{"id":3955,"date":"2018-09-29T23:13:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T03:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=3955"},"modified":"2018-09-30T12:16:08","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T16:16:08","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-a-readers-guide-to-the-invisible-committees-now-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-a-readers-guide-to-the-invisible-committees-now-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | A Reader\u2019s Guide to The Invisible Committee\u2019s *Now* (2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Invisible Committee\u2019s latest book,\u00a0Now<\/em>, is remarkably rich in ideas and theoretical imagination. Whether one agrees or not with the overall intervention\u2014which promotes a vision of destituent insurrection and communalist living\u2014the work itself is chock full of provocative critical theoretic insights.<\/p>\n

The Committee positions itself against critique and criticism, arguing that we now live in times that so explicitly value domination that there is no longer any need for the subtlety of critique. (8) Nevertheless, the Committee\u2019s book is filled with critique.\u00a0The Committee seeks to unmask illusions and to expose how power circulates in society, and sets forth how to challenge and contest that. It unveils the \u201cillusion of unity\u201d that has done \u201cits work of fooling people<\/em>,\u201d and shows that we live instead in an increasingly politically fragmented reality (22). It exposes \u201cthe iron cage of counter-revolution,\u201d in other words the fact that revolutionary movements always reconstitute the power relations that they at first attacked. (76) It offers a vision of critical praxis\u00a0<\/em>that places, at its heart, the value of action itself, for its own sake. It reverses the ends-means relation: action should not be undertaken as a means toward an end, but as an end in itself.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there are internal tensions in the book that may lead some readers to question at times the coherence of the intervention. But it would be wrong to focus on those minor tensions, and more productive, instead, to focus on passages that make provocative contributions to contemporary critical thought. The Committee\u2019s book, I suspect, is the product of several different authors, who have written separate portions of the book\u2014or taken primary responsibility for separate chapters.<\/a>[1] The author of the final chapter of the book writes about sitting underneath an \u201cold sequoia sempervirens\u201d (131) and mentions the other friends that they work with: \u201cIn this print shop dominated by an antique Heidelberg 4 Color which a friend ministers to while I prepare the pages, another friend glues, and a third one trims, to put together this little samizdat that we\u2019ve all conceived, in this fervor and enthusiasm, I experience that continuity.\u201d (132) Clearly, there are several hands at work on this book, and I suspect different contributing authors in different chapters. As a result, there are somewhat different theoretical takes on particular concepts, which suggests that the chapters can be read autonomously.<\/a>[2] The task in reading Now\u00a0<\/em>should be to address segments of the book, I believe, rather than the book as a whole. Let\u2019s do that here.<\/p>\n

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  1. Destituent power: Avoiding the Counterrevolution<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The central argument of chapter four, \u201cLet\u2019s Destitute the World,\u201d calls for destitution rather than constituent power: to knock down, rather than reconstitute political institutions.<\/p>\n

    For the Committee, the recurring problem with political action is that it always reproduces old forms of domination. Young student leaders become state ministers. Revolution turns into counterrevolution. This is what the Committee calls \u201cthe iron cage of counter-revolution\u201d: the fact that revolutionary movements always reconstitute the power relations that they first attacked. (76)<\/p>\n

    In order to escape the cycle, the Committee argues for a new type of power, destituent insurrections, that it opposes to constituent insurrections.<\/a>[3] The idea is to constantly avoid the reproduction of domination by always escaping from it, exiting, disengaging. The Committee writes:<\/p>\n

    where the \u201cconstituents\u201d place themselves in a dialectical relation of struggle with the ruling authority in order to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to\u00a0disengage from it<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t abandon the struggle; it\u00a0fastens on to the struggles positivity<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t adjust itself to the movements of the adversary but to what is required for the increase of its own potential. So it has little use for criticizing (79)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    How can we understand this? Perhaps with the following comment that the Committee makes about Communism: \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of fighting\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0communism. What matters is the communism that is lived\u00a0in the fight itself<\/em>. The true richness of an action lies within itself.\u201d (80) So there has to be a reversal of the ends and means relation: action is not undertaken as a means toward an end, but as a means in itself. This should remind us of Benjamin who, in The Critique of Violence<\/em>, imagines the possibility of violence as a means only. For their part, the Committee claims to draw inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari, and Lyotard. (79)<\/p>\n

    The Committee gives very concrete examples of what it has in mind with regard to destituent power:<\/p>\n