No More Learning

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. It is not merely the ability to counteract the immediate disappearance of the lived moment by "retention," that is, an inner, automatic function of holding onto temporal consciousness. It is also connected to a saving func- tion that enables the coming back to virtual topics and scenes. Memory is a result of the generation of networks through which the new introduces itself compulsively, and like an addiction, into older episodes of pain. Neuroses and national sensibilities have in common these movements in the domain of trauma. We know about neurotics that they prefer to, again and again, repeat their accident. Nations include the remembrance of their defeats at cult sites to which their citizens periodically go on pilgrimages. Thus it is necessary to put on stage all kinds of cultures of memory both detached from ourselves and with unconditional mistrust, no matter if the memories are dressed in religious, civil, or political garments. Under the pretense of purifying, emancipating, or merely creating identity, memories inevitably support some secret tendency to repeat and reenact.
Even popular victimology more or less understands the reactions of injured people. Through bad experiences they are dislocated from the
47
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
happy-forgetful center of society to its slippery margins, from which there is no longer any simple return to normal life. One understands this eccen- tric dynamic right away: to the victims of injustice and defeat, consolation through forgetting often appears unreachable. If it appears unreachable, it also appears unwanted, even unacceptable. This means that the fury of resentment begins at the moment the person who is hurt decides to let her- self fall into humiliation as if it were the product of choice. To exaggerate pain in order to make it bearable, to transcend one's depressed suffering, to "sport with his misery"—quoting Thomas Mann's sensitive and humorous
1
coinage about the primal father Jacob —to extend the feeling of suffered
injustice to the size of a mountain in order to be able to stand on its peak full of bitter triumph: these escalating and twisting movements are as old as injustice, itself seemingly as old as the world. Isn't "world" the name for the place in which human beings necessarily accumulate unhappy memories of injuries, insults, humiliations, and all kinds of episodes for which one wants revenge? Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma? Considerations like these allow us to draw the conclu- sion that measures taken to extinguish or contain smoldering memories of suffering have to belong to the pragmatic rules of every civilization. How would it be possible for citizens to go to bed peacefully if they had not called a couvre-feu for their internal fires?
Because cultures always also have to provide systems for healing wounds, it is plausible to develop concepts that span the entire spectrum of wounds, visible and invisible. This has been done by modern trauma sciences, which started from the insight that for moral facts it is also useful to apply physi- ological analogies, if only within certain limits. To use a familiar example, in the case of open bodily wounds, blood comes into contact with air, and as a result of biochemical reactions the process of blood clotting starts. Through it, an admirable process of somatic self-healing comes about, a process that belongs to the animal heritage of the human body. In the case of moral injuries we could say that the soul comes into contact with the cruelty of other agents. In such cases subtle mechanisms for the mental healing of wounds are also available—spontaneous protest, the demand to bring the perpetrator immediately to justice, or, if this is not possible, the intention to take matters into one's own hands when the time comes. There is also the retreat into oneself, resignation, the reinterpretation of the crime scene, the rejection of the truth of what happened, and, in the end, when only a drastic psychic treatment seems to work, the internalization of the violation as a
48
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
subconsciously deserved penalty even to the point of the masochistic wor- ship of the aggressor. In addition to this medicine chest for the injured self, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity developed moral exercises to enable
2
It is not only common wisdom and religion that have adopted the moral healing of wounds. Civil society also provides symbolic therapies intended to support the psychic and social reactions to the injuries of individuals and collectives. Since ancient times, conducting trials in front of courts has made certain that the victims of violence and injustice can expect repara- tion in front of a gathered people. Through such procedures is practiced the always precarious transformation of the desire for revenge into justice. However, just as a festering wound can become both a chronic and general malady, psychic and moral wounds also may not heal, which creates its own corrupt temporality, the infinity of an unanswered complaint. This implies the trial without satisfactory sentence and calls forth the feeling in the pros- ecutor that the injustice inflicted upon him is rather increased through the trial. What is to be done when the juridical procedure is experienced as an aberration? Can the matter be settled through the sarcastic remark that the world will one day go down because of its official administration—a state- ment perpetually reinvented as often as citizens experience the indolence of administrative bodies? Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage itself engages in payback? Isn't it more plausible to assume that rage, as a self- proclaimed executor, goes so far as to knock on the door of the offended?
RAGE RECOUNTED
THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY EXISTS IN COUNTLESS exemplary case studies, some more recent and some older. The search for justice has always brought about a second, wild form of the judiciary in which the injured person attempts to be both judge and warden at once. What is noteworthy about these documents, given our present perspective, is that only with the beginning of modernity was the romanticism of self- administered justice invented. Whoever speaks of modern times without acknowledging to what extent it is shaped by a cult of excessive rage suffers from an illusion. This is, even to the present day, the blind spot of cultural history—as if the myth of the "process of civilization" did not aim only to
the injured psyche to transcend the circle of injuries and revenge as such. As long as history is an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation, wisdom is required to bring the pendulum to a halt.
49
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
make invisible the release of vulgar manners under conditions of modernity but also to inflate revenge phantasms. While the global dimension of West- ern civilization aims at the neutralization of heroism, the marginalization of military virtue, and the pedagogical enhancement of peaceful social affects, the mass culture of the age of enlightenment reveals a dramatic recess in which the veneration of vengeful virtues, if we may so call them, reaches new, bizarre extremes.
This phenomenon can be traced back centuries before the French Revo- lution. The Enlightenment not only releases polemics of knowledge against ignorance but also invents a new quality of the guilty verdict by declaring all old conditions unjust before the demands of the new order; hereby the ecosystem of resignation begins to totter. Since time immemorial, human beings learned in this ecosystem to accept the apparent inevitabilities of mis- ery and injustice. The Enlightenment was thus required to allow revenge to be promoted to an epochal motive, as it dominated private as well as politi- cal affairs. Since the past is fundamentally always unjust, the inclination increases, not always but with increased regularity, to extol revenge as just.
OF COURSE, ANTIQUITY ALREADY KNEW GREAT ACTS OF REVENGE. From the furies of Orestes to the hysterics of Medea, ancient theater paid tribute to the dramatic potency of revengeful forces. Mythos knew as well from early on about the danger that begins with humiliation, a danger almost like a natural disaster. Medea's example shows particularly well the idea that the female psyche passes from pain to insanity with terrific velocity. This is what Seneca wanted to show when he depicts the hysterical heroine as an exemplary deterrent. In modern terminology, one would call attention to the fact that the passive-aggressive character is disposed to enter into states of excess whenever, by way of exception, she decides to become offensive. This is the framing of women on the rage stage, and, often, the privilege of the "great scene" ("groflen Szene") has always belonged to the "angry sex. " The ancients never imagined taking such exempla as anything other than warnings to orient themselves to the middle, away from excesses.
In the Eumenides, one of the key plays of Athenian drama, with which the Atride Trilogy of Aeschylus comes to an end, what is at issue is noth- ing less than the complete break with the older culture of revenge and fate as well as the introduction of a political concern for justice. This form of political justice should be practiced in the future exclusively in civil
50
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
courts. What is required for the establishment of such courts is the sensible theological-psychosemantic operation in which the old dignified goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyen, are renamed as the Eumenides, which means "those who want good" or "those caring for what is beautiful. " The mean- ing of the name change is unmistakable: "Where vengeance compulsion was, balanced, prudent justice will be. "
Whatever criteria one has in mind when searching the libraries of the Old
World, one will come across a large amount of references to the elementary
force of rage and the campaigns of vengeful fury. There are traces of a more
or less serious game with the romantic fire of rage, though this will become
a dominant motive only with the eighteenth century's emerging culture of
civil society. Since then, one great revenger hunts another, accompanied
by the sympathy of the audience of the modern imaginary. From the noble
robber Karl Moor to the angry veteran John Rambo; Edmond Dantes, the
mysterious Count of Monte Christo to Harmonica, the hero of Once Upon
a Time in the West, who has committed his life to a private nemesis; Judah
ben Hur, who exacted revenge against the spirit of imperial Rome with his
victory in an ominous chariot race, to the Bride, alias Black Mamba, the
protagonist of Kill Bill, who works through her death list. The time of those 3
wholiveforthe"greatscene"hascome. WhenDurrenmatt'soldladycomes for a visit, she exactly knows who needs to be liquidated out of the group of friends. Brecht's dreaming Pirate Jenny even knows a better answer to the question "Who is to die? ": all.
Stories of this kind seem to be natural ballads. By themselves they appear to aspire to a superior form of recitation and epic detail. By making visible the relationship between suffered injustice and just retribution, more recent acts of rage provide an illustration of the causality of fate. We moderns do not like to dispense with this lesson, however much we agree otherwise with the exercise of enlightenment, that is, the suspension of blind fate. The well- constructed story of rage provides the sublime for the people. It provides the audience with a compact formula for moral if/then relationships even if they pay the price of suspending the slow, formal application of the rule of law in order to practice a quicker form of retaliation. Moreover, rage satis- fies the popular interest in acts of which the perpetrator can legitimately be proud: such stories focus on the avengers, who by directly paying back for their humiliation release a part of the discontent with judicial civilization. They provide satisfying proof that the modern person does not always have to travel the windy road of resentment and the steep steps of the judiciary
51
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
process in order to articulate thymotic emotions.
In the case of injuries lead- ing to chronic illness, rage is still the best therapy. This feeling constitutes the reason for the pleasure taken in base things.
The dangerous liaisons between the revenge motif and popular narrative do not need to be unfolded in detail at this point. Apparently these linkages are so deep that sometimes the return of modern art to its great epic form is helpful—as in the case of the abovementioned work from the century of narrative film, Once Upon a Time in the West. It has rightly been claimed that this work provided the art of film with the proof that two formally impossible things were in fact possible: that serious opera can be appropri- ated through film and that the lost form of epic can once again be given a contemporary form.
The affinity between rage and popular narrative forms could be illus- trated by drawing on a countless number of more recent documents. One example is particularly illuminating: the picturesque life history of the Indian rebel Phoolan Devi (1968-2001). From the state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan, when she was still quite a young woman, was the main actress of a widely watched reality drama that aired across the whole of the Indian sub- continent. After she had been collectively abused and raped by her husband and other male inhabitants of her village (including policemen), she fled and joined a group of bandits with whom she devised a plan to ambush and liquidate those who were guilty of the crimes against her. The corpse of her husband is said to have been put onto a donkey and chased through the vil- lage. The simple folk celebrated the rebel as an emancipated heroine and saw her as an avatar of the gruesome-sublime goddess Durga Kali. The photo- graph that depicts Phoolan Devi's handover of her weapons to Indian law enforcement officials is one of the archetypical press images of the twentieth century. One can see in the young fighter all the concentrated anger of being given over to her undecided fate. After eleven years of prison, without trial, the "Bandit Queen" was pardoned. Then she was elected into the Indian parliament, where she served as an inspiring role model for the countless disenfranchised women of her country. In June 2001, she was shot in broad daylight in Delhi, probably by a relative of one of her killed rapists. When she was still alive, Indian folklore took up the story of this charismatic fig- ure, and Phoolan Devi was transformed into the heroine of a popular epic still sung by Indian villagers.
Rarely do the archaic and the modern interpretations of vengeful rage come together in one individual action. In what follows I want to follow up
52
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
on the assumption that, through the process of modernization, the novel increasingly returns from a literary and ideological mode to the life of indi- viduals and to public perception. A convincing example of this has recently moved the public in Germany, Switzerland, and the former Soviet states. Vitalij K. , an engineer from the Caucasus republic of Ossetia, lost his wife and two children in a plane crash caused by human negligence; after a year of mourning, he decided to seek revenge in the name of his family.
On July 1, 2002, a Bashkir passenger airplane from Moscow collided with a DHL freight plane 36,000 feet above Lake Constance. The incident occurred close to the town of Owing, and all seventy-one passengers lost their lives. Among other factors, the accident occurred because of false directions from the control tower in Zurich-Kloten. When the control tower operator in charge realized that both machines were on a collision course, he advised the pilot of the Russian plane orally to immediately start to descend. At the same time, the on-board computer indicated that he should accelerate. The fatal crash happened because the Russian captain gave more credence to the oral instructions, while the DHL place started to decline at the advice of the on-board computer. The ball of fire on the sky above Lake Constance could be seen almost a hundred miles away. In February 2003, the man from Ossetia, who had been born in 1956 and who could be called a winner of the postcommunist situation, appeared at the house of the Danish control tower operator near Zurich. He killed the operator on the terrace of his house by repeatedly stabbing him with a knife.
Before the drama in February 2003, Vitalij K. had attracted attention because he sometimes referred to "Caucasian methods" of conflict reso- lution. It is clear that the act of Vitalij K. came from a transformation of the work of mourning into a work of rage. Part of this work of rage was the sentence against the controller at the end of a short trial carried out by the court of his own intuition; the sentence was complemented by a pen- alty phase in which the judge slipped into the role of the hangman. This is a pattern that has increasingly permeated public consciousness since the beginning of modernity. It is not surprising that the Russian public pas- sionately followed the trial in Zurich of Vitalij K. during October 2005 and then protested his eight-year prison sentence. The avenger was promoted to the status of a national hero in his country of origin and across most of the former Soviet Union; for large parts of the population, he served as an object of identification.
53
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
FROM CASES SUCH AS THIS, ONE CAN DRAW THE CONCLUSION THAT vengeful impulses do not easily return to reality, at least not as long as cul- tural codes have failed to establish the conditions for such a return. We can speak of a return, even of a regression, insofar as such acts cannot claim to be justified anymore by official culture. In terms of the history of ideas, the era of the tribal commandment to engage in blood feuds is more than two millennia behind us. Granted, this is not the case everywhere. But the monopoly over violence that the modern state enjoys finds acceptance as a psychopolitical norm from a large majority of citizens and is supported almost without objections by the official pedagogy. Yet it cannot be denied that the imaginary produced by mass media provides an important space for the phantasm of the moral state of exception, including the vengeful attempt to come to terms with rage.
In order to make plausible the return of personal acts of revenge we have to assume that the force of the political and juridical civilization has become discredited. When the public order is accused of malfunctioning or of being a part of the problem (we might think of preferential treatment in court proceedings), individuals can take themselves to be appointed to represent justice as wild judges. In this sense it is possible to take modern revenge romanticism to be a specific part of an all-encompassing return to hero- ism. According to Hegel's insight, a hero in antiquity was someone who does what is necessary as an individual, someone who accomplishes what could not have been accomplished from the universal at that point in time; the heroism of the moderns lives off the intuition that even after the erec- tion of the rule of law, there can emerge situations in which the univer- sal is no longer operative. That even the nation, or rather the government, can be determined by heroic and revenge-romantic reflexes is suggested by the example of the Israeli president Golda Meir. After Palestinian terrorists attacked the quarters of the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Meir is said to have ordered Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to track the perpetrators and their supporters and kill them without any legiti- macy from a court proceeding. This operation (with the code name "The Wrath of God") was less a part of governmental action than a service to the imaginary of mass culture.
The popular and anarchist doubt about the regulatory power of "existing conditions" is connected to the tendency toward the new form of heroic action. Another consequence is the assumption of a permanent state of exception, and thus of the inclination of the actors to claim the right to help
54
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
themselves in their singular situations. Indeed, some theoreticians of the left such as Walter Benjamin and later Antonio Negri articulated the dangerous suggestion that for the majority of human beings living under conditions
4
of capitalism, the permanent state of exception is normal. Once the "order
of things" has become delegitimized, improvisations are needed, including some rough ones. Only a small step is required to go from the political and moral delegitimation of circumstances to their ontological delegitimation, and ontological delegitimations call into question not only the normative foundations of the institutions of the ancien regime but also the authority of the past as such. Once this moment has come, so-called reality becomes an object for revision and, if necessary, is authorized to be torn down. In light of this, the militant slogan of the twentieth century, transformed by Sartre, "on a raison de se revolter? would have to be slightly altered. It would need to be translated as: "not he who revolts against what exists is in the right, but he who avenges against it. "
THE AGGRESSOR AS GIVER
IN MY ANALYSIS OF RAGE, IT IS NECESSARY TO FIRST TURN TO ITS energetic dimension, and later I will turn to its temporal and pragmatic dimensions. This requires a certain asceticism with regard to reactions and patterns of interpretations. Initially it is necessary to bracket the desire to emphasize the devastating dynamism of rage. The concept of "destruction," at least, needs to be separated from any kind of moral valuation. It has to be understood as a metabolic phenomenon that needs to be investigated beyond either appraisal or criticism. The alleged or real tendency of rage to explode without concern for the future should not be put at center stage prematurely. Finally, it is necessary to leave out the common psychological attributions of motivation, as well as character diagnoses.
This provides a more even-tempered view of the phenomenon of rage, one that acknowledges that we are primarily dealing with an intensive form of energy that is ready to explode or be transferred. If one follows the image of effervescence, which already led the ancient authors to speak of furor, of eruption and storming ahead, it becomes apparent how much the expres- sion of rage possesses a giving, even a paradoxically generous trait. As a form of pure extroversion, the uninhibited expression of "foaming" rage adds an especially energetic supplement to the inventory of deeds. Naturally these mostly reveal themselves in a negative light because at first sight they
55
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
seem only to consist of uproar and suffering. It is easier to become aware of the giving dimension of rage if one regards the object of rage under the aspect of its similarity with the subject.
Whether rage comes on the scene like a sudden explosion or like chronic presentiment (after its hate-inflicted transformation into a proj- ect), it draws its force from an excess of energy that longs for release. Rage that manifests itself in punishment or acts of injury is connected to the belief that there is too little suffering in the world on a local or global level. This belief results from the judgment that suffering could be "deserved" in certain situations. The rage bearer sees in those people who are unjustly without suffering his most plausible enemies. He will never be content with the fact that pain is distributed unevenly to the point of intolerability. He wants to return a fair share of the excess of pain that has been stored up inside him to the person who caused it but has not yet been punished. He is infused with the knowledge that those without pain exist in a state of acute deficiency, and what they are missing is suffering. Seeing the deserv- ing go unpunished leads the vengeful individual to the conviction that he owns what others are lacking. He wants to become a donor, a profligate spender, even if he must force his gifts onto their recipients. Their habit of refusing to accept only provides rage and hatred with an additional motive to turn against its addressees.
There cannot be any doubt that there is a link between rage and pride, thanks to which rage provides itself with a moral certainty of its own legiti- macy. The higher the factor of pride in rage, the more effectively will the "you may" be transformed into a "you should. " The completely motivated vengeful action would be one that takes itself to be the execution of an indis- pensable, noble necessity. The corresponding empirical models would be revenge murders at the family level and wars of religion and independence on the ethnic and national levels.
As I have already stated, the rage bearer possesses the immediate evi- dence to assist the object of her rage in overcoming his own lack. Hours not spent in agony, a burning loss that needs to be suffered, a house that still stands in place without having been bombed, a knife that does not stick in the gut of a slanderer: these nuisances need to be overcome. Much more so than in the case of envy, which aims to humiliate and expropriate, rage (and likewise hatred, the conservation of rage) is an intensive turning toward the addressee in the game because it requires an act of authentic expenditure. One thus rightly says that human beings are as a consequence "inflicted
56
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
with" pain. The vengeful inflictor feels like someone who is rich enough to share something of his richness with his contemporaries.
As a rule, the donation of pain is sent to a precise address; however, the gift usually extends beyond the immediate recipient to affect those near her as well. Often the donator of pain agrees to this excess: if the individual des- ignated as object of rage led a pain-free life, then most likely the people in close proximity also led lives without suffering, defective lives. In this sense it never appears to be completely false for the donator of pain to involve these people. The more desperately the rage bearer's unconditional wish to give expresses itself, the less it is limited by a certain determinate addressee. Just like civil enthusiasm thinks it is embraced by the millions, rage that has been amplified to hatred addresses itself to a universe of unknown people. It is an affect capable of forming obscure general concepts and elevating itself to the level of vague abstractions.
When rage becomes hatred we can witness the basic operations of ide-
ology formation because conceptual fixations are the best preservative for
ephemeral responses. He who wants to remember his rage needs to preserve
it in hate containers. The advantage of these conceptualizations of rage is
that they can be used extensively without ever being used up entirely. Abso-
lute hatred ultimately does not require any determinate object right before
its eyes. Its abstractness, which is close to aimlessness, guarantees its spilling
over into what is universal. For its bearer, the knowledge that it is turning to
the general addressee is sufficient to make sure that he does not waste itself
unnecessarily. The condition is reached in which we can speak of expendi-
5
ture as such, expenditure pure and simple (sans phrase). In these divesti-
tures, the rage-filled giver of pain often risks his own life. In these cases, the giver makes himself into a physical addition to the bomb that is supposed to supply the missing suffering.
IT THUS DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE TO ESTABLISH A RELATIONSHIP between self-confident hatred and concepts such as nihilism—despite their prevalence as popular explanatory models. In general, the concept of hatred proves analytically unsuitable because it is deduced from the phenomenon of rage and can only be made intelligible as a form of preserving rage. One has to insist that rage, which is a standpoint, even a project, is not at all affil- iated with the nothingness we like to claim for hatred. Rage is not merely a militant form of indifference with regard to oneself and others. Even if
57
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
rage reveals recklessness, it would be a mistake to think that it is indifferent about everything. Rage that has become reified as hatred is resolute good- will. Initially it appears as a pointed attack that brings about an intense local pain. Then it secures an allegedly necessary increase of pain in the world in order to persist in terrible reports and other media exaggerations. In light of this perspective, it is the subjective and passionate appearance of that which the penalizing judiciary wants to embody objectively and without passion. Both rest on the axiom according to which the balance of the world after its disruption can only be recovered through an increase of pain at the right location.
In the case of individual donations of rage, the person who hates initially draws on her own rage supply, even at the risk of using up her capacity for experiencing rage. Nothing guarantees to the simple vengeful person that his sources are inexhaustible. As long as vengeful energy is not transformed into a project and the individual constantly faces the possibility of returning to peace through satisfaction or exhaustion, the small circle of anger and abreaction belongs to the energetic processes connected to our emotions.
In this sense we can understand the abreactive crime as the manifesta- tion of a power that demands the right to discharge itself even if this puts the actor into a position of moral injustice. This is why crimes from such impulsive sources tend to exhaust themselves when the deed is finished. The moment that the victim is out of sight, the perpetrator is able to forget it. Is it not true, after all, what is said about the brothers of Joseph after they sold him to Egypt, "for their hatred had been taken from them, and in time they were left with only vague recollections of how greatly the ninny had angered them"? 6 Because rage is initially a finite resource, its satisfaction through the deed is often its end, which sometimes compels the actor to surrender deliberately to the forces of law.
An exemplary return of a fatigued vengeful person to endure his sentence is depicted by Friedrich Schiller in his 1792 story "The Criminal from Lost Honor. " If Hegel, who read this novella attentively, refers to the sentence as the honor of the crime, we should immediately think of Schiller's poor "sun keeper. " This well-known ravager reveals his true identity to a respectful civil servant in a sentimental gesture in order to then surrender himself to the courts. Something similar is done by Kleist in Michael Kolhaas, although this German story about the passion of righteousness stands under a darker sign. This story of an overly sensitive person who takes revenge for two horses that were stolen from him embodies the process by which the rage
58
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
that drives a private person to carry out deeds of revenge becomes a meta- physics of self-administered justice. The fact that the raging citizen who sees his stubbornness fulfilled dies as a satisfied petit-bourgeois is revealing. It expresses nothing less than the anticipation of the revaluation of all values. The romantics, who opened themselves to the aesthetics of excess, picked up on the feeling that we can no longer depend on God's justice. They reveal a concern for those humiliated on the earth and those who make their contri- butions to the day of judgment during their lifetimes.
RAGE AND TIME: THE SIMPLE EXPLOSION
WHEN THE EXPENDITURE OF RAGE DEVELOPS MORE COMPLEX FORMS, the seeds of rage are consciously dispersed, and the fruits of rage are dili- gently harvested. Through hate culture, rage is carried out in the form of a project. Wherever revenge intentions ripen, dark energies become stabi- lized over longer periods. What Nietzsche says about the genesis of con- science, that it is premised on the human who can promise, is even more true for the memory of the one who engages in revenge. This person is an agent who remembers not only the injustice that has been inflicted upon him but also all his plans for paying it back. The person "who may promise" is, according to Nietzsche's complex characterization, the subject with the "lasting will. " Once this subject is constituted, revenge intentions can then be sustained over long periods of time—even passed from one generation to the next. Once the stage of transmission has reached the next agent, an authentic economy of rage has come into being. Now the resource of rage is no longer accumulated arbitrarily and occasionally wasted; rather, it is maintained and continually produced as the object of an ongoing project. Once it has reached this stage, rage becomes a treasure trove for its pos- sessor, opening up avenues to transpersonal motives. As soon as collectively administered amounts of rage are stored as treasures or assets, the question becomes pressing as to whether such accumulated assets can be invested like capital. I will answer this later with the support of a new psychopolitical definition for left-wing parties. In reality these parties need to be under- stood as banks of rage that, if they do their business well, will know how to effect politically and thymotically relevant gains.
If one admits that the banking and saving functions of rage assets are real and efficacious, one also understands how it is possible for rage to develop from its diffused initial stage to higher levels of organization. By
59
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
passing through this progression, rage travels the road from local and inti- mate emotion to public and political program. The temporal structure of rage-potentials also undergoes a total transformation. Rage undergoes a metamorphosis from a blind form of expenditure in the here and now to a far-sighted, world-historical project of revolution for the sake of those who have been humiliated and offended.
However, as long as rage remains explosive, it expresses itself by "flaming up": "And the rage of Achilles rose forcefully. " The direct thymotic abreac- tion is a version of fulfilled presence. For the raging person, as for the happy person, time does not exist. The uproar in the here and now neutralizes the retrospective and prospective ecstasies of time so that both disappear in the momentary energy flow. The life of the subject of fury is the sparkles in the chalice of the situation. For the romantics of energy, this acting in anger is a kind of flow. It implies a return to a mystic and animal time that, as its con- noisseurs avow, has the quality of the constantly fleeting now.
RAGE AS PROJECT: REVENGE
THE CREATION OF A QUALIFIED OR EXISTENTIAL TIME, THAT IS, A lived time with a retrospective and anticipatory character, occurs through the deferral of discharge. Rage potential is channeled into a vector that cre- ates a tension between then, now, and later. This is why we can say that the raging one who holds herself back preliminarily knows what it means to intend to do something. At the same time, she not only lives in history but also makes history—insofar as making history is the name here for taking motives from the past in order to take care of what comes. In this respect, nothing can be compared to revenge. Thymos that has been activated dis- covers through its desire for gratification the world as the realm of con- structing future projections, which gain momentum for the coming attack from what has been. Rage becomes the momentum of a movement into the future, which one can understand as the raw material for historical change.
As elementary as these considerations may appear, their implications reach into the innermost motives of twentieth-centuiy philosophy. If they are correct, they necessitate important modifications to one of the most well known theorems of modern philosophy. If they are correct, one should not interpret existential time as the immediate being-toward-death, as Hei- degger in Being and Time suggests in an interpretation that is as well known as it is rushed. The being-whole-ability of existence {das Ganz-sein-Kbnnen
60
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
der Existenz) is what matters to the thinker, an ability that does not depend on the fact of the individual considering his own death in order to ascertain his directedness toward something that is an unconditional future fact. Das- ein can just as well orient itself because it traverses the distance from humil- iation to revenge as a whole. Existential time emerges from such an anxiety (Hingespanntheit) toward its decisive moment. Such an act of endowing for one's own being-toward-goals (Seins-zum-Ziele) is more powerful than every vague heroic meditation of the end. When Dasein is angry it does not have the form of running ahead toward its own death, but of an anticipa- tion of the indispensable day of rage. One would rather have to speak of a running ahead to gratification. If one thinks back to the protagonist of the Iliad it becomes clear that a warlike being-toward-destruction has become his second nature. His departure for the last battle in front of the walls of Troy marks the beginning of the sequence of action with which the down- fall of the hero became necessary. In this respect, Heidegger's thesis that Dasein is being-toward-death belongs to those Europeans who carry on the work of the myth of Achilles throughout the ages.
Revenge emerges out of the project form of rage. This concept initially requires analysis from a neutral and ecological vantage point. One may rightly understand the desire for revenge as one of the most unfriendly desires of humanity. That it belongs to the causes of the greatest miseries is proven by history insofar as it has not yet been classified a "life teacher. " Called "zra," it is classified among the deadly sins. If anyone could say something positive about it, it is that with it the possibility of unemployment vanishes from the life of avenger. He who has a strong intention to practice a revenge is, for the time being, safe from suffering problems of meaning. A persistent will excludes boredom. The deep simplicity of rage satisfies the all-too-human desire for strong motivations. One motive, one agent, one necessary deed: this is the formula for a complete project. The most important character- istic of a well-organized and well-planned existence manifests itself in the lack of any arbitrariness. The avenger is safe from the "need of needless- ness" that Heidegger claimed would be the sign of an existence abandoned by a sense of ne-cessity (Not-Wenidigkeit). It is indeed impossible to claim that the avenger would live like a leaf in the wind; chance no longer has any power over her. This way revengeful existence gains a quasi-metaphysical meaning in a postmetaphysical age: thanks to rage the "utopia of motivated life" realizes itself in a domain in which an increasing amount of people feel empty. No one expressed this more clearly than Stalin when he said about
61
RAGE TRANSACTIONS
his colleagues Kamenew and Dschersinski, "To choose one's victim, to pre- pare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to b e d . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world. "7
RAGE AS BANK: REVOLUTION
THE PROJECT FORM OF RAGE (WHICH ONE WOULD CALL IN POLICE jargon self-administered justice or the mob mentality and in political jargon anarchism or the romanticism of violence) can expand to take on the form of a bank. This elevation (Aufhebung) of local anger resources and dispersed projects of hatred into an overarching instance. The task of this storehouse of rage, as for every authentic bank, consists in serving as a collection point and recycling agency for investments. This transition necessarily once again affects the temporal structure of those potentials invested in individual projects. Just as rage in its project form provides for a longer duration and allows for a pragmatic planning process, the bank form of rage requires that individual vengeful plans subject themselves to a superior perspective.