From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

2. The Defense of Necessity: On Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet

Woe to the creaturely remnant of existence who will not put off his existence, alas, who cannot do so, because the extinguished memory persists in its emptiness . . . the mute terror of the beast that, alone in its littleness, invisibly overcome, bereft of consciousness, creeps trembling under some dark shrubbery so that no eye may watch it dying. —HERMANN BROCH, THE DEATH OF VIRGIL TRAINING THE POSTPOLITICAL ANIMAL Toward the end of his response to Alexandre Kojève’s essay “Tyranny and Wisdom,” Leo Strauss gives a somewhat jocular twist to Marx and Engels’s famous call for the proletariat to unite and seize for themselves the reins of power. “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is time, to prevent the coming of the ‘realm of freedom.’ Defend, with might and main, if it needs to be defended,‘the realm of necessity.’”1 To a reader unfamiliar with the grounds of the debate between Strauss and Kojève over the meaning of Xenophon’s dialogue,“Hiero, or Tyrannicus,” the injunction to the workers to mobilize and fight against the advent of universal liberty must surely come across as both perverse and counterintuitive. The image of the proletariat banding together to fight for the freedom of all is perhaps the most persistent fantasy of progressive or left-wing thought, down to its contemporary incarnation in the“nonhomogeneous”multitude conscripted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to serve as the proper medium of global democratic political change. For Strauss, whose name in the public imagination has become inextricably linked to the imperialist 71 2 THE DEFENSE OF NECESSITY On Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet policies of U.S. neoconservatives, the workers’—or for that matter anyone ’s—revolution is justified here not as an offensive and expansionist form of warfare advancing the cause of freedom but rather as a primarily defensive and even nihilistic struggle on behalf of its opposite, raw “necessity.” For the universalization of freedom, if it were possible, would produce the conditions for the moral disintegration of humanity, and so even the nihilistic assertion of the will for willing’s sake is to be preferred to the monotonous peace and stability established by what Kojève calls the “homogeneous world-state,” which reduces its inhabitants to the subhuman status of pacified and quiescent beasts.2 Faced with such a “hideous prospect,” Strauss observes that “the last refuge of man’s humanity ” becomes “political assassination in the particularly sordid form of the palace revolution.”3 These two alternatives—the nightmare of a despotic global order and frenzied outbursts of a purely negative and unremittingly destructive revolt—present a harsh antinomy that nevertheless points to certain subterranean assumptions underlying both Enlightenment and postmodern accounts of globalization. Strauss engages Kojève by drawing out some of the grimmer implications of his opponent’s anthropology, which in Hegelian fashion defines the essence of the properly human as the willingness of human beings to risk their lives in a bloody struggle. The central principle in Kojève’s definition of what properly constitutes the human is the desire for glory, which is of course the force behind the Hegelian struggle for recognition but is also crucial for Machiavelli, for whom such strivings supplied the overriding and objective motor of political life.4 The posthuman era that follows the end of history is accompanied by the absence or dissipation of this desire, and by the collective primacy or preponderance of those manifold disordered desires relating to the pursuit of monetary gain, the enjoyment of luxury, and indulgence in bodily pleasure that Plato consigned to the lowest part of the soul. Kojève accordingly describes posthistorical society as one in which human beings have sunk into the condition of beasts. The fulfillment of the distinctly human desire for recognition signals not only the end of history and of bloody historical struggles, but also the transformation of human beings into pacified beasts whose art and culture have degenerated into trivial amusements, unmarked 72 THE DEFENSE OF NECESSITY by the vestiges of stern necessity or death-defying boldness that might otherwise endow them with a transcendent and sublime character. Just as Machiavelli, in chapter 18 of The Prince, regarded the Centaur as the proper emblem for the political subject in its combination of human rationality and violent, animal vigor, we might say that Kojèvian...