Taking into account this violence which is part of the normal functioning of global capitalism also compels us to throw a new light on its opposite, revolutionary terror. One should in no way cover up the harshness of the early Bolshevik rule – the point is elsewhere: precisely when they resorted to terror (and they often did it, openly calling the beast by its name: ‘Red Terror’), this terror was of a different type from Stalinist terror. In Stalin’s time, the symbolic status of the terror thoroughly changed – terror was turned into the publicly non-acknowledged, obscene, shadowy supplement to official discourse. It is significant that the climax of terror (1936–37) took place after the new constitution was accepted in 1935. This constitution was supposed to end the state of emergency and mark a return of things to normality: the suspension of the civil rights of whole strata of the population (kulaks, ex-capitalists) was rescinded, the right to vote was now universal, and so on and so forth. The key idea of this constitution was that now, after the stabilization of the socialist order and the annihilation of the enemy classes, the Soviet Union was no longer a class society: the subject of the state was no longer the working class (workers and peasants), but the people. However, this does not mean that the Stalinist constitution was a simple hypocrisy which concealed the social reality. To the contrary, the possibility of terror is inscribed into its very core: since the class war was proclaimed to be over and the Soviet Union was conceived of as the classless country of the People, those who opposed the regime (or were easily presumed to) became no longer ‘class enemies’ in a conflict that tore at the social body, but enemies of the People – insects, worthless scum to be excluded from humanity itself.
And far from concerning only the twentieth century, this topic retains its full actuality today. Alain Badiou recently proposed the formula of ‘defensive violence’: one should renounce violence (i.e. the violent takeover of state power) as the principal modus operandi, and rather focus on building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early Solidarność in Poland), and only resort to violence when the state itself uses violence to crush and subdue these ‘liberated zones’. The problem with this formula is that it relies on the deeply problematic distinction between the ‘normal’ functioning of state apparatuses and the ‘excessive’ exercise of state violence. Is not the first lesson in the Marxist notion of class struggle – or more precisely, on the priority of the class struggle over classes as positive social entities – the thesis that ‘peaceful’ social life is itself sustained by (state) violence, i.e. that ‘peace’ is an expression and effect of the (temporary) victory or predominance of one class (namely the ruling class) in the class struggle? What this means is that one cannot separate violence from the very existence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people). In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept that its violence is merely a matter of contingent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic reforms). This is why the standard liberal motto apropos of violence – it is sometimes necessary to resort to it, but it is never legitimate – is inadequate. From the radical emancipatory perspective, one should turn this motto around. For the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it is always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against the enemy or not).5
In short, the topic of violence should be demystified: what was wrong with twentieth-century communism was not its recourse to violence per se (the violent takeover of state power, terror in order to maintain power), but rather the larger mode of functioning which made this kind of violence inevitable and legitimized (the party as the instrument of historical necessity, etc.). In 1970, in the notes of a meeting with President Richard Nixon on how to undermine the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, CIA Director Richard Helms wrote succinctly: ‘Make the economy scream.’ Top US representatives openly admit that today the same strategy is being applied in Venezuela: former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said on Fox News that Chávez’s appeal to the Venezuelan people
only works so long as the populace of Venezuela sees some ability for a better standard of living. If at some point the economy really gets bad, Chávez’s popularity within the country will certainly decrease and it’s the one weapon we have against him to begin with and which we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the economy even worse so that his appeal in the country and the region goes down . . . Anything we can do to make their economy more difficult for them at this moment is a good thing, but let’s do it in ways that do not get us into direct conflict with Venezuela if we can get away with it.
The least one can say is that such statements give credibility to the suspicion that the economic difficulties faced by the Chávez government (major product and electricity shortages nationwide, etc.) are not only the result of the ineptness of its economic policies. Here we come to the key political point, which is difficult to swallow for some liberals: we are clearly not dealing here with blind market processes and reactions (say, shop owners trying to make more profit by keeping some products off the shelves), but with an elaborate and fully planned strategy – and in such conditions, is not a kind of terror (police raids on secret warehouses, detention of speculators and the coordinators of shortages, etc.), as a defensive countermeasure, fully justified? Even Badiou’s formula of ‘subtraction plus only reactive violence’ seems inadequate in these new conditions. The problem today is that the state is getting more and more chaotic, failing in its proper function of ‘servicing the goods’, so that one cannot even afford to let the state do its job. Do we have the right to remain at a distance from state power when state power is itself disintegrating, turning into an obscene exercise of violence so as to mask its own impotence?
Instead of a simplistic rejection of violence and terror, one should thus first widen its scope – learn to see violence where the hegemonic ideology teaches us to see none – and then analyze it in a concrete way, detecting the potential emancipatory use of what may at first appear to be purely reactionary militarism. Let us take, from the sphere of great art, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a play so exclusively focused on its hero’s militaristic-aristocratic pride and contempt for ordinary people that one can easily see why, after the German defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation powers prohibited its performance. Consequently, the play seems to offer a rather narrow interpretive choice: what are the alternatives to staging the play the way it is, i.e. to surrendering to its militaristic anti-democratic lure? We can try to subtly ‘extraneate’ this lure by way of its excessive aestheticization; we can do what Brecht did in his rewriting of the play, shifting the focus from the display of emotions (Coriolanus’ rage, etc.) to the underlying conflict of political and economic interests (in Brecht’s version, the crowd and the tribunes are not lead by fear and envy, but act rationally in view of their situation); or, perhaps the worst choice, we can overplay pseudo-Freudian stuff about Coriolanus’ maternal fixation and the homosexual intensity of his relationship with Aufidius. However, in the recent cinema version of the play, Ralph Fiennes (with his scenario writer John Logan) did the impossible, thereby perhaps confirming T. S. Eliot’s famous claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet: Fiennes broke out of this closed circle of interpretive options, which all introduce a critical distance towards the figure of Coriolanus, and fully asserted Coriolanus – not as a fanatical anti-democrat, but as a figure of radical Left.
Fiennes’s first move was to change the geopolitical coordinates of Coriolanus: ‘Rome’ is now a contemporary colonial city-state in crisis and decay, and the ‘Volscians’ Leftist guerrilla rebels organized in what we call today a ‘rogue state’. (Think of Colombia and the FARC, the ‘revolutionary armed forces of Colombia’ holding a vast territory in the south of the country – if only the FARC had not been corrupted by drug-dealing.) This first move echoes in many perspicuous details, like the decision to present the border between the territory held by the Roman army and the rebel territory, the place of contact between the two sides, as a lone access ramp on a highway, a kind of guerrilla checkpoint.6
One should fully exploit here the lucky choice of Gerard Butler for the role of Aufidius, the Volscian leader and Caius Martius’s (i.e., Coriolanus’s) opponent: since Butler’s greatest hit was Zack Snyder’s 300, where he played Leonidas, one should not be afraid to venture the hypothesis that, in both films, he basically plays the same role of a warrior-leader of a rogue state fighting a mighty empire. 300, the saga of the troop of Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae to halt the invasion of Xerxes’s Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq. Are things really so clear, however? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations: it is the story of a small, poor country (Sparta) invaded by the vast armies of a much larger state (Persia). At the time Persia was much more developed than the Peloponnese, and wielded much more impressive military technology – are not the Persians’ elephants, giants and flaming arrows the ancient versions of today’s high-tech weaponry? A programmatic statement towards the end of the film defines the Spartans’ agenda as standing ‘against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future’, which is further specified as the rule of freedom and reason. It sounds like an elementary Enlightenment programme, and with a communist twist! Also recall that, at the film’s beginning, Leonidas rejects outright the message of the corrupt ‘oracles’ according to whom gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians. As we later learn, these ‘oracles’ who were allegedly receiving the divine message in an ecstatic trance were actually paid off by the Persians, like the Tibetan ‘oracle’ who, in 1959, delivered to the Dalai Lama the message to leave Tibet and who was – as we learn today – on the CIA payroll.
But what about the apparent absurdity of the Spartan idea of dignity, freedom and reason being sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding the weakest children? This ‘absurdity’ is simply the price of freedom – freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given; it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The Spartans’ ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of Athenian ‘liberal democracy’: such discipline is democracy’s inherent condition, and lays the foundations for it. The free subject of reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not ‘freedom of choice’ made from a safe distance – a consumer’s choice. True freedom overlaps with necessity; one makes a truly free decision when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence – one does it because one simply ‘cannot do otherwise’. When one’s country is undergoing a foreign occupation and one is called on by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not ‘you are free to choose’, but: ‘Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?’ No wonder that all the early modern egalitarian radicals – from Rousseau to the Jacobins – admired Sparta and imagined republican France as a new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, etc. Even Trotsky called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of ‘war communism’ a ‘proletarian Sparta’.
So it is not that soldiers are the problem per se – the real menace is soldiers with poets, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry. There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry – why? Because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes no longer have the force to mobilize people for mass violence, a larger sacred Cause is needed, a Cause which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. And this brings us back to Coriolanus – who is the poet there? Before Caius Martius (aka Coriolanus) enters the stage, it is Menenius Agrippa who pacifies the furious crowd which is demanding grain. Like Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Menenius is the ideologist par excellence, offering a poetic metaphor to justify social hierarchy (in this case, the rule of the senate); and, in the best corporatist tradition, the metaphor is that of a human body. Here is how Plutarch, in his Life of Coriolanus, retells this story first reported by Livy:
It once happened . . . that all the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle, uncontributing part in the whole body, while the rest [of the members] were put to hardships and the expense of much labour to supply and minister to its appetites. The stomach, however, merely ridiculed the silliness of the members, who appeared not to be aware that the stomach certainly does receive the general nourishment, but only to return it again, and redistribute it amongst the rest. Such is the case . . . ye citizens, between you and the senate. The counsels and plans that are there duly digested, convey and secure to all of you your proper benefit and support.7
How does Coriolanus relate to this metaphor of body and its organs, of the rebellion of organs against their body? It is clear that, whatever Coriolanus is, he does not stand for the body, but is an organ which not only rebels against the body (the body politic of Rome), but abandons its body by way of going into exile – a true organ without a body. Is then Coriolanus really against the people? But which people? The ‘plebeians’ represented by the two tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, are not any kind of exploited workers, but rather a lumpenproletarian mob, the rabble fed by the state; and the two tribunes are proto-Fascist manipulators of the mob – to quote Kane (the citizen from Welles’s film), they speak for the poor ordinary people so that the poor ordinary people will not speak for themselves. If one looks for ‘the people’, then, they are rather to be found among the Volscians. One should watch closely how Fiennes depicts their capital: a modest popular city in a liberated territory, with Aufidius and his comrades in the uniforms of guerrilla fighters (not the regular army) mixing freely with commoners in an atmosphere of relaxed conviviality, with people drinking in open-air cafeterias, etc. – in clear contrast to the stiff formality of Rome.
So yes, Coriolanus is a killing machine, a ‘perfect soldier’, but precisely as such, as an ‘organ without a body’, he has no fixed class allegiance and can easily put himself in the service of the oppressed. As was made clear by Che Guevara, a revolutionary also has to be a ‘killing machine’:
Hatred [is] an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.8
There are two scenes in the film which provide a clue for such a reading. When, after his violent outburst in the senate, Coriolanus exits the large hall and slams the doors behind him, he finds himself alone in the silence of a large corridor, confronted with an old tired cleaning man, and the two exchange glances in a moment of silent solidarity, as if only the poor cleaning man can see who Coriolanus is now. The other scene is a long depiction of his voyage into exile, done in a ‘road movie’ tenor, with Coriolanus as a lone rambler on his trek, anonymous among the ordinary people. It is as if Coriolanus, obviously out of place in the delicate hierarchy of Rome
, only now becomes what he is, gains his freedom – and the only thing he can do to retain this freedom is to join the Volscians. He does not join them simply in order to take revenge on Rome, he joins them because he belongs there – it is only among the Volscian fighters that he can be what he is. Coriolanus’s pride is authentic, joined with his reluctance to be praised by his compatriots and to engage in political manoeuvring. Such a pride has no place in Rome; it can thrive only among the guerrilla fighters.
In joining the Volscians, Coriolanus does not betray Rome out of a sense of petty revenge but regains his integrity – his only act of betrayal occurs at the end when, instead of leading the Volscian army onto Rome, he organizes a peace treaty between the Volscians and Rome, breaking down to the pressure of his mother, the true figure of superego Evil. This is why he returns to the Volscians, fully aware what awaits him there: the well-deserved punishment for his betrayal. And this is why Fiennes’s Coriolanus is effectively like the saint’s eye in an Orthodox icon: without changing a word in Shakespeare’s play, it looks specifically at us, at our predicament today, outlining the unique figure of a radical freedom fighter.
So, back to Wahnich’s book: the reader should approach its topic – terror and terrorism – without ideological fears and taboos, as a crucial contribution not only to the history of the emancipatory movements, but also as a reflection on our own predicament. Do not be afraid of its topic: the fear that prevents you from confronting it is the fear of freedom, of the price one has to pay for freedom.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Discussions at several different places gave rise to this little book. I have to thank Antoine de Baeque for having suggested that I take part in the study day he organized on the Terror in 1999, thus helping me to put these reflections into shape; Didier Fassin for having invited me to an interdisciplinary seminar on the notion of the intolerable; Alain Brossat for inviting me to a conference on terrorism; Arlette Farge for having encouraged me in my reflection on political emotions at the seminar she and Pierre Laborie organized on the event and its reception; and Marc Abélès for having opened up paths of anthropological reflection in the LAIOS seminar. My thanks also to those colleagues and friends, fellow historians of the French Revolution whom I joined in conducting a seminar on ‘L’Esprit des Lumières et de la Révolution’: Françoise Brunel, Yannick Bosc, Marc Deleplace, Florence Gauthier and Jacques Guilhaumou. My special thanks to Éric Hazan for having re-read the text of this essay with care and friendship. And thanks, finally, to Didier Leschi, who helped me so often to clarify my investigation by re-reading the different pieces of the puzzle as they came to light.
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