Like its promoters and protagonists, the revolution haunting Europe was a sickness. This was also the thesis of Comte, who invited people to step up against this ‘chronic sickness’, this ‘insidious unrest’, these ‘deceptive hopes’. Along with his diagnosis of the sickness, he also revealed a concern, like Nietzsche, that it might spread among the ‘proletarians’, especially given the state of ‘continual excitement systematically directed towards passions related to their social condition.
Le Bon argued similarly. According to him, revolution represented the ‘triumph’ of ‘atavistic instincts’, ‘instincts of primitive barbarism’, ‘instincts of the ancestral wild’, or the ‘natural instincts transmitted to man from his primitive animality’. Taine also argued in the same way, at least in the interpretation of the crowd psychologist Le Bon, who credited the French historian with having finally clarified the meaning and course of the revolution, starting from its regression to a ‘wild primitive stage’. So it was clear that the key to understanding revolutions was not sociology or political economy, and not even history. Precisely because revolutions were not unleashed by objective contradictions, psychology or psychopathology were called upon to explain them.
But Nietzsche too credited the French historian with explaining the upheavals in France by the passions and history of the ‘modern soul’. As for the German philosopher, so too for Le Bon there was no more effective way of liquidating an author than to demonstrate his lack of psychological penetration. Which was more or less what Le Bon does with Rousseau, ‘a stranger to all psychology’.
Starting from the assertion that the sickness as diagnosed was incurable, as confirmed by its periodic re-emergence, it was easy to slip from psychology to physiology. The same was true of Nietzsche: ‘The means of comfort thought up by beggars and slaves are the thoughts of malnourished, tired or overexcited brains; that is the yardstick by which Christianity and the socialist visionary spirit [Phantasterei] should be judged’.
This led us once again back to Comte. Not by accident, after the Revolution of 1848 and in polemical opposition to it, doctors joined the Société Positiviste, driven by a clear conviction that the revolutionary agitation, ‘decomposition’ and ‘social sickness’ then raging increasingly required an energetic ‘medical intervention [médication]’, as a challenge that could only be met by a ‘regeneration of the medical art’.
For a whole historical period, apart from a few isolated and partial exceptions, revolution had been denounced because of its irreligiosity and atheism. Now this accusation underwent a thoroughgoing reversal: revolution now became synonymous with messianism or a theological-metaphysical stage. Whatever else, it was a symptom of sickness. Thus Comte, Nietzsche and Le Bon ended up perpetuating a tradition of thought that saw in the upheavals in Paris the eruption of delirium or madness, of plague or smallpox, in any case of a sickness of the soul or body.
It was against this tradition that Hegel polemicised: the revolutionary crisis could in no way be equated with ‘an anomaly and a transitory morbid paroxysm’, as the theorists of the Restoration claimed; rather, objective contradictions underlay it; these formed ‘the principle of all self-movement, which consists only in an exhibition of it’.
Against this historical background we can better understand Nietzsche’s development. ‘The barbaric slave class’ posed a terrible threat to culture in the years of The Birth of Tragedy, and then turned into reborn savages in the ‘Enlightenment’ period, to finally become the malformed and those whose lives had turned out badly. Leading this mass inclined to revolt were the innerly sick intellectuals. If continuity was expressed by means of the denunciation of the revolutionary sickness, what changed was the diagnosis of this sickness and the nature of the antidote. In the first and second phase, the so-called ‘metaphysical’ period, or rather the period the ‘enlightened’ Nietzsche called ‘metaphysical’, the revolutionary sickness was synonymous with the hypertrophy of reason and historical consciousness, so the antidote was represented by instinct, instinctive wisdom and super-historical myth. In the period of ‘Enlightenment’, the revolutionary sickness was above all the Schwärmerei in which the religious and political Phantasten or ‘metaphysical and artistic’ people engaged, people that had not yet achieved the ‘manliness’ reached by the rest of humanity.
In the final phase, the revolutionaries were represented as the malformed and those whose lives had turned out badly; their ideology and their behaviour were explained by means not only of psychopathology but also of a physiological component, which sometimes seemed to be inherited (Nietzsche now spoke, not by accident, not only of delirium and hallucination but also of epilepsy).

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel
Domenico Losurdo

 

Understandably, Nietzsche saw the new figure of the plebeian intellectual embodied above all in Rousseau, plebeian on account both of his social origin and his ideological positions and particularly treasured by the Jacobins. In his speech on inequality, Voltaire had already commented: ‘This is the philosophy of a beggar [gueux] that wants the rich to be robbed by the poor.’ One can see why Rousseau became for many the first and best of the gueux plumées. Constant accused him of having inspired with his ‘tirades against wealth and even against property’ the most brutal phase of the French Revolution, namely the social unrest of the disinherited masses and the Jacobin policy of intervention in the economy and the private sphere. Similarly, Flaubert saw in the author of The Social Contract ‘the progenitor of envious and tyrannical democracy’. These themes also found support in Germany, so a contemporary and opponent of Hegel, Gustav Hugo, ranked Rousseau among the ‘opponents of private property’. But it was above all Taine that took us back into the immediate vicinity of Nietzsche, whose school he claimed to have followed. While the French historian denounced Rousseau on account of the ‘rancour [rancune] of the poor plebeian’ that oozed from his writings, Nietzsche called him the ‘person of rancour [Ranküne-Mensch]’, who sought ‘in the ruling classes the cause of his being miserable [Miserabilität]’ (XII, 421), or a person of ‘ressentiment’ (GD, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 3 [193]). He was ‘idealist and canaille rolled into one’.
The consonance between Nietzsche and the culture of his time is clear. But no less obvious and equally important are the new elements. After pointing out that ‘the duality of idealist and canaille’ could also be seen in the French Revolution, the aphorism from Twilight of the Idols continues: ‘I do not really care about the bloody farce played out in this Revolution, its “immorality”: what I hate is its Rousseauian morality.’ Rousseau, ‘this deformity of a person’, ‘needed moral “dignity” in order to stand the sight of himself’. And, in the name of morality, the revolution propagated the ‘doctrine of equality’, which ‘seems as if justice itself is preaching here, while in fact it is the end of justice’, since it claimed to even out realities actually separated by an abyss (GD, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 48 [221–2]). Not only the claim to social equality, made especially by liberal authors, but also the claim to equality as such, and even the reference to an allegedly universal morality, itself pervaded by an egalitarian logic, was an expression both of plebeian rancour and exalted revolutionary utopianism.

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel
Domenico Losurdo

Преди няколко дни бяха публикувани съобщения за корейския вожд Ким Чен Ун, включително и за сателитна снимка на неговия влак. Това ми припомни една среща с дядо му Ким Ир Сен и неговия влак преди години.

Бях се уединил да пиша в писателския дом в Хисаря „Вила Петрович”. Оттук отидох на редовните ми лекции в Пловдив и се върнах на другия ден вечерта. Каква бе изненадата ми да видя, че само за два дни всички улици в курортното градче бяха прясно асфалтирани, а край тях бяха посадени цветя и храсти.
На другата сутрин се събудих към обяд и дочух оживление на площада срещу писателския дом. Изтичах да узная какво става и видях събрано множество със знаменца и букети. Внезапно засвири духова музика, множеството размаха флагчетата и букетите и завика „Ура” и на площада се появи черна правителствена лимузина. В нея с изненада съзрях лицето на севернокорейския диктатор Ким Ир Сен. Лимузината продължи по улицата към живковата резиденция до военния санаториум. Стана ми ясно каква е причината за рекордно бързото обновление на градчето.
Множеството зпочна да се разотива , а аз се отправих на разходка към гарата. Там ме очакваше ново смайване. На втория коловоз бе спрял дълъг луксозен влак, явно влакът на корейския диктатор, а от него слизаха млади корейки в еднакви сиви униформи. Към стотина, натовариха ги на два автобуса и ги отправиха нанякъде. По-късно разбрах, че са били настанени не в голямата резиденция, а в почивния, също луксозен, дом на ЦК, където обикновено ходеха на почивка чистачките и низшия персонал от окръжните комитети на партията.
Нито една от корейките от служебния персонал от влака на диктатора не се появи през следващите дни в градчето.
След като корейките бяха откарани с автобусите, присъствах на една странна маневра с влака на диктатора. Той беше толкова дълъг, че не можеше да се разположи целия в района на гарата и запушваше влизането в нея. Поради това бе разделен на две и двете половини бяха напъхани в двата останали гарови коловоза, така че влизането в гарата стана свободно за редовните влакове от Пловдив.
По време на останалите дни от престоя на Ким Ир Сен в Хисаря из градчето се разхождаха на двойки корейци със сиви униформи, очевидно от охраната на диктатора. След като визитатата му в Хисаря свърши, разбрах от управителя на живковата резиденция, когото познавах, жена му работеше в Пловдивския университет, че по време на пребиваването на Ким Ир Сен в Хисаря, охраната на резиденцията заловила някакъв севернокорейски студент, който искал да се промъкне и срещне с любимия си вожд Не разбрах обаче успял ли е да осъществи срещата си или е станал жертва на своята любов към вожда.
По време на престоя на Ким Ир Сен в Хисаря българските вестници не съобщиха нищо за пребиваването му в България, а когато напусна курортното градче, във вестниците се появи загадъчно съобщение, че е започнало официалното посещение ва другаря Ким Ир Сен в България.
Каква бе загадката за престоя на Ким Ир Сен в Хисаря?
Другарят Ким Ир Сен не обичал да пътува със самолет и винаги пътувал със специалния си влак. С него дошъл и на официална визита в България, но се оказало, че по това време неговият домакин, другарят Тодор Живков, не бил в татовината си. Поради което се наложило другарят Ким да го изчака в Хисаря, хем да се поизкъпе в български минерални води.

Това се сетих, когато преди няколко дни прочетох, че американски сателит заснел дългия влак на другаря Ким Чен Ур. Сигурен съм, че това е същия дълъг влак на дядо му. Ако американски сателит е заснел и посещението му в Хисаря, може и мен да ме има на снимката. Това са моите връзки с Ким Ир Сен и ЦРУ.

СВЕТЛОЗАР ИГОВ

Years ago, a Chinese social theorist with links to Deng Hsiao-Ping’s daughter told me an interesting anecdote. When Deng was dying, an acolyte asked him what he thought his greatest act had been, expecting the usual answer: namely that he would mention his economic reforms, which had brought such development to China. To the surprise of the questioner, Deng answered: “No, it was that, when the leadership decided to open up the economy, I resisted the temptation to go all the way and open up also political life to multiparty democracy.” (According to some sources, this tendency to go all the way was pretty strong in some Party circles and the decision to maintain Party control was in no way preordained.) We should resist here the liberal temptation to dream about how, had China also opened up to political democracy, its economic progress would have been even faster: what if political democracy had generated new instabilities and tensions that would have hampered economic progress? What if this (capitalist) progress was feasible only in a society dominated by a strong authoritarian power? Recall the classical Marxist thesis on early modern England: it was in the bourgeoisie’s own interest to leave political power in the hands of the aristocracy and keep for itself economic power. Maybe something homologous is going on in today’s China: it was in the interest of the new capitalists to leave political power to the Communist Party.

—

Some years ago, I heard an anecdote from a friend of Willy Brandt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev – at this time already a private citizen – wanted to visit Brandt, and he appeared unannounced at the door of his house in Berlin, but Brandt (or his servant) ignored the ringing of the bell and refused even to open the door. Brandt later explained to his friend his reaction as being an expression of his rage at Gorbachev: by allowing the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev had ruined the foundations of Western social democracy. It was the constant comparison with the East European communist countries that maintained the pressure on the West to tolerate the social democratic welfare state, and once the communist threat disappeared, exploitation in the West became more open and ruthless and the welfare state also began to disintegrate. Simplified as this idea is, there is a moment of truth in it: the final result of the fall of communist regimes is the fall (or, rather, the prolonged disintegration) of social democracy itself.

 

A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name, Untimely Interventions
Slavoj Žižek

Nothing indeed has been more common for Žižek than to attack Badiou precisely on the grounds that he completely fails to understand the first thing about love, desire, enjoyment and the death drive. Such an attack can take the typically antiphilosophical form of a disparagement, as when Žižek accuses Badiou of falling to the level of sheer non-thought: “When Badiou adamantly opposes the ‘morbid obsession with death,’ when he opposes the Truth-Event to the death drive, and so on, he is at his weakest, succumbing to the temptation of the non-thought.” Or else, especially in Žižek’s more recent works, the accusation can mask itself behind more respectable philosophical labels, such that Badiou turns out to have been blind to the role of pure negativity, or radical finitude, as a prior condition—the tabula rasa of all fantasies that alone clears the ground for a genuine ethical or political act. Thus, except for the sobered-up tone, in Less Than Nothing we are still within the same problematic as the one in The Ticklish Subject: “Negativity (whose Freudian name is the ‘death drive’) is the primordial ontological fact: for a human being, there is no ‘animal life’ prior to it, for a human being is constitutively ‘out-of-joint.’ Every ‘normality’ is a secondary normalization of the primordial dislocation that is the ‘death drive,’ and it is only through the terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of every positive order of ‘normality’ that a space is opened up for an Event.” Finally, what emerges as the fundamental stake in the ongoing disputes between Badiou and Žižek on the subject of Lacan is the problematic of the different relationships between truth, knowledge, and the real of enjoyment.

Enjoy Your Truth:
Lacan as Vanishing Mediator between Badiou and Žižek

Bruno Bosteels

But, at the beginning, you had the feeling that interpretation, by itself, cures. And, people who know Freud’s writing agree, that we have the feeling at a certain moment, that Freud and his pupils bumped up against symptoms which, in spite of being interpreted, remained. And that means that there is something more in the symptom, more than S1 and S2, more than articulation of signifiers. And Freud was not one to go back on this discovery. He was not followed by his pupils, but he considered precisely this resistance of the symptom. So, Freud developed a hypothesis, I believe it is not excessive to say, that it’s new in the history of human thought, that, yes, a patient may have something, and love fundamentally, be fundamentally attracted to something that harms him. That is, his most precious good may be bad. Freud called it primary masochism and negative therapeutic reaction. It’s a classy expression to say that they don’t want to be cured! Not only because they are of bad faith, not only because they resist the action of the analyst, but because there is something beyond the pleasure principle. And this beyond the pleasure principle Freud elaborated as the death instinct, which was refused by almost all his pupils. And you know the affinity of Lacan for this highly disputed concept. He gave a place to this supposed death instinct, and I found in a speech of Lacan to an audience in the ’30s, that already, he was defending this impossible concept. Impossible concept which is what? I would say death is what Lacan translated as Jouissance. Jouissance is the Lacanian name for what is beyond the pleasure principle.

Jouissance is Lacan’s name for what’s beyond the pleasure principle. That is to say,
what? Why a new name? Because, it is displeasure, it is pain, it is suffering. So, if
we say there is an unknown pleasure in the suffering of the symptom, an unknown
pleasure that presents itself as pain, this justifies giving it a new
name. Jouissance in this sense, is enjoyment in breach of the pleasure principle,
because it brings no pleasure, but discontrol, discontent, malaise. This could be the
notable thing to introduce in the United States, the contrary of the pursuit of
happiness, because the pursuit of jouissance is contrary to happiness, to the
equilibrium, the harmony, the satisfaction one calls happiness. And, if we accept
this name jouissance, well, we understand also that Freudian drives are not
psychological functions, that psychology can never really accommodate the drive
to instinct. Hunger and thirst are urges you can satisfy; the urge recedes when you
satisfy it. What is incomprehensible in the Freudian drive, in the definition Freud
himself gives of the drive, is that the satisfaction of the drive brings only the
demand for more, for “again”, as Lacan said, “for encore.” Jouissance  is the
Lacanian name for the satisfaction of the drive, as distinct from instinct. And, this
is also a short-cut to understand why Freud said that when you accept, when you
defer to the command of the super-ego, you are always more and more subjected to
its demands. So, what’s difficult about jouissance is that while desire is connected
to speech, and to signifiers, jouissance, on the contrary, is silence. And Freud spoke
mysteriously of the silence of the drives.

http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/miller.html

That’s why I stress this sentence, which may be found in Écrits, when he says, “Not everything is signifying, even if everything is structure.” You have to understand that this sentence from the 60s is already a commentary on his future mathemes. There is a gap here, there is a discrepancy, because from the beginning we define structure from Saussure as an articulation of the signifier. And we are obliged from analytic experience, to operate with a structure which accepts, I would say, a nonsignifying element. And what Lacan calls small “a” is the non-signifiable part of structure, which is easy to say but more difficult to construct. The problem is the relationship of this small “a” to A as Symbolic order. And, is it exterior, purely exterior? Is it interior? The word “extimacy” tries to transcend this opposition. Beginning with the word “intimacy,” which refers to the most private, the center of privacy, this intimacy is at the same time a forbidden zone for the subject. And, in some way, it was known from Augustine’s time, for instance, that at the center of yourself, in the most intimate of your intimacies, as Augustine says in his Confessions, there’s God. There is not you yourself absolutely. In some way God exemplifies this extimacy that is, at the very center, intimacy. That is to say, to drive a wedge into the argument, the most cherished of your intimacies is at the same time the most alien. That’s why Lacan disagreed with Freud on this point. He said “there is no desire to know, there is no drive to know.” And he added: “the only thing I have ever discovered in a patient, and in myself, is the drive not to know.” In that sense we may say that what resists in analytical experience is this jouissance as the very principle of symptom formation. That’s how Lacan defined the symptom: “truth resisting knowledge of jouissance.” And, perhaps, I could give one idea of the drive from this problematic. First, that the small “a,” as surplus jouissance needs to be distinguished from the phallus. Phallus—supposed phallocentrism—is not a final word of Lacan, but one of the first, and on the contrary, one may write that the phallus is something other than small “a.” The phallus as signifier of jouissance is something other than small “a.” A mistake is made here because Lacan defines the phallus as signifier of jouissance. That’s true. But jouissance in Lacan, I would say, is made of two parts: a signifiable part, and a non-signifiable part. And that condition gives a place to the other jouissance, the other-than-phallic jouissance, and that’s why Lacan would give a place to feminine sexuality not by revealing a feminine signifier but by taking into account small “a” as surplus jouissance.

from http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/miller.html

In the twenty-third seminar, Lacan stipulates that a sinthome is a
symptom upon which the very being of its subjective bearer depends.
Were the subject to be “cured” of his/her sinthome, he/she would
cease to exist, would dissipate along with this point de capiton of his/
her subjectivity itself. Hence, the therapeutic gain brought about by
analysis, according to the Lacan of the twenty-fifth seminar, hinges not
on eliminating the sinthome, but on making it transition from being an “in
itself” to a “for itself” (to resort to a bit of Hegelese not foreign to Lacan).
In so doing, the subject goes from being unconsciously in the grip of his/ her sinthome to having a margin of conscious distance from it, after the
achievement of which he/she may even come to identify with it (or at
least be comfortable enough living with it). This might be as much self-transparent freedom and contentment as analysis can afford.
Similarly, apropos invincible religion’s triumphant God hypothesis
as the sinthome of socio-symbolic subjectivity, perhaps there is no “cure”
for religiosity. Maybe the irreducible meanings enshrined in both religion
and philosophy are indeed incurable. However, if this sort of sens is
handled as a sinthome, then although an immediate, first-order atheism
might not be possible for speaking subjects, a mediated, second-order
one is a potential option. Both desire à la Lacan and belief too are
inherently self-reflexive. Hence, one can come not to desire one’s desire
for the divine, not to believe in one’s (first-order) belief. A second-order
atheism therefore would be attainable despite the impossibility of a first-order
one. This would be a position somewhat akin to the Kantian doctrine
of transcendental illusion.
The same might also hold for Lacan’s “insurgence” against
philosophy. Putting together some of his above-cited remarks, Lacanian
anti-philosophy could be described as a second-order rebellion against
unavoidable first-order philosophizing. One cannot help but lapse into
philosophical indulgences. But, one also can struggle against these
lapses. As an anti-philosopher, Lacan might be redescribed as an
uncomfortable and reluctant philosopher. Analogously, as an atheist,
Lacan perhaps is an unsettled, discontent Catholic

Lacan’s Endgame:
Philosophy, Science, and Religion in the Final Seminars
Adrian Johnston

 

Similarly, as Lacan showed, if Marx was the first structuralist,
that was because globalised capitalism offered the best example of the
structure of structuralists: a set of relations between exchange values
determined by their differences and mutual relations, a symbolic universe
without an exterior, a language without a metalanguage, an Other without an Other and a closed and unidimensional system comprised only of
one qualitative dimension and its quantitative variations and proportions,
devoid of otherness and negativity…
However, in addition to what is cognitively reflected, there is what
is symptomatically discovered: the covered-discovered by the reflection,
the extimate processes that underlie external or internal states, the
production of the product and the enunciation of the enunciated, but also
the negativity of positivity, the misery of wealth and the abstract character
of the most concrete. The discovery is made in the same reflection, in
the open and hollow structure, in the imperceptible matter that must be
calculated through the microscope of ‘abstraction’. It is here, in the
abstract, mathematical, empty and unfounded material structure, where
we discover that the most apparent is the least apparent, that the evident
is contradictory, that the whole is not-all, that the Other is barred and that
the king is naked, that he is a proletarian, a subject without attributes,
except to be alive…  What is important here is that the structure
and its economic materiality appear in Marx as what they are: precarious,
transitory, crossed by history, by conflicts and contradictions, by tensions
and struggles, by movement and by life, by disrupting desires and
corrosive drives and also, on a genetic level, as products of negation,
destruction and alienation, expropriation and privatisation, exploitation
and pauperisation, fetishisation and reification. We can reject some of
these conceptualisations, but we cannot deny that they designate in a
more or less accurate and adequate manner what is revealingly embodied
by the proletarian and understood as the historical truth of capitalism, as
a symptom of how bourgeois society strips and reveals to Marx everything
that he discovers.

 

Lacanizing Marxism: the Effects of Lacan

in Readings of Marx and Marxist Thinkers
David Pavón Cuéllar

 

Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated by Zlatomir Zlatanov

My translation of Zlatomir Zlatanov’s piece “Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated”: he is a theory oracle you should all know about. (Another trans. of mine is forthcoming soon in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation).
Снимка на Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

This is LOCKDOWN THEORY #24: “Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated” by Zlatomir Zlatanov: “The indirect guilt of neoliberal biopolitics is no longer actual. In the pandemic we are the abandoned of the absent cause, in the absence of cognitive mapping as substitute of class war – both are unactual. Catastrophisms are literalisms. The symbiotic Gaia apparently still does not know what she can do as a Spinozist body in the antidote of the organless body of death. If philosophers and pathogens are locked inside the correlate, then is not the ambiguous fixism of the Great Outdoors yet another viral concubinage? We would rather ask ourselves: is there anything like the witness of the absolute visit, an intransitivity as the pathogen of correlationism?”
https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/…/IJP…/announcement/view/34

Stanimir Panayotov