Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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the impossible’. This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against ‘formal’ freedom are all about, and therein lies the ‘rational kernel’ that is worth saving today: when he insists that there is no ‘pure’ democracy, that we should always ask apropos of any freedom, whom does it serve, what is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true radical choice. This is what the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom ultimately amounts to: the former refers to freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while the latter designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s aim is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice – when he asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: ‘Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?’
Which brings us back to Jacobin revolutionary terror, wherein we should not be afraid to identify the emancipatory kernel. Let us recall the rhetorical turn often taken as proof of Robespierre’s ‘totalitarian’ manipulation of his audience.26 This took place during Robespierre’s speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others had been arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that they would be next. Robespierre directly addressed the moment as pivotal, ‘Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth’, and went on to evoke the fear in the room: ‘One wants [on veut] to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised … One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees … One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed.’27 The opposition here is between the impersonal ‘one’ (the instigators of fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person ‘you’ (vous) to the first-person ‘us’ (Robespierre gallantly includes himself in the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer that ‘one wants to make you/us fear’, but that ‘one fears’, which means that the enemy stoking the fear is no longer outside ‘you/us’, the members of the Assembly; it is here, among us, among ‘you’ addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true masterstroke, assumed full subjectivisation – waiting a moment for the ominous effect of his words to sink in, he then continued in the first person singular: ‘I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.’28 What could be more ‘totalitarian’ than this closed loop of ‘your very fear of being found guilty makes you guilty’ – a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’? We should nonetheless reject the easy dismissal of this rhetorical strategy as one of ‘terrorist culpabilisation’, and discern its moment of truth: at the crucial moment of a revolutionary decision there are no innocent bystanders, because, in such a moment, innocence itself – exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle one is witnessing is not really one’s concern – is indeed the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I ‘did nothing against the revolution’, this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience ‘revolution’ as an external force threatening me.
But what is going on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that must have arisen in the mind of his audience – how can he be sure that he won’t be next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the ‘I’ outside ‘we’ – after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, that fact will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he himself unleashed will not swallow him up too? It is here that his position takes on a sublime greatness – he fully assumes that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason he is so serene, unafraid of his fate, is not that Danton was a traitor while he is pure, a direct embodiment of the people’s Will; it is that he, Robespierre, is not afraid to die – his eventual death will be a mere accident that counts for nothing: ‘What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.’29 Consequently, in so far as the shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls off and Robespierre openly asserts himself as a ‘Master’ (up to this point, we follow Lefort’s analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre’s first-person-singular ‘I’ is: I am not afraid to die. What authorises him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other, i.e., he does not claim that it is the people’s Will which speaks through him.
Another ‘inhuman’ dimension of the Virtue–Terror couple promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order, or every order of explicit normativity, has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to and apply the explicit norms; to what extent we’re meant to take them literally; how and when we’re allowed, solicited even, to disregard them; etc. – this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its norms: think of the polite offer-that-is-meant-to-be-refused – it is ‘habitual’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts it commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given us only on condition that we make the right decision: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no – but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite: the explicit ‘no’ effectively functions as the implicit injunction ‘do it, but in a discreet way!’ Measured against this background, revolutionary egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule. As Robespierre himself explained:
Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervours of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have dared aspire.30
To break the yoke of habit means, for example, that if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, then they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed insurrection led by the unique figure of John Brown:
African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North … John Brown wasn’t like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately.31
For this reason, John Brown is a key political