Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

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СКАЧАТЬ dictatorial dimension becomes palpable when the struggle turns into the struggle about the field of struggle itself.

      So what about the proletariat? Insofar as the proletariat is, within a social edifice, its ‘out of joint’ part, the element which, while a formal part of this edifice, has no determinate place within it, the ‘part of no-part’ which stands for universality, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ means: the direct empowerment of universality, so that those who are the ‘part of no-part’ determine the tone. They are egalitarian-universalist for purely formal reasons: as the part of no-part, they lack the particular features that would legitimate their place within the social body – they belong to the set of society without belonging to any of its sub-sets; as such, their belonging is directly universal. Here, the logic of the representation of multiple particular interests and their mediation through compromises reaches its limit; every dictatorship breaks with this logic of representation (which is why the simplistic definition of Fascism as the dictatorship of finance capital is wrong: Marx already knew that Napoleon III, this proto-Fascist, broke with the logic of representation). One should thus thoroughly demystify the scarecrow of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: at its most basic, it stands for the tremulous moment when the complex web of representations is suspended due to the direct intrusion of universality into the political field. With regard to the French Revolution, it was, significantly, Danton, not Robespierre, who provided the most concise formula of the imperceptible shift from ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to statist violence, or, in Benjamin’s terms, from divine to mythic violence: ‘Let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be.’³² For Danton, Jacobin revolutionary state terror was a kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not to seek revenge against the enemies but to prevent the direct ‘divine’ violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves. In other words, let us do what the people demand us to do so that they will not do it themselves …

      From Ancient Greece, we have a name for this intrusion: democracy. That is to say, what is democracy, at its most elementary? A phenomenon which, for the first time, appeared in Ancient Greece when the members of demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) not only demanded that their voice be heard against those in power. They not only protested against the wrongs they suffered and wanted their voice to be recognized and included in the public sphere, on an equal footing with the ruling oligarchy and aristocracy; even more, they, the excluded, those with no fixed place within the social edifice, presented themselves as the embodiment of the Whole of Society, of the true Universality: ‘we – the “nothing”, not counted in the order – are the people, we are All against others who stand only for their particular privileged interest.’ The political conflict proper designates the tension between the structured social body in which each part has its place, and ‘the part with no-part’ which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, the principled equality of all men qua speaking beings – up to and including the liumang, ‘hoodlums’, in today’s China, those who are displaced and float freely, without work or lodging, but also without cultural or sexual identities and without official papers.

      This identification of the part of society with no properly defined place within it (or resisting the allocated subordinated place within it) with the Whole is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernible in all great democratic events from the French Revolution (in which le tiers état proclaimed itself identical to the Nation as such, against the aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of the East European socialism (in which dissident ‘fora’ proclaimed themselves representative of the entire society against the Party nomenklatura). In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of antidemocratic politics always and by definition is and was depoliticization, the demand that ‘things should return to normal’, with each individual sticking to her particular job. And this brings us to the inevitable paradoxical conclusion: the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is another name for the violence of the democratic explosion itself. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is thus the zero-level at which the difference between legitimate and illegitimate state power is suspended, i.e., at which the state power as such is illegitimate. Saint-Just said in November 1792: ‘Every king is a rebel and a usurper.’ This phrase is a cornerstone of emancipatory politics: there is no ‘legitimate’ king as opposed to the usurper, since being a king is in itself a usurpation, in the same sense that, for Proudhon, property as such is theft. What we have here is the Hegelian ‘negation of the negation’, the passage from the simple-direct negation (‘this king is not a legitimate one, he is a usurper’), to the inherent self-negation (an ‘authentic king’ is an oxymoron, being a king is usurpation). This is why, for Robespierre, the trial of the king is not a trial at all:

      There is no trial to be held here. Louis is not a defendant. You are not judges. You are not, you cannot be anything but statesmen and representatives of the nation. You have no sentence to pronounce for or against a man, but a measure of public salvation to implement, an act of national providence to perform. […] Louis was king, and the Republic is founded: the famous question you are considering is settled by those words alone. Louis was dethroned by his crimes; Louis denounced the French people as rebellious; to chastise it, he called on the arms of his fellow tyrants; victory and the people decided that he was the rebellious one: therefore Louis cannot be judged; either he is already condemned or the Republic is not acquitted. Proposing to put Louis on trial, in whatever way that could be done, would be to regress towards royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counterrevolutionary idea, for it means putting the revolution itself in contention. In fact, if Louis can still be put on trial, then he can be acquitted; he may be innocent; what am I saying! He is presumed to be so until he has been tried. But if Louis is acquitted, if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the revolution?³³

      This strange coupling of democracy and dictatorship is grounded in the tension that pertains to the very notion of democracy. What Chantal Mouffe calls the ‘democratic paradox’ almost symmetrically inverts the fundamental paradox of authoritarian Fascism: if the wager of (institutionalized) democracy is to integrate the antagonistic struggle itself into the institutional/differential space, transforming it into regulated agonism, Fascism proceeds in the opposite direction. While Fascism, in its mode of activity, brings the antagonistic logic to its extreme (talking about the ‘struggle to death’ between itself and its enemies, and always maintaining – if not realizing – a minimal extra-institutional threat of violence, the ‘direct pressure of the people’ by-passing the complex legal-institutional channels), it posits as its political goal precisely the opposite, an extremely ordered hierarchical social body (no wonder Fascism always relies on organicist-corporatist metaphors). This contrast can be nicely rendered in the terms of the Lacanian opposition between the ‘subject of enunciation’ and the ‘subject of the enunciated (content)’: while democracy admits antagonistic struggle as its goal (in Lacanese: as its enunciated, its content), its procedure is regulated-systemic; Fascism, on the contrary, tries to impose the goal of hierarchically structured harmony through the means of an unbridled antagonism.

      In a homologous way, the ambiguity of the petty bourgeoisie, this contradiction embodied (as already Marx put it apropos Proudhon), is best exemplified by the way it relates to politics: on the one hand, the middle class is against politicization – it just wants to sustain its way of life, to be left to work and lead its life in peace (which is why it tends to support the authoritarian coups which promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so that everybody can return to his or her proper place). On the other hand, the petty bourgeois – in the guise of the threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority – are the main instigators of the grass-roots mass mobilization (in the guise of Rightist populism – say, in France today, where the only force truly disturbing post-political technocratic-humanitarian administration is Le Pen’s National Front).

      There are two elementary and irreducible sides to democracy: the violent egalitarian imposition of those who are ‘surnumerary’, the ‘part of no-part’, those who, while formally included within the СКАЧАТЬ