Speed and Politics

"Good conduct" is no longer morals taught in public school, but driver's education, which is becoming an obligatory part of the curriculum.3 But isn't this already the adventure of military monasticism, transforming the mystical body of Christ into an armed body, into marching orders?

Long before pirates, assault troops or hoodlums, the military monk finds gratifcation in the arsenal of death and terror. In fact, if the militarization of societies henceforth makes every citizen a war machine, the soldier-monk is, in this domain, a model and a precursor. The reform of the great orders, aimed at suppressing the military Gyrovagues, is a considerable revolution, since the monk's "solitude" is now spread to large, anational armed groups. The institution of monastic autism in the very nature, time, space, and social and human organizations that he relinquishes, his renunciation of personal tastes and identity, prefigure the nihilism of the technological revolution spoken of by Heidegger. The monk, voluntarily absent from himself, sworn to silence, chastity and especially obedience, becomes the vehicle of his "director" of conscience (the drive shaft that powers "order," a superior and universal "Reason") .

We know that monasticism is more a military invention than a religious one; we find it in every part of the world. Since antiquity, whenever the notion of State has developed, military sects have multiplied at the same time. It is no surprise that Hegel's concept of the modern State was born in Prussia, former home of the

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Teutonic Order, which was secularized in 1 525 . It was the carbonari, with their "cellular" organization, who became a model for other revolutionary groups, the clandestine movements that in Russia were the axes of a systematized terrorist war, of a permanent nihilism comparable both to the permanent war led by the great orders-first against the Muslims, then, in America, against the Asians-and then the guerrilla war led against Napoleon in Spain . . . Dugesclin, the secret master of the military Temple, had excelled there just as well. 4 In the same way, puritanism and industrialization progress together in Anglo-Saxon countries. With industrial internment, it is redemptive to put the soulless bodies of children and women to work because these bodies are guided by reasonable souls, the souls of engineers assigned to define their attitudes and gestures. Arbeit macht frei: Nazi and Chinese reeducation camps claim this old kinetic belief for themselves.

In these diferent examples, the conqueror, the warrior claims a function that seems to be a perversion of the priest's. For the Judeo-Christians, everything is said from the very first pages of the Bible: the warrior is a perverted priest. In fact, the first murder revolves around the means of occupying and exploiting productive soil, and especially around the rent received by God in exchange. God willingly accepts the sacrifice paid by the shepherd Abel but refuses that of the farmer Cain. The image of the first killer of men bears a direct relation to the rent paid on the earth, and here again everything is said in several lines: the sufering of the soil "opening its mouth'' and crying out as it drinks human blood for the first time-the blood of the territorial body as it slips away. (It shall no longer yield to you its fruit, says God . . . you will be a wanderer crossing over and invading the earth.) Deterritorialized farmer, the first killer of men is immediately designated a builder of cities (a commoner) .

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The importance of the priest (the magician) , of the patriarch, comes from his ability to establish and maintain this commerce of exchange with the gods/nature, to temper their whims, their violence. He is the one who, thanks to his scientific empiricism, can make them accept his sacrifice, the rent on the earth (he collects, sets and· levies the tax, tithe or-in its current manifestationchurch-ofering) . When, with the advent of the "foreigner," a commerce of transferable goods is instituted on the banks of the Mediterranean, it is curious to see the exchange take place in a similar way (as still happens today with certain nomads) : without any physical or even visual contact between the two parties. The merchandise is deposited on the shore or the side of the road, where the stranger will pick it up, put in its place the appointed value, and then leave. He thus passes like a shadow over the other's territory, scarcely setting foot on it, like those souls, those wills that occupy the invisible or uninhabitable parts of the universe. The colonial godowns and free ports still reproduce, in their way, this process of exchange existing outside of military conventions. The warrior, dromocratic killer and organizer of crossroad-cities, has from the dawn of history concentrated all his efort and science on exacting rent for the earth. Armed force is always one of military occupation, and it is at this level that the warrior appears as a perverted priest. Curiously, total war and the nuclear stand-of tend to bring him back to his original role. In fact, the principle of deterrence is not only a strategic formula, but is also the earth's inhabitants finally paying their rent, literally reaching the term (limit and end) .

The expatriate warrior, building the world-wide nuclear enclosure, is in a position to demand an exorbitant rent from populations that have become entirely native, given the current proportions of "the meter covered, protected." The function of the hero-military protector and tax collector-can thus in no way be limited to or even identified with "human commerce," as Clausewitz understands it, for instance. The warrior's or soldier-monk's abuse of the earth's (divine) hospitality is not only the acquisition or accumulation of soil and riches in the name of a State of which he is but the instrument (the lever, as Saint-Just says!) , but is all of that as the indefinite expansion of the abuse itself. Moreover, we find this clearly mimed by the great conquerors: Alexander is content to move forward, worried only about reaching a limit and thus an end to his power of penetration. If Frederick the Second declares that "to win is to advance," Napoleon states that he wants to found and not to possess. Conquest is reduced to quest; gesture is movement. Napoleon will die poor, like a soldier monk, in the little grey outfit that, on the battlefield, set him apart from his officers and gaudy, mercenary generals, designating the "detached" character he intended for his military art. Perverted priests-Muslim, Christian or otherwise-developing the arsenal of war alongside the inferno, mixing poverty with the "hatred of the world. "

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Financial politics are exercised around the abduction of persons, ransom systems; social protection leads to the perversion of charity into bodily assistance, of poverty into the power of money-to such an extent that when these great mechanisms stop functioning profitably, the Roman papacy of monks collapses. Its system of military security goes along with its system of social security, the Inquisition with its temporal power. It is the same for the great conquerors: they are all lost as soon as they must renounce the raping of nations . All greatness lies in Assault, in the dimension borrowed from distance. War is assault, because war is the permanent abuse of the earth's hospitality, its penetration. Here, once again, we must look at the speedometer of the racing engine, the combat racecar: an existential measure of the warrior's being, the dizzying flow of time, a rapidity-tax on the covered meter that ruins the earthly inhabitant, but simultaneously destroys the substance of its conqueror and measures the survivor's remaining hours. 5 In short, as in the turnaround of the topological ring, the survivor's disappearance depends on the answer he can give in space and time to Alexander the Great's question, to the problem o f his limits . 6

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The invader's performance resembles that of his athletic counterpart, of those olympic champions whose records first progressed by hours, then by minutes, then by seconds, then by fractions of seconds. The better they performed (the more rapid they became) , the more pitiful were the advances they obtained, until they could only be noticed electronically. One day the champion will disappear in the limits of his own record, as is already suggested by the biological manipulation of which he is the object, and which resembles the methods of artificial medical survival granted the terminally ilL For the dromomaniac the engine is also a prosthesis of survival . It is remarkable that the first automobiles, Joseph Cugnot's military trolley of 177 1 , for example, were steam-powered, already situating themselves at the limit of the animal body's metempsychosis, relay of historical evolution: the limit of the passage from the metabolic vehicle to the technological vehicle, spilling its smoke like a last breath, a final symbolic manifestation of the motor-power of living bodies.

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Speed and Politics

The End of the Proletariat

You can have a proletarian insurrection on 'the condition that the

others hold their fire. If they dump two tank battalions on you, the

proletarian revolution is as good as nothing.

\- Andre Malraux, Interviews

EVIDENTLY, DROMOLOGICAL progress and what we conventionally call human and social progress coincided but did not converge. The development can be summarized as follows:

1 . A society without technological vehicles, in which the woman plays the role of the logistical spouse, mother of war and of the truck.

1. The indiscriminate boarding of soulless bodies as metabolic vehicles.

1. The empire of speed and technological vehicles.

1. The metabolic vehicle competing with, then defeated by, the earthly technological vehicle.

We could logically conclude with a last paragraph:

1. The end of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of History in the war of Time.

If we come back to Goebbels' definition, or Engels', the invention of the militant-revolutionary worker or otherwise-already makes for no more than a "poor man's" version of the proletarian soldier. The proletarianization of the working classes is only one form of militarization-a temporary form.

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From 1 9 1 4 onward, the proletariat's motor-and thus political-power was no match for the European battlefields. This power, however, was still indispensable to the worksites of continental warfare. The military class, making sure to keep the proletariat under control, will thus allow it the illusion of being able to dominate, to submerge the bourgeois fortress. The latter is already ruined, pierced at all points by the expressway media (radio, telephone, television) , condemned by its former defenders to instant destruction through the anti-city strategy of total war. Nonetheless, we will soon become familiar with the limits of this military leave, in Prague, Warsaw, Beirut . . . and in Paris, too, in May '68, when, after the taking of the Odeon theatre, the government predicts at any moment the intervention of armored cars against the popular uprising. It is understandable that in the 1 920s, while the "Bolshevik threat" spread from Munich to the gates of India, the French government unleashed a new politics of social aid. All this was made necessary by the logistical redeployment of military-industrial nations in Europe and in the world. And yet everyone is surprised to discover that in Part XIII of the Preamble to the Treaty of Versailles it says that "the living conditions of the working classes" -of "the balance of military forces in the world" would be more appropriate!-"are incompatible with world peace."

This is the new mix that Junger partially reveals a little later, in 1 932, in his essay Der Arbeiter (the figure of the worker encompasses the soldier and the industrialist) , a work that was to win a large audience and rapidly become for the Germans a veritable political platform . . .

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In the same way, the French Union of the Left is a trap insofar as it has insisted, in General Cluseret's words, on having "the army constitute an unknown quantity in the social equation." In short, its only s trength has been its silence on the military question. It is inevitable that its undoing will be the problem of national Defense, and that the Communists, who have always accepted the Marxist model of military proletarianization, wil find themselves confronting radicals and socialists who, since May 1 968, have invested in a socialism "with a human face," liable to assemble a new, somewhat depoliticized electorate. It was under the auspices of the Portugese generals of the Armed Forces Movement that "the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat" was decreed in Southern Europe. We should not see in this, as Georges Marchais will later claim, a cause for rejoicing, a softening of ideological will, "the word 'dictatorship' having an unpleasant sound since the fascist experience." Indeed, we cannot accuse the Portugese military leaders-returning to their country after a long and bloody campaign of colonial repression-of excessive humanism. In fact, with the Marxist generals courted by Cunhal, the dictatorship of the proletariat regains its original military significance; and as good technicians of war, they acknowledge that the time when the proletariat's kinetic energy dominated political life, after having dominated the battlefield, is reaching an end-the time when, as Lenin says, the working class suddenly found itself courted and solicited even by the capitalists .

From now on, the animal body of the worker is devalued as the bodies of other domestic species were before him. The end of the dictatorship of the proletariat is only the Communist version of facts already noted-by the French army, for example, when they did away with the review board (law of ]uly 9, 1 970) , or in 1 975, on the liberal side, by the " Trilateral Commission" on the crisis of democracy: "We have come to recognize that if there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth, there are also potentially desirable limits to the infinite expansion of democracy. " The crisis of these liberal democracies is the end of a form of mobilization of the citizenry. The central historical pseudo-figure of the dominating producer is simultaneously removed by the two great ideological blocs, the proletarian worker declared unusable along with the consumer-producer of the capitalist world. The revolutionary experiment of the Armed Forces Movement was in this context exemplary because it claimed to raise the Portugese leftist forces to another level, that of an "army civilization." Thus in 1 97 5 , ship's captain Correia Jesuino, who had become "Minister of Social Communication" (we are reminded here of the naval proletarianization under Louis XIV by M. de Valbelle, the former captain of the galleys) , depicts the "left wing" oficers as "ethnologists studying a primitive people. " For, in his view, the Portugese people is underdeveloped. Jean Francois Revel, reporting these statements in L'Express (April 14, 1 975), indicated that the average salary of a Portuguese was comparable to that of a Breton or a Welshman, and didn't quite see where the "underdevelopment" was.

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All of this, indeed, is inexplicable in economic terms; instead we must emphasize a dromological military philosophy that challenges everyone's participation in a state totality, making this participation problematic. In the same way, if the nuclear problem in 1 977 caused the French Union of the Left to break apart, it was less a matter of megatons than of the political vectors of the new nuclear power. Without our realizing it, the nuclear weapon logically modifed the political constitution of the States in the world. As one lawyer put it, "We must recognize that the nuclear weapon has shown itself to be a source of constitutional right by modifying our actual constitution."

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Here again, it is not so much the final explosion that counts in deterrence; rather more it is questions such as those posed by Articles 5 and 1 5 of the French Constitution of 1 95 8 to the solitary decision maker that the Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armies, the President of the Republic, guarantor of the national territory's integrity, has become. The speed of the political decision depends on the sophistication of the vectors: how to transport the bomb? how fast? The bomb is _eolitical, we like to repeat-political not because of an explosion that should never happen, but because it is the ultimate form of military surveillance.

The political bourgeoisie, like the "revolutionary" parties, anesthetized by a long period of coexistence and full employment, by the euphoria of continued growth, are proving in Europe that "one can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it." The proletarian revolution now necessarily goes through the revolutions of the military institutions in the heart of the State's constitutional apparatus and, in fact, the principal actors who have taken the initiative these last years are no longer the great political parties, but the army, the unions, and even the unions in the army.

It is useful to notice here the anational nature of these events. For if one of the French national labor unions (the C.F.D.T) wholeheartedly supports military unionism, requesting a "body politic of the soldier, '' at the same time the famous A. F.L.-C . I . O . has declared itself ready to take the American soldiers' unions under its wing. Here something fundamental is happening, which no one has clearly pointed out: a non-partisan dialogue is being created between the world's labor forces and the military class and, in the short term, a "latinization" of Europe comparable to that of the South American continent. If General Vargas Prieto, "considered one of the most capable and progressive leaders in the Peruvian army'' (Le Monde, November 4, 1 975), declares in an interview that "the true forerunners of the Peruvian revolution are its armed forces, the root and institutional essence of the people because they are born from them/' we must understand that this really means a return to a situation that long precedes political Marxism, to a negation of the State-polis by the proletarian revolutionary forces.

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