For the
romantics
of energy, this acting in anger is a kind of flow.
Sloterdijk - Rage and Time
Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage itself engages in payback?
Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage, as a self- proclaimed executor, goes so far as to knock on the door of the offended?
RAGE RECOUNTED
THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY EXISTS IN COUNTLESS exemplary case studies, some more recent and some older. The search for justice has always brought about a second, wild form of the judiciary in which the injured person attempts to be both judge and warden at once. What is noteworthy about these documents, given our present perspective, is that only with the beginning of modernity was the romanticism of self- administered justice invented. Whoever speaks of modern times without acknowledging to what extent it is shaped by a cult of excessive rage suffers from an illusion. This is, even to the present day, the blind spot of cultural history—as if the myth of the "process of civilization" did not aim only to
the injured psyche to transcend the circle of injuries and revenge as such. As long as history is an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation, wisdom is required to bring the pendulum to a halt.
49
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
make invisible the release of vulgar manners under conditions of modernity but also to inflate revenge phantasms. While the global dimension of West- ern civilization aims at the neutralization of heroism, the marginalization of military virtue, and the pedagogical enhancement of peaceful social affects, the mass culture of the age of enlightenment reveals a dramatic recess in which the veneration of vengeful virtues, if we may so call them, reaches new, bizarre extremes.
This phenomenon can be traced back centuries before the French Revo- lution. The Enlightenment not only releases polemics of knowledge against ignorance but also invents a new quality of the guilty verdict by declaring all old conditions unjust before the demands of the new order; hereby the ecosystem of resignation begins to totter. Since time immemorial, human beings learned in this ecosystem to accept the apparent inevitabilities of mis- ery and injustice. The Enlightenment was thus required to allow revenge to be promoted to an epochal motive, as it dominated private as well as politi- cal affairs. Since the past is fundamentally always unjust, the inclination increases, not always but with increased regularity, to extol revenge as just.
OF COURSE, ANTIQUITY ALREADY KNEW GREAT ACTS OF REVENGE. From the furies of Orestes to the hysterics of Medea, ancient theater paid tribute to the dramatic potency of revengeful forces. Mythos knew as well from early on about the danger that begins with humiliation, a danger almost like a natural disaster. Medea's example shows particularly well the idea that the female psyche passes from pain to insanity with terrific velocity. This is what Seneca wanted to show when he depicts the hysterical heroine as an exemplary deterrent. In modern terminology, one would call attention to the fact that the passive-aggressive character is disposed to enter into states of excess whenever, by way of exception, she decides to become offensive. This is the framing of women on the rage stage, and, often, the privilege of the "great scene" ("groflen Szene") has always belonged to the "angry sex. " The ancients never imagined taking such exempla as anything other than warnings to orient themselves to the middle, away from excesses.
In the Eumenides, one of the key plays of Athenian drama, with which the Atride Trilogy of Aeschylus comes to an end, what is at issue is noth- ing less than the complete break with the older culture of revenge and fate as well as the introduction of a political concern for justice. This form of political justice should be practiced in the future exclusively in civil
50
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
courts. What is required for the establishment of such courts is the sensible theological-psychosemantic operation in which the old dignified goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyen, are renamed as the Eumenides, which means "those who want good" or "those caring for what is beautiful. " The mean- ing of the name change is unmistakable: "Where vengeance compulsion was, balanced, prudent justice will be. "
Whatever criteria one has in mind when searching the libraries of the Old
World, one will come across a large amount of references to the elementary
force of rage and the campaigns of vengeful fury. There are traces of a more
or less serious game with the romantic fire of rage, though this will become
a dominant motive only with the eighteenth century's emerging culture of
civil society. Since then, one great revenger hunts another, accompanied
by the sympathy of the audience of the modern imaginary. From the noble
robber Karl Moor to the angry veteran John Rambo; Edmond Dantes, the
mysterious Count of Monte Christo to Harmonica, the hero of Once Upon
a Time in the West, who has committed his life to a private nemesis; Judah
ben Hur, who exacted revenge against the spirit of imperial Rome with his
victory in an ominous chariot race, to the Bride, alias Black Mamba, the
protagonist of Kill Bill, who works through her death list. The time of those 3
wholiveforthe"greatscene"hascome. WhenDurrenmatt'soldladycomes for a visit, she exactly knows who needs to be liquidated out of the group of friends. Brecht's dreaming Pirate Jenny even knows a better answer to the question "Who is to die? ": all.
Stories of this kind seem to be natural ballads. By themselves they appear to aspire to a superior form of recitation and epic detail. By making visible the relationship between suffered injustice and just retribution, more recent acts of rage provide an illustration of the causality of fate. We moderns do not like to dispense with this lesson, however much we agree otherwise with the exercise of enlightenment, that is, the suspension of blind fate. The well- constructed story of rage provides the sublime for the people. It provides the audience with a compact formula for moral if/then relationships even if they pay the price of suspending the slow, formal application of the rule of law in order to practice a quicker form of retaliation. Moreover, rage satis- fies the popular interest in acts of which the perpetrator can legitimately be proud: such stories focus on the avengers, who by directly paying back for their humiliation release a part of the discontent with judicial civilization. They provide satisfying proof that the modern person does not always have to travel the windy road of resentment and the steep steps of the judiciary
51
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
process in order to articulate thymotic emotions. In the case of injuries lead- ing to chronic illness, rage is still the best therapy. This feeling constitutes the reason for the pleasure taken in base things.
The dangerous liaisons between the revenge motif and popular narrative do not need to be unfolded in detail at this point. Apparently these linkages are so deep that sometimes the return of modern art to its great epic form is helpful—as in the case of the abovementioned work from the century of narrative film, Once Upon a Time in the West. It has rightly been claimed that this work provided the art of film with the proof that two formally impossible things were in fact possible: that serious opera can be appropri- ated through film and that the lost form of epic can once again be given a contemporary form.
The affinity between rage and popular narrative forms could be illus- trated by drawing on a countless number of more recent documents. One example is particularly illuminating: the picturesque life history of the Indian rebel Phoolan Devi (1968-2001). From the state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan, when she was still quite a young woman, was the main actress of a widely watched reality drama that aired across the whole of the Indian sub- continent. After she had been collectively abused and raped by her husband and other male inhabitants of her village (including policemen), she fled and joined a group of bandits with whom she devised a plan to ambush and liquidate those who were guilty of the crimes against her. The corpse of her husband is said to have been put onto a donkey and chased through the vil- lage. The simple folk celebrated the rebel as an emancipated heroine and saw her as an avatar of the gruesome-sublime goddess Durga Kali. The photo- graph that depicts Phoolan Devi's handover of her weapons to Indian law enforcement officials is one of the archetypical press images of the twentieth century. One can see in the young fighter all the concentrated anger of being given over to her undecided fate. After eleven years of prison, without trial, the "Bandit Queen" was pardoned. Then she was elected into the Indian parliament, where she served as an inspiring role model for the countless disenfranchised women of her country. In June 2001, she was shot in broad daylight in Delhi, probably by a relative of one of her killed rapists. When she was still alive, Indian folklore took up the story of this charismatic fig- ure, and Phoolan Devi was transformed into the heroine of a popular epic still sung by Indian villagers.
Rarely do the archaic and the modern interpretations of vengeful rage come together in one individual action. In what follows I want to follow up
52
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
on the assumption that, through the process of modernization, the novel increasingly returns from a literary and ideological mode to the life of indi- viduals and to public perception. A convincing example of this has recently moved the public in Germany, Switzerland, and the former Soviet states. Vitalij K. , an engineer from the Caucasus republic of Ossetia, lost his wife and two children in a plane crash caused by human negligence; after a year of mourning, he decided to seek revenge in the name of his family.
On July 1, 2002, a Bashkir passenger airplane from Moscow collided with a DHL freight plane 36,000 feet above Lake Constance. The incident occurred close to the town of Owing, and all seventy-one passengers lost their lives. Among other factors, the accident occurred because of false directions from the control tower in Zurich-Kloten. When the control tower operator in charge realized that both machines were on a collision course, he advised the pilot of the Russian plane orally to immediately start to descend. At the same time, the on-board computer indicated that he should accelerate. The fatal crash happened because the Russian captain gave more credence to the oral instructions, while the DHL place started to decline at the advice of the on-board computer. The ball of fire on the sky above Lake Constance could be seen almost a hundred miles away. In February 2003, the man from Ossetia, who had been born in 1956 and who could be called a winner of the postcommunist situation, appeared at the house of the Danish control tower operator near Zurich. He killed the operator on the terrace of his house by repeatedly stabbing him with a knife.
Before the drama in February 2003, Vitalij K. had attracted attention because he sometimes referred to "Caucasian methods" of conflict reso- lution. It is clear that the act of Vitalij K. came from a transformation of the work of mourning into a work of rage. Part of this work of rage was the sentence against the controller at the end of a short trial carried out by the court of his own intuition; the sentence was complemented by a pen- alty phase in which the judge slipped into the role of the hangman. This is a pattern that has increasingly permeated public consciousness since the beginning of modernity. It is not surprising that the Russian public pas- sionately followed the trial in Zurich of Vitalij K. during October 2005 and then protested his eight-year prison sentence. The avenger was promoted to the status of a national hero in his country of origin and across most of the former Soviet Union; for large parts of the population, he served as an object of identification.
53
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
FROM CASES SUCH AS THIS, ONE CAN DRAW THE CONCLUSION THAT vengeful impulses do not easily return to reality, at least not as long as cul- tural codes have failed to establish the conditions for such a return. We can speak of a return, even of a regression, insofar as such acts cannot claim to be justified anymore by official culture. In terms of the history of ideas, the era of the tribal commandment to engage in blood feuds is more than two millennia behind us. Granted, this is not the case everywhere. But the monopoly over violence that the modern state enjoys finds acceptance as a psychopolitical norm from a large majority of citizens and is supported almost without objections by the official pedagogy. Yet it cannot be denied that the imaginary produced by mass media provides an important space for the phantasm of the moral state of exception, including the vengeful attempt to come to terms with rage.
In order to make plausible the return of personal acts of revenge we have to assume that the force of the political and juridical civilization has become discredited. When the public order is accused of malfunctioning or of being a part of the problem (we might think of preferential treatment in court proceedings), individuals can take themselves to be appointed to represent justice as wild judges. In this sense it is possible to take modern revenge romanticism to be a specific part of an all-encompassing return to hero- ism. According to Hegel's insight, a hero in antiquity was someone who does what is necessary as an individual, someone who accomplishes what could not have been accomplished from the universal at that point in time; the heroism of the moderns lives off the intuition that even after the erec- tion of the rule of law, there can emerge situations in which the univer- sal is no longer operative. That even the nation, or rather the government, can be determined by heroic and revenge-romantic reflexes is suggested by the example of the Israeli president Golda Meir. After Palestinian terrorists attacked the quarters of the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Meir is said to have ordered Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to track the perpetrators and their supporters and kill them without any legiti- macy from a court proceeding. This operation (with the code name "The Wrath of God") was less a part of governmental action than a service to the imaginary of mass culture.
The popular and anarchist doubt about the regulatory power of "existing conditions" is connected to the tendency toward the new form of heroic action. Another consequence is the assumption of a permanent state of exception, and thus of the inclination of the actors to claim the right to help
54
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
themselves in their singular situations. Indeed, some theoreticians of the left such as Walter Benjamin and later Antonio Negri articulated the dangerous suggestion that for the majority of human beings living under conditions
4
of capitalism, the permanent state of exception is normal. Once the "order
of things" has become delegitimized, improvisations are needed, including some rough ones. Only a small step is required to go from the political and moral delegitimation of circumstances to their ontological delegitimation, and ontological delegitimations call into question not only the normative foundations of the institutions of the ancien regime but also the authority of the past as such. Once this moment has come, so-called reality becomes an object for revision and, if necessary, is authorized to be torn down. In light of this, the militant slogan of the twentieth century, transformed by Sartre, "on a raison de se revolter? would have to be slightly altered. It would need to be translated as: "not he who revolts against what exists is in the right, but he who avenges against it. "
THE AGGRESSOR AS GIVER
IN MY ANALYSIS OF RAGE, IT IS NECESSARY TO FIRST TURN TO ITS energetic dimension, and later I will turn to its temporal and pragmatic dimensions. This requires a certain asceticism with regard to reactions and patterns of interpretations. Initially it is necessary to bracket the desire to emphasize the devastating dynamism of rage. The concept of "destruction," at least, needs to be separated from any kind of moral valuation. It has to be understood as a metabolic phenomenon that needs to be investigated beyond either appraisal or criticism. The alleged or real tendency of rage to explode without concern for the future should not be put at center stage prematurely. Finally, it is necessary to leave out the common psychological attributions of motivation, as well as character diagnoses.
This provides a more even-tempered view of the phenomenon of rage, one that acknowledges that we are primarily dealing with an intensive form of energy that is ready to explode or be transferred. If one follows the image of effervescence, which already led the ancient authors to speak of furor, of eruption and storming ahead, it becomes apparent how much the expres- sion of rage possesses a giving, even a paradoxically generous trait. As a form of pure extroversion, the uninhibited expression of "foaming" rage adds an especially energetic supplement to the inventory of deeds. Naturally these mostly reveal themselves in a negative light because at first sight they
55
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
seem only to consist of uproar and suffering. It is easier to become aware of the giving dimension of rage if one regards the object of rage under the aspect of its similarity with the subject.
Whether rage comes on the scene like a sudden explosion or like chronic presentiment (after its hate-inflicted transformation into a proj- ect), it draws its force from an excess of energy that longs for release. Rage that manifests itself in punishment or acts of injury is connected to the belief that there is too little suffering in the world on a local or global level. This belief results from the judgment that suffering could be "deserved" in certain situations. The rage bearer sees in those people who are unjustly without suffering his most plausible enemies. He will never be content with the fact that pain is distributed unevenly to the point of intolerability. He wants to return a fair share of the excess of pain that has been stored up inside him to the person who caused it but has not yet been punished. He is infused with the knowledge that those without pain exist in a state of acute deficiency, and what they are missing is suffering. Seeing the deserv- ing go unpunished leads the vengeful individual to the conviction that he owns what others are lacking. He wants to become a donor, a profligate spender, even if he must force his gifts onto their recipients. Their habit of refusing to accept only provides rage and hatred with an additional motive to turn against its addressees.
There cannot be any doubt that there is a link between rage and pride, thanks to which rage provides itself with a moral certainty of its own legiti- macy. The higher the factor of pride in rage, the more effectively will the "you may" be transformed into a "you should. " The completely motivated vengeful action would be one that takes itself to be the execution of an indis- pensable, noble necessity. The corresponding empirical models would be revenge murders at the family level and wars of religion and independence on the ethnic and national levels.
As I have already stated, the rage bearer possesses the immediate evi- dence to assist the object of her rage in overcoming his own lack. Hours not spent in agony, a burning loss that needs to be suffered, a house that still stands in place without having been bombed, a knife that does not stick in the gut of a slanderer: these nuisances need to be overcome. Much more so than in the case of envy, which aims to humiliate and expropriate, rage (and likewise hatred, the conservation of rage) is an intensive turning toward the addressee in the game because it requires an act of authentic expenditure. One thus rightly says that human beings are as a consequence "inflicted
56
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
with" pain. The vengeful inflictor feels like someone who is rich enough to share something of his richness with his contemporaries.
As a rule, the donation of pain is sent to a precise address; however, the gift usually extends beyond the immediate recipient to affect those near her as well. Often the donator of pain agrees to this excess: if the individual des- ignated as object of rage led a pain-free life, then most likely the people in close proximity also led lives without suffering, defective lives. In this sense it never appears to be completely false for the donator of pain to involve these people. The more desperately the rage bearer's unconditional wish to give expresses itself, the less it is limited by a certain determinate addressee. Just like civil enthusiasm thinks it is embraced by the millions, rage that has been amplified to hatred addresses itself to a universe of unknown people. It is an affect capable of forming obscure general concepts and elevating itself to the level of vague abstractions.
When rage becomes hatred we can witness the basic operations of ide-
ology formation because conceptual fixations are the best preservative for
ephemeral responses. He who wants to remember his rage needs to preserve
it in hate containers. The advantage of these conceptualizations of rage is
that they can be used extensively without ever being used up entirely. Abso-
lute hatred ultimately does not require any determinate object right before
its eyes. Its abstractness, which is close to aimlessness, guarantees its spilling
over into what is universal. For its bearer, the knowledge that it is turning to
the general addressee is sufficient to make sure that he does not waste itself
unnecessarily. The condition is reached in which we can speak of expendi-
5
ture as such, expenditure pure and simple (sans phrase). In these divesti-
tures, the rage-filled giver of pain often risks his own life. In these cases, the giver makes himself into a physical addition to the bomb that is supposed to supply the missing suffering.
IT THUS DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE TO ESTABLISH A RELATIONSHIP between self-confident hatred and concepts such as nihilism—despite their prevalence as popular explanatory models. In general, the concept of hatred proves analytically unsuitable because it is deduced from the phenomenon of rage and can only be made intelligible as a form of preserving rage. One has to insist that rage, which is a standpoint, even a project, is not at all affil- iated with the nothingness we like to claim for hatred. Rage is not merely a militant form of indifference with regard to oneself and others. Even if
57
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
rage reveals recklessness, it would be a mistake to think that it is indifferent about everything. Rage that has become reified as hatred is resolute good- will. Initially it appears as a pointed attack that brings about an intense local pain. Then it secures an allegedly necessary increase of pain in the world in order to persist in terrible reports and other media exaggerations. In light of this perspective, it is the subjective and passionate appearance of that which the penalizing judiciary wants to embody objectively and without passion. Both rest on the axiom according to which the balance of the world after its disruption can only be recovered through an increase of pain at the right location.
In the case of individual donations of rage, the person who hates initially draws on her own rage supply, even at the risk of using up her capacity for experiencing rage. Nothing guarantees to the simple vengeful person that his sources are inexhaustible. As long as vengeful energy is not transformed into a project and the individual constantly faces the possibility of returning to peace through satisfaction or exhaustion, the small circle of anger and abreaction belongs to the energetic processes connected to our emotions.
In this sense we can understand the abreactive crime as the manifesta- tion of a power that demands the right to discharge itself even if this puts the actor into a position of moral injustice. This is why crimes from such impulsive sources tend to exhaust themselves when the deed is finished. The moment that the victim is out of sight, the perpetrator is able to forget it. Is it not true, after all, what is said about the brothers of Joseph after they sold him to Egypt, "for their hatred had been taken from them, and in time they were left with only vague recollections of how greatly the ninny had angered them"? 6 Because rage is initially a finite resource, its satisfaction through the deed is often its end, which sometimes compels the actor to surrender deliberately to the forces of law.
An exemplary return of a fatigued vengeful person to endure his sentence is depicted by Friedrich Schiller in his 1792 story "The Criminal from Lost Honor. " If Hegel, who read this novella attentively, refers to the sentence as the honor of the crime, we should immediately think of Schiller's poor "sun keeper. " This well-known ravager reveals his true identity to a respectful civil servant in a sentimental gesture in order to then surrender himself to the courts. Something similar is done by Kleist in Michael Kolhaas, although this German story about the passion of righteousness stands under a darker sign. This story of an overly sensitive person who takes revenge for two horses that were stolen from him embodies the process by which the rage
58
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
that drives a private person to carry out deeds of revenge becomes a meta- physics of self-administered justice. The fact that the raging citizen who sees his stubbornness fulfilled dies as a satisfied petit-bourgeois is revealing. It expresses nothing less than the anticipation of the revaluation of all values. The romantics, who opened themselves to the aesthetics of excess, picked up on the feeling that we can no longer depend on God's justice. They reveal a concern for those humiliated on the earth and those who make their contri- butions to the day of judgment during their lifetimes.
RAGE AND TIME: THE SIMPLE EXPLOSION
WHEN THE EXPENDITURE OF RAGE DEVELOPS MORE COMPLEX FORMS, the seeds of rage are consciously dispersed, and the fruits of rage are dili- gently harvested. Through hate culture, rage is carried out in the form of a project. Wherever revenge intentions ripen, dark energies become stabi- lized over longer periods. What Nietzsche says about the genesis of con- science, that it is premised on the human who can promise, is even more true for the memory of the one who engages in revenge. This person is an agent who remembers not only the injustice that has been inflicted upon him but also all his plans for paying it back. The person "who may promise" is, according to Nietzsche's complex characterization, the subject with the "lasting will. " Once this subject is constituted, revenge intentions can then be sustained over long periods of time—even passed from one generation to the next. Once the stage of transmission has reached the next agent, an authentic economy of rage has come into being. Now the resource of rage is no longer accumulated arbitrarily and occasionally wasted; rather, it is maintained and continually produced as the object of an ongoing project. Once it has reached this stage, rage becomes a treasure trove for its pos- sessor, opening up avenues to transpersonal motives. As soon as collectively administered amounts of rage are stored as treasures or assets, the question becomes pressing as to whether such accumulated assets can be invested like capital. I will answer this later with the support of a new psychopolitical definition for left-wing parties. In reality these parties need to be under- stood as banks of rage that, if they do their business well, will know how to effect politically and thymotically relevant gains.
If one admits that the banking and saving functions of rage assets are real and efficacious, one also understands how it is possible for rage to develop from its diffused initial stage to higher levels of organization. By
59
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
passing through this progression, rage travels the road from local and inti- mate emotion to public and political program. The temporal structure of rage-potentials also undergoes a total transformation. Rage undergoes a metamorphosis from a blind form of expenditure in the here and now to a far-sighted, world-historical project of revolution for the sake of those who have been humiliated and offended.
However, as long as rage remains explosive, it expresses itself by "flaming up": "And the rage of Achilles rose forcefully. " The direct thymotic abreac- tion is a version of fulfilled presence. For the raging person, as for the happy person, time does not exist. The uproar in the here and now neutralizes the retrospective and prospective ecstasies of time so that both disappear in the momentary energy flow. The life of the subject of fury is the sparkles in the chalice of the situation.
For the romantics of energy, this acting in anger is a kind of flow. It implies a return to a mystic and animal time that, as its con- noisseurs avow, has the quality of the constantly fleeting now.
RAGE AS PROJECT: REVENGE
THE CREATION OF A QUALIFIED OR EXISTENTIAL TIME, THAT IS, A lived time with a retrospective and anticipatory character, occurs through the deferral of discharge. Rage potential is channeled into a vector that cre- ates a tension between then, now, and later. This is why we can say that the raging one who holds herself back preliminarily knows what it means to intend to do something. At the same time, she not only lives in history but also makes history—insofar as making history is the name here for taking motives from the past in order to take care of what comes. In this respect, nothing can be compared to revenge. Thymos that has been activated dis- covers through its desire for gratification the world as the realm of con- structing future projections, which gain momentum for the coming attack from what has been. Rage becomes the momentum of a movement into the future, which one can understand as the raw material for historical change.
As elementary as these considerations may appear, their implications reach into the innermost motives of twentieth-centuiy philosophy. If they are correct, they necessitate important modifications to one of the most well known theorems of modern philosophy. If they are correct, one should not interpret existential time as the immediate being-toward-death, as Hei- degger in Being and Time suggests in an interpretation that is as well known as it is rushed. The being-whole-ability of existence {das Ganz-sein-Kbnnen
60
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
der Existenz) is what matters to the thinker, an ability that does not depend on the fact of the individual considering his own death in order to ascertain his directedness toward something that is an unconditional future fact. Das- ein can just as well orient itself because it traverses the distance from humil- iation to revenge as a whole. Existential time emerges from such an anxiety (Hingespanntheit) toward its decisive moment. Such an act of endowing for one's own being-toward-goals (Seins-zum-Ziele) is more powerful than every vague heroic meditation of the end. When Dasein is angry it does not have the form of running ahead toward its own death, but of an anticipa- tion of the indispensable day of rage. One would rather have to speak of a running ahead to gratification. If one thinks back to the protagonist of the Iliad it becomes clear that a warlike being-toward-destruction has become his second nature. His departure for the last battle in front of the walls of Troy marks the beginning of the sequence of action with which the down- fall of the hero became necessary. In this respect, Heidegger's thesis that Dasein is being-toward-death belongs to those Europeans who carry on the work of the myth of Achilles throughout the ages.
Revenge emerges out of the project form of rage. This concept initially requires analysis from a neutral and ecological vantage point. One may rightly understand the desire for revenge as one of the most unfriendly desires of humanity. That it belongs to the causes of the greatest miseries is proven by history insofar as it has not yet been classified a "life teacher. " Called "zra," it is classified among the deadly sins. If anyone could say something positive about it, it is that with it the possibility of unemployment vanishes from the life of avenger. He who has a strong intention to practice a revenge is, for the time being, safe from suffering problems of meaning. A persistent will excludes boredom. The deep simplicity of rage satisfies the all-too-human desire for strong motivations. One motive, one agent, one necessary deed: this is the formula for a complete project. The most important character- istic of a well-organized and well-planned existence manifests itself in the lack of any arbitrariness. The avenger is safe from the "need of needless- ness" that Heidegger claimed would be the sign of an existence abandoned by a sense of ne-cessity (Not-Wenidigkeit). It is indeed impossible to claim that the avenger would live like a leaf in the wind; chance no longer has any power over her. This way revengeful existence gains a quasi-metaphysical meaning in a postmetaphysical age: thanks to rage the "utopia of motivated life" realizes itself in a domain in which an increasing amount of people feel empty. No one expressed this more clearly than Stalin when he said about
61
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
his colleagues Kamenew and Dschersinski, "To choose one's victim, to pre- pare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to b e d . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world. "7
RAGE AS BANK: REVOLUTION
THE PROJECT FORM OF RAGE (WHICH ONE WOULD CALL IN POLICE jargon self-administered justice or the mob mentality and in political jargon anarchism or the romanticism of violence) can expand to take on the form of a bank. This elevation (Aufhebung) of local anger resources and dispersed projects of hatred into an overarching instance. The task of this storehouse of rage, as for every authentic bank, consists in serving as a collection point and recycling agency for investments. This transition necessarily once again affects the temporal structure of those potentials invested in individual projects. Just as rage in its project form provides for a longer duration and allows for a pragmatic planning process, the bank form of rage requires that individual vengeful plans subject themselves to a superior perspective. This perspective proudly bears the title of "history"—history, of course, in the singular. Through the creation of a bank of rage (understood as a storage place for moral explosives and vengeful projects) individual vectors become part of a single project guided by a single administration, the demands of which do not always coincide with the rhythms of local actors and actions. But now subjection becomes inevitable: countless histories of rage are finally united in one common history.
This transition marks the transformation from the projective to the historical form of rage. As soon as a collective that invests its rage poten- tials—as well as its hopes and ideals—forms itself into a common, enduring operation, "history" itself takes on the form of an enterprise of the highest ambition. Historical narration takes on the task of accounting for the deeds and sufferings of the significant collective of rage. To say it almost with the words from 1848 of two famous colleagues: all history is the history of rage applications.
Once the rage economy becomes elevated to the level of a bank, anar- chistic companies led by small rage owners and locally organized anger groups become the subjects of harsh criticism. At the same time that the level of organization of rage is increased, there is a rationalization of the vengeful energy: it passes from pure impulsivity through a selective attack to a conception of attacks against the state of the world as a whole. From the
62
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
perspective of the rage bankers, the actions of local anger agencies are blind expenditures that almost never produce any appropriate return because the anarchic acting out of the forces of rage regularly provokes the intervention of security forces, which can easily neutralize individual eruptions of hatred and local revolt.
On this level, vengeful actions are usually persecuted as transgressions or punished as crimes. It is thus not helpful to destroy telephone boxes or to set cars on fire unless the act is meant to integrate the act of vandalism into a "historical" perspective. The anger of destroyers and arsonists consum- mates itself in its expression, and that it often regenerates itself through the harsh reactions of the police and the judiciary does not change its blindness. It is an attempt to smash fog with a stick. Even a mass movement like that of the slave leader Spartacus in the years 73 through 71 B. C. could not achieve more than a flaring-up of hatred across Italy against the domination of the Roman landowners. Even though the rebellious gladiators of Capua dealt multiple defeats to the Roman army, the final result of this revolt was the horror of 6,000 crucified rebels enduring several days of agony before dying. Its consequences were increased repression and deepened discouragement. The revitalization of the legend of Spartacus and its inclusion in the sym- bolic arsenal of modern class struggle tells us, however, that in the archives of rage one deals with a "heritage" that is millennia old. Remember: if one wants to cultivate and pass on rage, one needs to make one's offspring into a part of a history of victims who call for revenge.
An analysis of our historical experience shows without a doubt that the small craftsmanship of rage is condemned to exhaust itself in costly botch-ups. So long as the local assets for revolutionary zeal are not pooled at long-term collection points and remain unguided by a visionary leader- ship, they waste themselves in expressions of their growing unrest. Isolated anger quanta heat up in shabby dishes until they evaporate or leave behind burned sediments that cannot again be reheated. This is unmistakably revealed by the history of smaller protest parties. Only when discrete ener- gies are invested into superior projects and far-sighted, sufficiently calm, diabolic directors take care of administrating collective rage capacities is it possible for multiple, isolated fires to be transformed into one big power plant. This plant could provide the energy for coordinated actions, up to the level of "world politics. " Visionary slogans become necessary for this to occur, slogans that do not need merely to address the intense anger of human beings but to reach their inner feelings of bitterness and finally their
63
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
hope and their pride. The coldest rage writes up its activity reports in the style of hot idealism.
Just like the monetary economy, the rage economy passes a critical marker once rage has advanced from local accumulation and selective explosion to the level of a systematic investment and cyclic increase. In the case of money, one calls this difference the transition from treasure hoard- ing to capital. For rage, the corresponding transformation is reached once the vengeful infliction of pain is transformed from revenge to revolution. Revolution cannot be a matter of the resentment of an isolated private person, although such affects are also instantiated in its decisive moment. Revolution rather implies the creation of a bank of rage whose investments should be considered in as precise detail as an army operation before a final battle, or actions of a multinational corporation before being taken over by a hostile competitor.
The concept of the coming "revolution," considered in light of the events of 1917, finalizes the transition from the actualism to the futurism of rage. It implies a complete dismissal of the principle of expression. Vengeful acts of expression mean nothing more than a narcissistic expenditure of energy. The professional revolutionary, who is working as an employee of a bank of rage, does not express individual tensions, he follows a plan. This presup- poses the complete subordination of revolutionary affects under the com- mercial strategy. It does not suffice anymore to "embellish the world with horrors," to use the sarcastic-lucid phrase uttered by Schiller's hero in the play The Robbers, which Karl Moor proffers to characterize the maxim of his revolt against injustice. Whoever intends to embellish the world in the future needs to go much further in making it ugly than the romanticism of rebels and assassins could ever dream. Individual flowers of evil are no longer sufficient—one needs a whole art of gardening.
THE TERRIFYING FORCE OF THE NEGATIVE
BY "REVOLUTION," WHICH STILL SOUNDS SOMEWHAT FASCINATING even if it turns out to be increasingly empty, I mean the concept or, bet- ter, the phantasm that Lenin and Mao Zedong, the most successful entre- preneurs of rage, had in mind. By "revolutions" they meant that, through disciplined acts of hatred, one day there could be so much additional pain, so much excessive horror, so much numbing self-doubt among the secu- rity forces that everything that existed would soon melt down during a
64
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
day of mass rage. Once what exists has lost its eternal and firm hold, the rotten world can then be created anew through the fire of transformation. But for this to happen, the power of destruction needs to accomplish its work to the very end. Only when what is old is eradicated completely can the reconstruction of the true circumstances can be started on a totally level foundation.
What Hegel referred to as the terrifying force of the negative gains its most distinct contour in this religiously conditioned speculation. Human rage, gathered from all sources and through effective modes of organiza- tion, provides for the bizarre calculation of big rage bankers the energy for a new creation. Assuming that the terrible end is sufficiently terrible, it should accordingly pass over into an epochal beginning.
Through deliberations of this kind at the height of unblemished ruth- lessness, one can encounter a form of anxiety that would curdle the blood of motley rebels and local hate projects if they were capable of envisioning the great strategic perspectives. The apocalyptic entrepreneur of rage has to prevent the action of local cells from endangering the grand plan with premature activism. This commits him to an extreme ascetics that will also affect his followers. The world revolutionary must unfailingly plan against spontaneous feelings; he must tenaciously dismiss his first reactions. He knows that without the deepest asceticism in the here and now there will never be any reward in the beyond. The more that local outrage is in the right, the more it is wrong when seen from a global perspective. If one aims for the transformation of everything, one needs to curb the impatience of individual vengeful parties. It is much more necessary to commit all fac- tions waiting to explode to staying calm and prepared (In-Form-Bleiben) until the day of mature rage arrives.
The temporal structure of revolution thus needs to be conceived of as an all-inclusive advent. Whatever leads to revolution belongs to the meaning- ful time of real history. The course of this history is analogous to a burning fuse. A great historical experience and a dose of intuition are needed to be able to judge to what extent the fuse of rage has already burned up. If one possesses both, one is qualified to take a leadership role at the top of the rage bank. Such a boss is justified in dictating to his employees from his sovereign position that they should prepare and keep the dynamite dry; the first precondition for collecting rage as part of a political project of global significance is cold-bloodedness. On the one hand, this cold-bloodedness constantly needs to stir hatred and outrage. On the other hand, it is also
65
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
necessary for securing restraint. This way Dasein, in pre-explosive times, is in the mood of waiting while remaining ready for the next fight.
WHERE CAN ONE STUDY THIS HIGHER ECONOMY? NO ONE BELIEVES that studying Heidegger academically will be sufficient for gaining such dan- gerous knowledge. As much as the affinities with the basic claims of Being and Time are obvious, the Master from Messkirch only approached the temporal structure of revolutionary resentment in a formalist way before, for a time, evading it for the black heaven of the "national revolution. " Hei- degger never fully understood the logical and systematic implications of the concept of revolution. He understood it just as little as he understood the connection between our historicity and Daseins ability to be resentful. His investigation of the temporal structures of the caring, projecting, and dying Dasein does not provide us with an appropriate conception of the deep nexus of rage and time. The birth of history out of the project form of rage and, even more, the totality of processes leading to the capitalization of resentment remain obscure in his work.
APART FROM HEIDEGGER, WE WOULD OF COURSE HAVE TO REFER TO Marx and Lenin as the authorities for the dynamism of prerevolutionary and revolutionary negativity. It is peculiar that studying these authors is currently next to impossible. The reason for this is not that the texts are impenetrable but that the wall of Zeitgeist barricades access to them in a way that even the most patient person cannot independently overcome. With the exception of some still citable "passages," the works of the Marxist classics have become practically unreadable for people with contemporary intellectual, moral, and aesthetic reflexes. They seem to be written in an illusionary foreign tongue. Obsolete polemics permeate them to a degree that, for the time being, the deterring effect outweighs even the most moti- vated investigatory curiosity. Furthermore, they illustrate a fidelity to con- cepts one usually only finds in fundamentalist sects. Although they appeal to the science of "society" and its "contradictions," many classic leftist texts (with the exception of a few technical primary texts such as Capital) can be read only as unintended parodies. Only thanks to a completely untimely ascetics would it be possible to deduce from the writings of Marx and Lenin the building blocks of a theory of the present. (Mao Zedong's works would
66
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
have to be taken off the list of reasonable literature from the very begin- ning). Nonetheless, the works of these authors provide a massive compen- dium of rage insights. Without these, the tragedies of the twentieth century cannot be adequately depicted and explained. I will return to this sunken body of work in chapters 3 and 4 because they indirectly provide informa- tion about what lies ahead.
One of the last chances to get to know a little bit more about the unpop- ular strategies of the major rage economy is to draw on events in the West- ern world toward the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. In this morbid but equally glorious epoch, the thousand flowers of radicalism were in bloom as if for the last time. Then, it would have easily been pos- sible to assure oneself of Marx's remark that historical dramas regularly repeat themselves as farces after their first staging as tragedies. In this case, the farce consisted in the attempt to project the circumstances of the 1930s onto those of 1968 and afterward in order to derive the rules for "resis- tance" against the "ruling system. " Back then, one could often hear the doc- trine that patience should be the first virtue of the revolutionary. Words of advice like these mirrored a generational conflict in the radical left between the old school and the revolutionary youth. The late-Stalinist intelligentsia advised this youth that, although the revolution had already "begun" and in the future it would be necessary to always count "from now on," the manifest eruption of the revolution should, under no circumstances, be accelerated voluntaristically.
Only today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the peace of real consumerism is threatened through what is in many places proclaimed as "return of history" (part of it being a return of left-fascist whispers at the margins of academia), do we find a new chance to understand what the praise of revolutionary virtues truly meant. Patience designated the attitude of the historical subject of rage. This subject had freed itself from its personal motives through a cold quasi-idealist ascetics. Once a private factor becomes part of the inevitable revenge against the status quo (or according to the jargon of the time, praxis), voluntarism and a premature expenditure are unavoidable consequences. They are the "teething troubles" of the growing revolution. Although such eruptive episodes might still seem justified from the perspective of the actors, from the perspective of a leading employee of the world bank of rage they are the worst thing that could happen before the day of decision. The leading functionaries are convinced that a pre- mature eruption will prevent the coming into being of this most intensive
67
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
tension. Only this tension will allow the collection of globally dispersed assets of rage into one single and final action, which goes by the name of "world revolution. " The hostile acquisition of the "world" by those who are worse off presupposes that the various factions among the worse off refrain from wasting their powers in spontaneous and individual ventures.
The most famous examples of an anarchistic waste of rage deposits are the assassins who, on March 1, 1881, killed Czar Alexander II, the famous emancipator of the serfs. The immediate consequences consisted in the intensification of repression and the expansion of an omnipresent police system. Even more devastating was the senseless waste of hatred assets by the imitators of the assassins of 1881. These were a group of students of the University of St. Petersburg who were planning to kill the murdered czar's successor, Alexander III, on March 1,1886—as is well known, days of political rage follow a special calendar. Among the students was the twenty- one-year-old Alexander Ulyanov. The attempt was uncovered by the police before it could be carried out, and Alexander was imprisoned with four- teen other conspirators. He was sent to court and, in May 1887, hanged with four other insurgents who likewise were unable to feel remorse. The lives of the other ten were spared in line with the manners of a Russian autocracy famous for its acts of pardoning. Vladimir Ulyanov, the "brother of the hanged," subsequently underwent a process of change from which he emerged as "Lenin," the first wholehearted politician of rage in mod- ern times. In this capacity, he came to understand that the way to power can only lead through the conquest of the state apparatus, not through the merely symbolically relevant assassination of its representative.
The often cited phrase of the young Lenin, "we will not go this way,"
which was probably dated earlier or even invented, is rightly conceived of as
8
the first sentence of the Russian Revolution. With him begins the century
of the big business of rage. Who can forgo the killing of the prince, can receive, as a bonus to the conquered power, the dead prince for free.
68
THE WRATHFUL GOD
THE DISCOVERY OF THE METAPHYSICAL REVENGE BANK
AT THE END OF THE INTRODUCTION I CLAIMED THAT THE psychopolitical constellation of rage and time (or rage and history) is antici- pated by the theological constellation of rage and eternity. What this means exactly at this point needs to be developed. Nontrivial insights concerning the function and architecture of monotheistic religions will surface in the course of this investigation.
That theology wants to be a political quantity, that it can, and that it indeed needs to be such follow from a simple diagnosis. The religions that were relevant for the course of occidental European history, that is, the Mes- opotamian as well as the Mediterranean religions, have always been politi- cal and will remain so as long as they survive. In these religions, gods are the transcendent party supporters of their peoples and protectors of their kingdoms. They exercise this function even at the risk of having to invent a people and a kingdom that suits them. This is especially true for the God of monotheism. This God had to travel a long geopolitical path, from his precarious Egyptian beginnings to his Roman and American triumphs. This is the case despite the assertions of those who worship him: he is not a mere
69
THE WRATHFUL GOD
god of empires (since empires are notoriously perishable structures) but the
1
timeless and transpolitical creator and shepherd of all men.
In fact, the one and only God of Israel was initially a god without an empire. As an ally of a small people primarily concerned with their survival chances, he initially did not seem to be anything more than a provincial god. In time, however, he would transform himself into the most politically viru- lent god in the skies above Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. Although barely noticeable in the world, he was conscious of his omnipotence. He succeeded in offensively positioning himself against the pompously incar- nated imperial gods of the Near East and Rome, at the same time claiming clear superiority. As the claimant of an illustrious monopoly, he invited the ancient people of Israel to live far beyond their political means in matters of religion. He expected that they would trust him and thus hold their heads higher than the most powerful of emperors. He thus revealed himself as the
deuspoliticus par excellence, as the party member of all party members, as the anchor of a sacred one-sidedness that manifested itself in the far-reaching concept of the Covenant. As during the blossoming of communism, when the dogma was spread around that Marxist science united in itself objec- tivity and partisanship, so the Jewish and Christian theologies, which were always blooming plants, have made it clear from the beginning that God's universal justice expresses itself in the preferential treatment of one of the two allied peoples.
We have to assume that there is a constitutive primary phase in the development of the management of rage with a global scope (called, from a modern perspective, the submission of politics to morality, the art of the possible under the art of what can be wished), an initial phase that extends for more than two millennia. In this phase a threatening and sublime con- ception is shaped, according to which an autonomously steering and judg- ing but also participating and excitable as well as "agitating" (eifernder) God constantly intervenes in the course of human conflicts, alias history. Because the history of humanity is to a large extent synonymous with that which upsets God, these interventions mostly happen in the mode of wrath. God rages against his own people no less than against their adversaries. He shows his rage by sending wars, epidemics, famines, and natural catastro- phes as servile spirits of punishment (technically speaking, these spirits are secondary causes on behalf of the majesty who is the primary cause). At a later point, it was said about this God that when the day of Last Judg- ment would come, he would impose eternal bodily and spiritual pain on
70
THE WRATHFUL GOD
those who missed the chance to repent during their lives on earth and thus avoided their just sentence.
The motive of the court of judgment originated in the conceptions of the beyond in Ancient Egypt and the Near East. During its culmination in the late Middle Ages and the baroque period, it advanced to become the most aston- ishing of visual illustrations. If one had to define the, historically speaking, exceptionalism of Christian intelligence, one could put it as follows: Christian thinking is (or was until very recently) that thinking that in its concern for salvation also conceives of its opposite, hell. Even in the twentieth century, the Catholic Irishman James Joyce depicted, with the shiniest and blackest of
2 colors,themetaphysicalhorroroftheexperienceofsufferingforeternity. In
light of the influence of this idea, the concept of eternity became associated with a final penal and torture institution, based on a vast divine memory of injustice and corresponding rage competence. With the help of this set of
3 ideas,anxietybecamepartofthespiritualhistoryofChristianity. Itisprob-
ably correct to assume that theology secretly dispensed with the unfavorable ballast of dogmatic conceptions of hell during the twentieth century. Insofar as traces of the idea of a wrathful God have seeped into our contemporary memory, it still conjures up the memory of the most Christian of hells.
If the wrath of God is translated back into historical time and taken up by a human, universal direction, "history" comes into being. It enters the scene with a revolutionary climax whose meaning consists in avenging the injustice that provokes rage against those who caused the injustice and, even more so, against its structural conditions. One could define modernity as the epoch in which the motives of rage and immanence become fused. This liaison generates the coming into existence of a globally operative rage agency. In the next chapter, I will describe as the embodiment of such an institution the party that is always in the right. Only a control center of such a scale could realize what Schiller referred to with his dictum that world his- tory is the world's court of justice. But first I want to examine not the trans- lation of Holy Wrath into secular history but its accumulation in eternity.
RAGE RECOUNTED
THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY EXISTS IN COUNTLESS exemplary case studies, some more recent and some older. The search for justice has always brought about a second, wild form of the judiciary in which the injured person attempts to be both judge and warden at once. What is noteworthy about these documents, given our present perspective, is that only with the beginning of modernity was the romanticism of self- administered justice invented. Whoever speaks of modern times without acknowledging to what extent it is shaped by a cult of excessive rage suffers from an illusion. This is, even to the present day, the blind spot of cultural history—as if the myth of the "process of civilization" did not aim only to
the injured psyche to transcend the circle of injuries and revenge as such. As long as history is an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation, wisdom is required to bring the pendulum to a halt.
49
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
make invisible the release of vulgar manners under conditions of modernity but also to inflate revenge phantasms. While the global dimension of West- ern civilization aims at the neutralization of heroism, the marginalization of military virtue, and the pedagogical enhancement of peaceful social affects, the mass culture of the age of enlightenment reveals a dramatic recess in which the veneration of vengeful virtues, if we may so call them, reaches new, bizarre extremes.
This phenomenon can be traced back centuries before the French Revo- lution. The Enlightenment not only releases polemics of knowledge against ignorance but also invents a new quality of the guilty verdict by declaring all old conditions unjust before the demands of the new order; hereby the ecosystem of resignation begins to totter. Since time immemorial, human beings learned in this ecosystem to accept the apparent inevitabilities of mis- ery and injustice. The Enlightenment was thus required to allow revenge to be promoted to an epochal motive, as it dominated private as well as politi- cal affairs. Since the past is fundamentally always unjust, the inclination increases, not always but with increased regularity, to extol revenge as just.
OF COURSE, ANTIQUITY ALREADY KNEW GREAT ACTS OF REVENGE. From the furies of Orestes to the hysterics of Medea, ancient theater paid tribute to the dramatic potency of revengeful forces. Mythos knew as well from early on about the danger that begins with humiliation, a danger almost like a natural disaster. Medea's example shows particularly well the idea that the female psyche passes from pain to insanity with terrific velocity. This is what Seneca wanted to show when he depicts the hysterical heroine as an exemplary deterrent. In modern terminology, one would call attention to the fact that the passive-aggressive character is disposed to enter into states of excess whenever, by way of exception, she decides to become offensive. This is the framing of women on the rage stage, and, often, the privilege of the "great scene" ("groflen Szene") has always belonged to the "angry sex. " The ancients never imagined taking such exempla as anything other than warnings to orient themselves to the middle, away from excesses.
In the Eumenides, one of the key plays of Athenian drama, with which the Atride Trilogy of Aeschylus comes to an end, what is at issue is noth- ing less than the complete break with the older culture of revenge and fate as well as the introduction of a political concern for justice. This form of political justice should be practiced in the future exclusively in civil
50
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
courts. What is required for the establishment of such courts is the sensible theological-psychosemantic operation in which the old dignified goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyen, are renamed as the Eumenides, which means "those who want good" or "those caring for what is beautiful. " The mean- ing of the name change is unmistakable: "Where vengeance compulsion was, balanced, prudent justice will be. "
Whatever criteria one has in mind when searching the libraries of the Old
World, one will come across a large amount of references to the elementary
force of rage and the campaigns of vengeful fury. There are traces of a more
or less serious game with the romantic fire of rage, though this will become
a dominant motive only with the eighteenth century's emerging culture of
civil society. Since then, one great revenger hunts another, accompanied
by the sympathy of the audience of the modern imaginary. From the noble
robber Karl Moor to the angry veteran John Rambo; Edmond Dantes, the
mysterious Count of Monte Christo to Harmonica, the hero of Once Upon
a Time in the West, who has committed his life to a private nemesis; Judah
ben Hur, who exacted revenge against the spirit of imperial Rome with his
victory in an ominous chariot race, to the Bride, alias Black Mamba, the
protagonist of Kill Bill, who works through her death list. The time of those 3
wholiveforthe"greatscene"hascome. WhenDurrenmatt'soldladycomes for a visit, she exactly knows who needs to be liquidated out of the group of friends. Brecht's dreaming Pirate Jenny even knows a better answer to the question "Who is to die? ": all.
Stories of this kind seem to be natural ballads. By themselves they appear to aspire to a superior form of recitation and epic detail. By making visible the relationship between suffered injustice and just retribution, more recent acts of rage provide an illustration of the causality of fate. We moderns do not like to dispense with this lesson, however much we agree otherwise with the exercise of enlightenment, that is, the suspension of blind fate. The well- constructed story of rage provides the sublime for the people. It provides the audience with a compact formula for moral if/then relationships even if they pay the price of suspending the slow, formal application of the rule of law in order to practice a quicker form of retaliation. Moreover, rage satis- fies the popular interest in acts of which the perpetrator can legitimately be proud: such stories focus on the avengers, who by directly paying back for their humiliation release a part of the discontent with judicial civilization. They provide satisfying proof that the modern person does not always have to travel the windy road of resentment and the steep steps of the judiciary
51
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
process in order to articulate thymotic emotions. In the case of injuries lead- ing to chronic illness, rage is still the best therapy. This feeling constitutes the reason for the pleasure taken in base things.
The dangerous liaisons between the revenge motif and popular narrative do not need to be unfolded in detail at this point. Apparently these linkages are so deep that sometimes the return of modern art to its great epic form is helpful—as in the case of the abovementioned work from the century of narrative film, Once Upon a Time in the West. It has rightly been claimed that this work provided the art of film with the proof that two formally impossible things were in fact possible: that serious opera can be appropri- ated through film and that the lost form of epic can once again be given a contemporary form.
The affinity between rage and popular narrative forms could be illus- trated by drawing on a countless number of more recent documents. One example is particularly illuminating: the picturesque life history of the Indian rebel Phoolan Devi (1968-2001). From the state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan, when she was still quite a young woman, was the main actress of a widely watched reality drama that aired across the whole of the Indian sub- continent. After she had been collectively abused and raped by her husband and other male inhabitants of her village (including policemen), she fled and joined a group of bandits with whom she devised a plan to ambush and liquidate those who were guilty of the crimes against her. The corpse of her husband is said to have been put onto a donkey and chased through the vil- lage. The simple folk celebrated the rebel as an emancipated heroine and saw her as an avatar of the gruesome-sublime goddess Durga Kali. The photo- graph that depicts Phoolan Devi's handover of her weapons to Indian law enforcement officials is one of the archetypical press images of the twentieth century. One can see in the young fighter all the concentrated anger of being given over to her undecided fate. After eleven years of prison, without trial, the "Bandit Queen" was pardoned. Then she was elected into the Indian parliament, where she served as an inspiring role model for the countless disenfranchised women of her country. In June 2001, she was shot in broad daylight in Delhi, probably by a relative of one of her killed rapists. When she was still alive, Indian folklore took up the story of this charismatic fig- ure, and Phoolan Devi was transformed into the heroine of a popular epic still sung by Indian villagers.
Rarely do the archaic and the modern interpretations of vengeful rage come together in one individual action. In what follows I want to follow up
52
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
on the assumption that, through the process of modernization, the novel increasingly returns from a literary and ideological mode to the life of indi- viduals and to public perception. A convincing example of this has recently moved the public in Germany, Switzerland, and the former Soviet states. Vitalij K. , an engineer from the Caucasus republic of Ossetia, lost his wife and two children in a plane crash caused by human negligence; after a year of mourning, he decided to seek revenge in the name of his family.
On July 1, 2002, a Bashkir passenger airplane from Moscow collided with a DHL freight plane 36,000 feet above Lake Constance. The incident occurred close to the town of Owing, and all seventy-one passengers lost their lives. Among other factors, the accident occurred because of false directions from the control tower in Zurich-Kloten. When the control tower operator in charge realized that both machines were on a collision course, he advised the pilot of the Russian plane orally to immediately start to descend. At the same time, the on-board computer indicated that he should accelerate. The fatal crash happened because the Russian captain gave more credence to the oral instructions, while the DHL place started to decline at the advice of the on-board computer. The ball of fire on the sky above Lake Constance could be seen almost a hundred miles away. In February 2003, the man from Ossetia, who had been born in 1956 and who could be called a winner of the postcommunist situation, appeared at the house of the Danish control tower operator near Zurich. He killed the operator on the terrace of his house by repeatedly stabbing him with a knife.
Before the drama in February 2003, Vitalij K. had attracted attention because he sometimes referred to "Caucasian methods" of conflict reso- lution. It is clear that the act of Vitalij K. came from a transformation of the work of mourning into a work of rage. Part of this work of rage was the sentence against the controller at the end of a short trial carried out by the court of his own intuition; the sentence was complemented by a pen- alty phase in which the judge slipped into the role of the hangman. This is a pattern that has increasingly permeated public consciousness since the beginning of modernity. It is not surprising that the Russian public pas- sionately followed the trial in Zurich of Vitalij K. during October 2005 and then protested his eight-year prison sentence. The avenger was promoted to the status of a national hero in his country of origin and across most of the former Soviet Union; for large parts of the population, he served as an object of identification.
53
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
FROM CASES SUCH AS THIS, ONE CAN DRAW THE CONCLUSION THAT vengeful impulses do not easily return to reality, at least not as long as cul- tural codes have failed to establish the conditions for such a return. We can speak of a return, even of a regression, insofar as such acts cannot claim to be justified anymore by official culture. In terms of the history of ideas, the era of the tribal commandment to engage in blood feuds is more than two millennia behind us. Granted, this is not the case everywhere. But the monopoly over violence that the modern state enjoys finds acceptance as a psychopolitical norm from a large majority of citizens and is supported almost without objections by the official pedagogy. Yet it cannot be denied that the imaginary produced by mass media provides an important space for the phantasm of the moral state of exception, including the vengeful attempt to come to terms with rage.
In order to make plausible the return of personal acts of revenge we have to assume that the force of the political and juridical civilization has become discredited. When the public order is accused of malfunctioning or of being a part of the problem (we might think of preferential treatment in court proceedings), individuals can take themselves to be appointed to represent justice as wild judges. In this sense it is possible to take modern revenge romanticism to be a specific part of an all-encompassing return to hero- ism. According to Hegel's insight, a hero in antiquity was someone who does what is necessary as an individual, someone who accomplishes what could not have been accomplished from the universal at that point in time; the heroism of the moderns lives off the intuition that even after the erec- tion of the rule of law, there can emerge situations in which the univer- sal is no longer operative. That even the nation, or rather the government, can be determined by heroic and revenge-romantic reflexes is suggested by the example of the Israeli president Golda Meir. After Palestinian terrorists attacked the quarters of the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Meir is said to have ordered Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to track the perpetrators and their supporters and kill them without any legiti- macy from a court proceeding. This operation (with the code name "The Wrath of God") was less a part of governmental action than a service to the imaginary of mass culture.
The popular and anarchist doubt about the regulatory power of "existing conditions" is connected to the tendency toward the new form of heroic action. Another consequence is the assumption of a permanent state of exception, and thus of the inclination of the actors to claim the right to help
54
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
themselves in their singular situations. Indeed, some theoreticians of the left such as Walter Benjamin and later Antonio Negri articulated the dangerous suggestion that for the majority of human beings living under conditions
4
of capitalism, the permanent state of exception is normal. Once the "order
of things" has become delegitimized, improvisations are needed, including some rough ones. Only a small step is required to go from the political and moral delegitimation of circumstances to their ontological delegitimation, and ontological delegitimations call into question not only the normative foundations of the institutions of the ancien regime but also the authority of the past as such. Once this moment has come, so-called reality becomes an object for revision and, if necessary, is authorized to be torn down. In light of this, the militant slogan of the twentieth century, transformed by Sartre, "on a raison de se revolter? would have to be slightly altered. It would need to be translated as: "not he who revolts against what exists is in the right, but he who avenges against it. "
THE AGGRESSOR AS GIVER
IN MY ANALYSIS OF RAGE, IT IS NECESSARY TO FIRST TURN TO ITS energetic dimension, and later I will turn to its temporal and pragmatic dimensions. This requires a certain asceticism with regard to reactions and patterns of interpretations. Initially it is necessary to bracket the desire to emphasize the devastating dynamism of rage. The concept of "destruction," at least, needs to be separated from any kind of moral valuation. It has to be understood as a metabolic phenomenon that needs to be investigated beyond either appraisal or criticism. The alleged or real tendency of rage to explode without concern for the future should not be put at center stage prematurely. Finally, it is necessary to leave out the common psychological attributions of motivation, as well as character diagnoses.
This provides a more even-tempered view of the phenomenon of rage, one that acknowledges that we are primarily dealing with an intensive form of energy that is ready to explode or be transferred. If one follows the image of effervescence, which already led the ancient authors to speak of furor, of eruption and storming ahead, it becomes apparent how much the expres- sion of rage possesses a giving, even a paradoxically generous trait. As a form of pure extroversion, the uninhibited expression of "foaming" rage adds an especially energetic supplement to the inventory of deeds. Naturally these mostly reveal themselves in a negative light because at first sight they
55
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
seem only to consist of uproar and suffering. It is easier to become aware of the giving dimension of rage if one regards the object of rage under the aspect of its similarity with the subject.
Whether rage comes on the scene like a sudden explosion or like chronic presentiment (after its hate-inflicted transformation into a proj- ect), it draws its force from an excess of energy that longs for release. Rage that manifests itself in punishment or acts of injury is connected to the belief that there is too little suffering in the world on a local or global level. This belief results from the judgment that suffering could be "deserved" in certain situations. The rage bearer sees in those people who are unjustly without suffering his most plausible enemies. He will never be content with the fact that pain is distributed unevenly to the point of intolerability. He wants to return a fair share of the excess of pain that has been stored up inside him to the person who caused it but has not yet been punished. He is infused with the knowledge that those without pain exist in a state of acute deficiency, and what they are missing is suffering. Seeing the deserv- ing go unpunished leads the vengeful individual to the conviction that he owns what others are lacking. He wants to become a donor, a profligate spender, even if he must force his gifts onto their recipients. Their habit of refusing to accept only provides rage and hatred with an additional motive to turn against its addressees.
There cannot be any doubt that there is a link between rage and pride, thanks to which rage provides itself with a moral certainty of its own legiti- macy. The higher the factor of pride in rage, the more effectively will the "you may" be transformed into a "you should. " The completely motivated vengeful action would be one that takes itself to be the execution of an indis- pensable, noble necessity. The corresponding empirical models would be revenge murders at the family level and wars of religion and independence on the ethnic and national levels.
As I have already stated, the rage bearer possesses the immediate evi- dence to assist the object of her rage in overcoming his own lack. Hours not spent in agony, a burning loss that needs to be suffered, a house that still stands in place without having been bombed, a knife that does not stick in the gut of a slanderer: these nuisances need to be overcome. Much more so than in the case of envy, which aims to humiliate and expropriate, rage (and likewise hatred, the conservation of rage) is an intensive turning toward the addressee in the game because it requires an act of authentic expenditure. One thus rightly says that human beings are as a consequence "inflicted
56
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
with" pain. The vengeful inflictor feels like someone who is rich enough to share something of his richness with his contemporaries.
As a rule, the donation of pain is sent to a precise address; however, the gift usually extends beyond the immediate recipient to affect those near her as well. Often the donator of pain agrees to this excess: if the individual des- ignated as object of rage led a pain-free life, then most likely the people in close proximity also led lives without suffering, defective lives. In this sense it never appears to be completely false for the donator of pain to involve these people. The more desperately the rage bearer's unconditional wish to give expresses itself, the less it is limited by a certain determinate addressee. Just like civil enthusiasm thinks it is embraced by the millions, rage that has been amplified to hatred addresses itself to a universe of unknown people. It is an affect capable of forming obscure general concepts and elevating itself to the level of vague abstractions.
When rage becomes hatred we can witness the basic operations of ide-
ology formation because conceptual fixations are the best preservative for
ephemeral responses. He who wants to remember his rage needs to preserve
it in hate containers. The advantage of these conceptualizations of rage is
that they can be used extensively without ever being used up entirely. Abso-
lute hatred ultimately does not require any determinate object right before
its eyes. Its abstractness, which is close to aimlessness, guarantees its spilling
over into what is universal. For its bearer, the knowledge that it is turning to
the general addressee is sufficient to make sure that he does not waste itself
unnecessarily. The condition is reached in which we can speak of expendi-
5
ture as such, expenditure pure and simple (sans phrase). In these divesti-
tures, the rage-filled giver of pain often risks his own life. In these cases, the giver makes himself into a physical addition to the bomb that is supposed to supply the missing suffering.
IT THUS DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE TO ESTABLISH A RELATIONSHIP between self-confident hatred and concepts such as nihilism—despite their prevalence as popular explanatory models. In general, the concept of hatred proves analytically unsuitable because it is deduced from the phenomenon of rage and can only be made intelligible as a form of preserving rage. One has to insist that rage, which is a standpoint, even a project, is not at all affil- iated with the nothingness we like to claim for hatred. Rage is not merely a militant form of indifference with regard to oneself and others. Even if
57
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
rage reveals recklessness, it would be a mistake to think that it is indifferent about everything. Rage that has become reified as hatred is resolute good- will. Initially it appears as a pointed attack that brings about an intense local pain. Then it secures an allegedly necessary increase of pain in the world in order to persist in terrible reports and other media exaggerations. In light of this perspective, it is the subjective and passionate appearance of that which the penalizing judiciary wants to embody objectively and without passion. Both rest on the axiom according to which the balance of the world after its disruption can only be recovered through an increase of pain at the right location.
In the case of individual donations of rage, the person who hates initially draws on her own rage supply, even at the risk of using up her capacity for experiencing rage. Nothing guarantees to the simple vengeful person that his sources are inexhaustible. As long as vengeful energy is not transformed into a project and the individual constantly faces the possibility of returning to peace through satisfaction or exhaustion, the small circle of anger and abreaction belongs to the energetic processes connected to our emotions.
In this sense we can understand the abreactive crime as the manifesta- tion of a power that demands the right to discharge itself even if this puts the actor into a position of moral injustice. This is why crimes from such impulsive sources tend to exhaust themselves when the deed is finished. The moment that the victim is out of sight, the perpetrator is able to forget it. Is it not true, after all, what is said about the brothers of Joseph after they sold him to Egypt, "for their hatred had been taken from them, and in time they were left with only vague recollections of how greatly the ninny had angered them"? 6 Because rage is initially a finite resource, its satisfaction through the deed is often its end, which sometimes compels the actor to surrender deliberately to the forces of law.
An exemplary return of a fatigued vengeful person to endure his sentence is depicted by Friedrich Schiller in his 1792 story "The Criminal from Lost Honor. " If Hegel, who read this novella attentively, refers to the sentence as the honor of the crime, we should immediately think of Schiller's poor "sun keeper. " This well-known ravager reveals his true identity to a respectful civil servant in a sentimental gesture in order to then surrender himself to the courts. Something similar is done by Kleist in Michael Kolhaas, although this German story about the passion of righteousness stands under a darker sign. This story of an overly sensitive person who takes revenge for two horses that were stolen from him embodies the process by which the rage
58
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
that drives a private person to carry out deeds of revenge becomes a meta- physics of self-administered justice. The fact that the raging citizen who sees his stubbornness fulfilled dies as a satisfied petit-bourgeois is revealing. It expresses nothing less than the anticipation of the revaluation of all values. The romantics, who opened themselves to the aesthetics of excess, picked up on the feeling that we can no longer depend on God's justice. They reveal a concern for those humiliated on the earth and those who make their contri- butions to the day of judgment during their lifetimes.
RAGE AND TIME: THE SIMPLE EXPLOSION
WHEN THE EXPENDITURE OF RAGE DEVELOPS MORE COMPLEX FORMS, the seeds of rage are consciously dispersed, and the fruits of rage are dili- gently harvested. Through hate culture, rage is carried out in the form of a project. Wherever revenge intentions ripen, dark energies become stabi- lized over longer periods. What Nietzsche says about the genesis of con- science, that it is premised on the human who can promise, is even more true for the memory of the one who engages in revenge. This person is an agent who remembers not only the injustice that has been inflicted upon him but also all his plans for paying it back. The person "who may promise" is, according to Nietzsche's complex characterization, the subject with the "lasting will. " Once this subject is constituted, revenge intentions can then be sustained over long periods of time—even passed from one generation to the next. Once the stage of transmission has reached the next agent, an authentic economy of rage has come into being. Now the resource of rage is no longer accumulated arbitrarily and occasionally wasted; rather, it is maintained and continually produced as the object of an ongoing project. Once it has reached this stage, rage becomes a treasure trove for its pos- sessor, opening up avenues to transpersonal motives. As soon as collectively administered amounts of rage are stored as treasures or assets, the question becomes pressing as to whether such accumulated assets can be invested like capital. I will answer this later with the support of a new psychopolitical definition for left-wing parties. In reality these parties need to be under- stood as banks of rage that, if they do their business well, will know how to effect politically and thymotically relevant gains.
If one admits that the banking and saving functions of rage assets are real and efficacious, one also understands how it is possible for rage to develop from its diffused initial stage to higher levels of organization. By
59
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
passing through this progression, rage travels the road from local and inti- mate emotion to public and political program. The temporal structure of rage-potentials also undergoes a total transformation. Rage undergoes a metamorphosis from a blind form of expenditure in the here and now to a far-sighted, world-historical project of revolution for the sake of those who have been humiliated and offended.
However, as long as rage remains explosive, it expresses itself by "flaming up": "And the rage of Achilles rose forcefully. " The direct thymotic abreac- tion is a version of fulfilled presence. For the raging person, as for the happy person, time does not exist. The uproar in the here and now neutralizes the retrospective and prospective ecstasies of time so that both disappear in the momentary energy flow. The life of the subject of fury is the sparkles in the chalice of the situation.
For the romantics of energy, this acting in anger is a kind of flow. It implies a return to a mystic and animal time that, as its con- noisseurs avow, has the quality of the constantly fleeting now.
RAGE AS PROJECT: REVENGE
THE CREATION OF A QUALIFIED OR EXISTENTIAL TIME, THAT IS, A lived time with a retrospective and anticipatory character, occurs through the deferral of discharge. Rage potential is channeled into a vector that cre- ates a tension between then, now, and later. This is why we can say that the raging one who holds herself back preliminarily knows what it means to intend to do something. At the same time, she not only lives in history but also makes history—insofar as making history is the name here for taking motives from the past in order to take care of what comes. In this respect, nothing can be compared to revenge. Thymos that has been activated dis- covers through its desire for gratification the world as the realm of con- structing future projections, which gain momentum for the coming attack from what has been. Rage becomes the momentum of a movement into the future, which one can understand as the raw material for historical change.
As elementary as these considerations may appear, their implications reach into the innermost motives of twentieth-centuiy philosophy. If they are correct, they necessitate important modifications to one of the most well known theorems of modern philosophy. If they are correct, one should not interpret existential time as the immediate being-toward-death, as Hei- degger in Being and Time suggests in an interpretation that is as well known as it is rushed. The being-whole-ability of existence {das Ganz-sein-Kbnnen
60
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
der Existenz) is what matters to the thinker, an ability that does not depend on the fact of the individual considering his own death in order to ascertain his directedness toward something that is an unconditional future fact. Das- ein can just as well orient itself because it traverses the distance from humil- iation to revenge as a whole. Existential time emerges from such an anxiety (Hingespanntheit) toward its decisive moment. Such an act of endowing for one's own being-toward-goals (Seins-zum-Ziele) is more powerful than every vague heroic meditation of the end. When Dasein is angry it does not have the form of running ahead toward its own death, but of an anticipa- tion of the indispensable day of rage. One would rather have to speak of a running ahead to gratification. If one thinks back to the protagonist of the Iliad it becomes clear that a warlike being-toward-destruction has become his second nature. His departure for the last battle in front of the walls of Troy marks the beginning of the sequence of action with which the down- fall of the hero became necessary. In this respect, Heidegger's thesis that Dasein is being-toward-death belongs to those Europeans who carry on the work of the myth of Achilles throughout the ages.
Revenge emerges out of the project form of rage. This concept initially requires analysis from a neutral and ecological vantage point. One may rightly understand the desire for revenge as one of the most unfriendly desires of humanity. That it belongs to the causes of the greatest miseries is proven by history insofar as it has not yet been classified a "life teacher. " Called "zra," it is classified among the deadly sins. If anyone could say something positive about it, it is that with it the possibility of unemployment vanishes from the life of avenger. He who has a strong intention to practice a revenge is, for the time being, safe from suffering problems of meaning. A persistent will excludes boredom. The deep simplicity of rage satisfies the all-too-human desire for strong motivations. One motive, one agent, one necessary deed: this is the formula for a complete project. The most important character- istic of a well-organized and well-planned existence manifests itself in the lack of any arbitrariness. The avenger is safe from the "need of needless- ness" that Heidegger claimed would be the sign of an existence abandoned by a sense of ne-cessity (Not-Wenidigkeit). It is indeed impossible to claim that the avenger would live like a leaf in the wind; chance no longer has any power over her. This way revengeful existence gains a quasi-metaphysical meaning in a postmetaphysical age: thanks to rage the "utopia of motivated life" realizes itself in a domain in which an increasing amount of people feel empty. No one expressed this more clearly than Stalin when he said about
61
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
his colleagues Kamenew and Dschersinski, "To choose one's victim, to pre- pare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to b e d . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world. "7
RAGE AS BANK: REVOLUTION
THE PROJECT FORM OF RAGE (WHICH ONE WOULD CALL IN POLICE jargon self-administered justice or the mob mentality and in political jargon anarchism or the romanticism of violence) can expand to take on the form of a bank. This elevation (Aufhebung) of local anger resources and dispersed projects of hatred into an overarching instance. The task of this storehouse of rage, as for every authentic bank, consists in serving as a collection point and recycling agency for investments. This transition necessarily once again affects the temporal structure of those potentials invested in individual projects. Just as rage in its project form provides for a longer duration and allows for a pragmatic planning process, the bank form of rage requires that individual vengeful plans subject themselves to a superior perspective. This perspective proudly bears the title of "history"—history, of course, in the singular. Through the creation of a bank of rage (understood as a storage place for moral explosives and vengeful projects) individual vectors become part of a single project guided by a single administration, the demands of which do not always coincide with the rhythms of local actors and actions. But now subjection becomes inevitable: countless histories of rage are finally united in one common history.
This transition marks the transformation from the projective to the historical form of rage. As soon as a collective that invests its rage poten- tials—as well as its hopes and ideals—forms itself into a common, enduring operation, "history" itself takes on the form of an enterprise of the highest ambition. Historical narration takes on the task of accounting for the deeds and sufferings of the significant collective of rage. To say it almost with the words from 1848 of two famous colleagues: all history is the history of rage applications.
Once the rage economy becomes elevated to the level of a bank, anar- chistic companies led by small rage owners and locally organized anger groups become the subjects of harsh criticism. At the same time that the level of organization of rage is increased, there is a rationalization of the vengeful energy: it passes from pure impulsivity through a selective attack to a conception of attacks against the state of the world as a whole. From the
62
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
perspective of the rage bankers, the actions of local anger agencies are blind expenditures that almost never produce any appropriate return because the anarchic acting out of the forces of rage regularly provokes the intervention of security forces, which can easily neutralize individual eruptions of hatred and local revolt.
On this level, vengeful actions are usually persecuted as transgressions or punished as crimes. It is thus not helpful to destroy telephone boxes or to set cars on fire unless the act is meant to integrate the act of vandalism into a "historical" perspective. The anger of destroyers and arsonists consum- mates itself in its expression, and that it often regenerates itself through the harsh reactions of the police and the judiciary does not change its blindness. It is an attempt to smash fog with a stick. Even a mass movement like that of the slave leader Spartacus in the years 73 through 71 B. C. could not achieve more than a flaring-up of hatred across Italy against the domination of the Roman landowners. Even though the rebellious gladiators of Capua dealt multiple defeats to the Roman army, the final result of this revolt was the horror of 6,000 crucified rebels enduring several days of agony before dying. Its consequences were increased repression and deepened discouragement. The revitalization of the legend of Spartacus and its inclusion in the sym- bolic arsenal of modern class struggle tells us, however, that in the archives of rage one deals with a "heritage" that is millennia old. Remember: if one wants to cultivate and pass on rage, one needs to make one's offspring into a part of a history of victims who call for revenge.
An analysis of our historical experience shows without a doubt that the small craftsmanship of rage is condemned to exhaust itself in costly botch-ups. So long as the local assets for revolutionary zeal are not pooled at long-term collection points and remain unguided by a visionary leader- ship, they waste themselves in expressions of their growing unrest. Isolated anger quanta heat up in shabby dishes until they evaporate or leave behind burned sediments that cannot again be reheated. This is unmistakably revealed by the history of smaller protest parties. Only when discrete ener- gies are invested into superior projects and far-sighted, sufficiently calm, diabolic directors take care of administrating collective rage capacities is it possible for multiple, isolated fires to be transformed into one big power plant. This plant could provide the energy for coordinated actions, up to the level of "world politics. " Visionary slogans become necessary for this to occur, slogans that do not need merely to address the intense anger of human beings but to reach their inner feelings of bitterness and finally their
63
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
hope and their pride. The coldest rage writes up its activity reports in the style of hot idealism.
Just like the monetary economy, the rage economy passes a critical marker once rage has advanced from local accumulation and selective explosion to the level of a systematic investment and cyclic increase. In the case of money, one calls this difference the transition from treasure hoard- ing to capital. For rage, the corresponding transformation is reached once the vengeful infliction of pain is transformed from revenge to revolution. Revolution cannot be a matter of the resentment of an isolated private person, although such affects are also instantiated in its decisive moment. Revolution rather implies the creation of a bank of rage whose investments should be considered in as precise detail as an army operation before a final battle, or actions of a multinational corporation before being taken over by a hostile competitor.
The concept of the coming "revolution," considered in light of the events of 1917, finalizes the transition from the actualism to the futurism of rage. It implies a complete dismissal of the principle of expression. Vengeful acts of expression mean nothing more than a narcissistic expenditure of energy. The professional revolutionary, who is working as an employee of a bank of rage, does not express individual tensions, he follows a plan. This presup- poses the complete subordination of revolutionary affects under the com- mercial strategy. It does not suffice anymore to "embellish the world with horrors," to use the sarcastic-lucid phrase uttered by Schiller's hero in the play The Robbers, which Karl Moor proffers to characterize the maxim of his revolt against injustice. Whoever intends to embellish the world in the future needs to go much further in making it ugly than the romanticism of rebels and assassins could ever dream. Individual flowers of evil are no longer sufficient—one needs a whole art of gardening.
THE TERRIFYING FORCE OF THE NEGATIVE
BY "REVOLUTION," WHICH STILL SOUNDS SOMEWHAT FASCINATING even if it turns out to be increasingly empty, I mean the concept or, bet- ter, the phantasm that Lenin and Mao Zedong, the most successful entre- preneurs of rage, had in mind. By "revolutions" they meant that, through disciplined acts of hatred, one day there could be so much additional pain, so much excessive horror, so much numbing self-doubt among the secu- rity forces that everything that existed would soon melt down during a
64
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
day of mass rage. Once what exists has lost its eternal and firm hold, the rotten world can then be created anew through the fire of transformation. But for this to happen, the power of destruction needs to accomplish its work to the very end. Only when what is old is eradicated completely can the reconstruction of the true circumstances can be started on a totally level foundation.
What Hegel referred to as the terrifying force of the negative gains its most distinct contour in this religiously conditioned speculation. Human rage, gathered from all sources and through effective modes of organiza- tion, provides for the bizarre calculation of big rage bankers the energy for a new creation. Assuming that the terrible end is sufficiently terrible, it should accordingly pass over into an epochal beginning.
Through deliberations of this kind at the height of unblemished ruth- lessness, one can encounter a form of anxiety that would curdle the blood of motley rebels and local hate projects if they were capable of envisioning the great strategic perspectives. The apocalyptic entrepreneur of rage has to prevent the action of local cells from endangering the grand plan with premature activism. This commits him to an extreme ascetics that will also affect his followers. The world revolutionary must unfailingly plan against spontaneous feelings; he must tenaciously dismiss his first reactions. He knows that without the deepest asceticism in the here and now there will never be any reward in the beyond. The more that local outrage is in the right, the more it is wrong when seen from a global perspective. If one aims for the transformation of everything, one needs to curb the impatience of individual vengeful parties. It is much more necessary to commit all fac- tions waiting to explode to staying calm and prepared (In-Form-Bleiben) until the day of mature rage arrives.
The temporal structure of revolution thus needs to be conceived of as an all-inclusive advent. Whatever leads to revolution belongs to the meaning- ful time of real history. The course of this history is analogous to a burning fuse. A great historical experience and a dose of intuition are needed to be able to judge to what extent the fuse of rage has already burned up. If one possesses both, one is qualified to take a leadership role at the top of the rage bank. Such a boss is justified in dictating to his employees from his sovereign position that they should prepare and keep the dynamite dry; the first precondition for collecting rage as part of a political project of global significance is cold-bloodedness. On the one hand, this cold-bloodedness constantly needs to stir hatred and outrage. On the other hand, it is also
65
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
necessary for securing restraint. This way Dasein, in pre-explosive times, is in the mood of waiting while remaining ready for the next fight.
WHERE CAN ONE STUDY THIS HIGHER ECONOMY? NO ONE BELIEVES that studying Heidegger academically will be sufficient for gaining such dan- gerous knowledge. As much as the affinities with the basic claims of Being and Time are obvious, the Master from Messkirch only approached the temporal structure of revolutionary resentment in a formalist way before, for a time, evading it for the black heaven of the "national revolution. " Hei- degger never fully understood the logical and systematic implications of the concept of revolution. He understood it just as little as he understood the connection between our historicity and Daseins ability to be resentful. His investigation of the temporal structures of the caring, projecting, and dying Dasein does not provide us with an appropriate conception of the deep nexus of rage and time. The birth of history out of the project form of rage and, even more, the totality of processes leading to the capitalization of resentment remain obscure in his work.
APART FROM HEIDEGGER, WE WOULD OF COURSE HAVE TO REFER TO Marx and Lenin as the authorities for the dynamism of prerevolutionary and revolutionary negativity. It is peculiar that studying these authors is currently next to impossible. The reason for this is not that the texts are impenetrable but that the wall of Zeitgeist barricades access to them in a way that even the most patient person cannot independently overcome. With the exception of some still citable "passages," the works of the Marxist classics have become practically unreadable for people with contemporary intellectual, moral, and aesthetic reflexes. They seem to be written in an illusionary foreign tongue. Obsolete polemics permeate them to a degree that, for the time being, the deterring effect outweighs even the most moti- vated investigatory curiosity. Furthermore, they illustrate a fidelity to con- cepts one usually only finds in fundamentalist sects. Although they appeal to the science of "society" and its "contradictions," many classic leftist texts (with the exception of a few technical primary texts such as Capital) can be read only as unintended parodies. Only thanks to a completely untimely ascetics would it be possible to deduce from the writings of Marx and Lenin the building blocks of a theory of the present. (Mao Zedong's works would
66
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
have to be taken off the list of reasonable literature from the very begin- ning). Nonetheless, the works of these authors provide a massive compen- dium of rage insights. Without these, the tragedies of the twentieth century cannot be adequately depicted and explained. I will return to this sunken body of work in chapters 3 and 4 because they indirectly provide informa- tion about what lies ahead.
One of the last chances to get to know a little bit more about the unpop- ular strategies of the major rage economy is to draw on events in the West- ern world toward the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. In this morbid but equally glorious epoch, the thousand flowers of radicalism were in bloom as if for the last time. Then, it would have easily been pos- sible to assure oneself of Marx's remark that historical dramas regularly repeat themselves as farces after their first staging as tragedies. In this case, the farce consisted in the attempt to project the circumstances of the 1930s onto those of 1968 and afterward in order to derive the rules for "resis- tance" against the "ruling system. " Back then, one could often hear the doc- trine that patience should be the first virtue of the revolutionary. Words of advice like these mirrored a generational conflict in the radical left between the old school and the revolutionary youth. The late-Stalinist intelligentsia advised this youth that, although the revolution had already "begun" and in the future it would be necessary to always count "from now on," the manifest eruption of the revolution should, under no circumstances, be accelerated voluntaristically.
Only today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the peace of real consumerism is threatened through what is in many places proclaimed as "return of history" (part of it being a return of left-fascist whispers at the margins of academia), do we find a new chance to understand what the praise of revolutionary virtues truly meant. Patience designated the attitude of the historical subject of rage. This subject had freed itself from its personal motives through a cold quasi-idealist ascetics. Once a private factor becomes part of the inevitable revenge against the status quo (or according to the jargon of the time, praxis), voluntarism and a premature expenditure are unavoidable consequences. They are the "teething troubles" of the growing revolution. Although such eruptive episodes might still seem justified from the perspective of the actors, from the perspective of a leading employee of the world bank of rage they are the worst thing that could happen before the day of decision. The leading functionaries are convinced that a pre- mature eruption will prevent the coming into being of this most intensive
67
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
tension. Only this tension will allow the collection of globally dispersed assets of rage into one single and final action, which goes by the name of "world revolution. " The hostile acquisition of the "world" by those who are worse off presupposes that the various factions among the worse off refrain from wasting their powers in spontaneous and individual ventures.
The most famous examples of an anarchistic waste of rage deposits are the assassins who, on March 1, 1881, killed Czar Alexander II, the famous emancipator of the serfs. The immediate consequences consisted in the intensification of repression and the expansion of an omnipresent police system. Even more devastating was the senseless waste of hatred assets by the imitators of the assassins of 1881. These were a group of students of the University of St. Petersburg who were planning to kill the murdered czar's successor, Alexander III, on March 1,1886—as is well known, days of political rage follow a special calendar. Among the students was the twenty- one-year-old Alexander Ulyanov. The attempt was uncovered by the police before it could be carried out, and Alexander was imprisoned with four- teen other conspirators. He was sent to court and, in May 1887, hanged with four other insurgents who likewise were unable to feel remorse. The lives of the other ten were spared in line with the manners of a Russian autocracy famous for its acts of pardoning. Vladimir Ulyanov, the "brother of the hanged," subsequently underwent a process of change from which he emerged as "Lenin," the first wholehearted politician of rage in mod- ern times. In this capacity, he came to understand that the way to power can only lead through the conquest of the state apparatus, not through the merely symbolically relevant assassination of its representative.
The often cited phrase of the young Lenin, "we will not go this way,"
which was probably dated earlier or even invented, is rightly conceived of as
8
the first sentence of the Russian Revolution. With him begins the century
of the big business of rage. Who can forgo the killing of the prince, can receive, as a bonus to the conquered power, the dead prince for free.
68
THE WRATHFUL GOD
THE DISCOVERY OF THE METAPHYSICAL REVENGE BANK
AT THE END OF THE INTRODUCTION I CLAIMED THAT THE psychopolitical constellation of rage and time (or rage and history) is antici- pated by the theological constellation of rage and eternity. What this means exactly at this point needs to be developed. Nontrivial insights concerning the function and architecture of monotheistic religions will surface in the course of this investigation.
That theology wants to be a political quantity, that it can, and that it indeed needs to be such follow from a simple diagnosis. The religions that were relevant for the course of occidental European history, that is, the Mes- opotamian as well as the Mediterranean religions, have always been politi- cal and will remain so as long as they survive. In these religions, gods are the transcendent party supporters of their peoples and protectors of their kingdoms. They exercise this function even at the risk of having to invent a people and a kingdom that suits them. This is especially true for the God of monotheism. This God had to travel a long geopolitical path, from his precarious Egyptian beginnings to his Roman and American triumphs. This is the case despite the assertions of those who worship him: he is not a mere
69
THE WRATHFUL GOD
god of empires (since empires are notoriously perishable structures) but the
1
timeless and transpolitical creator and shepherd of all men.
In fact, the one and only God of Israel was initially a god without an empire. As an ally of a small people primarily concerned with their survival chances, he initially did not seem to be anything more than a provincial god. In time, however, he would transform himself into the most politically viru- lent god in the skies above Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. Although barely noticeable in the world, he was conscious of his omnipotence. He succeeded in offensively positioning himself against the pompously incar- nated imperial gods of the Near East and Rome, at the same time claiming clear superiority. As the claimant of an illustrious monopoly, he invited the ancient people of Israel to live far beyond their political means in matters of religion. He expected that they would trust him and thus hold their heads higher than the most powerful of emperors. He thus revealed himself as the
deuspoliticus par excellence, as the party member of all party members, as the anchor of a sacred one-sidedness that manifested itself in the far-reaching concept of the Covenant. As during the blossoming of communism, when the dogma was spread around that Marxist science united in itself objec- tivity and partisanship, so the Jewish and Christian theologies, which were always blooming plants, have made it clear from the beginning that God's universal justice expresses itself in the preferential treatment of one of the two allied peoples.
We have to assume that there is a constitutive primary phase in the development of the management of rage with a global scope (called, from a modern perspective, the submission of politics to morality, the art of the possible under the art of what can be wished), an initial phase that extends for more than two millennia. In this phase a threatening and sublime con- ception is shaped, according to which an autonomously steering and judg- ing but also participating and excitable as well as "agitating" (eifernder) God constantly intervenes in the course of human conflicts, alias history. Because the history of humanity is to a large extent synonymous with that which upsets God, these interventions mostly happen in the mode of wrath. God rages against his own people no less than against their adversaries. He shows his rage by sending wars, epidemics, famines, and natural catastro- phes as servile spirits of punishment (technically speaking, these spirits are secondary causes on behalf of the majesty who is the primary cause). At a later point, it was said about this God that when the day of Last Judg- ment would come, he would impose eternal bodily and spiritual pain on
70
THE WRATHFUL GOD
those who missed the chance to repent during their lives on earth and thus avoided their just sentence.
The motive of the court of judgment originated in the conceptions of the beyond in Ancient Egypt and the Near East. During its culmination in the late Middle Ages and the baroque period, it advanced to become the most aston- ishing of visual illustrations. If one had to define the, historically speaking, exceptionalism of Christian intelligence, one could put it as follows: Christian thinking is (or was until very recently) that thinking that in its concern for salvation also conceives of its opposite, hell. Even in the twentieth century, the Catholic Irishman James Joyce depicted, with the shiniest and blackest of
2 colors,themetaphysicalhorroroftheexperienceofsufferingforeternity. In
light of the influence of this idea, the concept of eternity became associated with a final penal and torture institution, based on a vast divine memory of injustice and corresponding rage competence. With the help of this set of
3 ideas,anxietybecamepartofthespiritualhistoryofChristianity. Itisprob-
ably correct to assume that theology secretly dispensed with the unfavorable ballast of dogmatic conceptions of hell during the twentieth century. Insofar as traces of the idea of a wrathful God have seeped into our contemporary memory, it still conjures up the memory of the most Christian of hells.
If the wrath of God is translated back into historical time and taken up by a human, universal direction, "history" comes into being. It enters the scene with a revolutionary climax whose meaning consists in avenging the injustice that provokes rage against those who caused the injustice and, even more so, against its structural conditions. One could define modernity as the epoch in which the motives of rage and immanence become fused. This liaison generates the coming into existence of a globally operative rage agency. In the next chapter, I will describe as the embodiment of such an institution the party that is always in the right. Only a control center of such a scale could realize what Schiller referred to with his dictum that world his- tory is the world's court of justice. But first I want to examine not the trans- lation of Holy Wrath into secular history but its accumulation in eternity.
