Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hierarchical ‘police’ order of social space; it stages a spectacle of a different order, of a different partage of the public space.³⁹ In today’s ‘society of spectacle’, such an aesthetic reconfiguration has lost its subversive dimension: it can all too easily be appropriated by the existing order. The true task does not lie in momentary democratic explosions which undermine the established ‘police’ order, but in the dimension designated by Badiou as that of the ‘fidelity’ to the Event: how to translate/inscribe the democratic explosion into the positive ‘police’ order, how to impose on social reality a new lasting order. This is the properly ‘terrorist’ dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order. And this is why, while everybody loves democratic rebellions, the spectacular/carnivalesque explosions of the popular will, anxiety arises when this will wants to persist, to institutionalize itself – and the more ‘authentic’ the rebellion is, the more ‘terrorist’ is this institutionalization. It is at this level that one should search for the decisive moment of a revolutionary process: say, in the case of the October Revolution, not the explosion of 1917–18, not even the civil war that followed, but the intense experimentations of the early 1920s, the (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts to invent new rituals of daily life: with what to replace the pre-revolutionary procedures of marriage and funerals? How to organize the most common interaction in a factory, in an apartment block? It is at this level of what, as opposed to the ‘abstract terror’ of the ‘big’ political revolution, one is tempted to call the ‘concrete terror’ of imposing a new order onto daily life, that the Jacobins and both the Soviet revolution and the Chinese revolution ultimately failed – not for the lack of attempts in this direction, for sure. The Jacobins were at their best not in the theatrics of Terror, but in the utopian explosions of political imagination apropos the reorganization of daily life: everything was there, proposed in the course of the frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from the self-organization of women to the communal homes in which the old would be able to spend their last years in peace and dignity. (So what about Robespierre’s rather ridiculous attempt to impose a new civic religion celebrating a Supreme Being? Robespierre himself formulated succinctly the main reason for his opposition to atheism: ‘Atheism is aristocratic.’⁴⁰ Atheism was for him the ideology of the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who had lost all sense of historical mission.)

      The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only ‘institutionalize’ itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to reinvent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou⁴¹ elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese ‘legists’ through the Jacobins to Lenin and Mao – it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can ‘move mountains’, ignoring ‘objective’ laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy of the people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the ‘complex circumstances’ which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people – suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his ‘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.’).⁴² And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms over our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments? What is demanded is:

      – strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in terms of 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 to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development – it is not a question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to ‘stop the train’ of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;

      – and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the ‘informer’ who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)⁴³

      Back in the early seventeenth century, after the establishment of the shogun regime, Japan made a unique collective decision to isolate itself from foreign cultures and to pursue its own path of a contained life of balanced reproduction, focused on cultural refinement, avoiding wild expansion. Was the ensuing period which lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century really just an isolationist dream from which Japan was cruelly awakened by Commodore Perry on the American warship? What if the dream is that we can go on indefinitely in our expansionism? What if we all need to repeat, mutatis mutandis, the Japanese decision, and collectively decide to intervene into our pseudo-natural development, to change its direction? The tragedy is that the very idea of such a collective decision is discredited today. Apropos of the disintegration of state socialism two decades ago, one should not forget that, at approximately the same time, the Western social-democratic welfare state ideology was also dealt a crucial blow; it also ceased to function as the imaginary able to arouse a collective passionate following. The notion that ‘the time of the welfare state has passed’ is today a piece of commonly accepted wisdom. What these two defeated ideologies shared is the notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous socio-historical development, to steer it in a desired direction.

      Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as ‘ideological’ and/or ‘totalitarian’: the social process is again perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate beyond social control. The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one cannot fight – one either adapts oneself to it, or one falls out of step with history and one is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as humane as possible, to fight for ‘global capitalism with a human face’ (this is what, ultimately, the Third Way is – or, rather, used to be – about). The sound barrier will have to be broken here, the risk will have to be taken to endorse again large-scale collective decisions – this, perhaps, is the main legacy of Robespierre and his comrades to us today.

      Moments before Robespierre’s death, the executioner noticed that his head would not fit into the guillotine with the bandages applied to his jaw wounds, so he brutally ripped them off; from Robespierre’s ruined throat emerged a ghastly piercing scream, only cut short as the blade fell upon his neck. The status of this last scream is legendary: it gave rise to a whole panoply of interpretations, mostly along the lines of the terrifying inhuman screech of the parasitical evil spirit which signals its impotent protest when it is losing possession of its host human body – as if, at this final moment, Robespierre humanized himself, discarding the persona of revolutionary virtue embodied and emerging as a miserable scared human being.

      The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite СКАЧАТЬ