought of this politics, and thus to destroy a
conception that posits the complete adhesion between politics and thought. Indeed, this
adhesion makes it impossible in practice to approach a closed mode from any other
perspective than objectivist, which equates the end of the politics with the end of the
thought. For the grasp of the closed mode to be in thought, the fusion between politics and
thought must
34 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
be repudiated. This is the apparent paradox of the theory of the mode, apprehended
through the filter of the method of saturation. The mode, relationship of a politics to its
thought, precisely because of thought, requires a radical separation between politics and
thought. The split between intellectuality and historicity presents this separation while
presenting what is required by the homogeneous multiplicity. If one is willing to
acknowledge that the real implies thought, in the statement Thought is a relation of the
real, then it is the investigation of the real of the closed mode (places of the name) that is
intellectuality. To get a hold on the real and on the multiplicity of ‘reals’, based on the
statement Thought is a relation of the real, is what I call grasping the prescriptive
crystallization.
In the process of the political sequence, the identification, or relationship to the thought, is
given as contemporary of the mode (we speak of Saint-just’s thought or of Lenin’s thought)
and as being present in the examination of the mode after closure. What remain intact are
the places of the name. The non-disappearance in thought of the fact that there were sites
is manifested in the work on categories. Intellectuality is this work which grasps the
prescriptive nature of the mode. Once the work on the prescriptive nature of the mode has
been completed, the method of saturation has reached the end of its cycle.
To say henceforth that it is not in relation to historicity that the re- identification in
intellectuality can be accomplished is to say that the shift to intellectuality does not operate
directly with regard to the cessation of the politics. The cessation of the politics signifies
itself and nothing else. To maintain the contrary is to take the conventional stance of iden-
tifying the cessation with failure; it is to adopt the commonplace attitude of historical
pessimism, wherein revolts are destined to be put down and revolutions to bear the marks
of horror. Conversely, when examined using the method of saturation, the lapsing opens
onto a new being of the enterprise, that of its intellectuality. And, as is the case for
Leninism, it opens onto an investigation that makes the categories that were major and that
marked the lapsing resonate to their highest pitch and even to their breaking point and, in
so doing, it allows us, through an opacifica- tion of these categories and by examining their
positioning and their
diverse functions in the thought of the mode, to arrive at the mode’s prescriptive nature.
The Method of Saturation, Names and Sites of the Name
The enterprise of saturation, while confirming the lapsing, opens onto categories of
p1ace(s) and of the prescriptive for every historical mode of politics in interiority. Although
the lapsing closes the historical singularity of the categories of a mode, it does not
invalidate the work on the intellectuality of the name that the mode deployed. Let us look
again at the example of the Leninist Party.
The Party in What Is To Be Done? is one of the sites of politics whose mode is the Bolshevik
mode. The method of saturation will record the lapsing of the category of Party and seek to
draw out its prescriptive dimension. The latter appears in what I call the character ‘subject
to condition’ (sous condition) of the category of lapsing. The Party then emerges as the site
of the character subject to condition of revolutionary politics as formulated by Lenin. What
do I mean by ‘subject to condition’? That politics is not expressive of social characteristics
or of classes in their economic determination. It is not spontaneous, to use the famous
expression, nor is it already there—politics is subject to the condition of stating its
conditions.
In the framework of the method of saturation, it is the character subject to condition of the
category of Party that is the prescriptive dimension. It is this character subject to condition
of politics that pos- sesses the prescriptive crystallization. The prescriptive, which I will
discuss later, proves then to be the singular distinctive category of a politics.
The saturation allows the work, to which the categories that are lapsing pertain—and
therein lies the point of intellectuality—to attain the status of singularity, of a singular
work whose historicity is over. But this declaration of closure is far from being a renegade
or forgetful declaration, for, by identifying its singularity, it redeploys the work in another
way. The method of saturation makes possible this difficult but essential transition from
historicity and modernity to a historically closed Singularity that is still active in the
question of the name. It enables us to maintain that the name had places. That these places
are now gone does not negate the fact that the name had places.
36 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
e. Mode and History
A difficulty arises however. The problematic of modes maintains that every modality of
existence of politics is singular. A mode being identified as the relationship of a politics to
its thought, it is the relationship of a politics to its thought that bears this singularity There
is then no place in the mode-based approach for a problematic of the succession of politics
or for a problematic of the progress of history—one of the possible forms of which is the
thesis of accumulation.
We can see the difficulty of the thesis of rare and sequential politics. As a sequential
subjectivity, this thesis forbids the investigation of politics in terms of continuity and
accumulation and it shatters previous relations between politics and history, in which the
intelligibility of politics was given by history which harbour an idea of continuity, be it
turbulent or dialecticized. My theory of politics does not limit itself to de-historicizing the
thought of politics by putting an end to any continuity, continuation, cumulation and
transformation; it exposes and lays bare the need for an intelligibility specific to politics.
This cannot be thought about in terms of history, transformation, accumulation or class, or
even in terms of the category of time that Bloch proposed as constitutive of history. The
thought of politics has to be left in this utter bareness. And we must ask whether politics
can be evaluated, once the hypothesis of its re-historicization has been dismissed. From the
standpoint of its internal thought, the end of the thought of continuity, of continuation, of
accumulation and of de-historicization, which is also a de-dialecticization, leads to a
paradoxical moment. This de-historicization being a condition for the subjectivation of
politics, we must concede that it is the price to pay for politics to be thinkable. But, as a
consequence, the de-historicization cancels the previous categories of subjectivation that
were proposed by the historicist problematic and empties them of content.
What were they? Essentially, the categories of the contemporary, of modernity and of the
present, which are subjective and objective categories exclusively in the sense that they
are subjective and historicist, and that they enable the bridging or stitching together of
what can be called not so much the singular as the particular with history and with time
taken in its succession. It is this bridging that, in my conception, politics avoids but loses,
thereby creating a situation of great subjective rupture.
This is a situation in which recourse to history is no longer possible. What this means in
intellectuality, I have already said—it is politics regarded as a thought and as a mode. This
also means that it becomes impossible to speak of a situation of politics in any way other
than from the inside. History allowed for putting in perspective and it had multiple senses.
The considerable subjective mutation that I have evoked means that, from now on, we are
dealing with the unicity of meaning. The multiplicity offered by history was that of local,
national and global settings that we can readily imagine if we think back to the professional
militants of the Third International, circulating from one situation to another on a global
scale. This widespread circulation no longer exists; it has been replaced by a limited
circulation. Similarly, categories such as war and peace, and socialism and capitalism were
carved out of history and added to specifically political categories, to the point that a plain
local strike could summon up the categories of war and peace and claim that they were at
issue. What could be called invariants in subjectivity existed, provided by history itself.
Everything was included in this framework. In the 19508, what can otherwise be
understood as shifts in direction and tactical reversals could be analysed as the use by the
parties of the day, in particular by the PCP, of this field of possibilities. The unionist-party
system pertained to this multiplicity of meaning provided by history— there were the
arena of the social and that of the State; there were inter- nationalism and nationalism.
Unicity, with which anyone who does politics in terms of mode is familiar, is given in the
problematic of places. This politics consists in ascribing the subjective to places and in
establishing a list of these sites— which must be a short list. The eflective unicity in a short
list is what gives a homogeneous character to the thought of politics in opposition to the
heterogeneous character of historicization. All sites are subjective sites, and prescriptive,
with no historicist adherence. It is this subjectivity without historicist adherence that
proves to be absolutely new, and that leads to the founding of the subjective (rather than to
its refounding). The earlier subjectivity that we called the ideologist subjective and that
consists, among other things, in securing the bridging to history, proposed a specular
relationship—in historicist subjectivation, it was possible to escape the subjectivation by
a shift to a different scale, level or
38 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
order, to different circles and strata of the dialectic of the subjective and the objective. The
consequence with regard to the subjective was that we were never restricted to a single
area of subjectivation, the other areas being displaced with regard to the most restricted
area and affording the possibility of thinking it from above. In the immediate data of
consciousness, the connection between levels was specular—through circulating
categories, it ofiered the possibility of thinking the subjective from a distance which did
not prevent it from claiming a homogeneity which was in fact a heterogeneity. The same
and the ‘elsewhere’ exchanged their prestige. We can see here the reason for the
obsolescence of the Party form which set itself up as practising at once the subjective place
and the elsewhere. The break in subjectivity does not only concern the heterogeneous
versus homogeneous debate. It is held in the hypothesis of a subjective without an
elsewhere.
f. Is It Possible to Think a Prior Mode?
Does unicity make it impossible to think of a past mode? Historicist theses, which are of
structure and of cumulation or of complex sedimen- tation, offer a framework of
intelligibility to what was and is no more. The 'century of Louis XIV’ is indubitably a
thinkable subject. But if we abandon this framework, how are we to think of what is no
more, a given past historical mode of politics, as well as history in the given sequence, from
the standpoint of consciousness and forms of consciousness? How are we to conceive of
modes anterior to one’s own? There is no metastructure of modes. Neither are modes a
phenomenological exemplification; nor are they figures of thought. There is no meta-
thought of modes. Does this mean that a past mode is unthinkable?
The method of saturation, through subsequent work on the intelligibility of the mode,
allows us to think a past mode. It is not necessary to be a sans-culotte to speak about Saint-
Just or practice participant observation (like Alfred Métraux living like an Indian to study
them). The methodological principle resides in the distinction between the thought of the
mode from the standpoint of its lapsing and the thought of the mode from the standpoint of
its existence. The thought of the mode from the standpoint of existence is politics and its
field. The thought of
the mode from the standpoint of its extinction is the approach in terms of the name and the
site of the name.
But this raises another question. Does the cessation of the mode lead to its de-
subjectivation? Is the subjectivation co-substantial with the mode in existence? Is it co-
substantial with the thought of politics when it exists? Must it be asserted that
subjectivation is a being of thought, in which case there would be no thought that is not
subjective? My response will not vary. To be sure, the end of a mode leads to the end of the
deployment of this subjectivity, but it does not negate the fact that it took place. This is the
essential benefit of the method of saturation. As for history, the end of the mode does not
modify its subordination to politics. Otherwise—and this is another modality of de-
subjectivation— I would have merely tacked the model of politics onto that of history and,
when politics ceased, restored history to itself. But the cessation is not a de-subjectivation;
neither is it the end point of the problematic of modes. And here is why.
The configuration of the name and of places of the name is one wherein, when the politics
ceases, the name ceases with the cessation of the mode. To be sure, the fact that the mode
had sites is not abolished as a result. And the cessation takes the name with it while the fact
that the name had sites remains. But this fact anchors the cessation in subjectivation, that
is to say, in a singular intellectuality. And the singular intellectuality outlines a new path—
this is a subjectivation of subjectivation, what I describe as the thought of the thought, or
thinkability, and not a meta-subjectivation.
That the mode is thinkable in a subjectivation of subjectivation is supported by the complex

movement that configures the name and the places of the name, beyond the cessation. And
this movement ensures that the subjectivation is not co-substantial with the existence of
the mode but, rather, co-extensive with its thought and what makes its thought thinkable. If
thought is thinkable, this thinkability operates beyond the mode’s cessation. Thus ends the
configuration of the name and the places of the name. The distribution of the sites of the
name is maintained beyond the name’s cessation. I therefore call ‘name’ what is thought in
thought and is given not by itself or directly but by categories
40 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
of sites that, even though they themselves are obsolete, have nonetheless given consistency
to the name. The fact that the name had places does not cease. As for the name, it has the
characteristic of both existing and being unnameable. In a mode, the name is that of politics
as an unnameable name and the mode or a given mode is only the category of the name.
Only the name’s places are nameable. To put it otherwise, politics is a name whose sites are
apprehensible in a mode. The example of the mode that I call revolutionary illustrates this.
It has as its sequence 1792 to 1794 and as the places of its name, the Jacobin Convention,
the sans- culottes and the revolutionary army. The revolutionary mode is the category of
the unnameable name that is revolutionary politics.
3. THE WORKER FIGURE
Between history and politics, which the tradition of historical materialism had connected,
there is, in fact, a separation. This separation is a complex one. In a text written in 1989,
‘Lénine et le temps’,’ I discussed the way in which a qualitative heterogeneity of history and
politics can be identified in an analysis of what Lenin wrote and said between February and
October 1917. Countering the common conception of Lenin as the political spokesman of
the direction of history, this analysis shows that, for Lenin, history and politics do not go
hand in hand and that they are, indeed, opposed. This is underscored by his view of the
relations between war and revolution from February to October 1917. History is on the
side of war and politics on the side of revolution; the two are never united. There is a
pronounced uncertainty and unpre- dictability manifested with respect to what touches on
revolution, while the analysis of war, supported by the analysis of imperialism, allows for
prediction. Because war belongs to history, I say that it is clear; whereas, revolution,
because it belongs to politics, is obscure. Difficulties and obscurities accrue in the times in
which we live. Politics is obscure, but so is history.
7 Sylvain Lazarus, ‘Lénine et le temps’, Les Conferences du Perroquet 18 (March 1989):

23—4.
What is the relevance of the method of saturation with regard to history and politics? On
this point, applying saturation to Lenin’s work paves the way to other avenues than those
that lead to the category of Party. The saturation of the category of Party led to the
problematic of politics subject to conditions and to the historical mode of politics. The
saturation of the relations between history and politics brings to the surface the underlying
question of the worker and that of the factory.
Lenin, as we know, was profoundly proletarian. This prescription is found in his thought
through the category of class, a category that is itself divided, as far as workers are
concerned, into social class and political class. The objective existence of workers does not
suffice to provide a foundation for the political capacity of workers. Politics is not
expressive of the social; neither is it expressive of history—the relations between politics
and history are more complex. Nevertheless, Lenin is powerfially ‘classist’ and Marxist and
presents himself as such. In his eyes, the proletarian class struggle is the revolutionary
political force of the modern world. But the fact is that ‘classism’ is obsolete.
The lapsing of classism determines the obsolescence of all classist references. Does this
necessarily lead to the obsolescence of all worker references? Seemingly, if we abandon
classism and the category of revolution—the two notions on which the proletarian
question in Lenin’s work relies—than the proletarian question will be caught in the closure
of these two supporting categories. The method of saturation, while validating the lapsing
of classism, brings a new category to the surface—that of the figure of the worker. To bring
out this category, first history and politics must be separated.
a. The Separation of History and Politics: Marx and Lenin
Lenin’s writings contain very important indications about workers and factories, mainly
with regard to the revolutions of 1905 and of February and October 1917. Lenin analyses
the shifts from an economic strike to a political strike and from a political strike to an
insurrectional strike.
The basis of Lenin’s thinking and of the Bolshevik mode of politics is the following
statement: Proletarian politics is subject to condition (sous condition). That it is subject to
condition indicates that politics is expressive
42 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
neither of social conditions nor—and this is the point that interests me here—of history as
Marx conceived of it. There is a separation between political capacity and social class but
also between political capacity and economics or history. This point thoroughly reframes
the theses of The Communist Manifizsto (1848).
Marx’s thesis can be put as follows: there is a structure of the real; societies are not
random, formless, chaotic, magmatic entities and, hence, alien to all thought. Societies fall
within the ambit of a structure. The structure is that of the class struggle. To speak of the
class struggle and the structure of societies, Marx calls on history, in as much as the class
struggle is at once objective and political—or, in my terms, descriptive and prescriptive.
In his famous letter to Weydemeyer,8 Marx specifies that his contribution is not the
discovery of the problematic of classes, which existed before him, but what could be called
the communist problematic of class, Which allows for the scientific grounding of the
prescriptive. But it is not the prescriptive that is scientific. The decline of the State, the
extinction of classes, the demise of the law of value, the end of the exploitation of man by
man, and the transition to the principle of ‘to each according to his or her needs’ are
scientific notions and political notions. To Marx, scientific notions are notions of political
consciousness—they are realizable. The communist category of class struggle establishes
the basis for this possibility, being at once scientific and political. This conception is the
thought of what I term the classist mode. Like all modes of politics, it proposes a singular
prescriptive and a singular possibility. From this perspective, emancipation is not so
much a utopia as a possibility. On one side is science, and on the other the prescriptive.
What characterizes Marx’s thinking is that the prescriptive and the descriptive (otherwise
put, science) are merged. To put it in terms that interest us here, history and politics are
merged. The name of this fusion is ‘historical consciousness’. The communist proletarian
has a scientific and prescriptive view of history—prescriptive because it is scientific. The
fusion will come about on its own, spontaneously, because it is necessary.
8 Karl Marx, Letter to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Collected Works, VOL. 39 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), p. 58.
This means that a natural-historical problematic of this fusion exists and that,
consequently, a natural, spontaneous and historical problematic of the prescriptive exists
as well. Politics proceeds from the placing of history on itself. The placing is what embeds a
separation in the fusion. Any politics effects a separation—Marx proceeded to separate
history and philosophy while Lenin, undertook to separate history and politics. The fusion
of history and politics is constitutive of the classist mode and of Marx’s conception. But
inasmuch as we are dealing with politics, there must be a separation. There is a strong
tension in Marx’s work between the historical certainty (of revolution) and separation,
which touches on what can be called the not-having—occurred (non advenu) character of
the revolution’s taking place (l’avoir lieu); this tension is manifested by the state of
consciousness and of proletarian forces. The real situation compels Marx to note the
separation between the present and what could occur. The problem of separation is
resolved by it being embedded in history, which reabsorbs politics. Separation under the
rule of fusion is, therefore, a placing.
The scientific and the possible being chained in history, the placing— for which the
communist class is the category—introduces us to the category of the possible. It is a
prescriptive possible on the one hand and a scientific possible on the other, which allows
for the twofold inscription of the possible—as scientific and political. It is the placing that
establishes the essential and militant character of the history of classes, their con-
tradictions—and their economic basis.
History deals with classes, economics and the State. The categories of capital, work, the
bourgeoisie, the proletariat and even that of antagonism, linked to the communist view of
class, are historical not political categories. We will say, therefore, that, for Marx, there is a
fusion of history and politics under the category of placement (which is itself ascribed to
that of the communist class) and that the prescriptive falls into this category. In the
Bolshevik mode of politics, the configuration is diiferent.
The Bolshevik mode breaks with Marx’s conception by the thesis of politics as subject to
condition (sous condition) while, at the same time, Lenin retains the placement operation
which he reserves to seizing power and to the State.
44 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Lenin does not go so far as to abandon the connection between class and history but he
makes it conditional on consciousness. Instead of being subject to the material conditions
of eiristence, as it was in Marx’s first materialism, consciousness is subject to an
antagonism towards the existing social order which is itself subject to condition. To clearly
indicate the break with Marx, it should be emphasized that the antagonism is itself one of
the conditions of the conditional character of consciousness. Being a condition of
consciousness, it cannot be regarded as one of its operations or as an object for it. Thus one
cannot argue that it is antagonism that constitutes consciousness—it appears instead to be
one of its propositions, the end product of a process subject to condition. Therefore, it is
not the antagonism that produces consciousness but consciousness that declares it. The
objective conditions are not what delimits the space of consciousness. Herein resides the
de-historicization. Consciousness is not so much an historical space as a political and pre-
scriptive space.
When the category at issue is that of consciousness, the prescriptive and the question of the
possible are given in very different terms than the terms that are operative when the
essential element is class. There can no longer be an expressive dialectic between relations
of production and forms of consciousness, otherwise this dialectic remains that of history,
of the State and of the economy, in which case it is no longer prescriptive. The
relinquishment of the category of communist class acting as a principle of placement in
history will therefore go hand in hand, in Leninism, with a separation between history and
politics. Now, the paradigm for this separation is the figure of the worker‘divided between
a social being and a political consciousness. Once history and politics have been separated
and history dismissed, the space of the worker figure shifts from the State to the factory as
site. (This will be discusses in detail in Chapter 4.)
b. Prescriptive and Possible
We have made frequent use of the terms ‘prescriptive’ and ‘possible’ in the discussion so
far and it is now time to define them. The hypothesis of the prescriptive designates the
intrinsically singular character of pol— itics and of its thought with regard to other
thoughts. The prescriptive
is what carries its singularity. An original conjunction exists of politics and ‘the doing’
(lefaire) of politics. This conjunction is generally called ‘practice’. As we have seen, I reject
this category as a prisoner of ideologism. What then is the prescriptive? Since politics is
neither a moral system nor a religion, the prescriptive is not a matter of a given order, laws
or rules. This category does not involve a doctrine of the application of thought, or a
doctrine of the relationship between means and ends, or a prediction.
The work of the prescriptive is the work of separation and the term ‘possible’ designates
the practicable and rational character of this separation. Politics is practical. The
weightiness inherent in practice ordinar- ily inspires the following theses on politics: it is
composite, eclectic, cynical or calculating, a fortunate turn of events, emblematic of the
fight of the strong against the weak, a stratagem and especially a mix of a bit of economics
and a bit of military art. And because it is a mix, it does not lend itself to an enterprise of
separation. On the other end of the spectrum, we observe examples of major separations:
the separation between politics and philosophy in Marx and the separation of history and
politics in Lenin. Saint-Just, for his part, separates the public space between virtue and
corruption between which he calls ‘good’ and ‘evil’. All forms of politics, in particular the
great ones that are ‘in interion‘ty’, take issue with the thesis of mixture. In them the thought
of politics is not composite; it undertakes separations where the prescription takes place.
In each of these thoughts, in each of these modes, the prescriptive is ascribable to the work
of separation. The prescriptive is, therefore, the work of separation, and the possible is at
once the decision to accomplish this work and its effectivity.
c. The Figure of the Worker
What about the figure of the worker in this regard? It is prescriptive. The task is to bring it
to a close as a historical proposition, extricate it from the intermediate position where
Lenin puts it and consider it as a political proposition.
The method of saturation applied to the Bolshevik mode of politics—and no longer to the
category of the Party—shows that the
46 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
worker figure is the crystallization point in the separation between politics and history. In
this, it allows for the closure of Marxism where it existed only carried by class, history and,
consequently, Where it remained in a state of political indistinction. But, even more, by
effecting the separation with history, it carries its own de—statification. If we posit the
State as the central category of history, the de-statification of the figure of the worker is
conceived in terms of a break with a Party-type problematic that links workers to the State
through the conceptual paradigm of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
We can then maintain that the separation between history and politics, once the
obsolescence of the classist mode has been conceded and the Bolshevik mode has been put
into perspective, opens onto the intellectuality of politics.
The lapsing of Leninism as historicity and the saturation that makes it a singularity then
produce two essential indications. The first indication is that politics is subject to
condition and this opens onto the category of the prescriptive. Politics, at least politics ‘in
interiority’, is prescriptive. The second indication is related to the figure of the worker,
situated in the complex, fragile relationships between the social existence of workers and
their eventual political capacity.
As for the investigation of politics and the possibility of thinking it, the foundational
category is that of the historical mode of politics. It is this category that marks the closure
with respect to ideologism and his— toricism, the two forms of intellectuality of politics
from 1968 through the 19808.
The investigation of the figure of the worker, for its part, requires a worker anthropology
and a study of the factory. This I undertook in several locations on several occasions: in
the transit authority (RATP) depots in Paris in 1968; in the Chausson de Reims factories in
1970; in the Coder factories in Marseilles, during the Renault-Billancourt strikes in 1973;
on the construction site in Fos-sur-Mer the same year, where I worked for a time as an
electrical fitter; in factories in Portugal in 1973; again at Renault-Billancourt in 1975; with
the workers of Solidarity in Poland in 1981; at Talbot-Poissy in 1984; at Renault-
Billancourt in 1985 ; in Canton in 1989; in some mines and rolling mills in the GDR,
Czechoslovakia
and Poland in the spring of 1990; again in eastern Germany in 1992; and in Poland in 1993.
I have seen factories: the factory as a site of time, the factory as a site of the State, the
factory as a site of money, and the factory as a political site.
The problematic of the singularity of politics and of its rare and sequential character relies
entirely on the thesis according to which politics is of the order of thought. The subjective
is not continuous. It comes about suddenly and then ceases to be—it enters then into a
state of lapsing. Yet, the category of subjectivity, as necessary as it may be, is not suf—
ficient. We must go farther. We must posit that politics is a thought, that it is a condition for
the subjective, under the singular modality of thought, to form not only the space of politics
but also the space in Which politics is thinkable. To say that politics is a thought is to say
that it is thinkable, that it is—and this is the whole point—thinkable from within itself and
not from disciplines or doctrines exterior to it. We must, therefore, maintain that if politics
is a thought, it is thinkable without requiring a process of thought that is above it or that
understands it. In other words, it is thinkable without recourse to the State or to econom-
ics, which are two distinct notions. The enterprise of conceiving politics from a standpoint
other than that of the State or of the economy is an enterprise of freedom and of a field
proper to decision.
CHAPTERZ THE TWO STATEMENTS
1.MY AIM
The intent of the anthropology of the name is to establish a basis for the knowledge of
thought and to open up the prospect of a thought with no object. The anthropology of the
name does not, therefore, aspire to be a science. Its two constitutive statements are People
think and Thought is a relation of the real. I propose to put these statements to the test,
which presupposes the practicability and the inquiry that give anthropology its
consistency. I aim to establish an anthropology of that which, until now, has been called
‘forms of consciousness’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘representation’. It is an anthropology of the
thought of people that necessitates being in a position to take on in anthropology the
statement People think. I call this anthropology not a subjective, interpretative or
comprehensive anthropology but, rather, a rational anthropology in interion'ty.
The interiority designates the attempt to elucidate the subjective from inside the subjective
and not in extefiority, that is, not by calling on objectivist or positivist referents. With
respect to the statement People think, the approach in interiority will examine What is
thought in the thought of people. Anthropology designates an investigation into forms of
thought, which requires study.
This anthropology is an anthropology of intellectuality and it is an anthropology in

interiority; that this anthropology is in inten’ority excludes it from the field of social
science, as represented by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in France and Max Weber in
Germany. The Anglo-Saxon culturalist school proposed a social and cultural anthropology,
in response to the separate fields of sociology, history and ethnol- ogy. Social and cultural
anthropology held out the promise of making the analysis of representations less rigid,
since it did not require general
THE TWO STATEMENTS 49
models. In Structural Anthropology (1958), Claude Lévi-Strauss established the first non-
empirical theoretical space, in contrast to BronisIaw Malinowski or Margaret Mead, an
apparently (and intentionally) non- philosophical space for the study of systems of
representation. The anthropology of the name situates itself, with full knowledge of the
implications, after structural anthropology and retaining its second term, although the
work of Lévi-Strauss, as great as is this author’s admiration for him, will not be examined
here. Lévi-Strauss’ hypothesis is that: To be analysed, systems of representation must be
regarded as classificatory systems. This is the principle of the structural approach. In
relation to structural anthropology, the word ‘anthropology’ is retained here as opening
onto the investigation of representations and in the wake of studies of forms of
consciousness conducted by Anglo-Saxon anthropology and picked up in a particular
system by Lévi-Strauss. But an anthropology of the name is distinct. In the Anglo-Saxon
case, as in the case of Lévi-Strauss, the independence of anthropology as thought is not
completely established based on the postulates posited by these authors. In addition, the
idea persists in both that anthropology is con- fined to subjects of study or fields long
regarded as exotic and with small- scale groups. The need to return to a certain type of field
or a certain type of study in order to identify the social anthropology ultimately translates
an intellectual difficulty with regard to the theoretical identification of the discipline as
singular.
Let us take two examples. In Totemism (1963) and in The Savage Mind (1966), Lévi-
Strauss finds himself compelled, as he establishes the classificatory approach, to
reintroduce the nature—culture tandem. In this way, he links structural anthropology to
What can be called a philosophy of thought whose relationship to eighteenth-century
philosophical thinking has often been underscored. In Rethinking Anthropology (1966),
Edmund Leach proposes the paradigm of human psychology. Anthro- pology of the name—
anthropology in that it pursues the study of representation and, more particularly, of
forms of thought, although it approaches them as singularities—refuses to rely on an
external general theory and is informed instead by a configuration of statements that posit
thought as thinkable in What it is, in thought, a relation of the real.
50 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
What is anthropological is that the relation of the real does not constitute the
identification of the thought and that Statement 2 is suspended until the statement People
think is accepted as an identifier of thought rather than as a reflexive statement. What
makes this anthropology original is not only that there is no external system of reference
but also that the relation of people and their thought, instead of being reflexive, is one of
confrontation and it emerges from interrogating the thought of people about what people
think. Underpinned by the confrontation between thinking and thinkability, the
anthropology of the name must break with a philosophy and a psychology of human beings,
and shift into a strict anthropologization of the category of thought. This implies a double
break vis-a-vis earlier anthropology—because it is a matter of the thought of people and
because anthropology of the name with regard to thought intends to move from the widely
accepted idea that thought is relative to the idea that it is singular. An anthropology of the
name is identified as a discipline whose purpose is to establish and identify subjective
singularities.
To my knowledge, such an anthropology does not exist because it is considered

impracticable. In analyses of representation, research has developed on what
anthropologists, sociologists and historians thought of what people thought. The analysis of
representations has been constituted in the discourse of science, of objectivity, and of its
filter on what was at issue in representations.
2. MY TOOLS
I now need the category of intellectuality to present the foundational statement People
think.
To maintain that there is thought‘ or, even more, that People think, without demanding that
thought hold forth on its requisites and conditions, is my first point. This is what I call
‘intellectuality’. Intellectuality stipulates the there is thought and delivers it from its
subservience to any problematic that maintains that a statement on thought must think a
1 We will see that we are dealing with a process.
minima of the condition of this statement and that thereby produces what is appropriate to
call ‘philosphemes’, that is to say, circulating elements. ‘Circulating’ indicates a singular
element used in a way that de- singularizes it. Circulating elements establish a
compatibility between heterogeneous areas, as we have seen in Chapter 1. Circulating
elements are those by which thought and the thought of thought communicate. Any
philosopheme requiring the totality to circulate will be in symbiosis with the totality. The
specific function of the philosopheme is to render the heterogeneous co-thinkable and thus
to be able to circulate. To my mind, thought and the thought of thought are disjunctive. It is
on this condition that the statement People think can be maintained.
So I call ‘intellectuality’ the fact that there is thought, without it being necessary that the
thought of this thought be stated. Intellectuality does not prescribe the identification of the
thought of the thought, even though it does not exclude it. The function of the category of
intellec— tuality is to posit that thought begins with itself, without for that matter
requiring what Althusser termed the specular relation.
In what I call still today the ‘sociology of representations’, the question of what is thought
in the thought of people is not discussed; it is science that resolves this question by
proposing objects, then establishing these objects as indicators and analysers. It is science
that rules on the thinking of people using an approach in exteriority and in objectivity. In
the classist, scientistic, positivist, objectivist approach (all terms for the same name), the
very question, ‘What is thought in the thought of people?’ cannot be raised and an
anthropology of representations is impossible; there is no way of getting out of the
dualisms prenotions-science or ideology-science.
Will it be maintained that people think is incompatible with scientists think, that is to say,
with ‘science is thought’? This is certainly the case in the scientistic sense but not in the
anthropology proposed here. Thought and the thought of thought will provide an account
of this anthropology. In the meantime, I must stress that the category of intellectuality
leads us to challenge any homonymy between this thought and that thought— the two
statements People think and Scientists think are absolutely separate and distinct. There is
thought and thought. Juxtaposing the two
52 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
statements (People think, Scientists think) does not in any way enable us to maintain that
science is in a position to think what people think. The existence of a multiplicity of
intellectualities is the direct consequence of the thesis of intellectuality that maintains that
a thought exists without it being necessary that the thought of the thought be identified.
Intellectuality, that is, the separation of the thought with the thought of the thought, elicits
a problematic of the multiplicity of intellectualities which is also like multiplicity of
thought. The thesis of a single intellectuality is that of science as a general normative
model; for science, there can be no other intellectuality. We have established ourselves
from the outset within a multiplicity of intellectualities. The statement People think leads
necessarily to this multiplicity—there are many intellectualities, not one, and each is
singular. The fact that each intellectuality is irreducible to anything other than itself
constitutes its singularity. Singularity stands in opposition to a problematic of concept (in
social science) and to a case-based or type-based approach whose main option is not so
much the universal as the norm—each situation being at once presence of and deviation
from the norm. With reference to phenomena of consciousness, I call category that which
has existence only in singularity A category can be named and identified but not defined,
because in the field of phenomena of consciousness, any definition requires the concept
and the object and ends up returning to science as the exclusive model. When we want to
name the category, we must consider the eventual multiplicity of its singularities. The
multiplicity is therefore in no way the breaking apart or the scission of the One, of an
original unity that has deteriorated. Multiplicity is not another name for the beginning of
thought; it does not designate the transition from a problematic of the whole, the totality,
the One, to a phenomenological problematic of the multiple. It is that by which and with
respect to which we must begin.
There are intellectualities. To identify one is to identify its mode.2 The mode will be the
operative category of the singularity of each intellectuality and we will call ‘multiplicity of
intellectualities’, the
2 The mode is either a historical mode of politics, in which case it qualifies politics and is
the relation of a politics to its thought; or it is a mode of intellectuality, that is to say, a
particular configuration of the process there is thought.
configuration of different modes. I posit the singularity and multiplicity of intellectualities.
3. PROPER NAMES
In the course of this analysis, I will be referring to Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Michel
Foucault, Louis Althusser, Marc Bloch, Moses Finley and Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known as
Lenin.
4. THE TWO STATEMENTS
Statement 1: People think. Statement 2: Thought is a relation of the real.
In the field of a rational conception of thought, there cannot be a single statement—there

are two statements. In my case, they are the two afore- cited statements. These are two
separate statements. The existence of two statements precludes a totalizing procedure. As a
result, the existence of two statements is essential.
For many authors, Statement 2 must be established from the outside, by other paths, or by
qualitatively different paths, than those used to establish Statement 1. This question of
pitting representations against scientific discourse runs through all nineteenth- and
twentieth-century thought. It also runs through sociology (Durkheim’s, for instance) as
much as politics (Lenin’s opposition between spontaneity and consciousness is of the same
order). This qualitative separation between the two statements, this difference in nature if
not in degree, which in practice reserves thought to scientific thought and is the general
line of classist anthropology (I will explain this further in the next chapter), will be
countered here by a set of propositions and investigations, the goal of which is:
1. to put an end to the exteriority and to the qualitative divide between
Statement 1 and Statement 2, by proposing to invest Statement 2
from within Statement 1 itself;
2. and, in so doing, to bring about a shift that opens a new space to anthropology, a shift
from the statement Scientists think to the
54 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
statement People think. It is a matter of opening to the multiplicity of thought, knowing

that science is one modality of this multiplicity and anthropology of the name is another
distinct modality thereof. Opening to the hypothesis of a multiplicity of thoughts
constitutes not so much areas as protocols of investigation which are absolutely
heterogeneous. The totalization of these different forms is not possible.
The two statements have two corresponding processes. Process 1: There is thought.
Process 2: That which is thought in thought.
The processes are what carry out the investigation of Statements 1 and 2, as much in
thought as through inquiry. There is thought is a process in that it supposes the existence of
thought, without having to concern itself with constituting it or with designating its origin.
‘There is’ is a position of thought, which does not designate an objectivity or a nature.
5. RATIONALISM AND RATIONALISMS
Of the two propositions, People think and Thought is a relation of the real, the most
innovative, it would seem, or at least the most singular, is the first statement. It is not that it
is explicitly maintained that people do not think, except by those who see history as a great
conspiracy and think that propaganda or television or some clergyman or another shape
minds. In the thesis People do not think, there is no room for a problematic of freedom that,
minimally, can be the name of the idea that situations of disaster are not permanent.
Instead, they are circumstantial and situations other than such situations of disaster also
exist. Freedom, or its index, is in the great multiplicity of the real.
It should be noted that even though the thesis People do not think is not explicitly
maintained, every effort seems to be made to get around both the fact of people thinking
and its investigation. As things stand today, the investigation of representations is in the
paradoxical situation of not having established the question ‘Do people think?’ as its central
question. This is the reason for the sterility of categories of representation and of
consciousness, which are unproductive because nothing in
the sphere of these notions is recognized as thought. One explanation for this state of
affairs (in social science) has to do with the status of thought today, and the way in which it
is strongly connected to ‘rationalism’ and to ‘scientific thought’, both of which are
affiliated with positivism and Marxism.
We can see the extent to which the statement People think breaks, to all intents and
purposes, with this particular scientific rootedness of thought, to the point of appearing to
be threatening and anti-rationalist. The statement People think, when bound up with
challenging the rationalist and scientific basis of the prevailing scientistic problematic of
thought, would then seem to present a difficulty.
Less discussion has been devoted to the statement People think and the investigation it
calls for than to the incompatibility between the statement and the dominant scientistic
conception of thought. This is why, in anthropology and sociology, more attention has been
paid to opinions and representations recognizing the mental activity of people, and the
question of knowing whether we are dealing with a thought has been carefully left aside.
The present-day situation of the analysis of representations in the social sciences
illustrates a type of relationship between Statement 1 and Statement 2 that ties the
intellectuality of people to the fundaments of rationalism. Today rationalism still presents
itself as the scientific or quasi-scientific discourse in exteriority on forms of consciousness,
representations, and ‘prenotions’, to borrow Durkheim’s term.
Scientific rationalism, which is here nothing other than scientistic rationalism, not only
asserts itself as rational but it also maintains that it is the sole possible form of rationalism,
that it alone is in a position to develop coherent debatable ideas about reality. The stakes
are high— what is at issue is nothing less than the quality of the sciences known as human
or social sciences.
The anthropology of the name proposes to leave the field of science for a field of rational,
debatable and refutable knowledge, which does not however pertain to the category of
science as it appears today in the social sciences which is designated here as scientism. The
terms of ‘scientistic thought’ characterize the conception of science at work in
56 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
sociology, economics and history. The theory that it proposes of science is that of
exteriority, law, causality and the universal. I am challenging it because it presents itself as
the sole paradigm of knowledge, and calling into question the theory of science that it
develops.
If, as I have said earlier, scientism is in exteriority, it is because a special configuration of
repeatability is dominant in it. The very strong connection between exteriority and
repeatability presupposes the absence of time as a category of consciousness.3 There is no
repeatability in the arena of history and society. The trivial response avoids the crux of the
matter by emphasizing the lack of modelizing or mathematizing; this is a feeble response
because all it does is note, in an empirical way, the difference in treatment between what
physics speaks about and what sociology speaks about. It limits itself to observing that the
one is not equivalent to the other. This is a form of identification by default.
Alongside the social existence of humans, a category of time is present, a subjective
category, specifying that what will come is open. There is no counter-example: When what
will come seems completely closed in the order of myths, rules or rites, then myths, rules
and rites, while asserting the closure of this opening, actually assert its possibility. What
will come, the opening, is the mark of the spirit of human beings and of the social world.
I will say that time and the inquiry that is its corollary are to society what mathematics and
experimentation are to physics. In the physics experiment, keep in mind that what Will
happen does not come under the heading of the possible and, consequently, it does not fall
into the category of time as a category in subjectivity. The non-repeatability, with regard to
society, is but the negative sign indicating that society does not pertain to the field of
physics, just as the absence of time, as a category of the possible, is but the negative sign,
for physics, of its heterogeneity to social disciplines.
My enterprise is not anti-rationalist, of course. Scientistic rationalism is one form of

rationalism; another can be conceived that puts an
3 This runs counter to psychoanalysis, where repetition is the figure of subjective time, as
Alain Badiou notes.
end to exteriority and to the postulate according to which rationalism can only be in
exteriority. I posit the multiplicity of rationalism; there is no one problematical process of
stating the real. The possibility of an anthropology of the name turns on the question of
knowing whether or not scientistic rationalism exhausts reality. With other rationalisms
being conceivable, the question becomes one of delimiting the fields.
6. A DOUBLE SHIFT
An Anthropology of Thought
Establishing the statement People think as a constitutive statement brings about a double
shift.
In scientistic rationality, the thesis is: The researcher (or scientist) thinks. The first shift
concerns what we must call the ‘first thinking’ (pre- mierpensant). The ‘first thinking’ is
what is said to think in the first statement. With the shift in terms of first thinking, what
we have is no longer The scientist thinks but, rather, the statement People think. In the
scientistic approach, the anthropology of representations is always an anthropol— ogy by
default: if the first thinking is The scientist thinks, then we are not grappling with the
question of what is thought in the thought of people; the statement People think is missing
and an indistinction is maintained between People think and People do not think. The
categories of representation and of consciousness are the supports of this indistinction.
If the first thinking is not People think, an investigation of What is thought in the thought of
people, or Process 2, becomes impossible. Identifying the first thinking with regard to the
thought, or the thought of which we are speaking with regard to the first thinking, is a
decisive matter. We will call the thought of the first thinking the ‘thought-there’ (pensée—
lzi). It opens onto different protocols of investigation; this is why the second shift, which
proceeds from the first, pits against the scientistic statement What is thought in the
thinking of the scientist? the statement of Process 2: What is thought in what people think?
The development of such a question or of such a process requires investigation. We are
dealing here less with a charge against science than with the following assertion: in the
field of questions that touch on thought, scientistic thinking
58 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
prohibits the possibility of the knowledge of thought. The anthropology proposed is only
secondarily an anthropology of representation and forms of consciousness; it is an
anthropology of thought, for which the name and the place of the name are operators, as
we will see in Chapter 4.
People think is not, as a result, a fact but, rather, a statement, and this statement must
henceforth be understood from within an anthropology of thought.
We are setting out here on a study of thought. The singularity of the method proposed is to
open at every moment to the need and the practicability of the study. The study consists in
relating people and what they think to each other; this process of relating constitutes a
confrontation (face-d-face).
In this confrontation what is at issue is not ‘who thinks’; it is not a problematic of the
subject or a problematic of class. In the classist problematic and positivist Marxist
sociology, although the existence of class thoughts is posited, no one maintains that the
group or the class thinks. It was Althusser who first brought up class thought and the
process without subject. Althusser represented an attempt to break with classist thought
and the subject of class, from the moment he proposed the process without subject and the
idea that any problematic of the subject is given as transcendental, that is to say, as idealist.
Althusser proposed statements on subjectivity that do not rely on subjects, and he opened
to an approach to subjectivity independent of the substratum of groups.
What can we say of subjects or their absence when we situate ourselves outside the
confines of the classist view and, therefore, have no social subjects or collectivities at our
disposal? Insofar as the first thinking of the confrontation is concerned, we cannot say that
we are dealing with constituted entities or collectivities or social subjects. People, here, are
what I call a ‘certain indistinct’, that the process of anthropological investigation manages
to isolate. The certain indistinct does not designate a group or a structure or a model. One
could say that it is an indistinct being-there with regard to history and society. In the
confrontation between people and their thought, the point is not to reproduce the
confrontation between objective factors concerning people (profession,
salary, training, place of residence, etc.) and representations, but to query, in the thought of
people, the relationship of people to their thought.
In People think, none of the two terms that constitute this statement is established in itself.
We do not know what people is any more than we know what is thought. Statement 1 only
proposes the relationship between the two terms and does not claim to proceed from
science or from a problematic of the subject. Nothing in my proposition indicates how to
think about thought, when other statements on thought are such that they also structure
thinking on what is said on thought. The thesis People think has to be maintained even
though we are not in a position to demonstrate it by showing what is thought. People think
is a problematic decision.
People think is therefore a statement that relies on nothing other than its own problematic
relevance which consists in immediately subjecting the thought of the statement to that
which the statement prescribes; in other words, to think People think will be reformulated
as What do people think? in the statement People think. The confrontation between people
and their thought emerges in querying the thought of people on what people think. The key
in applying a method in interiority is to suspend bringing up Statement 2 (Thought is a
relation of the real) at this stage in order to take on, from within the thought of people, the
identificatory, rather than reflexive, character of thought.
I will not say that all thought states its categories of identification, but all thought opens to
the question of its categories of identification, a question that could be contracted into the
terms of Process 2: What is thought in thinking? If we bring the real into the picture, before
examining the categories of identification of thought, we are necessarily involved in
applying a method in exteriority and, as a result, a scientistic method. On the other hand, if,
after examining the categories of identification, we bring into the picture the relation of the
real, we are choosing to work on the basis of interiority which opens the way to the
development of a rationalism that is compatible with an anthropology of the name.
The intersection of Statement 1 and of Statement 2 is decisive, as is the moment when this
articulation emerges, which is the moment of
60 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
bringing the real into the picture. The moment of the real is the moment when the question
of rationalism arises. The moment when the question of thought as a relation of the real
emerges is the moment that forges thought as a category in its own right. This moment is at
once that of Statement 2 (Thought is a relation of the real) and that of Process 2 (What is
thought in thought?), where thought is constituted as a singular category. The movement of
thought is then very precisely that which is opened by the application of the foundational
statement to its own field— namely, that which is thought in Statement 1. We will call
‘thought’ that which is thought in what people think. What is thought in what people think
is a relation of the real. Let me explain.
7. THOUGHT IS A RELATION OF THE REAL

We will now examine the second statement.
On the one hand, the second statement is initiated and elicited by the first, even though the
two do not form a single proposition. What we have here is not a logic of statements but,
rather, a logic of processes and of observing what differentiates them and identifies them.
The first process concerns People think. To think thought, the second process also opens
onto thought as a relation of the real. The first statement, by itself, designates nothing but
the certain indistinct, if it is not carried through to the second process, which is not
thought-there (la pensée-ld), and whose
modality remains to be discovered. On Thought is a relation of the real, the field lies before
us.
In addition, although it is not a single statement, the two statements have a unity of
problematics. And yet if we were to conclude from this that there is a unity of processes
and reduce the two to a single process, we would be eliminating the ‘to be known’
character of the statement Thought is a relation of the real. There would be no more
inquiry, since the duality of the processes relies on it. These two processes are what
indicate that there is a field of possible knowledge to be constituted; otherwise People
think turns into a philosopheme and a circulating element between Statements 1 and 2
and between Processes 1 and 2, and then category of inquiry is evacuated. Between the
statements and the
processes, there is a space opened for the possibility of inquiry. As much as the statements
are indeed necessary, an anthropology with only the statements is impossible. The
statements, which have taken on here, with Statement 1, the form of the thought-there and
of the certain indis— tinct are the clause of rationalism, which assumes the formulation of a
‘there is’ that is not to be constituted. If an anthropology is impossible with only the
statements, it is because the statements alone do not call for or constitute the inquiry—that
is to say, that which, from the interior of the investigation of what is thought in thought,
manifests the presence of thought as a relation of the real. The inquiry is, therefore, in the
process, the presence of Statement 2, that which in no way disturbs the interiorit}r of the
process.
Thus, Statement 2 must be examined in view of its singular process and not simply in a
logic of propositions. In Statement 1, thought emerges as a category. People think is not
equivalent to ‘people think thought’. The relation of thinking to what is thought in thought
is not transitive. There is a separation between Processes 1 and 2 but that does not mean
that one is in interiority and the other in exteriority, unlike processes in the scientistic
approach wherein the subjectivity is given in the division between representation and
science. There is then a separation of processes but, paradoxically, there is a unity of
statements. There is a link from one statement to the other but not one statement.
In the scientistic approach, there are also two processes and two statements. But the two
processes and the two statements are given in the following manner: on the one hand,
there is the mind in society and the subjectivity of representations; on the other hand,
science thinks. The scientistic approach contends that society exists and that its being is to
be an orderly, configured totality; science sets out to describe the diflerent dispositions,
their tendencies and counter-tendencies, their ade- quacy and their dysfunctioning. In this
approach, statements and processes are conflated and joined, inasmuch as the question of
thought is subordinated to that of science. But scientistic thought—insofar as we are
supposing here that it is a thought—is in the impossibility of thinking what is thought in its
thought. If scientistic thought is a thought, it is a thought without thought or, more
precisely, without thought in interiority,
62. SYLVAIN LAZARUS
in the sense that I have discussed of thought emerging when we query what is thought in
thought.
What is to be understood by the statement Thought is a relation of the real? This statement
posits that the relation of thought to the real is not objectal but also that the real is essential
to thought; it is to indicate this non-objectality that I propose the unusual formulation:
Relation of the real. The relation of the real is the relation in which the real is not a relation
of object. If the real is necessary to the existence of thought, it is not in the sense of the real
being the object of thought or of claiming that thought can only be of the real. The relation
of thought and of the real proposed here is different in that the real to which I refer erupts
into thought as that which will be at stake and in question, for thought to think.
What remains to be explained is what is meant by the real character of the real, making
sure that we are not dealing with a form of (sociological) nominalism, where the word is
taken for the existence of the thing. There is a real other than objectal, one that could be
constituted through inquiry, forming a new field of knowledge and not a new scientific
system. Dismissing the suspicion of nominalism means demonstrating that we are dealing
with an effective rationality of the real as it has been cited in Statement 2. If thought is not a
relation of the real, then the statement People think is untenable.
Thought as relation of the real is essential to the statement People think and it allows us to
authenticate the real character of the real. Our task is to show that there can be a thought of
singularity with reference to the real. Indeed, the question of the real character of the real
is not specific to an anthropology of the name; it exists in any rational investigation,
including in scientific inquiry. All forms of knowledge and all disciplines set out to establish
the real of the real that is their focus of inquiry. The existence of the discipline and its
development are what give consistency to the real of its real and to reducing the distance
between ‘real’ and ‘real of the real’. Every discipline singularizes the category of the real.
Acknowledging the existence of disciplines, that is to say, of singular rationalities and
realities, requires shifting from the idea of one rationality to that of several rationalities, in
putting forward propositions on the singular establishment of a real.
For Durkheim, it is in the distance between fact, in the sense of common opinion, and
social fact that positivist sociology is established. The definition of a social fact is that by
which the authentically real character of the real is established. The objectal problematic,
which has its own protocol of inquiry, requires that an object be defined (as, for example,
the famous case of Suicide [1897]). The scientistic idea of science defines itself by its
method and its object—in the investigation, a definition is required that is of the same type
as the definition of science. The real of a discipline is, therefore, produced by the procedure
of definition, which is itself an objectal procedure. We are dealing, in Durkheim’s case, with
a definitional method. Between a definitional, objectal real on the one hand and a
nominalist real on the other, is there room for a real that pertains to a non-objectal and
non-nominalist thought? Under what conditions is the real present in thought? In other
words, under what condition can there be a non-definitional form of knowledge?
Unquestionably, we could cite the following at the very least: Finley’s investigation of
politics in Ancient Greece; the subject of consciousness in Lenin’s work; and the analysis of
categories of the present and the past in Bloch’s. These will all be discussed in greater
detail hereafter. Mention could also be made of my own work on politics and worker
anthropology.4 But the question is more specific.
A definitional method and a non-definitional method stand in opposition as thought of

concept and thought of category. To explain this point, we must set forward what I call the
thinkability of thought. Intellectuality is the instruction of the protocol of Statement 1,
People think. Thinkability is the instruction of the protocol concerning What is thought in
the thinking of people, that is to say, Process 2, itself related to Statement 2. If thought is a
relation of the real, how is what is thinkable in this relation a relation of the real? Is what is
thinkable completely thinkable? Is it partially thinkable? Is it thinkable in flashes?
Knowledge unfolds in a movement of imbalance—what is thought in a given moment, in
the field of a discipline, unfolds in thought only with regard to that which one aspires to
know but that is not yet known. The processes of thinkability are not simple,
systematizable inventories of
4 See Chapter 4 and Study 2.
64 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
what is already known; they develop in an ever-present back-and-forth movement

between what is known and what is not. The movement of knowledge is constituted by the
formulation in what is known of that which is not yet known, in a dynamic, off-balanced
shifting of the unknown onto the known. The unknown is never entirely exhaustible.
The wellspring of knowledge, and what makes it possible, is that the thinkability of thought
as a relation of the real is never total. There is always something left over, a residue that
escapes thinkability. Non-definitional methods take hold within this imbalance. Definitional
approaches, on the other hand, stipulate the total thinkability of thought as a relation to the
real, which is only possible at the cost of an objectal real. The science in scientistic thinking
is, in fact, the assertion of direct knowledge. And yet the statement People think the real is
as untrue as it is impossible, inasmuch as it presupposes a transparent and adequate
relation between the real and thought. It is, in reality, a statement wherein the real escapes
thought.
For the real to be present in thought, we must maintain the thesis of a relation of thought to
the real, an indispensable condition for the thinkability of this relation, and for the
presence of the real in thought. In the expression relation of the real, of the real refers to
knowledge as non-total and non-totalizable, dynamic and singular.
8. REITERATION AND GAPS
That there is no thought without thought of thought becomes explicit in the category of
thinkability. It is a founding prescription for this singular thought that is an anthropology
of the name, one that opposes it to scientism, a thought without thought of thought, which
is replaced by the idea of science. A new problematic field is opened up by the question of
the thought of thought, if we consider Statement 2, where the word ‘thought’ is mentioned
only once. The reiteration of the word is not reduced to a simple duplication of its first field,
situated in Statement 1. Reiteration is the process of thinkability and it distinguishes this
process as much from philosophical reflexivity as from nominalist immediacy. Unlike
concepts, categories are amenable to reiteration; in
fact, the development of a category requires reiteration which is the condition of

thinkability, inasmuch as the reiteration makes the relation of the real appear. Reiteration
is manifest and at work in such sentences as: What is consciousness conscious of ? What is
represented in representation?
Every reiteration is singular and is to be distinguished from duplication. Duplication is not
a rule for the category, in the sense that there would be no category possible without a
simple name, amenable to duplication. There is no factory of the factory, for example (to
this, we will return later). The duplication is not what allows us to identify a reiteration.
The category is not defined by its capacity to be duplicated, although the case of duplicated
names belongs, as we have seen, to the field of anthropology of the name. Thus, the
reiteration of the word thought in the thought of thought has a particular status. It does not
open onto all thought; it is not the name of names and all names do not come within its
jurisdiction. It is the singular category that makes it possible to identify the space of
categories better. Thought will therefore be called the first of simple names. We will see
later (in Chapter 4) that considering the name from the standpoint of finding out what it is
the name of will involve identifying the name by examining the places of the name. Unlike
duplication, reiteration will open onto the loci of the name.
Reiteration opens therefore onto the proximity between thought and the thought of
thought and not onto duplication. By tying together thought and the thought of thought as
closely as possible, in a single assemblage, We are taking on the imbalance between what is
already thought and its real remainder, that which is to be thought. The reiteration
introduces a gap between thought and the thought of thought of that which, precisely, it is
not a duplication.
The gap is borne by the reiteration. And it is an index of knowledge as imbalance and as a
shifting movement. It is constituted from what Will come, rather than in the relation of
what is to what is. It opens, therefore, onto the category in subjectivity of the possible.
The scientistic model addresses the problem by eliminating both the reiteration and the
gap, the latter through a problematic of the object and the former by applying the
definitional method. This leaves the
66 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
requirements of proof which will be resolved through experimentation and

mathematization.
I have mentioned above the simple name. The simple name is a word that opens up a field
of thought—for example, politics. N 0t every word is a simple name. But to maintain the
presence of a simple name throughout our investigation—including, in our case, the
unnameable name and the sites of the name—prohibits and prevents misuse and recourse
to a meta—language, that is to say, to a meta-thought. The simple name must not be
separated from what it opens up in thought. Meta- thought—no words are needed to grasp
the thought. Meta-language— no thoughts are needed to grasp the word. When working on
a word that opens up a field of thought, such as ‘worker’ or banlieue, maintaining it as a
simple name removes the inclination to abandon the initial word, as it is given at the outset
of the investigation. Not maintaining a word that opens a field of thought as a simple name,
abandoning it, amounts to renouncing Statement 1, since the simple name is one of the very
words that represents the thought of people.
To sum up, the break between the single statement People think and statements of
reiteration such as The thought of thought, or ‘that which is to be thought in thought’ is
what enables thought, regardless of the discipline, be it an anthropology of the name or
scientistic sociology. This break occurs between the simple name and the thought of the
name, and, as a result, localizing this break (between the simple name and the reiteration
or thinkability) must be distinguished from the process of its elucidation which consists in
identifying the sites of the name. From the standpoint of localization, which is the break
between the simple name and its thinkability, the reiteration transforms the simple name
into a category. The reiteration creates the gap that opens onto the question of what will
remain of the simple name in the reiteration. From the standpoint of the process of
elucidation, the break is not in the separation between the category and the simple name,
which always leads to abandoning the simple name, and, hence, to abandoning the idea of
an anthropology of thought, since the simple name is equivalent to People think. We must,
on the contrary, consider that the simple name and the name are bonded from the
standpoint of the process of elucidation at the same time as we renounce neither the
break, which enables
thinkability, nor the gap, which must be ascribed to the possible. To be sure, reiteration
opens onto thinkability and onto the name as a category, but we must go back to the simple
name, that is, to intellectuality from the standpoint of the process of elucidation. It is not a
prenotion-science paradigm that is established in the relationship between the simple
name and the category, as would be the case if we turned the simple name into an impetus
to, or a sign of, thinkability The operation of thinkability, or the process of localization,
must therefore be separated from the simple name, being that it is governed by the break
and the gap. This is not the case for the process of elucidation, which is governed, for its
part, by the question of the loci of the name. Here the possible has the status of the
operator of the gap that introduces us into the prescriptive order.
As we have said, Statement 2 stands in a unity with Statement 1 and is also at odds with it.
In what sense? To clarify this, let us examine this break, or, rather, these breaks, since there
are two of them.
The first break is that of the transition from intellectuality to thinkability. The gap, as we
have seen, is the one that is introduced by the reiteration. It coincides with the break; it
specifies the process of localization, which opens onto what thinkability is still missing.
The second break does not concern the thinkability of thought in Statement 2: Thought is a
relation of the real. It concerns the disjunction between thought as relation of the real, or
Statement 2, and the previous group, which includes the first break between ‘thought-
there’ and reiteration or, yet again, between intellectuality and thinkability.
Statement 2 brings about a second break with the first and the group of elements with gaps
between them. In doing so, it reduces the terms of the first gap. Once thought as a relation
of the real is identified, the first gap between thought and thinkability (where thinkability
is identified) is attenuated. Thought as a relation of the real allows us to identify
thinkability; this is what has been called the ‘process of elucidation’. Once this is
accomplished, the first gap finds itself reduced. Once thinkability is identified, what it
thinks is that by which it is given.
The decisive moment when the real erupts as a category of thought must be subjected to
the question of knong if the process of eruption
68 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
of thought is in interiority or in exteriority. Can the eruption of the category fall within the
scope of such an interrogation? We know that the real in Statement 2 is not in exteriority.
The real is in thought here. Statement 2, in and of itself, does not prescribe the interiority
or the exten’on'ty of the problematic.
Statement 2, which is a statement in which the thought of the real as a category is said to
erupt, finds itself exposed, and threatened, with respect to the question of interiority or
exteriority. What is confirmed here is that the interiority or the exteriority are configured
prior to Statement 2 and are determined in the intersection between the reiteration and
the simple name, and, much more deeply, in the intersection between thinkability and
intellectuality. I will conclude by saying that we have attached the reiteration, and
henceforth the real, to the simple name and thereby related the investigation of the two
gaps to the investigation of the loci of the name, an investigation that will lead to the
name, or at least to its category, without eliminating the simple name.
CHAPTER3 THINKING AFTER CLASSISM

THESES OF THIS CHAPTER
a. Critical Dimension
The validity of a knowledge of thought or of the anthropology of the name will be

established by evidencing the lapsing and by undertaking a critique of what will be
designated as classist thought. The latter is identified as a thought in which a dialectic of
the objective and the subjective and a dialectic of the subjective and the objective are
essential. We will use the operator consciousness as the fundamental notion in examining
the first dialectic, and the notion of the State for the second. Insofar as the first dialectic is
concerned, we will show that what is actually at issue is less a dialectic than a reversibility
carried by operators. The notion of consciousness will be taken up in the lapsing of this
‘dialectic’. For the second dialectic, whose core is not reversibility but, rather, operation
and determination, the analysis of the notion of the State and its role will lead to examining
the notion of totality. At that point, Althusser’s category of over-determination will be
examined as the first problematic to be studied where the thought of the subjective is
presented in the status of politics. Finally, to determine whether we are really dealing with
a thought that is dependent on the classist dialectic, we will bring history into the picture.
In effect, history has two characteristics: it is identified as a thought-relation-of-the-State
and, consequently, as a thought of the dialectic of the subjective and the objective; at the
same time, history, especially the Annales School approach to history, introduces the
subjective. But history is a very complex matter. It will be addressed twice—in this
chapter and in the next— and studied with reference to categories of time and to
distributive multiplicity, with the examination of the thinking of Bloch.
70 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
b. Thetic Dimension
We will propose theses. The thought of the subjective is a categorical thought and a thought
of singularity. The examination of Foucault’s work serves here as a test plan whereas that
of Finley illustrates the existence of a thought of the sequence and of the non-structurality
of history. A thought of singularity intersects that of historical modes of politics but it does
not coincide With the thought of politics—its space is that of multiplicity, in the distinction
between homogeneous and heterogeneous multiplicities. Anthropology of the name
addresses politics as thought in that thinking thought is its aim. The relation of
anthropology of the name to the thought of politics is addressed, on the one hand, in the
doctrine of historical modes of politics that positions the sequential singularity of each
mode and, on the other hand, through the prescriptive that yields the category of the
possible. Studies of the modes and studies of the prescriptive are two convergent forms of
investigation of the unnameable name of politics. It is with respect to its unnameable
name that the presence of politics is legitimized in an anthropology of the name, the
possibility of including it there being dependent on the status of categories of singularity
and multiplicity. In the space of the question of the name, these categories organize politics,
history and time. We will demonstrate that homogeneous multiplicity, present in the sites
of a mode of politics in interiority, is bound up with a problematic of singularity.
A thought of singularity is a rational thought and a thought-relation- of-the—real—an

expression that marks the non-objectality of the real and its presence to thought through
rupture and eruption, and not through the relationship between a subject and an object. In
Statement 2, Thought is a relation of the real, the real does not refer to an already existing
given or to a constructed object. It is obviously not of the order of the unknowable; and it
cannot be said to be the object of scientific knowledge. It is not the first object, or that by
which a cognitive approach is identified. Here, the statement To know is to know the real is
a false statement. For the question of the real as such, and at this degree of generality,
does not identify any approach to knowledge. Quite the opposite—the statement Thought
is a relation of the real makes of the real 3
THINKING AFTER CLASSISM 71
paradoxical notion, since it is the foundation of thought yet it does not identify it.
Articulating thought with the statement People think and not, as in the objectivist
approach, with the real, without renouncing, for that matter, the category of the real, since
this category appears in Statement 2, is the first reversal introduced. The question of the
real as axial in the problematic and as the condition of its rationalism is maintained. In the
objectivist or scientistic approach, what characterizes the mode of treating the question of
the real, that is to say, the type of rationalism proposed, is not simply that it de-subjectifies
the subjective but mainly that it de-interiorizes the problematic of the subjective,
renounces it and asserts the impossibility of its investigation. I have already discussed this
point. If, in any inquiry whatsoever, the first statement links the real and thought in the
form ‘thought is thought of the real’, the constraint of the object and objectifiable real on
the analysis of the forms of the subjective is such that these forms find themselves
excluded from the field of the analysable itself. If we start with the real and not with the
thought of people; or if we start with a dialecticization of the thought of people and of the
real, the objectivist approach becomes the single and necessary approach. But this
approach simultaneously annuls the possibility of an anthropology of intellectuality. We
see here once again the central character of Statement 1. The anthropology in question
makes the investigation of the subjective compatible with the real, and with the investi-
gation of such categories as the factory and politics, which will be considered here as
categories in interiority. This new figure of compatibility is conditional on an approach in
interiority.
One of my central categories is the category of singularity. We can see at once the
difficulties in thinking the singular. Thinking the singular can be understood as a de-
singularization, an accession to the general, or, at least, to a case of the general. But it is also
possible to think without the object of thought being what establishes the thought, and this
in opposition to the thesis that maintains that thought exists only to the extent that its
object is established. My intention is not to assert that thought is always without an object
but, rather, to locate the question of the object as a particular case specific to the scientistic
approach and
72 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
as a specificity of the scientistic mode of intellectuality, and not as an invariant of all

thought or of all rational thought.
In scientism, the object is connected to the general, to establishing general laws which are
laws of the real. The order of the real and of its laws prescribes the order of thought, and
the hypothesis of irreducible singularities appears antinomic to the universality of the
scientistic conception of the real. In the scientistic view, there is no such thing as sin-
gularity, only cases and types. The assertion of the existence of laws of the real specific to
the scientistic approach and Statement 1 do not merely stand in opposition. The thought of
singularity is not a shift with regard to scientistic thought; it is a break in the problematic of
intellectuality. This is the second reversal.
l. SINGULARITY AND HISTORICAL MODES OF POLITICS
From this point on, I will be including politics in my field of investigation because it is an
exemplification of the thought of singularity, and because it is characteristic of the tension
between the definitional, objectal or scientistic approach and the process of subjectivation.
Politics is of the order of the subjective. This thesis is opposed to objectal doctrines that
conflate the analysis of politics with that of institutions, such as the Party, or with
structures, such as the State, and that thereby set up politics as a societal invariant that
lends itself to the analysis of power. To my mind, politics is a thought. This is what
establishes the basis of its sequential character and allows us to hypothesize about politics
without reducing it to the State, to economics or to history and without asserting that it
pertains to repeatability or to structure. The opposition between object and thought with
regard to politics coincides with the debate that opposes singularity and universalist
objectivism. If politics is a thought, it is of the order of singularity and will be an exem-
plification thereof. There is no such thing as politics in general, only singular political
sequences. Politics is not a permanent instance of societies; it is rare and sequential, and
is manifested in historical modes. The mode, which is the relation of a politics to its
thought, characterizes the lacunary existence of politics and permits a grasp of politics
through its
thought. Now the sequential and the non-objectal go hand in hand. The analysis of politics
is therefore exemplary of the tension between the objectal approach and an approach
based on subjectivity; the importance of subjectivity, in terms of an identification of politics
as thought, is opposed to objectality, which leads to undervaluing the thought of politics. If
the existence of politics is considered invariant, then politics does not belong to what is
called politics here and it does not belong to thought as developed by an anthropology of
the name. It is important to understand that the mode is a thought, in that it invests a
singularity with the thought of politics and deploys a singular political thought. Politics in
its singularity, that is to say, in its sequential dimension, does not coincide with the
structural permanence of objects such as the State and classes. Politics in thought is non-
objectal.
A historical mode of politics is, therefore, a singularity, in that it is manifested as the

relation of a politics to its thought. How is it identified? A mode begins and ends. It marks
the sequence of existence of politics. The work of identifying the mode involves delimiting
the sequence and dating it. The dating is in itself a complex question that will involve the
category of sites of politics. In effect, every historical mode of politics dis- plays particular
places and the disappearance of the place signifies the end of the sequence of the given
mode.
a. Modes in Intefiofity
Modes are in interiority or in exteriority. Interiority is marked by the homogeneous

multiplicity of sites; exteriority is characterized by a heterogeneous multiplicity and
presents itself as having a single locus—the State. Here are the modes in interiority whose
identification is proposed:
— The revolutionary mode, which is more particularly at issue here and whose sequence is
1792—94.
— The classist mode, where history is the category in consciousness of politics. History is
understood here as the product of the class struggle and is manifested in the development
of the working-class movement. What is at issue here is by no means the objective or
descriptive history to which the idea of historical materialism would much later be
attached but, rather, a category of political
74
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
consciousness and hence a prescriptive category. A single categorical register prescribes its
present and future. The loci of this mode are working-class movements and historical
movements. The sequence of this mode extends from 1848, date of the publication of The
Communist Manifi’sto by Marx and Engels, to 1871 with the Paris Commune, when the
categories of working-class movements or historical movements were exhausted.
The Bolshevik mode, which is characterized by the thesis of politics under condition. Here,
proletarian political capacity is not spontaneous, historical or socially determined; it is
obliged to state its own conditions. There is a gap between a conception in which politics is
expressive of the social and one in which it is subject to condition. The protocol of this gap
is given by What Is To Be Done? in the category of Party. The sites of the Bolshevik mode
are the Party and the soviets. The sequence of the mode stretches from 1902 (when Lenin’s
What Is To Be Done? was published) to October 1917. After this date, we witness the
statification of the Party. The Party and the soviets, which disappear, are no longer the sites
of a mode.
The dialectical mode, known by the proper name of Mao Zedong, which de-historicizes by
subordinating history to the masses, pushing it into the background and foregroundjng
such subjective notions as enthusiasm (for) and socialism. However, the relation to the
thought of politics is played out in the categories of political laws, which allow for an
approach to the conjuncture and to the situation. Thought is ascribed to the development of
laws that stem from relating the subjective to the objective. It is this relation that is
dialectical, with political knowledge proceeding by accumulation and leaps. A form of
knowledge exists that is exclusively political because such a knowledge is dialectical
without being historical. Even if the Party exists, it does not identify the mode. The mode is
dialectical materialism as such, confronted with great situations. Great situations cannot
renounce the principle of the masses. The dialectical mode relies therefore on human
capacity when political capacity is mobi- lized. In the dialectical mode, the dialectic is
distinct from Marx’s, where history is merged with class, and distinct from the Leninist
mechanism, where the Party mediates consciousness and history. It is, in fact, the very
thought of politics. The antagonism is conceived as a transformation and as a transition to
socialism, which is accomplished not by occupying an empty place—that of the State——
or in a shift from the bourgeois State to a proletarian State but by growth, as embodied by
the doctrine of liberated regions. Thus it is war, regarded as a factor of growth and
transformation, which corresponds to the dialectical mode and that is the privileged site
of the dialectic. The loci of the mode are those of the revolutionary war: the Party, the army
and the united front. The sequence limits of the mode are 1928, date of the publication of
Mao’s Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?, and 1958, which marks the
settlement of the Korean War and the moment when the construction of socialism in the
modalities of a revolutionary war ceases.
b. Modes in Exteriofity
Let us now examine the modes in exteriority, which are characterized by a heterogeneous
multiplicity of places and present themselves as having but one—the State. We will call a
mode in exteriority a thought of politics that argues in its statements that politics is not
thinkable or is not thinkable from within itself, but that the thought of politics, if one does
exist, requires at least one external referent, such as economy or law. In this way, the
thought of politics is subordinated to that of the State. It is therefore the State that
structures and subordinates the thought of politics, and, in this specific sense, this thought
can be said to be in exteriority We are dealing here nonetheless with a specific form of
subjectivity.
Let us take as a first example the parliamentary mode in France today. What we call a
parliamentary mode—as distinct from the parliamentary regime, which appears at the
end of the nineteenth century with the ‘state of the entire people’ and follow upon the ‘state
of classes’ —is the mode of politics in exteriority whose sequence begins in 1968. It is
defined by a modification of the State, which then became more functional and consensual;
by the intensification of the governmental and non-representative character of parties; and
finally, by the role of
76 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
public opinion, which will allow me to raise the question of one of the political sites of this
mode.
The State can be said to be functional when it not longer pretends to be representative of
the social body and is identified by clear evidence of technicality and its related constraints
(decisions are always presented as being good technically). The functional clarifies the
State as such. Consequently ‘functional’ means that the State is no longer in an antag-
onistic or programmatic context—the end of the programmatic, which dates to the early
years of Mitterrand’s government, is the end of the idea that a series of promised or
proposed measures could give direction to the State and that choices of politics were still
possible. ‘Functional’ indicates that the field of possibilities of the State has become very
limited and that certain forms of prescriptions on the State have disappeared.
To the functional corresponds the consensual which presents forms of consciousness of the
functional State and which, turning the State towards itself, reduces its separate,
inaccessible, repressive and authoritarian aspect to convey and emphasize the restrained
and constrained space of the field of consciousness. Technicality, as the essence of the
functional and consensual State, is essentially characterized by its economic valence. The
functional state is in no way the State of capital— capital that finds itself (and this is the
very meaning that can be given to the word ‘economy’) separated from it—but it
internalizes its requirements along with those of the crisis and regards them as an article
of faith. Ultimately, the consensual consists in leaving to the economy a part of the arena of
politics that belongs to the State and to the government, and reducing the space of
subjectivity not—and this is the paradox—to the economy but to State values. This it does
by asserting the external character of the economy, when, in fact, a significant part of
decisions concerning the economy come under the purview of State policies. The
consensual empties State’s actions (lefaire étatique) of its prescriptive dimensions while
proposing to concentrate opinion not on the real politics of the State but on its functional
aspect, presented mainly in the form of moral values.
We can now examine the question of the political loci of the parliamentary mode. One of
the sites of the parliamentary mode is precisely the consensual. It is a site in exteriority
insofar as it denies that politics is a thought; it calls it an opinion, an opinion on the
government of the functional State. Accepting this hypothesis has the effect of reinforcing
the State character of parties. The so-called political parties in the parliamentary mode
are far from representing a diversity of opinions. They are responsible for organizing in
subjectivity that the only possible political thought is an opinion regarding the
government. From this point of view, parties merely organize the subjective dimension and
forms of consciousness focused exclusively on the functional State. As a result, these
parties are not so much political organizations as State organizations.
80 it is easy to understand why the parliamentary mode, which features diflerent
heterogeneous sites—at the very least, the consensual and the factory as a temporal site—
claims that only one site exists which is, as we have said, the State.
But, far from being a site, the State is in fact a composite notion whose role is to configure
heterogeneous elements such as classes,1 and to organize mechanisms of representation
and subjectivity. When the State is the foundation of the thought of politics, it is given as a
unique site, whether it is in the form of the parliamentary State or in that of the Party-State
characteristic of socialist States. In the case of the Party-State, we are dealing with what can
be called a polymorph which manifests its diverse presence in all spheres of activity. The
question of the exteriority of a mode is therefore bound up with the question of the State.
On one level, the exteriority is consecutive to the nature of the mode, that is to say, to the
relation of a politics to its thought—if this politics maintains that the only relation to its
thought is exterior, we are in exteriority. On another level, the question is about the nature
of the loci and their multiplicity. In the parliamentary mode, we have said that the political
sites of the mode in exteriority are the consensual and, as we will see in Chapter 4, the
factory as temporal site.
1 The State, even in post-classism, always composes classes, the class in the social sense of
the term having by no means disappeared.
78 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
As for the Stalinist mode, it organizes its exteriority through the Party-State Which, by
really evacuating the law of value and private ownership of the means of production,
evacuates the economy.2 The kind of consensual subjectivation that we have seen taking
hold in the space of separation between the economy and the State in the parliamentary
mode, cannot exist here. The Party-State is the only given proposed to subjectivation and
the only practical space of the latter. Paradoxically, the Party-State seems less composite
than the State in the parliamentary mode insofar as the economy in socialism does not exist
and there is no site aside from the site of the State. The Party-State is less heterogeneous,
in fact, than the State of the parliamentary mode. Its terrorist character is deduced
therefrom—with every site being a site of the Party- State and of a faintly composite State,
and with the only norm of the site being that of the Party-State and this norm having no
other rule but itself, the Party-State imposes itself as the referent of all subjectivity. The
sequence of the Stalinist mode begins in the early 19303 and ends with the coming to
power of Mikhail Gorbachev.
2. DIALECTIC OF THE OBJECTIVE AND OF THE SUBJECTIVE
Let us call Marx’s thesis (that the material conditions of existence determine forms of
consciousness) a ‘dialectic of the objective and of the subjective’. From the standpoint of
an investigation of forms of thought, the dialectic of the objective and of the subjective is a
direct mapping of intellectuality onto an exterior reality. To this dialectic of the objective
and of the subjective, which underpins the though that we call classist, which is an objectal
and not only an objective approach, we have opposed an approach in interiority and the
category of the real.
Let us analyse the dialectic of the objective and of the subjective through examples of
political thought since they are particularly well known and enlightening. This is where the
use of this dialectic has been most intensive, but what follows is applicable to everything
that we have described as pertaining to a the scientistic approach and the classist thought
inherent in any problematic of exteriority.
2 I explain this thesis more fully in Chapter 4 and in Study 2.
This dialectic rejects singularity Its operators—class, consciousness, the Party and the
programme—remain in a state of indecision and ambi- guity as to categories not of a
singularity but of a generalizing multiplicity. Yet the subjective cannot be dialecticized. It
cannot be thought, in terms of thinkability, from anywhere but from itself.
Either the dialectic of the objective and of the subjective is thought from the standpoint of
objectivity, that is, from the standpoint of the scientific norming of consciousness
(consciousness is thought, for example, starting from the level of the development of
productive forces or of class structures), in which case the subjective is unthinkable—it can
be figured but not formulated. Or the dialectic of the objective and of the subjective is
stated from the standpoint of the subjective, in which case the status of the objective
remains uncertain. In its turn, it will be impossible to formulate, and will require a method
in exteriority that an examination in interiority cannot provide. We can clearly see the
great difficulty of this dialectic by simply evaluating it with respect to the two hetero-
geneous terms, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’.
Thus we have to examine the operators of this dialectic—which are class, consciousness,
the Party and the programme—and see how they enable the resolution of their constitutive
heterogeneity and are, at the same time, traversed by it. Take consciousness and class.
Consciousness is at once of the order of the objective (it is determined by the material
conditions of existence) and of the order of the subjective (it develops into a thought of
history and a view of the world). For its part, the operator class pertains at once to a
problematic of the subjective (consciousness of class) and to a problematic of the
objective (relations of production underpin class).
We are speaking here of operators and not of negation or of the unity of opposites. The
dialectics of the objective and the subjective in Marx’s thought has the singular
characteristic of not being a philosophical dialectic. It does not pertain to the category of
negation that belongs, for its part, to a philosophical conception of dialectics and to a
method wherein the dialectic is approached in terms of the structure of thought. The latter
is what Marx regards as idealist. Marx will try to shift the dialectic from a conception which
involves structures of thought to one
80 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
that requires operators which are themselves historical entities, that is to say, materialist.
The central operator is clearly that of class (keep in mind that Lenin will add that of the
Party). The break between Marx and Hegel is played out in this debate on the dialectic, and
although it is, to be sure, a break with idealism, it is even more a break with philosophy.
The operators of classist thought are evidently circulating notions that apply as much in the
subjective order as in the objective order; there is a transition between the being of things
and their thinkability, and the mental coexists with the material. There is coexistence. How
is this coexistence thinkable? In Marxism, it is given as the essence of materialism and it
re-establishes the idea of totality. The coexistence of the mental and the material turns out
to be the source of totalizing thought. From this point of view, totality and totalization both
refer to a dialectic of operators, and if Sartre removes himself from the Hegelian dialectic
with the notion of totalization, which he claims to be without totality, he does not remove
himself from the dialectic of the objective and the subjective. The totalizing thought is
likewise the source of the problematic of consciousness, in that class is intermediary
between a structured totality (society is organized in classes) and consciousness (class
consciousness).
3. REVERSIBILITY AND PARTY
The double attribution of consciousness to the material and to the subjective makes this a
difficult notion—its nature and the operation it per- forms become hard to grasp. The
objective end of the spectrum presents consciousness as determined, while the subjective
end presents it as an operator. It is because of this difficulty that the Party was very soon
contemporaneous with consciousness, and that, in the history of politics, the
consciousness-Party configuration became the object of diverse formulations, whereas
modification in the consciousness-Party couple manifested the historicity of politics. For
example, the Leninist version of this couple was very different from the version proposed
by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifiasto, and the reasons for these differences are
to be found in the heterogeneity of the two notions. In Marx, the
heterogeneity is given in the absence of the category of politics, that is to say, of a

subjective side. In Lenin, it is illustrated in What Is To Be Done? by two contradictory
statements: spontaneity is the embryo of consciousness and consciousness comes from
the outside. The heterogeneity remains present in all historical forms of the
consciousness-Party couple. Ultimately, what characterizes it is heterogeneity. Let us take a
closer look.
Thinking heterogeneity between the objective and the subjective is, therefore, the main
difficulty of this dialectic. How can we think the unity of the objective and the subjective?
Both Marx and Lenin address this problem with the notion of moment but resolve it
differently. For Marx, the moment is given in the unity of class and history and remains
therefore under the rule of history. For Lenin, who distinguishes between history and
politics (politics is conditional on organized revolutionary consciousness), the moment is
given in the unity of class and politics as organized consciousness. But the notion of Party
had become by the end of the nineteenth century the main support for the question of
consciousness. What was at issue was less a question of class consciousness than of Party
consciousness. Even more, the Party soon become the support for the reversibility of the
subjective to the objective.
This reversibility is crystallized by the programme. There is no such thing as a Party

without a programme. The programme is a subjective formulation of the objective. In the
logic as such of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, the existence of a Party and
a programme carries the subjective efiects of the objective situation. The reversibility is
marked by the programme which represents the shift from the subjective to a renewed or
transformed objectivity, but to an objectivity nonetheless. The dialectic of the objective and
the subjective is therefore a reversible dialectic. Its operators are all situated on the line of
this reversibility. And, what’s more, the debate between Lenin and the German social
democrats was a debate about reversibility, with the social democrats advocating partial
reversibility (reformism) and Lenin advocating total reversibility (revolutionary
antagonism).
In fact, after examining the category of reversibility, we are forced to conclude that the
dialecticity (dialecticité) is sustained not by the dialectic
82 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
of the objective and the subjective but, rather, by the operators. It is consciousness, class
and the Party that sustain the dialecticity. The objective and the subjective designate the
space and limits of the reversibility and what can be covered by an operator insofar as it
alone is dialectical. The dialectic becomes, as a result, a characteristic of operators and not
the co-thinkability of the material and the mental. Ultimately, in the dialectic of the
objective and the subjective, there is no dialectic in the philosophical sense—proceeding
either from negation or from contradiction—but, rather, reversible operators that sustain
the dialecticity. We must abandon the hypothesis of the co-thinkabih'ty of the material and
the mental, and put forward the idea that the sole operators that exist are consciousness,
class and the Party. Since the dialecticity is sustained by these operators alone, the co-
thinkability of the mental and the material is not established. Nevertheless, the Party was
to continue for a long time to self- proclaim itself both the eifect of and the capacity for such
co-thinkability. The failure of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective is not a failure
of dialectics but of the possible contribution that dialectics even- tually could make to the
co-thinkability of the mental and the material. The fundamental question is to know
Whether the subjective is dialectical in nature; and, given that it is in the position of a limit,
the answer is that it is not.
The faction fight between a Lukacsian reading emphasizing the subjective and an
Engelsian reading that stresses, to the contrary, the weight of factors of production, is
position between the notion of subjectivation (taken from Hegel) and the notion of
determination (taken from Engels). But, in both cases, the category of the subjective can
only be dialectical. And these readings do not object to the thesis set forward here that
states that only the operators are dialectical because they alone are reversible.
Apprehended through the use of operators, the subjective finds itself dissolved or
reformulated as existing only as it is related to the reversibility. Thereupon, the subjective
ends up including objects or crystallizations and there is no consciousness that is not
consciousness of. There is class consciousness which is consciousness of class. This is what
is to be understood by Marx’s distinction between class in itself and class for itself.
Consciousness is qualified by the object class. At the same time,

consciousness of class brings a subject into view—the proletariat. The connection
between the scientistic problematic and the classist problematic is broken here.
Consciousness necessarily reintroduces an objectal approach which leads to the Party in
politics and, as we will see, to the State in history. There are objects (abstract-concrete)
(objective-subjective) that are inherent in the problematic of consciousness. These objects,
or crystallizations, are class, Party, programme, State and revolution. They structure
classist thought and characterize the specific scientistic approach to questions of politics
and history. For classist thought—which dominates thinking from the early nineteenth
century to today—the investigation of politics is necessarily an investigation of objects,3 in
the sense that it is an objectal thought concerning operators. Classist thought is not simply
a thought in terms of class but a thought of operators. It is to be found as much in Carl von
Clausewitz as in Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, as much injean jaures as in Durkheim and
even in Weber (if we note the way in which the juxtaposition in his comprehensive
approach between religion and capitalism maintains, if not the co-thinkability, at least the
co-presentation of the mental and the material and of the objective and the subjective).
Taken as a category of investigation, consciousness is not suited for investigating the

subjective. As a category of investigation, and contrary to what I thought,4 I now see the
category of consciousness as de-subjectivating. It is therefore an unusable category. I
arrived at this conclusion after having tried for a long time to deploy the category of
consciousness in a problematic of the subjective. The reading I proposed of Lenin in 1981‘
in my theses on post-Leninism demonstrated that consciousness in Lenin’s thought is
largely consciousness of, in particular of the State. On
3 It is, therefore, not surprising that political sociology, a sub-category of classist thought, is
exclusively the sociology of political parties, and that is why it concentrates on the
investigation of the 'apparatus-and-ideology’ couple. Whereas very little research has been
done on the PCF’s political thought, texts abound on the history of its apparatus or on
analyses of its programme.
4 See Sylvain Lazarus, Notes de travail sur le post-léninisme (Paris: Editions Potemkine,
1981)
5 See ibid.
84 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the other hand, I stressed that, in some of his texts—in particular in What Is To Be Done?—
politics is of the order of the subjective, that it pertains to consciousness without
specification, and it thereby gives the subjective a much vaster and more indistinct area
than the mere consciousness of, be it consciousness of class relations or of the State. Thus
politics pertained entirely to consciousness, and the category of consciousness could be
used without specification, without it being a consciousness of. A dis- objectification of the
category of consciousness appeared possible. I do not think this is so any more and,
consequently, consciousness is no longer the central category of politics. To the extent that
I persist in thinking that politics is of the order of the subjective, I propose to grasp it in a
different way—by the historical mode of politics.
4. CONSCIOUSNESS AND PHENOMENOLOGY
Politics, to be considered as a subjectivity, must be invested as an intellectuality and as a

thought, eschewing less the Leninist problematic of political subjectivity—that is to say, the
problematic of conditional subjectivity—than its operators, the Party and consciousness.
Once again, the difficulty here is the question of the real. Does politics as intellectuality and
thought have a reality? This question was designated the question of communism.
Reversibility and objectification were organized in the theme and the term of communism,
and communism was crystallized in turn in communist parties. Communism was a
dialectical operator crystallized in an object—the shift from ‘communism’ to ‘communist
Party’ involved a shift from the operator (‘communism’) to the abstract-concrete object
(‘Party’). The irremediable crisis of communist parties ended this translation. This crisis is
also therefore the crisis of the hypothesis of this translation.
The dialectics of the objective and the subjective, shifted back to a focus on operators,
promotes a view of an objectal and circulating sub- j ective. And now, we may add,
phenomenological. Indeed, surpassing in importance the other operators, the central
notion in this view of the subjective is consciousness. We can speak in this regard of a
phenomenology of consciousness. Faced with the question of the subjective, the scientistic
approach proposes, with respect to consciousness, and in illustration of
its aptitude for reversibility, a phenomenology whose core is the notion of alienation. Let us
call alienation of consciousness the presumed impossibility of subjectivating outside a
scientific knowledge of reality. Freedom will be given as antinomic of alienation. The shift
to freedom will be accomplished through the mediation of science. Thus, by the play on
alienation and freedom, it is a phenomenology of consciousness that offers a space of
reversibility to consciousness. Phenomenology is also a reversibility. The space of
reversibility will be deployed following the path of crystallizations, or of abstract-concrete
and subjective~objective objects; these are the events of classes and of the State that we
call wars, revolutions or strikes.
The method in terms of the objective and the subjective pertains to an attempt to think the
heterogeneous or to think the heterogeneity of the subjective and the objective. The
question here is that of the real and of the way that it comes to be cited in thought. In the
classist approach, the real manifests a permanent and structural presence. In the approach
of anthropology of the name, there is a problematic of the real, whose mode of being is
rupture—not heterogeneity. Thought here is not thought of the real but, rather, thought of
the relation of the real, and, in fact, it is thought only to the extent that it is rupture and not
thought of the real. Thus we shift from a problematic of the real bound up with the
heterogeneous to a problematicwof the real bound up with rupture. What is proposed is
to replace a phenomenological view with a view in intellectuality of the subjective. But here
too there are questions to ask ourselves.
5. FROM THE SUBJECTIVE TO THOUGHT
Isn’t the category of the subjective intrinsically linked to operators, to reversibility, and to
the dialectic of the objective and the subjective? Isn’t it, like the operators of this dialectic,
in an internal—external position? Is it necessary to hold on to the category?
What is in question is not the word ‘subjective’—it could be replaced by ‘form of

consciousness’ or ‘representation’—or identifying better the object we are dealing with.
The question of knong not so much Who utters the subjective but from where this
utterance is made is obscured, because in the dialectic of the objective, the subjective, or
86 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
objectal approach, this question cannot be answered, in that the place from where the
statement on the subjective is made is either absent or roaming. The question is ultimately
nullified by the object and by the definitional approach.
We must therefore broaden the critique of the scientistic approach, incapable of leading to
thinkability and to the notion itself of the subjective. As a culmination point to our
analysis of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, we do not merely emphasize the
internal limits of this thought; we also demonstrate that the development of the critique
must be applied to the notion of the subjective, which is preva— lent. The phenomenology
of consciousness will be identified, therefore, as a problematic of the subjective and as
answering the need to maintain a discourse on the subjective in a problematic of the
heterogeneous, anti- nornic to a problematic of the subjective sustained by categories of
intellectuality and thinkability. Henceforth we will have to identify classist thought,
phenomenology of consciousness and a problematic of the heterogeneous, and consider
that this thought is not a general framework but, rather, a particular thought, the nucleus
of which is the notion of the subjective not that of thought.
One notion remains—that of the collective. Does the collective have a status apart, in that, if
this notion was at once internal to politics, existing in law, non-exclusive of the notion of
society, it opens to that which is both singular to each and shared. The notion of the
collective, in its relationship to the whole understood as a totality, emerges as that by
which the subjective is an attribute of the totality. The collective is by no means exempt
therefore from the critique undertaken, in that it links subjective and totality; it has no
special status, with respect to an approach to singularity. It could be thought that a
thought of politics must necessarily maintain the notion of the collective, be it in a
completely different space. This is neither possible nor necessary. It is not possible because
the idea of the collective is bound up with the different operators. And it is not necessary
because the fact that politics is not a solitary activity, that it is organically non-solitary, is
sustained by the idea of organiza— tion that is peculiar to it and which is in no manner a
substitute for the Party. The organization manifests the character in thought and in deed of
politics.

What remains then if consciousness, the Party, and the subjective itself, when it does not
amount to a thought, are dismissed?
On the one hand, a thought that offers to identify and name singularities, or thought in
interiority. On the other hand, the doctrine of historical modes of politics as a relation of a
politics to thought, and as that which makes it possible to undertake an investigation of a
politics from within itself.
The approach comprises two particularities:
No definition of politics is given; the approach is not definitional.
A politics, we maintain, is a thought; its mode can be qualified.
We are not then proposing a general theory but, rather, a protocol of investigation whose
aim is to test the statement, Can politics be thought in interiority? The problem is not ‘What
is politics?’ but, rather, ‘Is politics thinkable?’
The answer to the latter question is yes. The mode is the category thereof. The question
then is whether the mode participates, if only as an operator of the thought of politics, in a
general theory which as such necessarily reintroduces, when politics exists, the exteriority.
This raises the question of the very possibility of a thought in interiority. More precisely,
for there to be thought, won’t there be exteriority, at one point or another in the protocol?
What is at issue then is not rationalism, it is not the question of the real but, rather, that of
the possibility of an effective interiority of the thought of politics. The existence of a
thought without exteriority is dependent upon the possibility of a thought of singularity
and of a thought in interiority of singularity. What is at issue is the problematics of
singularity.
6. THOUGHT OF SINGULARITY AND MICHEL FOUCAULT
To clarify our position, let us discuss how Foucault addresses this point.
As the first theoretician of singularities, Foucault stopped at the threshold of the question
of interiority, after having isolated irreducible singularities with his notion of episteme: in
particular, the episteme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that of the
modern world
88 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The Order of Things (1966), he pronounces
the collapse of the episteme of the modern world and announces the coming of the
contemporary episteme. The identification of irreducible epistemes leads to
demonstrating the existence of their multiplicity. Yet Foucault neglects to identify what a
thought stating the existence of irreducible epistemes is about. He thus stops at the
threshold of the next question: If thought, which makes it possible to think the episteme, is
not a general theory, what is its status? Once we have posited the relation of words to
things as Foucault’s fundamental operator, we cannot avoid noting that nothing is said
about the exteriority or interiority of the operator to an episteme. The operator, having no
site, becomes the element of a general theory. The indetermination remains when it comes
to knowing from what place the relationship of words to things is formed. The problem
here is not that of the pertinence of the operator but of its relation to an episteme or to a
singularity. Since this relation is not localized, it can be said to be external—or, in my
terms, in exteriority. Foucault confines himself ‘to analysing discursive formations,
positivities and the knowledge that corresponds to them" in what are ultimately composite
singularities.
It is clear that stating the existence of singularities does not resolve the problem of the
thought that enables their investigation. The existence of a thought peculiar and specific to
singularity is nonetheless a tenable thesis. The difficulties reside in the shift from
singularities to the multiple. What happens when there are at least two singularities? Will
the researcher vary with the singularity and mould her thinking to each one? This propo—
sition would not displease advocates of the participative or comprehensive approach, but it
is untenable precisely because of its abstraction. A multiplicity of singularities that does
not require, to be thought, a general theory that brings exteriority back into the picture, is
indeed conceivable. In other words, a thought in interiority is possible, which is also
capable of addressing the multiplicity of singularities.
Because Foucault leaves vague the place (interiority or exteriority) from which the
multiplicity of epistemes is stated, this site was said to
6 See Michel Foucault, ‘Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie’, Cahiers pour l’analyse 9
(1968): 9—40.
be exterior. It is because of the exteriority of the operator that he cannot engage in the
analysis of a contemporary episteme.
We have to oppose here a multiplicity of singularities that includes and addresses the
contemporary to a thought of multiplicity that is not capable of dealing with contemporary
singularity due to the exteriority of its approach. This is the case for Foucault. In the
analysis of the multiplicity of singularities, in that of the closed mode and of the mode
taking-place, it is the approach in interiority that allows us to present in the same
(homogeneous) multiplicity a singularity taking place and another having taken place,
inasmuch as the thought of singularity is internal to the singularity. If the thought of
singularity is not internal to the singularity, if there is no interiority, the difference between
the contemporary and the non-contemporary becomes insurmountable because the past—
present opposition, the surrender to history and the stress on the thought of structure over
the thought of singularity suddenly appear. The impossibility for Foucault of arriving at
the identification of a new, contemporary episteme is the consequence of the operator’s
exteriority. That the question of interiority or exteriority remains undecided, and
ultimately settled in the direction of the latter, is manifested by Foucault’s difl'erentiated
treatment of epistemes: in interiority, through the analysis of discourses and
representations, or What Foucault calls ‘representation of representation’, for the
eighteenth century; and in a dialectic of the objective and the subjective, often in terms of
structure, for the analysis of institutions and power, for the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
The difficulty that we have just discussed is inherent to a thought of singularity. It is not
that its capacity to think the contemporary is what constitutes it and the place from which
it is stated, but it is essential for a thought of singularity to be able to approach
contemporary or non- contemporary singularities, in their multiplicity, without falling into
history. Insofar as the doctrine of mode is concerned, it is by the distinction between
historicity and intellectuality that this difliculty is resolved. A closed mode and a
contemporary mode (in interiority) can participate in a homogeneous multiplicity. The
method of saturation, as We have seen, determines the closed mode from the standpoint of
its
90 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
intellectuality; the latter does not call for the contemporary historicity of politics but,
rather, for a thought of thought.
The examination of the notion of episteme shows that the thought of singularity must be
combined with a thought of multiplicity. An approach in interiority is possible. Name, place
of name and two categories—politics and the factory—stand as figures of the modernity
of the approach in interiority.
At this point, the critique of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective has focused on
the claim of co-thinkability of the mental and the material, leading to a thought of the
heterogeneous. In reality, a substratum encompassing the confrontation of the material
and the mental is necessary to it. It is totality that thus proposes a figure of unicity in
opposition to the dual multiplicity of the objective and the subjective.
7. TOTALITY
Totality exists as much in Marxist thinking as in Durkheim’s and in the thinking of

historians for whom the real is a complex whole. Whether it is called a ‘society’ or a ‘social
formation’, whether it is Althusser’s already existing concrete whole or Durkheim’s society
as a regulated whole, the notion of totality is constitutive of the social sciences. Taking
society as a whole is what authorizes presenting either entities thereof (groups or classes)
or instances or areas, themselves regarded as a structure—kinship and myths, for
example. The notion of totality is essential because it allows us to account simultaneously
for diversity, heterogeneity and multiplicity, either of a society or of a group of societies,
while postulating their internal unity and essential links between their different
components. Mauss pushed this approach to its most extreme point in proposing the notion
of a total social phenomenon that maintains by its very terms that the social category
requires the totality. This totality is not that of Hegel, which is a homogeneous totality in
the field of the subjective; rather, it is a heterogeneous totality and the cornerstone of the
social sciences.
As we have said, the category of the subjective is only tenable and its investigation is only
possible in the space of the relation of thought to the thought of thought. There is no logic
of the internal investigation
of the subjective informing the dialectic of the objective and the subjective; there is a
presentation of the subjective within the totality, as one of its components. What makes
pointing to the subjective within the totality possible, When its investigation is impossible,
is the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, which Will now allow us to assess the
subjective in its distance from the scientifically apprehended objective.
When we have a word that opens onto a field of thought, or simple name, we have two
possible approaches. One establishes the investigation of the subjective in the relation
between thought and thinkability, and examines the simple name in its relationship to
intellectuality and thinkability. The other is the one Where the supposed dialectic of the
objective and the subjective operates in which (and this is the key) the simple name is
‘sufiicient’ and this is where we do not continue beyond, in the specific sphere of the name.
Even though the subjective is not thinkable in an approach in exteriority, the totality
presents the existence thereof. With this notion, something exists and is not thinkable: the
totality allows for the naming of the subjective, a nomination that presents it as thinkable,
even though it is not in the ‘dialectic’ of the objective and the subjective. The totality is,
therefore, the supporting notion for the would-be thinkability and the avowed
unthinkability, with respect to the protocol of the subjective.’ Thought in terms of totality
pertains to an aprioristic approach, that is to say, an approach where the formation of the
thinkability is heterogeneous to the simple name, or the word as the first space of the
name, to which thinkability is applied. Thus, any development built on the simple name is
necessarily aprioristic. Homogeneous thinkability, Which stands in opposition to
heterogeneous or aprioristic thinkability, is only deployed in the protocol that goes from
intellectuality to thinkability.
The objectal approach merely acknowledges the constitutive insuf- ficiency of the
aprioristic character of the name, when it is a simple
7 Once again we see the unthinkable of the real and its irreconcilable character, applied, in
this case, to the subjective. The heterogeneous claims to co-think the Whole, that is to say,
to surmount the heterogeneous character of the subjective and the objective, and in fine
the subjective becomes unthinkable. The real is, therefore, unthinkable in this case, that is,
if we accept that the subjective is a real.
92 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
name. Rather than recognizing the absence of a thought of thought, this approach will claim
to normalize thought through science. This is an impossible undertaking, whose only effect
is to replace homogeneous thinkability with notions of opinion, representation and
consciousness, all notions that are substituted for thought.8 In addition, apriorism pre-
supposes not the existence of thought or intellectuality but its permanence in the form of
an already existing thought that can be grasped in hindsight. Finally, we can say that, in the
scientistic and classist approach, thought is a thought in exterion'ty. It is therefore from the
standpoint of interiority, or of exteriority, that we are dealing with a thought. Thoughts in
exteriority or in interiority are problematics that determine differently what is thought in
thought.
However, the problematic of the objective and the subjective makes an analysis of
intellectualities impossible. We have indicated the way in which it proposed operators that
had themselves the characteristic of being objective and subjective and also of being, as
Althusser used to say, abstract-concrete. I indicated through the notion of reversibility how
the subjective could invest the objective. The examination of the totality requires that we
now show that the dialectic in question is not simply that of the objective and the
subjective but also that of the subjective and the objective.
8. THE DIALECTIC OF THE SUBJECTIVE AND THE OBJECTIVE
The dialectic of the subjective and the objective is presented as a problematic of

consciousness and as the key method to the materialist problematic of consciousness. The
dialectic of the subjective and the objective raises not so much the question of
determinations of consciousness as the issue of the possible effects of consciousness in the
order of the real. If consciousness is the main operator in the dialectic of the objective and
the subjective, the State is the central operator in the dialectic of the
8 One of the main interests, to my mind, of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), aside
from its major philosophical contribution, is to have put an end to apriorism and given
priority to an axiomatic of the multiple.
subjective and the objective; politics in exteriority can exemplify it. The totality is what
makes the co-presence of these two operators possible. Revolution, for its part, designates
them in an ‘evental’ rupture (rupture événementielle). Of the two tandems, objective-
subjective and subjective- objective, let us now concentrate on the latter.
This is the crux of the classist problematic With respect to the question of thought. Indeed,
in the classist view, the nucleus of thought is not consciousness but the State. Which is why
it is misguided to make alienation and relations of production into the centre of this
thought,
as the Frankfurt School does.
In the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, the difficulty of the co-thinkability is
given in the unthinkability of the subjective. The subjective is exempted from the quality of
the real. In the dialectic of the subjective and the objective, it is the category of the real, and
not the affiliation of the subjective to the order of the real, that raises difficulties of
identification. The category of the real is hard to establish in the dialectic of the subjective
and the objective. The totality will make up for this difliculty by setting itself up as an
abstract reality.
Whereas, in the first dialectic, the totality is the means for a nomination of the subjective,
in the second dialectic, the totality is the real, and is singularly so in the materialist
problematic. For it is in the materialist problematic that this shift is most manifest,
creating a strong tension in the relations of the subjective to the objective.
9. SITUATION, PRESCRIPTIVE, DESCRIPTIVE
If every thought establishes its problematic of the real, then the real is always to be
identified. There is no thjnkability of the real independent of a form of knowledge and of a
singular protocol of identification. How would a problematic of singularity that maintains
the category of the real not result in a proliferating multiplicity of realities? It is the cat-
egory of situation that serves to maintain the category of the real, With- out however
preserving a problematic of the One or of the totality. The category of situation works by
acknowledging the multiplicity of fields of knowledge, without this multiplicity making
every declaration or
94 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
statement on the situation” impossible, by arguing that every field of knowledge can
propose its proposition on the situation. There can be no thinkabih'ty of the real that is not
bound up with a singular protocol of identification, one of which is based on science and
the other on knowledge. The multiplicity of realities and their heterogeneity throws us
back to the differentiation of science and knowledge, that is to say to the opposition
between the descriptive and the prescriptive to which we will now turn our attention.
The descriptive is of the order of repeatability. It is the being of the scientificity of the real.
The prescriptive belongs to the category of situation and designates that which is not
repeated; it opens onto the question of the possible. The totality does not stipulate the
homogeneity or the possible composition of diiferent realities; neither does it uphold their
irreducibility. In the scientistic view, it sets up a thinkability common to science and
knowledge, by preserving the possibility of elements circulating from one to the other. It is
that by which the incompatibility between science and knowledge is not addressed.
The prescriptive, on the other hand, is strictly of the order of knowledge. It excludes the
totality which, for its part, always keeps a place for the descriptive, for the relation of
thought and reality, meaning the relation of thought, understood in the common sense of
the term—as knowledge or as science or as intellectuality—and reality. Yet, thought and
the real are not contemporary in thought. There is neither chronological sirnultaneity nor
logical co-presence but, rather, a time difference. Thought and the real are given neither in
the same time (otherwise it would be a matter of co-thinkability) nor in the same
statement. This is what the problematic of the two statements posits.
There are two approaches to this time difference: the descriptive, or the prescriptive. The
descriptive, indicator of scientistic thought and of the approach in exteriority, approaches
the time difference by nullifying it and positing that there is no thought aside from the
scientific thought of the real. It proceeds with the help of laws, variables, parameters and
9 Is politics, the example of a thought in interiority, a field of knowledge? If it is, why isn’t
the category of situation itself in this field? There is no generality. Situation is the name for
the unknown.
indicators that constitute the being of the scientificity of the real; this being is not a being in
itself but a described being. The descriptive posits the ought (devoir-étre) of the real, from
the standpoint of science, and takes hold between the is and the ought. The thought of the
descriptive and the thought of the statement are evidently distinct.
In the totality, that sustains the co-thinkability of science and knowledge (including the
subjective) by proposing the scientific model to knowledge, the descriptive tension is very
high, because giving up the descriptive would amount to giving up compatible thinkability.
The totality permits a thought of the real in the form of a possible composition of the
multiplicity of protocols, of the descriptive and of the subjective in the unicity of
thinkability.
The prescn'ptive offers a dificrent resolution for the distance between thought and the real.
Far from eliminating this distance, the prescriptive is established in it. The prescriptive
distance resolves the tension between Statement 1, People think, and the thinkability
opened by Statement 2, Thought is a relation of the real. The relationship between
Statements 1 and 2 does not take the form of an expressive or transitive mirror rela-
tionship. It does not assume that Statement 1 is the proposition and Statement 2 the
realization thereof. Neither is Statement 1 the substance and Statement 2 the essence. The
prescriptive is the articulation of the two statements in the name and in the place of the
name. The prescriptive is not the ought of the real with regard to science, as is the
descriptive. It is the ought of thought in its relationship to the real.
And so the prescriptive becomes the hypothesis made about the exis— tence of a strength
of character (force d’cime), such that it can support and face the uninterrupted protocol of
the real, held to be what it is, if by strength of character (fin'ce d’une pensée) what we
understand is the strength of a thought whose determination does not break down. In
other words, it is to hypothesize that the pursuit of thought can be sustained. The
descriptive pertains to the scientistic thought of science, the prescriptive to the thought of
thought. In the testing of thought— through what is sometimes called action, practice or
inquiry—the prescriptive indicates that we require of thought that it organizes the return
to thought, either by substantiating the statement or by formulating new
96 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
statements, Without losing its way. We can say then that it is not because thought is
relation of the real that it can do without itself.
10. TOTALITY, UNICITY
Totality organizes the multiple of intellectualities, their heterogeneity and that of of science
and knowledge. The movement of totality is towards unity, or towards what I call unicity.
Without this movement towards unicity, the multiple, whether it is knowledge or science,
risks prevailing and putting science and knowledge into a state of dispersion. The dialectic
of the subjective and the objective produces the category of totality—as that which makes
these different areas co-thinkable—by hypothesizing a unity in the thought of the different
forms of knowledge, a unity that thwarts heterogeneity and multiplicity. The totality acts as
a unity. This unity in intellectuality is what I call unicity. It will hesitate, for unicity is not
stable. It swings back and forth from unicity of thinkability to unicity of the real, without
specifying if it is already here or yet to come. The totality is made up of this back-and-forth
movement, being at once a concrete totality (unicity of the real, already here in Althusser’s
thought, and society in Marx or Durkheim) and an abstract unicity, nucleus of a general
thinkability, runs through science as knowledge, Without, however, presenting a meta-
science. It is that by which the thesis of a unity of the real and that of a unity of thought is
maintained, beyond the multiplicity of disciplines and protocols.
11. LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Althusser raises the problem in ‘Contradiction and Over-determination"° with the notion of
instance (economic, political, ideological), a notion that will be at the centre of its
resolution. Instances are elements of structure, that is, of the social totality or social
formation, and they are present in the totality as the multiplicity of its heterogeneity. The
instance is an element of the structure, but the multiplicity of the heterogeneous in the
totality is also said under the notion of instance
10 See Louis Althusser, For Marx (Ben Brewster trans.) (London: Penguin, 1962).
(and, as we will see, of contradiction). As for the unity, it is present in the totality with the
notion of over-determination. Over-determination articulates the multiplicity of instances
and opens the way to one of the instances, within the multiplicity, becoming dominant.
Now, the fact that an instance is dominant is a characteristic not of the instance but of the
whole. There is no already existing whole, there is no totality, which is not over-
determined. Over-determination is a property of the whole, the property that enables
thinking the whole beyond the diversity of instances, which, taken in themselves, are not
recomposable in a unity of the whole. The over-determination ensures the function of
unicity. But the instance also gives rise to contradiction. A first level of analysis of Althusser
is carried out in terms of instance and totality. A second level examines instance in
reference to the category of contradiction.
The analysis of over-determination and of the instance as dominant is also at work in a

problematic of contradiction that Althusser picks up from Mao.
In On Contradiction, written in 1936, Mao distinguishes between the principal

contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction. Mao’s notion of the principal
contradiction and that of the principal aspect of a contradiction correspond, respectively, to
the analytical and the prescriptive. The analytical point of view is that in which the
contradiction is termed principal because it is ascribable to a materialist and dialectical
view of the process, which maintains that everything is movement and imbalance; every
situation—a historical situation, for example—is but a fleeting precarious moment, itself
the product of other transitory moments or other contradictions. The principal aspect falls
within the ambit of the prescriptive. The principal aspect of a contradiction is a political
thesis on the basis of which the different aspects of a contradiction can be analysed
(between the Japanese and the Chinese in Mao’s text), from the standpoint of their
probable or possible future development. The principal aspect of a contradiction is a
wager on the future development of the contradiction.
Althusser combines the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction
in the notion of over-determination, bringing together in a single term the prescriptive
perspective and the analytical
98 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
and descriptive standpoint. In maintaining the prescriptive, though it be allied to the

descriptive, he preserves the intelligibility of the political decision which must go beyond
the mere acknowledgement of the multiplicity of instances. Being of the order of the
descriptive, the analytical cannot sufi‘ice for political decisions. If political decisions find
themselves merely faced with the multiplicity of instances, the intellectual heterogeneity
between the political decision and the analytics of instances explodes; and, being that this
analytics is historical materialism, this leads to an irreducible opposition between politics
and science, which is impossible for Althusser.
There is, therefore, a singular problem that Althusser wants to resolve—to think the
relationship of politics and science. Yet, Althusser’s entire enterprise tends to distance itself
from the dogmatic reversibility of politics and science that characterizes the Stalinist
outlook Althusser’s body of wor " is to be understood as seeking to pronounce the lapsing
and the closure of Stalinist thought. As much because it can be considered an additional
instance as because of its particular intellectuality and the problems that co-thinkability
poses in a problematic of totality, giving a place to politics is a critical question. Over-
determination makes it possible to resolve this question by acting as the unicity in the
complex whole. Two theses establish the relationship of instances to each other by the
placement of over-determination or unicity. One focuses on economics; the other on
politics. Thus the question of the relationship of one instance to the remainder of the whole
immediately arises. It is of decisive importance to know whether this relationship is that of
one instance to other instances, taken individually or successively, or the relationship to
the whole minus the instance in question. Althusser refutes both dogmatic expressivity and
humanism, be it Marxist. The first thesis, which stands in opposition to Stalinist
economism, posits that the economy, as an instance, does not determine all, that it does
not determine other instances. Instances would then be in a state of disorder.
The second thesis concerns politics. Althusser never maintains that politics is of the order
of the subjective, but neither does he assert the
11 See Lazarus, ‘Althusser, la politique et l’histoire’.
opposite—namely, that politics is not of the order of the subjective. Even though politics is
not a thought of the order of the subjective, it cannot be reduced to the instance that is
known as 'the political’, a pure instance that designates the judicial, the constitutional or
the State. Politics is apprehended by its process—the class struggle.
The first thesis opens onto the relationship of instances to one another within the whole: If
economics does not determine all, then how is the whole organized? The second concerns
politics, which is a process without subject, on the condition that Althusser’s thesis on his-
tory is appropriate for politics. Relating the first thesis to the second brings us to the
question of the relationship of politics to instances; for the moment, politics is not possible.
As such, the question of the relationship of instances is resolved either by a mechanistic
expressivity and the aggregation of instances, or by their distribution in an irreconcilable
multiple, producing, in the first case, Stalinist politics, Which Althusser does not want, and
in the second, the evacuation of politics, which he does not want either.
Over-determination is that by which a compatibility of politics and the problematic of

instances is posited. This compatibility postulates that a new thesis be stated about the
whole. The whole is over-deter— mined, but in non-Stalinist forms—economics is not the
omnipresent over-determination and yet there is still over-determination by an instance. It
is out of the relationship of over-determination to the configuration of instances that
politics is made possible. It is at once scientific and irreducible to one instance. Over-
determination makes it possible to articulate and maintain a logic of class struggle with an
analysis in terms of instances and the already existing whole. If class struggle is
expressive of instances, and, in particular, of economics, then politics does not have its own
field and the subjective does not exist. If class struggle and politics are left to the discretion
of a central committee, they will vary with occurrences and opportunities, and the
subjective is still not established. Althusser’s enterprise emerges as an attempt, against and
after Stalin, to propose a compatibility between politics and Marxism, even if it means
overhauling the latter. The problematics of instances and of over-determination is at the
centre of this overhaul.
100 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Finally, insofar as history, philosophy and politics are concerned, while not maintaining
that they are utterly separate, Althusser identifies them separately We are dealing,
therefore, with a problematic of the multiple, not with a problematic of multiplicity, that is,
a problematic in which every form of knowledge develops its singular thinking. There is a
multiple of forms of knowledge—without an intellectuality of multiplicity —that is given
as possible due to notions of unicity and totality.
The totality designates the character in itself of the real. The multiple of forms of
knowledge does not exhaust the real, the character in itself of the real that the totality
presents by making non-correspondence possible between fields of knowledge and the
being-there of the real or the already existing whole. The notion serves not only for the
composition of forms of knowledge or to establish their co-presence but also to ensure
that the real is not simply the result of a summing up of the realities of each discipline—at
any rate, an impossible operation. A real compatible with each knowledge, but not
reduced to it, is proposed through the concept of totality. This real is capable of sustaining
an obscure knowledge, for the real of the totality can be substituted for the absence in the
real of a field of knowledge. The totality allows for relative indetermination concerning
what I call the site of the real of certain fields.
Unicity proceeds from the question of thinkability and of the non- multiplicity of
thinkability. This notion designates a matrix of thought applicable to all disciplines. If the
totality refers to a problematic of the composition of the real, the unicity refers to the
thinkability of this composition. Unicity is not the category of thinkability of the totality
but the category of thinkability of the multiple character of the totality in a One of thought.
It is a category of the dialectic of the One and the multiple, on condition that we clearly
posit that the One does not belong to the totality; it is that of the thinkability in relation to
the totality.
In a problematic of the totality, paradoxically, certain fields can be indeterminate, because

the category of the real is in itself partly indeterminate. The real is in excess of the fields of
knowledge, and, as soon as an obscure field is examined, it refers back to the totality. The
obscurity of a field is homogeneous with the obscurity of a part of the real in relation to
the field as a whole. The effect of the problematic in terms of totality is to render one of
these fields obscure and make it possible
to think at once the unicity of the real and the diversity (in this case we cannot speak of
multiplicity) of processes and forms of knowledge. Every area of knowledge refers back to
its field or its instance, and to
the fact that it is co-thought.
12. SACRIFICED NAMES AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY
a. The Operation
In a thought of singularity, to the contrary, it is on the basis of the existence of the field
alone that the thought of the field is deployed. In the thought of totality, the name of a field
is said twice: with regard to the field of the name, and with regard to the totality and its co-
thinkability. This creates situations of imbalance wherein the existence of the field of the
name becomes random and the name can only be preserved thanks to co-thinkability.
These are situations of sacrificed names.
Names are distinct—what one name covers cannot be shared with what is covered by
another name. Concepts can be exported, not names. The problematic of totality, which is
that of co-thinkability, can only be affirmed at the cost of sacrificed names. It is from this
perspective that Althusser’s desire to re-identify the name of philosophy and that of pol-
itics is to be understood.12
From the standpoint of the dialectic of the subjective and the objective, co-thinkability can
be explained in a different way. The notion of State and its relationship to the totality are
the keys here. In the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, one of the central
operators is, as we have seen, consciousness. In the dialectic of the subjective and the
objective, the State is the central operator. The dialectic of the objective and the subjective
proceeds from a determination (the form of consciousness is determined by the material
conditions of existence). The dialectic of the subjective and the objective proceeds from an
operation. The shift from the objective to the subjective is a determination, whereas the
shift from the subjective to the objective is an operation. These involve two entirely
different logics. The tension between determination and operation comes from the
alternating interplay of the two dialectics and takes
12 See ibid.
102 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the form of an opposition between consciousness and the State. The State pertains at once
to a procedure of determination and a procedure of operation. It is a determined and
operative entity, at once descriptive and prescriptive. Determined: in classist
historiography, the State is the reflection of society and classes. Operative: the category
that identifies the State as operation is power. Relations are complex between the State and
the totality. The State is given as pertaining to two specifications, to determination and
operation, whereas the totality presents itself as neutral, that is to say, as escaping both
determination and operation. The characteristics of the neutrality and indistinction of the
totality, Whether the register is prescriptive or descriptive, are inherent to the co-
thjnkability. The double identification of the State and its hybrid character eliminate
neutrality and indistinction. The State is not the name of the totality— it is the product of a
dialectic.
History is a thought relation of the State. What then can be said of history with respect to
operation and determination? The question is all the more complex in that, depending on
the case, it makes use of one or the other or both. Marx, for his part, maintains that history
pertains to determination and operation. It is in this capacity that it can subsume politics
and include it. Identified through operation and determination, history is tied up with
politics through operation and to the State through its double determination.
b. Moses Finley
While refraining from examining the full extent of the question of history, I Will
nonetheless analyse here a particular historical thought, situated as an exception to the
dialectic of the objective and the subjective—namely, the thought of Moses Finley. Finley
is to be regarded as an inaugural figure in the break with the classist thought of history.
Finley was not a dialectician and the question of the State is not at the centre of his
preoccupations. He was a historian of the subjective and of invention. In ‘Myth, Memory,
and History’ (1965) and in Politics in the Ancient World (1983),13 he conceives of history
neither in terms of
13 See Moses Finley, ‘Myth, Memory, and History’, History and Theory 4(3) (1965): 281—
302; Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
operation nor in terms of determination. History, to Finley, requires no dialectic.
Finley argues that the Greeks invented history He does not attribute the emergence of the
concept to the shift from a mythical to a rational conception of the past. In fact, the
presumed break between a mythical and a rational view of the past is not qualified to
characterize history since the category of past does not identify history; this was a point on
which Bloch had already insisted. And the break with myth does not characterize the
emergence of history—after all, Herodotus, the father of history, maintains the reference to
myth. The invention of this discipline, of this thought, was not a reaction again epic poetry
and myth but, rather, a concurrent movement. If the emergence of history cannot be
reduced to the break with myth, then history was not formed through a rational break, in
the positivist sense of the term. The fact that dating and the secularization of the narrative
were required for the invention of history is symptomatic and by no means constitutive.
These two requisites do not identify it as a subject matter and should not be seen as its
origin.
History for Finley is a capacity, and it is a sequential capacity. ‘Myth, Memory, and History’
sets out to develop the new problematic of history by establishing this point. History must
not be seen as positivist (identified by its difference from myth) or as structural
(conceived from the standpoint of the State). It must stand on singular moments of
existence, which correspond to a temporary subjective capacity. Subjectivity exists when
there is a contemporaneity of consciousness with the sequence deemed historical. Finley’s
position therefore runs counter to the classist hypothesis of the permanence of history.
For Finley, history is not an invariant; not every society and not every period has a history.
There are societies that do not produce history, and not only societies without writing and
without a State. The absence of history does not indicate a problem of sources. For there to
be history, there must be a generation that thought about its own situation; then, the
history of this generation is possible for it and for posterior historians. A capacity for
history, therefore, does not always exist. History is not even a story; it is a thought, and a
thought that is contemporary with
104 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
itself. If a generation has not ‘put its history down in writing’, it will be forever lost and will
lend itself only to archaeology and reconstruction.
We can set forward then two theses: for history to exist, it must be contemporaneous with
itself and have a point of consciousness. Consequently—and this is the second thesis—the
occasion for a history that is contemporaneous to exist is not always a given. Finley does
not explicitly say that there is a need for a point of consciousness; it is in relation to the
existence of historians that the question of point of consciousness is raised. Be that as it
may, if there is a subjective capacity then there are historians to express it: Thucydides for
the Peloponnesian War, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray for the Paris Commune, Cardinal Retz
for the Fronde, and duc de Saint-Simon for the court of Louis XIV.
Such a thought and such a capacity belong to some generations, not all. The interest of a
generation in its history is not a reflex; it is a conscious approach. Since the latter is not
constant, it is not present in all societies; nor is it present at all times in a given society.
History appears on condition of consciousness.
History is a situation of thoughts or consciousness that enables contemporaneous or later

historians to invest the situation and propose statements and formulations 0n the matter.
It is essential therefore that such situations exist. When they do not, history is not
possible—not, once again, because of a lack of sources but, rather, because the subject
matter(1 will be returning to this category) of history is missing. The major shift proposed
by Finley is in maintaining that the subject matter of history is circumstantial, and that it is
a capacity of the period in question before being a capacity of the historian. Now, this
capacity of the period or of the generation is nothing if it is not political. In his work, Finley
no longer sets history up as an invariant field, an object or a structure. He proceeds to
unhinge history from the State and to connect it to politics. This is why we can say that the
conception that Finley proposes is one of a history in interiority.
It is in these terms that Finley reflected on the Greek invention of history. He underscores
that it is contemporaneous with the invention of the polis, but, more importantly, that it is
contemporary with the invention of politics. History as a point of consciousness, history as
non-
permanent and as invention, history unhinged from the State and linked to politics are
what distance Finley’s enterprise from any category of operation. By showing that history
accepts the category of invention, by subjecting the intelligibility of history to an
examination of the conditions of its invention, Finley excludes operation. The category of
invention opposes the category of operation understood as a rationalization which
attempts to achieve an agreement between consciousness and the world, the subjective
and the objective. The operation proceeds to ration- alize on the basis of a supposed
progress from the irrational to the rational, a thesis characteristic of those that maintain
that history arose from a break with myth. The category of invention comes to supplement
that of operation, not to take its place, for this would throw us back onto the old historicist
category of transformation. Where there is invention, there is the ‘in addition’ (l’en-plus)
which for this reason is precarious.
Politics too is an invention. In Politics in the Ancient World, politics is not reduced by Finley
to the State, to classes, to social management or to power. It is seen as a specific invention
and, therefore, not permanent. In a thought of politics, we would say that it is sequential
and rare. Finley finds himself at the origin of two inventions, history and politics. Are they
separate or related to the same underpinning? He does not take a position on the
separation of history and politics and this shows the limits of the notion of invention.
Admittedly, if Finley had set out to examine the question of the separation between
history and politics, he would have been forced to look for the invention of the separation
of history and politics in the history of the world (in my terms, he would have had to look
for Lenin). And this was not his intention. The separation of politics and history is not a
historical object; it belongs to the contemporary political field and requires the category of
singularity as much as that of the historical mode of politics.
Insofar as the historian is concerned, his task is clear—it consists in identifying the
categories that each historical period, that each generation producing history, deploys. In
doing so, Finley gives a very precise example of the non-definitional approach, since the
category of history is entirely built into the protocol of his investigation. And, taking
historical knowledge at the time of its invention (with Herodotus and Thucydides),
108 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
economics, that is to say, history. And Althusser criticizes Montesquieu for precisely what is
considered here a great quality—that he does not position himself in the order of
determination.
There was no problematic of the State before the nineteenth century. Class must therefore
be regarded as the principle of modernization of historical investigation. Class and State
became categories of the new modernity, as distinguished from forms of government and
principles, the previously active categories. In the nineteenth century, classist history
emerged in the context of a new configuration—a shift from an order- based approach to
one based on representation. Class, via the question of State, became the notion that
allowed classist history to achieve its thinkability. The notion of class made it possible to
answer the question of what is thought in historical thought. In addition, the thought of the
State, under the impact of the French Revolution and the Empire, was subjected to a
thought of fracture. The relationship between this fracture and the State was an issue
taken up by all historians. Tocqueville examines this relationship in The Old Regime and
the Revolution (1856), emphasizing the State and its institutions and subordinating classes
and fractures to them. Tocqueville argues that there was no reason for the French
Revolution to take place since the Ancien Regime had already undertaken the reforms that
the revolution demanded. Marx, on the other hand, turned the category of class into his
major category and positioned the State as internal to it. According to Marx, there is no
State that is not a class State. Given the expressivity between the State and the dominant
class, the notion of fiacture came to be in an absolute logical dependence on that of class—
Marx ascribed the fracture of the Ancien Régime to its class character. Historiography thus
developed in notions of class, the State and fractures. These were the notions through
which it tackled the notions of revolution and democracy.
With regard to an approach in terms of singularities, the question is: Is historiography a

singularity identified by the categories of class, state, revolution and democracy? Or are we
dealing with an intellectuality, identifiable in a generality, for which historiography was a
particular expression, and class the central schema? From this point of view, the question
of history, be it historiography or invention with the Greeks, is a challenge to singularity
and multiplicity.
In historical thought, Thought is a relation of the State. This statement could be a statement
identifying a specific intellectuality, that of nineteenth- century classist historiography—
this is the first hypothesis. Second hypothesis: history as thought-relation-of-the-State can
be a statement on history in general and on the general historical intellectuality. If we
accept the first hypothesis, if what we are dealing with is a specific intellectuality, then we
come to the conclusion that the State can itself be conceived as singular and as
characterizing a long sequence in the same way as an analysis of the revolutionary mode
asserts that the name ‘revolution’ characterizes a short sequence. The debate does not
concern the length of the sequence but the assertion that the concept of State can be
applied to a singularity. If the State in thought is singular, it is specific to the classist
period and to classist thought; there is a singularity and history is on the side of the
singularity, giving historical thought as relation of the State the status of a singularity And if
this thought has lapsed, then a historical thought, for which the notions of class and State
seem necessary, is no longer possible. History as thought-relation-of-the- State is
terminated.
If, on the other hand, we accept the second hypothesis, that history can be identified as a
general intellectuality for which the State is the central category through the statement
Historical thought is a relation of the State, it must be established that the State is not
specific to classist historiography. Rather, it clearly identifies a general historical intellec-
tuality for which the State would be the ‘certain indistinct’ in every singularity.
The criticism of the objectal approach leads, as far as thought and its fields are concerned,
to a thought in terms of multiplicity, of category and of singularity. The idea of singularity
draws on separation: separation of what is thought in the thought of people from
scientific thought; separation of philosophy and anthropology; separation of politics and
history. For example, we posited politics as singular; and, at the same time, the statement of
this singularity, in its very investigation, provides for its existence in a multiplicity of
occurrences or modes, each singular and irreducible to anything other than itself.
Singularity and multiplicity go hand in hand. And this common movement establishes the
basis of
110 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the category that identifies the singularity every time and gives it over to thought.
Historiography is classist. On first sight, one might be tempted to believe that we are
dealing with an original and unique configuration, whose end brings with it the end of
history. The other approach is to think of historiography as a particular occurrence of
historical thought, whose lapsing does not bring about that of history as intellectuality.
l3. POLITICS IN RELATION TO STATEMENT 1 AND STATEMENT 2
Let us reintroduce the historical mode of politics, where politics is not reducible to the
State, where it exists in interiority, and where it is identified as a sequence in thought
provided with sites. Politics is rare and sequential. It develops in a historical mode,
corresponding to a sequence and to places. The disappearance of the site leads to the
lapsing of the mode.
With regard to what has just been said of history, the term historical in ‘historical mode of
politics’ indicates the singularity of each mode; the thinkability of politics is given in the
form of a multiplicity of modes. The statement There is politics is developed though the
identification of historical modes. Historical thus participates in the identification of a
mode, which is designated as the relation of a politics to its thought, the thought being an
intellectuality and not a reiteration.
Will Statement 1 be People think politics? Is Statement 1 set up then as a thought of

politics, and hence as a historical thought, given the presence and the status of historical
in the historical mode of politics? And another question: Is Process 1 There is political
thought?
What is at stake here is crucial. Indeed, if we hold onto the statement People think politics,
then an anthropology of the name subsumes a thought of politics, and proposes itself to
cover the general space of thought and of thoughts, including political thought, if every time
we maintain that people think (politics, history, philosophy, etc.). This creates a difficulty,
bearing on the very identification of politics, history and philosophy. And, in face of this
difficulty, either we reintroduce the definitional approach, through aprioric and objectal
definitions, or we
THINKING AFTER CLASSISM lll
cannot really identify them and they become indistinct or, yet again, they are evacuated.
The other hypothesis is that the anthropology of the name leaves aside the question of
political thought and the thought of history (given as relation of the State, which thereby
attributes to history an organic difierendanon). In reality, this solution leads to a return to a
taxonomic conception of protocols and fields."
The singularity of every thought is not established on the basis of an inaugural statement
along the lines of There are thoughts, which would axiomatically posit the existence of
multiplicity. The singularity is a strict consequence of the approach in interiority and of the
analysis in terms of homogeneous multiplicities. For these reasons, Process 1 is There is
thought, and not ‘there are thoughts’.
It is important, therefore, to specify once again the method in two statements. Statement 1,
People think, does not spell out the singularity of what is thought; it is not a matter of an a
priori outlook but of a ‘there is’, which establishes the category of intellectuality. Statement
2 introduces the category of thought and its relationship: Thought is a relation of the real.
Philosophy is a thought-relationship-of-thought; history is a thought-relationship-of-the-
State. These are different thoughts. The question of history, like that of philosophy, is
played out then in Statement 2. The only internal relationship asserted between Statement
1 and Statement 2 is the anthropology of the name. In every protocol of knowledge, there
are two statements; history and philosophy are identified by their Statement 2, with a
non-specified Statement 1. In contrast, the specificity of an anthropology of the name, aside
from its two statements, which it shares with no other thought, is that Statement 2 is
15 The relationship of anthropology of the name to history and politics is neither a

relationship of subsumption nor one of exclusion. History and politics are both
investigations in thought, exemplifying the question of subjectivity. For history, there is the
presence of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective in the relationship to the State.
At the same time, history, as we will see more specifically in my examination of Bloch and
have already seen with Finley, has a thought of subjectivity. Politics, as I have presented it
and according to my theses, is in subjectivity, in interiority or in exteriority.
112 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
deployed from the interior of Statement 1—it is anthropology. In the two other forms of
knowledge, a relative autonomy exists of Statement 2 in relation to Statement 1.
The question of disciplines and fields is constituted exclusively in terms of Statement 2,

formulated as a different relation: relation of thought; relation of State. That there are other
statements on thought aside from thought is a relation of the real—that is to say, there are
other Statements 2—does not say anything about the pertinence of articulating other
Statements 2 to Statement 1, which, for its part, is invariant and non-specified in thought,
not invariant of all thought but invariant of all anthropology. Trying to position the
statement Philosophical thought is a thought-rclation-ofthought, which is a Type-Z
statement, in relation to Statement 1, amounts to anthropologizing philosophy. Obviously,
this is not my intention. In effect, with the exception of an anthropology of the name, which
constitutes Statement 2 out of State- ment 1, all other forms of knowledge have a variety of
Statements 1; the relationship to their own Statement 2 is not derived from the foun-
dational singularity of a Statement 1.
We have distinguished between thought-relation-of-the-real; philosophy, thought-

relation-of-thought; and history, thought—relation-of-the- State. What about politics? Does
it have a specific relation or does it pertain to an anthropology of the name, leading
therefore to an investigation of its name? Either politics pertains to an anthropology of
the name or politics is found in an articulation between Statement 1 and Statement 2,
where Statement 2 is either relation-of-the-State—Which leads to the historicization of
politics and brings it back to its degree zero—or relation-to-thought—Which amounts to
a political packaging of politics.
Not everything is thinkable and thought does not think all. It is, rather, in the movement
from the unknown to the known. The question arises of knowing from where thought is
constituted. We have distinguished between thought in interiority and in exteriority. We
have opposed the descriptive to the prescriptive, the determination and operation that
result thereof. Anthropology of the name does not pretend to think politics but to think on
the basis of modes of politics, because politics has no object, is not functional and does not
pertain to the dialec-
tic of the objective and the subjective. And finally, because politics falls outside the ambit of
the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, and, insofar as it is established, after the
lapsing of Marxism—Leninism, in the order of thought, its relation of the real is a relation
wherein the real is not an object but an indistinct. The possibility then exists of working on
politics as a name.
Politics is not in the relation of Statement 2 to Statement 1; it is a name. The category of

mode is the category of politics and opens onto a thought of singularity. The relation of
politics to the mode is that of the relation of the unnameable of the name to the loci of the
name. Every unnameable name has places, and a multiplicity of modes. Politics is of the
order of thought and in a relation of the real, where the real is an indistinct. The category of
indistinct presupposes that it is not the real that is thought in thought, and that thought
thinks the real is an inadmissible proposition. This is also the case for the thesis of a
correspondence between thought and reality. What is in question is, therefore, not what
thought thinks but what is thought in thought; it is thought that must be identified and the
categories that are specific to it. This is what characterizes the shift from an objectal
approach to an approach in terms of thinkability. The encounter between thought and the
real, called relation, is the thought in which the real is indistinct. Another statement on the
real aside from that of its indistinction prevents access to the thought of singularity. We are
in the astonishing situation where all we can think is thought and what is thought in
thought, and we cannot think what thought thinks.
The difficulty of historical thought comes from the fact that it is tricky to pull it away from
the dialectic of the objective and the subjective. Whence the risk of a pure eventality
arising, and the State becomes an indistinct, combining operation and determination. With
the status of history strained by the evacuation of the dialectic of the objective and the
subjective, maintaining definitional propositions on its object and its methods becomes
understandable. Finally, the State, coupled with totality—which, as a notion, presents itself
as neutral in terms of operation or determination—allows for statements that present
historical thought as relation of totality, and opens onto a very broad view of
114 SYLVAIN LAZARUS

historical thought, encompassing mentalities, economics, modes, reli- gions and social
history. These different ‘histories’ are just the different facets of a One which is, in fact, the
totality. To fully identify the State, as the nucleus of historical thought, one must see in the
end that this notion is concentrated in two other notions: that of structure and that of
time.“ Under State, we find, therefore, structure and time, for which ‘society’ is but the
coalescence.
We will now turn to a discussion of time.
16 It is worth noting here that ethnological structuralism is always the same thought
applied to a concrete stateless group, since structure and time are in reality nodal
categories subtending the problematic of the State from which the structuralism is derived.
Linguistics, which is a material science, constitutes an exception (I am opposing here
material sciences with forms of knowledge pertaining to thinkability).
CHAPTER 4 UNNAMEABLE NAMES
I will now go from words to names. Not all words are simple names. The identification of
the unnameable name is a procedure that is established by the interplay of the name and
the sites of the name.
The critique of classist thought developed in the earlier chapters led to the question of
history, approached from the angle of its singularity, which was ascribed to the statement
Historical thought is a relation of the State. But the question of history is also that of time
and only non- historicist historians (Finley) or those transitioning out of historicism
(Bloch) have discussed this in any meaningful way. Here, the question at issue is no longer
the State but, rather, the polysemy of time as well as of its uniqueness. And soon arises the
question of time itself. The end of classist thought must face up to this. So much so that the
question of the name that arises then must, in turn, face up to the status of time. For the
question of the name, is time polysernic? Is it in unicity? Or is it evacuated? On this subject,
we will study first Bloch, and then, once again, Finley.
The question of time, of its uniqueness or its evacuation, is a question of importance for
the anthropology of the name, for the latter can only be constituted on condition of
deploying a problematic of singularity and a problematic of homogeneous multiplicities.
An examination of the notion of time in Bloch’s work will enable us to differentiate
homogeneous and heterogeneous multiplicities. This is a crucial point because only a
homogeneous multiplicity forms the unnameable name. As for the heterogeneous
multiplicity, it goes hand in hand with nomination and complex composition.
The thesis of complex composition presupposes starting from a whole as a diversified and
composite ensemble. Such a conception inevitably leads to the naming of the name and,
insofar as subjective singularities are concerned, to objectification. If we look for such
objectifications in the
116 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
authors cited here as references, we see that Finley ends up naming politics with the term
‘invention’; that Bloch puts an end to his approach in subjectivity when he names the past
the ‘given’; that we find very legibly, in Durkheim’s work, society as a complex ensemble;
and that, for Althusser, there is always an already existing concrete whole. Our intention is
not exactly to point to the globality of these namings. But a strong relationship exists
between, on the one hand, the inaugural and foundational statement and, on the other,
naming or non-naming.
The manner in which Bloch develops his analysis can help illustrate the connection
between inaugural statements and naming procedures. For Bloch, time is a central
category. The subject matter of history is human beings over time, and so time is essential
in that it opens onto the study in subjectivity. At first glance, it would seem that there are
no global inaugural notions in Bloch’s work. But, upon closer scrutiny, time (which is
incidentally likened to plasma) plays this role, as the category is used to establish a
heterogeneous polysemy. As we will see, wherever there is heterogeneous polysemy, there
is naming; and where there is naming, there is heterogeneous polysemy. Indeed, Bloch
ascribes diflerent, at times contradictory, attributions to the category of time. The fact that
these attributions can be contradictory is qualified as heterogeneous polysemy, in that
some propose a thought of the subjective from within itself and some via the objective—
this is what Bloch calls thinking ‘from the inside and from the outside’. It is time that
enables us to co-present and co-think the inside (mentalities, for instance) and the outside
(structure); and it is time that recomposes subjective elements and heterogeneous
objectives. There is, therefore, heterogeneity because a polysemic notion—in this case,
time—allows us to bring together and think together what pertains to the objective and
what pertains to the subjec— tive. Time presents both simultaneity and non-simultaneity.
It is in a heterogeneous multiplicity that acts as a complex composition.
The heterogeneous polysemy appears clearly in Bloch’s analysis of the past and the future.
Applied to the future, the category of time makes a possibility; applied to what is over, it
yields the category of the past as a given. Time in the past is a given; in the future, it is a
possibility. Given and possible are heterogeneous, and time is said in different senses.
UNNAMEABLE NAMES 117
Time exists, therefore, in a heterogeneous multiplicity. If our intention is to explain the

subjective on the basis of the subjective itself, or thought on the basis of thought, it seems
necessary to break with heterogeneous multiplicities which continue to sustain composite
wholes and complex composition.
Is a homogeneous multiplicity conceivable that would ensure that we do not co-present the
objective and the subjective? The demonstration is carried out in two successive points.
First, it is a matter of reducing the heterogeneous multiplicity—once again, in this case,
time—to unicity. This is achieved through the category of the unrepeatable, divided
between the unrepeatable that has occurred and the unrepeatable that has not. This
contradicts the thesis of the past as a given and introduces the possible into the past. Time
is then in a unicity. But this does not suflice—we are still in a heterogeneous multiplicity of
unrepeatables. Divided in this way, the unrepeatable secures the unicity of time which
reduces the polysemy, but time remains in the heterogeneity of unrepeatables that have
happened and that have not.
The second point of the demonstration involves a break. The break is with naming. We
must evacuate naming as a producer of polysemy and time as a carrier of the heterogeneity
of unrepeatables. And we must cease applying the problematic of multiplicity to the name
and apply it instead to the loci of the name. In effect, reduced to its essential character, the
heterogeneous is formed through the naming of the name around which multiplicity
circulates. Leaving the heterogeneous means abandoning the naming of the name. But
renouncing naming also means shifting multiplicity from that of the name to that of places
of the name. The sites of a name are a modality of existence of the subjective. Insofar as
the unnameable name of a politics is concerned, let us look at the identification of
revolutionary politics whose places are the Jacobin Convention (1792—94), the sans-
culottes and the Revolutionary Army of 1793. These are all places of the name. They are all
homogeneous because they are subjective and they are subjective because they are
prescriptive. They are prescriptive because they proceed from a thought of politics whose
basic movement is that of separation, with the possible as a rational and practicable
character of this separation. In
118 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the case of the unnameability of the name, the multiplicity is delocalized (it is internal to
the singular name) and transformed—it is homogeneous. It is homogeneous because every
site of the name is a subjective site, identified by a prescription. Thus a homogeneous
multiplicity exists, if the argument for this multiplicity is developed on the basis of the loci
of a name.
One of the central theses in this book is that of the separation of history and politics along
with the need for their respective and not only differential identification. The examination
of the category of time, and its distantiation, will be joined to the enterprise of identifying
politics and to the absolute separation of the latter from history. To be sure, the preceding
criticism of the objectal approach and that of the dialectic of the objective and the
subjective have introduced us to these issues. But they have not resolved them inasmuch as
these critiques were undertaken by challenging the dialectic of the subjective and the
objective, and categories of consciousness and the State, and through categories of
determination and operation, whereas it is now a matter of frontally envisaging the
separation of history and politics. Until now, we have mainly concentrated on a critique of
classist thought, down to its most basic mechanisms. The separation of history and politics
can be introduced by the inside—outside tandem and by the opposition between them
(even though it cannot be reduced it), which it now calls for examining the category of
time brings the inside and the outside, and history and politics, together and renders them
co-thinkable while remaining, as we will see, in a partial subjectivation.
1. HISTORY AND TIME
a. Marc Bloch
Marc Bloch is not a historicist historian. He is a historian of transition outside historicism. I-

Iis intent is to distance himself from Durkheimian positivism and the contempt for history
that it brings with it. He also wants to distance himself from the pro-Robespierre outlook of
Albert Mathiez, deeming the split between Jacobinism and Dantonism ultimately
inoperative and beside the point. Finally, he dismisses the
Marxism-Leninism of the Third International because he does not think that it opens a
historical perspective. Bloch’s approach is singular. The structuring notions of his
enterprise are: ‘humans in time’ approached from ‘inside’ and from ‘outside’, and ‘time’
itself, which is what connects the inside and the outside. Bloch is a historian of transition
outside historicism because he tackles the question of inside and outside and joins in this
way the short list of historians of subjectivity. But Bloch remains within the confines of
historicism in that he accepts and seeks the hermeneutics and the meanings proposed by
the phenomenology of classist history. This is why the category of time is so important in
Bloch’s work, for the hermeneutics and the search for meaning are singularly informed by
time as a category.
When we examine the category of time in Bloch’s thinking, a heterogeneous multiplicity
emerges that serves in establishing the link between inside and outside and that leads back
to a dialectic of the subjective and the objective. The category of time does not stand,
therefore, as an exception to the dialectic. But even though it participates in the dialectic, it
does so in another configuration (albeit still of the order of the subjective) than that of
operation and of determination. This new configuration is the opposition between past and
future through which Bloch tackles the category of possibility.
b. The Historian’s Crafl
History and politics cannot be identified and separated by a simple method; identifying
history by the historical method would refer back either to an object or, at best, to a field.
Bloch proposes to replace method and object with the categories historical subject matter
and histo— rian’s craft. What is remarkable about his enterprise is that the historian’s craft
is the analyser of the notion of subject matter, and in this way it shakes 03 any eventual
transcendental character. The subject matter is what designates the singularity of what is
at issue in history. The subject matter is not the object or the content of a discipline—it is a
thesis of existence, concerning a singular substratum, such that a process of knowledge of
it is possible. Subject matter, here, is established in a new sense, one that is utterly extrinsic
to historicism, and does not reintroduce in any way
120 SYLVAIN LAZARUS

the notion of object or of objective, no more than it does a two-term dialectic (between
thought and subject matter). Bloch confirms this in refusing the definitional approach. ‘It
would be pointless,’ he writes, ‘to draw up a tedious and inflexible definition’ of history.1
Bloch maintains that historians rarely define. The identification of history is not achieved
through a dialectic of the objective and the subjective and, hence, it does not call for a
definition.
In a strong sense, starting from the historian’s craft develops on the subject matter of
history a protocol of identification through inquiry that pushes the category of this subject
matter, and the project of its examination, to an investigation of the name of history. The
subject matter can be said to be the ‘name of history’. Now, because of the category of
time, and, what’s more, despite this category, the name of history in Bloch’s work is a
heterogeneous name, that is to say, an impossible name. This name is not unnameable—it
is impossible. Sacrificed names are impossible. ‘Impossible name’ proved to be the name of
that which was termed above ‘sacrificed name’.
In the objectivist approach, time itself is an objective category that is deployed in the dating
and the counting, or in the analysis of the continuous and the discontinuous, of long time
and short time. What is counted is an objectifiable category, an instance, a structure, an
economic form, a type of state. The question of meaning, for its part, derives from the
turbulent history of structure. Time is that by way of which the apprehension of structure
is given; it is the category of subjectivation and of intellectuality of structure, because it is
also a characteristic of structure to develop in time. Historicist history, which connects
consciousness and structures through the mediation of time, is a notion that is at once
objective and subjective: objective by the counting and subjective in that consciousness is
ultimately conceived as capable of grasping structure, that is, history. Time becomes in this
way, and on this condition, a category in subjectivity. What is at stake is an analysis of the
category of the subjective through that of time, where the category of time proves not to be
a category of the subjective but a category of
1 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Peter Putnam trans.) (New York: V'mtage, 1953), p. 17.

subjectivation of phenomena of structure. For there is nothing to think aside from that
structure and rationalism requires time to be counted. If classist history relates the
question of the real to that of meaning through categories of structure and counted time,
for consciousness, the notion of time is central. It is through the notion of time that
structure can become a category of intellectuality. History, which cannot take on a total dis-
objectification of the subjective—one that would separate it too much from the question of
State, which is its centre—constructs a category of time that is compatible with a minimal
objectification of the subjective.
c. Time as a Distributive Function and Operator of Compatibility between Science and

Consciousness
History, for Bloch, deals at once with humans in time and with time (the time of structures).
But what is remarkable is that time, instead of being reduced to the objective and to the
subjective (in which case, we would be dealing with Chronos and Consciousness), functions
as a multiple operator, forming a necessary polysemy which leads to a heterogeneous
multiplicity. There is time and there is time. A multiple complexity of the category of time,
without the principle of this complexity being explicitly given in the dialectic of the
subjective and the objective, emerges. Time, as a multiple operator, is the site of history in
that it has, for Bloch, a function of distribution.
Bloch’s last book, The Historian’s Craft (1953), written during his years of exile and
resistance, after his study of the debacle of June 1940 in Strange Defizat (1946), is a very
great text. In my opinion, what he sets down in this book, more than the historian’s craft, is
history as thought. The historian and the resistant think and act here in the same breath.
Bloch sets the tone in the letter of dedication that opens the book, written to Lucien
Febvre on 10 May 1941. ‘We are vanquished, for a moment, by an unjust destiny,’ he
writes.z
In The Historian’s Crafi, Bloch breaks away from a unique model of science—which
Durkheim found, as we know, in physics in the nineteenth
2 Ibid., p. 2.
122 SYLVAIN LAZARUS

century—and maintains that relativist physics puts an end to the Durkheimian pan-
scientistic outlook. According to Bloch, no science offers a general model for scientific
thought and hence for other sciences. Each science develops its own space, its own terms
and its own processes of scientificity. The thesis that Bloch thereby defends is not simply
that a multiplicity of sciences exists, within which he counts history, but, rather, that each
science has a multiplicity of scientificities. His aim is to formulate the singular scientficity
of history.
Bloch’s enterprise appears to be constitutively contradictory. History is a science and it

must be considered and practised as such. At the same time, the science called history is a
brand-new type of science that sets out to explain human facts by recognizing their nature
as psychological facts and striving to explain them from within. Bloch engages, therefore, in
an investigation from ‘within’ and in an investigation of the inside and the outside. His
intention is to invest as much ‘social structures’ as ‘mentalities’ not for the mere purpose of
studying their relationship, and the ways in which they confront or intersect but because
he regards them as the foundation for the study of beliefs and representatiohs.
As an investigation of the subjective from within and from the outside, history becomes
the science of ‘men in time’.’ Time becomes the polysemic category, authorizing the shift
from the inside to the outside and from the outside in. It is the notion of duration that
enables this shift. Duration is the embedding in time of phenomena and processes. It can be
conceived either as a quality of phenomena (some are short- lived, others long-lasting) or
as the temporal counting of phenomena. It is, therefore, a category that operates from
within and from without.
The objectivist pressure on the category of time being very strong, Bloch specifies in
contrast the use that he makes of the category and its dimension of intellectuality: ‘[I-
I]istorical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the
very plasma in which events are immersed and the field within which they become
intelligible." And later: ‘This real time is, in essence, a continuum. It is also perpetual
3 Ibid., p. 23. 4 Ibid.

change. The great problems of historical inquiry derive from the antithe- ses of these two
attributes.”
After having identified time as intelligibility, Bloch makes it a category governed by the
unity of opposites and fractures time which becomes at once continuous and changing. The
fact that time is continuous and changing establishes the polysemy and leads this
foundational category to be given in a heterogeneous multiplicity. The latter is a mul-
tiplicity that reconvenes under a single term—time—the subjective associated with
something other than itself; it is also a polysemy in that this multiplicity is both itself and
an other. Heterogeneous multiplicity works therefore via polysemy. Bloch says so himself:
To summarize, human time will never conform to the implaca- ble uniformity or fixed
divisions of clock time. Reality demands that its measurements be suited to the variability
of its rhythm, and that its boundaries have wide marginal zones. It is only by this plasticity
that history can hope to adapt its classifications, as Bergson put it, ‘to the very contours of
reality’: which is prop- erly the ultimate aim of any science.‘
The contradictory and polysemic character of the endeavour is confirmed here;
nonetheless, the intelligibility of time is no longer merely a matter of hermeneutics. Time is
an operator of knowledge. This operator is not of the objectivist type (intelligibility does
not mean objectification); it is bound up with a comprehensive approach.’ If history is a
science, and if, ‘in the last resort, it is human consciousness that is the subject-matter of
history’,8 then the confrontation of science and human consciousness will not be deployed
through the dialectic of the subjective and the objective, nor will it proceed from a
phenomenological approach. There is no space of objectivity alone. Bloch’s originality is to
establish a compatibility between consciousness and science. But time
5 Ibid., pp. 23—4. 6 Ibid., p. 1'56. The emphasis is mine.
7 Nowhere is Max Weber mentioned in The Historian’s Crafi, unlike Frangois Simiand and
Georg Sirnmel.
8 Ibid., p. 125.
124 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
is a heterogeneous multiplicity. This heterogeneous multiplicity has, in Bloch’s thinking, a

function of distribution between consciousness and science. Time is distributed in diverse
attributions. And these attributions conjoin the ambitions of knowledge from within with
those of science, and allow for their compatibility, even though, in the final chapter of The
Historian’s Craft, Bloch maintains the principle of causal explanation as the fundament of
the historical method.
Bloch thus makes use of a distributive multiplicity that is a heterogeneous multiplicity and
that differs from a homogeneous multiplicity, in that the latter is attached to the
investigation of the name, whose multiplicity of sites provides access to the category.
Homogeneous multiplicity is related to the category and hence to singularity. The
distinction between a thought of distributive or heterogeneous multiplicity and a thought
of homogeneous multiplicity concerns the category of singularity and its thinkability.
Distributive or heterogeneous multiplicity does not have a bearing on the singularity of
forms of the subjective, of forms of thought, of consciousness, of mentalities, and is not
linked to an intelligibility of singularity. Keep in mind that it is the statement of the sin-
gularity of phenomena that separates a problematic of category from a problematic of the
concept. Yet, the concern for a thought of singularity is very much present in Bloch’s work,
evidenced in particular in what he describes as the study of a historical phenomenon’s
‘moment in time’, which involves situational studies of a singularity, be they examined in a
comparative framework. Because ‘[i]n a unique case, the specific elements cannot be
difierentiated; hence an interpretation cannot be made,” more cases have to be studied,
Which means that the interpretative work will necessarily find itself at some distance from
the first ‘case’. This dis— tanciation is not, I repeat, an objectification—it is internal to a
comprehensive approach and operates via the function that Bloch assigns to time.
d. The Past
One of Bloch’s most remarkable analyses concerns the categories of the past and the
present, where he establishes the inadmissibility of the proposition that history is the
science of the past. This proposition is discredited
9 Ibid., p. 35.
through a demonstration of the precariousness of the opposition between past and present.
Bloch argues that the method and thought of history as the history of the past are strictly
identical to those of the history of the present: ‘[T]o whatever age of mankind the scholar
turns, the methods of observation remain almost uniformly dependent upon “tracks”, and
are, therefore, fundamentally the same."° The opposition between past and present, insofar
as it allows us to identify that for which history is the name, is disqualified. But, in the kind
of dual movement that characterizes his work, Bloch ends up scientificating the idea of the
past so that it corresponds to the scientific character of history and, to better ground his
category in science, he offers a definitional characterization: ‘The past is, by definition, a
datum which nothing in the future will change.’11 History’s scientific character rests on
this assertion and, while criticizing positivism, Bloch maintains the thesis of history as sci-
ence. The constitution of the category of the past as a given satisfies this requisite.
However, the past is neither an object nor the object of history. It is the quality of history as
subject matter. Therefore, being a datum, which characterizes history as a subject matter
and a science, is in reality its condition. The price to pay is that the past doesn’t allow form
including the possible. The possible is, on the surface of it, exclusively reserved to the
future: ‘Only the future has contingency. The past is something already given which leaves
no room for possibility. The uncertainty, then, exists in us, in our memory, or in that of our
witnesses, and not in the
things themselves.’12
Thus, the past escapes the prescriptive, since the category of possibility is absent from it.
What is at stake in this definition of the past is not simply the facts or what is commonly
called their historical accuracy. Accuracy has no need for the category of things, no more
than the category of things indicates a borrowing from Durkheim’s The Rules of
Sociological Method (1895). Accuracy is the condition for history to be a science and for its
intelligibility to be scientific without for that matter requiring objectification. What is at
issue—and this is interesting for our
10 Ibid., p. 65. 11 Ibid., p. 48. 12 Ibid., p. 103.

126 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
purposes—is a distanciated intellectuality that differentiates past and future. To Bloch, past
and present do not require different methods of analysis, even though past and future are
distinguished from and even opposed to each other. Whatever their terms may be, Bloch
gives his work a true non-objectivist dimension by his configuration of present, past and
future, which opposes those who consider history a science of the past or an effect of a
causal structure. But to the extent that, for Bloch, the past cannot be a possibility does not
open onto a thought of singularity. Notwithstanding common conceptions, only if the past
allows for the possible can a thought of singularity be developed.
e. Multiplicity of Time and Unicity of Time
The paradox is that the past that Bloch presents as a given is in truth not unequivocal. The
past comprises an unrepeatable ‘having occurred’ (irrépétable advenu), which is the given,
and the unrepeatable ‘not-having- occurred’ (irrépétable non advenu). There is then a
heterogeneous multiplicity of unrepeatables. So it is clear that the category of possibility
that Bloch uses works for the past and not only for the future. Indeed, if the future is related
to possibility and the past to a given, there would seem to be a shift fi'om a multiplicity to a
unicity when, in fact, we remain in the multiplicity of the unrepeatable. Without the
multiplicity of the unrepeatable (that mustn’t be validated save for the purposes of this
demonstration), the thesis of the possible character of the future is evacuated. If we take
the thesis ‘the past is a given’ seriously, the assertion about the possible character of the
future is inadmissible. It is necessary, against Bloch, to consider that the possible does not
come up against the eflecmadon of the situation. Anticipation, efl'ectuation of the situation
and chronological distance do not alter the permanence of the possible. So we have to
maintain the possible in the having—taken-place (l’ayant- eu-lieu) and correct Bloch’s
thesis about the past being a given. Consequently, it is impossible to contrast the future and
the past, including in the work of Bloch. There is multiplicity of future, via the category of
possibility. There is multiplicity of the past. With the unrepeatable having occurred and
not-having-occurred, the possible is applied to the past. This is the order in which these
notions in Bloch’s work are to be examined, starting from with the future to the past and
not vice versa. Going

in the other direction would lead to the conclusion that there is no possible in the future.
Let us now retrace our steps, without validating the category of the unrepeatable. It is quite
clear that the polysemy of time in Bloch’s thinking is accompanied by the category of the
unrepeatable, only one instance of which is provided. The link between the unrepeatable
and the possible is therefore characteristic of history. On the surface again, the future is in
the realm of the possible and the past in that of the given. But this given, which, as we have
just seen, can be said to be an unrepeatable having-occurred, is lodged in a multiplicity of
unrepeatables, all of which, except one, are unrepeatables that have not occurred. The
multiplicity of unrepeatables is a heterogeneous multiplicity—the having—occurred
unrepeatable does not suffice for its own intelligibility. And to indicate this, Bloch calls on
the category of experience and on multiple experiences, since a single experience does not
suffice, he says, to sustain its own interpretation.
As a result, the unrepeatable, far fi'om opening onto a sufficient intellectuality of what
constituted it, actually impedes doing so, thereby manifesting that it excludes a thought of
singularity, apprehended from within itself. This is an important point: the very
unrepeatability that seemed to establish the specificity of historical phenomena—including
those of subjectivity—appears in the end to be a means of diflerenfia- tion, but only by
default, from the field of physical and biological experimentation and not of rational
investigation of the subjective from within itself.
This is why, getting around his own paradox, Bloch ends up sticking to the past as a given
that nothing will change and assigns to it the status of an experience. To maintain history in
the category of a science, the positivization of the past must be accomplished.
Bloch is thus obliged to propose the notion of experience13 in the remarkable category of
what he calls natural or spontaneous experience, the experience of societies and
individuals, and which he opposes to
13 The reader should keep in mind in the following paragraph that the French term
cxpériencc covers two concepts in English: experience and experiment. [Trans]
128 SYLVAIN LAZARUS

experimental-science physical and biological experiences, which are repeatable. History,
associated with the notion of time and with that of science, requires experiences, be they
natural.“ The notion of experience reinforces the polysemy and renders homogeneous
multiplicity and heterogeneous multiplicity indistinct. Politics and its category of
possibility pertain to another intellectuality, which, having no further need for the category
of experience, does not claim to be a science or to have the ambition of becoming one.
Abandoning the category of experience requires a homogeneous view of multiplicity. The
category of the possible is compatible only with a homogeneous multiplicity which is that
of sites of the name.
As we have seen, the category of subject matter opens in Bloch’s work to the polysemy of
time and to heterogeneous multiplicity. This polysemy is not, however, that of objective
time and subjective time, with its opposition between the time of economic structure and
the time of mentalities, but, rather, a polysemy of time, given as existing only in multiplicity,
with history having to practise this multiplicity and give it order. There is, therefore, a
configuration of the subject matter and of the polysemy of time, that is to say, a
configuration of subject matter and multiplicity.
This multiplicity prevents the question of the name from opening out of a lapsing of the
polysemy of time. The break between history and an anthropology of the name takes place
by way of a shift from a configuration linking subject matter and time in its polysemy,
which absorbs the question of the name, to a configuration comprising place and time,
which gives prominence to the question of the name. To ascribe the question of place to the
name is what we have called the site of the name. There is, therefore, no continuation of the
polysemy here; site and site of the name do not fall into the polysemic figure of historical
time.
14 Marc Bloch, ‘Que demander a l’histoire ?’ in Mélangcs historiques (Paris: Editions Serge
Fleury / EHESS, 1983), VOL. 1, pp. 6—7.
2. NAME AND TIME
a. Saturating the Uniqueness of Time

Let us begin by countering the polysemy of time with the unicity of time. And then let us
propose, in accordance with a remaking of the category of the possible and with the
homogeneous multiplicity of the sites of the name, to evacuate the category of time, be it in
the form of its uniqueness, which we have initially opposed to its polysemy. The sepa-
ration of history and politics is the operator of the shift from the polysemy of time to its
unicity, as well as the operator of the shift from the unicity of time to its evacuation. The
separation of history and politics must be accomplished in order to tackle the problematic
of the name and the sites of the name.
Any hypothesis of a political investigation of politics that does not involve reintroducing
history requires thinking about what took place outside the category of the unrepeatable. A
category of the possible is thereupon isolated that has as its sole substratum what has
happened. This is not Bloch’s category of the possible; his, underpinned by the multiplicity
of time, emerges at the end of a final examination that must be undertaken of his theses, in
a unicity of time. Because if we are in a multiple time, we have a multiple field of
possibilities—what has happened becomes also what could have happened and
tendentiously what had to happen, because that is how the multiplicity of time works. The
multiplicity of time leads to the structural and, in the end, what happened, in its necessity,
becomes an effect of structure. On the contrary, there is uniqueness of time when a
sequence is not reflected in the problematic of the multiplicity of time. The uniqueness of
time that would seem to distance us from Bloch’s thinking actually follows from it when we
sat- urate his theses with regard to the possible, to polysemy, to the unrepeatable and to
time. It is to this saturation that we will now turn. And it is only when the saturation is
accomplished, and the category of the unicity of time is established as what remains, that
we will be in a position to remake the category of the possible. The uniqueness of time
will then appear as a sign of the obstinate pursuit of the subjective’s capacity for its own
investigation.
130 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
To separate history and politics requires calling on a category of the possible that leaves
the unrepeatable behind. As long as we maintain the unrepeatability, even if we
differentiate between the having-occurred unrepeatable and the not-having-occurred
unrepeatable, we remain in the framework of polysemic time and the category of subject
matter. And the subject matter assumes the form of a Whole, in becoming the substratum
of the heterogeneous multiple. The separation of politics and history is accomplished with
the help of a possible that is distinct from that of polysemy. The possible, in its remaking,
does not topple into the multiplicity of unrepeatables, in that it is not an external speci-
fication of that which took place or that which takes place. In other words, in the
statements The future calls on the possible or Only the fi4ture calls on the multiple,
‘possible’ and ‘multiple’ are synonymous. As far as the past is concerned, if we follow Bloch,
the category of the possible, and hence of the multiple, is evacuated in favour of the given.
The fusion between thought and that which has taken place is effected, in that the essential
support for the fusion is not so much the multiplicity of time as the unrepeatable. Thought
seizes the unrepeatable as a given, which is but the name of the having-occurred
unrepeatable.
Saturating the polysemy of time and the category of the possible (as conceived by Bloch)
leads to the unicity of time, a notion that is in reality internal to the historian’s
configuration. For the unicity of time is nothing other than the unrepeatable and that which
underpins this category. The category of the possible comes consequently from the
unrepeatable, as does the category of heterogeneous historical multi— plicity. Returned to
its foundational category, time pertains to unicity. This is the limit thesis of Bloch’s space
that can be stated as follows: the unicity of time is unrepeatable. We started with time as
constitutively heterogeneous, continuous and changing, and we arrive at the thesis of time
underpinned in unicity by the unrepeatable. Once the work of dis- objectification and
reduction of polysemy has been carried out from within Bloch’s thinking, we arrive at the
category of time which then becomes a subjectivated category in thought. The work of
saturation showed that, if time is a category in thought in Bloch’s work—which it is not
exclusively—then it is the category of the unrepeatable. At this
point, the uniqueness of time can be defended. Uniqueness of time and category strictly in
thought are conjoined.
The point of the above is to make it possible to remake the category of the possible without
abandoning the investigation. It is a matter as much of remaking categories as of remaking
processes. Bloch’s entire enterprise concerns the process of historical knowledge as a
process of investigation. This process of knowledge also had to be saturated to make room
for the possibility of a different process of investigation. In the latter, which is ours, what
leads to the unicity of time is transferring the question of the multiple to the loci of the
name. The uniqueness of time, the end point of Bloch’s examination, is what has to be
abandoned in tackling the homogeneous multiplicity of sites of the name. When we
encounter the homogeneous multiplicity of sites of the name, the question of singularity
and multiplicity proves to be exempt from the question of time as an integral part of the
evacuation of heterogeneous multiplicity and of the unrepeatable.
This does not mean that the new configuration irnplodes the category of the possible,
which can be separated from that of time if we detach it from the heterogeneous
multiplicity, that is to say, from its empirical use, which is invested in the multiplicity of
unrepeatables. The point is not to associate unicity to the homogeneous multiplicity of
places of the name rather than associate it to the heterogeneous multiplicity of
unrepeatables. It is to separate the possible from the multiplicity so as to link it to the
prescriptive, wherein the possible is not the substance or nature of what can come, and
consequently it is not an external specification but, rather, that which permits thought to
think the relationship between what can come and what is. In the case of the prescriptive,
the possible is no longer an attribute of what will come and exclusively characteristic of the
future but, rather, a category in subjectivity that problematizes the approach to what can
be with respect to what is, as much in the future as in the past. What can be, with respect to
what is, runs through the past and the present as much as through the future. N 0t as being
unrepeatable, but in the following terms: what takes place does not eliminate the contents
of subjectivities that preceded it. The prescriptive possible is thus the content of
subjectivities and practices that presided over what has taken place.
132 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
In our problematic, multiplicity is deployed but it is a homogeneous multiplicity because it

is the multiplicity of places. The complexity of a political sequence is that of its major
processes, each of which is grasped by its site, in the sense that the disappearance of the
site brings about the end of the process. As the reader will remember, we identified the
Convention, the sans-culottes and the Revolutionary Army as the sites of the revolutionary
mode of the French Revolution; the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and the soviets
as the sites of the Bolshevik mode; and the mechanisms of revolutionary war (party, united
front and army) for the dialectical mode. There is then a multiplicity of sites in the
revolutionary mode and in the Bolshevik mode, that is to say, in the two modes in
interiority.
Reflecting on the multiplicity of sites is not synonymous with reflecting on the multiplicity
of time. The unicity of time was given as the condition for the investigation of the
subjective. Is the concrete multiplicity of sites compatible with the thesis of the
uniqueness of time? It is precisely with regard to this point that the question of the name
arises. The question of the name must be invested with the multiplicity of places.
b. The Name and Sites of the Name Necessitate Rejecting the Uniqueness of Time
As soon as we are in a problematic of multiplicity of sites—which is the anti-State
problematic par excellence, since the State asserts itself as the unique site and aspires to
destroy all others—the problematic of the unicity of time finds itself shaken: singularity
cannot be dissociated from homogeneous multiplicity, the latter being the homogenous
multiplicity of sites. Homogeneous multiplicity and singularity go together. The thesis of
singularity, sustained by the homogeneous multiplicity of sites, is what leads to the name.
The name is not that of time. It is the name of that for which the sites of the name are
multiple processes; the name of a singularity and of that which takes place only once.
The uniqueness of time vanishes as soon as we develop the multiplicity of sites because
holding on to the former recreates a relationship of totality and heterogeneity between the
uniqueness of time and the
multiplicity of sites. Places, the multiplicity of places, are the fulcrum of the question of the
name and its materialist basis. Thus emerges the space of the problematic of the name,
itself completely opened by the multiplicity of sites, which will be redeployed as sites of the
name.
c. The Doctrine of the Sequentiality of Politics Does Not Culminate in a Thought of the Name
Finley’s Politics in the Ancient World is, to our knowledge, the first text in which a historian
subverts the category of historical time through an analysis of political consciousness and
political thought. This book is of inestimable value when it comes to imagining the
possibility of a shift from the polysemy of time to a problematic of the name. For once that
for which politics is the name has been identified by singular processes, we see that the
name—that of politics—ceases to be when the sequence ceases. So the rarity of the
political sequence has to be extended to its name. If politics is rare and sequential, the
name (of politics) cannot rely entirely on the sequentiality of the sequence. Historiographic
polysemy is unusable here, where, when one is missing, other meanings remain. With
Finley, we leave behind any form of polysemy that would culminate in saying ‘there is
politics and there is politics’, in a multiple enun- ciation of the name, wherein when one
form is missing, another allows
us to hold onto the signifier.
Finley revokes the historical conception of politics, objects to common usage of the term
‘politics’, and rejects polysemy, even though it is the very nucleus of the historical
enterprise, insofar as it readily replaces the word ‘politics’ by the word ‘State’. The
eschewal of the polysemy of the word ‘politics’ keeps ‘State’ from being its synonym and
destroys the very heart of the historical enterprise that concentrates on the State.
Finley, and this is my interpretation, always seeks to attenuate the radicalness of his
propositions, which is why, after examining the invention of politics in Athens, he turns to
an analysis of the invention of politics in Rome. In so doing, he pays his dues to the
corporation of historians (from which he said that he did not want to be excluded)“
15 Interview in Cambridge, March 1986. See Natacha Michel, ‘La decision de Moses Finley’,
Le Perroquet: quinzomadaire d’opinion 64 (1986).
134 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
For this reason, he does not dismiss comparative approaches and, more subtly, he replaces
a polysemy of the name by a limited multiplicity of sites of the name—here in the figures of
Athens and Rome“—while leaving unresolved the question of whether the singularity
characteristic of each of these two sequential existences of politics is such that each is
sufiicient and that their simultaneous presentation is a simple matter of convenience.
Similarly, Finley attempts to stabilize his theses in a historical intellectuality by

associating name and site of the name in a way that the sites remain occurrences or events.
The category of invention is primary here and, being that by which the sequentiality is
demonstrated, it allows us to grasp the sequentiality of politics. But politics will be queried
less for itself and for what I call its name—hence less in its name—than in terms of its
invention.
It is very important to note that a problematic of the rarity and sequentiality of politics,
and, even more, of its precariousness, found in the writings of such dissimilar authors as
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Lenin and Finley, does not in itself harbour or lead to a thought
of what that name ‘politics’ deploys. The approach of sequentiality and precariousness is
not to be conflated with the question of the name.
d. The Cessation
The thematic of invention is that of sudden emergence and occurrence and not that of
beginnings or origins. And yet one of the capital questions of the anthropology of the
name is less that of beginning as of ending. The sites of the name end up being no longer
(the politics of Athens, the politics of the revolutionary or the Bolshevik mode, etc.) and the
fact that there is an end is not an outrage in thought or a catas- trophe for the mind. Better
yet, it is not the ending that is to be thought but, rather, what has come to an end.
What must be thought and identified is that which was and yet has ceased to be. This way
of seeing breaks with the form of historicism given over to categories of success and failure
(the failure of the
16 Athens and Rome play the role of a localization of the site. The site is not spatial.
Athenian democracy, Jacobinism or Leninism). Seeing in terms of failure always leads to

the question of what was lacking; it manifests a reserva- tion on what can be designated as
the integral character and the fullness of the real. Instead of accepting the test of the
integral fact, the problematic of failure cuts things up in its own way. The fact that a
politics ceases does not identify it. Quite the contrary. It is necessary to keep in mind that
all politics end. The cessation then is no longer a test of truth but that which comes to be at
the end of the sequence and which constitutes the sequence. The end of the sequence has
no particular privilege when it comes to identifying the sequence.
3. THE UNNAMEABLE NAME

Dis-objectification, let us not forget, is a dis-objectification of the subjective. It imposes the
relinquishment of the polysemy that supports the multiplicity of time. Any category in
thought pertaining to the name supports a multiplicity of sites but not a multiplicity of
time. Polysemy, on the other hand, is what organizes a confusion or an indecision between
the two opposing types of multiplicity: the multiplicity of places of the name, and the
multiplicity of time.
a. Abolishing the Category of T ime
For my part, I maintain the thesis of homogeneous multiplicities rather than heterogeneous
multiplicities. Sooner or later, heterogeneous multiplicities end up co-presenting the
subjective and the objective and come back to the thesis of the unthinkability of thought
when it is only presented. As far as we are concerned, the question is whether sites and
time are compatible with a homogeneous or heterogeneous multiplicity. To all
appearances, homogeneous multiplicity seems to be constituted on the basis of a unity of
places with time and to be governed by the latter, inasmuch as time is the foundational
category of the subjective. Heterogeneous multiplicities, on the other hand, are
paradoxically constituted in terms of the multiplicity of places, which are then considered
his- toncal singularities, and this multiplicity of places is dissociated from the multiplicity of
time. In contrast, homogeneous multiplicity is a categorial multiplicity (the category of
politics being the historical mode). It is a
136 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
concrete multiplicity, not a combinatorial one. Multiplicity is then the concrete mode of
being of the category, as evidenced by the existence of several modes of politics.
So we are setting the concrete multiplicity of the category of the historical mode of politics
up against polysemy, for polysemy is nothing but a multiplicity of the name—and not a
multiplicity of the category of name—and this leads sooner or later to the thesis of its
obscurity or its impossibility. Because this multiplicity leads to comparativism and
relativism, Bloch will establish (and this is why he stands as such an important figure for
anthropologists) a polysemy between the name, for him nameable (it is man and his
consciousness in context), and sites of the name, which he regards as historical
singularities. So here we find ourselves back with Bloch once again.
Time in Bloch’s work is the category in consciousness of the subjective just as it is that
which relates to the concrete character of people’s lives. But time remains a circulating
notion because it offers a space of circulation: humans in time, from the material point of
view and from the subjective point of view. Historicism, which is constituted as an anti- I-
Iegelian positivism, is supported with a dis-subjectivation of time and, one can argue, of
time as Hegel conceives of it: purely subjective and in the real of the absolute Idea. Yet
departing from Hegel does necessarily mean adopting heterogeneous multiplicity and an
anti-subjective resolution, and it does not necessarily lead to the polysemic unicity of
time. The unicity of the name is opposed to that of time, because the refusal and the
demonstration of the impossibility of the unicity of time permits the slip into the
unnameability of the name.
If time is kept as an investigative operator, we are in the order of a multiple of the

subjective and in an approach in exteriority, in that the category of time in history aims at
the identification of the subjective in its co-presence with the material. The polysemic
problematic of time functions, in Bloch’s thinking, from inside the subject matter and struc-
tures its investigation. And time accomplishes a necessary distanciation. To speak of the
subjective, distance is necessary; the categories of the subjective must also be categories of
distanciation—polysemy is a means of distancing and objectifying that leads to
comparativism and relativism. In Bloch’s work, time characterizes the polysemic approach;
in our
approach, the name makes abolishing the category of time possible. The name does not
subsume time; it undertakes its nominal abolition by a shift to unicity and then by ascribing
multiplicity to the movement that goes from the name to the site of the name.
b. The Unnameable Name
By assigning multiplicity to sites and making it homogeneous, we separated the

problematic of the name from any occurrence related to time, before proceeding to
eliminate the latter. The abolition of time refers the multiplicity back to sites—the
multiplicity becomes that of sites and not that opened by the polysemy of time. This
procedure firmly and definitively establishes interiority—indeed, the shift from
heterogeneous multiplicity to homogeneous multiplicity clearly concerns and gives full
consistency to the shift from exteriority to interiority. But does this displacement of
multiplicity ensure and concern interiority only? In truth, it opens onto an investigation of
the name and leads to what I have termed the unnameable name(s). How? First,
deductively, and then with regard to theses on the two statements.
Deductively. If homogeneous multiplicity is that of sites, the sites are those of a name and
this name is unnameable. If this were not the case, if the name were nameable, the
homogeneous multiplicity would be destroyed and we would find ourselves in a scientistic
impasse. Exteriority posits that the name exists and that it is polysemically nameable.
Reciprocally, to say that multiplicity is homogeneous is to posit that we are dealing with
unnameable names alone. This follows from the logic of multiplicities.
Next. Why are we dealing with unnameable names? For the simple reason that there can be
no naming in interiority from within interiority. This impossibility has to do with the
problematic of singularity. Subjec- tive singularity in interiority cannot bear naming;
otherwise it is designated from outside itself and we are back in a process of objectivizing
exteriority. This is the objection to naming that runs throughout our investigation.
But more profoundly, we cannot envisage singularity being the object of a naming because
doing so amounts to maintaining the thesis that
138 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
singularity thinks and to embarking on a monadology of thinking singularities. Now this
attitude annuls Statement 1 (People think) by assigning what we have called the ‘first
thinking’ (premier pensant)—the people— to the monadology of thinking singularities; by
disrupting the relationship between intellectuality and thinkability, since this relationship
is founded on two statements (and on these two statements) and on two processes; and by
uniting them in a single statement that would be Singularity thinks. In a sense, the
‘monadology of thinking singularities’ could be a Foucauldian reading of singularity If we
posit the statement Singularity thinks, we have no choice but to find the operators thereof
and the relationship of words to things exercises this function.
If we are to hold on to two statements and the relationship between intellectuality and
thinkability, we can designate no operation other than the shift from the name to the place
of the name. But why do we say that it is a matter of (sites of ) a name? Because departing
from the name and concentrating instead on the sites of a name is the method that respects
the fact that thinkability cannot yield the name. Thought can think its own thought but it
cannot give itself a name, due to the impossibility of a naming from interiority. In other
words, the thought of thought, or thinkability, cannot have a name lest it slip into
exteriority and objectification. Whereas any attempt to name the thought of thought will
only propose circulating between the subjective and polysemy and between
homogeneous multiplicity and heterogeneous multiplicity, thinkability can only be
thinkabiJity and be consequently in a relation to intellectuality, when it does not give itself
a name. We can say that the name is what remains of the subjective when time, as a cat-
egory of the subjective, reduced to its uniqueness (which is the condition of homogeneous
multiplicity), is evacuated. As such and in this sense, the name is unnameable.
The unnameable name is not the category. The category is nameable; the name is not. The
category is in the order of knowledge; the name is not, precisely because of its
unnameability. It is impossible to go from category to name.
4. SITES OF THE NAME
Every name has places. To identify these places requires establishing the category of the
name—for the unnameable name ‘politics’, the category is that of the historical mode of
politics. An investigation in terms of the unnameable name requires a shift to singularity
and to evidencing the possibility of a singular investigation of singularity Historical mode is
the category authorizing the identification of a politics from within itself. We arrive then at
the following thesis: the mode is the relation of a politics to its thought. Thus we can no
longer speak of politics in general. There are only modes, and every mode configures,
through its places, the space of the unnameable name of this singular politics. The category
is the mode and it is nameable. In every mode, one or more sites appear that identify the
singularity and prove to be the sites of the name.
However, the problematic of modes is established much more by what is thought in the
thought of a politics (this follows from the signi- fication itself of the term ‘mode’) than by
the movement that goes from sites of the name to the name. The identification of modes
produces categories and not names that are unnameable. Historical modes of politics
pertain to the anthropology of the name, on condition that there is never direct access to
the name, but that the category is deployed by the configuration of sites of the name.
In the example of the revolutionary mode of politics, which, as the reader may recall,
designates the 1792—94 sequence, the main figure of which is Saint-Just, the study is not
carried out using the very word ‘pol— itics’, using ‘politic’ as signifier, because the word or
signifier cannot carry the weight of its own thought. Good, evil and corruption are the cate-
gories that organize and configure Saint-Just’s thought of politics. The period of the
Convention is a singular period of existence of politics inasmuch as a thought of politics is
deployed in it that identifies the sequence. The thought that is at issue here does not
formally describe itself using the term ‘politics’; it utilizes instead such terms as ‘virtue’,
‘good’, ‘public spirit’ and ‘Republic’, all of which are categories of the revolutionary
mode.17 The mode that identifies this thought is a revolutionary mode,
17 See Study 1.
140 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
not aJacobin one. ‘Revolutionary mode’ is not the name of the politics of the Jacobin
Convention. On the other hand,_]acobin Convention, the sans-culottes and the
Revolutionary Army of 1793 are sites of revolutionary politics. There are sites of a name
that is unnameable.
To be more precise, we could say that the site is in interiority whereas the mode is the
categorial designation—and as a result, in exteriority, non-objectal in this case—of the
unnameable of the name. ‘Unnameable’ designates the impossiblenaming in interiority of
the name. The problematic of modes arrives at the unnameable of the name. The
problematic of categories allows us to practice sites of the name, without lapsing into
naming—the shift to category being a shift to thinkabih'ty, in an exteriority that is now
understood as categorial, and marking only the exclusion of the category outside the
unnameabih'ty of the name. There is categorial exteriority in all knowledge. A movement
emerges between intellectuality and thinkability, on the one hand, and places of the name,
on the other.
The work of identifying the places of the name leads not to the name but to each mode as a
singular category. The category appears then in exteriority in the categorial sense, meaning
in the exclusion of naming the name. A mode—in this case the revolutionary mode—taken
as an identified category (and no longer as a category to be identified) is neither in
interiority nor in exteriority, here in the objectal sense, without, however, becoming a
circulating element. Thus a non-inten'ority is posited that is not an objectal exteriority; it is
categorial. The historical mode will henceforth have this status. The historical mode of
politics is named, and this specification is the result of an identification in interiority; it is
not a name.
The mode is not a name, the sites do not have a name and the anthropology of the name
does not set out to constitute or identify names. This would evacuate its first intention,
which is to be an anthropology of thought, and give priority instead to a nominative, meta-
semantic approach, or one related to an archaeology of names. To maintain the hypothesis
of an anthropology of people’s thought, that is to say, the hypothesis of a full acceptance of
Statement 1, the shift must be possible from the word—as simple linguistic material—to
the category through
intellectuality, then thinkability and then the relation of the real. The condition of these
shifts is that the word opens onto a name deployed in its sites.
a. From Mode to the Simple Name ‘Worker‘
Between the problematic of modes, stemming from the investigation of politics, and that of
the factory as a specified site that we are going to discuss, there is a unity rather than an
identity. An investigation, comparable in many points to the preceding one, will be
conducted concerning the simple name ‘worker’ with the aim of determining if it has the
status of a name. For the purposes of this investigation, we must be in a position to
identify the singularity constituted by every site of this eventual name. If the name is
unnameable, if there is a homogeneous multiplicity of places of the name, and if every place
is singular, then approaching the simple name ‘worker’ involves, firstly, departing from the
structural and universalizing view that defines the term ‘worker’ as a producer of work in
the industrial space. The next step is to formulate an approach of singularity. Now, as we
know, singularities and homogeneous multiplicities are indissociably connected and this
connection forms the category of the name. What about the simple name ‘worker’?
What emerges is that ‘worker’ immediately summons up another simple name, which is
‘factory’. ‘Worker’ and ‘factory’ are paired. This pairing is indivisible, even when the simple
name ‘worker’ is evacuated. The singularity proves then to be found on the side of the
factory; the investigations that I have conducted in different countries in a variety of
contexts have prompted me to identify: the factory site of time, the factory site of the
state, the factory site of money and the factory political site. The category is therefore the
factory as specified site. Keep in mind that, if there is a multiplicity of sites of the name,
there is also a categorial multiplicity. In the case of the mode, we have: revolutionary,
classist, Bolshevik, dialectical, parliamentary and Stalinian. The category of factory as
specified site is in the multiplicity of the factory as site of time, site of the State and political
site. These are multiplicities of the category and not those of the sites. The first step in an
attempt to determine if ‘worker’ is a name to establish the category that gives us access to
the
142 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
singularity. The whole problem is to identify the unnameable name for which factory as a
specified site is the category. Is this category the category of the unnameable name
‘worker’? We shall see that it is a category of the unnameable name ‘worker-factory’.
The problem is complicated by the fact that, even though the present approach is unified
but not identified with the preceding approach to politics, here the focus is on the places
and the direction is from the places to the name. I am referred here back to the current
state of my research on worker anthropology and on politics, which has resulted in the
category of the mode. The central result of my research on worker anthropology and the
studies of factories has been the problematic of the specified site (factory), which is
constituted in the interplay of the terms ‘worker’ and ‘factory’, in that there will be absence
and presence of the word (‘worker’) in relation to the qualification of its sites (site of time,
of the State, political site).
b. Factory and Identification of Contemporary Modes

The method used in examining bygone modes goes from an identification of the mode
(this is the work on politics as thought) to its sites. A joint trajectory exists in the
investigation of the category of mode and of the category of sites of the name. In the
contemporary investigation of politics, the trajectory is distinct.
I set forward the hypothesis that the factory is a site for every contemporary historical
mode of politics, regardless of whether it is in interiority—in which case, we will see that
the factory is the site of the worker—or in exteriority—where the factory is the site of time
in the case of what we called the ‘parliamentary mode’, or the site of the state in the case
when production is not separated from the state and factories can be described as ‘parts’ of
the State (be it in Soviet-style factories or in the Chinese dan wéi type).
The investigation we are undertaking here into the simple name ‘worker’ is in the arena of
the taking-place, not the having-taken—place. What is at issue is the access to modernity
and to the space of politics today. The fundamental hypothesis involved in thinking politics
today is most certainly the factory as the specified site of all contemporary
historical modes of politics. Putting this hypothesis into practice requires an investigation
of the word ‘worker’ and the word ‘factory’.
When we consider the specified site and we take, for example, the factory as the site of
time, what does time designate? In other words, what is the relation between the
parliamentary mode, the unnameable character of parliamentary politics and time as the
specification of the factory as site in this mode? Is time what could be called the name of
the site, in the parliamentary mode? Obviously not, for sites have no names.
But this question is of importance. Let us illustrate it with the example of the Party in the
Bolshevik mode.
In the Bolshevik mode, the Party is one of the sites of the unnameable name of politics—
but what happens if we set it up as the name of a site? That the site has a nameable name
leads to the end of the mode and to statification. ‘Party’, understood as a name of a site,
pertains to Stalinist thought, not to the Bolshevik mode, and does not open onto the
thought of politics in interiority. To reach a thought in interiority of Leninism, the category
of Party must pertain to a prescription. Just as Bolshevik politics is subject to the condition
of stating its own conditions, so the Party is one of its sites, even if it is not the only one.
The Party is a site of the name and not a tool of history. The category of political site allows
us to maintain the thesis of the organized character of politics, without centring the
thought of politics on that of the organization, be it of the Party, the union or the State.
c. Access to the Contemporary Mode. Doctrine of Mode. Doctrine of Site.
The taking-place does not tolerate saturation; there is a difference in the process of
investigation into the having—taken-place and the taking-place. A specification of the
factory as one of the places of the mode exists in every contemporary historical mode of
politics. How are things configured when we are in the presence of singularity? What
remains of the factory once we have said that it is the site of time? This is the problem
evoked above. Its resolution makes it possible to resolve the problem of the name of the
specified place. We are justified in hesitating about what will lead to the specification. In
the example ‘site of time’, is it the factory
144 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
that accommodates time or is it time that organizes the factory, in which case ‘factory’ is
subordinate to time? In the event that we posit the existence of a name of the site, it is the
specification that erroneously serves as a name.
Places have no name, which is why the identification of the place must not be sought
through the name of the site but, rather, in terms of prescription. A site is not a name; it is a
prescription, which is to say that it is a subjective site. For the Bolshevik mode, the Party, as
we know, is one of the places of the name; but as soon as it is treated as the name of the
site, we find ourselves in an instrumental, State problematic. When we give a name to the
place, we dissolve the unnameable character of the name for which the place is the place.
Maintaining the unnameable character of politics means, therefore, also maintaining that
sites have no name. The enterprise is of utmost significance: it involves lodging the
organizational in the field of thought without lapsing into statism or economism. This is the
question that comes up with regard as much to the Party in the Bolshevik mode as to
factory in contemporary historical modes. If the factory as specified site is the name of a
site, if the factory as site of time is the name of a site of parliamentary mode, the name itself
of parliamentary politics ceases to be unnameable and becomes at the very least a
composition of the name of its sites: state, factory, nation. Or else time—in the formula
‘factory as site of time’—becomes the name of the mode. In the case that the factory is a
prescription, we are in another figure entirely. It is the specification that is the site of the
mode, and the site has no name. The specification identifies the place of the name.
The analysis of politics taking place challenges the category of the historical mode of
politics. The mode of taking-place cannot be identified in a solid, well-established manner
through the relationship of a politics to its thought. So a difierent movement is proposed
that Will identify a different entry point to the thought of politics that that of the relation-
ship to its thought. This other entrance is that of one of the sites of the name. And, since we
are by no means renouncing the mode, it is also a matter of putting the category to the test
of the contemporary taking- place. This is certainly not because the category of mode is
inappropriate to the analysis of the contemporary; rather, it is a matter of a distinct
avenue of inquiry. We must start from the terms ‘worker’ and ‘factory’, and no longer from
the relationship of a politics to its thought.
What’s more, if we do not proceed in this way, and relate the problematic of mode to
politics today and to the contemporary, then it proves to be nothing but a problematic
critical of historicism, maintaining the confusion and the bond between politics and history.
The problematic of modes could well serve to designate the confusion between politics and
history, but it is not in a position, in and of itself, to structure a thought that proves in a
practical manner the possible separation between history and politics. The investigation of
the taking-place must be conducted by the taking-place and the taking-place is given by its
places, not by the mode. To maintain the distinction in the protocol of investigation
between the taking-place and the having-taken-place, we must start from the places.
Two problematics emerge: that of the mode, and that of the sites of the name. The first
allows us to identify the historicism and to open onto a thought specific to politics. The
effective elucidation of the contemporary is carried out through the sites of the name and
the homogeneous multiplicity. Characterizing the mode during its sequence remains a
possibility. This does not mean to say that the ending of a sequence allows us to describe
the mode, by configuring it in its totality. The termination of a sequence is not what opens
onto the characterization of its mode. It is a question of the standpoint from which we
think. If we are contemporary With a mode, we are contemporary with its
places, with their intellectuality and with their thinkability.
The question is whether it is possible to think a closed mode without referring to an

element of the mode taking-place, since, if we are no longer in the field of science, there is
no neutral standpoint from which to think But the ‘non-neutral standpoint’ should not be
conflated with a mode taking-place. To think the mode taking-place requires a discussion
about the existence and nature of a place of this mode taking-place and about the
homogeneous or heterogeneous character of the multiplicity of these places. It is only on
these conditions that a thought of taking-place can emerge.
146 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Otherwise, if we deem that the closed mode can only be thought by way of the taking-place,
we find ourselves in a historicism that does not distinguish the taking—place from the
having-taken-place, or in an attempt to challenge historicism without ofiefing an idea of
what comes after. Our aim is to go beyond a simple critique of historicism. The choice of the
worker paradigm—which we know to be in crisis from the crisis of the worker movement,
Party and State—and the determination to propose a renewal of the worker figure in a
complete break with historicism lead to positing the factory as the site of the mode or
demanding a comparable hypothesis.
The hypothesis is, therefore, that the factory is the place of a mode of politics taking place
and that the investigation of the site opens onto that of the mode. What is being claimed is
not that the site is unique, but that, while eschewing the theses of historicism and
totalization, politics today can be invested by investing one of its places. Between the
investigation of the word ‘worker’, that of the factory as site, and putting the mode to the
test in its capacity to analyse contemporary forms of politics, a unity emerges. The question
‘for what is worker the name?’, when added to an implementation of the ‘worker-factory’
pairing, opens onto the specificity of the factory as site, with a division between the mode
in interiority and the mode in exteriority, which correspond to different specifications.
The question of place is put differently in a mode in interiority or in exteriority. There is a
tendency for ‘worker’, in its positive consistency, to become the characteristic of a mode in
interiority.
d. Worker and Factory
The word worker is an example Of a simple name, meaning one pertaining to Process 1. It
is a shifting term, weighted with ambiguities, the first of which is to constitute it into
‘workers’ in the plural. Then, it can be understood as an objectal transitivity: the ‘worker
movement’, the ‘worker Party’, ‘worker consciousness’, the ‘worker State’. It can be
contracted into ‘proletariat’; this is the Marxist-Leninist formulation, which, while turning
class into a referent, arrives through this contraction at a greater labih'ty of the term than
in the sense of ‘workers’, and adds to it a certain
UNNAMEABLB NAMES 147
telos. In the plural again, ‘workers’ can be understood as a collective (and, as we have said
earlier, ‘collective’ was that by which the subjective became an attribute of the totality).
Finally, ‘workers’, once again in the plural, can be understood as a socio-professional group,
wherein workers are differentiated from other types of employees and themselves sub-
divided into specialized workers, professional workers, skilled workers and so on. To be
complete, we should add the nexus of close equivalents of this simple name: ‘labourer’,
‘proletariat’, ‘employee’.
‘For what is worker the name?’ has been the subject of discussion since 1966 to our day.
And one of the characteristics of this discussion has been to consider the question
admissible and then to deem it out- dated. We can date the process of evacuating the
simple name ‘worker’ in France to the automobile strike of 1983 and 1984 at Citroén-
Aulnay and especially at Talbot-Poissy, where the term ‘irnmigrant’ began taking the place
of ‘worker’.
In response to the objectal lapsing of the term ‘workers’ or of the term ‘worker’—which
does not here have a distinct function—there were at least two possibilities. One consisted
in concluding that an end had come to workers as a subject and maintaining that the only
mode of being of the word was the subject form, attached to the classist perspective. And
given that the latter was obsolete, the subject form ‘workers’ had disappeared too. This is
the thesis of the parliamentary mode. The other avenue posits that the failure of the word
‘worker’ has to do with its unnameable character, itself the result of the objectal and
classist conception developed towards it, which remained historically dominant through
such terms as ‘worker movement’, 'working-class Party’ and ‘working class’.
5. WORKER ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE FACTORY AS SITE
The starting point of the thesis of a worker anthropology is the lapsing of this signifier,
which marks the end of an intellectuality; after which it moves on to examine the
possibility of other fields of intellectuality with regard to the word ‘worker’. The
deployment of this word requires that
148 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
I give a more detailed account of my research on the subject. It focused on the forms of
consciousness and representations of workers, taken as certain indistincts, as much at
Renault-Billancourt as in two factories in Canton in China, Poland and the former GDR.
What was at stake in the research was the word ‘worker’ considered as a category—and
not as a simple name—by way of the question, ‘what do workers think of workers?’
Obviously, the question did not concern opinions—any more than it aimed at obtaining
considerations on individuals; the focus was rather on the current constitution of the
word ‘worker’, beyond its objectal lapsing.
In examining the hypothesis that there is a different pertinence for the word ‘worker’, we
conclude that a study of this term in subjectivity and in interiofity is necessary. The only
way of taking into account the lapsing of the objectal, structural and classist method, that is
to say, of taking into account that there can be no constitution in exteriority of the word
worker, is to strictly apply Statement 2—Thought is a relation of the real—and to ask
workers what they think of workers. If there is a lapsing of the structural method, the only
possible way of developing another signifier (on condition of discovering it) is the
application of Statement 1 and Statement 2: People think, Workers think; Thought is a
relation of the real makes it possible to analyse the terms proposed by what workers think
of workers, terms which, as we will see, conjure up the factory as site.
Two rules were respected in the worker studies mentioned above. The first was the strict
application of Statement 1, Workers think, which is the condition of interiority. The second
was to consider as essential that the interviews take place in the factory and during work
time: this is a clause of the method whose aim is to limit the shifting of the word ‘worker’
between social status and subjective being.
a. Factory-Worker
The results are as follows. The lapsing of the classist intellectuality of the word worker is
confirmed and, at the same time, the protocol of this lapsing becomes clear: ‘worker’ proves
to be a circulating element in the study between factory and what is identified as being
outside the
factory and which will be named ‘society’. It is this circulation that appears as the protocol
of lapsing of the classist identity. A dual move— ment is observed: a split, on the one hand,
between the terms worker and factory and a bracketing together, and, on the other, of the
terms worker and society. In France, every time this bracketing takes place, we observe the
substitution of ‘immigrant’ for ‘worker’. As a result, if the term worker, in its proximity with
the term society, recedes, to be replaced by the term immigrant, we must suppose that the
fragility of the signifier worker with respect to the term society is the effect of a fragility of
the signifier ‘worker’ in the factory itself. And we must maintain that the word ‘worker’
has as a single space of consistency the factory itself, and that any attempt at extending it
outside the factory leads to the dissolution of the word. In the two cases, we are thrown
back to an investigation of the notion of factory, which is itself put to question by the word
‘worker’. Examining the simple name opens necessarily onto an examination of the factory.
‘Factory’ and ‘worker’ are a pairing. Examining one leads to examining the other.
b. The Factory as a Recent Category (Shanghai, 1966)
For Lenin, the factory is not a significant category but the term ‘worker’ is central to his
thinking. Lenin speaks of corporations and large industrial concentrations but offers no
singular problematic of the factory. If he regards it as a site, it is as a site for strikes, within
the familiar typology of economic, political and insurrectional strikes. The strike, therefore,
oscillates between a struggle against exploitation—that is, the economic strike—and the
fight against the state—that is, the insurrectional strike. But there is no problematic of the
factory as such either in Leninism or in Bolshevism—a fact that weighed very heavily on
their future since the factory became a site of the State and workers became State workers.
The factory is a recent category of thought. We date it explicitly to the rise of the worker or
mass phase of the Cultural Revolution in China, that is to say to the events that took place in
Shanghai between 1966 and 1968. As for the historical development of this category, it can
be observed in Italy (1968-70) at Fiat in Turin and Alfa-Romeo in Milan; in France during
the period of worker revolts (1968—78); and finally in
150 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Poland with Solidarnosc, from the spring of 1980 to the December 1981 coup d’état.
What these situation and these phases have in common, despite their extreme diversity, is
to have assigned to the space of the factory the question of the place of the State in the
factory. Obviously, this is directly the case in China and in Poland, both countries with
socialist economies and States, but we can advance the thesis that this is true of France and
Italy too, and do so without the risk of a paradox. Indeed, in France as in Italy, the State and
the issue of the State are at the centre of highly conflictual relations between new forms of
worker mobilization or worker action and institutional (and, as we will see, State) worker
unions and policies, as embodied by the PCP and the CGT in France, and the Partito
Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) and the Confeder- azione Generale
Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour, CGIL) in Italy. The case of
Poland will be developed separately later.
In Shanghai, as in the French and Italian cases, and in Poland, a political and ideological
configuration emerged—for which ‘factory’ will be the term—which aimed at undoing the
State inscription of the worker figure, directly established in socialism and indirectly
established but implemented through the mediation of unionism in the other countries
cited. In China and in Poland, State-owned companies embodied the inclusion of the sphere
of production in the State and for this reason they comprised factories, schools,
cooperatives, hospitals and agrarian structures. In Italy and in France, we have the
problematic of the company, linked to commodities and capital; and unions whose prob-
lematic is statification, as we have seen in the episode of the ‘Common Programme’.” The
State inscription of the worker figure and the attempt to subvert it show that, contrary to
economic and Marxist conceptions, the factory is a category in subjectivity and in
intellectuality. What appears in this configuration is that management is inoperative,
whether it is economic management, reflecting the factory as a site of
18 The ‘Programme Commun’ or Common Programme was signed by the Socialist Party,
the French Communist Party and Left radicals in 1972 in an attempt to form a broad-based
coalition on the left for electoral purposes. [Trans]
appropriation of surplus labour, or State management, reflecting industrial production as

being of the order of the State or of the order of the market. The factory as a recent
category is consequently that which breaks with statism and economism, which are the
objectivizing approaches. The break with statism results in a procedure of subjectiva— tion
wherein the category of the factory appears.
The factory as a recent category supports a new connection to the word ‘worker’, in
response to the crisis of the prior pairing formed by ‘workers and the State’. The crisis of
the dassist outlook is the crisis of the working class—class State space defined by the
ownership of means of production—the socialist State being that of collective ownership
and the capitalist State that of private property. At the time of Stalin’s death, statization and
objectification were at their peak. Socialist States saw themselves as embodying socialism.
Indeed, the whole idea of embodi- ment in this regard expressed an extreme form of the
idea of complete fusion between the subjective and the objective. Similarly, in a difierent
context, the PCP asserted not only that it was the Party of the working class but also that
the working class was the Party. A study of Stalinism shows that the hyper-dialecticization
of the objective and the subjective actually de-dialecticizes this very dialectic. This was the
conclusion reached by Sartre and French phenomenology in their desire to return to a
dialectic of consciousness at a time when the dialectic of the Party and the class was in the
process of complete de-dialecticization. A pseudo-Leninism had triumphed, replacing the
class as figure of the worker by the class as figure of the State. I say pseudo-Leninism,
because genuine Leninism had produced, alongside the dialectic between consciousness
and material conditions (which, in Marx’s terms, established materialism as the
determination of consciousness by material conditions), a second dialectic between forms
of consciousness and the State, the radical opposition to the existence of the State being the
criterion of revolutionary class consciousness. At the same time, a debate in the
international communist movement took place on the question of whether what was
actually happening was a de-dialecticization or a de-subjectivation.
The hypothesis of Mao—who always, as we know, had strong reservations with regard to
Stalin—was to attempt a re-dialecticization
152 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
through contradiction and practice, by instituting a new subject—the masses, which is a

post-classist category The events in Shanghai in 1966 accomplished a de-dialecticization.
This de-dialecticization consisted in separating, for a second time after the Soviets, the
working masses from the State and the Party, and in disrupting the expressivity between
them. These it did by laying bare the conditional character of class, Party and State, by
showing the random character of this conditional status and by managing to objectivate the
Party and the State, when Stalinism proposed falsely to subjectivate them. The experience
of 1966 in Shanghai represented a limit point: what was played out there was the end of
the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, through the elimination of the term ‘State-
Party’; a new protocol was proposed, admittedly classist and worker but actually
subjectified, because it presented a group of statements whose principle was ‘count on
your own forces’; and, finally, a brand-new category of factory was deployed. Texts from
the Shanghai factoryl9 propose to open worker universities, reduce bourgeois rights, limit
the division between manual and intellectual labour and, essentially, to put an end to the
politics of management executives which is, in fact, the politics of the communist Party in
the factory and the State mode of being of the factory. It is important to realize the extent to
which attacking management in socialist factories was comparable to challenging the
capital—work contradiction in a capitalist factory.
c. The Factory as a Political Site
Shanghai proposed to put an end to the dialectic of the objective and the subjective and
establish in its place procedures of subjectivation con- tained mainly in the emergence of
the factory as a political site. The political site is a non-dialecticized place, distinct from
the site of time in which the dialectic of consciousness, work and capital is experienced. It is
also distinct from the place of the State where the dialectic is played out in which the
objective prescribes the subjective, and the socialist character of the State prescribes what
will come of the worker figure.
19 Published in the pamphlet in French, Suivons la voie adoptec par l’usine dc machines-
outils de Shanghai pourfbrmer des technicians issus des rang: ouvriers (Paris: Editions de
Pékin, 1969).
The problematic of the political site is a non—dialecticizing problematic of site, in that any
dialecticizing problematic of site, calling on the State, leads to a denial of the ‘certain
indistinct’ that is the existing non-naming (innomination) of the word ‘worker’, and to a
denial of Statement 1 (People think). The ‘certain indistinct’ and People think form the
foundation of the worker figure and worker subjectivity. The problematic of the political
site turns out to be specific, and it can be posited that the factory as political site is the
tension of modernity. The political site is opposed to the site of time in capitalism and to
the site of the State in socialism. The problematic of site, added to that of the factory as a
political site, is What counters a dialecticized problematic of site by a subjectivated
problematic that appears to be the only one apt to come to terms with Statement 1.
Only the subjective problematic can ensure the hypothesis of a worker political capacity.
Any statement, with regard to politics, that is a dialecticized but not a subjectivated
statement has as its other term state capacity or State-union or State-Party capacity. Today,
the emergence of the factory has become that of a question that remains a question. Can
we speak of a worker capacity in other terms than in those of the Party, the State or the
class, and in another tone than that of a workerist optimism or, at the other extreme, of a
miserabilism?
d. Two Propositions
The thesis of the factory as a specific site leads, therefore, to the two following
propositions:
Proposition 1: There is circulation followed by evacuation of the word ‘worker’ if it is not

paired with the category of factory. When the term ‘worker’ is connected to the term
‘society’——as has been the case in France since the mid-19803—the descriptive ‘worker’
is evacuated and ‘immigrant’ takes its place. If ‘worker’ is connected to ‘State’ or to ‘Party’,
the term ‘Worker’ is given in its evacuation. It is therefore established that, if the term
‘worker’ is only meaningful when connected with the term ‘factory’, then the question
‘What do workers think of workers?’ cannot be answered until the question ‘What do
workers think of worlters and the factory?’ is answered. And the precise formulation of the
latter question is: What do workers think of workers at the factory?
154 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Only this formulation disrupts the circulating character of the word ‘worker’, including
With regard to the word ‘factory’. ‘Workers and factory’ is still a formulation in which the
term ‘worker’ is circulating; ‘workers at the factory’ begins to disrupt this circulation.
The factory emerges as a category and site and not as a spatialization, which yields the
formula ‘the workers are at the factory’—a descriptive topology in which factory is simply
a localization for the workers. In this case, the factory is no longer a category and the
circulating character of ‘workers’ is maintained.
Proposition 2: At the factory is the worker. This proposition is absolutely opposed to any
formulation of the type: ‘The factory is the site of the worker.’ ‘Factory’ and ‘worker’ are a
configuration of the real. Their conjunction is of great importance in that it distanciates, by
the procedure of de-dialecticization, the terms ‘society’, ‘State’ and ‘Party’. The factory as a
political site is the category of the factory when its relationship to ‘worker’ is de-
dialecticized.
e. The Collective
In the treatment of relations between ‘workers’ and ‘factory’, different possibilities appear,
some of which reintroduce the dialectic and the objectification. One of these protocols of
dialecticization subordinates the factory to spatialization by identifying workers with the
collective.
Collective labour, in Marx,20 is based not so much on the community of worker labour but
on labour governed by time. It is by labour time that surplus labour is extorted and labour
time is what articulates work with capital. The collective is, therefore, not directly linked to
a problematic of subject; it is a subjective efl'ect of that which workers share— to wit,
time. Collective labour is an abstraction (it is produced by time) and, assuming that it
becomes concrete, its law of deployment is the class struggle. For Marx, if relations of
production are What underpin the collective, then the latter operates in history. It is in the
end a notion both abstract and concrete, subjective and objective, since it ties the force
20 See Karl Marx, Capital, VOL. 1 (Ben Fowkes trans.) (London: Penguin Classics, 1976),
sect. 4.
of labour to the figure of the anti-despotic emancipating class. It is abstract because the
category of time is that by which we move from the obvious problematic of wages to that of
surplus value. But it is also concrete. And that it is so is what makes it possible, after Marx,
for the collective to position itself in the social arena instead of remaining a scientific and
historical category, thereby replacing class by the concrete group and communicating a
minimal subjectivity to the latter. The collective pertains to class not organization. Instead
of turning to the notion of class in the old Marxist sense of the term, the collective is called
upon to credit statistical groups with subjectivity, thus authorizing the shift from historical
class to sociological class. Asserting the subjective poten- tiality of the sociological class, the
collective acts from within the objective and the subjective according to the false
principle—if the objective exists, the subject can ensue.
Since it is abstract and concrete in the twentieth century, the collective will be expanded
not so much fi'om history to society as from history to the social, which has more of a need
for the notion of the concrete than that of the subjective and objective which is overly tied
to the dassist political perspective. Society, in the social version, itself ceases to be
represented as a historical entity and a political society, vehicles of revolution in the
historical dynamic of the class struggle. From the historical dynamic we arrive at social
situations that are presented as simply having to be resolved and whose connection with
the movement of history is no longer meaningful. We have thus shifted from a historical
thought, wherein revolution is essential, to a programmatic thought, where parties and
unions become the referents. The collective then indicates the local capacity for a
programmatic treatment of a situation. The collective of the classist mode is supplanted by
the collective as understood in the Stalinist mode. We must note in this regard the re-
emergence of the notion around May ’68, extending the hypothesis of the avant-garde of
conscious workers, through the theme of militant workers.
The abstract-concrete collective proves, therefore, to be a partially de-historicized variant
of the dialectic of the subjective and the objective,
which is established in a view of class that is not that of the class struggle. The lapsing of
the dialectic of the objective and the subjective brings
156 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
with it the lapsing of the collective, along with that of the working class, of labourers as a
whole entity and of the proletariat. And we cannot help but conclude that the collective, in
its attempt to stand apart, is a new version of these categories. It too is marked by the
statement There are workers, as they are. The statement There are workers, or At the
factory there are workers, presents the factory as a mere spatialization and as the formal,
exterior setting for the collective.
The notion of collective is antinornique to the category of factory. We are led to the
proposition: At the factory there is the worker. This proposition breaks with the
collective, does not relinquish the name of ‘worker’ in favour of ‘employee’ and takes up the
question of the simple name of ‘worker’.
f. The Factory as a Site of Time
What identifies the factory in parliamentary capitalism, and, more specifically, in the
parliamentary mode, is that it is the site of time. Time is understood here in Marx’s sense,
as that which articulates labour with capital. The factory, as a place of time, is evidenced in
the fact that the amount of labour is always conflictual there, including when dismissals
take place, the amount of time spent in the factory during a labourer’s life. Work, however,
is but one of the terms of the question of time; it does not. alone embody it, unless the
factory is defined as a site of work, in an attested workerist formulation. The other term of
the question of time is ‘capital’, with its mechanisms and processes, usually designated
today as ‘market economy’.
g. The Factory as a Site of the State
Insofar as the socialist State is concerned, characterizations in terms of State capitalism or

monopolist capitalism fail to identify it. If we stick to these positions (State capitalism,
existence of a ‘new bourgeoisie’ or nomenclature), we remain in a classist problematic. We
have to undertake another analysis of socialism, an analysis not in terms of relationship
of classes but, on the one hand, from the standpoint of the singular relationship that is—or
was—maintained between the State and production and, on the other, through the
category of Party-State.
Socialism cannot be defined as State capitalism of the State in that its original process
consists in the non-separation of the State and of production, which is the result of the real
decision to evacuate the law of value, commodities and money as a general equivalent. If
there is a non-separation of the State and of production, there is also no separation
between State and society, as is exemplified by the multi-functionality of the State-owned
enterprise. Such an enterprise combines production and social functions. It is a complex
that administers production units, training centres, retirement homes and so forth. The
State-owned enterprise is a piece of the State, actualized in the form of a multi-function-
ality, with functions of production, service and social control. In such an enterprise, there
are singular relationships between labour, labour organization and production. A
separation exists between labour and production; production does not govern the labour
factor as it does in capitalism.
In capitalism, production is subject to the constraint of the market and this constraint can
be found not only in the technical forms of work (pace, yield) but also in its representations
and in its values. Therefore, in a market economy, it is capital that configures the work
space and its subordination to production and to commodities.
The situation is completely different in the socialist State-owned enterprise. Instead of

being governed by the law of value, labour is structured in a relationship of exteriority to
production, whose efiect is the constitution of what could be called a ‘civil service of
labourers’ (fimc— tionnariat ouvrier). This term is apt because of the steadiness and regu-
larity, and also because the nature of such State-owned enterprises, and the public service
character of the labourer’s work and of the status of workers in socialism. The broadening
of the status of civil servant to manual labourers is one of the characteristics of socialism.
The socialist State is a Party-State. State and Party are indissociable. The Party oversees the
State, which gives rise to a singular State with a polymorphic function. Indeed, we will
apply the term ‘socialist State’ to a State with a polymorphic function. Socialism attempted
to build a society without economy and without law—the polymorphic State was meant
consequently to encompass the whole of the social field without
158 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
exception, including workers and farmers. As for the Party, it served as a mechanism of
control and regulation and thus found itself in charge of the polymorphism. In
parliamentaxism, the State can also be said to be polymorphic (and we are not designating
by this the separation of powers), but in a much more limited way. The economy exists,
which rhymes with a separation between production and the State; and law is in its own
separate arena, which is not to be conflated with that of legal institutions. In the
parliamentary mode, economics and law are separate.
In socialism, production and the arena of work are deployed in the planning and the
centralization—regardless of the technical meaning of these terms—and they are
embedded as a result in the arena of the State. Planning and centralization are but the
necessary result of the evacuation of the law of value and of commodities. The arena of
the State and that of work and production are identified with one another.
Conversely, in what we call here ‘capitalism’, the law of value and the market form a
separate arena of their own. We will posit that this separate arena in capitalism strictly
constitutes the economy. We will conclude then that there is no economy—in the sense
that this term designates a space that defines particular criteria setting the norms for
work and production—that is not separate from the State. In capitalism, the arena of
production and that of work are separate from that of the State. Until now, the logic of
separation between the State and the economy is the law of value.
Having suppressed the law of value, socialism abolished the separation, and hence
economics, and positioned production in the arena of the State. With the abolition of the
economy comes the elimination of mediation and separation between the arena of work
and production and that of the State. The State-owned enterprise in socialism is the con-
crete form of this absence of mediation and separation. This is why it can be called a ‘piece’
of the State.
In capitalism, the logic of separation between the space of the economy and the State is
also a logic of separation between the space of the economy and the space of the social.
This separation leads to others between the spaces of education, health, repression, police
and justice. These different separations are dependent on that of the economy and the
State. When the separation does not exist, all these spaces combine
to form one and are reserved in a practical form to the multi-functionality of the State-
owned enterprise.
Finally, the absence of economics allows us to assert that ownership, in terms of the
ownership of the means of production, is equally absent. The idea of State ownership or
collective ownership is retroactive—we see collective ownership by inference in relation to
private property, in precisely those situations when private ownership is absent. The
implicit thesis underlying the theme of collective ownership is that there can be no system
of production without a form of ownership. Yet, this is the case in socialism—the factory is
the site of the State and what is proposed institutionally to workers is the status of civil
servant.
The crisis of socialism and the introduction of elements of market economy into socialist
countries authorizes us to push the investigation farther. The research studies conducted in
March and April 1989 in two factories in Canton highlighted the fact that the factory in
socialism is not only the site of the State—it is also the site of money. By this I am not
referring to the introduction of capitalism into socialism but, rather, to an attempt by the
State to rally workers to a policy of putting a partial or total end to their civil-service status,
through the use of money For more on the crisis of socialism and the debate on the
progressive transition to capitalism, or on the utter break between the socialist State and
the post-socialist State, on the one hand, and on what happens to workers in this case, on
the other, I refer the reader to Study 2.
To summarize, the recent emergence of the categoryfactory led us to highlight the need to
de-dialecticize it, to point to the lapsing of the collective and to proposing the notion of
specified site, in categorial exteriority or in interiority. Finally, for the term ‘worker’ to
have consistency, it must be referred to the factory as a speafied site. The outcome of the
approach in this regard can be presented as follows:
1. At the factory, there is the worker is the statement that can sustain the worker figure. In
the specifications of the factory as the site of time and site of State, the characterizations in
consciousness of (workers-)immigrants or (workers-)civil servants are subverted, in
excep- tional situations, by the appearance of the category of the worker figure sustained
by the statement At the factory, there is the worker. In
160 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
the factory as site of time and in the factory as site of the State, the worker figure is either
radically evacuated or reduced. Indeed, in the factory as site of the State, the worker figure,
the one that can be sustained by the statement In the factory, there is the worker, appears
more as a reduced, subjugated subjectivity, but not eliminated. What is evacuated is the
effectiveness of the statement At the factory, where there is the worker.
2. The multiplicity of the factory as site, in other words, the multiplicity that identifies the
factory as site of the State, of time and as political site, is a categorial multiplicity pertaining
to a thinkability, either in interiority (the political site), or in exteriority (the site of the
State and the site of time). It is not a matter of an objectal identification, with regard to the
site of time or the site of the State. We are not dealing here with political economy but with
anthropology of thought. The categorial presence of the factory in the parliamentary mode
is the factory as site of time; we must then confer subjective consistency to the factory as a
category in this mode. We will call attempts at transgression, denial and confrontation of
the factory as site of time: turning the factory into a political site.
3. The factory as a political site is a break, with regard to the factory as a site of the State
and as a site of time.
However, a question arises. Are there singular ‘factories as political site’ that correspond to
the factory as site of time and the factory as site of the State? Do attempts at denial,
transgression and confrontation of the factory as a site of time and the factory as a site of
the State give factories as distinct political sites? If we can accept that the factory as site of
time can open onto the factory as a political site, can we accept that the subversion of the
factory as a site of the State is possible and opens onto the factory as a political site? What
is illustrated here is that the doctrine of modes and that of the factory as specified site do
not in any way reproduce the opposition between capitalist and socialist societies, in a way
that confines all worker phenomena to one society or the other. The factory as a political
site is not a circulating element; neither is it an invariant. It configures the difierent modes
of politics in a single field of thought, while maintaining the singularity of each: the
parliamentary
mode whose statement is The factory is the site of time, and the mode whose statement is
The factory is the site of the State. The example of Poland, where I carried out a study in
1981, is relevant with regard to this point, since the statement In the factory, there is the
worker was operative there.
h. The De-Statiflcation 0f the Word ‘Worker’ in the Polish Case
‘In Poland, the 1980—81 period, dominated by the activities of Solidarnosc, is a singular,
closed sequence, characterized by the lack of any aspiration to capitalism or of the traits of
nationalism, clericalism and anti-Sernitism that would come to mark the situation after
1986. In Polish factories, between 1980 and 1981, in the five cities along the Baltic coast, to
be sure, but also in the industrial centres of Ursus, Krakow and in the Silesian mines, we
witnessed the deployment of new worker statements. These new statements had very
paradoxically as a support the word ‘society’—emblematic, in the factory and outside, of
the fight against corruption and statification.
The word ‘society’ invested the popular capacity for a difiemnt econ— omy and different
social relations without calling on the State for that purpose. The State in its communist
form—as any other form of State, in particular, the State whose advent requires an
insurrection—was repudiated. The society embodied a popular political enterprise and
the possibility of a separation from the State. This sequence—a vast attempt at de-
dialecticization—had factories as a base, as workers endeavoured to end the Party-State’s
supervisory role and replace it with new forms, like oversight over management (the
directors were subject to controls or, later, they were nominated by Solidarnosc). It is
remarkable that it was not only a matter of strikes conducted to satisfy worker interests, as
legitimate as they may have been but also of establishing worker oversight as part of a
non-State and non-antagonistic project, and even more of an attempt to hold onto the term
‘society’ without statifying it. In the factory, there is the worker is to be understood in this
case as challenge to and criticism of what the dominant category of the site—which was the
State—was proposing as content to the worker figure: production sta- tistics, and model
workers. Every specification of the factory as site offers
162 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
its own paradigms of the worker figure. In the case of Poland, there was an affirmation of
the real worker in answer to the unreal of the State proposition. In the factory, there is the
worker was, then, an anti-State statement, without this statement—and this was its
smgulanty—ofienng a defence of another form of State, for example, one linked to the mar-
ket economy. That the market economy was not the space of the de-statification of worker
consciousness in a socialist country was what authorized the temporary emergence of the
worker figure. It did so for a short period of time and in contradistinction to what
happened after 1989.
The Cultural Revolution, in its worker or mass phase, and the worker phase of Solidarnosc
are, therefore, the only known alternatives to the factory as the site of the State that do not
at the same time have as a register the factory as a site of time. These two endeavours
stand as counter-examples to the collapse of socialism, the vain endeavours of the miners
of Vorkuta and the dominant problematic today of market economics as the sole post-
sociah'sm alternative, to the exclusion of any other avenue.
In France, a few factory situations between 1968 and 1978 stood out as revolts against the
prevailing unionism that established the worker figure in the context of production and the
State, with the dual assigna- tion to salary and to the government, that is, to strikes and
elections. There, what was at issue was the political capacity of the worker, and the
question became: Can worker be the name of a political capacity?
6. FROM 'WORKER’ AS A SIMPLE NAME TO THE WORKER FIGURE

‘At the factory, there is the worker’ is a post-classist, non-economist and non-collective
formulation of a worker figure that proves to be contemporary, modern and co-extensive
with the categoryfactory. It is marked by the emergence of the factory as a political site,
across situations and sequences invested by revolts against the factory as the site of the
State or against the factory as the site of time.
At the factory, there is the worker is the heart of the statement The factory is a political
site. Both are prescriptive statements of the order of the
subjective. The factory as a site of time, the factory as a site of the State, or the factory as a
political site likewise designate categories in subjectivity and forms of thought as a
relation of the real pertaining to Statement 2. In all three cases, the site is in categorial
exteriority and it is de-objec- tified. However, there is only one case in which the term
‘worker’ is in subjectivity and that is in the case where the factory is a political site. The
factory as a political site is the only case where the term ‘worker’ is subjectivated.
At this point, what remains of the simple name ‘worker’—after all, there was a risk of
seeing it too swept in the investigation into the lapsing of classism and historicism? To the
historicist linking of ‘worker—class’, I have opposed the pairing of ‘worker-factory’. This
pairing allowed us to specify the factory as a site, case by case. It now makes it possible for
us to shift from the simple name worker to the category of worker figure and to qualify it.
What is the worker figure? It is not the category of an unnameable name since the approach
here goes from the sites to the name. The worker figure appears therefore as one of the
sites of the ‘worker- factory’ pairing. The pairing being prescribed by the factory as a
specified site and by the worker figure, the factory as a specified site and the worker figure
are the sites of the pairing. The pairing therefore has the status of unnameable name.
In one of its sites, this unnameable name intersects the factory as a political site. In strict
doctrinal terms, we have the multiplicity of the factory as a site, and, as we know, this
multiplicity must be homogeneous. Upon initial examination, the factory as a site of time,
the factory as a site of the State and the factory as political site do not constitute a homo-
geneous multiplicity. For there to be heterogeneity between subjective specifications—
factory as a site of time, as a site of the state, as a political site marked by the statement At
the factory, there is the worker—there must be a compatibility, whether or not it is
homogeneous, between the sites of time, the sites of the State and the statement At the
factory, there is the worker. Yet the latter statement summons up the worker figure and, as
a result, it compels us to take The factory as political site and At the factory, there is the
worker as prescriptions and as the framework for the requisite
164 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
homogeneity. Empirically, in the cases where ‘the factory as a political site’ and ‘at the
factory, there is the worker’ existed, the factory and the worker figure were indeed
summoned up. Two unnameable names, the pairing ‘factory-worker’ and the name ‘politics’
have, therefore, a site in common. It is not a circulating site, parallel in its order to
circulating notions, but a unique shared site, inasmuch as two different names can have the
same site. But it is not through the doctrine of modes that this possibility is established,
since the mode is the relation of a politics to its thought and is not to be confused With
politics. It is insofar as any contemporary mode has the factory as a site that the two
unnameable names—politics and the pairing—have a single shared site.
The second site is the worker figure. It is not deducible from the specification of the factory.
We will not say that the worker figure is that of the civil-servant labourer21 in the case of
the factory as site of the State, or that the ‘exploited worker’ is the worker figure of the
factory as the site of time. The worker figure is not deduced from the specification (of the
factory as site) for the very reason that it is constituted outside modes in exteriority and
in situations of worker actions against the factory as a site of the State or as a site of time.
The worker figure is therefore intransitive to the specified place—it is the subjectivation of
the word ‘worker’. The unnameable name ‘worker-factory’ has at least two places, the
factory as site and the worker figure—we find ourselves therefore in the order of a
multiplicity of sites of the name, and there is no relation of transitivity, expressivity or
deducibih'ty of one site from another; the only relation that exists between the sites of the
name is their homogeneous multiplicity, not their expressive multiplicity. This is Why the
worker figure is not deducible from the factory as site.
In certain cases, the worker figure is homogeneous with the factory as site. This is the case
when both are in interiority not because such is the nature of the worker figure but
because such is the state of the situation. Only one case exists where the worker figure
presents the unnameable name ‘worker-factory’, and that is the case of the factory as
political site, the worker figure is then articulated to the statement At the factory, there is
the worker.
21 See Study 2.
Starting from the pairing ‘factory-worker', we raised the question of knong what remained
of the simple name ‘worker’. In the wake of the above discussion, we have to maintain the
following:
-—The simple name ‘worker’ does not take on the status of an unnameable name. ‘Worker’
is not a name.
— The pairing ‘worker-factory’ is an unnameable name. The factory as site is its first site. In
this, the factory is a specified site, shared, as the site of a name, with the unnameable name
of politics and with the unnameable name of ‘worker-factory’. The unnameable names
‘worker-factory’ and ‘politics’ are not in any way identical or reducible to each other.
— Even though ‘worker’ is not a name, comments are made in every factory situation on
the specification of the site and on the worker figure; statements in subjectivity are
formulated by the workers themselves.
— The worker figure can be constituted by a refusal of and revolt against the factory as a
site of time or as a site of the State. The worker figure as the second site of the unnameable
name ‘worker— factory’ designates a worker intellectual capacity that is not reducible to
the thought of the site of the mode of politics.
— There is only one case where the worker figure is deployed in a cre- ative subjectivity
and that is when it sustains the statements At the factory, there is the worker (statement on
the worker figure) and The factory is a political site (statement on the factory as specified
site).
— Finally, the pairing is not to be conflated with the unnameable name of politics; its places
are not those of a mode but those of another unnameable name. If we can apprehend a
contemporary mode of politics by the factory (as site), this is because, as we have already
said, the unnameable name of politics and the unnameable name ‘worker-factory’ share a
site. Perhaps the constellation of unnameable names and their places, illuminated and
shining in the dark, opens here because every investigation of the unnameable causes a
shift from the unknown to the known, as we have already discussed. It is surprising that, in
the end, the unnameable name of politics
166
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
does not sustain that of the worker figure, and it would be pointless to see in this assertion
a settling of accounts with Marxism, presented precisely as the fusion or the confusion of
the two names. Let us insist on the fact that thought in terms of mode is not a politics and
that the question of the name of politics, necessary to its thought, is not conjoined with its
doing (sonfaire) and hence is not conjoined with all its thought. The freedom of the worker
figure, which is also the sign of its contingent occurrence, with regard to the factory as site
of the mode, marks the excess of the thought of politics over the thought of the mode. The
attempt to situate the mode in the historical, and the worker figure in the prescriptive, is an
incorrect reading, which shatters the assertion of the homogeneous multiplicity of sites of
the name, an assertion that is of utmost significance in my eyes.
CHAPTERS TIME TO CONCLUDE
Anthropology of the name set out to investigate the subjective and argues for a procedure
of a non-nomination of names.
The unnameable of the name is apprehended through the concrete multiplicities of places
of the name, which are homogeneous multiplicities and which display the many
singularities of the category. Homogeneous multiplicities are all the modes of being of the
category. Knowledge as thought and knowledge of thought do not content themselves
with methodology, just as thought, as the subject matter, is eschewed. The real is given as
singular and having to be discovered.
The following categories are deployed within the context of the unnameable of the name:
the historical modes of politics, which is the category of the unnameable of the name of
politics as thought; and the factory as a specified site, which is the category of the
unnameable name ‘worker-factory’. And I would have liked to be able to add: thought,
which is the category of the unnameable inexistence of time, whose place is the gap and the
possible.
There are, therefore, unnameable names. The anthropology of the name maintains that the
only possible enterprise of naming consists in the naming of the sites of the name and the
identification of the category.
1. FROM STATEMENT TO PRESCRIPTION
Of the two statements that form the basis of the anthropology of the name, the first asserts
that people are not always intellectually incapable or powerless. As for the second
statement, it asserts that thought is not pure surging or wandering; it is a relation of the
real. The second statement is a postulation of ‘rationalism’, a term that is to be preferred
henceforth to ‘materialism’ since the former encompasses the latter.
168 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
These statements are prescriptions. They are prescriptive statements of ‘there is’. In the
arena of phenomena of consciousness, statements cannot be otherwise. No experimental
‘there is’ is suitable; we have to depart from the social sciences, and positioning ourselves
in the prescriptive manifests this separation from them. Try as one might to seek shelter
by accusing the prescriptive hypothesis of proceeding from voluntarism or intellectual
romanticism, the fact is that thought is always a matter of statements. To think is to
prescribe thought, assign it so as to summon it, compel it so as to test it, it is to presume
that it is a relation of the real, and practise an authentic protocol of inquiry towards it. The
anthropology of the name was deployed on the basis of these two statements and the
developments of these propositions appear to be antinomic to notions of consciousness,
ideology, a dialectic of the objective and the subjective, as well as the notion of the
collective.
The questioning of these notions is crystallized in the separation between history and
politics. Politics (la politique), which can by no means be conflated with the political (le
politique), is a thought. With regard to scholarly formulations and those of opinion, the
discussion proposed in this book concerns the possible and necessary separation between
politics and history, a separation that is paradigmatic of the distinction between forms of
historicist thought, reasoning and argumentation, and the thought of thought which here
is that of politics. Anthropology of the name explicitly declares that it is not a social science
and it refutes and criticizes historicism.
This stands in opposition to current sociological thinking which situates itself in the
typological, comparatist approach of historicism. Witness the strength of conviction
expressed by a sociologist of the ilk of Jean-Claude Passeron, who maintains in Le
Raisonnement sociologique (Sociological Reasoning, 1994) that history and sociology are
epistemo- logically indiscernible and that this indiscernibility applies in varying degrees to
all social sciences by identifying them with historical sciences.1 In the social sciences,
typologism, comparatism and historicism form a constellation that accounts for the
majority of theories and schools.
1 Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Raisonnement sociologiquc: L’espace non poppén'en du raison-

ncmcnt naturel (Paris: Nathan, 1994), p. 14.
TIME TO CONCLUDE 169
Even the attempt at de-historicization by Lévi-Strauss, who asserted his disloyal filiation to
Durkheim, stayed within the confines of historicism, notwithstanding the ambition of
structuralism to depart from it. The characteristics of the proposed way out simply did not
permit it. Lévi-Strauss proposed an abstract-concrete scheme that was not dialectical and
that seemed to his mind therefore to meet the requirement of de-historicization, all the
more so in that he evacuated time. He also, as we know, evacuated history. According to
LéVi-Strauss, spaces of organization and correspondences exist in kinship, in myths and in
thought. This unquestionable major anthropological discovery is entirely de- dialecticized.
It excludes all thought of politics since the latter is naturally outside its scope. However, the
de-dialecticization does not lead to a thought relation of the real but, rather, to a
classificatory thought that leads in turn to the thesis of the natural character of culture. The
endpoint of the idea that ‘to think is to classify’ is the encyclopedia and thought is ascribed
exclusively therein.
This de-historicization, marked by the evacuation of dialectics, of time and of history,

remains within the confines of historicism by a constitutive point—the foundational
‘there is’ is that of the whole, which is society. The category of society is foundational to
historicism, whether it is called ‘totality’ or ‘world’ or ‘historical world’. The social sciences
aspire to arrive at a composition of orders of the real, in its diversity, or, more precisely, to
analyse the real as a heterogeneous multiplicity. The postulated ‘there is’ is unique and
composite.
The options can differ: the approach may or may not be dialectical; the absence or presence
of time; a psychological dimension or a comprehensive approach. These are variations on
a common base—to think and to know (thought and knong being conflated), the
prescription of a composite initial unity must be formulated. To think without a composite
totality requires operating a radical change in prescription.
2. ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NAME AND COMMUNISM
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ This inaugural
proposition in The Communist Manifizsto brings
170 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
together the quadrilogy of historicism: history, society, struggle and classes. The category
of communism specifies Marxist historicism through the concept of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, proposing a non-statist classless society as the real end of history. Communism
can therefore be characterized as an historicist problematic of de-statification. It was on
this point that the enterprise failed—the de-statification from classes and, even more, from
the Party and the State proved to be impossible, and the Party, far from accelerating the
de-statification, ended up becoming the mainstay of the State in the form of the Party-State.
For Marx, communism supports the idea of a de-historicized end to historicism, of the class
struggle ending in an end to classes and, hence, an end to the State, and, of course, the
transition from the order of necessity to the order of freedom. Marx’s notion of State is as
close as could be imagined to that of class, and it is evident that this facilitates the thesis of
communism. Yet, already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more fully in
the twentieth, the space of the State proved to be no longer expressive of that of a class,
becoming what could be called the State of all the peoplefi'om the point of view of class
and, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletarian State of all the people. From
Marx’s triad, ‘proletarian class—history—communism’, there was a shift to the triad of
post-19l7 Lenin—‘party—revolution—state’. Already after the Commune, it was clear that
Marx’s proposition dividing society into two classes was inadequate. Whence the need to
return to a composite unicity and to a weakening of the notion of class that was to give rise
to the category of the Party which, as we have said, called on people everywhere and
broke with the notion of class—a development that was opposed by anarcho-syndicalists,
who were pure classists.
We have seen in Chapter 1, in discussing the difference between Marx and Lenin, that this
new situation—namely, of the state no longer being transitive to classes—is manifested by
and seeks resolution through the Party in the Leninist sense, which has nothing in common
with what is said in The Communist Manifesto. In the period from 1880 to 1917, the space
of historicism and that of communism were renewed and com- plexified with the hitherto
unknown notion of Party in its modern sense, contemporaneous with the imperialist and
parliamentary phase
of capitalism. From that point on, any question, including that of communism, would be
mediated by that of the Party, which became the operator of communism (to the point that
it would be called the ‘communist party’), as a substitute for the class. The thesis of
communism— the thesis of the de-historicization and de-statification of historicism as the
logic of class works towards the abolition of class struggle and of the state—disappeared.
What followed was far from confirming the prospect of de-statification, for it was propped
up by the new, decisive element—the Party—built up after 1917 into a Party—State.
The reliance of Marxist historicism on class is well known; what is less so is that the notion
of class is introduced by—and rests on—the notion of society, due to the quadrilogy
mentioned above. One could object that the notion of class is structure on that of
contradiction and not on that of society. Contradication in the strong sense, that is, in the
political sense that Mao attempted to impart to it, requires the dictatorship of the
proletariat; in my terms, contradiction in the strong sense is not objective—it is
prescriptive. After all, the dictatorship of the proletariat is itself but a phase of transition,
prior to what Marx, Lenin and Mao all call communist society, which may be a classless,
stateless society but is a society nonetheless. What has been called ‘totality’ or ‘unicity’ is
the paradigm of society—a society can only be a totality. And it is remarkable that political
outlooks based on Marxism inevitably propose compositions that fall in the realm of
composite unicity or of totality, such as class alliances, the entire people, or what the
Chinese call the new democracy, which includes the national bourgeoisie. Notions of cross-
class alliance, the entire people and the new democracy do not only participate in a logic of
composition; they offer a name to the whole in the form of its future and of its outlook. The
whole must have a name in order for a thought or dialectic of the part and the whole, of the
element and the aggregate, to be operative. The very question of history and its potential
movement is played out in the relationship of the part and the whole. The play of the
composite unicity or the totality is that of the movement of history. I will not say more
about the latter. On the other hand, let us note that the thesis, not of a multiplicity of sites of
politics but of a unicity—whether it be the Party in the political outlook
172 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
or the government in the historical approach—is internal to this problematic. In a word,
society and unicity of place (Party or government) work together in order to finally
establish the State as unique site and as a composition, the latter being at once fatal and
indispensible. The need for the State is an effect of the thesis of composite unicity that
requires a ‘composition’, and the State then appears as the unique site, necessary for any
thought of politics.
As for Lenin, his Marxism and his thought of the State are, in essence, purely historicist and
are founded on the notion of society that we have just examined.
The end result is that historicism has become obsolete and is certainly not saturable. And
with it collapses the notions of society and State, to which we will oppose the categories of
government, country and people.
3. SOCIETY AND STATE

Now let us look at a sociological stance. For Durkheim, there is no explicit problematic of
State—the will to de-politicize, de-historicize and de-dialecticize is such that the notion of
society becomes preponderant and that of the State disappears.
A current of modern sociology proposes to use classes, classifications and reproduction to
approach a space that it constitutes in an indif- ference to the question of knowing whether
it belongs to society or to the State. Without clearly separating a differential space of the
State with regard to that of society, the distinction between State and society becomes
difficult, as is evidenced by the current instability of the notion of the social. The long-
debated subject of education is a critical example of the undifl'erentiation that is operated.
Is the educational crisis to be approached from the standpoint of the State or of society?
State and society overlap, and the social in crisis is identified as that which escapes State
regulation. In truth, the social, a rough notion, is a residual product of classism and of the
classist antagonism. In classism, the antagonism was a principle of subjectification and,
consequently, the subjectification of the objective produced a relation to the State that was
pugnacious and that addressed it in the space of its destruction. After the end of classism,
the only possibility for the objective situation is to present itself to the State as the social in
crisis soliciting the State’s intervention. There is no way offered out of this ‘crisis’ beside
statification, which itself evidences the undifferentiation that we have underscored.
The incapacity to distinguish between society and the State leads to a configuration in
terms of part and whole (society being a real composite whole, in which the State can have
its place if it is one of its parts) that we examine with the help of the notions of structures,
fields and levels.
Class was the dynamic of historicism and of sociological historicism. The disappearance of
the dynamic of class led to a confusion between State and society, insofar as it was the class
struggle that put distance between them. With this difierendadon gone, what remains
today is the State, the economy and, as far as society is concerned, its state of crisis in the
category of the social. And, with regard to the latter, since society in its difference has been
evacuated, all that remains is the statification. In the social sciences, historicism has turned
into functionalism and structuralism.
4. THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIALISM IN THE USSR AND IN EASTERN EUROPE
Evental historicism, which was the bridge between the historicist ideologism of 1968 and
the Mitterandian parliamentarism of the 19808, had a sorry future. Historicism non-
relevance can also be assessed with regard to the collapse of socialism.
The category of revolution is obsolete. Yet it has continued to be used in an attempt to

account for real phenomena, even though the lapsing of the category is equally true in
socialist countries. In the historicist sense, the following revolutions took place: anti-Soviet
in Hungary, cultural in China, spring in Prague, not to mention, the East German revolts in
1953 and, later, the quiet revolution in Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
Velvet Revolution elsewhere.
Still, fiom the standpoint of historicism, every event in a socialist country is worthy of the
name ‘revolution’, even when it has been put down, as for example the struggle of
Solidarnosc which was chronologically the
174 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
last. As for the collapse of socialism, from the same perspective of thought, it is ever only
that which comes after the defeat of revolutions. The collapse of socialism is therefore
imputed in turn to the failure of revolutions in socialism.
But, even if we probe this thesis and accept the use of the category revolution, for the
purpose of examining it, the above-cited ‘revolutions’ cannot, strictly speaking, be
described as anti-socialist. They can be called, to the contrary, national or anti-
bureaucratic, but in no way can they be claimed to have been undertaken in the name of
parliamentarism and the law of value. The fact that the failure of revolutions is deemed
the decisive factor in the collapse of socialism illustrates the incapacity of historicist
thought to account for this collapse. In fact, the weakness of historicist thought in this
regard derives from the misuse of the category of revolution. We must, then, think the
collapse of socialism outside the category of revolution and, going against historicist
thinking, we must reverse the issues and pose them otherwise.
First, the category of revolution in the collapse of socialism, as much in the USSR as in East
Europe, is invalidated by the absence of a mass movement or a popular uprising. In fact, the
only truly mass phenomenon that can be noted was the collapse of the Party-State.
What if the failure of the revolutions could be fitted into the geneal- ogy of the Party-State?
Obviously this is the objection that arises. But it is not how the problem is posed. One
cannot help but note that the disappearance of the category of class in the thought of
Party-States is pushed to such an extreme that any dynamic disappears and the Party- State
form itself finds itself exhausted. The counter-example of parliamentarism shows us that
this type of State lives on an accomplished revolution—that of 1789, or the American Civil
War—which gives it if not legitimacy, then at least a foundation.
Thus we have to consider the slide into a market economy as a return to classism and a
redeployment of historicization, explicitly destined to revive a ‘static society’. What is at
stake is effectively a dynamizing return to historicist classism and the repositioning in an
operational space of the categories of class, State and the economy.
Thus, historicism seems to be reinforced by the collapse of socialism and the end of the
Party-State, and able to demonstrate the political aggressiveness it harbours by
conceptually criminalizing any problematic of revolution after having made use of it when
it was a question of fighting against the Party-State.
We can only conclude that the prevailing explanations for the collapse of socialism have
commanded the establishment of a revivified and purged historicism. The conceptual
movement has been that of a re- dynamization of a suitable historicism, in other words, of a
purged historicism, for the resurgence of historicism was conditional on this restriction.
This is clearly the explanation for the use of the category of revolution—it is the only
evental category available to historicism. Marxist historicism is henceforth incapable.
Non-Marxist historicism finds itself temporarily reinforced by the collapse of socialism and
somewhat uneasy with the constitution of a space of explanation in which what crystallized
the substance of historicism in the past—to wit, revolution—has now been criminalized.
Manifesting such total adaptability, historicism in the conceptual sense can be divided
between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary histori- cisms. The latter sort of
historicism does not lead, however, to a notion of the immobilism of societies but, rather, to
their envelopment in a legalism based on human rights. For counter-revolutionary
historicism, the question of the driving force of history is no longer relevant; there are only
good or bad areas that can be evaluated in political and legal terms by the yardstick of
human rights and the market economy.
But we should conclude otherwise. The stopping point of historicism is the collapse of the
socialist States, which brings it to its close. Its apparent resurgence leads to nothing but a
slide into the counter-
revolutionary. History ends with a return to a philosophy of history that can be called that
of human rights.
STUDIES
STUDY 1
THE CATEGORY OF REVOLUTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The text that follows illustrates the theory of the historical mode of politics and its
sequentiality. It presents the revolutionary mode of politics wherein the category of
revolution is exhausted, a category that can only be used thereafter by analogy. In the
revolutionary mode, the revolution is not the vehicle in historicity of politics; it is the
category of politics. There is but one revolution for which the category of politics is the very
term—the French Revolution.
1. THE REVOLUTION IS NOT A TRANSITION
The French Revolution exhausts the category of revolution when the latter is understood
from the standpoint of politics. The term, to be sure, has been maintained to our day. It is
our task to consider whether it is legitimate. Let us start with two remarks.
— The core of historical thought has been by turns philosophical, classist and
sociological.1
— It should be kept in mind that the categories of class, class struggle and conflict are
common to all nineteenth—century historiographers, from Guizot to Marx, and that the
attributions of the category of revolution are usually relatively simplistic and designate the
end of the Old Regime, on the one hand, and the Napoleonic State, on the other.
1 Historians, by and large, have circumvented the questions raised by their own dis-
cipline, with the notable exception of Bloch and Finley. It is interesting to note that neither
of these men were historians of the modem or contemporary periods.
STUDIES 177
Historiography, Doctrine of Boundary Markers
and the Equivocal Nature of the Term ‘Evolution’
The historicist perspective calls ‘revolution’ the turbulent and violent transition between
one state of society (called State 1) and another, qualitatively difierent state (called State
2). The role attributed to the diflerent events of the revolution are weighed in relation to
the two essential terms that are the end of State 1 and the establishment of State 2.
According to this conception, an event cannot in itself have revolutionary significance
unless it enters in some way into the process of mutation from State 1 to State 2. Although
for many years before the French Revolution, there were riots, looting and attacks on grain
convoys, which were perhaps premonitory, no one considers them pre-revolutionary. But
analogous events after 1789 and the meeting of the Estates-General are regarded as
revolutionary. Therefore it is not the event—the formal characteristics of the event—that is
decisive. It is its presence or absence within the limits that mark the boundaries of the
phase, deemed a phase of mutation.
Let us add an element to the definition of historians mentioned above: ‘revolution’ is the
term applied to the disruption of the old order of society caused by popular insurrectional
mobilizations, through which fractions of people attempt to formulate and establish a new
space. The revolution is not, therefore, in the historian’s conception, an effect of the
structure of class, society and civilization.
What is being challenged here, in a first approach, is not a structural method but the
problematics that make of the category of ‘revolution’ a joining or bridging that authorizes
the transition from one situation to another, from State 1 to State 2. In this conception, the
weight of the two states is such that it is both these states, indeed it is one or the other of
these states that serves as references. What belongs to the space of these references is
called ‘revolutionary’ and the revolution becomes a passage (from State 1 to State 2). But,
in fact, revolution is not a passage.
Tocqueville argued in The Old Regime and the French Revolution that, as far as the
emergence of a modern, if not democratic, State was concerned, the revolution was over
by 1789. This can be called an extreme position, which subordinates the revolution to the
State and to the
178 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
boundaries of the sequence. Tocqueville denies revolution in its function, including as an
effect of structure.
For the school at the opposite end of the spectrum—represented by Albert Mathiezz—the
main thing is to analyse the development of the revolution, its content, the precise
circumstances and events, and to formulate and defend its spirit. To Mathiez, tackling the
process of revolution itself requires holding at bay the question of what come before and
after it (States 1 and 2), by keeping away from teleological paradigms. This is only possible
if the historian seeks greater proximity with the paradigms of the revolutionaries who
attempted to think the very existence of the revolution, beyond the simple reference to a
prior boundary. Mathiez turns to Robespierre for this. Paradoxically, this proximity gives
Mathiez’s work a dimension of de-ideologization of historiography at the same time as it
shows it to be an attempt to eliminate any approach to revolution based on philosophemic
terms. If the philosopheme is a circulating category that operates a bridging, it is close to
ideology— both draw on a problematic of revolution as disruption, to be sure, but this
disruption is with reference to what came before and after it. This is the case in every
historiography of the revolution where the event takes on meaning only with regard to
what preceded it and what it opens onto.
Could it be otherwise? Not as long as we keep to a cognitive, positivist outlook on the
event, whether the outlook is idealist or Marxist. In either case, the event will always be
retrospective, if not in its description, at least in its intellectual substance. From this point
of view, ‘structural’ and ‘retrospective’ are synonymous.
The conception of revolution as a passage, based on a structural problematic, to which

bridging, joining, stitching together and related notions are necessary, has another
consequence aside from the retrospective outlook, namely, the general extension of the
name ‘revolution’. Indeed, as a general historic category, the term ‘revolution’ is used as
much for 1789 as for Cuba or Iran, regardless of the nature of the singular events. The
same is true of the great revolutions—the October
2 See Albert Mathiez, La Révolutionfrangaise (Paris: Denoél, 1955); La Vie chére et le

Mouvemcnt social sous la Terreur (Paris: Payot, 1973).
STUDIES 179
Revolution and the Cultural Revolution—even though they are not revolutions in the
sense of the French Revolution. We see the very formal character of using the term
‘revolution’ in these three situations, each singular. The only way out of this generalization
is to qualify each of these situations with regard to the processes of the politics that it
develops and terminates.
So, if we refuse the structural problematic, we must, therefore, totally renounce the
universality of the category of revolution and assume that this category, while being
generated by the French Revolution, has been saturated and exhausted by it.
This hypothesis demonstrates its relevance in analysing the revolution as a political
category. Whenever revolution takes on a structural sense, which is the case in history, the
category becomes inoperative as far as the process of analysis of politics is concerned.
Positing that the category of revolution has been saturated and exhausted by the event of
the French Revolution—which means, of course, identifying the latter—proceeds from a
conception of politics that considers it sequential and singular. On the contrary, the
structural use of the notion of revolution ineluctably produces a typological approach,
which does not allow for an investigation of the singularity of politics; it will never be
recognized, in what has taken place, that a process of politics has been completed. I
uphold the thesis of sequentiality and, hence, that of the completion of a politics, against a
view of history as always bouncing back from itself, which is at work in the structural
approach.
It is appropriate to use the term ‘French Revolution’ for a series of utterly singular political
processes that developed, evolved and reached completion in terms such that the category
of revolution is found to have known effectuation once and for all its—effectuation not in
the sense of its idea but in the sense of its process.
Sequentiality of Politics and Completion of a Sequence
The relationship between the efl'ectuation of politics and its failure is not a necessary one. I
am not maintaining that there is effectuation in failure or that failure is the only possible
form of eEectuation. Efiecmafion is of the political order and it is effectuation of politics. It
happens that it
180 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
is a failure and that thereafter a thought of politics will focus on finding other modalities so
that the mode of effectuation is no longer failure.
When politics disappears after having been, when it disappears at the end of a sequence of
development, its disappearance is an endogenous phenomenon, internal to the very
processes of politics—it is in this sense that we can speak of completion. The end of politics
is not only a return of the State as the only ‘natural’ logic of a society. The revival of the
logic of state is the consequence of the completion of a political sequence and not its cause.
Failure is not the essence of eifectuation.
If we regard politics as a discontinuous sequential phenomenon, how do we account for the

end of a sequence? In other words, why and how does politics cease to be? The completion
or close of a sequence has two senses:
—As I have just said, the closing of the sequence is internal to the politics itself and we
must recognize here the primacy of internal causes. Politics is not destroyed from the
outside, submerged or obstructed. Its exhaustion cannot be blamed on the opposing camp
and politics is not a victim that requires looking for an offender.
—If the politics ceases, it is because the process underway has been completed and that
there can be no other form of completion than the cessation of the politics. The sequences
of the politics’ existence are not incomplete or deformed, or simply in fragments or in
traces; they are the process of the politics itself and its mode of being. Therefore, we can
think politics because we can study the processes of these sequences. To posit that, in these
sequences, political processes are authentically at work, we must first admit that these
processes come to completion. This is the only way of arriving at a thought of politics from
the standpoint of politics.
If we do not maintain that processes of politics exist or existed, at best we will maintain
that fragments of sequences exist but in such con— ditions that politics is not thinkable
from its own standpoint for the basic reason that it is not in a position to produce
sequences in the process of deployment and, hence, of completion. In that case, politics is
not completely of the order of the thinkable and we are justified in tackling it from the
standpoint of economics, philosophy or the State. To think
STUDIES 181
about the existence of political sequences from the standpoint of their completion
concentrates and focuses a methodological element of the proposed method.
In an evolutionist scheme, the sense of a sequence is broadly inferred fiom what came
before and what follows. On the other hand, if we introduce the problematic of the
discontinuity of politics, if we apply it to the French Revolution by qualifying it as a political
sequence—proposing to analyse it not in terms of joining category and hence in
evolutionist and structural terms but as a political sequence—then a brand new sense is
given to the end of this sequence of politics, to its exhaustion. Let us approach the
problematic of boundary markers from a different entry point—that of the difference
between the problematic of discontinuous sequences of politics and their internal
completion, on the one hand, and that of the structural, evolutionist and ‘step-by-step’
approach, bound up with the category of transition, on the other.
In evolutionist approaches, referred to in militant jargon as ‘step-by— step’ approaches

(étapistcs), some stages of politics were actually stages of revolution, constituting a step-
by-step history of revolutions and state regimes. The meaning of the revolution was
identified by what it broke with and what it opened onto. In the structural problematic,
revolution was also a transition between two great European periods. Now ‘transition’ is
the term used from the perspective of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the expression
‘phase of transition’, the phase before communism and after capitalism. This transitional
phase, ever since Marx’s letter in 1852 to Weydemeyer, was a centrepiece of Marxist and
Leninist thinking. Although it was already related to a problematic of steps and phases, a
problematic marked by evolutionism, it was also dialecticized with breaks, the whole
having the classless and stateless society of communism as its end point. According to
Lenin in The State and Revolution, this society would be without democracy (since
democracy is a form of State), without parties and, no doubt, without politics. Admittedly,
Mao, for his part, posited that politics subsists in communism in the form of a struggle
between the old and the new, but this is not at odds with our reflections. The phase of
transition—even when it is presented as a political phase—has communism as a principle
of efiecmadon and completion. So
182 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
much so that we must say that the notion of communism proposes a real problematic of
completion, albeit with an objective—the advent of the classless society. Nonetheless what
will be completed in communism will have been not so much a sequence of politics but,
rather, a sequence of the State. Here again, be it with regard to revolution or with regard to
the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition takes on meaning only in relations to its
ultimate and initial boundary marks, and can only have an internal characterization and an
internal completion in a problematic of the State. Whether we are dealing with Marxism or
historicism, a thought in terms of transition is inoperative for a thought of politics. Both
an evolutionist model and a State scheme lead to the same conclusion—a doctrine of
boundary marks, in which the sense of what has taken place is inferred from what comes
before and after, and a reduction of politics to the State, which precludes a specific thought
of politics. Yet, a question arises.
Conflictuality
What relationship is there between the problematic of politics discussed here and the core
of the Marxist view of politics based on class struggle and antagonism? Furthermore, what
becomes of the antagonism in the problematic of completion? And if the idea of conflict is
maintained in the thought of politics, then does the completion, which is the end of politics,
coincide with the end of the conflict? If this is the case, we would have to redefine a political
antagonism, one that is no longer expressive of social classes and relations of production,
which, unlike political processes, are permanent. Or we would have to establish that
conflictuality is also an invariant, proceeding more from history than from politics. And
we would also find ourselves having to establish that conflictuality does not present the
useful paradigm for examining the French Revolution as a sequence. In this case, the
conflictuality (that is to say the fact that the revolution struggles with the counter-
revolution) would not give us a singular key to explain the end of the sequence.
As a preliminary to examining the category of conflictuality, let me say this, that whether or
not political process and class structure or a social base are dissociated is not the problem
here. Likewise, the question
STUDIES 183
of knowing whether the political processes that do exist are connected— be it with
complex relations—to the social base and relations of production and whether the great
hypotheses set forward by Marx should be pursued is outside the scope of what concerns
us here. What is inaccurate is to maintain the permanence of political processes simply
because of the permanence of social processes or of the social base and its State
structurations.
Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat were the old categories of conflictuality.
In fact, they are categories of historical materialism and they do not belong to the thought
of politics as I define it. Not only was the dictatorship of the proletariat a Marxist category
of history, but it was also a utopian category.3 The utopia is a well-argued approximation,
but for the simple reason that it is an approximation it is unre- alizable and hence
unrealistic. The essence of the approximation is the attribution of processes of politics to
State conflictuality and to the antagonism in relation to the State; it is therefore an
approximation concerning the politics brought about through the relation to the State and
through the intermediary of conflictuality. Imposing norms on politics by the State through
the agency of conflictuality is precisely what approximation and utopia consist in. We can
posit then that approximation and utopia characterize all thoughts of politics that rely on
something other than politics itself; and that with approximation and utopia, we find
ourselves in circulating categories, circulating, for example, between history and politics or
between philosophy and politics or, yet again, between economics and politics.
But the whole problem is that, if we examine Marx in The Communist Manifesto, we find
circulating notions, the core of which is precisely formed by categories of class struggle and
antagonism, that is to say, by categories of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat
and communism. The problematic of conflictuality and of antagonism is the rational core
of a Marxism that is transitive to politics, history, economics and philosophy, and, at the
same time, these categories (antagonism and
3 I am not identifying this term here with the utopian socialism mentioned by Marx at the
end of The Communist Manifesto.
184 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
conflictuality) stand as conceptual paradigms of approximation and utopia. To be sure, the

problematic of thought in interiority—which puts an end to problematics requiring
circulating categories—initially proves to be devoid of a problematic of conflictuality. It is,
therefore, inadmissible to use it, in our own approach, to account for the completion of a
political sequence and, consequently, it is inadmissible to bring the notion of conflictuality
into play to explain the end of the political sequence as far as the French Revolution is
concerned, as would be the case if we were trying to explain it using exogenous causes.
Causal Search and Structural State

Finally, let us test the efficiency of causal-type approaches and approaches to politics and
the French Revolution in terms of looking for causes, and trying to identify their eventual
specificity.
From this perspective, Carl von Clausewitz wrote the most remarkable texts on the
French Revolution,‘ delving into its causes and, at the
same time, attempting to explain why Germany and Prussia did not go through a similar
upheaval.
Clausewitz’s analysis is striking by its surprising modernity but, at the same time, it is a
prisoner of it. The modernity resides in his use of the terms ‘class’ and ‘State’. The crux of
Clausewitz’s causal approach consists in taking the ‘revolution’ event as an occasion to
study structures, as much from the standpoint of their fracture as from that of their new
recomposed forms. For Clausewitz, only a thought on the State and on processes of the
State seems to fulfil this agenda, and so he establishes the categories of class, people,
politics and war for the purpose of fully focusing on the historical processes of the State as
his subject matter. Thus he tackles the relations between war and politics, and becomes, in
the process, the theoretician of modern war from the standpoint of State and not from the
standpoint of politics. I-Iis causal analysis of the French Revolution is true to this
problematic. Clausewitz asserts the great importance of what he calls the ‘causes’ of the
French Revolution, the
4 See Carl von Clausewitz, De la Révolution d la Restauration, écrits ct lettres (Marie-

Louise Steinhauser trans.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
STUDIES 185
two main ones being interdass tension and corruption within the admin- istration and
government. With regard to this, he builds what could be called a doctrine of the structural
State,‘ which he apprehends and elab- orates on through the economic system of classes, or
through the State system of classes, or through a combination of the two. Regardless of the
interest of this construction, it substantiates, insofar as the revolution is concerned, the
identity of the structural problematic and of the causal problematic. And, just like for the
latter, the internal movement is to refer to the anterior and posterior boundaries of the
revolutionary sequence, which are designated as fractures or disruptions in structure. We
thus remain in a perspective of passage.
2. MARX AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: THE ILLUSION OF THE LEADING JACOBINS
Marx’s major thesis on the French Revolution was that it was a bourgeois revolution and in
this sense, a political revolution, which founded the legal equality and formal politics
indispensible to the development of the bourgeoisie.
To Marx, the State is the subject and stake of the revolution. However, to the political
revolution of the bourgeoisie, he contrasts the social, proletarian revolution, which, he
admits after the Paris Commune, must destroy the enormous bureaucratic, military and
police machine of the State, but which must also develop the revolutionization of the social
relations of production. This revolutionization has to be undertaken in such a way that it
leads, in practice, not so much to a new continuation of the State as to its decline. The
revolutionization of social relations aimed at the decline of the State is the dictatorship of
the proletariat. The latter category is transversal both to the State—it is no longer a
State—and to the abolition of class relations and of the difler- entiations between classes
themselves. Even though Marx vehemently insists, especially in early his writings from
1844—45, that what he calls ‘social ills’ cannot be rectified from within the State, from the
political
5 Structures exist but they are all caught up in the State—class is not a structure and the
State is the whole of all things.
186 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
point of view, in the sense that Marx understands it (revolutionization of social relations
and dictatorship of the proletariat), ‘the state and the organization of society are not two
different things. The state is the organization of society."
It is from this angle that he first discusses the French Revolution and that, for the first time,
he presents the will of the leading Jacobins as a symptom of the opposition between State
and social organization or as a sign of their inability to attain and deal with the social
revolution. According to Marx, this opposition and this inability is what condemned the
Jacobins to live in ‘illusion’. About the decree of the jacobin Convention to eliminate
pauperism and what it actually achieved, he writes: ‘Sirnply that there was now one decree
more in the world and that one year later starving women besieged the Convention. The
Convention, however, represented the maximum of political energy, political power and
political understanding.’ And later: 'The more powerful a state and hence the more political
a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to
seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state, i.e. at the actual organization of
society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and ofiicial expression. Political
understanding is just political understanding because its thought does not transcend the
limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable is it of comprehending
social problems. The classical period of political understanding is the French Revolution. [. .
.] The principle of politics [for the jacobins] is the will.’7
6 Keep in mind his analysis of pauperism: ‘Thus England finds poverty to be based on the
law of nature according to which the population must always outgrow the available means
of subsistence. From another point of view, it explains pauperism as the consequence of the
bad will of the poor, just as the King of Prussia explains it in terms of the unchn'stian
feelings of the rich and the Convention explains it in terms of the counter—revolutionary
and suspect attitudes of the proprietors. Hence England punishes the poor, the King of
Prussia exhorts the rich and the Convention beheads the proprietors’ (Karl Marx, ‘Critical
Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”, Vorwarts! 63
[7 August 1844]; available at: wwwmarxists.org/ archive/ marx/works/ 1844/ 08/
07.htm; last accessed on 29 March 2013).
7 Ibid.
STUDIES 187
It is also on the thesis of human will and the contradiction that arises with the ‘resistance’
of things that Albert Mathiez ends the third volume of his French Revolution: ‘[T]he
intransigence of Robespierre, who broke with his colleagues in the government at the very
moment when they were offering him concessions, sufliced to cause the collapse of a
structure suspended in a legal void. It was a memorable example of the limitations of the
human will in its struggle against the resistance of material things.’8
Pipe Dreams
Marx broadens his analysis concerning the leading Jacobins and the reasons for their fall
in The Holy Family (1845), where he uses a fictive Roman culture and moral notions to
identify the former and explain the latter.’ Citing Saint-Just in his report on‘Danton’s arrest,
when he says, ‘The
8 Here is the entire passage: ‘Twenty centuries of monarchy and slavery are not wiped out
in a few months. The most stringent laws cannot change human nature and social order in
a single stroke. Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just, who desired to prolong the
dictatorship in order to lay the foundation of civil institutions and overturn the rule of
wealth, were well aware of this. They would have succeeded only if they alone had
exercised full dictatorship. But the intransigence of Robespierre, who broke with his
colleagues in the government at the very moment when they were offering him
concessions, sufliced to cause the collapse of a structure suspended in a legal void. It was a
memorable example of the limitations of the human will in its struggle against the
resistance of material things’ (Mathiez, La Révolutionfi'ancaise, VOL. 3, p. 248).
9 This is what he writes: '[A]ccording to Robespierre and Saint-just, liberty, justice and
virtue could, on the contrary, be only manifestations of the life of the “people” and
properties of the “popular essence”.’ Marx specifies that, ‘Robespierre and Saint- Just spoke
explicitly only of "liberty, justice and virtue” of ancient times, belonging to “the popular
essence”. Spartans, Athenians and Romans in the time of their great- ness were “free, just
and virtuous peoples”.’ Marx proceeds to quote Robespierre in his speech on the principles
of public morals given at the Convention on 5 February 1794: ‘Which is the fundamental
principle of democratic or popular government? It is virtue. I mean public virtue which
worked such prodigies in Greece and Rome and which must work still greater ones in
republican France; virtue which is nothing but love of one’s country and its laws’ (Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family; or, Critique of Critical Criticism [R. Dixon
trans] [Moscowz Foreign Language Publishing House, 1956], pp. 163—4; available at:
http:/ / archive.org/ stream/holy- familyOOmarx/ holyfamilyOOmarx_djvu.txt; last
accessed on 29 March 2013).
188 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
world has been empty since the Romans, and only their memory fills it and still prophesies
liberty,’ Marx comments: ‘Saint Just describes the “liberty, justice and virtue” that he
demands in a single word when he says: “Revolutionaries must be Romans.”"°
This is how Marx explains Thermidor:
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic
and democratic republic based on real slavery with the modern spiritualist democratic
representative state which is based on emancipated slavery, on bourgeois society. What a
terrible mistake it is to have to recognize and sanction in the Rights of Man modern
bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest fieely
following its aims, of anarchy, of the self-alienated natural and spiritual individuality, and
yet subsequently to annul the manifestations of the life of that society in separate
individuals and at the same time to wish to model the political head of that society after the
fashion of the ancients.11
Having set up the notion of illusion or mistake, ‘This is not the place to vindicate the
mistake of the Terrorists historically.’lz This is Marx’s last word; to him, the Jacobins are
deluded terrorists.
The mistake is historically justified. The French Revolution was never anything but the
product of radical petty bourgeois, leading a bourgeois revolution, and so jacobin discourse
was necessarily informed by borrowings and duplicity, be it involuntarily, because they
could not be true and real. Variations on Marx’s judgement have been frequent.
One of these, with attenuating circumstances, consists in attributing the Jacobins

relationship to Antiquity—more to Roman than to Greek Antiquity—to the legal and
rhetorical training that many of the Convention leaders had received rather than to
historical erudition.
10 See ibid.
l 1 Ibid., p. 165 . (The translation of Marx’s Holy Family from the German into French,
renders ‘What a terrible mistake’ as ‘What a terrible illusion’ which Sylvain Lazarus puts
into italics, specifying in the note that the emphasis is his. [Trans.])
12 See ibid.
STUDIES 189
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in his preface to the French edition of Finley’s Politics in the Ancient
World,13 examines at length the relations of the French Revolution to Antiquity, which he
qualifies as ‘imaginary’, regarding them as a subject matter for study, since the imaginary of
a society is worthy of study in its own right.“ Vidal-Naquet specifies the kind of imaginary
that is at work: ‘This form of thinking has a name: millenarianism.’ But he adds: ‘Nothing
could be further from the truth than to bring their revolutionary thinking down to a
mfllenarianist temptation."’
Georges Lefebvre regards the ‘antiquity mania’ of the revolutionaries as a mere decor, of
no real importance in his eyes.
80 while Marx considers it the mistake or illusion of terrorists, Lefebvre regards it as a

mere decor, and Vidal-Naquet proposes in a more nuanced way to distinguish between the
historical thinking of the revolutionaries (this ‘yawning gap’ that enables them to build on
Antiquity) and their revolutionary political thinking, which is not to be conflated with
mfllenarianism.
According to Vidal-Naquet, historical knowledge was extensively renewed in the

nineteenth-century society that Marx examines, with its social role expressing ‘the
awareness that society had of being historical itself’.“ I do not share this analysis, even
though it softens Marx’s and
13 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Le mirage grec et la Revolution frangaise’, preface to Moses Finley,
Démocratie antique ct Démocratie moderne (Paris: Payot, 1990). Vidal-Naquet relates that
the sans-culottes of Saint—Maxirnin in the Var petitioned to have their village renamed
Marathon: 'This sacred name,’ they wrote to the Convention, ‘reminds us of the Athenian
plain that became the burial site for a hundred thousand satellites, but even more gently it
reminds us of the friend of the people [i.e. Jean- Paul Marat].’
14 ‘What these texts evidence is the existence in the historical thinking of revolutionaries
of a huge void that enables them to leap over the centuries of the Roman Empire, the
Middle Ages, and absolutism and feel that they are directly connected to the republican
Antiquity of the Greeks and Romans’ (see ibid.).
15 See ibid.
16 Here is the whole passage: ‘Its social role [that of the historical sense] was as radically
modified as its epistemological field. It no longer expressed the effort to eliminate time, by
a direct look at an ancient model but, rather, the awareness that society had of being
historical itself.’
190 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
offers a distinction between historical thought, on the one hand, and revolutionary thought,
on the other.
There is no historical thinking among the Jacobin revolutionaries because there was no
historical problematic at the time. There was purely and simply a thought of politics. When
the French Revolution speaks of Antiquity it is never in a historical discourse. On the
contrary, it was the French Revolution that paved the way to the question of history, to
the history that Marx and Engels maintained in The Communist Manifesto was only that of
the class struggle. So for them, history is that by which society escapes the State and
polititcs, through the intermediary of the proletarians, the vehicles of communism and the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
The idea of ‘deluded terrorists’ and the analysis in historical terms go hand in hand. To
challenge them, I propose a few theses and a reminder of Foucault’s theses on history and
representations.
When Foucault speaks of the existence of an age of history he is referring to ‘what

happened at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century: to that
too sketchily outlined mutation of Order into History’. As for representation, he writes:
‘[T]he fundamental mode of being of the positivities does not change; men’s riches, the
species of nature, and the words with which languages are peopled still remain what they
were in the Classical age: double representations— representations whose role is to
designate representations, to analyse them, to compose and decompose them in order to
bring into being within them, together with the system of their identities and differences,
the general principle of an order. It is only in the second phase that words, classes, and
wealth will acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with that of representation.’17
17 The whole passage runs as follows:
And it took a fundamental event—certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in
Western culture—to bring about the dissolution of the positivity of Classical knowledge,
and to constitute another positivity from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely
emerged.
This event, probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our
comprehension. Its scope, the depth of the strata it has
STUDIES 191
This being said, the theses we are proposing are the following:
— The Roman discourses pronounced by the Jacobins are a representation of a

representation, that is to say, a discourse that manifests a form of consciousness and a form
of political consciousness.
— The analysis of class is in contradiction with the analysis in terms of representation and,
being that the analysis of class does not appear according to Foucault until after 1795, the
French Revolution and Therrnidor, which predate it, are necessarily excluded from it.
— Representations of representations are forms of consciousness—a specifically political

subjectivity when the frameworks of thought are not that of history or materialism.
affected, all the positivities it has succeeded in disintegrating and recom- posing, the
sovereign power that has enabled it, in only a few years, to tra- verse the entire space of
our culture, all this could be appraised and measured only after a quasi-infinite
investigation concerned with nothing more nor less than the very being of our modernity.
The constitution of so many positive sciences, the appearance of literature, the folding back
of philosophy upon its own development, the emergence of history as both knowledge and
the mode of being of empiricity, are only so many signs of a deeper rupture. Signs scattered
through the space of knowledge, since they allow themselves to be perceived in the
formation, here of philology, there of economics, there again of biology. They are chrono-
logically scattered too: true, the phenomenon as a whole can be situated between easily
assignable dates (the outer limits are the years 1775 and 1825); but in each of the domains
studied we can perceive two successive phases, which are the limits of representation
articulated one upon the other more or less around the years 1795—1800. In the first of
these phases, the fundamental mode of being of the positivities does not change; men’s
riches, the species of nature, and the words with which languages are peopled, still remain
what they were in the Classical age: double representations—representations whose role
is to designate representations, to analyse them, to compose and decompose them in order
to bring into being within them, together with the system of their identities and dif-
ferences, the general principle of an order. It is only in the second phase that words,
classes, and wealth will acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with that of
representation (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences [London: Routledge, 1966], pp. 239—40).
192 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
— The categories of freedom, virtue and justice are not a historical ves- tiary, be it with
reference to Antiquity or to morality. They are the terms of political thought.
It is the political thought of the French Revolution sequence and we cannot in any way
endorse Marx’s assertion in this regard. Far from being mistakes or pipe dreams, and old
pipe dreams at that, the terms that Saint-Just chose, which will be the subject of
demonstration later, were new categories of his thought of politics. The Jacobins were not
deluded.
Let us dwell for a moment on Moses Finley He maintained that the invention of politics
took place in certain city-states in Ancient Greece, as in Republican Rome, and that politics
existed only during a certain sequence of time.“ For this reason, I think it significant that it
was very precisely to these periods that the Convention leaders referred. Will I say that,
when they themselves were faced with politics, they turned to periods when it existed?
Politics are always seeking other traces of politics.
3. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS A SEQUENCE: A QUESTION OF DATES
Now it is a matter of determining the sequence. Doing so does not mean referring to the
doctrine of boundary markers. The dating concerns the categories of beginning and
completion, which are, as we have tried to demonstrate, internal to the process of the
sequence and are manifested by the appearance and disappearance of a specific thought of
politics. The historical mode of politics is then clearly the relation of a politics to its
thought. The demonstration depends therefore on evidencing a specifically political and
really specific thought. But once we have acknowledged that the beginning and completion
of the sequence are endogenous, the sequence requires dates, and the dates are those of the
historical mode of politics, the singularity of which is at issue.
18 From the mid-seventh century BCE to the conquest of Alexander for the Greek world,
and from the mid-fifth century BCE to the end of the Republic for the Roman world. See
Finley, Politics in the Ancient World.
STUDIES 193
The question of dating is a major problem for historians, one that divides them. This
disagreement has meaning in itself, because each historian will decide on dates based on
his/ her political appreciation, and the distinctive characterizations of the revolution as a
political phenomenon that result. The dating of the French Revolution is a remarkable
illustration of the political character (that is to say, of the intellectuality of the politics
proposed in the historical analysis) of the features and markers of the historical analysis.
To my mind, and for the reasons stated above, the French Revolution sequence took place
between the summer of 1792 and July 1794.
Now let us turn back to historians. I will cite four: Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez, George
Lefebvre and Albert Soboul and will examine their responses to two questions. When did
the French Revolution end? And was there a single French Revolution or several
revolutions within the French Revolution, and, in the latter case, what are its sequences?
Aulard, Who published his Histoire politique de la Révolutionfiangaise (Political History of

the French Revolution) in 1901 , oddly dates the end of the French Revolution to 1804
When he says, ‘the government of the Republic was entrusted to an emperor.’ Aulard posits
a Republicanist and secular problematic of the French Revolution and takes a pro- Danton
stance.
Mathiez, in La Révolution frangaise, published in 1921, sets the end of the sequence to 9
Thermidor Year II, inJuly 1794, with the elimination of the revolutionaries and the end of
what he calls an attempt at an ‘egalitarian revolution’.
Lefebvre and Soboul, whose books on the history of the French Revolution date to 1930
and 1962 respectively, have the revolution running until 18 Brumaire Year VIII (November
1799) with Bonaparte’s coup d’état.
Aulard’s republicanism, the failure of the attempt to establish an egalitarian republic for
Mathiez, and the end put to the revolution by Bonaparte’s coup d’état for Lefebvre and
Soboul—the dates of the close
of the French Revolution differ, as do the principles that govern defining the end date.
194 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Mathiez—the great Mathiez, at least as a historian of the French Revolution—is pro-

Robespierre and will study the French RevolutiOn in the footsteps of ‘The Incorruptible’."
In setting the date of the end of the Revolution at 9 Thermidor, he is guided by two
principles: the existence (or absence) of revolutionaries and the egalitarian republic. On
Thermidor, Mathiez writes: ‘Robespierre and his party perished largely for having wished
to use Terror for the purposes of a new upheaval in property, and so the egalitarian
republic without rich or poor that they dreamt of establishing through the Ventose decrees
died with them."°
Lefebvre and Soboul, who do not think much of Mathiez, extend the French Revolution to
1799, the date of the coup d’état while, at the same time, maintaining that the end of the
sequence of the revolution actually came after the crushing of the revolt of Prairial Year III
(May 1795). Indeed, the revolutionaries that matter to these two historians are not the
revolutionaries of the Jacobin Convention but those in the popular movement: the sans-
culottes, the sections and the Parisian movement that was exterminated during the revolt
of Prain'al.
‘This is the date [May 1795] that should be taken as the end of the French Revolution. Its
mainspring was now broken. Henceforth the White Terror was unleashed,’ writes
Lefebvre.21 After what Soboul calls those ‘decisive days, the French Revolution was
over’.22
Why, if these two historians claim that the French Revolution was over in 1795, do they
pursue their discussion of it until 1799? What is
19 He explained his stance to the general assembly of the Societé des études robes-
pierristes in 1911: ‘If we have chosen Robespierre and his group as the general subject of
our studies, it is because Robespierre was at the centre of the French Revolution and there
is no better observation point for drawing out of this great movement of ideas and this
formidable clash of passions and interests a complete and sincere knowledge’ (cited in
Henri Calvet, preface to Albert Mathiez, La Révolutionfrangaise, 2ND EDN [Paris: Armand
Colin, 1959]).
20 Mathiez, La Révolutionfi'angaise, VOL. 3, p. 247.
21 Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799, VOL. 2 (John Hall Stewart
and james Friguglieti trans) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 145.
22 Albert Soboul, La Révolutionfiangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 414.

STUDIES 195
the French Revolution if it is not simply the revolution? For them, it is a historical sequence
that can be observed in three crystallizations and three processes:
— the Jacobins; — the popular movement;
— the Republic.
For Lefebvre and Soboul, the boundary marker for the history of the French Revolution will
be the completion of the latter process, that of the Republic, in 1799. Thermidor, as
important as they deem it to be, is never for them anything more than the disappearance of
the revolutionary fraction of the Jacobins; and it is the disappearance of the two other
processes—the popular movement and the Republic—some time after Thermidor that
determine their periodization. Therefore, it is not so much the politics existing in the
revolution that guides their choice as, on one side, the popular movement and, on the other,
and more decisively, the form of State.
The choices of chronology clearly have an impact on the distribution or non-distribution
of the French Revolution into different revolutions.
Lefebvre distinguishes three revolutions: the aristocratic revolution (in 1787 and 1788);
the revolution of the bourgeoisie; and the popular revolution. Here, the revolution is
distributed in the analysis of class.
Soboul picks up the theme of the revolt of the aristocracy (in 1787 and 1788), and, making
use of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of power bloc, he distinguishes a period of 'bourgeois
revolution and popular movement from 1789 to 1792’ followed by what he calls a
‘revolutionary government and popular movement from 1792 to 1795’.
The year 1792 is therefore essential—With the union of the Jacobins and the sans-culottes,
the downfall of the king, the proclamation of the Republic, the beginning of the Jacobin
Convention and the Battle of Valmy. The decisive character of this year is stressed by all the
historians, though they diverge on how they name the period.
On the other hand—and this is What interests us—according to Mathiez, the category of
revolution cannot be attributed to anything
196 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
other than the French Revolution itself. To the rest, he applies the term revolt, as in the
revolt of the nobility of 1787—88 or the Parisian revolt Of 1789.
For my part, I will retain two periods: 1789—92 and 1792-94. The summer of 1792 andjuly
1794 are, to my mind, the dates of the political sequence of the revolution, the dates of its
mode in interiority. In the political sense of the term, the revolution begins in 1792. What
happens before, in particular the events of 1789 (the taking of the Bastille, the Declaration
of the Rights of Man) do not acquire the reputation of belonging to the revolution until the
year 1792, the execution of the king in 1793, and the establishment of the revolutionary
government of 1793—94.
If it had not been for 1792—94, we would be speaking of 1789 only as a great legal
transformation—a constitutional revolution—which does not mean that we cannot call it a
mode of politics, but it does mean that it is not a mode in interiority. The summer of 1792
andjuly 1794 are the dates of a historical mode of politics in interiority. What is this mode?
4. SAINT-JUST: THEORETICIAN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MODE OF POLITICS
A singular mode of politics in interiority existed in France from the summer of 1792 to the
summer of 1794, that is, from the downfall of the king to Thermidor. And Saint-Just is its
great theoretician.
I propose to call this historical mode of politics in interiority the revolutionary mode of
politics; ‘revolutionary’ because the revolution is the central and general category of
political thought. Revolution is not a historical qualification of the situation and it is not
meant to be understood as an objectivizing and historicizing enterprise. Revolution is the
category of consciousness of the situation, and it is at once the category and the subject
matter of politics.
Historical mode of politics—relation of a politics to its thought. What can we say about
Saint-Just in this regard? The thought of Saint- Just consists of political observations
evidencing categories and these are no more legal than the terms ‘virtue’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil’
are moral.
STUDIES 197
These categories must, therefore, be taken as political categories of Saint- Just’s thought.
But first let us address the objection that, while ascribing a thought to Saint-Just, would
make of it a thought of the State.
Saint-Just and the State
Saint-Just constantly offered analyses and proposed measures that, although they concern
the State and the government, were developed outside and in opposition to a State and
governmental logic. When politics exists, it is confronted with the State and with
questions, contradictions and mediations that the State and the government face and
deploy. Saint-just relentlessly denounced administrative inertia, bureaucratic corruption
and overt sabotage on the part of certain ministries and certain administrative bodies. The
situation was all the more pressing at a time when a new State was being built, complete
with new civil servants and a new social sector for whom the revolution was as much an
opportunity as a choice.
Concerning the State, let us look at the main areas addressed by Saint-Just:
— The form of the Constitution and of laws. Co-author of the Constitution of 1793,
theoretician of revolutionary government until the peace, Saint-Just proposed detailed
distinctions between the government and the executive, laws and the Convention. The
Convention, he said, must not be of the order of the government or the executive; it must
‘soar above and be obeyed in the application of laws’.
— The economy, in this case inflation, prices, assignats, the Maximum Price Act and
poverty. A reading of the texts written by Saint-Just in early 1794 shows his constant
concern with inflation, grain and prices. The general line of thought involves taxing
products and earnings and then, with the Ventése Decrees, distributing the property of sus-
pected enemies of the revolution to the needy.
Saint-Just explicitly proposes an analysis of property. In Fragments d’institutions

républicaines (1793—94), he examines ‘the consequences of a principle of legislation that
would set a maximum and a minimum for property’, adding: ‘I believe that the depravity of
all Republics stems from the weakness of principles on property.’
198 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
— The army and war. Saint-Just was a theoretician of revolutionary war and a political
theoretician of war; his role in the armies of the Rhine and of the North is well known. He
was the one who formulated the general principles that Carnot, the Army of Year I and the
Army of Year II, and then Napoleon would put into practice and develop. Is there reason to
identify this thought of war with State thought?
There is nothing here to herald Clausewitz. Clausewitz was a theoretician of war from the
standpoint of States who considered war and States——in particular his State, Prussia—on
the basis of the Napoleonic wars. For him, the monarchic State can develop a national
military capacity equal to the French Revolution and the empire. This was not the case for
Saint-just.
In his report to the Convention ‘On the Necessity of Declaring the Government
Revolutionary until Peace’, Saint-Just proclaimed:
We are still lacking military laws and institutions consistent with the system of the
Republic that is being established.
In a time of innovation, anything that is not new is pernicious. The military art of monarchy
no longer suits us, for they are difirerent men with difierent enemies. [. . .] Our nation
already has a national character of its own. Its military system must be different from its
enemies’.23
23 The emphasis is mine. Here is the entire passage:
We are still lacking military laws and institutions that correspond to the system of the
Republic that is being established. In a time of innovation, anything that is not new is
pernicious. The military art of monarchy no longer suits us, for they are different men and
have different enemies. The power of people, their conquests and the splendour of their
politics and warfare have always depended on a single principle, a single powerful
institution. The Greeks owed their military glory to the phalanx and the Romans to the
legion, which vanquished the phalanx.
The phalanx and the legion are not merely names of bodies of a certain number of men;
they designate a certain combat order and military constitution.
Our nation has already a national character of its own. Its military system must be different
from its enemies’. Now if the French nation is
STUDIES 199
After the Battle of Fleurus when he charged relentlessly at the head of the troupes until the
Austrians and the Dutch surrendered and retreated beyond Belgium, Saint-Just returned
precipitously to Paris and wrote in his last report to the Convention (which he was unable
to read):
We had to come out victorious and we did. The battle of Fleurus contributed to opening up
Belgium. I want justice to be rendered to all and victories to be honoured, but not to the
point of honouring the government more than the armies for only those who are in battles
win and only those who are powerful profit from this. We must praise victories and forget
ourselves.24
Categories of SaintJust’s Thought of Politics
Revolution From a reading of Institutions republicaines, we can assert the following:
— Evolution is a category of the subjective: it pertains to principles and the Terror did not
ensure their victory
— Political prescriptions exist: happiness and public freedom
— A problematic of the event (which is not historical) can be formulated, whose
intelligibility pertains to categories of good and evil
—— And finally, a doctrine of the ‘precariousness of revolution’ emerges. This

precariousness of the revolution as a political sequence is
tremendous in its ardour and skill, and if its enemies are languid, cold and tardy, then our
military system must be impetuous.
If the French nation is pressed into this war by strong, generous passions—love of
freedom, hatred for tyranny and oppression—and if, on the contrary, its enemies are
mercenary slaves and passionless automatons, then the military system of the French
armies must be a shock force (Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Rapportfait au nom du Comité
dc Salut Public sur la nécessité dc declarer le gouvernement révolutionnaire jusqu’d la paix,
présenté d la Convention nationals, le 19 du Ier mois dc l’an II (10 October 1793) in
Oeuvres complétcs [Michele Duval ed.] [Parisz Gerard Lebovici, 1984], p. 527).
24 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Discours du 9 Thermidor an 11 in Oeuvres complétes
(Michele Duval ed.) (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1984),p. 911.
200 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
intrinsic to the sequence and allows us to assess it and master it (in the following text, the
characterization of the French Revolution as ‘moveable’). I propose to read the following
comments by Saint-Just with the aforementioned points in mind:
The revolution is thusfrozen; all the principles have been undermined. Nothing is left but
insurgents driven by intrigue. The use of terror has made crime dull, just as strong liquors
dull the palate. The time has probably not yet come to do good. The particular good that is
done is but a palliative. We will have to wait for the general evil to be big enough for
public opinion to feel that specific measures need to be taken to do good. What produces
the general good is always dreadfitl or seems bizarre when it is begun too soon [original
emphasis]. The revolution must stop with the perfection of happiness and publicfreedom
by laws. Its aspirations have no other aim and they must overthrow everything that stands
in the way; every period and every victory over monarchism must lead to and sanction a
Republican institution. We speak of the height of the revolution. Who will set this height? It
is moveable. There have been free peoples who have fallen from higher heights.”
Institutions
This is a central category in Saint-Just’s thinking. The institution is not of the order of the
State, the government or society. It is an invention that must sustain the revolutionary
spirit if it is to last. ‘The revolution passes,’ he writes. ‘What we need are institutions.’ What
is the institution if it is not of the order of society or of the State? That it is not is makes for
its extreme interest.
Through the institution, and, more specifically, the civil institution, they hypothesis of a
revolutionary society is posited. Saint-Just’s propositions concerning the category of
institution have little or nothing to do with the legal and With the legal type of reasoning
that characterizes the State problematic; they demonstrate instead a strongly subjective
25 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Fragments d’institutions républicaines, in Oeuvres com-
plétes (Michele Duval ed.) (Paris: Gerard Lebovici, 1984), p. 979. Emphases are mine,
unless otherwise noted.
STUDIES 201
and formally moral or ethical character. Morality in opposition to law? As it so happens,

this is the opposition of politics, revolution and the State, in particular, when the latter is
corrupted by an alliance between its new personnel and the scheming wealthy bourgeoisie.
It is also by the category of institution that the pursuit of politics is thought as a possibility,
while the invention of institutions, their invented character and, consequently, their non-
State and non-societal yet political character guarantee freedom.
Saint-just declares in the report intended for the Convention on 15 April 1794 on behalf of
the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security:
Form civil institutions, the likes of which have never been conceived before. There can be
no lasting freedom without them. They support the love of the homeland and the revolu-
tionary spirit when the revolution is over. Through this you will announce the perfection of
your democracy and the grandeur of your sights and you will hasten the downfall of your
enemies by showing them to be deformed in comparison.“
Likewise, in Institutions republicaincs, Saint-Just writes: ‘Institutions are the guarantee of

public liberty. They moralize the government and the civil state; they repress jealousies
that produce factions; they establish the delicate distinction between truth and hypocrisy,
between innocence and crime; they ground the rule of justice.’
Public Consciousness
Public consciousness is decisive in the problematic of Saint-Just. It underpins the notions
of good and evil, of people and freedom. Consciousness is an attribute of the people that
knows, or has the ability of knowing, the general good. It designates their political capacity.
At the Jacobin Convention, on 15 April 1794, Saint-Just declared:
26 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Rapport au nom du Comité dc Salut Public et du Comité dc

Sfireté Généralc sur la police généralc, sur la justice, le commerce, la législation et 1:: crimes
desfactions présenté d la Convention nationals le 26 Germinal an II, in Oeuvres com- plétes
(Michele Duval ed.) (Paris: Gerard Lebovici, 1984), pp. 818—19.
202 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Everything was done to corrupt the public spirit and to oppose the Convention. Spirit is not
the word. It is consciousness. We have to strive to fbrm public consciousness [. . .]. The
public spirit was a given impetus. So embrace public consciousnessfbr all hearts are equal
with regard to feelings of good and evil and this consciousness consists in the people’s
penchant for the general good.
Honour the spirit but rely on the heart. Freedom is not mere political chicanery. It is
inflexibility towards evil; it is justice and friendship.”
The categories of good and evil are not religious or transcendental in the least. Social
practice and its principles of consciousness serve as their references. These are categories
of practical consciousness that can be specified as political consciousness.
‘Most human ideas,’ says Saint-Just, ‘rely on the system of their corruption; all good is in
the circle of this corruption and all evil is beyond this circle.’
The People
The people are sovereign. The underlying conviction of all the revolutionaries of 1792—
94 is the same: there are the people and this is the political subject. What tasks are theirs
and what imperatives? On this point the Jacobins and the sans-culotte movement, the
Committee of Public Safety and the Jacobin Convention, the communes, the sections and
their societies will disagree. The sans-culottes undeniably have a programmatic view of
the people and of what they want and what they are owed. For Saint-Just, the eifectiveness
of the people as subject is freedom in the Republic.
‘In monarchies, all powerful men are free and the people are slaves;
in the Republic the people are free.’
And it is not true that this freedom is purely formal and legal. A people has but one
dangerous enemy and that is its government. ‘Yours,’ Saint-Just proclaimed to the
Convention, ‘constantly wages war on you with impunity’.
27 Ibid., p. 811. Emphasis mine.
STUDIES 203
Revolutionary Man
Revolution is what revolutionaries are about. The revolutionary can be identified by his
consciousness and his practice.
His consciousness: ‘A revolutionary man is inflexible but sensible. He is frugal and simple
but without afiecfing the luxury of false modesty. He is the irreconcilable enemy of every
lie, indulgence and affectation. Since his goal is to see the Revolution triumph, he never
finds fault with it, and he condemns his enemies without implicating the Revolution with
them; he does not criticize it, he illuminates it [. . .]. He is unyielding to the bad but he is
sensitive.’
‘ His practice: ‘He is so jealous for the glory of his country and for freedom that he never
acts without consideration. He is eager for combat; he pursues the guilty and defends the
innocent in the courts. He speaks the truth to instruct not to criticize. He knows that if the
Revolution is to triumph he must be as good now as he was bad in the past. His probity is
not a delicacy of the mind but a quality of the heart and something a given.’
Revolution, institution, consciousness, people, revolutionary man, good, evil, corruption

and precariousness are the structuring categories of Saint-Just’s political thought, by which
I identify the revolutionary mode of politics. What is its singularity?
This revolutionary mode of politics establishes the category of freedom in politics. The
category existed in philosophy, in law and in economics. Saint-just established it as a
political category. For the wind of freedom to exist, spirit and consciousness are required.
To pursue and invent freedom in face of the unbearable violation of goodness that arises
from force of circumstance, politics is necessary. There must be freedom in politics so that
people can, like revolutions, ‘advance from weakness to courage and from crime to virtue’.
To conclude, I will say that we know of at least two states of relations between revolution
and politics: the Bolshevik mode and the revolutionary mode.
In the Bolshevik mode, politics is formulated for itself, and it has revolution as a vehicle in
historicity. But the revolution is not really a
204 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
political category. It may very well be subject to the condition of politics, but it is a category
of history.
In the revolutionary mode, the revolution is not the vehicle in the historicity of politics. It is
the category of politics. This it is totally, without any encroachment. The sense of the term
is not the one that Marx gives to the word ‘revolution’, as a category of history, in fact, as
the category of history, and, at the same time, a category of consciousness at once
expressive of the situation and prescriptive towards it. Such a situation of the situation
will never take place again.
It is in this sense that in the problematic of modes, in the thought of politics, there is but
one revolution for which revolution is the category of politics. There is but one revolution
and that is the French Revolution.
STUDY 2
STUDY OF WORKERS IN CANTON CONFRONTING THE FACTORY AS A PLACE OF MONEY;

THE CONJUNCTURAL AND INTERNAL CONFIGURATION OF THE FACTORY AS A PLACE OF
THE STATE
Often, in the course of this book, I have referred to this study in discussing the factory as a
site of the State, the economy and its absence in socialism, and what is abusively called the
passage from socialism to capitalism. The following study serves to illustrate these points.
The study in Canton was structured around the following question: What do Chinese
workers say of Chinese workers? It focused, therefore, on what workers have to say about
whether or not the factory and the worker exist as categories in their eyes. Other questions
were raised, such as: What common points, in your opinion, do workers in the factory
have? What does it mean to be a worker in China today?
The study took place in the Guangzhou Heavy Machinery Plant (GI-IMP) and at Peugeot-
Canton (Guangzhoui Peugeot Automobile Corporation—GPAC), in March—April 1989. The
study could be conducted only because it was during the so-called period of openness—in
the wake of Deng Xiaoping reforms—that went hand in hand with a val- orization of
money, the market and new relations with foreign countries. The chronological
conjuncture of the study is situated between the death of Hu Yaobang and the Tiananmen
Square events. The comments of the Cantonese workers were made several weeks before
the student protests were crushed and 6,000 miles from Beijing. It was a conjuncture
marked by a number of decisions on the part of the government and by trends and decisive
choices that were underway. It could be said that it was a conjuncture of the State. History,
therefore, was present in the form of a conjuncture of the State, marked by reforms that I
call ‘de-socialization’.
206 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
The study of Canton reveals a particular configuration of the factory as a site of the State—
the factory as a site of money. Money is here a statement in consciousness and a
representation. It is also a precarious category for a conjuncture of reforms that was itself
highly precarious.
The money that everyone spoke about in Canton in 1989 was not, by any means, a general
equivalent. A very significant amount of social needs was not monetarized. Money appears
to be the main reference for what is new and in motion, and, in that capacity, for what is
regarded as having a future. ‘Class struggle has given way to money,’ says one worker. The
presence of money should not be understood simply as an expression of the passage from
revolution to commodities; it has much more to do with an attempt at the dynamization
internal to socialism.
The Two Periods
What was said in 1989 is still being said, in comparison and opposition to the period of the
Cultural Revolution. Comments by workers all indicated an opposition between the before
and after or what can be called the ‘two periods’, the (present-day) period of reforms and
the so-called period of ‘the iron rice bowl’. ‘The iron rice bowl’ refers to the protected
status of the worker as State employee and the guaranteed job security enjoyed by workers
in State-run enterprises, who could not be dismissed. These were ‘permanent worker’, with
positions for life, for themselves and for their families. When a worker retired, someone
fiom their immediate family was hired in their place. In 1989, the system of piecework
wages was used to get around the question of dismissals, or at least limit them. When there
is no work, workers earn little or nothing; they are not, however, dismissed and continue to
benefit from the non-monetary advantages provided by the work unit (dan wéi) to which
they belong.
In Canton, if the earlier period before the reforms was characterized, in the words of a
worker, as a time when ‘production depended on workers’, the situation was not one of
capitalism at the time of the study. Indeed, although production relations were being
transformed by new work and wage relations, the ownership of the means of production
remained what it was. The reform did not introduce a transformation in the ownership of
the means of production although it did introduce money as a referent—and this was a
radical change. Thus answers to
STUDIES 207
questions about the identification of the word ‘worker’ swung between references to salary
(it’s ‘making a living’), references to the domination of money in the factory (what Will
become then of the protected status of State workers?), or references to the diminished
social consideration to which workers are subjected in a money-informed context. But the
general paradigm remains work and production. Production is presented as the general
evaluator. Thus we are still dealing with a socialist model. The categories are those of work
and production, which the politics of reform formulates as ‘the more you work, the more
you earn’ (the principle of piecework wages) and ‘developing and modernizing
production are national objectives’.
Thus, without dismissing workers and without putting an end to the socialist factory, a
repositioning of the factory as the site of the State is accomplished from within the factory
itself, by way of piecework wages, a division of the factory into branches, and the election
of a direc- tor who seeks profits in a context of incentives to do so. Yet a capitalist economy
is not introduced and money here does not rhyme with commodities and industrial
capital. It does not identify capitalism. It appears much more as a principle of fluidity and
flexibility for production in reaction to the rigidity of planification, centralization and
stratification. At the same time, money is a category that can be rendered subjective by the
workers (it will be termed a State subjectification) when the objectives of the planning do
not mobilize them. Money is what prompts the workers to ‘buy into’ the factory once again
and to work more.
The Canton factory is not, therefore, a site of time. Piecework wages do not transform the
factory. We are sdll in a socialist State. Neither is it as if there were already a capitalist
infi'astructure and still a socialist superstructure. This money, which is not the sign of the
presence of capitalism, must be regarded as a singularity of socialism. With its presence in
the factory as a place of the State, we are faced with a singularity of socialism of the last
quarter of the twentieth century. Money is presented as the category of State politics in a
conjuncture of reforms, a State conjuncture that proposes production asthe present-day
arena of politics, whereas elsewhere the primacy of production remains and designates the
sequence in official terminology. It is money that qualifies the factory as a place of the State,
meaning the factory as specified site, which continues to be
208 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
governed by the State and its politics. What we are witnessing is not the birth of economy
separate from the State. The presence of money does not contradict the thesis according to
which the factory in socialism is
the site of the State. The introduction of money is related not to economic designs but to a
State politics.
Let us review what has been discussed above in the form of theses and questions.
1. The category of transition, after being widely used in Marxist texts in the 19205 (Lenin,
Trotsky, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky) and after having designated socialism as a phase of
transition leading from the dictatorship of the proletariat to a communist society, is now
strictly employed in the opposite sense to designate the hypothetical transition from
planned production to a market economy. The thesis of a transition from socialism to
capitalism is fallacious in my opinion. It disregards the question of the State. I object to
this use of transition because it presents socialism—be it at its end—and post- socialism as
a continuum. Between socialism and post-socialism occurs an essential event, which is the
collapse of the State. At that point, a new absolutely distinct sequence begins.
Planification was one of the characteristics of socialism, and let us keep in mind that its
objective was to make the category of commodities disappear and hence also its general
equivalent, money, whose use and function was to be strictly limited and increasingly
diminished. Socialism attempted to produce ‘socially useful’ products and not exchange
values. It is again in this sense that I will argue below that there is no economy in socialism
in the sense of a stabilized separation of production and the State. That was an altogether
singular hypothesis whose aim was to dissociate industrial and agricultural production
from the rule of capitalist profitability and active prices and to replace them with the rule
of social utility. This hypothesis worked for several years but gradually proved to be
impracticable. It fell into a crisis. The crisis was marked by the progressive reintroduction
of norms, practices, assessments and strategies related to money and to the market,
distinct, as we know, from the market economy. In the period of reforms, two hypotheses
on the dynamic of production compete and coexist: one is linked to socialization,
STUDIES 209
and the other to money. It is a matter of noting a failure of socialization and of partially
de-socializing in the hopes, real or simply declared, of reviving or re-dynamizing the
socialization.
2. As a result it is necessary to distance ourselves from the characteristic use of the term
‘transition’ by the liberal school, designating as it does the shift from planned production to
a market economy, from state-run enterprises to private business. What took place in East
European countries and in the ex-USSR since December 1989 is marked by the collapse of
socialist States. This was followed by the new choices and policies that characterize the
post-socialist period. Liberals use the notion of ‘transition’ to designate the collapse of
socialism and the introduction of a market economy in East European countries and in the
Soviet Union, and they analyse this collapse in terms of the economy, not the State. The
notion of transition presupposes the existence of a continuous process which takes place
in a unique historical period. It leaves no room, therefore, for rupture.
Indeed, what is left out of this conception is the State. The accepted qualification of
transition as a shift from planification to a market economy disregards the central question
of the State and provides an economist view that is truncated and inaccurate.
The importance of the question of the State must be re-established in the analysis of the
shift from State-run to private enterprise. It is the collapse of the socialist State as such that
periodizes and identifies the before and the after. Starting with the introduction of the
question of the State, we can identify two perfectly distinct contradictory periods: that of
the socialist State, and that of the post- socialist State.
3. It may seem surprising to hear me denying the existence of the economy in socialist
States, when it has been asserted with such insistence that the economy, economism or
even productivism were the driving forces thereof, and when the collapse of the socialist
States has so often been attributed to economic malfunctioning. In Marxist theory, there
was a base and a superstructure, in a dialectical relationship to each other. The reality of
the economy was ascribed to the base; its ideological forms, the law and the State were
ascribed
210
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
to the superstructure. No other theory beside Marxism insisted as much as it did on the
pre-eminence of the economy and, consequently, on its invariable presence. Nonetheless,
the socialist States should be regarded as a genuine attempt to put an end to the base and
superstructure opposition and, as a result, to the separation of the economy and the State.
Base and superstructure are not uni- versally and constitutively separated and in
opposition. We cannot follow Marx when he maintains that socialism is no longer a con-
tradictory system because the contradiction between the social relations of production and
the productive forces is no longer characterized by the private ownership of the means of
production.
. In the USSR, in the 1960s and in China after the death of Mao, a
series of ‘reforms’, from inside the socialist State itself, introduced new norms of
production, circulation and, in some cases, capital- ization in certain sectors, which were
explicitly informed by the logic of the market. From that point on, there was a coexistence
in the socialist State of old socialist norms and new socialist norms bound up with money.
These reforms were attempts at the development within the socialist State of money-
regulated sectors—or, at least, partially so. They indicate the co-presence not so much of
capitalist spaces and socialist spaces as of Marxist and non-Marxist socialist spaces, with
the latter characterized by money. In the USSR and in East European countries, either these
reforms did not resolve the difiiculties that prompted them or they amplified the dynamic.
With variations in trajectories and temporalities from country to country, they all ended
with the collapse of the socialist States.
Thereupon began a new period, the result of the break that the collapse of the socialist
State represents, a period that was utterly different than the first, in that it no longer had
the socialist State as a framework, not even as a framework undergoing a crisis. The frame-
work was the post-socialist State and society. There are, consequently, two conjunctures
that are dissociated from each other. The first is marked by reforms in the socialist State: in
the USSR, this is typically the perestroika. The second is marked by the post-socialist State.
. To my mind, the events in Beijing and their bloody repression had
as their backdrop the revolt of young urban students who were
STUDIES le
demanding that the partial de-socialization that was already underway be broadened to
encompass civil servants, intellectuals and management. In other words, they wanted the
extension of the rule of money, already effective in small businesses, which had been
deregulated since 1978, and in factories where piecework wages were in effect. They did
not feel that it was appropriate for a university professor to earn less than a skilled
worker and most intellectuals were demanding a new social system that would recognize
their proper ‘value’. To be sure, the theme of democracy was present in the student
movement (freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, freedom of organization) and it
went hand in hand with the theme of free markets and entrepreneurial freedom. The
undertaking was a failure, unlike the de-socialization of small business and of agricultural
production and the establishment of new norms of industrial production. These forms of
de-socialization did not attack the State or the Party. In fact, they were implemented by the
latter. The student revolt, for its part, took on the State in antagonistic terms. Its agenda
conflicted with that of the Party apparatus, the military apparatus and also a good portion
of the apparatus of factories, partisans, at the time, of finding a balance between money and
the State, that is, between the fixed-task entrepreneur and the Party.
7. China is still in a phase of reforms.
8. Centralization and planification are not what identify socialism and its internal
principles. Socialism can be more readily identified by the choice of a form of production
not governed by money as a general equivalent. In the capitalist economy, aside from
commodities and goods, services are based on a monetary and market economy; this is true
of housing, recreation, health and, to a non-negligible extent, education. To be sure, the
State, via the Keynesian and then social—democratic problematic of the social State, has
tried to limit the market character of services by partially or totally taking charge of their
accessibility, especially in regard to education and health. However, even thought the State
in capitalism may take charge of or exercises scrutiny over the so-called social sector, this
does not change the fact that such services belong to the order of commodities and are
governed by market forces. How was this issue resolved in socialist states?
212
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
Beginning in the 19505, a policy of State-owned enterprises was implemented; these were
called dan wéi in China. These work units were composed of the factory, schools, hospitals,
housing, shops and vacation and retirement homes. It is in this sense that we are to under-
stand the description by a manager in the GI-IMP of the huge grounds of the factory, its
shops and schools as a ‘factory-cum—society’.
. The space of the State-owned enterprise in the USSR and East
European countries and that of the dan wéi in China are, therefore, multifunctional and
complex. Three functions can be distinguished: first, a function of production; second, a
function of service; and finally, a function of social control and repression. These are
weakly or non-monetarized spaces and the introduction of money as a parameter impacts
these three functions in a variety of ways.
The key mechanisms acting on the first function are fixed rate and piecework wages; on the
second, the slight relaxing of conditions for moving and the possibility of changing jobs
(hence even- tually dan wéi). But, insofar as the second function is concerned, there is no
alternative structure to the socialist factory in the realm of services. A very weak private
housing market was proposed, when the demand was actually considerable, and there is no
real public-health or public-school system outside the dan wéi. In the realm of social policy
in China, there is no alternative for the moment to the dan wéi that would not involve a
willingness to give up the advantages and guarantees offered to State workers when it
comes to reimbursing medical expenses and to retirement rights. This is in fact what has
been developing since 1983: there has been no more hiring of ‘permanent workers’, also
called ‘State workers’;
rather, only contract workers, whose jobs are no longer guaranteed for life.
10. The reform, termed ‘de-socialization’, leads to paradoxical situa-
tions. In some branches of the heavy-machinery factory in Canton, salaries are completely
‘floating’, which means they consist solely in bonuses, and there is no more fixed salary, be
it minimal. In such situations, workers earn nothing when there are no orders or when
there is no electricity (because electricity is rationed in factories that have lost their
privileged status for electricity supply) or when the work cannot be done due, for instance,
to delivery delays. These
STUDIES 213
workers find themselves in a state of enormous insecurity, not because they lack the
guarantee of a job but because they lack the guarantee of a salary. They continue, however,
to benefit from fulis, the term used for the social advantages and the protection provided
by the dan wéi.
11. The study took place in conjuncture of reforms, not of a transition from socialism to
capitalism. Reforms such as these were attempted in other socialist countries (there were
many of them in Poland and Hungary since the beginning of the 19503 and, since 1965,
Soviet agriculture functioned this way). They have always had negative economic
consequences and have never led to reforming the system. On the contrary.
12. The study was focused not so much on State policies concerning the management of
companies and the role of the market and private capital, as on the forms of consciousness
of workers. The term ‘conjuncture’ refers to State politics and the historical arena. The sit-
uation designates the state of consciousness.
13. The category of situation belongs to a different register than that of conjuncture.
People—workers in this case—are the ones who take a stand on the situation, if there is
one. The category of situation is not an invariant, unlike that of conjuncture. There is
always a conjuncture to the extent that there are always State and governmental
decisions, and governmental politics.
QUESTION I. What is the role of the category of conjuncture in the situation? In other
words, what is the mode of presence of the question of the State in the consciousness
through conscious statements on the situation? How can we identify the State?
QUESTION 11. The factory here is the place of the State. In other modes— in the
parliamentary mode, for instance—the factory is the site of time and, in some sequences, it
becomes the political site and pertains to forms of subjectivity separate from or conflicting
with those of the State. With respect to forms of worker consciousness, and of what
workers say about forms of worker consciousness (the situation), what is the degree of
independence of the situation in relation to the conjuncture?
14. The relation between situation and conjuncture, between the space of the State and the
space of forms of consciousness, must be tackled
214
SYLVAIN LAZARUS
through the category of factory as specified site. This category allows us to tackle this
relation by providing reference points to identify the situation of forms of consciousness
and the eventual existence of worker statements. I proposed saying that the capitalist
factory is deployed as a place of time and the socialist factory as a place of the state. In the
latter two cases, the existence of statements in interiority pertain to another
specification—the factory as a political site. The fact that the factory is the site of the State
does not compel or require a correspondence between forms of thought and the con-
juncture. The factory as a place of the State being a statement in subjectivity, we cannot
deduce The factory as site of the State from the State. Here, money appears as a form of
subjectified consciousness, internal to the factory, and not as an attribute of the State.
In socialism, on the one hand, the factory is the site of the State; on the other, a problematic
of the multi-fimctionality of the State— and this multi-functionality includes production—
is proposed to apprehend the Party-State. We can then ask ourselves if the specification of
the factory as the place of the State is not the simple logical and objective consequence of
what production is in the State; this challenges the statement ‘the factory is the site of the
State’ as a subjective statement on the situation. Now, the situation and the conjuncture
are distinct. In the case of socialism, the fact that all things are in the arena of the State does
not authorize us to conclude that the situation follows from the conjuncture.
In the parliamentary mode, for example, if the factory as the site of time specifies the
factory as site, this statement does not break with the parliamentary mode. But because it
is a statement on the factory in the parliamentary mode, that is to say, a statement as sub-
jectivation, it is not to be conflated with the conjuncture of the State in the parliamentary
mode.
Turning back now to the subject of socialism, I must object to the thesis that socialism
invalidates the factory as a specified site in its distinctive subjectified singularity. This
thesis posits that the gen— eralized extension of the Party-State implies that there is
nothing other than the Party-State itself, when, in fact, the opposite is true. The existence of
the factory as a specified site is confirmed by the statement in subjectivity—Thefactory is
the site of money——Which is
STUDIES 215
a specification of the site and of the subjective statement singular to the factory, which
cannot be deduced from the State. There is a differential interplay of factory as specified
site and the State, which can be grasped by the differential interplay of situation and
conjuncture. We can posit, therefore, that, except when statements in interiority exist
that distance themselves from the State in the form of The factory is a political site, a
compatibility between the situation and the conjuncture is possible, which does not means
that the two are conflated or that the situation is inferred from the conjuncture.
15. The factory is the site of money in the period of reforms when the constitutive principle
of socialism—evacuating the law of value and limiting the extension of commodities—finds
itself greatly undermined. But it could also be said that the factory, during this period, is
the site of the State for what remains of socialism and the site of time for what pertains to
fixed task pay and piecework wages. This is not, however, our argument, because this line
of reasoning infers the factory from the State in an approach in objectivity From the
standpoint of an approach in subjectivity and statements in thought, the factory is the site
of money.
16. We have to return here to the question of the economy, of its singularity and the fact
that it only exists distinct from the State. I posit that the economy does not exist in
socialism.
17. The economy only exists as a separate entity from the State. In socialism, production
exists but not the economy.
18. There is no economy aside from a capitalist economy, or, to be more precise, capitalism
is the sole great form of contemporary economy known to this day.
19. The economy is not an invariant, a general structure, the simple consequence in
thought of the production, circulation and con- sumption of goods and services in any
human group. It is a singularity for which capitalism is the space—indeed, the sole and
unique space for the time being. It is understandable that Fernand Braudel tried to extend
the existence and form of it from Antiquity to our day. In his work, the singularity extends
to the limits of a lengthy history. This singularity is that of capital, the law of value, and the
convertibility of money. The two great theoreticians of the singularity that is capitalism
are Marx and Keynes.
216 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
20. It has been said that the economy was separate from the State; it is now being
maintained that it subordinates the State and this is why it is defined as an anti-history. The
thesis of subordination follows from the one positing the separation of the economy and
the State. Indeed, having its own arena, the economy is an endogenous process,
demonstrating crises and possibilities of regulation that are themselves endogenous. And
for these reasons, in its capacity as a separate entity from the State, it will be olfered as an
alternative to the State or as capable of subordinating it. It is this relation of the State’s
subordination to the economy that we call ‘anti-history’, history being for us a thought
relation of the State.
In fact, the different schools can be positioned with respect to the question of the State’s
subordination to the economy. There are those that attempt to put the State under the rule
of the economy, by proposing, as liberalism does, its extreme reduction. For others, like for
present-day theoreticians of regulation, the State is a reality conceived in its functional
subordination to the economy. The same can be said, despite appearances, of those who,
like Keynes, call on the State to regulate the economy. Keynes seems to subordinate the
economy to the State with the notion of regulation. But in reality the regulatory approach
does not put an end to the subordination of the State to the economy; it requires the
introduction of what could be called a ‘regulatory subordination’. Even when it is
subordinate to the economy, the State can be the economic regulator. Efficacy (the
regulation) and domination (of the economy over the State) are not to be confused with
each other. The thesis of regulation does not invalidate the thesis of the State’s
subordination to the economy.
21. The economy is separate from the State. This separation is what makes the economy an
anti-history. Capitalism keeps the State at a distance in a subordinated separation.
Capitalism is the only known site of this separation. As for socialism, its intent was to put
an end to this separation and to think the economy starting from the State by isolating
money as the general equivalent (being that by which the economy manifests itself as
separate) and replacing it with social necessity. Ability and need, as the reader will recall,
took the place of money—whence the communist motto, ‘to each according to his
STUDIES 217
abilities, to each according to his needs’. So it cannot be said that socialism was an attempt
to regulate the State by the economy or that it developed a figure contrary to the Keynesian
figure. The economy, requiring that the State be subordinate to it, was abolished via the
disruption of this subordination. By establishing the primacy of the State over the economy,
socialism abolished the economy.
22. Being that there is no economy in socialism, there can be no internal dynamic of
production in it. There are only political movements affecting production. Let us cite in this
regard the first stage of the Stakhanovite movement in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s,
the agricultural cooperative movement and the Great Leap Forward in China in the 19503.
Outside of these movements, state regulations were in effect.
23. Let us posit that, if the economy exists, it is flexible and trans- formable. If there had
been an economy in socialism, the latter would not have collapsed from its incapacity to
redeploy the former. The economy is not the mere existence of social relations of pro-
duction and the study of their nature and mechanism, but the capacity of the system of
production to be a process and to have the ability to be articulated, in a separation-cum-
link, with the conjuncture, which means with the State. And yet, it is the separation with
the State that enables the economy to have its own dynamic where the analytical space of a
historicity is forged, set in motion by the regulatory subordination of the State to the
economy. Just as there was no economy in socialism, there was no historicity of produc-
tion, and the latter had no efiect on its own future.
24. The Soviets have been criticized for their inordinate economism and for having
ascribed socialism to productive forces. Marx’s hypothesis was that socialism could have a
history and he ascribed the economy to capital. Lenin’s hypothesis was that socialism was a
matter class struggle. Dan’s was that socialism was a matter of politics. Only Stalin’s
Marxism-Leninism postulated the economic nature of socialism. The thesis that states that
the economy exists in socialism is a Stalinist thesis.
QUESTION 111. The question arises again. Do piecework wages and fixed task pay
represent the introduction of the economy where it did not
218 SYLVAIN LAZARUS
exist before? Could Deng Xiaoping reforms be regarded as a decision to introduce the
economy into socialism and to assert the compatibility of socialism and the economy?
25. Two singularities are designated: socialism and the economy.
The presence of money and of the law of value in some sectors does not indicate the
introduction of the economy. To the contrary, we maintain that there is no economy that is
not hegemonic. In this light, then, we must examine what the emergence of the economy
specifies when it is a singularity and not an invariant.
26. Advocates of the idea of a shift from socialism to a market economy uphold the idea of a
sequential continuum that would stretch from the introduction, say, of piecework wages to
the recognized hegemony of the market economy, including in the arena of the State. The
collapse of the socialist State would then be a necessary event but it would not bring
anything to a close. In a sense, we could say that, for those taking this stance, the close came
at the beginning of the reforms, that is to say, in the example of China, with the close of the
Maoist period and the arrival of Deng to power. Partisans of this position posit therefore
the radical heterogeneity of money, which they refer to as the ‘monetary economy’, to
socialism, since they support the idea of a continuity between the first introduction of the
aforesaid monetary economy and its overall hegemony, and hence the idea of an
uninterrupted development of economic hegemony. The economy, for them, is not a
singularity but an invariant that takes shape in the plurality of economies. For partisans of
this position, the category of the economy deploys a heterogeneous multiplicity. They
regard the collapse of socialism as demonstrating that the economy has laws, probably
natural, and see the market economy as its quintessence. In their eyes, the collapse of
socialism represents a reminder of the force of law and the triumph thereof.
From the above, it follows that the thesis according to which the crisis of the socialist
economy is the cause of the collapse of socialism is false. There is a need to look elsewhere
and otherwise.

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Anthropology of the Name

TRANSLATED BY GILA WALKER

LONDON NEW YORK CALCUTTA

Seagull Books, 2015

First published in French as Anthropologic du nom by Sylvain Lazarus © Editions du Seuil,

ISBN 978 0 8574 2 230 9

ix Preface to the English Edition

9 CHAPTER 1 The Distance Travelled and Categories

48 CHAPTER 2 The Two Statements

Thinking after Classism

l l 5 CHAPTER 4 Unnameable Names

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

The Puzzle and the Enthusiasm

It is enthusiastic about thought when it is possible to say how it is at work when it is at

Thought in Summoning People

The interlocution, therefore, is not with established disciplines and discourses, be it

1 See ‘Reiteration and Gaps’, p. 64.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi

xii SYLVAIN LAZARUS

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xiii

These two facets are joined by the category of thought.

Politics and Thought

a-l. The Historical Mode of Politics

xiv SYLVAIN LAZARUS

a-Z. The Place of a Mode

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xv

And so identifying a mode is being in a position to state—for a mode in progress, when it

xvi SYLVAIN LAZARUS

to conditions’ where the proletarian capacity is subject to the condition of consciousness,

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xvii

I am in favour of separation and also of unbinding (déliaison). Unbinding. In the plainest

It is no doubt a feature of my character to articulate unbinding and separation, and this

xviii SYLVAIN LAZARUS

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xix

objective reality), that is to say, in a relation between a subjective (which is always

What we are definitely not doing here is serving up an interpretative or comprehensive

Why ‘of the Name’?

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxi

xxii SYLVAIN LAZARUS

A Difl‘erent Way into the Question of the Unnameability of the Name

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxiii

Is a Thought of the Homogeneous Possible?

xxiv SYLVAIN LAZARUS

of access to the thought of the homogeneous.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxv

Multiplicities can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. The key question is to find out

xxvi SYLVAIN LAZARUS

of singularity in opposition to a problematic of heterogenous multiplic- ities that de-

This has two consequences.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxvii

xxviii SYLVAIN LAZARUS

will describe elsewhere as an adialectical subjective/ objective formation) or attributed to

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxix

xxx SYLVAIN LAZARUS

Politics as Thought or as State?

Anthropology of the Name

Accordingly, a new approach to thought and to phenomena of con- sciousness—that is to

Likewise, it would be inexact to maintain that an anthropology of the name is a theory of

Now the sense I attribute to anthropology, in a preliminary approach, is to be a discipline

People think is my first statement, or Statement 1. My second state- ment, or Statement 2, is

CHAPTER 1 THE DISTANCE TRAVELLED AND CATEGORIES

1. THE CAESURA OF MAY ’68

What I designate as an intellectual caesura or as the hypotheses of the thought of ’68

THE DISTANCE TRAVELLED AND CATEGORIES 11