请将“The main roads of this Machiavellian thematic are easily established. With Merleau-Ponty, we are invited to explore a politics that, under the name of Machiavelli, is neither of the understanding, nor of reason, but according to the last words of the Introduction to Signs (1960), “unremitting virtù.” With Claude Lefort, the emphasis on originary social division at once encompasses and bypasses class conflict to reappear in every human city in the form of an irreducible opposition between the powerful and the people. Thus the desire to think the political realm afresh so as to make up for Marx’s lacuna, and the definition of the political institution of society as a specific rendering in form of human coexistence that stages the question of.its meaning. As such, a new basis for critique of totalitarian domination and, at the same time, a fresh look at the “democratic invention” - or better, a new description of shared democratic life under the banner of “savage democracy” - is offered. Finally, with Hannah Arendt, we encounter what Etienne Tassin has termed “a phenomenology of action,” considered in its three dimensions - revealing, instituting, linking - and oriented toward the establishment of a public space as a space of appearance. Starting from a vigorous criticism of political philosophy, an unprecedented conception of political heroism is elaborated, in that it successfully outmaneuvers the pitfalls of heroism while maintaining politics’ imperative connection with this singular disposition.
Exploring this constellation further is not my intention here. No doubt linking Marx to the Machiavellian moment would, with regard to the ambiguities I have fleshed out, clearly complicate the problem. What kind of relationship might the contemporary Machiavellian moment have with Marx’s writings? Just as an account of this new Machiavellian constellation would be fruitful - whether we examine its orientations with the goal of locating their areas of divergence and conflict, or whether we aim to bring them together inventively - so too is it decisive not to neglect the movement of Marx’s thought, notably in the 1843 Critique. For we have seen that Marx’s impas-sioned questioning of “true democracy,” and its ultimate product, the opposition that deserves to be thought between democracy and the State, turns out to be a subterranean dimension of his writings, rising to the surface according to the demands and solicitations of the event. And is it not this opposition, this revelation of the conflict between democracy and the State, that is up to a certain point the outcome of the contemporary Machiavellian moment itself, as exemplified in Arendt’s republic of councils, or Lefort’s libertarian conception of democracy? From this perspective, Marx brings to light a living power that, since the French Revolution, and in every revolutionary rupture, from Paris 1848 to Budapest 1956, reminds us how emancipation in its multiple flights, in its democratic manifestations, is also directed against the State and rises inexorably against it. If the democratic revolution is to keep pace with the modern idea of liberty, it cannot do otherwise than to take full measure of the problem of the State. Since the foundering of the purportedly socialist bureaucratic regimes, the question of liberty has become the primary question, the primordial question. The question of emancipation is to be maintained absolutely. But is it in truth necessary to work at maintaining it? Is it not the spontaneity “of the people inhabiting the earth” who maintain it themselves, despite all the words of disparagement that claim regularly to have liquidated it? To inspire greater modesty to the “liquidators,” it may be recalled that in the 1830s, under the July Monarchy, the “eminent authorities” announced from the top of their pedestals that the era of revolution had come to an end. Does the demand of liberty come first? If the issue is to rediscover the political question in its integrality, as the inextricable link of justice and liberty, this also means that priority is given to liberty, to the institution of a free city; or rather, it means that we can and must attain justice through liberty, that in this way only the demands of justice can be met. The link of justice and liberty is thus of a nature to make the demand of justice in turn counteract the transformation of liberty into a conquering and predatory autonomy.
With this permanence of the problem of the State in mind, let us return to the thesis of Marx’s 1843 manuscript. What should be retained from it? The device described by Marx is most valuable in two respects. First, by virtue of the link it establishes between the development of true democracy, its advent, and the disappearance of the State. The closer democracy comes to attaining its truth (but does a political community ever attain its truth?) the more the State dwindles, undergoes a process of disappearance - that is, it ceases to exert an efficacy, a domination of a part that feigns to be equivalent to the whole. This disappearance does not imply a fulfilled socialization, nor that the political would be effectively bypassed, but that the political realm would be maintained as a moment that coexists with the other realms of social life, with the other instances of objectification by the real subject, the people.
Second, it is worth emphasizing for a last time the great importance given to the reduction in Marx’s 1843 Critique. The reduction constitutes the centerpiece of true democracy. It is by virtue of the reduction that the heterogeneity of democracy is asserted, that its rupture with the State is consummated, while the other political forms, even the republic, only reproduce and thereby reinforce the State. As seen, the reduction designates a double movement: as an act of interpretation, it needs to state the essence of the subject, to recognize the subject that manifests itself through political objectification; as an act of limitation - and once this recognition has been made - it needs to gauge political objectification correctly and to reduce it to its proper limits, to a moment and only a moment in the people’s existence. It is by means of the reduction that the political principle can at once avoid the overweening conceit of the State - objectification drifting over to alienation - and as such permeate society as a whole in a way that brings all the realms of the social to a common ground. Indeed, it is by being brought back to what it is essentially that the political moment is able to spread out to the totality of the social realms and to permeate them by diffusing democratic action. Such is the paradox of the reduction: the block it brings about, that forestalls the transfiguration of the political element into the State-form, triggers the extension of what is at stake and exemplified in the political realm - an experi-ence of universality, the negation of domination, the establishment of an isonomie public space - as if in being brought back to its roots in this way, democratic action could become apparent in public space per se and make itself part of the life of the people as a whole. Only this generalization of democratic action accounts for the unity of the universal and the particular by contrast to the application of a unifying form construed according to the model of reason.
Thus described, true democracy functions as a reprisal or counterattack to what Georg Simmel calls the tragedy of culture, at the heart of which the State as form plays an eminent role. From the perspective of a philosophy of life, Simmel points to an insurmountable aporia. Life can become manifest only by way of that which, as soon as the manifestation has been attained, acts as its contradiction; the manifestation of life depends on a force hostile to life. “Life is ineluctably condemned to become reality only in the guise of its opposite, that is as form.”1 This contradiction is insoluble, for on the one hand life becomes apparent and finds its specific existence only in form; on the other, and from the very moment of its appearance, the movement of form consists in leading its own life, in detaching itself from the vital force that created it in order to let its immanent logic unfold, gaining independence to the point of going well beyond its detachment and turning back against life. This conflict arises from the contrast between the qualities of life - dynamism, the continuous flux of experience, impulsion, overflowing spontaneity - and the characteristics of form as a crystallization that acts as a power of conservation in view of maintaining the cohesion of the whole. The condition of possibility for attaining existence, it is also the form specific to objective spirit that transforms itself into an imprisoning “thing” - Marx’s “boa constrictor” - that encloses and suffocates. “They (the forms) are the vessels for the creative life . . . They have their own logic and laws, their own significance and resilience arising from a certain degree of detachment and independence vis-à-vis the spiritual dynamism that gave them life. At the moment of their establishment they are, perhaps, well-matched to life, but as life continues they tend to become inflexible and remote from life, indeed hostile to it.”2
Translated into Simmel’s terms, Marx’s argument would therefore run as follows: the State-form makes itself independent, develops its specific logic (domination, totalization, appropriation of the name of the One) to the point of forgetting in its arrogance the source from which it stems - to the point of turning against the life of the people and crushing all manifestations that do not fit into its perspective. In short, there is a structural conflict between the logic of the State on the one hand, and the logic of democracy on the other. This juxtaposition of the two thinkers is all the more legitimate when we consider that Simmel had observed for himself the extent to which some of Marx’s descriptions of economic life - notably commodity fetishism - correspond perfectly to the tragedy of culture, to the paradox of a relation in which the terms are at once opposed and inextricably linked.3 For Marx, however, the tragedy of culture does not exist in the field of economy only; the 1843 Critique shows plainly enough that Marx was able to discover it in the political field as well. A single precaution should be taken when making this comparison: that which ' is thought by Simmel in the framework of a philosophy of life is Î thought by Marx from the standpoint of a philosophy of action. The ; tragedy Simmel attributes to the dynamism of life, to its spontaneous impulsion, resurfaces in Marx in the form of an action that does not exhaust itself in the act that is always exceeding itself, and is ready to take hold of itself in order to rebound and to carry itself further.”翻译为中文