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Introduction - Two dialectical axioms
In his Logiques des mondes (Badiou 2006), Alain Badiou provides a succinct definition
of "democratic materialism" and its opposite, "materialist dialectics": the axiom which
condenses the first one is "There is nothing but bodies and languages ...," to which
materialist dialectics adds "... with the exception of truths." This opposition is not so much
the opposition of two ideologies or philosophies as the opposition between non-reflected
presuppositions/beliefs into which we are "thrown" insofar as we are immersed into our lifeworld,
and the reflective attitude of thought proper which enables us to subtract ourselves
from this immersion, to "unplug" ourselves, as Morpheus would have put it in The Matrix, a
film much appreciated by Badiou, the film in which one also finds a precise account of the
need, evoked by Badiou, to control oneself (when Morpheus explains to Neo the lot of
ordinary people totally caught ("plugged") in the Matrix, he says: "Everyone who is not
unplugged is a potential agent").
This is why Badiou's axiom of "democratic materialism" is his answer to the question
of our spontaneous (non-reflexive) ideological beliefs: "What do I think when I am outside
my own control? Or, rather, which is our (my) spontaneous belief?" Furthermore, this
opposition is immediately linked to what (once) one called "class struggle in philosophy," the
orientation most identified by the names of Lenin, Mao Zedong and Althusser - here is
Mao's succinct formulation: "It is only when there is class struggle that there can be
philosophy." The ruling class (whose ideas are the ruling ideas) is represented by the
spontaneous ideology, while the dominated class has to fight its way through intense
conceptual work, which is why, for Badiou, the key reference is here Plato - not the
caricaturized Plato, the anti-democratic philosopher of the aristocratic reaction to Athenian
democracy, but the Plato who was the first to clearly assert the field of rationality freed from
inherited beliefs.
After all the bad words about the "phono-logocentric" character of Plato's criticism of
writing, it is perhaps time to assert its positive, egalitarian-democratic, aspect: in predemocratic
despotic state, writing was the monopoly of the ruling elite, its character was
sacred, "so it is written" was the ultimate seal of authority, the presupposed mysterious
meaning of the written text was the object of belief par excellence. The aim of Plato's
critique of writing is thus double: to deprive writing of its sacred character, and to assert the
field of rationality freed from beliefs, i.e., to distinguish logos (the domain of dialectics, of
rational reasoning which admits no external authority) from mythos (traditional beliefs):
The significance of Plato's criticism thus appears: to remove from writing its sacred
character. The way to truth is not writing but dialectics, i.e. the spoken word with its
implication of two or rather three parties: the speaker, the listener and the language
they share. With his criticism, Plato, for the first time in man's history, distilled the
notion of rationality as such, free from all mixture with belief.
(The qualification I am tempted to add here is that, perhaps, one should nonetheless
suspend Badiou's understandable reticence apropos "dialectical materialism" and turn
around the subject-predicate relationship between the two opposites: "materialist
democracy" versus "dialectical materialism.")
The Third Moment of Politics
There is a more constrained anthropological version of this axiom: for democratic
materialism, "there is nothing but individuals and communities," to which materialist
dialectics adds: "Insofar as there is a truth, a subject subtracts itself to all community and
destroys all individuation." (Badiou 2006: 9-17) The passage from the Two to Three is
crucial here, and one should bear in mind all its Platonic, properly meta-physical, thrust in
the direction of what, prima facie, cannot but appear as a proto-idealist gesture of asserting
that material reality is not all that there is, that there is also another level of incorporeal
truths.
Along these lines, one is tempted to supplement Badiou in two ways. First, are
bodies and languages not synonymous with being, its multiplicity, and worlds? The Three
we are dealing with is thus the Three of being, worlds and truths: for democratic
materialism, there are only the multiplicity of being (the endlessly differentiated reality) and
different worlds - linguistic universes - within which individuals and communities experience
this reality. (One should then, against Badiou, insist on the strict equality between world and
language: every world sustained by language, and every "spoken" language sustains a
world - this is what Heidegger aimed at in his thesis on language as a "house of being.") Is
this effectively not our spontaneous ideology? There is an endlessly differentiated, complex,
reality, which we, individuals and communities embedded in it, always experience from a
particular, finite, perspective of our historical world.
What democratic materialism furiously rejects is the notion that there can be an
infinite universal Truth which cuts across this multitude of worlds - in politics, this means
"totalitarianism" which imposes its truth as universal. This is why one should reject, say,
Jacobins, who imposed onto the plurality of the French society their universal notions of
equality and other truths, and thus necessarily ended in terror... This brings us to the
second supplement: there is an even more narrow political version of the democratic-materialist
axiom: "All that takes place in today's society is the dynamics of post-modern
globalization, and the (conservative-nostalgic, fundamentalist, Old Leftist, nationalist,
religious...) reactions and resistances to it" - to which, of course, materialist dialectics adds
its proviso: "... with the exception of the radical-emancipatory (Communist) politics of truth."
It is here that the materialist-dialectic passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the
axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist "class struggle," but, more precisely,
the Third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say,
the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own
"principal contradiction" (today, it is the opposition of market-freedom-democracy and
fundamentalist-terrorist-totalitarianism - "Islamofascism" etc.), and the first thing to do is to
reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a false opposition destined to
obfuscate the true line of division.
The false point of hegemonic politics
This allows us also to approach in a new way Badiou's concept of "point" as the point
of decision, as the moment at which the complexity of a situation is "filtered" through a
binary disposition and thus reduced to a simple choice: all things considered, are we
AGAINST or FOR (should we attack or retreat? support that proclamation or oppose it? etc.
etc.). With regard to the Third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic
politics, one should always bear in mind that one of the basic operations of the hegemonic
ideology is to enforce a false point, to impose on us a false choice - like, in today's "war on
terror," when anyone who draws attention to the complexity and ambiguity of the situation, is
sooner or later interrupted by a brutal voice telling him: "OK, enough of this muddle - we are
in the middle of a difficult struggle in which the fate of our free world is at stake, so please,
make it clear, where do you really stand: do you support freedom and democracy or not?"
(One can also imagine a humanitarian version of such a pseudo-ethical blackmail: "OK,
enough of this muddle about the neocolonialism, the responsibility of the West, and so on -
do you want to do something to really help the millions suffering in Africa, or do you just
want to use them to score points in your ideologico-political struggle?")
The obverse of this imposition of a false choice is, of course, the blurring of the true
line of division - here, Nazism is still unsurpassed with his designation of the Jewish enemy
as the agent of the "plutocratic-bolshevik plot." In this designation, the mechanism is almost
laid bare: the true opposition ("plutocrats" versus "Bolsheviks," i.e., capitalists versus
proletariat) is literally obliterated, blurred into One, and therein resides the function of the
name "Jew" - to serve as the operator of this obliteration. The first task of the emancipatory
politics is therefore to distinguish between "false" and "true" points, "false" and "true"
choices, i.e., to bring back the third element whose obliteration sustains the false choice -
like, today, the false choice "liberal democracy or Islamofascism" is sustained by the
obliteration of the radical secular emancipatory politics. So one should be clear here in
rejecting the dangerous motto "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," which leads us to
discover "progressive" anti-imperialist potential in fundamentalist Islamist movements: the
ideological universe of movements like Hezbollah is based on the blurring of distinctions
between capitalist neoimperialism and secular progressive emancipation: within the
Hezbollah ideological space, women's emancipation, gay rights, etc., are NOTHING BUT
the "decadent" moral aspect of Western imperialism...
Badiou's Evental Breaks
In his recent reading of Badiou, Adrian Johnston discerned a further ideologicocritical
potential of the Badiouian topic of evental breaks: when the balance of an ideological
situation is disturbed by arising "symptomal knots," elements which, while formally part of
the situation, do not fit into it, the ideological defense can adopt two main strategies, the
false "eventalization" of the dynamics which is thoroughly part of the existing situation, and
the disavowal of the signs which delineate true evental possibilities, their reading as minor
accidents or external disturbances:
one, making mere modifications appear to promise evental newness (a tactic that
comes to the fore in the ideology of late-capitalism, whose noisily marketed "perpetual
revolution" is really just an instance of the cliché "the more things change, the more
they stay the same"-or, as Badiou puts it, "capitalism itself is the obsession of novelty
and the perpetual renovation of forms"); two, making the sites sheltering potentially
explosive evental upheavals appear to be, at a minimum, unremarkable features of
the banal, everyday landscape, and, at most, nothing more than temporary,
correctable glitches in the functioning of the established system.
Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification: Johnston writes that "the ideology
of the worldly state, through a sort of bluff or masquerade, disguises its non-integrated
weakest points, its Achilles' heels, as fully integrated cogs and components of its allegedly
harmonious functioning-rather than as loci containing the potential to throw monkey
wrenches in its gears and thereby generate evental dysfunctions of this regime, a regime
that is never so deeply entrenched as it would like to appear to be in the eyes of its
subjects." Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the
threatening character of a disfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the
necessary result of the system's inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist
notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder - Jews - disturbing the
organic totality of the social edifice.
Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of
economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are "temporary, correctable glitches"
in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth,
the "exception" which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way
that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic
apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of
the psychic apparatus). No wonder Johnston uses here the Deleuzian term "minimal
difference" - "a minimal/minuscule difference (here construed as the difference between the
change-category statuses simultaneously assigned to a single intra-situational multiple both
by the ideology of the state and, in opposition, by another, non-statist framework)": when we
pass from the notion of crisis as occasional contingent malfunctioning of the system to the
notion of crisis as the symptomal point at which the "truth" of the system becomes visible,
we are talking about one and the same actual event - the difference is purely virtual, it does
not concern any of its actual properties, but only the way this event is supplemented by the
virtual tapestry of its ideological and notional background (like Schumann's melody for piano
first played with and then without the third line of notes written only for the eyes). Johnston is
right here in critically taking note of
Badiou's quick dismissal of apparently gradualist measures of seemingly minor
political adjustments and reforms (i.e., not-quite-evental gestures) in the spheres of
legislation and socio-economics while awaiting the quasi-divine intervention of the
system-shattering evental rupture ushering in an uncompromisingly "perfect"
revolution. But, the preceding analyses call into question whether he can be entirely
confident and sure that what appears to be gradual or minor really is so, or, rather,
simply seems this way solely under the shadow of statist ideology's assignation of
change-category statuses.
One cannot ever be sure in advance if what appears (within the register and the space of
visibility of the ruling ideology) as "minor" measures will not set in motion a process that will
lead to the radical (evental) transformation of the whole field. There are situations in which a
minimal measure of social reform can have much stronger large-scale consequences than
self-professed "radical" changes, and this "inherent incalculability to the factors involved in
setting the pace of the cadence of socio-political change" points towards the dimension of
what Badiou tried to capture under the title of the "materialist notion of grace." So when
Johnston raises the question of
what if the pre-evental actors "don't really know exactly what they're doing or quite
where they're going? What if, under the influence of statist ideology, they anticipate
that a particular gesture will effectuate a system-preserving modification only to find
out, after-the-fact of this gesture, that their intervention unexpectedly hastened (rather
than delayed) the demise of this very system?
- is not the first association that comes to mind here that of Mikhail Gorbachov's perestroika
which, while aiming at minor improvements that would make the system more efficient,
triggered the process of its total disintegration? These, then, are the two extremes between
which political interventions has to find their way: the Scylla of "minor" reforms which
eventually lead to total collapse (recall also the - justified, we can say today - Mao Ze
Dong's fear that even a minimal compromise with market economy will open up the path
that ends in total surrender to capitalism), and the Karybda of "radical" changes which in the
long run merely fortify the system (Roosevelt's New Deal, etc.). Among other things, this
also opens up the question of how "radical" different forms of resistance are: what may
appears as "radical critical stance" or as subversive activity can effectively function as the
system's "inherent transgression," so that, often, a minor legal reform which merely aims at
bringing the system in accordance with its professed ideological goals can be more
subversive than the open questioning of the system's basic presuppositions.
The Politics of Minimal Differences
These considerations enable us to define the art of a politics of minimal difference: to
be able to identify and then do focus on a minimal (ideological, legislative, etc.) measure
which, prima facie, not only does not question the system's premises, but even seem to
merely apply to its actual functioning its own principles and thus render it more selfconsistent;
however, a critico-ideological parallax view leads us to surmise that this minimal
measure, while in no way disturbing the system's explicit mode of functioning, effectively
"move its underground," introduces a crack in its foundations. Today, more than ever, we
effectively need what Johnston calls a "pre-evental discipline of time":
This other sort of temporal discipline would be neither the undisciplined impatience of
hurriedly doing anything and everything to enact some ill-defined, poorly conceived
notion of making things different nor the quietist patience of either resigning oneself to
the current state of affairs drifting along interminably and/or awaiting the unpredictable
arrival of a not-to-be-actively-precipitated "x" sparking genuine change (Badiou's
philosophy sometimes seems to be in danger of licensing a version of this latter mode
of quietism). Those subjected to today's frenetic socio-economic forms of latecapitalism
are constantly at risk of succumbing to various forms of what one could
refer to loosely as "attention deficit disorder," that is, a frantic, thoughtless jumping
from present to ever-new present. At the political level, such capitalist impatience
must be countered with the discipline of what could be designated as a specifically
communist patience (designated thus in line with Badiou's assertion that all authentic
forms of politics are "communist" in the broad sense of being both emancipatory as
well as "generic" qua radically egalitarian and non-identitarian) - not the quietist
patience condemned above, but, instead, the calm contemplation of the details of
situations, states, and worlds with an eye to the discerning of ideologically veiled weak
points in the structural architecture of the statist system. Given the theoretical validity
of assuming that these camouflaged Achilles' heels (as hidden evental sites) can and
do exist in one's worldly context, one should be patiently hopeful that one's apparently
minor gestures, carried out under the guidance of a pre-evental surveillance of the
situation in search of its concealed kernels of real transformation, might come to entail
major repercussions for the state-of-the-situation and/or transcendental regime of the
world.
Premature Actualisation
There is, however, a limit to this strategy: if followed thoroughly, it ends up in a kind
of "active quietism": while forever postponing the Big Act, all one does is to engage in small
interventions with the secret hope that somehow, inexplicably, by means of a magic "jump
from quantity to quality," they will lead to global radical change. This strategy has to be
supplemented by the readiness and ability to discern the moment when the possibility of the
Big Change is approaching, and, at that point, to quickly change the strategy, take the risk
and engage in total struggle. In other words, one should not forget that, in politics, "major
repercussions" do not come by themselves: true, one has to lay the ground for them by
means of the patient work, but one should also know to seize the moment when it arrives.
Even more, the lesson of Rosa Luxemburg's critique of reformism is pertinent here: it is not
enough to patiently wait for the "right moment" of the revolution; if one merely waits for it, it
will never come, i.e., one has to start with "premature" attempts which - therein resides the
"pedagogy of the revolution" - in their very failure to achieve their professed goal create the
(subjective) conditions for the "right" moment. The "specifically communist patience" is not
just the patient waiting for the moment when radical change will explode like what the
system theory calls "emergent property"; it is also the patience of losing the battles in order
to gain the final fight (recall Mao's slogan: "from defeat to defeat, to the final victory"). Or, to
put it in more Badiouian time: the fact that the evental irruption functions as a break in time,
as introducing a totally different order of temporality (the temporality of the "work of love,"
the fidelity to the event), means that, from the perspective of non-evental time of historical
evolution, there is NEVER a "proper moment" for the revolutionary event, the situation is
never "mature" for the revolutionary act - the act is always, by definition, "premature." Recall
what truly deserves the title of the repetition of the French Revolution: the Haiti revolution
led by Toussaint l'Ouverture - it was clearly "ahead of his time," "premature," and as such
doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an Event than the
French Revolution itself. These past defeats accumulate the utopian energy which will
explode in the final battle: "maturation" is not waiting for "objective" circumstances to reach
maturity, but the accumulation of defeats.
The Marxist Wager
Progressive liberals today often complain that they would like to join a "revolution" (a
more radical emancipatory political movement), but no matter how desperately they search
for it, they just "don't see it" (they don't see anywhere in the social space a political agent
with a will and strength to seriously engage in such activity). While there is a moment of
truth in it, one should nonetheless also add that the very attitude of these liberals is in itself
part of a problem: if one just waits to "see" a revolutionary movement, it will, of course,
never arise, and one will never see it. What Hegel says about the curtain that separates
appearances from true reality (behind the veil of appearance there is nothing, only what the
subject who looks there put it there), holds also for a revolutionary process: "seeing" and
"desire" are here inextricably linked, i.e., the revolutionary potential is not there to discover
as an objective social fact, one "sees it" only insofar as one "desires" it (engages oneself in
the movement).
No wonder Mensheviks and those who opposed Lenin's call for a revolutionary
takeover in the summer of 1917 "didn't see" the conditions for it as "ripe" and opposed it as
"premature" - they simply did not WANT the revolution. (Another version of this skeptical
argument about "seeing" is that liberals claim how capitalism is today so global and all encompassing
that they cannot "see" any serious alternative to it, that they cannot imagine
a feasible "outside" to it. The reply to this is that, insofar as this is true, they do not see at all,
tout court: the task is not to see the outside, but to see in the first place (to grasp the nature
of today's capitalism) - the Marxist wager is that, when we "see" this, we see enough,
inclusive of how to get out...) So our reply to the worried progressive liberals, eager to join
the revolution, and just not seeing its chances anywhere around, should be like the answer
to the proverbial ecologist worried about the prospect of catastrophe: don't worry, the
catastrophe will arrive...
Eating the Cake and Keeping It
To complicate the image further, we often have an event which succeeds through the
self-erasure of its evental dimension, as it was the case with the Jacobins in the French
Revolution: once their (necessary) job was done, they were not only overthrown and
liquidated, they were even retroactively deprived of their evental status, reduced to a
historical accident, to a freakish abomination, to an (avoidable) excess of the historical
development. (It was none other than Hegel who, in his very critique of the Jacobine
abstract freedom, perceived the necessity of this moment, dispelling the liberal dream of bypassing
1794, i.e., of passing directly from 1789 to the established bourgeois daily life. The
dream denounced by Robespierre as the dream of those who want "revolution without
revolution" is the dream of having 1789 without 1793, of eating the cake and keeping it...)
This theme was often varied by Marx and Engels - how, once the normal pragmaticutilitarian
bourgeois daily life was established, its own violent heroic origins were disavowed.
This possibility - not only the (obvious) possibility of an evental sequence reaching its end,
but a much more unsettling possibility of an event disavowing itself, erasing its own traces,
as the ultimate indication of its triumph, is not taken into account by Badiou: "the possibility
and ramifications of there being radical breaks and discontinuities that might, in part due to
their own reverberations unfolding off into the future, become invisible to those living in
realities founded on such eclipsed points of origin."
Such a self-erasure of the event opens up the space for what, in the Benjaminian
mode, one is tempted to call the Leftist politics of melancholy. In a first approach, this term
cannot but appear as an oxymoron: is not a revolutionary orientation towards future the very
opposite of the melancholic attachment to the past? What if, however, the future one should
be faithful to is the future of the past itself, i.e., the emancipatory potential that was not
realized due to the failure of the past emancipatory attempts and for this reason continues to
haunt us? In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposes the revolutionary
enthusiasm to the sobering effect of the "morning after": the actual result of the sublime
revolutionary explosion, of the Event of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, is the miserable
utilitarian/egotistic universe of market calculations. (And, incidentally, is not this gap even
wider in the case of the October Revolution?) However, one should not simplify Marx: his
point is not the rather commonsensical insight into how the vulgar reality of commerce is the
truth of the theater of revolutionary enthusiasm, what all the fuss really was about. In the
revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through, the
dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market
reality which takes over the day after - as such, this excess is not simply abolished,
dismissed as irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, continuing to haunt
the emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized. The excess of revolutionary
enthusiasm over its own actual social base or substance is thus literally that the future of/in
the past, a ghost-like Event waiting for its proper embodiment.
Repetition and Resurrection
Perhaps, the reason Badiou neglects this dimension is his all too crude opposition
between repetition and the cut of the Event, his dismissal of repetition as an obstacle to the
rise of the New, ultimately as the death drive itself, the morbid attachment to some obscure
jouissance which entraps the subject in the self-destructive vicious cycle. In this sense, "life"
as the subjective category of the fidelity to an Event "keeps at a distance the conservation
drive (the instinct misnamed 'of life'), as well as the mortifying drive (the death instinct). Life
is what breaks up with drives." (Badiou 2006: 531) What Badiou misses here is the fact that
"death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way
immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead"
urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and
corruption. As such, death drive stands for the very opposite of the obscure tendency to
self-annihilation or self-destruction - as is rendered clear in the work of Wagner whom
Badiou admires so much. It is precisely the reference to Wagner which enables us to see
how the Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for selfannihilation,
for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. Death drive does
NOT reside in Wagner's heroes' longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary,
the very opposite of dying - a name for the "undead" eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of
being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.
It is at this point that one should turn to Deleuze against Badiou, to Deleuze's precise
elaborations on repetition as the very form of the emergence of the New. Of course, Badiou
is too refined a thinker not to perceive the evental dimension of repetition: when, in Logiques
des mondes, he deploys the three "subjective destinations" of an event (faithful, reactive,
obscure), he adds a forth one, that of "resurrection," the subjective re-activation of an event
whose traces were obliterated, "repressed" into the historico-ideological unconscious: "every
faithful subject can thus reincorporate into its evental present a truth fragment which in the
old present was pushed beneath the bar of occultation. This reincorporation is what we call
resurrection." (Badiou 2006: 75) His beautifully developed example is that of Spartacus:
erased from official history, his name was resurrected first by the black slaves' rebellion in
Haiti (the progressive governor Laveaux called Toussaint Louverture "black Spartacus"),
and, a century later, by the two German Spartakists, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl
Liebknecht. What matters here, however, is that Badiou shirks from calling this resurrection
repetition...
Terror Revisited
Is, however, there not something terrorist in the very notion of "death drive" as a
political category? Yes - and why not? Therein resides one of Badiou's key contributions to
the contemporary political debate: his courageous rehabilitation of the notion of 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." (Badiou 2006:
98) In Le siècle, 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 1945, 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. 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 antihumanism,"
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 - as we shall see in the last chapter, therein resides the
ultimate wager of Lacan's "ethics of psychoanalysis."
The Noumenal and Phenomenal
Deleuze often varies the motif of how, in becoming post-human, we should learn to
practice "a perception as it was before men (or after) /.../ released from their human
coordinates" (Cinema 1, 122): those who fully endorse the Nietzschean "return of the same"
are strong enough to sustain the vision of the "iridescent chaos of a world before man"
(ibid., 81). Although Deleuze resorts here openly to Kant's language, talking about the direct
access to "things (the way they are) in themselves," his point is precisely that one should
subtract the opposition between phenomena and things-in-themselves, between the
phenomenal and the nolumenal level, from its Kantian functioning, where noumena are
transcendent things that forever elude our grasp. What Deleuze refers to as "things in
themselves" is in a way even more phenomenal then our shared phenomenal reality: it is the
impossible phenomenon, the phenomenon that is excluded from our symbolicallyconstituted
reality. The gap that separates us from noumena is thus primarily not
epistemological, but practico-ethical and libidinal: there is no "true reality" behind or beneath
phenomena, noumena are phenomenal things which are "too strong", too intens(iv)e, for our
perceptual apparatus attuned to constituted reality - epistemological failure is a secondary
effect of libidinal terror, i.e., the underlying logic is a reversal of Kant's "You can, because
you must!": "You cannot (know noumena), because you must not!"
Imagine someone being forced to witness a terrifying torture: in a way, the monstrosity
of what he saw would make this an experience of the noumenal impossible-real that would
shatter the coordinates of our common reality. (The same holds for witnessing an intense
sexual activity.) In this sense, if we were to discover films shot in a concentration camp
among the Musulmannen, showing scenes from their daily life, how they are systematically
mistreated and deprived of all dignity, we would have "seen too much", the prohibited, we
would have entered a forbidden territory of what should have remained unseen. This is also
what makes it so unbearable to witness the last moments of people who know they are
shortly going to die and are in this sense already living-dead - again, imagine that we would
have discovered, among the ruins of the Twin Towers, a video camera with magically
survived the crash intact and is full of shots of what went on among the passengers of the
plane in the minutes before it crashed into one of the Towers. In all these cases, it is that,
effectively, we would have seen things as they are "in themselvers", outside human
coordinates, outside our human reality - we would have seen the world with inhuman eyes.
(Maybe the US authorities do possess such shots and, for understandable reasons, are
keeping them secret.) The lesson is here profoundly Hegelian: the difference between the
phenomenal and the noumenal has to be reflected/transposed back into the phenomenal,
as the split between the gentrified normal phenomenon and the impossible phenomenon.
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 Les 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 disparition 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? Recall 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 nonexisting
in reality, IS operative as a virtual point of reference. 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. In this precise sense, Antigone herself was
inhuman (in contrast to Ismene, her "human, all too human" sister). One likes to quote the
chorus from Antigone about man as the most "demoniac" of all creatures, as a being of
excess, a being which violates all proper measures; however, it is crucial to bear in mind the
exact location of these lines: the Chorus intervenes immediately after it becomes known that
somebody (it is not yet known who this was) has defied Creon's order and performed the
funeral ritual on his body. It is THIS act which is perceived as a "demonic" excessive act,
and not Creon's prohibition - Antigone is far from being the place-holder of moderation, of
respect for proper limits, against Creon's sacrilegious hubris.
Conclusion - The Politics of Terror
What, then, would be the possible contours of a new politics of terror? Recall Badiou's
"eternal Idea" of the politics of revolutionary justice, at work from the ancient Chinese
Legists through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao, which 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 "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.").
(Badiou 2006: 29-37) Does the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to re-invent
this "eternal Idea"? That is to say, is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of
ecological catastrophe 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). At this level, 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.)
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