from:
http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm
[…]
Can one
imagine something more foreign to our universe of the freedom of opinions, of
market competition, of nomadic pluralist interaction, etc., than Robespierre's
politics of Truth (with a capital T, of course), whose proclaimed goal is
"to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of the truth"? Such
a Truth can only be enforced in a terrorist way:
If the
mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is
at the same time virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal;
terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe,
inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a
special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy
applied to our country's most pressing needs.
This
Robespierre's line of argumentation reaches its climax in the paradoxical
identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror "sublates" the
opposition between punishment and clemency - the just and severe punishment of
the enemies IS the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigor and charity
coincide:
To punish
the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to pardon them is barbarity. The rigor
of tyrants has only rigor for a principle; the rigor of the republican
government comes from charity.
What, then,
should those who remain faithful to the legacy of the radical Left do with all
these? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as
OURS, even - or precisely because - it is critically rejected. The only
alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front
of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better
than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: one should also not
allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this
means is that the ruthless self-critique should go hand in hand with a fearless
admission of what, to paraphrase Marx's judgment on Hegel's dialectics, one is
tempted to call the "rational kernel" of the Jacobin Terror:
"Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now,
no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was
deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: "What do
those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?" His answer is well-known:
they want corruption - another name for the subject's defeat. [2]
Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: "That which produces the general good is always terrible." [3] These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed. - The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre's speech "On war" is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who ruthlessly denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defense of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want "revolution without revolution" to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it. [4] Which is why Robespierre also denounced the temptation to export revolution to other countries, forcefully "liberating" them: "The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free against its will. All the kings could have vegetated or died unpunished on their blood-spattered thrones, if they had been able to respect the French people's independence."
The Jacobin revolutionary terror is sometimes (half)justified as the "founding crime" of the bourgeois universe of law and order, in which citizens are allowed to pursue in piece their interests, one should reject this claim on two accounts. Not only is it factually wrong (many conservatives were quite right to point out that one can achieve the bourgeois law and order also without the terrorist excess, as was the case in Great Britain - although there is Cromwell...); much more important, the revolutionary Terror of 1792-1794 was not a case of what Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence, but a case of "divine violence." [5] Interpreters of Benjamin struggle with what could "divine violence" effectively mean - is it yet another Leftist dream of a "pure" event which never really takes place? One should recall here Friedrich Engels's reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: "That which produces the general good is always terrible." [3] These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed. - The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre's speech "On war" is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who ruthlessly denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defense of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want "revolution without revolution" to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it. [4] Which is why Robespierre also denounced the temptation to export revolution to other countries, forcefully "liberating" them: "The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free against its will. All the kings could have vegetated or died unpunished on their blood-spattered thrones, if they had been able to respect the French people's independence."
The Jacobin revolutionary terror is sometimes (half)justified as the "founding crime" of the bourgeois universe of law and order, in which citizens are allowed to pursue in piece their interests, one should reject this claim on two accounts. Not only is it factually wrong (many conservatives were quite right to point out that one can achieve the bourgeois law and order also without the terrorist excess, as was the case in Great Britain - although there is Cromwell...); much more important, the revolutionary Terror of 1792-1794 was not a case of what Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence, but a case of "divine violence." [5] Interpreters of Benjamin struggle with what could "divine violence" effectively mean - is it yet another Leftist dream of a "pure" event which never really takes place? One should recall here Friedrich Engels's reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Of late, the
Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at
the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you
want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That
was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. [6]
One should
repeat this, mutatis mutandis, apropos divine violence: "Well and good,
gentlemen critical theorists, do you want to know what this divine violence
looks like? Look at the revolutionary Terror of 1992-1994. That was the Divine
Violence." (And the series goes on: the Red Terror of 1919...) That is to
say, one should fearlessly identify divine violence with positively existing
historical phenomena, thus avoiding all obscurantist mystification. When those
outside the structured social field strike "blindly," demanding AND
enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is "divine violence" -
recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended
from favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and
burning supermarkets - THIS was "divine violence"... Like the
biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men's sinful ways, it strikes out
of nowhere, a means without end - or, as Robespierre put it in his speech in
which he demanded the execution of Louis XVI: "Peoples do not judge in the
same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw
thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and
this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts."
The Benjaminian "divine violence" should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: NOT in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one's own life) made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not "immoral," it does not give the agent the license to just kill with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is JUSTICE, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which "people" (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price - the Judgment Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering - or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:
The Benjaminian "divine violence" should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: NOT in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one's own life) made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not "immoral," it does not give the agent the license to just kill with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is JUSTICE, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which "people" (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price - the Judgment Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering - or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:
What do you
want, you who would like truth to be powerless on the lips of representatives
of the French people? Truth undoubtedly has its power, it has its anger, its
own despotism; it has touching accents and terrible ones, that resound with
force in pure hearts as in guilty consciences, and that untruth can no more
imitate than Salome can imitate the thunderbolts of heaven; but accuse nature
of it, accuse the people, which wants it and loves it.
And this is
what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what
they really want is a "revolution without a revolution": they want a
revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a
revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to pre-existing norms, a
revolution in which violence is deprived of the "divine" dimension
and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals:
Citizens,
did you want a revolution without a revolution? What is this spirit of
persecution that has come to revise, so to speak, the one that broke our
chains? But what sure judgement can one make of the effects that can follow
these great commotions? Who can mark, after the event, the exact point at which
the waves of popular insurrection should break? At that price, what people
could ever have shaken off the yoke of despotism? For while it is true that a
great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous movement, and that tyranny can only
be hit by the portion of citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever
dare to attack it if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold
them responsible for the duration or violence of the political torment that had
saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by tacit proxy for
the whole of society. The French, friends of liberty, meeting in Paris last
August, acted in that role, in the name of all the departments. They should
either be approved or repudiated entirely. To make them criminally responsible
for a few apparent or real disorders, inseparable from so great a shock, would
be to punish them for their devotion.
This
authentic revolutionary logic can be discerned already at the level of
rhetorical figures, where Robespierre likes to turn around the standard
procedure of first evoking an apparently "realist" position and then
displaying its illusory nature: he often starts with presenting a position or
description of a situation as absurd exaggeration, fiction, and then goes on to
remind us that what, in a first approach, cannot but appear as a fiction, is
actually truth itself: "But what am I saying? What I have just presented
as an absurd hypothesis is actually a very certain reality." It is this
radical revolutionary stance which also enables Robespierre to denounce the
"humanitarian" concern with victims of the revolutionary "divine
violence": "A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies
of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my
face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains." The critical
analysis and the acceptance of the historical legacy of the Jacobins overlap in
the true question to be raised: does the (often deplorable) actuality of the
revolutionary terror compel us to reject the very idea of Terror, or is there a
way to REPEAT it in today's different historical constellation, to redeem its
virtual content from its actualization? It CAN and SHOULD be done, and the most
concise formula of repeating the event designated by the name
"Robespierre" is: to pass from (Robespierre's) humanist terror to
anti-humanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.
In his Le siècle, Alain Badiou conceives as a sign of the political regression that occurred towards the end of the XXth century the shift from "humanism AND terror" to "humanism OR terror." In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defense of the Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as "moral luck": the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that will emerge from it will be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror... More precisely, there are four variations on this motif: humanism AND terror, humanism OR terror, each either in a "positive" or in a "negative" sense. "Humanism and terror" in a positive sense is what Merleau-Ponty elaborated, it sustains Stalinism (the forceful - "terrorist" - engendering of the New Man), and is already clearly discernible in the French Revolution, in the guise of Robespierre's conjunction of virtue and terror. This conjunction can be negated in two ways. It can involve the choice "humanism OR terror," i.e., the liberal-humanist project in all its versions, from the dissident anti-Stalinist humanism up to today's neo-Habermasians (Luc Ferry & Alain Renault in France) and other defenders of human rights AGAINST (totalitarian, fundamentalist) terror. Or it can retain the conjunction "humanism AND terror," but in a negative mode: all those philosophical and ideological orientations, from Heidegger and conservative Christians to partisans of Oriental spirituality and Deep Ecology, who perceive terror as the truth - the ultimate consequence - of the humanist project itself, of its hubris.
There is, however, a fourth variation, usually left aside: the choice "humanism OR terror," but with TERROR, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical position difficult to sustain, but, perhaps, our only hope: it does not amount to the obscene madness of openly pursuing a "terrorist and inhuman politics", but something much more difficult to think. In today's "post-deconstructionist" thought (if one risks this ridiculous designation which cannot but sound as its own parody), the term "inhuman" gained a new weight, especially in the work of Agamben and Badiou. The best way to approach it is via Freud's reluctance to endorse the injunction "Love thy neighbor!" - the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor - for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas thereby obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of the Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radically "inhuman" Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the "living dead" in the concentration camps. At a different level, the same goes for Stalinist Communism. In the standard Stalinist narrative, even the concentration camps were a place of the fight against Fascism where imprisoned Communists were organizing networks of heroic resistance - in such a universe, of course, there is no place for the limit-experience of the Muselmann, of the living dead deprived of the capacity of human engagement - no wonder that Stalinist Communists were so eager to "normalize" the camps into just another site of the anti-Fascist struggle, dismissing Muselmann as simply those who were to weak to endure the struggle.
It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical anti-humanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting the others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics.
In philosophical terms, this "inhuman" dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human "individuality" or "personality" (which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Let mots et les choses, called the "transcendental-empirical doublet," of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individuals qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being? It is against the background of this topic of sovereign acceptance of death that one should reread the rhetorical turn often referred to as the proof of Robespierre's "totalitarian" manipulation of his audience. [7] This turn took place in the midst of Robespierre's speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and some others were arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn will also come. Robespierre directly addresses the moment as pivotal: "Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth." He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in the room:
In his Le siècle, Alain Badiou conceives as a sign of the political regression that occurred towards the end of the XXth century the shift from "humanism AND terror" to "humanism OR terror." In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defense of the Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as "moral luck": the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that will emerge from it will be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror... More precisely, there are four variations on this motif: humanism AND terror, humanism OR terror, each either in a "positive" or in a "negative" sense. "Humanism and terror" in a positive sense is what Merleau-Ponty elaborated, it sustains Stalinism (the forceful - "terrorist" - engendering of the New Man), and is already clearly discernible in the French Revolution, in the guise of Robespierre's conjunction of virtue and terror. This conjunction can be negated in two ways. It can involve the choice "humanism OR terror," i.e., the liberal-humanist project in all its versions, from the dissident anti-Stalinist humanism up to today's neo-Habermasians (Luc Ferry & Alain Renault in France) and other defenders of human rights AGAINST (totalitarian, fundamentalist) terror. Or it can retain the conjunction "humanism AND terror," but in a negative mode: all those philosophical and ideological orientations, from Heidegger and conservative Christians to partisans of Oriental spirituality and Deep Ecology, who perceive terror as the truth - the ultimate consequence - of the humanist project itself, of its hubris.
There is, however, a fourth variation, usually left aside: the choice "humanism OR terror," but with TERROR, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical position difficult to sustain, but, perhaps, our only hope: it does not amount to the obscene madness of openly pursuing a "terrorist and inhuman politics", but something much more difficult to think. In today's "post-deconstructionist" thought (if one risks this ridiculous designation which cannot but sound as its own parody), the term "inhuman" gained a new weight, especially in the work of Agamben and Badiou. The best way to approach it is via Freud's reluctance to endorse the injunction "Love thy neighbor!" - the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor - for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas thereby obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of the Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radically "inhuman" Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the "living dead" in the concentration camps. At a different level, the same goes for Stalinist Communism. In the standard Stalinist narrative, even the concentration camps were a place of the fight against Fascism where imprisoned Communists were organizing networks of heroic resistance - in such a universe, of course, there is no place for the limit-experience of the Muselmann, of the living dead deprived of the capacity of human engagement - no wonder that Stalinist Communists were so eager to "normalize" the camps into just another site of the anti-Fascist struggle, dismissing Muselmann as simply those who were to weak to endure the struggle.
It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical anti-humanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting the others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics.
In philosophical terms, this "inhuman" dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human "individuality" or "personality" (which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Let mots et les choses, called the "transcendental-empirical doublet," of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individuals qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being? It is against the background of this topic of sovereign acceptance of death that one should reread the rhetorical turn often referred to as the proof of Robespierre's "totalitarian" manipulation of his audience. [7] This turn took place in the midst of Robespierre's speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and some others were arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn will also come. Robespierre directly addresses the moment as pivotal: "Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth." He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in the room:
One wants
/on veut/ to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have
exercised /.../ One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to
the Committees /.../ One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed /.../
The
opposition is here between the impersonal "one" (the instigators of
fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which
almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person "you
/vous/" to first-person "us" (Robespierre gallantly includes
himself into the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an
ominous twist: it is no longer that "one wants to make you/us fear,"
but that "one fears," which means that the enemy stirring up fear is
no longer outside "you/us," members of the Assembly, it is here,
among us, among "you" addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity
from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true master's stroke,
assumes full subjectivization - waiting a little bit for the ominous effect of
his words to take place, he then continued in the first person singular:
I say that
anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public
scrutiny.
What can be
more "totalitarian" than this closed loop of "your very fear of
being guilty makes you guilty" - a weird superego-twisted version of the
well-known motto "the only thing to fear is fear itself"? One should
nonetheless move beyond the quick dismissal of Robespierre's rhetorical
strategy as the strategy of "terrorist culpabilization," and to
discern its moment of truth: there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial
moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself -
exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am
witnessing doesn't really concern me - IS the highest treason. That is to say,
the fear of being accused of treason IS my treason, because, even if I
"did not do anything against the revolution," this fear itself, the
fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is
external to the revolution, that I experience "revolution" as an
external force threatening me.
But what goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of his public - how can he himself be sure that he will not be the next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the "I" outside "we" - after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, his proximity to Danton will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he unleashed will not swallow him? It is here that his position assumes the sublime greatness - he fully assumes the danger that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the people's Will; it is that he, Robespierre, IS NOT AFRAID TO DIE - his eventual death will be a mere accident which counts for nothing:
But what goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of his public - how can he himself be sure that he will not be the next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the "I" outside "we" - after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, his proximity to Danton will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he unleashed will not swallow him? It is here that his position assumes the sublime greatness - he fully assumes the danger that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the people's Will; it is that he, Robespierre, IS NOT AFRAID TO DIE - his eventual death will be a mere accident which counts for nothing:
What does
danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from
fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without
ignominy.
Consequently,
insofar as the shift from "we" to "I" can effectively be
determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when
Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master (up to this point, we follow
Lefort's analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian
weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to
die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of
Robespierre's first-person singular ("I") is: I am not afraid to die.
What authorizes him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big
Other, i.e., he doesn't claim that he has a direct access to the people's Will
which speaks through him.
[…]
This
preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living, of course, turns the
soldier into a properly sublime figure. Instead of dismissing this feature as
part of the Fascist militarism, one should assert it as also constitutive of a
radical revolutionary position: there is a straight line that runs from this
acceptance of one's own disappearance to Mao Zedong's reaction to the atomic
bomb threat from 1955:
The United
States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs.
Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they
would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would
hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major
event for the solar system."("The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by
the Atom Bomb")
There
evidently is an "inhuman madness" in this argument: is the fact that
the destruction of the planet Earth "would hardly mean anything to the
universe as a whole" not a rather poor solace for the extinguished
humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure
transcendental subject non-affected by this catastrophe - a subject which,
although non-existing in reality, IS operative as a virtual point of reference.
Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly
abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of one's
immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this
indifference towards what Benjamin called "bare life": "I
despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you." [10] Che Guevara approached the same
line of though when, in the midst of the unbearable tension of the Cuban
missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war
which would involve (at least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people - he
praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its disappearance.
Another "inhuman" dimension of the couple Virtue-Terror promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex "reflexive" network of informal rules which tells us how are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. - and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (like in the case of potlatch). Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a "habit" to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no - but we are expected to we reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit "no" effectively functions as the implicit injunction "do it, but in a discreet way!" Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:
Another "inhuman" dimension of the couple Virtue-Terror promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex "reflexive" network of informal rules which tells us how are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. - and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (like in the case of potlatch). Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a "habit" to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no - but we are expected to we reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit "no" effectively functions as the implicit injunction "do it, but in a discreet way!" Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:
Such is the
natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions,
sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth
or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are
inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We
have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in
raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to
the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and
the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a
great people, the sublime fervors of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as
something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and
it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction
between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity
of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which
we have dared aspire.
To break the
yoke of habits means: if all men are equal, than all men are to be effectively
treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated
as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US,
which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed conflict between
the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:
African
Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and
minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the
abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see
African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that
African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the
end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end
discrimination in the North. /.../ John Brown wasn't like that. For him,
practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African
Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately. He made it very
clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he
made it clear by what he did. [11]
For this
reason, John Brown is the KEY political figure in the history of US: in his
fervently Christian "radical abolitionism," he came closest to
introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape: "John Brown
considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to
practice egalitarianism on every level. /.../ He made it very clear that he saw
no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by
what he did." [12] Today even, long after slavery was
abolished, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those
whites who support Brown are all the more precious - among them, surprisingly,
Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard
dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau [13] painted a portrait of a peerless
man whose embracement of a cause was unparalleled; he even goes as far as to
liken Brown's execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his
actual death) to Christ. Thoreau vents at the scores of those who have voiced
their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people can't relate to
Brown because of their concrete stances and "dead" existences; they
are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.
It is, however, this very consequent egalitarianism which is simultaneously the limitations of the Jacobin politics. Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: the capitalist inequalities ("exploitations") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consequent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the old boring motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour force). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct "terrorist" imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal health service...), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of "equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terrorist" equality) - it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such - our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: the egalitarian political "extremism" or "excessive radicalism" should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to "go to the end." What was the Jacobin's recourse to radical "terror" if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called "excesses" of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard tropes, shared by practically all the "postmodern" Leftists, according to which political "totalitarianism" somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the "principle" of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political "terror" signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political "terror," from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx's key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics ("if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared 'unpolitical' - that is, naturalized - in liberal discourse"). [14] As to philosophical roots of this limitation of egalitarian terror, it is relatively easy to discern the grounds of what when wrong with Jacobin terror in Rousseau who was ready to pursue to its "Stalinist" extreme the paradox of the universal will:
It is, however, this very consequent egalitarianism which is simultaneously the limitations of the Jacobin politics. Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: the capitalist inequalities ("exploitations") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consequent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the old boring motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour force). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct "terrorist" imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal health service...), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of "equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terrorist" equality) - it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such - our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: the egalitarian political "extremism" or "excessive radicalism" should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to "go to the end." What was the Jacobin's recourse to radical "terror" if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called "excesses" of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard tropes, shared by practically all the "postmodern" Leftists, according to which political "totalitarianism" somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the "principle" of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political "terror" signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political "terror," from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx's key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics ("if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared 'unpolitical' - that is, naturalized - in liberal discourse"). [14] As to philosophical roots of this limitation of egalitarian terror, it is relatively easy to discern the grounds of what when wrong with Jacobin terror in Rousseau who was ready to pursue to its "Stalinist" extreme the paradox of the universal will:
Apart from
this primitive contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest.
This follows from the contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both
free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are the opponents
at once free and subject to laws they have not agreed to?
I retort
that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the
laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even
those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of
all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are
citizens and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the
people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but
whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each
man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will
is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my
own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and
that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion
had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will;
and it is in that case that I should not have been free."(The Social
Contract, Book II, Chapter 2, "Voting")
The "totalitarian" catch here is the short-circuit between constative and performative: by reading the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision, but as a constative, as the act of expressing the opinion on (of guessing )what is the general will (which is thus substantialized into something that PRE-EXISTS voting), he avoids the deadlock of the rights of those who remain in the minority (they should obey the decision of the majority, because in the result of voting, they learn what the general will really is). In other words, those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority: in learning the result of the vote (which run against their individual vote), they do not simply learn that they are a minority - what they learn is that they were MISTAKEN about what is the general will.
The parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of Predestination cannot but strike the eye: in the case of Predestination, fate is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process, so that the stake of individuals' activities is not to performatively constitute their fate, but to discover (or guess) one's pre-existing fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively "will have been" necessary." This reversal was described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:
The "totalitarian" catch here is the short-circuit between constative and performative: by reading the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision, but as a constative, as the act of expressing the opinion on (of guessing )what is the general will (which is thus substantialized into something that PRE-EXISTS voting), he avoids the deadlock of the rights of those who remain in the minority (they should obey the decision of the majority, because in the result of voting, they learn what the general will really is). In other words, those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority: in learning the result of the vote (which run against their individual vote), they do not simply learn that they are a minority - what they learn is that they were MISTAKEN about what is the general will.
The parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of Predestination cannot but strike the eye: in the case of Predestination, fate is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process, so that the stake of individuals' activities is not to performatively constitute their fate, but to discover (or guess) one's pre-existing fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively "will have been" necessary." This reversal was described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:
The
catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but
also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if,
in futur antérieur, it appears as necessary. /.../ if an outstanding event
takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place;
nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus
the event's actualization - the fact that it takes place - which retroactively
creates its necessity. [15]
Dupuy
provides the example of the French presidential elections in May 1995; here is
the January forecast of the main polling institute: "If, on next May 8, Ms
Balladur will be elected, one can say that the presidential election was
decided before it even took place." If - accidentally - an event takes
place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: THIS,
not the common places on how the underlying necessity expresses itself in and
through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectics of
contingency and necessity. The same goes for October Revolution (once the
Bolsheviks won and stabilized their hold on power, their victory appeared as an
outcome and expression of a deeper historical necessity), and even of Bush's
much contested first US presidential victory (after the contingent and
contested Florida majority, his victory retroactively appears as an expression
of a deeper US political trend). In this sense, although we are determined by
destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. This, according to
Dupuy, is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to
"realistically" appraise the possibilities of the catastrophe, but to
accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense: like the election of
Balladur, "if the catastrophe will happen, one can say that its occurrence
was decided before it even took place." Destiny and free action (to block
the "if") thus go hand in hand: freedom is at its most radical the
freedom to change one's Destiny. [16] This brings us back to our central
question: how would a Jacobin politics which would take into account this
retroactive-contingent rise of universality look? How are we to reinvent the
Jacobin terror?
[18]
[…]
[18]
[…]
According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethic of the "categorical imperative" (the unconditional injunction to do our duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for the empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of the Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself - which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: "I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty..," Kant's ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude - no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer's orders. However, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such maneuver of putting the blame onto some figure of the big Other.
The standard motto of ethical rigor is: "There is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty!" Although Kant's well-known maxim Du kannst, denn du sollst! ("You can, because you must!") seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: "There is no excuse for accomplishing one's duty!" The very reference to duty as the excuse to do my duty should be rejected as hypocritical. Recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture; his excuse to himself (and to others) is: "I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do - it's my duty!" This is what psychoanalytic ethics thoroughly forbids: in it, I am fully responsible not only for doing my duty, but no less for determining what my duty is.
Along the same lines, in his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his utmost acerb irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of "guarantee" for the revolution; this guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social Necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to wait for the right moment, when the situation is "mature" with regard to the laws of historical development: "it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature") or the normative ("democratic") legitimacy ("the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic") - as Lenin repeatedly puts, as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of the state power, it should get the permission from some figure of the big Other (organize a referendum which will ascertain that the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s'autorise que d'elle-même: one should assume the revolutionary ACT not covered by the big Other - the fear of taking power "prematurely," the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act.
It is only such a radical stance that allows us to break with today's predominant mode of politics, the post-political biopolitcs, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a defense against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics: it is not the difference of two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself (with too high taxation), fear of ecological catastrophes - such a (post)politics always amounts to a frightening rallying of frightened men. This is why the big event not only in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration politics "went mainstream": they finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society - it is "our country, love it or leave it."
How are we to break out of this (post)politics of fear? The biopolitical administration of life is the true content of global liberal democracy, and this introduces the tension between democratic form and administrative-regulatory content. Which, then, would be the opposite of biopolitics? What if we take the risk of resuscitating the good old "dictatorship of the proletariat" as the only way to break biopolitics? This cannot but sound ridiculous today, it cannot but appear that these are two incompatible terms from different fields, with no shared space: the latest political power analysis versus the old discredited Communist mythology... And yet: this is the only true choice today. The term "proletarian dictatorship" continues to point towards the key problem.
[…]
So what about proletariat? Insofar as proletariat is, within a social edifice, its "out of joint" part, the element which, while formal part of this edifice, has no determinate place within it, the "part of no-part" which stands for universality, "dictatorship of the proletariat" means: the direct empowerment of universality, so that those who are "part of no-part" determine the tone. They are egalitarian-universalist for purely formal reasons: as part of no part, they lack the particular features that would legitimate their place within the social body - they belong to the set of society without belonging to any of its sub-sets; as such, their belonging is directly universal. Here, the logic of the representation of multiple particular interests and their mediation through compromises reaches its limit; every dictatorship breaks with this logic of representation (which is why the simplistic definition of Fascism as the dictatorship of financial capital is wrong: Marx already knew that Napoleon III, this proto-Fascist, broke with the logic of representation). One should thus thoroughly demystify the scare-crow of the "dictatorship of the proletariat": at its most basic, it stands for the tremulous moment when the complex web of representations is suspended due to the direct intrusion of universality into the political field. With regard to French Revolution, it was, significantly, Danton, NOT Robespierre, who provided the most concise formula of the imperceptible shift from "dictatorship of the proletariat" to statist violence, or, in Benjamin's terms, from divine to mythic violence: "Let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be." [19] For Danton, the Jacobin the revolutionary state terror was a kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not revenge on the enemies but to prevent the direct "divine" violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves. In other words, let us do what the people demand us to do so that they will not do it themselves...
From Ancient Greece, we have a name for this intrusion: democracy. That is to say, what is democracy, at its most elementary? A phenomenon which, for the first time, appeared in Ancient Greece when the members of demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) not only demanded that their voice be heard against those in power. They not only protested the wrong they suffered and wanted their voice be recognized and included in the public sphere, on an equal footing with the ruling oligarchy and aristocracy; even more, they, the excluded, those with no fixed place within the social edifice, presented themselves as the embodiment of the Whole of Society, of the true Universality: "we - the 'nothing', not counted in the order - are the people, we are All against others who stand only for their particular privileged interest." The political conflict proper designates the tension between the structured social body in which each part has its place, and "the part with no-part" which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, the principled equality of all men qua speaking beings - up to the liumang, "hoodlums," in today's China, those who are displaced and freely float, lacking their work-and-residence, but also cultural or sexual, identity and registration.
This identification of the part of society with no properly defined place within it (or resisting the allocated subordinated place within it) with the Whole is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernible in all great democratic events from the French Revolution (in which le troisième état proclaimed itself identical to the Nation as such, against aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of the East European Socialism (in which dissident "forums" proclaimed themselves representative of the entire society against the Party nomenklatura). In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of antidemocratic politics always and by definition is and was depoliticization, the demand that "things should return to normal," with each individual sticking to his or her particular job. And this brings us to the inevitable paradoxical conclusion: "dictatorship of the proletariat" is another name for the violence of the democratic explosion itself. "Dictatorship of the proletariat" is thus the zero-level at which the difference between legitimate and illegitimate state power is suspended, i.e., at which the state power AS SUCH is illegitimate. Saint-Just said in November 1792: "Every king is a rebel and a usurper." This phrase is a cornerstone of emancipatory politics: there is no "legitimate" king as opposed to the usurper, since being a king is in itself an usurpation, in the same sense that, for Proudhon, property as such is theft. What we have here is the Hegelian "negation of negation," the passage from the simple-direct negation ("this king is not a legitimate one, he is an usurper"), to the inherent self-negation ("authentic king" is an oxymoron, being a king IS usurpation). This is why, for Robespierre, the trial of the king is not a trial at all:
There is no
trial to be held here. Louis is not a defendant. You are not judges. You are
not, you cannot be anything but statesmen and representatives of the nation.
You have no sentence to pronounce for or against a man, but a measure of public
salvation to implement, an act of national providence to perform. /.../ Louis
was king, and the Republic is founded: the famous question you are considering
is settled by those words alone. Louis was dethroned by his crimes; Louis
denounced the French people as rebellious; to chastise it, he called on the
arms of his fellow tyrants; victory and the people decided that he was the
rebellious one: therefore Louis cannot be judged; either he is already
condemned or the Republic is not acquitted. Proposing to put Louis on trial, in
whatever way that could be done, would be to regress towards royal and
constitutional despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea, for it means
putting the revolution itself in contention. In fact, if Louis can still be put
on trial, then he can be acquitted; he may be innocent; what am I saying! He is
presumed to be so until he has been tried. But if Louis is acquitted, if Louis
can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the revolution?
[…]
There are
two elementary and irreducible sides to democracy: the violent egalitarian
imposition of those who are "surnumerary," the "part of no
part," those who, while formally included within the social edifice, have
no determinate place within it; and the regulated (more or less) universal
procedure of choosing those who will exert power. How do these to sides relate
to each other? What if democracy in the second sense (the regulated procedure
of registering the "people's voice") is ultimately a defense against
itself, against democracy in the sense of the violent intrusion of the
egalitarian logic that disturbs the hierarchic functioning of the social
edifice, an attempt to re-functionalize this excess, to make it a part of the
normal running of the social edifice?
The problem is thus: how to regulate/institutionalize the very violent egalitarian democratic impulse, how to prevent it from being drowned in democracy in the second sense of the term (regulated procedure)? If there is no way to do it, then "authentic" democracy remains a momentary utopian outburst which, the proverbial morning after, has to be normalized. [20]
[…]
The problem is thus: how to regulate/institutionalize the very violent egalitarian democratic impulse, how to prevent it from being drowned in democracy in the second sense of the term (regulated procedure)? If there is no way to do it, then "authentic" democracy remains a momentary utopian outburst which, the proverbial morning after, has to be normalized. [20]
[…]
Is
'democracy' a master-signifier? Without any doubt. It is the master-signifier
which says that there is no master-signifier, at least not a master-signifier
which would stand alone, that every master-signifier has to insert itself
wisely among others. Democracy is Lacan's big S of the barred A, which says: I
am the signifier of the fact that Other has a hole, or that it doesn't
exist. [21]
Of course,
Miller is aware that EVERY master-signifier bears witness to the fact that
there is no master-signifier, no Other of the Other, that there is a lack in
the Other, etc. - the very gap between S1 and S2 occurs because of this lack
(as with God in Spinoza, the Master-Signifier by definition fills in the gap in
the series of "ordinary" signifiers). The difference is that, with
democracy, this lack is directly inscribed into the social edifice, it is
institutionalized in a set of procedures and regulations - no wonder, then,
that Miller approvingly quotes Marcel Gauchet about how, in democracy, truth
only offers itself "in division and decomposition" (and one cannot
but note with irony how Stalin and Mao made the same claim, although with a
"totalitarian" twist: in politics, truth only emerges through
ruthless divisions of class struggle...).
It is easy to note how, from within this Kantian horizon of democracy, the "terrorist" aspect of democracy - the violent egalitarian imposition of those who are "surnumerary," the "part of no part" - can only appear as its "totalitarian" distortion, i.e., how, within this horizon, the line that separates the authentic democratic explosion of revolutionary terror from the "totalitarian" Party-State regime (or, to put it in reactionary terms, the line that separates the "mob rule of the dispossessed" from the Party-State brutal oppression of the "mob") is obliterated. (One can, of course, argue that a direct "mob rule" is inherently unstable and that it turns necessarily into its opposite, a tyranny over the mo itself; however, this shift in no way changes the fact that, precisely, we are dealing with a shift, a radical turnaround.) Foucault dealt with this shift in his writings on the Iranian revolution, where he opposes the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political, etc., transformations to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the cobweb of historical causality - it is irreducible to it:
It is easy to note how, from within this Kantian horizon of democracy, the "terrorist" aspect of democracy - the violent egalitarian imposition of those who are "surnumerary," the "part of no part" - can only appear as its "totalitarian" distortion, i.e., how, within this horizon, the line that separates the authentic democratic explosion of revolutionary terror from the "totalitarian" Party-State regime (or, to put it in reactionary terms, the line that separates the "mob rule of the dispossessed" from the Party-State brutal oppression of the "mob") is obliterated. (One can, of course, argue that a direct "mob rule" is inherently unstable and that it turns necessarily into its opposite, a tyranny over the mo itself; however, this shift in no way changes the fact that, precisely, we are dealing with a shift, a radical turnaround.) Foucault dealt with this shift in his writings on the Iranian revolution, where he opposes the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political, etc., transformations to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the cobweb of historical causality - it is irreducible to it:
The man in
revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts
the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man
'really' to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to
obey. [22]
[…]
It is
fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new;
English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to
present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But
they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out
historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different
sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way
of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. [23]
Deleuze
refers here to revolutionary explosions in a way which is strictly parallel to
Foucault's:
The Iranian
movement did not experience the 'law' of revolutions that would, some say, make
the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind
enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most
intensely lived part of the uprising touched, in an unmediated fashion, on an
already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The
spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity
whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian
clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the
uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the
grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is
'fear,' fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the
world had not seen an example for a long time. [24]
Foucault is
here effectively Deleuzian: what interests him are not the Iranian events at
the level of actual social reality and its causal interactions, but the
event-like surface, the pure virtuality of the "spark of life" which
only accounts for the uniqueness of the Event. What took place in Iran in the
interstice of two epochs of social reality was not the explosion of the People
as a substantial entity with a set of properties, but the event of
becoming-People. The point is thus not the shift in relations of power and
domination between actual socio-political agents, the redistribution of social
control, etc., but the very fact of transcending - or, rather, momentarily
canceling - this very domain, of the emergence of a totally different domain of
"collective will" as a pure Sense-Event in which all differences are
obliterated, rendered irrelevant. Such an event is not only new with regard to
what was going on before, it is new "in itself" and thus forever
remains new.
[…]
[…]
And this is
why, while everybody loves democratic rebellions, the spectacular/carnivalesque
explosions of the popular will, anxiety arises when this will wants to persist,
to institutionalize itself - and the more "authentic" the rebellion
is, the more "terrorist" is this institutionalization. It is at this
level that one should search for the decisive moment of a revolutionary
process: say, in the case of the October Revolution, not the explosion of
1917-1918, not even the civil war that followed, but the intense
experimentations of the early 1920, the (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts
to invent new rituals of daily life: with what to replace the pre-revolutionary
procedures of marriage and funerals? How to organize the most common
interaction in a factory, in an apartment block? It is at this level of what,
as opposed to the "abstract terror" of the "big" political
revolution, one is tempted to call the "concrete terror" of imposing
a new order onto daily life, that the Jacobins and both the Soviet revolution
and the Chinese revolution ultimately failed - not for the lack of attempts in
this direction, for sure. Jacobins were at their best not in the theatrics of
Terror, but in the utopian explosions of political imagination apropos the
reorganization of daily life: everything was there, proposed in the course of
the frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from the self-organization
of women to the communal homes in which the old will be able to spend their
last years in peace and dignity. (So what about Robespierre's rather ridiculous
attempt to impose a new civic religion celebrating a Supreme Being? Robespierre
himself formulated succinctly the main reason for his opposition to atheism:
"Atheism is aristocratic." [26] Atheism was for him the ideology of
the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who lost all sense of historical mission.)
The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only "institutionalize" itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to re-invent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou [27] elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese "legists" through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao - it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can "move mountains," ignoring "objective" laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy of the people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the "complex circumstances" which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people - suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his "a great truth" ("the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself"), and Mao's critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR , where he qualifies Stalin's point of view as "almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants."). [28] And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms at our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments? What is demanded is:
- strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, i.e., one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
- terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal "freedoms," technological control of the prospective law-breakers);
- voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will run counter the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development - it is not the question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to "stop the train" of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;
- and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron scandal, the Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped-off the financial authorities as true public heroes.) [29]
[…]
The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only "institutionalize" itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to re-invent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou [27] elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese "legists" through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao - it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can "move mountains," ignoring "objective" laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy of the people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the "complex circumstances" which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people - suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his "a great truth" ("the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself"), and Mao's critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR , where he qualifies Stalin's point of view as "almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants."). [28] And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms at our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments? What is demanded is:
- strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, i.e., one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
- terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal "freedoms," technological control of the prospective law-breakers);
- voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will run counter the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development - it is not the question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to "stop the train" of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;
- and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron scandal, the Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped-off the financial authorities as true public heroes.) [29]
[…]
The tragedy
is that the very idea of such a collective decision is discredited today.
Apropos of the disintegration of State Socialism two decades ago, one should
not forget that, at approximately the same time, the Western Social Democratic
welfare state ideology was also dealt a crucial blow, it also ceased to
function as the imaginary able to arouse a collective passionate following. The
notion that Èthe time of the welfare state has pastÇ is today a piece of
commonly accepted wisdom. What these two defeated ideologies shared is the
notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit
impersonal and anonymous socio-historic development, to steer it in a desired
direction.
Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as "ideological" and/or "totalitarian": the social process is again perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate beyond social control. The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one cannot fight - one either adapts oneself to it, or one falls out of step with history and one is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as human as possible, to fight for Èglobal capitalism with a human faceÇ (this is what, ultimately, the Third Way is - or, rather, WAS - about). The sound barrier will have to be broken here, the risk will have to be taken to endorse again large collective decisions - this, perhaps, is the main legacy of Robespierre and his comrades to us today.
[...]
Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as "ideological" and/or "totalitarian": the social process is again perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate beyond social control. The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one cannot fight - one either adapts oneself to it, or one falls out of step with history and one is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as human as possible, to fight for Èglobal capitalism with a human faceÇ (this is what, ultimately, the Third Way is - or, rather, WAS - about). The sound barrier will have to be broken here, the risk will have to be taken to endorse again large collective decisions - this, perhaps, is the main legacy of Robespierre and his comrades to us today.
[...]
The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold cruel determination signaled by his green eyes. As such, Robespierre serves perfectly today's anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as it was the case by the 19th century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary Cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the last biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity. [30] The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: "Terror wears a sea-green coat," "The good terrorist," "Virtue's demon executioner," and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb's "Sea-green, mad as a fish" (in Telegraph, May 6 2006). And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws "a chilling lesson for us today": Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but "/t/he bloodlettings brought about by this 'sincere' man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant." [31]
[...]
What better proof of the
ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the
mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the
simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats,
without which, as it was clear to Robespierre, a revolution "is just a
noisy crime that destroys another crime," the faith most poignantly
expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1994, the day
before his arrest and execution:
But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world's first Republic.
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