Book: In Defense of Lost Causes
Quotes of Book: In Defense of Lost Causes
Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities {"exploitation"} are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist-this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally {in principle}, the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling {his labor-power}. Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct "terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality {equal salaries, equal access to health services…}, which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality {different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged}. In short, the axiom of equality" means either not enough {it remains the abstract form of actual inequality} or too much {enforce "terroristic" equality}- it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form. book-quotefreedomterrorequalityIf the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the "mystified" form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. {If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other's gifts - recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year's present once again … } …the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person's gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the "pre-economy of the economy," its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely. book-quotefreedomgenerositygiftsBut what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This "absurdity" is simply the price of freedom-freedom is not free, as they put it in the film {300}. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the opposite of Athenian "liberal democracy," it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one's choice puts at stake one's very existence-one does it because one simply "cannot do otherwise." When one's country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not "you are free to choose," but: "Can't you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity? book-quotefreedomBetter to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap {non-violence appears as the highest violence}, likewise activity and inactivity {the most radical thing is to do nothing}. book-quote
