Autonomies

We share below a portrait of Charles Fourier’s critique of capitalism by René Shérer (from Ill Will, 23/05/2025) and a portrait of René Schérer’s continuation of that critique in and through the concept of hospitality (from a 2013 interview).

Charles Fourier, or the Great Swerve

René Schérer

A century and a half before Norbert Wiener established it as the science of order, Fourier discovered the antidote to the cybernetic worldview that constitutes the spontaneous ideology of late capitalist life. In his 1967 preface to Charles Fourier, l’attraction passionnée, translated here for the first time, René Schérer (1922–2023) argues that the enduring urgency of Fourier’s work lies not in his specific proposals for collective life, often laden with bombastically fantastic detail, but in his methodology. By radicalizing the procedure of Cartesian doubt and redirecting it against the very foundations of civilization itself, Fourier liberates doubt from the Cartesian certainty of “man as an indivisible source of values.” Rousseau challenged civilization only to rediscover a “natural” moral man, while Marx questioned the capitalist order without challenging the anthropology on which it rests; but it is only Fourier who manages to dislodge the entire classical image of the self as such. By conceiving social, animal, organic, and material relations as an ordered whole, Fourier denies human existence its place at the center of life’s forms. Once everything is in correspondence with everything, the world is decentered: the human “is entirely outside himself, defined by his relations with his environment, by the place that he occupies at any given moment,” able to rediscover himself only from the point of view of totality. It could perhaps be said that the entire post-human turn in anthropology, from Bruno Latour and Anna Tsing to Donna Haraway, owes a debt to Fourier. Yet with the difference that, while the latter theorists remain hampered by the melancholia of “surviving among ruins,” Fourier refuses to submit to the Hegelian dialectic of transgression and loss, with its tragic miserabilism. Whereas dialectical champions of desire accept dissatisfaction as the price of doing business, Fourier strips away the secret resources on which the metaphysics of lack and transgression, sin and repression depends: “the absence of the sacred on which sacrilege feeds. Nowhere is God more absent.” Passion for Fourier is not “a violence that divides, a communication rendered impossible, but on the contrary that which connects.” 

A similar radicality surrounds Fourier’s conception of labor. By contrast with the lionization of labor in Marxism, which, even released from relations of alienation, continues to identify labor with “effort and civic duty,” in Fourier labor is subordinated not to the law of value but to the laws of attraction. Once it is released from the competitive, professional ceremonies and rituals of the market, such activity loses its afflictive character and becomes the impetus for new collective assemblages of desire. In this way, Fourier anticipates the conversion or metanoia whereby the world becomes an object of attachment precisely through its construction as a site of collective defense. 

A friend and colleague of Deleuze, Foucault, Rancière, and Guattari, Schérer helped found the Revolutionary Homosexual Front [FHAR] alongside his lover, Guy Hocquenghem. A major anarchist philosopher in his own right, author of 20 books and co-editor of the journal Chimères, Schérer died in February 2023, a few months after his 100th birthday.