No More Learning

Postapocalyptic Christianity secured its survival as a church by subject- ing the place of its survival, the world or saeculum, to a thoroughgoing devaluation. In order for God to acquire his property from the church, the primary world needed to be ceded to a demon who would assume responsi- bility for it. This devil is correctly addressed according to Christian protocol as the Prince of This World. In the betrayal of the real world, a betrayal ratified by Augustine, motifs of apocalypticism, Gnosticism, and dualism are interwoven in an extremely damaging manner. Voltaire's saying that the history of mankind is tantamount to excerpts from the annals of hell elegantly summarizes the consequences (or at least the side effects) of the Christian dismissal of the world.
For my purposes, it would be inappropriate to provide a detailed history of the conception of hell. What is important to note in this context of the Christian depictions of the Inferno is that the increasing institutionalization of hell during the long millennium between Augustine and Michelangelo allowed the theme of the transcendent archive of rage to be perfected. The
97
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
introduction of the deceased into this great collection is a metaphysical necessity. From now on, no one will die without a final examination. The transcendent locations are organized, as readers of Dante well know, into three categories: the hell of perdition, the hell of purgation, and paradise. Arriving souls are assigned to the appropriate section by the most authori- tative of judges. All three sections share the character of an archive. While paradise and the hell of perdition constitute static archives in which the eternal presence of rage, or beatitude, dominates, the hell of purgation is a dynamic, intermediary realm in which the great multitude of average sin- ners are tossed through a purifying torture that comprises seven stages (cor- responding to the seven primary sins) before finally reaching the gates of heaven. This process is in precise accordance with each sinner's respective and carefully documented files of transgression.
CHRISTIAN FALLACIES: WHY THE SEARCH FOR REASONS FOR THE RAGE OF GOD IS MISLEADING
IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT THE DIDACTIC PLAY ABOUT THE WRATH of God already required additional explanations at the time of the first Chris- tian communities. Because Christianity presented itself in its first advertise- ments as the religion of loving one's enemy, forgiveness, renouncement of rage, and warm-hearted inclusiveness, the conflict between its happy mes- sage and its furious eschatology quite soon led to irritations. The promi- nent position of apocalyptic threat speeches in the collection of authentic words of Jesus inevitably leads to a conflict. Even if one does not agree with Oswald Spengler that the threatening words of Jesus presented his real spirit in the most authentic way,15 it cannot be denied that the apocalyptic fury lends a characteristic tone to his speeches.
The oldest theological documents of the new movement, the letters of Paul, thus already discuss this dilemma in an all but arbitrary way. Sub- sequent explicators of rage, who are led by Tertullian and Lactantius, also take on the task of making compatible God's thymos, or rather his orge, with the other qualities of the most sublime. There are three threads that con- nect the available explanations. According to the opinion of the authors, these threads only have to be rightly woven in order to understand why the God of the Christians is not only potentially capable of rage but also needs to unleash this rage at the present moment. Each thread corresponds to a theological concept: the first explains the implications of divine omnipo-
98
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
tence, the second explains divine justice, and the third explains divine love. The theologians seek to show with sufficient evidence why rage cannot be excluded from the spectrum of divine attributes.
However, the necessity of the wrath of God cannot be justified convinc- ingly from within theology. It does not at all follow from the "qualities" of God, which we know, as negative theology has always told us, only indirectly and by analogy. The nature of the rage thesis needs to be shown exclusively through a functional analysis, from a metatheological perspective, or in the language of psychopolitics. In fact, the Christianization of the wrath of God leads to a transcendent bank for the purpose of depositing deferred human thymotic impulses and deferred projects of rage whose global design lies beyond the conceptual horizon of the employees of these banks. Moreover, the employees were not supposed to understand the way the bank func- tioned because transcendent payback transactions could only be carried out in naivete. The bank undertook these transactions in the form of speech acts, which emphasize the existence of divine rage as well as the reasons to take it seriously. Such acts naturally need to be carried out bona fide because this is the only way through which they can unfold the desired effect, which is to threaten the recipient. Exaggeration is an essential part of this effect, while the slightest bit of irony would be its undoing. The speeches about the wrath of God present themselves as counseling in the shape of insistent prayers. From the point of view of theology, these prayers are dogmatic discourses that provide evidence for the proposition of Catholic ontology according to which the actually existing hell is a necessary and indispensable institu- tion. From this perspective there is a closer relationship between hell and the entire plan of creation than between Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican.
All the theological deductions of rage consist of pseudo-arguments that are of only a psycho-historical concern. They become intelligible when sub- jected to a functional analysis of dogma, even if some dogmas have been reformulated and presented as the most cutting-edge results of theologi- cal sophism up until the twentieth century, though they still allow insights into obscure areas of historical anthropology. In this context, we can think of the modes of world creation of the homo hierarchicus, the psychology of deliberate servitude, the mental dynamics of ontological masochism, the economy of resentment and, generally speaking, the cultural and economic preconditions for the preservation of rage.
Only faith provides an asylum for the three stereotypical deductions of rage: from omnipotence, justice, and the love of God. On the open field of
99
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
logical evaluation, however, these rage systems quickly collapse. The oldest record of a Christian embarrassment in light of the quality rage reveals the fragility of the foundation. It is well known that in the ninth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote down the first Christian word in defense of the wrath of God. The occasion was an uncomfortable discovery, which after having been made needed to be immediately concealed because of its fatal implications. The discovery was that God's qualities, omnipotence and justice, are not compatible.
One becomes conscious of this dangerous incompatibility the moment one checks God's omnipotence against its ontological implications. It becomes apparent that absolute power creates an access of free decisions (from a human point of view, arbitrary decisions) that cannot be traced back to rational and universally agreeable criteria. Otherwise, God would only be the secretary of the concepts that human reason comes up with. Consequently, the free omnipotence of God is responsible for infinitely more things in the world than could ever be explained by the principle of justice. Examples for this pervade the Old Testament and apologetic litera- ture. God in fact loves Jacob and dedicates his hatred to Esau; if the sources are credible, he prefers Israel and lets Egypt fall by punishing the pharaoh. Of course he could have reacted otherwise in each of these cases, and all others. However, he did not want to act differently than he acted. But why?
The only truthful answer is (according to Paul and his followers) that one is not permitted to ask "why" questions about the decisions of the Almighty. "Who are you, human, that you dare to dispute God? " From the perspective of the architecture of worldviews, God is precisely what func- tionalists call the foundation of contingency: all logical regresses end with him. The intellect may rest next to this last information: God's will and chance coincide in the infinite. Here we come across the aforementioned secret of discrimination. Theologians call it under their breaths "mysterium ininquitatis. " Indeed ,we can only talk of ultimate power if it expresses itself in absolute freedom of discrimination or preferential treatment. Once it becomes realized, expectations of justice and equal opportunity are sus- pended. Omnipotence stands for unfairness in the realm of the absolute.
Paul understands the implications of his topic and sees that the other indispensable attribute of God, justice, is endangered. Because God cannot be unjust, one must concede that his omnipotence from time to time over- shadows his justice. Thus Paul writes in Romans 9 concerning the revealed truth that God himself obdurated the mind of the Pharaoh (obdurare):
100
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory. (Romans 9:19-23, AV)
The ambiguity is obvious: the apostle needs to use the omnipotence of the creator in order to explain the unequal treatment of different people; yet he needs to revert to the justice of God, as well as his love, in order to lessen the intolerability of this omnipotence. That this to-and-fro movement fails to provide a justification for the wrath of God is self-evident. If countless human beings have been created to be vessels ofrage, this can only be logically justified by inferring that rage precedes its reasons or causes. In one sense, God becomes furious simply from thinking that one of his yet-uncreated creations will one day deny him his due respect. At the same time, he does create such disrespectful vessels in order to then practice his righteous rage against them. Whoever then asks how rage can arouse itself against the heartened sinner, before the predestined sinner has even been born, should prove whether he is not a vessel that is destined to be shattered.
The solution of the riddle can be found when looking at the vocabulary of the author of the Epistle to the Romans; for this purpose, verses 9:22 and 9:23 are of particular importance. There God's "glory" (potentia, divitiasglo- riae) is emphasized just as much as his will to "make known" (notam facere) his own power and glory and to "show" (ostendere) these. One needs to take these expressions literally. The divine business of rage rests on the need to expose the power of being able to express rage as forcefully as possible. According to its depth structure, it is "ostentatious"--only as the show of power, as fame, and as a demonstration of glory can it be kept alive and its authority sustained.
This rage show is, however, a mere prelude to a continuously deferred feature presentation. This fits another aspect of making threats for the sake of appearance, an aspect that is rarely missing even in the case of the most profane expressions of rage. In performance, rage announces that in the end things will be even worse. Rage is in itself an affect that likes to show
101
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
itself and to impress others. This starts at the level of animal expressivity, a fact that Seneca emphasizes in De ira by mentioning the irrepressibility of physical symptoms of rage. Every interference with its inherent impulse to manifest itself leads to a shifting of wrathful energies.
Here, we are dealing with a shift from the human to the divine level. To the degree that Christians internalize the prohibitions against rage and revenge that have been imposed upon them, they develop a passionate interest in God's ability to be full of rage. They realize that it is a privilege to practice rage, a privilege they renounce in the interest of the one and only furious one. Their identification with this glory becomes all the more intense because it will reveal itself on the day of rage. Christians always fail to imagine the rage of the lord fiercely enough because they are only allowed to let go of the prohibition of rage on the dies irae in order to fully enjoy the last spectacle. It is not accidental that the depiction of the Day of Judgment became the paradigmatic topic in the Christian imagination.
The two other derivations of the wrath of God, from justice and from the love of God, equally lead us into rushed contradictions and vicious circles. Simply pointing to the principle of proportionality is sufficient to show that the wrath of God cannot be derived from justice. The principle of propor- tionality serves as a regulative idea in the domain of what is considered just and appropriate: finite guilt can never lead to infinite penalty. However, because penalties of this kind are used as a threat, God's abysmal injustice (once again: his omnipotence) is used in order to demonstrate his justice. The failure of this argument is obvious. It is only the transition into a per- formative register that is responsible for the rage-theological intensification. For nothing could create a stronger impression than the imagining and depiction of divine terrors. These enter the game as soon as the conception of unbearable torment is combined with the idea of eternity. Rage, which is depicted as a consequence of justice, in reality obeys a magisterial political logic. It is embodied in an imaginary theater of horror that preserves for eternity that which could not be endured for a second in time. This is the reason fire has a prominent significance for the terror perpetuus. The psy- chopolitical necessity that was already evident for the early Christians, the need to present God at the height of his capacity to be enraged, was little by little reinforced by theological arguments. This is most obvious in the writ- ings of the great polemicist, Tertullian, who had no problem in promising total satisfaction in the beyond via a thirst for revenge stimulated through a renunciation of revenge. I will return to this topic soon.
102
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
What remains to be discussed here is the derivation of the wrath of God from his love, and what is interesting about it are the forms in which it fails. For it is here that the dynamics of resentment responsible for the entire domain becomes especially evident. Since Lactantius, apologists for the theorem of rage have inferred from the love of God the fact that he is not indifferent to the actions of humanity. This was taken as a reason to assume bipolarity in his affects. If God would not hate the godless and the unjust, he could not love the pious and the just. Thus God is enraged, quod erat demonstrandum.
One who does not want to waste time with the psychological naivete of this thesis can see how the derivation of the wrath of God from love fails in a more sophisticated way, which is, moreover, almost contemporary. Hans Urs von Balthasar locates the wrath of God doctrine directly with the high- est Christian theologoumenon, that is, the understanding of the trinity. He interprets the indifference of humanity to the Trinitarian communication of love as an insult of the honor of God. Rage, then, becomes an adequate answer to this insult. The wish of the Almighty to include all humans in the message of his love is initially to be read as a sign of generosity. However, it becomes alarming if it is accompanied by a magic right to penetration. If one attempts to withstand this right, one becomes guilty of insulting the Trinity. This reveals a barely concealed gender-mythological speculation according to which God is only masculine, while all other actors in the holy comedy have to accept feminine positions unless they are religiously frigid. The concept of insult reveals how the crude regulatory naivete of the Lac- tanctic rage theology passes into a more refined erotodynamic naivete of a semimodern t/zeo-psychology.
Balthasar, the most important thymotic among twentieth-century theologians, smartly emphasizes the honor of God: what follows from this concept is, first of all, how the loving God is insulted by the creature that is nonloving or orients its life according to other values. This is admittedly somewhat absurd; on the other hand, the dimension of divine "narcis- sism" and its striving for glory is emphasized to such a degree that the functional theory of rage seems to be confirmed. According to Balthasar, God has chronic difficulty with the enforcement of his glory, since it has from time immemorial had an occult side. How is it supposed to be pos- sible that the unimpressible at the same time bears witness to the glory of God? In light of this complication it is once more possible to establish a link to the psychopolitical interpretation of the wrath of God: it becomes
103
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
established from the compulsion to present a power that arises out of impotence.
The entire group of theses concerning the wrath of God, including its ghastly eschatological depictions, can only be reconstructed in the light of a thymotic economy. It is legitimate to let the biblical and Scholastic justifications of the wrathful God rest because of their logical inconsisten- cies. In reality, the title "God" functions in these discourses only as a place marker for the depository of human savings of wrath and as frozen wishes for revenge. The wrathful God is nothing but the administrator of secular resentment accounts, which are deposited with him or with his subor- dinate diabolic executives in order to be ready for withdrawal at a later time. The assets emerge through inhibited impulses of rage whose release was circumvented by such moral acts as forgiveness and the renunciation of revenge. The glory of God serves in this context as a guarantee of his legal capacity as executor of the treasury and as administrator over the currency. If he is elevated to the status of the Lord of History, it is because history includes precisely those mnemonic functions without which the stable relationship between rage deposits and rage payments could not be ascertained.
The motif of the dies irae, the day of rage, would never have reached its psychohistorical efficacy if the idea of the great payday was not logically connected to the complementary idea of a long phase of saving. What is called "history" gains its definite coherence only by designating the period during which the deposited quantities of rage and intensities of revenge keep the same value. Sufficiently long periods of acquiring rage and depositing revenge have to precede the day of rage. History is the bridge that connects the first deposits with the expiration of all grace periods. For this period of time there exists a strict prohibition of inflation. From the perspective of the criticism of morality, inflation is called a change of values, and precisely this change of values needs to be ruled out.
Assuming that Nietzsche's interpretation is correct, the historical Chris- tians were indeed often people who experienced high resentment tension. They had to reject every change of values that could devalue the historically accumulated assets of rage in the transcendent bank. However, because theologians had a realistic conception of both the inevitability of a change of value and the necessary weakening of impulses of rage and revenge, they compensated the danger of inflation by postponing penalties to eternity. By declaring all sentences to last for eternity, they made sure that no historically
104
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
conditioned losses or invalidations of rage would have to be accepted. The house of revenge should also not lose anything. In this context, the doctrine concerning the eternity of sentences, which is otherwise the bleakest spot of the religion of reconciliation, becomes understandable as an exceptionally motivated demand. Wherever the preservation of guilt has to exist over a long stretch of time, the recourse to eternity becomes indispensible. In good just as in bad days, eternity is the asylum of resentment.
IN PRAISE OF PURGATORY
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIANS AFTER THE MIDDLE AGES NEED TO BE credited for having started to sense the intolerability of their own resent- ment constructions. Subsequently, they felt compelled to weaken the excesses of their theology of rage. This was reflected in the invention of pur- gatory. It is probably not overdrawn to characterize the new theology of purgatory, which rapidly expanded from the eleventh century on, as the real innovation of the Christian thought that created history. With it came both an epochal structural change in the processing of resentment and a new logic of transition. It leads to a theory of second chances and third places. Studying these largely forgotten, although well reconstructed phenomena,16 will reveal, in the mediation forms of purgatorial processual logic, almost everything that, during the twentieth century, was referred to by Merleau- Ponty's cloudy expression "the adventures of the dialectic. "
These dialectics make clear the need for a third location between the Inferno and the Paradise. In contrast to the farmers and the monks of the early Middle Ages, who had made the submissive humilitas their second nature, the reemerging citizenry made thymotic demands in the realm of religion. These could not be reconciled with the terror of subordinating oneself to the alternatives of salvation or damnation. Christian citizens of newly flourishing European city cultures during the early high Middle Ages were the first to become convinced that inherited eschatologies were unten- able. They were the first ones for whom the need emerged to dismantle the problematic binary choice between salvation and eternal damnation. Instead, they introduced a crossover between these two poles. This process of dismantling became all the more necessary when eschatological threats were not primarily addressed to non-Christians, that is, to the members ofgentes, the "heathens," those foreign to religion, as well as the "insidious Jews," but to the more or less pious inhabitants of Christianized Europe.
105
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
The harshness of the tone with which eschatological thinking of the time of the church fathers addressed non-Christians, who were taken to deserve condemnation, can be seen in the polemical writings of the Catharginian Tertullian (ca. 155-ca. 220), most obviously in his treatise De spectaculis. Although for the historian of dogma it is a rather embarrassing example of logical Christian thinking, it is of high testimonial value for external interpretations of metaphysical strategies for working through rage. In De spectaculis the connection between earthly renunciation and satisfaction in the beyond is revealed in an almost obscene fashion. It is not accidental that Nietzsche and Max Scheler explicitly point to this work in their analy- ses of resentment. After Tertullian provides reasons that Christians should not be present at heathen spectacles (in particular because theaters are the romping places for demons), he directly discusses the divine compensations for earthly abstinence. He knows that Roman Christians require a certain reserve in order to be able to do without the "games. " The chariot races in the circus, the obscenities in the theater, the stupid exercises of fattened athletes in the stadium, and, most important, the fascinating cruelties in the arena, were everyday amusements in Roman society. However, Tertul- lian offers a compensation for staying away from the Roman spectacles. He erects a divine comedy over and against the earthly shows, a divine comedy
that does not merely satisfy the curiosity of its audience but also does jus- tice to the performative character of the glory of God by means of explicit demonstrations of rage. What will provide the highest satisfaction to the redeemed souls in heaven? They are able to dedicate themselves to the view of an exquisite enforcement of sentences:
But what a spectacle is already at hand--the return of the lord, now no object of doubt, now exalted, now triumphant! . . . Yes, and there are still to come other spectacles--that last, that eternal Day of Judgement 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 darkness! . . . those sages, too, the philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together And then there will be the tragic actors to be heard, more vocal in their own tragedy; and the players to be seen, lither of limb by far in the fire; and then the charioteer to watch, red all over in the wheel of flame,. . . unless it be that not even then would I wish to see them, in my desire rather to turn an insatiable gaze on them who vented their rage and fury on the Lord Such sights, such exultation,--what praetor, consul, quaestor,
106
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
priest, will ever give you of his bounty?
And yet all these, in some sort, are ours, pictured through faith in the imagination of the spirit. 17
Tertullian's statement is important because it reveals an early stage of the process of rage manipulation in a postapocalyptic style. During this stage, the inner censorship against openly revealed satisfaction through imagined horrors has not yet been implemented. More than a hundred years later the church leader Lactantius, in his work De mortibus persecutorum, will once again delight in surpassing the real horrors of the treatment of Christians by the Romans through the imagined cruelty of eschatological revenge. Both authors avowedly emphasize the basic trait of otherworldly revenge. It is known that Tertullian is also the first theologian of the Christian renuncia- tion of revenge. 18 He promises that suspended revenge will lead to an infi- nite satisfaction of the desire to witness revenge in the other world and thus strictly applies the postapocalyptic schema of "only then and yet also now. "
This arrangement is based on a juridical conception of the renunciation of rage. Who distances himself from rage here and now needs to be able to rely on God as the bookkeeping avenger. The person who does not attend the spectacles of this world will be presented a much more stimulating spec- tacle in the other world. The view of eternal torments satisfies the yearning of the apocalyptic for a total administration of the world within one single spectacle. Thus theory and resentment form a unity; pure view takes on the form of pure compensation. Those who have been redeemed not only enjoy the salvific view of God but also participate in the ultimate worldview of God, which looks down on the world that has been judged and destroyed.
WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF PURGATORY, THE CHRISTIAN management of rage gains momentum. To this point it was dominated by the primitive harshness of the choice between condemnation and salvation. This departure was made possible through a logical operation the audacity of which is difficult to comprehend within the context of modern theoreti- cal positions. In order to establish the otherworldly place of purgatory as a third eschatological space, the introduction of a processual moment into the heretofore timeless and statically conceived divine world became necessary. Thanks to this innovation, a middle segment of eternity was reintroduced into time and transformed into a stage for a cathartic sequel to earthly exis- tence. Thus purgatorial post-time was added to existential time. One could
107
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
claim straightaway that purgatory is the matrix and the pattern of what later was called history, that is, the processuality, which is thought to be singular, in which humanity constitutes itself as a global collective in order to, step by step, emancipate itself from the burden of its local pasts. If it is the case that in the beyond we still find catharsis (or progress), transformation, and "development," then the place of purification becomes latently historical. If human history orients itself against the background of purification (or progress), then it latently takes on purgatorial functions.
To finish this excursion into the history of the religious processing of rage in the Old World, I want to call attention to the increasing similarity of purgatorial practices to formal monetary transactions. Speaking of the creation of a treasury of rage should be taken as merely metaphorical. The transition from masses of rage from the treasury form to the capital form administered by banks can be taken literally, to some extent. As we know, the invention of purgatory soon led to an encompassing system of advance payments for the otherworldly purification sentences, a system that came to be known as the selling of indulgences (Ablafihandel). Thanks to these transactions, the pope and his bishops belonged to the group of the first gamblers in the emerging capitalist monetary economy. Lutheran Chris- tians probably recall that the anti-Roman fervor of the reformer was, among other things, provoked by the excesses of the business with the fear of hell. It supported the illusion that through the acquisition of "indulgences," it would be possible to secure otherworldly salvation. Luther's impulse was reactionary in an authentic sense insofar as he connected his faith and the pathos of grace to the unrelenting slogan "back to the deserved wrath of God" (which was then, of course, compensated by God's grace). As partisan of an either/or decision, Luther abhorred the modern sentiment behind the third way that the Catholic Church had laid out. This third way allowed for a reduction of the negotiable divine amount of rage for sins by making anticipatory payments. This procedure bears more than a superficial resem- blance to modern installment buying.
In this respect, Catholicism had already approached modern Mammon- ism much more than was ever possible for the much referred to spirit of Protestantism and its connection to capitalism. At least it needs to be admit- ted that the Catholic accumulation of a rage treasury and the establishment of the first general rage bank could not yet fulfill all important banking functions because the transformation of rage treasuries into fully valid, con- ferrable, and investable capital was not possible under Catholic supervision.
108
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
On this level, Christian eschatology did not get beyond the role of a savings bank. The transition to the investment of assets was accomplished only by the later rage organizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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.
109
? r6C
THE RAGE ^EVOLUTION
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
111
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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
112
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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
113
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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
114
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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.
115
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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 in 1905. 5 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
116
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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- versively connected poverty and irrepressible vitality. 10 After saying good- 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.
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
117
? THE RAGE REVOLUTION
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.