Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

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СКАЧАТЬ to each other? What if democracy in the second sense (the regulated procedure of registering the ‘people’s voice’) is ultimately a defence against itself, against democracy in the sense of the violent intrusion of the egalitarian logic that disturbs the hierarchical functioning of the social edifice, an attempt to re-functionalize this excess, to make it a part of the normal running of the social system?

      The problem is thus: how to regulate/institutionalize the very violent egalitarian democratic impulse, how to prevent it from being drowned in democracy in the second sense of the term (regulated procedure)? If there is no way to do it, then ‘authentic’ democracy remains a momentary utopian outburst which, the proverbial morning after, has to be normalized.³⁴

      The Orwellian proposition ‘democracy is terror’ is thus democracy’s ‘infinite judgement’, its highest speculative identity. This dimension gets lost in Claude Lefort’s notion of democracy as involving the empty place of power, the constitutive gap between the place of power and the contingent agents who, for a limited period, can occupy that place. Paradoxically, the underlying premise of democracy is thus not only that there is no political agent which has a ‘natural’ right to power, but, much more radically, that the ‘people’ itself, the ultimate source of sovereign power in democracy, does not exist as a substantial entity. In the Kantian perspective, the democratic notion of the ‘people’ is a negative concept, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit: it prohibits any determinate agent from ruling with total sovereignty. (The only moments when the ‘people exists’ are the democratic elections, which are precisely the moments of the disintegration of the entire social edifice – in elections, the ‘people’ is reduced to a mechanical collection of individuals.) The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of ‘totalitarianism’, and the mistake of ‘totalitarianism’ is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse (‘paralogism’) of political reason: ‘the People exists’ through a determinate political agent which acts as if it directly embodies (not only re-presents) the People, its true Will (the totalitarian Party and its Leader), i.e., in the terms of transcendental critique, as a direct phenomenal embodiment of the noumenal People … The obvious link between this notion of democracy and Lacan’s notion of the inconsistency of the big Other was elaborated by Jacques-Alain Miller, among others:

      Is ‘democracy’ a master-signifier? Without any doubt. It is the master-signifier which says that there is no master-signifier, at least not a master-signifier which would stand alone, that every master-signifier has to insert itself wisely among others. Democracy is Lacan’s big S of the barred A, which says: I am the signifier of the fact that Other has a hole, or that it doesn’t exist.³⁵

      Of course, Miller is aware that every master-signifier bears witness to the fact that there is no master-signifier, no Other of the Other, that there is a lack in the Other, etc. – the very gap between S1 and S2 occurs because of this lack (as with God in Spinoza, the Master-Signifier by definition fills in the gap in the series of ‘ordinary’ signifiers). The difference is that, with democracy, this lack is directly inscribed into the social system, it is institutionalized in a set of procedures and regulations – no wonder, then, that Miller approvingly quotes Marcel Gauchet regarding how, in democracy, truth only offers itself ‘in division and decomposition’ (and one cannot but note with irony how Stalin and Mao made the same claim, although with a ‘totalitarian’ twist: in politics, truth only emerges through the ruthless divisions of class struggle …).

      It is easy to note how, from within this Kantian horizon of democracy, the ‘terrorist’ aspect of democracy – the violent egalitarian imposition of those who are ‘surnumerary’, the ‘part of no-part’ – can only appear as its ‘totalitarian’ distortion, i.e., how, within this horizon, the line that separates the authentic democratic explosion of revolutionary terror from the ‘totalitarian’ Party-State regime (or, to put it in reactionary terms, the line that separates the ‘mob rule of the dispossessed’ from the Party-State’s brutal oppression of the ‘mob’) is obliterated. (One can, of course, argue that direct ‘mob rule’ is inherently unstable and that it turns necessarily into its opposite, a tyranny over the mob itself; however, this shift in no way changes the fact that, precisely, we are dealing with a shift, a radical turnaround.) Foucault deals with this shift in his writings on the Iranian Revolution, where he opposes the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political, and other transformations to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the web of historical causality – it is irreducible to it:

      The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man ‘really’ to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.³⁶

      One should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions: a revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, in other words in revolt, the noumenal dimension transpires. The paradox, of course, is that this noumenal dimension coincides with its opposite, with the pure surface of a phenomenon: the noumenon not only appears, the noumenal is what is, in a phenomenon, irreducible to the causal network of reality that generated this phenomenon – in short, the noumenon is phenomenon qua phenomenon. There is a clear link between this irreducible character of the phenomenon and Deleuze’s notion of event as the flux of becoming, as a surface emergence that cannot be reduced to its ‘bodily’ causes. His reply to the conservative critics who denounce the miserable and even terrifying actual results of a revolutionary upheaval is that they remain blind to the dimension of becoming:

      It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It’s nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.³⁷

      Deleuze refers here to revolutionary explosions in a way which is strictly parallel to Foucault:

      The Iranian movement did not experience the ‘law’ of revolutions that would, some say, make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched, in an unmediated fashion, on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is ‘fear’, fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the world had not seen an example for a long time.³⁸

      Foucault is here effectively Deleuzian: what interests him are not the Iranian events at the level of actual social reality and its causal interactions, but the evental surface, the pure virtuality of the ‘spark of life’ which only accounts for the uniqueness of the Event. What took place in Iran in the interstices of two epochs of social reality was not the explosion of the People as a substantial entity with a set of properties, but the event of becoming-People. The point is thus not the shift in relations of power and domination between actual socio-political agents, the redistribution of social control, etc., but the very fact of transcending – or, rather, momentarily cancelling – this very domain, of the emergence of a totally different domain of ‘collective will’ as a pure Sense-Event in which all differences are obliterated, rendered irrelevant. Such an event is not only new with regard to what was going on before, it is new ‘in itself’ and thus forever remains new.

      It is against this background that one can formulate a critique СКАЧАТЬ