Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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to be punished” is true if pronounced while the rebellion is taking place; however, once the rebellion has succeeded and a new legal order is established, this statement concerning the legal status of the same past act no longer holds. Here is Kant’s answer to the question “Is rebellion a legitimate means for a people to employ in throwing off the yoke of an alleged tyrant?”:
The rights of the people are injured; no injustice befalls the tyrant when he is deposed. There can be no doubt on this point. Nevertheless, it is in the highest degree illegitimate for the subjects to seek their rights in this way. If they fail in the struggle and are then subjected to severest punishment, they cannot complain about injustice any more than the tyrant could if they had succeeded . . . If the revolt of the people succeeds, what has been said is still quite compatible with the fact that the chief, on retiring to the status of a subject, cannot begin a revolt for his restoration but need not fear being made to account for his earlier administration of the state.34
Does Kant not offer here his own version of what Bernard Williams has called “moral luck” (or, better, “legal luck”)? The (not ethical, but legal) status of rebellion is decided retroactively: if a rebellion succeeds and establishes a new legal order, then it brings about its own circulus vitiosus, i.e., it pushes its own illegal origins into the ontological void, it enacts the paradox of retroactively grounding itself. Kant states this paradox even more clearly a couple of pages earlier:
If a violent revolution, engendered by a bad constitution, introduces by illegal means a more legal constitution, to lead the people back to the earlier constitution would not be permitted; but, while the revolution lasted, each person who openly or covertly shared in it would have justly incurred the punishment due to those who rebel.35
He could not have been clearer: the legal status of the same act changes with time. What is, while the rebellion goes on, a punishable crime, becomes, after the new legal order is established, the opposite—more precisely, it simply disappears, as a vanishing mediator which retroactively cancels/erases itself in its result. The same holds for the very beginning, for the emergence of the legal order out of the violent “state of nature”—Kant is fully aware that there is no historical moment of the “social contract”: the unity and law of a civil society is imposed onto the people by an act of violence whose agent is not motivated by any moral considerations:
since a uniting cause must supervene upon the variety of particular volitions in order to produce a common will from them, establishing this whole is something no one individual in the group can perform; hence in the practical execution of this idea we can count on nothing but force to establish the juridical condition, on the compulsion of which public law will later be established. We can scarcely hope to find in the legislator a moral intention sufficient to induce him to commit to the general will the establishment of a legal constitution after he has formed the nation from a horde of savages.36
What Kant is struggling with here is nothing other than the paradoxical nature of the political act. Recall, from the history of Marxism, how Lenin saved his most acerbic irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of “guarantee” for the revolution. This guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to wait for the right moment, when the situation is “mature” with regard to the laws of historical development: “it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature”), or the conception of normative (“democratic”) legitimacy (“the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic”)—as a Lacanian Lenin might have put it, it is as if, before a revolutionary agent risks the seizure of power, it should obtain permission from some figure of the big Other—by, say, organizing a referendum to ascertain whether the majority does in fact support the revolution.37 With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that a revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should take responsibility for the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other. The fear of taking power “prematurely,” the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act and is nicely rendered in the anecdote about the exchange between Lenin and Trotsky just prior to the October Revolution: Lenin is said to have asked: “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky supposedly replied: “And what will happen if we succeed?” Se non e vero e ben trovato . . . What is unimaginable within the positivist vision of history as an “objective” process which determines in advance the possible coordinates of political interventions is precisely a radical political intervention which changes these very “objective” coordinates and thus, in a way, creates the conditions for its own success. An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions—it retroactively creates its conditions.
We can see where Kant’s weakness resides: there is no need to evoke “radical Evil” in the guise of some dark primordial crime—all these obscure fantasies have to be evoked to obfuscate the act itself. The paradox is clear: Kant himself, who put such an accent on the ethical act as autonomous, non-pathological, irreducible to its conditions, is unable to recognize it where it happens, misreading it as its opposite, as unthinkable “diabolical Evil.” Kant is here one in a series of many conservative (and not only conservative) political thinkers, including Pascal and Joseph de Maistre, who elaborated on the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of a “founding crime” on which state power is based; to obfuscate these origins, one must offer the people “noble lies,” heroic narratives of the origins. One cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first-generation founders of the State of Israel who in no way obliterated the “founding crime” involved in establishing the new state: they openly admitted they had no right to the land of Palestine, it was just a matter of their force against the force of the Palestinians. On April 29, 1956, a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields galloped towards them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip. When the UN returned his body to the Israelis, his eyes had been gouged out. Moshe Dayan, the then Israeli Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:
Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.
It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza’s gates on its shoulders?38
Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the Israeli Defense Force), what cannot but strike one is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph, Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have every right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they had taken their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of guilt, but rather the need for a full acceptance of “the destiny of our generation in all its brutality,” or in other words, the assumption of the burden—not of guilt, but of the war in which might is right, in which the stronger force wins. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in “mythic violence”—an insight totally obliterated by recent Israeli self-legitimization. As in the case of feminism, which taught us to discover the traces of violence in what appears, in a patriarchal culture, as a natural authority (of the father), we should remember the grounding violence obliterated by today’s Zionism—Zionists should simply read Dayan and Ben Gurion.
This brings us to the contemporary liberal idea of global justice, whose aim is not only to characterize all past injustices as collective crimes, for it also involves the politically correct utopia of “restituting” the past collective violence (towards blacks, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants . . .) by payment or legal measures. This is the true utopia, the idea that a legal order can make recompense for