Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Between men and women it’s been pretty messy, the big disorder. Not necessarily unpleasant of course; it’s not war, it’s not some kind of permanent fuck-up, it’s rather a kind of mixing up and clearing up . . . No set rule, no rhyme or reason. Not at all as it is with animals, where everybody seems to know perfectly well how to do it. How, and with whom, and when . . . The animal world has realized the human dream of sex without a back-story, sex without (hi)story precisely when we humans have gone and invented literature to tell ourselves love stories in which nothing ever happens but a (hi)story . . . We’d be happy to put down our books and get straight to the point of what exactly it is to have sex ahistorically.⁴

      Examples like this indicate an approach to utopias which leaves behind the usual focus on content (on the structure of society proposed in a utopian vision). Perhaps it is time to step back from the fascination with content and reflect on the subjective position from which such content appears as utopian. On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence. When the subject directly identifies its own gaze with the objet a, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the objet a disappears from the field of vision. This brings us to the core of a Lacanian notion of utopia: a vision of desire functioning without an objet a and its twists and loops. It is utopian not only to think that one can reach full, unencumbered “incestuous” enjoyment; for it is no less utopian to think that one can renounce enjoyment without this renunciation generating its own surplus-enjoyment.

      However, the way to avoid this utopian reduction of the subject to the impossible gaze witnessing an alternate reality from which it is absent is not to abandon the topos of an alternate reality as such. Recall Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution as redemption-through-repetition of the past: apropos the French Revolution, the task of a genuine Marxist historiography is not to describe the events the way they really were (and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them); the task is rather to unearth the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which was betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). Marx’s point is not primarily to make fun of the Jacobins’ revolutionary enthusiasm, to show how their high-flown emancipatory rhetoric was just a means used by the historical “cunning of reason” to establish the vulgar reality of commercial capitalism; it is, rather, to explain how these radical-emancipatory potentials continue to “insist” as types of historical specters which haunt the revolutionary memory, demanding their enactment, such that the later proletarian revolution should also redeem (or put to rest) these ghosts of the past. These alternate versions of the past persisting in a spectral form constitute the ontological “openness” of the historical process, as was—again—clear to Chesterton:

      The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men’s minds are not really free to think such a thought.

      What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history always took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history.⁵

      Why, then, is the burgeoning genre of “What If?” histories hegemonized by conservative historians? The typical Introduction to such a volume begins with an attack on Marxists who allegedly believe in historical determinism. The editors’ conservative sympathies become clear as soon as one sees the contents pages of the leading What-If volumes: the favored topics oscillate between the “major premise”—how much better history would have been if a revolutionary or “radical” event had been avoided (if King Charles had won the civil war against Parliament; if the English Crown had won the war of independence against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the US civil war, aided by Great Britain; if Germany had won the Great War; if Lenin had been assassinated at the Finland Station . . .)—and the “minor premise”—how much worse history would have been if history had taken a more “progressive” twist (if Thatcher had been killed in the Brighton IRA bombing in 1984; if Gore had won instead of Bush and so had been president on 9/11, etc.). So what should the Marxist’s answer be here? Definitely not to rehash the tiresome old ratiocinations of Georgi Plekhanov on the “role of the individual in history” (the logic of “even if there had been no Napoleon another individual would have played a similar role, since the deeper historical necessity called for a passage to Bonapartism”). One should rather question the very premise that Marxists (and Leftists in general) are dumb determinists opposed to entertaining such alternative scenarios.

      The first thing to note is that the What-If histories are part of a more general ideological trend, of a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear, centered narrative and renders it as a multiform flow. Up to the domain of the “hard” sciences (quantum physics and its Multiple-Reality interpretation; neo-Darwinism, and so on), we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and alternate versions of reality—as Stephen Jay Gould, a Marxist biologist if ever there was one, bluntly put it: “Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.” These views of our reality as being one possible, and often even not the most probable, outcome of an “open” situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled but continue to haunt us as specters of what might have been, conferring on our “true” reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, is by no means foreign to Marxism—indeed, it is on such perceptions that the felt urgency of the revolutionary act often depends.

      Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favored topic among conservative What-If historians, let us look at how Lenin himself related to it: he was as far as imaginable from any kind of reliance on “historical necessity” (on the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who emphasized that one could not skip over the succession of stages prescribed by historical determinism: first bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution . . .). When, in his “April Theses” from 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for revolution, his proposals were met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his own party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik Party, no prominent leader supported his call for revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin’s “Theses”—far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood in the party, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized the “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,” and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded: “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy.” Lenin immediately perceived the revolutionary chance which was the result of unique contingent circumstances: if the moment was not seized, the chance for the revolution would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. So we have here Lenin himself entertaining an alternative scenario: “What if we do not act now?”—and it was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that pushed him to act.

      But there is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in a radical Marxist view: it brings the What-If logic to its self-reflexive reversal. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself a kind of realized alternative history, the reality we have to live in because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment and act. Military historians have demonstrated that the Confederacy lost the battle at Gettysburg because General Lee made a series of mistakes that were totally uncharacteristic: “Gettysburg was СКАЧАТЬ