ROBESPIERRE & CO.
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway's most recent book is The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in frontpage.com
and Pajamas
Media.
The
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published in France as a
neo-radical philosopher and glittering of late in the constellation
of travelling professors on the American university circuit,
has announced that “notre tâche aujourd’hui
est de réinventer une terreur émancipatrice”
(“our task today is to reinvent a liberating terror”),
igniting as well as stemming from “la violence populaire”
(“the violence of the people”). Robespierre is back,
decked out in gown and mortarboard.
For Zizek, as Adam Hirsch points out in The New Republic (December
3, 2008), the WTC nineteen who incinerated 3000 people were
actually victims of global capitalism, and therefore members
in good standing of the international Left and heroes of our
time. Thus, judging from Zizek’s recent statements and
especially from his introduction to his latest sortie, Robespierre:
entre virtu et terreur, written, by his rather intermittent
lights, to further the cause of liberty, equality and fraternity,
his fascination with Robespierre should come as no surprise.
Indeed, the “peace-loving” Left, which sees itself
as the representative of the hidden will of the people and the
herald of an equitable future for all, clearly has a powerful
Robespierrean element in its make-up. As German philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk, Zizek’s sane antithesis, explains in
Terror from the Air, “In the cultural domain ‘revolution’
is a code word for ‘legitimate’ violence.”
Left revolutionary culture also features a strong Surrealist
component. Adjusting for politics, what Sloterdijk goes on to
say in his book about Surrealism’s leading exponent, Salvador
Dali, could be applied equally well to Zizek and his neo-Robespierrean
kind: “an imperious amateur, given over to the illusion
of using an exacting technical device for the expression of
metaphysical kitsch.”
For Zizek and his followers, the “exacting technical device”
is a philosophical discourse with a distinct Marxist slant and
the “metaphysical kitsch” it produces is the dream
of a new world built upon the detritus of the old. In order
to achieve this aim, anything goes, no matter how absurd, vindictive
or discriminatory. The hybris of this incendiary project is
evident in the overheated rhetoric of another trendy and pretentious
book, Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s jargon-clotted,
academic bestseller, Empire, which could just as well have been
written by Zizek.
“The mythology of the languages of the multitude,”
the duo write, “interprets the telos of the earthly city,
torn away by the power of its own destiny from any belonging
or subjection to a city of God, which has lost all honor and
legitimacy.” Once again we find the acolytes of the Left
worshipping at the shrine of a secular religion, as did the
historical Robespierre, determined to build the shining City
of Man regardless of the suffering of men. Of course, the transformative
violence all these authors promote has been tried before, not
only in the French revolutionary period, but in the social gulag
of the Communist urbs proletariorum, leading to the misery,
disempowerment and impoverishment of hundreds of millions.
The revolution of sensibility which the Left is advancing relies
on the various means of repression available to it, from the
censorship of the tongue to hiring restrictions in the University
to the “black mythology” of mediatric propaganda
to violence in the name of “the people.” This is
why the Left is unwilling to oppose the modus operandi of global
terror as a strategy of warfare—it is partial to its own
form of the terreur émancipatrice in the culture wars,
which it considers legitimate. Terror, however, is terror, whatever
flavour or variety it assumes.
The modern Western university, as a central domain source for
the theory of emancipatory terror, is a signal case in point
and one that is worth examing in some detail. For it is there,
behind its hallowed portals, that the greatest harm is done.
In effect, the modern university has become a recruitment center
for the left-wing shock troops of the future. Uncle Noam wants
you! Intimidation through the abuse of authority and an atmosphere
of threat or violence is gradually becoming the norm in the
conduct of parietal life. When indoctrination fails, then intimidating,
failing or assaulting university students who ask inconvenient
questions or espouse unpopular positions becomes just another
strand in the beaupers of the Left. And as we know, conservative
speakers must often be accompanied by bodyguards when they address
campus audiences.
The hypocrisy is almost beyond belief. Doing all they can to
promote the virtues of “diversity,” “freedom”
and “multiple narratives,” the professional nihilists
who populate the Robespierrean Academy, like their collaborators
in the media and the political and administrative classes, are,
in fact, perpetuating a closed-shop ideology. The concept of
“difference” they advocate does not extend to those
who may be in disagreement with them. As Bernard Chapin, author
of Escape from Gangsta Island: A School's Progressive Decline,
writes, “the leftist bon mot “respect diversity”
is but a twisted joke. The radical’s concept of diversity
is limited to encountering someone of a different sex or hue
who feels exactly the same way about politics as they do”
(Pajamas Media, June 6, 2009).
From the Robespierrean perspective, the enemy is not fanatical
Islam, the practitioners of stealth jihad or the ironbound autocracies
of Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela, but conservative
thinkers who have warned against the enfeeblement of the national
will, the politicizing of the University and the dilution of
the traditional curriculum. The minions of the Left take great
pride in the aggressive means they deploy to silence those whom
they are unwilling to engage in debate.
The sudor of violence, both implicit and explicit, that swelters
in our universities is not a sign of agonistic courage, but
the very opposite, an expression of weakness, fear, ignorance
and abject cowardice. The reference point adopted by our liberal-left
professors and administrators and their impressionable student
clientele remains perpetually outside any current reality, so
that what may look like political dynamism is only a misplaced
and imprudent politics with largely destructive effects on actual
events.
It is, in the last analysis, merely a kind of political Surrealism
that strives to create a new and fanciful consensus by disrupting
conventional wisdoms, regardless of the casualties it inflicts
on the way to its destination. Hence its affinity for “legitimate”
violence and “revolutionary” upheaval. One part
Lenin, one part Dali, our soapbox Robespierres stand before
us, accoutered in all their bluster and perniciousness.
The efforts of our contemporary Robespierres and Robespierrettes
are directed toward finding ways of reinterpreting reality in
order to suit what they believe to be their interests and to
conform to their desires. But the adroit evasion of pivotal
questions, the practice of intimidation and the shutting down
of an informed conversation, coupled with a studied obliviousness
to how the world actually works, will one day exact its price.
And the price will be an exorbitant one. But there is one consolation.
Judging from historical precedent, whatever form the instrument
may take, whether macabre or remedial, the Zizeks of the Left
will also meet the waiting guillotine.
