Introduction: Causa Locuta, Roma Finita

      Roma locuta, causa finita—the decisive words of authority that should end a dispute, in all its versions, from “the Church synod has decided” to “the Central Committee has passed a resolution” and, why not, “the people has made clear its choice at the ballot box” . . . However, is not the wager of psychoanalysis the opposite one: let the Cause itself speak (or, as Lacan put it, “I, the truth, speak”), and the Empire (of Rome, that is, contemporary global capitalism) will fall apart? Ablata causa tolluntur effectus: when the cause is absent, the effects thrive (Les effets ne se portent bien qu’en absence de la cause). What about turning this proverb around? When the cause intervenes, the effects are dispelled . . .¹

      However, which Cause should speak? Things look bad for great Causes today, in a “postmodern” era when, although the ideological scene is fragmented into a panoply of positions which struggle for hegemony, there is an underlying consensus: the era of big explanations is over, we need “weak thought,” opposed to all foundationalism, a thought attentive to the rhizomatic texture of reality; in politics too, we should no longer aim at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects; the violent imposition of grand solutions should leave room for forms of specific resistance and intervention . . . If the reader feels a minimum of sympathy with these lines, she should stop reading and cast aside this volume.

      Even those who otherwise tend to dismiss “French” postmodern theory with its “jargon” as an exemplary case of “bullshit” tend to share its aversion towards “strong thought” and its large-scale explanations. There is indeed a lot of bullshitting going on these days. Unsurprisingly, even those who popularized the notion of “bullshit,” such as Harry Frankfurt, are not free from it. In the endless complexity of the contemporary world, where things, more often than not, appear as their opposites—intolerance as tolerance, religion as rational common sense, and so on and so forth—the temptation is great to cut it short with a violent gesture of “No bullshit!”—a gesture which seldom amounts to more than an impotent passage à l’acte. Such a desire to draw a clear line of demarcation between sane truthful talk and “bullshit” cannot but reproduce as truthful talk the predominant ideology itself. No wonder that, for Frankfurt himself, examples of “no bullshit” politicians are Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and, today, John McCain²—as if the pose of outspoken personal sincerity is a guarantee of truthfulness.

      The common sense of our era tells us that, with regard to the old distinction between doxa (accidental/empirical opinion, Wisdom) and Truth, or, even more radically, empirical positive knowledge and absolute Faith, one should draw a line between what one can think and do today. At the level of common sense, the furthest one can go is enlightened conservative liberalism: obviously, there are no viable alternatives to capitalism; at the same time, left to itself, the capitalist dynamic threatens to undermine its own foundations. This concerns not only the economic dynamic (the need for a strong state apparatus to maintain the market competition itself, and so on), but, even more, the ideologico-political dynamics. Intelligent conservative democrats, from Daniel Bell to Francis Fukuyama, are aware that contemporary global capitalism tends to undermine its own ideological conditions (what, long ago, Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism”): capitalism can only thrive in the conditions of basic social stability, of intact symbolic trust, of individuals not only accepting their own responsibility for their fate, but also relying on the basic “fairness” of the system—this ideological background has to be sustained through a strong educational, cultural apparatus. Within this horizon, the answer is thus neither radical liberalism à la Hayek, nor crude conservatism, still less clinging to old welfare-state ideals, but a blend of economic liberalism with a minimally “authoritarian” spirit of community (the emphasis on social stability, “values,” and so forth) that counteracts the system’s excesses—in other words what Third Way social-democrats such as Blair have been developing.

      This, then, is the limit of common sense. What lies beyond involves a Leap of Faith, faith in lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And the present book speaks from within this Leap of Faith—but why? The problem, of course, is that, in a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical wisdom itself, constrained to the horizon of the dominant form of common sense, cannot provide the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith.

      This shift is the shift from “I speak the truth” to “the truth itself speaks (in/through me)” (as in Lacan’s “matheme” of the analyst’s discourse, where the agent speaks from the position of truth), to the point at which I can say, like Meister Eckhart, “it is true, and the truth says it itself.”³ At the level of positive knowledge, it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is ultimately always self-referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager is here the Pascalean one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after “objective” truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks.⁴

      There are still only two theories which imply and practice such an engaged notion of truth: Marxism and psychoanalysis. They are both struggling theories, not only theories about struggle, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle: their histories do not consist in an accumulation of neutral knowledge, for they are marked by schisms, heresies, expulsions. This is why, in both of them, the relationship between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately doomed to failure—or, as Freud put it concisely, psychoanalysis would only be fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. At its most radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice: “This is why things went wrong . . .” One usually forgets that Freud’s five great clinical reports are basically reports on a partial success and ultimate failure; in the same way, the greatest Marxist historical