The political squads of the police and the parties always want to know who we are. Since, on the contrary, we only recognise ourselves in the critique that clarifies what we are not and what we do not want; since we speak the language of those who live contradiction and non-identity; since we exist as a plural subject only on the condition of collectively experimenting our contradiction in process in the very form of its realization, at the same time as these forms are subjected to every sort of recuperation; the effort at identifying us according to a logic well-tested through two centuries of counterrevolution backfires laughably and ignobly on those who would like to imprison us in a formula, so as to deliver us that much more easily to the prison walls. “Provocateur” is the term that appears indistinguishably in the infectious prose of the regime’s press, which forms a chorus with and thus unites in the same trench “democratic” journalism and the “militant” press. We accept the term, turning it on its head.

If “provocateurs” signifies men and women that do not accept the misery of the political game; if it signifies informal nuclei that slip away from any schema of hierarchical rackets; if it names experiences irreducible to the precepts of “revolutionary” theory crushed by history and appropriated by the counterrevolution; if it distinguishes those who cannot put up with the interiorization of capital and who struggle against every form of self-valorisation; if it qualifies the development of a theory and a practice that refuse to be constituted as separate spheres of individual and collective life; if “provocateur” signifies all of this, today we are provocateurs! We are the provocateurs of that process of demystification that forces the police, politicians of the regime and leaders of the fictitious opposition’s rackets, to unmask their substantial identity. Thus are they united against us publicly, employing the same techniques of snitching, terror, slander, using the same language and the same logic, resorting to the same wretchedness and the same trivial lies. We are the provocateurs of that process of sublation that induces sincere revolutionaries to break with their past and to participate in the historical heights and radical tensions of the time. Who get out from the bottlenecks and of all the archaic and restrictive ideologies, in order to fuse themselves with that tendency towards the point of view of the totality that, alone, leads the critique of the actual forms of capitalist domination to recognise the synthesis of every alienation fragmented and particular, the summa and the point of explosion of every past oppression that has already been overcome. We are and will be until the end, in sum, the provocateurs of the revolutionary process.

“GLOSSES ON HUMANISM”

From the origin of bourgeois society and across the entire course of its existence, the emphasis on the human has been the price paid for the development and the autonomisation of exchange value, as well as the progressive reification of human relations. The more that capitalist dehumanisation — the ‘organic composition’ of society and individuals — has developed, so the more one begins to discover as the referent of whatever ideology — against the artificial, the fictitious and the despotic — the natural, genuine, and human. But if, according to bourgeois apologetics, the invariance of human nature was the obvious guarantee of the system of planetary exploitation, it was a fatal misunderstanding thereof that induced the proletarian movement to exalt, against capital and the injustices of the relations of production, labor and the mere development of productive forces, understood as the general equivalent of the subject and emancipated man. The same reprimand and warning that Marx offered in his Critique of the Gotha Programme was insufficient — in virtue of the tenacious roots of the alternative theory that, while critical, was naturalist and positive — to illustrate to the proletariat the fact that, as is so clearly written in the critique of political economy, capital and labor are poles of a single relationship and must be accepted or rejected en bloc, not through the exaltation of one or the other. While Hegel defined and glorified the development of the essence of capitalist society as a process in which substance becomes subject, his immediate adversaries, materialists and existentialists, looked to find the true and authentic subject in the ruin of capital’s ‘automatism’. This subject, illuminated by the Hegelian dialectic, would have developed through the process of alienation and, in the end, become again, sometimes mythically, substance, human nature, only no longer counterfeit and disfigured. The human is here understood as something subterranean, a substratum temporarily lost and rediscovered in the exteriorisation of every immediate, living relation, but destined, after the pain of alienation, after the odyssey of history as ‘prehistory’ or as ‘fallen’ ‘exteriority’, to reemerge and to triumph. From here one finds the blind abandon, as certain as it is desperate, to the force of objective reason, to progress, to history. The theory that revindicates the human, in the face of its alienation and capitalisation, could carry out such an affirmation, however, only by ignoring that such corruption, far from being in contrast to any historically revealed human essence, was neither more nor less than the result of its exaltation, the extension of its natural traits, exterminating and death bearing.

It is for this reason that, once grasped down to their foundation, the humanist and anti-humanist attitudes are not, in fact, alternatives, but immediately identical. If, by whatever bitter irony, the Stalinist rapprochement of the hazy idealism expressed by both Lukács in History and Class Consciousness and by radical communism is true, it is because in these dangerously idealist results, you do not find the impatience of the revolutionary gesture, but an insistence on the alienation and the obscurity of the human as the cardinal point of the critique of capitalism, a common point then — the critique of fetishism and a call for the ‘lived’ — to phenomenology and existentialism. Nothing is more paradoxical than the call for a supersession of alienation pursued through the return to a human subject, to make such a subject — if it were possible — more proprietary as if it were not the case that, as with anti-humanism, the final union of capitalism and barbarism wasn’t inscribed in mechanisms of generalised self-preservation, in that universally human that cancels and exterminates all that which does not reflect it. Today, finally, it has certainly become clear that the humanist referent even in its most radical variants, is nothing but the expression, albeit turned on its head, of the ‘anthropomorphosis of capital’, of the ‘death of man’. Yet the anti-humanism theorised by dominant thought, above all through structuralism — which would like, with a profound albeit involuntary irony, to replace philosophy with the ‘human sciences’ — is in fact, as the ‘mimesis of death’, always directed towards the triumph of self-preservation and the subject: humanism in disguise. Neither is it comforting that here the problem of a change in thought is always expressed — as in the case of the problems of ‘decision’, ‘choice’, and ‘will’ — in ultimately subjective terms. To really think in a non-humanist manner does not mean, anyway, to think in anti-humanist terms, always despotic, arbitrary, violent: in a word, humanist. One cannot get out from the dialectic, from the evil of such a brutal history, by simply changing the sign, ‘turning it on its head’: each determinate overturning is but another confirmation. To take one’s distance from the human, from the history of the possessive subject in which unreconciled nature is preserved unrecognised does not mean to give in to, identifying oneself with the aggressor, the dehumanisation in course, to the objectivity of a linear destiny that in hindsight is seen to have been pursued by impersonal subjects.

The critique of ideology, the confrontation between reality and its ideal premises, as well as the unmasking of false consciousness and false reconciliation are today — even in the extreme form assumed by ‘critical theory’ — vain in face of late-capitalist society’s absolute integration of the yearning for true appearances and the human. Culture, critique, democracy — all only have sense outside of domination and reification. But if this integration has also demonstrated that the return to significance, fullness, use value — in a word, the human — is the alibi of barbarism and that it cannot be invoked without bad conscience, the consequence to be drawn from all of this is not any abandon to the truth of the facts, to an inhuman survival. The non-human, that which remains outside of the dialectic and of the false alternative between humanism and anti-humanism, that is perhaps the utopia of thought: something that is neither in the affirmation nor the violent death of the human and appearances, but rather in their suspense and dispersal. What could be the profile of a thought that was nourished on the non-human, on the trace of that which no longer exists or does not yet exist, of the no longer, not yet human, of that which in the human is not so cruelly subjective and natural? While its prophecy — as a limit, inquietude, promise — fed all of idealism, from the doctrine of the intelligible in Kant to the self-consciousness of absolute spirit in Hegel, even to the reign of liberty in Marx, here it still only serves the function of reparations, compensation, reintegration. Established through the pain of appearance, self-recognition, history, the non-human did not seem to ever really be free, in idealism, from its guilty and evil roots: its fulfilment had all of the characteristics, only with an inverted sign, of its odyssey.

The non-human, the radically different, would be in contrast, perhaps, a moment of opening in the gesture of taking leave from the idealist dynamic, a goodbye to the exaltation of the human carried through to the point of explosion. It would be the renunciation of the substitution of the dead god with a human that, in losing the meaning of its identity, begins to overflow according to a consuming impulse as it empties and annexes every limit, every transcendence, every infinite. It would be the refutation of the subject of rights, of needs, of production — thus the disposition to give oneself to that which is repressed and imprisoned within and outside of oneself, welcoming it in itself and thereby taking away all of its malignant, immediate urgency. It would be — as difference — that line where the impure mix of subject and object, characteristic of the realised dialectic at its end, is dissolved, separated. Thus the non-human would be neither fallen into the movement of history, nor the immobility of myth: rather it would be history’s arrest; neither the extension of the subject, nor merely its annihilation: rather its fracture; neither the exaltation of consciousness nor the formless silence of the unconscious: rather irreducible voice. To disintegrate identity, to dismantle the totality: neither because its fragments — asymmetrical and formless forced to ‘go outside themselves’ — have returned as contradictions, momentary engines of the destiny of the world, nor because they have been abandoned to their own blind drift, easy targets once again for the judgment of the dialectic. Rather, because they are sustained in their own non-identity.

Puzz (1974)