> Another chestnut from Foucault comes to mind: "Do not think that one
> has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is
> fighting is abominable."
Some forms of joyful politics are problematic, no? For instance:
revolutionary joy of the following kind
"Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)53; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence - it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are - as if by Grace - for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow - in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merlo-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth." Zizek, Repeating Lenin <http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm>
associated with destroying "enemies" constructed in the following way
"The lesson to be learned from Carl Schmitt is that the divide friend/enemy is never just the verification of a factual difference: the enemy is by definition always - up to a point, at least - invisible, it looks like one of us, it cannot be directly recognized, which is why the big problem and task of the political struggle is that of providing/constructing the recognizable IMAGE of the enemy. (This also makes it clear why Jews are the enemy par excellence : it is not only that they conceal their true image or contours - it is that there is ultimately NOTHING beneath their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the "inner form" that pertains to any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in a formless infinite plasticity). In short, the "enemy recognition" is always a performative procedure which, in contrast to the deceiving appearances, brings to light / constructs the enemy's 'true face.' Schmitt refers here directly to the Kantian category of Einbildungskraft , the transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognize the enemy, the conceptual subsumption under preexisting categories is not enough; one has 'to schematize' the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with concrete sensible features which make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle." Zizek <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-homo-sacer-in-afghanistan.html>
a "joy" similar presumably to that associated with acts of "popular justice" e.g. lynch mobs
"In the case of popular justice ... you have the masses and their enemies. Furthermore, the masses, when they perceive somebody to be an enemy, when they decide to punish this enemy - or to re-educate him - do not rely on an abstract universal idea of justice, they rely on their own experience, that of the injuries they have suffered, that of the way in which they have been wronged in which they have been oppressed; and, finally, their decision is not an authoritative one, that is, they are not backed up by a state apparatus which has the power to enforce their decisions, they purely and simply carry them out." Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 8-9
Ted