Revisionsim and Fear of Death
What Giri calls subjective destitution is therefore not just a new form of
political subjectivity but simultaneously something that concerns our basic
existential level, “a different way of being, involving a different modality
of life and death” (p. 15). In his afterword to Peter Hallward’s collection
Think Again, Badiou approvingly quotes Lin Biao: “The essence of revisionism
is the fear of death.”15 This existential radicalization of the political
opposition between orthodoxy and revisionism throws new light on the old ’68
motto: “The personal is political.” Here, the political becomes personal;
the ultimate root of political revisionism is located in the intimate
experience of the fear of death. Badiou’s version of it would be that, since
“revisionism” is, at its most basic, the failure to subjectivize oneself,
to assume fidelity to a Truth-Event, being a revisionist means remaining
within the survivalist horizon of the “human animal.”
There is, however, an
ambiguity that clings to Lin Biao’s statement. It can be read as saying that
the root of political revisionism lies in human nature which makes us fear
death; but it can also be read as saying that, since there is no unchangeable
human nature, our very intimate fear of death is already politically
overdetermined, for it arises in an individualist and egotistical society
with little sense of communal solidarity; which is why, in a communist
society, people would no longer fear death.
Subjective destitution
Already from this brief description it is clear that the phenomenon of
subjective destitution assumes many forms which cannot be reduced to the same
inner experience. There is the Buddhist nirvana, a disconnection from
external reality which enables us to acquire a distance towards our cravings
and desires: I assume a kind of impersonal stance, my thoughts are thoughts
without thinker. Then there are so-called mystical experiences which should
not be confused with nirvana. They also involve a kind of subjective
destitution, but this destitution takes the form of a direct identity between
me and a higher Absolute (typical formula: the eyes through which I see god
are the eyes through which god sees himself). My innermost desire gets
depersonalized, it overlaps with the will of god himself, so that the big
Other lives through me. In short, while in nirvana one steps out of the “
wheel of desire”, the mystical experience enacts the overlapping of our
enjoyment with the enjoyment of the big Other. Then there is the subjective
stance described by Giri: the destitution of a revolutionary agent which
reduces itself to an instrument-object of the process of radical social
change – he obliterates his personality, inclusive of the fear of death, so that revolution lives through him.
Then there is the explosion of self-destructive social nihilism; think of
Joker, but also of a scene in Eisenstein’s October in which a revolutionary
mob penetrates the wine cellar of the Winter Palace and engages in an orgy of
massive destruction of hundreds of bottles of expensive champagne. And, last
but not least, subjective destitution in its psychoanalytic (Lacanian) sense
of traversing the fantasy, which is a much more radical gesture than it may
appear. For Lacan, fantasy is not opposed to reality but provides the
coordinates of what we experience as reality, plus the coordinates of what we
desire. The two coordinates are not the same, but they are intertwined. When
our fundamental fantasy dissolves, we experience the loss of reality, which
also impedes our ability to desire. (We should also recall that traversing
the fantasy is not Lacan’s final word. In the last years of his teaching, he
proposed as the final moment of the analytic process identification with the
symptom, a gesture that enables us to have a moderately acceptable form of
life.)
How are these versions related? They seem to form a kind of Greimasian
semiotic square, since there are two axes along which they are disposed:
active engagement (self-destructive social explosion; revolutionary
destitution described by Giri) versus disengagement (nirvana, mystical
experience); self-contraction (destructive explosion against external
reality; nirvana) versus reliance on a big Other (God in mystical experience,
History in revolutionary destitution). In a destructive explosion, we
contract into ourselves by way of destroying our environment; in nirvana, we
just withdraw into ourselves leaving reality the way it is. In mystical
experience, we disengage from reality by immersing ourselves into divinity;
in revolutionary destitution, we renounce our Self by engaging in the
historical process of revolutionary change. (From the Lacanian standpoint,
these last two stances court the danger of falling into a perverse position
of conceiving oneself as an object-instrument of the big Other.)
What Lacan calls subjective destitution is the zero level, the neutral abyss
in the center of this square. Here one should be very precise. What we reach
in subjective destitution is not the absolute Void out of which everything
springs, but the very disturbance of this Void; not the inner peace of
withdrawal but the imbalance of the Void; not the fall of the Void into
finite material reality but the antagonism/tension in the very heart of the
Void which causes the emergence of material reality out of the Void. The
other four versions of subjective destitution structurally come second, they
are attempts to pacify the antagonism (“self-contradiction”) of the Void.
The question that arises here is: how should destitution in its
politically-engaged form avoid the fall into perversity? The answer is clear:
it should suspend its reliance of the big Other (of historical necessity,
etc.). Hegel constrained philosophy to grasping “what is,” but for Hegel “
what is” is not just a stable state of things, it is an open historical
situation full of tensions and potentials. One should therefore link Hegel’s
insight with Saint-Just’s claim: “Ceux qui font des révolutions
ressemblent au premier navigateur instruit par son audace.[Revolutionaries are akin to a first navigator guided by his audacity alone]
”. Isn’t this the implication of Hegel’s confinement of the conceptual
grasp to the past? As engaged subjects, we have to act with a view to the
future, but for a priori reasons we cannot base our decisions on a rational
pattern of historical progress (as Marx thought), so we have to improvise and
take risks. Was this also the lesson Lenin learned from reading Hegel in
1915? The paradox is that what Lenin took from Hegel – who is usually
decried as the philosopher of historical teleology, of inexorable and regular
progress towards freedom – was the utter contingency of the historical
process.
The common sense counter-argument that arises here is: subjective destitution
is such a radical gesture that it is limited to an enlightened elite, and
remains an impossible ethical ideal for the masses, except in rare episodes
of revolutionary enthusiasm. But I think that this reproach misses the point.
Giri emphasizes that subjective destitution is not an elitist stance of
leaders, but, on the contrary, a stance displayed by numerous ordinary
combatants, like the thousands who risked their lives in the struggle against
Covid. It is crucial to note here that subjective destitution as the
emergence of a radical gap in the continuity of History is here not an
explosion of destructive violence which can only in a later stage be
transformed into a pragmatic and realist construction of a new order. Giri
describes subjective destitution as a stance which enables us to engage in a
construction of a new social order. As such, revolutionary subjective
destitution should be strictly separated from the outbursts of radical
negativity which appear as self-destructive political nihilism.