Negativity Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept his immersion in some particular social role that confers on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the only way to the rational totality of the modern State leads through the horror of the revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of premodern organic “concrete universality,” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity. In other words, the point of Hegel’s deservedly famous analysis of the revolutionary Terror in Phenomenology is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral direct assertion of abstract Universal Reason, and was, as such, doomed to perish in self-destructive fury, since it was unable to organize the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable, and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point is, rather, the enigma of why, despite the fact that revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State. There is a clear parallel between this necessity of making the wrong choice in order to arrive at the proper result (of choosing “urination” in order to arrive at “insemination”), and the structure of the Rabinovitch joke, in which, also, the only way to arrive at the true reason is via the wrong, first reason. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The MIT Press, 2003, pp.83-4
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 03:04:10 +0000
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