‘divine violence’ should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will’, but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, not covered by the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral’, it does not give the agent the licence to kill mindlessly with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is justice, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which the ‘people’ (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price – the Judgement Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering – or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:
What do you want, you who would like truth to be powerless on the lips of representatives of the French people? Truth undoubtedly has its power, it has its anger, its own despotism; it has touching accents and terrible ones, that resound with force in pure hearts as in guilty consciences, and that untruth can no more imitate than Salome can imitate the thunderbolts of heaven; but accuse nature of it, accuse the people, which wants it and loves it.11
And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what they really want is a ‘revolution without a revolution’: they want a revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to pre-existing norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the ‘divine’ dimension and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals:
Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? What is this spirit of persecution that has come to revise, so to speak, the one that broke our chains? But what sure judgement can one make of the effects that can follow these great commotions? Who can mark, after the event, the exact point at which the waves of popular insurrection should break? At that price, what people could ever have shaken off the yoke of despotism? For while it is true that a great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous movement, and that tyranny can only be hit by the portion of citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever dare to attack it if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold them responsible for the duration or violence of the political torment that had saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by tacit proxy for the whole of society. The French, friends of liberty, meeting in Paris last August, acted in that role, in the name of all the departments. They should either be approved or repudiated entirely. To make them criminally responsible for a few apparent or real disorders, inseparable from so great a shock, would be to punish them for their devotion.12
This authentic revolutionary logic can be discerned already at the level of rhetorical figures, where Robespierre likes to turn around the standard procedure of first evoking an apparently ‘realist’ position and then displaying its illusory nature: he often starts with presenting a position or a description of a situation as absurd exaggeration, fiction, and then goes on to remind us that what, in a first approach, cannot but appear as a fiction, is actually truth itself: ‘But what am I saying? What I have just presented as an absurd hypothesis is actually a very certain reality.’ It is this radical revolutionary stance which also enables Robespierre to denounce the ‘humanitarian’ concern with victims of the revolutionary ‘divine violence’:
A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.13
The critical analysis and the acceptance of the historical legacy of the Jacobins overlap in the real question that should be discussed: does the (often deplorable) actuality of the revolutionary terror compel us to reject the very idea of Terror, or is there a way to repeat it in today’s different historical constellation, to redeem its virtual content from its actualization? It can and should be done, and the most concise formula of repeating the event designated by the name ‘Robespierre’ is: to pass from (Robespierre’s) humanist terror to anti-humanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.
In his Le siècle, Alain Badiou argues that the shift from ‘humanism and terror’ to ‘humanism or terror’ that occurred towards the end of the twentieth century was a sign of political regression. In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defence of Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as the notion of ‘moral luck’: the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that emerges from it proves to be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces and with or: either humanism or terror … More precisely, there are four variations on this motif: humanism and terror, humanism or terror, each either in a ‘positive’ or in a ‘negative’ sense. ‘Humanism and terror’ in a positive sense is what Merleau-Ponty elaborated, it sustains Stalinism (the forceful – ‘terrorist’ – engendering of the New Man), and is already clearly discernible in the French Revolution, in the guise of Robespierre’s conjunction of virtue and terror. This conjunction can be negated in two ways. It can involve the choice ‘humanism or terror,’ i.e., the liberal-humanist project in all its versions, from dissident anti-Stalinist humanism up to today’s neo-Habermassians (Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut in France, for example) and other defenders of human rights against (totalitarian, fundamentalist) terror. Or it can retain the conjunction ‘humanism and terror,’ but in a negative mode: all those philosophical and ideological orientations, from Heidegger and conservative Christians to partisans of Oriental spirituality and deep ecology, who perceive terror as the truth – the ultimate consequence – of the humanist project itself, of its hubris.
There is, however, a fourth variation, usually left aside: the choice ‘humanism or terror’, but with terror, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical position difficult to sustain, but, perhaps, our only hope: it does not amount to the obscene madness of openly pursuing a ‘terrorist and inhuman politics’, but something much more difficult to think through. In today’s ‘post-deconstructionist’ thought (if one risks this ridiculous designation which cannot but sound like its own parody), the term ‘inhuman’ has gained new weight, especially in the work of Agamben and Badiou. The best way to approach it is via Freud’s reluctance to endorse the injunction ‘Love thy neighbour!’ – the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbour – for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbour as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas thereby obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbour, a monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbour the term Thing [das Ding], used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbour is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radically ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the ‘living dead’ in the concentration camps. At a different level, the same goes for Stalinist Communism. In the standard Stalinist narrative, even the concentration camps were a site of the fight against Fascism where imprisoned Communists were organizing networks of heroic resistance – in such a universe, of course, there is no place for the limit-experience of the Muselmann, of the living dead deprived of the capacity of human engagement – no wonder that Stalinist Communists were so eager to ‘normalize’ the camps into just another site of the anti-Fascist struggle, dismissing the Muselmänner as simply those who were to weak to endure the struggle.
