the truth of consciousness. Not only would all organizational matters then be displaced onto moral issues, which could be framed in terms of honesty and betrayal, or good and evil, but, what is more, this could even lead to a position for which the knowledge of our finitude—that is, our essential nature as “erroneous beings”—would always be morally superior and theoretically more radical that any given action, which in comparison cannot but appear “dogmatic,” “totalitarian,” “voluntaristic,” and so on. In full melodramatic mode, we would end up with the attitude of the “beautiful soul” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being and put its trust in the absolute difference [between thought and being]. The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called “beautiful soul,” its light dies away with it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.49
This road toward the transparent beauty of good unhappy conscience based on the wisdom of our essential finitude, now openly post-communist if not actually anticommunist, may very well have been prefigured, unbeknownst to the author, in the double proposal of a humanist ethics of the party and a metaphysics of irreducible error. The history of the 1970s and 1980s, with its peremptory declarations of the “end of ideology,” the “death” of Marxism, or the “ethical turn,” would end up confirming the extent to which the defense of liberal democracy, with its absolute rejection of communism-as-totalitarianism, also adopted some of the features of this same “beautiful soul” who at least knows that its inactivity protects it from the Evil incurred by anyone intent upon imposing, here and now, some Good.
Indeed, in the decades following the publication of Los errores, the roles of ethics and politics seem to have been inverted. When Revueltas, through Jacobo and Ismael, speaks of an “ethics of the party” or an “ethics of Marxism,” ethics is still subordinated to politics, keeping the latter in check. Ethics, in other words, would provide the political process with certain practical maxims for maintaining its consistency. At the same time, there seems to be a suggestion that there exists no ethics outside the concrete thought-practice of a party, league, or group: “There is no ethics in general. There are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.”50 Such ethical considerations, however, can also become detached from the political processes in question, even to the point of subduing all politics as such. Here, then, we enter the terrain of a moralization of politics that no longer depends specifically on any militant procedure but that instead begins to undermine the sheer possibility of such forms of practice in general. This is because the new categorical imperative and the dominant moral judgment that it enables, whether of respect for the other or of compassion for the victim, teach us that the supreme value of our time consists in avoiding at all costs the production of more sacrificial victims. “Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances,” writes Badiou: “Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as ‘utopian’ turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil.”51
Revueltas, with his tireless critique of communist dogmatism, may have opened the door for those moralizing discourses that, even in left-wing variations, can barely dissimulate their strong undercurrent of vulgar anticommunism. The challenge he bequeaths to us thus consists in thinking the crimes of communism without converting the inevitability of error into the melodramatic premise for a complex of moral superiority that would deny that anything good might still emerge from Marxism—let alone from Hegelian Marxism.
Hegel’s finitude and its role in the evaluation of Stalinist dogmatism should be revisited from the point of view of this historical outcome. The premise of the irreducibility of error, of the insuperable nature of alienation, and of the necessary inadequacy between concept and being, indeed runs through the entire finitist tradition of reading Hegel. Thus, central to Kojève’s claim that Hegel is the first to attempt a complete atheist and finitist philosophy, we already find the idea that, on the phenomenological and anthropological level, such an attempt requires a view of “man” as an essentially erroneous being for whom being and thinking are never quite adequate to one another, or at least not yet:
Being which is (in the Present) can be “conceived of” or revealed by the Concept. Or, more exactly, Being is conceived of at “each instant” of its being. Or else, again: Being is not only Being, but also Truth—that is, the adequation of the Concept and Being. This is simple. The whole question is to know where error comes from. In order that error be possible, the Concept must be detached from Being and opposed to it. It is Man who does this; and more exactly, Man is the Concept detached from Being; or better yet, he is the act of detaching the Concept from Being. He does so by negating-Negativity—that is, by Action, and it is here that the Future (the Pro-ject) enters in. This detaching is equivalent to an inadequation (the profound meaning of errare humanum est), and it is necessary to negate or act again in order to achieve conformity between the Concept (=Project) and Being (made to conform to the Project by Action). For Man, therefore, the adequation of Being and the Concept is a process (Bewegung), and the truth (Wahrheit) is a result. And only this “result of the process” merits the name of (discursive) “truth,” for only this process is Logos or Discourse.52
The ability of human errors to survive, in fact, is what distinguishes man or the human being from nature, according to Kojève:
If Nature happens to commit an error (the malformation of an animal, for example), it eliminates it immediately (the animal dies, or at least does not propagate). Only the errors committed by man endure indefinitely and are propagated at a distance, thanks to language. And man could be defined as an error that is preserved in existence, an error that endures within reality. Now, since error means disagreement with the real; since what is other than what is, is false, one can also say that the man who errs is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, or an “ideal” that is present in the real.53
What is more, it is only thanks to, and not in spite of, our essentially human tendency to err that truth is possible. Otherwise, without the possibility of human error, being would be mute facticity. As Kojève adds: “Therefore, there is really a truth only where there has been an error. But error exists really only in the form of human discourse.”54 Or, to use Hegel’s own words from the Encyclopedia, in one of Adorno’s favorite formulations: “Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.”55
For Kojève, unlike what is the case for Adorno or Revueltas, true wisdom famously will bring about the perfect adequation of being and concept in the figure of the sage at the end of history. This also means that finitude, conscious of itself, passes over into the infinite; any additional act or action, then, is superfluous. By contrast, in the absence of any ultimate reconciliation, it would appear that philosophy or theory survives only in and through error, through the gap between the concept and its object or between representation and the real, a gap that is thus not merely temporary or accidental but constitutive of the possibility of knowing anything at all. And yet, if it is indeed the case that finitude today constitutes a new dogma that—rather than rendering the act superfluous—blocks
