When the party commits suicide

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 238, 1999, Pages 26-46

  Žižek, Slavoj ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 22844454154     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-39, New Haven and London, Yale University Press 1999.
2. For the historical data, we rely here on the otherwise standard Western liberal journalist report by Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over. Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, New York 1998.
3. Quoted from Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich. A Life Remembered, Princeton 1995, p. 134.
4. This logic was nicely formulated by Ayn Rand apropos of the anti-trust laws: everything a capitalist does becomes a crime - if his prices are higher than the others' prices, he exploits his monopolistic position; if they are lower, he practices unfair competition; if they are the same, it is collusion and conspiracy to undermine true competition. And is this not similar to the time of the patient's arrival in psychoanalysis? If the patient is late, it is a hysterical provocation; if he is early, it is an obsessional compulsion; if he arrives exactly on time, it is a perverse ritual.
5. The Road to Terror, p. 370. The same uncanny laughter also appeared at other places: 'Bukharin: Whatever they are testifying against me is not true. [Laughter, noise in the room.] Why are you laughing? There is nothing funny in all this.' (p. 394).
6. Franz Kafka, The Trial, Harmondsworth 1985, p. 48.
7. The Road to Terror, p. 315-6.
8. The Road to Terror, Ibid.,p. 322.
9. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 321.
10. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 399.
11. The Road to Terror, Ibid., pp. 404-5.
12. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 556.
13. The Road to Terror, Ibid., pp. 558-60.
14. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 558.
15. The Road to Terror, Ibid., pp. 387-8.
16. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 100.
17. Lenin's slanderers like to evoke this famous story as proof of his cold self-control and cruelty - however, even on its own terms, is this incident effectively an argument against Lenin? Does it not rather bear witness to an extreme sensitivity to music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue the political struggle? Who of today's cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a sensitivity? Is not Lenin here the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with extreme cruelty in taking political decisions - suffice it to recall Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who, after a hard day's work, always found time to play Beethoven's string quartets with his colleagues - is not the proof of Lenin's humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic unity of high culture and political atrocities, he was still extremely sensitive to the irreducible antagonism between art and the power struggle?
18. For a more detailed account of this key feature of Kant's ethics, see Chapter 11 of Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, Verso, London 1996.
19. See Alenka Zupančič, The Ethics of the Real, Verso, London 1999.
20. Let us also not forget that, in the weeks before October Revolution, when the debate was raging between Bolsheviks, Stalin did take sides against Lenin's proposal for an immediate Bolshevik take-over, arguing, along the Menshevik lines, that the situation was not yet 'ripe', and that, instead of such dangerous 'adventurism', one should endorse a broad coalition of all anti-Tsarist forces.
21. See Alain Badiou, L'Être et l'Événement, Paris 1988.
22. The Road to Terror, p. 480.
23. The Road to Terror, Ibid., p. 481.
24. See Sigmund Freud, 'Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia', in The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth 1979, p. 211.
25. The Road to Terror, p. 14.
26. The Road to Terror, Ibid.p. 14.
27. See Wilson, Shostakovich, pp. 124-5.
28. 'Foreword' by Elie Wiesel, in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge, MA 1989, p. xi.
29. The Road to Terror, p. 586.