Michel Clouscard

The understanding of the codification of the social body according to the being-code relation and through the dialectic of the frivolous and the serious provides the key to freeing the history of France before 1789 from a one-sided celebration of only the progressive aspects of the Enlightenment (struggle for rationalization).

On the contrary, an examination of the Encyclopedists' cautious and measured political conceptions of the Ancien Régime provides an example of their ideological positioning and epistemology, especially anthropological.

Positivist materialism, naturalism is certainly in opposition to the absolutist ideology that is theocracy of divine right, but a figure like Voltaire shows the real horizon of the intellectual elites of the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, on the eve of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie of money and culture managed to share the same "libertine" culture with the nobility.

For Clouscard, the Enlightenment elites certainly carry industrialization and rationalization which will be one of the ideological bases of the end of the political hegemony of the nobility and the clergy.

But without real critical discourse on the mode of production of wealth and on social issues.

Michel Clouscard (August 6, 1928 – February 21, 2009) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist.

An opponent of capitalism, a critic of the evolution of ideas of progress confronted with the liberal mutations of the end of the 20th century, his work is linked to the thought of Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, whose links and unity he shows.

He is known to have philosophically shown the collusion between capitalism and the French theory, represented by Lévi-Strauss and Deleuze, constructing his own concept of neo-Kantianism.

He developed a philosophical research around the idea of social contract, postulating that "the constitutive principle of any society is the relation between production and consumption".

His contribution aimed at providing a conceptual basis for thinking about a democratic and self-management political philosophy that would allow for the overcoming of the management of wealth, nations and the political education of citizens by the capitalist class.

Clouscard's early life was dominated by athletics.

Despite Clouscard's sharp criticism of the phenomenologist Husserl, Sartre commented "Being and Code shows a very ambitious undertaking. But in my opinion, it is this very ambition that makes the book valid (...) It is a true totalization (rather than totality), as it accounts for everything, even the individual (...) Its great merit is to show the best conditions for history to reveal itself concretely for what it is: an ongoing totalization.” This work will give rise to a lifetime of research and writing to develop his work and extend it to the study of French society from 1945 to the present day.

He studies the change in the socio-economic structure in Europe since 1945 and develops a conceptualization of the new capitalist political economy.

According to him, at the time of Karl Marx, industry had not reached the stage of light industry which allows the production of the gadget, the libidinal object and makes the study of frivolity an essential data to analyze contemporary production.

With the appearance of the mode of production of series, a qualitative change on the objects and the stakes of the production imposes to develop again the critique of the political economy of Karl Marx.

And from then on, to understand the ideological inflection of the capitalist society passed from a repressive moral doctrine to a permissive moral doctrine.

It is the passage from the austerity imposed to all under the traditional repressive fascism to the austerity of the post-May 68 period where the cultural models have changed: the permissiveness serving as a currency to disguise the economic oppression of the working class in the "new society" of the unfettered enjoyment.

The ideological consequences and the contradictions linked to this model prepare a new fascist repression of the contradictions, as Pier Paolo Pasolini also pointed out in The Hippies’ Speech, an "extremely right-wing fashion" of the "long-haired".

Clouscard thus understands social evolution as a historical whole in the making.

He relates the permissive evolution of social morality to the needs of a new mercantile order of capitalism – the need to create new markets and to continue the economic oppression of the working class.

He determines the economic and mercantile function of the promotion of new cultural models in advertising ideology to save capitalism in crisis.

Transgressive and libertarian emancipation is not criticized here from the point of view of the individual or civil society as an untouchable monad, but as part of a social body.

In the logic of a political philosophy of the State, the incitement to overthrow the "established order" by culture (Maoism) and the "imagination in power" of May 68, without changing the bases of the society, allowed the creation of new markets.

That is, the "liberated" consumption of goods or services produced through the continued oppression of the working class.

According to bourgeois ideologists, "free enjoyment" would lead to the individual freedom of workers "playing The Game", despite the alienation of the fruits of their labor power (the extortion of surplus value).

A rhetoric of diversion, according to this author, which brings to light a strategy of management of the social contradictions.

Being and Code is thus the conceptual basis of reference for his later study of French society.

He was preselected to compete in the 200 meters race at the 1948 London Olympics.

In the early 1970s, Michel Clouscard developed a critique of libertarian liberalism.

He retired to Gaillac to write the end of his work, which is still partly unpublished.

From the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Clouscard developed a critique of libertarian liberalism (libéralisme libertaire).

Clouscard's graduate studies in letters and philosophy under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre culminated with a thesis, Being and Code (L'Être et le Code; published 1972), presented to Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, for defense.

Clouscard was a professor of sociology at the University of Poitiers from 1975 to 1990, where he was influenced by his colleague, Jacques d'Hondt, a specialist in Hegel.

He died during the night of February 20–21, 2009, at his home, from Parkinson's disease.

According to Clouscard, the "capitalism of seduction" with its libertarian liberal face arises from the very evolution of the capitalist mode of production.

It testifies to a qualitative jump of the accumulated quantities which, at a certain moment, reach a libertarian structure of society.

With its libertarian face, liberalism achieves its own self-realization, until the inevitable catastrophe.

Clouscard speaks then about neofascism.

Drawing up the inventory of fixtures of the liberal counter-revolution's consequences, Clouscard produced a philosophical work to think and propose the basis of a new social contract and to enable a progressivist re-foundation.