Jean-PieVroryee r It'Csr azy How Many Things Don'tE xist SelecteWdr itings It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist Selected Writings of Jean-PierVroey er Translated from the French "ReicMho,d ed 'emplwoais"t ranslated byK enK nabbu ndetrh et it"lRee ich, How toU se;t"h eo thetre xtwse re translactoeldlo arbativbeylI ys aac CroninR,o geGrr egoiarned,L inda Lanphear. Published by Aragorn Moser Layout by Leona Benton Printed at "The Compound" 1818 Carleton St. Berkeley, CA 94703-1908 Cruel Hospice 2015 licensed under creative commons (!)@@ Table of Contents Introduction Reich: How to Use 1 Non-Well-Founded Set Theory: Putting an End to Marx's Reductionism 19 The Economy is Only an Ideology in Marx's Sense 25 My Goal in Life 60 What I am Satisfied With (1997) 65 There is No Society of the Spectacle 69 The Parthian Shot 101 Introduction Who is Jean-Pierre Voyer? French social thinkers don't have the best reputation in America. Typically they are seen as humorless, self-important, elitist intellectuals whose purpose is to tell the world not only what to believe, but what to do with those beliefs. We know Jean-Pierre Voyer, and he is none of those things. He has worked as a cab driver, a plumber and software programmer/entrepreneur. He never attended a university, and he is completely self-taught. He has a wicked sense of humor and all of his writings develop and make a critical analysis of his initial ideas. He has gone on record as saying that one of the goals of theory is to say what does not exist, in particular, the "economy". His provocative assertions made him many enemies, most of the time because the latter would rather maintain the status quo on essential questions rather than enter into a critical debate. ii In his search for an answer to the question: "Why don't people revolt?" he leaves no stone unturned. He is destructively funny and provocative when addressing trendy thinkers, politicians and politics. He puts his life where his mouth is. He is unique not only among French social thinkers, but among radical thinkers everywhere. Voyer is the most original thinker to come out of the post-1968 movement in Europe, so original in fact that he developed a profound critique of the failures and inadequacies of Marx and of the Situationists, which led to his estrangement from Debord. What is crucial is not that Voyer and Debord stopped talking, but that Voyer continues to think and write about the modem world as no one else does. Voyer is the author of six books and numerous articles published in France by Editions Champ-Libre, by Editions de la Nuit and by Editions Anonymes. His site contains all his writings: thousands of pages of research, correspondence, and theoretical and polemical work. His work is ferociously Hegelian in its method. He writes-about modem slavery, the iii tyranny of the commodity, communication, the movement of thought in society, the naivete of the materialist conception of this world-with a clarity and wit that would be reassuring except that they are also extremely demanding of the reader. Selected Excerpts from Voyer's Writings The following excerpts from Voyer's writings beckon to translators who can help bring more of his work to an English-language audience. Fortunately An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Misery of the People will appear next year in a LBC Books edition. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Misery of the People, Editions Champ Libre 1975 "The scandal of Marxism and of Situationism consists simply in claiming that the thought of Marx and the thought of the Situationists are true iv while the enemies of Marx and the enemies of the Situationists are still standing, as if the truth of a thought were not a practical question, a question of its power and of the annihilation of its enemies. In fact, Marxism is the victory of Stalin's 'thought,' that is, the victory of his police." Review of Contemporary Prehistory, 1982 "According to realism, it is correct and sensible to affirm that a reality exists and that it is independent of the human spirit. Moreover, according to this current of thought, the human spirit can progress in the direction of ever-increasing knowledge of this reality." (Bernard d'Espagnat, In Search of The Real, A Physicist's Perspective� Gauthier­ Villars, 1979.) Obviously, we are in complete disagreement with materialist realism, first on the nature of knowledge and then on all of the questions stemming from it, beginning with the question of reality. For materialist realism, knowledge is reduced to individual consciousness. For us, on the contrary, knowledge is not the knowledge or v thought of an individual, it is a world, it is the movement of thought in the world. Understood in this way, knowledge constitutes reality itself. It follows quite clearly that knowledge does not refer to an external and independent reality but to itself. So knowledge understood in the materialist realist sense as thought or consciousness of an individual necessarily refers to knowledge as a world. Thought, therefore, necessarily refers to the movement of thought in the world. However, it might seem that we agree with materialist realism on two points since (1) we are of the opinion, along with Hegel, that a reality exists and that it is exterior to the consciousness and the thought of the impoverished individual and, (2) we are of the opinion, against Kant, that reality is knowable. But this agreement is a simple appearance because we are totally opposed to materialist realism as to the meaning it gives to words, just as we are totally opposed to materialist realism as to the meaning it gives to the words 'communism' and 'revolution.' A reality exists but not as conceived of by materialist realism. The reality of this realism is