The Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and its Fate After the Cold War

289 Pages·2013·3.73 MB·English

by  Artemy Magun

Negative Revolution
About the Series

The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an ongoing
dialogue between contemporary European philosophy and political theory. Following
Hannah Arendt’s and Leo Strauss’s repeated insistence on the qualitative distinction
between political theory and political philosophy, the series showcases the lessons
each discipline can draw from the other. One of the most significant outcomes
of this dialogue is an innovative integration of 1) the findings of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis,
and deconstruction (to name but a few salient currents) and 2) classical as well
as modern political concepts, such as sovereignty, polity, justice, constitution,
statehood, self-determination, etc. In many instances, the volumes in the series both
re-conceptualize age-old political categories in light of contemporary philosophical
theses and find broader applications for the ostensibly non- or apolitical aspects of
philosophical inquiry. In all cases, political thought and philosophy are featured
as equal partners in an interdisciplinary conversation, the goal of which is to bring
about a greater understanding of today’s rapidly changing political realities.
The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Other volumes in the series include:
Deconstructing Zionism by Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala
Heidegger on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback,
Michael Marder and Peter Trawny
The Metaphysics of Terror by Rasmus Ugilt
The Voice of Conscience by Mika Ojakangas
Negative Revolution

Modern Political Subject and its Fate
After the Cold War
Artemy Magun
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
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First published 2013
© Artemy Magun, 2013
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eISBN: 978-1-4411-2920-8
Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Contents

Introduction 1
The situation 1
The definition 4
The word and the concept 6
Objections 11
On this book 12
1 The Russian Anti-Communist Revolution (1985–99) and
the French Revolution (1789–99) 15
The Russian anti-communist revolution 15
The Russian anti-communist revolution and the French Revolution 45
Melancholia: Its definition and its sources 59
Conclusion 71
2 What Does It Mean to Say “No”? Theories of Negativity 73
Introduction 73
Negativity in philosophy 82
Negativity and politics 117
Conclusion: Negativity and revolution 125
3 Theories of Revolution 127
Kant’s theory of revolution 127
Hölderlin on revolution: Leisure and reversal 170
Hegel on the French Revolution: Kings and cabbages 187
Marx’s negative revolution 193
Sorel and Benjamin: Critique of pure negation 201
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The impasse of the passage 209
Badiou and the negativity of revolution 229
Conclusion 238
Conclusion 241
Notes 245
Index 277

Introduction

The situation
This book tries to address the history and theory of revolution from a contemporary
standpoint, which is not the most encouraging perspective. Revolutions do happen,
and happen very often. However, they are viewed less as world-historical events and
more as part of the long historical process of democratization and liberalization.
Not that this is entirely wrong, but first of all, a “liberal,” “velvet,” “minimal,” or
“catching up” revolution is insufficient to ground and legitimize the late modern state
which is, essentially, a postrevolutionary state. It is also too weak to give negative
and/or utopian energies to a human subject living in this state: a subject whose
moral responsibility and methodic rationality is implied by the organization of our
sociopolitical regimes.
The good news contained in this book, is that perhaps revolutionary energy is still
present in these new revolutions, in spite of their failure to produce a genuine historical
break or a long-term democratic engagement. But, it is present negatively. Negativity
contains a particular latency: we tend to ignore our negative activity, as it is, in a sense,
a part of what we negate. Therefore, a revolution that is fully negative appears to be
disappointing: where are the noble ideals, utopias, quasi-religious creeds, etc. But, as I
will show, negativity is not only the boring, unproductive crumbling of things, it also
bears a positive, though unstable, being within itself. All great historical revolutions
have taken the form of violent breaks with the past—even though incomplete. It is
hard to say whether hope and imagination did actually prevail over saturation and
exhaustion which made the people, in 1989 or 1917, say “enough” to the authorities
and go to war against them.
Today, after two years (2011–12) of major revolutions and protest movements
throughout the world, there is hope and promise, on the one hand, but on the
other, there is the awareness that, following already established patterns, protests in
the developed countries of the “core” happen on a large scale but are innocuous for
the regime, whereas protests in the semi-periphery lead to violent revolutions and
give power to the people, only to produce a paralyzing split between the nationalist
conservatives and the liberal Westernizers. Because these things happen regularly,
revolutions gradually start seeming to be internal institutions of the current global
political system and not historic breakthroughs.
2 Negative Revolution
In many ways, these events and questions were prefigured 20 years ago during the
spectacular downfall of the Eastern bloc, accompanied by the impressive outburst
of energy by the people, or by “civil society” as many then said. Then, like today,
age-old regimes and leaders crumbled, producing global euphoria through the
ease of transformation and emancipation from the past. This was true even though
no new programs or creative institutions were built as a result: all ended with the
cloning of Western constitutions and joining Western international organizations,
there was a slide to nationalist conservatism in those countries that also cloned
Western constitutions but were never co-opted into the “West.” There followed, in
most postsocialist countries, a large-scale disengagement of masses from politics,
which meant that revolutions were not preserved in any sort of seriously democratic
institutions. Why do people tend to abandon the live universal after its triumphant
victory over dead letter regimes? This book explores this problem, which it translates
as the problem of negativity.
This book applies the philosophy of negativity and the theories of revolution to a
concrete historical case: the fall and transformation of the Soviet regime. I defend and
develop the following thesis: the event of the dissolution of the “socialist” regime in
the Soviet Union, which began in 1985 and ended in the late 1990s–early 2000s by the
consolidation of an authoritarian capitalist regime, strangely perhaps, is to be called a
revolution. In its political and philosophical significance, this event belongs to a line
of political revolutions that have been shattering the Western world since, at the very
least, the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The
sequence of events and the politico-anthropological situation in post-Soviet Russia
corresponds, in its basic traits, to the internal logic of past revolutions. My task is,
however, not to classify the current event according to this or that scheme but to show
that it is part of a single, unique—but open and incomplete—event of the European
revolution. The history of revolutions is neither a recurrent reproduction of identical
phenomena nor (as in the vulgar Marxist model) a gradual sequence of progressive
“stages.” It presents us with a series of emancipatory movements, each of which fails to
reach its ultimate goal, each of which stumbles in the middle of its course, only to be
resurrected and radicalized by a new historical wave which stumbles again and flows
back with all its unrealized might.
This new conceptual perspective on the current historical moment implies yet
another, symmetrical task: to redefine the concept of revolution as it appears from a
contemporary point of view. To redefine does not mean to arbitrarily invest the old
word with a new meaning. The redefinition of revolution implies a return to earlier
theories and accounts of revolution in order to reveal aspects of the concept that have
been forgotten or misinterpreted in subsequent traditions—or downplayed already in
the original texts. One has, therefore, to reenact in theory what the revolution invokes
in practice—a return to the past, a little before the moment (or moments) when history
took a “wrong” turn.
At the same time, one must consider the developing logic of the history of
revolutions. Revolutions at the end of the twentieth century were, as I will show,
“negative,” both in their radical denial of the past and in their denial of this denial: the
Introduction 3
negativity involved in these revolutions overflowed and extrapolated itself to negate
these revolutions and the very subject who accomplished it. From today’s stanpoint,
prior revolutions appear to be in many ways “negative” too. At the same time, the
current negativity of revolutions is also a result of their historical development, from
the past to the present.
The negativity of the anti-communist revolutions is explained by the fact that
they were “revolutions against revolutions” and that therefore, following the famous
Hegelian mechanism of “negation of negation,” they set free the negative element
that had been present in the revolution through its replay. Thus, from a negation of
something positive that the “first” revolution carried with it, we have come, through
revolutionizing the revolution itself, to seeing it as pure negativity. However, in contrast
to Hegel’s narrative, we see that in our case, there is nothing to rejoice about. Pure
negativity does not institutionalize itself qua positivity but remains negative, thus
producing an irrational self-humiliation of the political subject, skepticism and
cynicism in the public sphere, and the unconscious status of the very revolutionary
event that is taking place.
Revolution against a revolution is a form of reflection. People who revolutionized
in Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century knew what the revolution
was about, and, although they did not like it in principle, unwillingly followed
the revolutionary pattern. This, however, is not universal. There has been a new
phenomenon in the last 20 years. After a short period of embarrassment and
disorientation, democratic forces both in the West and in the periphery regained
power, so that the 2000s, surprisingly, was in fact a period of numerous large-scale
revolutions, revolutionary attempts, and protest movements. The latest (2011–12)
wave of events in the Middle East, United States, and Europe was probably the
peak of this tendency, but earlier we have seen “revolutions of color” in the former
socialist space, millions gathering on the streets to protest against the war in Iraq,
huge demonstrations in France, etc. However, what was significant for the actors and
observers of these revolutions was their very occurrence.1 The collective solidarity
and courage, the crumbling of a corrupt regime, and the possibility to watch this on
TV tend to become a goal in itself. This value of revolution as such also corresponds
to the theoretical perspectives on revolution: from Hannah Arendt to Badiou. Thus,
we deal also with a reflexive revolution, the one that constitutes a mirror image
of the negative revolution that I first described. In both cases, the form abstracts
itself from the content, and revolution appears as such: negatively, in the first case,
positively, in the second. However, if the negative revolution is, paradoxically, too
negative or negativist, so that it does not manage to achieve any positive results,
the reflexive “revolution for the sake of revolution” is not negative enough, and,
though rejoicing in the streams of desire and games of self-organization, it does
not contest society’s dominant values, such as moralism and pacifism in the late
bourgeois regimes.
Although this book is dedicated to the former, negative kind of reflexive revolutions,
one needs to keep in mind the more recent affirmative type of reflexive revolution
throughout the analysis.