The Ends of History

Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason

Amy Swiffen, Joshua Nichols, Amy Swiffen, Joshua Nichols

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136157752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Ends of History? considers how, despite the fact that events in the past 20 years have called Francis Fukuyama's infamous announcement of the end of history into question, the issue of the end of history is now a matter of renewed interest and debate.

Two decades ago we were confronted by the end of the Soviet Union and collapse of the geo-political divisions that had defined much of the twentieth century. From this particular end, the 'end of history' was proclaimed. But is it still possible to argue that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are the final form of law and mode of production in human history? Recent events have called this thesis into question: from 9/11 and the War on Terror, to the current global economic collapse and looming ecological crises, it seems that history if far from over. And yet, oddly enough, the question of 'the end' has returned. For example, in the often predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international American Empire or a new era of International Law, and the global resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political identification. On the other hand, perhaps the 'end' is still yet to come, slowly accumulating, mustering at the periphery of the geo-political landscape and outside the productive sphere. Responses taking up these questions range from a return to Universalism, political theology, Messianism, and even the old specter of communism. This volume assesses these responses, exploring what is at stake in proclaiming 'the end' in the current historical moment. Is it a matter of reading the writing on the wall? Or is the proclamation itself a political act? Furthermore is there a desire for the 'end'? In addressing these questions, the contributors to The Ends of History? confront the various 'ends' that we now live, and in so doing they open new lines of sight into the future.

Chapter 1

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Communist Desire

Jodi Dean

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I

In a widely cited essay published in 1999, Wendy Brown uses Walter Benjamin's term, “left melancholy,” to diagnosis a melancholia of the contemporary left. Her concern in the essay, which closely tracks Stuart Hall's discussion of the rise of Thatcherism, is to analyze the fears and anxieties of a left in decline, a left that is backwards-looking, self-punishing, attached to its own failure, and seemingly incapable of envisioning an emancipatory egalitarian future. For many Brown's timely and evocative essay captured a truth about the end of a certain history of the North American, British, and European left. Attuned to the ends and loss occasioned by the disintegration of the “we” previously held in common by the discourse of communism, in her words, to the “unaccountable loss” and “unavowedly crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms left, socialism, Marx, or movement,” Brown provided an opportunity to reflect on the failures and continuities in left projects in terms of the desires that sustain them (Brown 1999: 22). Her treatment of a “lost historical movement” suggested a kind of left “coming to grips” with, or facing of reality, the reality of neoliberal capitalism and the defeat of the welfare state.

Read from the expanse of more than a decade, however, Brown's essay is less convincing, for now it appears to err in its basic account of what was lost and why. Her discussion of Benjamin is misleading. Her treatment of Freud is one-sided. Nonetheless, by analyzing the left in terms of a general structure of desire establishing the contours of a key mode of left theorizing, Brown opens up possibilities for reconceiving communist desire, possibilities I try to extend in this essay.

“Left-Wing Melancholy” is the title of Benjamin's disparaging 1931 review of the poetry of Erich Kästner. Best known for his children's book, Emil and the Detectives, Kästner was a well-regarded Weimar-period poet, novelist, and journalist. In contrast to Kästner's bourgeois admirers, Benjamin describes Kästner's poetry as giving way to the complacency and fatalism of “those who are most remote from the processes of production and whose obscure courting of the state of the market is comparable to the attitude of a man who yields himself up entirely to the inscrutable accidents of his digestion” (Benjamin 1931: 426). In a later essay, “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin positions Kästner as an exemplar of the “new objectivity,” a literary movement that Benjamin argues “has made the struggle against misery a consumer good” (Benjamin 1934: 5). Citing “a perceptive critic,” actually himself writing in “Left-Wing Melancholy,” Benjamin quotes his earlier piece:

These extreme left-wing intellectuals have nothing to do with the worker's movement … The extreme left journalists of the type Kästner, Mehring, or Tucholsky are the decadent strata of the bourgeoisie who try to mimic the proletariat. Their function, seen from a political point of view, is to form not a Party, but a clique, seen from a literary point of view, not a school but a fad, from an economic point of view not to become producers but agents. Agents or hacks, who make a great show of their poverty and congratulate themselves on the yawning void.

(Benjamin 1934: 5–6)

As far as Benjamin is concerned, left-wing writers such as Kästner have no social function other than rendering the political situation into amusing content for public consumption. They transmit the apparatus of production rather than transform it, assimilating revolutionary themes into the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication. Benjamin writes, “I define a hack as a writer who fundamentally renounces the effort to alienate the apparatus of production from the ruling class in favor of socialism, by means of improving it” (Benjamin 1934: 4). In both “Left-Wing Melancholy” and “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin criticizes intellectual compromise, adaptation to the market, and the betrayal of the workers' movement, particularly insofar as this compromise, adaptation, and betrayal banks on authentic revolutionary impulses already part of everyday proletarian life.

Brown claims that “left melancholy is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal — even to the failure ofthat ideal — than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present” (Brown 1999: 20). I disagree. Nowhere in his review of Kästner does Benjamin fault him for a lingering attachment to political ideals. Benjamin in fact makes the opposite point, condemning Kästner for writing poems that are blind to action because “their beat very precisely follows the notes according to which poor rich folks play the blues” (Benjamin 1931: 426). Kästner's melancholy is a pose, a fashion trend, a commodity. He is not attached to an ideal; he has compromised revolutionary ideals by reducing them to consumer products.

Preoccupied more with the inadequacies of the contemporary left than with Benjamin's discussion of the service intellectuals do to the bourgeoisie when they turn revolutionary themes into consumer contents, Brown does not emphasize the compromise of the left melancholic. Instead she reads Benjamin's critique of Kästner as suggesting that “sentiments themselves become things for the left melancholic who ‘takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods’” (Brown 1999: 21). Brown locates in this reified loss a point of contact with the contemporary left: “We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them” (Brown 1999: 21). But Benjamin is not criticizing a left for its attachment to left passions, reasons, analyses, and convictions. Rather he is calling out Kästner and the “new objectivity” trend for their compromise and the resulting “metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption” (Benjamin 1931: 425). Unlike Brown's, Benjamin's left melancholic sublimates left commitment to revolution and the proletariat. A new objectivist, he fatalistically gives way to the bourgeois vision of the existing world instead of holding fast to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat to reorganize and transform production.

What, then, of melancholia? The most valuable aspect of Brown's analysis comes from her turn to Freud's 1917 paper on melancholia to provide an account of a particularly left structure of desire. As is well known, Freud distinguishes melancholia from mourning. Mourning responds to the loss of an object of love, whether that object is a person, country, freedom, or ideal. Like the subject who mourns, the melancholic subject presents little interest in the outside world. The crucial difference between them is that the melan-cholic's self-reproach and self-reviling extends to the very “over-coming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (Freud 1917: 245). The death drive, the force of loss, reformats the structure of desire itself. Freud writes:

The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning — an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished.

(Freud 1917: 245)

To account for this difference in self-regard, Freud distinguishes between mourning's consciousness of loss and the unconscious dimension of object loss in melancholia. Even when the melancholic knows that he lost, he does not know what he has lost, in what his loss consists for him.

Freud notes how in melancholia a critical agency splits off from the ego, a voice of conscience that criticizes the poor ego for all its moral failings. He explains that clinical experience reveals that the specific criticisms the melancholic levels against himself correspond most fully not to the melancholic subject but to one whom the subject loves or should love: “the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient's own ego” (Freud 1917: 247). What the patient seems to be saying about himself is really about someone else. The melancholic subject thus is one who has narcissistically identified himself with and attached himself to someone else, his loved object, now lost. Rather than acknowledging the loss, narcissistic identification protects the subject from it, bringing the object into the subject and enabling him to keep it as part of himself. This identification is fraught insofar as there is much about the loved object that the subject does not love, that the subject hates. To deal with this unavowable hatred, a “special agency” of the ego splits off to judge and condemn the loved object, now part of the subject himself. Freud explains: “In this way an object loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification” (Freud 1917: 248). The answer to the question of the subject's loss of self-respect turns on the object: it's the internalized object who is judged, criticized, and condemned, not the subject.

Brown uses Freud's account of melancholia to understand the fears and anxieties preventing the left from revising its anachronistic habits of thought. She highlights the persistence of melancholic attachment to a lost object, a persistence that, in superseding conscious desires to move on, renders “melancholia a structure of desire, rather than a transient response” (Brown 1999: 20). She emphasizes as well the unconscious, “unavowed and unavowable,” nature of melancholic loss. And she notes the shift of the “reproach of the loved object” onto the left subject, a shift that preserves “the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic” (Brown 1999: 21). Recounting some of the many losses on the left — of local and international community, of a moral and political vision capable of sustaining political work, of a historical moment — Brown asks whether there might also be a still unconscious, unavowed loss, namely, of “the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true” (Brown 1999: 22). She suggests that this promise formed the basis for left self-love and fellow feeling. So long as it remains foundational, unavowed and untransformed, it will doom the left to self-destruction.

Freud's study of melancholia enables Brown to bring to light the disavowed attachment underlying the fierce debates over post-structuralism and the status of the subject characteristic of a particular mode of left theory. She asks: “What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that romantic left promise? What do we punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment?” (Ibid.). The answer, she suggests, is that hatred and punishment are symptoms, strikes we wage upon ourselves so as to preserve the guarantees of left analysis itself. Scorn for identity politics and disparagement of discourse analysis, postmodernism, and “trendy literary theory,” is the displaced form of narcissistic attachment to Marxist orthodoxy. It's an attack aimed at an interiorized object, the loved and lost object that promised unity, certainty, clarity, and political relevance.

Brown illuminates a certain fantasy in left desire: left melancholia extracts historical experiences of division, contestation, and betrayal from the Marxist tradition in theory and socialist states in practice. In their place it leaves an invincible, reified, figure of the Master, one that is itself split between its authoritative and its obscene enactments. When leftists, stuck in their failure, blame this failure on post-structuralist theory and identity politics, Brown suggests, they disavow the non-existence of such a Master. Clinging to an impossible, fantastic Marxism that never existed, they protect themselves from confronting the loss of its historical time, the end of the sequence beginning in 1917 or, perhaps, 1789. They shield themselves from the passing away of a time when it made sense to think in terms of the determinism of capital and the primacy of class.

Is Brown right? Having diagnosed left immobility and self-loathing as melancholic, does she correctly identify what was lost and what is retained, what is displaced and what is disavowed? And does her account of melancholia as a structure of desire exhaust the potential of her move to Freud or might additional elements of his analysis also prove helpful for coming to grips with the left and the force of loss?

Benjamin's own account of left-wing melancholy suggests a loss of a different sort than Brown's — the betrayal of revolutionary ideals, of the proletariat. He criticizes Kästner and other new objectivists not only for clinging to a form marked by the depiction of the brutalities of everyday life but for commodifying this form, for packaging up the traces of spiritual goods as commercial content to be sold to the bourgeoisie. As Benjamin argues in “The Author as Producer,” however revolutionary the political tendency associated with the “new objectivity” may appear, “it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer” (1970: 3). Attached to an ideological experience of solidarity, the left melancholic disavows the practical effect of his journalistic activities. What Brown construes as a real loss of socialist ideals for which the left compensates via an obstinate and narcissistic attachment, Benjamin presents as compromise and betrayal, a compromise and betrayal that ideological identification with the proletariat attempts to displace. Brown suggests a left defeated and abandoned in the wake of historical changes. Benjamin compels us to consider a left that gave in, sold out.

Freud's gesture to the melancholic's loss of self-respect points in a similar direction. Describing a woman who “loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife,” Freud observes that she is really accusing her husband of incapacity. Her self-reproaches, some of which are genuine, “are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible” (Freud 1917: 247). These reproaches, Freud writes, “derive from the pros and cons of the conflict of love that has led to the loss of love” (Ibid.). Might not the woman be rightly recognizing her own incapacity to find a capable husband, one capable of sustaining her desire? Might she not be punishing herself for compromising, for making due, for allowing the pros and cons of the conflict of love to constrain her desire? If so, the woman's loss of self-respect is an indication of the guilt she feels at having ceded her desire. To use the terms given to us by Lacan, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire” (Lacan 1997: 321). The woman's identification with her husband is a compromise, the way she sublimates her desire so as to make him the object of it. The ferocity of her super-ego and the unrelenting punishment to which it subjects her indicates that she has given up on the impossibility of desire, desire's own constitutive dissatisfaction, to accommodate herself to everyday life.

Freud notes the delight super-ego takes in torment as well as the fact that the subject enjoys it. He writes:

If the love for the object — a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up — takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject's own self …

(Freud 1917: 250)

His analysis here uses the terminology of the drives set out in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In that essay, Freud says that the drives undergo the following vicissitudes: reversal into their opposite, turning round upon the subject's own self, repression, and sublimation. As Lacan makes clear, drive provides the subject with a way to enjoy. The enjoyment, jouiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Communist Desire
• 2 Uneven Developments and the End to the History of Modernity's Social Democratic Orientation: Madison's Pro-Union Demonstrations
• 3 Imperial Ends
• 4 Of First and Last Men: Contract and Colonial Historicality in Foucault
• 5 A Presence of a Constant End: Contemporary Art and Popular Culture in Japan
• 6 Frank's Motel: Horizontal and Vertical in the Big Other
• 7 Hegel and Plasticity
• 8 Hegel's Last Words: Mourning and Melancholia at the End of the Phenomenology
• 9 “If you could take just two books …”: Jacques Derrida at the Ends of the World with Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe
• 10 What Happened? What Is Going to Happen? An Essay on the Experience of the Event
• 11 History Drift
• Index