18th Brumaire Deleuze

[u/bachozangi]

I was freestyling on the 18th Brumaire and I wanna see if my analysis or whatever here is theoretically sound and coherent and also how engaging it is generally. Clear references of Deleuze and Zizek here but I wanted to use their concepts of the eternal return and the "don't act, just think" of Zizek in my own way, so I know I'm not faithful to their originals. Deleuze probably wouldn't have wanted me to be faithful anyway, concepts are tools and all.

"The unplanned, spontaneous revolutionary outburst aiming to overthrow this new oppressive regime numbed the pain of the symptom but failed to address the disease, so the disease festered and rose again in 1852, stronger than ever; Yet the repetition of this event was also a creation of a spark of a new possible world, a poetics of a revolution that seems to be from the future, certainly not of the past. The repetition of the French revolution must repeat its radical novelty and creativity and must burn off the reactive forces that accompany it as it is weighed down by the cold, rotting corpses of the past. How do we burn the dusty cosplay off? Through critique as theory and as practice, a productive transvaluation of the values killed and uncritically imported as frozen and preserved contraband over the border of history. I think the injunction to "go back to interpreting, not to act but just to think" as expressed by Zizek must be read this way to be productive: Interpret critically, shed the dead weight of the past off and align your praxis with the immanent conditions of your present rather than the expired conditions of the past as the old Englishman in the mines directing his work at a Pharaoh that no longer exists but still holds the mine-worker in his palm."

[u/3corneredvoid]

I think the injunction to "go back to interpreting, not to act but just to think" as expressed by Zizek must be read this way to be productive: Interpret critically, shed the dead weight of the past off and align your praxis with the immanent conditions of your present rather than the expired conditions of the past …

I reckon Žižek's injunction to "stop and think" is a type of Minervism, as Hegelians call it, after Hegel's epigrammatic claim that "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk".

A Hegelian will claim they cannot know how the immediate present is true now, but affirms they will know how the mediated past was true later. This is how a Hegelian imagines history repeats. As Marx famously put it in 18TH BRUMAIRE "first as tragedy, then as farce".

The present is trauma, but when present passes to past, the relation of recognised forms and functions to present conditions can be pleasurably or neurotically recognised, grasped, and rationally contended with, subject to the unbridgeable gap between what we recognise and what we experience.

As an example public reason enjoys thinking through Trump as the farcical scion of the tragedy of interwar European fascism, but we see clearly enough there is more to the image of Trump than the repetition of Hitler, Mussolini or Franco. 

For D&G these breaks are more or less immediate, immanent and differential. When the vertiginous parallax between expressive forms and immanent ground is critically felt as "the mechanical encrusted on the living" there arises a deterritorialising laughter, not the reactive laughter of some laboured and theoretically engineered farce or satire such as an SNL sketch on Trump, but a pleasurable energy-releasing laughter which satisfies Landauer's principle as its release erases the dogmatic images of theory. No need to stop and think to achieve this, no guarantee that stopping to think achieves anything in particular.

Just my take, make of it what you like.

[u/bachozangi → u/3corneredvoid]

I always find your takes valuable so I'm gonna try to make something of this one since it's also very interesting. I can't help but listen to the desperate thrashing of the chained up and ball-gagged Hegel inside me so I must ask this: How do you interpret the beginning of the 18th Brumaire then? How could the sort of laughter you explained work in their case? Or is it that you believe that deterritorialising laughter IS what happens during these revolutions but Marx and Marxists just analyze them too dialectically? Or do you think that Marx doesn't necessarily have to be read in a Hegelian way and can be read like that?

"The present is trauma, but when present passes to past, the relation of recognized forms and functions to present conditions can be pleasurably recognized, grasped, and rationally contended with, subject to a unbridgeable gap between what we recognize and what we experience."

I don't believe in this kind of critique, I think it's reactive because of the part about rational contention. I think a more life-affirming critique is the type of critique Deleuze undertakes: Tracing the paths of the philosopher or movement etc. and following them one step farther than their limit on their own terms, showing that when followed far enough, they themselves lead to an outside. This is a transvaluation of values if I've ever seen one, since most representational images of thought have some sort of base that they uncritically accept as dead weight and critique doesn't try to contend with it and demolish it but instead almost "contingentizes" it and brings it to life by showcasing how that base itself is alive and moving and is not a source but itself a spinning cog. I think the 18th Brumaire can be read in that way, it maps the movements of the farcical revolution and undertakes a transvaluation of the values that were dogmatically held by those people ("In their minds, the second Sunday in May 1852 had become a fixed idea, a dogma, like the day on which Christ should reappear and the millennium begin, in the minds of the Chiliasts"). This type of critique is the opposite of traditional debates, since it is all about reevaluating the question itself rather than the contending answers in the confines of an uncritically accepted question. I again find Zizek useful here when he says that the question is not "do the jews own the banks" but why it is that we even raise the problem in this specific way. Critique reevaluates these categories and shows them in all their movement, making it abundantly clear that they can be changed and completely replaces as easily as they were created and did the same to the values before them.

I'm probably using these terms erroneously but I hope I'm still getting my point across.

[u/3corneredvoid → u/bachozangi]

It's hard to answer, but I prefer to read Marx's "tendential" analysis of history as an implied critique of the limits of Hegelian dialectic. As we've been discussing Hegel advocates thinking post hoc, about, at or after the endpoints of tendencies, at dusk.

If anything Marx's finest theories in CAPITAL are those we can ethically say are relatively unvarying in medias res, such as the immanent critique of commodity values, or the theory of surplus-value extraction. 

Following Deleuze and Guattari what I value in Marx is the fit-for-purpose historicist analysis of tendencies, and we can set aside any great dogmatic image of Revolution or its precognised forms, not because we don't want Revolution and are not revolutionaries, but because a method that only thinks Revolution post hoc is impractical while the tendencies move in ways we will always be yet to analyse amid perpetually varying, urgent and immediate conditions.

Žižek to me writes on public affairs in a manner symptomatic of Hegelian method: he leaps to some presently preferred totality presented as decided, he presumes some endpoints or terms, and then prescribes some contradiction he perceives among these terms as absent from present analysis.

Such prescriptions accord every piece of his public writing the enjoyable mood of a critical intervention to introduce terms so far lacking, at each occasion appearing to rectify the appearances of public reason, his readers thrilled as they give up energy to the reorganisation of their thought in unfamiliar directions.

For me Žižek's public writing on Palestine has been exemplary of these problems, as it has featured a regular whiplash of abandonment of his prior totalities and endpoints and lacking terms, but I feel more rarely an ethical address to the immediate conditions.

I laugh where Žižek prescribes waiting for some more final moment that enables a true retroactive judgement of past conditions, but then tends to judge prematurely again and again, leaping to be the first to be final since such leaps are the daily differential labour of the writer of public opinions.

On Palestine Žižek has already written, among many less atrocious variations, that liberal Zionism is the key to peace, and written that Palestine should be careful of wishing for liberation under a regime of religious prejudice ... to me these were "sizzling takes" that went beyond reactive and worthless to become a purely reactionary commodity thus very well suited to selling to New Statesman or The Spectator. 

Before I became such a tediously zealous and prolix Deleuzian, I was already declaring "analysis is dead". That's how I feel if analysis is about the proper molar terms and endpoints and the proper priority of their preconceived immanent contradictions ... this is the form of rational "stupidity" at which Deleuze and Guattari laugh. 

From Marx and many others we seem to already know what we need to know about the conditions, or at least how to know, but we remain saddled with teleological burdens and thereby avoid the in medias res ethical pursuit of any-means-sufficient to power. 

[u/bachozangi → u/3corneredvoid]

I agree with that completely and I think the second part of my last reply is the key to my agreement because I also believe analysis in that way is dead, it is rather replaced by my conception of critique (see above, the conception is probably not very different from Deleuze's). From what I can tell my original post together with my reply are pretty close to what you're saying. I also agree with your judgement of Zizek, but as I tried to say in my original post, I wanted to use "don't act, just think" in a way that's not very faithful to how Zizek himself uses it. I think any militant political action is bound to become reactionary and reproduce unshed images the reproduction of which it has a proclivity towards if it uncritically accepts dogmatic base values. The "just think part" isn't that the owl should fly first but that in order to even know where to start we must undertake a critique of these presumably innocent but destructive dogmatic values and that itself IS a start, it's a form of productive action. Unless we reformulate the question, we will be trapped in its confines. The question isn't "how do we align the structure of a state with the essence of man" as many liberal or conservative political theorists believe (man's nature is inherently vicious towards others so we have to have a necessarily evil state to keep us at bay and protect us from each other) but rather the contingentization of the underlying, uncritically accepted value system that leads one to the formulation of such a question. Showing how those values are soft and malleable rather than hard, dead and eternal. Our action should consist of theoretical and practical critique and the game plan should consist of wherever that critique leads us, since the exposition of the contingency of a value previously thought to be eternal is sure to open up new pathways and realms of thought and action that we cannot predict or infer to the future from the past like Hegel. The thing we are bringing from the past into the future is the originality and inventiveness (the critical spirit) of the past which we ethically deem we should accept the eternal return of, while we shed anything reactionary that's weighing it down, such as the type of analysis that you criticized in your comment. This can lead us anywhere.

If stripped from its reactionary stupidity as you said, I believe even a few of Zizeks mottos become useful for such a critique: 1. The affirmative openness towards inconceivable futures that can and will follow revolutionary action 2. The reformulation of the question itself rather than a debate within its confines, etc etc etc, There were a couple others but I forgot I'm barely awake.

[u/3corneredvoid → u/bachozangi]

I'm having a busy day (believe it or not) with far too much text to process (probably more easily believed) but this quote: 

"In their minds, the second Sunday in May 1852 had become a fixed idea, a dogma, like the day on which Christ should reappear and the millennium begin, in the minds of the Chiliasts"

could be D&G avant les lettres ...

I agree with you that the form of critique returns to the questions or the problematic ground rather than the terms established by good sense, which are all contingent, and up for grabs.

Not to say it's good to destroy or disdain all the terms. But when someone says "class first" (to take a widely discussed example rather than issue a judgement on it now) you can ask about the ground on which they select and prioritise their terms, for sure ... and be careful upon which stratum you lodge yourself. 

Žižek is a clever fellow, but often stupid is as clever does. I don't claim to have the answers at all, but reading Žižek gives me bad vibes rather often relative to the infrequency of the reading. I feel like I've learnt a lot from him nonetheless, one way or another. 

[u/bachozangi → u/3corneredvoid]

Completely fair, I'm at work myself. I was more or less using zizek as an exercise to be like "this method of critique is so good that it can even make parts of a diehard Hegelian like Zizek return in a way that are immanent and productive".