No More Learning

4. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans.
Harry Zorn, (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 392; Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2001).
5. Concerning the source of the formula "x as such—x pure and simple," see Karl
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique ofPolitical Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 105. ^
235
6. 7.
8.
1. 2.
3.
4. 5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10.
Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, 537.
Quoted according to Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56; Conquest is doubtful about the authenticity of this statement.
See the doubts concerning the authenticity of the classic quotation in Christo- pher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005), 11.
2. THE WRATHFUL GOD
Cf. Regis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004).
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Penguin, 2003).
Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St Martin's Press 1990).
Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary ofReceived Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions, 1968).
Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Lfber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune (On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer, 1992), 73-74; "Simuli- erte Ready-mades von Fischli und Weiss," in Kunst-Kommentare (Vienna: Pas- sagen, 1977), 131-32; "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch-und Mas- senkulture," in Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Logic of collection: at the end of the age of the museum) (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 63-64; "On the New," Research Journal ofAnthology and Aesthetics 38 (2000): 5-17.
Cf. Raffaele Pettazonni, The All-Knowing God: Researches Into the Early Religion and Culture, trans. H. J. Rose (London: Methuen, 1956).
Cf. Jan Assmann, Politische Theologie zwischen Agypten und Israel (Political the- ology between Egypt and Israel) (Munich: Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Stiftung, 1992), 85. RuedigerSafranski,DasBoseoderdasDramaderFreiheit(Evil;or,thedramaof freedom) (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 32.
The concept of the "archive" is further explained through the cultural philo- sophical works of Boris Groys in chapter 3.
See, especially, Erich Zenger, A God of Vengeance? trans. Linda M. Maloney (Louisville, Ky. : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Zenger vehemently and for good hermeneutic reasons turns against the elimination of Jewish prayers of hatred from the Christian canon as well as from the hourly prayer of the Church. The theological arguments of the author are not as convincing as his herme- neutic ones. It is not clear what it is supposed to mean when he writes that the
1. RAGE TRANSACTIONS
236
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
"shrill tones of the psalms of enmity can serve to shock Christianity out of the
well-regulated slumber of its structural amnesia about God" (74).
11. Ralf Miggelbrink, Der zornige Gott. Die Bedeutung einer anstofiigen biblischen
Tradition (The wrathful god: The significance of a scandalous biblical tradition)
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 450.
12. Isaiah's argument that God only keeps a remainder is taken up again at a deci- sive passage of Augustine in his merciless teaching of mercy in the year 397: "To Simplician: On Various Questions. Book I (De Diversis Quaestionibus)," in
Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press, 1953) 370-406,1. 2.
13. Gerd Theifien and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus. Ein Lehrbuch (The his-
torical Jesus: a textbook) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), 249. 14. Concerning the metaphysical implications of the figure of speech "this world" (or "this life"), see Peter Sloterdijk, "1st die Welt verneinbar? Uber den Geist Indiens und die abendlandische Gnosis" (Can the world be unified? on the spirit of India and occidental gnosis), in Weltfremdheit (Unworldliness) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 220-33, especially section 1, "Fingerspitzengedanen" (Fingertip
thoughts).
15. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, ed.
Helmut Werner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 287.
16 In this context the works of Jacques Le Goff are most impotant. See his The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986).
17. TertuUian, Apology, De spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover
(Cambridge Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 297-301.
18. Cf. Nicholas Kwame Apetorgbor, TertuUian: Die Rache Gottes und die Verpflich- tung des Menschen zum Verzicht auf Rache. Die Bedeutung der Theologie Tertul-
liansfur das heutige afrikanische Christentum (TertuUian: The wrath of god and the human duty to renounce revenge. The significance of Tertullian's theology for contemporary African Christianity), (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 2004).
19. "Thence we came forth to rebehold the start": Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, trans. Henry W. Longfellow (New York: Chartwell, 2009), 34. 139,161.
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION:
ON THE COMMUNIST WORLD BANK OF RAGE^""
1. TertuUian, Apology, De spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 297-99.
2. Ibid. , 295.
237
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
3. Restif de la Bretonne, Revolutionare Nachte in Paris, ed. Ernst Gerhards (Bremen: Manholt, 1989). During the turmoil of 1848 similar slogans were used. Alexis de Tocqueville tells the story of a poor young country farmer who found work as servant for a family from Paris. "On the evening of the day when the insurrection started, he heard this child say as he was clearing away after the family dinner: 'Next Sunday (it was on a Thursday) it is we who will be eating the chicken's wings. ' To which a little girl who was working in the house answered: 'And it is we who will wear lovely silk dresses'" (Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. and trans. J. -P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr [New Bruns- wick, N. J. : Transaction, 1987], 143).
4. Antonio Negri, "The Specter's Smile," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium
on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso,
1999), 15.
5. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005), 103.
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Correspondence, 1844-1851, in Collected Works
(New York: International Publishers, 1982), 38:289.
7. Ibid. , 38:289.
8. Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner,
(Boulder, Colo. : Wesrview Press, 1978), 172.
9. FritzJ. Raddatz,ed. ,MohranGeneral:MarxundEngelsinihrenBriefen(Vienna:
Molden 1980), 203.
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 159.
11. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New
York: Vintage, 1984), 165 and 171.
12. Ibid. , 22.
13. Heiner Miiller, Der Auftrag (The mission), in Werke (Works) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 5:40.
14. Mikhail Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), in Staatlichkeit und Anarchie {Statism and Anarchy, note that this pamphlet is not included in English-language translations of Statism and Anarchy) ed. Horst Stuke (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), 103.
15. Concerning the significance of Methodism for democratic history, see Gertrud Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlighten- ments (New York: Knopf, 2004), 116-30.
16. Heinrich Heine, letter dated June 15,1843, in Sakularausgabe: Werke, Briefwech- sel, Lebenszeugnisse (Berlin: Akademie, 1970), 202.
17. Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), 101-2.
238
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
18. Ibid. , 95-99.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 195.
20. Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), 101.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1996), 354-55-
25. Concerning the early phase of the British workers' movement, which used reli-
gious justifications as well as those pertaining to human rights, see Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), 19-203.
26. This expression occurs, among other places, in Thomas Mann's diagnostic com- mentaries during the 1930s and 1940s. Concerning the continuing development
of the concept of a worldwide civil war, see Nikolaus Sombart, Rendezvous mit dem Weltgeist. Heidelberger Reminiszenzen 1945-1951 (Rendezvous with the world spirit: reminiscences from Heidelberg, 1945-1951) (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 268-76.
27. Concerning Lenin's intensification of the concept of class and the resulting com- promise, see this chapter, pages 162-63.
28. Cf. Karl Marx, Critique of HegeVs "Philosophy of Right," ed. Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 137.
29. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cam- bridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1971), 51.
30. One year after Stalin's death, Lukacs published his book Die Zerstorung der Ver- nung {The Destruction of Reason, 1954), which shows how a form of thinking, compromised by Leninist and Stalinist convictions, absolves itself. Concerning the ideological show trial as trial of absolution, see this volume, page 167.
31. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 75-76.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid. , 41.
34. Karlheinz Weifimann, Schwarze Fahnen, Runenzeichen: Die Entwicklng der poli-
tischen Symbolik der deutschen Rechten zwischen 1890 und 1945 (Black flags, rune symbols: the development of political symbolism of the German right between 1890 and 1945) (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1991).
35. Cf. Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken? Fine Untersuchung zur Risikoverar- beiung in der Wirtschaft (What is it that banks trade? an investigation into the
239
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
processing of risk in the economy), intro. Niklas Luhmann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1991).
36. See Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Uber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune
(On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer Verlag, 1992); "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch-und Massenkulture," in Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Logic of collection: at the end of the age of the museum) (Munich: Hanser, 1997); and Politik der Unsterblichkeit. Vier Gesprache mit Thomas Knoefel (Politics of immortality: four conversations with Thomas Knoefel) (Munich: Hanser, 2002).
37. See the section "The new as the valuable other," in Groys, Uber das Neue, 42-43. 38. For a systematic examination of the art world, see Beat Wyss, Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem (From image to the system of art) (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2006),
1:117-284.
39. Heiner Muhlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen. Entwurf einer kulturgenetischen
Theorie (The Nature of civilizations: An attempt of a culture-dynamic theory)
(Vienna: Springer, 1996).
40. Quoted by Ernst Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg 1917-1945. Nationalsozial-
ismus und Bolschewismus (The European civil war, 1917-1945: National Socialism
and Bolshevism), 6th ed. (Munich: Herbig, 2000), 339.
41. Quoted in Read, Lenin, 178.
42. See Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt. Philosophischer Extremis-
mus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Exit from the disenchanted world: philosophical
extremism between the world wars) (Munich: Fink, 1989), 13-20.
43. According to Stalin, the Communist Party had three to four thousand highest leaders ("the generals of our party"). Additionally, there were thirty to forty- thousand middle leaders ("our party officers") and a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand lower command personnel ("the sergeants of our party").
44. According to a consulted source, this hunnish thesis is attributed to Grigorij Sinowjew, one of Lenin's closest confidants. At a party meeting in Petrograd on
September 17, he declared, "We have to win over ninety of the one hundred mil- lion citizens of Soviet Russia. We should not speak to the others; we extermi- nate them. " According to a newspaper article, Sinowjew's speech was very well received. Quoted in Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg, 89, 513-14.
45. Cf. Alexander Jakowlew, Die Abgrundemeines Jahrhunderts. Eine Autobiographie
(The abysses of my century: an autobiography) (Leipzig: Faber und Faber, 2003),
154-55.
46. This is still depicted in the postcommunist literature, e. g. , in the satirical novel
about the Putin era by Victor Pelewin, Die Dialektik der Ubergangsperiode von 240
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
Nirgendwoher nach Nirgendwohin (The dialectics of the transitional period from
nowhere to nowhere) (Munich: Luchterhand, 2004).
47. The thesis that Lenin inaugurated fascism was developed during the 1950s by
such Soviet scholars as the Nobel laureate in physics Lew Davidowitsch Landau. After his mysterious encounter with Stalin in July 1935, Romain Rolland was the figurehead of Western pro-Sovietism. At the end of the 1920s he noted that com- munism had created fascism insofar as fascism was nothing but a "reverse Bol- shevism" (un bolchevisme au rebours). See Francois Furet, Le passe d'une illusion. Essai sur Videe Communiste au XXe siecle (Paris: Laffont 1995), 321. Antonio Negri admits that even today certain varieties of populism and fascism are deformed descendents of socialism; see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin 2004), 255. Landau's thesis is more radical and fitting than that of Rolland and Negri, because it iden- tifies Leninism not only "dialectically," as a provocation of fascism, but as its prototype.
48. Camus, The Rebel, 142.
49. Bukharin emphatically praised the affiliates of the Cheka, which returned from
their "horrible work" as "ruins of themselves. " Brecht's didactic play Die Mass- nahme (The Measures Taken) from 1930 reveals how important the mobiliza- tion of the willingness to kill was for communism. It rehearses the freedom of being allowed to kill and the embarrassment of having to kill in the service of revolutionary necessity. In a related sense, Andre Malraux shows in the opening scene of La condition humaine (1933) that the hero reaches a state of intoxication with revolutionary activism through engaging in murder. Concerning Brecht, see Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge Mass. : MIT Press, 200. 6), 260-61. During his notorious speech from October 4,1943, which was presented in the golden hall of the palace in Posen, Heinrich Himmler attempted to inculcate upon ninety-two SS officers that the German elite troops still had to catch up to the level of Soviet commissionaires when it came to an appropriate ability to kill. He believed that the Soviet functionaries assigned with the task of killing massively were twenty years ahead. In 2001 Robert Kaplan, who is a Leninist without knowing so, recommended in his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Vintage, 2003) that the American govern- ment do away with the Judeo-Christian morality of an unconditional protection of life. In light of coming tasks it should rather adopt a lethal "pagan" mentality. Charles Krauthammer and other neoconservative ideologists describe the uni- lateralism of the United States, which is ready to kill, a little more discreetly as "democratic realism. "
241
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
50. Cf. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1996), 187-212.
51. On the readjustment of cultural norms after phases marked by excessive stress, see Miihlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen, 50-97.
52. The Comintern did not shy away from any form of exaggeration in the ideologi- cal competition against the moderate rage-collecting systems on the left: up until the late 1920s their supporters still thought that it was morally correct and politi- cally useful to denounce the parliamentary socialists of Western countries as "social fascists. " The fatalism behind this manner of speaking has perhaps never been explicitly uncovered. After 1945 there were huge efforts to make everyone forget that the antifascist confession, which has been constitutive for the New Left during the second half of the twentieth century, started out as a movement against social democracy during the first half. In fact, Moscow attributed pri- mary importance to the "struggle against the socialist center" after 1919. This directive emphasized the anti-Menshevik line just like a compulsive neurosis of Bolshevism for purposes of foreign politics.
53. Quoted in Alexander Jakowlew, Die Abgrunde meines Jahrhunderts, 155.
54. Alexander Wat, My Century, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: New York Review
of Books, 2003), 22.
55. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (New York: Atheneum,
1970), 257.
56. This is the expression from the Manifesto of the Communist International
Addressed to the Global Proletariat, written in March 1919.
57. Kautsky's reply did not lack in resolution. See Karl Kautsky, Terrorismus und
Kommunismus. Ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution (Terrorism and communism: a contribution to the natural history of the revolution) (Berlin: Neues Vaterland, 1919). In this book he condemns Bolshevism as a "Tartar Socialism" and as an antisocialist regression to a state of barbarism.
58. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:394. "Hatred as well as the willingness to sacrifice both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. "
59. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europaischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (European revolutions and the character of nations) (Stuttgart: Kohl- hammer, 1951), 527.
60. Some time before his epochal speech at the twentieth Party convention of the KPdSU on Stalin's crimes and the devastations of his personal cult, Nikita Khrushchev made the astounding remark: "We have wasted the collected capi-
242
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
tal of trust, which the people bring to the party. We cannot exploit the trust of the people indefinitely" (quoted in Jakowlew, Ein Jahrhundert der Gewalt in Rutland, 31). In this book I try to explain what capital was in fact at stake.
61. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2008), 12-14.
62. Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys, Die Kunst des Fliehens. Dialoge uber die Angst, das heilige Weifi und den sowjetischen Mull (The art of escaping: dialogues on anxiety, sacred whiteneness, and Soviet garbage) (Munich: Hanser, 1991), 61.
63. See Boris Groys, Die Eifindung Rufilands (The invention of Russia) (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1995), 14-15.
64. Karl Marx, Civil War in France (1871; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998), 47. This remark did not stop Marx from soon claiming the opposite in order to exces- sively praise the actors of the failed Paris Commune.
65. Concerning the figure "terror in one country," see Arno Mayer, The Furies: Vio- lence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N. J. : Princ- eton University Press, 2000), 13 and 607-701.
66. Cf. Heiner Miihlmann, MSC. Maximal Stress Cooperation. The Driving Force of Cultures (Vienna: Springer, 2005).
67. It is thus not completely harmless when Antonio Negri reaches the conclusion in Multitude that apart from the primary front of worker and capitalist there is "a potentially infinite amount of classes. " The simplified translation of fronts into an opposition of poor and rich as "classes" would not be without risks. In light of the background of communist terror the question needs to be raised whether it is not also the case in contemporary discourses that new combative collectives are assigned with an occult mandate to engage in bloody activities.
68. Cf. Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (The communist postscript) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006).
69. Cf. Simon Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Allison Busby, 1981), 20.
70. Sebastian Haffher, Der neue Krieg (The new war) (Berlin: Alexander, 2000), 60.
71. See Mao Zedong's key text, "On Protracted War," in The Art of War (El Paso: El
Paso Norte Press, 2005), 165-288.
72. Cf. Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjiet
Union (Holistic work of art Stalin: divided culture in the Soviet Union) (Munich:
Hanser, 1988). ^
73. Both reasons can be identified in the reactions of the Chinese to the disastrous
insights of the great biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday: Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). The government prohibited
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3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
the publication of the book in China; patriotic Chinese intellectuals also reject it, judging from first impressions, as an external interference in intra-Chinese mat- ters. The civilizational implications of this reaction go deep. They are ultimately directed against the import of a victim-centric ethics; that is, if the Chinese do not ask about the victims of Mao's politics inside of the country, emigrants are not supposed to have the right to force such questions on them, particularly not intrusive historians and Western observers. The official terminology since 1981 in China is that the heritage of Mao is 70 percent good and 30 percent bad; this elides the 60 to 70 million lost human lives for which Maoism has been respon- sible since 1949. These lives are seen as a burden that can be surmounted only through the autochthonous art of taking stock.
74. Xuewu Gu, "List und Politik" (Cunningness and politics), in Die List (Cunning- ness), ed. Harro von Senger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 428-29.
75. Andre Glucksmann explicitly regretted his participation in the delusional Mao cult in France between 1968 and 1972 in his memoir Une rage d'enfant (Paris: Plon, 2006), 114-15.
76. A defense of "authentic Maoism," which is at the same time an impressive exam- ple of sovereign anachronism, is presented by Alain Badiou in his book Le siecle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 89-90.
77. Alexandre Dumas, The Count ofMonte Cristo (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 1203.
78. Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, 187.
79. Soren Kierkegaard, On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (1848). 80. Cf. Marx, Civil War in France, 98: "They have no ideals to realize, but to set free
the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. "
4. THE DISPERSION OF RA-GE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
1. Manfred Haettich, Zornige Burger. Vom Sinn und Ursinn des Protestierens (Angry
citizens: on sense and senselesness of protest) (Munich: Olzog, 1984).
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 88.
3. Cf. Henk Oosterlink, Radicale Middelmatigheid (Radical mediocracy) (Amster-
dam: Boom, 2002).
4. Additionally there was a second form of "theory": the official state philosophy
of Marxism and Leninism that was taught in all the countries of the Eastern bloc, a unity of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific
244
4. THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
communism, an amalgam that was so boring that its pupils only remember it
as frightening.
5. Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.