If we wished to meet you, it is in particular to question you on “the other pouring”, if one can say, of biopolitic about which you speak. A certain number of movements - those, precisely, from which we are resulting or to which we are close: that of without-papers, that of precarious, that of the patients of the AIDS or that, emergent, of the users of drugs - are spread exactly in the political place which you identified: in this zone of indictinction “between public and private, biological body and body politic, Zoe and bios”, in this “state of exception which became the rule”. However about these movements you speak little, or indirectly. They grind between your lines, but rather like objects (of the camps, the welfare or the medical capacity) that like subjects. You analyze with the biopolitic precision major one, that of the enemy, of which you thoroughly trace the genealogy, of which the hearth, you say, would be this “homo sacer”, naked life exposed to the sovereign capacity, and of which you examine the devices attentively, like the camp; but you forsake the biopolitiques ones of response or reappropriation, the biopolitic minor ones, “our” biopolitique, so to speak: that of AC! , of the collectives of without-papers or Act Up. You however think of it the possibility, and the need: “It is”, say you, “starting from this dubious ground, of opaque zone of lack of differentiation, which we must find today the way of another policy, another body, another word. I could give up under no pretext this indistinctness between private public and, biological body and body politic, Zoe and bios. It is there that I must find my space - there, or in no one another place. Only a policy on the basis of this conscience can interest me. ” But you do not explore the concrete forms of fight which practise, precisely, the policy since this conscience - and this experiment - state of exception. However there is not there, precisely, when unemployed claim a guaranteed income, when patients of the AIDS require treatments, or when users of drug assert sure drugs, the embryo of this other biopolitique which you call of your wishes?

In a direction, it would rather be necessary to reverse the question. They is rather actors in question until would have to be waited an answer. However, if the movements and the subjects about which you speak “grind between my lines rather like objects that like subjects”, it is that I see an main issue there: the question of the subject, precisely, which I can conceive only in term of process of subjectivation and desubjectivation - or rather like a difference or a remainder between these processes. Who is the subject of this biopolitic news, or rather of this biopolitic minor about which you speak? It is problem always essential in policy traditional, when it is a question of finding which is the revolutionary subject, for example. There are people who continue to pose this problem in the old direction of the term: that of the class, the proletariat. They are not problems obsolete, but as soon as one arises on the new ground about which one speaks, that of biopouvoir, biopolitic, the problem is differently difficult. Because the modern State functions, it seems to me, like a species of machine with désubjectiver, i.e. like a machine which scrambles all the traditional identities and, in same time, Foucault shows it well, like a machine to be re-coded, juridically in particular, the dissolved identities: there is always a resubjectivation, a reidentification of these destroyed subjects, these emptied subjects of any identity. Today, it seems to me that the political field is a species of battle field where these two processes proceed: at the same time destruction of all that was traditional identity - I say it without any nostalgia of course - and immediate resubjectivation by the State; and not only by the State, but also by the subjects themselves. It is what you evoke in your question: the decisive conflict is played from now on, for each one of its protagonists, including the new subjects about which you speak, on the ground of what I call the Zoe, biological life. And indeed it is not the different one: it is not question, I believe, to return to the traditional political opposition which separates clearly private and public, body politic and private body, etc But this ground are also that which exposes us to the processes of constraint of biopouvoir. There is thus there an ambiguity, a risk. It is what Foucault showed: the risk is that one réidentifie, that this situation of a new identity is invested, that a new subject is produced, but is fixed in the State, and that one consequently renews, in spite of oneself, this infinite process of subjectivation and constraint which precisely defines to biopouvoir it. I believe that one cannot escape the problem.

Is it of a risk or an aporia? Is any subjectivation fatally a constraint, or can one release something like a maxim, a receipt of subjectivation, which would make it possible to escape the constraint?

In last work of Foucault, there is an aporia which seems to me very interesting. There is on the one hand all work on the “concern of oneself”: it is necessary to be concerned with oneself, in all the forms of practice of oneself. And at the same time, on several occasions, it states the apparently opposite topic: déprendre is needed self. He says several times: “One is finished in the life if one wonders about his identity; art of living, it is to destroy the identity, to destroy psychology. ” Thus there is well here an aporia: a concern of oneself which must lead to a déprise of oneself. A way in which one could put the question, it is: what is it that a practice of oneself, not like process of subjectivation, but which would lead on the contrary only to a déprise, which would find its identity only in a déprise of oneself? It would so to speak be necessary to be held at the same time in this double movement, desubjectivation and subjectivation. Obviously, it is a ground difficult to hold. It is really a question of identifying this zone, this No man' S Land which would be between a process of subjectivation and a contrary process of desubjectivation, between the identity and an not-identity. This ground would have to be identified, because it is this ground which would be that of a biopolitic news. It is precisely what makes, in my eyes, the interest of a movement like that of the patients of the AIDS. Why? Because it seems to me that there, one is identified only on the threshold of an absolute desubjectivation, which sometimes can be even the risk of death. It seems to me that one is held there in this threshold. I tested a little in the book on Auschwitz, in connection with testimony, to see the witness as model of a subjectivity which would be only the subject of its own desubjectivation. The witness testifies to anything else only to his own desubjectivation. The survivor testifies only for the Moslems [3]. What interested me in the last part of this book, it was really to identify a model of the subject as what remains between a subjectivation and a desubjectivation, a word and a dumbness. It is not a substantial space, it is rather a difference between two processes. But there it is only one beginning. One touches hardly here with a new structure of subjectivity, but it is very complicated, it is a whole work to be made. It would really be necessary… It is a practice, not a principle. I believe that one cannot have general principles, except being attentive not to fall down in a process of Re-subjectivation which would be at the same time a constraint, i.e. to be a subject only in the measurement of a strategy or a tactic. Therefore it is very important to see in practice that each one or that the movements have themselves how these possible zones take shape. And that can be everywhere, while working starting from this concept of concern of oneself at Foucault, but by moving it in other fields: very practical of oneself that one can have, even this daily mystic who is the intimacy, all these zones where one côtoie a zone of not-knowledge or a zone of desubjectivation, who it is the sexual life or any aspect of the body life. There there are always figures where a subject attends its rout, côtoie its desubjectivation, all that, they are daily zones, a very banal daily mystic. It is necessary to be attentive with all that would give us a zone of this kind. It is still very vague, but it is that which would give the paradigm of biopolitic minor.

You present the identity like a risk, an error of the subject. There is not, nevertheless, a material thickness of the identities, would be this only insofar as the adversary assigns us with them, that it is by the law (think with the laws on immigration) or by the insult (think of the insults homophobes), which makes them so to speak objective? In other words, which margin of desubjectivation our social conditions do they leave us?

I work in this moment on the letters of Paul. Paul poses the problem: “What Messianic life? What will we make now that we are in Messianic time? What will we make compared to the State? ” And there there is this double movement which always made problem, which seems to me very interesting. Paul says at the same time: “Remainder under the social condition, legal or identity, in which you are. You are slave? Remain slave. You are doctor? Remain doctor. You are woman, you are married? Remain in the vocation in which you were called. ” But at the same time, he says: “You are slave? Does not trouble you, but make use, profit. ” I.e. it is not question only you exchanges of legal status, or that you exchanges your life, but make use. It specifies then what it wants to say by this very beautiful image: “like so not”, or “not”. I.e.: “You cry? As if you did not cry. You delighted? As if you were not delighted. Married Es you? Like not-groom. Did you buy a thing? As not-bought, etc” There is this topic of “like not”. It is not even “like if”, it is “like not”. Literally, it is: “Crying, like not crying; married, like nonmarried; slave, like nonslave. ” It is very interesting, because it would be said that it calls uses of the conduits of life which, at the same time, do not run up frontally against the capacity - remains under your legal condition, in your social vocation - but completely transform them in this form of “like not”. It seems to me that the concept of use, in this direction, is very interesting: it is a practice which one cannot assign the subject. You remainders slave, but, since you make use of it, on the mode of like not, you are not any more slave.

How such a use could be properly political, or under political conditions? Because it would be possible to see there conversion of a strictly individual or ethical thought, or even nun, in any case singular and “deprived”, let us say, with the quotation marks. Which relation this conversion with respect to its own statute, which makes it possible not to be one subject more, does it maintain with the policy? In what that does require community, fight, conflict, etc?

Of course, one regards sometimes this topic at Paul as concerning interiorization. But I do not believe at all that it is about that. Its problem, it is on the contrary that of the life of the Messianic community to which he addresses himself. For example, this topic of the use, one sees it arising in a very strong form - a critic of the right - in the movement franciscain, where the problem is that of the property: these orders which practise extreme poverty refuse any property, and at the same time they must make use of certain goods. There is on this occasion a very strong conflict with the Church, in the direction where the Church wants to admit well that they refuse a property right that it is a property right of the individual, or a property right of the order - because they refuse it even in time that order -, but she would like that they classify their conduit of life like right of use. It is something which still exists: the usufructus, right to use, as separate of the property right. They insist on the contrary, and it is the conflict there: they say: “Not, it is not a right of use, it is use without right. ” They call that usus pauper, the poor use. It is really the idea to open a Community zone of life which makes use, but which does not have right, and does not assert any. Moreover, Franciscains do not criticize the property, they leave all the rights to the Church of them: “The property? We do not want any. We make use of it. ” One can thus say that this problem is purely political, or at least Community.

Nevertheless, is this to be absolutely a chance if the references which you convene to think this alternative belong to the religious sphere? Per moment, to read you, there is in the designation of this other policy, or this other statute of the policy, something like a prophetic tone. You write for example: “This is why, if one allows us to advance a prophecy on the policy who announces herself, this one is not any more one combat for control or the conquest of the State by the new ones or old social subjects, but a fight between the State and the not-State (humanity), irremediable disjunction of the unspecified singularities and the official organization. ” Which place do you grant to these references and this tone-there in your work?

What interests me in the texts of Paul, it is not so much the field of the religion, but this specific field which deals with the monk but who does not coincide with him, which is the Messianic one, i.e. a field very close to the policy. There, it is rather another author who was decisive for me, which is not at all monk: it is Walter Benjamin, who thinks the Messianic one like paradigm of the policy, or say historical time. It is rather that of which it is question for me. And I think indeed that the way in which, into the first Thesis on the concept of history, Benjamin introduces theology as an entity which, even hidden, must help the historical materialism to gain the part against its enemies, remains a very legitimate and very current gesture, which gives us, precisely, the means of differently thinking time and the subject. Then you spoke about the prophet… These days, I was listening to the recorded courses of Foucault, in particular that where it distinguishes four figures from the véridiction in our culture: the prophet, the wise one, the technician, and then that which it calls the parrèsiastès, that which has courage to say the truth. The prophet speaks with the future, and not on his behalf, but in the name of something of other. The parrèsiastès, on the contrary, with which Foucault is undoubtedly identified, speaks on its behalf, and must say what is true now, today. Of course, he says that they are not separate figures. But me I would assert the figure of the parrèsiastès rather that of the prophet. Good, the prophet, it is obviously very important, and it is even a catastrophe which it left our culture: the figure of the prophet, it was that of the political leader until fifty years ago; it completely disappeared. But at the same time, it seems to me that one cannot think any more one speech which is addressed to the future. It is necessary to think the Messianic topicality, the kairos, the time of now. However, it is a model of very complicated time, because it is neither time to come - future eschatology, the eternal -, nor exactly historical time, time profanes, it is a piece of time taken over the profane time which, of the blow, changes. Benjamin writes some share that Marx secularized Messianic time in the classless society. It is completely true. But at the same time with all the aporias that generates - transitions, etc - it is a species of shelf on which the Revolution failed. One does not have a model of time which makes it possible to think that. In any case, I believe that the Messianic one is always profane, never religious. It is even the ultimate crisis of the monk, the folding back of the monk in the layman. On this subject, I think of a review which has just been published in France, by young people that I know, who am called Tiqqun [4]. There, it is really a Messianic review, because Tiqqun, in the cabal of Luria, it is precisely the term of the Messianic redemption, of the Messianic restoration. That interests me, because it is an extremely critical review, very political, which takes a very Messianic tone, but always in a completely profane way. Thus they call Bloom the new anonymous subjects, the unspecified, hollow singularities, ready with all, which can be diffused everywhere, but remain imperceptible, without identity but réidentifiables at each time. The problem that they arise, it is: “How to transform this Bloom, how this Bloom it will operate the jump beyond itself? ”

It is there, perhaps, which we have of the evil to follow you. Not on the Messianic posture, but on the “unspecified singularities”. How to say? To hear you, the biopolitic news, this policy who announces herself, notes more of the escape or the exit that resistance or conflict. On a side you identify very clearly an enemy, an adversary, very massive, very consistent, very coherent, which one can trace long genealogies, which one can locate recurring devices, etc Of the other, vis-a-vis the consistency of this adversary, all does as if you plead for a kind of policy of inconsistency, dissolution, dodging: rather than to manufacture collective subjects, it would be necessary to learn with “déprendre” from oneself; rather than to assert rights, it would be necessary to imagine “uses without right”; rather what to face the State, it would one be necessary to assume itself like a “not-State”, etc Or has always the latitude to flee? It seems to us that the power of the apparatuses biopolitic (think of the health policies public, the administration of the welfare, the control of immigration, etc) is due precisely to their force, terrible, of capture. To say that brutally, forgive us, it could be well that the desubjectivation is a luxury, of which the possibility is offered precisely only to those which escape the apparatuses from biopouvoir. How déprendre of oneself, to dodge the resubjectivation, to be a not-State, etc when one is “HIV positive”, “RMIste” or “drug addict”, i.e. taken, literally, in the categories and the devices of biopouvoir? Isn't one, very often, constrained to act like such rather than like not, to take again your terms? In short, one can have the feeling which you plead for mobility and dodging, where the power of capture and the material thickness of the enemy do not let an other choice to us only face it.

I see the problem well. I believe that all depends on what one understands by escape. It is a reason which one finds at Deleuze: the “creepage distance”, the praise of the escape. But you are right to protest. The concept of escape, it is not that there is elsewhere where one can go. Not, it is a very particular escape. It is an escape which does not have besides. Where would one be elsewhere where could flee? In certain cases, when the Berlin Wall was upright, for example, there were obvious escapes because there was a wall (but there was one elsewhere?). For me, it would be a question of thinking an escape which does not imply an escape: a movement in the situation where it takes place. It is only as such as the escape could have a political significance. And then there is another problem which seems to me to touch with the question that you posed. It is the problem which one finds at Marx when it makes the criticism of Stirner. In the German Ideology, it devotes more than one hundred pages to the theorist of the anarchy, of which it challenges the distinction between revolt and revolution. Stirner theorizes the revolt as a personal act of subtraction, egoist. For Stirner, the revolution, it is a political act which aims at the conflict against an institution, whereas the revolt, it is an individual act which does not aim at destroying the institutions. It is quite simply enough to let the State be, and more to face it: it will destroy itself. It is thus enough to be withdrawn - an escape. Marx very strongly criticizes this reason, but the fact that it devotes hundred pages to him shows well that it is a serious problem. With this opposition/revolution revolts, he opposes a kind of unit between the revolt and the revolution. He does not oppose a political concept to an anarchico-individual concept, he seeks the unit of both: it will be always for egoistic reasons, so to speak of revolt, that a proletarian will make a directly political act. There, even if that poses other problems, I would tend to think like Marx: a species of unit of the two gestures, or of interval, let us say. I would tend to not think a cut which isolates the escape from the revolution, as one tends to do it, but that any emanating act singular need of an individual, the proletarian, which does not have any identity, no substance, will be also, nevertheless, a political act. I believe that one should not oppose political action and escape, revolt and revolution, but to try to think the interval. But that made problem for Marx too. It is all the problem of the class. The class is not aware, the proletariat exists as a subject, but it is not aware. From where the Leninist problem of the party: one will need something which is not different from the class, which is not other thing only the class, but which will be so to speak the body of its conscience. It is an aporia, there too. I do not say that there is a solution with this problem, between the purely political line and creepage distances which would be a gesture of revolt. Neither the left model, nor the model of action without party: there needs to invent. Because after one falls into the problem from the political organization, of the party-class, which will produce “us”: the party is that which takes care that any action is political and not personal, not individual; the class, on the contrary, is the body of an infinite production of nonpolitical acts, but of individual revolts. But the problem is real.

It is besides a difficulty which arises, in practice, with all those which seek to produce collective - and at the time of “us” - apart from these machines to incorporate that are the political parties, and without the help of a higher general principle, which it is the Republic, the Class or the Man. If din feels near to associations to patients, unemployed or the precarious ones, it is precisely because they invent something like a policy with the first nobody, in new forms of organization, where the distinctions between the social one and the policy, the class and its conscience, the singular and the universal one, etc are erased, and where the political significance of the acts is immanente to the acts themselves.

Yes. It is necessary to invent a practice which would break the hull of these representations. Not a substantial subject to surely identify, but another thing, that it seems me to have found at Paul, to return to the work in progress. Paul deals with the Jewish law which divides the men as Jews and not-Jews, Juifs and Goyim. What will it make with this division? Paul is often introduced as if it were the mentor of the universalism, somebody which would have opposed to these divisions Jew/not-Jew a new universal principle, father of the Catholic church, i.e. universal. However when one looks at his work of near, it is exactly the opposite. Vis-a-vis this division imposed by the law (he considers at the bottom the law like what divides, which divides, Jewish/not-Jew, but also citizen/not-citizen, etc), instead of opposing as there would be tendency, us, at the time of the human rights, an universal principle against the ethnic division, he makes a very subtle thing: he even divides division. Does the law divide into Jews and not-Jews? Eh well me I will cut this division by another cut. There is several, for example Jewish according to the flesh and Jew according to the spirit, the breath. This cut flesh/breath will divide the exhaustive division which divided humanity between Juifs and not-Jews. This new division will produce Jews which are not Jewish, because they are Jews which are Jewish according to the flesh, and not according to the spirit, and of Goïm which are goïm according to the flesh, but not goïm according to the spirit. I.e. it will produce a remainder. Paul introduces a remainder into this Juif division/not-Jew. It is a species of cut which even cuts the line. Therefore, at the bottom, it is much more interesting: he does not oppose universal, he puts in failure the division of the law, he introduces a remainder. Because the Jew according to the spirit, he is not-Jew, he is also Jewish, but one could say that it is a species of not-not-Jew. Everywhere, Paul works like that: he divides division instead of proposing an universal principle. And what remains, it is the subject new, but indefinable, always remains about it because it can be on all the sides, as regards not-Jew, side of the Jews. There is something of invaluable to represent today a concept of people, and perhaps also to think what Deleuze said when it spoke about minor people, of the people as minority. It is less one problem of minorities, which a presentation of the people as being always in remainder compared to a division, something which remains or resists a division - not like a substance, but like a variation. It would be a question of proceeding rather like that, by division of division, rather than while wondering: “Which would be the Community universal principle which could enable us to be found together? ” On the contrary. It acts, vis-a-vis divisions which the law introduced, with the cuts that the law makes continuously, to work what makes failure while resisting, while remaining - to resist, remain, it is the same root.

It is exactly what occurred to France around without-papers. The law defined criteria, and all work not consisted in calling upon a general principle of hospitality, but showing that all the criteria produced situations which did not correspond any more to any: inexpulsables people and irrégularisables, etc Finally, the strategy of associations consisted in showing that one could gear down the criteria in way such as anybody does not correspond exactly to the alternative between clandestine and regular. There is a datum line which comes out from that.

It is what struck me at Paul. It is what one finds in the Bible, in the figure of the prophet: the prophet always speaks about a remainder of Israel. I.e. he addresses himself to Israel as with a whole, but announces to him that “only a remainder will be saved”. It is what is played at Isaïe, at Amos, in the prophetic speech. It would be said there that it is not a numerical portion, but the figure which any people must take in the decisive moment - in fact, safety or the election, but that can be anything of different. The people must occur in remainder, to take the figure of this remainder. It always should be seen in a given situation: what, in such a situation, would be posed as a remainder? That does not correspond to the distinction majority/minority. It is other thing. Any people take this figure if the moment is really decisive.

However, which place does it remain with the “given situations” and the “decisive moments”, precisely, in a criticism of the time as radical as yours? To read you, you lean more side of the aporia, dead end and failure - in particular in the way in which you return back to back, there still starting from Debord, the figures of totalitarianism and the democracy - which side of opportunity, blow, kairos, like you known as. In your books, you evoked in particular a “experiment of the absolute impotence”, and “loneliness and dumbness where we expected the community and the language”. Of what did think you?

One often reproached me, or at least allotted, this pessimism of which perhaps I do not realize. But me I do not see it like that. There is a sentence of Marx that Debord as quotes, as I like, it is: “The desperate plight of the company in which I live fills of hope. ” I share this vision: the hope is given for the desperate ones. I do not see myself so pessimistic. Not, to answer your question, I thought of the horrible political situation of the years 1980. I also think of the war of the Gulf and the wars which followed, in Yugoslavia in particular. Let us say that the new figure of the domination takes shape now rather well. It is at the bottom the first time that one sees also clearly works the spectacular model of it. Not only in the media: it is so to speak implemented politically. Simone Weil says some share that it is a fault of considering the war as a fact which relates to the foreign policy - it should be also regarded as a fact of internal policy. However it seems to me that, in these wars, one has an absolute indetermination precisely, an absolute indiscernibility between internal and foreign policy policy. Now, these things became commonplace. One finds them in the mouth of the experts: the foreign policy and the interior policy, it is the same thing. But I insist: there is no psychological or personal pessimism. It is another manner besides of posing the problem of the subject. It is at the bottom what I like much at Simondon: one can think that he thinks the individuation, always, like coexistence between an individual and personal principle and an impersonal, not-individual principle. I.e. a life is always made of two phases at the same time, personal and impersonal. They are always in report/ratio, even if they are definitely separate. I believe that one could call impersonal the order of the impersonal power with which any life is in report/ratio. And one could call desubjectivation this experiment which one makes every day of côtoyer an impersonal power, something which at the same time exceeds us and makes us live. Here, it seems to me that the question of art of living, it would be: how to be in connection with this impersonal power? How the subject could be in connection with its power, which does not belong to him, which exceeds it? It is a poetic problem, so to speak. The Romans called that the genius, impersonal principle fertile, which makes it possible to generate a life. There too, it is a possible model. The subject would be neither the conscious subject, nor the impersonal power, but what is held between the two. The desubjectivation does not have only one dark, obscure aspect. It is not simply the destruction of any subjectivity. It there also this other pole, more fertile and poetic, where the subject is only the subject of its own desubjectivation. Allow me, therefore, to refuse your charge: I am sure that you are more pessimistic than me…

[1] Homo Sacer, sovereign capacity and naked life, Threshold, 1997; What remains of Auschwitz, Bibliothèque Shores, 1999.

[2] The community which comes, theory of the unspecified singularity, Seuil, 1990; Means without end, notes on the policy, Library Shores, 1995.

[3] Der Muselmann, the “Moslem” indicates, in the slang of the camps, the man-mummy, it death living, that which ceased fighting, which lost any conscience and any will. This term probably returns “in the literal sense of the Arab term muslim, meaning that which is subjected without reserve to the divine will” (What remains of Auschwitz, Bibliothèque Shores, p. 53). According to Encyclopedia Judaïca, it could come “from the typical posture from these prisoners, blottis only, the legs folded up with “the Eastern” manner, the rigid face like a mask. ”. For Giorgio Agamben (Ibidem, p. 49), the “Moslem” is the name of the intémoignable: “The witness testifies in theory for the truth and the justice, which give to his words their consistency, their plenitude. However testimony is worth here primarily for what it misses; it carries in its heart this “intémoignable” which deprives the survivors of any authority. Pilot “truths”, the “integral witnesses”, are those which did not testify, and could not have done it. It is those which “touched the bottom”, the “Moslems”, absorbed. The survivors, pseudo-witnesses, speak in their place, by delegation - testify to a missing testimony. But to speak about delegation has here hardly direction: absorbed has nothing to say, no instruction or memory to be transmitted. They have neither “history” [...], neither “face”, nor “thought”. Who undertakes to testify for them knows that it will have to testify to the impossibity to testify. ” (Ibidem, p. 41-42).

[4] Tiqqun, critical review of metaphysics.