In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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causality—to which it is irreducible:
The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man “really” to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.18
One should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions: revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, that is, in revolt, the noumenal dimension transpires. The paradox, of course, is that this noumenal dimension coincides with its opposite, with the pure surface of a phenomenon: the noumenon not only appears, the noumenal is what is, in a phenomenon, irreducible to the causal network of reality that generated this phenomenon—in short, the noumenon is phenomenon qua phenomenon. There is a clear link between this irreducible character of the phenomenon and Deleuze’s notion of event as the flux of becoming, as a surface emergence that cannot be reduced to its “bodily” causes. His reply to the conservative critics who denounce the miserable and even terrifying actual results of a revolutionary upheaval is that they remain blind to the dimension of becoming:
It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It’s nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.19
Deleuze refers here to revolutionary explosions in a way which is strictly parallel to Foucault’s:
The Iranian movement did not experience the “law” of revolutions that would, some say, make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched, in an unmediated fashion, on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is “fear,” fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the world had not seen an example for a long time.20
Foucault is here effectively Deleuzian: what interests him are not the Iranian events at the level of actual social reality and its causal interactions, but the evental surface, the pure virtuality of the “spark of life” which only accounts for the uniqueness of the Event. What took place in Iran in the interstice of two epochs of social reality was not the explosion of the People as a substantial entity with a set of properties, but the event of a becoming-people. The point is thus not the shift in relations of power and domination between actual socio-political agents, the redistribution of social control, and so on, but the very fact of transcending—or, rather, momentarily canceling—this very domain, the emergence of a totally different domain of “collective will” as a pure sense-event in which all differences are obliterated, rendered irrelevant. Such an event is not only new with regard to what happened before, it is new “in itself ” and thus forever remains new.21
However, here, at their most sublime, things start to get complicated. Foucault has to concede that this division was internal to the engaged individuals themselves:
Let’s take the activist in some political group. When he was taking part in one of those demonstrations, he was double: he had his political calculation, which was this or that, and at the same time he was an individual caught up in that revolutionary movement, or rather that Iranian who had risen up against the king. And the two things did not come into contact, he did not rise up against the king because his party had made this or that calculation.22
And the same division cuts across the entire social body: at the level of reality, there were, of course, multiple agents, complex interactions of classes, the overdetermination of incompatible struggles; however, at the level of the revolutionary event proper, all this was “sublated” into “an absolutely collective will” that united the entire social body against the Shah and his clique. There was no division within the social body, no “class struggle,” all—from poor farmers to students, from clergy to disappointed capitalists—wanted the same:
The collective will is a political myth with which jurists and philosophers try to analyze or to justify institutions, etc. It’s a theoretical tool: nobody has ever seen the “collective will” and, personally, I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter. I don’t know whether you agree with me, but we met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people.23
Foucault opposes here revolt and revolution: “revolution” (in the modern European sense) designates the reinscription of a revolt into the process of strategic-political calculation: revolution is a process by means of which the revolt is “colonized by realpolitik”:
“Revolution” gave these uprisings a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, and defined their laws of development. […] Even the profession of revolutionary was defined. By thus repatriating revolt into the discourse of revolution, it was said, the uprising would appear in all its truth and continue to its true conclusion.24
No wonder Foucault compares the appearing of a collective will with two of Kant’s noumenal things (God, soul). When the noumenal appears, it is in the guise of ultimate horror—as Foucault is aware:
At this stage, the most important and the most atrocious mingle—the extraordinary hope of remaking Islam into a great living civilization and various forms of virulent xenophobia, as well as the global stakes and the regional rivalries. And the problem of imperialisms. And the subjugation of women, and so on.25
What has given the Iranian movement its intensity has been a double register. On the one hand, a collective will that has been very strongly expressed politically and, on the other hand, the desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this double affirmation can only be based on traditions, institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness, which have a very powerful attraction for individuals. To confront so fearsome an armed power, one mustn’t feel alone, nor begin with nothing.26
The picture thus becomes blurred. First, Foucault withdraws from overall support for the Iranian revolt (sustained by a hope that an entirely different society will emerge out of it, breaking out of the space of European modernity and its deadlocks) to valorizing only the enthusiastic moment of revolt itself: the European liberals who want to discredit the Iranian events because they ended up in an oppressive theocracy move at the same level as the clergy itself which is reclaiming the revolt in order to justify its rule—they both attempt to reduce the Event to a factor in a political struggle of strategic interests. Then, in a more subtle and surprising move, Foucault discerns another ambiguity which cannot be reduced to the difference between the level of pure revolt and the level of multiple sociopolitical interplay: “chauvinism,” “virulent xenophobia,” the “subjugation of women,” and so on, are not signs of the contamination of the Event by sociopolitical reality, they are inherent forces of the Event itself, that is, their mobilization gave the Event the strength to oppose itself to the oppressive political regime and to avoid getting caught in the game of political calculations. It is this very reliance on the “vilest” racist, anti-feminist, etc., motifs that gave the Iranian revolution the power to move beyond a mere pragmatic power struggle. To put it in Badiouian terms, the authentic Event thus becomes indistinguishable from a pseudo-Event.
Are we not dealing here with a kind of Hegelian triad in which the external opposition is gradually internalized, reflected into itself? First, the external opposition of the Iranian revolution in itself (a unique event) and the way it appears to Europeans is internalized into the two aspects of the events themselves: their pragmatic struggle-for-power side, and the side of