No More Learning

34. Karlheinz Weifimann, Schwarze Fahnen, Runenzeichen: Die Entwicklng der poli-
tischen Symbolik der deutschen Rechten zwischen 1890 und 1945 (Black flags, rune symbols: the development of political symbolism of the German right between 1890 and 1945) (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1991).
35. Cf. Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken? Fine Untersuchung zur Risikoverar- beiung in der Wirtschaft (What is it that banks trade? an investigation into the
239
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processing of risk in the economy), intro. Niklas Luhmann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1991).
36. See Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Uber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune
(On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer Verlag, 1992); "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch-und Massenkulture," in Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Logic of collection: at the end of the age of the museum) (Munich: Hanser, 1997); and Politik der Unsterblichkeit. Vier Gesprache mit Thomas Knoefel (Politics of immortality: four conversations with Thomas Knoefel) (Munich: Hanser, 2002).
37. See the section "The new as the valuable other," in Groys, Uber das Neue, 42-43. 38. For a systematic examination of the art world, see Beat Wyss, Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem (From image to the system of art) (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2006),
1:117-284.
39. Heiner Muhlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen. Entwurf einer kulturgenetischen
Theorie (The Nature of civilizations: An attempt of a culture-dynamic theory)
(Vienna: Springer, 1996).
40. Quoted by Ernst Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg 1917-1945. Nationalsozial-
ismus und Bolschewismus (The European civil war, 1917-1945: National Socialism
and Bolshevism), 6th ed. (Munich: Herbig, 2000), 339.
41. Quoted in Read, Lenin, 178.
42. See Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt. Philosophischer Extremis-
mus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Exit from the disenchanted world: philosophical
extremism between the world wars) (Munich: Fink, 1989), 13-20.
43. According to Stalin, the Communist Party had three to four thousand highest leaders ("the generals of our party"). Additionally, there were thirty to forty- thousand middle leaders ("our party officers") and a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand lower command personnel ("the sergeants of our party").
44. According to a consulted source, this hunnish thesis is attributed to Grigorij Sinowjew, one of Lenin's closest confidants. At a party meeting in Petrograd on
September 17, he declared, "We have to win over ninety of the one hundred mil- lion citizens of Soviet Russia. We should not speak to the others; we extermi- nate them. " According to a newspaper article, Sinowjew's speech was very well received. Quoted in Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg, 89, 513-14.
45. Cf. Alexander Jakowlew, Die Abgrundemeines Jahrhunderts. Eine Autobiographie
(The abysses of my century: an autobiography) (Leipzig: Faber und Faber, 2003),
154-55.
46. This is still depicted in the postcommunist literature, e. g. , in the satirical novel
about the Putin era by Victor Pelewin, Die Dialektik der Ubergangsperiode von 240
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
Nirgendwoher nach Nirgendwohin (The dialectics of the transitional period from
nowhere to nowhere) (Munich: Luchterhand, 2004).
47. The thesis that Lenin inaugurated fascism was developed during the 1950s by
such Soviet scholars as the Nobel laureate in physics Lew Davidowitsch Landau. After his mysterious encounter with Stalin in July 1935, Romain Rolland was the figurehead of Western pro-Sovietism. At the end of the 1920s he noted that com- munism had created fascism insofar as fascism was nothing but a "reverse Bol- shevism" (un bolchevisme au rebours). See Francois Furet, Le passe d'une illusion. Essai sur Videe Communiste au XXe siecle (Paris: Laffont 1995), 321. Antonio Negri admits that even today certain varieties of populism and fascism are deformed descendents of socialism; see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin 2004), 255. Landau's thesis is more radical and fitting than that of Rolland and Negri, because it iden- tifies Leninism not only "dialectically," as a provocation of fascism, but as its prototype.
48. Camus, The Rebel, 142.
49. Bukharin emphatically praised the affiliates of the Cheka, which returned from
their "horrible work" as "ruins of themselves. " Brecht's didactic play Die Mass- nahme (The Measures Taken) from 1930 reveals how important the mobiliza- tion of the willingness to kill was for communism. It rehearses the freedom of being allowed to kill and the embarrassment of having to kill in the service of revolutionary necessity. In a related sense, Andre Malraux shows in the opening scene of La condition humaine (1933) that the hero reaches a state of intoxication with revolutionary activism through engaging in murder. Concerning Brecht, see Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge Mass. : MIT Press, 200. 6), 260-61. During his notorious speech from October 4,1943, which was presented in the golden hall of the palace in Posen, Heinrich Himmler attempted to inculcate upon ninety-two SS officers that the German elite troops still had to catch up to the level of Soviet commissionaires when it came to an appropriate ability to kill. He believed that the Soviet functionaries assigned with the task of killing massively were twenty years ahead. In 2001 Robert Kaplan, who is a Leninist without knowing so, recommended in his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Vintage, 2003) that the American govern- ment do away with the Judeo-Christian morality of an unconditional protection of life. In light of coming tasks it should rather adopt a lethal "pagan" mentality. Charles Krauthammer and other neoconservative ideologists describe the uni- lateralism of the United States, which is ready to kill, a little more discreetly as "democratic realism. "
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? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
50. Cf. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1996), 187-212.
51. On the readjustment of cultural norms after phases marked by excessive stress, see Miihlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen, 50-97.
52. The Comintern did not shy away from any form of exaggeration in the ideologi- cal competition against the moderate rage-collecting systems on the left: up until the late 1920s their supporters still thought that it was morally correct and politi- cally useful to denounce the parliamentary socialists of Western countries as "social fascists. " The fatalism behind this manner of speaking has perhaps never been explicitly uncovered. After 1945 there were huge efforts to make everyone forget that the antifascist confession, which has been constitutive for the New Left during the second half of the twentieth century, started out as a movement against social democracy during the first half. In fact, Moscow attributed pri- mary importance to the "struggle against the socialist center" after 1919. This directive emphasized the anti-Menshevik line just like a compulsive neurosis of Bolshevism for purposes of foreign politics.
53. Quoted in Alexander Jakowlew, Die Abgrunde meines Jahrhunderts, 155.
54. Alexander Wat, My Century, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: New York Review
of Books, 2003), 22.
55. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (New York: Atheneum,
1970), 257.
56. This is the expression from the Manifesto of the Communist International
Addressed to the Global Proletariat, written in March 1919.
57. Kautsky's reply did not lack in resolution. See Karl Kautsky, Terrorismus und
Kommunismus. Ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution (Terrorism and communism: a contribution to the natural history of the revolution) (Berlin: Neues Vaterland, 1919). In this book he condemns Bolshevism as a "Tartar Socialism" and as an antisocialist regression to a state of barbarism.
58. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:394. "Hatred as well as the willingness to sacrifice both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. "
59. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europaischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (European revolutions and the character of nations) (Stuttgart: Kohl- hammer, 1951), 527.
60. Some time before his epochal speech at the twentieth Party convention of the KPdSU on Stalin's crimes and the devastations of his personal cult, Nikita Khrushchev made the astounding remark: "We have wasted the collected capi-
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tal of trust, which the people bring to the party. We cannot exploit the trust of the people indefinitely" (quoted in Jakowlew, Ein Jahrhundert der Gewalt in Rutland, 31). In this book I try to explain what capital was in fact at stake.
61. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2008), 12-14.
62. Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys, Die Kunst des Fliehens. Dialoge uber die Angst, das heilige Weifi und den sowjetischen Mull (The art of escaping: dialogues on anxiety, sacred whiteneness, and Soviet garbage) (Munich: Hanser, 1991), 61.
63. See Boris Groys, Die Eifindung Rufilands (The invention of Russia) (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1995), 14-15.
64. Karl Marx, Civil War in France (1871; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998), 47. This remark did not stop Marx from soon claiming the opposite in order to exces- sively praise the actors of the failed Paris Commune.
65. Concerning the figure "terror in one country," see Arno Mayer, The Furies: Vio- lence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N. J. : Princ- eton University Press, 2000), 13 and 607-701.
66. Cf. Heiner Miihlmann, MSC. Maximal Stress Cooperation. The Driving Force of Cultures (Vienna: Springer, 2005).
67. It is thus not completely harmless when Antonio Negri reaches the conclusion in Multitude that apart from the primary front of worker and capitalist there is "a potentially infinite amount of classes. " The simplified translation of fronts into an opposition of poor and rich as "classes" would not be without risks. In light of the background of communist terror the question needs to be raised whether it is not also the case in contemporary discourses that new combative collectives are assigned with an occult mandate to engage in bloody activities.
68. Cf. Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (The communist postscript) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006).
69. Cf. Simon Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Allison Busby, 1981), 20.
70. Sebastian Haffher, Der neue Krieg (The new war) (Berlin: Alexander, 2000), 60.
71. See Mao Zedong's key text, "On Protracted War," in The Art of War (El Paso: El
Paso Norte Press, 2005), 165-288.
72. Cf. Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjiet
Union (Holistic work of art Stalin: divided culture in the Soviet Union) (Munich:
Hanser, 1988). ^
73. Both reasons can be identified in the reactions of the Chinese to the disastrous
insights of the great biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday: Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). The government prohibited
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? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
the publication of the book in China; patriotic Chinese intellectuals also reject it, judging from first impressions, as an external interference in intra-Chinese mat- ters. The civilizational implications of this reaction go deep. They are ultimately directed against the import of a victim-centric ethics; that is, if the Chinese do not ask about the victims of Mao's politics inside of the country, emigrants are not supposed to have the right to force such questions on them, particularly not intrusive historians and Western observers. The official terminology since 1981 in China is that the heritage of Mao is 70 percent good and 30 percent bad; this elides the 60 to 70 million lost human lives for which Maoism has been respon- sible since 1949. These lives are seen as a burden that can be surmounted only through the autochthonous art of taking stock.
74. Xuewu Gu, "List und Politik" (Cunningness and politics), in Die List (Cunning- ness), ed. Harro von Senger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 428-29.
75. Andre Glucksmann explicitly regretted his participation in the delusional Mao cult in France between 1968 and 1972 in his memoir Une rage d'enfant (Paris: Plon, 2006), 114-15.
76. A defense of "authentic Maoism," which is at the same time an impressive exam- ple of sovereign anachronism, is presented by Alain Badiou in his book Le siecle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 89-90.
77. Alexandre Dumas, The Count ofMonte Cristo (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 1203.
78. Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, 187.
79. Soren Kierkegaard, On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (1848). 80. Cf. Marx, Civil War in France, 98: "They have no ideals to realize, but to set free
the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. "
4. THE DISPERSION OF RA-GE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
1. Manfred Haettich, Zornige Burger. Vom Sinn und Ursinn des Protestierens (Angry
citizens: on sense and senselesness of protest) (Munich: Olzog, 1984).
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 88.
3. Cf. Henk Oosterlink, Radicale Middelmatigheid (Radical mediocracy) (Amster-
dam: Boom, 2002).
4. Additionally there was a second form of "theory": the official state philosophy
of Marxism and Leninism that was taught in all the countries of the Eastern bloc, a unity of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific
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? 4. THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
communism, an amalgam that was so boring that its pupils only remember it
as frightening.
5. Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard
University Press, 2001). Negri's betrayal of the totem of the classical left extends to a point where he delegates it to the other political camp: "The old mole of reactionary thought resurfaces again," he states in a polemic against Huntington (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York: Penguin 2004], 34).
6. Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Derrida, un egyptien.
Leprobleme de la pyramide juive (Der- rida, an Egyptian: the problem of the Jewish pyramid) (Paris: Editions Maren Sell, 2006). In German: "Derrida, ein Agypter. Uber das Problem der jiidischen Pyramide," lecture for the memorial conference Un jour Derrida, Centre Pom- pidou, Paris, November 21, 2005.
7. Cf. Boris Groys, Privatizations; or, The Artificial Paradise of Post-Communism, catalogue for the exhibition Privatizations: Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe, May-June 2004, ed. Revolver (Frankfurt: Archive for Contemporary Art, 2005), 7-15.
8. Cf. Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (The communist postscript) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006).
9. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Goodbye Fortschritt: Das heilige Feuer der Unzufrieden- heit" ("Good-bye progress: the holy flame of dissatisfaction"), in Das neue Den- ken, das Neue denken. Ethik, Energie, Asthetik (The new thinking, thinking the new: ethics, energy, aesthetics), ed. Utz Claasen and Jiirgen Hogrefe (Gottingen: Steidl, 2005), 69-70.
10. See Hans-Joachim Stadermann, Die Fesselung des Midax. Eine Untersuching ueber den Aufstieg und Verfall der Zentralbankkunst (The captivation of Midax: an investigation on the rise and fall of the art of central banking) (Tubingen: Mohr, 1993).
11. The synergy between the deceleration of collapse and the mobilization of com- pensatory efforts is, to be sure, today suspended in a sensitive subsystem of capi- talist nation-states: more and more citizens of European countries are beginning to understand that the welfare state resembles a pyramid scheme, especially with regard to its central construction of retirement systems. In this system, senior citizens, the original investors, take their heavy returns, while the players of the third round are eaten by the dogs. Furthermore, the~national budgets of most countries to a large extent resemble Ponzi schemes whose stability rests on the quasi-religious incapacity of the creditors to imagine a state that is unable to pay
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(even though the insolvency crises of Russia and Argentina have confirmed that
even the unthinkable happens).
12. Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography ofAndrew Carnegie (1920; New York: Cosimo
Classics, 2005), 280.
13. Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (Jacques Offen-
bach and the Paris of his time) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994).
14. Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (Lon-
don: Pantheon, 2003), 112.
15. See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 227.
16. Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, "Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Rene Girards
anthropologischer Sendung" (Awakening in the realm of envy: a note on Rene Girard's anthropological mission), afterword to Ich sah den Satan fallen wie einen Blitz. Eine kritische Apologie des Christentums {I See Satan Falling Like Lightning), by Rene Girard (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2002), 241-54. Slavoj Zizek also addresses the perverse structure of the new enjoyment imperative in many parts of his work.
17. In Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistik. Historische Alternativen des 21. Jahrhundens (Utopistics: historical choices of the twenty-first century) (Vienna: Promedia, 2002), postulates the emergence ofa postcapitalist order because ofabstract systemic considerations. However, all concrete references to the modus operandi are miss- ing. Concerning the solar-political turn, see Herman Scheer, Solare Weltwirschaft. Strategie fur die okologische Moderne (Solar world economy: strategy for the eco- logical modernity), 5th ed. (Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 2002); and Scheer, Ener-
gieautonomie. Eine neue Politikfur erneuerbare Energien (Energy autonomy: a new
politics of renewable energies) (Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 2005).
18. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert? Unterwegs zu einer Kri- tik der extremistischen Vernunft" (What happened in the twentieth century? on the way to a critique of extremist reason), inaugural lecture for the Emmanuel Levinas Chair, Strasbourg, March 4, 2005; and Peter Sloterdijk and Hans-Jiirgen
Heinrichs, Die Sonne und der Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen (Sun and death:
dialogical investigations) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 304-20.
19. Oskar Lafontaine, who published a book called Die Wut wachst (Anger grows) (Munich: Econ, 2002), a few years ago, achieves success in the elections in the fall of 2005 for the German leftwing party. This success foreshadows how the chronically weak articulations of complaints of the unemployed, badly paid, and
marginalized could again provide for a nucleus of self-affirmations.
20. Jean Baudrillard, "Nique ta mere! Voitures brulees et non au referendum sont les
phases d'une meme revolte encore inachavee," Liberation, November 18, 2005. 246
? 4. THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
21. Concerning the motif of "immigrants in their own country" or postmodern nations as asylums for natives, see Sloterdijk and Heinrichs, Die Sonne, 188-89.
22. Hans Magnus Enzensberger Ausichten aufden Burgerkrieg (Expectations of civil war) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 32.
23. Ibid. , 48-49.
24. Ibid. , 52.
25. Some psychotlierapeutics explain that even strongly destructive tendencies are
reversible in the case ofbearers of fanatic feelings of hatred ifthose who are affected with these feelings are given ample opportunities to make compensatory positive experiences; see Carl Goldberg, "Terrorism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective,"
in Terrorism, Jihad, and Sacred Vengeance^ ed. Jerry Piven, Chris Boyd, and Henry Lawton (Giessen: Psychosozial, 2004), 212-13. It is uncertain whether this is also the case for the phenomena of amorphous negativism alluded to here. For the countless recruits of militant Islam the information provided by therapeutics does not apply. On the one hand, this much-cited hatred practically does not play a role for them; it is only a code and an infectious habitus, not a personal feeling. More recent social-psychological surveys in the United States have even reached the conclusion that terrorists are less neurotic than the average population. On the other hand, these large groups do not constitute potential patients but politi-
cal challengers who have to be answered with exclusively political means.
26. See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for
the World Economy (New York: Free Press, 2002), 1-48.
27. See Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in
Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
28. See Thomas Pany, "Die Fiirsten des IV. Weltkriegs. US-Think-Tanks und das
Netzwerk der Neokonservativen" (The lords of World War IV: U. S. think tanks and the network of neoconservatives), part 1, Telepolis, April 28,2003. In Western camps the talk of a Fourth World War has been conceived by neoconservative authors such as Eliot Cohen, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz as a catch phrase for the necessity of an encompassing war plan against political Islam. It should be remembered that the term "World War IV" has been used before by Subcommander Marcos from Chiapas in Mexico to refer to "globalization" as a major offensive of capital against the global poor.
29. Avi Primor, Terror als Vorwand (Terror as a pretense) (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2004), 29. ~~^
30. Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen (Sons and global power: terror within the rise and fall of nations) (Zur- ich: Orell Fussli, 2003), 31.
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? 4. THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
31. On the logic of readymades outside and inside of the art world, see Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Uber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune (On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer, 1992).
32. Concerning the genocidal potentials of the twenty-first century, especially in the Near East, see Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht. The same author dryly remarks: "let's give the next twenty Nobel Peace Prizes to those people who come up with an idea of dissolving the tensions without using violence! "
33. Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmach, 72-112.
34. Concerning the political and cultural creativity of modern Christianity, see
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europaischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (European revolutions and the character of nations), (Stuttgart: Kohl- hammer, 1951).
35. Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht, 24-25.
CONCLUSION: BEYOND RESENTMENT
1. Cf. Amartya Sen, La democratie des autres: Pourquoi la liberte Westpas une inven-
tion de VOccident (Paris: Payot and Rivages).
2. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1690; Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 1988).