I myself belong to the generation designated as baby boomers, at least until age has earned us the dreadful replacement moniker “golden agers.” Without this indispensable reference point, it won’t be possible to tell whether it is reactionary or not to propose, as I did in the introduction, that we should “learn to respect institutions.” Unless we know the genealogical cluster in which you are located, it will be impossible to know, given that habit has so many enemies, whether you want to protect a value by instituting it or, on the contrary, whether you want to betray it, stifle it, break it down, ossify it. Now we baby boomers have drained that bitter cup to the dregs. Confronting the ruins of the institutions that we are beginning to bequeath to our descendants, am I the only one to feel the same embarrassment as asbestos manufacturers targeted by the criminal charges brought by workers suffering from lung cancer? In the beginning, the struggle against institutions seemed to be risk-free; it was modernizing and liberating—and even fun; like asbestos, it had only good qualities. But, like asbestos, alas, it also had disastrous consequences that no one had anticipated and that we have been far too slow to recognize.
In particular, it took me a long time to understand what effect such an attitude was going to have on the subsequent generations from whom we were threatening to conceal the secret of institutions owing to our own congestion (and also owing to our numbers and our appetites for living lavishly and for a long time). We expected these generations to continue (as we had?), through the vigor of their critical spirit, to hold onto the originality of their initiatives, their spontaneity, their enthusiasm, everything that institutions were no longer able (and no longer knew how) to keep going. This was to sin against blessed habit; it was to claim to be continuing institutions without offering any way to ensure continuity. We thought we were protecting values and contrasts by extracting them from institutions—from which we had profited before we destroyed them—like fishermen who claim to be saving fish from asphyxiation by bringing them out into the air. One little hypocrisy too many; we have to hope it won’t be stamped on our foreheads on Judgment Day . . .
And here is the “malign inversion”: by losing the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence—habit being no longer able to ensure the relay—we have involuntarily pointed in the direction of a return to substance without specifying to the next generation that this return would be truly fatal, precisely for want of defining its means of subsistence. In Pierre Legendre’s words (provided that we extend them to all the modes and not just to psyches), we have broken the “genealogical principle,” that is, the search for antecedents and consequents. Being-as-other can gain its subsistence through the exploration of alterity, through multiplicity, through relations; it cannot ensure continuity by entrusting it to a substance. But without the scaffolding of habits, it cannot subsist at all! Here is where the trap closes, where the miracle product called asbestos begins to make the employees who breathe its microfibers cough their lungs out.
I may be overdramatizing the situation, but I cannot help thinking that if those who are starting to succeed us inadvertently sought to keep speaking of what is true or false, they would have no choice but to plunge headlong into a search for foundations, since institutions can no longer guarantee continuity. In other words, to those who, tired of spontaneity, are nevertheless still searching for truth, we have left no recourse but fundamentalism. Now all the contrasts I have talked about up to this point are lost forever if we set out in search of their “incontrovertible foundation”: God, of course, as we shall see, but also law, science, the psychogenics, the frenzied world itself, in short, the multiverse. If the reader has grasped the weight, or rather the lightness, of habit, he has also understood that there is nothing true except what is instituted, thus what is relative: relative to the weight, the thickness, the complexity, the layering, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity of institutions; but relative especially to the always delicate detection of the leap, the threshold, the step, the pass necessary for its extension. Exactly what Double Click teaches us to miss. By confusing the rejuvenation of institutions with their dismantling, hasn’t the baby-boomer generation made it possible to slip, almost unwittingly, from the critical spirit to fundamentalism? As if a first category mistake about blessed habit had triggered a second, infinitely more calamitous, concerning the radical distinction between what is true and what is instituted. The late modernism that thought it was digging the grave of its predecessors would thus have been digging its own grave!
I am well aware that we would be committing a new injustice, however, if we were to go on flagellating ourselves too long. If it is hard for our children to inherit our muddled passions, how could we have inherited the whole history of Modernism without difficulty? If it has seemed impossible for us to utter the words “truth” and “instituted” in the same breath, it is surely because of the lamentable state in which we had found the aforementioned institutions. If we have criticized them, it is surely because they had not been functioning for a long time—or at least because there was no longer a recipe adapted to their various regimes. If there were just one way to take habits, there would have been just one way to stand guard over institutions while keeping them from degenerating and tipping unnoticed from omission into forgetting. But as each mode has its own particular way of letting itself be omitted by habit, these are the differences that have made it so difficult for a civilization to provide the care that would have been required to maintain all the contrasts extracted by the ontological history of the Moderns.
If our predecessors had spent even a fraction of the energy devoted to the critique of institutions on differentiating all these cares, all these attentions, all these precautions, our generation would never have found itself before empty shells. But the very idea of care and precaution had become foreign to them, since they had hurled themselves blindly into this modernizing furor for which the time for care and attachments, as they saw it, had definitively passed. As if that archaic time were henceforth behind them and they had before them only the radiant future, defined precisely by a single emancipation, by the absence of precautions to be taken, this reign of irrational Reason whose cruel strangeness we have come to understand. I grant that it is hard for the young people born after us to inherit from the so-called May ’68 generation; but can someone tell me what we were supposed to do with the legacies left behind by the generations of “August ’14,” “October ’17,” and “June ’40”? Not an easy task, to inherit from the twentieth century! When will we be done with it? But we must try to be patient: once we have deployed all the modes, we shall know what we are to inherit and what we can, with a little luck, pass on to our descendants. In any case, in the face of what is coming, are not all generations, like all civilizations, equal in their ignorance?
