). In 1917, instead of waiting for the right moment of maturity, Lenin organized a preemptive strike; in 1920, finding himself in a position of the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being killed in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, i.e. he fully accepted the paradox of the party organizing-creating its base, its working class.
Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in Lenin's writings of 1917, which cover the span from his initial grasp of the unique revolutionary chance (first elaborated in the "Letters From Afar") to the "Letter to Central Committee Members," which finally convinced the Bolshevik majority that the moment to seize power has arrived. Everything is here, from "Lenin the ingenious revolutionary strategist" to "Lenin of the enacted utopia" (of the immediate abolishing of the state apparatuses). To refer to Kierkegaard, what we are allowed to perceive in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet "Lenin the Soviet institution," but Lenin thrown into an OPEN situation. Are we, within our late capitalist closure of the "end of history," still able to experience the shattering impact of such an authentic historical openness?
1. See Juergen Habermas, Die Neue Unuebersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1985. back up
2. As to this notion, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso Books 1997. back up
3. See Claude Lefort, La complication, Paris: Fayard 1999. back up
4. For an Althusserian attempt to save Lenin's Empiriocriticism, see Dominique Lecourt, Une crise et ses enjeux, Paris: Maspero 1973. back up
5. First published in 1990, then reprinted in Colletti, Fine della filosofia, Roma: Ideazione 1996. back up
6. When, in a typical transferential pathos, Lenin repeats again and again how Marx and Engels always called their philosophy "dialectical materialism," it is easy for an anti-Leninist Marxologue to draw attention to the fact that Marx and Engels NOT EVEN ONCE used this term (it was Georgi Plekhanov who introduced it). This situation presented a nice deadlock to the Soviet editors of the collected works of Marx and Engels: in the Index, there HAD to be the entry "dialectical materialism," which they then filled in with references to the pages where Marx or Engels speak of dialectics, of the materialist concept of history... However, this is not the whole story: there is a truth-effect in this hallucinatory projection of a later concept back into Marx. back up
7. I owe this parallel to Eustache Kouvelakis, Paris (private conversation). back up
8. For a more detailed critique of Adorno's "predominance of the objective," see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief, London: Routledge 2001. back up
9. In a passage of his Note-Books, Lenin comes to the edge of this insight when he notes how the very "abstraction" of thought, its "failure" to immediately grasp the object in its infinite complexity, its distance from the object, its stepping-back from it, brings us CLOSER to the "notion" of what the object effectively is: the very "one-sided" reduction the object to some of its abstract properties in the concept, this apparent "limitation" of our knowledge (sustaining the dream of a total intuitive knowledge) IS the very essence of knowledge... He comes to the edge of all this, and then again regresses to the predominant evolutionary notion of the infinite approaching to reality. back up
10. Quoted from V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, New York: International Publishers 1999, p. 40. back up
11. Lenin, op.cit., p. 40-41. back up
12. See Ernesto Laclau, "The Politics of Rhetoric," intervention at the conference Culture and Materiality, University of California, Davis, 23-25 April 1998. When today's postmodern political philosophers emphasize the paradox of democracy, how democracy is possible only against the background of its impossibility, do they not reproduce the paradoxes of the Kantian practical reason discerned long ago by Hegel? back up
13. See Eustache Kouvelakis's commentary to L'Introduction a la Critique de la philosophie du droit de Hegel, Paris: Ellipses 2000. back up
14. I owe this distinction to Alain Badiou (private conversation). back up
15. This should be the answer to Veit Harlan, the Nazi director who, around 1950, despaired about the fact that Jews in the US did not show any understanding for his defense for making The Jew Suess, claimed that no American Jew can really understand what was his situation in the Nazi Germany: far from justifying him, this obscene (factual) truth is the ultimate lie. - At a different level, there are in Palestine today two opposite narratives (the Jewish and the Palestinian one) with absolutely no common horizon, no "synthesis" in a larger meta-narrative; the solution thus cannot be found in any all-encompassing narrative. back up
16. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2000, p. 237. back up
17. This difference between interpretation and formalization is also crucial to introduce some (theoretical) order into the recent debates on the holocaust: although it is true that the holocaust cannot be adequately interpreted or narrated, in short: rendered meaningful, that all the attempts to do it fail and have to end in silence, it can and should be "formalized," situated in its structural conditions of possibility. back up
18. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. - Along the similar lines, Habermas, Rorty's great opponent, elevates the rise of "public space" of civil society, the space of free discussion that mediates between private lives and political/state apparatuses in the Enlightenment era. The problem is that this space of enlightened public debate was always redoubled by the fear of the irrational/passionate crowd which can, through the contamination (what Spinoza called imitatio affecti), explode into murderous violence based on superstitions manipulated by priests or other ideologists. So the enlightened space of rational debate was always based on certain exclusions: on the exclusion of those who were NOT considered "rational" enough (lower classes, women, children, savages, criminals...) - they needed the pressure of "irrational" authority to be kept in check, i.e. for them, Voltaire's well-known motto "If there were no Gold, one would have to invent him" fully holds. back up
19. See Peter Singer, The Essential Singer: Writings on an Ethical Life, New York: Ecco Press 2000. back up
20. See Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (New York: Chronicle Books 1999). back up
21. On account of its utter "realism," The Worst-Case Scenario is a Western book par excellence; its Oriental counterpart is chindogu, arguably the finest spiritual achievement of Japan in the last decades, the art of inventing objects which are sublime in the strictest Kantian sense of the term - practically useless on account of their very excessive usefulness (say, glasses with electrically-run mini-windshields on them, so that your view will remain clear even if you have to walk in the rain without an umbrella; butter contained in a lipstick tube, so that you can carry it with you and spread it on the bread without a knife). That is to say, in order to be recognized, the chindogu objects have to meet two basic criteria: it should be possible to really construct them and they should work; simultaneously, they should not be "practical," i.e. it should not be feasible to market them. The comparison between The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and chindogu offers us a unique insight into the difference between the Eastern and the Western sublime, an insight far superior to the New Age pseudo-philosophical treatises. In both cases, the effect of the Sublime resides in the way the uselessness of the product is the outcome of the extreme "realistic" and pragmatic approach itself. However, in the case of the West, we get simple, realistic advises for problems (situations) most of us will never encounter (who of us will really have to face alone a hungry lion?), while in the case of the East, we get unpractically complicated solutions for the problems all of us effectively encounter (who of us was not caught in the rain?). The Western sublime offers a practical solution for a problem which does not arise, while the Eastern sublime offers a useless solution for a real common problem. The underlying motto of the Eastern Sublime is "Why do it simply, when you can complicate it?" - is the principle of chindogu not discernible already in what appears to our Western eyes as the "impractical" clumsy form of the Japanese spoons? The underlying motto of the Western Sublime is, on the contrary, "If the problems do not fit our preferred way of solving them, let's change problems, not the way we are used to solve them!" - is this principle not discernible in the sacred principle of Bureaucracy which has to invent problems in order to justify its existence which serves to solve them? back up
22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, London: Verso Books 1996. back up
23. In an incident at the US academia, a couple of years ago, a lesbian feminist claimed that gays are today the privileged victims, so that the analysis of how the gays are underprivileged provides the key to understanding all other exclusions, repressions, violences, etc. (religious, ethnic, class...). What is problematic with this thesis is precisely its implicit (or, in this case, explicit even) UNIVERSAL claim: it is making exemplary victims of those who are NOT that, of those who can be much easier than religious or ethnic Others (not to mention the socially - "class" - excluded) fully integrated into the public space, enjoying full rights. Here, one should approach the ambiguity of the connection between gay and class struggle. There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno - suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky's infamous remark from his essay "Proletarian Humanism" (sic! - 1934): "Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear."(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, "Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland," in Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky's inciting statement, as well as Adorno's reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the "revolutionary" paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their "sexual depravity"... In order to function as the support of a "totalitarian" community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed "dirty secret," shared by those who are "in." Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of "Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless... (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)"? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the "essentialist" mistake of dismissing the Rightist "militaristic" homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the "authentic" subversive homosexuality. back up
24. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 178. back up
25. See Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce qui fait insigne (unpublished seminar 1984-85, the lecture on December 3 1984). back up
26. This also enables us to answer Dominick la Capra's reproach according to which, the Lacanian notion of lack conflates two levels that have to be kept apart: the purely formal "ontological" lack constitutive of the symbolic order as such, and the particular traumatic experiences (exemplarily: holocaust) which could also NOT have occurred - particular historical catastrophes like the holocaust thus seem to be "legitimized" as directly grounded in the fundamental trauma that pertains to the very human existence. (See Dominick la Capra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," Critical Inquiry, Volume 25, Number 4 (Summer 1999), p. 696-727.) This distinction between structural and contingent-historical trauma, convincing as it may appear, is doubly inadequate in its reliance on the Kantian distinction between the formal/structural a priori and the contingent/empirical a posteriori. First, EVERY trauma, trauma "as such," in its very concept, is experienced as something contingent, as an unexpected meaningless disturbance - trauma is by definition not "structural," but something which disturbs the structural order. Secondly, the holocaust was NOT simply a historical contingency, but something which, in its unique combination of the mythical sacrifice with technological instrumental efficiency, realized a certain destructive potential inscribed into the very logic of the so-called Western civilization. We cannot adopt towards it the neutral position of a safe distance, from which we dismiss the holocaust as an unfortunate accident: the holocaust is in a way the "symptom" of our civilization, the singular point in which the universal repressed truth about it emerges. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, any account of the Western civilization which does not account for the holocaust thereby invalidates itself. back up
27. One possible counter-argument is here that the category of the tragic is not appropriate to analyze Stalinism: the problem is not that the original Marxist vision got subverted by its unintended consequences, it is this vision itself. If Lenin's and even Marx's project of Communism were to be fully realized as to their true core, things would have been MUCH WORSE than Stalinism - we would have a version of what Adorno and Horkheimer called "die verwaltete Welt (the administered society)," a totally self-transparent society run by the reified "general intellect" in which the last remainders of the human autonomy and freedom would have been obliterated... The way to answer this reproach is to draw the distinction between Marx's analysis of the capitalist dynamic and his positive vision of Communism, as well as between this vision and the actuality of the revolutionary turmoil: what if Marx's analysis of the capitalist dynamic is not dependent on his positive determinations of the Communist societies? And what if his theoretical expectations themselves were shattered by the actual revolutionary experience? (It is clear that Marx himself was surprised by the new political form of the Paris Commune.) back up
28. Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebuecher 1933-1943, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 2000. back up
29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1972, p. 112. back up
30. This passage is indebted to conversations with Sebastian Budgen (London) and Eustache Kouvelakis. back up
31. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress 1965, Volume 42, p. 67. back up
32. Quoted from Neil Harding, Leninism, Durham: Duke University Press 1996, p. 309. back up
33. Harding, op.cit., p. 152. back up
34. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 87. back up
35. Ibid. back up
36. See Alain Badiou, Conditions, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1992. back up
37. William Craig, Enemy At the Gates, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2000, p. 307-308. back up
38. Craig, op.cit., p. 153. back up
39. See Alain Badiou, "L'Un se divise en Deux," intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001. back up
40. See Sylvain Lazarus, "La forme Parti," intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin. back up
41. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, p. 14. back up
42. See Fredric Jameson, "The Concept of Revisionism," intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001. back up
43. Is it not that the same "vase / two faces" paradox occurs in the case of the holocaust and gulag? We either elevate the holocaust into the ultimate crime, and the Stalinist terror is thereby half-redeemed, reduced to a minor role of an "ordinary" crime; or we focus on the gulag as the ultimate result of the logic of the modern revolutionary terror, and the holocaust is thereby at best reduced to another example of the same logic. Somehow, it doesn't seem possible to deploy a truly "neutral" theory of totalitarianism, without giving a hidden preference either to the holocaust or to gulag. back up
44. For a more detailed elaboration of this point, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief. back up
45. And the achievement of Georg Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness is that it is one of the few works which succeed in bringing these two dimensions together: on the one hand, the topic of commodity fetishism and reification; on the other hand, the topic of the party and revolutionary strategy - the reason why this book is profoundly Leninist. back up
46. For a further development of this point, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, London: Verso Books 2000. - It is often said that the ultimate product of capitalism are piles of trash - useless computers, cars, TVs and VCRs ...: places like the famous "resting place" of the hundreds of abandoned planes in the Mojave desert confront us with the obverse truth of the capitalist dynamics, its inert objectal remainder. And it is against this background that one should read the ecological dream-notion of the total recycling (in which every remainder is used again) as the ultimate capitalist dream, even if it is coated in the terms of retaining the natural balance on the Planet Earth: the dream of the self-propelling circulation of the capital which would succeed in leaving behind no material leftover - the proof of how capitalism can appropriate ideologies which seem to oppose it. back up
47. Another figure of this inexplicable excess occurs in many cinema comedies in which the hero, stranded alone in a small town, is forced to take his expensive car to the local mechanic who, to the hero's horror, proceeds to take the whole car to pieces; when, a day or two later, the mechanic puts the car together again, to everyone's surprise, it runs perfectly, although there are always a piece or two standing aside, the remainders that the mechanic did not find the place for when putting the car together... back up
48. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 168. back up
49. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 146. back up
50. In this context, the myth to be debunked is that of the diminishing role of the state. What we are witnessing today is the shift in its functions: while partially withdrawing from its welfare functions, the state is strengthening its apparatuses in other domains of social regulation. In order to start a business now, one has to rely on the state to guarantee not only law and order, but the entire infrastructure (access to water and energy, means of transportation, ecological criteria, international regulations, etc.), in an incomparably larger extent than 100 years ago. The recent electricity supply debacle in California makes this point palpable: for a couple of weeks in January and February 2001, the privatization ("deregulation") of the electricity supply changed Southern California, one of the highly developed "postindustrial" landscapes in the entire world, into a Third World country with regular black-outs. Of course, the defenders of deregulation claimed that it was not thorough enough, thereby engaging in the old false syllogism of "my fiancee is never late for the appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancee": deregulation by definition works, so if it doesn't work, it wasn't truly a deregulation... Does the recent Mad Cow Disease panic (which probably presages dozens of similar phenomena which await us in the near future) also not point towards the need for a strict state and global institutionalized control of the agriculture? back up
51. See Leslie Kaplan, L'exces-usine, Paris: Hachette 1984. back up
52. I owe this point to Alan Shandro's intervention "Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony" at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin. back up
53. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: the Communist Problem, Oxford: Polity Press 2000. back up
54. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 144. back up
55. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, op.cit., p. 144. back up
56. With regard to this point, the crucial figure of the Soviet cinema is not Eisenstein, but Alexander Medvedkin, appropriately named by Christ Marker "the last Bolshevik" (see Marker's outstanding documentary The Last Bolshevik from 1993). While wholeheartedly supportive of the official politics, inclusive of the forced collectivization, Medvedkin made films which staged this support in a way which retained the initial ludic utopian-subversive revolutionary impulse; say, in his Happiness from 1935, in order to combat religion, he shows a priest who imagines seeing the breasts of a nun through her habit - un unheard-of scene for the Soviet film of the 30s. Medvedkin thus enjoys the unique privilege of an enthusiastically orthodox Communist film-maker whose films were ALL prohibited or at least heavily censored. back up
57. Although it is also possible to argue that this violence effectively WAS an impotent passage a l'acte: an outburst which displayed the inability to break with the weight of the past symbolic tradition. In order to effectively get rid of the past, one does not need to physically smash the monuments - changing them into a part of the tourist industry is much more effective. Is this not what Tibetans are painfully discovering today? The true destruction of their culture will not occur through the Chinese destroying their monuments, but through the proliferation of the Buddhist Theme Parks in the downtown Lhasa. back up
58. One is tempted to question the very term "Leninism": is it not that it was invented under Stalin? And does the same not go for Marxism (as a teaching) which was basically a Leninist invention, so that Marxism is a Leninist notion and Leninism a Stalinist one? back up
59. See Chapters 2 and 3 of Susan Buck-Morss's outstanding Dreamworld and Catastrophe. back up
60. Both quotes from Maureen Freely, "Polymorphous sexuality in the Sixties," The Independent, 29 January 2001, The Monday Review, p. 4. back up
61. Quoted from Konkret, Heft 3 (March 2001), p. 9. back up
62. Christopher Hitchens, "Visit To a Small Planet," Vanity Fair, January 2001, p. 24. back up
63. Quoted from Jana Cerna, Kafka's Milena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993, p. 174. back up
64. One of the ultimate obscenities of the modern stance towards belief was formulated by the Chinese Communist Party: in the mid 90s, when the Chinese authorities claimed that THEIR Panchen Lama was the right one, not the one chosen and recognized by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, they accused the Dalai Lama of not respecting the old Buddhist tradition, of giving preference to political considerations over the old religious rules. So we had a Communist Party claiming that the birth of the child they identified as the Panchen Lama (who, as if by an accident, was born into a family of Communist cadres!) was accompanied by miraculous appearances on the sky, that, already when one year old, he displayed supernatural capacities. back up
65. John Berger, "The hammer and sickle," in Janus 5 (2000), p. 16. back up
66. Berger, op.cit., p. 17. back up
67. Or, to indulge in a similar mental experiment: in the last days of the Really Existing Socialism, the protesting crowds often sang the official songs, including national anthems, reminding the powers of their unfulfilled promises. What better thing for an East German crowd to do in 1989 than to simply sing the GDR national anthem? Because its words ("Deutschland einig Vaterland") no longer fitted the emphasis on East Germans as a new Socialist nation, it was PROHIBITED to sing it in public from late 50s to 1989: at the official ceremonies, only the orchestral version was performed. (The GDR was thus a unique country in which singing the national anthem was a criminal act!). Can one imagine the same thing under Nazism? back up
68. One should, perhaps, rehabilitate Marx's (implicit) distinction between the working class (an "objective" social category, the topic of sociological studies) and the proletariat (a certain SUBJECTIVE position - the class "for itself," the embodiment of social negativity, to use the old rather unfortunate expression). Instead of searching for the disappearing working class, one should rather ask: who occupies, who is able to subjectivize, today its position as proletarian? back up
69. At a more general methodological level, one should also turn around the standard pseudo-Nietzschean view according to which, the past we construct in our historiography is a symptom, an articulation of our present problems: what if, on the contrary, we ourselves - our present - is a symptom of the unresolved deadlocks of the past? back up
70. For a detailed Lacanian reading of this joke, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press 1993. back up
71. See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993, p. 32. back up