Jacques Camatte

Dialogue with Jacques Camatte (1935-2025)

The passing of Jacques Camatte (1935-2025) a week ago from the writing of this text recalls a life that ostentatiously lingered in thought, and a thought that was entirely enmeshed and intertwined in the irreducibility of life. For some of us that had the good fortune to interact – however briefly and momentary, although every contact is always destinial and inescapable – Camatte transpired generosity and authenticity, and his voice evoked an almost Adanic happiness that has become rare among human beings. A common friend these days has recalled that somewhere in Camatte’s writing there is an endorsement of a capacious phrase from Chernyshevsky that could very well serve to remember his enduring ethical pursuit: ‘we have finally understood that the Earth is a place of life rather than judgement’. The opening the Earth as a dwelling place for life forms means that it is insufficient to conceive of domination as an organization of modes of production, since capital is first and foremost a spatial-temporal arrangement towards the future of the human species, and thus of a certain conquest of the world sensuous life. 

This was the outstanding triumph of real sumption: the modulated and ongoing alienation of the human community (Gemeinwesen) into a community of capital that has arrested time of life to the point of adjusting it to homogenized agony of historical time. Against the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution that theologically exported the polarity of the eschaton and the ho katechon, already in the inception of 1970s Invariance Camatte called for an exteriority of any philosophy of history in order to rework of “a new relationship between human beings and nature”, and “breaking the lock that inhabits the creation of a new form of life”. The two citations in dialogue with each other come from “Against domestication” (1973) and the introduction to Urtext: frammento del testo originario di Critica dell’economia politica” (the 1977 Italian edition curated by Gianni Carchia), although these are variations from the depth of the emergence of the invariance of truth as a vantage point of the world. At the center is a form of life that renews the world that transitions beyond all forms of metaphysical logistics of appropriation, mere standing reserve, and the general arrangement for the mobilization of production. Any point of departure against domestication measures itself against the totality of this fluctuating dominion.

As it has been said of other great thinkers, Camatte’s ultimate passion was rooted in thinking one idea to the end and not of endorsing a system of concepts. For him it was the schism, that is, how to undo the historical process of domestication of a fictive community against the absorption of the increasing autonomization of fictive capital. The schism against the capitalist general equivalent also demands advancing a secondary schism against all humanism and its originary separation from nature. In schism, there is something of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers’ “thought of the word alone” that is receptive to the movement of the soul tries to account for the perceived voice. This precisely what Camatte carried as the lesson from Bordiga’s idiosyncratic original communist program: a movement against the historical benchmark of the development and political economy of growth, which will entail the exhaustion of the revolutionary horizon driven by an ideological political technification that tends to deepen the power towards the positionality of epochal nihilism expressed in the revitalization of strife and the ‘errancy of humanity’ (contrary to Martin Heidegger’s notion of errancy as a play between unconcealment and truth, for Camatte errancy is another name for the civilizational narrative that exemplifies the withering of the  human community into organized and protracted social reproduction and historical abstraction). Hence, as for Bordiga, Camatte conceived the ontology of communism as a world view (not as a political program oriented by concrete historical subject or distributive economic reproduction; not a soteriological dogma nor a transhistorical material idea); that is, broadly speaking, thinking the relationship between the human beings and the earth. A question more pressing than ever given the current planetary conflagration, which exposes the civilizational course that has lead to an inhospitable world where the survival of the human being has become the byproduct of an effective hostis of the community of capital integrated to the global surplus value accumulation.

In Camatte’s unrealized thought – but perhaps all forms of thinking are so – the bordigist gesture persists in locating the schism at the threshold of the force of real subsumption of the anthropomorphization of capital, where the notion of revolution itself is transfigured since, unlike Delacroix’s paradigmatic romantic painting, ‘liberty’ no longer guides the spirit of the “living”. Its redeeming voice also carries downwards unto the depth of the souls of the dead. Amadeo Bordiga himself in “Dialogato coi morti “(1956) writes that “The Revolution…it is always, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where it promised, where it has an appointment with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that it never fails, never deceives”. True life can also take place with the nearness of that which seems remote (as Gustav Landauer once claimed: “For me, the dead also live”).

If both the collapse of the future and the increasing adaptation of social life has entered a gnostic dialectic of endless self-legitimation, it is paramount to capture not just the insurrectionary, but the resurrection flight in Camatte’s gesture that opens possibilities lodged in the dead as an emblem for the return to the world “full of joy and exuberant life”, as he wrote in an apostrophe in “Scatologie et résurrection” (1975): “I will draw from mother earth the vital and infinite power and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community…I will have left your world and been resurrected!” Does holding on to the unity of the Gemeinwesen require a theological undercurrent? Is not the passion for schism, and by the same token the stazion, the energy within the very dispensation withheld between mystery and revelation that has prompted the congenital forms of formal mediations and institutions for the political community? These are the questions that we are exposed to in the enduring task if we are to take seriously a continuous ‘dialogue with Camatte’, which carries the voices of the dead. Ultimately, any authentic conversation that dwells in thought does not have to invent anything new; we are depositories of an endless communication that is handed over, interrupted, and transmitted to anyone willing to hear and capable of being traversed by the shared word. 

In his last year of thinking, Camatte insisted on the notion of “inversion” in the wake of the civilizational phase of extinction, which would require deposing all forms of hostilities and bringing to an end the partisan positions invested in orienting technology and morality (nature) in their seditious defense of the real dominium over the passing of the world. For the current depressing (and depressed) times, writes Camattes in “Instauration du risque d’extinction” (2020), what could very well be a prelude to a return to the repressed allowing a return to the past to initiate an inversion that would allow liquidation of lall exhibition abandoning enmity. This is why, as he told me in an exchange that we undertook five years ago, “inversion cannot be a strategy, as it is totally outside of politics, which is the dynamic of organizing people, of controlling them”. A breakthrough, then, only as a mystical downwards leap into the past? Absolutely – but only insofar as the mystic is the ethical witness to his own openness to the word, and whose exodus from the social machination prepares a return to the world beyond the flattening and dominant language molded by rhetorical dishonesty or passive narcissism of the subjectivity.

This is why according to Carlo Michelstaedter to have courage in the world means to decide between two irreducible figures: the dishonest trickster, or the mystic in the desert. There are no third terms in between. And whereas the dishonest subject knows how to play the hand to his best outcome in each given moment; the mystic knows that his decisive moment is always commencing because the genesis of the human species has yet to take place. This beginning is always at the brink of an untimely auratic experience. And aura names the incommensurable distance from the rational containment of the world — unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s internal introspection in the noosphere that will bring the fullfilment of a spiritualized humanity upon Earth (realized in part by the unification of the sciences by cybernetics); in other words, an exodus from the temporal nominalism that inhabits another life attuned to its genesis: “devenu-devenant ce monde et sur cette vie autre au moment où s’effectue sa création”, he writes in “La séparation nécessaire et l’immense refus” (1979).

The visitation of Jacques Camatte in the world bears witness to that invisible freedom of the human species ready to jump and traverse the catastrophic trumpeting into the living and the dead, making possible the refractions of thinking as original texture of existence. From now on, the exodus from the immanence of this world will embrace a disempowered but perpetual dialogue with Camatte’s demure schism of the living. Indeed, we are always on the path to an earthly beginning. 

The absorption of the sky of politics. On Michele Garau’s Lo scisma da un mondo che muore: Jacques Camatte e la rivoluzione (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

We must welcome that Michele Garau has written the first monograph on Jacques Camatte’s thought in any language, although the book, Lo scisma da un mondo che muore: Jacques Camatte e la rivoluzione (DeriveApprodi, 2024) it is also more ambitious than a mere philological reconstruction of the thinker of Invariance. Of course, not that there is anything particularly wrong with philological or archival work; rather, it is also that Lo scisma da un mondo che muore (2024) tries to think with Camatte (and also beyond some of his potential impasses) the historical bifurcation of a watershed moment in the history of humankind through the realization of the “capitalist revolution” as an autonomous colonization of every form of exteriority (Garau 7). If Camatte’s work has been only selectively considered in our ongoing discussions – while completely ignored at large by the so-called contemporary theory, which I guess it is an uplifting symptom – is precisely because he poses a challenge for a possible breakthrough in times of stagnation, while firmly announcing a much needed farewell to the modern revolution. But who would want to jump on that wagon when precisely voluntarism, prosthetic revolutionary cosmetic, and fictive communitarianism are all necessary platitudes to hold on to the illusion of ground right above the abyss? It is a rhetorical question, of course, but also one that Camatte move passed it in the in the decades of sixties and seventies observant to the material transformation of the working class, and the overall lesson of Amadeo Bordiga’s communism of the human species, which has also been rendered opaque and fossil-like by the victorious force of cultural hegemony and the whole grammatical structure of Gramsci’s thought in postwar political thought (and some will say well into our very present in the most recent cycle of failed left-populism). We said ‘farewell’ and this act, for Camatte after Bordiga’s teaching, means that the revolution has already taken place and must be perceived in the perspective of the crisis of negativity and the inception of the real absorption of capitalist development (Garau 14). 

Hence, new challenges lay ahead, which implies the abandonment of the historical and temporal productivity of revolutionary time – and Garau does an excellent mapping of bourgeois revolutionary thinking from Abbe Sieyès to Saint Just to later formulations of the Leninist paradigm of the dictatorship of the proletariat – which in the grand scene of modernity oriented the economy between form and function, but also between thought and action. If the epoch is said to be ‘anarchic’ is mainly because all these mediations and exclusive autonomous spheres have collapsed unto each other, and to favor one over the other is to work within the fiction of ideological reproduction at best. After Bordiga – Garau claims glossing Camatte, although there are nuances that I cannot consider in the space of this short commentary – the temporalization of the ius revolutionis can only bear in mind the crisis of presence (De Martino) as a suspension of exteriority that liberates right unto real subsumption. This means, following the recently polished phrase of Bordiga from his article “Tempo di abiuratori di scismi” (1965), that all revolutions are born and deployed as the affirmation of the schism. “Schism” or “scisma” — and one is reminded or taken back to a theological terrain, and not just as mitigated by the old ecclesiastical memories of the “Great Schism”, but because “schism” is also the “stazion” that fractures the visible-invisible legacy of form of the Church’s Trinitarian doctrine, and which is still the esoteric boiling point of the myth of political theology. This is a detour around Garau-Camatte-Bordiga’s intuition, since none of this is explicitly thematized in the book, nor should it be. It suffices that it opens to this question, given that Camatte’s own grammar of exhaustion – “extinction”, “inversion”, “autopoiesis”, “critique of organization”, “wandering” (erranza) – distill the echoes of an apocalyptic movement proper to the modern anthropological crisis, to put in terms of Ernesto de Martino.

Be as it may, the longue durée of civilizational development of Western revolutions (Edward Gibbon would claim at least since the reconstitution of the Christian Empire) there has been a process of adequation to invariant processes of capitalist accumulation that its substrate (whether permanent, uneven, natural law justified) becomes isomorphic to the structural needs of capitalist autonomization. In a cogent reading of Sieyes with Saint-Just in the framework of the French Revolution, Garau demonstrates how the genesis of modern politics and its categorial scaffolding (localization, constituent power, social unity, subject of rights, and representation) presuppose a thoroughly new vision to make the human community a clean slate for surface legibility (Garau 42). If the civil concept of the ancient polis was measurement and exchange; the crafting of high-modern state politics that took off in the eighteenth century was much thicker and spatially robust dynamics so that the ‘laws of commerce’ and population disciplining could come to fruition with its necessary infrastructural support. The schism was always a perturbation of the “sphere of politics” (and also of politics as a translucent sphere that can be observed, stabilized, and managed), and thus a great scandal.

Hence, the critique of political economy in the history of marxism was never able to untangle this mutual correspondence. For Garau at this point one can locate the difference between Camatte’s thought and Italian operaismo; given that Italian workerism at mid-century was never able to overcome the dialectic between the valence of value form and the theory of the production of capital. Whereas for Mario Tronti the struggle was still to be inscribed in to confrontation between the proletariat qua labor power; for Camatte the “invarianza” is not an permanent stage within the history of class struggle or Marxism, but of the human community and its resistance against the real subsumption of the material community (Garau 48). Decoupling the history of the working class as constitutive of productionism from the human community, allows Camatte, in the wake of Bordiga’s communism, to register the subsumption of capital as it collapses into dialectical negativity. Hence, communism is neither produced nor organized as operaismo always thought (Garau 26-27). And citing a passage from “Against domestication”, Garau argues that for Camatte the history of the proletariat struggle after 1945 is only the struggle to maintain the myth of the proletariat as the subject of a historical breakthrough (Garau 73). This is a staggering affirmation, and one that most definitely produces a theoretical schism. But the schism is also against the fictionalization of a subject of history, which has also been integrated into the emptying of social reality as we have come to know it in the final triumph of the fictive unto itself (Garau 93). 

There is the triumph of the fictive and expansive force of capital despotism, and then there is the struggle for the originary community (Gemeinwesen), which as Gianni Carchia argued in his “Glosa sull’umanismo” (1977) was still enmeshed in the contradiction between humanism and anti-humanism obstructing the vascular movement of non-identical fragments imploding the social. Is this getting at an impasse of Camatte’s own effort of thought to find an exit route? As an intelligent book, Lo scisma da un mondo che muore (2024), refuses to give an essay in the last three pages of the essay, although this difficulty is an object of attention. For instance, Garau writes in one of the clearest elaborations to tackle the problem directly: “La comunità deve allora essere riscoperta in una memoria della specie che finisce per radicarsi, questo è il rischio, esclusivamente in un bagaglio biologico. Nell’esaurimento delle strutture sociali preesistenti, dei linguaggi e degli schemi culturali, delle intelaiature rappresentative e cognitive, nella colonizzazione delle capacità psichiche, affettive, simboliche, è davvero possibile individuare un resto intoccabile dall’antropomorfosi del capitale che non debba essere, invece, creato dal nulla? C’è una «parte irriducibile», come scriveva Bataille, rispetto alle unità di misura del dispotismo economico? Non è semplice rispondere” (Garau 124).

In light of this rumination, Garau also attends to the cycle of contemporary revolts, which might stand as an instance of linguistic and existential struggle against domestication and the crisis of presence (Cesarano), and that might be capable of “absorbing the sky of politics into the most simple and elements components” (Garau 124-125). This is a great image, and one that has pictorial density and durability for thought even if it lacks specific elaboration. To absorb the open sky is to confront the exteriority of the world only as transfigured and brought back as a gathering of experience. The great German critic Kurt Badt comes to mind when writing about Constable: “the sky’s the organ of sentiment”. The embarrassing loss of the world today is fundamentally the destruction of the right attunement to our relation to the opening registered by what gleams above our heads. And perhaps this is a way to measure the capacity for non-movements rather than thinking that movements can disclose the sky. To this end, what could it mean to absorb the sky of politics – which is also a way to refuse the politics of sky, that is, the total planetary grand designs of geopolitical Tianxia? The irreductible may not be reduced to a substance, nor an ontological science nor a vitalist return to an originary community (if only mediated by the restriction of the archaic myth); but precisely that positionality of contact between what is exterior to life itself. To dislodge thought from all political plotting of objectivation and its plastic ligament of social adaptation. A life beyond itself that endures, and perhaps will outlive this dying world.