Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  How can we not see in this struggle a rehearsal, or the grounds, of her later critique of Leninism? He was mentoring her. His entire correspondence systematically displays one ‘huge unpleasant thing’, like the letters of ‘a teacher to his pet pupil’ (Ettinger, translating directly from the Polish, uses ‘schoolmaster’, which makes the link to her critique of Lenin stronger).110 He could be violent. When she started her affair with Kostya Zetkin he threatened to kill her. It was not an idle threat. He showed up with a gun with which he followed her down the street. He insisted on retaining the keys to the flat they once shared. Jogiches was exerting over Luxemburg the terrorising, draconian power of the night-watchman state. For Luxemburg, on the other hand, passion – like politics – was a question of freedom. ‘Blessed are those without passion,’ she wrote to her last lover, Hans Diefenbach – an affair conducted by correspondence from prison – ‘if that means they would never claw like a panther at the happiness and freedom of others.’ In fact, she continues, ‘That has nothing to do with passion [ . . . ] I possess enough of it to set a prairie on fire, and still hold sacred the freedom and the simple wishes of other people.’111 ‘You must let me do what I please and how I please,’ she wrote to Jogiches near the end of the affair. ‘I simply lead the life of a plant and must be left just as I am.’112 True passion stakes no claim. Like democracy, it does not own, control or master the other. It lets the other be. ‘I am only I once more since I have become free of Leo.’113

  By now, it should be clear why I think that most ways of thinking about the relationship between Luxemburg’s political and private life are misconceived. The most common of these, already alluded to, is that her letters reveal the human being, the woman behind the steely revolutionary; they show, for example – as the headline to one review of the 2011 translation of her letters announced – that Rosa Luxemburg was also ‘sensuous and full of laughter’.114 There is nothing more sensuous than Luxemburg’s writings on revolution, and laughter is as political for Luxemburg as anything else. ‘Laughter’, Hannah Arendt writes in Men in Dark Times, ‘helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it.’115 This could also be a creed for feminism. Remember Mt. Pelee in Martinique looking down and laughing at the weeping carnivores. When the Frankfurt prosecutor asked for her immediate arrest in 1914 on the grounds that she was bound to take flight, she retorted: ‘I believe you, you would run away; a Social Democrat would not. He stands by his deeds and laughs at your judgements.’116 Gillian Rose is surely right that Luxemburg raised facetiousness to a new political art.117 Nor do I accept Ettinger’s view that Luxemburg’s political identity hardened – as well it might have given the way the world was turning – mostly as a way of compensating for failure in her personal life. I do not view her personal life as a failure. Certainly I cannot see, as Nettl has it, the years after her break-up with Jogiches as the ‘lost years’. Nor do I consider, as Adrienne Rich suggests, that Luxemburg’s life illustrates that a woman’s ‘central relationship is to her work, even as lovers come and go’.118 We do not have to make the choice. What matters is not any sort of hierarchy between her public and private lives, but rather their profound intermeshing. And then, through that, what her immersion in the dark night of the soul brings – like Martinique, like revolution – to the surface of politics.

  ‘Why’, Luxemburg wrote to Kostya Zetkin in 1907, in London for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democracy Party, ‘am I plunging again into dangers and frightening new situations in which I am sure to be lost?’119 If politics for her is at moments a torment, it is also a compulsion. Her reproach against Jogiches for his immersion in the cause is also directed at herself. With this difference – and for me it makes all the difference – that Luxemburg takes full internal measure of the force to which she submits. In the same letter to Zetkin, she describes ‘an indistinct desire’ stirring somewhere ‘in the depths’, a longing to embrace the ‘shrill chords’, to ‘plunge’ into the whirlpool of London city’s night (the German ‘stürzen’, used both times, means to plunge, to stream, to fall).120 The street is full of staggering drunkards and screeching, squealing flower girls looking ‘frightfully ugly and even depraved’.121 This is Luxemburg in anticipation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ or Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (there is more than one way, we might say, to be a ‘watchman of the night’). It is of course a consoling myth to believe that if you open the inner portals of the mind, you will be flooded with light. Rather, the whole point of venturing down such paths is that you cannot possibly know where they will go. Luxemburg is tempted by what she cannot control. For me it is no coincidence that this so uncannily resonates with the unknowable spirit of revolution. For her deepest insights into both aspects of her life, Luxemburg plumbs the same source.

  It is often argued on the left that the darkness and fragility of psychic life are the opposite of politics (indeed its greatest threat). Instead, through Luxemburg, we might rather see this domain as politics’ shadow, or even handmaiden, a type of unconscious supporter in the wings. It is not unusual, as we discover reading the letters, for Luxemburg to find herself in parts of the mind where she does not wish to tread. Joyous, she was also permanently dissatisfied with herself.122 Luxemburg knew all too well about the link between creativity and psychic pain (the ‘gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility’).123 Contemplating the possibility of mental illness – being driven mad by Jogiches would perhaps be more accurate – she describes the sensation of thinking and feeling everything ‘as though through a screen of tracing paper’, the sensation of her thoughts ‘being torn away’.124 At another moment, she wrote that her life has always felt as if it was taking place somewhere else, ‘not here where I am’ – psychoanalysis would call this another scene (ein andere Schauplatz), the stage of the unconscious – somewhere ‘far away, off beyond the rooftops’.

  In one of his most famous images, Freud used the mystic or magical writing pad to describe the psyche as a set of infinite traces. The mind is its own palimpsest. It cannot be held to a single place. You never fully know yourself or the other. Luxemburg laments that she can scarcely be her ‘own adviser or counsellor’, but how could she, she continues, given how difficult it is even for the closest friends to know and understand each other, given the fact that language fails. There is no way to capture the truth behind the words: ‘Or one may perhaps have an excellent understanding of the actual words, but the “lighting”,’ she wrote to Robert and Matthilde Seidel in 1898. ‘Do you know what I mean?’125 Two years earlier she had included these lines from her favourite Polish writer, the romantic poet and dramatist, Adam Mickiewicz, in a letter to Jogiches:

  If the tongue were true to the voice

  And the voice to the thought,

  How then could the word ever hold within bounds

  The lightning of thought?126

  Words deceive because thought is boundless, dazzling (lighting/lightning), ‘Do you know what I mean?’ she beseeches her friends. How could they? When she has just laid on the page the fragments of her own failed understanding?

  For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic that our conscious utterances betray us, something always escapes. There is a point, Freud wrote famously in The Interpretation of Dreams, where all dreams plunge irretrievably into the unknown. The only chance of even getting close is to let the mind drift where it will. ‘The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation,’ he wrote, ‘cannot from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought.’127 Like revolution or the mass strike, we might say. This is Luxemburg: ‘It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.’128 ‘The revolution’, wrote Ahdaf Souief, ‘is like the Nile in flood: try keeping
that back with barriers and uniforms. The revolution, which began a year ago on 25 January, has gone everywhere. It has raged through some spaces, flowed steadily through others, and seeped into yet more. There is nowhere, nothing, nobody who has not been affected by it.’129

  That is why Freud’s only instruction to the patient – the sacrosanct but some would say increasingly neglected founding principle of analysis – was to free associate, to say whatever, however strange and unpredictable, comes into the patient’s head. For Freud the ungraspable nature of the human mind summoned the necessity of freedom. ‘The method of free association,’ writes Christopher Bollas, ‘subverts the psychoanalyst’s natural authoritarian tendencies.’130 (Compare Soueif: ‘try keeping that back with barriers and uniforms’.) A new method of thinking, he continues, free association unleashes ‘the disseminating possibilities that open to infinity’.131 We are close to Luxemburg’s observation to Luise Kautsky on infinity as infinity (as opposed to a neatly centred ball). As with revolution, you have to risk lifting the lid. The world must be allowed to fall apart in order – perhaps – for it to recover itself. First appalled, almost broken by the vote for the war, Luxemburg then realised that in order to move further, ‘all of this will still have to disintegrate and come apart more’.132 Freud was of course writing at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg. Out of the unconscious, Luxemburg lifts something I would call an ethics of personal and political life.

  Luxemburg’s disagreement with Lenin can also be seen in these terms. As Nettl puts it in his biography: ‘Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, who groped for new and deeper causes hitherto unknown for a moral and political cataclysm on a unique scale, the mere understanding of which taxed her greater powers to the full, Lenin was merely preoccupied with the size of the problem.’133 Luxemburg is offering a counter-erotics of revolution. It is surely no coincidence that recent feminist psychoanalytic thought likewise describes female sexuality as boundless (something other, we might say, than the size of the matter).

  *

  Jusqu’à outrance – beyond the limit. There is one more crossing to make. When Luxemburg left Poland hidden in the peasant’s cart she was starting on a journey which would see her cross and re-cross national boundaries for the rest of her life. When she later moved to Germany, she arrived ‘carrying the bundle of her Jewish family’s letters, party instructions to introduce herself as a Pole, and the marriage certificate that changed her citizenship from Russian to German’.134 Where, if anywhere, did she belong? ‘Predictably,’ wrote Ettinger, ‘the PPS [Polish Socialist Party] pointed to Luxemburg’s Jewish origin as inevitably blinding her to the real needs and wishes of the Polish nation. The same was said in 1970, at a symposium in Warsaw commemorating the 100th anniversary of her death.’135 In 1910, the Polish nationalist newspaper, Independent Thought, maintained that her physical disability was an example of the degeneration of the Jews.136

  Rootlessness, however, is also an asset, notably for women, as Woolf would later affirm. Luxemburg came from a world, in the words of Arendt, in which ‘a universal humanity and a genuine, almost naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted’.137 ‘One aspect of Rosa’s internationalism,’ wrote Nettl, ‘was to prefer the foreign.’138 ‘I do see the strengthening of inter­national feeling,’ she wrote to Henriette Roland Holst in 1904, ‘to be in and of itself, a means of fighting against bigotry and ­ignorance.’139 In Breslau prison at the end of her life, she translated A History of My Contemporary, the autobiography of the Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko: ‘From the conflict of three nationalities,’ she wrote in her introduction, ‘he made his escape into humanitarianism.’140 Goethe’s ‘universalism of interests’ was her ideal.141 There is another important analogy to be made here with psychoanalysis. The unconscious knows no national boundaries. Far from being a petty bourgeois or Eurocentric concept, Freud’s famous universalism was at least partly his advance-guard riposte to those who would castigate psychoanalysis as a ‘Bosch’ (Germanic) and/or Jewish science. The question of nationalism shadowed the emergence of psychoanalysis as much as it did the revolutions of the times. Freud famously attributed his own insights to the fact that as a Jew he could see the world obliquely.

  Luxemburg’s opposition to the idea of national self-determination – which was so central in her dispute with Lenin (and not only with him) – has to be understood in these terms. It was the fervent nationalism of the official Polish Socialist Party which led Luxemburg and Jogiches to split off and form the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Lithuania and Poland in 1893. ‘The nation as a uniform social-political whole,’ she observed in 1908, ‘simply does not exist.’142 Although she gave their journal one of her articles, she did not align herself with the Jewish Socialist movement, the Bund, which fought for the recognition of Jews as a national minority, and which Jogiches supported. It was one of the few political disagreements between them. She could not see the Jews as a special case. ‘What do you want with this particular suffering of the Jews,’ Luxemburg wrote to Mathilde Wurm in 1917 in one of her most controversial letters. ‘The poor victims on the rubber plantations in Puntumayo, the Negroes in Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play a game of catch are just as near to me [ . . . ] I have no special corner of my heart reserved for the ghetto; I am at home wherever in the world there are clouds, birds, human tears.’143

  She had of course been the target of anti-Semitism, endemic even in her own party in Germany. At the 1901 Social Democratic Congress, Wolfgang Heine told delegates that the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who of course included Luxemburg, were behaving like guests who ‘come to us and spit in our parlour’ (remember Adler insisting ‘we will not allow her to spit in our soup’).144 Looking back over his life, the German politician Gustav Noske accused Luxemburg and her fellow émigrés of turning Marxism into a ‘secret science’, the idea of a secret society or esoteric knowledge being another classical trope of anti-Semitism. By 1919 Noske was Defence Minister, responsible for the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. It seems unlikely that his anti-Semitism did not play its part when he authorised the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg.

  To say that Luxemburg was impatient with her Jewishness would, however, be to venture an understatement. She refused to read the Dreyfus affair, for example, as a Jewish matter, seeing it in terms of the struggle of socialism against militarism and clericalism, which it also was. And yet that is not the whole story (it rarely is). Her letters are peppered with Yiddish, although more than once she uses the word ‘kike’.145 And, as Rory Castle has recently uncovered, she wrote about anti-Semitism, describing it in a 1910 article, ‘After the Pogrom’, as the ‘common banner of political backwardness and cultural barbarism’.146 If she was at least partly in flight from her Jewishness, her Jewishness also returned, unbidden, to her. Although she and her family had struggled to be part of the non-Jewish world, they never relinquished their Jewishness. Her father, Edward, was a leading member of the Reformist Jewish community in Zamość and actively involved in its cultural and educational work.147 We could say that in the end her Jewishness was a ‘given’, one of the ‘indisputable facts’ of her life, as Arendt herself put it in her famous exchange with Gershom Scholem.148 In the ‘Junius’ pamphlet Luxemburg compares socialists opposing the war to ‘the Jews whom Moses led through the desert’ (she is paraphrasing Marx).149

  She also has moments of striking prescience, writing to Sophie Liebknecht in the midst of the war that, although the time for pogroms in Russia is over, in Germany they might be about to begin.150 ‘In Eastern Europe the subject most preferred for diverting the people’s bad disposition has always been the Jews,’ she wrote in her introduction to Korolenko, ‘and it is questionable whether they have yet played their role to the end.’151 The ‘Junius’ pamphlet ends with her reciting the murderous refrains of the war, ‘ “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” ’ – just how murderous she could not have yet known – which ring out while the soldiers and work
ers of France, Germany, Italy and Belgium totter ‘over their graves, grappling in each other’s death-bringing arms’.152 For Luxemburg, nationalism was violence. If the war taught her one thing it was how exciting virulent, mind-numbing patriotism could be. For Arendt, it is paradoxically her cosmopolitanism which shows how profoundly Luxemburg was in fact Jewish-identified (a majority of the anti-nationalist break-away Polish party were Jews). In Arendt’s eyes, this inclusive, borderless vision is what makes Luxemburg a true European, passionately engaged till the end of her life ‘in the destinies’ – note the plural – ‘of the world’.153 What this meant, among other things, is that she could see through the rhetoric of war. ‘It is a distorted form of bourgeois hypocrisy,’ she wrote in the ‘Junius’ pamphlet, ‘which leads each nation to recognise infamy only when it appears in the uniform of the other.’154

  If freedom is the freedom to think ‘otherwise’, then the question of the other is latent to that of freedom: to which others are you willing to accord the right to be free (instead of imputing infamy to them as a prelude to killing)? Luxemburg’s universalism is therefore the other side of her openness to the other, however far it takes her (‘jusqu’à outrance’). Again in this she is way ahead of her time. ‘A man who hastens to perform an important deed,’ she wrote in Rote Fahne (Red Flag), the paper of the Spartacists, ‘and unthinkingly treads upon a worm on his way is committing a crime.’155 ‘I am no more important than the ladybug,’ she wrote from prison in April 1917, ‘and I am inexpressibly happy with this sense of my own insignificance.’156 This is how she describes the ecological disaster, the 1891 famine ‘of truly biblical proportions’ that was the outcome of the policies of the Czar. She is citing a parson who gave evidence to the official enquiry:

  For the last three years, bad harvests have been sneaking up on us and one misfortune after another plagues the peasants. There is the insect pest. Grasshoppers eat up the grain, worms nibble on it, and bugs do away with the rest. The harvest has been destroyed in the fields and the seeds have been parched in the ground; the barns are empty and there is no bread. The animals groan and collapse, cattle move meekly, and the sheep perish from thirst and want of fodder . . . Millions of trees and thousands of farmhouses have become a prey to flames. A wall of fire and smoke surrounded us . . . It is written by the prophet Zephania: ‘I will destroy everything from the face of the earth, saith the Lord, man, cattle, and wild beasts, the birds and the fish.’