In the myth of Pasiphae, the woman who has an artificial cow built by Daedalus in order to mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. In this perspective, technology appears as the device through which man tries to attain – or re-attain – animality. But this is precisely the risk that humanity runs today through technological hypertrophy. Artificial intelligence, to which technology seems to want to entrust its extreme consequence, aims to produce an intelligence that, like animal instinct, functions by itself, so to speak, without the intervention of a thinking subject. It is the Daedalic cow through which human intelligence believes it can happily mate with the instinct of the bull, becoming or becoming again, an animal. And it is not surprising that from this union a monstrous being is born, with a human body and a bull’s head, the Minotaur, who is locked in a labyrinth and fed with human flesh.
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Georges Bataille: Popular Front in the Street
The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.
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In a certain sense, the Popular Front meant nothing more than the revolutionaries’ abandonment of the anti-capitalist offensive; the move to the defence of antifascism; the move to the simple defence of democracy; the abandonment, at the same time, of revolutionary defeatism.
Georges Bataille, Popular Front in the Street
The times, our times, call for a heightened concern with the echoes of early 20th century fascism in contemporary forms of authoritarian government. We will continue in our efforts to map this political reality through past and contemporary writers. And on this occasion, with the impetus of the Lundi Matin collective, we return to Georges Bataille‘s reflections on fascism, and more precisely, to his article on the French Popular Front of 1936, entitled “Popular Front in the Street”.
With France’s recent parliamentary elections (30/06 and 07/07), a New Popular Front emerged as the largest political block in the assembly, but without the sufficient number of parliamentary seats to form a majority based government. And while the politicians haggle over the distribution power, those who voted for the New Popular Front, the “people of the left” seem to have been forgotten. And it is with this in the background that Bataille still speaks to us.
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