Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ the Eastern European countries around 1990, when Really Existing Socialism was falling apart: all of a sudden, people were faced with the ‘freedom of political choice’. But were they really at any point asked the fundamental question of what kind of new order they actually wanted? Was it not rather that they found themselves in the exact situation of the subject-victim in a Beauvois-style experiment? They were first told that they were entering the promised land of political freedom; soon afterwards, they were informed that this freedom involved unrestrained privatisation, the dismantling of social security, and so on and so forth. They still had the freedom to choose, so, if they wanted, they could refuse to take this path; but, no, our heroic Eastern Europeans did not want to disappoint their Western tutors, so they stoically persisted in the choice they had never made, convincing themselves that they should behave as mature subjects who were aware that freedom has its price. This is why the notion of the psychological subject endowed with natural propensities, who has to realise its true Self and its potential, and who is, consequently, ultimately responsible for its own failure or success, is the key ingredient of liberal freedom.

      This is where one should insist on reintroducing the Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: in an act of actual freedom, one dares precisely to break this seductive power of symbolic efficacy. Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-given set of coordinates; rather I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of the ‘transition’ from Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that the Eastern Europeans never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition – all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) ‘thrown’ into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism …). What this means is that ‘actual freedom’, as the act of consciously changing this set, occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as if the choice is not forced and ‘chooses the impossible’. This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against ‘formal’ freedom are all about, and therein lies the ‘rational kernel’ that is worth saving today: when he insists that there is no ‘pure’ democracy, that we should always ask apropos of any freedom, whom does it serve, what is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true radical choice. This is what the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom ultimately amounts to: the former refers to freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while the latter designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s aim is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice – when he asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: ‘Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?’

      Which brings us back to Jacobin revolutionary terror, wherein we should not be afraid to identify the emancipatory kernel. Let us recall the rhetorical turn often taken as proof of Robespierre’s ‘totalitarian’ manipulation of his audience.²⁶ This took place during Robespierre’s speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others had been arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that they would be next. Robespierre directly addressed the moment as pivotal, ‘Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth’, and went on to evoke the fear in the room: ‘One wants [on veut] to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised … One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees … One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed.’²⁷ The opposition here is between the impersonal ‘one’ (the instigators of fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person ‘you’ (vous) to the first-person ‘us’ (Robespierre gallantly includes himself in the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer that ‘one wants to make you/us fear’, but that ‘one fears’, which means that the enemy stoking the fear is no longer outside ‘you/us’, the members of the Assembly; it is here, among us, among ‘you’ addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true masterstroke, assumed full subjectivisation – waiting a moment for the ominous effect of his words to sink in, he then continued in the first person singular: ‘I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.’²⁸ What could be more ‘totalitarian’ than this closed loop of ‘your very fear of being found guilty makes you guilty’ – a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’? We should nonetheless reject the easy dismissal of this rhetorical strategy as one of ‘terrorist culpabilisation’, and discern its moment of truth: at the crucial moment of a revolutionary decision there are no innocent bystanders, because, in such a moment, innocence itself – exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle one is witnessing is not really one’s concern – is indeed the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I ‘did nothing against the revolution’, this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience ‘revolution’ as an external force threatening me.

      But what is going on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that must have arisen in the mind of his audience – how can he be sure that he won’t be next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the ‘I’ outside ‘we’ – after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, that fact will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he himself unleashed will not swallow him up too? It is here that his position takes on a sublime greatness – he fully assumes that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason he is so serene, unafraid of his fate, is not that Danton was a traitor while he is pure, a direct embodiment of the people’s Will; it is that he, Robespierre, is not afraid to die – his eventual death will be a mere accident that counts for nothing: ‘What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.’²⁹ Consequently, in so far as the shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls off and Robespierre openly asserts himself as a ‘Master’ (up to this point, we follow Lefort’s analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre’s first-person-singular ‘I’ is: I am not afraid to die. What authorises him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other, i.e., he does not claim that it is the people’s Will which speaks through him.

      Another ‘inhuman’ dimension of the Virtue–Terror couple promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order, or every order of explicit normativity, has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to and apply the explicit norms; to what extent we’re meant to take them literally; how and when we’re allowed, solicited even, to disregard them; etc. – this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its norms: think of the polite offer-that-is-meant-to-be-refused – it is ‘habitual’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts it commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given us only on condition that we make the right decision: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no – but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite: the explicit ‘no’ effectively functions as the implicit injunction ‘do it, but in a discreet way!’ Measured against this background, revolutionary egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially at СКАЧАТЬ