“Un petit entraînement physique, pour l’acceptation du monde”. Christophe Tarkos and the neoliberal counter-revolution as the Revolution

Abstract

Christophe Tarkos, a self-defined “poète révolutionnaire”, does a revolution of a weird kind. His texts maximise the duplicity of the revolutionary idea in the 1990’s neoliberal context. On the one hand, as Graeber notes: “the Left had largely abandoned utopianism”; on the other: “the Right [...] had catastrophically appropriated [...] the idea that the revolutionary is the agent of the inevitable march of history” (Graeber: 2014). As the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism on all of life’s aspects is declared complete (Dardot and Laval: 2009), Tarkos formulates the depleted the critique of capital in the counter-revolutionary idiom of neoliberalism – “L’argent est la seule valeur universelle”, “l’argent est révolutionnaire” (Tarkos: 2008). In so doing, he lays out a political double-bind: that of neoliberalism itself, consistently destroying humans’ bodies, psyches and their living milieu, and that of the impossibility for revolutionary forces to bring the counter-revolution to a stop. In providing his reader with “un petit exercice musculaire de remise en forme pour supporter, accepter le réel” (Tarkos: 2014), he devises the poetical counterpart to Gary Becker’s extension of Homo œconomicus to humankind: “someone who accepts reality” (Becker: 1962). Yet most critics interpret Tarkos' texts in light of Left-wing emancipatory ideals: either in the indirectly subversive manner of Deleuze (Barda: 2018; Sainsbury: 2018; Caillée: 2014) or through a Marx-inspired exposition of capital’s hidden contradictions (Farah). Focussing on the poems L’Argent (1997) and Oui (1996), I argue that Tarkos does nothing of the sort. Claiming that neoliberalism and the political context of the 1990’s is more relevant to interpret them than the emancipatory tradition, I show that Tarkos' poetry “littéralise” the worldview in which there is indeed no alternative (Gleize: 2009). Comparing Tarkos' poems to the foundational kernel of neoliberal thought (W. Lippman; L. von Mises; F. Hayek; G. Becker and Paul H. Rubin), this article highlights their disturbing proximity and explore the socio-literary effects of the quashing of non-capitalist revolutionary hopes. Focussing on L’Argent, part 1 analyses how capitalist contradictions are weaponized, capitalism absolutised, and the Marxian revolution is equated with the neoliberal one. In part 2, a close-reading of oui shows Tarkos' language to be a free-evolving and indeterminately plastic entity which manages to combine freedom and determinacy in a way neoliberals have hitherto failed to conceive. From this, part 3 presents the foundations of neoliberal theory which are at work in Tarkos' texts. In accordance with this tradition, Tarkos instrumentalizes the evolutionary view of history in which capitalism is the “Great Revolution” (Lippman: 1937) to which the “intuitive” mind of “common men” (Paul H. Rubin: 2003) has to be adapted. Given that their “mental architecture” is “adapted to life in the small roving bands” (Hayek: 1988), it follows that the true task of revolutionaries, for Tarkos and neoliberals alike, is to foster “the revolutionary re-adaptation” of humanity to market fundamentalism, the division of labour, heightened competition and the universalisation of the commodity form. “La valeur de l’argent, he writes, réconcilie l’ensemble de soi et du monde, elle fait de soi l’adaptation elle-même” (Tarkos: 2008). In a poetical tour de force, Tarkos effectively invents the dream idiom of neoliberalism. The pre-determined horizon of capital as human’s necessary destiny is thereby reconciled with the metamorphic, unpredictable and internally “plastic” (Malabou) features of life and thought. A better player of this fool’s language-game than France’s game master Emmanuel Macron (Révolution: 2016), Tarkos' poems square the revolutionary circle in neoliberal times.