This is often the case during election campaigns, and it is probably even more so given the rise of fascist tendencies: everything is put on hold – common sense, reality, boldness, autonomy, determination. Instead, people sound out the situation, calculate their moves, whisper little secrets in each other’s ears and spout posturing that rings hollow. Everyone thinks they are manipulating everyone else, but it is always reality that we are scheming with. The author of this text sets out to examine what this appetite for political manoeuvring entails. Spoiler: the very logic of a world it purports to criticise.
Every political strategy, whatever its political persuasion, is based on two key concepts: the sovereign subject and the state apparatus. Whichever side it takes, it implies intervention from the outside into the structures. Whether they aim to prevent the decline of the white race or ward off the coming of fascism, political strategies rest on the same hackneyed fiction: the political – subject. The fact that their aims are opposite changes nothing of their form. One hates what the other defends, but both call upon a subject to rise up, a people to count themselves, a mass to allow itself to be led. Yet there is no subject, any more than there is an object. There are compositions, decompositions, recompositions, speeds. Strategy, for its part, imposes this grammar: a subject that aims, that calculates, that stands at the forefront; an object that it names, that it fixes, that it promises. The reality is that there is no political subject standing there, before the structures it claims to be able to alter. There is a singular production of a particular context: the political subject is a fable of the modern state just as much as the modern state is an effect of this fable – each needs the other as the riverbank needs the river.
So the strategists suggest that the situation is grave, more so than before, more so than ever. That, in the name of all those whose livelihoods are under threat, we must get our hands dirty, campaign for the century-old structures of a republic that massacred our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. “In the name of”, means that these voices have never been raised in the wake of the massacres; but from university lecterns, from lucrative chatter on Twitch, from parliamentary delegations, from publishing houses: from very specific interests whose voices are clearly heard. In this respect, whatever the objectives of the various strategies, their architectures are analogous. They share the same blind spots and perpetuate the same structures. They suggest the same modes of action, the same relationships to the world and to the masses – What should be done about those who abstain from voting? How can neighbourhoods be mobilised? Should we abandon rural areas? Thus caught up in the same fallacious representations of the State, the People and Power, strategists share the same obsession with the administration of the masses, using levers that are more or less ridiculous, increasingly paternalistic, and still far too didactic. For the State is a mode of governmentality whose fundamental axiom is separation: between subject and object, the individual and the collective, the public and the private, the political and the everyday. This separation, however fictional it may be, produces relationships and exists through them. On this basis, anything that strategically aims to take control of the state apparatus cannot claim to be anything other than a product arising from the relationships codified and distributed by the state apparatus itself, and cannot therefore bring about anything other than the continuation of those very relationships. However revolutionary the strategy may be, it delays the revolution.
What causes the normal course of events to vary is not so much the objectives we set ourselves to bring about that variation as the practice of variation itself. Adopting a mode of action characterised by procrastination, waiting for macro-political mechanisms to take effect, and faith in institutions—this stabilises, this institutes. And what establishes necessarily wards off variation: the position and those who covet it are made of the same code. That which truly varies has no position; that which has a position does not truly vary. In form, then, nothing changes from the enemy: the rally, the programme, the leader, the fervour. And everything is a question of form. The problem with the State lies less in its direct consequences on our lives than in the form of the relationships it produces between us and within us. The problem with political strategy is not that it is ill-suited to the situation it claims to be fighting; it is that it is a pure emanation of politics as conceived by the state apparatus: it is that its form is strictly endogenous to that which ravages the world and prevents us from inhabiting it. So when we hear that we must mobilise affects to rally support for a particular camp, and then get a reformist party elected, we see in this, if not a profound misunderstanding of what affects are, then at the very least a colossal materialist fallacy. Affects, too, are productions. They take place in the world. If the predominant emotions are those of security, refuge, identity and borders, it is not because people have decided as much or because so-called dominant figures have made them their rallying cries, but because the economy, insofar as it separates and administers, necessarily produces forms of life organised around these fetishes. It is therefore not a question of courting the masses by mobilising emotions produced by a given situation – which, quite logically, can only lead to the continuation of that situation – but of allowing practices to emerge that dismantle all the relationships inherent in the situation we wish to see disappear.
The strategy believes it looks towards a world yet to come, without realising that it is the result of a presence that denies itself. It believes it is determined by an objective it has supposedly set for itself, without realising that both itself and its objective are the direct consequences of its blindness to what is taking place here and now. And since it is fixated on what will never happen, everything seems to remain as it is. Indeed, is this not what it wishes for?
What strategic thinking avoids is the singularity of what is taking shape within what it deems non-political: attention to what is already taking place, to what is organising itself immanently, without a plan, without a programme, to what eludes the ravages of management. No dramatic gestures, no noise, just silence. Since it is based on an objective that is always already deferred, strategic thinking starts from an absence. Conversely, starting from a presence means nurturing potentials in order to allow variation to occur, to shape non-prescriptive relationships, to keep the world open.
Opening essay/An effort at an openning: The State, the people, the strategist
from lundimatin #533, 15/09/2026
This is often the case during election campaigns, and it is probably even more so given the rise of fascist tendencies: everything is put on hold – common sense, reality, boldness, autonomy, determination. Instead, people sound out the situation, calculate their moves, whisper little secrets in each other’s ears and spout posturing that rings hollow. Everyone thinks they are manipulating everyone else, but it is always reality that we are scheming with. The author of this text sets out to examine what this appetite for political manoeuvring entails. Spoiler: the very logic of a world it purports to criticise.
Every political strategy, whatever its political persuasion, is based on two key concepts: the sovereign subject and the state apparatus. Whichever side it takes, it implies intervention from the outside into the structures. Whether they aim to prevent the decline of the white race or ward off the coming of fascism, political strategies rest on the same hackneyed fiction: the political – subject. The fact that their aims are opposite changes nothing of their form. One hates what the other defends, but both call upon a subject to rise up, a people to count themselves, a mass to allow itself to be led. Yet there is no subject, any more than there is an object. There are compositions, decompositions, recompositions, speeds. Strategy, for its part, imposes this grammar: a subject that aims, that calculates, that stands at the forefront; an object that it names, that it fixes, that it promises. The reality is that there is no political subject standing there, before the structures it claims to be able to alter. There is a singular production of a particular context: the political subject is a fable of the modern state just as much as the modern state is an effect of this fable – each needs the other as the riverbank needs the river.
So the strategists suggest that the situation is grave, more so than before, more so than ever. That, in the name of all those whose livelihoods are under threat, we must get our hands dirty, campaign for the century-old structures of a republic that massacred our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. “In the name of”, means that these voices have never been raised in the wake of the massacres; but from university lecterns, from lucrative chatter on Twitch, from parliamentary delegations, from publishing houses: from very specific interests whose voices are clearly heard. In this respect, whatever the objectives of the various strategies, their architectures are analogous. They share the same blind spots and perpetuate the same structures. They suggest the same modes of action, the same relationships to the world and to the masses – What should be done about those who abstain from voting? How can neighbourhoods be mobilised? Should we abandon rural areas? Thus caught up in the same fallacious representations of the State, the People and Power, strategists share the same obsession with the administration of the masses, using levers that are more or less ridiculous, increasingly paternalistic, and still far too didactic. For the State is a mode of governmentality whose fundamental axiom is separation: between subject and object, the individual and the collective, the public and the private, the political and the everyday. This separation, however fictional it may be, produces relationships and exists through them. On this basis, anything that strategically aims to take control of the state apparatus cannot claim to be anything other than a product arising from the relationships codified and distributed by the state apparatus itself, and cannot therefore bring about anything other than the continuation of those very relationships. However revolutionary the strategy may be, it delays the revolution.
What causes the normal course of events to vary is not so much the objectives we set ourselves to bring about that variation as the practice of variation itself. Adopting a mode of action characterised by procrastination, waiting for macro-political mechanisms to take effect, and faith in institutions—this stabilises, this institutes. And what establishes necessarily wards off variation: the position and those who covet it are made of the same code. That which truly varies has no position; that which has a position does not truly vary. In form, then, nothing changes from the enemy: the rally, the programme, the leader, the fervour. And everything is a question of form. The problem with the State lies less in its direct consequences on our lives than in the form of the relationships it produces between us and within us. The problem with political strategy is not that it is ill-suited to the situation it claims to be fighting; it is that it is a pure emanation of politics as conceived by the state apparatus: it is that its form is strictly endogenous to that which ravages the world and prevents us from inhabiting it. So when we hear that we must mobilise affects to rally support for a particular camp, and then get a reformist party elected, we see in this, if not a profound misunderstanding of what affects are, then at the very least a colossal materialist fallacy. Affects, too, are productions. They take place in the world. If the predominant emotions are those of security, refuge, identity and borders, it is not because people have decided as much or because so-called dominant figures have made them their rallying cries, but because the economy, insofar as it separates and administers, necessarily produces forms of life organised around these fetishes. It is therefore not a question of courting the masses by mobilising emotions produced by a given situation – which, quite logically, can only lead to the continuation of that situation – but of allowing practices to emerge that dismantle all the relationships inherent in the situation we wish to see disappear.
The strategy believes it looks towards a world yet to come, without realising that it is the result of a presence that denies itself. It believes it is determined by an objective it has supposedly set for itself, without realising that both itself and its objective are the direct consequences of its blindness to what is taking place here and now. And since it is fixated on what will never happen, everything seems to remain as it is. Indeed, is this not what it wishes for?
What strategic thinking avoids is the singularity of what is taking shape within what it deems non-political: attention to what is already taking place, to what is organising itself immanently, without a plan, without a programme, to what eludes the ravages of management. No dramatic gestures, no noise, just silence. Since it is based on an objective that is always already deferred, strategic thinking starts from an absence. Conversely, starting from a presence means nurturing potentials in order to allow variation to occur, to shape non-prescriptive relationships, to keep the world open.