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THE QUESTION OF POWER © 2012 Sens & Tonka. Originally published in issue 9 of L'Anti-Mythes on December 14, 1974. ©This edition 2015 by Semiocexc(e) All rights reserved. No pare of chis book may be reproduced, scored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, elecrronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotexc(e) PO BOX 629. South Pasadena, CA 91031 www.semiocexce.com Cover Photograph: Edward S. Curtis, Nuh!irnahla- Qagyuhf. cl914. Design: Hedi El Kholti ISBN: 978-1-58435-183-2 THE QUESTION OF POWER AN INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE CLASTRES Translated by Helen Arnold With a Preface by Miguel Abensour semiotext(e) Preface by Miguel Abensour THE VOICE OF PIERRE CLASTRES It is in no way surprising to find Pierre Clastres interviewed by L'anti-mythes, a periodical created in the effervescence of the post May '68 period in Caen by former students of Claude Lefort. The journal is known for taking particular interest in the history of the Socialisme ou Barbarie1 group and for having published interviews with members of that then defunct group. Nthough Pierre Clastres never joined the group, he did feel close to the anti-bureaucratic scene and unreservedly shared its criticism of the USSR. This is corroborated by his note on Martchenko, published in the review 1. The group Socit1lisme ott Brirbr1rie, founded in 1945 and self-disbanded in 1967, engaged both in revolutionary activism and in developing a critical theory of contempo rary societies in which the same analysis was applied to both western capitalist societies and bureaucratic capitalist societies including the USSR and China, and which placed emphasis on the fundamental division of society into order-givers and order-takers, rather than on formal ownership of property. Although it remained very small- never more than several dozen members- it had a definite influence on the May 1968 movement, and on a number of important theoreticians, including Pierre Clastres. Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, co-founders of the group, were among its most prominent members, known for their political and social theoretical contributions. Despite their serious disagreements, they subsequently worked together in rwo periodicals, Textures ( 1970-75) and Libre (1977-80), along with Marcel Gauchet, a former student of Claude Lefort, who went on to write a number of books in which he cakes his distance with radical criticism of liberal democracy. [Translator's note] (5) Textures2 (issue 75/ 1O ) whose editorial committee included Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, among others. It was in that same issue that Marcel Gauchet began his long study of Clastres' work. Interestingly, we might point out that the interview in L'Anti-mythes was followed by a brief text by Marcel Gaucher pre viously published in October 1974 in Etudes de Marxologie, headed by Maximilien Rubel. A closer look shows that the interview with Pierre Clastres, published in issue 9 dated December 14, 1974, is in between the one with Cornelius Castoriadis (first semester 1974) and another with Claude Lefort (April 19, 1975). So it was definite ly from within that constellation of radical anti-totalitarianism that Clastres gave his contribution to L'Anti-mythes. Later, shortly before his accidental death in the summer of 1977, he participated active ly in the creation of the review Libre, which replaced Textures and published his last texts. As for the editors of L'Anti-mythes, one imagines they were stunned by Pierre Clastres' first writings, like so many others at the time, and were only too happy to give him an opportunity to expose the broad lines of his tremendously innovative work. Pierre Dumesnil, one of the threesome that conducted the interview, has described the visit. His description gives us an excellent idea of the intellectual climate at the time and of the tone of the talk: The majestic setting in which Pierre Clastres received us for our interview- Claude Levi-Strauss' office at the College de France- hardly impressed us, any more than the life-sized effigy of an American Indian decked in his finest feathers chat it contained. We were there to hear the singular thoughts of a political ethnologist, and we couldn't care less about our surroundings. Clascres' first books Chronicle of the Guayaki (6) Indians and the collection of articles in Society Against the State produced a stimulating shock in many of those who read them in France in the early 1970s. Enough so, in any case, for the tiny group that ran the journal L'Anti-Mythes in Caen (Normandie) to send three of its members to Paris to interview the author of those books. The contact was made by a good friend of several members of the group, Marcel Gauchet, a for mer student of Claude Lefort and like him a member of the editorial committee of the review Textures, whose somewhat sporadic publications we awaited impatiently. I remember the man as still very young (he was barely over 40 and we had not yet turned 25), with the leanness of the long-range hiker, expressing himself very calmly- we made practically no changes when transcribing his words into writing- concen trated on speaking accurately, and maintaining some distance with his listeners. He was neither Marxist nor structuralist, but in spite of what some of our questions may have inferred, his answers expressed no hostility or irony toward those of his colleagues who espoused those conceptions. Simply, com posedly, he informed us chat the theorization of kinship norms or some supposed economic determinism are not basic to the issue of power. Because it was definitely that very political question that interested him, and continued to interest him throughout his too short life. In his comments on a new edition of La Boetie's The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, published a year before his death, he wrote: "How can it be, wrote La Boetie, that most people obey a single indi vidual, and not only do they obey him but they serve him, and not only do they serve him but they serve him willingly?" There is no doubt that the question, more relevant than ever (7) here and now, was also one he himself raised. But symmetri cally, in those same comments, he spoke of a possible other world, one he had glimpsed during his stays with the Savages: "what do these primitive societies do to prevent inequality, divisions, and power relationships?" and he gives a beginning of an "answer": "they have no state because they don't want one, the tribe maintains a cleavage between chiefdom and power. ..." These societies are definitely, although of course unknowingly, societies against the state and not merely with out a state. That this interview, which embroiders on that assertion, is now available to English-speaking readers is excellent news for me, as was Paul Auster's lost and recently retrieved translation of the Chronicle oft he Guayaki Indians. Perhaps it will be Pierre Clastres' fate to be constantly rediscovered, after being apparently forgotten- like La Boetie. For a man who, he too, died so young, that would be a very fine fate. A few years earlier, Georges Balandier had delineated, in his Political Anthropology, what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science." So did Jean-William Lapierre, whose Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir poli tique (Essay on the foundations of political power) was targeted by Clastres in his essay "Copernic et !es sauvages" (Copernicus and the savages). It was Pierre Clastres who was to set forth the revolutionary theses that gave birth to new paradigms and to a new political anthropology. There were three theses: 1. So-called primitive societies are truly societies without a state, not because of any lack or deficit, but because they refuse the state, to the point where they can be called "societies against the state" rather (8)