Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

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СКАЧАТЬ dictum according to which Virtue without Terror is impotent, while Terror without Virtue is lethal, striking blindly?

      According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethic of the ‘categorical imperative’ (the unconditional injunction to do our duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself – which means that the subject herself has to assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: ‘I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty …’ Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude – no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Führer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of displacing the blame onto some figure of the big Other.

      The standard motto of ethical rigour is: ‘There is no excuse for not accomplishing one’s duty!’ Although Kant’s well-known maxim Du kannst, denn du sollst! (‘You can, because you must!’) seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: ‘There is no excuse for accomplishing one’s duty!’ The very reference to duty as the excuse to do my duty should be rejected as hypocritical. Recall the proverbial example of a severe and sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture; his excuse to himself (and to others) is: ‘I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do – it’s my duty!’ This is what psychoanalytical ethics thoroughly forbids: in it, I am fully responsible not only for doing my duty, but no less for determining what my duty is.

      Along the same lines, in his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his utmost acerbic irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of ‘guarantee’ for the revolution; this guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social Necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to wait for the right moment, when the situation is ‘mature’ with regard to the laws of historical development: ‘it is too early for the socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature’) or the normative (‘democratic’) legitimacy (‘the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic’) – as Lenin repeatedly puts, it is as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of the state power, it should get permission from some figure of the big Other (organize a referendum which will ascertain that the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other – the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for a guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act.

      It is only such a radical stance that allows us to break with today’s predominant mode of politics, post-political biopolitics, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a defence against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the politics of the status quo: it is not the difference between two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself (with its burdensome taxation), fear of ecological catastrophes – such a (post)politics always amounts to a frightening rallying of frightened men. This is why the big event – not only in Europe – in early 2006 was that anti-immigration politics ‘went mainstream’: the umbilical link that connected them to far Right fringe parties was finally cut. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – it is ‘our country, love it or leave it’.

      How are we to break out of this (post)politics of fear? The biopolitical administration of life is the true content of global liberal democracy, and this introduces the tension between democratic form and administrative-regulatory content. What, then, would be the opposite of biopolitics? What if we take the risk of resuscitating the good old ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the only way to break biopolitics? This cannot but sound ridiculous today, it cannot but appear that these are two incompatible terms from different fields, with no shared space: the latest political power analysis versus the old discredited Communist mythology … And yet: this is the only true choice today. The term ‘proletarian dictatorship’ continues to point towards the key problem.

      A commonsense reproach arises here: why dictatorship? Why not true democracy or simply the power of the proletariat? ‘Dictatorship’ does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy’s own underlying mode of functioning – from the very beginning, the thesis on the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorship, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship. When Lenin designated liberal democracy as a form of bourgeois dictatorship, he did not imply a simplistic notion about how democracy is really manipulated, a mere façade, or how some secret clique is really in power and controls things, and that, if threatened with losing power in democratic elections, it would show its true face and assume direct control. What he meant is that the very form of the bourgeois-democratic state, the sovereignty of its power in its ideologico-political presuppositions, embodies a ‘bourgeois’ logic.

      One should thus use the term ‘dictatorship’ in the precise sense in which democracy also is a form of dictatorship, i.e., as a purely formal determination. Many like to point out how self-questioning is constitutive of democracy, how democracy always allows, solicits us even, to question its own features. However, this self-referentiality has to stop at some point: even the ‘free-est’ elections cannot put into question the legal procedures that legitimize and organize them, the state apparatuses that guarantee (by force, if necessary) the electoral process, and so on. The state in its institutional aspect is a massive presence which cannot be accounted for in the terms of the representation of interests – the democratic illusion is that it can. Badiou conceptualizes this excess as the excess of the state’s re-presentation over what it represents; one can also put it in Benjaminian terms: while democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on the constitutive violence.

      Recall the lesson of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ – imagine a philosophical debate between a hermeneutician, a deconstructionist and an analytic philosopher. What they sooner or later discover is that they do not simply occupy positions within a shared common space called ‘philosophy’: what distinguishes them is the very notion of what philosophy as such is; in other words, an analytic philosopher perceives the global field of philosophy and the respective differences between the participants in a different manner from a hermeneutician: what is different between them is differences themselves, which are what render their true differences in a first approach invisible – the gradual classificatory logic of ‘this is what we share, and here our differences begin’ breaks down. For today’s cognitivist analytic philosopher, after the cognitivist turn, philosophy has finally reached the maturity of serious reasoning, leaving behind metaphysical speculations. For a hermeneutician, analytic philosophy is, on the contrary, the end of philosophy, the final loss of a true philosophical stance, the transformation of philosophy into another positive science. So when the participants in the debate get struck by this more fundamental СКАЧАТЬ