Revolutionary Autobiography
Ah, now, you do realize, people, that when Zizek releases a collection of the writings of Robespierre and writes his own critical introduction to the collection, that it's your responsibility to tell about this, right? You're not supposed to let seven months go by without saying anything to me. Sheesh!
I think this is a reproduction of the same essay that appears at the beginning of the anthology, but I'm not 100% certain. Here's a short excerpt:...Robespierre's line of argumentation reaches its climax in the paradoxical identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror "sublates" the opposition between punishment and clemency - the just and severe punishment of the enemies IS the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigor and charity coincide:To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to pardon them is barbarity. The rigor of tyrants has only rigor for a principle; the rigor of the republican government comes from charity.
What, then, should those who remain faithful to the legacy of the radical Left do with all these? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as OURS, even - or precisely because - it is critically rejected. The only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this means is that the ruthless self-critique should go hand in hand with a fearless admission of what, to paraphrase Marx's judgment on Hegel's dialectics, one is tempted to call the "rational kernel" of the Jacobin Terror: "Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: "What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?" His answer is well-known: they want corruption - another name for the subject's defeat.
What follows is a discussion of considerable length of the relationship between Terror and Humanism.
I'm almost done with The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. Once that's done, that will be two books about the French Revolution in as many weeks. The other one I read was The Days of the French Revolution. The second book, while providing a more-or-less comprehensive overview of the journées from 1789 to 1794, is Girondist and anti-robespierreiste in its approach. This in and of itself isn't terrible. The problem is that it succumbs to a lack of objectivity and doesn't make it fully comprehensible why certain events had to follow others. But then, this is a typical liberal approach to the Revolution which thinks you can have 1789 without 1793-94. There's been debate about this ever since the end of the 18th century, but the more I read about the Revolution, the more I'm of the opinion (following Hegel, actually) that, in a complicated way, the Terror doesn't begin in the fall of '93 but starts in '89, not even with the Bastille, but rather with the Tennis Court Oath. The very constitution of a people into a sovereign body already carries within it the seed of Terror. But that's neither here nor there. I'm not enough of an expert on the Revolution or on Hegel to give a considered opinion on that position.
The problem with the Robespierre biography is that, for my own purposes, which are far more general, the biography doesn't go into much analysis of the Revolution itself. It's mostly focused on Robespierre -- who, by the way, was an intensely interesting character. Probably no other political figure in all of history (with the possible exceptions of Richard III and Julius Caesar) have been more unfairly vilified. Jordan presents the reader with a multifaceted, even inspiring portrait of the theoretical and political evolution of the first true revolutionary in the modern sense: a fully public figure who is wedded body and soul to the political cause and who invents through his actions and self-analysis the genre of revolutionary autobiography. Robespierre was a tragic figure whose greatest strengths ended up turning into self-destructive weaknesses, but Jordan at least makes all of this comprehensible from within Robespierre's self-understanding itself, which, he argues, is actually inseparable from Robespierre's political beliefs. You don't come away liking Robespierre, necessarily -- considering how much he's a product of the late-18th century, I'm not sure it's possible to dislike him, either -- but you do gain a certain level of admiration for what he was trying to achieve and the extent to which he achieved it.
After finishing this, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue reading more about the French Revolution. I might do that, or I might finish the Hegel biography (got halfway through). I haven't figured out exactly what I'm doing with all this information yet. If the past is any indication of the future, this is all going to percolate down through the strata of my mind and shed some light on things, but I don't know exactly how that's going to happen or what the picture is going to look like. I am trying to figure something out, though, and it goes back to what I was talking about a few weeks ago about freedom, slavery, and historicity.