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Lenin 2017
Remembering, Repeating,and Working Through
V. I. LENIN
Edited and Introduced
by Slavoj Žižek
First published by Verso 2017
Introduction and Afterword © Slavoj Žižek 2017
The works of V. I. Lenin collected here derive
from the Marxists Internet Archive
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-188-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-189-3 (US EBK)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78663-187-9 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays Ltd
Contents
Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through by Slavoj Žižek
Note on the Texts
To M. F. Sokolov
To G. Myasnikov
New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise
Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain; the Harm of Despondency; the Utility of Trade; Attitude towards the Mensheviks, Etc.
Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B)
Memo Combating Dominant-Nation Chauvinism
Last Testament: Letters to Congress
On Education (Pages from a Diary)
On Cooperation (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)
Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)
How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection
Better Fewer, but Better
To Comrade Stalin
To P.G. Mdivani, F.Y. Makharadze and Others
Afterword: Lenin Navigating in Uncharted Territories by Slavoj Žižek
Notes
Sources
Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through
Remembering and Repeating
The title of Freud’s short text from 1914, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, provides the best formula for the way we should relate – today, 100 years later – to the event called the October Revolution. The three concepts Freud mentions form a dialectical triad: they designate the three phases of the analytical process, and resistance intervenes in every passage from one phase to the next. The first step consists in remembering the repressed past traumatic events, in bringing them out, which can also be done by hypnosis. This phase immediately runs into a deadlock: the content brought out lacks its proper symbolic context and thus remains ineffective; it fails to transform the subject and resistance remains active, limiting the amount of content revealed. The problem with this approach is that it stays focused on the past and ignores the subject’s present constellation which keeps this past alive, symbolically active. Resistance expresses itself in the form of transference: what the subject cannot properly remember, she repeats, transferring the past constellation onto a present (e.g., she treats the analyst as if he were her father). What the subject cannot properly remember, she acts out, reenacts – and when the analyst points this out, her intervention is met with resistance. Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis, and this turn is self-reflexive in a properly Hegelian sense: resistance is a link between object and subject, between past and present, proof that we are not only fixated on the past but that this fixation is an effect of the present deadlock in the subject’s libidinal economy.
With regard to 1917, we also begin by remembering, by recalling, the true history of the October Revolution and, of course, its reversal into Stalinism. The great ethico-political problem of the communist regimes can best be captured under the title ‘founding fathers, founding crimes’. Can a communist regime survive the act of openly confronting its violent past in which millions were imprisoned and killed? If so, in what form and to what degree? The first paradigmatic case of such a confrontation was, of course, Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ report on Stalin’s crimes to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. The first thing that strikes one in this report is the focus on Stalin’s personality as being the key factor in the crimes, and the concomitant lack of any systematic analysis of what made those crimes possible. The second feature is its strenuous effort to keep the Origins clear: not only is the condemnation of Stalin limited to his arrest and killing of high-ranking Party members and military officers in the 1930s (where rehabilitations were very selective: Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc., continued to be non-persons, not to mention Trotsky), ignoring the great famine of the late 1920s; but the report is also presented as announcing the return of the Party to its ‘Leninist roots’, so that Lenin emerges as the pure Origin spoiled or betrayed by Stalin. In his belated but perspicuous analysis of the report, written in 1970, Sartre noted that
it was true that Stalin had ordered massacres, transformed the land of the revolution into a police state; he was truly convinced that the USSR would not reach communism without passing through the socialism of concentration camps. But as one of the witnesses very rightly points out, when the authorities
