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doorway, waiting for something of some sort to happen in their lives, in which nothing happens. They wait. However, at the end of the act, in a flash a 'story' is sketched out, the image of a destiny. A girl, Nina, stands transfixed by the lights of the circus, staring with all her heart through a rent in the canvas at the clown performing his perilous act. Night has fallen. For one moment, time is in suspense. But she is already being watched by the Togasso, the good-for-nothing who hopes to seduce her. A quick defiance, retreat, departure. Now an old man appears, the 'fire-eater', her father, and he has seen everything. Something has taken shape, which might turn into a tragedy.

    A tragedy? It is completely forgotten in the second act. It is broad day in the spacious premises of a cheap eating-house. Here again we find a whole crowd of poor people, the same people but different characters: the same poverty and unemployment, the flotsam of the past, the tragedies and comedies of the present: small craftsmen, beggars, a cabman, a Garibaldian veteran, some women, etc. Also a few workers who are building a factory, in sharp contrast with their lumpen-proletarian surroundings: they are already discussing industry, politics, and, almost, the future, but only just and with difficulty. This is Milan from below, twenty years after the conquest of Rome and the deeds of the Risorgimento: King and Pope are on their thrones, the masses are in poverty. Yes, the day of the second act is indeed the truth of the night of the first: these people have no more history in their lives than they had in their dreams. They survive, that is all: they eat (only the workers depart, called by the factory hooter), they eat and wait. A life in which nothing happens. Then, just at the end of the act, Nina reappears on the stage, for no apparent reason, and with her the tragedy. We learn that the clown is dead. The men and women leave the stage little by little. The Togasso appears, he forces the girl to kiss him and give him what little money she has. Hardly more than a few gestures. Her father arrives. (Nina is weeping at the end of the long table.) He does not eat: he drinks. After a terrible struggle he succeeds in killing the Togasso with a knife and then flees, haggard, overwhelmed by what he has done. Once again a lightning flash after a long grind.

    In the third act it is dawn in the women's night shelter. Old women, blending into the walls, sitting down, talk or stay silent.

 
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One stout peasant woman, bursting with health, will certainly return to the country. Some women pass; as always, we do not know them. The lady warden leads her whole company to Mass when the bells ring. When the stage has emptied, the tragedy begins again. Nina was sleeping in the shelter. Her father comes to see her for the last time before prison: she must realize at least that he killed for her sake, for her honour . . . but suddenly everything is reversed: Nina turns on her father, on the illusions and lies he has fed her, on the myths which will kill him. But not her; for she is going to rescue herself, all alone, for that is the only way. She will leave this world of night and poverty and enter the other one, where pleasure and money reign. The Togasso was right. She will pay the price, she will sell herself, but she will be on the other side, on the side of freedom and truth. The hooters sound. Her father has embraced her and departed, a broken man. The hooters still sound. Erect, Nina goes out into the day light.

    The first of these misunderstandings is, of course, the accusation that the play is a 'mélodrame misérabiliste '. But anyone who has 'lived' the performance or studied its economy can demolish this charge. For if it does contain melodramatic elements, as a whole, the drama is simply a criticism of them. Nina's father does indeed live his daughter's story in the melodramatic mode, and not just his daughter's adventure, but above all his own life in his relations with his daughter. He has invented for her the fiction of an imaginary condition, and encouraged her in her romantic illusions; he tries desperately to give flesh and blood to the illusions he has fostered in his daughter: as he wishes to keep her free from all contact with the world he has hidden from her, and as, desperate that she will not listen to him, he kills the source of Evil, the Togasso. So he lives intensively and really the myths he has constructed to spare his daughter from the law of this world. So the father is the very image of melodrama, of the 'law of the heart'

 
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deluding itself as to the 'law of the world'. It is precisely this deliberate unconsciousness that Nina rejects. She makes her own real trial of the world. With the clown's death her adolescent dreams have died too. The Togasso has opened her eyes and dispatched her childhood myths along with her father's. His violence itself has freed her from words and duties. She has at last seen this naked, cruel world where morality is nothing but a lie; she has realized that her safety lies in her own hands and that she can only reach the other world by selling the only goods at her disposal: her young body. The great confrontation at the end of the third act is more than a confrontation between Nina and her father, it is the confrontation of a world without illusions with the wretched illusions of the 'heart', it is the confrontation of the real world with the melodramatic world, the dramatic access to consciousness that destroys the myths of melodrama, the very myths that Bertolazzi and Strehler are charged with. Those who make this charge could quite easily have found in the play the criticism they tried to address to it from the stalls.

    But there is another, deeper reason that should clear up this misunderstanding. I was trying to hint at it in my summary of the play's 'sequence', when I pointed out its strange 'temporal' rhythm.

    For this is, indeed, a play remarkable for its internal dissociation. The reader will have noted that its three acts have the same structure, and almost the same content: the coexistence of a long, slowly-passing, empty time and a lightning-short, full time; the coexistence of a space populated by a crowd of characters whose mutual relations are accidental or episodic -- and a short space, gripped in mortal combat, inhabited by three characters: the father, the daughter and the Togasso. In other words, this is a play in which about forty characters appear, but the tragedy concerns only three of them. Moreover, there is no explicit relationship between these two times or between these two spaces. The characters of the time seem strangers to the characters of the lightning: they regularly give place to them (as if the thunder of the storm had chased them from the stage), only to return in the next act, in other guises, once the instant foreign to their rhythm has passed. If we deepen the latent meaning of this dissociation it will lead us to the heart of the play. For the spectator actually

 
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lives this deepening as he moves from disconcerted reserve to astonishment and then passionate involvement between the first and the third acts. My aim here is merely to reflect this lived deepening, to make explicit this latent meaning which affects the spectator despite himself. But the decisive question is this: why is it that this dissociation is so expressive, and what does it express? What is this absence of relations to suggest a latent relation as its basis and justification? How can there coexist two forms of temporality, apparently foreign to one another and yet united by a lived relationship?

    The answer lies in a paradox: the true relationship is constituted precisely by the absence of relations. The play's success in illustrating this absence of relations and bringing it to life gives it its originality. In short, I do not think we are dealing with a melodramatic veneer on a chronicle of Milanese popular life in 1890. We are dealing with a melodramatic consciousness criticized by an existence: the existence of the Milanese sub-proletariat in 1890. Without this existence it would be impossible to tell what the melodramatic consciousness was; without this critique of the melodramatic consciousness it would be impossible to grasp the tragedy latent in the existence of the Milanese sub-proletariat: its powerlessness. What is the significance of the chronicle of wretched existence that makes up the essential part of the three acts? Why is this chronicle's time a march-past of purely typed, anonymous and interchangeable beings? Why is this time of vague meetings, brief exchanges and broached disputes precisely an empty time? In its progress from the first act through the second to the third, why does this time tend towards silence and immobility? (In the first act there is still a semblance of life and movement on the stage; in the second, everyone is sitting down and some are already lapsing into silence; in the third, the old women blend into the walls.) Why -- if not to suggest the actual content of this wretched time: it is a time in which nothing happens, a time without hope or future, a time in which even the past is fixed in repetition (the Garibaldian veteran) and the future is hardly groped for in the political stammerings of the labourers building the factory, a time in which gestures have no continuation or effect, in which everything is summed up in a few exchanges close to life, to 'everyday life', in discussions and disputes which are either abortive or reduced to nothingness by a

 
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meal, eating again. At these times, the gestures themselves reveal all their meaning. The character seen face-on at the beginning of the scene, his head hardly higher than the plate he would prefer to carry between his two hands. The time it takes him to fill his spoon, to lift it up to his mouth and over it, in an interminable movement designed to ensure that not one scrap is lost, and when at last he has filled his mouth, he lingers over his portion weighing it up before swallowing it. Then we see that the others with their backs to us are making the same movements: their raised elbows compensating for their unstable backs -- we see them eating, absently, like all the other absent people, making the same holy movements in Milan and in all the world's great cities, because that is the whole of their lives, and there is nothing which would make it possible for them to live out their time otherwise. (The only ones with an air of haste are the labourers, their life and work punctuated by the hooters.) I can think of no comparable representation in spatial structure, in the distribution of men and places, of the deep relations between men and the time they live.

    Now for the essential point: this temporal structure -- that of the 'chronicle' -- is opposed to another temporal structure: that of the 'tragedy'. For the tragedy's time (Nina) is full: a few lightning-flashes, an articulated time, a 'dramatic' time. A time in which some history must take place. A time moved from within by an irresistible force, producing its own content. It is a dialectical time par excellence. A time that abolishes the other time and the structure of its spatial representation. When the men have left the restaurant, and only Nina, her father and the Togasso are left, something has suddenly disappeared: as if the diners had taken the whole décor with them (Strehler's stroke of genius: to have made two acts one, and played two different acts in the same décor ), the very space of walls and tables, the logic and meaning of these locations; as if conflict alone substituted for this visible and empty space another dense, invisible, irreversible space, with one dimension, the dimension that propels it towards tragedy, ultimately, the dimension that had to propel it into tragedy if there was really to be any tragedy.

    It is precisely this opposition that gives Bertolazzi's play its depth. On the one hand, a non-dialectical time in which nothing happens, a time with no internal necessity forcing it into action;

 
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on the other, a dialectical time (that of conflict) induced by its internal contradiction to produce its development and result. The paradox of El Nost Milan is that the dialectic in it is acted marginally, so to speak, in the wings, somewhere in one corner of the stage and at the ends of the acts: this dialectic (although it does seem to be indispensable to any theatrical work) is a long time coming: the characters could not care less about it. It takes its time, and never arrives until the end, initially at night, when the air is heavy with the renowned night-owls, then as midday strikes, with the sun already on its descent, finally as dawn rises. This dialectic always appears after everyone has departed.

    How is the 'delay' of this dialectic to be understood? Is it delayed in the way consciousness is for Marx and Hegel? But can a dialectic be delayed? Only on condition that it is another name for consciousness.

    If the dialectic of El Nost Milan is acted in the wings, in one corner of the stage, it is because it is nothing but the dialectic of a consciousness: the dialectic of Nina's father and his consciousness. And that is why its destruction is the precondition for any real dialectic. Here we should recall Marx's analyses in The Holy Family of Eugene Sue's personages.[4] The motor of their dramatic

 
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conduct is their identification with the myths of bourgeois morality: these unfortunates live their misery within the arguments of a religious and moral conscience; in borrowed finery. In it they disguise their problems and even their condition. In this sense, melodrama is a foreign consciousness as a veneer on a real condition. The dialectic of the melodramatic consciousness is only possible at this price: this consciousness must be borrowed from

 
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outside (from the world of alibis, sublimations and lies of bourgeois morality), and it must still be lived as the consciousness of a condition (that of the poor) even though this condition is radically foreign to the consciousness. It follows that between the melodramatic consciousness on the one hand, and the existence of the characters of the melodrama on the other, there can exist no contradiction strictly speaking. The melodramatic consciousness is not contradictory to these conditions: it is a quite different consciousness, imposed from without on a determinate condition but without any dialectical relation to it. That is why the melodramatic consciousness can only be dialectical if it ignores its real conditions and barricades itself inside its myth. Sheltered from the world, it unleashes all the fantastic form of a breathless conflict which can only ever find peace in the catastrophe of someone else's fall: it takes this hullabaloo for destiny and its breathlessness for the dialectic. In it, the dialectic turns in a void, since it is only the dialectic of the void, cut off from the real world for ever. This foreign consciousness, without contradicting its conditions, can not emerge from itself by itself, by its own 'dialectic'. It has to make a rupture -- and recognize this nothingness, discover the non-dialecticity of this dialectic.

    This never happens with Sue: but it does in El Nost Milan. In the end the last scene does give an answer to the paradox of the play and of its structure. When Nina turns on her father, when she sends him back into the night with his dreams, she is breaking both with her father's melodramatic consciousness and with his 'dialectic'. She has finished with these myths and the conflicts they unleash. Father, consciousness, dialectic, she throws them all overboard and crosses the threshold of the other world, as if to show that it is in this poor world that things are happening, that everything has already begun, not only its poverty, but also the derisory illusions of its consciousness. This dialectic which only comes into its own at the extremities of the stage, in the aisles of a story it never succeeds in invading or dominating, is a very exact image for the quasi-null relation of a false consciousness to a real situation. The sanction of the necessary rupture imposed by real experience, foreign to the content of consciousness, is to chase this dialectic from the stage. When Nina goes through the door separating her from the daylight she does not yet know what her life

 
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will be; she might even lose it. At least we know that she goes out into the real world, which is undoubtedly the world of money, but also the world that produces poverty and imposes on poverty even its consciousness of 'tragedy'. And this is what Marx said when he rejected the false dialectic of consciousness, even of popular consciousness, in favour of experience and study of the other world, the world of Capital.

    At this point someone will want to stop me, arguing that what I am drawing from the play goes beyond the intentions of the author -- and that I am, in fact, attributing to Bertolazzi what really belongs to Strehler. But I regard this statement as meaningless, for at issue here is the play's latent structure and nothing else, Bertolazzi's explicit intentions are unimportant: what counts beyond the words, the characters and the action of the play, is the internal relation of the basic elements of its structure. I would go further. It does not matter whether Bertolazzi consciously wished for this structure, or unconsciously produced it: it constitutes the essence of his work; it alone makes both Strehler's interpretation and the audience's reaction comprehensible.

    Strehler was acutely aware of the implications of this remarkable structure,[5] and his production and direction of the actors were determined by it; that is why the audience was bowled over by it. The spectators' emotion cannot be explained merely by the 'presence' of this teeming popular life -- nor by the poverty of these people, who still manage to keep up a hand-to-mouth existence, accepting their fate, taking their revenge, on occasion with a laugh, at moments by solidarity, most often by silence -- nor by the lightning tragedy of Nina, her father and the Togasso; but basically by their unconscious perception of this structure and its profound meaning. The structure is nowhere exposed, nowhere does it constitute

 
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the object of a speech or a dialogue. Nowhere can it be perceived directly in the play as can the visible characters or the course of the action. But it is there, in the tacit relation between the people's time and the time of the tragedy, in their mutual imbalance, in their incessant 'interference' and finally in their true and delusive criticism. It is this revealing latent relation, this apparently insignificant and yet decisive tension that Strehler's production enables the audience to perceive without their being able to translate this presence directly into clearly conscious terms. Yes, the audience applauded in the play something that was beyond them, which may even have been beyond its author, but which Strehler provided him: a meaning buried deeper than words and gestures, deeper than the immediate fate of the characters who live this fate without ever being able to reflect on it. Even Nina, who is for us the rupture and the beginning, and the promise of another world and another consciousness, does not know what she is doing. Here we can truly say that consciousness is delayed -- for even if it is still blind, it is a consciousness aiming at last at a real world.

    The dynamic of this specific latent structure, and in particular, the coexistence without any explicit relation of a dialectical temporality and a non-dialectical temporality, is the basis for a true critique of the illusions of consciousness (which always believes

 
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itself to be dialectical and treats itself as dialectical), the basis for a true critique of the false dialectic (conflict, tragedy, etc.) by the disconcerting reality which is its basis and which is waiting for recognition. Thus, the war in Mother Courage, as opposed to the personal tragedies of her blindness, to the false urgency of her greed; thus, in Galileo the history that is slower than consciousness impatient for truth, the history which is also disconcerting for a consciousness which is never able to 'take' durably on to it within the period of its short life. This silent confrontation of a consciousness (living its own situation in the dialectical-tragic mode, and believing the whole world to be moved by its impulse) with a reality which is indifferent and strange to this so-called dialectic an apparently undialectical reality, makes possible an immanent critique of the illusions of consciousness. It hardly matters whether these things are said or not (they are in Brecht, in the form of fables or songs): in the last resort it is not the words that produce this critique, but the internal balances and imbalances of forces between the elements of the play's structure. For there is no true critique which is not immanent and already real and material before it is conscious. I wonder whether this asymmetrical, decentred structure should not be regarded as essential to any theatrical effort of a materialist character. If we carry our analysis of this condition a little further we can easily find in it Marx's fundamental principle that it is impossible for any form of ideological consciousness to contain in itself, through its own internal dialectic, an escape from itself, that, strictly speaking, there is no dialectic of consciousness : no dialectic of consciousness which could reach reality itself by virtue of its own contradictions; in short, there can be no 'phenomenology' in the Hegelian sense: for consciousness does not accede to the real through its own internal development, but by the radical discovery of what is other than itself.

    It was in precisely this sense that Brecht overthrew the problematic of the classical theatre -- when he renounced the thematization of the meaning and implications of a play in the form of a consciousness of self. By this I mean that, to produce a new, true and active consciousness in his spectators, Brecht's world must necessarily exclude any pretensions to exhaustive self-recovery and self-representation in the form of a consciousness of self. The classical theatre (though Shakespeare and Molière must be excepted, and

 
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this exception explained) gave us tragedy, its conditions and its 'dialectic', completely reflected in the speculative consciousness of a central character -- in short, reflected its total meaning in a consciousness, in a talking, acting, thinking, developing human being: what tragedy is for us. And it is probably no accident that this formal condition of 'classical' aesthetics (the central unity of a dramatic consciousness, controlling the other, more famous 'unities') is closely related to its material content. I mean that the material, or the themes, of the classical theatre (politics, morality, religion, honour, 'glory', 'passion', etc.) are precisely ideological themes, and they remain so, without their ideological nature ever being questioned, that is, criticized ('passion' itself, opposed to 'duty' or 'glory' is no more than an ideological counterpoint never the effective dissolution of the ideology). But what, concretely, is this uncriticized ideology if not simply the 'familiar', 'well known', transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself? What is the ideology of a society or a period if it is not that society's or period's consciousness of itself, that is, an immediate material which spontaneously implies, looks for and naturally finds its forms in the image of a consciousness of self living the totality of its world in the transparency of its own myths? I am not asking why these myths (the ideology as such) were not generally questioned in the classical period. I am content to be able to infer that a time without real self-criticism (with neither the means nor the need for a real theory of politics, morality and religion) should be inclined to represent itself and recognize itself in an uncritical theatre, that is, a theatre whose (ideological) material presupposed the formal conditions for an aesthetic of the consciousness of self. Now Brecht can only break with these formal conditions because he has already broken with their material conditions. His principal aim is to produce a critique of the spontaneous ideology in which men live. That is why he is inevitably forced to exclude from his plays this formal condition of the ideology's aesthetics, the consciousness of self (and its classical derivations: the rules of unity). For him (I am still discussing the 'great plays'), no character consciously contains in himself the totality of the tragedy's conditions. For him, the total, transparent

 
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consciousness of self, the mirror of the whole drama is never anything but an image of the ideological consciousness, which does include the whole world in its own tragedy, save only that this world is merely the world of morals, politics and religion, in short, of myths and drugs. In this sense these plays are decentred precisely because they can have no centre, because, although the illusion-wrapped, naïve consciousness is his starting-point, Brecht refuses to make it that centre of the world it would like to be. That is why in these plays the centre is always to one side, if I may put it that way, and in so far as we are considering a demystification of the consciousness of self, the centre is always deferred, always in the beyond, in the movement going beyond illusion towards the real. For this basic reason the critical relation, which is a real production, cannot be thematized for itself: that is why no character is in himself 'the morality of history' -- except when one of them comes down to the footlights, takes off his mask and, the play over, 'draws the lessons' (but then he is only a spectator reflecting on it from the outside, or rather prolonging its movement: 'we have done our best, now it is up to you').

    It should now be clear why we have to speak of the dynamic of the play's latent structure. It is the structure that we must discuss in so far as the play cannot be reduced to its actors, nor to their explicit relations -- only to the dynamic relation existing between consciousnesses of self alienated in spontaneous ideology (Mother Courage>, her sons, the cook, the priest, etc.) and the real conditions of their existence (war, society). This relation, abstract in itself (abstract with respect to the consciousness of self -- for this abstract is the true concrete) can only be acted and represented as characters, their gestures and their acts, and their 'history' only as a relation which goes beyond them while implying them; that is, as a relation setting to work abstract structural elements (e.g. the different forms of temporality in El Nost Milan -- the exteriority of dramatic crowds, etc.), their imbalance and hence their dynamic. This relation is necessarily latent in so far as it cannot be exhaustively thematized by any 'character' without ruining the whole critical project: that is why, even if it is implied by the action as a whole, by the existence and movements of all the characters, it is their deep meaning, beyond their consciousness -- and thus hidden from them; visible to the spectator in so

 
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far as it is invisible to the actors -- and therefore visible to the spectator in the mode of a perception which is not given, but has to be discerned, conquered and drawn from the shadow which initially envelops it, and yet produced it.

    Perhaps these remarks give us a more precise idea of the problem posed by the Brechtian theory of the alienation-effect. By means of this effect Brecht hoped to create a new relation between the audience and the play performed: a critical and active relation. He wanted to break with the classical forms of identification, where the audience hangs on the destiny of the 'hero' and all its emotional energy is concentrated on theatrical catharsis. He wanted to set the spectator at a distance from the performance, but in such a situation that he would be incapable of flight or simple enjoyment. In short, he wanted to make the spectator into an actor who would complete the unfinished play, but in real life. This profound thesis of Brecht's has perhaps been too often interpreted solely as a function of the technical elements of alienation: the abolition of all 'impressiveness' in the acting, of all lyricism and all 'pathos': al fresco acting; the austerity of the set, as if to eliminate any eye-catching relief (cf. the dark ochre and ash colours in Mother Courage ); the 'flat' lighting; the commentary-placards to direct the readers' attention to the external context of the conjuncture (reality), etc. The thesis has also given rise to psychological interpretations centred around the phenomenon of identification and its classical prop: the hero. The disappearance of the hero (whether positive or negative), the object of identification, has been seen as the very precondition of the alienation-effect (no more hero, no more identification -- the suppression of the hero being also linked to Brecht's 'materialist' conception -- it is the masses who make history, not 'heroes'). Now, I feel that these interpretations are limited to notions which may well be important, but which are not determinant, and that it is essential to go beyond the technical and psychological conditions to an understanding that this very special critique must be constituted in the spectator's consciousness. In other words, if a distance can be established between the spectator and the play, it is essential that in some way this distance should be produced within the play itself, and not only in its (technical) treatment, or in the psychological modality of the characters (are they really heroes or non-

 
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heroes? Take the dumb daughter on the roof in Mother Courage, shot because she beat her infernal drum to warn the unknowing city that an enemy was about to fall on it, is she not, in fact, a 'positive hero'? Surely we do temporarily 'identify' with this secondary character?). It is within the play itself, in the dynamic of its internal structure, that this distance is produced and represented, at once criticizing the illusions of consciousness and unravelling its real conditions.

    This -- that the dynamic of the latent structure produces this distance within the play itself -- must be the starting-point from which to pose the problem of the relation between the spectator and the performance. Here again Brecht reverses the established order. In the classical theatre it was apparently quite simple: the hero's temporality was the sole temporality, all the rest was subordinate to it, even his opponents were made to his measure, they had to be if they were to be his opponents; they lived his time, his rhythm, they were dependent on him, they were merely his dependants. The opponent was really his opponent: in the struggle the hero belonged to the opponent as much as the opponent did to the hero, the opponent was the hero's double, his reflection, his opposite, his night, his temptation, his own unconscious turned against him. Hegel was right, his destiny was consciousness of himself as of an enemy. Thereby the content of the struggle was identified with the hero's consciousness of himself. And quite naturally, the spectator seemed to 'live' the play by 'identifying' himself with the hero, that is, with his time, with his consciousness, the only time and the only consciousness offered him. In Bertolazzi's play and in Brecht's great plays this confusion becomes impossible, precisely because of their dissociated structure. I should say, not that the heroes have disappeared because Brecht has banished them from his plays, but that even as the heroes they are, and in the play itself, the play makes them impossible, abolishes them, their consciousness and its false dialectic. This reduction is not the effect of the action alone, nor of the demonstration which certain popular figures are fated to make of it (on the theme: neither God nor Caesar); it is not even merely the result of the play appreciated as an unresolved story, it is not produced at the level of detail or of continuity, but at the deeper level of the play's structural dynamic.

 
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    At this point dose attention is essential: up till now only tho play has been discussed -- now we must deal with the spectator's consciousness. I should like to show in a few words that this is not, as might have been thought, a new problem, but really the same one. However, if this is to be accepted, two classical models of the spectatorial consciousness which cloud our reflection must first of all be relinquished. The first of these misleading models is once again a consciousness of self, this time the spectator's. It accepts that the spectator should not identify with the 'hero'; he is to be kept at a distance. But is he not then outside the play judging, adding up the score and drawing the conclusions? Mother Courage is presented to you. It is for her to act. It is for you to judge. On the stage the image of blindness -- in the stalls the image of lucidity, led to consciousness by two hours of unconsciousness. But this division of roles amounts to conceding to the house what has been rigorously excluded from the stage. Really, the spectator has no claim to this absolute consciousness of self which the play cannot tolerate. The play can no more contain the 'Last Judgement' on its own 'story' than can the spectator be the supreme Judge of the play. He also sees and lives the play in the mode of a questioned false consciousness. For what else is he if not the brother of the characters, caught in the spontaneous myths of ideology, in its illusions and privileged forms, as much as they are? If he is kept at a distance from the play by the play itself, it is not to spare him or to set him up as a Judge -- on the contrary, it is to take him and enlist him in this apparent distance, in this 'estrangement' -- to make him into this distance itself, the distance which is simply an active and living critique.

    But then, no doubt, we must also reject the second model of the spectatorial consciousness -- a model that will haunt us until it has been rejected: the identification model. I am unable to answer this question fully here, but I shall try to pose it clearly: surely the invocation of a conception of identification (with the hero) to deal with the status of the spectatorial consciousness is to hazard a dubious correlation? Rigorously speaking, the concept of identification is a psychological, or, more precisely, a psychoanalytic concept. Far be it from me to contest the effectivity of psychological processes in the spectator seated in front of the stage. But it must be said that the phenomena of projection, sub-

 
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limation, etc., that can be observed, described and defined in controlled psychological situations cannot by themselves account for complex behaviour as specific as that of the spectator-attending-a-performance. This behaviour is primarily social and cultural aesthetic, and as such it is also ideological. Certainly, it is an important task to elucidate the insertion of concrete psychological processes (such as identification, sublimation, repression, etc., in their strict psychological senses) in behaviour which goes beyond them. But this first task cannot abolish the second -- the definition of the specificity of the spectatorial consciousness itself -- without lapsing into psychologism. If the consciousness cannot be reduced to a purely psychological consciousness, if it is a social, cultural and ideological consciousness, we cannot think its relation to the performance solely in the form of a psychological identification. Indeed, before (psychologically) identifying itself with the hero, the spectatorial consciousness recognizes itself in the ideological content of the play, and in the forms characteristic of this content. Before becoming the occasion for an identification (an identification with self in the species of another), the performance is, fundamentally, the occasion for a cultural and ideological recognition.[6]

 
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This self-recognition presupposes as its principle an essential identity (which makes the processes of psychological identification themselves possible, in so far as they are psychological): the identity uniting the spectators and actors assembled in the same place on the same evening. Yes, we are first united by an institution -- the performance, but more deeply, by the same myths, the same themes, that govern us without our consent, by the same spontaneously lived ideology. Yes, even if it is the ideology of the poor par excellence, as in El Nost Milan, we still eat of the same bread, we have the same rages, the same rebellions, the same madness (at least in the memory where stalks this ever-imminent possibility), if not the same prostration before a time unmoved by any History. Yes, like Mother Courage, we have the same war at our gates, and a handsbreadth from us, if not in us, the same horrible blindness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We have the same dawn and night, we skirt the same abysses: our unconsciousness. We even share the same history -- and that is how it all started. That is why we were already ourselves in the play itself, from the beginning -- and then what does it matter whether we know the result, since it will never happen to anyone but ourselves, that is, still in our world. That is why the false problem of identification was solved from the beginning, even before it was posed, by the reality of recognition. The only question, then, is what is the fate of this tacit identity, this immediate self-recognition, what has the author already done with it? What will the actors set to work by the Dramaturg, by Brecht or Strehler, do with it? What will become of this ideological self-recognition? Will it exhaust itself in the dialectic of the consciousness of self, deepening its myths without ever escaping from them? Will it put this infinite mirror at the centre of the action? Or will it rather displace it, put it to one side, find it and lose it, leave it, return to it, expose it from afar to forces which are external -- and so drawn out -- that like those wine-glasses broken at a distance by a physical resonance, it comes to a sudden end as a heap of splinters on the floor.

    To return finally to my attempt at definition, with the simple aim of posing the question anew and in a better form, we can see that the play itself is the spectator's consciousness -- for the essential reason that the spectator has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play in advance, and the develop-

 
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ment of this content in the play itself: the new result which the play produces from the self-recognition whose image and presence it is. Brecht was right: if the theatre's sole object were to be even a 'dialectical' commentary on this eternal self-recognition and non-recognition -- then the spectator would already know the tune, it is his own. If, on the contrary, the theatre's object is to destroy this intangible image, to set in motion the immobile, the eternal sphere of the illusory consciousness's mythical world, then the play is really the development, the production of a new consciousness in the spectator -- incomplete, like any other consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself, this distance achieved, this inexhaustible work of criticism in action; the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.

    I look back, and I am suddenly and irresistibly assailed by the question: are not these few pages, in their maladroit and groping way, simply that unfamiliar play El Nost Milan, performed on a June evening, pursuing in me its incomplete meaning, searching in me, despite myself, now that all the actors and sets have been cleared away, for the advent of its silent discourse?

August, 1962

 
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of Marx -- making Capital, with its sense of perspective and apparent 'objectivity', merely the development of a youthful intuition which finds its major philosophical expression in this text and in its concepts: above all in the concepts of alienation, of humanism, of the social essence of man, etc. As we know, Marxists did not think to react until very late, and their reaction was often of the same order as their fears and haste: they have tended to defend Marx in toto, and to take over their opponents' thesis, thereby overestimating the theoretical prestige of the 1844 writings, but to the profit of Capital. On this point Bottigelli has some noteworthy comments (pp. IX, XXXIX). They are a prelude to a demand which no serious commentator can avoid: the demand for a definition of a new and rigorous method of investigation, 'another method ' (p. X) than that of a simple prospective or retrospective assimilation. So we can and must now deal with these Manuscripts, which have been the argument of a struggle, the pretext for a prosecution, or the defence's redoubt, by an assured method: as a moment in the formation of Marx's thought, which, like all the moments in an intellectual development, does obviously contain a promise for the future, but also pin-points an irreducible and singular present. It is no exaggeration to say that in this irreproachable translation Bottigelli has given us a privileged object which has a dual theoretical order of interest for Marxists: because it concerns the formation, or rather the transformation of Marx's thought, but also because it provides the Marxist theory of ideology with an excellent opportunity to exercise and test its method.

    Finally, I should like to add that this translation is introduced by an important historical and theoretical Presentation, which not only brings us to the essential problems, but also situates and clarifies them.

    What, in fact, is the specific feature of the 1844 Manuscripts if they are compared with Marx's earlier writings? What is there in them which is radically new? The answer is given by the fact that the Manuscripts were the result of Marx's discovery of political economy. Naturally, this was not the first time that, as he put it himself, he experienced the 'embarrassment' of having to give an opinion on questions of an economic order (as early as 1842, the question of wood thefts evoked all the conditions of feudal agrarian property; similarly, also in 1842, an article on censorship

 
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and the freedom of the Press came up against the reality of 'industry', etc., etc.,), but these encounters with Economics only concerned some economic questions, and from the angle of political debates: in other words, these were not encounters with political economy, but with particular effects of an economic policy, or the particular economic conditions of social conflicts (The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ). But in 1844 Marx was confronted with political economy as such. Engels had prepared the way with his 'brilliant sketch' of England. But Marx had been impelled in this direction, as had Engels himself, by the need to look beyond politics for the reasons for its insoluble internal conflicts. It is difficult to understand the Manuscripts without taking into account this encounter, this first encounter. In his Parisian period (February to May, 1844), decisive in this respect, Marx gave himself over to the classical economists (Say, Skarbek, Smith, Ricardo), he took copious notes which leave their mark in the body of the Manuscripts themselves (the first part contains long quotations) -- as if he wanted to take into account a fact. But while recognizing it, he states that this fact rests on nothing, at least in the economists he has read, it is ungrounded and lacks its own principle. So, in one and the same movement, the encounter with political economy is a critical reaction to political economy and a thorough investigation of its foundations.

    What is the source of Marx's conviction that Political Economy is unfounded? The contradictions it states and registers, or even accepts and traduces: and before all else, the major contradiction opposing the increasing pauperization of the workers and the remarkable wealth whose arrival in the modern world is celebrated by political economy. This is the crux, the stumbling-block of the optimistic science which is built upon this feeble argument, just as the wealth of the proprietors is on the poverty of the workers. This is also its disgrace, which Marx wants to suppress by giving economics the principle it lacks, the principle which will be its light and its verdict.

    Here we come upon the other aspect of the Manuscripts : their philosophy. For this encounter of Marx's with political economy is, as Bottigelli correctly points out (pp. XXXIX, LIV, LXVII, etc.), an encounter of philosophy with Political Economy. Naturally, not of any philosophy: of the philosophy erected by Marx through all

 
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his practico-theoretical experiments (Bottigelli sketches out the essential moments: the idealism of the very first writings, closer to Kant and Fichte than to Hegel; Feuerbach's anthropology), modified, corrected and amplified by this encounter itself. But a philosophy still, for all that, profoundly coloured by the Feuerbachian problematic (Bottigelli, p. XXXIX) and leaning hesitantly towards a return from Feuerbach to Hegel. This is the philosophy which resolves the contradiction of Political Economy by thinking it, and through it, by thinking the whole of Political Economy and all its categories, with a key-concept as starting-point, the concept of alienated labour. This brings us to the real heart of the problem, and close to all the temptations both of idealism and of a hasty materialism. . . . For, at first sight, we are in familiar territory, I mean in that conceptual landscape in which we can identify private property, capital, money, the division of labour, the alienation of the labourer, his emancipation and the humanism which is his promised future. These are all, or nearly all, categories we shall meet again in Capital, and on this basis we might accept them as anticipations of Capital, or better, as a project for Capital, or even as Capital crayoned, already outlined, but only as a sketch, which, if it has the genius of the completed work, has not yet been filled in as it is in the latter. Painters do pencil sketches of this kind, drawn in one movement, new-born, and precisely because of this emergence, greater than the works they contain. There is something of this glitter in the fascination of the Manuscripts, in the irresistibility of their logic (Bottigelli correctly notes their 'rigorous reasoning ' pp. XXXIII, LXII, LIV, and their 'implacable logic') and the conviction of their dialectic. But there is also the conviction, the meaning conferred by this logic and rigour on the concepts we recognize in it, and therefore the very meaning of this logic and rigour: a meaning which is still philosophical, and when I say philosophical I am using it in the same sense as that to which Marx later linked an absolute condemnation. For rigour and dialectic are worth no more than the meaning they serve and add lustre to. One day we shall have to study this text in detail and give a word-by-word explanation of it; discuss the theoretical status and theoretical role assigned to the key concept of alienated labour ; examine this notion's conceptual field, and recognize that it does fill the role Marx then assigned it, the role of original basis ;

 
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but also that it can only fill this role so long as it receives it as a mandate and commission from a whole conception of Man which can derive from the essence of Man the necessity and content of the familiar economic concepts. In short, we shall have to discover beneath these terms imminently awaiting a future meaning, the meaning that still keeps them prisoners of a philosophy that is exercising its last prestige and power over them. And except that I would rather not abuse my freedom to anticipate this proof, I should almost say that beneath this relation, that is, beneath philosophy's relation of radical domination over a content soon to become radically independent, the Marx furthest from Marx is this Marx, the Marx on the brink, on the eve, on the threshold -- as if, before the rupture, in order to achieve it, he had to give philosophy every chance, its last, this absolute empire over its opposite, this boundless theoretical triumph, that is, its defeat.

    Bottigelli's presentation takes us to the heart of these problems. Among the most remarkable sections are the pages where he discusses the theoretical status of alienated labour, where he compares the economic concepts of the Manuscripts with the economic concepts of Capital, where he raises the basic question of the theoretical nature (for Marx in 1844) of the just encountered political economy. The simple sentence: 'Bourgeois political economy appeared to Marx as a kind of phenomenology ' (p. XLI) seems to me to be decisive, also, the fact that Marx accepts political economy precisely as it presents itself (p. LXVII) without questioning the content of its concepts or their systematicity as he was to do later on: it is this 'abstraction' of the Economy that authorizes the other 'abstraction': that of the Philosophy which is used to give it a basis. So a recognition of the philosophy at work in the Manuscripts necessarily returns us to our point of departure : the encounter with political economy, forcing us to ask the question: what is the reality that Marx encountered in the terms of this economics? The economy itself? Or more likely an economic ideology inseparable from the economists' theories, that is, in the powerful expression quoted above, a 'phenomenology '?

    I have only one more remark to make before closing. If some people find this interpretation disconcerting, it is because they give credence to a confusion (a confusion difficult for our contemporaries to avoid, be it said, for a whole historical past snares them a dis-

 
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tinction between these roles) between what have been called the political positions and the theoretical positions adopted by Marx in his formative period. Bottigelli has seen this difficulty very well and he takes it by the horns when, for example, he writes (p. XXXIII) that the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843) 'signals Marx's adhesion to the cause of the proletariat, that is, to Communism. This does not mean that historical materialism had already been worked out. ' So it is a political and theoretical reading of the writings of Marx's youth. A text such as On the Jewish Question, for instance, is a text politically committed to the struggle for Communism. But it is a profoundly 'ideological' text: so it cannot, theoretically, be identified with the later texts which were to define historical materialism, and which were to be capable of illuminating even the basis of that real Communist movement of 1843 which was born before them and independently of them, and to whose side Marx had rallied at that time. Anyway, even our own experience should remind us that it is possible to be 'Communist' without being 'Marxist'. This distinction is essential if we are to avoid the political trap of confusing Marx's theoretical positions with his political positions, and justifying the former from the latter. But this illuminating distinction brings us back to the demand formulate by Bottigelli: we must conceive of 'another method ' to explain Marx's formation, that is, his moments, his stages, his 'presents ' in short his transformation : to explain this paradoxical dialectic whose most extraordinary episode this is, the Manuscripts that Marx never published, but which, no doubt precisely for that reason, show him naked in his triumphant and vanquished thoughts, on the threshold of becoming himself at last by a radical realignment, the last: that is, the first.

December, 1962

 
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Remarks on the Terminology Adopted

 
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in a specific structure, men, means and a technical method of utilizing the means. This general definition of practice covers the possibility of particularity: there are different practices which are really distinct, even though they belong organically to the same complex totality. Thus, 'social practice', the complex unity of the practices existing in a determinate society, contains a large number of distinct practices. This complex unity of 'social practice' is structured, we shall soon see how, in such a way that in the last resort the determinant practice in it is the practice of transformation of a given nature (raw material) into useful products by the activity of living men working through the methodically organized employment of determinate means of production within the framework of determinate relations of production. As well as production social practice includes other essential levels: political practice -- which in Marxist parties is no longer spontaneous but organized on the basis of the scientific theory of historical materialism, and which transforms its raw materials: social relations, into a determinate product (new social relations); ideological practice (ideology, whether religious, political, moral, legal or artistic, also transforms its object: men's 'consciousness'): and finally, theoretical practice. Ideology is not always taken seriously as an existing practice: but to recognize this is the indispensable prior condition for any theory of ideology. The existence of a theoretical practice is taken seriously even more rarely: but this prior condition is indispensable to an understanding of what theory itself, and its relation to 'social practice' are for Marxism.

    Here we need a second definition. By theory, in this respect, I shall mean a specific form of practice, itself belonging to the complex unity of the 'social practice' of a determinate human society. Theoretical practice falls within the general definition of practice. It works on a raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it is given by other practices, whether 'empirical', 'technical' or 'ideological'. In its most general form theoretical practice does not only include scientific theoretical practice, but also pre-scientific theoretical practice, that is, 'ideological' theoretical practice (the forms of 'knowledge' that make up the prehistory of a science, and their 'philosophies'). The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory: this distinction takes the form of a 'qualitative'

 
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theoretical and historical discontinuity which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an 'epistemological break'. This is not the place to discuss the dialectic in action in the advent of this 'break': that is, the labour of specific theoretical transformation which installs it in each case, which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological. Restricting myself to the essential point as far as our analysis is concerned, I shall take up a position beyond the 'break' within the constituted science, and use the following nomenclature: I shall call theory any theoretical practice of a scientific character. I shall call 'theory' (in inverted commas) the determinate theoretical system of a real science (its basic concepts in their more or less contradictory unity at a given time): for example, the theory of universal attraction, wave mechanics, etc, . . . or again, the 'theory ' of historical materialism. In its 'theory' any determinate science reflects within the complex unity of its concepts (a unity which, I should add, is more or less problematic) the results, which will henceforth be the conditions and means, of its own theoretical practice. I shall call Theory (with a capital T), general theory, that is, the Theory of practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory of existing theoretical practices (of the sciences), which transforms into 'knowledges' (scientific truths) the ideological product of existing 'empirical' practices (the concrete activity of men). This Theory is the materialist dialectic which is none other than dialectical materialism. These definitions are necessary for us to be able to give an answer to this question: what is the use of a theoretical expression of a solution which already exists in the practical state? -- an answer with a theoretical basis.

 
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no other method in the world. What, then, should we say for the spontaneity of those triumphant avant-garde disciplines devoted to precise pragmatic interests; which are not strictly sciences but claim to be since they use methods which are 'scientific' (but defined independently of the specificity of their presumed objects); which think, like every true science, that they have an object, when they are merely dealing with a certain given reality that is anyway disputed and torn between several competing 'sciences': a certain domain of phenomena not yet constituted into scientific facts and therefore not unified ; disciplines which in their present form cannot constitute true theoretical practices because most often they only have the unity of a technical practice (examples : social psychology, and sociology and psychology in many of their branches)?[7]

    The only Theory able to raise, if not to pose, the essential question of the status of these disciplines, to criticize ideology in all its guises, including the disguises of technical practice as sciences, is the Theory of theoretical practice (as distinct from ideological

 
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practice): the materialist dialectic or dialectical materialism, the conception of the Marxist dialectic in its specificity.

    For we are all agreed that where a really existing science has to be defended against an encroaching ideology, where what is truly science's and what is ideology's has to be discerned without a really scientific element being taken by chance for ideology, as occasionally happens, or, as often happens, an ideological element being taken for a scientific element . . . , where (and this is very important politically) the claims of the ruling technical practices have to be criticized and the true theoretical practices that socialism, communism and our age will need more and more established, where these tasks which all demand the intervention of the Marxist dialectic are concerned, it is very obvious that there can be no question of making do with a formulation of Theory, that is, of the materialist dialectic, which has the disadvantage of being inexact, in fact of being very inexact, as inexact as the Hegelian dialectic. Of course, even this imprecision may correspond to a certain degree of reality and as such be endowed with a certain practical meaning, serving as a reference point or index (as Lenin says, 'The same is true of Engels. But it is "in the interests of popularization",' Philosophical Notebooks, p. 359), not only in education, but also in struggle. But if a practice is to be able to make use of imprecise formulations, it is absolutely essential that this practice should at least be 'true', that on occasion it should be able to do without the expression of Theory and recognize itself globally in an imprecise Theory. But if a practice does not really exist, if it must be constituted, then imprecision becomes an obstacle in itself. Those Marxist investigators working in avant-garde domains such as the theory of ideologies (law, ethics, religion, art, philosophy), the theory of the history of the sciences and of their ideological prehistory, epistemology (theory of the theoretical practice of mathematics and other natural sciences), etc. . . . , these risky but existing avant-garde domains; those who pose themselves difficult problems even in the domain of Marxist theoretical practice (the domain of history); not to speak of those other revolutionary 'investigators' who are confronted by political difficulties in radically new forms (Africa, Latin America, the transition to communism, etc.); if all these investigators had only the Hegelian dialectic instead of the Marxist dialectic, even if the former were

 
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purged of Hegel's ideological system, even if it were declared to have been 'inverted' (if this inversion amounts to applying the Hegelian dialectic to the real instead of to the Idea), they would certainly not get very far in its company! So, whether we are dealing with a confrontation with something new in the domain of a real practice, or with the foundation of a real practice we all need the materialist dialectic as such.

A Theoretical Revolution in Action

So we shall start by considering practices in which the Marxist dialectic as such is in action: Marxist theoretical practice and Marxist political practice.

Marxist Theoretical Practice

So a practice of theory does exist; theory is a specific practice which acts on its own object and ends in its own product : a knowledge. Considered in itself, any theoretical work presupposes a given raw material and some 'means of production' (the concepts of the 'theory' and the way they are used: the method). The raw material worked by theoretical labour may be very 'ideological' if the science is just coming into being; where an already constituted and developed science is concerned, it may be material that has already been elaborated theoretically, concepts which have already been formed. Very schematically, we may say that the means of theoretical labour, which are an absolute condition of its existence -- 'theory' and method -- represent the 'active side' of theoretical practice, the determinant moment of the process. The knowledge of the process of this theoretical practice in its generality, that is, as the specified form or real difference of the practice, itself a specified form of the general process of transformation, of the 'development of things', constitutes a first theoretical elaboration of Theory, that is, of the materialist dialectic.

    Now, a real theoretical practice (one that produces knowledges) may be well able to do its duty as theory without necessarily feeling the need to make the Theory of its own practice, of its process.

 
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This is the case with the majority of sciences; they do have a 'theory' (their corpus of concepts), but it is not a Theory of their theoretical practice. The moment of the Theory of theoretical practice, that is, the moment in which a 'theory' feels the need for the Theory of its own practice -- the moment of the Theory of method in the general sense -- always occurs post festum, to help it surmount practical or 'theoretical' difficulties, resolve problems insoluble for the movement of practice immersed in its activities and therefore theoretically blind, or face up to even deeper crises. But the science can do its duty, that is, produce knowledges, for a long time before it feels the need to make the Theory of what it is doing, the theory of its practice, of its 'method'. Look at Marx. He wrote ten books as well as the monument that is Capital without ever writing a Dialectics. He talked of writing it, but never started. He never found the time. Which means that he never took the time, for at that period the Theory of his own theoretical practice was not essential to the development of his theory, that is, to the fruitfulness of his own practice.

    However, Marx's Dialectics would have been very relevant to us today, since it would have been the Theory of Marx's theoretical practice, that is, exactly a determinant theoretical form of the solution (that exists in the practical state) to the problem we are dealing with: the problem of the specificity of the Marxist dialectic. This practical solution, this dialectic, exists in Marx's theoretical practice, and we can see it in action there. The method Marx used in his theoretical practice, in his scientific work on the 'given' that he transformed into knowledge, this method is precisely the Marxist dialectic ; and it is precisely this dialectic which contains inside it in a practical state the solution to the problem of the relations between Marx and Hegel, of the reality of that famous 'inversion' which is Marx's gesture to us, in the Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital, warning us that he has settled his relations with the Hegelian dialectic. That is why today we so miss the Dialectics which Marx did not need and which he refused us, even though we know perfectly well that we have it, and where it is: in Marx's theoretical works, in Capital, etc. -- yes, and of course this is the main thing, we can find it there, but not in a theoretical state! [8]

 
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relations ), this practice also may exist and develop, at least for a time, without feeling the need to make the theory of its own practice, the Theory of its 'method'. It may exist, survive and even progress without it; just like any other practice -- until the moment in which its object (the existing world of the society that it is transforming) opposes enough resistance to it to force it to fill in this gap, to question and think its own method, so as to produce the adequate solutions, the means of producing them, and, in particular, so as to produce in the 'theory ' which is its basis (the theory of the existing social formation) the new knowledges corresponding to the content of the new 'stages' of its development. An example of these 'new knowledges': what have been called the contributions of 'Leninism' for the period of imperialism in the phase of inter-imperialist wars; and what will later be called by a name which does not exist as yet, the theoretical contributions necessary for the present period, when, in the struggle for peaceful coexistence the first revolutionary forms are appearing in certain so-called 'underdeveloped' countries out of their struggles for national independence.

    After this, it may come as a surprise to read that the practice of the class struggle has not been reflected in the theoretical form of method or Theory,[10] when we seem to have ten decisive texts by Lenin, the most famous of which is What is to be Done?. But while this last text, for example, may define the theoretical and historical bases for Russian Communist practice, and prepare the way for a programme of action, it does not constitute a theoretical reflection on political practice as such. It does not, and did not intend to, constitute the theory of its own method in the general sense of Theory. So it is not a text on the dialectic, although the dialectic is certainly active in it.

    For a better understanding of this point, let us take as an example the texts by Lenin on the 1917 Revolution that I quoted or, gave precise references to previously.[11] The status of these texts should be made clear. They are not the texts of a historian, but of a political leader tearing himself away from the struggle for an

 
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    Thus conceived, Lenin's analysis is a practical response (his analysis is this response in a practical state) to the general theoretical question: what is political practice? what distinguishes it from other practices? or, if you prefer a more classical formulation: what is political action? Through Lenin, and against the speculative thesis (a Hegelian thesis, but one that Hegel inherited from an older ideology since it is already supreme in Bossuet) which regards the concrete of a political situation as 'the contingency' in which 'necessity is realized', we come to the beginning of a theoretical answer to this real question. We can see that the object of Lenin's political practice is obviously not Universal History, nor even the general History of Imperialism. The History of Imperialism is certainly at issue in his practice, but it does not constitute its particular object. The History of Imperialism as such is the particular object of other activities: the activity of the Marxist theoretician or of the Marxist historian -- but in such cases it is the object of a theoretical practice. Lenin meets Imperialism in his political practice in the modality of a current existence: in a concrete present. The theoretician of history or the historian meet it in another modality, the modality of non-currency and abstraction. So the particular object of political practice does belong to the history which is also discussed by the theoretician and the historian; but it is another object. Lenin knew perfectly well that he was acting on a social present which was the product of the development of imperialism, otherwise he would not have been a Marxist, but in 1917 he was not acting on Imperialism in general; he was acting on the concrete of the Russian situation, of the Russian conjuncture, on what he gave the remarkable name, 'the current situation', the situation whose currency defined his political practice as such. In the world that a historian of Imperialism is forced to see in section, if he wants to see it as Lenin lived it and understood it -- because it was, as the existing world is, the sole concrete world in existence, in the sole concrete possible, the concrete of its currency, in the 'current situation' -- Lenin analysed what constituted the characteristics of its structure: the essential articulations, the interconnexions, the strategic nodes on which the possibility and the fate of any revolutionary practice depended; the disposition and relations typical of the contradictions in a determinate country (semi-feudal and semi-colonialist, and yet imperialist) in the period

 
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in which the principal contradiction was approaching explosion. This is what is irreplaceable in Lenin's texts: the analysis of the structure of a conjuncture, the displacements and condensations of its contradictions and their paradoxical unity, all of which are the very existence of that 'current situation' which political action was to transform, in the strongest sense of the word, between February and October, 1917.

 
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Imperialism that even produced their paradoxes. But knowing this, he was concerned with something else in them than this general historical knowledge, and it was because a tested science had taught him the latter that he could really concern himself with something else, with what it was that constituted the structure of his practical object: with the typicality of the contradictions, with their displacements, their condensations and the 'fusion' in revolutionary rupture that they produced; in short, with the 'current situation' that they constituted. That is why the theory of the 'weakest link' is identical with the theory of the 'decisive link'.

    Once we have realized this we can return to Lenin with a quiet mind. However much any ideologue tries to bury him beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing there in the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation'. He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking to us about something quite simple: about his revolutionary practice, about the practice of the class struggle, in other words, about what makes it possible to act on History from within the sole history present, about what is specific in the contradiction and in the dialectic, about the specific difference of the contradiction which quite simply allows us, not to demonstrate or explain the 'inevitable' revolutions post festum, but to 'make' them in our unique present, or, as Marx profoundly formulated it,[15] to make the dialectic into a revolutionary method, rather than the theory of the fait accompli.[16]

    To sum up, the problem posed -- what constitutes Marx's 'inversion' of the Hegelian dialectic? what is the specific difference which distinguishes the Marxist dialectic from the Hegelian? -- has already been resolved by Marxist practice, whether this is Marx's theoretical practice or the political practice of the class struggle. So its solution does exist, in the works of Marxism, but only in a practical state. We have to express it in its theoretical form, that is, to move from what, in most of the 'famous quota-

 
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