Where revolt and repentance meet

The French word that best translates the Jewish word for 'atonement' and 'repentance', 'teshuvah', is (se) revolter. (Both words mean ‘turning’).

"On a raison de se revolter" (Mao, Sartre). Successful revolt is as much a return to an insufficiently explored set of possibilities, and, generating them, trauma, and a turn towards the absolutely new, the event. This is why recognizing your own moral errors and struggling for a political justice go together. There is a hope in this that is not the self-condemnation of false guilt. There is an aggression in this, too. Our increasingly totalitarian society is organized to exclude and prevent this.

Totalitarian societies, like military outfits, organize the complex maturity/infancy (on 'infancy', see Agamben, Infancy and History) in such a way that it is nearly impossible for anyone to break with the given. And what is so difficult about democracy is most clearly recognizable in the kind or situation where totalitarian/authoritarian states reveal an outside that approaches anarchy, which is absence of authority, principles, origin, and social architecture, or organization in an order with a sense of totality, and that outside is the community and democracy to come.

The difference between authoritarian and totalitarian societies/states is that the latter is a variant of the former that is organized in ways that are more 'interior', affirmative, and inclusive, while liberal authoritarianism (there is such a thing, and neoliberalism is this) tends to exclude and say 'no' more than 'yes', decline more than inviting. The totalitarian state in its 'progressive' forms promises inclusion and affirmation universally. For this reason, it can be as much matriarchal as patriarchal, a maternal authority being nurturing more than limit-setting and law-affirming. These are not alternatives (which is why today the critique of patriarchy is outdated and leads nowhere, or in no direction specifically worth going in, or going against, or not going in) for the simple reason that both are figures of the familial .

Such societies infantilize people in certain ways while organizing their participation and determining and facilitating their possible excellence in certain ways.

Figures of totality are inclusive by definition, but inclusion comes with exclusion.

It is hard to break with the given in such societies.

When a possibility is excluded, it can begin to appear as problematic, such that the very idea of it now moves onto the agenda. A society that opposes all liberty, or most family life, or whatever else, will ipso facto make an issue of the very idea thereof, and this will cause it to appear much more clearly on the horizon and as a thematized possibility that is now in question.

Anarchy, or the absence of rule, principle, origin, commanding order or organization, living by commandments of an authority, can come uniquely and in a novel way to seem possibility when the prevailing state of affairs is just the opposite: total organization, and administration, or management. An economy in which every thing is accounted for.

Totalitarianism tends towards the abolition of possibility and the event.

Democracy is the most difficult social form, because it requires citizens, and while subjects can be like children (as in the famous 'children of the republic' in the French national anthem), citizens can only be adults.

There is no correctional procedure or therapy for curing immaturity. Learning exists and there are procedures for learning as well as institutions that further it. But learning is not correction of a fault. The things you ought to know are not, as in Plato, things you 'must have known' even though you did not, so that 'ignorance is no excuse' even when it is the cause and could not have been avoided. What any subject or system needs may be something futural that has not yet come into existence.

Neoliberalism is theorized as an authoritarian organization of liberty.

If we are moving beyond the neoliberal era, it is because we are moving, again, towards totalitarianism, largely because of the dominance of surveillance technology and the marketing of identities and interests that presumes a closure of the world each of us lives in, and because the new ethos and nomos is psychological.

The idea of the psychological state is that every person is either insufficiently mature or just. We have surveillant, managerial therapies. The psychological state offers to solve everyone's problems and give them what they need -- to be successful and happy in the extant economy. The psychological state is anti-political because it tells everyone their problems are about them as individuals merely, and not about the society; what needs to be changed is only the individual and her or his attitude and manner of being.

Totalitarianism promises happiness and the good life; liberal authoritarianism only justice and the free life. This false opposition structures the prevailing one between totalitarianism and liberalism as the two alternatives. Both are capitalist because based on a principle of scarcity.

Totalitarianism promises what liberal authoritarianism forbids: the realization of one's desires.

It thus makes revolt impossible.

The idea of God has such bad press by now that it should usually be avoided, as it is only a stumbling block to thinking clearly. But if religion still mattered, it would say: there is a paradoxical unity of conscience and rebellion or revolt. A revolt is not a refusal merely. Every intellectual and ethical procedure deserving the name of revolt is a thorough working-out of the latent possibilities in the situation that one starts out by refusing as intolerable. Revolts are logical, as Rimbaud understood. The slave paradigmatically does not see many things clearly, but may grasp the indubitable necessity of refusing and throwing off his oppression. The revolutionary is lucid. The old ideas are not just tossed out or laughed at, though they are; they are reconfigured. There is a rewriting. But that is psychoanalysis, the individual ethical truth procedure of the person subjected to an authoritarian or totalitarian familial or communitarian regime. After it, the democracy to come.

This is why every system of governance that can only understand and punish individual disobedience, like the old Christian Church, is ethically false in the end. It is one-sided. That is why the criminal is the fraternal twin of the saint. Crime is by definition wrong, but the criminal at least sees that there is wrong. Totalitarian societies suffer not from guilt but boredom. They have stronger forms of attraction and weaker points of conflict and objects of controversy.

Whether or not art and theory can save us, it is clear that therapies cannot. Art opens onto the political, psychological management closes it onto the self. A self that in the end is only offered ways of managing its sadness. This sadness is desperate, and is poles apart from melancholy, which is not resigned but curious. In sites of profound boredom where everything is given and tends towards a reproduction of the same, melancholy and the thinking it facilitates is a negative affect to tarry with, even when people are offered palliatives for their anxiety and depression, because life is so hard and the society offers you nothing at all.

Resistance makes its compliance difficult. Rebellion refuses, and desires to invent a new direction. Resentment is resistance that knows its rage but doubts its power against the tyranny. Revolt repeats the traumatic event in a willed return that reconfigures it. The revolutionary zero hour is not avoidance but transformation. The greatest malediction would be to have nothing interesting to fight against. The strong affects of melancholy and rage are useful; the weak ones of fear, anger, and depression can only be confessed. Contentment is not joy. A society that has only problems to solve and not conflicts that divide it irreparably will be a republic of bored, exhausted, sterile cowards. Find your crisis.