No More Learning

The modern face of the Catholic system of selling indulgences showed itself in the openness with which the business borders between other- worldly and this-worldly commodities were overcome. This system created procedures to pay off transcendent debts with secular money. During the twentieth century, the atheist Catholic Georges Bataille reminded us of the necessity of a universal economy that does not stop at the commerce of commodities among one another, commodities and assets, or assets and assets. Rather it once again transcends the boundary that separates what is here and what is beyond to expand to transactions between life and death.
With this reference to the stimulation of early-modern financial economy through the business with eschatological anxiety, let me end this excursion to the religious sources of the old European management of rage. We can- not say with Dante, on his return from the Inferno, "E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele. "19 After the return to modern times we perceive a sky dark- ened by thunderclouds. There is only one spot where it is torn open. There one can perceive the red star of the revolution in the East, which rushes anxiously across the short twentieth century.
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ON THE COMMUNIST WORLD BANK OF RAGE
Let the axe dance on their skulls! Strike them dead! Strike them dead! ! Bravo: and skullsfitwell to ash trays Rage is the grand marshal.
Hunger is the regulator. Bayonet,browning,bomb . . . Ahead! Speed up!
VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKI, 150 MILLIONS
CONSIDERING THE ORIGIN, IDENTIFICATION, AND WORKING mechanism of divine wrath reveals a rarely noticed truth: apocalyptic the- ory allows for a unique frenetic exhilaration. It is ignited by the expectation that everything in the last instance will happen completely differently from how those currently successful believe it will. The apocalyptic's view trans- forms circumstances and events into unmistakable hints of the approaching end of the untenable old world. However, because this ending is yearned for intensely, even the darkest signs of the age are evangelically charged. While Greek theory exhilarates through the conception of participating in the timeless worldview of the gods, apocalyptic theory is intoxicated with the idea that from now on everything is only a part of a final vision.
After his polemics against Roman spectacles, Tertullian addresses the conversations of those who have been relieved and asks himself: "What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation? As I see all those kings, those great kings . . . groaning in the depths of dark- ness! "1 This combination of image and affect reveals the true psychopoliti- cal character (or one of the true characteristics) of the reversal of positions
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that lately would be described as revolution. The religiously justified and demanded total transformation reaches beyond the boundary between here and the beyond. It calls for a strict symmetric exchange between actual and future situations. The desire to see the concept of revolution realized according to its geometric meaning can be satisfied during, and only dur- ing, this metaphysical maneuver. Tertullian does not leave any doubt that this transformation caused by God's almighty will turns the affect balances of human existence upside down: "Then let us mourn (lugeamus) while the heathen rejoice, that, when they have begun to mourn, we may rejoice (gaudeamus) . "2 The symmetry of the reversal is guaranteed through depos- its of rage which have been stored with God. Once this depository matures on the Day of Judgment, the cosmic evening of suffering will be realized. Suffer in time, rejoice in eternity; rejoice in time, suffer for eternity. The satisfaction of resentment is exclusively secured through the anticipation of the future exchange of positions.
IF A REVOLUTION IS NOT ENOUGH
LATER, REAL "REVOLUTIONS" WERE ACCOMPANIED ONLY BY PHANTASMS of these symmetries. A believer that the last will be first would have to regard the realized revolution as a strict teacher of disappointment. Restif de la Bretonne mentions in The Nights of Paris that on July 13,1789, a group of robbers from Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a "horrifying mob," said the fol- lowing: "Today the last day for the rich and wealthy has started: tomorrow it is our turn. Tomorrow we will sleep in feather beds and those whose lives we have graciously spared will then, assuming that this is their wish, be able to reside in our darkest holes. "3 Reality would show within a few weeks that the revolution does not lead to the swapping of domiciles between rich and poor. Although there are new appointments to positions of power, at most an increase of preferential positions and attractive offices, the revolution never brings about an actual reversal of top and bottom, not to mention material equality. In the most favorable case, the revolution spreads the spectrum of elite functions so that more candidates are able to secure their profits. The personnel and the semantics change, but the asymmetries per- sist. If this is avoidable or inevitable? Only an interrogation of history can decide this question.
Since asymmetry is nothing but a technical term for inequality—which is the same as "injustice" from the perspective of egalitarian premises—all
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revolutions since the French Revolution of 1789 have been accompanied by consequent waves of disappointment and frustration. In addition to resig- nation and a cynical turning away from yesterday's illusions, these waves often lead to momentous formations of rage, which in turn produced the desire for an extended and deepened restaging of the revolutionary drama.
Since the events following the storming of the Bastille, the ideological and political history of Europe has been marked by the waiting of the disap- pointed for the second, the true, actual, and all-encompassing revolution. This second revolution is supposed to provide a delayed gratification for those who have been deceived and left behind during the great days. This is why the motto of the past two centuries was: The fight goes on! The use of this motto can be traced more or less explicitly to all dissidence movements from the radicals of 1792 up to the alter-mondialists of Seattle, Genoa, and Davos. After the victorious Third Estate had taken what it deserved in 1789, the losers also wanted to have their due. These losers were the Fourth Estate excluded from the feasts of the bourgeoisie.
The primary guilt for the exclusion of many from better positions was usually not attributed to a structural scarcity of preferred positions. Rather, an argumentative strategy was chosen according to which the combination of suppression, exploitation, and alienation was made responsible for a sit- uation in which good positions were not available to everyone. Overcoming the evil triad would supposedly create a world in which the specters of scar- city and injustice were dispelled. For the first time in the history of human- ity, a theater was supposed to have been created whose audience hall would consist exclusively of first rows.
Throughout the two-hundred-year-old tradition of the left, one largely ignored the fact that the motivation behind social Utopias was only to a small extent abolishing the privileges of the ruling class. True, Saint-Just, the death angel of egalitarianism, had taught that the power to change the world belonged to the unhappy. But was this reason enough to make the happy minority as unhappy as the miserable majority just to abide by the law of justice? Wouldn't it indeed have been simpler to create misery for 1 million happy people out 20 million French, rather than creating the illu- sion that it was possible to transform the miserable 19 million into satisfied citizens? The fantastic idea of translating the privileges of the happy into egalitarian entitlements always seemed much more attractive. It could be argued that this operation provided the original contribution of France to the psychopolitics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only thanks
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to this contribution was it possible for the French to redeem their soul after the horrible interlude of the guillotine. The price, however, was a certain inclination toward rebellious illusions, which since then has not missed any opportunity to manifest itself. At the last minute, the revolutionary nation stepped back from the abyss out of which resentment against the unhappy was lured, and France displayed the confidence to enter into an offensive strategy of generosity for the sake of the unhappy. The democratization of happiness constitutes the leitmotif of modern social politics in the Old World. It began with the fantasies of the early socialists—"Yes, sugar, herbs for all! "—and reaches to the redistributive policies of Rhenish capitalism.
Given the implications of the "continuing revolution" in terms of illu- sionary dynamics, it is not surprising that the strongest social-revolutionary impulses always emanated from those activists who spoke in the name of the masses but never forgot their own ambitions to climb the social ladder. Their weakness consisted in ignoring an elementary fact: even after success- ful transformations, good positions remain scarce and are struggled over. This ignorance of the real is methodical. If one can speak of a blind spot in the eye of the revolutionary, it consists in the expectation, which is never admitted, of reaping the fruits of the change. Is it thus legitimate to claim that revolutionaries are career oriented just like everyone else? It is, though not without qualification. At least initially, revolutionary business stands under the law of selflessness, or at least it appears this way. It is not acciden- tal, after all, that in speeches of praise for the most ruthless functionaries of the overthrow it is said that they did not act out of any kind of ambition for themselves. This, however, only proves that it is possible to combine mul- tiple blind spots. A milieu, revolutionary or not, is always also an alliance for the sake of jointly ignoring matters of fact that are obvious to those who are foreign to the milieu. What is obscured reveals itself afterward in the bitterness of failed aspirants because they were not taken care of while oth- ers made their way up. Then the complaint is voiced that the revolution has devoured its children. This is the proof that rage belongs to the renewable energies of those left behind.
GHOSTLY EXHILARATIONS
PSYCHOLOGICAL RETROFITTING BECOMES INDISPENSABLE UNDER these conditions. During the political crises ofmodernity, exhilaration makes a pact with revolt in order to simplify the latter's business. This business
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consists in, from time to time, renewing the illusions that those on top could soon switch places with those at the bottom. Nobody less than Alexis de Tocqueville, an eyewitness of the Paris turmoil of 1848, describes in his Recollections an episode that endows the laughter of the humiliated and offended with a prophetic significance. The scene occurs during dinner on a June day in 1848 in a beautiful apartment on the rive gauche, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. Antonio Negri cites it in order to counter what he regarded as Jacques Derrida's far too pacific, or harmless, elabora- tions in Specters of Marx with a more robust interpretation of the revolu- tionary spook:
The Tocqueville family is reunited. Nevertheless, in the calm of the evening, the cannonade fired by the bourgeoisie against the rebellion ofriotingwork- ers resounds suddenly—distant noisesfromthe right bank. The diners shiver, their faces darken. But a smile escapes a young waitress who serves their table and has just arrived from the Faubourg Saint Antoine. She's immediately fired. Isn't the true specter of communism perhaps there in that smile? The one thatfrightenedthe Tsar, the pope . . . and the Lord of Tocqueville? Isn't a glimmer of joy there, making for the specter of liberation? 4
THIS SIGN OF EXHILARATION IS ALREADY QUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE forced smile that we encounter in Tertullian's fantasy of the Day of Judg- ment. In a way, it is part of actual turmoil. It is carried on the surge of events, which reminds us from time to time that everything could turn out to be very different from what the well-fed people of success expect.
Since more recent history takes on the role of judging the old world, it executes in its extreme moments the judgment of the present over the past. For a moment the smiling servant secretly but nevertheless clearly joins the side of those revolting. The guests at the full table had every right to fear the verdicts of the worse-off Later generations do not know whether during this exhilaration it was class hatred or the pleasant anticipation of times of change that were announced through the noise on the streets. Did the maid smile because she was expecting to spend the following nights with one of the warriors? Or did she even believe that soon she would sit at the table herself and that Monsieur Tocqueville would have to serve her? In any case, such a smile no longer needs any apocalyptic pretenses. Actual events allow their interpreters to predict the future out of the rage of the present.
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If revolutionary intentions are transformed into a force of action that has
to prevail throughout significant periods of time, an explicit psychopolitics
of the inner just as much as the outer becomes indispensable. Such a psy-
chopolitics faces the challenge of creating a liquid rage reserve to fend off
the depressive temptations that inevitably follow political backlashes—one
may think for example of Lenin's "emigration blues" and his increasing
nervous neuropathies after the disappointment of his revolutionary hopes
5
in 1905. The correct way seems to consist in working on a secure connec-
tion between exhilaration and militancy. In a letter to Marx dated February 13, 1851, Friedrich Engels articulates a part of the psychopolitical pruden- tial rules intended to allow the revolutionary to survive in the midst of the historical "maelstrom. " Part of it consists in jealously watching over one's own intellectual superiority and material independence "by way of being substantially more revolutionary than the others. " Consequently, any kind of official governmental function has to be avoided, if possible, and every party position as well. A believer in the revolution does not need the formal recognition of holding office, nor any acclamation through "a herd of jack- asses who swear by us because they think we're of the same kidney as they. "6 This means "no seat on committees, etc. , no responsibility for jackasses, merciless criticism of everyone, and, besides, that serenity of which all the conspiracies of blockheads cannot deprive us. "7 This marks the reawaken- ing of the Aristotelian recommendation: "Never hate, but despise often. "
In a letter that Rosa Luxemburg wrote to her friend Mathilde Wurm on December 28,1916, from a prison in Berlin, a letter which has rightly become famous, there are comparable richly orchestrated dynamic figures of affec- tion. They are complemented by a desperately courageous, revolutionary- humanist credo, which has understandably become part of the annals of left militancy. At the beginning of the letter, the prisoner's intense dissatisfac- tion with whimsy in a letter from another friend is discharged:
In the melancholic view, I have been complaining that you people are not marching up to the cannon's mouth. 'Not marching' is a good one! You people do not march; you do not even walk; you creep. It is not simply a difference of degree, but rather of kind. On the whole, you people are a differ- ent zoological species than I, and your grousing, peevish, cowardly and half- hearted nature has never been as alien, as hateful to me, as it is now As for me, although I have never been soft, lately I have grown hard as polished steel, and I will no longer make the smallest concession either in political or
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personal discourse Do you have enough now for a New Year's greeting? Then see that you remain a Menschl. . . And that means to befirm,lucid and cheerful. Yes, cheerful despite everything and anything—since whining is the business of the weak. 8
This singular document makes clear that more than melancholy was prohibited in the stream of victorious bourgeois progress, a fact that was described in 1969 by Wolf Lepenies in his classic study Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Melancholy and society). The bourgeois leaders of the prole- tarian revolutionary movement also issued a prohibition against whining. It was thought that any inclination toward self-pity would deduct energies from the agents of world change, energies that would be lost for the great plan. Against this background it would be interesting to read what Rosa Luxemburg would have written to Jenny Marx. Karl Marx confides to his friend Engels in November 1868 that "my wife has for years. . . lost her spiritual balance. With her lament and crankiness she tortures the children to death. "9
Almost one hundred years later, with the knowledge of the failure of
the Soviet master plan, Antonio Negri attempted to reclaim exhilaration.
This time, he does not attempt it in the name of the industrial proletariat,
which had exhausted its role as historically efficacious rage collective under
a messianic flag. The new subjects of militant exhilaration are from now on
supposed to be the poor, the people at the rim of society, the bohemians
around the world, which Negri once again appeals to as the "multitude. "
He claims to have observed a promising smile on their lips, a "poor smile
of outlaws," which has once and for all emancipated itself from the existing
conditions. His role model is Charlie Chaplin, who in Modern Times sub-
10
THE EPOCHAL PROJECT: AROUSING THE THYMOS OF THE ABJECT
THE ABOVE REMARKS DO MORE THAN PROVIDE EVIDENCE FOR THE frequently documented connection between forced exhilaration and resent- ment. The outspoken words of Friedrich Engels, the vehement confession of Rosa Luxemburg, and finally Antonio Negri's hints of the ghostly smile
versively connected poverty and irrepressible vitality.
bye to the world revolution, what remains for eternal militancy is, it seems, only the laughter of those who do not have anything to laugh about.
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of the servant and the equally unconditional laughter of the underdog— all of these reveal clearly that such appeals to cheerfulness pursue an aim beyond personal moods. It is not at all the case that these authors want to contribute to an anxiously optimistic attitude toward life, an attitude that is at home in the Christian petit bourgeois juste milieu. In reality, if the call for exhilaration is of any importance, it is exclusively as a demand for a sover- eign attitude. The sovereignty desired by dissidents is, however, not looked for while hovering over the turmoil. The goal is to find it amidst of the bat- tle din of time. It is gained through the deliberate acceptance of a plight that no person capable of rational deliberation would take over. To be sovereign means to vote for that through which one is overburdened.
Militants aim to transform their existence into a center of world-changing rage. They are engaged in a permanent war on two fronts, against happiness and irony. This makes them into inverse romantics who, instead of sinking into world-weariness, want to embody the rage of the world in their per- son. Just as the romantic subject conceives of itself as the gathering point of pain, where surge not only personal grievences but also the sufferings of the world, the militant subject conceives of his life as the gathering point of rage, where all the unpaid bills are registred and stored for future payback. Apart from the reasons for outrage in the present, all of the unatoned-for horrors of past history are recorded. The strong heads of protest are the encyclo- pedists who collect the knowledge concerning the rage of humankind. The immense amounts of injustice are piled up in their occult archives, which leftwing historians characterize as the repositories of class societies. This is the justification for the amalgam of sentimentality and implacability that is typical of revolutionary affectivity. If one does not feel the rage of millenia in oneself, one misunderstands what is from now on at stake.
It becomes apparent that after the death of God, a new carrier of rage was needed. If human beings take over this role, they intimate more or less explicitly that history itself needs to secure the coming and execution of the Day of Judgment. The question, "What needs to be done? " can only be raised once those participating take over the mandate to secularize hell and to relocate the court of judgment into the present. While a believer around 1900 would have wanted prayer, "O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself! " (Psalm 94), he would have to accept anarchists and profes- sional revolutionaries entering his room. The price necessary for the turn to immanence in light of monotheist tradition is that the final horror becomes fully secular, pragmatic, and political. This attitude reached its most expres-
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sive form in the Russian terrorists who destabilized the empire of the czar with countless attacks starting in 1878. This "thirty years' apostolate of blood" is summarized in the words that the accused Kaliayev presented to the court: "I consider my death as a supreme protest against a world of blood and tears. "11
From the perspective of militant activists, the current social conditions— and I am speaking now of a period whose beginning can be dated to the last third of the eighteenth century—provides an outlook lamentable in every respect. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that things are as they are. On the other hand, it is deplorable that things as they stand do not bring forth a much higher degree of outrage. It is obvious that most people lack not only the necessary means to live a humane life but also the rage to revolt against this lack. As soon as one concedes the changeability of the world through human interventions in the natural and social orders, following the bourgeois theoreticians of progress, the second lack inevita- bly becomes the focus of attention. It is a deficit that activists believe can be overcome by their methods. While assuming that material poverty can be abolished through technical progress and a revolutionary redistribu- tion of existing goods—and in the last instance even an emancipatory reorganization of production—the disciples of unconditional militancy announce that from now on they are responsible for the spread of rage and indignation.
Hence, since "society" primarily suffers from an unforgivable lack of manifest rage with regard to its own conditions, the development of a cul- ture of indignation through the methodically exercised excitation of rage becomes the most important psychopolitical task, a task first taken up dur- ing the French Revolution, when the idea of "criticism" entered its triumphal course through the sphere of the existing conditions. The radical habitus of large milieus during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is attributable to the victory of criticism: the abjection of the "establishment" countless contemporaries was an a priori moral date. The militant currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries converged at this point, regardless of whether they followed the anarchistic, communist, international-socialist, or national-socialist rallying cries.
In the more talented militant minds, there is a certain megalothymic sentiment. This sentiment is revealed in the certainty that only generous outrage qualifies one to lead a certain movement. Naturally, militancy is for whatever reason hardly conceivable without a certain dose of thymotic
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irritability. From now on, however, "to militate" means nothing less than attributing a new subject to human history, a subject designed according to the rule of "rage. " To the extent to which militancy connects itself with moral and social intelligence, its agents' complex of rage and pride builds itself up to the level of an authentic megalothymics. The militant human being is not angry only as a result of his own affairs; if necessary, he trans- forms his personal feelings into the resonating ground of a universally sig- nificant upsurge of rage. Whether or not one believes in the ideal gener- alizations of the (for the most part) well-cultivated and well-fed rebels is initially only a question of taste.
At any rate, the militant idealisms that have become the important and even determining factors for serious politics during the last two hundred years remain totally incomprehensible without acknowledgment of the megalothymic, the vulgo and its ambitious and arrogant bearers. They would seem strange even to today's Westerners, members of an age without idea or significant politics. At the same time, they explain why the stron- ger minds of the opposition were for the most part morally sensitive com- moners who, motivated by a mixture of ambition and indignation against the establishment, joined the camp of revolt or the revolution. What Albert Camus said about the birth of the new community out of the spirit of indig- nation is true for all of these people: "I rebel, therefore we exist"—a sen-
12
It is not necessary to explain here in extreme detail why such statements do not fit the taste of the present. They sound like hollow slogans from an almanac for educated losers. For the historian they can serve as proof that the "revolutionary subject" in psychopolitical terms primarily referred to a functioning thymotic collective. Naturally, such a collective could not have presented itself with such a title both because the teachings of thymos had faded during the bourgeois century and also because rage, ambition, and indignation never seemed to be sufficient motives to justify their presenta- tion on the political stage. Only slowly was it understood that the noble superstructure would remain mere fiction without an ignoble foundation.
The theme of both Virgil and Freud, in which one must stir up the neth- erworld in order to win over the elevated gods does not just describe trips to Hades; it also points to the political arrangements for setting free those forces that have waited under civilized garments for the opportunity to
tence whose hardly comprehensible pathos clearly belongs to the past. few decades later, Heiner Miiller let his figures exclaim in a kindred spirit, "The home of the slaves is the revolt. "13
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explode, much like Typhon, the hundred-headed monster that Zeus buried beneath Mount Etna.
The rhetoric of the left was from its beginning confronted with the task of translating the affects of the "dangerous classes" into the language of ideals. It was the mission of revolutionary semantics to gain access to the ascendant energies, to transfigure them with Apollonian slogans. In fact, this connection of the higher and the lower created the obsession of moder- nity, the idee fixe of new times: whoever would make history in support of the degraded and humiliated must go beyond mere postulates. She would have to show that this time the historical tendency was in line with morality. The violence of facts, buried in the relationships of production, was sup- posed to be subservient to goodwill. It was supposed to help end an entire age of injustice. From now on, to support the revolution meant to partici- pate in the building of a vehicle to a better world, a vehicle powered by its own rage resources and steered by well-informed, Utopian pilots.
Work on this project had to start with the support of the rage-driven forces. The formula for this endeavor could have been "intellectus quaerens iram" if the doctors of the industrial conflicts were still able to speak Latin. As soon as insight begins its search for rage, it discovers a world of rea- sons to rebel, and this discovery is the drive for the translation of theory into praxis. However, only intellectuals are affected by the embarrassment that, for them, theory precedes praxis. For praxis-oriented people, the sit- uation has always been the opposite. They discover their battle lines and only then look for the fitting justifications. When Bakunin, for example, stated in 1869 with regard to the stupidity of the sentiment of the Russian people: "We have to stir up this ruinous sleep, this dullness, this apathy by all means We want that now only the deed dictates the word,"14 he was actually addressing a future wave of terrorists, who do not feel any need for theories in order to act. For them, assuming that their rage had indeed been directed at something beyond its horizon, the reverse formula was true: "ira quaerens intellectum" On the stage of the real world, rage, indignation, or "the movement" always preceded ideologies. Whatever the fighting heroes brought forward to justify their actions, the justification followed the path that rage was already traversing.
FOR PSYCHOHISTORIANS AND POLITICAL SCIENTISTS IT WOULD BE A rewarding task to retell the history of social movements from the eve of the
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French Revolution until the age of postmodern distractions as the narrative of thymotic collectives. Modern militancy looks back on a long succession of rage corporations in the shape of secret societies, terrorist organizations, revolutionary cells, national and supranational organizations, workers' par- ties, unions of all shades, aid organizations, and artistic associations. All of these are organized according to conditions of membership, rituals, and club activities, as well as their newspapers, journals, and editorial houses. Let us not forget that even for the Russian revolutionaries in exile dur- ing the regime of the czar, the publication and secret distribution of their newspapers—in particular the ominous Iskar—made up most of their activities. However different these forms of organization and media of com- munication might have been, all of these rage associations competed against one another to get the main part in the screenplay of history after 1789: the revolutionary subject who would patiently complete the task of emancipa- tion and, eo ipso, the task of democratizing all privileges, which the bour- geoisie had left only partially completed.
Gatherings of wrath begin almost without exception with an appeal to "the people. " As a reservoir of subversive energy and explosive unhappi- ness, this mythical force was enlisted again and again for the creation of insurgent movements. For over two centuries, the concrete forms of thy- motic collectives emanated from this matrix, from the French clubs of the Jacobins and the enrages of the great days, to the English dissenters and the "poor of Christ" (those Wesleyan Methodists who experienced their sub-
15
Early German communist groups also considered themselves part of the incalculably broad spectrum of politico-thymotic formations during the nineteenth century. Heinrich Heine was terrified by these groups, as he records in Confessions in 1854. In his visionary poem "Vagabond Rats," he writes about their hooligan-like following:
They carry their heads equally shaven, as radical as possible, as bald as a rat.
[Sie tragen die Kopfe geschoren egal Ganz radikal, ganz rattenkahl. ]
jectivization as a calling to become preachers of morality),
of the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Cambodian revolutions and the new social movements of global capitalism. None of these collectives could have gained power without the exuberant belief that in its "people" rage and jus- tice had become one.
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HE WAS SHOCKED THAT WEITLING, THE JOURNEYMAN TAILOR WITH
extravagant Utopian ideas, kept his cap on his head during a surprise meet- ing in a bookstore in Hamburg. With the hysterical immediacy of an actor who likes to show off his pains, Weitling rubbed his ankle on which the chains had rested during his time in prison. Nevertheless, ten years earlier, Heine had honored the psychohistorically important and, in terms of the history of ideas, inevitable nature of these new movements, using a bal- anced prose:
The destruction of the faith in heaven does not only possess a moral, but also a political significance. The masses do not anymore bear their earthly plight with Christian patience, but yearn for happiness on earth. Commu- nism is the natural result of this altered world view. It is spreading across all of Germany.
The strongest contribution to the communist cause comes from the moral unacceptability of contemporary society. Society only defends itself out of sheer need, "without faith in its legitimacy, even without self-respect, just like that older society whose morose structure collapsed when the son of the carpenter arrived. " Regarding the arrival of French communists, Heine remarked in a correspondent's report from 1843 that he enjoys speaking of them because only their movement deserves "a committed attention" insofar as it "is very similar to the Ecclesia pressa of the first century. It is despised and persecuted in the present while still possessing a propa- ganda whose zealousness of faith and dark destructive will also remind of Galilean beginnings. "16
INDIGNATION WITHOUT THEORY; OR, THE MOMENT OF ANARCHY
HEINE DIED A DECADE TOO EARLY TO HAVE PURSUED THE UNFOLDING of the tendencies that he had acknowledged to be inescapable. He had sensitively noticed that the merely "fine" arts had surpassed their zenith and that an age of dark moralisms and a-musical struggles cast its clouds ahead. During the course of events, the iconoclastic forces, which did not respect any form of higher culture, shifted from the communist to the anarchic pole. For the anarchists of the 1860s and 1870s, it seemed politically correct to dismiss any form of culture that was in line with the
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establishment of bourgeois society. The motivation lay in the ever more radically presented hostility against the state and religion, which, nolens volens, drew all phenomena of art and education that were indirectly dependent on the social order into its propaganda of destruction. Early anarchism also did not want to take seriously the culture of subversion: for it the only acceptable infiltration of the established order had to start with the gospel of the bomb.
In The Principles of the Revolution, the explicit manifesto of violence
of 1869, Bakunin laid down his conception of the primacy of destructive
actions. He revealed a remarkable distinction in the discontinuous tem-
poral phases in the entire revolutionary course of events: "With regard
to time, the concept revolution entails two completely different facts: the
beginning, the time of destruction of the existing social norms, and the
end, the construction, i. e. the creation of completely novel forms out of
this amorphism. "17 The success of the coming revolution initially depends,
according to Bakunin, exclusively on the radicalization of social tensions,
through which it is supposed to be possible that increasingly numerous
and extreme acts of violence will be sparked, acts that culminate in the
complete destruction of the old order. It is mainly those who are furious
and raging and, why not, also the criminals and terrorists who dictate the
course of events. At this stage, the occupational image of the revolution-
ary is mapped onto the popular figure of a noble criminal, and Bakunin
dedicated a sentimental hymn to the iconic Russian robbers of the for-
18
It could be argued that this statement regarding the destruction of the enemy "without thinking," a statement that Bakunin wrote down without much reflection, gained vast empirical content during the following century and a half, even though the innocence of the initial thoughtlessness would vanish quickly. It announces the secret of a habitus of destruction, which was the initially rhetorical and later increasingly practical point of orienta- tion for the extremist subcultures on the left, and later also on the right. In light of this fixation, it is necessary to speak of an anarcho-fascism that
as if he wanted to disclaim Hegel's harsh judgment of Schiller's
ests,
The Robbers that "it is still only boys who can be seduced by this rob- ber ideal. "19 According to the doctrine, the ones dominating during this phase are those "persons who cannot manage to suppress the compulsion to destructiveness inside themselves and who, still before the beginning of the universal war, identify and find the enemy and, without thinking, destroy him. "20
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anticipated the decisive character traits of the left and right fascist move- ments in nuce, traits that developed fully only later—an exception is the will to domination of the collapsed feudal and bourgeois state. Wherever the nations of extremism arose during the twentieth century, what was hidden in the anarchistic beginnings was fully revealed.
In 1869 Bakunin expressed his hope that those individual actions that were committed out of anger or fanaticism would grow "so to say, to an epi- demic passion of youth" until the general revolution would be born out of it. "This is the natural way," in what one might call the catechism of revolt. It follows that the revolution needs to be started with spectacular individual deeds, culminating in the "destruction of people of power. " "Furthermore, work is becoming increasingly easier," because from now on it slides down
21
rious word "amorphism": only once the old order is fully dissolved into formless elementary particles is the destructive initial phase of the revolu- tion over. Only then can constructive minds be allowed to get involved in the course of things and start the reconstruction of the world on the basis of egalitarian axioms. What remains decisive is that the reconstruction is made exclusively out of the formless mass of reality particles—without the state, the church, or capital processes. Anyone who thinks too early about recon- struction becomes a traitor to the holy goal of destruction because he is not able to serve it without hesitation. Let me remark in passing that "amor- phism" found a technical support during Bakunin's time in the invention of dynamite. The belief that it would be possible to "explode" entire social orders had its pragmatic paradigm not only in the storm on the Bastille but also in the most recent achievements in the domain of explosive material. It was not accidental that the rather material occupational name "Dinami- tario" was given to an Italian anarchist of the turn of the century. Just as Lenin's communism aimed later to create the synthesis of Soviet power and electrification, anarchism aimed in its time to present the product made out of destructive desires and dynamite.
According to the anarchistic theory ofphases, the first generation of revolt is only committed to its objection against the actual conditions. Because the beginning is autonomous with regard to the end, authentic revolutionaries initially have no right to reflect on "the paradisiacal edifice of future life. " In the present, all power, all rage, and all hatred need to be mobilized for "the initial course of the revolution. "22
the slippery slope of social dissolution.
The goal of the anarchic work of destruction is revealed in the myste-
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Based on the essence of the law of necessity and full justice, we have to dedi- cate ourselves fully to the enduring, irresistible, incessant destruction, which needs to grow like a crescendo as long as there is nothing left to destroy of the existing social forms. . . .
The revolution justifies everything The field has thus been cleared! . . . The victims have been identified by the unconcealed indignation of the people! . . . It will be called terrorism! . . . So what, to us it does not matter Today's generation needs to create by itself a relentlessly crude force and
23
WHAT IS SIGNIFICANT ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT IS THE CONNECTION of rage and the temporal pole of the beginning. When Bakunin speaks of revolution, he primarily thinks of the movement that initiates the struggle. This means that the departure for the revolutionary struggle is conceived of as a purely inchoate impulse. This impulse is more than a criminal act of expression because it is located within an incalculable future horizon. The revolutionary is nevertheless supposed to carry out his actions with so much expressive momentum that the people can interpret it as advertising signs of rage against the oppressors. Anarchism openly exposes its origin in the populism of rage. The true social anarchist dreams about the fusion of the rampant fury of destructiveness of individual actors with an immeasurable, latent rage of the people. The anarchist hoped for the manifest explosion of this rage just as the early Christians waited for the return of Christ. It was believed that this return could be brought closer by ever again leading the masses to use violence and terror until these "masses" saw in violence and terror their own tendencies and wishes. This signified the end of the process of exteriorizing horror. Christian "masses," which had for centuries become subdued through their fear of the Lord, would then understand that the time in which they had no other choice but to internalize metaphysical hor- ror had passed. They were transformed from frightened slaves into anarchic masters. Finally, these anarchic masters became the terrifying creators of history. Terror, which had been turned to the outside, is benevolent so long as it provides proof that the age of sacred intimidation is over.
One should not infer from the comparatively marginal political signifi- cance of Bakunin's thinking that it was a mere rhetorical movement, a form of political prelude to surrealism. The aesthetic reception of Bakunin in bohemian circles around 1900 should also not distract from his influence
march the unstoppable way of destruction.
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on the creation of an activist habitus. In reality, the forthright philosophy of destruction of the anarchists is one of the sources of the mobilizing and extremist attitudes that could later be observed in the fascist movements on the left and on the right.
The effects of anarchism are nonetheless more indirect. By far the most important effect can probably be located in the indirect influence that Lenin's thought enjoyed. Even though the leader of the Russian Revolu- tion took over the destructive judgments of Marx concerning Bakunin at least on the level of discourse, not to say at the level of lip service (because it is well known that the International Workers Association, also known as the First International, broke apart in 1876 because of an unbridgeable alienation between Marx and Bakunin), Marx secretly remained faithful to the terroristic voluntarism of Bakunin's understanding of the revolution, however much "voluntarism" was a curse in the dictionary of the Bolshe- vists. In a sense, the October Revolution was a revenge of Bakunin against Marx because Lenin, in the most "unfree" of all possible situations, set up a world-historical monument for Bakunin's doctrine concerning the destruc- tive element of the revolutionary beginning. He then admittedly dedicated himself to the completely un-Bakunian business of the despotic construc- tion of a government.
In February 1875, Bakunin expressed his despair to Elisee Reclus from Lugano, despair about the lack of revolutionary verve among the partially resigned, partially opportunist "masses. " Only a handful of steadfast groups, such as the Jurassier (people from the canton of Jura) and the Belgians, these "last Mohicans of the deceased International," could come up with the energy to continue to fight in the present conditions. Now only the erup- tion of war between the imperial powers of Europe could give wings to the revolutionary cause: "As for myself, my dear friend, I am too old, too sick, and—shall I confess it? —too disillusioned, to participate in this work There remains yet another hope: world w a r . . . . But what a prospect! "24
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE THYMOTIZATION OF THE PROLETARIAT
BY FAR THE MOST INFLUENTIAL CREATION OF A BODY OF RAGE occurred on the left wing of the workers' movement when it increas- ingly came under the influence of Marx's ideas during the last third of the nineteenth century. Retrospectively, it is clear that the strategic successes
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of Marxism rested on its superiority in formulating a sufficiently precise model for the powerful historical rage collective of that age. The leading thymotic group was from now on to be called the "proletariat" or, more specifically, the "industrial proletariat. " Part of its definition was, according to Marx's thought, a systematic concept of being exploited. This conception was supplemented by an ethically sophisticated historical mission centered around the concepts of alienation and reappropriation. Nothing less was at stake with regard to the liberation of the working class than the regenera- tion of the human being. This liberation would correct the deformations resulting from the living conditions of the majorities in class societies.
To understand the thymotic tendencies of the early workers' movements
it is essential to consider, apart from the impulses received from Christian
sects of awakening, Thomas Paine's Human Rights (1791-1792), which he
presented in response to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolu-
tion. The point of this work can be summarized in the demand that a lack
of property is no longer acceptable as a convincing pretense for politi-
cal disenfranchisement. Universally conceived human rights formalize a
claim to dignity, which the British had hitherto expressed in the euphonic
"birthrights. " This word was destined to explode the oligarchic equation
of property with the capability to hold rights, an equation rooted in politi-
25
cal custom.
Cavalry of the Chosen attacked the positions of the obdurate land-owning aristocracy. The attack of the poor majority on the rich minority, which has dominated the course of political and ideological transactions since the dis- covery of "mankind," in fact begins at that moment when the property-less present themselves as the party of human beings and want to be the bearers of equal rights as human beings. The way to speak of rights that belong to human beings as human beings gained its full force during struggles over the position on the economic ladder and the preservation of property of the ambitious middle strata of the society. The sum total of struggles on this front has been called class struggle since the early nineteenth century.
One can hear the echo of the pathos with which Cromwell's
The strength of Marxist doctrine was to substantiate the idealist verve of Paine's declaration of human rights with a firm foundation of materialist and pragmatic arguments. This happened at a time when materialism and pragmatism were about to become the religion of the reasonable. Because of Marx's contribution, the justification of human dignity shifted from the Christian-humanist conception of an order created in God's image to a historical anthropology of work. The essential basis for dignity was now
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of reality meant to think civil war. total war, neutrality was not an option.
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taken to be the demand that human beings—as the creators of their own existence—have a claim to enjoy the results of their activities. As a result, there was a semireligious valuation of concepts such as "work," "labor force," "process of production," and others, which when taken together with the concept of the proletariat—initially only an economic term—resulted in a messianic twist. Who from now on spoke about "work" in a Marx- ist vocabulary did not only meant more than the process of production, which is opposed to "capital" as the exploitable resource for the creation of value. Work thus became at the same time an anthropological, even demi- urgic, quantity. Humankind, civilization, prosperity, and the entire realm of higher values go back to this quantity.
It is thus not surprising that the transformed way of speaking about work turned into a rallying cry for thymotic movements of the working collective. The proletariat was challenged to understand itself—in spite of its often emphasized dehumanization and reification—as the true matrix of humanity in general, with all its future potential. On the other hand, this constellation of concepts showed that the enemy of the workers is at the same time the enemy of humankind and thus deserves to be pushed back to the past. In order to clearly draw the battle lines of a civil war of unprece- dented extent, the only thing that needed to be made plausible now was the position of the capital-owning class, regardless of its sometimes respectable private moral convictions, as the enemy of the workers. The ultimate war was supposed to release unconditional hostility: the capital-owning bour- geoisie, including its well-fed entourage, as the objective brutes, on the one side, and the proletarians, who were the sole producers of value, together with their escort of hungry offspring as the objectively true human beings, on the other side. In this war, the stakes include the true nature of the pro- ducing human being. Because one party, it is said, entertains a merely para- sitical relationship with regard to production, while the other party includes those that produce authentically, the latter has to be rightly and inevitably victorious in the end. From this moment onward, to understand the essence
26
Because this war was conceived of as a
Only in light of this anthropological background is it possible to under- stand the success that the concept of "class consciousness" has enjoyed. It is now easy to comprehend that the emphasis is less on "class" than on "consciousness"; the latter is necessarily a property of psychic systems or individuals. Today the concept of "class consciousness" would be replaced
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by "class communication," provided that the concept of classes can still be
27
used.
according to the pure revolutionary doctrine, only one true human class, the producers, which is confronted by the capitalist class of illusory human beings or value-sucking vampires. The labor force, which is the collective destined to struggle, therefore only needs to be convinced that it embodies, in spite of its empirical misery, true humanity and the future potential of the species. From an increased self-understanding, revolutionary shame would immediately emerge, shame that would in turn breed revolution- ary rage. As soon as the proletariat discovers that it represents humiliated humanity, it will not be able to continue to accept its current condition. In freeing themselves from their misery—what Hegel would have called the negation of the negation of their humanity—the members of the finally conscious class would start a global storm on the Bastille. By completing the final revolution, the class of the true human being would "overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contempt- ible being. "28
Under conditions of a civil society marked by capitalism, there is,
It is evident that the discourse surrounding the class consciousness of the workers referred, in fact, to nothing but the thyzmotization of the pro- letariat. Thymotization signifies the subjective aspect of the preparation for an extensive battle. Class consciousness thus never meant that the industrial worker was supposed to come home after work in order to read Schiller's Maid of Orleans to expand a mind constricted by turmoil and sorrow. The expression certainly never implied that workers were supposed to reflect on their misery in economical terms. Authentic class consciousness means consciousness of civil war. As such, it can only be the result of battles in which the truth of the position of the fighting class is revealed.
This being the case, "true class consciousness" would be light-years away "from the real, psychological thoughts of man about their lives," as Georg
29
Lukacs explained in a mildly threatening tone of voice.
more openly, the same author continued to teach that it is not what the workers thought at the time that was of importance for the future but rather what they were supposed to think according to the objective party doctrine. According to the teaching of the strategists of class struggle, no element of the social totality could escape the challenge to develop a true consciousness of its position and function in the big picture, certainly not the proletariat. Lukacs admits that authentic class consciousness for the bourgeoisie would be tantamount to an insight into the inevitable nature of its coming down-
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Threatening much
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fall. This was, if not a good, at least a sufficient reason that the bourgeoi- sie fled from its tragic knowledge into the domain of the unconscious and unreasonable. The destruction of reason and the bourgeoisie's insistence
30
For the proletariat, on the other hand, the acquisition of class conscious- ness turns into a gay science of its mission to be the "leader of history. " Unfortunately, such a sovereign conception cannot be acquired overnight and is not free. Only by going through the "infinitely painful path of the proletarian revolution with its many reverses" will the future "subject of history" work its way up to the true concept of itself. In addition, there is
31
If class consciousness would fully live up to its mission, it would have to create class knowledge, class pride, and class rage. The first factor was, according to the conviction of the communists as well as anarchists, already given by the life experience of the worker, however much it still required for its completion the experience of war, self-criticism, and dialectical theory. The second factor could be brought out by appealing to arguments concern- ing human rights, the anthropology of labor, and political economy. These were supposed to help the members of the proletariat hold their heads up high, as appropriate for their value-creating role. The third factor needed to be fueled and channeled by means of propaganda: "Right, just as the blaze of fire, now forces itself with power to the surface," the International visual- izes the course of thymotic mobilization. Meaningful eruption only hap- pens after rage has cultivated the proletariat for a long enough time. Com- plete class consciousness presupposes that the sum of pride and knowledge is multiplied by the rage of the thymotic collective. The mature result of the proletarian process of learning can manifest itself only practically, through militant revolutionary activism.
that it has a right to the positions it has lost are one and the same.
are only a few individuals who have the moral power to betray their own class, renounce their origin, and join the "standpoint of the proletariat. " Only from this standpoint would it be possible, it is claimed, to reconcile reason and sustainability for the future.
the burden of self-criticism,
they don't have to carry this burden alone, without the help of the party, which is always right. According to the self-elected masterminds of the working class, this class was sentenced "with historical necessity" to abide by the revolutionary schedule: "the proletariat cannot abdicate its mission. "32 The principles of this self-study culminate in the doctrine that one gets to know war only by waging it.
which needs to be carried by activists. Luckily,
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There
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It is not necessary to explain in detail why the conception of the class of producers as a victorious fighting subject of history could result in nothing but a bad realization of philosophy. The fateful mistake behind its concep- tion goes beyond the adventurous equation of the industrial labor force with humanity. The greater problem is the holistic or organological approach according to which a sufficiently organized association of people would be capable of copying the achievements and qualities of a single human being on a higher level. By way of subscribing to such a misconception, the classi- cal left entered the space of illusions in which the famous substantive collec- tives and the ominous elevated subjectivities were up to mischief. The class of producers, having become self-conscious, would thus be a giant, com- parable to Plato's ideal republic, an organization in which reason, feeling, and will are united to become one monological, dynamic unified self. The craziness of this illusion was instantly recognized by the workers' move- ment, which covered it up by emphasizing that class consciousness is to a high degree connected to the "problem of organization. " The magic word "organization" evoked the leap from the level of "many active individual wills" (Engels) to that of the standardized class will. The unrealizability of an effective homogenization of millions of spontaneous individual wills is, however, already manifested in the superficial belief that the illusion of class cohesion could be upheld through surrogate constructions.
The most far-reaching of these surrogate constructions entered the stage in the form of Lenin's conception of the party.