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Modern & Contemporary France, 2016 VOL. 24, NO. 2, 161–177 http://dx.doi.org/10

Modern & Contemporary France, 2016 VOL. 24, NO. 2, 161–177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2016.1153462 Anarchism, utopianism and hospitality: the work of René Schérer Diane Morgan Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK ABSTRACT René Schérer (born 1922) is lamentably almost unknown to the Anglo- American world as his work has, as yet, not been translated. He is one of the main specialists of the French ‘utopian socialist’ , Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and a major thinker in his own right. He is the author of more than twenty books and co-editor of the journal Chimères. Colleague and friend at Vincennes University (Paris 8) of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey..., he continues to host seminars at Paris 8 (now located at Saint-Denis). He is a living testimony to a radical past, and a continuing inspiration to a new generation of young thinkers. This article aims to convey the original specificity of his understanding of anarchism. By so doing, it will stress the importance of his work for any thinking concerned with a politicised resistance to social conformity and the supposed ‘state of things’ today. RÉSUMÉ Faute de traductions de ses œuvres en anglais, le nom de René Schérer (né 1922) est presque inconnu dans le monde anglo-américain. Il est pourtant l’un des spécialistes les plus éminents des œuvres de Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Il est aussi devenu une figure majeure de la philosophie continentale. Il est ainsi l’auteur de plus d’une vingtaine de livres et il est membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Chimères. Collègue (à l’université de Vincennes) et ami de Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey…, il continue d’animer un séminaire dans la même université, Paris 8 (maintenant située à St. Denis). Il est le témoin vivant d’un passé radical et demeure une inspiration pour une génération montante de penseurs. Cet article met en relief son approche singulière de l’anarchisme et souligne l’importance des écrits de René Schérer pour penser la résistance politique au conformisme social et à l’« état des choses » d’aujourd’hui. © 2016 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France CONTACT Diane Morgan findlm@leeds.ac.uk 162 D. Morgan Our task, our combat, is to preserve what is still left of the world’s seduction or to know how to revive it. One should add, in pure immanence, along the surface, far removed from any claim to superiority or unfathomable profundity, as the occasion presents itself, whilst roaming. To promote the anarchism of seduction, or, better still, of seductions, as its mode of existence is that of multiplicities. (Schérer 2008a, 75)1 Nowadays one cannot conceive a utopia that does not address itself to nomads, peoples and individuals, to the homeless, to the excluded. (Schérer 2009, 17)2 ‘Become who you are’ [Nietzsche]. Escape from your identifications that are merely titles thrown upon you, mere categorisations in a social classificatory system. You are not that number, that façade, that petrified language. Become who you are. Allow forces to pass through you, open your doors to them. What you are is not inside you. It is the capacity to become other, to receive that which is other than you. (Schérer 2005, 226)3 The distinctive contribution that René Schérer makes to our understanding of what anarchism is, or could be, is his insistence on its being combined with utopianism and hospitality.4 Indeed, a Schérerian theory and practice would be the embodiment of what could be called anarcho-utopian hospitality. This stance goes hand in hand with a far-reaching interrogation of who ‘we’ are in relation to ‘others’ . Schérer calls upon us to resist any notion of identity that wishes itself securely located in an homogeneous core or body (corps). He therefore rejects any form of identitarian politics. The most evident source for understanding Schérer’s idea of anarchism is his Anarchist Food: Exploded Anarchism (Nourritures anarchistes: l’anarchisme explosé, 2008a). The title can largely be explained by referring to the work of Antonin Artaud, in particular to his ‘To Have Done with the Judgement of God’ .5 In the Introduction (or ‘Starters’ , as the book is divided into courses like a gastronomical feast), Schérer quotes Artaud’s affirmation of potentiality of the body: … the need to abolish the idea, the idea and its myth, and to enthrone in its place the thundering manifestation of this explosive necessity: to dilate the body of my internal night, the internal nothingness of my self which is night, nothingness, thoughtlessness, but which is explosive affirmation that there is something to make room for: my body. (Artaud in Schérer 2008a, 21)6 Modern & Contemporary France 163 This ‘explosive affirmation’ of corporeality is neither in the name of its misrecognised ‘goodness’ , nor necessarily in the name of due ‘rights’ . Indeed, Schérer seeks to destabilise out presumptuous tendency to legislate in accordance with notions of morality.7 He is concerned with exposing ‘our moralising mania, our obsession with security, which is forever driving us to name and detect some new crime against which we then concoct new legislation’ (Schérer 2008a, 19).8 The ‘body’—which is not perceived as one ‘thing’ , as one organised ‘entity’— should remain rebellious to such codification and classification. Corporealised resistance is a major feature of Schérer’s anarchism. In Anarchist Food, the ‘outlawed’ , ‘micropolitical’ topic of homosexuality is addressed.9 ‘Micropolitics’ refers to those desires that are conventionally relegated to the ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ and that demand expression, but not with the aim of being assimilated or in any way normalised within a conventional system (Schérer 2008a, 81). Schérer opens his series of essays by proposing an ‘anarchist method’ (20). Here he cites with approval François Châtelet’s definition of anarchy as it appears in the collection The Revolution Without Model: anarchy is not the absence of organisation, it is the absence of transcendence. It is the refusal to impose, in whatever form, a principle of functioning that precedes the real. The idea of interiority is transcendence par excellence. (Châtelet cited by Schérer 2008a, 20–21)10 Hence an anarchist ‘method’ is a rebellious breaking away from the governing authority of laws and norms which explains its always more or less ‘criminal’—or ‘outlawed’—status (20). An integral aspect of this refusal of conceptual predetermination is the rejection of a supposedly controlling, centralised ‘subjectivity’ , of a presumed core ‘interiority that always lays claim to a transcendence that functions as an ultimate refuge’ (20).11 As we will see in this article, this venturing outside the classical ‘refuge of subjectivity’ is for Schérer paramount to entering an ‘anarchist utopia’ . Utopianism is indissociable from the name of René Schérer. Often used in derogatory fashion to indicate unrealistic ‘castles in the sky’ that are disconnected from the real world, the term ‘utopian’ is positively charged for Schérer. One of his major sources for his sense of the potentiality of utopian thought is, again, Charles Fourier. According to Fourier, social change cannot be brought about by appealing to an abstract, disembodied notion of reason that all humans are supposed to have in common. Indeed, the focus on what makes supposed ‘reasonable’ sense thwarts Image 1. René Schérer. 164 D. Morgan qualitative social change as those very mechanisms, the passions, that exist to combine us into social harmony, are stultified. A creatively dynamic social whole is produced, not in spite of the passions, but in a finely tuned concert with them as long as they are expansively developed in what he calls a ‘progressive series’ (Fourier 2006, 15). Indeed, Fourier flouts ‘civilised’ society’s logical certainties when he claims that whereas one cannot associate three families, one can easily associate three hundred (2001a, 266). He advocates that the more numerous the passions are, the more easily will they harmonise with each other (Fourier 2006, 13). Social harmony cannot arise from a commonality of stock characteristics that ‘we’ are all supposed to share. Instead it emerges from the proliferation of intensely divergent passions through which the individual unit, itself an artificial and egotistical construct of a brutalising world of commercial speculation and social exploitation, is refracted as if through a prism. Nature, including humans, was originally no monoculture (Fourier 2001b, 113). Like other, more natural forms, we too thrive in profusion. The colourful, multifaceted embodied personality that is able to re-emerge in Fourier’s radical social experiment in the phalansteries is predisposed to, and can ‘intermesh with’ [engrener], a range of people with and against whom they can nurture their diverse, sometimes bizarre and hybrid, tastes, interests and predilections. A Fourierist society is multi-headed and gregarious. As we have seen, it is not controlled by any transcendent authority. Schérer purports that it would be a society that knows neither courts nor judgements, only passions and attractions, and whose aim is to ‘multiply social relations’ (Schérer 2008a, 57). In Schérer’s Pour un nouvel anarchisme anarchy, which is ‘utopian’—inasmuch as it is a uploads/Geographie/anarchism-utupism-and-hospiyality.pdf