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  • The Ambiguous Debt of Counterrevolution to RevolutionReply to a Vigilant Melancholic
  • Soumyabrata Choudhury (bio)

introduction

In the letter of invitation to write for this issue—an unusual one that does not shrink from accentuating its partisan call in the name of a certain "historical immortal" Fidel Castro, whose recent death is also an occasion to recalibrate the economy of his life between its political historicity and revolutionary immortality—a central question is posed: What is lost when the concept of revolution is lost to the thinking of politics? I don't find myself capable of undertaking the Castroist recalibration but I will attempt a compact response to the general question.

My reply to this vigilant and melancholic question is that what is also lost when revolution is lost to politics is the thought of counterrevolution. Why do I place a special value on this somewhat paradoxical loss? For two reasons: first, to lose the reference to counterrevolution is to be deprived of a unifying diagnostic category with which to grasp our times on a global scale; second, with the disappearance of a kind of historical consciousness of revolution and counterrevolution, what vanishes, or tends to vanish, is the ambiguous debt counterrevolution has hitherto felt toward revolution even in the age of its greatest triumph.

It is important to clarify, of course, that the foregoing response to the initial partisan announcement stands its ground only on the condition that "loss" is not understood to be "nonexistence". Loss is rather to be grasped in the psychoanalytic sense that when a subject is said to suffer a "loss of reality" (2001b), what is indicated is a kind of lapse of the power of the subject to symbolize her reality. Often the loss [End Page 293] of reality is the measure of the very acuity, even violence, of the reality that the subject is unable to insert herself into anymore. It does not mean the empirical disappearance of that reality. However, before applying this analogy to the question of counterrevolution as a crisis of symbolization in a situation of disavowal of its originary debt to, at the very least, a revolutionary hypothesis, one must consider a radical, if counterintuitive, option.

Is it possible to conceptualize a pure counterrevolution, a counterrevolution which is not, in the words of Joseph de Maistre, "a revolution in reverse but the opposite of revolution?" (cited in Arendt, 8). When Hannah Arendt in her mid-twentieth-century classic On Revolution cites these words, she immediately consigns them to an "empty witticism" (8) And yet the triumphant speech of contemporary global capitalism does flicker between two registers: on the one hand, it proclaims a historical victory over all its erstwhile adversaries, including something like a revolutionary "left" opponent; on the other hand, it claims liberation from all past and historical moorings to, as if, be born anew. In this peculiar threshold of a new birth as well as a restoration of a truth beyond the tradition of revolutionary philosophy, which in Arendt's terms constitutes revolution as a kind of natality, as "new things,"1 the empty witticism of a pure counterrevolutionary affirmation, which is the opposite and not the reverse of revolution, seems to come alive.

However, the real point of interest in our present moment is not merely the burden and entanglement of its paradoxes but also the mechanisms by which the paradoxes can be carried off smoothly. The point of interest is to study how the historical debt to revolution is overcome—or disavowed, as the case may be. What is of interest is how counterrevolution, without a jolt of contradiction, constitutes itself as "new things" in history as well as a restoration of a truth that is attached to a kind of ontological system beyond all historical contingency. In concrete terms, the investigation of a "pure counterrevolution" would consist of asking, What is the "ontological system" of something that appears in history, say, something like "capitalism," but whose doctrine of being pronounces, at the very stroke of its historical enunciation, an immemorial truth? How might we carry off this counterintuitive and contradictory move smoothly so as to give an "empty witticism" a life of ideological power...

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