No More Learning

This background enables us to understand a fact that is sympto- matic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the bur- geoning modern world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvement was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the
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early
general training for contemporary performance ' v H . . . . ' - H
thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de {acto usually lead to weakenings.
Finally, we should speak of modern bankers, who, because of their role as lenders for people who seek to improve their situation, and, as business actors, often actually do so, prove the most effective motiva- tors for an intensifying change. Their work shows how a substantial part of the improvement imperatives under which the moderns live stem from the arcanum magnum of the modern property economy. If one formulates it explicitly, one stumbles on the categorical impera- tive of debt service: economize in such a way that, through an efficient use of resources, you can always be sure of being able to repay credit on time. The credit stress that forces growing populations of debtors into shape is a source of willingness to innovate that no theory of creativity has yet adequately acknowledged. As soon as one under- stands that modern disciplinings are based neither on the relationship of 'master and slave' nor on the opposition of 'capital and labour', but rather on the symbiotic antagonism of creditors and debtors, the entire history of money-driven 'societies' must be rewritten from scratch.
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New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics
In Praise of the Horizontal
In modernity, the metanoetic imperative increasingly changed into a prescription of 'outward application'. Its dissemination from the phil- osophical and monastic sphere into late aristocratic and bourgeois circles, and later also into proletarian and lower middle-class groups, reinforced the tendency towards de-spiritualization, pragmatization and finally the politicization of the dictate of change. Thus countless individuals in the centuries of modernization could follow the call to change their lives by opening the door to the typical products of their time. The magical paper products of the Gutenberg era - Bibles and non-Bibles alike - reached many, if not all, households over the years, decades and centuries. Whoever dealt with them seemed eo ipso on the better path. Printed texts accustomed their users to the dynamic of their time, which was still entirely opaque to them: that new media spread old content until different circumstances provide new content. This is in turn kept in circulation by the ageing media until the appearance of newer ones, which recycle the old media along with their old and new content.
What is decisive in all that followed is the observation that the demand for self-change and reversal no longer affected the change- disposed consciousness only from above: it need not always be the light from the vertical that casts the zealot to the ground before Damascus. The bright streak on the horizon towards which we wander on the ground now takes on a new spiritual and moral value. If the east is red, it cannot be a mistake to walk in that direction. The Reformation abolished the spiritual privileges of monastic life, as every point in the world is equidistant from grace. This changed the
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preconditions for a radical rejection of the world in their most sensi- tive point. If the ascetics in their strict orders were no closer to the light than the laymen in public offices and workshops, the latter could also find opportunities to advance spiritually by worldly means. The Enlightenment was able to follow on directly from this. And more than this: since the beginnings of the lighting policies that gave rise to the lumieres, one could imagine the path to the illumination of all things as a gentle upward slope on which anyone with a vaguely good will who understood the signs of the times could move forwards. An inarticulate urge from within was now to be sufficient in order to find the right path; where there is an urge, there is a way forwards. From the eighteenth century on, a constant striding along moderately rising paths was rationalized as the authentic mode of progress. Cultura non facit saltus. 103 World improvement is the good thing that needs time. 104
It is impossible to overstate the consequences of the shift towards a moderation of ethical standards; the tempering of aims restored an awareness of the moral chromaticism of the real. The ethical distinc- tion moved to the level of nuances. It not only gave tepid Christians back their clear conscience; it even granted the worldlings precedence in the quest for the good life - in fact, it made it possible after mil- lennia of spiritual discrimination to rehabilitate the worldly life as a positive movement in the horizontal, provided it showed a certain upward tendency. Whoever denied or dismissed this tendency was immediately reactionary; whoever was not content with it would dream sooner or later of a vertical exit from anything that seemed horizontal, continuous or foreseeable: of revolution.
Progress as Half-Price Metanoia
Thus the idea of progress and development in modernity transpires as the worst enemy of old-style radical metanoia. It deprives the steep old-ascetic vertical of its plausibility, relegating it to the domain of 'fanaticism'. This change lies behind the thousandfold repeated misreading of modernity as the era of secularization. Certainly Christianity lost its predominance in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, but only a few Enlightenment zealots established a form of 'humans alone' movement that slammed shut all doors to the beyond and sought to transfer everything unconditionally to the realm of immanence. The general populace had always retained a vague awareness of transcendence, even in the supposedly secular
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THE AVTO-Ol'ERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
simultaneously SUpposlt! on a
reality 'piecemeal supranaturalism', applying it also to himself. This disposition was perfectly suited to the pragmatic immanentism of the Modern Age, as well as the good logical manners of academia and the educated audience, and it is this familiar attitude that is attracting attention once more in the rumours currently circulating of a 'post- secular society'.
The central moral-historical event of this epoch was therefore not secularization, but rather the de-radicalization of the ethical distinction - or, if one prefers, the de-verticalization of existence. This is precisely what is meant by the once-great word 'progress'. The discreet spiritual sensation of the Modern Age was that the middle paths were now the ones leading to salvation. The moderation of demands for a radical disavowal of ancient Adam and his corrupt milieu gave worldliness a new dignity. They contributed to bringing about the cultural climate change in favour of a fundamental neophilia. It is unnecessary to demonstrate here how the inclination to welcome the new gave the Modern Age its futurist orientation. Since Hans Blumenberg'S central work, its debt to the rehabilitation of curiosity has been known. lOS
In its quieter periods, especially 1648-1789 and 1815-1914, and once more from 1945 to the present day, the newer era was, all in all, an age of half-price metanoia. In these times one could safely go along with the 'development' driving forwards grosso modo and let old Adam live in a bourgeois guise. To consider oneself one of the justi- fied, one of the good, it was sufficient to be in step with the times and follow the general trend of progress. From a critical point onwards, the reversal of consciousness was even supposed to take place for free, simply by remembering one's natural goodness: Rousseau even managed to proclaim Adam the true human being and denounce all attempts by civilization to educate him, better him and make him strive upwards as aberrations. To this day, we do not know what caused the deeper culture rupture in recent centuries - Rousseauism, with its doctrine that true nature is free for all, or Leninism, with its fierce re-raising of the price for changing the world and humans. The latter spawned activists who prided themselves on large-scale killing for the good cause, while the former seduced countless educated men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into believing that one could restore the human being's inner truth by doing away with all cultural trappings and artistic superstructures. 106
The half-price metanoia that defined the moral modus operandi 371
THE EXERCISES OF THE lv10DERNS
compromise seH-improvement world improvement. While the former was still entirely the business of the change-willing individual, the latter depended on the perform- ances of the teachers, inventors and entrepreneurs who populated the social field with the results of their activity - pedagogical results on the one side, technical and economic results on the other. As far as changes of method are concerned, one notes how the emphasis increasingly shifts from the practising self-influence of the individual to the effects of teachers and inventors on the many from without. When Seneca wrote to his only student, meum opus es, this was barely more than a motivating turn of phrase, not to mention a charming expression of pedagogical eros. He himself knew best of all that even in the demanding relationship between master and student, everything ultimately depends on the latter's willingness to mould
themselves.
Things look rather different when the modern school and the guild
of human-fitters set about their work: their life-changing intentions are undeniable, but their angle of attack is chosen in such a way that there can be no doubt as to the primacy of the outside influence. The early school drill has always pre-empted the student's own perform- ance; syllabuses lay down the courses of study before it can even occur to pupils that they might have an interest of their own in this or that subject; and for the buyers of competence-expanding devices, a possible contribution of their own is essentially meaningless from the start compared to the performance on offer. Each time it is the optimization from without that keeps the upper hand, even when the inner sediments of tuition and the habitual use of life-heightening means - works of art, prostheses, vehicles, communication media, luxury items etc. - become second nature for students and users.
World Improvement as Self-Improvement
These observations can be translated into a distinction: in the prac- tising life of the spiritual-ascetic, virtuosic or athletic type, the agent has a self-improving influence on themselves via the direct route of daily training. On the path of world improvement, by contrast, they become a user of objective optimization tools that modify their ethical status indirectly at most, albeit not insignificantly. This dis- tinction directly concerns the way in which the call to change one's life modifies the existence of the individual. As we have seen, where
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IS at
business jargon - existence comes under a steep vertical tension: it
imposes the passion form of the individually chosen field on life, whether that of the 'religious', artistic, political or sometimes also the sporting sphere. If, on the other hand, the half-price imperative is adopted, as in the shallower forms of enlightenment, progressive thought and starry-eyed idealism, a mode of existence is established whose aims are facilitation of life, breakdown of vertical tension and avoidance of passion.
As long as the moderate tendency succeeds in presenting itself as the reasonable that is in the process of becoming the real, and thus claims universal validity, it is not overly problematic to compare and perhaps even equate technological progress with moral and social progress. For conventional progressism, the journey forwards and upwards is one that does not need to be completed under one's own steam; it is like a current that we can allow to carry us. Coming from distant sources, it has flowed through entire epochs; our ship of progress would not have travelled so far had it not been drifting on this current - though we have only recently started guiding it towards the port. Shame on anyone who has trouble imagining rivers that flow uphill! Today one calls complex masses in qualified movement 'evolving systems' to neutralize the paradox in the requirement that forwards should simultaneously mean upwards. 10? The postmoderns sheepishly note down the pale remnants of progress under the heading 'complexity increase'. As long as the early Enlightenment looking ironically over the shoulders of the 'positive religions' itself functions like a religion, however - as an illusion-training club for groups, and as a practice system for internalizing surrealistic assumptions among individuals - it is the duty of every decent human being to promote the conviction that there are indeed rivers which flow uphill.
Having-Oneself-Operated-On: The Subject in Auto- Operative Curvature
It is necessary to insist on these essentially familiar and established observations because the complications that will concern us in the following can only be understood against this background. They relate firstly to the intense frictions between the strong and weak forms of the metanoetic imperative in modernity, and secondly to the relationship between the optimizations I carry out on myself and the life improvements which, as a contemporary of advanced inventions
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
I to the action as phrase 'having- oneself-operated-on' a logical choice for the second. Together, they refer to competing modes of anthropotechnic behaviour. In the first, I am moulded as an object of direct self-modification through measures of my own; in the second, I expose myself to the effects of others' operating competence and let them mould me. The interplay of self- operation and having-oneself-operated-on encompasses the entire
self-concern of the subject. ] 08
Modern conditions are characterized by the fact that self-competent
individuals increasingly draw on the operative competence of others for their acts on themselves. I call the referring-back of having-one- self-operated-on to self-operation the auto-operative curvature of the modern subject. It is based on a strongly evident fact: whoever lets others do something directly to them is indirectly doing something for themselves. This leads to an altered way of integrating suffering into actions. The competent subject must not only attend to the expansion of its own radius of action; it must also extend its responsibility for 'treatments' through others.
It is easy to see why this is the only possibility in a modernized world. Individuals are not only unable to take the entire work of changing the world upon themselves - they cannot even take care of everything required for their own personal optimization by them- selves. By exposing themselves to the effects of others' ability to act, they appropriate a form of passivity that implies a roundabout or deferred way of acting themselves. The expanded passivity compe- tence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one's own interests.
The Treated Self
Welcome passivity takes on numerous forms: having oneself informed, having oneself entertained, having oneself served, having oneself sup- plied, having oneself aroused, having oneself healed, having oneself edified, having oneself insured, having oneself transported, having oneself represented, having oneself advised, or having oneself cor- rected. Unwelcome forms of passivity supplement this series, begin- ning with letting oneself be blackmailed - through the dimension of disadvantageous employment contracts, for example, as examined by Marx, who took them as indicating a state of 'exploitation'; it follows from this, incidentally, that as soon as exploitation becomes chronic,
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a
we mention letting it
relevant in situations where the subject cannot cover its need for self- deception alone and, in order not to relent in its desire, turns to a qualified illusion provider who can supply what is needed.
Whatever the subject lets others do to it, it not only appropriates the 'treatments' after the fact, but seeks them of its own accord and integrates what is done to it into what it does to itself. From this perspective, one can see through Sartre's worn-out statement that we must make something out of what has been done to us as a one- eyed version of the passive-active interconnection. As is well known, Sartre always emphasized the act of self-appropriation, which puts an end to the previous acceptance of heteronomy. With this act, the subject breaks away from its being-object-for-others, thus realizing its freedom; at the same time, it does away with the bad faith that made it pretend to be a powerless something: whoever claims to be a thing among things has originally deceived themselves. It is not hard to recognize the model of resistance being applied to the philosophi- cal analysis of existence here - and one can even discern the dramatic shadow of the French Revolution in the projection's background. In addition, this accelerated the shift towards the externalization of the dictate of change, as its ambivalent outcome called into existence the modern forms of radicalism: dissatisfaction with the results of the revolution produced the concrete desire for its repetition; dissatisfac- tion with the repetitions produced the abstract longing for its perma- nence. Sartre was lucid enough to transfer the chronic dissatisfaction from the outer front back to the inner one. The consequences speak for themselves: if self-realization is presented as a rejection of passiv- ity that must constantly take place anew, the ghost light of permanent revolution takes hold of the individual's self-relationship - and Sartre, referring to Trotsky, in fact spoke of true morality as a conversion permanente. 109 This approach could only produce one result: the simultaneous destruction of politics and morals.
What is decisive, in fact, is the free cultivation of the passive ele- ments in the individual's self-relationship, corresponding to the auto- operative constitution of modern existence. For this we certainly do not need to choose the perverse exploitation of the suffering position, masochism, where the sexual relationship is embedded in a game of domination. In one of the most impressive sections of his early central work, Sartre showed this mode of having-oneself-operated~ on as the paradigm of a cunning, voluntary becoming-object~for­ others - brilliant in literary terms, but factually misleading. 11o The
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THE EXERCISES OF THE . M. ODERNS
interest in far more
the perverse contract of pain-seeker appointed
expresses; it is also much broader than one can grasp via the critique of power and domination. If I arrange for a transport company to take me from A to B, I take on board the driving service offered as an acceptable suffering - rides in hired vehicles only actually turn into masochistic ordeals on certain days. If I go to see my doctor, I usually also welcome the unpleasant examinations which his special- ized competence enables him to grant me; I subject myself to invasive treatments as if I were ultimately performing them on myself. If I switch on a preferred channel of mine, I nolens volens accept being flooded by the current programme. McLuhan's punning remark that message is massage makes philosophical sense if one recognizes it as a competent statement on the 'question of the subject' in the media age. Having oneself massaged symbolizes the situation of all those who act on themselves by allowing others to act on them.
In all cases of voluntarily sought passivity, it is easy to show how the passive aspects connect back to independent activity. This involves suspending that activity for the duration of the outside influence without abandoning the prospect of its resumption. The result is the phenomenon I here term the auto-operative curvature of actions in a highly labour-divided, or rather competence-divided and practice-divided, space of action. From the subject's perspective, its insertion into the curvature determines its actions through the ability to suffer. It does not mean submitting to domination, but rather sharing in a foreign competence. If the operation endured leads to the desired result, the suffering subject will believe that it performed an act of self-concern by handing the law of action to the operator. The statement 'I took myself in hand' is now replaced by a more complex formulation: 'I put myself in other hands so that, after completed treatment, I would once more be able to take myself in hand. '
If it were possible to keep its pietistic connotations at bay, one could mark this figure of a passivity underpinned by independent activity as the manifestation of 'calmness'1l1 that is constitutive of modernity. Calmness means passivity competence - it is the small change of ability that carries greater passions. It comes into play in situations where the subject is ready and willing to take the position of a client and profit from the savoir-faire of the operating partner. It is thus more a mode of prudence than the modern substitute for wisdom that Heidegger wanted to see in it. We recall: the philosopher had recommended 'calmness' [Gelassenheit] so that the modern human
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own once more to treatment itself. In behaviour is part of the game intelligence of humans in an elaborated networked world, where it is impossible to make a move without simultane- ously allowing others to play with one. In this sense, calmness is inseparable from the self-conception of experienced actors for whom the philosophical chimera of the subject residing at the centre of its circles of action has faded - or rather, has lost its utility value as the self-description of the day. It is replaced everywhere by concepts for agents who operate and are operated on, 'prosumers' and users of technical interfaces. ill Bazon Brock had already anticipated the figure of 'passivity competence' in the field of art observation decades ago: from 1968 on, he set up 'visitors' schools' at the 'documenta' in Kassel, and has meanwhile developed these further into the fourfold concept of the certified consumer, the certified patient, the certified
voter and the certified recipient.
In the Operative Circle: Medical Calmness
One of the most important modifications of calmness comes into play when the subject visits its 'treating' physician. Although the recent culture of having-something-done-to-oneself - which I shall here call a general form of having-oneself-operated-on - generalized the figure of the client, the medical field contains an older form of passivity for which one normally reserves the word 'patient'. It would not be sur- prising if it disappeared from the vocabulary of the medical system in the course of the twenty-first century, surviving only in conservative subcultures where sickness is viewed as a chance and the accident as a medium of self-experience. De (acto, this area too has been subject to clientization for some time, assisted not inconsiderably by the juridicization of the doctor-patient relationship. But whatever one calls the relationship between the doctor and their counterpart, it becomes acute when the latter entrusts themselves to the former for a surgical operation. Now one conventionally speaks of having-oneself- operated-on, meaning that faced with a serious diagnosis, the patient must be prepared for subjection to an invasive treatment. The content articulated in the old medical maxim vulnerando sanamus - we heal by wounding - translates on the patient side into a hypothesis: by allowing the infliction of skilled injury on myself, I contribute to my recovery. Although the asymmetry between the roles of patient and operator is great here, there is no doubt that the patient is an indirect
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
co-actor, meets action in space.
The curvature is rounded into a complete circle if the operator is the operated - a rare exception, but one that appears several times in medical history. A notable example is the doctor Leonid Rogozov, who was forced to perform an appendectomy on himself in 1961 during a stay at Novolazarevskaya Station, a Russian research station in the Antarctic. A famous photograph shows him lying on a table wearing a surgeon's gown with a face mask, having just opened his lower right abdominal wall. An even more sensational case was that of the American mountain climber Aron Ralston, who performed a spectacular self-amputation: following an accident during a mountain hike in Utah in April 2003 in which his right arm was trapped under a dislodged boulder, he decided, after attempting in vain to free himself for five days, to break his lower arm bone and sever the flesh with a blunt pocket knife. Afterwards he travelled the world as a speaker, describing his unusual act of self-concern to packed venues. In 2000, there was considerable attention in the media to the case of the then twenty-nine-year-old British performance artist Heather Perry, who performed a trepanation on her own skull using a local anaesthetic and a special drill - supposedly to cure her chronic fatigue and attain a higher level of consciousness. Furthermore, we know from the life story of the Indian wise man Ramana Maharshi (1873-1950) that he underwent surgery several times towards the end of his life for a cancer on his arm, and each time turned down the anaesthetic in favour of a Yogic form of pain neutralization. For an illuminated
man of the old school, it was clearly out of the question to accept a treatment by Western methods that violated the spiritual axiom of constant wakefulness.
As a rule, the auto-operative self-reference that enables the subject to tolerate technical modifications to its body displays a gentler cur- vature. Since around the eighteenth century, it has expressed itself in the extensive use of stimulants among enlightened Europeans. Their application increased from the twentieth century on, to the point of a massive use of doping agents in every possible discipline. It is no secret how dependent authors like Voltaire and Balzac were on caf- feine, or how much Sigmund Freud owed to his nicotinism. Equally, connoisseurs of Sartre's later career know of the extremes brought about by his alternating alcoholism and amphetamine addiction. In all these cases, the decisive question was obviously what the stimu- lated parties made out of what the stimulants had made of them. Sartre's addiction to amphetamines was not without a certain irony:
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was to create
October Revolution: The Ether Anaesthetic
From the mid-nineteenth century on, surgical operations saw the inclusion of anaesthesia, without which having-oneself-operated-on in the narrower sense would be inconceivable today. Its appearance on the stage of medical options was accompanied by one of the most profound modifications of the human self-relationship in modern times. If there has ever been a technical innovation that merited the use of the word 'revolution', it was the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic. Its first successful application was on 16 October 1846, in the operating theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where it was administered to the patient Gilbert Abbot with the aid of a specially constructed spherical ether inhaler for the removal of a neck tumour. The operation took place in the presence of the Boston medical elite, who constituted a rather sceptical audience after the failure of a similar attempt in the same auditorium using laughing gas. Once William Morton, the constructor of the ether ball, had induced the patient to take a few deep breaths from it, the surgeon, Dr Warren, carried out the operation in just under three minutes (before the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic in surgery, speed was of the essence), with no pain whatsoever felt by the patient. After completing the demonstration, Warren supposedly turned to those present with the words: 'Gentlemen, this is no humbug. ' Thus the strongest neo-evangelic message in medical history was conveyed by the greatest understatement. l13
This surgical 14 July, which entered the annals of medicine as 'ether day', changed the anthropotechnic situation of modernity more radi- cally than any individual political event or technical innovation since - including the biopolitical experiments of the Russian Revolution, as well as all attempts at genetic manipulation thus far. While the Bastille was immediately torn down as a supposed 'symbol of despot- ism' (the 'patriot' Palloy, a quick-witted building contractor who had appeared on the scene with a demolition crew as soon as the fortress was stormed, supposedly received the commission to demolish it as early as 16 July), the American doctors reverently preserved the scene of the rebellion against the tyranny of pain. The 'Ether Dome' at Massachusetts General Hospital can still be visited in its original state today. A painting by Robert Hinckley from 1882 captured the
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scene. news America
by sea in almost separate messages, European
doctors received it with almost universal enthusiasm, welcoming it like a secular gospel and imitating it to massive success; only a group of sceptics and algophilic traditionalists, who defended pain as part of the human condition, initially refused to consider the new method for disabling pain. Among the vast majority, there was a wave of emulation based not on mimetic rivalry, but on a long-felt need for deliverance from an epochal evil.
The 16th of October 1846 is the key date in the history of the operable human being: since then, the rediscovered possibilities of having-oneself-anaesthetized have enormously expanded the radius of having-oneself-operated-on by surgeons. Through the develop- ment of such new anaesthetics as Evipan (1932) or Propofol (1977), as well as highly effective opium derivatives, professionalized anaes- thesia has for some time also had efficient short-term narcotics at its disposal, enabling a significant reduction of wake-up time. Thanks to intensive research, the depth of the narcosis can now also be closely controlled, and the constant improvement of the necessary equipment rounds off the optimization of anaesthesia.
What made these rediscovered possibilities was the fact that between 1490 and 1846, European medicine almost entirely forgot the anaes- thetic techniques of antiquity and the Middle Ages, especially the formally well-known and frequently used 'soporific sponges', which contained highly effective extracts from poppies, henbane, mandrake and hemlock. This amnesia, which is still virtually inexplicable, was a factor in the harsh climate of reality throughout the Modern Age until the mid-nineteenth century: in this era, surgical operations were almost always torturous affairs that amounted to agonies for the patients.
On the Human Right to Unconsciousness
In philosophical terms, the reintroduction of complete anaesthesia marked a caesura in the self-relationships of modern humans. Not only because the contemporary subject's attitude towards its physical body and its operability is simply incomprehensible if one does not take into account the new possibility of consenting to the disabling of its sensitivity to pain. As self-awareness is often extinguished along with it, the subject faces the dramatic choice of temporarily resign- ing from its being-for-itself and entirely adopting the position of
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an unconscious in-itself. It not only agrees to this injury in its own interests - the precondition for all having-oneself-operated-on in the stricter sense - but also affirms artificial unconsciousness to gain an advantage. This is significant because it explicitly articulates a previ- ously unimaginable thesis: that humans can no longer be expected to endure every state of wakeful being-in-the-world. In this context it is worth mentioning that before the term 'anaesthesia' was officially established in the early nineteenth century, one sometimes spoke of suspended animation. This better expressed the central principle of the general anaesthetic: liberating the patient for the duty of 'ani- mated' passion.
One could say that in October 1846, the human right to uncon- sciousness was established - the right of not-having-to-be-present in certain extreme states of one's own psychophysical existence. The claim to this right had been prepared by a fashionable gesture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the proverbial phenomenon of fainting due to over-stimulation, which was accepted in particularly sensitive people - those of the female sex - as a mark of cultivated weakness, and flourished in the hysterical symptoms of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, the techniques of animal magnetism and artificially induced somnambulism, both discussed throughout Europe after 1785 and both early forms of what became known as 'hypnosis' in 1840, enabled modern subjects to become familiar with the advantages of suspended animation. These methods, which became common from the late eighteenth century on under the name of Mesmerism - also in the context of social vaudeville entertainment - occasionally served among doctors after 1800 as a forerunner of chemical anaesthesia. Mesmerism enjoyed an intensive reception by the Romantics and German Idealists, as it could be inter- preted as the royal road to the realm beyond everyday consciousness, almost a form of experimental theology. 114
This play with artificial unconsciousness reached its pinnacle in the 1830s, when laughing gas became the party drug of the British upper class. At the same time, elegant opium eaters and educated narcoma- niacs could be sure that their confessions would be read attentively by a public interested in anaesthetics of all kinds. Even two genera- tions later, the propagandists of the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) - Helena Blavatsky (1833-91), Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Leadbeater (1847-1934) - who showed a precise feeling for the spiritual market in mixing European mysticisms with Indian psychotechnics, found an audience that longed more than ever for instruction in the art of self-renunciation in the service of the self.
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Typically modern techniques for expanding one's passivity compe- tence were rehearsed in all these forms of conditional self-renunciation, though not always with ego-strengthening prospects. The element of auto-operative curvature manifests itself most clearly in the medically required general anaesthetic, as it constitutes a borderline case of tem- porary not-being-oneself in the service of being-oneself. It indicates a liminal zone that can only be shifted to regions even more distant from the self through an artificial coma - provided that the prospect of a controlled return to waking life is assured. Consent to this type of suspended animation means the last possible level of calmness. lIS
Revolutionary Un-Calmness
Alongside the subjective appropriation of technological and social progress in the context of calmness culture, or the system of con- ditional passivities, modernity brought forth a culture of un-calm- ness based on the declared unwillingness to await the results of slow progress. It includes a profound distrust towards most forms of letting-something-be-done-to-oneself. This regularly brings the domination-critical motif into play, namely that power and its abuse are synonymous. Un-calmness and the general rejection of passivity are the root of the extremisms that began to take hold in Western Europe and Russia in the nineteenth century and led into the 'revolu- tions' of the twentieth century.
Medical progress, on the other hand, aligned itself with the gradual model of the bourgeois Enlightenment. This taught its adepts to view every improvement achieved as the starting point for further opti- mizations. This applied not least to anaesthesia-supported surgery, which, despite its great leap forwards around the middle of the nine- teenth century, generally remained a case of cumulative skill increase on the path of progressive moderation.
The simultaneity of optimism and realism in the standard concept of progress was tied to an ambitious cultivation of the feelings of the time: at every moment, satisfaction at what had been achieved was meant to balance out impatience at what still had to be achieved - everything already possible had to be viewed in relation to the pros- pect of the not-yet-feasible.
In any case, participation in the 'great work of uplifting mankind' was unattainable without constant train- ing in patience and impatience. Both attitudes were based on the tacit assumption that the path to further civilization was itself a civilized journey.
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was
what can happen if this precondition is rejected. The adherents
extremist positions refused to participate in the balancing exercise between patience and impatience, voting instead for radical accelera- tion. According to them, the truth lay in imbalance: good, for them, was one-sided and partisan. Never give up impatience - this was the axiom of the desire committed to radicality. According to the pur- veyors of the extreme, the only respectable form of progress - the one that would tackle the social question at its roots - does not come gradually, but must rather constitute a sudden and irreconcilable rupture in the usual way of things. It is not an additional step on a prescribed path - more like a wild ride through uncharted terrain. The revolution builds its own roads in the direction it chooses; no slip road from the past can dictate where it should go. In the conquest of the improbable, yesterday's realists are out of place as route planners.
The followers of such ideas rely on the objection that one must not be taken in by the illusion of the necessary gradualness of progress, for it conceals the reprehensible slowing of development by a class of ruling preventers who are secretly determined to keep the people waiting until the end of time. They say 'progress', but what they mean is the perpetuation of the status quo. The most familiar version of this thesis is the Marxist one, which states that only the 'greed for profit' of the capital owners prevents the general release of 'pro- ductive powers' in favour of the workers, who are usually blithely equated with the 'people'. Another popular idea was the anarchist maxim that the preventers were first and foremost among the rep- resentatives of the states and its notorious ally, the church, which meant that only direct violence against both could bring about the necessary destabilization of the situation. Only dead souls accept the principle of gradual progress. Whoever is still morally alive listens to the voices testifying here and now to the intolerability of the prevail- ing conditions. These voices give the individual in revolt the mandate of immediate overthrow. The young Marx unforgettably formulated the categorical imperative of the revolution: it is the absolute duty of the activist 'to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being'. 116
Radical Metanoia as the Will to Overthrow
In reality, the rejection of the gradualness model of standard Enlightenment, to which the liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth
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centuries clung as much as the social democrats and Christian demo- crats, by no means stemmed solely from the pressure of social crises. It occurred because of a moral option whose inherent logic demanded a break with the existing state of things. This choice constituted the political continuation of the original ethical distinction between the own and the non-own as made since the beginnings of ascetic seces- sion. The central nuance lies in the fact that everything which is now to be viewed as non-own is assigned to the past, while the own lies exclusively in the future. The ethical distinction is temporalized, split- ting the world into things past to be rejected and future things to be welcomed. There is no hope in the present and the continuous - that applies in equal measure to ancient escapism and to the modern devaluation of all old regimes. But after the ontology of the finished existent was abandoned and the becoming of a 'different world' tran- spired as increasingly plausible, indeed inevitable, the future became an attractive home for those who made the great ethical distinction anew.
Thus it becomes deplorable to seek the attainment of satisfying conditions via the gentle slopes of bourgeois world improvement. Whoever chooses this pass has essentially already decided to leave everything as it was, no matter how many changes of detail might give the impression that the affirmability of conditions is on the increase. In truth, the primacy of the past remains in force as long as the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions is defined by the dominance of the latter. What the world lacks are not people willing to go along with changes on the plain; what it needs are people in whom an awareness of the vertical is reawakening. A few years before the October Revolution, one of the most distinguished authors of biopolitical utopianism in the early Soviet Union, the poet Alexander Svyatogor (1899-after 1937), had founded a group whose programme included the abolition of death, the scientifically achieved resurrection of the dead and the technological domination of the cosmos; the group called itself the 'Verticalists'.
Only those who take the idea of world improvement utterly seri- ously will arrive at the view that world improvement is not enough. Identification with the principle of externalized metanoia leads to the insight that the existing world, that is to say the given 'social' order, will remain incorrigible until its basal construction flaws - class society and the unequal distribution of material and immaterial wealth - are rectified. Thus the world of the 'existent' must not be progressively improved but revolutionarily eradicated. With the help of reusable elements from the old construction, the new construction
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can 111
'achievements' - past and futures ones Conventional progres- sism must be rejected so that the good intentions underlying it can take effect. It seems that the naivete of the progressives has been seen through once and for all: they sincerely believe they are doing a service to freedom by opting for small, controlled steps. In reality, they are allying themselves with what is quintessentially bad - with the conditions based on the private property of world-improving means.
The notion that property is the means to all other means was ruled out by the new radicals. The deep-seated ressentiment towards private property, indeed towards anything private, blocked the conclusion that follows from any impartial examination of wealth- producing and freedom-favouring mechanisms: an effective world improvement would call for the most general possible propertization. Instead, the political metanoeticians enthused over general disposses- sion, akin to the founders of Christian orders who wanted to own everything communally and nothing individually. The most impor- tant insight into the dynamics of economic modernization remained inaccessible to them: money created by lending on property is the universal means of world improvement. They are all the blinder to the fact that for the meantime, only the modern tax state, the anonymous hyper-billionaire, can act as a general world-improver, naturally in alliance with the local meliorists - not only because of its traditional school power, but most of all thanks to its redistributive power, which took on unbelievable proportions in the course of the twentieth century. The current tax state, for its part, can only survive as long as it is based on a property economy whose actors put up no resistance when half of their total product is taken away, year after year, by the very visible hand of the national treasury for the sake of communal tasks. What the un-calm understand least of all is the simple fact that when government expenditures constitute almost 50 per cent of the gross national product, this fulfils the requirements of actually existing liberal-fiscal semi-socialism, regardless of what label is used to describe this situation - whether people call it the New Deal, 'social market economy' or 'neo-liberalism'. 117 What the system lacks for total perfection is a homogeneous worldwide tax sphere and the long-overdue propertization of the impoverished world.
Against the background of the beginnings of a history of the ethical distinction outlined above, it is immediately apparent how the offen- sive articulation of communist and anarchist radicality opened a new
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Its most COIn- cides the strongest tendency to external application. This is why the twentieth century was the age of the 'commissars' who believed in changing the world by external and extreme means - we recall Arthur Koestler's essay 'The Yogi and the Commissar', which was published in 1942, in the heart of Europe's darkness, and in 1945 supplied the title for a volume of essays on the moral situation of the time that
gained international recognition. 118
Political Verticalism: The New Human Being
On the eve of the Russian Revolution, then, 'verticalism' could no longer assume its original form, in which it would purely have con- cerned individuals. Since the beginnings of ethical secession, it had been entirely down to them to force the impossible and remould themselves through tireless asceticism into wise men, god-men, new human beings - preferably alone, or in co-operation with other like- minded individuals if absolutely necessary. Even the wise men on the throne - Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in the West, Milinda and Ashoka in the East - did not think for a second of turning their individual philosophical metanoia into a state metanoia, a reversal for all. Even Paul, whose message was of the end of the world of death, was only actually speaking to the few who, through concern for their salvation, would be capable of joining the ranks of the saved before the imminent end.
In the course of its progress through the age of immanence, the absolute imperative turned into the dictate 'You must change the world - down to the very last elements of its construction, and with the involvement of everyone. ' Whoever sought to execute this dictate as a mere constant progression - through the synergy of school, the market and technology - would be falling prey to the most dangerous of all temptations from the start. They would be succumbing to the siren song of the bourgeoisie to choose the path of conformity, on which the old state remains intact beneath the semblance of constant improvement. The revolutionary, however, has themselves tied to the mast like Odysseus. Undaunted, they traverse the ambivalent zones where liberal and social-democratic sounds tempt them. The better they know what they are refusing, the more cold-bloodedly they remain committed to their mission.
The great change, then, can only be brought about by a categorical 386
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into privileged the haves and the have-nots, the knowing and
rulers and the ruled. This new version of the metanoetic impera- tive directly affects the agents who submit to it: what it demands of them is no less than a complete break with their previous lives and a transformation into revolutionaries. This cannot be achieved by those who content themselves with electing a party that loudly proclaims rebellious slogans, and least of all by those who think it is enough to harbour secret satisfaction when the bourgeois media report bloody acts of 'revolutionary violence'. The revolution demands an integral discipline whose absorptive energy absolutely matches the great asceticisms of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Above all, becoming a revolutionary is not simply a decision: one cannot transform oneself into the human of the future overnight. The New Human Being is a great not-yet for itself, even if it is brought near by the most feverish anticipations. Entrance into the revolution- ary process, therefore, is initially merely the beginning of a protracted self-renunciation. Whoever opts for the revolution as a new form of belonging must first admit that they are still human through and through - infused with the hereditary injustice of the entire history of mankind, filled with the inner sediments of class society, spoiled by the mis-conditioning of all previous generations, perverted and dis- torted even in the most intimate elements of their sexuality, their taste and their forms of everyday communication. They also remain the old human being in their continuing inability to be brotherly - most of all because they still exist as the victim of a distorted life instinct or, as Trotsky wrote, 'a pinched, morbid, hysterical fear of death',119 the deepest source of non-solidarity among mortals. The only difference between the revolutionary and the old human being is that the former has realized the nature of themselves and others, while the rest either suffer mutely or succumb to one of the countless self-delusions that historical humanity developed in order to accommodate itself to its situation.
The choice of an existence in revolution rules out both muteness and accommodation. Because it prefers the arduous path, it is comparable to an adept's flight to the Dharma path or a novice's entrance into a Christian order. Perhaps the elite of Lenin's professional revolution- aries proves the validity of this analogy, at least in ideal-typical terms; the difference, however, is a significant one: for the latter activists, there was never a binding monastic rule, unless one counts the abstract imperative of total self-instrumentalization. An even greater
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or
course of to univer-
sally valid criteria were disabled within their respective jurisdictions. The actually occurring revolution claimed ethical sovereignty, thus immunizing itself to all verdicts from without. If the party was always right, this was because the revolution is always right; consequently, those who actually carried out the revolution were right. Hence even their perversions were meant to be subject only to their own interpre- tations. No one who was not themselves at the forefront of the revo- lution was entitled to a judgement about the means it should choose. It alone could know how much killing was necessary for its success; it alone could decide how much terror would guarantee the triumph of its principles. It was Georg Lukacs who, amidst the war between white and red terrorists, coined the phrase 'Second Ethics' for the free choice of means by the bearers of the revolution.
This resulted in a situation where the revolution taking place could only be understood by its current leaders. The statement 'I am the revolution' was only true in theoretical and practical terms of Lenin and Stalin, who lived in the hot spot of the event, while none of the others, even seasoned fighters, could be sure of understand- ing the revolution. They all lived with the constant risk of suddenly being exposed as counter-revolutionaries. It was no longer enough to be orthodox in one's adherence to revolutionary principles; now one also had to be an orthodox believer in the incomprehensibility of the daily manoeuvres of one's leaders. Even when it arrested, tortured and shot dead its most faithful followers, the revolution still claimed to be right. The believers who allowed themselves to be subjected to such things were not witnesses whose memories were collected in a Moscow martyrology; they resembled mystics who undertook that most demanding of spiritual exercises, the resignatio ad infernum - the attempt to want nothing except what God or Stalin wants, even if it is my damnation. l2D
Communist Production of Humans
In our context, there is no need to address the 'religious' or religion- parodying dimensions of the Russian Revolution. l2l It is sufficient to hint at how the revolutionary complex of events took up the motif of human production, which had been virulent since the Enlightenment, and pushed it to its (provisionally) greatest heights. It was character- istic of the communist experiment that from the outset, it fought on
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both anthropotechnic fronts simultaneously in order to connect the spiritual-ascetic and biotechnical components as directly as possible. One must keep this strategy in mind whenever the frequently invoked formula of the New Human Being is used.
This production took place firstly in the elite cadres of the 'party', the training centres of revolutionary morals: these were the collecting places for individuals who, after an initial act of radical metanoia, were working on the eradication of the old human in themselves. It is hardly necessary to show in detail how the dispositions of orthodox spirituality still in effect here, with their thousand-year culture of de- selfing, became important. Anyone who postulated the New Human Being after 1917 only had to cover a small part of the moral evidence for this demand with the modern arguments that had circulated in Russia since 1863, the year in which Chernyshevsky's epoch-defining light novel What Is to Be Done? was published - Rakhmetov, one of the book's heroes, was a modern ascetic who slept on a bed of nails, trained his muscles and strictly monitored his diet. How many repli- cas of Rakhmetov were at work in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin is a question to which we will never find a clear answer. The only certainty is that whoever demanded the utmost of themselves in the face of the revolutionary upheavals stood in a tradition that extended back from The Philokalia - the belated Russian counterpart of The Imitation of Christ - to the Desert Fathers and the monasteries of Athos, and still had a virulent reservoir available for metanoetic procedures.
Secondly, the call for the New Human Being is formulated in socio- technical and biotechnical language. Because the productive powers invoked by Marxism are, according to their moral potency, powers of world improvement, the revolution states that they can and must be applied to human material. If one wants to establish socialism accord- ing to plan, its architects must themselves be produced according to plan. Bukharin's well-known claim in 1922 that the true aim of the revolution must be 'to alter people's actual psychology'122 clarifies the dimensional leap in revolutionary anthropotechnics: with the pro- duction of the producer, the producing collective reaches the stage of reflexiveness. What was once transcendent morality becomes part of a circuit: the eternally unchanging group of asceticisms is replaced by a cybernetic optimization system. 123
Many authors, including Trotsky, did not content themselves with the call to rebuild the psyche, and also held out the prospect of the genetic reconstruction of humans, even their cosmic reform: the foremost revolutionary demand was the physical optimization of humans through an elimination of sick and inferior variants - much
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was to in the improvement mental qualities - the parallels with the breeding speculations of 'scientific racism' during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany are par- ticularly clear. 124 The final perfection of the great reform, however, was presented in ideas of which no mere 'eugenicist' of either leftist or rightist persuasion could have dreamed: the emancipation of humans from space and time, from gravity, from the transience of the body and from conventional procreation. Ultimately, then, revolution
means disabling the second law of thermodynamics.
Even in the most utopian of concepts, one can easily see how the
figure of action in the auto-operatively curved space affects the level of great politics to produce a revolutionary passivity along with the revolutionary culture of activity: whoever has grand plans must also endure a great deal. In truth, everyday life after 1917 already forced the masses to be prepared for having-themselves-operated-on by the functionaries of the revolutionary state. The New Human Being could only be forced into existence if the current ones were willing to undergo major operations. The role of surgical metaphors in the language of the revolutionary leaders would merit a study of its own. They clarify the price of every political holism: whoever conceives of 'societies' as organisms will sooner or later be confronted with the question of where to apply the amputation instruments.
It is only in this context that the role of the aesthetic avant-garde in the Russian Revolution should be acknowledged: it committed itself to the titanic task of raising the passivity competence of the impoverished masses within a few years to the historically necessary level. The principal agitative quality of revolutionary art stemmed from the intoxicating project of proclaiming, for the first time in history, the passion for all. This is the meaning of the didactic turn evident in the manifold varieties of committed revolutionary art: peak performances of suffering were now offered by the 'commissars' to the many, who had previously known only vulgar suffering. No one was to be denied the right to crucifixion, though the technical matters of burial and resurrection were not settled in every detail. To convey what was on offer on a sufficiently broad scale, the fiction was spread that every single national comrade had entered a contract of treat- ment with the revolution, stating that they were ready and willing to endure and affirm whatever they were subjected to for their own good by the agencies of the great change. Only in the light of this hypoth- esis can one grasp the unfathomable passivity with which countless people bore the hardships of the 'transitional time' between the leg-
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most important was undoubtedly
of enduring the revolution and furthering it in the mode of suffering under it. No one can deny the great achievements of the Russians and the peoples associated with them in this field.
Even if the theory of the 'religious' nature of revolutionary ideol- ogy has been repeated ad nauseam in the relevant literature, it must nonetheless be emphasized that by its design, the Russian Revolution was not a political event but an anthropotechnic movement in a socio-political guise, based on the total externalization of the absolute imperative. Its contribution to making the nature of 'religion' explicit is of lasting significance - placing it in the group of synthetic illusion- practising organizations in modernity of which I showed above, using the example of the Church of Scientology, how they go about the production of auto-hypnotically closed counter-worlds. In both cases, the individually effective psychotechnic aspect was combined with mass-psychological effects based on leader cults and group narcis- sism. In undertaking a large-scale attempt to seize power over condi- tions, the communist experiment demonstrated what activists should believe in - and what they must allow to be done to themselves for the old human to be remoulded into the new one.
De facto, the communist upheaval triggered the second emergency of extensive biopolitics in the Modern Age - we discussed the first above in our recollections of the early modern state's demographic policy. The latter had failed spectacularly in the fine tuning of its methods, with consequences whose darkness requires no further elaboration here. The biopolitics of the Russian Revolution could likewise not be sure of its results, albeit for entirely different reasons. While the early modern state sought to produce the greatest number of subjects and took on board an enormous surplus of unusable ones, the revolutionary state strove for an organic collective of convinced individuals - and accepted the risk of losing all others. The first biopolitics sought the solution to its problems in the mass export of humans and extensive internment, while the second found the solu- tion in mass internment and even more massive extermination of humans. 125
The Biopolitics of the Miracle and the Art of the Possible
We have thus articulated the anthropotechnic secret of the 1917 revolution, and numerous authors have revealed it in different
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course the idea
morphosis that moved it towards depoliticization and remoulded it into a radical-metanoetic experiment. One must almost call it a subversion of politics through orientalization - but not only for the sake of portraying the Soviet state power as an 'oriental tyranny'. 'East' in this case refers to the tendency towards the supremacy of the spiritual factor. It seems that a revolution on Russian soil could only take place without becoming analogous to a conversion. The result was the enormous spectacle of a conversion from without.
Conversion means spiritually resetting one's life; revolution implies the gesture of redesigning the world from zero. It transforms histori- cally congealed reality into a mass without qualities that could liter- ally turn into anything in the reconstructive phase. In the chemical flask of revolution, the matter frozen into qualities is transformed into a totipotent potential that can be used by new engineers for free projects. Where world improvement is the priority, the New Human Being must be imagined as a function of a New Society. The New World comes about as the production of revolution and technology. The call for the technical repetition of the miracle is the most inti- mate agent of great change. For an enterprise on this scale, the reas- signment of faith from the miracle to the miraculous is not enough. While the Christian and Yogic traditions reserved the impossible for the few in their cuIts of saints and living-saved figures, the spiritually subverted revolution reclaims the impossible for all.
The definition of politics as the art of the possible - thus my premise - passed its historical test grosso modo. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, to whom we owe this formula, was presumably unaware that he had coined a phrase that momentarily put him on a level with the classics of political theory. He knew exactly what he was talking about, however, as he witnessed the opposing position- the politicization of the impossible and the remoulding of daydreams into party programmes - on a daily basis in all varieties from left to right, in the Berlin Reichstag as well as contemporary German and European journalism. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, equations of the desirable with the realizable constituted the pre- ferred procedure of the 'zeitgeist' for disseminating its slogans. At the same time, the mass press had recognized its most important task in the transport of illusions to its customers - in the era of mass circula- tion, the media are in fact not so much organs of enlightenment for
an audience of learners as service providers in the auto-operatively curved space of mass having-oneself-deceived.
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Only in contrast to the laconic thesis of the last German realpoli- tiker can one understand what happened in Russia in the wake of the October Revolution: it created a platform for politics as the art of the impossible. In full awareness, it abandoned the standard model of rational realism in favour of an unabashedly surrealistic praxis, even when it donned the bloodstained mantle of a 'realpolitik of revolution'. Though it presented itself as gruesomely realist in order to secure its initial victory, it knew that it could only survive as long as there was a light shining on it from far above: it could only gain its justification in the steepest vertical. 'Verticalists' were no longer simply the utopian poets around Svyatogor, who had published his Verses on the Vertical already in 1914 - the entire revolutionary elite was inspired by verticalist commitments.
The Era of Abolition
After the victorious civil war against the leftovers of the old 'society', the ascension of the revolution could truly begin. It rushed from one abolition to the next, from one securing measure to the next - the era of abolition was inevitably also a heyday for measures of all kinds. As far as abolitions were concerned, the elan of the intellectuals naturally exceeded that of the new lords of the Kremlin, though these too did what was necessary to earn their stripes as abolitionists. Not long after seizing power, they declared the abolition of private prop- erty; in their understanding of communism, this change in the legal system laid the foundation for all further resolutions. The abolition of bourgeois liberties ensued, and this was to be followed by that of the bourgeoisie themselves. The functionaries had understood why state overthrow could only be stabilized through a cultural revolution, meaning the liquidation of the bourgeois individual and its curricula. For them, the bourgeois was not only the class enemy who monopo- lized the means of world improvement and perverted de jure shared property into de facto private property; he was the embodiment of gradualness who unified all the errors of conventional realism and all the vices of self-centred rationalism.
The first preliminary stage of the New Human Being was the non- bourgeois moulded in political revolution, who had left behind the purportedly natural egocentricity of the old human being. Along with it, the 'preform' of the future human being also discarded the ethics of historical advanced civilizations concerned with the prohibition on human sacrifice - or more generally the prohibition on taking
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a
ity. What from was no less than the figure saint devoid of conscience - the most original contribution of the Bolshevik revolution to universal moral history.
Being and Time - the Soviet Version
In his book Soviet Civilization,126 Andrei Sinyavsky illustrates the prototype of the New Human Being using the figure of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1878-1926), chief of the notorious Cheka, the early Soviet secret police. He describes the feared model functionary - who had spent eleven years in banishment and Tsarist prisons, those training camps for those determined to stop at nothing, between 1897 and 1917 - as a man of steel 'with a soul as clear as crystal'. He assumed the role of the Soviet Union's chief executioner not because of cruel inclinations, but rather because he was prepared to sacrifice not only his own life but also his conscience on the altar of the revolution. As a consummate Leninist, he had internalized his teacher's doctrine that the revolutionary knowingly gets his hands dirty: only by sullying himself morally could he express his loyalty to the great cause. Like many historically aroused contemporaries in the 1920s, including those from the camp of non-Bolshevik 'revolutions', Dzerzhinsky had learned to interpret being as time. As a result, he wanted to do only what time wanted to do through him. With the obedience of the 'calm' person he listened out for its signals, which could seemingly be received unencrypted at the time: 'And if He orders you, "Lie! " - do so. 1And if He orders you, "Kill! " - obey. '127
In this context, it almost seems to follow a legendary template that this man, who was responsible for the liquidation of hundreds of thousands, had wanted to be a monk or a priest in his youth. It may be a tendentious fabrication that, as a crypto-Catholic, he secretly prayed to the Virgin Mary between cruel interrogations, or perhaps even after days full of executions. His wife stated plausibly that Dzerzhinsky, the selfless activist who worked around the clock, who slept in a narrow iron bed in his office and died of exhaustion at the age of forty-eight, had spoken of one day resigning from his office as Chief Executioner of the revolution, and, as People's Commissar for Education, devoting himself to the education of children and young people for the coming 'society'. Sinyavsky comments: 'Isn't that a wonderful prospect - in the spirit of communist morality - the chief
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tion the extermination of unusable
to the breeding of usable and convinced ones seems far less absurd if one takes into account the logic of acting from zero underlying both of these functions. What distinguishes the Soviet executioner from de Maistre's executioner is that one cannot possibility imagine him secretly saying to himself: 'No one liquidates better than I. '
Immortalism: The liquidation of Finitude
In the eyes of the philosophically radical among the representatives of the revolutionary intelligentsia, such phenomena as those described above were reduced to surface effects of the kind that had to be accepted nolens volens in a time of fundamental transformations. This group of ontological utopianists included, next to the aforemen- tioned Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), an esoteric and rocket scientist who became famous as the father of Russian space travel; Alexander Yaroslavsky (c. 1891-1930), an exponent of a 'cosmic maximalism'; Valerian Muraviev (1885- 1931), who postulated the overcoming of time and a technology of resurrection (anastatics); and Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), an advocate of 'physiological collectivism' and the founder of a move- ment for the 'struggle for vitality'. 129 For them, the metaphysical revo- lutionaries, almost all of whom were followers of Nikolai Fedorov (though some, like Svyatogor, negated his influence), who had laid the foundation for a politics of immortality with The Philosophy of the Common Task, the Bolshevik beginnings of the cultural revolu- tion were scarcely more than a crude, albeit limitedly useful prelude to the true 'world revolution' whose premises, prospects and methods these authors explored in their writings of the 1920s.
If the revolution made it possible to climb up the ladder of the abo- lition of traditional social problems, the abolition of 'private property of production means' and the bourgeois personality were productive, albeit provisional - not to say inferior - stages in a programme of ascent whose heights none of those caught in the turbulences of the great change could imagine. Yet these two operations, as momentous as they seemed to both the perpetrators and the victims of change, merely constituted the continuation of the bourgeois revolution of 1879, which had barely achieved more than the abolition of aristo- cratic privileges, the release of bourgeois ambitions and double-edged human rights rhetoric. From the Russian perspective, they continued
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were at most an entirely different scope.
After the era of preliminary attempts, the time was ripe for an opus hominis on a larger scale. The rule of humans over humans had become offensive, but was only the epiphenomenon of a far older and more comprehensive enslavement. Had mortal man not lived under the tyranny of outer and inner nature since time immemorial? Was not nature itself the biopower that wilfully created life on the one hand while letting it die equally wilfully on the other? Did its uni- versal domination not provide the matrix for all secondary forms of domination? Was it not necessary, then, to put the abolition of death on the agenda of a metaphysical revolution - and simultaneously an end to the fatalism of birth? What was the use of doing away with the absolutist state as long as one continued to pay tribute to the divine right of nature? Why liquidate the Tsar and his family if one did nothing to overturn the immemorial crowning of death as the lord of finitude?
Ending the Epoch of Death and Bagatelles
The speculative avant-garde of the Russian Revolution thought it had understood that one must begin directly at the highest rung on the abolition ladder if one wants to make the decisive difference. Otherwise the elimination of abuses and inequalities among people, even the abolition of the state and all repressive structures, would be provisional and in vain. If anything, they only sharpen the awareness of the absurdity that afflicts egalitarian 'society' as long as it fails to abolish death - including all forms of physical imperfection. Whoever wishes to eliminate the final cause of harmful privacy in human exist- ence must do away with the enclosure of each individual in their own little piece of lifetime. This is where the renewed 'common task' must begin. The true commune can only be formed by immortals; among mortals, the panic of self-preservation will always dominate. The equality of humans before death only satisfies that international of reactionary egalitarians who enjoy seeing the rich and powerful perish 'like cattle'. People of this kind have always sympathized with death in the role of the grand leveller - as presented annually at the Salzburg Jedermann production since 1920, dressed in the kitsch of the time. What none of these friends of the just end for all want to admit is the simple fact that death is the ultimate reactionary principle.
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nature.
by tirelessly inculcating it with the formula 'death is inevitable'. They provide the fuel for individualism, which encourages greed - in so far as one can apply this term to the striving to maximize experiences and advantages of being within the narrow window of existential time.
There could only be such a thing as a 'being-unto-death', which Heidegger emphasized as a structural feature of existence in his prin- cipal work of 1927, because even the most radical thinkers of the 'agonizing bourgeoisie' had not participated in the furthest-reaching revolution of the present day. In 1921, Alexander Svyatogor postu- lated a new agenda, beginning with the contention:
The question of the realization of personal immortality now belongs on the agenda in its full scope. It is time to do away with the inevitability of natural death. 130
In these words, we once again hear the tempus est with which Christian apocalypticism turns into the project of history: time itself has reached the point of supplying the password for the final histori- cal enterprise: do away with time! Whoever has understood the spirit of the age must ensure that there will soon be no more talk of finitude. The 'epoch of death and bagatelles' was coming to an end - what was beginning was 'the era of immortality and infinity'.