reagan's popularity gives us all food for thought. but we should first establish what type of confidence he is accorded. it is almost too good to be true. how can it be that every defence has fallen before him? how can it be that no mistake or political reversal damages his standing and that, paradoxically, his failures even improve it (which infuriates our french leaders, for whom things are the other way round: the more initiative and goodwill they show, the less popular they become). but the point is precisely that the confidence placed in reagan is a paradoxical confidence. just as we distinguish between real and paradoxical sleep, we should also distinguish between real and paradoxical confidence. the former is granted to a man or a leader on the basis of his qualities and his success. paradoxical confidence is the confidence we place ion someone on the basis of their failure or their absence of qualities. the prototype of this confidence is the failure of prophecy - a process that is well-known from the history of messianic and millenarian movements - following which the group, instead of denying its leader and dispersing, closes ranks around him and creates religious, sectarian, or ecclesiastical institutions to preserve the faith. institutions all the more solid for deriving their energy from the failure of the prophecy. this 'supplemental' confidence never wavers, because it derives from the disavowal of failure. such, making all due allowance, is the amazing aura that surrounds reagan's credibility, and which necessarily makes one think that the american prophecy, the grand prospect of utopia on earth combined with world power, has suffered a setback; that something of that imaginary feat that was to crown the history of two centuries has precisely not been realized, and that reagan is the product of the failure of that prophecy. in reagan, a system of values that was formerly effective turns into something ideal and imaginary. the image of america becomes imginary for americans themselves, at a point when it is without doubt profoundly compromised. this transformation of spontaneous confidence into paradoxical confidence and an achieved utopia into an imaginary hyperbole seems to me to mark a decisive turning-point. but doubtless things are not this simple. for i am not saying that the image of america is deeply altered in the eyes of the americans themselves. i am not saying that this change of direction in the reagan era is anything other than an incidental development. who knows? you have the same difficulty today distinguishing between a process and its simulation, for example between a flight and a flight simulation. america, too, has entered this era of undecidability: is it still really powerful or merely simulating power?
can reagan be considered the symbol of present-day american society - a society which, having once possessed the original features of power, is now perhaps at the face-lift stage? another hypothesis might be that america is no longer what it was, but is continuing on its course; its power has entered a phase of hysteresis. hysteresis: the process whereby something continues to develop by inertia, whereby an effect persists even when its cause has disappeared. we may speak, in this sense, of a hysteresis of history, a hysteresis of socialism, and so on. the whole thing continues to function like a body in motion by virtue of the speed it has already gathered or by inertia-steering, or like an unconscious man still remaining on his feet, by sheer force of equilibrium. or, in more comic vein, like the cyclist in jarry's supermale, who has died of exhaustion on the incredible trip across siberia, but who carries on pedalling and propelling the great machine, his rigor mortis transformed into motive power. a superb fiction, for the dead are perhaps even capable of going quicker, of keeping the machine going better than the living since they no longer have any problems. might america not be like jarry's five-man bicycle? but here again, though it seems quite clear the american machine has suffered something like a break in the current, or a breaking of the spell, who can say whether this is the product of a depression or of a supercooling of the machinery?
america is certainly suffering less than europe from the phase of convalescence that grand ideas are going througrh or from the decline in historical passions, for these are not the motor of its development. it is, however, suffering from the disappearance of ideologies that might contest its power and from the weakening of all the forces that previously opposed it. it was more powerful in the two decades after the second world war, but so too were the ideas and passions ranged against it. the american system could be violently attacked (even from within in the sixties and seventies). today, america no longer has the same hegemony, no longer enjoys the same monopoly, but it is, in a sense, uncontested and uncontestable. it used to be a world power; it has now become a model (business, the market, free enterprise, performance) - and a universal one - even reaching as far as china. the international style is now american. there is no real opposition any more; the combative periphery has now been reabsorbed (china, cuba, vietnam); the great anti-capitalist ideology has been emptied of its substance. all in all, the same concensus is forming around the us in the world at large as has developed around reagan at home. a credibility effect, an advertising effect, the potential adversary losing its defences. this is the way things have gone for reagan. little by little, everything facing him, everything opposing him has faded away, without its being possible to credit him with any personal political genius. concensus by effusion, by an elision of the oppositional elements and the margins. political decline, but pr ascendancy. it's the same for the us on a planetary scale. american power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own (it works by inertia, in an ad hoc fashion, in the void, hampered by its own strength). yet, on the other hand, the country indulges in a kind of promotional hype. america has a sort of mythical power throughout the world, a power based on the advertising image, which parallels the polarization of advertising images around reagan. it is in this way, by this kind of added value, of exponential, self-referential, though ultimately unfounded credibility, that an entire society becomes stabilised beneath a perfusion of advertising. the flooding of the dollar on the world marketplace is the symbol and finest example of this.
yet it is a fragile meta-stability, as much externally as on the domestic political stage. for, in the last resort, it is due to the evaporation of any real alternative, to the disappearance of resistances and antibodies. this is the real crisis of american reaganite power, that of a potential stabilization by inertia, of an assumption of power in a vacuum. in many respects it resembles the loss of immune defenses in an overprotected organism. that is why i feel there is a poetic irony in reagan contracting cancer. in its form, cancer is somewhat similar to that transparent credibility, that euphoria of a body no longer producing antibodies and threatened with destruction by an excess of functionality. the leader of the greatest world power struck down by cancer! power in the grip of metastases! the two poles of our civilization meet here. the end of presidential immunity. it will be aids next! this should mark the beginning of general implosion (in the eastern bloc, political power has long been in the grip of necrosis).
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual.
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