Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution 1783488727, 9781783488728

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule. It was the bloodiest revolution in a Warsaw Pact count

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Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution
 1783488727, 9781783488728

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: In Search of a New Paradigm for the Romanian Revolution
Notes
Chapter One Performative Contradiction: Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Perspectives
Notes
Chapter Two The Performance of Authenticity: Philosophers Question the Revolution
Notes
Chapter Three The Problem with the “Event”: Badiou’s Split Loyalties
Notes
Chapter Four Nostalgia for the Old Regime: A Freudian Interpretation
Notes
Chapter Five Pro-Natal Legislation and the Systematic Destruction of Intimacy
Notes
Chapter Six The Interruption of Mourning: On Forbidden Burials
Notes
Chapter Seven On Violence: Can the Revolution Be Saved?
Notes
Conclusion: Other Examples
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview



Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution



CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THEORY, CULTURE AND POLITICS Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics is a new interdisciplinary series developed in partnership with the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory based in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. This interdisciplinary series will focus on innovative research produced at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies. In recent years much work in Cultural Studies has increasingly moved away from directly critical-​theoretical concerns. One of the aims of this series is to foster a renewed dialogue between Cultural Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory in its rich, multiple dimensions. Series Editors: Glenn Jordan, Reader in Cultural Studies and Creative Practice and Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre, University of South Wales Laurent Milesi, Reader in English, Communication and Philosophy and Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University Radhika Mohanram, Professor of English and Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University Chris Norris, Distinguished Research Professor, Cardiff University Chris Weedon, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Director of Postgraduate Studies and Head of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University Titles in the Series: Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present, Frida Beckman Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, Günther Anders and Christopher John Müller, translated by Christopher John Müller Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, Roshini Kempadoo The Attention Economy: Labour, Time, and Power in Cognitive Capitalism, Claudio Celis Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution, Jolan Bogdan Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics, Gladys Pak Lei Chong Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money, edited by Laurent Milesi, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan (forthcoming) Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV: The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides, Annette-​Carina van der Zaag (forthcoming) Partitions and their Afterlives: Violence, Memories, Living, edited by Radhika Mohanram and Anindya Raychaudhuri (forthcoming) Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities, edited by Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve (forthcoming) Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora, Anindya Raychaudhuri (forthcoming) Cultures of the Extreme: From Abu Ghraib to ‘Saw’ and Beyond, Pramod K. Nayar (forthcoming) Refusing to Share: The Cultural Politics of Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-​Arie (forthcoming) Affective Connections: Towards a New Materialist Politics of Sympathy, Dorota Golańska (forthcoming) Music, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Time, Peter R Sedgwick and Kenneth Gloag (forthcoming) Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb, William J Spurlin (forthcoming)



Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution Jolan Bogdan

London • New York



Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-​34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2017 by Jolan Bogdan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:  HB: 978-​1-​78348-​872-​8 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78348-872-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78348-874-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—​Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/​NISO Z39.48-​1992. Printed in the United States of America



Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: In Search of a New Paradigm for the Romanian Revolution

1

1 Performative Contradiction: Structuralist and Post-​Structuralist Perspectives

15

2 The Performance of Authenticity: Philosophers Question the Revolution

45

3 The Problem with the “Event”: Badiou’s Split Loyalties

63

4 Nostalgia for the Old Regime: A Freudian Interpretation

85

5 Pro-​Natal Legislation and the Systematic Destruction of Intimacy

111

6 The Interruption of Mourning: On Forbidden Burials

137

7 On Violence: Can the Revolution Be Saved?

163

Conclusion: Other Examples

189

Bibliography

199

Index

207

v





Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father Viktor Bogdán. It is about him in two specific ways, though his name is not mentioned anywhere else in this book: 1. This is a meditation on the political and historical conditions that determined the trajectory of his life (and so many other lives), in the way that natural disasters determine the lives of individuals and families. Unlike natural disasters, political disasters are something that we can strive to understand and change. That is why books about political conflict, and all scholarship which supports the gaining of insight, are of the highest degree of importance to the project of human growth and cultural betterment. In an age where the arts and humanities are too frequently overlooked in favour of more clear-​cut, eminently fundable and less ambiguous fields of scholarship, the need for projects which inherently dwell in grey areas becomes all the more urgent. We must strive to understand that which is beyond our understanding, and too frequently, that which lies beyond us is what is within us, within our communities, in our governments, our laws, and in our cherished narratives. 2. The central question at the heart of this meditation is: How were the atrocities committed under Ceauşescu  –​ atrocities which shaped my family’s life in ways that I still do not understand –​possible? Generally, how is the commission of violence possible in such a widespread and institutionalized, culturally sustained way? I am in good company asking this question. For someone who does not subscribe to the idea that individual people are either inherently good or bad, it is truly a worthy task. And this meditation, in the context of the memory of my father, is a work of mourning at its very core. Behind each chapter, behind each question, lies a deeply vii



viii Acknowledgements

personal history which shall remain in the background. Indeed, what could be more banal than an attempt to write about suffering directly? Perhaps one day I will indulge in this exercise in order to more thoroughly demonstrate the futility of language. In the spirit of remembering my father, I extend this dedication to all of those individuals who suffered and continue to suffer under a repressive state ­apparatus –​ whatever specific manifestation it takes, and regardless of their own role in such a state –​in Romania, and beyond. I am indebted to the patience and generosity of countless individuals. I want to thank all the people immediately responsible for this book: my editors Laurent Milesi, Arleen Ionescu, Martina O’Sullivan and all the people at Cardiff and Rowman & Littlefield International who had a hand in this manuscript’s preparation. I am grateful to Sabina Andron for the use of her photographs for the cover. I want to thank the supervisors and examiners who guided my research through its lengthy and meandering journey, throughout my masters and doctoral work, together with the broader academic community at Goldsmiths and at the University of London. Alexander García Düttmann surely served as the best supervisor anyone has ever had. His careful readings and generous feedback made the core of the work possible. Howard Caygill’s influence over the philosophical trajectory of the work cannot be overstated. His seminars provided the foundation upon which the entire structure is built. Kodwo Eshun and Lynn Turner gave valuable support in the early days of the masters research. Mark Fisher, Jean-​Paul Martinon and Simon Choat were invaluable to the completion of the doctorate. I am indebted to Jolán Orbán, János Boros and Gábor Csordás, for their translation of Derrida’s essay “Quie est la mére?” and for the publication of this translation in Hungarian, as part of the book by the same name, Ki az anya? I also thank them for their hospitality at the University of Pécs. I want to reach even further back, to the days of my primary and secondary education. As my own children grow, my appreciation for early education deepens exponentially. So much  –​ indeed, everything!  –​ depends on those primary years. I am indebted to the Connelly Foundation for the financial support that made my early education possible. I am grateful for all my teachers throughout the early years, and for my students in the later ones. The old cliché holds true: we truly learn the most through teaching. I want to thank my family and friends, whose presence in my life is a delight to me, regardless of how frequently (or infrequently) I see them. My family in Romania: my aunts Manyi, Kató, Mária and Judtka, along with their husbands, my cousins and their beautiful growing families: Juditka, Áron and Biborka, Tibi, Panni and their children, Emőke and her family, István,



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Acknowledgements

ix

Kinga, Attila, Izabella, János and all the generations of Szőcs children and grandchildren. A special mention to my godfather Miklós Tóth, who always refers to me as his capitalist comrade (kapitalista elvtársnő). My family in Romania provided so much insight and perspective from the trenches. In particular, my aunt Margit Molnár, in addition to sharing her experience and wisdom, gathered accounts of the revolution from individuals in the community, which –​though they are not contained in this book –​provided foundational guidance. To my (American-​ish) cousins Walter and Monica Nicolau, and Gaby and Eli Loots, along with their children and parents: my great hope for the future is to see all of you more frequently. To my (American-​ish) family: Gina and Neil Kumaran, who are two of the most kind and generous people I know; my mother-​in-​law Christine Martinez and the rest of the extended clan throughout the west and southwest, who have all welcomed me and sincerely made me feel like one of the family from the first day. I fondly thank Wendy Russell and Sam McAuliffe, Manu Ramos, Shela Sheikh, Elina Staikou and all my friends from Goldsmiths. You have provided me with the intellectual community that I have always longed for. I thank my friends in the United States: Gustavo Gallegos, Whit Missildine, Nayomi Munaweera, Mark Ettensohn, Stephen Boatright, Megan Land, Janell Wysock, Ross Earhart, Geza Mika, Jenn Warpole, Terrence Martinez, their loved ones and my broader communities of artists, writers and scholars in the Bay Area and on the East Coast. I thank everyone who may not be listed by name but who nonetheless occupy prominent places in my heart. Listing your names on this page does my depth of feelings no justice. It merely serves as a warm-​up exercise in the aforementioned futility of language, which the rest of this book will go on to explore in greater depth. I thank Emil and Anna, my closest companions on this journey, who instilled a deep love of learning from the first day. I am fortunate to have a family who has always filled my life with books and with a love of learning. They gave me the drive to aim high and never settle. My brother’s interest in politics and history shaped my own, and it is the countless years of trying to catch up to him that helped me forge my own path with great focus. My mother’s constant encouragement and support gave me the resources to follow through with a lengthy and difficult process. Lastly and mostly, I thank my best friend Scott, who has read and reread this book more times than anyone could ever be expected to endure, for his deep insights; for his encyclopaedic knowledge of history and philosophy, of which I take constant advantage; for his unending support; for his companionship; for what we share and grow together –​ Benny and Sofie, who fill my days with more joy than I ever thought was possible.





Introduction In Search of a New Paradigm for the Romanian Revolution

In April 2006, Romania’s president Traian Băsescu ordered a commission to study and condemn the abuses of Ceauşescu’s communist regime. Romania was scheduled to join the European Union (EU) in January 2007, and Băsescu was under increasing pressure from various directions inside and outside of Romania to distance himself and his government from Romania’s past dictatorship. Several former Eastern Bloc states had already condemned their former governments –​the Czech Republic as early as 1993 –​and the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly had called on all former Soviet-​style nations to unilaterally and unequivocally condemn their communist pasts. What did such a gesture of condemnation look like, coming from a man whose personal and professional history was rooted in a government which he was being pressured to condemn? Not only Băsescu but also other members of Romania’s government had established themselves under Ceauşescu’s leadership. Even some of the members of the Commission were implicated in past abuses. The head of the Commission was Vladimir Tismăneanu, a reputed political scientist and professor at the University of Maryland, who left Romania and settled in the United States in the early 1980s. The Commission named Vladimir Tismăneanu’s father, Leonte Tismăneanu, along with a number of Romanian senators, including former president Ion Iliescu, among those responsible for supporting officially endorsed violent methods. Given Băsescu’s former ties to the Securitate, Romania’s secret police under Ceauşescu, the president might have also been included in the Commission’s report, making it as close to a self-​condemning document as one might find. Perhaps it ought to have been framed from the beginning as something more like a confession, offered up by those in positions of power as a type of atonement for their complicity in past abuses. In an interview published in Baltic Worlds in 2013, Tismăneanu talks about the need for 1



2 Introduction

confession in public discourse: “Many people talk about the need for reconciliation, but how can reconciliation take place if nobody atones?”1 It is hard to overstate the political sensitivity surrounding this topic, which makes Romanian scholars of recent history targets of hate speech and defamations of character, should they present views which speak against the normative rhetoric of reform. The act of denouncing corruption, in my view, falls into this rhetoric of normativity, at the same time that it is clearly a necessary part of discourse. On the one hand, it is important to acknowledge past mistakes and take responsibility for making reforms. (Let it be noted that it is possible to work for reform without an admission of guilt.) However, if the act of renunciation is done in bad faith, all it does is perpetuate bad faith and further erodes public trust, while making it possible for the one performing this gesture in bad faith to preserve a position of power. Possibly even more destructive than this, it creates a culture of bad faith and gives corrupt politicians another weapon which they can use to force others into acts of renunciation. This would essentially amount to a continuation of the practices established by the Securitate, which are so well rehearsed in Romanian society. Anyone who attempts to either cast blame or assume any responsibility has already implicated themself in an irredeemably compromising gesture. And there, I have just implicated myself in such a self-​compromising gesture: this is the very essence of performative contradiction. One must call attention to the ongoing corruption in contemporary Romanian politics, and recent political history, and one cannot do so without implicating one’s self in this history of corruption. Vladimir Tismăneanu illustrates this perfectly. His commission resulted in making himself the target of personal attacks from both sides of the issue, confronted by anti-​Semitism from the far right and charges of pandering to Băsescu from the left. Intonations of corruption and questions of his character came from all directions. Some reformers see Băsescu as having too many ties to the old regime, and yet he was the target of impeachment proceedings as a result of the report. Here, we can see how any discourse which becomes entrenched in the rhetoric of accusations and defensiveness does a disservice to the topic. What do Tismăneanu’s or Băsescu’s personal histories have to do with rampant corruption in Romania and the state of public discourse surrounding the revolution of 1989? There is an important connection, but not one that assaults on their character will repair. What Spinoza understood so well about political life  –​ in addition to the continuity of power between the population at large and those holding political office –​is that a commonwealth cannot succeed if it depends on the goodwill of its agents. Laws must be structured in such a way that they lessen the possibility of corruption. This is why focusing on the personal merits or



Introduction

3

failures of public officials is often unproductive, especially if these personality traits are not seen within a broader context of shared behaviours.2 In spite of the involvement of a few contested figures, the Tismăneanu Commission was for the most part composed of a healthy mix of reputable scholars, experts, dissidents and even a foreigner –​ University of California Professor Gail Kligman, author of The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania  –​ and presented conclusions that should, for the most part, come as no surprise to anyone. It named some names in terms of complicity, which is politically delicate, given the history of many members of the government, but hardly surprising or lacking in justification. It condemned the abuses which ought to be condemned (e.g. the “re-​education” experiments on political prisoners at Piteşti) and shed light on specific policies and individuals. Given the vast scope of the horrors which occurred under Ceauşescu, it would be hard to imagine any report going too far, in terms of its condemnation and implications of guilt. The overall conclusion was surprising because it asserted that the communist government was illegally imposed and enforced: A commission of experts headed by the well-​known historian of communism, Professor Vladimir Tismăneanu, concluded that communism was an illegal regime imposed by external armed force in the mid-​1940s, one which stayed in power through blanket oppression that left many hundreds of thousands of victims. It also concluded that the structures and mentality of Romanian communism resisted long after 1989, thereby distorting the transition to political and economic pluralism.3

Băsescu gave a speech about the report after the presentation of the Commission’s findings before Parliament in December of 2006, and chaos ensued. In the words of Tismăneanu, “There was truly an orgy of invectives and calumnies meant to shatter our will and de-​legitimize the whole endeavor.”4 Not surprisingly for such a document, the conclusions of the Tismăneanu Commission were attacked from both sides. Iliescu accused Băsescu of “McCarthyism,” and right-​wing nationalists passed resolutions to condemn the report for various reasons.5 Several complaints were voiced on the grounds of a lack of stylistic rigor, poor citations, and other errata. There are reports that members of the nationalist party (Partidul Romania Mare or PRM) began to physically intimidate former dissidents of the old regime, who were present in the chamber during Băsescu’s presentation of the findings. “Ultra-​nationalist members and their supporters (unimpeded by parliamentary officials) disrupted his speech and threatened the supporters of the commission who were in the visitors’ gallery, including ex-​political



4 Introduction

prisoners.”6 Accusations were made against Tismăneanu on the grounds of his Jewish heritage, and the credibility of the entire document was largely called into question from several angles. On the other hand, especially from outside of Romania’s borders, the report was questioned for not going far enough. My personal opinion echoes Tom Gallagher’s, who has written extensively about Romania, in particular about the compromised structures of power which emerged in the days after the revolution. In his introduction to Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong, in which he discusses the inadequate standards imposed on Romania’s EU accession, Gallagher does not shy away from highlighting the continuity of corruption between Ceauşescu’s regime and the successive “Second-​ranking communists,” with their “minimalist agenda for change.”7 His diagnosis of Romania’s EU membership is that Romanian politicians essentially tricked the officials in Brussels by convincingly pretending to enact the necessary reforms: “Instead, the main entities of the EU allowed themselves to be misled and disarmed by a calculating local elite well versed in simulating change. Romania became the 27th member of the EU on 1 January 2007 on the agenda of minimal change which its post-​communist leaders stubbornly clung to.”8 It is a remarkable detail that this is essentially the same accusation that philosophers and historians (like Gallagher himself) made about the Romanian Revolution of 1989. These accusations are the topic of my book, which will take a philosophical approach to unpacking the theoretical positions at work in the example of Romania, where the historical details and the accusations against the political agents participating in these historical details share a common thread. While Gallagher and I, and countless others, all agree that corruption in Romania continued after Ceauşescu’s execution, I fundamentally disagree with any diagnosis which seeks to portray Romania as a cunning, corrupt predator and the EU as a naïve, well-​meaning victim. Similarly, I resist the conclusion that one corrupt politician such as Ceauşescu can wreak havoc on a nation without some form of tacit support from the majority. This is often how Gallagher portrays Romania, and it is echoed in the Tismăneanu Commission’s report, which declared the communist government as illegal and illegitimate –​ which performs a convenient distancing –​ and in Băsescu’s presentation of the findings, when he says that the illegal communist regime “treated an entire population as a group of guinea pigs for an experiment.”9 The distancing that is performed when blame is placed on an externalized entity opens the door for a shifting of guilt, which, though it may be justified in some cases, ultimately does nothing to help change a complex political situation. The victim/​predator paradigm forecloses the possibility of a discussion where the victims participate in their own oppression and liberation, and such a discussion is precisely what is needed to interrupt



Introduction

5

the cycle. The performance of this othering was used to justify Ceauşescu’s swift execution and allowed the nomenclature to remain in power, because the evil and corrupt Ceauşescu had been vanquished, so all that remained was a renunciation of him and his regime. This is the trap the EU fell into when it called on Romania to condemn its past regime, as if this act somehow made Romania more ready to join the EU. This is the reason why I will marshal an ancient discursive tool, that of performative contradiction, to break down the dialectical paradigm which emerges over and over again when analysing artefacts of contemporary Romanian history in particular, and historico-​political events in general. A clear example of the type of binary logic which Gallagher –​ in his otherwise noble and thorough attempts to expose corruption in Romania –​ is guilty of can be seen in his description of the EU as a trusting body tricked by crafty Romanian leaders. Presumably, he means Băsescu, who oversaw the EU accession. Is Romania full of crafty political leaders, willing to put on a disingenuous performance of reform for personal gain? This is essentially the accusation of authenticity levelled against the revolution. Let us assume that they are indeed more than capable. Why is Gallagher’s emphasis on this problematic? His error comes not from his description of corruption in Romania (which is indisputable) but from that of the EU: It remains to be seen how great a setback for building a common Europe based on pluralistic principles will the admission of an unreformed Romania prove to be. But it cannot be ruled out that the EU’s legitimation of forces in Romania that only adopted the trappings of Western democracy could prove to be an important staging-​post in the resurgence of soft forms of political authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.10

The Syrian Civil War began in 2011, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe highlights that the backlash to political authoritarianism in Europe is not coming from Romania. The dreaded “Balkanization” of Western Europe is coming from even further to the East, but ironically also from within the West, where “terrorists” emerge as being at the same time both home-​grown and foreign. The dominant ideological narrative of the West continues to propel it to operate as if it rests on an unassailable foundation of democracy and freedom, which conveniently lends itself to justifications of armed military interventions at worst, and covert political and economic machinations at best, in the affairs of supposedly sovereign nations whose autonomy the West claims to respect. In fact, the West is too frequently willing to invade in order to install or preserve such national autonomy. This ethos eloquently illustrates the spirit of performative contradiction, and it also highlights some interesting fallout from



6 Introduction

the Tismăneanu Commission’s conclusion that the communist regime was externally imposed and therefore illegal. The law-​making nature of violence is at the heart of the question of national sovereignty, and ­chapter 7 of this book will deal precisely with this question through Walter Benjamin’s essay on the “Critique of Violence.” As for the propensity of Western powers delivering democracy at the end of a drone, let it be noted that the nations and peoples on the receiving end of such actions might react with a sentiment other than gratitude. In the analysis of certain instances, such as accusations of inauthenticity concerning the Romanian Revolution, it may emerge that the West itself is only paying lip service to the values of freedom and democracy and yet finds itself offended to discover that others can also feign these values. Regardless of the role the West played in supporting Ceauşescu’s regime, the field of artefacts generated by his regime are vast, and an analysis of them through performative contradiction is a great deal more elucidating than accusations of inauthenticity. In the preface to his thorough and invaluable book Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–89, Dennis Deletant shares a personal story about the process of getting his Romanian wife Andrea a passport in 1973. After the officers at the passport office refused to accept her application, Deletant personally wrote a memorandum to the commanding officer, making the request, together with veiled threats about how his disappointment –​ if she did not receive a passport –​ would likely be reflected in his writings about Romania to British audiences. After being granted an interview, the Deletants were given a list of thirty-​five affidavits which they had to have notarized and submit with the application, proving that she had no outstanding debts. After securing all the documents, the following conversation transpired: She congratulated us on our diligence but then, looking down at the list, heaved a sigh of regret. “I’m so sorry. There is one document you require which is not on this list.” Our faces dropped. “Is it that important, is it really necessary?” we asked in unison. “I’m afraid it is. It is an affidavit from the university saying that you have no gym shoes borrowed from the physical education department.” “But I have never done physical education,” Andrea protested. “I’m sorry, I still need the paper.”11

Deletant goes on to ponder the impulse behind the bureaucrat’s actions: My wife might be travelling to the West, but before she did so she would have to yield to the authority of this aging woman . . . Envy was translated into a need to demonstrate power and it was this sentiment that fuelled many of the conflicts which I was later to have with individuals within the Romanian bureaucracy . . . I have described this experience in detail because it highlights some of the



Introduction

7

ambiguities and contradictions which are fostered in human behaviour by the totalitarian state. 12

Totalitarianism is generally understood as absolute state control over the public and private affairs of individuals. State power rests with the ruling party, and the value of each citizen is determined proportionately to their adherence to state ideology. It is a system of governance where there are no checks and balances in place to negate the power wielded by the executive office of the state –​ this is where it may slip easily into a dictatorship –​ or one where the checks and balances are merely nominal, allowing for the exploitation of power but not the means of challenging such exploitation without significant disruption to the system itself. A key manifestation of totalitarianism is the unproblematic and widespread use of state violence, even and especially against members of the state’s population. The totalitarian states of the Eastern Bloc, all of which collapsed in the autumn of 1989, have been the subjects of much intense study since the end of the Cold War. Reflections range from triumphant declarations of the death of communism to lamentations of its lack. Within this field of study, which is generally historical and political in nature, containing catalogues of day by day events, eyewitness accounts and other narrative “facts,” the Romanian Revolution is given special attention for being the only one of the Warsaw Pact states to execute the dictator and, subsequently, to have the authenticity of the 1989 revolution called into question. This marks the first contradiction which readers of these events come across: that the nation which had the most violent revolution should also be the one whose authenticity is most in doubt. In addition to these historical analyses, there are two branches of theoretical research which inform the context of this book. On the one hand, a handful of key theorists use performative contradiction as a redemptive analytic tool, occasionally in the context of political events. Of these, Judith Butler is most prominent, and she sets the example which this book follows in its application of the term to the 1989 revolution in Romania. She uses performative contradiction to describe a situation where one who is excluded from speech nevertheless lays claim to it, such as illegal immigrants protesting for rights and protection under the law. Such direct applications are rare, but a number of post-​structuralists have successfully established the grounds for more such analyses to occur. The other branch of theoretical work which forms, and indeed inspired, this book comes from a collection of remarks made by a group of contemporary continental philosophers who have commented directly about the Romanian Revolution: Bernard Stiegler, Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard and Alain Badiou. The engagement with these two branches formed the rationale behind the research which led to this book, building upon the work of these scholars. The



8 Introduction

hope is that performative contradiction can reveal something about the events in Romania which others have overlooked. To this end, I will consider specific events and details about the history of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, to see how performative contradiction offers an alternative reading to those who dismiss its authenticity or value. The impact of such a sustained application of this concept to a specific political event will, hopefully, provide an example for how other such historical events might be analysed. I wish specifically to address accusations of inauthenticity against the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which have made appearances in the texts of several critical theorists over the past twenty-​five years. The objective is not to defend the Romanian Revolution, nor to argue for its authenticity, but to discuss the conditions and circumstances which led to these accusations. While not all the texts use the term “authentic,” they all rely on the concept of authenticity, and it is their expectation of this silent standard that the Romanian Revolution failed to meet. The core critique underpinning the discussion of these texts is that the notion of an authentic revolution, as a conceptual paradigm, is neither a sufficient, appropriate nor useful tool for an analysis of the events in Romania. I argue for this critique in several ways and present performative contradiction as a concept that can replace authenticity, as a theoretical model which is more appropriate for the analysis of this event. Conclusions are drawn for the broader relevance of performative contradiction, beyond the limitations of the case in Romania, throughout the text. Chapter 1 establishes its recent rhetorical lineage and use. Each subsequent chapter contains a discussion of specific details relevant to the 1989 revolution and applies the concept of performative contradiction to an analysis of those specific details, in order to demonstrate that this is not merely a useful analytic tool but an aspect of experience in modernity. The recognition of its presence, especially in the realm of politics, would amount to a paradigm shift not only in analysis, but in a potential ethics and in a philosophy of action. To this end, the concluding chapter focuses on non-​violence, its efficacy and its relationship to performative contradiction. While some chapters pan out to a more general philosophical overview, they do so in order to make a deeper interpretation of the Romanian example possible. This is particularly the case for the discussion of maternal ambiguity and patriarchy in ­chapter  5. The brutality of the abuses which arose from pro-​natal legislation are so extreme that their interpretation demands not only an engagement with psychoanalysis but, as Derrida argues in Archive Fever, an intervention in the project of “civilization” at large. The chapters are organized around historical events or individuals surrounding the ‘89 revolution, juxtaposed with relevant theoretical texts. Chapters 2 and 3 engage with and analyse theoretical texts which reference the Romanian Revolution directly and discuss the criticisms of the ‘89



Introduction

9

revolution that are presented, always in relation to an alternative interpretation through performative contradiction. Chapters 4 through 6 are about the figures and events indirectly surrounding the ‘89 revolution, like nostalgia in the decades after the fall, legislation in the years beforehand and the question of what happened to the bodies of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu. These three latter chapters utilize primary theoretical sources which do not reference the 1989 revolution directly but provide useful models that can shed light on some of the more opaque events. Freud and Derrida are relied on heavily. A framework of Spinoza’s model of sovereignty is introduced in ­chapter  3 and provides the definition of sovereignty which is integral to the discussions in the rest of the chapters. Historical details are deployed and juxtaposed with theories in order to test their relevance. Broader philosophical positions and paradigms are discussed in order to expand the sphere of relevance to include not just details from Romania but insights from other fields  –​ like psychoanalysis –​which can help form a somewhat clearer picture of the less transparent aspects of political action. At its core, this thesis is an attempt to understand and contextualize the abuses of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, and the subsequent transition of power, through a broadening of the lens of relevant interpretable materials. Concrete events and historical persons are used throughout to keep the theoretical interpretation in dialogue with the details of the examples. The beginnings of ­chapter  2 and ­chapter  3 outline a few of the most significant historical details of the 1989 revolution and then locate this book in its field, citing references to the revolution by prominent philosophers and political historians. This serves mainly as a guide to introduce the reader to the common ways in which the Romanian Revolution of 1989 is discussed by those both inside and outside of critical theory. Having established the general context, the book then moves on to discuss in more depth several of these details and references and analyse how they fall short, in the sense that they are unable to adequately encompass aspects of the situation which appear at odds. The main point of this body of work is to argue that in order for the analysis of the 1989 Revolution to remain true to the event, it must utilize the paradigm of performative contradiction. This will be demonstrated through locating performative contradictions in key aspects of Romania’s history, which is done in tandem with applicable critical texts. Each chapter contains a close reading of at least one significant scholarly work that relates directly to the situation in Romania, if not overtly in its theme, then through the implications of its application. In addition to a critical text, each chapter will also focus on a separate historical aspect of the 1989 revolution, sometimes using specific actions committed by members of the Ceauşescu family. Performative contradictions will be located in relation to these specific historical references, alongside a close reading of the theoretical texts.



10 Introduction

Before any of these site specific examples, ­chapter  1 will provide a history of the recent usage of performative contradiction in order to elaborate and provide a backdrop for how it is being used in this book. It will not trace the concept of paradox back to ancient Greece, but will instead take for granted the reader’s familiarity with contradiction in general and stick to a more contemporary discussion around the specific term of performative contradiction and how philosophers have used it since the 1960s, from an accusation of internal inconsistency to its assertion as a necessary operative component of political action, and subjectivity in general. A history of the recent usage of performative contradiction  –​ since the coining of this specific phrase –​ is necessary for the opening chapter of this book in order to ground the reader in the movement of the argument being deployed and to provide a context for its usage. “Performative contradiction” as a phrase began as an accusation of internal inconsistency and gained prominent recognition in the 1960s through J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, as well as through Jürgen Habermas’ accusations of the presence of performative contradiction in post-​structuralist texts. In this book, the usage of performative contradiction is asserted in a positive way to perform a reading of the Romanian Revolution that is somewhat redemptive. The need for a redemptive argument arises from the accusations of falsification and inauthenticity that the Romanian Revolution has been the recipient of in the years since 1989. The justification for using it in this way, in the context of Romania, comes from its defence in the work of the post-​structuralist tradition outlined at the end of ­chapter  1, in whose footsteps this book follows. Judith Butler’s description of Mexican illegal immigrants protesting against the US government as a performative contradiction concludes the chapter and provides a vital precedent for the application of the concept to a political event, which this book goes on to perform in depth. Chapter 2 introduces the discussion of performative contradiction specifically in relation to concrete statements made about Romania. It breaks away from the structure of ­chapter  1, which focused on the concept, and begins to deal with accusations of inauthenticity, while also introducing some of the historical details surrounding the ‘89 revolution. Chapter 2 establishes the historical context and recounts how specific members of the philosophical community have reflected on the event. It demonstrates the relevance of the philosophical debate in the context of the political events, and it also holds the philosophical readings accountable to history, in addition to holding the political events accountable to critical interpretations. In this way, the structure of the book has a consistent movement of arguments running through each chapter, even when the focus shifts between form and content from section to section. This structure is mirrored in the content of the arguments which demonstrate that an accusation of bad faith is not the



Introduction

11

last word on an interpretation of the events in Romania, any more than an accusation of internal inconsistency –​ which is to say, an accusation of performative contradiction –​ is the last word on philosophical dialogue around the problematization of the universal. The objective is not to turn the accusation back on the accusers, but to open up the dialogue around the Romanian Revolution, which these accusations closed, by pointing out the ways in which both the events, and the accusations, are internally troubled by the presence of contradictions. Furthermore, the hope is to learn from this structure, so that the dialogue can move beyond the authentic/​inauthentic dichotomy to a more productive space in which political aims are informed by philosophical insights. This self-​troubling structure, should it remain unacknowledged or dismissed, threatens to overthrow the efficacy of any revolutionary objective which relies on a claim of unified action. The concrete example discussed in ­chapter  2 is the falsification of images of dead bodies produced during the 1989 revolution, which triggered the accusations of bad faith from critics. A performative contradiction will reveal the performative nature of the image and how its power of signification, through manipulation, can reveal more about the truth of the dead bodies –​ which is to say, the truth of the death toll under Ceauşescu –​ than an image that has not been manipulated could reveal. On the level of concrete political artefacts, ­chapter  2 deals with accusations of inauthenticity which arose from television footage of the falsification of casualties, and ­chapter  3 deals with the television footage of the dead bodies of the Ceauşescus. In both cases, the image lies or is suspected of lying, and this casts doubt across the event or solidifies doubt which was already there, leading to a dismissal of the authenticity of the entire event. It is the aim of each chapter to interrupt this chain of deductions and offer alternative ways of interpreting the events. Chapter 3 continues dealing with these accusations, focusing on Badiou in particular. Chapter 4 will look at opinion polls showing high degrees of nostalgia for communism and read these through themes of inheritance and violence in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Chapter 5 will look at pro-​natal legislation under Ceauşescu, with the aim of looking at some of the most notorious abuses which occurred during his rule. The discussion of pro-​natal legislation serves as a meditation on the abuses which are denied by the opinion polls discussed in ­chapter  4. This chapter will discuss an essay by Derrida published in Hungarian in 1997, under the title Ki az anya?, based on seminars he gave at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and at the University of Pécs, Hungary, between 1993 and 1995, under the title Qui est la mére? Naissance, nature, nation. Through a critique of the need for certainty felt by neurotics, Derrida turns Freud’s diagnosis against him, and



12 Introduction

against patriarchy, based on a deconstruction of certainty surrounding the mother. The need for certainty and the justification of using force to achieve certainty are both evidenced by the pro-​natal legislation in Romania which existed under Ceauşescu, where pressuring families to bear children was seen as a valid strategy which would bring a thriving economy into being. In the absence of an effective economic plan, the repressive impulse guided legislation in all aspects of public life, culminating in a violation of the most private aspects of individual life. The portrait of Romania which should emerge is that of a nation in a state of extreme crisis, where brutal exertions of force in every aspect of daily life were seen as a means of combating extreme economic and social problems. Performative contradictions which reveal themselves in the details of analysis will also come forward on the macro level. This backdrop will become crucial for interpreting the events of the 1989 revolution because it defines the historical ground of collective agency through demonstrating that the multitude acts in collusion with the political forces in power, even and especially where a split sovereignty is visible. Chapter 6 presents an interpretation of the Romanian Revolution through an analysis of the interruption of mourning, using the example of Zoia Ceauşescu, who repeatedly asked for the bodies of her parents to be exhumed after they were executed and buried in secret. Through drawing a comparison between Zoia and Antigone, this chapter will consider the consequences of state interference in the process of mourning. Readings of Antigone will be considered, with the hope that Hegel’s or Butler’s thoughts on Antigone might shed some further light on how an analysis of the interruption of mourning could inform a reading of the ‘89 revolution. The aim of this chapter will be to consider how such an interruption further reveals the difficulty of a collective forward momentum, in the context of a social setting where the open lie dominates public discourse and grief is forbidden. The essentially totalitarian impulse of collectively intervening in the private lives of individuals through a repressive state apparatus results in a cycle of violence, denial and guilt. Zoia Ceauşescu and Sophocles’ Antigone will introduce models of non-​ violent political resistance against the state. Their positions as daughters of fallen sovereigns will force a troubling of the themes of sovereignty and the juridical and provide both a mythic and a concrete historico-​political example of the fallout that happens during transitions of power. This fallout is instantiated in the bodies of these women, as blood relatives and also symbolic figures, who bear the burden of inheritance to a deposed power. This burden expresses itself as the new sovereign’s interference in the mourning of the previous one. It points to an ontological guilt in Zoia and Antigone which manifests itself not in their complicity with the crimes of the dead relative,



Introduction

13

but their desire to see them buried. This conflict reveals a performative contradiction around the transition of sovereign power and demonstrates how the mere act of remaining loyal to the memory of the dead constitutes an assault on the acting sovereign. It also demonstrates that denying the burial rights of the heirs compromises the power of the new sovereign, rather than strengthening it. This denial invests the heir with power, through the act of stripping her of it. The inheritance of Marxism comes to the foreground in ­chapter  7. Each of the previous chapters mentions the inheritance left behind by Marx as a contested one, torn between the promise of a new world without class exploitation and the wreckage left behind in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In one way or another, every critic of the Romanian Revolution is in dialogue with this inheritance. The inclination to salvage Marx’s legacy through a dismissing of the ‘89 revolution is understandable. As evidenced by a close look at some of the aspects of social life in Romania before and after 1989, it is all too clear that social equality played no part in the dominant political practice. What did play a part is domination as a methodology, which permeated every aspect of individual, social and political life. Chapter 7 argues that the sanctioning of violence is perhaps the definitive feature of the Marxism which was adopted in Romania, and the subsequent totalitarianism was a direct consequence of this. It questions the assumption that a totalitarian exertion of force can ever lead to a socialist democracy. This chapter will no longer look at specific artefacts from the ‘89 revolution, but at the whole of the legacy of Marxism as it manifests itself through the events in Romania from the commencement of collectivization in the 1940s through today. While the previous chapters deal with questions surrounding what happened during the 1989 revolution, this chapter attempts to answer the bigger question underpinning these smaller ones: What happened with Marxism? Violence happened, and it was instantiated through legislation into totalitarianism. This insistence on institutionalized marginalization and violence proved to be anti-​democratic and resulted in a negation of the populist objectives of socialism, in spite of Marx’s prediction that it would do the opposite –​ namely, he predicted that it would dissolve state power, not enhance it. The whys and hows of this instantiation will be discussed through examples of the Communist Manifesto, and a therapy will be discussed as well, through performative contradiction. The concluding thought will be that if Marx thought violence was necessary to alter the conditions of social production, then he should have advocated for non-​violence. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” will be discussed as an alternative to the Communist Manifesto, offering a new model through which to salvage the aspects of Marxism which are democratic, over and against the aspects of it which are not.



14 Introduction

NOTES 1. Francesco Zavatti, “ ‘Historiography has been a minefield’: A conversation with Vladimir Tismăneanu,” Baltic Worlds, Vol. 1 (2013), 10–​13, accessed 26 April 2016, http://​balticworlds.com/​has-​been-​a-​minefield%E2%80%9D/​. 2. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (Studies in Prejudice) (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993). 3. Tom Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 248. 4. John Feffer, “The Commission in Romania,” The Huffington Post (12 March 2014), accessed 22 April 2016, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​john-​feffer/​the-​commission-​in-​romania_​b_​4952840.html. 5. Craig S. Smith, “Romanian Leader Condemns Communist Rule,” The New York Times (19 December 2006), accessed 20 April 2016, http://​www.nytimes. com/​2006/​12/​19/​world/​europe/​19romania.html?_​r=0. 6. Gallagher, Romania and the European Union, 248. 7. Gallagher, Romania and the European Union, 1. 8. Gallagher, Romania and the European Union, 3. 9. Smith, “Romanian Leader Condemns Communist Rule.” 10. Gallagher, Romania and the European Union, 4. 11. Dennis Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​89 (London: Hurts, 2006), xxiii. 12. Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate, xxiv–​xxv.



Chapter One

Performative Contradiction Structuralist and Post-​Structuralist Perspectives

A history of the recent usage of performative contradiction –​since the coining of this specific phrase –​is necessary for the opening chapter in order to demonstrate the ground where the movement of the argument is being deployed and to provide a context for its usage. The debate over performative contradiction can be explained in terms of the divide between two contemporary philosophical trajectories, that of the Modern European and Anglo-​American traditions, also known as the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. In the context of understanding this gulf, perhaps speaking in terms of structuralism and post-​structuralism is more useful, since the geographical delineations are not necessarily relevant. The following series of debates surrounding this term is representative of a moment where these two branches engage each other directly. In order to contextualize the significance of the usage of performative contradiction, one must first become familiar with the movement internal to the debate surrounding it and how an accusation of internal insistency is subverted and redeemed as an inconsistency necessary to and constitutive of subjectivity. This chapter begins with one side of the history in this thread of argumentation, through its coining by the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka, followed by Austin and treated in depth by Habermas, tracing its usage against post-​structuralism in general and against Jacques Derrida in particular. The accusation of performative contradiction in modern philosophical discourse centres around Jürgen Habermas, who “chastises deconstructionists for failing to register the distinction between the ‘world-​ disclosing’ functions of literature and the ‘problem-​ solving’ functions of theoretical discourse that have been differentiated out in modern societies.”1 According to Habermas, the failure of the acknowledgement of this distinction results 15



16

Chapter One

in post-​structuralist philosophers undermining the potency of their own arguments by creating a contradiction between what they say and how they say it. There is a vast history running on both sides of this debate, filled with accusations, defences and counter-​accusations. The present chapter seeks to provide a broad overview of some of the more significant examples on both sides of the performative contradiction debate, though it is by no means a fully comprehensive inclusion of all the voices involved. The emphasis here is placed on detailing the inception of this debate, which began with Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka in 1962 and is rarely discussed in essays treating this topic. Nonetheless, it is integral to understanding the origins of the argument presently being followed by those who use performative contradiction as an accusation. Following the discussions by Hintikka and Habermas, I will look closely at Martin Jay’s overview of the debate and Habermas’ role in it. The concluding section will focus on several texts by Jacques Derrida where he talks about performative contradiction explicitly, and it will also look at Judith Butler’s work on this topic, specifically at how she subverts, inverts and redeems it as a necessary and foundational aspect of political action and democracy. Though she is neither the first nor the only one to redeem performative contradiction, her application of this reading to present-day political events is most relevant in setting a precedent for an interpretation of the Romanian Revolution. Hintikka is credited with the term “performative contradiction,” which stems from a critique of Descartes published in his 1962 essay, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?”2 It became popularized by Habermas, who elaborated upon Karl-​Otto Apel’s follow-​up and a more generalized application of Hintikka’s critique. Habermas uses it primarily to describe communicative action, and the use of his terminology also has its lineage in Austin’s performative speech act. In the context of performative contradiction, a performative speech act is made by the speaker who asserts two conflicting claims at the same time, such as Epimenides’ liar paradox, in which the Cretan declares “all Cretans are liars,” thereby making it impossible to ascertain whether the speaker speaks the truth about the fact that he is a liar, or if this assertion means that he is telling the truth, which would in turn prove his initial claim false. Martin Jay clarifies this structure in “The Debate over Performative Contradiction,” where he discusses –​ among other examples of Habermas’ accusations of performative contradiction –​ Foucault’s meditation on this paradox in “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside”: A performative contradiction arises not when two antithetical propositions (A and not A) are simultaneously asserted as true but rather when whatever is being claimed is at odds with the presuppositions or implications of the act of claiming





Performative Contradiction

17

it. To use the terminology of J.L. Austin and John Searle, to which Habermas is indebted, it occurs when the locutionary dimension of a speech act is in conflict with its illocutionary force, when what is said is undercut by how it is said.3

In other words, “I am a liar” is not a performative contradiction because it presents two antithetical propositions (“I am a liar” and “I am not lying when I tell you I am a liar”), but rather because the act of confessing to being a liar is at odds with itself. The act of confessing to lying is at odds with the act of lying. Therefore, a liar cannot confess to lying without entangling themself in a performative contradiction, which, from the point of view of the Habermasian accusation, would undercut the truth value of the claim. There are many places through Habermas’ work where he explains in detail what the specific conditions of a performative contradiction are. I will highlight an example of this below and then review how performative contradiction is used as an accusation against post-​structuralism. The discussion of performative contradiction in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action summarizes Hintikka’s argument about Descartes and explains in detail the necessary conditions for the accusation: A performative contradiction occurs when a constative speech act k(p) rests on noncontingent presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition p. Following a suggestion by Jaakko Hintikka, Apel illustrates the significance of performative contradiction for understanding the classical arguments of the philosophy of consciousness.4

As his example, Apel uses Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” and reconstructs Descartes’ maxim in terms of a performative contradiction through a rhetorical exercise where the speech act “I hereby doubt that I exist” is uttered. The exercise is imagined as follows, which for Habermas demonstrates an undermining of the speech act’s truth claim and leads to a performative contradiction: ( a) I do not exist (here and now). At the same time, by uttering statement (a), he ineluctably makes an existential assumption, the propositional content of which may be expressed, (b) I exist (here and now), where the personal pronoun in both statements refers to one and the same person.5 This example already lays the groundwork for a usage of performative contradiction in a way that is not an accusation, but rather a description of the paradox underpinning subjectivity. In the Psychic Life of Power, Butler refers to this as the relationship between the subject and its subjection, in the



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Chapter One

Hegelian context. However, Habermas is more concerned with the rhetorical structure underpinning the utterance, which he believes undermines the potency of the argument by creating a contradiction between what is said and how it is said. His rhetoric is couched in terminology such as “truth claim,” “opponent” and “argumentation game,” which creates a sense in the reader that his position is perhaps more concerned about the sport of arguing than it is about uncovering a deeper meaning behind the argument. In this context, accusing someone of a performative contradiction is like calling a foul during a sports game. But is such an accusation enough to reveal something profound about the position of the one being accused? The implication for an interpretation of the Romanian Revolution runs parallel to this accusation, where the labelling of it as inauthentic is meant to strip away its credibility in much the same way as accusing a philosopher of a performative contradiction is meant to strip them and their argument of credibility or legitimacy as well. Both accusations have the same objective and arise from the presence of an internal inconsistency, which is deemed intolerable, or worse, intentionally committed and in bad faith. Habermas guides readers through a set of arguments, where the universality of moral principles is called into question by a “fallibilist”  –​ one who insists on holding on to certain beliefs, even though they may be false, in the absence of the possibility of gaining access to truth. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the example chosen to illustrate this point, the fallibilist is proved guilty of a performative contradiction when the one advocating for universalism proves that the fallibilist also relies on universal claims. For example, the declaration “there is no truth,” or “we cannot have access to truth,” is claiming a universal truth through its declaration.6 Habermas describes Apel’s accusation of performative contradiction, using the Munchhausen trilemma, which the fallibilist is guilty of: “On the basis of this trilemma the opponent concludes that attempts to ground the universal validity of principles are meaningless. This the opponent calls the principle of fallibilism.”7 The three avenues of argumentation available to someone trying to prove a universal truth, according to Munchhausen’s trilemma (also known as Agrippa’s trilemma, after the sceptic), are the circular (where induction is required to prove induction), the regressive (each proof requires further proof) and the axiomatic (there is a reliance on a core assumption). The fallibilist, who believes that truth is inaccessible, invokes Munchhausen’s trilemma against the advocate of universalism, claiming the argument is axiomatic: But the opponent will have involved himself in a performative contradiction if the proponent can show that in making his argument, he has to make assumptions that are inevitable in any argumentation game aiming at critical





Performative Contradiction

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examination and that the propositional content of those assumptions contradicts the principle of fallibilism.8

Habermas deployed this argument in various forms against Derrida. An example of his accusations can be found in his lecture “Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida,” where he argued that Derrida’s argument there, in the context of Dasein and grammatology, relies on structuralism and never successfully moves beyond a subject-​oriented position. “His attempt to go beyond Heidegger does not escape the aporetic structure of a truth-​occurrence eviscerated of all truth-​as-​validity.”9 Clearly, Habermas is demonstrating a performative contradiction in his opponent’s argument, showing that Derrida relies on the subject as he is critiquing it: “Derrida passes beyond Heidegger’s inverted foundationalism, but remains in its path.”10 The importance of truth as an ontological structure –​ which is to say, universalism –​ cannot be overstated in Habermas’ argument, nor is it possible to ignore the impossibility of its critique, if the presence of a structural contradiction is either denied or delegitimized. From what standpoint could one critique the structure of truth, or of the universal, when no position outside of it is structurally possible? The only game permitted in the “argumentation game” is the debate over what the truth is and what the truth is not, but never whether truth itself is a problematic concept. Any argument which would attempt to question the absolute usefulness of this paradigm is immediately found guilty of a performative contradiction because any questioning of truth is itself a truth assertion, which is of course contradictory and therefore self-​ defeating. The post-​structuralist response to this is to assert contradiction as the starting point of subjectivity and not to grant the accusation of contradiction the power to end a discussion around the problems of relying on universalism as a grounding philosophical position. The most threatening aspect of questioning universalism, as Simon Critchley puts it in reference to Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason he describes as heralding the divide between continental and analytic philosophers, is that scepticism threatens God, opens the door to atheism and thereby destroys the possibility of morality.11 The assumption is that moral action is not possible outside of an understanding of universal truth and universal principles, which are only accessible through reason and the chain of logical deduction. The questioning of any part of this system, either the tools or the end goal, is destructive and threatens to plunge the world into “a nightmare of total scepticism and nihilism.”12 The motivation for a questioning of such commitment to universalism, and the urgency of the need to do so, arises from the frequency of events littering history –​ the period surrounding the Romanian Revolution is full of



20

Chapter One

such events –​where a position of absolute certainty led to political atrocities. If the impetus to defend universalism comes from a desire to build a more just society, then the impetus to question it also comes from the same desire. Scepticism serves the purpose of interrupting certainty in order to derail a possible crisis, which is to say: to derail the crisis of certainty. The need for this is evidenced in the exact same section of Habermas’ accusation against Derrida, where the Holocaust and Derrida’s Judaism are frequently referenced, not so much to make a scathing philosophical point, but as anecdotal, almost witty commentary. For example, the following passage is clearly made in an ironic tone, delivered after the accusation of performative contradiction, and serves little purpose beyond mocking Derrida’s philosophical position and his faith: “The remembrance of the messianism of Jewish mysticism and of the abandoned but well-​circumscribed place assumed by the God of the Old Testament preserves Derrida, so to speak, from the political-​moral insensitivity and the aesthetic tastelessness of a New Paganism spiced up with Holderlin.”13 Interestingly, Habermas does not take this tone in order to defend Heidegger from Derrida, but merely for sport. Habermas is extremely critical of Heidegger’s relationship to Nazism, stating that “he detaches his actions and statements altogether from himself as an empirical person and attributes them to a fate for which one cannot be held responsible.”14 To those who are familiar with Derrida’s writings on Heidegger, it is clear that he is frequently –​even if it is not always as overt as it is in texts such as “Heidegger’s ear” –​ in dialogue with the concrete political reality of Heidegger’s connection with the Nazi party. Holding Heidegger accountable for this connection, and for his silence, is an integral part of reading his work. While one might want to separate the philosophy from the man and the history, this separation is in no sense something that should be taken for granted. And would it not be precisely a fitting task for philosophy, especially one which claims to have a moral standard, to hold the work accountable and to ask the hardest questions? Is it ethical, or even possible, to read Heidegger without thinking about the political realities he was living and working under? Or is the posing of the question already so disconcerting that one can only hear it as a de facto condemnation and dismissal of Heidegger, one that demands not a genuine engagement with the question, but a knee-​jerk defence? By contrast, should Heidegger be excluded from the cannon because of the political realities he was under and complicit in? The mildest inquiry into this topic yields a barrage of titles dealing with Heidegger’s guilt, demonstrating nothing more clearly than that walking this line, between engaging with his work while simultaneously engaging with the political context, is a difficult task and one that Derrida attempts to walk with sincerity.15 This rests in sharp contrast to Habermas’ comment above, which is not the only one of its kind





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21

in his lecture. It is far easier to pick a side, and either talk only about the man or only about the work, than to engage with both, and allow the contradictions to surface, permitting the structure to remain in the open, even and especially if it is cracked. Critchley argues that one of the most appealing features of Continental philosophy is its desire to bridge the gap between theory and practice or, as he puts it, “to bridge or reduce this gap between knowledge and wisdom (or theory and practice), thereby retaining something of an echo of the ancient definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom.”16 There is a parallel between the path of this debate and the one surrounding a certain aspect of the Romanian Revolution, which is an inclination to blame the actions of an entire group, or even a whole society, on one individual. This phenomenon will be discussed at length in ­chapter  4, which takes as its artefact for analysis the opinion polls in Romania which show extreme nostalgia for the old regime. The unspoken belief behind this argument is that if all the enemies (Nazis, communists, capitalists, dictators, etc.) can be identified and excised, then the rest of society will be able to move forward in a state of harmonious purity. The problem is not some deep, pervasive set of beliefs and practices that are shared by the whole, and therefore the responsibility for atrocities does not rest with everyone, but rather with a few, corrupt, immoral individuals, like Hitler or Ceauşescu, and a handful of their followers. The purpose of a revolution is to identify these criminals and bring them to justice. This is the type of black-​and-​white thinking that performative contradiction threatens because it undermines the stability of these dichotomous roles. This is the same purpose it serves in philosophical debate, which is why it is so fitting that the defence against the accusation of performative contradiction is the assertion of performative contradiction itself as the defence. The rest of this chapter will summarize the movements of this process in detail as it unfolds in political debate. Hintikka’s argument hinges on making a distinction between the interpretation “I think” (i) and the subsequent deduction “therefore I am” (ii), as we saw from Habermas’ reading in the previous section which highlights the role of doubt in this process: ( a) I do not exist (here and now) (b) I exist (here and now) The two interpretations are seen here as happening simultaneously (“here and now”). The simultaneity and the duality (I am /​I doubt) of the assertions are what causes Hintikka to challenge Descartes’ reading: “Where Augustine would have said that nobody can doubt anything without existing, Descartes in effect says that one cannot think that one doubts anything without thereby demonstrating to oneself that one exists. But he does not clearly distinguish



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the two arguments from each other.”17 The problem that is caused by this collapsing of interpretations results, for Hintikka, in Descartes drawing generalized, universal conclusions (i.e. about the nature of the existence of man) from a singular, performative insight (doubting one’s own existence). This is the site of the performative, and the contradiction. Hintikka continued, In the first passage Descartes is saying that it is impossible for him to think that he himself should not exist while he doubts something. In the second passage he says that it is impossible for him to think that anybody else should not exist while he (the other man) doubts something. The former passage expresses a performative insight, whereas the latter cannot do so.18

We can see that, for Hintikka, the problem is this conflict between the positive insight of the individual’s existence resting on the basis of their doubt. The negation forms the basis of the assertion. What is claimed (I exist) is at odds with the act of claiming it (I doubt my existence). This is a performative contradiction and what he considers an existential inconsistency. “Therefore, when the public speech-​acts are translated to ‘private’ speech-​acts, ‘I do not exist’ will definitely lead to the existential inconsistency. In this sense, ‘I exist’ can be self-​proved in terms of existence, and ‘I think, therefore I am’ is just a possible way of expressing this insight.”19 The performative contradiction is located between the performative gesture of self-​assertion and the contradictory gesture of self-​doubt. The logical flaw, or error, is the result of using self-​doubt as a tool for self-​assertion. This is Descartes’ error, according to Hintikka, and it is the foundational error at the origin of the performative contradiction debate. The logic of the argument works according to the following principle: “Cogito serves to express the performative character of Descartes’s insight; it refers to the ‘performance’ (to the act of thinking) through which the sentence ‘I exist’ may be said to verify itself’ ... For this reason, the sentences such as ‘I do not exist,’ ‘I doubt everything,’ or ‘I am not thinking about anything’ defeat themselves.”20 From the very beginning, there was disagreement over Hintikka’s reading of Descartes. The first voice of dissent belongs to Julius R. Weinberg. In the very next issue of The Philosophical Review, after the publication of Hintikka’s essay, in October of 1962, Weinberg describes Hintikka’s position as “a serious error of interpretation”21 and replies that he takes Descartes out of context and reduces his argument to a syllogistic inference. But what will be interesting to see is how the problem of the contradiction is treated by Weinberg. He brings our attention to a passage in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) which is crucial to understanding conclusions drawn on the Principles of Philosophy (1644). Weinberg quotes Descartes:





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Let him deceive me whoever can do so, nevertheless he will never bring it about that I am nothing as long as I shall think that I am something; or that at some time it be true that I never was, it being now true that I am, or even that two and three may be more or less than five, or similar things in which I cognize manifest contradiction.22

Weinberg argues that for Descartes, the consequence of the second meditation (cogito, ergo sum) is that denying it is a contradiction. To deny that I am, and that I think, results in contradicting my own existence. “Descartes has repeated the statements of the second meditation in a context which clearly puts the cogito, ergo sum as a consequence whose necessity is such that its denial is a contradiction.”23 This is pointed out in order to refute Hintikka’s claim that Descartes’ second meditation is somehow unique and inconsistent among his other writings. “In the principles we are explicitly told in the Preface that ‘he who would doubt all things cannot yet doubt that he exists while he doubts,’ and, in the body of the work, that ‘we cannot doubt our existence without existing while we doubt.’ ”24 While Hintikka and Habermas believe that “I doubt that I exist” is self-​defeating, for Descartes and for Weinberg, it is self-​affirming. Self-​doubt makes space for self-​reflection and self-​assertion. “We who think such things [namely that perhaps neither God nor heaven, nor bodies (including our own body and its members) exist] may not however be nothing, for it is a contradiction for us to think that that which thinks does not exist at the very time in which he thinks.”25 This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of subjectivity: that doubt is the condition of possibility for the cogito. “Hence this thought, I think, therefore I am is the first and most certain of all those which occur to anyone philosophizing in an orderly way.”26 The role of time is crucial here, as Weinberg draws our attention to its connection to contradiction. One must realize that if one is thinking, and doubting, he necessarily exists “in the very time in which he thinks.” As we saw from Habermas in the opening section –​(a) I do not exist (here and now) and (b) I exist (here and now) –​ time is equally crucial. But while Hintikka and Habermas conclude that this simultaneity is partly what causes the contradiction, time is not functioning in exactly this manner here. The simultaneity mentioned by Weinberg refers to “thinking” and “existing” at the same time but not necessarily that the resulting self-​assertion is also happening at the same time. Rather, it is only upon reflection that one can conclude with certainty that the “thinking” and the “existing” happened, and are happening, simultaneously. Philosophical reflection is not instantaneous with the subject of its contemplation, even if they necessarily overlap from time to time. Another essential aspect of Hintikka’s argument is the accusation that Descartes intuitively concludes “I am” from “I think.” This presupposition



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is problematic in a philosophical argument because the argument cannot be made without assuming the premise, and the premise can only be proved intuitively. This is one of the three aspects of the Munchhausen trilemma mentioned earlier, and Weinberg disagrees with this reading: “Hintikka also provides evidence to support Descartes’ alleged denial that the cogito, ergo sum is an inference: ‘According to Descartes, however, by saying cogito, ergo sum he does not logically (syllogistically) deduce sum from cogito but rather perceives intuitively … the self-​evidence of sum.’ ”27 Weinberg replies that Hintikka is privileging a logocentric deduction which is not supported by the text: “From [the text] we can extract only that sum is not syllogistically deduced from cogito, but rather it is something known per se. But what is known per se, is, as the context shows, not sum but cogito, ergo sum. What Descartes knows could be expressed in the following way: I think, I cannot think and not be, I am.”28 Weinberg’s point is that the inference is not a problem in Descartes’ argument because he does not make the argument in the form of a general claim, but a specific one. “What Descartes is saying here, then, is that it is not a syllogistic inference, not that it is not an inference at all. It is not syllogistic, for that would require ‘illud omne, quod cogitat, est sive existit,’ a general proposition.”29 The relationship between the individual insight and the general proposition was one of Hintikka’s main concerns from the start, and this passage from the private to the public is also the problematic site of “existential inconsistency,” leading to performative contradiction. I will return to this problem later in this chapter, in the context of Judith Butler and the universal. Another, more current aspect of the performative contradiction debate surrounds the difference between constative (world-​describing) speech acts and performative (world-​making) ones. “A much favoured terminology is that language is performative, not constative –​it brings a state of affairs into existence rather than describes a state of affairs in a way that could be adjudged true or false.”30 An argument that confuses these two types of speech acts also opens itself up to performative contradiction, and Habermas uses this argument against post-​structuralists. Thomas McCarthy, in his translator’s note to Legitimation Crisis, explains the structure underpinning Habermas’ ideal speech scenario: “A smoothly functioning language game rests on a background consensus formed from the mutual recognition of at least four different types of validity claims [Geltungsanspruche] that are involved in the exchange of speech acts.”31 These necessary components of ideal speech are “claims that the utterance is understandable, that its propositional content is true, and that the speaker is sincere in uttering it, and that it is right or appropriate for the speaker to be performing the speech act.”32





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These four validity claims are reminiscent of Austin’s description of performative speech acts and the necessary intentions and conditions which limit them, as outlined in “Lecture III” of How to Do Things with Words: A.1. There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. A.2. The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. B.1. The procedure must be executed by all participants correctly. B.2. The procedure must be executed by all participants completely.33 It is clear from the above passages that the essence of this line of argumentation rests on a normative, logocentric position which assumes that consensus and logic govern human interaction. It prohibits the possibility of contradiction and paradox at a structural level because “Linguistic communication is prior to deductive inference, intersubjectivity comes before self-​ consciousness and speech-​act precedes meditation.”34 According to this logic, the sum comes before the cogito. There is no simultaneity but a strict order of events. “Thereupon, philosophy is transformed to philosophy of language from philosophy of consciousness, and further the logical-​ philosophical study, which dissolves philosophy, examines knowledge and saves room for value through critique of language, is transformed to ‘transcendental pragmatics’ which provides a firm foundation for knowledge and moral norms.”35 Even though Habermas himself acknowledges that such a normative assumption is problematic, it nevertheless is seen as a necessary and integral part of communicative action, perhaps even and especially if it appears not to be applicable to states of crisis, exception or emergency. Commenting on another aspect of this logo-​linguistic structure, his translator Thomas McCarthy describes the structure of Habermas’ linguistic logic: “Habermas argues that this supposition of accountability, this expectation that the other could account for his behaviour in the same way that (we are convinced) we could account for ours, is a normal feature of functioning language games.”36 Without this accountability, communication would not be possible: “At the same time he is well aware that the assumption is usually counterfactual, that the exception is the rule in human history.”37 But this inconsistency between the normative rule governing the language game and the legacy of human history must be overlooked because, without this underpinning, hope for the resolution of conflicts would necessarily have to be abandoned. “The very act of participating in a discourse, of attempting discursively to come to an agreement about the truth of a problematic statement or the correctness of a



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problematic norm, carries with it the supposition that a genuine agreement is possible.”38 The following section outlines in detail Martin Jay’s essay “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists,” on some recent aspects of this debate, elaborating on Habermas’ position as well as some important voices of dissent. Further to the role of personal accountability, “According to Habermas, the communicative use of language harbours an immanent obligation to justify validity claims, if need be. When the claims one makes on a locutionary level deny the very possibility of such a justification, then a performative contradiction is committed.”39 The key component of the structure of performative contradiction is that the utterance must undermine the possibility of its own expression. “As Habermas puts it with reference to Adorno’s negative dialectics and Derrida’s deconstruction, ‘The totalizing self-​critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subject-​centred reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools.’ ”40 Jay outlines several arguments which defend against Habermas’ accusation of performative contradiction specifically, one of which was the example brought up in the opening paragraph of this text – namely, Foucault’s discussion of the liar paradox. Foucault focuses on the “I speak” aspect of the liar paradox and argues that the site of contradiction rests with the assertion that one has the power and agency to speak, to command language. “The challenge Foucault presents to the cogency of performative contradiction thus arises from his positing of the exemplary character of a literary language that is wholly exterior to the intentionality of the speaking subject.”41 This is the line of reasoning that could immediately be identified as a performative contradiction because the speech of the speaking subject depends on the ability and accountability of self-​expression though language. But while Habermas’ criteria for ideal speech are absolute, there is no room for any possibility of discussion concerning language outside the realm of total logo-​linguistic control. Foucault, on the other hand, does not claim that speech is always contradictory, merely that “If in this use of language there is no meaningful actor responsible for the speech acts whose locutionary and illocutionary responsible dimensions can be consistent or contradictory, then it makes little sense to employ performative criteria to judge the value of arguments or to characterize social tensions.”42 In other words, there is an aspect of language that transcends both constative and performative speech acts, an aspect which falls outside of any individual subject’s control, and it is senseless to judge speech as if this aspect was not present. Another defence, as outlined by Jay, comes from Rodolphe Gasché, in The Tain of the Mirror, where he argues that the discrepancies found in





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logical contradictions are not in fact contradictions because this line of argument can only ever apply when dealing with set and stable identities. Whereas many post-​structuralist critiques argue that since they are “ ‘eluded by the logic of identity, they are consequently not contradictions properly speaking.’ ”43 Highlighting the role played by identity in the Habermasian arguments segues into a discussion of Derrida and deconstruction and asks how these contradictions can be understood outside the logic of an identitarian schema. Jay asks, “If they are not to be understood as logical contradictions”  –​ which are the “the only kind of discrepancies for which the philosophical discourse can account” –​ “then what are they?”44 Gasché replies that the project of deconstruction is to account for these contradictions outside the normative logic of identity by “ ‘grounding’ them in ‘infrastructures’ discovered by analysing the specific organization of these ‘contradictions.’ ”45 Deconstruction is an analysis of contradiction, not simply, as Habermas might imply, a mechanism for producing contradiction. “These basic infrastructures are what Derrida calls archetraces, differance, supplementarity, iterability, re-​marking, dissemination, etc.”46 And these infrastructures, “whatever one makes of them,” underpinning contradictions “are not to be understood as equivalent to ‘contradiction.’ For they can never be resolved in a dialectical way through some kind of higher synthesis.”47 Where Gasché sees Derrida’s work on contradiction as progressive, he sees Austin and Habermas as essentially regressive because the project to overcome the “mentalist philosophy of reflection by turning to speech acts amounts to nothing more or less than the surreptitious reintroduction of the problem of reflection in order to solve the problems left in the wake of logical positivism.”48 And, “insofar as Habermas has adopted an Austinian notion of performance, he too falls prey to a philosophy of identitarian reflection, despite his repudiation of the mentalist fallacy.”49 Jay’s final example in this debate is Paul de Man’s defence of Nietzsche’s use of performative contradiction in Birth of Tragedy, in Allegories of Reading, where he “defends in Nietzsche precisely what Habermas criticizes: his willing embrace of performative contradiction, which results from his appreciation of the undecidable dimension of linguistic performance.”50 Here, de Man advocates, through Nietzsche, overcoming the problem through the acceptance of contradictions and without striving to find a solution to solving them. He does this in two ways. First, he defends Nietzsche for using a system (such as the scientific method) to undermine its own usefulness. “Already in the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche advocates the use of epistemologically rigorous methods as the only possible means to reflect on the limitations of these methods.”51 This is an ancient rhetorical tool common to the early sceptics, that of using the contents of an argument to subvert



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the argument. Far from it being a failing, it is a strategy of considerable importance with a track record of success. “One cannot hold against him the apparent contradiction of using a rational mode of discourse –​ which he, in fact, never abandoned –​in order to prove the inadequacy of this discourse.”52 There is a second, more substantial, defence of performative contradiction in The Birth of Tragedy that de Man highlights: “The ‘deconstruction’ of the Dionysian authority finds its arguments within the text itself, which can then no longer be called simply blind or mystified.”53 The dichotomous structure Nietzsche establishes between the Apolline and the Dionysian system instantiates contradiction when the two are gathered together during the moment of the festival, which is to say, the gathering together of the concept: Moreover, the deconstruction does not occur during statements, as in a logical refutation or in a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand, metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question.54

In order to show the incommensurable gap between rhetorical praxis and the metalinguistic statements they challenge, de Man quotes Nietzsche on Aristotle, and the law of non-​contradiction, which brings us back to the problem of identity. De Man quotes Nietzsche: “We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any ‘necessity’ but only of an inability.”55 The problem of insisting that arguments follow a strict regime of identity (A is A, A is not B) is not a problem as such, but rather a reflection of an inability to tolerate anything outside the bounds of this system. For Nietzsche, de Man argues, this inability is reflective of a wishful desire underpinning the argument and not a true dedication to understanding truth, which would amount to an interrogation of the preconditions of the law of non-​contradiction: If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate ground upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it.56

The question is whether the law is instructive or descriptive. Is it delivering a moral induction, or is it describing a phenomenon? “Either it asserts something about actual entities, as if one already knew this from some other source; namely that opposite attributes cannot be ascribed to them [konnen]. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it [sollen].”57 If contradiction is in fact a prevalent aspect of experience and consciousness, then a commandment against its use would already amount to an erasure, to a normative suppression of heterogeneity and to an imposition





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of a bad faith morality and identity politics: “[i]‌n that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the truth [erkennen] but to posit [setzen] and arrange a world that should be true for us.”58 Jay observes that for Nietzsche and for de Man, there is an unbridgeable gap between the content of an utterance and its expression. “Nietzsche may think he is rejecting the unequivocal affirmation of identity that is at the basis of the logic of noncontradiction, but his text does only one thing, deny that affirmation. To be performatively consistent, it would have to both deny and affirm simultaneously.”59 The accusation of performative contradiction or inconsistency, as demonstrated by Jay here, demands that the logic of identity be imposed upon performative contradiction as well. In short, this position holds that any argument that seeks to defend performative contradiction must be both consistent and inconsistent, contradictory and non-​contradictory, at the same time –​in order to be consistent with its own inconsistency. For de Man and other post-​structuralists who wish to challenge “Habermas’ reliance on the concept of performative contradiction as a cornerstone of his universal pragmatics,” it does not make sense “to charge someone with performative contradiction when such a crime is the original sin of all language.”60 But Jay concludes his article by defending Habermas, saying that “Essentially reducing language to only its ‘deepest’ level and bracketing the other as insignificant is as impoverished as assuming no meaningful distinction can be made between levels at all.”61 Does this describe the two positions fairly, as one side that only insists on the deepest (here, we are to read “deepest” as “most contradictory” and “meaningless”) aspects of language, while the other only stresses its “meaningful” logical function? A puzzling conclusion, since the accusation of insignificance, uselessness, contradiction or nonsense is not coming from those who seek to expose the foundations of language but from those who seek to ignore the depth of complexity involved in speech and emphasize only the logocentric aspects of its laws. True to the form of an effective defence against performative contradiction, Jay, in the concluding sentence, seems to find in Habermas’ accusation of performative contradiction something like a saving power put there by the presence of the performative contradiction: “It may be one of the central lessons of Habermas’s remarkable oeuvre that only when conflicts become performative contradictions can their resolution be possible at all.”62 The following section will look at Derrida’s direct treatment of performative contradiction in Paper Machine, Politics of Friendship and Monolingualism of the Other. In the first text, Derrida does not defend against an accusation of performative contradiction, but instead locates one in Austin. In Politics of Friendship, he discusses Aristotle’s quote “O my friends, there is no friend” as a performative contradiction with significant implications and consequences



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for democracy and universality. With Aristotle, he is pretending to accuse the statement of a performative contradiction in order to prove that it is not one, but also to prove that even if it was one, it would be good because performative contradictions are productive. And finally in Monolingualism, Derrida begins with splitting his voice and asserting the accusation against himself. In Paper Machine, Derrida accuses Austin of committing a performative contradiction when discussing the topic of “excuses.” Rather than addressing the topic directly, Derrida says, Austin instead discusses the topic in a cursory way. “Austin begins his article by announcing ironically that he is not going to deal with the subject . . . Excuses . . . First sentence: ‘The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits.’ ”63 Derrida focuses on the contradiction of choosing the topic for a lecture and then rather than giving a lecture, excusing himself at the beginning of the lecture for not giving a lecture on said topic: So he excuses himself for not treating excuses seriously, and for this remaining in ignorance or leaving others that way on the subject of what apologizing or making excuses means. And this happens at the point when (a performative contradiction?) he begins by himself apologizing –​ or rather by pretending to, by making an excuse for not treating the subject of excuses.64

Having thus demonstrated that Austin is guilty of the very thing that Derrida and other post-​structuralists are accused of –​because making excuses for not talking about excuses is a performative contradiction, where what is said (not talking about excuses) is undercut by how it is said (making an excuse) –​he jokes about the consequence of this ironic turn: “As to the hypothesis that Austin of all people would have let himself be caught out in a ‘performative contradiction,’ when we couldn’t even have formulated the suspicion without him, then we beg leave to smile at this along with Austin’s ghost.”65 The joke is at Austin’s expense, and others who attempt to use performative contradiction as an accusation, but Derrida does not go further to develop anything like a rebuttal. “As if it were possible to overcome all ‘performative contradictions’! And as if it were possible to rule out the possibility of someone like Austin playing a little with fire!”66 In Politics of Friendship, Derrida reads Aristotle’s “O my friends, there is no friend” in the context of the accusation of performative contradiction: “Derrida identifies a performative contradiction interpreted by Nietzsche as an account of friendship in which there is always an internal pocket capable of destroying friendship itself.”67 He wonders whether this can be considered as one of those types of performative contradictions which are self-​negating or if it can instead be read as something more dynamic, something involving a third party. “In this rather chilling account of friendship and democracy, there





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is always some unspeakable secret that must never be touched upon, and on which the possibility rests as a foundational silence.”68 But if this account is chilling concerning democracy and friendship, as Mark Currie claims in “U is for Universals,” his contribution to the critical theory volume Glossalalia (which we will look at further in the following section on Butler) is also redemptive in its interpretation of the contradiction. Derrida asks: How will you affirm non-​contradictorily that having some friends is to have no friend? But this contradiction is shown, denounced, objectified, stated, perhaps played out, between two meanings of the word friend or two qualities (the plural and the singular); it in no way affects the act of uttering, as would a “performative contradiction.”69

The accusation of performative contradiction, as it is intended by Habermas and Hintikka, asserts that by uttering it, the speaker undermines their own words. What Derrida does here is illustrate that while a type of contradiction is occurring, it is not happening between two equal and opposite forces. The action and the manner of the action contradict each other and are therefore vexing to logical argumentation. “However vivacious and present it remains, this ‘performative contradiction’ could still be handled as a mere piece of nonsense, a logical absurdity.”70 In other words, contradictory claims can be dismissed as absurd, joking comments and not something to be taken seriously. Aristotle’s remarks are to be read as playful, not as a serious observation about the nature of friendship. “Indeed, in the best of cases, and if this does not distract us from the gravity of the political affair, as the playful exercise of a paradox, a pleasant fiction, a fabulous pedagogy.”71 What Derrida demonstrates through this exercise is a depth of analysis of a performative contradiction that transcends mere accusation and dismissal. He shows how a performative contradiction can be made productive: “Provided that it really is a question of a simple performative contradiction –​ that is, as long as and provided that the two enunciative structures are sufficiently symmetrical to be mutually opposed and contradictory.”72 He shows the conditions for a different, yet equally philosophically rigorous interpretation, requiring that the contradiction remains in its own realm of a mutually constitutive dialectic: “Provided, therefore, that they make up a sentence and belong to a presently homogeneous ensemble.”73 In this example, Derrida is about to argue that it is not a performative contradiction. The difference which prevents this sentence from being homogeneous is described by Derrida as the difference between the canonical and the recoil versions: “The first speaks to friends, the second of friends.”74 The canonical version addresses the friends and announces the desire for friendship, a desire which opens up the space for future friendship, even as the



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second part of the sentence appears to foreclose on the possibility of it. We might think of this as a performative call, interpellating friends. Having demonstrated how an accusation of performative contradiction might arise, and also why this is not an example of one, Derrida parodies the accusation against Aristotle, mimicking Habermas: Opening with the vocative O, the famous interpellation harbours what some would call a “performative contradiction” (how can you claim to address friends when you tell them there are no friends? A serious philosopher should not play such a game which, moreover, damages the transparency and necessary univocity in the communicational space of democracy, etc.).75

The “necessary univocity in the communicational space of democracy” is a direct reference to Habermas’ ideal speech theory, such as he describes in his essay devoted to discussing Derrida, “On Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: “Under the pressure for decisions proper to the communicative practice of everyday life, participants are dependent upon agreements that coordinate their actions.”76 This agreement is what deconstruction makes impossible, according to Habermas. Derrida argues that while the accusation might be brought against Aristotle, it ought not to be; in no way does it prevent the utterance from revealing something profound about the nature of friendship. On the contrary, the presence of the contradiction opens up the possibility of this revelation. “With all the reversals, all the revolutions it engenders ad infinitum, the above ‘performative contradiction’, as we have amply seen, has the advantage of quickening  –​ indeed, of dramatizing –​ a desire for friendship which, never renouncing what it says should be renounced, at least opens thought up to another friendship.”77 On the one hand, Derrida shows that a performative contradiction is not a foreclosure or a joke, not something that ought to be dismissed by a “serious philosopher,” but a productive site adding to the condition of possibility for discourse. On the other hand, the analysis of the structure of the utterance demonstrates that he is more proficient at the analysis of discourse, and the unpacking of the structure of speech acts and contradictions, than his accuser. For Derrida, the recoil version in Aristotle’s sentence is more descriptive, and we could read it as a constative speech act rather than a performative one: “As for the recoil version, it appears to remain merely reportive [constatif]. It is not an appeal or an address, but a declaration without an exclamation mark, a description or a definition. In a neutral tone, calmly, without a gaping-​mouthed clamour, it claims to speak to what is.”78 The voice shifts from the second person, addressing the audience, the friends, to a voice occupying the third person, making a general point about there being no





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friends. The utterance contains a split subject and a split voice: “It no doubt still defines the truth of a contradiction (he who has many friends in truth has none), but this contradiction is pointed out from the position of a third party; it is not a self-​contradiction which would come to torment the very act of enunciation.”79 This split subject, proven by the presence of the split voice, is the performative contradiction at the heart of subjectivity and is present not in the literal utterance, but in the splitting of the subject that it reveals. In this passage, Derrida highlights how such a statement, containing a contradiction, opens up a space for analysis which is able to reveal something about the topic it addresses directly, friendship, but also about the subject making the utterance. Habermas, on the other hand, reads the project of deconstruction as “a critique of style, in that [Derrida] finds something like indirect communications, by which the text itself denies its manifest content, in the rhetorical surplus of meaning inherent in the literary strata of texts that present themselves as nonlineary.”80 In this quotation, Habermas is referring to Derrida’s reading of Husserl, Saussure and Rousseau and claims that these readings contradict their intended meanings, “against the explicit interpretations of their authors.”81 Derrida achieves this forced internal contradiction because, “thanks to their rhetorical content, texts combed against the grain contradict what they state.”82 Habermas’ implication here is that the texts themselves are not inherently contradictory, but rather that the contradiction is something inserted by Derrida and other post-​structuralists, who read them in a way that is literary, not analytic. Therefore, for Habermas, the contradiction, and the accusation of contradiction, belongs to Derrida, not to the original authors, nor to language, which “must prove its worth” in the context of real-​world events that necessitate communication: “It is in relation to this need for standing the test within ordinary practice that one may distinguish, with Austin and Searle, between ‘usual’ and ‘parasitic’ uses of language.”83 Yet this accusation that Derrida somehow tries to avoid real-​world problems which necessitate communication, or that he inserts contradiction where there is none, is hard to support in the case of the previous passage in Politics of Friendship –​which is clearly not a straightforward text that lends itself to easy analysis –​or with the example in Monolingualism of the Other, which is the final passage I will present here from Derrida. “Yes, I only have one language, yet it is not mine”84 is the statement that opens Derrida’s discussion of his relationship to the French language as an Algerian Jew whose first language was certainly not French –​and yet French is his “only” language. This alludes to a complex set of historical and political circumstances and relationships and is in every way grounded in the type of real-​world example that calls for communicative action. Yet Derrida, unlike Habermas, does not insist that a discussion requires consensus from the start,



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perhaps most especially because “real-​world” conflicts start in dissent rather than consent. For Habermas, language is expected to bear the burden of universal agreement, which will help smooth the rough edges of actual conflict. But there seems to be little room for entertaining the possibility that this conflict might manifest itself in language as well –​ that the political and the linguistic might be more closely linked than such a univocal speech theory presumes. As soon as Derrida makes this statement about the foreignness of one’s own language, he immediately splits his voice to parrot the Habermasian accusation listed above: “You are putting forward a sort of solemn attestation that stupidly drags itself by the heels into a logical contradiction.”85 Here, Derrida performs the accusation of performative contradiction against himself, using the voice of the other. “A scholar would perhaps diagnose something worse in a case so serious, which professes, on its own, to be incurable; on its own, your sentence expirates itself in a logical contradiction heightened by a performative or pragmatic contradiction.”86 And the reply comes back from Derrida, to the accusers: “To whom is the reproach of ‘performative contradiction’ often hastily addressed nowadays? To those who are wondering, asking themselves questions, and sometimes making it their duty to tie themselves into knots with it.”87 Derrida’s responses to being accused of performative contradiction illustrate clearly that he does not grant this accusation the authority and philosophical rigour it wants to claim for itself, nor does he see in it anything like a legitimate challenge to his work. His reply to Austin in Paper Machine shows how easily this argument can be turned on the accusers. The discussion about friendship shows how performative contradiction can be used as a tool for interpretation, and this present example has Derrida showing how to use performative contradiction to discuss problems where language and politics intersect. The accusation of performative contradiction as self-​negating, undercutting or theoretically compromising is openly dismissed: This childish armoury comprises one single, weak polemical device. Its mechanism amounts roughly to this: Ah! So you ask yourself questions about truth. Well, to that very extent, you do not yet believe in truth; you are contesting the possibility of truth. Come on! You are a skeptic, a relativist, a nihilist; you are not a serious philosopher! If you continue, you will be placed in a department of rhetoric or literature.88

To foreclose the possibility of seriousness as revealed through contradiction asserts that the ground upon which truth rests must never be challenged. The task of those “serious philosophers” who dismiss contradiction as trivial is to defend the truth that is already presumed, through logic which can never





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be questioned. When it is, the response is a string of value-​based accusations and personal insults. Of all the utterances of performative contradiction, Judith Butler goes furthest in putting the concept to work on the task of interpreting concrete political events. In Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords, Mark Currie’s essay “U is for Universals” discusses her work on the topic of performative contradiction and parodic performance and questions whether it might have universal applicability in spite of Butler’s treatment of only specific examples. Currie quotes Ernesto Laclau’s thoughts on this topic from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: “One of Butler’s most interesting contributions to social theory is her notion of ‘parodic performance.’ Butler has applied her notion only to very precise examples, and has not universalized her own notion.”89 As the discussion in the previous section on Habermas indicates, the universalization of a concept, especially one rooted in a divided subject, opens itself up to accusations of internal inconsistency. But, for post-​structuralist thinkers, this inconsistency is itself the condition of possibility for the universal. Laclau continues, “But my optimistic reading of her texts is that this generalization, if it is fully realized, can tell us something really important concerning the structure of social life.”90 The implication that this concept –​ which is clearly present in the examples Butler uses, which are not limited to the subject as such but patterns of subjectivity in general –​ can reveal something about the broader structure of social patterns and actions is at the heart of this book. That something which would be internal to social life as well as individual life is not merely the performative but what goes alongside it, a type of internal rupture, which manifests itself sometimes as a contradiction and, at other times, as a surplus: “My argument would be as follows: if a parodic performance means the creation of a distance between the action actually being performed and the rule being enacted, and if the instance of application of the rule is internal to the rule itself, parody is constitutive of all social action.”91 Here, a correlation emerges between the parodic and the contradictory performance in Butler’s work. If the parodic is a distancing between the action and the content of the enactment, which is internal to the content, one can see how performative contradiction is an example of this parody. Essentially, a thing is being distanced from itself through its enactment. The action performs the distancing, but the structure remains entirely internal so that it manifests as an act of self-​distancing through enactment. Laclau is referring to the parodic, especially as it is detailed in Butler’s early work on gender (“I describe and propose a set of parodic practices based in a performative theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame”92), and Currie’s decision to discuss it



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with her writings on performative contradiction is appropriate. The purpose of his argument –​the possible universalization of these concepts –​is to make this link to performative contradiction a concrete tool for broad political analysis: “What would the universalization of this notion of parodic performance or that of performative contradiction entail? My own view is that this question is the real intersection of political and aesthetic dealings with the issue of universality.”93 This intersection is precisely where the project of analysing the Romanian Revolution through such a structure occurs. The question that Currie forces into consideration is the relevance and value of this paradigm in a broader field. The universal applicability of a concept often acts as a litmus test in philosophical discussion, as is evidenced by the entire debate around performative contradiction. Currie argues in favour of its universalization: “And my answer to it would be, somewhat against Butler and Derrida, that there can be a kind of formal or abstract logic for performative contradiction capable of universalizing its significance.”94 Butler’s and Derrida’s treatment of the concept of performative contradiction reveals not so much a denial of its universal applicability, but rather that there is a chasm under the universal, that the universal is not internally consistent. Consequently, the universal is guilty of a performative contradiction, which is what redeems it and also keeps it from being universal. The impossibility of the universal is the only possible universal. Currie attempts to ground the universal in a stable, structured schematic which is widely applicable. The argument which he sets up is that performative contradiction reveals a tension between the universal and the particular, and this tension threatens the logical structure which underpins signification: “Fictional narratives are the most complex expressions that we have of logical difficulties in the relationship between particular and universal significance, particularly in those cases where narrative self-​consciousness and the performative contradiction seem to demolish any formal logic which might describe them.”95 The seeming destruction of this formal logic is the threat that compels the impulse to dismiss instances of performative contradiction as meaningless: “But this doesn’t mean that there is no formal logic. It means that there is a formal logic more complicated and more contradictory than the models we already have. Criticism . . . should be more abstract than the particularities it describes.”96 What Currie misses about Butler’s use of performative contradiction and the question of universalization that Habermas insists on is that, for her, the universal as such is problematic. In order for the universal to truly be universal, it must also perform a contradiction because it must include its own opposite –​ the particular. The universal cannot be such if it is exclusionary; yet identity theory insists on sameness and consistency. As such, no universal will ever be a universal as long as it has an outside, and once the outside is





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incorporated into the regime of identity  –​ once absolute alterity has been incorporated into sameness –​the boundaries of categorization between inside and outside are nullified. As we will see from Butler, the nature of universality is partly what is at stake here, and not a resolution to be sought, should it come in the form of a univocal authority: “This is what some would call a performative contradiction: an act of speech that in its very acting produces a meaning that undercuts the one it purports to make.”97 Butler summarizes Habermas’ project for universalizing an ideal speech scenario, and it becomes clear why performative contradiction threatens such a project. The universal collapses under the weight of its own claim by absorbing all difference and sublimating its own boundaries. The other thing that becomes clear is what conditions are required for an ideal speech act to occur. “What might guarantee a communicative situation in which no one’s speech disables or silences another’s speech . . . ?”98 Butler’s argument is that such an environment would be totalitarian, with a structurally enforced hierarchical homogeneity. “This seems to be the very project in which Habermas and others are engaged –​an effort to devise a communicative speech situation in which speech acts are grounded in consensus where no speech act is permissible that performatively refutes another’s ability to consent through speech.”99 The essence of the conflict between performative contradiction and universal communicative speech is that the prior renders the latter impossible. As long as meaning is unstable and prone to collapse, such instability threatens the project of communication. Furthermore, the ability to cause the instability to emerge through deliberately causing a performative contradiction through analysis  –​ which is what Habermas accuses Derrida of doing to Rousseau, Husserl, etc. when “he compels [these] texts ... to confess their guilt”100  –​ amounts to a violation of their speech. For Habermas, this violation is what a censure on performative contradiction would prevent. As Butler points out, Habermas insists that reaching consensus requires that words be correlated with universal meanings: “the productivity of the process of understanding remains unproblematic only as long as all the participants stick to the reference point of possibly achieving a mutual understanding in which the same utterances are assigned the same meaning.”101

The problem with demanding universal consensus is that such a demand points to a power with the ability to determine and enforce this consensus, and the involvement of such a sovereign apparatus is where Butler inserts her first critique. This entails questioning the nature of the community whose consensus is being asked –​ “But are we, whoever ‘we’ are, the kind of community in which such meanings could be established once and for all?”102 –​where the implication is that such consensus threatens to assimilate



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the diversity of the community: “Is there no permanent diversity within the semantic field that constitutes an irreversible situation for political theorizing?”103 The ultimate threat for Butler is neither a lack of agreement nor the instability of communication, but rather the force which seeks to absorb and assimilate difference: “Who stands above the interpretive fray in a position to ‘assign’ the same utterances the same meanings? And why is it that the threat posed by such an authority is deemed less serious than the one posed by equivocal interpretations left unconstrained?”104 Having questioned the silent authoritarian underpinnings of Habermas’ project, upon which his accusation against post-​ structuralism is based, Butler then goes on to demonstrate what performative contradiction looks like when what is being undermined by such a gesture is not the strength of one’s own philosophical argument, but rather an external authority, such as the one which threatens to eliminate difference. In this example, performative contradiction acts as a tool in the hands of the disenfranchised who are excluded from the universal (nation state) and who destabilize their position through laying claim to the universal. This reversal is itself a performative contradiction against the accusation of performative contradiction and serves as a demonstration of democratic political action: Consider, for example, the situation in which subjects who have been excluded from enfranchisement by existing conventions governing the exclusionary definition of the universal seize the language of enfranchisement and set into motion a “performative contradiction,” claiming to be covered by that universal, thereby exposing the contradictory character of previous conventional formulations of the universal. This kind of speech appears at first to be impossible or contradictory, but it constitutes one way to expose the limits of current notions of universality, and to constitute a challenge to those existing standards to become more expansive and inclusive. In this sense, being able to utter the performative contradiction is hardly a self-​defeating enterprise; on the contrary, performative contradiction is crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of historical standards of universality proper to the futural movement of democracy itself.105

Through Butler’s application, performative contradiction becomes a rhetorical device which exposes the fractured foundation of the universal category by highlighting the edges of that category. This is precisely the task it performs for the discussion surrounding the authenticity of the Romanian Revolution. If the concept of revolution cannot accommodate the events in Romania in late 1989, then the concept of revolution needs to be challenged. Indeed, Romania troubles the concept of revolution, just as it troubles the concept of communism: “The task of cultural translation is one that is necessitated precisely by that performative contradiction that takes place when one with no authorization to speak within and as the universal nevertheless lays





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claim to that term.”106 The core of the argument, at least in its application to political analysis, points to a foundational problem at the heart of the nation state and asserts that this problem can be readily observed when paying attention to who is granted rights under the law and how. “Or, perhaps more appropriately phrased [performative contradiction that takes place when] one who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split situation of being at once authorized and de-​authorized (so much for delineating a neat ‘site of enunciation’).”107 Butler does not try to justify or defend performative contradiction. Instead, she immediately puts it to work and inverts the example. Rather than a situation where I undermine myself by negating myself, I undermine the system that negates me by doubly negating myself. This example is applied in Who Sings the Nation-​State? to interpreting a recent political event where illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States sang the American national anthem in Spanish as part of a protest seeking political rights: “I want to suggest that this is precisely the kind of performative contradiction that leads not to impasse but to forms of insurgency.”108 They petitioned the state from the position of being excluded from the state through seizing and translating the language of the state. “In the middle of the anthem we hear the words ‘somos equales’: we are equal. One has to pause and wonder: does this speech act –​ that not only declares boldly the equality of the we but also demands a translation to be understood  –​ not install the task of translation at the heart of the nation?”109 Translation steps in as a form of distance, representing the gap which renders universal speech acts structurally, if not impossible, then at the very least complex to the point where their enactment requires the acknowledgement of an inherent distance: “A certain distance or fissure becomes the condition of possibility of equality, which means that equality is not a matter of extending or augmenting the homogeneity of the nation.”110 This distance, which was initially discussed as the defining feature of parodic performance, emerges here as the necessary component required for democracy to emerge, not as a finished state, but as a perpetual process of self-​distancing. Performative contradiction can withstand the criticisms and arguments accusing it of a philosophical error through exposing the paradox which rests at the heart of subjectivity. Furthermore, the structure of performative contradiction that reveals itself as a self-​reflexivity constitutive of consciousness underpins the ground from which a performative contradiction can be made, calling into doubt the stability of any ground upon which an accuser hopes to stand. The universal emerges only as a chasm which points to its own limitations, over and against an aim of totalitarian hegemony which could only be accomplished through the suppression of difference, and is anti-​democratic at its core.



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Real-​ world events that require urgent political analysis, such as the Romanian Revolution, resist the tools of interpretation which rely on an unproblematic univocity, which lead not towards a depth of understanding but an easy explanation which can quickly be exposed as inadequate. A sign of the inadequacy of an analytic tool emerges, in this example, in the form of accusations of inadequacy towards the events in question. The following chapters will take a closer look at this phenomenon which, appropriately, mirrors the structure of performative contradiction. The instances which this book goes on to analyse are not accusations of performative contradictions but accusations of bad faith. Rather than accuse the accusers of performative contradictions, by arguing that their accusations of bad faith are issued in bad faith, I will demonstrate that the presence of performative contradictions integral to the political movements in Romania specifically provokes these accusations. More importantly, a measure of internal consistency, or authenticity, is not necessarily the most productive path of analysis, and what Romania, through its various inconsistencies, reveals about the limits of revolution and communism proves far more significant for a discussion of these vital topics. The special attention Romania has received reveals not that the revolution ought to be disregarded, but precisely that it troubles the concept of revolution, just as it troubles the concept of communism. These concepts were troubled always-​already from within. Romania merely draws attention to this troubling and threatens to expose it. What emerges, especially in the next three chapters which deal specifically with concrete accusations, is that Romania threatens to expose the inadequacy of the paradigms which are used to critique its authenticity. The latter chapters reveal that the site of the revolution is an internal displacement which renders the univocity of action impossible. Revolution is not a univocity of action, which an accusation of inauthenticity presumes. Revolution is the moment of acknowledging the impossibility of univocity. The performative contradiction is this moment of self-​othering encountering itself, and this is the moment of democracy. NOTES 1. Martin Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists,” in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. A. Honneth et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 275. 2. Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71 (1962):  3–​32, accessed 11 May 2016, doi:  10.2307/​ 2183678.





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3. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 265–​266. 4. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 80–​81. 5. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 81. 6. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 81. 7. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 81. 8. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 81. 9. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 166. 10. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 167. 11. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xi. 12. Critchley, Continental Philosophy, xi. 13. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 167. 14. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 156. 15. Start, for example, with Heidegger and Nazism by Victor Farías, which in 1987 started this debate. 16. Critchley, Continental Philosophy, xi. 17. Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 26. 18. Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 26. 19. Donghui Han, “Performative Contradiction and the Regrounding of Philosophical Paradigms,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China, Vol. 3 (2008): 607–​621, accessed 11 May 2016. 20. Han, “Performative Contradiction,” 607. 21. Julius R. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Some Reflections on Mr. Hintikka’s Article,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71 (1962): 483–​491, accessed 11 May 2016, doi:  10.2307/​2183460. 22. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 23. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 24. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 25. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 26. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 27. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 28. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 489. 29. Weinberg, “Cogito, Ergo Sum,” 488. 30. Mark Currie, “U is for Universals,” in Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords, eds. Julian Wolfreys, Harun Karim Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 299. 31. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005) xiii–​xiv. 32. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, xiii. 33. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), original italics, 26–​36.



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34. Han, “Performative Contradiction,” 614. 35. Han, “Performative Contradiction,” 614. 36. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, xiv. 37. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, xiv. 38. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, xvi. 39. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 266. 40. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 266. 41. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 42. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 43. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 44. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 45. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 46. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 47. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 268. 48. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 269. 49. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 269. 50. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 269. 51. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 86. 52. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 86. 53. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 98. 54. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 98. 55. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 119–​120. 56. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 120. 57. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 120. 58. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 120. 59. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 271. 60. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 272. 61. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 273. 62. Jay, “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction,” 277. 63. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 75. 64. Derrida, Paper Machine, 76. 65. Derrida, Paper Machine, 76. 66. Derrida, Paper Machine, 76. 67. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 306. 68. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 306. 69. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verson, 2006), 234. 70. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 234. 71. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 234. 72. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 234. 73. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 234. 74. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 212.





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75. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 212. 76. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 198. 77. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 213. 78. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 213. 79. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 213. 80. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 189. 81. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 189. 82. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 189. 83. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 199. 84. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2. 85. Derrida, Monolingualism, 2–​3. 86. Derrida, Monolingualism, 2–​3. 87. Derrida, Monolingualism, 4. 88. Derrida, Monolingualism, 4. 89. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 304. 90. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 304. 91. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 304. 92. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxxi. 93. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 304. 94. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 304. 95. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 306. 96. Currie, “U is for Universals,” 306. 97. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 84. 98. Butler, Excitable Speech, 86. 99. Butler, Excitable Speech, 86. 100. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 189. 101. Butler, Excitable Speech, 86–​87. 102. Butler, Excitable Speech, 87. 103. Butler, Excitable Speech, 87. 104. Butler, Excitable Speech, 87. 105. Butler, Excitable Speech, 89–​90. 106. Butler, Excitable Speech, 91. 107. Butler, Excitable Speech, 91. 108. Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-​State? Language, Politics, Belonging (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), 63. 109. Butler, Who Sings the Nation-​State? 63. 110. Butler, Who Sings the Nation-​State? 63.





Chapter Two

The Performance of Authenticity Philosophers Question the Revolution

This chapter begins the discussion of performative contradiction specifically in relation to concrete statements made about Romania. It breaks away from the structure of ­chapter  1, which was focused on the concept, and deals with accusations of inauthenticity, as well as introducing some of the historical details surrounding the revolution. The initial goal, now that the philosophical context has been introduced, is to establish the historical context and then to recount how specific members of the philosophical community have reflected on the historical elements. This chapter will demonstrate the relevance of the philosophical debate in the context of the political events, and it will also hold the philosophical readings accountable to history. The objective is not to turn the accusation back on the accusers, though this is an inherent component of the trope of performative contradiction. The aim is to open up the dialogue around the Romanian Revolution, which has been closed by these accusations, by pointing out the ways in which both the events, and the accusations, are internally troubled by the presence of contradictions. Furthermore, the hope is to learn from this structure, so that the dialogue can move beyond the authentic/​inauthentic dichotomy to a productive space in which political aims are informed by philosophical insights provided by the presence of such a self-​troubling structure, which, should it remain unacknowledged or dismissed, threatens to overthrow the efficacy of any revolutionary objective which relies on a claim of unified action. The concrete example discussed in this chapter will be the falsification of images of dead bodies, produced during the revolution, which triggered the accusations of bad faith from critics. A performative contradiction will reveal the performative nature of the image and how its power of signification, through manipulation, can reveal more about the truth of the dead 45



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bodies –​which is to say, the truth of the death toll under Ceauşescu –​than an image that has not been manipulated could reveal. To quote the famous saying by Picasso, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”1 Timişoara is one of Romania’s most multicultural cities, located on the far Western border with Hungary, and the site of the first full-​blown anti-​ Ceauşescu protest in late 1989. The protest was triggered by an ethnic Hungarian priest, László Tőkés, who openly spoke up against the regime and, consequently, was being threatened by the government with relocation to a remote, non-​Hungarian part of Romania. He protested, and his congregation joined him in support. Gradually, over the days between 15 and 17 December, many others joined the protest, which gradually changed from siding with the priest to becoming a general anti-​government demonstration. There was a communication blackout between Timişoara and the rest of the country in order to prevent news of the demonstrations from spreading to other regions. Ceauşescu issued this order, fearing that telephone contact or media coverage would lead to infecting the rest of the population with unrest. The Romanian media did not report on the protest that began in Timişoara on 15 December 1989. Instead, calls went out to the nation to resist imperialist and fascist forces working to undermine the great Romanian state. Accustomed to decoding state propaganda, this message and the absence of coverage was precisely what the people needed to confirm rumours that something was actually happening. When Timişoara lost telephone connection with the rest of the nation on 18 December, all suspicions were confirmed. What ensued afterwards was a confusing set of attempts to represent to the outside world, and to the rest of the nation, what was happening, which included media footages of piles of bodies and an exaggerated death toll. The latter is the starting point for this chapter, which deals with critiques and accusations which arose, specifically, as a result of the footage of dead bodies in Timişoara. In his book Theft of a Nation: Romania since Communism, Tom Gallagher outlines the general succession of events and calls attention to the comparison between Timişoara and Tiananmen Square as an example of how bad it could have been, and was thought to have been, in the early days of the protests. He describes the hundreds of protestors who supported László Tőkés in his resistance against the forcible relocation to a rural area where he would be culturally isolated. Calling for the ethnic solidarity of the Hungarian community in resisting the state was one of the more serious accusations against him, alongside his calling attention to abuses of power by the Ceauşescu regime. What began as a small gathering of a few hundred members of the congregation, lighting candles and holding hands around the building which housed Tőkés, grew by several hundred more when Romanians and Serbs joined in. By 16 December, thousands of protestors gathered, no longer at





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the church but in front of the Romanian Communist Party headquarters for the city of Timişoara. On the evening of 17 December, orders came down to the local law enforcement branches to disband the demonstrators through force, and shootings began: “A determined stand at this point by the security forces against anti-​regime demonstrators would probably have produced a death-​toll exceeding the official casualty-​rate of just over 1,000 killed, making the Tiananmen Square repression of June 1989 in Peking appear minor by comparison.”2 Gallagher’s referencing of Tiananmen Square should be understood in the context of the audacity of violating the state’s censure on protest and the cataclysmic cultural shift that such a mass public action heralded. The rhetoric of the state’s infallibility was culturally enforced, absolutely vital to the ongoing existence of the regime, and had gone on for nearly three decades by 1989. Breaking the silence publicly was an enormous step, especially given the government’s track record of physical abuse towards dissidents. Gallagher’s observation points out that if the military had in fact followed the orders they had received, to forcibly end the protest, the result would have been an astronomical death toll. This is the reason why, during the early days of the revolution, Timişoara was compared to Tiananmen Square and was thought to have exceeded it in death count, which was at one point reported to be as high as 60,000. Bernard Stiegler, in Echographies of Television, discusses how the inflated body count in Timişoara was one of the root causes for doubting the authenticity of the Romanian Revolution and how this doubt is inextricably bound to the crucial role played by the televised footage of dead bodies: “The role of television in the 1989 Romanian ‘revolution’ remains the object of intense scrutiny and debate.”3 This shows Stiegler’s resistance to lending credibility to the revolution through placing the word in scare quotes. He does so for several reasons, based on a set of logical  –​ yet nonetheless false  –​ deductions. Since the death toll was inflated by Romanians, it leads one to conclude that it must not have been a truly serious incident because if it had been, an exaggeration of the events would not have been necessary. Furthermore, the seriousness of an event such as this is best measured in dead bodies, and since those have been proved to be insufficient, and in need of exaggeration, we can safely assume that nothing of significance actually occurred: “Among the most critical and contested events was the televising of an apparent massacre of antigovernment demonstrators by former communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s security forces in Timişoara, on December 16, 1989, in which it was initially reported 40,000 to 60,000 people had been killed.”4 The proof of the actual death toll never emerged, but a French journalist reported in Le Monde that the footage aired contained bodies which were not recently deceased, but in onset rigor mortis: “Considerable evidence emerged, after



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the fact, suggesting that this and other massacres had been carefully staged, and, in some cases, simply invented, and that the so-​called revolution was not a popular uprising but a coup.”5 Referring to the revolution as a coup is now commonplace. Another version of this dismissal is to say that it was somewhat more like a film, aimed at representing the revolution convincingly to the Romanian public and the outside world. There was a revolution, but it happened only on screen, not in actuality. In Videograms of a Revolution (1992), filmmakers Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică compiled footage of the Romanian Revolution, including live broadcasts aired during the event. When watching Videograms, it is difficult to shake the feeling that one is watching an action film. In the opening scene, a wounded young woman is being moved to a new hospital bed following two surgeries. She is preoccupied with the camera, asking if it’s recording with both image and sound. This incongruity ought to hit a viewer particularly hard, given that she should be more concerned with her wounds than her message for the camera. The fact that she is not points to her urgency at communication but also puts the authenticity of her wounds in question. Her anxiety is palpable as she addresses her viewers. What is not clear is whether her anxiety comes from the conflict and the injuries she has sustained or from her performance on screen. With great theatricality, she delivers her message of solidarity with the revolutionaries.6 Later in the film, the Ceauşescus have realized the threat to their lives and are attempting to flee, with revolutionaries in hot pursuit through the Central Committee building. The Ceauşescus head for the roof, and their helicopter is taking them away just as the revolutionaries emerge on the rooftop.7 And viewers also get to see behind-​the-​scenes action as one lucky cameraman is allowed into the meeting room where the name of the new government is being decided.8 Such rare footage is truly remarkable. After all, how many emerging governments allow their most pivotal decision-​making moments to be filmed? With all the reality-​TV-​ness of Big Brother (pun intended), and all the grit of a war film, viewers get to witness the birth of a new democracy. In Echographies of Television, Derrida comments on this phenomenon, of the television image’s ability to generate its own legitimacy: “When we watch television, we have the impression that something is happening only once: this is not going to happen again, we think, it is ‘living,’ live, real time, whereas we also know, on the other hand, it is being produced by the strongest, the most sophisticated repetition machines.”9 We know television is manipulative, and yet we cannot help ourselves but to believe it. Farocki and Ujică’s Videograms is, in fact, a meta-​documentary. The “live” televising of the revolution was itself the documentary. They then documented that first documentary, which included the footage of the dead bodies in question: “One sees (one believes one sees!) live, immediately, right





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away, without delay, but also –​or at least this is what one believes –​without any intervention or without any possible manipulation.”10 Derrida’s reading helps explain why the footage from Romania was initially, immediately, believed, but also what happened after the fact, when it emerged that the death toll was so disappointingly low. There had not in fact been a bloody massacre of innocent protestors (or at least not enough of a massacre) in the streets of Timişoara, and the new “democratic” government was composed entirely of former members of the old communist government. These realizations produced a sense of profound disillusionment and led to some of the readings cited above, interpreting the events as a coup, or, worse, an elaborately orchestrated television show. Bernard Stiegler discusses the nature of the image and the problematic dimension it brought to representing Romania’s revolution both to itself and to the outside world. Despite being aware of media bias or digital manipulation, Stiegler argues that the inherent characteristic of the image is to contain believability within itself. This trait stems from the analogue photo but carries on into the digital realm. The problem boils down to one simple equation: seeing is believing. The rule is that every analog photo presupposes that what was photographed was (real). Manipulation is on the contrary the essence, that is to say, the rule of the digital photo. And this possibility, which is essential to the digital photographic image, of not having been, inspires fear –​for this image, at the same time that it is infinitely manipulable, remains a photo, it preserves something of the this was within itself . . . And yet, well before the digital photo existed, there were exploitations of this “accidental” potential for manipulation of the analog photo, and these exploitations have become generalized in the mass media in recent years. They have become manifest and massive, but without for all that effacing the this was effect. In a doctored analog photo, there is something of the this was (it is essential to every photo). I can never simply say: This was not. I have to say: This was, but there is something, however, that isn’t quite right.11

What separates the analogue from the digital is the negative, which remains tied to the real, even when the developed photo can be subjected to manipulation. Baudrillard discusses the same problem in The Illusion of the End, where he argues that in the presence of digital technology, there is no longer any meaningful referent present: “Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events.”12



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Stiegler and Baudrillard both lay claim to a past when the image was pure and could be trusted, when it was generated by a negative, which was a true reflection of something real. The fact that it was exposed to manipulation even then does not detract from its originary trustworthiness, nor does the fact that the digital image shares certain characteristics with the analogue lend it any credibility. Television and digital media destroyed this reference to the actual and became purely self-​referential. This is the explanation for how Romania managed to televise a revolution that did not actually take place. The “this was” effect, a residue from the analogue image, is responsible for why people believed that these images represented something real, when in fact they were entirely staged. Agamben also shares this view, and in Means without End: Notes on Politics, he emphasizes the link between the rise of the media and the decline of democracy, which is one of the central concerns to the discussions of technology and the televising of the Romanian Revolution. After observing that media rules public opinion, and that the West has already forsaken democracy in this process, Agamben dubs Timişoara as “the Auschwitz of the age of the spectacle”: For the first time in the history of humankind, corpses that had just been buried or lined up on the morgue’s tables were hastily exhumed and tortured in order to simulate, in front of the video cameras, the genocide that legitimized the new regime. What the entire world was watching live on television, thinking it was the real truth, was in reality the absolute nontruth; and although the falsification appeared to be sometimes quite obvious, it was nevertheless legitimized as true by the media’s world system, so that it would be clear that the true was, by now, nothing more than a moment within the necessary movement of the false. In this way, truth and falsity become indistinguishable from each other and the spectacle legitimized itself solely through the spectacle.13

The complicity of the new regime with the old, in the literal form of the same people transplanting themselves from one administration to the other, is entirely uncontested, and rightfully so. Not only were key political ­figures –​ with a few notable exceptions, like Ceauşescu himself  –​ able to remain in power and reinvent themselves in new roles, but the various branches of the repressive state apparatus were also able to carry on, undisturbed. Žižek shares a humorous anecdote about a friend’s encounter with the Securitate, two years after the revolution. In 1991, after the anti-​Ceauşescu coup staged by the nomenklatura itself, the Romanian secret police apparatus, of course, remained fully operative, pursuing its business as usual. However, the effort of the secret police to project a new, kinder, image of itself, in step with the new “democratic” times, resulted





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in some uncanny episodes. An American friend of mine, who was in Bucharest on a Fulbright scholarship at the time, called home a week after his arrival and told his girlfriend that he was now in a poor but friendly country, where people were pleasant and eager to learn. After he hung up, the phone immediately rang; he picked up the receiver, and a voice told him in slightly awkward English that this was the secret police officer whose duty it was to listen to his phone conversation, and he wanted to thank him for the nice things he had said about Romania –​he wished him a pleasant stay and said goodbye.14

Such tales further confirm the prevalent suspicion that nothing actually happened in December of 1989, except for an elaborate television show put on by the administration meant to fool the world, get rid of Ceauşescu and rebrand itself as a democracy. The public in Romania generally get swept up in this interpretation as being either entirely complicit with the same bad faith agenda, aimed at the West, or duped into participation through their ignorance. So far, there has been no room for an interpretation which suggests that the revolution could have been entirely genuine and staged. Perhaps this kind of reading would require entertaining the possibility that the identity and agenda of a nation might be split and that several sides might get what they want, even when those desires are contradictory. For example, what about the possibility that the revolution was real, the massacre was real, the images televised were real, and Ceauşescu essentially remained in power, in spite of his death, in the form of a new government? This would amount to a performative contradiction, because it would have been the performance of the revolution that facilitated the continuance of the old regime. Without the revolution, Romania would have remained in its (presumably) unsustainable economic and cultural isolation, which Ceauşescu had pushed to such limits that it is hard to imagine what might have happened if he had simply passed out of power peacefully and been succeeded by his son Nicu, or a similar candidate. How long can an unsustainable situation be sustained? If Romania is any indication, quite a while, because it is presently being sustained, in spite of it having come to an end. This also amounts to a performative contradiction. The end of the regime is what allowed it to continue. Had there not been a revolution, perhaps it would have looked like North Korea, where Kim Jong-​il succeeded his father, Kim Il-​sung, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-​un. Or perhaps it would have looked more like Russia, where Gorbachev renounced communism and Putin continues to be democratically re-​elected. In a sense, this is close to what happened because the Romanian Communist Party was dissolved along with Ceauşescu. Ceauşescu was unwilling to renounce communism, unwilling to admit that it was dead, when all around Romania, it was dying. So it was necessary to stage a revolution, which would perform the act of renunciation



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in his stead. Baudrillard comments on this renunciation: “Gorbachev is giving up Marxism! Fantastic! But what does ‘giving up’ mean? Can you give up Marxism in the way you give up tobacco or alcohol?”15 Ceauşescu was forced to give up Marxism by a firing squad so that the Socialist Democratic Party of Romania could be free to reinvent itself as the Social Democratic Party, which was founded by Ion Iliescu, the first president after Ceausescu and his one-​time heir apparent. This new Social Democratic Party continues to be the dominant political party in Romania today. Iliescu’s long-​term involvement in the communist party, prior to the revolution, is another reason why many question the legitimacy of the “post” in the post-​communist government. One avenue of critique is to say that the government remained communist, evidenced by the fact that all the new members of government were the old members of government. Another avenue of critique is to say that none of them were ever communist to begin with. This is the path taken by Alain Badiou. In “Philosophy and the Death of Communism,” Badiou argues that “[t]‌he simulacra of the ‘Romanian Revolution,’ now recognized, also gives us a paradigm. In truth, what has occurred is nothing more than this: what was subjectively dead must enter into the State of death, and finally be recognized there as such.”16 This echoes some of Baudrillard’s points, who states in “The Timişoara Massacre” that “The Gulf War and the events in Eastern Europe are among those quasi-​unreal events which have less meaning in themselves than in the fact that they put an end to things which long ago ceased to have meaning (communism in the Eastern bloc countries, the Cold War for the Gulf).”17 For Badiou, it is a matter of dismissing the events in Romania as merely internally orchestrated by the government, lacking any authentic revolutionary quality, and thereby not being worthy of the name “event.” He argues that the participation of some protestors hardly qualifies as a genuine revolution, and that the spirit of communism was already long dead in Romania prior to the events of 1989.18 Badiou asserts that it is possible to remain loyal to the spirit of communism, faithful to the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the first communist revolution), because there the event can be separated out from the corruption of its state projection.19 It is not clear why this exception cannot also be made for Romania, why it is not possible to separate out the authenticity of the revolutionary intentions of the protestors in Timişoara (and Bucharest) from the politicians who were poised to invent or reassert positions of power in the new government. For Badiou, this might be the case presumably because he does not think enough people participated in the revolution, based on his standards of critical mass participation. Perhaps he does not think that enough people died, and perhaps the staging of the bodies in Timişoara contributes to this impression. If this is the case, then the connection between authenticity and a certain demand





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for blood ought to be explored because it is not necessarily clear why the number of dead should be synonymous with the eventfulness of an event, nor is it clear why exceptions can be made for the authenticity of the Bolshevik Revolution but not the Romanian one, other than that Badiou wants to remain faithful to one and not the other. What is clear is that the decision to stage the bodies indicates an awareness of the correlation between the standards of authenticity and a large death toll. Of all the critiques cited above, Baudrillard’s reading comes closest to an explanation that accommodates for the possibility that Romanians were perhaps not simply acting in bad faith, though he does not go very far with this concession. His reading, through the whole of The Illusion of the End, oscillates between damning critiques of Western culture and accusations of manipulative, infectious and ultimately destructive infiltrations from the East. It is hard to ascertain whether he is truly convinced that the East is committed to the destruction of the West at any cost or if he is merely parodying the worst fears of some Westerners. He will, for example, invoke Dracula20 and writes that “Evil was visible, opaque, localized in the territories of the East. We have exorcized it, liberated it, liquidated it. But has it, for all that, ceased to be evil? Not at all: it has become fluid, liquid, interstitial, viral.”21 Then, a few pages later, he will say that Romanians were not acting in bad faith and are merely part of a larger system, beyond their control, which determines the conditions of their participation: “We do the Romanians an injustice when we accuse them of manipulation and bad faith. No one is responsible. It is all an effect of the infernal cycle of credibility. The actors and the media sensed obscurely that the events in Eastern Europe had to be given credibility, that the revolution had to be given credibility by an extra dose of dead bodies.”22 His reading appears to be quite charitable at times. The Dracula reference is hard to justify, but, to his credit, the West receives comparable treatment: “Democracy itself (a proliferating form, the lowest common denominator of all our liberal societies), this planetary democracy of the Rights of Man, is to real freedom what Disneyland is to the imaginary. In relation to the modern demand for freedom, it offers the same characteristics as recycled paper.”23 Baudrillard is openly critical of both democracy in the West and communism in the East. He does appear to lean, at times, towards fairly brutal readings of Romania, but they are kept in the context of repeated assaults on the West and painted as part of a broader framework of history –​he employs analogies from physics  –​ where the end of communism heralds the end of capitalism as well, in a system of mutually assured self-​destruction. What all these critics share –​Baudrillard, Stiegler, Agamben and Badiou –​ is that they see a compromising of democracy in the West equally strongly, and a few of them maintain, to a greater or lesser extent, a fidelity to Marx



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and to the spirit of communism, rather than the compromised and corrupt example of its implementation in the East. They see the compromised position of democracy in relation to capital, with its advertising branch, the global media conglomerate, and perhaps their frustration with the events in Romania is simply an expression of mourning since it was capitalism, not communism, which was supposed to die. Perhaps, when they look at images of the Romanian Revolution, of the massacre that could have been, they see the death of a possibility that is simply too great to grieve for: the perfect proletarian uprising, the perfect revolution, which cannot occur without extreme violence. The death of this possibility cannot be admitted, and anything which presents itself as such must be exposed as a lie: “The most amusing feature of this history, the ironic thing about the end, is that communism should have collapsed exactly as Marx had foreseen for capitalism, with the same suddenness, and, ultimately, with such ease that it did not even strike the imagination . . . Capital has done communism’s work and communism has died in Capital’s place.”24 Romania stands apart from the other Eastern Bloc nations where communism collapsed because there, the transition was not so easy, and that transition did in fact strike the imagination of the West. The violence reported by the media, at first, appeared to be exactly what the gravity of such an event demanded. How could the dream of communism in the Eastern Bloc simply go quietly into the night? Where was the violence? Where was the bloodshed? Where was the outrage of the proletariat? History demanded it; Romania obliged. Initially, this elevated Romania to the position of prominence which was her due, having been an exemplary poster child in various capacities over Ceauşescu’s 25-​year tenure. Romania was unique in standing opposed to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which earned Ceauşescu Nixon’s favour and the nickname “the good dictator,” along with Most Favoured Nation status from the United States.25 It is another irony of history that such an exceptionally pro-​Western communist regime, having enjoyed such favour during the Cold War, while Ceauşescu was institutionalizing widespread human rights violations, should meet its end with such an extremely negative reception from the West for precisely the moment when a popular uprising finally intervened  –​ however limited the success of that intervention would prove to be. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes at length about the photograph in the early days of its emergence, citing it as a gesture that points to something, rather than a thing in itself: “The Photograph was never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; it points a finger at certain vis-​a-​vis, and cannot escape this pure didactic language. This is why, insofar as it is lithic to speak of a photograph, it seemed to me just as improbable to speak of the





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Photograph.”26 Barthes does not say that the referent is destroyed by the photograph, merely that through mechanization, the photograph is able to reproduce that which is not reproducible. But what he insists on is that when we look at a photograph, it is not the two-​dimensional object that we see, but the referent. This pointing gesture of the photograph is what prevents it from elevating to the level of language. Photography is –​ for Barthes –​ deprived of a mark-​making ability. It cannot represent. It can only point to something else: “It aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does. Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”27 The digital image, since it has lost its tether to the real event which it seeks to represent, seems also to have been liberated from the confines noted by Barthes, which apply to analogue photographs with negatives. Those cannot make marks, they cannot sign, but the digital image, which only has itself as a referent, can write its own content, and is not restricted by the “real.” If the digital image is granted access to signing then it, like language, can become performative. Could Austin’s performative speech act apply to the televised images of the bodies in Timişoara? In How to Do Things with Words, Austin elaborates the performative quality of speech acts, tracing the genealogy of its introduction into philosophy through Kant, by observing the scope of utterances reaching beyond the limits of traditionally understood grammar. Words are more than just descriptive. This is all taken for granted in the context of a contemporary post-​structuralist discourse, at least when it comes to language (and also perhaps when it comes to the work of art28), but Austin, writing in the 1950s, is worth revisiting, given the troublesome nature of the images generated by the Romanian Revolution and the feelings of offence that they generated in so many critics: “It has come to be seen that many specially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate (not to report) the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken.”29 What Barthes observes about the analogue photograph, and what Derrida, Stiegler and Baudrillard highlight about the troubling transition to the digital, is that we are unaccustomed to thinking about the image having a capacity to sign. The tradition of thinking about the analogue photo as merely a pointing device, merely descriptive, lacking any internal content, locks the interpretation of images into what Austin calls the “descriptive fallacy.” The technoscientific development of digital images is what now throws this



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model of interpretation into crisis, provoking accusations of bad faith, when it is revealed that the images of dead bodies in Romania did more than just “describe” a scene; they actually performed one. A performative utterance, for Austin, is exemplified by a wedding ceremony. “When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it.”30 Having established the performative power of utterances, he goes on to discuss the consequences of lies or bad faith promises. Given that “the outward utterance is a description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance,”31 it becomes crucial to determine the consequences of a deceitful gesture: “In no case do we say that the utterance was false but rather that the utterance –​or rather the act, e.g. the promise –​was void, or given in bad faith, or not implemented, or the like.”32 It is easy to see how this might apply to the images of dead bodies from Timişoara if we take them as performative acts. They were performative acts of a revolution, and the dead bodies were testifying to the brutality of the regime, having given their lives to overthrowing it. As with all promises, it was first and foremost a promise to tell the truth about what was happening. But beyond that –​ and what makes the Timişoara example unique –​ is that it actually performed the massacre instead of the Securitate or the army, and it did so in such a way that it was easily observable to an outside audience. The actual massacres which occurred under Ceauşescu remain less easily observable since those bodies have also been interfered with. When it emerged that the televised bodies were not killed by the Securitate during protests in Timişoara in mid-​December, there was outrage on behalf of everyone who had believed in it. The anxiety generated by this practice of interfering with the bodies of the dead will be revisited in greater detail in ­chapter  6, in the context of the bodies of the former dictator. What Austin reveals is that while it is possible to accuse Romanians of bad faith, or to say that the revolution is void (as Badiou, Agamben and Stiegler do), it is not possible to say that the images of the dead bodies were “false.” What these images do, to reiterate one of the preceding quotations, is indicate (not report) the circumstances under which they were made. Discussions of the Romanian Revolution, including Baudrillard’s and Stiegler’s, focus on the disillusionment produced by the realization that the dead bodies being filmed in Timişoara were not dead as a consequence of a violent suppression of protestors but had in fact already been dead as a result of entirely different circumstances. This added insult to injury because Western viewers wanted to show their support for the Romanian people who were standing up against the tyrant and wanted their cheers to constitute a significant act of support, just as, afterwards, they thought their criticism and dismissal of the revolution was equally vital.





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What were they cheering for? Certainly not the death of communism, since the struggle of class warfare must be kept alive, especially by the intellectual elite in the West. But they could cheer for the death of a dictatorship, and the more dead bodies there were, at the hands of such a heartless regime, the more certain their position of support for the revolutionaries. Only Romanians who died during the course of the present struggle mattered. Western viewers were not prepared to mourn the deaths of other fallen citizens of Timişoara and were deeply offended that they were being asked to do so, and under false pretences, no less. But were these pretences false? Was not everyone who died in Timişoara prior to Ceauşescu’s execution, in a manner of speaking, a victim of his regime? Why was it so offensive to be asked to mourn for them all? Several sources cite the dead bodies as having been dug up from a nearby pauper’s cemetery, meaning that they were completely economically destitute and marginalized, which is hard to achieve in a nation where so many inhabited those categories. An article in the Chicago Tribune, from 1990, quotes the local coroner: “[Dr. Milan] Dressler and Elena Bouca, a laboratory assistant at the county morgue, say the unearthed bodies were among those of 64 unclaimed vagrants, indigents and infants buried legally last year in a paupers’ grave.”33 Why would these people not be the “real” victims of the regime, just as much as the handful of people who were shot in the streets? The final death toll in Timişoara was revealed to be a disappointingly low number, an astronomical drop from the initially reported 40,000–60,000 cited by Stiegler, and even some of those few might not count because they may have been shot by the army, rather than the Securitate: “First reports from Timişoara last December said thousands of civilians were killed by Ceauşescu’s secret police, the Securitate. But recently, officials said the death toll was only 71.”34 That is dramatically lower, and the discrepancy is clearly a cause for alarm. Furthermore, “there were allegations that some of those may have been killed by the army, which switched sides during the uprising and moved against Ceauşescu.”35 According to this line of logic, shared not only by critics but also by the coroner, the only legitimate deaths, that one might justifiably be outraged over, would be the ones who died at the hands of the Securitate during the protests. People shot by the army do not count towards the massacre death toll because the army switched sides, and certainly no one who died due to poverty-​related conditions prior to the protests even matters. Yet some Romanians continue to insist that the number of people killed was far higher than what has been concluded, and part of the reason was that a few bodies disappeared: “Prosecutors say at least 40 bodies were taken from Timişoara to Bucharest during the first days of the revolution and cremated as part of what would have been a massive cover-​up had the Securitate succeeded



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in putting down the uprising.”36 But it is hard to prove that this happened, and supposing if it did, 40 is an even lower number than 71. Hardly worth the outrage of the international, or even national, community. Still, locals insist that many more were killed. “Another young factory worker, Viorel Cismaru, says everyone he knows is convinced authorities are covering up the real death toll. ‘I know many of the Securitate officers from before the revolution,’ he says. ‘They are still in charge. They are hiding the killings.’ ”37 Zoia Ceauşescu, who will be discussed in ­chapter  6, engaged in a similar struggle with regards to the bodies of her deceased parents, who were buried in secret, so that she remained uncertain as to the whereabouts of their bodies. Perhaps she was also uncertain about whether they had actually been executed in the manner that the state claimed. She did not trust the reports, and given the history of the Securitate’s tradition of disposing of bodies in secret, her doubt should come as no great surprise. The problem such activity engenders is an interruption of mourning, which can manifest itself in various ways, including Zoia’s doubt and the inflated death toll in Timişoara  –​ necessarily inflated, because dead bodies were being shipped off to Bucharest to be incinerated, so a real death toll could never be ascertained. In the absence of a referent, the digital image forms its own content, but this is not the same as saying that nothing happened. Instead of focusing on the victims of the Ceauşescu regime (a category which is problematic in itself, for various reasons), most critics turn their analysis away from what actually happened, which is too hard to pin down, towards criticizing the media and lamenting the manipulative nature of the digital image, which has now been hopelessly separated from its reference point. But what about those dead bodies? Reflecting on reconciling the emotional reality of looking at photographs of his deceased mother, over and against reading critiques of photography, Barthes writes: I realized with irritation that none discussed precisely the photographs which interest me, which give me pleasure or emotion. What did I care about the rules of composition of the photographic landscape, or, at the other end, about the Photograph as Family rite? Each time I would read something about Photography, I would think of some photograph I loved, and this made me furious. Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body; but an importunate voice (the voice of knowledge, of scientia) then adjured me, in a severe tone: “Get back to Photography. What you are seeing here and what makes you suffer belongs to the category ‘Amateur Photographs,’ dealt with by a team of sociologists; nothing but the trace of a social protocol of integration, intended to reassert the Family, etc.”38

My personal sentiments about the footage of dead bodies in Timişoara reflect Barthes’. I do not see the corrosion of sincerity in journalism. I do not





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see the inherent dishonesty of the digital image. I do not see a manipulation perpetrated by the media apparatus. What I see are the dead, and what I feel in response to looking at these images demands the impossible and unending work of mourning. “And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”39 For Barthes, he speaks specifically of his mother’s spectre, whom he re-​encounters through photographs, after her passing. In spite of what he said about the photograph only being able to point, and not to sign, in a previous passage, what Barthes touches upon here is the performative power of the image, which is especially disconcerting when it invokes a spectre. In Romania, the dead quite literally returned to join the revolution and were photographed, to prove that they had been present for it. In a way, it is actually quite appropriate to marshal them like this. The referent, in the example of Timişoara, was perhaps not meant to be the “massacre” that was supposed to have happened in the early days of the revolution but the massacre that actually happened during the course of the mundane, normalized brutalities of everyday life under the Ceauşescu regime. There is no single image that can capture what transpired in Romania prior to the revolution, but an image of piles of bodies from a pauper’s grave might not be too far from the mark. Perhaps the revolution itself was an act of mourning for all those bodies, accumulated under Ceauşescu, who met their end under brutal and secretive circumstances, who could not be adequately mourned and who, like the ghost of King Hamlet, kept returning to demand justice, disconcerting everyone who saw them and throwing the nation into chaos. The accusations of inauthenticity stem from the misrepresentation of dead bodies of people who had expired prior to the revolution and who were shot by the government during the revolution. This manipulation, whose presumed intent was to lend credibility to the new regime based on the allegations of violence against the former state, resulted in compromising the authenticity of the revolution. Once it emerged that the death toll in Timişoara was in fact much lower than originally thought, it cast an air of bad faith across the entire event and earned the scorn of foreign critics. The chain of deduction went as follows: Since it makes little sense to falsify testimony in this way, if the reality was actually as brutal as it was claimed to be, the logical conclusion which must be drawn is that the reality must not have been all that bad. And, if the political reality was not the extreme injustice and brutality that Romanians claimed, then the motivation for a violent revolution must also have been lacking. Therefore, the entire revolution was merely staged. Had



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it been otherwise, the massacre would have been real. Furthermore, leaders from the old regime emerged to take power, providing an opportunity to form a well-​structured argument claiming that the entire event was orchestrated. This was the premise that this chapter outlined and sought to trouble. Problematizing the assumption that the camera could represent the “real” to begin with exposed the standard of an impossible expectation. The truth-​ telling capacity of the image was discussed by Stiegler in the context of digital photography, revealing that he was aware of the problem of this expectation even as he made the accusation of bad faith against Romanians for the misrepresentation of the dead bodies. Through reading Barthes alongside Austin, the image revealed a twofold ability: the power to invoke the spectre and the power to lay claim to signification precisely through the manipulation that Stiegler discussed in reference to the digital image. This power also revealed the image’s propensity towards performative contradiction. If the image is granted access to the powers of language, and becomes performative, it is also able to commit performative contradictions. This is evidenced by the circumstances surrounding the falsification of the exaggerated death toll. The presence of a performative contradiction also haunts the revolution at large. Ceauşescu’s overthrow allowed the nomenclature to reorganize and rebrand in the form of a new democratically elected government. Žižek’s anecdote about the Securitate agent wiretapping his friend in the early nineties testifies to the fact that the activities of the old branches of government remained undisturbed by the revolution. In fact, it was the revolution that allowed them to continue working undisturbed. There is also another performative contradiction  –​ in the form of the images of the dead bodies in Timişoara, which have been proven as false –​ depicting dug-​up corpses from a nearby cemetery for indigents. In the context of a socialist nation, what better proof of the brutality, hypocrisy and failure of the government than the existence of such a graveyard? When coupled with the knowledge (or the suspicion) that the Securitate was shipping at least some of the bodies of people they had shot during the protest in Timişoara to Bucharest to be incinerated, it becomes clear that there is no image, in the form of a descriptive image, which can show all this. What the image can do, and what it did do, was tell the truth through an inflated, manufactured scene. The performative contradiction lies in the fact that the manipulation which was required in order to tell the truth is what discredits the image. The brutality of the Ceauşescu regime is depicted in the image of the dead bodies from Timişoara. This image is what prevents the brutality from being seen, and it is what provokes accusations of manipulation and bad faith. This performative contradiction exposed the performative nature of the image. This showed how its power of signification, through manipulation, was able to reveal more about the truth of the dead bodies than an image





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that has not been manipulated could reveal. The institutionalized practice of disposing bodies with the aim of covering up their murder, a practice which was prevalent under Ceauşescu and ultimately cast doubt over his body as well, led to the over-​representation of dead bodies during the revolution. In the context of a sustained practice of misrepresentation surrounding the dead, with the objective of covering up a climbing death toll at the hands of the state, a falsified image is the only possible expression of a realistic body count. Because the truth is unrepresentable, only falsification can hope to represent it. The theme of mourning also emerged as relevant not just for the interruption of mourning for those who died under Ceauşescu, but also for the death of communism. It is the mourning of the latter that the critics of the Romanian Revolution are touched by. Relying on Barthes’ description of the spectre in the photograph, alongside the performative nature of signification, allows for a reinterpretation of the exaggerated death toll in Timişoara. It shows how the images of the dead bodies may be regarded as a work of art aimed at representing the fallen victims of the regime, rather than a photojournalistic account of the events. While critics like Stiegler, Agamben and Baudrillard are justified in feeling offended, and even betrayed, by such an exaggeration, they must keep in mind that the expectations for standards of authenticity that they have placed on this event are impossible to satisfy. The circumstances surrounding the accurate representation of the victims in Timişoara transcend the limitations of the image. Digital manipulation offers the closest possible expression of something like truth in a situation where the forceful suppression of information is the norm. NOTES 1. Pablo Picasso, “Past Matters: Picasso Speaks, 1923,” Fifty Years of His Art by Alfred H. Barr Jr., published for The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 2. Tom Gallagher, Theft of a Nation (London: C. Hurst, 2005), 71. 3. Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews by Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 172. 4. Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 172. 5. Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 172. 6. This is set during the Timişoara incident on 16 December. 7. This is set on 22 December, after Ceauşescu’s rally in Bucharest. 8. The meeting is held in the TV studio. 9. Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 89. 10. Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 90. 11. Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 150.



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12. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 55. 13. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casario (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 80. 14. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 7. 15. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 53. 16. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clements (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), 129. 17. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 54. 18. For a detailed critique of Badiou’s reading, see my article “Sovereignty and the Death of Communism” in Word and Text, A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, Vol. 2, No. 1 (June 2012), 137–​153. 19. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 135. 20. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 47. “It is Dracula against Snow White . . . We have a good idea who is going to suck the other’s blood once their glass coffins are broken open.” 21. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 40. 22. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 57. 23. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 27. 24. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 51–​52. 25. Roger Kirk and Mircea Raceanu, Romania versus the United States: Diplomacy of the Absurd, 1985–​1989 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 26. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 5. 27. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6. 28. See, for example, Barbara Bolt’s Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). 29. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3. 30. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 6. 31. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 9. 32. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 10–​11. 33. Joseph A. Reaves, “Coroner: Romanian Massacre Never Happened,” Chicago Tribune (13 March 1990), accessed 19 November 2014, http://​articles.chicagotribune. com/​1990-​03-​13/​news/​9001210292_​1_​grave-​nicolae-​ceausescu-​bodies. 34. Reaves, “Coroner.” 35. Reaves, “Coroner.” 36. Reaves, “Coroner.” 37. Reaves, “Coroner.” 38. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 7. 39. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9.



Chapter Three

The Problem with the “Event” Badiou’s Split Loyalties

The previous chapter introduced a broad spectrum of content relevant to philosophical readings of the revolution from four critics: Baudrillard, Stiegler, Agamben and Badiou. It covered the origin of the accusations of inauthenticity, stemming from televised footage of the event, and offered an alternative reading through a discussion of the performative nature of the image. A performative contradiction emerged in two aspects of the misrepresentation of dead bodies in Timişoara: First, misrepresentation emerged as the only possible mode of representation in the context of a government which routinely disposed of corpses, and second, the representation was what prevented the image from being seen. This chapter will continue with a more in-​depth reading of Badiou’s dismissal of the Romanian Revolution. His discussion of Spinoza, in the context of the multitude and the death of communism, will provide a segue into a discussion of Spinozan sovereignty in general. This specific structure of sovereignty, as well as Spinoza’s description of revolution in A Political Treatise, will provide a core theoretical paradigm for the rest of the book. Badiou’s position will be critiqued from the standpoint of performative contradiction, and his dismissal of the Romanian Revolution will be challenged based on the standards that he establishes for the “event.” Spinoza is crucial for the theoretical underpinnings of my argument because his account of sovereignty provides an early modern example of an auto-​immune political philosophy. The structure of sovereignty that he establishes in the Political Treatise allows for a concrete interpretation of Ceauşescu’s behaviour in terms of self-​sabotage and a discussion of the multitude as always remaining saturated with power, even in the context of such a dictatorship. This model of revolution is incompatible with a conventional Marxist model, which relies on an antipathy between the multitude 63



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(proletariat) and the sovereign (aristocracy or bourgeoisie). This incompatibility will be the focus of the concluding chapter and the basis for a critique of violence. Badiou invokes Spinoza, who has received much attention in recent years,1 in support of his argument which dismisses the Romanian Revolution. But a close reading of Spinoza’s model of sovereignty can problematize Badiou’s reading of the events in Romania. When Nicolae Ceauşescu delivered his final speech to the crowd gathered below Bucharest’s Central Committee Headquarters, he extended his “revolutionary” greetings. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s documentary, Videograms of a Revolution, captures the moment when the crowd turned, and booed, instead of the cheers that Ceauşescu had become accustomed to over his 25-​year tenure. When the jeering began, the cameras faltered, momentarily tilted up towards the sky from their previously fixed position on the figure of the sovereign on the balcony, before cutting out all together. Static aired for a few seconds before the cameras once again began filming. State television had a moment of hesitation and then became static. The brief moments of looking to the sky, followed by static, marked the transition of the nation’s turn from Ceauşescu’s rule to an unknown future. When these events occurred, on 21 December 1989, the Berlin Wall had already fallen. Inside Romania’s borders, protesting had begun in Timişoara a week before, and the stage was already set for the crowd’s revolutionary response to Ceauşescu’s revolutionary greetings. Ceauşescu’s words were carefully crafted. He perhaps saw himself as the embodiment of Romania’s revolutionary communist values. He saw those values under attack all around his borders and was proud to try and preserve the spirit of the revolutionary proletariat in the face of mounting adversity. The crowd was also revolutionary, confronting a dictator head on, calling for change in a voice that had been unthinkable a few months ago. But were either Ceauşescu or the crowd opposing him en masse for the first time actually revolutionary? Where was the position of sovereignty located during this confrontation? Where, for that matter, was the spirit of communism? I will turn to Spinoza for his treatment of sovereignty because of the nature of the relationship he describes between the sovereign and the people. Specifically, the passage of sovereignty  –​ when the individual members of the nation, who have invested their natural power in a common leader, seek to reclaim it  –​ will be relevant to this reading of the Romanian revolution. For Spinoza of the Political Treatise, the transfer of power to a sovereign is absolute. No individual can take back the power he has relinquished, but the sovereign, through his actions or failures of actions, can lead to his own demise. He cannot be overthrown by the multitude. He must bring about his own end. In speaking of a demise which was already certain, Ceauşescu





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performs a sovereign divestment, together with the multitude, of his own sovereignty. The revolutionary greetings he offers the crowd perform their literal truth, released from any intentionality, even as the sovereign authority to extend them slips away from him. The Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad, who shot the couple before the cameras were ready to record. Consequently, not even a recording of the event was witnessed by the public, and rumours surfaced almost immediately, questioning whether they were in fact dead. A whole field of interpretation has evolved from this first moment of doubt, extending in scope to cover every aspect of the revolution, suggesting that the entire chain of events was staged by internal organizers. While this level of paranoia is not without legitimate cause, especially in the example being discussed here, it does seem to negate the role of the multitude and bears examination within the context of this paradigm. In A Political Treatise, the power balance between the people and their sovereign exists in something like a reciprocal system. This reading would allow for dialogue to open up around the possibility that the revolutionary multitude is every bit as powerful and active an agent as internal coup organizers might have been. The connection is made plain by Spinoza, where the multitude and the leaders form a contiguous line of sovereign power. This section will analyse the moment when sovereign power passes from one body to another through three approaches: the concrete political example of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s dictator from 1967 to 1989; Badiou’s reflections on this event in his essay, “Philosophy and the Death of Communism”; and Spinoza’s account of sovereign power in the Political Treatise. Through reading these examples, the operative paradigm of interpretation which comes closest to naming the dynamics of such a transition of political power is that of performative contradiction. In his essay, “Philosophy and the Death of Communism,” Alain Badiou attempts to resurrect the spirit of communism over and against the fall of the so-​called communist nation states of the Eastern Bloc. He points out that what died with the fall of these communist states was not the pure concept of communism itself, in its eventfulness, but the exposing of the empty facade of the imposters which called themselves by this name. Badiou argues that what occurred during the events of late 1989 in Eastern Europe was not something that we might call an “event,” like, for example, the genuine communist uprising of October 1917 in Russia, but something much more ordinary, and orchestrated, something which should not be called a revolution. Badiou proposes that the revolution was completely internally orchestrated, without the presence of any genuine revolutionary populist uprising: Note that it is not the uprisen solar masses who decided the end of the Party-​ State, the end of the Soviet empire. The regulating of this elephant occurred



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through an internal disordering, which was both concrete and yet devoid of perspective. The affair to this day has remained entirely a state affair.2

The state generated its own demise. This is how Badiou interprets the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and it echoes what Spinoza said several hundred years ago about how a sovereign must be careful not to become his own enemy: “And so he who holds dominion is not bound to observe the terms of the contract by any other cause than that, which bids a man in the state of nature to beware of being his own enemy, lest he should destroy himself.”3 It was not the revelation of the crimes of the dictatorships that finally caused the people to overthrow these states in 1989. It was the states themselves that caused their own end. But, Badiou argues, the subjective political history of the idea of communism is separate and independent from the objective history of a specific “state,” and therefore, communism endures even after the death of communist states. For Badiou, Ceauşescu’s greetings were not revolutionary and neither was the crowd’s negative response. Indeed, for him, the revolutionary event is reserved for true communism, for October 1917, and nothing else: “[a]‌n abrupt and complete transformation in a situation does not in any way signify that the grace of an event has occurred.”4 The overthrowing of a dictator is not enough to secure the status of an event, because a dictator being overthrown is not a truly singular occurrence: “[t]hat thousands of people marked here or there, in the streets and in a few factories, that they were happy with what was happening was the least they could do. But the indication that they thought and wanted the experience of a novelty without precedent, alas, that was not observed.”5 According to Badiou, such an event has not occurred since October 1917. The authenticity of that event is not something Badiou feels the need to question because for him, it is “the glorious uprise of the multiple.”6 Badiou appears disappointed by the events of late 1989 because what the Eastern Bloc states seemed to be fighting for was nothing more glorious that what was already well under way in the West. In short, what these so-​called revolutions seemed to be asking for was capitalism: “[e]‌lections and property owners, politicians and racketeers: is this all they want?”7 From the perspective of someone living in the West, bearing witness to the inadequacies of the system which communism in the East was meant to put an end to, the revolutions of 1989 were a source of disappointment, because they strengthened capitalism: “[i]f so, it is quite reasonable to trust the execution of such processes, not to the inventions of thought, but to specialists in the manoeuvre of apparatuses, indeed to the experts of the International Monetary Fund. As for a little supplement to the soul, the Pope is in on the affair.”8





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For Badiou, capitalism is not an idea, but rather a manoeuvre of the ideological apparatuses maintaining the status quo, and as such, it is not worthy of the title of “event,” or revolution, which is reserved for “the experience of a novelty without precedent.” Communism, on the other hand, even under another title, is “the philosophical and thus eternal concept of rebellious subjectivity.”9 While an event represents the new, it is also the eternal, and the moment par excellence of its example is October 1917 but under no circumstances November or December 1989. Even more than this, as Badiou argues here, what the concept of communism signifies in an absolute sense, is “philosophy under the condition of politics.”10 The idea that a revolution to achieve capitalism might signify an event is absurd to Badiou because capitalism is a banal pursuit of goods and services, whereas communism is the very history of the concept of “we,” the essence of politico-​philosophical thought. Communism is “[e]‌galitarian passion, the Idea of Justice, the will to break with the compromises of the service of goods, the deposing of egoism, the intolerance of oppression, the vow of an end to the State.”11 Here, communism is an anti-​state movement, and any state claiming to be communist leads to its own demise because the state cannot carry the burden of the concept of “communism.” Indeed, if “communism” and “state” are ultimately antithetical, as Badiou seems to be saying, following Marx, then such a thing as a “communist state” cannot exist outside of a literal paradox, or an oxymoron, or what we might call a performative contradiction. We would then evoke a state which declares first of all not just its essential provisionality but its permanent illegitimacy. This it insists on by sovereign right, the very right with which, by this stating, it overthrows. Were it a constative contradiction, rather than a performative one, the sovereign would declare, “I hold power,” when he does not. As it stands, the sovereign declares “I do not hold power.” Badiou believes that communism came into existence briefly during the October Revolution, when the secular multitude of Russia joined together to overthrow the tsarist state. But, according to him, this radical multitude no longer exists: “There is no longer a ‘we’, there hasn’t been for a long time.”12 Yet, Badiou and other “communist” echoes remain faithful to this “we,” remain a part of this “we,” and this is what allowed the secret truth about communism in Eastern Europe to be revealed: there was no communism in Eastern Europe, “It is the death –​ once again, the ancient death –​ of the hypothesis which allowed these ‘revelations’ to have such efficacy.”13 But this “we” faithful to the pure event of the communist idea is an already dead “we,” haunting Europe, Asia and the Americas. (I will not belabour this point here, but let it be said that any talk of “the death of communism” is always-​already compromised, as long as there are self-​proclaimed communist



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countries –​China, Cuba, North Korea, to name the obvious –​which are doing at least as well, or as badly, as some self-​proclaimed capitalist countries. The economic relationships which exist, through trade and other alliances, between so-​called communist and capitalist nations also make it somewhat futile to talk of an end of communism, or to speak of the divide between communist and capitalist nations as absolute.) Badiou uses the Romanian Revolution as an example of the simulacra of revolution, which revealed the long-​dead corpse of the spirit of communism: “The simulacra of the ‘Romanian Revolution’ now recognized, also gives us a paradigm. In truth, what has occurred is nothing more than this: what was subjectively dead must enter into the state of death, and finally be recognized there as such.”14 In a sense, what Badiou is arguing here, specifically with regards to Romania, is that what the revolution of ‘89 facilitated was not the death of communism for that country, which was already dead, but the mourning of that death, the mourning of the already lost communism. That is the symbolic death that Ceauşescu’s actual death represented. Badiou might be talking not about Ceauşescu’s dead body but about the dead bodies in Timişoara which were staged for the cameras. With this critique, he is following in the footsteps of a handful of other critics, such as Agamben, who, in Means without Ends, describes the events in Timişoara which triggered the uprising in Bucharest, where a contested number of protesters were killed: For the first time in the history of humankind, corpses that had just been buried or lined up on the morgue’s tables were hastily exhumed and tortured in order to simulate, in front of the video cameras, the genocide that legitimized the new regime. What the entire world was watching live on television, thinking it was the real truth, was in reality the absolute non-​truth.15

It is interesting that the Romanian Revolution produced so many questionably dead bodies, generating so much doubt about the state of the dead. Ironic, because there is a genuine, serious question about the dead, and their status as dead, which is what Badiou is bringing to our attention by speaking about the twice dead –​the ancient dead –​figure of the communist multitude, which nonetheless endures, in spite and because of its death. Badiou himself, in this essay, seems to want to resurrect the dead secular “we,” to rise up for the “event” of October ‘17, to attest and bear witness to the authenticity of that event, to which Badiou remains faithful. The authenticity of that event is not something he calls into question. By contrast, the Romanian Revolution, the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall – these he does not consider events, and here, the dead are marshalled to testify against the state and its crimes and prove the total lack of singularity





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of these non-​events. “Everything dies –​ which also means that no death is an event.”16 This is the logic Badiou attempts to use to prove that what happened in Eastern Europe was not a real event, which means that it was not a revolution, a term he would like to reserve exclusively for a communist uprising, such as one that follows in the footsteps of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Communism is dead on arrival. It begins as a spectre. It is already dead, and we have no knowledge of its birth. And when the state that claims to be communist falls, then communism dies a second death, and a third, and a fourth. Badiou hints at all this, but then says something else. If this is what he had in fact asserted, then he would have to acknowledge that communism was already dead during the October Revolution, and it could hardly then be an event that Badiou remains faithful to. All collective uprisings would fall equally into question, since to him, “every historical event is communist, inasmuch as ‘communist’ designates the trans-​temporal subjectivity of emancipation.”17 There is no reason to split hairs about the differences between the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 based on how, or whether, the state intervened, stole or mutated these revolutions. “Certainly, October ‘17 as event engages practical fidelities, but the thought which cements them together depends on the event as such, and not on its state projection.”18 If Badiou can remain loyal to October ‘17, “based on the thought which cements them together,” in spite of what it actually became, in its instantiation as a party state, then why can we not give the same credit to the revolutions of ‘89? Why Badiou’s extremely broad definition of “communism” is somehow not broad enough to include Romania is not clear, especially since he is so willing to divorce the thought of the revolution from the real political outcome. Say what he will about the simulacra of the Romanian Revolution –​the consequences of state intervention in the revolution, if we are content with this reading  –​ claiming that there was no popular uprising, no desire for “the trans-​temporal subjectivity of emancipation,” is disingenuous, as long as he is prepared to give credit to the Bolshevik Revolution. “Everything dies –​ which also means that no death is an event.”19 What is Badiou trying to say here? Perhaps that nothing productive comes out of talk about the “death of communism,” especially when, as he argues, what happened in Eastern Europe at the end of 1989 can hardly be called the “death of communism.” At best, he thinks we might call it the death of the death of communism, which is not to say that the two deaths cancel each other out: “[o]‌utside the state, there among the emblem and the insurrection, ‘communism’ had, for a long time, named nothing more that the tomb of a secular ‘we’.”20 The events of late ‘89 simply brought this to light, that what was happening was never communism and, thankfully, whatever it was had died.



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When Badiou introduces Spinoza, it is to support his claim that the death of communism, as it occurred in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Romania, was not in any way significant and that a meditation on the consequences of its implications is irrelevant. He wants to emphasize that only a meditation on life matters, which is what the true spirit of communism reflects. “ ‘Homo liber denulla re minus quam de morte cogita,’ decidedly, Spinoza was right; there is nothing to be thought in death, even if it be the death of an empire, other than the intrinsic nullity of being.”21 But Spinoza does not say anything about the “intrinsic nullity of being,” not in this quote, nor anywhere else. Badiou does not sufficiently make clear what the consequences of a second death are, nor even how a second death is possible. And introducing Spinoza, as he does, to make a point about the “intrinsic nullity of being,” is problematic. Spinoza can be marshalled for many arguments, but this is not one of them. Spinoza, as he is quoted here, does not say “there is nothing to be thought in death,” as Badiou would lead us to believe. This much is evident from the Latin. The passage in question is from Ethics, Proposition 67 of Book IV: A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death. Dem.: A free man, that is, one who lives according to the dictate of reason alone, is not led by fear, but desires the good directly, that is, acts, lives, and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage. And so he thinks of nothing less than death. Instead his wisdom is a meditation on life.22

For Spinoza, the “intrinsic nullity of being” is not a thought that would ever cross the mind of a free, rational man. Spinoza is not speaking about the impossibility of thought from the position of the dead. He is speaking about the opposite, about how reason leads us to dwell on life and the desire to improve one’s situation, rather than a preoccupation with a fear of death. Why does Badiou introduce Spinoza here, in a discussion about the death of communism? Perhaps it is the strength of the Spinozan multitude, the revolutionary force, that Badiou seeks to invoke. Recall that one of the things that “communist” signifies for Badiou is “the deposing of egoism.”23 To help the reader better understand his meaning, Badiou includes one of his own poems, “[h]‌ere I shall start up a chant of which I am the author,” one that has been sung on stage and which, we are told, only seems to become more and more relevant and necessary for describing the eternal truth of communism. “It is thus also a chant of announcement, the multiple name of what is always to come.”24 Among the groups listed in this great revolutionary multiple are “men of great labor sold with the earth whose colour they bear” and “girls demanding





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the rights of women.” It is not clear why he feels the need to describe people as being the same colour as earth, nor why a distinction needs to be made between girls and women, in terms of a struggle for political rights. What matters is that Badiou counts himself together with these “girls” and these men sold into slavery and announces in the final lines of his chant that together, he and they make up the true revolutionary communist multitude: “It is our intact singularity which has made this great hole in the world in which, century after century, the semaphore of communism is fixed.”25 The deposing of egoism which is constitutive of the signifier “communist” refers only to capitalist accumulation of private property and does not extend to the self-​fetishisation of a privileged western academic who declares himself a true revolutionary, while he dismisses as a banal, staged simulacrum the spontaneous uprising of millions of impoverished and terrorized Eastern Europeans who virtually unanimously banded together to overthrow an entire region of dictatorships. How does Spinozan sovereignty fit into the question of the mortality of communism? Badiou makes a Spinozan point about sovereignty when he states that communism is a vow to end the state: “Egalitarian passion, the Idea of Justice, the will to break with the compromises of the service of goods, the deposing of egoism, the intolerance of oppression, the vow of an end to the State.”26 According to this reasoning, any state that takes on the yoke of communism is making a vow to end itself. Communist states are self-​overthrowing. This is made clear by Marx in The Communist Manifesto, where he outlines that the dictatorship which is put in place after the revolution is temporary. But the transition from the dictatorship of the interim government and the subsequent direct democracy which is supposed to follow is far from clear and not adequately elaborated. At the end of Section Two, “Proletarians and Communists,” the Manifesto outlines the necessary steps for organizing the new communist state, such as the centralization of banks, education, manufacturing, agriculture, the abolition of private property and inheritance and the equal obligation of all to work. After all of these steps are completed, the new government is essentially supposed to dissolve on its own: When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have



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swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.27

That this is far from what happened in any of the communist states of Eastern Europe is history’s sad irony and the crucial problem which anyone who calls themselves a communist today must confront. Neither Marx, nor those loyal to the project of communism, have given an adequate explanation of how the initial dictatorship is meant to lose its political character, nor have the consequences of advocating for a totalitarian dictatorship  –​ even in the name of economic justice –​been addressed. But these consequences are clear from Eastern Europe. This is the reality that Badiou seeks to avoid when he chooses to champion the October Revolution while dismissing the Romanian one. Both were popular uprisings. Both were in direct response to the horrific conditions of exploitation perpetrated by the powerful few against the many weak. Spinoza’s politics of sovereignty might initially appear deceptively straightforward and simple. At first glance, what Spinoza appears to be saying, in A Political Treatise, is simply “might makes right.” While the “might” at first appears to belong to the powerful sovereign, this is only the case because the multitude have invested him with this power. In actuality, it is the people who have the might. The power balance between the people and their sovereign exists in something like a “checks and balances” system, albeit a potentially contested one. What Spinoza argues is that while this is an imperfect system, there is more possibility in it for a reasonable and peaceful society than a corrupt and oppressive one. Spinoza tells us that natural right is coextensive with natural power. Every natural entity, whether man or animal, is able to act in its own self-​interest and self-​preservation, as much as its natural power allows it to: “[f]‌or instance, fishes are naturally conditioned for swimming, and the greater for devouring the less; therefore fishes enjoy the water, and the greater devour the less by sovereign natural right.”28 Regardless of whether one is guided by reason or desire, they have the sovereign right to pursue their personal interests with all the resources they have available, “whether by force, cunning, entreaty, or any other means.”29 This is not exclusive to the state of nature, but in a commonwealth, there are laws which protect people from each other. In the state of nature, anyone may use whatever means they have to gain an advantage and do not need to fear retribution from the state, only from other individuals. Spinoza defines democracy as “a society which wields all its power as a whole”  –​ a definition not so far from Marx’s.30 The formation of the state comes about when men realize that so long as everyone is acting solely in their own interest, without regard for others, then all live in a general climate of “enmity, hatred, anger, and deceit.”31 Therefore, reason leads men to





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conclude that it is in everyone’s best interest to form a state, that “their life should be no more conditioned by the force of desire of individuals, but by the power and will of the whole body.”32 This is akin to what Marx says about the state composed of the proletariat, which will lose its “political character.” For Marx, this happens after all private property, and therefore class, has been forcibly abolished. Everything else will fall into place after the confiscation of private property. According to this logic, the wealthy are to blame, and they exploit the majority, who are poor. For the sake of argument, we may concede this point, but then why are we to believe that the ones who after the revolution –​even preliminarily –​control the collectivized wealth of the entire nation will act differently with this power than the wealthy capitalists who have just been overthrown? Is it because of the virtuous nature of the poor? Is it because only those who were born wealthy are capable of dishonesty, greed and exploitation, while those who come into power as a result of a revolutionary impetus towards economic justice are incapable of behaving in exactly the same manner as the ones who were overthrown? Spinoza is less idealistic about the virtues of humankind, takes irrationality and greed into account and therefore emphasizes the need for structuring the commonwealth according to a system of reason and law, a system whose stability does not rely on the goodwill of its agents: A dominion then, whose well-​being depends on any man’s good faith, and whose affairs cannot be properly administered, unless those who are engaged in them will act honestly, will be very unstable. On the contrary, to insure its permanence, its public affairs should be so ordered, that those who administer them, whether guided by reason or passion, cannot be led to act treacherously or basely. Nor does it matter to the security of a dominion, in what spirit men are led to rightly administer its affairs. For liberty of spirit, or courage, is a private virtue; but the virtue of a state is its security.33

With regard to questioning Marx, the emphasis must be placed on the transition from the interim dictatorship to the new non-​political stateless character of the state. How dependent is this transition on the virtue of the proletariat? The virtue of the interim dictator? If Marx made allowances for human passions (as Spinoza would say) in the administering of the new state, then where is the discrepancy which allowed for the atrocities of the USSR and communist Eastern Europe? Perhaps Spinoza can help us understand what happened in Eastern Europe by looking at how the formation of the state occurs from the state of nature. The process of forming the state consists of each individual transferring their natural sovereign power to a sovereign leader, which is to say, the body politic. But there is an implicit understanding in this transfer of power that



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this arrangement (social contract) only works as long as it is mutually beneficial: “[w]‌e may, therefore, conclude that a compact is only made valid by its utility, without which it becomes null and void.”34 The sovereign’s power is absolute, but not infinite, because anyone can break a contract if he has the power to break it: “[t]he sovereign right over all men belongs to him who has sovereign power, wherewith he can compel men by force, or restrain them by threats of the universally feared punishment of death.”35 Spinoza is not advocating for the sovereign to have the power of capital punishment; he is simply describing that the sovereign has this power. This is what it means to be the sovereign, and this power is absolute. But it is also finite and conditional: “Such sovereign right he will retain only so long as he can maintain his power by enforcing his will; otherwise he will totter on his throne, and no one who is stronger than he will be bound unwillingly to obey him.”36 The sovereign must hold the power to enforce his will. It is not given. Even though Spinoza has stated earlier in this section that “a compact is only made valid by its utility,” and that anyone should be expected to break a contract if it ceases to be advantageous, this contract where one’s individual power is vested in a sovereign is not so easily broken because of the power differential between the sovereign and the citizen: “[t]‌he sovereign power is not restrained by any laws, but everyone is bound to obey it in all things; such is the state of things implied when men either tacitly or expressly handed over all their power of self-​defence, or in other words, all their right.”37 In this structure of power, the sovereign is invested with power that can be taken away from him, at the same time as those who invest power in him have no choice but to do so. [f]‌or if they had wished to retain any right for themselves, they ought to have taken precautions for its defence and preservation; as they have not done so, and indeed could not have done so without dividing and consequently ruining the state, they placed themselves absolutely at the mercy of the sovereign power.38

The system of sovereignty that Spinoza describes has profound historical significance; it is generally understood as “a plea for freedom of thought and democracy”39 and is radical enough to have provoked censorship, excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam and imprisonment. While it clearly is a plea for religious tolerance, civil liberties and democracy, it is also more than that. It outlines a radical model of sovereignty which is both absolute and self-​collapsing and conforms to the structure of performative contradiction. Sovereignty emerges as a power that is received, yet absolute, and also one that must be performed and maintained. The key to sovereign power and its transferability is that individuals, as part of a multitude, maintain their power, even though they have transferred





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it to a sovereign. This multitude can be read in the communist “secular we” that Badiou writes about in “Philosophy and the Death of Communism.” If the sovereign who is entrusted with the power fails to preserve it, fails to act in a way that secures the greater good of the multitude, then that sovereign will be stripped of power. This is not a performative contradiction but a matter of logic. The performative contradiction lies in the fact that once a person relinquishes their power to a sovereign, they do so finally and absolutely. At the same time, they retain their power. The social contract is both absolute and conditional. The multitude, as sovereign, always retains and defends its sovereignty, even as it surrenders it absolutely. To be something and its mutually exclusive opposite simultaneously –​this is also not a performative contradiction. The performative contradiction lies in the fact that while the subject is performing the role of subject, they in fact preserve and continue to embody the sovereign power, while the sovereign leader, though acting with absolute power, is the one at the mercy of the multitude, the one dependent on the power of the multitude. By investing the sovereign with their power, they preserve it for themselves. By taking the power, the sovereign agrees to act in the best interest of the multitude –​ rather than his own personal best interest, should the two be at odds –​ surrendering in this way his inclusion in the multitude’s sovereignty. The problem of revolution emerges when the multitude must take back the power from a sovereign who is not acting in the best interest of the multitude. This act of reclaiming sovereign power is revolutionary because the multitude must act in a unified way, joining their individual power  –​ reclaimed from the sovereign –​to act against the sovereign, who still wields the power of his former subjects. That there should be a fracture in the force of the multitude –​ this is revolution. The sovereign and the multitude, both laying claim to the same power –​the structure of sovereign power both enables and forbids this. Spinoza describes the circumstances of fear under which men live bound to another, and this description applies to the mental state of those living in an oppressive state, under a dictator. There are different forms that this bondage takes: 1 . holding someone physically bound; 2. binding them through fear; 3. offering benefits that the recipient cannot afford to lose; and 4. offering benefits so the dependant lives to please the benefactor, rather than himself. The first two modes of bondage are only physical and will be ended as soon as opportunity presents itself. The last two are both physical and psychological,



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and freedom from these is dependent not on a physical opportunity for escape, but on the cessation of the emotions holding the one captive: “But in the third or fourth way he has made dependent on himself as well the mind as the body of the other; yet only as long as the fear or hope lasts, for upon the removal of the feeling the other is left independent.”40 In order to accurately gauge the role of hope and fear in running one’s life, man requires reason. The more reason man has, Spinoza argues, the more free he is. The reason a sovereign wields the power to forcefully make a subject conform to a set of laws, or punish him for disobeying, is because men are guided by “passions,” rather than by “reason,” and in order to preserve the stability and security of the state, for the benefit of all, those who threaten it must be forced to comply. To this end, the sovereign is granted any and all necessary powers of persuasion and enforcement. There is a foundational conflict at work in man, from which this rupture at the heart of sovereignty eventually emerges: 1 . Man is guided by his passions, rather than by his reason. 2. Man strives to preserve his existence. To the extent that these two guiding aspects of human nature are at odds, man must strive to preserve his existence in spite of the problems generated by the pursuit of his passions. The best way to preserve his existence is to allow reason to guide how he organizes his life. Spinoza tells us that man must work towards self-​preservation in spite of his passions. This is not set up as an antagonism by Spinoza but is what he calls natural right: [b]‌ut men are more led by blind desire, than by reason: and therefore the natural power or right of human beings should be limited not by reason, but by every appetite, whereby they are determined to action, or seek their own preservation . . . For man, whether guided by reason or mere desire, does nothing save in accordance with the laws and rules of nature, that is, by natural right.41

Natural right is where the passions and the desire for self-​preservation come together and form the state. This is a productive, rather than an antagonistic, relationship, and for Spinoza, while the irrational desires of man may be opposed to reason, they can never be opposed to natural right. The inevitable consequence of the structure of natural right is the formation of the state and the transfer of individual sovereign power to a sovereign figure: “If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately, and the more there are that have so joined in alliance, the more right they all will collectively possess.”42 Therefore, in order to ensure a life guarded from constant





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external threats, men join together to combine their power, to wield it as one, and enhance their natural rights. The consequence of organizing society in this way, through joining forces to increase power, is that individual power is forsaken for the benefit of social safeguards: Where men have general rights, and are all guided, as it were, by one mind, it is certain, that every individual has the less right the more the rest collectively exceed him in power; that is, he has, in fact, no right over nature but what the common law allows him. But whatever he is ordered by the general consent, he is bound to execute, or may rightfully be compelled thereto.43

This is where the initial conflict between passions and self-​preservation begins to re-​emerge, when an individual who has joined his power to the multitude finds himself opposed to that multitude and is bound to act against his own desires because of the social contract he is participating in. This aspect of forceful compulsion is built into the system in order to preserve the stability of the state as a whole, not the individual. If men were allowed to add or remove their individual power at will, the system would be unstable and inevitably collapse and ineffective in its stated goal: the preservation of the group. The security, stability and efficacy of the state hinges absolutely on state power compelling its citizens to act justly, and not on individual citizens acting according to their own good or bad conscience. The sovereign has the authority to punish anyone who threatens the stability of the state. Potential threats are posed by members of the state who have no hope of benefiting from the nation and also those who have no fear of punishment for disobeying the laws of the dominion. “And so, as those who are without fear or hope are so far independent, they are, therefore, enemies of the dominion, and may lawfully be coerced by force.”44 This system is effective in maintaining order and stability only as long as too many people do not fall into this category. If only a few have no hope or fear, they can be compelled and controlled. But if many begin to feel this way, the stability of the state is at risk. “It comes to be considered, that those things are not so much within the commonwealth’s right, which cause indignation in the majority.”45 If a majority of the citizens begin to lose hope in their government, and are not prevented by fear from acting against it, the next step towards the end of the state is that the many unhappy citizens will join forces, as they did in the beginning, when establishing the state. But now, they form a new multitude, from inside the existing state, to overthrow it and bring about a new state: “As the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude, it is certain that the power and right of the commonwealth are so far diminished, as it gives occasion for many to conspire together.”46 The power of the specific commonwealth is diminished, but this power grows



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correspondingly in the strength of the multitude: “So much for the right of supreme authorities over subjects.”47 Civil law, which governs the actions of the citizens, does not apply to governing the actions of the state towards its citizens. This is why a sovereign may use force to compel his subjects, and his subjects, individually, have no power to defend against the actions of the state. Civil law also does not govern the actions of states against each other, who are oriented towards each other just as two people are in the state of nature. When describing the state of nature between two nations, Spinoza refers to it as the law of war: Two commonwealths are naturally enemies. For men in the state of nature are enemies. Those, then, who stand outside a commonwealth, and retain their natural rights, continue enemies. Accordingly, if one commonwealth wishes to make war on another and employ extreme measures to make that other dependent on itself, it may lawfully make the attempt, since it needs but the bare will of the commonwealth for war to be waged.48

This relationship between two states corresponds exactly to the relationship of men to each other in the state of nature, and the same rule of logic applies, leading to the formation of alliances. Just as man, even if he is not entirely led by reason, concludes through his desire for self-​preservation that forming an alliance with others is more advantageous than living in constant fear of attack, so too, states come to this realization and form alliances. But peace is more difficult to arrange than war because it only requires one party to wage war, whereas it requires two to make peace: “Concerning peace it can decide nothing, save with the concurrence of another commonwealth’s will.”49 These are the matters which concern the sovereign of the commonwealth and yet another reason why he has complete authority over his subjects, at the same time that he is not bound by common laws with regards to his actions towards them. “As all these functions, and also means required to execute them, are matters which regard the whole body of the dominion, that is, are affairs of state, it follows, that affairs of state depend on the direction of him only, who holds supreme dominion.”50 Spinoza describes a monarchy here, but even in the context of a monarchy, he stresses the importance of advisors. What becomes clear by the end of the Political Treatise (Spinoza died prior to finishing the section on democracy) is that this structure of sovereignty applies equally to all forms of government, even though in this section he focuses on monarchy. “And hence it follows, that it is the right of the supreme authority alone to judge the deeds of every individual, and demand of him an account of the same.”51 Aware of having laid out a structure of governance that functions like a dictatorship, Spinoza –​ personally no stranger to the brutalities of the





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state  –​ addresses this apparent power imbalance, “But it is often asked, whether the supreme authority is bound by any laws, and, consequently, whether it can do wrong.”52 He does not speak about what is wrong in the sense of ethics, but according to reason, “in the sense in which philosophers and doctors say that nature does wrong,” when it causes harm to its own self. “A commonwealth then does wrong, when it does, or suffers to be done, things which may be the cause of its own ruin.”53 This is the sense in which Spinozan sovereignty is self-​collapsing, the sense in which it is a performative contradiction, or, as Derrida might say, it is autoimmune, because the cause of the demise of the state is the state itself. The cause of the collapse is never from without, always from within. For Marx, this was the natural course that communism was supposed to take. For Marx, this autoimmune collapse was the end goal of the state. For Spinoza, the end of a specific sovereign’s rule must not be allowed to throw the entire state into crisis. Each sovereign’s rule ends at that sovereign’s own hands, and the more equipped the structure of the state is to accommodate this transition, the more successful it is as a state. It is not a question of leaving the position of the sovereign empty. Even if this spot is filled with the proletariat, as it is supposed to be for Marx, the same structure of governance, and the same problems of leadership, would have to be accommodated by the new structure. The question remains: How is a totalitarian dictatorship supposed to lose its political character and transform itself into an economically egalitarian democracy? Spinoza describes three structures of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The description of the final category was interrupted by his death, but the trajectory of his thoughts can be ascertained from the structure of the previous sections. A state is most successful if it is stable. This stability can be accomplished through just and rational rule, but it necessarily must accommodate a transition of power which does not throw the commonwealth into crisis. Transitions of power are an unavoidable necessity, even if the sovereign passes away from power without conflict. But to what degree a nation can accommodate the removal of a sovereign in the circumstances of conflict and contested power is the true measure of a successful nation, one that is not dependent on the virtue of a single leader but on its own structure of governance. Democracies with a consistent schedule of free elections are a clear answer for accommodating the transition of sovereign power without causing instability in the commonwealth. If there are not regularly anticipated free elections, how a sovereign passes on power is much more likely to cause instability, which becomes evident when considering a situation of conflict. If a sovereign’s rule is indefinite, and he commits abuses, the question of how to break the contract between the sovereign and the multitude must be



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addressed: “Contracts or laws, whereby the multitude transfers its right to one council or man, should without doubt be broken, when it is expedient for the general welfare to do so.”54 The presence of a performative contradiction at the heart of the sovereignty, and the governance structure that Spinoza describes, is evident from the fact that only the sovereign can decide if it is in the best interest of the multitude to break this contract: “But to decide this point, whether, that is, it be expedient for the general welfare to break them or not, is within the right of no private person, but of him only who holds dominion.”55 The multitude can and must break the social contract when necessary, but the sovereign alone determines this necessity. The sovereign determines that his own actions are inadequate for the preservation of the general welfare of the society. He is a self-​overthrowing sovereign. And the commonwealth must make laws which adequately prepare it for such a transition of power. The sovereign, as the maker of law, must make adequate preparation for the cessation of his own power, for the sake of preserving the stability of the state. If a sovereign fails to make adequate preparation for a transition of power, and, furthermore, if his actions cause unrest among the majority of the population, the social contract which put him in power dissolves as a consequence. Notwithstanding, if [the laws] are of such a nature that they cannot be broken, without at the same time weakening the commonwealth’s strength, that is, without at the same time changing to indignation the common fear of most of the citizens, by this very fact the commonwealth is dissolved, and the contract comes to an end.56

If a state has left no room for a change in leadership without destabilizing itself, then the state is already unstable. “And therefore such contract is vindicated not by the civil law, but by the law of war.”57 Civil law is what the sovereign of the commonwealth establishes for the rule of the citizens, and does not apply to the sovereign. Law of war is essentially the state of nature, or natural right, which is absolute over all. But the sovereign treads on dangerous ground. Even though he is not bound to comply with civil law, and is above the law, as they say, exploitations of this power, if they lead to indignation in the majority, leads to the sovereign’s demise. This is what happened in Eastern Europe. Returning to the events of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, starting from the moment when Ceauşescu offered his revolutionary greetings to the moment when the static ceased, isolating this as the site of the transition of power from Ceauşescu back to the multitude, let us re-​examine what a Spinozan interpretation would mean for these events. The doubt surrounding the legitimacy of the revolution, accusations of internal coups, and so on,





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are important to acknowledge because what they point out is the diminished role of the multitude in the formation of the new government, the presence of old regime faces in the new regime, the murky events following Ceauşescu’s apprehension involving “terrorists,” and other similar problems. All these concerns are legitimate and accurately perceived by critics on both sides of Romania’s borders. But they are not sufficient to claim that the revolution was not authentic, not an “event” as Badiou would say, because the implicit claim made by this critique is that an “authentic” revolution involves only the actions of the multitude. Perhaps this understanding of revolution  –​ as something which should be bloody, or absolutely singular, rather than simply a turning from one power to another –​ is a residue from Marx’s hope for the necessarily violent proletariat uprising, which must lead to a totalitarian, centralized dictatorship. Spinoza presents us with a different model of revolution, one that emphasizes the central role of the sovereign, and his advisors, in the transition of power. What the Political Treatise might also help analysts of the revolution to consider is that perhaps it was not so much an internal coup, but rather more like a suicide: “[a]‌nd so he who holds dominion is not bound to observe the terms of the contract by any other cause than that, which bids a man in the state of nature to beware of being his own enemy, lest he should destroy himself.”58 Spinoza’s model of sovereignty is self-​overthrowing, which is to say that it has a performative contradiction as part of its internal structure. Such a model allows for a completely different reading for those who harbour suspicions that the revolution was internally organized because all revolution emerges as being internally organized. Rather than cast doubt over the authenticity of the revolution, such suspicions serve only to solidify its eventfulness, when read through the model of sovereignty outlined by Spinoza. Ceauşescu overthrew himself by providing cause and opportunity for the members of his council, and the nation at large, to conspire against him. His overthrow was the direct consequence of his own actions, which were against the best interests of the people. This is what a reading of revolution and sovereignty through Spinoza reveals. Badiou’s critique of Romania exposes a double standard concerning the motivation behind revolution and reveals that no revolution whose objective he perceives as being counter-​communist can ever be legitimized. For Badiou, it is not the image of dead bodies which provokes his dismissal of the events, as it did for Stiegler, Agamben and Baudrillard, but the apparent objective of wanting to become more like the capitalist West. This is, for Badiou, essentially counter-​revolutionary. The following chapter will question the validity of this premise by asking if Romanians really did want to become capitalists.



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NOTES 1. See, for example, Antonio Negri’s Subversive Spinoza: (UN) Contemporary Variations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) and Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, trans. O. Feltham and J. Clemens (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), 134. 3. Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 312. 4. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 129. 5. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 134. 6. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 127. 7. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 134–​135. 8. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 134–​135. 9. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 131. 10. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 130. 11. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 130, emphasis added. 12. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 126. 13. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 137. 14. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 128. 15. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casario (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 80. 16. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 128. 17. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 129. 18. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 135. 19. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 128. 20. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 128. 21. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 128. 22. Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 235. 23. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 130. 24. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 132. 25. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 134. 26. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 139. 27. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Fredrick Engels (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1906). 28. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 185. 29. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 187. 30. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 190. 31. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 187. 32. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 187. 33. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 283. 34. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 189. 35. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 189.







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36. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 189. 37. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 190. 38. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 190. 39. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, ix. 40. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 295. 41. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 292. 42. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 296. 43. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 297. 44. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 304. 45. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 305. 46. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 305. 47. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 305. 48. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 307. 49. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 307. 50. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 309. 51. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 309. 52. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 310. 53. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 310. 54. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 311. 55. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 312. 56. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 312. 57. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 312. 58. Spinoza, Theologico-​Political Treatise, 312.

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Chapter Four

Nostalgia for the Old Regime A Freudian Interpretation

“No matter how much we stage the death of communism or rejoice over the definitive death of Marx, the corpse is still moving, and its spectre is disrupting the world.”1

Having established the paradigm of performative contradiction and its relationship to revolution in the context of Romania, as well as problematized the readings of images which gave rise to suspicions of inauthenticity, this chapter will now focus on what the cultural landscape in Romania looked like in the years after the revolution. Performative contradiction will be located in relation to nostalgia and mourning. The first three chapters focused on establishing the ground that the thesis of this book rests on, including the criticisms which gave rise to a need for the reinterpretation that is presently being performed. The previous two chapters discussed concrete theoretical criticisms of the revolution, through visual artefacts. This chapter begins with introducing new material for interpretation, that of recent opinion polls from Eastern Europe reflecting nostalgia for the communist era. This material has not benefited from any direct theoretical critique. It has been discussed in the context of political analysis, especially after the 20-​year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the content proves difficult to interpret. As with the details of the revolution, the often baffling, contradictory and counter-​intuitive artefacts of public life in Romania remain illusive and a constant source of frustration for critics. While it is far from the aim of this book to provide a unified voice which can explain these phenomena, it does hope to offer some thoughts for an alternate model of interpretation and to problematize the premise that any voice should be unified. 85



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A closer look at the criticisms of the revolution revealed that all the critics shared a sense of loss for the project of communism in the Eastern Bloc, and their meditations on the artefacts of the revolution were, in part, works of mourning for this lost hope. Badiou went furthest in making this connection evident and reasserted his fidelity to communism in spite of the catastrophic path of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. One of his main critiques appeared in the form of the conclusion that Romanians gave up on communism. This chapter will question the validity of this premise, by asking if Romanians really did want to become more capitalist. Opinion polls taken twenty years after the revolution seem to indicate otherwise, which once again forces open questions around the motivations behind the revolution of 1989. Saying it was a coup or a simulacrum is an easy way to dismiss these questions. A more challenging task is to attempt to integrate the evidence and ask whether it was a coup at the same time that it was a revolution, and question the premise that the two are mutually exclusive. It would be more challenging still to suggest that it was fought for communism, just as much as it was fought against communism, because communism truly is not what was being practiced in Romania under Ceauşescu, any more than capitalism has been practiced in Romania in the years since his death. Perhaps it is this last detail, that of the absence of either a functional communism or a functional capitalism, which provides the best starting point for an attempt to understand the prevalence of nostalgia for communism in the Eastern Bloc at large, with Romania providing the most extreme example of this sentiment. This chapter will argue that the inability to mourn the death of communism in Romania, publicly, is also behind the nostalgia reflected in these opinion polls. It is not only foreign critics of the revolution that cannot accept the death of communism but also the vast majority of Romanians. The argument will consider the aspects of the Romanian example which set it apart from other Eastern Bloc nations –​ (a) the personality cult of Ceauşescu, (b) his execution and (c) the extreme nostalgia of most of the population –​ and read these aspects through Derrida, following the themes of inheritance and violence, leading to a reading of totemism in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. More than two decades have passed since a wave of social unrest swept across the Eastern Bloc in 1989, ending communist dictatorships in six countries, triggering the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as well as Albania and Yugoslavia, which were to follow two years later, resulting in the formation of nearly twenty new countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. Romania was part of the first wave of protests, the last of the first six nations to overthrow their dictators and the only one of the group to do so violently, with an execution of the former head of state. This execution sets Romania apart, and the fact that the dictator’s wife was also the second leader of the country, and, as such, killed alongside him, underscores the severity of the distinction.





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One way in which Romania is not different from other former communist states is the increasing nostalgia which has emerged among large portions of the population. In the words of a journalist writing about Slovakia and the Czech Republic, “Generations reared during Communism typically yearn for the days of free healthcare and education, of more affordable goods and services. But they forget the years of deprivation, poor-​quality goods and services –​ and the climate of fear and severe censorship.”2 But even in this Romania emerges as being more extreme than her neighbours, with a significant majority longing for pre-​1989 conditions, bridging age, income, social position and education levels. Recent surveys of public opinion show an alarming degree of longing for life under communism, with 63 percent of the population stating that their life was better before 1989 and 41 percent saying they would have voted for Ceauşescu, had he been running for office in 2010. In a 2006 Public Opinion Barometer by the Soros Foundation, 53 percent of Romanians thought communism was a good idea, while only 6 percent said they personally suffered under communism. Yet another survey shows that 86 percent of Romanians believe the state should provide a decent standard of living for its citizens and 84 percent believe it should also provide adequate employment. While 50 percent acknowledged that the communist regime was oppressive, and 41 percent believed that it was criminal, only 15 percent thought that Ceauşescu harmed the country. Echoing the previous explanation for this increasing nostalgia, one Romanian academic stated that it is “related to an acute sentiment of social insecurity; on the other [hand], they appear to be the results of insufficient (if any) public policies addressing the problem of dealing with the legacy of the country’s recent past.”3 Lack of public discourse around coming to grips with the legacy of Ceauşescu is certainly a problem, but there are a number of initiatives which seek to shed light on the abuses committed by the state under communism. The site of the prison in Sighet, for example, which was used exclusively to detain political prisoners, is now the site of the Sighet Memorial Museum, dedicated to the victims of communism. The archive contains the narratives of many individuals who were detained, tortured or killed during the communist era, and the founders of the museum actively work towards generating public discourse to build awareness and counteract “the amnesia of contemporary society.”4 In 2005, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest held an exhibition of over 160 paintings of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, created during their reign, illustrating the couple in various forms of extreme nationalist propaganda. “In many of the 165 paintings included in the exhibition, the late dictator and his wife are depicted as demigods. One shows Stephen the Great, a prominent late 16th-​century ruler, as half-​stepping out of a painting



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hanging on a wall to toast the Ceauşescu couple with a glass of red wine.”5 The purpose of the exhibit was to raise awareness and remind visitors of the absurdities of the Ceauşescu regime, but it is significant to note, once again, that while romantic nationalism was a prominent feature in many of the countries, no other Eastern Bloc peer had propaganda where the head of state was depicted as a deity. Ceauşescu took his cue for this from North Korean dictator Kim Il-​sung’s personality cult, and eventually it grew to include his wife Elena as well. The blatant discrepancy between the brutalities of day-today life under Ceauşescu and the arrogance of his self-​glorification is what the curators of the exhibit attempted to highlight. “ ‘A society that builds its future must know its past, the real past, just as it occurred. If I –​ a witness who lived in those times –​ don’t speak about them, then others who didn’t live then will invent their own version of such facts,’ reads a message in a museum elevator.”6 While it is possible that nostalgia prevails, and is actually increasing, because there are not enough initiatives such as this exhibition and the memorial museum at Sighet, it is also possible that other factors are exerting influence over popular consciousness in Romania. Ceauşescu is commonly regarded as the most corrupt of the Eastern Bloc dictators, and conditions in Romania under his rule are known to those living inside and outside of its borders as having been more extreme and austere than in neighbouring communist nations. These events occurred within the lifetime of most of Romania’s citizens and, as such, are a part of recent memory. While building an archive of cultural memory surrounding the artefacts of abuse is historically vital, it is also worth questioning the notion that the present-day nostalgia is a symptom of amnesia, rather than something more deliberate, though equally unconscious, such as grief or mourning, that is unable to express itself as such. In the words of Elisabeth Roudinesco, in dialogue with Jacques Derrida on this topic: The scene of our times, dominated by the spectre of a defeated communism that has come to haunt the future of a unified world under globalization and the triumph of the market economy, a world in a state of “catastrophe,” a world caught up in a “manic phase,” incapable of mourning over what it claims to have put to death.7

One of the interesting insights offered by the public opinion surveys is that a vast majority of Romanians believe it is the government’s responsibility to provide employment and ensure a certain standard of living for its citizens. Whatever political party various individuals actively support, it is clear from these surveys that Romanians are overwhelmingly socialist in





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their orientation. This further problematizes readings of the 1989 uprisings as being anti-​communist and implies rather that they were anti-​Ceauşescu. Romanians might not have wanted a different political system; they might merely have wanted a different leader, one who would implement communism more effectively. This suggests that the legacy of communism remains intact as Romania’s inheritance, and it was being threatened by Ceauşescu during his regime, rather than preserved by it. Ceauşescu, through his myriad abuses of power, squandered the wealth that was collectivized from (and for) the people. During the trial where he and Elena were sentenced to summary execution, the prosecutor asked the accused: Why did you ruin the country so much: Why did you export everything? Why did you make the peasants starve? The produce which the peasants grew was exported, and the peasants came from the most remote provinces to Bucharest and to the other cities in order to buy bread. They cultivated the soil in line with your orders and had nothing to eat. Why did you starve the people?8

Ceauşescu refused to acknowledge the legality of the trial and denied the charges. Interestingly, the majority of Romanians now seem to deny these charges as well, according to the opinion polls. Rather than giving credence to accusations that these polls are further proof of the staging of the Romanian Revolution, this public opinion might point instead to the twofold nature of the legacy of Ceauşescu’s communism in Romania. On the one hand, Romanians are faithful to the concept of communism, dissatisfied with the current government and romanticizing the past (this component will be analysed through Freud in a discussion of grief and mourning, rather than romanticization, nostalgia or amnesia); on the other hand, Ceauşescu was not implementing communism but an exploitative and wasteful totalitarianism and therefore had to be overthrown. In order for the Romanian public to remain loyal to their inheritance, they had to depose their head of state, who had built a personality cult around himself, and whom the public was used to seeing represented as a deity. Without attempting to go into a psychological speculation concerning the psychic impact this deification might have had on the public, let it simply be noted that it might have had some impact, even if most rational people did not literally see Ceauşescu as a demigod. The climate where all representations of him were positive, and dissent was severely punished, lasted for over twenty years and became increasingly extreme over time. Ceauşescu was habitually portrayed as being infallible, linked to the great historical figures in Romania’s history, with him as the natural culmination



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of centuries of progress. All power appeared to be centralized in his hands, or with close family members. Because of this exclusive attention, focused increasingly on Nicolae and Elena as a couple, they naturally also received all the blame. Meanwhile, the ideological goals of the nation appear to have remained intact and firmly socialist, in spite of Ceauşescu’s tenure and subsequent demise. While a significant portion of the population believes that the communist regime was not legitimate, and “criminal,” they nonetheless also believe, with an even greater majority, that the state should be responsible for providing jobs, housing and other basic needs.9 This is not a contradiction but merely points out that most Romanians can see through the fact that Ceauşescu’s regime was corrupt, and they are able to separate that corruption out from the ideological and material goals of communism in general. In this sense, the spirit of communism continues to endure in Romania, and elsewhere in so-​called “former communist” states, and this inheritance, which is a very loaded and multi-​faceted inheritance, must be addressed. The recent public opinion polls, cited in the introduction, point to a twofold inheritance. On the one hand, they demonstrate fidelity to the concept of communism. On the other hand, they demonstrate fidelity to the person of Ceauşescu in particular. What is most difficult to explain is why 63 percent of the population believe their life was better before 1989 and 41 percent say they would vote for Ceauşescu if he were running for office. Is it possible that life actually was better under Ceauşescu? Is it possible that the public is willing to live with the abuses of the former regime, in exchange for housing and job security? And, perhaps most importantly, is it possible that only 6 percent personally suffered under communism, as was reported in a poll by the Soros Foundation in 2006?10 This is where what we might charitably interpret as nostalgia makes an appearance. It is not difficult to understand, especially for those outside of Romania’s borders who remain loyal to the spirit of communism, as it were, how the ideology of the former system can remain intact, in spite of the events of 1989. If anything, that fidelity to the concept can remain intact in light of the abuses of the Ceauşescu years, it might give some hope that the project need not be entirely abandoned. But what is disturbing, what is highlighted by these public opinion polls, is that Romanians might be loyal not only to the spirit of communism but to the old regime and to Ceauşescu himself. This is the so-​called nostalgia, and this is what poses such a challenge for those seeking to interpret these phenomena. Romulus Rusan, co-​founder of the memorial museum at Sighet, outlines some of the abuses that the majority of Romanians remain loyal in spite





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of on the museum’s website, under the section entitled “From ‘the sea of bitterness’ ”:11 The historian who died at Sighet because he refused to abjure his work; the old colonel who died of septicaemia after leeches had sucked his blood in the rice field where he had been brought to perform forced labour; the three children from the Banat –​two twins aged one and their older brother –​who died of cold in the hut in Bărăgan where they had been deported; the student who committed suicide at Piteşti in order to escape the tortures of “re-​education”; the peasant with an acre of land who died in prison for having posted a letter “of denigrating content”; the sons and daughters expelled from school as “enemies of the people”; mothers made to divorce their husbands in order to save “the children’s cadre files”; the scholar who sacrificed his life in order to save a young man from pneumonia; the great founders of modern Romania dragged from the summits of the 1918 Union down into the mouldy dungeons of Galaţi, Sighet, Aiud, and Râmnicu Sărat.12

In Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​89, Dennis Deletant does much to elucidate the history of dissent throughout Communist rule and mentions the “re-​education” experiments referenced above. The description of the torture methods employed in the prison in Piteşti, where these experiments were conducted on jailed political dissidents between 1949 and 1952, likely resembles those practiced at Sighet. Prisoners were turned against each other and instructed to perform grossly inhumane torture on each other. These tactics were employed in the early 1950s under Gheorghiu-​Dej, Romania’s first communist dictator, and they re-​emerged in the 1960s under Ceauşescu in institutionalized form, where psychiatric abuse acquired commonplace use as a creative substitute for punishing dissent under Decree Law 12, “On the Medical Treatment of the Dangerously Mentally Ill.” There is also a discussion of Romania’s reaction to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Deletant implies that jailing of sympathizers may have had as much to do with economic conditions as it did with dissent, since 25,000 labourers were needed in the Danube Delta to work for a new cellulose plant venture.13 According to a New York Times article from 2006, Before 1989, Romania’s Securitate was one of the Eastern bloc’s largest secret police forces in proportion to its population. Under the oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, it was also among the most brutal. An estimated 11,000 agents and a half-​million informers watched millions of Romanian citizens, hundreds of thousands of whom were imprisoned for political reasons. Some were killed.14



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In a nation of 22 million, more than 2 percent of the population were informants. And yet, in 2010 only 6 percent remember this period as one during which they personally suffered, 63 percent remember their life as being better and 68 percent believe that communism is a good idea, just one that had been poorly executed.15 Rather than nostalgia, Rusan interprets this phenomenon as “[t]‌he amnesia of contemporary society [which] has condemned [the victims] to oblivion a second time, by erasing their memory.”16 This is why the museum at Sighet is a memorial, emphasizing the need for remembering as a means of combatting this amnesia. But there is something else at work here, besides nostalgia and amnesia, which might carry a significant connection to the representation of the Ceauşescus as deities. Namely, Romanian identity in general, and also in particular to its relationship to its history of communism, carries heavy religious overtones. Rusan, in the conclusion to his summary of just a few of the victims whose accounts are contained in the archive at Sighet, employs deeply religious language to appeal to the viewer, “Not all the victims were martyrs, but they all pray to us, from their heaven, not to forget them.”17 Likewise, during the occupation of the television station in Bucharest, during the 1989 protests, the poet and dissident Mircea Dinescu repeatedly invokes God, and how God is with the people of Romania, while addressing the nation for the first time, following Ceauşescu’s escape. The man who introduces Dinescu begins by making the sign of the cross.18 Ceauşescu used religion to solidify his position as the undisputed leader of Romania, starting with the development of his personality cult in the early 1970s. It then seamlessly made the transition away from him during 1989, where rhetorically God began being invoked by the revolutionaries as being on the side of the people, against the dictator. What is clear from this is that religious rhetoric was identified and employed both by the Ceauşescu regime and during the subsequent transition of power by those opposing him as a means of appealing to the general population. If nothing else, what can be deduced from this is that the public is perceived as being susceptible to religious rhetoric, and this in itself is significant. The religious susceptibility of the public is an aspect of the inheritance of communism in Romania that Freud and Derrida will help to analyse: By insistently confronting this concept or this figure of the [heir], I came to think that, far from the secure comfort that we rather too quickly associate with this word, the heir must always respond to a sort of double injunction, a contradictory assignation: It is necessary first of all to know and to know how to reaffirm what comes “before us,” which we therefore receive even before choosing, and to behave in this respect as a free subject.19





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“Abolition of all rights of inheritance” –​Third Tenet of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

To speak of communism as an inheritance, and to speak of Romania as an heir, we must also speak of Marx, of the rhetoric of violence contained in the Communist Manifesto, and inquire after the possibility of remaining loyal to communism without remaining loyal to a certain type of violence. This theme will be the primary topic of ­chapter  7. Contrary to the third tenet of the manifesto, inheritance is not a “right,” not a simple gift of accumulated capital, but a demand for acknowledgement that the heir has no right to refuse. In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes about his fidelity to “one of the ‘spirits of Marx,’ a spirit inspired by an idea of justice irreducible to all the failures of communism.”20 Derrida asserts, as does Badiou –​ discussed in the previous chapter –​that it is possible to remain loyal to the idea of communism, in spite of the abuses that transpired in so many “communist” nations between 1917 and 1989. On the “communist” side, the totalitarian evil took the form, terrifying indeed, of a corruption of the project –​or of the “ideal.” But the corruption of the plan is not the plan, even in the hypothesis according to which the plan allowed itself to be perverted in its original form . . . my respect for the communist “idea” is therefore intact (I indicate this respect in Specters of Marx with the necessity of an untiring deconstructive critique of capitalistic logic).21

If it is possible for Derrida to remain loyal to the spirit of communism at the same time that he is able to acknowledge the extent of the extreme abuses of communist regimes, then why is it not possible to interpret the events in Romania  –​ the revolution of twenty years ago, and the opinion polls of a few years ago –​ as being part of the same system? The situation in Romania is complicated by what appears to be a loyalty to Ceauşescu, but if this is separated out for a moment, the remainder of the evidence is not so difficult to explain, without needing to resort to accusations of coups, falsifications, stagings or simulacra. This is not to say that no element of orchestration was involved in the events surrounding Ceauşescu’s overthrow but merely that whatever elements of orchestrations were present during the events of 1989, these do not sufficiently explain the events, nor do they negate the authenticity of the Romanian public’s outrage at the horrors and absurdities of the Ceauşescu regime. What Derrida highlights with regards to the figure of the heir, be it Hamlet, Oedipus himself or my extension of his reading to the present example of



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Romania, the nation as a whole, is that an inheritance is always contested and compromised. The figure of Hamlet exemplifies the tragedy of inheritance. Instead of inheriting a kingdom, he inherits betrayal, war and death. Romanians, rather than inheriting the ideal of communism, suffered exploitation, poverty and torture. Perhaps a more closely analogous figure to Hamlet would be Nicu Ceauşescu, the heir apparent, set to inherit his father’s position of power not through a socialist-​democratic system but through the pseudo-​ deification of the Ceauşescu family, a structure harkening back to pre-​modern notions of sovereignty, far closer to Hamlet’s era than modern-​day politics in the West, to a time when sovereigns frequently lay claim to divine origins and blood-​kinship ties determined the inheritance of political power. Derrida brings forward another aspect of Hamlet’s relevance to interpretations of structures of inheritance and the rule of law as the authority of the father, which has to do with the spectrality of King Hamlet, the dead king, present only as a ghost and haunting the heir. “Hamlet is also the machine of repression in politics. Spectrality governs not only the problematic of mourning but also that of technics, the media, virtual reality; it therefore also governs the problematic of any account, in psychoanalytic and political reflection, of a general logic of spectrality.”22 This spectrality is present in two significant ways in the Romanian example: First, Ceauşescu appears to be haunting contemporary opinion polls, demanding to be mourned and second, the site of the accusations of inauthenticity, of coups and simulacra, is the site of virtual reality, of television. Because bodies were dug up and paraded before the cameras, to prove to the viewers that Ceauşescu had protestors killed;23 because Mircea Dinescu was told to show that he was working, before the cameras went live;24 because the Ceauşescus were shot before the cameras began filming, and so the execution had to be staged, to accompany the real dead bodies;25 that these events were choreographed for the cameras presents a challenge to some interpreters. But to demand that television footage be spontaneous or authentic? Television footage by nature is orchestrated. The account of the Romanian Revolution is troubled by the logic of spectrality, but not because it lacks authenticity. It is troubled because the burden of authenticity, as some would have it, cannot be hoisted upon television footage of the event, nor, it appears, even onto opinion polls taken twenty years after the fact. Inheritance, first and foremost, is a negation of the free subject, and it places a demand on the free subject to acknowledge this negation. A contradiction lies at the heart of inheritance, where the affirmation of the inheritance, the heir’s mere acknowledgement of the inheritance, requires a subjectivity that the inheritance negates. The subject is asked to compromise his sovereignty through this affirmation. For Romanians, expecting that they perform an authentic revolution before the cameras, for the benefit of a Western





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audience, is vastly problematic. One main problem, to begin with, is that the concept of “revolution” is already labouring under a paradigm informed by the Age of Reason, by the French Revolution and the rise of secularism and a certain consciousness of the multitude, as it relates to violent, organized, mass uprisings. If we want to save the Revolution, it is necessary to transform the very idea of revolution. What is out-​dated, old, worn out, impracticable, for many reasons, is a certain theatre of revolution, a certain process of seizing power with which the revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1917 are generally associated.26

The demand that Romanians, as a nation, reject Ceauşescu and have an authentic proletariat uprising faithful to the construct of “revolution,” conceived in the likeness and image of 1789,27 from the position of already being a “communist” nation –​ and that all this should occur in a way that is easily observable from an outside perspective, preferably on television –​ these expectations are mounted on the already contradictory and self-​negating structure of inheritance. “We cannot claim to do justice to a political reality without taking this virtual spectrality into account.”28 It is not just the acceptance of the inheritance but merely the acknowledgement of it which already causes a certain negation of the subject. In Romania, and elsewhere, the inheritance of communism demands to be acknowledged, and this demand places a burden on the heirs. It contains a certain element of violence, exploitation and totalitarianism, which are all already embedded in some form in the core of communism, as it was outlined by Marx when he wrote the Manifesto, influenced to whatever degree he may have been by regicide and the violence of the French Revolution. He references the French Revolution in several places. He sees the bourgeoisie as the product of that revolution, which then needed to be overthrown by the proletariat. The death implied in the language is literal. “When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie.”29 Also, in the opening section, he writes, “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons –​the modern working class –​the proletarians.”30 The rhetoric of violence, and the need for it, is clear. “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”31 The violence of the Romanian Revolution, the execution of the Ceauşescus, is not inconsistent with this inheritance, though neighbouring European nations did not witness similar extremes of violence. Even Ceauşescu –​ and



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those insulating and cushioning his position of power, including, to some degree, the entire nation32 –​ was loyal during his tenure to a certain concept of sovereignty and divine monarchy, veiled as a historically justified romantic nationalism, with Ceauşescu at the head of a lineage of struggle by great Romanians. This historical narrative became compounded with the particular brand of communism developed in Romania specifically.33 Romanians inherited this, in all its complexity and mutations, and according to Derrida, It is necessary [il faut] (and this it is necessary is inscribed directly on and within the received heritage), it is necessary to do everything to appropriate a past even though we know that it remains fundamentally inappropriate, whether it is a question of philosophical memory or the precedence of a language, a culture, and a filiation in general.34

It is necessary to make the gesture of affirmation, while knowing that it will never be fully appropriated. This kernel of awareness is significant, as the heir must realize that he will never be able to receive the whole of the inheritance, which is to say, the promise of the inheritance. The heir also cannot renounce the inheritance; he cannot walk away from it. An inheritance is not a matter of choice, but a matter of honouring the dead, and therefore also a matter of mourning. “Not choosing it (since what constitutes a heritage is first of all that one does not choose it; it is what violently elects us), but choosing to keep it alive.”35 The heir must acknowledge his inheritance, and at the same time, he must do so voluntarily. Derrida refers to this as a contradiction and a double injunction, “between the passivity of reception and the decision to say ‘yes’,” where the subject can begin “to select, to filter, to interpret, and therefore to transform.”36 This contradiction is a performative one, because inheritance demands that the subject negates his own subjectivity by acknowledging the inheritance which he has no choice but to acknowledge. At the same time, this acknowledgement and moment of self-​effacement is what allows the heir to choose the inheritance, to edit it, and so he has power to shape and mould the inheritance according to his own decisions. In this way, the structure of inheritance conforms to the structure of performative contradiction, and for Derrida, it also appears to be the moment of an event, where life is saved. “Life –​being-​ alive –​ is perhaps defined at bottom by this tension internal to heritage, by this reinterpretation of what is given in the gift, and even what is given in filiation.”37 He leads into a discussion of preserving life and refraining from putting to death, with inheritance as a means of the necessary transformation which must occur in order to keep something alive which is about to pass away. The heritage demands to be changed, reinterpreted, so it can be reborn and live on. To prevent ossification, it demands change in order to live.





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One example of an inheritance is the passing of life and wealth from one generation to the next; another is the shape and meaning of communism. The transformation is complex and contested. Inheritance is not related to, at least not in the way Derrida discusses it, the phenomenological instantiation of the body. The body of the father and the body of the son are separate bodies, though certainly there is a filial inheritance there. But inheritance transcends the genetic tie, which Derrida problematizes elsewhere.38 In the present example, the inheritance established through naming –​between King and Prince Hamlet, Nicolae and Nicu (Nicolae) Ceauşescu –​ may rest upon the genetic link but ultimately transcends it because they point to “the privilege granted to the father/​son relation, the masculine installation of sexual difference. The problematic of sexual difference, the analysis of this powerful privilege, of this privilege of power itself, of this privilege of the law as authority of the father.”39 This privileged relation is present in any inheritance but exaggerated when the father is literally also the sovereign, and doubly exaggerated when the subjects of the sovereign intervene in the passing of this inheritance and even seek to take the life of the sovereign. During such a moment of crisis, all the structures of power emerge in their bare form and are forced to account for themselves: inheritance, sovereignty, life, death, political ideology, revolution. Inheritance is a life that has its own agency, but it also requires the agency of others. In the context of protecting life, Derrida says, “not to leave intact or unharmed, not to leave safe the very thing one claims to respect before all else. And after all. Not to leave it safe: to save it perhaps, yet again, for a time, but without the illusion of a final salvation.”40 How might this play out in terms of having fidelity to a concept such as communism? Can one say that it was necessary to overthrow Ceauşescu in order to save communism? The opinion polls indicate that the Romanian public remains loyal to the socialist goals, so is this not one possible explanation for the polls, rather than calling it nostalgia? In “Philosophy and the Death of Communism,” discussed in the previous chapter, Badiou argues simply that what happened in Romania was not communism. Therefore, his fidelity to the concept remains intact because the abuses of the Ceauşescu regime can be safely kept from sullying the ideal, and likewise, the purity of the “event” can be distanced from the protests of 1989, which he refuses to call a revolution because they’re anti-​communist. Derrida, by contrast, provides a model whereby the Romanian example can be read as a generation of Romanians who inherited communism and had to overthrow Ceauşescu in order to save it, in order to make it new. Even at the moment –​and this is the other side of the double injunction –​when this very heritage, in order to save its life (within its finite time), demands



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reinterpretation, critique, displacement, that is, an active intervention, so that a transformation worthy of the name might take place: so that something might happen, an event, some history [de l’histoire], an unforeseeable future-​to-​come.41

The revolution of 1989 was precisely such an event, whereby the inheritance of communism passed away from the Ceauşescu regime, not into the hands of Nicu, the son and heir, but into the hands of other members of the communist party. What the polls demonstrate, many years after the event, with the high percentages of people calling for nationalized employment, housing and general quality of life measures, is that the spirit of communism remains fully intact in Romania today, unimpeded by the end of the Cold War, the declarations of the death of communism nor indeed by the horrors of the Ceauşescu regime. Considering communism as an inheritance of the Romanian public, through a Derridian lens, problematizes the common reading of these opinion polls as nostalgia or amnesia and provides the possibility of an interpretation where the current privileging of socialist values is seen not as a backward looking anomaly, but rather as a continuation of a longstanding fidelity to the inheritance of communism, albeit one that is problematic and contested. In order to form this reading of the continuing popularity of socialist values, these had to be separated out from the positive views of the former dictator. What this reading has not done is explain why so many (over 40 percent) said they would vote for Ceauşescu. In fact, this reading relies on an interpretation where the public is consciously at odds with Ceauşescu for his violations of communist principles and the exploitations of his position of power. The necessary narrative for this explanation states that the people knowingly overthrew Ceauşescu because he was an obstacle to communism, not a facilitator of it. And his transgressions were so severe that he had to be executed, along with his wife, because merely stripping him of power was not enough. With his death, the possibility of communism once again returned, and now, twenty years later, the people are still asking for the implementation of it. But if this narrative is true, how can over 40 percent say that they would have voted from him, had he been running for office in 2010? Not even a dissatisfaction with the current socio-​economic conditions explains such an extreme degree of loyalty, especially considering the swift and brutal execution of the ruling couple. An objection to this reading would be to point out that if the revolution was actually a coup, then the execution was swift precisely because Ceauşescu had to be got rid of so he would not expose this fact and regain the favour of the people. This theory of the internally organized coup is necessarily dismissive of the masses of people who publicly demonstrated in Timișoara and Bucharest between 15 and 25 December. It assumes that these were entirely orchestrated demonstrations. Never mind the level of organization it would





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have taken to completely orchestrate so many demonstrators, because it does remain within the sphere of possibility to have done so. Following the transition of power, there were many more protestors who marched on Bucharest, starting as early as 1990,42 so even if the 1989 demonstrations were orchestrated, it is unlikely that such a well-​organized, new political power would plan demonstrations against itself so soon after assuming office. And yet, this, too, remains within the sphere of possibility. But these possibilities of coups and orchestrations do not negate the reading that Romanians were unhappy with Ceauşescu yet believed –​and continue to believe –​in communism. What needs to be explained is why they continue to believe in Ceauşescu. In a discussion with Derrida about Marx, communism and revolution, Roudinesco reflects on the fate of the leaders of the French Revolution: These men were heroes who, from the moment they committed regicide, knew that they were condemned to the same fate as the sovereign whose head they had cut off. They knew they were going to die this violent death that they had set into operation with the guillotine, in order to give birth to a new society that they imagined would be more just and less violent.43

The revolutionaries suffered the same fate as the ones they were fighting against, in the hope that this violence would bring about peace for the future: this is not a performative contradiction. The performance of violence did not in fact enact peace, and the economic reorganization that followed heralded the rise of the bourgeoisie, who would become the target of Marx’s revolutionary goals. The French Revolution was simply violent and brought about the development of a new but equally unequal distribution of wealth. It further brought about the violence of the communist era, which again redistributed wealth in a way that was unequal. One cannot even say that Louis XVI was wealthy in a way that was significantly different from the way in which the Ceauşescus were wealthy, with their palaces and infamous golden toilets bought with the accumulated wealth of the nation.44 There is a performative contradiction in the spirit of a revolution which seeks to use the same weapons whose existence it fights against. For Robespierre, he “spoke out against the death penalty; then voted for the death of the king.”45 For Marx, he saw the establishment of the communist state as the end of the state, and he saw the establishment of a new ruling class as the necessary condition for the abolishment of an existing ruling class: If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old



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conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.46

What prevents these intentions from becoming enactments is perhaps hidden in the structure of the performative contradiction which underscores them. They are by nature contradictory, and the complexity contained in these structures of revolutionary aims is exposed by their apparent lack of contradiction. These revolutionary gestures perform the opposite of what they intend to perform. Violence does not lead to peace; it leads to more violence. Class oppression does not lead to economic equality; it leads to further class oppression, even if the ruling class is now composed of former members of the oppressed class. The contradiction here is that there is no contradiction. The outcome is determined not by the goals of the revolution (peace and economic equality) but by the means of the revolution (murder and forcible redistribution of wealth). The question is, what does all this mean in the context of the Romanian example and Ceauşescu’s execution? In a BBC interview after 1989, dissident Mircea Dinescu states, “It was crucial to know that Ceauşescu was dead, even though we’re humanists, and I’m a poet. If he hadn’t died, then we would have died. That’s the truth.”47 He says that Romanians could not believe what was happening, and that in order to convince themselves, they had to actually see the dead bodies. If the ruling couple had remained alive, no one would have believed that anything had changed, that they had actually been stripped of power. Their death was necessary for the public to even entertain the possibility that a revolution had occurred. True to the form of performative contradiction, the events of the revolution, and the conditions under which the Ceauşescus were tried and executed, have given rise to all the critiques and accusations of coups and falsifications of the revolution and been used as evidence to demonstrate that in fact no revolution took place in Romania. The events of the revolution, and in this is contained all the television footage and the burden of the spectral, are used as proof to show that there was no revolution. The task of executing a sovereign remains as consequential for modern-​ day Romania as it was for France at the turn of the eighteenth century. Of the death of Louis XVI, Derrida says, “I do not know if it was necessary to execute or not to execute the king . . . As such, by definition, the sovereign cannot be submitted to judgement without destroying the principle and foundation of the state.”48 The rise of the bourgeoisie that the French Revolution facilitated was seen, at least by Marx, as a necessary historical progression that would enable the proletariat to finally rise and break with the history of class struggle altogether. “The French Revolution, for example, abolished





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feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.”49 What the Romanian Revolution of 1947 demonstrates is that a revolution in the name of communist ideology, the revolution that occurred after WWII, when communism was initially implemented, is not sufficient to actually implement the goals of communism. What the revolution of 1989 demonstrates is that the overthrow and execution of a dictator operating under the yoke of communist ideology does not amount to the death of communism, nor does it even reflect a break with communist ideology. In fact, the execution of a communist dictator, in this example, might be a demonstration of fidelity to the goals of communism. The problem is, as Derrida points out, that the execution of the sovereign destroys the foundation of the state by destroying the principle of sovereignty. During his trial, Ceauşescu repeatedly rejected the validity of the proceedings: I will answer any question, but only at the Grand National Assembly, before the representatives of the working class. Tell the people that I will answer all their questions. All the world should know what is going on here. I only recognize the working class and the Grand National Assembly –​no one else.50

Ceauşescu’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of his judges did not prevent them from executing him. But his execution might have directly led to the sentiments reflected in recent opinion polls, demonstrating the fidelity of the Romanian public not only to communism, but to Ceauşescu himself. How significant of a threat might this fidelity be to the current power structure of Romanian politics? Is it enough to threaten the foundation of the state, and if so, what is the shape of this threat? Freud had no sympathy for the French Revolution . . . and in Totem and Taboo he states that at the origin of every society there is an act of murder, a real and necessary act of murdering the father, followed by a sanction that allows for the symbolic revalorization of the place of the father . . . Now, in the trial of Louis XVI, “justice was suspended.” It is not a matter of judging the king, says Robespierre, but of executing him. It seems to me that the regicide is necessary so that abolition can come afterward.51

In this passage, Roudinesco highlights the hope that the execution of an unjust sovereign can bring about peace and justice for the people. Following the thread of history, from Louis XVI to Ceauşescu, this might not be the case, but considering what Freud discusses in the referenced section of Totem and Taboo could serve to elucidate certain consequences of executing the sovereign.



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Freud connects the Oedipus complex to the “real and necessary act of murdering the father” which he places as the founding act of early man, marking the commencement of social law and order. From this originary act of violence committed by the fraternal horde against their patriarch came the taboos against incest and murder, and the reorganization of society in the form of a primitive democracy constituted of brothers who agreed not to hoard all the women52 in the clan for themselves and likewise agreed not to kill each other. These two traits were the defining characteristics of their father, whose greed resulted in the marginalization of the brothers. Because of his physical power, the father was able to keep all the wealth for himself, and none of his sons were strong enough on their own to oppose him. But they envied his power, and as Freud narrates this tale, each son wanted to kill his father and assume his position of power. They agreed to form a fraternal horde, where each did not try to kill the others and keep all the women for himself, not because they believed in something called justice, but because they knew they were not powerful enough to assume and maintain this position of power and feared they would suffer a similar fate as their father if they tried. In short, after murdering and devouring their father, they did not hoard and kill because they were afraid of being marginalized and killed. “Each single one of the brothers who had banded together for the purpose of killing their father was inspired by the wish to become like him and had given expression to it by incorporating parts of their father’s surrogate in the totem meal.”53 It was self-​interest, and not a sense of justice, which drove their decision to form a pact and not turn on each other. “But, in consequence of the pressure exercised upon each participant by the fraternal clan as a whole, that wish could not be fulfilled. For the future no one could or might ever again attain the father’s supreme power, even though that was what all of them had striven for.”54 Ceauşescu provides an example of another powerful patriarchal figure who hoarded resources for himself while the majority of people in his care lived their lives without many basic necessities. His execution could be read as an analogous primal murder by the brotherhood against the patriarch. They had to kill him, as Mircea Dinescu put it, because it was either him or them. In the context of the Oedipus complex, what Freud is discussing is the ambivalence felt by little boys towards their father, who both love and fear him. The defining characteristic is the ambivalence. It is not a simple hatred because the patriarch, the sovereign, is also loved and envied. The little boy wants to kill his father, in order to replace him. It is the desire to become the father that drives the ambition to destroy him. What the band of brothers discover, upon killing their father, is that they can never replace him, and so they are overcome by guilt. For the little boy with the Oedipus complex, Freud discusses the example of Little Arpad, a two-​and-​a-​half-​year-​old patient of Ferenczi, who was preoccupied with chickens. The totem is a surrogate for the father,





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a symbol which facilitates the sublimation of overwhelming desires, both positive and negative. Of Little Arpad and the chicken, Freud says, “[h]‌is attitude towards his totem animal was superlatively ambivalent: he showed both hatred and love to an extravagant degree. His favourite game was playing slaughtering fowl.”55 Little Arpad would enact the execution of his toy chickens and then enact a mourning of them. “ ‘The slaughtering of poultry was a regular festival for him. He would dance around the animals’ bodies for hours at a time in a state of intense excitement.’ But afterwards he would kiss and stroke the slaughtered animal or would clean and caress the toy fowls that he had himself ill-​treated.”56 For the fraternal clan (and for us, their descendants), the consequences of killing their father were immense. They each participated in the murder, and then consumed the body, in the hope of acquiring their father’s power. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him.”57 But after the deed was done, and each of the brothers realized they could not replace their father, their guilt led them to deify him, initially in the form of a totem animal. Then, as society developed and grew more complex, the totem became even more symbolic and was replaced by God. Freud narrates the development of early society in this way, tracing the birth and development of religion and symbolic order, and credits psychoanalysis with making this analysis possible. He spends much time outlining a ritual festival common to totemic religions, where the totem animal held sacred by the given tribe –​ the camel for the Bedouin of the Sinai Desert, the bear for the Bear clan of Ouataouak (Otawa), the turtle for the Zuni of New Mexico –​ is killed and eaten by all the members of the tribe. The three defining characteristics of this festival are (a) the animal is sacred and harming it is forbidden at any other time of year, (b) all members of the tribe must participate in the festive killing and eating of the animal and (c) the act is followed by a mandatory mourning period: Each man is conscious that he is performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only through the participation of the whole clan; nor may anyone absent himself from the killing and the meal. When the deed is done, the slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed. The mourning is obligatory, imposed by dread of a threatened retribution.58

As unflattering as this reading is, exposing itself to a myriad avenues of rightful criticism –​ethnocentrism and phallogocentrism, to name just the obvious ones –​it does provide a useful framework for interpreting the opinion polls in Romania which show support for Ceauşescu. Recall the three characteristics which set Ceauşescu apart from other former communist dictators in Eastern Europe: (a) depiction as deity, (b) execution and (c) extreme nostalgia.



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This is not an attempt to make a literal comparison between modern-​day Romania and early totemic religious clans, and even in Freud’s reading, he acknowledges the symbolic order as paramount over historical speculation because, after all, he is presenting this unpalatable narrative as the origin of all cultures. “Accordingly the mere hostile impulse against the father, the mere existence of a wishful phantasy of killing and devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction that created totemism and taboo.”59 Freud retreats from the literalness of this narrative by emphasizing the psychic power of fantasy and thereby displacing the birth of civilization from the literal act of murder and cannibalism. “[I]‌n this way we should avoid the necessity for deriving the origin of our cultural legacy, of which we justly feel so proud, from a hideous crime, revolting to all our feelings.”60 But a difficult task remains, where a very unpalatable set of events and circumstances demand to be analysed, and the usefulness of tools available for conducting this analysis should not be determined by their appeal. Romania had a troubled and dark past under Ceauşescu, where unspeakable crimes were committed by the regime against its own citizens. The revolution was bloody. The execution was swift. And now, the sentiments are woeful. How can any of this be explained? Freud provides one possible narrative. He even obviates the progressive connection from the father to the totem animal, then to God, and to divine kings. “As time went on, the animal lost its sacred character and the sacrifice lost its connection with the totem feast . . . God Himself had become so far exalted above mankind that He could only be approached through an intermediary –​the priest.”61 Is it more difficult to give credence to Freud’s hypothesis, or to explain why Ceauşescu was being depicted as a deity throughout the 1970s and 1980s? “At the same time divine kings made their appearance in the social structure and introduced the patriarchal system into the state.”62 Is it more difficult to explain how Ceauşescu was able to commit such atrocities as the ones outlined in the memorial at Sighet or that over 40 percent of those polled in 2010 say that they would have voted for him again? Freud offers an explanation for that as well. The defining characteristic of the Oedipus complex, which he connects totemism to, is the feeling of ambivalence felt towards the patriarch. His power is resented and envied. The father is both loved and hated. After he is killed, the guilt felt by the sons drives them to deify the father and keep him alive, in a manner of speaking, in the totem animal and then in the form of God. “They could attempt, in their relation to this surrogate father, to allay their burning sense of guilt, to bring about a kind of reconciliation with their father.”63 In this reconciliation, the symbolic father promised to care for them in a way that the real one never had, and so the sons honoured him and offered sacrifices to him. In the totemic sacrifice, there is a performative contradiction, where the animal that





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is sacred, and that is the literal and symbolic father, is killed as a gesture of honouring the father. It is a repetition of the crime and atonement for it. The single act of sacrifice contains both contradictory aspects. The act of murder is also the act of worship. Committing the crime demands atonement for the crime, and this atonement takes the form of repeating the crime. It is the murder which makes worship possible, and worship takes the form of murder. Freud also believed that the totemic sacrifice contained a self-​justification, where the sons could reconcile their guilt by believing that “If our father had treated us in the way the totem does, we should never have felt tempted to kill him.”64 And how did the totem treat them? “He promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father –​ protection, care and indulgence.”65 In return, the sons worshipped him and treated him with fear and respect. The sacrifice was a means of communing with him, of reasserting their physical ties, and sharing in his strength, through consuming the totem animal. The mandatory mourning which followed the sacrifice allowed the brothers to escape their fear of retribution for the crime. “In this fashion totemism helped smooth things over and to make it possible to forget the event to which it owed its origin.”66 This displacement of memory applied to the transition from totemic religions to theism, and moreover to the transition to the patriarchal system via divine kings. Gradually, God was invested with more and more authority, and the brotherhood relinquished more and more responsibility for the sacrifice. This is the phase in which we find myths showing the god himself killing the animal which is sacred to him and which is in fact himself. Here we have the most extreme denial of the great crime which was the beginning of society and of the sense of guilt.67

The events of the 1989 revolution, and the opinion polls of subsequent years in Romania, do not demonstrate a literal correlation to the totemic system described by Freud. But the figures where over 80 percent of those polled believe that it is the responsibility of the government to provide everyone with jobs and housing does indicate a mentality where the state is expected to care for its citizens to a more extreme degree that its neighbouring nations to the West. This can be read as a fidelity to communism, and it can also be read as an expectation of care from a patriarchal system, where responsibility is shifted away from individuals and placed in the hands of a patriarch. So much the better, if he is willing to call himself a deity and accept being honoured as such. But should he hoard too much for himself, to the detriment of many, then he will be devoured by his sons. One can begin to see what a Freudian explanation of the positive views of Ceauşescu would be. As with the murder of the father in the patriarchal



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horde, it is only in death that he achieves his full power and enjoys the love of his sons. “The scene of the father’s vanquishment, of his greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his supreme triumph.”68 In the context of this reading, what is surprising is that only 40 percent said they would vote for him now, and as many as 6 percent said they personally suffered under his care. The heir must acknowledge his inheritance, and he must filter it, in order to preserve it. He must kill it in order to keep it alive. Through his execution, Ceauşescu became the symbol of communism that he never was in practice. This sublimation of Ceauşescu into the spirit of communism is one aspect of what the opinion polls reflect, and this sublimation is also what interferes with the mourning process. Mourning Ceauşescu is unacceptable because of the abuses committed under his rule. The insistence on his guilt, which resulted in his swift execution –​as Mircea Dinescu said, “It was either him or us” –​ is responsible for the longing reflected in the opinion polls. Ceauşescu has become inseparable from the legacy of communism, so as long as a repressive instinct is present around his execution, a fidelity to one is necessarily also a fidelity to the other. The structure of sovereignty outlined in the previous chapter wields influence over the structure of inheritance and mourning outlined here, underpinned by the self-​collapsing apparatus of performative contradiction. The inability to mourn for Ceauşescu  –​ the inability to admit guilt for his execution –​ is reflected in his popularity in the opinion polls. The fact that he was executed swiftly and in secret does nothing to detract from a feeling of responsibility and guilt in the general public because his death was longed for and celebrated. Freud’s hypothesis of the totem meal takes on new depth when discussed in terms of the execution of a sovereign. The following chapter will take this moment of the totem meal in Freud’s narrative of history, what he named earlier as the “origin of our cultural legacy,”69 at least symbolically, and build a critique around it, based on a critique of patriarchy made by Derrida against Freud. Derrida will argue that this moment of cultural origin in Freud’s narrative is also the moment Freud calls “civilization,” which is marked not only by the totem meal but also by the moment when men turn away from a reliance on their senses to using reason. NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 78.





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2. Michael J. Jordan, in “After the Berlin Wall, Nostalgia for Communism Creeps Back,” Christian Science Monitor (9 November 2009), accessed 16 May 2016, http://​ www.csmonitor.com/​World/​Europe/​2009/​1109/​p11s01-​woeu.html. 3. Elena Dragomir, in “In Romania, Opinion Polls Show Nostalgia for Communism,” Balkanalysis.com (27 December 2011), accessed 16 May 2016, http://​ www.balkanalysis.com/​romania/​2011/​12/​27/​in-​romania-​opinion-​polls-​show-​nostalgia-​for-​communism/​. 4. Romulus Rusan, in “From ‘the sea of bitterness,’” accessed 16 May 2016, http://​www.memorialsighet.ro/​from-​the-​sea-​of-​bitterness. Sighet is also the birthplace of Elie Wiesel, so the historical significance of this location is further burdened by Romania’s role in the Holocaust. See, for example, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–​1944, by Radu Ioanid (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). 5. Unknown, “Ceauşescu Exhibit Opens in Bucharest,” Southeast European Times (28 March 2005), accessed 20 January 2013, SETimes.com. 6. Unknown, “Ceauşescu Exhibit.” 7. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 77–​78. 8. “Transcript of the closed ‘trial’ of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu,” Military base Târgovişte – December 25th 1989 Prosecutor Gica POPA. The English translation is by the US government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, accessed 22 January 2013, http://​www.ceausescu.org/​ceausescu_​texts/​revolution/​trial-​eng.htm. 9. Dragomir, “In Romania, Opinion Polls Show Nostalgia for Communism.” 10. Dragomir, “In Romania, Opinion Polls Show Nostalgia for Communism.” 11. Quoting the phrase coined by Romania’s national poet, the nineteenth-​century romantic Mihai Eminesu. 12. Rusan, “From ‘the sea of bitterness.’” 13. Dennis Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​89 (London: Hurst, 2006). 14. Craig S. Smith, “Eastern Europe Struggles to Purge Security Services,” The New York Times (12 December 2006), accessed 16 May 2016, http://​www.nytimes. com/​2006/​12/​12/​world/​europe/​12spooks.html?_​r=2&. 15. Dragomir, “In Romania, Opinion Polls Show Nostalgia for Communism.” 16. Rusan, “From ‘the sea of bitterness.’” 17. Rusan, “From ‘the sea of bitterness.’” 18. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică, Videograms of a Revolution, Documentary Film (Switzerland: Bremer Institut Film & Fernsehen, and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, 1992). 19. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 3. 20. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 81. 21. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 82–​83. 22. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 81. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casario (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 80. 24. Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution.



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25. There are many news clips circulating the same footage from Romania in December of 1989. Here is a link to the BBC feature, accessed 22 January 2013, http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=AEqS7lz0O9A. 26. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 83. 27. I am referring to the French Revolution as the revolution par excellence upon which the modern concept of revolution is based and the standard against which the Romanian Revolution’s authenticity is held by critics. The prior point from Derrida serves to underscore the reference. 28. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 81. 29. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Fredrick Engels (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), 39. 30. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 21. 31. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 58. 32. This is a Spinozan point, which is elaborated in the previous chapter, but states, briefly, that the social contract requires, and is based on, the willing participation of the majority of subjects. 33. North Korea, where power now appears to have passed successfully from Kim Il-​sung to his son, might provide an analogous example of this type of pseudo divine-​ monarchy-​communism, though this concept is so far off from what Marx imagined that one hesitates to even call it “communism.” And yet, that is precisely the topic of this discussion and the problem that “communist” nations suffer from. 34. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 3. 35. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 3. 36. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 4. 37. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 4. 38. See, for example, the discussion of “Who is the Mother?” in c­ hapter 5. See also Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 39. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 81. 40. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 4. 41. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 4. 42. The June 1990 Mineriad was the suppression of an anti–​National Salvation Front (FSN) sit-​in protests in Bucharest by the physical intervention of groups of industrial workers as well as coal miners from the Jiu Valley, brought to Bucharest by President Ion Iliescu to counter the rising violence of the protesters. Dennis Deletant, “Chapter 25: The Security Services since 1989: Turning Over a New Leaf,” ed. Henry F. Carey, Romania since 1989: Politics, Economics, and Society (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004), 507–​510. 43. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 83. 44. William Plummer and Margie Bonnett Sellinger, “After the Revolution, a Shocked Rumania Discovers the Luxuries of Its Rulers,” People, Vol. 33, No. 2 (15 January 1990), accessed 16 May 2016, http://​www.people.com/​people/​archive/​article/​0,,20116541,00.html. 45. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 85. 46. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 15.





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47. BBC interview with Mircea Dinescu, accessed 16 May 2016, http://​www. youtube.com/​watch?v=AEqS7lz0O9A. 48. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 89. 49. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 31. 50. “Transcript of the closed ‘trial’ of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu.” 51. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 89. 52. A critique of Freud based on accusations of misogyny, or opposition to historical narratives fetishizing the commodification of women, is not the task of this chapter. For an extended discussion of such a critique, see ­chapter 5 on Derrida, Freud and the uncertainty of the mother. 53. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Stachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 184. 54. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 184. 55. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 246. 56. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 246. 57. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 176. 58. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 174. 59. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 198. 60. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 198. 61. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 186. 62. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 186. 63. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 179. 64. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 179. 65. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 179. 66. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 180. 67. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 186. 68. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 186. 69. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 198.





Chapter Five

Pro-​Natal Legislation and the Systematic Destruction of Intimacy

The previous chapter widened the lens of analysis of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 to include details which occurred twenty years after the fact, and the present chapter will look at events that happened up to twenty years before. Looking at opinion polls from recent years served the purpose of further meditating on the ambivalence which has haunted the revolution from the start, proposing an interpretation through Freud that can explain certain aspects of this ambivalence through a structure of guilt and mourning. The emphasis on mourning will become the central focus for ­chapter  6. The present chapter will look at pro-​natal legislation under Ceauşescu, with the aim of looking at some of the most notorious abuses which occurred during his rule. In order to reconcile the high percentage of informants working for the Securitate and the high percentage of people who say they lived well under Ceauşescu, it is crucial to keep in mind Spinoza’s structure of sovereign power because it obviates the link between those in power and those who keep them there. Freud is equally important because he provides a useful narrative to explain why feelings of guilt towards a sovereign lead to a denial of the wrongdoings of that sovereign. Based on the previous chapter’s analysis, the general public in Romania felt they were victimized by Ceauşescu at the same time that they felt entirely complicit in the abuses of his regime. Prior to the revolution, the sense of victimization would have been prevalent. If they felt complicit, then, after his execution, feelings of guilt would naturally follow, hence the opinion polls which refuse to bear witness to the abuses. The following discussion of pro-​natal legislation serves as a meditation on the abuses which are denied by the opinion polls. The ultimate argument would be that Ceauşescu cannot be mourned because in order to feel bad about his death, an admission of complicity with his crimes would need to be acknowledged. Due to the extreme nature of these abuses, such a complicity must never be admitted because 111



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it is too offensive to a sense of self, too destructive to one’s psyche, and it threatens to undermine the entire legitimacy of the nation. The consequence of this denial is that the underlying modes of abuse are perpetuated through their denial. Simply put, if we do not acknowledge what we have done wrong, we will continue to repeat these wrongs. One of the most chilling aspects of Freud’s symbolic narrative of the fraternal horde is the illustration of how the psychic consequences of an act of murder lead to the institutions of organized religion and sovereign rule. Spinoza’s explanation of the origin of sovereign power is radically different from Freud’s, and yet they are not incompatible. Spinoza discusses how the state of nature, and men’s desire to live without the constant fear of being attacked, leads them to join forces and elect a sovereign. He also calls this process by the name of reason, and it does point to a fear of violation, such as murder, at the heart of the impetus for this transition from the state of nature to a society governed by law. Spinoza places a tremendous amount of focus on emphasizing the necessity of ethical governance, and his observations are also prescriptive. In a totalitarian state such as what Romania was like under Ceauşescu, with food shortages, informants and constant threats of physical violence from the state, people essentially returned to living in a state of nature, in the sense that they lived in a state of constant fear. Rather than the government providing protection through the rule of law, the rule of law itself became the threat. This threat comprised individuals wielding the sovereign power reinvested in them by the state (which is of course power invested by the people in the state to begin with) as weapons against each other. The perfect example of sovereign power that all members of the population had access to was that of acting as an informant. Because of the fact that anyone could potentially be an informant, combined with the brutality and lack of transparency of the police state, everyone essentially lived in a constant state of anxiety. It was not necessary for everyone to actually be an informant, any more than it was necessary for the fraternal horde to actually kill and devour their father. The fact that 94 percent of the population said that they did not personally suffer under such a system, and 40 percent would re-​elect Ceauşescu, reveals the most disturbing aspect of the opinion polls from the previous chapter, which is that it could happen again. That is the greatest threat to Romania: not that another dictator would secretly organize a coup and steal power, in order to replace Ceauşescu and oppress the people, but that the people would welcome such a dictator, willingly participate in another totalitarian system and, at the end of it, celebrate his execution, leading to their guilt and the repetition of the cycle. This is why it is crucial to understand the structure of sovereign power as being one contiguous force between the people and public officials and to resist any narrative which seeks to organize stable identities around victims and perpetrators.





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The repetition compulsion which is revealed, thanks to Freud, in such a political example is indispensable to a discussion of totalitarianism, which is, at its inner core, what this book seeks to do. Just as Spinoza and Freud were necessary for a discussion of what happened, and how it happened, Derrida will now shed some light on why it happened. His argument is that the need for certainty leads to a justification of the exertion of political control, specifically forceful control of bodies, which is to say totalitarianism. In order to make this argument, there will be a broad lens discussing the history of patriarchy and a narrow lens discussing the history of abortion rights in Romania. In the context of an obsessive need for certainty, it becomes clear that performative contradiction can be used as a method to unseat totalitarian inclinations. In this part of the thesis, the usage of performative contradiction changes from being a diagnostic tool to becoming a therapeutic one. The need for certainty and the justification of using force to achieve certainty are both evidenced by pro-​natal legislation in Romania, where forcing families to bear children was seen as a valid strategy which would bring a thriving economy into being. In the absence of an effective economic plan, the repressive impulse guided legislation in all aspects of public life, culminating in a violation of the most private aspects of individual life. All this should be read in the context of the ground which has already been covered, beginning with accusations of inauthenticity against the revolution, falsification of the images of the dead, thematically guided through structures of sovereignty, inheritance and guilt. The portrait of Romania which should be emerging is that of a nation in a state of extreme crisis, where brutal exertions of force in every aspect of daily life were seen as a means of combating extreme economic and social problems. Performative contradictions which emerge in the details of analysis also come forward on the macro level. This backdrop is crucial for interpreting the events of the revolution because it defines the historical ground of collective agency, in the sense of the multitude acting in collusion with the political forces in power, even and especially where a split sovereignty is visible. Ceauşescu’s extreme pro-​natal legislation is often cited in the context of abortion debates, held up by pro-​choice advocates as a warning for what might happen to a society which outlaws abortion. Sociologist Gail Kligman treats this topic extensively in The Politics of Duplicity, where she outlines in great detail the coercive conditions of reproductive regulation under Decree 770, the law that outlawed abortion in Romania in 1966. In a lecture delivered at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007, she warns her American audience about what might happen if extreme pro-​life legislation is allowed to pass in the United States, citing various examples where access to abortion is being challenged and restricted, state by state.1 The consistent observation, made by sociologists and population surveys working with abortion statistics,



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is that restricting access to abortion does not eliminate its practice. It merely drives it underground, with abortions being performed under unsafe circumstances or by unqualified individuals. It provokes a rise in maternal mortality2 and sometimes engenders a phenomenon called “abortion tourism,” where women travel to a nearby region where abortion is legal, such as Irish women traveling to the United Kingdom.3 Christian Mungiu’s 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is set in the final days of the Ceauşescu regime and tells the story of two young women, one of whom is pregnant and needs the help of the other to secure an illegal abortion. The film takes the viewer through the necessary steps, which grow more and more tortured as the narrative progresses: Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) does everything to help her college roommate, Găbiţa (Laura Vasiliu), who is far along in an unwanted pregnancy, to get an illegal abortion. During the first forty minutes, suspense builds as we follow Otilia preparing for an as-​yet-​unknown task: she borrows money, takes care of a hotel reservation, worries about a plastic tablecloth (whose gruesome utility is to be revealed later), and meets a mysterious man who goes by the name of Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). Once Otilia, Găbiţa, and Bebe gather in the hotel room, we witness a chilling round of negotiations during which the women are reluctant to say the word “abortion” and Bebe never says the word “sex” (replacing it with the euphemism “being nice”). After having sex with this abusive stranger as part payment for the abortion, Otilia has to go through more circles of hell: sitting through an exasperating family reunion at the house of her boyfriend Adi (Alexandru Potocean), then walking around the city at night in a terrifying search for somewhere to deposit the dead foetus in her purse.4

While this scene in the film might strike some as far-​fetched, those who are familiar with the conditions in Romania under Ceauşescu are likely to see many similarities with actual events. In The Politics of Duplicity, Kligman includes a series of first-​person accounts from doctors who had performed abortions and women who had received them. They include details about the scenes from women receiving abortions in private apartments, on kitchen tables, and from doctors who were accused and had served jail time.5 While none of Kligman’s accounts include doctors who performed the service in exchange for sexual favours, the point is similar, which is a highlighting of the uneasy power dynamic engendered under Ceauşescu’s policies, reliant as they were on secrecy, informants and repressive state measures. In the words of one critic’s description of the film, “The subtle and perverse nature of Romanian totalitarianism was that it managed to penetrate its subjects’ intimacy, psychology, and identity at a level that was much more profound and subversive than the state propaganda.”6 The iconic depictions of the ruling couple, which were mentioned in the previous chapter, perhaps carry





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some power merely because they are symptomatic of a perverse vanity. They are performative, in that the act of depicting yourself as a deity publicly, in a context where a critique of such a depiction is forbidden, is a performance of extreme power that does wield a psychically oppressive force over those who see these images, if only because it reminds them that they are powerless to publicly denounce such imagery. But, as Ioana Uricaru points out, they do not have the power to convince viewers of the content that they are attempting to represent. This is generally true of propaganda, which derives power from its force of delivery, not its content. Contrasted to this, but perhaps complimentary to it, is the insidious power of laws which corrupt the relationships between people: While it was relatively easy to resist the cult of personality and to laugh at exaggerated reports of economic successes, it was much more difficult to even diagnose what the twisted gender politics, the intricate system of arbitrary interdictions, and the collection of social constraints were actually doing to our minds as we were attempting to adapt and survive.7

The social conditions which arose under Ceauşescu –​where the possibility of secret informants in the form of friends and neighbours, or even relatives, was always looming as the backdrop for social interactions –​ produced a type of police state that was far more intrusive than threats from a more removed military presence. The repressive state apparatus penetrated virtually every social encounter. Uricaru continues with a description of the film: “While trying to arrange the room reservation at the hotel, Otilia has to beg two receptionists who take turns at ignoring, patronizing, and belittling her. Even when the dues (the pack of Kent cigarettes) are paid, the clerks persist in their threatening rudeness.”8 Their rudeness is threatening because of the consequences of being turned in to the authorities by an informant, who could be anyone, including a hotel receptionist. Olitia is in the act of committing a crime by helping her friend arrange an abortion. This puts her at the mercy of everyone she comes across. In the context of a totalitarian state where legal proceedings are essentially secretive, guilt is perennial. Olitia is not the one getting an abortion, and yet she is guilty. If someone accuses her, she will likely never know who, and the process by which her guilt would be ascertained, and her sentence executed, would be Kafkaesque. [t]‌hat a hotel receptionist should be a person of authority to whom Otilia has to report her comings and goings, explain her personal problems, and beg for a favour is a telling mechanism of a society set up as a Stanford prison experiment: half the population was, in one way or another, given power over the other half.9



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Uricaru correctly identifies the absurdity of the situation, except in her view of the division. Olitia has potentially just as much power over the hotel receptionist, and over her friend, as anyone has over her. That is the perverse equality at the heart of a system which relies on secret informants. Everyone is equally at its mercy. It reveals a perversion of the roles around bearing witness, determining guilt and bearing responsibility. These themes are at the heart of Derrida’s discussion of certainty and ambivalence, especially in the context of maternal rights and patriarchal structures. There is perhaps no better illustration of the problem Derrida describes concerning this topic than pro-​natal legislation under Ceauşescu. In any discussion of reproductive legislation, what is at stake is the public’s willingness to have the state participate in the reproductive lives of its citizens. There is a very justified and relevant reason to point to Ceauşescu’s Romania as a cautionary example for why abortion should remain legal and accessible, but the differences must also be noted. Ceauşescu’s motivation for making abortion illegal was not –​as it is for pro-​life advocates in the United States, Ireland or Poland, for ­example  –​ couched in religious terminology. Ceauşescu’s stated motivation was purely economic. There was no rhetoric concerning the sanctity of life or the rights of the foetus. The only moral duty in the context of Decree 770 was the mother’s job of strengthening the economy by birthing a work force. “In 1986, President Ceauşescu proclaimed that ‘the foetus is the socialist property of the whole society. Giving birth is a patriotic duty . . . Those who refuse to have children are deserters, escaping the law of natural continuity.’ ”10 Rhetorically, Ceauşescu was concerned with the life of the foetus only to the extent that it would eventually become part of the workforce, and with the life of the mother only to the extent that she was a means of producing this work force. He invoked the pseudo-​biological rhetoric of “the law of natural continuity” and described the childless as unnatural enemies of the state.11 These measures take the discussion far outside the context of a generic religious debate concerning the ethical justification of legalized abortion. And while some religious organizations prohibit abortion and the use of contraceptives and valorize having many children, few have so blatantly crossed the line into monitoring reproductive capacity through the invasive monthly physical examinations which were institutionalized under Ceauşescu. This would be the slippery slope argument: If the state is allowed to regulate reproduction, why would it stop short of regulating it absolutely? To those who would dismiss such arguments as nonsensical, Romania offers a chilling example. In Romania, the extreme degree of state involvement led to countless unwanted children being born to families who could not afford to care for them. The state could not afford to care for them either, and the extent of





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this failure of care came to light only after 1989, when the conditions inside state-​run orphanages were finally revealed.12 It might be more accurate to say that the state forced families to bear children, rather than to say that the state intervened. The state went quite a bit further than preventing abortion. It attempted to induce pregnancy, through economic and legal coercion. While couples could choose to abstain, or avoid pregnancy through various means, the lack of children would bring suspicion and scrutiny from the state. Ceauşescu’s intention was to increase the birth rate in order to strengthen the economy with a new wave of workers. The birth rate was in decline in the post–​World War II era and dropped even further after the 1957 law making abortion more accessible. “In September 1957 following the Soviet lead, a governmental decree made abortion on request available in Romania. From that point the crude birth rate declined continuously to 14.3 in 1966.”13 A sharp decline in the birth rate, and the rapid rise in abortions, followed the passing of this progressive law: “[a]‌t the same time the number of abortions per 100 live births rose steadily from 30 in 1958 to 408 in 1965, or about 80 percent of all conceptions. By this time, abortion had become the major means of fertility control in Romania”14 The focus in pro-​life rhetoric is on the life of the foetus, but the apparatus in play is that of a coercive, regulative impulse, where the law is invoked to enforce the reproductive agenda of the community, over and against the individual. Reproductive freedom was granted to Romania’s women in the form of biological self-​determination via legalized, widely accessible abortions. This revealed the fact that most women (80 percent of them) preferred to terminate their pregnancies rather than carry them to term. Instead of looking at the social conditions which were causing the vast majority of pregnant women to seek abortions, legislation instead went to the opposite extreme of trying to force them to give birth. Kligman observes that Decree 770 must be read in the context of the 1957 decree, which was seen as a victory for women’s rights, granting them reproductive self-​ determination; this right to self-​ determination was lost 15 completely less than a decade later. She identifies the root of the problem as the essentializing of the female role as a reproductive one, to the exclusion of men. Since women bear the physical responsibility, it is their reproductive rights which are over-​regulated by the state. But the entire family is threatened because there are penalties for individuals who are not married by a certain age, and for childless couples and households who do not have multiple children. “The social significance of the romanticized traditional family differed from its socio-​biological construction, which in essence was ‘bio-​socialist.’ For the purposes of propaganda, only the family with many children was sociologically important as an institution.”16 Legislation surrounding procreation brings the link between the family and the nation state to the foreground and puts the interests of individual self-​determination at odds with the objectives



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of the nation state, with the maternal body acting as the grounds for this conflict. “The family was not only a social institution but also a ‘biological social system . . . for increase of the population and the raising of new generations, thus for human exigencies and historical progress.’ Moreover, nature had essentialized women, endowing only them with the ability to bear life.’ ”17 Derrida’s thoughts on the surrogate mother offer an interesting way out of this essentialization of the maternal role by pointing to a fundamental misconception. His argument is that the modern technoscientific advancement that allows for surrogate mothers reveals an ancient truth about the mother, which is that her (reproductive) identity was never certain. What today is revealed through scientific intervention, which literally allows one woman to give birth to another woman’s child, was always present in the form of mother supplements because “everything we have thus far called a nursemaid or nanny, a wet nurse, or rather the mother-​replacements, the supplementary mothers and the infinite circle of mother supplements, all that which represented the mother, is already contained today in the word’s meaning.”18 This built-​in multiplicity of identity has been denied in favour of privileging the mother with an ossified and undoubtable unitary identity, unlike the father, whose identity requires inference. Reading Freud, Derrida calls attention to the supposed separation of the maternal and paternal roles, which Freud described as the difference between certainty and uncertainty. The identity of the mother is always certain, whereas the identity of the father requires reason and logical deduction. Therefore, argues Freud, the birth of civilization occurs at the moment when men turn away from relying only on their senses (matriarchy) and towards relying on reason (patriarchy). This argument is put forth succinctly in a footnote in the case study of the “Rat Man,” in “Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” which Derrida deconstructs at length in his essay, “Who is the Mother? Birth, Nature, Nation.” Quoting Freud, As Lichtenberg says, “An astronomer knows whether the moon is inhabited or not with about as much certainty as he knows who was his father, but not with so much certainty as he knows who was his mother.” A great advance was made in civilization when men decided to put their inferences upon a level with the testimony of their senses [neben das Zeugnis der Sinne] and to make the step [den Schluss] from matriarchy to patriarchy. –​ The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent [die Abstammung vom Vater]; Athena had no mother [mutterlose Athene].19

Derrida touches on the topic in various texts, specifically in Politics of Friendship, Monolingualism of the Other and Archive Fever, focusing on





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the assumption made by Freud, where he equates civilization with the logical deduction necessary for the determination of paternal identity, over and against the more primitive (“natural”) certainty of maternal identity. I will only say a word. It will go in the direction of what, in Freud’s eyes, and in particular in The Rat Man, ties the progress of science and of reason to the advent of the patriarchate. In a note which I do not have the time to read here and will comment on elsewhere, Freud makes three mistakes, with Lichtenberg, whose support he seeks.20

The “elsewhere” that Derrida refers to is an essay published in Hungarian by Jelenkor Press in 1997 under the title Ki az anya? based on seminars he gave in Paris at École des hautes études en sciences sociales and at the University of Pécs, Hungary, between 1993 and 1995, under the title Qui est la mere? Naissance, nature, nation. In this essay, Derrida deconstructs the equivalence Freud makes between logical deduction, civilization and fatherhood. [Freud] makes a mistake in affirming that there can be no doubt about the identity of the mother, insofar as it depends on the witness of the senses, while the identity of the father always remains doubtful since it depends, and it alone, on a rational inference, as that “legal fiction” of which Stephen speaks in Joyce’s Ulysses.21

The legal fiction is the hypothesis of the father’s identity, deduced through reason, which will be discussed shortly: However, better than ever today, if only with the possibility of surrogate mothers, prosthetic maternity, sperm banks, and all the artificial inseminations, as they are secured for us already and will be secured still more for us in the future by bio-​genetic techno-​science, we know that maternity is as inferred, constructed, and interpreted as paternity. And as paternal law.22

Derrida introduces this topic in Politics of Friendship, arguing that both maternity and paternity have always been based on inference, and this is the basis of the threefold mistake Freud makes. First, he believes the mother’s identity cannot be doubted. Second, he believes only the father’s identity can be doubted. Freud makes a second mistake in believing with Lichtenberg that paternity, and it alone, is as uncertain as the question of whether the moon is inhabited: we know today, in all objective certainty, that the moon is uninhabited, and, conversely, it is easier to see and to touch that satellite’s soil than the certain identity of a mother.23



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Third, he believes the father’s doubt leads to reason, which leads to civilization. He makes a third mistake in drawing from all these errors, illusions, or phantasms a phallogocentric conclusion: because of this presumed call to reason in the assignation of paternity, beyond the “witness of the senses,” the passage to patriarchy marked the civilizing triumph of reason over sensibility, of science over perception.24

Derrida elaborates this critique in “Who is the Mother?” focusing in the second half of the essay on the emphasis placed on bearing witness, and giving testimony before the law, which is a role Freud relegated to men, in the context of a patriarchal legal system where the mother is excluded from the structure of inheritance. The father is granted legal and symbolic power due to his position of uncertainty. The quotation above, taken from Archive Fever, provides a precise overview of what is expanded and elaborated in “Who is the Mother?” which he points to when he promises to “comment on [the note] elsewhere,” and the note is a footnote in The Rat Man, which contains the sentence about the hieroglyphic representation of witness as male genitalia: A witness who testifies to something before a court of law is still called “Zeuge” [literally, “begetter,” adds the English translator] in German, after the part played by the male in the act of procreation [nach dem mannlichen Anteil am Geschafte der Fortplanzung]; so too in hieroglyphics a “witness” is represented pictorially by the male genitals.25

The point that Derrida stresses repeatedly is that patriarchy rests on trusting the certainty of the senses when it comes to the identity of the mother and distrusting them when it comes to the father. The question of the mother is always formulated in terms of the identity of the mother, as if there could be no mother without “identity, as we so foolishly say nowadays.”26 Reason –​ civilization! –​is used in determining the father’s identity out of necessity, not out of preference. It is this necessity –​the necessity of certainty, and certainty as necessity –​ that Derrida focuses on deconstructing through Freud’s diagnosis of obsessional neurosis in The Rat Man,27 a diagnosis which is turned against patriarchy’s need to insist on the certainty of its parentage. The father’s mystical estate is how Derrida describes the structure of inheritance within a patriarchal system, where the father’s identity is always uncertain, and thereby privileged. He evokes Joyce’s Ulysses to mobilize “the legal fiction” of fatherhood uttered by the character of Stephen as echoing the hypothesis which Freud gives in Rat Man about the certainty of the mother and the uncertainty of the father. “Freud’s observation . . . contains at once the





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theme of the history of humanity as the history of witnessing, and a summary hypothesis about that which Joyce called ‘the legal fiction,’ more specifically what in Ulysses . . . Stephen, the boy calls . . . father’s hypothesis.”28 Fatherhood can only ever be a hypothesis, and for Freud it is “a hypothesis about the hypothesis,” because the mother’s body is viscerally, phenomenally, obviously present and witnessable during the moment of birth. The witness who is present during the moment of birth, whether or not it is the hypothetical father, can testify to the connection between the mother and the child. The entire structure of maternal certainty seems to be dependent on the presence of this witness and on their ability to testify to what they saw. It may be the hypothetical father, who can testify to the mother’s identity in court, but he cannot testify to his own identity as father, only to his identity as witness. And the witnessing provides the ground for the hypothesis. This is where the visual and the representable become central concerns. “The mother is visible, the father in the first case is invisible, at least this is what we think, and already we are predisposed to think that the mother and the father differ from each other like the visible from the invisible, the phenomenal from the conceptual.”29 The father is invisible with regards to his identity as father, overshadowed by the image of the mother. His identity is one which must be claimed, and in the process of assuming this ownership, the mother and child become subsumed as his property. Reason overcomes the senses and establishes itself as law, in order to compensate for its lack of visibility. And in this is hidden, like we will soon see, a large bearable framework, a question, which is just as important as the question of the mother (about whom they say that she bears the seed); as the question of the father, about whom they suppose that surely he matters somewhat.30

There may be yet another invisible party: the child. Presumably, the mother knows who the father is. She knows, but as far as the father is concerned, it will only ever be hypothetical to him. The father knows who the mother is, for certain, or so he supposes, because he (or a witness) may be present for the birth. The child, however, in spite of being present for the birth, can hardly be called a witness to anything, least of all to the identity of the others present during the event. So there is a fourth mistake made concerning the certainty of the identity of one’s own mother  –​ of which Lichtenberg and Freud are so sure –​on behalf of the child, whose hypothesis concerning the identity of either parent is far more tenuous –​ more a matter of faith –​ than the father’s hypothesis of his own fatherhood.31 The uncertainty of the mother is removed only by the presence of the witness, whose testimony may be submitted before the court. The testimony of the witness is sufficient to remove doubt concerning the mother’s identity and her unquestionable link to the child, but



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the potential testimony of the mother is not sufficient to remove the doubt concerning the identity of the father. The mother’s word cannot be trusted, and she is not a witness: The connection with the father always belongs to a place where the secret is always possible and enduring, a place that can be called mystical . . . This is why Stephen, in that section of Ulysses where he talks about legal fiction he refers to the mystery of Christ’s spiritual conception and the mystical estate of the father.32

While the father may have renounced faith in favour of reason with regards to his offspring, said offspring always maintain a “mystical” connection to their hypothetical father. “The mystery of Christ’s spiritual conception” has much to say about this, particularly from the point of view of Joseph, about whom Derrida says nothing explicitly and does not even mention him by name, just as he does not explicitly provide an account of parental certainty from the perspective of the child, whose perspective surely matters somewhat. Without straying too far off topic, into Christian mythology, the interesting thing about Joseph is that the status of his paternal claim is not at all in dispute. He is not the father, for certain. At best, he is an early example of a willing and informed surrogate father. This hints at a structure of paternity that is adoptive, rather than biological, and offers an alternative model to the obsession with certainty that at first glance might appear less diagnosable as obsessional neurosis, which is what Derrida observes in Freud’s description of patriarchy. But in the case of Joseph, where the mystical father is attributed with all procreative activity and his religious devotees do not attempt to compete with him, the relationship is not substantially different, simply because the certainty of the mother remains in place, as does the privileged position of the patriarch to be the one impregnating women. Freud describes the emergence of the father’s mystical power in the section at the end of Totem and Taboo, where the band of brothers has overthrown the patriarch, and through his death, he rises to a far more powerful position than he had in life: he becomes a totem animal, endowing the brothers with power; later a god; and later still, the state, in its early form through divine kings: “The scene of the father’s vanquishment, of his greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his supreme triumph.”33 The question once again becomes one of death and of inheritance, where the death of the father heralds the death of matriarchy and the turn to patriarchy, oddly reflected through the bodies of the living mother and the dead father and Freud’s claim that this turn amounts to progress. In Freud’s cosmology, the turn from matriarchy to patriarchy preceded the scene of the patriarch’s defeat by the band of brothers. The site of the alienation of the young men,





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the sons, was already happening in the context of a patriarchal society which had presumably turned to reason, in favour of the senses. The revelation of that system seems to be that patriarchy also alienates men. When describing Darwin’s primal horde as a potential precursor to totemism, Freud says, “All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.”34 But perhaps Freud did not give so much thought to how the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy correlated to the transition from the patriarchal horde to the more democratic band of brothers. Perhaps if he had, he might have considered the unpalatable nature of presenting the moment of the emergence of patriarchy as the essential foundational moment of civilization, seeing as how it is a site of brutality towards the sons as much as towards the women being hoarded. And yet this is the moment Freud chooses to advocate as progress and claims that it is ruled by reason. Others have noticed the incongruity with regards to Freud’s mentioning of matriarchy at this specific moment in Totem and Taboo. For instance, Peter Davies, in Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity, writes, At one stage, Freud speculates that the sons of the original primitive father, having killed him, erect the incest tabu in order to prohibit competition for his women . . . He suggests that this fatherless cultural stage may form the “germ of the institution of matriarchy, described by Bachofen, which was in turn replaced by the patriarchal organization of the family.” Freud provides no further explanation here, and the reference is confusing.35

I see no argument in the text which indicates that Freud actually saw the murder of the primal father by the sons as the moment of matriarchy. Quite the contrary, he appears to be merely paying lip service to Bachofen’s theory on matriarchy, in order to dismiss him in the very next sentence, where he states, “On the other hand, the claim of totemism to be regarded as a first attempt at a religion is based . . . upon taking the life of the totem animal,”36 which is to say, the father. And in Rat Man, he argues that matriarchy preceded patriarchy. Or are we to conclude that the patriarchal horde was not a patriarchal system? Or is there a cyclical nature to these transitions, with matriarchy following patriarchy, and then patriarchy once again? The march of civilization and progress seems to indicate that Freud believed this to be a unidirectional process: Freud executes this jump with shocking bravery and calm, about humanity’s progress about cultural or civilizational development (Kulturfortschritt), he sees as developmental this decision for the socio-​political power and organizational structure to give power to the father, that is a creator, life’s assumed procreatability is given over to the one whose identity no sensory witnessing can prove.37



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This marks the turn, politically, the revolution from the mother to the father, from the one whose identity is certain to the one whose identity never can be. The hypothesis of fatherhood supersedes maternal right, and deductive reason supplants sensibility. Without committing ourselves to a belief in matriarchy as a pre-​historical certainty, or to a linear historical narrative, there is the possibility here of reading matriarchy into the overarching patriarchal structure described by Freud. If we see the certainty of the mother, the fixity of her identity, as constitutive of the patriarchy which here begins to dominate it, then it becomes clear that patriarchy cannot develop without the hidden kernel of maternal certainty –​ matriarchy –​ around which it is built. Take away the certainty of the mother, and the uncertainty of the father loses the lack for which its claim to domination overcompensates. And the need for certainty, which is to say, the need for lack of competition, offers a crude and simple explanation for the motivations of the patriarch, who expels the sons when they reach an age at which they become sexual rivals. Attempting to eliminate the sons is another form that the obsessional neurosis surrounding paternal doubt can take in Freud’s cosmology, as it removes the doubt surrounding the patriarch’s filial certainty. But in both systems, if there is in fact any difference between these two modes of patriarchy, the certainty towards the mother remains, as does her status, consequently, as property. Freud, quoting Lichtenberg, says, “Astronomers can know with approximately the same amount of certainty, whether the Moon is inhabited, as who their father is, but not who their mother is.”38 Of the moon’s inhabitants, and of their own father, astronomers in 1909 –​ the original date of Freud’s manuscript  –​ could be equally certain. Derrida adds, “To say it differently, they don’t know anything, they know too little about things, they rely on presuppositions.”39 Derrida focuses on the symbolic meaning of the moon and turns Freud’s example against him by pointing out that the moon makes the connection between fatherhood and death explicitly clear, at the same time that it compromises the symbolic division between the sexes. The moon allies itself through Freud’s example with the father because here, and through “different mythologies, [it brings] the Moon into connection with death, [which is] rather more supportive of the connection between the father and the Moon, since the father’s uncertainty is founded on precisely that non-​living, non-​ vital bind.”40 The moon, through this example, and through a symbolic connection with death, is associated with fatherhood, which also assumes the connection to death. At the same time, “this heavenly body is usually associated with the woman, with the mother, with the regulating rhythm of fertility customarily.”41 While, for the mother, the moon strengthens her certainty, for the father it highlights his negligible role. Through their symbolic relationship to the moon and their structural relationship to the moment of birth, the





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double standard of certainty and uncertainty with regards to the mother and father is once again made clear. “The father might as well be dead during the moment of birth, so structurally speaking the father, as father, is already the dead father.”42 The mother has an unfair advantage, due to the certainty granted to her through her presence at the moment of birth, which may be witnessable by the hypothetical father. The scientific development of the surrogate mother, however, problematizes this certainty, which has historically been taken for granted. But Derrida tells us, “All of this, does not refer to the order of things, cannot hold pretensions to allude to the order of things, the a-​historical and pre-​technological order of things, the order of physis and techne.”43 What it provides is one specific state of possibility, a technoscientific and historical development, in which the body of the mother can be split in two: into the conceiving mother –​the one that provides the egg –​and the bearing mother –​ the one that carries the egg of another woman. Through this development, techne reveals its capacity to repeat and replace, reveals its ability to divide “that allegedly final unity, that oneness and origin, that which connects witnessing to physis, and which connects the senses [aux sens] (in the context of sensing [au sens]) to motherhood during birth.”44 The possibility of this separation (of the maternal body) is what introduces all the possibilities which technology is capable of separating (through reproduction and replacement) from the final unity. This alleged final unity is what made the supposed certainty of the mother possible, and it is what now disturbs this order, through the literal separation of the maternal body. But the act of bearing witness already disturbs this order because it relies equally on the senses of the one bearing witness during birth. And as the quote from Freud which initiated this critique points out, the witness is only ever a man, with the inference being that it is the hypothetical father: A witness who testifies to something before a court of law is still called “Zeuge” [literally, “begetter,” adds the English translator] in German, after the part played by the male in the act of procreation [nach dem mannlichen Anteil am Geschafte der Fortplanzung]; so too in hieroglyphics a “witness” is represented pictorially by the male genitals.45

Bearing witness relies just as much on the senses as the certainty of maternal identity, which Derrida has exposed as being a mistaken certainty. Bearing witness relies on the senses of the father, who can testify later about what he saw. Bearing witness is not a matter of logical deduction but a testimony of what was observed by the senses. And yet, in the context of bearing witness, relying on the senses is what justifies endowing the father with the juridical power of testimony. Derrida emphasizes the three categories of people who



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are denied the right to bear witness before the law: children, women and the mentally ill. “An entire culture would much rather give this possession [of bearing witness] without regulation to available adult men, than it would to children, the mentally ill, or a woman.”46 In the context of bearing witness before the law, the law forgets that it relies on the senses of the witness and treats testimony as if it were fact. In Romania, bearing witness was a weapon available to anyone willing to become an informant. The quote from Freud comes from a footnote to a case of obsessional neurosis, which he describes as an inability to tolerate doubt, leading to an obsessive meditation on the source of that doubt: “The predilection felt by obsessional neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn their thoughts by preference to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain open to doubt.”47 The connection is obvious in the context of a juridical structure where the doubt surrounding the identity of the father is so emphasized that it justifies the marginalization of the mother. Derrida connects obsessional neurosis not just to the structure of governance but also to religion, philosophy and art.48 In the context of the broader structure, it is not surprising that disciplines which have a history of being beacons of reason, especially in the service of proving the unprovable, should appear here. What is more surprising is the link between certainty and witnessing, which is to say, language and juridical structure, and Derrida’s meticulous exposure of the performative contradiction underpinning this entire system. He observes that Freud shows symptoms of obsessional neurosis in the very act of discussing symptoms of obsessional neurosis, which Freud diagnoses himself: “[t]‌he chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory  –​ in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness.”49 To this diagnosis is attached the footnote about Lichtenberg and the structural uncertainty of the mother, containing the sentence, “[a] great advance was made in civilization when men decided to put their inferences upon a level with the testimony of their senses and to make the step from matriarchy to patriarchy.”50 Freud acknowledges that there are topics which must necessarily remain open to doubt, not just in Rat Man but also in Totem and Taboo, in a footnote to his discussions of the patriarchal horde and the transition to totemism. Of his historical musings concerning the shape and nature of early society, he writes, [t]‌he lack of precision in what I have written in the text above, its abbreviation of the time factor and its compression of the whole subject matter, may be attributed to the reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic. It would be





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as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist upon certainty.51

In this instance, Freud states that it would be foolish and unfair to insist upon certainty, though this is exactly the context in which he asserts that the move away from uncertainty (through bearing witness) amounts to the progress of civilization for certain and the transition away from matriarchy to patriarchy. Likewise, he diagnoses obsessional neurotics based on their need for certainty in matters that must remain uncertain, like paternity or the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, while he asserts the unquestionable certainty of the mother in a footnote to that exact sentence as an explanation of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. In other words, obsessional neurosis is required in order to perform the diagnosis of obsessional neurosis and, in Freud’s case especially, in order to even formulate such a “disorder.” Derrida takes this point one step further, implicating virtually the whole of what Freud, with “shocking bravery and calm,” calls civilization: This is clear enough, isn’t it, all knowing, all critique, all knowledge and all philosophy –​ like the culture of that about which we’re uncertain, and in connection to which doubt is unrelinquishable  –​ in its possibility, its inclination, its dominant tendency, its culture, it here finds itself on the same page with obsessional neurosis, whose pathology, in any case, is the favourite terrain of especially philosophy as the culture of being forced to hold before one’s eyes the doubt and uncertainty.52

This aspect of bearing witness points to a disturbing, and disingenuous, cornerstone of patriarchy, one that dismisses the certainty of the senses when it comes to the mother but elevates them to law when it comes to the father, at the same time that it denies doing so. Freud asserts that the father’s identity is rooted in logic, where in fact it is rooted in bearing witness, which relies as much on the senses as the mistaken certainty of the mother’s identity. This gesture, of mobilizing a reliance on the senses and establishing an exclusive juridical system to do so, while insisting that this is in fact a reliance on reason, results in another performative contradiction. It privileges the mother, mistakenly, and this privileging results in her marginalization. It is, in practice, privileging as marginalization. This can be seen in the example of Romania’s pro-​natal legislation. The example of Romania further highlights the unnatural lengths to which the forced naturalization of the maternal role can lead, including the unnaturalization of the father. Ceauşescu took his role as patriarch quite literally, enough to justify intervening in the reproductive lives of all citizens. The father was, in effect, replaced by the state. “The state claimed



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its paternalist rights to protect the family and to determine reproductive cycles.”53 Furthermore, this claim negated the role of the father: To underscore, paternalism generalized the dependency relations experienced by women and children in the patriarchal family. Men were similarly subordinated; citizens of Ceauşescu’s socialist state may be said to have been structurally “feminized” in their positioning within the state. From the perspective of the paternalist state, all citizens, regardless of gender, were its dependent children. Healthy orphans, potential future workers, became actual wards of the state, being “raised” under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, and later, the Ministry of Labor. It was also widely believed that a special secret police corps was made up of orphans selected and raised expressly to loyally serve their “parents,” the Ceauşescus.54

Not only was the father marginalized, but the mother was replaced by the state as well. She was needed only long enough to bear the child, and after that, the orphanages could take the place of both parents. For this reason, it was even more crucial that the state intervene and monitor the pregnancy and felt entirely justified in doing so. It is a symptom of intense obsession with reproduction, which was seen as the economic tool for Romania’s viability. The population was seen quite literally as a means of reproduction, with women being the active agents in the process. Therefore, their reproductive agency had to be fiercely regulated because the future of the nation demanded it: The stagnation and rancidity of this certainty, and the knowledge that this certainty generates, retroactively illuminates for us this structural unnaturalness. At the same time, just like this connection, namely the connection representing the contact between the mother and child during birth, the representation of the mother and of birth is the birth place, if we can still say it like this, of the representation of nature or physis (nature, birth, nation, mother, etc.) –​ and of everything which today is, even if it isn’t naturally (of its own nature), in any case strips the value of motherhood from its naturalness, and retroactively illuminates the fact that it was never natural, but rather naturalized.55

Due to the privilege bestowed and enforced by the legal structure of a patriarchal society, the witness who is present during the moment of birth instantiates the physical presence of the state in the delivery room. Also, recall the brief reference to the example set by Christian mythology, where Joseph is a surrogate to the divine father. This displacement is not exactly analogous to the scientific development of maternal surrogacy, but structurally it serves as a similar symbol, and it highlights the connection between pregnancy and the mystical father. In Freud’s narrative of the history of patriarchy, the dead father from the patriarchal horde emerges first as a totem animal, then a deity and then as a divine king. In the example provided by Joseph, we see how





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the leader of the patriarchal horde retains exclusivity with regards to impregnating women. In the example of Romania, we see the state attempting to assume this role. Pro-​ natal legislation underscores the mistaken assumption of certainty surrounding the maternal body, which was the justification for the outlawing of abortion, coupled with a number of other extremely invasive measures, including denying access to any form of contraception, mandatory pelvic exams in the workplace, ensuring the detection of pregnancy at the earliest possible moment, a tax placed on those who did not have children and financial rewards for those who did (never mind that these financial rewards were inadequate).56 While Freud’s emphasis on historical progress rests on the father’s reliance on reason when it comes to determining his legal responsibility towards his alleged offspring, a Romanian doctor speaking for the benefits of Ceauşescu’s pro-​natal policies justifies them specifically for not needing to know who the father is. “ ‘Who is the child’s father?’ –​ a hypothetical question from a depraved society (and, I might add, reminiscent of a barbarism perpetuated until so-​called modern times) –​is, thank God, no longer asked. (In fact, it is no longer asked in any civilized society!) Of the list of questions . . . only the first is valid, that by which the future mother’s name and surname is officially registered.”57 This amazingly rich quotation, especially in the context of the present discussion, was uttered by Dr. Dragoş Serafim, a leading medical journalist, in February of 1986. Here are all of Freud’s suppositions turned squarely on their head by a man of science, asserting that only a barbaric society would ask who the father is, and that in the context of a civilized society only the name of the mother is relevant. Dr. Serafim was referring to the situation in Romania where only women mattered, and only in their capacity to birth a work force. The man was irrelevant in the role of father, except as a surrogate for the state, in his impregnation of the mother. Recall once again Freud’s description of the band of brothers in the patriarchal horde and their marginalization. Perhaps Freud’s many mistakes concerning certainty and doubt did not prevent him from observing something rather disquieting about the structure of a society based on the privileging of female reproductive capacity and how this leads to the marginalization of the men within this system. What he did not see was that the assumption of maternal certainty is what underpins this contradictory privileging as marginalization, and that it is not a reliance on reason, but rather a reliance on the senses and, furthermore, a symptom of neurosis. Should this quotation lead to a conclusion that removing the significance of the father’s identity would intervene on behalf of the mother? Clearly, in the case of Romania, it did not. The problem rests not on the father’s uncertainty, though, as described in relation to Ulysses, that is the foundation of the legal



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fiction upon which the mystical estate of fatherhood is based. The problem is the certainty of the mother. Even if the father himself becomes irrelevant, as he did in Romania, the state can act as a surrogate for him and maintain the structure without interruption. If anything, when the father is replaced by the state, the maternal body becomes subject to even more legislation. Freud’s position, and Derrida’s critique of it, is based on the significance of the father. The doubt surrounding his certainty leads to an obsessive meditation on the certainty of the mother. The father becomes more and more uncertain during the course of the obsessive preoccupation with his doubt, and the mother, by contrast, becomes more and more ossified in her role, which justifies the regulation of her reproductive rights by the state. Though the father’s identity is uncertain, determining it is crucial, which is why the emphasis on reason and logical deduction is so important that, for Freud, it heralds the birth of civilization. The question “Who is the father?” is the only significant question, since “Who is the mother?” is self-​evident. If the father’s identity was also irrelevant, if that doubt was irrelevant, then the importance placed on logic should become equally marginal. Romania provides us with a rare example of a set of historical and legislative circumstances where the question “Who is the father?” was equally irrelevant. And yet the legal ramifications for women were extremely severe, in spite of the irrelevance of the father’s identity, which was supposedly the basis for the marginalization of childbearing women. For Freud, the formation of civilization, and therefore the state, owes its birth to the certainty of the mother’s identity and therefore builds itself upon the foundation of the father’s doubt. If this paternal doubt is made irrelevant though the father’s marginalization by the state, then it should no longer function as a justification for the essentialization and marginalization of the mother. Surrogacy should liberate both the mother and the father from the state, but in fact it further marginalizes both. Under Ceauşescu, both the maternal and paternal roles were co-​opted by the state. Serafim’s words seem to contradict Freud’s because, for the latter, asking “Who is the father?” leads to reason, civilization and patriarchy, whereas, for Serafim, civilization precisely does not ask the question about the father’s identity. What the historical evidence of pro-​natal legislation in Romania reveals is that there is no contradiction between them because the obsession hinges not on the father’s doubt, but on the mother’s certainty. That certainty which Freud takes for granted is actually the cornerstone of patriarchy and civilization, not the father’s doubt, as he supposed, because we can see exactly the same result when the father’s significance is removed. The performative contradiction of privileging as marginalization which this obsessive certainty makes is easily witnessable in another quote from the doctor:





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With respect to the horrible question, “who forced you to give birth?” today, this issue is seen completely differently. It is not only that this question is proscribed by our society’s laws –​by definition, a humane society, or better said, a society of good will  –​ but, today, as you well know, we honour the other side of the coin, that is, the stimulation of natality, viewed as an important responsibility for the destiny of our people. The measures recently established by the Political Executive Bureau of the Central Committee of the PCR, upon the noble initiative of comrade Nicolae Ceauşescu, are, in this regard, eloquent.58

There is the complete summary of how this performative contradiction works, where Serafim calls attention to the fact that the state forces women to give birth and then asserts this as “by definition” humane and part of the destiny of the nation. The nation impregnates women, and they are significant only in this capacity. This chapter discussed pro-​natal legislation in Romania through Derrida’s deconstruction of logical certainty and patriarchy, which revealed a double standard in the juridical structure of bearing witness before the law. The introduction of doubt surrounding the certainty of the mother’s identity emerged as a furthering of her marginalization through the regulation of reproductive rights, rather than a potential saving power. The structure of obsessional neurosis reveals an excess of both certainty and doubt, which is why introducing absolute doubt around the identity of the mother leads to her marginalization as much as introducing absolute certainty. The technoscientific advancement of maternal surrogacy might reveal an ancient truth about the mother’s identity as being always-​already a multiplicity, but this multiplicity is not enough to preserve her legal rights, in the context of a culture which insists on remaining obsessed with her reproductive capacity. The corrupted role of the witness, as discussed by Derrida in terms of the juridical structure of patriarchy, emerges in the context of the Romanian example through the power of the informant. As illustrated by references to the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days at the opening of this chapter, where the role of the witness was to testify during the moment of an abortion, not the moment of birth, what remains constant is the juridical privileging of the witness over and the against the mother, even where both positions are displaced. This reveals the destructive character of the law in a society where its members generate a state of constant antagonism and fear, and law is used to corrupt intimacy even and especially inside the family. Such a reading is crucial for interpreting the actions and artefacts generated by the Romanian Revolution because it further reveals that any message –​ in terms of a revolutionary message –​which might have been sent by the participants of the revolution must be interpreted in terms of this context. The task of



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bearing witness is essentially corrupted, to say nothing of the corruption of the law the witness testifies before. In what sort of a court were Romanians asked to testify about the authenticity of their revolution? Derrida’s thoughts on the role of witnessing reveal an essentially mistaken structure underpinning the entirety of such potential testimony. Whatever critics of the revolution hope to authenticate, this chapter further proletarianizes the basis of their aims. While the standards of authenticity become more illusive, a closer look at conditions of existence in Romania prior to the revolution reveal the depth of unhappiness and dissatisfaction that was prevalent among the population, despite their widespread participation in structures which furthered this climate of enmity. Chapter 4 considered the manifestation of mourning for the dead sovereign through Freud’s description of the primal horde and how murdering the father led to his political and theological transcendence. This chapter considered how the relationship between parents is corrupted and othered through the interference of a totalitarian state. It showed how pro-​natal legislation exemplified an extreme example of this corruption and why this casts a long shadow over the interpretation of political events in Romania. The following chapter will continue along the theme of a corrupted intimacy within the family, further drawing out the link between the structure of sovereignty within the nation state and the intra-​familial power structure which it mirrors. The following chapter will look at mourning for the dead sovereign through the structure of the juridical, where mourning is prohibited. This chapter discussed interference by the state in the process of birth. The next chapter will discuss interference by the state in the process of death. Derrida extends Freud’s diagnosis of obsessional neurosis, and the conclusions drawn from that example will apply to this next one. A performative contradiction was revealed in the fraternal horde’s ambivalence towards the father, where simultaneous feelings of love and hate led to his murder and deification. The totem meal is the symbolic act instantiating performative contradiction, where the act of murdering and devouring the sacred one is an act of worship. The simultaneous privileging and marginalization of the mother mirrors this performative contradiction, exemplified in the celebration of maternity in Romania instantiated in the form of an absolute negation of reproductive self-​determination. NOTES 1. Gail Kligman, “A Cautionary Tale:  Revisiting Ceauşescu’s Anti-​Abortion Policies,” a public lecture, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, UCLA, Thursday, 14 June 2007, accessed 20 November 2014, http://​web.international.ucla. edu/​institute/​event/​5538?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.





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2. Author Unknown, “Delegalization of Abortion in Romania Led to Increased Rates of Infant, Maternal Mortality,” International Family Planning Digest, Vol. 1 (1975), 12–​13, accessed 16 May 2013, http://​www.jstor.org/​stable/​2948232. 3. Mary Gilmartin and Allen White, “Interrogating Medical Tourism: Ireland, Abortion, and Mobility Rights,” Signs, Vol. 36 (2011), 275–​280. doi:  10.1086/​ 655907, accessed 16 May 2013, http://​www.jstor.org/​stable/​10.1086/​655907. 4. Ioana Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: The Corruption of Intimacy,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 61 (2008), 12–​17, accessed 6 May 2013, http://​www.jstor.org/​ stable/​10.1525/​fq.2008.61.4.12. 5. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 148–​205. 6. Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” 15. 7. Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” 15. 8. Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” 15. 9. Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” 15. 10. Charlotte Hord, Henry P. David, France Donnay and Merrill Wolf, “Reproductive Health in Romania:  Reversing the Ceauşescu Legacy,” Studies in Family Planning, Vol. 22 (Population 1991), 231–​240, accessed 13 May 2013, http://​ www.jstor.org/​stable/​1966479. 11. For a critique of natural law in the context of feminism, Cristina Traina’s survey in Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of Anathemas provides a broad overview (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999). 12. Irina Tomescu-​Dubrow, “Children Deprived of Parental Care as a Persisting Social Problem in Romania: Postcommunist Transformation and Institutional Inefficiency,” International Journal of Sociology, Vol. 35 (2005), 57–​84, accessed 16 May 2016, doi: 10.1080/​00207659.2005.11043151. 13. B. Berelson, “Romania’s 1966 Anti-​ Abortion Decree: The Demographic Experience of the First Decade,” Population Studies, Vol. 33 (1979), 209–​222, accessed 16 May 2016, doi: 10.1080/​00324728.1979.10410438. 14. Berelson, “Romania’s 1966 Anti-​Abortion Decree,” 209. 15. Kligman, “A Cautionary Tale: Revisiting Ceauşescu’s Anti-​Abortion Policies.” 16. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 137. 17. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 137. 18. Jacques Derrida, Ki az anya? trans. János Boros, Gábor Csordás and Jolán Orbán (Pécs: Jelenkor Kiadó, 1997), 40. 19. Derrida, Ki az anya? 39. 20. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47–​48. 21. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48. 22. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48. 23. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48. 24. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48. 25. Derrida, Ki az anya? 39. 26. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.



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27. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, Volume 3, trans. Alix and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959). Rat Man’s case is discussed on 357–​383, with the footnote in question on 368–​369. 28. Derrida, Ki az anya? 12. 29. Derrida, Ki az anya? 12. 30. Derrida, Ki az anya? 12–​13. 31. Though the quest for paternal certainty is surely a renunciation of faith, this is a matter of anamnesis. Memory is a theme I wish to pick up on elsewhere, in the context of writing and techne, specifically with regards to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Bernard Steigler’s reading of Grammatology in Technics and Time, 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), for both Stiegler and Derrida on Heidegger. 32. Derrida, Ki az anya? 13. 33. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 186. 34. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 175. 35. Peter Davies, Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 236. 36. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 179. 37. Derrida, Ki az anya? 18. 38. Derrida, Ki az anya? 18. 39. Derrida, Ki az anya? 18. 40. Derrida, Ki az anya? 19. 41. Derrida, Ki az anya? 19. 42. Derrida, Ki az anya? 19. 43. Derrida, Ki az anya? 19. 44. Derrida, Ki az anya? 19. 45. Derrida, Ki az anya? 39. 46. Derrida, Ki az anya? 10. 47. Freud, Collected Papers, 368. 48. Two quotes about philosophy being a form of obsessional neurosis. I believe these points deserve more analyses than the context of this reading allows. “Very briefly I will refer to that well known and often commented upon part of Totem and Taboo (at the end of the second section), where Freud asserts that he found an ‘analogy’ between neurosis and the ‘great societal accomplishments’, that art, religion, and philosophy are only analogies, after which neuroses themselves are only deformations of those which they are the analogies of; hysteria would be deformed making, obsessional neurosis deformed religion, and paranoid mania is deformed philosophy” (34). Derrida, Ki az anya? 36. 49. Freud, Collected Papers, 68. 50. Freud, Collected Papers, 68, footnote 9. 51. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 177, footnote 55. 52. Derrida, Ki az anya? 34.







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53. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 43. 54. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 31. 55. Derrida, Ki az anya? 40. 56. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 89. 57. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 137. 58. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 137.

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The Interruption of Mourning On Forbidden Burials

This chapter interprets the Romanian Revolution through an analysis of the interruption of mourning, using the example of Zoia Ceauşescu, who repeatedly asked for the bodies of her parents to be exhumed since they were executed and buried in secret. Through drawing a comparison between Zoia and Antigone, this chapter will consider the consequences of the state’s interference in the process of mourning. Readings of Antigone will be considered, with the hope that Hegel or Butler’s thoughts on Antigone might shed some further light on how an analysis of the interruption of mourning could inform a reading of the revolution. Within the context of this book, the aim of this chapter’s analysis is to consider how such an interruption further reveals the difficulty of a collective forward momentum, culturally speaking, in the context of a social setting where the open lie dominates public discourse and grief is forbidden. The essentially totalitarian impulse of collectively intervening in the private lives of individuals through a repressive state apparatus results in a cycle of violence, denial and guilt. This was the conclusion of ­chapter  4, and ­chapter  5 further elaborated upon this conclusion by showing how this impulse underlies much of the cultural narrative of civilization, progress and the juridical. This argument deploys various elements of historical artefacts from Romania surrounding the revolution, in order to provide concrete, observable examples of these underlying structures. Performative contradictions are identified in order to demonstrate that a close analysis of specific political and social structures reveal themselves as self-​negating, with the hope that such observations will lead to a reflection on the efficacy of individual and collective action. We might call such action revolutionary. Performative contradiction functions as a diagnostic tool, but it also further hints at an instructive one. Once the structure is observed and understood, it might perhaps allow for the development 137



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of a methodology of action that is intentionally self-​negating. The following chapter identifies non-​violent action as such a methodology. For the present chapter, Zoia Ceauşescu and Sophocles’ Antigone will begin to introduce models of non-​violent political resistance against the state. Their positions as daughters of fallen sovereigns will force a troubling of the themes of sovereignty and the juridical and provide both a mythic and a concrete historico-​political example of the fallout that happens during transitions of power. This fallout is instantiated in the bodies of these women, as blood relatives and also symbolic figures, who bear the burden of inheritance to a deposed power. This burden expresses itself as the new sovereign’s interference in the mourning of the previous one. It points to an ontological guilt in Zoia and Antigone which manifests itself not in their complicity with the crimes of the dead relative, but rather with their desire to see them buried. This conflict reveals a performative contradiction around the transition of sovereign power and demonstrates how the mere act of remaining loyal to the memory of the dead constitutes an assault on the acting sovereign. It also demonstrates that denying the burial rights of the heirs compromises the power of the new sovereign, rather than strengthening it. This denial invests the heir with power through the act of stripping her of it. Zoia Ceauşescu, the daughter of Nicolae and Elena, was a mathematician who, unlike her younger brother Nicu, avoided political life in Romania during her father’s 25-​year rule. The press frequently represented her as a party girl. She died of lung cancer in 2006 at the age of 57. During the 1989 revolution, she was arrested along with her other siblings for “undermining the Romanian economy,” had her home confiscated and spent eight months in jail. She died believing that her parents were not buried in Ghencea Cemetery, Bucharest, and all attempts she made during her lifetime of having the bodies exhumed were denied by a military court. Four years after her death, in July 2010, the bodies were finally exhumed, and in November of the same year, DNA tests confirmed that the remains were those of the late dictator and his wife. Antigone’s story is perhaps more familiar. She was the dutiful daughter of Oedipus, acting as his guide after he blinded himself, having discovered that his wife Jocasta was also his mother. Her brothers Etoclese and Polynices fought for control of Thebes after their father’s death and killed each other in battle. Her uncle Creon assumed power, as the closest living male relative, and forbade Polynices’ proper burial because he waged war against Thebes and his brother, who had claimed sole power. Antigone disobeyed Creon and performed the burial rights for Polynices, for which she was sentenced to death by entombment in a cave. There, she took her own life in the way her mother had, by hanging herself. As for their differences and similarities, let us start with the obvious. Both Antigone and Zoia petition the state on behalf of deceased relatives who





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are considered enemies of that state. Antigone seeks a proper burial for her brother, who is proclaimed an enemy of the state because he declared war against it, fighting with his brother for power. Zoia petitions for her parents’ bodies to be exhumed because she doubts the identity of the corpses. The doubt surrounding the identities of the ones buried is likewise rooted in a lack of a proper burial because her parents were executed by the state in secret. Already, the differences are profound. What unites Zoia and Antigone is the lack of honour surrounding the burials, and this is due to the status of the dead as enemies of the state. And these are complicated enemies, designated as such precisely due to their proximity to power. Polynices was a prince of the kingdom; Nicolae Ceauşescu was the head of state. Has there been a reading of Antigone from the perspective of her position as daughter of the fallen king? All the focus is on her as a figure who defies the state and one who privileges the family over the law of the state. I want to put forward another reading, to suggest that what is significant about Antigone –​and this she shares with Zoia –​is that her proximity to the regime, her status as the daughter of the former sovereign, is what makes her petitioning of the state noteworthy. Through her familial association to the enemies of the state, she is implicated in their crimes, even if she has not been charged with them directly. (In Zoia’s case, she was arrested along with her siblings during the revolution, and all their property was temporarily confiscated.) Her request for an honourable burial for her relative, an enemy of the state, makes her complicit and challenges the very foundation of the current regime’s right to power. She invokes the sovereignty of the dead relative, in whose name she requests the burial. This is a performative contradiction in two ways. In this example, Zoia’s act of requesting the exhumation of her parents, in order to honour them, would actually dishonour them, by desecrating the bodies through digging them up. Also, the request, addressed to the state, is an affront, not a gesture of respect, because the ones on whose behalf the request is made are enemies of the state. This request to the state, while addressing the state in all its power, exposes the transient, vulnerable nature of that state power. The request performs an attack. The request legitimizes state power by petitioning it, but simultaneously, this petition assaults the legitimacy of state power. That there is cause to make this petition is already an indication of the fallibility of the state’s sovereign power. We will see this structure emerge in numerous places throughout this reading, such as the description of the relationship between kinship and state governance, where kinship is described as the condition of possibility for the state but must always remain outside of it. The tragedy at the heart of Zoia and Antigone’s position is that they are already guilty by association, even before they petition the state. They survive the dead and are implicitly asked by the current regime to renounce their familial allegiance. But is such a renunciation even possible? What is their



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relation to the law, they who are relatives of the dead sovereign who is now called “enemy”? This is their inheritance. It is law as such that Antigone and Zoia challenge. Sovereignty by nature is absolute, though it is temporally bound to a specific leader at any given time. Each of those finite placeholders of sovereignty nonetheless bear an infinite authority. The death of a sovereign who has fallen from power threatens to expose the vulnerability of the present sovereign and, through this, undermines the stability of the state. Zoia and Antigone instantiate this threat, defined as they are by their relationship to the fallen sovereign. Antigone represents a significant set of concerns, politically and philosophically. She chooses the law of the gods over the realm of human law and politics, providing us with an ancient example of feminine power, laying claim to divine law over and against state power. Through her death sentence, state power has the final word via the imposition of capital punishment, but Antigone overrides this too with her suicide. She also chooses her brother Polynices over her uncle Creon, the state head, which many have interpreted as her prioritization of kinship over the state. This reading pits family against state, which is not necessarily the most probing analysis that can be made of Sophocles’ play. This chapter takes, as one of its central themes, the significance of the connection between these two “opposites,” arguing that this link is not a mutually exclusive relationship as such, but rather a foundational, constitutive whole, each half continuously evolving and collapsing into the other. This is the significance of reading the Romanian Revolution through the family members of the Ceauşescu household. The ruling family in this example is the body and operative agent of the nation state. Their domestic realm is the body politic, the Romanian economico-​political oikos, just as Antigone’s family is an example of how one intra-​familial conflict determined the political state of the kingdom. Antigone petitions Creon for the burial of her brother’s body, and Zoia petitions the state for the bodies of her parents. Both are denied. For Antigone, this denial results in her defiance of state law, invoking the law of the gods. Zoia’s actions are not as drastic in response to her rejected request, but let us consider the higher law that is invoked when a burial is requested which pays respect to an enemy of the state. The state will not honour an enemy, but when this enemy is also a fallen sovereign, a former father of the state, then his power threatens to reach back through the ones who still seek to honour him. Zoia did not ask to have her parents buried, but rather to have their remains exhumed in order to confirm their identity. The similarity to Antigone does not hinge simply on the state’s desire to prevent a burial –​in Zoia’s case, the state succeeds, while in Antigone’s it does not –​but the impulse not to allow





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an honourable burial is common to both examples because the state does not want to show respect for an enemy, even one who is dead. What was the nature of the doubt surrounding the bodies of the Ceauşescus? Surely no one doubted that they were actually dead. After the revolution, there were those members of the public who demanded to see the bodies in order to know for sure that they were really and truly dead. But that was not what Zoia and her brother Valentin wanted to confirm, when they requested the bodies be exhumed. What a strange way to honour the dead: by digging up their graves. We could almost call it an anti-​Antigone-​like gesture. They wanted to dig up the bodies in order to confirm that they were really their parents. If it was not their bodies that were buried there, then where were their bodies buried? Perhaps their remains lay desecrated somewhere on the edge of a city, exposed to the elements, picked at by birds. And then, Antigone-​ esque steps would need to be taken, an honourable funeral demanded. A similarity to the dead bodies in Timişoara emerges, in that the state’s deliberate interference with the bodies of the dead results in doubt about the actual death and an interruption of mourning. The interference leads to an excess of doubt, which produces anxiety. The opinion polls discussed in ­chapter  4 considered the positive opinion of Ceauşescu as a possible consequence of ambivalence, but they may have also been an expression of mourning in the vein of Antigone and Zoia. Those opinion polls were likewise in dialogue with the present government, expressing to its members that the majority of people still honour the memory of Ceauşescu, but his death is what makes this loyalty possible. In death, Ceauşescu enjoys the popularity he claimed to have in life, and Zoia’s wish to have her parent’s bodies exhumed was likewise granted only after her death. Zoia and her brother’s arrest after the revolution points directly to the murky relationship between the family and the state, public and private property. The children’s property was seen as one with the parents’ property, and as the figureheads of the state, their private property was seen as the public’s rightful property. The children were punished for the crimes of their parents, and the state treated their private property as its own. Eventually, Valentin’s private collection of paintings would be returned to him from the National Museum of Art. This ruling is ambivalent as well. Wasn’t his wealth  –​ reflected in the collection of paintings –​necessarily gained from the exploits of his parents’ corruption, at the expense of the public? Why did the court decide to return them? The blame was placed initially on relatives, who were later absolved, while some more obviously involved political figures went on freely to inherit ruling positions in the new government without any scrutiny. The point of an analysis of the Romanian Revolution through familial roles and relationships is to complicate readings which seek to polarize the



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relationship between the sovereign and the people. A reading of the sovereign family –​ an immediate expansion of the body of the sovereign –​ helps multiply and proliferate the members involved. Inasmuch as the sovereign’s relatives extend beyond his own body, to those of his family members, advisers, confidants and others, there are familial ties between a sovereign and his people. And though these relationships may be fraught with conflict, contested inheritance, legacy and legend, they are not easily compartmentalized from each other and problematize an “us vs. them” dichotomy. The most significant implication of such a reading is that any interpretation of the Romanian Revolution which seeks to accuse Ceauşescu but absolve the rest as his exploited subjects has to account for the ties of fidelity between those who are deemed enemies of the state and those who are deemed its supporters and constituents. This is crucial for an internal monologue within the state. For those outside the nation state, it might be fruitful to focus on questions of how and why such extreme observable inconsistencies emerge from the wreckage of the revolution and what these inconsistencies mean. Zoia and Antigone both acted in the name of a deceased sovereign when they petitioned the state. They acted with the power of the sovereigns they sought to honour in death. Zoia’s act, asking for the bodies of her parents, demonstrates her power because she is not just any child; she is the former sovereign’s daughter. And she is put in the unique position of having to make this request because of who her parents were. Any child can request a proper burial for their parents, but not every child is put in a position where they must make this request and have it denied. The state has something invested in preventing Zoia’s parents, specifically, from being honoured. For Antigone, burying her brother goes even further because she actively performs the burial. Both actions expose the vulnerability of sovereign power at the same time that they invoke it. That they are able to lay claim to this power, in opposition to the wishes of the current sovereign, exposes the vulnerability of the state. For Antigone, Butler argues, “This deed is and is not her own, a trespass on the norms of kinship and gender that exposes the precarious character of those norms, their sudden and disorienting transferability, and their capacity to be reiterated in contexts and in ways that are not fully to be anticipated.”1 Butler is referring to the legacy of incest which Antigone’s family is mired in, through Oedipus’ curse, but this is not what I wish to focus on. I want to argue that what is exposed through revolution is the precarious character of sovereignty and the sudden and disturbing transferability of state power. This precariousness at the heart of sovereignty is what puts Zoia in the position of petitioning the state for the bodies of her parents, just as it pits Antigone against Creon in the name of her deceased brother. What unites Antigone and Zoia is nothing more than their relationship to dead sovereigns, and their survival of the deceased members of their households places their





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lives in precarious hands, acting as reminders of the changeability of state power, which is meant to represent precisely the opposite by its very nature. They are the very embodiment of tragedy because of course their request must be denied, even before it is asked. They are already enemies of the state prior to the petition, but this is not obvious until their request exposes them as such. Antigone makes herself an enemy by performing the burial rites, in direct violation of Creon’s order. The new sovereign decrees that the enemy of the state must be dishonoured through their death. The manner in which Polynices dies determines this ahead of time. He is killed in battle with his brother, having come as an invader. Ceauşescu is killed by his own army, charged with crimes against his people. Of course, the state will never grant forgiveness. And, yet, Zoia and Antigone ask for forgiveness because they cannot do otherwise. Where a “mere” daughter’s private request could be honoured, a request made by the child of a former head of state must be denied if her father, mother or brother has been declared an enemy of the state. It is no longer just a private, family matter because it concerns the current and former sovereign households, whose affairs are a matter of public concern. The defunct princess finds herself in the house of her new step-​ family, and her defining act as an adult casts her even further out from the shelter of the royal household, her former home. This request is where the sudden and disturbing transferability of sovereign power is exposed because the request, whether it is made by Zoia or Antigone, challenges the authority of the sovereign by invoking the rights, humanity and dignity of the dead sovereign. The very fact that there was a sovereign who came before, who met his end under revolutionary circumstances, opens up and exposes the fragility and vulnerability of the current sovereign and exposes his power as transitory in the face of divine law and mortal lifetimes. There is a performative contradiction at the heart of sovereignty because sovereignty as such is absolute and cannot easily accommodate, conceptually, the transfer of power from one individual sovereign to the next. Each sovereign must be absolute and transcend their own individuality. The contradiction is performative because the sovereign is embodied and must perform his will. The content of this performance is sovereign action, sovereign language. Butler describes how Antigone lays claim to this sovereignty through her opposition to Creon: “[h]‌er words, understood as deeds, are chiasmically related to the vernacular of sovereign power, speaking in and against it, delivering and defying imperatives at the same time, inhabiting the language of sovereignty at the very moment in which she opposes sovereign power and is excluded from its terms.”2 What Antigone and Zoia highlight is that these sovereigns are mortal, and the transitions of power between them are steeped in human law, not divine,



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absolute sovereignty. What makes this seemingly paradoxical position possible, where Antigone, together with Zoia, can make a request which employs sovereign language at the same time that she opposes it, is their direct relationship to sovereign power. It is their inheritance, and they have every right to invoke it. There was an old sovereign, and now there is a new one, and their heirs are the bridges passing between them. Antigone and Zoia represent the problems which arise during the transition of power, and this is what makes the position they occupy a tragedy of fate. They have no ambition nor possibility of laying claim to positions of political power, of replacing their parents’ positions, but they nonetheless have the right to make what seems like a minimal demand, that of honouring their dead relatives. But this request is not so minimal, since the concession it asks of the new sovereign is not one that can be made without compromising the current location of political power. This is why the most important theme in Antigone is sovereign power, rather than kinship. Concerning Hegel, and his reading of Antigone, Butler argues, “In Hegel, kinship is rigorously distinguished from the sphere of the state, though kinship is a precondition for the emergence and reproduction of the state apparatus.”3 The passage where Hegel establishes this precondition and distinction will be discussed later, with the aim of answering this question: “Does Antigone’s death signal the suppression of kinship by the state, the necessary subordination of the former to the latter?” Butler argues that Hegel’s reading of Antigone ultimately places her on the side of kinship, subordinate to state power, with the hope of exposing this reading as somehow underestimating the full significance of what Antigone represents, which is more –​in Butler’s opinion –​ an alternative model of kinship. I believe she is arguing that this alternative model of kinship threatens the normative demands of the state, and this is what causes Antigone’s demise. If Antigone troubles the normativity of kinship, I would like to suggest that Zoia troubles the normativity of the distinction between kinship and the state. For Zoia and the Ceauşescus, kinship does not necessarily take the back seat to the state apparatus, even after it sets the stage for its conditions of reproduction. One of the defining features of the Ceauşescu regime is how openly nepotism factored into the running of the state. Perhaps, in this example, it was the state that was subordinate to kinship, and not the other way around. And perhaps this inversion played a part in the demise of the Ceauşescus. The connection between kinship and state power is further complicated in examples where power can be inherited, such as the case with Creon, and where it should not obviously be inherited, but is anyway, as was the case in Romania, where Nicu Ceauşescu was the heir apparent in the context of a supposedly socialist democratic government. The division between kinship





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and state is troubled in any example where kinship is the condition for the inheritance of state power. There is one more aspect of this division between kinship and state that is significant to mention, structurally speaking, because “ethical consciousness must . . . acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality.”4 We might make a connection between the structural division underpinning human and divine law, likening it to the structural separation between kinship and government. They are mutually constitutive and mutually exclusive, and this self-​ collapsing structure, in so-​called secular societies as well, is the foundation of ethical consciousness to which Antigone, and perhaps Zoia, might lay claim. As was the case with sovereignty, there may be a performative contradiction at the heart of ethical consciousness as well, if the opposites which must be acknowledged are both foundational and mutually exclusive. This mutual incompatibility of two laws constitutes an antinomy, anti-​nomos, against law, and this is not incompatible with also calling it a performative contradiction. That there is the possibility of an antithesis within law, but contained by law, can be called a performative contradiction as a law which violates itself, but performs its own containment of this violation, preserving itself in its self-​contradiction. The previously cited liar paradox, the example par excellence of performative contradiction in the history of philosophy, is described by Hegel in the section where he discusses Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit, through a critique of the commandment, “Everyone ought to speak the truth.” He explains that what this commandment actually means is that everyone ought to speak the truth to the extent that they know the truth. Because this is not exactly what the commandment says, “with this admission, it in fact admits that already, in the very act of saying the commandment, it really violates it.”5 This structure is described in many ways throughout the history of philosophy, and there is this instance of it in Hegel, in this section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he describes the structure of ethical consciousness and how it operates in Antigone, which is to say, how Antigone performs ethical consciousness. This passage is singular and remarkable because in his discussion of Antigone, Hegel actually performs Antigone when he describes her emergence into ethical consciousness, by switching to the first person, “I.” The significance of this passage, in terms of problematizing the interpretation offered by Butler, and others, is that Hegel seems to suggest here that Antigone achieves ethical consciousness through her acknowledgement of the laws of the gods, while Creon does not acknowledge this and does not achieve ethical consciousness. Not only does Hegel privilege Antigone, but he goes so far as to speak as Antigone: “Sophocles’ Antigone acknowledges them as the unwritten and infallible law of the



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gods . . . If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited.”6 While both Zoia and Antigone represent a rupture in sovereignty, only one of them performs this rupture with intention. Zoia cannot lay claim to the ethical consciousness that Hegel attributes to Antigone because, unlike Antigone acting against Creon’s orders by burying her brother, Zoia does not violate human law when requesting the exhumation of the bodies of her parents. Zoia performs a request, whereas Antigone performs a burial. To the extent that Zoia stands for the division between kinship and law, at the same time that she is the physical instantiation of the link between these two opposites, she occupies the position which makes ethical consciousness possible, even if she lays no direct claim to this consciousness. Antigone has come to represent an example of feminine defiance against a patriarchal state. This tendency, to unquestioningly champion Antigone as a certain feminist impulse against patriarchy, is what this chapter will question through a reading of Hegel. This specific vein of interrogation follows questions of certain feminist interpretations, alongside Butler’s Antigone’s Claim –​ where she asserts that Antigone cannot be read simply as a symbol of femininity. I agree with Butler that Antigone cannot be read as a simple feminine symbol of political resistance against a masculine state because, among other concerns, the identity ascribed to her in the play does not depict an unproblematic femininity. But I will challenge her reading of Hegel and argue that he does not treat Antigone as a symbol of kinship, over and against the state and inferior to it. The consequence of this argument in terms of the Romanian Revolution is an alternative model of sovereignty as it is revealed through Zoia, a symbol of weak force in political power, who transcends and carries forward the spirit of sovereignty. Butler lists a number of interpretations of Antigone which she finds problematic, among them Zizek’s and Lacan’s, along with Irigaray’s, who in Speculum of the Other Woman marshals Antigone “as a principle of feminine defiance of statism and an example of anti-​authoritarianism,” and Hegel’s, who “has her stand for the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal rule, but also for the principle of kinship.”7 “Who was this ‘Antigone?’ . . . There is of course, the Antigone of Sophocles’ play by that name, and that Antigone is, after all, a fiction, one that does not easily allow itself to be made into an example one might follow without running the risk of slipping into irreality oneself.”8 This is the critique aimed at Irigaray and Hegel. To Hegel, she says, “[Antigone] hardly represents the normative principles of kinship, steeped as she is in incestuous legacies that confound her position within kinship.”9 She is Jocasta and Oedipus’ daughter. Her name Antigone (Ἀντιγόνη) may be taken to mean “unbending,”





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coming from “anti-​” (against, opposed to) and “-​gon /​ -​gony” (corner, bend, angle; e.g. polygon), but it has also been suggested to mean “opposed to motherhood” or “in place of a mother” based from the root gonē, “that which generates” (related: gonos, “-​gony”; seed, semen). Her mother is also her grandmother, and her father is also her brother. Recall that in Oedipus Rex, when Jacosta learns that she has married her son, she hangs herself in their bedroom. And when Oedipus finds Jacosta, he uses the pins from her dress to blind himself. Antigone is one of four children born from this unhappy couple. Within her family structure, time and generation are both out of joint. The reason we should take notice of this critique in terms of resisting any simple allegiance between Antigone and an unproblematic identity rooted in kinship should be obvious. Oedipus and Jacosta’s actions demonstrate that there was no normative acceptance of incest operating in Antigone’s home. And yet, she is the product of this home, and at the end of the play, she takes her own life in the same manner that Jacosta took hers. She hangs herself. She may be an anti-​mother, but she is also a mimicking-​mother. She perhaps opposes her through this mimicry, at the same time that this mimicry is a confession of her ontological guilt. Not the guilt of burying her brother, but the guilt of being herself, who she is: at once a political subject and a domestic subject, belonging to the sovereign family mired in a legacy of incest and violence. Antigone should not be viewed as the basis for any kinship that does not wish itself to be bound up, from the start, in violent, irrevocable and tragic incest. Butler continues (against Irigaray), And she hardly represents a feminism that might in any way be unimplicated in the very power that it opposes. Indeed, it is not just that, as a fiction, the mimetic or representative character of Antigone is already put in question but that, as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed.10

We know now not to think of Antigone as a one-​dimensional subject of either kinship or political resistance, but rather, to be vigilantly on the lookout for a pointing “beyond” the limits of politics, representation and, presumably, beyond the “family” as well. Now let us look more closely at what the problem is, not with Antigone, but with her interpreters. Butler continues, What struck me first was the way in which Antigone has been read by Hegel and Lacan, and also by the way in which she has been taken up by Luce Irigaray, and others, not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a pre-​political opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it. Indeed, in the interpretation that Hegel has made



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famous, and which continues to structure appropriations of the play within literary theory and philosophical discourse, Antigone comes to represent kinship and its dissolution, and Creon comes to represent an emergent ethical order and state authority based on principles of universality.11

If Antigone represents kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it, then Zoia can likewise be said to represent the same. Her concern for honouring the memory of her parents clearly stems from familial love. Though neither Antigone nor Zoia are involved in political life as such, as Butler says, their “defiant speech has political implications.” But does their position constitute a “prepolitical opposition to politics”? While it can be argued that in ancient Greece women occupied a place outside politics because women were excluded from the political decision-​making which occurred in the senate, Butler has argued, convincingly, that occupying a position where one is deliberately deprived of political power can hardly be called “prepolitical” precisely because the exclusion is based on political action.12 The family contains political subjects and produces political subjects. Perhaps the more interesting question is why some of these subjects are excluded from legislative and juridical processes by other subjects and how this politics of exclusion is played out within the micro-​political institution called “family.” But this is not my question here. The question for this chapter is whether Hegel advocates a reading of Antigone in which she represents “kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it.” In short, is woman –​as the guardian of the domestic –​occupying a position outside of the political? And, perhaps more importantly, does Hegel say that Creon “represents an emergent ethical order and state authority based on principles of universality,” as Butler argues? In terms of an analysis of Zoia, it is relevant to determine if Antigone can justly be read as a feminine/​familial figure who is subordinate to political power. I will argue that Hegel does not read her this way. I also do not believe that an interpretation of Antigone as a champion of failed kinship and martyred feminism is the most relevant reading, and looking to Zoia may help us liberate her from this category. Zoia could likewise be reduced to a simple kinship-​oriented drive, whose life is dominated by higher political forces which she cannot participate in. But this is not what makes either of them interesting. They are not opposed to patriarchal state power because they are family-​oriented women. In fact, they both reject the family in a sense. Zoia married, but remained childless, and maintained a reputation for heavy drinking and smoking. Antigone chose to take her own life, rather than obey her uncle, marry and have children. These are hardly stereotypical female gender norms. They are opposed to state power because they are the offspring of





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dead and dishonoured sovereigns. It is this position that makes them interesting figures for an analysis of the transferability of sovereign power. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in a section called “Reason as Lawgiver,” Hegel lays out the structural relationship between pure consciousness and self-​consciousness.13 At the end of this section, Hegel presents an interpretation of Antigone not as a principle of either femininity or kinship  –​ which are both based in simple, forgetful self-​consciousness  –​ but rather as an example of radical action which transcends its individual self-​consciousness, transcends the realm of political, gendered identity and emerges instead as a radical, transcendental, ironic and tragic ethical consciousness.14 Hegel plays Antigone; he performs emergence into ethical consciousness as Antigone, as one who does not question the laws of the gods but honours them, over and against human law. The structure of how the ethical is linked to the divine is laid out by Hegel in the Phenomenology, in the section on “Ethical Order,” where he outlines how the “simple substance of Spirit, as consciousness, is divided” in the instantiation of individual beings. “This Spirit can be called the human law, because it is essentially in the form of a reality that is conscious of itself.” Human law is described as the “Spirit of government” mediating “concrete existence.”15 Opposed to this spirit of government is divine law. “Confronting this clearly manifest ethical power [‘Spirit as government /​concrete existence’] is, however, another power, the Divine Law.” In this section on Ethical Order and the family,16 Hegel explains the relationship between human and divine law as reflected by the laws governing man and those governing woman. The mother, as guardian of the home, operates according to the law of the household gods (Penates), whereas the man leaves the domestic space, and his life is governed by human law, in the public sphere, “into the consciousness of universality.”17 Man is ethical if he takes the divine law with him when entering into the realm of human law. But in their separation, neither is ethical, the man because he has forgotten divine law (Creon), and the woman because she is not conscious of it and is merely operating according to her “baser” instincts. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, at the head of the household and the guardian of the divine law. In this way, the two sexes overcome their [merely] natural being and appear in their ethical significance, as diverse beings who share between them the two distinctions belonging to ethical substance.18

Divine law confronts human law, but the ethical can be found only in their union. This is the aspect of Hegel which invites criticism from feminists and non-​feminists alike because of the oversimplified heteronormative gender structure outlined above. Man can become ethical by participating in politics,



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but woman is resigned to a life of unreflected domestic service, which she can only transcend through her role as mother and wife. Actually, this part is not entirely clear. It is her role as mother and wife, which she performs instinctively, that keeps her from ethical consciousness, yet Hegel is also saying that it is through this role –​ of lacking ethical consciousness –​ that she achieves ethical consciousness. When we look more closely at Antigone, it becomes clear how Hegel sees that a woman can achieve ethical consciousness through her familial roles; namely, through a type of transcendental death. As Polynices’ sister, Antigone is pushed into ethical consciousness when her baser familial instincts of honouring her dead brother come into conflict with Creon’s (human) law. She must follow the laws of the gods, but she understands very clearly that violating human law is the only way to achieve this. This invites further criticism because now, Hegel seems to be saying that the only way for woman to achieve consciousness is through death, whereas man can achieve it through politics. Likewise, Zoia abstained from political activity throughout her life and only came into conflict with the law when she felt compelled to mourn for her parents. “The loss of the brother is therefore irreplaceable to the sister and her duty towards him is the highest. This relationship is at the same time the limit at which the self-​contained life of the Family breaks up and goes beyond itself.”19 Polynices goes beyond the family, physically and politically, in order to participate in the consciousness of universality, but Antigone does so as well when she publicly mourns him. The event of the brother’s death, specifically, is identified by Hegel as the moment when the “Family breaks up and goes beyond itself.” But it is not only Antigone for whom death creates ethical consciousness. And Creon, while embodying the spirit of government and human law, is clearly not ethical because he dishonours divine law by denying Polynices’ burial. His son Haemon, who is engaged to Antigone, also chooses death. “We saw her hanged by the neck, fastened by a noose of fine linen, and him wrapped around her, clinging to her around the waist, bewailing the destruction of his lost bride and the deeds of his father and his unhappy marriage bed.”20 Is Haemon not more like a woman than Antigone, representing a base commitment to the family over and against the political? “There they lay, corpse on corpse, and, poor thing, he got his wedding rites in the house of Death, showing to humanity by how much foolishness is the greatest evil for a man.”21 If a simple reading of Antigone’s position is that she lays claim to a divine law which transcends the realm of individuals, then this reading of Hegel both helps and hurts her. It helps her, because it explains how a self-​differentiating individuality such as Antigone can claim that she is obeying a higher law. But it hurts her because if she can lay claim to it, then so can Creon. And all of a sudden, the antithesis between the political and the divine is collapsed.





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The “matter in hand” collapses it, just as it does the antithesis between the universal and the individual. The matter in hand simply is. And because it is, it is right, and it is absolute. Antigone cannot speak from a position outside the universal state. This reading would presume not just that Antigone and Creon’s actions simply cancel each other out but, indeed, that Hegel gives Creon a position of privilege. This would mean that Hegel privileges the state, the realm of the political, and the human law governing individuals. Since women were associated with a simple undifferentiated unity, it can be argued that the differentiated individuals involved in producing the “matter in hand” and the political are necessarily and specifically men, not women and men together. Hegel states, “This ‘matter in hand’ is therefore the ethical substance; and consciousness of it is the ethical consciousness.”22 If only men are involved in production of the “matter,” then they are also the only ones able to develop “ethical consciousness.” This is the condition under which Creon’s position usurps Antigone’s. Let us recall what Butler said at the beginning of Antigone’s Claim: Indeed, in the interpretation that Hegel has perhaps made most famous, and which continues to structure appropriations of the play within much literary theory and philosophical discourse, Antigone comes to represent kinship and its dissolution, and Creon comes to represent an emergent ethical order and state authority based on principles of universality.23

Given this legacy, when we look at what Hegel wrote about Antigone, we should expect to find Creon on the same side with an emergent ethical order and state authority. What we find instead is Antigone occupying the position of ethical consciousness, through her acknowledgement of the eternal laws of the gods. In the paragraph before this first reference to Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the following sentence: “Ethical self-​consciousness is immediately one with essential being through the universality of its self; belief, on the other hand, starts from the individual consciousness.”24 Essence and self-​ consciousness are unified when self-​ consciousness is aware of the universality of its self. This is the state of ethical consciousness. But if self-​consciousness is merely conscious, merely an individual consciousness, then it relies on belief rather than knowledge and is not ethical consciousness. The gendered relationship of this structure is the following: woman is universal self, unaware of its division; man is divided self, unaware of its unity. Either one can transcend their unethical states by becoming “self-​conscious.” Antigone transcends the realm of finite individual consciousness because she recognizes the gods, who are: “unalienated spirits transparent to



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themselves, stainless celestial figures that preserve in all their differences the undefiled innocence and harmony of their essential nature.” Hegel continues, The relationship of self-​consciousness to them is equally simple and clear. They are, and nothing more; this is what constitutes the awareness of its relationship to them. Thus, Sophocles’ Antigone acknowledges them as the unwritten and infallible law of the gods. “They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they come from, none of us can tell.”25 They are. If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakable, intrinsic being, and regard them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not.

Here, Hegel states very clearly that it is Antigone who acknowledges the unquestionable law of the gods and recognizes her obligation to them. She achieves ethical self-​consciousness through the act of burying her brother. Antigone, without action –​ before she buries her brother –​ is simply a “this self,” standing in opposition against pure consciousness to the extent that she is an individual. But once she commits the act which violates human law, in the name of divine law, she produces the “matter in hand.” This makes her “right,” in the sense that she understands that human law, reflected in the “this-​self-​consciousness” of Creon, is only a partial aspect of pure consciousness. Creon, on the other hand, thinks the laws of the gods need to be validated by his individual insight. Ultimately, he is loyal to the fractured, individual subjectivity of man and supplants the laws of the gods with human law. Yet Hegel has gained a reputation for stating exactly the opposite. Hegel has several more significant passages on Antigone which must be looked at in order to better understand the linage of interpretations. In “Dramatic Motivation and Language,” we can once again find cause to believe that Hegel ultimately sidelines Antigone in favour of Creon, though he appears also to favour her. “Of still greater interest, albeit wholly involved in human feeling and action, is the contradiction which we have set before us in the ‘Antigone,’ one of the most sublime, and in every respect most consummate work of human effort ever produced.”26 Hegel introduces the play as exceptional but Antigone as a figure faithful to the underworld. “The gods, however, whom she thus revered, are the Dei inferi of Hades, the instinctive Powers of feeling, Love and kinship, not the daylight gods of free and self-​conscious, social, and political life.”27 Here, we are led to believe that Antigone is not acting out of a higher understanding of ethical being, but rather a base, simple urge of sisterly love, which is rooted in the family and not in the higher functions of government and human law which are reflected in the daylight of ethical consciousness.





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Hegel describes the structural relationship between the government and the community. The community is the upper law, which dwells in the light of day and manifests itself as government. “Government is concrete actual spirit reflected into itself, the pure and simple of the entire ethical substance.” The community then splinters off into its various component parts, among them the family: “But spirit is at the same time the force of the whole combining these parts again within the unity which negates them, giving them the feeling of their want of independence, and keeping them aware that their life only lies in the whole.”28 There is a rupture at the heart of community, one that spirit unites, at the same time that they split into independent parts. If this is the relationship between the family and the state, then it can hardly be said that the state excludes the family in any unproblematic way. What it provides is a model of continuity illustrating the flow of sovereign power between the people and the government. “The spirit of universal assemblage and association is the single and simple principle, and the negative essential factor at work in the segregation and isolation of these systems.”29 These systems include not only the family but also the structure of private property, employment, guilds, associations and so on. All these organizations strive to become separate and independent. What Hegel suggests in the discussion of these separations is the essential link between death and revolutionary force, acting as a stabilizing force. It is a fascinating model of ethical order, maintained through disorder: In order not to let things get rooted and settled in this isolation and thus break up the whole into fragments and let the common spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to the very center by war. By this means it confounds the order that has been established and arranged, and violates their right to independence, while the individuals are made, by the task thus imposed on them by government, to feel the power of their lord and master, death. By thus breaking up the form of fixed stability, spirit guards the ethical order from sinking into merely natural existence, preserves the self of which it is conscious, and raises the self to the level of freedom and its own powers. The negative essential being shows itself to be the might proper to community and the force it has for self-​maintenance. The community therefore finds the true principle and corroboration of its power in the inner nature of divine law, and in the kingdom of the nether world.30

As we recall, Antigone calls on the gods of the underworld.31 And, where it initially looked like Creon was defending the community in the name of government, in the light of day, it now emerges that Antigone, through her reverence for “their lord and master, death,” is the one acting for the self-​ preservation of the community, in the name of spirit. In this passage, government intervenes against the ossification of separate individualities through



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sending men to war. These ossified identities must be disrupted, for the sake of the survival of the community, through the family and gendered identity. They have, after all, forgotten the whole of pure consciousness. The positions of essentialized gender identities should not be read as Hegel’s declaration of the ideal state of human relationships, but rather as the ossified identities of “this-​self-​consciousness,” which has lost its knowledge of pure ethical consciousness and threatens spirit. This state of determinate individuation is decidedly flawed. The position of woman is that of simple universality. She is without internal conflict; without it being internally at odds with a particular subjectivity (i.e. desire), she translates into a lack of consciousness. She is a simple, unified universal and therefore lacks the self-​conscious friction which pits the individual against the universal and results in pure ethical consciousness. The man acquires this pure ethical consciousness through being a “citizen” and having the “self-​conscious power belonging to the universal life, the life of the social whole.” Through access to political and social life, “he acquires the rights of desire, and keeps himself at the same time in detachment from it.”32 The family isn’t conscious of itself, but it produces children –​ which constitute the nation. The wife is ethical when she sees her husband and children in general and is not moved by particular individual love for them. Antigone says as much in the section on replaceability: “I could get another husband when mine died, and a child from another man, if I lost one from him, but since my mother and father both lie in Hell, there is no field where I could grow another brother.”33 The difference between the wife and the husband is that he has “the impulsive condition of mere particular desire.” Presumably, it is this active agency of desire on the part of the husband that leads to the production of children since the wife remains oblivious to desire. She, like her daughter, does not become [conscious] of desire, and does not actualize it, because the law of the family is her inherent, implicit, inward nature, which does not lie open to the daylight of consciousness, but remains inner feeling and the divine element exempt from actuality. The feminine life is attached to these household divinities, and sees in them both her universal sustenance and her particular individuality, yet so views them that this relation of her individuality to them is at the same time not the natural one of pleasure.34

The division between the sexes described above is what Hegel means by “original determinate nature.” It is a “this self” that has gender. Ethical life, on the other hand, is both the ethical substance of the universal and the substance of the particular. The originally determinate nature of gendered life can never lay claim, in and of itself, to ethical life. Only through transcending the





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particular. The husband does this, in his limited context, through citizenship summoning him into state-​sanctioned war. The wife does it through absence of desire. This is the tragic state of affairs described by Hegel. But what is clear is that ethical consciousness stands in opposition to this sort of reductive identity construction. It is not a one-​sided gendered subjectivity. To demonstrate that within his paradigm, man and woman are not in a simple dynamic of superior and inferior positions, Hegel provides a very interesting description of the upward and downward motion of man and woman and their relations to ethical consciousness. Woman, while located in the netherworld, has an upward momentum. Man, on the other hand, is located in the light of day and human law but is descending downward, out of consciousness and individuality, into death. Does Hegel advocate a reading of Antigone where she represents the precondition of the political, but not politics? The family, as the inner indwelling principle of sociality operating in an unconscious way, stands opposed to its own actuality when explicitly conscious; as the basis of the actuality of a nation, it stands in contrast to the nation itself; as the immediate ethical existence, it stands over against the ethical order which shapes and preserves itself by work for universal ends; the Penates of the family stand in contrast to the universal spirit.35

We see from the above passage how the family, and woman as the guardian of the family, is established as the condition for the possibility of universal (political) life but remains outside of it because it is an unconscious operation; and when it becomes conscious, it “stands opposed to its own actuality.” If we read Antigone into this operation, then Antigone is an unconscious familial force who remains outside the conscious realm of the universal. But is this what Hegel says about her, or are some of his readers simply inclined to take issue with him placing woman and the family in a hierarchy, beneath the political life of men? Family life, if we are inclined to reduce woman to this, serves only one aim: “The positive purpose peculiar to the family is the individual as such.”36 We might take this to mean that woman’s purpose is simply to produce male offspring who will enter the political sphere and thus achieve universal consciousness through political action. This has echoes of the previous chapter and how a commitment to reducing women to this role leads to a loss of reproductive self-​determination. “The content of the ethical act must be substantial in character, or must be entire and universal; hence it can only stand in relation to the entire individual, to the individual qua universal.” But Hegel warns us not to read this to mean that a family member can transcend the unconscious existence of the family by taking action which



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is merely preoccupied with political concerns. This does not constitute universal consciousness because such an act, “like a process of education,” or participation in a specific democratic process, “has merely a limited content.” While such an act “operates in a negative way on the family,” which is the condition of its possibility, leaving the family behind for the sake of political action is not enough to reach universal consciousness. The citizen . . . does not belong to the family, nor does it deal with one who is going to be a citizen and so will cease to have the significance of a mere particular individual: it has as its object and content this specific individual belonging to the family, takes him as a universal being, divested of his sensuous or particular reality.37

The universal being is both a family member and a citizen, but neither a family member nor a citizen in particular. The universal being takes action in order to achieve universal consciousness, transcending his “sensuous or particular reality.” The act no longer concerns the living but the dead, one who has passed through the long sequence of his broken and diversified existence and gathered up his being into its one completed embodiment, who has lifted himself out of the unrest of a life of chance and change into the peace of simple universality.38

For Hegel, the possibility of achieving this “simple” universality does not belong only to men. He lifts Antigone up as an example of this achievement. “This condition of universality, which the individual as such reaches, is mere being, death; it is the immediate issue of the process of nature, and is not the action of a conscious mind.”39 Each member of the family has the opportunity to transcend their finite role and enter into ethical consciousness. The duty of the member of a family is on that account to attach this aspect too, in order that this last phase of being also (this universal being), may not belong to nature alone, and remain something irrational, but may be something actually done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it.40

On the one hand, death is the inevitable process of nature and does not require consciousness for the being to achieve it. But it is the duty of a family member to perform the action by which consciousness is achieved with regards to death: “death is the fulfilment and highest task which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf.” Family life does not take the back seat to politics in this process of achieving consciousness. “Blood relationship therefore supplements the abstract natural process of consciousness,





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by interrupting the work of nature, and rescuing the blood relation from destruction, the passage into mere being, is necessary, it takes upon itself the act of destruction.”41 The act of burying the dead is described here as an interruption of nature, whereby the one performing the burial transforms themselves and the dead relative from particular individuality into universal being. “Thereby the family makes the dead relative a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower living creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him.”42 Antigone prevents this fate for Polynices by performing the burial rights for him, against Creon’s orders. By taking this action, she not only overcomes the particular singular consciousness of the citizen, whose preoccupation is with the specific temporality of his immediate concerns, but also saves her brother from being dishonoured by the forces of natural decomposition. Creon’s action is ethical in the context of human law but not universal consciousness. This act belongs to Antigone, not Creon: “This last duty thus accomplishes the complete divine law, or constitutes the positive ethical act towards the given individual.”43 Creon’s role is this: “Every other relation towards [the dead] which does not remain at the level of love, but is ethical, belongs to human law, and has the negative significance of lifting the individual above the confinement within the natural community to which he belongs as a concrete individual.”44 To the extent that Creon is also Polynices’ blood relation, we may question whether his prevention of the burial is ethical even in the context of human law. Antigone’s action, on the other hand, is firmly on the side of ethical action and universal consciousness. First, because she honours death, and second, because she performs her duty: “The loss of a brother is thus irreparable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.”45 Butler takes issue with Hegel here because he asserts that “The brother . . . is in the eyes of the sister a being whose nature is unperturbed by desire and is ethically like her own; her recognition of him is pure and unmixed with any sexual relation.”46 Desire is described as unethical because it is particular. For Hegel, Butler argues, if Antigone is acting with desire for her brother (this possibility is indicated by her legacy of incest), then her action is not ethical because it comes out of a specific, particular desire and not universal consciousness. This is the root of the conflict Butler has with Hegel. But this is a strange conflict. Hegel valorises Antigone, and declares her an ethical figure, because of how he reads her (lack of desire for her brother). Butler asks, what if Antigone acted with desire? Would Hegel then declare her actions unethical? It seems that what Butler may be after is a reading of desire as ethical consciousness, of reading the particular as redemptive in



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the way that the universal is. And perhaps this is a fair critique. But it is far from the accusation of saying that Hegel privileges Creon over Antigone. If this were true, then he would be valorising the particular consciousness of the individual, and human law, over and against universal consciousness and honouring death. Butler may also have a problem with the normative description of familial life and gender roles which Hegel describes, and this would also be a fair point, though Hegel does not advocate these roles. He merely describes them as the compromised state of current affairs. What lifts Antigone up over the particular ethical life governing the division between the sexes is precisely her relationship to death, which is indisputably present, regardless of any desire she may or may not feel for either her would-​be husband or her brother. Her desire cannot nullify the significance of her revolutionary act of burying her brother against the order of the state. In fact, what makes her action doubly significant is that she interrupts not only nature but also human law. While we may certainly take issue with things that Hegel says concerning desire, the division of the sexes and woman’s role in the life of the family and the state, his championing of Antigone over Creon is clear. Human law demands obedience from its subjects. But in order to transcend the political, these subjects must disobey. Antigone’s act is transcendental, for Hegel, because she sees the divine justice of disobeying human law. This is one key aspect of her inheritance. But the implications for sovereignty are even more profound because Zoia and Antigone lie on the fault line of the transferability of sovereign power. The performative contradiction at the heart of sovereignty is manifested in the finite body of a sovereign, seeking to contain an infinite divine power. The sovereign’s offspring, whom this infinite sovereign power seeps into, carry it beyond the deceased sovereign’s reach, living on to trouble the legitimacy of the new sovereign’s power. Zoia can still lay claim to ethical consciousness, even though she broke no human law by requesting that her parents’ bodies be exhumed, by virtue of the fact that she persistently petitioned the state. She had no way of knowing whether her parents had even been buried. At least Antigone knew precisely where Polynices’ body was to be found. The Romanian state’s guilt then becomes not the execution of the Ceauşescus but the secrecy surrounding their trial, execution and burial, which then gave rise to Zoia’s legitimate doubt. Both Zoia and Antigone represent a rupture in sovereignty, and they both perform this rupture with intention. Zoia lays claim to the ethical consciousness that Hegel attributes to Antigone because, like Antigone acting against Creon’s orders by burying her brother, Zoia’s petition offends the state by





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requesting the exhumation of the bodies of her parents. Zoia performs a request, whereas Antigone performs a burial. To the extent that Zoia stands for the division between kinship and law, at the same time that she is the physical instantiation of the link between these two opposites, she occupies the position which makes ethical consciousness possible. Because Antigone’s familial relations are temporally out of joint  –​ her mother is also her father’s mother –​ they challenge social norms rather than enforcing them. Butler is using “the culture of the death drive and incest taboo” to challenge Hegel’s reading of kinship norms in Antigone. “[T]‌he point . . . is not to unleash incest from its constraints but to ask what forms of normative kinship are understood to proceed as structural necessities from that taboo.”47 Perhaps the implication here is that the ramifications of Oedipus’ curse are the inevitable deaths of his children. This is the normative punishment for violating the incest taboo. If nepotism is the state equivalent of incest, then the demise of the Ceauşescus likewise follows the fate of Oedipus’ offspring. Death drive is reflected in the taboo on incest, but death also facilitates the emergence of ethical consciousness. The act of burying the dead is described here as an interruption of nature, whereby the one performing the burial transforms themselves and the dead relative from particular individuality into universal being. These readings of Antigone follow the themes of ossified gender roles introduced in the previous chapter. Chapter 5 demonstrated how the fetishisation of reproduction manifested itself in terms of legislative abuses. Derrida’s thoughts on maternal prosthesis and Hegel’s reading of Antigone both offer warnings against gendered normativity and models of resistance against such norms. There is an ossified gender dichotomy at the heart of totalitarianism and obsessional neurosis, which Antigone and Zoia disrupt through the rupture in sovereignty that they represent. These past two chapters have guided the discussion of the Romanian Revolution along gender lines, in order to expose how such roles express themselves symptomatically during the moment of revolution when sovereignty is in flux. Hegel’s reading of Antigone expanded the moment of revolution  –​ the turning of sovereignty  –​ to specifically name death’s role in it, further pointing to the crucial position occupied by mourning in this process. The following chapter will alter course once again, in order to consider the role played by Marx in establishing the precedent for such a totalitarian ossification –​ not necessarily of just gender roles, but an ossification of class roles as well –​ which justifies violence. The aim of the last chapter will be to demonstrate that as a methodology of action, non-​violence will prove more effective than totalitarian force.



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NOTES 1. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 24. 2. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 28. 3. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 29. 4. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 33 5. Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 254, P424. 6. Hegel, Phenomenology, 261, P437. 7. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 1. 8. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 1. 9. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 1. 10. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 1. 11. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 2–​3. 12. See her critique of Agamben and “bare life” in Who Sings the Nation-​State? 13. Hegel, Phenomenology, 261, P419. 14. Hegel, Phenomenology, 252. 15. Hegel, Phenomenology, P449. 16. Hegel, Phenomenology, 267–​276. 17. Hegel, Phenomenology, 275. 18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 275. 19. Hegel, Phenomenology, 275. 20. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. J. E. Thomas (Clayton, DE: Prestwick House, 2005), lines 1226 and 1246. 21. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1240–​1241. 22. Hegel, Phenomenology, 275. 23. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 2–3. 24. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 261, P436. 25. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 456–​457. 26. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, eds. Anna Paolucci and Henry Paulucci (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 1976), 178. 27. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 178. 28. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 178. 29. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 178. 30. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 266–​267. 31. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 178. 32. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 269. 33. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 916–​920. 34. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 268. 35. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 268. 36. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 263. 37. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 263. 38. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 264. 39. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 264.







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40. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 264. 41. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 265. 42. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 265. 43. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 265. 44. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 265. 45. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 269. 46. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 269. 47. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 30.

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On Violence Can the Revolution Be Saved?

The previous two chapters focused on a troubling of gender through a discussion of the performative contradictions which emerge when gender is regulated by the state. In the context of the artefacts generated by the Romanian Revolution, a discussion of gender was used to obviate an instantiation of the totalitarian impulse. Freud’s diagnosis of obsessional neurosis in ­chapter  4 –​ which Derrida turned on him in ­chapter  5 –​ explained how the symptoms of such a neurosis manifest themselves in a political setting. Both Freud and Derrida perform this diagnosis against collective historico-​political legacies, and the precedent these arguments set allows for an analysis of the events in Romania through this diagnosis. Freud explains the history of cultural development through the totem meal, and Derrida explains the history of civilization through obsessional neurosis. Freud provides the ground which Derrida turns his argument upon and against, and the agonism established between the two must be read as the link of inheritance. The structure of inheritance was discussed at length in ­chapter  3, as a call which the heir has no choice but to answer but has the power to filter the content through this response. The inheritance of Marxism now comes to the foreground in this chapter. Each of the previous chapters has mentioned the inheritance left behind by Marx as a contested one, torn between the promise of a new world without class exploitation and the wreckage left behind in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In one way or another, every critic of the Romanian Revolution is in dialogue with this inheritance. The inclination to salvage Marx’s legacy through a dismissing of the revolution is understandable. As is evidenced by a close look at some of the aspects of social life in Romania before and after 1989, it is all too clear that social equality played no part in the dominant political practice. What did play a part is domination as a methodology, which permeated every aspect of individual and social political life. 163



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Marx clearly advocated for the use of force and direct violence in the Communist Manifesto. This chapter will argue that the sanctioning of violence is perhaps the definitive feature of Marxism which was adopted in Romania, and the subsequent totalitarianism was a direct consequence of this. This chapter will also argue that this legacy of violence must be discussed and interrogated by anyone who wishes to remain faithful to a struggle for class equality. The evidence of totalitarianism which took hold in so many nations that embraced communism might indicate that there is an antipathy between violence and class justice. Indeed, it seems clear from the start that class justice is an essentially democratic impulse, while totalitarianism is an essentially anti-​democratic one. What must be interrogated is the underlying assumption that a totalitarian exertion of force can ever lead to an essentially democratic justice. This chapter is no longer looking at specific artefacts from the revolution but at the whole of the legacy of Marxism as it is evidenced by the events in Romania, from the commencement of collectivization in the 1940s through today. While the previous chapters dealt with questions surrounding what happened before, during and after the revolution, this chapter attempts to answer the bigger question underpinning all of these smaller ones: What happened with Marxism? The answer already put forth in this introduction is that violence happened, and it was instantiated through legislation, into totalitarianism, through absolute state control over public and private life. Through such a sanctioning of violence, the democratic goals of the movement were undermined. A democratic society protects the human rights of all citizens (even and especially those who protest and actively fight for a change in governance) and applies rule of law equally, in addition to free elections and the general participation in policymaking. What the failure of communism in Eastern Europe demonstrates is that democracy is foundational to social justice, while state violence, particularly in the form of totalitarianism, is antithetical to it. Romania claimed to be a socialist democracy, but in practice it was neither socialist nor democratic since the majority of citizens were intimidated, marginalized and impoverished. Marx paved the way for this failure through advocating for violence and absolute state control in the Communist Manifesto. If Marx thought violence was necessary to alter the conditions of social production, then he should have advocated for non-​ ­violence. Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” will be discussed as an alternative to the Communist Manifesto, offering a new model through which to salvage the aspect of Marxism which is democratic, over and against the aspect of it which is not. In Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​ 89, Dennis Deletant describes terror and totalitarianism as follows:





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Police terror is an intrinsic feature of totalitarianism, and communist rule in Romania confirmed this. Terror was the instrument wielded by all the communist regimes of Eastern Europe as the means of implementing the Marxist-​ Leninist revolution. The destruction of an existing society and the creation of a new one was achieved by a single mass party, composed of an elite and dedicated membership whose targets were central control and direction of the economy, a technologically perfected monopoly of the media and complete direction of the armed forces. The task assigned to the police was to remove the “enemies” of the regime and those classes of the population who were considered an obstacle to the centralized running of the economy. This programme was initiated by Gheorghiu-​Dej after 1945. It was the inheritance of Nicolae Ceauşescu.1

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx insists on the necessity of violence, as the only means by which the proletariat can reclaim the wealth which the bourgeoisie have stolen through the structure of capitalism. The landlord and the factory owner extract labour and value from the proletariat under exploitative conditions and then personally profit from it. Because the bourgeoisie will never willingly surrender their ill-​gotten wealth, the proletariat must use violence to break the unjust conditions of production and destroy the organization of private property. Marx’s solution demands a violent revolution, and it goes several steps further: After the revolution, during the throes of the transitional period leading to the socialist state free of class struggle, a violent dictatorship must be established by the proletariat –​for the proletariat, of the proletariat –​ because the bourgeoisie will try to take back their private property. Free speech must be suppressed, education must be strictly monitored and all formerly private enterprises –​ such as media, banking, etc. –​ must be collectivized and brought under the control of the dictatorship, in order to prevent the bourgeoisie from using these to reclaim their former wealth. A cursory glance at Romania under Ceauşescu reveals a worst-​case scenario –​one that Marx no doubt never intended –​where this interim dictatorship drags on forever, is every bit as removed from the interests of the people as the capitalist system it replaced and commits unspeakable crimes and acts of violence against the citizens whose name it exists in and lays claim to. And yet it largely conforms to the guidelines laid out in the Manifesto:  “[t]‌he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”2 From the start, a rhetoric of democracy is used in an anti-​democratic way to justify the marginalization and the use of force. Moreover, “[t]he proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”3



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The only way in which it doesn’t conform is the only one that matters: that all these measures of violence will lead to the natural abolition of their conditions of existence. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.4

It has proven to be a historically significant oversight to claim that this necessarily violent transition would lead to the end of class antagonism. Marx did foresee difficulty in the transition, but that is precisely when he insisted on the use of centralized force: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.5

Marx saw, perhaps, something like a performative contradiction at the heart of a solution to class struggle: absolute class antagonism, in the form of a violent revolution, followed by the establishment of a political system far more violent and unjust than the one it overthrows, necessarily leads to the abolition of class antagonism. This is necessarily the case, in Marx’s logic, because the conditions in the new (interim) government will be so extreme that they will wipe away the residue of any past injustices and thereby eliminate the very basis of class antagonism. Because it is the many underprivileged against the few overprivileged, the overprivileged just need to be marginalized thoroughly and completely enough to reset the entire system. And when it is reset, what emerges is a new state where there is no personal greed and no inclination towards exploitation by those who happen to find themselves in positions of power. It was an imperfect vision. Was violence the defining tenet underpinning Marx’s thoughts? If it was not, is his insistence on violence and force enough of a basis for critique, even if recent history had developed otherwise? Another relevant question here is whether there is a performative contradiction present in Marx’s reasoning, and if so, could there be something left to





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be salvaged from the corpse? Is there something to claim and redeem through the inheritance that calls to us? As previous chapters have addressed –​ particularly ­chapters  2 through 4, on Spinozan sovereignty and inheritance  –​ remaining loyal to the cause of economic justice, and therefore to a certain spirit of Marxism, ought to be possible without being immediately associated with the worst abuses of communist regimes. And, as Badiou is quick to point out,6 these regimes were never really “communist.” Certainly, that is true. No one should accuse Ceauşescu, with his golden toilet, of having been a communist, no matter how often he was described as one, either by himself or anyone else. Not all speech is performative, and bad faith is too frequently a key feature of political speech. This less appealing and less romantic part of the inheritance demands that the abuses sanctioned by Marx be held accountable, and if there is something inherent in Marxism which necessarily leads to totalitarian state-​sanctioned abuse, it must be discussed. No part of the Marxist project can be salvaged if this very crucial issue remains ignored by those who claim to continue to be loyal to him. This is the question of a sanctioned, necessary violence at the heart of the Communist Manifesto. Recalling a passage from ­chapter  3, in Romania, and elsewhere, the inheritance of communism demands to be acknowledged, and this demand places a burden on the heirs. It contains a central element of violence, exploitation and totalitarianism, which are all already embedded in some form in the core of communism, as it was outlined by Marx when he wrote the Manifesto, influenced to whatever degree he may have been by regicide and the violence of the French Revolution. He references the French Revolution in several places. He sees the bourgeoisie as the product of that revolution, which then needed to be overthrown by the proletariat. The death invoked in the language appears to be literal. “When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie.”7 Also, in the opening section, he writes, “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons —​the modern working class —​the proletarians.”8 The rhetoric of violence, and the need for it, is clear. “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”9 Marx follows this call to arms with an outline of what the newly formed state must do: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.



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2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-​lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.10 The fact that these guidelines led to such extreme and unchecked abuses should be troubling enough to warrant an interrogation of the core assumptions Marx was labouring under. The question must be asked as to whether a system without any checks and balances, without any recourse to appeal –​for example, on behalf of the “rebels” whose property is being confiscated, in point 4 –​ is viable. Or, to go further, the targeting of “emigrants” in the same sentence –​whose presence here must point to a meditation on borders and statehood –​ is unlikely to lead to anything other than a perpetually self-​ justifying violent totalitarianism. A manifestation of this can be seen in the abuses of the Securitate and what they were willing to do in the name of suppressing opposition against the communist party, which is to say, the state. Due to the lack of checks and balances, the interests of the people in general morphed gradually into the interests of the people in positions of power. Why did Marx not foresee that corruption and greed might need to be accounted for in a political system, and why did he offer a blanket sanctioning of state violence? Marx appears to have thought that something like a performative contradiction is required for the abolition of class antagonism. His assumption was that the proletariat will dissolve political power through seizing it by force. Seizing power dissolves power. Through claiming it, they eliminate that which they claim. Moreover, the aim of claiming it is to dissolve it, through claiming it.





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This is not exactly a performative contradiction, though, as Marx describes it, because power was not supposed to dissolve immediately through its seizing. The proletariat was supposed to have enough time to institutionalize a totalitarian state, which exists for the sole purpose of marginalizing the bourgeoisie and keeping them from re-​acquiring their previous property and positions of wealth and power. The logic is that if the previously powerful, who were exploitative and unjust, are forcibly prevented from reverting to their old practices of gain through exploitation, then the newly powerful (proletariat) will never turn to such means themselves and, therefore, political class oppression will cease to exist, along with class and politics itself. This line of logic seems to assume that something like a species/​being difference exists between the rich and the poor, where one is capable of unethical behaviour while the other is not. This dualism might be what allows Marx to advocate for the use of violence in a completely unproblematic way, as if nothing could go wrong in a totalitarian state established and maintained by force. Leaving these criticisms aside for a moment, what is interesting, and perhaps redemptive, in Marx’s logic is the resemblance that this structure of power bears to a performative contradiction. Through seizing power, you dissolve the very power that you have just seized. Perhaps this dynamic was visible to rural farmers in Romania whose land was being collectivized in the late 1940s. And perhaps it was visible to some participants of the Romanian Revolution, like Mircea Dinescu, the poet and dissident who addressed the people during the television studio takeover in Bucharest, who was told to show that he was working before the cameras went live. Perhaps, in the weeks, months and years after the revolution, it became clear to a few outspoken and persecuted dissidents that the power they thought to have seized in December of 1989 had strangely disappeared. However, this is not what Marx meant. Marx argued that power itself was meant to cease existing, at the hands of the proletariat. He most certainly did not mean that power was meant to cease existing only for the proletariat. He did not mean that, when the proletariat claim power by force, they will find that power instantaneously evaporated and, if not returned to the old master, then, at the very least, turned to a new one. This could be a core performative contradiction exposed by revolutionary violence: when power is grasped, it dissolves in the hands of the one grasping it. Power is required to seize power. The Spinozan multitude is always-​ already saturated with power, which is why revolutionary violence is possible at all. When a large enough group mobilizes in communal action, they can affect some change on their environment, regardless of the degree of their marginalization. The nature of the change is difficult to predict, but the group will usually have some common complaints and goals. This joint,



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and to some degree organized, communal action is commonly referred to as a revolution, but that label is most solidified if the aims of the group are met: the French Revolution, for example, is solidified, unlike the Romanian Revolution, which is in question. Perhaps history helps with the solidification process, allowing time for narratives to emerge, granting victory for one side or another. The structure of performative contradiction permeates the process of revolution in several ways. First, the position of marginalization is compromised from the start. Recall, from ­chapter  3, the discussion of Spinoza’s analysis of power. The key to sovereign power and its transferability is that individuals, as part of a multitude, maintain their power, even though they have transferred it to a sovereign. This multitude can be read in the communist “secular we” that Badiou writes about in “Philosophy and the Death of Communism.” If the sovereign who is entrusted with the power fails to preserve it, fails to act in a way that secures the greater good of the multitude, then that sovereign will be stripped of power. This is not a performative contradiction but a matter of logic. A performative contradiction lies in the fact that once a person relinquishes their power to a sovereign, they do so finally and absolutely. At the same time, they retain their power, and moreover, the one with whom the power is entrusted is placed in a position of absolute ethical responsibility. The social contract is both absolute and conditional. The multitude always retains and defends its sovereignty, even as it surrenders it absolutely. This split sovereignty is why it is possible for a large group to become severely marginalized, at the same time that it remains saturated with power. At the moment of communal action, it is both this marginalization and this power that is invoked. One cannot happen without the other. Revolution requires both weakness and power inhabiting the same body, the same group. In fact, revolution requires inhabiting the position of weakness, and denying the position of power, while acting with the power that is being denied. On the opposite side, the one occupying the position of leadership (with sovereign power) requires acting as if one had power, and perhaps using that power to marginalize others, while in fact not having that power, which remains with those who are being marginalized. In the Spinozan structure, inside which this entire analysis is being performed, those who are being marginalized are being oppressed by their own power, by the power they have invested in their sovereign. Another performative contradiction influences the result of this communal action. Perhaps the degree of awareness of one’s power, in the face of oppression, determines some of the results. For example, if one is not aware of having power and acts with the desire of violently seizing power from those who are merely borrowing it, then what might be seized is precisely nothing.





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In Romania, the reality that nothing (at least, no meaningful political power) was seized by the people became evident very quickly, and the brutally swift execution of the Ceauşescus did not prevent this realization from creeping into everyone’s consciousness. Violent action cannot act as a substitute for revolutionary action, nor is it synonymous with it. This is another mistake that rests on Marx’s shoulders: insisting on violence ensures violence, but it does not necessarily ensure social change towards economic justice. In Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,” he appears torn between problematizing the use of violence and remaining loyal to Marx’s vision of a violent uprising. It is an attempt at reconciling Spinoza and Marx, where a notion of Spinozan sovereignty and the multitude is marshalled for the Marxist proletariat uprising. The problem with this reconciliation is that Marx believed in the possibility of an end to state power, and Spinoza understood state power to be a manifestation of the power of the multitude. For Spinoza, there is no question of ending governance, which is merely a symptom of collective social life, but of setting ethical conditions for governance. For Marx, there appears to be a belief that we can somehow become free of power. He believes that injustice can be ended by the elimination of state power. “On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.”11 This passage on the final page of the “Critique of Violence” echoes Marx almost exactly, when in the Manifesto he says that the forceful abolition of bourgeoisie property will sweep away the conditions of class antagonism and usher in a new era where class antagonism no longer exists. The difference between Spinoza and these positions occupied by Marx and Benjamin are irreconcilably incongruous and based on radically different models of power and sovereignty. What makes Spinoza incompatible with Marxist views of revolution is his understanding of the structure of power, emanating not from some external state power coming from above but from the person of each individual. It all reduces back to the state of nature and whatever power any individual has in their phenomenological manifestation. Whether this is brute physical power, or the more subtle powers of persuasion, each individual has a certain amount of power that they bring to bear on the world around them. Political power is merely an extension of this basic, core power present in all individuals. The existence of this power is not what Spinoza problematizes, nor does he harbour desires to do away with it, which would of course be absurd. The only way to do away with power in general is to do away with individuals in general. He concerns himself exclusively with how to govern ethically, within these conditions of power relations, between individual bodies exerting individual powers over each other. Sovereignty is an



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extension of this, manifesting itself in the sovereign powers of states and heads of states, which are both the symbolic and the actual organizations of collective power. If these structures of governance are happening unethically (i.e. against the common good), the Spinozan system has built in safeguards, an autoimmune response, if you will, which kick the multitude into gear and reorganize the power structure. This is the moment of revolution, and we can certainly read Marx as describing such a moment, with his call to violence. Violence is by no means absent in the Spinozan framework, nor does he lament its inclusion. It is merely a symptom that can be triggered by oppression, by the misuse of collective power entrusted to heads of state. The problem with Marx is the belief that power can be got rid of by physically getting rid of the state. Marx performs an othering between the state and the people. He sets up a false dichotomy because he fails to see the contiguous connection between the people and the state. There is in fact no possible separation between the two, and the political reality of this is observable in the Romanian example. Killing Nicolae Ceauşescu did not eliminate the problem. This is because Ceauşescu –​ the human being called Nicolae Ceauşescu –​ was not the sole source of the political problems in Romania. Performative contradiction problematizes the use of violence and exposes why Marx’s insistence on violence is counter-​revolutionary. It reveals that only non-​violent action can achieve a truly violent political transformation, not through a violent marginalization but through actual change brought about by a realization of personal sovereign power and an ethical wielding of its force. In the Spinozan framework of the political body, an act of violence is always an act of self-​harm, just as the sovereign’s unjust treatment of the multitude is an act of self-​harm, an act of self-​overthrowing. As sovereignty has a performative contradiction at its core, so does revolutionary political action, violent or not. Having seen how the violence of the Romanian Revolution, specifically as it conforms with the violence insisted upon by Marx, was at best ineffectual and at worst self-​defeating, I now turn to two texts which advocate social justice through non-​violence. I hope to explore an alternative to the problem presented by Marx and entertain what implications there might be for social change through non-​violent revolutionary action, further interrogating the relationship between violence, non-​violence and performative contradiction. The first text considered will be Thoreau’s widely influential, yet canonically ignored, “Civil Disobedience,” followed by Walter Benjamin’s far more impenetrable “Critique of Violence.” Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” is known for its influence on the leaders of some of the twentieth century’s most significant





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non-​violent movements, most notably the Civil Rights Movement in the United States through Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi’s resistance against the imperial British rule of India. Written roughly at the same time as the Communist Manifesto, Thoreau’s essay was a result of his meditations on events and circumstances surrounding his arrest in 1846 for his refusal to pay the poll tax in the state of Massachusetts. At the time, there was a head tax –​not a voting tax –​imposed on every man between the ages of twenty and seventy. Thoreau refused to pay this tax on account of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican War. He was consequently imprisoned, albeit for only one night, before a relative paid the tax on his behalf, and continued to pay it pre-​emptively in subsequent years. This situation was not uncommon during that period, and there are various accounts of other men who refused to pay the tax, some of whom were jailed but many of whom avoided prison because relatives pre-​emptively intervened by paying it in their stead.12 This intervention angered Thoreau, who wished to bring attention to his opposition to the state through his imprisonment. In an introduction to the essay’s 1968 publication, Walter Harding (the then Secretary of the Thoreau Society) wrote, [s]‌o many of Thoreau’s townsmen expressed a curiosity about his actions and wanted to know the rationale for his trying to go to jail that Thoreau finally wrote out an explanation and delivered it as a lecture on “the relation of the individual to the State” at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848.13

Thoreau’s meditations on this relationship, and his instincts for a specific type of targeted political action, bear surprisingly strong Spinozan overtones, especially where it concerns the power of the individual as constitutive of state power. Thoreau’s opposition to slavery and the Mexican War lead him to write about the torsion between the will of the people in general versus the will of specific individuals in government with specific political interests that contradict the will of the public: “[t]‌he government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”14 Thoreau does not see himself as being anti-​government in general and insists on being heard as a member of the public with a claim to the system of governance. He encourages everyone who opposes the actions of the state, to “[c]ast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”15 Refusing to pay his poll tax and wishing to go to jail, along with speaking publicly about his opposition, is Thoreau’s way of casting his whole influence against the state. He sees a soldier refusing to serve as another example of such an action and criticizes those soldiers who “serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.”16 He cites Confucius for



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recognizing the “individual as the basis of the empire,” and argues that “[t]here will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”17 He does not perform an othering between the rich and the poor and presents a very persuasive explanation of the relationship between the individual and state power, as well as naming and enacting models of non-​ violent resistance, such as withholding tax and refusing military service, which are rooted in the power of the citizen as a legal entity and not in the amount of physical power (for violence) that an individual can bring to bear on those around him. He sees injustice being committed by the state, and his willingness to go to jail lends an unquestionable credibility to his position. He criticizes those who are unwilling to risk imprisonment but criticizes the state even more so for its unjust laws and the unjust enforcement of those laws: Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?18

The state’s legal resistance to reform is at the heart of Thoreau’s question. Thinking back to Marx’s justification for the absolute necessity of totalitarian governance, one explanation for this resistance is a fear of losing control over the legal ethos of the governance structure, a concern which is most present when a majority, or sizeable minority, is being deliberately marginalized by those who control the state. For Marx, the justification rested in the need to prevent the bourgeoisie from reclaiming power. For Thoreau, there were clear economic reasons for those with political influence to pursue a war against Mexico and to maintain the institution of slavery. In Romania, similarly clear economic motivations could be found for events preceding and following the regime change of 1989, as well as the one which heralded collectivization after World War II. The circumstances of each specific instance may differ, but the inclination to maintain political power by force arises as a necessity proportionate with the level of urgency to a call for change. The greater the need for change, the greater the resistance to it. The more violent the suppression of change, the more extreme the need for it. And the efficacy of implementing the desired change is what is at the heart of this interrogation. Why should non-​violent means be more effective towards the goal of change than violent ones? If Ceauşescu is a counter-​example to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and Marx is a





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counter-​example to Thoreau, then what makes one side more effective than the other? In the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin teases out the relationship between law and violence, and the types of violence sanctioned by law, versus violence outside the law, which is deemed illegal by the state. He points out that law, in general, is by nature committed to self-​preservation, regardless of the identity of state politics: One might perhaps consider the surprising possibility that the law’s interest on a monopoly of violence vis-​a-​vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.19

This observation is not at odds with the inclination noted above, of specific state political agendas to force some into marginalized positions, in the hope of preserving a specific locus of power. To restate this inclination more broadly, one might simply say that all power, not just state power, is inclined towards self-​preservation. In the instance of concrete physical violence directed at the state, Benjamin explains, it is illegal because of the law-​making character of violence. If it were sanctioned by the law, it would threaten to usurp the law through asserting its own law-​making character. Benjamin, in this discussion, is referring specifically to a revolutionary proletariat uprising, in the vein of Marx. What remains confusing is that in order for this dynamic to work, the identity of law in particular needs to be stable because the establishment of a new law, through law-​making violence over and against the old law, would by no means abolish law in general because it is law-​making at the same time that it is law-​destroying. The state wishes to maintain all claims to violence because it is law-​preserving, but this does imply an attachment to some perceived identity because otherwise, the fluid destruction and formation of law, at the hands of violence, would not emerge as a threat, for the destruction and re-​formation are mutually constitutive. The necessity of prohibition emerges out of a desire for self-​preservation, which requires self-​identification. Returning to Thoreau, “[o]‌ne would think that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its defensive, its suitable and proportionate penalty?”20 Law is by nature self-​preserving, but this desire for self-​preservation (at all cost) leads to its obsolescence. The only way it can endure is if it makes itself fluid and changeable. “So is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body.”21 This mirrors the structure of gender discussed in the previous two chapters, where its ossification led to its erasure, in the context of pro-​natal legislation performing an



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erasure of childbearing women. For Antigone and Zoia, their out-​of-​joint-​ ness with the roles assigned to them is what allowed for the possibility of an emergence of ethical consciousness. Common to these examples, and shared by the structures of inheritance and sovereignty, is an erasure of self that results in the preservation of self. The two selves are not self-​same, but only through this self-​othering does the self survive. Opposed to this structure is that of ossification and obsessional neurosis, where a forcing of rigid identity preservation results in destruction. This inclination is what manifests itself in the form of totalitarianism. The same structure of performative contradiction that we have seen thus far in sovereignty and revolutionary action emerges here as well, in relation to law and violence, which are of course inseparable from all the other aspects of historico-​political narratives. The reason it is crucial to acknowledge and account for the central structural presence of performative contradiction in political action is because without this insight, any political movement exposes itself to counter-​productive, and in fact self-​defeating, activity. The Romanian Revolution serves as this text’s central example of a compromised political moment, and perhaps this is in large part determined by Marx’s specific relationship to violence, which led to unchecked abuses in totalitarian Romania, which were likewise counter-​productive and self-​defeating, particularly in a state that claimed to be socialist. If political violence operates according to the principles of performative contradiction, then it is only through non-​violence that a revolutionary transformation can occur, and furthermore, direct violence is likely to prove to be self-​destructive to a movement. By way of a counter example, representing movements which have proved more successful than the one in Romania, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi should be considered, and through them, Thoreau. Gandhi always kept a copy of “Civil Disobedience” in his luggage and “said he never went anywhere –​ not even to jail –​ without a copy of the pamphlet because it epitomized the whole spirit of his life.”22 And King, speaking about his organized boycotts of segregated buses in Alabama, said, “I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, ‘We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.’ ”23 Recalling the impact Thoreau had on him when first reading his work in college, King said, “[f]‌ascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.”24 Thoreau delivers a scathing criticism of unreflective, hypocritical civic life presided over by apathy and fear. He stands in vehement and urgent opposition to slavery and the invasion of Mexico and argues for legal reform





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through non-​compliance with government, specifically in the form of refusing to pay tax. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-​bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if such a thing is possible.25

It is true that Thoreau advocates for non-​violence, but that is not the primary objective. He is more concerned with effective intervention in government and believes the most effective way of achieving this is through thoughtful non-​compliance. At no point does he say anything to indicate that certain effective measures should not be taken if they risk spilling blood. His goal is to counter-​act the violence already being committed by the state, and he sees the logical way to achieve this is to not support the state in its violent actions. His solution is to cease being violent. His desired goal is the elimination of state violence, and his means happen to also coincide, in that they are non-​violent means of resistance. His ethos of action is non-​action, not non-​violence, and it is occurring in the specific context of man’s relation to the state. He does not set out to be non-​violent in the movement; the non-​violence is a by-​product –​albeit an unavoidable one –​ of passive resistance: When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this would a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.26

The most surprising aspect of Thoreau’s argument, however, is not that pacifism is not his stated goal, but rather that performative contradictions underpin the text. He cites Cicero, posing the question of whether it is just to steal a plank of wood from a drowning man,27 then references a biblical passage in reply, indicating that “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it”28 if they do so at the cost of committing murder. If the circumstances of saving one’s own life are such that they cost the life of another, then they are not saving one’s own life. This cuts to the very core of the problem with violence. Thoreau’s objective is not to be a pacifist. His objective is to not participate in committing violence. The violence is already under way. He is choosing to abstain from committing it. The performative contradiction lies in the fact that self-​ preservation is an act of self-​harm if it comes at the cost of harming another. “This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it



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cost them their existence as a people.”29 This mirrors the Spinozan framework of the body politic, where a sovereign harms himself by harming the public. Thoreau speaks from the side of complicity, advocating for justice through ceasing aggression and exposing the performative contradiction governing the actions of the oppressor: self-​preservation is an act of self-​harm. There is a constitutive problem with his position, namely that injustice continues to be committed in his name, both by the state and by his relatives, who pay taxes in his name. In spite of Thoreau’s serious and concerted efforts, injustice continues to be committed on his behalf. This is an issue he attempts to address, and the topic of his unwilling complicity will be discussed momentarily. Next, Thoreau points to the contradiction of a public who supports a soldier’s refusal to serve in a war, while paying taxes which fund that war: “[t]‌he soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught.”30 The public is fully complicit and bears responsibility for the war. Their support of the war is established by their participation in paying taxes and has nothing to do with where they stand politically, in relation to the war. Their verbal support of the soldier who refuses to serve is simultaneously negated by the act of paying taxes. This is a contradiction, and certainly a hypocrisy, but it is not a performative contradiction because the paying of taxes is not effected in any way, regardless of the political position that the citizen advocates for verbally. There is a painful irony in that Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes did not prevent his taxes from being paid, and his willingness  –​ or rather, his desire –​to go to jail for not paying taxes was only enough to keep him in jail for one night, in a facility where the inmates were allowed out during the day and would be more accurately compared to a boarding house in this sense.31 “Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighbouring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon.”32 The irony of Thoreau’s position is entwined with the problem of complicity in the ontological sense. It also points to a performative contradiction in the act of paying taxes, which requires the agency of the citizen, while negating the agency of the citizen since the state overrides the individual’s agency. The individual has no choice about paying taxes, which is demonstrated best by Thoreau, whose taxes were paid in spite of all his efforts to avoid paying them. He could literally not avoid paying his taxes, and they were paid against his will. Juxtaposed to the aggressor is the position of the victim, which is likewise underpinned by a performative contradiction in “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau argues that only the slave can vote for his own freedom. Only the one without the right to vote can vote.





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When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.33

This is remarkably similar to Judith Butler’s discussion of performative contradiction in Who Sings the Nation-​State?, where she discusses illegal Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles singing the US national anthem in Spanish, laying claim to their right to free speech without having the right to speak before the state. “I want to suggest that this is precisely the kind of performative contradiction that leads not to impasse but to forms of insurgency.”34 They petitioned the state from the position of being excluded from the right to petition the state. It is somewhat more challenging to capture the relationship to complicity from the other side, from the position occupied by Thoreau, for example, where the revolution comes not from the marginalized but from the privileged –​ granting ahead of time, of course, that this position is infinitely compromised from the outset. Thoreau asserts throughout the text that he is outside the state, and his decision to not pay taxes is an indicator of this ability to step outside the system. That his taxes were paid against his will served as a frustration, but it did not lead him to question, fundamentally, the idea that he could exclude himself from participating in the state.35 He was entirely preoccupied with escaping blame for being complicit with the state. “What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”36 He took care in his private affairs to not be complicit: “[f]‌or my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the state.” What Thoreau clearly does not want to admit is that he occupies a position of privilege, and that privilege protects him, even when he wishes that it did not. Having a relative nearby who has agency and expendable income to pay his tax is just one symptom of this privilege, which he did nothing to earn being the recipient of; yet he cannot help but benefit from it, even as he sees the injustice of the situation. This is an odd type of injustice in that Thoreau is a victim of an injustice that is an excess of justice, if it can be articulated in this way. This is the position he wishes to step outside of, and this is the position he calls the state, though it is clearly greater than the boundaries of a nation state: I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbour as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-​countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax-​bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State.37



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Thoreau believed that he could refuse this allegiance, and his most significant literary contribution, “Walden,” is an ode to his return to the state of nature. But nature is complicated, especially in its relationship towards the political.38 In Who Sings the Nation-​State?, Butler critiques Agamben’s claim of “bare life” (we might trace the discussion here back to a Spinozan state of nature) with respect to the nation state’s treatment of its marginalized members. She takes issue with the idea that when a nation state expels a being, that being is placed back into nature, into what essentially amounts to a state without politics. Butler argues convincingly that this state of “nature” is precisely enforcing a state of subjection and is far from being a realm without politics: It may be the case that one crucial and central operation of sovereign power is the capacity to suspend the rights of individuals or groups or to cast them out of a polity. When cast out, one is cast out into a space or a condition of bare life, and the bios of the person is no longer linked to its political status. By “political” here is meant membership in the ranks of citizenship. But does this move not precisely place an unacceptable juridical restriction on the political?39

Despite his vehement opposition to slavery and the war on Mexico, despite his acute awareness of these two great injustices, Thoreau is unable to see his own position accurately, from the other end of the socio-​economic stratum: “[i]‌t is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-​free, fancy-​free, imagination-​free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers and reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.”40 Unfortunately, they can. Unwise rulers can fatally interrupt a man; they can make him a slave, they can send him to war, they can put him in jail –​ the kind that is not like a boarding house –​ they can fatally interrupt his life, as so many lives have been fatally interrupted throughout history. If this were not the case, there would be no motivation for Thoreau’s actions, for his desire for reform, for his indignation at the injustice he sees around him. We do not arrive into the state of nature as pure beings. We are born into the political, with the original sin of being always-​already interpolated by the state apparatus, always-​already complicit in all the crimes our state commits in our name. The social contract binds us. There is no state of nature that we can return to, no Garden of Eden, there, at the edge of the forest by Walden Pond, where we can return to and absolve ourselves of guilt. Thoreau believed he could get outside it by not paying taxes, and if paying taxes was the only thing implicating us in the state, this might be a solution. However, as Spinoza tells us, joining forces in that original state of nature already established the state. Wherever two form an alliance, there the state is instantaneously formed. Even if a state without taxation existed, it would still be a state, and its citizens would still be always-​already complicit in its





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crimes. The path forward is not to seek a way to absolve ourselves of this ontological guilt, but, as Thoreau says, to cherish the wise minority, to not crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus, but to govern ethically and accommodate change, even and especially at the cost of a loss of self. The general strike, as Marx described it, would be a model of civil disobedience in line with successful non-​violent political movements, as it is a model of peaceful organized resistance. The general strike, if separated from Marx’s support of a violent revolution and the establishment of the interim totalitarian government, is non-​violent and conforms perfectly to Thoreau’s model of action. With Marx, the problem arises with the insistence of violence during the revolution and then becomes solidified in the establishment of law, following the revolution. If it remained simply with the general strike, the problem of what should follow afterwards would still arise. The question of governance would still emerge. Even if this question were to be deferred in favour of a longing for anarchy, for a non-​state, without governance, all such an argument would accomplish is an insistence on terminology, on a demonization of words like “state” and “government,” which essentially diverts the discussion but does nothing to address the actual problem. What remains to be addressed is the mode of interaction between masses of people living in clusters of semi-​shared space. If the law of anarchy should state that there should be no law, that is already a law, and a performative contradiction. If “no-​government men,”41 as Thoreau calls them, should insist that it is not a state they’re forming but a voluntary community, they have already committed the mistake of thinking that they are outside of history, in the state of nature, that equal playing field from which they can make original choices, independent of any factors governing their current state of existence. It is the argument of bare life for which Butler criticizes Agamben, and it misses the point that the men and women comprising the government are the same men and women who make up the community, whose decisions about law-​making affect the quality of life for the whole community. The government is not an “other” to the people but an extension of them, though its members may act against their best interests, and “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.”42 This is what is so difficult to accept in cases of extreme human rights violations, like genocide or state-​sanctioned torture, or like the numerous widespread abuses that occurred in Romania not just during Ceauşescu’s tenure but also before and after his rule. It is convenient to blame Ceauşescu, and his wife and children, and execute some of them, but this does nothing to address the problems which led to these abuses. What it does is allow the community to try to absolve itself of guilt and ignore the causes that led vast numbers of people to victimize each other. As discussed in ­chapter 4, in



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relation to the totem meal, this displacement of justice results in the transformation and perpetuation of injustice, which will merely manifest itself in a new form. The problem of how to govern ethically remains the central question, and the trouble with governance is that it requires cooperation and compromise, in addition to the constant awareness of the insight that what offends the majority is an act of self-​destruction. “As the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude, it is certain that the power and right of the commonwealth are so far diminished, as it gives occasion for many to conspire together.”43 Benjamin outlines a sphere of politics that is strongly Spinozan when he states that violence is avoided by the state when it fears mutual disadvantage and relinquishes its monopoly on violence in specific instances to this end. The right to strike is one such example. This avoidance of violence is also evidenced in conflicts between individuals, where a resolution is sought for fear of violence breaking out. For Benjamin, a non-​violent resolution of conflict is possible within the sphere relating to objects, given preconditions of good faith. However, it is no longer possible between men, if compelled by law. This is evidenced by the legislative process, which does not sanction lying. “This makes clear that there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.”44 Benjamin argues that when the legislative process is aware of its founding revolutionary power, it does not need to place sanctions on fraud because “deception, having itself no trace of power about it, was, on the principle ius civile vigilantibus scriptum est, exempt from punishment in Roman and ancient Germanic law.”45 This is counter-​intuitive because forbidding deception is seen as a sign of weakness, whereas tolerating deception occurs in a context where deception itself is seen as having no power. If deception needs to be forbidden, it becomes invested with power, and this occurs only in a decaying state that has lost awareness of its origins and lacks confidence in its own legitimacy. There is a performative contradiction in that lies are made powerful by their prohibition, and this results from fear, not from ethics. “It turns to fraud, therefore, not out of moral considerations, but for fear of the violence that it might unleash in the defrauded party. Since such fear conflicts with the violent nature of law derived from its origins, such ends are inappropriate to the justified means of law.”46 Because violence is law-​making, law cannot fear violence. If it does, it has forgotten itself. Fear cannot be the motivation behind law. Here, law begins to assume a sovereign character. Just as the sovereign must feel secure in the power that has been invested in him by the multitude, or fall, so too must law feel secure in its own originary violent power.





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The sovereign right over all men belongs to him who has sovereign power, wherewith he can compel men by force . . . such sovereign right he will retain only so long as he can maintain his power by enforcing his will; otherwise he will totter on his throne, and no one who is stronger than he will be bound unwillingly to obey him.47

Its process of self-​preservation cannot be rooted in fear but in the righteousness of its own power. Spinoza’s influence on Benjamin is clear when considering the sanction on lying. In the Political Treatise, discussed in ­chapter  3, Spinoza explains that a government which relies on the goodwill of its members will never be stable. If law has to be repressive, in order for the state to function properly, then that state will be a weak one. This is what Marx did not account for and why “communist” states ruled by fear and violence toppled across Europe: A dominion then, whose well-​being depends on any man’s good faith, and whose affairs cannot be properly administered, unless those who are engaged in them will act honestly, will be very unstable. On the contrary, to insure its permanence, its public affairs should be so ordered, that those who administer them, whether guided by reason or passion, cannot be led to act treacherously or basely. Nor does it matter to the security of a dominion, in what spirit men are led to rightly administer its affairs. For liberty of spirit, or courage, is a private virtue; but the virtue of a state is its security.48

In the state of nature, people are allowed to use whatever means they have at their disposal, including physical force and deception, in order to get what they want. The purpose for joining forces into a state is precisely to receive the benefit of not being constantly at the mercy of others in the state of nature. Reason leads men to conclude that it is in everyone’s best interests to form a state, that “their life should be no more conditioned by the force of desire of individuals, but by the power and will of the whole body.”49 This narrative of state formation is similar structurally to Freud’s account of early man in ­chapter  4, especially with regards to the totem meal, in that it is a story illustrative of a moment of origin that was unwitnessable and remains unknowable. The purpose of the narrative is to shed light on the fundamental nature of political origins. Freud explains his account of patriarchal structure, thanks to insights that psychoanalysis made possible. Spinoza and Benjamin explain it through philosophic insights: Accordingly the mere hostile impulse against the father, the mere existence of a wishful phantasy of killing and devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction that created totemism and taboo. In this way we should



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avoid the necessity for deriving the origin of our cultural legacy, of which we justly feel so proud, from a hideous crime, revolting to all our feelings.50

Law is always-​ already saturated with violence, and therefore there is something like a redundancy in justifying violent means through law. The problematic nature of law, and its relationship to violence, demands to be understood in order for ethical governance to be possible. For Benjamin, admitting that violence can be used as a means to an end is already a condoning of violence and a forfeiting of the question of the ethical need for non-​violence. To say that it is justified to use violence in certain cases leaves only the task of cataloguing instances where it is justified and where it is not. It ignores the question of whether it is justified. Benjamin describes legal philosophy as a defence of the violence of natural law and in relation to the state, exposes the threatening law-​making character of violence, which the state demands exclusive access to. He rejects any “ends versus means” discussion of violence. Since the presence of law itself is inseparable from violence, “like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence.”51 All contracts, especially the social contract, regardless of the peaceful conditions they are formed under, are rooted in violence and sanction violence if the contract is violated by either party. Benjamin argues that this is the revolutionary founding force to which all contracts owe their existence, that all legal origins are rooted in violence, and if this is forgotten, the power of the contract will fall into decay. This structure elaborates on what Spinoza describes as the transition out of the state of nature into the political. For Spinoza, the formation of the state comes about when men realize that so long as everyone is acting solely in their own interest, without regard for others, then all live in a general climate of “enmity, hatred, anger, and deceit.”52 Therefore, reason leads men to conclude that it is in everyone’s best interests to form a state. Benjamin describes this moment as a revolution, anchored in the power of law-​making violence. His critique of what he saw happening in the state of politics around him was that it had forgotten this foundation. “In our time, parliaments provide an example of this [decay]. They offer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have not remained conscious of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence.”53 Due to the forgetting of the violence that their legislative power represents, a government becomes ineffective, and while it may insist on non-​ violence, it does so only out of fear. It remains rooted in violence, and compulsive in character, especially concerning the compromises it makes. This is Benjamin’s chilling description of politics in Germany after World War I. “Significantly, the decay of parliaments has perhaps alienated as many minds from the ideal of a nonviolent resolution of political conflicts as were





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attracted to it by the war.”54 Less than two decades later, Benjamin will have been forced to flee Nazi Germany and will have met his end at the hands of a Spanish bureaucrat, who tries to bribe him, driving Benjamin to commit suicide. The passage from Peter Demetz is worth quoting at length for the benefit of anyone who is unclear about the conditions under which Walter Benjamin died: In late September 1940, Benjamin (who had picked up his U.S. visa in Marseilles) crossed the French-​Spanish border with a small band of fellow exiles, but was told on the Spanish side by the local functionary (who wanted to blackmail the refugees) that Spain was closed to them, and that they would be returned in the morning to the French authorities, who were just waiting to hand them over to the Gestapo. Benjamin –​totally exhausted and possibly sick –​took an overdose of morphine, refused medical help, and died in the morning, while his fellow refugees were promptly permitted to proceed through Spanish territory to Lisbon.55

The actions of one state official, motivated by personal greed, cost the world the life of Walter Benjamin. His actions were not performed in a vacuum, but as part of a broader culture of corruption evident in political life, calling attention to moments where private decisions bring about public consequences. Just as executing Ceauşescu did not solve the problem in Romania, so too othering the abuses which gave rise to National Socialism in Germany –​ and placing all the blame in one place –​ misses the point. What previous chapters have revealed is that the nation at large is complicit in the guilt of the sovereign and that his execution is simultaneous with his deification. What does it mean, then, when a nation establishes a totalitarian state such as Romania? How are we to interpret the acts of violence that the public participated in (think of the informants discussed in ­chapter  5), even as it suffered greatly as a consequence of this participation? Violence was a defining tenet of Marx’s model, and it is counter-​productive to the democratic objectives of the cause. In order to salvage something from the corpse, the project must be rewritten, and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” provides a model that could be used to redeem it, particularly with regards to the non-​violent general strike. This is a concrete step that those who wish to remain loyal to Marx might take. Traces of performative contradiction are already present in the Communist Manifesto, in the structure of how Marx thought power might dissolve in the hands of the revolutionaries. It is likewise present in Thoreau’s thought, when he describes voting as an act available only to the slave who has been denied the right to vote. Benjamin’s insight reveals that a state’s reliance on violence betrays its weakness and a forgetting of its revolutionary founding power. This insight is particularly



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relevant for Romania, and any state where sanctioned abuse is seen as the solution to political problems. The enactment of state violence is a confession of state weakness. Conversely, non-​violent action is a display of strength. Marx identified the necessity of a general strike, and this is the aspect of his legacy that could be salvaged by a non-​violent struggle for economic equality. In fact, it stands in opposition to a privileging of violent action. The performative contradiction that Marx sees as necessary to abolish class antagonism is more likely to be found in something like a non-​violent strike, rather than a bloody revolution. The dichotomy between the rich and the poor must also be interrogated, and like gender, class might prove to be performative. This is not to say that either class or gender are imaginary, but rather that the deconstructions which are rather well rehearsed in terms of gender identity might also apply to class, particularly when it comes to legislative power forcefully imposing one of these roles through punitive measures. In terms of gender, we saw pro-​natal legislation in Romania as an example of an enactment of forced gender roles because it singled out the mother as the sole bearer of responsibility during pregnancy. This privileging resulted in her marginalization. As the sole bearer of responsibility, she was stripped of this responsibility. In terms of class struggle, the ossification of class roles performs this same simultaneous privileging and marginalization. If the classes are locked in their identities as such, then the stability of these identities condemns each of them. The privileged are envied and sentenced to death by virtue of their privilege, and the poor are relegated to marginality, even after the revolution. This phenomenon is readily observable in the example presented by Romania and explains how the privileged and the marginalized maintained their roles, in spite of the transitions of power that came to pass after World War II, and again after 1989. The concluding thought is that the less entrenched and ossified these roles are, both class and gender, the more stable the society that produces them. Just as the stability of a nation is compromised by the totalitarian regime’s unyielding grip on power, making it impossible to change leadership without disrupting the state, the democratic spirit of a nation is likewise compromised by a rigid enforcement of gender and class roles. The lessons gleaned from the performativity of gender roles can serve as a guide to class mobility. In the context of a nation where wealth is stagnant, where the poor for the most part remain poor, and the rich for the most part remain rich, democracy is compromised. The conclusion will discuss other examples of performative contradiction, in relation to regulations on political donations in the United States, which brings the uneasy relationship between class, capital and democracy clearly into focus.





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NOTES 1. Dennis Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​89 (London: Hurst, 1995), 1. 2. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Fredrick Engels (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), 26. 3. Marx, Manifesto, 26. 4. Marx, Manifesto, 27. 5. Marx, Manifesto, 26. 6. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, trans. O. Feltham and J. Clemens (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), as discussed in c­ hapter 3. 7. Marx, Manifesto, 26. 8. Marx, Manifesto, 26. 9. Marx, Manifesto, 26. 10. Marx, Manifesto, 26–​27. 11. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 300. 12. Walter Harding makes several mentions of close friends of Thoreau who also refused to pay the tax and were imprisoned, among them Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” Walden & Civil Disobedience, the Variorum Editions (New York: Washington Square Press, 1973), 325. 13. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 330. 14. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 343. 15. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 353. 16. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 345. 17. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 364. 18. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 350–​351. 19. Benjamin, Reflections, 281. 20. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 351. 21. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 351. 22. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 334. 23. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 338. 24. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 338. 25. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 353. 26. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 353. 27. “If a fool should snatch a plank from a wreck, shall a wise man wrest it from him if he is able?” Cicero, De Officiis, III, xxiii, in Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 366, footnote 14. 28. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 366, footnote 15, Matt. X:39. 29. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 347. 30. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 349. 31. “But he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.” Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 357. 32. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 358.



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33. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 348. 34. Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-​State? Language, Politics, Belonging (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), 63. 35. “Although the person who paid Thoreau’s tax has never been positively identified, it is generally agreed that it was probably his Aunt Maria Thoreau.” Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 367, footnote 43. 36. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 351. 37. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 359. 38. Further to note 4 on fusis, “our initial task will consist in examining the origins of modern technology, which Heidegger describes in the primordial ‘experience’ of Being as [fusis], together with the human manners of comportment to this the primordial manisfestness of Being.” John Loscerbo, Being and Technology (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1981), 3. Also, “the right to rights, emphasizing the first, is one that’s not yet guaranteed by the law, but not for that reason ‘natural’ either.” Butler, Who Sings the Nation-​State? 65. 39. Butler, Who Sings the Nation-​State? 38–​39. 40. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 361. 41. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 344. 42. Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 282. 43. Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 305. 44. Benjamin, Reflections, 289. 45. Benjamin, Reflections, 290. 46. Benjamin, Reflections, 290. 47. Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise, 189. 48. Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise, 283. 49. Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise, 187. 50. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Stachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 198. 51. Benjamin, Reflections, 288. 52. Spinoza, A Theologico-​Political Treatise, 187. 53. Benjamin, Reflections, 288. 54. Benjamin, Reflections, 288. 55. Benjamin, Reflections, xiv–​xv.



Conclusion Other Examples

Performative contradiction, as a conceptual paradigm, is one of the most productive and versatile tools available in the field of contemporary thought. It is an ancient therapy, one that is once again enjoying new life, thanks to the work of post-​structuralist philosophers and theorists. The key to its productivity and therapeutic value is the insight that the structure contains opposites within itself and performs a torsion as it performs a unification. Conceptually, this requires a great deal of tolerance of ambiguity, to state Adorno’s diagnosis of the authoritarian personality in more positive terms. This ambiguity is, during the performative contradiction, constitutive of consciousness and is essentially antithetical to totalitarianism, which seeks always and only to integrate and smooth over torsion through the suppression of difference. Performative contradiction (as a gathering-​together of the concept) stands in opposition to this hegemonic regime of identity policing by exposing the rupture at the heart of subjectivity. To invoke Derrida, the archive is always-​ already anarchic. This does not mean that all is chaos. It is not a nihilistic philosophy. It does not mean that nothing matters. Nor, on the other hand, does it mean that the difference of difference is always sublimated into sameness. Performative contradiction is never stagnant; it is always a movement. There is no ossification because the performative is a type of motion. Unlike contradiction, which can stagnate and turn to stone, performative contradiction always and only undermines itself in its act of self-​assertion, and this self-​undermining is its act of salvation. It means that chaos and order are at once present, at once gathered together and inseparable. Teasing out the relationship of these opposites, how they manifest and compromise and inform each other, has been the task of this analysis. The problem with providing examples of other applications of performative contradiction to political events is that it is necessary to have more than 189



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just a superficial knowledge of the historical details. My hope is that readers will come to this document because something about contradiction and revolution will resonate with their own areas of interest and expertise. After reading the text and seeing the concept put to work, they may apply it in their own fields. A vast array of recent events could benefit from such attention: the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the current tensions within the EU, the Syrian refugee crisis, immigration in general, elections, economic policy, debt, and so on. The first three chapters set up the explanation of performative contradiction and contextualized the specific example of the Romanian Revolution in its field and within the discipline. These would be unique to any other specific historical example which could be analysed through performative contradiction. Chapters 4 through 7 established specific precedents for future readings, or, rather, they leave many threads open which might be picked up elsewhere, in relation to numerous other historical events. I will attempt to demonstrate a few brief examples of what these might look like, though the reader is asked to bear in mind that the objective of this book is to open up a new set of discursive tools, which could be applied in countless ways. These examples are not meant in any way to be prescriptive or limiting in their scope. Individuals familiar with specific examples will know in what way performative contradiction might be most productively applied. The first example that comes to mind is the structure of nostalgia and nationalism. Freud’s critique of nostalgia in ­chapter 4 –​ his uncovering of the hidden dynamic of ambivalence behind a sentimental reminiscing of the past –​exposes the repressed animosity felt towards the object of desire. Other historical examples might benefit from this model, especially where there is nationalist nostalgia for a bygone Golden Era. Hungarians still lament the Treaty of Trianon, and some openly advocate for a re-​appropriation of the lost territories. Many conservative Americans think of the McCarthy era (the 1950s) as the golden years of American culture, the very definition of “normalcy,” and they also think of Ronald Reagan’s two-​term tenure as an economic success for the nation. What if it were to emerge, through analysis, that these nostalgic views also hide something far more sinister, something primal and violent, like the cannibalistic band of brothers in the patriarchal horde? Derrida, in ­chapter  5, helped us see that the legislative marginalization of women, particularly in a reproductive capacity, is only possible through the essentialization and sanctification of their reproductive role. Just as the murder of the patriarch is simultaneously the act of his worship, the sanctification of the mother is the simultaneous stripping away of her legal rights. I mentioned some differences between pro-​life rhetoric that is religious in nature and the propaganda in Romania which simply appropriated the bodies



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of the mother and child for the use of the state. There is another type of anti-​ abortion rhetoric which invokes human rights discourse to claim that the innocent foetus is being deprived of its human rights by being murdered. The legal sanctioning of this act, the argument goes, results in a dehumanization of the foetus that is akin to the treatment of colonial subjects and slaves, who were similarly deprived of subjectivity, human rights and protection under the law. A further analysis of this argument, and a thorough breakdown of its structure in the context of performative contradictions at play in such rhetoric, would greatly benefit the quality of public discourse surrounding reproductive rights. For example, in this context, it might emerge that the foetus –​the one who is not born and has no agency, nor any capacity for life or sentience outside of the body of the mother, one who is essentially only potentially human –​is the only human. Whereas the mother, through her perfectly essentialized reproductive capacity, is too human to actually be considered one, legally speaking. She has an excess of humanity because she is growing a human. In the context of this discourse, she in effect loses not only her legal rights, but her humanity as well, to the foetus. Taken to this extreme, only the foetus is human. The mother no longer is. She is merely an apparatus used for growing humans. That this stripping away of humanity should happen in the name of human rights is a perfect performative contradiction. A crucial aspect of this argument requires the denial of uncertainty surrounding the development and birth of the foetus, as if “naturally” all foetuses develop and are born without incident –​ to say nothing of what happens in the days, months and years after the birth. This repression of doubt mirrors the ossification of the female role as essentially reproductive. Chapter 6 discussed the interruption of mourning that occurs during transitions of power, as it effects –​ or is instantiated through –​ members of the former head of state’s family –​ who seek to grieve for their deceased. Zoia Ceauşescu and Antigone were discussed, with the aim of highlighting the internal tensions at play in a state with a newly emerged sovereign power. Countless examples come to mind, particularly from nations with a history of totalitarian rule, where a leader who is either overthrown or dies naturally throws governance into chaos or generates a proliferation of questionable legislative decisions, such as Creon’s order against a respectable burial for Polynices, or the Romanian government’s show trial, closed execution and secret burial of the Ceauşescus. One analogous figure to Ceauşescu is Saddam Hussein, who similarly rose to power as a socialist revolutionary during the 1960s, serving as the leader of Iraq from 1979 until 2003. His trial took place under an interim government. He was charged with crimes against humanity and sentenced to death after being convicted of the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites in 1982. During the process of such a trial, it is interesting to consider which charges are brought



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and ultimately used to justify the execution. For the Ceauşescus, they were convicted of genocide, specifically for the deaths of the 60,000 protestors in Timișoara, which soon turned out to be false. For Hussein, the Dujali Massacre –​with less than 150 deaths –​from the early 1980s was the most significant charge the court cited, after a 24-​year rule. Why are charges against dictators so difficult to formulate? After a lengthy tenure as dictator, should there not be an overabundance of credible evidence to justify an execution? Perhaps it is only during this moment that the complicity of an entire system of government, including the general public, truly becomes visible and hamstrings the legislative process, so that those who want to pull the trigger must carefully avoid accidentally indicting themselves. In Romania, the Ceauşescus were the last people to be executed before the outlawing of capital punishment in 1990. No such laws have been passed in Egypt since the 2011 revolution, where the former –​ and first democratically elected –​ head of state has recently received a death sentence. Perhaps if Egypt’s preceding president Hosni Mubarak had been executed during the revolution, rather than merely convicted and jailed –​along with his sons – for corruption,​his successor Mohamed Morsi might have taken similar steps to avoid the execution he currently faces. Even if this death sentence is never carried out, it brings up the question of the symbolic role played by such a sentence, and performative contradiction might help make sense of it. Images and YouTube videos of Hussein’s hanging went viral soon after his death. “However the moment of his execution was not shown. Pictures of his body wrapped in a shroud were later broadcast on TV.”1 Recall how the trial and execution of the Ceauşescus was also televised, except for the moment when they were actually shot. What is the meaning of this looking away performed by the camera at exactly the moment of climax? Might it perhaps betray a sign of respect, or a moment of grief, which must immediately be suppressed? Hussein refused to wear a hood during his execution. He refused to look away. A spokeswoman for Hussein’s daughters is quoted by the BBC, in the same article as the one referenced above, as saying, “They felt very proud as they saw their father facing his executioners so bravely.”2 Another example which would benefit from close analysis following the model of performative contradiction, particularly surrounding the inability to mourn –​ or perhaps better phrased as the perversion of grief –​ is the recent activity of North Korea’s Kim Jong-​un. The son of the late Kim Jung-​il, and current head of state, ordered the execution of at least fifteen senior officials since assuming power after his father’s death in 2011. The most notable of these executions was that of his uncle Jang Song-​thaek, once second-​in-​command to his father. According to most reports, in 2013, he was accused of counter-​revolutionary actions and treason and promptly executed. Because of



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the media blackout from North Korea, the deaths remain shrouded in mystery and, like in Romania, the status of the dead, and the circumstances of the deaths, cannot be confirmed due to state interference. After North Korea announced Jang Song-​thaek’s death to the international community, a Chinese satirist reported on social media that the uncle had been stripped naked and fed to a pack of starving dogs.3 Western media outlets picked up the story, which was eventually reported on NBC News, The Daily Mail, the New York Daily News and the London Evening Standard –​ all of which presumably did not realize that the original report came from a satirist. This example resonates with the exaggerated death toll in Timișoara, initially reported by Romanian television and later picked up by Western media. Recall the importance of these false reports in casting doubt over the entire revolution. To complicate matters further, with regards to North Korea, retired National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman, who has been acting somewhat like a freelance cultural ambassador between North Korea and the United States, and who has personally spent time with Kim Jong-​un, claims to have seen Jang Song-​thaek –​ along with others who have allegedly been executed –​ on a recent visit to North Korea.4 Rodman even has a documentary due for release, titled Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang.5 The lack of transparency concerning these executions is further complicated by Rodman’s eyewitness account, which echoes with the discussion of bearing witness  –​ and the compromised juridical value of that role  –​ discussed in ­chapter  5. False, inaccurate, contested or otherwise compromised accounts of death inhibit the process of grief and impede the process of mourning. Even the mourning of a so-​called “natural” death can cause similar disturbances in this process. That this might be the case for Kim Jong-​un is indicated by the fact that “Of the seven pallbearers at former leader Kim Jong-​il’s 2011 funeral, apart from Kim Jong-​un, all have either been executed, lost their jobs or have not been seen in some time.”6 Might Kim Jong-​un possibly be punishing those who were closest to his father? Might he in some way blame them for his death? Even a cursory glance at the materials forces such questions to arise, challenging the conventional interpretation of these events, which tend to think of these acts merely as punishment for disloyalty. This is the most readily available conclusion that one could draw, based on charges of treason, and certainly the accusation of disloyalty is a profound one, but one that runs much deeper than these interpretations would indicate. And, in contrast, recall the charges of genocide against Ceauşescu, which were clearly developed to justify the execution. When one looks at the structure behind such charges, a more puzzling set of circumstances emerges. Take, for example, that it is not just Jang Song-​thaek,



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the former vice-​chairman of the National Defence Commission, who was executed, but the vacancy he left behind as a high-​ranking defence minister seems to mark replacement candidates for a similar fate. Recently appointed defence minister Hyon Yong-​chol was also executed for treason, prompting the American satirical newspaper The Onion to run an article entitled “Newly Sworn-​In North Korean Official Wondering How He’ll Eventually Be Executed.”7 What this string of executions points to is that perhaps there is something like an ontological guilt associated with holding a position too close to the location of power, at least for Kim Jong-​un. Perhaps being a defence minister constitutes an act of treason in and of itself. Likewise, bearing too close a relationship to the former sovereign might constitute guilt towards the current one. A 2014 article in a Huffington Post affiliate speculated that Jang Sung-​ thaek’s widow Kim Kyong-​hui  –​ the current leader’s paternal aunt, sister to his father –​ may also be dead, possibly from suicide.8 Her only daughter Jang Kum-​song reportedly took her own life in Paris in 2006. The performative contradictions which emerged through readings of Antigone and Zoia might be put to use in an analysis of the lives of these women, to see what their proximity to North Korea’s current and former leader reveals about the structure of sovereignty. What Kim Jong-​un appears to demonstrate is that the new sovereign need not be an enemy of the former one, and he need not have usurped power, in order for similar performative contradictions to emerge during the transition of sovereignty. Chapter 7 revealed that traces of performative contradiction were already present in Marx’s thinking when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, in how he thought about the dissolution of power in the hands of those seizing it. It was likewise present in Thoreau’s thoughts in relation to voting rights. The general strike was identified as an aspect of the Manifesto which might be salvaged by those who want to remain loyal to Marx, through the pursuit of non-​violent means. Taking the performative contradiction expressed by Thoreau, where only those without the right to vote can vote, how might the general strike be reimagined? What would a general strike look like where the only ones on strike are those who are unemployed? Might the unemployed be the only ones who can truly strike? What would a theory of the general strike look like if these were its conditions of possibility? Like illegal immigrants demanding rights from the state that excludes them from power, would these unemployed workers –​ are they in fact “workers” if they are unemployed? –​ petition the government, or would they petition corporations? The relationship between governments and corporations –​ governments as corporations –​ would here emerge as a crucial site for analysis. In the context of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which prohibited



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the government from restricting financial contributions made to politicians by non-​profit corporations, the blurring between government and corporations is acutely visible. With no limitations on financial contributions, those with the most wealth are able to directly wield the most influence over elections. The stated mission of Citizens United, a non-​profit organization, is as follows: Restoring our government to citizens’ control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United’s goal is to restore the founding fathers’ vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and goodwill of its citizens.9

For Citizens United, there is an equivalence between freedom and capital. Political donations should be unlimited in order to increase freedom for citizens. This draws an equivalence between freedom and capital since it claims that capital in the form of political donations is what insures political freedom. Additionally, the sentiment evoked by the use of “citizen” is meant to create further associations between capital and democracy, as if the greatest amount of capital is necessarily the result of the greatest amount of democracy; hence, unlimited financial contributions means increased citizens’ control over government. This position is asserted without the slightest hint of irony, in a nation where, according to a 2014 article in Forbes, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to average worker pay ratio was 331:1, and the CEO to minimum wage worker ratio was 774:1.10 Annually, this translates roughly to $11.7 million for the CEO, $35,000 for the average worker and $15,000 for the minimum wage worker, with the poverty line that year being about $24,000 for a family of four. A close reading of Citizens United through the lens of performative contradiction could open up a rich (slight pun intended) field of scholarship to political analysts, economists, cultural critics and philosophers interested in the relationship between capital, democracy and freedom. It begs the question of what freedom’s relationship is to itself. Who are the most free, in this context? What type of freedom can be found in a life of economic uncertainty? Perhaps abundant wealth is potentially more economically uncertain than extreme poverty. Perhaps casting a vote is worth exponentially more than not casting one, at the same time that it is a more compromising gesture. What is a vote worth, and how is this worth determined by the circumstances under which it is cast? Thoreau argued that only those who are deprived of the right to vote can lay claim to it, and he encouraged citizens to vote with their whole bodies, not merely with a piece a paper. This is a radical reimagining



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of voting, which destabilizes the act by reminding us of the revolutionary law-​making violence at the heart of this seemingly benign law-​preserving act. These examples highlight, with greater or lesser degrees of precision, how performative contradiction can be used to analyse a vast assortment of political events. Just as the body of the book shows that there are infinite threads of existing research running through each of these themes (democracy, violence, patriarchy, authenticity, representation –​both visually and politically), the conclusion shows that these topics are by no means limited to Romania. Each of these examples would benefit from a reading as close as the one this book performs for the Romanian example, and perhaps running through them with haste does a disservice to their complexity. Nonetheless, these examples demonstrate an urgent need for such analysis and call attention to the critical mass of events which demand –​and defy –​interpretation. NOTES 1. “Saddam Hussein Executed in Iraq,” BBC News (30 December 2006), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​middle_​east/​6218485.stm. 2. “Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq,” BBC News. 3. Jonathan Kaiman, “Story about Kim Jong-​ un’s Uncle Being Fed to Dogs Originated with Satirist,” The Guardian (Monday, 6 January 2014), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.theguardian.com/​world/​2014/​jan/​06/​story-​kim-​jong-​un-​uncle-​ fed-​dogs-​made-​up. 4. “Kim Jong-​un’s Uncle Still Alive, says Dennis Rodman,” Want China Times (7 May 2014), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.wantchinatimes.com/​news-​subclass-​ cnt.aspx?id=20140507000127&cid=1101. 5. Borys Kit, “Dennis Rodman Opens Up about ‘The Interview,’ Invites Seth Rogan to North Korea (Exclusive),” The Hollywood Reporter (24 January 2015), accessed 7 June 2015 http://​www.hollywoodreporter.com/​news/​ dennis-​rodman-​opens-​up-​interview-​766651. 6. “North Korean Defence Chief Hyon Yong-​chol ‘Executed,’ ” BBC News (13 May 2015), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​32716749. 7. “Newly Sworn-​In North Korean Official Wondering How He’ll Eventually Be Executed,” The Onion No. 51 (2015), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.theonion. com/​article/​newly-​sworn-​north-​korean-​official-​wondering-​how-​he-​50411. 8. Emily Thomas, “North Korean Leader Kim Jung Un’s Aunt May Be Dead: Report,” The Huffington Post (6 January 2014, updated 25 January 2014), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2014/​01/​06/​kim-​jong-​un-​aunt-​dead-​_​n_​ 4551044.html. 9. From the Mission Statement under Who We Are of Citizens United, accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.citizensunited.org/​who-​we-​are.aspx.



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10. Kathryn Dill, “Report: CEOs Earn 331 Times As Much As Average Workers, 774 Times As Much As Minimum Wage Earners,” Forbes (15 April 2014), accessed 7 June 2015, http://​www.forbes.com/​sites/​kathryndill/​2014/​04/​15/​report-​ceos-​earn-​ 331-​times-​as-​much-​as-​average-​workers-​774-​times-​as-​much-​as-​minimum-​wage-​ earners/​.





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Index

abortion, 113–​114, 115, 116, 117, 129, 131, 191 Agamben, Giorgio, 7, 50, 53, 56, 61, 63, 68, 81, 180, 181 Agrippa’s trilemma. See Munchhausen’s trilemma Antigone, 138–​141, 142–​144, 145–​149, 150–​159 Apel, Karl-​Otto, 2, 3, 18 Aristotle, 28, 29–​30, 31, 32 Austin, John, 10, 16, 17, 25, 27, 29–​30, 33, 34, 55–​56, 60 authenticity, 45–​61, 63, 66, 68, 81, 93, 94–​95 Badiou, Alain, 7, 52–​53, 56, 63, 64, 65–​72, 75, 81, 86, 93, 97, 167, 170 Barthes, Roland, 54–​55, 58–​59, 60, 61 Băsescu, Traian, 1, 2, 3, 5 Baudrillard, Jean, 7, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 61, 63, 81 Benjamin, Walter, 171, 175, 182–​185. See also violence Butler, Judith, 7, 17–​18, 35–​39, 142, 143, 144, 146–​148, 151, 157–​158, 159, 179, 180, 181

Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 50, 128, 139, 165, 172, 174, 191; abuses committed by, 46, 54, 61, 91, 97, 111–​112, 181; and communism, 51–​52, 64, 66, 86, 89, 97–​98, 106, 167; dead body of, 68, 100, 141; death toll under, 11, 46; execution of, 5, 52, 65, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 106, 143, 171, 185, 192, 193; legacy/​memory of, 87–​88, 89–​90, 93, 94, 98, 103–​104, 112, 141; overthrow of, 60, 101; pro-​natal legislation of, 11–​12, 111–​132; protests against, 46, 64, 98–​99; regime of, 1, 4, 9, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 88, 90, 96–​97; and religion, 92; self-​sabotage of, 63, 64–​65, 81; wealth of, 99 Ceauşescu, Nicu, 51, 94, 98, 138, 144 Ceauşescu, Valentin, 141 Ceauşescu, Zoia, 12, 58, 137, 138–​141, 142–​144, 145, 146, 148–​149, 150, 158–​159, 176, 191, 194 “Civil Disobedience,” 172–​174, 175–​179, 185. See also Thoreau, Henry David Currie, Mark, 31, 35–​36

Ceauşescu, Elena, 9, 65, 86, 87–​88, 89, 90, 98, 138, 181

Deletant, Dennis, 6–​7, 91, 164–​165 de Man, Paul, 27–​29 207



208 Index

Derrida, Jacques, 8, 11–​12, 15, 37, 48–​49, 55, 79, 88, 100, 101, 106, 113, 116, 163, 189, 190; inheritance and, 93–​97; performative contradiction and, 19–​20, 26–​37, 96; “Who is the Mother?” 118–​121, 122, 123–​126, 127, 128, 131, 132 Descartes, René, 16, 17, 21–​24 Dinescu, Mircea, 92, 94, 100, 102, 106, 169 Foucault, Michel, 16, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 11–​12, 101–​106, 111, 112, 113, 118–​121, 122–​125, 126–​127, 128–​129, 130, 132, 163, 183 Gallagher, Tom, 4, 5, 46, 47 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 173, 176 Gasché, Rodolphe, 26–​27 Gheorghiu-​Dej, 91, 165 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 15–​19, 20–​21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33–​34, 36, 37, 38 Hamlet, 93, 94, 97 Hegel, Georg W. F., 144, 145–​146, 147–​148, 149–​153, 154–​159 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 20 Hintikka, Jaakko, 15, 16, 17, 21–​24, 31 Iliescu, Ion, 1, 3, 52 image, 45–​61, 113, 115, 121 inheritance, 89–​90, 92, 93–​98, 106 Jay, Martin, 16–​17, 26–​27, 29 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 173, 176 Laclau, Ernesto, 35 Louis XVI, 99, 100, 101 Marx, Karl, 13, 53–​54, 67, 71–​72, 73, 79, 81, 85, 93, 95, 99–​100, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–​69, 171, 172, 174–​75, 176, 181, 183, 185, 186, 194

Marxism, 13, 52, 163, 164, 167 mother, 12, 58, 59, 116, 118–​119, 120, 121–​122, 124–​125, 126, 127, 128, 129–​130, 131, 132, 147, 149, 150, 186, 190–​191 mourning, 12, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 68, 85, 86, 88, 94, 96, 103, 105, 106, 111, 132, 137–​159, 192, 193 Munchhausen’s trilemma, 18–​19, 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27–​28, 29, 30 North Korea, 51, 88, 192–​194 nostalgia, 9, 21, 85–​106, 190 October Revolution (1917), 52, 65–​66, 67, 69, 72 Securitate (secret police), 1, 50–​51, 56, 57–​58, 60, 91, 111, 168 Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 63–​65, 66, 70, 72–​80, 81, 111, 112, 113, 170, 171–​172, 180, 183, 184 Stiegler, Bernard, 7, 47–​48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 81 Thoreau, Henry David, 172–​175, 176–​181, 185, 194, 195 Tiananmen Square, 46, 47 Timişoara, 46–​47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57–​59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 68, 98, 141, 192, 193 Tismăneanu, Vladimir, 1–​2, 3, 4 totalitarianism, 7, 13, 86, 89, 113, 114, 159, 164–​165, 167, 168, 176, 189 universalism/​the universal, 11, 18–​20, 35, 36–​37, 38–​39 violence, 13, 93, 95–​96, 99–​100, 163–​186 Weinberg, Julius R., 22–​23, 24 Žižek, Slavoj, 50–​51