1 The Dialectic of Politics and Antipolitics
The thesis of this book is simple; its articulation is more complicated, as it moves between philosophy and politics, the present and the past, a New Left and an old one. Two dates form its bookends:1989 and 2001. The first, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and realized two years later by the disappearance of the Soviet Union, opened a new era of political possibilities. The second, September 11, 2001, posed a challenge to the irenic vision of a new democratic future. My thesis is that the interpretation of 1989 as the overcoming of totalitarian communism and therefore the advent of democracy was misleading; as a result, political thinkers have been unable to understand the new challenges that arose in the wake of 9/11. They reacted to terror with force because they did not understand the paradoxical dialectics of antipolitical violence and political freedom. They were caught between politics and antipolitics. This short introduction will outline the justification of this thesis and make clear the way in which it is then articulated in the chapters that follow.
The political world during the first half of the twentieth century was colored by reactions to the unimagined horrors of the Great War; its second half was overdetermined by the Cold War. The revolutions of 1989 seemed to promise that the twenty-first century could be the age of democracy. But the defeat of totalitarianism came so suddenly, smoothly, and nearly effortlessly that it hardly seemed necessary to reflect on what had been left behind, and why. The opposition between communist totalitarianism and capitalist freedom seemed self-evident; each represented different economic systems on which the rights and freedoms of their citizens depended. The revolutions of 1989 upended this perspective; they were political more than they were economic. They made evident the paradoxical nature of totalitarianism. It was a political regime that denied the autonomy of the political at the same time that the power of the state was used to suppress any perceived challenge to the existing framework of social relations. The creation of an independent civil society broke the barren loop that nourished a paradoxical political regime that was built on the denial of politics. 1 The autonomy of the political became possible once the power of the state disappeared. The democratic potential that emerged was dynamic, open, and imaginative; but it was precarious because there existed no shared foundation for individual choice. Seeking stability, unsure of their identity, wanting to insure security, some who were now freed would opt for an authoritarian government while others clung to a national or ethnic identity, and still others saw the integration into global capitalism as their only choice. 2 The variety of options that were opened with the defeat of totalitarianism meant that democracy was not the inevitable default position. It was one option but not the only one.
A quarter of a century later, the revolutions of 1989 have failed to realize the democracy they made possible. More troubling from my perspective is the fact that the existing Western democracies have persevered in their course, as if 1989 were a confirmation of their own virtues. The idea that democracy incarnates the good while totalitarianism is inherently evil, along with the implication that the overthrow of the latter automatically opens the space of the former, is a vast and misleading simplification. I will instead interpret communist totalitarianism as a manifestation of what I call antipolitics, which is a paradoxical vision of the political that seeks to eliminate particular conditions that produce the need for politics. Antipolitics can manifest itself in different forms. 3 After 1989, it adopted the costumes of authoritarianism, nationalism or, more easily, it simply surrendered to the global market. Each choice incarnated a paradox since each of these forms of antipolitics proposed specific concrete political actions. This paradoxâthe fact that antipolitics is a form of politicsâhas recurred repeatedly in practice as well as in theory. It might appear that 1989 overcame the paradox of antipolitical politics. The communists had been a political party whose maintenance in power was justified as the means to realize political goals whose rational and historical justification had been articulated by Marx. They may not have wanted to rule as totalitarians (which explains the existence of reformers in their midst) but their power depended on, and enforced, a form of antipolitics by denying the legitimate existence of other possible political frameworks. 4
It would be misleading to criticize the moral intentions of the proponents of antipolitics, or to deny the difference between living under regimes of communism, technocracy, or fundamentalism. But the revolutions of 1989 illustrate the presence of a more fundamental problem. The overthrow of the totalitarian state opens the domain that I call the political. This is a universe of possibilities which, because they are only possible, are sometimes intoxicating, at other times sobering, and always precarious. The freedom to choose becomes an imperative; it is impossible to remain suspended in a world without gravity, to live in a space where everything is possible and nothing is certain. Once that political choice is exercised, whatever it may be, the domain of the political has been de facto closed; antipolitics now stands on the horizon. A horizon may point beyond the present but it can also close it off. Although some forms of antipolitics may be more open and thus more desirable than others, the dialectic of the political and antipolitics will perdure. The trick is to articulate a self-critical politics that avoids being fixated as an antipolitics in order to preserve the open horizon of the political. Practice has to look to theory, political will has to be supplemented by judgment, present problems have to be seen from the horizon of historical experience.
This is where the second bookend of this volume becomes important. On September 11, 2001, the dialectic of antipolitics and the political failed. Terrorism incarnates, fixates, and freezes the horror of antipolitics. However nihilistic it may be, terrorism is an antipolitics that does seek a type of political end. Its perverse political aim is to provoke an overreaction that will weaken its enemy at the same time that its own courage attracts new followers. This is the point where the failure to understand the revolutions of 1989 came to be felt. The response to the antipolitical threat should have sought an opening for a renewal of political space. Instead, the declaration of a âwar on terrorismâ had the opposite effect. It itself was an antipolitics. The reply to violence with violence has no end, literally or politically. The war against the perpetrators of 9/11 became the âglobal war against terrorâ that knows no limit; for that reason it is also incapable of defining victory. The preservation of the animal existence of the citizenry is not the realization of the political; it is the most brutal and also the most banal form of antipolitics.
The failure to understand the revolutions of 1989 took its revenge with the decision to invade Iraq. Whether or not they believed that Iraq was producing nuclear weapons, the neo-conservatives 5 within the Bush government as well as the âliberal hawksâ in the intelligentsia recognized that a war with no political end was doomed to failure. In order to give their use of force a political goal, they drew a false analogy to 1989, asserting that once the dictator was gone, the Iraqi people would enthusiastically embrace democracy, pelting the conquering army with roses, returning immediately to work in order to insure that the invasion was financially and morally cost free. It should be no surprise that the result has been just the opposite: anarchy, tribalism, and religious conflict that have endured for more than a decade. This openness without limits destroyed the horizon for the reconstruction of the political. One source of the false analogy was the failure to recognize the difference between an opening of the political that was the result of the experience of a civil society refusing to kneel in the face of antipolitics and a âliberationâ (and occupation) by a foreign army. 6 The other source was the misunderstanding of the revolutions of 1989 that underlies the chapters of this book.
2 The Origins of this Book: The Actuality of the New Left
On September 12, 2001, the day after the shock, I was asked by the editors of the German monthly, Kommune, which had regularly translated my political commentaries for French publications to write an essay on the political significance of 9/11. The invitation was a sort of blessing; in the face of such unmitigated horror, an intellectual tries to construct meaning with the aid of his only tools, words and thoughts. I began the next day, when the air in New York smelled still of the carnage, and the atmosphere of uncertainty weighed even as the autumn sun warmed the blue sky. My essay, published also in the French monthly Esprit, was given different titles by the editors, each stressing different aspects of the same analysis. The Germans posed a simple question, âWar or Politics?â That was indeed the question of the moment. The French editors were more declarative, âWhen America tragically rejoins the World.â 7 Their title alluded to the fact that, after 1989, George Bush senior had declared the creation of a ânew world orderâ which he of course expected to be dominated by the hegemonic power of the USA. In that context, the always critical French were saying that 9/11 demonstrated that, like it or not, America is part of the world, and that this world is multipolar, open to violence and subject to the whims of fortune. It cannot be dominated by sheer force or terror, nor ruled by unilateral power. In effect, Americaâs reply to the terror had to be based first of all on learning how to say âwelcomeâ to the world. That meant that politics is necessary, but it didnât prescribe what form such a politics should it take.
As is often the case when trying to think the unthinkable, I looked back to my own past for some anchor to hold together the uncertainties of the moment. The first paragraph of my essay began with a rhetorical question that tried to fix the immensity of the shock.âWhere were you on November 22, 1963?â Even the young remember that date because the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that day began a new political age for a suddenly sobered America. A similar question was posed more painfully by September 11, 2001. However, if the murder of Kennedy was followed by a blind engagement in Vietnam, that same American society also engaged in a âWar on Povertyâ that was a culmination of the battle for civil rights. âWhich would it be this time,â I asked, âwhen we hear of a âwarâ against a non-identified enemy and when society seems to forget itself in a patriotic spirit that threatens either to dissipate in the long term or to explode into a demand for an immediate and terrible revenge?âAlthough I might formulate these considerations in more theoretical terms today, they reflect still my way of thinking about politics and antipolitics.
This search for political meaning links the challenge posed by 9/11 to my experience as a participant in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s; and that earlier engagement also hints at the source of my interest in the experience of the revolutions of 1989. 8 In 1967, I attended an international conference in Veszprem, Hungary, organized by the Quakers bringing together two youth leaders from each of the major countries in the East and the West. It seemed like a good occasion to present a petition against the Vietnam War. Only one participant, a Czech, refused to sign. Her argument was precisely the one that would be developed by the future dissident leader, Vaclav Havel, in his 1978 book, The Power of the Powerless, which expressed the political logic that animated the anti-totalitarian dissidents. In a word, she asked why should I go through the motions? Why should I alienate my voice by signing a meaningless petition? Why join the consensus? In short, why accept the values of antipolitics? This was an early manifestation of the stubborn power that opened the hard path to 1989; it is the expression of the power of the political. 9
It remains to ask what was ânewâ about the New Left in the West? That question helps to explain why could and what should the West have learned from the revolutions of 1989? The paradoxical dialectics of antipolitics suggests that those revolutions represented a challenge to the dominant Western liberal mode of thinking about the political. Although some participants in the New Left did not shy from rhetorical excess, denouncing political liberalism as a subtle form of totalitarianism, the essential weight was directed at liberalismâs defense of what I call antipolitics. 10 In effect, the Western New Left was seeking to redefine the political, to open it to critical questioning, and to refuse the limits of polite liberal discourse. The sad story of the dissolution and self-destruction of the New Left can in turn be explained by the dialectics of antipolitics and the political. The unlimited field of the political that it opened was precarious, uncertain, and anxious; it was tempting to fall back on theories, to look for certainties, and to define fixed identities. Varieties of Marxism flourished, dogmatism replaced curiosity, the inventive slogan that identified the personal as the political turned against its proponents. That story has been told before; I refer to it here only to explain the kinds of engagement that are reflected in the chapters that follow.
3 The Structure of Engagement
It would be necessary to write another book in order to develop the theory of engagement that unifies this collection. In truth, I was trying to formulate that larger book when I came to recognize the unity of the chapters that compose this volume. What I describe here are four general types or dimensions of political engagement. I do not claim that this typology is either necessary or complete. It is built from questions that have concerned me during the years that have followed the revolutions of 1989. It also expresses a way of thinking that is typical of the New Left as I have briefly described it here. I leave the justification of my theory of what a New Left could become to the larger study to come.
Engagement does not result from either political or ...