By David Black
A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Fraud. By Jaime Semprún. Translated and with an Introduction by Eric-John Russell (MIT:2023)
Jaime Semprún (1947-2010), though never a member of the Situationist International (1957-1972), became closely associated with the SI’s founder, Guy Debord; so much so that when A Gallery of Recuperation was published in 1976, some reviewers thought Debord had written it. The central question addressed by Semprún’s book, appearing as it did several years after the revolt of students and workers in France, May 1968, is, as Eric-John Russell puts it in his 110-page introduction,
‘What happens to revolutionary critique in the hands of those who interests align with the preservation of a society divided into classes, mediated by exchange, and subordinated to the principle of capital accumulation?’
Of the entries in A Gallery of Recuperation, the majority are philosophers, namely: Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Andr é Glucksmann, Jean Franklin, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The others are François Mitterand’s economic guru, Jaques Attali; the writer and film-maker, Gérard Guégan; and former Situationist Raoul Vaneigem.
In this short book, Semprún make no attempt to summarize the oeuvres of his gallery of recuperators (even less so with Deleuze and Guattari, who are dismissed in one sentence as being ‘dumber’ than each other). Russell’s introduction provides very useful historical contextualisation. But the only knowledge of the entrants in his Gallery Semprún expects from his readers is having heard or read about them. He has no wish to encourage his readers to spend any time studying their books.
In the case of Castoriadis, Semprún’s ideal reader in 1976 would know that this erstwhile exponent of workers self-management (autogestion) in the Fordist economy of the late-1950s, attracted the brief interest of Debord and the Situationist International. As Debord soon discovered, Castoriadis’s practical politics were positivist, with a Marxist gloss. It came as no surprise that when Castoriadis’s vision of rationalised council communism came to naught, he rejected Marx as the last of the ‘metaphysical’ dialecticians (after Plato, Aristotle and Hegel). Semprún comments, ‘the tragedy of Castoriadis is that his past remains even newer than his intellectual present’ and he is left ‘grappling with the ghost of his own thought, which arrives to pull him out his Freudian sleep, as he comically struggles in his prefaces [to his earlier revolutionary writings] to sabotage anything of real importance… while miring himself in a catch-22 situation by repeating “It is not that simple”.’
Jean-François Lyotard was, until 1963, a member of the group Castoriadis founded, Socialisme ou Barbarie. He left, according to Semprún, because he found Castoriadis’s liquidation of Marxism ‘insufficiently liquidating’. For Lyotard, the acclaimed inventor of the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘libidinal economy’, it was necessary to ‘completely abandon critique’ in order to embrace the alienated relations of capital as a ‘machinery of delight’. One had ‘neither to judge causes nor isolate effects, energies pass through us and we have to suffer them’. Lyotard, says Semprún,
‘learned from Freud that human beings, however dispossessed, lididinally invest in their very dispossession in order to come to terms with it… all activity, or passivity is libidinal, workers go to work for pleasure. Lyotard gets off on cutting-edge cultural consumption and keeps coming back for more.
Foucault, the philosopher-criminologist, concluded from his study of the 19th century bourgeois murderer, Lacenaire, that (in Semprún’s interpretation) ‘coarser criminals are needed, illiteracy may even be required as a stamp of authenticity, or at least criminals who provide him with opportunity to peddle his exegetical contortions and tics. Fall into line everyone!’
The other personifications in the gallery get similar treatment. In the case of Glucksmann, the repentant Maoist, turned nouvelle philosophe of the New Right:
‘Accomplishing the daring feat of appearing more moronic than he actually is, he pretends to have suddenly realized, upon reading the works of Solzhenitsyn, that there was a police terror inseparable from ideological absolutism.’
Jacques Attili, Mitterand’s techo-futurologist and economic guru is exposed as a plagiarist and recuperator of various radical (including Situationist) strands of ideas. Attali’s later career as founder of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was responsible for restructuring and privatising the economies of post-communist Europe in the 1990s would have come as no surprise to Semprún.
The most surprising entry in the Gallery is Raoul Vaneigem, who is chiefly famous for his book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. But he is also famous, for having taken a booked holiday in the Mediterranean during the height of the street-fighting in Paris in May 1968, a faux pas neither Semprún or Debord forgive or forget. Vaneigem is portrayed as typical of
‘All those who speak of self-managment and workers’ councils, or even about (you must be joking) transparency and subversive play without referring explicitly to the concrete conditions of contemporary class struggle and to the possibilities and necessities they contain. Such people have corpse in their mouth: the corpse of the Situationist International.’
Irony, Eric-John Russell notes in his introduction, is a medium ‘endangered by the dissolution of the difference between surface and depth.’ Russell, after explicating the relation between Situationist praxis and the historic moment of May 68, turns to the years ‘between 1973 and 1977’ when ‘les annees soixante-huit came to an end’. As J Bourg, quoted by Russell, puts it, ‘The twentieth century began with Vladimir Lenin’s observation that making an omelette means breaking eggs; it ended with the assertion of the rights of chickens.’
In part as a reaction against the dogmatism of the French Communist Party and the exhaustion of existentialism of phenomenology, from the early 1960s, ‘Parisian cynicism proceeded from an anti-humanist detachment and turned towards the sciences of linguistics, structural anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.’ This erosion of any stable subjectivity was inherited from the naive scientism of 19th century French posivitism. The loss of objectivity is related to a modernised Nominalism , presented as a ‘metaphysics of desire‘, in which ‘erotic spontaneity’ supposedly unleashed the energies of madness and fantasy.
‘In this way, the concept of recuperation is integral to that of the spectacle’ in which the differences pivot on ‘unbridled reconcialation’. The spectacle’s ‘postulate of equivalence’ derives from exchange relations; ‘The bark of accommodated critique will always be worse than its bite’.
Russell maintains that ‘the counterrevolutionary forces earlier in the decade [the 1970s] were part of a larger process of the restructuring of capital, itself a defeat for the workers movement that would culminate in the early 1980s.’ This led to the deregulation of financial markets, ‘for which capital expands without investing in productive activity’. For the worker (including the ‘intellectual’ worker) this has led to an employment regime of increasing precarity.
What makes Semprún’s book relevant to this day is its critique of the dominant ‘ethos of liberation and continuous transgression of the desirants’ which has its ‘truth’ in ‘the eternally new of a perpetual present’. The recuperators, having inherited the tricks of the town market charlatan, ‘are in no short supply, with every online opinion strong-arming every other to dominate likes and retweets in an algorithmic orgy of con artists and grifters’.
In this new high-tech world of instant communication and thirst for instant gratification, the status of intellectuals is downgraded; to present them as ‘imputing class consciousness or having any real grasp over present catastrophes, cannot but come off as a bad joke… Look closely at any radical academic and you will find a publicist, if not a used car salesperson’.
Russell, striking a rare note of optimism, suggests that Gallery of Recuperation at least reminds us that the ‘wretched methods’ of the intellectuals might some day be looked on – after Hegel’s Owl of Minerva has spread its wings – as having, in Marx’s words, ‘wrung the neck of their own purpose.’
The passages from Semprún, as quoted above, provide only a taste of the torrent of insult and invective. His prose is largely free of clichés and ill-informed bad faith. Ad hominen critique is or course taboo in academia and in mainstream (or would-be mainstream) media. But the book leaves this reader wishing there was more of it today, in the face of the what is on offer from Guardian and Novara commentators.
