Sunday, September 25, 2005
(11:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reservations
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §260:It is the powerful who understand how to honor; this is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and tradition--all law rests on this double reverence--the faith and prejudice in favor of ancestors and disfavor of those yet to come are typical of the morality of the powerful; and when the men of "modern ideas," conversely, believe almost instinctively in "progress" and "the future" and more and more lack respect for age, this in itself would sufficiently betray the ignoble origin of these "ideas."Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, §12:
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction[...] has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. [...] Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.I keep thinking of Benjamin's Theses as I read Nietzsche. (Jared Woodard has an unpublished paper on Schmitt and Nietzsche; I personally can't prove the connections philologically, but it seems plain enough that there are connections, and therefore connections between Benjamin and Nietzsche.) It would seem that a "reactionary" critique can serve as the foundation for a "radical" critique in that the "reactionary" critique first shows up the present situation as strange, as non-obvious, as contingent -- leftist critique radicalizes the ressentiment of the most recently defeated ruling class; surely we can see this in the medevialist nostalgia of the most prominent early socialists.
Understanding that it may be misguided and certainly a little naïve to perform this type of analysis on such a short timescale, I would venture this interpretation of the current situation in American politics -- the most recently displaced rulers are mainstream liberals. It is both fortunate and unfortunate for those liberals that Bush so obviously stole his first election and arguably stole his second as well. The stolen election allows them the opportunity to view him as a usurper, to hate and despise him, but at the same time, it blunts the potential critique that would view the "conservative revolution" as usurping not simply in that it has "rigged" the electoral system or "duped" the populace -- after all, when have we had an "honest" electoral system or a well-informed populace interested in rational debate on matters of common concern -- but in and for itself. The election of Bush, no matter whether it was "technically" legitimate under the stated rules for elections, calls into question the very legitimacy of "actually existing democracy," of the faith that somehow getting citizens to fill out a card to select their representatives is going to produce a free and just society in abstraction from the present nearly irrevocable corruption of public discourse and of power relations.
Thus, as regards Chávez -- I think it is more than reasonable to assume that he legitimately won the last election according to the standard rules governing free elections, but I don't particularly care either way. I think it's terrible for Bush to steal an election, but if stealing elections is what is necessary for a genuinely left-wing figure such as Chávez to exercise power, then go for it. We see what the moralism of democracy and concensus is achieving among our very morally upright Democratic representatives -- perhaps it is time for immoralism.
