Итог полностью

I would like to consider the example of the debate on popular art. (1 am somewhat worried by the communicability of what 1 have to say and that must be evident in the difficulty I have in saying it.) You are aware of the recurring debate on popular art, proletarian art, socialist realism, popular culture, etc., a typically theological debate into which sociology cannot enter without getting caught in a trap. Why? Because it is the terrain par excellence of the oracle effect I have just been describing. For example, what is called socialist realism is in fact the typical product of that substitution of the individual ‘1’ of the political delegates, of the Zhdanovian ‘I’ to call it by its real name, in other words, the second-rate petit-bourgeois intellectual who wants to impose order, especially on first-rate intellectuals, and who universalizes himself by setting himself up as the people. And an elementary analysis of socialist realism would show that there is nothing popular in what is in reality a formalism or

even an academicism, based on a highly abstract allegorical iconography, ‘the Worker’, etc. (even if this art seems to satisfy, very superficially, the popular demand for realism). What is expressed in this formalist and petit-bourgeois art - which, far from expressing the people, involves rather a negation of the people, in the form of that naked-torsoed, muscular, sun-tanned, optimistic people turned towards the future, etc. - is the social philosophy and the unconscious ideal of a petite bourgeoisie of party men who betray their real fear of the real people by identifying themselves with an idealized people, torches aloft, the living flame of Humanity ... The same could be demonstrated of popular culture, etc. What we are dealing with are typical cases of subject substitution. The priesthood - and (his is what Nietzsche was getting at - the priest, the Church, the apparatchik of every country substitutes his own vision of the world (a vision deformed by his own libido dominandi) for that of the group of which he is supposedly the expression. The 'people' is used these days just as in other times God was used - to settle accounts between clerics.

Homology and the Effects of Misrecognition

But we must now ask how all these double-dealing strategies, these strategies of the ego and its double, manage to work in spite of everything: how is it that the delegate's double-dealing doesn't betray itself? What has to be understood is what comprises the heart of the mystery of the ministry, namely, ‘legitimate imposture". It is not. in fact, a question of getting away from the naive representation of the dedicated delegate, the disinterested militant, the self-ahnegating leader, in order to fall back into the cynical view of the delegate as a conscious and organized usurper - that is the eighteenth-century view, as found in Helvetius and d’Holbach. of the priest, and a very naive view, for all its apparent lucidity. Legitimate imposture succeeds only because the usurper is not a cynical calculator who consciously deceives the people, but someone who in all good faith takes himself to be something that he is not.

One of the mechanisms that allow usurpation and double-dealing to work (if 1 may put it like this) in all innocence, with the most perfect sincerity, consists in the fact that, in many cases, the interests of the delegate and the interests of the mandators, of those he represents, coincide to a large extent, so that the delegate can believe and get others to believe that he has no interests outside