The Plaster of Right on the Wooden Leg of the Individual
 But beneath the appearance -- which itself is also a part of the reality -- the exploitation continues. With social democracy, capitalist society cherishes and sets on stage the dream of a society which would abolish classes while preserving capital. The orgy of democratism which has marked recent years shows that society always needs to believe in this dream. Democratism rests on the illusion according to which procedures of representation ( the designation of representatives, the setting in play of deliberation and collective decision making ) guarantee individuals and societies the greatest possible control of their fate. The polling booth ( « L'isoloir » ) is the symbol par excellence of democratism. This act in which man isolates himself from his counterparts ( for which the only equivalent is the act of defecation ) in order to take a decision which is supposed to commit him for life, aims to ritually give a minimal reality to this « private world », this « micro-entity separated off from the social whole » over which he would reign as a « little independent sovereign » : his individuality. In reality, and today less than ever, the lone man has no will of his own. Each of his acts, his desires and his thoughts is always a moment in the continuity of the acts, desires and thoughts of others. If ideas of individual liberty and of personal will have a meaning it is that of a capacity to defy the influences which form a person. The more he is capable of recognising these influences and modulating them, the more his relation with them is immediate, the more a person is free. However never in human history have individuals not also been subjected to impersonal, dehumanised influences, been obedient to an abstract logic ( the economy ), never have images and ideas not escaped people at such a point to concentrate themselves in a world both foreign and omnipresent ( the spectacle ). Never, perhaps, have individuals not been confronted with a domination that is both meticulous and imperceptible. Formerly, they could dream of killing the king -- sometimes they even did it. Today one would have to be shut into in the vizor-less armour of a rusted ideology to believe that one could change what exists by killing a democratic leader. The gesture would be as ridiculous as voting for or against him. The more impotent man is to change his life, the more must be put into play the infinite conquest of rights inside this life. One must especially put into play the right to designate representatives who, in fact, represent nothing more than the interests of lobbies, the general interest of capital and their interest in seeing their own poor appetites are met. But, in reality, who is unaware of this ? Who would argue with Castoriadis ( whose re-reading of Freud has apparently left him in a better state than Lefort has been left by his re-reading of Tocqueville ) when he declared in an interview : « To choose for eternity between Barre and Mitterand, the mere statement of this project is enough to condemn it » ? And yet people vote. Our representatives may not look appetising... At least they guarantee that we are not in one of those totalitarian countries where terror is permanent, where they torture in cellars, where the Brise-Glace could not appear. Rather democracy than that terror. Here we see how terror even reigns in territories where no torturers operate. |