Politics as a battle of images: Lordon’s media theory

Frédéric Lordon is a well-known figure in French radical politics and theory. While being a leading voice and visible actor in the last decade of anti-government protests, Lordon has also an unusual trajectory from heterodox Marxist political economy to Spinozist affect theory. In this paper I aim to focus on Lordon’s little-known media theory. I argue that an important element of his move away from economics, monetary and financial questions was his emphasis on the role of images in social and political struggles. In Figures of Communism, he argues that to make communism desirable and arrive at positive affects, we need a new ecology of images. ‘Politics… is a battle of images’ (Lordon 2021: 16). He points to political graffiti as ‘an affective machine’ that is worth more than 30 years editorials from centre-Left newspaper Libération.
Constructing a perfect edifice of political theory is not enough, only an intervention in the physics of images is necessary to conceive and desire communism as a reality. Capitalism feeds off people’s misery, communism will only emerge by investing the domain of the imaginary — not a hopeful imaginary but a joyful and immediate one. ‘The historical fatality of communism is that it has never taken place and yet it is crippled by disastrous images’ (Lordon 2021: 16). I reconstruct the structure of Lordon’s media theory by dialoguing with strands of French media theory as well as Spinozo-Marxist affect theory. In his recent work on affective politics and communism, Lordon makes it clear that images and the imaginary play a significant role. A way to engage in the field of external stimuli is to intervene in the distribution of the sensible, to show a new image (a ‘dialectical image’) that pierces through the current visual and social order.