fiat iustitia et pereat mundus

Slavoj Žižek - Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?

2012-01-03T07:10:00.001+01:00

The main feature of historical thought proper is not ‘mobilism’ (the motif of the flu-

idification or historical relativization of all forms of life), but the full endorsement of a

certain impossibility: after a true historical break, one simply cannot return to the past,

one cannot go on as if nothing happened—if one does it, the same practice acquires a

radically changed meaning. Adorno provided a nice example with Schoenberg’s aton-

al revolution: after it took place, one can, of course, (and one does) go on composing

in the traditional tonal way, but the new tonal music has lost its innocence, since it is

already ‘mediated’ by the atonal break and thus functions as its negation. This is why

there is an irreducible element of kitsch in the twentieth century tonal composers like

Rachmaninov—something of a nostalgic clinging to the past, of an artificial fake, like

the adult who tries to keep alive the naïve child in him. And the same goes for all do-

mains: after the emergence of philosophical analysis of notions with Plato, mythical

thought lost its immediacy, all revival of it is a fake; after the emergence of Christian-

ity, all revivals of paganism are a nostalgic fake.

Writing/thinking/composing as if a Rupture didn’t occur is more ambiguous

than it may appear and cannot be reduced to a non-historical denial. Badiou once

famously wrote that what unites him with Deleuze is that they are both classic phi-

losophers for whom Kant, the Kantian break, didn’t happen—but is it so? Maybe

this holds for Deleuze, but definitely not for Badiou.1 Nowhere is this clearer than in

their different handling of the Event. For Deleuze, an Event effectively is a pre-Kan-

tian cosmological One which generates multitude, which is why Event is absolutely

immanent to reality, while the Badiouian Event is a break in the order of being (tran-

scendentally constituted phenomenal reality), an intrusion into it of a radically het-

erogeneous (‘noumenal’) level, so that we are clearly in (post-)Kantian space. This is

why one can even define Badiou’s systematic philosophy (developed in his last mas-

terpiece Logics Of Worlds) as Kantianism reinvented for the epoch of radical contin-

gency: instead of one transcendentally-constituted reality, we get the multiplicity of

worlds, each delineated by its transcendental matrix, a multiplicity which cannot be

mediated/unified into a single larger transcendental frame; instead of the moral Law,

we get fidelity to the Truth-Event which is always specific with regard to a particu-

lar situation of a World.

Is Hegel’s speculative idealism not the exemplary case of such a properly historical

impossibility? Can one still be a Hegelian after the post-Hegelian break with tradition-

al metaphysics which occurred more or less simultaneously in the works of Schopen-

hauer, Kierkegaard and Marx? After this break, is there not something inherently false

in advocating a Hegelian ‘absolute Idealism’? Is, then, any re-affirmation of Hegel not

a victim of the same anti-historical illusion, by-passing the impossibility to be a Hege-

lian after the post-Hegelian break, writing as if the post-Hegelian break did not hap-

pen? Here, however, one should complicate things a little bit: in some specific condi-

tions, one can and should write as if a break didn’t happen—in what conditions? To

put it simply and directly: when the break we are referring to is not the true break but

a false break, the one which obliterates the true break, the true point of impossibility.

Our wager is that this, precisely, is what happened with the ‘official’ post-Hegelian an-

ti-philosophical break (Schopenhauer-Kierkegaard-Marx): although it presents itself

as a break with idealism as embodied in its Hegelian climax, it ignores the crucial di-

mension of Hegel’s thought, i.e., it ultimately amounts to a desperate attempt to go on

thinking as if Hegel did not happen—the hole of this absence of Hegel is, of course, filled in

with the ridiculous caricature of Hegel the ‘absolute idealist’ who ‘possessed absolute

Knowledge’. The re-assertion of Hegel’s speculative thought is thus not what it may ap-

pear to be, the denial of the post-Hegelian break, but the bringing-forth of the dimen-

sion whose denial sustains the post-Hegelian break itself.

HEGEL VERSUS NIETZSCHE

Let us develop this point apropos Gerard Lebrun’s posthumously published L’envers de

la dialectique2, one of the most convincing and forceful attempts to demonstrate the im-

possibility of being Hegelian today—and, for Lebrun, ‘today’ stands under the sign of

Nietzsche.

Lebrun accepts that one cannot ‘refute’ Hegel: the machinery of Hegel’s dialectics

is so all-encompassing that nothing is easier for Hegel than to demonstrate triumphant-

ly how all such refutations are inconsistent, to turn them against themselves—‘one can-

not refute an eye disease’, as Lebrun quotes approvingly Nietzsche. Most ridiculous

among such critical refutations is, of course, the standard Marxist-evolutionist idea

that there is a contradiction between Hegel’s dialectical method which demonstrates

how every fixed determination is swiped away by the movement of negativity, how ev-

ery determinate shape finds its truth in its annihilation, and Hegel’s system: if the des-

tiny of everything is to pass away in the eternal movement of self-sublation, doesn’t the

same hold for the system itself? Isn’t Hegel’s own system a temporary, historically-rel-

ative, formation which will be overcome by the progress of knowledge? Anyone who

finds such refutation convincing is not to be taken seriously as a reader of Hegel.

How, then, can one move beyond Hegel? Lebrun’s solution is Nietzschean histor-

ical philology: one should bring to light the ‘eminently infra-rational’ lexical choices,

takings of sides, which are grounded in how living beings are coping with threats to

their vital interests. Before Hegel set in motion his dialectical machinery which ‘swal-

lows’ all content and elevates it to its truth by destroying it in its immediate being, im-

perceptibly a complex network of semantic decisions has already been taken. In this

way, one begins to ‘unveil the obverse of the dialectics. Dialectics is also partial. It also

obfuscates its presuppositions. It is not the meta-discourse it pretends to be with regard

to the philosophies of ‘Understanding’’.3 Lebrun’s Nietzsche is decidedly anti-Heideg-

gerian: for Lebrun, Heidegger re-philosophizes Nietzsche by way of interpreting the

Will to Power as a new ontological First Principle. More than Nietzschean, Lebrun’s

approach may appear Foucauldian: what Lebrun tries to provide is the ‘archaeology

of the Hegelian knowledge’, its genealogy in concrete life-practices.

But is Lebrun’s ‘philological’ strategy radical enough in philosophical terms? Does

it not amount to a new version of historicist hermeneutics or, rather, of Foucauldi-

an succession of epochal episteme? Does this not—if not legitimize, at least—make

understandable Heidegger’s re-philosophication of Nietzsche? That is to say, one

should raise the question of the ontological status of the ‘power’ which sustains par-

ticular ‘philological’ configurations—for Nietzsche himself, it is the will to power; for

Heidegger, it is the abyssal game of ‘there is’ which ‘sends’ different epochal configu-

rations of the disclosure of the world. In any case, one cannot avoid ontology: histori-

cist hermeneutics cannot stand on its own. Heidegger’s history of Being is an attempt

to elevate historical (not historicist) hermeneutics directly into transcendental ontolo-

gy: there is for Heidegger nothing behind or beneath what Lebrun calls infra-rational

semantic choices, they are the ultimate fact/horizon of our being. Heidegger, however,

leaves open what one might call the ontic question: there are obscure hints all around

his work of ‘reality’ which persists out there prior to its ontological disclosure. That is to

say, Heidegger in no way equates the epochal disclosure of Being with any kind of ‘cre-

ation’—he repeatedly concedes as an un-problematic fact that, even prior to their ep-

ochal disclosure or outside it, things somehow ‘are’ (persist) out there, although they do

not yet ‘exist’ in the full sense of being disclosed ‘as such’, as part of a historical world.

But what is the status of this ontic persistence outside ontological disclosure?4

From the Nietzschean standpoint, there is more in the ‘infra-rational’ semantic de-

cisions than the fact that every approach to reality has to rely on a pre-existing set of

hermeneutic ‘prejudices’ or, as Heidegger would have put it, on a certain epochal dis-

closure of being: these decisions effectuate the pre-reflexive vital strategy of the Will to

Power. To such an approach, Hegel remains a profoundly Christian thinker, a nihil-

ist thinker whose basic strategy is to revamp a profound defeat, a withdrawal from full

life in all its painful vitality, as the triumph of the absolute Subject. That is to say, from

the standpoint of the Will to Power, the effective content of the Hegelian process is one

long story of defeats and withdrawals, of the sacrifices of vital self-assertion: again and

again, one has to renounce vital engagement as still ‘immediate’ and ‘particular’. Ex-

emplary is here Hegel’s passage from the revolutionary Terror to the Kantian morali-

ty: the utilitarian subject of the civil society, the subject who wants to reduce the State

to the guardian of his private safety and well-being, has to be crushed by the Terror of

the revolutionary State which can annihilate him at any moment for no reason what-

soever (which means that the subject is not punished for something he did, for some

particular content or act, but for the very fact of being an independent individual op-

posed to the universal)—this Terror is his ‘truth’. So how do we pass from revolution-

ary Terror to the autonomous and free Kantian moral subject? By what, in more con-

temporary language, one would have called full identification with the aggressor: the

subject should recognize in the external Terror, in this negativity which threatens all

the time to annihilate him, the very core of his (universal) subjectivity, i.e., he should

fully identify with it. Freedom is thus not freedom from Master, but a replacement of

one Master with another: the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The

price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all ‘pathological’ particular

content—duty should be accomplished ‘for the sake of duty’.

Lebrun demonstrates how this same logic holds also for language: ‘State and lan-

guage are two complementary figures of the Subject’s accomplishment: here as well as

there, the sense that I am and the sense that I enounce are submitted to the same im-

perceptible sacrifice of what appeared to be our ‘self’ in the illusion of immediacy’.5 He-

gel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the

universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in

the concrete life-world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I

am no longer the sensually-concrete I, since I am caught into an impersonal mecha-

nism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as

the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This

is one of the ways to understand what Lacan called ‘symbolic castration’: the price the

subject pays for its ‘transubstantiation’ from the agent of a direct animal vitality to the

speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.

A Nietzschean reading easily discerns in this reversal of Terror into autonomous

morality a desperate strategy of turning defeat into triumph: instead of heroically fight-

ing for one’s vital interests and stakes, one pre-emptively declares total surrender, gives

up all content. Lebrun is here well aware how unjustified is the standard critique of

Hegel according to which the dialectical reversal of the utter negativity into new high-

er positivity, of the catastrophe into triumph, functions as a kind of deux ex machina, pre-

cluding the possibility that the catastrophe remains the final outcome of the process—

the well-known common sense argument: ‘But what if there is no reversal of negativity

into a new positive order?’ This argument misses the point, which is that this, precise-

ly, is what happens in the Hegelian reversal: there is no effective reversal of defeat into

triumph but only a purely formal shift, change of perspective, which tries to present

defeat itself as a triumph. Nietzsche’s point is that this triumph is a fake, a cheap magi-

cian’s trick, a consolation-prize for losing all that makes life worth living: the real loss

of vitality is supplemented by a lifeless spectre. To Lebrun’s Nietzschean reading, Hegel

thus appears as a kind of atheist Christian philosopher: like Christianity, he locates the

‘truth’ of all terrestrial finite reality into its (self)annihilation i.e., all reality reaches its

truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that

there is no Other World in which we would be repaid for our terrestrial losses: tran-

scendence is absolutely immanent, what is ‘beyond’ finite reality is nothing but the immanent

process of its self-overcoming. Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence

is ‘absolute negativity’, as he makes it clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of

Master and Servant: the Servant’s secured particular/finite identity is unsettled when,

in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets the

whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced

to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self:

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or
that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sov-
ereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled
throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This
complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability
into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, abso-
lute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of
consciousness.6

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his par-

ticular Self? Nothing—in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does

not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and

recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which

threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the

very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that

threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of

his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only

‘greatness’ there is is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is

not that the suffering brought about by alienating labour of renunciation is an inter-

mediary moment to pass, so that we should just endure it and patiently wait for the re-

ward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for

our patient submission, suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that is to

be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our

finite Self with its ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Self to universality. This is also

how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: ‘One says that

tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reali-

ty, it disappears simply because it is superfluous’.7 It becomes superfluous when people

no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular

interests, but when they become ‘universal citizens’ by directly identifying the core of

their being with this universality—in short, people no longer need the external master

when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves.

The obverse of Hegel’s ‘nihilism’ (all finite/determinate forms of life reach their

‘truth’ in their self-overcoming) is its apparent opposite: in continuity with the Platonic

metaphysical tradition, he is not ready to give its full right to negativity, i.e., his dialec-

tics is ultimately an effort to ‘normalize’ the excess of negativity. For late Plato already,

the problem was how to relativize-contextualize non-being as a subordinate moment

of being (non-being is always a particular/determinate lack of being measured by the

fullness it fails to actualize, there is no non-being as such, there is always only ‘green’

which participates in non-being by not being ‘red’ or any other colour, etc.). In the

same vein, Hegelian ‘negativity’ serves to ‘proscribe absolute difference’ or ‘non-be-

ing’8: negativity is constrained to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determina-

tions. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction

of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/

maintained/elevated, posited in their ‘truth’ as ideal notional determinations. What

remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional

structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no:

a no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, a no of struggle which

aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation.

STRUGGLE AND RECONCILIATION

This brings us to back to the incompatibility between Hegel’s thought and any kind of

evolutionary or historicist ‘mobilism’: Hegel’s dialectics excludes all ‘mobilism’, it ‘in no

way involves the recognition of the irresistible force of becoming, the epopee of a flux

which takes everything with it’:

The Hegelian dialectics was often—but superficially—assimilated to a mobilism. And it is
undoubtedly true that the critique of the fixity of determinations can give rise to the con-
viction of an infinite dialectical process: the limited being has to disappear again and al-
ways, and its destruction extends to the very limit of our sight …. However, at this level,
we are still dealing with a simple going-on (Geschehen) to which one cannot confer the in-
ner unity of a history (Geschichte).9

To see this, to thoroughly reject the ‘mobilist’ topic of the eternal flux of Becoming

which dissolves all fixed forms, is the first step towards dialectical reason in its radical

incompatibility with the allegedly ‘deep’ insight into how everything comes out of the

primordial Chaos and is again swallowed by it, the Wisdom which persists from an-

cient cosmologies up to the Stalinist dialectical materialism. The most popular form of

‘mobilism’ is the traditional view of Hegel as the philosopher of ‘eternal struggle’ pop-

ularized by Marxists from Engels to Stalin and Mao: the well-known ‘dialectical’ no-

tion of life as an eternal conflict between reaction and progress, old and new, past and

future. This belligerent view which advocates our engagement on the ‘progressive’ side

is totally foreign to Hegel, for whom ‘taking sides’ is as such illusory (since it is by def-

inition unilateral). Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests

Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the ‘truth’ of the engaged positions emerges

through it, i.e., how the warring parties are ‘reconciled’ through their mutual destruc-

tion. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honour, victory, defence, etc., but the

emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of

the false stability of our organized finite lives. War serves to elevate individuals to their

‘truth’ by making them obliterate their particular self-interests and identify with the

State’s universality. The true enemy is not the enemy we are fighting but our own fini-

tude—recall Hegel’s acerbic remark on how it is easy to preach the vanity of our finite

terrestrial existence, but much more difficult to accept this lesson when it is enforced

by a wild enemy soldier who breaks into our home and starts to cut members of our

family with a sabre ….

In philosophical terms, Hegel’s point is here the primacy of ‘self-contradiction’

over external obstacle (or enemy). We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our

activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles

because we are finite and inconsistent. In other words, what the subject engaged in a

struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the mate-

rialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the fighting subject needs the fig-

ure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges

on his opposing the enemy, so that his (eventual) victory over the enemy is his own de-

feat, disintegration. As Hegel likes to put it, fighting the external enemy, one (unknow-

ingly) fights one’s own essence. So, far from celebrating engaged fighting, Hegel’s point

is rather that every struggling position, every taking-sides, has to rely on a necessary

illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realiza-

tion of my being). This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion

of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent

constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which pre-

vents your full realization)—the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire

identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology

is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly the Fascist anti-Semitism as the

most elementary form of ideology, one is even tempted to say: ideology as such, kat’

exochen. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, this foreign intruder who disturbs and cor-

rupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishist objectivization, a stand-

in, for the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order, for the immanent antagonism (‘class strug-

gle’) which generates the dynamic of the social system’s instability.

Hegel’s interest in the topic of struggle, of the ‘conflict of the opposites’, is thus that

of the neutral dialectical observer who discerns the ‘Cunning of Reason’ at work in

struggle: a subject engages in struggle, is defeated (as a rule in his very victory), and

this defeat brings him to his truth. We can measure here clearly the distance that separates

Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to re-

suscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat, they

are all gone—the ‘truth’ of the struggle only emerges in and through defeat.

This is why the standard Marxist denunciation of the falsity of the Hegelian rec-

onciliation (already made by Schelling) misses the point. According to this critique, the

Hegelian reconciliation is false, it occurs only in the Idea, while real antagonisms per-

sist—in the ‘concrete’ experience of the ‘real life’ of individuals who cling to their par-

ticular identity, state power remains an external compulsion. Therein resides the crux

of the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political thought: Hegel presents the modern

constitutional monarchy as a rational State in which antagonisms are reconciled, as an

organic Whole in which every constituent (can) find(s) its proper place, but he thereby

obfuscates the class antagonism which continues in modern societies, generating the

working class as the ‘non-reason of the existing Reason’, as the part of modern society

which has no proper part in it, as its ‘part of no-part’ (Rancière).

What Lebrun rejects in this critique is not its diagnosis (that the proposed recon-

ciliation is dishonest, false, an ‘enforced reconciliation’ [erpresste Versoehnung—the title of

one of Adorno’s essay] which obfuscates the antagonisms’ continuous persistence in so-

cial reality): ‘what is so admirable in this portrait of the dialectician rendered dishonest

by his blindness is the supposition that he could have been honest’10. In other words,

instead of rejecting the Hegelian false reconciliation, one should reject as illusory the

very notion of dialectical reconciliation, i.e., one should renounce the demand for a

‘true’ reconciliation. Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real

suffering and antagonisms—his formulas of reconciliation from the foreword to his

Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present’,

or, to put it in Marx’s terms, in reconciliation, one does not change external reality to

fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of this miserable reality it-

self. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel only propos-

es its new interpretation, thus in a way misses the point—it knocks on an open door,

since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have

to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.

The same insight underlies Hegel’s analysis of the passage from labour to thought

in the subchapter on Master and Servant in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Lebrun is

fully justified in emphasizing, against Kojève, that Hegel is far from celebrating (col-

lective) labour as the site of the productive self-assertion of human subjectivity, as the

process of forceful transformation and appropriation of natural objects, their subordi-

nation to human goals. All finite thought remains caught in the ‘spurious infinity’ of

the never-ending process of the (trans)formation of objective reality which always re-

sists the full subjective grasp, so that the subject’s work is never done: ‘As an aggressive

activity deployed by a finite being, labour signals above all man’s impotence to inte-

grally take possession of nature’.11 This finite thought is the horizon of Kant and Fichte:

the endless practico-ethical struggle to overcome the external obstacles as well as the

subject’s own inner nature. Their philosophies are the philosophies of struggle, while

in Hegel’s philosophy, the fundamental stance of the subject towards objective reality

is not the one of practical engagement, of confrontation with the inertia of objectivity,

but the one of letting-it-be: purified of its pathological particularity, the universal sub-

ject is certain of itself, it knows that his thought already is the form of reality, so it can

renounce enforcing its project on reality, it can let reality be the way it is.

This is why labour gets all the more close to its truth the less I work to satisfy my

need, i.e., to produce an object I will consume. This is why industry which produces

for the market is spiritually ‘higher’ than production for one’s own needs: in market-

production, I manufacture objects with no relation to my needs. The highest form of

social production is therefore that of a merchant: ‘the merchant is the only one who

relates to the Good as a perfect universal subject, since the object in no way interests

him on behalf of its aesthetic presence or its use value, but only insofar as it contains a

desire of an other’.12 And this is also why, in order to arrive at the ‘truth’ of labour, one

should gradually abstract from the (external) goal it strives to realize. The parallel with

war is appropriate here: in the same way that the ‘truth’ of the military struggle is not

the destruction of the enemy, but the sacrifice of the ‘pathological’ content of the war-

rior’s particular Self, its purification into the universal Self, the ‘truth’ of labour as the

struggle with nature, its stuff, is also not victory over nature, it is not to compel nature

to serve human goals, but the self-purification of the labourer itself. Labour is simulta-

neously the (trans)formation of external objects and the disciplinary self-formation/ed-

ucation (Bildung) of the subject itself. Hegel here celebrates precisely the alienated and

alienating character of labour: far from being a direct expression of my creativity, la-

bour forces me to submit to artificial discipline, to renounce my innermost immediate

tendencies, to alienate myself from my natural Self:

Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby unalloyed feeling
of self. This satisfaction, however, just for that reason is itself only a state of evanescence,
for it lacks objectivity or subsistence. Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and
checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fash-
ions the thing.13

As such, labour prefigures thought, it achieves its telos in thinking which no longer

works on an external stuff, but is already its own stuff, or, which no longer imposes its

subjective/finite form onto external reality, but is already in itself the infinite form of

reality. For the finite thought, the concept of an object is a mere concept, the subjec-

tive goal one actualizes when, by way of labour, one imposes it onto reality. For the

speculative thought, on the contrary, thought is not merely subjective, it is in itself al-

ready objective, i.e., it renders the objective conceptual form of the object. This is why

the inner Spirit, certain of itself,

...no longer needs to form/shape nature and to render it spiritual in order to fixate the di-
vine and to make its unity with nature externally visible: insofar as the free thought thinks
externality, it can leave it the way it is (kann er es lassen wie er ist).14

This sudden retroactive reversal from not-yet to already-is (we never directly realize a
goal—we directly pass from striving to realize a goal to a sudden recognition that the
goal already is realized) is what distinguishes Hegel from all kinds of historicist topic, in-
clusive of the standard Marxist critical reproach that the Hegelian ideal reconciliation is
not enough, since it leaves reality (the real pain and suffering) the way it is, so that what is
needed is actual reconciliation through radical social transformation. For Hegel, the illu-
sion is not that of the enforced ‘false reconciliation’ which ignores the persisting divisions;
the true illusion resides in not seeing that, in what appear to us as the chaos of becoming,
the infinite goal is already realized:

Within the finite order, we cannot experience or see that the goal is truly achieved. The
accomplishment of the infinite goal resides only in overcoming the illusion (Taeuschung—
deception) that this goal is not yet achieved.15

In short, the ultimate deception is not to see that one already has what one is looking

for—like Christ’s disciples who were awaiting his ‘real’ reincarnation, blind for the fact

that their collective already was the Holy Spirit, the return of the living Christ.

A STORY TO TELL

How are we to counter this diagnosis of the ‘disease called Hegel’ which centres on the

dialectical reversal as the empty/formal gesture of presenting defeat as victory? The

first observation that imposes itself is, of course, that reading the ‘infra-rational’ se-

mantic choices as expressing a strategy of coping with obstacles to the assertion of life

is in itself already an ‘infra-rational’ semantic choice. But more important is to note

how such a reading subtly imposes a narrow version of Hegel which obliterates many

key dimensions of his thought. Is it not possible to read Hegel’s systematic ‘sublation’

of each and every shape of consciousness or social life-form as, precisely, the descrip-

tion of all possible life-forms, vital ‘semantic choices’, and of their inherent antagonisms

(‘contradictions’)?16 If there is a ‘semantic choice’ that underlies Hegel’s thought, it is

not the desperate wager that, retroactively, one will be able to tell a consistent all-en-

compassing meaningful story within which each detail will be allotted its proper place,

but, on the contrary, the weird certainty (comparable to the psychoanalyst’s certain-

ty that the repressed will always return, that a symptom will always spoil every fig-

ure of harmony) that, with every figure of consciousness or form of life, things will al-

ways somehow ‘go wrong’, that each position will generate an excess which will augur

its self-destruction.

Does this mean that Hegel does not advocate any determinate ‘semantic choice’,

since, for him, the only ‘truth’ is the very endless process of ‘generation of corruption’

of all determinate ‘semantic choices’? Yes, but on condition that we do not conceive

this process in the usual ‘mobilist’ sense.

How, then, does the truly historical thought break with such universalized ‘mobi-

lism’? In what precise sense is it historical and not simply the rejection of ‘mobilism’ on

behalf of some eternal Principles exempted from the flow of generation and corrup-

tion? Here, one should again differentiate historicity proper from organic evolution. In

the latter, a universal Principle is slowly and gradually differentiating itself; as such, it

remains the calm underlying all-encompassing ground that unifies the bustling activity

of struggling individuals, their endless process of generation and corruption that is the

‘cycle of life’. In history proper, on the contrary, the universal Principle is caught into

the ‘infinite’ struggle with itself, i.e., the struggle is each time the struggle for the fate of

the universality itself. This is why the eminently ‘historical’ moments are those of great

collisions when a whole form of life is threatened, when the reference to the established

social and cultural norms no longer guarantees the minimum of stability and cohesion;

in such open situations, a new form of life has to be invented, and it is at this point that

Hegel locates the role of great heroes. They operate in a pre-legal, stateless, zone: their

violence is not bound by the usual moral rules, they enforce a new order with the sub-

terranean vitality which shatters all established forms. According to the usual doxa on

Hegel, heroes follow their instinctual passions, their true motifs and goals are not clear

to themselves, they are unconscious instruments of the deeper historical necessity of

giving birth to a new spiritual life form—however, as Lebrun points out, one should

not impute to Hegel the standard teleological notion of a hidden Reason which pulls

the strings of the historical process, following a plan established in advance and using

individuals’ passions as the instruments of its implementation. First, since the mean-

ing of one’s acts is a priori inaccessible to individuals who accomplish them, heroes in-

cluded, there is no ‘science of politics’ able to predict the course of events: ‘nobody has

ever the right to declare himself depositary of the Spirit’s self-knowledge’17, and this im-

possibility ‘spares Hegel the fanaticism of ‘objective responsibility’’18—in other words,

there is no place in Hegel for the Marxist-Stalinist figure of the Communist revolution-

ary who knows the historical necessity and posits himself as the instrument of its imple-

mentation. However, it is crucial to add a further twist here: if we merely assert this im-

possibility, we are still ‘conceiving the Absolute as Substance, not as Subject’—we still

surmise that there is some pre-existing Spirit imposing its substantial Necessity on his-

tory, we just accept that the insight into this Necessity is inaccessible to us. From a con-

sequent Hegelian standpoint, one should go a crucial step further and realize that no

historical Necessity pre-exists the contingent process of its actualization, i.e., that the

historical process is also in itself ‘open’, undecided—this confused mixture ‘generates

sense insofar as it unravels itself’:

It is people, and they only, who make history, while Spirit explicates itself through this
making. […] The point is not, as in a naïve theodicy, to find a justification for every event.
In actual time, no heavenly harmony resonates in the sound and fury. It is only once this
tumult recollects itself in the past, once what took place is conceived, that we can say, to
put it briefly, that the ‘course of History’ is a little bit better outlined. History runs forward
only for those who look at it backwards; it is linear progression only in retrospect. […]
The Hegelian ‘providential necessity’ has so little authority that it seems as if it learns from
the run of things in the world which were its goals.19

This is how one should read Hegel’s thesis that, in the course of the dialectical devel-

opment, things ‘become what they are’: it is not that a temporal deployment merely

actualizes some pre-existing atemporal conceptual structure—this atemporal concep-

tual structure itself is the result of contingent temporal decisions. Let us take the exem-

plary case of a contingent decision whose outcome defines the agent’s entire life, Cae-

sar’s crossing of Rubicon:

It is not enough to say that crossing Rubicon is part of the complete notion of Caesar. One
should rather say that Caesar is defined by the fact that he crossed Rubicon. His life didn’t
follow a scenario written in the book of some goddess: there is no book which would al-
ready have contained the relations of Caesar’s life, for the simple reason that his life itself
is this book, and that, at every moment, an event is in itself its own narrative.20

But why shouldn’t we then say that there is simply no atemporal conceptual structure,

that all there is is the gradual temporal deployment? Here we encounter the proper-

ly dialectical paradox which defines true historicity as opposed to evolutionist histor-

icism, and which was much later, in French structuralism, formulated as the ‘prima-

cy of synchrony over diachrony’. Usually, this primacy was taken to mean the ultimate

denial of historicity in structuralism: a historical development can be reduced to the

(imperfect) temporal deployment of a pre-existing atemporal matrix of all possible

variations/combinations. This simplistic notion of the ‘primacy of synchrony over dia-

chrony’ overlooks the (properly dialectical) point, made long ago by (among others)

T.S. Eliot in his ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, on how each truly new artistic phe-

nomenon not only designates a break from the entire past, but retroactively chang-

es this past itself. At every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also

encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it—say, after the disintegration

of the Soviet Union in 1991, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical

event, i.e., it is (for the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a

new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastroph-

ic mis-direction of history which reached its end in 1991. Or, back to Caesar, once he

crossed Rubicon, his previous life appeared in a new way, as a preparation for his lat-

er world-historical role, i.e., it was transformed into the part of a totally different life-

story. This is what Hegel calls ‘totality’ or what structuralism calls ‘synchronic struc-

ture’: a historical moment which is not limited to the present but includes its own past

and future, i.e., the way the past and the future appeared to and from this moment.

It is, however, at this very point, after fully conceding Hegel’s radical break with

traditional metaphysical theodicy, that Lebrun’s makes his critical move. The funda-

mental Nietzschean strategy of Lebrun is first to admit the radicality of Hegel’s under-

mining of the traditional metaphysics, but then, in the crucial second step, to demon-

strate how this very radical sacrifice of the metaphysical content saves the minimal

form of metaphysics. The accusations which concern Hegel’s theodicy, of course, fall

too short: there is no substantial God who writes in advance the script of History

and watches over its realization, the situation is open, truth emerges only through the

very process of its deployment, etc., etc.—but what Hegel nonetheless maintains is the

much deeper presupposition that, at the end, when the dusk falls over the events of the

day, the Owl of Minerva will take flight, i.e., that there always is a story to be told at the

end, the story which (‘retroactively’ and ‘contingently’ as much as one wants) recon-

stitutes the Sense of the preceding process. Or, with regard to domination, Hegel is of

course against every form of despotic domination, so the critique of his thought as the

divinization of the Prussian monarchy is ridiculous; however, his assertion of subjec-

tive freedom comes with a catch: it is the freedom of the subject who undergoes a vio-

lent ‘transubstantiation’ from the individual stuck onto his particularity to the universal

subject who recognizes in the State the substance of his own being. The mirror-ob-

verse of this mortification of individuality as the price to be paid for the rise of the ‘tru-

ly’ free universal subject is that the state’s power retains its full authority—what only

changes is that this authority (as in the entire tradition from Plato onwards) loses its ty-

rannical-contingent character and becomes a rationally-justified power.

The question is thus: is Hegel effectively enacting a desperate strategy of sacrific-

ing everything, all the metaphysical content, in order to save the essential, the form it-

self (the form of a retrospective rational reconstruction, the form of authority which

imposes onto the subject the sacrifice of all particular content, etc.)? Or is it that Leb-

run himself, in making this type of reproach, enacts the fetishist strategy of je sais bien,

mais quand même …—‘I know very well that Hegel goes to the end in destroying meta-

physical presuppositions, but nonetheless …’? The answer to this reproach should be a

pure tautology which marks the passage from contingency to necessity: there is a sto-

ry to be told if there is a story to be told. That is to say, if there is a story to be told (if,

due to contingency, a story emerges at the end), then this story will appear as necessary.

Yes, the story is necessary, but its necessity itself is contingent.

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in Lebrun’s critical point—does Hegel ef-

fectively not presuppose that, contingent and open as the history may be, a consistent

story can always be told afterwards? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, is the entire edi-

fice of the Hegelian historiography not based on the premise that, no matter how con-

fused the events, a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end, magically con-

verting nonsense into sense, chaos into new order? Recall just his philosophy of history

with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom …. And is it

not true that, if there is a lesson of the twentieth century, it is that all the extreme phe-

nomena that took place in it cannot ever be unified in a single encompassing philo-

sophical narrative? One simply cannot write a ‘phenomenology of the twentieth centu-

ry Spirit’, uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist

attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colo-

nialism …. But why not? Is it really so? What if, precisely, one can and should write a

Hegelian history of the twentieth century, this ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm), as

a global narrative delimited by two epochal constellation: the (relatively) long peace-

ful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 till 1914 as its substantial starting point

whose subterranean antagonisms then exploded with the First World War, and the on-

going global-capitalist ‘New World Order’ emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the

return to a new all-encompassing system signaling to some a Hegelian ‘end of histo-

ry’, but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions? Are the great revers-

als and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentieth century, its numerous ‘co-

incidences of the opposites’—the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even

more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare—not the

very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel

have made of today’s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is

sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would have insisted on the ‘me-

diation’ of the opposites.21

POTENTIALITY VERSUS VIRTUALITY

Convincing as it may appear, Lebrun’s critical diagnosis of the Hegelian wager that

there is always a story to tell nonetheless again falls short: Lebrun misses an addition-

al twist which complicates his image of Hegel. Yes, Hegel sublates time in eternity—

but this sublation itself has to appear as (hinges on) a contingent temporal event. Yes,

Hegel sublates contingency in a universal rational order—but this order itself hinges

on a contingent excess (say, State as a rational totality can only actualize itself through

the ‘irrational’ figure of the King at its head). Yes, struggle is sublated in the peace of

reconciliation (mutual annihilation) of the opposites, but this reconciliation itself has

to appear as its opposite, as an act of extreme violence. So Lebrun is right in empha-

sizing that Hegel’s topic of the dialectical struggle of the opposites is as far as possible

from an engaged attitude of ‘taking sides’: for Hegel, the ‘truth’ of the struggle is al-

ways, with an inexorable necessity, the mutual destruction of the opposites—the ‘truth’

of a phenomenon always resides in its self-annihilation, in the destruction of its imme-

diate being. Does, however, Lebrun here nonetheless not miss the proper paradox: not

only did Hegel have no problem with taking sides (with an often very violent partial-

ity) in the political debates of his time; his entire mode of thinking is deeply ‘polemi-

cal’, always intervening, attacking, taking sides, and, as such, as far as possible from a

detached position of Wisdom which observes the ongoing struggles from a neutral dis-

tance, aware of their nullity sub specie aeternitatis. For Hegel, the true (‘concrete’) univer-

sality is accessible only from an engaged ‘partial’ standpoint.

The way one usually reads the Hegelian relationship between necessity and free-

dom is that they ultimately coincide: for Hegel, true freedom has nothing to do with

capricious choices; it means the priority of self-relating to relating-to-other, i.e., an

entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potentials without being impeded by

any external obstacle. From here, it is easy to develop the standard argument against

Hegel: his system is a fully ‘saturated’ set of categories, with no place for contingen-

cy and indeterminacy, i.e., in Hegel’s logic, each category follows with inexorable im-

manent-logical necessity from the preceding one, and the entire series of categories

forms a self-enclosed Whole... We can see now what this argument misses: the Hege-

lian dialectical process is not such a ‘saturated’ self-contained necessary Whole, but

the open-contingent process through which such a Whole forms itself. In other words,

the reproach confuses being with becoming: it perceives as a fixed order of Being (the

network of categories) what is for Hegel the process of Becoming which, retroactive-

ly, engenders its necessity.

The same point can also be made in the terms of the distinction between potenti-

ality and virtuality. Quentin Meillassoux has outlined the contours of a post-metaphys-

ical materialist ontology whose basic premise is the Cantorian multiplicity of infinities

which cannot be totalized into an all-encompassing One. Such an ontology of non-All

asserts radical contingency: not only are there no laws which hold with necessity, ev-

ery law is in itself contingent, it can be overturned at any moment. What this amounts

to is the suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: not only the epistemologi-

cal suspension, but also the ontological one. That is to say, it is not only that we can-

not ever get to know the entire network of causal determinations, this chain is in itself

‘inconclusive’, opening up the space for the immanent contingency of becoming—such

a chaos of becoming subjected to no pre-existing order is what defines radical materi-

alism. Along these lines, Meillassoux proposes a precise distinction between contingency

and chance, linking it to the distinction between virtuality and potentiality:

Potentialities are the non-actualized cases of an indexed set of possibilities under the condi-
tion of a given law (whether aleatory or not). Chance is every actualization of a potentiali-
ty for which there is no univocal instance of determination on the basis of the initial given
conditions. Therefore I will call contingency the property of an indexed set of cases (not of a
case belonging to an indexed set) of not itself being a case of a set of sets of cases; and vir-
tuality the property of every set of cases of emerging within a becoming which is not dom-
inated by any pre-constituted totality of possibles.22

A clear case of potentiality is the throw of a die through which what was already a pos-

sible case becomes a real case: it was determined by the pre-existing order of possibil-

ities that there is a 1/6 chance for number 6 to turn up, so when number 6 does turn

up, a pre-existing possible is realized. Virtuality, on the contrary, designates a situation

in which one cannot totalize the set of possibles, so that something new emerges, a case

is realized for which there was no place in the pre-existing set of possibles: ‘time cre-

ates the possible at the very moment it makes it come to pass, it brings forth the possi-

ble as it does the real, it inserts itself in the very throw of the die, to bring forth a sev-

enth case, in principle unforeseeable, which breaks with the fixity of potentialities’.23

One should note here Meillassoux’s precise formulation: the New arises when an X

emerges which does not merely actualize a pre-existing possibility, but whose actuali-

zation creates (retroactively opens up) its own possibility:

If we maintain that becoming is not only capable of bringing forth cases on the basis of
a pre-given universe of cases, we must then understand that it follows that such cases ir-
rupt, properly speaking, from nothing, since no structure contains them as eternal potenti-
alities before their emergence: we thus make irruption ex nihilo the very concept of a temporality
delivered to its pure immanence.24

In this way, we obtain a precise definition of time in its irreducibility: time is not only

the ‘space’ of future realization of possibilities, but the ‘space’ of the emergence of

something radically new, outside the scope of the possibilities inscribed into any atem-

poral matrix. The emergence of a phenomenon ex nihilo, not fully covered by the suf-

ficient chain of reasons, is thus no longer—as in traditional metaphysics—the sign of

the direct intervention of some super-natural power (God) into nature, but, on the con-

trary, the sign of the inexistence of God, i.e., a proof that nature is not-All, not ‘covered’

by any transcendent Order or Power which regulates it. A ‘miracle’ (whose formal def-

inition is the emergence of something not covered by the existing causal network) is

thus converted into a materialist concept:

Every ‘miracle’ thus becomes the manifestation of the inexistence of God, in so far as eve-
ry radical rupture of the present in relation to the past becomes the manifestation of the
absence of any order capable of overseeing the chaotic power of becoming.25

On the basis of these insights, Meillassoux brilliantly undermines the standard ar-

gument against the radical contingency of nature and its laws (in both senses: of the

hold of laws and of the laws themselves): how come that nature is so permanent, that

it (mostly) conforms to laws? Is this not highly improbable, the same improbability as

that of the die always falling on 6 up? This argument relies on a possible totalization of

possibilities/probabilities, with regard to which the uniformity is improbable: if there is no

standard, nothing is more improbable than anything else. This is also why the ‘aston-

ishment’ on which the Strong Anthropic Principle in cosmology counts is false: we start

from human life, which could have evolved only within a set of very precise precondi-

tions, and then, moving backwards, we cannot but be astonished at how our universe

was furnished with precisely the right set of characteristics for the emergence of life—

just a slightly different chemical composition, density, etc., would have made life im-

possible …. This ‘astonishment’ again relies on the probabilistic reasoning which pre-

supposes a preexisting totality of possibilities.

This is how one should read Marx’s well-known statement, from his introduction

to the Grundrisse manuscripts, about the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of

ape: it is profoundly materialist, i.e., it does not involve any teleology (man is ‘in germ’

already present in ape, ape immanently tends towards man). It is precisely because the

passage from ape to man is radically contingent/imprévisible, because there is no in-

herent ‘progress’ in it, that one can only retroactively determine/discern the condi-

tions (not ‘sufficient reasons’) for man in ape. And, again, it is crucial to bear in mind

here that the non-All is ontological, not only epistemological: when we stumble upon

‘indeterminacy’ in nature, when the rise of the New cannot be fully accounted for by

the set of its preexisting conditions, this does not mean that we encountered the limi-

tation of our knowledge, our inability to understand the ‘higher’ reason at work here,

but, on the contrary, that we demonstrated the ability of our mind to grasp the non-

All of reality:

The notion of virtuality permits us […] to reverse the signs, making of every radical ir-
ruption the manifestation, not of a transcendent principle of becoming (a miracle, the
sign of a Creator), but of a time that nothing subtends (an emergence, the sign of non-All).
We can then grasp what is signified by the impossibility of tracing a genealogy of novel-
ties directly to a time before their emergence: not the incapacity of reason to discern hid-
den potentialities, but, quite on the contrary, the capacity of reason to accede to the inef-
fectivity of an All of potentialities which would pre-exist their emergence. In every radi-
cal novelty, time makes manifest that it does not actualize a germ of the past, but that it
brings forth a virtuality which did not pre-exist in any way, in any totality inaccessible to
time, its own advent.26

For us Hegelians the crucial question here is: where is Hegel with regard to this dis-

tinction between potentiality and virtuality? In a first approach, there is massive evi-

dence that Hegel is the philosopher of potentiality: is not the whole point of the dialec-

tical development as the development from In-itself to For-itself that, in the process of

becoming, things merely ‘become what they already are’ (or, rather, were from all eter-

nity)? Is the dialectical process not the temporal deployment of an eternal set of poten-

tialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages?

However, this mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates the moment we fully take

into account the radical retroactivity of the dialectical process: the process of becoming

is not in itself necessary, but the becoming (the gradual contingent emergence) of necessity

itself. This is (also, among other things) what ‘to conceive substance as subject’ means:

subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very nihil out of

which every new figure emerges, i.e., every dialectical passage/reversal is a passage

in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits/creates its necessity.

THE HEGELIAN CIRCLE OF CIRCLES

The stakes of this debate—is Hegel a thinker of potentiality or a thinker of virtuali-

ty?—are extremely high: they concern the (in)existence of the ‘big Other’ itself. That

is to say, the atemporal matrix which contains the scope of the possibilities is one of

the names of the ‘big Other’, and another name is the totalizing story we can tell af-

ter the fact, i.e., the certainty that such a story will always emerge. What Nietzsche re-

proaches to modern atheism is precisely that, in it, the ‘big Other’ survives—true, no

longer as the substantial God, but as the totalizing symbolic frame of reference. This is

why Lebrun emphasizes that Hegel is not an atheist conveniently presenting himself as

Christian, but effectively the ultimate Christian philosopher. Hegel always insisted on

the deep truth of the Protestant saying ‘God is dead’: in his own thought, the substan-

tial-transcendent God dies, but is resurrected as the symbolic totality which guaran-

tees the meaningful consistency of the universe—in a strict homology with the passage

from God qua substance to the Holy Spirit as the community of believers in Christian-

ity. When Nietzsche talks about the death of God, he does not have in mind the pa-

gan living God, but precisely THIS God qua Holy Spirit, the community of believers.

Although this community no longer relies on a transcendent Guarantee of a substan-

tial big Other, the big Other (and thereby the theological dimension) is still here as

the symbolic frame of reference (say, in Stalinism in the guise of the big Other of His-

tory which guarantees the meaningfulness of our acts). Did Lacan himself not point

in this direction when, in 1956, he proposed a short and clear definition of the Holy

Ghost: ‘The Holy Ghost is the entry of the signifier into the world. This is certainly

what Freud brought us under the title of death drive’.27 What Lacan means, at this mo-

ment of his thought, is that the Holy Ghost stands for the symbolic order as that which

cancels (or, rather, suspends) the entire domain of ‘life’—lived experience, the libidi-

nal flux, the wealth of emotions, or, to put it in Kant’s terms, the ‘pathological’: when

we locate ourselves within the Holy Ghost, we are transubstantiated, we enter anoth-

er life beyond the biological one.

But is this shift from the living gods of the real to the dead God of the Law really

what happens in Christianity? Is it not that this shift already takes place in Judaism, so

that the death of Christ cannot stand for this shift, but for something much more radi-

cal—precisely for the death of the symbolic-’dead’ big Other itself? The key question is

thus: is the Holy Spirit still a figure of the big Other, or is it possible to conceive it out-

side this frame? If the dead God were to morph directly into the Holy Ghost, then we

would still have the symbolic big Other. But the monstrosity of Christ, this contingent

singularity interceding between God and man, is the proof that the Holy Ghost is not

the big Other which survives as the spirit of the community after the death of the sub-

stantial God, but a collective link of love without any support in the big Other. There-

in resides the properly Hegelian paradox of the death of God: if God dies directly, as

God, he survives as the virtualized big Other; only if he dies in the guise of Christ, his

earthly embodiment, he also disintegrates as the big Other.

When Christ was dying on the cross, earthquake and storm broke out, a sign that

the heavenly order itself—the big Other—was disturbed: not only something horri-

ble happened in the world, the very coordinates of the world were shaken. It was as if

the sinthom, the knot tying the world together, was unravelled, and the audacity of the

Christians was to take this is a good omen, or, as Mao put it much later: ‘there is great

disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent’. Therein resides what Hegel calls the

‘monstrosity’ of Christ: the insertion of Christ between God and man is strictly equivalent to the

fact that ‘there is no big Other’—Christ is inserted as the singular contingency on which the univer-

sal necessity of the ‘big Other’ itself hinges. In claiming that Hegel is the ultimate Christian

philosopher, Lebrun is thus—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—right for the wrong reason.

Only if we bear in mind this dimension, can we really see why the Darwinian (or

other evolutionary) critics of Hegel miss the point when they ridicule Hegel’s claim that

there is no history in nature, that there is history only in human societies: Hegel does

not imply that nature is always the same, that forms of vegetal and animal life are forev-

er fixed, so that there is no evolution in nature—what he claims is that there is no his-

tory proper in nature: ‘The living conserves itself, it is the beginning and the end; the

product in itself is also the principle, it is always as such active’.28 Life eternally repeats

its cycle and returns to itself: substance is again and again reasserted, children become

parents, etc. The circle is here perfect, at peace with itself. It is often perturbed—from

without: in nature, we, of course, do have gradual transformations of one species into

another, and we do get clashes and catastrophes which obliterate entire species; what

one does not get in nature is the Universal appearing (posited) as such, in contrast to its

own particular content, a Universal in conflict with itself. In other words, what is miss-

ing is nature is what Hegel called the ‘monstrosity’ of Christ: the direct embodiment

of the arkhe of the entire universe (God) in a singular individual which walks around as

one among the mortals. It is in this precise sense that, in order to distinguish natural

from spiritual movement, Hegel uses the strange term ‘insertion’: in an organic process,

...nothing can insert itself between the Notion and its realization, between the nature of
the genus determined in itself and the existence which is conformed to this nature; in the
domain of the Spirit, things are wholly different.29

Christ is such a figure which ‘inserts itself’ between God and its creation. Natural

development is dominated-regulated by a principle, arkhe, which remains the same

through the movement of its actualization, be it the development of an organism from

its conception to its maturity or the continuity of a species through generation and de-

cay of its individual members—there is no tension here between the universal princi-

ple and its exemplification, the universal principle is the calm universal force which

totalizes/encompasses the wealth of its particular content; however, ‘life doesn’t have

history because it is totalising only externally’30—it is a universal genus which encom-

passes the multitude of individuals who struggle, but this unity is not posited in an

individual. In spiritual history, on the contrary, this totalization occurs for itself, it is

posited as such in the singular figures which embody universality against its own par-

ticular content.

Or, to put it in a different way, in organic life, substance (the universal Life) is the

encompassing unity of the interplay of its subordinate moments, that which remains

the same through the eternal process of generation and corruption, that which returns

to itself through this movement; with subjectivity, however, predicate passes into subject:

substance doesn’t return to itself, it is re-totalized by what was at the beginning its pred-

icate, its subordinated moment. This is how the key moment in a dialectical process is

the ‘transubstantiation’ of its focal point: what was first just a predicate, a subordinate

moment of the process (say, money in the development of capitalism), becomes its cen-

tral moment, retroactively degrading its presuppositions, the elements out of which it

emerged, into its subordinate moments, elements of its self-propelling circulation. And

this is also how one should approach Hegel’s outrageously ‘speculative’ formulations

about Spirit as its own result, a product of itself: while ‘Spirit has its beginnings in na-

ture in general’,

the extreme to which spirit tends is its freedom, its infinity, its being in and for itself. These
are the two aspects but if we ask what Spirit is, the immediate answer is that it is this mo-
tion, this process of proceeding from, of freeing itself from, nature; this is the being, the
substance of spirit itself.31

Spirit is thus radically de-substantialized: Spirit is not a positive counter-force to na-

ture, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural

stuff, it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from. Hegel directly disowns the notion

of Spirit as some kind of positive Agent which underlies the process:

Spirit is usually spoken of as subject, as doing something, and apart from what it does, as
this motion, this process, as still something particular, its activity being more or less con-
tingent […] it is of the very nature of spirit to be this absolute liveliness, this process, to
proceed forth from naturality, immediacy, to sublate, to quit its naturality, and to come to
itself, and to free itself, it being itself only as it comes to itself as such a product of itself; its
actuality being merely that it has made itself into what it is.32

If, then, ‘it is only as a result of itself that it is spirit’,33 this means that the standard talk

about the Hegelian Spirit which alienates itself to itself and then recognizes itself in its

otherness and thus reappropriates its content, is deeply misleading: the Self to which

spirit returns is produced in the very movement of this return, or, that to which the

process of return is returning to is produced by the very process of returning. In a sub-

jective process, there is no ‘absolute subject’, no permanent central agent which plays

with itself the game of alienation and disalienation, losing/dispersing itself and then re-

appropriating its alienated content: after a substantial totality is dispersed, it is another

agent—previously its subordinated moment—which re-totalizes it. It is this shifting of

the center of the process from one to another moment which distinguishes a dialectical

process from the circular movement of alienation and its overcoming; it is because of

this shift that the ‘return to itself’ coincides with accomplished alienation (when a sub-

ject re-totalizes the process, its substantial unity is fully lost). In this precise sense, sub-

stance returns to itself as subject, and this trans-substantiation is what substantial life

cannot accomplish.

Perhaps what is missing in Lebrun is the proper image of a circle that would

render the unique circularity of the dialectical process. For pages, he fights with differ-

ent images to differentiate the Hegelian ‘circle of circles’ from the circularity of tradi-

tional (pre-modern) Wisdom, from the ancient topic of the ‘cycle of life’, its generation

and corruption. How, then, are we to read Hegel’s description which seems to evoke

a full circle in which a thing merely becomes what it is? ‘Necessity only shows itself at

the end, but in such a way precisely that this end reveals how it was equally the First.

Or, the end reveals this priority of itself by the fact that, in the change actualized by

it, nothing emerges which was not already there’.34 The problem with this full circle is

that it is too perfect, that its self-enclosure is double—its very circularity is re-marked

in yet another circular mark. In other words, the very repetition of the circle under-

mines its closure and surreptitiously introduces a gap into which radical contingency is

inscribed: if the circular closure, in order to be fully actual, has to be re-asserted as clo-

sure, it means that, in itself, it is not yet truly a closure, i.e., that it is only the (contin-

gent excess of) its repetition which makes it a closure. (Recall again the paradox of the

Monarch in Hegel’s theory of rational State: one needs this contingent excess to actu-

alize the State as rational totality. This excess is, in Lacanese, the excess of the signifier

without signified: it adds no new content, it just performatively enregisters something

that is already there.) As such, this circle undermines itself: it only works if we supple-

ment it with an additional inside-circle, so that we get the figure of the ‘inside-inverted

eight’ (regularly referred to by Lacan, and also once invoked by Hegel). This is the true

figure of the Hegelian dialectical process, a figure missing in Lebrun’s book.

HEGEL AND REPETITION

Perhaps, however, we do encounter here the limit of Hegel, although not in the Nietzs-

chean sense deployed by Lebrun. If life is a substantial universality, is then what inserts

itself in the gap between its Notion and the Notion’s actualization, and what thereby

breaks the substantial circularity of life, not death? To put it bluntly: if Substance is Life,

is Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is

the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal reproduction of the life-substance through the in-

cessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements, i.e., the ‘spurious

infinity’ of a repetition with no progress, the ultimate irony we encounter here is that

Freud, who called this excess of death over life ‘death drive’, conceived it precisely as

repetition, as a compulsion-to-repeat. Can Hegel think this weird repetition which is

not progress, but also not natural repetition through which substantial life reproduces

itself? A repetition which, by its excessive insistence, precisely breaks the cycle of nat-

ural repetition?

As was indicated already by Deleuze, the true move ‘beyond Hegel’ is thus not to

be sought in the post-Hegelian return to the positivity of ‘real life’, but in the strange

affirmation of death in the guise of pure repetition—the affirmation which puts into the

same line two strange bedfellows, Kierkegaard and Freud. In Hegel, repetition plays a

crucial role, but within the economy of Aufhebung: through a mere repetition, an imme-

diacy is elevated into universality, a contingency is transformed into necessity—after

his death, Caesar repeats itself as ‘caesar’, i.e., no longer the designation of a particu-

lar individual, but the name of a universal title. Hegel was unable to think ‘pure’ repe-

tition, a repetition not yet caught into the movement of Aufhebung.

A further paradox here is that this limitation of Hegel points not only towards

Freud but also towards Marx. In a certain sense, the speculative movement of Capital

can also be said to indicate a limit of the Hegelian dialectical process, something that

eludes Hegel’s grasp. It is in this sense that Lebrun mentions the ‘fascinating image’ of

Capital presented by Marx (especially in his Grundrisse): ‘a monstrous mixture of the

good infinity and the bad infinity, the good infinity which creates its presuppositions

and the conditions of its growth, the bad infinity which never ceases to surmount its

crises, and which finds its limit in its own nature’35. Actually, it is in Capital itself that

we find this Hegelian description of the circulation of capital:

...in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different
modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its par-
ticular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the oth-
er without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If
now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value succes-
sively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is
money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a pro-
cess, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it
at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value
from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement,
in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, there-
fore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being
able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the
form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving
itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity
may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It
is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its
own spontaneous generation.36

Note how Hegelian references abound here: with capitalism, value is not a mere ab-

stract ‘mute’ universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of commodities;

from the passive medium of exchange, it turns into the ‘active factor’ of the entire pro-

cess. Instead of only passively assuming the two different forms of its actual existence

(money—commodity), it appears as the subject ‘endowed with a motion of its own,

passing through a life-process of its own’: it differentiates itself from itself, positing its

otherness, and then again overcomes this difference—the entire movement is its own

movement. In this precise sense, ‘instead of simply representing the relations of com-

modities, it enters […] into private relations with itself’: the ‘truth’ of its relating to its

otherness is its self-relating, i.e., in its self-movement, the capital retroactively ‘sublates’

its own material conditions, changing them into subordinate moments of its own ‘spon-

taneous expansion’—in pure Hegelese, it posits its own presuppositions.

Crucial in the quoted passage is the expression ‘an automatically active character’,

an inadequate translation of the German words used by Marx to characterize capital

as ‘automatischem Subjekt’, an ‘automatic subject’, the oxymoron uniting living subjec-

tivity and dead automatism. This is what capital is: a subject, but an automatic one,

not a living one—and, again, can Hegel think this ‘monstrous mixture’, a process of

subjective self-mediation and retroactive positing of presuppositions which as it were

gets caught in a substantial ‘spurious infinity’, a subject which itself becomes an alien-

ated substance? (This, perhaps, is also the reason why Marx’s reference to Hegel’s dia-

lectics in his ‘critique of political economy’ is ambiguous, oscillating between taking it

as the model for the revolutionary process of emancipation and taking it as the mysti-

fied expression of the logic of the Capital.)37

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is the absolute

negativity, this central notion of Hegel’s thought, not precisely a philosophical figure

of what Freud called ‘death drive’? Is, then, insofar as—following Lacan—the core of

Kant’s thought can be defined as the ‘critique of pure desire’, the passage from Kant

to Hegel not precisely the passage from desire to drive? Do the very concluding lines

of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (on the Idea which enjoys to repeatedly transverse its circle)

not point in this direction? Is the answer to the standard critical question addressed

to Hegel—‘But why does dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical me-

diation always continue its work?’—not precisely the eppur si muove of pure drive? This

structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-’automatic’ character of the dialecti-

cal process—one often reproaches Hegel the ‘mechanical’ character of dialectics: be-

lying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the dialectical

process is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows and processes all pos-

sible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packed in

the same triadic form ….

The underlying true problem is the following one: the standard ‘Hegelian’ scheme

of death (negativity) as the subordinate/mediating moment of Life can only be sus-

tained if we remain within the category of Life whose dialectic is that of the self-medi-

ating Substance returning to itself from its otherness. The moment we effectively pass

from Life(-principle) to Death(-principle), there is no encompassing ‘synthesis’, death in

its ‘abstract negativity’ forever remains as a threat, an excess which cannot be econo-

mized. In social life, this means that Kant’s universal peace is a vain hope, that war for-

ever remains a threat of total disruption of organized state Life; in individual subjec-

tive life, that madness always lurks as a possibility.

Does this mean that we are back at the standard topos of the excess of negativi-

ty which cannot be ‘sublated’ in any reconciling ‘synthesis’, or even at the naïve Engel-

sian view of the alleged contradiction between the openness of Hegel’s ‘method’ and

the enforced closure of his ‘system’? There are indications which point in this direc-

tion: as was noted by many perspicuous commentators, Hegel’s ‘conservative’ political

writings of his last years (like his critique of the English Reform Bill) betray a fear of

any further development which will assert the ‘abstract’ freedom of the civil society at

the expense of the State’s organic unity, and open up a way to new revolutionary vio-

lence.38 Why did Hegel shirk back here, why did he not dare to follow his basic dialecti-

cal rule, courageously embracing ‘abstract’ negativity as the only path to a higher stage

of freedom? Furthermore, do Hegel’s clear indications of the historical limitations of

his system (things to be discovered in natural sciences; the impossibility of grasping the

spiritual essence of countries like North America and Russia which will deploy their

potentials only in the next century) not point in the same direction?

Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized

modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquility of private

rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sex-

uality is restricted to marriage, the future is safe …. In this organic order, universality

and particular interests appear reconciled: the ‘infinite right’ of subjective singularity

is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign

power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their

very freedom. Lebrun asks here the fateful question: ‘Can the sentiment of the Uni-

versal be dissociated from this appeasement?’39 Against Lebrun, our answer should be:

yes, and this is why war is necessary—in war, universality reasserts its right against and

over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity

of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to

fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal

negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal

oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

1. Even with Deleuze, one can claim that his Spinoza is a post-Kantian Spinoza, a Spinoza impercepti-

bly re-read through post-Kantian frame. Deleuze does something like Fellini in Satyricon, where he stages

the Roman pagan universe the way it appears retrospectively, from the Christian standpoint—with the un-

derlying idea that one can really grasp what paganism was only in this retrospective way.

2. See Gerard Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique. Hegel a la lumière de Nietzsche, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2004.

The irony is that, three decades earlier, Lebrun published one of the greatest books on Hegel, defending him

from his critics: La patience du concept, Paris, Gallimard, 1973.

3. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 23.

4. And, incidentally, Lacan’s prima facie weird decision to stick to the term ‘subject’ in spite of Heidegger’s

well-known critique of subjectivity is grounded precisely in this obscure excess of the ontic over its ontolog-

ical disclosure: ‘subject’ is for Lacan not the self-present autonomous agent reducing entire reality to its ob-

ject, but a pathetic subject, that which suffers, which pays the price for being the site of the ontological disclo-

sure in ontic flesh—the price whose Freudian name is, of course, ‘castration’.

5. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 83.

6. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 117.

7. G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1969, pp. 247-8.

8. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 218.

9. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 11.

10. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 115.

11. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 207.

12. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 206.

13. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 118.

14. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte (Werke, Vol. XI), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, p. 323.

15. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, par. 442.

16. In this precise sense, the eight hypotheses in the part II of Plato’s Parmenides form a Hegelian systemat-

ic exercise: they deploy the matrix of all possible ‘semantic choices’ in the relationship between the One and

Being, with the final ‘nihilistic’ outcome that there is no ultimate Ground guaranteeing the consistent unity

of reality, i.e., that the ultimate reality is the Void itself.

17. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 40.

18. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 41.

19. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, pp. 41-44.

20. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 87.

21. And, let us not forget that, for Hegel himself, his philosophical reconstruction of history in no way pre-

tends to ‘cover everything’, but consciously leaves blanks: the medieval time, for example, is for Hegel one

big regression—no wonder that, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, he dismisses the entire medi-

eval thought in a couple of pages, flatly denying any historical greatness to figures like Thomas Aquinas. Not

even to mention the destructions of great civilizations like the Mongols’ wiping out so much of the Muslim

world (the destruction of Baghdad, etc.) in the 13th century—there is no ‘meaning’ in this destruction, the

negativity unleashed here did not create the space for a new shape of historical life.

22. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, in this volume, pp. 231-2

23. Meillassoux, ’Potentiality and Virtuality’, p. 233.

24. Meillassoux, ’Potentiality and Virtuality’, p. 232.

25. Meillassoux, ’Potentiality and Virtuality’, p. 233 n7.

26. Meillassoux, ’Potentiality and Virtuality’, p. 235.

27. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IV: La relation d’objet, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1994, p. 48.

28. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion (Werke, Vol. XVI), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag 1970, pp. 525-526.

29. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 90.

30. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 250.

31. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, Dordrecht, Riedel 1978, pp. 6-7.

32. Hegel, Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, pp 6-7.

33. Hegel, Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, pp 6-7.

34. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 297.

35. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 311.

36. Quoted from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.

37. And, perhaps, this same limitation of Hegel also accounts for his inadequate understanding of mathe-

matics, i.e., for his reduction of mathematics to the very model of the abstract ‘spurious infinity’. What Hegel

was unable to see is how, like the speculative movement of the capital in Marx, modern mathematics also

displays the same ‘monstrous mixture of the good infinity and the bad infinity’: the ‘bad infinity’ of repeti-

tion gets combined with the ‘good infinity’ of self-relating paradoxes.

38. Hegel died a year after the French revolution of 1830.

39. Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, p. 214.

Absolute contingency

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“If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power--something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.”

― Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude

Agape

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Drilling into hearts of darkness

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by Slavoj Zizek

There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood … our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Does not the same duality characterise our present? At the forefront of our minds, these days, violence signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ''subjective'' violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.

We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the ''objective'' violence inscribed into the very smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

The catch is subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint - subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ''normal'' state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjective violence.

Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ''dark matter'' of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ''irrational'' explosions of subjective violence.

The true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, recently made into a film (The Whistleblower, directed by Larysa Kondracki), provides a terrifying example of the invisible violence. Bolkovac, a policewoman from Nebraska, applied in 1998 to join the United Nations' international police taskforce in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Upon her arrival, she was put in charge of a project aimed at fighting violence against women.

Soon after, she stumbled upon a sex-trafficking ring, run by the Serbian mafia and trading in girls from Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, some as young as 12. Soon, another sinister link appeared - the clientele for the trafficked girls were Americans working in Bosnia, even Bolkovac's fellow police officers.

Evidence suggested that American and other international contractors were having sex with underage trafficking victims or even buying them outright. Proofs demonstrated the UN personnel even actively participated in the organisation of the sex-trafficking rings, profiting from it.

Alarmed by what she saw, Bolkovac sent repeated reports up the chain of command, but time and again her reports were ignored or summarily dismissed as ''solved''. After less than two years on the job, Bolkovac was demoted and then summarily fired for gross misconduct. She finally was forced to flee the country, carrying a bag packed with her investigative reports, after it was determined there was a probable threat to her life.

Bolkovac successfully sued DynCorp, a private security company which hired her, for wrongful termination. DynCorp went on to dismiss seven of its employees in Bosnia for ''unacceptable behaviour'' and publicised internal efforts to reform its screening mechanisms.

But the sex-trafficking scandal has not prevented DynCorp from winning several lucrative US State Department contracts, including similar police-training missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company has faced accusations of massive misconduct in those countries as well; for example, a US diplomatic cable published by the WikiLeaks website suggests that DynCorp workers employed to train Afghan policemen had been seen taking drugs and paying for young ''dancing boys'' or child prostitutes.

The New York Times review of the film rightfully points out that The Whistleblower tells a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief. However, in an incredible ideological tour de force, the same review denounces the film's very truthfulness as an aesthetic failure - The Whistleblower ultimately fizzles by withholding any cathartic sense that justice was done, or ever will be done, once Bolkovac spills the beans to the British news media.

True, in real life we are far from the ''cathartic sense'' of films like All the President's Men or The Pelican Brief in which the final disclosure of the political crimes brings a kind of emotional relief and satisfaction.

And is the lesson of Libya after Gaddafi's fall not a similar one? Now we learned Gaddafi's secret services fully collaborated with their Western counterparts, up to the participation in programs of rendition. We can discern this complicity between the ''rogue states'' and the Western guardians of human rights at its most radical in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is again emerging as the African heart of darkness.

The cover story of Time magazine on June 5, 2006, was ''The World's Deadliest War'' - a detailed documentation on how about four million people died in Congo as the result of political violence over the previous decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers' letters - as if a filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact.

To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering; it should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, the oppression in Tibet.

Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradian ''heart of darkness'' - no one dares to confront it head-on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, or an Israeli or an American, is worth thousands of times more to the media than the death of a nameless Congolese.

Why this ignorance? On October 30, 2008, Associated Press reported that Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general besieging Congo's eastern provincial capital Goma, said he wanted direct talks with the government about his objections to a deal in the billions of dollars that gives China access to the country's vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway. As problematic (neocolonialist) as this deal may be, it poses a vital threat to the interests of local warlords, since its eventual success would create the infrastructural base for the Congo as a functioning united state.

In 2001, a UN investigation on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that the conflict in the country was mainly about access, control and trade of five key mineral resources - coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold.

According to this investigation, the exploitation of Congo's natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is ''systematic and systemic'', and the Ugandan and Rwandan leaders in particular (closely followed by Zimbabwe and Angola) had turned their soldiers into armies of business. Rwanda's army made at least $US250 million in 18 months by selling coltan, used in mobile phones and laptops.

The report concluded that the permanent civil war and disintegration of Congo ''has created a 'win-win' situation for all belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.''

Beneath the facade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the contours of global capitalism. After the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo no longer exists as a united operating state - especially its eastern part is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords controlling their patch of land by an army which as a rule includes drugged children, each of the warlords with business links to a foreign company or corporation exploiting the (mostly) mining wealth in the region.

This arrangement fits both partners: the corporation gets the mining right without taxes, the warlord gets money. The irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech products like laptops and mobile phones - in short, forget about the savage customs of the local population, just take away from the equation the foreign high-tech companies and the whole edifice of ethnic warfare fuelled by old passions will fall apart.

Not the least irony is here that among the greatest exploiters are Rwandan Tutsis, the victims of the horrifying genocide more than a decade ago. In 2008, the Rwandan government presented many documents which demonstrated the complicity of former French president Francois Mitterrand (along with his administration) in the genocide of the Tutsis. France supported the Hutu plan for the takeover, up to arming their units, in order to regain influence in this part of Africa at the expense of the Anglophone Tutsis. France's dismissal of the accusations as totally unfounded was itself unfounded.

Bringing Mitterrand to the Hague tribunal, even posthumously, would have been a true act: the furthest the Western legal system went in this way was the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, already a rogue statesman. The indictment of Mitterrand would have crossed the fateful line and for the first time brought to trial a leading Western politician who pretended to act as protector of freedom, democracy and human rights. The lesson of the trial would thus have been the complicity of the Western liberal powers in what the media present as the explosion of the ''authentic'' Third World barbarism.

The ''ethical'' side of capitalism is thus the result of a complex process of ideological abstraction or obliteration. Companies dealing with raw materials extracted in suspicious conditions (using de facto slaves or child labour) effectively practice the art of ''ethical cleansing'', the true business counterpart to ethnic cleansing. Through reselling, such practices obscure the origins of raw materials bought in places where the materials were produced under conditions unacceptable in the West.

There definitely is a lot of darkness in the dense Congolese jungle - but its heart lies elsewhere, in the bright executive offices of our banks and high-tech companies.

In order to truly awaken from the capitalist ''dogmatic dream'' (as Immanuel Kant would have put it) and see this other true heart of darkness, one should reapply to our situation Bertolt Brecht's old quip from his The Threepenny Opera: ''What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?''

What is the stealing of a couple of thousand dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared with financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur?

What is a Congolese local warlord compared to the enlightened and ecologically-sensitive Western top manager? Maybe Jose Saramago was right when, in a recent newspaper column, he proposed treating the big bank managers and others responsible for the meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose place is in the Hague tribunal.

Maybe one should not treat this proposal just as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but take it seriously.

G. A. Cohen - Against Capitalism

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Is the West helping Qaddafi to quash the Arab revolt?

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Libya and the World Left | Immanuel Wallerstein

There is so much hypocrisy and so much confused analysis about what is going on in Libya that one hardly knows where to begin. The most neglected aspect of the situation is the deep division in the world left. Several left Latin American states, and most notably Venezuela, are fulsome in their support of Colonel Qaddafi. But the spokespersons of the world left in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and indeed North America, decidedly don’t agree.

Hugo Chavez’s analysis seems to focus primarily, indeed exclusively, on the fact that the United States and western Europe have been issuing threats and condemnations of the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi, Chavez, and some others insist that the western world wishes to invade Libya and “steal” Libya’s oil. The whole analysis misses entirely what has been happening, and reflects badly on Chavez’s judgment – and indeed on his reputation with the rest of the world left.

First of all, for the last decade and up to a few weeks ago, Qaddafi had nothing but good press in the western world. He was trying in every way to prove that he was in no way a supporter of “terrorism” and wished only to be fully integrated into the geopolitical and world-economic mainstream. Libya and the western world have been entering into one profitable arrangement after another. It is hard for me to see Qaddafi as a hero of the world anti-imperialist movement, at least in the last decade.

The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France.

And above all, the opposition in the United States to military action is coming both from the public and more importantly from the military. The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mullen, have very publicly stated their opposition to instituting a no-fly zone. Indeed, Secretary Gates went further. On Feb. 25, he addressed the cadets at West Point, saying to them: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president again to send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

To underline this view of the military, retired General Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO forces, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post on Mar. 11, under the heading, “Libya doesn’t meet the test for U.S. military action.” So, despite the call of the hawks for U.S. involvement, President Obama will resist.

The issue therefore is not Western military intervention or not. The issue is the consequence of Qaddafi’s attempt to suppress all opposition in the most brutal fashion for the second Arab revolt. Libya is in turmoil because of the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. And if there is any conspiracy, it is one between Qaddafi and the West to slow down, even quash, the Arab revolt. To the extent that Qaddafi succeeds, he sends a message to all the other threatened despots of the region that harsh repression rather than concessions is the way to go.

This is what the left in the rest of the world sees, if some left governments in Latin America do not. As Samir Amin points out in his analysis of the Egyptian uprising, there were four distinct components among the protestors – the youth, the radical left, middle-class democrats, and Islamists. The radical left is composed of suppressed left parties and revitalized trade-union movements. There is no doubt a much, much smaller radical left in Libya, and a much weaker army (because of Qaddafi’s deliberate policy). The outcome there is therefore very uncertain.

The assembled leaders of the Arab League may condemn Qaddafi publicly, but many, even most, may be applauding him privately – and copying from him.

It might be useful to end with two pieces of testimony from the world left. Helena Sheeham, an Irish Marxist activist, well-known in Africa for her solidarity work there with the most radical movements, was invited by the Qaddafi regime to come to Libya to lecture at the university. She arrived as turmoil broke out. The lectures at the university were cancelled, and she was finally simply abandoned by her hosts, and had to make her way out by herself. She wrote a daily diary in which, on the last day, Mar. 8, she wrote: “Any ambivalence about that regime, gone, gone, gone. It is brutal, corrupt, deceitful, delusional.”

We might also see the statement of South Africa’s major trade-union federation and voice of the left, COSATU. After praising the social achievements of the Libyan regime, COSATU said: “COSATU does not accept however that these achievements in any way excuse the slaughter of those protesting against the oppressive dictatorship of Colonel Gaddafi and reaffirms its support for democracy and human rights in Libya and throughout the continent.”

Let us keep our eye on the ball. The key struggle worldwide right now is the second Arab revolt. It will be hard enough to obtain a truly radical outcome in this struggle. Qaddafi is a major obstacle for the Arab, and indeed the world, left. Perhaps we should all remember Simone de Beauvoir’s maxim: “Wanting to be free yourself means wanting that others be free.”

the people, united, will never be defeated

2011-02-23T08:01:00.000+01:00

Peter Hallward: Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking

guardian.co.uk

In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to "think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it". By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to an end. The sort of history that ordinary people might make was to fade away within a "new world order", a world in which a narrow set of elites would control all the main levers of power.

Sure enough, for much of the last 30 years, these elites have waged a relentless assault on the people they exploit. Trade unions have been decimated, real wages cut, public services privatised, public resources plundered. For many of these years during which "there was no alternative", resistance in most places was either marginal or symbolic. In one guise or another, resigned submission remained the prevailing order of the day.

Not any more. In different ways in different places (including most dramatically some places that until very recently were often taken for granted as among the most "docile" and "stable" countries around), people all over the world are rediscovering a principle at work in every revolutionary sequence: if we are willing to act in sufficient numbers and with sufficient determination, we already have all the power we need to devise and impose our own alternative. If we are determined to pursue it, we now have an opportunity to help change the world.

This isn't to say that either the neoliberal order or the imperial power that protects it are in any imminent danger of collapse. An opportunity is nothing more, or less, than an opportunity. The governments led by people like David Cameron and Barack Obama continue to press an agenda of "reform" that amounts to little less than a form of class warfare. In the UK, current government plans for education and public services are far more aggressive than anything Margaret Thatcher could have proposed. Nevertheless, in the last few years, and most obviously in the last few months, the general balance of power has begun to shift in three far-reaching ways, which together may well transform not just the Middle East but also the world as a whole.

First of all, of course, after demonstrating more clearly than ever before what the unrestricted pursuit of profit involves, in 2008 neoliberal credit mechanisms imploded in spectacular style, and the credibility of the capitalist world system itself took an unprecedented hit. The costs associated with what many have declared the "financial coup d'état" have now exposed the current rule of political accounting for all to see: privatise the profits, socialise the losses. This is the kind of rule that tends to suffer from publicity.

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. This public money was spent, just as blatantly, to avoid change rather than implement it. The underlying contradictions in the economy haven't been addressed, and the banking sector has been left to carry on more or less as before. As the consequences of this monumental failure start to hit more and more people over the coming months, class-polarising austerity may well become a difficult political position to defend, especially since measures once justified in terms of economic necessity are now so visibly a matter of deliberate choice and priority.

At the same time, the imperial power that only a few years ago insisted on "full-spectrum dominance" has encountered significant limits to its deployment, both at home and abroad. Washington hawks may still dream of attacking Iran, but it's perhaps more difficult now to imagine a new US war of aggression than at any time since 1945. Rarely has so dominant, so large and so expensive an army looked so powerless. Rarely, too, has so much diplomatic power looked so hollow, fractured and hypocritical. As it has done so often in previous decades, the US is still free to use its UN veto to thwart justice in the Middle East, but it now finds itself obliged to veto its own policy along with it, at a cost that has already endangered its most essential goal in the region: an end to the Palestine liberation movement.

The US and its allies have been discovering that it's a lot harder, these days, to lie about what this and other deceitful political processes involve – a difficulty that may soon also have consequences for the ongoing missions to stabilise Haiti, pacify Iraq, conquer Afghanistan, demonise Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and so on. This is the second factor at issue here, dramatised most obviously in al-Jazeera's publication of the Palestine papers last month, following the WikiLeaks revelations last year. A combination of new technologies, new social media and new sources of information (not least al-Jazeera itself), enabling new forms of association and deliberation, are starting to make it more difficult for political elites to rely on a compliant press to set and limit the political agenda.

These new means of accessing and sharing information are also starting to have a transformative impact on the third and most important development: the extraordinary resurgence of popular mobilisation and solidarity – a renewal that began with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador (and at work more recently, among other places, in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe, in Iran, in China, across Europe), but that has now crossed a new threshold in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya. As one Egyptian protester put it, very concisely: "I used to watch television, now television watches me." On the other side of the world, the tens of thousands of protesters who are mobilising to protect their unions in Wisconsin are among the many millions who have been watching and learning, and who see some similarities between their state governor and Egypt's deposed president. In the UK, students and workers gearing up for another round of direct confrontation with Cameron's government have been watching, too.

Diplomats and pundits rush to assure us that what we're really seeing in north Africa is just an oriental variation on the east European uprisings of 1989, or the subsequent "colour revolutions" – uprisings that served mainly to consolidate rather than challenge the global status quo. Of course, no one can say how the north African mobilisations will develop, or how far they will spread. Like earlier revolutions in France, Haiti and Russia, these are mobilisations whose spatial and temporal (let alone ethnic or religious) dimensions are quite emphatically not fixed in advance. But we do know that they have already changed the course of history, and that they will continue to change it. In each new confrontation, they have demonstrated anew the truth of an old conviction that will always be more powerful than any amount of violent repression or scornful dismissal: the people, united, will never be defeated.

Whatever happens next, the people of north Africa and the Middle East have already won victories that will never be erased. The clashes in Tunis on 11-12 January, the capitulation of riot police in Cairo and Alexandria on 28 January, the retaking of Manama's Pearl Square on 19 February, the liberation of Benghazi on 20 February – in the annals of revolutionary history, events of the 2011 Arab spring may one day invite comparison more readily with the summer of 1789 or the autumn of 1917 than with the winter of 1989.

In each case, what's been at stake first and foremost is less a specific demand for objective change than a subjective process of self-empowerment. Every revolutionary sequence applies in practice a principle that every counter-revolutionary theory seeks to deny or disguise: there is indeed no deeper source of legitimacy than the active will of the people. A revolutionary sequence is one in which those people who set out to transform their situation find a way to clarify and mobilise the will of its people as a whole. Where it exists, the will of the people is sustained through the practice of those who compose and impose it in the collective interest – and who thereby invariably risk, at the hands of those few who oppose this interest, misrepresentation as criminals or outsiders.

As the philosopher Alain Badiou points out in a recent editorial, "once they cross a certain threshold of determination, persistence and courage, the people can indeed concentrate their existence in a public square or avenue, in a few factories, or in a university. In the wake of a transformative event, the people are composed of those who are able to resolve the problems posed by this event" – for instance, the problems involved in defending a square, or sustaining a strike, or confronting an army. Buoyed by the assertion of their hard-won power, the people of north Africa and the Middle East are currently inventing means of solving such problems at a rate that already defies any sort of historical comparison at all. Their priority now is clearly to consolidate and organise this power in the face of the many new and more daunting problems they will soon have to confront.

Needless to say, the struggle to come will again play out in different ways in different places. The consequences of even the most resounding victory are always uncertain, and it may take a long time for those of us who live in the more sheltered parts of the world to learn our own lessons from north Africa's example. The old neoliberal assault remains set to continue. Now everyone knows, however, that it will only prevail if we allow it to.

an injury to one is an injury to all

2011-02-23T06:58:00.000+01:00

Jemi një!

2011-02-13T19:51:00.001+01:00

Mrekullia e Sheshit Tahrir - Sllavoj Zhizhek

Kujt nuk i bie në sy natyra prej “mrekullie” e ngjarjeve në Egjipt: ka ndodhur diçka përtej asaj që pakkush e kishte parashikuar, duke thyer opinionet e ekspertëve, sikur kryengritja të mos ishte thjesht një rezultat i kauzave sociale, por një ndërhyrje e një agjencie misterioze të cilën mund ta quajmë, në një formë platonike, ide e brendshme e lirisë, drejtësisë dhe dinjitetit.

Kryengritja ishte universale: menjëherë u pa se ishte e mundshme e mbarë bota të identifikoheshim me të, ta kuptonim për çfarë po bëhej, pa pasur nevojë për analiza kulturore të elementëve të shoqërisë egjiptiane. Në kontrast me revolucionin iranian të Khomeinit (ku të majtët duhet të luftonin ta përfshinin mesazhin e tyre brenda kornizës së dominuar islamike), këtu në Egjipt është e qartë se ka një thirrje të pastër shekullare për liri dhe drejtësi, saqë “Vëllazëria Myslimane” u detyrua ta përshtaste gjuhën e kërkesave shekullare.

Momenti më sublim ndodhi kur të krishterët koptë dhe myslimanë u bashkuan në një lutje unike në Sheshin Tahrir të Kajros, duke brohoritur “Jemi një!” – duke promovuar kështu përgjigjen më të mirë kundër dhunës sektare fetare. Ata neokonservatorë që kritikojnë multikulturalizmin në emër të vlerave universale të lirisë dhe demokracisë, tani janë zënë ngushtë në konfrontim me momentin e tyre me të vërtetën: ju doni liri universale dhe demokraci? Kjo është ajo çfarë kërkojnë njerëzit e Egjiptit, prandaj çka nuk ju shkon për qejfi neokonservatorëve? A mos është sebep fakti se protestuesit në Egjipt përmendin lirinë dhe dinjitetin në të njëjtën frymë si drejtësi sociale dhe ekonomike?

Që nga fillimi dhuna e protestuesve ka qenë shumë simbolike, një akt i pakënaqësisë radikale dhe qytetarisë kolektive. Ata s’e pranuan autoritetin e shtetin, - nuk ishte thjesht një çlirim i brendshëm, por një akt social i shkëputjes së zinxhirëve të servilizmit. Dhuna fizike ishte ndërmarrë nga kopukët e angazhuar nga Mubaraku në hyrje të Sheshit të Çlirimit mbi kuaj dhe deve duke i rrahur njerëzit; shumica e protestuesve nuk bënë asgjë më shumë sesa u vetëmbrojtën.

Megjithëse sfidues, mesazhi i protestuesve nuk ishte prej atyre që kërkonte vrasje. Mesazhi kërkonte ikjen e Mubarakut, dhe kështu të hapet një hapësirë për liri në Egjipt, një liri prej të cilës nuk përjashtohet askush – thirrja e demonstruesve për ushtrinë – madje edhe për policinë e urryer, nuk ishte “Vdekshi!”, por “Jemi vëllezër! Na bashkohuni!”. Kjo tregon më së miri shkallën emancipuese të demonstruesve krahasuar me një thirrje ta zëmë të një krah populist djathtist” megjithëse mobilizimi djathtist pretendon se uniteti organik i njerëzve, është një unitet i përmbledhur rreth idesë së bashkimit kundër një armiku të emërtuar (hebrenjtë, tradhtarët).

Po ku jemi tani? Kur një regjim arrin majën e krizës, e ka të shkruar të ndjekë dy hapa. Para rënies së tij eventuale, një këputje merr hov: të gjithë njerëzit e kuptojnë se loja ka marrë fund, dhe kështu ata më nuk duan t’ia dinë për frikën. Nuk është vetëm se regjimi humb legjitimitetin, por vetë ushtrimi i dhunës perceptohet si një reaksion i pafuqishëm paniku. Ne të gjithë mbajmë skenën klasike të filmave të animuar: macja arrin në një humnerë, por vazhdon të ecë, duke injoruar faktin se nuk ka tokë nën këmbë; fillon të bie vetëm kur shikon poshtë dhe e heton humnerën. Kur humb autoritetin e vet, regjimi bëhet si një mace mbi humnerë: me qëllim që të bjerë vetëm i duhet kujtuar të shikojë poshtë këmbëve.

Vlerësuesi klasik i revolucionit të Khomeinit, Ryszard Kapuscinski lokalizoi momentin pikant të kësaj theqafje të shahut të shahëve: në një udhëkryq të Teheranit, një demonstrues i vetmuar refuzoi të zhvendosej kur një polic e urdhëroi me zë të lartë të lëvizte, dhe polici u spraps, dhe brenda pak orësh i gjithë Teheranit mori haberin për incidentin, dhe megjithëse rrugët u bënë arena betejash për javë me radhë, secili në njëfarë forme e dinte se lojës po i vinte fundi.

A po ndodh e njëjta gjë edhe në Egjipt? Për disa ditë me radhë në fillim, dukej se Mubarak ishte vendosur tashmë në pozitën e maces proverbiale. Pastaj pamë një përpjekje për ta rrëmbyer revolucionin. Kjo rrëmujë të ndante frymën: zëvendëspresidenti i ri, Omar Suleiman, një ish-shef i policisë sekrete për torturime masive, prezantoi veten si “fytyra njerëzore” e regjimit, e i cili ishte caktuar për monitorimin e tranzicionit drejt demokracisë.

Lufta e Egjiptit për qëndresë nuk është një konflikt i vizioneve, është një konflikt ndërmjet një vizioni të lirisë dhe një verbërie për të kapur shtetin që nuk lë formë pa përdorur – terrorin, mungesën e ushqimit, ryshfetin me paga të rritura – për ta shkelur vullnetin për liri.

Kur presidenti Obama mirëpriti kryengritjen si një shprehje legjitime e opinionit që duhet pranuar nga qeveria, konfuzioni ishte i përgjithshëm: turmat në Kajro dhe Aleksandri nuk donin që kërkesat e tyre të pranoheshin nga qeveria, ata mohuan legjitimitetin e qeverisë. Ata nuk e donin qeverinë e Mubarakut si një partner në dialog. Ata madje as që donin një qeveri që ishte e gatshme t’ua dëgjonte opinionet, ata donin një riformësim të përgjithshëm të shtetit.

Ata nuk kanë një opinion, ata janë e vërteta e situatës në Egjipt. Mubaraku e di këtë shumë më mirë se Obama: nuk ka vend për kompromis në këtë çështje, sikur se nuk kishte asnjë kompromis kur u sfiduan regjimet komuniste në fund të viteve tetëdhjetë të shekullit të kaluar. Ose duhet të bjerë i tërë pallati presidencial i Mubarakut, ose do të tradhtohet kryengritja.

Po çfarë do të thuhet për frikën se, pas rënies së Mubarakut, qeveria e re do të jetë armiqësore ndaj Izraelit? Nëse qeveria e ardhshme do të jetë një përfaqësuese e njerëzve që me krenari gëzojnë lirinë, atëherë s’kemi çka frikësohemi:antisemitizmi mund të rritet vetëm në kushte të shtypjes dhe dëshpërimit. (Një raport nga Egjipti i CNN-së prej një province tregoi sesi qeveria po shpërndan thashetheme se organizatorët e protestave dhe gazetarët e huaj ishin dërguar nga hebrenjtë për ta dobësuar Egjiptin – pse ndodhi bash kështu kundër Mubarakut mik i hebrenjve.)

Një prej ironive më të ashpra të situatës së fundit është shqetësimi i Perëndimit se transicioni duhet të kryhet në një rrugë “ligjore” – sikur Egjipti paska pasur deri tan sundim të rendit dhe ligjit. A kemi harruar tashmë se për shumë vjet me radhë, Egjipti ishte në një gjendje të jashtëzakonshme? Mubaraku anuloi sundimin e rendit dhe ligjit, duke e mbajtur mbarë vendim në një avullim politik, duke nxitur një jetë ndrydhur politike. Rëndësi ka ajo që kaq shumë njerëz rrugëve të Kajros pretendojnë se tani ndihen të lirë për herë të parë në jetën e tyre. Çfarëdo që do të ndodhë, ajo që është thelbësore është se “ndjenja e të qenit i lirë” nuk është varrosur nga realpolitika cinike.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus

2011-01-31T14:39:00.002+01:00

Egypt: Lessons for US Foreign Policy

Ramez Naam
Those who help to oppress a people inevitably will be targets of their rage.

Over the last few days, Egyptians have taken to the streets, demanding that Egyptian president and dictator Hosni Mubarak step down. The protests so far haven’t had a religious or anti-American bent. They’re not Islamist. They are a wave of people – mostly young people – expressing their frustration at corruption, joblessness, economic stagnation, and above all, at the lack of political and personal freedoms that we in the West enjoy.

I am a US citizen, but I was born in Egypt, have returned multiple times, and have family there today. It’s difficult to find fans of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Mr. Mubarak is the third ‘president’ of Egypt and has held that role for 29 years. While Egypt has elections of a sort, they’re largely charades orchestrated to rubber stamp Mubarak and his National Democratic Party. Egyptians essentially have no say in who governs them. Nor are they allowed to speak out against the government. That alone is an offense for which one may be imprisoned, beaten, or occasionally killed.

Yet Egypt is also a recipient of American aid. Since 1975, the US has sent more than $40 billion in direct military aid to Egypt, out of a grand total of $60 billion in military and economic aid. That aid keeps the totalitarian regime in power.

The US has done this for clear reasons. Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize and make peace with Israel. For that, Egypt is rewarded with aid. In addition, Egypt is a key military partner. US and Egyptian forces conduct joint exercises in the area every year. And Egypt is the site of the Suez Canal, a vital shipping lane that connects Europe and the Mediterranean to the Gulf, India, China, Japan, and more. Along with the Panama Canal, it’s one of the most vital and vulnerable sea passages in the world. The US, along with rest of the industrialized world, has a vested interest in keeping the Suez Canal open and under stable management. Egypt provides that.

For those reasons and more, the US has continued to prop up the government of Hosni Mubarak for decades. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have both urged Egypt to embrace free speech and allow more dissent and hold more open elections, but those words ring hollow when the US continues to send $2 billion a year in aid to the country. What’s more, no administration has been willing to mix the issues of US support and domestic political reform.

Vice President Joe Biden said a few days ago that Mubarak is not a dictator and that he should not step down. Mr. Biden knows full well that Mubarak is a dictator – an unelected and unpopular leader who uses torture, summary arrest, and a perpetual ‘state of emergency’ to maintain power.

Ten months ago, in March 2009, Hilary Clinton said that human rights violations shouldn’t interfere with a planned trip by Mubarak to Washington DC, and that she considered Mubarak and his wife friends of the family.

There are good reasons for the United States to want a stable and pro-US government in place in Egypt. Yet the protests on the street today show how supporting convenient dictators can have negative consequences. If those protesters on the street do manage to topple Mubarak, what will a new government in Egypt look like? What will its attitude be to towards the US, given that the US has supported a regime that has oppressed the Egyptian people for the last 30 years?

The reality is that if a new Egyptian government is hostile to the US, that will be in part a natural response to US behavior. For multiple decades, the United States has put dollars into the hands of a dictator who suffers no dissent. The tear gas Egyptian security forces are hurling into crowds was made in the United States. When Egyptian security forces open fire and kill protesters, there’s a case to be made that they’re doing so on American dollars.

The US has a long history of supporting convenient dictators. America did so with the Shah of Iran, who rewarded American patronage with sites for US military bases useful for force projection. America did so with Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, reversing the US stance on the coup that brought him to power and even on his country’s flagrant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, because Pakistan was a potential ally help in tracking down Al Qaeda. And the US has done so with Hosni Mubarak, helping him suppress democracy in exchange for his support of Israel and of US military and foreign policy aims in the region.

These policies are extremely shortsighted. They belie a lack of faith in one of the founding principles of the United States: that governments are created by the people, for the people. Americans generally believe democracy to be the best form of government ever created, and yet in US foreign policy America often turns its back on freedom and democracy in order to achieve short term goals.

There will always be short term threats. There will always be economic resources the US needs access to. There will always be locations where the US wants to place military bases, or countries to fly over on the way to others. Yet we Americans shouldn’t allow these temptations to distract us from either our long term safety or from the values and principles that have made the United States such a great nation.

Those values and principles center on liberty – on personal freedom of expression, on the right of the governed to choose who governs them, on protection from tyrannical excesses. If we believe that all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights, then we should behave that way in our international affairs. Today the US behaves as if only Americans are endowed with those rights. The world sees this behavior, and the trust afforded the United States is diminished by it.

Moreover, all principles aside, it is simply in the long term best interests of the United States and the entire world to encourage democracy, liberty, and widespread prosperity across the whole of the planet. Democracies seldom war with one another. They seldom produce terrorists. They do tend to lower corruption, lower populace frustration, and lift prosperity. More democracies in the world would mean fewer hotspots for the US military planners to worry about. They’d mean fewer potential terrorists in training. They’d mean more natural allies for the United States and other democratic powers to work with to solve global problems.

The coming decades will only increase the extent to which spreading democracy is in the best interest of the United States, and to which supporting dictators, however tempting in the short run, is a threat to American security and global security. The last decade made it clear that highly motivated individuals and small groups can wreak tremendous havoc against vastly superior nation states. Witness 9/11. Yet the continued development of technology makes it possible to imagine terrorist actions that would make 9/11 pale by comparison.

Nuclear terrorism, always a threat, remains on the table. Bioterrorism, until now largely a hypothetical, will become more and more plausible as the basic tools of biotechnology continue their exponential drop in price and their dissemination to hobbyists. Electronic attacks will become more and more dangerous as industrialized nations built computer-controlled smart grids and increasingly connect physical infrastructure to the global net.

No amount of security can be guaranteed to catch all threats. And as it becomes possible to put together terrorist threats with less money, less expertise, less time, and fewer people, traditional security mechanisms will become less and less effective. That does not mean the US and other democracies should give up on efforts to catch and stop terrorist acts. It does mean that we need a complement to enforcement. Prevention, as they say, is the best medicine. And the best form of prevention is to eliminate or reduce the conditions that lead to the frustration, hopelessness, and anger that help breed terrorists.

John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” I believe Kennedy was correct. I would augment his statement with a corollary: Those who help oppress a people will inevitably be the targets of their rage.

When Iranian students toppled the Shah in 1979, they rightly perceived the United States as the sponsor of the corrupt and unelected dictator who’d oppressed them for decades. That did not help their attitudes towards the US. It stoked their anger and helped build a new regime that fundamentally rejected the US and the western way of life and which has spent the past 30 years training, funding, and arming anti-American terrorists.

If Egyptian protesters do manage to topple Mubarak (which, as an American with roots in Egypt, I hope they do), they will have every reason to be hostile to the US. That hostility is unlikely to translate into better governance or a better ally. American complicity in oppressing democracy produces blow-back in the form of anti-American sentiment and anti-American action.

It’s time to stop thinking short term. It’s time to stop placing military alliances, access to economic resources, or even peace treaties above the spread of the principles of liberty and self-determination. It’s time for America to place its principles above its short term self interests. And if the US does so, I firmly believe that it will enhance its standing in the world, its safety, and the condition of hundreds of millions of men and women.

In the long run, democracies make the best friends and allies. In the long run, encouraging democracy – through free and fair elections, through personal freedom of expression, through the establishment of a free and uncensored press – is the best foreign policy investment any free nation can make.

I look forward to the day when an American administration makes encouraging worldwide liberty and democracy – for both pragmatic and principled reasons – the #1 US foreign policy goal.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/naam20110130

The Hypocrisy of the West

2011-01-25T07:05:00.005+01:00

"So when it's up to criticize countries like Belarus, for example, the Western powers, the EU, America, all have a very strong voice. They all expressed their concerns about the vote-rigging and the threatening of the opposition. Why is that? Why are countries like Germany talking strong, and have a strong voice, name and shame human rights abuses in countries like Belarus and not, for example, in China?" Michalski asks.

"That is simply because we don't deal with Belarus so much. We don't make so much business. Belarus doesn't have any natural resources which would be interesting for us. So it's easy to name and shame countries like these."

Wenzel Michalski, the communications director for Human Rights Watch's Germany office

An Extremist for Love

2011-01-23T06:09:00.002+01:00

"Turning Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday into a national holiday is one of the things that America got right. It's a day set apart from all others, when all generations will pause to think about a great man, his legacy and what it should mean to us.

So far that sounds great, and to a large extent it's what's happened. But I've been around for all of the MLK birthday celebrations so far, and the yearly "celebration of his life" is starting to look in ways like a Disneyized version of both the man and his legacy. The last thing we need today is a romanticized version of Martin Luther King, Jr., much less an idealized version of the struggle that he stood for.

In l945, when Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower toured the former German concentration camp at Ohrdruf, he famously said to an aide, "Take pictures. Take lots of pictures. Some day some sons of bitches are going to try to say this never happened."

I haven't heard anyone say that the Civil Rights movement never happened, but the national memory is turning pretty soft. Despite the successful efforts of the Texas School Board to foist upon all American schoolchildren the audacious rewrite of history that gives short shrift to the Civil Rights movement -- and the shameless willingness of textbook publishers to go along with that - the facts do remain the facts. The Civil Rights movement was and remains one of the most significant social justice movements in the history of the Unites States. And despite the almost odd emphasis on "community service" which has come to mark this day- as in, you know, help the homeless, feed the poor, be "peaceful" -- Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for a love that was more significant and more difficult, involving a lot more suffering than just being a good citizen for a day. If all Martin Luther King Jr. had stood for was community service - if his message to black America had been simply to ameliorate the suffering in its midst through compassionate one-on-one action -- then he would probably not have died how or when he did. Let's be clear about that, and not hand down to our children some whitewashed version of the man and his mission. Martin Luther King was far more courageous and more dangerous to the status quo than is reflected in this contemporary caricature.

He challenged the United States to allocate its vast and gargantuan resources in a more fair, just and compassionate way; and for that, he died. He challenged, at the end of his life, the increasing American militarism that sent young men to die for old men's mistakes; and for that, he died. He demanded that the United States make good on its creed of liberty and justice for all, not just in word but in deed; and for that he died. We do not serve his legacy, and we do not serve our children, by portraying either the life or the struggle or the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. as simply the story of a peaceful man who sought to establish "the beloved community" and then, for some mysterious reason that shall remain shrouded in obfuscation, was shot on a motel balcony and died.

No, kids, if you believe that, then you're not asking enough questions. Yes, it's our job to keep his dream of the beloved community alive, but it's also our job to be as critically intelligent as he was regarding the entrenched resistance to the materialization of that dream.

A Protestant theologian in the 20th Century wrote a commentary on the story of the Good Samaritan as he made his journey from what we might call "good" Samaritan to "conscious" Samaritan. The first time the Samaritan saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. The second time he saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. The third time he saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. About the fourth time he saw the beggar on the road, he stopped to ask himself, "Why are there so many beggars?" Martin Luther King would not just ask us to help those who suffer; he would ask us to challenge the institutional forces that make all that suffering inevitable.

On King's birthday this year, a good doctor in Oakland received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Hero's award for treating children with asthma in a low-income community. It struck me, as I watched the award ceremony, that in order to truly honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., we need do more than honor the good doctor who treats asthma: we need to ask ourselves, and demand of our government, what environmental regulations have been so compromised, and to whose financial benefit, that so many children in American today, particularly in our most disadvantaged communities, have asthma to begin with.

In order to truly keep Dr. King's dream of the beloved community alive, we must dream our own contemporary version of it. We can dream of an America that is not willing to protect the privileges of the few at the expense of the needs of the many; we can dream of an America in which our citizens are not so easily manipulated to equate the size of our military budget with the safety of our future; we can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.

MLK's love was not a complacent love, any more than his political activism was cynical or angry. When confronted with the accusation that he was an extremist, Dr. King made this reply, "Perhaps I am, but I'm an extremist for love." Did you hear that kids? Be extremists....for love. Do not be tricked into thinking that the struggle for the beloved community is easy, unchallenged, or over. It is none of those things. Just as in the days of Dr. King, the struggle for justice is often difficult, it attracts the ire of the prevailing system, and it is far from over. On this one day each year, when we think of Dr. Martin Luther King -- what he gave us, and what we lost -- in order to honor him most deeply, we will do more than community service. We will remember that our service must not stop there. We will try, as he did, to truly step up to the plate. And like him, we will change the world."

Marianne Williamson

An Extremist for Love | CommonDreams.org

How can we find a new heroic figure?

2011-01-22T01:48:00.004+01:00

"In any period of time, in any sequence of history, we have to maintain a relationship with what exceeds our possibilities; with what, as an idea, exists beyond the natural needs of the human animal. In crucial experiences, such as love, artistic creation, scientific discoveries, political struggle, we must exceed the limits of our vital and social determinations. We must encounter, within our own humanity, the obscure, violent, at the same time luminous and peaceful, element of inhumanity within the human element itself. That is why my friend Jean-Franois Lyotard wrote that the famous "human rights" are in fact "the rights of the infinite". For humanity is not reducible to animality, to the extent that the inhuman is a creative part of humanity. It is in the element of inhumanity that human creation shows that part of human nature which does not exist but must become; Humanity is never completely realized, is never something natural. Humanity is an infinite victory over its immanent element of inhumanity To accept, to support, this experience of the inhuman element of ourselves, we must, all of us, human animals, use some imaginary means. We must create a symbolic representation of this humanity which exists beyond itself, in the fearsome and fertile element of the inhuman. I call that sort of representation an heroic figure. "Figure", because the action of a figure is a symbolic one. "Heroic", because heroism is properly the act of the infinite in human actions. "Heroism" is the clear appearance, in a concrete situation, of something which assumes its humanity beyond the natural limits of the human animal.

I firmly believe that our historical moment is disoriented. What does this mean? The previous century was defined by a terrible experience of the inhuman. The idea was to create at any cost a new world and a new man. The heroic figures, sometimes as frightening black figures, were elsewhere.

The word "revolution" was the synthesis of a destructive experiment. Communist revolution, the artistic destruction of all arts, the scientific and technological revolution, the sexual revolution...

The figure of the end of the old traditions was the heroism of destruction and the creation ex nihilo of a new real. Humanity itself was the new God. Today, all of this is in a state of total crisis. One of the symptoms of the crisis is the return of the old traditions and the appearance of the resurrection of old dead Gods. All the heroic figures are old ones, too, such as, for example religious sacrifice and bloody fanaticism. In the guise of these figures, nothing new can occur. They are aligned with a disjunction between the human and the inhuman, and not of an integration of the inhuman in a new sequence of the historical existence of humanity. But the absence of any sort of heroic figure is by no means any better than the old sacrifice.

We have got the strict inhumanity of technological murder and bureaucratic supervision of all aspects of life instead. We have got bloody wars, without any form of conviction or faith. In fact, without an active figure with an element of symbolic creative value, we have got a dark war between the old religious sacrifice and the blind will of capitalistic control.

That is why we need to think about the fate of heroic figures. Our problem can be formalized in new terms. In disoriented times, we cannot accept the return of the old, deadly figure of religious sacrifice; but neither can we accept the complete lack of any figure, and the complete disappearance of any idea of heroism.

In both cases, the consequences will be the end of any dialectical relationship between humanity and its element of inhumanity, in a creative mode. So the result will be the sad success of what Nietzsche named; "the last man." "The last man" is the exhausted figure of a man devoid of any figure. It is the nihilistic image of the fixed nature of the human animal, devoid of all creative possibility.

Our task is: How can we find a new heroic figure, which is neither the return of the old figure of religious or national sacrifice, nor the nihilistic figure of the last man? Is there a place, in a disoriented world, for a new style of heroism?"

Alain Badiou

Continue here.

Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe

2011-01-21T10:07:00.003+01:00

Chaos, Consciousness, and the Cosmos

by Miriam Frankel

It sounds like hocus-pocus: An infinite number of parallel universes in which hallucinating brains can pop out of empty space. So perhaps it’s appropriate that one of the leading cosmologists behind the idea, Andrei Linde, is also an amateur magician. Now, to prove that he hasn’t just pulled his theories out of a hat, Linde is looking for concrete evidence for this "multiverse" that could be picked up by the Planck satellite or at the Large Hadron Collider. The results could change our conceptions of consciousness and time, too.

Linde, who is based at Stanford University in California, is well-known for entertaining his friends and colleagues. "He is pretty good at performing magic tricks, and draws some great cartoons and portraits," says Tufts University cosmologist, and FQXi member, Alexander Vilenkin. More importantly, he adds, "Andrei is one of the most creative physicists I know."

That creative flair has led Linde to pioneer "the new cosmological paradigm," over the past 30 years. He had been puzzled about why distant parts of the universe look the same and have the same temperature, when conventional wisdom said that they were too far apart to ever have been in contact. To explain their similarity, Linde and others came up with the theory of inflation, which states that the very early universe went through a period of extremely rapid expansion. This solved the problem because it meant that far-flung regions of the universe would once have been connected, before inflation hurled them apart.

But the story didn’t end there. By the mid 1980s, Vilenkin and Linde realized that inflation was not a single event. Rather, many different patches of the cosmos could suddenly start inflating and blow up to huge volumes—each a universe in its own right. The most radical version of this theory proposed by Linde, known as eternal chaotic inflation, paints a picture of the multiverse as a Mandelbrot set—a growing fractal of universes—each one with different physical laws.

But critics argue that speculating about a multiverse is a waste of time—and possibly even unscientific. By definition, any neighboring universes are so far away that we could never directly observe them. The trouble is not just that we do not have any evidence for the multiverse yet, but that it seems that there is no way we could ever either prove or falsify the idea.

Linde usually responds to such criticisms by quoting Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." In particular, he argues, the multiverse provides the only logical answer to the question of why the constants of nature seem to be finely-tuned in such a way that they allow life to exist. "If there is an infinite number of universes with different physical laws, it makes sense that we happen to live in a universe that allows life," Linde explains.

However, Linde also agrees that the multiverse needs experimental support to win over skeptics. With a grant from FQXi, he is searching for concrete scientific predictions based on the theory—and he is already making progress.

The first place to look for evidence of the multiverse is at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists there hope to unmask the secret identity of dark matter, the mysterious unidentified substance believed to make up the majority of matter in the universe. The best candidates for dark matter are "supersymmetric WIMPS" (weakly interacting massive particles) for which LHC physicists are already on the lookout. But, if Linde is right, physicists may find out that dark matter is made out other exotic particles, called "axions," which are backed by the multiverse theory.

Linde is also looking to the skies for help. In the late 1990s, astronomers noticed that the expansion of the universe was inexplicably accelerating—something that has been attributed to existence of an unknown "dark energy." If dark energy turns out to be down to a varying energy density filling space, termed "quintessence," as some cosmologists suspect, rather than being caused by a constant energy density, then this will be a blow to the multiverse theory.

The European Space Agency’s Planck satellite could also relay evidence in the form of gravity waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—caused by inflation. However, if the LHC simultaneously finds evidence for the existence of certain other supersymmetric particles hypothesised to be related to gravity waves, called "light gravitons," then this will challenge some of the most popular models of the multiverse based on string theory, says Linde.

Vilenkin also has an eye on data from Planck, but for a more dramatic reason. He believes that its measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation could reveal the bruises of collisions between our cosmos and its neighbors. (See "When Universes Collide" and "New Year, New Universe.")

But even if we can never directly observe other universes, that doesn’t mean that we should necessarily dismiss them as fantasy, says Martin Rees, an early advocate of the multiverse at the University of Cambridge. "We take Einstein’s theory very seriously because it predicts things we can test, but we also believe what it predicts inside black holes, which we cannot observe," he says. Rees argues that the multiverse will become far less controversial once physicists understand more about how and why inflation occurs.

But even those who accept the mind-boggling multiverse will have to wrap their heads around yet more "crazy" questions, says Linde. To properly understand the arrow of time, for instance, we may need to incorporate consciousness into cosmology, he claims. Quantum mechanics strangely suggests that the wave function (that is, the mathematical description) of an entire universe doesn’t change in time, meaning that the universe doesn’t evolve, despite our observations. But if you divide the wave function into two, with one part for the observer and another for the "rest of the universe," both wave functions suddenly depend on time. The observer—and in extension consciousness—is therefore crucial for the appearance of an arrow of time, says Linde.

Once Linde started thinking about consciousness, there was no turning back. He, and others, have even calculated the probability that consciousness—in the form of thinking, disembodied brains—can be momentarily produced by quantum fluctuations in an empty universe. (See "Measuring Up the Multiverse.") And given that there are an infinite number of universes, this probability could be quite large—a bizarre mathematical result that caused physicists to debate what consciousness actually is and what implications it has for cosmology.

"To me, understanding life and consciousness would be even more important than understanding the universe," says Linde. "But we start with the universe because it is simpler."

Whether such complicated questions can be answered remains to be seen. Hopefully our magician has an ace hidden somewhere in his sleeve.

Urime 28 Nëntorin!

2010-11-28T20:46:00.000+01:00

The Wisdom of the American People

2010-11-28T19:39:00.001+01:00

If I Said I'm Thankful for the Wisdom of the American People, Would You Think I'm Crazy? | OurFuture.org

If I Said I'm Thankful For The Wisdom Of The American People, Would You Think I'm Crazy?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

November 26, 2010 - 3:23am ET

There are lots of things to be thankful for in this world, and I've got a pretty good list: A loving family, the glittering splendor of the cascading galaxies, Eddie Hinton's guitar solo on the Staples Singers' "I'll Take You There" [1]... you know, the usual stuff.

But here's something you may not think warrants much gratitude this November: The wisdom and common sense of the American people. Just hear me out, okay? If you do then, in the spirit of the holiday, there will be pie afterwards.

Pie charts, that is.

Before everybody starts shouting about the foolish choices the public keeps making -- Tea Parties and Republican victories, or that lame fashion trend of wearing tights without any pants, or the fact that Dollhouse got cancelled[2] butDancing With the Stars is still popular -- listen to this:

The American public would rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut Social Security. They want to protect Medicare from future cuts and ensure that the college loan program remains intact. They think Congress should focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy, and deal with deficit spending later. They'd rather see politicians support a "made in America" program than vote for more free trade. They want to see significant investment in infrastructure and want to end tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

And that's not all. By enormous majorities, the public want to do more to reign in Wall Street, spend more to end poverty, and ensure that everyone has access to health care. When it comes to the issues, this country is overwhelmingly progressive, overwhelmingly pro-government, and overwhelmingly in favor of doing the things we need to do to build a better society.

But wait, as the late night TV ads say. That's not all. The public's preferred prescription for the nation -- higher taxes for the wealthy, more infrastructure spending, preserved or expanded social programs, reigning in the bankers who wrecked the economy -- is exactly what most economists think is needed to improve our financial picture. Once in a while that "wisdom of crowds" thing works. Now that's something to be grateful for.

Sure, most people don't call themselves "progressive" or "liberal" in polls. Why should they? They've lived through decades of a saturation-media campaign that's told them those words mean something weak or mushy. But who cares what they call themselves? These labels are getting a little moldy, anyway. Consider this: Banks should be required to do more lending to small businesses, rather than make a profit off their discounted Federal Reserve money with reckless bets and cynical deals. More money for the entrepreneurs that are the lifeblood of the economy: Is that a "liberal" position? Maybe, but it also fits the kind of thinking that used to be called "conservative," too (back when "conservative" wasn't a euphemism for "a hired hack generating talking points for sell-out politicians at a corporate-funded 'think tank' (and we use the term lightly)").

What about the last election? Didn't the "people" elect a new Congress that's going to work night and day to undermine these goals? Yes, they did. But what real alternative were they given? Which party was out there night and day telling voters they'll protect Social Security and Medicare, tax the wealthy, and fight poverty? Sure, we saw some individual politicians saying that. But which party sent a clear message on behalf of the people's agenda? Neither. In its absence, voters voted against the party in power because they don't like what they see.

Many of these observations were confirmed in a post-election poll co-funded by the Campaign for America's Future. 58 percent of voters said they were trying to send a message that said they were unhappy with the way things are done in Washington. Why should they be anything but unhappy, when nobody's speaking for them?

Maybe that's why more voters than not would change the Constitution to overthrow the Supreme Court's Citizens United (46 percent to 36 percent) decision so that corporate campaign contributions can be limited. They're right about that, too.

The fact that nobody's speaking up for the public's aspirations may help explain why voter turnout this year was an anemic40.3 percent, up only slightly from 2006. And here's a statistic that should interest a certain president and party who rode into office on the crest of a youth wave charged with enthusiasm and energy: The number of young voters plunged by more than half. 51 percent of voters aged 18-29 showed up in 2008, and that number plummeted to a truly pathetic 20.4% this year. That's even fewer than voted in 2006.

If politicians want to know how to win power and build enthusiasm, they should spend less time on the people that voted against them and more time on the people who didn't vote at all. Good policies happen to be good politics, too. (What's that expression -- "doing well by doing good?")

Even when the media and the special interests try to manipulate public opinion, this stubborn preference for the good keeps rearing its head. The New York Times deficit calculator, for example, was a somewhat slanted exercise that (intentionally or not) overemphasized deficit cutting at the expense of more urgent priorities. Nevertheless, as David Leonhardt wrote, their preferences were: "Reduce the size of the military rather than reduce pay for noncombat members of the military. Impose a millionaire's tax rather than cut deductions for high-income households. Cap the growth of Medicare spending rather than raise the eligibility age."

The same thing happened with last summer's AmericaSpeaks "town hall" venture. Despite slanted materials and distorted questions, participants came up with a decidedly progressive set of recommendations anyway. It was, as we said at the time, "a mind-control experiment gone horribly right." (And the planners' attempted self-justification after the fact didn't pass intellectual muster.)

A political scientist once said that the media can't influence what you think, but it can influence what you think about. A lot of money and effort has spent lately to influence both. As Robert Borosage [3] observed, efforts funded by billionaire Pete Peterson have succeeded in making sure that government deficits become the primary focus of debate -- despite the rampant unemployment and stagnant economy that should rightfully be a higher priority. But the effort to change what you think has been a bust. The public's smarter than a lot of people think.

And for that, I am truly thankful.
_______________________

Here's the dessert -- pie, and lots of it.

Voters would rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut Social Security benefits (a perfectly viable option that never seems to even warrant a mention in these Peterson-funded projects):

And despite the money spent to persuade us that raising the retirement age isn't a benefit cut [3], a virtually identical number of people oppose that idea, too:

And they're right. It's not necessary to make these cuts. They would impose unnecessary hardship, and there are other ways to get the necessary revenue. What would the public rather do about the deficit?

What's more, the public believes in government and its mission. Americans don't want to cut Medicare, as the Bowles/Simpson and Rivlin/Domenici proposals would do. They'd rather protect it than cut it in the name of deficit reduction:

They want to protect college loan programs, too:

And they want to extend benefits for the unemployed (Congress, are you listening?)

I'm genuinely moved to see that, even after a half-century-long effort to demonize the poor, Americans still care about poverty and want to do more to end it:

And when it comes to deficits, they know who really got us into this mess, which is why they want to do more to restrain Wall Street recklessness:

Pretty smart, if you ask me. Happy Thanksgiving!

_______________________

[1] I love Pops Staples, but it was the late, great Eddie Hinton -- guitarist, songwriter, and singer par excellence -- who played that beautiful solo.
[2] Dollhouse was science fiction, and most people don't like science fiction. They like Dancing With the Stars better. I think that's wrong (and it probably also explains why I didn't get more dates in high school.)
[3] Conflict of interest alert: I work for the guy -- he's one of my bosses at the Campaign for America's Future -- but he's right.

This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project and the Strengthen Social Security campaign.

Progresi është i mundshëm!

2010-11-17T20:13:00.004+01:00

ALBIN KURTI - Çka jemi dhe çka kemi?

Pamundësia me të cilën janë të rrethuar qytetarët e Kosovës në përditshmërinë e tyre, prej lart interpretohet si paaftësi e përgjithshme e shoqërisë. Në anën tjetër, paaftësia e politikanëve të Kosovës, që është tipar i përgjithshëm i tyre, interpretohet nga vetë ata si pamundësi e pushtetit të kufizuar që kanë. Kështu është kur plagës i shtohet fyerja.

Njerëzit janë të varfër e të papunë jo pse kështu ka thënë Zoti apo pse kështu i ka kushtëzuar natyra. As pse ata kanë ndonjë kulturë inferiore a defiçiencë kulturore që doemos i lë të prapambetur. Njerëzit janë të varfër e të papunë, sepse janë bërë të varfër e të papunë. Politikat e mbrapshta qeveritare dhe sistemi i padrejtë socio-ekonomik i varfëron e i nxjerr njerëzit nga puna.

Në Kosovë vijon të jetë në modë citimi i asaj thënies së famshme për atë se si çdo popull e ka atë qeveri që e meriton. Aq e përhapur është kjo thënie, saqë askush tashmë nuk e di që autori i saj është Joseph De Maistre. Mirëpo, ka një thënie të një francezi tjetër, të kundërt për nga domethënia, e të cilën nuk e kam dëgjuar ta ketë cituar kush te ne. Jean-Jacques Rousseau ka shkruar diku se çdo qeveri e ka atë popull që e krijon.

Më parë sesa gjurmimin e së vërtetës sonë përmes këtyre dy thënieve, duhet parë të vërtetën brenda vetë këtyre dy thënieve, përkatësisht motivet dhe pasojat e dy parafrazimeve të mësipërme. Me fjalë të tjera, le t’i trajtojmë De Maistre-in dhe Rousseau-në si dy kriminelë.

Joseph De Maistre, filozof e diplomat i fundit të shekullit XVIII dhe fillimit të atij XIX, senator dhe i biri i kryetarit të Senatit, ka qenë kundër Revolucionit Borgjez Francez që përmbysi absolutizmin monarkik dhe rendin feudal. Ai deri në fund të jetës së tij përmes shkrimeve, fjalimeve e punimeve ka kërkuar kthimin e monarkisë dhe të autoritarizmit dhe dominimin e Papatit. Në anën tjetër, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, filozof dhe shkrimtar i shekullit XVIII, me kritikën e tij ndaj pabarazisë dhe afirmimin e asaj që e quante vullnet i përgjithshëm, e inspiroi revolucionin e vitit 1789 i cili do ta ndryshojë përgjithmonë Francën dhe Evropën. Që prej atëherë, çdokush që është përpjekur të kuptojë teoritë politike a sociologjike, shtetin a historinë, e ka pasur të pamundur ta evitojë Rousseau-në.

Të dy thëniet gjithsesi janë thellësisht politike dhe krejtësisht të kundërta. Joseph De Maistre, duke thënë që çdo popull e ka qeverinë që e meriton, bënte përgjegjës popullin dhe shfajësonte qeverinë. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, duke thënë që çdo qeveri e ka popullin që e krijon, fajësonte pikërisht qeverinë. I pari përpiqej ta racionalizonte realitetin; i dyti, inkurajonte realizimin e racionales. I pari kërkonte pranimin e qeverisë (nga populli); i dyti kërkonte pranimin e popullit (nga qeveria). I pari i frikësohej të resë që mund të vijë; i dyti frikësohej se e vjetra mund të mos shkojë.

Por, le ta ndërpresim gjithë këtë shtjellim. Pra, kemi (aso qeverie) ashtu siç jemi (si popull), apo jemi (si popull) ashtu siç kemi (qeverinë)? Përgjigjja e denjë për këtë pyetje është veçse një pyetje tjetër: a duam ndryshime?

Nuk është e mundshme edhe të mos pajtohesh me qeverisjen e korruptuar, edhe të mendosh se e kemi atë qeveri të cilën e meritojmë. Ose nisesh nga racionalizimi i padrejtësisë dhe përfundon në inferioritet skllavërues, ose – dhe kështu duhet – nisesh nga mospranimi i realitetit të padrejtë dhe... nisesh, për ndryshimet që i do.

antinatalist quotations

2010-11-14T03:11:00.000+01:00

Today is my birthday. To celebrate the occasion I decided to remind you, lest you've forgotten, how stupid and meaningless natural human life is. Here are a few wonderful quotations I found here:

Sophocles wrote in his Oedipus at Colonus:

It is best not to have been born at all: but, if born, as quickly as possible to return whence one came.^[10]

Heinrich Heine, who spent the last eight years of his life paralyzed, partly blind and heavily sedated on his “mattress grave” (death bed), said:

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

Gustave Flaubert wrote:

The idea of bringing someone into this world fills me with horror...May my flesh perish utterly! May I never transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominies of existence!

Schopenhauer, in his essay On the Suffering of the World articulates the position as follows:

If the act of procreation were neither the outcome of a desire nor accompanied by feelings of pleasure, but a matter to be decided on the basis of purely rational considerations, is it likely the human race would still exist? Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at least not wish to take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?^[11]

The unorthodox Biblical writer Qohelet maintains:

I further observed all the oppression that goes under the sun: the tears of the oppressed, with none to comfort them; and the power of their oppressors—with none to comfort them. Then I accounted those who died long since more fortunate than those who are still living; and happier than either are those who have not yet come into being and have never witnessed the miseries that go under the sun.^[12]

Zapffe, in a 1990 documentary, said:

In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.

Mark Twain, in The Five Boons of Life, said:

The fairy came, bringing again four of the gifts, but Death was wanting. She said: "I gave it to a mother's pet, a little child. It was ignorant, but it trusted me, asking me to choose for it. You did not ask me to choose." "Oh miserable me! What is there left for me?" "What not even you have deserved: the wanton insult of Old Age."

Mark Twain, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, said:

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Together is the Future

2010-11-10T15:37:00.000+01:00