Re: <nettime> Choking Cuban writers - revolutionary violence?

[Darko Draskovic <darkophilos@yahoo.com>]

I will try to address two (from my point of view) crucial issues. Appeal for
free unrestricted intellectual discourse seems to me ideological for two
aspects:

1) as Althusser would put it, it denegates it’s own very ideological
character, pretending to assert the neutral and objectively rational discourse
over the dogmatic and indoctrinating

2) the word “unrestricted” is crucial here; the demand for
unrestricted/unprohibited/uncensored thinking and expression of thought, in
it’s essence is demand for negative/formal freedom (“freedom of”), and is
the landmark of ideology of humanitarian rights, id est very core of liberal
ideological matrix. I am addressing here Zizek’s interpretation of
postitv/real freedom in article “Can Lenin tell us the truth?” as an
opposition to aforementioned negative freedom.

I am from Serbia and Montenegro, country formerly known as FR Yugoslavia, in
which similar appeal for humane rights where made. Socialist party regime,
which was mere resemblance of the former communist party nomenclature, and
which was (socialist party) in it’s ideological essence explosive mixture of
social democracy plus nationalism (as an unofficial and repressed opinion
inside party, but the core of ruling ideology in it’s opposition to
aforementioned ideology of socialist rulers), was accused of flagrantly
breaking human rights. Soon after, NGO-s started to appear all over the country
and infrastructure for the so-called civil society was under construction, and
they only and innocently wanted to “circulate literature on human rights”.
The rest is known: even the mere resemblance of the former communist regime had
to go down.

 

Lesson to be learned here is not that US government inherently opposes
communism in so far that mere resemblance of socialist state of affair have to
be historically put ad acta.  Milosevic and his socialist regime enjoyed
political green light in the US government political traffic for long time,
until they went separate ways. It is more likely that we are here dealing with
the lesson on the humanism (and it’s accompanying ideology of human rights):
there is no politically innocent humanism. 

In the light of recent arrestments in Cuba we have to pose one more crucial and
substantial question, question which obsessed existentialism, that of the
revolutionary violence. Humanism of the humanitarian right does not answers the
fore mentioned question, it merely puts it ad acta (claiming the self-evident
negative/dehumanizing character of the violence as such, and consequently
revolutionary violence in particular), depolitizing it. So the
political/revolutionary stake here is not the violation of human rights, but
the issue of theoretical context in which the political/revolutionary violence
is understood. Answer to that question is Leitfaden (connecting thread) (as
Heidegger would put it), to answer the question whether and when the
revolutionary violence is justified in general, and whether the recent
oppression in Cuba, in particular is justified or not.

////*********////
U njoj proleteri nemaju šta da izgube osim svojih okova. A dobit će čitav svijet.
Spectre is still roaming...

		
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