Miller is aware that every master-signifier bears witness to the fact that there is no master-signifier, no Other of the Other, that there is a lack in the Other, etc. – the very gap between S1 and S2 occurs because of this lack (as with God in Spinoza, the Master-Signifier by definition fills in the gap in the series of ‘ordinary’ signifiers). The difference is that, with democracy, this lack is directly inscribed into the social system, it is institutionalized in a set of procedures and regulations – no wonder, then, that Miller approvingly quotes Marcel Gauchet regarding how, in democracy, truth only offers itself ‘in division and decomposition’ (and one cannot but note with irony how Stalin and Mao made the same claim, although with a ‘totalitarian’ twist: in politics, truth only emerges through the ruthless divisions of class struggle …).
It is easy to note how, from within this Kantian horizon of democracy, the ‘terrorist’ aspect of democracy – the violent egalitarian imposition of those who are ‘surnumerary’, the ‘part of no-part’ – can only appear as its ‘totalitarian’ distortion, i.e., how, within this horizon, the line that separates the authentic democratic explosion of revolutionary terror from the ‘totalitarian’ Party-State regime (or, to put it in reactionary terms, the line that separates the ‘mob rule of the dispossessed’ from the Party-State’s brutal oppression of the ‘mob’) is obliterated. (One can, of course, argue that direct ‘mob rule’ is inherently unstable and that it turns necessarily into its opposite, a tyranny over the mob itself; however, this shift in no way changes the fact that, precisely, we are dealing with a shift, a radical turnaround.) Foucault deals with this shift in his writings on the Iranian Revolution, where he opposes the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political, and other transformations to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the web of historical causality – it is irreducible to it:
The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man ‘really’ to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.36
One should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions: a revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, in other words in revolt, the noumenal dimension transpires. The paradox, of course, is that this noumenal dimension coincides with its opposite, with the pure surface of a phenomenon: the noumenon not only appears, the noumenal is what is, in a phenomenon, irreducible to the causal network of reality that generated this phenomenon – in short, the noumenon is phenomenon qua phenomenon. There is a clear link between this irreducible character of the phenomenon and Deleuze’s notion of event as the flux of becoming, as a surface emergence that cannot be reduced to its ‘bodily’ causes. His reply to the conservative critics who denounce the miserable and even terrifying actual results of a revolutionary upheaval is that they remain blind to the dimension of becoming:
It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It’s nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.37
Deleuze refers here to revolutionary explosions in a way which is strictly parallel to Foucault:
The Iranian movement did not experience the ‘law’ of revolutions that would, some say, make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched, in an unmediated fashion, on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is ‘fear’, fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the world had not seen an example for a long time.38
Foucault is here effectively Deleuzian: what interests him are not the Iranian events at the level of actual social reality and its causal interactions, but the evental surface, the pure virtuality of the ‘spark of life’ which only accounts for the uniqueness of the Event. What took place in Iran in the interstices of two epochs of social reality was not the explosion of the People as a substantial entity with a set of properties, but the event of becoming-People. The point is thus not the shift in relations of power and domination between actual socio-political agents, the redistribution of social control, etc., but the very fact of transcending – or, rather, momentarily cancelling – this very domain, of the emergence of a totally different domain of ‘collective will’ as a pure Sense-Event in which all differences are obliterated, rendered irrelevant. Such an event is not only new with regard to what was going on before, it is new ‘in itself’ and thus forever remains new.
It is against this background that one can formulate a critique of Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetics, of his idea of the aesthetic dimension of the political act proper: a democratic explosion reconfigures the established hierarchical ‘police’ order of social space; it stages a spectacle of a different order, of a different partage of the public space.39 In today’s ‘society of spectacle’, such an aesthetic reconfiguration has lost its subversive dimension: it can all too easily be appropriated by the existing order. The true task does not lie in momentary democratic explosions which undermine the established ‘police’ order, but in the dimension designated by Badiou as that of the ‘fidelity’ to the Event: how to translate/inscribe the democratic explosion into the positive ‘police’ order, how to impose on social reality a new lasting order. This is the properly ‘terrorist’ dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order. And this is why, while everybody loves democratic rebellions, the spectacular/carnivalesque explosions of the popular will, anxiety arises when this will wants to persist, to institutionalize itself – and the more ‘authentic’ the rebellion is, the more ‘terrorist’ is this institutionalization. It is at this level that one should search for the decisive moment of a revolutionary process: say, in the case of the October Revolution, not the explosion of 1917–18, not even the civil war that followed, but the intense experimentations of the early 1920s, the (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts to invent new rituals of daily life: with what to replace the pre-revolutionary procedures of marriage and funerals? How to organize the most common interaction in a factory, in an apartment block? It is at this level of what, as opposed to the ‘abstract terror’ of the ‘big’ political revolution, one is tempted to call the ‘concrete terror’ of imposing a new order onto daily life, that the Jacobins and both the Soviet revolution and the Chinese revolution ultimately failed – not for the lack of attempts in this direction, for sure. The Jacobins were at their best not in the theatrics of Terror, but in the utopian explosions of political imagination apropos the reorganization of daily life: everything was there, proposed in the course of the frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from the self-organization of women to the communal homes in which the old would be able to spend their last years in peace and dignity. (So what about Robespierre’s rather ridiculous attempt to impose a new civic religion celebrating a Supreme Being? Robespierre himself formulated succinctly the main reason for his opposition to atheism: ‘Atheism is aristocratic.’40 Atheism was for him the ideology of the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who had lost all sense of historical mission.)
The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only ‘institutionalize’ itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to reinvent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou41 elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese ‘legists’ through the Jacobins to Lenin and Mao – it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the