Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 26

One of the main anti-totalitarian clichés is that of “intellectuals” (in the infamous Paul Johnson sense of the term) seduced by the “authentic” touch of violent spectacles and outbursts, in love with the ruthless exercise of power which supplements their limp-wristed existence—the long line from Plato and Rousseau to Heidegger, not to mention the standard list of the dupes of Stalinism (Brecht, Sartre …). The facile Lacanian defense against this charge would be to point out that the least one can say about Lacanian psychoanalysis is that it renders us immune to such “totalitarian temptations”: no Lacanian has ever committed a similar political blunder of being seduced by a mirage of a totalitarian revolution …

However, instead of such an easy way out, one should rather heroically accept this “white intellectual’s burden.” Let us approach it at its most problematic. The contours of the debate about the status of Heidegger’s Nazi engagement (was it just a passing mistake of no theoretical significance or was it grounded in his thought itself? Did it contribute to the turn Heidegger’s thought took afterwards?) are strangely reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s brief engagement on behalf of the Iranian revolution.¹⁶ How could the following lines not evoke a striking parallel with Heidegger?

Many scholars of Foucault view these writings [on Iran] as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We suggest that Foucault’s writings on Iran were in fact closely related to his general theoretical writings on the discourse of power and the hazards of modernity. We also argue that Foucault’s experience in Iran left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre and that one cannot understand the sudden turn in Foucault’s writings in the 1980s without recognizing the significance of the Iranian episode and his more general preoccupation with the Orient.¹⁷

In both cases, one should invert the standard narrative according to which the erroneous engagement awakened the thinker to the limitations of his previous theoretical position and compelled him to radicalize his thought, to enact a “turn” that would prevent such mistakes from occurring again (Heidegger’s shift to Gelassenheit, Foucault’s to the aesthetic of the self): Foucault’s Iranian engagement, like Heidegger’s Nazi engagement, was in itself (in its form) an appropriate gesture, the best thing he ever did, the only problem being that it was (as to its content) a commitment in the wrong direction.

Rather than reproach Foucault for his “blunder,” one should read his turn to Kant a couple of years later as his response to this failed engagement. Foucault is interested in the notion of enthusiasm as Kant deploys it apropos the French Revolution (in his Conflict of Faculties, which we already quoted in Chapter 1): as we have already noted, for Kant, its true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris—many things there were terrifying, outbursts of murderous passions—but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of the sympathetic observers all around Europe … Did Foucault thereby not propose a kind of meta-theory of his own enthusiasm about the Iranian revolution of 1978—79? What matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hopes in the possibility of a new form of spiritualized political collective.

Was Iran, then, for Foucault the object of “interpassive authenticity,” the mythical Other Place where the authentic happens—Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia today …—and for which Western intellectuals have an inexhaustible need? And, incidentally, one could redeem in the same way not only the enthusiasm evoked by Stalinist Russia in many Western intellectuals and artists in the 1930s and 1940s, but even the enthusiasm stoked in those who were otherwise bitter critics of Stalinism by the Maoist Cultural Revolution: what matters was not the brutal violence and terror in China, but the enthusiasm fired up by this spectacle amongst the Western observers … (And—why not?—one could claim the same for the fascination of Nazi Germany for some Western observers in the first four years of Hitler’s rule when unemployment fell rapidly, and so on!)

However, the problem with this reading is that, in his interpretation of the Iranian events, Foucault turns this perspective around and opposes the enthusiasm of those engaged in the event to the cold view of the external observer who discerns the larger causal context, the interplay of classes and their interests, and so on and so forth. This shift of the enthusiasm aroused in an external observer to the enthusiasm of those caught in the events is crucial—how are we to think the link of these two locations of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of direct participants and that of external and disengaged (disinterested) observers? The only solution is to “deconstruct” the very immediacy of the lived experience of the direct participants: what if this immediacy is already staged for an observer, for an imagined Other’s gaze? What if, in their innermost lived experience, they already imagine themselves being observed? Along these lines, in his last text on Iran (“Is it Useless to Revolt?”, from May 1979), Foucault opposes the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political, and so on, transformations to the magical event of the revolt which somehow suspends the network of historical causality—to which it is irreducible:

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.¹⁸

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, that is, 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.¹⁹

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

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.²⁰

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 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 a 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, and so on, but the very fact of transcending—or, rather, momentarily canceling—this very domain, 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 happened before, it is new “in itself ” and thus forever remains new.²¹

However, here, at their most sublime, things start to get complicated. Foucault has to concede that this division was internal to the engaged individuals themselves:

Let’s take the activist in some political group. When he was taking part in one of those demonstrations, he was double: he had his political calculation, which was this or that, and at the same time he was an individual caught up in that revolutionary movement, or rather that Iranian who had risen up against the king. And the two things did not come into contact, he did not rise up against the king because his party had made this or that calculation.²²

And the same division cuts across the entire social body: at the level of reality, there were, of course, multiple agents, complex interactions of classes, the overdetermination of incompatible struggles; however, at the level of the revolutionary event proper, all this was “sublated” into “an absolutely collective will” that united the entire social body against the Shah and his clique. There was no division within the social body, no “class struggle,” all—from poor farmers to students, from clergy to disappointed capitalists—wanted the same:

The collective will is a political myth with which jurists and philosophers try to analyze or to justify institutions, etc. It’s a theoretical tool: nobody has ever seen the “collective will” and, personally, I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter. I don’t know whether you agree with me, but we met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people.²³

Foucault opposes here revolt and revolution: “revolution” (in the modern European sense) designates the reinscription of a revolt into the process of strategic-political calculation: revolution is a process by means of which the revolt is “colonized by realpolitik”:

“Revolution” gave these uprisings a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, and defined their laws of development. […] Even the profession of revolutionary was defined. By thus repatriating revolt into the discourse of revolution, it was said, the uprising would appear in all its truth and continue to its true conclusion.²⁴

No wonder Foucault compares the appearing of a collective will with two of Kant’s noumenal things (God, soul). When the noumenal appears, it is in the guise of ultimate horror—as Foucault is aware:

At this stage, the most important and the most atrocious mingle—the extraordinary hope of remaking Islam into a great living civilization and various forms of virulent xenophobia, as well as the global stakes and the regional rivalries. And the problem of imperialisms. And the subjugation of women, and so on.²⁵

What has given the Iranian movement its intensity has been a double register. On the one hand, a collective will that has been very strongly expressed politically and, on the other hand, the desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this double affirmation can only be based on traditions, institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness, which have a very powerful attraction for individuals. To confront so fearsome an armed power, one mustn’t feel alone, nor begin with nothing.²⁶

The picture thus becomes blurred. First, Foucault withdraws from overall support for the Iranian revolt (sustained by a hope that an entirely different society will emerge out of it, breaking out of the space of European modernity and its deadlocks) to valorizing only the enthusiastic moment of revolt itself: the European liberals who want to discredit the Iranian events because they ended up in an oppressive theocracy move at the same level as the clergy itself which is reclaiming the revolt in order to justify its rule—they both attempt to reduce the Event to a factor in a political struggle of strategic interests. Then, in a more subtle and surprising move, Foucault discerns another ambiguity which cannot be reduced to the difference between the level of pure revolt and the level of multiple sociopolitical interplay: “chauvinism,” “virulent xenophobia,” the “subjugation of women,” and so on, are not signs of the contamination of the Event by sociopolitical reality, they are inherent forces of the Event itself, that is, their mobilization gave the Event the strength to oppose itself to the oppressive political regime and to avoid getting caught in the game of political calculations. It is this very reliance on the “vilest” racist, anti-feminist, etc., motifs that gave the Iranian revolution the power to move beyond a mere pragmatic power struggle. To put it in Badiouian terms, the authentic Event thus becomes indistinguishable from a pseudo-Event.

Are we not dealing here with a kind of Hegelian triad in which the external opposition is gradually internalized, reflected into itself? First, the external opposition of the Iranian revolution in itself (a unique event) and the way it appears to Europeans is internalized into the two aspects of the events themselves: their pragmatic struggle-for-power side, and the side of a unique politico-spiritual Event. Finally, these two aspects are identified as the form and content of the same event: the oppressive misogynist ideology, anti-Semitism, and so forth, are the only ideological materials at the disposal of the Iranians that can sustain the properly metaphysical elevation of the Event—the Event turns into a purely formal feature, indifferent towards its specific historical content. In other words, Foucault ends up at a point at which one should effectively raise the question usually addressed to Badiou: why, then, is Hitler’s Nazi “revolution” not also an Event? Does it not share the very features attributed by Foucault to the Iranian revolution? Did we not have there also the spiritual unity of people, undivided into particular subgroups separated by interests, a unity for which individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves? And, as in the case of Iran, was this spirit of unity not sustained by the “vilest” elements of tradition (racism and so on)?

At this point, the only move that remains is to drop this form itself—no wonder, then, that, after his Iranian experience, Foucault withdrew to the topic of the care of the self, of the aesthetics of existence (and, politically, to supporting different human-rights initiatives, which makes him in France a darling of the neoliberal-humanitarian “new philosophers”). Here, one can only venture the hypothesis that the conceptual root of this Foucauldian deadlock is his key notion of the dispositif. At first sight, it may appear that Lacan’s big Other is the poor cousin of Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, which is much more productive for social analysis. However, there is the deadlock of the dispositif with regard to the status of the subject: first (in his history of madness), Foucault tended to exclude from it the resisting core of subjectivity; then, he shifted his position to its opposite, to the radical inclusion of resistant subjectivity into the dispositif (power itself generates resistance, and so on—the themes of his Discipline and Punish); finally, he tried to outline the space of the “care of the self” that allows the subject to articulate through self-relating his own “mode of life” within a dispositif, and thus to regain a minimum of distance from it. The subject is here always a curve, a disturbance, of the dispositif, the proverbial grain of sand that disrupts its smooth running. With Lacan’s “big Other,” the perspective is completely the opposite: the very “positing” of the big Other is a subjective gesture, that is, the “big Other” is a virtual entity that exists only through the subject’s presupposition (this moment is missing in Althusser’s notion of the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” with its emphasis on the “materiality” of the big Other, its material existence in ideological institutions and ritualized practices—Lacan’s big Other is, on the contrary, ultimately virtual and as such, in its most basic dimension, “immaterial”).

But let us return to Iran. Foucault’s blunder in no way implies that the Iranian revolution was a pseudo-Event (in a Badiouian sense) comparable to the Nazi “revolution”: it was an authentic Event, a momentary opening that unleashed unprecedented forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” To detect this dimension, it is enough to follow closely the shifts and reversals of the Iranian events, the gradual closing of the multiple modes of self-organization of the protesting crowds through the takeover of political power by the new Islamic clergy. There was nothing comparable to the effervescent first months after the shah’s fall—the constant frantic activity, debates, utopian plans, etc.—in Germany after the Nazi takeover (although there was something comparable going on in the first years after the October Revolution). One should not take this qualitative difference as something that concerns only the formal level of events (or, even worse, the group-psychological level, as if the Iranian explosion was more “sincere” than the Nazi one)—its crucial dimension was that of socio-political content: what makes the Iranian explosion an Event was the momentary emergence of something new that pertained to the struggle to formulate an alternative beyond the existing options of Western liberal democracy or a return to pre-modern tradition. The Nazi “revolution” was never “open” in this authentic sense.

Foucault was also fully justified in emphasizing Shia Islam’s potential for serving as the ideological vehicle for a democratic-egalitarian movement: the opposition Sunni versus Shia is, in political terms, one of hierarchical state organization versus the egalitarian opening of the event. In contrast to both Judaism and Christianity, the two other religions of the book, Islam excludes God from the domain of paternal logic: Allah is not a father, not even a symbolic one—God as One is neither born nor does He give birth to creatures: there is no place for a Holy Family in Islam. This is why Islam emphasizes so much the fact that Muhammad himself was an orphan; this is why, in Islam, God intervenes precisely at the moments of the suspension, withdrawal, failure, “blackout,” of the paternal function (when the mother or the child are abandoned or ignored by the biological father). What this means is that God remains thoroughly in the domain of the impossible-Real: He is the impossible-Real beyond the father, so that there is a “genealogical desert between man and God.”²⁷ (This was the problem with Islam for Freud, since his entire theory of religion is based on the parallel of God with the father.) More importantly still, this inscribes politics into the very heart of Islam, since the “genealogical desert” renders impossible a grounding of the community in the structures of parenthood or other bonds based on blood: “the desert between God and Father is the place where the political institutes itself.”²⁸ With Islam, it is no longer possible to ground a community in the mode of Totem and Taboo, through the murder of the father, the ensuing guilt bringing brothers together—thence Islam’s unexpected actuality. This problem is at the very heart of the (in)famous umma, the Muslim “community of believers”; it accounts for the overlapping of the religious and the political (the community should be grounded directly on God’s word), as well as for the fact that Islam is “at its best” when it grounds the formation of a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity—no wonder Islam succeeds when young men find themselves deprived of a traditional familial safety network.

This, too, compels us to qualify and limit the homology between Foucault’s Iranian engagement and Heidegger’s Nazi commitments: Foucault was right in engaging himself, he correctly detected the emancipatory potential in the events; all insinuations of liberal critics that this was yet another chapter in the sad saga of Western radical intellectuals projecting their fantasies onto an exotic foreign zone of turbulence, which allows them to satisfy simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their secret “masochistic” longing for harsh discipline and oppression, totally miss the point. So where was his mistake? One can claim that he did the right thing for the wrong reason: the manner in which he theorized and justified his engagement is misleading. The framework within which Foucault operates in his analysis of the Iranian situation is the opposition between the revolutionary Event, the sublime enthusiasm of the united people where all internal differences are momentarily suspended, and the pragmatic domain of the politics of interests, strategic power calculations, and so forth—the opposition which, as we have already seen, directly evokes Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (or, more precisely, the sublime which evokes the noumenal dimension) and the phenomenal. Our thesis is here a very precise one: this general frame is too “abstract” to account for different modalities of collective enthusiasm—to distinguish between, say, the Nazi enthusiasm of the people united in its rejection of the Jews (whose effects were undoubtedly real), the enthusiasm of the people united against the stagnating Communist regime, or a properly revolutionary enthusiasm. The difference is simply that the first two are not Events, merely pseudo-Events, because they lacked the moment of a truly utopian opening. This difference is strictly immanent to enthusiastic unity: only in the last case, the common denominator of this unity was the “part of no-part,” the “downtrodden,” those included in society with no proper place within it and, as such, functioning as the “universal singularity,” directly embodying the universal dimension.

This is also why the opposition between noumenal enthusiasm and particular strategic interests does not cover the entire field—if it were so, then we would remain stuck forever in the opposition between emancipatory outbursts and the sobering “day after” when life returns to its pragmatic normal run. From this constrained perspective, every attempt to avoid and/or postpone this sobering return to the normal run of things amounts to terror, to the reversal of enthusiasm into monstrosity. What if, however, this is what is truly at stake in a true emancipatory process: in Jacques Rancière’s terms, how to unite the political and the police, how to transpose the political emancipatory outburst into the concrete regulation of policing? What can be more sublime than the creation of a new “liberated territory,” of a positive order of being which escapes the grasp of the existing order?

This is why Badiou is right to deny the status of an Event to the enthusiasm that followed the collapse of the Communist regimes. When, in the last months of 2001, the Miloevi regime in Serbia was finally toppled, many Marxists in the West raised the question: “What about the coal miners whose strike led to the disruption of the electricity supply and thus effectively brought Milosevic down? Was that not a genuine workers’ movement, which was then manipulated by the politicians, who were nationalists or corrupted by the CIA?” The same symptomatic point emerges apropos of every new social upheaval: in each of these cases, such people identify some working-class movement which allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, socialist potential, but was first exploited and then betrayed by the pro-capitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that the Revolution is round the corner: all we need is an authentic leadership which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potential. If one is to believe them, Solidarno was originally a workers’ democratic-socialist movement, later “betrayed” by its leadership which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA … There is, of course, a grain of truth in this approach: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of Communism was that the great revolts (the GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Solidarity in Poland) were originally workers’ uprisings which only later paved the way for the standard “anti-Communist” movements—before succumbing to the “external” enemy, the regime got a message about its falsity from those whom these “workers’ and peasants’ states” evoked as their own social base. However, this very fact also demonstrates how the workers’ revolt lacked any substantial socialist commitment: in all cases, once the movement exploded, it was smoothly hegemonized by standard “bourgeois” ideology (political freedom, private property, national sovereignty, and so forth).