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This Robespierre's line of argumentation reaches its climax in the paradoxical identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror "sublates" the opposition between punishment and clemency - the just and severe punishment of the enemies IS the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigor and charity coincide:
What, then, should those who remain faithful to the legacy of the radical Left do with all these? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as OURS, even - or precisely because - it is critically rejected. The only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this means is that the ruthless self-critique should go hand in hand with a fearless admission of what, to paraphrase Marx's judgment on Hegel's dialectics, one is tempted to call the "rational kernel" of the Jacobin Terror: "Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: "What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?" His answer is well-known: they want corruption - another name for the subject's defeat. [2]<ref>Alain Badiou, ''Logiques des mondes'', Paris: Seuil 2006, p. 98.</ref>
Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: "That which produces the general good is always terrible." [3] <ref>Louis-Antoine-Leon Saint-Just, ''Oeuvres choisies'', Paris: Gallimard 1968, p. 330.</ref> These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed. - The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre's speech "On war" is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who ruthlessly denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defense of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want "revolution without revolution" to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it. [4] <ref>And he was right: as we know today, in the last days of his freedom, king Louis XVI was negotiating with foreign power a plot to start a large war of France against European powers, where the king would pose himself as a patriot, leading the French army, and then negotiate with the powers of Europe a honourable peace for France, thus regaining his full authority - in short, the "gentle" Louis XVI was ready to plunge Europe in war to save his throne...</ref> Which is why Robespierre also denounced the temptation to export revolution to other countries, forcefully "liberating" them: "The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free against its will. All the kings could have vegetated or died unpunished on their blood-spattered thrones, if they had been able to respect the French people's independence."
The Jacobin revolutionary terror is sometimes (half)justified as the "founding crime" of the bourgeois universe of law and order, in which citizens are allowed to pursue in piece their interests, one should reject this claim on two accounts. Not only is it factually wrong (many conservatives were quite right to point out that one can achieve the bourgeois law and order also without the terrorist excess, as was the case in Great Britain - although there is Cromwell...); much more important, the revolutionary Terror of 1792-1794 was not a case of what Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence, but a case of "divine violence." [5] <ref>See Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in ''Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926'', Cambridge (Ma): Harvard University Press 1996.</ref> Interpreters of Benjamin struggle with what could "divine violence" effectively mean - is it yet another Leftist dream of a "pure" event which never really takes place? One should recall here Friedrich Engels's reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
One should repeat this, ''mutatis mutandis'', apropos divine violence: "Well and good, gentlemen critical theorists, do you want to know what this divine violence looks like? Look at the revolutionary Terror of 1992-1994. That was the Divine Violence." (And the series goes on: the Red Terror of 1919...) That is to say, one should fearlessly identify divine violence with positively existing historical phenomena, thus avoiding all obscurantist mystification. When those outside the structured social field strike "blindly," demanding AND enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is "divine violence" - recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets - THIS was "divine violence"... Like the biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men's sinful ways, it strikes out of nowhere, a means without end - or, as Robespierre put it in his speech in which he demanded the execution of Louis XVI: "Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts."
The Benjaminian "divine violence" should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto ''vox populi, vox dei'': NOT in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one's own life) made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not "immoral," it does not give the agent the license to just kill with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is ''fiat iustitia, pereat mundus'': it is JUSTICE, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which "people" (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price - the Judgment Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering - or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:
And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what they really want is a "revolution without a revolution": they want a revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to pre-existing norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the "divine" dimension and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals:
This authentic revolutionary logic can be discerned already at the level of rhetorical figures, where Robespierre likes to turn around the standard procedure of first evoking an apparently "realist" position and then displaying its illusory nature: he often starts with presenting a position or description of a situation as absurd exaggeration, fiction, and then goes on to remind us that what, in a first approach, cannot but appear as a fiction, is actually truth itself: "But what am I saying? What I have just presented as an absurd hypothesis is actually a very certain reality." It is this radical revolutionary stance which also enables Robespierre to denounce the "humanitarian" concern with victims of the revolutionary "divine violence": "A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains." The critical analysis and the acceptance of the historical legacy of the Jacobins overlap in the true question to be raised: does the (often deplorable) actuality of the revolutionary terror compel us to reject the very idea of Terror, or is there a way to REPEAT it in today's different historical constellation, to redeem its virtual content from its actualization? It CAN and SHOULD be done, and the most concise formula of repeating the event designated by the name "Robespierre" is: to pass from (Robespierre's) humanist terror to anti-humanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.
It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical anti-humanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting the others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics.
In philosophical terms, this "inhuman" dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human "individuality" or "personality" (which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Let mots et les choses, called the "transcendental-empirical doublet," of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individuals qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being? It is against the background of this topic of sovereign acceptance of death that one should reread the rhetorical turn often referred to as the proof of Robespierre's "totalitarian" manipulation of his audience. [7] <ref>See the detailed analysis in Claude Lefort, "The Revolutionary Terror," in ''Democracy and Political Theory'', Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988, p. 50-88.</ref> This turn took place in the midst of Robespierre's speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and some others were arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn will also come. Robespierre directly addresses the moment as pivotal: "Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth." He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in the room:
The opposition is here 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 first-person "us" (Robespierre gallantly includes himself into 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 stirring up fear is no longer outside "you/us," 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 master's stroke, assumes full subjectivization - waiting a little bit for the ominous effect of his words to take place, he then continued in the first person singular:
What can be more "totalitarian" than this closed loop of "your very fear of being guilty makes you guilty" - a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto "the only thing to fear is fear itself"? One should nonetheless move beyond the quick dismissal of Robespierre's rhetorical strategy as the strategy of "terrorist culpabilization," and to discern its moment of truth: there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself - exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing doesn't really concern me - IS the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason IS my treason, because, even if I "did not do anything 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 goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of his public - how can he himself be sure that he will not be the 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, his proximity to Danton will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he unleashed will not swallow him? It is here that his position assumes the sublime greatness - he fully assumes the danger that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, 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 which counts for nothing:
Consequently, insofar as the shift from "we" to "I" can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when 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 authorizes him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other, i.e., he doesn't claim that he has a direct access to the people's Will which speaks through him. This is how Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, described the proper attitude of a warrior: "every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, 'Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.' This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand." [8] <ref>Quoted from Brian Daizen Victoria, ''Zen War Stories'', London: Routledge 2003, p. 132.</ref> This is why, according to Hillis Lory, many Japanese soldiers in WWII performed their own funerals before living for the battlefield:
This preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living, of course, turns the soldier into a properly sublime figure. Instead of dismissing this feature as part of the Fascist militarism, one should assert it as also constitutive of a radical revolutionary position: there is a straight line that runs from this acceptance of one's own disappearance to Mao Zedong's reaction to the atomic bomb threat from 1955:
There evidently is an "inhuman madness" in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of the planet Earth "would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole" not a rather poor solace for the extinguished humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure transcendental subject non-affected by this catastrophe - a subject which, although non-existing in reality, IS operative as a virtual point of reference. Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of one's immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this indifference towards what Benjamin called "bare life": "I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you." [10] <ref>P.R.Palmer, ''Twelve Who Ruled'', New York: Atheneum 1965, p. 380.</ref> Che Guevara approached the same line of though when, in the midst of the unbearable tension of the Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war which would involve (at least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people - he praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its disappearance.
Another "inhuman" dimension of the couple Virtue-Terror 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 are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. - and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (like in the case of potlatch). Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a "habit" to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no - but we are expected to we reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: 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 least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:
To break the yoke of habits means: if all men are equal, than all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:
For this reason, John Brown is the KEY political figure in the history of US: in his fervently Christian "radical abolitionism," he came closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape: "John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level. /.../ He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did." [12] <ref>''Ibid''</ref> Today even, long after slavery was abolished, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more precious - among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau [13] <ref>See Henry David Thoreau, ''Civil Disobedience and Other Essays'', New York: Dover Publications 1993.</ref> painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embracement of a cause was unparalleled; he even goes as far as to liken Brown's execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his actual death) to Christ. Thoreau vents at the scores of those who have voiced their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people can't relate to Brown because of their concrete stances and "dead" existences; they are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.
It is, however, this very consequent egalitarianism which is simultaneously the limitations of the Jacobin politics. Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: the capitalist inequalities ("exploitations") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consequent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the old boring motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour force). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct "terrorist" imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal health service...), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of "equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terrorist" equality) - it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such - our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: the egalitarian political "extremism" or "excessive radicalism" should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to "go to the end." What was the Jacobin's recourse to radical "terror" if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called "excesses" of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard tropes, shared by practically all the "postmodern" Leftists, according to which political "totalitarianism" somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the "principle" of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political "terror" signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political "terror," from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx's key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics ("if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared 'unpolitical' - that is, naturalized - in liberal discourse"). [<ref>Wendy Brown, ''States of Injury'', Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, p. 14] .</ref> As to philosophical roots of this limitation of egalitarian terror, it is relatively easy to discern the grounds of what when wrong with Jacobin terror in Rousseau who was ready to pursue to its "Stalinist" extreme the paradox of the universal will:
I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free."(The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 2, "Voting")
The parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of Predestination cannot but strike the eye: in the case of Predestination, fate is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process, so that the stake of individuals' activities is not to performatively constitute their fate, but to discover (or guess) one's pre-existing fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively "will have been" necessary." This reversal was described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:
Dupuy provides the example of the French presidential elections in May 1995; here is the January forecast of the main polling institute: "If, on next May 8, Ms Balladur will be elected, one can say that the presidential election was decided before it even took place." If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: THIS, not the common places on how the underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity. The same goes for October Revolution (once the Bolsheviks won and stabilized their hold on power, their victory appeared as an outcome and expression of a deeper historical necessity), and even of Bush's much contested first US presidential victory (after the contingent and contested Florida majority, his victory retroactively appears as an expression of a deeper US political trend). In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. This, according to Dupuy, is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to "realistically" appraise the possibilities of the catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense: like the election of Balladur, "if the catastrophe will happen, one can say that its occurrence was decided before it even took place." Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: freedom is at its most radical the freedom to change one's Destiny. [16] <ref>What one should bear in mind is how Predestination is totally foreign to its Eastern counterpart, reincarnation. What they both share is the idea that my present state is predetermined - however, in the first case, it is by the inscrutable and contingent divine decision which precedes my existence and thus has nothing whatsoever to do with my acts, while, in the second case, it is by my own acts in my previous lives, which make my present predicament nonetheless dependent on me. What gets lost in the notion of reincarnation is the irreducible gap between virtue and grace, between my character and my fate, i.e., the utter contingency and externality of my fate with regard to my character.</ref> This brings us back to our central question: how would a Jacobin politics which would take into account this retroactive-contingent rise of universality look? How are we to reinvent the Jacobin terror?The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, [17] <ref>Jacques Lacan, ''Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis'', London: Routledge 1992.</ref> refers to as the "perspective of the Last Judgment," a perspective even more clearly discernible in one of they key terms of the Stalinist discourse, that of "objective guilt" and "objective meaning" of your acts: while you can be an honest individual who acted with most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless "objectively guilty," if your acts serve reactionary forces - and it is, of course, the Party which has the direct access to what your acts "objectively mean." Here, again, we not only get the perspective of the Last Judgment (which formulates the "objective meaning" of your acts), but also the present agent who already has the unique ability to judge today's events and acts from this perspective. [18]<ref>The same goes for such a radical hedonist atheist like Marquis de Sade: perspicuous readers of his work (like Pierre Klossowski) guessed long ago that the compulsion to enjoy which drives the Sadean libertine implies a hidden reference to a hidden divinity, to what Lacan called the "Supreme-Being-of-Evil," an obscure God demanding to be fed with the suffering of the innocents.</ref>
We can see now why Lacan's motto il n'y a pas de grand Autre /there is no big Other/" brings us to the very core of the ethical problematic: what it excludes is precisely this "perspective of the Last Judgment," the idea that somewhere - even if as a thoroughly virtual point of reference, even if we concede that we cannot ever occupy its place and pass the actual judgment - there must be a standard which allows us to take measure of our acts and pronounce their "true meaning," their true ethical status. Even Jacques Derrida's notion of "deconstruction as justice" seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of "infinite justice," forever postponed, always to come, but nonetheless here as the ultimate horizon of our activity. Lacan himself pointed the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant's philosophy as the crucial antecedent of the psychoanalytic ethics. As such, Kantian ethics effectively harbors a "terrorist" potential - a feature which points in this direction would be Kant's well-known thesis that Reason without intuition is empty, while Intuition without reason is blind: is not its political counterpart Robespierre's dictum according to which, Virtue without Terror is impotent, while Terror without Virtue is lethal, striking blindly?
Recall the lesson of the Hegelian "concrete universality" - imagine a philosophical debate between a hermeneutically, 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, i.e., an analytic philosopher perceives the global field of philosophy and the respective differences between the participants differently than a hermeneutically: what is different among them are differences themselves, which is what renders 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, with the cognitivist turn, philosophy finally reached the maturity of a serious reasoning, leaving behind metaphysical speculations. For a hermeneutically, analytic philosophy is, on the contrary, the end of philosophy, the final loss of true philosophical stance, the transformation of philosophy into another positive science. So when the participants in the debate get struck by this more fundamental gap that separates them, they stumble upon the moment of "dictatorship." And, in a homologous way, the same goes for political democracy: its dictatorial dimension becomes palpable when the struggle turns into the struggle about the field of struggle itself.
So what about proletariat? Insofar as proletariat is, within a social edifice, its "out of joint" part, the element which, while formal part of this edifice, has no determinate place within it, the "part of no-part" which stands for universality, "dictatorship of the proletariat" means: the direct empowerment of universality, so that those who are "part of no-part" determine the tone. They are egalitarian-universalist for purely formal reasons: as 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 financial capital is wrong: Marx already knew that Napoleon III, this proto-Fascist, broke with the logic of representation). One should thus thoroughly demystify the scare-crow 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 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." [19] <ref>Quoted in Simon Schama, ''Citizens'', New York: Viking Penguin 1989, p. 706-707.</ref> For Danton, the Jacobin the revolutionary state terror was a kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not revenge on 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 the wrong they suffered and wanted their voice 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 the liumang, "hoodlums," in today's China, those who are displaced and freely float, lacking their work-and-residence, but also cultural or sexual, identity and registration.
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 social edifice, have no determinate place within it; and the regulated (more or less) universal procedure of choosing those who will exert power. How do these to sides relate to each other? What if democracy in the second sense (the regulated procedure of registering the "people's voice") is ultimately a defense against itself, against democracy in the sense of the violent intrusion of the egalitarian logic that disturbs the hierarchic functioning of the social edifice, an attempt to re-functionalize this excess, to make it a part of the normal running of the social edifice?
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. [20]<ref>The trap to be avoided here is to oppose these two poles as the "good" one versus the "bad" one, i.e., to dismiss the institutionalized democratic procedure as the "ossification" of the primordial democratic experience. What truly matters is precisely the degree to which the democratic explosion succeeds in getting institutionalized, translated into social order. Not only are democratic explosions easily accessible for those in power, since "the day after" people awaken in the sober reality of power relations reinvigorated by the fresh democratic blood (which is why those in power love "explosions of creativity" like the French May '68); often, the "ossified" democratic procedure to which the majority continues to stick as to the "dead letter," is the only defense remaining against the onslaught of "totalitarian" crowd passions.</ref>
The Orwellian proposition "democracy is terror" is thus democracy's "infinite judgment," 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 "people" themselves, the ultimate source of the sovereign power in democracy, doesn't exist as a substantial entity. In the Kantian way, the democratic notion of "people" is a negative concept, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit: it prohibits any determinate agent to rule with full sovereignty. (The only moment when "people exists" are the democratic elections, which are precisely the moment of the disintegration of the entire social edifice - in elections, "people" are reduced to a mechanical collection of individuals.) The claim that 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:
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 edifice, it is institutionalized in a set of procedures and regulations - no wonder, then, that Miller approvingly quotes Marcel Gauchet about 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 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 brutal oppression of the "mob") is obliterated. (One can, of course, argue that a direct "mob rule" is inherently unstable and that it turns necessarily into its opposite, a tyranny over the mo itself; however, this shift in no way changes the fact that, precisely, we are dealing with a shift, a radical turnaround.) Foucault dealt 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, etc., transformations to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the cobweb of historical causality - it is irreducible to it:
One should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions: revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, i.e., 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, 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:
Deleuze refers here to revolutionary explosions in a way which is strictly parallel to Foucault's:
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 event-like 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 interstice 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 canceling - 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 of Jacques Rancière's political aesthetics, of his idea of the aesthetic dimension of the proper political act: a democratic explosion reconfigures the established hierarchic "police" order of social space, it stages a spectacle of a different order, of a different partage of the public space. [25] <ref>See Jacques Ranciére, ''The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible'', London: Continuum 2004.</ref> In today's "society of spectacle," such an aesthetic reconfiguration lost its subversive dimension: it can all too easily be appropriated by the existing order. The true task are not momentary democratic explosions which undermine the established "police" order, but the dimension designated by Badiou as that of the "fidelity" to the Event: how to translate/inscribe the democratic explosion into the positive "police" order, how to impose on social reality a NEW lasting order. THIS is the properly "terrorist" dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order. And this is why, while everybody loves democratic rebellions, the spectacular/carnivalesque explosions of the popular will, anxiety arises when this will wants to persist, to institutionalize itself - and the more "authentic" the rebellion is, the more "terrorist" is this institutionalization. It is at this level that one should search for the decisive moment of a revolutionary process: say, in the case of the October Revolution, not the explosion of 1917-1918, not even the civil war that followed, but the intense experimentations of the early 1920, the (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts to invent new rituals of daily life: with what to replace the pre-revolutionary procedures of marriage and funerals? How to organize the most common interaction in a factory, in an apartment block? It is at this level of what, as opposed to the "abstract terror" of the "big" political revolution, one is tempted to call the "concrete terror" of imposing a new order onto daily life, that the Jacobins and both the Soviet revolution and the Chinese revolution ultimately failed - not for the lack of attempts in this direction, for sure. Jacobins were at their best not in the theatrics of Terror, but in the utopian explosions of political imagination apropos the reorganization of daily life: everything was there, proposed in the course of the frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from the self-organization of women to the communal homes in which the old will be able to spend their last years in peace and dignity. (So what about Robespierre's rather ridiculous attempt to impose a new civic religion celebrating a Supreme Being? Robespierre himself formulated succinctly the main reason for his opposition to atheism: "Atheism is aristocratic." [26] <ref>Maximilien Robespierre, ''Oeuvres Complètes'', Paris: Ernest Leroux 1910-1967, Vol. 10, p. 195.</ref> Atheism was for him the ideology of the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who lost all sense of historical mission.)
The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only "institutionalize" itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to re-invent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou [27] <ref>See Alain Badiou, ''Logiques des mondes'' , "Introduction."</ref> elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese "legists" through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao - it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can "move mountains," ignoring "objective" laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy of the people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the "complex circumstances" which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people - suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his "a great truth" ("the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself"), and Mao's critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR , where he qualifies Stalin's point of view as "almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants."). [28] <ref>The catch, of course, resides in the ambiguity of "people": are the people who are trusted the "empirical" individuals or THE People, on behalf of whom one can turn the terror on behalf of the people against people's enemies into the terror against individual people themselves? Does the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to re-invent this "eternal Idea"?</ref> And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms at our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments? What is demanded is:
- strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, i.e., one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
- voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will run counter the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development - it is not the question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to "stop the train" of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;
- and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron scandal, the Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped-off the financial authorities as true public heroes.) [29]<ref>However, the temptation to avoid unconditionally here is to perceive ecological catastrophies themselves as a kind of "divine violence" of nature, the justice/vengeance of nature - such a conclusion would have been an unacceptable obscurantist projection of meaning into nature.</ref>
Back in the early 17th century, after the establishment of the shogun regime, Japan made a unique collective decision to isolate itself from foreign culture and to pursue its own path of contained life of balanced reproduction, focused on cultural refinement, avoiding wild expansion. Was the ensuing period which lasted till the middle of the 19th century really just an isolationist dream from which Japan was cruelly awakened by Commodore Perry on the American warship? What if the dream is that we can go on indefinitely in our expansionism? What if we all need to repeat, mutatis mutandis, the Japanese decision, and collectively decide to intervene into our pseudo-natural development, to change its direction? The tragedy is that the very idea of such a collective decision is discredited today. Apropos of the disintegration of State Socialism two decades ago, one should not forget that, at approximately the same time, the Western Social Democratic welfare state ideology was also dealt a crucial blow, it also ceased to function as the imaginary able to arouse a collective passionate following. The notion that Èthe time of the welfare state has pastÇ is today a piece of commonly accepted wisdom. What these two defeated ideologies shared is the notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous socio-historic development, to steer it in a desired direction.
Moments before Robespierre's death, the executioner noticed that his head would not fit into the guillotine with the bandages applied to his jaw wounds, so he brutally ripped them off; from Robespierre's ruined throat emerged a ghastly piercing scream, only cut short as the blade fell upon his neck. The status of this last scream is legendary: it gave rise to a whole panoply of interpretations, mostly along the lines of the terrifying inhuman screech of the parasitic evil spirit which signals its impotent protest when it is losing possession of its host human body - as if, at this final moment, Robespierre humanized himself, discarding the persona of Revolutionary Virtue embodied and emerging as a miserable scared human being.
The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold cruel determination signaled by his green eyes. As such, Robespierre serves perfectly today's anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as it was the case by the 19th century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary Cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the last biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity. [30] <ref>Ruth Scurr, ''Fatal Purity'', London: Chatto & Windus 2006.</ref> The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: "Terror wears a sea-green coat," "The good terrorist," "Virtue's demon executioner," and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb's "Sea-green, mad as a fish" (in Telegraph, May 6 2006). And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws "a chilling lesson for us today": Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but "/t/he bloodlettings brought about by this 'sincere' man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant." [31] <ref>Antonia Fraser, "Head of the revolution," ''The Times'', April 22 2006, Books, p. 9.</ref> Happy us who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully engage themselves in their projects... what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as it was clear to Robespierre, a revolution "is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime," the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1994, the day before his arrest and execution:
