Saturday, April 17, 2004
(6:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Joy and Revolution
Is there room for joy in philosophy, specifically in “revolutionary” philosophy?
Slavoj Žižek, in his “Repeating Lenin,” has this to say:
Lenin's slanderers like to evoke his famous paranoiac reaction at listening to Beethoven's appasionata (he first started to cry, then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford to let himself go to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat the enemies instead of mercilessly fighting them) as the proof of his cold self-control and cruelty - however, even at its own terms, is this accident effectively an argument AGAINST Lenin? Does it not rather bear witness to an extreme sensitivity for music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue the political struggle? Who of today's cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a sensitivity? Is not Lenin here at the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with the extreme cruelty in taking political decisions (suffice it to recall Heydrich, the holocaust architect, who, after a hard day's work, always found time to play with his comrades Beethoven's string quartets) - is not the proof of Lenin's humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic unity of high culture and political barbarism, he was still extremely sensitive to the irreducible antagonism between art [and] power struggle?This Leninist “paranoia” is similar to a certain Wesleyan paranoia—but the difference is significant. Wesleyan asceticism is oriented toward joy, as the Plain Account of Christian Perfection makes clear. But what is the outcome of the Leninist revolution? A world of grayness, a purgatory.
This is not to take some naïve approach and “choose America” over the communist debacle, nor is it an attempt to commend the concrete results of the Wesleyan revolution—the paranoia and cruelty of the Church of the Nazarene and the “apolitical” reactionism of many pentecostal churches prevent me from taking that route. So what am I proposing? “Joy in Christ”? Perhaps. I quote this from Barth’s Humanity of God:
But it is just in view of Jesus Christ that the judgment is made that God’s divinity does not exclude, but includes his humanity. If only Calvin had continued thinking more energetically at this point in his Christology, in his doctrine of God, in his doctrine of predestination and then logically in his ethics! Then his Geneva would not have become such a dismal affair. Then his letters would not have contained so much bitterness.The really revolutionary thing about Christianity, for Žižek and others, is that everything has already happened. I don’t know if they necessarily think this through in all its rigor, ignorant as they seem to be of much twentieth-century theology—the coming future, the messianic kingdom, has content. We already know what it looks like, and it looks like Jesus of Nazareth. The future has already happened and is happening. How different this is from a joyless Marxism, where the shape of society “after the revolution” can never be conceptualized—and where, consequently, revolution itself becomes the promised utopia. To quote Žižek:
Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom); neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence - it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are - as if by Grace - for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow - in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merlo-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.The Christian utopian vision short-ciruits even this Leninist utopia: we can enjoy freedom and happiness now, without even fighting. The pacifism of the early church is a new kind of messianic ideal in which war itself is skipped over. This may well be “revolution without revolution,” or it could be a radical step further, “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles”—embracing the accusation of “revolution without revolution,” enjoying a revolution that has already been accomplished.
The Christian hope is perhaps perverse, and it is not self-evidently correct or desirable, but it is at very least distinctive.
