Marching to the Remainder by Simone Weil

1934

To imagine that we can switch the course of history along a different track by transforming the system through reforms or revolutions, to hope to find salvation in a defensive or offensive action against tyranny and militarism – all that is just day- dreaming. There is nothing on which to base even the attempt. Marx’s assertion that the regime would produce its own gravediggers is cruelly contradicted every day; and one wonders, incidentally, how Marx could ever have believed that slavery could produce free men. Never yet in history has a regime of slavery fallen under the blows of slaves. The truth is, to quote a famous saying, slavery degrades man to the point of making him love it; that liberty is precious only in the eyes of those who effectively possess it; and that a completely inhuman system, as our is, far from producing beings capable of building up a human society, models all those subjected to it – oppressed and oppressors alike- according to its own image.

Everywhere, in varying degrees, the impossibility of relating what one gives to what one receives has killed the feeling for sound workmanship , the sense of responsibility, and has developed passivity, neglect, the habit of expecting everything from the outside, the belief in miracles. Even in the country, the feeling of the deep-seated bond between the land which sustains man and the man who works the land has to a large extent been obliterated since the taste for speculation, the unpredictable rises and falls in currencies and prices have got country folk in the habit of turning their eyes towards the towns. The worker has not the feeling of earning his living as a producer; it is merely that the undertaking keeps him enslaved for long hours every day and allows him each week a sum of money which gives him the magic power of conjuring up at a moment’s notice ready-made products, exactly as the rich do. The presence of innumerable unemployed, the cruel necessity of having to beg for a job, make wages appear less as wages than as alms. As for the unemployed themselves, the fact that they are involuntary parasites, and poverty-stricken into the bargain, does not make them any less parasites. Generally speaking, the relation between work done and money earned is so hard to grasp that it appears almost accidental, so that labor takes on the aspect of servitude, money that of a favor.

The so-called governing classes are affected by the same passivity as all the others, owing to the fact that, snowed under as they are by an avalanche of inextricable problems, they have long since given up governing. One would look in vain, from the highest down to the lowest on the social ladder, for a class of men among whom the idea could one day spring up that they might, in certain circumstances, have to take in hand the destinies of society; the harangues of the fascists could alone give the illusion of this, but they are empty.

As always happens, mental confusion and passivity leave free scope to the imagination. On all hands one is obsessed by a representation of social life which, while differing considerably from one to class to another, is always made up of mysteries, occult qualities, myths, idols and monsters; each one thinks that power resides mysteriously in one of the classes to which he has no access, because hardly anybody understands that it resides nowhere, so that the dominant feeling everywhere is that dizzy fear which is always brought about by loss of contact with reality. Each class appears from the outside as a nightmare object. In circles connected with the working-class movement, dreams are haunted by the mythological monsters called Finance, Industry, Stock Exchange, Bank etc.; bourgeois dream about other monsters which they call ringleaders, agitators, demagogues; the politicians regard the capitalists as supernatural beings who alone possess the key to the situation, and vice versa; each nation regards its neighbors as collective monsters inspired by a diabolical perversity. One could go on developing this theme indefinitely.

In such a situation, any log whatever can be looked upon as king and take the place of one up to a certain point thanks to that belief, and this is true, not merely of men in general, but also in that of the governing classes. Nothing is easier, for that matter, than to spread any myth whatsoever throughout a whole population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at the appearance of  ‘totalitarian’ regimes unprecedented I history. IT is often said that force is powerless to overcome thought; but for this to be true, there must be thought. Where irrational opinions hold the place of ideas, force is all-powerful. It is quite unfair to say, for example, that fascism annihilates free thought; in reality it is the lack of free thought which makes it possible to impose by force official doctrines entirely devoid of meaning. Actually, such a regime even manages considerably to increase the general stupidity, and there is little hope for the generations that will grow up under the conditions it creates. Nowadays, every attempt to turn men into brutes finds powerful means at its disposal. On the other hand, one thing is impossible, even if you were dispose of the best public platforms, and that is to diffuse clear ideas, correct reasoning and sensible views on any wide scale.

It is no good expecting help to come from men; and even if it were otherwise, men would none the less be vanquished in advance by the natural power of things. The present social system provides no means of action other than machines for crushing humanity; whatever may be the intentions of those using them, these machines crush and will continue to crush as long as they exist. With the industrial convict prisons constituted by the big factories, one can only produce slaves and not free workers, still less workers who would form a dominant class. With guns, aeroplanes, bombs, you can spread death, terror, oppression, but not life and liberty. With gas masks, air-raid shelters and air-raid warnings, you can crate wretched masses of panic-stricken human beings, ready to succumb to the most senseless forms of terror and to welcome with gratitude the most humiliating  forms of tyranny, but not citizens. With the popular press and wireless, you can make a whole people swallow with their breakfast or their supper a series of ready-made and, by the same token, absurd opinions –for even sensible views become deformed and falsified in the minds which accept them unthinkingly; but you cannot with the aid of these thing as arouse so much as a gleam  of thought. And without factories, without arms, without the popular press you can do nothing against those who possess all these things. The same applies to everything. The powerful means are oppressive, the non-powerful means are inoperative.

 Each time that the oppressed have tried to set up groups able to exercise a real influence, such groups, whether they went by the names of parties or unions, have reproduced in full within themselves all the vices of the system they claimed to reform or abolish, namely, a bureaucratic organization, reversal of the relationship between means and ends, contempt for the individual, separation of thought and action, the mechanization of thought itself, the exploitation of stupidity and lies as a means of propaganda, and so on.

The only possibility of salvation would lie in a methodical cooperation between all, strong and weak, with a view to accomplishing a progressive decentralization of social life; but the absurdity of such an idea strikes one immediately. Such a form of cooperation is impossible to imagine, even in dreams, in a civilization that is based on competition, on struggle, on war. Apart from such cooperation, there is no means of stopping the blind trend of the social machine towards increasing centralization, until the machine itself suddenly jams and flies into pieces. What weight can the hopes and desires of those who are not at the control levers carry, when, reduced to the most tragic impotence, they find themselves the mere playthings of blind and brutish forces. As for those who exercise economic or political authority, harried as they are incessantly by rival ambitions and hostile powers, they cannot work to weaken their own authority without condemning themselves almost certainly to being deprived of it. The more they feel themselves to be animated by good intentions, the more they will be brought, even despite themselves, to endeavor to extend their authority in order to increase their ability to do good; which amounts to oppressing people in the hope of liberating them, as Lenin did. It is quite patently impossible for decentralization to be initiated by the central authority; to the very extent to which the central authority is exercised, it brings everything else under its subjection.

Generally speaking, the idea of enlightened despotism. Which always has a Utopian flavor about it, is in our day completely absurd. Faced with problems whose variety and complexity are infinitely beyond the range of great as of limited minds, no despot in the world can possibly be enlightened. Though a few men may hope, by dint of honest and methodical thinking, to perceive a few gleams in this impenetrable darkness, those whom the cares and responsibilities of authority deprive them of both leisure and liberty of mind are certainly not of that number.

In such a situation, what can those do who still persist, against all eventualities, in honoring human dignity both in themselves and in others? Nothing, except endeavor to introduce a little play into the cogs of the machine that is grinding us down; seize every opportunity of awakening a little thought wherever they are able, encourage whatever is capable, in the sphere of politics, economics or technique, of leaving the individual here and there a certain freedom of movement amid the trammels cast around him by the social organization. That is certainly something, but it does not go very far. On the while, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travelers who find themselves in a motor ca-car launch at full speed and driverless across broken country. When will the smash-up occur after which it will be possible to consider trying to construct something new? Perhaps it’s a matter of a few decades, perhaps of centuries. There are no data enabling one to fix a probable lapse of time. It seems, however, that the material resources of our civilization are not likely to become exhausted for some considerable time, even allowing for wars; and, on the other hand, as centralization, by abolishing all individual initiative and all local life, destroys by its very existence everything that might serve as a basis for a different form of organization, one may suppose that the present system will go on existing up to the extreme limit of possibility.

To sum up, it seems reasonable to suppose that the generations which will have to face the difficulties brought about by the collapse of the present system have yet to be born. As for generations now live, they are perhaps, of all those that have followed each other in the course of human history, the ones that will have to shoulder the maximum of imaginary responsibilities and the minimum of real ones. Once this situation is fully realized, it leaves a marvelous freedom of mind. . .

Only fanatics are able to set no value on their own existence save to the extent that it serves a collective cause; to react against the subordination of the individual to the collectivity implies that one begins by refusing t subordinate one’s own destiny to the course of history. In order to resolve upon undertaking such an effort of critical analysis, all one needs is to realize that it would enable him who did so to escape the contagion of folly and collective frenzy by reaffirming on his own account, over he head of the social idol, the original pact between the mind and the universe.

Unchanged Forever by Vasily Grossman

He was alone in his room, but in his mind, in his thoughts, he was talking to Anna Sergeyevna”:

Do you know? At the very worst of times I imagined being embraced by a woman. I used to imagine this embrace as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everything I had been through. It would be as if nothing of it had ever happened. But it turns out that it’s you that I have to talk to, that it’s you I have to tell about the very worse time of all. . .

It was a conversation  in a prison cell, at dawn, after an interrogation. One of my cell mates – he’s no longer alive, he died soon after – was called Aleksey Samoilovich. I think he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. But he frightened me, I found his mind very frightening. Not because it was evil – an evil mind is not really frightening. His mind wasn’t evil, but indifferent and mocking; he mocked faith. He appalled me but, more important, he also attracted me. It was if I were being sucked in, and I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make him share my faith in freedom.

His life had gone badly for him, but there was nothing special about it. It was no different from the lives of many other people. He had been accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda – Article 58, Section 10, the most common accusation of all.

I was brought back from my cell after being interrogated. What a list one could make of techniques of violence; burning at the stake, today’s prison fortresses the size of a provincial capital, and the labor camps themselves. The original instruments of capital punishment were a hemp rope and a club that crushed your head; nowadays, though, an executioner just turns on the master switch and does away with a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. There is no need to raise an axe. Our age is an age of supreme violence on the part of the State – supreme violence against the individual human being. But in this lies our strength and hope. It is the twentieth century that has shaken  Hegel’s principle of the rationality of the world historical process, of the rationality of everything that is real. After decades of troubled debate, nineteenth-century Russian thinkers came to accept this principle, but now at the height of the State’s triumph over human freedom, Russian thinkers in padded jackets are overturning Hegel’s principle and proclaiming this supreme principle of universal history; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’

Yes, yes, yes, at this time of total triumph of inhumanity it has become clear that everything created by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future; it will leave no trace.

This was my faith and with it I returned to my cell. I am lying half dead on the bedboards, and the only thing alive in me is my faith: my belief that human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that the history of life – from the amoeba to the human race – is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that life itself is freedom. And this faith gives me strength, and I keep turning over in my mind a precious, luminous, and wonderful thought that has been hidden in our prison rags. As if with my hands, I keep exploring this thought; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’

Aleksey Samoilovich hears me out, half alive as I am and says “That’s just a comforting lie. The history of life is the history of violence triumphant. Violence is eternal and indestructible. It can change shape, but it does not disappear or diminish. Even the word ‘history,’ even the concept of history is just something people have dreamed up. There is no such thing as history. History is milling the wind; history is grinding water with a pestle. Thinkers mistake  its constant chaotic transformations for evolution and search for its laws. But chaos knows no laws, no evolution, no meaning, and no aim. Man does not evolve from lower to higher. Man is  as motionless as a slab of granite. His goodness, his intelligence, his degree of freedom are motionless; the humanity in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?”

And, you know, it felt as if nothing in the world can be worse than all this. I’m lying on the bedboards and, dear God, I start to feel an anguish that is more than I can bear – all from talking to one very clever man. It feels like death, like an execution. Even breathing feels more than I can bear. I only want one thing: not to see, not to hear, not to breathe. To die. But relief came from a quite unexpected direction. I was dragged off again to be interrogated. They didn’t give me time to get my breath back. And I felt better, I felt relieved. Freedom, I knew again, is inevitable. To hell with the troikas that fly, thunder and sign death warrants. Freedom and Russia will be united!

Excerpts from an Interview with Leo Lowenthal

Lowenthal:

I was a rebel, and everything that was then oppositional, that is, to quote Benjamin, on the side of the losers in world history, attracted me as if by magic. I was a socialist, a supporter of psychoanalysis and of phenomenology in neo-Kantian circles. I took a job that brought me in contact with Eastern European Jews, something that, for example, was extremely embarrassing for my father and for Adorno's. . . . It was nothing short of a syncretic accumulation in my brain and heart of aspirations, tendencies, and philosophies that stood in opposition to the status quo. I still vividly remember reading Lukács's Theory of the Novel and his indictment of "the infamy of the status quo." This formulation summed up my fundamental feelings—namely, to hate and reject as "infamous" all elements of the status quo. This was deeply rooted in me. 

Well, then, in [my] everyday life it really made no difference if one was a Jew or not. One could go into practically any hotel, join almost any club. We always laughed about the fact—precisely because it was such a phenomenon of the fringe—that the island Borkum didn't allow any Jews. I only learned about a kind of anti-Semitism—that which made it impossible for one to go to certain restaurants, hotels, or clubs—here in America. To be sure, I had heard about this already in Germany, but I couldn't believe it.

 Believe it or not, in W.W.I, I ended up in a workers' regiment made up of sons of proletarians and poor peasants. Poor devils, rough, sometimes brutal, uneducated men. We had to live in the barracks and eat the horrible swill there; we weren't allowed to have our own uniforms but were given the sweat-covered uniforms of previous "grunts." Besides drilling and shooting (which I was really not good at—the rifle butt would almost always recoil and hit me on the cheek), we were mainly kept busy loading rails for railroad tracks. Once a rail fell on my fingers; you can still see my crooked fingernail. I was the constant object of mockery. At that time I experienced the potential anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism of the German proletariat and peasants.

It was an awful time. I tried everything to get out of there. I volunteered for the front; I would have preferred to die. I was rejected. I then applied to become a cadet officer so that, as an officer, I could escape those circumstances. Refused. All of this was for me—and I am not exaggerating—a kind of anticipatory concentration-camp experience. It certainly contributed to the strengthening of my alleged elitist arrogance as an intellectual. As you know—we've discussed it often enough—I don't consider the accusation of elitism an insult, but rather praise. We felt that the war was already lost, and that we were thus involved with a fundamentally meaningless business. Sometime I'll show you a couple of pictures of me as a soldier in 1918 along with my company. Looking at these photos, one might say that I should demand a veteran's pension from the American government! I was really the epitome of a "sad sack," a personal representation of the "stab-in-the-back" legend, so to speak.

But enough of that.


I attended lectures on philosophy: that was part of the Marxist tradition—it was necessary to be educated philosophically if one wanted to be a young nonconformist, a revolutionary thinker. I should remind you once again that I was fundamentally imbued with the conviction—don't forget, this was 1920, 1921—that the world revolution was around the corner and that this whole bourgeois lecture business would soon be done with.


We always perceived ourselves in opposition to the status quo; we were radical nonconformists. We didn't want to play along. Probably if we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have survived. Ultimately the thought of the disasters that resulted from "playing along" never left us. Everything we did later in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (already at that time it was known in the academic community as "Café Marx") was tinged with this radical conviction. The whole atmosphere of the Institute, not just the influence of Max Horkheimer, allowed me to further develop my view of the world, of nature, and of life. Of course, the basis for this was already there, characterized essentially by a concern for independence. This is best captured by our slogan of nicht mitmachen, not playing the game.


So, I came to America in 1934, and in 1935 I wanted to take a vacation with my wife for the first time. We went for advice to a very elegant travel agency in Rockefeller Center. They gave me the addresses of some twenty hotels and resorts to which I then wrote, always adding at the end, "Please tell me whether Jews are welcome." I had been advised to do this by friends who had already lived some time in America. Of these twenty letters—and you have to keep in mind that this was 1935, at the high point of the depression in America—at least half weren't answered at all. Some of the others wrote that they generally rented to older people, which was quite ridiculous, since I hadn't mentioned my age at all. And others wrote that of course they had nothing against Jews but that we might feel "uncomfortable" with their other guests. So, in short, we suddenly discovered that something like a real everyday anti-Semitism did exist here and that as a Jew one couldn't freely take part in all social spheres. That was a nasty disappointment. That hotels and clubs, even whole professions, were simply closed to Jews—that didn't yet exist in Germany to such an extent. German anti-Semitism in relation to other European varieties of anti-Semitism is still an issue. Look, Jews were driven out of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, and who knows where else. That sort of thing was quite rare in Germany until Hitler came. To be sure, then he drove the Jews straight into the gas chamber.

Dubiel: During the early 1930s, when you all defined your theoretical direction still as materialistic, you still considered yourselves, at least morally, part of the labor movement. This definitely changed in 1936 (I mention this date because of Horkheimer's classic essay). Since then you have considered yourselves as, in Adorno's apt description, a Flaschenpost [a message in a bottle]—a lonely, marginal group critically examining the course of the world.

Lowenthal: I agree with that.Here, as well as in most of Western Europe, the so-called proletariat is now a petit-bourgeois group with a massive interest in the status quo. Soviet Communism is a perversion of a theory, a moral system, and a style of thought that are essentially good. Hitler's fascism, in contrast, is bad for the very reason that its basic conception of man is inhuman. At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s a metaphysical and basically antihistorical reaction occurred in Germany: Husserl and his followers, the materialist metaphysics of Nicolai Hartmann, Max Scheler, Jung's psychology, Ludwig Klages, and a whole configuration of new "perennial philosophies." Early Nazi ideology was also an ahistorical, pseudo-metaphysical play with history and society. Our group attempted to trace the historical self-consciousness that had been achieved; to heighten critical historical consciousness was our theoretical agenda. Is this what you are after?

When I took a walk with Horkheimer in the summer of 1934, he said that fascism in Germany had one positive effect, namely the politicization of society. This had never occurred so extensively, throughout the entire population. People now found that what happened in the political sphere concerned them directly, and this meant an end to public apathy as a characteristic of German political life—a topic about which I have written frequently. Such a politicization of the population is contrary to the interests and ideology of big capital.

Dubiel: This is only a marginal note: Is it not surprising that this apathy should, immediately after 1945, reappear more strongly than ever before in German history?


Lowenthal: This only proves our thesis that fascism creates a new political context characterized by the total mobilization of society, where everyone is a fellow prisoner, fellow culprit, and conscious fellow traveler of the political order. When this authoritarian and totalitarian terror apparatus disappears, the society falls back into public apathy—everywhere, not only in Germany. Fascism has not succeeded in politicizing the American nation; during World War II the population here was as unpolitical and uninvolved as ever. Dubiel: So, we could reformulate: Developed capitalist societies produce the socioeconomic conditions under which fascism can develop. But when the political apparatus of the society organized by capital has fallen into fascist hands, that system takes on a new quality no longer compatible with the interests of finance capital.
Lowenthal: This is exactly what I meant. This was our theory.

Let me repeat: this economistic interpretation is one-sided. We surely would not have feared to remain in Switzerland merely because big capital was in power. We feared that a specifically fascist political culture would arise in Europe and that the inner and outer realms of one's life would no longer be secure.

We anticipated of the decline of the Weimar Republic and the preparation of our flight abroad, along with our conviction, at that time, that the spread of fascism was more likely than a world war. We had left for the United States and built there an island of German radical intellectuals. This in itself was rather significant. If I were to elaborate on all of this in detail it would add up to a unique fusion of intellectual talent, worldwide political perspectives, and a far-ranging imagination molded by an upper-class Jewish lifestyle. None of us believed that all this would be confirmed by the reputation earned by the Frankfurt group. Nor could I say with certainty that I am happy about all this, because I am not sure whether this "integration" isn't also part of this society's ability to integrate and thereby defuse everything. But there it is. First of all, it was a miracle we survived and were able to overcome all the obstacles to emigration, to rise eventually from the ashes from the 1950s onward. For we really have become an ineradicable part of Western intellectual life and, in a certain sense, of political life. I recall having heard in intellectual and personal conversations the reproach that one could not always be critical, that sometimes one should also be constructive. We were always scandalous troublemakers. You are familiar with the famous reproach to Erich Kästner: "Herr Kästner, and what about the positive aspects?" Well, it is exactly the negative that was the positive: this consciousness of not going along, the refusal. The essence of Critical Theory is really the inexorable analysis of what is.

Although I do not agree with Horkheimer's excessively religious symbolism during his last years, when he defined the "completely other" of this society by referring to the name of a God who must not be named, this reticence points to something that unites us. What man can do in freedom should not be anticipated, and one must always say no to what is happening because it is not happening in freedom. We cannot escape from Hegel's antithetical position. How could we really do so? After all, the synthesis is to be made by the subjects themselves. We are the involved collaborators of the negative phase of the dialectical process. It was this belief that held us together and gave us so much strength. It helped us avoid seduction by reality, which is not to say that we do not, on occasion, enjoy the good things life has to offer. Yet none of us has ever succumbed to the Faustian warning: "If ever I say to any moment: “Linger, you are so wonderful."

 To put it in even stronger terms: art teaches, and mass culture is learned; therefore, a sociological analysis of art must be cautious, supplementary, and selective, whereas a sociological analysis of mass culture must be all-inclusive, for its products are nothing more than the phenomena and symptoms of the process of the individual's self-resignation in a wholly administered society.

The utopian-messianic motif, which is deeply rooted in Jewish metaphysics and mysticism, played a significant role for Benjamin, surely also for Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, and for myself. In his later years, when he ventured—a bit too far for my taste—into concrete religious symbolism, Horkheimer frequently said (and on this point I agree with him completely) that the Jewish doctrine that the name of God may not be spoken or even written should be adhered to. The name of God is not yet fulfilled, and perhaps it will never be fulfilled; nor is it for us to determine if, when, and how it will be fulfilled for those who come after us. I believe that the essential thing about practical socialism that so shocked us is the idea that one is permitted to plan for someone else. The notion of something perhaps unattainable, perhaps unnameable, but which holds the messianic hope of fulfillment—I suppose this idea is very Jewish; it is certainly a motif in my thinking, and I suppose it was for my friends as well—but quite certainly it was for Benjamin a shining example of the irrevocable commitment to hope that remains with us "just for the sake of the hopeless."

President Impeached by Hans L. Trefousse

It was bad enough that during 1866 Mid-term elections President Johnson toured the nation giving speeches in favor of various candidates. Presidents traditionally refrained from doing that; once elected to the highest office they were supposed to be ‘above the fray.” President Johnson’s careless pronouncements- in speeches or interviews with the press- also caused him such great trouble that even Senator Doolittle bemoaned Johnson’s extemporaneous speeches: “He falls into the great error of supposing it possible to lay aside his official character and speak as a private citizen about public affairs.” His lawyers were determined to prevent such pitfalls during the impeachment itself and they succeeded: discretion prevailed, Johnson followed the advise of counsel, however extraordinarily difficult it was for him to do so.

What irked the President most was his conviction that proceedings against him were unfair. There were no ‘high crimes or misdemeanors’ in any of the nine articles of impeachment.  In the case of his supposed violation of the recent Tenure of Office Act even the radicals understood that their objections wouldn’t stand for one-half hour before the Supreme Court, even under the chiefdom of the highly partisan Salmon Chase. They did everything they could to prevent a test case from getting before the Courts.

In view of the difficulties, it may be asked why Congress ever started the impeachment proceedings in the first place. After all, the moderates had long been opposed to the trial; why did they now join with their radical colleagues in an all-out effort to oust the president?

The answer to these questions must be sought in the Republicans concern about Reconstruction. As long as Johnson remained in the White House, Republican hopes for a reformed South with a modicum of rights for the freedmen seemed endangered, and his latest actions – the changes in the commanding generals and the bestowal of patronage on Southern conservatives – heightened this apprehension. Then, by challenging the Tenure of Office Act  (sacking Stanton as Secretary of War), the president frightened moderates as well as radicals, and they became convinced of the necessity of removing him. There was widespread concern, that, by drawing a combination of Southern and Northern Democrats to his side Jackson might endanger future Republican successes.

Their case was weak and the impeachment was not managed well. They were ‘poor judges of human nature and poor readers of human motives”, according to the Chicago Tribune. One could hardly call Johnson a “great” criminal as they did. Butler, who vowed to try the cases he would a horse case, appeared aggressive and offensive. By trying to prevent the cabinet from testifying, he merely raised doubts in various senators’ minds. Nor did Boutwell’s violent abuse do much good. It disgusted even faithful Republicans. Because the managers had a poor case, they took refuge in various legal devices, a tactic seen as a confession of weakness. For instance, their refusal to allow a vote on the first article, which they knew was offensive to Senators Sherman and Howe, could only increase the impression that the entire proceeding was nothing but a political maneuver.

In addition, there was widespread apprehension about  Speaker Ben Wade. His clearly expressed ideas on inflation, protection, women’s rights, and justice for the workingman frightened many moderate and conservative Republicans.. Should Wade move into the White House, it was likely that he would receive the next vice presidential nomination. ” the gathering of evil birds around Wade (I mean tariff robbers) leads me to think that a worse calamity might befall the Republican Party than the acquittal of Johnson, wrote the journalist Horace White.. Chief Justice Chase also disliked his fellow Ohioan. James A. Garfield warned that conviction meant the transfer of the presidency to “a man of violent passions, extreme opinions and narrow views; a man who had never thought thoroughly or carefully on any subject except slavery  . . .surrounded by the worse and most violent elements of the Republican Party.”

Others thought that if successful, impeachment would, logically, have been the destruction of the Executive Department of Government- hypothetically, Congress, under the Tenure of Office Act, would  obtain absolute control over all Presidential appointments. As Senator Trumbull said:

Once set the example  of impeaching the President for what, when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided, will be regarded as insufficient causes . . .no future President will be safe who happens top differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed by them important, particularly if of a political character . . .what then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution, so carefully devised and so vital to its perpetuity? They are all gone.

The short time left of Johnson’s term was also a factor:

To convict and depose a Chief Magistrate of a great country while his guilt was not made palpable by the record, and for insufficient, reasons would be fraught with greater danger to the future of the country than can arise from leaving Mr. Johnson in office for the remaining months of his term.

Nor did Republicans think conviction would be any help to Grant, whom they had already chosen as their next candidate for President.

In the meantime, as the trial stretched-on, though silenced by his lawyers, Johnson was by no means inactive in his own defense. In keeping with the political skills he had learned in Tennessee, despite his frequent disavowals of any deals to secure acquittal, he did in fact engage in various maneuvers to win over doubtful senators. He appointed General John M. Scholfield- who sought guarantees that Johnson would drop his opposition to Reconstruction before he accepted- as Secretary of War.   Wavering senators persuaded him to transmit the radical constitutions of South Carolina and Arkansas without delay. Senator Grimes of Iowa was given assurances that  henceforth Johnson ‘would be guilty of no indiscretion, commit no rash act, and consult with his cabinet.”

While Johnson had always believed that the gap between himself and the moderates, particularly on the problems of Reconstruction and the future of the freemen, was too large to be bridged, now he felt the time was ripe for an accommodation. He had done all he could to frustrate congressional efforts at Reconstruction; his conviction would be of no help to the South, while acquittal might well be a signal for the turning of the tide. At any rate, as a practical matter, Republicans in Congress held a veto-proof majority.

The final result was 35 to 19, exactly one vote short of the required two-thirds for conviction.

What had the president accomplished by his victory? Above all, he had succeeded in preserving the Constitution that he admired so much [he had preserved the separation of powers, defended State’s Rights and the prerogative of the rebels to reconstitute their governments as they saw fit] . AS his old collaborator in East Tennessee put it : We now feel that you, with the Constitution in your right hand (holding it aloft) have made a most complete & overwhelming triumph. We now have abiding faith in the perpetuity of Republican institutions - & that Mongrel Radicalism is dead! dead!” “THE TIDE TURNING”, proclaimed a big headline in the Richmond Whig, which expressed the conviction that a conservative change was in progress in every direction. Already partially  on the run, the mortality  Southern Unionists were everywhere threatened.

Thaddeus Stevens sensed the dimensions of the defeat. His life had been a failure, he complained. “With all this great struggle of years in Washington, and the fearful sacrifice of life and treasure,” he declared, “I see little hope for the Republic.” He was especially despondent about the future of the freedman. Johnson had evidently restored hope to the South, and probably he had so undermined the process of Reconstruction that it could not succeed afterward. To be sure, it was not until after the acquittal that the new constitutions of Southern states with their provisions for black enfranchisement went into effect, and after the election of General Grant, black suffrage was guaranteed by the fifteenth amendment. However, Republican rule in the South proved ephemeral. It could not be established on a permanent basis, no matter many force acts sought to guarantee it. Johnson’s adamant opposition at a time when,( in the midst of the devastating  aftermath of the War), radical measures might have succeeded, laid the foundation for failure. From Johnson’s point of view, therefore, he had not been unsuccessful. He had preserved the South as a ‘white man’s country’.

[ ‘What might have been’ is a silly game but it still seems doubtful that if Johnson had been convicted the outcome would have been any different. All politicians seek to divine the will of the majority and to vindicate the conclusions they come to. In this case, Johnson seems to have succeeded. The predominant mood in the country- North and South- favored white supremacy, though perhaps not exactly his Jefferson-Jacksonian brand of it. .  .  but that’s a longer story.]

The Logos Club by Laurent Binet

They enter a magnificent room constructed entirely in wood, designed as a circular amphitheater, decorated with wooden statues of famous anatomists and doctors with a white marble slab at its center where copses used to be dissected. At the back of the room, two statues of flayed men, both in wood, support a tray holding a statue of a woman in a thick dress that Bayard supposes to be an allegory of medicine but who if she had her eyes blind-folded could also be justice incarnate . . .

It is gone midnight. The session begins: a voice rings out. It’s Bifo who speaks first, the man from Radio Alice who set Bologna ablaze in ’77. He quotes  a Petrarch canzone that Machiavelli used in the conclusion of The Prince:

Virtue against fury shall advance the fight,

And it in the combat soon shall put to flight:

For the old Roman valor is not dead,

Nor in the Italians breasts extinguished.

The melody of a patriotic anthem arises within the circular amphitheater. Bifo draws the first subject, a line by Gramsci:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new can not be born.”

The two candidates stand either side of the dissecting table, below the audience, as at the center of an arena. Standing, it is easier for them to turn around and address the whole room . . . the marble table glows supernaturally white.

The first candidate – a young man with an Apulian accent, open-shirted, big silver belt buckle begins.

If the dominant class has lost consentement – in other words if it is no longer dirigeante [management] but merely dominante and the only power it holds is of coercition – this signifies precisely that the great masses are detached from traditional ideologies, that they no longer believe in what they believed before . . . it is precisely this interregnum that encourages the birth of what Gramsci called a great variety of morbid symptoms.

The young duelist rotates slowly, declaiming to the whole room. We know exactly what morbid phenomena Gramsci was alluding to. Don’t we? It is the same one that menaces us today. He leaves a pause. He shouts “Fascismo!”


By leading his audience to conjure the idea before he pronounces the word, it is as if, at this instant, he delivers the thought of all his listeners telepathically, creating a sort of collective mental communion by the power of suggestion. The idea of fascism crosses the room like  a silent wave. The young duelist has at least achieved one essential objective: setting the agenda of the debate. And, into the bargain, dramatizing it as intensely as possible: the fascist danger, the still fertile womb, etc.

And yet there is a difference between the situation in today and Gramsci’s era. Today we no longer live under the threat of fascism. Fascism is already established in the heart of the government. It writhes there like larvae. Fascism is no longer the catastrophic consequence of a state in crisis and a dominant class that has lost control of the masses. It is no longer the sanction of the ruling class but its insidious recourse, its extension, designed to contain the advance of progressive forces. This is no longer fascism supported openly but a sinking, shadowy, ashamed fascism, a fascism not of soldiers but shifty politicians, not a party of youth but a fascism of old people, a fascism of secret, dubious sects made up of aging spies in the pay of racist bosses who want to preserve the status quo but who are suffocating Italy inside a deadly cocoon. It is a cousin who makes embarrassing jokes during dinner but who we still invite to family meals. It is no longer Mussolini, it is the Freemasons of Propaganda Due.

There are boos from the audience. The young Apulian need only wrap up now: Incapable of imposing itself completely, but sufficiently established in every echelon of the  state machinery to prevent any change of government (he wisely says nothing about the historic compromise), fascism in its larval form is no longer the menace hovering over a never-ending crisis, but is the very condition of that crisis’s permanence. The crisis that has mired Italy for years will be resolved only when fascism is eradicated from the state. And for that, he says, raising his fist, “La lotta continua!”[the struggle continues!]

Applause.

Although his opponent will offer a strong defense of the negrienne idea that the crisis is no longer a passing or possibly cyclical moment, the product of a dysfunctional or exhausted system, but the necessary engine of a mutant, polymorphic capitalism obliged to keep moving forward under pressure, citing as evidence the election of Thatcher and the imminent election of Reagan, he will be defeated by two votes to one. In the audience’s opinion, the two duelists will have put on a high quality show, justifying their rank of dialectician (the fourth of the seven levels.) But the young Apulian will certainly have drawn some advantage from speaking against fascism.

It’s the same thing for the next duel : “Cattolicesimo e marxismo.” (a great Italian classic.)

The first duelist talks about Saint Francis of Assisi, about mendicant orders, about Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Mathew, about worker priests, about liberation theology in South America, about Christ driving the money changers from the temple, and concludes by making Jesus the first authentic Marxist-Leninist.

Uproar in the amphitheater. Bianca applauds noisily. The scarf gang lights a joint. Stefano uncorks a bottle that he brought with him just in case.

The second duelist can talk all he wants about the opium of the people, about Franco and the Spanish Civil War, about Pius XII and Hitler, about the collusion between the Vatican and the Mafia, about the Inquisition, about the Counter-reformation, about the Crusades as the perfect example of an imperialist war, about the trials of Jan Hus, Bruno, and Galileo. But its hopeless. The audience is impassioned. Everyone gets to their feet and starts singing “Bella Ciao,” even though this has no connection with anything. With the crowd fully behind him, the first duelist wins by three votes to zero.


The next duel pits a young woman against an older man; the question is about soccer and the class struggle; Bianca explains to Simon that the country has been rocked by “Totonero,” a match-fixing scandal involving the players of Juventus, Lazio, Perugia . . . and also Bologna.


Once again, against all expectations, it is the young woman who wins by defending the idea that the players are proletarians like other workers and that the club bosses are stealing their hard work.

The night wears on, and the time is come for the digital duel. The silence of the statues – Gallienus, Hippocrates, the Italian anatomists, the flayed men, and the woman on the tray- contrasts with the agitation of the living. People smoke, drink, chat, eat picnics.

Bifo summons the duelists. A dialectician is challenging a peripatetician.

A man takes his place next to the dissecting table. It’s Antonini. And facing him, stiff-backed and severe with her immaculate bun, Luciano’s mother walks down the steps to the dissecting table.

Bifo draws the subject: “Gli intellettuali e il potere”. Intellectuals and power. It is the prerogative of the lower-ranked player to begin – the dialectician.

In order for the subject to be discussed, it is up to the first duelist to problematize it. In this case, that’s easy to work out: Are intellectuals the enemies or the allies of those in power? It’s simply a question of choosing. For or against? Antonini decides to criticize the caste to which he belongs, the caste that fills the amphitheater. Intellectuals as accomplices with those in power. Cosi sia.

Intellectuals: the functionaries of the superstructures that participate in the construction of the hegemony. So, Gramsci again: all men are intellectuals, true, but not all men serve the function of intellectuals in society, which consists in working for the spontaneous consent of the masses. Whether ‘organic” or “traditional,” the intellectual always belongs to an “economic-corporative” logic. Organic or traditional, he is always in the service of those in power, present, past, or future.

The salvation of the intellectual, according to Gramsci? Becoming one with the Party. Antonini laughs sardonically. But the Communist Party itself I so corrupt! How could it provide redemption for anyone these days? Compromesso storico, sto cazzo! Compromise leads to compromised principles.

The subversive intellectual? Ma fammi il piacere! He recites a phrase from another man’s film: “Think about what Suetonius did for the Caesars! You start with the ambition to denounce something and you end up an accomplice.”

Theatrical bow.

Prolonged applause.

It’s the old lady’s turn to speak.

“Io so.”

She to begins with a quotation, but she choses Pasolini. His now-legendary “J’accuse,’ published in the Corriere della Sera in 1974.

“I know the names of those responsible for the massacre of Milan in 1969. I know the names of those responsible for the massacre of Brescia and Bologna in 1974. I know the names of the important people who, with the aid of the CIA and the Greek colonels, and the Mafia, launched the anti Communist crusade, then tried to pretend they were anti-fascist. I know the names of those who, between two Masses, gave instructions and assured the protection of old generals, young neo-fascists, and ordinary criminals. I know the names of the serious and important people behind comic characters and drab characters. I know the names of serious and important people behind the tragic young people who have offered themselves as hired killers. I know all these names and I know all the crimes – the attacks on institutions and massacres –of which they are guilty.”

The old woman growls and her trembling voice rings out in the Archiginnasio.

“I know. But I have no proof. Not even any clues. I know because I am an intellectual, a writer, who strives to follow everything that happens, to read everything that is written on this subject, to imagine all that is unknown or shrouded in silence; who puts together disparate facts, gathering the fragmentary, disordered pieces of an entire, coherent political situation, who restores logic where randomness, madness, and mystery seems to reign.”

Less than a year after that article, Pasolini was found murdered, beaten to death on a beach in Ostia.

Gramsci dead in prison. Negri imprisoned. The world changes because intellectuals and those in power are at war with one another. The powerful win almost every battle, and the intellectuals pay with their lives or their freedom for having stood up to the powerful, and they bite the dust. But not always. And when the intellectual triumphs over the powerful, even posthumously, then the world changes. A man earns the name of intellectual when he gives voice to the voiceless.

Antonini, whose physical integrity is at stake, does not let her finish. He cites Foucault, who says we must “put an end to spokespeople.” Spokespeople do not speak for others, but in their place.

So the old woman responds straight away, insulting Foucault as senza coglioni: didn’t he refuse to intervene, here, in the parricide scandal that shook the whole country three years ago, just after publishing his book on the parricide of Pierre Riviere? What is the point of an intellectual if he doesn’t intervene in a matter that corresponds precisely to his field of expertise?

In response, Antonini says that Foucault, more than anyone else, has exposed the vanity of this posture, this way the intellectual has of (he quotes Foucault again) “giving a bit of seriousness to minor, unimportant disputes” Foucault defines himself as a researcher, not an intellectual. He belongs to the long-term goals of research, not to the agitation of polemic. He said: “Aren’t intellectuals hoping to give themselves greater importance through ideological struggle than they actually have.”

The old woman gasps. She spells it out: Every intellectual, if he correctly carries out the work of heuristic study for which he is qualified and that ought to be his vocation, even if he is in the service of those in power, works against the powerful because, as Lenin said (she turns around theatrically, her gaze sweeping the entire audience), the truth is always revolutionary. “La veritas e sempre rivoluzionaria!”

Take Machiavelli. He wrote The Prince for Lorenzo de Medici: he could hardly have been more of a courtesan. And yet . . . this work, often regarded as the height of political cynicism, is a definitive Marxist manifesto: “Because the aims of the people are more honest than those of the nobles, the nobles wishing to oppress the people, and the people wishing not to be oppressed.” In reality, he did not write The Prince for the Duke of Florence, because it has been published everywhere. By publishing The Prince, he reveals truths that would have remained hidden and reserved exclusively for the purposes of the powerful: so – it’s a a subversive act, a revolutionary act. He delivers the secrets of the Prince to the people. The arcana of political pragmatism stripped of fallacious divine and moral justifications. A decisive act in the liberation of humankind, as all acts of de-consecration are. Through his will to reveal, explain, expose, the intellectual makes war on the sacred. In this, he is always a liberator.

Antonini knows his classics. Machiavelli, he replies, had so little concept of the proletariat that he couldn’t even consider its condition, its needs, its aspirations. Hence, he also wrote: "And when neither their property not their honor is taken from them, the majority of men live content.” In his gilded age, he was incapable of imagining that the overwhelming majority of humankind was (and still is) absolutely lacking in property and honor, and could therefore not have them taken from them . .

The old woman says that this is the very beauty of the true intellectual: he does not need to want to be revolutionary in order to be revolutionary. He does not need to love or even know the people in order to serve them. He is naturally, necessarily Communist. .

Antonini snorts contemptuously that she will have to explain that to Heidegger.

The old woman says that he would do better top reread Malaparte.

Antonini talks about the concept of cattivo maestro, the bad master.

The old woman says that if there was a need to make clear with an adjective that the maestro is bad, that is because the maestro is essentially good.

It is clear there will be no knock-out in this bout, so Bifo whistles to signal the end of the duel.

The two adversaries stare each other,. Their features are hardened, their jaws tense, they are sweating, but the old woman’s bun is still immaculate.

The audience is divided, indecisive.

Bifo’s two fellow judges vote, one for Antonini, the other for Luciano’s mother.

Everyone waits for Bifo’s decision

Bifo votes for the old woman

Monica Vitti turns pales.

Sollers smiles.

Antonini does not flinch.

He places his hand on the dissecting table. One of the judges gets to his feet: a tall, very thin man, armed with a small, blue-bladed hatchet.

When the hatchet chops off Antonini’s finger, the echo of the severed bone mingles with that of the blade hitting marble and the director’s scream.

Monica Vitti bandages his hand with her gauze scarf while the judge respectfully picks up the finger and hands it to the actress.

Bifo proclaims loudly : “Onore agli arringatori.” The audience choruses: Honor to the duelists.

Luciano’s mother returns to sit down next to her son.

As at the end of a movie when the lights have not yet come back up, when the return to the real world is experienced as  a slow, hazy awakening, when the images are still dancing behind our eyes, several minutes pass before the first spectators, stretching their numb legs, stand up and leave the room.

The anatomical theater empties slowly. Bifo and his fellow judges gather pages of notes into cardboard folders then retire ceremoniously. The session of the Logos Club dissolves into the night.

Simone Weil and MLKJr. by Robert Coles

Simone Weil stumbled into an experience familiar in the history of social observation among intellectuals who have wanted to see firsthand how others live and share their fate for ethical as well as documentary purposes. On the one hand, there is the anticipated scene of people down on their luck: children sick, parents without work or barely able to feed their families, schooling thoroughly inadequate, if at all available, abysmal sanitation – a sad litany known to public health doctors  and nurses, muckraking journalists and welfare workers. And yet, in our ghettos today or in those Portuguese villages, an outsider willing to stop and look and listen (and remove any ideological glasses he or she happens to be wearing) will soon enough become confounded by something else waiting there to be noticed: people down and out, true, but capable, some of them, of thoughtfulness, perseverance, and an impressive kind of stoic forbearance. Sometimes those same people will show a personal honor, a courtesy and civility, a hospitality that make one go back home and take another look there, at one’s neighbors, oneself. How does one comprehend  them, in all their vanity, their conceits and deceits?

Simone Weil was too smart and tough to romanticize the poor as individuals, or poverty as a condition. She was also to observant and honest to sweep the dilemma under the rug and keep reciting the same old formulaic banalities. Instead, she bowed to fate in all its ironic, paradoxical, inconsistent, and ambiguous nature: those who have nothing materially can have a moral or spiritual strength, whereas those who seem to have everything that the world has to offer in the way of of possessions and power can be moral idiots, or maybe morally adrift and hungry, they know not for what. . . .


Martin Luther King often asked himself why people misunderstand or hate others, and so doing, do themselves so much damage.

I have begun to realize how hard it is for a lot of people to think of living without someone to look down upon, really look down upon. It is not just that they will feel cheated out of someone to hate; it is that they will be compelled to look more carefully at themselves, at what they don’t like in themselves. My heart goes out to people I hear called rednecks; they have little, if anything, and hate is a possession they can still call upon reliably, and it works for them. I have less charity in my heart for the well-to-do and well-educated people – for their snide comments, cleverly rationalized ones, for the way they mobilize their political and moral justifications to suit their own purposes. No one calls them to account. The Klan is their whipping boy. Someday all of us will see that when we start going after a race or a religion, a type, a region, a section of the Lord’s humanity – then we are cutting into His heart, and we are bleeding badly ourselves. But then, I guess there’s lots of masochism around!*

It was not false modesty that led Simone Weil to write, in a July 1943 letter to her parents a month before she died:

Some people feel in a confused way that there is something to what I have been saying, arguing for. But once they have made a few polite remarks about my intelligence their conscience is clear. After which, they listen to me or read me with the same hurried attention which they give to everything, making up their minds definitely about each separate little hint of an idea as it appears: “I agree with this,” “I don’t agree with that, “This is marvelous,” “That’s completely idiotic. In the end they say “Very Interesting,” and pass on to something else. They have avoided fatigue. What else can one expect? I am convinced that the most fervent Christians among them don’t concentrate their attention much more when they are praying or reading the Gospel. Why imagine that it is better elsewhere? I have seen some of those elsewheres. As for posterity, before there is a generation with muscle and power of thought the books and manuscripts of our day will surely have disappeared.

*Spoken in the course of a personal interview, January 10, 1963, in Atlanta, Georgia

Terror in Perspective by Sophie Wahnich

[First I rely on an except from Zizek’s forward to give readers a sense of what’s going on in Wahnich’s book.]


When, in 1953, Zhou En Lai, the Chinese premier, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what he thought about the French Revolution; Chou replied: ‘It is still to early to tell.’ The events of 1990 proved him spectacularly right: with the disintegration of the ‘people’s democracies’, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins.

Nowhere is the dictum ‘every history is the history of the present’ more true than in the case of the French Revolution; its historiographical reception has always closely mirrored the twists and turns of later political struggles. The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is a predictably flat rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning. The product of the godless modern mind, it is at the same time interpreted as God’s judgment on humanity’s wicked ways – so its traces should of course be kicked over as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude is a more differentiated one: its formula is ‘1789 without 1793’. In short, what sensible people want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution that does not smell of a revolution. Francois Furet proposes another liberal approach: he tried to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly. In short, Furet’s aim was to de-eventalize the French Revolution: it is no longer (as for a tradition stemming from Kant and Hegel) the defining moment of modernity, but a local accident with no global significance, one conditioned by the specifically French tradition of absolute monarchy. Jacobin state centralism is only possible, then, against the background of the ‘L’etat c’est moi’ of Louis XIV. There was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc., but – as the English example demonstrates – the same could have been much more effectively achieved in a more peaceful way. . .  Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the ‘passion of the Real’ : If you say A- equality, human rights and freedoms – then you should not shirk its consequences but instead gather the courage to say B – that terror needed to really defend and assert A.


Both liberal and conservative critics of the French Revolution present it as a founding event of modern ‘totalitarianism’: the taproot of all the worst evils of the twentieth century- the Holocaust, the Gulag, up to the 9/11 attacks- is to be found in the Jacobin ‘Reign of Terror’. The perpetrators of Jacobin crimes are either denounced as bloodthirsty monsters, or, in a more nuanced approach, one admits that they were personally honest and pure, but then adds that this very feature made their fanaticism all the more dangerous. The conclusion is thus the well-known cynical wisdom: better corruption than ethical purity, better a direct lust for power than obsession with one’s mission.

Wahnich’s book systematically undermines this predominant doxa. In a detailed historical analysis of the stages of Jacobin Terror, she first demonstrates how this Terror was not an uncontrolled explosion of destructive madness, but a precisely planned and controlled attempt to prevent such an explosion. She does what Furet wanted to do, but from the opposite  perspective: instead of denouncing Terror as an outburst of some eternal ‘totalitarian’ which explodes from time to time (millenarian peasants’ revolts, twentieth century communist revolutions . . .), Wahnick provides its historical context, resuscitating all the dramatic tenor of the revolutionary process. And then, in a detailed comparison between French Revolutionary Terror and recent fundamentalist terrorism, she renders visible their radical discontinuity, especially the gap that separates their underlying notions of justice. The first step towards correct politics is to break with false symmetries and similarities.


However, what is much more interesting is that, beneath all these diverging opinions, there seems to be a shared perception that 1989 marks the end of the epoch which began in 1789 – the end of a certain ‘paradigm’, as we like to put it today: the paradigm of a revolutionary process that is focused on taking over state power and then using this power as a lever to accomplish global transformation. Even the ‘postmodern’ Left (from Antonio Negri to John Holloway) emphasizes that a new revolution should break with this fetishization of state power as the ultimate prize and focus on the much deeper ‘molecular’ level of transforming daily practices. It is at this point that Wahnick’s book intervenes: its underlying  message is that this shift to ‘molecular’ activities outside the scope of state power is in itself a symptom of the Left’s crisis, and indication  that today’s Left (in the developed countries) is not ready to confront the topic of violence in all its ambiguity – a topic which is usually obfuscated by the fetish of “Terror”. This ambiguity was clearly described more than a century ago by Mark Twain, who wrote apropos of the French Revolution in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”:

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years . .,. Our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . .A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief Terror which we have all have been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror  - that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

[The ‘Reign of Terror’ was a controlled response to the threat and dread evoked by the success of counter-revolutionary forces as well as in in-discriminant slaughter of the guilty and innocent alike in the September massacres. The rage of the people had to be channeled, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had to be defended. The principle of equality- not so much in the egalitarian sense- but in the sense of the full participation of each individual- whether poor or rich- in the sovereignty of the  State, that politics is the home of liberty- and freedom is the condition where each plays the role of guarantor of the say of others. ‘L’etat c’est moi ‘ writ large. You may not be able to petition God to any effect, but you must be free to petition the State. Wapnich contrasts this notion of freedom to that which conceives itself as let loose from the strictures, responsibilities and risks of a political life, with all the indifference to the fate of our fellow citizens that entails. Thus, Wahnich writes:

The passion of the revolutionaries was not passion for the poor, but rather passion for declared, inviolable and sacred rights, the passion for justice and equality (in politics). These were the values, rather than homogenizing egalitarianism, that founded human identity as an identity in which life was worth nothing if there was no respect for the rights that transformed it into a universal political existence.

With Thermidor, citizens had to renounce the expression of their point of view; they no longer had access to the political logos. In terms of the deputy Rouzet, ‘the citizens must not be tempted to substitute reasoning for he submission he owes to the law.’ Ejection of the revolutionary democratic model in which, in the face of the governments that were always assumed to be fallible, each citizen was responsible for maintain the rights of man and the citizen, was the Thermidorian characteristic. It was accompanied by rejection of universal suffrage, and those reforms of civil law that led to more egalitarian practices between men and women, as well as among heirs with a view to reducing the disparities of wealth that resulted from birth. .  .

Thermidor inaugurated for our age the reign of emotional victimhood. If there was competition, it was no longer to produce a hierarchy of heroes or martyrs, but rather a hierarchy of victims. Only those who had suffered by losing a loved one to the guillotine could drown their sorrows at certain balls reserved for them, where they aestheticized their status by wearing the famous thread of red silk against their bare necks. . .


Anger and justice were  the key words of the ‘terror-response’ of the French Revolutionaries, as they are today, but the forms and sites of profaned  sacrality have fundamentally changed. Where formerly it was an attack on the body that represented the political project, represented the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens [inscribed on the dead body of the murdered Marat, for example], which called for heroism in the face of profanation, now it is an attack on the body that represents a humanism outside of politics which presupposes this resort to heroism.* These bodies divested of their responsibility for common political existence are the effective representation of the American political project – a project that assumes that the veritable mode of liberty consists in no longer acknowledging any such responsibility [as if no fault or guilt could possibly be attached to what went on in the World Trade Center before it was utterly destroyed]. This absence of knowledge leads to a disinterest in the lives of others, in their equal or unequal value. The desire to promote equality in free action on a cosmopolitan scale now appears inconceivable. . .

Nowadays, it does not matter which body is cruelly affected and for what reason; the only worthwhile thing is the ‘beautiful day of life’,  whatever this might be. To destroy it always means producing a victim and becoming guilty. Walter Benjamin protested this kind of morality. In his text on violence and la, in fact, Benjamin criticized a ‘theorem’ that has become a virtual rule in the west, namely

“the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal and even vegetable life, or limit to human life. Their argument, exemplified in an extreme case by the revolutionary killing of an oppressor, runs as follows: ‘If I do not kill, I shall never establish the world dominion of justice . . .that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist . . . We, however, profess that higher even than  the happiness and justice of existence stands existence itself. . .but the proposition that existence stands higher than  just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life . . . Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, any more than it can be aid to coincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even the uniqueness of his bodily person.”

It is the theory of an ordinary humanity founded on an indescribable or undiscoverable citizenship,[ that citizenship which, in truth, is the foundation of liberty].

 *of the police and first respondors or those victims and loved ones who become the objects of ‘our thoughts and prayers’

Strong Truths by Slavoj Zizek

When we are dealing  with ‘strong truths’ (les veritas fortes), shattering insights, asserting them entails symbolic violence. When la patrie est en danger, Robespierre said, one should fearlessly state the fact that ‘the nation is betrayed. This truth is known to all Frenchmen: ‘Lawgivers, the danger is immanent; the reign of truth has to begin: we are courageous enough to tell you this; be courageous enough to hear it.’ In such a situation, there is no place for a neutral position. In his speech celebrating the dead of 10 August 1792, Abbe Gregoire declared: ‘there are people who are so good that they are worthless; and in a revolution which engages in the struggle of freedom against despotism, a neutral man is a pervert who, without any doubt, waits for how the battle will turn out to decide which side to take.’ Before we dismiss these lines as ‘totalitarian’, let us recall a later time when the French patrie was again en danger, the situation after the French defeat in 1940, when none other than General de Gaulle, in his famous radio address from London, announced to the French people the ‘strong truth’: France is defeated, but the war is not over; against the Petainist collaborators one must insist that the struggle goes on. The exact conditions of this statement are worth recalling: even Jacques Duclos, the second-strongest person in the French Communist Party, admitted in private conversation that if, at that moment, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Petain would have won 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to the Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who spoke on behalf of the true France (on behalf of France as such, not only on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’!). What he was saying was deeply true even if, ‘democratically’, it was not only without legitimization but also clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. (And the same goes for Germany: it was a tiny minority actively resisting  Hitler that stood for Germany, not the active Nazis or the undecided opportunists.)

This is not a reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth – as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology. There can be democratic elections which enact  an event of Truth - elections in which, against sceptic-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion – the exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves the elections as such are not a medium of Truth.


This position of a minority which stands for All is more than ever relevant today, in our post-political epoch in which a plurality of opinion reigns: under such conditions, the universal Truth is by definition a minority position. As Sophie Wahnich has pointed out, in a democracy corrupted by media, what ‘freedom of the press without the duty to resist’ amounts to is ‘the right to say anything in a political relativist manner instead of defending the ‘demanding and sometimes lethal ethics of truth.”[*] In such a situation, the uncompromising insistent voice of truth (about ecology, about biogenetics, about the excluded . . .) cannot but appear as ‘irrational;’ in its lack of consideration for the opinions of others, in its refusal of the spirit of pragmatic compromise, in its apocalyptic finality. Simone Weil offered a simple and poignant formulation of this partiality of truth:

There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity itself – and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All others lie.

The slum dwellers are indeed the living dead of global capitalism: alive, but dead in the eyes of the polis.


The term ‘eternal Truth’ should be read here in a properly dialectical way, as referring to eternity grounded in a unique temporal act (as in Christianity, where eternal Truth can only be experienced and enacted by endorsing the temporal-historical singularity of Christ). What grounds a truth is the experience of suffering and courage, sometimes in solitude, not the size or force of a majority. This, of course, does not mean that there are infallible criteria for determining the truth: its assertion involves a kind of wager, a risky decision; one has to cut  out its path, sometimes even enforce it, and at first those who tell the truth are as a rule not understood, they struggle (with themselves and others), looking for the proper language in which to express it. It is the full recognition of this dimension of risk and wager, of the absence of any external guarantee, that distinguishes an authentic truth engagement from  any form of ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fundamentalism.”[**]

But, again: how are we to distinguish this ‘demanding and sometimes lethal ethics of truth’ from sectarian attempts to impose one’s own position on everyone else? How can we be sure that the voice of the minoritarian ‘part of no-part’ is indeed the voice of universal truth and not merely that of a particular grievance? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the truth we are dealing with is not ‘objective’, but a self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of the enunciation. In his (unpublished) Seminar 18 on ‘a discourse which would not be that of a semblance’, Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: ‘Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes the truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.’ There is nothing ‘theological;’ in this precise formulation, only an insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the ‘test’ of the analyst’s interpretation lies in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient. This is how one should also (re)read Marx’s Thesis XI: the ‘test’ of Marxist theory is the truth-effect it unleashes in its addressees (the proletarians), in transforming them into revolutionary subjects.

The problem, of course, is that today there is no revolutionary discourse able to produce such a truth-effect – so what are we to do? The quintessential text here in Lenin’s wonderful short essay “On Ascending a High Mountain, written in 1922, when, after winning the Civil War against all odds, the Bolsheviks had to retreat into the New Economic Policy, giving a much wider scope to the market economy and private property. Lenin uses the simile of a climber who has returned to the valley after his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak in order to describe what a retreat means in a revolutionary process, i.e., how one retreats without opportunistically betraying one’s fidelity to the Cause:

Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He find himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more  difficult for our imaginary traveler than the ascent – it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not the exhilaration that one feels going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. . . .The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; the chuckle gleefully and shout: ‘He’ll fall in a minute! Serves him right, the lunatic!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee and behave mostly like Judas Golovlyov. They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: “It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did we not, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back!) He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’

After enumerating the achievements  of the Soviet state, Lenin goes on to focus on what was not done:


But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions ( and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes).And there is nothing absolutely terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism – that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that –we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its maneuvering ability; we have kept clear  heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching n extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).


This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line from Westward Ho: ‘Try again. fail again. Fail better.’ Lenin’s conclusion – ‘to begin from the beginning over and over again’- makes it clear that he is not talking merely of slowing down in order to defend what has already been achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point: one should ‘begin from the beginning;’, not from where one managed to get to in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual process, but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning again and again. This is exactly where we are today, after the ‘obscure disaster’ of 1989. As in 1922, the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: “Serves you right, you lunatics who wanted to enforce their totalitarian vision on society! Others try to conceal their malicious glee, raising their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say; ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision of creating a just society! Our heart beats in sympathy with you, but our reason told us that your noble plans could end only in misery and new forms of servitude!’ While rejecting any compromise with these seductive voices, we certainly now have to ‘begin from the beginning’, not ‘building  on the foundations of the revolutionary epoch of the twentieth century (from 1917 to 1989 or precisely, 1968) but ‘descending to the starting point in order to choose a different path.

[*] in his essay “The Biographical Fashion”, Leo Lowenthal writes that it [biographical literature]  “takes on almost mystical traits in which anything and everything merges into a great gray sameness. This is the mystique of relativism, which is shared by victims and masters alike. To the latter it is the appropriate expression for the conservation of power at any price, the former confess almost masochistically how little they value their own thoughts or the application of their minds to serious intentions.”

[**] For those for whom God exists (in the guise of the big Other of History whose instruments they are), everything is permitted . . .However, the theological reference can also function in the opposite way: not in the fundamentalist sense of directly legitimizing political measures as an imposition of the divine will, whose instruments are the revolutionaries, but in the sense that the theological dimension serves as a kind of safety valve, a mark of the openness and uncertainty of the situation which prevents political agents from conceiving of their acts in terms of self-transparency -  ‘God’ means that we should always bear in mind that the outcome of our acts will never fit our expectations. This imperative to ‘mind the gaps’ refers not only to the complexity of the situation in which we intervene; it concerns above all the utter ambiguity of the exercise of our own will.- ‘Afterword’, page 174-5