What truly threatens societies, if it is neither man against nature, nor the consumer, nor man against woman?
In this interview, Dominique Pagani distinguishes the environment, a product of human praxis, from nature, which he refuses to deify. He defends the former and opposes an environmentalism he considers anti-humanist. He links Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, readers of an irrationalist Nietzsche, to the counterrevolution of Capital in the 1970s and to the "liberal-libertarianism" described by Clouscard. He rejects the notion of a "consumer society," since everyone is both producer and consumer, and reduces classes to two according to the relation between what one produces and what one consumes. He defends a social feminism against an identity-based feminism that divides the exploited. He concludes on the need for a theoretical detour.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
A close collaborator and friend of Michel Clouscard, Dominique Pagani is, like him, a thinker whose theses and reflections on our modern world deserve discussion, inasmuch as they upend many current conceptions, and notably conceptions prevalent in the ranks of the radical left: on ecology, feminism or the consumer society. That is why we wanted to talk with him about these burning issues: an interview that our colleagues at the blog Le Comptoir were kind enough to publish in part. Here, then, is the interview, as conducted by this humble Isegorian blog, and reproduced here in its entirety.
When the discussion turns to questions of ecology, you like to present yourself as “the most anti-green man in Europe.” Beyond what seems to be provocation, what is it that bothers you in today’s ecologist movement?
One can speak of provocation, at least as an appetizer, if you like, but my aim is to awaken rather than to provoke. A small clarification to begin with: I am not anti-ecology, I am anti-ecologist, and the distinction is important. My position is simple: I am an ardent defender of the environment, I want to reassure all those who are sincerely attached to it. And besides, just between us, I have never met anyone whose ideal was to live in a polluted, ugly and dangerous environment. I have never met anyone who wears himself out dirtying his own home, spreading bad smells or noxious fumes through it …never! Preserving the best possible environment is a cause that commands unanimity. Only, the environment—and here I would like to introduce a distinction that is elementary in the literal sense (in the sense that it ought to be taught in elementary school)—is not the same thing as nature.
Look at the environment that surrounds us here, it is one of the most beautiful in Europe, with the most beautiful part of the Alps, the surroundings are superb. But what is there that is natural here? To speak of “nature” when one is facing a landscape amounts to intellectual burglary and to a denial of the exploitation of surplus value, for it comes down to stealing the memory of all the immense material, intellectual and even spiritual efforts accomplished by human beings over thousands of years, which have produced this miracle of the real setting. I see a very pleasant paved path running along the lake, between lawns and gallery forest, trees planted and spaced out, I see benches, I see people talking—language did not fall from the trees! Yesterday I was visiting, in Burgundy, a Romanesque chapel in the middle of a wheat field; the whole made a marvel, in the sense given to that word by the “Matter of Britain,” as one says when speaking of the Arthurian tales: it goes without saying that if there were ever any question of razing the whole thing to lay out the parking lot of a shopping mall, I would be among the first to oppose it, as a friend of the environment, certainly, but absolutely not of nature, for the chapel, like the wheat field, embodies in its own way a victory over the immediate, pre-human given. And that is precisely why they are “marvels,” literally speaking, i.e. supernatural entities, of a supernaturality wrested from the field of the imaginary alone and embodied in the effective reality of history and geography through the mediation of what Marxists—I am thinking here of the immense Clouscard—call praxis. For thousands of years man has been striving to establish within the universe a shred of truly magical space-time, which extends only insofar as nature recedes: for there to be a field, there has to be a non-forest or a non-marsh, or even a non-sea—think of the Dutch, who could conquer the ground of their daily existence only by encroaching on the infinite expanse of sodium chloride! For man to appear, what efforts it takes, and what struggles against nature!
In short, if ecology expresses the defense of the environment, I am for it; if it means the defense of nature, I oppose it as resistance opposes collaboration. The environment, I adore it, and I am the first to defend every fruit of human sweat and intelligence, but then the aim is not to “protect nature” or “the planet”: how can one not be weary to the point of nausea of this discourse of the collaborators of “Beeeeing,” to speak like the incense-bearers of the most Nazi of philosophers.
It is time to remember that real nature, the nature that is the object of physics alone, is more than inhuman: icy or incandescent, infinitely more full of ammonia, methane or phosphorus than of chlorophyll! So one must not idealize it by associating it with some equilibrium or other that it would be sacrilege to upset: the notion of “equilibrium” implies that one stops the cursor at an ideal point; it thus refers to a finality, and therefore to a subject, that is, to a counter-universe in which one passes from the universe of “somethings” to that of the “someone,” that is to say not merely something other than nature, which for its part is nothing but mechanism, but exactly its opposite. For centuries people raved on this subject—I am thinking of Aristotle when he said that if bodies fall and accelerate in their fall, it is because they are hurrying to rejoin their natural place, supposed to be “below,” and that this can be likened to horses which, on their way back to the farm, speed up on catching the good smell of hay coming from the nearby stable: all this phantasmagoria (which in no way diminishes the prodigious effort of intelligibility deployed by the greatest disciple of Plato) was dispelled by the Galilean-Cartesian enlightenment. Real nature couldn’t care less about man, nor about the animal either; it couldn’t care less about life: without even speaking of the dinosaurs, it has several times liquidated and almost annihilated nearly all living species. Life, for that matter: do you find much of it in the universe? Well, to remain reasonable, it is highly probable that there is life elsewhere, for purely statistical reasons deriving from the law of large numbers, but for the moment the only life we know of is here. So this identification, through a cascade of fallacious syllogisms, between green, organic, nature,—all these elements have nothing to do with one another—is a matter of collective delirium! Green in the universe, look for it, on Mars for example: is there any? On the Moon, is there any? The universe is not green!
One often finds among the greens this same kind of phantasmatic reasoning, with regard to global warming, for example. The climate is warming: so what? When the Vikings arrived, the first to do so, in Greenland, they called it “Green Land,” and it was much warmer there than today. That was the famous heat peak between the ninth and the thirteenth century, before the Little Ice Age from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. One has to understand that there is no ideal temperature in Being—to speak like the philosophers –, just as there is no equilibrium in the universe, except metaphorically.
Would the ecologist movement, then, be an antihumanism?
Yes, it could not be more so. And I am worried to see millions of children (to say nothing of teenagers), somewhat defenseless, confronted with the dominant ideology hammered home in the media down to the least wildlife documentary: they acquire a hatred of man and a love of nature from everything they hear, everything they see. Look at that fellow with his ultralights over Kilimanjaro, Nicolas Hulot, a likable guy for all that, whose “beautiful images” I do, moreover, appreciate, sullied though they are by the tedious untruths of their commentary: “And here are peoples who have known how to live in harmony with nature”: and there he shows us three Maasai to whom he gave three pennies just beforehand so that they would recite the obligatory vulgate, whereas each of the three dreams only of a television broadcasting that several-times-a-day miracle, the weather report—the Maasai are herders in perpetual search of pasture—or even of a simple transistor radio to follow the soccer matches!
We live in an ambient climate of the deification of nature, even though it is only by extricating himself from nature that man acquires freedom. Think of the conclusion of Goethe’s Faust—40 years of reflection between the first Faust and the last! –: that final scene of the second Faust where he is in Holland, blind, on the point of dying, the Devil still has not managed to get his soul, because man, that restless animal, is always unsatisfied, and he hears it said that a dike is being built; in the same instant he realizes that the Devil has lost the game from the moment there appears the possibility, granted by praxis alone (to speak like Marx), of “living free on a free land.” Here is Goethe’s conclusion: “Living free on a free land” which, through the labor of each, has freed itself from its constraints. As Rousseau says, if “the impulse of appetite alone,” a term that connotes the instincts, and therefore nature, “is slavery, obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom.” And the most important word in this sentence is the “oneself.” It is the law one has prescribed to oneself and not the law that has been prescribed to me, that a tyrant, that an illegitimate power has prescribed to me by force. So that is one of the first things: as a man, I have a value of freedom which is worth what it is worth, it can be debated, but when I study nature, thanks first to Galileo, then to Newton, Einstein and still others, I see less and less freedom and more and more necessities. I see laws, implacable ones, which suffer no exception: the moon has no other possible trajectory than to revolve around the Earth, without the slightest chance, just to take its mind off things, of revolving around Saturn!
“We live in an ambient climate of the deification of nature, even though it is only by extricating himself from nature that man acquires freedom.”
These are things one must keep in mind, otherwise we head for barbarism, as we are being pushed to do at present. Contemporary philosophy, that of the victors of the Cold War, is a relentless assault on this triangle whose 3 vertices are man, the universal and progress. I quote Foucault: “Man is a recent creature and fortunately destined to disappear soon.” In the documentaries I was talking about, which the kids watch, all they do is tell them that man is wicked: “look at these paradises we have ruined”: it is nothing but a sermon of anti-humanism, of the deification of nature and the demonization of man.
We must not forget that the first organized nature reserve in Europe was created in Thuringia, that (magnificent) “green heart of Germany,” as it was called under the Third Reich. And Wagner, that rabid anti-Semite (even if his music reaches such heights that Nietzsche’s psychic health imploded from frequenting it), was a member of a vegetarian organization and campaigned passionately against the vivisection of animals, while evoking, among the first to do so, the hypothesis of a Vernichtung of the Jews… Pollution, you see? There is that side to it now. Soon they will be explaining to Africans that mosquitoes must be protected… One of the leading causes of death in the world is malaria. I have seen classes decimated after the rainy season. There were gaps in my class, people who had died during the vacation. Well, this mosquito, which today kills more people than AIDS, than car accidents, and which, not content with inoculating malaria, is the vector of many other terrifying diseases, I guarantee you it is pure organic, hyper-organic, without any artificial additives.
You have just mentioned Michel Foucault as one of the representatives of this modern antihumanism, but he is also, as you often point out, one of the representatives of irrationalism, along with, among others, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and their ilk. What dangers do you perceive in these philosophical currents?
I do not like playing the imprecator, as those you mention never stopped doing against the three favorite targets of postmodernity: humanism, progress and the universal. So I do not want to demonize them, but simply to draw historical correlations. Their thought appears at the moment when Capital takes things back in hand, around the 70s, between the “Thirty Glorious Years” and the “Forty Shameful Years”; that is, at the moment of recovering the ground lost since the Liberation and the victory over Nazism. Do not take my word for it, take measurements as scientists do: take the two great forces that decline on the French political chessboard from 68 onward, Gaullism and communism, that is, the 2 great counter-Atlanticist forces, at least those that carried the most weight on the right as on the left. So both of them decline after Cohn-Bendit and Deleuze… how curious! Not that there aren’t excellent reasons to be anti-Gaullist—I myself always voted against the Gaullist governments at the time –, there are also, sometimes, excellent reasons to be anticommunist—religious, personal, biographical, etc… –, but when one is at once anti-Gaullist and anticommunist, that does remind you of something, doesn’t it, historically? Pétainism! It is curious that we find this same target as the 70s approach, that is to say—and it is now that we see it, in the harsh light of the crisis we are going through: we no longer have any excuse, as we did in the “seventies,” for not seeing it—at the moment when the economic process begins that has brought us to where we are, to the financialization of the economy. I do not want to play the paranoiac who sees causality everywhere, but one could at least establish some indubitable correlation: it is in the 70s, of which May 68 is only a prodrome, that the financialized economy appears, against industrial investment, and that mass unemployment reappears.
So it is at the moment when these decisive mutations of the 70s appear, when Nixon flings in the face of the world the biggest bogus check of all time by decoupling the dollar from gold, when the Cold War turns around, when the Soviet Union begins to go down on one knee, it is at the moment when the present misfortune takes shape, that we see surging onto the ideological ramparts of the battle a whole constellation of “French doctors” (for France is the country where the Marxisant intelligentsia has been, since the Liberation, the most battle-hardened), developing the themes rehashed ever since to the point of nausea, from within the most snarling of counter-revolutions, that of the “neocons,” of neoconservatism, thus bringing back into fashion, renamed as “new struggles,” counter-values that were thought to be forever buried beneath the rubble of the Third Reich; a revanchist counter-revolution (which never got over the traumatic reversal of Stalingrad) and all the bloodier for it. Do not think that I am shutting you, along with your readers (and myself with you), into a mere “debate of ideas” against a backdrop of conspiracism; think rather of the “Maoist” Khmer Rouge, whose first and terrifying decimations, even before emptying Phnom Penh, that polluted Babylon, to fill the green and therefore healthy countryside of the delta, were committed against thousands of pro-Soviet Vietnamese locked in combat with the US war machine, with one of the deadliest battles inscribed in the appalling “black book” of anti-communism. These génocidaires had done their ideological and political training… in Paris! Under the mentors of the anti-CP “left,” and were diplomatically backed tooth and nail by all the Atlanticist powers (“Western” is a murkier term), after their defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese communists, to the great dismay of our mao-spontex.
“Contemporary philosophy, that of the victors of the Cold War, is a relentless assault on this triangle whose 3 vertices are man, the universal and progress.”
At the Liberation, at the end of the war, the minimal consensus had been “never again,” that is to say doing everything to eradicate the brown plague, notably through education—and war was indeed waged… but on the red plague! Not on the brown plague: that was the beginning of “the Cold War.” That is the original sin on which the contemporary world rests. Priority was given to the struggle against the red plague. Now, “these new struggles,” it is precisely from this reversal onward that they begin to operate, and that the counter-revolution in which Capital takes things back in hand is prepared.
These thinkers relied in particular on Nietzsche, but not the Nietzsche I love, the one who said—in a work that is not marginal and that is called Thus Spoke Zarathustra—this magnificent sentence: “I am weary of all the poets: they muddy their waters so that they may seem deep.” No, their Nietzsche, that of the likes of Onfray, Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, in short the sinister version that the most Nazi of the shepherds of Beeeing had made of him beforehand, is the Nietzsche-horribile dictu! The one who defends irrationalism, the one who combats the immense “theoretico-logical” effort accomplished from Plato to Marx, from Descartes to Kant and then Hegel, denouncing it as one and the same stratagem so that the mass of oxen that we are, able to attain only reason and not “poematic” genius, may cast their net over exceptional men: we do not have the same Nietzsche. Just as it is not ecology I hold a grudge against but ecologism, it is not Nietzsche I hold a grudge against but the fraudulent Nietzschean discourse that appeared at the same time as the great reversal of the Cold War, that is to say when everything became an instrument of combat for striking down every reference not only to Marx, but also to any idea of progress and humanism. What I reproach them for is having taken part in the reassertion of control that was being prepared at that moment on the international level.
It is from this school of thought that this counter-revolution made its mark, a school of thought that I sum up under the syntagm of libertarian liberalism—which Clouscard was the first to formulate, even if it has caught on now—an important syntagm since it brings into relation things that are separate and even considered completely opposed: either you are Pompidou or you are Cohn-Bendit, people thought, before Clouscard revealed to us that the relation of the latter to the former is that of the promoter to the entrepreneur! I warn against all these reversals of values: their ideological expression dates from that Parisian seedbed of bio-politicians and other rhizomists, anti-Platonists, anti-Christians (cunning anti-Semitism knew how to adapt), anti-Cartesians, anti-Hegelians, anti-Marxists.
To come back to Faust, let us listen to the warning of Mephistopheles: “If you despise science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost.” Science and reason are not always sexy or fun, but they are solid stuff; they bring men together instead of dividing them. Let me remind you that the statements that lie at the basis of all mathematical rationality, the “first notions” (definitions, axioms, postulates, etc…), Euclid called “requests”: you see the humanism there is behind that word, I ask you to grant me this axiom, this postulate, otherwise everything I say is false. It is magnificent, before stating something that must no longer be contradicted one must first submit it to someone: that is where one sees that the rational and the collective are linked, to attack the one is to attack the other, it is to attack the zoon politikon that man is.
Instead of the analysis of this counter-revolution of Capital, what we have seen develop, especially on the left, is the denunciation of what is commonly called the “consumer society.” For your part, you vehemently reject this concept, going so far as to say that if a consumer society truly existed, it would be socialism realized and you would run to it right away. So what do you see that is mendacious in this term?
You are asking dangerous questions, that is to say questions that make me say dangerous things. For the moment, let us speak humbly: what is philosophizing, if not reflecting on a material that does not come from philosophy? If philosophy is done in the final year of high school, it is because people think that at the end of a cycle of studies one has learned enough things in literature, history, geography and the sciences to begin setting them before the mirror that turns everything around, the mirror of reflection—so let us reflect in order to answer this question.
I am in front of the television, and I see a program about “consumers” in a supermarket: but what does it mean, in the end, consumers? The journalist goes to question what is called a “consumer.” He asks: “So what do you do?” and the person answers, “Ah, me, I’m just off the three-shift rotation at the factory, I’m worn out, but I have to do some shopping before going home”—the guy is a producer, why do they call him a consumer?
They question a 2nd person: she is a lowly clerk at the Post Office, who is fed up too, who has a few hours to do her shopping before getting yelled at by her husband and her children, after having been yelled at by her office manager and by the public standing in line because the sector has obtained the elimination of posts, a public that insults her all day long, emboldened by the anti-civil-servant consensus of popular culture. And these people get called consumers? It is extraordinary to what extent we have abandoned dialectics. We are all consumer-producers, or producer-consumers.
Now, let us be a little more abstract and think socially. Socially, there are two great social classes in humanity. Of course there are thousands of them, social classes are complicated; besides, at the end of the unfinished manuscript of Marx’s Capital, one sees a title in capital letters: “Social Classes.” And he dies. We must also talk about it, this notion central to Marxism, which had its in-itself, as Hegel would say, but did not have time to be developed for-itself. These thousands of social stratifications, I reduce them to two, as Michel Clouscard taught me to do: since time immemorial, there has been the class of those who consume more than they produce and that of those who produce more than they consume.
For it really is a bit much, this reigning notion of “consumerism”: let us submit it to our reflecting mirror. From what point on does one decide that I consume “too much”? It is, after all, an extraordinary interference in what is most sovereign in me. In the hypothetical case of a period of scarcity, where it turns out that there is not enough for everyone, limiting oneself is very good. I lived for quite a long time in countries where scarcity was the rule, so there the discourse of limitation is legitimate. But apart from that, from what point on does one decide that I consume too much? I am going to answer you very precisely, that is to say in quantifiable terms, the opposite of the discourse of the doxa: it is from the moment when I consume more than I produce.
Nowadays we are told that we ought to go into raptures over having a table, over eating from a plate instead of eating on the ground like the dog, but we are not going to go into raptures every day over having a table and a plate, given that we have had them for millennia: it is something acquired, so it is not a luxury. Something that was luxurious at one time, for example aluminum saucepans, which formerly were owned only by extremely rich families because they were prohibitively expensive, can now be available everywhere: what has changed is production, economic value is a function of that production. It is in relation to the economic state of my historical present that I must judge what is too much and what is not enough, and not with reference to an imaginary past.
You know when people say, “Say what you like, but all the same our standard of living has changed, me, when I was little…”: that is idiotic reasoning! A standard of living must be assessed in relation to the possibilities of today’s economy, that is, of the present productive potential. In the same way that I am not going to fall into depression because I cannot go and spend my vacation on the planet Mars, given that we are not in a position to do so, I am not, conversely, going to regard myself as living in luxury because in another era my way of life would not have been possible for all.
“It is an extraordinary return of the old guilt-tripping of the sinner by the Church.”
That being so, I do not understand how, when we have barely emerged from the darkness, we are already being called “dirty cynical consumers.” I belong to one of the richest countries in the world, France, I am not among the most deprived in this country, nor among the richest, for that matter, and well, I find that I do not consume enough. I am going to strike you as scandalous, shameless, but frankly I do not walk into stores without looking at the prices, buying the top of the line, no, so far I have not had the opportunity: I was a senior executive at one time, I earned a very good living, and yet I have never bought a car for cash in my life. Do you know many people who buy cars for cash? You want ten grand, here you go! What I mean is that we are not unbridled consumers, the limits are very much there. I find that I do not consume enough, and it is to this “not enough” and this “too much” that I would like to draw your reflection, because they are value judgments, they are not economic notions. Note that we are now in crisis, and the only crisis that recalls, even remotely, by its gravity, what we are living through is the crisis of the 30s: the parallel is commonplace. In the 30s, an economist had spoken of the “absurd spectacle of crowds starving to death in front of overflowing granaries,” coffee was thrown into locomotives to drive prices up, milk was poured into the gutters. And what does that mean? That too much milk was being produced? There was only one fashionable word—already!—at the time, and that was “overproduction,” just as we are now labeled “overconsumers,” “overproduction” of cereals, of meat, of milk. And yet read Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath: what one sees there is rather too many children dying for lack of milk!
It is an extraordinary return of the old guilt-tripping of the sinner by the Church, which used to tell him, “You wallow in luxury, you consume too much, you wallow in the delights of this world.” That is serious, all the same! So no, the majority of people are not cynical consumers and, in my opinion, given the level of production and technology made possible today, I rather find that we are falling very far below what we could consume.
Through your profession, you have very often been confronted with the destitution and suffering of populations in the poor countries of Africa, and more particularly with those of women. And yet you reject the dominant Western feminism: why?
All other things being equal, nothing is more exploited than the poor woman in a poor country. What is the day of an African woman in the Sahel like? She is a woman who gets up at daybreak at the latest, who starts off walking several kilometers to fetch water, then she goes straight on for more kilometers to fetch the wood to heat the water, and after that she starts pounding, and until the end of the day she will pound with a kid on her back and almost one in each arm. But there has been a division of tasks in history, let us take Africa: look at Niger, for example, but it is the same thing in Mali, where from September on you know that there will not be a drop of rain for the next six months, what do the men do then? They go down 500 or 1000 kilometers to the South, they are migrants, they go to Ghana or to Côte d’Ivoire, where the climate is wetter, and they go and sell themselves as farm laborers. So there are men who leave for the South, far away from their homes, and so what? There are hysterical feminists who will come along and say to the husband, “You’re a bastard!” as if there were no home, as if there were no family, as if the one were the intimate enemy of the other. There are certainly scoundrels among these poor wretches of guys, but beyond this marginal fringe most of the Africans I have known work like crazy, men or women, to survive, or quite simply to live better. The shared misfortunes of a man and a woman who both manage as best they can to survive as a household, whether on the hills of Rwanda planting tea or on the docks of the port of Abidjan, and in our societies too, are the misfortunes of the poor above all. Both, men and women, are exploited by a monstrous system. What threatens these societies, and ours too, is not a cleavage between man and woman, but other men and women who, for their part, are the beneficiaries of the exploitation of the former.
So yes, I will always be on the side of social feminism, when it is a matter of granting women the same rights as men. Nevertheless I combat this feminism of the (thousand) media plateaus à la Fourest, the kind that does not defend the emancipation of women for the greater benefit of humanity as a whole, but which, in a bloody denial of class struggles, ontologically opposes women to men, as if they were first and foremost abstractions. And above all, I reproach certain feminists for framing the problem as an identity quarrel. Instead of all of us being united—“proletarians of all countries, unite”—against a minority (of men and of ladies!) that would not hold out long if we were united, we let ourselves be divided between Hutus and Tutsis, between men and women, between forty-somethings and young graduates, Shiites and Sunnis, gays and straights… the list is as long as the regression it brings about! These “ontological” identities are what is most imaginary and most dangerous. In Greek mythology, you thus have Procrustes, who stood at the crossroads of several roads and caught passersby to put them on a table, and they had to be exactly the length of the table, which of course never happens, things are not so exact in reality. So, when people were too short, he stretched, he racked, and when it was too long he cut, until Theseus rendered him harmless. That is the imaginary when one absolutely insists on making it correspond to reality. One of the rare sentences of Deleuze’s that I could countersign states that the most dangerous thing is to be “the prey of the other’s dream.” Such are the realities that identitarian thinking carries with it.
It is frightening, and we are all in the process of fulfilling this prophecy of Clouscard’s: “Capitalism (in its final phase, ‘liberal-libertarian,’ that is to say pre-fascist) will bring civil war among the poor.” Unfortunately, the dominant feminism takes up this war of identities, which is in my opinion the deadliest thing in the world at present.
To conclude, what is to be done in the face of this impasse in which our world seems to find itself, how should the struggle be waged?
What is most lacking today in the political struggle is the theoretical detour. Lenin said: “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice,” and in Plato’s Republic, which raises precisely this question of what is to be done in the city, Socrates answers by saying that one must make an “immense detour,” for there are too many things that we do not know and that are not clear. And I thank you for having given me the opportunity to clarify a few of them, however slightly.