Theory versus the Political Act?

From Žižek and Heidegger - IJŽS Vol 1.4 (2007)

"Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933"

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This, also, compels us to qualify and limit the homology between

Foucault’s Iranian engagement and Heidegger’s Nazi engagement:

Foucault was right in engaging himself, he correctly detected the

emancipatory potential in the events; all insinuations of liberal

critics that his engagement is yet another chapter in the sad

saga of Western radical intellectuals projecting their fantasies

into an exotic foreign upheaval which allows them to satisfy

simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their secret

“masochistic” longing for harsh discipline and oppression,

totally misses the point. So where was his mistake? One

can claim that he did the right thing for the wrong reason:

the way he theorized and justified his engagement is

misleading. The frame within which Foucault operates in

his analysis of the Iranian situation is the opposition

between the revolutionary Event, the sublime enthusiasm

of the united people where all internal differences are

momentarily suspended, and the pragmatic domain of

the politics of interests, strategic power calculations, etc.

– the opposition which, as we have already seen, directly

evokes Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (or, more

precisely, the sublime which evokes the noumenal

dimension) and the phenomenal. Our thesis is here a very

precise one: this general frame is too “abstract” to account

for different modalities of collective enthusiasm – between,

say, the Nazi enthusiasm of the people united in its rejection

of (whose effects were undoubtedly real), the enthusiasm of

the people united against the stagnating Communist regime,

or the properly revolutionary enthusiasm. The difference is

simply that the first two are not Events, merely pseudo-Events,

because they were lacking the moment of properly utopian

opening. This difference is strictly immanent to enthusiastic

unity: only in the last case, the common denominator of this

unity was the “part of no-part,” the “downtrodden,” those

included in society with no proper place within it and, as such,

functioning as the “universal singularity,” directly embodying

the universal dimension.

This is why, also, the opposition between noumenal

enthusiasm and particular strategic interests does not

cover the entire field – if it were so, then we would remain

stuck forever in the opposition between emancipatory

outbursts and the sobering “day after” when life returns to

its pragmatic normal run. From this constrained perspective,

every attempt to avoid and/or postpone this sobering return

to the normal run of things amounts to terror, to the reversal

of enthusiasm into monstrosity. What if, however, this is

what is truly at stake in a true emancipatory process: in

Jacques Ranciere’s terms, how to unite the political and the

police, how to transpose the political emancipatory outburst

into the concrete regulation of policing. What can be more

sublime than the creation of a new “liberated territory,”

of a positive order of being which escapes the grasp of

the existing order?

This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic

events of the collapse of the Communist regimes the

status of an Event.

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