Would I Die For You?

There is something deeply curious and unsatisfying about discussions of politics that exclude from the outset the possibility of violence. It's as if they find it unthinkable that politics could be a matter of life and death, that political stakes are those worth dying for and killing for. To my mind, such discussions are premised on a prior exclusion of conviction. Any idea worth "going all the way" for, is foreclosed as irrational or juvenile.

What is particularly perplexing is how this exclusion can be thought together with a notion of seriousness: it's as if anything 'serious' is not worth dying for, not worth fighting for, not worth killing for. It's as if so-called seriousness were not itself the result of life and death struggles and did not itself rely on continued practices of murder and brutalization. In this way, the violence that sustains so-called seriousness is occluded, hidden. And, the possibility of political conviction is dismissed as foolish or unthoughtful.

I disagree. I admire the commitment of revolutionaries who have fought against kings, tsars, colonialists, segregation, apartheid, and the WTO. I admire those who struggle to organize workers and factories. To me, their willingness to put their lives on the line demonstrates a great deal of seriousness. And, I think it is an important corrective to the smug and cynical currents of post-political acquiescence to pose this issue, to raise the challenge: what is worth dying for?

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

If you hope to achieve your goals and to enjoy the results to any extent, the more pertinent question would be what is worth killing for.

The objection to Lenin et al. from "the liberals" is not that he "put his life on the line," but that his political actions led to the deaths of a lot of people (as opposed to the prefered liberal approach to mass death, which is to "let it happen" as opposed to directly choosing it). MLK and all those people put their lives on the line and are widely admired in the mainstream -- the problem comes in when you start killing people.

[Jodi]

So, the objection is that he was not a martyr, that he pursed organized political action, and that he was willing to acknowledge that killing was an element of achieving his political goals.

"Letting happen" seems to me to be a complete ethical failure, a using of death without taking responsibility for it; so, if people die because of the absence of health care, food, or safety in work, that is somehow ethically ok? To my mind, this is not only unethical but a matter to be fought against politically.

And, as you know, Zizek doesn't tell us: you should die for X; that would get us off the hook.

I'm puzzled by your use of 'enjoy' in the first sentence.

[Adam Kotsko]

I mean that political hopes of the kind you are discussing are hopes for this world, and therefore, you want to be alive to see what happens.

You put the killing and dying for together, but you ended really strongly on "dying for," which seems to veer from the central point -- everyone agrees that it's admirable to die for a cause, but the question is, how do you decide to force someone else (who may not care one way or another and who may even be sympathetic) to die for your cause while you live on?

"Letting it happen" is of course the central way in which our present system makes it impossible to assume responsibility for the death of another -- you might check out Matt's comments on Dominic's thread on the Zizek article, which opens up a decidedly non-Zizekian viewpoint on Levinas.

[mig]

Ever been to "Redrum Burger" in Davis California? They boast burgers that are "so good, they're to die for."

;-)

http://www.daviswiki.org/Redrum_Burger

[Adam Kotsko]

If the "War on Terror" is a matter of "the American way of life" itself, is not Bush asking our soldiers to die for a hamburger?

[Jodi]

Yes, I saw Matt's comment.

I don't think that hopes for this world and wanting to see what will happen are the same. Primarily, because they reduce the hopes to embodied persistence or use something like bare life as a trump. There are tons of examples of folks being willing to take risks or practice their fidelity to a truth event knowing full well they won't or might not live to see what will happen. Moses, for example, or, many women as they go through pregnancy and childbirth.

Well, there are lots of ways to force people to die for one's cause (draft them, burn their villages, promise them lots of goodies, etc). I think that Zizek's point (and Lenin's) is not that of forcing people to die--it's more a question of the conviction that leads to killing.

[mig]

The day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech, in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, known as "I've been to the mountaintop," in which he calls for the development of "a kind of dangerous unselfishness," according to which the logic of fear epitomized by the levite in the story of the good Samaritan (i.e. "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?") is reversed, and one comes to ask, "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" He closes saying, " Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

http://www.afscme.org/about/kingspch.htm

Perhaps the question of what is worth dying for is secondary to the question of what is not worth living with, and the corresponding reckless disregard for one's own person in the interests of something other, whether a person, an idea, the will of God etc.

[Jodi]

Thanks for the passage, mig. Really beautiful and appropriate.

On not worth living with: wow, that is an amazingly hard question. It's particularly hard if posed as a matter of the individual and makes me think of survivors' guilt--are they guilty because they confront the fact that they answered the question WRONG?

if I think of the question collectively, it makes me think of the challenges of political organizing and collective responsibility where the question is both a matter of confronting the truth of our mode of existence (the remnants, exclusions) and whether we can discard comfortable aspects of our lives when we acknowledge, no, these practices, exclusions ARE NOT worth our comfort, our way of life.

[Adam Kotsko]

Moses does bitch a lot about how he is excluded from the Promised Land. But now that you mention Moses, it might be interesting to read Lenin in conjunction with Moses instead of (or in addition to) Paul.

[Jodi]

I agree! Certainly one can view him as a revolutionary, bringing a new people into being etc.

[Adam Kotsko]

At long last -- a dissertation topic!

[Jodi]

I presume you are joking--but it would be a terrific topic. Another good topic (though perhaps only for an essay) would be a systematic comparison of Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek on Paul.

[Rodkong]

do narco-terrorists like the FARC (and their right-wing counterpart the AUC) count as noble revolutionaries?

[Alain]

Jodi, Adam, Mig - great discussion. The topic of Moses of course raises Freud's speculation that Freud was actually murdered in a reenactment of the horde of brothers murdering the primal father. It would be interesting to look at this as a sort of insurrection or even possibly a counter revolution.

[Alain]

Oops! Freudian slip - Up above I meant to say Freud speculated that Moses was murdered, of course. ha, ha.

[Jodi]

Alain, I love your slip--and your provision of another chapter or two for Adam's dissertation.

Rodkong: why not? (although, actually, I don't know much of anything at all about the groups you mention; on one hand, I think the war on drugs is a vehicle for all sorts of awful things; on the other, revolutionary situations are unstable, they can go in different directions, involve different actors, etc and thus need to be assessed on their own terms).

[mig]

Re: Jodi's example: Moses' 'fidelity to a truth event he would not live to see.'

I remember a lesson, from way back in Sunday school, which gave a different flavor to Moses' situation: Moses' punishment for his 'lack of fidelity' (i.e. striking the stone with his staff twice at Meribah, rather than once as God commanded, or something like that) was that he would never see the promised land. It would be interesting to integrate here the Freudian thesis brought up by Alain. The Israelites carry out God's punishment for Moses' lack of faith in order to bring about the truth event. Moses as condition of (im)possibility of the event.

But perhaps this confuses fidelity to the event and faith in God.

[Adam Kotsko]

There's a course at CTS next semester on the "Paul and Philosophy" movement -- and John Milbank, co-editor of Theology and the Political, is reportedly offering a similar course at Nottingham in the Fall (when Anthony goes). I know my advisor, Ted Jennings, has done an essay comparing Badiou et al., but I don't know if it's out yet -- I think he had to rewrite it once the Agamben came out in English (previously he had pieced together Agamben's take on Paul from various other references).

I'm still undecided about taking the course, because much of it seems redundant -- but there's also a lot of Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, etc., that I haven't done and I need to get more of those guys too. (The alternative is a course on theology of the cross.)

[Jodi]

Mig--your suggestion is great; I think the gap between Moses' faith and truth event is important (it hadn't occured to me in the least; maybe I should go back to Sunday School?)

Adam--these courses then will likely generate all sorts of papers on the topic.

[jholbo]

Jodi writes: "There is something deeply curious and unsatisfying about discussions of politics that exclude from the outset the possibility of violence." I understand the sentiment - which seems agreeable, but rather trivial - but am puzzled by the link to the post. What is the connection between Adam's post and this exclusion you find curious? Are you actually implying that Adam is making this exclusion? If so, why?

[Charles R]

You know, I have been planning on doing my dissertation on a 'systematic comparison of Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek on Paul', but unfortunately I'm not in the best of philosophy departments to do that... For me, there seems to be more than enough for an essay, in the sense that I think it's worth exploring why Paul, of all people, appeals to contemporary Left philosophers, of all people, and if there is a larger political stake in promoting the formal structure of religious missionaries as a model of change.

[Jodi]

John--I meant to link my post to the discussion, not the post per se.

Charles R.: I see a couple of 'larger structure' matters, at least on Zizek's side. One is a critical strategy against Derrida/Levinas. Another is a strategy against right wing religious fundamentalists (not that they would read his work but that those on the left who do would realize that Christianity can be used quite radically).

[pebird]

Yes, being a Jacksonian Democrat is morally icky, noting how complicit Jackson was with mass-murder.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159228681X/ref=pd_bxgy_text_b/104-4012788-1378364?%5Fencoding=UTF8

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
I may be splitting hairs here, but it strikes me that there's a difference between "what would you die for?" and "what would you risk dying for?". I lost a job for organizing a union once, I knew going into it that there was a good chance it would happen, even expected it (we toasted our impending unemployment over drinks at lunch the day we went public), but that attempt was predicated on a view that the shop at the time was unbearable as it was. And it was still the case that we thought we could win - otherwise we'd have all just resigned and stolen a bunch of office supplies. Similarly, someone who joins a guerilla group likely knows they may die, may expect to die (not to compare my union activity to this stuff, it's not nearly that momentous), but that's not the same as someone who lights their body on fire as protest against a war, or otherwise makes a decision not to risk death but to actually die for something.
take care,
Nate

[Adam Kotsko]

Charles, If you want to do that dissertation, you might want to rethink the "missionary" thing.

[Jodi]

Nate--I agree that these are not the same. Setting out how they are different, though, is another matter. I have some hesitations about acts that are destructive primarily for the sake of spectacle as well as acts that have a kind of perversity to them, a kind of self instrumentalization where one is doing this really for the sake of God, eternal reward, historical recognition. I don't think all such acts of self immolation are like this, though. Much depends on what happens afterwards, how they are politicized. There is something admirable about hunger strikes, say, particularly those that are well organized and expose the violence being done to those who are striking.

[Charles R]

Adam, my thought is that Paul identified himself as a missionary, even if this missionary activity ultimately had as its motivating kernel a misdirection towards his own people's jealousy. Paul was a figure who straddled different worlds, and thought the message he preached was applicable to both—on this, we can agree, right? In this sense, being a missionary means looking to turn what was a singular thing into an address to/for a plurality. To become all things to all men, to please all men in all things—perhaps Paul, here, is where he appeals to people.

But what did you have in mind?

[Adam Roberts]

This is all very interesting. It surprised me, a little, that no-one on the *Valve* thread picked what I regarded as one of the implicit holes in my argument. Which is, I'm clearly happy to slap Lenin, Stalin (and Hitler). But a residual attachment to my youthful fourth internationalism leaves Trotsky out of the picture. Was he any better? How many deaths was he responsible for, riding around Russia in that train of his during the civil war? I wonder if I leave Trotsky out because *his* deaths (as it were) were mostly wartime deaths, and that, you know, people get, like, killed in wartime. But this is the least defensible ideologicaly strategy of all. Simply calling your campaign of mass-murder a 'war' (against International Jewry, or Counter-Revolution, or, oh now let me see, let's say against Terror) doesn't let you off the hook. Moreover Trotksy was directly responsible for introducting 'political commissars' into army units, and for the charming policy of shooting his own troops for cowardice, backsliding, retreating under almost any conditions, not wanting to go to battle without a gun, 'looking at me in a funny way' and so on.

[Jodi]

This is a really reflective comment, Adam.

Here's what it makes me think (or, here's how it accords with what I think), although I will put this too crudely: ultimately, the problem is not with killing. It's whether one agrees or disagrees with what motivated the killing, with the cause to which it is connected. For me, the 'accepted' 'permissible' violences of capitalism, of economic greed, are like 'unpardonable sins'--that deaths in horrible jobs, deaths brought about by starvation and pollution, deaths occassioned by failures to provide adequate medical care, deaths brought about corporate greed (Coca Cola, Exxon, etc) are somehow within the range of accepted violence is the worst obscenity I can imagine.

There is something irresponsible in excluding, say, the genocide against native Americans and the deaths in wartime when trying to defend the US.

There is something problematic in a law of numbers that simply counts bodies--what about the uncounted? How do we know what to count? Who is doing this counting? What is the time frame in which the count proceeds?

This is why I find Zizek's discussion of Lenin and Stalin so helpful. From the official terror of Lenin we have the hidden, perverse terror of Stalin (the worst of which occurs after the Soviet Constitution is ratified). And, under Stalin this killing becomes a perverse vehicle for enjoyment, service to the big Other of the Party (which starts to eat and destroy itself) rather than an element of the revolutionary transformation of a society.

[Adam Roberts]

Yes, it gets a bit crude, doesn't it, trying to separate 'real' war from 'mock' war. In Trotsky's defence, you could say that his war was undeniably a real one, not started by the Red Russians, but forced upon him by actual White counter-revolutionaries and fomented by a cabal of Western nations explicitly to try and bring down the Bolshevik government. There was a real self-defence agenda there. If we're not going to declare ourselves as thorough-going buddhist-pacifists we probably have to know which wars to count (eg, Spanish Civil War, yes: American War On Terror, no).

[Nate]

Hi all,
Adam K and Charles R, you probably know this stuff much better than I do, but I found a remark in Badiou's Paul book today that reminded me of your remarks on Moses - p56, re: Lacanian ethics of the analyst, "at the end of the treatment, the latter must (...) occupy the position of refuse so that the analysand may endure some encounter with his or her real. By virtue of which, as Lacan notes, the analyst comes very close to saintliness." Reminded me of Moses, though I suppose thinking of it now Moses was forced to remain outside, wasn't he?

Jodi and Adam R, I'm not all that up on Soviet history, but re: Trotksy, I once I happened to read both Michael Perelman's "Invention of Capitalism" (a close read of early political economists' stances on enclosure and primitive accumulation) and Daniel Cohn-Bendit's "Obsolete Communism, A Leftwing Alternative". I was struck by how much there was in common between Perelman's quotes from Steuart and Cohn-Bendit's quotes from Trotsky regarding recalcitrant peasants. The remarks boil down to, in my opinion, kill them until they work as told (until primitive accumulation is successful). So I don't think it's just a matter of self-defense, and I don't think the Bolsheviks were much in the way of revolutionary transformation of society (unless one means revolutionizing the forms of capitalist production, which I'm pretty sure you don't). You two can probably out-historical reference me on this, of course, so I can't back this up further for now.
Best wishes,
Nate