From:
International Journal of Žižek Studies
ISSN 1751- 8229
Volume Two, Number Two
"The Hegelian 'Night of the World': Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality"
Robert Sinnerbrink - Macquarie University (Australia)
http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/136/222
[....]
II: Abstract Negativity and Concrete Universality
Žižek’s reflections on the Hegelian subject, however, do not only have psychoanalytic and
cultural significance; they also have social and political implications. In The Ticklish Subject as
well as elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world” is explicitly linked with
the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universality. In an argument charged with political resonances, Žižek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity—the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations—enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience. Far from rehearsing the cliché of Hegel’s reconciliationist stance towards the state, Žižek claims that the radical negativity of the subject—the ‘night of the world’—means that there can be no concrete universality without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror (as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the post-revolutionary Jacobin Terror, an abstract negativity that ushered in the modern bourgeois state (Hegel 1977: 355-363)). This Hegelian argument concerning abstract negativity and concrete universality provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to Žižek’s critique of various contemporary forms of ‘post-political’ ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley’s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006: 332-334; Žižek 2008: 339-350)).
Žižek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete
universality. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel’s subordinating of
particularity to universality, Žižek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realised through individualisation; that is, the concrete universal is embodied in the individual. As Žižek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the “properly modern notion of
individualisation” occurs through secondary identification (1999: 90). The individual is initially
immersed in its immediate milieu, the particular life-form into which he or she is born (family,
local community). It is only once one’s primary identifications with one’s ‘organic’ community are
broken that one becomes an “individual,” namely by asserting one’s autonomy through
identification with a secondary community that is also universal and ‘artificial’; that is, mediated
and sustained through the free activity of independent subjects (profession, nation, independent
peer-group versus traditional apprenticeship, organic community, prescribed social role, and so
on) (Žižek 1999: 90). The abstract opposition between primary and secondary identifications
(where primary identifications are rejected in favour of secondary identifications) is suspended
once the primary identifications are reintegrated and experienced as the “modes of appearance”
of my secondary identifications (Žižek 1999: 90).
Žižek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, ‘crossbreeding’ it
with Hegel’s distinction between neutral “positive” Universality and differentiated “actual”
Universality (1999: 90). The former refers to the “impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence
of its particular content”; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, “which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted” (Žižek 1999: 91). The Universal as neutral ‘container’ that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as “the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation” (Žižek 1999: 91). The latter is the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content. Indeed the passage from abstract to concrete universality, Žižek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity;
phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative “comes into existence in the guise of
the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction” (Žižek 1999: 91)—via what the
Phenomenology will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the
subject’s power to “tarry with the negative”.
The striking conclusion Žižek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the
passage from abstract to contract universality is via “the full assertion” of this power of radical
negativity, the negation of all particular content (1999: 92). At one level this would seem to be
an instance of the famous Hegelian Aufhebung; we must lose immediate reality in the selfcontraction of the “night of the world” in order to regain it as social reality, symbolically mediated by the subject; or we must renounce the immediate organic whole, submitting ourselves to the activity of the understanding, in order to regain it at a higher, mediated level as the “totality of Reason” (Žižek 1999: 92). Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see Žižek 1991: 31-38); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognises “the horror of the psychotic self-contraction,” the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the “reconstituted organic whole” (Žižek 1999: 92-3).
From Abstract to Concrete Universality
Žižek’s radical reading of Hegel challenges this orthodoxy: the passage through negativity, from
abstract to concrete universality, is not about avoiding the moment of radical negativity in favour of the rational totality. Rather, it claims that this passage is unavoidable; the passage to the high passes through the low, the direct choice of the higher is precisely the way to miss it (Žižek 1999: 93). Citing another favourite speculative passage from the Phenomenology, Žižek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a
conjunction which Nature “naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest
fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Hegel 1977: 210). It is not a
matter of choosing insemination rather than urination (as though these comprise an abstract
opposition, as representational consciousness would have it). Rather, we have to pass through
the ‘wrong choice’ (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the ‘right choice’ (biological
conception, insemination, the reproduction of life): the speculative meaning—the Hegelian
infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion/elimination and
conception/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension
—emerges only as an after-effect of the first, ‘wrong’ reading, which is contained within, indeed
constitutive of, the speculative meaning (Žižek 1999: 93).6
Žižek’s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality
requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the ‘wrong’ choice of the abstract
negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the ‘right’ choice of a
stable, rational, democratic state. At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass
the negative and directly choose “the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life-world”
results in the even greater violence of a “regression to premodern organic society”; a denial of
the “infinite right of subjectivity” that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (Žižek 1999:
93). The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate
social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel’s famous analysis of
the French revolution, it is only by passing through the “horror of revolutionary Terror” that the
constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’ are destroyed and the “infinite right
of subjectivity in its abstract negativity” can thus be asserted (Žižek 1999: 93).
Again, Žižek questions the standard reading of Hegel’s famous analysis in the
Phenomenology of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project,
with its “direct assertion of abstract Universal reason,” perishes in “self-destructive fury”
because it fails to organise its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order
(1999: 93). Hegel’s point, rather, as Žižek argues, is to show how the revolutionary Terror,
despite being an historical deadlock, is nonetheless necessary in order to effect the historical
passage towards the modern rational state (1999: 93). The historical situation that opposes “a
premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of
abstract negativity” always involves an Hegelian forced choice: “one has to choose Terror” (the
‘wrong’ choice) against pre-modern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the
‘right’ choice; namely to create the conditions “for the new post-revolutionary reconciliation
between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual” (Žižek 1999:
94).
Žižek thus fully endorses the Hegelian claim that the freedom of subjectivity emerges out
a certain experience of radical negativity. This also applies to the contrast between ethical life
and morality: the immersion of the subject in his/her concrete social life-world versus his/her
“abstract individualist/universal moral opposition to this concrete inherited universe” (Žižek
1999: 94). The moral individual, acting on behalf of a larger universality, acts so as to challenge
and undermine the inherited determinate ethical mores of his/her community (Socrates versus
the Greek polis; Christ versus the Jewish people) (Žižek 1999: 94). As Hegel argues, however,
the stubborn attachment of the moral subject to his/her convictions, despite the demands of the
ethical totality, also dialectically transitions into its opposite, that is, into Evil—yet another
instance of the passage through negativity marking the movement from abstract to concrete
universality. As Žižek points out, Hegel is well aware that this abstract universality gains
existence through violence, the destructive fury towards all particular content, which is again the
only way the concrete Universal can be realised through the emergence of the freedom of
individual subjectivity (1999: 94).
Once again, Žižek challenges the doxa concerning the young Hegel’s aesthetic vision of
harmonious Greek Sittlichkeit: Hegel ‘becomes Hegel’ once this vision of a stable organic
totality (as developed in the 1802-3 System of Sittlichkeit) is abandoned. Such a model, Žižek
remarks, is in fact closer to the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ characteristic of political romanticism,
with its anti-modernist emphasis on organic community and anti-universalistic traditionalism
(1999: 94). Indeed, it is only after Hegel too makes the ‘wrong’ choice (idealised Greek
Sittlichkeit) that the mature Hegel can make the ‘right’ one: namely, acknowledging that the only path to concrete universality (and the modern state) is via the subject’s choice of abstract
negativity (the skandalon of Christ’s emergence versus the nostalgic hope for a renewed
version of Greek Sittlichkeit) (Žižek 1999: 94-5). The mature Hegel’s concept of reconciliation,
on Žižek’s reading, is thus deeply ambiguous: it is not only the reconciliation of a split (between
individual subjectivity and social totality) but reconciliation with this split as “the necessary price
of individual freedom” (1999: 95). The stereotype of the young radical Hegel who later became
the conservative ‘state philosopher’ justifying the existing social order should thus be turned on
its head: it is the revolutionary project of the younger Hegel that prefigured the establishment of
a new organic Order that abolishes modern individuality, while the mature Hegel’s insistence on
the right of subjectivity—including the unavoidable passage through abstract negativity—
provides the only way historically to ensure the achievement of concrete universality (Žižek
1999: 95). The lesson to be drawn here is twofold: that liberal democratic modernity cannot
disavow its revolutionary, indeed violent, historico-political origins; and that political romanticism can recur even in the guise of an anti-universalist insistence on particularity, difference, and ‘community’.
To return to my earlier discussion, this is why Hegel praises the Understanding
[Verstand] (rather than reason) in the “tarrying with the negative” passage from the
Phenomenology quoted above. It is the understanding’s power to “disrupt any organic link,” to
treat as separated what originally exists within a concrete context, that guarantees the subject’s
freedom as Spirit. Indeed, this negative power of the understanding is a more developed version
of what the younger, romantic Hegel called the ‘night of the world,’ the power of the presynthetic
imagination; “the power that precedes the synthesis of imagination whose highest
expression is logos” (for Heidegger, that which gathers together) (Žižek 1999: 96). The image of
Hegel the arch-conservative, arguing for a return to a premodern organic social totality in which
each individual has his/her prescribed place, is thus radically false. Rather, for Hegel, the very
existence of subjectivity “involves the ‘false’, ‘abstract’ choice of Evil, of Crime”—that excessive
moment of abstract negativity that throws the whole social order momentarily ‘out of joint’ (Žižek 1999: 96). The destruction of organic community, the subject’s ‘irrational’ insistence on some ‘abstract’ feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualised—or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which substance also becomes subject. As Žižek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a “substantially different Unity,” a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999: 96)—precisely in the modern political state, the formalised
‘embodiment’ of negativity that nonetheless retains the trace of this violent power to expose the
life of its citizens. Hegel thus anticipates the Foucaultian-Agambenian theme of biopolitics, the
‘negative’ power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens.
The ‘Night of the World’ and Revolutionary Violence
Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian theme of concrete universality—the necessity of a
passage through abstract negativity in order to attain the individualisation of the subject as free
and universal—is taken up again in The Parallax View (2006). It also informs his recent analysis
(2008: 337-380) of the “crisis in determinate negation” afflicting liberal democratic politics and
contemporary political philosophy (Critchley and Badiou). In The Parallax View, Hegel’s ‘night of
the world’ passage reappears again, this time in connection with the question of revolutionary
violence. Žižek cites here Rebecca Comay’s fascinating discussion of the link between the
Hegelian analysis of the self-destructive fury of the revolutionary Terror, and the “obsessive
fantasies of survival entertained by the popular imaginary of the guillotine” (2006: 43). Such
spectral decapitation fantasies were vividly manifested, Comay observes, in the “proliferation of
blushing heads, talking heads, suffering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed, returned the
gaze, the disembodied body parts, detached writing hands, the ghosts and ghouls and zombies
that would fill the pages of gothic novels throughout Europe” (Comay 2004: 386). As Žižek asks,
with these nightmarish fantasies of spectral decapitation haunting the post-revolutionary world,
are we not back again within Hegel’s notorious ‘night of the world’? The frenzy of revolutionary
upheaval destroys the fabric of ordinary historical and social reality, returning us to the
elementary ‘zero-level’ of subjectivity; the “spectral obscene proto-reality of partial objects
floating around against the background of the ontological Void” (2006: 44). Revolutionary
violence disrupts social reality through the exercise of abstract negativity, temporarily returning
the subject to the elemental level of proto-subjectivity, the dismembering violence of the ‘night of the world’.
Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel’s brutal observation
concerning the guillotine—the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, “a
meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head” (Hegel 1977: 360; Žižek 2006: 43)—and the
archaic revival of ‘sacrificial’ beheadings practised by Islamist terrorists. Such beheadings occur
through knife-wielding executioner rather than the impersonal operation of the guillotine; and
while performed in secret they are video recorded in order to be disseminated via Jihadist
propaganda websites for a globally dispersed audience. In the latter case, however, this
abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of “Absolute Freedom,” as was the
case, from Hegel’s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist
terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern ‘right of individual
subjectivity’: a simultaneously ‘pre- and post-modern’, technologically primitive (knives,
boxcutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the
‘morally decadent’ liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity
possible.
The point of Hegel’s analysis, it must be said, is to show that this revolutionary Terror is
fundamentally self-undermining; that it cannot reconcile the drive towards (abstractly conceived) Absolute Freedom with the historically achieved norms of freedom and subjectivity that define the institutions of modernity. Žižek’s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality is effected.
Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and
understanding: the contrast between the ‘romantic’ reading of Hegel that gives priority to the
‘pre-synthetic’ imagination of the ‘night of the world’ (abstract negation) versus the ‘idealist’
reading that emphasises the “power of the negative” articulated through the discursive
understanding (determinate negation). Žižek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and
determinate) in a Schellingian manner, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of
negativity. This move, however, exposes him to the criticism that his account of revolutionary
Terror flirts with a political romanticism that valorises the abstract negativity of revolutionary
struggle over the determinate negation that results in the rational social and political institutions
of the modern state. For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be
aufgehoben in the rational organisation of the self-reforming social and political institutions of
modernity. We only revert to the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence when these norms and institutions have utterly broken down, lost all legitimacy and normative authority, that is, when the (violent) historical transition to a new configuration of Spirit is already well underway. Must we say, however, with Žižek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality—the freedom of subjectivity—can be historically realised?
Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’?
The question for us today, then, is to ask what happens when this rational totality (Western
neoliberal democracy) becomes disturbed by the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism.
There are at least two distinct Hegelian responses: one is to point to the role of the selfreforming
institutions of modernity, those of capitalist liberal democracy, to effectively pacify,
manage, or control these contradictory dynamics without entirely eliminating them. This line of
thought—given popular expression in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
—tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have
effectively reached the ‘end of history’ in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible. This ‘Fukuyamaian’ line then cleaves into at least two
opposing positions: the moral or religious conservative position arguing for a return to traditional
values to offset the deracinating effects of neoliberalism, a desperate attempt to refound the
disturbed Sittlichkeit of multicultural liberal democracies; and the libertarian-postmodernist
position that displaces political radicalism to the contested sphere of culture, arguing for a
cultural politics of difference, utopian multiculturalism, radical affirmation of the Other, and so
on, as ways of affirming ethical forms of freedom and plural modes of subjectivity made possible
by capitalist liberal democracy. The point, for Žižek, is that both moral-religious conservative
and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the ‘Fukuyamaian’ thesis: that capitalist liberal
democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. “The dominant ethos
today,” as Žižek remarks, “is ‘Fukuyamaian’: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the
finally found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is render it more just, tolerant,
and so forth” (2008: 421).
On the other hand, there is the romantic, revolutionary position, which argues for a
retrieval of the abstract negativity of the revolutionary tradition in order to perform a destructive negation that would disrupt the capitalist economico-political system. This is the line of thought —Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration—that Žižek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). For Žižek, we must first of all question and
theoretically reject the ‘Fukuyamaian’ liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy
is not necessarily the ‘universal and homogeneous’ form of the state, as Kojève put it, in which
the atomised post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their
narcissistic consumer pleasures (Kojève 1969: 157-162). Rather, the contradictory dynamics of
contemporary global capitalism—we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World
food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth—suggest that
it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even
decline.
Žižek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here: the ecological crisis (global
warming, ‘peak oil’); the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of
‘intellectual property’; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments
(biogenetics); and new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated
communities, non-state governed zones of disorder (2008: 421-427). In light of these
intersecting antagonisms confronting global capitalism, the historical question of whether it is
possible to redeem the failed revolutionary attempts of the past (Benjamin) may not yet be
entirely closed.
Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal
democratic but also ‘postmodernist’ politics that depoliticise the economy—‘naturalising’ it as the
unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics—and thereby displace political conflict
to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political
radicalism to the cultural sphere—our contemporary ‘aestheticisation of politics’—is an
ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal
democracies. It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the ‘sublimated’ sphere of culture (as in the familiar ‘culture wars’ that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian ‘postmodernists’ in symbolic struggles over moral and cultural questions of subjectivity, identity, and values). The
problem with this pseudo-Hegelian sublimation of politics into culture, however, is that it leaves
untouched what Marx correctly identified as the ‘base’ of these morally driven forms of sociocultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism. This is why Žižek’s has recently argued—notably in In Defense of Lost Causes—for a refusal of the liberal democratic ‘moral blackmail’ that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic,’ and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left. Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity, a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’ or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious ‘imaginary community’ of liberal democracy.
The question, however, is whether this can be done without relapsing into the
nightmarish violence of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’. Are there more determinate forms of
negation—of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism—that might
disturb the liberal democratic ‘moral consensus’ that has so strikingly paralysed the Left? Does
reclaiming the history of revolutionary activism also imply the risk of embracing forms of
violence that have marred twentieth-century political history? Or can the revolutionary spirit—the spectre of Marx, if one will—be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? Žižek’s Hegelianism and his Marxist-Leninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue. The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be
aufgehoben through the formation of rational social and political institutions capable of
reconciling the deracinating effects of capitalism with the principle of individual subjectivity. The
Marxist-Leninist response, on the other hand, would argue that such liberal-capitalist institutions themselves be subjected to revolutionary violence—a ‘negation of the negation’—that would create the historical conditions for future (communist) emancipation. We should note, though, that the Hegelian response is retrospective and descriptive; a conceptual comprehension of the underlying logic of the dynamics of modernity that would reconcile us to the vicissitudes of
modern freedom. The Marxist-Leninist response, by contrast, is prospective and prescriptive; a
demand to translate theory into practice, overcoming this alienating opposition by means of
revolutionary action. Žižek appears to argue for a synthesis of these distinct, seemingly
incompatible, responses, which raises the following difficulty: how is the Hegelian account of the
negativity involved in the transition from abstract to concrete universality to be reconciled with
the Marxist-Leninist demand for revolutionary action that would negate all such merely
‘ideological’ comprehension?
One response would be to suggest that Žižek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of
the moment of negativity in any theorisation—and political practice—of the historical realisation
of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril. For in
that case it either assents to the ‘Fukuyamaist’ consensus that there is ‘nothing to be done’
since we’ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) ‘end of history’; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent
(abstract) negation of the status quo. The Hegelian response, by contrast, would be to argue for
the possibility of a retrieval of the revolutionary tradition that has also become historically
reflective and socio-politically determinate: not simply an abstract ‘violent’ negation of modern
liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus—
the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism—that sustains them; a productive negation
that would both preserve their emancipatory potentials while also negating their alienating sociocultural effects. Such a task, of course, is easier said than done. Žižek’s bold engagement with the relationship between the negativity of the (Hegelian) subject and the antagonisms defining global capitalism thus throws down the philosophico-political gauntlet. All the more so if one believes that social and political movements today should reclaim that seemingly most ‘lost’ of causes—the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.
Notes
1 This Hegelian background is crucial, I suggest, for grasping Žižek’s critical response to Simon
Critchley’s claims for a (Levinasian) ethical anarchism of resistance in response to global
capitalism (Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006: 332-334; Žižek 2008: 339-350).
2 Žižek returns precisely to Hegel’s “night of the world” passage in his analysis of Schelling’s Die
Weltalter, comparing the Hegelian radical negativity and conception of madness as withdrawal
from the world with the Schellingian “self-contraction” that “negates every being outside itself”
(Žižek 1997: 8).
3 As Žižek remarks, he has referred to these two Hegelian passages “repeatedly in almost all
my books” (1999: 67, fn. 33).
4 Otto Weininger, like Heidegger, recoils from the abyss of subjectivity: Weininger via recourse
to his misogynistic “henids” or phantasmatic “confused feminine representations” (1994: 145),
and Heidegger via his “turn” from the Daseinsanalytik of Being and Time towards the gentle
releasement towards Being (1999: 22-28).
5 In this respect, Žižek’s Hegelianism echoes the radical reading of Hegel—inflected by Marx
and Heidegger—made famous by Alexandre Kojève in his 1933-39 Lectures on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (1969).
6 As A. V. Miller observes, Hegel makes a similar speculative point (in his Philosophy of Nature)
concerning the mouth, which combines kissing and speech on the one hand, with eating,
drinking, and spitting on the other (Hegel 1977: 210-211, fn. 1).
7 This is why Žižek criticises Simon Critchley’s claim (2007: 5-6) that all forms of revolutionary
vanguardism—including Leninism, Maoism, Situationism, and Al-Qaeda-style Islamism—are to
be equally rejected as forms of active nihilism. By blurring the difference between the distinct
political logics of “radical egalitarian violence” (what Badiou calls the “eternal Idea” of
revolutionary justice) and “anti-modernist ‘fundamentalist’ violence” (defining radical Islamism),
Critchley lapses into “the purest ideological formalism”, echoing the identification, both by
liberals and conservatives, of so-called ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ forms of totalitarianism (Žižek 2008:
348).
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Former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide returned to Haiti this morning after a seven-year period of exile in South Africa. Speaking at the airport in the Haitian capital, Port au Prince, Aristide used the French, Spanish, English and Zulu languages to address the crowd. Zulu was a gesture of gratitude to his former South African hosts whose President, Jacob Zuma, is a Zulu speaker. Aristide had been studied African languages while in exile.
Aristide did not comment directly on the flawed general elections in Haiti, the second round of which is due to take place this Sunday, March 20. Instead he focused on the need to replace "exclusion" of the mass of the Haitian poor with "inclusion" through educational and economic improvements. "Today there are not even two doctors per 11 thousand Haitians; that is the result of exclusion...Haiti lives in extreme poverty, hunger, unemployment, drugs and injustice and exclusion."
He made a point of thanking Cuba for its solidarity work after last year's earthquake in the Puerto Prince area, which killed 300,000 people, and the current cholera epidemic, which has killed another 4,000.
Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, had been a strong critic of the brutal dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who has also returned to Haiti after a long exile in France. Aristide was elected president in 1991, but was almost immediately overthrown by the Duvalierist military, which proceeded to massacre thousands of poor Aristide supporters.
In 1994, Aristide obtained the armed support of the Clinton administration to return him to Haiti, in exchange for which he accepted most of the "Washington Consensus" plan of "free trade" (which, in practice, meant eliminating import tariffs on U.S. taxpayer subsidized rice and other imports), privatization and austerity. As a result, thousands of Haitian farmers were driven off the land because they could not compete with U.S. imports, while American rice producers, based in Clinton's home state of Arkansas, reaped a bonanza.
Aristide did succeed in abolishing the army, which had been such a source of instability and human rights abuses in the past. After a period out of power, Aristide was elected again in 2001, with the support of militant poor people's organizations that sometimes constituted themselves as armed militias to fight against the rich and against Aristide's opponents.
In 2004, he was overthrown again by violent right-wing gangs supported by the Bush administration and the French government. Aristide accuses the United States of being directly involved in his overthrow. France was angry with Aristide for demanding reparations for money that France had extorted from Haiti in the 19th and 20th centuries, and thus is seen to have connived in the coup.
Since then there has been a UN peacekeeping contingent in Haiti, which itself has become controversial because of clashes with poor Haitians. Aristide's enemies and the Bush administration made accusations against Aristide of corruption and abuse of power, but his supporters see this as mere propaganda.
Aristide's party, Fanmi Lavalas, very popular among poor Haitians, was excluded from the elections under the pretext of a technicality. As a result, there was to be a runoff between Merlande Manigat, a right-wing candidate with Duvalierist connections, and Jude Celestin, the candidate of the Inte (Unity) party of President Rene Preval. However, the elections were deeply flawed and the United States, Canada and France pressured Preval's government to push Celestin out of the runoff, and instead permit Michel "Sweet Mickey" Martelly, another Duvalierist who has promised to restore the army, to run against Manigat in the runoff. Martelly, who is a popular singer, has pulled ahead of Manigat in the polls.
The United States had been trying to pressure South Africa into keeping Aristide out of Haiti until after the elections. This was the topic of a last minute phone call by President Obama to President Zuma of South Africa yesterday. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had also asked for South Africa to block Aristide's return The South African Foreign Ministry angrily retorted that his country would have no part in "holding [Aristide] hostage" and facilitated his flight to Haiti, in which Aristide was accompanied by his U.S. lawyer, Ira Kurzbahn, and actor Danny Glover.
Aristide may have timed the trip because no matter who wins the election, they would be likely to take action to prevent his return, by cancelling his passport (given to him by the current government headed by Rene Preval) or other means, perhaps including violence.
So perhaps it was now or never.