Heterologias

The place where this texts originate is not one political place among others (...). I would say, to be simple and direct, while not wishing to be simplistic, comes from the left. But the task that now befalls us is to elucidate, to review, indeed to revolutionize what the term 'left' means.
In order to speak of the site that we are dealing with, I might venture the following thought: 'left' means, at the very least, that the political, as such, is receptive to what is at stake in community. (On the other hand, "right" means, at least, that the political is merely in charge of order and administration). In this sense, and provided we remain open to all the reelaborations and all the theoritical and pratical rethinking that might be necessary, the political is indissocialbe from something that the word "communism" has expressed all to poorly, even as it remains the word to point toward it, albeit very obscurely, even confusedly.
I make no claim to dissipate this obscurity entirely. But we should begin with this much: the political is the place where community as such is brought into play. It is not, in any case, just the locus of power relations, to the extent that these relations set and upset the necessarily unstable and taut equilibrium of collectivity. I do not wish to neglect the sphere of power relations: we never stop being caught up in it, being implicated in its demands. On the contrary, I seek only to insist on the importance and gravity of the relations of force and the class and/or party struggles of the world at a moment when a kind of broadly pervasive democratic consensus seems to make us forget that 'democracy', more and more frequently, serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other that of its own expansion.