Mao and Manichaeism: An Episode in the Politics of Purity

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Notes

¹ As opposed to other, more Leninist groups, such as Badiou, Michel and Lazarus's U.C.F.M.L., the GP already practiced a kind of semi-anarchist spontaneist politics, which resulted in them being derisorily branded Maos-spontex, after the brand of cleaning products. Lecourt dismisses them as a ‘perfunctory variety of Bakuninite anarchism’, adding: ‘For in elaborating the “positive” content of the Western ideological theme of ‘dissidence’, the move they are involved in, which they are careful to present as a renunciation of Marxist theory out of a concern for political efficacy, is in fact simply a regression on the very terrain of the anarchist tradition where they were already located: a regression from Bakunin to Stirner, from anarchism as a revolutionary movement to the metaphysical speculations of absolute individualism’. Quoted in Dominique Lecourt, ‘Dissidence or Revolution?’ [1978], in The Mediocracy: French Philosophy since 1968 (London: Verso, 2001), p.183.

² Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Ontologie de la révolution I. L'Ange: Pour une cynégetique du semblant (Paris, Grasset, 1976); Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Ontologie de la révolution II. Le Monde: Réponse à la question «Qu'est-ce que les droits de l'homme?» (Paris, Grasset, 1978).

³ André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers [1977], trans. Brian Pearce (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980).

⁴ See Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy. These can be complemented by a reading of Linhart, Aubral and Delcourt and Dews. Perhaps the most sophisticated approach to the phenomenon, through the prism of the place of the intellectual, is provided by Jacques (and Danielle) Rancière's essays from the time published in Révoltes logiques.

⁵ Gilles Deleuze, ‘À propos des nouveaux philosophes et d'un problème plus général’, Minuit, 24, May (1977). Originally published as a free supplement, the interview is now available in Gilles Deleuze, ‘On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem)’, Two Regimes of Madness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade (Semiotext(e): New York, 2007), p.144.

⁶ One of the most humorous moments in Contre la nouvelle philosophie comes with the following vignette, which sardonically synthesises the coordinates of L'Ange: ‘This is the scene in the head of Jambet and Lardreau: 350 million Chinese proudly brandishing their bleeding sex toward the empty tribune of president Mao’. Quoted in François Aubral and Xavier Delcourt, Contre la nouvelle philosophie (Paris, Gallimard, 1977), pp.136-137.

⁷ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire – Livre XVII. L'envers de la psychanalyse (Seuil: Paris, 1991), p.21.

⁸ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire – Livre XVII, p.20.

⁹ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L'Ange, p.34.

¹⁰ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L'Ange, p.10.

¹¹ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L'Ange, p.10.

¹² Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L'Ange, p.12.

¹³ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Le Monde, p.192.

¹⁴ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L'Ange.

¹⁵ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Le Monde, p.204.

¹⁶ See Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

¹⁷ Jacques Rancière, Les scènes du peuple (Lyon: Horlieu éditions, 2003), p.4.

¹⁸ I have tried to address this question in my ‘Communism as Separation’ in Peter Hallward (ed), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.138-149.

¹⁹ Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp.224-225.

²⁰ Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, p.225.