The crisis of totalitarianism and the drift into post-totalitarianism is largely, but not only, a crisis of the ideological way of thinking. However, the “wooden language” of the regime had become a mentality for the apparatchiks and even citizens, which survives today in the new democracies.
The legacies of totalitarianism were most apparent in societies, institutions, and the everyday norms of people who emerged from the carcasses of totalitarian states. However, as ideology, mentality, and mode of thinking, totalitarianism was not confined to territories ruled by totalitarian states. The lure of totalitarianism for European “philotyrannical intellectuals” (Lilla Reference Lilla2001, 197) has been discussed at length in intellectual history, political theory, social theory, and political philosophy. My concern in this chapter is with the post-totalitarian legacies of totalitarian thinking. These legacies are not confined to post-Communist and post-Nazi countries. The difference between totalitarian intellectuals in such countries and those who lived all their lives in liberal democracies was in their political moral luck (Williams Reference Williams1981). Some West European post-World War II totalitarian thinkers and authors, like drunk drivers cruising empty pavements at the dead of night, were incredibly lucky because they did not kill, purge, inform against, jail, torture, or join the secret police. By luck rather than virtue, their worst actions were the publications of apologies for atrocities committed by othersFootnote 1 (Glucksmann Reference Glucksmann and Pearce1980; Judt Reference Judt1994; Wolin Reference Wolin1992; Reference Wolin1995; Reference Wolin2006; Reference Wolin2010). For them, the totalitarian ideals were more important than their victims. This old totalitarian intellectual tradition carries on from Louis Althusser to Alain Badiou and their epigones.
Fukuyama’s (Reference Fukuyama1992) interpretation of Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of the history of ideology and political ideas resembled the plot of a Western: History was a series of ideological duels. At the end, there was a final showdown at Checkpoint Charlie: The good ideology (President Ronald Reagan comes to mind) shot down the bad ideology and it bit the dust. The European townspeople thanked the good cowboy and he rode out of town into the California sunset. The end, scholarly disputed credits, lights. Yet the history of political ideas and ideologies resembles the plot of horror movies such as the Alien series more than Westerns such as High Noon. Just when the audience thinks the monster (or specter, to borrow Derrida’s Reference Derrida and Wills1995 appropriation of the Communist Manifesto) is killed and destroyed, and the hero can relax, the monster returns from an unexpected direction, albeit in a new form, having survived the apparent climactic confrontation. Neo-totalitarianism also comes from unexpected directions, including from Western Europe, as we saw in the previous chapter.
Admittedly, of all the aspects of totalitarianism, ideology probably disintegrated first. The traumatic experiences of violent humiliation and despair during Stalinism and the Soviet invasions of 1956 and 1968 de-ideologized late-totalitarian societies on the level of consciousness and conviction long before the regimes collapsed (Wydra Reference Wydra2007). “Well before the 1980s, ideology had ceased to be the mortar holding that edifice together” (Solnick Reference Solnick1999, 219). The terminal crisis of Communist ideology predated the collapse of Communism by at least two decades (Tismaneanu Reference Tismaneanu2012, 141–145). The suppression of the Marxist Humanists who introduced an internal Marxist criticism of totalitarianism demonstrated that totalitarian ideology could not reform. Recognizing the end of ideology as a mobilization tool, Communist states sought popular legitimacy during the ultimate two decades of totalitarianism through granting privileges and offering patronage. In return for political acquiescence the population received a minimal low standard of living and some consumerist goods. Further patronage was distributed to particularly loyal comrades. Dissidents were excluded. As the totalitarian utopian ideology lost its ability to promise and mobilize, the totalitarian elite attempted to use fear and suspicion as alternative mobilizing forces (Voslensky Reference Voslensky and Mosbacher1984, 291–295). The artificial generation of emergencies served elites who wished to encourage their subjects to concentrate their attention on real or imaginary external enemies rather than on the predatory and corrupt practices of their ruling class. This method was effective in multinational totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and contemporary North Korea, where ethnic xenophobia and international conflicts respectively mobilized populations in the absence of convincing ideologies.
Old-fashioned totalitarian ideologies can still be found on the post-totalitarian political fringes. Some of the new radical populist, nationalist, and xenophobic leaders such as Vadim Tudor in Romania were the old ideologues of Communist totalitarianism and their new ideologies are embarrassingly similar to their origin. Tamás (Reference Tamás, Diamond and Plattner2002, 130–131) foresaw that nationalism would fail in the post-totalitarian context, like all other ideologies. Societies that share widespread draft dodging and tax avoidance and whose members do not contribute to charity cannot be nationalist or communitarian. In post-totalitarian pluralistic political systems, divisions between parties often have some ideological facade, but little substance. At the most cynical ideological extreme, there is Russia’s “managed democracy” where all the parties that are allowed to run for elections and their diverging ideologies are overtly designed and controlled by the same clique in power. After totalitarianism, patronage replaced ideology as the bridge that connected citizens with political parties. The substitution of patronage for ideology took place also after Nazism and Fascism in Austria and Italy, and to an extent in West Germany.
Post-Communist countries were not prepared for the economic catastrophe of 2007–2008 as they were prepared for the famous J-curve of economic recession and growth after Communism. After 2008, poor and disoriented pensioners became nostalgic for the impoverished ideological and material certainties of their youth. Unemployed and disillusioned youth pined for the illusion of a better past that their elders and the political establishment appeared to abhor and fear. As the effects of the recession slowly dissipate, the appeal of neo-totalitarian movements will hopefully diminish in Europe, Western as well as Eastern: The extreme right of the National Front and extreme Trotskyite left are still stronger in France than in any of the post-Communist democracies, save for Hungary.
The ubiquitous viable, dangerous, and rarely noticed legacies of totalitarian ideologies are not in political utopias, programs, or even parties and movements. They are buried deep in the psyche, in the mentality and forms of thought, discourse, and argumentation of post-totalitarian thinkers. Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 471) considered early totalitarian ideology simple dogma. In her analysis ideology infers by consistent rigorous methods from false axiomatic premises, while ignoring reality. But by late totalitarianism, the gap between the immediately observable social reality and the official ideology could not be bridged by merely deducing and inferring logically from false axiomatic assumptions because the received axioms, however false, were not sufficient for deducing the required conclusions. The Marxist and Leninist scriptures continued to be used, but often in the form of decontextualized quotations. Without interpretation, it was impossible to be wrong. Late-totalitarian ideology was governed by rules that regulated the relations of words with each other, but the words ceased to have a meaning or refer to anything in the world. Defending this ideological language against criticisms required an attack on the very possibility of language that makes sense and has a reference. The attack on language expanded further to an attempt to silence reason, to throw spikes into the wheels of logical inference and deduction to prevent critical analysis of social and political reality. This turned education into indoctrination. It was impossible to teach economically a few assumptions and allow students to use reason to infer conclusions or results. It became necessary to teach a long list of politically undisputable premises, a complex dogma. Ideological language became a speech act whose meaning was submission of reason to power. Totalitarian ideologues who did not live in totalitarian countries confronted a similar challenge to the one faced by their colleagues who worked for totalitarian states: a yawning gap between ideology and social reality. Western European totalitarian thinkers also had to face criticisms in the absence of censorship and terror. They were free, though, from the constant silent rebuke of totalitarian social reality because they fantasized about rather than faced it. These circumstances forced them to go into further extremes in assaulting the usefulness of language to refer to the world and of reason to argue against ideology. Two legacies of totalitarian thinking, the assault on language as a way of representing and referring to the world and the subversion of reason through the systematic and repetitive use of logical fallacies, persist and endure in the thinking and writings of post-totalitarian authors whether or not they live in a post-totalitarian society.
The most common totalitarian method for undermining the potency of language to refer to anything definite in the world was “dialectical” elimination of the differences between opposite concepts. For example, all the totalitarian regimes and ideologues presented themselves as “democratic.” They obscured the meaning of the concept and then corrupted it to mean its totalitarian opposite. If concepts can mean their opposites (war is peace, freedom is slavery, to use Orwell’s examples; cf. Tuckerova Reference Tuckerova, Bradatan and Oushakine2010), language loses its solid form and becomes a dough-like formless mass that cannot hold together to mean and refer, communicate and convince. As Orwell showed so convincingly in 1984 and Havel (Reference Havel and Blackwell1980) in The Memorandum, if a totalitarian regime can construct a language that is useless for criticizing it, a political opposition has to invent a new language before it can express its political criticisms, aspirations, and plans. “By calling ‘autonomous’ that which is powerless, ‘federated’ that which is unitary, ‘democratic’ that which is autocratic, ‘united’ that which is schismatic, ‘popular’ that which is imposed by terror, ‘peaceful’ that which invites war – in brief, by systematically corrupting language to obscure reality – the Communists have made inroads into our sense of political reality” (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick1982, 135). Pocock (Reference Pocock2009) and the Cambridge school’s examination of the primary function of language in the history of political thought emphasized the difficulties in breaking through the cages of conceptual frameworks. Totalitarianism constructed a cage made of logical fallacies designed, like the impossible constellations in an Escher drawing, to make breaking out impossible.
The Czech literary critic and dissident Petr Fidelius (Reference Fidelius1998; Reference Fidelius2000) analyzed the language and rhetoric that was used by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, rediscovering the logical fallacies of composition and division. “The fallacy of composition may occur when we reason that a property belonging to the parts is possessed by the whole.” Vice versa, “the fallacy of division may occur when we reason that a property belonging to the whole is possessed by the parts” (Nolt Reference Nolt1984, 257 ff). Fidelius applied this rediscovered logical analysis to the relations between “the people,” “the working people,” “the party as the core of the working class,” “the healthy core of the party,” and “the leader” in Communist rhetoric. The part substituted for the whole, so the leader became gradually identical with the people (cf. Tuckerova Reference Tuckerova, Bradatan and Oushakine2010). Just as useful for totalitarian purposes was the slippery slope fallacy, to move by small increments from one opposite to another to reach the dialectical identity of opposites. Each stage in the slippery slope fallacy broadens the meaning of a concept by just a little, blurring boundaries, until one opposite becomes gradually identical with the other. For example, if the borders between morning and late morning, late morning and noon, noon and afternoon, afternoon and early evening, early evening and evening, and evening and night are sufficiently blurred and the blurred relations are transitive, morning becomes night.
The late-totalitarian ideologues used logical fallacies and obscured language to target in particular democracy and the responsible agent, the person. Totalitarianism, like other forms of autocracy, is marked by the rule of unelected nonrepresentative few. To present itself as democratic, totalitarianism had to somehow obscure the fact that it was the rule of a minority founded on violence and terror, while presenting democracies with free and fair multiparty elections and majority rule, as being ruled by a minority that is able to manipulate the hapless majority to vote against its interests and the common good.
“Homo Sovieticus” was a version of the person stripped down to a collection of raw basic needs and fears that could then be manipulated by the totalitarian system. Accordingly, the late-totalitarian world view reduced all opinions, beliefs, statements of conviction, ideals, and knowledge to personal interests because nothing else was left of the person. I stress personal rather than group or class interests as in classical Marxism, because in the atomized late-totalitarian society the regime recognized and attempted to encourage and manipulate individual interests, passions, and fears, while fighting any manifestation of civil society and solidarity. This legacy survived as post-totalitarian denial of personal responsibility. After totalitarianism, many people had reasons to be ashamed for being cowards, conformists, or opportunists. Perpetrators feared punishment. They shared an interest in denying personal responsibility by deconstructing the individualist concept of the person. If there was no person and no personal responsibility, nobody was guilty. This deconstruction of the morally responsible agent constitutes the antihumanistic legacy of totalitarianism. The founding text of this tradition is Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (Reference Heidegger and Capuzzi1977) written immediately after the Second World War to Sartre as a kind of apology for (I cannot write “his”) involvement with Nazism, by denying the presence of the person. This text presented a watershed in European history of ideas, the first post-totalitarian apology founded on a developed antihumanistic philosophy. Many more were to follow, some directly indebted to Heidegger, others inspired by easier and later “postmodernist” texts.
Next, I analyze four representative post-totalitarian authors and texts that preserve these legacies of late-totalitarian thinking, dialectical language that conflates opposites and logical fallacies, to undermine democracy and personal responsibility. The first is an appreciation of post-totalitarian Czech democracy by a former officer of the Czechoslovak secret police who attempted to claim that democracy is dictatorship, and dictatorship is democracy. Second, I examine Habermas’ similar misrepresentation of democracy as dictatorial and the domination of an intellectual minority as democratic. Derrida used similar logical fallacies to attack the concept of the responsible liberal individual. Finally, I discuss Žižek’s criticism of the concept of totalitarianism that attacks democratic dissent by identifying it with its opposite.
Antediluvian after the Fall
Oskar Krejči’s book, History of Elections in Bohemia and Moravia (Reference Krejči1995), on post-1989 Czech politics and their historical background, offers a late-totalitarian perspective on post-totalitarian democracy. The author started his career after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. While a student at Prague’s Charles University, he was a member of the committee that purged the University of Reformed Communists and other opponents of the invasion and was rewarded with a period of study in the Soviet Union (where often foreign students like him were recruited by the KGB). Upon returning, he joined the Czechoslovak Secret Police (the StB) and rose in the ranks to become an adviser to the last Prime Minister of Communist Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Adamec. He participated in the short negotiations that transferred power from the Communist Party to Civic Forum. After the transfer of power, he worked briefly in the office of the president until he was lustrated. The English translation of this originally Czech language book is in nonidiomatic English. Even the quotations from English language originals were translated back to English from their Czech translations. The translator is not credited. The book was published in English through the intervention of John Bradley, who was a retired lecturer at the University of Manchester in England and originally a Czech émigré. Bradley explained to me that in return, Krejči gave him access to secret police files that he privatized.
Krejči argued against representative government in general and the Czech democratic government in particular. He attempted to analyze the political scene in the first half of the nineties to draw up a strategy for a return to power of the Communist Party in coalition with centrist parties. Most interesting is the distinctly late-totalitarian ideological mode of thought that underlies the book. Krejči characterized (xxiv) “people’s democracy” (the term used by the communist regimes for self-reference) as offering the greatest and most permanent accountability of representatives. To achieve this unusual link of totalitarianism with accountability, he merged the concept with its opposite, that of direct democracy. He associated “people’s democracy” with Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson. This concept of “people’s democracy” was designed to confuse by conflating direct democracy and American Republicanism with totalitarianism. In a language that does not distinguish totalitarianism from direct democracy and Republicanism, it is impossible to criticize Communism without rejecting democracy. As much as Krejči attempted to identify totalitarianism with direct democracy, he identified representative democracy with oligarchy: “The very idea of representative democracy means a redefinition of the democratic idea. The election with its arithmetic and geometry, which are inaccurate if measured by the ideals of justice, is nothing but a practical continuation of the process which makes the democratic ideal more and more relative” (159–160). Conceptually, Krejči conflated totalitarianism with direct democracy under the label of people’s democracy to contrast it with representative democracy conflated with oligarchy.
In the epilogue, appropriately entitled “Elections – Weakness of Democracy?” Krejči claimed that the “elected power elite” determines the rules of the election game in representative democracy and therefore it is not democratic. He described democratic governments as founded on a “dummy majority” resulting from the majority election system, coalition governments, mass media, manipulation of the public by governments, encouragement of abstention, and “dictatorship of artificial clusters … republican oligarchy where the elite mastered the technique of mass manipulation in post-modern society” (412). “Elections in post-modern capitalism are only a dummy game about the government of people” (417). According to Krejči, the June 1990 elections in Czechoslovakia that took place six months after the Velvet Revolution “happened under a strong tendency toward an information monopoly in public mass media and under purpose-tied pre-electoral activity of government officials whose efforts exerted many months before election day would not conform to any standards of a really democratic society which supervises the management of public funds” (402; italics mine).
The November 1989 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution becomes antidemocratic when conceptually fused with the “normalization” process that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the deposition of the reformist Communist leadership:
the movement towards liberal democracy originally started in Czechoslovakia after November 1989 with the violation of franchise. If all post-socialist Eastern European countries headed directly towards free elections, Czechoslovakia chose an intermediary stage which copied the “normalization” policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Treaty armies occupied the country on August 21, 1968 – reconstruction of legislative and representative bodies. This move was politically redundant once Vaclav Havel was elected President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in December 1989 by the Federal Assembly – it was formed under socialist electoral laws and in line with the nomenclature of the day. It was, however, an extremely important and still underestimated act whose implications augured the development of the political culture of Czechoslovakia in the following period …. Most of the recalled or resigned deputies were the representatives of the former profane regime – this, however, does not alter the fact that the reconstruction itself was a violation of franchise.
The first post-totalitarian democratic elections in Czechoslovakia took place six months after the revolution. Prior to those elections, the federal and national parliaments were composed of old Communists and undemocratically elected representatives of Civic Forum and the Slovak Public Against Violence that occupied seats vacated by Communist delegates according to the transition agreement between the dissidents and the Communist Party. This constitutional assembly, as it were, was the result of direct democracy, of demonstrations in the streets that led to the formation of Civic Forum to represent directly the demonstrating masses in negotiations with the Communist oligarchy. But Krejči conflated the opposites, Communist oligarchy as “people’s democracy” and direct democracy as oligarchy.
After 1992, the preconditions for the return of the Czech “left” (read: the Communist Party) according to Krejči (380) were:
1. Independent information system of the leftist party.
2. Mutual recognition of dissatisfied persons, easy explanation of the problems by a party with a tradition of representing dissatisfaction.
3. Mass character of dissatisfaction without easy mobility and successful selfish individuals who break ranks with their class.
4. Foreign intervention on the side of the Left (sic!). Old habits die hard, and Czech Communists who joined the secret police after the Soviet 1968 invasions could not imagine acting without fraternal help from the East.
The big enemy of “the Left” (read: the Communist Party) was real or perceived social mobility (privatization, restitution), as well as traditionalism, and private media subjected to the “interests of big money.” Krejči’s analysis of the reasons for the success of the Right in the Czech Republic when compared with other post-socialist countries correctly included the better economic situation, the political success of privatization, the new individualistic mentality, and, most significantly for Krejči,
Middle-aged Leftist intellectuals were ruled out from active politics with the help of vetting [i.e., lustration] but this intelligentsia might have become an agent of experience and courage to take risk. That is why, unlike other countries, Leftist propaganda is missing in mass media – Left-oriented mass media acting on intellectuals is missing too, in effect. In a word, the ideological background to the “Brazauskas effect” [the return of Communists to power, named after the leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party] is missing.
The late totalitarian secret police officer and ideologue considered himself a leftist intellectual, a member of the intelligentsia, producing propaganda in the mass media. After all the linguistic obfuscation and logical fallacies, Krejči could only conclude that: “Analyses of the 1990 and 1992 elections allow just one possible conclusion: the average Czech voter behaves irrationally” (404). The idea that democratic majorities can be the result of irrationality and therefore are not truly democratic and should be ignored connects Krejči with Rousseau and Habermas.
Democracy as a Seminar
One of the oldest and most seductive utopian programs in political philosophy is the transformation of the polity into a school, ruled by teachers, who educate the citizens-pupils. This is a political fantasy that is particularly appealing to pedagogues: Plato imagined turning the state into an exclusive selective elite school. “Rousseau’s adored Legislator is nothing but the great Educator” (Talmon Reference Talmon1970, 31). The Bolsheviks attempted to turn society into a kind of strict reform school for delinquents, a prison that specialized in discipline rather than academic achievement (Michnik Reference Michnik, Gross and Cave1998, 105). Habermas’ deliberative democracy endorsed the research seminar as a new model for the polity.
Ideally, the research seminar is dedicated to open critical deliberations about research methods and their results. However, as most graduates of advanced seminars know, academic reality rarely quite matches this ideal. Research seminars devolve too often into more or less sophisticated indoctrination sessions for advanced students in the tenets of a particular school or personal approach. Students may be guided through a selective reading list that directs them to the opinions, methods, and even dogmas of their teacher, which they are expected to develop, apply, or polemically defend in their writings. Some, perhaps most, academics who direct homogenization in the guise of deliberation honestly believe they convince their students by the power of their arguments, rather than by their authority, selection of readings, and control and moderation of discussions. Since seminar leaders disagree with each other, significant correlations between their opinions and those of their students are not likely to emanate exclusively from deliberation or even from the predisposition of students to choose teachers who share their approaches or convictions.
If the homogenization fails and by the end of the seminar some or even most students are unconvinced, it is tempting to explain dissent by ignorance (the students did not read the assigned reading and did not pay attention to class discussions), the baneful influence of other bad teachers (they came to graduate school from an inferior department with a different orientation and refuse to learn), or vice (the students are attention-seeking contrarians, they have a problem with authority, they were sent as provocateurs by the enemies of the teacher within or without the faculty, or they have mental problems that prevent them from making rational decisions). Once the reasons for disagreement with a teacher are reduced to irrationality or malevolence, the dissenters should be neutralized, bullied, threatened, silenced, or expelled, to allow the other students to learn. Within an academic environment, this sort of pedagogy is pathetic but rarely dangerous because students can exit when they do not have a voice (Hirschman Reference Hirschman1970). However, if the state is a research seminar and the teachers are committed to the proposition that any rational person must agree with them, the absence of a democratic majority is an embarrassment that can only be explained by irrationality or malevolence and it follows that such a majority is not truly democratic. If the state is a utopian grand seminar, the educating state must overcome the irrational views citizens accumulated through their interaction with manipulative partisan politicians, the media, religion, the market or, most significantly, their own interests. Society must be homogenized and reeducated and its prior loyalties and convictions must be obliterated as a precondition to true democracy. This precondition must be achieved by a homogenizing minority that can then direct the “democratic” seminars. This reasoning develops in the following consecutive stages:
1. Democratic majorities should vote for the common good, what is good for all members of society upon reflection and deliberation.
2. When the majority does not vote for the common good, the majority is not truly “democratic.” Real democracy is not the rule of the majority, but the rule of “best reasons” (cf. Young Reference Young2000, 23).
3. Majority vote against the common good reflects ignorance, sectarianism, or manipulative oppression by an interested minority that uses its institutionalized power though religion, the media, and so on to delude the majority to vote against what is good for all.
4. The necessary initial task of “democracy” and its leaders is to overcome all the forces that mislead people into voting against the common good, such as the mass media, religion, class divisions, economic inequality, and special interests.
5. This requires the elimination of all social inequalities and their legacies.
6. An educated intellectual avant garde should be in charge both of distinguishing voting majorities that result from the common will from those that result directly or indirectly from social inequalities and of homogenizing and reeducating the ignorant voters because the enlightened avant garde has direct knowledge of the true common good.
7. Only when sufficient homogenization is achieved can democracy in the sense of majority vote be permitted and beneficial.
8. Society can never be sufficiently homogenous and reeducated to generate the kind of universal democratic consensus on all issues that would emanate from shared reason and common interest. The avant garde of the revolutionary intellectual elite can never be sufficiently powerful to bring about the desired homogenization and reeducation. Therefore it always needs more power.
Reasons 1 through 6 constitute oligarchic authoritarian pseudodemocracy. Reasons 7 and 8 take the oligarchy over the brink into totalitarianism, though 8 would rarely be stated in such blunt terms. Rousseau and the Jacobins presented a classical case for a slide from 1 through 6, oligarchy, to 7 and 8, totalitarianism. I argue that Habermas’ theory of “deliberative democracy” displays clearly 1 through 7 reasoning. Habermas’ political philosophy identifies democratic majority rule with its opposite, and vice versa, like Krejči does.
Rousseau (Reference Rousseau2001, book two) argued that the state should be directed by the general will toward the common good. The general will is distinct of the will of all because according to Rousseau, it is based on the common interest, while the will of all is founded on private interests, the aggregate of private wills. Rousseau believed that if informed people deliberate, without forming special groups or parties, from many little differences should emerge the general will. To manifest the general will, society should not be composed of associations and special interests, but of equal citizens. Jacob Talmon (Reference Talmon1970) considered Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will to be the philosophical fountainhead of totalitarian democracy: Rousseau’s doctrine implied according to Talmon that citizens who do not prefer the general will, do not really will what they think they will, and so should be coerced to do what they really will (cf. a similar argument in Berlin Reference Berlin2002). The totalitarian project is to “liberate” people of their individuality, social ties, and loyalties, to allow their deliberations to direct them to the common will. Rousseau rejected parliamentary democracy because popular sovereignty should not be transferred to representatives who would develop oligarchic special interests.
A well-organized intellectual minority, certain of their special knowledge of the content of the general will, like the Jacobins (who were initially just a political debating club) may find democracy redundant if the voters are ignorant of the general will. In his Secret Catechism, Robespierre stated that the greatest danger to liberty is from people’s lack of enlightenment that results from their ignorance and misery. The opinions of the people do not count, are not the general will, as long as they are hungry, dominated, and misled by the rich who hire venal journalists to manipulate them (Talmon Reference Talmon1970, 106). Democracy is not about listening to the people and counting their votes, but about the creation of conditions for the true expression of the general will. Till then, the intellectual revolutionary vanguard may follow the common will, not democratic majority vote (105–107). Robespierre and Sieyes reached the conclusion that the pure general will cannot be relegated to a selfish assembly, to mere parliamentary majorities. “The majority in the real sense is where the true general will resides, even if that will happens to be expressed by a numerical minority” of Jacobin activists (99). The idea that popular majority vote does not count as democratic until certain (more or less extensive and utopian) egalitarian prerequisites are satisfied runs from the Jacobins through Habermas to contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy such as Bohman (Reference Bohman1996) and Gutmann and Thompson (Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996; Reference Gutmann and Thompson2004).
There is a significant continuity between the arguments of Rousseau for the common will and of Habermas for practical reason. Habermas followed Rousseau more than Kant in using the subjunctive rather than the indicative voice to express the general will: “The moral principle is so conceived as to exclude as invalid any norm that could not meet with the qualified assent of all who are or might be affected by it … only those norms are accepted as valid that express a general will” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Nicholson1990a, 63). Habermas explicated the general will as a consensus following a reflexive process of argumentation, mutual criticism, and airing of cultural values among all concerned. Following such a seminar-like process, the common will emerges (67). Since for Habermas only the results of an ideal speech situation are rational, less than ideal speech situations are, to varying degrees, less than rational. Rescher (Reference Rescher1993, 156–157) traced Habermas’ consensual utopia to Hegel’s march of reason in history and Marx’s dream of a homogenous society without special interests. Even sympathetic readers of Habermas such as Dryzek (Reference Dryzek1990) and Bohman (Reference Bohman1996) found the requirement for consensus disturbing in the context of pluralist society. Habermasian consensus is an impossible utopia. It stands to reason then for Habermas to proceed on what an ideal speech situation would have resulted in, rather than bother with a necessarily imperfect actualization of democracy. As with the Jacobin use of Rousseau’s utopia, requiring a utopian speech situation leads to falling back on a hypothetical general will or consensus that can never be achieved in practice or corroborated empirically. An intellectual minority can then conveniently define and represent (and enforce if armed) the hypothetical general will that would have resulted from an ideal speech situation and call the result “deliberative democracy.”
Habermas tended to reduce what he called “knowledge” to power relations. Yet, he would like political deliberation to be rational and free of such biases. The utopian solution is the homogenization of society, an end to power distinctions and biased “knowledge.” However, such a utopia can be approximated only by the total concentration of power in a political center that can destroy all competing power concentrations. Habermas’ utopian presuppositions for discourse are: Everybody who can speak and act can participate in discourse. Everybody can question any assertion. Everybody can introduce any assertion. Everyone can express his or her attitudes, desires, and needs. No speaker can be prevented by internal or external coercion from the above (Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Nicholson1990a, 89). Though this ideal can and does form the foundation of an innocuous ethical system, politically, its utopian impossibility may be used to legitimize a dictatorship that should regulate and enforce rules of discourse. Habermas was aware of some of these problems. But his reply only strengthens my reservations: Discourse rules, he claimed, are not constitutive; “discourse rules are merely the form in which we present the implicitly adopted and intuitively known pragmatic presuppositions of a special type of speech, … participants in argumentation must assume these conditions to be approximately realized … regardless of whether and to what extent these assumptions are counterfactual in a given case or not” (91–92). Habermas acknowledged that “[t]opics and contributions have to be organized. The opening, adjournment, and resumption of discussions must be arranged. Because of all these factors, institutional measures are needed to sufficiently neutralize empirical limitations and avoidable internal and external interference so that the idealized conditions always already presupposed by participants in argumentation can at least be adequately approximated” (92). This gives the manager of democracy considerable powers.Footnote 2
Later, Habermas (Reference Habermas and Rehg1996) distanced himself from Rousseau. Habermas located sovereignty in the rational public sphere between civil society and the state, rather than in the “people” like Rousseau. However:
On account of its anarchic structure, the general public sphere is, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication than are the institutionalized public spheres of parliamentary bodies. On the other hand, it has the advantage of a medium of unrestricted communication ….
Only in an egalitarian public of citizens that has emerged from the confines of class and thrown off the millennia-old shackles of social stratification and exploitation can the potential of an unleashed cultural pluralism fully develop – a potential that no doubt abounds just as much in conflicts as in meaning-generating forms of life. But in a secularized society that has learned to deal with its complexity consciously and deliberately, the communicative mastery of these conflicts constitutes the sole source of solidarity among strangers.
Deliberation in the public sphere requires, then, first the establishment of a Communist utopia, the homogenization of society, and the generation of classless secularized society. Unfortunately, the totalitarian power required for such radical egalitarian transformation of society, to allow the emergence of “authentic complete democracy,” can never be achieved, and when approximated has never been used for that purpose. Once any group achieves total power, it uses it in its own interests. The Jacobins first excluded from discussion the special interests, the upper classes and the clerics; when that was considered insufficient, they decapitated them, when that proved yet insufficient they proceeded to decapitate other classes with special interests, culminating with themselves.Footnote 3
Nicht schuldig
The primal scene of the post-totalitarian twentieth century took place at the Nurnberg Trials after the Second World War. The leaders of Nazi Germany were brought to justice and asked whether they pled guilty. One after another the Nazi leaders stood to attention and answered confidently, unhesitatingly, indeed indignantly: “Nicht schuldig,” not guilty, not responsible (German uses the same word for guilt and responsibility). The arguments that were heard at the Nurnberg Trials have been heard since then at countless other post-totalitarian courtrooms, criminal and of public opinion: “Justice” is the victors’ use of their power to judge the vanquished according to their own interest laden values. The accused were but manifestations, moments of their era, history, nation, race, discourse community, and so on, and therefore could not be held personally responsible for their actions. Actually, no individuals participated in any crime, only anonymous masses and abstract entities. The accusers were morally indistinguishable from the accused: Did not the Americans commit genocide against the Indians? And what about slavery and racism in the South? The only rule in history is “Might makes right.” The losers were judged and punished for having lost and nothing else.
Similar claims have been made by virtually all the totalitarian perpetrators in the twentieth century and their representatives, such as Saddam Hussein, and Jacques Vergès – the advocate of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s butcher of Lyon, and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. In previous centuries, occasionally, political sinners were filled with remorse, confessed, and retired to a monastery or to grow cabbages. But remorse has disappeared from twentieth century political discourse along with concepts such as “atonement,” “amends,” and “penance.” Only the materialistic “compensation” or the legalistic “redress” were left as vestiges of this once vast discourse. Responsibility itself has become a politically and philosophically contentious concept.
Vulgar Marxism used determinism and ontological social holism, the metaphysical doctrine that social units exist more fundamentally than individuals, to shun responsibility. Contemporary irresponsibility, however, appears to seek its legitimization in the denial of the existence of the person, the subject of responsibility. The responsibility of intellectuals has been debated for the better part of the previous century following their involvements with and consequent apologies for totalitarianism. Heidegger, Lukacs, Gentile, Merleau-Ponty (indeed much of the whole post-WWII French intellectual milieu), de Man, and the like have been notoriously nicht schuldigen (Wolin Reference Wolin1992; Judt Reference Judt1994; Ott Reference Ott and Blunden1994, 165–168, 205; Wolin Reference Wolin1995, 123–239). Perhaps the best portrayal of the post-totalitarian hybrid intellectual-criminal is in Malcolm Bradbury’s (Reference Bradbury1992) novel Doctor Criminale, where the search for the great post-glasnost intellectual ends at the Swiss banks where he deposited embezzled state funds for his Communist masters. Though this is a fictional novel, it is painfully close to Central European academic and intellectual reality. Bradbury told me that he combined Lukacs and de Man to create the character of Bazlo Criminale.
In his writings from the early nineties, Derrida turned increasingly to social and political themes, including responsibility, before turning to theology before his death. The deconstruction of the person poses a challenge to responsibility. Derrida attempted to rise to the challenge. In his search for responsibility, Derrida turned to the philosophy of Jan Patočka, the Czech philosopher and co-founder with Václav Havel of the dissident movement of Charter 77. Patočka is a natural point of reference in a search for philosophical responsibility because he fulfilled in his life a unique integration of philosophy and practice, assuming moral responsibility and accepting consequentially a Socratic fate in a struggle for human rights (Kohák Reference Kohák1989; Tucker Reference Tucker2000).
Derrida interpreted parts of Patočka’s 1975 fifth and sixth Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Patočka Reference Patočka and Kohák1996, 95–118). Patočka was concerned with understanding the self-destruction of Europe in wars and revolutions during the twentieth century. This theme resembles Edmund Husserl’s (Reference Husserl and Carr1970) pre-World War II Crisis of European Sciences, only from a Czech perspective and after forty more years of European self-destruction, wars, revolution, invasions, oppression, and desperation, most notably the 1968 Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring.
Patočka drew a distinction between the “everyday” and the “exceptional,” the realm of passion and “the demonic.” He perceived the realm of the everyday as alienating and inauthentic. Work was for him self-enslavement that was forced on us to survive. The other side of everydayness was escapism, a stepping out of the self, an orgiastic ekstasis, demonic loss of responsibility. Patočka interpreted the modern history of Europe as cycles alternating between technological everydayness and orgiastic irresponsibility, wars and revolutions. Patočka interpreted religion as the realm where the orgiastic element of the sacred was overcome by regulation and the imposition of responsibility before modernity took over from religion and undid this imposition of responsibility. Following the early Heidegger, confrontation with finitude, with death, is the only experience we expect to undergo entirely alone. Unlike in Heidegger, it should lead to individuation of the soul, the subject of responsibility (Heidegger discussed neither soul nor responsibility). Religious confrontation with finitude in the form of belief in the preservation of the soul led according to Patočka to individuation and personal responsibility. Patočka conceived history proper (in a philosophical sense of significant past) as the process of overcoming inauthentic everydayness and its equally inauthentic orgiastic escape companion in an authentic discovery of the self and inquiry into it, care for the soul. History began then in the Greek polis with the rise of philosophy and the discovery of Being (Patočka was Eurocentric; Asian thinkers discovered the self at about the same time). Unlike Heidegger, Patočka perceived Plato’s metaphysics in this light, as turning the soul away from the orgiastic toward discipline, responsibility, and transcendent ideas. Christianity in this respect was for Patočka, as for Nietzsche, Platonism for the people; for Patočka, however, that was a good thing. Christianity achieved personal responsibility and the suppression of the orgiastic via a relation to a personal God, the salvation of the soul, and fear of damnation for sin.
Patočka conceived the crisis of modernity as the destruction of the Christian-Platonic ontology of responsibility that had overcome the cycles of everydayness and orgiastic eruptions by modern scientific rationality, the objectification of nature and its emptying of values and meaning, as Patočka’s teacher, Husserl, argued in his Crisis (Reference Husserl and Carr1970). Patočka thought that he discovered sacrifice as a mean for transcending modern everydayness without resorting to orgiastic escape. He sought to found “communities of shattered,” dissidents who sacrificed everydayness and assumed responsibility through confrontation with their own finitude, death, a confrontation that this leader of Charter 77 did not survive (Tucker Reference Tucker2000, 59–88).
In his Gift of Death (Reference Derrida and Wills1995) Derrida concentrated on the religious origin of responsibility. Derrida correctly attributed to Patočka the view that responsibility has a history. Derrida emphasizes Patočka’s Nietzschean contention that Platonism incorporated the orgiastic mystery (Nietzsche’s Dionysian) while Christianity suppressed it. Derrida claimed independently of Patočka that the religious suppression of the orgiastic created a secret, whose death is mourned. Derrida added to Patočka’s philosophy of history that in response to the responsibility of man, God gives a gift of death: “a history of secrecy as history of responsibility is tied to a culture of death, in other words to the different figures of the gift of death or of putting to death” (10). According to Derrida, the repressed secret returns occasionally in orgiastic eruptions. Derrida attempted to weaken the contrast between responsibility and the orgiastic escapes, claiming that they have not been fully suppressed, but remained in the form of a mourned secret and that the dead orgiastic returns.
The totalitarian legacies in Derrida’s thought emerged when he equated irresponsibility with responsibility to reach the typically totalitarian dialectical identity of opposites. Derrida began by asserting that not knowing the meaning of responsibility is somehow “irresponsible.” Derrida quoted Patočka to the effect that Christianity has an inadequate thematization of what responsibility is or must be, to conclude unlike Patočka that all responsibility involves irresponsibility because
the concept of responsibility has, in the most reliable continuity of its history, always implied involvement in action, doing, a praxis, a decision that exceeds simple conscience or simple theoretical understanding, it is also true that the same concept requires a decision or responsible action to answer for itself consciously, that is, with knowledge of the thematics of what is done, of what action signifies, its causes, ends, etc.… We must continually remind ourselves that some part of irresponsibility insinuates itself wherever one demands responsibility without sufficiently conceptualizing and thematizing what “responsibility” means; that is to say everywhere … the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination. It will have to decide without it, independently from knowledge; that will be the condition of a practical idea of freedom. We should therefore conclude that not only is the thematization of the concept of responsibility always inadequate but that it is always so because it must be so.
Employing the logical fallacy of slippery slope, the derivation of opposites from each other gradually by intermediary stages, taking advantage of the vagueness of some words (Nolt Reference Nolt1984, 270–273), Derrida reduced responsibility to its opposite, decisionism, which is closely associated with the political events that Patočka characterized as orgiastic and irresponsible. Derrida’s basic fallacy was the identification of responsibility with its opposite: “a decision that exceeds simple conscience or simple theoretical understanding.” Then, he played on the contradictions that this perverted sense of “responsibility” created in contrast with its ordinary language use. Derrida came squarely on the side of the orgiastic when he asserted that Platonic politics that forbid the secret orgiastic, the kind of politics the dissident Patočka attempted to lead, were totalitarian. In other words, supporting responsibility at the expense of the orgiastic tendencies that bred totalitarianism was according to Derrida totalitarian and irresponsible. Decisionism of the kind Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt supported became “responsibility.” Derrida derived using the slippery slope fallacy the exact opposite of what Patočka meant.
Derrida interpreted without distortion Patočka’s position that responsibility and philosophy are born of the freedom, facing finitude, to be a unique self. But then, through a misinterpretation of Levinas’ criticism of Heidegger’s discussion of death, Levinas’ emphasis on responsibility to the other, Derrida again derived the opposite, sacrifice in the sense of giving the gift of death to other people as responsibility (sic!). Instead of the Socratic self-sacrifice of Patočka, Derrida’s “responsible” sacrifice was Kierkegaard’s (Reference Kierkegaard and Hannay1985; cf. Tucker Reference Tucker1992) decisionist interpretation of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. Notice again the dialectical identity of opposites as it destroys language’s ability to say anything coherent:
I must sacrifice what I love. I must come to hate what I love, in the same moment, at the instant of granting death. I must hate and betray my own, that is to say offer them the gift of death by means of the sacrifice … insofar as I love them. I must hate them insofar as I love them …. It must hate and betray what is most lovable. Hate cannot be hate, it can only be the sacrifice of love to love. It is not a matter of hating, betraying by one’s breach of trust, or offering the gift of death to what one doesn’t love.
Derrida’s style identifies opposites, thereby providing ideological legitimization for sacrificial infanticide, motivated by a secret absolute irresponsible responsibility to the bloodthirsty transcendental realm:
a secret, hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious God, the one who decides, without revealing his reasons, to demand of Abraham that most cruel, impossible, and untenable gesture: to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. All that goes on in secret. God keeps silent about his reasons. Abraham does also, and the book [Fear and Trembling] is not signed by Kierkegaard, but by Johannes de Silentio.
Derrida differentiated what he called absolute responsibility, which corresponds with what ordinary language calls irresponsibility, from general responsibility that corresponds with responsibility in its ordinary sense:
For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared belief is that responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret, to the possibility and even the necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them … the absolute responsibility of my actions, to the extent that such a responsibility remains mine, singularly so, … instead implies secrecy. But what is also implied is that, by not speaking to others, I don’t account for my actions, that I answer for nothing and to no one, that I make no response to others or before others… Absolute responsibility is not a responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or responsibility in general. It needs to be exceptional or extraordinary, and it needs to be that absolutely and par excellence: it is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible.
This leads to a “duty” to be irresponsible:
Absolute duty demands that one behave in an irresponsible manner (by means of treachery or betrayal), while still recognizing, confirming, and reaffirming the very thing one sacrifices, namely, the order of human ethics and responsibility. In a word, ethics must be sacrificed in the name of duty … one must do that in the name of duty, of an infinite duty, in the name of absolute duty. And this name which must always be singular is here none other than the name of God as completely other, the nameless name of God, the unpronounceable name of God as other to which I am bound by an absolute, unconditional obligation, by an incomparable, nonnegotiable duty. The other as absolute other, namely, God, must remain transcendent, hidden, secret, jealous of the love, requests, and commands that he gives and that he asks to be kept secret. Secrecy is essential to the exercise of this absolute responsibility as sacrificial responsibility.
Derrida’s verbiage performed quite a fit of dialectics: the ultimate irresponsibility of sacrificing one’s children turned into absolute responsibility, and ethical responsibility became irresponsibility. Derrida was aware of the political implications of this dialectics. He wrote of the endless wars over and sacrifices for the site of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, mount Moriah, traditionally identified with Temple Mount in Jerusalem among the three monotheistic religions:
The reading, interpretation, and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves sites of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice. Isaac’s sacrifice continues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front. There is no front between responsibility and irresponsibility but only between different appropriations of the same sacrifice, different orders of responsibility.
Derrida offered legitimization for individual and communal forms of sacrificial murder. Derrida ridiculed the likely response of contemporary French society to a father who would sacrifice his son on the top of Montmartre and consequently be prosecuted and subjected to all kinds of legal, psychiatric, and terror “experts.” Derrida claimed that “society” has no right to morally condemn such a sacrifice, considering all the terrible things that happen in the world facing Western indifference (85–87), the kind of et toi aussi defense advocates such as Jacques Vergès mounted when totalitarian dictators and their henchmen such as Klaus Barbie were brought to justice as a more ingenious alternative to “he was just following orders,” a mere irresponsible instrument. Derrida attacked in a traditional post-totalitarian fashion the possibility of moral language that could be used to criticize and condemn the actions of states, terrorists, and totalitarian oppressors. This kind of attack on the usefulness of language to engage, describe, and criticize the world was typical of late-totalitarian ideologies. Derrida deconstructed ethics and the concept of responsibility in an extreme dialectical of attack on language that would not have shamed any late-totalitarian ideologue:
The concept of responsibility, like that of decision, would thus be found to lack coherence or consequence, even lacking identity with respect to itself, paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or an antinomy. That has never stopped it from “functioning” as one says. On the contrary, it operates so much better, to the extent that it serves to obscure the abyss or fill in its absence of foundation …. What is thus found at work in everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice, and first and foremost in the axiomatics of private, public, or international law, in the conduct of internal politics, diplomacy, and war, is a lexicon concerning responsibility that can be said to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere to be found, even if we can’t go so far as to say that it doesn’t correspond to any concept at all …. One simply keeps on denying the aporia and antinomy, tirelessly, and one treats as nihilist, relativist, even poststructuralist, and worse still deconstructionist, all those who remain concerned in the face of such a display of good conscience.
Derrida found the essence of responsibility not in the “abyss” of rational discourse but in an unreturned gaze of the seeing but unseen supreme God who can see into the places where the self cannot see itself. And God demands human sacrifice:
The sacrifice of economy, that without which there is no free responsibility or decision (a decision always takes place beyond calculation), is indeed in this case the sacrifice of the oikonomia, namely of the law of the home (oikos), of the hearth, of what is one’s own or proper, of the private, of the love and affection of one’s kin.
Derrida’s perverted “ethics of responsibility” concluded with totalitarian fanaticism, the demand to sacrifice all privacy, home and family, to some God or another, may it be the state, the race, or the class.
After 1989, Derrida returned with nostalgia to examine his Marxist tradition. He wanted to reappropriate the Marxian legacy for the interpretation of the contemporary world. The new fin de siècle apocalyptic endism (of history, philosophy, etc.) reminded him of his younger Marxist days, the social environment, which together with the revelations about Communism in the fifties led to the development of deconstruction. Derrida warned against a return to Marx without Marxism as another school of Western philosophy without the injunction to change the world while interpreting it, to revolt. Surprisingly, he rejected the “anesthesia of new theoretism.” Yet, Derrida defended the heterogeneity of voices and untranslatable languages of Marx the revolutionary, theoretician, terrorist, and scientist (Derrida Reference Derrida and Kamuf1994). Derrida’s philosophy is post-totalitarian, though he lived only in an intellectually rather than politically totalitarian milieu. Though Derrida did not have the opportunity to take part in constructing a totalitarian regime, he lived in and then outgrew an intellectually totalitarian universe where Marxism and Maoism were dominant. Just like his post-totalitarian counterparts in Eastern Europe, Derrida retained late-totalitarian modes of thinking after he ditched their content. The dialectical identity of opposites, the attack on human responsibility, the assault on language and its ability to say something critical about the world, the provocative defense of terrorism and human sacrifice, are all legacies of ideological totalitarianism, whether or not Derrida still believed in the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this respect, Derrida’s thinking was as post-totalitarian as that of a former secret policeman such as Krejči or a former employee of a Marxist-Leninist institute such as Slavoj Žižek.
Totalitarianism as Freedom
Like Krejči and Derrida, Žižek’s rhetoric is based on the identity of opposites. Žižek’s favorite dialectically identical opposites were totalitarianism and freedom. He claimed that the totalitarian label is used by a hegemonic liberal academic establishment to suppress “free radicals” (his pun). Žižek (Reference Žižek2001, 131) distinguished the “space” from the “positive content that fills it.” He acknowledged that Communism provided a dismal content, but claimed that it “opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which … enabled us to measure the failure of actually existing socialism itself.” That “space,” according to Žižek, was “opened and sustained by the Communist breakthrough, by its attempt to escape the logic of capital.” From within this space dissidents “criticized and denounced the day-to-day terror and misery” of Communism. Therefore, “when dissidents like Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unwittingly, for the most part) spoke from the place opened up by Communism itself – this is why they tend to be so disappointed when ‘actually existing capitalism’ does not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle” (131).
Žižek divided Communism into two parts alluded to by the metaphors of “space” and “content.” Then he posited that Communism opened up “the space” and that the dissidents settled in that space. The dissidents were indebted for their “space” to the Communists and so in some respect were Communist themselves. The first assumption required the obfuscation of the concept of Communism, dividing it into two vague metaphorical realms, of space and content, criticizing the second, but defending the first. The alleged “space” is of “utopian experimentation.” Utopianism in Europe goes back to the sixteenth century and has a long history of intellectual and social experimentation (Kumar Reference Kumar1991). Communism did not open any new space in that respect. The Communists following Marx distinguished Marxism from utopian socialism. Most significantly, the absence of any utopian ideas or ideologies is distinctive of the revolutions of 1989 and some of the dissident critique of Communism (Garton-Ash Reference Garton-Ash1990; Tamás Reference Tamás, Diamond and Plattner2002). Political criticism does not have to come from within utopian space. There are plenty of other possible vantage points for political criticism. It has been possible to criticize Communism from the perspective of really existing liberal democracy, from a religious perspective as religious dissidents and Pope John Paul II did, or from the vantage point of personal authenticity as Havel did. Havel and other late-Communist dissidents have not had much to say about the economy. They had few expectations that could be disappointed of the economic systems that succeeded Communism (which require a stretch of the imagination to be described as “capitalist”). The result of all this invalid reasoning and faulty assumptions is the identification of antinomies, the abolition of the distinction between totalitarianism and dissent and with it the possibility of using the second concept as a clear and distinct critical opposite of the first.
Žižek claimed that Stalinist ideology is radically ambiguous because “even at its most ‘totalitarian’ … [it] exudes an emancipatory potential” (Žižek Reference Žižek2001, 131). Žižek brought a couple of examples from Communist propaganda for its alleged emancipatory potential: A Soviet movie about the 1919 civil war where a popular court “sentences” a mother and son who spied for the Whites to education and medical treatment (Trotsky invented the Red Terror to deal with the Whites in the civil war, but that does not matter for evaluating the values underlying a propagandistic fantasy), and the novels of East German author Christa Wolf where the place of work is described as a locus of community. He contrasted East German propaganda with “the ‘invisibility’ of the millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories, from Chinese Gulags to Indonesian or Brazilian assembly lines” (Žižek Reference Žižek2001, 133). The conflation of gulags with Third World factories is reminiscent of Heidegger’s (Reference Heidegger, Sheehan and Richardson1981) response to a question about the Holocaust by conflating it with the mechanization of agriculture in East Germany. By conflating industrialization with gulags and contrasting this conflated concept with East German propaganda (not East German reality, of course), Žižek achieved, as Heidegger did, the abolition of antinomy between radical evil (the Holocaust, gulags) and working class industrial drudgery (assembly lines in third world countries) and contrasted them with something semimythical (Being, emancipatory space) that has a surprising historical manifestation (East Germany).
The next “dissident” Žižek presented as totalitarian was Antigone. The conflict between Sophocles’ Antigone who adheres to universal moral rules and the tyrant Creon was interpreted by East European dissidents as a conflict between absolute morality and tyrannical political power of the kind they were engaged in. Žižek, however, sought to reverse this standard interpretation, to present Antigone as totalitarian and Creon as a pragmatist if not a liberal. Obscuring Antigone’s adherence to what the Greeks considered received morality, Žižek presented her as exemplifying “unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice … of the mores that regulate the intersubjective collective of the polis, her insistence is actually ‘mad,’ disruptive, evil …. A proto-totalitarian figure” (Žižek Reference Žižek2001, 157). Žižek put Antigone on a logical slippery slope that glides from unconditional fidelity to morality, through madness, to being evil, and finally to proto-totalitarianism. He then misrepresented Creon, the tyrant who demands obedience to power, as intersubjectively Habermasian: “If anything, the so-called ‘arguments’ are on Creon’s side (the burial of Polynices would stir up public unrest etc.)” (Žižek Reference Žižek2001, 158). Žižek completed the fallacious logical descent through a slippery slope dumping Antigone in the totalitarian pool: “the opposition between Creon and Antigone is the opposition between unprincipled pragmatism and totalitarianism: far from being totalitarian Creon acts as a pragmatic state politician, mercilessly crushing any activity that would destabilize the smooth functioning of the state and civic peace. To go even further, is not the very elementary gesture of sublimation ‘totalitarian,’ in so far as it consists in elevating an object into the Thing?” (Žižek Reference Žižek2001, 158). The archetypal dissident Antigone became totalitarian and the tyrant Creon a civic leader. If dissidents were totalitarian and tyrants were civic leaders, if Communist propaganda was emancipatory and Communism opened a space for freedom, then there is no more good and evil in politics because everything is like everything else and political action becomes directionless and pointless. Better to leave the late-totalitarian elite in power, then, as pragmatic tyrants are better than totalitarian dissidents, or was it the other way around?
