Terror and Materialism
I came across this interesting passage in the Zizek essay, and I'd like to hear what some of you think about it. The problem here is not terror as such - our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: the egalitarian political "extremism" or "excessive radicalism" should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to "go to the end." What was the Jacobin's recourse to radical "terror" if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called "excesses" of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard tropes, shared by practically all the "postmodern" Leftists, according to which political "totalitarianism" somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the "principle" of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political "terror" signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political "terror," from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx's key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics ("if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared 'unpolitical' - that is, naturalized - in liberal discourse").
There are two ideas in here that I find intriguing:
There are two ideas in here that I find intriguing:
- The first is the idea that excessive radicalism is a sign of displacement. I take him to mean that terror is always terror of the abstract, of the "law", enacted on material reality. You have a mere "should", but the should is purely abstract, totally heterogeneous with reality, and so the only force it has is a normative force in opposition to inclination, sensibility, or materiality in general. But because an abstract norm can't "go to the end", because it can't penetrate into the actual material basis of the society, because it can't go to the part where matter and thought become one (for Zizek, as for Marx, this is where you have the production and reproduction of the material basis of the society), all it can do is "rage" at reality. This is why the heads have to come off. The death sentence is built right into the idea of Law itself, since the abstraction of the law is already at odds with material reality. This would make the Terror just the highest expression of a certain conception of law understood in opposition to or standing independent from the material basis of society.
- But then the second thing is, I'm not sure if I agree with the way in which he wants to understand this idea of "going to the end". He seems to understand going to the end as going to the end of politics itself where politics no longer means anything. He's correct in denying that political logic has autonomy compared to material production. Is he going to the opposite extreme in suggesting that the political struggle is merely a spectacle? I'm wondering aloud about this, because I learned Marx in a kind of dippy way where we were trying to read him as a political and possibly (possibly) as an ethical theorist. Is there a theory of political action in Marx's thought, and can that be read against a more reductive interpretation?
It's clear to me that the shortcomings of Robespierre's approach mostly stem from the fact that he's not an economic thinker, that he has almost no original insights with regard to political economy. This is a problem not only from a tactical point of view or from the point of view of his success or failure. It's also not just a problem for Robespierre. I also think this is directly connected to why the Terror occurs. The Terror is the highest expression of a concept of political sovereignty that was inaugurated, not in 1792 or 93, but rather in 1789. But then, what would it mean to go all the way in the opposite direction? Does a synthesis make its way in here somewhere?