COLLAPSE: BREAKDOWNS AND PASSAGES OF THE PRESENT STRUGGLES

Resumo

O presente artigo aposta em um diagnóstico acerca da atualidade: atravessamos, no campo político, uma experiência de colapso, um movimento físico o qual se dá quando um certo corpo esgota suas possibilidades repertoriais - exigindo, assim, seu abandono. Após a narrativa de uma trajetória da esquerda - da Revolução Francesa, passando pelas disputas proletárias pelo centro do poder e pelas atualizações operadas pelos jovens hippies e partícipes do Maio de 68 - chegamos à atualidade. Tratamos de operar um pensamento no qual, além e aquém da polêmica e das trincheiras filosófico-militantes, opera a relação paradoxal entre o ressentimento e a singularização - a tentativa de articular as lutas identitárias e a não sujeição do sujeito a uma verdade de si. Explicitamos tal relação paradoxal com o objetivo de fornecer mais ferramentas para uma clínico-política do comum, que possibilite articulações entre diferentes perspectivas onto-epistêmico-políticas.

Palavras-chave:
política; história; memória; ética

Resumen

Este artículo apuesta por un diagnóstico sobre la actualidad: atravesamos, en el campo político, una experiencia de colapso, un movimiento físico que se da cuando un cierto cuerpo agota sus posibilidades repertoriales - exigiendo su abandono. Después de la narración de una trayectoria de la izquierda - de la Revolución Francesa, pasando por las disputas proletarias por el centro del poder y por las actualizaciones operadas por los jóvenes hippies y partícipes del Mayo del 68 - llegamos a la actualidad. Tratamos de operar un pensamiento en el que, además de la polémica y de las trincheras filosófico-militantes, opera la relación paradójica entre el resentimiento y la singularización - el intento de articular las luchas identitarias y la no sujeción del sujeto a una verdad de sí. Hemos explicitado esta paradoja objetivando proporcionar más herramientas para una clínico-política del común la cual posibilite articulaciones entre diferentes perspectivas onto-epistêmico-políticas.

Palabras clave:
política; historia; memoria; ética

Abstract

This article bets on a diagnosis about the actuality: that we cross, in the political field, a certain experience of collapse, a physical movement which occurs when a certain body exhausts its repertoire possibilities - thus requiring its abandonment. After the narrative of a trajectory of the left - from the French Revolution, through the proletarian disputes by the center of power and by the updates carried out by the young hippies and participants of May of 1968 - we have reached the present. We try to operate a thought in which, beyond and beyond the controversy and the philosophical-militant trenches, the paradoxical relation between resentment and singularization operates - the attempt to articulate the identity struggles and the non-subjection of the subject to a truth of self. We explain this paradoxical relation with the aim of providing more tools for a clinician-policy of the common that allows articulations between different onto-epistemic-political perspectives.

Keywords:
politics; history; memory; ethic

1. To collapse: the asphyxia of the present’s possibilities and its imperative of reinvention

Do we collapse? The Houaiss dictionary indicates that the term may refer to bodily states - a state of shock characterized by physical weakness, by weakening or excessive fluid loss, usually accompanied by heart failure, as well as by failure of the nervous system - as it may have figurative meanings - sudden reduction in efficiency, ruin, the state of what is falling apart, of what is in crisis or about to end - or it may refer to botanical processes - the reduction or complete extinction of the turgescence of a vegetable (Houaiss & Villar, 2009, p. 491). However, the word collapse can be directed to other senses, perhaps more interesting to the conceptual direction with which we want to deal with in this text. In physics, collapsing refers to the implosion of a celestial body before its own gravitational force when exhausting its cosmic fuel in the machining of itself: it refers, therefore, to the collapse of something that was taken to its limit in that way of existence under which it lasted until then. The collapse is, therefore, the effect of a process of supreme exhaustion of a model that has exhausted all repertory possibilities, demanding in an absolutely concrete way its abandonment.

This singular event, which causes fear and suffocation at first, can also be seen as a privileged turning point, where the need for radical deviation opens up: it is possible to see in this event the imperative of an intense reinvention. This essay is dedicated to accompanying and forcing thought under a supposedly peaceful stance induced by the daze of the present: something has collapsed on the left wing and in its project designs. An entire generation came of age having lived its trajectory on what was termed a "left-wing government." They saw their achievements, but also accompanied their many shakes, failures and inconsistencies. This essay aims to forge some analytical tools for thinking about our current clinician-politic, by promoting the possibility of productions of other common ones in full collapse: territories of articulations of other differences, in order to evidence our contemporary clinical-political powers.

Here is the perceptual pact that contracts us: we perceive, feel and live a world that is no longer the same as in the past: neoconservative and neoliberal waves, intensifying and expanding the debate about the struggles of social movements linked to existential identities and their social markers, squatting around the world, at schools and universities in Latin America. Under the protection of the perceptual pact of such events on a national and global scale, it is easy to affirm that such challenges have forced us into having thinking as a transgression of our common sense.

At the same time, we seem to share certainties: we know that something has collapsed, we know what has collapsed, we know what it is to collapse, and we know the effects of such a collapse. The evidence put in sequence formed a large analytical block, enabling us to walk together and on the march: we all know, together and without tension, that something collapsed, what has collapsed, what is to collapse, and what are the effects of this collapse. However, it may be politically interesting to draw back from these evidences and to initiate this text driven by an arsenal of doubts and problematizations that may lead us to a genealogical and conceptual confrontation of the present - this present that, we can affirm in a unison, is collapsing. Thus, we will go through an uncertain and fragmentary plot of events that will make the current reality of what we call the left wing, so that a web of questions can find concreteness and consistency.

2. Overlapping the webs of the left wing and its "Us": a genealogical glance

Every battle is an event: it envelops unique forces and gives way to specific confrontations. Not surprisingly, a handful of different clashes have come to fruition throughout history, taking place under the momentary and almost inescapable urgencies to which certain political games have urged. Struggles are set up, but perhaps there is, inevitably, also the dismantling of such struggles. In these struggles, what persists and what is undone in the collapse of politics in the present? What legacies and distances do we make when we feel the noisy weight of the structure that is broken?

If every starting point is arbitrary, the sensitivities of the demarcation of a beginning are undone. We will take the invention of the “left”, the passage from a specifically spatial and relative term to a political terminology, as the beginning of a story, the beginning of something that may persist and undo itself simultaneously in the urgencies of the present. It was in the final stretch of the eighteenth century that the French bourgeoisie captured and decreed the intolerable monarchy that had lasted so long, and unmindfully confronted and decapitated it: from Saint-Just to Robespierre, a multitude was driven by the transverse certainty that revolutionary justice could not wait any longer. With the cry of "enough with the Bastille," a new state of affairs should emerge under the noble necks being reaped by guillotines, taking shape under the directives that were appearing - freedom, equality and fraternity - and the conditions - the terror deemed necessary to defend such directives.

The Jacobin revolutionary paradigm - modern and bourgeois, violent and sans-culottes, European and anti-monarchist - left as a legacy, since this gigantic founding event, something important to the history of the battles: the landmark of the invention of the left wing, or the passage of a term until then exclusively spatial to a political meaning. Since then, the leftism has become a mode of existence - a relative position in the world that, of course, does not hold it back to the events of the late eighteenth century.

If it was in this context that this strange term was founded - under a historical movement that sank the monarchy and caused the emergence of the state and the bourgeoisie as the ruling class - it soon became the target of an intense dispute of meanings. Already under the nominative establishment of the left wing in the nineteenth century, another confrontation was pressing. If, after the end of sovereignty, capitalism quickly presented itself as the main economic and subjective system - operating the distinction between those who owned the means of production and those who sold their time and their labor force in a relationship that was necessarily an exploitation - the way it could and should be faced generated intense dissent - a class dissent, a dissent within the left wing.

The confrontation between Karl Marx's socialism and Mikhail Bakunin's revolutionary collectivism took place constantly within the International Association of Workers (AIT), which aimed at organizing the proletarian class for the political struggle. In the beginning, the course of the institution was given by Proudhon's mutualism, but Marx and Engels soon assumed the reins of the movement and gave unequivocal direction to the struggle until the arrival of Bakunin. Even if both participants in the theoretical and militant confrontation were critical of capitalism, the way they perceived the reading and the departure of the economic and social system was divergent: from socialism to anarchism, there was an vast difference. Who was the real enemy: was it the state or the capital? After a series of divergences, and not without difficulty, Bakunin was expelled from the Association in 1872 in a symbolic and victorious Marxist movement in this struggle concerning the particularities of the movement.

In the spring of 1871, concomitantly with the theoretical and militant clash with the AIT, thousands of communards declared themselves free and, by instituting a popular government, decreed the Paris Commune: it was the first proletarian government in history (Merriman, 2015, p. 75). Aside from the theoretical and militant clash that was insinuating itself at the heart of the AIT, twenty thousand people lost their lives in the name of the workers' cause in the clash with the French officialdom. Behind every barricade, the dream of another possible world held flags, to the last breath of bodies surrendered to revolution and the future. It was not very different from the dream that in the vicinity of 1917 caused proletarians and peasants to unite around Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik cause and force the deposition of Tsar Nicholas II. This time, however, the victory established the first socialist country in history: the Soviet Union. If what in Cuba, in the late 1950s, packed with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos was a nationalist and independant furor, a few years later the unexpected victory of the small revolutionary military group was aligned with the communist bloc commanded by the Soviet countries.

If there are many divergences between the movements, it is inevitable to realize that there is something that crosses and transversalizes them: beyond a way of operating or a belief in an ideal, of victories and defeats pertaining to all games, there was always the imperative of a revolution to be made. All this ideology - which may have origin not only terminologically on the left side of the French National Assembly of the late 1800s - weighs and somewhat collapses in the youth of the 1960s. It was there that a certain effort once again established the intolerable character of the present, but it did not do so under the nickname of revolution. Drenched with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, what American youth gave way to at that moment was the flight of ideology that for nearly two centuries had become dissatisfied with the state of things. An intense use of the body, the betting on alternative communities, the search for altered states of consciousness: a much more micropolitical modulation - and absolutely different - than that which made communists and anarchists confront each other with passion. No wonder Leonardo Padura reminds us that young Cubans - late revolutionaries - must:

(…) have been the only members in the entire civilized and student-full Western world of our generation who, for example, never carried a marijuana cigarette to our mouths and those who, despite the heat that flowed through our veins, later liberated ourselves from sexual atavisms, ruled by the taboo of virginity (nothing is closer to communist morality than Catholic precepts). In the Hispanic Caribbean, we were the only ones to live without knowing that salsa music was born or that the Beatles (Rolling Stones and Mamas too) were a symbol of rebellion and not of imperialist culture, as we were often told. (Padura, 2013, p. 93)

It was as if there was a whole world between Commander Che Guevara's military uniform and Jim Morrison's leather pants: from military seriousness to the Dionysian body, a new modulation of confrontation with the world was heralded in those days of Vietnam War, peace and love, Flower Power and Woodstock. On the other side of the ocean, and almost at the same time, in March 1968, French youngsters, starting an insurrection at the University of Nanterre, took the streets of Paris in a completely different way from what their contemporaries had pleaded almost a century before. Motivated by a sexual ban - the visit to the dormitories for the opposite sex - and their opposition to the Vietnam War, a series of events meant that, in a few months, the French capital would be overrun by university students' dissatisfaction.

Occupying the intellectual center of the capital, in the Quartier Latin of the famous and emblematic Sorbonne and Collège de France, young people flooded the walls and sidewalks with words such as "it is forbidden to forbid" and "let us be realistic, let us demand the impossible". Even though the statement was repeated - the young people wanted the revolution - the old guideline was not: they did not want the power of State. No wonder, the French Communist Party said that the movement was disturbing the cause: the conditions were not yet propitious. It was the French May of 1968, set up without planning and bequeathing to history something different from what the left wing movements traditionally pointed out. Beneath and beyond the class struggle, a bet on the modification of the customs appeared.

However, beyond the tensions between generations and their forms of struggle articulated or not to central parties, a new conflict arose between those who adopted adjectives like "progressive", "subversive" and the like: the body itself and its customs were being posed as the last frontier to be sustained on the battlefield versus those who affirmed the imperative of collective struggle and the seizure of the state apparatus; body and daily life were now present in the contemporary emergence of struggling identities in the midst of the collapse of the left wing.

For many, the counterculture and its appeal to the body and the transformation of customs in a pacifist way was a naive escapism that was unable to perceive the repressive violence of the system, invisible in the simple gesture of consumption, in the architecture of cities, in state governance poverty and so on. We see here the oppositions so extensively debated between civilization and barbarism or violence and brutality: civilizational models in shock were digging themselves while pointing fingers to the absence of reason on the opposite side. Violence would be the affirmation of force in function of the civilizing need (both left and right wing, both of the police and social movements), while barbarism would be excessive, that which breaks with the reason of a certain system of articulated acceptability, in turn, to a particular project of society. Between arbitrary arrests, acts of resistance, criminalization of political-social movements on the one hand; and explosions of shops, spaces or public buildings, armed guerrilla warfare on the other hand; one can always observe the problematization of articulations between different projects, models, society and the violence inherent to their respective reasons of State.

In a deviation from the tension of violence-brutality or civilization-barbarism, it is possible to perceive the emergence of another conflict of the left wing, at least since the mid-twentieth century: the tension between civil rights struggles tied to ethnic-racial identities, gender and sexuality, and the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. If there were many relations between these movements, both in the United States and in Europe, we have, on the other hand, the production of diverse divisions: the class movements affirmed the secondary nature of the battles for the civil rights of the groups before the causal essentiality of the class struggle. Thus, they made theoretical considerations about the need not to fragment struggles, uniting them by class identity (which would be the cause of all other oppressions), while reproducing misogynist, homophobic, transphobic and racist practices and thinking their daily lives. From a structuralist perspective, violence linked to social markers would be only a minor symptom of the constituent conflict of society between those who possess the means of production and those who offer their own body and time. From this perspective, to stick to the struggles that see the domestic as political and that give shape to the very notion of micropolitics would be to lose itself in a superstructural ideological illusion that would fragment and weaken the real battle.

However, from the weakening of left-wing movements articulated with the USSR on account of Nikita Khrushchev's denunciations of the Stalinist regime's crimes, Soviet reactions to 1968, and finally the Soviet reforms of the 1980s and their dissolution into 1990, we saw a relative increase in struggles other than class struggles: ecological movements served as a refuge for old hippies and others against the consumer society. New configurations of movements emerged, calling into question the capitalist logic: free software movement, Solidary Economy, initiatives for sustainability and fair trade, varied associations and diverse forms of anarchism (anarchopunk, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-criticizers and so on). We were also able to follow in this period many achievements on the part of the feminist groups, lgbtts, blacks, indigenous people, among others, that went on with their mobilizations differentiating themselves many times from Marxism and the class issue. In this way, we witnessed the growth of other ways of asserting ourselves as the left wing to swarm the world through a series of new macro and micropolitical initiatives.

If, since the mid-1980s, with glasnost and perestroika, there had already been an internal confrontation movement in Soviet communism, perhaps the resounding mark of its collapse was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the end of East Germany and the political decline, the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama, stated: "history is over" (1992, p. 10). But was it really over? With the collapse of a communist bet - and if we agree that we are no longer hippies or young Frenchmen - what is left?

3. Fragmentations and the emergence of new geometries and grammars of struggle: collapse as reinvention

In 2015, during an interview with a cable television channel, a famous television actor said he was disillusioned and unable to understand the current political moment. He had always supported the Workers' Party and its directives, but at the moment, in the face of successive scandals of corruption and physiological compositions, it had as its only political activity to collect cans and other waste from the edges of a river. On the other hand, some social movements linked to identities of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity currently point to an attempt to retake party politics from other terms than right/left or progressive/liberal. In 2016, some entities of the Black Movement and the Central Única das Favelas launched a new political party: "Frente Favela Brasil" (the Brazilian Favela Front), in what was an evident sign of the exhaustion. Anderson Quack, one of the members of the movement, said in an interview available on the Internet: "Let's go forward, neither leftist nor rightist: favelist" (Nitahara, 2016).

In a similar way, we are currently following the initiative for the formation of a Brazilian Feminist Party. As the philosopher Márcia Tiburi defined in an interview for the website Brasil 247 (Fraga, 2016):

What I see is that we are turning the idea of a party into something else, we are bringing a new meaning to the idea of a party. And we are replacing the term power - in the history of patriarchy, of male domination - with the term potentiality. Okay, we live in a crisis of representation, but for women, this crisis has always existed. Women were never represented in politics. And, along with women, all the oppressed groups, a whole population that should be a citizen and that was alienated of their rights of citizenship. Calling it feminism already means that we are not traditional. (5^th paragraph)

We can obeserve, therefore, that in the face of the exhaustion of the left wing (from the 1960s, through its worldwide intensification in 1990 and national events in the years 2010), there are variations on the battlefield of politics: having a new uprising of civil rights struggles would be a reinvention of the political field or another attempt to retake a lost field of possibilities? To the left wing, which has been losing hope of the possible, Deleuze said: "well that there is the exhaustion of the possible; and especially do not believe that the exhaustion is only tired, and that the possible persists, under the present impotence in realizing it" (Zourabichvili, 2000, p. 334). And if this is the case, one may have to assert the ethics of exhaustion Deleuze perceived in Beckett's television pieces: exhausting the possible - and making any encounter impossible - is to necessarily create another field of possibility: another field of perception and sensibility - singular, unpredictable: another world, anyway.

Since 2011, we have witnessed the emergence of other micropolitical movements in the world's political scene, when occupation of the streets became a hallmark of dissatisfaction: Spain, Turkey, Egypt, USA and, finally, in 2013, Brazil were stages of enormous movements that urged that something else needed to happen. If the nihilist indication was recurrent - "against all that is here" were words frequently repeated on Brazilian streets - the statement made against the party representation policy also led to the street: "party-less" was what many said.

If the red flags that fluttered in the parks on sunny Sundays in the 1990s and 2000s were heirs to the tradition of the left wing anchored to the class struggle and seizure of state power, it is inevitable to say that such militancy suffered a thud by finding a new statement which did not present another flag or another party: on the contrary, the new intonation of the streets called for a world without flags and without parties. If, by leaps and bounds, that party whose red flag had been held up for such a long time - a party of the workers, at least in the name - had lasted for more than a decade in the command of the nation, no longer did it have as much support: now the streets were occupied by the ones without a party. Something was collapsing and opening a void. But with the collapse of this period, what active inventions remain on the left wing stances beyond passive nihilism?

4. Paradoxes between resentment and the plastic forces in affirming contemporary political struggles: human rights as a forge field

Friedrich Nietzsche (1999) presented in his work On the Genealogy of Morality a narrative of the civilizing process as the history of mnemonic techniques and its craft of erecting promises in the core of the human being. Thus, we might consider that the definition of the most adequate human would be that it is an animal that makes promises. Nietzsche presents the trajectory of these techniques aimed at forging a memory in the wild animal through fire, blood, pain and suffering, later transforming and sophisticating these instruments into guilt and compassion. It is the narrative of how we have domesticated ourselves by becoming predictable, trustworthy and harmless. The history of techniques is what has made humanity this planned, calculated species in order to know what it can expect of itself and others, and which helps us to problematize the possible field of current micropolitics between the notions of resentment-domestication and invention-subversion.

There continued to be blood, martyrdom, and sacrifice when humans felt the need to create in themselves a memory; the most hideous sacrifices and pawns (among them the sacrifice of the firstborn), the most disgusting mutilations (castrations, for example), the cruelest rituals of all religious cults (all religions are, at their deepest level, systems of cruelties) - it all originated in that instinct that it saw in pain the most powerful auxiliary of mnemonics. In a certain sense, this includes all asceticism: some ideas must become indelible, omnipresent, unforgettable, "fixed", so that the entire nervous and intellectual system is hypnotized by these "fixed ideas" - and ascetic procedures and ways of life are means to rid those ideas of the competition of all the others, to make them "unforgettable". (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 50)

Thus, it was by the sophistication of the present hatred in the affirmation of this memory that we could watch the arrival of the ascetisms and its love for the nothingness. We saw the birth of asceticism as a renunciation of the world, renunciation of itself in the name of an ideal, of an idea that served as an anchor for our promise, which, in turn, began to mark our existence, sedentarized in a moral territory. Chastity, punishment, small clerical penalties, frugal sexual, food and language-related restraints among many other daily prohibitions, are streams that dribble our memory and deepen in the bottom the promise that makes us docile and predictable.

Such sufferings, either self-inflicted or imposed by others, are easily acceptable in our society, since we see a value in them: the construction of progress, social well-being, soul salvation, a new possible world - many are the names, beliefs and ideas - but in all we see the presence of a future that justifies the present sacrifice. In this dynamic, we must keep our projects of society at all costs, mark them with iron and fire, guilt and memory, since, more important than implementing them and confronting them with their collapses, it is fundamental that we govern one another for the purpose of these: such corporate models are the fixed ideas that allow us a solid territory, that is, the consciousness of who we are. After all, as Nietzsche asserts: "what revolts in suffering is not the suffering itself, but its lack of meaning" (1999, p. 58).

We see here the clear articulation between two common uses of the term consciousness: cognitive and moral (being able to be conscious and having a conscience or simply being conscious). Consciousness, for Nietzsche, is a kind of organ directed to communication, that is, to the production of homogeneities: a chair, a lamp, an engineer, a psychologist, or the truth, the good, and all these words act on the world trying to produce a homogenization of worldly singularities, which unites them in sets that nullify their differences in function of their similarities. We know that no psychologist is the same as the other, we know that some of them seem more like psychiatrists, others like artists, or even anthropologists, but we nevertheless insist that under the word "psychologists" there is a homogeneous identity set to which we can refer. Such action provides us with greater security, docility, and planning of the world and ourselves. After all, how costly would our lives be if, at every instant and for each singularity, a new name and a new musicality were created?

Thus, this awareness allows us to form a segmented community, a cohesive community, based on the principle of homogeneity of the group: renegade all foreigners, different or strange, as these can be "dangerous" to the maintenance of the established order. Thus, to enjoy the bounties of protection that the herd provides, we give up everything that could be considered distinct, crooked, devious, strange, or wicked to remain a part of the herd and receive its protection.

The fear and vertigo of being alone, separate and independent of the herd is the same fear in the face of words that no longer fit the differences of the world into an identity set: in both cases it is a question of abandoning the assertive security provided by a home that protects, and from this point on we see ourselves as nomadic wanderers delivered to the vertigo of doubts, uncertainties and changes. But would such an assertion necessarily lead us to discard such words on principle? Do Nietzsche's ethics, if we throw ourselves at experimentation, lead to a denial of the possibility of identity and homogenization? In turn, would all identities be identical to each other? Are these questions relevant to the current micropolitical field?

This is especially true when we are confronted with the strengthening of forms of social struggle articulated to well-defined and often binary-opposing identities in their modes of segmentation of the world: men-women, black-white, white-indigenous, cis-trans, hetero-homo, disabled and non-disabled, peripheral-central, among many others. We know that such binarisms have been and are produced in particular from a certain hegemonic normality taken as an absolute point of reference and, therefore, made invisible in its perspective. For example, in the construction of the very notion of rights in the nascent modernity, there was already androcentrism, whiteness, heterogeneity and cisnormativity, among others, from which arise the paths that organize our regimes of speaking, thinking, doing and feeling. From this transcendent center, made invisible in its omnipresence in the Western gaze, we have segmented niches called "deviations" to all those that do not fit into the pattern: the practices of societal distinction that until today separate women, blacks, lgbtts, handicapped, poor; who these people are before this norm has long been instituted.

However, especially in the twentieth century (but since long before) such identities forged by the West were displaced and taken as a power of organization, struggle and identification by these populations. Certainly, in order to affirm such identities that allow social movements to fight for rights, consciousness, memory and all its capacity to forge homogeneities are necessary; after all, such operations are what make the uniting forces possible around a homogeneous community. In the same way, we see the opposition of the "other" as a way of self-affirmation, we follow the need to move from the pattern and seek our identity also through a process of negation of the colonialist normalizing centrality instituted and invisible as a partial perspective. However, even through consciousness, identity and denial in homogenizations and binarisms, we can not simply equate the affirmation of these identities with, for example, the affirmation of an European identity that denies xenophobia to immigrants from the southern hemisphere. Should we take the opening to experimentation as if it were a denial of identity, considering all identity, denial and homogeneity identical and homogeneous with each other?

We capture here the need for a paradoxical movement in the face of identity and resentment: the need not to be identitary with respect to identity, and not to be resentful of resentment by denying all denial. To assume a posture of a priori hatred before them in the name of immanence and experimentation would be to make this immanence a transcendence and a model, without the necessary paradoxical movement of resumption of immanence as a style and not as a single metaphysics. Instead, we can assume the paradoxical movement of an immanence-difference which, in affirming itself, becomes the first and therefore transcendent, but which perceives transcendence itself as immanent returns to its bottom without foundation when it is perceived as immanent to its own statement and never as the first or as the priority reference point of the ethical and aesthetical ontology (Costa, 2012, pp. 127-130).

Even conceiving what we commonly call "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" as practices based more on a morality of debt-obligation than on an ethic-aesthetic of potency-possibility, it would not allow us to equate both perspectives by the simple fact that they tend to normative-punitive individualizations. After all, while the reiteration of colonial duty by what is “politically incorrect” requires the annihilation of difference by violence, the judicialization of the “politically correct”, in most cases, struggles to preserve possibilities of existence: debt-obligations that imply different ethical-aesthetic assertions of the ways of being from the perspective of power.

In both cases we see general principles taken as necessary regardless of the contingencies and singularities of contexts, affirmed with the force of unconditional imperatives, of unforgettable and unbreakable promises. However, can we see a power within the resentment in some of these cases? Can we glimpse paradoxes between the creative force of Nietzsche's forgetfulness and the heavy anchor of promises that say "no"? It seems to us that hatred for hatred can be a strategically necessary operation in our world, causing us to thunder at certain behaviors, postures, stylistics, without blinking openings: maxims such as "torture no more", "sexists shall not pass", among many others, are firm imperatives that we can sustain. However, of course we do not speak here of mere resentment imprisoned to a memorial “no”, but to a “no” that is ready to reinvent its trajectories, as in the movement that is not reduced to producing a memory of blood and tears spilled in the basement of the dictatorship, but enlarges and always recreates itself in the face of the fact that torture was and continues to be a State practice, only now concentrated on another social class. Thus, we speak of a resentful memory, but one that wants, through a fundamental and abiding "no", to be the remembrance that also invents by experiencing itself in the fields of the unknown, the other and contemporaneity. We speak of a promise, a slogan, a resentment that cultivates memory, but in its dissonant affirmation with the current hegemonic stylistics (whiteness, cis-heteronormativity, androcentrism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, etc.), this statement ends by operating a clinical-political displacement of the norm, allowing singularizations to grow in its gaps.

Memory, guilt, promise and homogeneity: we know that in Nietzsche's work these dynamics become psychological types; the man of action and the man of resentment, the aristocrat and the slave, among others. However, Oswaldo Giacóia (2002) indicates that we should not take these modes of existence as types, as personalities or psychic structures, but that we take them psychic dynamics present in each of us: we are complex beings, made of resentment and creation, since the platform of the subjects' constitution is, according to Nietzsche, a living battlefield, always in movement and tension. Perhaps we can add one more warning to that already made by Giacóia: these dynamics are not exactly opposite, but paradoxical, otherwise, we could easily incur a resentment against resentment, in a denial against denial, a thunderous “no” against everything “no”, which would certainly be a forced simplification of the world: we would paint the sky in the umbrella so that we would never abandon its protection. We argue here, on the contrary, that each "no" occurs in a context of single contingencies, acquiring different strategic meanings in the technologies of subjectivation, in this way, while some refusals reinforce established boundaries, others force established limits, hegemonic norms, tensioning our modes of seeing, hearing, saying, feeling the world, enabling the singularization of such modes beyond the norms. We therefore affirm a paradoxical “yes” to the “no” strategically placed next to the tensioning of the norms (whiteness, cis-heteronormativity, androcentrism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, etc). We would thus make Nietzsche's argument more complex:

While all noble morality is born from a triumphant "Yes" to itself, from the beginning the slave morality says "No" to the outside, to another, to a "not-self" - and this "No" is what creates it: the slave morality always requires an opposing and outward world in order to be able to act at all - its action is always a reaction. (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 29)

In the Philosophy of Difference (a heterogeneous plot, but most often a legacy of Nietzsche), we consider that in our daily life we seldom affirm differences, as we always see their reduction to an equality of equality. The very difference would be its nomadic singularity, a primary ontology based on the radical difference of the impossibility of being submitted to identity sets. Thus, difference would be what always escapes all attempts at homogenization and generalizing overcoding. It is what escapes the limits that we had set earlier; it is what breaks with the implicit or explicit metaphysical forms, what transgresses the good sense and the common sense.

The definition of difference presented by Deleuze leads us to think that the great problem in the practices of prejudice and discrimination in society are not differences, but equalities: the right to difference is not given to certain societal groups which are subject to practices of social distinction in identity sets taken as constituted by equals. In this way, being considered an individual or effecting uniqueness becomes a privilege given only to the norm. Lombroso's indication is paradigmatic: "All women fall into the same category, while every man is an individual in himself; the physiognomy of the former conforms to a general pattern; the latter is unique for each case "(Lombroso, 1896, quoted by Scott, 2005, p. 17). Thus, what produces the stigmatization of minority groups are the practices of homogenization ruled by a norm that takes such groups as the deviation from the pattern, that is, practices of inclusion in deviant groups, practices of inclusion of the singularities in an identity set that seeks to overcode them into a set of characteristics that would be common to all its members.

At the same time that this relationship of equality of the "deviants" in their own identity niche takes place, the norm elaborates relations of inequality and asymmetry. It is not a question of the differences established to break with these subgroups of equals, but of the production of an equality that allows the hierarchical comparison between them. If we produce, for example, stigmas about women and blacks, this is because we put them all in the same territory of comparison at an intersection with another set of identities taken as “the norm”.

It is from a production of homogenization, from a common point, that we produce inequality relations. Certainly, since the constitution of human rights, at the time of the French Revolution, we have seen that such formulations are affirmed from the identitary set of men, whites, heterosexuals and holders of a certain amount of goods. However, even so, it is not an assertion of the difference of women and of others in the face of men. Rather, on the contrary, women are understood from a definition of equality among all human beings, universal, making the concreteness of a patriarchal perspective invisible in this assertion of rights by appealing to nature, laws and norms in general as real in themselves - and, therefore, regulators of conduct in society. Thus we see the speech of the Jacobin Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, a fervent abolitionist, in 1793 (the speech on the first anniversary of the Republic), against the claims of the thinker Olympe de Gouges, who sought to extend the rights for women:

Since when is it decent to watch women abandon their homes, the cradles of their children, to go to public places, to speak in galleries, in the Senate forums? Was it to men that nature entrusted domestic care? Did nature give us breasts to breastfeed our children? (Quoted by Scott, 2005, p. 21)

Thus, we saw the production of a set that allowed the establishment of a normal curve where white, heterosexual and property holder men were raised to the standard level, making this normative invisible by adopting it as essential attributes. It is a complex movement: first a common field of equality was formed, from a normative perspective, which allowed for analogical comparisons - which then nullified the radicality of singularities. Subsequently, we had the formation of identity sets that were taken as distinct from each other (blacks, whites, Asians, Amerindians, for example). In this way, we had in this process the constitution of a common plan that tamed these differences (a common plan that was nothing more than a circular segmentation taken as an absolute reference point). Subsequently, these circles of distinction were segmented and, finally, relations of inequality were articulated: difference, equality, distinction, inequality; evidently these are not linear operations, but rather co-generated operations that we have presented here in a didactic and simplified way.

Blacks, as well as women, transgenders and all sexual diversity that displace heteronormativity, are not given the right to singularity, since their characteristics are soon considered attributes of a larger identity group that acts as the essence. However, in addition to these practices of identity-homogenization that produced asymmetric relations of oppression and the like, we also saw the reversal of the struggle in favor of this circular segmentation as a gregarious space of support, reflection, reaction to oppression and resistance. The assumption of the deviation as a practice of resistance is an important marker, especially of the so-called civil rights movements, which revert to the imposed social distinction (which forces the insertion of subjectivities into homogeneous identity sets) and makes it possible that a homogenizing operation that forms identities (we women, we gays, we trans, we blacks) can have effects of difference by dislocating, transgressing, breaking, interfering with the centrality of the set taken as an absolute reference, making its concreteness and, particuarly, the weight of its privileges and oppressions, susceptible: an inventive difference affirmed by the paradoxical resumption of identities that displaces and subverts the hegemonic norms and re-enables singularities.

Here we return to the question that started this essay: passages in the midst of exhaustion. We have followed how the struggles of the present articulate identity and difference in their clear displacement effects by shaking the placidity of the set taken as normative reference. Thus we observed that such circular segmentations affirm, through identities and cultures of memories, the consistency necessary for the hard struggle of the micropolitical routine, without necessarily being essential in inherent fates before which we are always and necessarily submitted: there is no shortage of singularities in its daily clinical-policy of breaching the norm and promoting possibilities of singularities. Thus, such identity struggles articulate a new field of possibilities in the midst of the collapse of left-wing projects; identity practices taken here as differences and as a non-subjection of the subject to its true self (Foucault, 2004, p. 276).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Dec 2018
• Date of issue
  2018

History

• Received
  16 Oct 2017
• Reviewed
  30 Sept 2018
• Accepted
  30 Sept 2018