Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and its Fate After the Cold War 9781441147554, 9781441168085, 9781501301605, 9781441129208

Table of contents :
HalfTitle
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
The situation
The definition
The word and the concept
Objections
On this book
1 The Russian Anti-Communist Revolution (1985–99) and the French Revolution (1789–99)
The Russian anti-communist revolution
The Russian anti-communist revolution and the French Revolution
Melancholia: Its definition and its sources
Conclusion
2 What Does It Mean to Say “No”? Theories of Negativity
Introduction
Negativity in philosophy
Negativity and politics
Conclusion: Negativity and revolution
3 Theories of Revolution
Kant’s theory of revolution
Hölderlin on revolution: Leisure and reversal
Hegel on the French Revolution: Kings and cabbages
Marx’s negative revolution
Sorel and Benjamin: Critique of pure negation
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The impasse of the passage
Badiou and the negativity of revolution
Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Negative Revolution

About the Series The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an ongoing dialogue between contemporary European philosophy and political theory. Following Hannah Arendt’s and Leo Strauss’s repeated insistence on the qualitative distinction between political theory and political philosophy, the series showcases the lessons each discipline can draw from the other. One of the most significant outcomes of this dialogue is an innovative integration of 1) the findings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction (to name but a few salient currents) and 2) classical as well as modern political concepts, such as sovereignty, polity, justice, constitution, statehood, self-determination, etc. In many instances, the volumes in the series both re-conceptualize age-old political categories in light of contemporary philosophical theses and find broader applications for the ostensibly non- or apolitical aspects of philosophical inquiry. In all cases, political thought and philosophy are featured as equal partners in an interdisciplinary conversation, the goal of which is to bring about a greater understanding of today’s rapidly changing political realities. The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Other volumes in the series include: Deconstructing Zionism by Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala Heidegger on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback, Michael Marder and Peter Trawny The Metaphysics of Terror by Rasmus Ugilt The Voice of Conscience by Mika Ojakangas

Negative Revolution Modern Political Subject and its Fate After the Cold War Artemy Magun

N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 © Artemy Magun, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. eISBN: 978-1-4411-2920-8 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Contents

Introduction The situation The definition The word and the concept Objections On this book 1 The Russian Anti-Communist Revolution (1985–99) and the French Revolution (1789–99) The Russian anti-communist revolution The Russian anti-communist revolution and the French Revolution Melancholia: Its definition and its sources Conclusion 2

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What Does It Mean to Say “No”? Theories of Negativity Introduction Negativity in philosophy Negativity and politics Conclusion: Negativity and revolution Theories of Revolution Kant’s theory of revolution Hölderlin on revolution: Leisure and reversal Hegel on the French Revolution: Kings and cabbages Marx’s negative revolution Sorel and Benjamin: Critique of pure negation Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The impasse of the passage Badiou and the negativity of revolution Conclusion

1 1 4 6 11 12 15 15 45 59 71 73 73 82 117 125 127 127 170 187 193 201 209 229 238

Conclusion

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Notes Index

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Introduction

The situation This book tries to address the history and theory of revolution from a contemporary standpoint, which is not the most encouraging perspective. Revolutions do happen, and happen very often. However, they are viewed less as world-historical events and more as part of the long historical process of democratization and liberalization. Not that this is entirely wrong, but first of all, a “liberal,” “velvet,” “minimal,” or “catching up” revolution is insufficient to ground and legitimize the late modern state which is, essentially, a postrevolutionary state. It is also too weak to give negative and/or utopian energies to a human subject living in this state: a subject whose moral responsibility and methodic rationality is implied by the organization of our sociopolitical regimes. The good news contained in this book, is that perhaps revolutionary energy is still present in these new revolutions, in spite of their failure to produce a genuine historical break or a long-term democratic engagement. But, it is present negatively. Negativity contains a particular latency: we tend to ignore our negative activity, as it is, in a sense, a part of what we negate. Therefore, a revolution that is fully negative appears to be disappointing: where are the noble ideals, utopias, quasi-religious creeds, etc. But, as I will show, negativity is not only the boring, unproductive crumbling of things, it also bears a positive, though unstable, being within itself. All great historical revolutions have taken the form of violent breaks with the past—even though incomplete. It is hard to say whether hope and imagination did actually prevail over saturation and exhaustion which made the people, in 1989 or 1917, say “enough” to the authorities and go to war against them. Today, after two years (2011–12) of major revolutions and protest movements throughout the world, there is hope and promise, on the one hand, but on the other, there is the awareness that, following already established patterns, protests in the developed countries of the “core” happen on a large scale but are innocuous for the regime, whereas protests in the semi-periphery lead to violent revolutions and give power to the people, only to produce a paralyzing split between the nationalist conservatives and the liberal Westernizers. Because these things happen regularly, revolutions gradually start seeming to be internal institutions of the current global political system and not historic breakthroughs.

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In many ways, these events and questions were prefigured 20 years ago during the spectacular downfall of the Eastern bloc, accompanied by the impressive outburst of energy by the people, or by “civil society” as many then said. Then, like today, age-old regimes and leaders crumbled, producing global euphoria through the ease of transformation and emancipation from the past. This was true even though no new programs or creative institutions were built as a result: all ended with the cloning of Western constitutions and joining Western international organizations, there was a slide to nationalist conservatism in those countries that also cloned Western constitutions but were never co-opted into the “West.” There followed, in most postsocialist countries, a large-scale disengagement of masses from politics, which meant that revolutions were not preserved in any sort of seriously democratic institutions. Why do people tend to abandon the live universal after its triumphant victory over dead letter regimes? This book explores this problem, which it translates as the problem of negativity. This book applies the philosophy of negativity and the theories of revolution to a concrete historical case: the fall and transformation of the Soviet regime. I defend and develop the following thesis: the event of the dissolution of the “socialist” regime in the Soviet Union, which began in 1985 and ended in the late 1990s–early 2000s by the consolidation of an authoritarian capitalist regime, strangely perhaps, is to be called a revolution. In its political and philosophical significance, this event belongs to a line of political revolutions that have been shattering the Western world since, at the very least, the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The sequence of events and the politico-anthropological situation in post-Soviet Russia corresponds, in its basic traits, to the internal logic of past revolutions. My task is, however, not to classify the current event according to this or that scheme but to show that it is part of a single, unique—but open and incomplete—event of the European revolution. The history of revolutions is neither a recurrent reproduction of identical phenomena nor (as in the vulgar Marxist model) a gradual sequence of progressive “stages.” It presents us with a series of emancipatory movements, each of which fails to reach its ultimate goal, each of which stumbles in the middle of its course, only to be resurrected and radicalized by a new historical wave which stumbles again and flows back with all its unrealized might. This new conceptual perspective on the current historical moment implies yet another, symmetrical task: to redefine the concept of revolution as it appears from a contemporary point of view. To redefine does not mean to arbitrarily invest the old word with a new meaning. The redefinition of revolution implies a return to earlier theories and accounts of revolution in order to reveal aspects of the concept that have been forgotten or misinterpreted in subsequent traditions—or downplayed already in the original texts. One has, therefore, to reenact in theory what the revolution invokes in practice—a return to the past, a little before the moment (or moments) when history took a “wrong” turn. At the same time, one must consider the developing logic of the history of revolutions. Revolutions at the end of the twentieth century were, as I will show, “negative,” both in their radical denial of the past and in their denial of this denial: the

Introduction

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negativity involved in these revolutions overflowed and extrapolated itself to negate these revolutions and the very subject who accomplished it. From today’s stanpoint, prior revolutions appear to be in many ways “negative” too. At the same time, the current negativity of revolutions is also a result of their historical development, from the past to the present. The negativity of the anti-communist revolutions is explained by the fact that they were “revolutions against revolutions” and that therefore, following the famous Hegelian mechanism of “negation of negation,” they set free the negative element that had been present in the revolution through its replay. Thus, from a negation of something positive that the “first” revolution carried with it, we have come, through revolutionizing the revolution itself, to seeing it as pure negativity. However, in contrast to Hegel’s narrative, we see that in our case, there is nothing to rejoice about. Pure negativity does not institutionalize itself qua positivity but remains negative, thus producing an irrational self-humiliation of the political subject, skepticism and cynicism in the public sphere, and the unconscious status of the very revolutionary event that is taking place. Revolution against a revolution is a form of reflection. People who revolutionized in Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century knew what the revolution was about, and, although they did not like it in principle, unwillingly followed the revolutionary pattern. This, however, is not universal. There has been a new phenomenon in the last 20  years. After a short period of embarrassment and disorientation, democratic forces both in the West and in the periphery regained power, so that the 2000s, surprisingly, was in fact a period of numerous large-scale revolutions, revolutionary attempts, and protest movements. The latest (2011–12) wave of events in the Middle East, United States, and Europe was probably the peak of this tendency, but earlier we have seen “revolutions of color” in the former socialist space, millions gathering on the streets to protest against the war in Iraq, huge demonstrations in France, etc. However, what was significant for the actors and observers of these revolutions was their very occurrence.1 The collective solidarity and courage, the crumbling of a corrupt regime, and the possibility to watch this on TV tend to become a goal in itself. This value of revolution as such also corresponds to the theoretical perspectives on revolution: from Hannah Arendt to Badiou. Thus, we deal also with a reflexive revolution, the one that constitutes a mirror image of the negative revolution that I first described. In both cases, the form abstracts itself from the content, and revolution appears as such: negatively, in the first case, positively, in the second. However, if the negative revolution is, paradoxically, too negative or negativist, so that it does not manage to achieve any positive results, the reflexive “revolution for the sake of revolution” is not negative enough, and, though rejoicing in the streams of desire and games of self-organization, it does not contest society’s dominant values, such as moralism and pacifism in the late bourgeois regimes. Although this book is dedicated to the former, negative kind of reflexive revolutions, one needs to keep in mind the more recent affirmative type of reflexive revolution throughout the analysis.

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The definition I will present here a condensed definition of revolution, which will be developed and problematized later in the book. The main traits of a revolution are as follows: 1. Overthrow of the ruling regime which relies on a religious or quasi-religious ideology and thus draws its legitimacy from outside society. a. The Soviet regime relied on the rationally pragmatic as well as the transcendent, sacral modes of legitimization. Thus, the state apparatus was supplemented by the power structures of the Communist Party, which played a role analogous to that of the church, specifically the Catholic, rather than Orthodox, Church (Stalin once compared it to the “Order of the Knights of the Sword”). The political struggle was framed as a dogmatic debate on passages from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The state relied on a hierarchical order of heroes, with the mummified Lenin on top—in an exact parallel to the Orthodox cult of saints. b. George Bataille once observed2 that in spite of the traditional Marxist doctrine, historically, there were no serious revolutions that challenged the bourgeois regime. In the revolutions of the last two centuries, what is targeted are the remains of feudal, hierarchical society in the liberal state. Bataille was writing before the revolution of 1968. The latter can be interpreted as contradicting his claim but may also be read as confirming it and exposing the theologico-political elements of the liberal state itself. This liberal capitalist state is inseparable from the “remains” of the theologico-political, as this was proven already by Marx who showed that the capital itself was a religious entity. Meanwhile, in spite of these remains, the liberal state bears in itself the unfulfilled drive of emancipation from external authority. The revolution coincides therefore with the infinite task of secularization (finding a place in this world), which still remains our horizon. 2. Foundation and ideological legitimization of a new state regime that would draw on society itself for its legitimacy. Political subjectivization: the emergence of the point of view of an autonomous (collective or individual) subject that strives to master and appropriate the historical process. a. Revolution, as I treat it in my book, is a modern phenomenon, and its logic is closely linked to the notion of subject, which is central for modernity’s self-understanding. The metaphysical fiction of self-mastery inherent in the notion of subject has been largely and justly criticized in twentieth-century thought. However, my position, in the case of the subject as in the case of revolution, is that these concepts have to be preserved, but criticized or deconstructed. What is important is the attempt at self-mastery: a reflexive turn, which implies not just the commanding of oneself but also self-stoppage and paralysis. However, the project of self-mastery/self-annulment necessarily fails and opens a constitutive internal gap in political action or consciousness.

Introduction

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b. Revolution is less a point of birth of new social structures than it is a retrospective attempt to legitimize, master them, and resolve the new tensions brought by the change. Alexis de Tocqueville argued convincingly in his Old Régime and the French Revolution3 that socioeconomic modernization had been largely accomplished by the time the French Revolution erupted. The same, to a lesser extent, is true for the Soviet Union where the economy had increasingly developed into an unofficial “market” of nonmonetary exchange in the 1970s and 1980s, and communist ideology was merely a formal façade. c. Revolutionary regimes, in their early stages, are driven toward a democratic form of government by the very logic of revolution, as they get rid of all external principles that could justify a hierarchy. d. The legal foundation of a new regime, which may seem to be a mere formality, is in fact highly important as a symbol of internal rupture in society and in the subject, which leads to internal struggle in political life as well as in the psychic life of an individual. 3. The political crisis does not stop with the fall of the old system of power but only deepens and broadens, becoming an internal crisis. a. The old regime usually falls easily as society is consolidated in opposing it. The main events of the revolution happen afterward, when society splits, and a long and destructive period of internal struggle begins. Both the French Revolution of the 1790s and the Russian Revolution of the 1980s and 1990s followed this sequence. b. Anthropologically, revolutionary societies are characterized by various forms of self-negation: stagnation, melancholia, deprivation, and suffering. This feature, as I will show later, is common to both the French and the Russian revolutions. 4. A revolution is an event with political and epistemological implications. It blocks the historical horizon as well as opens it—through the mediation of this blockage.   A revolution reverses our representations of past and future and retroactively determines the “past” epoch (L’Ancien régime, “the communist period”)—where not only the memories but also the unaccomplished projects of most people “remain.” Revolution, for its part, does not immediately lead to the formulation of radically new ideas or projects. Neither the French Revolution nor the Russian October Revolution brought forth any completely new ideas about politics. Their leaders predominantly drew on existing political theories, being too busy and uncertain to invent new ones (the American Revolution, with its “Federalist papers,” is here an exception; the programmatic book of E. Sieyès was written just before the French Revolution).   Revolution blocks the access of the subject to his/her own future so that she/ he no longer knows what to expect from himself/herself and cannot plan his/her own life normally. Paradoxically, because of this block, revolution pushes, in a

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second turn, to search for radically new and unexpected political decisions—to define the emerging situations as absolutely novel and unprecedented. Thus, both the French Revolution of 1789 and the October Revolution of 1917 led to political and philosophical reflections on the novelty of the historical situation; of course, these reflections came later.All of this is true even of such revolutions as the anti-Soviet one, which did not really aspire to be a historical breakthrough. The radical nature of change creates a sense of circulation and recombination which is captured in the word “revolution.” In this sense, it is important to notice revolution at the moment it happens and not miss the sense of openness that it brings.

The word and the concept History of the word The Latin word “revolutio” first appears in the Christian literature of late Antiquity, and applies to such phenomena as the rolling away of the stone from Christ’s grave or to the wandering of the soul.4 In the Middle Ages, the word referred to an astronomic and astrological notion: the circular movement of the luminaries around the Earth. In the twelfth century, the word, in its astronomic meaning, appeared in the new vernacular languages. Soon enough, however, in the fourteenth century, the word took on a political flavor and came to designate civic disorder and the change of government. This happened in Italy where such political changes were common events in the life of the city-states. Thus, the first known political use of “revolution” (Italian “rivoluzioni”) belongs to Italian writer of chronics Giovanni Villiani: “. . . che in così piccolo tempo la città nostra ebbe tante novità e varie rivoluzioni.” At about the same time, and still with reference to Italian politics, the word appeared in French as “revolucion” or “révolution.” It is hard to say if this political meaning is a metaphorical transfer of the astrological and astronomic meaning (as maintained, for example, by Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck with his coauthors) or if it developed independently (as argued by Ilan Rachum). The latter is quite plausible since the political use of the word corresponded well with the medieval view of secular history as a circular, destructive, and unstable “fortuna.”5 In any case, contamination of the astronomic/ astrological meaning in later usage of the word is certain. Through derivation from or contamination with the notion of the circular course of planets, “revolution” came simply to designate temporal change, referring to a period of time rather than to an instantaneous happening. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the word is used occasionally to refer to temporal change, usually with connotations of catastrophe and instability. Thus, in the melancholic phrase of Hamlet, “Here’s the fine revolution, if we had the trick to see’t” (Hamlet, Act V, scene 1), “revolution” refers to nothing else but death— while this death is integral to the impenetrable turmoil of fortuna. Still, in this period, the astronomic meaning persisted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this

Introduction

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astronomic meaning acquired particular popularity with the publication and diffusion of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). In the context of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s–50s, “revolution” again came to be used as a political term. However, this usage was relatively rare and remained indecisive. Outside England, the political usage of the word (as suggested by Koselleck and Rachum) was taboo, since it implied the natural and inevitable character of change and presented it as a fait accompli. The official discourse preferred terms with a clearly negative connotation: rebellion, sedition, and others. The word “revolution” came to the foreground of political discourse after the Glorious Revolution in England (1688). It was actively used by proponents of the revolution, for example, Locke who emphasized return to usurped freedoms and rights. The circles in France (mainly, the Protestants) that were sympathetic with the new English regime also used the word “revolution” to stress the “restorative” element of the change. Gradually, the official opponents of the English government had to accept this usage to attack the “revolution.”6 With the acceptance of the word “revolution” for the event of 1688, the meaning began to transform radically. It increasingly referred to a singular, unique event of “the” revolution, rather than to the melancholic picture of destructive change in general.7 This revolution was an established, accomplished fact, and thus, the “taboo” on the recognition of a successful revolt was effectively lifted. In the course of the eighteenth century, “revolution” became a “fashionable” word. The American Revolution was already definitively recognized as such. The French Revolution was anticipated, predicted by the philosophes: Voltaire, Mably, Rousseau, and Diderot all speak of their hope and/or fear of future revolutions. Moreover, in their discourse the word underwent a new transformation, which the events of the 1790s would seal. “Revolution” now came to mean an opening into the unknown future rather than a repetition of or a return to the past. “What will be the consequences of this revolution? We do not know,” says Diderot in 1774.8 The change in the meaning of the word from the return of the past toward the opening into the future is, according to Koselleck and his coauthors, the main and definitive change. Still, it appears to me that the authors exaggerate the novelty of this turn to the new. The notion of circular change, or fortuna, has always implied an element of the unpredictable and obscure.9 As the phrase by Shakespeare shows, revolution has always referred to the advent of something that had been hidden from human view. The eighteenth-century turn consists in the projection of time’s obscurity on the linear notion of history and the assimilation of secular, profane change into the concept of the singular, irreversible event framed according to the model of sacred history. The crucial and definitive crystallization of the concept took place after 1789, during and in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Since then, the political meaning of the word has ultimately triumphed over the astronomic one. Revolution became, again, the revolution, with even more force than after 1688. It turned into an ideological value, which was disputed among the revolutionary forces and denounced by the counterrevolution. The French Revolutionaries realized that they were not going to emulate England or America but to establish a new world. Still, they aspired to

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restore the remote Roman Antiquity, which they hoped would create an irreversible foundation. In accordance with the old notion, the revolution was seen as an irresistible force of time (now “history”); the “revolutionary torrent” (Robespierre) was exalted as a moral imperative (each citizen had to make a revolution “of one’s own”10) and as a fruit of free human agency.11 All of this shows that the word “revolution” came to mean a singular historical event with great ontological and epistemological consequences. It was, as Jules Michelet rightly noted, a secular analogue of the Christian Resurrection—a reenactment of the sacred Event—directed against Christianity and the church, which obtained the name of a profane, secular happening par excellence. In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt presents the history of the concept as a descent of the “revolution” from the (astronomic) sky to the earth.12 However, there was also a complementary development: the word designating political turmoil came to mean a unique and revelatory event. Thus, if Arendt’s analysis stresses the “higher” origins of the notion, my reconstruction seeks to de-sublimate the notion of revolution, to bring it back to earth from the skies of sacred history.

The relationship between the word and the concept If we now make an abstraction of the history of the notion and depart from its present form, we will have to explore, from the phenomenological point of view how the word relates to the concept, and how aspects of the concept are reflected in the word. The concept of revolution, as we inherited it, is inseparable from the word “revolution,” and my reading tries to coordinate the logical reading with the structure of the word, in its inherited factuality. The meaning does not have to derive from the etymology, but in the everyday usage of the language inevitably interweaves with the word’s internal structure. The word “revolution” has the prefix “re-” and the root “vol,” derived from the Latin verb “volvo,” to roll, to turn.

The prefix The Latin prefix “re-” means, primarily, opposition, of a countermovement. In accordance with this meaning, it also means return. Only secondarily and by derivation does this prefix carry the meaning of repetition. Therefore, the word “revolution,” which may mean circular and repetitive movement, also has the meaning of forceful resistance. In my logical reconstruction of the concept, I will build on this constellation of meanings inherent in the word structure. Resistance to a force that is active and advancing can be perceived as a return. Indeed, such was the case in all historical revolutions: early modern revolutions simply claimed to retreat toward recent, medieval freedoms, while the French Revolution appealed to the indeterminate, remote past of another people. In each case, the symbolic return is a way to retrospectively appropriate one’s own past, or to reject one’s past and to start from the beginning, to “re-do” and “re-make” history. The limitations on freedom are thus understood temporally as dependence on the past (which one can never master).

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Rejected institutional structures are proclaimed to be a thing of the past, an “Ancien Régime.” The issue of the revolution is, finally, not only a turn to the past but also the reversal of the past and future. The hitherto viable progressive projects are proclaimed to be a thing of the past, while what was supposed to be long accomplished becomes a perspective for the future. Later, in the philosophical reception of the concept of revolution, this reversal of time will, as I go on to show, be often compared to the Copernican “revolution” of the point of view of the universe. As far as the “re-“ points at the return to the past, to the act of memory, it also implies a reflection: a turn of the subject to oneself, a discovery and exploration of interiority (as opposed to the “progressive” movement directed away, toward the outside). In fact, the resurrection of the distant historical past, in a revolution, has to remain a fantasy. The reflection on the interiority of the subject is, on the contrary, the real, actual symptom of this imaginary “resurrection” or “restoration.” This connection between revolution and interiority was developed in the philosophy of German Idealism. Kant, claiming to repeat the reversal of the point of view of Copernicus, manages to reflect upon the interior, subjective nature of forms of human cognition. Hegel goes further and notes the direct link between remembrance and interiorization in a pun on the German word Er-innerung, which becomes one of his central concepts. In its reactive and restorative aspects, the concept of revolution is parallel to such historical events and concepts as the “Reformation” and the “Renaissance.” Although historically these terms have nothing to do with the word “revolution,” theorists of the French Revolution immediately noticed the similarity (Hegel, Heine, Marx, Michelet). Throughout Christian history, all major historical movements started as “renaissances” of Antiquity or as “reforms” and returns to the early period of Christianity. The French Revolution is no exception. This fact has much to do with Christian doctrine: the Messiah has already come, the event has happened, and thus the relation to historical truth is mainly retrospective. This does not prevent new events, be they sacred or secular, from mirroring and reenacting the event of the coming of Christ. This reenactment often happens, however, against the existing heritage of Christianity, as a return to its forgotten roots. The return to Antiquity also depends on the Christian model of time, which imposes a linear break between (pagan) Antiquity and the new (Christian) age. Reversal of history, in both cases, is premised on irreversible linearity, which precedes all possible reversals. Early in the history of the concept, “revolution,” far from designating the human effort of returning to the origin, referred rather to the force of fortuna that threatened to reverse and destroy the projects begun by humans. While the image of time remains circular and pointless, in relation to human lives and deeds the return to the beginning means destruction and death—irreversible. It would therefore be wrong to simply juxtapose the circular “revolution” of the Middle Ages with the linear “revolution” of modernity. In both cases, the word carries a strong connotation of an irreversible disaster, of a destructive, negative force. The concept of revolution as it was formed in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, thus, has the meaning both of irresistible

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disaster and the human effort to reverse the bad fortune and to found a stable state anew.

The root The root “volvo” repeats and redoubles what the prefix already expressed. The circular movement is a movement that constantly returns. With its redundancy, the word “revolution” emphasizes the principle of repetition and points at its infinite excess: the revolution keeps rolling back to the beginning, again and again. The redundancy also alludes to the possible opposition between the two reversals. The reenactment of revolution happens against the revolution and reverses the reversal itself. We will see that this structure of the word expresses well the internal paradox of historical revolutions. The semantics of circular movement is typical for Indo-European words that refer to time or to the events happening in time. “Revolution” is not an exception. In the Russian language, for example, the word for time “vremia,” derives from the root “vert-,” to roll. Another Russian expression “popast’ v oborot,” to get into a difficult and rapidly developing situation, literally means “to get into a revolution.” One can also mention the French word “bouleversement”: a deep, transformative, and disturbing experience. On the one hand, the choice of the circle as a metaphor of time is due to the fact that humans have always chosen cyclical processes (such as day and night or seasons) to represent and measure time. On the other hand, when words for circular motion refer to events, the circularity connotes not only the participation of the event in a great cycle of nature but equally the small “ups and downs” that are inherent in the dynamics of the event itself. Here, the circularity refers not to the orderly cycle but to the unpredictable nature of movement that constantly changes direction. The circular motion, unlike the linear, implies the constant application of force—it may not be inertial. Thus, for example, Newton conceived circular motion (unlike the linear, which is relative to the point of view) as a sign of a true, absolute motion in absolute time and space. Circular motion is a sign that something “truly” happens to you, independent of your will or perspective. Thus it is not by chance that, as I mentioned earlier, the seemingly innocent word “revolution” was censored as an admittance of political change, as a fait accompli, and that it subsequently came to mean the authentic historical event or (in Kant) a sign of such an event. We see that historical changes in the meaning of the word “revolution” correspond to the ambiguities that are present in the internal structure of the word. These historical changes were not univocal and were changes in the predominant meaning of the word rather than the emergence of hitherto nonexistent meanings. Such ambiguities in the word signify a difficulty in the concept. The concept of revolution is paradoxical. It points to the limits of human reason and, therefore, invites serious philosophical elaboration. “Revolution” is both reversible and irreversible, an action of historical force and human effort, a return to the past and an opening into the future. In its circular motion it re-veals the previously hidden truth about the subject and, through its orientation toward the unknown future, exposes the subject’s internal obscurity.

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Meanwhile, it imposes a debt of understanding—what has actually happened? In this book I will try to make sense of the complex and contradictory structure inherent in the concept of revolution.

Objections The choice of the French Revolution as a parallel may seem questionable: why choose a French event while passing in silence the great Russian Revolution of 1917? Is it not obvious that the 1980s anti-communist revolution was happening in conscious reference to the October Revolution of 1917, whose results it wanted to undo? It is obvious indeed, but this is why, for the purposes of this book, the idea is to follow the thrust of the event and temporarily bypass the sedimented spirit of the great Russian Revolution, which, by the 1980s, was seen as the foundation of an authoritarian and hypocritical system. Given the objective crisis of communism as a project, there was a search for a new or old forgotten form of emancipation; inevitably, the former Enlightenment concepts of freedom and justice came under fire as “ideology.” In the process of this revolution against revolution, apart from a conscious return to the precommunist revolutionary tradition, there was, as I will show, a reproduction of the  structural logic of the French Revolution, by virtue of the analogy in the situations and the events. This is not to say that the Revolution of 1917 does not show the symptoms of “negative revolutions”; but, it is less typical in this sense, and should be the subject of a separate study.13 Another obvious objection may be made to my main argument. Why do I deem it necessary to resuscitate the metaphysical, theologico-political, and foundationalist notion of revolution? Isn’t this a hopeless attempt to console melancholic liberal subjects through their identification with imaginary entities? This objection would be valid if I were to understand revolution as an instantaneous advent of freedom, liberty, and fraternity, canceling one epoch and inaugurating another. Such ideological understanding is typically used by the state to legitimize itself while safely “leaving” the moment of its foundation in the past. My reconstruction and deconstruction of the concept of revolution involves, on the contrary, a critique of its ideological, metaphysical, and theological interpretations. I describe the logic of revolution by drawing attention to the actual processes that the fiction of a one-time foundational event both induces and covers up. Revolution is essentially an event of secularization, a retreat of the theologico-political. As such, it belongs both to political theology and secular history. Understanding of the present moment requires passage through the theological notion of history and analysis of the internal inadequacy that allowed it to eclipse. We will understand nothing in the present moment if we simply assume that political theology is gone forever. Most legal and political concepts of the modern liberal-democratic state stem either from medieval theology or from the politics of the ancient city-states—and the latter, although it involved a movement of secularization, was far from being entirely “secular.”14

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This symbolic legal layer of contemporary politics, in which hardly anyone “believes” any longer, continues to be efficient and productive in the material life of the subjects who do not “believe” in it. The legal announcement of the end of an old regime and the inauguration of the new one are not yet, in themselves, an actual revolution. However, this symbolic cut penetrates material reality and induces the complex and contradictory political and psychological processes which make up the “body” of revolution. It is sufficient to read a current newspaper to see that world politics is, in these days, still centered on political theology. Finally, the very notion of the secular is a theological notion. Modern history, especially the history of the concept of revolution that I have just outlined, systematically shows how theology, once put aside, happily resuscitates within hitherto “secular” concepts. The same, and even to a larger degree, is true of the metaphysical implications of most political concepts and institutions, and of their association with philosophical systems that now stand in need of reevaluation. Hence, the only viable approach to political theory is, in my view, the critique (or in twentieth-century words destruction, deconstruction) of theological and metaphysical notions—a critique that must itself use the theological apparatus to proceed. Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse15—this applies first of all to the notion of revolution and now to its revival. My analysis of the concept of revolution is, of course, only a small contribution to the critique of political metaphysics, but it uses its strategy and tactics. The tactics of the critique involves a step back, which is meant to uncover the possibilities of meaning that metaphysics too quickly fixes and sublimates. This step back is meant to prepare the practical jump forward, away from the political theology, toward the new possibilities that are yet unknown. This step back and jump forward are precisely what the revolution itself, with its clumsy, syncopated, pigeon-toed pace (we will see proof of this in my discussion of Kant), is about.

On this book The history of this book is not an easy one. I wrote the first version in 2000–2, as a PhD thesis in Political Science at the University of Michigan, and then reworked it in French for a doctoral dissertation in Philosophy from the University of Strasbourg. Immediately after this, I returned to Russia, where the postrevolutionary élan of anarchy and creativity was still being experienced. At that time, I could not find an English-language publisher, but I did find a Russian, and later a French one, so the book was published in a form rather close to the original thesis. One part of the thesis, the one on Arendt, became an article published in the History of Political Thought, in 2007. I must say that the complexity of the argument and the intimate existential questions that are explored made it difficult for me to develop and revise the book, and it is only now, ten years after, that I was able to do it for the English-language publisher Bloomsbury Press. This is basically a new book on the same topic of negative

Introduction

13

revolution, as it retells the narrative of the Perestroika anew, contains a new division on melancholia, a large chapter on the theory of negativity, and new extensive material on the theories of revolution in political philosophy. What makes the genre of the book special is its attempt at applied philosophy, which uses serious metaphysical discourse for analysis of a concrete historical experience. Therefore, the logic is ascending, even if not fully inductive (as it was in the first version of the book). Chapter  1 starts with the case of Perestroïka and its perplexities, comparison with the French Revolution, and to the melancholia and negativity that unite both. From this empirical intuition, I go deeper into the phenomenon and concept of negativity. Chapter 2 explores negation as a linguistic and logical phenomenon and its ontological pertinence through a brief and very schematic narrative of the history of conceiving negation, in its many meanings and types, in the philosophical tradition. This theory provides for transcendental understanding: how is a negative revolution thinkable? What are its conditions of possibility? What are the main internal tensions that would explain the logic of its development. Central in this account are the theorists of negativity as (failed) inversion: Aristotle with his correlate oppositions, and Kant with his “negative magnitudes.” Finally, Chapter 3 puts this picture into the theoretical context of the major theories of revolution. I do not, of course, aspire to collate an encyclopedia of such theories, but rather will choose only those that are important for understanding what is going on here and now: Kant (the key figure of this book), Hölderlin, Hegel, Marx, Sorel, Benjamin, Arendt, and Badiou. I call my method logico-hermeneutic. The first chapter is a hermeneutic of a specific historical experience, which helps in formulating major philosophical questions. The second chapter tries to reconstruct logic, and applies a logical concept of negation, thus abstracting in part from the historical locus of the event. Finally, the third chapter practices a more traditional hermeneutic of canonic texts: to anchor the logic back into the history, this time the history of late modernity in which the concept and the problem of revolution are among the most central. The book is in part retrospective: even in the new version, one must realize that I started writing it ten years ago, when the anti-Soviet revolution was still recent, still a “now” of a sort. Today it is most certainly a thing of the past, precisely because a new wave of democratic protests has started. Nevertheless, I claim, it is an event to whose democratic desires and victories it is important to keep fidelity. But most importantly, this revolution was a new paradigm of modern politics, which retrospectively illuminated its past and contributed to create a new image of historical revolutions as negative revolutions. I am indebted to several people for their help throughout the entire process of writing this book. Here is a nonexhaustive list of those whose help and intellectual influence made this book possible: Tim Bahti, Mladen Dolar, Ted Hopf, Boris Kagarlitsky, Andreas Kalyvas, Esa Kirkkopelto, Oleg Kharkhordin, Nikolay Koposov, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Susanna Lindberg, Jean-Luc Nancy, Benjamin Noys, James I. Porter, Arlene Saxonhouse, Alexander Semyonov, Thomas Schestag, and Slavoj Žižek. Special thanks go to my parents, wife, and daughter for their support, and to the European University at Saint-Petersburg and to Smolny College, also for the support,

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and for the intellectual atmosphere allowing thought not just to sharpen but also to get armed and translatable into many sociolects and epistemolects. On a polemical note, I would like to thank the numerous enthusiasts (so-called pirates) who underwent a certain risk by making available for persons not living in the central Western countries the enormous body of knowledge accumulated in the last centuries and digitalized in the last decades. Great thanks go to the editor of the series Michael Marder, who, fortunately, was able to read the Russian version, and subsequently the English one. And finally, I express my gratitude to the publishing house Bloomsbury Press.

1

The Russian Anti-Communist Revolution (1985–99) and the French Revolution (1789–99)

The Russian anti-communist revolution The fall of communism in the USSR Although this book is concerned with the philosophy of history and not with history as such, it takes the Russian political experience of the last 30  years as its point of departure. At the same time, it is not addressed specifically to Russians or to specialists on Russia. Therefore, a brief account of events is required. There are some, though not many, such accounts in English, and I will list those recommended for further reading in the notes.1 Today, the account of the Soviet transformation from communism to capitalism appears as a sad story. An authoritarian2 and cynical Soviet state, after decades of turmoil, has ended up as an authoritarian and cynical Russian state. But, whereas authoritarian socialism relied on the emancipatory heritage of revolution and on Enlightenment faith in the just and wealthy society to come, authoritarian postsocialism, starting from a cynical rule of “political technologists,” increasingly relies today on conservative and nationalist ideology for its legitimization. In the process of transformation, Russia lost its world standing and increasingly resembled, in the perception of Western observers, a number of countries on the “semi-periphery,” where a small, educated class eternally fights against a nationalistic authoritarian government for liberal and democratic values. Many “knew” from the very start that this would be a sad story and deplored the destiny of Russia instead of trying to change it. But, the transition from one authoritarianism to another included a major revolutionary event, with mass demonstrations, media becoming a channel of true democratic process, barriers and taboos on both speech and action gradually breaking down, and a cultural revolution that was Russia’s belated 1968. My own generation came into its own in this period and was ethically and emotionally socialized during this breakdown of the old and

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breakthrough of new practices and values. A significant point in this book is that we, those in Russia (and the former Soviet Union) who lived through these events, should be “faithful” to them—faithful in Badiou’s sense but not quite, because we must also be fully aware of this event’s inherent contradictions, which eventually brought it to failure. The Soviet regime of the 1970s and early 1980s abandoned the mobilizational politics of Stalin and Khrushchev, stabilized the elite, and improved economic wellbeing by making private apartments and imported consumer goods widely available to the general population. This became possible because of the discovery of rich resources of oil and gas, and of the reorientation of the economy to export, at the price of its inclusion into the world market. At the same time, all liberalizing tendencies within the party and opposition from outside the party were harshly repressed through imprisonment, psychiatric detention of “dissidents,” and strict censorship. The ideological “civil religion” of the Soviet Union came to a standstill; party leaders were no longer strong in theoretical matters; Cold War and relative economic well-being allowed the switch from communist ideology to the imperialist/national language of competition with the West and the promise of economic progress. “Communism” was increasingly seen as a regime of material abundance rather than a humanist utopia. As a result, the state alienated itself from several large social groups. Bureaucracy was becoming increasingly cynical and corrupt (even though corruption in most cases took a “natural” form of privilege rather than a monetary one, although this was also present). Despite state monopoly, there was a rising “shadow” economy. Workers lost their revolutionary enthusiasm; monetary rewards, within the socialist system, were no longer sufficient motivation for work and there was a drop in the productivity of labor. The intellectuals (“intelligentsia” in Russian) mostly abandoned communist ideology and developed a culture of duplicity: giving only lip service to Marxist dogma, they privately developed an alternative discourse in which they freely combined liberal and conservative ideas and, absent authority of arbitration, equally seriously valued the literature of Russian symbolism, astrology and Yoga, Orthodox religion, the neoEurasianist ideas of Solzhenitsyn and Lev Gumilev, and economic liberalism. Of course, there were different and often opposing tendencies, but the “culture of the kitchens” was relatively consolidated in this eclectic amorphous opposition to communism. The alternative Left (“true” Leninism, Trotskyism) was originally popular in the dissident milieu, but increasingly, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these ideas were losing popularity. It is in this situation that, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, a new party leader, started his reforms, beginning with an attempt at a technological breakthrough but then realizing the need for a new mobilization of the people. Following the ideas of his youth, Gorbachev thought that a new wave of communist revolution, which he called “perestroika” (“reconstruction”), could be framed in the spirit of democratic humanist socialism. He understood (unconsciously inspired by the history of socialism from Stalin to Mao) that the energizing of the masses and a renewal of the elites could be achieved only through democratic reform. What Gorbachev chose was not to create

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new grassroots activist institutions, as done by Stalin and Mao, but to go back to the very early years of Soviet history when revolutionary power rested in democratically elected councils called “Soviets.” These “Soviets” were originally not under the direct control of the party but proved too weak to secure power by themselves; therefore, in the early 1920s they were gradually deprived of actual power by party organs. Nevertheless they remained in place and served as secondary organs of power and as symbols of “people’s democracy.” Gorbachev simply decided to revive them and give them a share of real power, thus going back to the revolutionary foundation of the Soviet state. In 1986, Gorbachev announced that “perestroika” was actually a “revolution.” Because the Soviets had already existed and because he himself started the “revolution,” he did not foresee an actual change of the regime, and the slogan of “revolution” referred to the continuation of the 1917 foundation. In 1988, Gorbachev held a party conference that ruled to hold a free election of “people’s deputies” (where party leaders would be obliged to take part) to set up a national “Congress of people’s deputies,” an institution that had not existed since the 1920s. When the strict control of society was weakened, a powerful grassroots movement of “discussion clubs” emerged. Throughout the country, activists who proposed ideas on how to promote perestroika emerged. In 1987, the first rallies started, in defense of architectural heritage and on other local issues; in 1989, rallies supporting opposition candidates and later deputies in the Congress brought together hundreds of thousands. All of this was accompanied by a gradual breakdown of censorship of the media, which were staffed and directed by intellectuals who secretly shared an alternative agenda. In the new, relatively free situation, the media polarized: the more significant and popular ones started disseminating liberal ideas, most prominently referring to Stalin’s crimes, the need for market economy, and to the previously forbidden modernist/avant-garde art and culture, but a large group of journals and newspapers promoted Russian nationalism and conservatism, and opposed liberal/democratic reforms as being essentially pro-Western. However, the liberal party implicitly shared many conservative values, and it is doubtless because of this that Gorbachev’s revolution from above was originally so successful, and took a liberal-democratic turn. To give just two examples of perestroika ideological production: in 1986, a film came out in movie theaters throughout the country called “Repentance” (Pokayanie), shot by Georgian director Tenghiz Abuladze. It was an allegory of Stalinist terror and portrayed a mid-twentieth-century dictator, and his contemporary bourgeois descendants who have to cope with the past. The film received enormous media attention, because of its message and also because it was allowed to be shown. It became, for a while, a manifesto of Gorbachev’s liberal party supporters. But what does the film actually represent? It puts Stalinist terror into an extemporaneous space of allegory, and frames it in a Christian form: the dictator, called Varlam Aravidze, destroys a church and takes away a crucifix from his small son; in the end a prophetic character says that “the street named after Varlam Aravidze does not lead to a temple.” The protagonist is Nino, daughter of a Christian artist murdered by the dictator. She repeatedly digs up his body from the grave and sets

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it before the dictator’s son’s window. This is a direct parallel to Sophocles’ Antigone, but in an inverted form: Antigone buries a body whereas Abuladze’s Nino unearths it. Antigone was a conservative revolutionary who defended the ancient order and religion. Nino inverts her actions by presenting the conflict in public, not covering it up. She, nevertheless, shares Antigone’s religious-ritualistic matrix. Another example is Yuri Shevchuk’s (DDT) 1987 rock song “Revolution.” Rock music was one of the central cultural phenomena of the perestroika: it had previously been tolerated but was not allowed to be played in large concert halls or on TV. After the ban was lifted, it turned out that the Soviet Union had disposed of a rich and original rock tradition: the most popular groups representing the New Wave style were remarkable for their serious poetic texts. The music was usually not as aggressive and violent as would be expected from Western radical musicians. Nor was the content. Yuri Shevchuk was one of the most famous rock musicians, and his “Revolution” song was very popular: given the moment, its march-like rhythm and the word “revolution” in the refrain gave it a mobilizing force. But if we look closely at the text (not always clearly understandable at a concert), it is actually counterrevolutionary! “Revolution, you taught us to believe that the Good is unjust!” sang Shevchuk (referring to the October revolution of 1917), and at the end of the song the melody of Marseillaise appeared in a slow-motion version. So it was a kind of anti-revolution song: neither nonrevolution nor pro-revolution but precisely anti-revolution, a negative magnitude of revolution, one could say.3 Overall, it was a mix of conservative and liberaldemocratic values that characterized the discourse of the revolutionary counter-elite of the 1980s. Starting as a revival of revolution, perestroika gradually radicalized its energy of rupture with the past and developed a total rejection of Soviet official values (revolution and progress among them). Thus, it evolved into a conservative revolution of sorts (different from that of the Nazis, in that the revolutionary component was liberal, not socialist or nationalist; however, it was nationalist in some Soviet Republics other than Russia).4 For this reason, while Gorbachev spoke of revolution officially, few of his liberal supporters actually used the term. It reminded them of the communist tradition that they opposed, but also more generally of the violence and radical-democratic politics that, paradoxically, they, being themselves radical democrats, abhorred. In 1989, at a newly elected Congress of deputies, which was shown live on TV, an open political struggle emerged between the liberal progressives, mostly intellectuals from Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic republics, and the majority of the Congress, more conservatively oriented. Gorbachev maneuvered between the two but backed off when confronted by the radical demands of the opposition. Apart from procedural democracy, they demanded the passing of a new constitution, proposed to strike out the article of the constitution giving a leading role to the Party, etc. But what was most disturbing were the forceful demands for national autonomy, first from the Baltic states and Georgia, and later from many other ethnic “republics.” There were several ethnic riots. Supported by grassroots clubs, nationalist movements in the republics, and the liberal media, the progressive deputies organized mass rallies in Moscow and Leningrad, with hundreds of thousands of participants. In 1989–91,

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coal miners throughout Russia organized a series of mass strikes demanding not only a better supply of consumer goods and the economic autonomy of mines, but also, increasingly, political reforms such as the constitutional annulment of the leadership of the Communist Party, liquidation of privileges for the leadership, etc. Although the educated class (“intelligentsia”) prevailed at the rallies, polls showed wide support for the opposition from many social strata. It was a moment of hegemony when many interests coincided in their demand for economic and political freedom: intellectuals, shadow economy businessmen, people speculating on imported consumer goods, nationalists, and even underpaid workers: all wanted freedom, all admired the Western socioeconomic model that combined prosperity and political liberties, all believed that the market would value their work correctly, and democracy would make justice prevail. This said, other groups, such as the military and the police, the retirees who were fully dependent on the state budget and socialized in the Stalin era, workers from the military industrial complex, largely remained in opposition to liberal reform, even though ideological momentum was not on their side, and many of them eventually bought into liberal ideology. Meanwhile, a severe economic crisis broke out. Gorbachev introduced partial reforms, such as the relative economic autonomy of enterprises, workers councils at the same enterprises, and permission to form nonstate “cooperatives.” This happened during the financial crisis provoked by the drastic fall of oil prices in 1985–6 (arguably triggered by policy decisions taken by the United States and Saudi Arabia) and by the measures taken in the early years of Gorbachev’s rule, such as large-scale investment in hard machinery and reduction of alcohol sales (leading to huge budget losses). State enterprises had not been created to compete with each other and so each was a monopoly in its area; this economic autonomy in conjunction with self-rule led to a rise in prices and inflation. Cooperatives were busy selling goods smuggled from the same state enterprises. But most importantly, there remained state regulation of consumer prices, which meant that with inflow of cash into the economy goods just disappeared from stores; in 1990–1, the government had to introduce ration cards for many basic items such as sugar, bread, and cigarettes. Gorbachev’s international politics is widely known: since 1986, he was in dialogue with the West and consistently aimed for the end of Cold War and a lifting of the Iron Curtain. This fitted with his ideas of democratic socialism, but consciously or not, a decisive factor was the fall of oil prices and the need for Western credits and imports. In 1989, Gorbachev abstained from intervention in revolutions in some Eastern European countries (Warsaw block). At first, these revolutions seemed to be versions of Soviet perestroika, but it soon became clear that they took an anti-Soviet pro-capitalist turn, and by that time it was already impossible to stop them. In 1990, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of Germany in exchange for economic benefits that could have been much larger: a decision for which he has been most criticized inside Russia. He did not even sufficiently insist, as he should arguably have, that the new Germany should not enter NATO. The discourse of leading Soviet media, by the 1990s, was that of hard core liberalism: Gorbachev’s ideas of democratic socialism were seen as dishonest official propaganda.

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The opposition found a charismatic leader in Boris Yeltsin, a Moscow party leader who had criticized Gorbachev for his slow pace of reform and had been fired in 1987. Yeltsin allied himself with the intellectuals, dissidents, and democratic activists, won at regional elections, and became, in 1990, chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation (primary among 15 Soviet Republics). Other opposition figures became mayors in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities. The Baltic republics held referenda and declared their independence from the USSR; other ethnic republics, led by party elites, started preparing for similar measures. By the end of 1990, Gorbachev allied with the conservative group in the party and decided to work toward consolidating the Union. He authorized an armed intervention in Lithuania, which failed, and then tried to organize the signing of a new federal treaty. This failed as well. In August 1991, a group of conservative leaders arrested Gorbachev in his country resort in Crimea and proclaimed a state of emergency. Tanks entered the streets of Moscow and the Baltic capitals. In response, people took to the streets; in Moscow, close to a million demonstrators came to protect Yeltsin’s headquarters. Many army and police chiefs refused to fulfill their orders. Leaders of the “coup d’état” tried to approach the Crimea, to negotiate with Gorbachev, but were arrested on the way. Political power in Russia fell into the hands of Yeltsin. In December 1991, Yeltsin met with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union, forming instead a loose “Commonwealth of Independent States.” Yeltsin appointed Soviet economic expert and editor of the journal “Communist,” Yegor Gaidar, as acting prime minister, with a plan to save the economy through “shock therapy” in the form of radical liberal reforms, following the example of Leszek Balzerowicz’s reforms in Poland, in accordance with the advice of Western experts such as Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Åslund. On January 1, 1992, the previously fixed consumer prices were lifted and consumer goods immediately flooded the stores. Spiral inflation followed in the course of 1992 (prices rose about 25 times). Voucher privatization was started, but, contrary to declared promises, it led to the accumulation of former state property in the hands of enterprise directors and some businessmen. The cost of individual vouchers was negligible, and most citizens received nothing in the course of privatization. However, most private apartments were privatized free of charge. Many representatives of the opposition movement were elected as parliament deputies and appointed in the government. However, former party and industry leaders preserved their posts. No lustrations were conducted. Yeltsin and his government of reformers made a conscious choice of reaching a compromise with enterprise directors so as to avoid civil war, which they feared. Much power was also given to regional leaders, many of whom were former party bosses. Ethnic subrepublics within Russia received wide autonomy; however, the claim for sovereign independence by the Chechen republic was not recognized and a compromise was not reached, which, in 1994, led to a military attack against the republic. Gaidar’s government only held until December 1991, when the Supreme Soviet of Russia insisted on Gaidar’s resignation as a result of hyperinflation and the loss of savings that followed. Gaidar and his team of reformers remained in the government, but a member of the Soviet industrial elite, former Gazprom head, Victor

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Chernomyrdin, was appointed prime minister. All these events led to a change in public mood. The liberal-democratic opposition largely demobilized, seeing what appeared to be a victory of their cause, but also, the technocratic nature of the government they had led to power. Those activists who stayed mobilized were concentrated in the elected organs such as the Supreme Soviet and regional councils. They gradually moved into opposing the authoritarian style of leadership by Yeltsin and the regional leaders, as well as the reforms that led a part of the population to impoverishment. The political struggle between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, which had once elected him, intensified up to late September–early October, 1993, when Yeltsin ultimately dissolved the Supreme Soviet, and tens of thousands of activists rose in its defense. The standoff was violent on both sides and ended once more in the entrance of tanks into Moscow: this time they actually shot at the building of the Supreme Soviet, in which an armed defense was organized. The president’s party won the day and the Supreme Soviet leaders were arrested. In December 1993, a new Constitution largely copied from that of the French, with a semi-presidential form of government but with an extremely strong office of president (enabled to dissolve a Supreme Soviet after three negative votes against a prime minister candidate) was passed on a referendum. The “Soviet” system that had survived since 1917 was undone and replaced by a regular parliamentary system. However, at the election held at the same time, the liberaldemocratic block that supported Yeltsin won only a relative majority, with the newly formed reactionary “Communist Party” coming second, and—an absolutely new phenomenon—a party led by political enterpreneur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, playing with extravagant statements of extreme nationalist spirit, showed strength and came first. At the same election, the liberal-democrats split into those who supported Yeltsin and the reformist part of the government and those who suggested another, softer way of liberal reforms and emphasized democratic self-rule. The latter group formed the “Yabloko” party based on local activist structures built in the 1980s. All of this was visibly the end of liberal hegemony in Russian society although not yet in its political leadership. After 1993, politics in the streets of Russian cities came to an end, and only small numbers gathered in the street, mostly to support the “red-brown” coalition of conservative “communists” and nationalists. People abandoned politics and instead focused on struggling with the new economic challenges, and on the new opportunities that consumption, entertainment, and economy provided. Radical liberal reforms also ended, giving way to a slow maneuvering between the IMF, with its demand for reforms in exchange for credits (oil prices were still very low), and the interests of the industrial lobby. The Chechen war fought in 1994–6 reinforced the standing of the military and undermined the democratic legitimacy of Yeltsin. Yeltsin ruled with increasingly authoritarian methods, relying on a camarilla consisting of his family members, a journalist, a bodyguard, an industry leader, a liberal reformer, and some nouveau riches, the “oligarchs.” Critics described this period as new stagnation, because most efforts went into maintaining the status quo. Vladimir Sogrin is right, I think, when he calls this period a “Thermidor,” even though the leader of the previous phase (Yeltsin) remained in power. Yeltsin, who had fallen very sick by the mid-1990s (he was

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rumored to be a heavy drinker), seemed to be a different person from the charismatic persona that he was during the perestroika. Russian cities were at that time like cities of the global south: ubiquitous street trade, gambling, prostitution, high levels of street crime, frequent shootings in the streets, murders of officials and businessmen, etc. Everyday behaviors and perceptions of a subject were infused with anomia: an ordinary person would avoid paying taxes, ignore rubbish in a stairwell, take care only of one’s own apartment, drivers would not stop at pedestrian crossings, etc. Installing iron doors was among the most prosperous small businesses. Nevertheless, the situation had an intense utopian feel, as the symbols and phenomena previously known only from books and films (the Iron Curtain had been in place for almost three generations) penetrated everyday life: advertisements for Coca-Cola and McDonalds on the roofs of former party buildings, sexual permissiveness, including street prostitution in the cities, vulgarlooking nouveaux riches (“New Russians”), “gangsters” and “mafioso,” inclusion of the previously forbidden dissident authors into school programs, etc. Compared to Soviet codes and hierarchies, this new reality seemed carnivalesque: a topsy-turvy world. Many tendencies, such as the taste for dark feelings (opposed to Soviet optimism), declared egoism, self-commodification of women, or open derision/rejection of other races, can be explained mainly as a reversal of official Soviet values. Large groups of population were impoverished even in comparison with the relatively modest life of the late Soviet period. University professors and school teachers, among others, lost their social status and earned below US$100 a month (not enough to survive in a city). In industrial production sites, where people retained their jobs, many continued working full-time for a ridiculous salary or often for no salary at all (in the mid-1990s salary was often delayed by years). These workers used their small gardens in the country (“dachas”) to grow vegetables for eating and selling, and/or used money from their retired parents; retirement was often the only source of income for many families. The question remains: Why did the supposed reforms not lead to social revolution?5 We can speak of a surprising political apathy in Russia, which lasted from 1993 until 2011. People seemed to buy into the explanations of authorities that the country had no money, that their industries were not profitable, and that reform was going to create a Western-type economy, so just a little patience was needed. The state budget was indeed thin, although billion-sized fortunes were then in the making. One major reason why the country went through this period without a civil war or regime change was the actions of Western charity foundations, such as Soros, Ford, Carnegie, and McArthur. All of them were very active in Russia at the time, and Soros, in particular, launched special programs for academics, paying them personal grants for their research, textbook creation, etc. No serious institutional effort was made to control or improve the quality of this production, which was uneven but saved the families of thousands of intellectuals and prevented them from leaving the country. From another perspective, this support helped secure the pro-Western liberal attitude of intellectuals and prevented potential revolt against neoliberal reforms. Nevertheless, public mood with regard to government policy was negative; liberal reformers and Yeltsin as their patron lost mass support, and the Communist Party

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of the Russian Federation, which had developed an ideological mix of conservatism, nationalism, and socialism, gained points: in 1995, it won a relative majority at the Duma elections. Media (as I will discuss in detail later) emphasized and exaggerated a sense of impending doom. Therefore, before the presidential election in 1996, support for Yeltsin was minimal and the victory of “communist” candidate G. Zyuganov seemed to be imminent. In this situation, liberals mobilized, organized a mass propaganda campaign, and rallied all major media channels to their side. As it was later leaked, some falsifications were also employed6 and Yeltsin won the election in the second round, even though he was seriously ill throughout most of the campaign. Shortly after the election, Yeltsin (acting through his new chair of the security council Alexander Lebed) ended the war in Chechnya and gave it suspended autonomous status until 2000. Yeltsin’s regime was ever more authoritarian as he increasingly relied on his camarilla. In 1996–7, before and after the election, the government organized a number of “mortgage auctions” in which it pledged several key industries, such as nonferrous metals, oil, communications networks, to young businessmen who had made their fortune in the financial sector: the task, as they themselves admitted, was to privatize the industries and to rally the support of the business sector for the regime: the pledges were never returned, and the corporations became the property of financial holdings at deplorably low prices. Immediately after, liberal ministers were caught accepting bribes from one of the auction participants, and most of them were sacked from the government. The Russian economy remained unstable throughout the 1990s. Oil and gas cost relatively little, and the country regularly applied for credit from the IMF. These credits, which were modest in size (overall 32 billion dollars given incrementally throughout the 1990s), came with very serious requirements for economic liberalization and privatization, and forced the presence of liberal reformers on Yeltsin’s government, even in the face of their growing unpopularity. In 1998–9, a new, important ideological shift happened. In 1998, Russia announced a state default, which was an indirect result of the Asian stock crisis and an immediate result of building a financial “pyramid” of state obligations. The Rouble underwent a five-time devaluation. This new currency collapse (the latest of several) was perceived in dominant media as an ultimate bankruptcy of monetarist politics. Yeltsin appointed a conservative, Evgeny Primakov, to run the government, although, in fact, the latter did not fully abandon his preexistent liberal policies. Shortly after, NATO, ignoring Russian objections, bombed Serbia, in response to its police action in Kosovo. This move, coming after a series of dismissive acts, such as the expansion of NATO into former Soviet Republics, was the last straw and led to unanimous denunciation by the Russian media and elites; former liberal-democrats rallied with the nationalist or statist “camp.” Yeltsin sacked Primakov and, after having tried another figure in the interim, appointed Vladimir Putin (former KGB chief) as the prime minister and his de facto “successor.” In the fall of 1999, terrorist attacks destroyed several apartment buildings throughout Russia (in fact, these events anticipated the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States). In response, Yeltsin and Putin restarted the Chechen war, and

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Putin built himself a media image of a strong decisive personality with a moderately nationalist but enlightened outlook. With such a profile, he was supported by all serious ideological groups, and easily won the 2000 election. After winning popular support, Putin started the slow process of dismantling the liberal-democratic institutions, and by 2008 had built a classic electoral authoritarian regime, where he managed to preserve his autocracy until today, by accepting but cunningly bypassing the rule that limited presidency to two consecutive terms. . One decisive action that he took during his first term was the monopolization of major TV channels, which allowed changing the predominantly negativist and critical mood of dominant media into a mixture of official optimism and low-taste entertainment mostly borrowed from the US TV format (stand-up and situation comedy, talk shows with fictional sentimental plots, reality shows, etc.). “Stability” became the primary slogan of the regime. Putin’s success built on three main conditions: the drastic rise of oil and gas prices, which allowed him to stabilize the economy and raise revenue; the trend of depoliticization and political apathy that continued from the 1990s; and the split of society into a liberal intellectual minority and a conservative/socialist majority. Each of these groups was afraid that the other would prevail if the system was opened up (liberals because of the Western influence, conservatives because of the democratic majority). Putin, who originally flirted with both and preserved a liberal-capitalist economy and a permissive consumerist society, while also protecting the military and the police sectors and limiting the influence of international organizations, was a classic Bonapartist autocrat. In 2012, he lost this Bonapartist momentum by openly siding with only one of the two major social-ideological forces, which means that the regime will change its nature in the coming years. Now, there is the question of historical diagnosis, which is so important for the present book. The immediate reactions to the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were extremely optimistic. This seemed like a fresh rediscovery of democracy, in the face of growing political apathy in the West, but the one that confirmed the superiority of existing Western society. Some authors spoke of “civil society” revolutions and, even if this mostly applied to the velvet revolutions in Poland and the Czech Republic, it was equally applicable to the grassroots component of the Soviet perestroika, even though there was an equally important component of a “revolution from above” (as in the Russia of Peter I or Alexander II, or in the Germany of Bismarck). Authors of the liberal establishment reacted to the events in a triumphalist way by emphasizing the victory of gradual modernization and “democratization.” Thus, Samuel Huntington wrote about the “third wave” of democratization,7 starting in Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, continuing in Latin America, and culminating in the democratic transformations in the Eastern bloc. Huntington explained democratic changes by the rise of the educated and affluent middle class, thus exemplifying a classical liberal evolutionism in the spirit of a Herbert Spencer or a Schumpeter. Inspired in part by Huntington, many political scientists of the period understood the change as “transition to democracy.” The works of some eminent scholars from the regions in question, such as Guillermo O’Donnell and Adam Przeworski, became

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classics in this field of study, and it was at least for a while hegemonic in the political science communities of postsocialist countries. “Democracy” was understood primarily in the post-Schumpeterian way, as a system of institutions centered on free, competitive elections. In the 1990s, “transitology” of post-Soviet Russia was increasingly focused on the problem of “consolidation”8: democracy, in this account, existed but was not firmly institutionalized, so that state institutions were to be developed and rooted in the consensus of elites. Ironically, this was the very program that Putin and his team started to pursue when they came to power in 1999. Other liberal triumphalists emphasized the revolutionary character of the change, noting however that the Eastern European revolutions were predominantly soft and nonviolent. Thus, Ralf Dahrendorf contrasted these “revolutions” with the utopian and violent events of the great French and Russian revolutions, seeing them as examples of what Edmund Burke, the great liberal conservative, meant when he preferred the English traditionalist Glorious Revolution to the French rationalist one.9 Bruce Ackerman, a theorist for whom revolutions are generally crucial for explaining democracy as rule of the people (it is in revolutions that the People, with capital P, can actually surface), wrote The Future of a Liberal Revolution,10 praising the “rational” and “limited” character of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1989–91. In contrast, some Left-wing critics, such as Alain Badiou in France and Boris Kagarlitsky inside Russia, rejected the “revolutionary” qualification of these events. For Badiou, this was an “obscure disaster” under the guise of revolution.11 Indeed, it was the demise of a regime that was degenerate but nevertheless preserved a constituent tie with (“fidelity” to) the heritage of emancipatory revolution. The new “revolution” lacked emancipatory content and simply remained reactive. It was thus not an “Event” in the sense of Badiou’s philosophy: such an event is always associated with affirmation of a previously unrecognized existence, with a new generic “truth.” Later, without knowing Badiou, Boris Kagarlitsky, one of the few leftist Russia dissidents and oppositional politicians, published a book, Restoration in Russia,12 in which he insisted not just on the reactionary aspect of liberal economic reforms (restoration of capitalism after 70 years of the communist project), but on the authoritarian sociopolitical dynamic of Russia in the 1990s, which would in his view be close to a classical Restoration. Russian public discourse and social thought of the 1990s were generally opposed to the nomination of “revolution.” Thus, sociologist Yuri Levada, a leading Soviet intellectual of the 1970s and later the director of a leading poll agency emphatically contested the “revolutionary” designation, citing lack of popular mobilization, new ideas, a utopian vision, or powerful leaders.13 This reflected Levada’s generally pessimistic view of post-Soviet society as an inertial continuation of the inherently unfree “Homo Sovieticus.” In my view, these arguments cannot undo the evidence for the revolutionary character of the process, and the radicalness of change. The ultra-liberal, libertarian vision of the intellectuals of the 1980s was also a utopia, even if a dubious one. Moreover, in the Russian public sphere, the denegation of revolution played the ominous role of demobilizing the political subject, and I thought, in the end of the 1990s when I first conceived this study, that this was an ideological battle to be fought. The proof, which I

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obtained as I started studying the history of revolutions, was that the great revolutions of the past viewed anthropologically had their dark, destructive, and depressive side. The question is, why revolutions produce, not just moments of political mobilizations, but a long-lasting apathy and melancholia. Unfortunately, the owl of Minerva flies in the dusk, and I was sitting in the library of the University of Michigan when thinking this through; by the time these ideas were published in Russia, they were belated: Putin gladly recognized that the 1990s had been a revolutionary period but, like Bonaparte in 1799, he claimed to have finished it: “The last decade has been tumultuous for Russia; one can say without exaggeration that it was revolutionary. . . . it is time, however, to say that this cycle is over. There will be no more revolutions, no more counter-revolutions. The solid and economically grounded stability of the state is good for Russia and for its people.”14 At this juncture, Putin wanted to rely on the “revolution” to justify the legitimacy of his rule and to state its irreversibility, thus opposing the forces of communist revanche. At the same time, he sought to distance the democratic and liberating element of revolution from today’s state, which he was eager to “stabilize.” I defended my PhD thesis on this subject in the University of Michigan in 2002, but by that time there appeared an excellent book on the revolutionary character of Russian postcommunist transformation, written by Vladimir Mau (a leading Russian liberal reformer) and Irina Starodubrovskaya, in the genre of comparative politicaleconomic history: The Challenge of Revolution. Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective.15 In comparing the processes of classical modern revolutions (England of the 1640s– 50s, France of the 1790s, Russia of 1917–29), Mau and Starodubrovskaya discover that on the external level of the sequence of events, as well as in their internal socioeconomic logic, these periods show similarities with the transformation that began in Russia in 1985. As a result, we see that “the basic characteristics of the recent Russian revolution do not differ from those of previous revolutions.”16 All revolutions, say Mau and Starodubrovskaya, following Marx,17 start in a situation of essential nonsimultaneity of development in different sectors of society, of fragmentation of society, and of weakness of the government. Based on this problematic situation, revolutionary events happen in the following sequence (which Mau and Starodubrovskaya borrow from C. Brinton18): (1) the relatively easy overthrow of the previous system and the rule of the moderates; (2) the rule of the radicals; (3) the partial restoration of the Thermidor. In the Russian case, the first period corresponds to Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s, the second is represented by the government of Gaidar and of other radical economic liberals, while the third starts after their ousting in 1993 and continues until Putin’s movement toward a Bonapartist-like regime. Then, the authors move on to distinguish three major stages of modern Western civilization: early modernization with its emergence of the free market bourgeois economy, industrialization, and the current early postmodernization, with its priority of information-based technology and of the service sector over the industrial. Contemporary “postmodern” revolutions, they say, paradoxically reproduce the pattern of the early modernizing revolutions (the English and the French revolutions), with their emphasis on (negative) liberalization and emancipation.

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This being said, there are a few features in the last Russian revolution that remain unique. The authors speak of three such major unique features. First is the role of the “revolution from above,” without the overthrow of the regime in the first stage of the revolution. Second, the relative absence of mass violent action and the low degree of violence in general. Third, the self-consciousness of the actors in the revolution (Yeltsin, Gaidar) who denied and purposefully avoided any association with a “revolution”— Mau and Starodubrovskaya illustrate this by interviews with the “revolutionaries” of the 1990s. As I have mentioned earlier, such denial was generally characteristic of liberal discourse of the 1990s, so that the revolution somehow happened “unconsciously” for the actors themselves. Mau and Starodubrovskaya are, I think, generally right in their narrative account. It is particularly valuable that they emphasize the negative condition of revolution, that is, the weakness of state that precedes it and continues throughout. But, as we can see, the authors generally join the trend that conceives anti-communist revolution as being somehow soft and liberal. Their account of “early postmodernization” ignores the antagonistic and open nature of this process. Also, they say little of revolutionary ideology and of the processes of subjectivization and depoliticization that conditioned the change. Today, in the year 2013, the events of 1980s–90s in Eastern Europe appear in yet another historical perspective, which perhaps was not yet as easily accessible in the end of 1990s, at least to the subjects who, like myself, even aligning with the political Left, enthusiastically identified with the ongoing change. This historical horizon is that of neoliberal transformation (some even speak of a “neoliberal revolution,” even if not in the strict terminological sense of revolution). After the failed leftist revolution of the late 1960s and the economic crisis of the 1990s, there emerged a political force that brought together the neoclassical economic theory (and ideology) of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and of the Chicago economic school, elements of the good old conservative discourse (the natural character of the market, its inherent Western values and religion, its critique of ubiquitous “totalitarianism,” that is, of any strong state with a civic agenda) and of American “libertarianism” (a utopian idea of a self-sufficient strong individual whom society should not bind). This force managed to impose a set of political economic reforms (deregulation, commercialization of public goods) and an ideological hegemony, although in the West, one cannot say that neoliberalism has univocally won the day: the old social democratic forces remain strong, even if mostly defensive. Neoliberal creative destruction of welfare institutions has, however, been unproductive: because of its ideology of spontaneity and naturalness of “rational choice,” neoliberal utopia remains extremely thin, and policy keeps producing chaotic crises, from which, however, financial capital comes out reinforced. The events in Soviet Union and in the countries of the Warsaw pact, even if these latter countries were relatively closer to outside influences and had their own dynamics that brought them into the crisis, retrospectively appear fully logical in this larger context. The ideas of Hayek and Friedman, and of Reagan and Thatcher, infiltrated the minds of Soviet intellectuals who had, since the 1970s, adopted a stance of inverted opposition to official ideology, and developed their own mix of conservative and liberal values. The political and economic crisis in the USSR was a crisis of the Fordist model,

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the same as the one that had led to neoliberal reforms in the West. The rapprochement with the Western establishment gradually opened the Soviet leadership to the ideas that were dominant there at the time. The reforms of the 1990s were consciously assisted by Western neoliberal economists and fostered by the policies of international financial organizations. “Privatization” in Eastern Europe, the sale of key industries to the banks, was a literal implementation of the neoliberal dream, even though in Russia, as in the West, this process had its limits: the welfare sector was not commercialized, but simply ignored and underfinanced, so that its commercialization happened spontaneously in the form of corruption. One major difference between Russian and Western neoliberalism was that the former was articulated as an emancipatory antiauthoritarian ideology. Young critically minded intellectuals in Russia had (until recently) usually become staunch neoliberals, while the “Left” opposition was usually associated with traditionalism, nationalism, and support of authoritarianism in this or that form. Therefore, at least ideologically, there was a successful construction of libertarian utopia, the only problem with which was the growing disengagement with the majority of one’s own population who did not want to become “enterpreneurial,” thus remaining “paternalist” and, yes, increasingly reactionary. This, however, may not be an argument against the revolutionary substance of the events. Rather, it points at the continuity of modernity, in what pertains to its emancipatory horizon and political subjectivization, and in what pertains to the dialectic of this emancipation. It was already the Manifesto of the Communist Party that described the revolutionary and destructive nature of the bourgeois political economy. For Marx, bourgeois revolutions were not negative or destructive enough, and he envisaged a proletarian revolution that would be more fundamental because it would involve social transformation. In “On the Jewish Question,” he warned of purely political revolutions which are more radical, the more they are insufficient, and which have thus recourse to terror.19 So far, all the revolutions that we have known have stemmed from an imbalance in the economy and emerged in response to a vacuum of power. Through this, revolutions give body to the theory of a free human subject (individual or collective) that emerged from the violent tumults of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in the work of the great skeptical melancholics, from Machiavelli and Ficino to Shakespeare and Descartes. Starting with Münzer’s revolutionary Lutheranism, then in the puritan uprisings of the seventeenth century, next, the secular republican revolutions of the eighteenth, there were regular breakthroughs of the Modern utopia of democratic self-rule. In terms of this promise of freedom and democracy, historical progress has been thus far relative. There is a radical egalitarian and democratic/republican utopia (the “communist hypothesis” as Badiou calls it20) that had already been imagined by the Levelers, and then repeatedly tried by the revolutionaries; but this usually led to a thermidorean and Bonapartist transformation of revolutionary regimes into an authoritarian state. Or, to echo Lefort, there is a vacuum of power that the modern post-revolutionary regime claims to maintain, but it tends to obliterate negativity, so that another revolution is needed. The internal dialectic of negativity, with its transformation of revolt into revulsion, of enthusiasm into melancholia, is the anthropological mechanism that

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explains this passage. But it is also responsible for a survival of a revolutionary virus in a postrevolutionary state (which any modern state is), for the interiorization of a revolutionary subject into the solitary subditus. I do not want to dismiss a historical future as such, but my claim is that today revolutions are increasingly becoming immanent in the bourgeois/socialist regime of modernity, as the excesses and truth events of its inherent negativity, and as creative moments that give humans an empty space where they could actually project new forms of organization by recombining and inverting existing social relations. In other words, a liberal, self-governing, and at the same time subordinate subject has revolution (as annihilation, inversion, and transgression) as an imaginary focus of its autonomy: the imaginary that periodically erupts as the real. The modern subject is self-related, in terms of self-control as well as of self-hindering and of self-destruction. This will be the argument developed extensively in the rest of the book. To return to neoliberalism, it must be noted that this ideology and historical force has an emancipatory core: this is why they managed to capture hearts. But then, this genuine moment is reinterpreted in the banalized popular form of purely external “negative” freedom à la Isaiah Berlin, the existential subjectivity is reinterpreted as individual enterpreneurialism, and the call to “democracy” and the “self ” leads in practice to a preaching of a myriad moralizing rules and regulations. Individualist freedom is no freedom at all, since it prevents people from organizing themselves and thus facilitates full control of life by the bureaucracy. Thus, to say that the Soviet and Eastern European revolutions were neoliberal (or rather, intercepted by neoliberalism early on) would be true, but this in no way undermines their revolutionary character, the degree of the dethroning of authority that they accomplished, and the sense of novelty that they created. What the neoliberal context marks is the fact that neoliberal revolutions were unconscious: the actors thought that they accomplished natural laws and the “Western” system, thus missing a chance to establish free institutions. But even this is not that exceptional: the French Revolutionaries, even if they did sublimate and emphasize the Revolution, nevertheless thought that it consisted in a return to the good old Roman times, not in an avantgarde creativity. The neoliberal regime advocates an established electoral democracy and a businessfriendly rule of law, but it tends to pass the decision-making into the hands of large corporations and nonelected experts. Therefore, it has authoritarian tendencies. But, by dismantling the welfare state, traditional education, and public sphere (which are increasingly limited by “efficiency”), neoliberalism, paradoxically, is also conducive, sometimes even consciously so, to grassroots “civil society” that would take upon itself what the state dis-engages from. In this sense, for instance, neoliberal policy in today’s Russia supports the formation of tenants’ unions. Moreover, the obviously limited character of electoral democracy needs an additional space of contestation, and usually the state tolerates such demonstrations as long as they demonstrate the relative weakness of the anarchically minded movements of the “multitude.” The recent decade, particularly 2010–12, was a decade of democratic revolutions in the periphery (post-Soviet ones in particular), and of large-scale protest movement in Europe and

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the United States. Many of the periphery revolutions were neoliberal in spirit, like perestroika (but without the socioeconomic break that accompanied it), while the European protest movements were anti-neoliberal, generally Leftist and anarchist, but almost universally unsuccessful. Historically speaking, neoliberal transformation was only one major context of the anti-communist revolution in Soviet Union. Another one was the continuous influence of 1968.21 As mentioned earlier, in their cultural agenda and effects, the East European revolutions of the 1980s were clearly a belated victory of the 1968 movement, in the sense that they attacked an old-style high culture, with its patriarchal, Victorian, and elitist values, to introduce the radically new standards of sexual permissiveness, linguistic and dress informality, and women’s emancipation. Like in the 1960s West, rock music was in the East the major symbol and vehicle of propaganda of these new values and lifestyles. One may even say that this part of the revolution was actually its most successful and emancipatory part: it won quickly, fully, and irreversibly—only to develop, in the 2000s, into commercially driven “low” mass culture, having already nothing to do with the intensity and musical negativity of rock. Politically, the East European revolutions had contrasts and analogies with the 1968 revolution: the latter was leftist, the former rightist, in their rhetoric. However, both were univocally anarchist, in the sense that they demonized the state as such. This is, moreover, not just an analogy but a historical continuity between the anarchic 1968 and the libertarian 1989/91. Generally, it may be said that the anti-communist revolutions happened at the intersection of these two historical waves, and their strange and generally sad destiny was an effect of the interference produced by this collision. The main moral of the story I am telling here is the fatal unwillingness of Soviet citizens in the 1980s and 1990s to recognize the eventful and essence of solidarity of their political actions. The revolution did happen, but it happened latently, unconsciously for the actors who were mostly relying on the “normal” standards of imaginary Western democracy, or on naturalism or neotraditionalism. This unconscious revolution could not, of course, create any lasting democratic institutions and gave birth to an anarchic and anomic society. However, the unconscious character of perestroika created the condition of its return, and we see now, under very different circumstances, a new wave of mobilization that meets a much more serious resistance than 20 years ago, and thus has all chances, in the future, to come to an adequate political self-understanding. It remains, however, to explain the logic of this self-produced failure, its conditions of possibility, and its place in the conceptual history of modernity.

Depoliticization and melancholia Litanies and melancholia The Russian anti-communist revolution produced not just depoliticization but an aggressive propaganda of despair in media and in private communication. This situation, which could be called postrevolutionary melancholia, holds, in my view, the key to the historical meaning of what happened. I will now analyze it in more detail.

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First, apathy and melancholia in the public sphere, especially on the ideological level, did not mean the overall loss of energy for the people. On the contrary, the economic crisis of the 1990s required intensification: most people held many jobs at a time, workday legislation was not enforced, etc. At the same time, the sphere of entertainment enjoyed a major spurt. Secondly, melancholia expressed itself not simply in a passive detachment but in a peculiar aggressive public lamentation. For example, in 1992, the year of the greatest inflation and loss of savings, the frontwoman of the state-owned Russian TV channel Svetlana Sorokina finished every news program with some apocalyptic statement like: “I hope that all of you survive until we meet again tomorrow.” Both intellectuals and the masses shared a deep and bitter pessimism and catastrophism, which was somewhat strange in the context of a life that was, indeed, often hard, but apparently running its everyday course: the subway, for instance, ran on schedule. Anxiety had its mobilizing effects, but it was also expressed in the defeatist feelings that every effort is futile. Many otherwise insightful social theorists22 wrote, in the 1990s, books about the incredible, unsurpassable trauma of the Gulag, of the violent urbanization of peasants, etc., which has survived in the heart of every Russian for several generations and still dooms any positive political effort to failure. This mood was parallel, in a way, to the tone of Adorno who famously denied the possibility of lyric poetry after Auschwitz. This defeatism avant la lettre was somewhat strange to hear and to read in a postrevolutionary situation. But so is any traumatic symptom. Its persistence indicates that it does not correspond to material trauma but rather exceeds it. The actual problem was memory, which became undesirable and redundant. In what is perhaps the best book on perestroika and the postcommunist transformation in Russia, Nancy Ries, an anthropologist from Cornell, describes in detail this genre of lamentation (or “litany”) that she heard from virtually everyone she talked with in Russia between 1989 and 1992.23 This genre usually included a comparison with “normal” Western countries, conclusions about the inherent incapacity and traumatism of the Soviet (Russian) people, especially on the level of the economy, then a rhetorical question (“why is everything so bad for us?”) or a statement of hopelessness (“This motherland of ours is so unfortunate, so unfortunate”).24 Characteristically, although at the time both men and women gave these desperate comments on the situation, the particular “virtuosity” in this genre belonged to women. Ries notes the possible functional role of this discourse in Soviet times (as a psychological protection of the powerless against the regime and the risk of taking action). She also remarks on its evident inadequacy—indeed the fiercest “lamenters” were often quite well off— and its dysfunctional paralytic effect at the time of reform. One has to add that this mood was actively sustained by the media and by opinion leaders (who were by no means starving). Ries gives several accounts of this phenomenon. One explanation is the long-standing Russian tradition, first of this specific genre of litanies (usually performed by women), in literary, religious, and everyday discourse, and second of the high esteem for poverty (and for the claim of poverty) in general. This tradition had, of course, to surface in the period of a major breakdown, when complaints were likely to find abundant material and a sympathetic audience. The second major

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explanation proposed by Ries is the symbolic functionality of the “litanies” dating back to Soviet times: the expression of a certain masochist “pride” of having endured hardships, a close but not identical pride in having actual power to endure all of this, the quasi-religious or ritual supplication of deliverance from hardship, and finally the possible concealment of one’s success from potential or actual envy. Thirdly, there is the pragmatic, not simply symbolic, functionality of the genre, as it had constantly been used in complaints to the authorities. Moreover, I’d add to Ries’s list that the complaints, particularly those about economic troubles, were the mobilizing discourse of popular movements in the early stages of the anti-communist revolution. Ries’s analysis is generally impeccable (and applies beyond 1992 when she stops her analysis). It is now important to include this phenomenon in the structure of the transformation (revolution) itself, instead of simply pointing at its dysfunctional and untimely character. Ries rightly argues that the “litanies” have a partly “screening” effect. In other words, I suggest, they fit into a structure of what Freud described as “fetishistic” disavowal25: “I know that mother does not have a penis but nevertheless . . .” I know that I work hard, hold several jobs, and manage to earn enough money to survive. I also know that most people around me manage to survive, too. Nevertheless, I know that in general the conditions of life are miserable and catastrophic. It is easy to see that this ideological structure may not only play a paralyzing but also a mobilizing role in maintaining the necessity of an extreme effort (since the lamenters imagine themselves to be at the edge of a catastrophe). It seems that, in our situation, it paralyzes political and social enthusiasm and the capability for a long-term strategic activity, but mobilizes day-to-day (every day is the last one, every day is the edge) work and consumption. Moreover, sudden disgust and horror at the conditions of political and social life is an effect as much as a growing sensibility to troubles through the free media, as of the raised criteria of perfection and of actual devastation. As such, the litany may be seen as a symptom and a vehicle of the turn to the better, except that its negative energy is directed toward the subjects themselves and risks destroying them before they actually reflect upon this positive change. While the “litanies” of the Russians may have several pragmatic explanations, one has to consider their meaning. Intentionally, these lamentations speak of profound dissatisfaction with the world; they show a disposition that has for ages been called “melancholia.” Melancholia can be described as negative affectation. I will analyze it systematically later, but here I will start with its discussion in psychoanalysis and related contemporary cultural theory. The association of melancholia with intellectual activity stems from Aristotle, and in modern times, melancholia is particularly understood to be a mood of intellectuals. Wolf Lepenies, a German sociologist and author of a seminal book Melancholia and Society,26 rightly argues that the anti-communist revolutions of 1989–91 were driven by melancholics: These intellectuals . . . were moralists who endowed all Europe with a new culture of confrontation, they first belonged to a “complaining class” but have now become

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active melancholics who were denouncing the violent character of the official optimism. . . . The moralists of the Eastern Europe were melancholics who freed themselves from the inhibition of activity and, for a while, got hold of power and had to act. .  .  . But for this very reason they soon transformed themselves into “experts” or disappeared from the political scene.27

It is accepted by all that melancholia involves a reflexive motion of the subject to himself/herself. The question is about the cause of this introversion. The most obvious answer, and the one that I will tentatively choose here, to start with (but there are others to come), belongs to Freud who, in a rather literal way, attributes melancholia to loss of an external object of attachment.28 But, he says, it is a loss that remains unconscious, that is, we do not realize that the object, once separated, remains dear to us. The negativity of the event of separation is thus not fully experienced, or even repressed: it is negation without negativity. As a result, writes Freud, the subject turns the libidinal energy upon himself/ herself, in a form of self-aggression. What the subject perceives as his/her self contains a part that “represents” the object and becomes alien to the subject (“the shadow of the object fell upon the ego,”29 says Freud). This leads to struggles with oneself, with its paralyzing, but at times triumphant and “manic,” effects. Often the subject devalues himself/herself in front of the lost object—which then “receives,” invisibly, the subject’s complete energetic investment. As Freud emphasizes, “self-abasement” must not correspond to objective reality, it is a certain posture that the patient likes to present as publicly as possible. “Feelings of shame in front of other people . . . are lacking in the melancholic . . . One must emphasize the presence in him of almost the opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure.”30 This seems to be written expressly for the post-Soviet Russian subjects who try to persuade them of their extreme misery and worthlessness, except that the object is not an individual but a collective entity: Russian people as a whole, a “we.” At times the subject manages to delimit, symbolically and materially, the object from himself/herself. In this case, the libidinal energy that has been reserved and accumulated in the “war of position” with oneself, bursts out and leads to ecstatic, hectic activity. The strength of Freud’s analysis is that he sees melancholia as an externally motivated internalization. What is not quite clear in Freud’s analysis is why the energy turned toward the subject from the object is negative, while the libido had originally been that of love. Freud seems to refer to the ambivalence of libido as such. The logic is clearer in the 1911 article of Freud’s disciple Karl Abraham, which Freud later used for his own essay.31 Abraham explains the negativity of interiorized libido by the fact that the subject cannot turn reproaches against the beloved object and thus turns them against himself/herself. A contemporary psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva, in Black Sun, explains Freudian melancholia, rightly in my view, as the unwillingness to negate the dysfunction of the symbol of negation (and thus the whole symbolic function). The melancholic, she says, “disavows (verleugnet) the denegation (Verneinung), he annuls, suspends it and returns, with nostalgia, to the real object of his/her loss that s/he does not manage

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to lose”32: s/he denies and rejects, but the negative formulations do not have force, and the melancholic rests attached to the presymbolic “Thing.” Thus, melancholia is not the hypertrophy but a (voluntary) failure of negativity, like in the Marxian interpretation of Hegel’s Aufhebung, or in Nietzsche’s indigestion of history: failure of being done with, or going through, the past. I see an analogy between Freud’s theory and the story of postrevolutionary melancholia. In the case of revolution, the “lost” object is not the mother or a lover, but rather sovereign authority, which has been symbolically degraded and ousted in the course of revolution. Lacking sovereign ideocratic authority, which is of course an object of ambivalent affective investment (one can identify with it but also constantly criticize it, to make it a scapegoat for social troubles), a postrevolutionary society remains one-on-one with itself, and the negative energy accumulated during the revolution is now scattered within society, without an obvious point of application. It is then that a fratricidal struggle (terror, civil war) can start; however, it is also an obvious mechanism of paralysis, self-denunciation, and widespread depression expressed in an active form. What Freud notes but does not develop is the staged character of melancholia. Even though there may be something that is (partly) lost, a melancholic subject invents and exaggerates his/her losses. Abraham even mentions a typical melancholic fantasy of impoverishment.33 The fictional element of melancholia was explored more recently in Giorgio Agamben’s excellent book on melancholia: Stanzas.34 Agamben clearly shows that the loss lamented in melancholia is a fantasy; it serves to locate, incorporate, and appropriate the swaying negativity. [M]elancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. Here psychoanalysis seems to have reached conclusions very similar to those of Church fathers, who conceived of sloth as the withdrawal from a good that has not yet been lost and who interpreted the most terrible of its daughters, despair, as an anticipation of unfulfillment and damnation. . . . [I]t might be said that the withdrawal of melancholical libido has no other purpose than to make viable an appropriation in a situation in which none is really possible. . . . If the libido behaves as if a loss had occurred although nothing has in fact been lost, this is because libido stages a simulation where what cannot be lost because it has never been possessed appears as lost, and what could never be possessed because it never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost.35

Note Agamben’s emphasis on simulation; we are dealing not so much with an illusionary object but with a certain posture, a certain magical, ritualistic practice, “a faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning for an object even before this object is lost.”36 Agamben notes that Freud shares with the tradition of writing on melancholia the concepts of “withdrawal from reality and the withdrawal into oneself of the contemplative tendency.”37 But he disagrees with Freud’s “realistic” solution to the

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enigma of melancholia. In fact, the very object that is supposedly lost dominates the subject and casts its shadow over it. In this sense, says Agamben, “a melancholic proves his fidelity to the object by the same gesture that abolishes it”: melancholia is centered on the object, in an essentially ambivalent way. This object—and here Agamben follows Lacan—is not to be read in a naturalist way. It is both external and internal; the external experience is here transformed by imagination. This is also why Agamben brings together Freud’s theory of melancholia and his theory of fetishism (as presented in the “Fetishism” article from 1927).38 A fetishist subject, says Freud, is the one who wants to disavow (verleugnen) an obvious fact, namely the absence of penis in his/her mother. The object—the fetish—is the last one s/he can see before discovering this sad truth. Therefore, the fetish serves as a screen that allows the subject to maintain belief in the phallic mother—while at the same time knowing it is not true. This is a disavowal or a split (Spaltung) in the Ego. Agamben rightly notes that here, too, there is an ambiguous relationship to an object. In the case of melancholia, its absence is posited (while in fact it is unconsciously present), and in the fetishist case, a presence is affirmed, at a cost of a split in the consciousness. What Agamben rejects in Freud is the sharp separation between the object as a placeholder and an original object of attraction and/or fantasy. It is the same object that is lost and that is mourned, the same object represents a phallic presence and is a screen for its absence: “the fetish, whether a part of the body or an inorganic object, is at the same time the maternal penis and a sign of its absence.” Fetish is thus “both [a] symbol of something, and its negation.”39 This interpretation brings us back to our postrevolutionary subjects. As mentioned, the paradox was that the better off they were, the more they lamented. There was a split between evidence of their well-being and the apocalyptic discourse: a split that resembled a fetishistic disavowal. This fits well with Slavoj Žižek’s well-known theory of fetishism inherent in the ideology as such, and in particular, in the cynical subjectivity of the late socialist society, where one went to communist meetings and paid lip service to the ideology s/he did not believe, and this sufficed for the survival of the system. During a revolutionary event, the negativity inherent in this split burst out, and the practices depending on the belief in the “phallic” authority of the party and the parousia of communism were dismantled—only to be reversed into the ritualistic discourse of the end of times, associated with prosaic consumerist enjoyment. Reversal means that revolutionary negation was incomplete and the ambivalent libidinal attachment to authority remained in the reversed shape of negative magnitude. This was thus a reversal of fetishism into melancholia: a reversal that constituted a reflexive self-punishing subject. Neither Freud nor Agamben say much of the event through which the subject encounters/loses the libidinal object. But clearly this matters, because in their interpretations, the infinite and overflowing energy is attributed to the Ego, and the external stimulus is in the best case “just” an object. Freud’s interpretation of melancholia depends upon his theory of libido, which sets “primary narcissism” as an origin and then sees it as attaching itself to objects. Nothing is more dubious than this mythic Fichteanism. The primary state in which a child does not distinguish between

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Ego and the world could equally be called a primary pantheism (and in fact Freud calls it, following Romain Rolland, an “oceanic feeling”40). In our case, the “fetish” of the revolutionary subjects is revolution as a disaster, the event itself. And event is not just an object, even if it can be fetishized. In my view, a third term must be added to the Freudian/Agambenian internalization of libido: the event of encounter and loss of the object; it is this event that sets free the infinite energy of freedom, which opens up the subject to the objective world, and at the next moment, makes it pull back and lock infinite energy in the finite space-time of subjectivity. One cannot say if this event is fully on the subjective side or objective side. One other limitation of Freud’s and Agamben’s analysis is the assumption that melancholia can be explained as a history of an individual subject and his/her encounters and fantasies. Again, this is very problematic, because it makes us assume the subjectivity that, the authors say, is only produced as a result of melancholia. Moreover, melancholia is a cultural phenomenon and concerns a collective, not just solitary, subject. But in this case, communication must be its major factor. What is the role of community in melancholia? Is it simply provoked by a separation with passive objects or by active intrusions of such objects in an eventful manner? And if “objects” are active, then they are probably also “subjects,” and these can be melancholic in their own right? These are many questions that will reappear in the course of the study, although one thing is beyond doubt: a revolution in general, and the anti-communist revolution par excellence, is an interiorization of the infinite energy of event as a result of which the negativity of revolution finds itself in a free, suspended state: this is revolutionary melancholia.

Fetishist melancholia in the anti-communist revolution In the case of post-Soviet subjects, the following then happens. Discontent aimed at government results in its downfall. But this discontent does not go away as a result, and now there is no one to “address” it to. In addition, the loss is intangible and incomplete. Thus, the subjects exaggerate and hypostasize the historical loss, interpret their problems as the internal, universal misery of the whole country and torture themselves, in the absence of the exterior authority to blame or supplicate. In the case of lamentations, the situation consists of two levels. First, there is an exaggeration and generalization of loss, which allows the subject to make sense of internal change and at the same time to obtain a “screen” for his/her own private, egotistic activity. “In this disastrous time, everyone thinks only of oneself, people no longer help their friends, they live only for their money etc.” This gives the subject a justification to be egotistic, blaming the general catastrophe that does not necessarily affect him or her. A private success seems to be an exception that confirms the rule (and the rule, in turn, confirms the exception). The “catastrophe” itself would consist, meanwhile, of the self-dissolution of the universal, which would justify, in turn, the abandonment of the universal (and this means also, of the political) by an individual. Thus, private life, the life of acquisition and expense, is, wherever it is possible, in blossom. Public life, and thus the sphere of a subject’s identity, is in ruins, and the

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development of the country is at an impasse. We ultimately see that it is the very relationship between the particular and the universal which is subject to disavowal in “fetishist melancholia.” The subject chooses to ignore his/her own engagement in the event, the possibilities that it opens, the new point of view from which s/he can negatively assess reality, the new criteria with which s/he can compare this devalued reality. Instead, he or she perceives the event as an externally inflicted disaster. We are dealing, in the same movement, with a disavowal of the event (in its positive, opening form) and with its fetishization (in a negative, destructive form). However, and this is the second level of the situation, the lamentations are also rhetorical devices, which are addressed—to whom?—to an absent, imaginary big Other who could deliver society from catastrophe and from the excessive energy of demand and aggression that it turns against itself. What, in Soviet times, was a functional mode of obtaining goods from the government, now became a depressive litany addressed to thin air. Thus, in accordance with the logic of fetishism, imaginary, exaggerated loss further develops into a relation to an imaginary, external object. In our case, this is less the partial object of desire and more the anthropomorphic symbolic instance. In the case of litanies, documented by Ries, who is herself a foreign guest, this authority is the imaginary omnipotent “West,” an object of jealousy and of demand. However, as already mentioned, Russian faith in the help of the West quickly proved to be in vain. Fetishist melancholia is an ambiguous delimitation of the absolutely negative (absolutely Other). The negative is rejected with horror, and the subject turns to his/ her supposed self-sufficiency and autonomy. Alternatively, the negative delimitation of the absolute Other makes this Other, in its turn, a self-sufficient authority, with a scope of power much broader than that of the human subject. Radical individualism transforms in a moment into a state of ultimate helplessness. It is easy to see how this logic corresponds precisely to the attitude of Russian people toward politics and state: they oscillate between contempt and disgust, on the one hand, and the supplication of tyrannical emergency measures in a moment of trouble. This looks like a desperate diagnosis. However, the situation may contain in itself its own cure. The fantasy of complete negation evokes a symmetrical negative effort of escaping from the catastrophe. Any imaginary exterior instance will ultimately prove illegitimate and powerless. The “work of mourning” that the subject performs for his/her ritualistic purposes is the ceaseless material activity that attempts again and again to complete the negation and to “go on.” This activity is the actual content of the revolution, and thus the second meaning of the word “revolution” or “event” (which necessarily implies the first one, of an imagined absolute loss). While it is, with all its irrational disavowals, much less efficient than an open battle of civil war, it is also more radical. As a result of considering the logic of lamentation, we come to realize something crucial about Russian transformation. This will be further generalized as the logic of a revolutionary event. The liberating, opening content of this event is disavowed, or denied, while the destructive side of it is hypostasized and exaggerated. The event, in its orientation, is subject to an ambivalent attitude resulting in a taboo, a deifying (and petrifying) concealment, in such a way that the subjects of an event live through it, to

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borrow Benjamin’s famous image,41 with their heads turned back, in a staged resistance to the event that makes it appear, as it were, from outside. The “event,” or “revolution,” means two things at once: first the latent, incomplete, self-contradictory negation; second the fantasy of a complete negation and absolute foundation. Both fetishism and melancholia are structured around the void of the event, the incompletion of the change that they fill in with their catastrophic fantasies. Subsequently, the subjects of revolution apply the negation to this fantasy that they have themselves produced. They turn back to the ambiguous, uncertain event, and push off from it, to move forward and away. I will show in the following section how this logic was already thoroughly traced in Kant’s reading of the French Revolution, and evoked in many subsequent philosophical accounts of revolution.

Negativism and catastrophism The anthropological phenomenon of self-denunciation in the 1990s in Russia did not express itself only in the private litanies addressed to visitors from the West. There was a public aspect to these practices as well: litanies were used in the media not just as complaints but as a panic-driven hyperbolization of event. Some Russian intellectuals polemicized against negativist ideology and tried to explain it. Contemporary Russian sociologist Grigory Kertman, in his article “Catastrophism in the Context of Russian Political Culture,”42 derives the tendency to emphasize disaster from Russian history. He speaks of a complex of “social impotence,” closely tied to “paternalism,” which characterized Russian society since the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, as an effect of its sociopolitical structure. At the same time, an explosion of paternalism in the 1990s was, according to Kertman, a reaction of paternalist culture to the new crisis situation. The function of catastrophism consisted, then, in raising a subject’s self-esteem in a difficult economic situation (“I deserve better”) by addressing discontent to the state, and secondly, because of the egalitarian values of Soviet society, in aspiring to solidarity with society as a whole by denying its increasing stratification and its opening of possibilities for many but not for all. This interpretation, though not without strength, implies that the subjects of “catastrophic” ideology were those who suffered from the ongoing reforms. Then, after all, this ideology is not that problematic, it would just express opposition to the ongoing revolutionary changes by those who objectively suffered from it, instead of reconciling with the neoliberal values of individual success and of the society of opportunities. Kertman’s perspective is itself informed by these neoliberal values from whose standpoint he dismisses the pleas for social solidarity. But, as Ries shows, and as the history of the 1990s confirms, catastrophic ideology, while it could well resonate with the feeling of the newly unemployed or underpaid workers and engineers was actually disseminated from “above,” from the mediatic intellectuals in the capitals who actually did get economic and career opportunities in a new regime and acquired a freedom of speech that was important for them. In this case, we actually see in the catastrophism less of a call for solidarity and more of a screen of social atomization. The diagnosis of disaster justified egotistic career strategies, legitimated then by the widespread ideologeme of “survival,” and assumed the dissolution of social ties.

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Also, the historical heritage of public voice in the form of complaint, reinforced, one must add, by the mode of conflict solving in the late Soviet system (most efficiently, a complaint to the party and state committees and councils), does not per se explain the usage of this form in a new situation, for rhetorical purposes: new complaints were without a clear addressee. Daniil Dondurey, film critic, sociologist, and liberal essayist, wrote, in the end of 1990s, a series of articles that attacked and analyzed the situation of irrational negativism. He chooses the logic of “cui bono” and explains negativist discourse through the interests that it serves. These interests, he says, are for the most part economic, and egotistic at that. The mass popularization of fear and distrust in one’s forces, violence over one’s ideals give a sense of instability to the whole order of life. From here, one has just to make a small step to digging dirt on one’s political opponents, or trusting the slander. In troubled water, it is easy to build empires, to consolidate power, to hijack the state organs. And earn more and more money. 43

According to Dondurey, the conscious organizers or unconscious beneficiaries of negativism were oligarchic financial-industrial groups interested in speculating on the instability of the Russian economy. Media and intellectuals would be their accomplices, consciously or otherwise, even though this would go against their direct interests, and against the state, which owned a large share of the media in question. Dondurey, like Kertman, considers negativism as a cohesive force, fictively uniting not just the poor but also the rich: “the only thing that brings the nation into a socio-psychological whole is an atmosphere of depression (podavlennost’), a feeling of living in misery (neschastie). It is a hard life for a retired old person who does not have enough money for living, for a professor who cannot make savings, for an entrepreneur who must evade taxes, and even for one who was unable to fetch the blocking package of stocks of the ‘Sviazinvest’ (a Russian communications monopoly sold at an auction in 1996, after which the losing bidders launched a ‘dirt-digging’ campaign against the liberal reformers in the government).”44 Once again, we see that an illusion of solidarity coexists with justification of purely egotistic and immoral behavior: the anomia. Agreeing in part with Dondurey’s analysis, I need, however, to add that a reduction of ideology to interest (in the spirit of the good old eighteenth century) has its limitations. The entrepreneurs who disseminated negativism must have already been touched by it: the desire to speculate at any price reflects a very particular type of subjectivity: lonely, anomic, and adventurous. Ideology not just played their card; it also formed their very interests, constituted them, and many other people as social subjects. As a result of the oversimplifying explanation of negativism, Dondurey, in 1997–8, formulates an alternative program: the media should promote a positive “ideology,” and consciously inspire optimism, like they do in the United States. It is no surprise that this program was in part fulfilled by Putin’s regime of 2000. Political events are now covered in an optimistic style. Criminal shows with graphic details held their place in the prime time slot, but they were balanced by a large number of sitcoms and

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stand up comedies, usually low in price and taste in comparison with the standards of the Soviet and 1990s Russian TV. In the 2000s, negativistic discourse was stopped, at least in the most influential media, and this coincided with the definite end of the revolutionary process in politics and in society. But, as we now know, this did not make society happier and the country more progressive. In fact, the very idea of ideology as planned propaganda stems from the negativist, or nihilist, roots that Dondurey criticizes: the subject cannot create values at will, and when/if it does, it only reproduces its own conditions of existence—a lonely desperation of someone who had “overcome” his/her trauma by abandoning himself/herself, and the very world. The negative revolution produced nihilism and this in turn produced an official discourse of cynical optimism. An important philosophical analysis of the meaning of Russian negativism in the 1990s was written by the great Russian philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin. In his article, “The Law of Russian History,”45 Bibikhin compared the situation of the 1990s with the epoch of Tzar Peter the Great (1699–1725). In the reconstruction of Bibikhin, Peter interrupted the slow tempo of preceding reforms and drove the country into a convulsive condition of “total mobilization.” Peter reacted to the instantaneous shock of a historical event (which Bibikhin compares to Heraclitus’ concept of “lightning”), in a mimetic form, by a series of brusque and unexpected moves. Bibikhin describes his policy quite critically: his voluntarist orders often were not implemented (because he did not push them through), he did not leave a trusted successor, etc. However, Bibikhin sees his rhythm as a particular form of human encounter with history. The leading countries are a space of early discipline, of a distant preparation to the inevitable experience of the Limiting (predelnoe), and the backward ones—of the late discipline of sobering up after this encounter. The Limiting, be it lightning or war, is generally not of something one would be able to prepare for. Any encounter here is shocking anyway. But in this case, countries should be counted as the leading or backward not by an imaginary standard of movement or development, but by a capacity or incapacity to notice one’s belatedness and distance from the event of the world. On this measure we have long or always been ahead of Europe.46

This historiosophic comparison suffers from a nationalist perspective (expected of someone who consciously relied, among others, on the traditions of Russian philosophy), and it exaggerates the “preparedness” of Europe (there had been plenty of convulsions in its history), but it does notice an important logic of revolutionary events: a subject is taken by surprise and therefore reacts to the event in an emergency, helter-skelter, convulsive mode. The advantage of this attitude consists, for Bibikhin, in the refusal to appropriate or tame the events that bring one together with the limits of one’s world, and with his/her own capacity to transcend these limits. The reservation with regard to the Limiting is a paradoxical form of openness and proximity to it. It is in this context that the negativistic aspects of the event should be seen. He writes: “Let us look anew at the Russian habit of emphasizing one’s retardedness, unfitness, and waste-like character (brosovost, literally, being fit for thrown away).” Peter and one of his ideologists Ivan Pososhkov like to practice an overall dismissal of Russia,

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particular in the face of the West as a model (sounds familiar in the contemporary context). Bibikhin quotes Pososhkov: “Though I have not been to other countries, I do not expect to find anywhere the habits as bad as in our land.”47 The brosovost, waste character, is akin to broshennost, Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, but in Russian this also means to throw oneself into a cause, to dedicate oneself fully to it. In Heidegger’s terms, this corresponds to the project Entwurf. Catastrophism borders with utopia. “The shift of despair/promise must be complete, so as to derive the absolute need of an urgent change out of the absolutely intolerable situation in the present.”48 One can draw an analogy with the utopian enthusiasm of the perestroika, which shifted almost overnight into the lamentation of the 1990s. Bibikhin himself often notes that this event was a revolution.49 He analyzes catastrophic exaggeration in the work of Anna Akhmatova, renowned Russian poet of the twentieth century, in whose mature poetry there is a constant motif of disaster (“beda”). Bibikhin notes that Akhmatova herself had at the end a relatively successful biography for her time (she lived until the thaw when she became world famous; her son Gumilev was in GULAG and on his return became a famous scholar; her ex-husband was shot and executed but much after her divorce, etc.). Nevertheless, there was a “captivating acuteness,” “sweet enjoyment” in the insistence on the disaster, and this should be read, in the case of Akhmatova, as fidelity to the lightning-like sovereignty of the event, which is at the same time catastrophic and utopian. The strength of Bibikhin’s interpretation derives from its hermeneutic character that takes paradoxical ideas seriously. It also contains a danger of an overly tolerant attitude to the ideology: if catastrophism is the traditional attitude of Russian culture to “Limiting” then there is no need to criticize it. In my view (here I agree with Dondurey), in the 1990s, self-humiliation and self-lessening destroyed Russian society from inside. Something went wrong, and not just with the economic reforms. My interpretation of negativism will be developed further in the comparison with France and in the theory of melancholia, but here I want to show that this phenomenon must be subject not only to a hermeneutical reading but also to ideological critique, in the spirit of L. Althusser. Althusser rightly claimed that modern ideology proceeds in the mode of subjectivization of an individual. However, he saw this subjectivization as a secret, latent mechanism of reproduction of the existing system. This mechanism makes the subject identify with this system and take responsibility for it. This fits the conservative model of reproduction of a liberal capitalist system. Ideology functions differently in revolutionary societies. Here, it produces an individual and individualist subject by means of the dissolution of existing social ties. It is thus negative subjectivization. Catastrophic consciousness is ideal to produce a “sovereign” individual who fictively imagines society as a conglomerate of desperate egoists and refuses to share in any meaningful collective effort preferring instead a personal “survival.” Any revolution is a process of subjectivization, since it turns the society toward itself and makes it symbolically, responsible for its own development. It is an act of democratic self-foundation. This is why a revolution, as its very name implies, goes back and not just forward. It requires a thorough auto-critique and an appeal to past generations (Benjamin). A subject, as Lacan’s graph of desire famously shows, is

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constituted retrospectively, inserted into the past. But any memory is also an interrupted backward movement, a negative effort to mentally undo events that have happened. Jules Michelet notes of the French Revolution that it was a “belated advent of eternal justice.”50 The absolutist state was a state of justice, in the sense that it legitimated the monarch as an instance of justice. But, says Michelet, this system was built essentially on the order of grace. In contrast to this progressive but superficial regime, the French Revolution established new justice through digging into the depth of popular life: it denuded a “deep abyss of arbitrary rule”51 that actually dominated the monarchy and reacted to the age-old forgotten prisoners of the Ancien Régime. Revolution goes deep inside, and back, where monarchy wants to go forward. In the case of the anti-Soviet revolution, the original ideological discourse was “repentance” (as exemplified by the aforementioned film by Abuladze and a series of publications on Stalinist terror). Next, it passed to the cruel and brutal depiction of the actual situation in the country. And only then did revolutionary auto-critique gradually transform into passive self-denunciation and apocalyptic consciousness. The “step back” thus did not lead to a jump forward: the subject remained in the place where it had retreated. Generally, one can say that the newly formed subject finds an imaginary zero point, a low start, which provides for his/her position of autonomy, self-foundation, and critical consciousness. Hence Saint-Just’s “malheureux” presented as “powers of the Earth,”52 and also Marx’s suffering proletariat. A subject must be melancholic. The problem is that this zero perspective can lead both to an active uprising and to a passive fatalism. In the latter case, the subject puts his/her identity above his/her calling and compensates the unstable eventful transformation by self-hindrance and withdrawal into one’s ego (and perhaps its close circle) out of the larger society with its ethical order, which, as a consequence of catastrophism, presents itself in imagination as nonexistent, or scotomized, to use a notion that Freud attributes to René Laforgue.53 Such a subject paralyzes himself/herself, so as to remain a subject in the course of revolution. The apocalyptic and self-humiliating fantasies are then just so many justifications for self-hindrance. One can evoke here Adorno and Horkheimer’s image of the modern subject as Ulysses tied to the mast so as to hear the music of the sirens: Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self—the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings—was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at all its stages, and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand in hand with the blind determination to preserve it. . . . The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. [Odysseus] listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast, and the stronger the allurement grows the more tightly he has himself bound, just as later the bourgeois denied themselves happiness the closer it drew to them with the increase in their own power.54

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Note how Adorno and Horkheimer, before Lacan and Althusser, describe the negative constitution of the modern subject. But what is also powerful in their account is the understanding that a melancholic paralysis happens, as a paradoxical reaction, at the point of encounter with a joyful infinity of future: the same thought was later expressed by Bibikhin who described melancholia as a consequence of shock from an encounter with a “limiting,” transcendent force. To conclude, we see that the modern subject, with two sides—paralysis (a subject of constant choice, and of egotistic fixation) and an open, reflexive activity—has an eventful and not just institutional genesis. Before the subjectivity builds into a system of capitalist relations of production, it is constituted in a moment of revolutionary transformation.

Historical steps of negation in the Russian revolution In the anti-communist Russian revolution, one may also trace a historical conjunction between fetishistic and melancholic splits. Former Soviet mentality was structured fetishistically (indeed, it is a paradigmatic example of Žižek’s theory of “cynical” ideology): no one believed in communism, but they pretended to believe, and this was as much a hidden mine in the body of the regime as it was a tool of its perpetuation. But, the degree of symbolic alienation covered up the degree of material, practical contamination of a subject with the regime. Thus, the easy and relatively unanimous symbolic execution of communism led to a grave internal split that reproduced the features of fetishism but added the features of melancholia—the (self)-paralyzing power, stagnation—which had been earlier attributed to the past and to the degenerate communist government! Thus far, I have articulated and illustrated the following structure of revolutionary negativity: symbolic death of the alienated Other—the resulting void— interiorization—indeterminate internal split. This situation makes the situation in Russia homologous to the global situation that is constituted by the same event—the dissolution of communist regimes. This homology allows an analysis of the Russian situation in universal terms. As Žižek, in drawing a parallel between our situation and the French Revolution, writes: In the face of the apparent worldwide triumph of liberal-capitalist ideology, it would be far more productive to recall Hegel’s dictum that a political movement gains victory when it splits. The moment of liberal democracy’s triumph, the moment when its external adversary, incarnated in the Communist “Evil Empire,” disintegrated, is in itself (and will soon also become “for itself ”) the moment of confrontation with its immanent limit: its own weakness can no longer be exculpated by means of a comparison with “Them.” In the West as well as in the East, we are already witnessing new political movements which are “events” in the sense elaborated by Alain Badiou: emergences of something that cannot be longer integrated into the existing ideological frameworks, signs of the New the pathbreaking character of which is attested by the very fact they do not know what

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The internalization of the problem, or limit, is thus productive in overcoming it. The conflict is no longer projected outside but becomes an internal problem requiring a break with something in oneself. But, according to the logic of melancholia, this break and this limit are not recognized as such. They are still concealed by the (false) perception of internal unity as it remained from the times of antagonism with the external enemy. All these elements form a coherent structure around the negativity of the revolutionary drive. The new Russian revolution was, first of all, a “symbolic death”56 of communist ideology. It consisted of several symbolic events, signatures, decrees: the permission, in 1989, to criticize Lenin, this sacra sacrorum of Soviet ideology, the 1991 coup d’état that demonstrated the incapacity of communist conservators, the fall of monuments, and the change of state attributes. These symbolic acts “canceled” the regime, which had already lost most of its symbolic efficiency by the time. Second, the anti-communist revolution was a stoppage of a certain motion that was perceived as a historical march to communism, and not a passage from one spatialized “epoch” to another, as in the vulgar Marxist, or the historicist, notion of revolution. As such, the revolution had to put forward the task of erasing the heritage of communism and of starting the Russian state anew (this was, for example, one of the effects, if not purposes, of the mass loss of savings in 1992). However, events showed that destruction was not to become the actual direction of revolutionary development. From the very beginning the negative attitude toward authorities—the attitude that rose from the private into the public sphere and caused the fall of the regime—had the character of disavowal and repulsion. Disavowal is the continuation and overreaching of simple physical negation as resistance. Indeed, its meaning used to float between the meanings of active resistance and of the refusal to recognize an adversary. It is used in the former meaning, for example, in the US Declaration of Independence (1776): “[W]e have conjured them [the British people] by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these [royal British government’s] usurpations.”57 The Russian society turned. It turned away from the authorities and away from the place they occupied, from the place of ideology and public politics. Negation does not necessarily imply an open fight; its more radical or at least purer form is total contempt and dismissal. The symbolic negation implicit in the task of founding a new state with a new name sets the impossible goal of a total, radical break. The impossibility of this goal makes the effort of negation infinite. Starting with reasonable anger against authorities, the revolutionary negation overreaches, so to speak, into disavowal, fear, and escape. If the word “revolution,” with its root “volvo,” “to turn,” may only with some violence be translated as a “turning away,” the meaning is obvious in its “twin,” the word “revolt.” This word has the same root and prefix and emerged in France at about the same time (a little bit earlier—in the beginning of the sixteenth century) that the word “revolution” and had a meaning very close although not identical with the meaning of the latter word. In addition to the political meaning, “revolt,” in English as well as in French, has a meaning of disgust—of revulsion.

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As already stated, the Soviet state had itself been a product of revolution, but the party-state that resulted from it had gradually transformed itself and became a bureaucratic authoritarian regime. Still, this regime actively promoted communist ideology, which included an apology of a revolution accomplished by the wretched and the poor. This ideological rhetoric was becoming increasingly ritual and outdated, but it was nevertheless a hidden virus of negativity that was potentially lethal for entrenched bureaucracy, which was alienated from society. Gorbachev revitalized revolutionary rhetoric, with the result that communist revolutionary ideology exploded, in an antirevolutionary revolution. Unlike the revolutions of the past, this revolution targeted not just arbitrary authority but also ideology, the very space that had once been opened by negativity but then filled by the positivity of “developed socialism” and by the quasi-transcendence of communism-as-religion. The loss of alienated authority, and of this external, transcendent quasi-religion on which it had relied, has not led to any substitution. The event was just too radical. The anti-communist revolution, far from serving as a progressive force or as a “locomotive of history” (Marx), set a block, or a limit, both to the progress toward utopia (on which the communist ideology was founded) and to the belief in a transcendent utopia as such. In a way, it was an act of impatience that could no longer tolerate the constant adjournment of the arrival of communism. People went on strike against the injunction of eschatologically oriented work. At the same time, they were impatient with regard to the slow decay of the Soviet regime, which was gradually giving up its ideological premises. Instead of waiting for the evolution, this revolution—like any revolution—blocked a progressive movement and restored attention to forgotten ideological content, in order to erase it decisively and then to set a prohibition upon any transcendent ideological content. At the same time the revolution froze and suspended current social antagonisms. This picture has to be systematically compared with the situation surrounding the French Revolution, in order to distill the concept of revolution in its structure and possible variations and to thematize the features of the French Revolution, which are perhaps not so obvious. My comparison will deal primarily with the anthropological aspect of revolution. I will try to elucidate the situation in which the revolutionary subject finds himself or herself, the meaning that this situation acquires for the subject, and the practical problems that he or she faces in this situation. It will gradually become clear that this anthropological situation of the French Revolution, this founding event of modernity, was very similar to the situation of the Russian postcommunist subject.

The Russian anti-communist revolution and the French Revolution Negativity It is in a way blasphemous to compare the great French Revolution, which laid the foundation for a liberal-democratic state and for emancipatory Left-wing movements across the world, to the anti-communist revolution in the Soviet Union, which was directed against communist ideology, which did not result in any serious ideology, and

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which failed to build any lasting institutions of freedom. Nevertheless, recent experience teaches us, retrospectively, about something in the past. We live at the moment when we (I speak of dominant Western ideologies) remain loyal to the French Revolution as a foundation of freedom, but we have abandoned most of the substantive ideas stemming from it (Jacobinism, socialism, communism), except perhaps liberal “human rights” (which comes down to the limitation of the power of state over the individual and a right to contestation of authority). There is a saturation of revolutionary heritage: the 1989 jubilee even made many, inspired by François Furet, claim that the revolution was finally over, a thing of the past. The anti-communist revolutions of 1989–91, with their contestation of “totalitarianism,” threw their shadow on the French Revolution, too, making one remember the Terror, massacres in Vendée, and other unpleasant aspects. But, at the same time, since then we have had already two significant waves of revolutions, which as always produced mass enthusiasm in the spectators, as did the French Revolution, in Kant’s account. Revolutions remain inscribed in many modern constitutions as constituent events, and the appeal to revolutionary tradition is one of the arguments that allow parliamentary regimes to be considered “democratic.” In this context, revolution is increasingly understood as negative, which explains its attraction, its permanent subsistence as an immanent force of the state, and its drawbacks, which explain why, in spite of the progress of Enlightenment, public freedom, fraternity, and other good things remain ideals rather than facts. The French Revolution was seen by contemporaries as a great dawn of humanity; it was a fall of the notorious absolutist state and of the regime of privileges, and a victory of the liberal and republican theories previously elaborated by intellectuals. An uprising from below led not to a riot but to a creation of new institutions, such as the Constituent Assembly and the popular, directly democratic, militant “sections.” Positively or negatively, the French Revolution remained a reference for most political movements for the century to come, and the currently dominant political framework “Right–Left” recalls the position of factions in the Assembly. Reinhart Koselleck famously considered the French Revolution a Sattelzeit, where most political concepts changed their meaning for a future-oriented and democratic content. The concept of “revolution” itself was reinterpreted to mean a one-time irreversible event, and became a value in itself: Jacobins fought for its continuation, and Napoleon later proclaimed that it was “terminée.” All said, the picture of an avant-garde breakthrough of history must be nuanced. First of all, the French Revolutionaries themselves were not “future-oriented,” at least not in the sense of linear progress. Jacobins were republicans, according to the fashion of the time, and they thought that they were restoring the Roman republic not building a new modern democracy. As Marx wrote, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time—that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society—in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.  .  .  . Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism—the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the Publicolas, the tribunes,

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the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle. But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy.58

The reason why the revolutionaries had to cover up the bourgeois content of their revolution was that it was negative, in the abstract sense, destroying the society into atoms, and thus not conducive to “fraternity” or democratic solidarity: The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society.  .  .  . Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function. But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society.59

Positive emancipation—collective and creative—was happening, but only ideally, and this for Marx means fictionally, and the negative emancipation, materially. So, said Marx, the French Revolutionaries derived their poetry not from the future but from the past. Their ideas were thus not necessarily “novel”: they creatively developed the liberal and republican theories available (some preferred Locke and Montesquieu, some, Rousseau and Mably), and also borrowed from the experiences of the American Revolutionaries who had started a decade earlier. As we have seen in the Introduction, one of the connotations of the word “revolution,” as it conclusively entered political language after the English Glorious Revolution was indeed a restitution of the earlier freedoms of various strata of society, freedoms that had been usurped by the absolute monarchy. More broadly, “revolution” connoted a return, a countermovement, and was conceived, very much as in the postcommunist case, as the cancellation of a trend of history that went wrong. The

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revolution was directed against a tyrant and a usurper. The exact point where it went wrong is debatable: it was lost in the depth of the times, as in Rousseau’s account, or coincided with the rise of absolutism in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, or, most likely, it had to do with the fall of the Roman republic. In its “Roman” citations, the Revolution clearly reproduced all the lamentations about the deterioration of times that the Renaissance had inherited from medieval Christian eschatology. The question (as in the Russian anti-communist revolution) was therefore one of reversal of history and return to an idealized past. This sense of reversal, of interruption, and of opposition seems incompatible with the common vision of revolution as a vehicle of general progressive tendencies. For example, some historians of the “revisionist” wave argued that the French Revolution interrupted the general political tendency of the last half of the eighteenth century in Europe: the rise of the cultural, political, and economic hegemony of the nobility.60 If it were not for the revolution, this tendency could have given an entirely different face to post-Enlightenment Europe. Undoubtedly, the French Revolutionaries did build new institutions. But the beginning was passive and reactive. As it is well known, the French Revolution started from above, when the king decided to convene, for the first time in 150  years, the traditional medieval corporate organ of General Estates, in order to authorize a new tax. This institution implied the writing of the “doléances,” complaints, to be delivered by the elected deputies to the king. Ironically, these doléances were used by many to express their republican and liberal principles. E. Sieyès had published, before the Estates were convened, a pamphlet “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État,”61 describing how the Estates should be turned into what he called a “constituent power” for a new parliamentary system. And this is precisely what happened in July 1789: the Estates transformed themselves into a Constituent Assembly. Here, there are obvious parallels with the process of revolution in the Soviet Union where the former decorative “Soviets” were used as an organ of true democracy, and behaved in a constituent fashion: in both cases, it was the nonclassical, nonparliamentary form of estates and Soviets that allowed a revolutionary constituent process. Anthropologically, one cannot say that the revolution was driven only by joy and enthusiasm (although these were largely present during the so-called honeymoon period from September 1789 up to the flight of the king in April of 1791). During the revolution in Paris, the province was seized by the so-called Great Fear.62 This was large-scale panic by the peasants and small city dwellers caused by the widespread rumor that large gangs of bandits were wandering around France and preparing to seize bread from the peasants. The revolutionary events in Paris stimulated these rumors, and added the idea of an aristocratic conspiracy that instigated the bandits to take revenge on the people. Peasants and townsmen prepared to defend themselves and were ready to meet the bandits in full force throughout the summer of 1789. This wave of mimetic panic played a large role in agitating and mobilizing the populace for subsequent revolutionary events; this negative, affective foreground of revolutionary enthusiasm was soon to change into the mood of terror, both in the active and the passive sense of the word.

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After the “honeymoon” came the war against an alliance of European powers, which France herself started, and this war did not at first turn out well. In August 1792, after a new popular uprising, the king was dethroned and arrested, and a republic was proclaimed. A new election brought to power a Convention, in which the Jacobin Club got to play the dominant role. After a war of factions inside the club, and after the war was accompanied by a severe economic crisis, the radical Jacobins, the Mountain, start a politics of terror, which it calls by name, putting terror on the “ordre du jour.” The concept of terror is interesting, because it normally depicts a passive condition, an affect, but here it gets to mean an active policy of imposing this affect on those considered as enemies. The revolutionaries were aware of this ambiguity. Here is what Robespierre writes: You could not even imagine certain excesses committed by the hypocrite counterrevolutionaries to disgrace (flétrir) the revolutionary cause. Could you believe that in the countryside, where the superstition has most of its power, [the enemies], not content with overloading the functions of cult with forms that would render them odious, spread terror among the people, disseminating a rumor that one wanted to kill all children under 10 years and all the old people above 70? That this noise was spread particularly in Brétagne, and in the departments of Rhein and Mosel? This is one of the crimes attributed to the public prosecutor of the criminal tribunal of Strasbourg, who is present here. The tyrannical follies of this man make it verisimilar all that is told of Caligula and of Heliogabal, but one cannot believe them even in the face of the evidence.63

Robespierre presents the terror that he himself spreads as the work of others, and emphasizes the role of imagination that the terror needs to be efficient. The crime of the victims of terror consists then in the very dissemination of terror. This is a symmetrical structure that testifies to a mimetic panic that penetrates society, and of which the Montagnards are not the only subjects and not the only objects. Out of the many interpretations of terror I will mention here Hannah Arendt, who derives it from a sentimental mood of pity, in its turn linked to the social question of poverty; and the one of Hegel, who is known for presenting the French Revolutionary as an empty and abstract universality killing all the particulars. In fact, as I will show in detail in Chapter 3, Hegel’s argument is more nuanced because he thinks that the revolutionaries try to take out of the suspects “more than their sheer being,” that is, an imaginary counteruniversal. This is precisely what is going on in the passage from Robespierre. As we have already seen, the revolutionary situation is somewhat more complex than the schematic sequence: foreclosure of the Other—the emerging void—the interiorization of the split. What complicates is the indeterminacy of the split or, more generally, the nonbeing of negativity, the nonbeing of the event. We cannot say: “today, on the 14th of July or on the 10th of August, there happened a revolution.” It had always started in advance and has still remained incomplete afterward. What does this mean, practically? First of all, any split, temporal, spatial, or political, is “swaying,” and all activity of negation inevitably turns against the actor

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itself. Perhaps the most important version of this swaying is temporal (in a revolution all splits are articulated temporally). The event of revolution is, in spite of a certain symbolic inscription, undatable; one does not notice the moment when the state actually shifted from communism to democracy, from planned economy to market. Far from undermining the break or a trauma, its absence or suspension actually constitutes it. Thus, the government of Gaidar, which came to power in Russia in 1991, attempted a so-called shock therapy: a painful click (“You’ll feel a little pinch”), a loss of consciousness—and you are on the other side. In reality however, the shift was gradual, and most people succeeded in surviving it. But the traumatic experience of this situation has lasted for several years. The ultimate shock recalled from 1992 consisted, in my view, in the fact that there was no shock. In the Eastern European anticommunist revolution, as Elster, Offe, and Preuss rightly argue, the inarticulateness of the break was particularly characteristic. We do not find an analog to terror in the postcommunist transformation in Russia. There was nothing comparable to France in terms of state-sponsored internal violence (even though Chechnya is an important exception). Many factors are responsible for this difference: influence of the West, absence of military conditions, liberal ideology of the reformers, etc. However, the “shock therapy” is in a way analogous to “terror,” as an attempt to negatively mark a radical passage, while at the same time to desensitize people to its shock-like effect. This shows a similarity of historical thinking in the actors of the two revolutions in response to the growing fatigue, impatience, and passivity in the public who had just participated in a major revolutionary crisis. It is in the spirit of Hegel that Claude Lefort64 interprets revolutionary terror. As already mentioned, Lefort thinks that it is the politics and discourse of terror that are responsible for the heritage of the French Revolution, which defines modern democracy. The politics of terror, as presented in the speeches of Robespierre, is expressed through the gap between the sovereign substance of Robespierre’s accusations and the place from where he speaks: he never formulates accusations from his own person but always projects the subject of the policy elsewhere; he speaks not in his own voice. Lefort thus speaks of the empty place of power as of a gap between the “symbolic” and the “real” aspects of power. This gap is defined as an inadequate excess of words in relation to things, and vice versa. Moreover the very politics of terror was driven by the necessity to maintain the emptiness of the (just emptied) place of absolute power. The need for an effect of such an empty place required efforts to dissimulate the position from which the terror was executed, and to dissolve agency and speech among multiple unlocatable subjects. In the end, the fall and execution of the leading Jacobins themselves was a “symbolic suicide,” a sacrifice, a negation of their own negative activity. This event (the Thermidor) symbolically installed and bequeathed the empty place of power, the prohibition of its occupancy, and the gap between the symbolic and material positions of power to later generations as the central feature of contemporary democracy.65 This gap, or excess, has a material existence in what Lefort calls, in following Tocqueville, “ceaseless agitation.”66 In other words, democracy is driven by a melancholic anxiety centered on the void, or, better, around the internal inadequacy of the political subject.

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What Lefort underestimates, however, and what Hegel sees much better in his description of the revolutionary terror as losing its meaning,67 is the degree to which the negativity he describes can lead not just to melancholia as anxiety but, more classically, to melancholia as apathy, withdrawal, and interiorization. And this is what the French Revolution also demonstrates. This theoretical construction has an almost exact theoretical parallel in the reflection upon the current situation in Russia. Vladimir Bibikhin, whom I have already mentioned, evokes in his book Recognize Yourself (1997), in connection with current Russian events, a story from a Russian medieval chronicle.68 Bibikhin recalls as a “primary scene” of Russian history the events of 1015, when Prince Vladimir died, and one of his three sons had to succeed him. It so happened that two of the three sons (Boris and Gleb), including the older, “legitimate” one, abstained from a fratricidal struggle and let the third one, known as the “damned” (okaiannyi) ever since, usurp power and kill them both. Power in Russia, Bibikhin argues, has since been a space emptied by an abstaining withdrawal and “picked up” by a usurper. However, there is an important difference to Lefort: Bibikhin emphasizes that in the case of Boris and Gleb the question is less of simple prohibition and more of disgust or revulsion (otvrastchenie). The difference is important—although, in my view, it is a difference within one genus. And it is clearly this difference between active destruction and inactive dismissal that separates the French Revolution from the Russian postcommunist one. The appeal of Bibikhin to ancient Russian history may, however, be somewhat misleading. The logic that he treats seems to me less a heritage of a long bygone past than the internal logic of a revolutionary historical event. The theory of Lefort was radicalized by Jean-Luc Nancy in his short article “L’abrégé philosophique de la Révolution française.”69 Nancy applies the concept of the “retreat of the political” that he developed in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe70 to the French Revolution. Nancy argues that the event of the French Revolution consisted in the withering away, the escape of the political as such (of the constitutive opening of public space), which first took the shape of its radical and intense thematization— the last appearance, last battle, or a sunset, so to speak. Not that public politics was sublated and symbolically preserved, as Lefort argues. Instead, it actually withdrew, faded, escaped, turned away, and gave way to politics as administration, as economy, etc. All it left was a trace, or a scar, in the place of its presence. But, this trace has been re-traced ever since; the event was replayed, in countermovement to the dominant tendency.71 We see something similar in the anti-communist revolution and in general in the current situation in the world. I will simply mention the two most representative versions of the history of perestroika and its aftermath. Yegor Gaidar, Russian acting prime minister in 1992 and leading theorist of the Russian liberal party, explained the events in a book titled State and Evolution.72 According to him, by the 1980s, communist ideology was absolutely discredited, the state-run economy had gradually altered, and the reality of economic relations in Russia was coming closer and closer to the market, with the exception that bargains were unofficial and had a “barter” character. The agents of this economy, the economic and party officials, wanted, according to

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Gaidar, to play their game openly and more conveniently. That is why they finally got rid of the obstacle presented by communist ideology and secured for themselves the “conversion” of their capital of power and connections into private property. Thus, the gain of nomenclatura from privatization was inevitable and natural. A different and much more accurate account belongs to another Russian political theorist Boris Kapustin.73 He shows that the rationale for Gorbachev’s perestroika was precisely the decay of communist ideology and, thus, the dissolution of political and social ties. The reforms were started in order to refresh and renew the ideological basis of society but, paradoxically, led to the death of this ideology. If Gaidar’s account sounds something like Tocqueville’s story of the French Revolution (a gradual evolution with the nonevent of revolution, which simply confirms what is already in place), Kapustin’s narrative suggests an explanation of the kind that Lefort, or rather Nancy, would support. The suicide of communist ideology led to the triumph of cynical and economist tendencies. Thus, when V. Sogrin suggests calling the political development in Russia of the 1990s a “Thermidor,”74 he is exactly right, except for the fact that Thermidor not only betrays and stops the revolution but is a development coextensive with it, even necessary for a situation of fundamental political change or negation. The leaders of “Thermidorean” France were the same people who had been sitting in the Convention, voted for the decrees proposed by Jacobins, for the king’s execution, in particular. The execution of Robespierre was part of the politics of terror started by Robespierre himself. It was the revolutionary energy itself that turned, on the ninth of Thermidor, against the revolution and suppressed its democratic elements. The Thermidorean state bears the trace of the authentic event that made it possible.

Melancholia Retreat I have noted in the previous section the disastrous immersion into public melancholia in the course of the Soviet anti-communist revolution: when there was a chance for institution building and democratic participation, the society lost interest in politics and performed this withdrawal through an aggressive rhetoric of self-denunciation (or at least of the denunciation of the country, people, and their current activities). Was this melancholia a result of the moderate nature of this revolution, or of its anticommunist, anti-utopian content? In fact, we can see a parallel process in this most radical and creative revolution that the French Revolution was. The melancholic side of the French Revolution (which goes against its popular image) is particularly represented in Jules Michelet’s “History of the French Revolution.” In his construction, the Jacobin Terror of 1792–4 was already a desperate, hysterical attempt to mobilize a society that had started to withdraw from public life. The terror was as much a reaction to rising apathy as it was a contribution to it. The repeated philippics of Saint-Just and Robespierre against the “forces” that paralyze and stop the revolution were addressing an actually existing problem.

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Michelet writes (as usual, in very exact terms): Beyond territorial conquest and revolutionary drama, one discovers an immobile world, a dubious region to which we also must descend: the troubled and weighty swamp of public indifference. One observes it above all in the cities, and especially in Paris, from the end of [17]92. Marat deplores it in December. Where are the great crowds of 1789, the millions of people who surrounded the altar of federations in 1790? One does not know the answer. The people, in 1793, have retreated [entré chez lui]; before the end of this year, it will be necessary to pay one a salary so that he returns to the sections [of the Commune]. It is in this situation of growing apathy, and in order to remedy it, that the fearsome [redoutable] machine of Salut Public, which had loosened up in 92, and its main spring, the Jacobin society, are recomposed.75

Michelet views public apathy as preceding terror. The liberal contemporaries of revolution, such as G. De Stael or B. Constant, viewed it as an effect of terror, a reaction to it. My consideration of postcommunist transformation as revolution, where the public retreat from politics was impelled by disappointment in politics and not by terror makes me side with Michelet rather than with de Stael and Constant. It is noteworthy, however, that even they viewed the impact of terror less a prudent reaction of the people to avoid politics and more their paralysis and apathy. As de Stael writes in her Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la revolution, [i]n the beginning of revolution, the same insurrections which, having obtained no limitations, led to anarchy and shortly afterwards to the Terror—these same insurrections testified to the interest of people in the Revolution. A strong republican government would, at this moment, create a public spirit. However, after the tyranny of Robespierre, the nation, the people, if outside of military camps, was hardly too animated. The nation is completely dominated by what reminds it of Terror, as those animals in America that, according to some accounts, tremble at the sound of a rattlesnake. The revolutionary means are an analogue of the head of Medusa for the nation: instead of directing it, they petrify it.76

Thus, de Stael agrees that revolution leads from brief excitement to the psychological inhibition of people. Instead of mobilizing and animating the people for motion (such was their proclaimed goal) they stopped it. For de Stael, it takes terror as an instrument of revolution to bring this inhibition about—but apart from this point, the difference between her and Michelet is not too large. Especially if we consider that terror was more than a policy, it was a general social mood. Robespierre and Saint-Just did not admit that they promoted terror: instead, they attributed the instillation of terror to their opponents, the counterrevolutionaries. The public apathy, writes Michelet, was simultaneous with the retreat of the public into the sphere of entertainment, where prostitution and gambling succeeded amidst the frenzy of public revolts. The same process was seen in the Russia of the 1990s (as, incidentally, in the Russia of the 1920s). Games and sexual excesses substituted

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for the activity of political struggle. Their necessity is, once again, connected with the loss of an external enemy or cause and, respectively, of fraternal (sororial) solidarity. The hated adversary or the beloved neighbor was now to be artificially reproduced or bought. Gambling and prostitution are also related to boredom, empty, stagnated time, whose emptiness is not the result of the lack of events (there was no such lack in any of the revolutions) but of the loss of the absolute that nothing comes to replace. Haunted by this loss, society is stalled by the inability to move away from itself. Games and paid love are the many ways in which this loss is staged to live through the melancholia.77 Note how Michelet, quoted earlier, uses the expression “entré chez lui.” Literally it means “entered into his own”: “entered” (which would imply a discovery, progress; an opening of an epoch) stands here for “withdrew,” “retreated,” “set back.” The expression “le peuple .  .  . est entré chez lui” could also mean that the people have entered the space of harmonious and autonomous existence—the very goal of revolution. But here, ironically, as with the misinterpreted oracles in Greek tragedies, we get the literal fulfillment of this goal that goes against revolution itself. In this sense, one may agree with François Furet and others78 that ideology as such properly appears only with the French Revolution (shortly after the word itself is introduced). Is not the sphere of ideology and of struggles for hegemony all about literalizing the jointly agreed, universal, reflexive, even tautological formulas and turning their sense to the opposite? This is possible only because the principal ideological formulas—autonomy, equality, freedom, subjectivity—are constituted by the event of revolution, which takes two opposite directions: of restriction and emancipation; of power and powerlessness. Reflexivity and freedom, in the Jacobin discourse, border on suicide. Let us quote a dictum of Saint-Just concerning the interiority of revolutionary conflict: Wilhelm Tell, forced to push an apple off his son’s head with a mortal arrow—here is the image of the people armed against itself.79

The relation of (self-)opposition is figurative. Therefore the question is one of precision: detouring, declining, turning (the “volvo” of revolution), missing the exact mark by millimeters. We have almost reached freedom except that this very understanding and the utterance (thus, the phrase “revolution is complete” actually means “the revolution is over”) distances us from it and turns it into its opposite. There is always “one last effort”80 that is needed; the project of revolution is interminable. The mutually metaphorical relation, vertiginous oscillation, “revolution,” of the opposite meanings around the proper meaning of “revolution,” erases itself into the sheer “re-”—the necessity of repetition and negation of any formulation, which can never arrive at a proper meaning.81 The period marked by the phenomenon of apathy is, for Michelet, the very period in which the “invincible current” of revolution is born—the figure that occupies so much space in Hannah Arendt’s conception. The link between abstention from activity, efforts at stoppage, and effects of an external driving force is obvious. Not only do these efforts at stoppage intensify the usual inertia of world motion and seem to come

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from outside, but the stoppage is also a magic ritual, a posture meant to conjure this force in the secret desire to feel it and to be carried along by something external and ontologically independent.82

Revolutionary temporality The god of melancholia, according to tradition, is Saturn. French Girondist Revolutionary Pierre Vergniauld famously compared the revolution to this GrecoRoman divinity: “Revolution is like Saturn, it consumes its own children!” In his brilliant “hymn” to Saturn in The Origin of German Tragic Drama,83 Walter Benjamin points to the ambiguous, two-faced character of this god, and to the state of internal discord that he represents. Melancholia appears in the shape of apathy as well as of mad ecstasy. Its negativity rouses the desire for irreversible escape—an escape that may turn into the escapism of postcommunism or into the French Revolution’s rush to a new land and new people. But Saturn (Greek Kronos) is, above all, a god of time. And indeed, many paradoxes of the indeterminately split interiority have a temporal character. Most theories of melancholia emphasize that, in this disposition, time slows down, and one can directly feel the agency of time, the emptiness, the monotonous motion of minutes, hours, and days. The English word “longing” captures this situation well where time is too long and at the same time inescapable. The process of loss of the transcendent Other and of the interiorization of the split is the process of secularization (saeculum, in Latin, means precisely age, time). Time, as was established at least since Kant, is the very form of interiority of the subject’s self-relation. It may also be said that time is interiorized and indeterminate negativity, which I have described, earlier in this chapter, as being the essence of revolution. The basic paradox of time, as it was developed by Aristotle,84 consists in the ambiguity of continuity (synekheia) and border (peras): when we separate two moments of time, our distinction may only be relative and conventional because the second moment is as much the continuation of the first as it is its successor. Time is the principle of indeterminacy, and excess, in spatial divisions. In his “Encyclopaedia,” Hegel calls it the negation of space;85 indeed, in time, all spatial divisions are suspended and all points may potentially move into each other. In this sense, it introduces both the possibility of unidirectional change and the potential reversibility of all changes. Time, says Hegel (in a probable allusion to Vergniauld), is the Greek god Chronos (Roman Saturn) who “gives birth to everything and destroys his offspring.”86 This threat of potential reversal is precisely the “revolutionary” aspect of time. Time is more than simply the negation of space, says Hegel, it is “abstract selfreferring negativity,” the principle of negativity as such. Time suspends every spatial division, but it is also time, paradoxically, which introduces the horizon of an indeterminate but absolute limit (finitude) into spatial divisions. In other words, time introduces the principle of the limit but makes each actual limit relative. The definition of time, therefore, coincides with the definition of negative revolution: the indeterminate internal split. All of this may be illustrated and symbolized with respect to any kind of motion. Humans prefer to speak of death and of the paradoxes of familial succession. Even

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physical death does not suffice to erect an absolute border—a human being leaves its imprints on the community, and there is a species of memory (one that Freud called the “unconscious”) that does not recognize time but treats the past as though it was present; hence the “spectral” apparitions of the nominally dead and the rituals of mourning directed at their conjuration. The situation of succession is even more difficult. Here the synchronic symbolic (spatial) structure clashes with the diachronic, temporal one: a son is supposed to catch up with his father (this is called formation or education) and to oust him by taking his place in the synchronic structure, but the father himself keeps changing and stays alive (or dead—but stays) even when you think you have succeeded him. Succeeding implies exceeding. The son and the father, or the new and the old in general, find themselves in a relation of mutual chasing. The aspiration to a single place in the structure puts both into a sort of spectral suspension. This was the situation of the French Revolutionaries. In “Second Discourse Concerning the Trial of the King” Saint-Just says: One will say that the revolution is over, that there is no more reason to be afraid of the tyrant . . . but, Citizens, tyranny is like a reed that the wind bends and that rises again. . . . Revolution starts when the tyrant ends.87

And also: His [Louis XVI’s] constant politics are constantly to stay motionless, or to march with all the parties.88

The ambivalence of this rhetoric is striking: the king represents the terrible force of stoppage that blocks the revolution from even starting. However, he accomplishes this stoppage by actively persecuting revolutionaries in a specter-like, indestructible fashion, and thus he himself has to be stopped by them. There is more: stoppage, which is a primary definition of negativity, is at the same time maintenance, preservation. By refusing to march with the king, we leave him where he is—not so far away. Being but a usurper who has, as Saint-Just argues in this speech, to be judged as a foreign enemy, the king manages to penetrate the very interiority of the revolution. The king who is no longer in power, this transcendent principle, the incorporation of the political, of the sacred, etc., has been “internalized,” so to speak. There is now a king in all of us, in all our parties, etc. The de-crowning of the king—his symbolic death—led him into a “spectral” existence. The specter chases you wherever you run, it is impossible to kill—because it has already been killed. It has been deprived of a vulnerable earthly body and entered your own body. It is not only the symbolic place of the king, his name, that now exists by itself—the very lack, or lack of lack, the border between the earthly and the sacred that he was manifesting and covering up, the limit and excess have now been “set free” and dissolved in the body of the people, or in the king’s sublime body.89 We are not fighting symbolic and external prohibition anymore. The king is no longer a symbolic father who has access to enjoyment and denies it to others. He is a specter, a rival who is both conjured up and exorcized to redeem the fratricidal struggle, the work of his melancholic wake. The execution of the king does imagine,

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conjure, signify him as an external intruder, but the reasoning behind it denudes the problem of inescapable interiority. In a way, Hegelian interiorization [Erinnerung] of Spirit is a continuation and radicalization of the problem as discussed by Kant. The insurmountable limit, to formulate briefly Kant’s main intuition, consists in the fact that there is and can be no determinate limit. Any pretense to have discovered and fixed an absolute limit—a border with the exterior that would be accessible to experience—has to be refuted by critical instance. This condition, in turn, constitutes a much harsher limit on the chances to escape anywhere, to kill something definitively, or to start anything completely anew.90 Therefore, we must modify our previous characterization of the revolutionary situation as of a fall into interiority; we are dealing with an activity that is aspiring, pretending at interiority, while at the same time exorcizing and conjuring—up and away—the exterior. In the French Revolution, there is no lack in external forces. There is war with European powers, but it is interpreted as a European civil war; the enemy is pursued within the country, within the revolutionary movement itself. In exchange, the internal factional struggle feeds on mutual accusations of treason and complicity with the foreign enemy. Affirmation of interiority could have followed the obvious path of setting borders, of a Schmittean split into “us and them,” into outside and inside. But it does not: the enemy is, as the late Schmitt himself acknowledged,91 an absolute enemy that has to be annihilated; in negation that goes along with disavowal. And, at the same time, the interiority of “us,” “the people,” requires the absolute authority of a foundation, the existence of an ontologically independent sovereign force. Revolution searches—conjures up—the interior qua exterior, the interior in an exterior form. The reason for such “externalization” is the aforementioned exteriority of interiority to its subject (prohibition on decisive transcendence is itself external). Thus, in spite of the obvious difference between the claim of impotence from our Russian contemporaries and the exorcistic frenzy of the French Revolutionaries, they deal with similar issues. In the first case, something is signified as external with a “let go,” a resignation, and a retreat into the private sphere. In the second, the external appears as an unsurpassable obstacle through a desperate fight. As a result, in both cases, one’s own history takes the meaning of external fate, the state emerges as an agent exterior to society, which may end with an affirmation of a dictatorial, Bonapartist authority as well as with legitimization and habituation—the stabilization of revolutionary practice in its very split instability. In the postrevolutionary state, society comes to look at the ossified structures of its interior struggle with renewed estrangement.

Poverty and pity We do not find an exact analogue to the depressed “litanies” of Russians during and after perestroika in the French Revolution. However, there is a phenomenon in the revolution of 1789–99 that is akin to these litanies: the appeal to poverty and to compassion with the people as a political resource. Of course, this appeal, unlike the Russian case, was serving, for the most part, not for the apathy but for the violent attacks on government and for the justification of Jacobin Terror. The language and action of

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poverty was, first of all, that of the sansculottes, especially of sansculotte women, whose participation in the revolution was often inspired by the shortage of bread or other economic crises92 (similarly, in the late 1980s–early 1990s, old Russian women became a significant political force, since they were consolidated and mobilized by standing in long lines to buy groceries). Later, under the pressure of sansculottes and of the radical Left Jacobins (Hébert, Chaumette), constant appeals to the poor and the unfortunate (malheureux) appeared in the speeches of Saint-Just and Robespierre. Arendt places the phenomenon of poverty in the center of her discussion of the French Revolution. This accent is perhaps, exaggerated, at least as far as the Jacobin leaders are concerned (in fact, their program was based more on virtue than on compassion, and “happiness” to them meant life in a stable republic not prosperity). Arendt notes that the rhetoric of misery, misfortune, and poverty was, in essence, a hindering factor in the revolution that prepared its doom. First, as in the case of Russian litanies, it is the relatively well-off who speak this language so well, out of compassion. They identify therefore with the passive, paralyzing nature of suffering, and contaminate their active, creative position with passivity and necessity. Passivity and necessity lead to violence, which, for Arendt, belongs to stagnating and antipolitical factors. I will address Arendt’s position in more detail later. The problem with her account is that poverty and misery are not, as she presents them, a material, “biological” condition, but the embodiment of the catastrophic event and of the wretchedness of the world approaching its end. It is this meaning that poverty has carried throughout the history of Christian Europe, and which inevitably surfaced at times of turmoil like the French Revolution. Arendt is aware of this meaning and needs it for her argument but rhetorically suppresses it. However, what I accept in her argument is, first of all, the observation that the appeal to the economic hardships of the lower strata of society is a melancholic exaggeration of suffering. Second, Arendt is perceptive enough to notice the hindering, “counterproductive,” and negative character of these appeals, even when they effectively drive popular uprisings. In fact, Michelet goes even further than Arendt and notes the role of (predominantly feminine) compassion and extrasensitivity in the counterrevolution in the proper sense of the word: [I]n each family, in each house, the counter-revolution had an ardent proponent, who was zealous, tireless, beyond suspicion, sincere, naïvely passionate, and who was weeping, suffering, who did not say a word that would not be or appear an outburst of a broken heart . . . An enormous force that was truly invincible. To the degree that the Revolution, provoked by the resistance to it, had to strike someone—it received a strike in return: the reaction of tears, sighs, screams of the woman that pierced stronger than the daggers.93

It is significant that Michelet, who is so sensitive to the complaints of the poor in his other books, avoids the language of litanies in his “History of the French Revolution.” This means that he may share, if not Arendt’s distrust of compassion, then her observation of its contradiction to the goals of revolution. One has also to note how Michelet shrewdly suspends the “authenticity” of the woman’s complaint between “being” and “appearance.” Compassion, at least since

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Aristotle, is the function par excellence of mimetic, theatrical representation. As in the Russian situation, one cannot underestimate the theatrical nature of revolutionary melancholia in the French Revolution. The Freudian theory of melancholia, as discussed earlier, goes very well together with Lefort’s aforementioned analysis of revolutionary discourse. Melancholia, like the discourse of terror, is built around the gap between one’s practical and symbolic positions.94 In both cases, there is an imaginary identification with the other, which perpetuates the ungraspable negativity of revolutionary drive. What is lamented in this compassionate melancholia is primarily the impossibility of fusion with the Other or of his/her definitive delimitation. The revolution is an event of interiorization, a development of the indeterminate internal split. As such, it may lead to a production (a “conjuration”) of an “artificial” external authority, which the society may provisionally “invest” with its negativity. We know that the French Revolution ended with the establishment of the autocratic regime of Napoleon Bonaparte—a regime that inherited, in spite of its nondemocratic nature, many revolutionary projects and problems. The Russian negative revolution also ended in a Bonapartist regime. This turn, which is unfortunate in many respects, will however not undo the event of postcommunist revolution. The tendency toward self-determination of the subject and contestation of authority, even if it at times takes a primarily private, in-political form, is, in my view, irreversible. It is therefore important to have the revolutionary event in mind as a landmark of historical and political orientation, and perhaps as a standpoint of political resistance. The revolutionary subjects, after having successfully denounced and ousted an ideological, almost theocratic, Soviet regime, remained face-to-face with their own negativity, that is, the anger against all universalist authority and public spirit, which no longer had a recognizable target (the communist party and its leadership). Thus, the negative energy turned against the subjects themselves, causing them to withdraw from the public sphere, to elaborate a negativist and catastrophic ideology, and to hinder the efforts of rapid development, which finally resulted in depoliticization, ubiquitous anomia, and a slow entrenchment of an authoritarian, openly conservative, counterrevolutionary regime, with “stability” as its main slogan. It is important however to note that unconsciously this disastrous public melancholia was driven by violent anarchic rage accumulated under the Soviet regime.

Melancholia: Its definition and its sources I have discussed Freudian theory of melancholia, and its revision by Agamben. Freud’s theory comes at the end of a long history of conceptualizing melancholia. For ages, melancholia had been a generic concept for most of what we call today “mental disorders,” as well as neuroses and psychoses. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it becomes synonymous with “depression,” has its meaning been reduced to a particular type of mental state.

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ll ll ll ll ll

upset mood, paralysis, self-hindrance, and tendency to suicide tendency to reflection a condition of inescapable interiority ambiguous attribution to mind or body anxiety, agitation, often erupting into violent outbursts of energy (mania).

Being a negative affectation, melancholia is also understood as a passive state. But, because it is often described as sadness without cause, it is a pure affect, affect as such, or, in the language of German idealism, an auto-affection that helps the subject to make sense of being affected. In other words, melancholia is an affect of being affected, a second degree of affect. This is also why it is the emotional support of what in modern times is called “subjectivity.” Here, what is most interesting to me is the ontological and historical explanation of melancholia, its empirical and essential origin. Before Freud, it had always been physiological, but physiology itself contained a good deal of philosophy, theology, and myth. The concept has a long history: it was discussed in Ancient Greece as a medical notion by Hippocrates and his school, and the first elaborate account comes to us from pseudo-Aristotle.95 The central idea behind the concept is, of course, the “humoral” theory of the human body, explaining the four types of temperaments. According to this theory, temperament is determined by the predominance of one of four liquids: blood (sanguinic), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric), and black bile (melancholic). This physiology is not just empirical. It reflects Empedocles’ doctrine of the four main elements. In favor of this doctrine, and of the symmetry of the argument, it makes a certain violence on the material. Phlegm, even though nonexistent from the point of view of today’s medicine, was at least empirically observable (lymph or pus, for instance). But black bile does not exist; bile is yellow, in some conditions it can be dark but not black. It is significant that black bile is not even a separate entity: bile is split into two subspecies, black and yellow. Its “blackness” has a symbolic character and is perhaps akin to Sophocles “black blood.”96 As Jean Starobinsky writes, the specifics of “black bile” is in its irreducible interiority: “If blood, yellow bile and flegma come to the surface and are evacuated without difficulties, the black bile, being locked and stagnant, does not have a way out. Its site is spleen, but it does not have a channel that would lead outside. It is an image of a forced interiority.”97 Moreover, in the case of melancholia, Greeks did not strictly observe their physiological theory of temperament, but often described it psychologically: for instance, as a predominant state of “fright and despondence.”98 Throughout history, melancholia has been treated as a chiasmus of mind and body; physiology starts using ethical metaphors when describing it, while psychology often treats it as a hardening, reification of the psyche: the very distinction of mind and body is put into question by this condition. Here it must be noted that this hesitation between the physiological and psychological explanation is itself a melancholic symptom: a psychic problem is “converted” into an external symptom, and a bodily condition is considered as subjective, self-imposed.

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Aristotle, in his Problemata, defines melancholia ambiguously as a disorder and as a natural condition (temperament). It is as though the external and exceptional negative process is naturalized and incorporated into the positive system of nature. If it is a disease, this disease is needed by nature for its self-realization. Aristotle also notes that black bile is special in the sense that it can have opposite qualities depending on temperature: causing loss of spirit, apathy (athymia) when cold, and agitation (mania) when hot. As we will see in the following, Aristotle, in his analysis of negativity as opposition, introduced the concept of contraries. Melancholia is a state capable of receiving contrary determinations, contrary tendencies, and pushing them to the limit. But when it reaches a mean—to meson—it can lead to distinction in culture or politics99; an Aristotelian valorization of a difficult passage between two polar opportunities. It is a condition of potentiality—another of Aristotle’s conceptual innovations— which maintains these polar opportunities and alternates between them. One can tentatively say that melancholia is a disorder of the potential, in the same way as, tragedy, with its polar pathemata of fear and pity, is the art of the potential. This is why, Aristotle asks the question “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?”100 Melancholia is thus an affect of a creative subject, of a poet, because it works with the matter of potentiality. Ancient medicine largely followed the theories of Hippocrates and Aristotle. The next significant theory on melancholia came from Roman physician Galen, in the first century ad. Galen lists the main symptoms of melancholia to be fear and despondence; he says its carrier is not black bile per se but the blood that is mixed with it. There are three types of melancholia depending on its site; it can be blood vessels, brain, or stomach, and in the last case we deal with a subspecies of melancholia, the “hypochondria,” which literally means the zone under the ribs: it is there, Galen said, that the blood with black bile is stocked. There are many organs under the ribs, and in this case the location of the disease in the body is particularly indeterminate, this is why hypochondria ended up being understood (in the eighteenth century) as an imaginary disease. In the Middle Ages, the dominant concept of melancholia was “acedia,” a danger of apathy and loss of spirit that threatened monks. Cassian, one of the first ideologues of the monastic movement, says: “our sixth battle is with what the Greeks call acedia, and we can call ‘fatigue of the heart.’” It equals alienation, and is a characteristic of loners. In a way “acedia” underlined the negative aspect of Christianity as a religion, its counter-worldly aspect (which allowed Nietzsche to call it a religion of hatred and nihilism). As often in such cases, negativity started threatening the very cult of this negative religion. The theory of melancholia was also learned and studied in the Middle Ages: in the Arab world, in scholastics, and in courtois poetry. Constantin Africanus, eleventhcentury medical writer, played a role in the transmission of Aristotelian melancholia to the poets, through underlining its imaginary—“timor a non timendo”—and erotic components101 (“merencholia illa eroica” was a popular formula, where “eroica” stood

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for “erotic” and then, by contamination, also, “heroic”). In the late Middle Ages, melancholia was increasingly understood in symbolic terms, as a cultural, collective condition. There are several formulae that express the negative essence of melancholia: they call it a “demon of noon”102 and even a “devil’s bath” (balneum diaboli), in the sense that it washes the body from the inside.103 Troubadours dedicated their poems to “Dame Mélancolie” whom they depicted as an old lady, dressed in black, with eyes downcast. But the beautiful “Dame” of their poetry appears as a lost object, and arouses the “spiritus phantasticus,” which also inflames melancholia. Melancholia becomes particularly significant culturally in the neo-Platonist philosophy of Renaissance. Nicholas of Kues and Marcilio Ficino have discussed it in their writings. What gets special attention is the association of melancholia with reflection and creativity. Ficino writes, for instance: [The black bile] obliges thought to penetrate and explore the centre of its objects, because the black bile is itself akin to the centre of the earth. Likewise it raises thought to the comprehension of the highest, because it corresponds to the highest of the planets.104

Thinking means turning inside, reflecting, and—I would add—suspending things as possibilities. Interiority does not just mean the inside of the body or a soul hidden in the body, but a potentiality hidden within something. Hence also the connection between melancholia and imagination, which naturally interested the art-centered culture of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. As a Renaissance theorist of painting, Romano Alberti writes, with an admirable precision: Painters become melancholics because, wishing to imitate, they must retain the phantasms fixed in the intellect [i.e., the images which, according to some ancient theories of perception, detach themselves from an object and pass into the soul], so that afterward they can express them in the way they first saw them when present; and, being their work, this occurs not only once, but continually. They keep their minds so much abstracted and separated from nature that consequently melancholia derives from it. Aristotle says, however, that this signifies genius and prudence, because almost all the ingenious and prudent have been melancholics.105

Thus, interiority also implies suspended, delayed temporality. The contemplation of essences, akin to Husserl’s epokhe, requires the suspension and suspense of a thing in one’s mind, in order to transform it into an idea. One can also evoke here the Benjaminian notion of revolution, in which the “now-time” of revolution convokes in itself, at the moment of stoppage, all the suspended possibilities left behind by past history. In the seventeenth century, melancholia seems to be the dominant mood of philosophy and literature: this is the time of the gloomy philosophies of Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, of the new tragic spirit ranging from Shakespeare (Hamlet) to Calderon and Gryphius (and other authors of German drama of the period that Walter Benjamin described as melancholic). Benjamin (following Pascal) describes the

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seventeenth-century sovereign monarch as a melancholic. The nobles, gathered in the court, discussed and tried to escape “ennui” or boredom. Medically, in this period, there is the theory of Thomas Willis, which tries to abandon the “dialectical” conception of melancholia as developed by Aristotle and opposes melancholia to mania. Staying loyal to the humoral theory, he nevertheless explains melancholia mostly by psychological factors. Generally, the literary accounts of melancholia in the seventeenth century lose their dramatic character and reflect a paradoxical mixture of pleasure and pain, valued for its inward turn. As Panofsky, Klibansky, and Saxl write: What emerges here is the specifically “poetic” melancholy mood of the modern; a double-edged feeling constantly providing its own nourishment, in which the soul enjoys its own loneliness, but by this very pleasure becomes again more conscious of its solitude, “the joy in grief,” “the mournful joy,” “or the sad luxury of woe,” to use the words of Milton’s successors.  .  .  . This modern melancholy mood is essentially an enhanced self-awareness, since the ego is the pivot round which the sphere of joy and grief revolves.106

In the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, in English, the metonym “spleen” was used for melancholia (it was believed that black bile was generated in the spleen). In 1709, Countess Ann Finch wrote a poem titled “Spleen” in which she rephrases Aristotelian teaching but turns it into a mysterious form: What art thou, SPLEEN, which ev’ry thing dost ape? Thou Proteus to abus’d Mankind, Who never yet thy real Cause cou’d find, Or fix thee to remain in one continued Shape. Still varying thy perplexing Form, Now a Dead Sea thou’lt represent, A Calm of stupid Discontent. Then, dashing on the Rocks wilt rage into a Storm. Trembling sometimes thou dost appear, Dissolved into a Panick Fear. On Sleep intruding dost thy Shadows spread, Thy gloomy Terrours round the silent Bed, And croud with boading Dreams the Melancholy Head: Or, when the Midnight Hour is told, And drooping Lids thou still dost waking hold.107

Finch thus emphasizes ambiguity,, plasticity, and the negativity of melancholia. The evocation of terror and “panick fear” allude to the eventful, emergency-like character of the melancholic mood. However, in the eighteenth century an epochal change unfolded in medical theory and the theory of mood and temperament. The humoral theory was gradually abandoned and was replaced with the discovery of nerves. It was no longer the waves

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or baths that defined our mental condition, but the peculiar cords that received and instantly transmitted irritation. At the same time, a large role was attributed to the so-called animal spirits that were supposed to connect the organs of the body and transmit signals among them. In this context, melancholia and mania are replaced by “hypochondria” and “hysteria.” Hypochondria is typically referred to as a synonym of melancholia.108 In spite of the physiological terms of hypochondria and hysteria, in the eighteenth century, their meaning was increasingly emancipated from physiological symptoms; if bodily causes were admitted, they were not discussed much.109 Hypochondria becomes a fashionable disease of the time, and is associated with another popular cultural concept, the “sentimental.” In Germany, the definition of “hypochondria” referred more precisely to heightened sensibility (Empfindelei). As Christian Franz Timme, eighteenth-century German writer, put it, “‘Sentimentality is hypochondria of the soul.’ All those excesses that evoke hypochondria cause also the sentimentality.”110 His contemporary Carl Friedrich Pockels wrote: “hypochondria is not seldom a consequence of a sensuously perceptive character .  .  . but even without this bodily weakness hypochondria is often a daughter of the sensibility [Empfindelei] which has its seat in the force of imagination.”111 Johann Christoph König, late eighteenth-century German author, contrasts Empfindsamkeit (good sentimentality) and Empfindelei, comparing an overly sentimental person with a hypochondriac who is anxious about everything and who unnecessarily complicates his own life. He tells a moralistic story exemplifying the troubles of a hypochondriac and through a reflexive trope suggested the complicity of literature in hypochondria: The two lovers had a terrible number of scary punishments and significant dreams. If I knew if you, my dear, were already hypochondriac, I would tell you a couple of examples, but since I don’t, I’ll drop this idea. For otherwise it could happen that I would make you thus into a hypochondriac.112

Thus, the eighteenth-century notion of melancholia/hypochondria implies a complex mixture of internal and external causes: it is a new constellation that requires conceptualization. It was Kant who gave perhaps the most complex and nuanced theory of melancholia. Because it will be connected, in the end of his life, to his understanding of revolution, I will treat his theory in detail in Chapter 3. But Kant’s interest in melancholia/hypochondria was announced early on. Here is what he writes in the 1764 “Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful”: He whose feeling tends towards the melancholic is so called not because, robbed of the joys of life, he worries himself into blackest dejection, but because his sentiments, if they were to be increased above a certain degree or to take a false direction through some causes, would more readily result in that than in some other condition. He has above all a feeling of the sublime.113

One can read this as an indication that melancholia proceeds from a particular condition of excessive intensity and excessive openness of affects: a sublimely feeling person dares to exceed the finite and experiences ecstasy from this risk, but at any

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moment s/he can encounter the terrible and/or turn his/her excessive forces against himself/herself. This analysis is akin to the much later theories of modern melancholia, in Tocqueville or Durkheim (with his concept of anomia). The modern subject, with its infinite Faust-like drive for discovery and a taste for intense joy is susceptible to the paradoxical melancholia of overexcitement. Much later, in the 1798 Conflict of Faculties, Kant analyzed hypochondria in the light of his philosophy of autonomous subject, and saw it as an instance of the aporias of self-mastery, brought into implicit analogy with the French Revolution. But there, too, hypochondria performs its thrust at self-mastery under pressure from external signs coming from newspapers. It is after Kant that hypochondria really becomes a philosophical concept. Novalis for instance writes of art as of the aim of “absolute hypochondria.”114 The eighteenth century is known as a “sentimental” age. It was a time, for example, when private letters commonly contained confessions that the author had cried upon the letters of the correspondent. The sentimentality of which Arendt writes with regard to French Jacobins, deriving it from Rousseau, was in fact a universal framework of the epoch, with anxiety about its excesses. Sentimental novel and exaggerated emotional expression in letters and in oral discourse permeated eighteenth-century culture. This image of the epoch of Enlightenment is an important correction to its earlier depiction by Jürgen Habermas who interpreted its “public sphere” as that of a rational and non-rhetorical discussion.115 Public sphere was there, but a sentimental one, and it implied not only the right of selfexpression but also an obligation to be affected by whatever happens and a will to affect. As Lawrence Sterne, author of the notion of “sentimental,” wrote on the enlightened epoch: [A]ll comes from thee, great—great SENSORIUM of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation.116

Note the reference to Newton’s theory of gravity (with time and space as a sensorium of God), and the idea of a heightened, alert sensibility that reacts to a tiny stimulus. Today we would say in such a case that someone’s nerves are left naked. We will see in the following how this logic works in Dostoyevsky, the new sentimentalist of the nineteenth century. While it is seductive to see the sentimental as a reaction against the narrow rationalism of Enlightenment, it is now common to view it as an inherent aspect of Enlightenment that gives body and content to reason and allows for the organic development of a person.117 The two most important ideological roots of sentimentalism were, first, the empiricism of Locke and of the Scottish moral philosophy (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson) that elaborated the notion of “sentiment” and “emotionalized” it; secondly, German pietism (this influence, however, was mostly important in Germany). These influences met with the developing institution of public media and mass literature (novels), on the one hand, and with the ideological opposition of bourgeoisie to the aristocracy, on the other, to produce sentimentalism as a literary genre and a cultural phenomenon.

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Indeed, sentimental novels were touching and popular, newspapers required the “sensational” to better impress and interest their audience, and the sentimental novels usually depicted poor, virtuous girls of the third estate offended by the powerful aristocratic villains, thus giving the genre a strong political sounding. The result of this sensationalism was often violent, and the sentiment was frequently tested through “terrorist” methods. For example, Rousseau, who, in his Second Discourse makes a human being by nature sentimental disposing off only two sentiments of pity and terror, has himself recourse to literary terrorism, to illustrate this (but choosing an example by which he was in turn violently affected by another author): One sees with pleasure the author of the Fable of the Bees, forced to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from his cold and subtle style in the example he gives in order to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned man who sees outside a wild beast tearing a child from his mother’s breast, breaking his weak limbs in its murderous teeth, and ripping apart with its claws the palpitating entrails of this child. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which he takes no personal interest!118

Bernard Mandeville was a doctor by training and author of the Fable of the Bees, a classical work in liberal political theory, as well as “A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Histerick Passions, Vulgarly Call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women” in which he gives an obviously autobiographical example of a fear of being sick with syphilis (without any reason), and a fear of this disease’s symptoms “possesed [his] Fancy for hours together, till the Horror of them entering deeper into [his] Soul, sometimes struck [him] with such unspeakable Pangs of Grief, as no Torture, or Death could ever be able to give.”119 Note a curious chiasmus here between external bodily symptoms that are important only as a fancy entering the soul, which results in torture stronger than any physical pain. Sentimentalism was a political weapon and not just a mode of entertainment. Russian writer and one of the leading figures of the Russian Enlightenment Alexander Radischev, wrote, in 1790, a book entitled A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow,120 for which he was immediately arrested and exiled. The book was written in imitation of Sterne, but it contained a sentimental depiction of the horrible life of the Russian serfs. Apart from the enlightened emancipatory views, the book was a document showing that the nobility could no longer ignore, could not afford not to notice, the life of their compatriots of another estate. The changing optics made the serf holders vulnerable to the suffering of their peers. Radischev, even more directly than Rousseau, and anticipating the rhetoric of the Montagnard Jacobins, used sentimentalist optics to denounce the tyrannical social order. Thus, in the central scene of the Journey,121 he described a dream where he saw himself as a self-satisfied monarch. A wanderer comes to this monarch, in spite of evervigilant guards, says that she is “Truth,” and removed the walls from his eyes, so that he comes to see the horrible condition of his subjects. The leitmotif of the book is the need to penetrate the blind, deaf, and petrified souls of the power holders, to awaken them “with a hammer on the head, if necessary,”122 so that they give way to others’ sufferings.

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Emotions, even though they are valued positively, were seen as violent shock-like intrusions. As all other sentimentalist writers, Radishchev directly linked the need for such sensibility with the question of freedom of the press. However, in the “Dedicace” of the book Radischev wrote: Is nature so stingy to its offspring as to innocently cover the truth from those who went astray? Has this formidable stepmother produced us so that we feel only disasters, and never the bliss? My reason trembled from this thought, and my heart pushed it away. I found the comforter to the man in the man himself. “Raise the veil from the eyes of the natural sensibility—and I will be blessed” . . . I heartened up from the despair where the sensibility and compassion had thrown me; I felt enough force in myself to resist falsehood; and—an unspeakable joy—I felt that everyone can participate in the welfare of one’s peers.123

Thus, in spite of the accent on suffering, Radischev saw a source of positive emotion, not in the practical overcoming of suffering but in the very fact of compassion as a basis for egalitarian sociability, and of truth as a basis for publicity. Such was the formulation of the Enlightenment program, which redeemed proto-terrorism of a sort by the joy derived from the very fact of affectation (which equals affection here). From the philosophical standpoint, we can say that Enlightenment by insisting on the veracity of representation and on the existential facticity of experience runs into a problem. David Denby, in his analysis of sentimentalism, rightly points out that this genre emerges in response to a problem of mediating the singularity of personal experience with the universality of the abstract reasoning that comes to dominate everyday life with the development of the state and capitalism.124 It must be added that sentimentalism not just attempts to mediate but also expresses the contradiction between the two, and this contradiction is an internal one. Indeed, existential singularity is the very definition of experiential truth that the rationalist Enlightenment seeks to establish and spread. But the ideal of science, à la Descartes or Locke, as a sum and system of facts is put into question by the infinitely continual nature of the world, in which every singular experience has, in fact, vanishingly small significance in the light of universal totality. However, it is this singular experience that is considered the only true foundation of truth and has a right to claim the attention of the subject. The claim of this right by the tiny singularity that is, by definition, on the verge of nothing, which does not fully exist in the sense of an objective fact, takes a hyperbolic terrorist form and attacks the subject of experiential reason, who, on his/her part, is violently overwhelmed by the excessive factual information but who is at the same time paralyzed and settled, in its passive openness, by the inescapable identification with a victim, so that the hypochondriac curiosity appears as a moral duty or as hypnotic blackmail. (You ignore the suffering of the other, and then suffer yourself.) The reason to emphasize this new melancholia-hypochondria is that it completely changes our usual perspective on melancholia as a condition of closed interiority, which is at best caused by separation from an external object (like in Freud). Here, in the eighteenth century, it is the opposite: a dark melancholic mind is the one that is too open, too attentive to what happens, and particularly to what is written. This is why it

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is constituted by the new mediatic culture of Enlightenment. Of course, hypochondria is also reflective: it is commonly compared to Terence’s play “Heautontimoroumenos,” “The self-tormenter.” It consists in applying to oneself an external misfortune, and actively exploring this misfortune with a curious eye. Thus, it seems that melancholia— this internal condition par excellence—has both internal and external reasons, and in modern times the inward turn and the self-closure are motivated by a curiosity and mimetic contamination. It is easy to see that sentimental hypochondria is no worse explanation of the negative affects during both revolutions than the Hyppocratic black bath or the Freudian unconscious lack. The French Revolution happens at the peak of sentimental culture, and sentimentalism is used by revolutionaries for relying on the hardships of the malheureux, and in spreading terror (or projecting it on others). A proliferation of newspapers and journals in this period is also well known. As for the Soviet antiSoviet subjects, here too, the mood of uncovering the dark past and criticizing the present coincided with the needs for sensationalism in the newly liberalized media; in the 1990s, melancholia became not just a personal mood but a mediatic ideology. In fact, sentimentalism, after having appeared forcefully in the eighteenth century, has never really stopped determining modern culture. In the early nineteenth century, the sentimental tradition is continued in a much more reflective, interiorized, and ironic form by the romantics. In a way, keeping an emphasis on feelings, mostly sad ones, they replace the sentimental by the sublime. Pity gives way to a certain masochist pride of a disappointed demonic hero. But, in the mid-nineteenth century, there is a new explosion of media and of mediatic literature, and sentimentalism appears again, for example, in the work of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky, a thinker no less than fiction writer, may teach us a lot here. Dostoyevsky started with overtly sentimentalist and political pieces, such as “The Poor People.” His post-prison writings are much more multifaceted, since they do not just exploit the pity of the poor but put it in question and show the obverse side of pure revolt, which uses sentimentalist strategies. Such is the case of The Possessed. But the main development of the topic by Dostoyevsky is to be found in The Karamazov Brothers, in the famous presentation by Ivan Karamazov of the case of a “tear of a single tortured child,” because of which Ivan is “returning his ticket” to the reign of universal harmony (which he seriously considers both in the socialist and Christian versions). But consider how he starts on what sounds (anachronistically) like a Nietzschean note: I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors [blizhnikh, the close ones]. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from “self-laceration,” from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.125

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Clearly, what is at stake is the force of presentation and representation: the new media culture; sentimental literature brings things too close to the subject, so that their very spectacle (spectacle of anything) becomes as intolerable as it is fascinating. Sentimentalist literature draws on rhetoric of emotional reinforcement and amplification. Ivan questions the very terrorist rhetoric that he, and the author, practice: the rhetoric of vivid and intolerable pictures of suffering. Nietzsche, a passionate reader of Dostoyevsky, is by the way also an important step in the sentimental tradition—as its great critic. Throughout his work, there is a powerful critique of compassion (Mitleid) as proliferation of suffering. Christianity is for him a sentimentalist religion. “Beggars ought to be abolished: for one is vexed at giving to them and vexed at not giving them,” to quote perhaps the most provocative but by no means isolated statement.126 But I return to Dostoyevsky. In his monologue, Ivan clarifies the connection of his problem with compassion with the world of the media: You see, I’m a collector of certain little facts that appeal to me and, would you believe it, I note down and save anecdotes of a particular kind from newspapers and stories, wherever I find them, and I already have a good collection.127

Thus a sentimental story of the poor murderer Richard is found in “a nice pamphlet” translated from French into Russian by “some aristocratic Russian Lutheran philanthropists and was distributed free with newspapers and other publications for the edification [prosvestchenie, lit. ‘enlightenment’] of the Russian people.”128 Of the poor girl whose “one little tear”129 he does not want to sacrifice for the sake of “higher harmony,” Ivan says, “I understand nothing, and now . . . I don’t want to understand anything. I want to stick to facts.”130 This argument of Ivan is a paraphrase of an argument by Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky who, in his letter to Botkin, wrote, “but if I could mount the highest step of the ladder of development I would ask you to give me account of all victims of the life and of history, otherwise I would jump from this highest step head-first.”131 Thus Belinsky’s argument is directed not against Christianity, as in Dostoyevsky, but against Hegel: in both cases, however, the Enlightenment vision of future harmony is involved. A good enlightened subject, Ivan wants to see the girl avenged with his own eyes, not entrusting this to the future: “I want to be here when everyone suddenly finds out the why and the wherefore of the being.”132 Ivan describes the suffering of the child in detail, trying to persuade his interlocutor Alyosha. Dostoyevsky uses “terrorist” tools of sentimentalist literature in order to expose here, so to say, the sentimentalist condition of the Enlightenment and of the public sphere. Enlightenment means the overexposure133 of the subject who “dares to know” and to imagine. This exposure is an autodestructive, autoimmune drive of a subject who feels the breath of transcendence but who wants to bring himself/herself to the new world in its entirety, to enlighten the totality with the transcendent light. Here, the subject suffers a failure: his/her erudition, armed by imagination always finds in the totality something that would bar access to the supposed new epoch of Enlightenment. Following Rousseau and Radischev, but also arguing against them, Dostoyevsky

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formulates the self-contradiction of Enlightenment: the Enlightenment of the world throws light also on the things that are incompatible with the utopia of universal harmony that the Enlightenment, even in its sentimental version, projects upon the world. Or, in other words, the Enlightenment enters into contradiction with what it throws light on. (Thus Dostoyevsky goes against Radischev, for whom the light itself redeems its terrible object.) The terrorist strategy works in the space opened up by this contradiction and does not resolve it, but reaffirms it by its paralyzing spasm. This is already a more complicated picture of the modern dark mood. The withdrawal from the world that it threatens with is not just a result of post-Christian nihilism, or of excessive intellectual activity. It has to do with a utopian feeling of “new times,” which in the eighteenth century gets christened as “Enlightenment,” and is closely akin with what we here discuss as “revolution.” This utopian feeling is not just an image of the future, but the force of the present, which increasingly overwhelms the subject by engaging him/her in the destiny of humanity, by stimulating his/her curiosity (Blumenberg rightly saw this trait as characteristic of modernity) with a kaleidoscope of empirical facts and, last but not the least, by the infinite possibilities of recognition (Werther, Raskolnikov, and many other sentimental characters combine sentimentality with a desire for recognition: a subject is also an object of manifestation). But, irrationally as it seems, here and there the subject pulls back at the threshold of this brave new world, is for some reason afraid of the universal festival that is so near. As Dostoyevsky shows, the light of knowledge in a joyful transparent world makes one test it, and one invariably finds a minor fact that contradicts it. Asymmetry of negation and affirmation makes it such that a particular existential proposition can refute a universal truth (while a positive verification of it would be potentially infinite). What follows then, is the “absolute hypochondria” (Novalis), in which one keeps constructing counterexamples to Enlightenment, playing devil’s advocate to it: with the help of the very light of knowledge that the Enlightenment provides. It is as though the subject, in the face of utopia, would go back to take with him/her his/her own past, otherwise the one who will be happy will not be the Ego. This turn of subjectivization may lead to a disaster, as the subject never actually jumps forward after stepping back. If we now think back to Freud’s theory of melancholia as a consequence of lack, we remember that a mysterious moment in it concerned the ambivalence of libido and the way in which love of the object turns into hate of the self. In fact, negativity comes not from the object per se, but from an event that separated it, and not only this, but split the subject itself by the border between past and future. It is this event that the subject cannot really accept, this event (like the revolution we discuss) remains unconscious, and missing courage to face the new gets stuck with the shadow of a halfundone positive object. The anti-communist revolution in 1980–90s Russia, seen by the liberals as a triumphant progress of Enlightenment, led indeed to an explosion in knowledge and sensation, as in one’s capacities of affecting and informing others. Simultaneously, it left the collective subject in a state of dispersed and interiorized negativity, without an external authority or enemy. The progress of Enlightenment, again, was responsible for the imperative of complete autonomy and self-reliance, experienced as abandonment.

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These two contrasting tendencies of modernity produced peculiar postrevolutionary collective melancholia: the aggressive tormenting of each other, and of no one in particular, by the subjects emancipated from the universal, in the face of an obscure force of history.

Conclusion I have tried to show how the overthrow of communism and subsequent state formation in Russia follow the logic of revolution, not simply in its external sequence of events but also in its anthropological and ideological content. The Russian Revolution was a new event in the history of modern secularization and interiorization of society. Aimed against a new civil religion created by revolutionary tradition itself, this revolution revealed some essential tendencies and potential that had been originally contained in the phenomenon of revolution, and cast a retrospective light on modern postrevolutionary society. The anti-communist revolution was not a step in a linear progression that would actually lead from a “previous” state of affairs to a new, “progressive” one (as those who call it “modernization” or “transition” still imply). Rather, as the French Revolution, it was a late outbreak in reaction to the various economic and social processes of what we could call “modernization.” In the Russian case, it was the crisis and ritualization of communist ideology, the drift of the economy toward a species of “state capitalism,” the privatization of society and other features. These processes under way were, however, neither symbolized nor legitimized. The political society needed to cope with and to “author” the partly occurring and partly still indispensable change. Thus, instead of continuing to change and gradually reforming society in the “Chinese” style, the country exploded in a crisis, which, far from adapting the country to the new economic situation, largely destroyed its political, economic, and social structures. It canceled, most importantly, its political identity and therefore introduced the question of political foundation. Revolutionary crisis revolves around the need for a radical break with the past and of the foundation of the new. This temporal break is a problem since it has to be introduced, spatially, inside the social body, inside each person. Anything short of collective suicide would not make this break absolute. Anything short of a time machine would not undo it. This creates a situation of internal split, which takes either the form of the disavowal of the past and of the escape from any subjectivized political position, or the form of the longing for the idealized past of the Brezhnev era. The event of the break itself is either exaggerated in horror (“the young democrats destroyed a great country”) or disavowed with cynicism (nothing changed, all rogues remain in their places). In any case, society finds itself in a melancholic situation where something is lost and something has to be created, but what is unknown. Neither longing nor hope finds itself an articulate object. The radical break, the pure negativity, haunts society and holds sway over it but does not incorporate itself.

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As any revolution, the Russian transformation enacts the problems of the entire world and presents itself to it as an exemplary spectacle. Thus, it reminds the rapidly progressing but rarely eventful West that any change or progress has the absolute break of event as its foundation and limit. This limit is not positive or material but nevertheless efficient. If the West wants to preserve itself as the realm of self-rule and of the subject, then it will have to face and think through the revolutionary crises everywhere where it transforms or expands. Modern revolution is not complete as long as people remain alienated from history, and as new circumstances will pose a challenge to their subjectivity. Neither is it sufficiently thought through, at least sufficiently for our present experience and forms of perceiving the world. Thinking is a part and continuation of revolutionary activity since, like the latter, it is driven by the impossible task of self-mastery. Revolution is going to its end but we keep philosophizing by inertia. In the remaining chapters I will attempt to develop, or at least to recall, a conceptual understanding of the revolution that would correspond both to the historical novelty of our situation and to its universal aspects.

2

What Does It Mean to Say “No”? Theories of Negativity

Introduction Saying “no” keeps us alive and sane: No to the cynicism of the ruling ideology, to the brutal egoism of a subject left desperate by the dissolution of social ties, to the propaganda of an aura and anxiety that attacks us in the media, to the usurped space of public sociability, to the arrogant formalism of the West, and to the cowardly nationalism of the East. Unfortunately, all these things do not disappear if we deny, oppose, or publicly criticize them. In a way, it is morally beneficial to ignore them and live as though the slogans of democracy, human rights, and Enlightenment were actually the only valid standards of today’s society, because open struggle against corruption and technocracy risks affirming and legitimizing it as such— as in Russia where everyone likes to chastise the ubiquitous corruption of any business or government agency so that corruption, for many, becomes tolerable. The modern subject establishes itself through emancipation from all sorts of tyranny—prejudice, tradition, and even nature. Moreover, in its Cartesian or Kantian versions, and in its revolutionary incarnations, it posits an absolute rupture with the past, which represents unfreedom and obscurity, in favor of a vita nuova, and delimits itself from the world of inanimate objects through a gesture of doubt. But, needless to say, this negation, as inscribed into critiques and constitutions, remains largely a symbolic gesture: tyrannical institutions do not dissolve on hearing the words of intellectuals, and, what is worse, a new despotism emerges in the person of the enlightened, negating subject who returns to nature the fear that it had once imposed on him/her. The concept of negativity emphasizes the peculiarity of negation as a linguistic and logical operator. This is not to say that negativity is a purely linguistic or logical phenomenon, but our understanding of it proceeds from linguistic negation. There are two fundamental paradoxes in the use of negation. First, there is a contradiction between the subjective and objective aspects of saying “no.”

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“No” is a way to refute a previous statement or a proposition evoked in the very same statement, or a name. But to refute means, objectively, to express the non-being of this or that situation or thing. If it does not exist, then how would it have come to expression, even a false one? Where does the lie come from? To be consistent, a negation must refute not just the proposition that is its object, but the very enunciation of this proposition. Very often, when saying “no,” we raise our voice, gesticulate, repeat the negation, because the very enunciation sounds wild. This happens when different ideologies and language games clash: imagine you meet a relative at a family party and s/he starts to convince you that it was the CIA who exploded the Twin Towers, that Jews indeed control a large part of world finance (and deserve respect for this accomplishment), or something like this. Or a natural scientist colleague explains to you that religious doctrines, or happiness, proceed from genes. Notably, we do not have evidence to refute this, since a properly negative proposition does not build on positive facts but refers to an infinite, or at least overly large, quantity of such. The statements in question are so wrong that we question the very fact of their enunciation. But in this case, our negative statement also sounds stupid (“hard to prove that you are not a camel,” as a Russian proverb goes). An accomplished negation would remove the very need for itself: this is why “negativity” is very often understood ontologically. A negating subject naturally aspires to step outside the sphere of language and to destroy the very object that s/he negates (in case it actually exists, although it should not), or to make the interlocutors who evoke it, shut up. Because otherwise s/he falls into contradiction. Another solution, however, is to emphasize only the objective and thus theoretical function of negation, by using a defense mechanism: ignore what you have negated even if it actually continues its existence (Freud’s fetishist “disavowal”). A negative expression contradicts itself by its very enunciation or, in other words, the subjective side of negation contradicts its objective side. If extraterrestrials, or the Jewish conspiracy, do not exist, then why are you discussing them at all? As we will see, Freud, in his essay “Die Verneinung,” analyzed this paradox seeing it as a sign of psychological ambivalence, although he, too, emphasizes the unique role of a symbol of negation for expressing this ambivalence. The result of all this, in symbolical activity, is that negative expression is often latent (it is important, for instance, that neoliberalism is an objectively horrible policy and not that we as social-democratic intellectuals oppose it); in other cases, when objective negation is contested by others, it is, on the contrary, repeated and emphasized. There is a dialectic inscribed into the very use of negation. As Danish linguist Otto Jespersen demonstrated in his unsurpassed book-long study of Indo-European linguistic expression,1 linguistic negation tends to be used enclitically, without accent, to be monosyllabic. Therefore, it gradually starts failing in its actual function. Therefore, linguistic development shows a repeated reinforcement of negation by various positively meant words, such as “one” (the Latin “non” and the English “no”), “step” (the French “pas”), etc. The negative adverb very often is rather weakly stressed, because some other word in the same sentence receives the strong stress of contrast, the chief use of a negative statement being to contradict and to point a contrast.2

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The negation is therefore in need of strengthening: There are various ways of strengthening the negatives. Sometimes it seems as if the essential thing were only to increase phonetical bulk of the adverb by an addition of no particular meaning, as when Latin non was preferred to “ne” . . . But in most cases the addition serves to make the negative more impressive as being more vivid or picturesque, generally through an exaggeration, as when substantives meaning something very small are used as subjuncts.3

Note this emphasis on quantitative increase and polar contrariety: Aristotle, as we will see, also thinks that negation is essentially opposition and singles out the “contrary” as that which is most different, opposition being pushed to the extreme. Often, like in French, the new positive negation (“pas,” “plus”) is accentuated after the proposition, while the anticipatory “ne” remains without accent. In German, there remained only the final accentuated “nicht,” which makes a German negative phrase intelligible only retroactively, from the end, so that the meaning of such phrases undergoes an inversion to the contrary in the very process of their reading (“Das glaube ich ganz und gar nicht”). These reinforcing negative expressions are staging a polemic within the statement, while the early enclitical negation is so to say “ashamed” of itself and has a privative effect: the negated predicate is affirmed to the contrary. Thus, a negative statement can be read as an expression of an objective privation, when something that could and maybe should happen, does not happen. Or, the same statement can be read as an energetic, aggressive gesture by the subject who thereby affirms its autonomy and opposes his/her existential linguistic act to the universal content it expresses. Lacan, whom I will discuss later, draws attention to this breakthrough of existential subjectivity, and shows that it often happens via a redoubled negation. But such a repeated, redoubled negation can sometimes lead not even to a two-tiered negation as in the French “ne pas,” but to a full-scale logical contradiction, so that the logic of negative expression actually goes against formal logic. The oscillation of negation between the content of a proposition (the thought it expresses) and an external gesture of its de-position leads to a clash between language and logic. Hence the second major paradox of negativity consists in the equivocity of double negation. Indeed, repeating, reiterating the negation does not necessarily help to make it more convincing. As English poet Philip Sidney wrote in the sixteenth century, at the inception of modernity: Oh grammar rules, oh now your virtues show So children still read you with awefull eyes, As my young dove may in your precepts wise Her grant to me, by her own virtue know. For late, with heart most high, with eyes most low, I crav’d the thing which ever she denies: She, lightning Love, displaying Venus’ skies, Lest once should not be heard, twice said, “No, No.” Sing then, my Muse, now Io Paean sing,

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In the nineteenth century, Hegel famously endowed double negation with a transformative capacity: the resulting affirmation does not equal a simple “yes,” but makes the action in question neutralized and sublimated: even the reward desired by Sidney would now be losing immediacy and be a conscious and meaningful surrender. In his Science of Logic, Hegel developed a concept of negation of negation, which does not mean a restoration of immediacy and annulment of negation but a reaffirmation of original statement on a new level. A double negation allows restoring the unity and identity of a thing, after having understood how it is determined from outside, how it is internally contradictory, split, etc.: all of this is true, but there is a unity to all these disjoined predicates, which have to be negated in the second turn, so that as a result, a thing equals its history and preserves itself in the mediated or idealized form. Double negation produces reflection and idealization. But, in this new ideal form the thing is itself nothing but negativity: its essence is none of its predicates or definitions but its principle of motion. In this sense, there is only one thing that really is, and that is spirit or the subject (no longer a specific subject of a predicate but subject writ large: spirit, humanity). Thus, double negation produces a reaffirmation, on the one hand, but on the other hand it remains what it is: an “absolute negation” that keeps negating itself. What Hegel does not develop is how constant self-negation can sustain itself, how we can “tarry” with the negative, how it can keep foaming from the cup of infinity, etc. Because self-negation is self-contradiction, should it not cancel itself at the end of the day, after a period of melancholic self-destruction? (Alexandre Kojève would later complete Hegel’s theory in precisely this direction). This is one big question for all theory of negativity. Another big question is a mirror of this one: how can we take negativity seriously if it ends up affirming, saying “yes” (like in Sidney), or keeps reinstating negation thus recognizing the failure of the previous one. The very joy of discovering “absolute negativity” is premature if this absolute negativity does not really negate anything but remains merely negative. In full accordance with Hegel’s theory, most unencouraging events and institutions that we oppose have themselves been a result of negation, they incorporate negativity rather than propose or affirm some genuinely universal principles. This is again obvious in postrevolutionary countries like Russia where the authoritarian regime keeps appealing to democracy and rule of law and does not claim any universal legitimacy apart from this hypocritical reference, and where the egotistic behavior is justified by the loss of the mythical solidarity of Soviet times. But this is equally true of today’s Western societies that use economic efficiency as a universal criterion based on disappointment in any absolute principles or goals except for the universal abstraction of free trade “democracy.”5 A “no” to these regimes is a negation of negation, first negation being understood as theoretical or objective (nihilism, an

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understanding of nothingness), second as practical or subjective (rejection of nihilism). But it is a repetition of negation that risks reinforcing the nihilism of the status quo, as in the aforementioned example with corruption in Russia: “you see,—they will respond to your ‘no’—we cannot agree on anything here, then let us resort to the relativist and sceptical authority of capital.” Can we perform the negation of negation in a way that would not be tautological? And is there a way to ground and support our emancipatory and sovereign “no”? Here is one more concrete example of double negation. As mentioned earlier, Jacques Lacan draws our attention to the redoubling of negation in French, in the case of the so-called ne explétif: “je crains qu’il ne vienne” (I fear that he would come).6 The use of the negative is illogical here, since “fearing” already implies the subject’s modal negation of the guest’s arrival. So, it is a real-life case of Hegelian double negation. This structure is even more common in Russian where the negative adverbs (never, nowhere, etc.) require a second negative particle before the verb (“ya nikogda otsiuda ne uedu” means “I will never leave from here”). But what does this ungrammatical structure mean? According to Lacan, it stages a disjuncture between the negation that is a part of the phrase’s content or message, and the negation that is reflexive: addressed by the subject of speech with regard to his/her own utterance: not only I fear that he comes, but this very statement evoking his arrival is what I reject. It is as though Sidney’s coquettish “I will not, not sleep with you” would mean a passionate, tortured refusal not a surrender. This a split between what Émile Benvéniste calls “sujet d’énoncé” and “sujet d’énonciation.” It is the latter that, in Lacan’s view, speaks for the “unconscious”: the split of subjects in speech corresponds to the split of subjects in the consciousness or psyche. (Freud, whom Lacan otherwise follows here, calls “unconscious” the content of the negated statement, in the sense that it appears in a neutralized, suspended form: thus, to Freud, as Jean Hyppolite rightly saw it,7 Hegelian Aufhebung produces the unconscious. Not so in Lacan where it produces spirit itself.) For Lacan, double negation thus proceeds from weakness or failure of the first negative, which seems to leave untouched the negated thought, taking it, in a way, too calmly. The second negation shatters the very site of the utterance and meaning, at the same time demonstrating the instance of absolute negativity that the subject is. Not an Aufhebung or sublimation but a certain excess of negativity is at play here. Thus, to summarize, a double or repeated negation can fail in three ways: it can simply annul itself and restore the previous affirmation; it can collapse into tautological, powerless, sheer negativity that does not really negate anything; finally, it can get stuck in a paralysis of internal contradiction, saying no for the second (third, fourth, etc.) time means to constantly refute oneself. In this sense, negation, by trying to overcome its own futility, blocks itself. Therefore, the task it really faces is to get to the point and reach a conclusive annulment of its object, while at the same time constituting a space of freedom (pure negativity) in its place. But this task remains infinite. In fact, negation hints at the possibility of destruction and erasure of what it denies (since it attributes falsity to the expression and illegitimacy to the object). But it does not achieve it, since the very act of negation testifies to the existence of what it denies,

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both in expression and in reference. Hence the need to repeat the negation, and hence the idea of a radical negation as erasure: the one that does not just reject but acts as though the denied thing or situation had not existed in the first place. “Negation of negation” would in this context be a radicalization of negation. In fact, before Hegel, some thinkers noticed that negation of negation did not necessarily restore the status quo: thus, Aquinas qualifies the One as “negatio negationis et rei simul”:8 negation of the negation and of the thing [that had been negated] too: unlike Hegel, he sees the double negation as a radicalization of negation, which seeks to overcome its internal contradiction of both negating and affirming its object. Lacan9 speaks in this respect of a “second death,” a death that would be absolute. Paradoxically, the radicalness of this second negation, hardly achievable in practice, turns negation to its theoretical side: to pretend not to know anything on the subject is in a way more negative than to explicitly deny it. Freud’s Verneinung is therefore a partial lifting of repression, much weaker than what Lacan calls foreclosure or Verwerfung: a radical rejection of an experience “by default,” without the need of its active denial. Here, as elsewhere, we encounter dissymmetry between negation and affirmation. On the one hand, language implies the reversibility of these operations: either you affirm something or deny it. Affirmative and negative universal statements appear to be contrary to each other (thus in Aristotle), and thus also symmetrically reversible. However, if we view them ontologically, as forms of the subject’s symbolic activity in the world, we immediately see that the symmetry does not work. A negative statement (negation of affirmation) quotes the positive, and is thus a hybrid of negation and affirmation (the affirmation is here reinstated in a suspended, idealized way). Negation of negation does not annul it or return it to the prior affirmation. The negation is, on the one hand, inefficient, on the other, excessive in relation to the affirmation that it cannot annul. This has a fundamental sociohistoric importance: the negative effort of the modern subject directed against the instances of domination and serfdom does not effectively cancel these instances but preserves them in an idealized/unconscious form (depending on the perspective of the Aufhebung). At the same time, this effort, this destructive rage, does not stop even after the physical destruction of a tyrant but turns against the subject itself, in revolutionary terror, psychological/cultural melancholia of the modern subject, and the like. Andrey Platonov, Soviet Russian writer and researcher of revolutionary negativity, noted this effect: “No revolutionary, but only a fool, reckons with reality. This is the same as to kick and to feel the pain from your own blows. Such a fighter would not stand long: he will fall down from the imaginary pain of his own blows.”10 Compassion shown by revolutionaries to their enemies is here a psychological analogon to the interiorization and reflexivization of negation that had originally been a determinate denial of something unacceptable, implying a move to posit it as external, to oust it. Finally, Lacan’s disjuncture of two subjects of two negations implies an equivocation of negation. If negation of negation does not restore affirmation, if a negation requires a second negation in another part of the sentence, then perhaps these negations are homonymous signs of different operations and/or states of things. This is the

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conclusion that Aristotle, with his love of analogy, reaches in his Categories and De Interpretatione. It is he who distinguishes two phenomena so natural for us: contrariness and contradiction (adding two more: privation and correlation). It is one thing when we negate and imply that the contrary to the suggested hypothesis is true. Then, our negation enters the heart of the matter: it helps to determine the truth, because the contraries are intimately linked, belong to one genus, and represent teleological motors moving in opposite directions. Even more instructive, and objective, is a privative negation: Pierre is not in the café but he should have been: negation points at the modality of the situation and to its natural form. But contradiction is completely different. It refers to two mutually indifferent situations or things, or to a simple absence of a certain situation. Either there is rain or not; one and the same thing cannot at the same time be red and blue, etc. No active force is implied, no information on one member of contradiction can be derived from the other. In the Middle Ages they sharpened this Aristotelian classification by distinguishing between negations inside and outside the genus (the former are contraries and privations, the latter are contradictions). Kant creatively continued the same tradition when he formulated his famous distinction between the nihil privativum (an active force that destroys what is denied) and nihil negativum (a simple absence where no destructive force is implied).11 Hegel picks up on Kant’s ontologization of the negative, when he makes “negativity” into a force; a fact of being, not of language. But, he dialectically dissolves Kant’s dichotomy by presenting the privativum and negativum as two different moments of the work of the negative. For Hegel, the nihil negativum is the primitive, abstract form of negation characteristic for Understanding. But it is also the highest, self-reflexive form of negativity that abstracts itself from its object and understands itself as spirit. In the middle, there is the necessary moment of contrariness into which a thing falls apart (Kant’s nihil privativum). In various shapes, the equivocation of negativity, and its dialectic, is of primary importance for our sociohistoric tasks. First, the modern subject does not just emancipate itself by denying the past and reaching into the unknown. While ousting past forms, it produces their inversions (sovereign people instead of sovereign monarchs’ rule, man not God is the center of universe, and other “Copernican” revolutions). Broadly speaking, contemporary democracy implies a spirit of contestation of any powers that be in a subordinate but emancipated subject. Science and technology are involved in a battle against the determinate laws and the insistent presence of nature fought with nature’s own arms. Some kind of restlessness of negativity must be maintained, as Hegel rightly formulated. But the risk is that the site of negativity becomes the site of aversion, and absolute negation becomes self-destructive: nihil privativum can logically lead to nihil negativum of the abandonment of the world and disappointment in the universal. Hegel himself saw this danger in his analysis of the French Revolution, when he qualified the death on the guillotine as “the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage”12; later German tradition (Nietzsche and Heidegger among many others) elaborated the concept of “nihilism” as the negation of the very “nothing” that must have ideally been the spring of historical progress. Kojève expressed the same idea in opposite terms

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when he suggested that history would end by auto-annulment and bring forward a new idle state of nature. This is the problem of negativity. Now, let me proceed historically and explain the aforementioned moments of this problem in more detail. I will recapitulate the first section: ll ll ll ll ll

the ambivalence of double negation the asymmetry between negation and affirmation the latency and weakness of negation with regard to affirmation the respective need for its repetition and reinforcement the equivocation between contrariness, privation, and contradiction.

One easy answer to these problems is modern revolutionary tradition, which, as we have seen lately, is alive and well. Here, there is the objective existence of negation which turns into practice and leads to the symbolical ousting of the past and to both symbolical and real transformations of society, so as to produce a foundation and a historical rupture. “Revolution” suggests by its name a reversal, a U-turn of history. Hence its intimate connection with the linguistic and logical phenomenon of negation: negation aspires to undo/cross out a previously uttered statement; it introduces a symmetrical structure of choice between “yes” and “no,” of “good” and “not good” (see on this example how any indeterminate negation naturally tends toward a meaning of opposition). But, this symmetry remains incomplete, since the negation cannot undo an affirmation but has to reinstate it, and in every two opposites one is defined through another and bears an inherently negative character. This makes the negation itself an irreversible gesture (a double negation does not destroy itself). Negativity is thus an introduction of symbolical reversibility into an irreversible world. It is the tradition of revolutions that gives us an example of emancipation and constitutes us (and our societies) as civic subjects. But the problem, again, is that contemporary revolutions appear to be increasingly negative or destructive in character. The enthusiasm and catharsis of emancipation stem from the shattering of institutions that had seemed eternal. But there are hardly any innovative sociopolitical programs, except for market capitalism and representative democracy. Some (like A. Badiou) deny destructive revolutions the right to be called so. No positive program, no ontologically preexisting “uncounted” social elements—no revolution. In contrast, Marx13 thought that a true revolution only begins from a site of negativity and the social dissolution of the proletariat—no preexisting social group or class can accomplish a radical revolution. Of course, some emancipatory momentum and potential of self-organization stems from the very fact of joint destructive activity. As Oscar Anweiler said of the revolutionary Soviets, they played a “dual role”: representation of working-class interests and “revolutionary overthrow.”14 But, the destructive goals and negative results of revolution, doomed to remain unaccomplished, quickly turn to apathy and melancholia and retreat into the private sphere. Negation of negation appears here not as intensification of negative force but as a recognition of negation’s powerlessness.

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Negation 1 is then understood as practical (subjective), negation 2 as theoretical (objective). Revolutions fail, but therefore they repeat themselves, feeding a historical tradition of enthusiasm that alternates with melancholia. As Immanuel Kant said at the inception of revolutionary tradition, revolution is a phenomenon that “is not to be forgotten”15 —precisely as a heritage of unaccomplished and therefore redoubled negation. The revolutionary tradition, recognized as the origin and consequence of today’s democratic world, is a fragile but positive existence of negativity. Practically, it nourishes will to action, theoretically, melancholia and self-depreciation of a subject. Here are some theoretical considerations that are thus made actual. Negativity is a concept that is highly suitable for the interpretation of the contemporary world for the following reasons. 1. It allows the capture of the ambiguity of apathy and sterile fruitlessness of effort and of revolutionary energy, resting on the real openness of action and passion. The two stem from the denial of the transcendent absolute that, however, remains negatively implied.16 Ambiguity between them proceeds from ambivalence between the objective (theoretical) and subjective (practical) meanings of negation. And, the use of the negative operator allows the discerning of an active, practical core under an apparent lack and inertia. 2. It helps to describe, theoretically, the late modern historical situation, where old institutions of domination, religions, and ethnic borders continue to exist even if they are symbolically discredited. There is a sense of historical exhaustion that, nevertheless, does not lead to transcendence but leaves a subject constantly at a threshold. What we see behind is ruins, as Walter Benjamin17 (and Joseph Brodsky after him18), famously stated. I would add—ruins of everything. Negation of negation translates into the failed promise of negativity. The frustrated will of a narcissistic subject to sovereignty leads, practically, to the derealization of the world and its transformation into a mere image. There is, on the one hand, the lack of a clearly determined outside (because science and media concentrate all being within one’s reach), and, on the other, there is a sense of the subject’s right and duty to negate. As a result, we have the Sartrean mauvaise foi: a cynical subject of ideology who is caught in the trap of his/her own subjectivity, an ironic distance to what one does/says permits one to live a quiet conformist life without noticing it. 3. In the environment of negated self-identical objects, there is a positivist ideology that presents dominant interpretations of phenomena as “iron facts,” beyond their universal horizon, their history, and their potential for transformation. Positivism reduces all social processes to relationships of individuals, which means either of elites or of statistic majorities. Any alternative to positivism has to pass through an antidote of negativism. The liberal-democratic insistence on openness, difference, semiotic, and hermeneutic is a way to maintain the negativity of modernity in consciousness and action.

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4. This liberal-democratic spirit of critique is insufficient as long as it is predetermined by its opponent. An institution of negativity depends on the coexisting positivity untouched by it, and freedom becomes an autonomous humanist “public sphere.” The second degree of negativity is needed to transform both oppressive institutions and the liberal subjectivity that depends on them. 5. As a consequence of this condition, we have a utopian glimpse of an impossible condition—of negativity as such, the pure or “absolute” negativity as Hegel used to call it. Such negativity would not be a mere nothingness (in fact, the nothing is a contradictory notion since it would, as a thinkable entity, be something), but an infinite horizon that would (i) provide conditions for the constant Bildung qua self-overcoming, (ii) build up a sociability based on the mimetic mutual sharing of identities, and on the communist, fraternal relationship to the Other as a foreground not as figure (in opposition to the hypostasizing of the Other in the bourgeois anti-utopian philosophy). In response to the criticism of negative ontologies, which have become popular in the nineteenth century, from Bergson and Heidegger to Deleuze and Negri (we will specify them later), the following is the answer. 1. Negativity is not a mere hypostasis of lack, pain, or passivity. Negation, logically and linguistically, is what comes after an affirmation. But this secondary status does not deprive it of its irreducible ontological position. A philosophy of negativity is superior to sheer “affirmationism” because it presupposes an overabundance of being that it denies, by carving out a free space for a subject. This is in particular a meaning of Nietzsche’s thesis on the primacy of forgetting, as well as of Bataille’s primacy of expenditure, in the “general economy”: two thinkers who are wrongly enlisted as allies by the affirmationists as led by Deleuze. 2. Negativity is even less a mere diagnosis of crisis. Badiou, along with some others, holds the primacy of negativity responsible for present-day political culture that privileges victimhood and suffering, not agency. The “negative dialectic” of the Frankfurt School is often read as sheer insistence on the gap, dissonance, and incoherence, instead of an inquiry into new moving forces of the present. This criticism can hold, superficially, against some moments in Benjamin and Adorno, but in fact, both authors used their negative dialectic to free access to the active potentiality of subjects (Benjamin) and to the material substantiality of objects (Adorno). In what follows, I will show that the genuine negative philosophy is not just about gaps and disjunctures (nihil negativum), but equally about the negative magnitudes of imagination that uncovers a hidden obverse side under the dogmatic appearance of a status quo.

Negativity in philosophy I claim that this modern requirement of negativity was foreshadowed throughout the history of Western metaphysics, even though it has become actualized only now.

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I will now trace this history, focusing on the double structure of negation as negation of negation, and on the mutual transitions of subjective and objective negation. One may say that the first reflection on negativity started in mythological thought and in the Pythagorean School that divided all beings into couples of contraries. Thus, an idea of a fully reversible universe was introduced, and the negative was understood as opposite, thus allowing the subject to symbolically master death and frustration. But, philosophy as such starts with the questioning of this reversibility: with the discovery of the asymmetry of the world, and of the self-contradictory nature of the negative. This was the move of Parmenides. The path of opposition, that is, negation— the ambiguous path of people “with two heads”—was, according to him, to be banned. He thus redoubles the theoretical (objective) negation with a practical, imperative one (even though it was not meant to be revolutionary but a practice of theory). “For never shall this be proved, that things that are not (ta meonta) are; Nor will the force of true belief allow that, beside what is, there could also arise anything from what is not; wherefore Justice looseth not her fetters to allow it to come into being or perish, but holdeth it fast; and the decision on these matters rests here: it is or it is not.”19 These ontological imperatives are in fact internally contradictory, because they negate the negation in their turn. Parmenides interprets a negative statement as ambivalence or even a performative contradiction—it implies a mutually exclusive and thus self-destroying relationship of two statements, because what is negated had just been affirmed in the very act of naming. But, ironically, Parmenides cannot get rid of the rejected negative form completely and “tolerates” it as a particular inferior path of inquiry—that of opinion. Something like Hegel’s Aufhebung seems to be already operative there, and it is the Aufhebung of negativity itself. Hegel indeed says, in his theory of identity, that it uses negation only to dismiss it: “A is enunciated, and a not-A which is the pure other of A; but this not-A only shows itself in order to disappear. In this proposition, therefore, identity is expressed as a negation of negation.”20 Furthermore, Parmenides describes the path of negation where reigns ambiguity, imagery, and subjective irony. Here, “of all things the path is back-turning,” palintropos,21 he says. This is an exact definition of linguistic negation: indeed, by saying “no,” we parry, revert the previous statement, aiming to undermine its positing. A negation transforms the negated possibility into a failed attempt or a rejected draft. Ironic irresponsibility and a cynical presentation of the world as a set of indifferent options for arbitrary choice is inherent here, reminiscent of contemporary ideology, and Parmenides rightly criticizes it. However, the idea of palintropos is already a concept of negation as opposition, and thus of what in modernity is called “revolution.” A force opposite to the actual is valid even if unreal in its formulation. When actualized, the will backward (Nietzsche), the will to undo the past, is the very opposite of cynicism—an attempt to undermine the posited being presented by the conservatives as the only possible world. And an attempt to found the subject in the impossible Oedipal gesture of becoming one’s own father. Being has to be converted into possibility and changed. It is possible precisely because time is not fully real and because everything that is posited is already a matter of opinion and implicit negation.

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Parmenides’ argument caused many contemporary reflections, the most important of which belonged to Democritus, Gorgias, and Plato. Leucippus and Democritus opposed Parmenides by making the non-being (me on), or “void” (to kenon) a fullfledged (although indeterminate, apeiron) element of the world, together with the Being that consisted of the “indivisibles,” “atoms.” “Leucippus and his associate Democritus hold that the elements are the full and the void; they call them being and not-being respectively. Being is full and solid, not-being is void and rare. Since the void exists no less than body, it follows that not-being exists no less than being.”22 Democritus’ atom is Parmenides’ being, the void is the same meon that, for Parmenides, could not exist except in the opinions of men. Note (this is typical) that a hypostasis of negation coexists here with a materialist outlook. This is a radical metaphysical physics: in a way, Democritus answers to the protopositivist Parmenides what Heidegger would later respond to the contemporary positivists: if you say that you study facts “and nothing besides,” then what is this “nothing besides”? Mladen Dolar suggests, in a fine article, that Democritus arrives at this system at the price of introducing a negative magnitude named by an unexisting word “den,” the part of “me-den,” “nothing,” which remains after the deletion of “no.”23 The nothing then precedes the matter, which presents itself as a negation of negation—a sort of embodiment of negativity. Note that Democritus was also called a “laughing philosopher,”24 and we can suggest that his physics implies an infinite and melancholic25 irony, where “non-being” also means vanity. Another immediate reaction on Parmenides came from leading Athenian “sophist” Gorgias from Leontine. Gorgias wrote a speech titled “On What Is Non-Being,” which we only know via a paraphrase by Sextus Empiricus.26 In his speech he says that being, to exist, must exist somewhere, and if we take all being together, it must exist “nowhere,” thus it does not exist. This is the same argument as that in Democritus, but inverted. Now, it is the “beings” themselves that do not exist. Gorgias also refutes Parmenides’ identification of being with thought and discourse (logos), because, he says, we can both conceive and name the nonexistent things. Notably, he gives examples of imaginary creatures, such as Scylla and Chimaera, and of imaginary events, such as “a man flying or chariots racing in the sea” (the association of negation with imagination is a constant motif throughout history). Thus, we both think and speak of the non-being, and therefore, says Gorgias paradoxically, being itself is unthinkable: even more removed and transcendent than Parmenides would imagine. Thus, practicing what we today could call the dialectic, Gorgias (before Hegel) demonstrates the reversibility of being and nothing, and the impossibility of thinking of one without another: passages from being to non-being and vice versa play a crucial role in thought, rhetoric, and understanding. Nihilist avant la lettre, Gorgias gives an apology of illusionism, the one that Plato will later criticize, agreeing however that the sphere of the negative (what he calls khora, a pure receptacle of being, the one that Gorgias lacked) was a ground for illusions and lies. Plato picks up on Parmenides’ relative tolerance of the negative, and reinforces it by reinterpreting the me on, non-being, as an “other” than being, or difference27 (Plato, Sophistes, 1892, vol. 4). In spite of Deleuze’s attempt to oppose difference to negation, in

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Plato, like in Hegel, they are moments of the same logic. Thus, in “Parmenides,”28 Plato allows for four “hypotheses” under which the “otherness” may actually be thinkable or really exist. The first is what we would call a “regular” negativity: multiplicity consisting of parts. It is, however, contaminated with the One that it mirrors. The second “otherness” becomes totally ungraspable and transcendent, like the One that it opposes (this would, for Hegel, be absolute negativity). In the third and penultimate (seventh if we count the hypotheses on the existence of the One)—that of the relative nonexistence of the One—the correlate Other becomes “other of the other” (which is not reducible to the original “one,” but is essentially plural): [T]hey are other than each other; for they have no alternative, except to be others of nothing. . . . They are each, then, others of each other, in groups, for they cannot be so one at a time, if one does not exist. But each mass of them is unlimited in number, and even if you take what seems to be the smallest bit, it suddenly changes, like something in a dream; that which seemed to be one is seen to be many, and instead of the very small it is seen to be very great in comparison with the minute fractions of it.29

Finally, the fourth type of otherness is just a “nothing” (which, in this case, coincides with the absent and unthinkable “One”).30 In the seventh hypothesis of Parmenides (the third one on the “Other”) and in the Timaeus where he speaks of the khora (Place), a universal receptacle without qualities, described apophatically as “a Kind invisible and unshaped, and in some most perplexing (aporotata) and most baffling way partaking of the intelligible,”31 Plato in fact draws an image of the pure negativity, emphasizing that it can only be conceived as producing images—as a fragile constellation of indeterminate plastic matter. Plato emphasizes the fleeting—“they change even while one is mentioning them”32 (50b, 117)—nature of figures (skhemata, but also mimemata) the place takes in and produces. In this accent on the ungraspable nature of formless space, Plato anticipates modern accounts of negativity. Like Gorgias, against whom he argues, Plato is convinced that the world of me on is the realm of images and specters—possibilities that do not fully exist or fully lack—shapes of the cloud-like heteromorphic (negative) matter. Thus, in Plato, we see the ambiguity of the negation of negation: as a contradiction that ousts the negated and the negativity, as a kind of Hegelian sublation (determinate reflection) that leaves a space for negation, while moving on to a new affirmation, and as a pure infinite negativity, akin to Hegel’s third step of dialectical movement, and later to Heidegger’s anxiety as intuition of nothingness. As for the fourth, revolutionary meaning of the negation of negation, as a passage à l’acte—we would have to leave classical antiquity and wait for Neoplatonism. The contribution of Aristotle to the problem of negativity is hard to overstate, since it is he who stands at the origin of all our classification and terminology, and he is the author of the fundamental dichotomy of contrariness and contradiction. In his usual style, Aristotle tries to solve the aporias of negative reality and expression through a statement of equivocation. To the equivocity of being, there corresponds an equivocity of the negative, and of what he calls “the opposites,” “ta antikeimena.” In the Categories,

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Aristotle explores the oppositions in being, and affirmation and negation appear only as subspecies. In On Interpretation, it is the logos that gets attention, and thus the types of opposition appear as the ways in which affirmative and negative statements relate to each other. The scholastics chose to qualify contraries and contradictions as “negations” of a different kind. In any case, what we call “negation” and “negativity” incorporates the field of opposition, since opposition is one meaning of “no” (“not at all; to the contrary”), and both are associated with “negative magnitude” as it is understood in modern arithmetics. But Aristotle generally subsumes negation under the rubric of opposition, always describing the negative as a relation, not an entity. The only exception is the beginning of “On Interpretation.” Truth of a judgment, Aristotle repeatedly says, depends on a correct composition of names. Therefore, it would be absurd to evaluate truth or non-truth of one particular name. Falsehood starts only from the two names (Plato, with his doctrine of the Other, would agree with this). Nevertheless, negation is for Aristotle more than simply an expression of falsehood of a statement (that it becomes in modern positivism). Negation is an opposition and therefore it can actually be applied to single names—but in a peculiar way. “ “Not-man” and the like are not nouns, and I know of no recognizable names we can give for such expressions as these, which are neither denials nor sentences. Call them (for want of a better name) indefinite (aoriston) nouns, since we use them for all kinds of things, nonexistent as well as existing.”33 This “aoriston” was originally translated into Latin as “infinitus,” and the corresponding concept of negation is traditionally called “infinite”—which is not wrong, because by such negation we refer to an infinite universum of whatever “man” is not. The concept is close in meaning to what Aristotle subsequently calls “privation,” but here this privation is considered from the point of view of its linguistic reference, hence the evocation of a khora-like indeterminate infinity, which famously scared the Ancients but occupied much space in their intellectual concerns. When Heidegger, 2,500 years later, develops his concept of Anguish (Angst) as an intuition of the Nothing qua nothing in particular, the nonbeing (Nichts) is here not unlike Aristotle’s “infinite name.” Similarly, Lacan’s corrective to Heidegger (emphasizing the role of the minuscule “one” or “res” or “hilum” that is denied in the linguistic expressions of “nothing”) emphasizes the privative nature of the infinity negativity that we can access. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s many interests lay not with the negations of names but in negations as oppositions of entities and of propositions about them. Aristotle presents negation as a relationship between two beings or two propositions: thus, in a way, he agrees with Plato on the idea of the “Other” as a support of any negativity. At the same time, he does not evacuate negation or opposition from philosophy but presents nonbeing (me on) as itself one of being’s modes: “being” may mean a substance or maybe a negation of substance, “some things are said to ‘be’ because they are substance; others because they are modifications of substance; others because they are a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of substance . . . or productive or generative of substance or of terms relating to substance, or negations of certain of these terms or of the substance” (hence he even says that not-being is not being).34 And thus, the equivocity of negation itself belongs to the equivocity of being.

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In the Categories,35 Aristotle specifies four different modes of such opposition: correlatives, contraries, privatives to positives, and “affirmation to negation”—the latter relation is what he calls, in De Interpretatione,36 a contradiction (antiphasis). Aristotle was the first to introduce this classification, and, with modifications, it has lived up to our time. In late antiquity, his teaching was formalized by Apuleius into the so-called logical square, which shows the relations of contrariness and contradiction between the couples of affirmative and negative statements differing in quantity. Correlatives (ta pros ti), says Aristotle, are terms that form a couple, such as double and half, evil and good. Here an opposition appears as a symmetrical inversion. The introduction of this form allows Aristotle to view the world not as a set of fixed or fluid entities but as a structure of relations capable of recombination (Parmenides’ “palintropon”). As we will see further, by what we today call contraries, particularly when an inversion to the contrary is taking place, we often mean the Aristotelian correlatives. Such inversion is by no means anything trivial, a pure mirror reflection. Thus, for Greeks, it is such an inversion that characterized democracy. For Aristotle—with his taste of mediating opposites—one necessary factor of political liberty (feature of democracies) is “liberty to govern and to be governed in turn.”37 A sense of democracy very different from contemporary accounts, where either the rotation concerns only the elites (Schumpeter et al.) or it is only the breakthrough of the outcasts (Rancière et al.), not them replacing those in power, that matters. Aristotle defines contraries (ta enantia) in several ways. In the Categories, they are defined as differences within one genus, although it is added (strangely) that they “can belong to contrary genera or be themselves genera,” such as good and evil.38 In On Interpretation,39 the contrary relationship exists between a universal affirmation and negation (“all men are wise—no one is wise”). In Metaphysics40 Aristotle adds that they are “the most widely differentiated things” or “things between which the difference is greatest either simpliciter, or generically or formally.” This definition does not seem very strict: there is no clear criterion on how to distinguish a mere quantitative difference within a genus, from contrariness. Aristotle’s examples are black and white: they do not form a correlative couple like the double and the half. “The good is not spoken of as the good of the bad, but as the contrary of the bad, nor is white spoken of as the white of the black, but as the contrary of the black.”41 This is dubious: as we will see, Hegel, in his Logic, will insist precisely on the fact that the good is, or becomes, the good of the bad, and this is what makes the two contrary. Modern tradition obliterates Aristotle’s “pros ti” relationship, but indeed it would make sense to see it, as Hegel implicitly did, as a way to strictly define the contrary itself. The place of contraries, as opposed to contradictories, in Aristotle’s system is central. It is the contraries that describe the genus–species relation that forms a twotier definition of a thing. “Contrariety is a complete differentia” and “the differentia [in a species] is a contrariety.”42 The species is defined teleologically as a full development of its difference from others. The genus remains in the background as a support of contrary forces: importantly, for Aristotle, contraries, unlike contradictories, are co-possible, inherent in one genus and one subject.43

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The discovery of contrary relationship, which has to be considered together with the correlative one, adds a crucial turn to the theory of negativity. On the one hand, a contrary force and a reversal are the ways in which the merely ideal pure negation appears in the world. Aristotle notices it because he is interested in the temporal becoming of forms, absolute alterity of me on being one of them. On the other hand, if we think in modern terms of a self-realizing subject, then the reversals and contraries are ways to repeat and reinforce a “simple” negation: because a simple “no” does not really do the job, and complete destruction is unthinkable, the force of negation expresses itself by inverting its object or using another object as a positive mark of its denial. This is what Freud will later develop. But let us move further in Aristotle’s classification. Privation (steresis) is the situation when “what may have a faculty then is deprived of this faculty, when it is totally absent and yet should be naturally present and present also at that time.”44 A negative relation is in this case dependent on the implication of a naturally positive relation: the thing is absent where it should have been; this is a case of clear asymmetry, where negation does not come from any substantial instance, but adds itself to an affirmation that alone remains substantial. Modern thinkers (from Kant to Heidegger) will go further and will say that here privation is a special negative form of possession itself. The introduction of privation also helps Aristotle to ground his ontology of organic development: non-being exists as a blockage of natural development, in relation to the telos; it is the perfection of telos that, paradoxically, explains non-being: not everyone is perfect. But, on the other hand, privation, in opposition to contrariness, is asymmetric: “From possession you may pass to privation but not from the latter to the former. A man who has once become blind never finds that his sight is restored, as a man who has once become bald never after recovers his hair and a man who has once lost his teeth never after can grow a new set”—notes Aristotle,45 in a melancholic vein. The case of privation is an instance of a tendency, mentioned earlier, to treat all negation as objective and to ignore the very act of negativity and an oppositional stance from which a negation is uttered (in privation, negativity characterizes our object, not anything subjective or eventful around it). Aristotle thinks this is legitimate—but only in some circumstances. In the case of contrariness, negativity is, in contrast, emphasized as such. The introduction of privation helps by the way to resolve the Parmenidean worry: the negation can be “stated either in the simple form that Unity is not present, or in the form that it is not present in a particular class; in the latter case Unity is modified by the differentia, apart from the content of the negation (for the negation of Unity is its absence); but in privation there is a substrate about which the privation is predicated.”46 The same is true of the contraries, of course. In fact, says Aristotle, contraries and privation/possession are tightly linked, so that [in the table of contraries] “the second column of contraries is privative, and everything is reducible to Being and Nothing, and Unity and Plurality.”47 Finally, the contradiction, antiphasis, is a relation between the mutually incompatible state of affairs, and statements on them. Here, negation finally comes to its own and is

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always named as such. Aristotle shows that a contradiction to a universal judgment is always a particular, existential one, and a statement about a possibility is contradicted by an impossibility. Contradiction is thus unproductive and not instructive. Thus, Aristotle delimits and criticizes Plato’s translation of negation into alterity. This translation works for the case of contradiction, but not for the three other modes of “opposition,” in being and in speech. Correlation, contrariness, and privation are determinate negations, which are substantially associated with what they negate. They describe a negative (oppositional) element in reality itself. More specifically, they allow a logical formulation of the central concept of Aristotle’s metaphysics: that of possibility and actuality. Thus, anticipating Kant and Hegel, Aristotle provides for thinking negativity as an active force and not as an encounter of indifferent positivities. We mentioned that Parmenides’ idea of negation as reversibility was literally instantiated in Attic tragedy. Tragedy puts opposites on stage and Aristotle as its main theorist conceptualizes, in his Poetics, a dramatic world of colliding contraries. Both Oedipus and Antigone are figures of the impossible retroactive desire that is revolutionary and conservative at the same time. Aristotle describes tragedy as a passage from happiness to unhappiness or vice versa, via a turning point of peripeteia. He also describes a peculiar affective state of spectators who are torn between the contrary passions of fear and pity. Finally, the tragedy depicts potentialities not the actuality, and it is by this that it is “most philosophical.”48 Aristotle, who distinguishes contraries from mere contradictory terms, points at their teleological nature, thus implicitly accepting that each of them can become a goal of determined action, and presenting being in a dramatic fashion. It is in the fictional drama that the world presents itself as a potentiality by presenting the coexistence and unity of contrary forces within one subject. Fiction, art, becomes a support of ethical action and not a mere tool of propaganda. The same dramatic collision of opposites—apathy (athymia) and ecstasy (mania)—is, to Aristotle, characteristic of melancholia—another institution of negative affectivity that Aristotle proclaims to be close to philosophy.49 Melancholia and tragedy are two discoveries in antiquity, along with metaphysics. Nietzsche called early Greek philosophy “tragic,” and indeed it is penetrated by reflections on the ubiquity of void and on the futility of finite life. The two greatest pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus have throughout the Middle Ages been the emblematic images of melancholia: one because he laughed at anything, the other because he cried. And Aristotle famously associated melancholia with artistic and intellectual genius: “Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are obviously melancholic?”50 Aristotle restores the Pythagorean/Heracleitean dialectic of contraries, on the condition of putting them into the context of possibility and imagination, of perceiving negative affects (pathos, black bile) as its support, and of inviting to balance them in one’s ethical life. While Aristotle does not thematize the double negation, he distributes what we call negative into four different meanings. The distinction between correlation, privation, contradiction, and opposition has to be read as a statement of ambivalence between theoretical (objective) and practical (subjective) meanings of negation, and as

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discovery of an active negative force behind the sterility of mere lack and behind the depression of melancholia. Now, let us briefly turn to neo-Platonism. As mentioned, neo-Platonists give the negation of negation a new practical meaning. Here, in negative theology, the subject is expected to proceed through consecutive ascendance to the transcendent One. As Plotinus, not yet a Christian, formulated it, “a one (solitary individual) should escape to the one (the Unique and the Sole): redoubling of the ‘one’ equals here the redoubling of negation.” The most influential representative of Christian neo-Platonism, PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, recommended the “agnosia,” “a-knowledge,” of God (the “a-” is here not a simple denial but an “alpha privativa”). He built a series of apophatic determinations of God, each of which was supposed to be negative in this regard. As a commentator says, for Pseudo-Dionysius, the “negative of abstraction denotes the superlative positive.”51 Never, then, is it true to say, that we know God; not from His own nature (for that is unknown, and surpasses all reason and mind), but, from the ordering of all existing things, as projected from Himself, and containing a sort of images and similitudes of His Divine exemplars, we ascend, as far as we have power, to that which is beyond all, by method and order in the abstraction and pre-eminence of all, and in the Cause of all.  .  .  . And He is neither conceived, nor expressed, nor named. And He is not any of existing things, nor is He known in any one of existing things. And He is all in all, and nothing in none. And He is known to all, from all, and to none from none.52

According to Maimonides, a Judaic neo-Platonic theologian of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, divine attributes are “negations of privations”: qualities that we ascribe to God belong to him only in a doubly negative way. In the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen, a famous Jewish Neo-Kantian, thought that Maimonides thus used Neo-Platonic mysticism in a Judaic theological way, because he speaks of the Platonic meon (me being a modal, weaker negation) as a messianic openness to the future. The same is true of “infinite judgment,” where negation of a statement sends us back to an undetermined variety of possibilities, playing thus a denotative role analogous to Aristotle’s “infinite name.” In both cases, negativity serves here as a sort of fulcrum. Maimonides by no means conceives of the negative attributes in a purely negative vein, but rather relates them to infinite judgment, which only apparently takes on the form of negation in that its formulation employs a negating particle. Aristotle has rendered a disservice to the students of logic in his time, as well as to those of the Middle Ages and modern times, by failing to maintain the distinction between the two negating particles ou and me. We find this distinction sharply outlined, and productively elucidated and developed by Plato [Cohen primarily means Plato’s concept of meon]. Although Maimonides had not read the Sophists and Parmenides, he probably knew Even the latter presents the meaning of infinite judgment for that kind of negation which only appears to be a negation,

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in a forceful and lucid manner. Hence, Maimonides was able to find in Plato as well as in neo-Platonism the point of departure and support for developing his own fundamental doctrine of Knowing God: it is not through negation, but rather through a negation that is only apparent, that we attain a true and fast affirmation of God.53

From a contrary standpoint (and without referring to Cohen), Russian Orthodox philosopher Sergiy Bulgakov54 criticizes the whole neo-Platonic tradition up to Eckhart for applying to God the category of meon, because in his view, this undermines God’s radical transcendence. Thus, medieval negative theology becomes the subject of a very modern debate, the one that, as we will see, forms the nerve of contemporary thought (the radicalness of negation and the possibility of its completion). The most radically “negative” of the neo-Platonists was Meister Eckhart, German theologian of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Eckhart follows Pseudo-Dionysius in describing God as the one who “dwells in the nothingness,” but he apparently means it in a more substantial way: for Eckhart, “nothingness” is the potential and creative element in God, the one out of which all creatures emerge.55 God (or “Godhead”) himself is, in a way, “nothingness.” “[I]f I say: ‘God is wise,’ that is not true. I am wiser than he. If I say ‘God is a being,’ it is not true: he is a being transcending being and a transcending nothingness. . . . You ought to sink down out of all you’re your-ness, and flow into his his-ness .  . . so completely that you with him perceive forever his uncreated is-ness, and his nothingness, for which there is no name.”56 Hence, logically, if the soul wants to grasp God, it must empty itself and approach the nothingness from within. This is in itself a double negation because by approaching nothingness we get rid of our original creaturely nothingness (in the sense that our essence is God and not ourselves). In this motion, says Eckhart, we should “pray to God that we may be free from God.”57 Medieval scholastic thought, being generally a development of Aristotelianism, was in many ways impregnated by the neo-Platonist tradition. The understanding of negation is one such case. Although the scholastics generally used Aristotle’s classification of negations by dividing them most importantly into those inside and outside the genus (the inside ones being privations and contraries, the outside, contradictions), they also had to accept, at times, the primacy or even substantiality of negation. Thus, Thomas understands unity as a negative transcendental. However, this negativity only exists from the point of view of a finite being, not in God himself. The situation changes for Duns Scotus and his school. Scotus emphasizes that negation may apply to the first not the second intention, that is, to the substance and not to its quality. Scotus distinguishes “negation inside the genus” from privation, on the one hand, and from negation outside the genus (i.e. contradiction), on the other. Such negation inside the genus is internal difference, and as such, it inherently exists in God, being “responsible” for the “incommunicable” character of a divine “person.”58 This is not ontological negativity in Hegel’s sense, but rather a Platonic ontology of differential individuation. The theme of negation had not been central in early modern thought. An important exception is Spinoza who also did not develop on it largely in his ontology of overflowing

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totality, valued subsequently by the “anti-negativist” Deleuze. However, in his letter dated June 24, 1674, to his friend Jarig Jelles, Spinoza writes: As to the doctrine that figure is negation and not anything positive, it is plain that the whole of matter considered indefinitely can have no figure, and that figure can only exist in finite and determinate bodies. For he who says, that he perceives a figure, merely indicates thereby, that he conceives a determinate thing, and how it is determinate. This determination, therefore, does not appertain to the thing according to its being, but, on the contrary, is its non-being. As then figure is nothing else than determination, and determination is negation (determinatio negatio est), figure, as has been said, can be nothing but negation.59

What Spinoza says here is that since the universe (which equals God) does not have a form or shape (figura) (a neo-Platonic mystical notion of God and being), all such forms or shape limit it somehow and thus introduce negativity into God who does not contain it per se. Not noticed in Spinoza’s time, this phrase and thought was to have a stellar “career” in the philosophy of German idealism. However, only Kant, in his pre-critical period, made an efficient move to “reintroduce” negativity into philosophy. In his 1763  “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,”60 Kant introduces a distinction between logical negation (non-A), which implies sheer lack (nihil negativum; Mangel), and “real” (i.e. physical, material) negation, which implies opposition (nihil privativum; Realrepugnanz)—a minus A, so to speak. “Real” negation is not a simple logical function (of falsehood) but a material force (aiming at resistance to another force). Unlike logical negation, real negation is not mutually exclusive with the “positive” force it negates. By introducing “negative magnitudes” into philosophy or, more precisely, “world wisdom” (Weltweisheit), Kant reinterprets the seemingly passive or inertial happenings as active forces. For Kant (unlike what will later appear in Freud and Lacan) both “negative” and the “positive” magnitudes are ontologically equivalent, and, per se, positive. However, like Freud and Lacan after him, Kant points at the unconscious character of what the negative magnitudes denote, at least when we speak of psychology. Subsequently, Kant notices crucially that there is something obscure and hidden about negative psychological forces. I am now thinking, for example, of a tiger. This thought disappears, and in its stead the thought of a jackal occurs to me. It is, of course, true that, in the succession of representations, one cannot detect within oneself any special effort of the soul operating to cancel one of the representations mentioned above. But what an admirably busy activity is concealed within the depths of our minds which goes unnoticed even while it is being exercised. And it goes unnoticed because the actions in question are very numerous and because each of them is represented very obscurely.61

This recalls the later qualification of imagination, in the first Critique, as a hidden art of the soul, and indeed Kant’s examples concern the (negative) constitution of images.

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Kant further refers negative forces to the empirical understanding of the unconscious, as derived from Leibniz: If you ask a man even the greatest learning at a moment when he is relaxing and at rest to recount something to you or share part of his knowledge of things with you, you will find that he knows nothing in this state, that he is empty and that he has no definite thoughts or judgments. But stimulate him by asking him a question or by expressing a view of your own, and his learning will reveal itself in a series of activities. . . . Without any doubt, the real grounds of this occurrence had long been present in him, but since the consequence, as far as consciousness was concerned, was zero, those real grounds must have been opposed to each other.62

This unconsciousness of negativity is an important intuition, which is not fully explained within Kant’s system: Freud will later repeat this thought and we need it for the explanation of the latency of a negative revolution. In the first Critique, there are two main places where Kant speaks of negation. In the end of the Transcendental Analytic63 (Kant 1998: 382–3; A 190–2), he draws a “table of nothing” where he describes the way in which his categories define their object: this seemingly existential question in fact still belongs to the field of transcendental, subjective constitution. There is a purely theoretical notion without any experience underlying it (ens rationis); an object without a concept—this is the already familiar nihil privativum, because here we do not have a positive concept for a thing and name it through its opposite (in a way, I would add, this is an antonomastic metaphor); ens imaginarium (conditions of experience taken without the experience); and nihil negativum, which here refers to self-contradictory, internally impossible concepts. The ens imaginarium, empty space and time as a sheer negativity, reminds one of Plato’s khora, formless space. Heidegger, in his book on Kant,64 emphasizes ens imaginarium as a form of nothing. This allows him to enlist Kant as an ally to his own ontology of a being that equals “nothingness” (nichts), and Kant’s force of imagination (Einbildungskraft) becomes then, unnoticed by Kant himself, an intellectual intuition constitutive of the being as such. The other treatment of negativity in the first Critique refers to a “transcendental ideal”65 —a totality of all possible facts and events. To form a concrete concept out of this, we need negation, but this negation remains an indeterminate (“infinite”) operation that describes a phenomenon through its other or even through its contrary (“a person blind from birth cannot form a least representation of darkness because it does not have a representation of light, the savage has no acquaintance with poverty because he has none with prosperity”66). This is analogous to the “nihil privativum” from the table of nothing, but here it is taken in the empirical and not transcendental sense. It is hard to miss the proximity of this theory to Spinoza’s, even though Spinoza saw negation itself as determinate, and the totality of being as infinite.67 In both cases, negation is given an active though secondary role, and is a mode of judging about the unknown and the indeterminate. One can further ask whether Kant’s “thing in itself,” this “focus imaginarius” as he names it, does not have in

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itself something of a negative magnitude or nihil privativum. And indeed, the nihil privativum as described in the table of nothing—the object without a concept that can be named only in contrast to what we know—comes close to this interpretation. Hans Vaihinger, in his theory of “as if,” emphatically argues that the “thing in itself ” is just an instrumental fiction of reason and cites Kant’s contemporary Solomon Maimon who compared it to the imaginary number √−a.68 Kant’s “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” had not received too much attention, until a point. It is an obviously “precritical” text, with negative magnitudes seen as directly corresponding to symmetrical physical forces, and the sum of these forces (what would later become “the transcendental ideal”) is, in a mechanistic and even (we would add today) somewhat nihilistic fashion, equated with zero. Even the aforementioned Hans Vaihinger, a great Kantian thinker who used mathematical notions to demonstrate the crucial role of what he called “fictions” for science, dismissed the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” in one paragraph: “The whole text on ‘negative magnitudes’ suffers from this fault [sc. the realistic treatment of math]: indeed, Kant fully ignores the fictive nature of negative magnitudes.”69 However, Hermann Cohen (whose subsequent interest in the messianic, privative negation I have mentioned) rightly saw the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” with its division of nihil negativum and nihil privativum, of logical and real oppositions, and with its recognition of the logical gap between the real ground and its effect as an anticipation of the subsequent distinction between the synthetic and analytic—thus, of the very heart of the Critique.70 One attentive reader of the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” in the twentieth century was Jacques Lacan: we will return to his reading in detail, although, faithful to himself, he did not leave any systematic interpretation of the text, just some sporadic remarks. Here I will just emphasize that, for Lacan, negative magnitudes stand for the unconscious, symbolic, or phantasmatic structures of subjectivity that do not have a physical referent (their referent is a subjective force). But apart from Lacan, Kant’s “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” was also read and commented in the twentieth century’s Marxist tradition, in the context of Hegelian-Marxist dialectic—to prove or disprove that Kant would be its predecessor. The most elaborate and influential is perhaps the essay by Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Dialectic.71 Colletti makes a general claim, aimed largely at the Marxist tradition starting with Engels and continuing with Diamat, that contrariety does not have anything to do with dialectics.72 The contrary relation, he says, is just a relation of two objective forces that do not necessarily have anything to do with each other, except that they collide in action. And it is precisely Kant’s Attempt that serves as proof. Kant’s sharp distinction between logical opposition (=contradiction) and real opposition (=contrariety) is interpreted as the difference between conflict in meaning, on the one hand, and a physical collision of forces, on the other. While Kant, as we know, focuses on “real opposition” and deems it as a new type of relationship formerly unnoticed by “world wisdom,” Colletti privileges logical opposition or the

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contradiction. He understands dialectics as a logical contradiction (as opposed to contrary opposition) and explains it so: Not-A is the negation of A. In itself and for itself it is nothing; it is the negation of the other and nothing else. Therefore if we wish to attach any significance to not-A, we must at the same time know what A is, i.e. what not-A is negating. But A, too, is negative. Just as not-A is its negation, so A is the negation of not-A. Thus since to say A is in effect equivalent to saying not-not-A, A too, if it is to have any meaning, must be referred to the element of which it is the negation. Neither of the two poles is anything in itself or for itself; each is a negative. Furthermore, each is a negative-relation. If in fact we wish to know what one extreme is, we must at the same time know what the other is, which the first element is negating. Each term therefore, to be itself, implies a relation to the other term; the result is unity (the unity of opposites).73

It is only logical that, from this purified notion of dialectic, he derives the neo-Kantian or even positivist conclusion that dialectic is a structure of logic, not of reality itself. Its applicability to reality is only possible as a function of a mistaken, perverted appearance of historical reality. Thus, what is contradictory is only the capitalist universe of alienation and fetishism: after its removal, nature will be restored in its rights, and there will be nothing dialectical in it. This argument is naïve and uncritical, since it hypostasizes the physical world as though it would have a preset noncontradictory intelligibility apart from human reason: the logic of understanding appears as superior to the dialectic of reason. (In fact, as it was already clear to Greeks, physical motion is unthinkable in noncontradictory terms.) But, this argument consistently follows from Colletti’s interpretation of Kant and his reliance on its pre-critical elements. Ernesto Laclau, a thinker largely responsible for the rethematization of negativity in our time, criticizes Colletti for his equation of dialectic with logical contradiction and advances, instead, a notion of antagonism: a relationship in which the two terms not just exclude the being of each other, but mutually block their very identity: “in the case of antagonism, . . . the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself.”74 However, Laclau does not contest Colletti’s dismissal of real (contrary) opposition, and he repeats his catastrophic denial of the reality of dialectic.75 What this leads to in Laclau and Mouffe’s own teaching is that antagonisms are preferred to their resolutions. Antagonisms are gaps symbolized through empty signifiers, but what about the fantasies and images that do not just symbolize the problem and mark the enemy, but present a real ground for a victory over him/her? In this sense, the only historical horizon of Laclau and Mouffe’s teaching is democracy: without a notion of real oppositions that would negatively engage with present-day structures, the two British authors cannot envision any movement that would destroy the present state of things. Now, back to Colletti. He obviously reads Kant against the grain: he sees his accomplishment in the separation of logical contradiction from empirical mechanistic collision (real opposition or contrariety) that had been often confounded with it. Kant was also proud of this separation of his, but in the sense that he discovered the

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nonexclusive negative relation, and thus the real existence of negativity in the world. Thus, what I have originally presented as Kant’s pre-critical limitation, in a text that already moves in the direction of the critique (namely the physicalist understanding of negative magnitudes) appears for Colletti as the very center of Kant’s argument, critical in its own right (the logical relation is purified of the physical one). But, in a way, Colletti’s reading is justified, except that he gets the tendency of the text wrong, and does not develop its potential and, most importantly, he misunderstands what dialectic itself is. As we will see below, in Hegel, the dialectic of negativity cannot be reduced to contradiction. Contradiction is its culmination, the moment when the poles conflict and fall apart. But to become contradictory, the original internal difference must first grow, develop into dramatically opposed contrary poles, and only then will the contraries reveal their own incompatibility qua contradiction. There must be a moment of delay, of “tarrying with the negative,” in order for internal inconsistency to reveal itself.76 Kant does not, of course, go as far as this. But, as we have seen, his “negative magnitudes” are more than just independent colliding forces. The important thing is that these forces are defined through each other and, moreover, that one of them does not find a proper name and needs to be identified via the other. Thus, particularly in his examples of abstraction as “negative attention,” or of the thought of the jackal distracting from the thought of the tiger, Kant catches the movement in which reality becomes contradictory and presents itself as such. Moreover, he alludes to the need for negative magnitudes in human negative agency. This agency, both physical and mental, is in need of inversions, in order to understand contradiction and to perform it (qua denial or destruction). Here, Kant’s negative magnitudes remind not only of Hegel but also of Aristotle with his correlative oppositions. Because real oppositions are not things but forces, they are also relations. Kant’s phrase used by Colletti is this: “The motive force of a body in one direction and an equal tendency of another body in the opposite direction, do not contradict each other: as predicates, they are simultaneously possible in one body.”77 But this means that the two forces are not just objectively independent, but that they are objectively symmetrical, different only in time and space. This means that logical unity and dialectic are already built into the physical element of “real opposition”—quod erat demostrandum. German idealism continued the reflections of Kant on the ontological value of negation. Fichte uses “negation,” as opposed to “reality” and partly convertible with it, in his dialectic of I and non-I. An issue for him is in particular the symmetry between the two: in the final count, reality has priority over negation, which it constitutes. Also, Fichte, in the Science of Knowledge from 1794, repeats the argument of Spinoza on the negative character of any finite determinacy: this is precisely the way in which the activity of thinking, being a specific mental act, becomes negative, passive itself.78 “Negation” is thus antithetical to “reality” and synonymous with “passivity”—for Fichte this means that it determines the existence of things external to Ego. Spinoza is not mentioned (although Fichte could know of his famous argument from S. Maimon and F. Jacobi).

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But the concept of negativity and its “promotion” as a central principle and value of metaphysics belongs to Hegel. In this, he inaugurates the properly modern, posttheological philosophy of the subject although we have to remember that he relied on a long history and got back to the ancient Greek emphasis on the negative. The idea of negativity is ubiquitous in Hegel’s writings, starting from the Iena period. The substantivization of “negation” into “negativity” and “the negative” shows that we are dealing neither with an objective “non-being” or “nothingness” nor with a merely subjective act of negation but with an ontological force into which the subjective negation is reflected or projected: the subject’s will to negate (to distinguish, to overcome, and also to preserve), is not its arbitrary whim, but it proceeds from a process in the things by which they are ready to be negated. Historically, I would specify the following motifs in Hegel’s usage of the “negative.” First, he opposes the dogmatic tendency both of scientific reason and of previous idealist philosophies (such as of Jacobi and Schelling), to build knowledge on facts and/or laws. It is not by chance that Comte would later describe these facts and laws as “positive”: in spite of their objective appearance, they are in fact “posited” by the subject with reference to an external authority of nature or God. “Negative” thinking does not oppose to these positive facts an equally formal principle of negation, but allows conceiving any fact or law as internally contradictory, implying the possibility of its opposite. All knowledge appears then as a result of an internal development, of both the object (the “substance”) and the subject. Secondly, Hegel suggests a picture of the objective world as always-already negated. This comes from his usage of Spinoza’s formula, omnis determinatio est negatio: all determinate things and their concepts are certain limitations of the universum, and the limitation is always to some extent arbitrary. Therefore things are inconsistent and self-contradictory. This self-contradiction draws them into motion, and this motion always has something of a historical movement through which they do not just change place, but are internally transformed from changing any of their seemingly external predicates; hence the right that we have to apply the logical concepts, negation being the central one, ontologically. If we suspend the external determination of time and place from our factual propositions, we will get a system of logical contradictions. Time and space are, as we would now say, fetishistic operators that allow us to pretend these contradictions do not exist: to disavow them. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.79

From the fact that the world around us has already been negated, it does not follow that we must restore positive totality. However, it is not recommended to relax and

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reconcile with the limited, seemingly self-identical order as it is. The negativity, in Hegel, is both a statement of fact and an imperative. Therefore, negation is always double: the first, an ontological limitation, the second, the self-refutation of this limitation, the negation of negation. In other words, the finite negativity of things is a bomb hidden inside them: the negation has not been felicitous, that is, a thing is not fully coinciding with its narrow determination (genus, species, etc.) but on the one hand partakes of the infinite substance, and on the other hand leaves the negation unfulfilled. Hegel repeatedly comments on the futility and powerlessness of sheer negation (e.g. in the chapter on the French Revolution, “Absolute Freedom and Terror,”80 where “unmediated pure negativity” turns into “the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage,” thus unable to transform society). Thus, negation must be continued and repeated: which, paradoxically, means that it has to negate itself to be a negation of negation or the absolute negation. In this reflexive movement, the subject grows from within the Substance or from behind its back. Negativity is recognized as such, attains a positivity of its own, and creates a new objective world in which negativity is not obliterated but consciously maintained qua “spirit.” Note that here as elsewhere “negation of negation” has an ambivalent meaning: either negation is thereby finally annulled, or it is reinstated on a new level. In fact, for Hegel, both happen simultaneously: the second, reflective negation, while remaining a negation, does not touch the object but creates a free space and a free subject capable of accepting a universal in its objective exteriority. However, the risk of negation’s auto-destruction and paralysis remains, and therefore its preservation appears, in Hegel, as an ethical task. In the most famous passage from “Phenomenology,” he writes: But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this nonactuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.81

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Hegel says here, on the one hand, that negativity (and spirit) comes to the world not from outside but from the very matter of abstract understanding and the “positive” facts it describes. The task is to discover and cherish the negativity inherent in this abstract picture, to study the objective world as a tragic world of pain and internal contradiction, and to patiently “work” so as to redeem it by setting free the force that holds it in tension. Note also the emphasis on the fragility and volatility of the negative: we tend to overlook it, not notice it, in concentrating on what is being negated and rejecting and forgetting it as a wrong move; the task of a speculative philosopher is to be attentive to the substance of negativity, to what filters the “wrong moves,” to what constitutes enemies and denudes lies. In the Science of Logic, where Hegel writes about logical negation more specifically, he introduces the concept of sublation, the “Aufhebung,” by describing the double meaning of preservation and annulment (“putting an end to”) that this German word has.82 A third meaning, that of elevation, is hinted at in a reference to the Latin “tollere.” Thus, true negation is neither pure empty negation of nothing nor a powerless attempt that ends up reinstating what it denies, but an uplifting and at the same time neutralization of its content, in a move toward what is its truth, a new historical form. For instance, private property, contractual relations, family are all preserved in the modern state but are no longer self-sufficient universal forms of social organization. Their internal contradictions are neutralized by moving to new sources of unrest and conflict. One must say that, strangely, while Hegel extensively speaks of negativity, he rarely explains the very concept, that is, the usage of the linguistic and logical operator of negation in the ontological sense. Heidegger is right when he criticizes Hegel, paradoxically, for not really putting in question negativity itself, the fundamental concept of his system.83 The closest Hegel comes to such thematic questioning is in the second book of the Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence, where he discusses negation and treats it as the subjective, reflective negation being an act of reason. He builds a sequence: “identity—difference—opposition—contradiction,” which only partly corresponds to Aristotle’s typology of the negatives. “Difference” is for Hegel, unlike Plato, also a form of negation, but an undeveloped one, while in the opposition (or contrariness), the differences in one genus become reflected onto one another and are seen as inversions: master is a master of the slave (the slave is implied), and a slave—of the master (master is implied in the slave), hence the symmetrical and symbiotic nature of their relationship (one cannot but think here of Aristotle’s ta pros ti, not just his enantia). Positedness is likeness and unlikeness; these two, reflected into themselves, constitute the determinations of opposition. Their immanent reflection consists in that each is within it the unity of likeness and unlikeness. Likeness is only in a reflection which compares according to the unlikeness and is therefore mediated by its other indifferent moment; similarly, unlikeness is only in the same reflective reference in which likeness is.—Each of these moments, in its determinateness, is therefore the whole. It is the whole because it also contains its other moment; but this, its other, is an indifferent existent; thus each contains a reference to its non-

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being, and it is reflection-into-itself, or the whole, only as essentially referring to its non-being.84

Thus (against Deleuze’s interpretation that I will mention later), Hegel defines the contrary not as an extreme, maximal difference but as a reflection of its other, so that the difference between the two terms becomes increasingly internal, and their essence, differential in itself. It is this interiorization that leads to collapse, since it collects the difference into one and the same genus or substance. The terms carry their non-being within themselves, which ends with contradiction, that is, with the impossibility of their coexistence, and with a practical, real destruction of their relations, with a passage into the “ground,” a logical foundation of the thing, which widens the horizon and places it in a universal context. The big remaining question is whether the “ground” appears as a result of destruction and crisis, which push the situation forward into the unknown, or if this ground grows organically out of the very history of the thing’s self-overcoming. How predictable and calculable is the movement of the spirit? Hegel himself hesitates on this and, in the end of The Science of Logic, he presents an alternative between the tripartite or quadripartite rhythm of dialectic: [T]he other of the other, the negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the identical, the universal. In the whole course, if one at all cares to count, this second immediate is third to the first immediate and the mediated. But it is also third to the first or formal negative and to the absolute negativity or second negative; now in so far as that first negative is already the second term, the term counted as third can also be counted as fourth, and instead of a triplicity, the abstract form may also be taken to be a quadruplicity; in this way the negative or the difference is counted as a duality. The third or the fourth is in general the unity of the first and the second moment, of the immediate and the mediated.85

Hegel continues the long tradition of distinguishing between equivocal senses of negativity: one is here a determinate privation that depends on what it denies, another a nihil negativum, which in Hegel, unlike Kant, becomes a force of its own and occupies the place of the subject and source of negativity. But, being purely negative, it cannot really occupy this place. The question is whether absolute negativity, the negative of the negative, has an autonomous consistence of its own, or if it immediately collapses into reaffirmation by way of self-cancellation of two negations. In the former case, the dialectic takes a revolutionary form and moves forward with its destructive side. Hegel inserts into his discussion of negation as opposition, an important remark on negative magnitudes, which continues the thoughts of Kant and presents a criticism of accepted mathematical doctrines. Hegel shows that in arithmetic, positive and negative numbers are sometimes used symmetrically, and sometimes the positive is understood as the magnitude itself, before its determination (so that one could think that if –а * +а = –а2, then +а * –а = +а2, but in fact it is not considered so, and the +а means а in general). In economics, debt and credit count equally in the movement of capital and should be considered in their absolute value.86 This is an inherent contradiction that is obfuscated by the optics of understanding that reigns in mathematics. Negation, taken as opposition to the positive, is (pace Kant) therefore not fully symmetrical with

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it, as long as it functions within the framework of opposition: a more radical negation would aim to destroy the very quality and essence of “a,” which is precisely what the contradiction is set to accomplish in abandoning the theoretical plane. Herbert Marcuse, in his excellent commentary on Hegel,87 emphasizes the destructive aspect of his dialectic. The identity of a thing as we know it is in fact a result of external forces blocking its development: dialectic helps to uncover its internal tension, its internal potentialities; but to set them free, the thing has to be destroyed in its current identity, as a result of an internal contradiction. Only then can it pass into a new shape of existence, which had been its hidden ground all through. For, what does the unity of identity and contradiction mean in the context of social forms and forces? In its ontological terms, it means that the state of negativity is not a distortion of a thing’s true essence, but its very essence itself. In socio-historic terms, it means that as a rule, crisis and collapse are not accidents and external disturbances, but manifest the very nature of things and hence provide the basis on which the essence of the existing social system can be understood. It means, moreover, that the inherent potentialities of men and things cannot unfold in society except through the death of the social order in which they are first gleaned. When something turns into its opposite, Hegel says, when it contradicts itself, it expresses its essence. . . . The Doctrine of Essence thus establishes the general laws of thought as laws of destruction: destruction for the sake of the truth.88

The young Hegelian reaction to Hegel, particularly Marx’s, had already given a similar interpretation. Criticism aims at the Aufhebung and emphasizes its theoretical (objective) side: Aufhebung is not just activity of spirit but also a recognition of negation’s failure. Marx therefore suggests passing over from theoretical negation to physical destruction. The religious, ideological critique, in the case of post-Restorational Germany that is permeated by the cynical spirit and preserves the social order whose spirit had “passed away,” is no longer efficient: it perpetuates its object. One has to negate this negation, and destroy the very object that had made the liberal critique possible. The liberal preservation of past institutions that Hegel’s Aufhebung conceives should become the object of a second revolution. War upon the state of affairs in Germany! By all means! This state of affairs is beneath the level of history, beneath all criticism; nevertheless it remains an object of criticism just as the criminal who is beneath humanity remains an object of the executioner. . . . It is not a lancet but a weapon. Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy.89

This is a negation that no longer enjoys itself or coincides with the positive—it is purely negative. But that also means that it cannot nor should last: Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism.90

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“Socialism” is here a regime of new positivity as mediated through the negation of private property: communism serves as a vanishing mediator with negative magnitude, a regime of determinate negation. Nietzsche holds a position similar to Marx. He suggests going a step further and instead of reaffirming the “generic” being of humans (Feuerbach and Marx) to overstep the human genus as such, thus getting rid of the stumbling block of Aufhebung, which he understands as a reflexive turn of originally affirmative forces of becoming. Nietzsche, although he is frequently enlisted as a predecessor of the “affirmationist” trend, has dialectical tendencies in his thought, such as the ubiquitous rhetoric of inversions and chiasmata, which frequently leads him to place rhetorical emphasis on negative movements. The theory of forgetting (as prior to memory) in The Genealogy of Morals is one example (forgetting is mental “negation,” crossing something out from consciousness: and Nietzsche points out how difficult this is), and the halfdelirious setting to Brandes of a problem about how to “lose” himself is the other such example.91 Noys quotes an interesting statement from Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche actually posits the indifference between position and negation. “I know the pleasure in destroying to a degree that accords with my powers to destroy—in both respects I obey my Dionysian nature which does not know how to separate doing No from saying Yes.”92 The nineteenth century was otherwise a time of the ascent of positivism, which by its very title was a movement that was interested in negativity but rejected or marginalized it. A standard positivist position, defended for example by Chr. Sigwart,93 was to say that negation is a purely subjective, secondary logical operation, which claims a previously formed complete statement to be false. It is in this context that perhaps the most elaborate theory of negativity in the nineteenth century was presented by Henri Bergson—this positivist anti-positivist thinker was a critic of positivism from inside. In his Creative Evolution,94 Bergson reprints his article from the Revue Philosophique (1890) dedicated to the concepts of nothing and negation. He rejects the intellectual significance of negation, thus reinforcing his picture of a continuous world without breaks. But he also gives its theory, which influenced subsequent French thought, both the one that built on negativity and the one that repelled it. Bergson insists that negation and position are asymmetrical. Negation is secondary; it is a reflection upon affirmation. It is infinite or indeterminate (Bergson thus reduces all negation to the logic that Aristotle attributed to a negative name, not judgment): If now we analyze this idea of Nothing, we find that it is, at bottom, the idea of Everything, together with a movement of the mind that keeps jumping from one thing to another, refuses to stand still, and concentrates all its attention on this refusal by never determining its actual position except by relation to that which it has just left.95

Furthermore, negation does not correspond to any state of affairs, it is of “social and pedagogic nature,”96 that is, “not” is a rhetorical or expressive operator, which is

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addressed to another person not a thing. Finally, negation and nothing appear only in a mind endowed with memory: they imply a human temporality that makes breaks: To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is not enough to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; it is necessary besides to turn our back on the present, to dwell on the past, and to think the contrast of the past with the present in terms of the past only, without letting the present appear in it.97

All of this will allow, subsequently, to Sartre and Lacan, to announce negation to be the site of consciousness or subjectivity in their irreducible negativity and trancendence. In the twentieth century, we experience an explosion of reflection on negation: from Frege, Freud, Heidegger, and Sartre and further to Marcuse and Adorno. The practical revolutionary drive of Hegel and Marx interests Marcuse, but not most other authors who take up a pessimist and therefore a theoretical/contemplative perspective on negation. The overall contribution of the twentieth century is to give a realistic experiential understanding of negativity, needed to legitimize and institutionalize it in the world where positivism continued to acquire hegemony. Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of what we call neo-positivism, could be expected to agree with the reductionist critique of negation by Sigwart and Bergson, but in fact he suggested an original doctrine that upheld negation as substantial content of thought, and of the meaning of a proposition. Negation, says Frege,98 is not external to a sentence whose copula it would undo or whose falseness it would demonstrate. On the contrary, negation is “a possible component of a thought” and as such is “a part of the predicate.”99 A negation of an entire statement, like “it is false that the accused was in Rome,” can always be replaced by an assertion, “it is true that the accused was not in Rome.” This normalizing of negativity allows Frege to propose a solution to the problem of number: he builds the sequence of arithmetical numbers upon the zero or empty set, the existence of which follows from the possibility of a contradictory definition like “an entity that does not equal itself.” But, the rehabilitation of negativity leaves out the paradoxes and ambiguities associated with this phenomenon. Martin Heidegger started his career by attempting to understand negation phenomenologically: in his early writings, he emphasizes, in the spirit of Kant’s “negative magnitudes” and of Frege’s conceptualization of negativity, that negation can deny a referent but not the validity of a statement: thus, negation is itself a productive operation constituent of a specific modification of meaning (which it does not destroy but reaffirms). “The non-validity is itself a certain validity.”100 Negation has an intentionality of its own. The mature Heidegger, arguing against Hegel’s subject-based negative construction of a human being, nevertheless also defines this being negatively, via specific access to the indeterminate sphere of what he calls “The Nothing” (Nichts). The sense of historical totality and its exhaustion, of the shrinking of the Earth as achieved by the Enlightenment, leads to contrast the totality of being with its latent foreground. In his inaugural speech in Freiburg, “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger opens the theme of negativity by ironically reverting the words of Hyppolite Taine: in scientific existence, “That to which the relation to the world refers are being themselves—and nothing

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besides.”101 This “nothing besides,” says Heidegger, which is refuted for some reason, is a sign that there is some strange remainder calling for its obstinate rejection (here, modern positivists closely resemble Parmenides, and Heidegger, Democritus). In fact, this “nothing besides” is a proper name of a special entity, “The Nothing.” Using what Aristotle called an “infinite name,” the “Nothing,” Heidegger describes the affect of anguish (Angst)—the modern version of ancient melancholia—that paradoxically gives humans a negative intuition of the universum. In anguish, the imagination, so to say, “runs through” everything to encounter nothing. The universum in question thus presents itself the infinite openness of being. As such, this plastic and transformative nothing can thus become a matrix for a creative and decentered post-subject (Dasein) who looks upon itself from the point of view of the infinite, and not the other way around. Returning to the neo-Platonic mystics and at the same time mobilizing the phenomenological argumentation, Heidegger rejects Hegel’s attempt to subjectivize negativity and insists that negation, being by definition secondary to affirmation and dependent on it, cannot therefore be deduced from a voluntary or linguistic act (which is by definition affirmative) but must proceed from an intentional object on which this act is oriented. This object happens to be “the Nothing.” It is clear from the above that being (qua nothing) is fragile and instable and is always already lost. When we define nothing as “the nothing,” it tends to present itself as one more substance and thus to lose its transcendent character. “The nothing” thus designates at once exhaustion and excess. Still, in spite of its intangibility, the nothing may signal itself to a human being in the disposition of anxiety: disposition that is characterized by a certain shrinking back, recoil [Zurückweichen], and repulsion [Abweisung]: The nothing itself does not attract: it is essentially repelling [abweisend]. But this repulsion is itself such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole.102

Thus the paradigm of exteriority and transcendence helps to shed light upon the latency of the event and the tendency of its obliteration—which shows itself so clearly in the historical experience of revolution described in Chapter 1. At the same time, seen in this light, “anguish” seems a problematic concept, because it assumes a negative shrinking from the negative ground that the nothing is. Such shrinking is logically valid, but it is not the only possible option. It is imaginable that we accept nothingness with gratitude, love it, are faithful to it, etc. So the fact that we are anxious about it and tend to avoid it or even repress it is implicitly a product of a double negation, and not just of a phenomenological intending of nothingness. Heidegger’s view of the negative is somewhat modified in his 1939 course on negativity in Hegel.103 If, in “What Is Metaphysics,” he argued that the nothing is the source of all negation and criticized Hegel for claiming the opposite, now he reverses the roles. In “Negativity,” it appears that Hegel was wrong to start his logic with the concepts of being and nothing, which are undifferentiated and identical, and even more wrong to jump to “becoming” as the way out of their emptiness. What Hegel lacks is the internal difference of being (or nothing) with itself, its excess over a specific being. It

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is this ontological difference that is the true ground of Hegel’s negativity, which, thinks Heidegger, is Hegel’s great but unclarified concept.104 Radical negativity is thus not inversion but destruction, and Hegel is right that this destruction leads straight to the question of ground, Grund. What Hegel’s philosophy nevertheless obliterates is the fact that the only real “Grund” is nothing, an Abgrund. Being itself “nihilates” and constantly opens up an abyss lying under any event of being, separating a being from itself. Finally, in a 1955 open letter to E. Jünger, “Concerning the Line,” Heidegger takes issue with Jünger’s revolutionary call to transcend the condition of modernity by stepping over a historical line, and in this context to the question of negation (in continuity with the 1939 course, Heidegger is interested in negativity as an actual force and movement).105 The line cannot be crossed but is important as a border, as connection, and as trajectory. No transcendents, but transcendence as a constant practice: Heidegger’s position is not that different from Kant here; the treatment of Jünger’s revolutionary line-crossing is similar since it resolved at the level of material signifier. Heidegger suggests to take the line not just as a temporal threshold but also as a symbol of negation, and from now on to write the word “being” crisscrossed, as “being” (under denegation, Freud would say).106 Being does not disappear being crossed out; on the contrary, it is detached from its linguistic sign and thus appears in a new light. This is generally how negation (being a symbolic operation) works: attacking something means revealing its hidden essence. Heidegger draws attention to the material sign of negation, the diagonal cross, by associating it with the “Geviert” that connects earth with sky, and humans with gods. The force of negation thus comes not from the subject but from the transcendental structure of three-dimensional space, with its four sides and two lines. “Line” itself is a force of negativity since it crosses something out and implies something else. Unlike Kant and Hegel, Heidegger thus implies that it is pre-subjective openness of space not subject-related time which already contains the structure of self-annulment as reversal. No revolutions, then, without a restructuring and reorientation of space, without what Schmitt called the “Nomos of the Earth” (no revolutions in one country, perhaps? It would be too hasty, of course, to see this as a belated apology of the Nazi Lebensraum). A more prosaic image of negativity was given, in a Hegelian reading of Heidegger, by Jean-Paul Sartre.107 “Nothingness” stands here not for being but for subjectivity: it represents a decentered, depersonalized field, which suspends posited entities by transforming the world into a foreground for the absent figure: the nonthetic consciousness has access to the immediate sensuous matter of things in their becoming, beyond their interpretation or judgment on their presence. An eschatological religious consciousness without God—this is what could be said about both Heidegger and Sartre’s negative atheology. Explicitly following Bergson, Sartre notes the secondary nature of negation with regard to affirmation. But, he deduces from this the importance of negation and of “nothingness” as its intention. Consciousness slides on the surface of corporeal things,

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negates them, but is by definition impossible to incorporate. The negative is not but it is a mode of human precarious existence. The classical illustration of this is so-called bad faith (mauvaise foi) where a subject pretends that his/her actions (such as, for instance, holding a woman’s hand) have a purely objective material nature: subjective meanings have a happy quality of non-objectivity and can thus be ignored or dissimulated.108 In this analysis, Sartre combines Bergson with Freud (whose analysis of “negation” and “fetishism” I will evoke later): the secondary and social meaning of negation makes it constitutive of a social world and of the specific latency or even unconsciousness of meanings that this world abounds in. The subject of bad faith, like Freud’s fetishist, uses the materialist and objectivist world as a screen against the nothingness that s/he secretly knows of, and fears. Also like Bergson, Sartre attributes “nothingness” to time, by which he understands the ability to isolate the actual moment of now and thus to interrupt the flow of becoming by introducing a “cleavage” between the past and the present.109 Negation is also constitutive of the imaginary: evoking the theme of his previous book, Sartre says that it “encloses in its very structure a nihilating thesis.”110 He is in good company here too, since we saw that already for Kant, negation requires an imagination of a “negative magnitude”: but Sartre puts it another way around, since for him the imaginary carries with itself a particular annulled intentionality. Partly because of this, in Sartre’s own work of imagination, his literary work follows a profound reinstatement of the philosophical melancholia (“Nausea”: but the first projected title of Sartre’s novel was “Melancholia”), as a coincidence of the subject’s absolute freedom, and of his apathy and disgust at the encounter with the objective world. Unlike Heidegger with his “anguish,” Sartre’s “nausea” emphasizes the polarity and an active repugnance between the finite being and the infinite “nothing” from whose point of view the human mind observes them in frustration. The human negativity is the more powerless the more it is absolute. Heidegger and Sartre coincide here with another great thinker of negativity of the twentieth century, Benjamin: he, too, pointed at melancholia as a properly modern affect, an affect of a subject as a supposed world sovereign who at the same time is paralyzed in the face of the abundance of commodified objects. Even tragedy is seen by Benjamin in a melancholic light: he distinguishes ancient tragedy from the modern Trauerspiel, which is profoundly melancholic and incapable of overcoming or “purifying” its negativity.111 Like other thinkers of whom we speak here, Benjamin valorizes negativity thus understood as a subjective attitude: he reinterprets revolutions as “brakes” of the locomotives of history112 and gives an apology of a “destructive character” who “sees ways everywhere” “where others encounter walls or mountains.”113 Sigmund Freud, in his essays on “Negation”114 and “Fetishism,”115 shows the powerlessness of negation as a logical, linguistic, and psychological force of a subject, but endows the subject with the force to be a symbolic master of his/her impotence. Negation, with its inevitable inadequacy of posture, is thus at the origin of the symbolic function as such. Negation is self-contradictory, because it affirms what it negates, and thus needs to negate it once more. It therefore gives an alibi to the subject to avow his/her internal inconsistency with potential for an internal split. This split (Spaltung)

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happens in the case of fetishism, when the subject “disavows” (verleugnet) a part of reality that he unconsciously knows about. In Lacan’s later reconstruction,116 Freud had specified at least four modes of negation: negation (Verneinung), disavowal (Verleugnung), repression (Verdrängung), and foreclosure (Verwerfung). Each of these is only incompletely negative: it does not destroy the denied thing or phenomenon or entirely erase it, so it “returns” in this or that fashion. All these instances of negation are unconscious in this or that way. Freud, like Kant, heeds the latency of negativity. Not just the negated content but the very act of negation gets obliterated. The incompleteness of negation thus plays a double role: it renders negativity infinite, bound to repeat, but it also allows to ignore it, to say that the negation had not been there at all. This is the case of the Verneinung, denegation: the subject does evoke the idea of the dreamt woman being his mother, so his negation is not radical; Freud in fact shows that it is not even the idea of incest itself but the very negation that constitutes the true object of obliteration. But here negation is on the surface, so we tend to pass immediately to the content—and are mistaken. Linguistically, this tendency to dismiss negation shows itself in the enclitic, stressless mode of its usage that was discussed by Jespersen. We often say our “not” very quickly and accompany it by a denying gesture (for instance, a headshake that is meant as though to shake off the sticky meaning), to show that not just the object but also our “no” does not deserve attention. However, as Jespersen also shows, this can, dialectically, lead to the reinforcement of negation, to the emphasis on it. Thus, not all negation is unconscious—even though an emphasis may lead to the positivization of negation’s meaning, a loss of its inherently relational and parasitic character. Like Hegel, Freud associates negativity with symbolic mastery and like him he attributes to it a version of Aufhebung—but only a symbolic one. This Aufhebung leads to internal conflicts, because the subject appropriates from culture contradictory roles and meanings (cf. Marx’s criticism of Aufhebung). But, a biographical analysis allows us to reenact the Aufhebung in a conscious way. For Freud,117 the origins of positive and negative judgments are the drives (Triebe) of love and hatred, which, respectively, aim at inclusion or absorption of an object and at its repulsion and expulsion outside the borders of the Ego. Prior to symbolic rejection of an undesirable object, there is, says Freud, a zone of indifference, the non-acceptance into the Ego. It is this early type of negation that, in Lacan’s later reconstruction, is characterized by Verwerfung, foreclosure, and characterizes a psychotic subject.118 It turns out, strikingly, that (1) the “external” reality, which for the small child is defined as indifferent, is for the post-Oedipal subject constituted by the negative drive, the hatred. At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.119 Thus, negation as Verwerfung is constitutive of objective reality itself, which means that reality starts with an event of differentiation and separation, and not with a simple Bejahung, which would involve images, deceptive phenomena as well as objective representations. Being and event are penetrated by the force of denial and bear its mark unconsciously in the later stages where the “external” appears, on the contrary,

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as a criterion of truth (truth is negatable, image is not). But, of course, the originary affirmation, Bejahung, is indispensable for reality too. It is this double constitution of “reality” that, for Lacan, makes possible the hallucination which happens in the zone that had been foreclosed or rejected by the child from his/her Ego, and not filled in ever since by a “reality” coming from outside. “Realizing” negativity is incomplete since it does not destroy but posits at a distance; it does not quite negate: thus reminding of Hegel’s Aufhebung or determinate reflexion. Destruction, on the other hand, fuses with affirmation: (2) Love, at its early “pregenital” stage, is almost indistinguishable from hatred, because it aims to devour its object. Nevertheless, Freud does not say that love and hatred are identical, they only become so: hatred per se stems from the aforementioned non-incorporation. It is only the more mature stage of genital love that finds enjoyment in the external existence of a beloved object, and coincides, again, with Hegel’s “determinate reflection,” which posits an object qua external. Preliminary stages of love emerge as provisional sexual aims while the sexual instincts are passing through their complicated development. As the first of these aims we recognize the phase of incorporating or devouring—a type of love which is consistent with abolishing the object’s separate existence and which may therefore be described as ambivalent. At the higher stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, the striving for the object appears in the form of an urge for mastery, to which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference. Love in this form and at this preliminary stage is hardly to be distinguished from hate in its attitude towards the object. Not until the genital organization is established does love become the opposite of hate.120

This is a highly important statement, because Freud conceives here an indistinguishable identity of position and negation. In a later text “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,”121 Freud famously attributes to the subject two equally originary drives of life and death: the latter being responsible for the will both to destroy and to repeat (repetition being a form of stoppage). The destructive force allows the subject to achieve a symbolic mastery over himself/herself by introducing an absent symmetry into the world via symbols, negative magnitudes: as the story of the fort-da game brilliantly testifies. Importantly, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud shows how drives can undergo reversals of their aims (love into hate, sadism into masochism, voyeurism into exhibitionism, etc.). Reversals involve one-term polarities, contraries (love and hate), but in most cases they concern the correlative (in the Aristotelian sense) positions of activity and passivity (i.e. subject and object): “I beat someone” may mean that I actually want myself to beat someone, but something in me resists this desire. Although, and because, Freud says that there is no “no” in the unconscious (the “no” does not touch the phenomenal content but only a subjective form of presentation, a judgment), he shows how the subject expresses his/her rejection and denial via reversals. Reversals are thus active forms of negativity that stage and enact its empty message, give body to negativity, and compensate for the powerless “no” of Verneinung. To an

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analyst, this allows for a dialectical interpretation of the subject’s symptoms, where love can mean hate, thus returning to their early unity. The world of unconscious is reversible and symmetrical, what the conscious and objective experience is not. Like Hegel, Freud maintains that there is an early unity of negation and affirmation; “in the early psychic life” of a “narcissistic” ego, they are not separate yet. The act that unites them is devourment: destruction and appropriation at the same time. It is this act that is subsequently performed symbolically as the process of interiorization (of father, most importantly)—the true origin of the unconscious. It is against this neo-Hegelian position of Freud that both Sartre and Herbert Marcuse (disciple of Heidegger and follower of Benjamin) raise their voices. Sartre derides the figure of devourment as consciousness and insists on the impossibility of the “fundamental project” to reconcile negativity and positivity, subject and object.122 Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization,123 notes that there is an external source to the internal antagonism of life and death instincts, and this is societal repression. In his 1966 Political Preface to his book,124 Marcuse criticizes the “introjection of the principle of reality” that is effectuated by contemporary society: Freud’s theory on the destruction drive may be misused to legitimize the status quo of authoritarian capitalism. In fact, Marcuse says, in the absence of repression, the destructive drive may simply become a conservative force aimed at the preservation of a “gratified” status quo.125 In his 1966 talk “To the Notion of Negation in Dialectics” where unfortunately much more attention is given to dialectic than to negation, Marcuse notes: “The questionable status of the concept of negation that would develop itself as a liberation from inside a standing totality . . . [there is] a real possibility that the standing antagonistic totality is negated and sublated from outside, and in this way the next historical stage is attained.”126 Hence Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic that I evoked earlier in the discussion of Hegel: Marcuse thinks that for Hegel truth of a thing is its destruction. What is curious generally about Marcuse’s position is that his interpretation of Hegel is on the one hand clearly Marxist, revolutionary; but on the other hand, we know that he was a student of Heidegger, and it is hard not to see the latter’s concept in “destruction.” Which is important because if in Marx, destruction is a breakthrough toward utopia or a telos, in Heidegger, this concept is responsible for the return of a thing to its abyssal ground. The same position is held by Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s last book was titled Negative Dialectic. It is hard to miss the strong affinities between Adorno, with his search for the “nonidentical,” and the French thought of the period,127 even if Adorno insisted on negativity and Derrida with Deleuze (as we will see later) rejected it. However, what is absent from Adorno’s book is a detailed discussion of the logic of negation. What he does is to violently oppose Hegel’s presumed positive result of double negation: “to negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that negation was not negative enough.”128 In truth, negation, in its incessant repetition, is defined from outside by the resistance of the subject against an object that remains external to it. The accent is thus shifted from Hegel’s triumphalist combat with and domination of nature to the defense against the violent world of both nature and society. We find ourselves closer to the “no, no” of Sidney’s woman who tries to reject a suitor, than to Hegel’s narcissism of self-sustaining negativity. Thought opposes the positive being

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that insistently offers itself to it. Like Sartre, Adorno makes negativity into the (noble) point of weakness and subalternity, but unlike him, he refuses to reduce the subject to an ephemeral “nothingness,” expecting instead an object-oriented action. For Adorno, negativity is not, predominantly, a tool of idealization, but a materialist method: an object comes before the subject and a stretch out into the objective world remains the task of thought. Negative dialectics start with the “preponderance of the object” over the subject, and ends in the object as a work, not as a living incorporation of spirit but rather as an abject fetish that is a sign of alienation.129 Thus, negativity is in Adorno, like in Marcuse, neither contemplation of an eternal nothing nor subjective methodology, but a historical condition of oppression in which we currently stand. Adorno and Marcuse agree that negativity stems from the external limitation of a subject’s capacities, and it would be cynical to attribute this negativity to the human spirit, or to a “death drive.” What their theory depends on is not just a need to subvert the status quo but the sense of a utopian transcendence that must be reached. The “outside” is by definition indeterminate and infinite. It is not pure negativity, but something to exist in the future, which is nevertheless defined negatively. But in our time of closing immanence, this position becomes problematic, and dangerously merges with the apologies of pure negativity or openness. The question to address to the Frankfurt School is whether there is currently no way to tentatively outline or “pro-ject” the transcendent future, to reach into it in a way that would not be blind. We can see so far that in the twentieth century there is a radicalization of the Hegelian notion of negativity (whether called or not by this name), and that this radicalization shows two contrary directions. On the one hand, absolute negativity is absolute indeterminacy, openness, plasticity, etc., something that breaks and destroys any positive shape or order. On the other hand, for the same reason, true negation cannot have a positive result, and remains powerless before the dead weight of positive existence. Here, again, there are two ways of viewing this powerlessness: the negation is doomed either because it keeps reaffirming the thing it negates (Freud), or because, having achieved no result, it must repeat itself and negate the negation, which may well lead to Aufhebung, but at the price of self-destroying the negation and reinstating the negated object in its very materiality (even if its meaning has been aufgehoben). Perhaps the most radical development of this conceptual play appears in Alexandre Kojève, Russian-French philosopher usually seen as an inceptor of the great French philosophical tradition of the twentieth century. Kojève interpreted Hegel as a thinker of the end of history and emphasized the negative meaning of this “end”: history does not freeze in an eternal nunc stans of Aufhebung (which would be rather, I think, Hegel’s own intention), but simply ceases after having accomplished its goal. Human subject is finite, and human history is finite, otherwise it would not make sense and would not entail negativity. But if this is true, then human history must end, its telos is its annulment. Therefore, says Kojève, today a satisfied human being returns to nature (which is, pace Hegel, not dialectical at all). Or, as he corrected himself later, perhaps it returns, not just to animality but to a paradise of purely symbolic “snubbing” that Kojève thought he found in Japan.130

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These ideas of Kojève found a peculiar continuation in the thought of George Bataille: another virtuoso of negative thinking. Already in the 1930s, Bataille suggested, in a letter to Kojève, a concept of “unemployed negativity”: he thus objected to Kojève’s idea of the self-destruction of negativity by suggesting that negativity can subsist even in the state of accomplished positivity: negativity does not die out but stays without work, without effect, and (as he implies) it would even be more radical than the working negativity which is contaminated by the positive. Bataille is thus in agreement with his contemporaries Sartre and Lacan in his emphasis on the weakness and latency of negativity which exists in excess of the positivity that it powerlessly opposes. Bataille sees negativity in using but inverting the theory of Kojève, in a festive idleness rather than in productive work; hence his notion of sovereignty as an empty destructive gesture, and the dialectical reversal of the capitalist political economy in the “Notion of Expenditure” and The Accursed Share.131 According to Bataille, the primary anthropological foundation economy is not the need to acquire or produce but the need to spend and dispense: which implies in turn that we always already deal with some material existence, and negation comes second, never reaching its goal of total destruction. The inverse side of negative thinking is, paradoxically, “base” materialism, since in this paradigm we can never start or create ex nihilo. Jacques Lacan, follower of both Freud and Kojève, was a thinker who, in the twentieth century, was most interested in the psychological and philosophical meaning of negation. I cannot draw in detail here on his oeuvre, so I will emphasize the central elements of his theory. The very first seminar of Lacan, the 1953–4 session on Freud’s papers on technique,132 contains a discussion of Freud’s Verneinung with Jean Hyppolite, the leading French philosopher of his time. Apparently, Lacan’s interest in this text stems, first, from Freud’s statement of the value of the symbolic (negative expression being a symbol par excellence, a symbol that substitutes for a failure allowing to include it into the psychic economy), second, from his classification of the modes of radicality of negation: Verneinung, negation, Verdrängung, repression, but also a nameless exclusion of undesirable reality from the Ego, which Lacan associates with “Verwerfung,” foreclosure, word used by Freud in his analysis of the psychosis of the “Wolfman.”133 Hyppolite, in this seminar, gives a Hegelian reading of Freud in which he observes the “dissymmetry” of affirmation and negation (a double negation does not return to the prior affirmation), but interprets it in the moderately optimistic way. Verneinung, says Hyppolite, is a form of Aufhebung, and in Freudian terms it approaches sublimation: the repression is not undone, but symbolized; there is a double negation which produces an idealization of unconscious drives. Hyppolite (not Lacan!) derives from Hegel an apology of structuralism, since he sees in negation “the fundamental attitude of symbolicity rendered explicit.”134 Referring to Hegel’s “master and slave,” Hyppolite even notes that physical destruction is a worse option than a symbolic negation.135 This position clearly influenced Lacan’s early apology of the “symbolic” character of the unconscious. Lacan’s main interest, however, is not the Aufhebung of the unconscious, but Freud’s analysis of negative judgments as an interplay of the originary “Bejahung,” “yes-saying,” of a phenomenon,

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and the incorporation of reality into the narcissistic ego which leaves a piece of reality ousted. It is here, says Lacan, where a fundamental rejection (Ausstoßung, Verwerfung) appears, prior to the symbolic negations of Verdrängung, Verneinung, and Verleugnung. The originary rejection is, together with the Bejahung, responsible for the constitution of the real, so that in some cases it can also produce illusions of reality: hallucinations. Following both Hegel and Freud but going further than them, Lacan will gradually come to the conclusion that reality itself is constituted by negation/rejection, which sets the scene for the gift-like appearance of being. In Seminar 6, Desire and Its Interpretation, and Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan analyzes the so-called ne explétif, the seemingly illogical introduction of negation into a sentence that already has a negative meaning, like, in French, “je crains qu’il ne vienne.”136 This, for Lacan, is a sign of disjuncture between what E. Benvéniste calls the “subject of enunciated” and the “subject of enunciation.” The latter, says Lacan, is the subject of the unconscious, the one who contradicts himself/herself. It is this subject that utters the second, seemingly excessive (“explétif ”) “ne.” Similar logic is, says Lacan, at work in the English language, where negation of action is accompanied by an auxiliary verb (“I don’t eat” instead of “I eat not”): this verb corresponds to the function of subject and adds a sense of resolution, of reinforcement to its content. Negation cannot be uttered neutrally: it requires an expressive, nonconceptual redoublement, reinforcement: precisely because content-wise, it is too “weak,” leaving its content untouched. In the Écrits of 1960, “On the Subversion of Subject and the Dialectics of Desire,”137 Lacan uses some algebraic symbols to express the phantasy of castration which, to him, is indispensable for a successful formation of subjectivity (at least the male subjectivity). This phantasy, he says, is best signified by the “imaginary” number of the square root of −1 (√−1). The “phallus,” the signifier of power and plenitude, is in fact only thinkable under the sign of subtraction. First, this subtraction is as yet “imaginary” in the sense of Lacan’s theory—linked with an immediate analogical identification. This is “minus phi,” absence of a penis. But then this lack gets signified, symbolized: and here we have the S(Ø)—a signifier of the lack in the other—which equals “–1” because it stands apart in the chain of signifiers. This signifier (S1) is also auto-referential: it is a deictic sign referring to the very fact of the utterance of the subject of enunciation. Hence the operation of square root from “−1.” What is important is that both “−1” and “√−1” are non-natural numbers; they do not correspond to a referent but are projections of symmetry and reversibility into an asymmetrical world (e.g. the asymmetry of sexual anatomy). Ever since his Seminar 3 (1955–6), Lacan makes an explicit appeal to Kant’s “Attempt to Introduce the Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy.” In the end of Seminar 11, he speaks about the function of the empty signifier as constitutive for the unconscious. This particular empty signifier, says Lacan, is, however, not entirely indeterminate. It is not “zero,” he says, which takes the place of the numerator of the proportion “signifier/ signified,” but the “dialectized significations in the relation of the desire of the Other.”138 From the point of the view of the Other, the empty, indeterminate signifier of the subject becomes the signifier of the determinate lack, the signifier of desire. And the

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subject interiorizes this point of the Other as his own. Thus, we understand what Lacan says further: It will be important, in what will follow in my seminar next year, to show how the experience of analysis forces us to seek a kind of formalization such that the mediation of this infinity of the subject with the finitude of desire may occur only through the intervention of what Kant, on his entry into the gravitation of the thought that one calls philosophical, introduced with so much freshness in the term negative quantities. . . . The negative quantity, then, is the term that we shall find to designate one of the supports of what is called castration complex, namely, the negative effect in which the phallus object enters into it.139

The “finitude of desire” and the “infinity of the subject” are the interpretations of the signifier as a determinate lack and as indeterminate negation (hiatus, gap, béance): nihil privativum and nihil negativum. Here, Lacan emphasizes that the two concepts are not easily reconciled, they contradict each other. The resolution of their mutual relationship lies in the signifier itself. The introduction of a symbol, especially of a mathematical one (detached from any “natural” meaning of its own), stamps and gives body to the impossibility of a “negative” magnitude, of what would be nothing and something at the same time. The crucial gesture of Kant is, for Lacan, that of the symbolization of the negative, in all its contradictory, impossible nature. The symbolization performs a function analogous to that of Hegelian Aufhebung, this word that it is “joyful to find in the language,”140 in indicating the point of the impossible coincidence of the positive and negative in human experience. In Seminar 13, Lacan returns to Kant and says: Thus it is perhaps not the same moment of the structural lack of the subject which is supported, I am not saying here is symbolized, here the symbol is identical to what it causes, namely the lack of the subject. I will come back to it. At the level of lack there has to be introduced the subjective dimension of lack (le manque du sujet) and I am astonished that no one has remarked in the article by Freud on fetishism the use of the verb vermessen and one can see that in its three uses in this article he designates the lack in the subjective sense. It is not the same moment where the structural lack of the subject supports itself, I am not saying symbolizes itself; the symbol is identical to what it causes, that is, the lack of the subject (le manque du sujet). One has to introduce a subjective dimension of manque, and I am surprised that nobody noticed the use of the term vermessen in Freud’s article on fetishism: this term designates the subjective manque, in the sense in which the subject misses out (manque son affaire).141

Here, more directly than in the Écrits, Lacan notes that the symbol of lack (manque) must fail (manquer). Negation does not succeed in denoting what it must; it is a weak, unconvincing symbol. The “void” within the subject is in practice a failed probe of filling it in. This is also a failure of Kant who attempts (“Essay,” “Versuch”) but fails to introduce negative magnitudes into philosophy: in fact he abandons the project

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thereafter. The failure, which causes Lacan’s disappointment, is Kant’s realistic approach to negative magnitudes, his conviction of their symmetry with the positive ones, and the relative nature of their negativity. In Lacan, the proliferation of signs destined to designate the negativity of castration (“−φ,” “−1,” “√−1”) has also to do with the inability to symbolize. In Seminar 11, Identification, Lacan uses more data from linguistics, quoting Otto Jespersen’s essay on negation142 and the Latin Etymological dictionary by Ernout and Meillet;143 the etymology of negation in most languages is in fact a compound of a negative particle and a word meaning a smallest element (one, step, etc.): “non,” and English “no” is in fact “no one.” This is proof for the fact that negation needs the idea of the smallest “one,” and is thus not only a privation of a unit (−1), but also a negation of oneness, which suspends the meaning of the phrase without canceling it. The “trait unaire” or “unary trait” that is responsible, in Lacan, for identification, requires further negation; it exists in subtraction. Finally, in Seminar 20, Encore,144 Lacan introduces the so-called formulae of sexuation where he applies the logical sign of negation to a quantor—which goes against the rules of formal logic where negation can only be applied to a proposition. As a result, we get the monsters: “in-existence” (⌐∃) and the “not-all” (⌐∀). The first applies to the position of the symbolic father in the “male” formulae: although there does not exist anyone who could be outside of the law of castration, this “does not” should be read together, as a name, and then the law implies an instance of exception to this law (Freud’s primordial father) who, of course, does not “exist,” but is nevertheless functioning phantasmatically, in the psychic economy (cf. the “trait unaire” and “−1”). The second monster (⌐∀) describes a feminine position in the sense, says Lacan, that a “woman” is not fully determined by the logic of castration, and preserves a remainder that is untouched by its oscillatory movement. Through this remainder, the “woman” refers to the infinite negativity of “lack in the Other”; her negativity is not oriented at any correlative positivity (like phallus) that she would lack: she lacks nothing (Nancy calls this “la manque de rien”145). Joel Dor146 rightly notes that this late theory of negativity is in line with Lacan’s earlier ideas on Freud’s Verneinung and the “expletive negation.” However, this negation that does not annul but reaffirms in a modified form, its object, continues the tradition that goes from Hegel’s Aufhebung to Frege’s conceptual negation and to Heidegger’s early ideas of negative validity. To briefly summarize the rich contribution of Lacan to negative philosophy, one can see that he adds to the Sartrean theme of desperately negative subjectivity (“passion inutile”), the Kantian-Hegelian idea of two different negations. On the one hand, negation is a way to establish a symbolical reversibility in an irreversible world, to build a system of contraries that can be briefly described as the logic of castration. To Lacan, negation is inseparable from contrariness and inversion; it allows the subject to symbolically master indeterminate lack. But, on the other hand, there is an excess to this circle, which makes negation fail and makes the subject encounter a void that is emptier than the burrow of castration: the infinite lack in the Other, the negation of negation taken not in Hegel’s sense as an act of

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overcoming but as a sad statement of fact (there is no negation; and castration is castrated itself). The other side of this negativity is material excess: the “nonspecular,” indestructible “object a.” In the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, the concept of negativity, so important for the self-understanding of the modern subject, and forming the core of the influential Hegelian-Marxist tradition, became an object of attack. Originally, this was an attack on the part of Bergson, which organically fit into the positivist criticism of ontologizing negation. But in the second half of the twentieth century, Bergson’s criticism was renewed and continued by Deleuze, and, in another lineage, supported by Derrida: in both cases as an attempt to tear with “teleological” Hegelianism. As we have seen already Bergson, in his Creative Evolution, tried to demonstrate the superficial, “rhetorical” nature of negation and to deny it an ontological relevance. Although after Bergson, France saw a revival of Hegelianism and the great Sartrean version of negative ontology, the Bergsonist critique received a second breath in the 1960s. In this period, we observe, within the rich post-Kojève French philosophical tradition, a turn to what Benjamin Noys calls “affirmationism.” “Difference” is preferred to negation and contradiction, “force” to subjectivity, creation and production to destruction. The general context of this turn is, as Noys rightly says,147 a search of compromise between the critical spirit and the surviving capitalism that appropriated some of it. But it is equally an anarchist and irrationalist reaction against both Marxism and Hegelianism as the grand ideologies that were addressed to a subject, individual or collective (a party). A (certain) Platonic thought of “otherness” and of the “khora” was operated here to justify the spirit of subjective alibi and strategic maneuver, plus a depersonified, nonanthropomorphic utopia rather than an existential or political position of any sort. The positions of Derrida and Deleuze should be evoked here. Derrida, particularly in his essay on Bataille, rejects the notion of negativity because it is a logical concept that implies a coherence of thinking and a sense of verbal propositions. “Negativity” does not destroy the sense itself and is thus not radical enough in doing what it promises. Note that Derrida is sympathetic to what it thus promises, in Bataille as in others: he tries to resolve the problem by other means, which include poetic nonsense and comic reduction ad absurdum. Deleuze, on his part, does not oppose the philosophical discourse as such. Like Derrida, he tries to preserve the nonidentical and singular under the title of “difference,” which he opposes (!) to negation. Deleuze refers to Plato and relies on the “Sophist” where negativity is explained through “alterity.” The apology of difference is preceded by a rich and learned criticism of Aristotle and Hegel both of whom introduce the notion of difference, only to subordinate it to the hyperbolic category of contrary opposition. The true difference, says Deleuze, is internal (a thing distinguishes itself from what does not distinguish itself from it), infinite, and minimal, it is based on the infinitely small, as opposed to the hyperbolic nature of logical opposition. The difference adds something to notion, does not subtract anything from it; it individuates, not abstracts. Being itself is difference.

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The appearance of dialectic that persists in all texts of Deleuze148 (for instance, the “Copernican Revolution” that inverts the relationship of identity and difference and makes the former turn around the latter, Deleuze 1994: 40)  is explained by him in the sense that a negative effect can in fact be produced by affirmation itself: a decisive affirmation can destroy. “The negative .  .  . is the effect of an affirmation that is too strong or too different” (Deleuze, 1994: 54). Also, “the non-being is not the being of the negative, but rather, it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question” (Deleuze 1994: 64). Deleuze argues against Sartre who explained the question by negativity, and relies on Heidegger who, he thinks, has the question as a site of difference not of negation (Deleuze 1994: 64). We recognize the themes of Bergson, but also some ideas of theorists of negativity turned back against them. Indeed, philosophy of difference, like philosophy of negativity, emphasizes the relational essence of beings. Deleuze’s insistence on the weak and minimal character of difference reminds of the latency and superficiality that have been attributed to negation by Sartre (negativity in Sartre has nothing to do with the dramatic emphasis on the contraries for which Deleuze reproaches Aristotle and Hegel). The ontology of “question” comes from Heidegger who derived it from “The Nothing,” or crossed out “Being”: not a negative entity in the sense of Hegel but an ontological void in the spirit of Democritus or Plato. Deleuze’s idea of negation as secondary to affirmation continues the logic of Kant’s “negative magnitudes”: what seems to us a “nothing” is in fact an active force, say both Kant and Nietzsche (whom Deleuze, for this reason, wrongly enlists into “affirmationists”). In a way, Deleuze gives us an interesting theory of negativity, even though he calls it something else. The main problem of this theory is, however, the lack of a return effect of the new affirmative difference on what had preceded it. Without the reflection that is inherent in opposition, one is unable to affect anything backward or forward; motion, adored by Bergson and Deleuze, appears as sheer distribution or disjunction, without a possibility of backward and forward effects, because these are precisely achieved through negation. Politically, and this is well shown by Noys, such theories hesitate between individualist and aestheticist maneuvering, and a program of dogmatic and self-confident politics bordering fascism. Furthermore, the price for rejecting negativity is dualism where the affirmative world of differences clashes with a regime of transcendental law, of what Deleuze and Guattari call “striated space,” and Negri and Hardt call “Empire.” There is no meta-theory to explain and thus criticize from inside the existence of this unpleasant instance, the dialectic is lacking, which leads to a rather Manichaean picture of the world. The following is in response to the Bergsonian-Deleuzean criticism of negative ontologies: 1. Negativity is not a mere hypostasis of lack, pain, or passivity. Negation, logically and linguistically, is what comes after an affirmation. But this secondary status does not deprive it of its irreducible ontological position. A philosophy of negativity is superior to sheer “affirmationism” because it presupposes an overabundance of being, which it denies by carving out a free space for a subject.

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This is in particular a meaning of Nietzsche thesis on the primacy of forgetting, as well as of Bataille’s primacy of expenditure in the “general economy”: two thinkers who are wrongly enlisted as allies by the affirmationists as led by Deleuze. 2. Negativity is even less a mere diagnosis of crisis. Badiou, along with some others, holds the primacy of negativity responsible for the present-day political culture that privileges victimhood and suffering, not agency. The “negative dialectic” of the Frankfurt School is often read as sheer insistence on gap, dissonance, and incoherence, instead of an inquiry into new moving forces of the present. This criticism can hold, superficially against some moments in Benjamin and Adorno, but in fact both authors used their negative dialectic to free access to the active potentiality of subjects (Benjamin) and to the material substantiality of objects (Adorno). Genuine negative philosophy is not just about gaps and disjunctures (nihil negativum), but equally about the negative magnitudes of imagination that uncovers a hidden obverse side under the dogmatic appearance of a status quo. This is more or less where we are now. Negative dialectic seeks to find in social reality itself the springs of its transformation. It is based on suspicion and attack of an essentially liberal “critical” attitude that affirms the world by the very gesture of criticizing it. Negation of negation means an active transformation of both the subject and the system it opposes. This is the necessity of negation, in contrast to the “affirmationist” theories of French philosophical anarchism (Derrida, Deleuze, Negri, and even, strangely, Badiou—see once again Noys149). Rejection of negativity places even the revolutionary branch of these theories into the position of a beautiful soul that ignores the profound dependence of its narcissistic image (multitudes, immaterial creativity) on the imperial/statist system that it deems to be an external evil. At the same time, the analysis of negativity, in its subjective and objective forms, and in its reflexive reduplication, makes us understand reigning melancholia and political apathy as products of an active negative force. Discovery and cultivation of this force may transform melancholia into revolution—and its repression into the unconscious transforms revolution into melancholia. I would insist on a double injunction to accept and nurture negative forces, to act on them, by negating the ground of one’s own negation, and to imagine the opposite to the status quo. However, reversibility of the world is incomplete, negativity remains tentative and imaginary, and negation can only be an abyssal fulcrum for a jump forward.

Negativity and politics It is not a particularly fresh statement that politics would be a matter of negating. Heraclitus famously proclaimed war to be “father of all things”; war was for him not

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just empirical butchery but a universal dialectical concept of a disjuncture in the One. It is also in antiquity that democracy, by no means a favorite regime of philosophers, was associated with multicolored plurality and thus with the sphere of alterity that we today associate with negativity. However, neither in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages has war-like politics or democracy been hegemonic. They become so only in modernity, first war, next democracy. Modernity is as such an epoch of negativity if there was ever one, and this is true of modern politics as well, which gradually ousts religion to become (again), along with science, technology, and economy (recently separated from it), the main theater of human activity. Negativity defines politics throughout the modern period, at least in theory, but this needs to be discussed in greater detail since we know that negativity is an equivocal concept. Hobbes gives a negative foundation of politics. It is based (back to Heraclitus with his “war is the father of all things”) on the natural war of all against all. Men are equal (everyone can kill another) and therefore hostile, because of “competition,” “diffidence,” and desire for “glory.”150 The war makes an individual solitary and brutish so that he rationally calculates that it would be better not to fight any longer. The war is then teleologically annulled via a kind of negation of negation, so that the constitution of a good state is presented as a condition of reciprocal separation, and of a rule of formal law that has no other ground than force. Total war remains its hidden truth. This would be a sad description of what Hegel would later call the “abstract negativity” of “civil society,” if Hobbes would not at the same time give this state a sublime name and image of Leviathan, the God’s monster, and himself “a mortal God.” There is tension between the fruitless and limited nihil negativum of Hobbes’s state, and the nihil privativum (or negative magnitude) of the monstrous sublimity into which it is cloaked, and of the melancholy picture of disastrous war. Hobbes was at the origin of liberal constitution, and there were some who followed him into the negative/melancholic construction of it, such as Bernard de Mandeville, specialist on hypochondria and misanthropic author of The Fable of the Bees,151 which rightly diagnoses the new liberal values (individualism, wealth, calculation of profits, etc.) as vices stemming from the weakening of social ties, but which dialectically convert to virtues in the overall functioning of society.152 The same tolerance for negativity can be then traced in US federalists: John Madison included in his constitutional theory a clause on the inevitability and use of factions—the phenomenon previously presumed to be harmful to republics.153 The concept of negativity was as such suggested by Hegel in a direct political context. Hegel follows Hobbes for much of his dialectical construction of politics (war, civil society as a rule of abstraction, god-like sovereignty as a representative unity that overcomes this abstraction). And, like Hobbes, he is bound to envelope his system into the sublime figure, this time, of spirit (whom Bruno Bauer would later, half-jokingly, qualify as a “demon”154). Already in his Iena writings, Hegel introduces the notion of negativity with respect to politics. Negativity is the site of the individual (Einzelne). Its main manifestations are crime (revolt of the individual will that makes necessary the universality of law)

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and war. War is not, as in Hobbes, a nuisance to private business and collective life, but, on the contrary, a way to invigorate public spirit and to check its natural tendency to apathy. Through war, “the ethical health of nations is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that stagnation which a lasting calm would produce—a stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace, would also produce among nations.”155 This statement is later quoted (a self-quotation rare for Hegel) in the remark to the Philosophy of Right.156 So Hegel does not change his mind on war even after the Napoleonic era of enthusiastic warfare is over. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he does, however, emphasize the ambiguity of all war in the chapter on the conflict between family and state (the Antigone reading). In order not to let them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting the [communal] spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to their core by war. By this means the government upsets their established order; and violates their right to independence, while the individuals who, absorbed in their own way of life, break loose from the whole and strive after the inviolable independence and security of the person, are made to feel in the task laid on them their lord and master, death.157

War produces a unity of citizens by dissociating and then re-associating them— “the power of the whole, which brings these parts together again into a negative unity.”158 But war also brings death, and with death, a loss of all energy, a triumph of chthonic forces of individuality. Risk of death brings an affirmation of universality, but death itself brings nothing, a nihil negativum. And the threshold between them is accidental. Therefore, in the case of ancient polis, war is a movement between the state and the family, as well as between the human and the divine. The same is true of the master–slave case, and of the case of the French Revolution, where, as we have mentioned, the attempt to produce universality through the guillotine leads to the banality of death. Hegel insists that political negativity is subordinate to positivity. In a developed state, this subordinate negativity exists in the “real” sphere of political economy, with its individualist competition and legalistic justice. As for the war itself, it is not that easily restricted and “sublated.” However, by its very nature, it leads to mutual destruction and thus logically leads to peace and remains an episode. Negativity negates itself: as Hegel writes in the “System of Morality” of the “fanaticism of havoc” of Genghis Khan’s barbaric resistance to culture, which is a diabolical evil, or a generalized crime of a sort: “like negation in general, it has its own negation in itself. The formless drives itself on towards indeterminacy until, because it is not after all absolutely formless, it bursts, just as an expanding bubble of water bursts into innumerable tiny drops; it departs from its pure unity into its opposite, i.e., the absolute formlessness of absolute multiplicity, and therefore becomes a completely formal form or absolute particularity and therefore the maximum of weakness.”159 Or, as he writes in the essay on “Natural Law”: “Since the system of reality is rooted entirely in negativity and infinity, it follows that, in its relation to positive totality it must be

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treated wholly negatively by this latter and must remain subject to the dominance of this relation.”160 What Hegel thus adds to Hobbes and to liberalism is, first, historicity of politics: which means that the state does not fully overcome any past political forms but preserves them within itself like Russian dolls. As Hegel writes in his early political works, “nullification [Vernichtung] posits something it nullifies, i.e. the real, so that there must be an actuality and difference which cannot be overcome by ethical life.”161 Hobbes would probably agree with this: the fear of death does not annul positive occupations but even sustains them, when projected only to the state. But subsequently, in Hegel’s Phenomenology, this logic of formation (Bildung) is historicized: “In a Spirit that is more advanced than another, the lower concrete existence has been reduced to an inconspicuous moment; what used to be the important thing is now but a trace; its pattern is shrouded to become a mere shadowy outline. . . . The single individual must also pass through the formative stages of universal Spirit so far as their content is concerned, but as shapes which Spirit has already left behind, as stages on a way that has been made level with toil.”162 Hegel’s negativity is thus the powerless negativity of privation in the Aristotelian sense: nature can be denied or lost but not removed completely. However, for Hegel this privation is a condition for the existence of negativity in its pure state, which, by definition, is bound to be totally unproductive. Thus, the second innovation of Hegel is freedom, which is the presence of negativity as a principle. Hobbes and liberalism generally do not recognize this, but there should be something, a mechanism or an institution, that would make sure that the order of nature does not return and that the war of all against all does not culminate in a new organic unity. Hegel’s injunction is to “tarry with the negative,” with all the difficulty of this task, since the negative has a natural tendency to recede. Only the magical spirit (alias the subject) can support this contradictory task. Hence the role of the French Revolution, which for the first time in history manifests the pure force of negativity, and at the same time denudes its sheer vacuity. As a historical period this is nevertheless an irreversible step toward a developed objectivation of spirit in the modern state. Revolution is also a model for endless but transitional dialectical reversals: a slave becomes a master, only to end up in a social order without masters and slaves. The role of revolution remains transitional and the sense of Hegel’s model is mainly liberal: he separates the state into distinct spheres and is content with the symbolic sublimation of contradictions not with their physical destruction. Here, as we have seen, Marxism comes in, and makes an even stronger bet on negativity, in the sense of destruction and transcendence of the current order. Negativity is not so much Aufhebung as revolution; revolutionary politics being a second, absolute negation of already inherent negativity. This negation is nihil negativum: time taken in a subjective sense of active destruction, not in the objective sense of the rule of abstraction. Still, like in Hegel, this negation is bound to have its subject: not demonic spirit but Christ-like proletariat. In the twentieth century, political negativity surfaces again in relation to the rediscovery of subjectivity in Marxism. To discover politics and the subject meant, in a

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way, to rediscover the negative. Sorel, in a way, understood it, when, in his famous 1907 text, he emphasized the significance of violence for Marxist politics: not as physical destruction but as manifesting a sharp break that separates a political act from its past, and the antagonism that the seemingly peaceful politics of strikes represents in relation to the bourgeois regime. The response to this by Benjamin made explicit this hidden theory of negativity: for Benjamin, the example of true, redemptive violence was the bloodless murder of the Korah tribe by God. I will spend more time on Sorel and Benjamin in the next chapter. Later, in the 1920s, Carl Schmitt invents the concept of the “political” and defines it, in the tradition of Hobbes and Schmitt, as war or, more precisely, based on the friend–enemy distinction. It is negativity, but negativity limited by clearly delineated subjects. “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.”163 Schmitt carefully mentions both association and dissociation, but clearly what is in question here is contrary opposition. His accent on intensity even evokes Aristotle’s definition of contrariness as the greatest difference. But the dialectic of association and dissociation, which is not directly stated but implied here as elsewhere, sends us straight back to Hegel. As such, Schmitt’s theory expands the liberal concept of politics beyond the borders of state and toward revolution and civil war. However, Schmitt sees the insufficient negativity of the concept and adds the notion of “absolute enemy,”164 one who is beyond the mutually recognizing couple, friend–enemy, and who is denied both subjectively and objectively, both practically and theoretically: it is the enemy who should not have existed. The contrary couple (friend/enemy) is reinforced through contradiction, not in the sense that this very couple intensifies their relations (as in Hegel), but in the sense that the two are contrasted with a third, who is opposed to both in the more radical way of contradiction.165 A double negation is taken here, unlike Marxism, with historical pessimism as a threat to a shaky order. Generally speaking, nineteenth and twentieth centuries add revolution and democracy, as concepts of political negativity, to prior liberal formulations. The Hegelian and Marxist construction of revolution was one such concept. Democracy, the key self-designation of modern constitution since the late nineteenth century, was more ambivalently construed. In fact, democracy as a rule of totality is not negative. Spinoza, who was the first to speak well of democracy and called it a “most absolute form of government” does not invest any negativity in the concept: it is just a rule of all, similar to nature’s auto-constitution. But, historically, democracy was established in revolutions and protest movements, and this gave it contestatory meaning. In the nineteenth century, the negativity of democracy was emphasized mostly by its critics. The last half of this century saw theories of “masses” and “crowds,” most of them, particularly Le Bon’s, openly being used to denounce democratic regimes. The new regime is seen to be the rule of a dangerous, unruly multitude. Dostoyevsky famously depicts revolutionaries as mass-like “Demons” in his famous novel. It was the same line of thought that in the twentieth century gradually converted into the

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language of denunciation of so-called totalitarian regimes: “negative” politics, in the evaluative sense of “negative,” if ever there was one. The Right accused Hitler and Stalin of “nihilism,” and the Left, as represented by the Frankfurt School and Hannah Arendt, described it as Hell on Earth, and so on. The affirmative conceptualization of democracy’s negative constitution is, actually, a thing of the recent past and an issue in ongoing debates. In the twentieth century, “democracy” became a proxy for a liberal-democratic constitutional regime, and the concept lost its contestatory meaning becoming instead a name for normalcy. The dominant theories of democracy in Political Science deny the notion of “people,” defining politics as a competition of elites and a set of public institutions. Liberal-democratic political philosophy, as represented by Habermas and his many followers, emphasizes, in contrast, the role of cohesion and social ties, but defines them via the goal of consensus. It is in this context that post-1968 left-wing political thought attempted to recapture the meaning of democracy as a subversive concept. Here, several authors have to be mentioned. First, Claude Lefort, whose notion of “void” in the center of power I have already evoked. Here, negativity is nihil negativum taken objectively, but, like Hegel, made into a resource of pure negativity for leaving open the political field, and a basis for practical efforts to contest authority. Second, Laclau and Mouffe. In their 1983 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,166 Laclau and Mouffe explicitly use Hegel’s notion of negativity to describe the inherent impossibility of a coherent self-understanding of a society. In Laclau and Mouffe’s complicated theory of what happens “beyond the positivity of the social,” society as such is impossible and incoherent; hence there is inherent negativity. This negativity comes out in the open as “antagonism,” which is described, pace Coletti, in a situation where “the presence of the Other prevents me from being fully oneself.”167 In such situations, where the “logic of equivalence” takes over the “logic of difference,” and the indeterminacy of the social whole is contested, a universalist struggle erupts around an otherwise particular “quilting point.” “[C]ertain discursive forms, through equivalence, annul all positivity of the object and give a real existence to negativity as such.”168 This theory of antagonism, say Laclau and Mouffe, is an alternative to the traditional (Kantian) poles of real opposition and contradiction. Opposition is not mutually exclusive (two colliding trains are not antagonistic) and contradiction does not necessarily lead to conflict. This passage is strange for its aspiration to originality because the “antagonism” in question directly coincides, in my view, with Hegel’s transition from contrariness (opposition) to contradiction, which is the very center of Hegelian dialectic, and the basis for Marcuse’s interpretation endorsed by Laclau and Mouffe. What is added, however, is the Kantian-Lacanian touch of the “impossibility of society.” This ontologizing of negativity allows thinking ahistorically outside a perspective of overcoming: hegemonies replace one another endlessly and this is a good thing as far as openness of the social is preserved. Hegel would respond that in such a vision “openness” risks being positivized, while the very idea or criterion of “society” as such must have some affirmative embodiment, too. In Hegel’s system, it is the state and its powerless sovereign. It must not be this boring,

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of course, but the lack of any notion of the positive beside the negative may create a condition for the return of the repressed in the dogmatic and naïve visions of the social body as nationalism and fundamentalist religion. In a democracy, social negativity leads, in the view of Laclau and Mouffe, to a state of permanent struggle and contestation, the terms of which are always redefined anew. First used as a descriptive notion, negativity further becomes a normative concept in the work of Mouffe alone. Using Schmitt, she sets “agonism” as a criterion for good democracy. Of course, this is a very moderate form of negativity, but one that builds on a sober understanding of the fact that antagonisms actually lead to destruction of the field. The issue here is, of course, the Aristotelian distinction between the “contradictory” (antagonism) and the “contrary” (this would be “agonism”). Slavoj Žižek later criticized the theory of Laclau and Mouffe for relativism and suggested that there must be something ontologically “hard” about antagonism itself, even though it can be variously resignified. Bringing the theory of Laclau and Mouffe back to its Marxist origins, Žižek suggested that “antagonism” is the same as Lacan’s impossible “real,” and that both correspond to Marx’s notion of class struggle.169 Maybe the clearest sense of negativity in a democracy belongs to Jacques Rancière who, in his Disagreement (La Mésentente), presents democracy not as a rule of all, but as a rule of the excluded, of those who have “no part.”170 This definition is, of course, contradictory; therefore democracy is supposed to find itself in a constant movement (Rancière does not call it revolutionary, but could) that aims at inclusion and recognition of these new subjects. Here, democracy is not just a regime of contestation of authority but of constant subversion and renewal of the very political frame of reference. Negativity is here closer to Marx’s and Marcuse’s destruction than to the sheer negativity of Lefort, but at the same time any sense of history is lacking here: democracy is forever the best. In this context, one must mention the Italian post-Operaist thought that redefines democratic politics (inverting Hobbes) as a rule of the “multitude” not of the unitary subject. In their bestselling “Empire,” “Multitude,” and “Commonwealth,” Negri and Hardt even predict a revolution of the multitude, although it would take a form of a purely negative “exodus.” In fact, they say, multitude is already the dominant productive class, it fully exists as a social group in itself and for itself, but it cannot live as it can (freely, on the basis of self-government) because of the limiting power of the bureaucratic capitalist “empire.” The task is just to escape this power and establish one’s order. Spinoza, notably, is their principal reference here. Although Negri and Hardt emphatically defined “negation” and “dialectic” as categories of the bureaucratic mind, in fact their theory also presents politics as an inversion of the Old regime’s order, as anti-politics of sorts. Jacques Rancière reacted to their theory by saying that it lacks negativity. “In the thought of multitudes there is a phobia of the negative, of a politics that would define itself as being ‘against,’ but also of a politics that would only be politics, i.e. founded only on the inconsistence of egalitarianism and of the hazardous construction of its manifestations.”171 Multitude, unlike the “people,” does not imply an internal division in society.172 As Žižek writes, “the message of collaboration-in-differences is ideology

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at its purest . . . because any notion of vertical antagonism that cuts through the social body is strictly censored, substituted by . . . the wholly different notion of ‘horizontal’ differences.”173 It is indeed unclear, in Negri and Hardt, why and how the revolution would erupt: the subject may be there, but what is this subject unhappy with; what are the sites of crisis that would make the empire inconsistent. This is what is lacking in the “nondialectical” thinking of Negri, Hardt, and their followers. Apart from negativity as antagonism and contestation, we can also conceive of negativity as stoppage. In a way, stopping a motion is more radical than responding to it with another motion (Benjamin, theorist of strikes, famously compared the task of a revolutionary to activating the emergency break rather than being the “locomotives of world history”174). In recent decades, this “strike” attitude was often generalized as a cessation of action—withdrawal from participation in the capitalist system. Thus, a series of authors (Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Negri, and Hardt) have drawn attention to Hermann Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”175 The protagonist of this story answered most of the demands addressed to him with the words: “I would prefer not to.” The translation of this position into politics would, according to the aforementioned authors, constitute, paradoxically, a truly active and truly subversive political position. It appears, however, that this “purely negative” position of abstention from action is not truly sufficient. Like a more active opposition, abstention and suspension leave untouched what they deny, reminding of Freud’s disavowal: pretending that something does not exist does not destroy it but produces a split within ourselves. We should thus complement this position of nonengagement, which interrupts circular activity, with a position of impatient action that interrupts an infinite movement of mutual reflection. All of this shows the stakes of emphasizing, as I do, the negativity of modern, and especially recent, revolution. But, in my account, negativity is, of course, a much more equivocal phenomenon than the spirit of contestation and unrest emphasized by the authors just mentioned. First, modernity is a demonic epoch par excellence. Negativity winning its way in its time is secretly or openly feeding on the dark potentiality of negative magnitudes such as melancholia, misanthropy, destruction drive (“destrudo”), and obscure plays with evil. It is not by chance that this period starts with the persecution of “witches” and an obsession with astrology, produces then the scary phantasmagoric machines, and continues recently with the technological massacres and the invention of weapons of mass destruction. The diagnoses of modernity as a play with the Devil, as given by Goethe, Hoffmann, Bulgakov, Thomas Mann, and others, should not be ignored but incorporated into the newly popular “political theology.” As Nietzsche once asked rhetorically, “What? Does not that mean, in the popular language: God is disproved but not the devil. On the contrary! And who the devil also compels you to speak popularly?”176 In an “unpopular” way, we can criticize, with Heidegger, the spirit of inversion of Platonism, but in an age of democracy, it matters if the populace thinks in symmetrical contraries.

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From this point of view, it is insufficient to think in terms of pure negativity or nihil negativum without giving full credit to the inevitable sublimation and hypostasis of negativity. Second, symmetrically, we should not fall into the celebration of conflict and antagonism (such as do Rancière, Laclau, Mouffe, and others). This would be close to the liberal agenda with an addition of seriousness to the conflict. Negativity is inherently unstable, and when it is institutionalized, it can eventually break through in the form of Schmittean antagonism, “us–them,” which hardly expresses the truth of the situation but usually leads to the deadlock of what Badiou calls “opposition,” and to a unilateral picture of the world on each side. At the same time, the consequence of both war and revolution is not really catharsis but the sheer void of death, and/or the ennui of the satisfied destruction drive, a mourning of the dismissed universal.

Conclusion: Negativity and revolution I will use the space of this conclusion to address more specifically the theme of negativity and revolution. When we say today that we need a revolution, if not as a practical aim to achieve then as a fact of the past for us to orient ourselves, in part, we just mean “negativity”: in the Schmittean sense of accepting and intensifying the disagreement with the currently dominant powers of one’s country or of the global establishment, in Rancière’s sense of the need for dissensus (and thus of a revolutionary apparition of a new collective subject), in the Sorelian sense of a sharp and momentous change, and finally, in the general sense, of a utopian void coming from the symbolical devaluation of the past, and thus of the crumbling of the parts of one’s own self. Of course, there is also a “positive” side to a revolution, which, after all, has to proceed from the substantive claims of a newly emerging subject. Also, if we speak of revolution as a founding event, then it has to move us from the past to the future: which seems to be difficult with just negativity, without a positive moving force. But, as we have seen, the now fashionable philosophies of affirmation are not very satisfactory answers to this problem: the force of something new and independent cannot destroy or outdo existing forces and authorities of the status quo but finds itself coexisting with them and even subordinate to them, in the indeterminate area of liberal tolerance. The theory of negativity demonstrates that a practical action aimed at a new beginning must be armed, not just with the nihil negativum of negation (as in such slogans as NIMBY, “basta,” “indignados,” etc.), but also with the nihil privativum of a real opposition, which would still be dependent on what it sees as the status quo, but imaginatively transforms and recombines it in a utopian or aesthetic fashion. The lesson of Hegel is that negativity per se is indeed void and insufficient, but that it has a particular positivity to it. As Nietzsche continues the same thought, your depression and self-limitation is always a hidden joy of your hidden self that inflicts them on

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you. Is this a thought of affirmation? No, this is a thought of negativity: a profound understanding of it as a “negative magnitude” of will. However, symmetrically, at the moment when a revolution does happen, and previously repressed forces deploy in liberated civil society, nihil negativum does not recede, but remains, survives, even if the old regime is fully demoralized and decapitated. The theory of negativity is a unique tool to understand the internal dialectic of a revolutionary event (i.e. any event that is revolutionary in its situation): the force of anger, hatred, and contempt after it wins over its object turns against the subject, which, in the case of the collective subject, means not just melancholia but also the dissolution of social ties. Sometimes this force takes the form of direct terror, although, as we have seen, terror is not the most extreme case of negativity: it is moreover a desperate attempt to fill the void opened by the pure negativity of apathy and boredom. In this sense, contemporary anti-political revolutions, like the anti-communist ones, are ontologically more radical than those of the eighteenth century: even though there is less blood, less spectacle, etc. One may say that they are truly nihilistic: what the conservatives feared in the nineteenth century when they called revolutionaries “the nihilists” was realized in the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, one of the lines in the present book is that we should not speak of pure negativity as “nothingness” in the spirit of Eckhart or Heidegger. What both meant was something other than being, but the substantivization itself is not fortunate, and Nietzsche was right when he mocked those who prefer willing “the nothing” to willing nothing. Negativity is always dependent on what it denies, and when it starts denying everything, then it denies itself in turn: pure negativity is therefore in truth an impure instability of unrest: melancholia never coinciding with permanent forcelessness, but the latter alternating with anxiety and/or mania. In the same sense, one is never content with one revolution, either understood as a joyful start of history, or understood as its depressing end. The free space of negativity opened by a revolution and its devastating force of depreciation on all things both cease and petrify with time, so that a renewal of both the regime and of thought structures is necessary, including the very word “no,” which does not hold its meaning forever (we have seen that in history it has been reinforced by the addition of previously positive terms such as “one,” “hilum,” etc.).

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Theories of Revolution

Kant’s theory of revolution Reversal and reversibility The Copernican Revolution As we saw in the Introduction, the word “revolution” refers to circular inversion, but in the course of history it came to mean an irreversible rupture. At the same time, as I developed in Chapter 2, negativity, apart from the obvious meaning of dismissal and destruction, inevitably implies the operation of reversal, at least as one of its meanings, at most as its necessary moment. Aristotle speaks in this sense of “correlative” oppositions, Kant on “real oppositions,” and Hegel conceives the contraries as interiorized inversions. In what follows, I will demonstrate the role that the contrary as such, and reversal in particular, plays in Kant’s theory of revolutionary event, and how it is here a precursor of many subsequent theories, particularly those of Hölderlin, Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin. It is not surprising that the indeterminate split of revolution produces characteristic “chiastic” reversals, or exchanges of properties (the Leftist Right and the Rightist Left1 in Russia; the stoppage by motion and interminability of the stopping effort in France, etc.); undecidable circularities (do people give birth to the republic or does the republic give birth to the people?); and characteristic reflexivity (recall Saint-Just’s appeal to Wilhelm Tell, which is so exemplary of his rhetoric). If anything that the subject confronts bears an internal, unlocatable, haunting character, if there is no spatially or temporally external point to which it can refer, then it is clear that any relationship that this subject enters may be symmetrically inverted. Any border is arbitrary; therefore, whatever we exclude as the other is, from another point of view, also the subject itself, and the subject is also the other. Their relationship may be inverted, if necessary (although the inverted picture would not have any privilege either). Thus, the enemy that the Jacobins fight turns out to be part of themselves, and the struggle becomes suicidal, as the Jacobins themselves come to realize. On a more basic level, the very idea of “revolution” (one has to recall its astronomical, Copernican connotation of “celestial revolution”) is one of reversal.

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In both the French and the latest Russian revolutions time itself would change its (catastrophic) course and turn backward, and political actors would exchange their positions. The people occupy (at least formally) the royal place. The king is beheaded, and the people who are his “sublime body”2 become a new king—thus a worm, when beheaded, regenerates from its tail. Chiastic reversals are, more generally, one of the effects of negativity: the work of the negative first cuts the world into elements and second suspends (liberates) them from their determinations. Thus, any combination becomes possible, and the world becomes a festival of combinatorics. However, negation itself, on the contrary, is irreversible in tendency. A reversal is both subjective and objective and necessarily implies reversal of a point of view. The subject has to project himself/herself anthropomorphically into the alien, unknown object (with which it still stands in inseparable unity) and thus to obtain, in imagination, access to the new, inverted point of view. As Nietzsche shows,3 the very notion of “object” is here an anthropomorphic substantivization of the fluid, temporal nature of being. Hegel, in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, uses the word “reversal” (Umkehrung) to characterize the substantivization and positivization of the negative. Such an operation allows, or would allow, according to him, the establishment of circular exchange between the positive and the negative.4 Assuming that the field of knowledge is always asymmetrically and perspectivally centered, a change of perspective is needed to obtain an inverted, reflected view. Something has to play the role of the mirror. Access to a complementary picture requires a turn of the mind, a flight of imagination that is itself conveniently figured as a shift in the “point of view.” The figure of the inverted point of view has dominated the modern age, from Columbus and Magellan’s discoveries of primitive, “natural” people (premised, as one should not forget, on the inversion of geographical perspective), through Copernicus’ conversion of the geocentric system into the heliocentric one, toward Locke and Leibniz with their theory of subjectivity as “reflection.” This sequence finds its radicalized follow-up in German philosophy: in Kant who claims to be Copernicus’ heir; in Hegel’s “speculative” (i.e. mirror-like) affirmation of reversibility in the relationship between subject and substance. Reversal of this relationship is, for Hegel, the essence of human history. Significantly, the clearest statement of such inversion is to be found in the account of the French Revolution given by Hegel in The Lectures on the Philosophy of History.5 According to Hegel, the French Revolution made humans stand on their heads, not on their feet. Thereafter humankind guides itself by its own reason and is therefore master of its own history. Another important figure in the history of “reversals” was Nietzsche. Nietzsche conceptualized science and grammar as “anthropomorphic” (implanting “objects” and “actions”—framed on the model of moral subjects, with their points of view—into the indeterminate, completely alien world). Political reversals of the French Revolution paralleled scientific and philosophical reversals. This common motif of modern philosophy and history later attracted criticism from Heidegger whoaccused many modern thinkers (in particular Hegel and Nietzsche) of sheer reversal [Umkehrung, Umdrehung] of ancient metaphysics—a

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reversal that left its basic structure intact.6 Heidegger thus subsumes modernity under the model of revolution (we know about the mood of “conservative revolution” in Germany of the Weimar, as well as of the Nazi period) and is highly critical of this model. Beyond the reversal, he looks for radical, purer negation. As it has already become clear, something more than a simple reversal is at stake in the concept of revolution. The uncanny mirror inversions of traditional imagery (we have already forgotten how our contemporary dogmas of “natural law,” “popular sovereignty,” “celestial bodies,” etc., are polemical, paradoxical inversions of traditional concepts) establish reversibility and reciprocity, or, more generally, universal epistemological and ontological equivalence. Paradoxical reversals of traditional hierarchies were mediators on the way to the triumph of ideas of equality, relativity, history, etc. According to Kant, the primary event of the Enlightenment is the establishment of the reciprocity of points of view. Such reciprocity may not be an actual state of things, but is a potential that is occasionally actualized in the imagination of other standpoints (Critique of the Power of Judgment; “Answer to the question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”). The role of imagination in the reversal is implicit also in prior statements of Kant upon the event of reversal, which would set the conditions for the reciprocity in question. Kant is reversing traditional metaphysics in order to obtain a new, estranged point of view upon the subject. However, the character of his reversal is ambiguous. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he decisively identifies his gesture with that of Copernicus (with the “Copernican Revolution,” to use a later pun on the title of Copernicus’ book). The latter discovers the motion of observer beyond the apparent motion of objects, and Kant, similarly, discovers the activity of the positioned subject in what had appeared as the inherent qualities of things. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.7

Kant is, in fact, suggesting that to decenter the subject, one has to occupy, in imagination, the point of view of the thing itself. Kant carefully conceals this anthropomorphic figure in his published work, but in his Opus Posthumum he clearly calls the thing in itself a “negative point of view [negative Standpunkt],”8 thus shedding retrospective light upon the figure of the “Copernican” Revolution. From this imagined perspectival center of the thing in itself, it turns out that what we attribute to things are just conveniences of knowledge and conditions of the subject’s unity. The thing itself, however, is not determined by the necessity to be known. Anthropomorphically speaking, it “does not care” about the subject’s gaze. Thus, there is no reason whatsoever to assume

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preestablished harmony between consciousness and the world, and qualities of things have to be explained by the subject’s point of view. Like Copernicus, Kant uses a strange anthropomorphic fiction in his argument in order to refute prior anthropomorphism stemming from a naive worldview. Both need, as it were, to “pass” through the logic of anthropomorphic fiction in order to reject it. Copernicus, as we know, converted the geocentric system into a heliocentric one, not into the more decentered picture of the universe that we now have. His reversal was precisely of the type that Heidegger later criticizes for insufficiency, as the centered structure of the universe remained intact. The reflection upon the motion (activity) of the observer comes, in Copernicus’ system, from the imagined point of view of another observer, located in the absolute point of the sun. The Kantian system and the approach of modern science whose principles it tries to decipher is much closer to another cosmological theory, one that stems from neoplatonists, which is then developed by Nicolas of Cusae and Giordano Bruno, and finds its systematic triumph in Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton—the doctrine of an infinite universe consisting of multiple, coexisting stellar worlds. Multiplicity, equivalence, and reversibility of points of view in this system are possible only through radical exteriority (nonrepresentability) of the divine, absolute point of view upon them. Kant, who was sympathetic with the cosmological side of this doctrine (thus, for example, his standing conviction that other planets are populated), presents, in the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason, the critical operation of theoretical reason as a similar decentering reversal. But this time, it is the critique of practical reason that builds upon a new, invisible, and unattainable center on the model that is closer to the Copernican one. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.  .  .  . The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The seconds begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world.9

How do these two different reversals and reflections coexist? In fact, the Copernican “episode” is an imaginary point of passage (a vanishing mediator), which further makes possible decentered, pluralistic “realism,” and that this is true for the history

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of cosmology as well as for Kant’s epistemological doctrine and for his theory of revolution. This historical point corresponds in its function to the inaccessible point of absolute subjectivity. This absolute subjectivity, available only in idea of reason or in the imagination, is definitively absent from the world of experience. As in the case of astronomical reversals, the constitution of the moral subject in the second Critique goes through the imagination of symmetry. This role is played by the so-called typic of practical judgment.10 Categorical imperative, in its different formulations, is always a requirement of universality, not reciprocity. However, as such, it is only an idea of reason that is beyond any experience. To apply it in practice, one has to reformulate it in terms of an imaginary experience of a situation (itself a law, but in the sense of empirical regularity, a law of nature) which, on the one hand, reciprocally reverses points of view and, on the other hand, demonstrates the monstrosity and unthinkability of the self-contradictory maxim of an immoral action. For example, one says: [I]f everyone permitted himself to deceive when he believed it to be to his advantage, or considered himself authorized to shorten his life as soon as he was thoroughly weary of it, or looked with complete indifference on the need of others, and if you belonged to such an order of things, would you be in it with the assent of your will?11

In a different vein but with similar logic Kant’s practical reason hinges on the ambiguous idea and image of the deity: the coincidence of omnipotence and omniscience, the subjective principle that mirrors the human subject in the nonhuman world. Human moral will “corresponds” to the will of God; it derives its law, as it were, from the divine point of view that it conceives and imagines. However, the actual occupation of this point of view, the coincidence of human knowledge with being and power, would mean an ultimate catastrophe, the dissolution of the moral subject. In a powerful image, Kant evokes—and repels—this situation. Assuming now that nature had here complied with our wish and given in that capacity for insight or that enlightenment which we would like to possess or which some believe erroneously they actually do possess, what would, as far as we can tell, be the result of it? Unless our whole nature were at the same time changed, the inclinations, which always have the first word, would first demand their satisfaction and, combined with reasonable reflection, their greatest possible and most lasting satisfaction under the name of happiness; the moral law would afterward speak, in order to keep them within their proper limits and even to subject them all to a higher end which as no regard to inclination. But instead of the conflict that moral disposition now has to carry on with inclinations, in which, though after some defeats, moral strength of soul is to be gradually acquired, God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. . . . Transgression of the law would, no doubt, be avoided: what is commanded would be done; but . . . most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, only a few from hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions, on which alone in the eyes of supreme wisdom the worth of the person and even that of the world

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depends, would not exist at all. As long as human nature remains as it is, human conduct would thus be changed into mere mechanism in which, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well, but there will be no life in the figures.12

This terrible image is, as I will show, a precursor to Kant’s theory of revolution. The point of foundation coincides with that of monstrosity and allows only a quick glimpse, where a direct gaze, as one at Medusa’s head, would mean petrification and death. Structurally, I emphasize here the imagined situation of reciprocity, of a returned gaze (note the mention of the eyes of the human subject and of “supreme wisdom”), and the strange, “subtracted” character of this image: its necessary, foundational character, and at the same time the repulsion and denial of it. Kant justifies law from both ends, providing an imaginary example of universal illegality, and by associating law with divinely accessible truth about the world. From both sides however, we encounter a contradiction that annuls the very possibility of human practice. In both cases, law is justified through contrast with an impossible, intolerable, dangerous image of absolute, be it absolute evil or absolute good. The revolutionary event is dominated by reversals, which seem to provide a counterexample to my argument about the impossibility of total reversibility. If everything were reversible, then revolution could indeed be an absolute subversion of human history, a fall into an abyss. If nothing was reversible, the human history would have never even started. The full reversibility is self-contradictory: if everything is already reversible, then it is simply equivalent. Why then reverse things and how to explain their reversals? Where does the interminable circulation of revolution obtain its moving force? For reciprocity and exchange to exist there have to be two sides of the line, as well as a connector between them, a pineal gland, so to speak. But then this contradictory element would be a fiction as impossible as the revolution! This is the problem that lies in the foundation of the problematic of the event. Any definition of event needs to take it into account. I will further show how Kant’s philosophy of history conceives of revolution as a self-contradictory mediator allowing one to distinguish between the symmetrical notions of past and future, good and evil, law and crime, etc. The revolutionary event, as I will show in relying on Kant’s thought, may perform all this only under the condition of its subtraction.

Possibility and actuality of the reversal Reversal implies reversibility as its condition, but only as a potential. The finitude of subject and the temporality that follows from it introduces actual irreversibility into otherwise reversible categories of understanding. The reversal itself would be impossible if the reversibility was always automatically guaranteed and actualized. The actual reversibility and reciprocity of every action would exclude the sense of temporal orientation implicit in the very notion of reversal. More precisely, reversibility conflicts with the possibility of the event and of history (which it makes, for the first time, visible, in allowing, at least in intention, an inversion of temporal arrow—see Schlegel’s dictum of the historian as a “prophet turned backwards”13). If any action was

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symmetrical within itself, or if its reversal was simultaneous with it, no action would be possible at all. J.-L. Borges wrote a very fine short story called “The Immortal,”14 where he describes immortality as a certainty for any event to find its reversal, which would restore the status quo (the source of this idea is probably Nietzsche’s early horror of the idea of Eternal Return15). Such a condition would, obviously, deprive existence of any sense: it would be a collapse of history into zero. It is the finitude that provides possibilities, and possible reversals stay unrealized. Finitude introduces both reversibility and irreversibility as conditions of historicity. A correlate to this logic is the notion of time: strict unidirectionality would allow no time (the past would not be retained, future would not be anticipated, one would forget every new moment, like Nietzsche’s cows16), and strict reversibility would not allow it as well. Thus reversibility is, at least partly, suspended as potential. Potentiality, for its part, cannot exist without at least partial actualization. The actuality of reversibility is reciprocal exchange: in a monetary economy, for example, the actual direction of each good’s trajectory may be asymmetrical (Japan exports cars and imports Hollywood movies, usually not vice versa), but the process rests upon the presumption of equivalence and potential reversibility.

The actual reversibility: Exchange In Sublime Object of Ideology,17 Slavoj Žižek shows how the equivalence of exchange—its abstraction, circularity, closure—is established through a paradoxical and ambiguous element that incorporates lack and surplus. The logic (which goes back to Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”18) is the following: if reversibility is potential and not simultaneous, as it has to be, for the exchange to make sense, then at any given moment the operation is unilateral. We have two complementary points of view, or two disjunct and nonsimultaneous series, so that equivalence may be challenged from each point of view: “Every year I send you these beautiful cars! And what do I get back, with a delay? Stupid, degrading movies!” For the exchange to be symbolically efficient, we need an element that would be a member of each series, a car and a movie at the same time (perhaps a Hollywood blockbuster about Japanese cars, or a car with a video screen would do), so to speak. In Marx’s economic theory a paradigmatic form of such an element is labor, counted as a commodity. In the “Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848” Marx notes that while Locke interpreted labor as increase and appropriation (of an object), labor equally involves the giving away of oneself (an investment into the object). Its operation has a negative, “minus” character.19 Obviously, one can view the situation from both points of view with equal correctness. But precisely this possibility allows labor, as phallus, in libidinal economy, or as Derridean pharmacon in rhetoric, to carry the double meaning of positive and negative, presence and absence. This gap that looks like a bridge (or a bridge that looks like a gap) defers the closure of the exchange and maintains its dynamics by disrupting and suturing the exchange at the same time. Labor plays the pivotal role in the economic exchange because it is simultaneously appropriation and expropriation, giving and taking, it embodies in itself both directions of exchange. It therefore works as a “pineal gland” of economy, a necessarily

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contradictory, ambiguous element of structure. “Exchange” as long as it involves labor is not truly an exchange, not one between positive values (I give you honey; you give me meat). Labor, from the point of view of the worker, is not an external thing that could be passed from one owner to another (A+B → A) but a subtraction from the worker’s complete being (A → A−B). This subtraction coincides with the emergence, in a negative form, of what is being subtracted—the worker invested a part of his/her essence into an object, which has been then expropriated. The compensation that a capitalist pays to the worker ignores this investment and regards it as a quantitative weakening of the labor force (A → 1/8 A, for example), which can be restored by an equivalent, homologous remedy (add 7/8 A). The essential subtraction (−B) stays uncompensated and indestructible (unless, perhaps, the very object that has been produced will be symbolically or materially devoured by the worker) but produces infinite dissatisfaction and readiness (always) for surplus work (why not work a little bit more). Since subtraction precedes any addition, it becomes truly irreversible and the compensatory process would be infinite. This negativity driving the “exchange” widens the abyss where each new “exchange” doubles the distance, the worker loses, and the capitalist adds; the accumulation of capital, says Marx, coincides with the pauperization of workers.20 Žižek in his account of the “paradoxical” but constitutive element in the cycle of exchange does not mention Heidegger, but in fact his conception owes as much to the latter as it does to Marx. For Heidegger death is the paradoxical possibility par excellence,21 a possibility that cannot be actualized in the full sense of the word (because when death is here, I am not, etc.) but that is at the same time absolutely inevitable. Death functions thus as both absolutely impossible and absolutely possible—but never actual. Both distinction and mutual reversibility of actuality and possibility are constituted through this ambiguous member, the “impossible possibility” as Heidegger calls it.22 We will see that this role of paradoxical element, carrying both positive and negative meanings, is played by the event of revolution in Kant’s philosophy of history. Death, with its double character, is also irreversible. It constitutes the finitude of the subject, which suspends the reversibility as potential not actual, and makes time possible. There is an intimate connection between the necessity for an ambiguous negative/positive element, and the directionality and irreversibility of exchange and of history. The need for an irreversible element of exchange has been emphasized as frequently as the need for the ambiguous element in it. Similarly, the alienation of the worker from the object may not be restored by any material compensation, anything short of the object’s destruction. Paul Ricoeur, in his book Oneself as Another,23 discusses the reversibility and reciprocity of deictic pronouns designating the situation of speech and anchoring other situations on this basis. “I” and “you,” “here” and “there” are essentially exchangeable and through their exchange language allows the “taking of another point of view.” “I” may be said of oneself by anyone. On the other hand, Ricoeur emphasizes that this situation is possible only because language is built upon some fundamental asymmetries. Thus, the signified of a deictic pronoun (I as a person, for example) is, on the contrary, something unique and unexchangeable. Another fundamental

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asymmetry has to do with the relation between subject and object, between active and passive roles (or “voice”). There is a prohibition on the reversal of these roles and one cannot establish equivalence between the utterances: “I read a book” and “A book reads me.” According to Ricoeur, language requires constitutive asymmetries on the level of its practical functioning but is symmetrical in terms of its ideal structure. Finally, I have to mention Jacques Derrida’s economic philosophy (whose project is inherited from Heidegger and Bataille), which views the reversibility of exchange as a function of an irrevocable and unilateral gift (interrupting each step in an exchange process). In what follows, I will show that Kant’s theory of revolution provides the condition of possibility of history by establishing the concept of irreversible event. This concept has reversal as its content but is, in its form, irreversible. Event is an ambiguous element and is both positive and negative; it has been negated and exists in a subtracted form that is neither purely actual nor purely potential. Or rather, the event (as labor or death) is itself the operation of abyssal subtraction.

Two reactions of Kant to the French Revolution The second “Conflict” I will start with the second of the two texts: The Conflict of the Faculties.24 Its actual composition precedes that of the first text (in “The Metaphysics of Morals”) but the date of publication is later. This excludes, by the way, the hypothesis that Kant changed his mind with regard to revolution, and therefore gave a different, positive account of it in the Conflict. The essay in question is written independently but was later included by Kant in a collection of three texts, The Conflict of the Faculties. The first of the essays collected in this book introduces the theme of “conflict” and “discord” [Streit] between university faculties and suggests separating the respective spheres of competence, so that the “lower,” “philosophical” faculty would have an area where it would be heard and even allowed to set the rules of discussion with the three “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine. The latter three are “higher” as long as they deal with the sphere of government interests; their doctrines derive from dogmas and orders and themselves have a binding force. Granting authority to the highest faculties and admitting the traditional “servant maid” status of philosophy, Kant ironically suggests that, being a servant, it might still be a “torchbearer,” a leader. Wherever the discussion is not open to the people [Volk], philosophy has a right to address the educated public [Litteraten] and to challenge the self-limitations imposed by higher faculties by questioning their foundations: What is the source of religion? What right does the government have to give orders (what is the right of a right)? Why live rather than die? How to distinguish health from sickness? In the three Conflicts, Kant shows that, in each case, these “external” or purely “theoretical” questions define the central, most internal, empirical cases with which each of the “higher” faculties actual deals: the question of religious sects, revolution, and “hypochondriac” diseases (i.e. those that we would today call psychosomatic), respectively. In the very center of the scope of the

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theological, legal, or medical faculty, there stands a “monstrous” object that does not make sense within the limits of the field and calls these limits into question. The text is thus counterevidence to the common criticism of Kant by Hegel and his followers for failing to take into account the concrete issues of history and politics, which are defined by the paradoxes of reason. Indeed, Kant persistently does exactly this. The question is how he explains these issues. In each of the Conflicts, the fundamental problem is the same one: the speculative possibility, the possibility of a factual and imperative embodiment of reason. In each of the three cases, the solution Kant gives is the factual and eventful character of the potential involved in the subjectivity as such, instead of an external empirical event or apparatus that would transform humanity and reveal the absolutes available to reason. The speculative solution is therefore in each case considered and rejected. The embodiment of the absolute is replaced with an ambiguous sign that is embodied in human existence itself. This will become clearer in the course of my argument where I will first concentrate on Kant’s discussion of revolution while also making references to two other sections of Conflict. The second Conflict is with the faculty of law. Its title, however, does not explicitly refer to law—the essay is called “A Renewed Question: Is the Human Kind Constantly Progressing to the Better?” The essay, as I mentioned, was written before Kant decided to unite it with two others under the title The Conflict of the Faculties. The legal and political significance of the issue therefore appears relatively late in the text (section 8). However, the question of interpretive authority (common for all three Conflicts) plays a major role in its argument. For reasons that will become clear later, politicians and lawyers remain blind to the event of human progress; they stick to empirical truths and abstract legal postulates (both belong to understanding not to reason); therefore, they believe in the status quo and help in reproducing it. It is only the philosopher who can discern this event (which is not a tangible object) and expose it to the educated public (not to the people). Based on the prediction of humanity’s constant progress, this philosopher would call for republican rule. This rule should be implemented not, of course, by an uprising (a call to such would be a transgression of the competence of the philosophical faculty) but by a republican mode of rule in what legally is still a monarchy and autocracy. Such a republican rule would be a provisional measure that would prepare the people for eventual transition to a republican constitution. Kant starts the essay by pointing to the inherent reversibility of historical developments and to the subsequent impossibility to extrapolate this or that direction on the entire human history. This line of argument is not new: Kant repeats, with variations, the development he had made earlier in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.25 It is not just that the optimistic (“eudemonistic”) and pessimistic (“terrorist”) notions of human history are at fault; there is no ground to the strict conviction that human history lacks direction. This latter argument (to which Kant attributes the utmost popularity) is probably directed at cynical lawyers and politicians with whom Kant is in “discord” here. Rejection of the three hypotheses follows from the finitude and freedom (their relationship has been established in the second Critique) of the human subject. First,

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the finitude of the subject denies him/her access to any absolute point of view from which the whole of history would reveal itself. Second, the availability of such a point of view would contradict (the experiential fact and transcendental requirement of) human freedom: in order for human action to make sense and to be possible, the consequence of its action has to stay indeterminate. 4. The problem [and task, Aufgabe] of progress is not to be resolved directly through experience. Even if we felt that the human race, considered as a whole, was to be conceived as progressing and proceeding forward for however long a time, still no one can guarantee that now, this very moment, because of the physical disposition of our species, it would not enter the epoch of its decline; and inversely, if it is moving backwards, and in accelerated fall into baseness, a person may not despair even then of encountering a turning point [punctum flexus contrarii] where because of the moral disposition of our kind, its course would turn anew to the better. For we are dealing with beings that act freely, to whom, it is true, what they ought to do may be dictated in advance, but of whom it may not be predicted what they will do: we are dealing with beings who, from the feeling of self-inflicted evil, when things disintegrate altogether, know how to adopt a strengthened motive for making them even better than they were before that state. But “miserable mortals” says the Abbot Coyer, “nothing is constant in your lives except inconstancy!”26

This passage, early in the essay, introduces the central subtle distinction with which it deals. On the one hand, revolution—the “turning point,” punctum flexus contrarii, seems to be its obvious definition—as an irreversible turn to the new and to the better is impossible (a symmetrical turn could always happen). On the other hand, this impossibility is introduced precisely through the possibility that this complementary turn could be happening right now. The pattern is thus paradigmatic for Kant’s doctrine: the impossibility of an absolute point of view makes relative points of view parallel and interchangeable. The term punctum flexus contrarii alludes to the mystical definitions of deity and to Kant’s own antinomies—clearly something that would belong more to the noumenal than to the phenomenal order. Meanwhile, Kant clearly speaks of a historical happening, an object of experience, which can by no means be strictly noumenal. There is thus, from the very beginning, ambiguity as to the status of the historical event as well as to its possibility. The event is presented both as an impossibility of decisive reversal and as a constant, essential possibility. It is thus a “possible impossibility,” a possibility that can only exist as such and may not be fully actualized. Note the theme of latency and indeterminacy in the definition of the event. We do not know whether the event (the turn) is or is not happening right now. Kant insists on this swaying indeterminacy of the event throughout his essay. The event, in the early stages of the argument, takes an unconscious character. While here it is still externalized, very soon we will see that the event is unconscious because of its suspended ontological status.

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Thus far, Kant gradually radicalizes the indeterminacy and the nonavailability of the event. In the course of human affairs seems senseless to us, perhaps it lies in a poor [unrecht genommenen] choice of position from which we regard it. Viewed from the earth, the planets sometimes move backwards, sometimes forwards, and sometimes not at all. But if the standpoint selected is the sun, an act which only reason can perform, according to the Copernican hypothesis they move constantly in their regular course. . . . But, and this is precisely the misfortune, we are not capable of placing ourselves in this position when it is a question of the prediction of free actions. For that would be the standpoint of providence which is situated beyond all human wisdom, and which likewise extends to the free actions of man; these actions, of course, man can see, but not foresee with certitude (for the divine eye there is no distinction in this matter). . . . If we were able to attribute to man an inherent and unalterably good, albeit limited, will, he would be able to predict with certainty the progress of his species toward the better, because it would concern an event [Begebenheit] that he himself could produce [machen]. But in connection with the mixture of good and evil in his predisposition, the proportion of which he is incognizant, he himself does not know what effect he might expect from it.27

Once again, the event is latent; we do not know whether it happens or not. The mixture of good and evil will in the human being is not determined a priori (we can only know a priori that there are both kinds). The comparison of Copernicus’ sun with divine providence is not, however, entirely justified: the sun is located inside the Universe, while God, of course, is not. Copernicus’ turn consists in accessing the divine point of view indirectly through imagining an external but empirical point of view. Similarly, Kant proceeds to look for the revelation of the meaning of history in the external but empirical gaze upon the subject. First, however, he states, quite logically, that the issue of knowing the disposition of humanity beforehand is only possible through the actions of humans. These, however, are precisely the objects of prediction. There is a logical and temporal circle there, and still Kant makes a “revolutionary” U-turn in his argument and affirms, in spite of himself, that both progress and its prediction are, in some way, possible and have to be searched for. 5. Yet the prophetic history of the human race must be connected to some experience [Erfahrung]. There must be some experience in the human kind which, as an event [Begebenheit], points to the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better, and (since this should be the act of a being endowed with freedom) toward the human race as being the author of this advance. But from a given cause an event as an effect can be predicted [only] if the circumstances take place [eräugnen] which contribute to it. That these conditions must take place [sich eräugnen müssen] some time or other can, of course, be predicted in general, as in the calculation of probability in games of chance; but that prediction cannot

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enable us to know whether what is predicted is to happen in my life and I am to have an experience of it. Therefore an event [Begebenheit] must be sought which points to the existence of such a cause and to its effectiveness in the human kind, undetermined with regard to time, and which would allow progress toward the better to be concluded as an inevitable consequence.28

Note the intricate logic. It is only the free subject who can freely produce the event [Begebenheit] of progress. But for this action to be possible, some circumstances have to have taken place, to have been possible to witness [eräugnen sich]. The event, like the interpretation of signs, is structured temporally and falls into at least two moments—that of the favorable constellations of things, and that of the event that irreversibly interprets them, manifests their meaning. There are two words for event or happening: the Begebenheit and the Eräugnis, the older form of the word Ereignis. The root of Eräugnis is Auge, eye, and more specifically äugen, to glimpse, to look cautiously, and eräugen, to see, to witness. Heidegger unites the two Kantian terms in his concept of Ereignis, in which he emphasizes the givenness (es gibt Ereignis), and the derivation from Eräugnis: its epistemological, revelatory character.29 In Kant both Begebenheit and Eräugnis have epistemological significance: the latter manifests and emblematizes the direction of history and the occurrence of Eräugnis, the former induces the subject to action through a certain insight. Relations between the two are therefore (expectedly) circular and the distinction between them is not strict: Begebenheit, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, plays the role of Eräugnis by inducing the subject to further action. Interpretation of the sign of the event by its external observers is itself a sign to be interpreted. The conclusion then could also be extended to the history of the past (that it has always been in progress) in such a way that the event [Begebenheit] would have to be considered not itself as the cause of history, but only as an intimation [als hindeutend], a historical sign (signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon) demonstrating [beweisen] the tendency of the humankind viewed in its entirety, that is, seen not as [a sum] of individuals (for that would yield an interminable enumeration and computation), but rather as divided into nations and states (as it is encountered on earth).30

The event is thus a “historical sign” [Geschichtszeichen]. Far from embodying and fulfilling something that would coincide with the (noumenal) purpose of humanity, it intimates [hindeutet] and opens itself and history for interpretation, in the three temporal modes of past, present, and future.31 It is given, but it is not a fact or a datum with a fixed location or meaning. It does not contain its meaning but acquires it only in the interaction with the spontaneity of the subject to whom it is given. The sign itself is (or rather may be) experienced, but its meaning sways, appears, and disappears intermittently. The latency of the event is the latency of a sign’s meaning: the latter does and at the same time does not (or does not fully) contain its own signification. It is the subject who reads this signification into the sign, and this subjective activity of interpretation has an unconscious, disavowed reality: one can always defend oneself

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from a sign of catastrophe by saying that the subject is “seeing things” where there is just a sign. Meaning does not coincide with the sign; moreover, it involves its negation, or at least the negation of its literal meaning. This meaning may be attributed to other signs as well, and is extrapolated, in potential form, onto the entire course of history. In spite of all that, the sign of this latent occurrence is determined in its existence (not in meaning), and is dated by the present—analogous to the earlier mentioned turn [Umwendung] that would unnoticeably be taking place here and now. The present is located between the actuality of the past and the potentiality of the future; it is an actual, “real” possibility. Kant is speaking of the present historical moment—the French Revolution. 6. Concerning an event of our time which demonstrates this moral tendency of the human race. This event consists neither in momentous deeds nor crimes committed by men whereby what was great among men is made small or what was small is made great, nor in ancient splendid political edifices which vanish as if by magic while others come forth in their place as if from the depths of the earth. No, nothing of the sort. It is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great transformations, and manifests such a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the players on one side against those on the other, even at the risk that this partiality could become very disadvantageous for them if discovered. Owing to its universality, this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once; owing to its disinterestedness, a moral character of humanity, at least in its predisposition, a character which not only permits people to hope for progress toward the better, but is already itself progress in so far as its capacity is sufficient for the present. The revolution of a people rich in spirit which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost—this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation [Mitteilung] that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.32

The function of historical sign is thus passed over to the public manifestation of the spectators who interpret political revolution. Political revolution still plays the role of the sign but in the negated if not denegated form: no, it is not the revolution that is the historical sign; or it is one, exactly through the fact that its meaning transcends it. The interpretation of a sign, as it expresses itself materially, itself becomes a sign, and is written over the first one.33 The negation of this kind is a definition of sign as such; it follows from the allegorical nature of meaning.

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Because it does not hold, does not contain its meaning in itself, a sign is always also a sheer sign, a trace. The emptiness and latency of the event of which Nancy writes in “Surprise of the Event” may be attributed to its trace-like character. Kant insists on the point that I was making earlier in discussing Nancy’s reading of Hegel: the emptiness of the event is the emptiness from an imagined (attempted) substance. Its void may only be affirmed in repetitive, compulsive probing. The negative definition of revolution as a sign of event takes us back to the discussion of the sublime in Kant’s third Critique. The sublime, which is manifested in the feeling of enthusiasm, is the encounter of the subject with a natural object that transcends its capacity for understanding or of practical resistance. This encounter turns the subject to reflect on his/her own capacity to imagine, which is infinite, and which therefore exceeds even a relatively enormous object or occurrence. Therefore, says Kant, the sublime is never contained in the object (which simply induces it) but in the subject, and his/her infinite capacities. The failure of the subject’s understanding points back to the internal contradiction between the idea of the whole, of the absolutely enormous, the absolutely omnipotent, etc. that the subject has in his/her reason, and the experience, which will never encounter anything that would correspond to the absolute. Imagination (still operating in empirical terms) is capable of transcending any empirical border, but is always infinitely far from the transcendent limit set up by reason. The French Revolution seems to follow the same logic: violent political turmoil is important but is infinitely less significant than the “participation” of spectators who are thus reminded of their always exceeding, potentially infinite capacity for moral growth (and the unavailable presence of noumenal, absolute goodness). What is there in the French Revolution that makes it induce sublime feelings? Before we answer this question, we have to quote another passage from the second Conflict: 7. Prophetic history of humanity. In the principle there must be something moral, which reason presents as pure; but because of its great and epoch-making influence, reason must present it as the acknowledged duty of the human soul, concerning humankind as a whole (non singularum, sed universorum), which hails, with such universal and impartial sympathy, the hopes for its success and the efforts toward realizing it. This even is the phenomenon, not of revolution but (as Erhard expresses it) a phenomenon of the evolution of a constitution in accordance with natural law which, to be sure, is still not won solely by wild battles—for war, both civil and foreign, destroys all previously existing statutory constitutions. This evolution leads to striving after a constitution that cannot be bellicose, that is to say, a republican constitution. The constitution may be republican either in its political form or only in its manner of governing, in having the state ruled through the unity of the sovereign (the monarch) by analogy with the laws that a nation would provide itself in accordance with the universal principles of legality. Now I claim to be able to predict—even without prophetic insight [Sehergeist]— according to the aspects and omens [Vorzeichen] of our day, the attainment of this goal. That is, I predict its progress toward the better, which, from now on, turns

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out to be no longer completely retrogressive. For such a phenomenon in human history is not to be forgotten, because it has revealed a tendency and capacity in human nature for improvement such that no politician, affecting wisdom, might have conjured out of the course of things hitherto existing, and one which nature and freedom alone, united in the human race in conformity with inner principles of right, could have promised. But so far as time is concerned, it can promise this only indefinitely and as a contingent event [Begebenheit aus Zufall]. But even if the end viewed in connection with this event should not now be attained, even in the revolution or reform of a national constitution should finally miscarry, or, after some time had elapsed, everything should relapse into its former rut (as politicians now predict), that philosophical prophecy would lose nothing of its force. For that event is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled [in Erinnerung gebracht] on any favorable occasion by the nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind; because then, in an affair so important for humanity, the intended constitution, at a certain time, must finally attain that constancy which instruction by repeated experience suffices to establish in the minds of all men.34

Things now become clearer. The reason why the revolution, or rather the event of our times to which it refers, is a true turning point not a relative change of direction, is its relation to memory. Revolution is a mnemotechnical sign. The impossibility of forgetting it provides for its persistence. Once on human minds, as a “debt” that you formulate in a negative form, it secures favorable conditions for human efforts in the direction of improvement. As we know from Kant’s other writings, humans are still free to choose good or evil, but they are more and more likely to become “mature,” that is, responsible, mindful of their own action, and obedient to the law. The vehicle of unforgettable memory is repetition, the almost compulsive return to the (empty) scene of the “event of our times.”35 The question of progress in the human race is constantly renewed and this renewal itself contributes to the solution. Compulsive repetition of an aporia constitutes experience, in the sense also of training: a series of repeated, failed attempts to revive the (failed) revolution moves humanity out of the state of “minority.” As we have seen earlier, “[t]he conclusion then could also be extended to the history of the past (that it has always been in progress).” The event changes not only the present but equally the future and the past. To understand this strange argument, we can turn again to Kant’s trope of the “Copernican Revolution.” From Copernicus to Newton and Leibniz, the imaginary occupation of the point of view of the sun works as a vehicle for radical decenterment: any point of view is now a potential center, any star is a sun. We have mentioned the “Copernican” inversion undertaken by Benjamin in relation to time: the past becomes the present and the present becomes the future that redeems it. Similarly, we have to interpret Kant’s phrase. The event happens now but it retrospectively reveals the eventful, irreversible nature of any point in history, that is, the “now” of event and action. The past becomes linear progression for us

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only retrospectively, from the point of view of the “sun,” which is the “event of our time.” The future becomes eventful and historical effectively, for itself, because of the unforgettable nature of the event.

Footnote to “The Metaphysics of Morals” This logic of memory is further developed in the second large treatment of revolution by Kant in his footnote to “The Metaphysics of Morals.” This footnote appears to comment upon Kant’s denial of people’s right to revolution. Such a revolution against the law, in the name of law, would inevitably be self-contradictory, and abolish the principle of law altogether. “For it is then apparent that the people want to be the judge in their own suit.” Of all the atrocities involved in the overthrow of a state, the murder of a monarch is still not the worst, because it is possible to imagine it takes place out of the popular fear that, were he to remain alive, he might re-main himself and let them feel a well-deserved punishment; in that case this deed would not be a deed of penal justice but only of self-preservation. It is the formal execution of a monarch that grips the soul filled with Ideas of human justice with a shudder [Schaudern] that one repeatedly feels as soon as and as often as one thinks of this scene, like the fate of Charles I or Louis XVI. How can this feeling be explained, if it is not an aesthetic one (compassion, the effect of imagination which sets oneself in the soul of the one who suffers) but rather a moral feeling, resulting from the complete overturning [Umkehrung] of all concepts of right? It is regarded as a crime that remains forever and can never be expiated (crimen immortale, inexpiabile), and it seems to be like the sin that cannot be forgiven either in this world or the next.36

Once again we deal with an unforgettable sign. The meaning of the event is decentered and displaced onto spectators and their “moral feelings” (which are, in Kant, of a special, nonpathological order, akin to the experience of the sublime37). Their shudder, like their enthusiasm, persists in compulsively returning to the scene, as though to probe into its uncertain, indeterminate being, and to regain vigor. The death of a monarch by execution is itself immortal; this sin is irremediable and indestructible. The theme of irreversibility surfaces again in noteworthy adjacency to the theme of reversal or turning point [Umkehrung]. Revolution seems to have a meaning of reversal, and at the same time forbids any reversal of its meaning. What is the relationship between reversal and irreversibility here? Should we, perhaps, speak of an irreversible reversal? Or, rather, of the irreversible advent of reversibility and reciprocity? Indeed, Kant’s definition of Enlightenment (another historical event in our time) emphasizes reciprocity of points of view, and the possibility of taking, or rather imagining, the position of another person.38 However, irreversibility is itself presented as a repeated failure of a reversal. We saw in Hegel, and will see further in Kant, that this failed reversal is the very Umkehrung of the revolution. It is not that the reversal is irreversible, but that the irreversibility consists of repeated negation, incompletion of the abyssal, and radical reversal of law.

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This reversal is not just one of the reversals. The crime of the revolution is at the same time aiming at founding a new state and at destroying any foundation, at opening an infinite, groundless abyss. Now the criminal can commit his misdeed either on a maxim he has taken as an objective rule (as holding universally) or only as an exception of a rule (exempting himself from it occasionally). In the latter case he only deviates from the law (tough intentionally). . . . In the first case, however, he rejects the authority of the law itself, whose validity he still cannot deny before his own reason, and makes it his rule to act contrary to the law. His maxim is therefore opposed to the law not by way of default only (negative) but by rejecting it (contrarie) or, as we put it, his maxim is diametrically opposed to the law, as contradictory to it (hostile to it, so to speak). As far as we can see, it is impossible for a human being to commit a crime of this kind, a formal diabolically evil (wholly pointless) crime; and yet it is not to be ignored in a system of morals [although it is only the Idea of extreme evil).39

The crime of murdering the king points to a contradictory maxim, which is at the same time directed against the law, and is itself law-like, nonpathological, and formal. Law against law. Kant points to the structural necessity of conceiving this diabolical evil in spite of its impossibility or inapplicability (to humans), which he postulated in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Very precisely, he calls it an Idea—a necessary construction of reason located at the focus imaginarius40 of contradictory tendencies. Antinomies developed in the first Critique41 negatively point to the Ideas of God, of the world, and at other concepts forbidden to the grasp of understanding, which only run into contradictions when one tries to conceive them. The use of these ideas by reason is purely “regulative” and not “constitutive”; reason needs them for its operation but treats them as mere fictions. According to the third Critique,42 the subject acquires access to ideas within himself/herself when something in empirical reality makes a step in their direction (for example, is very large) but fails to come even close (to the size of the whole world, in this case). Something similar is going on in the case of revolution. We now discuss the famous “ambiguity” in Kant’s attitude to revolution. Today, he cautiously tends to approve it; tomorrow he denounces it in repulsion. Today enthusiasm, tomorrow shudder. It is now clear that ambiguity, or rather the internal contrariness of these emotions, is not (or not simply) a caprice of a wandering mind but rather a consequence of the inherent ambiguity of the event itself. As a (imagined) point of an absolute beginning, it is also (from another perspective) a point of an absolute terminus. In the imaginary focus of history, foundation coincides with subversion. Like labor in political economy or like death in the field of human possibilities, revolution is an ambiguous element the existence of which allows the symmetrical (past/future) structure of time and history. As such, it is also an unreal, spectral element. Its negative/positive nature indicates that it exists under subtraction. Immediately, and quite logically, Kant makes us aware of this in his text: The reason for shudder at the thought of the formal execution of a monarch by his people is therefore this: that while his murder is regarded as only an exception

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to the rule that the people makes its maxim, his execution must be regarded as a complete overturning [Umkehrung] of the principles of the relation between a sovereign and his people (in which the people, which owes its existence only to the sovereign’s legislation, makes itself his master), so that violence is elevated above the most sacred rights most brazenly and in accordance with principle. Like a chasm that irretrievably swallows everything, the execution of a monarch seems to be a crime from which the people cannot be absolved, for it is as if the state commits suicide. There is, accordingly, reason for assuming that the agreement to execute the monarch actually originates not from what is supposed to be a rightful principle but from fear of the state’s vengeance upon the people if it revives at some future time, and that these formalities are undertaken only to give that deed the appearance of punishment, and so of a rightful procedure (such as murder would not be). But this disguising of the deed miscarries; such a presumption on the people’s part is still worse than murder, since it involves a principle that would have to make it impossible to generate again a state that has been overthrown.43

In a most peculiar move, Kant pulls back; because the horrible event could not have happened, it did not happen. The U-turn made in the footnote to “The Metaphysics of Morals” is symmetrically made to Conflict as well. There, Kant first states the impossibility of concluding on the progress of humankind, and then, in spite of everything, he finds a sign of an irreversible historical event. Here, on the contrary, he discusses the event and then concludes that it could not have happened. In each case, the text performs the historical turn that it discusses. It would seem that Kant defends himself and the reader from a nightmare by insisting upon the normal, everyday character of the occurrence (something like: this is not the end of the world; it is the emergence of an area of low tension, resulting in wind, combined with a clash of tectonic plates in the zone of rift, etc.). Kant pushes the “denegation” of revolution, according to the famous dream-logic, or the logic of the “borrowed-pot” (I never borrowed your pot, I returned it yesterday, and it was leaky to start with) to the extreme. It was not revolution that mattered, it was not revolution but evolution, it did not happen at all. But it is exactly by means of this “denegation” that Kant gains access to the unforgettable (or inexpiable), historically absolute, character of the event. If the event does not concern political matters but the mind of the subject, and if nothing in the world corresponds to it, then it is impossible to get rid of, to stop thinking about, with shudder or enthusiasm. Interiorized, it becomes inalienable, and chases the subject wherever it goes, as the king (or the fantasy of absolute sovereignty) chases, in Saint-Just’s imagination, revolutionary parties. However, simply attributing the being of the event (qua Idea) to the subject is not an option either. The foundation of law by annulment of the preceding one—this symbolic suicide—is not just empirically impossible but also illogical, unthinkable. Therefore, this unthinkable thought remains in the subject like an irritating splinter, a (historical) sign without meaning. The subject returns to it, as to a traumatic event, again and again, probes it by attempting to think the unthinkable, and fails. This failure constitutes sublime experience and turns the subject to contemplation of his/her own pure reason, the capacity to think the empty something (the thing in itself). One recognizes here the definition of event encountered

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in Nancy: the event is an empty happening, history without content. Its emptiness is, however, not immediate, but a result of subtraction of a fantasy, of the fundamental fantasy of self-foundation. This, finally, is the exact way in which the event is constituted by its negativity. The irreversibility of the event is the irreversibility of negation; it follows from the logical dissymmetry of negation and affirmation.

Negativity of the event as grounds for its irreversibility Negation of negation does not return it to its prior, positive state but converts it into a peculiar, spectral, “undead” mode of being. First of all, whatever it does to negation qua content, it reaffirms in its form (a negation again). Moreover, as long as negation is always impure, it always contains an affirmative (or certain) core (what Husserl44 called “protodoxa” [Urdoxa]), so that any subsequent negation is unable to cancel this core. This is the mechanism of Freudian “denegation”: if I say: no, this was not my mother, I deny the fact but I succeed in communicating its meaning and evoking its potentiality. The clearest explanation of Freud’s view of negation, of its connection to Hegelian “negation of negation,” and to the notion of sign, is to be found in Jean Hyppolite’s spoken commentary on Freud’s Verneinung delivered during one of Jacques Lacan’s seminars. [W]hat does this asymmetry between affirmation and negation signify? It signifies that all of the repressed can once again be taken up and used again in a sort of a suspension, and that, in some way, instead of being under the domination of the instincts of attraction and repulsion, a margin of thought can be generated, an appearance of being in the form of non-being, which is generated with negation, that is to say when the symbol of negation is linked up with the concrete attitude of (denegation). . . . That is how one should understand the text, if one admits its conclusion, which at first seemed strange to me. . . . This view of denegation fits very well with the fact that in analysis we never discover a “no” in the unconscious .  .  . But one certainly finds destruction there. So one must make a clearcut distinction between the instinct of destruction and the form of destruction . . . In denegation, one should see a concrete attitude at the origin of the explicit symbol of negation, which explicit symbol alone makes possible something like the use of the unconscious, all the while maintaining the repression.45

Hyppolite, following Freud, identifies negation with symbolic, semiotic (Freud speaks of judgment as a failed attempt at physical incorporation/ejection) function. Negation in judgment does not reach up to destruction, but is a symbol or an aborted attempt. Moreover, any negation is in this sense only a failed attempt at complete negation. Negation is not a negation but always only a symbol of negation. Negation is always impure and therefore incomplete. Any new negation of negation aspires to bring it to completion (i.e. to complete erasure and destruction) but succeeds only in the re-signification of it. The negated leads therefore to spectral, infinite, immortal

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existence (or nonexistence) in what Freud (and Kant, as we will see) understands as “the unconscious.” In his article on “Negation”46 [or “denegation,” Verneinung], Freud affirms: “there is no negation in the unconscious.” There is no negation because the unconscious already exists under the sign of negation; there is nothing further to negate, and any such further negation is unable to destroy the positive “content” of negation.47 The unconscious, however, must not be thought of as a static thesaurus of negated meanings. It is a system of traces, indeterminate signs, whose meaning must again and again be reproduced by the subject’s interpretation. This activity of imagination is built into a larger structure of the subject’s practical (historical) action: that of the drive [Trieb]. The structure of the drive corresponds to the threefold structure of the historical sign as developed by Kant in Conflict and, earlier, in Anthropology. The sign of negation is, first, rememorativum as long as it requires a constant return to itself, in its incomplete, negated condition. Second, it is demonstrativum: it demonstrates, experimentally, the failure of the subject to incorporate or to remedy the sign, to decide upon its existence or meaning. It is this drive to regress that Kant describes, both in Conflict and in “The Metaphysics of Morals,” as the repeated, compulsive return to the sign of the event, with a reenactment of enthusiasm or shudder . This demonstration leads the subject to reflect upon the infinite potential of his/her activity, and to perceive the “not” of the sign, its incompleteness, as the “not yet” as much as “no more.” The excess over reality leads the subject to turn away from the sign and look forward into the future, foreseeing the potential to surpass any given limit (the prognostic aspect of the sign). Time is a sphere of both (potential) reversibility and of (actual) irreversibility. Both these principles mirror the relationship between the positive and the negative. They are, first of all, complementary and reciprocal (a statement is either true, or false, etc.), but, as they start to apply to the same object one after another, and are not mutually exclusive, their irreversibility comes into play. The principle of temporal irreversibility is in general nothing but the asymmetry between the positive and the negative: the past is what has already once been negated and thus cannot be undone. The future, that which can be done, deals, on the opposite, with what could be either positive or negative—with the reversible. Thus, the irreversibility of the event bears a temporal character of the distinction between the past and the future.

We may say of the “denegated” fantasies that they enter consciousness “under subtraction.” The logical negation involved in judgment (this was not my mother: therefore someone else) is, as Freud shows, only a cover-up and a symbol for real opposition, an active resistance to recognition of the mother. This resistance takes place, as it were, in the absence of positive pressure (who asked the patient whether it was his mother, in the first place?). We deal with an opposition to which there is no prior preceding position. Somehow this case seems different from the complementary one where we would have a positive force without opposition. The dissymmetry of negation in judgment seems to have less to do with what Kant, in his “Attempt to Introduce Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” calls “logical negation” (A versus

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non-A) than with what he calls “real opposition”: an arithmetical negative, active force of resistance, anti-A.

The sublime character of the event: Resistance to the impossible The discussion of negativity sets the scene for the discussion of revolution in Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties. First step: what seems a “magical” disappearance of monarchical states is, in the terms of Kant’s “Attempt,” a “negative emergence.” It is an effect of the latent force of resistance, which has undermined despotism throughout the Enlightenment period, and now, despotism having vanished, is set free as an actual, no longer latent, force. This force is a mirror image, or after-image, of despotism, and therefore is counterdespotism, which is not particularly better than its counterpart. Retrospectively, the seemingly natural and invariably absolute monarchy became one of two opposite forces (therefore the event gave new meaning to the whole of history), and the political specter divided into the Right and the Left, the liberals and the conservatives. The resulting situation does not pose any major philosophical problems: it remains on the level of play of physical forces, which is still, by definition, reversible. The emergence was, in this sense, not negative but positive. But the very event of introduction (or eruption) of the negative due to the disappearance of the countering force is possible only because the subject attempts to introduce, actualize—what?—his/ her impossible fantasy of self-foundation, of absolute freedom. In this (imagined) moment of introduction, s/he posits simultaneously the positive (law) and the negative (cancellation of [prior] law), a point where negative and positive magnitudes would pass into each other and thus communicate (mathematically, zero manifests this impossible and necessary point: in the line of real numbers, the positive and negative numbers come infinitely close to each other but never meet). In an event, both the positive and the negative are present (to the mind) simultaneously, and this poses a formal contradiction. Revolution tries to found law in opposition to law; therefore, it is an enactment of (completely impossible) diabolical evil. This emergence of fantasy in a subject’s mind is truly negative. By revolution, the negative operation is redoubled. The very event of revolution is thought of as a “negative emergence,” or subtraction of law, by law. The result would be an impossible “minus law” that would, for Kant, mean something as impossible as a square root from a negative magnitude. But this subtraction is subtracting itself, negating itself (and thus becomes self-referential and infinite). The event did not happen except in our imagination. History is therefore progress toward the better minus revolution or, better, plus/minus the revolution. The revolution is “included out” of history. It functions as an operative fiction, a blind spot—it maintains the apparently coherent unity of the representation. The external principle of legality and resistance to it on the subject’s part, in the name of an autonomous legislation, coincide in the impossible focus imaginarius of the positive with the negative. Because of its double determination, the focal point is indeterminate and is located as much inside the subject as it acts upon him/her from

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outside. This imagined abyssal event provokes, in turn, an attempt to resist it, which inevitably fails as there is nothing to resist. But the persistence of the necessary fiction of absolute reversal leads the subject to resist again and again and to probe the reality of this uncanny fantasy. As a result, the subject repeatedly comes to reflect upon himself/ herself, and upon its infinite capacity, which is the mirror image of the impossible, infinite abyss. The supposedly absolute positivity of law is itself revealed as a negative counterpart to the absolute negativity of revolution.48 The situation corresponds exactly to one particular example in the theory of the sublime from the third Critique: Bold, overhanging, as it were, threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist [widerstehen] into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness [Allgewalt] of nature.49

In The Conflict of the Faculties Kant considers and rejects a speculative solution to the problem of history, one which would find a material embodiment of (otherwise unstable) subjectivity and thus make it actual and irrevocable. The followers of Kant, the so-called speculative idealists, attempted to determine the passage from subjectivity to the physical world, to establish a “pineal gland” connecting activity and passivity, interiority and exteriority. Kant, however, retrieves the indestructible and persistent character of human subjectivity from elsewhere, namely from the very failure of the subject to embody himself/herself or to find his/her own embodiment. Subjectivity is constituted by the lack of a speculative solution in the recurrent and recursive reproduction of the subject’s incompletion, and of the impurity of the negative. It has been repeatedly remarked that Kant’s reading of revolution follows the logic of sublime, as developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. There the observation of immensity in nature, an abyss of a mountain gorge for example, or the sky (an inverted abyss) leads the subject to turn to himself/herself and to admire his/her infinite power of imagination (because s/he can think of something even higher than the stars, deeper than the deepest abyss). What is the logic here? First, there is a coincidence between an object or event in the world (an abyss, a huge mountain, or a natural disaster) and the infinite ambition of reason and imagination. The absolute seems to enter the empirical world by negating it and infinitely surpassing (or destroying) everything hitherto familiar. Kant speaks interchangeably of the meaning of this event as absolute and infinite, which shows that he conceives the absolute in the negative sense (as the negation of all worldly limits; the negation of negation). Thus, the sublime object or event seems to mirror not even the absolutely positive entity or idea but the totalizing negativity, the very split between reason and understanding that is constitutive of the

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subject. Therefore, the logic of the sublime coincides, at first glance, with the logic of the beautiful (miraculous coincidence of nature with the regularity of transcendental forms): the latter satisfies the interest of Understanding, and the former, the interest of Reason: [T]he beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation [Darstellung] of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of an indeterminate concept of reason.50

But, of course, in the case of Reason such coincidence is prohibited. If it were true, the subject would become superfluous. The worldly, objective existence of the gap between reason and understanding would destroy that very gap, destroy the indeterminacy and suspense in relation to the absolute, the very faith and hope through which finite Kantian subject is made possible. Therefore, as in the case of revolution, Kant is quick to pull back. This is not what you think it is, it is just a natural object; true negativity is in your reason only, and your imagination is not only infinite (being relieved of its constraints by reason) but also strong enough to conceive impossible (logically contradictory) things. In the sublime experience, the world appears as it would be, if it were to correspond to the interest of reason. Kant comes close to Hegel’s speculative reflection, touches upon it, and pushes off from it. The contradiction is potential, not actual. Thus, both in the case of the sublime and of revolution, the sign induces (but does not necessarily cause, Kant emphasizes) a fantasy, a fear, or a desire for an impossible, contradictory, but still imaginable situation (such as reality vanishing in response to the subject’s incapacity to grasp it or law founded on the opposition to law). Then, in turn, it leads to repulsion from—a disavowal of—this situation. The sign maintains the fantasy while preserving the subject’s alibi (this is not really true, these are my reveries), but makes the fantasy unforgettable (internal and therefore indestructible) through the mnemotechnics of denial. The repetitive insistence of this (fundamental) fantasy that would, if it were true, subvert the subject actually maintains it. The sublime sign vividly testifies against the Schwärmerei (exaltation) of dogmatism (i.e. reaffirms reason’s authority over understanding), and reassures reason of its autonomous, infinite power (Kraft). The logic of revolution in Kant strictly coincides with the logic of “fundamental,” or “original,” fantasy developed in psychoanalysis. The content of this fantasy is the self-foundation or self-conception of subject; therefore the Oedipal myth is one of its paradigmatic figures. Another common paradigm of fundamental fantasy, particularly important for Freud, is the masochistic one, where activity and passivity coincide in the grammatical “passive” voice: “A child is being beaten” (Ein Kind wird geschlagen).51 In this grammatical form, the action is formally attributed to the subject, who is, at the same time, its object. The circular, reflexive form of the foundation requires an imaginary reversal, an imposition of reciprocity (pertaining to symbolic systems) upon the irreversibility and asymmetry of the finite human world. In the case of Oedipus, and more generally of incest, the noncontradictory, and physically quite possible, sexual act with one’s mother, induces a logically impossible fantasy of being one’s father. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, in their masterful study of Freud’s theory

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of fantasy (“Fantasme des origines et l’origine du fantasme”52), show that the form of the fundamental fantasy coincides with its content: the subject not only imagines self-foundation but aspires to perform this foundation by the very act of fantasizing, as long as the latter is a reflexive, self-affecting act mediated by the imagination of an impossible self-mastery. First, the fiction of self-foundation serves as a “negative magnitude,” an active appropriation of one’s passive state and an instrument of selfcontrol. The situation is thus parallel with “magical” subjectivization by means of negative magnitudes, addressed earlier, and the prototype of the Oedipal reversal of family roles is the Freudian game of fort-da. Second, the attempt to achieve selffoundation fails, but this failure serves, in its turn, as a mirror, which allows the subject to reflect on his/her infinite relation to oneself. This is also how the things stand with Kant’s theory of revolution. The impossible idea of self-foundation (and at the same time self-subversion) of law does not have any tangible existence, either objectively or subjectively. As any fantasy, it has a practical existence qua attempt or probe. It is constituted in the spectators of revolution by the repeated attempts (experiments) of mental reversal, of time (turning back to the point of origin), or of the political order (the sovereign rules the people or the people rule over the sovereign). Needless to say, the activity of revolutionaries themselves aims at the same reversal, enacting it experimentally not in their mind but on the stage of the world; hence the same fantasy of returning to the past (Rome), reversing history, prosecuting the king qua king (thus making law cancel the previous legal order). However, as Kant insists, a true, accomplished reversal of this kind (such as “diabolical evil”) is logically contradictory and thus infinitely unachievable. The failure of this effort serves a reflective purpose, revealing to the subject his/her specific, resistant character. The subject learns that, in its resistance, it is absolutely active, in the sense that its activity is driven by something nonworldly. Thus, if it does not found, it at least finds itself: the subject is symbolically constituted by the failure to reach its foundation. Instead of the permanency of foundation, revolution—the irreversibility of the failed reversal—gives the subject the spectral immortality of infinite progress, the constancy of being inconstant. The nonremediable, unforgettable character of the idea of revolution has to do not only with the fact that it did not happen but also with the structure of this very thought. This structure is one of the imagined coincidences of opposites. It is symmetrical, “palindromic” (law/antilaw), so to speak, and therefore lacking counterthought, an efficient remedy that would allow one not to think about it. This, as mentioned earlier, is grounds for the famous “ambiguity” of Kant’s revolution: from one point of view, it is the advent of law, from another it is its complete annulment. The denegation, prohibition, subtraction of this (anyway) impossible event is the exemption of an ambiguous element as a basis for reciprocity of a system. To distinguish between legality and illegality requires foreclosing the imaginary point of their intersection in time, in space, or in logic. The impossibility of reversal or remedy exposed by revolution does not become a remedy in its turn. If laughter, as Kant says in the “Attempt to Introduce Negative Magnitudes . . .,” is difficult to stop, even by turning back to something serious, then

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revolution, in its self-contradictory absurdity, is a kind of joke that causes transcendental laughter, one for which there is no remedy. And indeed, Kant’s consideration of revolution in the second Conflict ends with a joke that exposes its paradoxical nature. Conclusion. A doctor who consoled his patients from one day to the next with hopes of a speedy convalescence, pledging to one that his pulse beat better, to another an improvement in his stool, to a third the same regarding his perspiration, etc., received a visit from one of his friends. “How is it going, dear friend, with your illness,” was the first question. “How should it be? [wie wird’s gehen?] I’m dying of sheer improvement! [Ich sterbe vor lauter Besserung!]—I blame no one, when, considering the ills of the state,” he begins to despair of the health of the humanity and its progress toward the better; but I would rely on the heroic remedy [Arzneimittel] that Hume prescribes and which would effect a quick cure. “If, at the present time,” he says, “I see the nations on the point of war with one another, it is as if I were seeing two besotted fellows beating each other about with cudgels in a china shop. For not only do they have to recover slowly from the bruises they administered to each other, but afterwards they must pay for the damages that they have done.” Sero sapient Phryges. However, the painful consequences of the present war can compel the political prophet to confess a very imminent turn [Wendung] of humanity to the better that is even now in prospect.53

This joke may be read in many ways. It is not even clear from the language what is going on: is it the doctor or the friend who asks the question, and which one of them is ill?54 I lean toward the first version: it seems that the doctor himself is ill, and the friend is asking him about his health. The doctor then, unable to detach from his professional role and at the same time aware of his situation, accompanies the sober forecast with a consolation. His expression takes on additional humor because the doctor’s death may indeed serve the improvement of the survivors who would thus get rid of his deceptive predictions and (through the evidence of his death) become aware of their own active subjectivity capable of acting here and now. This interpretation seems to be the most likely one, first of all because the distinction is made between the “patients” [Patienten] and a “friend” (who is therefore hardly a patient), and because the irony implied in the second possible interpretation (a patient mistrusting the doctor) would be pointless. But, more importantly, the interpretation that I choose thematizes the central issue of Kant’s philosophy: the internal split and the relationship between the passivity (receptivity) and activity of the subject. What is important to me here is the impossible symmetrical reversal that lies at its core. The doctor who is himself ill is unable to speak just from the point of view of the patient and applies to himself the deceptive formula “for sheer improvement.” The reversed situation (doctor in the position of patient) leads to an impossible coincidence and the clash of two (active and passive, doctor’s and patient’s) opposite points of view. Its impossible, reflexive character therefore evokes wars and (armed) revolutions that come close to the impossible idea of total suicide, self-subversion, but stay short of it (as Saint-Just’s Wilhelm Tell who shoots the apple on his own head). The evocation of the abyss and the failure to coincide with it makes wars and revolutions into sources of unstoppable “shudder” (or laughter) conducive to the institution of peace.

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In this interpretation, the Kantian joke and his theory of revolution correspond closely to the theory of laughter (thus a self-analysis of Kant’s favorite trope—a joke) developed several years earlier, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. If someone tells this story: an Indian, at the table of an Englishman in Surat, seeing a bottle of ale being opened, and all the beer, transformed into foam, spill out, displayed his great amazement [Verwunderung] with many exclamations, and in reply to the Englishman’s question “What is so amazing here?” answered, “I’m not amazed that it’s coming out but by how you got it all in,” we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure, not because we find ourselves cleverer than this ignorant person, or because of any other pleasing thing that the understanding allows us to note here, but because of a tense [gespannt] expectation that suddenly disappeared into nothing. . . . [Kant proceeds to retell several other jokes—A.M.]. It is noteworthy that in all such cases the joke must always contain something that can deceive for a moment; hence, when illusion disappears into nothing, the mind looks back again in order to try it once more, and thus is hurried this way and that by rapidly succeeding increases and decreases of tension and is set into oscillation [in Schwankung gesetzt wird]: which, because that which as it were struck the string bounces back suddenly (not through gradual slackening), is bound to cause a movement of the mind and an internal bodily movement in accordance with it, which continues involuntarily, and produces weariness, but at the same time also cheerfulness.55

The negative relation of mind and reality and the sudden emptying out of the subject’s representations univocally attribute laughter and the laughable to the sphere of the sublime (not of beautiful). Moreover, the structure of revolutionary shudder and enthusiasm coincides exactly with the structure of laughter. The subject follows in thought the reversal that would be impossible and senseless in reality (note the parallel between the content of the Indian’s suggestion and the structure of laughter itself), as though probing this impossibility and confirming it with relief. But the relief does not last long and the certitude is never complete: the reciprocity of symbolic structure drives the subject to probe again and again the possibility of self-mastery that is foreclosed by its finitude (i.e. by time). However, the laughter (or shudder) that originates from the impossibility of the reversal is itself irreversible. One cannot stop laughing and keeps laughing “involuntarily.” The difficulty of finding a counterpoint to laughter, mentioned by Kant in “Attempt,” has perhaps proven to be transcendental rather than empirical. The “irreversible reversal” that we have been searching for, with Kant, in the historical event of revolution comes into being through the failed reversal of the irreversible.

The third Conflict and the revolutionary spasm The logic of the second Conflict is transposed and continued in the third one.56 The theme of this essay is the relationship between the faculties of philosophy and medicine. The essay is devoted to the 1796 book by Christoph Hufeland, Macrobiotic,

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or The Art to Extend Human Life.57 Hufeland was a famous doctor of his time; he taught in the University of Iena, and treated Goethe and Schiller, among other patients. Kant also asked him advice on his own health. Hufeland’s book is a kind of pop-diet of the time. But it has a theoretical core: the distinction between the task of extending life and the task of curing diseases (which sometimes could actually help live longer). Therefore, Hufeland is concerned with the mind not just with the body, and is worried about excessive sensibility and sentimentality (Empfindelei), about a hypertension of the force of imagination (Einbildungskraft). “Thus [through an exalted imagination], one disposes the body to the sudden and violent revolutions [sic], which can harm life . . . because they turn a spark into a violent explosion.”58 Revolution itself is seen as a hyperbolic and hypochondriac phenomenon. Of course, Hufeland’s advices are banal and conformist: he recommends the following of diets, not to commit adultery, and even to observe the moral law (hence his interest in Kant)—a blasphemous, in Kant’s term, subordination of morals to physiological concerns. And still, Kant took interest in the book—because he had been searching for the zone where the subject’s freedom would intersect and interact with the pragmatic concerns of one’s phenomenal existence. Like in the two previous Conflicts, Kant finds a sphere within the jurisdiction of the medical faculty, where the problem, as well as its remedy, is determined by the free activity of the subject and by his/her reason, rather than by external and accidental material influences. This sphere is to be found, according to Kant, in various diseases that we would today call neuroses, caused or at least sustained by the activity of the subject. The fundamental problem of medicine coincides with the fundamental problem of Kant’s doctrine: the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the spontaneity and the receptivity of the subject. With the second of the two man’s natural wishes, to stay healthy [the first one was merely to prolong life—A.M.], it is, on the contrary [i.e., unlike the first case— A.M.], always uncertain. He can feel himself healthy (to judge by his comfortable feeling about his life) but he can never know that he is healthy. . . . I have outlived a good many of my friends or acquaintances who boasted of perfect health and lived by an orderly way of life adopted once and for all, while the seed of death (illness) lay in them unnoticed, ready to develop. They felt healthy but did not know that they were ill, for while the cause of natural death is always sickness, causality cannot be felt. It requires understanding, whose judgment can err. Feeling, on the other hand, is infallible [untrüglich], but we do not call a man ill unless he feels ill, he is entitled to express his well-being only by saying that he is apparently [scheinbarlich] in good health.59

The problem is that illness is defined ambiguously. It is both the actual physical process in the body and the feeling about this process, which is sometimes sufficient to constitute illness. We recognize the problem encountered in the case of history; we do not know whether or not the turning event, punctum flexus contrarii, is taking place right now. However, there are cases when enthusiasm about a turning toward the better is itself sufficient to constitute progress. Again, the discussion hinges on

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speculative possibility; a phenomenon may itself constitute a noumenally efficient force in history as in medicine. We will see how, carefully and hesitantly, as in the case of history, Kant bypasses the seduction of the ultimate fusion between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Medicine becomes, in Kant’s account, indeed akin to history: it is a personal history, or an (auto-)biography. That is why, after asking the reader’s pardon, in developing his argument about the medical faculty, he switches to first-person discourse and to personal experience as to the only possible way of discussing these matters. This experience is that of self-inflicted diseases: if they are simply phenomenal, and caused by a subject’s free activity, it would seem that the same activity would be able to put an end to them. With regard to these illnesses, Kant formulates the same question of phenomenality/noumenality as a heading for the whole discussion. This time it is formulated in terms of distinction between activity and passivity, interiority and exteriority: “On the power of the human mind to become a master over his morbid feelings merely by a firm resolution [Vorsatz].”60 Two prominent cases include hypochondria and insomnia. The first is defined as a fictitious or poetic (dichtende, the word used for creative writing) disease,61 which is a creation of the faculty of imagination [Einbildungskraft]. In the case of this Hypochondria vaga there is no definite material cause for the disease, and even the patient is unable to attribute it to one particular cause. Instead, he “finds in himself every disease he reads about in books.”62 The disease is thus that of reading or of imagination induced by signs. This imagination presents something fearful and catastrophic—an imaginary foe that the organism has to resist—and thus gives to the disease its body. The indeterminacy of the symptoms drives the subject to compulsive probing activity. Thus, through the medium of imagination, the mind manages to work upon itself (inflicting damage to itself), but in a manner diametrically opposed to the self-mastery of autonomous will. The opposite of the mind’s self-mastery, in other words, is faint-hearted brooding about the ills that could befall one, and that one would not be able to withstand if they should come. It is a kind of insanity; for though some sort of unhealthy condition .  .  . may be the source of it, this state is not felt immediately, as it affects the senses, but is projected back [vorgespiegelt] as an already impending [bevorstehendes] illness by poetic imagination [dichtende Einbildungskraft]. And then the self-tormenter (heautontimoroumenos),63 instead of pulling himself together, summons the doctor’s help.64

A very similar dynamic is in action in the case of insomnia. Doctors usually advise a patient to drive all thoughts from his head; but they return, or others come in their place, and keep him awake. The only disciplinary advice is to turn away his attention as soon as he perceives or becomes conscious of any thought stirring (just as if, with his eyes closed, he turned them to a different place). . . . But it may happen to anyone, now and then, that when he lies down in bed ready to sleep he cannot fall asleep even by diverting his thoughts in this way. When this happens he will feel a kind of spasm (like a cramp) in his brain . . .65

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The words “cramp” and “spasm” that are used here by Kant are another obvious parallel to the revolutionary context of the text. The words were widely used metaphorically with regard to the French Revolution. For example, the leader of the Girondist faction, P. Vergniaud, when he defended them from the accusations of Robespierre (April 10, 1793), says, rejecting the reproaches of excessive moderation: Either an insurrection has an object, or it does not have one. In the latter case, it is a convulsion of political body.66

The insurrection is thus exactly like melancholia in Freud’s analysis: when a subject lacks an object, the latter turns against itself and becomes a destructive form of selfrelation (terror, for instance). What is unclear is what precedes: the lack of object or destructive self-affection of “pure” insurrection. Kant was interested in the question of madness and the milder pathologies of spirit since the early period of his work. In 1764, he wrote “Essay on the Maladies of the Head,”67 by which he understands different kinds of madness. In this work, unlike the mature Conflict, Kant holds to the thesis on the physiological nature of madness—but whatever the causes of head diseases, their effects are of concern to Kant—disorders of free subjectivity. Their progression makes one lose contact with reality and requires a “diet of the mind.” This is precisely the problem that Kant will address in his critical writings by suggesting that the main faculties of the soul should be limited in their applicability. Thus, it is not accidental that, in classifying the diseases, Kant follows the hierarchical structure of the faculties of the soul (later to become the basis of Critique): thus, foolishness is a problem of mere passion; derangement, an effect of “reversal in the concepts of experience,” which in fact means confusing sensations and imagination, this “poetic force” active in one’s mind; dementia, a disorder of the power of judgment; and madness, a disorder of reason.68 Hypochondria figures here as a species of “derangement”; it is the result of dispersed irritation, where “an ill,” “regardless which place it may have as its main seat . . . migrates incessantly through the nerve tissue through all parts of the body. It draws a melancholic haze around the seat of the soul such as the patient feels in himself the illusions of almost all maladies of which he read in the books.”69 Further, in practice, it is identified with melancholia (“the melancholic is a fantasist with respect to life’s ills”70). Thus, hypochondria, and melancholia as its generalized version, are described here as conditions of indeterminate negativity, and at the same time reflexivity. The nerves, in this description, resemble the sentimentalist media that we discussed in the first chapter: Sterne’s literary sensorium of the world parallels Kant’s hypochondria. In the Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View, Kant returns to the question of melancholia and hypochondria. He identifies them with each other and adds, to the old idea of imagination, the idea of signs that induce melancholic hypochondria: “certain physical sensations do not so much disclose a real disease present in the body but rather are mere causes of anxiety about it.”71 As mentioned earlier, hypochondria, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, was a highly popular cultural topic, and was used synonymously with melancholia: not just as a specific psychophysiological problem, but as a social malaise.72 Samuel

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Johnson, in his dictionary of 1755, defines “hypochondriac” as “melancholy; disordered in the imagination.”73 The indeterminate (vague) location of hypochondria in the body and its link to imagination indeed brings it close to the old Aristotelian theory of melancholia (this disorder of geniuses produced by a liquid with contradictory qualities), except that it is increasingly explained by nerves and character rather than by humors or glands. Hypochondria is a kind of reflexivization of melancholia: the physiological theory of soul, which is the basis for conceiving melancholia, becomes itself a symptom of disorder: the hypochondriac is the one who tries to localize physiologically the negative sentiment that s/he feels. While hypochondria describes, in the language of the time, a complex negative affectation similar to melancholia, and Kant also treats it as a disorder, it must be noted that its very thematization is linked to the emancipatory tendencies of Enlightenment. Hypochondria is a sympathetic description of someone, like Kant, who does not trust his health to the alienated medical “science,” but wants to have a conscious and rational attitude to his body. The negative affect is the price one pays for autonomy, but also the result of an ideological clash within Enlightenment, between abstract rationality and free subjectivityThus, derision over “hypochondria” may mean ideological polemic from the point of view of abstract rationality, and transcendental hypochondria as developed in the Conflict is a symptom of the internal crisis of Enlightenment. Still, the problem of hypochondria and insomnia lies, for Kant, within the subject: in the circular and interwoven character of activity and passivity, nature and mind. The faculty of imagination Einbildungskraft is the central notion in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it unites in itself both active and receptive aspects of subjectivity. In actively creating an image and encoding it in terms of perception, as though it had been affecting it from outside, imagination is a paradoxical knot of past and future, activity and passivity. As such, it serves as a mediator between categories of understanding and forms of experience.74 The danger and the spastic character of hypochondria lie in the reversibility and infinite circularity between the subject’s body and his/her will that characterize the process of imagination. Imagination, says Kant in Conflict, performs a temporal reversal and hypostasizes the creation of mind as a preceding, exterior state of affairs. Moreover, as a result of indeterminacy of symptoms (signs in the body) or letters (signs in the book), the subject has his/her own activity coming onto him, as it were, from outside, through compulsion. The situation speaks to the age-old “psychophysical problem” and to Kant’s Third Antinomy: the activity of the subject is himself/herself corporeal and may thus be explained (away) by an external chain of causes. A vicious circle is thus formed between the exteriority and interiority of causation. This aporetic, infinite situation results in a spasm or cramp: the subject realizes that s/he produces the disease himself/herself, and thus stops doing anything, which hinders the body, and this results, of course, in an aggravation of his/her state. Note the temporal deadlock that constitutes the spasm—a vicious circle of subjectivity apparent also in the situation of revolution. If I want good institutions, I need good people and their mores; if I need good people and their mores, I need good institutions to have educated them; if I actually start thinking about it, I am entirely lost.

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The very notion of fear implies the notion of imagination.75 Fear anticipates and constructs an imaginary object. The actual object of fear is indeterminate, it is the indeterminacy itself, and the subject may push it as far as he can in his imagination, along the infinite line that goes from being to nothing. This fear is, of course, equally a temptation of negativity. However, resistance of the subject to his own tempting imagination and his realization of the fact that sensual imagination is not capable of catching a noumenal, ultimate catastrophe oppose the force of freedom to the imaginary catastrophe. The hypochondriac imagination may paralyze the subject with an indestructible image of self-destruction. At the same time, fear of this impossible catastrophe may provide the subject with the infinite will to self-perfection. The imaginary disease is, in this case, a vehicle and symptom of human progress. “Discomfort is itself not a sickness but often only the desire to increase one’s wellbeing [Begierde der Erweiterung des Wohlbehagens]—not the negative but the contrarie oppositum,” says Kant in his Opus Posthumum,76 two years after the publication of The Conflict of the Faculties. “Not the negative but the contrarie oppositum” means “not nihil negativum” but “nihil privativum”—a force of hindrance that is another aspect of the force of progress. The landscape is the same as in Conflict. What seems, on the one hand, to be an image of an absolute, impossible catastrophe is at the same time a sign and a vehicle of the will for improvement, in the spectators who experience the event of revolution as sublime. The same, as we saw in the first chapter, may be said of Russian postcommunist subjects. They are paralyzed by the specter of self-annulment, but are also, paradoxically, mobilized by it, so that their exaggerated melancholia is a vehicle and symptom of the will for improvement. As I mentioned earlier, the indestructible (“inexpiable”) nature of the imagined catastrophe is its suspended character, neither purely objective nor purely subjective. Since it is not objective, it may not be solved by a physical, objective remedy; but since it is not purely subjective (it has an intentional meaning, an objectivated content), it may not be undone simply by an effort of will. The same indestructibility of imagination is at stake here. Further, as in the case of revolution, the imagination of these or those ills is not the whole picture; the fundamental fantasy here is the illusion of complete self-mastery, that is, mastery over one’s own body and denial of the exterior character of diseases. The “opposite of self-mastery” is illusion and will of complete physical selfmastery, in the same way as the opposite of autonomous self-legislation of moral law is the will and illusion to lay the foundation of this law anew, in the historical world. The subject is not, truly, the free author of his/her own diseases (in this case, it would be easy to undo them), but he imagines himself/herself being one. The self-inflicted disease of hypochondria therefore parallels the case of the diabolical evil of self-annulling law in the French Revolution. Illusion was driving the activity of revolutionaries, but it did not, from this fact, become truer. What, then, is true mastery? What would be an alternative and a remedy to hypochondria? Is it possible to get rid of this self-reinforcing short-circuit? Here Kant, expectedly, hesitates. Kant shows that a purely “activist” (although not truly active, in Kant’s terms) instrumental solution to hypochondria (belief in the omnipotence of diet, for example)

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is insufficient. Such a solution is premised on belief in the unity of mind and body and on eudemonistic (directed at happiness) ethics. To this remedy, which Kant sometimes77 calls Epicurean, he seems to oppose a Stoic remedy: we do not, indeed, have control over our body, but we do (supposedly) have control over our thoughts. The first recipe that Kant suggests would therefore consist in the “subtraction of attention” away from the imagined illness, or from the obsessive thought, to some other issue (compare to this the remedy to laughter proposed in “Attempt”). Another recipe, also borrowed from the Stoics, is added to the first one. It is an (parody) approximation of the curing power of Kant’s critique. One has to realize that physical diseases develop in the body and therefore, if existent, will develop beyond my will. If not—well, it is even better. However, this method is more of a noble lie: Kant formulates it in his favorite conditional, fictional mode: “But I have mastered its influence on my thoughts and actions by diverting my attention from this feeling [of pressure—A.M.], as if it had nothing to do with me [als ob es mich gar nicht anginge].”78 In fact, the strict separation of body and mind is refuted by the very fact of the existence of self-inflicted illnesses. Illness has a physical as well as a semiotic, symptomatic character (signs in the books or in the body). The division between the physical and the spiritual is obviously wrong when it comes to signs. The very fact that the compulsive probing of interpretation may be revoked by the subject itself contributes, logically enough, to its anxiety. Such a revocation is, however, impossible, because meaning is already exteriorized and is now located neither in the sign itself nor in the subject who interprets it. Indeed, along with all his attempts to prescribe a remedy, Kant persistently observes that, in spite of applying them, he has himself been unable to fully get rid of hypochondria or insomnia. He shrewdly remarks that there are cases when the vicious circle of self-mastery seizes one irremediably. All pathological attacks in which man’s mind can become a master over these feelings by sheer steadfast will, as the superior power of a reasoning animal, are spastic (cramplike) in nature. But we cannot convert this proposition and say that every spastic seizure can be checked or eliminated merely by a firm resolution. For some of them are such that an attempt to subject them to the forces of one’s resolution aggravates the convulsive ailment. This was true in my own case, when I contracted an illness that the Copenhagen Newspaper described, about a year ago, as an “epidemical catarrh accompanied by pressure in the head [Kopfbedrückung]” (I came down with it a year before this, but the symptoms were similar). The result of it was that I felt disorganized—or at least weakened and dulled—in my intellectual work; and since this ailment has attached itself to the natural weakness of my old age, it will end only with the life itself.79

This case is precisely one of the “illness read of in books”—or newspapers. Kant even takes time to emphasize the retroactive temporal structure of this hypochondriac imagination and interpretation. The sign (what he calls in the second Conflict as a “preliminary sign,” Vorzeichen) precedes and determines actual recognition and interpretation. The meaning of a sign is temporal and quasi-circular; interpretation is induced by the past sign and projects back into it (one is reminded of Freud’s

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Nachträglichkeit). Remember the interrelation described in the second Conflict between two elements of the event, Eräugnis and Begebenheit. The structure seems parallel to the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Jewish priests, mentioned in the beginning of the second Conflict: in their lamentations about the approaching catastrophe, they burdened or put pressure [beschwert hatten] upon the people they governed and thus brought the state to dissolution. The fact that disease is inflicted by the activity of a subject’s imagination does not mean that s/he will be free to revoke it. The activity here is exterior to its actor. The split between exteriority and interiority (between higher and lower “faculties”) is an interior one; it cuts through the very intimacy of the subject. The fact that the imagination of the subject does not correspond here, as Kant notes,80 to any present object does not necessarily give relief, but places this object of imagination into a spectral limbo, neither interior nor exterior. The deadlock is not surprising to anyone who has read the second Conflict and “The Metaphysics of Morals”: the scars left by signs that are indeterminate in their meaning are irremovable, whether it is a good thing or not. As a result of this irrevocable event, we risk falling into aporetic circulation or paralysis. However, as in the case of revolution, Kant seems to provide, once more, for a dissymmetrical, progressive way of life, even with compulsive oscillation. The direct remedy of dismissing selfinflicted illnesses “as though they would have nothing to do with me”81 is unavailable. However, Kant gives indirect hints at the possible way of dealing with indeterminate signs without submitting to the imaginary death avant la lettre. The most direct statement of a remedy that would still be plausible, after all that has been said, is given in passing, among several other relative, empirical dietetic prescriptions. By the way, philosophizing, in a sense that does not involve being a philosopher, is a means of warding off many disagreeable feelings and, besides, a stimulant to the mind that introduces an interest into its occupations—an interest which, just because it is independent of external contingencies, is powerful and sincere, though it is merely in the nature of a game, and keeps the vital force from running down. On the other hand philosophy, whose interest is the entire end of reason (an absolute unity), brings with it a feeling of power [Gefühl der Kraft] which can well compensate to some degree for the weaknesses of old age through an appreciation of life’s value by reason [vernünftige].82

We turn back to the problem as presented in the previous section of my text: to the logic of the sublime. If the subject realizes that the illness s/he has been imagining is not contained in his/her own symptoms, that s/he does not immediately die at the thought of a mortal disease, s/he obviously feels temporary relief (before s/he starts probing again). But, even more importantly, in front of this objectless anxiety s/he is able to reflect (as in the case of the sublime laughter) upon the infinite power of one’s imagination, which is one’s own, but is decentered and located beyond one’s control. Now, along the lines we have traced previously, this is not the end of the logical sequence. Subsequently the subject perceives his power to resist and repel the fantasy

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of an abyssal catastrophe (suicide by force of one’s mind, so to say): his/her infinite esteem for life is proven by the force to withstand the (impossible) seduction of the suicide qua effective self-mastery. The feeling of power is, of course, a phenomenal, not noumenal, condition. But it is a peculiar one. Power is exactly the kind of feeling (about oneself) that would be impossible if not probed and checked in experience. The feeling of illness also has this double character! The feeling of power is a mirror image of a fantasy of a paralyzing catastrophe (spasm). Because this paralysis is not complete, because it is not yet death, the mind reflects that the inherent incompleteness of negation testifies to the infinite potential of the absolutely positive.83 Philosophizing therefore comes close to the “Stoic” remedy. The problem with this remedy is that it is fiction that covers up the true state of things. According to Kant, the Stoics’ remedy is self-contradictory: the need for it is precisely the consequence of the interaction between mind and body. The remedy, by solving the medical or quasimedical problem, operates on the bodily symptoms of the disease (in contradiction to what it says explicitly). As such it is, however, truly beneficial. In accordance with the text on “negative magnitudes,” one has to treat the detachment of mind from the disease not as a mere lack (nihil negativum) of connection between mind and body, but as a stimulating activity, which is still acting on the body, but in a negative (in the sense of real opposition) way. As Kant writes in his essay “Announcement of the Near Conclusion of a Treaty for Eternal Peace in Philosophy,”84 The Stoic philosopher Posidonius gave an example of the medicinal power of philosophy when he experimented on his very own person in the presence of the great Pompei (Cicero, Tusculanes, lib. 2, sect. 61): he was able to overpower a violent attack of gout by means of a lively attack on the Epicurean school; the attack of gout went down to his feet, never having been able to reach his heart and his head. And so he proved the immediate physical effect of philosophy, which nature intended to achieve by its means (bodily health) when he declaimed the sentence: “pain is nothing evil.”85

The imaginary disease, in its turn, plays the role of necessary fiction—negative magnitude introduced as a fulcrum to jump in thought toward the positive one. That is why Kant opens his essay by claiming that only duty is a panacea against all diseases although this is “only a diet to be adopted: i.e., it functions only negatively, as an art to keep the illness away [abzuhalten].” The positivity of moral law appears for the thought, as in the case of the French Revolution, secondarily, in response to the fantasy of the catastrophe of self-contradiction, and the negative work of its rejection. However, the subject is still, reactively, in the position of activity toward this catastrophe, as long as its incompleteness allows projecting the catastrophe into the future, as an uncertain danger that can be actively anticipated. The reader should be aware that the view of duty and of philosophy presented in the third Conflict is far from the common view of Kant’s ethical teaching (mostly based on his ethical writings of the 1780s). Here Kant does not maintain (as Hegel attributes

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to him in Phenomenology) that the subject should not notice anything around him/her and act on a purely subjective internal law. Duty and moral law are read in political and personal history, which appears as the history of the body. However, due to the quasi-circular structure of interpretation, Kant is able to establish the autonomy and activity of his ethics by performing a temporal inversion: the catastrophe to which he reacts is projected into the future. Hegel perceives this very well and accuses Kant86 of a fictional “transposition” [Verstellung], of introducing a certain theater where the past is presented as future and future as past. However, it is precisely the point of Kant’s work that both fiction and temporal inversion are inherent qualities of imagination, thus also of signs and of events (revolutions). Hegel rightly perceives the theatrical, mimetic aspect of Kant’s “imagination.” This aspect becomes obvious in texts such as The Conflict of the Faculties where revolutionaries, by their performance inversions, provoke the reflection of “spectators” upon their duties, and the hypochondriac subject plays games with himself or herself, and provokes the imposition of a sheer sign, or law, by falling into self-contradiction. The enactment of anxiety provokes, by opposition, the flight to pure duty. The theatrical aspect of Kant’s concept of imagination is, however, already obvious from his own frequent reference to it as “play.” Thus, very precisely, he calls hypochondria a counterbalance (literally, a “counter-play” [Widerspiel]) to the mind’s true self-mastery.87 However, Hegel underestimates the fact that the temporal inversion enacted by imagination is, in Kant, also a fictional enactment of foundation (and, at the same time, subversion) of subjectivity, in its relation to objectivity. This is even more striking since Hegel himself, in the same book, gives a strikingly close version of the constitutive act of subjectivity when he describes a family burying the already dead relative as “taking upon itself the act of destruction.”88 Imagination is a constitutive condition both of objective knowledge (determination of the past) and, as we come to see, of will (determination of future). Imagination helps to maintain anxiety, a constant state of emergency, without which any need for action or subjectivity would be erased. However, the mediator of the imagination is subsequently repelled, suspended, or foreclosed so that the subject is able to adequately perceive and act in the world. Kant’s ethic is abstract because it is maximalist. An ethical act is mediated by the fantasy of the (always deferred) catastrophe of self-annulment (=foundation), a constant state of emergency (this catastrophe is self-contradiction in the case of categorical imperative as well as of revolution). The ethical act is presented as a suspension of the whole world in the “either/or” (thus anticipating Kierkegaard). The very distinction of past and future, of activity and passivity whose quid pro quo Hegel reproaches to Kant, become possible through the negative magnitude of imagination, the subtraction of a catastrophic fantasy. Without imagination (a condition unthinkable for mortals), the subject would undergo symbolic collapse like that of Borges’ “immortal.” A catastrophe, the suspension of which by imagination maintains subjectivity, would actually happen at the moment that it is definitively ruled out. Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s (and his own) “nonserious” enactment of subjectivity leads him to move forward toward the recognition of catastrophe as a fait accompli and to grant recognition and embodiment

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of the subject’s negativity in the world. Here Hegel, hesitantly, departs from Kant and posits infinite subjectivity as an immediate fact. The absolute subject who coincides with substance is the opposite of the Kantian subject. The Hegelian incorporation of the subject signifies the dissolution and subversion of subjectivity, as we understand it, and comes close to what psychoanalysis calls a psychosis. The oscillation of the moral subject between external and internal motivation is structured like the process of reading itself and grounded in the double determination of a sign. Negativity is revealed to the subject in the “moral feeling” of anxiety that probes and reaffirms worldly (bodily) negativity. This revelation of negativity in a sign may only be incomplete and obscure. It is constituted as a denial and failure of knowledge. Kant’s moral law is premised on the denial of access to the subject’s own (“noumenal”) will. Hence law and body share the obscurity of a sign. All of this gives us an indication of the way of life that Kant actually describes and prescribes, the way of living through the event. It is an unstable, swaying equilibrium. The subject keeps returning to the edge of a catastrophe to push off from its image with new vigor, as though applying a lever. In revolution, as in hypochondria, the asymmetry of history is affirmed, but in a strange way, through a rejection of complementary asymmetry. Progress toward good is achieved through the glimpse into and the rejection of an irrevocable catastrophe. Indeed, while talking of his invincible insomnia, Kant inserts the following footnote: It is sometimes said that exercise and early training are the only factors determining which side of a man’s body will be stronger or weaker, as far as the use of his external members is concerned. . . . But this assertion is quite incorrect. Experience [Erfahrung] teaches that if we have our shoe measurements taken from our left foot, and the left shoe fits perfectly, the right one is too tight; and we can hardly lay the blame for this on our parents, for not having taught us better when we were children. The advantage of the right side over the left can also be seen from the fact that, if we want to cross a deep ditch [tiefen Graben], we put our weight on the left foot and step over with the right; otherwise we risk falling into the ditch. The fact that Prussian infantrymen are trained to start out with the left foot confirms, rather than refutes, this assertion; for they put this foot in front, as on a fulcrum [hypomochlium, literally, small lever—A.M.], in order to use the right side for the impetus of the attack, which they execute with the right foot against the left.89

This text, first noticed and commented on by Jacques Derrida,90 speaks for itself. Revolution is here allegorically presented as a syncope91 of history: a fictional negative magnitude put forward for the sake of instantaneous jump forward with an impulse of infinite power. One has to move up to a dangerous point into the direction of an abyss to obtain élan to jump forward as far as one can (but toward no specific goal or limit). Imagination and interpretation are a “counterplay” [Widerspiel] that provokes the reflection of the subject on its negative capacity, and proves it by elaborating and refuting a contrary assumption. The “diabolical evil” of revolution is such a fulcrum; it plays the role of an advocatus diaboli.

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Arnd Wedemeyer, in his brilliant article “Kant Spacing Out,”92 quotes a note of old Kant that is published in the Opus Posthumum: A V[l]igilantius But not burdened [behaftet] with coma vigil.

The former can be a businessman; the latter is incapable of business but rather bound [geheftet] to a thought that merely is incapable of stepping forward to another and pushing it forward and extending itself. Coma Vigil.

Coma Vigil is a great oxymoron, and a very precise name for insomnia, this strange and fascinating condition between sleeping and waking, in which the two are reflexively interwoven. Wedemeyer notes, however, that Kant, in this period, suffered from more than just insomnia, but from long stupor-like states in which he continuously repeated names of his friends. In his interpretation, the Coma Vigil is the name for a sort of intellectual intuition that corresponds, in the bodily experience, to Kant’s transcendental subject, which obsessively repeats its “I”—“a Heftung [boundedness] to the very form of thinking, that is, the Heftung of pure apperception onto itself, cannot be experienced.”93 Wedemeyer even invents a pun and names Kant’s teaching a “Transcendental Paralytic.”94 And then it turns out that the Coma Vigil is a point-like perforation of consciousness, its blind spot, in which it opens up for transcendence. Both the material and its analysis by Wedemeyer are important for my argument since the paralyzing and fascinating force of transcendental subjectivity is akin to the spasm of the event. But Kant would not agree with the logophobic tendency of Wedemeyer (who is probably inspired by Levinas) of identifying the ground of reason with a pathological stupor to be saved only through a transcendent Other. For Kant, at least in this case, subjectivity is not just a self-identical “I” but a reflection of the “I” over itself, of the “I” as subject, to “I” as object, so that hypochondria and insomnia are not just issues of consciousness, but (and here I agree with Susan Shell) of its relationship with the body. Hence the danger of a spasm-like paralysis of a vicious circle that an oxymoron-like Coma Vigil nicely captures. From this proceeds a rhythmic dissolution of this deadlock through the separation and symbolization of the subject and object, negation and affirmation, and through negative magnitudes (such as the thought of jackal as opposed to the tiger, in the “Attempt.” Kant is all about the anxiety of paralysis, and the search of remedy from it, in walking, marching, and progressing. Now, one has to view this practice of syncopated progressing in close connection with the question of reading signs. In the third Conflict signs, whether books or bodily symptoms appear to be pathogenic. However, a sign—a sheer sign—appears also as a cure. When Kant conceives of a remedy against (persistent) insomnia, he readily concedes that a simple diversion of attention is not enough. As we know from the text on “negative magnitudes,” there has to be a counterforce or a lever for such negative effort. [I]mpatient at feeling my sleep interfered with, I soon had recourse to my Stoic remedy of fixing my thought forcibly on some neutral object that I chose at random

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(for example, the name Cicero which contains [enthaltenden] many associated ideas [Nebenvorstellungen]), and so diverting my attention from sensation.95

Cicero is, of course, anything but an object “chosen at random.” In the Critique of Pure Reason,Cicero appears as a critic of the very (“Stoic”) doctrine Kant provisionally puts forward in the beginning of the third Conflict: namely, that one does not have to worry about one’s sickness, since if one is already sick, then one cannot do anything about it. This erroneous doctrine (“ignava ratio,” lazy reason, as Kant calls it) is paradoxically associated in the first Critique with the belief in the mind’s complete mastery over the world, possibility to embrace it all. *[Ignava ratio] is what the ancient dialecticians called the sophism which goes as follows: if it is your fate to recover from this illness, then that will happen whether you employ your physician or not. Cicero says that this way of inferring gets its name from the fact that if one follows it, then that would leave reason without any use in life.

This footnote refers to the following place in the text: The first mistake that arises from using the idea of a highest being not merely regulatively but (contrary to the nature of an idea) constitutively, is that of lazy reason (ignava ratio).* One can use this term for any principle that makes one regard his investigation into nature, whatever it may be, as absolutely complete, so that reason can take a rest, as though it had already accomplished its business.96

Crucially for my present discussion, Kant already here, in the first Critique, indicates the interconnectedness and circularity between the strict separation of mind and world, and of their complete fusion. Together these two fictions constitute the convulsion of hypochondria. In the first Critique Kant refutes, of course, the Stoic solution and points at its danger. In the third Conflict it also ultimately fails. But Cicero is also evoked in the passage from the “Announcement” (quoted above) where he is the source for the story about Posidonius, the crucial “positive” example, or type, which Kant gives of a correct ethical and medical attitude. Cicero thus induces associations [Nebenvorstellungen] both with good and bad remedy or with good and bad applications of the same remedy. Why, then, this elliptical mention of him, and the use of his sheer name, rather than of the doctrines associated with his name, to set oneself to sleep? The mention of the name “Cicero” suspends its meaning(s) between affirmation and negation; it evokes at the same time the positive and negative perspectives upon the “Stoic remedy.” As such, it subtracts the attention from the vicious circle to give it access to the suspended core of the problem (mind/body indeterminacy). The task of suspension is less to direct attention elsewhere than it is what Kant calls in the “Attempt” the “negative attention,” attention whose target is the same one from which it turns away. In this operation, the sheer name of Cicero is analogous to the doctrine that it evokes in mind: the Stoic doctrine that pretends to believe in the separation of mind and body, but, in the guise of this pretense, actually performs a vigorous negative intervention of mind into the body.

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The “sheer” matter of a sign is not so easy to attain. Usually one automatically jumps over from a name to its meaning ( Roman philosopher and consul, savior of the fatherland, etc.). A classical way to achieve the opaque materiality of a sign, especially during insomnia, is repetition. Evoking Cicero as a sheer name serves the same purpose as the counting of sheep, and is, likewise, most easily (as one may add to Kant’s elliptic text) achieved by repeating it. Repeat the name of Cicero 30 times and it will suspend (although not completely lose) its meaning for you. However, this repetition would only be a sign of repetition on a larger scale—the anxious oscillation between attempts to master one’s body and attempts to detach oneself from it. This desperate circulation may ultimately lead to saturation, suspension of both doctrines, and prepare an infinite space for a jump out of the circle. Such is the hope given by experience. The name of Cicero stands, in the end, for the sign, or signs, as such. Signs both carry disease (induce imagination) and provide remedies for it (being different from their imagined meanings). The clash and ambiguity of two opposite, equally untenable propositions allow the subject to emancipate him/herself from them and to hold to the material, obscure sign as to a provisional safeguard of the only self-mastery actually available to him or her: a chance of emancipation.

Reading, then, is structured in the way that the Prussian infantry walks or in the mode of walking in general. Each sign provides a seductive interpretation but the reader pulls back to realize that this interpretation is not included in the present sign. This interpretation is therefore not affirmed but suspended, inviting a new sign to readdress the meaning of the former one, and so on. Reading is thus a successive oscillatory motion that moves forward by going back and forth or from left to right and from right to left. It is therefore structured like walking, or like history, with its progress (German Fortschritt, meaning, like its Latin analogue, a “step forward”). Oscillation differs from circularity in its expanding character: each time we go to the “left” even further, then even further to the right, in the mode of a contest [Streit]. The meaning of Kant’s title therefore appears to designate the competition of subject with itself, which is a guarantee of infinite progress. Thus, the French Revolution claimed a return to the Roman republic, in a contest against the more recent legacy of Rome (Catholicism, for example), turning the past from passive legitimate obedience into the product of an active process of institution. Kant makes indirect references to walking throughout the treatise, but by the very end of it the metaphor of reading (interpreting) as walking finally surfaces, in a masterful stroke. Kant tells the reader about the difficulties that he encounters with reading in his old age. To be easier to read, a text should be printed in “Breitkopf characters, which would correspond better to the name Buchstaben [letters] (bücherner Stabe [beechwood staffs], as though for steadying oneself [Feststehen]).”97 The word Feststehen, in its ambiguity, on its own may serve as an emblem of The Conflict of the Faculties and of my reading of it. Literally it means to stand still and upright. The word has a transitive twin in the word Feststellen, to posit and fix. However, in the context of staffs it means, as the translator in this instance rightly understands, “steadying oneself,” serving as a lever to push away from the ground. The

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English relative of the prefix fest-, “fast,” in its meanings of fixation (“to hold fast”) and rapidity, carries the same ambiguity even more vividly. Revolution evokes a meaning of foundation, of hard soil, of absolute beginning—of prescribing law to oneself. This meaning is an impossible even unthinkable one. The word touches upon the fantasy of foundation, suspends it, and pushes the reader off. It is itself a staff or a probe. But this particular staff is used to push off from the abyss! The only possible way to imagine this mode of walking would be to imagine someone who is climbing, as the hero in a cartoon, up a falling stairway. By evoking the impossible fantasy of absolute legislation, the word Feststehen, this historical sign, conceals and sustains the nomadic actuality (temporality) of historical being as progress and the actuality of law as of the infinite process of interpretation. It evokes the transcendental fiction of fixed meanings of the words in a universal language, then turns away and alludes to the allegorical structure of meaning (one uses the literal meaning of a word to push off toward a metaphorical one). The word Feststehen means both “fixing” and “steadying oneself,” both impossible fixation and persistent attempts (probes) of momentary fixation, which one uses to move on—one meaning through and because of the other. The word “revolution,” which has always meant both an event of change (in its political usage) and an epoch (an astronomical “revolution” is the period between two identical positions of stars in the sky)98 sends back from the fantasy of foundation toward the infinite power of humans to negate every other state of affairs and to turn away toward the new and unknown. Revolution (in the first sense) is the impossible condition of possibility of the revolution (in the second sense). The pivotal turn of the staff—toward the ground; away from it—is the closest meaning of the volvo of revolution.

Conclusion Theoretical implications The analysis of Kant’s theory of revolution allows us to clarify its concept and its applicability to the present political situation. My reading shows that the concept of event may not be used as yet another meta-theoretical instance to precede or incorporate the instance of being. The fact that Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis finds its genealogy in the reaction to the French Revolution by contemporary thinkers suggests that this concept plays the role of a historical “anchor” by which a theory speaks to the historical experience. Event is a place that allows us to learn theoretical lessons from experience. Therefore, it is justified to use the theories of Kant and other thinkers to clarify the present political situation, and also to obtain access to these theories from our own experience. This reading of Kant confirms and develops my prior suggestions about the negative character of the revolutionary event of our time, negation (repulsion, revulsion, escape) as its anthropological mechanism, and, last but not least, its imaginary, simulative character. The “melancholia” of Russian revolutionary subjects closely corresponds to

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Kant’s “hypochondria” and constitutes a “counterplay” [Widerspiel] that alleviates the trauma of social change and, possibly, instigates negative, revolutionary activity. The point at stake, both in Kant and in the present political situation in Russia, is the autonomy and identity of a political subject, state, and citizen: political “subjectivization.” Kant’s theory of revolution exposes a complex structure, where subjects swing between extremes of absolute helplessness and omnipotence, between fantasies of detachment from the world and total control over it. Kant tentatively suggests a middle way, contingent on the phenomenality of freedom and on the infinite potential inherent in the incomplete negativity of the event. This middle way, literally a way out (which Kant also terms an “exit out of the state of minority”99), is at the core of the notion of experience. Experience of the event is education by negative example, a sublime education. In this long section, I went through several stages in reconstructing Kant’s logic of thinking of the revolutionary event. Clearly, there are several simultaneous tendencies in Kant’s philosophy of history and it would be impossible to synthesize all of them. Still, at the end of this engagement with Kant, I can make several conclusions. First, revolution is, for Kant, part of a broader issue of the conditions of possibility of free subjectivity as self-relation and self-mastery. It applies to political subjects the logic earlier developed for the subject of knowledge and action. The possibility of finite, incomplete power of subject over oneself involves an impossible fantasy of complete self-mastery as (the Oedipal) self-generation. This self-contradictory fantasy or idea manifests the highest creative potential of human beings and the danger of their selfdissolution. The idea of the subject is polarized and split. The strategy of Kant’s Critique is therefore polemical and agonistic. Its agon is however, in my point of view, not a simple struggle between “good” and “bad” subjectivity, or revolution, but a combat with an imaginary and impossible enemy, the resistance to the seduction of self-destruction and of absolute negation, which inevitably emerges from all emancipatory activity. The enemy is terrible but the good news is that it does not exist. All finite embodiments of this danger are only signs of disaster, which are always already exceeded by the subject’s infinite negativity. This sign is one of danger as well as one of hope but, according to Kant, their relations are asymmetrical, and hope is half a step ahead of danger, which it uses as a lever.

Political implications The political implications of my reading of Kant and of the theory of “event under subtraction” are obvious enough. First of all, my reading presents Kant as an antifoundationalist who uncovers a structure where foundation serves as a constitutive fiction for a process of successive pivotal turns that always falls short of a founding. I have mentioned how seductive the notion of foundation is for the consideration of the French Revolution and for the event in general. Even Lefort, with all his perceptiveness, depends on the logic of symbolic institution. The “void” of democracy is not exactly real—it is made effective by revolution as its symbolic effect. While Lefort thinks in very general terms, and the meaning left over by revolution is for him nothing but negation, we have seen, with the

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support of Kant’s theory of the sublime, that even the negativity of the subject is never embodied in reality—signs fall short of speculative reflection and do not fully mirror subjectivity. The issue is wider than the political foundation; it is a question of meaning as such. The foundationalist view implies a theory of an independent symbolic sphere and of the fixation of meaning in a sign. I showed that Kant emphatically rejects any such theory and conceives of revolution only as of a temporary fulcrum to be pushed off, not as a firm ground or, for that matter, a constitution. The answer, in terms of legal theory, is, of course, antinaturalist but not strictly positivist either. Law is defined as the interpretation of signs but the sign is not binding on itself; it binds as a function of danger of losing its meaning. The sign with an uncertain meaning makes a law only through the subject’s imagination of a foundational and catastrophic event. The incompleteness of the catastrophe (negation) that throws something into the past and thus makes it “past” and the survival of the past from this catastrophe induce the subject to reflect upon his/her infinite potential of resistance. This, if anything, could contribute to the political subjectivization of the Russian people and to the conversion of their negative work into a “feeling of power.” The past repeals and drives away rather than speaks for itself. The meaning (of law) is suspended between the past and future and calls for progress: a step forward (away) and a “renewal” of the question. Secondly, Kant’s theory of revolution resists the fetishistic disavowal of the event, as well as its hypostasizing. The event, in its negative and incomplete character, is inevitably latent, but this is a danger that has to be signified, interpreted, and worked through. On the other hand, the disavowal of the negativity of the event has its complement in the upholding and fixation of the event into a fetish. The postcommunist Russian culture of the 1990s was a perfect example of Kant’s revolutionary hypochondria. The spastic, vicious circle between people and institutions led to the paralysis of stagnation. The government jumped back and forth between attempts to restore total control over society (which supposedly lies in a state of complete disaster) and “liberal” moves to abandon society and economy to work “on their own.” To make sense of this circulation and to constitute the fiction of the autonomous, self-mastering state (and subject), the post-Soviet subjects imagined and enacted an impossible catastrophe of foundation and subversion at the same time. This imagined catastrophe became a fetish, conjured up and conjured away in two different facets (compare Kant’s “ambiguity”). The Chechen problem provided a perfect fit for the role of a fetishicized enemy since it united in itself the aspect of foundation (of the new Chechen state) and of subversion (of order; of the Moscow government). In exteriorized form, the Russian state fought in the Chechen rebels the subversive character of its own foundational effort. All these fictions constitute the ideology of the society and are reproduced in the minds of individuals. These individuals treat the situation with Kant’s “Stoic” remedy of behaving as though the problems “did not have anything to do with them.” Paradoxically, this very ideology allows them to justify the “emergency” use of violence by the state: the danger, because of the intentional withdrawal of attention, is perceived as unexpected and external. The two main fictions of hypochondria—all-powerfulness

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and complete detachment of the subject—work together to create a revolutionary spasm. This logical connection is anticipated in the passage quoted earlier from the Critique of Pure Reason concerning Cicero and the “lazy reason”—belief in the power of reason to completely subordinate the world goes along with a (individualist) detachment from it (if it is possible, it must have already happened). Moreover, Kant associates all-powerfulness not necessarily with the human subject, but with God, with the terrible divine point of view, an access to which would relieve the subject from the need to act by giving him/her cognitive access to the totality of events. In our case, it is the state that occupies the role of the mediator between perceived omnipotence and powerlessness of the subject. On the contrary, Kantian ethics points out the incomplete reach of any worldly sovereign to prove and maintain the infinite power of the individual subject. The spastic political situation is set on the maintenance of the state of emergency. The apocalyptic theater performed by the Russian intelligentsia (on the model of Kant’s Jewish prophets who destroy the state by their self-fulfilling catastrophic prophecies) maintains the spasm as paralysis or as desperate anxiety. Two complementary remedies to this hypochondria—acting as if nothing had happened (“Stoic remedy”) and following the circle of attempted self-mastery on and on— further contribute to the disease. But there are other true (although never certain) remedies in Kant’s text: the recognition of failure; consequent reflection upon one’s own subjective agency in the imposition of the disease and on one’s infinite capacity; recognition of the sheer materiality of the sign and of the uncertainty of the sign of catastrophe. These remedies may only be retrieved through experience as training: through a repetitive, perseverant series of probes and failures. The educational character of the Kantian “experience” speaks to the often-expressed hope and need of political education in the Russian revolutionary situation. But this education may only be valid as revolutionary experience perseverant in its impossible desire and sober enough to recognize its failure. The signs of our revolution (the fact of overturning the communist regime; some recent artworks) give us a chance—Kant emphasizes that this is only a chance and a favorable opportunity—of learning how to live historically.

Hölderlin on revolution: Leisure and reversal German poet Friedrich Hölderlin was also a great thinker. It is important to consider both his poetic and theoretical work in this book, for several reasons. First, Hölderlin was particularly attentive to the paradoxical or, to speak in Hegelian language, “dialectical” nature of revolution: to its negative elements. Secondly, his work is in intense dialogue with the teaching of Kant, including his treatment of revolution. Thirdly, Hölderlin, rediscovered in the early twentieth century by the George circle, had unsurpassed influence upon the twentieth century intellectual tradition. The theory of caesura became the grounds for a melancholic but Left-oriented “negative dialectic” without reconciliation, as performed by Walter Benjamin (one of whose first writings is on Hölderlin’s caesura), Theodor Adorno, and, in France, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

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At the same time, the sublime hymnic pathos of Hölderlin’s poetry made possible for Martin Heidegger, a great though conservative German philosopher, a reappropriation of him as an early praise of the ecstatic openness of the Being understood as constant passage. Biographically, Hölderlin was closely associated with the French Revolution and with the Jacobin movement at large. Pierre Bertaux’s by now classical book,100 even if it may exaggerate the political seriousness of the poet, still, amply demonstrates his involvement in the movement of the so-called German Jacobins, sympathy with the French Girondists, friendship with Isaac Sinclair, the risk of arrest, etc. Most importantly, Bertaux emphasizes the expression of revolution as an event in the work of Hölderlin. Apart from obvious republican topics, such as the revolutionary character of the novel “Hyperion,” the republican mood of Empedocles from the “Death of Empedocles,” and the sympathizing allegory of revolution as “dissolution” of fatherland in the fragment Werden im Vergehen, Bertaux emphasizes the mystical and cult-like attitude of both young Hölderlin and Hegel to the French Revolution (which for them, like for Robespierre, was a new religion). Most interesting for me in this regard is Hölderlin’s constant attention to festivals (most notably Friedensfeier and many other poems), which is encouraged by the French Revolutionary holidays.101 Here, art itself becomes a medium of revolution, and revolution, not an object but a medium of poetry. Strangely though, Bertaux does not mention the poem “The Leisure,” which is the most direct allegory of revolution in Hölderlin’s poetry, and which I analyze in detail below, using both theoretical and poetological tools.

Hölderlin and Kant In his “remarks” on Sophocles’ Oedipus, Hölderlin introduces the notion of “categorical inversion,” kathegorisches Umkehr,102 which serves as a proxy for political revolution and signifies a radical and irreversible break and change of direction, as a result of which “the beginning and the end do not rhyme.” This “categorical turn” is, in Hölderlin’s reading of tragic drama, marked by a “caesura,” “empty transport,” or a “sign that equals zero.” Given the proximity in time, and the constant attention of Hölderlin to Kant’s work, it is plausible to read this as a rejoinder to the second part of Kant’s Streit, with its long discussion on the reversibility of historical trends, and a discovery of a irreversible trend as alluded to by a “historical sign.” The other thematic parallel to Kant’s Streit is to be found in Hölderlin’s hymn of 1802, Patmos. The poem famously starts with the statement: “Where the danger is, there lies also the salutary.” This phrase is most relevant to Kant’s treatment both of revolution (with its catastrophic and salutary sides, the impossibility of the full catastrophe is salutary) and of “self-mastery” that turns into neurosis. In the next key moment, the poem suggests that “it is not evil, if something is lost, and the living sound disappears from speech, since the divine work resembles ours, and the Highest one does not will everything at once.” Here, the impossibility of complete synthesis (Hölderlin agrees with Kant, see also a short poem “The Middle of Life,” “Hälfte des Lebens,” and compare Kantor and theory of sets) is emphasized, hence the role of time and thus not just of memory but also of forgetting. The ellipsis is proclaimed to be

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a creative principle, a principle of “summits of time” separated through the divine Zerstreuung, dissemination. (Indeed, the poem proceeds in an elliptic manner, not naming Johannes, and only naming Christ at the very end.) This resolute emphasis on a negative relationship to an event is something new in Hölderlin with regard to Kant, although we saw that Kant tried to push off certain ideas via critique. But this emphasis is understandable in the view of the above: an event of a caesura serves not just as a mnemotechnical sign but also as a stopper on the way of one’s infinite desire to reverse time and go backward. . Further, Hölderlin writes: “Ein Lösungszeichen, und hier ist der Stab/ des Gesanges. . .” (“[The name of Christ—here omitted—is], a sign of deliverance, and here is the staff/ Of the song”). In the next stanza, speaking of God, the poem says: “Still ist sein Zeichen am donnernden Himmel.” “Still” can mean here “fixed,” “solid,” and mute or silent. In the following stanza the hymn ends with a culmination: “der Vater aber liebt,// Der über allen waltet,// Am meisten, daß gepfleget werde// Der veste Buchstab, und bestehendes gut// Gedeutet. Dem folgt deutscher Gesang” (“but what our Father// Who reigns supreme// Most loves is that we keep the letter// Fast in our care and well interpret// What endures. Which German song follows”). The final lines of the poem rhyme with those evoked earlier, on Loesungszeichen: not only through the mention of the song [Gesang] but also through the implication, right after having stressed the fixed [veste] character of the letter, that one may follow it (or at least the principle of interpretation), thus that it moves, or at least shows direction. Or, one can read that the song follows after the silence of the fast letter. Both these passages clarify the situation described in the beginning of the hymn: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst// Das Rettende auch.” This contradiction is more understandable from Kant’s text. The sign of deliverance (and of separation, of syllable from a word, of a letter from a syllable) evokes the catastrophe and keeps it at bay, in its obscure materiality. It is thus both the disease and the remedy; the chance of selfcure (and care, Pflege) by means of a sheer sign comes in the end after having passed through the layers of superimposing interpretations. Sign seduces fear and provides a consolation by being only a sign. “To care” means here to “guard”—to keep the letter empty and at the same time to keep probing it for different meanings and endings. The split of Stab from the Buchstab is itself Buchstablich, literal: it literally interprets the metaphoric word “letter” and thus contributes to the materialization, desemantization, literalization of signs in this poem, and to the combinatorics of its form. However, in its semantic meaning, “Stab” refers to the “pivotal” role of signs, which induce but do not contain their meanings, and further induces two contradictory meanings at once.

“The Leisure” and the dialectic of revolution The modern notion of history was definitively formulated in the eighteenth century when Rousseau and Kant restricted the access of humans to their own supersensible, substantial nature (essence).103 Man appeared as a historical being, whose definition lies in its development (or, in the case of Rousseau, fall), in its negativity. Immediately

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after this vision of human nature was made public, a question arose, which has since featured in subsequent traditions in the philosophy of history—the question of the access of humans to historicity, that is, to pure historicity or pure temporality, regardless of this or that particular historical development. Such access would permit humans to obtain knowledge of themselves and secure spontaneity of action. Even blocked from transcendent, God-like, absolute freedom, humans may still be free historical actors if they can deliver themselves from the fixed determination of past and future, which forces them into alienated labor for development, or into the labor of mourning. They would still act and produce, but do so as free subjects, out of nothing. If human essence lies in human history, then why does history move forward, what is the principle of its movement? Without such a principle, history would not be different from space; it would have already been over. Such a principle, for human history, may only be human freedom, human spontaneity and negativity, the capacity to abstract oneself from the past and to create the new out of nothing. But how does one touch or represent this nothing? An image, an incorporation, or a Kantian “schema” of negativity would be either an all-destructive tempest or a gap, hiatus, pause in the order of time and space. Thus, Rousseau, in his Letter to d’Alembert on the spectacles, speaks, paradoxically, of the laborieuse oisiveté,104 the laborious idleness of Spartans who, while not present at the lost origin of history, enjoyed in it an “exceptional” place. Later, Schiller displaced human liberty into the intermediate space of aesthetical play, a game that would allow one to “cancel [aufheben] time within time.”105 Even Hegel, in spite and because of his identification of history with the labor of the negative, still speaks of periods of happiness as the “blank pages of history.”106 Finally, Marx built his theory of capitalism upon the notion of surplus labor, the labor performed by the worker during free, or, more precisely, “disposable” time. For Marx, this leisure activity constitutes free, authentic human action107—but at the same time its cunning exploitation by capitalism (paying for your free labor) makes possible the cyclic, infinite, and frenetic increase of capitalist production.108 In our century, George Bataille developed this theory of Marx, inverting the concept of economy and grounding it in surplus and festive expense, rather than in lack and productivity.109 All these developments concentrated on the practical aspect of luxury and leisure as the excess or surplus of historical time. The epistemological aspect of free time was most clearly presented by Hölderlin, in his “Remarks” on Sophocles’ tragedies. There, Hölderlin clearly states the possibility of the direct contemplation of pure Kantian forms: space and time (the possibility that Kant himself had foreclosed). This possibility is opened by the interruption—caesura—of the narrative form, which creates an unfilled excess of “leisure time” (die müßige Zeit) in the middle, and in which a hero must sustain himself/herself, “so that the course of the world does not show any rupture.”110 But first of all the tragic representation consists in the facticity of the word, which, being rather an internal structure than a pronounced [sound], goes, fatally, from a beginning to an end. [It consists] in the sequence of events, in the grouping of persons against each other, and in the form of reason, which emerges in the frightening leisure of a tragic time [in den furchtbaren Muße einer tragisccher Zeit

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bildet], and, as it [the form of reason] has presented itself in contradictions, in their wild emergences, later, in the human time, it counts as a firm opinion born from the divine destiny.111

When the action suddenly stops, the spectator perceives, in silence, the surplus of this action, something that still moves (in himself/herself, through himself/herself) when nothing moves. This “something” is time itself, the principle of human freedom and excess. For Hölderlin, this moment of free time, the radicalized version of Kantian sublime, is explicitly both epistemological and practical. Tragedy, “an imitation of action,” presents to the human being its own freedom, freedom as excess, and time that is empty for spontaneous action. Hölderlin links this notion of free time with political revolution: as we have evoked, he speaks of “categorical” and “infinite reversal” (Umkehr, Umkehrung), and of the republican character of tragedy (Remarks on Antigone). The motion that presents itself in spite of the apparent pause appears as indeterminate and therefore infinite. The motion “in the void,” the motion of time itself, has no immanent limits. Leisure is excessive time and excessive motion. This is how it appears. In reality, however, the motion that the subject perceives during leisure is his/her own motion, which constitutes this leisure: it terminates the inertia of labor and adjourns desires and plans for the future. This negative activity is, first, potentially infinite (as it has, in turn, to hinder itself) and, second, seems to come to the subject as an external necessity. “Excessive time” is not fully free, and therefore it poses an imperative, a drive to exceed. The opening of time, which is excessive, empty, or infinite, depending on the perspective, drives the subject to probe his/her infinity and to exceed himself/herself, to leave oneself behind. This is why Hölderlin compares tragedy to a sports competition. The game is a leisure activity par excellence, but at the same time it has no internal limits and is competitive, leading thus to an infinite internal struggle. When Hölderlin compares Oedipus the tyrant to a fistfight,112 he may refer to a monotonous, merciless series of strikes that aim at the same point in the body, in an attempt to knock out the adversary. Leisure opens an abyss of disaster; it tempts one to perish and drives him/ her to escape from peril. The link of free time with revolution is even more direct in Hölderlin’s poem Die Müße, an explicit allegory of the French Revolution, written in 1797, during the tensions caused by the advance of the French Revolutionary troops. Here Hölderlin clarifies many things in the development of German idealism, and goes even further than Marx, who knew his work well enough (the epigraph from Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion stands on the front page of the German-French Yearbook that Marx and his friend Ruge edited in Paris) but never himself made an explicit parallel between his theory of revolution and his notion of free time and surplus labor. (This fact created an unfortunate ambiguity in the Marxist concept of revolution, allowing its interpretation as a historical necessity and deferring the ethics of leisure activity until the coming of communism.) The fragmentary poem is interesting, among other things, because of its enigmatic moment of ellipsis, where the letter W stands on its own. Until recently, the editors dismissed this peculiarity as negligence and “complemented” the letter with the word “wood” (Wald)—thus F. Beißner. The Frankfurter edition of D. E. Sattler restored the

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manuscript version. I will try to show that this fragmentary capital letter fits the logic of the poem, the poem that is dedicated to the materialization of language and to the destruction and atomization of the material signifier. This letter that stands on its own has an obvious pendant in the oeuvre of Hölderlin—the already mentioned feste Buchstab, “solid letter,” in the enigmatic ending of Patmos; itself a possible allusion to Kant’s “historical sign.” Hölderlin’s poem works to demystify the concept of “free time,” and points to its internal contradiction. Time may not be entirely “free” or “static”—this would mean an absolute nothing or a spatial picture. The very idea of leisure consists in the fact that, even in free time, something continues to move. “Leisure” signifies, strictly speaking, not the void but the excess of time, time as excess. It designates the human condition as that of posthumous superfluity and untimeliness. As such, Leisure is both a condition of freedom (or, rather, liberation), as it is a condition of anxiety, inachievement, and infinite unrest. Here, as we saw, Hölderlin agrees with both Rousseau and Marx: “free time” is the principle of freedom and labor. The surplus that, from one point of view, appears as spontaneity and infinite power, from another point of view appears as a principle of excessive, unstoppable inertia of senseless motion, such as the wage laborer’s desire to keep working after the end of the labor day. The very attempt to terminate this unnecessary rest of motion makes yet another motion, that of termination. And thus ad infinitum. This double character of leisure appears not only in the economic sphere, but also in political revolution and in aesthetical, poetic production, which, by definition, constitutes an activity of leisure and is addressed to someone who wants to spend his/her time. I quote here Hölderlin’s The Leisure in its entirety, followed by my analysis.113 Die Muße Sorglos schlummert die Brust und es ruhn die strenge Gedanken. Auf die Wiese geh’ ich hinaus, wo das Gras aus der Wurzel Frisch, wie die Quelle mir keimt, wo die liebliche Lippe der Blume Mir sich öffnet und stum mit süßem Othem mich anhaucht. Und an tausend Zweigen des Hains, wie an brennenden Kerzen Mir das Flämchen des Lebens glänzt, die rötliche Blüthe, Wo im sonnigen Quell die zufriednen Fische sich regen, Wo die Schwalbe das Nest mit thörigen Jungen umflattert, Und die Schmetterlinge sich freun, und die Bienen da wandl’ ich Mitten in ihrer Lust; ich steh im friedlichen Felde Wie ein liebender Ulmbaum da, und wie Reben und Trauben Schlingen sich rund um mich die süßen Spiele des Lebens. Oder schau ich hinauf zum Berge, der mit Gewölken Sich die Scheitel umkränzt und die düstern Loken im Winde Schüttelt, und wenn er mich trägt auf seiner kräftigen Schulter, Wenn die leichtere Luft mir alle Sinne bezaubert Und das unendliche Thal, wie eine farbige Wolke Unter mir liegt, da werd’ ich zum Adler, und ledig des Bodens

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Wechselt mein Leben im All der Natur wie Nomaden den Wohnort. Und nun führt mich der Pfad zurük ins Leben der Menschen, Fernher dämmert die Stadt, wie eine eherne Rüstung Gegen die Macht des Gewittergotts und der Menschen geschmiedet Majestatisch herauf, und ringsum ruhen die Dörfchen; Und die Dächer umhüllt, vom Abendlichte geröthet Freundlich der häußliche Rauch; es ruhn die sorglich umzäunten Gärten, es schlummert der Pflug auf den gesonderten Feldern. Aber ins Mondlicht steigen herauf die zerbrohene Säulen Und die Tempeltoren, die einst der Furchtbare traf, der geheime Geist der Unruh, der in der Brust der Erd’ und der Menschen Zürnet und gährt, der Unbezwungne, der alte Erobrer Der die Städte, wie Lämmer, zerreißt, der einst den Olympus Stürmte, der in den Bergen sich regt, und Flammen herauswirft. Der die Wälder entwurzelt und durch den Ozean durchfährt Und die Schiffe zerschlägt und doch in der ewigen Ordnung Niemals irre dich macht, auf der Tafel deiner Geseze Keine Sylbe verwischt, der auch dein Sohn, o Natur, ist Mit dem Geiste der Ruh’ als einen Schoose geboren. Hab ich zu Hauße dann, wo die Bäum das Fenster umsäuseln Und die Luft mit dem Lichte mir spielt, von menschlichem Leben Ein unsterbliches Blatt zu gutem Ende gelesen Leben! Leben der Welt! du liegst wie ein heiliger W Sprech ich dann, und es nehme ein Axt, dich zu ebnen, Glücklich wohn ich in dir. The Leisure The breast carelessly slumbers, and the grave thoughts are at rest. I go out into the meadows, where the fresh grass Springs out of its root, where the lovely lip of the flower Opens to me and mutely envelops me with its sweet breath. And on the thousand branches of a grove, as though a little flame of life Was shining to me from the burning candles, the red flowers bloom, Where in a sunny spring scurry the happy fish, Where a swallow flies about the nest with the mindless youngsters, And the larks, and the bees rejoice, There I wander in the midst of their joy, I stand in the peaceful field As a loving elm-tree, and as vine and bunches The sweet plays of life crawl around me. Or I look at the mountain, which crowns its summit with clouds, And shakes its curls on the wind, And when it carries me on its powerful shoulders,

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When the rarefied air enchants all my senses, And the infinite valley, as a colorful cloud, Lies under me, then I become into an eagle, and, liberated from the ground, My life, as the nomads, constantly changes its dwelling place in the All of nature. Now the path leads me back into the life of men, Far away majestically dawns the city, as a copper armor That is forged against the power Of the Thunder god and of men, and around it rest the villages; And the smoke of houses, reddened by the evening light, Friendly illuminates the roofs; there rest the carefully fenced gardens, There slumbers the plow in the demarcated fields. But, in the moonlight there rise the broken columns, And the temple doors, which once saw the Frightening one, The hidden spirit of unrest, which angers and ripples In the breast of Earth and of men, the Irresistible, The old Conqueror, who tears apart the cities, as lambs, Who once stormed the Olympus, who stirs inside the mountains And throws out flames. Who unroots the woods and moves through the Ocean And breaks the ships and who, meanwhile, never makes you err from the eternal   order, Never erases a syllable from the table of your law, Who is also your son, oh Nature, born from the same womb with the spirit of rest. Then, at home, where the trees whisper around the window, And the air plays with the light, I have read the immortal leaf of human life Up to a good end. Life! Life of the world! You lie as a sacred W Say I then, and it would take an axe to even you up, Happily I live in you.114

While all speech practices are trying to constitute and to delineate the suspension of all “other” practices, to short-circuit a split between rest and motion, silence and speech—the lyric poetry, in its rhythmical mode of repetitively interrupted monotony, thematizes this task of speech in an especially illustrative way. Lyric is language in suspense, neither affirmed nor denied, addressed neither to no one nor to a particular person. It is a proliferation of words driven by oblivion, suppression, or inaccessibility of the Word of an absolute name of true language.115 Many senses of Hölderlin’s poem coincide in the fortunate English word “rest”: immobility, leisure, and also a remainder. The poem starts with a description of “carelessness” and calm that one experiences in a pause. From the very beginning, the figures of grass stemming from and out of the root [aus der Wurzel], like a spring or a source [Quelle], of the open although mute lips of the flowers, the reference to the “sweet play of life” [süßen Spiele des Lebens] do not leave any doubt about the philosophical ambitions of the text. In the tradition of Kant’s and especially Schiller’s theories of free

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“play,” Hölderlin’s “leisure” is a space for opening and freedom, a source for human creative activity, and the manifestation of the original “roots” of humanity (from which it, however, departs) in language. In the rest of the poem the hero turns to wandering—a circulation between the plain and the mountains, between the settled and circumscribed “rest” of the countryplace, and the nomadic life of the mountaineers. Circulation is a ceaseless motion in-between, and it seems therefore to give a hope of “settling” within itself, to attain this “Bacchanalian revel,” in which, according to a famous phrase of Hegel, all members would dissolve and form a “transparent and simple repose.”116 Hölderlin’s hero becomes an eagle, that is “free from the ground” (ledig des Bodens), and his life, “as nomad,” keeps changing “in the All of Nature” (im All der Natur). Of Nature—or of language, since the letters of the word Adler (eagle) also wander—All der. The pause for leisure makes one dream of pure mediation or pure passage. In his fragment “Becoming in Dissolution,” Hölderlin speaks of a paradoxical state “between being and not being,” of a contradictory passage (Übergang), which also has the meaning of ascent and of excess.117 This passage helps to “clarify and reunite the gap [Lücke] and the contrast, which stand between the new and the past,” and is necessary retrospectively, from the point of view of the new that has already appeared. Hölderlin further speaks, significantly, of the “matter of passage” (Materie des Überganges). It is the same landscape that we encounter in the poem Die Muße. Leisure lets the poet reflect upon the historical change that has already taken place: stage a retrospective passage between the past and the new, access the threshold of birth into meaning and being. Hence the materialization of language, the return to the point of yet unborn meaning. The aspiration of leisure is to stand inside absolute mobility. The transitory pause has to leave one as s/he is, for a new start. But precisely this task of “keeping” to oneself leads to a catastrophe. It turns out that leisure also rouses the spirit of “unrest” (Unruhe)—the spirit of splitting that leaves behind ruins (the “broken columns” and, significantly, “temple gates”—Tempeltore—which are also, as it appears, the gates of tmesis, the limits of fragmentation). This spirit operates not just on stone and wood but also on the linguistic matter of the poem. It “deroots” (entwurzelt) not only trees but also words: Der die Wälder entwurzelt, Der in den Bergen sich regt. It is not difficult to see here the exemplary demonstration of the work of parataxis—the strategy of dissolution that Adorno perceived in Hölderlin’s poems on the syntactic level118 applies as well on the level of the literal composition of words. Where does the “spirit of unrest” come from? It comes from the very effort of putting oneself at leisure. Leisure is not yet fully leisure: the fact that it “rests,” in the sense of remainder, means that it does not fully “rest,” in the sense of vacation. Further, the violent operation of interrupting work and putting oneself at rest itself violates rest and has to be put at rest: hence, “leisure” threatens with a vicious circle of self-hindrance, of purification from the remnants of the past. The project and fiction of accessing “empty” time rouses the fury of destruction. The same situation may be described in yet another way. Left alone to himself, in the free space of leisure, a human being probes the limits of his/her freedom, checks

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whether s/he is fully and truly free; hence the violence and destruction that so often follows human play. The task is to make sure that the time of despotic labor is over, to accomplish the passage from the past in order to access, “under” the layers of historical residue, the pure essence of being and time, one’s own essence. The probing of freedom coincides therefore with its foundation: the goal of the game is to find and to found one’s own, to appropriate the world and to make it one’s home; hence the political address of Hölderlin’s poem that I discuss here. The logic of the “spirit of unrest” also works on the level of language, which, in order to be poetic, has to be playfully put in suspense, to be exposed as a “pure medium.” Thus, the words, with their “settled,” referential meanings, have to be destroyed to denude the “sheer” materiality of syllables and letters. Words still “work,” syllables and letters “rest,”: their atomistic existence promises a pure reading of the essence of language and the capture of the voice of silence. This also means the ultimate separation of ideal meaning from material signs and vice versa. By fragmentation, one attains not only pure signs but, from another point of view, pure immaterial meaning. The “unrest” of reading—of this leisure activity par excellence—splits the words in trying to dismiss them as “void,” to throw them away as leftovers, like a rocket throws away its steps. Hölderlin seems to find consolation, for a moment, in the fact that the spirit of unrest does not destroy any syllable (keine Sylbe verwischt) from the “table of laws”—it simply shatters and scatters them. Sylbe in this poem full of “wood” metaphors also refers to the Latin silva—a word for “wood” that is etymologically connected to the Greek hyle, matter. A human being—a reader—wants to live “in” the permanence of matter with its alphabet and with its recombination. But the syllables are themselves divisible into letters, and, logically speaking, any self-identical element will be divisible in its turn. The search for the void promises to be an infinite movement with its never fulfilled attempt to stop—and liberate—everything. Therefore it has to be suddenly interrupted. This interruption of a pause affirms by its very failure—because its sudden rupture in medias res manifests the potential infinity of leisure. Both excess and lack, in their indication of this potential infinity, open a space for leisure (or for festive play) within textual work. Hölderlin writes: “Life, life of the world, you lie as a sacred W/Say I then, and it takes an axe to even you up”(Leben, Leben der Welt, du liegst wie ein heiliger W/ Sprech ich dann, und es nehme ein Axt, wer will dich zu ebnen). A letter emerges out of a syllable, a capital letter—a “title,” a “name,” an identifying element of language. In the next line this—or rather the complementary—operation seems to be rejected, or approved? “Evening up” a word means “decapitating” it—taking “ebnen” out of “Leben.” However, the letter W stands as a ruin of decapitation: it is left capital and thus negates the possibility of total “materialization.” Except for its status as a ruin, W marks an interruption of a line, a sudden (unexpected) caesura. The frenzy of circulation and arrest halts in a moment of silence—and then goes on (“Say [or ‘speak’] I then,” Sprech ich dann). The very effort of finding a meaningless, void sign fails: the letter W is not at all meaningless. Thus, it is identical in writing with the Greek letter omega—a symbol for ending. In Hölderlin’s poem, the end is possible only as an interruption and is therefore

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self-contradictory. The very fact that the letter still means something, even though it means the end, prevents the poem from being accomplished. Further, in the actual end of the poem, there remains a comma, so that the text itself remains (like leisure) a fragment, a ruin, a rest. Real “rest” turns out to be possible only as a fleeting moment of interruption. It is a rest from rest, leisure from leisure, interruption of interruption. It is only in and at this moment that one can truly “dwell” (the poem ends with a reiteration—“Happily I live in you”—Gluecklich wohn’ ich in dir). It is also at this moment that language arrives at naming: the naming of language and of the reader. W may possibly (although not necessarily) be read as a ruin of the word Wort—“word.” Its “void” may only be established by probing it—by filling it in with the syllable “[O]rt”—place—like a bowl that may be proved void only in filling and pouring.119 It therefore exposes to the reader the movement of his/her own voice, which continues to speak when the text stops. A syllable does, after all, disappear—but it returns from another side, that of the inertia of reading. In the empty pause that is guarded by the “sacred” W—an aforementioned “temple door”—we “hear” a voice that speaks in silence, the voice of silence. This is what, in the very beginning of the poem, is promised by the open and mute lips of the flower. Word [Wort]—language, poetry—is not an empty place but an emptiness from a place [Ort]. This further emptiness may also be read in (or into) the poem itself. One could arrive at yet another hypothesis concerning the word that starts with W: the Wohnort, a living place, which is mentioned in the poem as the “living place of nomads.” If decapitated, this word becomes its contrary an “[O]hnort,” a “placelessness.” The place kept empty by the letter W is thus suspended between the place and the lack of place. The poem approaches the absolute transcendence of the inaccessible, inhospitable void. The letter W is a “temple door”—it delimits and guards the sanctuary of silence. This placeless void is the true and inaccessible “leisure” around which the poem of Hölderlin does its work. A “place,” a silence, a temporal “break” are no more than the recognized failures of the human activity that is, ultimately, directed at such failures and the momentous capture of capital. The moment of failure sustains repeated efforts to keep continuity and, like any rest, charges with energy. This is also the meaning of ellipsis in Kleist: “Puppets, like elves, need the ground only so that they can touch it lightly and renew the momentum of their limbs through this momentary delay.”120 In the letter W, the reader touches on the limit of divisibility as on something exterior to him or her. The moment of interruption is a moment of transcendence and delimitation. The letter stands as a solitary temporal gate, which is impenetrable but which, in this very impenetrability, invites a human being for singular self-recognition (so is the gate of the law in Kafka’s parable Before the Law—the parable told to a hero whose name does not go further than the letter K). The interruption is sudden: the exact position of a limit is indeterminate. It therefore manifests law, understood, in the Kantian sense, as an indeterminate limit, a principle of finitude and limitation. The letter remaining from an unspecified word is the “firm letter,” das feste Buchstab that Hölderlin evokes, several years later, in the end

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of his hymn Patmos. The letter that stands firmly on its own, without a determinate meaning, is the letter of law, the symbol of prohibition imposed on the immediate access to purity of being. If leisure is a condition of probing the foundation, then, in arriving at the limit of the law, it both fails and succeeds. It fails, because the limit is imposed on it and not appropriated, and because it cannot even access the absolute limit, only a sign of this limit is available. The subject of leisure succeeds, however, in proving the limitation of freedom in his/her own free experience. The law expressed by the “firm letter” is, in strict accordance with Kant’s teaching, both autonomous and heteronomous. It is a law of autonomy, which is imposed from outside. At the same time, the letter, as we have said, guards the empty place where should have been a word. The law is therefore expressed not just in a firm letter but in what Hölderlin, in his short fragment The Meaning of the Tragedies (1799), calls “a sign = 0.”121 The context of this formula shows that Hölderlin interpreted this “zero” symbol as a material but meaningless sign, thus, again, in the direction of the feste Buchstab. However, the formulation is more radical: it alludes to the possibility that the symbol is simply absent in its place, in an ellipsis, and is a sign of its own erasure. The same thought appears in the “Remarks to Oedipus”: the “caesura” that interrupts the tragedy is treated by Hölderlin as an “empty transport,” a metaphor without meaning—or, one could add, a mute language. This moment of interruption opens, according to Hölderlin, a mediated, negative access to the “pure word”—a word without a word, the voice of language itself. The silence becomes productive, “poetic”—it gives word to the word itself. In the hymn Friedensfeier, The Festival of Peace (which is in many ways parallel to Die Muße), Hölderlin says: “Schicksalgesetz ist, daß Alle sich erfahren/ Daß, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei” (“It is the law of destiny that everyone experiences on oneself, that, when the silence turns, it is also the language”).122 Thus, the letter and the ellipsis of the interrupted word produce a double effect. On the one hand, the letter blocks access to the word, forbids continuance. On the other hand, it allows touching upon the independence of language and time, hearing its “voice.” The interruption and the inertia create the effect of a “speaking silence.” Hölderlin himself formulates this double function of poetry with precision. The task of the contemporary poets, he says in Remarks to Antigone, is: “den Geist der Zeit festhalten und fühlen”—first to establish and to impose the spirit of time, second to feel it. Hölderlin’s poem carries an obvious political message. It speaks of the French Revolution, this strange period of time that had lasted, by the time of the poem’s composition, for almost eight years, and which, driven by the almost idyllic dream of peace and freedom123 (eventually, a dream also shared by Hölderlin) had led to a paroxysm of violence and terror. As it was later shown by Hegel (discussed in the following section), the French Revolutionaries did not aim to become tyrants but on remaining inessential and intermediary servants of the universal itself, of pure negativity. Their task consisted, further, in leading the people, like Moses, from the corrupted state of the Ancien Régime toward a new realm of reason and nature. Toward the close of the revolution, the French people were still contaminated by the virus of absolutism, from which the Montagnard Jacobins tried to cure them

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not only by means of terror but through systematic public education, L’Instruction Publique. They insisted, in their struggle against the Girondists, that the revolution— this transitory period—was not yet over, and that it was too early to say that the new, republican, regime had been safely established. The problem of the French Revolutionaries, as we saw in Chapter 1, was therefore that of passage. On the one hand, they were haunted by the past, on the other hand, they were extending the transitory period further and further, unable to exit from the potentially infinite movement of revolution. The project of temporal mediation is akin to the project of political structure: in the suspended, intermediate state there can be no hierarchy. Equality, a crucial member of the revolutionary triad, is not simply an ideological dogma but an inference from the revolutionary condition itself, when everything and everyone has to start over, from zero. In the transitory period, power is suspended and does not legitimately belong to anyone. The Jacobins fiercely attacked aristocratic elements, but they were even more suspicious about the popularity of their own members: as intermediaries and representatives of the people, the revolutionaries had no right to personal power, power could not have a name associated with it. “It would take an axe to even you up”—says Hölderlin in addressing the “life of the world.” The axe and the decapitalized “even” life—Leben—point to the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, in the struggle for pure passage and for countable equality (evenness). Hölderlin shows, first, that the search for pure mediation, for “leisure” from history, is a process of self-perpetuating fragmentation and “de-capitation.” Mediating continuity is haunted by its starting point. As we have mentioned, the French revolutionaries faced the same problem: they felt that the king was obsessively following them in their revolutionary movement and would not let them break away—hence the need to kill him. The same impossibility of escape from the beginning applies to words, these “mediators” of meaning. A mediating word has its own prior (capital letter) and posterior and therefore does not really mediate. The same is true for the text that has to begin and end; a beginning belongs not only to the text but first to a context that precedes it. The project for pure evenness of matter and complete political equality and suspension is, according to Hölderlin, doomed to failure, regardless of heads on the chopping block. Due to the potential infinity and vicious circularity of this project, it has to be suddenly interrupted in the middle. The letter W stands as a limit for fragmentation and as a remainder of unevenness. This capital letter testifies to the failure of the project of erasing the uniqueness of the proper name and of the referential (nominative) aspect of language in general. The letter W, moreover, is an icon of a crown, and, as such, it emblematizes the monarchical element that stands on its own after the separation of the king’s head from his body. The beheading of the king could not help but affirm and fix absolutism in its distilled form: the Jacobins killed the king but immortalized the royal place of power by his public execution. The execution of the king marked the French Revolution in history as a virus and trace of the royal, absolutist institution of power, the triumphant failure of voiding the signifier. We should remember, at this moment, the theory of Claude Lefort, evoked

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in Chapter  1, which interprets late modernity as an epoch of the “empty place” of sovereign power (the image of void as a symbol of revolution was, in its turn, borrowed from Michelet). We can now see that this poem of Hölderlin—and his entire corpus—hold an important place in the development of the modern philosophy of history. Building on Kant and Schiller, Hölderlin anticipates the notion of labor, as it will appear in Hegel and especially in Marx. Hölderlin notices that “free time” is, paradoxically, a source, spring [Quelle], for poetic labor. Marx will later build on the same intuition and show that the exploitation of labor by capital builds on the engagement of “surplus-labor,” performed during what seems to the worker to be his “free time.” Meanwhile, according to Marx, free, “disposable” time is the positive ideal of human development and the chance for freedom. Hölderlin’s poem, written with explicit reference to the French Revolution, illuminates, in my view, the implicit links between Marx’s political and economic doctrines. The paradigm of free, nonalienated labor is the revolution: people suddenly enter the surplus time of history, where they have to find and be found themselves. As capital progresses through surplus labor, thus history progresses with revolutions. To abolish necessary labor and leave only the surplus is, of course, impossible. As impossible as it is to abolish history in favor of perpetual revolution. However, the border between the necessary and the supplementary is indeterminate, fluid. Thus, labor and leisure are one, and the task of the critique consists in exposing the free nature of labor and the destructive, infinite labor inherent in the moments of leisure and festivity.

Inversions in the void We now turn to the theoretical work of Hölderlin. This work, as it has been often noted,124 constitutes a draft of a dialectical, and speculative, system, belonging to the same movement as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Hölderlin is particularly attentive to negativity as an aspect of dialectical movement. Thus, his views on history and on revolution are eloquently embodied in the title of the otherwise highly cryptic essay Werden im Vergehen (“Becoming in Dissolution,” 1798?).125 The essay, in Fichtean language, formulates a paradox according to which the very process of dissolution is at the same time productive: new possibilities open up for the future, and spontaneously emerge from negative motion. Motion is one and the same. This decline or transition of the fatherland (in this sense) is felt in the parts of the existing world so that at precisely that moment and to precisely that extent that existence dissolves, the newly-entering, the youthful, the potential is also felt. For how could dissolution be felt without union; if, then, existence shall be felt and is felt in its dissolution.126

The negativity of dissolution not only destroys but also unites: it dissolves society into its minute elements, going through each of these elements, only to produce infinite

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possibilities of rearrangement (cf. the dissolving work of the “spirit of unrest” in The Leisure).127 The beginning and end | point is already posited, found, secured; and hence this dissolution is also more secure, more relentless [and] more bold, and as such it therefore presents itself as a reproductive act by means of which life runs through all its moments and, in order to achieve the total sum, stays at none but dissolves in everyone so as to constitute itself in the next; except that the dissolution becomes more ideal to the extent that it moves away from the beginning point, whereas the production becomes more real to the extent that finally, out of the sum of these sentiments of decline and becoming which are infinitely experienced in one moment, there emerges by way of recollection (due to the necessity of the object in the most finite state) a complete sentiment of existence.128

Notably, “the beginning and end is posited,” as in a tragedy, so that the significance of revolution is in the opening that it produces in medias res, by virtue not of substantive destruction or emergence but of severing and rebuilding relations. Negative revolution, for Hölderlin (as later for Marx), is neither Destruktion nor Aufhebung (even though the past emerges from it in an idealized form), but an Auflösung that dissolves existing relationships by creating a space for plasticity in the spirit of the Platonic khora. In this movement, Hölderlin distinguishes two separate movements: “ideal” and “real” dissolution; one goes from the present to the past, the other is directed from the present that it rejects, toward the future. The paradox is thus also a counterpoint of two rhythms: the same is subsequently affirmed in Hölderlin’s “Remarks” on tragedy, of time itself. Most important, at least for the topic of revolution, are Hölderlin’s two “Remarks” on tragedy, devoted respectively to “Oedipus the tyrant” and to “Antigone” (1804).129 Although these texts are, prima facie, technical writings of a poet on the rules of his trade, in fact, Hölderlin uses the formal analysis of tragedies in order to formulate an ambitious philosophy of history, centered on the significance of the present historical moment, that of the French Revolution and its aftermath. The apparatus of Kantian philosophy is being deployed here for a reinvention of a new dialectical method, and the emphasis on empty time which, as we have seen, generally follows the Kantian and Schillerian theory of time serves to underline the negativity of history, in both subjective and objective terms. In the reading of The Leisure, I have already evoked the passages on leisurely time, which, in the remarks, depict a break in the very middle of the tragic narrative: a break in which the very conditions of time and space appear as such, and which at the same time presents them as a dangerous, “frightening” void. The tragic hero has to “hold fast” (feststehen) in this void in order to carry on his shoulders the continuity of history: a conception similar to Schelling’s theory of tragedy that had praised the same hero for “supporting” the unbearable contradiction of tragedy (for Schelling130 the contradiction was the freedom of will and material determination, from Kant’s third Antinomy; for Hölderlin, it is rather the contradiction of chaos and form, in their reciprocal excess).

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Hölderlin, like the twentieth century’s modernists, denies the mystical identification of poetry with subjective genius and suggests treating it rationally, based on what he calls “lawful calculation.”131 He goes on to describe substantive conflict as described in the tragedy, in formal, structural terms. In the reading of Oedipus, there is “the evercontending dialogue, hence the chorus as a contrast to the former . . . [e]verything is speech against speech, one canceling the other.”132 Thus, in the reading of Antigone, he describes drama as a sort of agonistic sports show and considers Antigone and Creon as holding substantially identical positions that differ only in time (“the one mainly loses because it begins, the other wins because it follows”133). This formalism is clearly related to the conception of the leisurely void, in which time and space are all that remains; it is in these empty conditions that the drama of history takes place. There is hardly any need to describe in detail Hölderlin’s theory of tragedy—famous as it is—but I will just reiterate that according to him, tragic narrative is characterized not just by a sharp turn in action from good to bad fortune (Aristotle’s “peripety”), but by an analogon of what in poetic meter is called caesura—a “counterrhythmic interruption.” Caesura is a negative interpretation of peripety. The term emphasizes the coexistence of two logics in a narrative: formal and substantive (like in the poetic rhythm where the meter coexists with the natural syntax and with the system of accents and lengths existing in the language). The formal structure is symmetrically opposed to the substantive: if the narrative builds up to the end (as in “Oedipus”) so that the most significant events happen in the end, and if they make the action develop rapidly as though in the direction of an abyss, then the caesura is needed in the first part. In the contrary case, when the most important events happen in the beginning and the narrative constantly turns back to them, then the formal break should come closer to the end. What is important here is the understanding of time as a rhythmic system of two movements: it is this that makes Hölderlin consider negativity as correlation. What is added by Hölderlin to Kant’s and Schiller’s analysis is the reversal that happens in empty time and space. Negativity as void and break give place to the negativity of negative magnitudes, of inversions: what we know from Aristotle as the correlative type of negation, and will later see in Hegel as the reflexive determination of opposition—the very soul of dialectic. Here is what Hölderlin writes: In the chorus scenes of “Oedipus” .  .  . the frightfully festive forms, the drama [appears] as language for a world where under pest and confusion of senses and under universally inspired prophecy in idle time (müßige Zeit), with the God and man expressing themselves in the all-forgetting forms of infidelity—for divine infidelity is best to retain—so that the course of the world will not show any rupture and the memory of the heavenly ones will not expire. At such moments man forgets himself and the god and turns around [kehrt um] like a traitor, naturally in saintly manner .  .  . [Here] man forgets himself because he exists entirely for the moment, the god [forgets himself] because he is nothing but time; and either one is unfaithful, time, because it is reversed categorically at such a moment, no longer rhyming beginning and end; man, because at this moment of categorical

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reversal he has to follow and thus can no longer resemble the beginning in what follows.134

What is conceived here is a negative relationship that connects its members in spite of its negative thrust. The categorical turn, Umkehr, clearly designates revolution (in the German of the time135). And this becomes even clearer in the “Remarks to Antigone,” where he calls Antigone an anti-God, Antitheos,136 attributes to her a “rebellion” (Aufruhr), and to the tragedy, a “republican” form of reason” (because Kreon is turned down at its end). Revolution, then, is conceived as a categorical U-turn: categorical meaning probably the same as in Kant’s “categorical imperative”—self-sufficient, univocal, absolutely binding. Moreover, the shift from the categorical imperative to the categorical turn suggests hidden polemics between the ethics based on law and ethics based on event, and on the rupture this event introduces. The course of events in Antigone is that of a rebellion where, to the extent that it is a patriotic cause, it is important that everything senses itself as being seized by an infinite reversal [Umkehr] . . . For patriotic reversal is the reversal of all modes and forms of representation. However, an absolute reversal of these, an absolute reversal altogether without point of rest is forbidden for man as a knowing being.137

But the most ambitious interpretation of world history happens in the previous section of the “Remarks on Antigone,” where Hölderlin compares the ancient and the modern (“hesperic”) world. This relationship is, like revolution, a temporal one, and is itself a kind of tragedy. Indeed, the perspectives of the two epochs are not just different and contrary; they are opposed in the way of reversal, as relations, not entities. First of all, the task of Zeus (father of time or father of Earth) is “to reverse the striving from this world to the other into a striving from another world to this one.”138 This is a program of radical romanticism, the one that Marx will later pick up as “critique of Earth,” and which opposes the standard ideology of revolutionary Enlightenment as an idealistic or utopian tendency doing violence to nature. Secondly, this is particularly the program of modernity: For us, existing under the more real Zeus who not only stays between this Earth and the ferocious world of the dead, but who also forces the eternally anti-human course of nature on its way to another world more decidedly down onto earth . . . for us, then, the Greek representations change insofar as it is their chief tendency to comprehend themselves, which was their weakness; on the other hand, it is the main tendency in the mode of representation of our time to designate something, to possess a skill [Geschick], since the lack of destiny [Schicksal], the dysmoron, is our deficiency.139

The same thought appears in the famous letter to Böhlendorf from December 4, 1801: [T]he Greeks are less master of the sacred pathos, because to them it was inborn, whereas they excel in their talent for presentation, beginning with Homer, because this exceptional man was sufficiently sensitive to conquer the Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian empire and thus to veritably appropriate what is

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foreign. . . . With us it is the reverse. Hence it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence. I have labored long over this and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us namely, the living relationship and destiny, we must not share anything identical with them. Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien. . . . For this is the tragic to us: that, packed up in any container, we very quietly move away from the realm of the living, [and] not that consumed in flames we expiate the flames which we could not tame [like the ancients did].140

The accomplishment of Hölderlin is here not just the more secular and materialist interpretation of modernity than has usually been the case, but also the refusal to draw a substantial distinction between antiquity and modernity (or any other epoch). What changes is the relationship between what is near, one’s own, and thus “hard to grasp,” and the desideratum that is easier to objectivize and to reflect on. Thus, Hölderlin considers the term “revolution” seriously: it is not a circular turnover of regimes, and not a simple passage from one regime to another, but, in the spirit (but not in the letter) of Kant’s Streit, a U-turn of an existing tendency; a negation of movement, not of rest. Kant, as we remember, speaks of such U-turns, but with fear: what characterizes the (non-)revolution is its irreversibility. Hölderlin makes the overturning of a tendency a paradoxical curvature, a virage of freedom, not a statement of depressing circularity. This makes revolution more negative and more radical. Time, then, is not, as in Kant, just a synthesis and sequence of moments in a linear sequence, although it is a form of self-relation (as also in Kant). Time (the Russian word is by the way vremya, from turning, vertere) is a principle of infinite and incomplete reversal. The very essence of time is not that it goes forward but that it is possible to stop and turn back to recollect the past; or to take a standpoint on the as yet unreal future. Time is thus reversibly irreversible: reversible, but not to the end. The negativity of the rupture and “betrayal” leads to the play of reversals, which develops simple negation into reflective opposition, thus connecting its poles. And this is the function of art, to provide this reflection and connection, while the ethical imperative of a (revolutionary) subject is to be persistent and patient, in this time of turns and revelations. This is in fact fidelity to infinity: a reversal cannot be complete, and there is at least the matter of negativity, time itself, which can remain and survive the catastrophe in its pure ideal form.

Hegel on the French Revolution: Kings and cabbages The sublime and the banal: Masters and cabbages Hegel’s reading of the French Revolution, although it gives the event huge worldhistorical importance, sees it as a negative and thus pure existential event. Jean-Luc Nancy, in his essay “Surprise of the Event,”141 aptly depicts in both Hegel and Heidegger the emphasis on a “sheer,” purely substanceless happening, bloßes Geschehen: this is

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witnessed in the chapter on absolute freedom and terror. Hegel does not employ the word “event” here but defines the revolution as nur das negative Tun, “solely the negative doing.” The “sole work,” in the sense of act (Werk und Tat) of “universal freedom” is, for Hegel, “death . . . which has no inner significance or filling, for what is being negated is the unfilled and unfulfilled point of the absolutely free self [ein Tod der keinen inneren Umfang und Erfüllung hat; denn was negiert wird, ist der unerfüllte Punkt des absolut freien Selbst]. It is thus the most coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”142 However, Hegel oscillates between figuration and denial of figuration to the negative. First, universal freedom appears as “negative doing,” that is, destruction, disappearance.143 But this action is immediately figured as “the Fury of destruction.” This statement on the banality of death is further followed by the reiteration of the formula “death as the absolute master.”144 Empty, meaningless death, which is compared only with actions expressed by verbs, becomes substantivized and anthropomorphized. This is the fundamental “inversion” of revolution, which corresponds to the Umkehrung converting, in the “Preface” to Phenomenology, death and negativity into being.145 But this “being” is primarily one of imagination, and second, it is not truly negative any longer. It is a failed attempt to incorporate the negative, which may only cause boredom and laughter. The sublimation of death draws its sublimity from the failure of its signification. Death is an impossible concept that even the strongest language is unable to grasp. At the same time, the sublimity of language covers up, blinds the subject to the even less supportable nothingness that is exposed by the banality of the guillotine.146 The sublimation itself fails. The text passes through the exaggerated figures of the “furies” and of the “absolute master” only to return again and again to the statement of the emptiness and banality of death. In the face of death, words become sheer linguistic matter. “In this flat, commonplace monosyllable [Tod, death—A.M.] is contained the wisdom of the government, the abstract intelligence of the universal will, in the fulfilling of itself.”147 Thus, accomplished or, rather, a more complete, negativity consists in the dissociation of death from meaning and embodiment; its sole, and true, body is now a meaningless sign that does not really contain it. It is not just that the language here loses death, is unable to hold it—death itself is at the same time nothing but a sign, it only exists as a sign, as a remainder, a trace of what is gone and therefore does not exist. But this trace does not mean anything. As a meaningless sign, it stands only for its own signification, for the possibility of signification as such, which happens to coincide with negativity and death.

The fight with an imaginary enemy Hegel’s reading of the French Revolution in Phenomenology is not a simple description of the advent of pure negativity and void. His attention is centered on the “negative doing” that applies itself to this negativity and negates it (in the form of the empty self)

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once more. The doing is thus a remainder, the incompleteness of negation; hence a very explicit world play on the word unerfüllt that may mean both unfulfilled (incomplete) and unfilled, without inner content. It is not just that pure universality is empty but also that its negation is as yet incomplete and must be negated again. Thus, we have seen in the rhetoric of the Jacobins a reflection of the fact that their efforts at interrupting the tendencies of the Old Regime was itself an activity of its continuation. On the other hand, their will to continue the revolution (qua new life) clashed with this first will to stop it (as a process belonging to the history of Absolutism). Their insistence on the incomplete character of revolution becomes a clear logical consequence. We see then that the conception of negative Tun is not simply reducible to an “empty” operation, or operation upon the empty. It is “negative” also in the mathematical sense of a subtraction from zero. Hegel couples this doing with being as such, as long as its privileged operation is death. Death is, for Hegel, sheer and abstract, because so is being (pure positivity) itself; death, death and failure of the Jacobins included, paradoxically brings the fight for abstract universality to its triumph—triumph of empty abstraction—or subtraction. The “solely negative doing” is nothing but the subtraction of being: When the universal will maintains that what the government has actually done is a crime committed against it, the government, for its part, has nothing specific and outwardly apparent by which the guilt of the will opposed to it could be demonstrated; for what stands opposed to it as the actual universal will is only an unreal [unwirkliche] pure will, intention. Being suspected, therefore, takes place, or has the significance and effect, of being guilty; and the external reaction against this reality that lies in the simple inwardness of intention, consists in the cold, matter-of-fact annihilation of this existent self, from which there is nothing else to take away [wegzunehmen] but its mere being.148

This passage describes the logic underlying Jacobin Terror, where mere intention (or even suspicion) was sufficient for prosecution. But it also reveals something else: the general will is split between the concrete but illegitimately particular government and the abstract, unreal force of negativity. These sides fight each other because of the contradiction between their particularity and abstract negativity, respectively. In spite of the efforts at destruction undertaken by the government, there is always something that remains and persists (we have seen testimony of this in the speeches of Saint-Just). What remains, is, first of all, the very activity of destruction, the negative doing, which exceeds and survives what it negates. It is the negation itself that due to its incompleteness always remains on the level of intention and is never incorporated. The revolutionary government fights with the remainder of negation, which threatens to negate, in turn, the general will itself. The general will, as stabilized and incorporated in the government, fights its own mirror image, its own infinite and indeterminate force of destruction, in anything that persists outside it. Thus, it fights more than this persisting being actually is, more than there is, tout court. The fight with an unreal enemy means a fight with an imaginary enemy. The passage in question has to be read along with the sublimated image of “death, the absolute master.” This “absolute master”

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is the negative magnitude of the revolution. It is the unreal, persisting character of negation that the self-consciousness, on both sides of the revolutionary “barricade,” fights in this sublimated, hyperbolic image. In executing a demonized enemy of the revolution, the guillotine subtracts from the being more than it can give: the figure of absolute negation. The negative advent of the sheer being actualizes itself in the revolution through the mediation of an arithmetical “negative”: through the projection of the imaginary opposition to the (empty) universal, and the actual fight with this imaginary enemy.

The irreversibility of revolution The oscillation between the figuration of negativity and the denial of this figuration suggests an infinite circle, which would turn revolution into a superfluous farce. However, like the option of the embodiment of death, the circularity and reciprocity between the negative and positive is put into question, appears as an imaginary specter, and is ultimately denied. Hegel’s reading of revolution contains a description of an unrealized, missed opportunity. When Hegel speaks of the “fear [Furcht] of the absolute master, death,” this fear (as is the case in the dialectics of master and slave) is supposed to bring society back to its limited, structured being. But here the counterfactual mode enters: Out of this tumult, Spirit would be thrown back to its starting point, to the ethical world and real world of culture, which would have been merely refreshed and rejuvenated by the fear of the lord and master which has again entered men’s hearts. Spirit would have anew to traverse anew and continually repeat this cycle of necessity if the result were only complete interpenetration of self-consciousness and Substance .  .  . [But this is not the form the final result assumed], and the meaningless death, the unfilled negativity of the self, changes round in its inner Notion into absolute positivity.149

What is ultimately missed is the glimpse of circular reversibility, reciprocity between being and death, event and thing, positivity and negativity. The revolution affirms (exactly as in Kant, shown later) this reversibility in potentia by denying it in actu; it is a failure of the reversal of event and the establishment of its irreversibility.150 There is no way back but the will to return provides for the repeated attempts to do so. Therefore, Hegel reverts to the statement of the meaninglessness of death in emphasizing that postrevolutionary individuals may no longer retain the richness of determinations available to them in the age of Enlightenment: All these determinations have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom; its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror [Schrecken] of the negative that contains nothing positive in it, nothing that fills it with a content.151

Destructive disaster has indeed no locatable embodiment, no being. This is what makes it most fearful. One has to heed the two different words that Hegel uses for

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“fear”—Furcht or sublimated fear of the absolute master; Schrecken or the effect of banal, empty death. Miller renders Schrecken as “terror” (and the word Schrecken was indeed used at the time as a common reference to Jacobin rule) but its specific connotation is a scare, a simple shock. Schrecken is the name for a moment of empty negation, which comes by surprise, suddenly and instantly, but to which the subject has to return again and again in order to make sense of what has happened. Not that this negation does not have an object—any negation does—but it is indifferent to it. This negation oversteps the boundaries of what it negates and is thus indeterminate. We are frightened because “something” has happened—but we do not know exactly what. This unfilled and unfulfilled negation turns out, once again, to be “positive”— because it is imperishable, unforgettable in its unfilled negativity. Hegel calls the passage to this negation “the most sublime education” [die erhabenste Bildung], but this is sublimation in the strict Kantian sense of the word, as the persistence of pure failure, an index of negativity. This sublime is not a sublime body (for Kant, there is no sublime object) but a simple sign. The sublimation in question is thus emphatically not sublimation in the sense of crowning and incorporating death as the absolute master. Empty negation is more sublime than the sublime itself. Its body is not the sublime body of the king but the sheer materiality of the signifier, the “flat monosyllable ‘death.’ ” What [self-consciousness] loses there, is abstract being, the immediate existence of that insubstantial center; and that vanished immediacy is the universal will as such which it now knows itself to be, so far as it is the sublated [aufgehoben] immediacy, so far as it is pure knowledge or pure will. By this means it knows this will to be itself, and knows itself to be its essential reality; but not as immediate essence, not will as revolutionary government or anarchy struggling to establish an anarchical constitution, nor itself as a center of this faction or the opposite; the universal will is its pure knowing and willing, and its universal will qua this pure knowledge and volition.152

Thus, self-consciousness, or the subject, sees that it is able to know and to will something that does not have, and may not have, a stable being or meaning. Failure of the attempt to bring pure negativity into being maintains it in the form of loss, in the subject’s self-knowledge. Pure negativity is not positivized but coincides with pure positivity. In its nonactuality it is indestructible; the material absence of its embodiment (its negativity) coincides with its existence in the form of a meaningless sign (death), the positing without content. One can say that the subject identifies with the void of the revolutionary event, and the result, as the next section of Phenomenology claims, is Kantian moral subjectivity, with its noumenal but empty formal freedom. Thus, on the one hand, negativity becomes positive in the subject itself. But, we remember that Phenomenology is a narrative, and that the subject of formal will is not yet the absolute subject. In this sense, self-recognition happens historically and thus there is a gap between the revolutionary moment of subjectivity and subjectivity as such. Thus seen, Hegel does not differ much from Kant or Badiou: any identification of the subject or a naming of the void has a historical, thus passing, but memorable character.

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Affinities with Kant If we sum up this reading of Hegel, it appears strangely similar to the treatment of the French Revolution by Kant, written about ten years earlier. Hegel, like Kant, emphasizes the fantastic, diabolic figuration of pure negativity and agrees with Kant that such negativity has never indeed fully come into existence. It was established in its absence. But neither did sheer circulation and inconclusive oscillation take place. Instead, exactly as in Kant’s analysis, the irreversible event constituted selfreflection of the self-consciousness upon the subjective character of pure negativity (coinciding with empty, pure positivity). Finally, as in Kant (particularly taking into account his third Conflict), the positive side of this event was embodied in a meaningless sign, inducing, although not containing, the subjective will of absolute negativity. Indeed, the place that the reading of the Revolution occupies in Phenomenology may confirm this interpretation. Immediately after the section on “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” Hegel turns to the problem of moral subject and then to the critique of dualism in Kant’s moral philosophy. Thus, the French Revolution may be read as a historical correlate of the advent of Kantianism, the point where Kant’s philosophy is made possible. Further criticism of Kant in Phenomenology may be seen as criticism of his inadequate or insufficient solution to the advent of pure negativity, that is, his inability to perceive its positive, historical aspect. Or, in all likelihood, the insufficiency of Kant’s moral teaching is due to the incomplete advent of sheer negativity in the French Revolution. This negativity, not yet sublated, was (according to Hegel) revealed only in an ambiguous sign and could not (in principle) be fully embodied; therefore, Kant could develop only abstract, legalistic ethics, based on interpretation of the letter of law. Negativity, this force of abstraction, itself depends on the force of abstraction (this “negative attention”) produced by signs (including the “historical sign” of revolution). The usual reading of Hegel’s account of revolution (present, for instance, in Kojève), where the attempt to establish pure (abstract) universality would result in the destruction of anything particular, has to be nuanced. The revolutionary government, with its aspiration to abstract universality, does not bring about death directly as the death of the particular (it imagines itself to be neutral and thus coexistent with the particularities that it governs, cf. Rousseau’s dichotomy of general and particular will). It brings death through a mediating fantasy of fighting with another universal (or “counteruniversal”), with a diabolical enemy who would fight against freedom as consistently and disinterestedly as the revolutionaries fight for it. This arithmetically negative fantasy is again an inverted image of the revolutionaries themselves, and of the reflective, self-applied character of their potentially infinite internal struggle. Any negation of certain content is incomplete as long as it is not both existential and epistemological negation: destruction and oblivion. Death comes only as a side effect of an effort at infinite abstraction and purification. The fantasy of a demonic enemy takes the place of the (arithmetically) negative void opened by being, that is, by the (impossible) possibility of death.

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Marx’s negative revolution Marx’s theory of revolution has been sufficiently researched, and I will not cover it in its entirety here. What interests me is the connection, in Marx, of revolution and negativity. In the chapter on negativity, I have already specified the way in which Marx criticizes Hegel’s Aufhebung: the preservation of the sublated past and the interiorization of it in the present. This is not as fortunate as Hegel considered it to be. It fills the present with a mass of indigested forms of life, which weigh on it with a dead weight of senseless, brutal, and cynical oppression. The present moment requires a new, radical negation qua destruction, accompanied by the ideological weapon of derision, satire. This theory of negativity reflects also Marx’s attitude to revolution. In his early writings, where most reflections on revolution are concentrated, Marx always speaks of two revolutions. The first revolution is the French one, which has already happened. Marx consistently emphasizes its negative and destructive sides. In On the Jewish Question (the passage I have already quoted in Chapter 1 with regard to the French Revolution), he writes: Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word—feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political—that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. . . . The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. . . . Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function. But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content. Feudal society was resolved into its basic element—man, but man as he really formed its basis—egoistic man. This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the

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precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man.153

Thus, for Marx, the French and American revolutions (he mentions the latter, too), being political in nature, nevertheless have devastating social results: they withdraw and subtract the political from the society, thus turning society into the Hegelian “civil society,” “state of need and understanding.” The product of negative revolution is dispersion and atomization, which (here Marx is again faithful to Hegel) is itself a form of limitation, an imprisonment of a subject in the boundaries of individuality. But if, in Hegel, state was supposed to sublate and complement civil society at a new level, in Marx, it is just a false universal, a fiction that covers up the alienation of social life from the universal and maintains an unfortunate split between state and society. So, the first revolution is just a first, abstract negation, which, on the one hand, brings sheer destruction, and on the other hand, leaves untouched the very elements of feudal society: egotistic men and women who are used to oppression and have thus always been alienated from the universal, but now their alienation is completed. The state, in idealist enthusiasm, pushes away society by abandoning it to its own fate. It is easy to see that this is not just an application but also an inversion of Hegel’s message: what for Hegel is a sublation and sublimation is for Marx alienation and subtraction: he draws on the symmetry of the dialectical movement and notices the backward movement—when a gun shoots, it pulls back; when a refrigerator freezes, it also produces heat; in the same manner, the history that produces the joy of emancipation also produces an impoverished, desperate subject, in its back. It is the same with revolutionary melancholia: the self-foundation of a subject means, by definition, self-destruction and self-oppression; a jump forward requires a step back and it often happens that self-destruction and retreat prevail over the spectacular but short-lived jump into the kingdom of ends. Of course, this reverse perspective fully depends on the judgment of the fake character of autonomous ideality. What Marx does not say here, but what can be deduced, is that this judgment is possible because the first revolution’s rhythm is broken. It stumbles, because it reaches out too quickly toward a utopian consciousness of universal Enlightenment and severs the link with the unhappy consciousness that had been desiring this Enlightenment; the desired treasure is attained, but the desire is gone in the process. As a result, freedom is reserved for parliament sessions and civic assemblies, while the good old master/servant relationship dominates in the rest of society, in the form of exploitation. Also importantly, in On the Jewish Question, Marx warns on the dangers of the merely political revolution, which, being partial, can for this very reason turn to terror. Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive

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taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine. At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real specieslife of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.154

This is a criticism of what was later to be called “totalitarianism”: it is not the social revolution but precisely the political revolution that tends, at its peak, to subordinate and politicize civil society, but without undoing the very gap between society and politics, this turns into violence and bad repetition. Stalin and Mao would launch terror not because they were radical but because they remained political revolutionaries. For the same reason, the only logical end of such regimes is a conservative restoration of capitalist civil society. Permanent revolution (Proudhon’s term) is evoked here pejoratively, in anticipation of bad infinity, and part of what is meant here is revolution as an institution, which is so characteristic of today’s world. The social revolution would, in contrast, abolish the state as an autonomous entity and give power to society. In the introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx drafts the contours of a second revolution. This radical revolution is described as a particular mission of Germany in contrast to the merely political revolution built by France. Here, Marx develops the idea of a revolutionary class. In France, there was such a class— bourgeoisie— which was “a general representative” of society, an analogon of what Hegel called a “universal estate” (although he meant bureaucracy). The fact that this class predated the revolution is also responsible for its partial, merely political character: this class shapes society in its image and is not interested in undoing the conditions of its own existence. Bourgeoisie, in France, was opposed to nobility and clergy, which together played the role of a “negative representative.” The first revolution thus stems, in accordance with dialectic, from an opposition of contraries, a polarization: this reinforces its energy but also limits its freedom to maneuver. In contrast, Germany, which has no developed universal class, no polarization, cannot undergo a classical political revolution. But—and this being a dialectical volteface—this is precisely the reason why it can undergo a radical revolution, which would achieve human and not just political emancipation. Where, then, is the positive possibility for German emancipation? Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby

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emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat. . . . By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.

So, the second revolution proceeds from the site of society’s self-dissolution, its internal impossibility. It is thus, again, negative, in a more complete way than the political revolution had been. Unlike the latter, it does not have a positive force behind negation, but is itself what Hegel called “absolute negativity.” Marx speaks of a dissolution (“Auflösung”), which is probably opposed to Hegel’s Aufhebung, as the name of a negation that does not preserve anything, and apparently destroys the very “elements” that had been left untouched by the first revolution. At the same time, Marx’s construction remains in a way faithful to Hegel if we read the Berlin professor to say that absolute negativity is not a moment to supersede in search of grounds, but is itself already the result that may be viewed affirmatively. In this sense, Marcuse’s Marxist theory of external negation better fits Hegel than Marx himself: yes, revolution is just a destructive mechanism within society, and society must undergo a collapse, but the very process of destruction (dissolution) creates the contours of the future. What Marx does not say in this text, but will explain in the Manifesto, is that the negative movement of bourgeois society and its dissolution in the proletariat is already “communism”—a regime of generic, absolute unity where an element runs through any fixed identity, as one is “. . . critical critic in the evening.” Hegel would say that communism remains abstract, because it does not jump to a developed organic structure and does not incorporate its opposite. But for Marx, communism has no opposite to incorporate, it puts an end to mourning, lets the dead bury their dead, and lives off the surplus time and surplus value of leisure. In his later work, Marx (who knew much of Hölderlin from Bettina von Arnim and put his phrase as an exergue to the German-French Yearbook) develops this Hölderlinian motif of leisure, which will prevail in the communist society, and which (qua surplus time) is already a secret of the human production of value. But, in the introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx is interested in the “posthumous” existence of the Old Regime in Germany, the anachronistic posthistorical time, which can nevertheless produce a new dawn: a revolution that emerges without ready conditions. In all these cases, an excess and surplus of time is at stake: Jacques Derrida later described this motif under the name of “anachronism.”155 One other fundamental feature of Marx’s theory of revolution is his attention to the problem of relationship between intellectuals and proletarians. In the introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx famously offers to join the forces

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of German idealist philosophy to transcend the proletarians’ negative condition. In “German Ideology” with Engels, Marx introduces the concept of “ideology,” which he compares to “camera obscura”156 because it inverts the actual role of ideas and material forces, makes what is active, passive, and what is passive, active: puts history on its head. “Ideologists” are those who believe in the unilateral power of ideas over matter. Powerless to destroy the situation, they pretend to ignore and disavow it by denying (“criticizing”) it theoretically. Marx and Engels propose instead a historical “materialism,” while never denying a dialectical circulation between things and their ideas. This problematic became a constant in the social-democratic movement and was discussed with renewed energy by Lenin, Luxemburg, Lucacs, and Gramsci. Lenin insisted on a leading role for the party and its ideas. Lucacs built a more complex theory under which the proletariat, being both subject and object of society, by being a site of contradiction, also has access to the totality of social relations. Gramsci was much more serious about the problem of the split between intellectuals and masses and suggested relying on “organic intellectuals” not yet torn from the activities they reflect on. Thus, broadly speaking, revolution is for Marx linked to the mind/body relationship. Because it involves society acting on its own, it involves also a split into active and passive instances. This split can never be absolute, it is just functional. Nevertheless, it shows that the problem of self-foundation and self-mastery implies the irreducible duality of human experience and the task of conceiving and constructing a mode of mediation between ideas (projected into the future) and bodies (which risk losing their meaning). A “specter” is one such form, a workers’ international is another. In communist society, the division between intellectual and manual labor would be overcome, and one would “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” Nevertheless, it does not seem that Marx would have found a plausible synthesis of idea and matter: what matters is that he posited this as a key problem of revolution and revolutionaries. Further development of Marx’s theory of revolution is to be found in his pamphlet “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Here, there are some familiar thoughts, such as the doctrine of two revolutions, and the destructive nature of the first, bourgeois one. But then the argument, enriched by the experience of a new revolution (1848–52), goes into greater detail. First, Marx launches a characteristic dialectic of reversals. Bourgeois revolutions and proletarian revolution are related as contraries (Aristotelian pros ti), not in the sense of polarities but in the sense of contrary movement in time: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—here the content goes beyond the phrase. . . .

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Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day—but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [hangover, literally cat’s trouble] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals—until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!157

The revolution of 1848 is not just a bourgeois revolution but a repetition of one that definitively moves from progress to reaction, as though having been scared by the experience of the future. In this sense, there is not just opposition between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, but also between tragic and comic bourgeois revolutions: In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondists and the rule of the Girondists by the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line. It is the reverse with the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15, and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of Order. The party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble, and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on those shoulders when one fine morning it perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets. Each party kicks from behind at the one driving forward, and leans over in front toward the party which presses backward. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious gyrations. The revolution thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.158

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The question is, then, where the proletarian revolution, with its futurist perspective, to be found, if the nineteenth century’s revolution is exemplified by the mirror-like inversion of revolution that the 1848 was. Either it remains in project, or the same revolution of 1848 is also a failed proletarian one, if seen from a reverse perspective. Revolutions, as it turns out, deserve their name because they involve temporal inversions, steps back and forward. Marx thinks of historical time not as a linear progression but as a principle of reversibility, which nevertheless preserves the basic orientations of past and future. Revolutions negate, not a static status quo of an Ancien régime, but an existing movement, which they interrupt and turn around, subsequently interrupting, slowing down, or accelerating their own movement (all of these are modes of temporal self-affection). Further, radical negativity, taken empirically, cannot but proceed via contraries: opposing movement is here a way of radicalizing sheer negation by actively engaging what it negates and introducing a “negative magnitude” of time into the slow progression of monotonous time. When Marx speaks of advance and backward turns, this has to be understood not just in terms of the progress of social institutions, but in terms of temporality as such: the modern subject systematically undoes its own work and returns to the state of infancy and immaturity (here one has to think of Althusser’s criticism of subjectivity as of a constant production of beginners), but also engages in an infinite rush to the better, forgetting himself/herself in the process (here Durkheim’s anomia would be a twentieth-century proxy). Marx’s description of the bourgeois revolution vividly reminds us of contemporary revolutions: the anticommunist ones, the “colored” ones, and most probably the avalanche-like movements of 2011–12. The quick discharge of events (increasingly facilitated by the progress of the media) creates a rupture between society and the revolutionary state, the negative energy of revolution loses its enemy, and loses its subject, thus leading to a backward movement of resubjectivization and self-torture. While the French Revolution proceeded “with Roman costumes and Roman phrases,” the 1848 revolution was already disguising itself in the costumes of the revolution of 1789–99, so that ultimately it brought to power a new Napoleon and a new empire. But if, in the French Revolution of 1789–99, the costumes added a tragic seriousness to the picture, in 1848, on the contrary, the disguise was of a farcical nature. Here, there is a genuine problem, because in a way the French Revolution was the foundation for a new historical epoch, and what had been for the revolutionaries a courageous step into the past, or into the unknown is, for us, a foundation and a point of subjectivization. All subsequent revolutions “derived their poetry” from this French Revolution, thus repeating its own gesture of recovering origins. But any such turn to the past is willy-nilly melancholic in nature, which is why Marx calls to let the dead bury their dead and turn to the future—thus bypassing the terra firma of grounding subjectivity. However, in the next quoted paragraph he says the opposite and presents the proletarian revolution in the classical Hegelian spirit of the “work of the negative,” as a patient movement of auto-critique. Thus, a turn to the past is inevitable but the tendency matters: either we take a glimpse of the new and go back to reassess ourselves and produce new demands and desires, or we rely on past energies and jump into the future without discerning its novelty (interestingly, Benjamin’s inverted image of

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revolution as needed to satisfy the dreams of past generations would fall into the second, wrong category according to Marx, even though Benjamin’s idea of interrupting and exploding monotonous time fully fits with Marx’s intentions). It seems anyway that both revolutions are destined to oscillate between the past and future, between the ideal and material elements. It is also because of the characteristic suspension of the postrevolutionary/ prerevolutionary time that, says Marx, time itself may have an impact on events. The 1848 revolution is a development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world’s coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers . . . If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness.159

The fact that the calendar works on its own testifies that we deal with the empty time of negativity, Kant’s ens imaginarium or Hegel’s absolute negativity, which, left without a measure of concrete movement, keeps negating itself, turning around like a wheel. The same is true of abstract labor time in Marx’s capital: it abstracts itself from the real logic of labor and therefore turns a meaningful production into a routine, renewable daily toil.160 Nevertheless, time is also an interior sense, and thus a medium of reflection: Marx’s temporal logic is a representation of a reflective, self-relating subject that, in the absence of stopping or anchoring, is lost in a mirror play of infinite subjectivization. The role of mimesis, of image and fiction, in Marx’s description of revolutionary movement, is important. It has to do with the fact that the revolutionaries find themselves in no-place and no-time, they are suspended in absolute negativity, “between past and future.” The Ancien Régime is already symbolically dead but a new regime had not been established or at least recognized. We remember that already in Plato, the nonbeing of khora was a source of images. One can only metaphorically describe oneself when one is nothing already or nothing yet, in a situation of symbolic collapse. An inversion, a contrary movement, is in this sense a metaphor of negativity itself. Here, again, Derrida161 rightly speaks of the constitutive structure of anachronism that produces “specters,” or “shadows without bodies” as Marx says. To the Hegelian Aufhebung, which does not fully kill but spectralizes, there corresponds here another negative movement, which anticipates but pulls back without grasping, out of respect or of fear of self-destruction: this movement also produces suspended images, specters, or perhaps angels, demons, and their hybrids. Thus, to conclude, Marx develops Hegel’s negative understanding of revolution and presents revolution not just as an abstract nothingness but as suspension of time

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in a state of constant reversibility. This carnivalesque reversibility predictably invokes laughter as an affect of negativity. However, the absolute negativity of abstract time hides an excessive element, which is the negative movement itself. In history, this is the proletariat, which suffers from the wheel of history; later, in the economy, lthis is the surplus time that is hidden beyond the cycle of abstract temporality. It is in this respect that Benjamin’s image of the dwarf of historical materialism hidden under the chess automaton of progressive history should be read. But we are at the same time back with Hegel: abstract negativity has hidden grounds in the very act of negation, which is itself not abstract; there is an asymmetry in the relation of contraries, and this can lead to a destructive crisis, from which negativity emerges in a new affirmative and emancipatory image, and surplus time appears as such, as a free space-time to dwell in. The big question is, of course, whether the surplus can exist without what it exceeds, and negative act, without what it negates.

Sorel and Benjamin: Critique of pure negation A crucial step in the development of the notion of negative resistance in Marxist thought was taken by French syndicalist George Sorel (1847–1922). In the wake of a relatively successful general strike during the first Russian Revolution (1905–7) and in opposition to the defeatism and reformism of contemporary social democracy,162 Sorel set out to write an apology for the general strike as a paradigmatic case of revolutionary violence.163 We have seen, with Kant and Hegel, that a negation or a change is as such not yet internalized and is an autonomous product and instance of human action. Simple motion (as Galileo showed) is still inertial, external to the subject. It is its hindrance or acceleration, the second negation (the second “derivative,” in mathematical terms) that constitutes truly subjective effort and “humanizes” motion. Acceleration is an obvious characteristic of any revolutionary action (which impatiently “hastens” events and is accused of untimeliness). But hindrance is no less important. At the outset of the century, when the capitalist system was still rapidly developing, the focus of the socialist revolutionary movement moved from a “positive,” “progressive” policy, be it reform or an immediately progressive socialist revolution, to the “negative” politics of a strike. If a capitalist economy, according to Marx, constantly “revolutionizes its means of productions”164 and makes “everything solid melt into the air,” then resistance would imply stoppage of this frenetic movement. Interruption of work comes as an act of totalizing impatience and exhaustion with the world. The Russian word for strike is zabastovka, deriving from the Italian word basta, “that’s enough.” Stoppage by strike is a withdrawal of the labor force from the world that it sustains and makes tangible. It actualizes this force, so to speak, in the form of an arithmetical negative (by withdrawing, subtracting it). The catastrophic violence that could follow such a withdrawal would not be the violence of the strikers but the previously latent external violence that they had been containing.

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This provides a context to better understand Sorel’s claims, some of which are quite complex: 1. A strike is not a “nonviolent” form of struggle but a form of revolutionary war.165 2. As such, it serves mainly not pragmatic but rather paradigmatic, exemplary qualities. It is a means to mobilize the proletariat and, negatively, to convince it of its strength (look what happens when you withdraw your strength from reality and you will see that it only holds by your invisible effort). 3. A proletarian strike, unlike a political one, does not set itself any immediate pragmatic goals. Thus it avoids the vicious circles of violence where one political party takes the place of another. 4. Violence in a general strike is not only an example but it is also necessarily a myth. The “generalness” of the strike and the radical character of violence are not achievable in effect. Sorel166 points out that even the Christians had only 10 or 20 real martyrs but exaggerated these cases to mobilize the masses. The same applies to the French Revolution which was materially (Sorel shares Tocqueville’s point of view) a trivial and inconclusive event. It takes a myth to “sublimate” revolutionary violence and make it absolute. Sorel writes: It must never be forgotten that the perfection of this [Sorel’s] method of representation would vanish in a moment if any attempt was made to resolve the general strike into a sum of historical details: it must be taken as an undivided whole and the passage from capitalism to socialism conceived as a catastrophe whose development defies description.167

5. This myth does not just sublimate violence but also mystifies the present moment. Unlike utopia, myth relates to the present. Myths must be judged as a means of acting on the present; all discussion of the method of applying them a future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important. 168



Here and now, it creates an illusion of a void space in which one is prepared to take completely spontaneous action. 6. The result of the violence mythologized in this way is an “irrevocable transformation.”169 This, in a nutshell, is Sorel’s argument. It is quite advanced conceptually, to the degree where it shows features akin to Kant’s theory of subjectivity. Indeed, Sorel’s “myth” resembles Kant’s “regulative idea”170—an instrumental fiction that is necessary to explain and constitute the possibility of (among other things) spontaneous human freedom.171 Note how Sorel’s construction corresponds to the concept of revolution we have built up to this point: the fantasy of absolute negation is its unachievable goal, the irreversibility (irrevocability) of its direction its actuality. It is interesting to note that the “mysticism” of Sorel is not that distant from certain versions of liberal ideology, such as J. S. Mill’s vision of society as experimentation where “individuals” will act creatively on the condition of constant epistemological

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uncertainty. The liberal state, according to this theory, builds on the (fictional) assumption that truth is always suspended and never actually achieved. The reluctance of liberal state to use force against its members serves to provoke individuals to act and even to oppose the state as a test of its right to exist. If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand for it. If this be so, the sooner civilization receives notice to quit, the better.172

Of course, as Carl Schmitt173 rightly argues, this theory, in exact opposition to Sorel’s, aims to maintain and suspend the status quo. Its deferral of the truth that would “eventually” win is, in Sorel’s terms, “utopian.” Still, Mill hints at the possibility that this liberal tolerance is a provocation to an opposition to the regime. Does the liberal government then tolerate resistance based on a “myth” close to the myth of this resistance itself? Can we not say that the utopian belief in the truth to come is also a “myth” meant to stimulate present day action? Can we not say that the refusal of Sorel to define the content of “spontaneous” action is utopian and even liberal? This strange proximity further shows the kinship between liberal and radical revolutionary positions. Both stem from revolutionary thought and border each other in pursuing their seemingly incompatible goals. It is important to perceive the implicit link of Sorel’s theme of strike with his notion of an inevitable incompletion of an empirical event, be it a strike or a revolution. Sorel argues against the positivist trends in social democracy, which believe in a necessary progressive movement of society toward a revolution. Against these opponents, Sorel argues (in classic Kantian fashion) that society will never be objectively ripe for revolution. Revolution itself, or a strike itself, will never be fully accomplished. This is why one has to act here and now, without waiting, in using the unachievable ideal of strike or revolution as a regulative myth. A strike is therefore a form of negative politics par excellence, as it never corresponds to any concept, including the concept of negativity. One can point to an important ambiguity in Sorel’s argument. What is the temporal character of the mythical strike that he talks about? Is it an instant of zero length, which would cut history into two parts? Or, as Sorel’s usage of the word “catastrophe” seems to suggest, are we dealing with an active and potentially infinite destructive force? The political value of the first option is problematic; on the one hand, the event would be over the same moment that it would begin; but on the other hand, it would create a dangerous illusion of an already accomplished change. The other option suggests that there is something not absolute and therefore not quite mythical in the “myth of violence.” It is around this ambiguity that the revolutionary thought of Walter Benjamin gradually developed. Benjamin’s work, in spite of its complexity and fragmentary

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character, holds singular importance for my project since it occupies a prominent place in both revolutionary theory and theoretical philosophy (the two branches of the present work). Benjamin’s thought influenced the tradition of emphasis on negation in politics and philosophy, namely that of the so-called Frankfurt School. Both Adorno, who developed under the direct influence of Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, who read Benjamin in the later stages of his development, refer to him as to the direct source of their “negative” dialectic.174 In 1921 Benjamin set out to write a text that would continue Sorel’s theory on the general strike but would put it more explicitly into the categories of Kantian critique. In this text, titled “Critique of Violence,”175 he takes issue with Sorel’s unfortunate choice of the word “myth.” In Benjamin’s view (which is grounded in a long tradition), myth is a device for the legitimization of legal power. Myth deals with origins and foundations. As such, it inevitably leads to a vicious circle between “law-creating” [rechtschaffende] and “law-preserving” [rechterhaltende] violence— violence as “means” and violence as an “end.” “Law-preserving” violence (like that of the police), which applies law each time to a new situation, thus cannot avoid instituting, performatively, a new law. Any violence directed against the regime becomes, in the case of victory, not only law-making but also law-preserving. One could add (although Benjamin does not mention this) that law-creating violence cannot help reinstating previously existing authority (as in the case of the French Revolutionaries who partly reinstated absolutist law by prosecuting the former king and the aristocrats). In the case of the strike, “mythical” interpretation would see it as provocation of the repressive violence of the state, which would in turn reaffirm the revolutionaries in their proud sacrifice. This violence will reinstate and fix the revolutionary as a counterpart of authority in their circular battle. Thus it will not be purely negative. Benjamin cites the Greek myth of Niobe, who claimed to be happier than the gods and thus provoked Apollo to exterminate all her children. Niobe, as a result, turned into a weeping statue. Benjamin does not want a proletarian (or any other unfortunate rebel) to be either forever frozen in the status of an offended victim, or, for that matter, to retake the position of offender upon himself/herself. An alternative to this “ambiguity” of the myth is what Benjamin calls “pure,” “divine” violence. As an example of such “reigning” [waltende] violence, Benjamin cites a Biblical story of the Korah: a group of Levites who were exterminated by God for their wrongdoings, by being swallowed up in a suddenly revealed chasm. This violence, says Benjamin, meets the Korah “undeclared, without warning, hitting and stopping not before annihilation [Vernichtung].” Benjamin thinks in terms of Kantian critique. Divine violence, he insists, plays an educational role, among others. It sets a limit to human violence by showing that the latter cannot appropriate or achieve negation. The commandment “thou shall not kill” is an instance of divine violence that forbids human violence. At the same time, God justifies humans taking up divine-like violence in a state of exception [Notwehr], by taking responsibility for it upon himself. In this way, he expiates176 humans in situations where violence is, exceptionally, to be applied.

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Benjamin follows Sorel’s argument very closely. Apart from the change of the word from “mythical” to “divine” and perhaps from his occasional (but secondary) mention of the progressiveness of proletarian revolution, Sorel would probably readily subscribe to everything that Benjamin is saying. Benjamin cites with sympathy Sorel’s distinction between “political” (cyclical) and “proletarian” strikes as a parallel to his own distinction between the mythical and the divine. If Benjamin points to the divine as to the limit of imaginative power, to a failure of imagination—then so does Sorel in his evocations of the sublime and the mystical. The problem with both Benjamin and Sorel is that they work with the fantasy (or idea) of pure negation (although Benjamin admits that it is not absolute, but spares souls, unlike bodies177). Sorel seems to operate with a “beautiful soul” distinction between a noble but unattainable truth and the imperfect world that needs to be tricked to think that it is possible to attain. What is the point of “striking” (in both senses of the English word) if you know that the strike is impossible anyway? In practice, this distinction will never work. Benjamin is more consistent in reserving actual divine violence for cases of emergency. But if, in these cases, divine, pure violence remains an example, a “guiding rule,” then there is a danger of confusion between the pure (divine) and the human. The strictly limiting character of pure annihilation in Benjamin is therefore a weak defense in the face of the obvious proximity of his “divine” violence with the Nazi’s project of “Final Solution,” which was also a fantasy of traceless, total annihilation of Jewry (this rather evident association was noted by Derrida in his reading of the “Critique of Violence”178). Benjamin and Sorel have to be granted far-reaching prophetic sensitivity but the project they are engaged in still seems compromised. It is in the later thoughts of Benjamin (who was already aware, if not of the Final Solution, then of what was on its perpetrators’ minds) that the “negative” idea of revolution is revised and further developed. In his later work, Benjamin becomes gradually critical of momentary “strikes” (blows) of negativity; he treats such strikes as a blinding shock.179 In the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin indicated that divine violence, while pure, was not absolute, not “with regard to the soul of the living.”180 In his last text, written after the infamous pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939 and posthumously titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin introduces the notion of an absolute negation, an absolute “second” death—one that threatens not only physical destruction but also oblivion. This absolute death, far from being an “expiatory,” exclusive act of God, appears, on the contrary, as an extreme danger, a catastrophe. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.181

The catastrophe threatens mankind not instantly but permanently, since it is the virtual end of the agency of time (understood by modernity as an abstract, monotonous measure of accelerating change and destruction). The critique (as a true trial, crisis)

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therefore takes place in the face of an enemy, though the enemy may, in its absolute character, be a product of the imagination. As we have seen, this is also the case in the Kantian critique. The task of messianic revolutionary redeeming consists for Benjamin, as he says in Zentralpark about Auguste Blanqui, “to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn.”182 Danger provides an opportunity of accessing failed hopes and the mute resistance of the past, which face their destruction by progress. The appearance of Blanqui (who plays a large role in the later thought of Benjamin) is important here. Blanqui is someone who represents the politics of nontheoretical, spontaneous action. His “theoretical” texts are dedicated to the tactics of barricade battles. Barricades, like strikes, are forms of negative resistance, resistance that works by blocking motion. However, Blanqui, as opposed to Bartleby with his abstention from action, is a model, first, of active resistance, second, of an action that would also be “reactive.” Benjamin emphasizes that Blanqui’s activity responds to acute danger, which is about to actualize itself. The abstention of Bartleby, on the contrary, appears to be truly and almost purely active, and not reactive. But it risks remaining totally meaningless. Meanwhile, for Blanqui as for Benjamin, negative action is also revealing; it has an epistemological meaning: On s’engage et puis on voit. In order to see, one has to realize that s/he cannot see anything without acting. As Benjamin’s sixth thesis says, “to articulate the past historically” means “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”183 To be exposed to danger means literally the exposition of nonrealized possibilities, which would otherwise be simply waiting for the right moment. Thus, it is often said that some dying people see their lives flashing by before their eyes. Memory consists of the things that one reserves for later, of incomplete actions. The moment of mortal danger is the moment of danger for these reserved possibilities. On the contrary, if the danger is overcome, one can have easier access and perhaps take over the incomplete projects that had been latent under the regime of positive “adjourning.” The regime of bourgeois parliamentarism (as famously criticized by Schmitt184) or positivist social democrats is dangerous because they always adjourn and delay decisions. They thus hide the finitude of human life and their delay hides within itself mortal and merciless destruction. Things and historical forces that are exposed to danger, that are almost destroyed by history, have the character of outdated remains, “ruins.” The present moment, the moment of action has itself, according to Benjamin, this superfluous and ruinous character. “In relation to the history of all organic life on earth . . . the paltry fifty-millenia history of Homo sapiens equates to something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would take up to one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” Now-time (Jetztzeit), which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe.185

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“Now-time” is the place for the final meeting of all persisting epochs, which has the messianic task of bringing them together. The setting of this impossible task is made possible because of the redundant and negligible position that the now-time acquires as a result of its delaying, halting, and holding of preceding moments (the halting itself is not halted and therefore not redeemed in the same plane). The failure of the task is secured by the impossibility of bringing together the heterogeneous: memories are “fleeting” as one tries to mediate between them and to pass from one to another. But this very failure provides for the success of now-time (or after-time) in emblematizing the superfluous essence of each new epoch and of time as such. Each past epoch is in the process of becoming. Their “official” ending (such as the fall of Rome or the conquest of Renaissance Italy) does not exhaust their vision or potential. An epoch continues beyond its historical boundaries and survives for memory. The instant of remembrance [Eingedenken] of those epochs is at the same time the moment of their stoppage. All past epochs, with their unfulfilled, interrupted projects swarm at the moment of this stoppage as the cars of a suddenly stopped train collide and crash against each other. All of this means, however, that danger, although absolute in principle and in perspective, is not fully accomplished at each particular present moment. Absolute negation is imaginary (mythical?); experience deals only with incomplete or nearly complete negations. This provides negativity with an extension in time (as opposed to momentary “divine violence”). This extension, on the one hand, perpetuates the catastrophe, but on the other hand, it always leaves hope for salvation here and now, at the last moment. Along with this hope, there exists also space for a revolutionary act, a “threshold” from which one can leap into action. Such revolutionary action is, indeed, purely negative, disruptive in relation to what Benjamin calls the “continuum of history.” However, this “continuum” is itself sheer destruction and negation. Revolutionary negativity is therefore one of “second degree”; it fights, in its turn, against the tendency toward the absolute, total negation (where “absolute negation” is the imaginary projection and distilment of the experience of historical change). In Thesis 15, Benjamin famously qualifies revolutionary action as an interruption, destruction of time. What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse mode.186

Benjamin further relates an episode from the history of the July revolution of 1830, when insurgents started, at the same time and in many places, to shoot at tower clocks. He cites a poem of Hugo that compares these shooters with the biblical Joshua as “irritated against the hour,” and willing to “stop the day” (actually, Benjamin could have as well quoted, as I did above, Marx’s “18th Brumaire,” on the force of calendar that settled the destiny of the failed 1848 revolution). It is easy to misread this passage as a cultivation of an alternative time, which does not belong to the spatialized temporality

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of the clock. However, it is important to see that, as throughout “On the Concept of History,” we are dealing with combat. The evocation of Joshua, who asked God to stop the sun in order to win the battle, is only too telling. Calendars do not transpose us into any primordial time, but as days of memorial recollection [Eingedenken] they set obstacles in the way of all-destructive homogeneous time, which is counted by clocks—of time that pretends to be infinite and hides from a subject the moment to act, the now-time.187 The resulting trajectory is not that of an ecstatic instant, but that of a train braking at full speed. The survival of an epoch from the continual disaster of history turns it from a relic of the past into a promise of the future, a legacy of failed utopian striving. Benjamin’s “Theses,” as all major theories of revolution, perform an imaginary reversal of temporal modes. The past and the future exchange roles. The act of remembrance is no longer the gaze of the subject from the present into the past but the gaze of the past at the subject and at his present situation. The present is being watched by the undead specters of previously failed possibilities. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. . . . [T] here is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.188

Revolution therefore implies a “Copernican” Revolution; it requires an external point of view upon the subject, which decenters his/her privileged position of an absolute observer (this is key to the revolutionary struggle against all other “privileges”). Benjamin emphasizes the link of his thoughts with this Copernican Revolution (and thus with Kant’s thoughts on revolution) in using the figure of “heliotropism” to characterize the relation of the past to the redeeming now-time: “As flowers turn toward the sun, what has been strives to turn—by dint of a secret heliotropism—toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”189 While explicit reference to Copernicus is missing in this text, it is present in a slightly earlier, but parallel, discussion in Benjamin’s unfinished project: the so-called Passagen-Werk. The Copernican turn [Wendung] in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in “what has been” [“das Gewesene”], and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation has to be overturned [sich umkehren], and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal—the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened to us; to establish them is the affair of memory. Indeed, awakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious. . . . There is a not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.190

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The logic is the same as in the “Theses”: the present, instead of being a detached spectator of a parade (Triumphzug) of past events, itself enters the scene, and, like the sun, becomes for the past a center to which it strives and an object at which it looks (forward).191 Benjamin refers to the famous beginning of Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, where the hero, at the moment of waking up, has to recreate—out of nothing—not just his memories but even the things that he sees in front of himself. The work of waking up is paradoxical; it experimentally creates the things that seemed to have remained in the past, and at the same time remembers the present as though it had been past as well. The temporal orientations of experience are here inverted and subverted. Copernicus, as Benjamin, replaces the old center with a new one—the sun. But his gesture (I will return to this discussion later) quickly leads to the relativization of all centers and to the doctrine according to which all stars are so many suns. Similarly, for Benjamin, each moment is a “now,” each is potentially a messianic center. “The state of exception in which we live is the rule” (Thesis 8). In an earlier text, “Surrealism” (1929), Benjamin compares revolution with an alarm clock that rings “60 minutes in an hour.”192 The reversibility of spatial or temporal positions deprives the subject of its historical exclusivity but at the same time allows him to perceive the uniqueness of each historical instant. The excuse of being “too late” or “too early” for action does not survive the reversal and relativization of temporal modes. This reversibility lets the subject relate to his past as to the moments of freedom (not solely the accomplished fact) and to envision future possibilities in their historical flesh, not as vague and vain fantasies. Passage through the critical point of danger allows the revolutionary subject to look at himself/herself from outside. It thus endows him with a universalist and practical understanding of history. This concept of critical reversal in Benjamin goes back to Kant and to his theory of revolution. Toward the end of his life, in connection with the decisive political events that materialized some of his prior theoretical constructions, Benjamin arrived at the concept of negativity and of revolution, which goes back to the classical theories of the French Revolution in Hegel and Kant. Revolutionary struggle is understood as reflected negation, negation of negation. This means, first (in accordance with Benjamin’s early “Critique of Violence”), that revolutionary action has a character of stoppage (Stillstellung) and, second (in opposition to the earlier text), that this stoppage has the structure of a fight with an absolute enemy. In seeing critique as inseparable from danger, and pure negativity as a criterion as well as threat, Benjamin reaffirms critique in the Kantian sense of the word.

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The impasse of the passage Many of the ideas and themes in this book originate from the reading of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963).193 This book occupies an important place in Arendt’s corpus.194 In her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she showed how modernity

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led to the disastrous and unprecedented collapse of political life. This collapse had to be derived, theoretically speaking, from some important and unfortunate changes in the concept of the political. The most important perversion of which Arendt speaks was the gradual loss of distinctions between the public and the private, between the apparent and the secret sides of human activity. If modern understanding of politics is a distortion, then the obvious question about an undistorted picture arises. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt presented a conceptual definition of politics that had been available to the Greeks, but which has since gradually disappeared. The book builds a tripartite division of human activity into “labor,” “work,” and “action.” Only action (praxis) is purely political and it has been obliterated by history through contamination with the labor of subsistence (ponos) and work (creation, poïesis). Action, unlike work, is not instrumental. It exists for itself and makes a new beginning in a chain of events. Thus, politics has to be conceived and organized in a way that would make such free agency possible. There should be a public space, a scene, where people could be seen in action. There should be a class of people who are exempt from the need to work or to produce. All of this is good. However, a serious question arises. People who act in the Greek public space are, of course, courageous and imaginative. But are they fully free if they act in the preestablished conditions determined in so much detail? “The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame’”—says Arendt.195 But supposed by whom? If the “human condition” is eternal, or created once and for all, then this limitation of human freedom cannot be overcome, and actors are as free as they can be. However, we know from Arendt herself that history actually moves. Political structures do change, and often change very radically. Who is freer, the citizens of Athens or the Germanic barbarians who destroyed the ancient civilization and established their own new political regime? In The Human Condition, Arendt mentioned this difficulty when she pointed at the exclusion of legislative activity from the order of political action in Greece.196 This is logical because legislation is “work” or creation. It does not exist for itself but alienates itself as a “public thing” in the written laws. Thus, a problem arises. If political communities are instituted by someone, then this someone has to be the freest person on earth, since s/he, imitating God, creates something from nothing, and creates structures and rules under which further actions will be possible. At the same time, this political founder would not be an entirely free actor, since his/her action would be instrumental, not self-sufficient, it would be directed at the creation of an external, alien thing (res publica) and, most probably, at the destruction of the things that preceded it. It is this problem that Arendt approaches in On Revolution. It is not by chance that she builds her argument mainly on Roman and on Judeo-Christian models. If the Greek experience (as I will show) is also present, then it is interpreted in the “Roman” or “modern” (but, in fact, universal) sense of founding activity. Thus, of all Greek heroes, Arendt picks Theseus, the “legendary founder of Athens,” to name in the conclusion of her book. This turn signifies, in my view, a change in Arendt’s epistemological orientation. She no longer believes in the “original” structure of

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politics but links the epistemological question of origin (like her own “return” to the Greeks) and the political act of beginning or founding. It is not that Arendt knows what a true beginning is and that people begin their specific activities in the frame of this given and known beginning. It turns out, as I will show, that the question, how to begin something, is simultaneous with the search for a beginning. Epistemology is inseparable here from ontology and from history. The revolutionaries start something over and, as Arendt shows, turn to the past as to an already existing beginning. The structure of the beginning is thus circular and paradoxical. The “human condition” is not a nicely delimited structure but a series of paradoxes in which a “beginner” has to orient himself/herself and to make practical choices and decisions.

The new The first focus of my reading is the notion of new beginning, which defines Arendt’s understanding of “human condition” and of human history. Why this emphasis on novelty (and not, for example, on change, on transformation, on enlightenment, on destruction, after all)? The answer to this question is obvious but usually not sufficiently emphasized.197 The attention to novelty is already presupposed in Arendt’s first political experience and theory—totalitarianism, which is total catastrophe or the threat thereof that severs man from the past (tradition) and forbids him to repeat it. The catastrophe of the twentieth century (as well as the more gradual but no less destructive march of modernity) is, Arendt always emphasizes, unprecedented. It makes both past and future obscure, “unpredictable,” no longer transparent. The subject no longer knows what to expect from himself/herself. After having survived the disaster, you can either despair or start something anew: you cannot know what, until you start. “But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; the beginning is the promise, the only message which the end can produce,” notes Arendt in the conclusion of The Origins of Totalitarianism.198 Conceptually, Arendt retrieves her concept of novelty and beginning from Saint Augustine. “That there be a beginning man was created, before whom nobody was”— says Augustine in his City of God.199 This phrase concludes a chapter titled “The Blasphemous Notion of Cyclical Returns to Misery of the Souls in Bliss.” The purpose of this chapter is to refute the cyclical understanding of history. The main trouble with this understanding is that it denies men their chances and hope for salvation, thus leaving them in recurrent misery. But God forbid that what the philosophers threaten should be true, that our genuine misery is never to have an end, but is only to be interrupted time and time again, throughout eternity, by intervals of false happiness. In fact, nothing could be falser or more deceptive than a happiness in which we shall be ignorant of our coming wretchedness, even while we are in that light of truth; or else we shall dread it even while we are at the summit of felicity. . . . [T]here is nothing to compel us to suppose that the human race had no beginning, no start in time, because there is no reason to believe in those strange cycles which prevent the appearance

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of anything new. . . . For if a soul is set free, and will never return again to misery, just as it has never before been set free, the something has come into being which has never been before, and something of great importance, namely the eternal felicity of a soul, a felicity which will know no end.200

The notion of novelty is negatively defined: it is the “unprecedentedness,” the nonrepetition of anything in the past, which constitutes the new. This is not to say that the new is simply the negation of the old: this concept has a positive content— embracing what actually constitutes innovation. But the fact of the matter is that we know nothing about this positive content from the concept of the new itself: the latter even forbids us to know anything about such content before experiencing it. Far from being an automatic consequence of rejecting the old, an innovation, if it happens, presents itself as salvation and as a release from a catastrophe. One hardly needs to recall that Augustine’s City of God was written in order to come to terms with the fall of the 1,000-year Roman Empire, in the same way that the emerging possibility of the self-destruction of mankind in the Holocaust is the constant background for Arendt’s political thought.201 The forbidding memory of the past sets up the space for revolutionary action. Indeed, the book On Revolution begins with an introductory chapter on the new type of war. This contemporary warfare presents, as Arendt states in the very first paragraph of the book, “the threat of total annihilation.”202 We have seen earlier in the reading of Kant’s notion of the sublime how the totality of the threat and its failure to fulfill itself in the moment exposes the subject to the potential infinity and obscurity of his capacity to fall or to rise. The survival from and the incompletion of the catastrophe serve therefore as a promise for a new future. It is in the horizon of the threat of total catastrophe (“total annihilation” or “total domination”) that the new revolution enters the agenda. But previous revolutions also presupposed and aroused similar fears. The rejection and destruction of the old world immediately awakens not only infinite hope for emancipation, but also infinite anxiety—fear of destruction and ignorance as to its potential source. As Arendt notes in The Life of the Mind, “[t]he foundation legends . . . indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect.”203 Furthermore, revolutionary action, in its negativity and rejection of everything firm, is fragile if not ultimately “futile.” The infinite, absolute task of the revolutionaries—the task of foundation—leads them to fear infinite, absolute death, physical destruction accompanied by oblivion and erasure. Arendt persistently points to this fear, risk, and danger of catastrophe that turns the goal of revolution, ultimately, into a “salvation” of the world that is falling into the abyss. For example, she writes of the American colonists (whose experience preceded the American Revolution as the experience of the Second World War preceded the attempts at revolution throughout the postwar period): In either case, they obviously feared the so-called state of nature, the untrod wilderness, unlimited by any boundary, as well as the unlimited initiative of

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civilized men bound by no law. This fear is not surprising, it is the justified fear of civilized men, who, for whatever reasons, have decided to leave civilization behind them and strike out on their own.204

That the failure of revolution constitutes for the actors a catastrophe and a threat follows, for example, from the following phrase: “[N]othing threatens the very achievements of revolution more dangerously and more acutely than the spirit which has brought them about.”205 Finally, the revolution itself functions as a threat or danger—and this potential catastrophe is enough to set off an event: [T]he very emergence of revolution on the political scene as event or as threat had demonstrated in actual fact that this tradition [the political tradition in general— A.M.] had lost its anchorage, its beginning and principle, and was cut adrift.206

The word “salvation” appears nine times in Arendt’s book in application to the task of revolution: enough to drum into our ears the sense of crisis and danger, not of creative luxury, inherent in the new beginning. Salvation is, of course, a notion highly overdetermined by theological connotations. In accord with St John, Arendt argues that revolutionary salvation lies in words—that is, promises that the newly liberated members of society give to each other. Words not only provide the needed social bonds, but they also perpetuate the act of foundation in guarding its memory. What saves the affairs of mortal men from their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it.207

The paradoxes of revolution The primary task of Arendt is to understand and to judge the actors of revolution. To understand and to judge them, she must provisionally adopt their point of view. Arendt’s attempt at understanding revolutionaries from their practical point of view, and her framing of the project of revolution in terms of logical paradoxes are closely related. It is not by chance that Arendt sometimes calls these paradoxes “psychological”208 and sometimes, “logical”209 or even “abstract.”210 Logical antinomies appear from the point of view of an engaged actor. Similarly, Kant subordinated the conditions of possibility of theoretical reason to the “interest” of practical reason.211 It is precisely from the point of view of an agent that a situation presents itself as a puzzling difficulty. The possibility of a solution is available only retrospectively to a remembering spectator.

The vicious circle of self-foundation I begin with the temporal and causal formulation of the paradox of revolution. We encountered it in the first chapter when dealing with the reversals characteristic of the French and the Russian anti-communist revolutions. Arendt states them, first of all,

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in application to law and legitimacy. The temporal order involved here is, therefore, symbolic, the strict order of sequence and derivation. It is the terms of this order that are being inverted in the circle of pouvoir constitué (constituted power) and pouvoir constituant (constituent power) discovered by Sieyès. The “perplexity of foundation”212 consists in the plain fact that constituent power (the people, or nation), which is supposed to precede constituted power (the law-making body), does not effectively exist before the latter emerges. Moreover, it is only the performative act of this lawmaking body claiming to draw its origin from the people (“We, the people,” in the case of the American Constitution) that retroactively “constitutes,” in its turn, its own origin.213 This vicious circle is, of course, familiar and almost ubiquitous wherever there is a question of beginning. It pertains not only to the problem of constitution-making, but equally to that of the prosecution of the king (either you judge him ex post facto or you appeal to the prior law from which he was explicitly exempt); of democratic participation in the revolutionary state (people are liberated but remain habituated to the prior, despotic regime); and of the relation between the state and society in general. The classical formulation of the problem may be found, as I mentioned earlier, in Rousseau’s The Social Contract. As long as revolution involves an internal split of the social body and soul into the past and the future, the subject will be torn between the roles of passivity and activity, between fear and hope, between the past and the future. This aporetic situation brings into question the only possible solution—absolute, unconditional break, a creation ex nihilo, a novel ground that would not pertain to anything from the past. In a similar way, Kant’s first Critique introduces the absolute (the thing in itself) in two complementary fashions: as a premise of his study, its point of departure—and, in its end, as an idea of reason negatively derived from its antinomies. The need for an absolute manifested itself in many different ways, assumed different disguises, and found different solutions. Its function within the political sphere, however, was always the same: it was needed to break two vicious political circles, the one apparently inherent in human law-making, and the other inherent in the petitio principii which attends every new beginning, that is, politically speaking, in the very task of foundation. The first of these, the need for all positive, man-made laws for an external source to bestow legality upon them and to transcend as a “higher law” the legislative act itself, is of course very familiar and was already a potent factor in shaping of absolute monarchy.214

The first problem is internal to the sphere of law. It is, very simply, the problem of the infinite regression of laws: what legitimates the law from which the other laws derive in turn? The second problem has to do with the constitutive act: it transcends the realm of law and involves the temporal logic of the event. The act of establishing a constitution is itself unconstitutional, as it has not been authorized prior to the act itself. Clearly, the vicious circle in question has to do with an impossible task that I discussed in connection with Kant—the task of self-foundation. It is akin to the task of Sophocles’ Oedipus (who appears at the end of Arendt’s book) to know

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oneself and to give birth to oneself (to become one’s own father). We saw with Kant how self-foundation is impossible, how it would constitute an “inexpiable crime,” a catastrophe, but how it nevertheless becomes an inescapable regulative horizon. After the event exposes the necessity and impossibility of self-foundation, the subject finds him/herself stuck in the intermediary space between freedom and crime. This inescapable “in-between” is also, according to Arendt, the condition of revolution.

The negative and the positive Revolution commences with a violent, negative liberation from injustice and oppression. However, this liberation is not sufficient and therefore not truly liberatory.215 True liberation is called freedom and involves the establishment of something positive in the place of overthrown institutions. Machiavelli’s insistence on violence . . . was the direct consequence of the twofold perplexity in which he found himself theoretically and which late became the very practical perplexity besetting the men of revolutions. The perplexity consisted in the task of foundation, the setting of the new beginning, which as such seemed to demand violence and violation, the repetition, as it were, of the old legendary crime (Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Abel) at the beginning of history.216

However, in conspicuous opposition to man’s age-old dreams as well to his later concepts, violence by no means gave birth to something new and stable but, on the contrary, drowned in a “revolutionary torrent” the beginning as well as beginners.217

The passage from negation to establishment is in truth an impasse. Clearly, this problem is closely related to the previous one: revolution needs an absolute break with the past, so that even the active negation of the latter risks pulling it back into incessant circulation. The past must not be simply rejected but forgotten, disavowed. Violence, as Arendt insists throughout her work, does not create power. The subject of violence is passive and isolated. S/he is driven by external necessity rather than by his/her own agency. Violence is, as Nietzsche would have put it, reactive: it admits and symbolically upholds what it attacks. Or, as Hegel would have framed it, violence confronts the independent, alien character of its object, failing either to fully annihilate it or to appropriate it. We recognize the logical paradox of negation, which was treated in the second chapter of this book. Negation is dependent on something positive. It logically requires this ground and, therefore, cannot get rid of it. Hence, negation is never complete; it is never truly a negation. For this reason, it is potentially infinite, “boundless.”218 The object of violence and the need for it never go away. All of this, in the case of revolution, leads to a strange situation: the old regime is falling apart, and something new is in the air. However, the passage from the old to the new is problematic: an abyss, an “unbridgeable chasm,”219 divides the two. If you start with the old, you will never reach the new; if you start with the new, you will

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never eradicate the old (as in Zeno’s aporias). Revolution is precisely the enactment of this passage, an experience of the abyss in the event. The flow of history destroys everything old without our participation, but humans need to constitute their own power and try to become subjects of history. This is why Arendt gives so much attention to the abyssal, extemporaneous condition of revolution: [F]reedom is no more the automatic result of liberation than the new beginning is the automatic consequence of the end. The revolution—so at least it must have appeared to these men—was precisely the legendary hiatus between end and beginning, between a no-longer and a not-yet.220

This situation “between past and future” is characterized by the loss of temporal orientation, by confusion between the past and the future, and by the indeterminate simultaneity of termination and beginning, of fear and hope.

Preservation and innovation The strange hiatus of the revolution, with its temporal vicious circles and indeterminate internal splits, creates a situation where all symbolic landmarks are in constant flow and confusion; hence, perhaps the most important paradox of revolution emphasized by Arendt: that of preservation and innovation. This paradox is complementary to the paradox of liberation and freedom. Innovation differs from sheer destruction—but it is no less different from the creation of something firm. The triad of “violence, preservation, beginning” is akin to the triad from Arendt’s The Human Condition: “labor, productive work, action.” An action or a beginning involves destruction of something old and at the same time a foundation, the creation of a new “public thing.” However, in both of these aspects it finds itself alienated and vanishing in the face of the positive that it destroys or creates. The French Revolution, according to Arendt, lost the new beginning in the destruction, while the American one ultimately forgot itself in its own institutional product. We have seen, in reading Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” how the legal foundation binds itself in the circle of “law-creating” and “law-preserving” violence. Something similar is at work in Arendt’s account of revolution. It seems perfectly logical that once the new has been instituted it has to be preserved. Equally, what opposes the new institutions should not be preserved. No logical paradox so far. The paradox begins when preservation and innovation become generalized, absolutized political perspectives and when they coincide in the intermediate space of the event. The first formulation of the paradox in Arendt’s book refers to the consciousness of the revolutionaries. The early revolutions of modernity, such as the revolution of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, were seen by their participants as the restoration of old freedoms rather than as radical innovations. The American “Declaration of Independence” can still be read along the same lines. The awareness of the novelty of the enterprise came, according to Arendt, in the process of change, as a result of the experience of making a revolution.221

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There are logical reasons for this situation. In the face of a crisis or danger, the task presents itself as salvation, release, and survival rather than as free creativity. Furthermore, after the first steps of innovation, fragility in the face of the apparent omnipotence of the enemy becomes acute. It is at this early stage of revolution that the goals of preservation and innovation become strictly simultaneous and conflicting, since the preservation of what has already been done comes into direct conflict with the task of continuing to reshape society. The latter necessarily involves the partial destruction of revolutionary institutions already in place (such as the Constituent Assembly in France or the Supreme Soviet in postcommunist Russia). Psychologically speaking, the experience of foundation combined with the conviction that a new story is about to unfold in history will make men “conservative” rather than “revolutionary,” eager to preserve what has been done and to assure its stability rather than open for new things, new developments, new ideas.222

This psychological contradiction may also take the form of a logical antinomy. Abstractly and superficially speaking, it seems easy enough to pin down the chief difficulty in arriving at a plausible definition of the revolutionary spirit without having to rely exclusively, as we did before, on a terminology which was coined prior to revolutions. To the extent that the greatest event in every revolution is the act of foundation, the spirit of revolution contains two elements which to us seem irreconcilable and even contradictory. The act of founding the new body politic, of devising the new form of government involves the grave concern with the stability and durability of the new structure; the experience, on the other hand, which those who are engaged in this grave business are bound to have is the exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning, the high spirits which have always attended the birth of something new on earth.223

Why does Arendt call this internal contradiction “superficial”? She believes there is a difference between the preservation of institutions and the preservation of the “open space of freedom.” The loss of revolutionary spirit in the United States is due to the prevalence of preservation over openness to the new. But this is the case only because the preservation of institutions took over the remembrance of the event. The distinction between the two is crucial. Like Hegel, Arendt maintains that preservation and negation are reconcilable, as “two sides of the same event.”224 For Hegel, this reconciliation (Aufhebung) takes place in the postrevolutionary state, while Arendt finds it in the event and in fidelity to its emancipatory potential. To better understand the intricacy of this argument we have to consider, once more, the temporal structure of revolution. Arendt repeatedly shows, with a reference to Kafka’s short parable “He,” that an event is located “between past and future,” in the crossfire, so to speak, from two sides of time.225 This image has, however, some further implications that Arendt does not spell out but that help to explain her reading of revolution.

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Indeed, the situation “between past and future” means also the ambiguity and simultaneity of two interpretations of one’s temporal orientation. On the one hand, the agents of revolution face an evolving catastrophe, a disaster. They look at the unknown, approaching future with fear and concern for self-preservation. On the other hand, they reject the past with indignation and look to the future with hope.226 The very event of revolution is located at the (imaginary) point where revolution, which was hitherto feared or hoped for, turns out to be a fait accompli and a thing of the recent past.227 As I attempted to show in the first chapter, it is after this moment that things become especially complicated, as the event in becoming is located both in the past and in the future, and the attitudes to both the past and the future become contradictory (rejection or preservation, fear or hope). The very same accelerating course of events may be interpreted here in two contradicting fashions: what for one side may appear a liberating “revolutionary torrent,” for the other side may seem an apocalyptic disaster. What for some is a road to an absolute end, is for others an opening to a new era of freedom and happiness. The structure that I describe here has two dimensions. The positive or negative attitude to the past and to the future is one component of the situation. The other is the direction that the events take in time. Time may be going from the past to the future (in which case, the focus is on the past, and on choosing the “right” event to stick to). One looks to the past in hope or fear. Then, the hope is projected into the future or is safeguarded against possible future troubles. If the past is feared, then the future becomes a possibility to escape the past (as in Arendt’s case), or just another source of fear (as in the case of Kafka’s “He”). The future becomes the area of subjective agency and control (compare the homonymy between “I will” in the sense of voluntary act and “I will” in the sense of future tense). Conversely, if time runs from the future to the past, the focus is on the future that we do not control but on which we concentrate in fear or hope. The past (with which the self identifies) becomes, in this case, an object of preservation from future troubles or the melancholy routine from which to be released. Clearly, these cases are not mutually exclusive. One can be afraid of something in the past and be loyal to something else that is also in the past. Distinctions play a crucial role and the contradiction becomes logical only if generalized and absolutized. But the problem is that it has to be absolutized on the symbolic level if we want to found a state or to constitute a political subject. It is noteworthy that the two major references for Arendt’s concern for novelty, St Augustine and Machiavelli, both combined their theories of the new with a strong emphasis on preservation and stability. Both shared a view of time as of the source of unknown events coming from the future toward the past.228 An attitude of preservation, of holding to the past, is the natural position of an actor who has accomplished something but is still full of hope of continuing it into the promising future. But, as long as this conservative attitude emerges, it risks being reinterpreted in yet another switch of temporal orientation. Instead of being seen as a development of something past into (its) future, it may easily become preservation of the past against attack from the future. Such a conservative stance, like that of complete rejection of the past, is, according to Arendt, dangerously reactive and passive. Speaking of the

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violent, necessity-driven, passionate politics of the French sans-culottes, she makes a powerful observation: [T]he men of American Revolution [as opposed to those of the French one— A.M.] remained men of action from beginning to end, from the Declaration of Independence to the framing of the Constitution.  .  .  . Since passion had never tempted them in its noblest form as compassion, they found it easy to think of passion in terms of desire and to banish from it any connotation of its original meaning, which is παθειν, to suffer and to endure. This lack of experience gives their theories, even if they are sound, an air of lightheartedness, a certain weightlessness, which may well put into jeopardy their durability. For, humanly speaking, it is endurance which enables man to create durability and continuity.229

This phrase is typical of Arendt’s style. She often puts important pieces of her analysis under negation (or “denegation”) to maintain the purity of her distinctions. In this case, the Americans are miraculously exempt from what appears to be yet another face of the internal contradiction of revolutionary action. Even more strangely, they are exempt from it through their “lack of experience”—while experience of freedom is emphasized by Arendt as what positively distinguishes the agents of American Revolution from those of the French, throughout the book. Clearly, for Arendt, the American experience of freedom consisted in the freedom from experience—from the experience of internal, imminent danger. Still, critical honesty leads Arendt to return to this issue to identify the chief reason why the posterity of the American Revolution abandoned its spirit, in the will to endurance. Arendt says in her last chapter: [F]ailure to remember is largely responsible for the intense fear of revolution in America, for it is precisely this fear that attests to the world at large how right they are to think of revolution only in terms of the French Revolution. Fear of revolution has been the hidden leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy in its desperate attempts at stabilization of the status quo.”230

Here, clearly, the switch in temporal interpretation happened once again. The first, revolutionary “switch” turned the future into the past, made the revolution a thing of the past rather than a thing of the future, and allowed revolutionaries to look into the past in search for their future. In the second postrevolutionary switch, revolution becomes, again, a thing of the future, while the previously acquired conservative attitude to the past remains intact. In a strange synthesis, the focus switches back from the past to the future in fear that this future may be dangerous for the cautiously preserved past. Time now runs from the future into the endangered past. Concern for the past that is thus understood is reactive and passive; it ignores the fact that the danger of destruction lies in the past as well as in the future. This leads, according to Arendt, to oblivion and even to a disavowal of the revolutionary origins of the Western world—the condition that is still in place today and that played such a disastrous role in determining the fate of the anti-communist revolutions.

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Historical revolutions I now turn to the paradoxes of revolution that actually play out in the historical cases Arendt discusses: the French and the American revolutions. In the first case, the paradoxes lead to a deadlock, and the negative, violent side wins over the positive, foundational one. In America, a narrative development is possible, in which the negativity of revolution could be overcome or bypassed.

“Social Question” and passions in the French Revolution Arendt’s chapter on the “Social Question” in the French Revolution must be read in the context of her attempt to separate the “positive,” constructive side of the revolution from its negative, destructive side. At most, she is ready to accept negativity as a necessary but passing moment, but is not willing to accept the abyssal consequences of the task, to escape the past. At the same time, she gives a wonderful analysis of revolutionary negativity even if she rejects it rhetorically. In spite of herself, Arendt shows how the infinite terror and pity of the French Revolutionaries became constitutive of the revolutionary event as such. The argument in “Social Question” would seem to run something like this. Unfortunately for the French Revolution, it took place in a condition of severe scarcity. Therefore, the liberating movement of revolution was taken over by the demand of the sans-culottes for material subsistence. Moreover, in another unfortunate turn, agents of the revolution, themselves by no means sans-culottes and probably well-fed but influenced by Rousseau’s doctrine of compassionate pity, saw their political task as being the alleviation of suffering of the poor. Finally, because they searched for the truth in human passions, the revolutionaries engaged in terror against the enemies who were supposedly hiding their interiority from the public gaze. According to Arendt, this attitude was highly problematic and self-destructive for the revolutionary cause. First, politics driven by poverty contradicts the sharp distinction (as developed by Arendt in The Human Condition) between economy and politics. The economy deals with the survival and maintenance of the life-cycle. As such, it fundamentally excludes anything new, any shining excellence that belongs to the realm of politics. The French Revolution violated this distinction and this led to disaster. Arendt’s second argument, which is more consistent with the general line of On Revolution, places the drive for subsistence on the negative, violent, and passive side of the revolutionary dilemma. The sans-culottes were bound by their life conditions and rebelled against them out of necessity. Their agency was thus alienated, not autonomous, and violent. At the same time, the Jacobin revolutionaries were also driven into reactivity and violence by their pity—a sentiment which is by definition passive and not autonomous. Pity and terror drove the revolution into a cycle of suicidal violence. All of this is based on a sharp and perceptive analysis of Jacobin discourses and from documents from the Parisian sections. The interpretation and evaluation of these sources is, however, more than questionable. The obligatory division between politics and economy seems to be an artificial construction imposed on events from the outside. Indeed, the Jacobins are hardly to blame for the unfortunate hegemony of economy

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over politics that Arendt deplores in the second half of the twentieth century. It was the Thermidor government, not the Jacobin one, that famously dedicated itself to an interest-driven pro-bourgeois policy. The struggle of the sans-culottes for subsistence indeed bore a political character. But this struggle cannot be reduced to reactive violence. The sans-culottes called for action in a state of emergency. Like Arendt, members of the Parisian sections viewed economic conditions as a prerequisite for political despotism. But this is precisely why they thought that poverty was a political danger. “The food of body is as necessary as that of spirit; one does not go without another: the hunger is one of the tyrants’ secrets for enslaving the people, and it is certain that the project of our enemies is to starve us in the very midst of abundance.”231 It further appears from the reading of the documents from Parisian sections (Arendt’s chief source) that necessity, far from being an alienated, biological force, is the condition of historical agency as such. The time of necessity puts a limit on patience, constitutes a state of emergency, and lends to action in its appropriate time, its kairos. “Sansculotte, it is time make the generals fight and ring the alarm bell arm yourself so that this does not last, because you see that they push you to your last breath, if you trust me it is better to die in defending your Glory for your fatherland than to die of starvation.”232 “Necessity,” etymologically derived from Latin ne cedere—not to retreat, not to fail—is the category of opposition to death, destruction, and failure. In the discourse from both the Parisian sections and the leading Jacobins, “necessity” was always linked to a state of crisis and emergency.233 The discussion of poverty in Arendt, misleadingly titled “Social Question,” must therefore be reinterpreted in the light of her analysis of revolution as a historical event that oscillates between catastrophe and salvation. Among the most frequent synonyms of “poverty” in the discourse of the French Revolution was la misère, a word meaning both poverty and misery. The poor themselves were often called infortunés, the “unfortunate.”234 Poverty as misère was understood as the general condition of wretchedness that evoked pity. The “unfortunateness” of the poor points to a turn of destiny or providence that has made them so.235 The poor of the French Revolution did not view poverty as a state of nature or a life condition of any sort but as a coming danger and enemy. It is common knowledge that discourse on poverty was the moving force behind the French Revolution. However, as this moving force, it belonged to the apocalyptic, millenarist discourse. This discourse on poverty was the discourse on event par excellence. When the Parisian sans-culottes revolted in 1789, the rural and the provincial population understood the event and took part in it, in their own way. As I mentioned in the first chapter, 1789 was a year of what historians call The Great Fear.236 Arendt mentions this phenomenon but immediately dismisses its connection to the Jacobin terror by mistakenly attributing “Great Fear” to the “ruling classes.”237 In fact, the Great Fear and its heritage presented a danger against which the terror was directed. And crucially, the subjects of this fear were not the “ruling classes” but the peasants endangered by poverty. The years of drought brought peasants to the verge of death and vague news of unrest coming from the capital led to an irresistible wave of panic.238

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The intensity of the “Great Fear” remained in popular memory for a very long time. The peasants’ experience of mobilization played a large role in subsequent civil struggles and antifeudal uprisings that took place in the country during the course of the revolution. Subsequent revolutionary discourse was infused with the discourse on fear and terror. The protocols of Parisian sections, examples of which I cited earlier, are full of references to danger and peril. The language of poverty is the language of danger. The revolt of the poor is not an additional, accidental element of the French Revolution. It erupts simultaneously with political uprising and constitutes the critical moment when the event is recognized and action must be taken immediately. “Poverty” or “misery” is not material need per se, but a certain interpretation of it, a certain discourse (which is shared even by the people who are not poor). This discourse serves not only as a complaint to the authorities in order to alleviate suffering, but it is also a discourse of emergency and of resistance against abyssal danger. The eruption of fear itself marks an event that imprints itself in memory and retrospectively splits history into the “before” and “after.”239 Provided the tone and the substance of Arendt’s revolutionary narrative, we can suspect that for her, like for Rousseau, pity, fear, poverty, and misery are hidden allegories of her attitude to the past and of revolution’s own temporality. For Arendt, in her time, past revolutionary moments are fragile and immortal accomplishments of human essence, but at the same time remainders from a lost, interrupted tradition, so that the present task is not only to salvage them from oblivion, through poetry, but also through active repetition (or imitation). Seemingly, the French Revolutionaries saw their own task as salvation, redemption of those whom the tradition of despotism had placed in misery and in a state of constant danger. They also viewed their own beginning as fragile and weak compared to the weight of the despotic tradition still dominant in the rest of the world. This fragility was exposed to both fear and compassion. The daring actions of the revolutionaries stemmed from the desire to interrupt suffering not to witness it any longer. However, this action did not quench suffering but brought it into the open, so that, in their tragic theater, the revolutionaries acted out their suffering. This active, acting form of passion, which can no longer be held inside (in the “private sphere,” to which Arendt tries to restrict it) and is therefore shared with others, is precisely the definition of tragic pity and fear. The problem with the revolt of the poor consists, for Arendt, less in the revolt itself than in the pity the others felt for them. The paradoxical consequence of this politics of pity became the rule of terror. Terror is opposite to pity (hence the call from revolutionaries, cited by Arendt, to be inhuman for the sake of pity240): the Other whose suffering or whose rhetorical pathos contaminates you is now perceived as a danger. The chance of coming together through pity both seduces and threatens. But terror is itself a mimetic, contagious passion, through which pity is, so to say, applied to oneself and therefore leads to direct violent action. Arendt’s argument in this chapter is clearly anti-mimetic.241 It puts into doubt the existing reading of Arendt as an apologist for tragedy as a political model, as well as the well-known readings of Arendt by Jacques Taminiaux and Dana Villa, both of whom present Arendt as a defender of mimetic praxis against Heidegger’s anti-mimetic

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poiesis.242 In fact, in “Social Question” Arendt denounces the tragic form of history, although, indeed, she does associate the revolutions with it. Fear and pity are, since Aristotle, seen as the two main vehicles of tragic mimesis.243 Their thematization in Arendt’s book, which is dedicated to the turning event of revolution, suggests that the matrix for her thinking here is the tragedy: a narrative centered on a turning point, peripeteia, arousing negative passions of fear and pity, and meant to accomplish their sublimation in a quasi-sacrificial manner. In the last decades, there have been several works describing Arendt’s political theory as tragic, of which the most significant is Robert Pirro’s Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy devoted in large part to On Revolution.244 Pirro emphasizes the social and communal aspects of tragedy in Arendt, and its positive effects (such as the achieved reconciliation of viewpoints; the self-recognition of a citizen; the synthesis of activity and passivity in the person of spectator). In contrast, what matters most for me in Arendt’s On Revolution is the negativity of mimetic passions. Arendt knows well that any historical passage is tragic, and that any Oedipal will to self-mastery has self-annulment on its obverse. She perceives the anthropological negativity of revolutions only to warn against its “boundless” element. In the French Revolution, the eruption of negativity was infinite, circular, and reflexive: therefore, it failed, but left a scar in historical memory. On the contrary, in the United States, the negativity was just a limited moment of the movement, it was limited, therefore the revolution succeeded. However, because there was no shock of violence, the American treasure of freedom, she says in the last chapter of the book, was forgotten and abandoned. So, tragedy works here as the story of a failed rite of passage: either it is consumed in a boundless mimetic cycle, or it is forgotten because it is not boundless enough.245 Something like a Benjaminian theory of a memorable event as a failure would be applicable here. It is mimesis rather than material need itself that leads to the emergence of irresistible “revolutionary torrent.” The circle of mutual identification reinforces and accelerates the passions leading them to a paroxysm.246 Mimesis, or imitation, is a fundamental form of sociability, that is, of humans’ relation to each other.247 As such, it is a constitutive principle of art, of imagination, and, via imagination, of knowledge as such. Plato, in the tenth book of The Republic,248 mounts a fierce critique of mimesis, considering it to be a principle of confusion and error, of indeterminate chaos. Plato refers here to pity (eleos) as the paradoxical enjoyment of the suffering of the other.249 The identification with the suffering “part of the soul” perpetuates the passivity and weakness that are inherent in the latter. It contaminates with passivity the active part of the soul, which is the very subject of pity. Meanwhile, Plato presents this critique in the mimetic, even dramatic form of a written dialogue. Moreover, his theory of truth itself has its mimetic elements: the forms, or ideas, stamp themselves upon the soul and serve as models for human creative activities. This paradox allowed Aristotle, in Plato’s footsteps, to notice and underline the constitutive ambiguity of mimesis. The notion of mimetic catharsis, which can be read either as purification of the passions or their purge, testifies to this ambiguity. Since Aristotle sees that pity and fear, drawn to high intensities, can contradict each other

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and even themselves (pity of oneself against excessive pity and fear of excessive fear), he suggests that they can themselves be remedies against the undesirable effects that Plato had justly denounced. The significance of mimesis goes far beyond the theater: imitation, in Aristotle, belongs to the very nature of humans.250 When Arendt, in The Human Condition, defines the human being as existing in a “plurality” (“men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”251), she is also attentive to the irreducibly mimetic nature of humans living together. “Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.”252 One could not state the constitutive ambiguity of the mimesis more laconically. To identify with the Other means to imagine an identity with him/her and at the same time to surpass this Other to establish an identity of one’s own in “pushing off ” from the Other. The question of pity and mimesis in Arendt takes us back to the political problem of revolution as self-transformation and self-overcoming. Obviously, there will always be activists and masterminds of revolutionary change, and the idea of an autonomous, popular revolution requires that we have some form of representation involved. Pity for the poor and, generally, the identification of leaders with the masses is a medium of representation taken literally as identification. As any representation, it can lose its convincing force, and then genuine compassion would dissolve into sentimental, condescending, and hypocritical pity. Nevertheless, the contamination of negativity by pity seems to be the price for the legitimacy of revolution as self-annulment and self-foundation. The active “subjects” of revolution have to act on themselves in order to be subjects in the proper philosophical sense of the word. In this consideration of pity, Arendt actually follows Marx, for whom the central problem of revolution was the relationship between the intellectuals (“philosophers” and “ideologues”) and the suffering proletarians. Although Marx did not write specifically on pity, his mature writing is full of sentimental language aimed at arousing compassion for workers in intellectuals; the comic laughter of his earlier writings aspires to show that intellectuals do not have a stable position in society, nor a language of their own, and have to therefore speak from a displaced position of what they are not. And this is what Arendt does not quite see: the lack of recognized selves and exteriority of the intellectual profession, the public activity, and of “ideas” as such left intellectuals no other option but to jump into the mimetic chain reaction. In her theory of action, Arendt does recognize its irreducibly mimetic character. Action may not avoid reference to others. It must compare itself with their actions and seek the grounds on which it can make a difference. Action may not, therefore, avoid contamination with passion: “Because the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a doer but always and at the same time a sufferer.”253 All of this is indeed a consistent and courageous apology of mimesis. It would, however, be too hasty to conclude (as do Taminiaux and Villa) that Arendt overcomes the anti-mimetism of the Western tradition, which runs from Plato to her teacher Heidegger. On Revolution shows that Arendt when confronted with a specific historical example proved unwilling to accept the contamination of action through passion and

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the indeterminate boundlessness of the mimetic relation, with its antistructural force. Arendt, as so many before her, became contaminated by the complex of anti-mimetic mimesis. In the chapter on “Social Question,” Arendt distinguishes between compassion (identification with one person), solidarity (identification with the community in its entirety), and pity (identification with the indeterminate multitude).254 It is the latter that poses the danger of unlimited chaos. This innovative classification is based on limitation: [S]entiments, as distinguished from passion and principle, are boundless, and even if Robespierre had been motivated by the passion of compassion, his compassion would have become pity when he brought it out into the open where he could no longer direct it toward specific suffering and focus it on particular persons. What had perhaps been genuine passions turned into the boundlessness of an emotion that seemed to respond only too well to the boundless suffering of the multitude in their sheer overwhelming numbers.255

The same “boundlessness” is further attributed to terror (which, as Arendt mentions,256 is also the French word for fear): The hunt for hypocrites is boundless and can produce only demoralization.257 The eighteenth century terror was still enacted in good faith, and if it became boundless, it did so only because the hunt for hypocrites is boundless by nature.258

This is a classic expression of the good old anti-mimetic program. Like Plato, Arendt sees the danger of unlimited, unreserved mimesis, which introduces confusion and indeterminacy in society.259 For both Plato and Arendt, this confusion of entities inherent in any identification with the Other threatens to produce an infinite, chaotic, unstable, and irrational frenzy. Arendt goes so far in her momentary Platonism as to contrast pity, a “sentiment,” with the “ideas” that characterize solidarity.260 With her concern for the plurality of men and worldly appearance, Arendt cannot fully share Plato’s rejection of chaotic mimesis for the sake of orderly ideas (forms) without falling into contradiction. Therefore, immediately following her critique of pity, she accuses Robespierre of anti-mimetism. Indeed, the persecution of “hypocrites” during the terror was an attack on semblance, inauthenticity, stemming from the infinite quest for interior truth (of which I spoke in my second chapter). The terror, or fear, is as “boundless” as pity in reaction to which it arises. The Jacobins, therefore, embody a complex of mimetic anti-mimetism—one that is also detected in Plato and especially in Rousseau. As I mentioned, fear is an aspect of pity that acts counter to pity, thus representing the anti-mimetic side of mimesis itself. Fear, reacting to mimesis, in turn spreads mimetically and becomes panic; it is “boundless” as long as it reproduces the very contamination it tries to suppress. The anti-mimetism of the French Revolutionaries was no less dangerous than their mimesis. It violated, according to Arendt, the ban of distinguishing between “being and appearance,” which is constitutive of politics. In the realm of human affairs,

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Arendt concludes, being and appearance are “indeed one and the same.”261 Plato is rejected and secular appearance as appearance (Hegel’s definition of idea) takes the place of supersensual truth. Arendt’s analysis of the Jacobin’s contradictory attitude toward mimesis and of its significance for politics is brilliant and insightful. However, her own position in relation to mimesis leaves the reader somewhat perplexed. Clearly, Arendt wants to draw a line between the “bad,” passive mimesis of pity and the “good,” active mimesis of political action. A similar dichotomy appears when Arendt speaks of the imitational element in historical revolutions. Imitation, she says, is inevitable, but a true reenactment of revolutionary tradition will follow, in the words of John Adams, a “desire not only to equal or resemble, but to excel.”262 This “excellence” is not as harmless as it may seem, since to excel means also to exceed, to surpass. To surpass your mimetic model means also to surpass, exceed yourself. If passive mimesis cultivates lack, active mimesis is based on excess and surplus. Both of these introduce indeterminacy and potential infinity, danger to identity and authenticity into the political sphere. The question remains, how firmly one can distinguish between passive and active mimesis, as long as profound indeterminacy and nonidentity must be common to the two by definition? Is the “appearance” that equals being supposed to be selfidentical? Does it not react and reenact other people’s actions? If it is self-identical and related only to itself, then how is it different from idea? If it is not, then how does it escape indeterminacy, infinity, and, finally, the internal negativity that haunts mimetic action? The ambivalence of revolutionaries toward mimesis parallels their ambivalence toward total destruction, toward the past, etc. And Arendt mimics this ambivalence. Her fear of infinite pity may well be analogous to the fear of Robespierre himself and, certainly, to the ambiguous attitude of Rousseau toward theater in general and pity and fear in particular (it is sufficient to consult his Letter to D’Alembert on the Theatre263). Robespierre and Saint-Just were very probably motivated by resistance against their own infinite mimetic seduction and by the will to limit mimesis by exorcising a scapegoat. The condition “between past and future,” simultaneously postdeath and prebirth, overdetermines subjects by putting them in the condition of inherent impurity and ambiguity, of excess and confusion. The seduction and fear of pure death, pure negation, and pure action haunts the inhabitants of these mimetic spaces (from Greek tragedians to the Jacobins) and their interpreters, from Aristotle (with his theory of catharsis, purification) to Arendt. Catharsis is the process of purification, but, as such, it does not necessarily mean the attainment of purity. Any purity is imaginary—indeed, Aristotle’s phrase denies and affirms it in the same movement. Negativity itself is inherently impure. The purism in these circumstances threatens with a purge. Arendt sometimes lends herself to such a “purifying” interpretation, and it is, therefore, important not to succumb to it. Catharsis, in its paradoxical movement, fails to eliminate fear and pity but exposes them in all their potential infinity and reciprocity as the springs of human passion and action.

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The experience at the Mayflower In the face of the aporetic nature of revolution and of the story of French failure, Arendt still maintains that a revolution is, paradoxically, possible. The American Revolution of the eighteenth century is an example of a revolution that actually happened and succeeded, at least provisionally. How is one to describe this event, which, by its very definition, resists description? Traditionally, the beginning belongs, Arendt points out, to the sphere of the mysterious and legendary. It is usually a poetic, mythical narrative that “resolves” a logical paradox into a temporal sequence and bridges the abyss dividing past and future, death and birth, nature and culture. In the case of the American Revolution, however, we have documentary testimonies as to the course of the event. Based on these documents, Arendt, in her fourth chapter (“Foundation 1”), constructs a historical narrative, a sequence of practical steps that bypass the logical contradiction between negative destruction and positive foundation and lead to the successful foundation of a state. However, Arendt does not seem to be satisfied with this gradualist picture. In her second chapter on the American Revolution (“Foundation 2”), she emphasizes the parallel between her version of the historical development of the American Revolution and the merely legendary, metaphoric, and figural accounts of foundation (of Israel and Rome). By now, we know that the beginning is so fragile and hard to remember that it can only be remembered through mimetic, poetic means. In fact, the gradualist account of Americans having a long prerevolutionary tradition and experience of self-organization does not help us to understand the revolutionary nature of the event that happened there in the eighteenth century. Revolution—this new beginning—has to interrupt the historical narrative somewhere and suspicion rises that Arendt simply dissolves the event by covering it up with a long, gradual development. There has to be a break somewhere. And indeed, Arendt does find it again, in the poetic form, by displacing the event back to the seventeenth century, or even inventing it anew. The first account, in “Foundation 1,” is still relatively dry. Power, in Arendt’s account, was born in the suspended state of the pilgrims between Britain and America, between their past and their future. The Mayflower Compact was drawn up on the ship and signed upon landing. . . . [T]hey [the Piligrims] obviously feared the so-called state of nature, the untrod wilderness, unlimited by any boundary, as well as the unlimited initiative of men bound by no law. This fear is not surprising; it is the justified fear of civilized men who, for whatever reasons, have decided to leave civilization out on their own.264

A striking turn in this happy story of American political experience! The word “fear” is repeated three times and we remember that repetition is the only way to remember fragile beginnings. It was the fear—the fear of “bad weather,” of the state of nature, and of wilderness—that constituted the moment of action and of foundation. The central moment of this fear is the fear of the Other. In the situation of an unlimited community, identification presents a danger that threatens the subject with the loss of himself or herself, both in the epistemological and ontological senses. Thus, Arendt also introduces “tragic,” mimetic logic into her vision of the American Revolution. If the emphasis here is on fear rather than on pity, this should not deceive us, as we

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remember that Arendt agrees with Lessing that these two passions are inseparable and arise from the same situation.265 The word experience originally meant “crossing the high seas,” a passage over an abyss.266 It is the situation between past and future, between rejected England and the feared abyss of freedom that constitutes the revolutionary event. The danger of the elements is a background and a figure for the fear of negativity inherent in liberation and of the “ocean” of the unbound human multitude (as Arendt refers to it in the chapter on “Social Question”267). It is on the ship, in the constant fear of death, that a crucial turn in temporal orientation occurred: from the escape from toward the entrance into; from the prospective fear toward the retrospective allegiance to the event of promise as to a fait accompli, from “liberation” toward “freedom.” The fear of total destruction and the vision of the absolute void serve to constitute a reflexive, autonomous subject: “The really astounding fact in the whole story is that their [colonists’] obvious fear of one another was accompanied by the no less obvious confidence they had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a ‘civil Body Politick.’”268 The social contract is based here, in traditional fashion, on fear of the state of nature. Arendt is quite close to Hobbes here as she derives the emergence of the body politic from mutual fear, fear of the unbounded (mimetic) relation of people to each other. There is, of course, a crucial difference: Arendt sees this fear as empowering the political subject while Hobbes uses it to justify the withdrawal from political activity. This “solution” is poetical and rhetorical: the argument focuses on the “positive” promise while the rhetoric emphasizes negative fear. The argument about fear is partly introduced under a “denegation” (a figure allowing the saying of something and pretending not having said it officially): “it is perhaps of no great relevance . . . whether” the colonists “were forced to covenant by the fear of shipwreck” or because they were themselves feared by the Virginian.269 Fear and practical enthusiasm about the new refer to the same object, which is absolute negativity, the break with the past, and the immediate community of people. Revolutionaries, like Arendt herself, are ambivalent with regard to revolution; they make a revolution out of fear of revolution. The purpose of my reading is to suggest that in Arendt’s final account, the French and the American revolutions are conceptually identical—in spite of her attempts to oppose them. In the “Social Question,” Arendt suggests that the American Revolution was achieved as though “in a kind of ivory tower into which the fearful spectacle of human misery, the haunting voices of abject poverty, never penetrated.”270 However, in her narrative construction of the American Revolution and its “primal scene,” she cannot avoid a reference to fear of the catastrophe, to fear of being left “abject” if not in poverty then in exile. This can mean two opposite things. First is that the actual revolutionary event, and the revolutionary narrative, cannot bypass the abyss of boundless mimetic passions, and Arendt has to recognize it. Second, that Arendt uses the poetic figure of fear on the ship as a hidden legitimation of the American Revolution through the “minimal” dosage of mimetic passions that actually led to their

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delimitation. It is almost as though Arendt placed in opposition Americans’ fear and the French pity (without noticing the parallel between fear and “terror”).

Conclusion To sum up, Arendt’s theory of revolution was the attempt to found a non-Marxist and nonliberal theory of history, where democratic legitimacy, and public freedom are legitimated not by the substantive aspects of rule but by a founding event that brought them to life and opened up a space of action and creation. It is the process of revolution and not the substance of the regime that matters. Further, it is not the self-responsible, self-grounding liberal subject that matters, but an open crisis of revolution that brought it to life, even though in an unaccomplished, merely symbolic form. This philosophy, owing obviously to Kant and Heidegger, is an anticipation of what, in the 1980s, was accomplished by Alain Badiou. Unlike Badiou, Arendt gives a complex picture of the process of the revolutionary event, where the eruption of boundless negativity threatens to dissolve the event. With its negative aspect, the revolutionary event is fragile, it can easily be forgotten: at least forgotten in its subversive moments (also the moments of negativity even though Arendt would not call them so). However—and this is what Badiou does not accept in Arendt—she suggests limiting negativity by strictly dividing the political and social spheres between action and work. The sense of revolution appears then as political, not social, consisting purely in self-sufficient action that would transcend material interest. It is hard to miss here the legacy of Kant’s ethical spiritualism. But Arendt also poses the problem that is common in many theories of revolution, Marx in particular: how can the intellectuals and/or heroes constitute a people without relating to the masses that do not live for politics? Does not the role of intellectuals in revolution make it into an elite coup rather than a popular revolution? The answers to these questions, be they optimistic or discouraging, are found by Arendt in the sphere of the sentimental.

Badiou and the negativity of revolution Badiou’s philosophy of event has lately become very influential, so there is no need here to retell and interpret it in detail. However, it is hard to overemphasize the role of Badiou in reactualizing the concept of revolution in contemporary circumstances, which also played an important role in this book. Like Badiou, I also see in revolution the crucial framework for thinking about modernity and the modern subject, but his philosophy does not give justice to negativity in the form and content of revolution, which is the primary focus of my book. Badiou uses the “event” as the transcendental horizon of important cultural practices, including politics, science, art, and love: the procedures that constitute and require a free autonomous subject. The task is to denaturalize these forms of experience and to show that they are only possible as a function of a point-like emergence of

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something new, something that transcends reigning rationality and even—says Badiou using terms that remind of Levinasean criticism of Heidegger—transcend the order of being itself. The duration of these practices, their intensive temporality, is thus not natural either, but depends on the repeated action of a subject, his/her “fidelity” to the once emergent event. This said, the event is not entirely transcendent, but builds on a rupture, or excess, in the structure of the preexisting being. Using the mathematical theory of sets, Badiou shows that any unity qua totality (a “situation,” as he calls it, this time using Sartrean language) is imperfect because by uniting elements, it cannot itself unite all its parts, or subsets, and, at the same time, some of its elements may not be its parts, that is, they can include other elements that fall out of the totality in question. The event happens when there is an element of a situation (“evental site,” designated as x) whose elements, in turn, do not belong to the situation at all neither individually nor as a category (only as an empirical grouping), so that it does not make a part of the situation. Then it may happen that these elements suddenly come to the surface and are reunited, within the context of the situation, by an addition of a proper name (note this emphasis on a sign that constitutes the event: a proper name but expressed in a mute letter of a mathematical formula). Thus, a new illegitimate set of the “event” is born (Ex = (x, Ex)), which includes itself and is, from the point of view of mathematics, and of being, inconsistent. Being inconsistent, it can nevertheless be sustained in existence by the bet of a faithful subject. The task of this subject is not just to reaffirm the “event,” but to rearrange the situation so as to gradually build another strange subset—a generic set that is indiscernible from the point of view of the situation and escapes all classification possible within it. Once again, the existence of this set is undecidable and is a result of the subject’s “forcing.” Although events can belong to the four different spheres (and generate four “generic procedures”), in Badiou’s Being and Event, the privileged paradigm is that of political revolution.271 The non-recognized elements of the evental site are the sans-culottes of the French Revolutions, proletarians from the revolutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the various excluded groups from Marcuse’s postwar revolutionary theory. In Badiou, they are viewed from the perspective of the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s that put forward recognition as a political slogan. The self-reference of the name of the event is the use and defense of the name of “revolution,” which, during the French Revolution and its aftermath, was an important factor of the event itself. It is also revolution that, since Kant, had been a source of reflections on the historical event in philosophy. Finally, the “generic” set, being a mathematical concept, vividly recalls this peculiar concept of the absolute that is Marx’s “communism.” Badiou’s gesture is to take Marx and Marxist tradition, particularly the one busy with the constitution of an activist subject (Lucacs, Benjamin, Gramsci, Sartre), and to generalize it, abandoning its particular historical anchoring (the passage from the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian revolution) and making it into what is by all standards a transcendental meta-theory. “Event” becomes something like a horizon in the terms of phenomenology and hermeneutics: a finite framework that endows experience with meaning and sets its temporal orientation. In Badiou, however, this

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finitude is intensively infinite: there are many singular events, and each of them is potentially inexhaustible, although empirically events tend to exhaust themselves and get saturated. For Badiou, the event, as dependent on the “intervention” of the subject, is constitutive of time. This is to say that the theory of intervention forms the kernel of any theory of time. Time—if not coextensive with structure, if not the sensible form of the Law—is intervention itself, thought as the gap between two events. The essential historicity of intervention does not refer to time as a measurable milieu. . . . Time is here, again, the requirement of the Two: for there to be an event, one must be able to situate oneself within the consequence of another. . . . the event is only possible if special procedures conserve the evental nature of its consequences. This is why its sole foundation lies in a discipline of time, which controls from beginning to end the consequences of the introduction into circulation of the paradoxical multiple, and which at any moment knows how to discern its connection to chance. I will call this organized control of time fidelity.272

Thus, time, for Badiou, is a something that an event founds and renders possible. In this, it is analogous to Heidegger’s “within-timeness.” Time, for Badiou, is synthesis of the manifold, because, in the form of fidelity, it selects the occurrences that are linked to an event. This synthesis would not be possible without the active perseverance of the subject, his/her discipline. But time is also the time of an interval between two events, which combines fidelity to the first one with anticipation of the new one (intervention itself is eventful). The title of Badiou’s book echoes that of Heidegger’s—Being and Time.273 He substitutes “event” for “time,” apparently to show that event is prior to time, and the time each time depends on a specific event. But for Heidegger, time is also eventful, even in Being and Time, before he introduces the concept of Ereignis, event-enowning. The Self ’s resoluteness against the inconstancy of distraction, is in itself a steadiness which has been stretched along—the steadiness with which Dasein as fate “incorporates” into its existence birth and death and their “between,” and holds them as thus “incorporated,” so that in such constancy Dasein is indeed in a moment of vision for what is world-historical in its current Situation.  .  .  . Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own Self. As resoluteness which is ready for anxiety (Angst), this loyalty is at the same time a possible way of revering the sole authority which a free existing can have—of revering the repeatable possibilities of existence.274

By his mention of death and anxiety, Heidegger gives more attention to negativity than Badiou, even though the latter’s event is also empirically finite (being potentially infinite). In Heidegger’s account, unlike Badiou’s, time includes a circulation between past and future, a turn back and a projection forward. But for both, time is a function of Kantian synthesis rather than Hegelian absolute negativity, and it lacks the revolutionary movement of constant auto-destruction and auto-critique that Marx

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eloquently describes in the “18th Brumaire”: “constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew . . . recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals.”275 Marx can afford a negative understanding of event, because he sees it necessarily as a second event, a revolution within a revolution. Not so with Badiou for whom each event comes anew and does not preserve the memory of the previous one, except as a structural analogy. In spite of his insistence on political radicalism, Badiou is a postMarxist who, in the period of collapse of Marxist parties and of the Soviet bloc, saves Marxist heritage by idealizing it, extrapolating it to everything, and abandoning the “great narrative” of historical communism. It is for the same reason that Badiou, like Benjamin, reorients history from the future to the past: events are moments of novelty, but it is important not to abandon them all too quickly in search of other events, or for a noneventful universalist logic, but to carry their heritage through even under circumstances that make one doubt. This is a message conditioned by melancholia of the Left in the neoliberal era and a call to resist the seduction of the neoliberal critique of Marxism; at least because there had been an authentic experience at its origin, which had set some as yet unaccomplished goals. Like Benjamin, Badiou wants to treat the past as a past present, which cannot be dismissed just for the sake of the calendar, and, like him, he points at the unevenness of time, which contains periods of normalized rationality as well as moments of intense enthusiasm, which found and animate the former. The resulting dualist ontology thus teaches one to soberly recognize the noneventful being as a period of sedimentation that requires memory and active construction of the future. The melancholic figure of a turn to the past that is implicit here is nevertheless dismissed by Badiou in favor of the affirmative “fidelity.” The political message of my book—the need for my generation to hold on to the emancipatory form of the revolutions of 1989–91, in spite of their neoliberal content and their rapid descent into apathy and denial of the event—is thus in line with Badiou. However, my task is to build a meta-theory that would allow understanding this denial and apathy as a function of event itself. Otherwise we do not give the event enough credit for having found only the good side of reality; the disappointment, betrayal, and political melancholia, would then be presented as an unethical attitude of a “reactive” subject. The order of the normalizing “state” would thus be abstractly opposed to the order of event in a Manichaean anarchist manner: just like it happens in Deleuze, Negri, and their followers. Badiou’s project deserves better. But for this the event requires a theory of negativity. In fact, Badiou does have a theory of negativity. It is briefly mentioned in the Being and Event and is later developed in the Logics of Worlds and in two talks, “Destruction, Negation, Subtraction—On Pier Paolo Pasolini,”276 and “Three Negations.”277 Benjamin Noys analyzes Badiou’s approach to negation in detail in his 2010 book,278 even though he uses it for aims that differ from mine and counters Badiou’s eventful affirmation by defending the standpoint of a noneventful subject of negativity. Noys rightly notes that in the context of post-1968 French philosophy, Badiou comes “to the edge of the negative” in taking it most seriously but still insisting on what Noys calls the

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“affirmationist” priority of affirmation over negation. As he observes, “In the current context of capitalist crisis and the global ‘war on terror,’ Badiou has started to register the limits of affirmationism and the necessity for the ‘adjustment or calibration between the properly negative part of negation and the part I [Badiou] call subtractive.’”279 In its simplest form, Badiou’s attitude to negation is close to Deleuze’s. “Empirically, novelty is accompanied by destruction. But it must be clear that this accompaniment is not linked to intrinsic novelty; on the contrary, it is always a supplementation by truth. Destruction is a retro-effect of the new supplementation upon the former situation.”280 So, negativity is only a shadow of an affirmative new truth, which transcends the situation. Badiou further distinguishes between destruction and “subtraction,” which is “the affirmative part of negation.” For example, the sheer inconsistent multiplicity on the one hand, and the event itself and the generic set on the other are all subtracted from a situation, separated, disconnected from it. Without subtraction, says Badiou, a sheer destruction leads to nihilism and terror. This is a rather trivial position: all Badiou says is that the negative force has a positive “carrier,” the negativity per se is unproductive. This is something that Plato, with his logic of alterity, and Aristotle with Kant, with their ideas of contrariness and privation, would agree with. What Badiou adds is the conceptualization of negation as separation, not as opposition. Through this move that both Plato, with his “Other”—and Deleuze, with his disjunctive synthesis— would approve, negativity as such is deprived of any transformative force. A further development of the same argument is to be found in the Logics of Worlds: a book dedicated to phenomenality of and in events. There, Badiou inserts a long development on negativity in Hegel. The result is the conclusion that, in the sphere of “appearance,” which means the concrete existence in the framework of an event, negation is not just the either–or of contradiction, but the polarity of the contrary. This, as we have seen, is a correct and important statement, which had informed the theory of negativity from Aristotle to Kant, Hegel and Marx. Negation, for all these authors, is embodied qua negative magnitude, or a contrary force. Here one would hope for something on the inversional content of a revolutionary event. But, in fact, Badiou gives the contrary a very surprising definition, which can be seen as his contribution to the theory of negativity. The “reverse,” he says, is the separated: the reverse of X is the maximal measure (“envelope”) of what is most unrelated to it. As one would have guessed, the example of reverse entities is a revolutionary and conformist subject (Ariane and Alladine in the play of Maeterlinck that Badiou uses to exemplify his theory). At best, this is a wild interpretation of Aristotle’s theory on contraries as a maximal difference in the genus. Aristotle emphasizes not only difference but also the genus, so for him, contraries, not speaking of correlatives, are subject to a dialectic of unity and difference. Not so for Badiou, who uses the empirical manifestation of negation to posit something entirely different. This is indeed closer to Plato’s “Otherness,” with the difference that Plato never spoke of reversals or contraries, and in Badiou, otherness can be empirically reconstructed within a situation. As for Hegel’s understanding of contraries as of reflexive chiasms, Badiou does not even evoke it in his discussion of Hegel. Neither has he evoked Marx for whom

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inversions are a way to treat the temporal medium of appearing negation. In Badiou’s phenomenology, time plays only a quantitative role, which makes the whole picture quite static, apart from the explosive emergence of events. The question to Badiou: how does this antidialectical theory of negation work in his own theory of event, and in the actual experience of events? First, the role of negativity in the logic of Badiou’s event is larger than he himself would admit. Ontology builds on the “void” of the empty set. It is thus nihilistic, because the “void” of “ontology,” in fact, subtractively dismisses the inconsistent multiplicity of being. The logic of “foundation” of one set by another works by analogy with the general foundation of ontology in the void, by associating a set to an element with which it has nothing in common, counting the latter, relatively, for the void. The price for this logic of foundation is a disjuncture between belonging (of an element) and inclusion (of a part). This is clearly the internal negativity of being. It reaches a limit in the evental site, which is located “at the edge of the void” and leads to the eruption of event, which counts it for one. Note: what does the event consist of? Of the negated content it redeems. The only thing that is really new about it is its name. So, in a way, it is the negativity itself, the outburst of crisis, which is reinterpreted as a positivity of event, this “ultra-one.” This resembles classical dialectics in the spirit of Hegel if not of Engels (event as a practically achieved synthesis of inconsistent multiplicity and ontology).281 The next step is the construction of a generic set. This is also described negatively as an insistent escaping of each possible determination. As a result, we get something new and “indiscernible,” but we do not have a language to describe it. This story does not really have a place for a breakthrough of a radically new phenomenon; rather, Badiou proceeds immanently, by describing the new as negatively produced by and from the old, so that as a result something new and positive emerges. How is this different from Hegel’s labor of the negative, which also turns negativity into positive being? Only an emphasis on an unnameable and heterogeneous nature of what had thus emerged, a positing of event and generic set as superior entities: but in some readings, Hegel was also an apophatic theologian of Absolute Spirit. Such apophatic apology of the “new” is, by the way, in turn not free from negative language and, although a positive being of the new is presupposed, it stays completely indeterminate and may only be negatively described, so that there is in a way more negativity in this approach than in the more immanent doctrines where negation itself is recognized as an active force of history. Secondly, Badiou’s ontology and phenomenology of event badly correspond to the events we actually know. Most events, and particularly revolutions, undergo moments where negative forces seem to exceed their secondary status. The main instances of this are fratricidal terror and revolutionary melancholia. These phenomena play a crucial role in the failure of revolutions. In Badiou’s terms, it would imply the following: 1. Terror was an indispensable violence by an affirmative progressive force inflicted on the force of the Old regime. 2. Melancholia was a logical reaction of those who did not become faithful to the event, to the emergence of this awesome but separate and subtractive phenomenon.

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But both forces finally were experienced by the revolutionaries themselves and the best way to explain them would be the coexistence of contrary forces within the event. Revolution was not just about separation but also about self-foundation, and this required a step backward in a movement of subjectivization—requiring self-destruction as well as self-foundation. The “event” could not destroy the situation (its negative force did not suffice for this) but engaged with it, which led to their mutual reflection. Therefore, the two Ex terms that make up part of Badiou’s formula of event (Ex= (x, Ex)), make not just a tautology but a potential contradiction (revolution against the revolution). Hegel famously showed282 that a tautological statement (A = A) contains contradiction, because A is stopped and deprived of development or manifestation by the statement of its identity. It is exactly the same problem with Badiou’s event: while we all fight for its identity and reaffirm it in fidelity, don’t we also interrupt and negate it as a temporal experience, by concentrating it in the past, qua a determinate event? This is a central issue: the fact that we need a theory of event to which we need to be faithful as a thing of the past means that there is a reason why this event is not fully present. The truth of event if accepted as such (the evental site included in the situation) would not fulfill the task of emancipation, it would assimilate the event into the normalizing order of state. Therefore, we need to not just affirm the existence of the event but also at the same time take care so that it remains in suspension. As Badiou himself admits in his reading of Mallarmé (a crucial section in Being and Event): [A]n event whose content is the eventness of the event . . . cannot . . . have another form than that of indecision. Since the master must produce the absolute event (the one, Mallarmé says, which will abolish chance, being the active, effective, concept of the “there is”), he must suspend this production from a hesitation which is itself absolute . . . . Between the cancellation of the event by the reality of its visible belonging to the situation and the cancellation of the event by its total invisibility, the only representable figure of the concept of the event in the staging of its undecidability. . . . Given that undecidability is a rational attribute of the even, and the salvatory guarantee of its non-being, there is no other vigilance than that of becoming, as much through the anxiety of hesitation as through the courage of the outside-place, both the feather, which “hovers about the gulf,” and the star, “up high perhaps.”283

This differs from what we would normally think of Badiou’s “intervention.” It not only posits the event but also tends to undo it at the very moment when it acquires a further existence—both happen at once. Which explains the anxiety that a subject of the event feels: not the Heideggerian anxiety of nothing, but Freudian/Lacanian ambivalent anxiety about a seductive/repulsive fantasy of pure presence. In Mallarmé, the event is present in the form of an obscure sign, as Badiou fully acknowledges in evoking the feather (a “beautiful image” of the indecidability of the event, he says) and the star. These signs of the event send us back to Kant and his ambivalence to the event that is incorporated in a “historical sign.” In this version, Badiou’s description is closer to the ambivalent experience of the actual revolutions, and their self-destructive scenarios. But, to put it tactfully, it seems

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that the intuition drawn from the reading on Mallarmé is insufficiently incorporated in the systematic part of Badiou’s theory, which repeatedly rejects dialectics. This further leads us to the question of affects. Badiou’s account of event is associated with a certain ethics, which has Stoic overtones; it is activist and rationalist (hence the “discipline,” “selection” of multiples linked to the event, “enquiries,” and so on). The question remains on the passive element of subjectivity. What, except moral duty, makes one faithful to the event? Is it Kantian sublime respect, or is it a Feuerbachean “idée fixe”? Badiou does occasionally evoke affects, such as in the discussion of Mallarmé just quoted, or in the Ethics where he introduces “affects of truth,” states of the “unequalled intensities of existence.”284 The examples of such affects that he gives are very positive: happiness, joy, enthusiasm, pleasure. But, they do not play a serious role in the development of his theoretical argument. What is absent are those passions (pathoi) par excellence that make one suffer, because they penetrate and break through the subject. Sam Gillespie, in his seminal work on Badiou,285 rightly suggests that Badiou lacks a theory of the affect, that he “needs a framework through which one can speak of how subjects are gripped by events.”286 Gillespie compares Badiou to Lacan (although for some reason not to Heidegger) and concludes that a “drive” adequate to the subject’s fidelity is anxiety, Lacan’s angoisse, as an uncertain relationship to a “lack of the lack” that “never lies”—to the “object ‘a.’” Indeed, there is a similarity, if we think of Badiou’s singular, nonincluded elements of the site, which emerge, in his terms, from the apparent “void”—in the same way, object “a” emerges in the place of the lack that it comes to incorporate. This observation of Gillespie is crucial for the further development of the theory of event and needs to be developed. Gillespie rightly alludes to affective fascination and obsession (typical for the relationship of anxiety to the object “a”), but he does not say anything on the inherent ambivalence of anxiety’s relation to its object (which we saw in Badiou’s discussion of Mallarmé), and of the ambivalent, paradoxical structure of this “object” as such. Both Heidegger and Badiou, his disciple, lack understanding of the distentio (Augustine) on which temporality bears and of the negativity inherent in the subject’s attitude to anything to which s/he stands “loyal.” The fact that an event remaining a source of enthusiasm and object of fidelity is conceived as something no longer fully actual means that we project and oust it back, or project and defer it forward. It is only on this condition that something like temporality as such is possible, and only in this way can we get rid of any naturalist residue in the understanding of temporality. An event, to be relevant for action, may only be so as a fulcrum, to shatter and impress the subject, and then push him/her away from itself. We have seen a reflection on this ambivalence in Kant’s theory of event as presented earlier. Another affect that one can assume in the situation of Badiou’s event is the feeling of separation and abandonment of the past event, and of the situation in which it emerges. All speaks of the fact that the situation remains and we preserve contact with it. The rupture that the event produces is not absolute, and it leads to destructive consequences in the situation, as he himself admits. Then joy and enthusiasm would stem not just from the enjoyment of the new but from the liberation/separation from

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the old. The event, as Arendt among others rightly perceived, allows one to set up a free space and start anew; or think of Marx’s proletarian revolution that lets “the dead bury their dead.” There emerges a privative relationship with everything that is thus set apart (arbitrary rule of despots, indebtedness to obsolete laws, etc.). Badiou’s own analysis of Saint-Paul shows this depotentialization of old law only too well. It is therefore likely that the event is driven forward not just by the enjoyment of presence but also by the joy of destruction, this oscillatory movement of going back to a past traumatic memory and making sure that it is no longer valid. Otherwise, what is the need for an event as a spring of a progressive movement? Nietzsche is important here, because he conceived event as a temporal rupture and inversion. We have already evoked his negative understanding of event in Chapter 2: the description of a “moment” as a gateway or even a fork between two roads— forward and backward,287 the correlative notion of the impossible “willing backwards,”288 and the insistence on the active (noninertial) nature of forgetting which, for him, is a faculty constitutive of human temporality and human will (i.e. of the autonomous subjectivity).289 For Nietzsche, the need of negativity for the event and for the subject stems from an overabundance of being, which has to expel something to become free and active. Being, as an infinite set in Cantor’s sense, would include mutually contradictory influences that would paralyze the subject and make knowledge impossible. Hence the necessary repression, that is, the distancing and the symbolic rejection of certain facts and possibilities. In this Nietzschean context, Badiou’s subject, who enjoys the discovery of the new, would be a subject of lack but not of excess. In a fine short text “Who Is Nietzsche,”290 Badiou notes the numerous places, mostly in Nietzsche’s late letters and works, where he speaks in terms of event and understands himself as such an event, capable of “shooting history into two halves.”291 Nietzsche—Badiou admits—is a great thinker of eventful historicity. What Badiou does not accept in Nietzsche is the fact that this “event” remains a declaration and has no communicable, objective content. In this sense, Nietzsche was a nihilist, for this reason, he was an “antiphilosopher,” and for this reason, says Badiou, we now need “to lose him,” as Nietzsche himself mentions in one of his last letters (“the difficulty now is to lose me”—he writes to Georg Brandes292). This text is curious because Badiou does not pay attention to the main thing that separates Nietzsche’s event from his, namely emphasis on the negative force of event which “breaks history into two halves” and therefore ousts, puts into distance, brackets, suspends a part of the content of history, contrary to Badiou’s emergence of the new and of the repressed. And Badiou, having ignored this, reenacts the very gesture of Nietzsche (“dare to lose me!”), quoting Nietzsche with regard to Nietzsche himself, as though Nietzsche, strangely, would be the only event in the world in relation to which we should be not “faithful” or at least “indifferent” but actively negative. Does this not correspond to Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s notion of nihilism? Nihilist is the one who negatively thinks of the negative (ousts it, takes it for nothing at all).293 To conclude, Badiou’s theory of event, which is in fact a generalized theory of revolution, deserves serious respect and attention for its attempt to point at the indispensability of an ethical will of the subject for the continuous existence of modern

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freedom and reason, and to ground this subject in an objective crisis of nonrecognition, which modern freedom and reason constantly fall into. However, the ontological status of the subject remains too thin here and is not accompanied by a serious phenomenology of event: instead, we are offered a phenomenology that is not eventful. The fascinating antimatter of event, which we observe in previous theoretical accounts of revolution, retreats under the grandeur of ethical pathos. Paradoxically, this theory serves well to elucidate the historical situation, in its fundamental structure, but is less fit to produce or take part in an event (of which it honestly speaks by denying philosophy the status of a generic, truth-making procedure).

Conclusion The result of this historical overview of major existing theories is that, by now, the concept of event and of the revolution as its political expression remains one of the most important intellectual tools for conceiving the ontological constitution and the ethico-practical orientation of the subject, as well as the possibility and legitimacy of free states (the collective subjects). The heterogeneity of time (with its periods of high and low intensities, crises, and balanced states), the need for synthesizing time that a subject constantly faces, and at the same time, the problem of making real the temporal ruptures within the subject itself, all suggest that we build ontology on events, and polities, on revolutions, as finite and phenomenal foundations of actions and institutions. At the same time, as this chapter vastly demonstrates, the events, these states of high intensity and new discoveries, are internally contradictory, dialectical: the open situations they create produce destructive and demonic tendencies and, most importantly, the reflexive move of self-foundation that each event necessarily involves is interwoven with the risk and seduction of self-annulment. Kant showed this in his later writings, and most of the later theorists return to this observation, too. The problem with the theory of revolution is, as Arendt rightly saw, to combine the self-assurance of a new subject with the joyful experience of freedom and the task for this subject—to combat and destroy the structures of oppression that remain built into the subjects and institutions even after they unseat the oppressors and become conscious of their freedom. The “affirmative” contempt for the past and its total, contradicting negation both lead to the same alternative—inefficient moral protest or annihilating terror. The theory of negativity instead suggests that a revolutionary negation requires a schema, that is, an inversion, real opposition, which is built by imagination and allows moving society forward, through a carnivalesque demonstration of the reversibility of hierarchies. Hence the name “revolution,” whose etymological potential is little used in existing theories on revolution. The twentieth century moved from reflection on particular revolutions and revolutionary projects, to the idea of revolution as such, as a form of modern historicity. This generalization and abstraction is, on the one hand, a good thing, as long as it frees

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us from egocentricism and allows us to understand new or foreign situations without imposing a specific agenda; on the other hand, this abstraction of event is a danger: the abstraction leaves less stimuli for a reflexive subject to take part in the event, or, as it happens with the current wave of protests, the need for an event is actually the main motive for taking part in it. Also, the empty form of revolution risks being multiplied by the media ad nauseam (or ad melancholiam). In this context, Badiou’s attempt to deduce the objective of event from its form is very promising (I am speaking of the notion of generic set as the construction of absolute indeterminacy), although insufficient. The empiricist rhetoric from the Deleuzians, speaking of multitudes and multiplicity of events, is not really an alternative, because, again, this lacks practical content on which one could concentrate. Perhaps what is needed now—when philosophy, particularly the French thought of the last 50 years, really made a great effort of understanding—is to move into the more specific historical and literary phenomenologies of revolutions and other events, which would build on philosophical theories but develop the potential of innovation, inversion, and recombination that they describe.

Conclusion

In this book, I hope to have achieved the following results: (1) I have studied, with a philosophical, logico-hermeneutical methodology, the recent history of Russia, and attempted to explain the failure of the emancipatory drive that emerged there during Gorbachev’s reforms in the end of the 1980s. Logically, the reconstruction can be summed up as follows. Since the uprising of the Soviet citizens was directed not against a “feudal” regime but against a tyrannical regime based on Enlightenment, it led to the dethroning of the universal itself. Furthermore, the loss of sovereign authority with a claim to quasi-transcendent “communism,” led to the turning of society against itself, in a collective motion analogous to the Freudian structure of melancholia. The national self-denigration and self-contempt made sense of the new social situation where social links were rapidly dissolving, and a-nomic egotistic behavior, a curious solidarity in deceiving the (by now absent) big Other, became an accepted norm. The lively and intense Russian society of the 1990s and early 2000s was still enthusiastic about the utopian breakthrough of Western freedoms and commodities, but ideologically repressed everything that related to the universal and common. (2) This story is not just a consequence of the victory of liberal ideology although it did play a significant role in it. Lamentations about Russia combined with egotism and skepticism with regard to any ideology and contempt of formal rules make a very special blend that hardly coincides with the moralistic individualism of the neoliberal kind (closer to an extreme libertarian position). My claim in the book is that this story reveals something important and latent in the history of modernity as far as its legitimacy and self-understanding is based on revolutions. Any revolution has a negative force of a break with the past and of a jump into the unknown; in any revolution such a break can only be internal (a break with the past self) and thus remains incomplete; therefore any revolution deserving of its name must be, at least in part, negative and melancholic. This is confirmed by the history and reception of the French Revolution, in which, as I show, various negative affects, oriented both at the self and at the other, come to the foreground, most importantly the tragic couple of compassion and terror. This led further to the first theoretical proxy, to introduce a very generic and abstract notion of melancholia, as a negative affect traditionally seen as being culturally and historically meaningful and valid. The short history of the concept and phenomenon of melancholia introduces important nuances in its Freudian interpretation: melancholia is not just about inward reflection but also, particularly in its modern form, about

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the sentimental blackmail of the subject by outside images. Thus, if a revolutionary subject is melancholic, it is in part because it unconsciously bombards itself with signs of despair. (3) Why is it that when we want to oust something into the past and establish a new life (the key function of subjectivity) we end up in a paralysis? Why do such important events remain, for many, difficult to recognize as such? What are the conditions of possibility of this complicated development? Here, following Hegel in the sense of “negative dialectic,” but in part redoing the work he leaves implicit, I introduce the concept of negation (or negativity) as a unique instrument of language and logic, fit to make sense of temporal events. ll

ll

ll

Negation and affirmation are an asymmetrical couple: negation does not fully annul the affirmation. This is why negativity is the logic of time: the ontological medium of asymmetry but partial reversibility. This is also why what had been negated remains in memory; time does not destroy fully. Negation is weak, but it therefore ideally serves as an alibi. There is a small step between a rejection of something and the ignoring of something existing as though it did not happen (I have mentioned the use of the word “disavowal” in both meanings). Negation has a tendency to be omitted, left unstressed, because it aims to destroy the very idea of what it denies. It is like a hasty gesture of self-correction: one often picks up a fallen piece quickly and everyone pretends that nothing happened. However, precisely for this reason, and because it is by definition unaccomplished, negation has a tendency to be repeated, so that a new negation denies both the original affirmation and the first negation. If the original object is actually gone or forgotten, then the objectless negation, pure negativity, stays in memory as its symptom—and this is the structure of melancholia. A negative event thus stays in memory as a compulsion to repeat the negation, even though its object may be lost.

(4) Thus, repetition of negation means also negation of negation. This is a double movement which, on the one hand, dismisses the first negation and makes it unconscious, but, on the other hand, repeats and purifies this negation in its very form. This radicalization and purification of negativity is paradoxical because negation cannot be absolutely pure “by definition.” “Nothing” as a substantive “thing” would be nonsense. Thus, “pure” negativity means self-suppression of negativity, its unrest, its placelessness, and timeless internality. The revolution of the late twentieth century, which revolutionizes revolutionary heritage (of Enlightenment, of authoritarian emancipation of communism, etc.) itself, produces negation of negation, which results in the unprecedented interiorization of negativity by society which deteriorates (both actively and passively) into collective melancholia. After elaborating on this general theory, I go back to history, armed with an overview of the canonical theories of revolution. The main focus is on Kant, who struggles with the constitutive antinomy of the revolutionary event, and, in my

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reading, implicitly formulates a dialectic of self-foundation. Hölderlin understands revolution first of all as a leisurely pause of caesura, and second, literally, as Umkehr, turn around that happens during this pause: he thus detects a force of backward, regressive movement that is inseparable from historic revolutions. The analysis of Hegel is short but crucial for the book, since Hegel interprets revolution via the notion of negativity and emphasizes the oscillation of the latter between sublimation and loss of meaning: this is precisely the destiny of revolution which, anthropologically, combines enthusiasm with apathy and cynicism. This is followed by Marx who shares Hölderlin’s playful view of revolution as reversal and proposes a theory of two revolutions, which relate to each other in an inverted way. Marx also emphasizes that a true revolution must depart from a site of pure negativity (the proletariat) and not from any partial claims and problems. Pure negativity cannot exist (it would immediately negate itself), but as an idea it is a leitmotif of Western metaphysics, starting with Plato’s khora. Pure can it be, however, in a melancholic state, or in a state of anxiety, where what is missing has been lost or retroactively invented. Moving on to the couple Sorel–Benjamin, I show that in early twentieth-century political thought, revolution is already conceived as being negative—as a moment of rupture and violence. Benjamin evokes, again, the image of pure negativity and absolute rupture (“divine violence”) where, logically, the very act of violence would be evanescent. But, in later work, he develops an understanding (owing much to Hölderlin) of revolution as a stoppage of history: stoppage being a negation of negation; a revolution of the revolution. Hannah Arendt is important as a critic of revolutionary tragic passions: in her criticism, she reveals the crucial paradox of revolution as self-foundation and detects its negative current; unfortunately, she takes an overly partial stance vis-à-vis this negativity. Finally, Alain Badiou, our contemporary, is discussed. His focus is on event and revolution, and he makes a fully persuasive attempt to found a metaphysical system on the concept of event; however, his unfortunate disavowal of dialectic and thus of the negativity of event turns it into a moralistic notion. The task of this book is not to prove the correspondence of historical reality to an abstract philosophical idea. Its first goal is to notice the event that is going on and that became obliterated, unconscious, due to a set of objective and subjective reasons. Thus, I show that the circumstances usually evoked to deny or “denegate” revolutionary events and the very acts of denial are actually the most significant symptoms of this event. The negativity of revolution is responsible for the fact that it was hard to notice and easy to disavow. The same negativity that may lead to eruptions of violence is also responsible for the disappointment of people in politics and for the melancholia and apathy which characterize revolutionary societies. The disavowal of the event goes together with the disavowal of the political. Both of them may, however, lead to violence which is even more radical than the struggle with an oppressive state. When negativity is internal and lines of conflict are not clearly articulated, the enemy is all the more hateful because he is not recognized. The disavowed enemy is an absolute enemy. Thus, the identification of revolution as such and the analysis of its negativity explain its latency,

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expose the dangers of this latency, and argue for the broad symbolic recognition of recent revolutions. The second goal of the book is to help the disoriented subject to orient himself or herself in the situation by making sense of its symbolic and practical structure. To orient1 oneself means also to determine the direction of movement: hence, my persistent interest is in the paradoxical interrelation between reversibility and irreversibility (and thus, between disorientation and orientation) that is inherent already in the word “revolution.” The question is not to determine some general trend of world history as a whole but to show the tendencies inherent in the current situation: to put this situation into the historical context of 15 years before and 15 years after it. The identification of the sides of the conflict should allow the subject to position himself/herself in it. The most important “adversary” (whether s/he is personified or not) is, according to this book, seduction by the idea of absolute negation. It is one thing to pursue negativity and to insist on it; another is to believe that total destruction and obliteration may be accomplished and done with. To speak ethically, one should resist this seduction and those who are possessed by it. The third goal of my project is critique in the broad Kantian sense of the word. I criticize the accepted, convenient illusions and show, on the one hand, that they are determined by wishful thinking and, on the other hand, that they are the ways in which the subject refuses his/her own freedom. Critique—the incomplete project of all postKantian European philosophy—also means the task of separating, in each situation what is determined and produced by the logic of the subject’s own symbolic and material activity, and what comes to him or her from outside. It is clear from this book, I believe, that the powerlessness, depression, and contempt for the universal are in a postrevolutionary individual entirely of his/her own making. But the very condition of historical pressure that makes one block and protect oneself is not produced by ourselves. The subject steps back from the universal, fearing an over-engagement in its enormity, which could threaten his/her ego. Our inwardness is constantly penetrated by the images and symbols from outside and the most external and random signs may induce a painful self-relation of melancholia. These signs are usually produced by someone, but their very signification is linked to the curiosity and infinite ambition of humans: their interest in strangeness and the desire of a risky self-exposure. This contact with the outside, human “transcendence,” is the issue of time or history.2 It comes in a situation that may only be described, from the logical point of view, as contradictory or impossible, and is therefore signified through the paradoxical sign of negation. Beyond and because of this impossibility, the subject opens himself or herself to what exceeds him or her and what may take the form of a danger, an occasion, or a promise. It is up to the reader to interpret my book in any of these three ways if, of course, he or she would not be satisfied with dismissing it (along with the situation that it treats) as hopeless.

Notes Introduction 1 For an empirical instance of such self-centeredness of the new movements, see Artemy Magun and Oleg Zhuravlev, Protestnomu dvizheniu ne khvataet populizma, http://slon.ru/russia/protestnomu_dvizheniyu_ne_khvataet_populizma-869844. xhtml, accessed January 25, 2013. 2 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols 2 and 3 (New York, NY: Zone books, 1993), 279. 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. St. Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 4 In this brief historical outline, I rely on the following accounts of the history of the concept: Reinhart Koselleck et al., “Revolution,” in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–), 5, 653–788; Jean-Marie Goulemot, “Le mot ‘révolution’ et la formation du concept de révolution politique,” Annales historiques de la Revolution Française, 39(190) (1967), 417–44; Revolution, A History of the Idea, ed. David Close and Carl Bridge (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985); Mona Ozouf, “Révolution,” in: Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, ed. Mona Ozouf and François Furet (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 415–35; Ilan Rachum, “Revolution:” The Entrance of a New Word into Western Political Discourse (Lanham, NY and Oxford: University Press of America, 1999). 5 Cf. John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 79, 116. The political use of “revolution” coincides, as Pocock indicates, with the notion of “anakyklosis,” circular political change, by the Hellenistic writer Polybius. However, says Pocock, it was not “necessary to read Polybius on the anakyklosis to employ the imagery of wheels and cycles” (116). 6 See Ozouf, “Révolution,” 416–17. 7 Koselleck et al., “Revolution,” 671. 8 The spoken words of Diderot rendered by G. T. Raynal, cited in Koselleck et al., “Revolution,” 721. 9 Cf. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 79: “Fortune’s wheel became the image of repetition as well as of an unpredictability.” 10 The objective set by the Commission of Surveillance of Lyon, in 1793, cited in Ozouf, “Revolution,” 428. 11 See Ozouf, “Revolution,” 433–4. 12 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1965; Penguin Books, 1990), 42. 13 A study I have already undertaken, in part, in my article, as of now available only in Russian, “Otrizatelnaysa revoliuzia Andreya Platonova” [“Andrey Platonov’s Negative Revolution”], Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 106 (2011).

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14 See the classic book of Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) or the more recent studies of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London and Boston: Routledge, 1983). 15 Johann W. von Goethe, Truth and Poetry from My Own Life (G. Bell and Sons, 1908), 203; see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (New York: Polity Press, 2008), 127–30.

Chapter 1 1 The most recommended accounts are Vladimir Sogrin, Politicheskaya istoriya sovremennoy Rossii (Moscow: Infra-M, 2001)—a relatively dry and neutral account; Boris Kagarlitsky, Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed (New York and London: Verso, 1995) (a leftist reaction to the reforms of the 1990s); Lilia Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Carnegie Endowment, 2007) (this is a highly biased liberal critique of the post-perestroika regime); Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of Revolution. Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 In classical Arendtian terms, Soviet Union was not “totalitarian” by this time: the state did not seriously intrude into private life and did not use mass terror: the only spheres that were seriously regulated were politics and economy. 3 In 2005, Shevchuk composed a new song, “Counter-Revolution,” in which he lamented the restorational elements of Putin’s Russia. Thus, by this time, he clearly recognized his 1987 song as a revolutionary hymn. But in 1987, this was not at all obvious. 4 Artemy Magun, “Perestroika kak konservativnaya revoliuzia” (“Perestroika as a Conservative Revolution”), Neprikosnovennyi Zapas, N6(74) (2010), 122–39. 5 For instance, see Carine Clement, O. Miryasova, and Andrey Demidov, Ot obyvatelya k aktivistu (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2010), 76–8. 6 Alexander Oslon, “Kak v 1996 godu analiticheskaya gruppa sdelala oprosy sozialnym faktom,” Sozialnaya realnost, 6 (2006). www.polit.ru/article/2006/09/25/analitgroup/, accessed January 17, 2013. 7 Samuel Huntigton, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1993). 8 See, for example, Consolidating the Third-Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives, ed. L. Diamond, M. Plattner, Yun-Han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 9 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). 10 Bruce Ackerman, The Future of a Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 11 Alain Badiou, Of an Obscure Disaster. On the End of the Truth of the State (Maastricht: Yan van Eyck Academy, 2009 [1991]). 12 Boris Kagarlitsky, Restavrazia v Rossii (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2003). 13 Iuri Levada, “1989–1998: Desiatiletie vynuzhdennykh peremen,” Monitoring obshestvernnogo mneniia: economicheskye i social’nye peremeny, 1 (1999), 7–12.

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14 Vladimir Putin, Presidential address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, 2001. http://president.kremlin.ru/events/191.html. 15 See note 1. The book appeared simultaneously in Russia, under the title Velikie revoliuzii. Ot Kromwelia do Putina (The Great Revolutions. Cromwell to Putin) (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001). See also Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin, for an account of “Soviet-Russian Revolution” that, to McFaul, was more successful in its goals than the previous ones (370). 16 Mau and Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of Revolution, 335. 17 Ibid., 301; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 35 (1996), 749–50. 18 Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1965). 19 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 3 (1973), 155–6. 20 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (New York and London: Verso, 2010). 21 See Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, “1989, the Continuation of 1968,” Review, 15(2) (Spring 1992), 221–42. 22 See, for instance, Mikhail Ryklin, Terrorologiki (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1992); Nina Kozlova, Gorizonty povsednevnosti sovetskoy epokhi. Golosa iz khora (Moscow: IPHRAN, 1996). 23 Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 24 Ibid., 84–5. 25 See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974), vol. 21, 147–58. See also Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 241–53, passim. 26 Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998 [1969]); Melancholia and Society (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992). 27 Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft, XXV; cf. ibid., XVI. 28 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Standard Edition, vol. 14 (London: Hogart Press, 1956–74), 237–58. 29 Ibid., 248. 30 Ibid., 246. 31 Karl Abraham, “Note on the Psychoanalytic Investigation and Treatment of ManicDepressive Insanity and Allied Conditions,” in: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1927 [1911]), 137–56. 32 Julia Kristeva, Soleil Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 55. 33 Abraham, “Note on the Psychoanalytic Investigation and Treatment of Manicdepressive Insanity and Allied Conditions,” 148. 34 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. R. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholia and the Act,” Critical Inquiry, 26 (Summer 2000), 661. 37 Agamben, Stanzas, 19. 38 Ibid., 31–5. Julia Kristeva also believes that melancholia is akin to fetishism: a mute object-fetish becomes a substitution for an absent maternal thing. In both cases, there is a disavowal, Verleugnung—the weakest form of negation, in which it is preserved in a weakened, powerless form; Kristeva, Soleil Noir, 57–8.

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39 Agamben, Stanzas, 31–2. 40 Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI (1927–31), 1–56. 41 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. H. Zohn, in: Selected Writings, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003), vol. 4, 389–400. 42 Grigory Kertman, “Katastrofism v kontexte rossiyskoy politicheskoy kultury,” Polis, 4 (2000), 6–18. 43 Daniil Dondurey, “Samyi perspektivnyi biznes—zapugivanie strany,” Expert (April 6, 1998), 88–91 (quot. 90). 44 Ibid. 45 Vladimir Bibikhin, “Zakon russkoy istorii,” in: DrugoeNachalo (Saint-Petersburg: Nauka, 2003), 8–69. 46 Ibid., 14. 47 Ibid., 15. 48 Ibid., 17. 49 Ibid., 24. 50 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, 58. This is, by the way, a phrase that Bibikhin liked to quote. 51 Ibid., 92. 52 L.-A. de Saint-Just, Rapport sur les personnes incarcérées, 8 ventôse an II (1794), www.antoine-saint-just.fr/textes/26–02–94.html, accessed January 23, 2013. 53 Freud, “Fetishism,” vol. 21, 147–58, cit. 153. 54 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 26. 55 Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 270. The place from Hegel that Žižek refers to appears in the end of the section on Enlightenment that immediately precedes the discussion of the Revolution (or describes the transition to it): The Phenomenology of Spirit, VI B II b; 329–55. 56 For this concept of Lacanian thought, see in particular The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1992). 57 Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The National Defense Institute, 1994). 58 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York, NY: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–), vol. 11 (1979), 103. 59 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 166. 60 L. Bergeron, “L’introduction,” in: L’âge des révolutions européennes (1780–1848), ed. L. Bergeron, F. Furet, and R. Koselleck (Paris-Montreal: Bordas, 1973). The appearance of this argument in the book coauthored by Furet is somewhat strange since in his later book, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), he emphatically rejects the plausibility of the hypothesis of “seigneurial reaction.” 61 Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État (Paris: PUF, 1982 [1789]). 62 George Lefebvre, La Grande peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). 63 Maximilien Robespierre, “Sur les principes de morale politique,” 18 pluviôse de l’an ii (5 février 1794), 126.

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64 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (New York, NY: Polity Press, 1988), 59–88. 65 According to Lefort, the desire for the gap was associated, in the Jacobin Terror with the fantasy of interminability so that the inevitable termination established it retrospectively as a sign of the void. “Their (terrorists’) fascination with being is at the same time a fascination with abyss. This is why they call down death on their heads in an attempt to find a sign of their inscription in the people, in nature and in history” (84). “The terror is revolutionary in that it forbids anyone to occupy the place of power; and in that sense, it has a democratic character” (86). That the attempt of the revolutionaries to inscribe themselves, and their fantasy of themselves, was successful, may be concluded from Lefort’s remark in his other essay: “of all regimes of which we know, it is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real” (225). 66 Ibid., 168. 67 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, 605–12, see its reading in the third chapter of the book. 68 Vladimir Bibikhin, Uznai sebia (Saint-Petersburg: Nauka, 1998), 194–210. 69 Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’abrégé philosophique de la Révolution française,” Po&sie, 49 (1989), 211–18. 70 Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le retrait du politique (Paris: Galilée, 1983). 71 The background here is the Heideggerian notion of “Unverborgenheit”: of truth as disclosure that always moves in two directions at once—it shows itself in hiding and in withdrawing itself from view. 72 Yegor Gaidar, Gosudarstvo i evoliuziia (Moscow: Evraziia, 1995). 73 Boris Kapustin, Sovremennost’ kak predmet politicheskoy teorii (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), chapter 8. 74 Vladimir Sogrin, “Zakonomernosti russkoy dramy,” Pro et contra, 4(3) (1999), 155–69. 75 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, IX, 1, vol. 2, 7–8. Cf. Albert Soboul, Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II (Paris: Seuil, 1968): “The majority of the militant section members were on their feet since the 14 of July of 1789, they participated at all uprisings. After the 10th of August [1792], their activity has even intensified. The enthusiasm and excitement of these great days involved a nervous fatigue, that the militants felt after their victory. Five years of revolutionary struggles have worn out the personnel of the sections that was mobilizing the popular movement. . . . With the prolongation of war, the popular movement lost much of its vigor” (242). 76 Germaine de Stael, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la revolution (Geneva: Librairie de Droz, 1979 [1798]), 328. 77 Michelet views games and prostitution precisely as the staging of loss and destruction (Histoire de la Révolution française, 23–4). He is thus in accord with Freud’s theory of playing in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, 1–64). On the connection between prostitution, gambling, and melancholia, see Walter Benjamin, in particular his “On Some Motives in Baudelaire,” 313–56, and especially sections 9 and 11; 329–32 and 337–41. 78 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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79 L. Saint-Just, “Rapport sur les factions d’étranger,” 13.03.1794, in: L. Saint-Just, Oeuvres choisies, 207–31 (cit. 215). 80 To use an expression of de Sade in the title of his ironic text written during the French Revolution, “Les Français, encore un effort pour devenir républicains!” 81 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 6–18. 82 As in the definition of work given by Hegel in Phenomenology: the work succeeds in giving a subject a sense of self through provoking the resistance of the thing that is worked upon and that is thus affirmed in its autonomy. The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), trans. A. V. Miller, B IV A, 111–19. 83 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2003). 84 Aristotle, Physics Δ, see in particular 222a10–20, trans. R. Hope (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961). 85 Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, in: Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 9, par. 258, 49. 86 Ibid. 87 “On dira que la révolution est finie, qu’on n’a plus rien a craindre du tyran . . ., mais, Citoyens, la tyrannie est un roseau que le vent fait plier et qui le relève. . . . La révolution commence quand le tyran finit.” Saint-Just, “Second Discours concernant le jugement de Louis XVI” (second discourse concerning the judgment of Louis XVI), December 27, 1792, in Oeuvres choisies, 100. 88 Ibid., 94. 89 See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 253–77. 90 I will return to this motive in my discussion of Hannah Arendt who draws from Kant (and Augustine) the concept of “beginning” and, exactly in his spirit, demonstrates the paradoxes that emerge when, in a revolution, the capacity to begin becomes the aspiration of an absolute and earthly foundation. 91 Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Dunkler und Humblot, 1963), 56. See also the reading of this formula by Jacques Derrida, in The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997), chapters 5 and 6. 92 One strong example is the famous march of women in Versaille on October 5, 1789, aimed at bringing the king to Paris, which was started as a protest against the food shortage. 93 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, VIII, 2, vol. 1, 1146. 94 In Bénvéniste and Lacan, this split is often designated as that between the “subject of the enounced” (position that I claim to occupy) and the “subject of enunciation” (the position from which I actually speak). The French terms are, respectively, sujet d’énoncé and sujet d’énonciation. The split in question, which is characteristic both for melancholic Russian subjects and, in Lefort’s analysis, for Jacobin revolutionaries, should count as one of the utmost symptoms of revolution. 95 Aristotle, Problem 30, in: Aristotle, Problems 20–38, trans. W. Hett, H. Rackham, and Loeb Library (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1957), 155–69. 96 In “Ajax,” line 920. 97 J. Starobinsky, “L’encre et la mélancolie,” in Mélancolie, 24. 98 Hippocrates, Aphorisms, section 6.23, trans. Francis Adams; http://classics.mit.edu/ Hippocrates/aphorisms.6.vi.html, accessed January 18, 2013. 99 Aristotle, Problems 30, in: Aristotle, Problems 20–38, 155–69. 954b1, 163.

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100 Ibid., 953a10, 155. 101 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus reprint, 1979), 86. 102 “Meridianum demonem,” in: Cassianus, De institutis coenobiorum, X, 1, cited in Agamben, Stanzas, 8. 103 A long tradition started by Origen and continued by Luther and Melanchthon, see Starobinsky, “L’encre de la mélancolie,” in: Mélancolie. Génie et Folie en Occident, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 25. 104 De vita triplici, 1, 5, Opera, 497, quoted in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 259. 105 Romano Alberti, Trattato della nobilita della pintura (Rome, 1585), quoted in Agamben, Stanzas, 25. 106 Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 231. 107 Winchilsea, Anne (Kingsmill) Finch, Countess of: Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (London: printed for J[ohn] B[arber] and sold by Benj. Tooke at the Middle-Temple-Gate, William Taylor in Pater-Noster-Row, and James Round, in Exchange-Alley, Cornhil, 1713), 88–96. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ finch/1713/mp-spleen.html, accessed January 17, 2012. 108 Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1974), vol. 1, 151. 109 Starting here and up to page 71, I reproduce a part of my article: Artemy Magun, “The Birth of Terrorism Out of the Spirit of Enlightenment: The Subject of Enlightenment and the Terrorist Sensorium,” in: Law and Evil. Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge 2010), 148–68. 110 Christian Friedrich Timme, Der empfindsame Maurus Pankrazius Ziprianus Kurt, auch Selmar genannt. Ein Moderoman. Erfurt 1781/1782, 43, 59, cited in Sauder, Empfindsamkeit, 151, my translation (Artemy Magun). 111 Karl Friedrich Pockels, “Über die Verschiedenheit und Mischung der Charactere,” in: Beitrage zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnis, besonders in Rucksicht unserer moralischen Natur, Berlin 1788, 3–50, cit. 41 ff., cited in Sauder, Empfindsamkeit, 151, my translation (Artemy Magun). 112 Johann Christoph König, Versuch eines populaires Lehbuchs des guten Geschmacks für Mädchen und Junglinge (Nürnberg 1780), 126; Sauder, Empfindsamkeit, vol. 3, 102–3. 113 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. G. Zoller and R. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33 (2:220). 114 Novalis, Schriften, t. 2, 614. 115 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 116 Ibid., “The Bourbonnois,” 155. See also the chapter titled “A Fragment” (45–6), where Sterne explicitly compares this “sensorium” of sympathy to the tragic theater: in the city of Abdera, he says, during a presentation of Euripides’ play, everyone was taken over by the fire of love. 117 See Sauder, Empfindsamkeit, vol. 1. Sauder cites Roland Mortier: “sensibilite et lumieres vont dans le même sens et tendent vers la réalisation d’un type humain complet, dont le bonheur consiste non à se mutiler d’une part de soi-même, mais à assumer pleinement tous les aspects de son moi” (235). 118 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. R. Masters (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1964), 107.

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119 Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick Passions (London, 1711), 238; quoted in Susan Baur, Woeful Imagining (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 153. 120 Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) (Russian original: Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Moscow: Pravda, 1978)). 121 Ibid., “Spasskaya Polest,” 67–76. 122 Ibid., “Chudovo,” 56. 123 Ibid., “The Dedicace,” 40. 124 David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139. 125 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, trans. Ignat Avsey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 296. 126 F. Nietzsche, Daybreak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109. 127 Ibid., 299. 128 Ibid., 300–1. 129 Ibid., 307. 130 Ibid., 305. 131 Cited in: V. V. Zenkovsky, Istoria russkoy filosofii (Leningrad: EGO, 1991), 69. 132 Dostoyevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, 306. 133 Cf. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (New York and London: Verso, 2006), 57.

Chapter 2 1 Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages (Kobenhavn: A. Host, 1917). Reprinted in 2010 by General Books (print-on-demand). 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Philip Sidney, Astrophile and Stella, Sonnet 63 (A. Kline, 2003). www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Sidney55thru81.htm, accessed January 17, 2012. 5 See Benjamin Noys, Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 162, for the argument emphasizing the need for negative thinking by the inherence of negation in the real abstraction that forms our culture. 6 Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: Norton, 1997), v, 64. 7 Jacques Lacan, Seminar 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 289–98. 8 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones de quodlibet, 10, q.1, a.1, ad 3; quoted in Wolfgang Hübener, “Die Logik der Negation als Ontologisches Erkenntnismittel,” in: Positionen der Negativität (München: Hg. v. Harald Weinrich, 1975), 105–42. 9 Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 270–90. 10 Andrey Platonov, “All-Russian Clunker,” November 1921, in: Sochineniya (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), vol. 1, book 2, articles, 187–94, cit. 189. 11 Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1763), 203–42.

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12 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 360. 13 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 186–7. 14 Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets. The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils 1905–1921, trans. Ruth Hein (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, Random House, 1974), 55. 15 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. Gregor (New York, NY: Abaris books, 1979), II, 7, 88. 16 Noys, in his recent book (Persistence of the Negative), criticizes the “affirmationist” of contemporary French philosophy and suggests the need for returning to negativity. To summarize his argument, I see Noys proposing four main arguments for this need: first, the need to analyze and oppose the “real abstraction” of the capital, which is in itself negative—negation is “the means to contest the universalizing power of the abstract from within” (166); secondly, the role of negation in fostering agency; thirdly, the negative essence of masochism as of the strategy of suspension and subversion (as opposed to direct transgression); fourthly, the need to conceive destruction not just creation (Noys illustrates this third usage through a quote from Benjamin (3, quoting Benjamin’s essay on Edward Fuchs). Now, as it is clear from this very list, we need negation not just for pragmatic but also for theoretical purposes, as a tool for recognizing dialectical transformations that one and the same subjective position can undergo. The most important of the dialectical oppositions that the concept of negation can address is the opposition between agency and apathy, activity and passivity, both of which are expressed through negative statements and attitudes with regard to the world and being. Implicitly, this is evident from the mention of masochist strategy (163–5, see also his article in the present volume), which is precisely the attempt to remain active in the very gesture of radical passivity. 17 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in: Selected Writings (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 4; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York and London: Verso, 1998), 381–400, cit. thesis 9, 392. 18 Joseph Brodsky, “Turning back, we look but only see old ruins,” “Letter to a Roman Friend,” trans. G. Kline, in: A Part of Speech (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 52–5. 19 G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 7.1–2, 8.13–15, 270–4. 20 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 360. 21 Parmenides 6.9, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 271. 22 Aristotle, Metaphysics A4, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989), 985 b 4; The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 406–7. 23 Mladen Dolar, “Tyche, Clinamen, Den,” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 46, #2, 2013, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-013-9254-0, accessed July 19, 2013. 24 Seneca 1928–1935, vol. 1, “On Anger,” 2.10.5. 25 Richard Burton remarks on the melancholic character of the “laughing” Democritus, in his Anatomy of Melancholia, which he even signs as “Democritus Junior.” 26 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.65–87, 11–19.

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27 Plato, “Sophist,” in: Dialogues, Loeb Library, vol. VII, trans. H. N. Fowler (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1921). 28 Ibid., 193–332. 29 Ibid., quot. 164 C–D, 327. 30 Ibid., 166 C, 331. 31 Plato, Timaeus 49–52; Plato, Dialogues, Loeb Library, vol. IX, trans. R. Bury (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989), 113–25, quot. 119. 32 Ibid., 50b, 117. 33 Aristotle, Categories, trans. Harold Cooke (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16a30, 117. 34 Metaphysics Г 1003b10, Aristotle, Loeb Library, vol. XVII, 149. 35 Aristotle, Categories, 82–96: 11b15—13b35. 36 Ibid., 125–9; 17a30–18a12. 37 Aristotle, Politics VI 1317b, Aristotle, Loeb Library, vol. XXI, trans. H. Rackham (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1990), 489. 38 Aristotle, Categories, 14a20, 97. 39 Ibid., 147: 20a15–30. 40 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1017a25, 237. 41 Ibid., 83: 11b35–40. 42 Ibid., 1058a15, 310. 43 Ibid., 1009a35, 185. 44 Aristotle, Categories, 85: 12a30. 45 Ibid., 13a35, 93. 46 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1004a15, 153. 47 Ibid., 1004b25, 157. 48 Aristotle, The Poetics, 1451b 1–5, Loeb Library, trans. Hamilton Fyfe (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35. 49 Aristotle, Problems 20–38, 155–69; cit. 953a10, 155. 50 Ibid. 51 Dionysius the Areopagite, Works, On Divine Names, preface by J. Parker, 8. www.ccel. org/ccel/dionysius/works.pdf, accessed January 25, 2013. 52 Ibid., 60, 69. 53 Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, trans. A. Bruckstein (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 [1908]), par. 79–80; 87–8. The commentator, Almut Bruckstein, righty evokes Aristotle’s “privation” as an analogon of the presumed Platonic distinction between “you” and “me” (87–8). 54 Sergey Bulgakov, Svet Nevecherniy. Sozerzaniya i Umozrenia [The Non-Evening Light. Contemplations and Mind Pictures] (Moscow: Put’, 1914). 55 Meister Eckhart, “On Detachment,” in: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, ed. B. McGuinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 292. 56 Eckhart, “German Sermon 83,” 207; cf. R. Schürmann, The Wandering Joy (Aurora, CO: Lindisfarne Press, 2001), 163–5. 57 Eckhart, “On the Poverty of Spirit,” 200. 58 Wolfgang Hübener, “Die Logik der Negation als Ontologisches Erkenntnismittel,” 118–20; Joachim Ritter, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1984), vol. 6, 671–2. 59 Spinoza, June 24, 1674, letter to Jarig Jelles, Epistle 50, in: Baruch Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995),

Notes

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

73

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259–60. On the significance and role of Spinoza’s formula, see: Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 [1979]). Macherey thinks that Hegel misread Spinoza’s phrase by taking it out of the context (that belongs only to geometrical figures) and generalizing it: adding the word “omnis,” “all.” Spinoza, in his view, does not hold the univocally negativist view of finite things that Hegel attributes to him. From this observation on the missed encounter, Macherey reconstructs an original metaphysic of Spinoza, which he presents as a viable alternative to Hegel’s. See on this also a more recent work by Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’: determination, negation, and self-negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel,” in: Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Forster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 175–96. Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1763), 203–42. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 236–7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (below as CPR) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 382–3, A 190–2. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 101–2. Kant, CPR, 553–9, A 571–83 Ibid., 555, A 575. See on this Melamed (2012): Melamed says that in fact the difference between Kant and Spinoza is not so large and shows, using Kant’s later texts, that he might have been aware of Spinoza’s doctrine on the subject. Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1922), 110. Ibid., 617. Hermann Соhen, Die systematische Begriffe in Kants vorkritischen Schriften nach ihrem Verhaltniss zum kritischen Idealismus (F. Dümmler, 1873), 30. Cohen gives a detailed reading to the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (25–30) and concludes, among other things, that the usage of simple mathematical symbols, such as plus and minus, to real oppositions is precisely the sign of the fact that they can only be synthetically grasped, not logically analyzed. The negative magnitudes, one would add, then appear as names—here. Cohen is at the origin of the interpretation of Kant that will continue into those of Benjamin and Lacan. Lucio Colletti, “Marxism and the Dialectic,” New Left Review, I/93 (September– October 1975), 1–29. Colletti cites, for instance, Karl Korsch and Cesare Luporini for the evocation of “real repugnances” as being dialectical. But it is in the Soviet tradition, which he does not quote, that the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” received special attention as a pre-dialectical text. One can mention A. Deborin, V. Asmus, K. Bakradze, among others. See, for instance K. Bakradze, “Problema dialektiki v nemezkom idealizme” (“Problem of Dialectic in the German Idealism”), in: Izbrannye filosofskie trudy (Tbilisi: Tbilisy University, 1981), vol. 1, 27–241, par. 11. Colletti, “Marxism and the Dialectic,” 4.

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74 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York and London: Verso, 1985), 125. 75 Ibid., 126. 76 Cf. Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing (New York and London: Verso, 2012): “This is why, at the end of his Science of Logic, Hegel says that if one wants to count the moments of a dialectical process, they can be counted either as three or as four—what is negated is already in itself negated. But there is a further point to be added here: it is not only that, as in our example, if one sticks to abstract subjective autonomy without its more concrete fulfillment, this autonomy negates itself. Much more importantly, this ‘sticking’ is necessary, unavoidable, one cannot by-pass it and move on directly to a more concrete higher form: it is only through the ‘excessive’ sticking to the lower form that the self-negation takes place which then creates the need (or opens up the space) for the higher form. . . . A moment turns into its opposite precisely by way of sticking to what it is, by refusing to recognize its truth in its opposite” (246–7). 77 Colletti, “Marxism and the Dialectic,” 7; Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” 211 (2:171); the translation used by Colletti is replaced by the one from the latest edition. 78 J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), part 2, par. 4, D; 134 (1.140). 79 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 2. 80 Ibid., 355–63 81 Ibid., 19. 82 Hegel, Science of Logic, 81–2. 83 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), vol. 68, 37–41. 84 Ibid., 368. 85 Ibid., 746. 86 Ibid., 371–2. 87 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1966 [1941]). 88 Ibid., 148–9. 89 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, 6. 90 Ibid., 305. 91 Letter to Brandes, January 1, 1889, in: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (New York, NY: Hackett, 1996), 345. 92 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1969), 327; Noys, Persistence of the Negative, 34. 93 Christoph Sigwart, Logic, trans. H. Bosanquet (London: Sonnenschein and Company, 1895). 94 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1922). 95 Ibid., 305. 96 Ibid., 304. 97 Ibid., 300. 98 Gottlob Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). 99 Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 128.

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100 Martin Heidegger, “Die Lehre Vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” in: Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), vol. 1, 183–4. 101 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 89–110, quot. 95. 102 Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics,” in: Basic Writings (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1969), 89–110. 103 Hegel, 1. Die Negativität. 2. Erläuterung der “Einleitung” zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in: Gesamtausgabe, Band 68 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993). 104 The notes for this course are highly interesting but fragmentary and cryptic. On their interpretation, see O. Pöggeler, “Hegel und Heidegger über Negativität,” HegelStudien, 30 (1995), 145–66; Nikolay Plotnikov, “Absolutnyi dukh i drugoe nachalo. Hegel y Heidegger,” Voprosy filosofii, 12 (1994), 178–84. See also Susanna Lindberg, Entre Heidegger et Hegel (P.: Harmattan, 2010) for an excellent demonstration of the inadequacy of most Heidegger’s reproaches to Hegel as based on systematic misinterpretation (thus, Heidegger accuses Hegel of subjectivism and cartesianism; thinks that “becoming” is just motion while in fact it is emergence ex nihilo and a “fundamental struggle with the absolute limit,” similar to Heidegger’s notion of Being, 108). 105 Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. W. McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 291–322. 106 Ibid., 310. 107 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993). 108 Ibid., 43–70. 109 Ibid., 27–8. 110 Ibid., 26. 111 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Jean Clair, in his edited volume on melancholia, notes that melancholia encompasses the whole of Western tradition, being affirmed as a condition of theory at its origin (in Aristotle) and reaffirmed in the twentieth century as a central affect of the time by Benjamin, Sartre, and others (Jean Clair, éd., Mélancolie. Génie et Folie en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), particularly 452–61). 112 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 265. 113 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 541–2. 114 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 19, 235–9. 115 Ibid., vol. 21, 147–58. 116 Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York, NY: Norton, 1997), 64–5, for repression, denegation, and foreclosure. On fetishism, see Jacques Lacan, Les relations d’objet (P.: Seuil, 1994). 117 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 111–40. 118 Lacan, Seminar 1, 52–61. 119 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 138. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., vol. 18, 1–65. 122 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 578–80. 123 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution.

258 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151

Notes Ibid., XII. Ibid., 234–5. Herbert Marcuse, Schriften (Springe: zuKlampen, 2004), vol. 8, 197. See on this, Artemy Magun, “Negativity (Dis-)embodied: Philippe Lacoue– Labarthe and Theodor W. Adorno on Mimesis,” New German Critique, 40(1) (Winter 2013), 118. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. Ashton (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 159. Ibid., 183–5, 192–6. Aléxandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 161–2. George Bataille, A Critical Reader (Oxford and Maiden: Blackwell, 1998), 297. Lacan, Seminar 1. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (the ‘Wolf-man’),” in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974), vol. 17, 7–122. Lacan, Seminar 1, 295. Ibid., 292. “I’m afraid that he comes.” A Russian reader would recognize a similarity with the Russian grammar, which often requires double negation, like Ya nikogo ne boyus (“I fear nobody” or “I don’t fear anyone”). Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, NY: Norton, 1977), 292–325. Lacan, Seminar 11, 252. Kant’s essay has been already cited in the beginning of the Seminar, in relation to the question of causality (21–2). This reference would deserve a special and more elaborate discussion. Ibid., 252. Translation modified. Hegel, Science of Logic, part 1, book 1, section 1, chapter 1, C, remark c; 81–2. Jacques Lacan, Seminar 13, trans. Cormac Gallagher (December 15, 1965), 16, www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/13-The-Object-ofPsychoanalysis1.pdf: III, accessed January 18, 2013. Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages. Alfred Ernout and Alfred Meillet, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine (Paris: Klinksieck, 2001). Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), 80ff. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Manque de rien,” in: Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Allbin Michel, 1991), 201–7. Joel Dor, Introduction à la lecture de Lacan 2. La structure du sujet (Paris: Denoel, 1992), 232–3. Noys, Persistence of the Negative, 2. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York, NY: Athlone Press, 1994). Noys, Persistence of the Negative. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

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152 “Thus Every Part Was Full of Vice, Yet the Whole Mass a Paradise” (Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 27). 153 Alexander Hamilton, John Madison, and John Jay, Federalist Papers, #10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 40–6. 154 Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1989), 113–14. 155 G. W. F. Hegel, “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law,” in: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102–80, cit. 141. 156 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), #324, remark, 361. 157 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 273. 158 Ibid. 159 G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life, trans. T. Knox (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1979), www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/, accessed September 9, 2012, section 2. 160 Hegel, Political Writings, 141. 161 G. W. F. Hegel, On the Scientific Foundations of Natural Law, in: Political Writings, quot. 146. 162 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 16. 163 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. 164 Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 64–7. 165 Artemy Magun, “Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth and the Evolution of his Thought,” Critique and Humanism, 35 (2010), 23–38. 166 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 167 Ibid., 125. 168 Ibid., 128–9. 169 J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues On The Left (London and New York: Verso, 2000). 170 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2005). 171 “Peuple ou multitude: questions d’Eric Alliez à Jacques Rancière,” Multitudes, 9 (May–June 2002), 95–100, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Peuple-ou-multitudes, accessed January 17, 2013. 172 See also Ernesto Laclau, “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles,” in: Empire’s New Clothes, ed. J. Dean and P. Passavant (New York-London: Routledge, 2004), 21–30; Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 253–64. 173 Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 258. 174 Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” in: Selected Writings (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 4, 402. 175 Hermann Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in: The Writings of H. Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwest University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), vol. 9, 13–45. 176 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger, 2004), 37.

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Chapter 3 1 Thus, in Russia, as I mentioned in the first chapter, the traditional “Left-wing” content (appeal to the poor, call for social justice and redistribution) coincides with the structural rightist position (reactionary, revanchist mood; national and imperialist agenda, etc.) in the case of the Communist Party, and vice versa for the liberals (left-wing Rightists, so to say). 2 See Ernst Cantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. K. Schlechta (München: C. Hanser, 1960), vol. 3, Nachlass, see for example 862–3, passim. 4 “Tarrying with the negative is the magical force that turns [umkehrt] it [the negative] into being,” The Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, 19. 5 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, NY: Dover, 1956), 442–57. 6 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, I, in: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.1. 7 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 110 (B XVI). 8 Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, fascicle 7, sheet IV, 2, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 22, 42. This passage is, unfortunately, omitted in the partial translation of the Opus Postumum into English, ed. Eckart Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9 Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, in: Practical philosophy, 153–271, cit. 268. 10 Critique of Practical Reason, I, book 1, chapter 2, 194–8. 11 Ibid., 196. 12 Ibid., I, book 2, chapter 2, IX, 257–8. I am obliged to Slavoj Žižek for his emphasis and analysis of this passage. The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 25. For the notion of origin as of a foreclosed imagination of mirror-like symmetry, circularity, and reciprocity, see also the analysis of narcissism by Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Fantasme des origines et l’origine du fantasme,” Les Temps Modernes, 215 (April 1964), 1833–68. 13 Friedrich von Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragmente,” fragment 80, in: Fragmente (Jena, Leipzig: E. Diederichs, 1904); English translation: Philosophical Fragments (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1991). 14 Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in: The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000), 3–19. 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History,” in: Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. 16 Ibid., 1. 17 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, ch. 1, 11–53. 18 Jacques Lacan, “Le séminaire sur la lettre volée,” in: Écrits (New York, NY: Nortona & Company, 2006), 6–50. 19 See for example, the section on “Estranged Labour” in “The Economicophilosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in: Marx and Engels, Collected works, vol. 3, 229–326. “In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object bondage, appropriation as estrangement, as alienation” (281, translation modified).

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20 The identification of this logic in Marx, and development of it in the Capital makes absolutely unjustified the portrayal of Marx by Hannah Arendt as of the thinker of quantifiable and circular sphere of what she calls “labor,” or “life” (The Human Condition [Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1958]). The infinitization proposed by Marx is the radical critique of the “quantifiable” view of life process. 21 See Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. Francois Raffoul (New York, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), 59. 22 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 306 [262]. 23 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 192–3. 24 The last decades of the twentieth century saw a rising interest in Kant’s philosophy of history and in his treatment of the French Revolution. The most important texts in this new tradition are Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982); F. Lyotard, L’enthousiasme (Paris: Galilée, 1986); F. Proust, Kant. Le ton de l’histoire (Paris: Payot, 1991); and Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate (Paris: Payot, 1991). Diverse as these readings are, they are driven by a common interest: to find the possibility of a historically (and thus contextually) founded political and philosophical reasoning, without appealing to a speculative solution (a direct translation of empirical history into human freedom and meaning) and/or to a notion of unitary history with an encompassing direction and meaning. To draw on history means, for the authors in question, to draw on an experience of a particular event, which (as a beginning [Arendt and Proust], or as a meaningless sign [Lyotard and Fenves]), opens the subject to new possibilities. This event of indeterminate significance or meaning serves further to institute a sphere of sociability or community that would be founded not on truth or transparence but on judgment without preestablished rules (Arendt and Lyotard), on affects (Proust), or on the seemingly marginal modes of public discourse, such as soothsaying and rumors (Fenves).   It must be further noted that this new sequence of readings is indebted to the interpretation of Kant by Martin Heidegger, in the Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997) and in his other texts. Although Heidegger does not address the politico-historical texts of Kant, he centers his interpretation of Kant’s epistemology around the faculty of imagination, which serves to open the human being to the unknown and to orient him/her temporally and historically, with relation to the future. Heidegger’s thought, in particular, enables Proust and Fenves to read Kant’s historicity, respectively, as a sphere of pure receptivity and of hermeneutical, historically oriented, interpretation.   My own reading, which follows here, owes much to Heidegger as well as to Arendt, Lyotard, Proust, and (particularly) to Fenves. However, my reading is a part of a broader attempt to build a concept of revolution. As such, it aims less to reconstitute the last truth about Kant than to try following his logic and to understand his argument. In this endeavor, I differ from the authors mentioned above in several respects. While I follow their quest to avoid the speculative transition from experience to freedom, I do draw on the Hegelian method, which I receive through a long Hegelian tradition going through Kojève to Lacan, and which, as I hope to show, is in no way alien to Kant’s intention. Like Kant and Hegel, I am interested in seeing how a historical event gives rise to political, practical, and epistemological

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25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33

Notes subjectivity. And, as already mentioned in the second chapter, in using the notion of imagination, I prefer to speak not (as Heidegger does) of the pure imagination or of imagination of nothing, but rather of the counter-imagination, or of the imagination of the impossible. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. J. Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45–7. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, II, 4, 83. Ibid. Ibid., II, 5, 151. Heidegger, On the Way to Language. Heidegger talks of the event as a source of insight [Einblick] and, as I have mentioned, notes in a subsequent marginalia the link of the Ereignis to eräugnen. The debt of Heidegger’s notion of event to Kant was noticed by J.-F. Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983), 232–6. In a draft to the second “Conflict”—the so-called Krakauer Fragment (in: Immanuel Kant, Politische Schriften [Köln und Opladen: Weltdeutscher Verlag, 1965], 167–75), Kant actually uses the word Ereignis (instead of Begebenheit) to address the event of revolution. Lyotard somewhat too quickly assimilates both authors into the “speculative” solution, without noticing, that for each, the event does not speak but rather looks; provides an estranged point of view upon being and human being. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, II. The tripartite division of the regime of the sign (rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon) appears also in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, par. 39, in: Anthropology, History, Education, 300–3 (7: 191–3). (Anthropology was published in 1798, same year as the “Conflict,” but much of its material goes back to the lectures that Kant started teaching 20 years before the publication.) Here, the division, significantly, is applied to the type of sign that Kant calls “natural,” as opposed to an “artificial” sign or to a miraculous one. I send the reader back to Chapter 2 for the discussion of the displacement of the event from nature to politics. Ibid., II, 6, 153. There is an aphorism of Nietzsche taking issue with Kant’s reading of the French Revolution. Nietzsche shrewdly perceives the structure of revolution as a regressive series of reflective reversals:



This is what finally happened, in the bright light of more recent times, to the French Revolution, that gruesome [schauerliche] and (on close consideration pointless) farce: noble and exalted [schwärmerische] spectators across Europe have, from a distance, interpreted their own indignations and inspirations [Begeisterungen] into it, and for so long, and with such passion, that the text has finally disappeared under the interpretation. In the same way, a noble posterity could again misunderstand the entire past, and in so doing, perhaps, begin to make it tolerable to look at.—Or rather: hasn’t this happened already? Weren’t we ourselves this “noble posterity”? And right now, since we’re realizing this to be the case—hasn’t it stopped being so?



(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. J. Norman (modified) [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], aph. 38, 37).While Kant emphasizes how these reversals are signs that reveal the subject to itself, Nietzsche shows, with irony, how they forever foreclose the subject (itself an unread preliminary sign, Vorzeichen) from the possibility of self-knowledge. Needless to say, such a foreclosure lies in the basis of Kant’s reflection, too, but the sign, for him, is already linked with a—subtracted—meaning. In Nietzsche the signs are not entirely deprived

Notes

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

263

of meaning either; the very promise of reversal is such a suspended meaning. Nietzsche’s own version of such reflective reversal, or revolution—the Eternal Return—is characteristically presented as a thought, suspended between affirmation and negation. Furthermore, in a striking parallel to Kant’s ambiguous treatment of revolution, Nietzsche, in different stages of his thought, reverses his attitude to the Eternal Return from repulsion (second Untimely Meditation) to joy (Gay Science). One can show how Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Return is a development of the same metaphysical exigency that is present in Kant’s reversals. I hope to undertake such a study in the future. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, II, 7, 88, my underlining. Indeed, generally speaking, memory may be defined as a failed attempt to reverse time; it is not just an intellectual, but a volitional act. Time provides the condition of possibility of memory by its incomplete reversibility. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” 464–5, my underlining here and below. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 204; Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 49, 153–4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 40. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” 464–5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Doctrine of Elements, Pt. II, Div. II, appendix (“Of the regulative use of the ideas of pure reason”). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Doctrine of Elements, Pt. II, Div. II, Bk II, Ch. II. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 40. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” 464–5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, I, par. 104–6, 216–218. Jean Hyppolite, “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung,” in: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1988), 297. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in: Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 19: 233–9; quot. 235. Cf. J. B. Pontalis: “[L’inconscient] ignore le négatif parce qu’il est négatif, qui s’oppose à la supposée pleine positivité de la vie,” cited in Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 183. Thus imagination constitutes the intelligible world only by having first created its monstrous counterpoint. This line of argument is similar to the view of imagination developed by S. Žižek in The Ticklish Subject (chapter 1). Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 28, 144. Translation modified in accordance with Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 23, 128. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in: Standard Edition, vol. 17, 175–205. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Fantasme des origines et l’origine du fantasme” (see note 12 above). Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 93–4. In the original text from 1798, doctor’s phrase reads: “Ich sterbe für lauter Verbesserung,” “I die, for the better.” The editor of volume 7 of the academic edition of Kant’s works, Ewald Frey, replaced “für” by “vor,” because he decided, based on a linguistic analysis, that Kant uses here “für” in the sense of “vor,” in a usage that has

264

55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Notes since then become dated: Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, hsgb. Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1968 (1900–), vol. 7; “Orthographie, Interpunction und Sprache,” 353. The phrase would then mean: “I die from improvement,” and would be the response of the friend to the question of the doctor, a response that would reproach the doctor for his false promises. But the first reading is possible too: here, it is the doctor himself who would pronounce the phrase in response to the question of the friend: his own death would serve as a promise for the friend’s health. The recent edition edited by W. Weischedel restores the former version: Kant, Werkausgabe, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977), 367. But the very ambiguity is characteristic and increases the humor of the joke. In both meanings, there is a clash between the idea of infinite progress and the fact of finitude, which makes one laugh. But for Kant, as we see, the finitude and the unaccomplished nature of event are, paradoxically, conditions of progress, via the faculty of memory. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 54, 209–10, translation modified. On Kant’s third Conflict, see the aforementioned work by Peter Fenves, and a very rich detailed reading by Susan Shell (The Embodiment of Reason. Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community [Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995]). Shell’s main argument in her reading is that Kant, in his rich philosophy of hypochondria, criticizes the theory of inward consciousness and presents reason as fully affectable from outside, in its very inwardness, thus giving ground to a thinking of community and interconnection. “Consciousness is no more testimony (as Leibniz and Rousseau differently believed) to the inviolability of the soul than are the feelings of constriction with which wakefulness for Kant was inextricably connected, his Herzbeklemmung bringing home to him in an especially forceful way the connection between worldly consciousness and the body. . . .” (298). Christof Hufeland, Macrobiotik, oder Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (Verlag: Jena, 1796). Hufeland, Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern, 2, S. 50. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, thrid Conflict, 100. Ibid., 98. For the notion of an imaginary and thus an impossible disease, of a fictitious but structurally possible catastrophe, see the reading of Sophocles’ “Antigone” by Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire 7. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 321. In translating the words of Sophocles’ Chorus that define a human being, Lacan talks of the “escape into imaginary diseases” (la fuite dans les maladies impossibles). Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 103. Kant refers to the title of the famous comedy by Menander. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 103. Ibid., 105. Séance de la Convention (April 10, 1793). www.royet.org, accessed January 13, 2013. Immanuel Kant, “Essay on the Maladies of the Head,” in: Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. G. Zoller and R. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65–77. Ibid., 70, 2.264. Ibid., 72, 2.266. Ibid. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Eucation, 317 (7:212).

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72 Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart: J. Metzsler, 1974), vol. 1, 151. 73 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (New York, NY: New Classic Books, 2005 [1755]). The article “hypochondriack: 1. Melancholy; disordered in the imagination . . . 2. Producing melancholy; having the nature of melancholy.” 74 See Critique of Pure Reason, the second chapter of the “Transcendental Analytic”: Doctrine of Elements, Pt. II, Div. I, Bk. I, Ch. II , ; A 86–130; B 118–68. On the intermediary character of imagination, see in particular B 150–6 (par. 24). The classical thematization of Kant’s theory of imagination is Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. For a recent reappraisal of this notion, see Žižek, The Ticklish Subject. 75 For this obvious but important point, see Lacan, Seminaire 1, Les écrits techniques de Freud: “L’homme n’a jamais peur que d’une peur imaginaire” (“A human being may only have an imaginary fear”), 249. 76 Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 197. 77 See for instance the Critique of Practical Reason, Part 2, “The Doctrine of Method.” 78 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 104. On the notion of als ob, as if, in Kant, see Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. 79 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 112. 80 “A reasonable man”—Kant writes, while yet nurturing the idea of a possible remedy— “does not grant [statuiert nicht] any such hypochondria; if uneasiness comes over him and threatens to develop into melancholia—that is, self-devised illness—he asks himself whether the object of his anxiety [Beängstigung] is present [da sei]” (104). The notion of objectless anxiety here anticipates the whole philosophical tradition, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan. We have noted Claude Lefort’s view that French Revolution, with its revelation of void, established (cf. Kant’s statuiert) the rule of political anxiety. Kant, by his denial of legal “granting” of anxiety seems to insist on its character of a question, of suspension. 81 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 104. 82 Ibid., 102. 83 For the notion of the fantasy of a catastrophe in Kant, see the essay of Jacques Derrida, Du ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983). 84 Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by I. Kant, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 83–93. 85 Ibid., 85. 86 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, VI B c, 374–383. Miller translates this as “dissemblance or duplicity.” 87 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 103. 88 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, VI A, 271. 89 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 106. Compare a statement in the “Announcement of a Treaty . . .” (85), which directly links the question of the left/right dissymmetry and of its necessary inversion, to the question of evil: The ambiguity in the expression “bad” (malum [Übel] and evil (pravum [Böse]) is easier to avoid in Latin than in Greek. . . . With respect to fate, the difference between right and left (fato del vextro vel sinistro) is a mere difference in the external relation of man. With respect to his freedom, however, and to the relation of the law to his inclinations, it is a difference in the interior of man. In the first case, the straight is opposed to the slanting (rectum obliquo); in the second case, the straight is opposed

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90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107

Notes to the crooked, the crippled (rectum pravo s. varo, obtorto). The fact that the Latins assign an unfortunate event to the left side may very well arise because one is not as agile at warding off attacks with his left hand as with the right. But the reason that, in the auguries, when the auspex turned his face to the so-called temple (in the south), he interpreted the lightning bolt that occurred on the left as good fortune seems to be that the thunder god who would be thought to be across from the auspex held his lightning in the right hand. Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos ou le conflit des facultés,” in: Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 436–8. For syncope as a central quality of Kant’s philosophical gesture, and of his writing, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Le discours de la syncope (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976). Nancy generalizes the notion of syncope to mean a disequilibrium, a double operation of junction and disjunction. In his book, Nancy addresses in some detail the third, medical Conflict (133–7) but, strangely, does not mention the footnote on the feet—which gives a strict definition of the syncope, strictu sensu—an accent on a weaker tone. Arnd Wedemeyer, “Kant Spacing Out,” Modern Language Notes, 109(3) (April 1994), 372–98. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 381. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 107. Critique of Pure Reason, Doctrine of Elements, Pt. II, Div. II, Bk. II, Ch. III, footnote, 615 (B 717). Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, third Conflict, 115. Ilan Rachum, Revolution: The Entrance of a New Word into Western Political Discourse (Lanham, NY and Oxford: University Press of America, 1999), 56–8. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’ ” in: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22. Pierre Bertaux, Hölderlin und die Französische Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). Ibid., 82–3. Friedrich Hölderlin. “Anmerkungen zum Oedipus,” in: Werke, Briefe, Dokumente (München: Winkler, 1990), 618–24, cit. 624. This section reproduces in part my article: Artemy Magun, “The Work of Leisure: The Figure of Empty Time in the Poetics of Hölderlin and Mandelshtam,” Modern Language Notes, 118(5) (December 2003), 1152–76. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes (P.: Biblioteque de la Pléïade, Gallimard), 5, 122. English translation: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. A. Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. Wilkinson and L. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). For the original, see Lettres sur l’éducation esthétique de l’homme (a bilingual edition) (Paris: Aubier, 1992), Letter 14, 206. Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, NY: Dover, 1956), 26. Karl Marx, “Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863,” in: Collected Works, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1975–), 30,

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108 109 110 111 112

113

114

115 116

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190–2; 32, 390–39; Karl Marx, “Grundrisse,” Collected Works, 2, 9, 94–9. In these pages of the “Grundrisse,” Marx speaks explicitly of “leisure time,” “Mussezeit;” elsewhere he uses a latinism “disponibel”: “disposable time.” On Marx’s theory of free time, see also my article “Marx’s Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment,” in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 22(1) (2010), 90–109. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, part III, chapter X; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 35, 239–306. George Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. R. Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1988). Friedrich Hölderlin, “Anmerkungen zum Oedipus,” in: Werke, Briefe, Dokumente (Miunchen: Winkler, 1990), 618–24, cit. 624; Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. T. Pfau (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 1988). Ibid., 670–6, cit. 672. Emphasis mine. Hölderlin, Werke, Briefe, Dokumente, 675; Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 115—but, Pfau makes a strange and serious mistake in the translation of this passage and translates furchtbare Muße as “tragic weariness of time.” This would translate Zeitmatte, which appears elsewhere in the “Remarks,” but not in this passage. Of course, weariness and leisure are indeed linked (weariness makes one to rest or want to rest), but not identical. This analysis of the poem Die Muße grew out of the seminar that professor Thomas Schestag dedicated to it in November 1997, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m also indebted to Manuela Achilles, Ulrich Plass, and Shai Ginsburg for their contributions to the discussion. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Frankfurter Ausgabe,” in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. D. E. Sattler (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1977–), 3, 83–95. Sattler dates the poem, hypothetically, with the summer of 1796. F. Beißner, an earlier editor, dates it with 1797, and inserts “Wald,” wood, instead of the fragmentary W. (Sämtliche Werke. Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, W. Kohlhammer, 1954, 1, 236.) While the version of the poem given by Sattler is clearly more authentic than Beißner’s (he presents the photocopy of the manuscript), I would prefer the dating of the Stuttgarter Ausgabe. A. Beck, the editor of Hölderlin’s letters in the Stuttgarter Ausgabe, justly notes the proximity of the poem Die Muße with a letter that Hölderlin wrote to his sister in the end of April 1797 (VI, 2, 836). There Hölderlin speaks, first, of his visit of the mountain Taunus and of the panorama (including “Frankfurt with lovely villages and forests lying around it”) and, second, of his impressions from S. Gontard’s summer house in Adlersflucht, near Frankfurt, mentioning chestnuts growing around the house. The candle-like reddish flowers named in the poem are unmistakably chestnuts, which precisely blossom in April–May, not in Summer, as Sattler suggests. Finally, this letter to the sister speaks of a “special situation,” where the French Revolutionary troops standing at the door of the city did not immediately fulfill the conditions of a peace treaty, so that the “celebration of peace” by the people of Frankfurt was for a while mixed with anxiety. This latter anxiety of peace may be one of the connotations of Hölderlin’s poem. Cf. Walter Benjamin. “The Task of the Translator,” in: Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), 253–63. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 27.

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117 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 96–100. Martin Heidegger, in his reading of Hölderlin’s poem “Andenken” (Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982, vol. 52) justly notes the importance of the motive of festivity in Hölderlin’s poetry. He also notes that the time of festivity is associated with a state of transition—Übergang. This remark is even more pertinent, since Übergang means both a passage in between and a passage over something, a surpassing and excess. Thus, in our poem the leisure time is both an intermediary pause and an aftertime or an over-time—a posthumous, superfluous state. The attempt to hold an intermediary pause implies an excess and therefore leads to a state of interminable and self-reinforcing tension. This link between Übergang and Überfluß was noted already by Schiller in his letters on the aesthetic education (Letter 27). I cannot, however, agree with the whole of Heidegger’s reading, which downplays the negative aspects of leisure time and takes for granted the immediate existence of the unique and unusual that manifests itself in festive days. I insist, on the other hand, on the essentially negative nature of festival as a cessation or interruption of work. It is not by chance that Heidegger, in enumerating the instances where Hölderlin mentions the festival, never mentions the prosaic and negative but the most explicit “leisure” of the 1797 poem. 118 Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Holderlin’s Late Poetry,” in: Notes to Literature, trans. S. W. Nicholson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2: 109–49. 119 That the German word “Wort” contains the “Ort,” place, is an old observation, which was already made by Angelus Silesius in his “Cherub Wanderer.” 120 Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater” (1811), in: Sämtliche Werke (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997), 945–50. 121 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 89. “Now in the tragic, the sign in itself is insignificant, without effect, yet original matter is straightforward. Properly speaking, original matter can only appear in its weakness; however, to the extent that the sign is posited as insignificant = 0, original matter, the hidden foundation of any nature, can also present itself. If nature properly presents itself in its weakest talent, then the sign is, nature presenting itself in its most powerful talent = 0.” 122 Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedensfeier, English translation in Poems and Fragments, ed. W. Hamburger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1967), 439. 123 For the idyllic tendencies in the revolutionary ideology, see Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). It is not by chance that the festival became one of the main forms of the symbolic manifestation of the French Revolution. 124 See for instance Dieter Henrich, “Hegel und Hölderlin,” in: Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 9–40. 125 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 96–100. 126 Ibid., 96. 127 On the negative unity, see Politics of the One, ed. Artemy Magun (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2013). 128 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 96–7. 129 Ibid., 101–18. 130 F. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in: The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays 1794–6 (1980), trans. F. Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press). 131 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 101 ff. 132 Ibid., 107.

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133 Ibid., 113. 134 Ibid., 108. 135 See on this, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Metaphrasis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 136 Ibid., 112. Note the proximity with Nietzsche’s “Antichrist” strategy and the difference with Heidegger’s “last God.” No victory, no practical negation without negative magnitudes. 137 Ibid., 114–15. 138 Ibid., 112. 139 Ibid., 113–14. 140 Ibid., 149–50. 141 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” in: Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 159–76. 142 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, “Absolute freedom and terror,” VI B III. 360, translation modified. 143 My interpretation of “actualization,” or “conversion into being” of the negative as happening in the form of destruction, is in accord with Kojève (L’introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 143): “Absolute freedom is nothing—this is why its ‘realization’ or revelation is just death or nothing” (143). 144 “These individuals who have felt the fear of death, of their absolute master, again submit to negation and distinctions, arrange themselves in the various spheres, and return to an apportioned and limited task, but thereby to their substantial reality” (The Phenomenology, 361). 145 See Werner Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion,” in: Premises (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 337–82. As Hamacher notes, already in the passage from the preface to the Phenomenology the figuration of negativity is called into question. The passage ends with the words: “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative into its face, and tarrying with it. Only this tarrying with it is the magical force that turns [umkehrt] the negative into being.” But it starts in the following way: “Death, as if we would like to call so this inactuality [Unwirklichkeit], is the most terrible thing.” The anthropomorphic attribution of face to the negative is possible only on the premise that we “want to call so,” name and substantivize, “this inactuality.” However, as I have noted before, the very “turn” or conversion into being is ambiguous: on the one hand, it may mean figuration and embodiment, on the other, the destruction or disappearance of something previously existent (the being of negation is the destruction). In the first case, the negative is positivized and is thus not fully negative. In the second case, it is much purer, but is still attached to the positivity of what is being negated. What happens in the revolution is the advent of negation qua destruction, but qua destruction of a positive image of itself. 146 Thus, already in Hegel, we can see a distant anticipation of Arendt’s “banality of evil.” 147 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 360, emphasis mine. 148 Ibid., 360, translation modified. 149 Ibid., 362. 150 Kojève, L’introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 142, thus comments on this passage of Hegel: “There is no way back. In spite of appearances, the post-revolutionary State is radically different from the pre-revolutionary State. . . . There is no way back

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151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

166 167 168 169 170 171

172 173 174

Notes because this State presupposes Absolute Freedom, and it destroys it only to realize its nothingness.” Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 362. Ibid. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, 166. Ibid., 155–6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Camuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Ibid., vol. 11 (1979), 124. Marx, “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Collected Works, vol. 11, 154. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 124. See Artemy Magun, “Marx’s Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment,” in Rethinking Marxism, 22(1) (2010), 90–109. Derrida, Specters of Marx. Debates about the anarcho-syndialism and the status of the strike have been going on among socialists since the 1870s. George Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. Hulme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in: Collected Works, vol. 6, 477–519, cit. 487. “Proletarian acts of violence have no resemblance to these [Robespierre’s, Inquisition’s etc.—A.M.] proscriptions; they are purely and simply acts of war, they have the value of military manoeuvres and serve to mark the separation of classes” (Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 105). Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 180–2. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 129. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, I, part 2, section 2, book 1. “Spontaneous” is, of course, a Kantian term. The “categorical imperative” from his second Critique is, like Sorel’s myth, a fictional device (“always act as though . . .”) providing conditions for freedom. While the coincidence of Sorel with Kant is largely unconscious (his main source is the philosophy of Henri Bergson), he does mention him in the 1908 appendix to the Reflections on Violence, as strangely mixing “scholastic” and “mystic” tendencies (Reflections on Violence, 259). He calls the general strike an “idea” on page 251. For the understanding of myth in the sense of a regulative fiction, see Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 142: “[B]y accepting the idea of a general strike, although we know that it is a myth, we are proceeding exactly as a Modern physicist does who has complete confidence in his science, although he knows that the future will look upon it as antiquated.” John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in: On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1991), 103. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT, 1985). See Theodor W. Adorno, The Negative Dialectic (New York, NY: Continuum, 1990); Herbert Marcuse, The One-dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 257, and other works by those authors.

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175 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in: Selected Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. 1, 236–52. 176 Ibid., 259. 177 Ibid., 250. 178 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. D. Cornell (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 179 This notion is best developed by Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction” and in “Some Motives in Baudelaire,” in: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 313–56, cit. 319–21 and 339–41. 180 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. 181 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391. 182 Benjamin, “Central Park,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, 188. 183 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391. 184 Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. 185 Ibid., 396, translation modified. 186 Ibid., 395. 187 The motive of the clock as the destructive force is borrowed by Benjamin from Baudelaire. See “Some Motives of Baudelaire” for a detailed discussion of homogeneous time. 188 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390. 189 Ibid. 190 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999); The Convolute K, 388–9, translation modified. Cf. Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectic at a Standstill,” in: On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991), 260–91. 191 The gaze of the things themselves at the spectator is the dominant theme of Benjamin’s work. In his “Some Motives of Baudelaire” (1938), he ties this reversibility of the gaze together with the notion of “involuntary memory” in Proust. Thus, the reversibility of gaze is inseparable from the reversible relationship between past and present. 192 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” trans. E. Jephcott, in: Selected Writings 1927–1934 (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 207–21, cit. 221. 193 Here I reproduce in part my article: Artemy Magun, “The Double Bind. The Ambivalent Treatment of Tragic Passions in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Revolution,” History of Political Thought, 4 (2007), 719–46. 194 Arendt, On Revolution. Hereafter referred to as OR. 195 Arendt, The Human Condition, 197. 196 “[T]he idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern ad found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 63). 197 For an exception, see: Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: Uncommenced Dialogue,” in: Philosophy in the Time of Lost Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1997). “The impetus behind Arendt’s affirmation of politics and active citizenship was—writes Beiner—neither romanticism nor utopianism but fear and dread” (118). 198 The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 478–9.

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199 Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XII, 21, 502. Arendt refers to this phrase in OR, 211; The Life of the Mind, 2, 108, 158, 217. 200 Saint Augustine, City of God, 499–500. 201 This very observation was made by R. Beiner in his “Interpretive Essay” to Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. “Like Augustine, we live and think in the shadow of great catastrophe, and therefore, like him, we must attend to man’s capacity for beginning . . .” (96). 202 Arendt, OR, 11. 203 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), book 2, 207. 204 Arendt, OR, 167; emphasis mine. 205 Ibid., 232. 206 Ibid., 162. 207 Ibid., 220. See also 20, 172–4, 251. 208 Ibid., 41. 209 Ibid., 211. 210 Ibid., 223. 211 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, part 1, book 2, chapter 2, III. 212 Arendt, OR, 164. 213 See Siéyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? An important discussion of the hidden reliance of the constituting acts on an already existing authority, of the constative element of a performative, is to be found in Jacques Derrida, “Déclarations d’indépendance,” in: Otobiographies (P.: Galilée, 1984), 11–32, and, in relation to the On Revolution, in B. Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding the Republic,” APSR, 85(1) (March 1991), 97–113. 214 Arendt, OR, 161. 215 See Arendt, OR, 19–20. In page 33 Arendt emphasizes the problematic “difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and freedom.” 216 Arendt, OR, 38. 217 Ibid., 209. 218 Ibid., 92. 219 Ibid., 20. 220 Ibid., 205. 221 Ibid., 41–7. 222 Ibid., 41. 223 Ibid., 223. 224 Ibid. 225 See the preface to the Between Past and Future and The Life of the Mind, 202–11. 226 The orientation of modern revolutions toward the future has often been seen as their defining characteristic. See Koselleck et al., “Revolution,” 653–788. 227 See William Sewell, “Historical Effects as Transformation of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society, 25 (1996), 841–81. See also the famous dialogue of Louis XVI with the Duke of Liancourt on July 14: “Is this a revolt?”—“No sir, this is a revolution.” 228 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1961), ch. 11, 17, 267; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. H. Mansfield (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985), ch. 25. The comparison of fortune

Notes

229 230 231

232 233

234 235 236 237 238 239

240 241 242 243

244

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with “one of these violent rivers” and the ethics of standing against it in building “dikes and dams” shows that, for Machiavelli, the source of historical movement comes from the future, and the present faces it coming. Arendt, OR, 95. Ibid., 217. My translation; Die Sansculotten von Paris, ed. W. Markov and A. Soboul (Berlin, 1957), 102–4 (this book one of Arendt’s major sources in her study of the “Social Question”). Historians have shown that this claim of the sans-culottes is partly justified: agricultural producers were reluctant to sell their goods under conditions of inflation and the famine in the city was partly due at this point to the badly managed distribution of food. An anonymous poster. The French text is illiterate and lacks most of the punctuation signs (which I reproduced in the translation), Die Sansculotten von Paris, 302. See, for instance, Die Sansculotten von Paris, 374; Maximilien Robespierre, Textes Choisis (Paris, 1958), vol. 2, 80. In Robespierre’s speeches we may also find the passages justifying Arendt’s reading where Robespierre speaks of subsistence as the means of survival and compares it to the circulating “blood” of the body politic (56–7). See, for example, Die Sansculotten von Paris, 356. Most explicitly, although not in direct relevance to the French Revolution, the Russian word for poverty, bednost, derives directly from the word beda, a disaster. See George Lefebvre, La Grande peur de 1789 (Paris, 1970). Arendt, OR, 99. Lefebvre, La Grande peur, 77. The function of fear as totalized by imagination in the constitution of a historical event and of an active human subject goes back to Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Fear as the foundation of subjectivity appears in the book twice: in the section on “lordship and bondage” (The Phenomenology of Spirit, B IV A, 111–19) and then in the discussion of the French Revolution (BB VI B III, 355–63). Arendt, OR, 89. See, for this observation, Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Hannah Arendt’s French Revolution,” in: Amor Mundi, Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. Bernauer (Boston: Springer, 1987), 203–13. Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. M. Gendre (New York: NY, 1998 [1992]); Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger. The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). See Aristotle, Poetics, 1149b. But the association of pity and fear with tragedy and mimesis dates back to Plato: see Phaedrus, trans. C. J. Rowe (Warminster, 1986), 268c, for pity and fear in tragedy, and The Republic, trans. A. Bloom (New York, NY, 1968), 606b for pity only (Loeb Classical Library # 199: Harvard University Press, 1995). Robert Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). See also the article by Allen Speight: “Arendt and Hegel on the Tragic Nature of Action,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 28 (2002), 523–36. The reading by Speight of both Hegel and Arendt is quite close to that of Pirro. Among the theorists who are attentive to Arendt’s “tragic” motives one should also mention Peter Euben. See, for instance, his article “Arendt’s Hellenism,” in: The

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248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259

260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271

Notes Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151–64. Euben emphasizes that tragedy is a sphere of tensions, and he even suggests viewing “the tensions in Arendt’s work through the lens of tragedy” (162), namely the tension between the democratic and “associative” understandings of politics, and the heroic and aestheticized ones. Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005). See the notion of “hyperbologics” in Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” 231. The following discussion is a brief overview of the philosophy of mimesis developed by Lacoue-Labarthe. I refer the reader to his numerous books, some of which are translated into English. The most important of them, especially with regard to Plato and Aristotle, is the essay “Typography” (Typography, 43–138). Arendt, The Republic, X, 595–609. Ibid., 606b. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b6. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 190. Arendt, OR, 88–9. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 97, quoting R. Palmer. Ibid., 100. Hannah Pitkin, in her The Attack of the Blob (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998), rightly emphasizes the fear of the indeterminate and the infinite that penetrates Arendt’s analysis of society. She notes that “[d]espite all Arendt’s talk about nature, necessity, and process, the real issue are their simulacra” (192). However, in the next step, Pitkin repeats the metaphysical, anti-mimetic gesture par excellence by dismissing and censoring both the mimetic confusion and Arendt’s anxiety about it for the sake of “real” problems. Well, it would be nice if problems were always “real”—they would not, then, be problems anymore! Arendt, OR, 89. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 69. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. A. Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Arendt, OR, 167. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” 6. See the discussion of this fact in: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La poésie comme expérience (Paris, 1986), 30–1; R. Munier (“Réponse à une enquête sur expérience,” in Mise en page, N1 [May 1972]), n.p. Arendt, OR, 90. Ibid., 167. Ibid. Ibid., 95. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005), 180.

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272 Ibid., 210–11. 273 See on this, for instance, Alexei Chernyakov, . . ., in Politics of the One (Bloomsbury, 2013). 274 Alain Badiou, Being and Time, trans. O. Feltham (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005), 390–1. 275 Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in: Collected Works, vol. 11, 104. 276 Alain Badiou, “Destruction, negation, subtraction—on Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Graduate Seminar, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, February 6 (2007). www.lacan.com/badpas.htm. 277 Alain Badiou, “Three Negations,” Cardozo Law Review, 29 (April 2008), 1877–83. 278 Noys, Persistence of the Negative. 279 Ibid., 141, quoting Badiou, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative,” Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008), 645–59, 652. 280 Badiou, Being and Event, 407, translation modified. 281 On the unrecognized dialectical structure of Badiou’s mature thought, see Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 282 Hegel, for instance, in The Science of Logic, 358–61 (11.262–5). 283 Badiou, Being and Event, 198. 284 Alain Badiou, Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (New York, NY: Verso, 2001), IV, 4, 53. 285 Sam Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty, Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2008). 286 Ibid., 118. 287 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. R. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 126. 288 Ibid., 111. 289 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35–6. See on Nietzsche’s negative temporality, a fine collection: M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Time and History (Walter de Gruyter, 2008). 290 Alain Badiou, “Who Is Nietzsche?,” Le Pli, 11 (2001), 1–11. 291 Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Franz Overbeck from October 18, 1888, in: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (New York, NY: Hackett, 1996), 315. 292 Letter to G. Brandes, January 1, 1889, ibid., 345. 293 See for instance M. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 68, “Negativität,” 15: “The essence of nihilism consists in forgetting the nothing while losing oneself in the enframing (Gestell) of beings.”

Conclusion 1 We remember that “orientation” was an important term in Kant’s philosophy vocabulary. 2 To agree here with Heidegger (see especially the Sein und Zeit), who, in spite of himself, inherits this thesis from Hegel.

Index Abraham, Karl  33–4 absolute negation  76, 79, 98, 120, 168, 190, 196, 202, 205, 207 Abuladze, Tenghiz  17–18, 42 Ackerman, Bruce  25 Adorno, Theodor  31, 42–3, 82, 103, 109, 110, 117, 170, 178, 204 Agamben, Giorgio  34–6, 59, 124 Akhmatova, Anna  41 Alberti, Romano  62 Althusser, Louis  41, 43, 199 anxiety  31, 50–1, 60, 65, 73, 85, 104, 126, 156, 159–60, 162–4, 170, 175, 212, 231, 235–6, 243 apathy, withdrawal from politics  22, 24, 26, 51, 53–5, 61–2, 80–1, 89, 106, 117, 119, 232, 243 Aquinas, Thomas  78 Arendt, Hannah  3, 6, 8, 12, 13, 49, 54, 58, 65, 122, 209–29, 237–8, 243 The Human Condition  210 On Revolution  209–29, 210 on the American revolution  227–9 on the French revolution  220–6 on the new  211–13 on the paradoxes of revolution  213–19 The Origins of Totalitarianism  209–11 Aristotle  13, 32, 55, 59, 60–3, 75, 78–9, 85–91, 96, 99, 102, 104, 115–16, 121, 127, 185, 223–4, 226, 233 on contradiction  87–8 on infinite name  90, 104 on privation (steresis)  88ff on the contraries  87–91 on the correlatives (pros ti)  87, 99, 197 Augustine, Aurelius  211–12, 218, 236 Badiou, Alain  3, 13, 25, 28, 43, 80, 82, 117, 125, 191, 229–40, 243 Being an Event  230ff Logics of Worlds  232

Bataille, Georges  The Accursed Share  111, 245, 267 Benjamin, Walter  13, 38, 41, 47, 55, 62, 81–2, 106, 109, 115, 117, 121, 124, 127, 142, 170, 199–209, 216, 223, 230, 232, 243 Critique of Violence  199–209, 215 Bergson, Henri  82, 102–3, 105–6, 115–16 Bibikhin, Vladimir  40–3, 51–2 Bulgakov, Sergey  91, 124 catharsis  80, 125, 223, 226 Cicero  161, 165–6, 170 Clair, Jean  251, 257 Cohen, Hermann  90–1, 94 Colletti, Lucio  94–6, 255–6 communism  11, 15–16, 43–6, 71, 101–2, 174, 196, 230, 232, 241–2 contradiction  79–81, 85–91, 94–101, 121–3, 148, 184, 195, 197, 217, 227, 235 contrariness, inversion, reversal  9–10, 13, 29, 35, 48, 75, 79–80, 85, 87–9, 96, 99, 102, 105, 108–9, 111, 114, 120, 121–4, 127–35, 132, 137, 142, 143–4, 149–53, 156–7, 162, 171, 183–8, 194, 199–200, 208–9, 233–4, 237–9 Copernican revolution  127–32, 208–9 Critique of Pure Reason  129 Critique of the Power of Judgment  149 Dahrendorf, Ralf  25 Deleuze, Gilles  82, 84–5, 92, 100, 109, 115–17, 124, 232–3 democracy  17–19, 24–5, 28–30, 43, 46, 48, 50, 73, 76, 79–80, 87, 95, 118, 121–4, 168, 201, 203 Democritus  84, 89, 104, 116 Derrida, Jacques  109, 115, 117, 124, 135, 163, 196, 200, 205 De Stael, G.  53

278

Index

dialectic  28, 63, 74, 79, 82, 84–5, 89, 94–102, 107, 109–12, 116–18, 120–4, 126, 165, 170, 172–85, 190, 194–5, 197, 204, 208, 233–4, 236, 238, 242–3 Dickens, Charles  68 dissolution  2, 36, 38, 41, 43, 52, 73, 80, 126, 131, 160, 163–4, 171, 178, 183–4, 193, 195–6 dissymmetry of affirmation and negation  78, 111, 146–7 Dondurey, Daniil  39–41 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  65, 68–70, 121 double negation  75–8, 80, 89, 91, 104, 109, 111, 121 Eckhart, Meister  91, 126 Enlightenment  11, 15, 46, 48, 65–70, 73, 103, 129, 131, 143, 157, 186, 190, 194, 241–2 event  2–3, 5, 7–11, 13, 15, 25, 33, 35–8, 40, 43, 45–6, 49–52, 54, 58–9, 66, 70–2, 104–5, 107, 125–6, 127, 129, 132–54, 158, 160, 163–4, 167–9, 171–2, 186–8, 190–2, 202–3, 213–23, 227–39, 242–3 Fenves, Peter  261, 264–5 fetishism  35, 37–8, 43, 95, 106–7, 113 Ficino, Marcilio  28, 62 Frege, Gottlob  103, 114 French Revolution  2, 5–9, 11, 13, 15–72, 98, 118–20, 128, 135–46, 156, 158, 161, 166–8, 171, 174, 181–4, 187–92, 193, 198–9, 202, 204, 209, 216, 219, 220–6, 230, 241 Freud, Sigmund  116–23, 132, 154, 156, 159, 164, 168, 244, 249 Gaidar, Yegor  20, 26–7, 50–2 German idealism  9, 60, 92, 96, 174 Gorbachev, Mikhail  16–20, 26, 45, 52, 241 Gorgias  84–5, 86–7 Habermas, Jurgen  65, 122 Hardt, Michael  116, 123–4 Hegel, Georg  3, 9, 13, 34, 43, 49–51, 55, 57, 69, 76–9, 82–3, 85, 87, 89, 91, 94, 96–101, 103–5, 107–16, 118–22, 125, 127–8, 136, 141, 143, 150, 161–3,

170–1, 173, 178, 181–3, 185–96, 199–201, 217, 226, 231, 233–5, 242–3 affinities with Kant  192–3 the fight with an imaginary enemy  188–9 Iena writings  118 the irreversibility of revolution  189–91 on Aufhebung  85, 99–101, 194 on civil society  193–4 on contrariness  100 on the French Revolution  185–93 Science of Logic  76, 99–100 the sublime and the banal  187–8 Heidegger, Martin  41, 79, 82, 84–6, 88, 93, 99, 103–6, 109, 114–16, 124, 128–30, 134–5, 139, 167, 171, 187, 222–4, 229–31, 235–7 Heraclitus of Ephesus  40, 89, 117–18 Hippocrates  60–1 Hölderlin, Friedrich  13, 127, 170–87, 196, 243 and Kant  171–2 caesura  170–3, 179, 181, 185, 243 The Festival of Peace  181 inversions in the void  183–7 The Leisure and the dialectic of revolution  172–83 The Meaning of the Tragedies  18 Hufeland, Christoph  The Art to Extend Human Life  154 Hume, David  152 Husserl, Edmund  63, 148 hypochondria  61, 64–70, 118, 135, 154–9, 162–5, 168–70 insomnia  155, 156 interiorization  9, 29, 36, 43, 49, 51, 55, 57, 59, 71, 78, 100, 109, 193, 242 irreversibility  26, 132–4, 143, 146–8, 150–1, 187, 190–1, 202, 244 Jacobin Terror  52, 57, 189, 221 Jespersen, Otto  74, 107, 114 Kagarlitsky, Boris  13, 25 Kant, Immanuel  9–13, 38, 46, 55, 57, 64–5, 73, 79, 81, 88–96, 100–1, 103, 105–7, 112–16, 122, 127–75, 180–1, 184–7,

Index 190–2, 201–6, 208, 212–15, 229–31, 233, 235–6, 244 Attempt to Introduce Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy  92–6 footnote to “The Metaphysics of Morals”  143–6 on nihil privativum/nihil negativum  79–80, 82, 92–4, 100, 113, 117–20, 118, 122, 125–6, 158, 161 Opus Posthumum  129, 158, 164 on reversal and reversibility  127–35 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason  136, 144 the second “Conflict of the Faculties”  135–43ff the sublime character of the event: Resistance to the impossible  148–53 the third “Conflict of the Faculties” and the revolutionary spasm  153–67 Kapustin, Boris  52 Kertman, Grigory  38–9 Kojève  76, 79, 110–11, 115, 192 Koselleck, Reinhart  6–7, 46 Kristeva, Julia  33 Lacan, Jacques  35, 41–3, 75, 77–8, 92, 103, 107–8, 111–14, 122–3, 133, 146, 235–6 Laclau, Ernesto  95, 122–3, 125 Lefort, Claude  28, 50–2, 59, 122–3, 168, 182 Levada, Yuri  25 libido  33–6, 70 Lyotard, François  261–2 Madison, John  118 Maimonides  90–1 Mandeville, Bernard  66, 118 Marcuse, Herbert  101, 103, 109–10, 122–3, 196, 204, 230 Marx, Karl  2, 4, 9, 13, 16, 26, 28, 34, 42, 44–7, 80, 94, 101–3, 107–9, 115, 120–3, 127, 133–4, 173–5, 183–4, 186, 193–201, 224, 229–33, 237, 243 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction  195, 196 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  197–201

279

Manifesto of the Communist Party  28 On the Jewish Question  28, 193–4 Mau, Vladimir  8, 26–7 media  15, 17–19, 23–4, 30–2, 38–40, 65–9, 73, 156, 239 melancholia  5, 13, 26, 28, 30–44, 51, 52–71, 78, 80–1, 89–90, 104, 106, 117, 124, 126, 156, 157–8, 167, 194, 232, 234, 241–4 and catastrophism  38–43 and fetishism  36–8 and time  55–7 and poverty  57–9 and sentimentalism  64–71 as retreat  52–5 Freud on  33–6 litanies  30–6 Michelet, Jules  8–9, 42, 53–5, 59, 186 modernity  4, 9, 13, 28–30, 45, 70–1, 75–6, 81, 83, 105, 118, 124, 129, 183, 186–7, 189, 205, 209, 211, 216, 229, 241 Mouffe, Chantal  95, 122–5 Nancy, Jean-Luc  13, 31, 51–2, 114, 141, 146, 187 negative dialectics  82, 109–10, 117, 170, 204, 242 negative magnitudes  13, 82, 92, 94, 96, 100, 103, 108, 113–14, 116–17, 124, 151, 161, 164, 185 Negri, Antonio  82, 116–17, 123–4, 232 neo-Platonism  62, 90–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich  34, 61, 68–9, 79, 82, 83, 89, 102, 116–17, 124–6, 128, 133, 215, 237 nihilism  40, 61, 70, 76–7, 79, 84, 94, 122, 126, 233–4, 237 nothingness  77, 82, 85, 91, 93, 97, 104–6, 110, 126, 188, 200, 212 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)  65, 70 novelty  29, 199, 211–12, 216, 218, 232–3 Noys, Benjamin  13, 102, 115, 116–17, 232 Parmenides  83–5, 87, 89–90, 104 Plato  84–6, 90–1, 115–16, 200, 223–6, 233 Platonov, Andrey  78 Plotinus  90 Pockels, Karl Friedrich  64

280

Index

privation  75, 79–80, 86, 88–91, 100, 114, 120 protest movements  1, 3, 29–30, 121 Proust, Françoise  209 public sphere  3, 25, 29–31, 44, 59, 65, 69, 82 Putin, Vladimir  23–6, 39 Rachum, Ilam  6–7 Radishchev, Alexander  67 Renaissance  9, 48, 62, 207 Ries, Nancy  31–2, 37–8 Robespierre, Maximilien  8, 46, 49–50, 52–3, 58, 156, 171, 225–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  7, 47–8, 65–6, 69, 172–3, 175, 192, 214, 220, 222, 225–6 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine  42, 52–4, 56, 58, 127, 145, 152, 189, 226 Sartre, Jean-Paul  81, 103, 105–6, 109–11, 114–16, 230 Schmitt, Carl  57, 105, 121, 123, 125, 203, 206 Scotus, Duns  91 Shell, Susan  164 Shevchuk, Yuri  18 Sieyès, Emmanuel  5, 48, 214 sign, symbol  35, 74, 104–5, 110, 112, 114, 136, 139–43, 145–7, 150, 158–9, 162–4, 166–72, 175, 179, 181, 188, 191–2, 230, 235, 244 Sogrin, Vladimir  21, 52 Sorel, George  13, 121, 201–9, 243

Starobinsky, Jean  60 Starodubrovskaya, Irina  26, 27 Sterne, Lawrence  65–6 subject  1–11, 22, 25–6, 28–9, 33–7, 40–3, 45, 50, 57, 59–61, 65, 67, 69–70, 73–9, 81–3, 87–91, 97–8, 100, 103–10, 112–17, 120–1, 123–32, 132–41, 144–5, 147–64, 166–70, 174, 181, 187–8, 191–2, 194, 197, 199–201, 208–9, 211–12, 214–15, 218, 227–39, 242, 244 sublime  141, 143, 145, 148–53, 158, 160, 168–9, 174, 187–8, 191, 205, 212, 236 terror  17, 23, 28, 34, 42, 46–53, 57, 59, 63, 66–70, 78, 98, 126, 136, 156, 181–2, 188–92, 194–5, 200, 220–2, 225, 229, 233–4, 238, 241 Timme, Christian Franz  64 tragedy  47, 61, 89, 106, 174, 181, 184–6, 222–3 violence  18, 27, 39, 44, 50, 58, 60, 121, 145, 149, 169, 179, 181, 186, 195, 201–5, 207, 209, 215–16, 220–1, 223, 228, 234, 243 Wedemeyer, Arnd  164 Yeltsin, Boris  20–3, 27 Žižek, Slavoj  13, 35, 43, 123, 133–4