its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the US atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.20
There evidently is an ‘inhuman madness’ in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of the planet Earth ‘would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole’ not a rather poor solace for the extinguished humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure transcendental subject unaffected by this catastrophe – a subject which, although non-existing in reality, is operative as a virtual point of reference. Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of one’s immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this indifference towards what Benjamin called ‘bare life’: ‘I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you.’21 Che Guevara approached the same line of thought when, in the midst of the unbearable tension of the Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war which would involve (at least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people – he praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its own disappearance.
Another ‘inhuman’ dimension of the couple Virtue–Terror promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. – and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the metarules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (as in the case of potlatch). Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a ‘habit’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no – but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit ‘no’ effectively functions as the implicit injunction ‘do it, but in a discreet way!’. Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:
Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervours of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have dared aspire.22
To cast off the yoke of habit means: if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:
African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North. […] John Brown wasn’t like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately. He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn’t make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did.23
For this reason, John Brown is the key political figure in the history of the US: in his fervently Christian ‘radical abolitionism’, he came closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape:
John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level. […] He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn’t make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did.24
Even today, long after the abolition of slavery, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more precious – among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau25 painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embrace of a cause was unparalleled; he even went so far as to liken Brown’s execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his actual death) to Christ. Thoreau lashes out at the scores who voiced their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people cannot understand Brown because of their concrete stances and ‘dead’ existences; they are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.
It is, however, this very consistent egalitarianism which marks simultaneously the limitations of Jacobin politics. Recall Marx’s fundamental insight about the ‘bourgeois’ limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities (‘exploitations’) are not the ‘unprincipled violations of the principle of equality’, but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the tired and old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois’ socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of ‘unequal’ exchange between the worker and the capitalist – this exchange is fully equal and ‘just’, ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity she is selling (her labour-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct ‘terrorist’ imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal wages, equal health treatment …), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of ‘equality’ means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforcing ‘terrorist’ equality) – it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such – our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: egalitarian political ‘extremism’ or ‘excessive radicalism’ should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to ‘go all the way’. What was the Jacobins’ recourse to radical ‘terror’ if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called ‘excesses’ of Political Correctness? Do they also not display
