No More Learning

The impressive achievement of Plato's interpretation of thymos consists in a per- son's ability to be infuriated. This turn against oneself can come about when a person does not live up to the expectations that would have to be satisfied in order for that person not to lose self-respect. Plato's discovery thus con- sists in pointing out the moral significance of intense self-disrespect. This manifests itself in a twofold way: First, it expresses itself in shame, an affec- tive, all-encompassing mood that completely fills the subject. Second, this rage-drenched self-reproach takes on the form of an inner appeal to one- self. The act of being dissatisfied with oneself proves to the thinker that the human being has an inert, even if only obscure idea of what is appropriate, of what is just and worthy of praise. When not living up to this idea, a part of the soul, that is, thymos, lodges an appeal. With this turn to self-refusal the adventure of independence begins. Only he who is able to disapprove of himself is able to control himself.
The Socratic-Platonic conception of thymos presents a milestone on the way to the moral domestication of rage. It is situated halfway between wor- ship of quasi-divine Homeric menis and the stoic dismissal of wrathful and intensive impulses. Thanks to Plato's theory of thymos, civil and militant impulses receive the right to remain in the philosopher's city. Because the polis that is governed by reason also needs the military, which is introduced here as the group of guardians, civilized thymos is allowed to remain within the city walls in the spirit of protection. Plato insists upon the recognition of protective virtues as powers that constitute society in many different ways. Still, in the late dialogue Politicus, which deals with the skills required for statesmanship, the well-known allegory of the weavers underlines the necessity of creating the spiritual web of the "state" by interlacing prudent disposition and courageous attitude.
Aristotle also mentions the advantages of rage. His evaluation of this affect is surprisingly positive, at least insofar as it is coupled with courage.
self-respect.
In book 4 of the Republic, Plato presents an outline of a theory of thy-
23
INTRODUCTION
Legitimate rage still has an "ear for reason,"20 even if it often storms off like an overly hasty servant who does not listen until the end of his orders. It becomes a vice only if it appears together with a lack of abstinence, that is, when it leads to excess. "Rage is necessary. Nothing can be achieved with- out it. Nothing can be achieved when it does not fulfill the soul and ani- mate courage. One should, to be sure, not make it into a leader. Rather one should only take it to be a comrade-in-arms. "21
Given that the thymos that has been conditioned by civilization is the
22
psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a striving for recognition, it becomes clear why the lack of recognition by relevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specific opponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects this test, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feels disrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied (which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if I deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that I have reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, which situated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wise person is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because the individual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second, because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep her- self free from all that does not depend on herself.
Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to find one's self- worth resonating in the other. This desire could easily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself to become unhappy, one with a universal suc- cess rate if it were not for those dispersed cases of successful mutual recog- nition. Lacan probably said what is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a grounding mirroring process, even though his models, prob- ably unjustly, situate early infantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in front of the mirror is more of a children's disease. But among adults the striving for reflection in the recognition of others often means the attempt to take possession of a will-o'-the-wisp—in philosophi- cal jargon: to instantiate oneself in what is insubstantial. Lacan's oeuvre moreover expresses the ambition to amalgamate the theory of thymos (as it was reformulated by Kojeve) with psychoanalytic eroticism. At the kernel of his project is the freebooting mixture of the Freudian death wish with Hegel's struggle for recognition. Through the introduction of foreign fac- tors Lacan exploded Freud's systematic edifice, but not without claiming that in truth the project meant a "return to Freud. "23
24
INTRODUCTION
Without a doubt, the introduction of a thymotic element into psycho- analytic teaching pointed in the right direction. However, the initial con- sequence was the confusing growth of a performance that popularized the hybrid concept of desire (desir). With this concept, Lacan was also able to conceal his strong misjudgment of sexuality. To talk of "desire" was attrac- tive because it covered two phenomena that, although completely different in terms of their origin, could be connected because of their mutual rela- tionality. The confusion was as complete as it was welcome. It is telling that nowadays there are countless confusing "introductions to Lacan"; we are still waiting for a clear summary. As one can see, the reason is easy to point out: Lacan's contributions to the psychological knowledge of the present could only be reformulated by means of a framework in which the relation- ship of eroticism and thymotics is explained. However, as long as the theory that needs to be framed is intended to be itself the frame and measure, there is no end to the confusion.
NIETZSCHE'S INSTANT
LOOKING BACK AT THE HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AND IN particular its convulsive first half, one gets the impression that it saw the failure of the civilization of thymotic energies on all fronts. This means a failure of the project that Plato demanded, Aristotle praised, and the peda- gogues of the bourgeois age attempted to put into practice. If the goal of the political experiment of modernity consisted in translating the thymotic energies of the masses into political forms and in mobilizing these energies for standard "progress," we have to acknowledge a catastrophic failure. This has ultimately led to tearing down the experiments, regardless whether they were conducted under white, red, or brown flags.
To a large extent, this failure was caused by modern radicalisms that attempted, under idealistic as well as materialistic pretenses, to open up untraveled paths for collective rage, paths that were supposed to lead to sat- isfaction. Leaving modern institutions such as parliaments, courts, and pub- lic debates by the wayside, and in contempt of small escapes, these pathways resulted in huge releases of rage, resentment, and fantasies of extermination. They were excesses of previously unknown quantities that should finally be understood as what they were in terms of their psychopolitical quality: a chain of thymos catastrophes caused not only by the failure of the tradi- tional religious and civilized management of rage but by the organization
25
INTRODUCTION
of a new politics of rage or, to put it more drastically, the organization of a novel economy of rage. It needs to be insisted on that the violence of the twentieth century did not "erupt" at any point in time. It was planned by its agents according to entrepreneurial criteria and controlled by its managers with long-term oversight for its objects. What at first sight appeared like the highest level of running amok in reality consisted of bureaucracy, party organization, routine, and the effects of organizational reflection.
Before focusing on the new economy of rage, the science of war and resentment, before considering this as the psychopolitical riddle of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche's unique position in the history of ideas should be pointed out. This author, who is as disturbing today as he ever was, introduced himself to his posterity as the "happy messenger with- out comparison. " At the same time he referred to himself as the "destroyer
par excellence. "24 From the "evangelical" perspective he speaks as the teacher of emancipated egoism. From his position as destroyer, he speaks as a war- lord who campaigns against morality as a means of domination used by the weak. Nietzsche exposed resentment and its modern repercussions as the fundamental affects of the metaphysical age. His self-consciousness was infused with the certainty that his great deed, exposing resentment as what it is, would divide human history in diametrically opposed periods, just as the Christian calendar divided the entirety of world history into the time before and the time after the birth of Christ. Nietzsche comments on this in his self-portrait, Ecce Homo, revealing a deliberate exposition of equanim- ity: "The concept of politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures from the old society will have exploded—they are all based on lies: there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. "25
My goal is not to applaud the prophet Nietzsche for having conceptual- ized the giant thymotic battles of the twentieth century in advance. Nor do I intend to once again spread out in what sense and based on which teachings Nietzsche was the most inspiring neo-thymotic psychologist of modernity. His fateful interpretation of Christian morality should rather be interpreted within the parameters set by the knowledge of our age as an act of revenge against life. Speaking about "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Our Experience," as Thomas Mann paradigmatically did in a rich essay in 1947, is not easy. It is not only because of political and technical evolution that the 120 years that separate us from the hysterical-lucid endgame of the author con- stitute an obstacle for interpretation. Perspectives have shifted significantly; in some cases, even issues of epochal consequence have been clarified.
26
INTRODUCTION
Today, for example, we can perceive clearly that, in general, Nietzsche's ingenious analysis of resentment and, in particular, of the priesdike type of human being have been burdened by a mistake of address as well as a mis- take of dating. The wanderer of Eze and Sils-Maria condemned Christian- ity by means of a biblical pathos. At the time Christianity had for a long time already not represented an adequate object for such a vehement attack. It had already, particularly in its Protestant wing (which Nietzsche should have known better), mutated into a happy (Hfe-friendly), mild, and human- itarian-supernatural wellness enterprise. The only way it differed from its worldly competitors was in a couple of bizarre suprarational dogmas— complemented by a metaphysically well versed euthanasia, the charms of Church music, and an old-style Sunday collection for the sake of the needy and, lest we forget, a penny for Africa. The fact that Catholicism presented itself after 1870 as being at the peak of its antimodern campaign does not change the general situation. All of its efforts on the theological and politi- cal fronts were only the effects of weakness: the flight of the pope into the dogma of infallibility, the mobilization of an external mission, the militant incitement of Marianic fervor, the condemning of liberal and secular books, the founding of ultramontane parties in the parliaments of the secular world. All of these actions revealed the frightful panic of a declining power. The most important symbols for the situation of the Catholic cause remained, despite everything, the expropriation of the church states through the young Italian nation as well as the retreat of the humiliated pope into the walls of
26
At the same time, in the milieu of nationalism and internationalism new and acute breeding grounds for resentment emerged and were supported by an unknown type of clergy, the secular clergy of hate, who stormed against "existing conditions. " In defense of Nietzsche's honor, we may say that he was always a strong opponent of both of these tendencies. This does not change the fact that he was wrong about his main enemy and that his main problem consisted in his anachronistic judgment. If it truly was the resis- tance to resentment that constituted the highest priority of the age, then the "attack" (Abrechnung) on Christianity would have had to take a back- seat to the struggle against national-revolutionary and world-revolutionary "moodiness" (Muckertum), to use Nietzsche's term. In fact, "rage," which is a recurrent point of reference in Nietzsche's deduction of dominating morality from slavish reflexes, can also be applied to the most active move- ments of resentment ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its timeliness
the Vatican, where until 1929 he put on the face of a martyr.
27
INTRODUCTION
is not exhausted by these considerations. On the basis of everything that we know today about what we might expect, we have to assume that the first half of the twenty-first century will also be characterized by large-scale con- flicts. These will be initiated by collectives of rage and by humiliated "civi- lizations. " This is yet one more reason to continue the work that Nietzsche started and to put on the agenda a more fundamental reflection on the causes and effects of rage in modernity.
What primarily needs to be kept in mind against Nietzsche's furious con- clusion is that the Christian era, taken as a whole, was not the age of practic- ing rage. It was an epoch in which an ethics of deferring rage was solemnly implemented. The reason for this is not difficult to identify: it lies in the Christian belief that the justice of God will one day, at the end of all time, ensure that moral actions will be rewarded and immoral actions punished. The prospect of a life after death has always been connected in the Chris- tian sphere of ideas with the expectation of a transhistorical act of balancing pain and suffering. The price for this ethics of abstaining from rage in the present for the sake of retribution in a world beyond was high—Nietzsche's judgment on this point was clear. He insisted on the generalization of a latent resentment that projected the postponed wish for revenge onto its counterpart, the anxiety of being condemned. It was projected into the cen- ter of belief, the teaching of last things. The punishment of arrogant people thus became for all eternity the condition for the ambivalent arrangement of men of goodwill with bad circumstances. The side effect of this arrange- ment was that those people who were good and humble themselves started to be afraid of what they attributed to omniscient evil. I will discuss this issue more extensively in the following chapter, which concerns the wrath of God and the establishment of a transcendent bank of vengeance.
PERFECTED CAPITALISM: AN ECONOMY OF GENEROSITY
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE "AGE OF EXTREMES," AS ERIC HOBSBAWM HAS
27
characterized it, Georges Bataille began to draw from Nietzsche's psy-
chological intuitions their economic consequences. He understood that Nietzsche's attempt to criticize morality, as a last consequence, necessitated a different economy. If one wants to understand morality in terms of thy- motic concepts, one needs to reform the economy in a thymotic way. But how could we conceive of an economic life not based on erotic impulses, that is, desire, greed, and impulsive consumption? What would an economy look
28
INTRODUCTION
like were it based on thymotic impulses such as the desire for recognition and self-respect? How would we conceive of the introduction of pride into the capitaUst economy, an economy that openly confesses that it abides by the primacy of profit maximization, avarice, an overall unnoble motive that becomes justified even by its defenders only in reference to the claim that the entrepreneurial realist is himself condemned because of the vulgarity of the real. The axiom of everyday business, as is widely known, is that he who wants to come out of a nasty match the winner has to accept the rules of the game. Realism against this background means to be cool with one's cruelty.
The often cited revaluation of values could never approach its goal if it could not manage to show the facts of capitalist economy in a different light. There are two options for the introduction of pride into economy: either one needs to be willing to ruin oneself through ostentatious expendi- ture for the sake of the prestige of one's name, as did the aristocrats before the French Revolution, or one needs to find a post-aristocratic sovereign use of wealth. The question is thus: Is there an alternative to the blind accu- mulation of value? Is there an alternative to the chronic trembling in the instant of taking stock? Is there an alternative to the unrelenting compul- sion to pay off one's debts?
The search for the answer to these questions leads to a domain in which economic and moral facts are not easy to distinguish. The Nietzsche- inspired critic of the general economy discovers in the heart of common economic life the transformation of moral guilt through monetary debt. It is hardly necessary to state the obvious. The capitalist mode of economy could only have started its victory march because of this pragmatic trans- formation. The time of guilt is characterized by the pursuit of a criminal by the consequences of his deeds. This time ends consequently with the atonement for the effects of the deeds. To be in debt means thus nothing less than to live through a time of compulsive repayment. However, while guilt makes one depressed, debts make one feel alive, at least as long as they
28
To pay off and to pay back are acts that point back to the center of trans- actions. They are the objective operations that, when translated into sub- jective feeling, lead to resentment. If one traces the concept of resentment
appear together with entrepreneurial energy.
decisive connecting trait: both make sure that the lives of those they affect remain bound by a knot created in the past. Jointly they create a retrogres- sive compulsive union, through which what has been retains its domina- tion over what will be.
29
Guilt and debt have one
INTRODUCTION
to its material and economic sources, one finds the basic and original con-
viction that nothing in the world can be gotten for free and that every step
must be paid back to the last penny. Here economic thinking passes over
into ontology, and ontology, into ethics. Being, which is intended to mean
the sum of all transactions, secures a balance between what has been bor-
rowed and what needs to be returned. In the spirit of macroeconomics,
which was bewitched at the beginning of the metaphysical era by the idea
of reimbursement, one can even interpret death as the repayment of a debt
that the recipient of life has borrowed from the giver of life. The high-
est articulation of this thought appears in an obscure sentence of Anaxi-
mander that interprets the basic happening of Being as "reimbursement"
29
The other economy is based on the thesis that the worth of paying back is a fiction that is rooted in the compulsive use of the schema of equal value. If one wants to leave the illusion of equivalence one needs to call into question the equals sign between what has been taken and what has been paid back. Moreover, one would have to interrupt the illusion of equal values in order to lend priority to a form of thinking with unequal values. In a transcapital- istic economy, the progressive, creative, giving, and excessive gestures need to become constitutive. Only operations that are engaged for the sake of the future have the power to explode the law of exchanging equivalences, by way of forestalling becoming-guilty and going into debt.
The moral pattern of this new capitalism is the psychologically unlikely but morally indispensable gesture of forgiving someone who is guilty. With this gesture the primacy of the past in a victim-perpetrator relationship is canceled out. The victim supersedes his humanly plausible and psychody- namically legitimate wish for revenge and returns to the perpetrator the freedom to make a new beginning. Wherever this happens, the chain of revenge, the economy of payback, is broken. Through recognizing the inev- itable imbalance between guilt and atonement, the person who was harmed once again finds freedom. The time after forgiving can thus gain the quality of an enriching new beginning. With forgiveness, the antigravitational ten- dency of human coexistence gains the upper hand; antigravitation is move- ment for the sake of increasing unlikeliness.
If one wants to understand the degree to which Nietzsche intervenes against the spirit of revenge, one needs to take into account that the author of Zarathustra attacks Anaximander himself. Nietzsche aims to efface Anaximander's proposition by stating its opposite: "Observe, there is no retribution. "30
(tisin didonai).
30
INTRODUCTION
In the material sector, the corresponding act is the voluntary offering that is not rooted in having good credit and that does not entail any specific duty on the part of the recipient. The same gesture can manifest itself in the form of debt relief or as the renunciation of the violent collection of an open debt. This also violates the primacy of revenge and the compulsion to pay back. The essence of the gift consists in extending the scope of freedom on the side of the receiver. The gesture is at times augmented to the point of festive generosity, when the giver and the receiver are for a moment con- nected through joint exaltation, a feeling that can possibly have long-lasting consequences. It stimulates the pride of the recipients to think over what would be an adequate response. It reaches its highest degree in donations to beneficiaries who are not close in time and space to the giver and thus cannot return anything—Nietzsche designed for this form of exaltation the interesting name "love of those most remote" (Fernstenliebe). These acts of "giving virtue" leave it up to the future to do with the gift whatever it can and wants. Whereas the common economy that is dictated by the "lower Eros" is based on the affects of wanting to have, the thymotic economy is based on the pride of those that are free enough to give.
Bataille traces in Nietzsche's writing the contours of an economy of pride in which the concept of investment is radically modified. While typical investors use their means in order to get back more than they invest, other people invest their resources to satisfy their pride and to attest to their good fortune. Both impulses make it impossible for the providers to expect gains in the same currency, while gains in reputation and pride are completely legitimate and desirable.
However paradoxical this behavior might appear, the economy of pride is founded on the conviction of its participants of their meaningful investments—admittedly only after other dealings have been satisfied. In 1900, the great sponsor Andrew Carnegie expressed this circumstance in a classical expression: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. " This is a sentence that the ordinary wealthy person is careful not to cite. From the perspective of experienced givers, holding onto inherited or achieved wealth can only be judged a missed opportunity of expenditure. Whereas the usual types of businessmen can increase, with a bit of luck, their assets or that of their shareholders, this different breed of investor can add new lights to the splendor of the world. Through their dealings, and in how they handle them, they elevate their very existence to splendor. Whoever enjoys this splendor understands that value only comes into being when one, by way of giving
31
INTRODUCTION
everything one has, attests to the existence of things beyond all value; this "constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself [and] has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity. "31 The second kind of rich people refrain from the stupidity of accumulation without purpose or goal. They do with their assets things an animal that only wants to have more and more could never achieve. They associate themselves with the power of antigravitation: they change the course of things such that vulgar acts are always more likely to occur.
One has to be careful not to romantically misunderstand Bataille's incite- ments concerning a universal economy. These ideas do not at all aim at the introduction of a communism for rich people. They also do not point to an aristocratic redistribution of goods in social-democratic or socialist soci- eties. The true significance of these ideas consists in instituting a cleavage within capitalism in order to create its most radical—and only fruitful— opposite. This is different from the traditional conception of the left, a left that has been overpowered by its own depiction of everything as miserable.
If one takes Marx at his word, it becomes clear that the motive for the turn of capitalism against itself was not foreign to him. In contrast, he believed that only the "completion" of the transformation of everything by capitalism could bring about a new form of economy. The possibility of a turn with the name "revolution" is produced by evolution itself. The whole fatal nature of Marxism consists in its undecidability with regard to the question of how much time the capitalist process will in the end need in order to produce the preconditions for a postcapitalist transformation of wealth. Seen from today's perspective, it is self-evident that the big match of capital had, by about 1914, already been played only until about halftime. A long series of intensifications, conflicts, and unraveling still lay ahead. Thus it was still far from being able to transcend itself for the sake of a successive formation. The leaders of the Russian as well as the Chinese revolutions were completely wrong when they claimed Marxist theory for themselves. Both political enterprises created amalgamations of political fundamental- ism and aggressive opportunism. Through this combination they lost every sense of economic success, evolution, and necessary temporal order. While the postcapitalistic situation could only be imagined according to Marx's essential writings as the ripe fruit of a capitalism developed "to the end," Lenin and Mao made the principle of the terroristic abuse of unripe condi- tions into the key to success. Their theories revealed what the term "pri- macy of politics" implies in its radical interpretation.
32
INTRODUCTION
One needs to admit that behind the concept of a "perfected capitalism," a long list of unwanted surprises awaits the interpreter, a list no less true today than it was during the time of Marx and Lenin. This concept requires from those who use it a degree of insight into the still unrealized potentials of economic, technical, and cultural evolution, which for understandable reasons the revolutionary leaders could not yet have achieved. At the same time, it demands from those who suffer from the game a degree of patience, a degree that cannot be reasonably expected if one knows where the voy- age leads and how long it will last. It is thus not surprising that the idea of "ripe conditions" outgrew the communists, in that this theoretical trope made the revolution necessary where evolution had barely started its work, where productive market economies were to a large degree absent. They tried their best to accomplish the impossible: to transcend capitalism with- out ever having known it. The flirtations of the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese in the time of Mao with accelerated industrialization were little more than impotent attempts to keep up an evolutionary appearance. In reality, Lenin's selection of the revolutionary moment was from the begin- ning purely motivated by opportunism—in accordance with Machiavelli's theory concerning the most favorable opportunity—and Mao Zedong's analogous attacks were to a large degree voluntaristic distortions.
Overhastiness remained the mark of all initiatives in the name of a post-
capitalist future from revolutionaries of this kind. It was clear for substan-
tial reasons that the necessary developments would have taken centuries.
However, without a sufficient reason—impatience and ambition are never
sufficient—the revolutionaries estimated that it would only take a couple of
decades; the ultrarevolutionaries even estimated only a few years. The dis-
torted picture with which the revolutionary will justified its plans depicted
the chaos of war, post-tsarist Russia, and post-emperor China as "ripe situ-
ations. " In fact, communism did not produce a postcapitalistic but a post-
monetary society. Boris Groys has shown that these societies gave up the
steering medium (Leitmedium) money in order to replace it with the pure
32
in more than the magical manipulation of the evolutionary calendar. After all, it cannot be ruled out that revolution comes to the aid of evolution. Its incurable weakness was the furious resentment against property—which expressed itself in the bitter term "private property" (also known as the "private possession of the means of production"), as if everything private
language of command.
The birth defect of the communist idea of economy consisted, however,
33
INTRODUCTION
could as such be described as something stolen. This affect may claim high moral standards—it is, anyhow, incapable of doing justice to the essence of the modern economy, which is, from the bottom up, based on possession. According to a comparison coined by Gunnar Heinsohn, the communist dismissal of the principle of ownership is akin attempting to accelerate a
33
vehicle by taking out its motor.
the Marxist tradition (as well as some of its right-wing fanatic rivals) were never able to get over their mistrust of wealth as such, not even when they proclaimed openly, in close proximity to the government, that they wanted to create wealth more intelligently and distribute it more justly. The left's economic mistake was always at the same time its psychopolitical confes- sions. To the communists in power, taking satisfaction in the philistine joy of expropriation and longing for revenge against private property was, overall, always more important than any spreading of values. Thus, in the final analysis, not much of the great elan of the egalitarian turn of humanity survived than the blatant self-privileging of functionaries, not to mention the effects of paralysis, resignation, and cynicism.
Moreover, the movements of the left in
Nonetheless, at the time of its bloom, the socialist economy also pos- sessed offensive thymotic traits because, as we have seen, all revolutionary projects are borne by and sustained through impulses within the pride- rage-indignation spectrum. Whoever takes the Soviet cult surrounding its "worker heroes" merely as a curiosity in the history of economy needs to consider that left-wing productivism was the attempt to introduce a touch of greatness into a system that suffered from its own vulgar premises.
The thymotic economy latently present in Nietzsche's criticism of morality stimulates an alternative monetary economy in which wealth appears together with pride. Nietzsche's criticism aims to remove the mask of lament from the face of modern prosperity. What is hidden beneath this mask is the self-disdain of mean-spirited owners of large for- tunes. They display a form of disdain which is fully legitimate according to Platonic thymos theory because the soul of the wealthy rightly attacks itself if it does not find its way out of the circle of insatiability. The pre- tense of cultivation and interest in culture, which is common in this stra- tum of society, does not change this fact; interest in fine arts is usually only the Sunday mask of greed. The soul of the wealthy could only be healed through beautiful actions that reclaim the inner approval of the noble part of the soul.
34
INTRODUCTION
The thymotization of capitalism was not an invention of the twentieth century; it was not necessary to wait for Nietzsche and Bataille to discover its modus operandi. It happens by itself whenever entrepreneurship enters a new territory in order to create the conditions for new revenue and its distributive emission. In regards to creative aggression, capitalism never needed extra help from philosophical mentors. It is not the case that it suffered too much from moral inhibitions. However, also with regard to its generous side, it developed rather uniquely and distinct from philoso- phy. If at all, it was inspired by Christian motifs, in particular in the Great Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We should not forget that according to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's vigilant account, it was in England, even if not often, that a capitalist entrepreneur made four mil- lion pounds in earnings in order to give away three million to charity as a Christian gentleman. One of the best known cases of a generous donation from capital gain is connected to the name of Friedrich Engels. For more than thirty years, Engels used the rather modest profits from his factory in Manchester to keep Marx's family in London alive; at the same time, the family head used this money to overthrow an order of things in which a person like Engels was possible and necessary. Be that as it may, the gen- erosity of donators cannot be reduced to a liberalism of "small deeds," typical of bourgeois reform. It would also be inappropriate to dismiss such gestures as paternalism. What becomes visible through them is rather a metacapitalist horizon that becomes clear in the moment capital turns against itself.
"People don't strive for happiness, only the English do. "34 When Nietzsche noted down this bon mot he was probably too heavily influenced by the antiliberal cliches of his time. What makes the aphorism important, nonetheless, is the fact that it reminds us of a time when the resistance to the propaganda of erotization and vulgarization could invoke impulses of pride and honor, impulses that have largely been forgotten today. These impulses established a culture of generosity. This phenomenon increasingly disappears in times of anonymous equity funds. Let us limit ourselves to the assertion that the thymotic use of wealth in the Anglo-American world, above all, in the United States, could become a persistent fact of society. On the European mainland, on the other hand, it could not so far establish itself—largely because of blind trust in the state, subventions, and tradi- tions of celebrating misery.
35
INTRODUCTION
THE POSTCOMMUNIST SITUATION
ONE FINAL COMMENT ABOUT THE "SPIRITUAL SITUATION OF OUR TIMES" in order to uncover the strategic perspective of what follows: in the past, one would have called this strategic perspective "engagement. " The follow- ing considerations are situated within a debate that has moved the intellec- tual public sphere of the West since the 1990s. To make a long story short, the goal is to take issue with the usual psychopolitical interpretation of the postcommunist situation.
The introduction of this situation was, to a large extent, completely unex- pected to people engaging in political debates in 1990. The political interpret- ers of the postwar era were content with commenting on both the victory of the Allies over the Axis dictatorships and the new world order from the tradition of their discipline. Across the board, there was a large consensus about and commitment to democracy and the free-market economy. Old comrades were granted the meager joy of taking out their antifascist medals from time to time. During this long belle epoque (which was only clouded by nuclear threats) there was a consensus that the "working through" of totalitarian excesses in Europe fulfilled the historical obligation of the epoch. Other than that one only needed to sit and watch how liberal civilization with the help of social-democratic correctives made use of the historical demand for a better world. There was hardly anyone who possessed the theo- retical means and moral motivation to think beyond the order of the bipolar era. The implosion of the hemisphere of actual socialism did more than con- demn its ideologies and institutions to meaninglessness. Most important, it created a situation in which "successful" capitalism had to take on the sole responsibility of the world. But Western thinkers were not provoked into providing exceptionally creative ideas in response to this new order.
It does not require too much concentration to see that some themes and motives of the present book are the product of an imaginary dialogue with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which originally appeared in 1992. 1 do not conceal that I am convinced that this publication belongs, in spite of its easily identifiable weak aspects, to the few works of contemporary political philosophy that touch upon the essence of our time. This publication testifies to the fact that academic thinking and presence of mind are not always mutually exclusive. Apart from more recent works
35 Fukuyama's work presents the most thought-through system of analysis
by Boris Groys that reveal a new horizon for the diagnosis of our age,
36
INTRODUCTION
of the postcommunist world situation up until the present day—and the same can be said about its relationship to political anthropology. In my opinion, the course of events since 1990 has largely confirmed Fukuyama's (and implicitly also Alexandre Kojeve's) conception, according to which we can only understand the contemporary global situation if we begin with an insight into the present state of the struggle for recognition. The fact that Fukuyama confesses his allegiance to the conservative camp in the United States does not commit his readers to share the same political affiliation. The aspects of his work that can be interpreted progressively come to the fore once one attempts to push the conservative veil to the side. In any case, the more or less intentionally committed misinterpretations do not deserve to be taken seriously in a commentary.
Among the interpreters who attribute substantial significance to Fuku-
yama's attempt to understand the postcommunist situation, Jacques Der-
rida has, understandably, a special position. In the most insightful of his
political books, Specters ofMarx, the inventor of "deconstruction" discusses
the theses of The End of History in an intensive, if largely skeptical and
36
sometimes polemical way.
of Fukuyama's line of argument, not least because Derrida does not argue in a deconstructive mode—rather he intends to improve the argument. Derrida is convinced that he is able to prove that Fukuyama's book is in fact a somewhat hasty application of Hegel to the modern state, a form of Chris- tian eschatology. Such ad hoc narratives, Derrida admits, mainly serve to satisfy the desire for happy endings to otherwise sad stories. In fact, Fuku- yama's book, owing to its evangelic tone, could have only become a media gadget, more or less misunderstood, as it ran around the world, but with- out its true problematic having been penetrated. What would be required for a serious discourse concerning the "end of history" is an illumination of the obscure relationship between the secular and technological civiliza- tions of the West to the three messianic eschatologies that emerged out of the religious thinking of the Near East—the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic. It is revealing that in this metaphysical corner of the world, people still argue about the meaning of the course of the world and the spiritual orientation of politics at large. "The war for the 'appropriation of Jerusa- lem' is today the world war. It is happening everywhere, it is the world. "37 What can be brought to bear against Fukuyama is, according to Derrida, his hidden, one-sided dependence on the customs of Christian messianology: it is well known that Christians conceive the Messiah as someone who has
Derrida presents a fascinating reconstruction
37
INTRODUCTION
arrived, whereas Derrida emphasizes the Jewish emphasis on waiting for the one who has not yet come. An analogous relation is present in the political narratives concerning the establishment of democracy in bourgeois societ- ies. While the interpreter of successful liberal civilization thinks he is able to assume the actual presence of democracy, his critic firmly defends the view that democracy could only be conceived of as a democracy to come, a future democracy.
As inspiriting as Derrida's commentary on The End of History may be, if one compares Fukuyama's book and Derrida's commentary, what comes to mind is that Derrida, without providing any justification, did not ade- quately discuss the serious part of Fukuyama's attempt to present a contem- porary form of thymotology. Derrida justifies this neglect by briefly stating that Fukuyama's conception of thymos and megalothymia (the human right of pride and greatness) is intended as a counterweight to the one-sidedness of Marxist materialism. To put it mildly, this judgment reveals a rather selective reading of Fukuyama. We thus have to conclude that even such an eminent reader as Derrida missed the point of Fukuyama's book. Following the traces (Spuren) of Alexandre Kojeve and Leo Strauss, Fukuyama's book intends nothing less than the recovery of an authentic political psychology on the basis of a reestablished polarity of eros and thymos. It is obvious that this political psychology, which has hardly anything in common with so- called mass psychology and other applications of psychoanalysis to political issues, moved to the center of the current need for a new theoretical orien- tation through the course of world-historical events.
No one who understands something about the rules of literary criti- cism is surprised that, overall, Fukuyama's book received such bad press in European reviews. Its readers wanted to understand it mostly as an extended victory cry of liberalism after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the "socialist alternative. " It was presumed that the author, with his thesis concerning the end of history, only provided an updated version of Yankee ideology, according to which the American way of life meant the completion of human evolution from the desert to the shopping mall, from the hand axe to the ballot, from sitting around a bon- fire to using the microwave. Since this initial reaction, sneering references to Fukuyama's book became a running gag in the political feuilletons in Europe. Many contributors never tired of repeating that history has, of course, in reality not come to an end and that the victorious West must not sit still after a partial victory in the struggle against ideological specters.
38
INTRODUCTION
This position is, by the way, fully justified—yet we need to understand it completely differently from the way it is understood by the authors of the abovementioned reviews.
I do not want to ponder for too long the observation that these objec- tions are often presented in a tone of neorealist arrogance, as if the com- mentators feel superior the moment they uncover a philosophical author as announcing allegedly naive messages. The anti-intellectual affect of Fukuyama's critics should be mentioned as only an aside. When histori- ans defend themselves against the danger of being fired because of a phi- losopher, this is not unreasonable. In reality, the author anticipated the most essential concerns and objections of his critics. In the concluding chapter of his book, which carries the ominous title "The Last Men," he pursues with astonishing sensitivity the question of whether the currently successful liberal democracy is actually capable of providing the complete satisfaction of the intellectual and material needs of all of its citizens. His answer is the answer of a skeptical conservative who knows that there are contradictions "at the heart of our liberal order, even after the last fascist dictator, swaggering colonel, or Communist party boss has been driven from the face of the earth. "38
One can thus not identify the diagnostic lesson that is concealed in The End ofHistory. The title only quotes, as we have stated, an original interpre- tation of Hegel's philosophy by Alexandre Kojeve, an interpretation Kojeve had already developed in the 1930s. Kojeve located the "end of history" in the year of the appearance of the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. Fukuyama's original insight consists in his attentive observation that wars of prestige and struggles of jealousy between the citizens of the free world moved to center stage just at the moment when the mobilization of civil energies for wars at the outer fronts came to an end. . Successful liberal democracies, the author understands, will always be infiltrated by currents of free-floating dissatis- faction. This has to be the case because human beings are condemned to suffer from thymotic unrest, and "last men" even more than everyone else, even though the mass culture we witness in posthistory initially appears in the form of eroticism. The ambitions addressed by mass culture can be as little satisfied as the ambitions of resentments (at least in the case of the greater success of other people).
Once the physical battles have been fought, the metaphysical battles begin. The latter are inevitable because the activity of the liberal world, which consists in the mutual recognition of all by all as equal citizens of
39
INTRODUCTION
society, is in truth far too formal and unspecific to open up individual access to happiness. Especially in a world of universally amended liberties, human beings cannot cease to strive for the specific forms of recognition manifested in prestige, wealth, sexual advantage, and intellectual superiority. Because such goods will always remain scarce, in liberal systems there will always be a large reservoir of distrust and frustration in inferior competitors—not to mention those who are truly worse off and the de facto excluded. The more a "society" is satisfied in its basic features, the more colorfully the jealousy of all against all will flourish. This jealousy entangles candidates vying for better positions in petty wars that permeate all aspects of their lives. At the same time, the system of the "open society" has the advan- tage of also employing the darker energies. Jealousy constantly generates alternative preferences, in particular in the domain of the ever-increasing and ever-differentiating culture and media business. Sports have become indispensable as an expansive system of winning and becoming famous, of stimulating and channeling postmodern excesses of ambition. Taken as a whole, it can be said that in the insatiable prestige battles of posthistory, elites continuously emerge from nonelites. If a public sphere is dominated by the expressive lives of countless actors who can never really be on top and yet have advanced significantly, then one can be certain that what we are dealing with is a flourishing democracy.
The old world knew slave and serf, the bearers of the unhappy conscious-
ness of their time. Modernity has invented the loser. This figure, which one
meets halfway between yesterday's exploited and today's and tomorrow's
superfluous, is the misunderstood product of the power games of democ-
racies. Not all losers can be pacified by pointing out that their status cor-
responds to their poor placement in a contest. Many will object by saying
that they have never gotten a chance to participate in order to be positioned
according to their merits. Their resentful feelings turn not just against the
winners but also against the rules of the game. When the loser who loses too
often calls into question the game as such by means of violence, this makes
conspicuous the state of emergency (Ernstfall) of a politics after the end of
history. The new emergency currently presents itself in two forms: in liberal
democracy as a postdemocratic politics of order, which expresses itself as
the degeneration of politics into policing and in the transformation of poli-
ticians into agents of consumer protection; and in frustrated countries torn
by civil war, wherein armies of powerful, superfluous people (Uberflussigen)
39
continue to annihilate one another.
40
INTRODUCTION
In the meantime, we have understood that not only the "contradictions" at the heart of our own system but the political culture of the West and its offspring civilizations in the East and in the South have tampered with the postcommunist situation. New movements of militant and energetic, superfluous malcontents, rapidly growing networks that channel the hatred of losers, subterranean proliferations of methods of sabotage and destruc- tion all seem to be responsible for the return of historical terror and the cor- responding hopes. It is against the background of such phenomena that we have to understand the countless treatises about the "return" or the "new beginning" of history, which have been flooding the essay market of the West for several years now. The common denominator of such commen- taries is the automatic allegation that outbreaks of violence on the global stage would be a new start of a history that had temporarily slowed down. Unmistakably, we are dealing with a simplified version of Hegelianism: if history until now advanced through struggling opposition (as the popular- ized version of dialectics assumes), we may legitimately conclude that the appearance of new combatants continues the process of history.
It needs to be clarified, against what is proclaimed in the literature, that the occurrence of terrorism in Western civilization's relationship to the outside world, on the one hand, and a new form of the social question in its internal relationships, on the other, should precisely not be understood as a sign of the "return" of history. The modus vivendi of the West and its offspring cultures is indeed posthistorical in essential points. Its form is no longer oriented by epos and tragedy; pragmatically, it can no longer be constructed on the successes of a unilateral style of action. At the same time, given the present state of affairs, it is not possible to situate anywhere
40
an alternative to the Western model.
is a thoroughly posthistorical phenomenon. Its time starts when the rage of those who have been excluded connects to the infotainment industry of those who have been included, merging into a violent system-theater for "last men. " To impute to this business of terror historical meaning would be a macabre abuse of already exhausted language resources. The eternal recurrence of the same, no matter as one-eyed rage or as a form of rage short-sighted in both eyes, does not suffice to speak of a restoration of his- torical existence. Who wants to attribute clear sight to wearers of black eye patches, to allow them to define the state of evolution?
Concerning the new social question, it is obvious that a return to the mistakes of the past cannot provide a solution. Only a repetition of the
41
So-called global terrorism, especially,
INTRODUCTION
posthistorical compromise between capital and labor, that is to say, the future, could provide for a relative appeasement on this front. This would imply a taming of the speculative monetary economy (in recent terms, the capitalism of parasites) and the quick implementation of an economy based on private property in developing countries. To point to the necessity of extending the welfare state to the supranational level describes the hori- zon for a serious new social politics. The only alternative to such a politics would be the authoritarian turn of world capitalism, in which certain fatal options of the 1920s and 1930s would reappear on the agenda. Indicators pointing in these directions are not at all lacking if one inspects the global situation today.
The second macropolitical task of the future, the integration of non- human actors, forms of life, ecosystems, and "things" in general into the domain of civilization does not have anything in common with traditional questions surrounding history as we have known it. What is sometimes referred to as "ecopolitics" generally rests on the presupposition that prob- lems that have been caused by human beings should be solved by the origi- nators and those affected. This again leads to organizational, administrative,
41
The reader now only needs to be warned against misunderstanding the indicated recourse to Plato's implicit and secret return to Greek idealism. Plato is appealed to here as the teacher of a more mature view of culturally and politically effective ambition dynamics. We listen to him like we would listen to a guest lecturer visiting us from an eclipsed star. Apart from that, the turn to a higher form of psychological realism has to be carried out using the theo- retical means of our time. It will only succeed if one can withstand the tempta- tion to which the European intellectuals in the twentieth century succumbed, willingly and often. These intellectuals have even shown an anticipatory obe- dience with regard to the suggestive force of realism. They have always showed too much understanding for the all-too-normal actions of human beings who are stimulated by desire and resentment—and justified this understanding in the name of the always one-sided, downcast view of "reality. "
and civilizational tasks, but not to epics and tragedies.
major task of the future will be the neutralization of potential genocides in the countries of the Near and Middle East and elsewhere, countries that are populated by angry young men. This task can only be tackled with the help of a politics of posthistorical dedramatization. Time is required for all of these processes. What we do not need is a relapse into "history" as such, but exclusively a time of education (Lernzeit) for civilizations.
42
Finally, the third
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche's central didactic idea concerning the death of God gains an importance within the context of this introduction. Its psychopolitical implications can be felt with palpable delay. "God is dead" means now that we live in a time in which the old absorption of rage through an austere beyond that demands respect increasingly vanishes. The deferral of human rage in favor of the wrath of God at the end time is no longer an accept- able imposition for countless people, and has not been for quite a while. Such a situation indicates the likelihood of an overthrow. The politics of impatience expands accordingly. It finds adherents not the least among ambitious people who have a talent for expressing their outrage. These actors believe that they should start an assault as soon as nothing can be lost, neither here nor there. Who could deny that the exorbitant terror of the past century—it suffices to refer to the Russian, German, and Chinese exterminations—resulted from the ideological outbreaks of rage through the medium of secular agencies? Who could miss that the stage for the ter- rors of the twenty-first century has already been set up today?
Thus the way any understanding of both recent catastrophes and those that now announce themselves first needs to recall theology. The alliance between rage and eternity was a Christian axiom. I will have to show how it was possible for the constellation of rage and time—or rage and history—to emerge from this. In our religiously illiterate decades, people have almost completely forgotten that to speak of God in monotheism meant always at once to speak of a wrathful God. A wrathful God is the great impos- sible variable of our age. But what if, beneath the surface, he is working on becoming our contemporary once again?
Before once again calling attention to this figure that has been covered by the ruins of history, it is useful to look more closely at the business terms of the economy of rage.
43
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
Rage, oh rage,
is a pleasure that is preserved for the wise.
DA PONTE AND MOZART,
LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, lj86
THERE IS NO PERSON LIVING TODAY WHO HAS NOT REALIZED that the Western world, and through it also indirectiy all other areas of the world, is being irritated by a new theme. With a concern that is half true and half put-on, Westerners raise an alarm: "Hatred, revenge, irreconcil- able hostility have suddenly appeared again among us! A mixture of foreign forces, unfathomable as the evil will, has infiltrated the civilized spheres. "
Some people, engaged for the sake of morality, make similar observa- tions with a form of realism marked by a tone of reproach. They emphasize that the so-called foreign forces cannot confront us as absolutely foreign. What many people pretend to experience as a terrible surprise is, according to the moralist, only the flipside of the domestic modus vivendi. The end of pretense lies before us. "Citizens, consumers, pedestrians, it is urgent to wake up from lethargy! You do not know that you still have enemies, and you don't want to know because you have chosen harmlessness! " The new appeals to awakening the conscience aim to enforce the idea that the real has not been tamed, not even in the great bubble of irreality that encloses citizens of affluent society like the womb protects a fetus. If what is real is
45
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
taken to be what could kill, the enemy presents the purest incarnation of the real. With the renaissance of the possibility of hostility, the return of the old-fashioned real lies before us. From this, one can learn that a con- troversial topic is put on the agenda only when an irritation is transformed into an institution—an institution with visible protagonists and permanent employees, customer service, and its own budget, with professional confer- ences, public relations, and continuing reports from the problem area. The constant visitor in the West, the spirit of revenge, can profit from all of this. It can say to itself: I irritate, therefore I am.
Who could deny that, as usual, the alarmists are almost right? The inhab- itants of affluent nations sleepwalk mostly within illusions of apolitical pac- ifism. They spend their days in gold-plated unhappiness. At the same time, their molesters, their virtual hangmen, immerse themselves at the margins of happiness zones in the manuals of explosive chemistry. These manuals have been checked out of the public libraries of the host country. Once one has listened to the alarm for some time, one feels like one is viewing the opening credits of a disturbing documentary where the naive and its oppo- site are put into a perfidiously astonishing sequence by directors who know how to create effects: new fathers open up cans of food for their children; working mothers put a pizza in the preheated oven; daughters swarm into the city in order to make use of their awakening femininity; pretty salesgirls step outside during a short break to smoke a cigarette while returning the gaze of those passing by. In the suburbs, petrified foreign students put on belts filled with explosives.
THE MONTAGE OF SUCH SCENES FOLLOWS LOGICS THAT CAN EASILY BE understood. Many authors who see their vocation as educating the pub- lic in matters of politics—among them neoconservative editorial writers, political antiromantics, wrathful exegetes of the reality principle, converted Catholics, and disgusted critics of consumerism—want to reintroduce into a population of overly relaxed citizens the basic concepts of the real. For this purpose they quote the most recent examples of bloody terror. They show how hatred enters standard civil contexts. They do not tire of claiming that under the well-kept facades, amok has already for a long time been run- ning. They constantly have to scream: this is not a drill! Because for quite some time the public has become used to the routine translation of real violence into mere images, into entertaining and terrifying, pleading and
46
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
informative images. The public experiences the development of opposition as a tasteless regression into a dialect extinct for many years.
BUT HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SERIOUSLY PRESENT RAGE AND ITS EFFECTS,
its proclamations and explosions as news? What needed to be intentionally
forgotten before the desire could emerge to stare at those who effectively
practice revenge against their alleged or real enemies as if they were visitors
from distant galaxies? How was it at all possible, after the disappearance of
the West-East divide in 1991, for us to come to believe that we had been
thrown into a universe in which individuals and collectives could let go of
their capacity to have revengeful feelings? Is it not the case that resentment is
7 what is distributed the most around the world, even more so than bon sens .
Starting with the mythic era, it has been part of popular wisdom that the human being is that animal unable to cope with too many things. Nietzsche would say that the human being as such has something "German" to it. It is not capable of digesting the poisons of memory and suffers from certain unfriendly impressions. The saying that "sometimes the past does not want to pass" preserves the ordinary version of the sophisticated insight that human existence is initially just the peak of cumulative memory. Memory does not merely mean the spontaneous activity of the internal sense of time.