of the neighbour. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of ‘theoretical anti-humanism’, allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called ‘human, all too human’, and confronts the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name ‘Auschwitz’ – an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan, at the same time, the ultimate support of ethics.
In philosophical terms, this ‘inhuman’ dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human ‘individuality’ or ‘personality’ (which is why, in today’s popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of a pure subject is a non-human – alien, cyborg – who displays more fidelity to its task, and to dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl’s dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate all humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Les mots et les choses, called the ‘transcendental-empirical doublet’, of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this – a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individual qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one’s life, on being ready to forsake one’s being? It is against the background of this topic of the sovereign acceptance of death that one should reread the rhetorical turn often referred to as the proof of Robespierre’s ‘totalitarian’ manipulation of his audience.14 This turn took place during Robespierre’s speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and some others had been arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn would also come. Robespierre directly indicates the moment is pivotal: ‘Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth.’ He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in the room:
One wants [on veut] to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised. […] One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees. […] One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed […]15
The opposition is here between the impersonal ‘one’ (the instigators of fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person ‘you [vous]’ to first-person ‘us’ (Robespierre gallantly includes himself into the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer that ‘one wants to make you/us fear’, but that ‘one fears’, which means that the enemy stirring up fear is no longer outside ‘you/us’, members of the Assembly, it is here, among us, among ‘you’ addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true master stroke, assumes full subjectivization – waiting a little bit for the ominous effect of his words to take place, he then continues in the first-person singular: ‘I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.’16
What can be more ‘totalitarian’ than this closed loop of ‘your very fear of being guilty makes you guilty’ – a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself? One should nonetheless move beyond the quick dismissal of Robespierre’s rhetorical strategy as the strategy of ‘terrorist culpabilization’, and to discern its moment of truth: there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself – exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing does not really concern me – is the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I ‘did not do anything against the revolution’, this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience ‘revolution’ as an external force threatening me.
But what goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of his public – how can he himself be sure that he will not be the next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the ‘I’ outside ‘we’ – after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, his proximity to Danton will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he has unleashed will not swallow him up? It is here that his position takes on a sublime greatness – he fully assumes the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the people’s Will; it is that he, Robespierre, is not afraid to die – his eventual death will be a mere accident which counts for nothing:
What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the homeland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.17
Consequently, insofar as the shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master (up to this point, we follow Lefort’s analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre’s first-person singular (‘I’) is: I am not afraid to die. What authorizes him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other; in other words, he does not claim that he has direct access to the people’s Will which speaks through him. This is how Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, described the proper attitude of a warrior:
every day without fail one should consider oneself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.18
This is why, according to Hillis Lory, many Japanese soldiers during World War II performed their own funerals before leaving for the battlefield:
Many of the soldiers in the present war are so determined to die on the battlefield that they conduct their own public funerals before leaving for the front. This holds no element of the ridiculous to the Japanese. Rather, it is admired as the spirit of the true samurai who enters the battle with no thought of return.19
This pre-emptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living of course turns the soldier into a properly sublime figure. Instead of dismissing this feature as part of Fascist militarism, one should assert it as also constitutive of a radical revolutionary position: there is a straight line that runs from this acceptance of one’s own disappearance to Mao Zedong’s reaction to the atomic bomb threat
