– the citizen – as an agent of the market. It is a total commercialization of higher education. I think this is pretty much a catastrophe. Because just as in more confused times, like today, we don’t just need experts. We also need people who will think more radically to arrive at the real root of problems.
So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them see more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective.
Let’s look at another example from ecology. When the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unfortunately happened in the summer of 2010, people quickly needed experts to deal with the animals and other sea creatures. No, that’s not what we need. Indeed, what should be raised here is a much more fundamental question about such problems, problems for all of us which potentially shatter our commons: “What are the risks if we have to keep the oil drill?” “What kind of industry can replace it?”
Therefore, we should not have only these two extremes: on the one hand, people who are conscious of these issues and, on the other, the majority who just follow their careers and are indifferent to these socio-ecological problems. We should build bridges between the two . It was a most beautiful moment, for me, when those really important scientists, from Einstein to Oppenheimer, started to raise more general, fundamental questions about the atomic bomb and other such political issues. So, again, I think it is more important than ever that people become aware that much more is at stake, especially with biogenetics and other scientific development, than just technological problems.
15
Embodying a Proletarian Position
The problem being raised when one is to respond to “the private use of reason” is the fact that this cannot be achieved. We all are aware that there should be certain socio-political responses to this, but still the question of “who?” remains. Who is the subject/agent of revolution? Who is going to make the new world possible?
SŽ: I don’t think there is only one agent. There will not be a new working class, or whatever. I think they are the people who find themselves in what I call a proletarian position : they are sometimes poor, sometimes well-off. What I would like to say about this notion of the proletarian position is that when you are reduced to some kind of zero level, then another subject emerges who is no longer the same self . I’d like to refer to the book The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés) , written by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who claimed that even now we have a new form of psychic illness. If the twentieth century was defined by hysterical neurosis, now, increasingly, we have a “post-traumatic personality.” This is the new order, which means we were submitted to some kind of trauma. It can be rape, public disorder, illness, or whatever. Well, we will survive, but as the living dead, deprived of all our social existence and substance.
When Malabou develops her notion of “destructive plasticity,” of the subject who continues to live after its psychic death, she touches the key point: the reflexive reversal of the destruction of form into the form acquired by destruction itself. Quite simply, you are so shocked that, even if you are still alive, yourself, your ego is destroyed. Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, one is tempted to say that the subject deprived of its libidinal substance is the “libidinal proletariat.” This is a position of desperation.
In the same way, in ecological terms, we are becoming proletarians. By this I
So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them see more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective.
Let’s look at another example from ecology. When the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unfortunately happened in the summer of 2010, people quickly needed experts to deal with the animals and other sea creatures. No, that’s not what we need. Indeed, what should be raised here is a much more fundamental question about such problems, problems for all of us which potentially shatter our commons: “What are the risks if we have to keep the oil drill?” “What kind of industry can replace it?”
Therefore, we should not have only these two extremes: on the one hand, people who are conscious of these issues and, on the other, the majority who just follow their careers and are indifferent to these socio-ecological problems. We should build bridges between the two . It was a most beautiful moment, for me, when those really important scientists, from Einstein to Oppenheimer, started to raise more general, fundamental questions about the atomic bomb and other such political issues. So, again, I think it is more important than ever that people become aware that much more is at stake, especially with biogenetics and other scientific development, than just technological problems.
15
Embodying a Proletarian Position
The problem being raised when one is to respond to “the private use of reason” is the fact that this cannot be achieved. We all are aware that there should be certain socio-political responses to this, but still the question of “who?” remains. Who is the subject/agent of revolution? Who is going to make the new world possible?
SŽ: I don’t think there is only one agent. There will not be a new working class, or whatever. I think they are the people who find themselves in what I call a proletarian position : they are sometimes poor, sometimes well-off. What I would like to say about this notion of the proletarian position is that when you are reduced to some kind of zero level, then another subject emerges who is no longer the same self . I’d like to refer to the book The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés) , written by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who claimed that even now we have a new form of psychic illness. If the twentieth century was defined by hysterical neurosis, now, increasingly, we have a “post-traumatic personality.” This is the new order, which means we were submitted to some kind of trauma. It can be rape, public disorder, illness, or whatever. Well, we will survive, but as the living dead, deprived of all our social existence and substance.
When Malabou develops her notion of “destructive plasticity,” of the subject who continues to live after its psychic death, she touches the key point: the reflexive reversal of the destruction of form into the form acquired by destruction itself. Quite simply, you are so shocked that, even if you are still alive, yourself, your ego is destroyed. Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, one is tempted to say that the subject deprived of its libidinal substance is the “libidinal proletariat.” This is a position of desperation.
In the same way, in ecological terms, we are becoming proletarians. By this I
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