My Brilliant Friend

“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (chapter 116)

This wonderful, arresting metaphor comes at the beginning of a short chapter near the end of Story of a New Name, the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So far I have only read these first two. I’ll pick up the third soon, and perhaps even finish it in time to be impatient about the arrival of the translation of the fourth. Here I’ll make no attempt at plot summary (and won’t be shy about spoilers). I’ve read very little of the material which has appeared about these books so far. Rothman’s piece asking "Ferrante or Knausgaard?", which I read after I was already well into the first volume, left me with absolutely no desire to read the latter, but unsatisfied of course with the description of the former.

The umbrella metaphor is effective, and in several ways. The umbrella—a banal shelter—turns against the one holding it. This marks it at once as “defective,” but of course it is in the nature of umbrellas to open and close. Like this object, the narrator Lenù, if not the narrative, is defined by oscillation. She is now transcendentally happy, now plunged into depression. Open and closed. In part this is an effect of the childhood and adolescence that is the subject of the first two volumes of the novel, but the oscillation is nearly oppressive, and I cannot imagine that it will do more than stretch out a little as Lenù ages. I also stumble over the mix of temporal orders. Ferrante plays with this: “now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.” The return to Naples is discrete, a punctual moment. But the comparison is not. The punctual return is not compared to another simple punctual event, but to the having of an umbrella like that. And this temporal structure is not without parallel in the book itself—the just-mentioned oscillation, of course, but also the various slowly-changing backdrops against which the events of the novel take place. This means, most immediately, “the neighborhood” in Naples, the menacing backdrop of poverty and the camorra.

Of course this background is not unchanging. Indeed the most obvious themes of the novel are woven into the larger story of the Italian postwar. Lenù and Lila grow up literally in the wreckage of fascist Italy, which is always present, if poorly understood and rarely discussed by the adults. There is ambient violence--unexploded wartime ordinance both real and metaphorical. As the characters grow up, Italy is going through the postwar boom, the years of modernization. Parents who grew up without running water will see their children demand televisions. Lenù, Lila, and practically all their acquaintances are poor, provincial—their parents aren’t illiterate, for the most part, but their parents were. Lenù will get out, go to university, other characters will educate themselves and be educated in various ways.

Writing and language therefore hold a special place here. Do you speak in dialect? Do you speak Italian? Lenù’s return to Naples, described in the quote above, is marked by the famous linguistic in-between-ness of one who has escaped, or is trying to escape, her origins through education. She never entirely lost her Neapolitan accent at school in Pisa, but she no longer sounds right to her friends and family either. From the very beginning the two friends read and were enchanted not just by words, not just by writing, but by the cultural object that is a printed book. It seemed important, magical, a marker of success and power. The novel begins, of course, with Lenu’s decision to write, to record as much as she can about the existence of Lila—a sort of counter to Lila’s willful disappearance. This is a sort of violence inflicted through words. And we see many examples throughout the narrative. In writing, Lila hurts Lenù, makes her feel small and a failure. Characters are constantly mixing their words together. Of course, most important are the acts of co-creation between Lenù and Lila. But there is also Lenù and Nino, Lila and Nino. Not that this is constrained to verbal reproduction. Lila’s creativity is manifest constantly, is an active force in the world of the novel, she designs shoes, and the conflict over Lila’s photograph is an important plot point, as is her her desecration/creation in reworking it, its eventual destruction. Lenù, it seems, is always struggling with the possibility, the feeling, that indeed she is nothing more than another creation of Lila’s, even if we as readers see clearly that this isn’t so.

The novel is of course actuated by a vanishing act, but it is also full of acts of wanton destruction, importantly of written words. The narrator writes, ostensibly, to prevent Lila from really disappearing, and begins the narrative proper with the primordial act of violence in which the two girls throw away one another’s most prized possessions, their dolls. The second volume is given its whole emotional tenor, is haunted, by Lenù’s shocking destruction of Lila’s private journals. Then of course that volume ends with the appearance of Lenù’s novel, the reappearance of its ur-text, the novel Lila wrote as a child, and Lila’s own destruction, in the hellish meat-packing plant, of that object. All of these texts are defined and given agency, in the novel, as much by their audience, the moral authority of culture, as by their authors. For instance Lenù’s first article so freighted with emotion and given, to no obvious response, to Nino. Lila’s childhood production had deeply moved Lenù, but for whatever reason vanished for years, unremarked upon, not encouraged, by their teacher. Lila’s text, the production of which is treated by the narrative in a cursory way, like the treatment for an illness, is apparently impulsively given to a man in response to his proposal of marriage. It, too, vanishes for a little while, only to be taken up, accepted, published, by cultural authority.

Some bonds cannot be dissolved. Some situations, some people, cannot be escaped. It seems wrong, insufficient, to say that the relationship between Lenù and Lila is at the heart of the novel. Who is the brilliant friend? This is not a relationship, the word is too vapid. On every page, we have the force-field of Lila shaping Lenù’s life—and, for the reader, for the narrator, if not for Lenù in the narrative, we can see how the lines of force run in both directions. This novel is not, I think, going to be about how, ultimately, we learn not to be cruel. It is not a liberal novel, not a Bildungsroman, not a novel about making one’s self on one’s own, not about learning to be free. 

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (NYRB 2012) left me with the strong urge to write. Indeed among its strongest implicit lessons is that writing is a moral and political task. In the final, hurried chapter Serge defines “intellectual work” as “understanding and expression” (437)—the clarity and force of this makes me think it must be a well-worn line drawn from some classic author unknown to me. It’s an excellent, if capacious, definition. Here, in any case, are some extremely disorganized reactions to this extraordinary book.

           

Serge tells his own story from when he was a boy in Belgium in the pre-war years, up to his arrival in Mexico from Vichy. His memory is almost incredibly prodigious. How can he recount all these things, all these names, with such confidence? Doubtless he make some mistakes, but perhaps we can say this is what you get when you combine a novelist’s eye for detail and character with the time to think that prison can give a person, and with the necessity, born of political chaos and danger, of carrying everything in your head. And in any case, especially once the narrative arrives in Russia, there is a clear work of memory or witness going on. Serge has known many extraordinary people, almost all of them on one loosing side or another. The Old Bolsheviks he knew, in particular, were actively erased from history. Not even history will be safe if we loose (or, rather, if they win). Indeed. 

           

I picked this book up almost by chance. The milieu of Serge’s early life, French-language radical and anarchist, is one I know a little. And it is a compelling read. Serge’s family background—Russian and very political—profoundly shaped his engagement with French and Belgian milieu, of course, but the language of pure revolt, the instinct, the vital necessity of revolt, this is all familiar. And it seems to me that Serge never gives up certain aspects of this early world. For instance an almost biological approach to revolutionary possibility matched with a capacious and idealistic humanism. And he seems to have been an unusually acute participant-observer of the revolutionary years in Russia. I hedge here only because I feel myself radically unequipped to pass judgment on his judgments.

           

The central question, for Serge at least, in writing about 1917-20 is, what went wrong? His answer, at bottom, is simple: the Cheka. Serge recognized the political realities of the civil war, the necessity for rapid, summary justice in certain cases. In places he suggests that the Cheka had from very early on de facto independence, was essentially uncheckable by the political authorities, even when they sought to do so. Thus when the central committee decides to end capital punishment for political crimes, the Checka ‘liquidates their stock’ just before the new policy comes into effect, and this without repercussion. This interacts with other explanations, of course. Serge suggests for instance that if the Red Army had taken Warsaw in 1920 (126ff), then the domestic situation might have been quite different. But other conjunctural and psychological explanations for the Bolshevik choice for Terror are also offered. My own preference is usually for institutional or meso-level explanations for this sort of thing.

In any case, life and death, critical intelligence and fatal necessity, are at war everywhere in the Memoire (and these are basically 19^th century categories). For instance there is the (to me) surprising question of suicide, which returns at many points in the narrative. Does a Bolshevik have the right to take her or his own life? Does this not belong to the party? Is it not for the Party to decide when your usefulness has ceased? And then during the discussion the Moscow trials, we get the chilling line: “In any case, it was not a matter of persuasion: it was, fundamentally, a matter of murder” (394). But can this be entirely right? What about the spectacle of it all? Without claiming to understand better than Serge, it is nonetheless possible to say that, writing in 1940, the Terror of the late 1930s did not make sense to him (although perhaps it is only to me that it does not make sense?). It could not be explained in the way that some earlier episodes of terror could be. Even much of the systemic violence of these years, the destructive, criminal, inefficiencies of agricultural collectivization, this can be rationally understood on the basis of the relative powers and incentives of the various actors. How Stalin’s bureaucracy could fool itself at the expense of the peasant makes sense. But the Terror? Perhaps not. Interestingly, one line of analysis that he does not seem to pursue is the pathological-Stalin line. Neither the Terror nor anything else is laid entirely at Stalin’s door.

The critical intelligence, the free individual, has political prediction as one great and dangerous task. Many of Serge’s predictions seemed uncannily accurate. Almost untrustworthily so. Indeed some lines are very remarkable for being written in the early 1940s. For instance, “the most atrocious and tragic crime of our age: the extermination by the Nazis of the Jews of occupied Europe. Nothing at the present can measure the political, social, and psychological consequences of this crime. Even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization, has been put in question” (444). Also from late in the book, I was surprised to see a reference to Walter Benjamin’s suicide (and that he is described as a “poet” (427). In any case, the point for me is that Serge’s clairvoyance has very little or nothing at all to do with any reading of Marx he has done. Of course this vocabulary is important for him, and he is perfectly capable of class analysis when it is useful, but his background is anarchist and his politics are left-Bolshevik. And here I’m thinking less of the—in themselves very interesting—remarks at the end of the book, for instance the struggle with pessimistic conclusions about the value, never mind utility, of critical intelligence, but of the actual substance of his life as he recounts it.

This is the kind of book I want others to read and think about. I’m not sure that I would assign it to undergraduates—although perhaps it would be possible to excise a really useful 15 pages from it on the early Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Serge as a character is on the one hand appealing—intelligent, human, strong-willed in the best possible way. And on the other hand, one wonders. I had to consult the notes before I realized that he’d had three wives—this is how little a part they play in the narrative. At least one is also from, as it were, radical stock, but it’s still difficult to read about the in-laws being made to suffer for the sins of the son-in-law. Serge’s son is a much more fully-drawn character than anyone else in the narrative, certainly than the various wives. But this moral problem—the commitment to uncompromising truth versus the obligation to family—is not something Serge is willing to entertain. Nor indeed could he possibly have done for very long in his own life without wavering much more than he did. Nor are all of his political formulations ones it would be easy to accept today, for instance he is very, it seems to me oddly, aware of who looks Jewish.

Finally, a missed connection, unusual for someone like Serge who seems to have met practically every consequential person in his vicinity. For me one of the only really sour notes in the text was near the end, when he arrives in Martinique and finds “childlike Negroes” who are a “people...still in their infancy” and so unlikely to overthrow the “diluted form of slavery” that Serge quite rightly recognizes there (430). Serge knew André Breton quite well, and stayed with him in Marseilles waiting to get across the Atlantic. Breton does not seem to have been on the boat that took Serge to Martinique (unless I misremember). But Breton came to Martinique in the same period, and there seems to have wandered into a bookshop run by Aimé Césaire and his circle, where he picked up Tropiques and, looking through this locally-printed journal, declared it excellent. This was an important encounter because useful for Césaire and others. I wonder if Serge came into the same bookshop? The margins of empire and the gutters of war indeed.

His body lies a-mouldering

The deed was done. The next day the world knew and the world sat in puzzled amazement. It was ever so and ever will be. When a prophet like John brown appears, how must we of the world receive him? Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it? If we do, the shame will brand our latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear white logic, now helping, now fearing to help, now believing, now doubting? Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine; but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know the right. How shall we know it? That is the Riddle of the Sphinx. We are but darkened groping souls, that know not light often because of its very blinding radiance. Only in time is truth revealed. To-day at last we know: John Brown was right. (172)

This is the first paragraph of the 12th chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown. The previous chapters narrative briefly Brown’s life and character, at more length his actions in Kansas, and finally, in some evaluative detail, the planning for and execution of the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Du Bois goes quite lightly and quickly over how it is that John Brown decided to devote his and his family’s life to breaking slavery, the main fact is that he did so. Du Bois says, “he was the sword on which struggling Kansas and its leaders could depend, the untarnished doer of its darker deeds, when they that knew them necessary cowered and held their hands” (174). That phrase, “untarnished doer of…dark deeds” is I think the crucial one.

The book is constructed entirely from secondary sources—in this it is something like, although on a very different scale, Black Reconstruction. Also like that work, it is a fine example of committed interpretive historiography. We hear about John Brown’s life, we get a theory of the Alleghenies as the ‘central fact’ of his geographic imagination, we learn that he read up on the Haitian Revolution to learn about guerilla warfare and also, somewhat surprisingly, that his troop read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason to pass the time (151). Du Bois rejects with some heat the idea that Brown’s plan was from the beginning silly or amateur and destined to pitiful failure. Brown had experience fighting, he knew the terrain, and it was indeed plausible that a well financed guerilla could operate in the Alleghenies striking into the “great black way” of the Shenandoah. That the raid on Harper’s Ferry failed is not itself evidence that it was stupidly or naively conceived.

Although it is not exactly ever said, we understand clearly that the author agrees with Frederick Douglass that Brown’s plan was not likely to succeed. Douglass, Du Bois clearly thinks, was correct that in the end, “only national force could dislodge national slavery” (175). Still, Du Bois emphasizes the final meeting between Douglass and Brown, in which Shields Green, a recent runaway, chooses Brown over Douglass. He cites at length from Douglass’ later recounting of the moment,

“Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved…my discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course. When about to leave, I asked Green what he had decided to do, and was surprised by his coolly saying, in his broken way, ‘I b’lieve I’ll go wid de old man.’ Here we separated” (149).

Du Bois returns to this later on, in his evaluative chapter. He says, “As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro race. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan” (175). For all that this book might be called hagiography, Du Bois is perfectly willing to go further than this. The black people who had made it to Canada, with whom Brown was in communication, who he tried to enlist in his band—they knew what slavery was, and what the plantation was, in a way that John Brown, for all his moral firmness, simply could not. And, then, as Du Bois says, “was not their whole life already a sacrifice?” (176). These are hard questions, and it seems to me that Du Bois says what he can, and leaves a great deal up to historical contingency. What if the plan had gone off earlier, as it would have without the interference of Hugh Forbes? It would have had a wider support base among anti-slavery circles, there would have been more on-the-ground support. What if Brown had avoided being trapped in Harper’s Ferry, had made it up into the mountains to start his guerilla war? As it was—and this was important for Du Bois to emphasize in 1909—a number of free blacks did join, and a number of enslaved people did help in the heat of the moment. It mattered, after all, to Du Bois that black men and women (principally, in this narrative, Harriet Tubman) could be the agents of their own emancipation—this is one of the big interventions of Black Reconstruction.

Certainly I am not a historian of the US in the 19th century, so there is much that I’m unable to judge in this book. But I have at least some interest in revolutionary radicals, and it seems to me that Brown and his cohort should be included in any survey of international 19th century revolutionists. He studied Toussaint, he sought advice (although apparently he shouldn’t have) from a man who marched with Mazzini. He was part of the 19th century Revolutionary tradition. One might cite as evidence of this the somewhat bizarre, at least to me, convention called in order to draft a constitutional framework for “the government of a band of isolated people fighting for liberty” (131). Interesting, also, from a more contemporary point of view, is Du Bois’ reproduction of debate over the flag to be flown by this group. Despite some objections, especially from former slaves, Brown insisted that the guerilla should fly the Stars and Stripes (127-133). More difficult to square, I think, with the European Revolutionary tradition with which I’m more familiar is Brown’s religious fundamentalism. He was an anti-slavery egalitarian, indeed—but from his own point of view, he was absolutely engaged in a religious war.

And here is what, in the end, I find so compelling, what I so much want to worry over, about Brown today. It would be difficult today to deny the values, from a certain point of view, for which he fought. Human equality and freedom are so much the definitive words of our political idiom that they are in real danger of being totally voided of meaning. So we can only applaud a struggle in their name. Yet, I think, we cannot avoid the fact that Brown was essentially a militant fundamentalist terrorist. The violence in Kansas seemed to be settling the question in favor of the slave-holders. Indeed, it seemed that peace and at least formal, although absolutely not real, democracy was about to be established. It was at this juncture, if I understand correctly, that in order to push the situation in the better direction, Brown took a group of men out to a settlement that was a hotbed of pro-slavery activity, and began knocking on doors. He had the man of the house dragged outside, taken a little ways away into the woods, and cut down with broadswords. This was repeated at several houses. There is a ritualistic aspect to this violence. It was, in a real sense, blood expiation for the crime of slavery.

Du Bois repeats in several places the somewhat ungainly catchphrase, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression” (195), and calls this Brown’s great lesson for ‘our time.’ Really, though, it is only on the very last page of the book that Du Bois gets to the moral and historical claim at the heart of John Brown’s life, at least as he’d written it. Finally he says, “John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost to-day” (201). This is the temporal fix, this is the anti-liberal claim of the revolutionary at its purest: not tomorrow, today. Without action it will be worse tomorrow, not better.

Edward Said, I think, wrote one of his very last books on the ‘late work,’ that is, works of art made not long before the artist died. Here are John Brown’s last written words, set down the day the state of Virginia hung him: “I, John brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done” (186).

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I am reading from the 1997 edition under the care of John David Smith in the ‘American History Though Literature’ series. I wish very much that I had the newer edition made for the ongoing Du Bois complete works project. For one thing, the Smith edition—and I blame the publisher not Smith—has a terribly large number of typos. ‘John brown’ is an especially common and egregious one. If I had time, I would look at the Sanborn letters, the more recent Oates biography and/or the much more recent Reynolds one. But I haven’t looked into this much at all yet.

Jeffersonian apocalypse

In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, & shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue & embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.

The Jefferson quote above (from a letter to the representative of the US government in France, dated Jan 3, 1793), given in more length than is usual, displays a range of justifications for the violence then underway in France. Politics is a battle, and people die. The violence was committed for a noble cause, “the liberty of the whole earth,” one for which those who perished would have been glad to make the sacrifice. And, anyway, “was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” But then, as though it was a necessary consequence of the need to overcome his own affective suffering in the face of the instrumentalist logic and the impossible goal he had just invoked, Jefferson’s language becomes apocalyptic. Rather than a few hallowed martyrs, he now speaks of desolating half the earth—and more—the revolutionaries would be justified, like the wrathful God of the Old Testament, in destroying humanity and starting over. It is enough to make one think that there is, perhaps, a terrible destructive logic wrapped up in 18th century natural right doctrines.

Zizek's Violence

Zizek’s short book Violence (2008) begins with a series of distinctions and delimitations in order to bring into view his proper object.  He distinguishes first between subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is the immediate physical, physiological, experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1).  In contradistinction to this is objective violence, which is distinguished into symbolic and systemic varieties.  Symbolic violence includes hate speech, the various hierarchies inscribed into our daily language (of gender, for instance), but also the “more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such” (2).  Systemic violence is the apparently straightforward designation for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2).  The whole point of the book, we are told, is to get away from the “inherently mystifying…direct confrontation” (3-4) with specific acts of subjective violence.  The crude political point is that acts of violence, be they bombings on American soil or genocides committed in a far away African country, are mediatized in such a way as to demand an immediate, and therefore partial, subjective, response.   Zizek’s goal, then, is to examine the background against which the ‘subjective’ violence is rendered just that, subjective rather than objective.  The point is not (only or centrally) to show, once again, that capitalism is built on the violence of expropriation, or that certain categories of individuals are systemically excluded from equal access to certain resources.  As Zizek elaborated at length in his Parallax View, it is the inescapable gap between the objective and subjective that is the space of the subject.  So the point here is to examine the mutual positioning of objective and subjective violence in order to understand what kind of a subject is situated there, and how a different one might arise. 

Put differently, Zizek is interested in sites of resistance.  For instance, in his discussion of tolerance, and the critique of it that sometimes emerges from postcolonial studies, his view of cultural difference is ruled by the consideration of political possibility.  He says,

The self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism.  One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice…Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.  However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here; form has an autonomy and efficacy of its own.  So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters—it opens up a space for critical reflection (147-8).

The point that Zizek wants to make, it seems to me, goes beyond the notion that a rhetoric can become a reality, that an appearance to be maintained can become a positive force for change.  He remains, I think, attached to the level of the subject.  He means something more like, without formal freedom, there will be no concrete freedom—but entirely in relation to the individual, not the society. 

This allows us to enter into the terrain that is generally upsetting for readers of Zizek.  For Zizek, the subject becomes free only in the moment of terror.  This moment is the juncture between subjective and objective.  The position here is in some sense a Hegelian one, of course, and a Lacanian one.  But it is more interesting to point out that it is Zizek’s way of suturing ethics into politics.

The key text examined in Violence is Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  The notion Zizek wants to explore is that of divine violence.  Although Zizek isn’t quite willing to say it, it seems to me that he identifies divine violence ultimately with the abyss of human freedom, or we might say more in his own terms, with the terror of the radical emptiness of the subject.  This is where he follows Lacan against Kant, “What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196).  Divine violence is Zizek’s way of discussing this same fact of freedom and possibility on the objective level.  Zizek cites a long passage from Benjamin’s “Critique,” and then asserts that divine violence is to be understood as the “domain of sovereignty” (198).  Divine violence is not law-making, but beyond law.  It is, one is tempted to say, immanent and therefore outside the realm of law.  Without law, no crime.  Hence, Zizek says, “It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life; whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory.  One should therefore not be afraid to assert the formal parallel between the state annihilation of homini sacer, for example the Nazi killing of the Jews, and the revolutionary terror, where one can also kill without committing a crime and without sacrifice” (199).  This passage has alarmed certain people.  Not without reason.  Zizek then goes on, quoting Benjamin, “Less possible and also less urgent [the implication is, than revolutionary/divine/pure violence itself] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases…”  He concludes from Benjamin’s warnings that the instance of divine violence (now fully transformed into revolutionary violence) is not really of the order of Being—and then, I think oddly, he goes on to say that it is rather of the order of Event.  This is odd because the identification, or rather the assertion, of the Event is absolutely crucial in Badiou’s scheme of things.  Zizek compares the event to the miracle that, although it might have empirically verifiable causes, remains for the believer a miracle.  Fine, but a sort of identification none the less plays a crucial role here. 

In the end, though, divine or revolutionary violence comes to have a fairly banal meaning for Zizek.  We might in Rancièrian language say that it is violence erupting from the part of no part, or in Badiou’s terms, from beside the void.  Of course these are not the same thing, and I think that Zizek does not want to exactly endorse either of them.  Rather, for him, divine violence is that which comes from those who are the constitutive outside of the capitalist system.  And here is where the split within the field of objective violence returns.  Divine violence is that which takes place when a subject has risen from subjective freedom into the simultaneous necessities of the symbolic and the structural.  The agent of divine violence is both existentially free (inside the imperious terror of baseless, necessary action), and objectively free (pinioned to the outside of the inflexible wheel of capital).  He says,

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision.  It is a decision (to kill, to risk or loose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.  If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence.  When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence.  Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets.  This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways (202).

This last sentence is a bit over the top, forced on Zizek by the example, and not entirely in keeping with the theoretical frame.  Or perhaps it suggests that underneath it all, the content inherited from Marx is in fact just an approach to the moral content of the global economy?

The very last move of Zizek’s book is remarkable, and I think suggests a serious and perhaps significant convergence between him and the authors of Commonwealth.  Zizek goes to Robespierre and Che Guevara, and the notion of revolutionary love.  Commenting on Robespierre, “divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: as such, its status is radically subjective, it is the subject’s work of love” (203), and then further at the end of the chapter, “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight; the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love” (205).  Here is the subjective, I think we must say ethical, side to the more familiar and comprehensive, the more apparently provocative but in fact conventional, claim of Zizek’s that Hitler was not violent enough.  The subject is asked to embrace their own radical brokenness, to assume the gap constitutive of others in an act of terribly violent love.  If this ethical act is accompanied by a genuinely radical politico-economic reconfiguration—if, to emphasize, the twin terrors of both symbolic and systemic objectivity can be assumed in the freedom of the subject—then we will have made revolution.

The second, 2009, edition of In Defense of Lost Causes contains an afterword entitled “What is Divine about Divine Violence?”  It is essentially a clarification and restatement of the ideas presented in Violence—indeed certain sections are simply word-for-word copies (it is also, incidentally, a venue for the continuation of Zizek’s polemic with Simon Critchley).  Although a few examples are operative here, a central one is Haiti.  Zizek follows Susan Buck-Morss in her Hegelian reading of the Revolution a certain distance, but stops at what he calls her “liberal limit” (471).  Her liberalism—and this is not a wrong definition of liberalism—amounts to a rejection of (most) revolutionary activity on the grounds that it will simply make things worse than they already are.  Revolution is thus to be avoided, to be treated as a fearful last resort.  Zizek firmly rejects this.  He suggests that we must, “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination” (471).  A familiar move.  From this perspective, “we should thus condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness” (472). Zizek has here the great virtue of stating his position in a clear and unambiguous manner. 

He is simply drawing necessary conclusions from his premises when he says that it is entirely possible and necessary to distinguish between the acts of violence committed by the Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier) and the chimères (Lavalas).  Precisely the same acts, the same mode of inflicting painful death on a human being, has objectively different meanings.  When a murder is committed by the chimères, for Zizek, “these desperate acts of violent popular self-defense are again examples of divine violence: they are to be located ‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.  Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (478).  He thus arrives at a “minimal definition of divine violence,” that is, “the counter-violence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (483).  Then, framing a distinction that is significantly different from the earlier one between emancipator/repressive violence, he says, “if mythic violence serves the state, divine violence doesn’t serve another, better, purpose (such as life) – it doesn’t serve anything, which is why it is divine” (484-5).  It is not too clear how this divine, purposeless violence, lines up with a revolutionary violence that is anti-repressive.  Perhaps the relationship is one of inclusion.  A struggle for freedom is not positive, but rather anti-repressive.  It is therefore not really to any positive purpose.  In this sense it is divine, even though Zizek also sees Nazi genocidal violence as basically divine, but not therefore revolutionary.  So some objective element must enter into the evaluation of purposeless, pure, violence, to distinguish that which is revolutionary from that which is not.  And here again, Zizek is at least very clear.  I think we can assume that the objective element that intervenes to assign violence into the mythic or the divine is the same as that which distinguishes divine-revolutionary from simply divine-sovereign violence.  This is the ethical commitment.  He says, returning to the Haitian example, “chimères and Tonton Macoutes may perform exactly the same act—lynching an enemy—but where the first act is divine, the second is only the ‘mythic’ obscene and illegal support of power.  The risk involved in reading or assuming an act as divine is fully the subject’s own” (485). 

That, I believe, is a fair presentation of what Zizek says about violence in these two recent texts.  My summary has of course had an element of evaluation and criticism, but an adequate contextualization of the arguments in the history of such arguments and in the contemporary political and theoretical contexts would be required to mount a proper critique of the corner into which Zizek has painted himself.  The major issue, it seems to me, is how to reconcile the above justification—or story about how to distinguish justifiable and non-justifiable acts of violence from one another—with what I take to be Zizek’s ‘positive’ political project of subtraction.  Is the analytic here worked out simply a way to think about that violence which is acceptable in pursuing and defending specific instances of subtraction?  Violence ceases to be revolutionary, divine, the moment that it becomes something the revolutionary government wields ‘so that the people do not do it themselves’?  This certainly is the case, but as a criterion it doesn’t go very far.  A fuller account of what Zizek means by subtractive, Bartleby-inspired, politics is required before one could move forward here.  And that’s for another day.   

Burn the manuscript

From the Chronicle, about the sit-ins at Columbia, and associated depredations (h/t to Cliopatria):

Like other faculty members, Ranum scrambled to stop the sit-ins. Unlike any of them, he did so in full academic regalia, climbing through the window of President Grayson Kirk's office, in Low Memorial Library, wearing, as usual, a flowing black gown.

"I did that as dramatically as I could," Ranum said. "I was in fine shape, and I was interested in the demonstrators as a political historian. To me the world is a laboratory to understand the past." Once inside Low, he concluded that Rudd, although a strong leader and a superb tactician, had only a limited grasp of issues, including the issue of whether it was legitimate to use violence to advance the radical cause.

"I explained that they should get out of there, that the possibility for their punishment would go up the longer they stayed, and, if they did get out now, this might be treated more as a prank than as a political act," Ranum told the university's oral-history project about a month later. "I held over their heads, as dramatically and forcefully as I could, the possibility of a counterrevolution at Columbia, and I said that the United States is a fundamentally liberal society but with politically conservative, authoritarian elements, and that, rather than accept a radicalized university, the society would snuff out the university—and that I for one would prefer the existing state to the totalitarian state which a counterrevolution would bring about."

Neither argument had any effect on the protesters, who believed that the people of Harlem were going to rise up and join the demonstration, turning a campus rebellion into a biracial revolt. To Ranum, that was fanciful thinking. The radicals, most of them upper-middle-class white kids, spoke a language most Harlem residents would find incomprehensible: the language of Marxism. They regarded the university as the "soft underbelly" of capitalism and believed shutting it down would provoke change. "They did not want to come out, I believe, except by the police," Ranum told the oral-history project. "They needed the issue of the police. They needed the issue of police brutality, further to radicalize the campus."

David B. Truman, the popular, energetic dean whom Kirk put in charge of handling the crisis, had come to the same conclusion. "Calling the police would have given the SDS the confrontation that for months and longer they had been seeking. It would also have activated the strong faculty aversion to having the police on campus," he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. When the police were finally called in, a week after the building occupations began, things went as disastrously as Truman had expected. More than 700 people were arrested, and nearly 150 were injured in the violence that accompanied the raid.

The raid produced an angry backlash against the university and generated enormous sympathy for the protesters. Rudd and the SDS chapter were propelled to national prominence, making them de facto leaders of the New Left. But the student members still faced suspension or expulsion for their role in the rebellion, and they had it in for Ranum, who, after meeting with them in Low Library, had put out a mimeographed statement saying that the only alternative to police action would be for the students occupying the buildings to seize control of the demonstration from SDS.

I'm interested here in the shifting emphasis and valuation of personal, in the most concrete, almost physiological sense--flowing robes, prestige--and quite abstracted political motives. Accusations of hypocrisy on one side, ambition and stupidity on the other; claims to political 'seriousness' on both. A professor getting out of place by giving political advice to students and students getting quite literally out of place (setting scholarship on fire). The soft underbelly of capitalism is at least as confused and 'ideological' an idea as the belief that reasoned discourse prevails in university administration. What a comfortingly ambiguous and meaningless footnote on the late 1960s.

Schlesinger on violence

For reasons having to do with dissertation research rather than contemporary politics, a friend of mine forwarded to me the text of a commencement speech given by Aurthur M. Schlesinger, jr. It was delivered in 1968, on the day Robert Kennedy was shot. The text I have was published in Harper’s magazine (August, 1968, pp. 19-24) under the title, "America 1968: The Politics of Violence," and is available in their (subscription only) archive. The bulk of the speech is devoted to criticizing those on the New Left—in particular Herbert Marcuse—who, Schlesinger says, have contributed to the creation of an environment in which violence, for instance assassination, seems like a good choice. Schlesinger is especially horrified by Marcuse’s rejection of free speech and ‘tolerance.’ For Schlesinger, it is the role of the “intellectual community” to be the custodians of reasoned debate, and the intellectuals of the New Left are going down a disastrous path in rejecting this traditionally leftist role. Here are some extracts, not selected to be representative.

The world today is asking a terrible question—a question which every citizen of this Republic should be putting to himself: what sort of people are we, we Americans?

And the answer which much of the world is bound to return is that we are today the most frightening people on this planet.

...

We cannot blame our epidemic of murder abroad on the wickedness of those who will not conform to our views of how they should behave and how they should live. For the zeal with which we have pursued an irrational war suggests the internal impulses of hatred and violence demanding outlet and shaping our foreign policy to their ends.

We must recognize that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark, intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as if a primal curse had been fixed on our nation, perhaps when we first began the practice of killing and enslaving those whom we deemed our inferiors because their skin was another color. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.

We are also, at our best, a generous and idealistic people. Our great leaders—Lincoln most of all—have perceived both the destructive instinct and the moral necessity of transcending destruction if we are going to have any sort of rational and decent society. They have realized how fragile the membranes of our civilization are, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composition, so tense in its interior relationships, so cunningly enmeshed in underground fears and antagonisms, so entrapped by history in the ethos of violence.

...

We can no longer regard harder and violence as accidents and aberrations, as nightmares which will pass away when we awake. We must see them as organic in our national past; we must confront them; we must uncover the roots of hatred and violence and, through self-knowledge, move toward self-control.

...

Let me make it clear that I am not talking about the student uprisings of recent weeks. I have no question that on balance the world stands to gain from student protest.

...

Surely there is little more pathetic than the view that violence in American society will benefit the left. A limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change; but, if the left, through the cult of the deed, helps create an atmosphere which destroys the process of democracy itself, the winners will be those who use violence best, and they will be on the right.

Harper’s, in their October issue, published two letters objecting to so much as the publication of this speech, and one short one praising it. Harper’s stands accused by Harley McAdams of having “assisted this most pompous of our ‘intellectuals’ in another one of his fatuous diatribes thinly disguised as an analysis of violence.” John Van Laer, on the other hand, with an appointment in the Psychology department at Hunter College, says, “if there is any national sickness today, its most dramatic symptom is the universal outcry that unthinkingly fastens the blame for every hideous act of some demented Arab irredentist, Bulgarian refugee, Czech defector, or Cuban extremist on American society and institutions.”