Question Paper from: IBPS PO Mains 2017

To remake the world (including Nature), Fourier mobilized: an intolerance (for Civilization), a form (classification), astandard (pleasure), on imagination (the 'scene'), a discourse (his book), all of which pretty well defined 'the action of the signifier or the signifier in action. This action continually makes visible on the page a glaring lack, that of science and politics, that is, of the signified. What Fourier lacks (for that matter voluntarily) points in return to what we ourselves lack when we reject Fourier: to be ironic about Fourier is always - even from the scientific point of view - to censure the signifier. Political and Domestic (the name of Fourier's system), science and Utopia, Marxism and Fourierism, are like two nets whose meshes are of different sizes. On the one hand, Fourier allows to pass through all the science that Marx collects and develops; from the political point of view (and above all since Marxism has given an indelible name to its shortcomings). Fourier is completely off to one side, unrealistic and immoral. However, the other, facing, net allows pleasure, which Fourier collects, to pass through. Desire and Need pass through, as though the two nets were alternatively superimposed, playing at topping hands. However, the relationship of Desire and Need is not complementary (were they fitted one into the other, everything would be perfect), but supplementary: each is the excess of the other. The excess: what does not pass through. For example, seen from today (i.e., after Marx), politics is a necessary purge; Fourier is the child who avoids the purge, who vomits it up. The vomiting of politics is what Fourier calls Invention. Fourierist invention ("For me, I am an inventor, and not an orator") addresses the absolutely new, that about which nothing has yet been said. The rule of invention is a rule of refusal: to doubt absolutely (more than did Descartes, who, Fourier though, never made more than a partial and misplaced use of doubt), to be in opposition with everything being done, to treat only of what has not been treated, to stand apart from "literary agitator", Book People, to preach what opinion holds to be impossible. It is in sum for this purely structural reason (old/new) and through a simple constraint of the discourse (to speak only where there has not yet been speech) that Fourier is silent understood in the modem sense: Fourier repudiates the writer, i.e. the certified manager of good writing, of literature, he who guarantees decorative union and thus the fundamental separation of substance and form; in calling himself an inventor ("I am not a writer, but an inventor"), he places himself at the limit of meaning, what we today call Text. Perhaps, following Fourier, we should henceforth call inventor (and not writer or philosopher) he who proposes new formulae and thereby invests, by fragments, immensely and in detail, the space of the signifier.

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