立冬已過，一年又將盡。在多名學者及作家過世之年，翻看當代思想領袖齊澤克（Slavoj Zizek）為去年（2011）定性的新作《危險地做夢的一年》（The Year of Dreaming Dangerously），心頭不禁再一次熱血上湧。
都說今天已非思想的世代。一方面，人們無暇深思，另一方面，論述都採取直接表態的方式，因而其實也不構成論述（discourse本有曲折之意）。前者關乎時間，後者關乎（文化）空間。有人認為當今社會大勢，風起雲湧事件發展速度加上資訊爆炸，不公義的程度也愈來愈不可忍耐，人人都急於行動，思想變成（太）奢侈的事情。
2011是怎麼的一年呢？「中東波」；佔領華爾街；英國、西班牙、希臘先後發生暴亂及大規模群眾集會……全世界宛如加了溫的大水缸，熱氣騰騰，但仍未見有壓倒性的大事發生。「中東波」最像會帶來大變天了，但西方「民主力量」介入之後，「自由選舉」舉行，一切好像又恢復秩序——大家其實也可能希望如此。
經濟壓迫代替政治壓迫
「中東波」有點像要重蹈「蘇東波」覆轍，獨裁者倒台，只不過證實了資本主義代議政治的「勝利」，以大家明知也極有問題（可能更有問題）的市場經濟壓迫代替政治壓迫。以「佔領華爾街」為首的全球佔領行動，更好像只能帶點慵懶的姿態延續好一段日子；香港版「佔領中環」便「分享」了類似的狀，到場支援的人們很快發現，佔領者的訴求極度多元，彼此課題迥異到這麼一個地步﹕彷彿「在一起」對抗一點什麼的幸福感便足以支撐行動本身。
齊澤克回顧如此這般的一年，以「危險地做夢」為之容。發夢如履險，不，發夢根本便是危險的——真實的不可知，四面楚歌，沒有出路，然後你以為是夢——無比真實的夢，當然到頭來你難以完全喘定，承認那不過是你希望（還）是夢的真實！
思考礙行動
《危險地做夢的一年》繼續充斥齊澤克的「反轉再反轉」式論述，例如一開始他便觸及文首提到的思想與行動的辯證，提到高舉思想旗幟者喜歡引用的康德（I. Kant）概念「理性的公共使用」（Public
Use of Reason）。相對於服從方程式「不要想，只要聽（命）」和革命方程式「不要聽（別人向你下的命令），只要（用自己的腦筋）想」，康德主張「又聽又想」。公開地思想，私下才聽命（道德法則、無上命令）。在這種框架下，讀者會以為作者會擁抱康德（熟悉齊澤克的讀者例外，因為大家都習慣了他是黑格爾主義者，喜歡久不久便嘲諷一下康德），然而他隨即寫道，這種公開地思想（理性的公共使用）只會令人實踐無能。公共地思想的知識分子會看出現存制度的弱點、缺失，然後傾向要求統治者進行改革（reform），並且止於改革。他引用英國推理大師卻斯特頓（G.K. Chesterton）的話﹕「自由思想是反對自由的最佳保障。」讓奴隸去好好思想，思考他究竟是否需要，是否希望自由，這樣他們便無暇解放自己。
只重行動易迷失
好了，最重要還是行動吧！？然而，齊澤克「反轉再反轉」方式的厲害之處正好在於，他不會讓讀者那麼好過。如果2011年還可以說為人們帶來某些啟示的話，難道那不便是行動、行動、再行動下的（表象）迷失嗎？單純揚棄「理性的公共使用」，除了會走向「理性的私下使用」（帶來諸如共產黨精英集權的悲劇），還會令身處2012末日意識高漲下的我們，舉止無措，進退失據。
當你以為最重要是思想時，齊澤克論斷思考不可耐的結果；當你以為還是轉而勇於行動或專注於行動好了時，他便說思想是行動失據的「救星」。而且以上論述是堆在一起，反覆地互為對立面，交替提出。
同樣的反轉思維（逆向思考的變奏）直接適用於任何迷失處境。當我們感到前路茫茫，頭上充滿問號，不曉得選擇面前哪一條路，齊澤克卻告訴我們，前面的確沒有路，也根本沒有（現成的）路。我們自覺沒有答案，喪失方向，他便來反問﹕真的沒有答案嗎？請問﹕問題在哪裏？難道事情不是恰好倒過來﹕我們不是沒有答案，而是沒有問題嗎？
2012的末日文化現象，對齊澤克來說，只是一次文化資本主義的符號機器操作。環保學者不斷危言地球快要經歷環保災難，然而，他們愈說得着緊起勁，愈表示了他們其實並不相信，更未意識到末日的降臨。保持清醒的懷疑觀望者才是真正的信徒（雖然他們常被視為不信者），對這些人來說，末日一定會到來，甚至早已到來。真正的末日是開放的，會以不為人們所期許的方式出現。2011出現的種種亂象，正可作為末日前的「徵兆」。它們並非沒有答案的問題，而是反過來，還未有問題的答案。它們本身便是答案，只是人們的理性還未準備好，無法找到恰當的問題，好讓人們以它們作為回答。
末日早已到
這便是《危險地做夢的一年》提倡的「未來目光」。只有後來者回過頭來，才看到今天所有事的意義。齊澤克修正馬克思的地方，在於他認為當下的人們毋須再接納一套歷史規律理論，以之衡定今天事態的位置，例如汲汲於尋找「共產主義種子」，為今天的實然性烙下「必然性」的印記。明天不能逆料，不該用憶想的明天定位今天，而是仍站在今天積極參與事態的位置，迎接明天的任何可能。
明乎此，「理性的公共使用」未必有問題，它之可能帶來軟弱，只是缺乏了主體參與。而這主體，懂得做夢的主體，到頭來當然一定要是——危險的。
Final chapter from Žižek’s book, 《The Year of
Dreaming Dangerously》
So where do we stand now, in 2012? 2011 was the year of dreaming
dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the
world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fragile and
inconsistent the awakening was, with all of its many facets displaying the same
signs of exhaustion: the enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises
and religious fundamentalism; the OWS is losing momentum to such an extent
that, in a nice case of the “cunning of reason,” the police cleansing of
Zuchotti Park and other sites of the OWS protests cannot but appear as a
blessing in disguise, covering up the immanent loss of momentum. And the same
story goes on all around the world: the Maoists in Nepal
seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela’s
“Bolivarian” experiment more and more regressing into a caudillo-run populism…
What are we to do in such depressive times when dreams seem to fade away? Is
the only choice we have the one between nostalgic-narcissistic remembrance of
the sublime enthusiastic moments, and the cynically-realist explanation of why
the attempts to really change the situation had to fail?
The first thing to state is that the subterranean work of dissatisfaction is
going on: rage is accumulating and a new wave of revolts will follow. The weird
and unnatural relative calm of the Spring of 2012 is more and more perforated
by the growing subterranean tensions announcing new explosions; what makes the
situation so ominous is the all-pervasive sense of blockage: there no clear way
out, the ruling elite is clearly losing its ability to rule. What makes the
situation even more disturbing is the obvious fact that democracy doesn’t work:
after elections in Greece
and in Spain,
the same frustrations remain. How should we read the signs of this rage? In his
Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond:
“The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to
those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone
possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”
[1] Events like the OWS protests, the Arab
Spring, demonstrations in Greece
and Spain,
etc., have to be read as such signs from the future. In other words, we should
turn around the usual historicist perspective of understanding an event out of
its context and genesis. Radical emancipatory outburst cannot be understood in
this way: instead of analyzing them as a part of the continuum of past/present,
we should bring in the perspective of the future, i.e., we should analyze them
as limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future
which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential. According to
Deleuze, in Proust, “people and things occupy a place in time which is
incommensurable with the one that they have in space”
[2]: the notorious madeleine is here in
place, but this is not its true time.
[3] In a similar way, one should learn the
art to recognize, from an engaged subjective position, elements which are here,
in our space, but whose time is the emancipated future, the future of the
Communist Idea.
However, while one should learn to watch for such signs from the future, we
should also be aware that what we are doing now will only become readable once
the future will be here, so we should not put too much hopes into the desperate
search for the “germs of Communism” in today’s society. One should thus strive
for a delicate balance between reading signs from the (hypothetic Communist)
future and maintaining the radical openness of the future: openness alone ends
up in decisionist nihilism which constrains us to leaps into the void, while
full reliance on the signs from the future can succumb to determinist planning
(we know what the future should look like and, from a position of
meta-language, somehow exempted from history, we just have to enact it).
However, the balance one should strive for has nothing to do with some kind of
wise “middle road” avoiding both extremes (“we know in a general sense the
shape of the future we are moving towards, but we should simultaneously remain
open to unpredictable contingencies”). Signs from the future are not constitutive
but regulative in the Kantian sense; their status is subjectively mediated,
i.e., they are not discernible from any neutral “objective” study of history,
but only from an engaged position—following them remains an existential wager
in Pascal’s sense. We are dealing here with the circular structure best
exemplified by a science-fiction story set a couple of hundred years ahead of
our time when time travel was already possible, about an art critic who gets so
fascinated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he travels back
in time to meet him; he discovers that the painter is a worthless drunk who
even steals from him the time machine and escapes to the future; alone in
today’s world, the art critic paints all the paintings that fascinated him in
the future and made him travel into the past. In a homologous way, the
Communist signs from the future are signs from a possible future which will
become actual only if we follow these signs—in other words, they are signs
which paradoxically precede that of which they are signs. Recall the Pascalean
topic of deus absconditus, of a “hidden god” discernible only to those who
search for him, who are engaged in the path of this search:
“God has willed to redeem men and to open salvation to those who seek it. But
men render themselves so unworthy of it that it is right that God should refuse
to some, because of their obduracy, what He grants others from a compassion
which is not due to them. If He had willed to overcome the obstinacy of the
most hardened, He could have done so by revealing Himself so manifestly to them
that they could not have doubted of the truth of His essence; as it will appear
at the last day, with such thunders and such a convulsion of nature that the
dead will rise again, and the blindest will see Him. It is not in this manner
that He has willed to appear in His advent of mercy, because, as so many make
themselves unworthy of His mercy, He has willed to leave them in the loss of
the good which they do not want. It was not, then, right that He should appear
in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men;
but it was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He
could not be known by those who should sincerely seek Him. He has willed to
make himself quite recognizable by those; and thus, willing to appear openly to
those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee
from Him with all their heart. He so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He
has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who
seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and
enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
[4]
God gives these signs in the guise of miracles, and this is why the same
mixture of light and obscurity characterizes miracles: miracles are not visible
as such to everyone, but only to believers—skeptical non-believers (to whom
Pascal refers as “libertins,” in a typical 17th century way, as opposed to the
18th century predominant meaning of debauchery) can easily dismiss them as
natural phenomena, and those who believe in them as victims of superstition. Pascal
thus openly admits a kind of hermeneutic circle in the guise of the mutual
interdependence of miracles and “doctrine” (the church teaching): “Rule: we
must judge of doctrine by miracles; we must judge of miracles by doctrine. All
this is true, but contains no contradiction.” Perhaps, one can apply here
Kant’s formula of the relationship between reason and (sensuous) intuition:
doctrine without miracles is sterile and impotent, miracles without doctrine
are blind and meaningless. Their mutual independence is thus not symmetrical:
“Miracles are for doctrine, and not doctrine for miracles.” In Badiou’s terms,
miracle is Pascal’s name for an Event, an intrusion of the impossible-Real into
our ordinary reality which momentarily suspends its causal nexus; however, it
is only an engaged subjective position, a subject who “desires to see,” which
can truly identify a miracle.
[5]
Many perspicuous Marxists noted long ago how this Pascal’s topic, far from
standing for a regression to obscurantist theology, points forward towards the
Marxist notion of a revolutionary theory whose truth is discernible only from
an engaged class position. And are we today not in exactly the same situation with
regard to Communism? The times of “revealed Communism” are over: we cannot any
longer pretend (or act as if) the Communist truth is simply here for everyone
to see, accessible to neutral rational historical analysis; there is no
Communist “big Other,” no higher historical necessity or teleology to guide and
legitimize our acts. In such a situation, today’s libertins (postmodern
historicist skeptics) thrive, and the only way to counter them, i.e., to assert
the dimension of Event (of eternal Truth) in our epoch of contingency, is to
practice a kind of Communism absconditus: what defines today’s Communist is the
“doctrine” (theory) which enables him to discern in (the contemporary version
of) a “miracle”—say, an unexpected social explosion like the crowd persisting
on Tahrir Square—its Communist nature, to read it is a sign from the
(Communist) future. (For a libertin, of course, such an event remains a
confused outcome of social frustrations and illusions, an outburst which will
probably lead to an even worst situation than the one to which it reacted.)
And, again, this future is not “objective,” it will come to be only through the
subjective engagement which sustains it.
Perhaps, we should turn the usual reproach about what we want and what we
don’t want around: it is basically clear what we want (in the long term, at
least); but do we really know what we don’t want, i.e., what we are ready to
renounce of our present “freedoms”?) Or, to go back to our Ninotchka joke: we
want coffee, but do we want it without milk or without cream? (Without state?
Without private property? Etc.) It is here that we should remain resolutely
Hegelian—Hegel’s opening towards the future is a negative one: it is
articulated in his negative/limiting statements like the famous “one cannot
jump ahead of one’s time” from his Philosophy of Right. The impossibility to
directly borrow from the future is grounded in the very fact of retroactivity
which makes future a priori unpredictable: we cannot jump onto our shoulders
and see ourselves “objectively,” the way we fit into the texture of history,
because this texture is again and again retroactively rearranged. In theology,
Kart Barth extended this unpredictability to the Last Judgment itself,
emphasizing how the final revelation of God will be totally incommensurable
with our expectations:
“God is not hidden to us; He is revealed. But what and how we shall be in
Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end of God’s road,
at the breaking in of redemption and completion, that is not revealed to us;
that is hidden. Let us be honest: we do not know what we are saying when we
speak of Jesús Christ’s coming again in judgment, and of the resurrection of
the dead, of eternal life and eternal death. That with all these there will be bound
up a piercing revelation—a seeing, compared to which all our present vision
will have been blindness—is too often testified in Scripture for us to feel we
ought to prepare ourselves for it. For we do not know what will be revealed
when the last covering is removed from our eyes, from all eyes: how we shall
behold one another and what we shall be to one another —men of today and men of
past centurias and millenia, ancestors and descendants, husbands and wives,
wise and foolish, oppressors and oppressed, traitors and betrayed, murderers
and murdered, West and East, Germans and others, Christians, Jews, and heathen,
orthodox and heretics, Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Reformed; upon
what divisions and unions, what confrontations and cross-connections the seals
of all books will be opened; how much will seem small and unimportant to us
then, how much will only then appear great and important; for what surprises of
all kinds we must prepare ourselves. We also do not know what Nature, as the
cosmos in which we have lived and still live here and now, will be for us then;
what the constellations, the sea, the broad valleys and heights, which we see
and know now, will say and mean then.”
[6]
From this insight, it becomes clear how false, how “all too human,” the fear
is that the guilty will not be properly punished—here, especially, we must
abandon our expectations: “Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety
seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that
hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to
be empty!”
[7] And the same uncertainty holds for the
Church itself—it possesses no superior knowledge, it is like a postman who
delivers mail with no idea what it says: “The Church can only deliver it the
way a postman delivers his mail; the Church is not asked what it thinks it is thereby
starting, or what it makes of the message. The less it makes of it and the less
it leaves on it its own fingerprints, the more it simple hands it on as it has
received it—and so much the better.”
[8]
No wonder Hegel formulated this same limitation apropos politics: especially
as Communists, we should abstain from any positive imagining of the future
Communist society. Recall Christ’s sceptical words against the prophets of doom
from Mark 13: “If anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look,
there!’ don’t believe it. For there will arise false Christs and false
prophets, and will show signs and wonders, that they may lead astray, if
possible, even the chosen ones. But you watch.”
[9] Watch for the signs of the apocalypse,
bearing in mind the open meaning of this term in Greek: apokálypsis (“lifting
of the veil” or “revelation”) is a disclosure of something hidden from the
majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception. On
account of this radical heterogeneity of the New, its arrival has to cause
terror and confusion—recall Heiner Müller’s famous motto: “the first appearance
of the new is the dread.” Or, as Seneca put it almost two thousand years ago: “
Et
ipse miror vixque iam facto malo / potuisse fieri credo. /Although the
evil is already done, we still find it hard to believe it is possible.”(Medea
883-4) This is how we react to radical Evil: it is real, but still perceived as
impossible. But does the same not hold for everything that is really New?
So what about apocalyptic tones we often hear, especially after a
catastrophe occurs? The ultimate paradox here is that the very excessive
catastrophism (»the end of the world is near« mantra) is a defense, a way to
obfuscate the true dangers, not to take them really seriously. This is why the
only appropriate reply to an ecologist who tries to convince us of the
impending threat is that the true target of his desperate arguing is HIS OWN
non belief—consequently, our answer to him should be something like »Don’t
worry, the catastrophe will come for sure!«… And the catastrophe is coming, the
impossible is happening all around us—but watch patiently, don’t get caught in
precipitous extrapolations, don’t let yourself go to the properly perverse
pleasure of: “This is it! The dreaded moment has arrived!” In ecology, such
apocalyptic fascination arrives in many diverse forms: global warming will
drawn us all in a couple of decades; biogenetics will bring the end of human
ethics and responsibility; bees will disappear soon and unimaginable starvation
will follow… Take all these treats seriously, but don’t be seduced by them and
enjoy too much the false sense of guilt and justice (“We offended Mother Earth,
so we are getting what we deserve!”). Instead, keep your head cool and—”but you
watch”:
“But you watch, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It
is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in
charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake.
Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will
come, in the evening, or at midnight,
or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you
asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”(Mark 13)
Stay wake and watch for what? As we have already seen, the Left entered a
period of profound crisis—the shadow of the XXth century still hangs over it,
and the full scope of the defeat is not yet admitted. In the years of
prospering capitalism, it was easy for the Left to play a Cassandra, warning
that the prosperity is based on illusions and prophesizing catastrophes to come.
Now the economic downturn and social disintegration the Left was waiting for is
here, protests and revolts are popping up all around the globe—but what is
conspicuously absent is any consistent Leftist reply to these events, any
project of how to transpose islands of chaotic resistance into a positive
program of social change: “When and if a national economy enters into crisis in
the present interlocking global order, what has anyone to say— in any
non-laughable detail—about ‘socialism in one country’ or even ‘partly detached
pseudo-nation-state non-finance-capital-driven capitalism’?”
[10] T.J. Clark sees the reason for this
inability to act in the Left’s “futuralism,” in its orientation towards a
future of radical emancipation; due to this fixation, the Left is immobilized
“by the idea that it should spend its time turning over the entrails of the
present for the signs of catastrophe and salvation,” i.e., it continues to be premised
“on some terracotta multitude waiting to march out of the emperor’s tomb.”
[11]
We have to admit the grain of truth in this simplified bleak vision which
seems to sap the very possibility of a proper political Event: perhaps, we
should effectively renounce the myth of a Great Awakening—the moment when (if
not the old working class then) a new alliance of the dispossessed, multitude
or whatever, will gather its forces and master a decisive intervention. The
entire history of the (radical) Left, up to Hardt and Negri, is colored by this
stance of awaiting the Moment. After describing multiple forms of resistance to
the Empire, Hardt and Negri’s Multitude ends with a messianic note pointing
towards the great Rupture, the moment of Decision when the movement of
multitudes will be transubstantiated the sudden birth of a new world: “After
this long season of violence and contradictions, global civil war, corruption
of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the biopolitical multitudes, the
extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some
point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand.”
[12] However, at this point when one expects
a minimum theoretical determination of this rupture, what we get is again
withdrawal into philosophy: “A philosophical book like this, however, is not
the place for us to evaluate whether the time for revolutionary political
decision is imminent.”
[13] Hardt and Negri perform here an all to
quick jump: of course one cannot ask them to provide a detailed empirical
description of the Decision, of the passage to the globalized “absolute
democracy,” to the multitude that rules itself; however, what if this a
justified refusal to engage in pseudo-concrete futuristic predictions masks an
inherent notional deadlock/impossibility? That is to say, what one does and
should expect is a description of the notional structure of this qualitative
jump, of the passage from the multitudes resisting the One of sovereign Power
to the multitudes directly ruling themselves.
So what happens if we radically renounce this stance of eschatological
expectation? Clark concludes that one has to admit the tragic vision of
(social) life: there is no (great bright) future, the “tiger” of suffering,
evil, and violence is here to stay, and, in such circumstances, the only
reasonable politics is the politics of moderation which tries to contain the
monster: “a politics actually directed, step by step, failure by failure, to
preventing the tiger from charging out would be the most moderate and
revolutionary there has ever been.”
[14] Practicing such a politics would provoke
a brutal reply of those in power and dissolve the “boundaries between political
organizing and armed resistance.”
[15] Again, the grain of truth in this
proposal is that, often, a strategically well-placed precise “moderate” demand
can trigger a global transformation—recall Gorbachov’s “moderate” attempt to
reform the Soviet Union which resulted in its
disintegration. But is this all one should say (and do)?
There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately
rendered in English:
futur and
avenir.
Futur stands
for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the
tendencies which are already here, while
avenir points more towards a
radical break, a discontinuity with the present—
avenir is what is to
come /
a venir/, not just what will be. Say, in today’s apocalyptic
global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Jean-Pierre
Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological
breakdown, of global economic and social chaos—even if it is indefinitely
postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our
reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the catastrophy is through
acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and
take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to
come.” We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper
level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what
we should be striving for—to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” over
up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”
Based on this distinction, we can see what was the problem with Marx (as
well as with the XXth century Left): it was not that Marx was too utopian in
his Communist dreams, but that his Communism was too “futural.” What Marx wrote
about Plato (Plato’s Republic was not a utopia, but an idealized image of the
existing Ancient Greek society), holds for Marx himself: what Marx conceived as
Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism, capitalism without
capitalism, i.e., expanded self-reproduction without profit and exploitation.
This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel’s “tragic” vision of
the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us, where every
intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always thwarts our
expectations. All we can be certain of is that the existing system cannot
reproduce itself indefinitely: whatever will come after will not be “our
future.” A new Middle East war or an economic chaos or
an unheard-of environmental catastrophe can swiftly change the basic
coordinates of our predicament. We should fully assume this openness, guiding
ourselves on nothing more than ambiguous signs from the future.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades
Project, Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1999.p. 482.
[2] Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis:
Minnesota University
Press 1989, p. 39.
[3] With all respect for Marcel Proust’s genius,
when one reads about his way of life – spending most of the day in
half-darkened room, sleeping long, depending on his servant – it is difficult
to resist the pleasure of imagining him being condemned by a workers’ regime to
a years or so of re-education camp, where he would be forced to get up at 5 AM,
wash in cold water, and then, after a meager breakfast, work most of the day
digging up and transporting earth, with the evenings filled up with singing
political sings and writing confessions…
[4] All quotes from Pascal are from the online
version of Pensees.
[5] As to the relevance of Pascal’s deus
absconditus for the notion of transference in psychoanalysis, see Guy Le
Gaufey, L’objet a, Paris: EPEL
2012.
[6] Karl Barth, God Here and Now, New
York: Routledge 2003, p. 45-46.
[7] Op.cit., p. 42.
[8] Op.cit., p. 49.
[9] Also translated as: “/But/ be on your
guard!”
[10] T.J.Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New
Left Review 74 (March/April 2012), p. 55.
[11] Op.cit., p. 54.
[12] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude,
New York: The Penguin Press 2004,
p. 358.
[13] Op.cit., p. 357.
[14] Clark, op.cit., p.
67.
[15] Op.cit., p. 74.
