Just two years ago, this or that leftist commando was bursting in, denouncing the magisterial function, the star system, alienation, apathy; cutting the electricity; raising his clubs; locking up the teacher awhile; and abusing the students. In their eyes, our palaver, our readings, our affectations are gimmicks at best, and at worst treasons; for them, it’s a state of war, an emergency. To ponder a metalepsis in book 9 of The Laws is not futile, it’s criminal. They know where to go.

We used to fight a bit. Only once did it lead to something worthwhile. It was on the day of an active strike What could we do? At the time we were working on the operators in persuasive discourse, making use of Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Sophistic Refutation. We subjected the statements relative to the strike to the same analysis. Once again we were speaking of Platonic pragmatics. Enter the commando unit armed with clubs, shouting that we were breaking the strike. A fight starts, quickly followed by palavers between the two groups, the beseigers and the beseiged. The latter argue as follows: on the one hand, our “normal” activity is to study persuasive discourse, especially political discourse. On the other hand, to participate in an active strike is to occupy the workplace and to think together about the discourses that persuade or dissuade us from striking. The difference between these two activities is not distinguishable. You demand that it be, and you think it could be if we used certain words (exploitation, alienation), a certain syntax (“…it is not by chance that…”), certain names (Marx…). Question: in your eyes, how many Marxes per sentence would it take for our discourse to become one of active strikers?

Lyotard, J.-F., Endurance and the Profession,

collected in Readings, B. and Geiman, K. (trans.) Political Writings (London: UCL, 1993), pp 71-2.