Slavoj Žižek is one of today’s most brilliant philosophers. There’s no disputing that he sounds rambling and incoherent, but far from being off-putting, it forces one to consider (decipher?) his words all the more carefully. Indeed, the material and ideas are such that they defy clear exposition by being themselves. As a futurist, I should also emphasize that it is every bit as important to become intimately acquainted with the philosophical trends of the day, as with the environmental or technological; note that thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Gramsci, in some ways, prophesied the “meaning” of the 20th century, if there’s any such thing. First up, Žižek’z Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the desert in question of course referring to Baudrillard’s desert (“No new ideas, only citation, revision, – and annihilation” – AK). [my emphasis]
As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, “really-existing men” are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new — the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: “man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man.” We have here the tension between the series of “ordinary” elements (“ordinary” men as the “material” of history) and the exceptional “empty” element (the socialist “New Man,” which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man’s essence, “alienated” in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is — the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past. One should formulate here things in a very precise way: the reason why the Stalinist fury of purification is so destructive resides in the very fact that it is sustained by the belief that, after the destructive work of purification will be accomplished, SOMETHING WILL REMAIN, the sublime “indivisible remainder,” the paragon of the New. It is in order to conceal the fact that there is nothing beyond that, in a strictly perverse way, the revolutionary has to cling to violence as the only index of his authenticity, and it is as this level that the critics of Stalinism as a rule misperceive the cause of the Communist’s attachment to the Party. Say, when, in 1939-1941 pro-Soviet Communists twice had to change their Party line overnight (after the Soviet-German pact, it was imperialism, not, Fascism, which was elevated to the role of the main enemy; from June 22 1941, when Germany attacked Soviet Union, it was again the popular front against the Fascist beast), the brutality of the imposed changes of position was what attracted them. Along the same lines, the purges themselves exerted an uncanny fascination, especially on intellectuals: their “irrational” cruelty served as a kind of ontological proof, bearing witness to the fact that we are dealing with the Real, not just with empty plans — the Party is ruthlessly brutal, so it means business…
So, if the passion of the Real ends up with the pure semblance of the political theater, then, in an exact inversion, the “postmodern” passion of the semblance of the Last Men ends up in a kind of Real. Recall the phenomenon of “cutters” (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order — with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing. The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, the feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown. On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol… Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real — in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. However, at the end of this process of virtualization, the inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.
And was the bombing of the WTC with regard to the Hollywood catastrophe movies not like the snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-maso porno movies? This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: one can effectively perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of the XXth century art’s “passion of the real” — the “terrorists” themselves did it not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT. The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate “effect,” sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies. Snuff movies which deliver the “real thing” are perhaps the ultimate truth of virtual reality. There is an intimate connection between virtualization of reality and the emergence of an infinite and infinitized bodily pain, much stronger that the usual one: do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new “enhanced” possibilities of TORTURE, new and unheard-of horizons of extending our ability to endure pain (through widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new forms of inflicting it)? Perhaps, the ultimate Sadean image on an “undead” victim of the torture who can sustain endless pain without having at his/her disposal the escape into death, also waits to become reality.
Part of this deals with the idea that given the choice, many people prefer weight – pain, responsibility, burdens, etc, over (unbearable) lightness – freedom, the virtual, meaninglessness, etc. This results in a desire to succumb to Dionysian vertigo, the urge to fall back to the ground, to ground oneself in reality. To deny the reality of their desert, totalitarians need to impose a desert a reality. One disturbing consequence is that as the gap between virtuality and reality gets much bigger in the next decades (due to the ongoing genetics & computing revolutions, even as humanity’s sustenance base collapses), the urge to return to reality will become all the greater – opening up ever more terrifying vistas for dominating peoples and nations for the e-totalitarianisms of the future.
The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. The letters of the deceased attackers are quoted as “chilling documents” — why? Are they not exactly what one would expect from dedicated fighters on a suicidal mission? If one takes away references to Koran, in what do they differ from, say, the CIA special manuals? Were the CIA manuals for the Nicaraguan contras with detailed descriptions on how to perturb the daily life, up to how to clog the water toilets, not of the same order — if anything, MORE cowardly? When, on September 25, 2001, the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar appealed to Americans to use their own judgement in responding to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon rather than blindly following their government’s policy to attack his country (“You accept everything your government says, whether it is true or false. /…/ Don’t you have your own thinking? /…/ So it will be better for you to use your sense and understanding.”), were these statements, taken in a literal-abstract, decontextualized, sense, not quite appropriate? Today, more than ever, one should bear in mind that the large majority of Arabs are not fanaticized dark crowds, but scared, uncertain, aware of their fragile status — witness the anxiety the bombings caused in Egypt.
Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the “civilized” West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the “barbarian” Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real: in Africa, EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTC collapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small financial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Ruanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.
The “Other” is not a dark monolith; rather, at least in the Muslim world’s case, it is both much weaker and less self-confident than the West, Steyn to the contrary. And it is that very weakness that breeds the extremism of the reaction against Rationalism (“Islam is the solution!”), and by proxy, against the West. (Compare and contrast Dar al-Islam to emerging Asia; a gulf of difference).
The hubristic egocentricity of a Western civilization that portrays itself to be the culmination of historical progress. The ressentiment brewing towards the West in the Third World… or is Žižek part of the “barbarian” intelligentsia as defined by Krylov, seeking to rationalize the psychology of the “reprimitivized” terrorists as it is in a sense his own? (as Steyn, for instance, may argue).
…Of course, the “return to the Real” can be given different twists: one already hears some conservatives claim that what made us so vulnerable is our very openness — with the inevitable conclusion lurking in the background that, if we are to protect our “way of life,” we will have to sacrifice some of our freedoms which were “misused” by the enemies of freedom. This logic should be rejected tout court: is it not a fact that our First World “open” countries are the most controlled countries in the entire history of humanity? In the United Kingdom, all public spaces, from buses to shopping malls, are constantly videotaped, not to mention the almost total control of all forms of digital communication.
I can see what he’s getting at. In a sense, for every specific prohibition in advanced industrialized nations, there are ten unwritten taboos held by (industrial) society. Having been to a few poor nations, I felt that in a human sense they were in many ways more natural and even “freer” than in the West, despite their low figures on international league tables of transparency or bureaucratization.Is industrial civilization worth sustaining?
Does the same not hold also for warfare? Far from pointing towards the XXIth century warfare, the WTC twin towers explosion and collapse in September 2001 were rather the last spectacular cry of the XXth century warfare. What awaits us is something much more uncanny: the specter of an “immaterial” war where the attack is invisible — viruses, poisons which can be anywhere and nowhere. At the level of visible material reality, nothing happens, no big explosions, and yet the known universe starts to collapse, life disintegrates… We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare in which the biggest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. Instead of a quick acting out, one should confront these difficult questions: what will “war” mean in the XXIst century? Who will be “them,” if they are, clearly, neither states nor criminal gangs? One cannot resist the temptation to recall here the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: are, along the same line, the “international terrorist organizations” not the obscene double of the big multinational corporations — the ultimate rhizomatic machine, all-present, although with no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious “fundamentalism” accommodated itself to global capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contrafiction, with their particular/exclusive content and their global dynamic functioning?
Nation-states would be wise to exploit the opportunities for piracy, for untraceable actions, for Unrestricted Warfare, that this environment – in which the means of making terror are democratized – will usher in. The terrorist group – MNC comparison is apt. For instance, purveyors of Islam have a largely free and decentralized market.
Two philosophical references immediately impose themselves apropos this ideological antagonism between the Western consummerist way of life and the Muslim radicalism: Hegel and Nietzsche. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. (One cannot but note the significant role of the stock exchange in the bombings: the ultimate proof of their traumatic impact was that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for four days, and its opening the following Monday was presented as the key sign of things returning to normal.) Furthermore, if one perceives this opposition through the lenses of the Hegelian struggle between Master and Servant, one cannot avoid noting the paradox: although we in the West are perceived as exploiting masters, it is us who occupy the position of the Servant who, since he clings to life and its pleasures, is unable to risk his life (recall Colin Powell’s notion of a high-tech war with no human casualties), while the poor Muslim radicals are Masters ready to risk their life…
Žižek is brilliant as usual.
The WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved… The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent — to adopt such an “innocent” position in today’s global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms — the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women’s rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame…) — the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on “fundamentalist” ideological grounds.
See Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism. To him, 9/11 was entirely symbolic, an attack on the System and its nihilism of transparency, an attack inspired by vertigo – the urge to return to reality, as Žižek might add. At the super-human level, it is just a clash of belief systems.
No wonder that anti-Americanism was most discernible in “big” European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rang (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of “Americanization” in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe.
Not well integrated into the rest of the essay, but another brilliant observation on its own. The big European nations can only exist as self-supported Great Powers (or even empires) when globalization wanes. Hence another, quasi-spiritual, reason that with the imminent retreat of globalization, Europe will return to its future.
Can one imagine a greater irony than the fact that the first codename for the US operation against terrorists was “Infinite Justice” (later changed in response to the reproach of the American Islam clerics that only God can exert infinite justice)? Taken seriously, this name is profoundly ambiguous: either it means that the Americans have the right to ruthlessly destroy not only all terrorists but also all who gave then material, moral, ideological etc. support (and this process will be by definition endless in the precise sense of the Hegelian “bad infinity” — the work will never be really accomplished, there will always remain some other terrorist threat…); or it means that the justice exerted must be truly infinite in the strict Hegelian sense, i.e., that, in relating to others, it has to relate to itself — in short, that it has to ask the question of how we ourselves who exert justice are involved in what we are fighting against. When, on September 22 2001, Derrida received the Theodor Adorno award, he referred in his speech to the WTC bombings: “My unconditional compassion, addressed at the victims of the September 11, does not prevent me to say it loudly: with regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless.” This self-relating, this inclusion of oneself into the picture, is the only true “infinite justice.”
All pursuits of an “absolute” end in failure, meaninglessness, or oblivion.
Another excellent piece by Žižek is When the Party Commits Suicide, which is an exploration of the psychologies of the millenarian mind, of the quasi-theological aspects of communism regimes. (Rather appropriate on the 75th anniversary of Kirov’s assassination).
Once we enter the Stalinist universe of the ridiculous sublime, the ultimate form of sacrifice is no longer the tragic fate of the fighter dedicated to the Cause, but a much more radical self-sacrifice. Let me elucidate it apropos of the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, when there were no public trials, no ritualized public self-accusations comparable to Stalinist show trials: people simply disappeared in the night, they were dragged away, and nobody dared to speak or ask about it.2 The […] paradox of the power edifice in which the public structure and its obscene hidden double overlap: instead of the usual public-symbolic power structure sustained by the obscene invisible network of apparatuses, we have the public power structure which directly treats ITSELF as an anonymous, secret, hidden body. As such, the Khmer Rouge regime was a kind of political equivalent to the famous publicity description of the Linda Fiorentino utterly evil femme fatale character from John Dahl’s neo-noir The Last Seduction: “Most people have a dark side… she had nothing else.” In the same way, while most of the political regimes have a dark side of obscene secret rituals and apparatuses, the Khmer Rouge regime had nothing else… This is probably “totalitarianism” at its unsurpassed purest — how did this take place?
The key act of the Stalinist Communist Party is the official consecration of its History (no wonder that THE Stalinist book was the infamous History of VKP(b)) — only at this point, the Party symbolically starts to exist. However, the Communist Party of Cambodia had to remain “illegal” as long as the key problem of its history was not solved: WHEN did its founding congress take place? In 1951, the CP of Cambodia was established as part of the Vietnam-dominated Indochinese CP; in 1960, the “autonomous” Cambodian CP was formed. How to make a choice here? Till the mid 70ies, the Khmer Rouge, although already fiercely autonomous and nationalist, still needed the support of Vietnam; so their official historian Keo Meas made an almost Freudian compromise-solution, proclaiming as the official birthdate of the Party September 30 1951 — the YEAR of the founding of the Cambodian wing of the Indochinese CP and the DAY of the 1960 congress of the autonomous Cambodian CP. (History, of course, is here treated as a pure domain of meaning without regard for facts: the chosen date reflected the present political balance, not historical accuracy.) In 1976, however, the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was strong enough to break from the Vietnam tutelage — what better way to signal this than to CHANGE THE DATE of the party foundation, i.e. to rewrite history and to acknowledge as the true date the date of the constitution of the autonomous Cambodian CP, September 30 1960?
However, it is now that the true Stalinist deadlock emerges: how, then, to explain the embarrassing fact that, till now, the CP publicly cited another date as its grounding moment? To publicly acknowledge that the previous date was a pragmatic, politically opportune manoeuvre was, of course, unthinkable — so, logically, the only solution was to discover a plot. No wonder, than, that Keo Meas was arrested and tortured to confess (in an act of supreme irony, his confession was dated September 30 1976) that he proposed the compromise date in order to disguise the existence of an underground, parallel Cambodian Communist party controlled by Vietnam and destined to subvert from within the true, authentic, PC of Cambodia… Is this not a perfect example of the properly paranoiac redoubling — the Party has to remain underground, a secret organization, and can only appear publicly when it rejects/externalizes this underground existence in its uncanny double, in ANOTHER parallel secret Party? Now we can also understand the logic of the highest Communist sacrifice: by confessing to his treason, Keo Meas enabled the Party to propose a consistent history of its origins, taking upon himself the guilt for the past opportunistic compromises. These compromises were NECESSARY at that time: so […] the sign of correct orientation; in this sense, it was possible to speak of “healthy symptoms,” as in the following criticism of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony by the arch-Stalinist composer Isaac Dunayevsky: “The brilliant mastery of the Fifth Symphony […] does not preclude the fact that it does not by any means display all the healthy symptoms for the development of Soviet Symphonic Music.”3 Why, then, use the term “symptom”? Because, precisely, one can never be sure if a positive feature really is what is pretends to be: what if someone just feigns to faithfully follow the party line in order to conceal his true counterrevolutionary attitude? A similar paradox is discernible already in the Christian superego dialectic of Law and its transgression (sin): this dialectic does not reside only in the fact that Law itself cites its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not “natural,” spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress the Law. When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we OBEY the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep in ourselves, we fell the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin. Superego feeling of guilt is therefore right: the more we obey the Law, the more we are guilty, because this obedience effectively IS a defense against our sinful desire, and, in Christianity, the desire (intention) to sin equals act itself — if you just covet your neighbor’s wife, you already commit adultery. This Christian superego attitude is perhaps best rendered by T. S. Eliot’s line from his Murder in the Cathedral, “the highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason” — even when you do the right thing, you do it in order to counteract, and thus conceal, the basic vileness of your true nature… 4
Perhaps, a reference to Nicolas Malebranche allows us to throw some further light on this procedure. In the standard version of modernity, ethical experience is constrained to the domain of “subjective values” as opposed to “objective facts”. While endorsing this modern line of separation between “subjective” and “objective,” between “values” and “facts,” Malebranche transposed it WITHIN the very ethical domain, as the split between “subjective” Virtue and “objective” Grace — I can be “subjectively” virtuous, but this in no way guarantees my “objective” salvation in the eyes of God; the distribution of Grace which decides my salvation depends on totally “objective” laws, strictly comparable to the laws of material Nature. Do we not encounter another version of this same objectivization in the Stalinist show trial: I can be subjectively honest, but if I am not touched by the Grace of the insight into the necessity of Communism, all my ethical integrity will make me no more than an honest small-bourgeois humanitarian opposed to the Communist Cause, and, in spite of my subjective honesty, I’ll remain forever “objectively guilty”? These paradoxes cannot be dismissed as the simple machinations of the “totalitarian” power — they harbor a genuine tragic dimension overlooked by the standard liberal diatribes against “totalitarianism.”
He then applies this concept of the “Communist sacrifice” to Stalin and Bukharin.
One should be very attentive to what these lines mean. Within the standard logic of guilt and responsibility, Stalin could have been pardoned if he were really to believe in Bukharin’s guilt, while his accusing of Bukharin in the case of being aware of his innocence would have been an unpardonable ethical sin. Bukharin inverts this relationship: if Stalin accuses Bukharin of monstrous crimes while fully aware that this accusations are false, he is behaving as a proper Bolshevik, placing the needs of the Party higher than the needs of the individual, which is for Bukharin totally acceptable. What is, on the contrary, fully unbearable to him is the possibility that Stalin really believed in Bukharin’s guilt.
Then on the cases for action (Bolsheviks – seize the moment!) or inaction (Mensheviks – let the inevitability of historical progress see us through), prior to the October Revolution.
One is tempted to resort here to Lacanian terms: what is at stake in this alternative is the (in)existence of the “big Other”: Mensheviks relied on the all-embracing foundation of the positive logic of historical development, while Bolsheviks (Lenin, at least) were aware that “the big Other doesn’t exist” — a political intervention proper does not occur within the coordinates of some underlying global matrix, since what it achieves is precisely the “reshuffling” of this very global matrix.
This, then, is the reason why Lukacs had such admiration for Lenin: his Lenin was the one who, apropos of the split in the Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, when the two factions fought about a precise formulation of who can be a party member as defined in the party program, wrote: “Sometimes, the fate of the entire working class movement for long years to come can be decided by a word or two in the party program.” Or the Lenin who, when he saw the chance for the revolutionary takeover in the late 1917, said: “History will never forgive us if we miss this opportunity!” At a more general level, the history of capitalism is a long history of how the predominant ideologico-political framework was able to accommodate (and to soften the subversive edge of) the movements and demands that seemed to threaten its very survival. Say, for a long time, sexual libertarians thought that monogamic sexual repression is necessary for the survival of capitalism — now we know that capitalism can not only tolerate, but even actively incite and exploit forms of “perverse” sexuality, not to mention promiscuous indulgence in sexual pleasures. However, the conclusion to be drawn from it is NOT that capitalism has the endless ability to integrate and thus cut off the subversive edge of all particular demands — the question of timing, of “seizing the moment,” is crucial here. A certain particular demand possesses, in a certain moment, the global detonating power, it functions as a metaphoric stand-in for the global revolution: if we unconditionally insist on it, the system will explode; if, however, we wait too long, the metaphoric short-circuit between this particular demand and the global overthrow is dissolved, and the System can, with sneering hypocritical satisfaction, make the gesture of “You wanted this? Here you have it!”, without anything really radical happening. The art of what Lukacs called Augenblick (the moment when, briefly, there is an opening for an ACT to intervene into a situation) is the art of seizing the right moment, of aggravating the conflict BEFORE the System can accommodate itself to our demand. So we have here a Lukacs who is much more “Gramscian” and conjecturalist/contingentian than it is usually assumed — the Lukacsean Augenblick is unexpectedly close to what, today, Alain Badiou endeavours to formulate as the Event: an intervention that cannot be accounted for in the terms of its pre-existing “objective conditions.”20 The crux of Lukacs’s argumentation is to reject the reduction of the act to its “historical circumstances”: there are no neutral “objective conditions”, i.e. (in Hegelese) all presuppositions are already minimally posited.
The global capitalist-industrial System has indeed assimilated many social demands – of workers, feminists, etc – and has survived and even been strengthened by them. Will it react in time to the converging challenges of limits to growth, though? – considering that accommodating to them requires jettisoning the System’s linchpin, perpetual growth. Or will “green socialism” successfully make a revolutionary Event, from outside the System (such perturbations become increasingly likely when a dynamic system is under stress). That said, the revolution can easily swing the other way and turn reactionary, racialist – just as its 20th century forebears.
In the notion of social antagonism, INTRAsocial differences (the topic of concrete social analysis) overlap with the difference between the Social as such and its Other. This overlapping becomes palpable in the highpoint of Stalinism, where the enemy is explicitly designated as non-human, as the excrement of humanity: the struggle of the Stalinist Party against the enemy becomes the struggle of humanity itself against the non-human excrement. At a different level, the same goes for the Nazi anti-Semitism, which is why Jews are also denied the basic humanity. And, again, this radical level of confrontation should not seduce us into abandoning the concrete social analysis of the holocaust. The problem with the academic holocaust-industry is precisely the elevation of the holocaust into the metaphysical diabolical Evil, irrational, apolitical, incomprehensible, approachable only through respectful silence. Holocaust is the ultimate traumatic point where the objectifying historical knowledge breaks down, where it has to acknowledge its worthlessness in front of a single witness, and, simultaneously, the point at which witnesses themselves had to concede that words fail them, that what they can share is ultimately only their silence as such. Holocaust is referred to as a mystery, the heart of darkness of our civilization; its enigma in advance negates all (explanatory) answers, defying knowledge and description, noncommunicable, lying outside historicization — it cannot be explained, visualized, represented, transmitted, since it marks the Void, the black hole, the end, the implosion, of the (narrative) universe. Accordingly, any attempt to locate it in its context, to politicize it, equals the anti-Semitic negation of its uniqueness… Here is one of the standard version of this exemption of the holocaust:
“A great Hassidic Master, the Rabbi of Kotsk, used to say, ‘There are truths which can be communicated by the word; there are deeper truths than can be transmitted only by silence; and, on another level, are those which cannot be expressed, not even by silence.’
And yet, they must be communicated.
Here is the dilemma that confronts anyone who plunges into the concentration camp universe: How can one recount when — by the scale and weight of its horror — the event defies language?”27
Are this not the terms that designate the Lacanian encounter of the Real? However, this very depoliticization of the holocaust, its elevation into the properly sublime Evil, the untouchable Exception out of reach of the “normal” political discourse, can also be a political act of utter cynical manipulation, a political intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical political relations. First, it is part of the postmodern strategy of depoliticization and/or victimization. Second, it disqualifies forms of the Third World violence for which Western states are (co)responsible as minor in comparison with the Absolute Evil of the holocaust. Third, it serves to cast a shadow on every radical political project, i.e. to reinforce the Denkverbot against the radical political imagination: “Are you aware that what you propose ultimately leads to the holocaust?”
Precisely as Marxists, we should then have no fear in acknowledging that the purges under Stalinism were in a way more “irrational” than the Fascist violence: paradoxically, this very excess is an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was the case of a perverted authentic revolution. In Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a “normal” everyday life, if one did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of course, if one were not of Jewish origins…), while in the Stalinism of the late 30ies, nobody was safe, everyone could be unexpectedly denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor. In other words, the “irrationality” of Nazism was “condensed” in anti-Semitism, in its belief in the Jewish plot, while the Stalinist “irrationality” pervaded the entire social body. For that reason, Nazi police investigators were still looking for proofs and traces of actual activity against the regime, while Stalinist investigators were engaged in clear and unambiguous fabrications (invented plots and sabotages, etc.).
However, this very violence inflicted by the Communist Power on its own members bears witness to the radical self-contradiction of the regime, i.e. to the fact that, at the origins of the regime, there was an “authentic” revolutionary project — incessant purges were necessary not only to erase the traces of the regime’s own origins, but also as a kind of “return of the repressed,” a reminder of the radical negativity at the heart of the regime. The Stalinist purges of high Party echelons relied on this fundamental betrayal: the accused were effectively guilty insofar as they, as the members of the new nomenklatura, betrayed the Revolution. The Stalinist terror is thus not simply the betrayal of the Revolution, i.e. the attempt to erase the traces of the authentic revolutionary past; it rather bears witness to a kind of “imp of perversity” which compels the post-revolutionary new order to (re)inscribe its betrayal of the Revolution within itself, to “reflect” it or “remark” it in the guise of arbitrary arrests and killings which threatened all members of the nomenklatura — as in psychoanalysis, the Stalinist confession of guilt conceals the true guilt. (As is well known, Stalin wisely recruited into the NKVD people of lower social origins who were thus able to act out their hatred of the nomenklatura by arresting and torturing high apparatchiks.) This inherent tension between the stability of the rule of the new nomenklatura and the perverted “return of the repressed” in the guise of the repeated purges of the ranks of the nomenklatura is at the very heart of the Stalinist phenomenon: purges are the very form in which the betrayed revolutionary heritage survives and haunts the regime. The dream of Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist presidential candidate in 1996 (things would have turned out OK in the Soviet Union if only Stalin had lived at least 5 years longer and accomplished his final project of having done with cosmopolitanism and bringing about the reconciliation between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church — in other words, if only Stalin had realized his anti-Semitic purge…), aims precisely at the point of pacification at which the revolutionary regime would finally get rid of its inherent tension and stabilize itself — the paradox, of course, is that in order to reach this stability, Stalin’s last purge, the planned “mother of all purges” which was to take place in the Summer of 1953 and was prevented by his death, would have to succeed. Here, then, perhaps, the classic Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist “Thermidor” is not fully adequate: the actual Thermidor happened only after Stalin’s death (or, rather, even after Khruschev’s fall), with the Brezhnev years of “stagnation,” when nomenklatura finally stabilized itself into a “new class.” Stalinism proper is rather the enigmatic “vanishing mediator” between the authentic Leninist revolutionary outburst and its Thermidor. On the other hand, Trotsky was right in his prediction from the 30ies that the Soviet regime can end only in two ways: either a worker’s revolt against it, or the nomenklatura will no longer be satisfied with political power, but will convert itself into capitalists who directly own the means of production. And, as The Road to Terror claims in its last paragraph, with a direct reference to Trotsky,28 this second solution is what effectively happened: the new private owners of the means of production in ex-Socialist countries, especially in the Soviet Union, are in their large majority the members of the ex-nomenklatura, so one can say that the main event of the disintegration of “really existing Socialism” was the transformation of nomenklatura into a class of private owners. However, the ultimate irony of it is that the two opposite outcomes predicted by Trotsky seem combined in a strange way: what enabled the nomenklatura to become the direct owner of the means of production was the resistance to its political rule whose key component, at least in some cases (Solidarity in Poland), was the workers’ revolt against the nomenklatura.
“The radical ambiguity of Stalinism”; an interesting philosophical rationalization of that system. Nothing more to add, except in so far as to note that in my The Sisyphean Loop, Stalin’s final purge against the “rootless cosmopolitans” would have been “the culmination of a steady process under Stalin in which ‘diasporic’ elements (Rationalism – poshlost) were expunged in favor of Russia’s older imperial identities (mysticism – sobornost)”. A continuation of Stalin’s rule for five more years would certainly have moved back the time needed for poshlost / nomenklatura domination / Thermidor to seep in; but is not the eventual dismantling of charismatic authority inevitable after the Great Leader’s death? One can only note that in the long run, the System has always won.
As Alain Badiou pointed out, in spite of its horrors and failures, the “really existing Socialism” was the only political force that — for some decades, at least — seemed to pose an effective threat to the global rule of capitalism, really scaring its representatives, driving them into paranoiac reaction. Since, today, capitalism defines and structures the totality of the human civilization, every “Communist” territory was and is — again, in spite of its horrors and failures — a kind of “liberated territory,” as Fred Jameson put it apropos of Cuba. What we are dealing with here is the old structural notion of the gap between the Space and the positive content that fills it in: although, as to their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery, they at the same time opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which, among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of the really existing Socialism itself. What the anti-Communist dissidents as a rule tend to overlook is that the very space from which they themselves criticized and denounced the everyday terror and misery was opened and sustained by the Communist breakthrough, by its attempt to escape the logic of the Capital. In short, when dissidents like Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unknowingly, for the most part of it) spoke from the place opened up by Communism itself — which is why they tend to be so disappointed when the “really existing capitalism” does not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle. Perhaps, Vaclav Klaus, Havel’s pragmatic double, was right when he dismissed Havel as a “socialist”…
The difficult task is thus to confront the radical ambiguity of the Stalinist ideology which, even at its most “totalitarian,” still exudes an emancipatory potential. From my youth, I remember the memorable scene from a Soviet film about the civil war in 1919, in which Bolsheviks organize the public trial of a mother with a young diseased son, who is discovered to be the spy for the counter-revolutionary White forces. At the very beginning of the trial, an old Bolshevik strokes his long white mustache and says: “The sentence must be severe, but just!” The revolutionary court (the collective of the Bolshevik fighters) establishes that the cause of her enemy activity was her difficult social circumstances; the sentence is therefore that she be fully integrated into the socialist collective, taught to write and read and to acquire a proper education, while her son is to be given proper medical care. While the surprised mother bursts out crying, unable to understand the court’s benevolence, the old Bolshevik again strokes his mustaches and nods in consent: “Yes, this is a severe, but just sentence!”
It is easy to claim, in a quick pseudo-Marxist way, that such scenes were simply the ideological legitimization of the most brutal terror. However, no matter how manipulative this scene is, no matter how contradicted it was by the arbitrary harshness of the actual “revolutionary justice,” it nonetheless provided the spectators with new ethical standards by which reality is to be measured — the shocking outcome of this exercise of the revolutionary justice, the unexpected resignification of “severity” into severity towards social circumstances and generosity towards people, cannot but produce a sublime effect. In short, what we have here is an exemplary case of what Lacan called the “quilting point [point de capiton],” of an intervention that changes the coordinates of the very field of meaning: instead of pleading for generous tolerance against severe justice, the old Bolshevik redefines the meaning of “severe justice” itself in terms of excessive forgiveness and generosity. Even if this is a deceiving appearance, there is in a sense more truth in this appearance than in the harsh social reality that generated it.
A profound defense of socialism – albeit one that paradoxically, I might add, actually doomed it, as the apparent “failure of the really existing Socialism itself” in Russia in tandem with its opening up a space for its own refutation, enabled the workers revolt which triggered the end of economic coercion, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the reassertion of the System’s power over Eurasia.
Next philosopher – perhaps Jean Baudrillard or Nick Bostrom.
Related posts:
2 Comments
Thanks, this is brilliant.
Say, do you have an rss feed for all of your posts? For some reason this doesn’t appear here.
Danke for the thanks.
Full feed is at Feedburner (linked to at the right of the header navigation bar) and here (though it may not render properly on some browsers, it works perfectly for subscription purposes through a reader).
On my request, Andy aggregates only my “Da Russophile” feed, which deals exclusively with Russia or Russia-related topics.