Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

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СКАЧАТЬ shared by practically all the ‘postmodern’ Leftists, according to which political ‘totalitarianism’ somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the ‘principle’ of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw material to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political ‘terror’ signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all forms of political ‘terror’, from the Jacobins to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, presuppose the foreclosure of the sphere of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx’s key insight that the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics (‘if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared ‘‘unpolitical’’ – that is, naturalized – in liberal discourse’²⁶).

      As to philosophical roots of this limitation of egalitarian terror, it is relatively easy to discern the roots of what went wrong with Jacobin terror as lying in Rousseau who was ready to pursue to its ‘Stalinist’ extreme the paradox of the general will:

      Apart from this original contract, the votes of the greatest number always bind the rest; and this is a consequence of the contract itself. Yet it may be asked how a man can be at once free and forced to conform to wills which are not his own. How can the opposing minority be both free and subject to laws to which they have not consented? I answer that the question is badly formulated. The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those that are passed against his will, and even to those which punish him when he dares to break any one of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; it is through it that they are citizens and free. When a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve of the proposition or reject it, but whether it is in conformity with the general will which is theirs; each by giving his vote gives his opinion on this question, and the counting of votes yields a declaration of the general will. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to my own prevails, this proves only that I have made a mistake, and that what I believed to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had prevailed against the general will, I should have done something other than what I had willed, and then I should not have been free.²⁷

      The ‘totalitarian’ catch here is the short-circuit between the constative and the performative: by reading the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision, but as a constative one, as the act of expressing the opinion on (of guessing) what the general will is (which is thus substantialized into something that pre-exists voting), he avoids the deadlock of the rights of those who remain in the minority (they should obey the decision of the majority, because in the result of voting, they learn what the general will really is). In other words, those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority: in learning the result of the vote (which runs against their individual votes), they do not simply learn that they are a minority – what they learn is that they were mistaken about the nature of the general will.

      The parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of Predestination cannot but strike the eye: in the case of Predestination, fate is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process, so that what is at stake in individuals’ activities is not to performatively constitute their fate, but to discover (or guess) their pre-existing fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively ‘will have been’ necessary. This reversal was described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:

      The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in futur antérieur, it appears as necessary. […] If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity.²⁸

      Dupuy provides the example of the French presidential elections in May 1995; here is the January forecast of the main polling institute: ‘If, on next May 8, M. Balladur is elected, one can say that the presidential election was decided before it even took place.’ If – accidentally – an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, not the commonplaces on how the underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity. The same goes for the October Revolution (once the Bolsheviks won and stabilized their hold on power, their victory appeared as an outcome and expression of a deeper historical necessity), and even of Bush’s much contested first US presidential victory (after the contingent and contested Florida majority, his victory retroactively appears as an expression of a deeper US political trend). In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. This, according to Dupuy, is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to ‘realistically’ appraise the possibilities of the catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense: like the election of Balladur, ‘if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided before it even took place.’ Destiny and free action (to block the ‘if’) thus go hand in hand: freedom is at its most radical the freedom to change one’s Destiny.²⁹ Which brings us back to our central question: what would a Jacobin politics which took into account this retroactive-contingent rise of universality look like? How are we to reinvent the Jacobin terror?

      Let us return to Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror: according to its argument, even some Stalinists themselves, when (in half-private, usually) forced to admit that many of the victims of the purges were innocent, and were accused and killed because ‘the Party needed their blood to fortify its unity’, imagine the future moment of final victory when all the necessary victims will be given their due, and their innocence and their highest sacrifice for the Cause will be recognized. This is what Lacan, in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,³⁰ refers to as the ‘perspective of the Last Judgement’, a perspective even more clearly discernible in one of the key terms of Stalinist discourse, that of the ‘objective guilt’ and ‘objective meaning’ of your acts: while you can be an honest individual who acted with most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless ‘objectively guilty,’ if your acts serve reactionary forces – and it is, of course, the Party which has the direct access to what your acts ‘objectively mean’. Here, again, we not only get the perspective of the Last Judgement (which formulates the ‘objective meaning’ of your acts), but also the present agent who already has the unique ability to judge today’s events and acts from this perspective.³¹

      We can see now why Lacan’s motto ‘il n’y a pas de grand Autre [there is no big Other]’ brings us to the very core of the ethical problematic: what it excludes is precisely this ‘perspective of the Last Judgement’, the idea that somewhere – even if as a thoroughly virtual point of reference, even if we concede that we cannot ever occupy its place and pass the actual judgement – there must be a standard which allows us to take the measure of our acts and pronounce their ‘true meaning’, their true ethical status. Even Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘deconstruction as justice’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the spectre of ‘infinite justice’, forever postponed, always to come, but nonetheless here as the ultimate horizon of our activity. Lacan himself pointed the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant’s philosophy as the crucial antecedent of psychoanalytical ethics. As such, Kantian ethics effectively harbours a ‘terrorist’ potential – a feature which points in this direction would СКАЧАТЬ