My first (proper) post! I have been really interested in the debate over whether, for want of a better description, Stalin was mad or not. But the thing is, I don't think you can call someone mad and believe that automatically makes them evil and vice versa. There are many people who have neurological or mental disorders who create music, art, literature, etc. (that is 'people who are mad can do good') Similarly, there are many people who are perfectly rational who can do evil thing: how is it that officers during the holocaust could oversee the killing of thousands of Jews and then sit back to enjoy Beethoven's quartets? It cannot just be that a part of them was mad that just got switched off. What I could say is that Stalin's acts are rational, but are organised according to a counter logic. Since there is no universal mental logic, I realise that the notion of a counter logic begs the question "counter to what?" Nevertheless, I keep the term, because what I mean is that it is counter to what we would consider rational. This argument is followed up in Friedlaender's "Probing the Limits of Representation". But even this is insufficient, which is why I've written this piece. There seems to me a link between psychoanalysis and ethics (and value), but it cannot be expressed so simply (bad/good). Stalin's crime was not that he didn't care about what he was doing - he was doing it to pursue some notion of good - the will to do good is there. And it's not even that he wanted power for himself: his actions were not necessarily pathological. The question is, where does the evil of Stalin's acts reside? I'm sorry for bombarding you with such a long piece of writing, but I hope that it will provoke some debate. In reply to people who want their writing to be clear, I hope it meets your criteria. Okay, I'm being indulgent now ...
Thanks Simon H.
Blair with Stalin
Today's liberal democratic political constellation reads Stalinism only in light of its abuses. In other words, the 'ground' of the Stalinist era, the window through which we see it, is one of Human Rights. In this way, all concrete socio-historical analysis of that period is somehow redundant. In the current political climate, such analysis becomes a kind of dirty secret. Who has not felt the need to say: "Of course I'm not saying that ... (Stalinism was not evil; the Holocaust was not evil; 11/9 was not evil) ..." when one wants to make a point that is not related to the central issue of Human Rights? Today, what is forbidden it is forbidden to even talk about evil; Stalinism and Nazism are raised to the level of a trauma: simply because of their evil, we are not allowed to talk about the nature of their evil, so much so that Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein are seen as, essentially, the same. The volume that has been written about the impossibility of
communicating the holocaust has made it a commonplace to say that it cannot be comprehended; it cannot be spoken of. What this does is elevate an event to an ex nihilo event with no historical basis, a traumatic point of the Real which cannot be symbolised.
At work in this current prohibition is the legitimisation of a state of affairs; by saying that an event embodies sublime evil, we say '(at least) what we have now is not evil'.
And this tars all revolutionary political projects with the same brush; Zizek writes of the current denkverbot: "[The elevation of an event to a properly sublime evil] casts a shadow on every radical political project, i.e. to reinforce the Denkverbot against the radical political imagination: 'Are you aware that what you propose ultimately leads to the holocaust?' "
Alain Badiou has said in an interview:
Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
In other words, the fixation on human rights is really just a way to deflect attention from other events; "it disqualifies forms of the Third World violence for which Western states are (co)responsible as minor in comparison with the Absolute Evil of the holocaust."
Secondly, it is part of what Badiou calls the ethics of the other. The other is defined, in this case only by his finitude, his mortality, his bodily reality. Hence, the highest form of suffering is victimhood. Everybody is a victim. We feel this strongly in Western countries with a high propensity towards litigation: everybody has potential, but the highest form that this potential can take - its highest ethical horizon - is that one can be a victim. I feel the horrible proximity of the other who can do harm to me by smoking next to me; by crashing into my car; by burning me with hot coffee. Intervention in the name of 'human rights' is a symptom of the current postmodern politics. The surprise of the 'coalition' forces who find that the 'liberated' are not always grateful are stung by this point. They had viewed these liberated people as victims, not as political subjects (that is, those with the potential to be the subject of a truth).
To examine Stalinism in ethical terms, which we appeal to when we use the term 'evil' does have its uses in historical analysis. It is useful to examine where Stalin fits in amongst this ethical configuration.
In Kant's conception of ethics, a moral act is performed out of duty to the moral law (the Categorical Imperative to perform only acts that will hold good for all situations, could become a Universal maxim), and only for the moral law (for the form only and not for any pathological motive). Zizek writes:
[the] moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty; that is, it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself - which means that the subject him or herself has to assume responsibility for 'translating' the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations.
How, then, can we fail to act ethically? Firstly, we can have the will to perform acts out of respect to the moral law but fail ('frailty', for Kant); secondly, because of our impurity we perform an act that respects the moral law in its legality, but out of pathological motives; thirdly, we make our pathological motives the object of our adherence to the law as such - for Kant, 'wickedness'. What is of interest to us, however, is Kant's notion of Diabolical Evil where a subject elevates non-compliance with the moral law a condition of action regardless of the benefit or harm it does to us: that is, it turns the moral law upside down. However, since the ethical act has no form, it is identical to the ethical act.
Badiou picks up on this with respect to his own ethics. First of all, Badiou's ethics arises out of his conception of the Truth Event. A subject only emerges as an (ethical) subject through a Truth Event. The ethical act for a subject is simply to follow this truth (expressed by Lacan's maxim: don't give up on your desire). But the problem is that a truth event is hard to distinguish from what Badiou calls a simulacrum of truth - like Kant's Diabolical Evil, a truth appears to us as identical to its simulacrum - the difference being that a truth event is universal 'for all', whereas a simulacrum can only be for a group (excluding or at the expense of another group: this is where Zizek's distinction of 'we a people' and 'we the people' comes in handy).
Stalin, though, does not appear to contradict any of these maxims: his acts are ethical with regard to his own (counter)ethical position, yet he is not a figure of Diabolical evil, as such a will is impossible - if one turns non-compliance with the law into a non-pathological condition, then this non-pathological condition is identical with the ethical act.
Badiou suggests the way in which Stalinism is evil in his idea that a Truth is always not-all and the subject that believes he is the instrument of historical necessity is, in the Lacanian sense, a pervert (in short, the Lacanian pervert, rather than obtaining enjoyment (jouissance) through desire of the Other, or rather that bit of the other that we make the object (objet a) - represented as $ qua a, turns this relation upside down and obtains enjoyment by making himself the object: the object-instrument of the other's will, a qua $). In a sense, Badiou is saying, one should follow a truth to the end (don't give up on your desire), but realise that your truth is not-all and one should not act as the object of the truth, but rather as the subject of the truth (or rather, the subject of the Being-towards-death). To change the wording of Kant's prohibition a little: "There is no excuse for following your desire"; though the truth demands that we should follow our act through to the
end, this is, in the end, no excuse for our actions whilst following that truth.
Now, the benefits of this analysis are that it allows us to see the seeds of a possible evil in the actions of today. When Tony Blair made his extraordinary announcement that even if WMDs are not found history will forgive him, in his smug assurance, he was in effect, saying the following: Although WMDs may not be found and I lied to you about this, this does not matter because I had to lie to you in order to fulfil the needs of History.
In Lacanian terms: "Although I lied to you, such a lie was necessary for me to carry out my duty to the Other." In other words: "I had to lie even though lying is a breach of my duty because such a lie was the only way I could carry out my duty to the Other."
Does this not illustrate an interesting point about the workings of the ethics of perversion? In order to fulfil our duty (to the Other) we have to break our (true) duty (to the Moral Law).
Stricto sensu, then, Blair's act is unethical. His argument, though, would be that his breach of the Law is, in fact, not his choice (or that he had to make the choice, which is the same thing) - that it was forced on him by his duty to the Other.
In Blair's statement he effectively announces his actions as a necessary, forced choice: it was not my choice to bomb Iraq: History compelled me to do it." Again, the notion of history, here, acts as little more than a fetish object. For Blair to place himself as the object of the History-Other's will is a clear disavowal of agency best explained by another contradictory statement: yes, I bombed Iraq but it was not me that did it; how could I do otherwise, for History judged that I had to do it and I had no choice in the matter.
Here, it is useful to return to Kant for the locus of the Moral Law in this case. Alenka Zupanacic writes of the self-deceiving subject who has committed an unethical act:
[...] he would simply go on asserting hypocritically that he had to muster all his strength to tell the truth to the other, that he himself suffered enormously when he hurt the Other, yet could not avoid it, because it was his duty to do so.
If we swap the word "truth" for "lie" in this statement, do we not have the perfect description of Blair: as the commonplace goes he is a moral man whose conscience is torn, but utterly sincere about his convictions? And can we not reverse this to show that Blair is Zupanacic's hypocrite who "suffers enormously" when he betrays the Moral Law and is forced to do the bidding of the Law of the Other (in our case understood as 'human Rights')?
In this sense, Blair hides behind the falsity of the 'laws of Historical Necessity' in order to hide the obvious fact that he lied to reach the place of his jouissance.
Slavoj Zizek: When the Party Commits Suicide http://www.bard.edu/hrp/zizekessay2.htm Slavoj Zizek: Plague of Fantasies (final appendix) Alain Badiou: Cabinet Magazine interview http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php Ethics Alenka Zupanacic: Ethics of the Real
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