of an irreversible crisis in relations between capitalist economy and
politics.
During the modern era, complexity has been reduced to the practical
and epistemic categories of political governance. We could say that the
speed of proliferation of socio-communicational chaos has been gov-
erned by the conscious elaboration of chaoid institutions on the part
of organized human will.
This capacity to govern has exhausted itself over the course of our
century.
Social complexity is no longer governable and not even comprehen-
sible by politics.
But to this, political thought has reacted in the course of the century
with aggressive movements.
The more fragile its practical hold on the world has become, the
more politics has tried to maintain its unlimited domination.
1968 is the culminating moment of this delirium of omnipotence of
the declining politician, but at the same time, it is the comprehension
(torn, fragmented, confused) of another kind of being of thought: one
founded on friendship, on nomadic and provisional community. 1968
inaugurated the coming to consciousness of the ironic character of
thought, that is (since the two are the same thing) of chaosmotic
becoming. When thought wants to impose a world form by creating
ideology, it institutes a principle of seriousness that substitutes the
integralist pretext of truth for the play of communication.
Irony is the awareness of the playfulness of language and of the
singular (but not therefore weak) character of the ethical perspective
instituted by the play of language.
1968 is a watershed in the history of thought because it is then that
the dialectical illusion of modern thought comes to its end.
But at the same time, in its ideological variant, 1968 conceived of
the movement as a moment of realization of thought. Thought became
ideology insofar as it wanted to impose the universal form of the world,
reducing difference to identity. At first, continuing the Enlightenment
enterprise, the twentieth century tried to impose universal identity (social-
ism, democracy or the market). When this attempt to impose universal
principles collapsed (and 1989 is the moment when this happened), it was
then that the ideology closed itself into the compound of particular iden-
tities, of reemerging nationalisms, and widespread forms of integralism.
Particular identities have nothing to do with difference. Difference is
becoming other, infinite play that unfolds along the edge between
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