Après la gauche

The questions implied in the title are genuine and important, but unfortunately the participants spend the entire time avoiding them, and constantly act as if there is really nothing much to think about here. Not one of them has any semblance of a critique of the left, not one has any real proposals, not one has a clue about what is to be done (and not one has the courage to admit that), not one has any meaningful word to say about economics or economic models (despite the constant invocation of the demon “neoliberalism”). Not one.

Or rather: one. The first thing Stiegler says is something like that, in the system today, there are not left-wing people or right-wing people, this is the wrong way to look at it (but it’s only a tiny snippet). But when he says, towards the end, “I believe that we can start to think about the left again, but on the condition that we go very very far in questioning the categories of the theorems that have been at the base of the left for decades”, not only is he making a crucial point, but he might as well be rebuking the other interviewees to their faces. All their emphatic gesticulations are just so many masks covering the denial and carelessness that lies at the root of their boneheaded but oh-so-clever posturing. I’m also pretty sure that Stiegler receives the least amount of onscreen time of any of them. For a bit more on how he sees the origin and fate of the left/right distinction, cf., Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, ch. 12.