ARBRE À PALABRES

Any introduction to English translations of writing by Jacques Camatte needs to acknowledge the prolonged efforts of Fredy Perlman, David Brown, Alex Trotter and Rob Lucas as well as those of Unpopular Books who kept translations made in the 1970s in print circulation. It’s safe to say that these efforts took place at a distance from academic institutions or mainstream publishing houses. The writing itself, the works of Camatte, were informed by the revolutionary milieu in which he was involved from at least the 1950s, and can be said to be the outcome of an independent-minded and autodidact impulse which began with a Marxist exegesis that still retains its intense speculative focus. Despite his abandoning of the theory of the proletariat, Camatte studied and wrote on Marx throughout his life. He retained an affinity to Marx, as he did to many other writers (including Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller and André Leroi-Gourhan), that mark his works as accompanyings, as ongoing non-judgemental conversations based upon a sense of solidarity and mutual enquiry.

The thought-provoking impact of his earlier writings – by which he is mostly known and through which he is still sometimes dismissively assessed – may explain why there has been less interest, or enthusiasm, for his later writings which, following upon a thorough study of the Left-Communist current, amount to a far from straight-forward re-articulation of revolutionary theory (in its stead he comes to speak of inversion). This is perhaps why he was awarded various epithets. He was a primitivist, a hippie, a back-to-the-lander, a Baudrillardian doom-monger, and, my personal favourite, a psychedelic Bordigist. These monikers, intended as insults, may well have been provoked by the theoretical and emotional difficulties that Camatte’s work brought to the milieus: they dealt with the evanescence (as Camatte might say), the gradual fading of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat to which many of us had more than an intellectual attachment.

Another explanation for what, perhaps unfairly, could be called an Anglo-speaking ‘neglect’ of three decades of his research and writing is, as is perhaps already becoming clear, the sheer amount of works he has produced over this time. This may sound dramatic and overly-fawning but one example of this vast output can be seen in what could be called his magnum opus: Émergence de Homo Gemeinwesen. This work, which could be called an anthropogenesis of Homo sapiens – or, applying the words of Camatte, “an investigation of the human psyche” – was begun in 1986 and was being continually added-to up until the later additions of the 2020s. One could also draw attention to his book length study of psychoanalysis, L’Oeuvre de Freud. Both of these works saw Camatte developing new concepts which feature in some of these newly translated works and for which we will offer fledgling explanations drawn from Camatte’s own in-process glossary.¹

So, the sheer bulk of Camatte’s untranslated work presents difficulties. Where to begin is one. With his contemporary commentaries on current events (Covid, Ukraine) or in the deep pre-modern dynamics that gave rise to enigmatic and avidity-inducing concepts like speciosis-ontosis and dereliction? A further challenge is the way that Camatte, as a polymath, disregards disciplinary boundaries. To fully translate Camatte, especially his long-form works, entails, at different turns, some kind of knowledge of marxism, value theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, philosophy, paleontology, geology, reproductive biology etc. Any prospective translator would have to proceed tentatively and, at times, blindly, as Camatte does not just skim the surface of these disciplines, but chews on them, turns them over and integrates them into his work which, on some occasions is not without pages of digression. On this latter, it could also be offered that another less problematic difficulty lies in the fact that Camatte’s work, as it appears on the Revue Invariance website, seems not to have been edited. It most definitely does not come across as peer reviewed!

On this issue I was involved in an email correspondence with Camatte several years ago about one or two translation projects that were eventually published by Ill Will. At times Camatte’s writings are quite clipped, at others his sentences are labyrinthine and occasionally contain repetitions. There was thus a strong temptation, when translating, to also make editorial changes. However minimal these were in draft translations, Camatte passionately refused them. I took this to mean that he preferred a more literal translation as opposed to any mediating or re-writing encroachment upon his texts. This had its own issues when it came to some of his key concepts and frequently used words. These became the subject of a honing-in. For instance, the French word enfermement which could be translated as ‘confinement’ or ‘imprisoning’ etc, was not sufficient for Camatte who preferred ‘shutting-in’: in this way Camatte stressed not just the physical sense of constriction, but a psychical sense of on-going processes of mental enclosure which imply not just dogmatic dismissal but dissociative states etc.

Turning to the writings translated here, and, as mentioned above, it is useful to offer a guide to some of the word-concepts that Camatte had developed over the years. Although he has supplied an on-line glossary to aid his readers (this seems akin to a FAQ) their meanings can be seen to be still evolving and shifting in the time since this glossary was written. This is as much about the way that a single word can, for Camatte, carry a polysemy, a poetic resonance that retaliates against the fixing of meaning and, almost contrary to what we expect from theory, makes reading his writings a personable interaction, a witness to improvisation. There is no haranguing, no polemical put-downs, no intellectual racketeering, no self-aggrandisement. A dialogism? A poetry made by all? Let’s see…

Glossary

Dereliction

In the Glossary entry for this word the following can be found: “A concept of theological origin: the state of the abandoned creature of God. It expresses total dependence and the loss of all support, of all reference points. The concepts of Hilflosigkeit (S. Freud), Geworfenheit (M. Heidegger), Loneliness (H. Arendt) and Crisis of Presence (E. de Martino) can all imply a state of dereliction.”

In ‘Becoming of the Inversion,’ Camatte impactfully describes dereliction as the “anxiety of being alone.”

Imprint

For ‘empriente’ Camatte gives: “A concept created by K. Lorentz, widely adopted by A. Janov. It is the memory trace left by a trauma that can later be activated, leading to replays. R. Hubbard identified something similar with his concept of the engram.”

To this can be added the following by Arthur Janov: “Imprints, as I use the term, are repressed memories which find their way into the biological system and produce distorted functions. These distortions can be both organic and psychological. The formation of imprints takes place during early childhood, and falls off critically after about the age of ten. That is, it would take a much greater force after that to engrave an imprint than at the age of two, for example.”²

In ‘Emergence and Becoming of Ontosis’, Camatte speaks of imprints as “potentially indelible memory-traces” and as “behavioural patterns.”

Inversion

This word, which seems to take the place not only of ‘revolution’ but of what Camatte sometimes terms ‘liberation-emergence’, is described in the following manner in the Glossary: “Inversion refers to the establishment of a future contrary to that effected up to this day which comprises of: separation from nature, repression, refusal, abstraction, riots (uprisings, revolutions) but also wars and peace. Inversion can take place by accessing the Gemeinwesen dimension within us in the here and now and amidst the community of those who converge and participate. It is therefore not a question of returning to an earlier phase, to an ancestral behaviour, but accessing something germinating in us, in this case: the deep naturalness which has always been repressed, (more or less obscured) as well as continuity with all living beings and with the cosmos.”  

It could be suggested that the emphasis that Camatte, in his later works, places on birth and childhood, is an indicator that inversion is accessible through an awareness of a parental repression that “combined with the setting up of the dynamics of enmity and the elimination of affectivity”, effectively elides the newborn as a “unique and absolutely new being.” Inversion then becomes ‘revolutionary’ in terms of actively nourishing singularities, or as Camatte puts it, “to enable each and everyone to assert themselves as both individuality and Gemenwisen.” ³

Replay(s), Replaying etc.        

Camatte’s word is ‘rejouement.’ From the Glossary: “A concept widely used by Arthur Janov, deriving from Freud’s notion of ‘repetition compulsion,’ indicating that we tend, unconsciously, to re-perform what we have experienced following trauma, or to re-perform what our parents have experienced.”

Retraction, retracted etc.

‘Escamotage’ is a frequently used word in Camatte’s later writings. It is mainly translated here as ‘retraction,’ but also implies ‘evading’ and is close to his use of ‘conjurer’ (conjuring-away). The Glossary defines ‘escamotage’ as “A dynamics that make important facts disappear while often giving the impression of their being taken into account.”

In ‘Arising and Becoming of Ontosis’, Camatte makes reference to the Lacanian notions of ‘foreclosure’ and ‘scotomisation.’

Speciosis-Ontosis

At the very minimum the challenging concept of speciosis-ontosis could be linked to phylogenesis and ontogenesis. To this minimum would have to be added the fact that these new concepts have arisen because, for Camatte, the notion of ‘psychosis' is insufficient to describe the madness of a species that, over millennia, has transitioned from living in continuity with the rest of the living world to living in a discontinuity conditioned by the manifold traumas that this discontinuity brings about, but which remain at the level of unconscious emotions. Speciosis-Ontosis, then, operates on the human being at the level of its species-being (phylogenesis) and at the level of its individually-lived life (ontogenesis), and these, as Camatte suggests are united (hence the hyphen) by being lived and experienced as simultaneously diachronous and synchronous.

This plays havoc with the periodisation debates in that with speciosis the historical time-span is widened to take into consideration the rise of hunting in the Paleolithic, the domestication of animals and agriculture in the Neolithic and the enslavement of women over millennia. Any “psychosis of the species”, then, is traced back by Camatte to human activities that, in seeking protection from the threat of extinction (which Camatte sees as an imprint) give rise to a human psychism informed by traumas that are fled from. This fleeing, this wandering, then comes to give rise to the ‘movement of value’ as it gives rise to capital and latterly, virtualisation. For Camatte, affect plays a key role in speciosis: “The imprint of affection is the primordial imprint in Homo sapiens and in the lived experience of each and everyone of us. It imposes itself as a discomforting, diffuse phenomenon that is difficult to discern, as an encumbrance that blocks our life process.”⁴  Speciosis, then, from the separation from nature to the separation of the individual from the species, becomes linked to a refusal to be affected, to be locked-in to an immutable individuality marked by both a lack of empathy and an indifference to others.

To end this translator’s introduction, it is fitting to cite the epigram that appears at the foot of the Revue Invariance website: “I have no enemies: shutting-in is abolished.” Now that Camatte has sadly passed away it is to be hoped that this epigram could take on a wider resonance: to work towards a cessation of enmity that at the end of the day is only another means of individualisation, to be cautious of separations of all kinds as these induce psychical splittings and carry ‘othering’ dynamics that ‘shutting-us-in’ take no heed of the species-being as an individual-gemeinwesen, as a singularity. Perhaps this latter is the bare minimum or the nucleus to explore and from which to build upon? Jacques’s life and work are still to be discovered. He set great store by continuity. In this light I recall his imaginative reading of Marx’s ‘notion’ of the historic party. For Jacques this becomes a “reach beyond the possible [that] constitutes continuity among the human generations.” It can be said to contain “all of humanity perceived through time” that is hostile to capitalism. Utopian? Exilic? Maybe. But what an invitation to adventure it is that he offers. The adventure of recasting revolution as “creating new emotional relationships for the redeployment of life.”