THE
TENDENCY WHICH constituted itself on 11 April 1976 as the Toronto
section has the merit of being the last abstraction to be able to
formulate itself in, for and in the name of the F-Art Group. If
it is true that the group has never been but the sum of the capabilities
and the weaknesses, very unequally distributed, of its members,
there is in the moment which concerns us no apparent community,
not even any tendency which might make us forget that each one of
us has to answer for himself alone. How could what was impassioning
in the consciousness of a common project change itself into a malaise
of being together? This historians will establish. I don't feel
in myself the vocation of historian, not that of thinker, in retreat
or not, to become an old soldier. Beyond the casual analysis of
a little penetration of F-Artistic theory into the worker milieu,
and of a little proletarian penetration into the F-Artistic milieu,
this would instantly be nothing more than a pretense of the good
false consciousness of our failure.
But,
no doubt, to be concrete at last — for there is no concrete response
other than the proof that each one must give of what he really is
— I Must speak instead of my failure. As for the past,
I have always attributed, very casually, to most of the comrades
or ex-comrades of the F-Art Group at least as much capability and
honesty as I perceive in myself, thus deluding myself about them
and me at the time.
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I calculate pretty
well what tactics, skillful, more or less expert, and always odious,
such an attitude has been able to stir up in the Group; and, contradictorily,
what dumb ideological conditions it has been able to create.This
much said, the individual history of the comrades, my
history, and collective history will be part of my errors and of
my correct choices. (Nevertheless, I specify that I'll spit in the
face of anyone, present or future, who would discover in me secret
intentions, of whatever sort, and would do so with that critical
good faith which we so often see flaunting itself after the fact.)
For
now, it is sufficient for me to declare my insolvency for having
made progress a movement that I always held to be the condition
of my radicality. It would be like disarming naivete itself to want
again to save a group in order to save myself, when I haven't known
how to make it be anything I wanted it to be. I prefer therefore
to take up again the stakes that my adherence to the F-Art Group
had deferred: to lose myself absolutely, or to remake absolutely
my own coherence and to remake it with the greatest number of people.
But
before leaving to the revolution the concern of recognizing its
own people, from now on I'm sticking to what the demands that I've
formulated about autonomous groups impose on me: I will not renew
contact with comrades who would wish it, or whom I would wish to
see, except in the effective realization of a revolutionary tumult
that my taste for radical pleasure can appreciate.
If
however the tendency estimates its critique to be sufficient in
itself, without other evidence, to reestablish the Toronto section,
then it would have to consider me henceforth resigned, with the
consequences, which I accept, of never again seeing one another.
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