Foreign Rights

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s technocrats decided to euphemize the plan to align the State with the interests of private business culture, calling it “governance.” This conceptual coup successfully dressed up neoliberal brutality in a model of “sound management.” Collectively, we are still paying the price. From that moment on, governing would entail deregulation of the economy, privatization of public services, a clientoriented approach to citizens, and the undermining of unions. Applied to a management or commerce by social groups representing various interests, governance claims to be the art of selfmanagement. Having become standard practice, referred to today at any occasion and from across the political spectrum, its opportunistic malleability is increasingly replacing the old terms of politics. In fifty short texts, Alain Deneault demonstrates the progression of this colonization of all areas of society by governance. This is an “anesthetizing revolution,” make no mistake: it quietly establishes an era of totalitarian management.

“The power is in the hands of the mediocre. Their empire now extends to all spheres of life: the arts, the economy, science, law, and politics. Hardworking and quick to breed, they are extremely effective, so much so that the time is not distant that they will have extinguished every passion, suppressed all sense of daring, and slashed every genuine political idea to shreds.” In this book, Alain Deneault offers an incisive and at times caustic analysis of the reign of mediocrity, which sterilizes the human mind by spreading a reckless love for cultural and political tepidness. Mediocrity is a social order that permanently threatens to collapse in the middle.

« What is to be done? » Lenin’s question once initiated reflexions for building a new order. It is now rhetorical : Tell me I can’t do anything as I don’t have the strength to actively engage in the act of resistance the circumstances call for. We pitifully look for a De Gaulle to respond to, or a Ghandi to massively imitate — but each of us in his own corner. At this stage of political dereliction, indeed, what is to be done? Stop the indignation and move on to the next question. Work endlessly towards a synthesis of valid causes, organize beyond sectarian and parochial divides, mock ideology, objectify concepts that propaganda describes as merely subjective, transcend hegemonic modes of organization and experiment institutional forms that resemble us. Radicalize!

The settler, a middle figure who is neither in the unbearable position of the colonized nor in the indefensible position of the colonizer, is generally dismissed as an extra in the colonial narrative. Complementing Albert Memmi’s diptych, Alain Deneault reveals here the useful, even indispensable, idiot of the appropriation of territory, a figure that exists only in absolute solidarity with the class that dominates it, but whose political and economic powerlessness allows him to identify, when appropriate, with the colonized. The setting in which Alain Deneault portrays this figure: Canada. Caught between a colonial past that it wishes to forget and a republican expansion that is constantly postponed, this land that we call « country » excels only in the mediocrity of its extreme-central policies, but it gives to political theory an important object: the condition of the settler, which has been that of the majority of its population and which remains so in a thousand unspoken ways.

This book questions the difficulty of conceiving collective emancipation in a world dominated by capitalist technocracy and individualism. Alain Deneault pursues the ideas found in his previous essays La médiocratie and Politique de l’extrême center. He invites us to break with the dynamics of identity-based quarrels where everyone uses their own conscience as a stick to hit others, and in which everyone seems to let the world run to its ruin, as long as his or her cause and interest advance here and now. He deplores the degradation of important categories into slogans and clichés, and reminds us that underneath these debates lie precious issues and desires that must be urgently brought out of the rubble.

The era of the unprecedented marks ecological and climatic mutations unseen before, and the forthcoming social transformations will be radical. In a world where political thought is struggling to find objects as clear-cut as socialism was in the previous century, angst is a driving force in the search for substitute objects, but their inadequacy creates even more angst... What is to be done? This question is so often asked that it causes vertigo. It has punctuated political thought for more than a century, and is finally causing us to freeze. Before asking it, we need to examine its premises and implications. So, beyond any tightly defined program, we must reflect on the movement, the trial, the risk, the attempt, in order to discover the object of our thinking at the very moment it is given to us.