No More Learning

Bataille traces in Nietzsche's writing the contours of an economy of pride in which the concept of investment is radically modified. While typical investors use their means in order to get back more than they invest, other people invest their resources to satisfy their pride and to attest to their good fortune. Both impulses make it impossible for the providers to expect gains in the same currency, while gains in reputation and pride are completely legitimate and desirable.
However paradoxical this behavior might appear, the economy of pride is founded on the conviction of its participants of their meaningful investments—admittedly only after other dealings have been satisfied. In 1900, the great sponsor Andrew Carnegie expressed this circumstance in a classical expression: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. " This is a sentence that the ordinary wealthy person is careful not to cite. From the perspective of experienced givers, holding onto inherited or achieved wealth can only be judged a missed opportunity of expenditure. Whereas the usual types of businessmen can increase, with a bit of luck, their assets or that of their shareholders, this different breed of investor can add new lights to the splendor of the world. Through their dealings, and in how they handle them, they elevate their very existence to splendor. Whoever enjoys this splendor understands that value only comes into being when one, by way of giving
31
INTRODUCTION
everything one has, attests to the existence of things beyond all value; this "constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself [and] has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity. "31 The second kind of rich people refrain from the stupidity of accumulation without purpose or goal. They do with their assets things an animal that only wants to have more and more could never achieve. They associate themselves with the power of antigravitation: they change the course of things such that vulgar acts are always more likely to occur.
One has to be careful not to romantically misunderstand Bataille's incite- ments concerning a universal economy. These ideas do not at all aim at the introduction of a communism for rich people. They also do not point to an aristocratic redistribution of goods in social-democratic or socialist soci- eties. The true significance of these ideas consists in instituting a cleavage within capitalism in order to create its most radical—and only fruitful— opposite. This is different from the traditional conception of the left, a left that has been overpowered by its own depiction of everything as miserable.
If one takes Marx at his word, it becomes clear that the motive for the turn of capitalism against itself was not foreign to him. In contrast, he believed that only the "completion" of the transformation of everything by capitalism could bring about a new form of economy. The possibility of a turn with the name "revolution" is produced by evolution itself. The whole fatal nature of Marxism consists in its undecidability with regard to the question of how much time the capitalist process will in the end need in order to produce the preconditions for a postcapitalist transformation of wealth. Seen from today's perspective, it is self-evident that the big match of capital had, by about 1914, already been played only until about halftime. A long series of intensifications, conflicts, and unraveling still lay ahead. Thus it was still far from being able to transcend itself for the sake of a successive formation. The leaders of the Russian as well as the Chinese revolutions were completely wrong when they claimed Marxist theory for themselves. Both political enterprises created amalgamations of political fundamental- ism and aggressive opportunism. Through this combination they lost every sense of economic success, evolution, and necessary temporal order. While the postcapitalistic situation could only be imagined according to Marx's essential writings as the ripe fruit of a capitalism developed "to the end," Lenin and Mao made the principle of the terroristic abuse of unripe condi- tions into the key to success. Their theories revealed what the term "pri- macy of politics" implies in its radical interpretation.
32
INTRODUCTION
One needs to admit that behind the concept of a "perfected capitalism," a long list of unwanted surprises awaits the interpreter, a list no less true today than it was during the time of Marx and Lenin. This concept requires from those who use it a degree of insight into the still unrealized potentials of economic, technical, and cultural evolution, which for understandable reasons the revolutionary leaders could not yet have achieved. At the same time, it demands from those who suffer from the game a degree of patience, a degree that cannot be reasonably expected if one knows where the voy- age leads and how long it will last. It is thus not surprising that the idea of "ripe conditions" outgrew the communists, in that this theoretical trope made the revolution necessary where evolution had barely started its work, where productive market economies were to a large degree absent. They tried their best to accomplish the impossible: to transcend capitalism with- out ever having known it. The flirtations of the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese in the time of Mao with accelerated industrialization were little more than impotent attempts to keep up an evolutionary appearance. In reality, Lenin's selection of the revolutionary moment was from the begin- ning purely motivated by opportunism—in accordance with Machiavelli's theory concerning the most favorable opportunity—and Mao Zedong's analogous attacks were to a large degree voluntaristic distortions.
Overhastiness remained the mark of all initiatives in the name of a post-
capitalist future from revolutionaries of this kind. It was clear for substan-
tial reasons that the necessary developments would have taken centuries.
However, without a sufficient reason—impatience and ambition are never
sufficient—the revolutionaries estimated that it would only take a couple of
decades; the ultrarevolutionaries even estimated only a few years. The dis-
torted picture with which the revolutionary will justified its plans depicted
the chaos of war, post-tsarist Russia, and post-emperor China as "ripe situ-
ations. " In fact, communism did not produce a postcapitalistic but a post-
monetary society. Boris Groys has shown that these societies gave up the
steering medium (Leitmedium) money in order to replace it with the pure
32
in more than the magical manipulation of the evolutionary calendar. After all, it cannot be ruled out that revolution comes to the aid of evolution. Its incurable weakness was the furious resentment against property—which expressed itself in the bitter term "private property" (also known as the "private possession of the means of production"), as if everything private
language of command.
The birth defect of the communist idea of economy consisted, however,
33
INTRODUCTION
could as such be described as something stolen. This affect may claim high moral standards—it is, anyhow, incapable of doing justice to the essence of the modern economy, which is, from the bottom up, based on possession. According to a comparison coined by Gunnar Heinsohn, the communist dismissal of the principle of ownership is akin attempting to accelerate a
33
vehicle by taking out its motor.
the Marxist tradition (as well as some of its right-wing fanatic rivals) were never able to get over their mistrust of wealth as such, not even when they proclaimed openly, in close proximity to the government, that they wanted to create wealth more intelligently and distribute it more justly. The left's economic mistake was always at the same time its psychopolitical confes- sions. To the communists in power, taking satisfaction in the philistine joy of expropriation and longing for revenge against private property was, overall, always more important than any spreading of values. Thus, in the final analysis, not much of the great elan of the egalitarian turn of humanity survived than the blatant self-privileging of functionaries, not to mention the effects of paralysis, resignation, and cynicism.
Moreover, the movements of the left in
Nonetheless, at the time of its bloom, the socialist economy also pos- sessed offensive thymotic traits because, as we have seen, all revolutionary projects are borne by and sustained through impulses within the pride- rage-indignation spectrum. Whoever takes the Soviet cult surrounding its "worker heroes" merely as a curiosity in the history of economy needs to consider that left-wing productivism was the attempt to introduce a touch of greatness into a system that suffered from its own vulgar premises.
The thymotic economy latently present in Nietzsche's criticism of morality stimulates an alternative monetary economy in which wealth appears together with pride. Nietzsche's criticism aims to remove the mask of lament from the face of modern prosperity. What is hidden beneath this mask is the self-disdain of mean-spirited owners of large for- tunes. They display a form of disdain which is fully legitimate according to Platonic thymos theory because the soul of the wealthy rightly attacks itself if it does not find its way out of the circle of insatiability. The pre- tense of cultivation and interest in culture, which is common in this stra- tum of society, does not change this fact; interest in fine arts is usually only the Sunday mask of greed. The soul of the wealthy could only be healed through beautiful actions that reclaim the inner approval of the noble part of the soul.
34
INTRODUCTION
The thymotization of capitalism was not an invention of the twentieth century; it was not necessary to wait for Nietzsche and Bataille to discover its modus operandi. It happens by itself whenever entrepreneurship enters a new territory in order to create the conditions for new revenue and its distributive emission. In regards to creative aggression, capitalism never needed extra help from philosophical mentors. It is not the case that it suffered too much from moral inhibitions. However, also with regard to its generous side, it developed rather uniquely and distinct from philoso- phy. If at all, it was inspired by Christian motifs, in particular in the Great Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We should not forget that according to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's vigilant account, it was in England, even if not often, that a capitalist entrepreneur made four mil- lion pounds in earnings in order to give away three million to charity as a Christian gentleman. One of the best known cases of a generous donation from capital gain is connected to the name of Friedrich Engels. For more than thirty years, Engels used the rather modest profits from his factory in Manchester to keep Marx's family in London alive; at the same time, the family head used this money to overthrow an order of things in which a person like Engels was possible and necessary. Be that as it may, the gen- erosity of donators cannot be reduced to a liberalism of "small deeds," typical of bourgeois reform. It would also be inappropriate to dismiss such gestures as paternalism. What becomes visible through them is rather a metacapitalist horizon that becomes clear in the moment capital turns against itself.
"People don't strive for happiness, only the English do. "34 When Nietzsche noted down this bon mot he was probably too heavily influenced by the antiliberal cliches of his time. What makes the aphorism important, nonetheless, is the fact that it reminds us of a time when the resistance to the propaganda of erotization and vulgarization could invoke impulses of pride and honor, impulses that have largely been forgotten today. These impulses established a culture of generosity. This phenomenon increasingly disappears in times of anonymous equity funds. Let us limit ourselves to the assertion that the thymotic use of wealth in the Anglo-American world, above all, in the United States, could become a persistent fact of society. On the European mainland, on the other hand, it could not so far establish itself—largely because of blind trust in the state, subventions, and tradi- tions of celebrating misery.
35
INTRODUCTION
THE POSTCOMMUNIST SITUATION
ONE FINAL COMMENT ABOUT THE "SPIRITUAL SITUATION OF OUR TIMES" in order to uncover the strategic perspective of what follows: in the past, one would have called this strategic perspective "engagement. " The follow- ing considerations are situated within a debate that has moved the intellec- tual public sphere of the West since the 1990s. To make a long story short, the goal is to take issue with the usual psychopolitical interpretation of the postcommunist situation.
The introduction of this situation was, to a large extent, completely unex- pected to people engaging in political debates in 1990. The political interpret- ers of the postwar era were content with commenting on both the victory of the Allies over the Axis dictatorships and the new world order from the tradition of their discipline. Across the board, there was a large consensus about and commitment to democracy and the free-market economy. Old comrades were granted the meager joy of taking out their antifascist medals from time to time. During this long belle epoque (which was only clouded by nuclear threats) there was a consensus that the "working through" of totalitarian excesses in Europe fulfilled the historical obligation of the epoch. Other than that one only needed to sit and watch how liberal civilization with the help of social-democratic correctives made use of the historical demand for a better world. There was hardly anyone who possessed the theo- retical means and moral motivation to think beyond the order of the bipolar era. The implosion of the hemisphere of actual socialism did more than con- demn its ideologies and institutions to meaninglessness. Most important, it created a situation in which "successful" capitalism had to take on the sole responsibility of the world. But Western thinkers were not provoked into providing exceptionally creative ideas in response to this new order.
It does not require too much concentration to see that some themes and motives of the present book are the product of an imaginary dialogue with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which originally appeared in 1992. 1 do not conceal that I am convinced that this publication belongs, in spite of its easily identifiable weak aspects, to the few works of contemporary political philosophy that touch upon the essence of our time. This publication testifies to the fact that academic thinking and presence of mind are not always mutually exclusive. Apart from more recent works
35 Fukuyama's work presents the most thought-through system of analysis
by Boris Groys that reveal a new horizon for the diagnosis of our age,
36
INTRODUCTION
of the postcommunist world situation up until the present day—and the same can be said about its relationship to political anthropology. In my opinion, the course of events since 1990 has largely confirmed Fukuyama's (and implicitly also Alexandre Kojeve's) conception, according to which we can only understand the contemporary global situation if we begin with an insight into the present state of the struggle for recognition. The fact that Fukuyama confesses his allegiance to the conservative camp in the United States does not commit his readers to share the same political affiliation. The aspects of his work that can be interpreted progressively come to the fore once one attempts to push the conservative veil to the side. In any case, the more or less intentionally committed misinterpretations do not deserve to be taken seriously in a commentary.
Among the interpreters who attribute substantial significance to Fuku-
yama's attempt to understand the postcommunist situation, Jacques Der-
rida has, understandably, a special position. In the most insightful of his
political books, Specters ofMarx, the inventor of "deconstruction" discusses
the theses of The End of History in an intensive, if largely skeptical and
36
sometimes polemical way.
of Fukuyama's line of argument, not least because Derrida does not argue in a deconstructive mode—rather he intends to improve the argument. Derrida is convinced that he is able to prove that Fukuyama's book is in fact a somewhat hasty application of Hegel to the modern state, a form of Chris- tian eschatology. Such ad hoc narratives, Derrida admits, mainly serve to satisfy the desire for happy endings to otherwise sad stories. In fact, Fuku- yama's book, owing to its evangelic tone, could have only become a media gadget, more or less misunderstood, as it ran around the world, but with- out its true problematic having been penetrated. What would be required for a serious discourse concerning the "end of history" is an illumination of the obscure relationship between the secular and technological civiliza- tions of the West to the three messianic eschatologies that emerged out of the religious thinking of the Near East—the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic. It is revealing that in this metaphysical corner of the world, people still argue about the meaning of the course of the world and the spiritual orientation of politics at large. "The war for the 'appropriation of Jerusa- lem' is today the world war. It is happening everywhere, it is the world. "37 What can be brought to bear against Fukuyama is, according to Derrida, his hidden, one-sided dependence on the customs of Christian messianology: it is well known that Christians conceive the Messiah as someone who has
Derrida presents a fascinating reconstruction
37
INTRODUCTION
arrived, whereas Derrida emphasizes the Jewish emphasis on waiting for the one who has not yet come. An analogous relation is present in the political narratives concerning the establishment of democracy in bourgeois societ- ies. While the interpreter of successful liberal civilization thinks he is able to assume the actual presence of democracy, his critic firmly defends the view that democracy could only be conceived of as a democracy to come, a future democracy.
As inspiriting as Derrida's commentary on The End of History may be, if one compares Fukuyama's book and Derrida's commentary, what comes to mind is that Derrida, without providing any justification, did not ade- quately discuss the serious part of Fukuyama's attempt to present a contem- porary form of thymotology. Derrida justifies this neglect by briefly stating that Fukuyama's conception of thymos and megalothymia (the human right of pride and greatness) is intended as a counterweight to the one-sidedness of Marxist materialism. To put it mildly, this judgment reveals a rather selective reading of Fukuyama. We thus have to conclude that even such an eminent reader as Derrida missed the point of Fukuyama's book. Following the traces (Spuren) of Alexandre Kojeve and Leo Strauss, Fukuyama's book intends nothing less than the recovery of an authentic political psychology on the basis of a reestablished polarity of eros and thymos. It is obvious that this political psychology, which has hardly anything in common with so- called mass psychology and other applications of psychoanalysis to political issues, moved to the center of the current need for a new theoretical orien- tation through the course of world-historical events.
No one who understands something about the rules of literary criti- cism is surprised that, overall, Fukuyama's book received such bad press in European reviews. Its readers wanted to understand it mostly as an extended victory cry of liberalism after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the "socialist alternative. " It was presumed that the author, with his thesis concerning the end of history, only provided an updated version of Yankee ideology, according to which the American way of life meant the completion of human evolution from the desert to the shopping mall, from the hand axe to the ballot, from sitting around a bon- fire to using the microwave. Since this initial reaction, sneering references to Fukuyama's book became a running gag in the political feuilletons in Europe. Many contributors never tired of repeating that history has, of course, in reality not come to an end and that the victorious West must not sit still after a partial victory in the struggle against ideological specters.
38
INTRODUCTION
This position is, by the way, fully justified—yet we need to understand it completely differently from the way it is understood by the authors of the abovementioned reviews.
I do not want to ponder for too long the observation that these objec- tions are often presented in a tone of neorealist arrogance, as if the com- mentators feel superior the moment they uncover a philosophical author as announcing allegedly naive messages. The anti-intellectual affect of Fukuyama's critics should be mentioned as only an aside. When histori- ans defend themselves against the danger of being fired because of a phi- losopher, this is not unreasonable. In reality, the author anticipated the most essential concerns and objections of his critics. In the concluding chapter of his book, which carries the ominous title "The Last Men," he pursues with astonishing sensitivity the question of whether the currently successful liberal democracy is actually capable of providing the complete satisfaction of the intellectual and material needs of all of its citizens. His answer is the answer of a skeptical conservative who knows that there are contradictions "at the heart of our liberal order, even after the last fascist dictator, swaggering colonel, or Communist party boss has been driven from the face of the earth. "38
One can thus not identify the diagnostic lesson that is concealed in The End ofHistory. The title only quotes, as we have stated, an original interpre- tation of Hegel's philosophy by Alexandre Kojeve, an interpretation Kojeve had already developed in the 1930s. Kojeve located the "end of history" in the year of the appearance of the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. Fukuyama's original insight consists in his attentive observation that wars of prestige and struggles of jealousy between the citizens of the free world moved to center stage just at the moment when the mobilization of civil energies for wars at the outer fronts came to an end. . Successful liberal democracies, the author understands, will always be infiltrated by currents of free-floating dissatis- faction. This has to be the case because human beings are condemned to suffer from thymotic unrest, and "last men" even more than everyone else, even though the mass culture we witness in posthistory initially appears in the form of eroticism. The ambitions addressed by mass culture can be as little satisfied as the ambitions of resentments (at least in the case of the greater success of other people).
Once the physical battles have been fought, the metaphysical battles begin. The latter are inevitable because the activity of the liberal world, which consists in the mutual recognition of all by all as equal citizens of
39
INTRODUCTION
society, is in truth far too formal and unspecific to open up individual access to happiness. Especially in a world of universally amended liberties, human beings cannot cease to strive for the specific forms of recognition manifested in prestige, wealth, sexual advantage, and intellectual superiority. Because such goods will always remain scarce, in liberal systems there will always be a large reservoir of distrust and frustration in inferior competitors—not to mention those who are truly worse off and the de facto excluded. The more a "society" is satisfied in its basic features, the more colorfully the jealousy of all against all will flourish. This jealousy entangles candidates vying for better positions in petty wars that permeate all aspects of their lives. At the same time, the system of the "open society" has the advan- tage of also employing the darker energies. Jealousy constantly generates alternative preferences, in particular in the domain of the ever-increasing and ever-differentiating culture and media business. Sports have become indispensable as an expansive system of winning and becoming famous, of stimulating and channeling postmodern excesses of ambition. Taken as a whole, it can be said that in the insatiable prestige battles of posthistory, elites continuously emerge from nonelites. If a public sphere is dominated by the expressive lives of countless actors who can never really be on top and yet have advanced significantly, then one can be certain that what we are dealing with is a flourishing democracy.
The old world knew slave and serf, the bearers of the unhappy conscious-
ness of their time. Modernity has invented the loser. This figure, which one
meets halfway between yesterday's exploited and today's and tomorrow's
superfluous, is the misunderstood product of the power games of democ-
racies. Not all losers can be pacified by pointing out that their status cor-
responds to their poor placement in a contest. Many will object by saying
that they have never gotten a chance to participate in order to be positioned
according to their merits. Their resentful feelings turn not just against the
winners but also against the rules of the game. When the loser who loses too
often calls into question the game as such by means of violence, this makes
conspicuous the state of emergency (Ernstfall) of a politics after the end of
history. The new emergency currently presents itself in two forms: in liberal
democracy as a postdemocratic politics of order, which expresses itself as
the degeneration of politics into policing and in the transformation of poli-
ticians into agents of consumer protection; and in frustrated countries torn
by civil war, wherein armies of powerful, superfluous people (Uberflussigen)
39
continue to annihilate one another.
40
INTRODUCTION
In the meantime, we have understood that not only the "contradictions" at the heart of our own system but the political culture of the West and its offspring civilizations in the East and in the South have tampered with the postcommunist situation. New movements of militant and energetic, superfluous malcontents, rapidly growing networks that channel the hatred of losers, subterranean proliferations of methods of sabotage and destruc- tion all seem to be responsible for the return of historical terror and the cor- responding hopes. It is against the background of such phenomena that we have to understand the countless treatises about the "return" or the "new beginning" of history, which have been flooding the essay market of the West for several years now. The common denominator of such commen- taries is the automatic allegation that outbreaks of violence on the global stage would be a new start of a history that had temporarily slowed down. Unmistakably, we are dealing with a simplified version of Hegelianism: if history until now advanced through struggling opposition (as the popular- ized version of dialectics assumes), we may legitimately conclude that the appearance of new combatants continues the process of history.
It needs to be clarified, against what is proclaimed in the literature, that the occurrence of terrorism in Western civilization's relationship to the outside world, on the one hand, and a new form of the social question in its internal relationships, on the other, should precisely not be understood as a sign of the "return" of history. The modus vivendi of the West and its offspring cultures is indeed posthistorical in essential points. Its form is no longer oriented by epos and tragedy; pragmatically, it can no longer be constructed on the successes of a unilateral style of action. At the same time, given the present state of affairs, it is not possible to situate anywhere
40
an alternative to the Western model.
is a thoroughly posthistorical phenomenon. Its time starts when the rage of those who have been excluded connects to the infotainment industry of those who have been included, merging into a violent system-theater for "last men. " To impute to this business of terror historical meaning would be a macabre abuse of already exhausted language resources. The eternal recurrence of the same, no matter as one-eyed rage or as a form of rage short-sighted in both eyes, does not suffice to speak of a restoration of his- torical existence. Who wants to attribute clear sight to wearers of black eye patches, to allow them to define the state of evolution?
Concerning the new social question, it is obvious that a return to the mistakes of the past cannot provide a solution. Only a repetition of the
41
So-called global terrorism, especially,
INTRODUCTION
posthistorical compromise between capital and labor, that is to say, the future, could provide for a relative appeasement on this front. This would imply a taming of the speculative monetary economy (in recent terms, the capitalism of parasites) and the quick implementation of an economy based on private property in developing countries. To point to the necessity of extending the welfare state to the supranational level describes the hori- zon for a serious new social politics. The only alternative to such a politics would be the authoritarian turn of world capitalism, in which certain fatal options of the 1920s and 1930s would reappear on the agenda. Indicators pointing in these directions are not at all lacking if one inspects the global situation today.
The second macropolitical task of the future, the integration of non- human actors, forms of life, ecosystems, and "things" in general into the domain of civilization does not have anything in common with traditional questions surrounding history as we have known it. What is sometimes referred to as "ecopolitics" generally rests on the presupposition that prob- lems that have been caused by human beings should be solved by the origi- nators and those affected. This again leads to organizational, administrative,
41
The reader now only needs to be warned against misunderstanding the indicated recourse to Plato's implicit and secret return to Greek idealism. Plato is appealed to here as the teacher of a more mature view of culturally and politically effective ambition dynamics. We listen to him like we would listen to a guest lecturer visiting us from an eclipsed star. Apart from that, the turn to a higher form of psychological realism has to be carried out using the theo- retical means of our time. It will only succeed if one can withstand the tempta- tion to which the European intellectuals in the twentieth century succumbed, willingly and often. These intellectuals have even shown an anticipatory obe- dience with regard to the suggestive force of realism. They have always showed too much understanding for the all-too-normal actions of human beings who are stimulated by desire and resentment—and justified this understanding in the name of the always one-sided, downcast view of "reality. "
and civilizational tasks, but not to epics and tragedies.
major task of the future will be the neutralization of potential genocides in the countries of the Near and Middle East and elsewhere, countries that are populated by angry young men. This task can only be tackled with the help of a politics of posthistorical dedramatization. Time is required for all of these processes. What we do not need is a relapse into "history" as such, but exclusively a time of education (Lernzeit) for civilizations.
42
Finally, the third
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche's central didactic idea concerning the death of God gains an importance within the context of this introduction. Its psychopolitical implications can be felt with palpable delay. "God is dead" means now that we live in a time in which the old absorption of rage through an austere beyond that demands respect increasingly vanishes. The deferral of human rage in favor of the wrath of God at the end time is no longer an accept- able imposition for countless people, and has not been for quite a while. Such a situation indicates the likelihood of an overthrow. The politics of impatience expands accordingly. It finds adherents not the least among ambitious people who have a talent for expressing their outrage. These actors believe that they should start an assault as soon as nothing can be lost, neither here nor there.
Who could deny that the exorbitant terror of the past century—it suffices to refer to the Russian, German, and Chinese exterminations—resulted from the ideological outbreaks of rage through the medium of secular agencies? Who could miss that the stage for the ter- rors of the twenty-first century has already been set up today?
Thus the way any understanding of both recent catastrophes and those that now announce themselves first needs to recall theology. The alliance between rage and eternity was a Christian axiom. I will have to show how it was possible for the constellation of rage and time—or rage and history—to emerge from this. In our religiously illiterate decades, people have almost completely forgotten that to speak of God in monotheism meant always at once to speak of a wrathful God. A wrathful God is the great impos- sible variable of our age. But what if, beneath the surface, he is working on becoming our contemporary once again?
Before once again calling attention to this figure that has been covered by the ruins of history, it is useful to look more closely at the business terms of the economy of rage.
43
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
Rage, oh rage,
is a pleasure that is preserved for the wise.
DA PONTE AND MOZART,
LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, lj86
THERE IS NO PERSON LIVING TODAY WHO HAS NOT REALIZED that the Western world, and through it also indirectiy all other areas of the world, is being irritated by a new theme. With a concern that is half true and half put-on, Westerners raise an alarm: "Hatred, revenge, irreconcil- able hostility have suddenly appeared again among us! A mixture of foreign forces, unfathomable as the evil will, has infiltrated the civilized spheres. "
Some people, engaged for the sake of morality, make similar observa- tions with a form of realism marked by a tone of reproach. They emphasize that the so-called foreign forces cannot confront us as absolutely foreign. What many people pretend to experience as a terrible surprise is, according to the moralist, only the flipside of the domestic modus vivendi. The end of pretense lies before us. "Citizens, consumers, pedestrians, it is urgent to wake up from lethargy! You do not know that you still have enemies, and you don't want to know because you have chosen harmlessness! " The new appeals to awakening the conscience aim to enforce the idea that the real has not been tamed, not even in the great bubble of irreality that encloses citizens of affluent society like the womb protects a fetus. If what is real is
45
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
taken to be what could kill, the enemy presents the purest incarnation of the real. With the renaissance of the possibility of hostility, the return of the old-fashioned real lies before us. From this, one can learn that a con- troversial topic is put on the agenda only when an irritation is transformed into an institution—an institution with visible protagonists and permanent employees, customer service, and its own budget, with professional confer- ences, public relations, and continuing reports from the problem area. The constant visitor in the West, the spirit of revenge, can profit from all of this. It can say to itself: I irritate, therefore I am.
Who could deny that, as usual, the alarmists are almost right? The inhab- itants of affluent nations sleepwalk mostly within illusions of apolitical pac- ifism. They spend their days in gold-plated unhappiness. At the same time, their molesters, their virtual hangmen, immerse themselves at the margins of happiness zones in the manuals of explosive chemistry. These manuals have been checked out of the public libraries of the host country. Once one has listened to the alarm for some time, one feels like one is viewing the opening credits of a disturbing documentary where the naive and its oppo- site are put into a perfidiously astonishing sequence by directors who know how to create effects: new fathers open up cans of food for their children; working mothers put a pizza in the preheated oven; daughters swarm into the city in order to make use of their awakening femininity; pretty salesgirls step outside during a short break to smoke a cigarette while returning the gaze of those passing by. In the suburbs, petrified foreign students put on belts filled with explosives.
THE MONTAGE OF SUCH SCENES FOLLOWS LOGICS THAT CAN EASILY BE understood. Many authors who see their vocation as educating the pub- lic in matters of politics—among them neoconservative editorial writers, political antiromantics, wrathful exegetes of the reality principle, converted Catholics, and disgusted critics of consumerism—want to reintroduce into a population of overly relaxed citizens the basic concepts of the real. For this purpose they quote the most recent examples of bloody terror. They show how hatred enters standard civil contexts. They do not tire of claiming that under the well-kept facades, amok has already for a long time been run- ning. They constantly have to scream: this is not a drill! Because for quite some time the public has become used to the routine translation of real violence into mere images, into entertaining and terrifying, pleading and
46
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
informative images. The public experiences the development of opposition as a tasteless regression into a dialect extinct for many years.
BUT HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SERIOUSLY PRESENT RAGE AND ITS EFFECTS,
its proclamations and explosions as news? What needed to be intentionally
forgotten before the desire could emerge to stare at those who effectively
practice revenge against their alleged or real enemies as if they were visitors
from distant galaxies? How was it at all possible, after the disappearance of
the West-East divide in 1991, for us to come to believe that we had been
thrown into a universe in which individuals and collectives could let go of
their capacity to have revengeful feelings? Is it not the case that resentment is
7 what is distributed the most around the world, even more so than bon sens .
Starting with the mythic era, it has been part of popular wisdom that the human being is that animal unable to cope with too many things. Nietzsche would say that the human being as such has something "German" to it. It is not capable of digesting the poisons of memory and suffers from certain unfriendly impressions. The saying that "sometimes the past does not want to pass" preserves the ordinary version of the sophisticated insight that human existence is initially just the peak of cumulative memory. Memory does not merely mean the spontaneous activity of the internal sense of time. It is not merely the ability to counteract the immediate disappearance of the lived moment by "retention," that is, an inner, automatic function of holding onto temporal consciousness. It is also connected to a saving func- tion that enables the coming back to virtual topics and scenes. Memory is a result of the generation of networks through which the new introduces itself compulsively, and like an addiction, into older episodes of pain. Neuroses and national sensibilities have in common these movements in the domain of trauma. We know about neurotics that they prefer to, again and again, repeat their accident. Nations include the remembrance of their defeats at cult sites to which their citizens periodically go on pilgrimages. Thus it is necessary to put on stage all kinds of cultures of memory both detached from ourselves and with unconditional mistrust, no matter if the memories are dressed in religious, civil, or political garments. Under the pretense of purifying, emancipating, or merely creating identity, memories inevitably support some secret tendency to repeat and reenact.
Even popular victimology more or less understands the reactions of injured people. Through bad experiences they are dislocated from the
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happy-forgetful center of society to its slippery margins, from which there is no longer any simple return to normal life. One understands this eccen- tric dynamic right away: to the victims of injustice and defeat, consolation through forgetting often appears unreachable. If it appears unreachable, it also appears unwanted, even unacceptable. This means that the fury of resentment begins at the moment the person who is hurt decides to let her- self fall into humiliation as if it were the product of choice. To exaggerate pain in order to make it bearable, to transcend one's depressed suffering, to "sport with his misery"—quoting Thomas Mann's sensitive and humorous
1
coinage about the primal father Jacob —to extend the feeling of suffered
injustice to the size of a mountain in order to be able to stand on its peak full of bitter triumph: these escalating and twisting movements are as old as injustice, itself seemingly as old as the world. Isn't "world" the name for the place in which human beings necessarily accumulate unhappy memories of injuries, insults, humiliations, and all kinds of episodes for which one wants revenge? Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma? Considerations like these allow us to draw the conclu- sion that measures taken to extinguish or contain smoldering memories of suffering have to belong to the pragmatic rules of every civilization. How would it be possible for citizens to go to bed peacefully if they had not called a couvre-feu for their internal fires?
Because cultures always also have to provide systems for healing wounds, it is plausible to develop concepts that span the entire spectrum of wounds, visible and invisible. This has been done by modern trauma sciences, which started from the insight that for moral facts it is also useful to apply physi- ological analogies, if only within certain limits. To use a familiar example, in the case of open bodily wounds, blood comes into contact with air, and as a result of biochemical reactions the process of blood clotting starts. Through it, an admirable process of somatic self-healing comes about, a process that belongs to the animal heritage of the human body. In the case of moral injuries we could say that the soul comes into contact with the cruelty of other agents. In such cases subtle mechanisms for the mental healing of wounds are also available—spontaneous protest, the demand to bring the perpetrator immediately to justice, or, if this is not possible, the intention to take matters into one's own hands when the time comes. There is also the retreat into oneself, resignation, the reinterpretation of the crime scene, the rejection of the truth of what happened, and, in the end, when only a drastic psychic treatment seems to work, the internalization of the violation as a
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subconsciously deserved penalty even to the point of the masochistic wor- ship of the aggressor. In addition to this medicine chest for the injured self, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity developed moral exercises to enable
2
It is not only common wisdom and religion that have adopted the moral healing of wounds. Civil society also provides symbolic therapies intended to support the psychic and social reactions to the injuries of individuals and collectives. Since ancient times, conducting trials in front of courts has made certain that the victims of violence and injustice can expect repara- tion in front of a gathered people. Through such procedures is practiced the always precarious transformation of the desire for revenge into justice. However, just as a festering wound can become both a chronic and general malady, psychic and moral wounds also may not heal, which creates its own corrupt temporality, the infinity of an unanswered complaint. This implies the trial without satisfactory sentence and calls forth the feeling in the pros- ecutor that the injustice inflicted upon him is rather increased through the trial. What is to be done when the juridical procedure is experienced as an aberration? Can the matter be settled through the sarcastic remark that the world will one day go down because of its official administration—a state- ment perpetually reinvented as often as citizens experience the indolence of administrative bodies? Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage itself engages in payback? Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage, as a self- proclaimed executor, goes so far as to knock on the door of the offended?
RAGE RECOUNTED
THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY EXISTS IN COUNTLESS exemplary case studies, some more recent and some older. The search for justice has always brought about a second, wild form of the judiciary in which the injured person attempts to be both judge and warden at once. What is noteworthy about these documents, given our present perspective, is that only with the beginning of modernity was the romanticism of self- administered justice invented. Whoever speaks of modern times without acknowledging to what extent it is shaped by a cult of excessive rage suffers from an illusion. This is, even to the present day, the blind spot of cultural history—as if the myth of the "process of civilization" did not aim only to
the injured psyche to transcend the circle of injuries and revenge as such. As long as history is an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation, wisdom is required to bring the pendulum to a halt.
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make invisible the release of vulgar manners under conditions of modernity but also to inflate revenge phantasms. While the global dimension of West- ern civilization aims at the neutralization of heroism, the marginalization of military virtue, and the pedagogical enhancement of peaceful social affects, the mass culture of the age of enlightenment reveals a dramatic recess in which the veneration of vengeful virtues, if we may so call them, reaches new, bizarre extremes.
This phenomenon can be traced back centuries before the French Revo- lution. The Enlightenment not only releases polemics of knowledge against ignorance but also invents a new quality of the guilty verdict by declaring all old conditions unjust before the demands of the new order; hereby the ecosystem of resignation begins to totter. Since time immemorial, human beings learned in this ecosystem to accept the apparent inevitabilities of mis- ery and injustice. The Enlightenment was thus required to allow revenge to be promoted to an epochal motive, as it dominated private as well as politi- cal affairs. Since the past is fundamentally always unjust, the inclination increases, not always but with increased regularity, to extol revenge as just.
OF COURSE, ANTIQUITY ALREADY KNEW GREAT ACTS OF REVENGE. From the furies of Orestes to the hysterics of Medea, ancient theater paid tribute to the dramatic potency of revengeful forces. Mythos knew as well from early on about the danger that begins with humiliation, a danger almost like a natural disaster. Medea's example shows particularly well the idea that the female psyche passes from pain to insanity with terrific velocity. This is what Seneca wanted to show when he depicts the hysterical heroine as an exemplary deterrent. In modern terminology, one would call attention to the fact that the passive-aggressive character is disposed to enter into states of excess whenever, by way of exception, she decides to become offensive. This is the framing of women on the rage stage, and, often, the privilege of the "great scene" ("groflen Szene") has always belonged to the "angry sex. " The ancients never imagined taking such exempla as anything other than warnings to orient themselves to the middle, away from excesses.
In the Eumenides, one of the key plays of Athenian drama, with which the Atride Trilogy of Aeschylus comes to an end, what is at issue is noth- ing less than the complete break with the older culture of revenge and fate as well as the introduction of a political concern for justice. This form of political justice should be practiced in the future exclusively in civil
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courts. What is required for the establishment of such courts is the sensible theological-psychosemantic operation in which the old dignified goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyen, are renamed as the Eumenides, which means "those who want good" or "those caring for what is beautiful. " The mean- ing of the name change is unmistakable: "Where vengeance compulsion was, balanced, prudent justice will be. "
Whatever criteria one has in mind when searching the libraries of the Old
World, one will come across a large amount of references to the elementary
force of rage and the campaigns of vengeful fury. There are traces of a more
or less serious game with the romantic fire of rage, though this will become
a dominant motive only with the eighteenth century's emerging culture of
civil society. Since then, one great revenger hunts another, accompanied
by the sympathy of the audience of the modern imaginary. From the noble
robber Karl Moor to the angry veteran John Rambo; Edmond Dantes, the
mysterious Count of Monte Christo to Harmonica, the hero of Once Upon
a Time in the West, who has committed his life to a private nemesis; Judah
ben Hur, who exacted revenge against the spirit of imperial Rome with his
victory in an ominous chariot race, to the Bride, alias Black Mamba, the
protagonist of Kill Bill, who works through her death list. The time of those 3
wholiveforthe"greatscene"hascome. WhenDurrenmatt'soldladycomes for a visit, she exactly knows who needs to be liquidated out of the group of friends. Brecht's dreaming Pirate Jenny even knows a better answer to the question "Who is to die? ": all.
Stories of this kind seem to be natural ballads. By themselves they appear to aspire to a superior form of recitation and epic detail. By making visible the relationship between suffered injustice and just retribution, more recent acts of rage provide an illustration of the causality of fate. We moderns do not like to dispense with this lesson, however much we agree otherwise with the exercise of enlightenment, that is, the suspension of blind fate. The well- constructed story of rage provides the sublime for the people. It provides the audience with a compact formula for moral if/then relationships even if they pay the price of suspending the slow, formal application of the rule of law in order to practice a quicker form of retaliation. Moreover, rage satis- fies the popular interest in acts of which the perpetrator can legitimately be proud: such stories focus on the avengers, who by directly paying back for their humiliation release a part of the discontent with judicial civilization. They provide satisfying proof that the modern person does not always have to travel the windy road of resentment and the steep steps of the judiciary
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process in order to articulate thymotic emotions. In the case of injuries lead- ing to chronic illness, rage is still the best therapy. This feeling constitutes the reason for the pleasure taken in base things.
The dangerous liaisons between the revenge motif and popular narrative do not need to be unfolded in detail at this point. Apparently these linkages are so deep that sometimes the return of modern art to its great epic form is helpful—as in the case of the abovementioned work from the century of narrative film, Once Upon a Time in the West. It has rightly been claimed that this work provided the art of film with the proof that two formally impossible things were in fact possible: that serious opera can be appropri- ated through film and that the lost form of epic can once again be given a contemporary form.
The affinity between rage and popular narrative forms could be illus- trated by drawing on a countless number of more recent documents. One example is particularly illuminating: the picturesque life history of the Indian rebel Phoolan Devi (1968-2001). From the state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan, when she was still quite a young woman, was the main actress of a widely watched reality drama that aired across the whole of the Indian sub- continent. After she had been collectively abused and raped by her husband and other male inhabitants of her village (including policemen), she fled and joined a group of bandits with whom she devised a plan to ambush and liquidate those who were guilty of the crimes against her. The corpse of her husband is said to have been put onto a donkey and chased through the vil- lage. The simple folk celebrated the rebel as an emancipated heroine and saw her as an avatar of the gruesome-sublime goddess Durga Kali. The photo- graph that depicts Phoolan Devi's handover of her weapons to Indian law enforcement officials is one of the archetypical press images of the twentieth century. One can see in the young fighter all the concentrated anger of being given over to her undecided fate. After eleven years of prison, without trial, the "Bandit Queen" was pardoned. Then she was elected into the Indian parliament, where she served as an inspiring role model for the countless disenfranchised women of her country. In June 2001, she was shot in broad daylight in Delhi, probably by a relative of one of her killed rapists. When she was still alive, Indian folklore took up the story of this charismatic fig- ure, and Phoolan Devi was transformed into the heroine of a popular epic still sung by Indian villagers.
Rarely do the archaic and the modern interpretations of vengeful rage come together in one individual action. In what follows I want to follow up
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on the assumption that, through the process of modernization, the novel increasingly returns from a literary and ideological mode to the life of indi- viduals and to public perception. A convincing example of this has recently moved the public in Germany, Switzerland, and the former Soviet states. Vitalij K. , an engineer from the Caucasus republic of Ossetia, lost his wife and two children in a plane crash caused by human negligence; after a year of mourning, he decided to seek revenge in the name of his family.
On July 1, 2002, a Bashkir passenger airplane from Moscow collided with a DHL freight plane 36,000 feet above Lake Constance. The incident occurred close to the town of Owing, and all seventy-one passengers lost their lives. Among other factors, the accident occurred because of false directions from the control tower in Zurich-Kloten. When the control tower operator in charge realized that both machines were on a collision course, he advised the pilot of the Russian plane orally to immediately start to descend. At the same time, the on-board computer indicated that he should accelerate. The fatal crash happened because the Russian captain gave more credence to the oral instructions, while the DHL place started to decline at the advice of the on-board computer. The ball of fire on the sky above Lake Constance could be seen almost a hundred miles away. In February 2003, the man from Ossetia, who had been born in 1956 and who could be called a winner of the postcommunist situation, appeared at the house of the Danish control tower operator near Zurich. He killed the operator on the terrace of his house by repeatedly stabbing him with a knife.
Before the drama in February 2003, Vitalij K. had attracted attention because he sometimes referred to "Caucasian methods" of conflict reso- lution. It is clear that the act of Vitalij K. came from a transformation of the work of mourning into a work of rage. Part of this work of rage was the sentence against the controller at the end of a short trial carried out by the court of his own intuition; the sentence was complemented by a pen- alty phase in which the judge slipped into the role of the hangman. This is a pattern that has increasingly permeated public consciousness since the beginning of modernity. It is not surprising that the Russian public pas- sionately followed the trial in Zurich of Vitalij K. during October 2005 and then protested his eight-year prison sentence. The avenger was promoted to the status of a national hero in his country of origin and across most of the former Soviet Union; for large parts of the population, he served as an object of identification.
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FROM CASES SUCH AS THIS, ONE CAN DRAW THE CONCLUSION THAT vengeful impulses do not easily return to reality, at least not as long as cul- tural codes have failed to establish the conditions for such a return. We can speak of a return, even of a regression, insofar as such acts cannot claim to be justified anymore by official culture. In terms of the history of ideas, the era of the tribal commandment to engage in blood feuds is more than two millennia behind us. Granted, this is not the case everywhere. But the monopoly over violence that the modern state enjoys finds acceptance as a psychopolitical norm from a large majority of citizens and is supported almost without objections by the official pedagogy. Yet it cannot be denied that the imaginary produced by mass media provides an important space for the phantasm of the moral state of exception, including the vengeful attempt to come to terms with rage.
In order to make plausible the return of personal acts of revenge we have to assume that the force of the political and juridical civilization has become discredited. When the public order is accused of malfunctioning or of being a part of the problem (we might think of preferential treatment in court proceedings), individuals can take themselves to be appointed to represent justice as wild judges. In this sense it is possible to take modern revenge romanticism to be a specific part of an all-encompassing return to hero- ism. According to Hegel's insight, a hero in antiquity was someone who does what is necessary as an individual, someone who accomplishes what could not have been accomplished from the universal at that point in time; the heroism of the moderns lives off the intuition that even after the erec- tion of the rule of law, there can emerge situations in which the univer- sal is no longer operative. That even the nation, or rather the government, can be determined by heroic and revenge-romantic reflexes is suggested by the example of the Israeli president Golda Meir. After Palestinian terrorists attacked the quarters of the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Meir is said to have ordered Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to track the perpetrators and their supporters and kill them without any legiti- macy from a court proceeding. This operation (with the code name "The Wrath of God") was less a part of governmental action than a service to the imaginary of mass culture.
The popular and anarchist doubt about the regulatory power of "existing conditions" is connected to the tendency toward the new form of heroic action. Another consequence is the assumption of a permanent state of exception, and thus of the inclination of the actors to claim the right to help
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themselves in their singular situations. Indeed, some theoreticians of the left such as Walter Benjamin and later Antonio Negri articulated the dangerous suggestion that for the majority of human beings living under conditions
4
of capitalism, the permanent state of exception is normal. Once the "order
of things" has become delegitimized, improvisations are needed, including some rough ones. Only a small step is required to go from the political and moral delegitimation of circumstances to their ontological delegitimation, and ontological delegitimations call into question not only the normative foundations of the institutions of the ancien regime but also the authority of the past as such. Once this moment has come, so-called reality becomes an object for revision and, if necessary, is authorized to be torn down. In light of this, the militant slogan of the twentieth century, transformed by Sartre, "on a raison de se revolter? would have to be slightly altered. It would need to be translated as: "not he who revolts against what exists is in the right, but he who avenges against it. "
THE AGGRESSOR AS GIVER
IN MY ANALYSIS OF RAGE, IT IS NECESSARY TO FIRST TURN TO ITS energetic dimension, and later I will turn to its temporal and pragmatic dimensions. This requires a certain asceticism with regard to reactions and patterns of interpretations. Initially it is necessary to bracket the desire to emphasize the devastating dynamism of rage. The concept of "destruction," at least, needs to be separated from any kind of moral valuation. It has to be understood as a metabolic phenomenon that needs to be investigated beyond either appraisal or criticism. The alleged or real tendency of rage to explode without concern for the future should not be put at center stage prematurely. Finally, it is necessary to leave out the common psychological attributions of motivation, as well as character diagnoses.
This provides a more even-tempered view of the phenomenon of rage, one that acknowledges that we are primarily dealing with an intensive form of energy that is ready to explode or be transferred. If one follows the image of effervescence, which already led the ancient authors to speak of furor, of eruption and storming ahead, it becomes apparent how much the expres- sion of rage possesses a giving, even a paradoxically generous trait. As a form of pure extroversion, the uninhibited expression of "foaming" rage adds an especially energetic supplement to the inventory of deeds. Naturally these mostly reveal themselves in a negative light because at first sight they
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seem only to consist of uproar and suffering. It is easier to become aware of the giving dimension of rage if one regards the object of rage under the aspect of its similarity with the subject.
Whether rage comes on the scene like a sudden explosion or like chronic presentiment (after its hate-inflicted transformation into a proj- ect), it draws its force from an excess of energy that longs for release. Rage that manifests itself in punishment or acts of injury is connected to the belief that there is too little suffering in the world on a local or global level.