No More Learning

No wonder that the do-gooder of the present instinctively shies away from the sublime as if he sensed the ancient danger in it. The way in which the modern appreciation of effort is enlisted is even more threatening. The partisans of the tearfully communicative eros lament and defy this allegedly inhumane principle not without a sense for the stra- tegic position they are in. 17
The task is thus to regain a psychology of self-confidence and self- assertion. Such a psychology needs to do more justice to the psychodynamic conditions of our existence. This presupposes a correction to the erotologi- cally partitioned conception of the human being, which characterizes the horizons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, what is needed is a radical distancing from the ways of conditioning the Western psyche that have deeply engraved us, in the older religious form or in the younger metamorphoses. Most important, we need to distance ourselves from the blatant ideology that results from the Christian anthropology according to which the human being is a sinner, an animal that is sick with pride, one that can only be saved through faithful humility.
Clearly, a movement that would distance itself from these phenomena would not be easy to bring about. Although the phrase "God is dead" is
18
? INTRODUCTION
already looked up by journalists on a regular basis, the theistic resources of humility continue to exist in democratic consensualism without being seriously endangered. It is quite possible to let God die and yet continue to have quasi-god-fearing people. Even if it is the case that most contemporary people have been carried off by antiauthoritarian currents, even if they have learned to express their own need for recognition, from a psychological point of view they continue to depend on a relationship of semi-rebellious obedience with regard to the lord who takes care of them. They demand "respect" and do not want to give up on the advantages of dependence. It would be even harder for them to emancipate themselves from the con- cealed bigotry of psychoanalysis. They continue to believe dogmatically that even the most powerful of human beings cannot be more than a conscious sufferer of his love-sick condition, which goes by the name of neurosis. The future of these illusions is secured by the big coalition: Christianity and psy- choanalysis can successfully defend their claim of outlining the horizon of human knowledge so long as they understand this monopoly as providing a definition for the human condition as characterized by a constitutive lack, a lack that used to be known as "sin. " Whenever lack is in power, the "ethics of indignity" has the word.
Hence, as long as both of these smart systems of bigotry dominate the scene, our understanding of the thymotic dynamic of human existence remains covered up for both individuals and political groups. Thus access to studying the dynamics of self-assertion and rage in psychic and social systems is practically blocked. In this situation we are constantly forced to grasp thymotic phenomena by way of the inappropriate concepts of eroti- cism. Under conditions of such a bigoted blockade, the direct intention never really comes to the fore because it is only possible to approach the facts by way of distorted traits. At least the underlying traits are, in spite of the erotic misconception, never fully covered up. Once we have called this dilemma by its name it becomes clear that it can only be overcome through the underlying conceptual apparatus.
THEORY OF THE PRIDE ENSEMBLE
POLITICAL SCIENCE OR, BETTER, THE ART OF THE PSYCHOPOLITICAL steering of the community, has had to suffer most from the thoroughly practiced but mistaken approach of psychological anthropology in the West. This approach misses a whole set of axioms and concepts that would
19
? INTRODUCTION
be appropriate for the nature of its object. What from the vantage point of thymotics is seen unmistakably as the primary condition cannot be pre- sented directly through the detour around available erotodynamic con- cepts. At this point let me mention the six most important principles that can serve as the point of origin for a theory of thymotic unities:
? Political groups are ensembles; they endogenously stand in relationships of thymotic tension
? Political actions are started through a decrease in the tension between cen- ters of ambition
? Political fields are formed through the spontaneous pluralism of auto- affirmative forces; the relationships among these forces change because of interthymotic frictions
? Political opinions are conditioned and steered through symbolic opera- tions that present a sustained relationship to the thymotic emotions of collectives
? Rhetoric, the doctrine of controlling affects in political ensembles, is applied thymotics
? Power struggles within political bodies are always also struggles for priority between thymotically charged, ambitious individuals and their following; the art of the political thus includes the process of compensating losers
If one presupposes a natural pluralism of thymotic power centers, one needs to investigate their relationships according to their specific field regularities. Whenever real force-force relationships are at stake, reference to the self-love of the actors does not help us get further--or if it does, it is only with regard to subordinated aspects. Instead, it needs to be stated first that political units (conventionally understood as peoples and their subgroups) are, from the perspective of systems theory, "metabolic quanti- ties. " They continue to exist only as producing and consuming entities that convert stress and fight with enemies and other entropic factors. It is strik- ing that to the present day, thinkers formed by Christianity and psycho- analysis have trouble admitting that freedom is a concept that only makes sense within the framework of a thymotic conception of the human being. Economists zealously recite the doctrines of the latter thinkers, situating the human being as the consuming animal in the center of their appeals-- according to which they only want to see human freedom as the choice of feeding dishes.
20
? INTRODUCTION
Through metabolic activities heightened inner achievements in a vital system become stabilized, at the physical as well as at the psychological level. The phenomenon of warm-bloodedness is its most impressive embodiment. With it, the emancipation of the organism from surrounding temperatures was accomplished approximately at the "half-time of evolution"--the bio- logical departure to being able to move freely. Everything depends on one's ability to freely move, an ability that will later be called freedom, with all its different connotations. From a biological perspective, freedom means the ability to actualize the entire potential of the spontaneous movements that are specific to an organism.
The separation of the warm-blooded organism from the primacy of its milieu finds its mental counterpart in the thymotic impulse of the indi- vidual as much as it does so in that of groups. As a moral, warm-blooded animal, the human being is dependent on keeping up a certain internal level of self-esteem. This also initiates a tendency toward disassociating the "organism" from the primacy of the milieu. Whenever proud impulses assert themselves, there arises on the psychological plane an inner-outer gradient on which the inner, self-pole naturally has the higher frequency. If one prefers nontechnical parlance, one can contradict the same con- ception by showing that human beings share an innate sense for the dig- nity of justice. Every political organization of communal life has to honor this intuition.
Part of the business of morally complex systems--that is, cultures--is the self-stimulation of its actors through an elevation of thymotic resources such as pride, ambition, the need for recognition, indignation, and the sense of justice. Units of this kind cultivate throughout the conduct of their lives locally specific values that can lead to the use of universal dialects. Empiri- cal research can convincingly prove how successful ensembles will keep their form through a higher inner frequency--but what is noteworthy, by the way, is their frequently aggressive or provocative style of relating to the environment. The stabilization of self-confidence in such a group is subject to a body of regulations, which more recent theory of culture has called "decorum. "18 In a victorious culture, decorum is understandably measured according to the polemic values to which it owes its previous successes. This is the reason for the close liaison between pride and victory in societies that have emerged out of successful battles. Groups that are moved by the dynamics of pride often enjoy being disliked by their neighbors and rivals so long as this provides strength for their feeling of sovereignty.
21
? INTRODUCTION
As soon as the stage of initial ignorance among various metabolic col- lectives has passed, that is, once the mutual unwillingness to recognize one another has lost its innocence, they inevitably enter a situation of being forced to compare themselves and to establish a relationship. This leads to the discovery of a dimension that can be called, in a broad sense, for- eign politics. As a consequence of their becoming a reality for one another, the collectives begin to understand one another as coexisting quantities. Through this consciousness of coexistence foreigners are experienced as chronic stress factors, and a society's relationship to them needs to be con- verted into institutions--usually this takes the form of conflict prepara- tion or diplomatic efforts. From this point onward, each group reflects its own desire for being seen as valuable in the manifest recognition of the others. The poisons of neighborhood slowly seep into these mutually relating ensembles. Hegel discussed this form of moral reflection with the influential concept of recognition. He thus anticipates a powerful source of satisfaction or fantasies of satisfaction. That he at the same time named the origin of countless irritations becomes evident from the nature of the subject matter. On the field of the struggle for recognition, the human being becomes a surreal animal that risks its life for a colored scrap, a flag, a chalice.
Recognition would be better described anew as primarily a matter of interthymotic relationships. What contemporary social philosophy dis- cussed with varying success under the heading "intersubjectivity" often means just the opposition and the interplay of thymotic centers of tension. Where common intersubjectivism is used to present the transactions among actors in psychoanalytic and thus ultimately erotodynamic concepts, from now on it is more advisable to move on to a thymotologic theory of mutual effects and actions of multiple ambition agencies. Although ambitions can be modified by way of erotic affects, taken for themselves they originate in an idiosyncratic center of impulsiveness and can only be understood from the perspective of this center.
GREEK PREMISES, MODERN STRUGGLES: THE THEORY OF THYMOS
FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF SUCH PHENOMENA IT IS USEFUL, as I have already indicated, to go back to the far-sighted formulations in the philosophical psychology of the Greeks. Thanks to the studies of the neo-
22
? INTRODUCTION
classical Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss and his school (which have largely and unjustly been claimed by political neoconservatives in the United States), it is again today possible to pay attention to the bipolar dynamics of the human psyche acknowledged and investigated by the great Greek think- ers. Strauss created a situation in which we become aware, apart from Plato the erotologist and author of the Symposium, of Plato the psychologist of self-respect. 19
In book 4 of the Republic, Plato presents an outline of a theory of thy- mos of great psychological richness and extensive political importance. The impressive achievement of Plato's interpretation of thymos consists in a per- son's ability to be infuriated. This turn against oneself can come about when a person does not live up to the expectations that would have to be satisfied in order for that person not to lose self-respect. Plato's discovery thus con- sists in pointing out the moral significance of intense self-disrespect. This manifests itself in a twofold way: First, it expresses itself in shame, an affec- tive, all-encompassing mood that completely fills the subject. Second, this rage-drenched self-reproach takes on the form of an inner appeal to one- self. The act of being dissatisfied with oneself proves to the thinker that the human being has an inert, even if only obscure idea of what is appropriate, of what is just and worthy of praise. When not living up to this idea, a part of the soul, that is, thymos, lodges an appeal. With this turn to self-refusal the adventure of independence begins. Only he who is able to disapprove of himself is able to control himself.
The Socratic-Platonic conception of thymos presents a milestone on the way to the moral domestication of rage. It is situated halfway between wor- ship of quasi-divine Homeric menis and the stoic dismissal of wrathful and intensive impulses. Thanks to Plato's theory of thymos, civil and militant impulses receive the right to remain in the philosopher's city. Because the polis that is governed by reason also needs the military, which is introduced here as the group of guardians, civilized thymos is allowed to remain within the city walls in the spirit of protection. Plato insists upon the recognition of protective virtues as powers that constitute society in many different ways. Still, in the late dialogue Politicus, which deals with the skills required for statesmanship, the well-known allegory of the weavers underlines the necessity of creating the spiritual web of the "state" by interlacing prudent disposition and courageous attitude.
Aristotle also mentions the advantages of rage. His evaluation of this affect is surprisingly positive, at least insofar as it is coupled with courage.
23
? INTRODUCTION
Legitimate rage still has an "ear for reason,"20 even if it often storms off like an overly hasty servant who does not listen until the end of his orders. It becomes a vice only if it appears together with a lack of abstinence, that is, when it leads to excess. "Rage is necessary. Nothing can be achieved with- out it. Nothing can be achieved when it does not fulfill the soul and ani- mate courage. One should, to be sure, not make it into a leader. Rather one should only take it to be a comrade-in-arms. "21
Given that the thymos that has been conditioned by civilization is the psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a striving for recognition,22 it becomes clear why the lack of recognition by relevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specific opponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects this test, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feels disrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied (which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if I deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that I have reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, which situated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wise person is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because the individual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second, because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep her- self free from all that does not depend on herself.
Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to find one's self- worth resonating in the other. This desire could easily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself to become unhappy, one with a universal suc- cess rate if it were not for those dispersed cases of successful mutual recog- nition. Lacan probably said what is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a grounding mirroring process, even though his models, prob- ably unjustly, situate early infantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in front of the mirror is more of a children's disease. But among adults the striving for reflection in the recognition of others often means the attempt to take possession of a will-o'-the-wisp--in philosophi- cal jargon: to instantiate oneself in what is insubstantial. Lacan's oeuvre moreover expresses the ambition to amalgamate the theory of thymos (as it was reformulated by Kojeve) with psychoanalytic eroticism. At the kernel of his project is the freebooting mixture of the Freudian death wish with Hegel's struggle for recognition. Through the introduction of foreign fac- tors Lacan exploded Freud's systematic edifice, but not without claiming that in truth the project meant a "return to Freud. "23
24
? INTRODUCTION
Without a doubt, the introduction of a thymotic element into psycho- analytic teaching pointed in the right direction. However, the initial con- sequence was the confusing growth of a performance that popularized the hybrid concept of desire (desir). With this concept, Lacan was also able to conceal his strong misjudgment of sexuality. To talk of "desire" was attrac- tive because it covered two phenomena that, although completely different in terms of their origin, could be connected because of their mutual rela- tionality. The confusion was as complete as it was welcome. It is telling that nowadays there are countless confusing "introductions to Lacan"; we are still waiting for a clear summary. As one can see, the reason is easy to point out: Lacan's contributions to the psychological knowledge of the present could only be reformulated by means of a framework in which the relation- ship of eroticism and thymotics is explained. However, as long as the theory that needs to be framed is intended to be itself the frame and measure, there is no end to the confusion.
NIETZSCHE'S INSTANT
LOOKING BACK AT THE HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AND IN particular its convulsive first half, one gets the impression that it saw the failure of the civilization of thymotic energies on all fronts. This means a failure of the project that Plato demanded, Aristotle praised, and the peda- gogues of the bourgeois age attempted to put into practice. If the goal of the political experiment of modernity consisted in translating the thymotic energies of the masses into political forms and in mobilizing these energies for standard "progress," we have to acknowledge a catastrophic failure. This has ultimately led to tearing down the experiments, regardless whether they were conducted under white, red, or brown flags.
To a large extent, this failure was caused by modern radicalisms that attempted, under idealistic as well as materialistic pretenses, to open up untraveled paths for collective rage, paths that were supposed to lead to sat- isfaction. Leaving modern institutions such as parliaments, courts, and pub- lic debates by the wayside, and in contempt of small escapes, these pathways resulted in huge releases of rage, resentment, and fantasies of extermination. They were excesses of previously unknown quantities that should finally be understood as what they were in terms of their psychopolitical quality: a chain of thymos catastrophes caused not only by the failure of the tradi- tional religious and civilized management of rage but by the organization
25
? INTRODUCTION
of a new politics of rage or, to put it more drastically, the organization of a novel economy of rage. It needs to be insisted on that the violence of the twentieth century did not "erupt" at any point in time. It was planned by its agents according to entrepreneurial criteria and controlled by its managers with long-term oversight for its objects. What at first sight appeared like the highest level of running amok in reality consisted of bureaucracy, party organization, routine, and the effects of organizational reflection.
Before focusing on the new economy of rage, the science of war and resentment, before considering this as the psychopolitical riddle of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche's unique position in the history of ideas should be pointed out. This author, who is as disturbing today as he ever was, introduced himself to his posterity as the "happy messenger with- out comparison. " At the same time he referred to himself as the "destroyer
par excellence. "24 From the "evangelical" perspective he speaks as the teacher of emancipated egoism. From his position as destroyer, he speaks as a war- lord who campaigns against morality as a means of domination used by the weak. Nietzsche exposed resentment and its modern repercussions as the fundamental affects of the metaphysical age. His self-consciousness was infused with the certainty that his great deed, exposing resentment as what it is, would divide human history in diametrically opposed periods, just as the Christian calendar divided the entirety of world history into the time before and the time after the birth of Christ. Nietzsche comments on this in his self-portrait, Ecce Homo, revealing a deliberate exposition of equanim- ity: "The concept of politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures from the old society will have exploded--they are all based on lies: there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. "25
My goal is not to applaud the prophet Nietzsche for having conceptual- ized the giant thymotic battles of the twentieth century in advance. Nor do I intend to once again spread out in what sense and based on which teachings Nietzsche was the most inspiring neo-thymotic psychologist of modernity. His fateful interpretation of Christian morality should rather be interpreted within the parameters set by the knowledge of our age as an act of revenge against life. Speaking about "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Our Experience," as Thomas Mann paradigmatically did in a rich essay in 1947, is not easy. It is not only because of political and technical evolution that the 120 years that separate us from the hysterical-lucid endgame of the author con- stitute an obstacle for interpretation. Perspectives have shifted significantly; in some cases, even issues of epochal consequence have been clarified.
26
? INTRODUCTION
Today, for example, we can perceive clearly that, in general, Nietzsche's ingenious analysis of resentment and, in particular, of the priesdike type of human being have been burdened by a mistake of address as well as a mis- take of dating. The wanderer of Eze and Sils-Maria condemned Christian- ity by means of a biblical pathos. At the time Christianity had for a long time already not represented an adequate object for such a vehement attack. It had already, particularly in its Protestant wing (which Nietzsche should have known better), mutated into a happy (Hfe-friendly), mild, and human- itarian-supernatural wellness enterprise. The only way it differed from its worldly competitors was in a couple of bizarre suprarational dogmas-- complemented by a metaphysically well versed euthanasia, the charms of Church music, and an old-style Sunday collection for the sake of the needy and, lest we forget, a penny for Africa. The fact that Catholicism presented itself after 1870 as being at the peak of its antimodern campaign does not change the general situation. All of its efforts on the theological and politi- cal fronts were only the effects of weakness: the flight of the pope into the dogma of infallibility, the mobilization of an external mission, the militant incitement of Marianic fervor, the condemning of liberal and secular books, the founding of ultramontane parties in the parliaments of the secular world. All of these actions revealed the frightful panic of a declining power. The most important symbols for the situation of the Catholic cause remained, despite everything, the expropriation of the church states through the young Italian nation as well as the retreat of the humiliated pope into the walls of the Vatican, where until 1929 he put on the face of a martyr. 26
At the same time, in the milieu of nationalism and internationalism new and acute breeding grounds for resentment emerged and were supported by an unknown type of clergy, the secular clergy of hate, who stormed against "existing conditions. " In defense of Nietzsche's honor, we may say that he was always a strong opponent of both of these tendencies. This does not change the fact that he was wrong about his main enemy and that his main problem consisted in his anachronistic judgment. If it truly was the resis- tance to resentment that constituted the highest priority of the age, then the "attack" (Abrechnung) on Christianity would have had to take a back- seat to the struggle against national-revolutionary and world-revolutionary "moodiness" (Muckertum), to use Nietzsche's term. In fact, "rage," which is a recurrent point of reference in Nietzsche's deduction of dominating morality from slavish reflexes, can also be applied to the most active move- ments of resentment ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its timeliness
27
? INTRODUCTION
is not exhausted by these considerations. On the basis of everything that we know today about what we might expect, we have to assume that the first half of the twenty-first century will also be characterized by large-scale con- flicts. These will be initiated by collectives of rage and by humiliated "civi- lizations. " This is yet one more reason to continue the work that Nietzsche started and to put on the agenda a more fundamental reflection on the causes and effects of rage in modernity.
What primarily needs to be kept in mind against Nietzsche's furious con- clusion is that the Christian era, taken as a whole, was not the age of practic- ing rage. It was an epoch in which an ethics of deferring rage was solemnly implemented. The reason for this is not difficult to identify: it lies in the Christian belief that the justice of God will one day, at the end of all time, ensure that moral actions will be rewarded and immoral actions punished. The prospect of a life after death has always been connected in the Chris- tian sphere of ideas with the expectation of a transhistorical act of balancing pain and suffering. The price for this ethics of abstaining from rage in the present for the sake of retribution in a world beyond was high--Nietzsche's judgment on this point was clear. He insisted on the generalization of a latent resentment that projected the postponed wish for revenge onto its counterpart, the anxiety of being condemned. It was projected into the cen- ter of belief, the teaching of last things. The punishment of arrogant people thus became for all eternity the condition for the ambivalent arrangement of men of goodwill with bad circumstances. The side effect of this arrange- ment was that those people who were good and humble themselves started to be afraid of what they attributed to omniscient evil. I will discuss this issue more extensively in the following chapter, which concerns the wrath of God and the establishment of a transcendent bank of vengeance.
PERFECTED CAPITALISM: AN ECONOMY OF GENEROSITY
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE "AGE OF EXTREMES," AS ERIC HOBSBAWM HAS characterized it,27 Georges Bataille began to draw from Nietzsche's psy- chological intuitions their economic consequences. He understood that Nietzsche's attempt to criticize morality, as a last consequence, necessitated a different economy. If one wants to understand morality in terms of thy- motic concepts, one needs to reform the economy in a thymotic way. But how could we conceive of an economic life not based on erotic impulses, that is, desire, greed, and impulsive consumption? What would an economy look
28
? INTRODUCTION
like were it based on thymotic impulses such as the desire for recognition and self-respect? How would we conceive of the introduction of pride into the capitaUst economy, an economy that openly confesses that it abides by the primacy of profit maximization, avarice, an overall unnoble motive that becomes justified even by its defenders only in reference to the claim that the entrepreneurial realist is himself condemned because of the vulgarity of the real. The axiom of everyday business, as is widely known, is that he who wants to come out of a nasty match the winner has to accept the rules of the game. Realism against this background means to be cool with one's cruelty.
The often cited revaluation of values could never approach its goal if it could not manage to show the facts of capitalist economy in a different light. There are two options for the introduction of pride into economy: either one needs to be willing to ruin oneself through ostentatious expendi- ture for the sake of the prestige of one's name, as did the aristocrats before the French Revolution, or one needs to find a post-aristocratic sovereign use of wealth. The question is thus: Is there an alternative to the blind accu- mulation of value? Is there an alternative to the chronic trembling in the instant of taking stock? Is there an alternative to the unrelenting compul- sion to pay off one's debts?
The search for the answer to these questions leads to a domain in which economic and moral facts are not easy to distinguish. The Nietzsche- inspired critic of the general economy discovers in the heart of common economic life the transformation of moral guilt through monetary debt. It is hardly necessary to state the obvious. The capitalist mode of economy could only have started its victory march because of this pragmatic trans- formation.
The time of guilt is characterized by the pursuit of a criminal by the consequences of his deeds. This time ends consequently with the atonement for the effects of the deeds. To be in debt means thus nothing less than to live through a time of compulsive repayment. However, while guilt makes one depressed, debts make one feel alive, at least as long as they appear together with entrepreneurial energy. 28 Guilt and debt have one decisive connecting trait: both make sure that the lives of those they affect remain bound by a knot created in the past. Jointly they create a retrogres- sive compulsive union, through which what has been retains its domina- tion over what will be.
To pay off and to pay back are acts that point back to the center of trans- actions. They are the objective operations that, when translated into sub- jective feeling, lead to resentment. If one traces the concept of resentment
29
? INTRODUCTION
to its material and economic sources, one finds the basic and original con- viction that nothing in the world can be gotten for free and that every step must be paid back to the last penny. Here economic thinking passes over into ontology, and ontology, into ethics. Being, which is intended to mean the sum of all transactions, secures a balance between what has been bor- rowed and what needs to be returned. In the spirit of macroeconomics, which was bewitched at the beginning of the metaphysical era by the idea of reimbursement, one can even interpret death as the repayment of a debt that the recipient of life has borrowed from the giver of life. The high- est articulation of this thought appears in an obscure sentence of Anaxi- mander that interprets the basic happening of Being as "reimbursement" (tisin didonai). 29 If one wants to understand the degree to which Nietzsche intervenes against the spirit of revenge, one needs to take into account that the author of Zarathustra attacks Anaximander himself. Nietzsche aims to efface Anaximander's proposition by stating its opposite: "Observe, there is no retribution. "30
The other economy is based on the thesis that the worth of paying back is a fiction that is rooted in the compulsive use of the schema of equal value. If one wants to leave the illusion of equivalence one needs to call into question the equals sign between what has been taken and what has been paid back. Moreover, one would have to interrupt the illusion of equal values in order to lend priority to a form of thinking with unequal values. In a transcapital- istic economy, the progressive, creative, giving, and excessive gestures need to become constitutive. Only operations that are engaged for the sake of the future have the power to explode the law of exchanging equivalences, by way of forestalling becoming-guilty and going into debt.
The moral pattern of this new capitalism is the psychologically unlikely but morally indispensable gesture of forgiving someone who is guilty. With this gesture the primacy of the past in a victim-perpetrator relationship is canceled out. The victim supersedes his humanly plausible and psychody- namically legitimate wish for revenge and returns to the perpetrator the freedom to make a new beginning. Wherever this happens, the chain of revenge, the economy of payback, is broken. Through recognizing the inev- itable imbalance between guilt and atonement, the person who was harmed once again finds freedom. The time after forgiving can thus gain the quality of an enriching new beginning. With forgiveness, the antigravitational ten- dency of human coexistence gains the upper hand; antigravitation is move- ment for the sake of increasing unlikeliness.
30
? INTRODUCTION
In the material sector, the corresponding act is the voluntary offering that is not rooted in having good credit and that does not entail any specific duty on the part of the recipient. The same gesture can manifest itself in the form of debt relief or as the renunciation of the violent collection of an open debt. This also violates the primacy of revenge and the compulsion to pay back. The essence of the gift consists in extending the scope of freedom on the side of the receiver. The gesture is at times augmented to the point of festive generosity, when the giver and the receiver are for a moment con- nected through joint exaltation, a feeling that can possibly have long-lasting consequences. It stimulates the pride of the recipients to think over what would be an adequate response. It reaches its highest degree in donations to beneficiaries who are not close in time and space to the giver and thus cannot return anything--Nietzsche designed for this form of exaltation the interesting name "love of those most remote" (Fernstenliebe). These acts of "giving virtue" leave it up to the future to do with the gift whatever it can and wants. Whereas the common economy that is dictated by the "lower Eros" is based on the affects of wanting to have, the thymotic economy is based on the pride of those that are free enough to give.
Bataille traces in Nietzsche's writing the contours of an economy of pride in which the concept of investment is radically modified. While typical investors use their means in order to get back more than they invest, other people invest their resources to satisfy their pride and to attest to their good fortune. Both impulses make it impossible for the providers to expect gains in the same currency, while gains in reputation and pride are completely legitimate and desirable.
However paradoxical this behavior might appear, the economy of pride is founded on the conviction of its participants of their meaningful investments--admittedly only after other dealings have been satisfied. In 1900, the great sponsor Andrew Carnegie expressed this circumstance in a classical expression: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. " This is a sentence that the ordinary wealthy person is careful not to cite. From the perspective of experienced givers, holding onto inherited or achieved wealth can only be judged a missed opportunity of expenditure. Whereas the usual types of businessmen can increase, with a bit of luck, their assets or that of their shareholders, this different breed of investor can add new lights to the splendor of the world. Through their dealings, and in how they handle them, they elevate their very existence to splendor. Whoever enjoys this splendor understands that value only comes into being when one, by way of giving
31
? INTRODUCTION
everything one has, attests to the existence of things beyond all value; this "constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself [and] has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity. "31 The second kind of rich people refrain from the stupidity of accumulation without purpose or goal. They do with their assets things an animal that only wants to have more and more could never achieve. They associate themselves with the power of antigravitation: they change the course of things such that vulgar acts are always more likely to occur.
One has to be careful not to romantically misunderstand Bataille's incite- ments concerning a universal economy. These ideas do not at all aim at the introduction of a communism for rich people. They also do not point to an aristocratic redistribution of goods in social-democratic or socialist soci- eties. The true significance of these ideas consists in instituting a cleavage within capitalism in order to create its most radical--and only fruitful-- opposite. This is different from the traditional conception of the left, a left that has been overpowered by its own depiction of everything as miserable.
If one takes Marx at his word, it becomes clear that the motive for the turn of capitalism against itself was not foreign to him. In contrast, he believed that only the "completion" of the transformation of everything by capitalism could bring about a new form of economy. The possibility of a turn with the name "revolution" is produced by evolution itself. The whole fatal nature of Marxism consists in its undecidability with regard to the question of how much time the capitalist process will in the end need in order to produce the preconditions for a postcapitalist transformation of wealth. Seen from today's perspective, it is self-evident that the big match of capital had, by about 1914, already been played only until about halftime. A long series of intensifications, conflicts, and unraveling still lay ahead. Thus it was still far from being able to transcend itself for the sake of a successive formation. The leaders of the Russian as well as the Chinese revolutions were completely wrong when they claimed Marxist theory for themselves. Both political enterprises created amalgamations of political fundamental- ism and aggressive opportunism. Through this combination they lost every sense of economic success, evolution, and necessary temporal order. While the postcapitalistic situation could only be imagined according to Marx's essential writings as the ripe fruit of a capitalism developed "to the end," Lenin and Mao made the principle of the terroristic abuse of unripe condi- tions into the key to success. Their theories revealed what the term "pri- macy of politics" implies in its radical interpretation.
32
? INTRODUCTION
One needs to admit that behind the concept of a "perfected capitalism," a long list of unwanted surprises awaits the interpreter, a list no less true today than it was during the time of Marx and Lenin. This concept requires from those who use it a degree of insight into the still unrealized potentials of economic, technical, and cultural evolution, which for understandable reasons the revolutionary leaders could not yet have achieved. At the same time, it demands from those who suffer from the game a degree of patience, a degree that cannot be reasonably expected if one knows where the voy- age leads and how long it will last. It is thus not surprising that the idea of "ripe conditions" outgrew the communists, in that this theoretical trope made the revolution necessary where evolution had barely started its work, where productive market economies were to a large degree absent. They tried their best to accomplish the impossible: to transcend capitalism with- out ever having known it. The flirtations of the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese in the time of Mao with accelerated industrialization were little more than impotent attempts to keep up an evolutionary appearance. In reality, Lenin's selection of the revolutionary moment was from the begin- ning purely motivated by opportunism--in accordance with Machiavelli's theory concerning the most favorable opportunity--and Mao Zedong's analogous attacks were to a large degree voluntaristic distortions.
Overhastiness remained the mark of all initiatives in the name of a post- capitalist future from revolutionaries of this kind. It was clear for substan- tial reasons that the necessary developments would have taken centuries. However, without a sufficient reason--impatience and ambition are never sufficient--the revolutionaries estimated that it would only take a couple of decades; the ultrarevolutionaries even estimated only a few years. The dis- torted picture with which the revolutionary will justified its plans depicted the chaos of war, post-tsarist Russia, and post-emperor China as "ripe situ- ations. " In fact, communism did not produce a postcapitalistic but a post- monetary society. Boris Groys has shown that these societies gave up the steering medium (Leitmedium) money in order to replace it with the pure language of command. 32
The birth defect of the communist idea of economy consisted, however, in more than the magical manipulation of the evolutionary calendar. After all, it cannot be ruled out that revolution comes to the aid of evolution. Its incurable weakness was the furious resentment against property--which expressed itself in the bitter term "private property" (also known as the "private possession of the means of production"), as if everything private
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? INTRODUCTION
could as such be described as something stolen. This affect may claim high moral standards--it is, anyhow, incapable of doing justice to the essence of the modern economy, which is, from the bottom up, based on possession. According to a comparison coined by Gunnar Heinsohn, the communist dismissal of the principle of ownership is akin attempting to accelerate a vehicle by taking out its motor. 33 Moreover, the movements of the left in the Marxist tradition (as well as some of its right-wing fanatic rivals) were never able to get over their mistrust of wealth as such, not even when they proclaimed openly, in close proximity to the government, that they wanted to create wealth more intelligently and distribute it more justly. The left's economic mistake was always at the same time its psychopolitical confes- sions. To the communists in power, taking satisfaction in the philistine joy of expropriation and longing for revenge against private property was, overall, always more important than any spreading of values. Thus, in the final analysis, not much of the great elan of the egalitarian turn of humanity survived than the blatant self-privileging of functionaries, not to mention the effects of paralysis, resignation, and cynicism.
Nonetheless, at the time of its bloom, the socialist economy also pos- sessed offensive thymotic traits because, as we have seen, all revolutionary projects are borne by and sustained through impulses within the pride- rage-indignation spectrum. Whoever takes the Soviet cult surrounding its "worker heroes" merely as a curiosity in the history of economy needs to consider that left-wing productivism was the attempt to introduce a touch of greatness into a system that suffered from its own vulgar premises.
The thymotic economy latently present in Nietzsche's criticism of morality stimulates an alternative monetary economy in which wealth appears together with pride. Nietzsche's criticism aims to remove the mask of lament from the face of modern prosperity. What is hidden beneath this mask is the self-disdain of mean-spirited owners of large for- tunes. They display a form of disdain which is fully legitimate according to Platonic thymos theory because the soul of the wealthy rightly attacks itself if it does not find its way out of the circle of insatiability. The pre- tense of cultivation and interest in culture, which is common in this stra- tum of society, does not change this fact; interest in fine arts is usually only the Sunday mask of greed. The soul of the wealthy could only be healed through beautiful actions that reclaim the inner approval of the noble part of the soul.
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? INTRODUCTION
The thymotization of capitalism was not an invention of the twentieth century; it was not necessary to wait for Nietzsche and Bataille to discover its modus operandi. It happens by itself whenever entrepreneurship enters a new territory in order to create the conditions for new revenue and its distributive emission. In regards to creative aggression, capitalism never needed extra help from philosophical mentors. It is not the case that it suffered too much from moral inhibitions. However, also with regard to its generous side, it developed rather uniquely and distinct from philoso- phy. If at all, it was inspired by Christian motifs, in particular in the Great Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We should not forget that according to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's vigilant account, it was in England, even if not often, that a capitalist entrepreneur made four mil- lion pounds in earnings in order to give away three million to charity as a Christian gentleman. One of the best known cases of a generous donation from capital gain is connected to the name of Friedrich Engels. For more than thirty years, Engels used the rather modest profits from his factory in Manchester to keep Marx's family in London alive; at the same time, the family head used this money to overthrow an order of things in which a person like Engels was possible and necessary. Be that as it may, the gen- erosity of donators cannot be reduced to a liberalism of "small deeds," typical of bourgeois reform. It would also be inappropriate to dismiss such gestures as paternalism. What becomes visible through them is rather a metacapitalist horizon that becomes clear in the moment capital turns against itself.
"People don't strive for happiness, only the English do. "34 When Nietzsche noted down this bon mot he was probably too heavily influenced by the antiliberal cliches of his time. What makes the aphorism important, nonetheless, is the fact that it reminds us of a time when the resistance to the propaganda of erotization and vulgarization could invoke impulses of pride and honor, impulses that have largely been forgotten today. These impulses established a culture of generosity. This phenomenon increasingly disappears in times of anonymous equity funds. Let us limit ourselves to the assertion that the thymotic use of wealth in the Anglo-American world, above all, in the United States, could become a persistent fact of society. On the European mainland, on the other hand, it could not so far establish itself--largely because of blind trust in the state, subventions, and tradi- tions of celebrating misery.
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? INTRODUCTION
THE POSTCOMMUNIST SITUATION
ONE FINAL COMMENT ABOUT THE "SPIRITUAL SITUATION OF OUR TIMES" in order to uncover the strategic perspective of what follows: in the past, one would have called this strategic perspective "engagement. " The follow- ing considerations are situated within a debate that has moved the intellec- tual public sphere of the West since the 1990s. To make a long story short, the goal is to take issue with the usual psychopolitical interpretation of the postcommunist situation.
The introduction of this situation was, to a large extent, completely unex- pected to people engaging in political debates in 1990. The political interpret- ers of the postwar era were content with commenting on both the victory of the Allies over the Axis dictatorships and the new world order from the tradition of their discipline. Across the board, there was a large consensus about and commitment to democracy and the free-market economy. Old comrades were granted the meager joy of taking out their antifascist medals from time to time. During this long belle epoque (which was only clouded by nuclear threats) there was a consensus that the "working through" of totalitarian excesses in Europe fulfilled the historical obligation of the epoch. Other than that one only needed to sit and watch how liberal civilization with the help of social-democratic correctives made use of the historical demand for a better world. There was hardly anyone who possessed the theo- retical means and moral motivation to think beyond the order of the bipolar era. The implosion of the hemisphere of actual socialism did more than con- demn its ideologies and institutions to meaninglessness. Most important, it created a situation in which "successful" capitalism had to take on the sole responsibility of the world. But Western thinkers were not provoked into providing exceptionally creative ideas in response to this new order.
It does not require too much concentration to see that some themes and motives of the present book are the product of an imaginary dialogue with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which originally appeared in 1992. 1 do not conceal that I am convinced that this publication belongs, in spite of its easily identifiable weak aspects, to the few works of contemporary political philosophy that touch upon the essence of our time. This publication testifies to the fact that academic thinking and presence of mind are not always mutually exclusive. Apart from more recent works by Boris Groys that reveal a new horizon for the diagnosis of our age,35 Fukuyama's work presents the most thought-through system of analysis
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? INTRODUCTION
of the postcommunist world situation up until the present day--and the same can be said about its relationship to political anthropology. In my opinion, the course of events since 1990 has largely confirmed Fukuyama's (and implicitly also Alexandre Kojeve's) conception, according to which we can only understand the contemporary global situation if we begin with an insight into the present state of the struggle for recognition. The fact that Fukuyama confesses his allegiance to the conservative camp in the United States does not commit his readers to share the same political affiliation. The aspects of his work that can be interpreted progressively come to the fore once one attempts to push the conservative veil to the side. In any case, the more or less intentionally committed misinterpretations do not deserve to be taken seriously in a commentary.
Among the interpreters who attribute substantial significance to Fuku- yama's attempt to understand the postcommunist situation, Jacques Der- rida has, understandably, a special position. In the most insightful of his political books, Specters ofMarx, the inventor of "deconstruction" discusses the theses of The End of History in an intensive, if largely skeptical and sometimes polemical way. 36 Derrida presents a fascinating reconstruction of Fukuyama's line of argument, not least because Derrida does not argue in a deconstructive mode--rather he intends to improve the argument. Derrida is convinced that he is able to prove that Fukuyama's book is in fact a somewhat hasty application of Hegel to the modern state, a form of Chris- tian eschatology. Such ad hoc narratives, Derrida admits, mainly serve to satisfy the desire for happy endings to otherwise sad stories. In fact, Fuku- yama's book, owing to its evangelic tone, could have only become a media gadget, more or less misunderstood, as it ran around the world, but with- out its true problematic having been penetrated. What would be required for a serious discourse concerning the "end of history" is an illumination of the obscure relationship between the secular and technological civiliza- tions of the West to the three messianic eschatologies that emerged out of the religious thinking of the Near East--the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic. It is revealing that in this metaphysical corner of the world, people still argue about the meaning of the course of the world and the spiritual orientation of politics at large. "The war for the 'appropriation of Jerusa- lem' is today the world war. It is happening everywhere, it is the world. "37 What can be brought to bear against Fukuyama is, according to Derrida, his hidden, one-sided dependence on the customs of Christian messianology: it is well known that Christians conceive the Messiah as someone who has
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? INTRODUCTION
arrived, whereas Derrida emphasizes the Jewish emphasis on waiting for the one who has not yet come. An analogous relation is present in the political narratives concerning the establishment of democracy in bourgeois societ- ies. While the interpreter of successful liberal civilization thinks he is able to assume the actual presence of democracy, his critic firmly defends the view that democracy could only be conceived of as a democracy to come, a future democracy.
As inspiriting as Derrida's commentary on The End of History may be, if one compares Fukuyama's book and Derrida's commentary, what comes to mind is that Derrida, without providing any justification, did not ade- quately discuss the serious part of Fukuyama's attempt to present a contem- porary form of thymotology. Derrida justifies this neglect by briefly stating that Fukuyama's conception of thymos and megalothymia (the human right of pride and greatness) is intended as a counterweight to the one-sidedness of Marxist materialism. To put it mildly, this judgment reveals a rather selective reading of Fukuyama. We thus have to conclude that even such an eminent reader as Derrida missed the point of Fukuyama's book. Following the traces (Spuren) of Alexandre Kojeve and Leo Strauss, Fukuyama's book intends nothing less than the recovery of an authentic political psychology on the basis of a reestablished polarity of eros and thymos. It is obvious that this political psychology, which has hardly anything in common with so- called mass psychology and other applications of psychoanalysis to political issues, moved to the center of the current need for a new theoretical orien- tation through the course of world-historical events.
No one who understands something about the rules of literary criti- cism is surprised that, overall, Fukuyama's book received such bad press in European reviews. Its readers wanted to understand it mostly as an extended victory cry of liberalism after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the "socialist alternative. " It was presumed that the author, with his thesis concerning the end of history, only provided an updated version of Yankee ideology, according to which the American way of life meant the completion of human evolution from the desert to the shopping mall, from the hand axe to the ballot, from sitting around a bon- fire to using the microwave. Since this initial reaction, sneering references to Fukuyama's book became a running gag in the political feuilletons in Europe. Many contributors never tired of repeating that history has, of course, in reality not come to an end and that the victorious West must not sit still after a partial victory in the struggle against ideological specters.
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? INTRODUCTION
This position is, by the way, fully justified--yet we need to understand it completely differently from the way it is understood by the authors of the abovementioned reviews.
I do not want to ponder for too long the observation that these objec- tions are often presented in a tone of neorealist arrogance, as if the com- mentators feel superior the moment they uncover a philosophical author as announcing allegedly naive messages. The anti-intellectual affect of Fukuyama's critics should be mentioned as only an aside. When histori- ans defend themselves against the danger of being fired because of a phi- losopher, this is not unreasonable. In reality, the author anticipated the most essential concerns and objections of his critics. In the concluding chapter of his book, which carries the ominous title "The Last Men," he pursues with astonishing sensitivity the question of whether the currently successful liberal democracy is actually capable of providing the complete satisfaction of the intellectual and material needs of all of its citizens. His answer is the answer of a skeptical conservative who knows that there are contradictions "at the heart of our liberal order, even after the last fascist dictator, swaggering colonel, or Communist party boss has been driven from the face of the earth. "38
One can thus not identify the diagnostic lesson that is concealed in The End ofHistory. The title only quotes, as we have stated, an original interpre- tation of Hegel's philosophy by Alexandre Kojeve, an interpretation Kojeve had already developed in the 1930s. Kojeve located the "end of history" in the year of the appearance of the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. Fukuyama's original insight consists in his attentive observation that wars of prestige and struggles of jealousy between the citizens of the free world moved to center stage just at the moment when the mobilization of civil energies for wars at the outer fronts came to an end. . Successful liberal democracies, the author understands, will always be infiltrated by currents of free-floating dissatis- faction. This has to be the case because human beings are condemned to suffer from thymotic unrest, and "last men" even more than everyone else, even though the mass culture we witness in posthistory initially appears in the form of eroticism. The ambitions addressed by mass culture can be as little satisfied as the ambitions of resentments (at least in the case of the greater success of other people).
Once the physical battles have been fought, the metaphysical battles begin. The latter are inevitable because the activity of the liberal world, which consists in the mutual recognition of all by all as equal citizens of
39
? INTRODUCTION
society, is in truth far too formal and unspecific to open up individual access to happiness. Especially in a world of universally amended liberties, human beings cannot cease to strive for the specific forms of recognition manifested in prestige, wealth, sexual advantage, and intellectual superiority. Because such goods will always remain scarce, in liberal systems there will always be a large reservoir of distrust and frustration in inferior competitors--not to mention those who are truly worse off and the de facto excluded. The more a "society" is satisfied in its basic features, the more colorfully the jealousy of all against all will flourish. This jealousy entangles candidates vying for better positions in petty wars that permeate all aspects of their lives. At the same time, the system of the "open society" has the advan- tage of also employing the darker energies. Jealousy constantly generates alternative preferences, in particular in the domain of the ever-increasing and ever-differentiating culture and media business. Sports have become indispensable as an expansive system of winning and becoming famous, of stimulating and channeling postmodern excesses of ambition. Taken as a whole, it can be said that in the insatiable prestige battles of posthistory, elites continuously emerge from nonelites. If a public sphere is dominated by the expressive lives of countless actors who can never really be on top and yet have advanced significantly, then one can be certain that what we are dealing with is a flourishing democracy.
The old world knew slave and serf, the bearers of the unhappy conscious- ness of their time. Modernity has invented the loser. This figure, which one meets halfway between yesterday's exploited and today's and tomorrow's superfluous, is the misunderstood product of the power games of democ- racies. Not all losers can be pacified by pointing out that their status cor- responds to their poor placement in a contest.