No More Learning

Afterwards he travelled the world as a speaker, describing his unusual act of self-concern to packed venues. In 2000, there was considerable attention in the media to the case of the then twenty-nine-year-old British performance artist Heather Perry, who performed a trepanation on her own skull using a local anaesthetic and a special drill - supposedly to cure her chronic fatigue and attain a higher level of consciousness. Furthermore, we know from the life story of the Indian wise man Ramana Maharshi (1873-1950) that he underwent surgery several times towards the end of his life for a cancer on his arm, and each time turned down the anaesthetic in favour of a Yogic form of pain neutralization. For an illuminated
man of the old school, it was clearly out of the question to accept a treatment by Western methods that violated the spiritual axiom of constant wakefulness.
As a rule, the auto-operative self-reference that enables the subject to tolerate technical modifications to its body displays a gentler cur- vature. Since around the eighteenth century, it has expressed itself in the extensive use of stimulants among enlightened Europeans. Their application increased from the twentieth century on, to the point of a massive use of doping agents in every possible discipline. It is no secret how dependent authors like Voltaire and Balzac were on caf- feine, or how much Sigmund Freud owed to his nicotinism. Equally, connoisseurs of Sartre's later career know of the extremes brought about by his alternating alcoholism and amphetamine addiction. In all these cases, the decisive question was obviously what the stimu- lated parties made out of what the stimulants had made of them. Sartre's addiction to amphetamines was not without a certain irony:
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was to create
October Revolution: The Ether Anaesthetic
From the mid-nineteenth century on, surgical operations saw the inclusion of anaesthesia, without which having-oneself-operated-on in the narrower sense would be inconceivable today. Its appearance on the stage of medical options was accompanied by one of the most profound modifications of the human self-relationship in modern times. If there has ever been a technical innovation that merited the use of the word 'revolution', it was the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic. Its first successful application was on 16 October 1846, in the operating theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where it was administered to the patient Gilbert Abbot with the aid of a specially constructed spherical ether inhaler for the removal of a neck tumour. The operation took place in the presence of the Boston medical elite, who constituted a rather sceptical audience after the failure of a similar attempt in the same auditorium using laughing gas. Once William Morton, the constructor of the ether ball, had induced the patient to take a few deep breaths from it, the surgeon, Dr Warren, carried out the operation in just under three minutes (before the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic in surgery, speed was of the essence), with no pain whatsoever felt by the patient. After completing the demonstration, Warren supposedly turned to those present with the words: 'Gentlemen, this is no humbug. ' Thus the strongest neo-evangelic message in medical history was conveyed by the greatest understatement. l13
This surgical 14 July, which entered the annals of medicine as 'ether day', changed the anthropotechnic situation of modernity more radi- cally than any individual political event or technical innovation since - including the biopolitical experiments of the Russian Revolution, as well as all attempts at genetic manipulation thus far. While the Bastille was immediately torn down as a supposed 'symbol of despot- ism' (the 'patriot' Palloy, a quick-witted building contractor who had appeared on the scene with a demolition crew as soon as the fortress was stormed, supposedly received the commission to demolish it as early as 16 July), the American doctors reverently preserved the scene of the rebellion against the tyranny of pain. The 'Ether Dome' at Massachusetts General Hospital can still be visited in its original state today. A painting by Robert Hinckley from 1882 captured the
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scene. news America
by sea in almost separate messages, European
doctors received it with almost universal enthusiasm, welcoming it like a secular gospel and imitating it to massive success; only a group of sceptics and algophilic traditionalists, who defended pain as part of the human condition, initially refused to consider the new method for disabling pain. Among the vast majority, there was a wave of emulation based not on mimetic rivalry, but on a long-felt need for deliverance from an epochal evil.
The 16th of October 1846 is the key date in the history of the operable human being: since then, the rediscovered possibilities of having-oneself-anaesthetized have enormously expanded the radius of having-oneself-operated-on by surgeons. Through the develop- ment of such new anaesthetics as Evipan (1932) or Propofol (1977), as well as highly effective opium derivatives, professionalized anaes- thesia has for some time also had efficient short-term narcotics at its disposal, enabling a significant reduction of wake-up time. Thanks to intensive research, the depth of the narcosis can now also be closely controlled, and the constant improvement of the necessary equipment rounds off the optimization of anaesthesia.
What made these rediscovered possibilities was the fact that between 1490 and 1846, European medicine almost entirely forgot the anaes- thetic techniques of antiquity and the Middle Ages, especially the formally well-known and frequently used 'soporific sponges', which contained highly effective extracts from poppies, henbane, mandrake and hemlock. This amnesia, which is still virtually inexplicable, was a factor in the harsh climate of reality throughout the Modern Age until the mid-nineteenth century: in this era, surgical operations were almost always torturous affairs that amounted to agonies for the patients.
On the Human Right to Unconsciousness
In philosophical terms, the reintroduction of complete anaesthesia marked a caesura in the self-relationships of modern humans. Not only because the contemporary subject's attitude towards its physical body and its operability is simply incomprehensible if one does not take into account the new possibility of consenting to the disabling of its sensitivity to pain. As self-awareness is often extinguished along with it, the subject faces the dramatic choice of temporarily resign- ing from its being-for-itself and entirely adopting the position of
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an unconscious in-itself. It not only agrees to this injury in its own interests - the precondition for all having-oneself-operated-on in the stricter sense - but also affirms artificial unconsciousness to gain an advantage. This is significant because it explicitly articulates a previ- ously unimaginable thesis: that humans can no longer be expected to endure every state of wakeful being-in-the-world. In this context it is worth mentioning that before the term 'anaesthesia' was officially established in the early nineteenth century, one sometimes spoke of suspended animation. This better expressed the central principle of the general anaesthetic: liberating the patient for the duty of 'ani- mated' passion.
One could say that in October 1846, the human right to uncon- sciousness was established - the right of not-having-to-be-present in certain extreme states of one's own psychophysical existence. The claim to this right had been prepared by a fashionable gesture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the proverbial phenomenon of fainting due to over-stimulation, which was accepted in particularly sensitive people - those of the female sex - as a mark of cultivated weakness, and flourished in the hysterical symptoms of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, the techniques of animal magnetism and artificially induced somnambulism, both discussed throughout Europe after 1785 and both early forms of what became known as 'hypnosis' in 1840, enabled modern subjects to become familiar with the advantages of suspended animation. These methods, which became common from the late eighteenth century on under the name of Mesmerism - also in the context of social vaudeville entertainment - occasionally served among doctors after 1800 as a forerunner of chemical anaesthesia. Mesmerism enjoyed an intensive reception by the Romantics and German Idealists, as it could be inter- preted as the royal road to the realm beyond everyday consciousness, almost a form of experimental theology. 114
This play with artificial unconsciousness reached its pinnacle in the 1830s, when laughing gas became the party drug of the British upper class. At the same time, elegant opium eaters and educated narcoma- niacs could be sure that their confessions would be read attentively by a public interested in anaesthetics of all kinds. Even two genera- tions later, the propagandists of the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) - Helena Blavatsky (1833-91), Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Leadbeater (1847-1934) - who showed a precise feeling for the spiritual market in mixing European mysticisms with Indian psychotechnics, found an audience that longed more than ever for instruction in the art of self-renunciation in the service of the self.
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Typically modern techniques for expanding one's passivity compe- tence were rehearsed in all these forms of conditional self-renunciation, though not always with ego-strengthening prospects. The element of auto-operative curvature manifests itself most clearly in the medically required general anaesthetic, as it constitutes a borderline case of tem- porary not-being-oneself in the service of being-oneself. It indicates a liminal zone that can only be shifted to regions even more distant from the self through an artificial coma - provided that the prospect of a controlled return to waking life is assured. Consent to this type of suspended animation means the last possible level of calmness. lIS
Revolutionary Un-Calmness
Alongside the subjective appropriation of technological and social progress in the context of calmness culture, or the system of con- ditional passivities, modernity brought forth a culture of un-calm- ness based on the declared unwillingness to await the results of slow progress. It includes a profound distrust towards most forms of letting-something-be-done-to-oneself. This regularly brings the domination-critical motif into play, namely that power and its abuse are synonymous. Un-calmness and the general rejection of passivity are the root of the extremisms that began to take hold in Western Europe and Russia in the nineteenth century and led into the 'revolu- tions' of the twentieth century.
Medical progress, on the other hand, aligned itself with the gradual model of the bourgeois Enlightenment. This taught its adepts to view every improvement achieved as the starting point for further opti- mizations. This applied not least to anaesthesia-supported surgery, which, despite its great leap forwards around the middle of the nine- teenth century, generally remained a case of cumulative skill increase on the path of progressive moderation.
The simultaneity of optimism and realism in the standard concept of progress was tied to an ambitious cultivation of the feelings of the time: at every moment, satisfaction at what had been achieved was meant to balance out impatience at what still had to be achieved - everything already possible had to be viewed in relation to the pros- pect of the not-yet-feasible. In any case, participation in the 'great work of uplifting mankind' was unattainable without constant train- ing in patience and impatience. Both attitudes were based on the tacit assumption that the path to further civilization was itself a civilized journey.
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was
what can happen if this precondition is rejected. The adherents
extremist positions refused to participate in the balancing exercise between patience and impatience, voting instead for radical accelera- tion. According to them, the truth lay in imbalance: good, for them, was one-sided and partisan. Never give up impatience - this was the axiom of the desire committed to radicality. According to the pur- veyors of the extreme, the only respectable form of progress - the one that would tackle the social question at its roots - does not come gradually, but must rather constitute a sudden and irreconcilable rupture in the usual way of things. It is not an additional step on a prescribed path - more like a wild ride through uncharted terrain. The revolution builds its own roads in the direction it chooses; no slip road from the past can dictate where it should go. In the conquest of the improbable, yesterday's realists are out of place as route planners.
The followers of such ideas rely on the objection that one must not be taken in by the illusion of the necessary gradualness of progress, for it conceals the reprehensible slowing of development by a class of ruling preventers who are secretly determined to keep the people waiting until the end of time. They say 'progress', but what they mean is the perpetuation of the status quo. The most familiar version of this thesis is the Marxist one, which states that only the 'greed for profit' of the capital owners prevents the general release of 'pro- ductive powers' in favour of the workers, who are usually blithely equated with the 'people'. Another popular idea was the anarchist maxim that the preventers were first and foremost among the rep- resentatives of the states and its notorious ally, the church, which meant that only direct violence against both could bring about the necessary destabilization of the situation. Only dead souls accept the principle of gradual progress. Whoever is still morally alive listens to the voices testifying here and now to the intolerability of the prevail- ing conditions. These voices give the individual in revolt the mandate of immediate overthrow. The young Marx unforgettably formulated the categorical imperative of the revolution: it is the absolute duty of the activist 'to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being'. 116
Radical Metanoia as the Will to Overthrow
In reality, the rejection of the gradualness model of standard Enlightenment, to which the liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth
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centuries clung as much as the social democrats and Christian demo- crats, by no means stemmed solely from the pressure of social crises. It occurred because of a moral option whose inherent logic demanded a break with the existing state of things. This choice constituted the political continuation of the original ethical distinction between the own and the non-own as made since the beginnings of ascetic seces- sion. The central nuance lies in the fact that everything which is now to be viewed as non-own is assigned to the past, while the own lies exclusively in the future. The ethical distinction is temporalized, split- ting the world into things past to be rejected and future things to be welcomed. There is no hope in the present and the continuous - that applies in equal measure to ancient escapism and to the modern devaluation of all old regimes. But after the ontology of the finished existent was abandoned and the becoming of a 'different world' tran- spired as increasingly plausible, indeed inevitable, the future became an attractive home for those who made the great ethical distinction anew.
Thus it becomes deplorable to seek the attainment of satisfying conditions via the gentle slopes of bourgeois world improvement. Whoever chooses this pass has essentially already decided to leave everything as it was, no matter how many changes of detail might give the impression that the affirmability of conditions is on the increase. In truth, the primacy of the past remains in force as long as the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions is defined by the dominance of the latter. What the world lacks are not people willing to go along with changes on the plain; what it needs are people in whom an awareness of the vertical is reawakening. A few years before the October Revolution, one of the most distinguished authors of biopolitical utopianism in the early Soviet Union, the poet Alexander Svyatogor (1899-after 1937), had founded a group whose programme included the abolition of death, the scientifically achieved resurrection of the dead and the technological domination of the cosmos; the group called itself the 'Verticalists'.
Only those who take the idea of world improvement utterly seri- ously will arrive at the view that world improvement is not enough. Identification with the principle of externalized metanoia leads to the insight that the existing world, that is to say the given 'social' order, will remain incorrigible until its basal construction flaws - class society and the unequal distribution of material and immaterial wealth - are rectified. Thus the world of the 'existent' must not be progressively improved but revolutionarily eradicated. With the help of reusable elements from the old construction, the new construction
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can 111
'achievements' - past and futures ones Conventional progres- sism must be rejected so that the good intentions underlying it can take effect. It seems that the naivete of the progressives has been seen through once and for all: they sincerely believe they are doing a service to freedom by opting for small, controlled steps. In reality, they are allying themselves with what is quintessentially bad - with the conditions based on the private property of world-improving means.
The notion that property is the means to all other means was ruled out by the new radicals. The deep-seated ressentiment towards private property, indeed towards anything private, blocked the conclusion that follows from any impartial examination of wealth- producing and freedom-favouring mechanisms: an effective world improvement would call for the most general possible propertization. Instead, the political metanoeticians enthused over general disposses- sion, akin to the founders of Christian orders who wanted to own everything communally and nothing individually. The most impor- tant insight into the dynamics of economic modernization remained inaccessible to them: money created by lending on property is the universal means of world improvement. They are all the blinder to the fact that for the meantime, only the modern tax state, the anonymous hyper-billionaire, can act as a general world-improver, naturally in alliance with the local meliorists - not only because of its traditional school power, but most of all thanks to its redistributive power, which took on unbelievable proportions in the course of the twentieth century. The current tax state, for its part, can only survive as long as it is based on a property economy whose actors put up no resistance when half of their total product is taken away, year after year, by the very visible hand of the national treasury for the sake of communal tasks. What the un-calm understand least of all is the simple fact that when government expenditures constitute almost 50 per cent of the gross national product, this fulfils the requirements of actually existing liberal-fiscal semi-socialism, regardless of what label is used to describe this situation - whether people call it the New Deal, 'social market economy' or 'neo-liberalism'. 117 What the system lacks for total perfection is a homogeneous worldwide tax sphere and the long-overdue propertization of the impoverished world.
Against the background of the beginnings of a history of the ethical distinction outlined above, it is immediately apparent how the offen- sive articulation of communist and anarchist radicality opened a new
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Its most COIn- cides the strongest tendency to external application. This is why the twentieth century was the age of the 'commissars' who believed in changing the world by external and extreme means - we recall Arthur Koestler's essay 'The Yogi and the Commissar', which was published in 1942, in the heart of Europe's darkness, and in 1945 supplied the title for a volume of essays on the moral situation of the time that
gained international recognition. 118
Political Verticalism: The New Human Being
On the eve of the Russian Revolution, then, 'verticalism' could no longer assume its original form, in which it would purely have con- cerned individuals. Since the beginnings of ethical secession, it had been entirely down to them to force the impossible and remould themselves through tireless asceticism into wise men, god-men, new human beings - preferably alone, or in co-operation with other like- minded individuals if absolutely necessary. Even the wise men on the throne - Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in the West, Milinda and Ashoka in the East - did not think for a second of turning their individual philosophical metanoia into a state metanoia, a reversal for all. Even Paul, whose message was of the end of the world of death, was only actually speaking to the few who, through concern for their salvation, would be capable of joining the ranks of the saved before the imminent end.
In the course of its progress through the age of immanence, the absolute imperative turned into the dictate 'You must change the world - down to the very last elements of its construction, and with the involvement of everyone. ' Whoever sought to execute this dictate as a mere constant progression - through the synergy of school, the market and technology - would be falling prey to the most dangerous of all temptations from the start. They would be succumbing to the siren song of the bourgeoisie to choose the path of conformity, on which the old state remains intact beneath the semblance of constant improvement. The revolutionary, however, has themselves tied to the mast like Odysseus. Undaunted, they traverse the ambivalent zones where liberal and social-democratic sounds tempt them. The better they know what they are refusing, the more cold-bloodedly they remain committed to their mission.
The great change, then, can only be brought about by a categorical 386
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into privileged the haves and the have-nots, the knowing and
rulers and the ruled. This new version of the metanoetic impera- tive directly affects the agents who submit to it: what it demands of them is no less than a complete break with their previous lives and a transformation into revolutionaries. This cannot be achieved by those who content themselves with electing a party that loudly proclaims rebellious slogans, and least of all by those who think it is enough to harbour secret satisfaction when the bourgeois media report bloody acts of 'revolutionary violence'. The revolution demands an integral discipline whose absorptive energy absolutely matches the great asceticisms of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Above all, becoming a revolutionary is not simply a decision: one cannot transform oneself into the human of the future overnight. The New Human Being is a great not-yet for itself, even if it is brought near by the most feverish anticipations. Entrance into the revolution- ary process, therefore, is initially merely the beginning of a protracted self-renunciation. Whoever opts for the revolution as a new form of belonging must first admit that they are still human through and through - infused with the hereditary injustice of the entire history of mankind, filled with the inner sediments of class society, spoiled by the mis-conditioning of all previous generations, perverted and dis- torted even in the most intimate elements of their sexuality, their taste and their forms of everyday communication. They also remain the old human being in their continuing inability to be brotherly - most of all because they still exist as the victim of a distorted life instinct or, as Trotsky wrote, 'a pinched, morbid, hysterical fear of death',119 the deepest source of non-solidarity among mortals. The only difference between the revolutionary and the old human being is that the former has realized the nature of themselves and others, while the rest either suffer mutely or succumb to one of the countless self-delusions that historical humanity developed in order to accommodate itself to its situation.
The choice of an existence in revolution rules out both muteness and accommodation. Because it prefers the arduous path, it is comparable to an adept's flight to the Dharma path or a novice's entrance into a Christian order. Perhaps the elite of Lenin's professional revolution- aries proves the validity of this analogy, at least in ideal-typical terms; the difference, however, is a significant one: for the latter activists, there was never a binding monastic rule, unless one counts the abstract imperative of total self-instrumentalization. An even greater
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or
course of to univer-
sally valid criteria were disabled within their respective jurisdictions. The actually occurring revolution claimed ethical sovereignty, thus immunizing itself to all verdicts from without. If the party was always right, this was because the revolution is always right; consequently, those who actually carried out the revolution were right. Hence even their perversions were meant to be subject only to their own interpre- tations. No one who was not themselves at the forefront of the revo- lution was entitled to a judgement about the means it should choose. It alone could know how much killing was necessary for its success; it alone could decide how much terror would guarantee the triumph of its principles. It was Georg Lukacs who, amidst the war between white and red terrorists, coined the phrase 'Second Ethics' for the free choice of means by the bearers of the revolution.
This resulted in a situation where the revolution taking place could only be understood by its current leaders. The statement 'I am the revolution' was only true in theoretical and practical terms of Lenin and Stalin, who lived in the hot spot of the event, while none of the others, even seasoned fighters, could be sure of understand- ing the revolution. They all lived with the constant risk of suddenly being exposed as counter-revolutionaries. It was no longer enough to be orthodox in one's adherence to revolutionary principles; now one also had to be an orthodox believer in the incomprehensibility of the daily manoeuvres of one's leaders. Even when it arrested, tortured and shot dead its most faithful followers, the revolution still claimed to be right. The believers who allowed themselves to be subjected to such things were not witnesses whose memories were collected in a Moscow martyrology; they resembled mystics who undertook that most demanding of spiritual exercises, the resignatio ad infernum - the attempt to want nothing except what God or Stalin wants, even if it is my damnation. l2D
Communist Production of Humans
In our context, there is no need to address the 'religious' or religion- parodying dimensions of the Russian Revolution. l2l It is sufficient to hint at how the revolutionary complex of events took up the motif of human production, which had been virulent since the Enlightenment, and pushed it to its (provisionally) greatest heights. It was character- istic of the communist experiment that from the outset, it fought on
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both anthropotechnic fronts simultaneously in order to connect the spiritual-ascetic and biotechnical components as directly as possible. One must keep this strategy in mind whenever the frequently invoked formula of the New Human Being is used.
This production took place firstly in the elite cadres of the 'party', the training centres of revolutionary morals: these were the collecting places for individuals who, after an initial act of radical metanoia, were working on the eradication of the old human in themselves. It is hardly necessary to show in detail how the dispositions of orthodox spirituality still in effect here, with their thousand-year culture of de- selfing, became important. Anyone who postulated the New Human Being after 1917 only had to cover a small part of the moral evidence for this demand with the modern arguments that had circulated in Russia since 1863, the year in which Chernyshevsky's epoch-defining light novel What Is to Be Done? was published - Rakhmetov, one of the book's heroes, was a modern ascetic who slept on a bed of nails, trained his muscles and strictly monitored his diet. How many repli- cas of Rakhmetov were at work in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin is a question to which we will never find a clear answer. The only certainty is that whoever demanded the utmost of themselves in the face of the revolutionary upheavals stood in a tradition that extended back from The Philokalia - the belated Russian counterpart of The Imitation of Christ - to the Desert Fathers and the monasteries of Athos, and still had a virulent reservoir available for metanoetic procedures.
Secondly, the call for the New Human Being is formulated in socio- technical and biotechnical language. Because the productive powers invoked by Marxism are, according to their moral potency, powers of world improvement, the revolution states that they can and must be applied to human material. If one wants to establish socialism accord- ing to plan, its architects must themselves be produced according to plan. Bukharin's well-known claim in 1922 that the true aim of the revolution must be 'to alter people's actual psychology'122 clarifies the dimensional leap in revolutionary anthropotechnics: with the pro- duction of the producer, the producing collective reaches the stage of reflexiveness. What was once transcendent morality becomes part of a circuit: the eternally unchanging group of asceticisms is replaced by a cybernetic optimization system. 123
Many authors, including Trotsky, did not content themselves with the call to rebuild the psyche, and also held out the prospect of the genetic reconstruction of humans, even their cosmic reform: the foremost revolutionary demand was the physical optimization of humans through an elimination of sick and inferior variants - much
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was to in the improvement mental qualities - the parallels with the breeding speculations of 'scientific racism' during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany are par- ticularly clear. 124 The final perfection of the great reform, however, was presented in ideas of which no mere 'eugenicist' of either leftist or rightist persuasion could have dreamed: the emancipation of humans from space and time, from gravity, from the transience of the body and from conventional procreation. Ultimately, then, revolution
means disabling the second law of thermodynamics.
Even in the most utopian of concepts, one can easily see how the
figure of action in the auto-operatively curved space affects the level of great politics to produce a revolutionary passivity along with the revolutionary culture of activity: whoever has grand plans must also endure a great deal. In truth, everyday life after 1917 already forced the masses to be prepared for having-themselves-operated-on by the functionaries of the revolutionary state. The New Human Being could only be forced into existence if the current ones were willing to undergo major operations. The role of surgical metaphors in the language of the revolutionary leaders would merit a study of its own. They clarify the price of every political holism: whoever conceives of 'societies' as organisms will sooner or later be confronted with the question of where to apply the amputation instruments.
It is only in this context that the role of the aesthetic avant-garde in the Russian Revolution should be acknowledged: it committed itself to the titanic task of raising the passivity competence of the impoverished masses within a few years to the historically necessary level. The principal agitative quality of revolutionary art stemmed from the intoxicating project of proclaiming, for the first time in history, the passion for all. This is the meaning of the didactic turn evident in the manifold varieties of committed revolutionary art: peak performances of suffering were now offered by the 'commissars' to the many, who had previously known only vulgar suffering. No one was to be denied the right to crucifixion, though the technical matters of burial and resurrection were not settled in every detail. To convey what was on offer on a sufficiently broad scale, the fiction was spread that every single national comrade had entered a contract of treat- ment with the revolution, stating that they were ready and willing to endure and affirm whatever they were subjected to for their own good by the agencies of the great change. Only in the light of this hypoth- esis can one grasp the unfathomable passivity with which countless people bore the hardships of the 'transitional time' between the leg-
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most important was undoubtedly
of enduring the revolution and furthering it in the mode of suffering under it. No one can deny the great achievements of the Russians and the peoples associated with them in this field.
Even if the theory of the 'religious' nature of revolutionary ideol- ogy has been repeated ad nauseam in the relevant literature, it must nonetheless be emphasized that by its design, the Russian Revolution was not a political event but an anthropotechnic movement in a socio-political guise, based on the total externalization of the absolute imperative. Its contribution to making the nature of 'religion' explicit is of lasting significance - placing it in the group of synthetic illusion- practising organizations in modernity of which I showed above, using the example of the Church of Scientology, how they go about the production of auto-hypnotically closed counter-worlds. In both cases, the individually effective psychotechnic aspect was combined with mass-psychological effects based on leader cults and group narcis- sism. In undertaking a large-scale attempt to seize power over condi- tions, the communist experiment demonstrated what activists should believe in - and what they must allow to be done to themselves for the old human to be remoulded into the new one.
De facto, the communist upheaval triggered the second emergency of extensive biopolitics in the Modern Age - we discussed the first above in our recollections of the early modern state's demographic policy. The latter had failed spectacularly in the fine tuning of its methods, with consequences whose darkness requires no further elaboration here. The biopolitics of the Russian Revolution could likewise not be sure of its results, albeit for entirely different reasons. While the early modern state sought to produce the greatest number of subjects and took on board an enormous surplus of unusable ones, the revolutionary state strove for an organic collective of convinced individuals - and accepted the risk of losing all others. The first biopolitics sought the solution to its problems in the mass export of humans and extensive internment, while the second found the solu- tion in mass internment and even more massive extermination of humans. 125
The Biopolitics of the Miracle and the Art of the Possible
We have thus articulated the anthropotechnic secret of the 1917 revolution, and numerous authors have revealed it in different
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course the idea
morphosis that moved it towards depoliticization and remoulded it into a radical-metanoetic experiment. One must almost call it a subversion of politics through orientalization - but not only for the sake of portraying the Soviet state power as an 'oriental tyranny'. 'East' in this case refers to the tendency towards the supremacy of the spiritual factor. It seems that a revolution on Russian soil could only take place without becoming analogous to a conversion. The result was the enormous spectacle of a conversion from without.
Conversion means spiritually resetting one's life; revolution implies the gesture of redesigning the world from zero. It transforms histori- cally congealed reality into a mass without qualities that could liter- ally turn into anything in the reconstructive phase. In the chemical flask of revolution, the matter frozen into qualities is transformed into a totipotent potential that can be used by new engineers for free projects. Where world improvement is the priority, the New Human Being must be imagined as a function of a New Society. The New World comes about as the production of revolution and technology. The call for the technical repetition of the miracle is the most inti- mate agent of great change. For an enterprise on this scale, the reas- signment of faith from the miracle to the miraculous is not enough. While the Christian and Yogic traditions reserved the impossible for the few in their cuIts of saints and living-saved figures, the spiritually subverted revolution reclaims the impossible for all.
The definition of politics as the art of the possible - thus my premise - passed its historical test grosso modo. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, to whom we owe this formula, was presumably unaware that he had coined a phrase that momentarily put him on a level with the classics of political theory. He knew exactly what he was talking about, however, as he witnessed the opposing position- the politicization of the impossible and the remoulding of daydreams into party programmes - on a daily basis in all varieties from left to right, in the Berlin Reichstag as well as contemporary German and European journalism. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, equations of the desirable with the realizable constituted the pre- ferred procedure of the 'zeitgeist' for disseminating its slogans. At the same time, the mass press had recognized its most important task in the transport of illusions to its customers - in the era of mass circula- tion, the media are in fact not so much organs of enlightenment for
an audience of learners as service providers in the auto-operatively curved space of mass having-oneself-deceived.
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Only in contrast to the laconic thesis of the last German realpoli- tiker can one understand what happened in Russia in the wake of the October Revolution: it created a platform for politics as the art of the impossible. In full awareness, it abandoned the standard model of rational realism in favour of an unabashedly surrealistic praxis, even when it donned the bloodstained mantle of a 'realpolitik of revolution'. Though it presented itself as gruesomely realist in order to secure its initial victory, it knew that it could only survive as long as there was a light shining on it from far above: it could only gain its justification in the steepest vertical. 'Verticalists' were no longer simply the utopian poets around Svyatogor, who had published his Verses on the Vertical already in 1914 - the entire revolutionary elite was inspired by verticalist commitments.
The Era of Abolition
After the victorious civil war against the leftovers of the old 'society', the ascension of the revolution could truly begin.
It rushed from one abolition to the next, from one securing measure to the next - the era of abolition was inevitably also a heyday for measures of all kinds. As far as abolitions were concerned, the elan of the intellectuals naturally exceeded that of the new lords of the Kremlin, though these too did what was necessary to earn their stripes as abolitionists. Not long after seizing power, they declared the abolition of private prop- erty; in their understanding of communism, this change in the legal system laid the foundation for all further resolutions. The abolition of bourgeois liberties ensued, and this was to be followed by that of the bourgeoisie themselves. The functionaries had understood why state overthrow could only be stabilized through a cultural revolution, meaning the liquidation of the bourgeois individual and its curricula. For them, the bourgeois was not only the class enemy who monopo- lized the means of world improvement and perverted de jure shared property into de facto private property; he was the embodiment of gradualness who unified all the errors of conventional realism and all the vices of self-centred rationalism.
The first preliminary stage of the New Human Being was the non- bourgeois moulded in political revolution, who had left behind the purportedly natural egocentricity of the old human being. Along with it, the 'preform' of the future human being also discarded the ethics of historical advanced civilizations concerned with the prohibition on human sacrifice - or more generally the prohibition on taking
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
a
ity. What from was no less than the figure saint devoid of conscience - the most original contribution of the Bolshevik revolution to universal moral history.
Being and Time - the Soviet Version
In his book Soviet Civilization,126 Andrei Sinyavsky illustrates the prototype of the New Human Being using the figure of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1878-1926), chief of the notorious Cheka, the early Soviet secret police. He describes the feared model functionary - who had spent eleven years in banishment and Tsarist prisons, those training camps for those determined to stop at nothing, between 1897 and 1917 - as a man of steel 'with a soul as clear as crystal'. He assumed the role of the Soviet Union's chief executioner not because of cruel inclinations, but rather because he was prepared to sacrifice not only his own life but also his conscience on the altar of the revolution. As a consummate Leninist, he had internalized his teacher's doctrine that the revolutionary knowingly gets his hands dirty: only by sullying himself morally could he express his loyalty to the great cause. Like many historically aroused contemporaries in the 1920s, including those from the camp of non-Bolshevik 'revolutions', Dzerzhinsky had learned to interpret being as time. As a result, he wanted to do only what time wanted to do through him. With the obedience of the 'calm' person he listened out for its signals, which could seemingly be received unencrypted at the time: 'And if He orders you, "Lie! " - do so. 1And if He orders you, "Kill! " - obey. '127
In this context, it almost seems to follow a legendary template that this man, who was responsible for the liquidation of hundreds of thousands, had wanted to be a monk or a priest in his youth. It may be a tendentious fabrication that, as a crypto-Catholic, he secretly prayed to the Virgin Mary between cruel interrogations, or perhaps even after days full of executions. His wife stated plausibly that Dzerzhinsky, the selfless activist who worked around the clock, who slept in a narrow iron bed in his office and died of exhaustion at the age of forty-eight, had spoken of one day resigning from his office as Chief Executioner of the revolution, and, as People's Commissar for Education, devoting himself to the education of children and young people for the coming 'society'. Sinyavsky comments: 'Isn't that a wonderful prospect - in the spirit of communist morality - the chief
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tion the extermination of unusable
to the breeding of usable and convinced ones seems far less absurd if one takes into account the logic of acting from zero underlying both of these functions. What distinguishes the Soviet executioner from de Maistre's executioner is that one cannot possibility imagine him secretly saying to himself: 'No one liquidates better than I. '
Immortalism: The liquidation of Finitude
In the eyes of the philosophically radical among the representatives of the revolutionary intelligentsia, such phenomena as those described above were reduced to surface effects of the kind that had to be accepted nolens volens in a time of fundamental transformations. This group of ontological utopianists included, next to the aforemen- tioned Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), an esoteric and rocket scientist who became famous as the father of Russian space travel; Alexander Yaroslavsky (c. 1891-1930), an exponent of a 'cosmic maximalism'; Valerian Muraviev (1885- 1931), who postulated the overcoming of time and a technology of resurrection (anastatics); and Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), an advocate of 'physiological collectivism' and the founder of a move- ment for the 'struggle for vitality'. 129 For them, the metaphysical revo- lutionaries, almost all of whom were followers of Nikolai Fedorov (though some, like Svyatogor, negated his influence), who had laid the foundation for a politics of immortality with The Philosophy of the Common Task, the Bolshevik beginnings of the cultural revolu- tion were scarcely more than a crude, albeit limitedly useful prelude to the true 'world revolution' whose premises, prospects and methods these authors explored in their writings of the 1920s.
If the revolution made it possible to climb up the ladder of the abo- lition of traditional social problems, the abolition of 'private property of production means' and the bourgeois personality were productive, albeit provisional - not to say inferior - stages in a programme of ascent whose heights none of those caught in the turbulences of the great change could imagine. Yet these two operations, as momentous as they seemed to both the perpetrators and the victims of change, merely constituted the continuation of the bourgeois revolution of 1879, which had barely achieved more than the abolition of aristo- cratic privileges, the release of bourgeois ambitions and double-edged human rights rhetoric. From the Russian perspective, they continued
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were at most an entirely different scope.
After the era of preliminary attempts, the time was ripe for an opus hominis on a larger scale. The rule of humans over humans had become offensive, but was only the epiphenomenon of a far older and more comprehensive enslavement. Had mortal man not lived under the tyranny of outer and inner nature since time immemorial? Was not nature itself the biopower that wilfully created life on the one hand while letting it die equally wilfully on the other? Did its uni- versal domination not provide the matrix for all secondary forms of domination? Was it not necessary, then, to put the abolition of death on the agenda of a metaphysical revolution - and simultaneously an end to the fatalism of birth? What was the use of doing away with the absolutist state as long as one continued to pay tribute to the divine right of nature? Why liquidate the Tsar and his family if one did nothing to overturn the immemorial crowning of death as the lord of finitude?
Ending the Epoch of Death and Bagatelles
The speculative avant-garde of the Russian Revolution thought it had understood that one must begin directly at the highest rung on the abolition ladder if one wants to make the decisive difference. Otherwise the elimination of abuses and inequalities among people, even the abolition of the state and all repressive structures, would be provisional and in vain. If anything, they only sharpen the awareness of the absurdity that afflicts egalitarian 'society' as long as it fails to abolish death - including all forms of physical imperfection. Whoever wishes to eliminate the final cause of harmful privacy in human exist- ence must do away with the enclosure of each individual in their own little piece of lifetime. This is where the renewed 'common task' must begin. The true commune can only be formed by immortals; among mortals, the panic of self-preservation will always dominate. The equality of humans before death only satisfies that international of reactionary egalitarians who enjoy seeing the rich and powerful perish 'like cattle'. People of this kind have always sympathized with death in the role of the grand leveller - as presented annually at the Salzburg Jedermann production since 1920, dressed in the kitsch of the time. What none of these friends of the just end for all want to admit is the simple fact that death is the ultimate reactionary principle.
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nature.
by tirelessly inculcating it with the formula 'death is inevitable'. They provide the fuel for individualism, which encourages greed - in so far as one can apply this term to the striving to maximize experiences and advantages of being within the narrow window of existential time.
There could only be such a thing as a 'being-unto-death', which Heidegger emphasized as a structural feature of existence in his prin- cipal work of 1927, because even the most radical thinkers of the 'agonizing bourgeoisie' had not participated in the furthest-reaching revolution of the present day. In 1921, Alexander Svyatogor postu- lated a new agenda, beginning with the contention:
The question of the realization of personal immortality now belongs on the agenda in its full scope. It is time to do away with the inevitability of natural death. 130
In these words, we once again hear the tempus est with which Christian apocalypticism turns into the project of history: time itself has reached the point of supplying the password for the final histori- cal enterprise: do away with time! Whoever has understood the spirit of the age must ensure that there will soon be no more talk of finitude. The 'epoch of death and bagatelles' was coming to an end - what was beginning was 'the era of immortality and infinity'. 131 'Biocosmism alone can define and regulate society as a whole. '132 One year later, Alexander Yaroslavsky announced the birth of Cosmic Maximalism, which incorporated immortalism, interplanetarism and the suspen- sion of time, while Alexander Bogdanov simultaneously published his ideas on a 'Tectology of the Struggle Against Old Age'. He enthused over the notion that one could realize socialism physically by turning entire populations into artificial kinship circles and immune alliances through extensive reciprocal blood transfusions. With this physicali- zation of brotherliness, 'blood' - usually the domain of the right - transpires as the medium of an actual communist circulation. 133
,Anthropotechnics'
Among the authors of the metaphysical revolution in the 1920s, if I am not mistaken, it was Valerian Muraviev who examined the ques- tion of producing the New Human Being most extensively, thinking through its technological aspects from the widest possible perspec- tive. Naturally the contemporary thought form of the 'production of
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corrupt
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS an
. ~ not least in the
H U . U U V U presented itself most nakedly. It the mass
production of socialist proletarians as the most pressing planned task; if they did not exist before, the supposed carriers of the revolution should at least be brought into being after the event. The language game of human production was equally firmly established in Soviet pedagogy. As far as we know, however, it was Muraviev - whose writings of the early 1920s contain the first use of the term 'anthro- potechnics', largely synonymous with the word 'anthropurgy', coined at the same time - who aimed more for the production of a higher form of human. 134 Owing to his study of Eastern and Western spir- itual traditions, Muraviev saw the connection between the ascetic and the technical revolt against nature more clearly than other authors with biocosmist-immortalist tendencies. In his view, the achievements stemming from conventional forms of 'asceticism and the Yogi move- ment' inevitably reached their limit because, through the age-old idealistic contempt for the material sphere, they remained defined by 'neglect of the bodily aspect'. The 'remoulding of human beings', however, 'was not conceivable merely in mental and moral terms'. Bs It now had be built on entirely new foundations - that is, on techni- cal, serial and collectively guided procedures. Among these, Muraviev states, eugenics would only have a secondary function on account of its clumsiness. Certainly, he writes, the eugenic procedures of the present go far beyond the primitiveness of Paracelsus' attempts to breed homunculi in calves' stomachs or pumpkins; nonetheless, they remain tied to the awkwardness of sexual reproduction and the ugly excesses of natural birth, which can only be viewed as an 'extraor- dinarily complicated, painful and imperfect process'. 136 Eugenics through breeding, which produces favourable results with plants and animals, can only be transferred to humans to a limited degree.
Consequently, Muraviev continues, one must think about new procedures in which the division of humanity into men and women becomes meaningless. The abolition of birth and the production of humans in the laboratory must lead to a 'fourth method for recasting the human being' - the other three being ascetic-didactic, therapeutic- medical and eugenic-breeding measures. Here the idea of what would later be called cloning momentarily appears ('budding'), which, according to Muraviev, should by no means only be considered the domain of lower life forms. If such a procedure were applied to more advanced creatures too, and ultimately to Homo sapiens, humans would no longer be the result of a sexual relationship between two
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more ill a community to the highest When this com- munity devotes itself to the production of humans, it celebrates a
technical sacrament - in free synthesis outside of the old nature.
The appearance of New Human Beings would mean that of new bodies which could subsist on light and would no longer be subject to gravitation. At the same time, the new technology for creating humans would bring an unheard-of level of individualization within reach. In time, the template human of today would disappear, and the basis for vulgarity would be eliminated not only socially and aes- thetically, but also biologically. Then artists of Shakespeare's and Goethe's calibre would no longer create dramas, but humans and groups of humans - anthropic singularities and social sculptures that would make the works of earlier art history look like lifeless prelimi-
nary exercises. 137
The principal operation of biopolitical utopianism in Russia can
be expressed in a simple formula: what had previously seemed pos- sible only in the imagination would now be realized in technical procedures. Where there were man-made works, there would now be man-made life. Modern technology tears down the boundary between being and phantasm, and transforms impossibilities into schemata of the actually possible - empty sets that would now begin to be filled with actually existing entities. The term 'anticipation', which forms a common thread running through Marxist commentar- ies on the 'achievements' of earlier cultural periods, would now refer to planned phantasms. This same transgression of limits, incidentally, forms the basis of the American mass culture flourishing at the same time, which, especially since the flooding of the Hollywood 'dream factory' with European emigres, had been producing one variation after another on the motif of dreams come true. 138 Aron Zalkind (1889-1936), a Soviet psychologist who sought to combine Freudian and Pavlovian approaches in his 'pedology' of the 1920s (in order to reclaim the field of education for the widely used theory of 'condi- tioned reflexes', and to annex cultural theory as a field of application for higher reflexology), calls this 'scientifically based fantasizing'. 139 It provides the foundation for the art of socialist prognostics. 140 This is the concrete utopian counterpart of Oswald Spengler's equally pretentious attempt to place the narratability of the future on a sci- entific footing through insight into the processuallaws of 'cultures'. In his report on the psychosocial future of socialist humans, Zalkind predicted that they would be transformed through revolutionary treatment into ever more stable, more productive, more vital and
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THE EXERCISES THE MODERNS
immune system in
a function of communal preservation - unlike in Western society, where individualist disintegration proceeds inexorably. The blurring of boundaries between didactics, therapy and politics is characteristic of Zalkind's opportunistic-optimistic argumentation: it conceives of communist humans as unlimitedly flexible patients of change who can only win if they allow unlimited operations on themselves. What Zalkind does not reveal are the methods of communist anaesthesia. Lenin knew: state terror is the functional equivalent of general anaes- thetic in difficult operations on large collectives.
Post-Communist Postlude: Revenge of the Gradual
I shall refrain from commenting on the empirical fate of the immor- talist and biocosmist impulses in the early phase of the Russian Revolution; no one should be surprised if the gulf between the pro- grammatic and the pragmatic is dramatic in such projects. If there were a pantheon of Icarian phenomena, the Russian bio-utopians would have a claim to a chapel of their own. Almost all of these protagonists of the highest abolition perished in the turbulences of the revolution they had so vigorously affirmed: except for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who, co-opted and honoured by Soviet officials 'as a brilliant son of the people', died at an advanced age in 1935, all other protagonists of the biopolitical revolt met an end more typical of the time. Svyatogor disappeared in a 'corrective labour camp' in 1937, at the age of forty-eight. Muraviev's trail ends around 1930, when he was roughly forty-five, in a detention camp - probably on the infamous Solovetzky Islands in the White Sea. Yaroslavsky was shot dead while trying to escape from said camp in December 1930, aged around thirty-five. Bogdanov died in 1928 at the age of fifty-five after performing a blood transfusion experiment on himself. Zalkind died of a heart attack at forty-eight, in 1936, upon receiving the news that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had condemned and banned his 'pedology' as 'anti-Marxist pseudo-science'.
It seems equally superfluous to explain at length why, after the end of the Second World War - and all the more after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc around 1990 - virtually no one in the East or the West had the slightest interest in a revolt against the human condition, the old Adam, the unconscious and the entire syndrome of finitudes - except in the simulation rooms of the unre-
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IN THE CURVED SPACE
,n,v""-,, museum, is a curator every It would be a error, however, to conclude from global anti- utopianism 1945, which was only broken up by the third youth movement of the twentieth century - the international student revolt - that the system of modern 'societies' had lost its 'forward' orienta- tion and its quality as a universal training camp for ever-growing virtuosities, or 'qualifications' and 'competencies'.
In reality, the global system after 1945 simply carried out the neces- sary course correction. It eliminated the mode of revolution from its catalogue of operative options, instead deciding entirely on that of evolution. The appearance of neo-revolutionary discourses around 1968 was merely an expanded romanticism that appropriated such historical figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Brecht and Wilhelm Reich as ready-mades. In the principal current of the time, the gradualness party came to power once more - led by an elite of determined professional evolutionaries. Behind the exterior of the general anti-revolutionary mood, which articulated itself discursively as anti-totalitarianism or anti-fascism, lay a return to the progressive traditions of the Baroque and the Enlightenment, whose pragmatic core is the relatively con- stant, rationally supervised expansion of human options. In order to take part in these optimization movements, it was no more necessary for progress to be writ large than to feign belief in the goddess of history.
The development of the Western civilizatory complex after 1945 seems to provide almost complete confirmation for the moderate. It led to the saturation of one's surroundings with easily accessible means of world improvement for most. Their distribution occurred partly through free markets, partly through services of the redistribu- tive state and the overgrown insurance system - the two apolitical operationalizations of the solidarity principle, which do more for the practical implantation of leftist motifs than any political ideology could.
The most important intellectual-historical realignment, however, lay in the fact that metanoia changed its direction yet again: after an era of bloody slogans and malign abstractions, the commonplace seemed like something one could 'bring back' once more. Countless people realized that the here and now was a remote island on which they had never set foot. This supplied one of the preconditions for the rediscovery of the ethical distinction in its original form - the distinction between concern for oneself and attention to everything else. Nothing was more helpful for the disenchanted revolutionaries than the re-actualization of this distinction. In Jean-Luc Godard's film
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utters time: 'One not save by saving a
militant youth movements, a creature that had been absent from the scene for a long time resurfaced: the adult. Its reappearance gave life to offensive pragmatisms that filled empty word-shells like 'democ- racy', 'civil society' or 'human rights' with actual content. Thus the awareness of what had been achieved was accompanied by a broad agenda outlining the next optimization steps for countless targets of progressive praxis. Today, this is the real working form of a decen- tralized international that articulates itself in tens of thousands of projects in the traditions of world improvement elan - without any central committee that would have to, or even could, tell the active what their next operations should be. 141
The all-pervasive pragmatism of the post-war years must not, therefore, be dismissed as restoration, as the eternal Jacobins would like. Nor does it express any return to modesty. In reality, the complex of Western 'societies' under the leadership of the USA has constantly raised the level of economic and technical evolution since the 1960s - to the point where the ability of populations to keep up with their fleeting financial and media system became problematic. This became manifest primarily after the neo-liberal coup against the semi-socialism of the 'mixed economy' that dominated the West after 1945 until the Thatcherist-Reaganist caesura of the late 1970s. 142 Through this aggravation of the climate, global capitalism transpired as the agency of 'permanent revolution' demanded in vain by the ideologues of the communist command-based economy. The mixed economy was popular as long as a capitalism domesticated by the welfare state could present itself as the power that more or less kept the promises of declared socialism. In the meantime, the accelerated permanent revolution known for the last twenty years as 'globalism' is compelling countless people to work once more on the expansion of their passivity competence - much to the displeasure of the last devotees of 'permanent revolution' in Europe, who dream incessantly of the lost comfort of Rhine Capitalism. 143 Exposed to the cruelties of the expanded world market, they feel the compulsion to have an operation again - this time to improve their competing fitness on the now unpredictable world markets. In the great financial crisis of 2008, however, the necessity of having operations also caught up with the operators.
The supra-epochal tendency of modernity towards a de-verticali- zation of existence continued under the present conditions. At the
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immune systems through some of
larism. This is the origin of the widespread new interest 'religious' and spiritual traditions - and the discreetly reawakening awareness of vertical imperatives. In fact, a resolute anti-verticalism established itself in the dominant forms of the zeitgeist after 1945: in existen- tialism as the cult of finitude, in vitalism as the cult of overexertion, in consumerism as the cult of metabolism, and in tourism as the cult of changing location. In this de-spirited time, top athletes took over the role of guarding the holy fire of exaggeration. They are the Dbermenschen of the modern world, beheaded Dbermenschen who strive to reach heights where the old human being cannot follow them - not even within themselves. It is the inner androids that now constantly exceed themselves. All that the old human being inside the athletes themselves can offer is a dull commentary on the perform- ances of the Dber-androids they embody.
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The Critique o f Repetition
Damned to Distinguish Between Repetitions
The ethical distinction took effect from the moment in which repeti- tion lost its innocence. The appearance of ascetics and asceticisms in the twilight of the advanced civilizations revealed a difference that had not been open to explicit development in earlier stages of civili- zation: in choosing to withdraw, the early practising ethicists broke with the conventional forms and attitudes of life. They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes - not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordi- nary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together - or not at all. 'The whole man must move at once. '
The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philoso- phers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehen- sive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts
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EXERCISES AND
up,
rises up as a new construction on
favourable repetition.
A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers
showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as con- trolled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception - it is the eternal recurrence of the cliches that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce 'characters'. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the nega- tion of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: 'La betise n'est pas mon fort. ' [Stupidity is not my strong suit. ] They would be the human who had killed the mari- onette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental de- automatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliche depot - a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras sup- posedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: 'Every char- acteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. '144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.
This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
lmmerse
costly is, now, point.
matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discov- ery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground - the average mortals will cling nonethe- less to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.
The Creature that Cannot Practise
In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of ren- dering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area - that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics' experi- ments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spiritu- ales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud - triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house - ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99. 9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The
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IS to one IS original plenty others. If one to more
self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one's own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.
In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athe- matic rhythms, rules and rituals - regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non- mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.
Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise - if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being's dispo- sition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the neces- sary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies - this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superflu- ous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: 'A single winter relaxed Hannibal's fibre.