Raoul Vaneigem, a French author and revolutionary activist with a unique poetic and essayistic style, recently died. He is famous for his 1968 best-selling book The Revolution of Everyday Life, known in the French version as Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations. I read it for the first time on a train crossing the French countryside. I was a teenager at the time. It left me with a lasting impression of intimacy with the author and his radicality, especially around the theme of what he called “radical subjectivity”. I reread it recently and found this passage particularly inspiring:
“My subjectivity feeds on events. The most varied events: a riot, a sexual fiasco, a meeting, a memory, a rotten tooth. The shock waves of reality in the making reverberate through the caverns of subjectivity. I am caught up in these oscillations whether I like it or not, and, though not everything affects me with equal force, I am always faced with the same paradox: no sooner do I become aware of the alchemy worked by my imagination upon reality than I see that reality reclaimed and borne away by the uncontrollable river of things.”
Reality then appears stronger than my own poor imagination. Yet am I not myself real through all these affections? No doubt, I am a being who thinks, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses and feels. Yet this image of the subject still seems far too poor to account for the richness of my experience. Although I perform all these acts of consciousness, are they really within my power?
I feel, therefore I am. Before I can think or reason, I already feel, and from this feeling I draw my first certainty: my experience does not come primarily from myself, but from the world that surrounds me. I encounter my own existence through what first appears to lie outside me.
While reading it once more, I cannot help but notice that my subjectivity feeds on events too. I can see that the most trivial event is not always the least important, but is surely the least recognized. So what happens when I try to give my reality a bit of attentiveness? Even if my ordinary daily moments are precious to me, I do not choose them. They happen; I experience them: indeed, never in complete passivity, but neither do I choose between the rotten tooth and the loved one. On the contrary, imagination first appears as an active negation of this “objective” material reality, and seems to dissolve it through a recomposition of the object according to intimate wishes. Imagination expresses, against reality, the category of possibility.
That dialectic between imagination and reality expresses, in my opinion, the grounding of all thinkable praxis that involves radical subjectivity and radical emancipation. The main difficulty lies in the strong opposition between subjective wishes, which express possibilities, and social needs, which express necessity.
What exactly is radical about it? Why is it relevant to us from the perspective of care ethics and politics? According to Marx, in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.” And what is man if not his own needs? This is not a positive definition, but rather the conception that, in practice, the human being must reconcile with itself, and the individual with humanity. [The radical definition of man from the point of view of his immediate, singular needs and wishes joins the Tronto definition of care.]
The deepening of desires into radical needs is at the same time the intensification of needs into radical desires. It is the very process through which a class becomes conscious of itself, becomes attentive to itself, and begins to fight for itself through each of its singular members. The revolutionary project does not separate personal expression from objective necessity, but recognizes in desire an objective root that can be shared and socialized, and in each person’s need an irreducible, qualitative singularity.
In contemporary society, on the contrary, dominated groups are compelled to restrict their needs to the physiological and vital minimum, that is, to the reproduction of their labour-power, which constitutes their social utility: they suffer the alienation of their needs and must repress every desire of their own in order to survive, while dominant groups promote their desires into imperious needs, even though these are merely childish whims. They do not live according to need, but according to desire transformed into the consumption of the world and of human beings.
When desires and needs are separated in the dominant imaginary, we can be sure that it is a class imaginary in which some consume and profit while others produce and care.
At first hand, it seems that, if the nature of imagination and thus of wishes is to push beyond all limits, it is in its nature to contest reality, to oppose it and criticize it. On the other hand, reality, because it is the actual state of things, seems to represent the status quo. In this first brutal opposition, we can argue that imagination is revolutionary and reality is inherently reactionary.
But it is not so easy. Capitalism, especially, has long fetishized movement for its own sake, and innovation based on our creative capacities, only for the purpose of accumulation, which ultimately does not change the foundations of society, but rather impoverishes workers further. At the same time, every act of conservation is not conservative: sometimes it is only defensive of a previous social conquest.
However, individual wishes, and therefore imagination, can express a radical need that the actual organization of production cannot satisfy.
I can imagine these events otherwise. In imagination, reality can be recreated completely through wishes. What first seems to be a pure opposition between my subjective imagination and objective reality reveals to me, on second thought, the nature of my subjectivity, which relies on wishes. By virtue of this revelation, I can see that my desire is an expression of objective reality, in the same way that reality becomes subjective through my individual participation.
The famous slogan of May 68, “mistake your wishes for reality” (probably inspired by the reading of Vaneigem), means, in my opinion, nothing other than “mistake your reality for wishes”. This appropriation of reality, which is at the same time the realization of wishes, is precisely what Vaneigem called radical subjectivity.
Why is it relevant? We do not define humanity by a positive abstraction, but by wishes, which are a negation of all limits. Wishes here cannot be understood as the opposite of need, but as a need that has become stable in time and without which we cannot continue to live. Radical subjectivity can then be understood as the expression of my (and our) radical needs through the personal expression of these needs, as wishes.
In his study of needs in Marx, Agnes Heller introduced the notion of “radical needs”.
It reveals at the same time the core of my subjectivity. I become radically subjective when I begin to recognize that I live from what I desire, which is always at the same time an expression of reality and of its imperfection.
So I ask myself, following Vaneigem: What is reality if it is not the opposite of my imagination? But what would this imagination be if it were not defined by its opposition to reality? Is this reality not mine?
What can be revealed to us when we focus a bit on our own desire, and see the gap between this desire and the cruelty of the real?