Kieran Aarons
In a decisive passage in Means Without End, Giorgio Agamben declares that contemporary politics has functioned as a “devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities all throughout the planet, so as then to rehash and reinstate their definitively nullified form.” Amidst this erosion and collapse, it is his hope that another image of the political might come to the fore, one which would be “neither…an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end,” but rather “a pure mediality without end intended” — in other words, a politics in which an Earthly idea of happiness assumes pride of place.
While I share this hope, the present paper aims to identify a different, and decidedly darker trajectory, one which has only deepened in recent years. This divergent line has two distinct forks, both of which (I claim) the work of Italian philosopher and mythologist Furio Jesi helps us to grasp.
1.
The first fork, or “interruption,” is the one consciously adopted by American neo-fascists after 1975. It was in these years that American neonazis consciously began to develop a style of propaganda consciously shorn of antiquated symbology and political theory. In a wager reminiscent of Georges Sorel, their aim was to hollow out white nationalist ideology into a “flexible structure” that operates as a call to action for militant racists with widely varied beliefs. The central document of this period, The Turner Diaires, aimed to cull a highly functional yet ideologically nonspecific narrative from the detritus of outmoded fascist political jargon and rhetoric — a myth. In other words, confronted by the eclipse of its theoretical and strategic horizons, a defeated and culturally obsolete far-right political movement responded to its own exhaution not by rehabilitating the political-ideological impulse, but by drawing upon the resources of myth to continue itself by religious means.
In a longer study published last year, I traced the genealogy of this particular current of far right militancy across four decades.1 In the last decade and a half, the accelerationist far right has initiated a wave of mass murders in the USA that assume the form of ritualized martyrological killings, organized in a monstrous, open-ended rhizomatic reality game without any mastermind or offline headquarters, driven not by a core ideological or theoretical vision but by a mythic narrative repeatedly consecrated and resanctified through monumental bloody deeds. By deposing the traditional function of the ideological or theoretical programs, this decentralized neonazi religion of death propagates itself through ritualized testimonial acts of murder by which adherents “prove their” fidelity to the core myth. These acts of killing have no real aim other than to promote more acts like them, in an ever-expanding cascade of negativity. In this respect, having been subtracted from any long-term military or causal goals or ends, they are treated as “adequate” unto themselves.
In his 1979 work Right Wing Culture, Jesi offers a helpful framework to account for this paradoxical autonomization of the act of killing. In an infamous discussion, Jesi maintains that a not-insignificant number of the fascist bombings that rocked Italian cities in the 1970s were likely useless by design. This fact can only be explained by the function they served within the multi-tiered movement in the 1970s, which was composed of both esoteric and profane currents, a division that had as its correlate a hierarchy in the quality of “souls.” At any given moment you had “two classes of people”: the true metaphysical initiates (followers of Evola), and the class of “all those who, unable or unwilling to detach themselves from the world, remain at the entry level.” The most general strategic task of the sagely leaders was to discipline and train those of a lower, more worldly quality, to harden and strengthen their souls until they become bonafide bearers of so-called racial tradition. The commision of high risk and deadly terrorist bombings offered a venue for such didacticism. Although some of these acts might appear conspicuously “useless” from a military point of view, something else was happening in and through them at another level or register: “aided by the proper pedagogy of the useless task,” these attacks contribute to a spiritual development by which “the Race perfects itself, improves, becomes stronger and purer with the passing of generations.” This superimposition of an esoteric spiritual vocation over action insulates its meaning from both its consequences and its agent: not only is the virtue of the act subtracted from any causal-historical logic of militaristic calculations, but there it is (strictly speaking) no need for the agent to even comprehend the role he or she plays in the wider strategy.
Although there’s a longer story to be told about the reorganization of the far-right over the past four decades, and the transformation of the “sagely leader” from a literal person into a virtual function performed by the myth itself, I will set this aside for the sake of time. The important point is that, even as this two-tiered social stratification of the neonazi movement disappears, leaving only neophytes performing call-and-response with one another, the “pedagogy of the useless task” remains. If the real strategic task is spiritual, then the importance of these killings lies not in their causal calibration of means and ends, nor the tactical repertoire they advanced; the “true” strategy is playing out at another level, in view of which the production of exemplary deaths is seen as a step forward. Rather than aligning means and ends in view of a concrete social and political program, what is needed are bold spiritually-invigorating sacrifices that inspire imitation. To wage a war on the Federal government, no amount of expropriated C-4, AR-15’s, and claymore mines will suffice. Nor is a political theory or ideological viewpoint capable of doing the work of binding actors to one another and convincing them to hurl themselves into violent action. The strategy of the far right has been to eclipse all of these theoretical and strategic alignments of means and ends, by leaning instead into mythologemes. The aim of these mass killings is to pay tribute to the myth, to profess one’s belonging to the community around it, and to call others to do the same.
The neofascist response to the collapse of classical politics reveals one way that the path toward a politics of pure means can become captured within a sacrificial cult, the liberation of gestures and lives becoming mutilated and turned back against itself through a frenzied wave of useless slaughter.
2.
Along a second fork, the destituent energy unlocked by the current wave of global revolts succeeds in blowing open the continuum of capitalist time, yet the path to a genuine revolutionary overcoming of bourgeois civilization finds itself captured within an increasingly hollow iteration of what Jesi calls “cruel festivals,” mass events in which the drive to community erupts into a hollow experience of mythic time devoid of metaphysical stakes, and unable to carry its subversive energy back into normal time.
Communist theory has long had an ‘insurrectional’ current, a defining feature of which is its effort to theorize the distinctive space and time of revolt in its difference from historical time. The tendency is present in Stirner, Sorel, Benjamin and Bataille, and was revived during and after May of 1968 by Blanchot, Jesi, and even the young Agamben, among others. Although they differ on details, all of the above theorists understand riots and revolts as events that “suspend historical time,” allowing participants to overcome their passivity and isolation, interrupt patterns of learned-domination, and regain access to a more robust participation in the human potentiality of collective creation. Participation in open revolt autonomizes the fabric of human experience, inducing a direct, immediate, and common participation in the world. The fact that insurrectional violence must suspend the very time that conditions its emergence indicates well enough why it cannot be reduced to a pre-ordained end, nor to an overarching narrative of social progress. For this reason, this insurrectional current of thinkers have each, in their own way, attempted to complicate the image of revolution proper to social democratic historicism.
What does it mean to say that revolutionary violence “suspends history?” What is the internal form of suspended time and of the subjectivity that inhabits it? Is there more than one way to suspend, break-apart, or transform historical time? If so, what forms of community and collective action do each make possible? These are some of the questions that Furio Jesi set out to address in his 1969 work Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, a study of the relation between mythic and historical time in the Spartacist insurrection of 1919 in Berlin.
Jesi’s central question is a strategic one: why do revolts produce only a fragmentary and broken chain of insurrectional “measures,” before eventually terminating in the return of normal time? Revolts are surely capable of hatching ephemeral communities through the intense participation in a commonly-held truth, but they are often unable to give these a consistency that would let us inhabit them. Jesi is convinced that this failure to make the leap into a revolutionary sequence cannot be explained solely by accidental, logistical, or historical causes. There is something in the very experience of the “suspended time” of revolt that obstructs the necessary task of severing and reorganizing time.
What is it that holds revolt back? According to Jesi, the answer must be sought in the same mechanism that grants revolt is phenomenological power, namely, “myth,” or more precisely, a “mythological machine” that suspends time only by generating a symbolic experience of being outside of history.
Why did the Spartacist revolt fail? Jesi rejects a purely ideological or logistical explanation of this failure. The failure was not due only to a lack of ‘radicality’, nor was it a purely military defeat. It is essential to understand the existential transformation that revolts generate in its participants. Spartakus sets out to produce a concept of revolt as a mode of experience, a “regime of perception.” On the handout, you’ll find a citation from the book. Jesi’s essential phenomenological insight is that revolt nullifies certain features of human experience, while autonomizing, amplifying and absolutizing others. It is important to highlight four dimensions of this experience:
- Whereas ‘revolution’ is associated with an ideological and dynamic historical mode of thinking engaged in preparing its forces for a future clash, ‘revolt’ crystalizes ideologies into lived symbols, which both absolutize and polarize the field of perception;
- When the field of perception becomes symbolized, thought enters into an immediate coincidence with decision, resulting in gestures that consummate themselves without reserve, actions undertaken for their own sake, as pure ‘means without ends’;
- Urban revolts induce a breakdown of the division between public and private space, opening onto an immediately collective ‘use’ of the city, an anonymous ‘appropriation’ of urban space;
- Revolt destitutes the organ of the vanguard political party, and along with it, the preparatory horizon of planning: in a revolt, we act now, acts take on an immediate self-sufficiency, they are played out along a symbolic mesh, rather than a preparatory one.
In all of this, historical time is not abolished, but merely suspended; it is, in other words, incapacitated, placed out of reach. Revolt affects its destitution upon power, stripping it of legitimacy and dragging it down to Earth; yet its agents are not left untouched, but undergo a peculiar destitution of their faculties along the way. The new forms of collective individuation proper to the experience of rioting and revolt depend precisely on the decommisioning of the preparatory longevity associated with historical time, which must on some level remain suspended. The community of revolt depends upon a practical and temporal mode of experience that must deactivate in advance its own possible longevity or consistency. In other words, it is formally exceptional. Let us recall that, in Homo Sacer Vol. 1, Giorgio Agamben defines the relation of exception as “the condition of being included through an exclusion, of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one cannot fully assume.” Such is precisely, Jesi shows, the status of suspended time of revolt in its relation to history. Jesi’s analysis of revolt both confirms and deepens the link that Giorgio Agamben has since estab- lished between the logic of the exception and sacrifice, allowing us to identify the presence of the arcanum imperii not only within formations of state and economic power, but also within insurrectional sequences that set out precisely to topple them.
While this transformative rupture accounts for the tremendous creative power of revolt, it also invites its greatest danger: if the experience of freedom cannot escape the closed circle of suspended time, the ‘waking state’ it produces can descend into a dream and become trapped in a mythical image of its own activity, ultimately finding itself locked into a sacrificial contest with its enemies. While the “sovereign ban” described by Agamben installs a relation of exception vertically from above, Jesi exposes the existence of an “insurrectional ban” operating from below. The insurrectional ban names the simultaneous open-and-shut motion whereby the “opening” of historical time onto an Outside serves to reclose perception within the narrow walls of mythical identification.
Although the creative power of such experiences is real, the dangers they harbor are formidable: suspended time tends to engender a sacrificial incapacity to limit our defeats, a fact to which Jesi attributes the demise of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Berlin, in 1919. On Jesi’s read, the downfall of Luxemburg and Leibknecht lay in their inability to “dissociate” themselves from the revolt. They allowed the “spellbinding force of the capitalist symbols of power” to become transformed into the symbols of an evil that must be heroically and sacrificially destroyed, at all costs. This is why, in spite of the pleas of virtually all of her comrades, Luxemburg refused to depart for Frankfurt, and remained in Berlin.
The theoretical task Spartakus bequeaths to us—one which Jesi never himself properly solved—consists not in the avoidance of riots and revolts, but in the search for a theory of insurgent temporality that would overcome the externality between suspended and historical time. In other words, what is needed is a non-exceptional theory of the relation between revolt and revolution.
**
To be clear, there is no question here of establishing any political or ethical symmetry between ourselves and far-right terrorism. One thousand things separate the two currents. Still, certain minimal formal analogies may nevertheless be highlighted.
Along both forks, the capture of the anarchic destituent potentiality of our epoch germinates subjectivities only through its reliance on increasingly desperate cultic rituals of violence. These can take various forms: a nihilistic embrace of ever-higher-stakes attacks upon state property or shooting battles with fascists and police in the streets, or (on the far-right) accelerationist mass murders in commercial and religious spaces. In both cases, the releasement of the gesture or the logic of action from the archic reign of Western metaphysical principles ends up being converted into a religio mortis, a religion of death in which the psychic space of myth authenticates itself exclusively through exposure to death for oneself and others. Instead of an Earthly happiness, a destitution interrupted resolves itself into a religious fervor with no positive horizon or divergent sensibility by which to point a way out of the disaster of our time.
Naturallty, this affective and imaginative poverty tends to be reinforced by the poverty of political language that afflicts our time. On the far-left and the far-right alike, we find a common tendency to traffic in what Jesi describes (following Spengler) as “wordless ideas,” a motley assemblage of slogans, catchphrases, and symbols treated by their devotees as autointerpretive, despite their total absence of any substantive prophetic or visionary content. It is enough to witness the desperate lionization of American democracy by young insurgents battling the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, the nonsensical evocations of “insurrection” after the right-wing riot at the capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, or evocations of the French Revolution during both Occupy and the Yellow Vest uprisings to recognize that radical politics today has become an “atmosphere that does not ask to be ‘understood’ in any sense.”
If the revolts of our day no longer seem capable of passing over into revolutions, what are we to do? The task for revolutionaries cannot be to avert or avoid the festive epiphanies occasioned by revolt altogether, since this would only condemn us to a reconciliation with the status quo — an ethical impossibility. At the same time, we must no longer pretend not to see the black holes that lie in wait for us. Instead, we must attempt to recognize and neutralize the religio mortis that endangers uprisings from within, and above all for their most fervent devotees. To do so, we must first clarify the nature and function of the mythological machine in which the political experience of our time is captured. The entirely modest and inadequate task of this paper was simply to initiate this conversation.
- Kieran Aarons, “Genealogy of Far-Right Accelerationism,” Pólemos. Materials of Philosophy and Social Criticism (2023), Issue 1. ↩︎